With Gógol begins a new period of Russian literature, which is called

by Russian literary critics “the Gógol period,” and 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 displayed some

literary talent and wrote a few comedies in Little Russian, but Gógol

lost him at an early age. The boy was educated 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. Petersburg

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.

His début was in 1829, with little novels taken from 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 recognised Gógol’s genius, and received

him with open arms.

Little Russia differs considerably from the central parts of the

empire, _i. e._, from the country round Moscow, which is known as Great

Russia. It has a more southern position, and everything southern has

always a certain attraction for northerners. 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 Byzantine 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 mid-summer 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.”

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 neighbours 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.

TARÁS BÚLBA--THE CLOAK

The pearl of Gógol’s Little-Russian novels is an historical novel,

_Tarás 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 Sícha. Men of all conditions, including runaways

from their landlords, outlaws, and adventurers of all sorts, could

come and settle in the Sícha without being asked any questions but

whether they went to church. “Well, then, make the sign of the cross,”

the hetman of the Sícha said, “and join the division you like.” The

Sícha 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 Sícha, 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 Sícha, which--as often

happened in those times--was quickly drawn into war, in consequence 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 siege 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 be 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 apparel

hanging about in the 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]

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.

_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 on

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 Suit_,

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 beginning 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 _répertoire_ 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 be 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

poor people could be bought.” His 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 Maníloffs 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 the influence of “pietists”--especially of

Madame O. 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 1852.

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 I.’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 indictment 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 torch-bearer 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 Dostoyévskiy were a direct outcome of Gógol’s initiative.

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] There is a good English translation of _The Inspector-General_,

from which, with slight revision, I take the following passage.

_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 Gorodníchiys’! 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_): “As 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....”

_Korobkin_: 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_).

_Postma._: 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.

[13] This was in those times an expression which meant “without

paying.”

PART IV

Turguéneff--Tolstóy

CHAPTER IV

TURGUÉNEFF--TOLSTÓY

Turguéneff: The main features of his Art--_A Sportsman’s

Notebook_--Pessimism of his early novels--His series

of novels representing the leading types of Russian

society--Rúdin--Lavrétskiy--Helen and Insároff--Bazároff--Why _Fathers

and Sons_ was misunderstood--_Hamlet and Don Quixote_--_Virgin Soil_:

movement towards the people--_Verses in Prose_. TOLSTÓY: _Childhood

and Boyhood_--During and after the Crimean War--_Youth_: In search of

an ideal--Small stories--_The Cossacks_--Educational work--_War and

Peace_--_Anna Karénina_--Religious crisis--His interpretation of the

Christian teaching--Main points of the Christian ethics--Latest works

of Art--_Kreutzer Sonata_--_Resurrection_.

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.

For the artistic construction, the finish and the beauty of his novels,

Turguéneff was very probably the greatest novel-writer 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 “history-making” 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 Turguéneff’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.

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.”

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 Note-Book_ 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.

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 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, slave-owning 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 Lézhneff, 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 Lézhneff, “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]

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.

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.

* * * * *

The next novel of Turguéneff was _Fathers and Sons_. It was written in

1859 when, instead of the sentimentalists and “æsthetical” 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.

_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, Písareff, 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 Bazároff, 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

well-being!” 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.”

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; he 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 he finds in himself: he feels his

weakness, but each self-consciousness is a force wherefrom results

his irony, the opposite of the enthusiasm 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 he, 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, he 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 them 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 Bazároff’s

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 had 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.

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 beginnings of the movement. Besides,

Turguéneff did not meet with any of the best representatives 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 Bazároff’s 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.

In conclusion, a few words, at least, must be said about his “_Verse 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’s 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, Tolstóy 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.

Venguéroff--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 æsthetical schools), proved to be a

_chef d’œuvre_.

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,

1854_, 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 they 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--Tchernyshévskiy, 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 party 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 epicuræan 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

Tchernyshévskiy’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 Neklúdoff; 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 the 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 those 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 utilising some family traditions and documents)

a great historical novel, _The Decembrists_ (see Chapter I.), and he

finished in 1863 the first chapters of this novel (Vol. III. 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 Róstoff, or of

Denísoff, stand out with individual features. When you think of the

variety of human characters 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 whom 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 Bagratión, 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,

or to 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 Timókhins 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 of 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. Karatáeff 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, an 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

æsthetic 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 Napoléon 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,

Napoléon, reduced to such small proportions, and even ridiculed. But

the Napoléon who came to Russia was no longer the man who had inspired

the armies of the _sans-culottes_ 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 Napoléon 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

Napoléon 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 KARÉNINA.

Of all the Tolstóy 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 branded, the rights of a new love, serious and deep,

appearing after years of happy married life, had only been the more

seriously analysed. Tchernyshévskiy’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.