Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature

Title: Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature

Author: Pëtr Kropotkin

Topics: art, history

Date: 1915

Source: Retrieved on February 27th, 2009 from dwardmac.pitzer.edu

Chapter 1: The Russian Language

The Russian Language

One of the last messages which Turguéneff addressed to Russian writers from his death-bed was to implore them to keep in its purity “that precious inheritance of ours — the Russian Language.” He who knew in perfection most of the languages spoken in Western Europe had the highest opinion of Russian as an instrument for the expression of all possible shades of thought and feeling, and he had shown in his writings what depth and force of expression, and what melodiousness of prose, could be obtained in his native tongue. In his high appreciation of Russian, Turguéneff — as will often be seen in these pages — was perfectly right. The richness of the Russian language in words is astounding: many a word which stands alone for the expression of a given idea in the languages of Western Europe has in Russian three or our equivalents for the rendering of the various shades of the same idea. It is especially rich for rendering various shades of human feeling, — tenderness and love, sadness and merriment — as also various degrees of the same action. Its pliability for translation is such that in no other language do we find an equal number of most beautiful, correct, and truly poetical renderings of foreign authors. Poets of the most diverse character, such as Heine and Béranger, Longfellow and Schiller, Shelley and Goethe — to say nothing of that favourite with Russian translators, Shakespeare — are equally well turned into Russian. The sarcasm of Voltaire, the rollicking humour of Dickens, the good-natured laughter of Cervantes are rendered with equal ease. Moreover, owing to the musical character of the Russian tongue, it is wonderfully adapted for rendering poetry in the same metres as those of the original. Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” (in two different translations, both admirable), Heine’s capricious lyrics, Schindler’s ballads, the melodious folk-songs of different nationalities, and Béranger’s playful chansonnettes, read in Russian with exactly the same rhythms as in the originals. The desperate vagueness of German metaphysics is quite as much at home in Russian as the matter-of-fact style of the eighteenth century philosophers; and the short, concrete and expressive, terse sentences of the best English writers offer no difficulty for the Russian translator.

Together with Czech and Polish, Moravian, Serbian and Bulgarian, as also several minor tongues, the Russian belongs to the great Slavonian family of languages which, in its turn — together with the Scandinavo — Saxon and the Latin families, as also the Lithuanian, the Persian, the Armenian, the Georgian — belongs to the great Indo-European, or Aryan branch. Some day — soon, let us hope: the sooner the better — the treasures of both the folk-songs possessed by the South Slavonians and the many centuries old literature of the Czechs and the Poles will be revealed to Western readers. But in this work I have to concern myseif only with the literature of the Eastern, i.e., the Russtan, branch of the great Slavonian family; and in this branch I shall have to omit both the South-Russian or Ukraïnian literature and the White or West-Russian folk-lore and songs. I shall treat only of the literature of the Great-Russians; or, simply, the Russians. Of all the Slavonian languages theirs is the most widely spoken. It is the language of Púshkin and Lermontoff, Turguéneff and Tolstóy.

Like all other languages, the Russian has adopted many foreign words Scandinavian, Turkish, Mongolian and lately, Greek and Latin. But notwithstanding the assimilation of many nations and stems of the Ural-Altayan or Turanian stock which has been accomplished in the course of ages by the Russian nation, her language has remained remarkably pure. It is striking indeed to see how the translation of the bible which was made in the ninth century into the Ianguage currently spoken by the Moravians and the South Slavonians remains comprehensible, down to the present time, to the average Russian. Grammatical forms and the construction of sentences are indeed quite different now. But the roots, as well as a very considerable number of words remain the same as those which were used in current talk a thousand years ago.

It must be said that the South-Slavonian had attained a high degree of perfection, even at that early time. Very few words of the Gospels had to be rendered in Greek and these are names of things unknown to the South Slavonians; while for none of the abstract words, and for none of the poeticaI images of the original, had the translators any difficulty in finding the proper expressions. Some of the words they used are, moreover, of a remarkable beauty, and this beauty has not been lost even to-day. Everyone remembers, for instance, the difficulty which the learned Dr. Faust, in Goethe’s immortal tragedy, found in rendering thesentence: “In the beginning was the Word.” “Word,” in modern German seemed to Dr. Faust to be too shallow an expression for the idea of “the Word being God.” In the old Slavonian translation we have “Slovo,” which also means “Word,” but has at the same time, even for the modern Russian, a far deeper meaning than that of das Wort. In old Slavonian “Slovo” included also the meaning of “Intellect” — German Vernunft; and consequently it conveyed to the reader an idea which was deep enough not to clash with the second part of the Biblical sentence.

I wish that I could give here an idea of the beauty of the structure of the Russian language, such as it was spoken early in the eleventh century in North Russia, a sample of which has been reserved in the sermon of a Nóvgorod bishop (1035). The short sentences of this sermon, calculated to be understood by a newly christened flock, are really beautiful; while the bishop’s conceptions of Christianity, utterly devoid of Byzantine gnosticism, are most characteristic of the manner in which Christianity was and is still understood by the masses of the Russian folk.

At the present time, the Russian language (the Great Russian) is remarkably free from patois. Litttle-Russian, or Ukraïnian,[1] which is spoken by nearly 15,000,000 people, and has its own literature — folk-lore and modern — is undoubtedly a separate language, in the same sense as Norwegian and Danish are separate from Swedish, or as Portugueese and Catalonian are separate from Castilian or Spanish. White-Russian, which is spoken in some provinces of Western Russia, has also the characteristic of a separate branch of the Russian, rather than those of a local dialect. As to Great-Russian, or Russian, it is spoken by a compact body of nearly eighty million people in Northern, Central, Eastern, and Southern Russia, as also in Northern Caucasia and Siberia. Its pronunciation slightly varies in different parts of this large territory; nevertheless the literary language of Púshkin, Gógol, Turguéneff, and Tolstóy is understood by all this enourmous mass of people. The Russian clasics circulate in the vilages by millions of copies, and when, a few years ago, the literary property in Púshkins works came to an end (fifty years after his death), complete editions of his works — some of them in ten volumes — were circulated by the hundred-thousand, at the almost incredibly low price of three shillings (75 cents) the ten volumes; while millions of copies of his separate poems and tales are sold now by thousands of ambulant booksellers in the villages, at the price of from one to three farthings each. Even the complete works of Gógol, Turguéneff, and Goncharóff, in twelve-volume editions, have sometimes sold to the number of 200,000 sets each, in the course of a single year. The advantages of this intellectual unity of the nation are self-evident.

Early Folk-Literature: Folk-lore — Songs — Sagas

The early folk-literature of Russia, part of which is still preserved in the memories of the people alone, is wonderfully rich and full of the deepest interest. No nation of Western Europe possesses such an astonishing wealth of traditions, tales, and lyric folk-songs some of them of the greatest beauty — and such a rich cycle of archaic epic songs, as Russia does. Of course, all European nations have had, once upon a time, an equally rich folk-literature; but the great bulk of it was lost before scientific explorers had understood its value or begun to collect it. In Russia, this treasure was preserved in remote villages untouched by civilisation, especially in the region round Lake Onéga; and when the folklorists began to collect it, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they found in Northern Russia and in Little Russia old bards still going about the villages with their primitive string instruments, and reciting poems of a very ancient origin.

Besides, a variety of yery old songs are sung still by the village folk themselves. Every annual holiday — Christmas, Easter, Midsummer Day — has its own cycle of songs, which have been preserved, with their melodies, even from pagan times. At each marriage, which is accompanied by a very complicated ceremonial, and at each burial, similarly old songs are sung by the peasant women. Many of them have, of course, deteriorated in the course of ages; of many others mere fragments have survived; but, mindful of the popular saying that “never a word must be cast out of a song,” the women in many localities continue to sing the most antique songs in full, even though the meaning of many of the words has already been lost.

There are, moreover, the tales. Many of them are certainly the same as we find among all nations of Aryan origin: one may read them in Grimm’s collection of fairy tales; but others came also from the Mongols and the Turks; while some of them seem to have a purely Russian origin. And next come the songs recited by wandering singers — the Kalíki — also very ancient. They are entirely borrowed from the East, and deal with heroes and heroines of other nationalities than the Russian, such as “Akib, the Assyrian King,” the beautiful Helen, Alexander the Great, or Rustem of Persia. The interest which these Russian versions of Eastern legends and tales offer to the explorer of folk-lore and mythology is self-evident.

Finally, there are the epic songs: the bylíny, which correspond to the Icelandic sagas. Even at the present day they are sung in the villages of Northern Russia by special bards who accompany themselves with a special instrument, also of very ancient origin. The old singer utters in a sort of recitative one or two sentences, accompanying himself with his instrument; then follows a melody, into which each individual singer introduces modulations of his own, before he resumes next the quiet recitative of the epic narrative. Unfortunately, these old bards are rapidly disappearing; but some five-and-thirty years ago a few of them were still alive in the province of Olónets, to the north-east of St. Petersburg, and I once heard one of them, whom A. Hilferding had brought to the capital, and who sang before the Russian Geographical Society his wonderful ballads. The collecting of the epic songs was happily begun in good time — during the eighteenth century — and it has been eagerly continued by specialists, so that Russia possesses now perhaps the richest collection of such songs — about four hundred — which has been saved from oblivion.

The heroes of the Russian epic songs are knights-errant, whom popular tradition unites round the table of the Kíeff Prince, Vladímir the Fair Sun. Endowed with supernatural physical force, these knights, Ilyiá of Múrom, Dobrýnia Nikítich, Nicholas the Villager, Alexéi the Priest’s Son, and so on, are represented going about Russia, clearing the country of giants, who infested the land, or of Mongols and Turks. Or else they go to distant lands to fetch a bride for the chief of their schola, the Prince Vladimir, or for themselves; and they meet, of course, on their journeys, with all sorts of adventures, in which witchcraft plays an important part. Each of the heroes of these sagas has his own individuality. For instance, Ilyiá, the Peasant’s Son, does not care for gold or riches: he fights only to clear the land from giants and strangers. Nicholas the Villager is the personification of the force with which the tiller of the soil is endowed: nobody can pull out of the ground his heavy plough, while he himself lifts it with one hand and throws it above the clouds; Dobrýnia embodies some of the features of the dragon-fighters, to whom belongs St. George; Sádko is the personification of the rich merchant, and Tchurílo of the refined, handsome, urbane man with whom all women fall in love.

At the same time, in each of these heroes, there are doubtless mythological features. Consequently, the early Russian explorers of the bylíny, who worked under the influence of Grimm, endeavoured to explain them as fragments of an old Slavonian mythology, in which the forces of Nature are personified in heroes. In Iliyá they found the features of the God of the Thunders. Dobrýnia the Dragon-Killer was supposed to represent the sun in its passiive power-the active powers of fighting being left to Iliyá. Sádko was the personification and the Sea-God whom he deals with was Neptune. Tchúrilo was taken as a representative of the demonical element. And so on. Such was, at least, the interpretation put upon the sagas by the early explorers.

V.V. Stásoff, in his Origin of the Russian Bylíny (1868), entirely upset this theory. With a considerable wealth of argument he proved that these epic songs are not fragments of a Slavonic mythology, but represent borrowings from Eastern tales. Iliyá is the Rustem of the Iranian legends, placed in Russian surroundings. Dobrýnia is the Krishna of Indian folk-lore; Sádko is the merchant of the Eastern tales, as also of a Norman tale. All the Russian epic heroes have an Eastern origin. Other explorers went still further than Stásoff. They saw in the heroes of Russian epics insignificant men who had lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Iliyá of Múrom is really mentioned as a historic person in a Scandinavian chronicle), to whom the exploits of Eastern heroes, borrowed from Eastern tales, were attributed. Consequently, the heroes of the bylíny could have had nothing to do with the times of Vladímir, and still less with the earlier Slavonic mythology.

The gradual evolution and migration of myths, which are successively fastened upon new and local persons as they reach new countries, may perhaps aid to explain these contradictions. That there are mythological features in the heroes of the Russian epics may be taken as certain; only, the mythology they belong to is not Slavonian but Aryan altogether. Out of these mythological representations of the forces of Nature, human heroes were gradually evolved in the East.

At a later epoch when these Eastern traditions began to spread in Russia, the exploits of their heroes were attributed to Russian men, who were made to act in Russian surroundings. Russian folk-lore assimilated them; and, while it retained their deepest semi-mythological features and leading traits of character, it endowed, at the same time, the Iranian Rustem, the Indian dragon-killer, the Eastern merchant, and so on, with new features, purely Russian. It divested them, so to say, of the garb which had been put upon their mystical substances when they were first appropriated and humanised by the Iranians and the Indians, and dressed them now in a Russian garb — just as in the tales about Alexander the Great, which I heard in Transbaikalia, the Greek hero is endowed with Buryate features and his exploits are located on such and such a Transbaikalian mountain. However, Russian folk-lore did not simply change the dress of the Persian prince, Rustem, into that of a Russian peasant, Iliyá. The Russian sagas, in their style, in the poetical images they resort to, and partly in the characteristics of their heroes, were new creations. Their heroes are thoroughly Russian: for instance, they never seek for blood-vengence, as Scandinavian heroes would do; their actions, especially those of “the elder heroes,” are not dictated by personal aims, but are imbued with a communal spirit, which is characteristic of Russian popular life. They are as much Russians as Rustem was Persian. As to the time of composition of these sagas, it is generally believed that they date from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, but that they received their definite shape-the one that has reached us in the fouteenth century. Since that time they have undergone but little alteration.

In these sagas Russia has thus a precious national inheritance of a rare poetical beauty, which has been fully appreciated in England by Ralston, and in France by the historian Rambaud.

Lay of Igor’s Raid

And yet Russia has not her Iliad. There has been no poet to inspire himself with the expolits of Iliyá’, Dobrýnia, Sádko, Tchúrilo, and the others, and to make out of them a poem similar to the epics of Homer, or the “Kalevála” of the Finns. This has been done with only one cycle of traditions: in the poem, The Lay of Igor’s Raid (Slóvo o Polkú Igoreve).

This poem was composed at the end of the twelfth century, or early in the thirteenth (its full manuscript, destroyed during the conflagration of Moscow in 1812, dated from the fourteenth or the fifteenth century). It was undoubtedly the work of one author, and for its beauty and poetical form it stands by the side of the Song of the Nibelungs, or the Song 0f Roland. It relates a real fact that did happen in 1185. Igor, a prince of Kíeff; starts with his druacute;zhina (schola) of Warriors to make a raid on the Pólovtsi, who occupied the prairies of South-eastern Russia, and continually railded the Russian villages. All sorts of bad omens are seen on the march through the prairies — the sun is darkened and casts its shadow on the band of Russian warriors; the animals give different warnings; but Igor exclaims: “Brothers and friends: Better to fall dead than be prisoners of the Pólovtsi! Let us march to the blue waters of the Don. Let us break our lances against those of the Pólovtsi. And either I leave there my head, or I will drink the water of the Don from my golden helmet.” The march is resumed, the Pólovtsi are met with, and a great battle is fought.

The description of the battle, in which all Nature takes part — the eagles and the wolves, and the foxes who bark after the red shields of the Russians — is admirable. Igor’s band is defeated. “From sunrise to sunset, and from sunset to sunrise, the steel arrows flew, the swords clashed on the helmets, the lances were broken in a far-away land — the land of the Pólovtsi.” “The black earth under the hoofs of the horses was strewn with bones, and out of this sowing affliction will rise in the land of the Russians.”

Then comes one of the best bits of early Russian poetry — the lamentations of Yaroslávna, Igor’s wife, who waits for his return in the town of Putívl:

“The voice of Yaroslávna resounds as the complaint of a cuckoo; it resounds at the rise of the sunlight.

“I will fly as a cuckoo down the river. I will wet my beaver sleeves in the Káyala; I will wash with them the wounds of my prince — the deep wounds of my hero.”

“Yaroslávna laments on the walls of Putívl.

Oh, Wind, terrible Wind! Why dost thou, my master, blow so strong? Why didst thou carry on thy light wings the arrows of the Khan against the warriors of my hero? Is it not enough for thee to blow there, high up in the clouds? Not enough to rock the ships on the blue sea? Why didst thou lay down my beloved upon the grass of the Steppes?

“Yaroslávna laments upon the walls of Putívl.

“Oh, glorious Dniéper, thou hast pierced thy way through the rocky hills to the land of Póovtsi. Thou hast carried the boats of Svyatosláv as they went to fight the Khan Kobyák. Bring, oh, my master, my husband back to me, and I will send no more tears through thy tide towards the sea.

“Yaroslávna laments upon the walls of Putívl.

“Brilliant Sun, thrice brilliant Sun! Thou givest heat to all, thou shinest for all. Why shouldest thou send thy burning rays upon my husband’s warriors? Why didst thou, in the waterless steppe, dry up their bows in their hands? Why shouldest thou, making them suffer from thirst, cause their arrows to weigh so heavy upon their shoulders?

This little fragment gives some idea of the general charter and beauty of the Saying ahout Igor’s Raid.[2]

Surely this poem was not the only one that was composed and sung in those times. The introduction itself speaks of bards, and especially of one, Bayán, whose recitations and songs are compared to the wind that blows in the tops of the trees. Many such Bayáns surely went about and sang similar “Sayings” during the festivals of the princes and their warriors. Unfortunately, only this one has reached us. The Russian Church, especially in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, pitilessly proscribed the singing of all the epic songs which circulated among the people: it considered them “pagan,” and inflicted the heaviest penalties upon the bards and those who sang old songs in their rings. Consequently, only small fragments of this early folk-lore have reached us.

And yet even these few relics of the past have exercised a powerful influence upon Russian literature, ever since it has taken the liberty of treating other subjects than purely religious ones. If Russian versification took the rhythmical form, as against the syllabic, it was because this form was imposed upon the Russian poets by the folk-song. Besides, down to quite recent times, folk-songs constituted such an important item in Russian country life, in the homes alike of the landlord and the peasant, that they could not but deeply influence the Russian poets; and the first great poet of Russia, Púshkin, began his career by re-telling in verse his old nurse’s tales to which he used to listen during the long winter nights. It is also owing to our almost incredible wealth of most musical popular songs that we have had in Russia, since so early a date as 1835, an opera (Verstóvskiy’s Askóld’s Grave), based upon popular tradition, of which the purely Russian melodies at once catch the ear of the least musically-educated Russian. This is also why the operas of Dargomýzhsky and the younger composers are now successfully sung in the villages to peasant audiences and with local peasant choirs.

The folk-lore and the folk-song have thus rendered to Russia an immense service. They have maintained a certain unity of the spoken language all over Russia, as also a unity between the literary language and the language spoken by the masses; between the music of Glínka, Tchaykóvoky, Rímsky Kórsakoff, Borodín, etc., and the music of the peasant choir — thus rendering both the poet and the composer accessible to the peasant

The Annals

And finally, whilst speaking of the early Russian literature, a few words, at least, must be said of the Annals.

No country has a richer collection of them. There were, in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, several centres of development in Russia, Kíeff, Nóvgorod, Pskov, the land of Volhýnia, the land of Súzdal (Vladímir, Moscow[3]) Ryazán, etc., represented at that time independent republics, linked together only by the unity of language and religion, and by the fact that all of them elected their Princes — military defenders and judges — from the house of Rúrik. Each of these centers had its own annals, bearing the stamp of local life and local character. The South Russian and Volhýnian annals-of which the so-called Nestor’s Annals are the fullest and the best known, are not merely dry records of facts: they are imaginative and poetical in places. The annals of Nóvgorod bear the stamp of a city of rich merchants: they are very matter-of-fact, and the annalist warms to his subject only when he describes the victories of the Nóvgorod republic over the Land of Súzdal. The Annals of the sister-republic of Pskov, on the contrary, are imbued with a democratic spirit, and they relate with democratic sympathies and in a most picturesque manner the struggles between the poor of Pskov and the rich — the “black people” and the “white people.” Altogether, the annals are surely not the work of monks, as was supposed at the outset; they must have been written for the different cities by men fully informed about their political life, their treaties with other republics, their inner and outer conflicts.

Moreover, the annals, especially those of Kíeff, or Nestor’s Annals, are something more than mere records of events; they are, as may be seen from the very name of the latter (From whence and How came to be the Land of Russia), attempts at writing a history of the country, under the inspiration of Greek models. Those manuscripts which have reached us — and especially is this true of the Kíeff annals — have thus a compound structure, and historians distinguish in them several superposed “layers” dating from different periods. Old traditions; fragments of early historical knowledge, probably borrowed from the Byzantine historians; old treaties; complete poems relating certain episodes, such as Igor’s raid; and local annals from different periods, enter into their composition. Historical facts, relative to a very early period and fully confirmed by the Constantinople annalists and historians, are consequently mingled together with purely mythical traditions. But this is precisely what makes the high literary value of the Russan annals, especially those of Southern and South-western Russia, which contain most precious fragments of early literature.

Such, then, were the treasuries of literature which Russia possessed at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Mediæval Literature

The Mongol invasion, which took place in 1223, destroyed all this young civilisation, and threw Russia into quite new channels. The main cities of South and Middle Russia were laid waste. Kíeff, which had been a populous city and a centre of learning, was reduced to the state of a straggling settlement, and disappeared from history for the next two centuries. Whole populations of large towns were either taken prisoners by the Mongols, or exterminated, if they had offered resistance to the invaders. As if to add to the misfortunes of Russia, the Turks soon followed the Mongols, invading the Balkan peninsula, and by the end of the fifteenth century the two countries from which and through which learnina used to come to Russia, namely Servia and Bulgaria, fell under the rule of the Osmanlis. All the life of Russia underwent a deep transformation.

Before the invasion the land was covered with independent republics, similar to the mediæval city-republics of Western Europe. Now, a military State, powerfully supported by the Church, began to be slowly built up at Moscow, which conquered, with the aid of the Mongol Khans, the independent principalities that surrounded it. The main effort of the statesmen and the most active men of the Church was now directed towards the building up of a powerful kingdom which should be capable of throwing off ihe Mongol yoke. State ideals were substituted for those of local autonomy and federation. The Church, in its effort to constitute a Christian nationality, free from all intellectual and moral contact with the abhorred pagan Mongols, became a stern centralised power which pitilessly persecuted everything that was a reminder of a pagan past. It worked hard, at the same time, to establish upon Byzantine ideals the unlimited authority of the Moscow princes. Serfdom was introduced in order to increase the military power of the State. All independent local life was destroyed. The idea of Moscow becoming a centre for Church and State was powerfully supported by the Church, which preached that Moscow was the heir to Constantinople — “a third Rome,” where the only true Christianity was now to develop. And at a later epoch, when the Mongol yoke had been, thrown off, the work of consolidating the Moscow monarchy was continued by the Tsars and the Church, and the struggle was against the intrusion of Western influences, in order to prevent the “Latin” Church from extending its authority over Russia.

These new conditions necessarily exercised a deep influence upon the further development of literature. The freshness and vigorous youthfulness of the early epic poetry was gone forever. Sadness, melancholy, resignation became the leading features of Russian folk-lore. The continually repeated raids of the Tartars, who carried away whole villages as prisoners to their encampments in the South-eastern Steppes; the sufferings of the prisoners in slavery; the visits of the baskáks, who came to levy a high tribute and behaved as conquerors in a conquered land; the hardships inflicted upon the populations by the growing military State — all this impressed the popular songs with a deep note of sadness which they have never since lost. At the same time the gay festival songs of old and the epic songs of the wandering bards were strictly forbidden, and those who dared to sing them were cruelly persecuted by the Church, which saw in these songs not only a reminiscence of a pagan past, but also a possible link of union with the Tartars.

Learning was gradually concentrated in the monasteries, every one of which was a fortress built against the invaders; and it was limited, of course, to Christian literature. It became entirely scholastic. Knowledge of nature was “unholy,” something of a witchcraft. Asceticism was preached as the highest virtue, and became the dominant feature of written literature. Legends about the saints were widely read and repeated verbally, and they found no balance in such learning as had been developed in Western Europe in the mediæval universities. The desire for a knowledge of nature was severely condemned by the Church, as a token of self-conceit. All poetry was a sin. The annals lost their animated character and became dry enumerations of the successes of the rising State, or merely related unimportant details concerning the local bishops and superiors of monasteries.

During the twelfth century there had been, in the northern republics of Nóvgorod and Pksov, a strong current of opinion leading, on the one side, to Protestant rationalism, and on the other side to the development of Christianity on the lines of the early Christian brotherhoods. The apocryphal Gospels, the books of the Old Testament, and various books in which true Christianity was discussed, were eagerly copied and had a wide circulation. Now, the head of the Church in Central Russia violently antagonised all such tendencies towards reformed Christianity. A strict adherence to the very letter of the teachings of the Byzantine Church was exacted from the flock. Every kind of interpretation of the Gospels became heresy. All intellectual life in the domain of religion, as well as every criticism of the dignitaries of the Moscow Church, was treated as dangerous, and those who had ventured this way had to flee from Moscow, seeking refuge in the remote monasteries of the far North. As to ihe great movement of the Renaissance, which gave a new life to Western Europe, it did not reach Russia: the Church considered it a return to paganism, and cruelly exterminated its forerunners who came within her reach, burning them at the stake, or putting them to death on the racks of her torture chambers.

I will not dwell upon this period, which covers nearly five centuries, because it offers very little interest for the student of Russian literature; I will only mention the two or three works which must not be passed by in silence.

Correspondence between John IV. and Kúrbiskíy

One of them is the letters exchanged between the Tsar John the Terrible (John IV.), and one of his chief vassals, Prince Kúrbskiy, who had left Moscow for Lithuania. From beyond the Lithuanian border he addressed to his cruel, half lunatic ex-master Iong letters of reproach, which John answered, developing in his epistles the theory of the divine origin of the Tsar’s authority. This correspondence is most characteristic of the political ideas that were current then, and of the learning of the period.

After the death of John the Terrible (who occupies in Russian history the same position as Louis XI. in French, since he destroyed by fire and sword — but with a truly Tartar cruelty — the power of the feudal princes), Russia passed, as is known, through years of great disturbance. The pretender Demetrius who proclaimed himself a son of John, came from Poland and took possession of the throne at Moscow. The Poles invaded Russia, and were the masters of Moscow, Smolénsk, and all the western towns; and when Demetrius was overthrown, a few months after his coronation, a general revolt of the peasants broke out, while all Central Russia was invaded by Cossack bands, and several new pretenders made their appearance. These “Disturbed Years” must have left traces in popular songs, but all such songs entirely disappeared in Russia during the dark period of serfdom which followed, and we know of them only through an Englishman, Richard James, who was in Russia in 1619, and who wrote down some of the songs relating to this period. The same must be said of the folk-literature, which must have come into existence during the later portion of the seventeenth century. The definite introduction of serfdom under the first Romanoff (Mikhail, 1612–1640); the wide-spread revolts of the peasants which followed — culminating in the terrific uprising of Stepán Rázin, who has become since then a favourite hero with the oppressed peasants; and finally the stern and cruel persecution of the Non-conformists and their migrations eastward into the depths of the Uráls — all these events must have found their expression in folk-songs; but the State and the Church so cruelly hunted down everything that bore trace of a spirit of rebellion that no works of popular creation from that period have reached us. Only a few writings of a polemic character and the remarkable autobiography of an exiled priest have been preserved by the Non-conformists.

Split in the Church — Memoirs of Avvakúm

The first Russian Bible was printed in Poland in 1580. A few years later a printing office was established at Moscow, and the Russian Church authorities had now to decide which of the written texts then in circulation should be taken for the printing of the Holy Books. The handwritten copies which were in use at that time were full of errors, and it was evidently necessary to revise them by comparing them with the Greek texts before committing any of them to print. This revision was undertaken at Moscow, with the aid of learned men brought over partly from Greece and partly from the Greco-Latin Academy of Kieff; but for many different reasons this revision became the source of a widely spread discontent, and in the middle of the seventeenth century a formidable split (raskól) took place in the Church. It hardly need be said that this split was not a mere matter of theology, nor of Greek readings. The seventeenth century was a century when the Moscow church had attained a formidable power in the State. The head of it, the Patriarch Níkon, was, moreover, a very ambitious man, who intended to play in the East the part which the Pope played in the West, and to that end he tried to impress the people by his grandeur and luxury — which meant, of course, heavy impositions upon the serfs of the Church and the lower clergy. He was hated by both, and was soon accused by the people of drifting into “Latinism”; so that the split between the people and the clergy-especially the higher clergy-took the character of a wide-spread separation of the people from the Greek Church.

Most of the Non-conformist writings of the time are purely scholastic in character and consequently offer no literary interest. But the memoirs of a Non-conformist priest, AVVAKÚM (died 1681), who was exiled to Siberia and made his way on foot, with Cossack parties, as far as the banks of the Amúr, deserve to be mentioned. By their simplicity, their sincerity, and absence of all sensationalism, they have remained the prototype of Russian memoirs, down to the present day. Here are a few quotations from this remarkable work:

When I came to Yeniséisk,” Avvakúm wrote, “another order came from Moscow to send me to Daúria, 2,000 miles from Moscow, and to place me under the orders of Páshkoff. He had with him sixty men, and in punishment of my sins he proved to be a terrible man. Continually he burnt, and tortured, and flogged his men, and I had often spoken to him, remonstrating that what he did was not good, and now I fell myself into his hands. When we went along the Angará river he ordered me, ‘Get out of your boat, you are a heretic, that is why the boats don’t get along. Go you on foot, across the mountains.’ It was hard to do. Mountains high, forests impenetrable, stony cliffs rising like walls — and we had to cross them, going about with wild beasts and birds; and I wrote him a little letter which began thus: ‘Man, be afraid of God. Even the heavenly forces and all animals and men are afraid of Him. Thou alone carest nought about Him.’ Much more was written in this letter, and I sent it to him. Presently I saw fifty men coming to me, and they took me before him. He had his sword in his hand and shook with fury. He asked me: ‘Art thou a priest, or a priest degraded?’ I answered, ‘I am Avvakúm, a priest, what dost thou want from me?’ And he began to beat me on the head and he threw me on the ground, and continued to beat me while I was lying on the ground, and then ordered them to give me seventy-two lashes with the knout, and I replied: ‘Jesus Christ, son of God, help me!’ and he was only the more angered that I did not ask for mercy. Then they brought me to a small fort, and put me in a dungeon, giving me some straw, and all the winter I was kept in that tower, without fire. And the winter there is terribly cold; but God supported me, even though I had no furs. I lay there as a dog on the straw. One day they would feed me, another not. Rats were swarming all around. I used to kill them with my cap — the poor fools would not even give me a stick.”

Later on Avvakúm was taken to the Amúr, and when he and his wife had to march, in the winter, over the ice of the great river, she would often fall down from sheer exhaustion. “Then I came,” Avvakúm writes, “to lift her up, and she exclaimed in despair: ‘How long, priest, how long will these sufferings continue?’ And I replied to her: ‘Until death even’; and then she would get up saying: ‘Well, then, priest; let us march on.’” No sufferings could vanquish this great man. From the Amúr he was recalled to Moscow, and once more made the whole journey on foot. There he was accused of resistance to Church and State, and was burned at the stake in 1681.

The Eighteenth Century — Peter I. and his contemporaries

The violent reforms of Peter I., who created a military European State out of the semi-Byzantine and semi-Tartar State which Russia had been under his predecessors, gave a new turn to literature. It would be out of place to appreciate here the historical significance of the reforms of Peter I., but it must be mentioned that in Russian literature one finds, at least, two forerunners of Peter’s work.

One of them was KOTOSHÍKHIN (1630–1667), an historian.[4] He ran away from Moscow to Sweden, and wrote there, fifty years before Peter became Tsar, a history of Russia, in which he strenuously criticised the condition of ignorance prevailing at Moscow, and advocated wide reforms. His manuscript was unknown till the nineteenth century, when it was discovered at Upsala. Another writer, imbued with the same ideas, was a South Slavonian, KRYZHÁNITCH, who was called to Moscow in 1659, in order to revise the Holy Books, and wrote a most remarkable work, in which he also preached the necessity of thorough reforms. He was exiled two years later to Siberia, where he died.

Peter I., who fully realised the importance of literature, and was working hard to introduce European learning amongst his countrymen, understood that the old Slavonian tongue, which was then in use among Russian writers, but was no longer the current language of the nation, could only hamper the development of literature and learning. Its forms, its expressions, and grammar were already quite strange to the Russians. It could be used still in religious writings, but a book on geometry, or algebra, or military art, written in the Biblical Old Slavonian, would have been simply ridiculous. Consequently, Peter removed the difficulty in his usual trenchant way. He established a new alphabet, to aid in the introduction into literature of the spoken but hitherto unwritten language. This alphabet, partly borrowed from the Old Slavonian, but very much simplified, is the one now in use.

Literature proper little interested Peter I.: he looked upon printed matter from the strictly utilitarian point of view, and his chief aim was to familiarise the Russians with the first elements of the exact sciences, as well as with the arts of navigation, warfare, and fortification. Accordingly, the writers of his time offer but little interest from the literary point of view, and I need mention but a very few of them.

The most interesting writer of the time of Peter I. and his immediate successors was perhaps PROCOPÓVITCH, a priest, without the slightest taint of religious fanaticism, a great admirer of West-European learning, who founded a Greco-Slavonian academy. The courses of Russian literature also make mention of KANTEMIR (1709–1744), the son of a Moldavian prince who had emigrated with his subjects to Russia. He wrote satires, in which he expressed himself with a freedom of thought that was quite remarkable for his time[5] TKRETIAÓVSKY (1703–1769) offers a certain melancholy interest. He was the son of a priest, and in his youth ran away from his father, in order to study at Moscow. Thence he went to Amsterdam and Paris, travelling mostly on foot. He studied at the Paris University and became an admirer of advanced ideas, about which he wrote in extremely clumsy verses. On his return to St. Petersburg he lived all his afterlife in poverty and neglect, persecuted on all sides by sarcasms for his endeavours to reform Russian versification. He was himself entirely devoid of any poetical talent, and yet he rendered a great service to Russian poetry. Up to that date Russian verse was syllabic; but he understood that syllabic verse does not accord with the spirit of the Russian language, and he devoted his life to prove that Russian poetry should be written according to the laws of rhythmical versification. If he had had even a spark of talent, he would have found no difficulty in proving his thesis; but he had none, and consequently resorted to the most ridiculous artifices. Some of his verses were lines of the most incongruous words, strung together for the sole purpose of showing how rhythm and rhymes may be obtained. If he could not otherwise get his rhyme, he did not hesitate to split a word at the end of a verse, beginning the next one with what was left of it. In spite of his absurdities, he succeeded in persuading Russian poets to adopt rhythmical versification, and its rules have been followed ever since. In fact, this was only the natural development of the Russian popular song.

There was also a historian, TATÍSCHFF (1686–1750), who wrote a history of Russia, and began a large work on the geography of the Empire — a hard-working man who studied a great deal in many sciences, as well as in Church matters, was superintendent of mines in the Uráls, and wrote a number of political works as well as history. He was the first to appreciate the value of the annals, which he collected and systematised, thus preparing materials for future historians, but he left no lasting trace in Russian literature. In fact, only one man of that period deserves more than a passing mention. It was LOMONÓSOFF (1712–1765). He was born in a village on the White Sea, near Archángel, in a fisherman’s family. He also ran away from his parents, came on foot to Moscow, and entered a school in a monastery, living there in indescribable poverty. Later on he went to Kíeff, also on foot, and there he very nearly became a priest. It so happened, however, that at that time the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences applied to the Moscow Theological Academy for twelve good students who might be sent to study abroad. Lomonósoff was chosen as one of them. He went to Germany, where he studied natural sciences under the best natural philosophers of the time, especially under Christian Wolff, — always in terrible poverty, almost on the verge of starvation. In 1741 he came back to Russia, and was nominated a member of the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg.

The Academy was then in the hands of a few Germans who looked upon all Russian scholars with undisguised contempt, and consequently received Lomonósoff in a most unfriendly manner. It did not help him that the great mathematician, Euler, wrote that the work of Lomonósoff in natural philosophy and chemistry revealed a man of genius, and that any Academy might be happy to possess him. A bitter struggle soon began between the German members of the Academy and the Russian who, it must be owned, was of a very violent character, especially when he was under the influence of drink. Poverty, his salary being confiscated as a punishment; detention at the police station; exclusion from the Senate of the Academy; and, worst of all, political persecution — such was the fate of Lomonósoff, who had joined the party of Elizabeth, and consequently was treated as an enemy when Catharine II. came to the throne. It was not until the nineteenth century that “Lomonósoff was duly appreciated.

“Lomonósoff was himself a university,” was Púshkins remark, and this remark was quite correct: so varied were the directions in which he worked. Not only was he a distinguished natural philosopher, chemist, physical geographer, and mineralogist: he laid also the foundations of the grammar of the Russian language, which he understood as part of a general grammer of all languages, considered in their natural evolution. He also worked out the different forms of Russian versification, and he created quite a new literary language, of which he could say that it was equally appropriate for rendering “the powerful oratory of Cicero, the brilliant earnestness of Virgil and the pleasant talk of Ovid, as well as the subtlest imaginary conceptions of philosophy, or discussing the various properties of matter and the changes which are always going on in the structure of the universe and in human affairs.” This he proved by his poetry, by his scientific writings, and by his “Discourses,” in which he combined Huxley’s readiness to defend science against blind faith with Humboldt’s poetical conception of Nature.

His odes were, it is true, written in the pompous style which was dear to the pseudo-classicism then reigning, and he retained Old Slavonian expressions “for dealing with elevated subjects, but in his scientific and other writings he used the commonly spoken language with great effect and force. Owing to the very variety of sciences which he had to acclimatise in Russia, he could not give much time to original research; but when he took up the defence of the ideas of Corpernicus, Newton, or Huyghens against the opposition which they met with on theological grounds, a true philosopher of natural science, in the modern sense of the term, was revealed in him. In his early boyhood he used to accompany his father — a sturdy northern fisherman — on his fishing exxpcditions, and there he got his love of Nature and a fine comprehension of natural phenomena, which made of his Memoir on Arctic Exploration a work that has not lost its value even now. It is well worthy of note that in this last work he had stated the mechanical theory of heat in such definite expressions that he undoubtedly anticipated by a full century this great discovery of our own time — a fact which has been entirely overlooked, even in Russia.

A contemporary of Lomonósoff, SUMARÓKOFF (1717–1777,) who was described in those years as a “Russian Racine,” must also be mentioned in this place. He belonged to the higher nobility, and had received an entirely French education. His dramas, of which he wrote a great number, were entirely immitated from the French pseudo-classical school; but he contributed very much as will be seen from a subsequent chapter, to the development of the Russian theatre. Sumarókoff wrote also lyrical verses, elegies, and satires — all of no great importance; but the remarkably good style of his letters, free of the Slavonic archaisms, which were habitual at that time, deserves to be mentioned.

The Times of Catherine II.

With Catherine II who reigned from 1752 till 1796, commenced a new era in Russian literature. It began to shake off its previous dulness, and although the Russian writers continued to imitate French models — chiefly pseudo-classical — they began also to introduce into their writings various subjects taken from direct observation of Russian life. There is, altogether, a frivolous youthfulness in the literature of the first years of Catherine’s reign, when the Empress, being yet full of progressive ideas borrowed from her intercourse with French philosophers, composed — basing it on Montesquieu — her remarkable Instruction (Nakáz) to the deputies she convoked; wrote several comedies, in which she ridiculed the old-fashioned representatives of Russian nobility; and edited a monthly review in which she entered into controversy both with some ultraconservative writers and with the more advanced young reformers. An academy of belles-letters was founded, and Princess VORONTSÓVA-DÁSHKOVA (1743–1819) — who had aided Catherine II. in her coup d’état against her husband, Peter III., and in taking possession of the throne was nominated president of the Academy of Sciences. She assisted the Academy with real earnestness in compiling a dictionary of the Russian language, and she also edited a review which left a mark in Russian literature; while her memoirs, written in French (Mon Histoire) are a very valuable, though not always impartial, historical document.[6] Altogether there began at that time quite a literary movement, which produced a remarkable poet, DERZHÁVIN (1743–1816); the writer of comedies, VON WÍZIN (1745–1792); the first philosopher, NÓVIKOFF (1742-18I8); and a political writer, RADÍSCHEFF (1749–1802).

The poetry of Derzhávin certainly does not answer our modern requirements. He was the poet laureate of Catherine, and sang in pompous odes the virtues of the ruler and the victories of her generals and favourites. Russia was then taking a firm hold on the shores of the Black Sea, and beginning to play a serious part in European affairs; and occasions for the inflation of Derzhávin’s patriotic feelings were not wanting. However, he had some of the marks of the true poet; he was open to the feeling of the poetry of Nature, and capable of expressing it in verses that were positively good (Ode to God, The Waterfall). Nay, these really poetical verses, which are found side by side with unnatural, heavy lines stuffed with obsolete pompous words, are so evidently better than the latter, that they certainly were an admirable object-lesson for all subsequent Russian poets. They must have contributed to induce our poets to abandon mannerism. Púshkin, who in his youth admired Derzhávin, must have felt at once the disadvantages of a pompous style, illustrated by his predecessor, and with his wonderful command of his mother-tongue he was necessarily brought to abandon the artificial language which formerly was considered “poetical,” — he began to write as we speak.

The comedies of VON WÍZIN (of FONVIZIN), were quite a revelation for his contemporaries. His first comedy, The Brigadier, which he wrote at the age of twenty-two, created quite a sensation, and till now it has not lost its interest; while his second comedy, Nédorosl (1782), was received as an event in Russian literature, and is occasionally played even at the present day. Both deal with purely Russian subjects, taken from every-day life; and although Von Wízin too freely borrowed from foreign authors (the subject of The Brigadier is borrowed from a Danish comedy of Holberg, Jean de France), he managed nevertheless to make his chief personages truly Russian. In this sense he certainly was a creator of the Russian national drama, and he was also the first to introduce into our literature the realistic tendency which became so powerful with Púshkin, Gógol and their followers. In his political opinions he remained true to the progressive opinions which Catherine II. patronised in the first years of her reign, and in his capacity of secretary to Count Pánin he boldly denounced serfdom, favouritism, and want of education in Russia.

I pass in silence several writers of the same epoch, namely, BOGDANÓVITCH (1743-18O3), the author of a pretty and light poem, Dusheñka; HEMNITZER (1745–1784), a gifted writer of fables, who was a forerunner of Krylóff; KAPNÍST (1757–1809), who wrote rather superficial satires in good verse; Prince SCHERBÁTOFF (1733–1790), who began with several others the scientific collecting of old annals and folklore, and undertook to write a history of Russia, in which we find a scientific criticism of the annals and other sources of information; and several others. But I must say a few words upon the masonic movement which took place on the threshold of the nineteenth century.

The Freemasons: First Manifestation of Political Thought

The looseness of habits which characterised Russian high society in the eighteenth century the absence of ideals, the servility of the nobles, and the horrors of serfdom, necessarily produced a reaction amongst the better minds, and this reaction took the shape, partly of a widely spread Masonic movement, and partly of Christian mysticism, which originated in the mystical teachings that had at that time widely spread in Germany. The freemasons and their Society of Friends undertook a serious effort for spreading moral education among the masses, and they found in NÓVIKOFF (1744–1818) a true apostle of renovation. He began his literary career very early, in one of those satirical reviews of which Catherine herself took the initiative at the beginning of her reign, and already in his amiable controversy with “the grandmother” (Catherine) he showed that he would not remain satisfied with the superficial satire in which the empress delighted, but that, contrary to her wishes, he would go to the root of the evils of the time: namely, serfdom and its brutalising effects upon society at large. Nóvikoff was not onIy a well-educated man: he combined the deep moral convictions of an idealist with the capacities of an organiser and a business man; and although his review (from which the net income went entirely for philanthropic and educational purposes) was soon stopped by “the grandmother,” he started in Moscow a most successful printing and book-selling business, for editing and spreading books of an ethical character. His immense printing office, combined with a hospital for the workers and a chemist’s shop, from which medicine was given free to all the poor of Moscow, was soon in business relations with booksellers all over Russia; while his influence upon educated society was growing rapidly, and working in an excellent direction. In 1787, during a famine, he organised relief for the starving peasants-guite a fortune having been put for this purpose at his disposal by one of his pupils. Of course, both the Church and the Government looked with suspicion upon the spreading of Christianity, as it was understood by the freemason Friends; and although the metropolitan of Moscow testified that Nóvikoff was “the best Christian he ever knew,” Nóvikoff was accused of political conspiracy.

He was arrested, and in accordance with the personal wish of Catherine, though to the astonishment of all those who knew anything about him, was condemned to death in 1792. The death-sentence, however, was not fulfilled, but he was taken for fifteen years to the terrible fortress of Schüsselburg, where he was put in the secret cell formerly occupied by the Grand Duke Ivan Antonovitch, and where his freemason friend, Doctor Bagryinskiy, volunteered to remain imprisoned with him. He remained there till the death of Catherine. Paul I. released him, in 1796, on the very day that he became emperor; but Nóvikoff came out of the fortress a broken man, and fell entirely into mysticism, towards which there was already a marked tendency in several lodges of the freemasons.

The Christian mystics were not happier. One of them, LÁBZIN (1766–1825), who exercised a great influence upon society by his writings against corruption, was also denounced, and ended his days in exile. However, both the mystical Christians and the freemasons (some of whose lodges followed the Rosenkreuz teachings) exercised a deep influence on Russia. With the advent of Alexander I. to the throne the freemasons obtained more facilities for spreading their ideas; and the growing conviction that serfdom must be abolished, and that the tribunals, as well as the whole system of administration, were in need of complete reform, was certainly to a great extent a result of their work. Besides, quite a number of remarkable men received their education at the Moscow Institute of the Friends-founded by Nóvikoff — including the historian Karamzín, the brothers Turguéneff, uncles of the great novelist, and several political men of mark.

RADÍSCHEFF (1749–1802), a political writer of the same epoch, had a still more tragic end. He received his education in the Corps of Pages, and was one of those young men whom the Russian Government had sent in 1766 to Germany to finish there their education. He followed the lectures of Hellert and Plattner at Leipzig, and studied very earnestly the French philosophers. On his return, he published, in 1790, a Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the idea of which seems to have been suggested to him by Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. In this book he very ably intermingled his impressions of travel with various philosophical and moral discussions and with pictures from Russian life.

He insisted especially upon the horrors of serfdom, as also upon the bad organisation of the administration, the venality of the law-courts, and so on, confirming his general condemnations by concrete facts taken from real life. Catherine, who already before the beginning of the revolution in France, and especially since the events of 1789, had come to regard with horror the liberal ideas of her youth, ordered the book to be confiscated and destroyed at once. She described the author as a revolutionist, “worse than Pugatchóff”; he ventured to “Speak with approbation of Franklin” and was infected with French ideas! Consequently, she wrote herself a sharp criticism of the book, upon which its prosecution had to be based. Radíscheff was arrested, confined to the fortress, later on transported to the remotest portions of Eastern Siberia, on the Olenek. He was released only in 1801. Next year, seeing that even the advent of Alexander the First did not mean the coming of a new reformatory spirit, he put an end to his life by suicide. As to his book, it still remains forbidden in Russia. A new edition of it, which was made in 1872, was confiscated and destroyed, and in 1888 the permission was given to a publisher to issue the work in editions of a hundred copies only, which were to be distributed among a few men of science and certain high functionaries.[7]

The First Years of the Nineteenth Century

These were, then, the elements out of which Russian literature had to be evolved in the nineteenth century. The slow work of the last five hundred years had already prepared that admirable, pliable, and rich instrument — the literary language in which Púshkin would soon be enabled to write his melodious verses and Turguéneff his no less melodious prose. From the autobiography of the Non-conformist martyr, Avvakúm, one could already guess the value of the spoken language of the Russian people for literary purposes.

Tretiakóvskiy, by his clumsy verses, and especially “Lomonósoff and Derzhávin by their odes, had definitely repelled the syllabic form that had been introduced from France and Poland, and had established the tonic, rhythmical form which was indicated by the popular song itself. Lomonósoff had created a popular scientific language; he had invented a number of new words, and had proved that the Latin and Old Slavonian constructions were hostile to the spirit of Russian, and quite unnecessary. The age of Catherine II. further introduced into written literature the forms of familiar everyday talk, borrowed even from the peasant class; and Nóvikoff had created a Russian philosophical language — still heavy on account of its underlying mysticism, but splendidly adapted, as it appeared a few decades later, to abstract metaphysical discussions. The elements for a great and original literature were thus ready. They required only a vivifying spirit which should use them for higher purposes. This genius was Púshkin. But before speaking of him, the historian and novelist Karamzín and the poet Zhukóvskiy[8] must be mentioned, as they represent a link between the two epochs.

KARAMZÍN (1766–1826), by his monumental work, The History of the Russian State, did in literature what the great war of 18l2 had done in national life. He awakened the national consciousness and created a lasting interest in the history of the nation, in the making of the empire, in the evolution of national character and institutions. Karamzín’s History was reactionary in spirit. He was the historian of the Russian State, not of the Russian people; the poet of the virtues of monarchy and the wisdom of the rulers, but not an observer of the work that had been accomplished by the unknown masses of the nation. He was not the man to understand the federal principles which prevailed in Russia down to the fifteenth century, and still less the communal principles which pervaded Russian life and had permitted the nation to conquer and to colonise an immense continent. For him, the history of Russia was the regular, organic development of a monarchy, from the first appearance of the Scandinavian varingiar down to the present times, and he was chiefly concerned with describing the deeds of monarchs in their conquests and their building up of a State; but, as it often happens with Russian writers, his foot-notes were a work of history in themselves. They contained a rich mine of information concerning the sources of Russia’s history, and the suggested to the ordinary reader that the early centuries of mediæval Russia, with her independent city-republics, were far more interesting than they appeared in the book.[9] Karamzín was not the founder of a school, but he showed to Russia that she has a past worth knowing. Besides, his work was a work of art. It was written in a brilliant style, which accustomed the public to read historical works. The result was, that the first edition of his eight-volume History — 3,000 copies — was sold in twenty-five days.

However, Karamzín’s influence was not limited to his History: it was even greater through his novels and his Letters of a Russian Travelier Abroad. In the letter he made an attempt to bring the products of European thought, philosophy, and political life into circulation amidst a wide public; to spread broadly humanitarian views, at a time when they were most needed as a counterpoise to the sad realities of political and social life; and to establish a link of connection between the intellectual life of our country and that of Europe. As to Karamzín’s novels, he appeared in them as a true follower of sentimental romanticism; but this was precisely what was required then, as a reaction against the would-be classical school. In one of his novels, Poor Liza (1792), he described the misfortunes of a peasant girl who fell in love with a nobleman, was abandoned by him, and finally drowned herself in a pond. This peasant girl surely would not answer to our present realistic requirements. She spoke in choice language and was not a peasant girl at all; but all reading Russia cried about the misfortune of “Poor Liza,” and the pond where the heroine was supposed to have been drowned became a place of pilgrimage for the sentimental youths of Moscow. The spirited protest against serfdom which we shall find later on in modern literature was thus already born in Karamzin’s time.

ZHUKÓVSKIY (1783–1852) was a romantic poet in the true sense of the word, and a true worshipper of poetry, who fully understood its elevating power. His original productions were few. He was mainly a translator and rendered in most beautiful Russian verses the poems of Schiller, Uhland, Herder, Byron, Thomas Moore, and others, as well as the Odyssey, the Hindu poem of Nal and Ramayanti, and the songs of the Western Slavonians. The beauty of these translations is such that I doubt whether there are in any other language, even in German, equally beautiful renderings of foreign poets. However, Zhukóvskiy was not a mere translator: he took from other poets only what was agreeable to his own nature and what he would have liked to sing himself. Sad reflections about the unknown, an aspiration towards distant lands, the sufferings of love, and the sadness of separation — all lived through by the poet — were the distinctive features of his poetry. They reflected his inner self. We may object now to his ultra-romanticism, but this direction, at that time, was an appeal to the broadly humanitarian feelings, and it was of first necessity for progress. By his poetry, Zhukóvskiy appealed chiefly to women, and when we deal later on with the part that Russian women played half a century later in the general development of their country we shall see that his appeal was not made in vain. Altogether, Zhukóvskiy appealed to the best sides of human nature. One note, however, was missing entirely in his poetry: it was the appeal to the sentiments of freedom and citizenship. This appeal came from the Decembrist poet, Ryléeff.

The Decembrists

The Tsar Alexander I. went through the same evolution as his grandmother, Catherine II. He was educated by the republican, La Harpe, and began his reign as a quite liberal sovereign, ready to grant to Russia a constitution. He did it in fact, for Poland and Finland, and made a first step towards it in Russia. But he did not dare to touch serfdom, and gradually he fell under the influence of German mystics, became alarmed at liberal ideas, and surrendered his will to the worst reactionaries. The man who ruled Russia during the last ten or twelve years of his reign was General Arakchéeff — a maniac of cruelty and militarism, who maintained his influence by means of the crudest flattery and simulated religiousness.

A reaction against these conditions was sure to grow up, the more so as the Napoleonic wars had brought a great number of Russians in contact with Western Europe. The campaigns made in Germany, and the occupation of Paris by the Russian armies, had familiarised many officers with the ideas of liberty which reigned still in the French capital, while at home the endeavours of Nóvikoff were bearing fruit, and the freemason Friends continued his work. When Alexander I., having fallen under the influence of Madame Krüdener and other German mystics, concluded in 1815 the Holy Alliance with Germany and Austria, in order to combat all liberal ideas, secret societies began to be formed in Russia — Chiefly among the officer’s — in order to promote the ideas of liberty, of abolition of serfdom, and of equality before the law, as the necessary steps towards the abolition of absolute rule. Everyone who has read Tolstóy’s War and Peace must remember “Pierre” and the impression produced upon this young man by his first meeting with an old freemason. “Pierre” is a true representative of many young men who later on became known as “Decembrists.” Like “Pierre,” they were imbued with humanitarian ideas; many of them hated serfdom, and they wanted the introduction of constitutional guarantees; while a few of them (Péstel, Ryléef), despairing of monarchy, spoke of a return to the republican federalism of old Russia. With such ends in view, they created their secret societies.

It is known how this conspiracy ended. After the sudden death of Alexander I. in the South of Russia, the oath of allegiance was given at St. Petersburg to his brother Constantine, who was proclaimed his successor. But when, a few days later, it became known in the capital that Constantine had abdicated, and that his brother Nicholas was going to become emperor, and when the conspirators learned that they had been denounced in the meantime to the State police, they saw nothing else to do but to proclaim their programme openly in the streets, and to fall in an unequal fight. They did so, on December I4 (26) 1825, in the Senate Square of St. Petersburg, followed by a few hundred men from several regiments of the guard. Five of the insurgents were hanged by Nicholas I., and the remainder, i.e., about a hundred young men who represented the flower of Russian intelligence, were sent to hard labour in Siberia, where they remained till 1856. One can hardly imagine what it meant in a country which was not over-rich in educated and well-intentioned men, when such a number of the best representatives of a generation were taken out of the ranks and reduced to silence. Even in a more civilised country of Western Europe the sudden disappearance of so many men of thought and action would have dealt a severe blow to progress. In Russia the effect was disastrous — the more so as the reign of Nicholas I. lasted thirty years, during which every spark of free thought was stifled as soon as it appeared.

One of the most brilliant literary representatives of the “Decembrists” was RYLÉEF (1795–1826), one of the five who were hanged by Nicholas I. He had received a good education, and in 1814 was already an officer. He was thus by a few years the elder of Púshkin. He twice visited France, in 1814 and 1815 and after the conclusion of peace became a magistrate at St. Petersburg. His earlier productions were a series of ballads dealing with the leading men of Russian history. Most of them were merely patriotic, but some already revealed the sympathies of the poet for freedom. Censorship did not allow these ballads to be printed, but they circulated all over Russia in manuscript. Their poetical value was not great; but the next poem of Ryléef and especially some fragments of unfinished poems, revealed in him a powerful poetical gift, which Ryléef’s great friend, Púshkin, greeted with effusion. It is greatly to be regretted that the poem has never been translated into English. Its subject is the struggle of Little Russia for the recovery of its independence under Peter I. When the Russian Tsar was engaged in a bitter struggle against the great northern warrior, Charles XII., then the ruler of Little Russia, the hétman Mazépa conceived the plan of joining Charles XII. against Peter I. for freeing his mother country from the Russian yoke. Charles XII., as is known, was defeated at Poltáva, and both he and thehétman had to flee to Turkey. As to Voinaróvsky, a young patriot friend of Mazapa, he was taken prisoner, and transported to Siberia. There, at Yakútsk, he was visited by the historian Miiller, and Ryléeff makes him tell his story to the German explorer. The scenes of nature in Siberia, at Yakútsk, with which the poem begins; the preparations for the war in Little Russia and the war itself; the flight of Charles XII. and Mazépa; then the sufferings of Voinaróvsky at Yakútsk, when his young wife came to rejoin him in the land of exile, and died there — all these scenes are most beautiful, while in places the verses, by their simplicity and the beauty of their images, evoked the admiration even of Púshkin. Two or three generations have now read this poem, and it continues to inspire each new one with the same love of liberty and hatred of oppression.

Chapter 2: Púshkin — Lérmontoff

Púshkin: Beauty of form

Púshkin is not quite a stranger to English readers. In a valuable collection of review articles dealing with Russian writers which Professor Coolidge, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, put at my disposal, I found that in 1832, and later on in 1845, Púshkin was spoken of as a writer more or less familiar in England, and translations of some of his lyrics were given in the reviews. Later on Púshkin was rather neglected in Russia itself, and the more so abroad, and up to the present time there is no English translation, worthy of the great poet, of any of his works. In France, on the contrary — owing to Turguéneff and Prosper Mérimée, who saw in Púshkin one of the great poets of mankind — as well as in Germany, all the chief works of the Russian poet are known to literary men in good translations, of which some are admirable. To the great reading public the Russian poet is, however, nowhere well known outside his own mother country.

The reason why Púshkin has not become a favourite with West European readers is easily understood. His lyric verse is certainly inimitable: it is that of a great poet. His chief novel in verse, Evghéniy Onyéghin, is written with an easiness and a lightness of style, and a picturesqueness of detail, which makes it stand unique in European literature. His renderings in verses of Russian popular tales are delightful reading. But, apart from his very latest productions in the dramatic style, there is in whatever Púshkin wrote none of the depth and elevation of ideas which characterised Goethe and Schiller, Shelley, Byron, and Browning, Victor Hugo and Barbier. The beauty of form, the happy ways of expression, the incomparable command of verse and rhyme, are his main points — not the beauty of his ideas. And what we look for in poetry is always the higher inspiration, the noble ideas which can help to make us better. In reading Púshkin’s verses the Russian reader is continually brought to exclaim: “How beautifully this has been told! It could not, it ought not, to be told in a different way.” In this beauty of form Púshkin is inferior to none of the greatest poets. In his ways of expressing even the most insignificant remarks and describing the most insignificant details of everyday life; in the variety of human feeling that he has expressed, and the delicate expression of love under a variety of aspects which is contained in his poetry; and finally, in the way he deeply impressed his own personality upon everything he wrote — he is certainly a great poet.

Púshkin and Schiller

It is extremely interesting to compare Púshkin with Schiller, in their lyrics. Leaving aside the greatness and the variety of subjects touched upon by Schiller, and comparing only those pieces of poetry in which both poets speak of themselves, one feels at once that Schiller’s personality is infinitely superior, in depth of thought and philosophical comprehension of life, to that of the bright, somewhat spoiled and rather superficial child that Púshkin was. But, at the same time, the individuality of Púshkin is more deeply impressed upon his writings than that of Schiller upon his. Púshkin was full of vital intensity, and his own self is reflected in everything he wrote; a human heart, full of fire, is throbbing intensely in all his verses. This heart is far less sympathetic than that of Schiller, but it is more intimately revealed to the reader. In his best lyrics Schiller did not find either a better expression of feeling, or a greater variety of expression, that Púshkin did. In that respect the Russian poet decidedly stands by the side of Goethe.

His youth; his exile; his later career and death

Púshkin was born in an aristocratic family at Moscow. Through his mother he had African blood in his veins: she was a beautiful creole, the granddaughter of a negro who had been in the service of Peter I. His father was a typical representative of the noblemen of those times: squandering a large fortune, living all his life anyhow and anyway, amidst feasts, in a house half-furnished and half-empty; fond of the lighter French literature of the time, fond of entering into a discussion upon anything that he had just learned from the encyclopædists, and bringing together at his house all possible notabilities of literature, Russian and French, who happened to be at Moscow.

Púshkin’s grandmother and his old nurse were the future poet’s best friends in his childhood. From them he got his perfect mastership of the Russian language; and from his nurse, with whom he used to spend, later on, the long winter nights at his country house, when he was ordered by the State police to reside on his country estate, he borrowed that admirable knowledge of Russian folk-lore and Russian ways of expression which rendered his poetry and prose so wonderfully Russian. To these two women we thus owe the creation of the modern, easy, pliable Russian language which Púshkin introduced into our literature.

He was educated at St Petersburg, at the Tsárskoe Seló Lyceum, and even before he left school he became renowned as a most extraordinary poet, in whom Derzhávin recognised more than a mere successor, and whom Zhukóvsky presented was his portrait bearing the following inscription: “To a pupil, from his defeated teacher.” Unfortunately, Púshkin’s passionate nature drew him away from both the literary circles and the circles of his best friends — the Decembrists Púshkin and Küchelbecker — into the circles of the lazy, insignificant aristocrats, amongst whom he spent his vital energy in orgies. Something of the shallow, empty sort of life he lived then he has himself described in Evghéniy Onyéghin.

Being friendly with the political youth who appeared six or seven years later, on the square of Peter I at St Petersburg, as insurgents against autocracy and serfdom, Púshkin wrote an Ode to Liberty, and numbers of small pieces of poetry expressing the most revolutionary ideas, as well as satires against the rulers of the time. The result was that in 1820, when he was only twenty years old, he was exiled to Kishinyóff, a very small town at the time, in newly annexed Bessarabia, where he led the most extravagant life, eventually joining a party of wandering gypsies. Happily enough he was permitted to leave for some time this dusty and uninteresting little spot, and to make, in company with the charming and educated family of the Rayévskys, a journey to the Crimea and the Caucasus, from which journey brought back some of his finest lyrical works.

In 1824, when he had rendered himself quite impossible at Odessa (perhaps also from fear that he might escape to Greece, to join Byron), he was ordered to return to Central Russia and to reside at his small estate, Mikháilovskoye, in the province of Pskov, where he wrote his best things. On December 14, 1825, when the insurrection broke out at St Petersburg, Púshkin was at Mikháilovskoye; otherwise, like so many of his Decembrist friends, he would most certainly have ended his life in Siberia. He succeeded in burning all his papers before they could be seized by the secret police.

Shortly after that he was allowed to return to St Petersburg: Nicholas I undertaking to be himself the censor of his verses, and later on making Púshkin a chamberlain of his Court. Poor Púshkin had thus to live the futile life of a small functionary of the Winter Palace, and this life he certainly hated. The Court nobility and bureaucracy could never pardon him that he, who did not belong to their circle, was considered such a great man in Russia, and Púshkin’s life was full of little stings to his self-respect, coming from these classes. He had also the misfortune to marry a lady who was very beautiful but did not in the least appreciate his genius. In 1837 he had to fight on her account a duel, in which he was killed, at the age of thirty-five.

Fairy tales: Ruslán and Ludmíla

One of his earliest productions, written almost immediately after he left school, was Ruslán and Ludmíla, a fairy tale, which he put in beautiful verse. The dominating element of this poem is that wonderland where “a green oak stands on the sea-beach, and a learned cat goes round the oak, — to which it is attached by a golden chain, — singing songs when it goes to the left, and telling tales when it goes to the right.” It is the wedding day of Ludmila, the heroine; the long bridal feast comes at last to an end, and she retires with her husband; when all of a sudden comes darkness, thunder resounds, and in the storm Ludmíla disappears. She has been carried away by the terrible sorcerer from the Black Sea — a folk-lore allusion, of course, to the frequent raids of the nomads of Southern Russia. Now, the unhappy husband, as also three other young men, who were formerly suitors of Ludmíla, saddle their horses and go in search of the vanished bride. From their experiences the tale is made up, and it is full of both touching passages and very humorous episodes. After many adventures, Ruslán recovers his Ludmíla, and everything ends to the general satisfaction, as folk-tales always do. [10]

This was a most youthful production of Púshkin, but its effect in Russia was tremendous. Classicism, i.e. the pseudoclassicism which reigned then, was defeated for ever. Everyone wanted to have the poem, everyone retained in memory of whole passages and even pages from it, and with this tale the modern Russian literature — simple, realistic in its descriptions, modest in its images and fable, earnest and slightly humouristic — was created. In fact, one could not imagine a greater simplicity in verse than that which Púshkin had already obtained in this poem. But to give an idea of this simplicity to English readers remains absolutely impossible so long as the poem is not translated by some very gifted English poet. Suffice it to say that, while its verses are wonderfully musical, it contains not one single passage in which the author has resorted to unusual or obsolete words — to any words, indeed, but those which everyone uses in common conversation.

Thunders came upon Púshkin from the classical camp when this poem made its appearance. We have only to think of the Daphnes and the Chloes with which poetry used to be embellished at that time, and the sacerdotal attitude which the poet took towards his readers, to understand how the classical school was offended at the appearance of a poet who expressed his thoughts in beautiful images, without resorting to any of these embellishments, who spoke the language which everyone speaks, and related adventures fit for the nursery. With one cut of his sword Púshkin had freed literature from the ties which were keeping it enslaved.

The tales which he had heard from his old nurse gave him the matter, not only for Ruslán and Ludmíla, but also for a series of popular tales, of which the verses are so natural that as soon as you have pronounced one word that word calls up immediately the next, and this the following, because you cannot say the thing otherwise than in the way in which Púshkin has told it. “Is it not exactly so that tales should be told?” was asked all over Russia; and, the reply being in the affirmative, the fight against pseudo-classicism was won forever.

This simplicity of expression characterised Púshkin in everything he afterwards wrote. He did not depart from it, even when he wrote about so-called elevated subjects, nor in the passionate of philosophical monologues of his latest dramas. It is what makes Púshkin so difficult to translate into English; because, in the English literature of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth is the only poet who has written with the same simplicity. But, while Wordsworth applied this simplicity mainly to the description of the lovely and quiet English landscape, Púshkin spoke with the same simplicity of human life, and his verses continued to flow, as easy as prose and as free from artificial expressions, even when he described the most violent human passions. In his contempt of everything exaggerated and theatrical, and in his determination to have nothing to do with “the lurid tragic actor who wields a cardboard sword,” he was thoroughly Russian: and at the same time he powerfully contributed towards establishing, in both the written literature and on the stage, that taste for simplicity and honest expression of feeling of which so many examples will be given in the course of this book.

His Lyrics

The main force of Púshkin was in his lyrical poetry, and the chief note of his lyrics was love. The terrible contradictions between the ideal and the real, from which deeper minds, like those of Goethe, or Byron, or Heine, have suffered, were strange to him. Púshkin was of a more superficial nature. It must also be said that a West-European poet has an inheritance which the Russian has not. Every country of Western Europe has passed through periods of great national struggle, during which the great questions of human development were at stake. Great political conflicts have produced deep passions and resulted in tragical situations; but in Russia the great struggles and the religious movements which took place in the seventeenth century, and under Pugatchóff in the eighteenth, were uprisings of peasants, in which the educated classes took no part. The intellectual horizon of a Russian poet is thus necessarily limited. There is, however, something in human nature which always lives and appeals to every mind. This is love, and Púshkin, in his lyric poetry, represented love under so many aspects, in such beautiful forms, and with such a variety of shades, as one finds in no other poet. Besides, he often gave to love an expression so refined, so high, that his higher comprehension of love left as deep a stamp upon subsequent Russian literature as Goethe’s refined types of women left in the world’s literature. After Púshkin had written, it was impossible for Russian poets to speak of love in a lower sense than he did.

“Byronism”

In Russia Púshkin has sometimes been described as a Russian Byron. This appreciation, however, is hardly correct. He certainly imitated Byron in some of his poems, although the imitation became, at least in Evghéniy Onyéghin, a brilliant original creation. He certainly was deeply impressed by Byron’s spirited protest against the conventional life of European society, and there was a time when, if he only could have left Russia, he probably would have joined Byron in Greece.

But, with his light character, Púshkin could not fathom and still less share, the depth of hatred and contempt towards post-revolutionary Europe which consumed Byron’s heart. Púshkin’s “Byronism” was superficial; and, while he was ready to defy “respectable” society, he knew neither the longings for freedom nor the hatred of hypocrisy which inspired Byron.

Altogether, Púshkin’s force was not in his elevating or freedom-inspiring influence. His epicureanism, his education received from French emigrés, and his life amidst the high and frivolous classes of St Petersburg society, prevented him from taking to heart the great problems which were already ripening in Russian life. This is why, towards the end of his short life, he was no longer in touch with those of his readers who felt that to glorify the military power of Russia, after the armies of Nicholas I had crushed Poland, was not worthy of a poet; and that to describe the attractions of a St Petersburg winter-season for a rich and idle gentleman was not to describe Russian life, in which the horrors of serfdom and absolutism were being felt more and more heavily.

Púshkin’s real force was in his having created in a few years the Russian literary language, and having freed literature from the theatrical, pompous style which was formerly considered necessary in whatever was printed in black and white. He was great in his stupendous powers of poetical creation: in his capacity of taking the commonest things of everyday life, or the commonest feelings of the most ordinary person, and of so relating them that the reader lived them through; and, on the other side, constructing out of the scantiest materials, and calling to life, a whole historical epoch — a power of creation which, of those coming after him, only Tolstóy has to the same extent. Púshkin’s power was next in his profound realism — that realism, understood in its best sense, which he was the first to introduce in Russia, and which, we shall see, became afterwards characteristic of the whole of Russian literature. And it is in the broadly humanitarian feelings with which his best writings are permeated, in his bright love of life, and his respect for women. As to beauty of form, his verses are so “easy” that one knows them by heart after having read them twice or thrice. Now that they have penetrated into the villages, they are the delight of millions of peasant children, after having been the delight of such refined and philosophical poets as Turguéneff.

Drama

Púshkin also tried his hand at the drama; and so far as may be judged from his latest productions, Don Juan and The Miser-Knight, he surely would have achieved great results had he lived to continue them. His Mermaid (Rusálka) unfortunately remained unfinished, but its dramatic qualities can be judged from what Darmýzhsky has made of it in his opera. His historical drama, Boris Godunóff, taken from the times of the pretender Demetrius, is enlivened here and there by most beautiful scenes, some of them very amusing, and some of them containing a delicate analysis of the sentiments of love and ambition; but it remains rather a dramatic chronicle than a drama. As to The Miser-Knight, it shows an extraordinary power of mature talent, and contains passages undoubtedly worthy of Shakespeare; while Don Juan, imbued with a true Spanish atmosphere, gives a far better comprehension of the Don Juan type than any other representation of it in any literature, and has all the qualities of a first-rate drama.

Towards the end of his very short life a note of deeper comprehension of human affairs began to appear in Púshkin’s writings. He had had enough of the life of the higher classes; and, when he began to write a history of the great peasant uprising which took place under Pugatchóff during the reign of Catherine II, he began also to understand and to feel the inner springs of the life of the Russian peasant-class. National life appeared to him under a much broader aspect than before. But at this stage of the development of his genius his career came to a premature end. He was killed, as already stated, in a duel with a society man.

Evghéniy Onyéghin

The most popular work of Púshkin is his novel in verse, Evghéniy Onyéghin. In its form it has much in common with Byron’s Childe Harold, but it is thoroughly Russian, and contains perhaps the best description of Russian life, both in the capitals and on the smaller estates of noblemen in the country, that has ever been written in Russian literature. Tchaykóvsky, the musician, has made of it an opera which enjoys a great success of the Russian stage. The hero of the novel, Onyéghin, is a typical representative of what society people were at that time. He has received a superficial education, partly from a French émigré, partly from a German teacher, and has learned “something and anyhow.” At the age of nineteen he is the owner of a great fortune — consisting, of course, of serfs, about whom he does not care in the least — and he is engulfed in the “high-life” of St Petersburg. His day begins very late, with reading scores of invitations to tea-parties, evening parties, and fancy balls. He is, of course, a visitor at the theatre, in which he prefers ballet to the clumsy productions of the Russian dramatists; and he spends a good deal of his day in fashionable restaurants, while his nights are given to balls, where he plays the part of a disillusioned young man, who is tired of life, and wraps himself in the mantle of Byronism. For some reason or other he is compelled to spend a summer on his estate, where he has for a neighbour a young poet, educated in Germany and full of German romanticism. They become great friends, and they make acquaintance with a squire’s family in their neighbourhood. The head of the family — the old mother — is admirably described. Her two daughters, Tatiána and Olga, are very different in nature: Olga is a quite artless girl, full of the joy of living, who worries herself with no questions, and the young poet is madly in love with her; they are going to marry. As to Tatiána, she is a poetical girl, and Púshkin bestows on her all the wonderful powers of his talent, describing her as an ideal woman: intelligent, thoughtful, and inspired with vague aspirations towards something better than the prosaic life which she is compelled to live. Onyéghin produces upon her, from the first, a deep impression: she falls in love with him; but he, who has made so many conquests in the high circles of the capital, and now wears the mask of disgust of life, takes no notice of the naïve love of the poor country girl. She writes to him and tells him her love with great frankness and in most pathetic words; but the young snob finds nothing better to do than to lecture her about her rashness, and seems to take great pleasure in turning the knife in her wound. At the same time, at a small country ball Onyéghin, moved by some spirit of mischief, begins to flirts in the most provoking way with the other sister, Olga. The young girl seems to be delighted with the attention paid to her by the gloomy hero, and the result is that the poet provokes his friend to a duel. An old retired officer, a true duelist, is mixed up in the affair, and Onyéghin, who cares very much about what the country gentlemen, whom he pretends to despise, may say about him, accepts the provocation and fights the duel. He kills his poet friend and is compelled to leave the country. Several years pass. Tatiána, recovered from an illness, goes one day to the house where formerly Onyéghin stayed and, making friends with an old keeper, spends days and months reading in his library; but life has no attraction for her. After insistent supplication from her mother, she goes to Moscow, and there she marries an old general. This marriage brings her to St Petersburg, where she plays a prominent part in the Court circles. In these surroundings Onyéghin meets her once more, and hardly recognises his Tánya in the worldly lady whom he sees now; he falls madly in love with her. She takes no notice of him, and his letter remain unanswered. At last one day he goes, at an unseemly hour, into her house. He finds her reading his letters, her eyes full of tears, and makes a passionate declaration of his love. To this Tatiána replies by a monologue which is so beautiful that it ought to be quoted here, if there existed an English translation which rendered at least the touching simplicity of Tatiána’s words, and consequently the beauty of the verses. A whole generation of Russian women have cried over this monologue, as they were reading these lines:

“Onyéghin, I was younger then, and better looking, I suppose; and I loved you” ... but the love of a country girl offered nothing new to Onyéghin. He paid no attention to her.... “Why then does he follow her now at every step? Why such display of his attention? Is it because she is now rich and belongs to the high society, and is well received at Court?”

“Because my fall, in such condition,

Would be well noted ev’rywhere,

And bring to you an envied reputation?”

And she continues:

“For me, Onyéghin, all this wealth,

This showy tinsel of Court life,

All my successes in the world,

My well-appointed house and balls ...

For me are nought! — I gladly would

Give up these rags, this masquerade,

And all the brilliancy and din,

For a small shelf of books, a garden wild,

Our weather-beaten house so poor —

Those very places where I met

With you, Onyéghin, that first time;

And for the churchyard of our village,

Where now a cross and shady trees

Stand on the grave of my poor nurse.

* * *

And happiness was possible then!

It was so near!”

She supplicates Onyéghin to leave her. “I love you,” she says:

“Why should I hide from you the truth?

But I am given to another,

And true to him I shall remain.”[11]

How many thousands of young Russian women have later on repeated these same verses, and said to themselves: “I would gladly give up all these rags and all this masquerade of luxurious life for a small shelf of books, for life in the country, amidst the peasants, and for the grave of my old nurse in our village.” How many have done it! And we shall see how this same type of Russian girl was developed still further in the novels of Turguéneff — and in Russian life. Was not Púshkin a great poet to have foreseen and predicted it?

Lérmontoff

It is said that when Turguéneff and his great friend, Kavélin, came together — Kavélin was a very sympathetic philosopher and a writer upon law — a favourite theme of their discussions was: Púshkin or Lérmontoff?” Turguéneff, as is known, considered Púshkin one of the greatest poets, and especially one of the greatest artists, among men; while Kavélin must have insisted upon the fact that in his best productions Lérmontoff was but slightly inferior to Púshkin as an artist, that his verses were real music, while at the same time the inspiration of his poetry was of a much higher standard than that of Púshkin. When it is added that eight years was the entire limit of Lérmontoff’s literary career — he was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-six — the powers and the potentialities of this poet will be seen as once.

His Life

Lérmontoff had Scotch blood in his veins. At least, the founder of the family was a Scotchman, George Learmonth, who, with sixty Scotchmen and Irishmen, entered the service of Poland first, and afterwards, in 1613, of Russia. The inner biography of the poet remains still but imperfectly known. It is certain that his childhood and boyhood were anything but happy. His mother was a lover of poetry — perhaps a poet herself; but he lost her when he was only three years old — she was only twenty-one. His aristocratic grandmother on the maternal side took him from his father — a poor army officer, whom the child worshipped — and educated him, preventing all intercourse between the father and the son. The boy was very gifted, and at the age of fourteen had already begun to write verses and poems — first in French, (like Púshkin), and soon in Russian. Schiller and Shakespeare and, from the age of sixteen, Byron and Shelley were his favourties. At the age of sixteen Lérmontoff entered the Moscow University, from which he was, however, excluded next year for some offence against a very uninteresting professor. He then entered a military school at St Petersburg, to become at the age of eighteen an officer of the hussars.

A young man of twenty-two, Lérmontoff suddenly became widely known for a piece of poetry which he wrote on the occasion of P7Uacute;shkin’s death (1837). A great poet, as well as a lover of liberty and a foe of oppression, was revealed at once in this passionate production of the young writer, of which the concluding verses were especially powerful. “But you,” he wrote, “who stand, a haughty crowd, around the throne, You hang men of genius, of liberty, and fame! You have now the law to cover you, And justice must close her lips before you! But there is a judgment of God, — you, dissolute crowd! There is a severe judge who waits for you. You will not buy him by the sound of your gold...And, with all your black blood, You will not wash away the stain of the poet’s pure blood!” In a few days all St Petersburg, and very soon all Russia, knew these verses by heart; they circulated in thousands of manuscript copies.

The Caucasus

For this passionate cry of his heart, Lérmontoff was exiled at once. Only the intervention of his powerful friends prevented him from being marched straight to Siberia. He was transferred from the regiment of guards to which he belonged to an army regiment in the Caucasus. Lérmontoff was already acquainted with the Caucasus: he had been taken there as a child of ten, and he had brought back from this sojourn an ineffaceable impression Now the grandeur of the great mountain range impressed him still more forcibly. The Caucasus is one of the most beautiful regions on earth. It is a chain of mountains much greater than the Alps, surrounded by endless forests, gardens, and steppes, situated in a sounthern climate, in a dry region where the transparency of the air enhances immensely the natural beauty of the mountains. The snow-clad giants are seen from the Steppes scores of miles away, and the immensity of the chain produces an impression which is equalled nowhere in Europe. Moreover, a half-tropical vegetation clothes mountain slopes, where the villages nestle, with their semi-military aspect and their turrets, basking in all the gorgeous sunshine of the East, or concealed in he dark shadows of the narrow gorges, and populated by a race of people among the most beautiful of Europe. Finally, at the time Lérmontoff was there the mountaineers were fighting against the Russian invaders with unabated courage and daring for each valley of their native mountains.

Poetry of Nature

All these natural beauties of the Caucasus have been reflected in Lérmontoff’s poetry, in such a way that in no other literature are there descriptions of nature so beautiful, or so impressive and correct. Bodenstedt, his German translator and personal friend, who knew the Caucasus well, was quite right in observing that they are worth volumes of geographical descriptions. The reading of many volumes about the Caucasus does not add any concrete features to those which are impressed upon the mind by reading the poems of Lérmontoff. Turguéneff quotes somewhere Shakespeare’s description of the sea as seen from the cliffs of Dover (in King Lear), as a masterpiece of objective poetry dealing with nature. I must confess, however, that the concentration of attention upon small details in this description does not appeal to my mind. It gives no impression of the immensity of the sea as seen from the Dover cliffs, nor of the wonderful richness of colour displayed by the waters on a sunny day. No such reproach could ever be made against Lérmontoff’s poetry of nature. Bodenstedt truly says that Lérmontoff has managed to satisfy at the same time both the naturalist and the lover of art. Whether he describes the gigantic chain, where the eye loses itself — her in snow clouds, there in the unfathomable depths of narrow gorges; or whether he mentions some detail: a mountain stream, or the endless woods, or the smiling valleys of Georgia covered wit flowers, or the strings of light clouds floating in the dry breezes of Northern Caucasia, — he always remains so true to nature that his picture rises before the eye in life-colours, and yet it is imbued with a poetical atmosphere which makes one feel the freshness of these mountains, the balm of their forests and meadows, the purity of the air. And all this is written in verses wonderfully musical. Lérmontoff’s verses, though not so “easy” as Púshkin’s, are very often even more musical. They sound like a beautiful melody. The Russian language is always rather melodious, but in the verses of Lérmontoff it becomes almost as melodious as Italian.

Influence of Shelley

The intellectual aspect of Lérmontoff is nearer to Shelley than to any other poet. He was deeply impressed by the author of Prometheus Bound; but he did not try to imitate Shelley. In his earliest productions he did indeed imitate Púshkin and Púshkin’s Byronism; but he very soon struck a line of his own. All that can be said is, that the mind of Lérmontoff was disquieted by the same great problems of Good and Evil struggling in the human heart, as in the universe at large, which disquieted Shelley. Like Shelley among the poets, and like Schopenhauer among the philosophers, he felt the coming of that burning need of a revision of the moral principles now current, so characteristic of our own times. He embodied these ideas in two poems, The Demon and Mtsýri, which complete each other. The leading idea of the first is that of a fierce soul which has broken with both earth and heaven, and looks with contempt upon all who are moved by petty passions. An exile from paradise and a hater of human virtues, he knows these petty passions, and despises them with all his superiority. The love of this demon towards a Georgian girl who takes refuge from his love in a convent, and dies there — what more unreal subject could be chosen? And yet, on reading the poem, one is struck at every line by its incredible wealth of purely realistic, concrete descriptions of scenes and of human feelings, all of the most exquisite beauty. The dance of the girl at her Georgian castle before the wedding, the encounter of the bridegroom with robbers and his death, the galloping of his faithful horse, the sufferings of the bride and her retirement to a convent, nay , the love itself of the demon and every one of the demon’s movements — this is of the purest realism in the highest sense of the word: that realism with which Púshkin had stamped Russian literature once and for all.

Mtsýri

Mtsýri is the cry of a young soul longing for liberty. A boy, taken from a Circassian village, from the mountains, is brought up in a small Russian monastery. The monks think that they have killed in him all human passions and longings; but the dream of his childhood is — be it only once, be it only for a moment — to see his native mountains where his sisters sang round his cradle, and to press his burning bosom against the heart of one who is not a stranger. One night, when a storm rages and the monks are praying for fear in their church, he escapes from the monastery, and wanders for three days in the woods. For once in his life he enjoys a few moments of liberty; he feels all the energy and all the forces of his youth: “As for me, I was like a wild beast,” he says afterwards, “and I was ready to fight with the storm, the lightning , the tiger of the forest.” But, being an exotic plant, weakened by education, he does not find his way to his native country. He is lost in the forests which spread for hundreds of miles round him, and is found a few days later, exhausted, not far from the monastery. He dies from the wounds which he has received in a fight with a leopard.

“The grave does not frighten me,” he says to the old monk who attends him. “Suffering, they say, goes to sleep there in the eternal cold stillness. But I regret to part with life....I am young, still young....hast thou ever known the dreams of youth? Or hast thou forgotten how thou once lovedst and hatedst? Maybe, this beautiful world has lost for thee its beauty. Thou art weak and grey; thou hast lost all desires. No matter! Thou hast lived once; thou hast something to forget in this world. Thou hast lived — I might have lived, too!” And he tells about the beauty of the nature which he saw when he had run away, his frantic joy at feeling free, his running after the lightning, his fight with a leopard. “thou wishest to know what I did while I was free?” — I lived, old man! I lived! And my life, without these three happy days, would have been gloomier and darker than thy powerless old age!” But it is impossible to tell all the beauties of this poem. It must be read, and let us hope that a good translation of it will be published some day.

The Demon

Lérmontoff’s demonism or pessimism was not the pessimism of despair, but a militant protest against all that is ignoble in life, and in this respect his poetry has deeply impressed itself upon all our subsequent literature. His pessimism was the irritation of a strong man at seeing others round him so weak and so base. With his inborn feeling of the Beautiful, which evidently can never exist without the True and the Good, and at the same time surrounded — especially in the worldly spheres he lived in, and on the Caucasus — by men and women who could not or did not dare to understand him, he might of easily have arrived at a pessimistic contempt and hatred of mankind; but he always maintained his faith in the higher qualities of man. It was quite natural that in his youth — especially in those years of universal reaction, the thirties — Lérmontoff should have expressed his discontent with the world in such a general and abstract creation as The Demon. Something similar we find even with Schiller. But gradually his pessimism took a more concrete form. It was not mankind altogether, and still less heaven and earth, that he despised in his latter productions, but the negative features of his own generation. In his prose novel, The Hero of our Own Time, in his Thoughts (Duma), etc., he perceived higher ideals, and already in 1840 — ie, one year before his death — he seemed ready to open a new page in his creation, in which his powerfully constructive and critical mind would have been directed towards the real evils of actual life, and real, positive good would apparently have been his aim. But it was at this very moment that , like Púshkin, he fell in a duel.

Love of freedom

Lérmontoff was, above all, a “humanist,” — a deeply humanitarian poet. Already at the age of twenty-three, he had written a poem from the times of John the Terrible, Song about the Merchant Kaláshnikoff, which is rightly considered as one of the best gems of Russian literature, both for its powers, its artistic finish, and its wonderful epic style. The poem, which produced a great impression when it became known in Germany in Bodenstedt’s translation, is imbued with the fiercest spirit of revolt against the courtiers of the Terrible Tsar.

Lérmontoff deeply loved Russia, but not the official Russia: not the crushing military power of a fatherland, which is so dear to the so-called patriots, and he wrote:

I love my fatherland; but strange that love,

In spite of all my reasoning may say;

Its glory, bought by shedding streams of blood,

Its quietness, so full of fierce disdain,

And the traditions of its gloomy past

Do not awake in me a happy vision....

What he loved in Russia was its country life, its plains, the life of its peasants. He was inspired at the same time with a deep love towards the natives of the Caucasus, who were waging their bitter fight against the Russians for their liberty. Himself a Russian, and a member of two different expeditions against the Circassians, his heart throbbed nevertheless in sympathy with that brave, warm-hearted people in their struggle for independence. One poem, Izmsail-Bey, is an apotheosis of this struggle of the Circassians against the Russians; in another, one of his best — a Circassian is described as fleeing from the field of battle to run home to his village, and there his mother herself repudiates him as a traitor. Another gem of poetry, one of his shorter poems, Valérik, is considered by those who know what real warfare is as the most correct description of it in poetry. And yet, Lérmontoff disliked war, and he ends one of his admirable descriptions of fighting with these lines:

“I thought: How miserable is man! What does he want? The

sky is pure, and under it there’s room for all; but without reason

and necessity, his heart is full of hatred. — Why?”

His Death

He died in his twenty-seventh year. Exiled for a second time to the Caucasus (for a duel which he had fought at St Petersburg with a Barrante, the son of the French ambassador) he was staying at Pyatigórsk, frequenting the shallow society which usually comes together in such watering places. His jokes and sarcasms addressed to an officer, Martýnoff, who used to drape himself in a Byronian mantle the better to capture the hearts of young girls, led to a duel. Lérmontoff, as he had already done in his first duel, shot sideways purposely; but Martýnoff slowly and purposely took his aim so as even to call forth the protest of the seconds — and killed Lérmontoff on the spot.

Púshkin and Lérmontoff as Prose-Writers

Toward the end of his life Púshkin gave himself more and more to prose writing. He began an extensive history of the peasant uprising of 1773 under Pugatchóff, and undertook for that purpose a journey to East Russia, where he collected, besides public documents, personal reminiscences and popular traditions relating to this uprising. At the same time he also wrote a novel, The Captain’s Daughter, the scene of which was laid in that disturbed period. The novel is not very remarkable in itself. True, the portraits of Pugatchóff and of an old servant, as well as the description of the whole life in the small forts of East Russia, garrisoned at that time by only a few invalid soldiers, are very true to reality and brilliantly pictured; but in the general construction of the novel Púshkin paid a tribute to the sentimentalism of the times. Nevertheless, The Captain’s Daughter, and especially the other prose novels of Púshkin, have played an important part in the history of Russian literature. Through them Púshkin introduced into Russia the realistic school, long before Balzac did so in France, and this school has since that time prevailed in Russian prose-literature. I do not mean, of course, Realism in the sense of dwelling mainly upon the lowest instincts of man, as it was misunderstood by some French writers, but in the sense of treating both high and low manifestations of human nature in a way true to reality, and in their real proportions. Moreover, the simplicityof these novels, both as regards their plots and the way the plots are treated, is simply marvellous, and in this way they have traced the lines upon which the development of Russian novel writing has ever since been pursued. The novels of Lérmontoff, of Hérzen (Whose Fault?), and of Turguéneff and Tolstóy descent, I dare to say, in a much more direct line from Púshkin’s novels than from those of Gógol.

Lérmontoff also wrote one novel in prose, The Hero of our Own Time, of which the hero, Petchórin, was to some extent a real representative of a portion of the educated society in those years of romanticism. It is true that some critics saw in him the portraiture of the author himself and his acquaintances; but, as Lérmontoff wrote in his preface to a second edition of this novel — “The hero of our own time is indeed a portrait, but not of one single man: it is the portrait of the vices of our generation,” — the book indicates “the illness from which this generation suffers.”

Petchórin is an extremely clever, bold, enterprising man who regards his surroundings with cold contempt. He is undoubtedly a superior man, superior to Púshkin’s Onyéghin; but he is, above all, an egotist who finds no better application for his superior capacities than all sorts of mad adventures, always connected with love-making. He falls in love with a Circassian girl whom he sees at a native festival. The girl is also taken by the beauty and the gloomy aspect of the Russian. To marry her is evidently out of question, because her Mussulman relatives would never give her to a Russian. Then, Petchórin daringly kidnaps her, with the aid of her brother, and the girl is brought to the Russian fort, where Petchórin is an officer. For several weeks she only cries and never speaks a word to the Russian, but by and bye she feels love for him. That is the beginning of the tragedy. Petchórin soon has enough of the Circassian beauty; he deserts her more and more for hunting adventures, and during one of them she is kidnapped by a Circassian who loves her, and who, on seeing that he cannot escape with her, kills her with his dagger. For Petchórin this solution is almost welcome.

A few years later the same Petchórin appears amidst Russian society in one of the Caucasus watering towns. There he meets with Princess Mary, who is courted by a young man — Grushnísky, — a sort of Caucasian caricature of Byron, draped in a mantle of contempt for mankind, but in reality a very shallow sort of personage. Petchórin, who cares but little for the Princess Mary, finds, however, a sort of wicked pleasure in rendering Grushnítsky ridiculous in her eyes, and uses all his wit to bring the girl to his feet. When this is done, he loses all interest in her. He makes a fool of Grushnítsky, and when the young man provokes him to a duel, he kills him. This was the hero of the time, and it must be owned that it was not a caricature. In a society free from care about the means of living — it was of course in serfdom times, under Nicholas I — when there was no sort of political life in the country, a man of superior ability very often found no issue for his forces but in such adventures as Petchórin’s.

It need not be said that the novel is admirable written — that it is full of living descriptions of Caucasus “society”; that the characters are splendidly delineated, and that some of them, like the old Captain Maxím Maxímytch, have remained living types of some of the best specimens of mankind. Through these qualities The Hero of our own Time, like Evghéniy Onyéghin, became a model for quite a series of subsequent novels.

Other poets and novelists of the same epoch

Krylóff

The fable-writer KRYLÓFF (1786–1844) is perhaps the Russian writer who is best known abroad. English readers know him through the excellent work and translations of so great a connoisseur of Russian literature and language as Ralston was, and little can be added to what Ralson has said of this eminently original writer.

He stands on the boundary between two centuries, and reflects both the end of the one and the beginning of the other. Up to 1807, he wrote comedies which, even more than the other comedies of the time, were mere imitations from the French. It was only in 1807–1809 that he found his true vocation and began writing fables, in which domain he attained the first rank, not only in Russia, but among the fable-writers in all modern literatures. Many of his fables — at any rate, the best known ones — are translations from Lafontaine; and yet they are entirely original productions. Lafontaine’s animals are academically educated French gentlemen; even the peasant in his fables come from Versailles. There is nothing of the sort in Krylóff. Every animal in his fables is a character — wonderfully true to life. Nay, even the cadence of his verses changes and takes a special aspect each time a new animal is introduced — that heavy simpleton, the Bear, or the fine and cunning Fox, or the versatile Monkey. Krylóff knew every one of them intimately; he knew each of their movements, and above all he had noticed and enjoyed long since in his own self the humorous side of every one of the dwellers of the forests or the companions of Man, before he undertook to put them in his fables. This is why Krylóff may be taken as the greatest fable-writer not only of Russia — where he had a not to be neglected rival in DMÍTREFF (1760–1837) — but also of all nations of modern times. True, there is no depth, no profound and cutting irony, in Krylóff’s fables. Nothing but a good0natured, easy-going irony, which made the very essence of his heavy frame, his lazy habits, and his quiet contemplation. But, is this not the true domain of fable, which must not be confounded with satire?

At the same time there is no writer who has better possessed and better understood the true essence of the really popular Russian language, the language spoken by the men and women of the people. At a time when the Russian litérateurs hesitated between the elegant, Europeanised style of Karamzín, and the clumsy, half-Slavonic style of the nationalists of the old school, Krylóff, even in his very first fables, written in 1807, had already worked out a style which at once gave him a quite unique position in Russian literature, and which has not been surpassed even by such masters of the popular Russian language as was Ostróvskiy and some of the folk-novelists of a later epoch. For terseness, expressiveness and strict adherence to the true spirit of the popularly-spoken Russian, Krylóff had no rivals.

The minor poets

Several minor poets, contemporary of Púshkin and Lérmontoff, and some of them their personal friends, must be mentioned in this place. The influence of Púshkin was so great that he could not but call to life a school of writers who should try to follow inn his steps. None of them reached such a height as to claim to be considered a world poet; but each of them has made his contribution in one way or another to the development of Russian poetry, each one has had his humanising and elevating influence.

KOZLÓFF (1779–1840) has reflected in his poetry the extremely sad character of his life. At the age of about forty he was stricken with paralysis, losing the use of his legs, and soon after that his sight; but his poetical gift remained with him, and he dictated to his daughter some of the saddest elegies which Russian literature possesses, as also a great number of our most perfect translations. His Monk made everyone in Russia shed tears, and Púshkin hastened to acknowledge the strength of the poem. Endowed with the most wonderful memory — he knew by heart all Byron, all the poems of Walter Scott, all Racine, Tasso, and Dante, — Kozlóff, like Zhukóvskiy, with whom he had much in common, made a great number of translations from various languages, especially from the English idealists, and some of his translations from the Polish, such as The Crimean Sonnets of Mickiewicz, are real works of art.

DÉLWIG (1798–1831) was a great personal friend of Púshkin, whose comrade he was at the Lyceum. He represented in Russian literature the tendency towards reviving ancient Greek forms of poetry, but happily enough he tried at the same time to write in the style of the Russian popular songs, and the lyrics which he wrote in this manner especially contributed to make of him a favourite poet of his own time. Some of his romances have remained popular till now.

BARATÝNSKIY (1800–1844) was another poet of the same group of friends. Under the influence of the wild nature of Finland, where he spend several years in exile, he became a romantic poet, full of the love of nature, and also of melancholy, and deeply interested in philosophical questions, to which he could find no reply. He thus lacked a definite conception of life, but what he wrote was clothed in a beautiful form, and in very expressive, elegant verses.

YAZÝKOFF (1803–1846) belongs to the same circle. He was intimate with Púshkin, who much admired his verses. It must be said, however, that the poetry of Yazýkoff had chiefly an historical influence in the sense of perfecting the forms of poetical expression. Unfortunately, he had to struggle against almost continual illness, and he died just when he had reached the full development of his talent.

VENEVÍTINOFF (1805–1822) died at a still younger age; but there is no exaggeration in saying that he promised to become a great poet, endowed with the same depth of philosophical conception as was Goethe, and capable of attaining the same beauty of form. The few verses he wrote during the last year of his life revealed the suddenly attained maturity of a great poetical talent, and may be compared with the verses of the greatest poets.

PRINCE ALEXANDER ODÓEVSKIY (1803–1839) and POLEZHÁEFF (1806–1838) are two other poets who died very young, and whose lives were entirely broken by political persecution. Odóevskiy was a friend of the Decembrists. After the 14 th of December, 1825, he was arrested, taken to the fortress of St Peter and St Paul and then sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, whence he was not released till twelve years later, to be sent as a soldier to the Caucasus. There he became the friend of Lérmontoff, one of whose best elegies was written on Odóevskiy’s death. The verses of Odóevskiy (they were not printed abroad while he lived) lack finish, but he was a real poet and a patriot too, as is seen from his Dream of a Poet, and his historical poem, Vasilkó.

The fate of POLEZHÁEFF was even more tragic. He was only twenty years old — a brilliant student of the Moscow University — when he wrote an autobiographical poem, Sáshka, full of allusions to the evils of autocracy and of appeals for freedom. This poem was shown to Nicholas I, who ordered the young poet to be sent as a soldier to an army regiment. The duration of service was then twenty-five years, and Polezháeff saw not the slightest chance of release. More than that: for an unauthorised absence from his regiment (he had gone to Moscow with the intention of presenting a petition of release to the Tsar) he was condemned to receive one thousand strokes with the sticks, and only by mere luck escaped the punishment. He never succumbed to his fate, and in the horrible barracks of those times he remained what he was: a pupil of Byron, Lamartine, and Macpherson, never broken, protesting against tyranny in verses that were written in tears and blood. When he was dying from consumption in a military hospital at Moscow Nicholas I pardoned him: his promotion to the grade of officer came when he was dead.

A similar fate befell the Little Russian poet SHEVCHÉNKO (1814–1861), who, for some of his poetry, was sent in 1847 to a battalion as a common soldier. His epical poems from the life of the free Cossacks in olden times, heart rendering poems from the life of the serfs, and lyrics, all written in Little Russian and thoroughly popular in both form and content, belong to the fine specimens of poetry of all nations.

Of prose writers of the same epoch only a few can be mentioned in this book, and these in a few lines. ALEXANDER BESTÚZHEFF (1797–1837), who wrote under the nom de plume of MARLÍNSKIY — one of the “Decembrists,” exiled to Siberia, and later on sent to the Caucasus as a soldier — was the author of widely-read novels. Like Púshkin and Lérmontoff he was under the influence of Byron, and described “titanic passions” in Byron’s style, as also striking adventures in the style of the French novelists of the Romantic school; but he deserves at the same time to be regarded as the first to write novels from Russian life in which matters of social interest were discussed.

Other favourite novelists of the same epoch were: ZAGÓSKIN (1789–1852), the author of extremely popular historical novels, Yúriy Miloslávskiy, Róslavleff, etc., all written in a sentimentally patriotic style; NARYÉZHNYI (1780–1825), who is considered by some Russian critics as a forerunner of Gógol, because he wrote already in the realistic style, describing, like Gógol, the dark sides of Russian life; and LAZHÉCHNIKOFF (1792–1868), the author of a number of very popular historical novels of Russian life.

Chapter 3: Gógol

Little Russia

With Gógol begins a new period of Russian literature. which is called by Russian literary critics “the Gógol period,” which lasts to the present date. Gógol was not a Great Russian. He was born in 1809, in a Little Russian or Ukraïnian nobleman’s family. His father had already dispayed some literary talent and wrote a few comedies in Little Russian, but Gógol lost him at an early age. The boy was educatcd in a small provincial town, which he left, however, while still young, and when he was only nineteen he was already at St. Petersburg. At that time the dream of his life was to become an actor, but the manager of the St. Ptersburg Imperial theatres did not accept him, and Gógol had to look for another sphere of activity. The Civil Service, in which he obtained the position of a subordinate clerk, was evidently insufficient to interest him, and he soon entered upon his literary career.

Nights on a Farm near Dikónka and Mírgorod

His debut was in 1829, with little novels taken form the village-life of Little Russia. Nights on a Farm near Dikánka, soon followed by another series of stories entitled Mírgorod, immediately won for him literary fame and introduced him into the circle of Zhukóvskiy and Púshkin. The two poets at once recognized Gógol’s genius, and received him with open arms

Village life and humour

Little Russia differs considerably from the central parts of the empire, i.e., from the country around Moscow, which is known as Great Russia. It has a more southern position, and everything southern has always a certain attraction for northerner. The villages in Little Russia are not disposed in streets as they are in Great Russia, but the white washed houses are scattered, as in Western Europe, in separate little farms, each of which is surrounded by charming little gardens. The more genial climate, the warm nights, the musical language, the beauty of the race, which probably contains a mixture of South Slavonian with Turkish and Polish blood, the picturesque dress and the lyrical songs-all these render Little Russia especially attractive for the Great Russian. Besides, life in Little-Russian villages is more poetical than it is in the villages of Great Russia. There is more freedom in the relations between the young men and the young girls, who freely meet before marriage; the stamp of seclusion of the women which has been impressed by Bvzantine habits upon Moscow does not exist in Little Russia, where the influence of Poland was prevalent. Little Russians have also maintained numerous traditions and epic poems and songs from the times when they were free Cossacks and used to fight against the Poles in the north and the Turks in the south. Having had to defend the Greek orthodox religion against these two nations, they strictly adhere now to the Russian Church, and one does not find in their villages the same passion for scholastic discussions about the letter of the Holy Books which is often met with in Great Russia among the Non-conformists. Their religion has altogether a more poetical aspect.

The Little-Russian language is certainly more melodious than the Great Russian, and there is now a movement of some importance for its literary development; but this evolution has yet to be accomplished, and Gógol very wisely wrote in Great Russian-that is, in the language of Zhukóvskiy Púshkin, and Lérmontoff. We have thus in Gógol a sort of union between the two nationalities.

It would be impossible to give here an idea of the humour and wit contained in Gógol’s novels from Little Russian life, without quoting whole pages. It is the good-hearted laughter of a young man who himself enjoys the fulness of life and himself laughs at the comical positions into which he has put his heroes: a village chanter, a wealthy peasant, a rural matron, or a village smith. He is full of happiness; no dark apprehension comes to disturb his joy of life. However, those whom he depicts are not rendered comical in obedience to the poet’s whim: Gógol always remains scrupulously true to reality. Every peasant, every chanter, is taken from real life, and the truthfulness of Gógol to reality is almost ethnographical, without ever ceasing to be poetical. All the superstitions of a village life on a Christmas Eve or during a midsummer night, when the mischievous spirits and goblins get free till the cock crows, are brought before the reader, and at the same time we have all the wittiness which is inborn in the Little Russian. It was only later on that Gógol’s comical vein became what can be truly described as “humour,”-that is, a sort of contrast between comical surroundings and a sad substratum of life, which made Púshkin say of Gógol’s productions that “behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears.”

How Iván Ivánovitch quarrelled with Iván Nikíforytch

Not all the Little-Russian tales of Gógol are taken from peasant life. Some deal also with the upper class of the small towns; and one of them, How Iván Ivánovitch quarrelled with Iván Nikíforytch, is one of the most humorous tales in existence. Iván Ivánovitch and Iván Nikíforytch were two neihbours who lived on excellent terms with each other; but the inevitableness of their quarrelling some day appears from the very first lines of the novel. Iván Ivánovitch was a person of fine behaviour. He would never offer snuff to an acquaintance without saying: “May I dare, Sir, to ask you to be so kind as to oblige yourself.” He was a man of the most accurate habits; and when he had eaten a melon he used to wrap its seeds in a bit of paper, and to inscribe upon it: “This melon was eaten on such a date,” and if there had been a friend at his table he would add: “In the presence of Mr. So and So.” At the same time he was, after all, a miser, who appreciated very highly the comforts of his own life, but did not care to share them with others. His neighbour, Iván Nikíforytch, was quite the opposite. He was very stout and heavy, and fond of swearing. On a hot summer day he would take off all his clothes and sit in his garden, in the sunshine, warming his back. When he offered snuff to anyone, he would simply produce his snuff box saying: “Oblige yourself.” He knew none of the refinements of his neighbour, and loudly expressed what he meant. It was inevitable that two men, so different, whose yards were only separated by a low fence, should one day come to a quarrel; and so it happened.

One day the stout and rough Iván Nikíforytch, seeing that his friend owned an old useless musket, was seized with the desire to possess the weapon. He had not the slightest need of it, but all the more he longed to have it, and this craving led to a feud which lasted for years. Iván Ivánovitch remarked very reasonably to his neighbour that he had no need of a rifle. The neighbour, stung by this remark, replied that this was precisely the thing he needed, and offered, if Iván Ivánovitch was not disposed to accept money for his musket, to give him in exchange — a pig... This was understood by Iván Ivánovitch as a terrible offence: “How could a musket, which is the symbol of hunting, of nobility, be exchanged by a gentleman for a pig!” Hard words followed, and the offended neighbour called Iván Ivánovitch a gander... A mortal feud, full of the most comical incidents, resulted from these rash words. Their friends did everything to re-establish peace, and one day their efforts seemed to be crowned with success; the two enemies had been brought together-both pushed from behind by their friends; Iván Ivánovitch had already put his hand into his pocket to take out his snuff-box and to offer it to his enemy, when the latter made the unfortunate remark: “There was nothing particular in being called a gander; no need to be offended by that.” ....All the efforts of the friends were brought to nought by these unfortunate words. The feud was renewed with even greater acrimony than before; and, tragedy always following in the steps of comedy, the two enemies, by taking the affair from one Court to another, arrived at old age totally ruined.

Tárás Búlba — The Cloak

The pearl of Gógol’s Little-Russian novels is an historical novel, Tárás Búlba, which recalls to life one of the most interesting periods in the history of Little Russia — the fifteenth century. Constantinople had fallen into the hands of the Turks; and although a mighty Polish-Lithuanian State had grown in the West, the Turks, nevertheless, menaced both Eastern and Middle Europe. Then it was that the Little Russians rose for the defence of Russia and Europe. They lived in free communities of Cossacks, over whom the Poles were beginning to establish feudal power. In times of peace these Cossacks carried on agriculture in the prairies, and fishing in the beautiful rivers of Southwest Russia, reaching at times the Black Sea; but every one of them was armed, and the whole country was divided into regiments. As soon as there was a military alarm they all rose to meet an invasion of the Turks or a raid of the Tartars, returning to their fields and fisheries as soon as the war was over.

The whole nation was thus ready to resist the invasions of the Mussulmans; but a special vanguard was kept in the lower course of the Dniéper, “beyond the rapids,” on an island which soon became famous under the name of the Sécha. Men of all conditions, including runaways from their landlords, outlaws, and adventurers of all sorts, could come and settle in the Sécha without being asked any questions but whether they went to church. “Well, then, make the sign of the cross,” the hetman of the Sécha said, “and join the division you like.” The Sécha consisted of about sixty divisions, which were very similar to independent republics, or rather to schools of boys, who cared for nothing and lived in common. None of them had anything of his own, excepting his arms. No women were admitted, and absolute democracy prevailed.

The hero of the novel is an old Cossack, Tarás Búlba, who has himself spent many years in Sécha, but is now peacefully settled inland on his farm. His two sons have been educated at the Academy of Kíeff and return home after several years of absence. Their first meeting with their father is very characteristic. As the father laughs at the sons’ long clothes, which do not suit a Cossack, the elder son, Ostáp, challenges him to a good boxing fight. The father is delighted, and they fight until the old man, quite out of breath, exclaims: “By God, this is a good fighter; no need to test him further; he will be a good Cossack!-Now, son, be welcome; let us kiss each other.” On the very next day after their arrival, without letting the mother enjoy the sight of her sons, Tarás takes them to the Sécha, which — as often happened in those times — was quickly drawn into war, in conscquence of the exactions which the Polish landlords made upon the Little Russians.

The life of the free Cossacks in the republic “beyond the rapids” and their ways of conducting war are wonderfully described; but, paying a tribute to the then current romanticism, Gógol makes Tarás’ younger son, a sentimentalist, fall in love with a noble Polish-lady, during the seige of a Polish town, and go over to the enemy; while the father and the elder son continue fighting the Poles. The war lasts for a year or so, with varying success, till at length, in one of the desperate sorties of the besieged Poles, the younger son of Tarás is taken prisoner, and the father himself kills him for his treason. The elder son is next taken prisoner by the Poles and carried away to Warsaw, where he perishes on the rack; while Tarás, returning to Little Russia, raises a formidable army and makes one of those invasions into Poland with which the history of the two countries was filled for two centuries. Taken prisoner himself, Tarás perishes at the stake, with a disregard of life and suffering which were characteristic of this strong, fighting race of men. Such is, in brief, the theme of this novel, which is replete with admirable separate scenes.

Read in the light of modern requirements, Tarás Búlba certainly would not satisfy us. The influence of the Romantic school is too strongly felt. The younger son of Tarás is not a living being, and the Polish lady is entirely invented in order to answer the requirements of a novel, showing that Gógol never knew a single woman of that type. But the old Cossack and his son, as well as all the life of the Cossack camps, is quite real; it produces the illusion of real life. The reader is carried away in sympathy with old Tarás, while the ethnographer cannot but feel that he has before him a wonderful combination of an ethnographical document of the highest value, with a poetical reproduction — only the more real because it is poetical — of a bygone and most interesting epoch.

The Little-Russian novels were followed by a few novels taken from the life of Great Russia, chiefly of St. Petersburg, and two of them, The Memoirs Of a Madman and The Cloak (Shinél) deserve a special mention. The psychology of the madman is strikingly drawn. As to The Cloak, it is in this novel that Gógol’s laughter which conceals “unseen tears” shows at its best. The poor life of a small functionary, who discovers with a sense of horror that his old cloak is so worn out as to be unfit to stand further repairs; his hesitation before he ventures to speak to a tailor about a new one; his nervous excitement on the day that it is ready and that he tries it on for the first time; and finally his despair, amidst general indifference, when night-robbers have robbed him of his cloak — every line of this work bears the stamp of one of the greatest artists. Sufficient to say that this novel produced at its appearance, and produces still, such an impression, that since the times of Gógol every Russian novel-writer has been aptly said to have re-written The Cloak.

The Inspector-General

Gógol’s prose-comedy, The Inspector-General (Revizór), has become, in its turn, a starting point for the Russian drama — a model which every dramatic writer after Gógol has always kept before his eyes. “Revizór,” in Russian, means some important functionary who has been sent by the ministry to some provincial town to inquire into the conditions of the local administration — an Inspector-General; and the comedy takes place in a small town, from which “you may gallop for three years and yet arrive nowhere.” The little spot — we learn it at the rising of the curtain — is going to be visited by an Inspector-General. The local head of the Police (in those times the head of the Police was also the head of the town) — the Gorodníchiy or Governor-has convoked the chief functionaries of the place to communicate to them an important news. He has had a bad dream; two rats came in, sniffed and then went away; there must he something in that dream, and so there is: he has just got this morning a letter from a friend at St. Petersburg, announcing that an inspector-general is coming, and — what is still worse — is coming incognito! Now, the honourable Governor advises the functionaries to put some order in their respective offices. The patients in the hospital walk about in linen so dirty that you might take them for chimney sweeps. The chief magistrate, who is a passionate lover of sport, has his hunting appareI hanging about inthe Court, and his attendants have made a poultry-yard of the entrance hall. In short, everything has to be put in order. The Governor feels very uncomfortable. Up to the present day he has freely levied tribute upon the merchants, pocketed the money destined for building a church, and within a fortnight he has flogged the wife of a non-commissioned officer, which he had no right to do; and now, there’s the Inspector-General coming! He asks the postmaster “just to open a little” the letters which may be addressed from this town to St. Petersburg and, if he finds in them some reports about town matters, to keep them. The postmaster — a great student of human character — has always indulged, even without getting this advice, in the interesting pastime of reading the letters, and he falls in with the Governor’s proposal.

At that very moment enter Petr Iványch Dóbchinsky and Petr Iványch Bóbchinsky. Everyone knows them, you know them very well: they play the part of the town Gazette. They go about the town all day long, and as soon as they have learnt something interesting they both hurry to spread the news, interrupting each other in telling it, and hurrying immediately to some other place to be the first to communicate the news to someone else. They have been at the only inn of the town, and there they saw a very suspicious person: a young man, “who has something, you know, extraordinary about his face.” He is living there for a fortnight, never paying a penny, and does not journey any further. “What is his object in staying so long in town like ours?” And then, when they were taking their lunch he passed them by and looked so inquisitively in their plates — who may he be? Evidently, the Governor and all present conclude, he must be the Inspector-General who stays there incognito... A general confusion results from the suspicion. The Governor starts immediately for the inn, to make the necessary enquiries. The womenfolk are in a tremendous excitement.

The stranger is simply a young man who is travelling to rejoin his father. On some post-station he met with a certain captain — a great master at cards — and lost all he had in his pocket. Now he cannot proceed any farther, and he cannot pay the landlord, who refuses to credit him with any more meals. The young man feels awfully hungry — no wonder he looked so inquisitively into the plates of the two gentlemen — and resorts to all sorts of tricks to induce the landlord to send him something for his dinner. Just as he is finishing some fossil-like cutlet enters the Gorodníchiy; and a most comic scene follows, the young man thinking that the Governor came to arrest him, and the Governor thinking that he is speaking to the Inspector-General who is trying to conceal his identity. The Governor offers to remove the young man to some more comfortable place. “No, thank you, I have no intent to go to a jail,” sharply retorts the young man... But it is to his own house that the Governor takes the supposed Inspector, and now an easy life begins for the adventurer. All the functionaries appear in turn to introduce themselves, and everyone is only too happy to give him a bribe of a hundred roubles or so. The merchants come to ask his protection from the Governor; the widow who was flogged comes to lodge a complaint....In the meantime the young man enters into a flirtation with both the wife and the daughter of the Governor; and, finally, being caught at a very pathetic moment when he is kneeling at the feet of the daughter, without further thought he makes a proposition of marriage. But, having gone so far, the young man, well-provided now with money, hastens to leave the town on the pretext of going to see an uncle; he will be back in a couple of days...

The delight of the Governor can easily be imagined. His Excellency, the Inspector-General, going to marry the Governor’s daughter! He and his wife are already making all sorts of plans. They will remove to St. Petersburg, the Gorodníchiy will soon be a general, and you will see how he will keep the other Gorodníchies at his door! ... The happy news spreads about the town, and all the functionaries and the society of the town hasten to offer their congratulations to the old man. There is a great gathering at his house-when the postmaster comes in. He has followed the advice of the Governor, and has opened a letter which the supposed Inspector-General had addressed to somebody at St. Petersburg. He now brings this letter. The young man is no inspector at all, and here is what he writes to a Bohemian friend of his about his adventures in the provincial town:[12]

The Postmaster (reads) I hasten to inform you, my dear friend, of the wonderful things which have happened to me. On my way hither an infantry captain had cleared me out completely, so that the innkeeper here intended to send me to jail, when, all of a sudden, thanks to my St. Petersburg appearance and costume, all the town took me for a Governor-General. Now I am staying at the Gorodníchiy’s! I have a splendid time, and flirt awfully with both his wife and his daughter... Do you remember how hard up we were, taking our meals where we could get them, without paying for them, and how one day, in a tea-shop, the pastry-cook collared me for having eaten his pastry to the account of the king of England?[13] It is quite different now. They all lend me money, as much as I care for. They are an awful set of originals: you would split of laughter. I know you write sometimes for the papers — put them into your literature. To begin with, the Governor is as stupid as an old horse...

The Governor (interrupting): That cannot be there! There is no such thing in the letter.

Postmaster (showing the letter) — Read it then, yourself.

Governor (reads) An old horse”...impossible! You must have added that.

Postmaster: How could I?

The Guests: Read! read!

The Postmaster (continues to read) “The governor is as stupid as an old horse”...

Governor: The deuce! Now he must repeat it — as if it were not standing there already!

Postmaster (continues reading): Hm, Hm, yes! “an old horse. The postmaster is also a good man”....Well he also makes an improper remark about me....

Governor: Read it then.

Postmaster: Is it necessary?

Governor: The deuce! once we have begun to read it, we must read it all through.

Artémy Filípovitch (head of the philanthropic institutions): Permit me, please, I shall read (puts on his spectacles and reads): The postmaster is quite like the old porter in our office, and the rascal must drink equally hard.”...

Postmaster: A naughty boy, who ought to be flogged-that’s all!

Art. Fil. (continues reading) The head of the philanthropic in-in ...

Korobki: Why do you stop now?

Art. Fil. Bad writing. But, after all, it is quite evident that he is a scoundrel.

Korobkin: Give me the letter, please. I think, I have better eyes (tries to take the letter).

Art. Fil. (does not give it) : No use at all. This passage can be omitted. Further on everything is quite readable.

Korobkin: Let me have it. I shall see all about it.

Art. Fil: I also can read it. I tell you that after that passage everything is readable.

Postm.: No, no, read it all. Everything was read so far.

The Guests: Artémy Filípovitch, pass the letter over. (To Korobkin) Read it, read it!

Art. Fil.: All right, all right. (He passes the letter.) There it is; but wait a moment (he covers a part of it with his finger). Begin here (all surround. him).

Postman: Go on. Nonsense, read it all.

Korobkin (reads) “The head of the philanthropic institutions resembles a pig that wears a cap”...

Art. Fil. (to the audience): Not witty at all! A pig that wears a cap! Have you ever seen a pig wearing a cap?

Korobkin (continues reading) “The inspector of the schools smells of onions all through!”

The Inspector (to the audience): Upon my honour, I never touch onions.

The Judge (apart): Thank God, there is nothing about me.

Korobkin (reading): “The judge”.....

The Judge: There! ...(aloud): Well, gentlemen, I think the letter is much too long, and quite uninteresting — why the deuce should we go on reading that nonsense?

Insp. of Schools: No! no!

Postm: No!-go on!

Art. Fil.: No, it must be read.

Korobkin: (continues) “The judge Lyápkin-Tyápkin is extremely mauvais ton.” (Stops.) That must be a French word?

The Judge. The deuce knows what it means. If it were only “a robber,” then it would be all right, but it may be something worse.

In short, the letter produces a great sensation. The friends of the Governor are delighted to see him and his family in such straits, all accuse each other, and finally fall upon the two gentlemen, when a police soldier enters the room and announces in a loud voice: “A functionary from St. Petersburg, with Imperial orders, wants to see you all immediately. He stays at the hotel.” Thereupon the curtain drops over a living picture of which Gógol himself had made a most striking sketch in pencil, and which is usually reproduced in his works; it shows how admirably well, with what a fine artistic sense, he represented to himself his characters.

Its influence

The Inspector-General marks a new era in the development of dramatic art in Russia. All the comedies and dramas which were being played in Russia at that time (with the exception, of course, of Misfortune from Intelligence, which, however, was not allowed to appear on the stage) hardly deserved the name of dramatic literature: so imperfect and puerile they were. The Inspector-General, on the contrary, would have marked at the time of its appearance (1835) an epoch in any language. Its stage qualities, which will be appreciated by every good actor; its sound and hearty humour; the natural character of the comical scenes, which result from the very characters of those who appear in this comedy; the sense of measure which pervades it — all these make it one of the best comedies in existence. If the conditions of life which are depicted here were not so exclusively Russian, and did not so exclusively belong to a bygone stage of life which is unknown outside Russia, it would have been generally recognised as a real pearl of the world’s literature. This is why, when it was played a few years ago in Germany, by actors who properly understood Russian life, it achieved such a tremendous success.

The Inspector-General provoked such a storm of hostile criticism of the part of all reactionary Russia, that it was hopeless to expect that the comedy which Gógol began next, concerning the life of the St. Petersburg functionaries (The Vladimir Cross), could ever be admitted on the stage, and Gógol never finished it, only publishing a few striking scenes from it: The Morning of a Busy Man, The Law Suite, etc. Another comedy, Marriage, in which he represented the hesitation and terror through which an inveterate bachelor goes before a marriage, which he finally eludes by jumping out of a window a few moments before the begining of the ceremony, has not lost its interest even now. It is so full of comical situations, which fine actors cannot but highly appreciate, that it is still a part of the current repertoire of the Russian stage.

Dead Souls

Gógol’s main work was Dead Souls. This is a novel almost without a plot, or rather with a plot of the utmost simplicity. Like the plot of The Inspector-General, it was suggested to Gógol by Púshkin. In those times, when serfdom was flourishing in Russia, the ambition of every nobleman was to become the owner of at least a couple of hundred serfs. The serfs used to be sold like slaves and could be bought separately. A needy nobleman, Tchítchikoff, conceives accordingly a very clever plan. A census of the population being made only every ten or twenty years, and every serf-owner having in the interval to pay taxes for every male soul which he owned at the time of the last census, even though part of his “souls” be dead since, Tchítchikoff conceives the idea of taking advantage of this anomaly. He will buy the dead souls at a very small expense: the landlords will he only too pleased to get rid of this burden and surely will sell them for anything; and after Tchítchikoff has bought two or three hundred of these imaginary serfs, he will buy cheap land somewhere in the southern prairies, transfer the dead souls, on paper, to that land, register them as if they were really settled there, and mortgage that new sort of estate to the State Landlords’ Bank. In this way he can easily make the beginnings of a fortune. With this plan Tchítchikoff comes to a provincial town and begins his operations. He makes, first of all, the necessary visits.

“The newcomer made visits to all the functionaries of the town. He went to testify his respects to the Governor, who like Tchítchikoff himself, was neither stout nor thin. He was decorated with a cross and was spoken of as a person who would soon get a star; but was, after all, a very good fellow and was fond of making embroideries upon fine muslin. Tchítchikoff’s next visits were to the Vice-Governor, to the Chief Magistrate, to the Chief of Police, the Head of the Crown Factories..... but it is so difficult to remember all the powerful persons in this world..... sufficient to say that the newcomer showed a wonderful activity as regards visits. He even went to testify his respects to the Sanitary Inspector, and to the Town Surveyor, and after that he sat for a long time in his carriage trying to remember to whom else he might pay a visit; but he could think of no more functionaries in the town. In his conversations with all these influential persons he managed to say something to flatter every one of them. In talking with the Governor he accidentally dropped the remark that when one enters this province one thinks of paradise — all the roads being quite like velvet; and that ‘governments which nominate wise functionaries surely deserve universal gratitude.’ To the Chief of the Police he said something very gratifying about the police force, and while he was talking to the Vice-Governor and to the presiding magistrate, who were only State-Councillors, he twice made the mistake of calling them ‘Your Excellency,’ with which mistake they were both immensely pleased. The result of all this was that the Governor asked Tchítchikoff to come that same day to an evening party, and the other functionaries invited him, some to dine with them, others to a cup of tea, and others again to a party of whist.

About himself Tchítchikoff avoided talking, and if he spoke at all it was in vague sentences only, with a remarkable modesty, his conversation taking in such cases a rather bookish turn. He said that he was a mere nobody in this world and did not wish people to take any particular interest in him; that he had had varied experiences in his life, suffered in the service of the State for the sake of truth, had had many enemies, some of whom had even attempted his life, but that now, wishing to lead a quiet existence, he intended to find at last some corner to live in, and, having come to this town, he considered it his imperative duty to testify his respect to the chief functionaries of the place. This was all they could learn in town about the new person who soon made his appearance at the Governor’s evening party.

“Here, the newcomer once more produced the most favourable impression... He always found out what he ought to do on every occasion; and he proved himself an experienced man of the world. Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also Tchítchikoff would make remarks to the point. If the conversation related to some inquest which was being made by the Government, he would show that he also knew something about the tricks of the Civil Service functionaries. When the talk was about billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, he knew all about brandy; as to Custom officers, he knew everything about them, as though he had himself been a Custom officer, or a detective; but the most remarkable thing was that he knew how to cover all this with a certain sense of propriety, and in every circumstance knew how to behave. He never spoke too loudly, and never in too subdued a tone, but exactly as one ought to speak. In short, take him from any side you like, he was a very respectable man. All the functionaries were delighted with the arrival of such a person in their town.”

It has often been said that Gógol’s Tchítchikoff is a truly Russian type. But — is it so? Has not every one of us met Tchítchikoff? — middle-aged; not too thick and not too thin; moving about with the lightness almost of a military man... The subject he wishes to speak to you about may offer many difficulties, but he knows how to approach it and to interest you in it in a thousand different ways. When he talks to an old general he rises to the understanding of the greatness of the country and her military glory. He is not a jingo — surely not — but he has, just in the proper measure, the love of war and victories which are required in a man who wishes to be described as a patriot. When he meets with a sentimental reformer, he is sentimental and desirous of reforms, and so on, and he always will keep in view the object he aims at at any given moment, and will try to interest you in it. Tchítchikoff may buy dead souls, or railway shares, or he may collect funds for some charitable institution, or look for a position in a bank, but he is an immortal international type; we meet him everywhere; he is of all lands and of all times; he but takes different forms to suit the requirements of nationality and time.

One of the first landlords to whom Tchítchikoff spoke of his intention of buying dead souls was Maníloff — also a universal type, with the addition of those special features which the quiet life of a serf-owner could add to such a character. “A very nice man to look at,” as Gógol says; his features possessed something very pleasant — only it seemed as if too much sugar had been put into them. “When you meet him for the first time you cannot but exclaim after the first few minutes of conversation: ‘What a nice and pleasant man he is.’ The next moment you say nothing, but the next but one moment you say to yourself: ‘The deuce knows what he is,’ and you go away; but if you don’t, you feel mortally bored.” You could never hear from him a lively or animated word. Everyone has some point of interest and enthusiasm. Maníloff had nothing of the kind; he was always in the same mild temper. He seemed to be lost in reflection; but what about, no one knew. Sometimes, as he looked from his window on his wide courtyard and the pond behind, he would say to himself: “How nice it would be to have there an underground passage leading from the mansion to the pond, and to have across the pond a stone bridge, with pretty shops on both its sides, in which shops all sorts of things useful for the people could be bought.” His poor eyes became in this case wonderfully soft, and his face took on a most contented expression. However, even less strange intentions remained mere intentions. In his house something was always missing; his drawing room had excellent furniture covered with fine silk stuff, which probably had cost much money; but for two of the chairs there was not sufficient of the stuff, and so they remained covered with plain sack-cloth; and for many years in succession the proprietor used to stop his guests with these words: “Please, do not take that chair; it is not yet ready.” “His wife ... But they were quite satisfied with each other. Although more than eight years had passed since they had married, one of them would still occasionally bring to the other a piece of apple or a tiny sweet, or a nut, saying in a touchingly sweet voice which expressed infinite love: ‘Open, my dearest, your little mouth, — I will put into it this little sweet.’ Evidently the mouth was opened in a very charming way. For her husband’s birthday the wife always prepared some surprise — for instance, an embroidered sheath for his tooth-pick, and very often, sitting on the sofa, all of a sudden, no one knows for what reason, one of them would leave his pipe and the other her work, and impress on each other such a sweet and long kiss that during it one might easily smoke a little cigarette. In short, they were what people call quite happy.”

It is evident that of his estate and of the condition of his peasants Maníloff never thought. He knew absolutely nothing about such matters, and left everything in the hands of a very sharp manager, under whose rule Maníloff’s serfs were worse off than under a brutal landlord. Thousands of such Mániloffs peopled Russia some fifty years ago, and I think that if we look closer round we shall find such would-be “sentimental” persons under every latitude.

It is easy to conceive what a gallery of portraits Gógol was enabled to produce as he followed Tchítchikoff in his wanderings from one landlord to another, while his hero tried to buy as many “dead souls” as he could. Every one of the landlords described in Dead Souls — the sentimentalist Maníloff, the heavy and cunning Sobakévitch the arch-liar and cheat Nózdreff, the fossilised, antediluvian lady Koróbotchka, the miser Plyúshkin — have become common names in Russian conversation. Some of them, as for instance the miser Plyúshkin, are depicted with such a depth of psychological insight that one may ask one’s self whether a better and more humane portrait of a miser can be found in any literature?

Towards the end of his life Gógol, who was suffering from a nervous disease, fell under thoe influence of “pietists” — especially of Madame 0. A. Smirnóff (born Rossett), and began to consider all his writings as a sin of his life. Twice, in a paroxysm of religious self-accusation, he burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls, of which only some parts have been preserved, and were circulated in his lifetime in manuscript. The last ten years of his life were extremely painful. He repented with reference to all his writings, and published a very unwholesome book, Correspondence with Friends, in which, under the mask of Christian humility, he took a most arrogant position with respect to all literature, his own writings included. He died at Moscow in I852.

It hardly need be added that the Government of Nicholas I. considered Gógol’s writings extremely dangerous. The author had the utmost difficulties in getting permission for The Inspector-General to be played at all on the stage, and the permission was only obtained by Zhukóvskiy, at the express will of the Tsar himself. Before the authorisation was given to print the first volume of Dead Souls, Gógol had to undergo most incredible trouble; and when the volume was out of print a second edition was never permitted in Nicholas l.’s reign. When Gógol died, and’Turguéneff published in a Moscow paper a short obituary notice, which really contained absolutely nothing (“any tradesman might have had a better one,” as Turguéneff himself said), the young novelist was arrested, and it was only because of the influence of his friends in high position that the punishment which Nicholas I. inflicted upon him was limited to exile from Moscow and a forced residence on his estate in the country. Were it not for these influences, Turguéneff very probably would have been exiled, like Púshkin and Lérmontoff, either to the Caucasus or to Siberia.

The police of Nicholas I. were not wrong when they attributed to Gógol a great influence upon the minds of Russians. His works circulated immensely in manuscript copies. In my childhood we used to copy the second volume of Dead Souls-the whole book from beginning to end, as well as parts from the first volume. Everyone considered then this work as a formidable indicment against serfdom; and so it was. In this respect Gógol was the forerunner of the literary movement against serfdom which began in Russia with such force, a very few years later, during and especially after the Crimean War. Gógol never expressed his personal ideas about this subject, but the life-pictures of serf-owners which he gave and their relations to their serfs — especially the waste of the labour of the serfs — were a stronger indictment that if Gógol had related facts of brutal behaviour of landlords towards their men. In fact, it is impossible to read Dead Souls without being impressed by the fact that serfdom was an institution which had produced its own doom. Drinking, gluttony, waste of the serf’s labour in order to keep hundreds of retainers, or for things as useless as the sentimentalist Maníloff’s bridges, were characteristic of the landlords; and when Gógol wanted to represent one landlord who, at least, obtained some pecuniary advantage from the forced labour of his serfs and enriched himself, he had to produce a landlord who was not a Russian: in fact, among the Russian landlords such a man would have been a most extraordinary occurrence.

As to the literary influence of Gógol, it was immense, and it continues down to the present day. Gógol was not a deep thinker, but he was a very great artist. His art was pure realism, but it was imbued with the desire of making for mankind something good and great. When he wrote the most comical things, it was not merely for the pleasure of laughing at human weaknesses, but he also tried to awaken the desire of something better and greater, and he always achieved that aim. Art, in Gógol’s conception, is a torchbearer which indicates a higher ideal; and it was certainly this high conception of art which induced him to give such an incredible amount of time to the working out of the schemes of his works, and afterwards, to the most careful elaboration of every line which he published.

The generation of the Decembrists surely would have introduced social and political ideas in the novel. But that generation had perished, and Gógol was now the first to introduce the social element into Russian literature, so as to give it its prominent and dominating position. While it remains an open question whether realism in the Russian novel does not date from Púshkin, rather even than from Gógol — this, in fact, is the view of both Turguéneff and Tolstóy-there is yet no doubt that it was Gógol’s writings which introduced into Russian literature the social element, and social criticism based upon the analysis of the conditions within Russia itself. The peasant novels of Grigoróvitch, Turguéneff’s Sportsman’s Notebook, and the first works of Dostoyéskiy were a direct outcome of Gógol’s initiative.

Realism in the Russian novel

Realism in art was much discussed some time ago, in connection chiefly with the first writings of Zola; but we, Russians, who had had Gógol, and knew realism in its best form, could not fall in with the views of the French realists. We saw in Zola a tremendous amount of the same romanticism which he combated; and in his realism, such as it appeared in his writings of the first period, we saw a step backwards from the realism of Balzac. For us, realism could not be limited to a mere anatomy of society: it had to have a higher background; the realistic description had to be made subservient to an idealistic aim. Still less could we understand realism as a description only of the lowest aspects of life, because, to limit one’s observations to the lowest aspects only, is not to be a realist. Real life has beside and within its lowest manifestations its highest ones as well. Degeneracy is not the sole nor dominant feature of modern society, if we look at it as a whole. Consequently, the artist who limits his observations to the lowest and most degenerate aspects only, and not for a special purpose, does not make us understand that he explores only one small corner of life. Such an artist does not conceive life as it is: he knows but one aspect of it, and this is not the most interesting one.

Realism in France was certainly a necessary protest, partly against unbridled Romanticism, but chiefly against the elegant art which glided on the surface and refused to glance at the often most inelegant motives of elegant acts — the art which purposely ignored the often horrible consequences of the so-called correct and elegant life. For Russia, this protest was not necessary. Since Gógol, art could not be limited to any class of society. It was bound to embody them all, to treat them all realistically, and to penetrate beneath the surface of social relations. Therefore there was no need of the exaggeration which in France was a necessary and sound reaction. There was no need, moreover, to fall into extremes in order to free art from dull moralisation. Our great realist, Gógol, had already shown to his followers how realism can be put to the service of higher aims, without losing anything of its penetration or ceasing to be a true reproduction of life.

Chapter 4: Turguéneff — Tolstóy

Turguéneff

Púshkin, Lérmontoff and Gógol were the real creators of Russian literature; but to Western Europe they remained nearly total strangers. It was only Turguéneff and Tolstóy — the two greatest novelists of Russia, if not of their century altogether — and, to some extent, Dostoyévskiy, who broke down the barrier of language which had kept Russian writers unknown to West Europeans. They have made Russian literature familiar and popular outside Russia; they have exercised and still exercise their share of influence upon West-European thought and art; and owing to them, we may be sure that henceforward the best productions of the Russian mind will be part of the general intellectual belongings of civilised mankind.

The main features of his Art

For the artistic construction, the finish and the beauty of his novels, Turguéneff was very probably the greatest novelwriter of his century. However, the chief characteristic of his poetical genius lay not only in that sense of the beautiful which he possessed to so high a degree, but also in the highly intellectual contents of his creations. His novels are not mere stories dealing at random with this or that type of men, or with some particular current of life, or accident happening to fall under the author’s observation. They are intimately connected with each other, and they give the succession of the leading intellectual types of Russia which have impressed their own stamp upon each successive generation. The novels of Turguéneff, of which the first appeared in 1845, cover a period of more than thirty years, and during these three decades Russian society underwent one of the deepest and the most rapid modifications ever witnessed in European history. The leading types of the educated classes went through successive changes with a rapidity which was only possible in a society suddenly awakening from a long slumber, casting away an institution which hitherto had permeated its whole existence (I mean serfdom), and rushing towards a new life. And this succession of “historymaking” types was represented by Turguéneff with a depth of conception, a fulness of philosophical and humanitarian understanding, and an artistic insight, almost equal to foresight, which are found in none of the modern writers to the same extent and in that happy combination.

Not that he would follow a preconceived plan. “All these discussions about ‘tendency’ and ‘unconsciousness’ in art,” he wrote, “are nothing but a debased coin of rhetorics... Those only who cannot do better will submit to a preconceived programme, because a truly talented writer is the condensed expression of life itself, and he cannot write either a panegyric or a pamphlet: either would be too mean for him.” But as soon as a new leading type of men or women appeared amidst the educated classes of Russia, it took possession of Turguéneff. He was haunted by it, and haunted until he had succeeded in representing it to the best of his understanding in a work of art, just as for years Murillo was haunted by the image of a Virgin in the ecstasy of purest love, until he finally succeeded in rendering on the canvas his full conception.

When some human problem had thus taken possession of Tuguéneff’s mind, he evidently could not discuss it in terms of logic — this would have been the manner of the political writer — he conceived it in the shape of images and scenes. Even in his conversation, when he intended to give you an idea of some problem which worried his mind, he used to do it by describing a scene so vividly that it would for ever engrave itself in the memory. This was also a marked trait in his writings. His novels are a succession of scenes — some of them of the most exquisite beauty — each of which helps him further to characterise his heroes. Therefore all his novels are short, and need no plot to sustain the reader’s attention. Those who have been perverted by sensational novel-reading may, of course, be disappointed with a want of sensational episode; but the ordinary intelligent reader feels from the very first pages that he has real and interesting men and women before him, with really human hearts throbbing in them, and he cannot part with the book before he has reached the end and grasped the characters in full. Simplicity of means for accomplishing far-reaching ends — that chief feature of truly good art — is felt in everything Turguéneff wrote.

George Brandes, in his admirable study of Turguéneff (in Moderne Geister), the best, the deepest, and the most poetical of all that has been written about the great novelist, makes the following remark:

“It is not easy to say quite definitely what makes of Turguéneff an artist of the first rank... That he has in the highest degree the capacity which makes a true poet, of producing living human beings, does not, after all, comprise everything. What makes the reader feel so much his artistic superiority is the concordance one feels between the interest taken by the poet in the person whom he depicts, or the poet’s judgment about this person, and the impression which the reader himself gets; because it is in this point — the relation of the artist to his own creations — that every weakness of either the man or the poet must necessarily appear.”

The reader feels every such mistake at once and keeps the remembrance of it, notwithstanding all the efforts of the author to dissipate its impression.

“What reader of Balzac, or of Dickens, or of Auerbach — to speak of the great dead only — does not know this feeling!” Brandes continues. “When Balzac swims in warmed-up excitement, or when Dickens becomes childishly touching, and Auerbach intentionally naïve, the reader feels repulsed by the untrue, the unpleasant. Never do we meet with anything artistically repulsive in Turguéneff.”

This remark of the great critic is absolutely true, and only a few words need be added to it, with reference to the wonderful architecture of all Turguéneff’s novels. Be it a small novel, or a large one, the proportion of the parts is wonderfully held; not a single episode of a merely “ethnographical” character comes in to disturb or to slacken the development of the inner human drama; not one feature, and certainly not one single scene, can be omitted without destroying the impression of the whole; and the final accord, which seals the usually touching general impression, is always worked out with wonderful finish. [14]

And then the beauty of the chief scenes. Every one of them could be made the subject of a most artistic and telling picture. Take, for instance, the final scenes of Helen and Insároff in Venice: their visit to the picture gallery, which made the keeper exclaim, as he looked at them, Poveretti! or the scene in the theatre, where in response to the imitated cough of the actress (who played Violetta in Traviata) resounded the deep, real cough of the dying Insároff. The actress herself, with her poor dress and bony shoulders, who yet took possession of the audience by the warmth and reality of her feeling, and created a storm of enthusiasm by her cry of dying joy on the return of Alfred; nay, I should even say, the dark harbour where one sees the gull drop from rosy light into the deep blackness of the night — each of these scenes comes to the imagination on canvas. In his lecture, Hamlet and Don Quixote, where he speaks of Shakespeare and Cervantes being contemporaries, and mentions that the romance of Cervantes was translated into English in Shakespeare’s lifetime, so that he might have read it, Turguéneff exclaims: “What a picture, worthy of the brush of a thoughtful painter: Shakespeare reading Don Quixote! “It would seem as if in these lines he betrayed the secret of the wonderful beauty — the pictorial beauty — of such a number of his scenes. He must have imagined them, not only with the music of the feeling that speaks in them, but also as pictures, full of the deepest psychological meaning and in which all the surroundings of the main figures — the Russian birch wood, or the German town on the Rhine, or the harbour of Venice — are in harmony with the feeling.

Turguéneff knew the human heart deeply, especially the heart of a young, thoroughly honest, and reasoning girl when she awakes to higher feelings and ideas, and that awakening takes, without her realising it, the shape of love. In the description of that moment of life Turguéneff stands quite unrivalled. On the whole, love is the leading motive of all his novels; and the moment of its full development is the moment when his hero — he may be a political agitator or a modest squire — appears in full light. The great poet knew that a human type cannot be characterised by the daily work in which such a man is engaged — however important that work may be — and still less by a flow of words. Consequently, when he draws, for instance, the picture of an agitator in Dmitri Rúdin, he does not report his fiery speeches — for the simple reason that the agitator’s words would not have characterised him. Many have pronounced the same appeals to Equality and Liberty before him, and many more will pronounce them after his death. But that special type of apostle of equality and liberty — the “man of the word, and of no action” which he intended to represent in Rúdin — is characterised by the hero’s relations to different persons, and particularly, above all, by his love. By his love — because it is in love that the human being appears in full, with its individual features. Thousands of men have made “propaganda by word,” all very much in the same expressions, but each of them has loved in a different way. Mazzini and Lassalle did similar work; but how different they were in their loves! You do not know Lassalle unless you know his relations to the Countess of Hatzfeld.

Pessimism of his early novels

In common with all great writers, Turguéneff combined the qualities of a pessimist and a lover of mankind.

“There flows a deep and broad stream of melancholy in Turguéneff’s mind,” remarks Brandes, “and therefore it flows also through all his works. Though his description be objective and impersonal, and although he hardly ever introduces into his novels lyric poetry, nevertheless they produce on the whole the impression of lyrics. There is so much of Turguéneff’s own personality expressed in them, and this personality is always sadness — a specific sadness without a touch of sentimentality. Never does Turguéneff give himself up entirely to his feelings: he impresses by restraint; but no West European novelist is so sad as he is. The great melancholists of the Latin race, such as Leopardi and Flaubert, have hard, fast outlines in their style; the German sadness is of a caustic humour, or it is pathetic, or sentimental; but Turguéneff’s melancholy is, in its substance, the melancholy of the Slavonian races in its weakness and tragical aspect, it is a descendant in a straight line from the melancholy of the Slavonian folk-song... When Gógol is melancholy, it is from despair. When Dostoyévskiy expresses the same feeling, it is because his heart bleeds with sympathy for the down-trodden, and especially for great sinners. Tolstóy’s melancholy has its foundation in his religious fatalism. Turguéneff alone is a philosopher... He loves man, even though he does not think much of him and does not trust him very much.”

A Sportsman’s NoteBook

The full force of Turguéneff’s talent appeared already in his earlier productions — that is, in the series of short sketches from village life, to which the misleading title of A Sportsman’s NoteBook was given in order to avoid the rigours of censorship. Notwithstanding the simplicity of their contents and the total absence of the satirical element, these sketches gave a decided blow to serfdom. Turguéneff did not describe in them such atrocities of serfdom as might have been considered mere exceptions to the rule; nor did he idealise the Russian peasant; but by giving life-portraits of sensible, reasoning, and loving beings, bent down under the yoke of serfdom, together with life-pictures of the shallowness and meanness of the life of the serf-owners — even the best of them — he awakened the consciousness of the wrong done by the system. The social influence of these sketches was very great. As to their artistic qualities, suffice it to say that in these short sketches we find in a few pages most vivid pictures of an incredible variety of human characters, together with most beautiful sketches of nature.

Contempt, admiration, sympathy, or deep sadness are impressed in turns on the reader at the will of the young author — each time, however, in such a form and by such vivid scenes that each of these short sketches is worth a good novel.

His series of novels representing the leading types of Russian society

In the series of short novels, A Quiet Corner, Correspondence, Yákov Pásynkov, Faust, and Asya, all dated 1854 and 1855, the genius of Turguéneff revealed itself fully: his manner, his inner self, his powers. A deep sadness pervades these novels. A sort of despair in the educated Russian, who, even in his love, appears utterly incapable of a strong feeling which would carry away all obstacles, and always manages, even when circumstances favour him, to bring the woman who loves him to grief and despair. The following lines from Correspondence characterise best the leading idea of three of these novels: A Quiet Corner, Correspondence, and Asya. It is a girl of twenty-six who writes to a friend of her childhood:

“Again I repeat that I do not speak of the girl who finds it difficult and hard to think... She looks round, she expects, and asks herself, when the one whom her soul is longing for will come... At last he appears: she is carried away by him; she is like soft wax in his hands. Happiness, love, thought — all these come now in streams; all her unrest is settled, all doubts resolved by him; truth itself seems to speak through his lips. She worships him, she feels ashamed of her own happiness, she learns, she loves. Great is his power over her at that time! ... If he were a hero he could have fired her, taught her how to sacrifice herself, and all sacrifices would have been easy for her! But there are no heroes nowadays... . Still, he leads her wherever he likes; she takes to what interests him; each of his words penetrates into her soul — she does not know yet how insignificant and empty, how false, words can be, how little they cost the one who pronounces them, how little they can be trusted. Then, following these first moments of happiness and hopes, comes usually — owing to circumstances (circumstances are always the fault) — comes usually the separation. I have heard it said that there have been cases when the two kindred souls have united immediately; I have also heard that they did not always find happiness in that ... however, I will not speak of what I have not seen myself. But — the fact that calculation of the pettiest sort and the most miserable prudence can live in a young heart by the side of the most passionate exaltation, this I have unfortunately learned from experience. So, the separation comes... Happy the girl who at once sees that this is the end of all, and will not soothe herself by expectations! But you, brave and just men, you mostly have not the courage, nor the desire, to tell us the truth ... it is easier for you to deceive us ... or, after all, I am ready to believe that, together with us, you deceive yourselves.”

A complete despair in the capacity for action of the educated man in Russia runs through all the novels of this period. Those few men who seem to be an exception — those who have energy, or simulate it for a short time, generally end their lives in the billiard room of the public house, or spoil their existences in some other way. The years 1854 and 1855, when these novels were written, fully explain the pessimism of Turguéneff. In Russia they were perhaps the darkest years of that dark period of Russian history — the reign of Nicholas I. — and in Western Europe, too, the years closely following the coup d’état of Napoleon III. were years of a general reaction after the great unrealised hopes of 1848.

Turguéneff, who came very near being marched to Siberia in 1852 for having printed at Moscow his innocent necrological note about Gógol, after it had been forbidden by the St. Petersburg censorship, was compelled to live now on his estate, beholding round him the servile submissiveness of all those who had formerly shown some signs of revolt. Seeing all round the triumph of the supporters of serfdom and despotism, he might easily have been brought to despair. But the sadness which pervades the novels of this period was not a cry of despair; it was not a satire either; it was the gentle touch of a loving friend, and that constitutes their main charm. From the artistic point of view, Asya and Correspondence are perhaps the finest gems which we owe to Turguéneff.

To judge of the importance of Turguéneff’s work one must read in succession — so he himself desired — his six novels: Dmitri Rúdin, A Nobleman’s Retreat (Une nichée de Gentilshommes, or, Liza, in Mr. Ralston’s version), On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Virgin Soil. In them, one sees his poetical powers in full; at the same time one gets an insight into the different aspects which intellectual life took in Russia from 1848 to 1876, and one understands the poet’s attitude towards the best representatives of advanced thought in Russia during that most interesting period of her development. In some of his earlier short tales Turguéneff had already touched upon Hamletism in Russian life. In his Hamlet of the Schigróvsky District, and his Diary of a Useless Man, he had already given admirable sketches of that sort of man. But it was in Rúdin (1855) that he achieved the full artistic representation of that type which had grown upon Russian soil with especial profusion at a time when our best men were condemned to inactivity and words. Turguéneff did not spare men of that type; he represented them with their worst features, as well as with their best, and yet he treated them with tenderness. He loved Rúdin, with all his defects, and in this love he was at one with the best men of his generation, and of ours, too.

Rúdin

Rúdin was a man of the “forties,” nurtured upon Hegel’s philosophy, and developed under the conditions which prevailed under Nicholas I., when there was no possibility whatever for a thinking man to apply his energy, unless he chose to become an obedient functionary of an autocratic, slaveowning State. The scene is laid in one of the estates in middle Russia, in the family of a lady who takes a superficial interest in all sorts of novelties, reads books that are prohibited by censorship, such as Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; and must always have round her, whether it be in her salon in the capital or on her estate, all sorts of men of mark. It is in her drawing-room that Rúdin makes his first appearance. In a few moments he becomes master of the conversation, and by his intelligent remarks to the point wins the admiration of the hostess and the sympathy of the younger generation. The latter is represented by the daughter of the lady and by a young student who is the tutor of her boys. Both are entirely captivated by Rúdin. When he speaks, later on in the evening, of his student years, and touches upon such taking subjects as liberty, free thought, and the struggles in Western Europe for freedom, his words are full of so much fire, so much poetry and enthusiasm, that the two younger people listen to him with a feeling which approaches worship. The result is evident: Natásha, the daughter, falls in love with him. Rúdin is much older than Natásha — silver streaks already appear in his beautiful hair, and he speaks of love as of something which, for him, belongs to the past. “Look at this oak,” he says; “the last autumn’s leaves still cover it, and they will never fall off until the young green leaves have made their appearance.” Natásha understands this in the sense that Rúdin’s old love can only fade away when a new one has taken its place and gives him her love. Breaking with all the traditions of the strictly correct house of her mother, she gives an interview to Rúdin in the early morning on the banks of a remote pond. She is ready to follow him anywhere, anyhow, without making any conditions; but he, whose love is more in his brain than in his heart, finds nothing to say to her but to talk about the impossibility of obtaining the permission of her mother for this marriage. Natásha hardly listens to his words. She would follow him with or without the consent of her mother, and asks: “What is then to be done?” — “To submit,” is Rúdin’s reply.

The hero who spoke so beautifully about fighting against all possible obstacles has broken down before the first obstacle that appeared in his way. Words, words, and no actions, was indeed the characteristic of these men, who in the forties represented the best thinking element of Russian society.

Later on we meet Rúdin once more. He has still found no work for himself, neither has he made peace with the conditions of life at that time. He remains poor, exiled by the government from one town to another, till at last he goes abroad, and during the insurrection of June, 1848, he is killed on a barricade in Paris. There is an epilogue to the novel, and that epilogue is so beautiful that a few passages from it must be produced here. It is Leézhneff, formerly Rúdin’s enemy, who speaks.

“I know him well,” continued Lézhneff, “I am aware of his faults. They are the more conspicuous because he is not to be regarded on a small scale.”

“His is a character of genius!” cried Bassístoff.

“Genius, very likely he has!” replied Léhneff,” but as for character... That’s just his misfortune: there’s no force of character in him... But I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and, believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to anyone who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you remember, Sásha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. The coldness is in his blood — that is not his fault — and not in his head. He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people’s expense, not like a swindler, but like a child... Yes; no doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want; but are we to throw stones at him for that? He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use, that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? Indeed, I myself, to begin with, have gained all that I have from him. Sásha knows what Rúdin did for me in my youth. I also maintained, I recollect, that Rúdin’s words could not produce an effect on men; but I was speaking then of men like myself, at my present age, of men who have already lived and been broken in by life. One false note in a man’s eloquence, and the whole harmony is spoiled for us; but a young man’s ear, happily, is not so over-fine, not so trained. If the substance of what he hears seems fine to him, what does he care about the intonation? The intonation he will supply for himself! ”

“Bravo, bravo!” cried Bassístoff, “that is justly spoken! And as regards Rúdin’s influence, I swear to you, that man not only knows how to move you, he lifts you up, he does not let you stand still, he stirs you to the depths and sets you on fire!”[15]

Lavrétskiy

However, with such men as Rúdin further progress in Russia would have been impossible: new men had to appear. And so they did: we find them in the subsequent novels of Turguéneff — but they meet with what difficulties, what pains they undergo! This we see in Lavrétskiy and Líza (A Nobleman’s Retreat) who belonged to the intermediate period. Lavrétskiy could not be satisfied with Rúdin’s rôle of an errant apostle; he tried his hands at practical activity; but he also could not find his way amidst the new currents of life. He had the same artistic and philosophical development as Rúdin; he had the necessary will; but his powers of action were palsied — not by his power of analysis in this case, but by the mediocrity of his surroundings and by his unfortunate marriage. Lavrétskiy ends also in wreck.

A Nobleman’s Retreat was an immense success. It was said that, together with the autobiographic tale, First Love, it was the most artistic of Turguéneff’s works. This, however, is hardly so. Its great success was surely due, first of all, to the wide circle of readers to whom it appealed. Lavrétskiy has married most unfortunately — a lady who soon becomes a sort of a second-rate Parisian lioness. They separate; and then he meets with a girl, Líza, in whom Turguéneff has given the best impersonation imaginable of the average, thoroughly good and honest Russian girl of those times. She and Lavrétskiy fall in love with each other. For a moment both she and Lavrétskiy think that the latter’s wife is dead — so it stood, at least, in a Paris feuilleton; but the lady reappears bringing with her all her abominable atmosphere, and Líza goes to a convent. Unlike Rúdin or Bazároff, all the persons of this drama, as well as the drama itself, are quite familiar to the average reader, and for merely that reason the novel appealed to an extremely wide circle of sympathisers. Of course, the artistic powers of Turguéneff appear with a wonderful force in the representation of such types as Líza and Lavrétskiy’s wife, Líza’s old aunt, and Lavrétskiy himself. The note of poetry and sadness which pervades the novel carries away the reader completely. And yet, I may venture to say, the following novel, On the Eve, far superseded the former both in the depth of its conception and the beauty of its workmanship.

Helen and Insároff

Already, in Natásha, Turguéneff had given a life-picture of a Russian girl who has grown up in the quietness of village life, but has in her heart, and mind, and will the germs of that which moves human beings to higher action. Rúdin’s spirited words, his appeals to what is grand and worth living for, inflamed her. She was ready to follow him, to support him in the great work which he so eagerly and uselessly searched for, but it was he who proved to be her inferior. Turguéneff thus foresaw, since 1855, the coming of that type of woman who later on played so prominent a part in the revival of Young Russia. Four years later, in On the Eve, he gave, in Helen, a further and fuller development of the same type. Helen is not satisfied with the dull, trifling life in her own family, and she longs for a wider sphere of action. “To be good is not enough; to do good-yes; that is the great thing in life,” she writes in her diary. But whom does she meet in her surroundings? Shúbin, a talented artist, a spoiled child, “a butterfly which admires itself “; Berséneff, a future professor, a true Russian nature — an excellent man, most unselfish and modest, but wanting inspiration, totally lacking in vigour and initiative. These two are the best. There is a moment when Shúbin as he rambles on a summer night with his friend Berséneff, says to him: “I love Helen, but Helen loves you... Sing, sing louder, if you can; and if you cannot, then take off your hat, look above, and smile to the stars. They all look upon you, upon you alone: they always look on those who are in love.” But Berséneff returns to his small room, and opens Raumer’s “History of the Hohenstauffens,” on the same page where he had left it the last time...

Thereupon comes Insároff, a Bulgarian patriot, entirely absorbed by one idea — the liberation of his mother-country; a man of steel, rude to the touch, who has cast away all melancholy philosophical dreaming, and marches straight forward, towards the aim of his life — and the choice of Helen is settled. The pages given to the awakening of her feeling and to its growth are among the best ever written by Turguéneff. When Insároff suddenly becomes aware of his own love for Helen, his first decision is to leave at once the suburb of Moscow, where they are all staying, and Russia as well. He goes to Helen’s house to announce there his departure. Helen asks him to promise that he will see her again to-morrow before he leaves, but he does not promise. Helen waits for him, and when he has not come in the afternoon, she herself goes to him. Rain and thunder overtake her on the road, and she steps into an old chapel by the roadside. There she meets Insároff, and the explanation between the shy, modest girl who perceives that Insároff loves her, and the patriot, who discovers in her the force which, far from standing in his way, would only double his own energy, terminates by Insároff exclaiming: “Well, then, welcome, my wife before God and men!”

In Helen we have the true type of that Russian woman who a few years later joined heart and soul in all movements for Russian freedom: the woman who conquered her right to knowledge, totally reformed the education of children, fought for the liberation of the toiling masses, endured unbroken in the snows and gaols of Siberia, died if necessary on the scaffold, and at the present moment continues with unabated energy the same struggle. The high artistic beauty of this novel has already been incidentally mentioned. Only one reproach can be made to it: the hero, Insároff, the man of action, is not sufficiently living. But both for the general architecture of the novel and the beauty of its separate scenes, beginning with the very first and ending with the last, On the Eve stands among the highest productions of the sort in all literatures.

Why Fathers and Sons was misunderstood

The next novel of Turguéneff was Fathers and Sons. It was writen in 1859 when, instead of the sentimentalists and “aesthetical” people of old, quite a new type of man was making its appearance in the educated portion of Russian society — the nihilist. Those who have not read Turguéneff’s works will perhaps associate the word “nihilist” with the struggle which took place in Russia in 1879–1881 between the autocratic power and the terrorists; but this would be a great mistake. “Nihilism” is not “terrorism,” and the type of the nihilist is infinitely deeper and wider than that of a terrorist. Turguéneff’s Fathers and Sons must be read in order to understand it. The representative of this type in the novel is a young doctor, Bazároff — “a man who bows before no authority, however venerated it may be, and accepts of no principle unproved.” Consequently he takes a negative attitude towards all the institutions of the present time and he throws overboard all the conventionalities and the petty lies of ordinary society life. He comes on a visit to his old parents and stays also at the country house of a young friend of his, whose father and uncle are two typical representatives of the old generation. This gives to Turguéneff the possibility of illustrating in a series of masterly scenes the conflict between the two generations — “the fathers” and “the sons.” That conflict was going on in those years with bitter acrimony all over Russia.

One of the two brothers, Nikolái Petróvitch, is an excellent, slightly enthusiastic dreamer who in his youth was fond of Schiller and Púshkin, but never took great interest in practical matters; he now lives, on his estate, the lazy life of a landowner. He would like, however, to show to the young people that he, too, can go a long way with them: he tries to read the materialistic books which his son and Bazároff read, and even to speak their language; but his entire education stands in the way of a true “realistic” comprehension of the real state of affairs.

The elder brother, Peter Petróvitch, is, on the contrary, a direct descendant from Lérmontoff’s Petchórin — that is, a thorough, well-bred egotist. Having spent his youth in high society circles, he, even now in the. dulness of the small country estate, considers it as a “duty” to be always properly dressed “as a perfect gentleman,” strictly to obey the rules of “Society,” to remain faithful to Church and State, and never to abandon his attitude of extreme reserve — which he abandons, however, every time that he enters into a discussion about “principles” with Bazároff. The “nihilist” inspires him with hatred.

The nihilist is, of course, the out-and-out negation of all the “principles” of Peter Petróvitch. He does not believe in the established principles of Church and State, and openly professes a profound contempt for all the established forms of society-life. He does not see that the wearing of a clean collar and a perfect necktie should be described as the performance of a duty. When he speaks, he says what he thinks. Absolute sincerity — not only in what he says, but also towards himself — and a common sense standard of judgments, without the old prejudices, are the ruling features of his character. This leads, evidently, to a certain assumed roughness of expression, and the conflict between the two generations must necessarily take a tragical aspect. So it was everywhere in Russia at that time. The novel expressed the real tendency of the time and accentuated it, so that — as has been remarked by a gifted Russian critic, S. Venguéroff — the novel and the reality mutually influenced each other.

Bazároff

Fathers and Sons produced a tremendous impression. Turguéneff was assailed on all sides: by the old generation, which reproached him with being “a nihilist himself”; and by the youth, which was discontented at being identified with Bazároff. The truth is that, with a very few exceptions, among whom was the great critic, Písaareff, we do not properly understand Bazároff. Turguéneff had so much accustomed us to a certain poetical halo which surrounded his heroes, and to his own tender love which followed them, even when he condemned them, that finding nothing of the sort in his attitude towards Baxároff, we saw in the absence of these features a decided hostility of the author towards the hero. Moreover, certain features of Bazároff decidedly displeased us. Why should a man of his powers display such a harshness towards his old parents: his loving mother and his father — the poor old village-doctor who has retained, to old age, faith in his science. Why should Bazároff fall in love with that most uninteresting, self-admiring lady, Madame Odintsóff, and fail to be loved, even by her? And then why, at a time when in the young generation the seeds of a great movement towards freeing the masses were already ripening, why make Bazároff say that he is ready to work for the peasant, but if somebody comes and says to him that he is bound to do so, he will hate that peasant? To which Bazároff adds, in a moment of reflection: “And what of that? Grass will grow out of me when this peasant acquires wellbeing!” We did not understand this attitude of Turguéneff’s nihilist, and it was only on re-reading Fathers and Sons much later on, that we noticed, in the very words that so offended us, the germs of a realistic philosophy of solidarity and duty which only now begins to take a more or less definite shape. In 1860 we, the young generation, looked on it as Turguéneff’s desire to throw a stone at a new type with which he did not sympathise.

And yet, as Písareff understood at once, Bazároff was a real representative of the young generation. Turguéneff, as he himself wrote later on, merely did not “add syrup” to make his hero appear somewhat sweeter.

“Bazároff,” he wrote, “puts all the other personalities of my novel in the shade. He is honest, straightforward, and a democrat of the purest water, and you find no good qualities in him! The duel with Petr Petróvitch is only introduced to show the intellectual emptiness of the elegant, noble knighthood; in fact, I even exaggerated and made it ridiculous. My conception of Bazároff is such as to make him appear throughout much superior to Petr Petróvitch. Nevertheless, when he calls himself nihilist you must read revolutionist. To draw on one side a functionary who takes bribes, and on the other an ideal youth — I leave it to others to make such pictures. My aim was much higher than that. I conclude with one remark: If the reader is not won by Bazároff, notwithstanding his roughness, absence of heart, pitiless dryness and terseness, then the fault is with me — I have missed my aim; but to sweeten him with syrup (to use Bazároff’s own language), this I did not want to do, although perhaps through that I would have won Russian youth at once to my side.”

Hamlet and Don Quixote

The true key to the understanding of Fathers and Sons, and, in fact, of whatever Turguéneff wrote, is given, I will permit myself to suggest, in his admirable lecture, Hamlet and Don Quixote ( 1860). I have already elsewhere intimated this; but I am bound to repeat it here, as I think that, better than any other of Turguéneff’s writings, this lecture enables us to look into the very philosophy of the great novelist. Hamlet and Don Quixote — Turguéneff wrote — personify the two opposite particularities of human nature. All men belong more or less to the one or to the other of these two types. And, with his wonderful powers of analysis, he thus characterised the two heroes:

“Don Quixote is imbued with devotion towards his ideal, for which he is ready to suffer all possible privations, to sacrifice his life; life itself he values only so far as it can serve for the incarnation of the ideal, for the promotion of truth, of justice on Earth... He lives for his brothers, for opposing the forces hostile to mankind: the witches, the giants — that is, the oppressors... Therefore he is fearless, patient; be is satisfied with the most modest food, the poorest cloth: he has other things to think of. Humble in his heart, he is great and daring in his mind.” ... “And who is Hamlet? Analysis first of all, and egotism, and therefore no faith. He lives entirely for himself, he is an egotist; but to believe in one’s self-even an egotist cannot do that: we can believe only in something which is outside us and above us ... As he has doubts of everything, Hamlet evidently does not spare himself; his intellect is too developed to remain satisfied with what be finds in himself: he feels his weakness, but each self-consciousness is a force wherefrom results his irony, the opposite of the enthusiam of Don Quixote.” ... “Don Quixote, a poor man, almost a beggar, without means and relations, old, isolated — undertakes to redress all the evils and to protect oppressed strangers over the whole earth. What does it matter to him that his first attempt at freeing the innocent from his oppressor falls twice as heavy upon the head of the innocent himself? ... What does it matter that, thinking that he has to deal with noxious giants, Don Quixote attacks useful windmills? ... Nothing of the sort can ever happen with Hamlet: how could be, with his perspicacious, refined, sceptical mind, ever commit such a mistake! No, he will not fight with windmills, he does not believe in giants ... but he would not have attacked them even if they did exist ... And yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic, although he disbelieves in good, be does not believe in evil. Evil and deceit are his inveterate enemies. His scepticism is not indifferentism.” ... “But in negation, as in fire, there is a destructive power, and how to keep it in bounds, how to tell it where to stop, when that which it must destroy, and that which it must spare are often inseparably welded together? Here it is that the often-noticed tragical aspect of human life comes in: for action we require will, and for action we require thought; but thought and will have parted from each other, and separate every day more and more...

“And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought...”

This lecture fully explains, I believe, the attitude of Turguéneff towards Bazároff. He himself belonged to a great extent to the Hamlets. Among then he had his best friends. He loved Hamlet; yet he admired Don Quixote — the man of action. He felt his superiority; but, while describing this second type of men, he never could surround it with that tender poetical love for a sick friend which makes the irresistible attraction of those of his novels which deal with one or other of the Hamlet type. He admired Bazároff — his roughness as well as his power; Bazároff overpowered him; but he could by no means have for him the tender feelings which he had had for men of his own generation and his own refinement. In fact, with Bazároff they would have been out of place.

This we did not notice at that time, and therefore we did not understand Turguéneff’s intention of representing the tragic position of Bazároff amidst his surroundings. “I entirely share Bazároffs ideas,” he wrote later on. “All of them, with the exception of his negation of art.” “I loved Bazároff ; I will prove it to you by my diary,” he told me once in Paris. Certainly he loved him — but with an intellectually admiring love, quite different from the compassionate love which he had bestowed upon Rúdin and Lavrétskiy. This difference escaped us, and was the chief cause of the misunderstanding which was so painful for the great poet.

Turguéneff’s next novel, Smoke (1867), need not be dwelt upon. One object he had in it was to represent the powerful type of a Russian society lioness, which had haunted him for years, and to which he returned several times, until he finally succeeded in finding for it, in Spring Flood, the fullest and the most perfect artistic expression. His other object was to picture in its true colours the shallowness — nay, the silliness, of that society of bureaucrats into whose hands Russia fell for the next twenty years. Deep despair in the future of Russia after the wreck of that great reform movement which had given to us the abolition of serfdom pervades the novel; a despair which can by no means be attributed entirely, or even chiefly, to the hostile reception of Fathers and Sons by the Russian youth, but must be sought for in the wreck of the great hopes which Turguéneff and his best friends bad laid in the representatives of the reform movement of 1859–1863. This same despair made Turguéneff write “Enough; from the Memoirs of a Dead Artist” (1865), and the fantastic sketch, “Ghosts” ( 1867), and he recovered from it only when he saw the birth in Russia of a new movement, “towards the people!” which took place amongst our youth in the early seventies.

Virgin Soil: movement towards the people

This movement he represented in his last novel of the above-mentioned series, Virgin Soil (1876). That he was fully sympathetic with it is self-evident; but the question, whether his novel gives a correct idea of the movement, must be answered to some extent in the negative — even though Turguéneff had, with his wonderful intuition, caught some of the most striking features of the movement. The novel was finished in 1876 (we read it, in a full set of proofs, at the house of P.L. Lavróff, in London, in the autumn of that year) — that means, two years before the great trial of those who were arrested for this agitation took place. And in 1876 no one could possibly have known the youth of our circles unless he had himself belonged to them. Consequently, Virgin Soil could only refer to the very earliest phases of the movement: misconception of the peasantry, the peculiar inca-did not meet with any of the best representativs of it. Much of the novel is true, but the general impression it conveys is not precisely the impression which Turguéneff himself would have received if he had better known the Russian youth at that time.

With all the force of his immense talent, he could not supply by intuition the lack of knowledge. And yet he understood two characteristic features of the earliest part of the movement: misconception of the peasantry, the peculiar incapacity of most of the early promoters of the movement to understand the Russian peasant, on account of the bias of their false literary, historical, and social education; and the Hamletism: the want of resolution, or rather “resolution sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought,” which really characterised the movement at its outset. If Turguéneff had lived a few years more he surely would have noticed coming into the arena the new type of men of action — the new modification of Insároff’s and Bazároffs type, which grew up in proportion as the movement was taking firm root. He had already perceived them through the dryness of official records of the trial of “the hundred-and-ninety three,” and in 1878 he asked me to tell him all I knew about Mýshkin, one of the most powerful individualities of that trial.

He did not live to accomplish this. A disease which nobody understood and was mistaken for “gout,” but which was in reality a cancer of the spinal cord, kept him for the last few years of his life an invalid, rivetted to his couch. Only his letters, full of thought and life, where sadness and merriment go on in turn, are what remains from his pen during that period of life, when he seems to have meditated upon several novels which he left unfinished or perhaps unwritten. He died at Paris in 1883 at the age of sixty-five.

Verses in Prose

In conclusion, a few words, at least, must be said about his “Poems in Prose,” or “Senilia” (1882). These are “flying remarks, thoughts, images,” which he wrote down from 1878 onwards under the impression of this or that fact of his own personal life, or of public life. Though written in prose, they are true pieces of excellent poetry, some of them real gems; some deeply touching and as impressive as the best verses of the best poets (Old Woman; The Beggar; Másha; How Beautiful, how Fresh were the Roses) ; while others (Nature, The Dog) are more characteristic of Turguéneff’s philosophical conceptions than anything else he has written. And finally, in On the Threshold, written a few months before his death, he expressed in most poetical accents his admiration of those women who gave their lives for the revolutionary movement and went on the scaffold, without being even understood at the time by those for whom they died.

Tolstóy — Childhood and Boyhood

More than half a century ago, i.e. in 1852, the first story of Tolstóy, Childhood, soon followed by Boyhood, made its appearance in the monthly review, The Contemporary, with the modest signature, “L.N.T.” The little story was a great success. It was imbued with such a charm; it had such freshness, and was so free of all the mannerism of the literary trade, that the unknown author at once became a favourite, and was placed by the side of Turguéneff and Gontcharóff.

There are excellent children stories in all languages. Childhood is the period of life with which many authors have best succeeded in dealing. And yet no one, perhaps, has so well described the life of children from within, from their own point of view, as Tolstóy did. With him, it is the child itself which expresses its childish feelings, and it does this so as to compel the reader to judge full-grown people with the child ‘s point of view. Such is the realism of Childhood and Boyhood — that is, their richness in facts caught from real life — that a Russian critic, Písareff, developed quite a theory of education chiefly on the basis of the data contained in these two stories of Tolstóy’s.

It is related somewhere that one day, during their rambles in the country, Turguéneff and Tolstóy came across an old hack of a horse which was finishing its days in a lonely field. Tolstóy entered at once into the. feelings of the horse and began to describe its sad reflections so vividly, that Turguéneff, alluding to the then new ideas of Darwinism, could not help exclaiming, “I am sure, Lyov Nikoláevitch, that you must have had horses among your ancestors!” In the capacity of entirely identifying himself with the feelings and the thoughts of the beings of whom he speaks, Tolstéy has but few rivals; but with children this power of identification attains its highest degree. The moment he speaks of children, Tolstóy becomes himself a child.

Childhood and Boyhood are, it is now known, autobiographical stories, in which only small details are altered, and in the boy Irténeff we have a glimpse of what L.N. Tolstóy was in his childhood, He was born in 1828, in the estate of Yásnaya Polyána, which now enjoys universal fame, and for the first fifteen years of his life he remained, almost without interruption, an inhabitant of the country. His father and grandfather — so we are told by the Russian critic, S. Vengueroft — are described in War and Peace, in Nicholas Róstoff and the old Count Róstoff respectively; while his mother, who was born a Princess Volkhónskaya, is represented as Mary Bolkónskaya. Leo Tolstóy lost his mother at the age of two, and his father at the age of nine, and after that time his education was taken care of by a woman relative, T.A. Ergólskaya, in Yásnaya Polyána, and after 1840, at Kazáñ, by his aunt P.I. Yúshkova, whose house, we are told, must have been very much the same as the house of the Róstoffs’ in War and Peace.

Leo Tolstóy was only fifteen when he entered the Kazáñ University, where he spent two years in the Oriental faculty and two years in the faculty of Law. However, the teaching-staff of both faculties was so feeble at that time that only a single professor was able to awaken in the young man some passing interest in his subject. Four years later, that is in 1847, when he was only nineteen, Leo Tolstóy had already left the University and was making at Yásnaya Polyána some attempts at improving the conditions of his peasant serfs, of which attempts he has told us later on, with such a striking sincerity, in The Morning of a Landlord.

The next four years of his life he spent, externally, like most young men of his aristocratic circle, but internally, in a continual reaction against the life he was leading. An insight into what he was then — slightly exaggerated, of course, and dramatised — we can get from the Notes of a Billiard Marker. Happily he could not put up with such paltry surroundings and in 1851, he suddenly renounced the life he had hitherto led — that of an idle aristocratic youth — and following his brother Nicholas, he went to the Caucasus, in order to enter military service. There he stayed first at Pyatigórsk — the place so full of reminiscences of Lérmontoff — until, having passed the necessary examinations, he was received as a non-commissioned officer (yunker) in the artillery and went to serve in a Cossack village on the banks of the Térek.

His experiences and reflections in these new surroundings, we know from his Cossacks. But it was there also that in the face of the beautiful nature which had so powerfully inspired Púshkin and Lérmontoff he found his true vocation. He sent to the Contemporary his first literary experiment, Childhood, and this first story, as he soon learned from a letter of the poet Nekrásoff, editor of the review, and from the critical notes of Grigórieff, Annenkoff, Druzhínin, and Tchernyshévskiy (they belonged to four different aesthetical schools), proved to be a chef d’aeuvre.

During and After the Crimean War

However, the great Crimean war began towards the end of the next year (1853), and L.N. Tolstóy did not want to remain inactive in the Caucasus army. He obtained his transfer to the Danube army, took part in the siege of Silistria, and later on in the battle of Balakláva, and from November, 1854, till August, 1855, remained besieged in Sebastopol — partly in the terrible “Fourth bastion,” where he lived through all the dreadful experiences of the heroic defenders of that fortress. He has therefore the right to speak of War: he knows it from within. He knows what it is, even under its very best aspects, in such a significant and inspired phase as was the defence of these forts and bastions which had grown up under the enemy’s shells. He obstinately refused during the siege to become an officer of the Staff, and remained with his battery in the most dangerous spots.

I perfectly well remember, although I was only twelve or thirteen, the profound impression which his sketch, Sebastopol in December, 18 54, followed, after the fall of the fortress, by two more Sebastopol sketches — produced in Russia. The very character of these sketches was original. They were not leaves from a diary, and yet they were as true to reality as such leaves could be; in fact, even more true, because the were not representing one corner only of real life — the corner which accidentally fell under the writer’s observations — but the whole life, the prevailing modes of thought and the habits of life in the besieged fortress. They represented — and this is characteristic of all subsequent works of Tolstóy — an interweaving of Dichtung and Wahrheit, of poetry and truth, truth and poetry, containing much more truth than is usually found in a novel, and more poetry, more poetical creation, than occurs in most works of pure fiction.

Tolstóy apparently never wrote in verse; but during the siege of Sebastopol he composed, in the usual metre and language of soldiers’ songs, a satirical song in which he described the blunders of the commanders which ended in the Balakláva disaster. The song, written in an admirable popular style, could not be printed, but it spread over Russia in thousands of copies and was widely sung, both during and immediately after the campaign. The name of the author also leaked out, but there was some uncertainty as to whether it was the author of the Sebastopol sketches or some other Tolstóy.

On his return from Sebastopol and the conclusion of peace (1856) Tolstóy stayed partly at St. Petersburg and partly at Yásnaya Polyána. In the capital he was received with open arms by all classes of society, both literary and worldly, as a “Sebastopol hero” and as a rising great writer. But of the life he lived then he cannot speak now otherwise than with disgust: it was the life of hundreds of young men-officers of the Guard and jeunesse dorée of his own class — which was passed in the restaurants and cafés chantants of the Russian capital, amidst gamblers, horse dealers, Tsigane choirs, and French adventuresses. He became at that time friendly with Turguéneff and saw much of him, both at St. Petersburg and at Yásnaya Polyána — the estates of the two great writers being not very far from each other; but, although his friend Turguéneff was taking then a lively part in co-editing with Hérzen the famous revolutionary paper, The Bell (see Chapter VIII.), Tolstóy, seems to have taken no interest in it; and while he was well acquainted with the editing staff of the then famous review, The Contemporary, which was fighting the good fight for the liberation of the peasants and for freedom in general, Tolstóy, for one reason or another, never became friendly with the Radical leaders of that review — Tchernyshévsky, Dobrolúboff, Mikháiloff, and their friends.

Altogether, the great intellectual and reform movement which was going on then in Russia seems to have left him cold. He did not join the part of reforms. Still less was he inclined to join those young Nihilists whom Turguéneff had portrayed to the best of his ability in Fathers and Sons, or later on in the seventies, the youth whose watchword became: “Be the people,” and with whom Tolstóy has so much in common at the present time. What was the reason of that estrangement we are unable to say. Was it that a deep chasm separated the young epicuraean aristocrat from the ultra-democratic writers, like Dobrolúboff, who worked at spreading socialistic and democratic ideas in Russia, and still more from those who, like Rakhmétoff in Tchernyshévsky’s novel What is to be done, lived the life of the peasant, thus practising then what Tolstóy began to preach twenty years later ?

Or, was it the difference between the two generations — the man of thirty or more, which Tolstóy was, and the young people in their early twenties, possessed of all the haughty intolerance of youth, — which kept them aloof from each other. And was it not, in addition to all this, the result of theories? namely, a fundamental difference in the conceptions of the advanced Russian Radicals, who at that time were mostly admirers of Governmental Jacobinism, and the Populist, the No-Government man which Tolstóy must have already then been, since it distinctly appeared in his negative attitude towards Western civilisation, and especially in the educational work which he began in 1861 in the Yásnaya Polyána school?

The novels which Tolstóy brought out during these years, 1856–1862, do not throw much light upon his state of mind, because, even though they are, to a great extent autobiographical, they mostly relate to earlier periods of his life. Thus, he published two more of his Sebastopol war-sketches. All his powers of observation and war-psychology, all his deep comprehension of the Russian soldier, and especially of the plain, un-theatrical hero who really wins the battles, and a profound understanding of that inner spirit of an army upon which depend success and failure: everything, in short, which developed into the beauty and the truthfulness of War and Peace was already manifested in these sketches, which undoubtedly represented a new departure in war-literature the world over.

Youth, in search of an ideal

Youth, The Morning of a Landed Proprietor, and Lucerne appeared during the same years, but they produced upon us readers, as well as upon the literary critics, a strange and rather unfavourable impression. The great writer remained; and his talent was showing evident signs of growth, while the problems of life which he touched upon were deepening and widening; but the heroes who seemed to represent the ideas of the author himself could not entirely win our sympathies. In Childhood and Boyhood we had had before us the boy Irténeff. Now, in Youth, Irténeff makes the acquaintance of Prince Nektúdoff; they become great friends, and promise, without the slightest reservation, to confess to each other their moral failings. Of course, they do not always keep this promise; but it leads them to continual self-probing, to a repentance one moment which is forgotten the next, and to an unavoidable duality of mind which has the most debilitating effect upon the two young men’s character. The ill results of these moral endeavours Tolstóy did not conceal. He detailed them with the greatest imaginable sincerity, but he seemed nevertheless to keep them before his readers as something desirable; and with this we could not agree.

Youth is certainly the age when higher moral ideals find their way into the mind of the future man or woman; the years when one strives to get rid of the imperfections of boyhood or girlhood; but this aim is never attained in the ways recommended at monasteries and Jesuit schools. The only proper way is to open before the young mind new, broad horizons, to free it from superstitions and fears, to grasp man’s position amidst Nature and Mankind; and especially to feel at one with some great cause and to nurture one’s forces with the view of being able some day to struggle for that cause. Idealism — that is, the capacity of conceiving a poetical love towards something great, and to prepare for it — is the only sure preservation from all that destroys the vital forces of man: vice, dissipation, and so on. This inspiration, this love of an ideal, the Russian youth used to find in the student circles, of which Turguéneff has left us such spirited descriptions. Instead of that, Irténeff and Neklúdoff, remaining during their university years in their splendid aristocratic isolation, are unable to conceive a higher ideal worth living for, and spent their forces in vain endeavours of semi-religious moral improvement, on a plan that may perhaps succeed in the isolation of a monastery, but usually ends in failure amidst the attractions lying round a young man of the world. These failures Tolstóy relates, as usual, with absolute earnestness and sincerity.

The Morning of a Landed Proprietor produced again a strange impression. The story deals with the unsuccessful philanthropic endeavours of a serf-owner who tries to make his serfs happy and wealthy — without ever thinking of beginning where he ought to begin; namely, of setting his slaves free. In those years of liberation of the serfs and enthusiastic hopes, such a story sounded as an anachronism — the more so as it was not known at the time of its appearance that it was a page from Tolstóy’s earlier autobiography relating to the year 1847, when he settled in Yásnaya Polyána, immediately after having left the University, and when extremely few thought of liberating the serfs. It was one of those sketches of which Brandes has so truly said that in them Tolstóy “thinks aloud” about some page of his own life. It thus produced a certain mixed, undefined feeling. And yet one could not but admire in it the same great objective talent that was so striking in Childhood and the Sebastopol sketches. In speaking of peasants who received with distrust the measures with which their lord was going to benefit them, it would have been so easy, so humanly natural, for an educated man to throw upon their ignorance their unwillingness to accept the threshing machine (which, by the way, did not work), or the refusal of a peasant to accept the free gift of a stone house (which was far from the village) ... . But not a shade of that sort of pleading in favour of the landlord is to be found in the story, and the thinking reader necessarily concludes in favour of the common sense of the peasants.

Then came Lucerne. It is told in that story how the same Neklúdoff, bitterly struck by the indifference of a party of English tourists who sat on the balcony of a rich Swiss hotel and refused to throw even a few pennies to a poor singer to whose songs they had listened with evident emotion, brings the singer to the hotel, takes him to the dining-hall, to the great scandal of the English visitors, and treats him there to a bottle of champagne. The feelings of Neklúdoff are certainly very just; but while reading this story one suffers all the while for the poor musician, and experiences a sense of anger against the Russian nobleman who uses him as a rod to chastise the tourists, without even noticing how he makes the old man miserable during this lesson in morals. The worst of it is that the author, too, seems not to remark the false note which rings in the conduct of Neklúdoff, nor to realise how a man with really humane feelings would have taken the singer to some small wine-shop and would have had with him a friendly talk over a picholette of common wine. Yet we see again all Tolstóy’s force of talent. He so honestly, so fully, and so truly describes the uneasiness of the singer during the whole scene that the reader’s unavoidable conclusion is that although the young aristocrat was right in protesting against stone-heartedness, his ways were as unsympathetic as those of the self-contented Englishmen at the hotel. Tolstóy’s artistic power carries him beyond and above his theories.

This is not the only case where such a remark may be made concerning Tolstóy’s work. His appreciation of this or that action, of this or that of his heroes, may be wrong; his own “philosophy” may be open to objection, but the force of his descriptive talent and his literary honesty are always so great, that he will often make the feelings and actions of his heroes speak against their creator, and prove something very different from what he intended to prove.[16] This is probably why Turguéneff, and apparently other literary friends, too, told him: “Don’t put your ‘philosophy into your art.’ Trust to your artistic feeling, and you will create great things.” In fact, notwithstanding Tolstóy’s distrust of science, I must say that I always feel in reading his works that he is possessed of the most scientific insight I know of among artists. He may be wrong in his conclusions, but never is he wrong in his statement of data. True science and true art are not hostile to each other, but always work in harmony.

Small stories — The Cossacks

Several of Tolstóy’s novels and stories appeared in the years 1857–1862 (The Snow-Storm, The Two Hussars, Three Deaths, The Cossacks) and each one of them won new admiration for his talent. The first is a mere trifle, and yet it is a gem of art; it concerns the wanderings of a traveller during a snow-storm, in the plains of Central Russia. The same remark is true of the Two Hussars, in which two generations are sketched on a few pages with striking accuracy. As to the deeply pantheistic Three Deaths, in which the death of a rich lady, a poor horse-driver, and a birch-tree are contrasted, it is a piece of poetry in prose that deserves a place beside Goethe’s best pieces of pantheistic poetry, while for its social significance it is already a forerunner of the Tolstóy of the later epoch.

The Cossacks is an autobiographical novel, and relates to the time, already mentioned on a previous page, when Tolstóy at twenty-four, running away from the meaningless life he was living, went to Pyatigórsk, and then to a lonely Cossack village on the Térek, hunted there in company with the old Cossack Yeróshka and the young Lukáshka, and found in the poetical enjoyment of a beautiful nature, in the plain life of these squatters, and in the mute adoration of a Cossack girl, the awakening of his wonderful literary genius.

The appearance of this novel, in which one feels a most genuine touch of genius, provoked violent discussions. It was begun in 1852, but was not published till 1860, when all Russia was awaiting with anxiety the results of the work of the Abolition of Serfdom Committees, foreseeing that when serfdom should be done away with a complete destruction of all other rotten, obsolete, and barbarous institutions of past ages would have to begin. For this great work of reform Russia looked to Western civilisation for inspiration and for teachings. And there came a young writer who, following in the steps of Rousseau, revolted against that civilisation and preached a return to nature and the throwing off of the artificialities we call civilised life, which are in reality a poor substitute for the happiness of free work amidst a free nature. Everyone knows by this time the dominant idea of The Cossacks. It is the contrast between he natural life of these sons of the prairies and the artificial life of the young officer thrown in their midst. He tells of strong men who are similar to the American squatters, and have been developed in the Steppes at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, by a perilous life, in which force, endurance, and calm courage are a first necessity. Into their midst comes one of the sickly products of our semi-intellectual town life, and at every step he feels himself the inferior of the Cossack Lukáshka. He wishes to do something on a grand scale, but has neither the intellectual nor the physical force to accomplish it. Even his love is not the strong healthy love of the prairie man, but a sort of slight excitement of the nerves, which evidently will not last, and which only produces a similar restlessness in the Cossack girl, but cannot carry her away. And when he talks to her of love, in the force of which he himself does not believe, she sends him off with the words: “Go away you weakling!”

Some saw in that powerful novel such glorification of the semi-savage state as that in which writers of the eighteenth century, and especially Rousseau, are supposed to have indulged. There is in Tolstóy nothing of the sort, as there was nothing of the sort in Rousseau. But Tolstóy saw that in the life of the Cossacks there is more vitality more vigour, more power, than in his well-born hero’s life — and he told it in a beautiful and impressive form. His hero — like whom there are thousands upon thousands — has none of the powers that come from manual work and struggle with nature; and neither has he hose powers which knowledge and true civilisation might have given him. A real intellectual power is not asking itself at every moment, “Am I right, or am I wrong?” It feels that there are principles in which it is not wrong. The same is true of a moral force: it knows that to such an extent it can trust to itself. But, like so many thousands of men in the so-called educated classes, Neklúdoff has neither of these powers. He is a weakling, and Tolstóy brought out his intellectual and moral frailty with a distinctness that was bound to produce a deep impression.

Educational work

In the years 1859–1862 the struggle between the “fathers” and the “sons” which called forth violent attacks against the young generation, even from such an “objective” writer as Gontcharóff — to say nothing of Písemskiy and several others, — was going on all over Russia. But we do not know which side had Tolstóy’s sympathy. It must be said, though, that most of this time he was abroad, with his elder brother Nicholas, who died of consumption in the south of France. All we know is that the failure of Western civilisation in attaining any approach to well-being and equality for the great masses of the people deeply struck Tolstóy; and we are told by Venguéroff that the only men of mark whom he went to see during this journey abroad were Auerbach, who wrote at that time his Schwartzwald stories from the life of the peasants and edited popular almanacks, and Proudhon, who was then in exile at Brussels. Tolstóy returned to Russia at the moment when the serfs were freed, accepted the position of a mirovóy posrédnik, or arbitrator of peace between the landlords and the freed serfs, and, settling at Yásnaya Polyána, began there his work of education of children. This he started on entirely independent lines, — that is, on purely anarchistic principles, totally free from the artificial methods of education which had been worked out by German pedagogists, and were then greatly admired in Russia. There was no sort of discipline in his school. Instead of working out programmes according to which the children are to be taught, the teacher, Tolstóy said, must learn from the children themselves what to teach them, and must adapt his teaching to the individual tastes and capacities of each child. Tolstóy carried this out with his pupils, and obtained excellent results. His methods, however, have as yet received but little attention; and only one great writer — another poet, William Morris, — has advocated (in News from Nowhere) the same freedom in education. But we may be sure that some day Tolstóy’s Yásnaya Polyána papers, studied by some gifted teacher, as Rousseau’s Emile was studied by Froebel, will become the starting point of an educational reform much deeper than the reforms of Pestalozzi and Froebel.

It is now known that a violent end to this educational experiment was put by the Russian Government. During Tolstóy’s absence from his estate a searching was made by the gendarmes, who not only frightened to death Tolstóy’s old aunt (she fell ill after that) but visited every corner of the house and read aloud, with cynical comments, the most intimate diary which the great writer had kept since his youth. More searchings were promised, so that Tolstóy intended to emigrate for ever to London, and warned Alexander II., through the Countess A. A. Tolstáya that he kept a loaded revolver by his side and would shoot down the first police officer who would dare to enter his house. The school had evidently to be closed.

War and Peace

In the year 1862 Tolstóy married the young daughter of a Moscow doctor, Bers; and, staying nearly without interruption on his Túla estate, he gave his time, for the next fifteen or sixteen years, to his great work, War and Peace, and next to Anna Karénina. His first intention was to write (probably untilising some family traditions and documents) a great historical novel, The Decembrists (see Chapter 1.), and he finished in 1863 the first chapters of this novel (Vol. 111. of his Works, in Russian; Moscow, 10th edition). But in trying to create the types of the Decembrists he must have been taken back in his thoughts to the great war of 1812. He had heard so much about it in the family traditions of the Tolstóys and Volkhónskys, and that war had so much in common with the Crimean war through which he himself had lived that he came to write this great epopee, War and Peace, which has no parallel in any literature.

A whole epoch, from 1805 to 1812, is reconstituted in these volumes, and its meaning appears — not from the conventional historian’s point of view, but as it was understood then by those who lived and acted in those years. All the Society of those times passes before the reader, from its highest spheres, with their heart-rending levity, conventional ways. of thinking, and superficiality, down to the simplest soldier in the army, who bore the hardships of that terrible conflict as a sort of ordeal that was sent by a supreme power upon the Russians, and who forgot himself and his own sufferings in the life and sufferings of the nation. A fashionable drawing-room at St. Petersburg, the salon of a person who is admitted into the intimacy of the dowager-empress; the quarters of the Russian diplomatists in Austria and the Austrian Court; the thoughtless life of the Róstoff family at Moscow and on their estate; the austere house of the old general, Prince Bolkónskiy; then the camp life of the Russian General Staff and of Napoléon on the one hand, and on the other, the inner life of a simple regiment of the hussars or of a field-battery; then such world-battles as Schöngraben, the disaster of Austerlitz, Smolénsk, and Borodinó; the abandonment and the burning of Moscow; the life of those Russian prisoners who had been arrested pell-mell during the conflagration and were executed in batches; and finally the horrors of the retreat of Napoléon from Moscow, and the guerilla warfare — all this immense variety of scenes, events, and small episodes, interwoven with romance of the deepest interest, is unrolled before us as we read the pages of this epopee of Russia’s great conflict with Western Europe.

We make acquaintance with more than a hundred different persons, and each of them is so well depicted, each has his or her own human physiognomy so well determined, that each one appears with his or her own individuality, distinct amongst the scores of actors in the same great drama. It is not so easy to forget even the least important of these figures, be it one of the ministers of Alexander I. or any one of the ordinances of the calvary officers. Nay, every anonymous soldier of various rank — the infantryman, the hussar, or the artilleryman — has his own physiognomy; even the different chargers of Rostoff, or of Denísoff, stand out with individual features. When you think of the variety of human character which pass under your eyes on these pages, you have the real sensation of a vast crowd — of historical events that you seem to have lived through — of a whole nation roused by a calamity; while the impression you retain of human beings who you have loved in War and Peace, or for whom you have suffered when misfortune befell them, or when they themselves have wronged others (as for instance, the old countess Róstoff and Sónitchka) — the impression left by these persons, when they emerge in your memory from the crowd, gives to that crowd the same illusion of reality which little details give to the personality of a hero.

The great difficulty in an historical novel lies not so much in the representation of secondary figures as in painting the great historical personalities — the chief actors of the historical drama — so as to make of them real, living beings. But this is exactly where Tolstóy has succeeded most wonderfully. His Bagratlón, his Alexander I., his Napoléon, and his Kutúzoff are living men, so realistically represented that one sees them and is tempted to seize the brush and paint them, imitate their movements and ways of talking.

The “philosophy of war” which Tolstóy had developed in War and Peace has provoked, as is well known, passionate discussion and bitter criticism; and yet its correctness cannot but be recognised. In fact, it is recognised by such as know war from within, or have witnessed human mass-actions. Of course, those who know war from newspaper reports, especially such officers as, after having recited many times over an “improved” report of a battle as they would have liked it to be, giving themselves a leading rôle — such men will not agree with Tolstóy’s ways of dealing with “heroes”; but it is sufficient to read, for instance, what Moltke and Bismarck wrote in their private letters about the war of 1870–71, or the plain, honest descriptions of some historical event with which we occasionally meet, to understand Tolstóy’s views of war and his conceptions of the extremely limited part played by “heroes” in historical events. Tolstóy did not invent the artillery officer Timókhin who had been forgotten by his superiors in the centre of the Schöngraben position, and who, continuing all day long to use his four guns with initiative and discernment, prevented the battle from ending in disaster for the Russian rearguard: he knew only too well of such Timókhins in Sebastopol. They compose the real vital force of every army in the world; and the success of an army depends infinitely more upon its number of Timókh’ns than upon the genius of its high commanders. This is where Tolstóy and Moltke are of one mind, and where they entirely disagree with the “war-correspondent” and with the General Staff historians.

In the hands of a writer possessed of less genius than Tolstóy, such a thesis might have failed to appear convincing; but in War and Peace it appears almost with the force of self-evidence. Tolstóy’s Kutúzoff is — as he was in reality — quite an ordinary man; but he was a great man for the precise reason, that, forseeing the unavoidable and almost fatal drift of events, instead of pretending that he directed them, he simply did his best to utilise the vital forces of his army in order to avoid still greater disasters.

It hardly need be said that War and Peace is a powerful indictment against war. The effect which the great writer has exercised in this direction upon his generation can be actually seen in Russia. It was already apparent during the great Turkish war of 1877–78, when it was absolutely impossible to find in Russia a correspondent who would have described how “we have peppered the enemy with grape-shot,” or how “we shot them down like nine-pins.” If a man could have been found to use in his letters such survivals of savagery, no paper would have dared to print them. The general character of the Russian war-correspondent had grown totally different; and during the same war there came to the front such a novelist as Gárshin and such a painter as Vereschágin, with whom to combat war became a life work.

Everyone who has read War and Peace remembers, of course, the hard experiences of Pierre, and his friendship with the soldier Karatáeff. One feels that Tolstóy is full or admiration for the quiet philosophy of this man of the people, — a typical representative of the ordinary, common-sense Russian peasant. Some literary critics concluded that Tolstóy was preaching in Karatáeff a sort of Oriental fatalism. In the present writer’s opinion there is nothing of the sort. Karatáeff, who is a consistent pantheist, simply knows that there are natural calamities, which it is impossible to resist; and he knows that the miseries which befall him — his personal sufferings, and eventually the shooting of a number of prisoners among whom to-morrow he may or may not be included — are the unavoidable consequences of a much greater event: the armed conflict between nations, which, once it has begun, must unroll itself with all its revolting but absolutely ungovernable consequences. Karatáeff acts as one of those cows on the slope of an Alpine mountain, mentioned by the philosopher Guyau, which, when it feels that it begins to slip down a steep mountain slope, makes at first, desperate efforts to hold its ground, but when it sees that no effort can arrest its fatal gliding, lets itself quietly be dragged down into the abyss. Karataéff accepts the inevitable; but he is not a fatalist. If he had felt that his efforts could prevent war, he would have exerted them. In fact, towards the end of the work, when Pierre tells his wife Natásha that he is going to join the Decembrists (it is told in veiled words, on account of censorship, but a Russian reader understands nevertheless), and she asks him: “Would Platón Karatáeff approve of it?” Pierre, after a moment’s reflection, answers decidedly, “Yes, he would.”

I don’t know what a Frenchman, and Englishman, or a German feels when he reads War and Peace — I have heard educated Englishmen telling me that they found it dull — but I know that for educated Russians the reading of nearly every scene in War and Peace is a source of indescribable aesthetic pleasure. Having, like so many Russians, read the work many times, I could not, if I were asked, name the scenes which delight me most: the romances among the children, the mass-effects in the war scenes, the regimental life, the inimitable scenes from the life of the Court, aristocracy, the tiny details concerning Napoleon or Kutúzoff, or the life of the Róstoffs — the dinner, the hunt, the departure from Moscow, and so on.

Many felt offended, in reading this epopee, to see their hero, Napoleon, reduced to such small proportions, and even ridiculed. But the Napoleon who came to Russia was no longer the man who had inspired the armies of the sansculottes in their first steps eastwards for the abolition of serfdom, absolutism, and inquisition. All men in high positions are actors to a great extent — as Tolstóy so wonderfully shows in so many places of his great work — and Napoleon surely was not the least actor among them. And by the time he came to Russia, an emperor, now spoiled by the adulation of the courtiers of all Europe and the worship of the masses, who attributed to him what was attributable to the vast stir of minds produced by the Great Revolution, and consequently saw in him a half-god — by the time he came to Russia, the actor in him had got the upper hand over the man in whom there had been formerly incarnated the youthful energy of the suddenly-awakened French nation, in whom had appeared the expression of that awakening, and through whom its force had been the further increased. To these original characteristics was due the fascination which the name of Napoleon exercised upon his contemporaries. At Smolénsky, Kutúzoff himself must have experienced that fascination when, rather than rouse the lion to a desperate battle, he opened before him the way to retreat.

Anna Kareénina

Of all the Tolstóy’s novels, Anna Karénina is the one which has been the most widely read in all languages. As a work of art it is a master-piece. From the very first appearance of the heroine, you feel that this woman must bring with her a drama; from the very outset her tragical end is as inevitable as it is in a drama of Shakespeare, In that sense the novel is true to life throughout. It is a corner of real life that we have before us. As a rule, Tolstóy is not at his best in picturing women — with the exception of very young girls — and I don’t think that Anna Karénina herself is as deep, as psychologically complete, and as living a creation as she might have been; but the more ordinary woman, Dolly, is simply teeming with life. As to the various scenes of the novel — the ball scenes, the races of the officers, the inner family life of Dolly, the country scenes on Lévin’s estate, the death of his brother, and so on — all these are depicted in such a way that for its artistic qualities Anna Karénina stands foremost even amongst the many beautiful things Tolstóy has written.

And yet, notwithstanding all that, the novel produced in Russia a decidedly unfavourable impression, which brought to Tolstóy congratulations from the reactionary camp and a very cool reception from the advanced portion of society. The fact is, that the question of marriage and of an eventual separation between husband and wife had been most earnestly debated in Russia by the best men and women, both in literature and in life. It is self-evident that such indifferent levity towards marriage as is continually unveiled before the Courts in “Society” divorce cases was absolutely and unconditionally condemned; and that any form of deceit, such as makes the subject of countless French novels and dramas, was ruled out of question in any honest discussion of the matter. But after the above levity and deceit had been severely bran, the rights of a new love, serious and deep, appearing after years of happy married life, had only been the more seriously analysed. Tchernyshévsky’s novel, What is to be done, can be taken as the best expression of the opinions upon marriage which had become current amongst the better portion of the young generation. Once you are married it was said, don’t take lightly to love affairs, or so-called flirtation. Every fit of passion does not deserve the name of a new love; and what is sometimes described as love is in a very great number of cases nothing but temporary desire. Even if it were real love, before a real and deep love has grown up, there is in most cases a period when one has time to reflect upon the consequences that would follow if the beginnings of his or her new sympathy should attain the depth of such a love. But, with all that, there are cases when a new love does come, and there are cases when such an event must happen almost fatally, when, for instance, a girl has been married almost against her will, under the continued insistence of her lover, or when the two have married without properly understanding each other, or when one of the two has continued to progress in his or her development towards a higher ideal, while the other, after having worn for some time the mask of idealism, falls into the Philistine happiness of warmed slippers. In such cases separation not only becomes inevitable, but it often is to the interest of both. It would be much better for both to live through the sufferings which a separation would involve (honest natures are by such sufferings made better) than to spoil the entire subsequent existence of the one — in most cases, of both — and to face moreover the fatal results that living together under such circumstances would necessarily mean for the children. This was, at least, the conclusion to which both Russian literature and the best all-round portion of our society had come.

And now came Tolstóy with Anna Karénina, which bears the menacing biblical epigraph: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay it,” and in which the biblical revenge falls upon the unfortunate Karénina, who puts an end by suicide to her sufferings after her separation from her husband. Russian critics evidently could not accept Tolstóy’s views. The case of Karénina was one of those where there could be no question of “vengeance.” She was married as a young girl to an old and unattractive man. At that time she did not know exactly what she was doing, and nobody had explained it to her. She had never known love, and learned it for the first time when she saw Vrónskiy. Deceit, for her, was absolutely out of the question; and to keep up a merely conventional marriage would have been a sacrifice which would not have made her husband and child any happier. Separation, and a new life with Vrónskiy, who seriously loved her, was the only possible outcome. At any rate, if the story of Anna Karénina had to end in tragedy, it was not in the least in consequence of an act of supreme justice. As always, the honest artistic genius of Tolstóy had itself indicated another cause — the real one. It was the inconsistency of Vrónskiy and Karénina. After having separated from her husband and defied “public opinion” — that is, the opinion of women who, as Tolstóy shows it himself, were not honest enough to be allowed any voice in the matter — neither she nor Vrónskiy had the courage of breaking entirely with that society, the futility of which Tolstóy knows and describes so exquisitely. Instead of that, when Anna returned with Vrónskiy to St. Petersburg, her own and Vrónskiy’s chief preoccupation was. How Betsey and other such women would receive her, if she made her appearance among them. And it was the opinion of the Betsies — surely not Superhuman justice — which brought Karénina to suicide.

Religious crisis

Everyone knows the profound change which took place in Tolstóy’s fundamental conceptions of life in the years 1875–1878, when he had reached the age of about fifty. I do not think that one has the right to discuss publicly what has been going on in the very depths of another’s mind; but, by telling us himself the inner drama and the struggles which he has lived through, the great writer has, so to say, invited us to verify whether he was correct in his reasonings and conclusions; and limiting ourselves to the psychological material which he has given us, we may discuss it without undue intrusion into the motives of his actions.

It is most striking to find, on re-reading the earlier works of Tolstóy, how the ideas which he advocates at the present time were always cropping up in his earlier writings. Philosophical questions and questions concerning the moral foundations of life interested him from his early youth. At the age of sixteen he used to read philosophical works, and during his university years, and even through “the stormy days of passion,” questions as to how we ought to live rose with their full importance before him. His autobiographical novels, especially Youth, bear deep traces of that inner work of his mind, even though, as he says in Confession, he has never said all he might have said on this subject. Nay, it is evident that although he describes his frame of mind in those years as that of “a philosophical Nihilist,” he had never parted, in reality, with the beliefs of his childhood.[17] He always was an admirer and follower of Rousseau. In his papers on education (collected in Vol. IV. of the tenth Moscow edition of his Works) one finds treated in a very radical way most of the burning social questions which he has discussed in his later years. These questions even then worried him so much that, while he was carrying on his school work in Yásnaya Polyána and was a Peace Mediator — that is, in the years 1861–62 — he grew so disgusted with the unavoidable dualism of his position of a benevolent landlord, that — to quote his own words — “I should have come then, perhaps, to the crisis which I reached fifteen years later, if there had not remained one aspect of life which promised me salvation, — namely, married life.” In other words, Tolstóy was already very near to breaking with the privileged class point of view on Property and Labour, and to joining the great populistic movement which was already beginning in Russia. This he probably would have done, had not a new world of love, family life, and family interests, which he embraced with the usual intensity of his passionate nature, fastened the ties that kept him attached to his own class.

Art, too, must have contributed to divert his attention from the social problem — at least, from its economic aspects, In War and Peace he developed the philosophy of the masses versus the heroes, a philosophy which in those years would have found among the educated men of all Europe very few persons ready to accept it. Was it his poetical genius which revealed to him the part played by the masses in the great war of 1812, and taught him that they — the masses, and not the heroes — had accomplished all the great things in history? Or, was it but a further development of the ideas which inspired him in his Yásnaya Polyána school, in opposition to all the educational theories that had been elaborated by Church and State in the interest of the privileged classes? At any rate, War and Peace must have offered him a problem great enough to absorb his thoughts for a number of years; and in writing this monumental work, in which he strove to promote a new conception of history, he must have felt that he was working in the right way. As to Anna Karénina, which had no such reformatory or philosophical purpose, it must have offered to Tolstóy the possibility of living through once more, with all the intensity of poetical creation, the shallow life of the leisured classes, and to contrast it with the life of the peasants and their work. And it was while he was finishing this novel that he began to fully realise how much his own life was in opposition to the ideals of his earlier years.

A terrible conflict must have been going on then in the mind of the great writer. The communistic feeling which had induced him to put in italics the fact about the singer at Lucerne, and to add to it a hot indictment against the civilisation of the moneyed classes; the trend of thought which had dictated his severe criticisms against private property in Holstomyér: the History of a Horse; the anarchistic ideas which had brought him, in his Yásnaya Polyána educational articles, to a negation of a civilisation based on Capitalism and State; and, on the other hand, his individual property conceptions, which he tried to conciliate with his communistic leanings (see the conversation between the two brothers Lévin in Anna Karénina) ; his want of sympathy with the parties which stood in opposition to the Russian Government and, at the same time, his profound, deeply rooted dislike of that Government, all these tendencies must have been in an irreconcilable conflict in the mind the great writer, with all the passionate intensity which is characteristic of Tolstóy, as with all men of genius. These constant contradictions were so apparent that while less perspicacious Russian critics and the Moscow Gazette defenders of serfdom considered Tolstóy as having joined their reactionary camp, a gifted Russian critic, Mihailóvskiy, published in 1875 a series of remarkable articles, entitled The Right Hand and the Left Hand of Count Tolstóy, in which he pointed out the two men who constantly were in conflict in the great writer. In these articles, the young critic, a great admirer of Tolstóy, analysed the advanced ideas which he had developed in his educational articles, which were almost quite unknown at that time, and contrasted them with the strangely conservative ideas which he had expressed in his later writings. As a consequence, Mihailóvskiy predicted a crisis to which the great writer was inevitably coming.

“I will not speak,” he wrote, “of Anna Karénina, first of all because it is not yet terminated, and second, because one must speak of it very much, or not at all. I shall only remark that in this novel — much more superficially, but for that very reason perhaps even more distinctly than anywhere else — one sees the traces of the drama which is going on in the soul of the author. One asks oneself what such a man is to do, how can he live, how shall he avoid that poisoning of his consciousness which at every step intrudes into the pleasures of a satisfied need? Most certainly he must, even though it may be instinctively, seek for a means to put an end to the inner drama of his soul, to drop the curtain; but how to do it? I think that if an ordinary man were in such a position, he would have ended in suicide or in drunkenness. A man of value will, on the contrary, seek for other issues, and of such issues there are several.” (Otechestvennyia Zapiski, a review, June, 1875; also Mihailóvskiy’s Works, Vol. III, P. 491.)

One of these issues — Mihailóvskiy continued — would be to write for the people. Of course, very few are so happy as to possess the talent and the faculties which are necessary for that:

“But once he (Tolstóy) is persuaded that the nation consists of two halves, and that even the ‘innocent’ pleasures of the one half are to the disadvantage of the other half — why should he not devote his formidable forces to this immense task? It is even difficult to imagine that any other theme could interest the writer who carries in his soul such a terrible drama as the one that Count Tolstóy carries. So deep and so serious is it, so deeply does it go to the root of all literary activity, that it must presumably destroy all other interests, just as the creeper suffocates all other plants. And, is it not a sufficiently high aim in life, always to remind ‘Society’ that its pleasures and amusements are not the pleasures and the amusements of all mankind, to explain to ‘Society’ the true sense of the phenomena of progress, to wake up, be it only in the few, the more impressionable, the conscience and the feeling of justice? And is not this field wide enough for poetical creation? ...

“The drama which is going on in Count Tolstóy’s soul is my hypothesis,” Mihailóvskiy concluded, “but it is a legitimate hypothesis without which it is impossible to understand his writings.” (Works, 111, 496.)

It is now known how much Mihailóvskiy’s hypothesis was prevision. In the years 1875–76, as Tolstóy was finishing Anna Karénina, he began fully to realise the shallowness and the duality of the life that he had hitherto led. “Something strange,” he says, “began to happen within me: I began to experience minutes of bewilderment, of arrest of life, as if I did not know how to live and what to do.” “What for? What next?” were the questions which began to rise before him. “Well,” he said to himself, “you will have 15,000 acres of land in Samara, 3000 horses — but what of that? And I was bewildered, and did not know what to think next.” Literary fame had lost for him its attraction, now that he had reached the great heights to which War and Peace had brought him. The little picture of Philistine family — happiness which he had pictured in a novel before his marriage, Family happiness, he had now lived through, but it no longer satisfied him. The life of Epicureanism which he had led hitherto had lost all sense for him. “I felt,” he writes in Confession, “that what I had stood upon had broken down; that there was nothing for me to stand upon; that what I had lived by was no more, and that there was nothing left me to live by. My life had come to a stop.” The so-called “family duties” had lost their interest. When he thought of the education of his children, he asked himself, “What for?” and very probably he felt that in his landlord’s surroundings he never would be able to give them a better education than his own, which he condemned; and when he began thinking of the well-being of the masses he would all of a sudden ask himself: “What business have I to think of it?”

He felt that he had nothing to live for. He even had no wishes which he could recognise as reasonable. “If a fairy had come to me, and offered to satisfy my wish, I should not have known what to wish ... I even could not wish to know Truth, because I had guessed of what it would consist. The Truth was, that life is nonsense.“He had no aim in life, no purpose, and he realised that without a purpose, and with its unavoidable sufferings, life is not worth living (Confession, VI, VII).

He had not — to use his own expression — “the moral bluntness of imagination” which would be required not to have his Epicureanism poisoned by the surrounding misery; and yet, like Schopenhauer, he had not the Will that was necessary for adjusting his actions in accordance with the dictates of his reason. Self-annihilation, death, appeared therefore as a welcome solution.

However, Tolstóy was too strong a man to end his life in suicide. He found an outcome, and that outcome was indicated to him by a return to the love which he had cherished in his youth: the love of the peasant masses. “Was it in consequence of a strange, so to say a physical love of the truly working people,” he writes — or of some other cause? but he understood at last that he must seek the sense of life among the millions who toil all their life long. He began to examine with more attention than before the life of these millions. “And I began,” he says, “to love these people.” And the more he penetrated into their lives, past and present, the more he loved them, and “the easier it was for me to live.” As to the life of the men of his own circle — the wealthy and cultured, “I not only felt disgust for it: it lost all sense in my eyes.” He understood that if he did not see what life was worth living for, it was his own life “in exclusive conditions of epicureanism” which had obscured the truth.

“I understood,” he continues, “that my question, ‘What is life?’ and my reply to it, ‘Evil,’ were quite correct. I was only wrong in applying them to life altogether. To the question, ‘What is life?’ I had got the reply, ‘Evil and nonsense!’ And so it was. My own life — a life of indulgence in passions — was void of sense and full of evil, but this was true of my life only, not of the life of all men. Beginning with the birds and the lowest animals, all live to maintain life and to secure it for others besides themselves, while I not only did not secure it for others: I did not secure it even for myself. I lived as a parasite, and, having put to myself the question, ‘What do I live for?’ I got the reply, ‘For no purpose.’”

The conviction, then, that he must live as the millions live, earning his own livelihood; that he must toil as the millions toil; and that such a life is the only possible reply to the questions which had brought him to despair — the only way to escape the terrible contradictions which had made Schopenhauer preach self-annihilation, and Solomon, Sakiamuni, and so many others preach their gospel of despairing pessimism, this conviction, then, saved him and restored to him lost energy and the will to live. But that same idea had inspired thousands of the Russian youth, in those same years, and had induced them to start the great movement “V narod!” — “Towards the people; be the people!”

Tolstóy has told us in an admirable book, What is, then, to be done? the impressions which the slums of Moscow produced upon him in 1881, and the influence they had upon the ulterior development of his thoughts. But we do not yet know what facts and impressions made him so vividly realise in 1875–81 the emptiness of the life which he had been hitherto leading. Is it then presuming too much if I suggest that it was this very same movement, “towards the people,” which had inspired so many of the Russian youth to go to the villages and the factories, and to live there the life of the people, which finally brought Tolstóy, also, to reconsider his position as a rich landlord?

That he knew of this movement, there is not the slightest doubt. The trial of the Netcháeff groups in 1871 was printed in full in the Russian newspapers, and one could easily read through all the youthful immaturity of the speeches of the accused the high motives and the love of the people which inspired them. The trial of the Dolgúshin groups, in 1875, produced a still deeper impression in the same direction; but especially the trial, in March, 1877, of those of transcendent worth, girls Bárdina, Lubatóvitch, the sisters Subbótin, “the Moscow Fifty” as they were named in the circles, who, all from wealthy families, had led the life of factory girls, in the horrible factory-barracks, working fourteen and sixteen hours a day, in order to be with the working people and to teach them... And then — the trial of the “Hundred and Ninety-Three” and of Véra Zasúllitch in 1878. However great Tolstóy’s dislike of revolutionists might have been, he must have felt, as he read the reports of these trials, or heard what was said about them at Moscow and in his province of Túla, and witnessed round him the impression they had produced — he, the great artist, must have felt that this youth was much nearer to what he himself was in his earlier days, in 1861–62, than to those among whom he lived now — the Katkóffs, the “Fets,” and the like. And then, even if he knew nothing about these trials and had heard nothing about the “Moscow Fifty,” he knew, at least, Turguéneff’s Virgin Soil, which was published in January, 1877, and he must have felt, even from that imperfect picture, so warmly greeted by young Russia, what this young Russia was.

If Tolstóy had been in his twenties, he might possibly have joined the movement, in one form or another, notwithstanding all the obstacles. Such as he was, in his surroundings, and especially with his mind already preoccupied by the problem — “Where is the lever which would move human hearts at large, and become the source of the deep moral reform of every individual?” with such a question on his mind, he had to live through many a struggle before he was brought consciously to take the very same step. For our young men and women, the mere statement that one who had got an education, thanks to the work of the masses, owed it therefore to these masses to work in return for them — this simple statement was sufficient. They left their wealthy houses, took to the simplest life, hardly different from that of a workingman, and devoted their lives to the people. But for many reasons — such as education, habits, surroundings, age, and, perhaps, the great philosophical question he had in his mind, Tolstóy had to live through the most painful struggles, before he came to the very same conclusion, but in a different way: that is to say, before he concluded that he, as the bearer of a portion of the divine Unknown, had to fulfil the will of that Unknown, which will was that everyone should work for the universal welfare.[18]

The moment, however, that he came to this conclusion, he did not hesitate to act in accordance with it. The difficulties he met in his way, before he could follow the injunction of his conscience, must have been immense. We can faintly guess them. The sophisms he had to combat — especially when all those who understood the value of his colossal talent began to protest against his condemnation of his previous writing — we can also easily imagine. And one can but admire the force of his convictions, when he entirely reformed the life he had hitherto led.

The small room he took in his rich mansion is well known through a world-renowned photograph. Tolstóy behind the plough, painted by Ryépin, has gone the round of the world, and is considered by the Russian Government so dangerous an image that it has been taken from the public gallery where it was exhibited. Limiting his own living to the strictly necessary minimum of the plainest sort of food, he did his best, so long as his physical forces lasted, to earn that little by physical work. And for the last years of his life he has been writing even more than he ever did in the years of his greatest literary productivity.

The effects of this example which Tolstóy has given mankind everyone knows. He believes, however, that he must give also the philosophical and religious reasons for his conduct, and this he did in a series of remarkable works.

Guided by the idea that millions of plain working people realised the sense of life, and found it in life itself, which they considered as the accomplishment of “the will of the Creator of the universe,” he accepted the simple creed of the masses of the Russian peasants, even though his mind was reluctant to do so, and followed with them the rites of the Greek Orthodox Church. There was a limit, however, to such a concession, and there were beliefs which he positively could not accept. He felt that when he was, for instance, solemnly declaring during the mass, before communion, that he took the latter in the literal sense of the words — not figuratively — he was affirming something which he could not say in full conscience. Besides, he soon made the acquaintance of the Non-conformist peasants, Sutyáeff and Bondaryóff, whom he deeply respected, and he saw, from his intercourse with them, that by joining the Greek Orthodox Church he was lending a hand to all its abominable prosecutions of the Non-conformists — that he was a party to the hatred which all Churches profess towards each other.

Consequently, he undertook a complete study of Christianity, irrespective of the teachings of the different churches, including a careful revision of the translations of the gospels, with the intention of finding out what was the real meaning of the Great Teacher’s precepts, and what had been added to it by his followers. In a remarkable, most elaborate work (Criticism of Dogmatic Theology), he demonstrated how fundamentally the interpretations of the Churches differed from what was in his opinion the true sense of the words of the Christ. And then he worked out, quite independently, an interpretation of the Christian teaching which is quite similar to the interpretations that have been given to it by all the great popular movements — in the ninth century in Armenia, — later on by Wycliff, and by the early Anabaptists, such as Hans Denck,[19] laying, however, like the Quakers, especial stress on the doctrine of non-resistance.

His interpretation of the Christian teaching

The ideas which Tolstóy thus slowly worked out are explained in a succession of three separate works: (1) Dogmatic Theology, of which the Introduction is better known as Confession and was written in 1892; (2) What is my Faith? (1884); and (3) What is then to be Done? (1886), to which must be added The Kingdom of God in Yourselves, or Christianity, not as a mystic Teaching but as a new Understanding of Life (1900) and, above all, a small book, The Christian Teaching (1902), which is written in short, concise, numbered paragraphs, like a catechism, and contains a full and definite exposition of Tolstóy’s views. A number of other works dealing with the same subject — such as The Life and the Teachings of the Christ, My Reply to the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication, What is Religion, On Life, etc., were published during the same year. These books represent the work of Tolstóy for the last twenty years, and at least four of them (Confession, My Faith, What is to be Done, and Christian Teaching) must be read in the indicated succession by everyone who wishes to know the religious and moral conceptions of Tolstóy and to extricate himself from the confused ideas which are sometimes represented as Tolstóyism. As to the short work, The Life and the Teaching of Jesus, it is, so to speak, the four gospels in one, told in a language easy to be understood, and free of all mystical and metaphorical elements; it contains Tolstóy’s reading of the gospels.

These works represent the most remarkable attempt at a rationalistic interpretation of Christianity that has ever been ventured upon. Christianity appears in them devoid of all gnosticism and mysticism, as a purely spiritual teaching about the universal spirit which guides man to a higher life — a life of equality and of friendly relations with all men. If Tolstóy accepts Christianity as the foundation of his faith, it is not because he considers it as a revelation, but because its teaching, purified of all the additions that have been made to it by the churches, contains “the very same solution of the problem of life as has been given more or less explicitly by the best of men, both before and since the gospel was given to us — a succession which goes on from Moses, Isaiah, and Confucius, to the early Greeks, Buddha, and Socrates, down to Pascal, Spinoza, Fichte, Feuerbach, and all others, often unnoticed and unknown, who, taking no teachings on mere trust, have taught us, and spoken to us with sincerity, about the meaning of life”[20]; because it gives “an explanation of the meaning of life” and “a solution of this contradiction between the aspiration after welfare and life, and the consciousness of their being unattainable” (Chr. Teach. § 13) — “between the desire for happiness and life on the one hand, and the increasingly clear perception of the certainty of calamity and death on the other” (ibid., § 10).

As to the dogmatic and mystical elements of Christianity, which he treats as mere additions to the real teaching of Christ, he considers them so noxious that even he makes the following remark: It is terrible to say so (but sometimes I have this thought) if the teaching of Christ, together with the teaching of the Church that has grown upon it, did not exist at all — those who now call themselves Christians would have been nearer to the teachings of Christ — that is, to an intelligent teaching about the good of life — than they are now. The moral teachings of all the prophets of mankind would not have been closed for them.”[21]

Putting aside all the mystical and metaphysical conceptions which have been interwoven with Christianity, he concentrates his main attention upon the moral aspects of the Christian teaching. One of the most powerful means — he says — by which men are prevented from living a life in accordance with this teaching is “religious deception.” “Humanity moves slowly but unceasingly onward, towards an ever higher development of consciousness of the true meaning of life, and towards the organisation of life in conformity with this development of consciousness;” but in this ascendant march all men do not move at an equal pace, and “the less sensitive continue to adhere to the previous understanding and order of life, and try to uphold it.” This they achieve mainly by means of the religious deception which consists “in the intentional confusion of faith with superstition, and the substitution of the one for the other.” (Chr. Teach., § § 181, 180.) The only means to free one’s self from this deception is — he says — “to understand and to remember that the only instrument which man possesses for the acquisition of knowledge is reason, and that therefore every teaching which affirms that which is contrary to reason is a delusion.” Altogether, Tolstóy is especially emphatic upon this point of the importance of reason. (See The Christian Teaching, §§ 206, 214.)

Another great obstacle to the spreading of the Christian teaching he sees in the current belief in the immortality of the soul — such as it is understood now. (My Belief, p. 134 of Tchertkoff’s Russ. ed.) In this form he repudiates it; but we can — he says give a deeper meaning to our life by making it to be a service to men — to mankind — by merging our life into the life of the universe; and although this idea may seem less attractive than the idea of individual immortality, though little, it is sure.” (Chr. Teaching.)

In speaking of God he takes sometimes a pantheistic position, and describes God as Life, or as Love, or else as the Ideal which man is conscious of in himself (Thoughts about God, collected by V. and A. Tchertkoff); but in his last work (Christian Teaching, ch. VII. and VIII.) he prefers to identify God with “the universal desire for welfare which is the source of all life.” “So that, according to the, Christian teaching, God is that Essence of life which man recognises both within himself and in the whole universe as the desire for welfare; it being at the same time the cause by which this Essence is enclosed and conditioned in individual and corporal life” (§36). Every reasoning man — Tolstóy adds — comes to a similiar conclusion. A desire for universal welfare appears in every reasoning man, after his rational consciousness has been awakened at a certain age; and in the world around Man the same desire is manifest in all separate beings, each of whom strives for his own welfare (§37). These two desires “converge towards one distinct purpose — definite, attainable, and joyful for man.” Consequently, he concludes, Observation, Tradition (religious), and Reason, all three, show him “that the greatest welfare of man, towards which all men aspire, can only be obtained by perfect union and concord among men.” All three show that the immediate work of the world’s development, in which he is called upon to take part, is “the substitution of union and harmony for division and discord.” “The inner tendency of that spiritual being-love — which is in the process of birth within him, impels him in the same direction.”

Union and harmony, and steady, relentless effort to promote them, which means not only all the work required for supporting one’s life, but work also for increasing universal welfare — these are, then, the two final accords in which all the discords, all the storms, which for more than twenty years had raged in the distraught mind of the great artist, all the religious ecstasies and the rationalistic doubts which had agitated his superior intelligence in its insistent search for truth finally found their solution. On the highest metaphysical heights the striving of every living being for its own welfare, which is Egoism and Love at the same time because it is Self-Love, and rational Self-Love must embrace all congeners of the same species — this striving for individual welfare by its very nature tends to comprise all that exists. “It expands its limits naturally by love, first for one’s family — one’s wife and children — then for friends, then for one’s fellow-countrymen; but Love is not satisfied with this, and tends to embrace all” (ibid., §46).

Main points of the Christian ethics

The central point of the Christian teaching Tolstóy sees in non-resistance. During the first years after his crisis he preached absolute “non-resistance to evil” — in full conformity with the verbal and definite sense of the words of the gospel, which words, taken in connection with the sentence about the right and the left cheek, evidently mean complete humility and resignation. However, he must have soon realised that such a teaching not only was not in conformity with his above-mentioned conception of God, but that it also amounted simply to abetting evil. It contains precisely that license to evil which always has been preached by the State religions in the interest of the ruling classes, and Tolstóy must have realised this. He tells us how he once met in a train the Governor of the Túla province at the head of a detachment of soldiers who were armed with rifles and provided with a cart-load of birch-rods. They were going to flog the peasants of a village in order to enforce an act of sheer robbery passed by the Administration in favour of the landlord and in open breach of the law. He describes with his well-known graphical powers how, in their presence, a “Liberal lady” openly, loudly and in strong terms condemned the Governor and the officers, and how they were ashamed. Then he describes how, when such an expedition began its work, the peasants, with truly Christian resignation, would cross themselves with trembling hand and lie down on the ground, to be martyrised and flogged till the heart of the victim stopped beating, without the officers having been touched in the least by that Christian humility. What Tolstóy did when he met the expedition, we don’t know: he does not tell us. He probably remonstrated with the chiefs and advised the soldiers not to obey them — that is, to revolt. At any rate, he must have felt that a passive attitude in the face of this evil — the non-resistance to it — would have meant a tacit approval of the evil; it would have meant giving support to it. Moreover, a passive attitude of resignation in the ace of evil is so contrary to the very nature of Tolstóy, that he could not remain for a long time a follower of such a doctrine, and he soon altered his interpretation of the text of the gospel in the sense of: “Don’t resist evil by violence.” All his later writings have consequently been a passionate resistance against the different forms of evil which he has seen round about himself in the world. Continually he makes his mighty voice resound against both evil and evil-doers; he only objects to physical force in resisting evil because he believes that works harm.

The other four points of the Christian teaching, always according to Tolstóy’s interpretation of it, are: Do not be angry, or, at least, abstain from anger as much as you can: Remain true to the one woman with whom you have united your life, and avoid all that excites passion: Do not take oaths, which in Tolstóy’s opinion means: Never tie your hands with an oath; oath-taking is the means resorted to by all governments to bind men in their consciences to do whatever they bid them do; and finally, Love your enemies; or, as Tolstóy points it out in several of his writings: Never judge, and never prosecute another before a tribunal.

To these five rules Tolstóy gives the widest possible interpretation and he deducts from them all the teachings of free communism. He proves with a wealth of arguments that to live upon the work of others, and not to earn one’s own living, is to break the very law of all nature; it is the main cause of all social evils, as also of nearly all personal unhappiness and discomforts. He shows how the present capitalistic organisation of labour is as bad as slavery or serfdom has ever been.

He insists upon the simplification of life — in food, dress, and dwelling — which results from one’s taking to manual work, especially on the land, and shows the advantages that even the rich and idle of to-day sould find in such labour. He shows how all the evils of present misgovernment result from the fact that the very men who protest against bad government make every effort to become a part of that government.

As emphatically as he protests against the Church, he protests against the State, as the only real means for bringing to an end the present slavery imposed upon men by this institution. He advises men to refuse having anything to do with the State. And finally, he proves with a wealth of illustrations in which his artistic powers appear in full, that the lust of the rich classes for wealth and luxury — a lust which has no limits, and can have none — is what maintains all this slavery, all these abnormal conditions of life, and all the prejudices and teachings now disseminated by Church and State in the interest of the ruling classes.

On the other hand, whenever he speaks of God, or of immortality, his constant desire is to show that he needs none of the mystical conceptions and metaphysical words which are usually resorted to. And while his language is borrowed from religious writings, he always brings forward, again and again, the rationalistic interpretation of religious conceptions. He carefully sifts from the Christian teaching all that cannot be accepted by followers of other religions, and brings into relief all that is common to Christianity as well as to other positive religions; all that is simply humane in them and thus might be approved by reason, and therefore be accepted by disbelievers as well as by believers.

In other words, in proportion as he has lately studied the teachings of different founders of religions and those of moral philosophers, he has tried to determine and to state the elements of a universal religion in which all men could unite — a religion, however, which would have nothing supernatural in it, nothing that reason and knowledge would have to reject, but would contain a moral guidance for all men — at whatever stage of intellectual development they may halt. Having thus begun, in 1875–77, by joining the Greek Orthodox religion — in the sense in which Russian peasants understand it — he came finally in The Christian Teaching to the construction of a Moral Philosophy which, in his opinion, might be accepted by the Christian, the Jew, the Mussulman, the Buddhist, and so on, and the naturalist philosopher as well — a religion which would retain the only substantial elements of all religions: namely, a determination of one’s relation towards the universe (Weltanschauung), in accordance with present knowledge, and a recognition of the equality of all men.

Whether these two elements, one of which belongs to the domain of knowledge and science and the other (justice) to the domain of ethics, are sufficient to constitute a religion, and need no substratum of mysticism — is a question which lies beyond the scope of this book.

Latest works of Art

The disturbed conditions of the civilised world, and especially of Russia, have evidently more than once attracted the attention of Tolstóy, and induced him to publish a considerable number of letters, papers, and appeals on various subjects. In all of them he advocates, first of all, and above all, an attitude of negation towards Church and State. Never enter the service of the State, even in the provincial and urban institutions, which are granted by the State only as a snare. Refuse to support exploitation in any form. Refuse to perform military service, whatever the consequences may be: for this is the only method of being truly anti-militarist. Never have anything to do with Courts, even if you are offended or assailed; — nothing but evil results from them. Such a negative and eminently sincere attitude, he maintains, would better promote the cause of true progress than any revolutionary means. As a first step, however, towards the abolition of modern slavery, he also recommends the nationalisation, or rather the municipalisation, of land.

It is manifest that the works of art which he wrote during the last five-and-twenty years, after 1876, must bear deep traces of his new point of view. He began, first, by writing for the people, and although most of his small stories for popular reading are spoiled to some extent by the too obvious desire of drawing a certain moral, and a consequent distortion of facts, there are a few among them — especially How much Land is required for a Man — which are wonderfully artistic. The Death of Iván Illýtch need only be named to recall the profound impression produced by its appearance.

In order to speak to a still wider audience in the theatres for the people, which began to be started in Russia about that time, he wrote The Power of Darkness, — a most terrible drama from the life of the peasants, in which he aimed at producing a deep impression by means of a Shakespearian or rather Marlowian realism. His other play — The Fruits of Civilisation — is in a comical vein. The superstitions of the “upper classes” as regards spiritualism are ridiculed in it. Both plays (the former — with alterations in the final scene) are played with success on the Russian stage.

However, it is not only the novels and dramas of this period which are works of Art. The five religious works which have been named on a preceding page are also works of art in the best sense of the word, as they contain descriptive pages of a high artistic value; while the very ways in which Tolstóy explains the economical principles of Socialism, or the No-Government principles of Anarchism, are as much masterpieces as the best socialistic and anarchistic pages of William Morris — far surpassing the latter in simplicity and artistic power.

Kreutzer Sonata

Kreutzer Sonata is surely, after Anna Karénina, the work of Tolstóy which has been the most widely read. However, the strange theme of this novel and the crusade against marriage altogether which it contains so much attract the attention of the reader and usually become the subject of so passionate a discussion among those who have read it, that the high artistic qualities of this novel and the analysis of life which it contains have hardly received the recognition they deserve. The moral teaching that Tolstóy has put in Kreutzer Sonata hardly need be mentioned, the more so since the author himself has withdrawn it to a very great extent. But for the appreciation of Tolstóy’s work and for the comprehension of the artist’s inner life this novel has a deep meaning. No stronger accusation against marriage for or mere outer attraction, without intellectual union or sympathy of purpose between husband and wife, has ever been written; and the struggle that goes on between Kóznysheff and his wife is one of the most deeply dramatic pages of married life that we possess in, any literature.

Resurrection

Tolstóy’s What is Art? is mentioned in Chapter VIII. of this book. His greatest production of the latest period is, however, Resurrection. It is not enough to say that the energy and youthfulness of the septuagenarian author which appear in this novel are simply marvellous. Its absolute artistic qualities are so high that if Tolstóy had written nothing else but Resurrection he would have been recognised as one of the great writers. All those parts of the novel which deal with Society, beginning with the letter of “Missie,” and Missie herself, her father, and so on, are of the same high standard as the best pages of the first volume of War and Peace. Everything which deals with the Court, the jurymen, and the prisons is again of the same high standard. It may be said, of course, that the principal hero, Neklúdoff, is not sufficiently living; but this is quite unavoidable for a figure which is meant to represent, if not the author himself, at least his ideas or his experience: this is a drawback of all novels containing so much of an autobiographical element. As regards all the other figures, however, of which so immense a number pass under our eyes, each of them has its own character in striking relief, even if the figure (like one of the judges or of the jurymen, or the daughter of a jailer) appears only on a single page, never to reappear again.

The number of questions which are raised in this novel — social, political, party questions, and so on — is so great that a whole society, such as it is, living and throbbing with all its problems and contradictions, appears before the reader, and this is not Russian Society only, but Society the civilised world over. In fact, apart from the scenes which deal with the political prisoners, Resurrection applies to all nations. It is the most international of all works of Tolstóy. At the same time the main question: “Has Society the right to judge? Is it reasonable in maintaining a system of tribunals and prisons?” this terrible question which the coming century is bound to solve, is so forcibly impressed upon the reader that it is impossible to read the book without, at least, conceiving serious doubts about our system of punishments. Ce livre pèsera sur la conscience du siècle. (“This book will weigh upon the conscience of the century”) was the remark of a French critic, which I heard repeated. And of the justice of this remark I have had the opportunity of convincing myself during my numerous conversations in America with persons having anything to do with prisons. The book weighs already on their consciences.

The same remark applies to the whole activity of Tolstóy. Whether his attempt at impressing upon men the elements of a universal religion which — he believes — reason trained by science might accept, and which man might take as guidance for his moral life, attaining at the same time towards the solution of the great social problem and all questions connected with it — whether this bold attempt be successful or not, can only be decided by time. But it is absolutely certain that no man since the times of Rousseau has so profoundly stirred the human conscience as Tolstóy has by his moral writings. He has fearlessly stated the moral aspects of all the burning questions of the day, in a form so deeply impressive that whoever has read any one of his writings can no longer forget these questions or set them aside; one feels the necessity of finding, in one way or another, some solution. Tolstóy’s influence, consequently, is not one which may be measured by mere years or decades of years: it will last long. Nor is it limited to one country only. In millions of copies his works are read in all languages, appealing equally to men and women of all classes and all nations, and everywhere producing the same result. Tolstóy is now the most loved man — the most touchingly loved man — in the world.

Chapter 5: Goncharóff — Dostoyéskiy — Nekrásoff

Goncharóff

Goncharóff occupies in Russian literature the next place after Turguéneff and Tolstóy, but this extremely interesting writer is almost entirely unknown to English readers. He was not a prolific writer and, apart from small sketches, and a book of travel (The Frigate Pallas), he has left only three novels: A Common Story (translated into English by Constance Garnett), Oblómoff, and The Precipice, of which the second, Oblómoff, has conquered for him a position by the side of the two great writers just named.

In Russia Goncharóff is always described as a writer of an eminently objective talent, but this qualification must evidently be taken with a certain restriction. A writer is never entirely objective — he has his sympathies and antipathies, and do what he may, they will appear even through his most objective descriptions. On the other hand, a good writer seldom introduces his own individual emotions to speak for his heroes: there is none of this in either Turguéneff or Tolstóy. However, with Turguéneff and Tolstóy you feel that they live with their heroes, that they suffer and feel happy with them — that they are in love when the hero is in love, and that they feel miserable when misfortunes befall him; but you do not feel that to the same extent with Goncharóff. Surely he has lived through every feeling of his heroes, but the attitude he tries to preserve towards them is an attitude of strict impartiality — an attitude, I hardly need say, which, properly speaking, a writer can never maintain. An epic repose and an epic profusion of details certainly characterise Goncharóff’s novels; but these details are not obtrusive, they do not diminish the impression, and the reader’s interest in the hero is not distracted by all these minutiae, because, under Goncharóff’s pen, they never appear insignificant. One feels, however, that the author is a person who takes human life quietly, and will never give way to a burst of passion, whatsoever may happen to his heroes.

Oblómoff

The most popular of the novels of Goncharóff is Oblómoff, which, like Turguéneff’s Fathers and Sons, and Tolstóy’s War and Peace and Resurrection, is, I venture to say, one of the profoundest productions of the last half century. It is thoroughly Russian, so Russian indeed that only a Russian can fully appreciate it; but it is at the same time universally human, as it introduces a type which is almost as universal as that of Hamlet or Don Quixote.

Oblómoff is a Russian nobleman, of moderate means — the owner of six or seven hundred serfs — and the time of action is, let us say, in the fifties of the nineteenth century. All the early childhood of Oblómoff was such as to destroy in him any capacity of initiative. Imagine a spacious, well-kept nobleman’s estate in the middle of Russia, somewhere on the picturesque banks of the Vólga, at a time when there were no railways to disturb a peaceful patriarchal life, and no “questions” that could worry the minds of its inhabitants, A “reign of plenty,” both for the owners of the estate and the scores of their servants and retainers, characterises their life. Nurses, servants, serving boys and maids surround the child from its earliest days, their only thoughts being how to feed it, make it grow, render it strong, and never worry it with either much learning or, in fact, with any sort of work. “From my earliest childhood, have I myself ever put on my socks?” Oblómoff asks later on. In the morning, the coming mid-day meal is the main question for all the household; and when the dinner is over, at an early hour of the day, sleep — a reign of sleep, sleep rising to an epical degree which implies full loss of consciousness for all the inhabitants of the mansion and its dependencies — spreads its wings for several hours from the bedchamber of the landlord even as far as the remotest corner of the retainers’ dwellings.

In these surroundings Oblómoffs childhood and youth were passed, Later on, he enters the University; but his trustworthy servants follow him to the capital, and the lazy, sleepy atmosphere of his native ‘Oblómovka’ (the estate) holds him even there in its enchanted arms. A few lectures at the university, some elevating talk with a young friend in the evening, some vague aspiration towards the ideal, occasionally stir the young man’s heart; and a beautiful vision begins to rise before his eyes — these things are certainly a necessary accompaniment of the years spent at the university; but the soothing, soporific influence of Oblómovka, its quietness and laziness, its feeling of a fully guaranteed, undisturbed existence, deaden even these impressions of youth. Other students grow hot in their discussions, and join “circles.” Oblómoff looks quietly at all that and asks himself: “What is it for?” And then, the moment that the young student has returned home after his university years, the same atmosphere again envelops him. “Why should you think and worry yourself with this or that?” Leave that to “others.” Have you not there your old nurse, thinking whether there is anything else she might do for your comfort?

“My people did not let me have even a wish,” Goncharóff wrote in his short autobiography, from which we discovered the close connection between the author and his hero: “all had been foreseen and attended to long since. The old servants, with my nurse at their head, looked into my eyes to guess my wishes, trying to remember what I liked best when I was with them, where my writing table ought to be put, which chair I preferred to the others, how to make my bed. The cook tried to remember which dishes I had liked in my childhood — and all could not admire me enough.”

Such was Oblómoff’s youth, and such was to a very great extent Goncharóff’s youth and character as well.

The novel begins with Oblómoff’s morning in his lodgings at St. Petersburg. It is late, but he is still In bed; several times already he has tried to get up, several times his foot was in the slipper; but after a moment’s reflection, he has returned under his blankets. His trusty Zakhár — his old faithful servant who formerly had carried him as a baby in his arms — is by his side, and brings him his glass of tea. Visitors come in; they try to induce Oblómoff to go out, to take a drive to the yearly First of May promenade; but — “What for?” he asks. “For what should I take all this trouble, and do all this moving about?” And he remains in bed.

His only trouble is that the landlord wants him to leave the lodgings which he occupies. The rooms are dull, dusty — Zakhár is no great admirer of cleanliness; but to change lodgings is such a calamity for Oblómoff that he tries to avoid it by all possible means, or at least to postpone it,

Oblómoff is very well educated, well-bred, he has a refined taste, and in matters of art he is a fine judge. Everything that is vulgar is repulsive to him. He never will commit any dishonest act; he cannot. He also shares the highest and noblest aspirations of his contemporaries. Like many others, he is ashamed of being a serf-owner, and he has in his head a certain scheme which he is going to put some day into writing — a scheme which, if it is only carried out, will surely improve the condition of his peasants and eventually free them.

“The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him” — Goncharóff writes, “the, miseries of mankind were not strange to him. Sometimes he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human sorrows. He felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire of going somewhere far away, — probably into that world towards which his friend Stoltz had tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears would then flow upon his cheeks, It would also happen that he would himself feel hatred towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread all over the world; and he would then feel the desire to show mankind its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within him, rotting in his head like waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make all his blood boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sinews would be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming themselves into decisions... Moved by a moral force he would rapidly change over and over again his position in his bed; with a fixed stare he would half lift himself from it, move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ... the inspiration would seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself into an act of heroism, and then, what miracles, what admirable results might one not expect from so great an effort! But — the morning would pass away, the shades of evening would take the place of the broad daylight, and with them the strained forces of Oblómoff would incline towards rest — the storms in his soul would subside — his head would shake off the worrying tboughts — his blood would circulate more slowly in his veins — and Oblómoff would slowly turn over, and recline an his back; looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly with his eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neighbouring house — and how many times had he thus followed with his eyes that sunset!”

In such lines as these Goncharóff depicts the state of inactivity into which Oblómoff had fallen at the age of about thirty-five. It is the supreme poetry of laziness — a laziness created by a whole life of old-time landlordism.

Oblómoff, as I just said, is very uncomfortable in his lodgings; moreover, the landlord, who intends to make some repairs in the house, wants him to leave; but for Oblómoff to change his lodgings, is something so terrific, so extraordinary, that he tries by all sorts of artifices to postpone the undesirable moment. His old Zakhár tries to convince him that they cannot remain any longer in that house, and ventures the unfortunate word, that, after all, “others” move when they have to.

“I thought,” he said, “that others are not worse than we are, and that they move sometimes; so we could move, too.”

It “What, what?” exclaimed Oblómoff, rising from his easy chair, “what is it that you say?”

Zakhár felt very ashamed. He could not understand what had provoked the reproachful exclamation of his master, and did not reply.

“Others are not worse than we are!” repeated Iliyá Iliych (Oblómoff) with a sense of horror. “That is what you have come to. Now I shall know henceforth that I am for you the same as ‘the others’.”

After a time Oblómoff calls Zakhár back and has with him an explanation which is worth reproducing.

“Have you ever thought what it meant — ‘the others,’ “Oblómoff began. “Must I tell you what this means?”

Poor Zakhár shifted about uneasily, like a bear in his den, and sighed aloud.

“‘Another’ — that means a wild, uneducated man; he lives poorly, dirtily, in an attic; he can sleep on a piece of felt stretched somewhere on the floor — what does that matter to him? — Nothing! He will feed on potatoes and herrings; misery compels him continuously to shift from one place to another. He runs about all day long — he, he may, of course, go to new lodgings. There is Lagáeff; he takes under his arm his ruler and his two shirts wrapped in a handkerchief, and he is off. ‘Where are you going?’ you ask him. — ‘I am moving’, he says. That is what ‘the others’ means. — Am I one of those others, do you mean?”

Zakhár threw a glance upon his master, shifted from one foot to the other, but said nothing.

“Do you understand now what ‘another’ means?” continued Oblómoff. “‘Another,’ that is the man who cleans his own boots, who himself puts on his clothes — without any help! Of course, he may sometimes look like a gentleman, but that is mere deceit: he does not know what it means to have a servant — he has nobody to send to the shop to make his purchases; he makes them himself — he will even poke his own fire, and occasionally use a duster.”

“Yes,” replied Zakhár sternly, “there are many such people among the Germans.”

“That’s it, that’s it! And I? do you think that I am one of them?”

“No, you are different,” Zakhár said, still unable to understand what his master was driving at. But God knows what is coming upon you... “

“Ah! I am different! Most certainly, I am. Do I run about? do I work? don’t I eat whenever I am hungry? Look at me — am I thin? am I sickly to look at? Is there anything I lack Thank God, I have people to do things for me. I have never put on my own socks since I was born, thank God! Must I also be restless like the others?What for? — And to whom am I saying all this? Have you not been with me from childhood? ... You have seen it all. You know that I have received a delicate education; that I have never suffered from cold or from hunger, — never knew want — never worked for my own bread — have never done any sort of dirty work... Well, how dare you put me on the same level as the ‘others’?”

Later on, when Zakhár brought him a glass of water, “No, wait a moment,” Oblómoff said. “I ask you, How did you dare to so deeply offend your master, whom you carried in your arms while he was a baby, whom you have served all your life, and who has always been a benefactor to you?” Zakhár could not stand it any longer — the word benefactor broke him down — he began to blink. The less he understood the speech of lliyá Iliych, the more sad he felt. Finally, the reproachful words of his master made him break into tears, while Ilyá Iliych seizing this pretext for postponing his letter — writing till to-morrow, tells Zakhár, “you had better pull the blinds down and cover me nicely, and see that nobody disturbs me. Perhaps I may sleep for an hour or so, and at half past five wake me for dinner.”

About this time Oblómoff meets a young girl, Olga, who is perhaps one of the finest representatives of Russian women in our novels. A mutual friend, Stoltz, has said much to her about Oblómoff — about his talents and possibilities, and also about the laziness of his life, which would surely ruin him if it continued. Women are always ready to undertake rescue work, and Olga tries to draw Oblómoff out of his sleepy, vegetative existence. She sings beautifully, and Oblómoff, who is a great lover of music, is deeply moved by her songs.

Gradually Olga and Oblómoff fall in love with each other, and she tries to shake off his laziness, to arouse him to higher interests in life. She insists that he shall finish the great scheme for the improvement of his peasant serfs upon which he is supposed to have been working for years. She tries to awaken in him an interest for art and literature, to create for him a life in which his gifted nature shall find a field of activity. It seems at first as if the vigour and charm of Olga are going to renovate Oblómoff by insensible steps. He wakes up, he returns to life. The love of Olga for Oblómoff, which is depicted in its development with a mastery almost equalling that of Turguéneff, grows deeper and deeper, and the inevitable next step — marriage — is approaching... But this is enough to frighten away Oblómoff. To take this step he would have to bestir himself, to go to his estate, to break the lazy monotony of his life, and this is too much for him. He lingers and hesitates to make the first necessary steps. He postpones them from day to day, and finally he falls back into his Oblómoffdom, and returns to his sofa, his dressing gown, and his slippers. Olga is ready to do the impossible; she tries to carry him away by her love and her energy; but she is forced to realise that all her endeavours are useless, and that she has trusted too much to her own strength: the disease of Oblómoff is incurable. She has to abandon him, and Goncharóff describes their parting in a most beautiful scene, from which I will give here a few of the concluding passages:

“Then we must part?” she said ... .. “If we married, what would come next?” He replied nothing. “You would fall asleep, deeper and deeper every day — is it not so? And I — you see what I am — I shall not grow old, I shall never be tired of life. We should live from day to day and year to year, looking forward to Christmas, and then to the Carnival; we, should go to parties, dance, and think about nothing at all. We should lie down at night thanking God that one day has passed, and next morning we should wake up with the desire that to-day may be like yesterday; that would be our future, is it not so? But is that life? I should wither under it — I should die. And for what, Iliyá? Could I make you happy? “

He cast his eyes around and tried to move, to run away, but his feet would not obey him. He wanted to say something, but his mouth was dry, his tongue motionless, his voice would not come out of his throat. He moved his hand towards her, then he began something with lowered voice, but could not finish it, and with his look he said to her, “Good-bye — farewell.”

She also wanted to say something, but could not moved her band in his direction, but before it had reached his it dropped. She wanted to say “Farewell,” but her voice broke in the middle of the word and took a false accent. Then her face quivered, she put her hand and her head on his shoulder and cried. It seemed now as if all her weapons had been taken out of her hand — reasoning had gone — there remained only the woman, helpless against her sorrow. “Farewell, Farewell” came out of her sobbings...

“No,” said Olga, trying to look upon him through her tears, “it is only now that I see that I loved in you what I wanted you to be, I loved the future Oblómoff. You are good, honest, Iliyá, you are tender as a dove, you put your head under your wing and want nothing more, you are ready all your life to coo under a roof ... but I am not so, that would be too little for me. I want something more — what, I do not know; can you tell me what it is that I want? give me it, that I should... As to sweetness, there is plenty of it everywhere.”

They part, Olga passes through a severe illness, and a few months later we see Oblómoff married to the landlady of his rooms, a very respectable person with beautiful elbows, and a great master in kitchen affairs and household work generally. As to Olga, she marries Stoltz later on. But this Stoltz is rather a symbol of intelligent industrial activity than a living man. He is invented, and I pass him by.

The Russian Malady of Oblómovism — Is it exclusively Russian?

The impression which this novel produced in Russia, on its appearance in 1859, was indescribable. It was a far greater event than the appearance of a new work by Turguéneff. All educated Russia read Oblómoff and discussed “Oblómovism.” Everyone recognised something of himself in Oblómoff, felt the disease of Oblómoff in his own veins. As to Olga, thousands of young people fell in love with her: her favourite song, the “Casta Diva,” became their favourite melody. And now, forty years afterwards, one can read and re-read “Oblómoff” with the same pleasure as nearly half a century ago, and it has lost nothing of its meaning, while it has acquired many new ones: there are always living Oblómoffs.

The Precipice

At the time of the appearance of this novel “Oblómoffdom” became a current word to designate the state of Russia. All Russian life, all Russian history, bears traces of the malady — that laziness of mind and heart, that right to laziness proclaimed as a virtue, that conservatism and inertia, that contempt of feverish activity, which characterise Oblómoff and were so much cultivated in serfdom times, even amongst the best men in Russia — and even among the malcontents. “A sad result of serfdom” — it was said then. But, as we live further away from serfdom times, we begin to realise that Oblómoff is not dead amongst us: that serfdom is not the only thing which creates this type of men, but that the very conditions of wealthy life, the routine of civilised life, contribute to maintain it.

“A racial feature, distinctive of the Russian race,” others said; and they were right, too, to a great extent. The absence of a love for struggle; the “let me alone” attitude, the want of “aggressive” virtue; non-resistance and passive submission — these are to a great extent distinctive features of the Russian race. And this is probably why a Russian writer own work. As a result there is no wholeness, so to speak, in the main personages of the novel. The woman upon whom he has bestowed all his admiration, Vyéra, and whom he tries to represent as most sympathetic, is certainly interesting, but not sympathetic at all. One would say that Goncharóff’s mind was haunted by two women of two totally different types when he pictured his Vyéra — the one whom he tried — and failed — to picture in Sophie Byelovódova, and the other — the coming woman of the sixties, of whom he saw some features, and whom he admired, without fully understanding her. Vyéra’s cruelty towards her grandmother, and towards Ráisky, the hero, render her most unsympathetic, although you feel that the author quite adores her. As to the Nihilist, Vólokhoff, he is simply a caricature — taken perhaps from real life, — even seemingly from among the author’s personal acquaintances, — but obviously drawn with the desire of ventilating personal feelings of dislike. One feels a personal drama concealed behind the pages of the novel. Goncharóff’s first sketch of Vólokhoff was, as he wrote himself, some sort of Bohemian Radical of the forties who had retained in full the Don Juanesque features of the “Byronists” of the preceding generation. Gradually, however, Goncharóff, who had not yet finished his novel by the end of the fifties, transformed the figure into a Nihilist of the sixties — a revolutionist — and the result is that one has the sensation of the double origin of Vólokhoff, as one feels the double origin of Vyéra.

The only figure of the novel really true to life is the grandmother of Vyéra. This is an admirably painted figure of the simple, commonsense, independent woman of old Russia, while Martha, the sister of Vyéra, is an excellent picture of the commonplace girl, full of life, respectful of old traditions — to be one day the honest and reliable mother of a family. These two figures are the work of a great artist; but all the other figures are made-up, and consequently are failures; and yet there is much exaggeration in the tragical way in which Vyéra’s fall is taken by her grandmother. As to the background of the novel — the estate on a precipice leading to the Vólga — it is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Russian literature.

Dostoyévskiy — His first Novel

Few authors have been so well received, from their very first appearance in literature, as Dostoyévskiy was. In 1845 he arrived in St. Petersburg, a quite unknown young man who only two years before had finished his education in a school of military engineers, and after having spent two years in the engineering service had then abandoned it with the intention of devoting himself to literature. He was only twenty-four when he wrote his first novel, Poor People, which his school-comrade, Grigoróvitch, gave to the poet Nekrásoff, offering it for a literary almanack. Dostoyévskiy had inwardly doubted whether the novel would even be read by the editor. He was living then in a poor, miserable room, and was fast asleep when at four o’clock in the morning Nekrásoff and Grigoróvitch knocked at his door. They threw themselves on Dostoyévskiy’s neck, congratulating him with tears in their eyes. Nekrásoff and his friend had begun to read the novel late in the evening; they could not stop reading till they came to the end, and they were both so deeply impressed by it that they could not help going on this nocturnal expedition, to see the author and tell him what they felt. A few days later Dostoyévskiy was introduced to the great critic of the time, Byelínskiy, and from him he received the same warm reception. As to the reading public, the novel produced quite a sensation. The same must be said about all subsequent novels of Dostoyévskiy. They had an immense sale all over Russia.

The life of Dostoyévskiy was extremely sad. In the year 1849, four years after he had won his first success with Poor People, he became mixed up in the affairs of some Fourierists (members of the circles of Petrashévskiy), who used to meet together to read the works of Fourier, commenting on them, and talking about the necessity of a Socialistic movement in Russia. At one of these gatherings Dostoyévskiy read, and copied later on, a certain letter from Byelínskiy to Gógol, in which the great critic spoke in rather sharp language about the Russian Church and the State; he also took part in a meeting at which the starting of a secret printing office was discussed. He was arrested, tried (of course with closed doors), and, with several others, was condemned to death. In December, 1849, he was taken to a public square, placed on the scaffold, under a gibbet, to listen there to a profusedly-worded death-sentence, and only at the last moment came a messenger from Nicholas I., bringing a pardon. Three days later he was transported to Siberia and locked up in a hard-labour prison at Omsk. There he remained for four years, when owing to some influence at St. Petersburg he was liberated, only to be made a soldier. During his detention in the hard-labour prison he was submitted, for some minor offence, to the terrible punishment of the cat-o’-nine-tails, and from that time dates his disease — epilepsy — which he never quite got rid of during all his life. The coronation amnesty of Alexander II. did not improve Dostoyévskiy’s fate. Not until 1859 — four years after the advent of Alexander II. to the throne — was the great writer pardoned and allowed to return to Russia. He died in 1883.

General Character of his Work

Dostoyévskiy was a rapid writer, and even before his arrest he had published ten novels, of which The Double was already a forerunner of his later psycho-pathological novels, and Nétochka Nezvánova showed a rapidly maturing literary talent of the highest quality. On his return from Siberia he began publishing a series of novels which produced a deep impression on the reading public. He opened the series by a great novel, The Downtrodden and Offended, which was soon followed by Memoirs from a Dead-House, in which he described his hard-labour experience. Then came an extremely sensational novel, Crime and Punishment, which lately was widely read all over Europe and America. The Brothers Karamázoff, which is considered his most elaborate work, is even more sensational, while The Youth, The Idiot, The Devils are a series of shorter novels devoted to the same psycho-pathological problems.

If Dostoyévskiy’s work had been judged from the purely aesthetic point of view, the verdict of critics concerning its literary value would have been anything but flattering. Dostoyévskiy wrote with such rapidity and he so little cared about the working out of his novels, that, as Dobrolúboff has shown, the literary form is in many places almost below criticism. His heroes speak in a slipshod way, continually repeating themselves, and whatever hero appears in the novel (especially is this so in The Downtrodden), you feel it is the author who speaks. Besides, to these serious defects one must add the extremely romantic and obsolete forms of the plots of his novels, the disorder of their construction, and the unnatural succession of their events — to say nothing of the atmosphere of the lunatic asylum with which the later ones are permeated. And yet, with all this, the works of Dostoyévskiy are penetrated with such a deep feeling of reality, and by the side of the most unreal characters one finds characters so well known to every one of us, and so real, that all these defects are redeemed. Even when you think that Dostoyévskiy’s record of the conversations of his heroes is not correct, you feel that the men whom he describes — at least some of them — were exactly such as he wanted to describe them.

Memoirs from a Dead-House

The Memoirs from a Dead-House is the only production of Dostoyévskiy which can be recognised as truly artistic: its leading idea is beautiful, and the form is worked out in conformity with the idea; but in his later productions the author is so much oppressed by his ideas, all very vague, and grows so nervously excited over them that he cannot find the proper form. The favourite themes of Dostoyévskiy are the men who have been brought so low by the circumstances of their lives, that they have not even a conception of there being a possibility of rising above these conditions. You feel moreover that Dostoyévskiy finds a real pleasure in describing the sufferings, moral and physical, of the down-trodden — that he revels in representing that misery of mind, that absolute hopelessness of redress, and that completely broken-down condition of human nature which is characteristic of neuro-pathological cases. By the side of such sufferers you find a few others who are so deeply human that all your sympathies go with them; but the favourite heroes of Dostoyévskiy are the man and the woman who consider themselves as not having either the force to compel respect, or even the right of being treated as human beings. They once have made some timid attempt at defending their personalities, but they have succumbed, and never will try it again. They will sink deeper and deeper in their wretchedness, and die, either from consumption or from exposure, or they will become the victims of some mental affection — a sort of half-lucid lunacy,during which man occasionally rises to the highest conceptions of human philosophy — while some will conceive an embitterment which will bring them to commit some crime, followed by repentance the very next instant after it has been done.

Downtrodden and Offended

In Downtrodden and Offended we see a young man madly in love with a girl from a moderately poor family. This girl falls in love with a very aristocratic prince — a man without principles, but charming in his childish egotism — extremely attractive by his sincerity, and with a full capacity for quite unconsciously committing the worst crimes towards those with whom life brings him into contact. The psychology of both the girl and the young aristocrat is very good, but where Dostoyévskiy appears at his best is in representing how the other young man, rejected by the girl, devotes the whole of his existence to being the humble servant of that girl, and against his own will becomes instrumental in throwing her into the hands of the young aristocrat. All this is quite possible, all this exists in life, and it is all told by Dostoyévskiy so as to make one feel the deepest commiseration with the poor and the down-trodden; but even in this novel the pleasure which the author finds in representing the unfathomable submission and servitude of his heroes, and the pleasure they find in the very sufferings and the ill-treatment that has been inflicted upon them — is repulsive to a sound mind.

Crime and Punishment

The next great novel of Dostoyévskiy, Crime and Punishment, produced quite a sensation. Its hero is a young student, Raskólnikoff, who deeply loves his mother and his sister — both extremely poor, like himself — and who, haunted by the desire of finding some money in order to finish his studies and to become a support to his dear ones, comes to the idea of killing an old woman — a private money-lender whom he knows and who is said to possess a few thousand roubles. A series of more or less fortuitous circumstances confirms him in this idea and pushes him this way. Thus, his sister, who sees no escape from their poverty, is going at last to sacrifice herself for her family, and to marry a certain despicable, elderly man with much money, and Raskólnikoff is firmly decided to prevent this marriage. At the same time he meets with an old man — a small civil service clerk and a drunkard who has a most sympathetic daughter from the first marriage, Sónya. The family are at the lowest imaginable depths of destitution — such as can only be found in a large city like St. Petersburg, and Raskólnikoff is brought to take interest in them. Owing to all these circumstances, while he himself sinks deeper and deeper into the darkest misery, and realises the depths of hopeless poverty and misery which surround him, the idea of killing the old money-lending woman takes a firm hold of him. He accomplishes the crime and, of course, as might have been foreseen, does not take advantage of the money: he even does not find it in his excitement; and, after having lived for a few days haunted by remorse and shame — again under the pressure of a series of various circumstances which add to the feeling of remorse — he goes to surrender himself, denouncing himself as the murderer of the old woman and her sister.

This is, of course, only the framework of the novel; in reality it is full of the most thrilling scenes of poverty on the one hand and of moral degradation on the other, while a number of secondary characters — an elderly gentleman in whose family Raskólnikoff’s sister has been a governess, the examining magistrate, and so on — are introduced. Besides, Dostoyévskiy, after having accumulated so many reasons which might have brought a Raskólnikoff to commit such a murder, found it necessary to introduce another theoretical motive. One learns in the midst of the novel that Raskólnikoff, captivated by the modern, current ideas of materialist philosophy, has written and published a newspaper article to prove that men are divided into superior and inferior beings, and that for the former — Napoleon being a sample of them — the current rules of morality are not obligatory.

Most of the readers of this novel and most of the literary critics speak very highly of the psychological analysis of Raskólnikoff’s soul and of the motives which brought him to his desperate step. However, I will permit myself to remark that the very profusion of accidental causes accumulated by Dostoyévskiy shows how difficult he felt it himself to prove that the propaganda of materialistic ideas could in reality bring an honest young man to act as Raskólnikoff did. Raskólnikoffs do not become murderers under the influence of such theoretical considerations, while those who murder and invoke such motives, like Lebiès at Paris, are not in the least of the Raskólnikoff type. Behind RaskólnIkoff I feel Dostoyévskiy trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like him, might have been brought to act as Raskólnikoff did, and what would be the psychological explanation if he had been driven to do so. But such men do not murder. Besides, men like the examining magistrate and M. Swidrigailoff are purely romantic inventions.

However, with all its faults, the novel produces a most powerful effect by its real pictures of slum-life, and inspires every honest reader with the deepest commiseration towards even the lowest sunken inhabitants of the slums. When Dostoyévskiy comes to them, he becomes a realist in the very best sense of the word, like Turguéneff or Tolstóy. Marmeládoff — the old drunken official — his drunken talk and his death, his family, and the incidents which happen after his burial, his wife and his daughter Sónya — all these are living beings and real incidents of the life of the poorest ones, and the pages that Dostoyévskiy gave to them belong to the most impressive and the most moving pages in any literature. They have the touch of genius.

The Brothers Karamázoff

The Brothers Karamázoff is the most artistically worked out of Dostoyévskiy’s novels, but it is also the novel in which all the inner defects of the author’s mind and imagination have found their fullest expression. The philosophy of this novel — incredulous Western Europe; wildly passionate; drunken, unreformed Russia; and Russia reformed by creed and monks the three represented by the three brothers Karamázoff — only faintly appears in the background. But there is certainly not in any literature such a collection of the most repulsive types of mankind — lunatics, half-lunatics, criminals in germ and in reality, in all possible gradationsas one finds in this novel. A Russian specialist in brain and nervous diseases finds representatives of all sorts of such diseases in Dostoyévskiy’s novels, and especially in The Brothers Karamázoff — the whole being set in a frame which represents the strangest mixture of realism and romanticism run wild. Whatsoever a certain portion of contemporary critics, fond of all sorts of morbid literature, may have written about this novel, the present writer can only say that he finds it, all through, so unnatural, so much fabricated for the purpose of introducing — here, a bit of morals, there, some abominable character taken from a psycho-pathological hospital; or again, in order to analyse the feelings of some purely imaginary criminal, that a few good pages scattered here and there do not compensate the reader for the hard task of reading these two volumes.

Dostoyévskiy is still very much read in Russia; and when, some twenty years ago, his novels were first translated into French, German and English, they were received as a revelation. He was praised as one of the greatest writers of our own time, and as undoubtedly the one who “had best expressed the mystic Slavonic soul” — whatever that expression may mean! Turguéneff was eclipsed by Dostoyévskiy, and Tolstóy was forgotten for a time. There was, of course, a great deal of hysterical exaggeration in all this, and at the present time sound literary critics do not venture to indulge in such praises. The fact is, that there is certainly a great deal of power in whatever Dostoyévskiy wrote: his powers of creation suggest those of Hoffman; and his sympathy with the most down-trodden and down-cast products of the civilisation of our large towns is so deep that it carries away the most indifferent reader and exercises a most powerful impression in the right direction upon young readers. His analysis of the most varied specimens of incipient psychical disease is said to be thoroughly correct. But with all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are incomparably below those of any one of the great Russian masters: Tolstóy, Turguéneff, or Gontcharóff. Pages of consummate realism are interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy only of the most incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling interest are interrupted in order to introduce a score of pages of the most unnatural theoretical discussions. Besides, the author is in such a hurry that he seems never to have had the time himself to read over his novels before sending them to the printer. And, worst of all, every one of the heroes of Dostoyévskiy, especially in his novels of the later period, is a person suffering from some psychical disease or from moral perversion. [...]

Nekrásoff — Discussions about his Talent

[...] the side of Púshkin and Lérmontoff (“higher still than Púshkin and Lérmontoff,” exclaimed some young enthusiast in the crowd), and the question, “Is Nekrásoff a great poet, like Púshkin and Lérmontoff?” has been discussed ever since.

Nekrásoff’s poetry played such an important part in my own development, during my youth, that I did not dare trust my own high appreciation of it; and therefore to verify and support my impressions and appreciations I have compared them with those of the Russian critics, Arsénieff, Skabitchévskiy, and Venguéroff (the author of a great biographical dictionary of Russian authors).

When we enter the period of adolescence, from sixteen years to twenty, we need to find words to express the aspirations and the higher ideas which begin to wake up in our minds. It is not enough to have these aspirations: we want words to express them. Some will find these words in those of the prayers which they hear in the church; othersand I belonged to their number — will not be satisfied with this expression of their feelings: it will strike them as too vague, and they will look for something else to express in more concrete terms their growing sympathies with mankind and the philosophical questions about the life of the universe which pre-occupy them. They will look for poetry. For me, Goethe on the one side, by his philosophical poetry, and Nekrásoff on the other, by the concrete images in which he expressed his love of the peasant masses, supplied the words which the heart wanted for the expression of its poetical feelings. But this is only a personal remark. The question is, whether Nekrásoff can really be put by the side of Púshkin and Lérmontoff as a great poet.

Some people repudiate such a comparison. He was not a poet, they say, because he always wrote with a purpose. However, this reasoning, which is often defended by the pure aesthetics, is evidently incorrect. Shelley also had a purpose, which did not prevent him from being a great poet; Browning has a purpose in a number of his poems, and this did not prevent him from being a great poet. Every great poet has a purpose in most of his poems, and the question is only whether he has found a beautiful form for expressing this purpose, or not. The poet who shall succeed in combining a really beautiful form, i.e., impressive images and sonorous verses, with a grand purpose, will be the greatest poet.

Now, one certainly feels, on reading Nekrásoff, that he had difficulty in writing his verses. There is nothing in his poetry similar to the easiness with which Púshkin used the forms of versification for expressing his thoughts, nor is there any approach to the musical harmony of Lérmontoff’s verse or A. K. Tolstóy’s. Even in his best poems there are lines which are not agreeable to the ear on account of their wooden and clumsy form; but you feel that these unhappy verses could be improved by the change of a few words, without the beauty of the images in which the feelings are expressed being altered by that. One certainly feels that Nekrásoff was not master enough of his words and his rhymes; but there is not one single poetical image which does not suit the whole idea of the poem, or which strikes the reader as a dissonance, or is not beautiful; while in some of his verses Nekrásoff has certainly succeeded in combining a very high degree of poetical inspiration with great beauty of form. It must not be forgotten that the Yambs of Barbier, and the Châtiments of Victor Hugo also leave, here and there, much to be desired as regards form.

Nekrásoff was a most unequal writer, but one of the above-named critics has pointed out that even amidst his most unpoetical “poem” — the one in which he describes in very poor verses the printing office of a newspaper — the moment that he touches upon the sufferings of the workingman there come in twelve lines which for the beauty of poetical images and musicalness, connected with their inner force, have few equals in the whole of Russian literature.

When we estimate a poet, there is something general in his poetry which we either love or pass by indifferently, and to reduce literary criticism exclusively to the analysis of the beauty of the poet’s verses or to the correspondence between “idea and form” is surely to immensely reduce its value. Everyone will recognise that Tennyson possessed a wonderful beauty of form, and yet he cannot be considered as superior to Shelley, for the simple reason that the general tenor of the latter’s ideas was so much superior to the general tenor of Tennyson’s. It is on the general contents of his poetry that Nekrásoff’s superiority rests.

We have had in Russia several poets who also wrote upon social subjects or the duties of a citizen — I need only mention Pleschéeff and Mináyeff — and they attained sometimes, from the versifier’s point of view, a higher beauty of form than Nekrásoff. But in whatever Nekrásoff wrote there is an inner force which you do not find in either of these poets, and this force suggests to him images which are rightly considered as pearls of Russian poetry.

Nekrásoff called his Muse, “A Muse of Vengeance and of Sadness,” and this Muse, indeed, never entered into compromise with injustice. Nekrásoff is a pessimist, but his pessimism, as Venguéroff remarks, has an original character. Although his poetry contains so many depressing pictures representing the misery of the Russian masses, nevertheless the fundamental impression which it leaves upon the reader is an elevating feeling. The poet does not bow his head before the sad reality: he enters into a struggle with it, and he is sure of victory. The reading of Nekrásoff wakes up that discontent which bears in itself the seeds of recovery.

His Love of the People

The mass of the Russian people, the peasants and their sufferings, are the main themes of our poet’s verses. His love to the people passes as a red thread through all his works; he remained true to it all his life. In his younger years that love saved him from squandering his talent in the sort of life which so many of his contemporaries have led; later on it inspired him in his struggle against serfdom; and when serfdom was abolished he did not consider his work terminated, as so many of his friends did: he became the poet of the dark masses oppressed by the economical and political yoke; and towards the end of his life he did not say: “Well, I have done what I could,” but till his last breath his verses were a complaint about not having been enough of a fighter. He wrote: “Struggle stood in the way of my becoming a poet, and songs prevented me from becoming a fighter,” and again: “Only he who is serviceable to the aims of his time, and gives all his life to the struggle for his brother men — only he will live longer than his life.”

Sometimes he sounds a note of despair; however, such a note is not frequent in Nekrásoff. His Russian peasant is not a man who only sheds tears. He is serene, sometimes humourous, and sometimes an extremely gay worker. Very seldom does Nekrásoff idealise the peasant: for the most part he takes him just as he is, from life itself; and the poet’s faith in the forces of that Russian peasant is deep and vigorous. “A little more freedom to breathe — he says — and Russia will shew that she has men, and that she has a future.” This is an idea which frequently recurs in his poetry.

Apotheosis of Woman

The best poem of Nekrásoff is Red-nosed Frost. It is the apotheosis of the Russian peasant woman. The poem has nothing sentimental in it. It is written, on the contrary, in a sort of elevated epic style, and the second part, where Frost personified passes on his way through the wood, and where the peasant woman is slowly freezing to death, while bright pictures of past happiness pass through her brain — all this is admirable, even from the point of view of the most aesthetic critics, because it is written in good verses and in a succession of beautiful images and pictures.

The Peasant Children is a charming village idyll. The “Muse of Vengeance and Sadness” — one of our critics remarks — becomes wonderfully mild and gentle as soon as she begins to speak of women and children. In fact, none of the Russian poets has ever done so much for the apotheosis of women, and especially of the mother-woman, as this supposedly severe poet of Vengeance and Sadness. As soon as Nekrásoff begins to speak of a mother he grows powerful; and the strophes he devoted to his own mother — a woman lost in a squire’s house, amidst men thinking only of hunting, drinking, and exercising their powers as slave owners in their full brutality — these strophes are real pearls in the poetry of all nations.

His poem devoted to the exiles in Siberia and to the Russian women — that is, to the wives of the Decembrists — in exile, is excellent and contains really beautiful passages, but it is inferior to either his poems dealing with the peasants or to his pretty poem, Sasha, in which he describes, contemporaneously with Turguéneff, the very same types as Rúdin and Natasha.

It is quite true that Nekrásoff’s verses often bear traces of a painful struggle with rhyme, and that there are lines in his poems which are decidedly inferior; but he is certainly one of our most popular poets amidst the masses of the people. Part of his poetry has already become the inheritance of all the Russian nation. He is immensely read — not only by the educated classes, but by the poorest peasants as well. In fact, as has been remarked by one of our critics, to understand Púshkin a certain more or less artificial literary development is required; while to understand Nekásoff it is sufficient for the peasant simply to know reading; and it is difficult to imagine, without having seen it, the delight with which Russian children in the poorest village schools are now reading Nekásoff and learning full pages from his verses by heart.

Other Prose-writers of the same Epoch

Having analysed the work of those writers who may be considered as the true founders of modern Russian literature, I ought now to review a number of prose-writers and poets of less renown, belonging to the same epoch. However, following the plan of this book, only a few words will be said, and only some of the most remarkable among them will be mentioned.

Serghéi Aksákoff

A writer of great power, quite unknown in Western Europe, who occupies a quite unique position in Russian literature, is SERGHÉI TIMOFÉEVITCH AKSÁKOFF (1791–1859), the father of the two Slavophile writers, Konstantín and Iván Aksákoff. He is in reality a contemporary of Púlshkin and Lérmontoff, but during the first part of his career he displayed no originality whatever, and lingered in the fields of pseudo-classicism. It was only after Gógol had written — that is, after 1846 — that he struck a quite new vein, and attained the full development of his by no means ordinary talent. In the years 1847–1855 he published his Memoirs of Angling, Memoirs of a Hunter with his Fowling Piece in the Government of Orenbúrg, and Stories and Remembrances of a Sportsman; and these three works would have been sufficient to conquer for him the reputation of a first-rate writer. The Orenbúrg region, in the Southern Uráls, was very thinly inhabited at that time, and its nature and physiognomy are so well described in these books that Aksákoff ‘s work reminds one of the Natural History of Selbourne. It has the same accuracy; but Aksákoff is moreover a poet and a first-rate poetical landscape painter. Besides, he so admirably knew the life of the animals, and he so well understood them, that in this respect his rivals could only be Krylóff on the one hand, and Brehm the elder and Audubon among the naturalists.

The influence of Gógol induced S. T. Aksákoff to entirely abandon the domain of pseudo-classical fiction. In 1846 he began to describe real life, and the result was a large work, A Family Chronicle and Remembrances (1856), soon followed by The Early Years of Bagróff-the-Grandchild (1858), which put him in the first ranks among the writers of his century. Slavophile enthusiasts described him even as a Shakespeare, nay, as a Homer; but all exaggeration apart, S. T. Aksákoff has really succeeded not only in reproducing a whole epoch in his Memoirs, but also in creating real types of men of that time, which have served as models for all our subsequent writers. If the leading idea of these Memoirs had not been so much in favour of the “good old times” of serfdom, they would have been even much more widely read than they are now. The appearance of A Family Chronicle — in 1856 — was an event, and the marking of an epoch in Russian literature.

Dahl

V. DAHL (1801–1872) cannot be omitted even from this short sketch. He was born in Southeastern Russia, of a Danish father and a Franco-German mother, and received his education at the Dorpat university. He was a naturalist and a doctor by profession, but his favourite study was ethnography, and he became a remarkable ethnographer, as well as one of the best connoisseurs of the Russian spoken language and its provincial dialects. His sketches from the life of the people, signed KOZAK LUGANSKIY (about a hundred of them are embodied in a volume, Pictures from Russian Life, 1861), were very widely read in the forties and the fifties, and were highly praised by Turguéneff and Byelínskiy. Although they are mere sketches and leaflets from a diary, without real poetical creation, they are delightful reading. As to the ethnographical work of Dal it was colossal. During his continual peregrinations over Russia, in his capacity of a military doctor attached to his regiment, he made most wonderful collections of words, expressions, riddles, proverbs, and so on, and embodied them in two large works. His main work is An Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, in four quarto volumes (first edition in 1861–68, second in 1880–1882). This is really a monumental work and contains the first and very successful attempt at a lexicology of the Russian language, which, notwithstanding some occasional mistakes, is of the greatest value for the understanding and the etymology of the Russian tongue as it is spoken in different provinces. It contains at the same time a precious and extremely rich collection of linguistic material for future research, part of which would have been lost by now if Dal had not collected it, fifty years ago, before the advent of railways. Another great work of Dal , only second to the one just mentioned, is a collection of proverbs, entitled The Proverbs of the Russian People (second edition in 1879).

Ivan Panaeff

A writer who occupies a prominent place in the evolution of the Russian novel, but has not yet been sufficiently appreciated, is IVAN PANAEFF (1812–1862), who was a great friend of all the literary circle of the Sovreménnik (Contemporary). Of this review he was co-editor with Nekrásoff, and he wrote for it a mass of literary notes and feuilletons upon all sorts of subjects, extremely interesting for characterising those times. In his novels Panáeff, like Turguéneff, took his types chiefly from the educated classes, both at St. Petersburg and in the provinces. His collection of “Swaggerers” (hlyschí), both from the highest classes in the capitals, and from provincials, is not inferior to Thackeray’s collection of “snobs.” In fact, the “swaggerer,” as Panáeff understood him, is even a much broader and much more complicated type of man than the snob, and cannot easily be described in a few words. The greatest service rendered by Panáeff was, however, the creation in his novels of a series of such exquisite types of Russian women that they were truly described by some critics as “the spiritual mothers of the heroines of Turguéneff.”

A. HERZEN (1812- 1870) also belongs to the same epoch, but he will be spoke of in a subsequent chapter.

Hvoschinskaya (V. Krestóvskiy-pseudonyme)

A very sympathetic woman writer, who belongs to the same group and deserves in reality much more than a brief notice, is N. D. HVOSCHINSKAYA (1825–1869; Zaionchkóvskaya after her marriage). She wrote under the masculine nom-de-plume of V. KRESTOVSKIY, and in order not to confound her with a very prolific writer of novels in the style of the French detective novel-the author of St. Petersburg Slums, whose name was VSEVOLOD KRESTOVSKIY — she is usually known in Russia as “V. Krestóvskiy-pseudonyme.”

N. D. Hvóschinskaya began to write very early, in 1847, and her novels were endowed with such an inner charm that they were always admired by the general public and were widely read. It must, however, be said that during the first part of her literary career the full value of her work was not appreciated, and that down to the end of the seventies literary criticism remained hostile to her. It was only towards the end of her career (in 1878–1880) that our best literary critics — Mihailóvskiy, Arsénieff and the novelist Boborýkin — recognised the full value of this writer, who certainly deserves being placed by the side of George Eliot and the author of Jane Eyre.

N. D. Hvóschinskaya certainly was not one of those who conquer their reputation at once; but the cause of the rather hostile attitude of Russian critics towards her was that, having been born in a poor nobleman’s family of Ryazán, and having spent all her life in the province, her novels of the first period, in which she dealt with provincial life and provincial types only, suffered from a certain narrowness of view. This last defect was especially evident in those types of men for whom the young author tried to win sympathy, but who, after all, had no claims to it, and simply proved that the author felt the need of idealising somebody, at least, in her sad surroundings.

Apart from this defect, N. D. Hvóschinskaya knew provincial life very well and pictured it admirably. She represented it exactly in the same pessimistic light in whichTurguéneff saw it in those same years — the last years of the reign of Nicholas I. She excelled especially in representing the sad and hopeless existence of the girl in most of the families of those times.

In her own family she meets the bigoted tyranny of her mother and the “let-me-alone” egotism of her father, and among her admirers she finds only a collection of good-for-nothings who cover their shallowness with empty, sonorous phrases. Every novel written by our author during this period contains the drama of a girl whose best self is crushed back in such surroundings, or it relates the still more heartrending drama of an old maid compelled to live under the tyranny, the petty persecutions and the pin-prickings of her relations.

When Russia entered into a better period, in the early sixties, the novels of N. D. Hvóschinskaya also took a different, much more hopeful character, and among them The Great Bear (1870–70 is the most prominent. At the time of its appearance it produced quite a sensation amidst our youth, and it had upon them a deeper influence, in the very best sense of the word, than any other novel. The heroine, Kátya, meets, in Verhóvskiy, a man of the weakling type which we know from Turguéneff’s Correspondence, but dressed this time in the garb of a social reformer, prevented only by “circumstances” and “misfortunes” from accomplishing greater things. Verhóvskiy, whom Kátya loves and who falls in love with her — so far, at least, as such men can fall in love — is admirably pictured. It is one of the best representatives in the already rich gallery of such types in Russian literature. It must be owned that there are in The Great Bear one or two characters which are not quite real, or, at least, are not correctly appreciated by the author (for instance, the old Bagryánskiy) ; but we find also a fine collection of admirably painted characters; while Kátya stands higher, is more alive, and is more fully pictured, than Turguéneff’s Natásha or even his Helen. She has had enough of all the talk about heroic deeds which “circumstances” prevent the would-be heroes from accomplishing, and she takes to a much smaller task — she becomes a loving school mistress in a village school, and undertakes to bring into the village — darkness her higher ideals and her hopes of a better future. The appearance of this novel, just at the time when that great movement of the youth “towards the people” was beginning in Russia, made it favourite reading by the side Of MORDÓVTSEFF’S Signs of the Times, and Spielhagen’s Amboss und Hammer and In Reih und Glied. The warm tone of the novel and the refined, deeply humane, poetical touches of which it is full — all these added immensely to the inner merits of The Great Bear. In Russia it has sown many a good idea, and there is no doubt that if it were known in Western Europe, it would be, here as well, a favourite with the thinking and well inspired young women and men.

A third period may be distinguished in the art of N. Hvóschinskaya, after the end of the seventies. The novels of this period — among which the series entitled The Album: Groups and Portraits is the most striking — have a new character. When the great liberal movement which Russia had lived through in the early sixties came to an end, and reaction had got the upper hand, after 1864, hundreds and hundreds of those who had been prominent in this movement as representatives of advanced thought and reform abandoned the faith and the ideals of their best years. Under a thousand various pretexts they now tried to persuade themselves — and, of course, those women who had trusted themthat new times had come, and new requirements had grown up; that they had only become “practical” when they deserted the old banner and ranged themselves under a new one — that of personal enrichment; that to do this was on their part a necessary self-sacrifice, a manifestation of “virile citizenship,” which requires from every man that he should not stop even before the sacrifice of his ideals in the interest of his “cause.” “V. Krestovskiy,” as a woman who had loved the ideals, understood better than any man the real sense of these sophisms. She must have bitterly suffered from them in her personal life; and I doubt whether in any literature there is a collection of such “groups and portraits” of deserters as we see in The Album, and especially in At the Photographer’s. In reading these stories we are conscious of a loving heart which bleeds as it describes these deserters, and this makes of “The groups and portraits” of N. D.Hvóschinskaya one of the finest pieces of “subjective realism” we possess in our literature.

Two sisters of N. D. Hvóschinskaya, who wrote under the noms-de-plume of ZIMAROFF and VESENIEFF, were also novelists. The former wrote a biography of her sister Nathalie.

Poets of the same Epoch

Several poets of the epoch described in the last two chapters ought to be analysed at some length in this place, if this book pretended to be a Course in Russian literature. I shall have, however, to limit myself to very short notes, although most of the poets could not have failed to be favourites with other nations if they had written in a language better known abroad than Russian.

Koltsoff

Such was certainly KOLTSOFF (1808–1842), a poet from the people, who has sung in his songs, so deeply appealing to every poetical mind, the borderless steppes of Southern Russia, the poor life of the tiller of the soil, the sad existence of the Russian peasant woman, that love which is for the loving soul only a source of acute suffering, that fate which is not a mother but a step-mother, and that happiness which has been so short and has left behind only tears and sadness.

The style, the contents, the form — all was original in this poet of the Steppes. Even the form of his verse is not the form established in Russian prosody: it is something as musical as the Russian folk-song and in places is equally irregular. However, every line of the poetry of the Koltsóff of his second period — when he had freed himself from imitation and had become a true poet of the people — every expression and every thought appeal to the heart and fill it with poetical love for nature and men. Like all the best Russian poets he died very young, just at the age when he was reaching the full maturity of his talent and deeper questions were beginning to inspire his poetry.

Nikitin

NIKITIN (1824–1861) was another poet of a similar type. He was born in a poor artisan’s family, also in South Russia. His life in this family, of which the head was continually under the influence of drink, and which the young man had to maintain, was terrible. He also died young, but he left some very fine and most touching pieces of poetry, in which, with a simplicity that we shall find only with the later folk novelists, he described scenes from popular life, coloured with the deep sadness impressed upon him by his own unhappy life.

Pleschéeff

A. PLESCHÉEFF (1825–1893) has been for the last thirty years of his life one of the favourite Russian poets. Like so many other gifted men of his generation, he was arrested in 1849 in connection with the affair of the “Petrashévskiy circles,” for which Dostoyévskiy was sent to bard tabour. He was found even less “guilty” than the great novelist, and was marched as a soldier to the Orenbúrg region, where he probably would have died a soldier, if Nicholas I. had not himself died in 1856. He was pardoned by Alexander II., and permitted to settle at Moscow.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Pleschéeff never let himself be crushed by persecution, or by the dark years which Russia has lately lived through. On the contrary, he always retained that same note of vigour, freshness, and faith in his humanitarian though perhaps too abstract ideals, which characterised his first poetical productions in the forties. Only towards his very latest years, under the influence of ill-health, did a pessimistic note begin to creep into his verses. Besides writing original poetry he translated very much, and admirably well, from the German, English, French and Italian poets.

The Admirers of Pure Art: Tutcheff

Besides these three poets, who sought their inspiration in the realities of life or in higher humanitarian ideals, we have a group of poets who are usually described as admirers of “pure beauty” and “Art for Art’s sake.” TH. TYÚTCHEFF (1803–1873) may be taken as the best, or, at any rate, the eldest representative of this group. Turguéneff spoke of him very highly — in 1854 — praising his fine and true feeling for nature and his fine taste. The influence of the epoch of Púshkin upon him was evident, and he certainly was endowed with the impressionability and sincerity which are necessary in a good poet. With all that, his verses are not much read, and seem rather dull to our generation.

Maykoff

APOLLON MAYKOFF (1821–1897) is often described as a poet of pure art for art’s sake; at any rate, this is what he preached in theory; but in reality his poetry belonged to four distinct domains. In his youth he was a pure admirer of antique Greece and Rome, and his chief work, Two Worlds, was devoted to the conflict between antique paganism and natureism and Christianity — the best types in his poem being representatives of the former. Later on he wrote several very good pieces of poetry devoted to the history of the Church in mediaeval times. Still later, in the sixties, he was carried away by the liberal movement in Russia and in Western Europe, and his poems were imbued with its spirit of freedom. He wrote during those years his best poems, and made numbers of excellent translations from Heine. And finally, after the liberal period had come to an end in Russia, he also changed his opinions and began to write in the opposite direction, losing more and more both the sympathy of his readers and his talent. Apart from some of the productions of this last period of decay, the verses of Máykoff are as a rule very musical, really poetical, and not devoid of force. In his earlier productions and in some pieces of his third period, he attained real beauty.

Scherbina

N. SCHERBINA (1821–1869), also an admirer of classical Greece, may be mentioned for his really good anthological poetry from the life of Greek antiquity, in which he even excelled Máykoff.

Polonskiy

POLONSKIY (1820–1898), a contemporary and a great friend of Turguéneff, displayed all the elements of a great artist. His verses are full of true melody, his poetical images are rich, and yet natural and simple, and the subjects he took were not devoid of originality. This is why his verses were always read with interest. But he had none of that force, or of that depth of conception, or of that intensity of passion which might have made of him a great poet. His best piece, A Musical Cricket, is written in a jocose mood, and his most popular verses are those which he wrote in the style of folk-poetry. One may say that they have become the property of the people. Altogether Polónskiy appealed chiefly to the quiet, moderate “intellectual” who does not much care about going to the bottom of the great problems of life. If he touched upon some of these, it was owing to a passing, rather than to a life interest in them.

A. Fet

One more poet of this group, perhaps the most characteristic of it, was A. SHENSHIN (1820–1892), much better known under his nom-de-plume of A. FET. He remained all his life a poet of “pure art for art’s sake.” He wrote a good deal about economical and social matters, always in the reactionary sense, but — in prose. As to verses, he never resorted to them for anything but the worship of beauty for beauty’s sake. In this direction he succeeded very well. His short verses are especially pretty and sometimes almost beautiful. Nature, in its quiet, lovely aspects, which lead to a gentle, aimless sadness, he depicted sometimes to perfection, as also those moods of the mind which can be best described as indefinite sensations, slightly erotic. However, taken as a whole, his poetry appears monotonous.

A. K. Tolstóy

To the same group one might add A. K. TOLSTÓY, whose verses attain sometimes a rare perfection and sound like the best music. The feelings expressed in them may not be very deep, but the form and the music of the verses are delightful. They have, moreover, the stamp of originality, because nobody could write poems in the style of Russian folk-poetry better than Alexéi Tolstóy. Theoretically, he preached art for art’s sake. But he never remained true to this canon and, taking either the life of old epical Russia, or the period of the struggle between the Moscow Tsars and the feudal boyars, he developed his admiration of the olden times in very beautiful verses. He also wrote a novel, Prince Serébryanyi, from the times of John the Terrible, which was very widely read; but his main work was a trilogy of dramas from the same interesting period of Russian history (see Ch. VI).

Almost all the poets just mentioned have translated a great deal, and they have enriched Russian literature with such a number of translations from all languages — so admirably done as a rule — that no other literature of the world, not even the German, can claim to possess an equally great treasury. Some translations, beginning with Zhukóvskiy’s rendering of the Prisoner of Chillon, or the translations of Hiawatha, are simply classical. All Schiller, most of Goethe,nearly all Byron, a great deal of Shelley, all that is worth knowing in Tennyson, Wordsworth, Crabbe, all that could be translated from Browning, Barbier, Victor Hugo, and so on, are as familiar in Russia as in the mother countries of these poets, and occasionally even more so. As to such favourites as Heine, I really don’t know whether his best poems lose anything in those splendid translations which we owe to our best poets; while the songs of Béranger, in the free translation of Kúrotchkin, are not in the least inferior to the originals.

The Translators

We have moreover some excellent poets who are chiefly known for their translations. Such are: N. GERBEL (18271883), who made his reputation by an admirable rendering of the Lay of Igor’s Raid (see Ch. 1.), and later on, by his versions of a great number of West European poets. His edition of Schiller, translated by Russian Poets ( 1857), followed by similar editions of Shakespeare, Byron, and Goethe, was epoch making.

MIKHAIL MIKHAILOFF (1826–1865), one of the most brilliant writers of the Contemporary, condemned in 1861 to hard labour in Siberia, where he died four years later, was especially renowned for his translations from Heine, as also for those from Longfellow, Hood, Tennyson, Lenan, and others.

P. WEINBERG (born 1830) made his reputation by his excellent translations from Shakespeare, Byron (Sardanapal), Shelley (Cenci), Sheridan, Coppe, Gutzkow, Heine, etc., and for his editions of the work of Goethe and Heine in Russian translations. He still continues to enrich Russian literature with excellent versions of the masterpieces of foreign literatures.

L. MEY (1822–1862), the author of a number of poems from popular life, written in a very picturesque language, and of several dramas, of which those from old Russian life are especially valuable and were taken by RIMSKIY KORSÁKOFF as the subjects of his operas, has also made a great number of translations. He translated not only from the modern West European poets — English, French, German, Italian, and Polish — but also from Greek, Latin, and Old Hebrew, all of which languages he knew to perfection. Besides excellent translations of Anacreon and the idylls of Theocritus, he wrote also beautiful poetical versions of the Song of Songs and of various other portions of the Bible.

D. MINAYEFF (1835–1889), the author of a great number of satirical verses, also belongs to this group of translators. His renderings from Byron, Burns, Cornwall, and Moore, Goethe and Heine, Leopardi, Dante, and several others, were, as a rule, extremely fine.

And finally I must mention one, at least, of the prose-translators, VVEDÉNSKIY (1813–1855), for his very fine translations of the chief novels of Dickens. His renderings are real works of art, the result of a perfect knowledge of English life, and of such a deep assimilation of the genius of Dickens that the translator almost identified himself with the original author.

Chapter 6: The Drama

Its Origin

The drama in Russia, as everywhere else, had a double origin. It developed out of the religious “mysteries” on the one hand and the popular comedy on the other, witty interludes being introduced into the grave, moral representations, the subjects of which were borrowed from the Old or the New Testament. Several such mysteries were adapted in the seventeenth century by the teachers of the Graeco-Latin Theological Academy at Kieff for representation in Little Russian by the students of the Academy, and later on these adaptations found their way to Moscow.

The Tsars Alexis and Peter I.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century — on the eve, so to speak, of the reforms of Peter I. — a strong desire to introduce Western habits of life was felt in certain small circles at Moscow, and the father of Peter, the Tsar Alexis, was not hostile to it. He took a liking to theatrical representations, and induced some foreigners residing at Moscow to write pieces for representation at the palace. A certain GREGORY undertook this task and, taking German versions of plays, which used to be called at that time “English Plays,” he adapted them to Russian tastes. The Comedy of Queen Esther and the Haughty Haman, Tobias, Judith, etc., were represented before the Tsar. A high functionary of the Church, SIMEON PÓLOTSKIY, did not disdain to write such mysteries, and several of them have come down to us; while a daughter of Alexis, the princess Sophie (a pupil of Simeon), breaking with the strict habits of isolation which were then obligatory for women, had theatrical representations given at the palace in her presence.

This was too much for the old Moscow Conservatives, and after the death of Alexis the theatre was closed; and so it remained a quarter of a century, i.e., until 1702, when Peter I., who was very fond of the drama, opened a theatre in the old capital. He had a company of actors brought for the purpose from Dantsig, and a special house was built for them within the holy precints of the Kremlin. More than that, another sister of Peter I., Nathalie, who was as fond of dramatic performances as the great reformer himself, a few years later took all the properties of this theatre to her own palace, and had the representations given there — first in German, and later on in Russian. It is also very probable that she herself wrote a few dramas — perhaps in collaboration with one of the pupils of a certain Doctor Bidlo, who had opened another theatre at the Moscow Hospital, the actors being the students. Later on the theatre of Princess Nathalie was transferred to the new capital founded by her brother on the Neva.

The répertoire of this theatre was pretty varied, and included, besides German dramas , like Scipio the African, Don Juan and Don Pedro, and the like, free translations from Molière, as also German farces of a very rough character. There were, besides a few original Russian dramas (partly contributed, apparently, by Nathalie), which were compositions drawn from the lives of the Saints, and from some Polish novels, widely read at that time in Russian manuscript translations.

It was out of these elements and out of West European models that the Russian drama evolved, when the theatre became, in the middle of the eighteenth century, a permanent institution. It is most interesting to note, that it was not in either of the capitals, but in a provincial town, Yarosláv, under the patronage of the local tradesmen, that the first permanent Russian theatre was founded, in 1750, and also that it was by the private enterprise of a few actors: the two brothers Vólkoff, Dmitrévsky, and several others. The Empress Elisabeth — probably following the advice of Sumarókoff, who himself began about that time to write dramasordered these actors to move to St. Petersburg, where they became “artists of the Imperial Theatre,” in the service of the Crown. Thus, the Russian theatre became, in 1756, an institution of the Government.

Sumarókoff

SUMARÓKOFF (1718–1777), who wrote, besides verses and fables (the latter of real value), a considerable number of tragedies and comedies, played an important part in the development of the Russian drama. In his tragedies he imitated Racine and Voltaire. He followed strictly their rules of “unity,” and cared even less than they did for historical truth; but as he had not the great talent of his French masters, he made of his heroes mere personifications of certain virtues or vices, figures quite devoid of life, and indulging in endless pompous monologues. Several of his tragedies (Hórev, written in 1747, Sináv and Trúvor, Yaropólk and Dílitza, Dmítri the Impostor) were taken from Russian history; but after all their heroes were as little Slavonian as Racine’s heroes were Greek and Roman. This, however, must be said in favour of Sumarókoff, that he never failed to express in his tragedies the more advanced humanitarian ideas of the times — sometimes with real feeling, which pierced through even the conventional forms of speech of his heroes. As to his comedies, although they had not the same success as his serious dramas, they were much nearer to life. They contained touches of the real life of Russia, especially of the life of the Moscow nobility, and their satirical character undoubtedly influenced Sumarókoff’s followers.

Pseudo-classical Tragedies: Knyazhnín, Ozeroff

KNYAZHNÍN (1742–1791) followed on the same, lines. Like Sumarókoff he translated tragedies from the French, and also wrote imitations of French tragedies, taking his subjects partly from Russian history (Rossláv, 1784; Vadím of Nógorod, which was printed after his death and was immediately destroyed by the Government on account of its tendencies towards freedom).

OZEROFF (1769–1816) continued the work of Knyazhnín, but introduced the sentimental and the romantic elements into his pseudo-classical tragedies (Oedipus in Athens, Death of 0lèg). With all their defects these tragedies enjoyed a lasting success, and powerfully contributed to the development of both the stage and a public of serious playgoers.

First Comedies

At the same time comedies also began to be written by the same authors (The Brawler, Strange People, by Knyazhnín) and their followers, and although they were for the most part imitations of the French, nevertheless subjects taken from Russian everyday life began to be introduced. Sumarókoff had already done something in this direction, and he had been seconded by CATHERINE II., who contributed a couple of satirical comedies, taken from her surroundings, such as The Fête of Mrs. Grumbler, and a comic opera from Russian popular life. She was perhaps the first to introduce Russian peasants on the stage; and it is worthy of note that the taste for a popular vein on the stage, rapidly developed — the comedies, The Miller by ABLESÍMOFF, Zbítenshik (The Hawker), by Knyazhnín, and so on, all taken from the life of the people, being for some time great favourites with the playgoers.

VON-WIZIN has already been mentioned in a previous chapter, and it is sufficient here to recall the fact, that by his two comedies, The Brigadier (1768) and Nédorosl (1782), which continued to be played up to the middle of the nineteenth century he became the father of the realistic satirical comedy in Russia. Denunciation (Yábeda), by KAPNIST, and a few comedies contributed by the great fablewriter KRYLÓFF belong to the same category.

The First Years of the Nineteenth Century

During the first thirty years of the nineteenth century the Russian theatre developed remarkably. The stage produced, at St. Petersburg and at Moscow, a number of gifted and original actors and actresses, both in tragedy and in comedy. The number of writers for the stage became so considerable that all the forms of dramatic art were able to develop at the same time. During the Napoleonic wars patriotic tragedies, full of allusions to current events, such as Dmítri Donskói (1807), by Ozeroff, invaded the stage. However, the pseudo-classical tragedy continued to hold its own. Better translations and imitations of Racine were produced (KATÉNIN, KOKÓSHKIN) and enjoyed a certain success, especially at St. Petersburg, owing to good tragic actors of the declamatory school. At the same time translations of KOTZEBUE had an enormous success, as also the Russian productions of his sentimental imitators.

Romanticism and pseudo-classicalism were, of course, at war with each other for the possession of the stage, as they were in the domains of poetry and the novel; but, owing to the spirit of the time, and patronised as it was by KARAMZÍN and ZHUKÓVSKIY, romanticism triumphed. It was aided especially by the energetic efforts of Prince SHAHOVSKÓY, who wrote, with a good knowledge of the stage, more than a hundred varied pieces-tragedies, comedies, operas, vaudevilles and ballets — taking the subjects for his dramas from Walter Scott, Ossian, Shakespeare, and Púshkin. At the same comedy, and especially satirical comedy, as also the vaudeville (which approached comedy by a rather more careful treatment of characters than is usual in that sort of literature on the French stage), were represented by a very great number of more or less original productions. Besides the excellent translations of HMELNÍTZKIY from Molière, the public enjoyed also the pieces of ZAGÓSKIN, full of good-hearted merriment, the sometimes brilliant and always animated comedies and vaudevilles of Shahovskóy, the vaudevilles of A. I. PÍSAREFF, and so on. True, all the comedies were either directly inspired by Molière or were adaptations from the French into which Russian characters and Russian manners had been introduced, but as there was still some original creation in these adaptions, which was carried a step further on the stage by gifted actors of the natural, realist school, it all prepared the way for the truly Russian comedy, which found its embodiment in Griboyédoff, Gógol and Ostróvskiy.

Griboyédoff

GRIBOYÉDOFF (1795–1829) died very young, and all that he left was one comedy, Misfortune from Intelligence (Góre ot Umá), and a couple of scenes from an unfinished tragedy in the Shakespearean style. However, the comedy is a work of genius, and owing to it alone, Griboyédoff may be described as having done for the Russian stage what Púshkin has done for Russian poetry.

Griboyédoff was born at Moscow, and received a good education at home before he entered the Moscow University, at the age of fifteen. Here he was fortunate enough to fall under the influence of the historian Schlötzer and Professor Buhle, who developed in him the desire for a thorough acquaintance with the world-literature, together with habits of serious work. It was consequently during his stay at the University (1810–1812) that Griboyédoff wrote the first sketch of his comedy, at which he worked for the next twelve years.

In 1812, during the invasion of Napoleon, he entered the military service, and for four years remained an officer of the hussars, chiefly in Western Russia. The spirit of the army was quite different then from what it became later on, under Nicholas I.: it was in the army that the “Decembrists” made their chief propaganda, and Griboyédoff met among his comrades men of high humanitarian tendencies. In 1816 he left the military service, and, obeying the desire of his mother, entered the diplomatic service at St. Petersburg, where he became friendly with the “Decembrists” Tchaadáeff (see Ch. VIII.), Ryléeff, and Odóevskiy (see Ch. I. and II.).

A duel, in which Griboyédoff took part as a second, was the cause of the future dramatist’s removal from St. Petersburg. His mother insisted upon his being sent as far as possible from the capital, and he was accordingly despatched to Teheran. He travelled a good deal in Persia, and, with his wonderful activity and liveliness, took a prominent part in the diplomatic work of the Russian Embassy. Later on, staying at Tiflís, and acting as a secretary to the Lieutenant of the Caucasus, he worked hard in the same diplomatic domain; but he worked also all the time at his comedy, and in 1824 he finished it, while he was for a few months in Central Russia. Owing to a mere accident the manuscript of Misfortune from Intelligence became known to a few friends, and the comedy produced a tremendous sensation among them. In a few months it was being widely read in manuscript copies, raising storms of indignation amongst the old generation, and provoking the greatest admiration among the young. All efforts, however, to obtain its production on the stage, or even to have it represented once in private, were thwarted by the censorship, and Griboyédoff returned to the Caucasus without having seen his comedy played at a theatre.

There, at Tiflís, he was arrested a few days after the 14th of December, 1825 (see Ch. I.), and taken in all speed to the St. Petersburg fortress, where his best friends were already imprisoned. It is said in the Memoirs of one of the Decembrists that even in the gloomy surroundings of the fortress the habitual brightness of Griboyédoff did not leave him. He used to tell his unfortunate friends such amusing stories by means of taps on the walls that they rolled on their beds, laughing like children.

In June , 1826, he was set free, and sent back to Tiflís. But after the execution of some of his friends — Ryléeff was among them — and the harsh sentence to hard labour for life in Siberian mines, which was passed upon all the others, his old gaiety was gone forever.

At Tiflís he worked harder than ever at spreading seeds of a better civilisation in the newly conquered territory; but next year he had to take part in the war of 1827–1828 against Persia, accompanying the army as a diplomatic agent, and after a crushing defeat of the Shah, Abbas-mirza, it was he who concluded the well-known Turkmanchái treaty, by which Russia obtained rich provinces from Persia and gained such an influence over her inner affairs. After a flying visit to St. Petersburg, Griboyédoff was sent once more to Teheran — this time as an ambassador. Before leaving, he married at Tiflís a Georgian princess of remarkable beauty, but he felt, as he left the Caucasus for Persia, that his chances of returning alive were few: “Abbas, Miraz,” he wrote, “will never pardon me the Turkmanchái treaty” — and so it happened. Afew months after his arrival at Teheran a crowd of Persians fell upon the Russian embassy, and Griboyédoff was killed.

For the last few years of his life, Griboyédoff had not much time nor taste for literary work. He knew that nothing he desired to write could ever see the light. Even Misfortune from Intelligence had been so mutilated by censorship that many of its best passages had lost all sense. He wrote, however, a tragedy in the romantic style, A Georgian Night, and those of his friends who had read it in full rated extremely high its poetic and dramatic qualities; but only two scenes from this tragedy and the outline of its contents have reached us. The manuscript was lost — perhaps at Teheran.

Misfortune from Intelligence is a most powerful satire, directed against the high society of Moscow in the years 1820–1830. Griboyédoff knew this society from the inside, and his types are not invented. Real men gave him the foundations for such immortal types as Fámusoff, the aged nobleman, and Skalozúb, the fanatic of militarism, as well as for all the secondary personages. As to the language in which Griboyédoff’s personages speak, it has often been remarked that up to his time only three writers had been such great masters of the truly Russian spoken language: Púlshkin, Krylóff, and Griboyédoff. Later on, Ostróvskiy could be added to these three. It is the true language of Moscow. Besides, the comedy is full of verses so strikingly satirical and so well said, that scores of them became proverbs known all over Russia.

The idea of the comedy must have been suggested by Molière’s Misanthrope, and the hero, Tchátskiy, has certainly much in common with Alceste. But Tchátskiy is, at the same time, so much Griboyédoff himself, and his cutting sarcasms are so much the sarcasms which Griboyédoff must have launched against his Moscow acquaintances, while all the other persons of the comedy are so truly Moscow people — so exclusively Moscow nobles — that apart from its leading motive, the comedy is entirely original and most thoroughly Russian.

Tchátskiy is a young man who returns from a long journey abroad, and hastens to the house of an old gentleman, Fámusoff, whose daughter, Sophie, was his playmate in childhood, and is loved by him now. However, the object of his vows has meanwhile made the accquaintance of her father’s secretary — a most insignificant and repulsive young man, Moltchálin, whose rules of life are: First, “moderation and punctuality,” and next, to please everyone in the house of his superiors, down to the gatekeeper and his dog, “that even the dog may be kind to me.” Following his rules, Moltchálin courts at the same time the daughter of his principal and her maid: the former, to make himself agreeable in his master’s house, and the latter, because she pleases him. Tchátskiy is received in a very cold way. Sophie is afraid of his intelligence and his sarcasm, and her father has already found a partner for her in Colonel Skalozúb — a military man full six feet high in his socks, who speaks in a deep bass voice, exclusively about military matters, but has a fortune and will soon be a general.

Tchátskiy behaves just as an enamoured young man would do. He sees nothing but Sophie, whom he pursues with his adoration, making in her presence stinging remarks about Moltchálin, and bringing her father to despair by his free criticism of Moscow manners — the cruelty of the old serfowners, the platitudes of the old courtiers, and so on; and as a climax, at a ball, which Fámusoff gives that night, he indulges in long monologues against the adoration of the Moscow ladies for everything French. Sophie, in the meantime, offended by his remarks about Moltchálin, retaliates by setting afloat the rumour that Tchátskiy is not quite right in his mind, a rumour which is taken up with delight by Society at the ball, and spreads like wildfire.