biblical epigraph: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay it,” and in
which the biblical revenge falls upon the unfortunate Karénina, who
puts an end by suicide to her sufferings after her separation from
her husband. Russian critics evidently could not accept Tolstóy’s
views. The case of Karénina was one of those where there could be no
question of “vengeance.” She was married as a young girl to an old
and unattractive man. At that time she did not know exactly what she
was doing, and nobody had explained it to her. She had never known
love, and learned it for the first time when she saw Vrónskiy. Deceit,
for her, was absolutely out of the question; and to keep up a merely
conventional marriage would have been a sacrifice which would not
have made her husband and child any happier. Separation, and a new
life with Vrónskiy, who seriously loved her, was the only possible
outcome. At any rate, if the story of Anna Karénina had to end in
tragedy, it was not in the least in consequence of an act of supreme
justice. As always, the honest artistic genius of Tolstóy had itself
indicated another cause--the real one. It was the inconsistency of
Vrónskiy and Karénina. After having separated from her husband and
defied “public opinion”--that is, the opinion of women who, as Tolstóy
shows it himself, were not honest enough to be allowed any voice in
the matter--neither she nor Vrónskiy had the courage of breaking
entirely with that society, the futility of which Tolstóy knows and
describes so exquisitely. Instead of that, when Anna returned with
Vrónskiy to St. Petersburg, her own and Vrónskiy’s chief preoccupation
was--How Betsey and other such women would receive her, if she made her
appearance among them. And it was the opinion of the Betsies--surely
not Superhuman Justice--which brought Karénina to suicide.
RELIGIOUS CRISIS
Everyone knows the profound change which took place in Tolstóy’s
fundamental conceptions of life in the years 1875-1878, when he had
reached the age of about fifty. I do not think that one has the right
to discuss publicly what has been going on in the very depths of
another’s mind; but, by telling us himself the inner drama and the
struggles which he has lived through, the great writer has, so to say,
invited us to verify whether he was correct in his reasonings and
conclusions; and limiting ourselves to the psychological material
which he has given us, we may discuss it without undue intrusion into
the motives of his actions.
It is most striking to find, on re-reading the earlier works of
Tolstóy, how the ideas which he advocates at the present time were
always cropping up in his earlier writings. Philosophical questions and
questions concerning the moral foundations of life interested him from
his early youth. At the age of sixteen he used to read philosophical
works, and during his university years, and even through “the stormy
days of passion,” questions as to how we ought to live rose with their
full importance before him. His autobiographical novels, especially
_Youth_, bear deep traces of that inner work of his mind, even though,
as he says in _Confession_, he has never said all he might have said
on this subject. Nay, it is evident that although he describes his
frame of mind in those years as that of “a philosophical Nihilist,” he
had never parted, in reality, with the beliefs of his childhood.[17]
He always was an admirer and follower of Rousseau. In his papers on
education (collected in Vol. IV. of the tenth Moscow edition of his
_Works_) one finds treated in a very radical way most of the burning
social questions which he has discussed in his later years. These
questions even then worried him so much that, while he was carrying
on his school work in Yásnaya Polyána and was a Peace Mediator--that
is, in the years 1861-62--he grew so disgusted with the unavoidable
dualism of his position of a benevolent landlord, that--to quote his
own words--“I should have come then, perhaps, to the crisis which I
reached fifteen years later, if there had not remained one aspect of
life which promised me salvation--namely, married life.” In other
words, Tolstóy was already very near to breaking with the privileged
class point of view on Property and Labour, and to joining the great
populistic movement which was already beginning in Russia. This he
probably would have done, had not a new world of love, family life, and
family interests, which he embraced with the usual intensity of his
passionate nature, fastened the ties that kept him attached to his own
class.
Art, too, must have contributed to divert his attention from the
social problem--at least, from its economic aspects. In _War and
Peace_ he developed the philosophy of _the masses versus the heroes_,
a philosophy which in those years would have found among the educated
men of all Europe very few persons ready to accept it. Was it his
poetical genius which revealed to him the part played by the masses in
the great war of 1812, and taught him that they--the masses, and not
the heroes--had accomplished all the great things in history? Or, was
it but a further development of the ideas which inspired him in his
Yásnaya Polyána school, in opposition to all the educational theories
that had been elaborated by Church and State in the interest of the
privileged classes? At any rate, _War and Peace_ must have offered him
a problem great enough to absorb his thoughts for a number of years;
and in writing this monumental work, in which he strove to promote a
new conception of history, he must have felt that he was working in
the right way. As to _Anna Karénina_, which had no such reformatory or
philosophical purpose, it must have offered to Tolstóy the possibility
of living through once more, with all the intensity of poetical
creation, the shallow life of the leisured classes, and to contrast it
with the life of the peasants and their work. And it was while he was
finishing this novel that he began to fully realise how much his own
life was in opposition to the ideals of his earlier years.
A terrible conflict must have been going on then in the mind of the
great writer. The communistic feeling which had induced him to put in
italics the fact about the singer at _Lucerne_, and to add to it a hot
indictment against the civilisation of the moneyed classes; the trend
of thought which had dictated his severe criticisms against private
property in _Holstomyér: the History of a Horse_; the anarchistic ideas
which had brought him, in his Yásnaya Polyána educational articles, to
a negation of a civilisation based on Capitalism and State; and, on
the other hand, his individual property conceptions, which he tried to
conciliate with his communistic leanings (see the conversation between
the two brothers Lévin in _Anna Karénina_); his want of sympathy with
the parties which stood in opposition to the Russian Government
and, at the same time, his profound, deeply rooted dislike of that
Government, all these tendencies must have been in an irreconcilable
conflict in the mind of the great writer, with all the passionate
intensity which is characteristic of Tolstóy, as with all men of
genius. These constant contradictions were so apparent that while less
perspicacious Russian critics and the _Moscow Gazette_ defenders of
serfdom considered Tolstóy as having joined their reactionary camp,
a gifted Russian critic, Mihailóvskiy, published in 1875 a series of
remarkable articles, entitled _The Right Hand and the Left Hand of
Count Tolstóy_, in which he pointed out the two men who constantly
were in conflict in the great writer. In these articles, the young
critic, a great admirer of Tolstóy, analysed the advanced ideas which
he had developed in his educational articles, which were almost
quite unknown at that time, and contrasted them with the strangely
conservative ideas which he had expressed in his later writings. As a
consequence, Mihailóvskiy predicted a crisis to which the great writer
was inevitably coming.
“I will not speak,” he wrote, “of _Anna Karénina_, first of all
because it is not yet terminated, and second, because one must speak
of it very much, or not at all. I shall only remark that in this
novel--much more superficially, but for that very reason perhaps
even more distinctly than anywhere else--one sees the traces of the
drama which is going on in the soul of the author. One asks oneself
what such a man is to do, how can he live, how shall he avoid that
poisoning of his consciousness which at every step intrudes into the
pleasures of a satisfied need? Most certainly he must, even though
it may be instinctively, seek for a means to put an end to the inner
drama of his soul, to drop the curtain; but how to do it? I think
that if an ordinary man were in such a position, he would have ended
in suicide or in drunkenness. A man of value will, on the contrary,
seek for other issues, and of such issues there are several.”
(_Otéchestvennyia Zapíski_, a review, June, 1875; also Mihailóvskiy’s
_Works_, Vol. III, p. 491.)
One of these issues--Mihailóvskiy continued--would be to write for the
people. Of course, very few are so happy as to possess the talent and
the faculties which are necessary for that:
“But once he (Tolstóy) is persuaded that the nation consists of two
halves, and that even the ‘innocent’ pleasures of the one half are
to the disadvantage of the other half--why should he not devote his
formidable forces to this immense task? It is even difficult to
imagine that any other theme could interest the writer who carries in
his soul such a terrible drama as the one that Count Tolstóy carries.
So deep and so serious is it, so deeply does it go to the root of
all literary activity, that it must presumably destroy all other
interests, just as the creeper suffocates all other plants. And, is
it not a sufficiently high aim in life, always to remind ‘Society’
that its pleasures and amusements are not the pleasures and the
amusements of all mankind, to explain to ‘Society’ the true sense of
the phenomena of progress, to wake up, be it only in the few, the more
impressionable, the conscience and the feeling of justice? And is not
this field wide enough for poetical creation?...
“The drama which is going on in Count Tolstóy’s soul is my
hypothesis,” Mihailóvskiy concluded, “but it is a legitimate
hypothesis without which it is impossible to understand his writings.”
(_Works_, III, 496.)
It is now known how much Mihailóvskiy’s hypothesis was a prevision. In
the years 1875-76, as Tolstóy was finishing _Anna Karénina_, he began
fully to realise the shallowness and the duality of the life that he
had hitherto led. “Something strange,” he says, “began to happen within
me: I began to experience minutes of bewilderment, of arrest of life,
as if I did not know how to live and what to do.” “What for? What
next?” were the questions which began to rise before him. “Well,” he
said to himself, “you will have 15,000 acres of land in Samara, 3000
horses--but what of that? And I was bewildered, and did not know what
to think next.” Literary fame had lost for him its attraction, now that
he had reached the great heights to which _War and Peace_ had brought
him. The little picture of Philistine family-happiness which he had
pictured in a novel before his marriage (_Family Happiness_) he had now
lived through, but it no longer satisfied him. The life of Epicureanism
which he had led hitherto had lost all sense for him. “I felt,” he
writes in _Confession_, “that what I had stood upon had broken down;
that there was nothing for me to stand upon; that what I had lived by
was no more, and that there was nothing left me to live by. My life
had come to a stop.” The so-called “family duties” had lost their
interest. When he thought of the education of his children, he asked
himself, “What for?” and very probably he felt that in his landlord’s
surroundings he never would be able to give them a better education
than his own, which he condemned; and when he began thinking of the
well-being of the masses he would all of a sudden ask himself: “What
business have I to think of it?”
He felt that he had nothing to live for. He even had no wishes which
he could recognise as reasonable. “If a fairy had come to me, and
offered to satisfy my wish, I should not have known what to wish ...
I even could not wish to know Truth, because I had guessed of what it
would consist. The Truth was, that life is nonsense.” He had no aim in
life, no purpose, and he realised that without a purpose, and with its
unavoidable sufferings, life is not worth living (_Confession_, VI,
VII).
He had not--to use his own expression--“the moral bluntness of
imagination” which would be required not to have his Epicureanism
poisoned by the surrounding misery; and yet, like Schopenhauer, he had
not the Will that was necessary for adjusting his actions in accordance
with the dictates of his reason. Self-annihilation, death, appeared
therefore as a welcome solution.
However, Tolstóy was too strong a man to end his life in suicide. He
found an outcome, and that outcome was indicated to him by a return to
the love which he had cherished in his youth: _the love of the peasant
masses_. “Was it in consequence of a strange, so to say a physical love
of the truly working people,” he writes--or of some other cause? but
he understood at last that he must seek the sense of life among the
millions who toil all their life long. He began to examine with more
attention than before the life of these millions. “And I began,” he
says, “to love these people.” And the more he penetrated into their
lives, past and present, the more he loved them, and “the easier it
was for me to live.” As to the life of the men of his own circle--the
wealthy and cultured, “I not only felt disgust for it: it lost all
sense in my eyes.” He understood that if he did not see what life was
worth living for, it was his own life “in exclusive conditions of
epicureanism” which had obscured the truth.
“I understood,” he continues, “that my question, ‘What is life?’
and my reply to it, ‘Evil,’ were quite correct. I was only wrong in
applying them to life altogether. To the question, ‘What is life?’
I had got the reply, ‘Evil and nonsense!’ And so it was. My own
life--a life of indulgence in passions--was void of sense and full of
evil, but this was true of my life only, not of the life of all men.
Beginning with the birds and the lowest animals, all live to maintain
life and to secure it for others besides themselves, while I not only
did not secure it for others: I did not secure it even for myself. I
lived as a parasite, and, having put to myself the question, ‘What do
I live for?’ I got the reply, ‘For no purpose.’”
The conviction, then, that he must live as the millions live, earning
his own livelihood; that he must toil as the millions toil; and that
such a life is the _only_ possible reply to the questions which
had brought him to despair--the only way to escape the terrible
contradictions which had made Schopenhauer preach self-annihilation,
and Solomon, Sakiamuni, and so many others preach their gospel of
despairing pessimism, this conviction, then, saved him and restored to
him lost energy and the will to live. But that same idea had inspired
thousands of the Russian youth, in those same years, and had induced
them to start the great movement “_V narod!_” “Towards the people; be
the people!”
Tolstóy has told us in an admirable book, _What is, then, to be
done?_ the impressions which the slums of Moscow produced upon him in
1881, and the influence they had upon the ulterior development of his
thoughts. But we do not yet know what facts and impressions made him so
vividly realise in 1875-81 the emptiness of the life which he had been
hitherto leading. Is it then presuming too much if I suggest that it
was this very same movement, “towards the people,” which had inspired
so many of the Russian youth to go to the villages and the factories,
and to live there the life of the people, which finally brought
Tolstóy, also, to reconsider his position as a rich landlord?
That he knew of this movement there is not the slightest doubt. The
trial of the Netcháeff groups in 1871 was printed in full in the
Russian newspapers, and one could easily read through all the youthful
immaturity of the speeches of the accused the high motives and the love
of the people which inspired them. The trial of the Dolgúshin groups,
in 1875, produced a still deeper impression in the same direction; but
especially the trial, in March, 1877, of those of transcendent worth,
girls Bárdina, Lubatóvitch, the sisters Subbótin, “the Moscow Fifty”
as they were named in the circles, who, all from wealthy families,
had led the life of factory girls, in the horrible factory-barracks,
working fourteen and sixteen hours a day, in order to be with the
working people and to teach them.... And then--the trial of the
“Hundred-and-Ninety-Three” and of Véra Zasúlitch in 1878. However great
Tolstóy’s dislike of revolutionists might have been, he must have felt,
as he read the reports of these trials, or heard what was said about
them at Moscow and in his province of Túla, and witnessed round him
the impression they had produced--he, the great artist, must have felt
that this youth was much nearer to what he himself was in his earlier
days, in 1861-62, than to those among whom he lived now--the Katkóffs,
the “Fets,” and the like. And then, even if he knew nothing about
these trials and had heard nothing about the “Moscow Fifty,” he knew,
at least, Turguéneff’s _Virgin Soil_, which was published in January,
1877, and he must have felt, even from that imperfect picture, so
warmly greeted by young Russia, what this young Russia was.
If Tolstóy had been in his twenties, he might possibly have joined the
movement, in one form or another, notwithstanding all the obstacles.
Such as he was, in his surroundings, and especially with his mind
already preoccupied by the problem--“Where is the lever which would
move human hearts at large, and become the source of the deep moral
reform of every individual?” with such a question on his mind, he had
to live through many a struggle before he was brought consciously
to take the very same step. For our young men and women, the mere
statement that one who had got an education, thanks to the work of
the masses, owed it therefore to these masses to work in return for
them--this simple statement was sufficient. They left their wealthy
houses, took to the simplest life, hardly different from that of
a workingman, and devoted their lives to the people. But for many
reasons--such as education, habits, surroundings, age, and, perhaps,
the great philosophical question he had in his mind, Tolstóy had to
live through the most painful struggles, before he came to the very
same conclusion, but in a different way: that is to say, before he
concluded that he, as the bearer of a portion of the divine Unknown,
had to fulfil the will of that Unknown, which will was that everyone
should work for the universal welfare.[18]
The moment, however, that he came to this conclusion, he did not
hesitate to act in accordance with it. The difficulties he met in
his way, before he could follow the injunction of his conscience,
must have been immense. We can faintly guess them. The sophisms he
had to combat--especially when all those who understood the value of
his colossal talent began to protest against his condemnation of his
previous writing--we can also easily imagine. And one can but admire
the force of his convictions, when he entirely reformed the life he had
hitherto led.
The small room he took in his rich mansion is well known through a
world-renowned photograph. Tolstóy behind the plough, painted by
Ryépin, has gone the round of the world, and is considered by the
Russian Government so dangerous an image that it has been taken from
the public gallery where it was exhibited. Limiting his own living
to the strictly necessary minimum of the plainest sort of food, he
did his best, so long as his physical forces lasted, to earn that
little by physical work. And for the last years of his life he has
been writing even more than he ever did in the years of his greatest
literary productivity.
The effects of this example which Tolstóy has given mankind everyone
knows. He believes, however, that he must give also the philosophical
and religious reasons for his conduct, and this he did in a series of
remarkable works.
Guided by the idea that millions of plain working people realised the
sense of life, and found it in life itself, which they considered
as the accomplishment of “the will of the Creator of the universe,”
he accepted the simple creed of the masses of the Russian peasants,
even though his mind was reluctant to do so, and followed with them
the rites of the Greek Orthodox Church. There was a limit, however,
to such a concession, and there were beliefs which he positively
could not accept. He felt that when he was, for instance, solemnly
declaring during the mass, before communion, that he took the latter
in the literal sense of the words--not figuratively--he was affirming
something which he could not say in full conscience. Besides, he soon
made the acquaintance of the Non-conformist peasants, Sutyáeff and
Bondaryóff, whom he deeply respected, and he saw, from his intercourse
with them, that by joining the Greek Orthodox Church he was lending a
hand to all its abominable prosecutions of the Non-conformists--that he
was a party to the hatred which all Churches profess towards each other.
Consequently, he undertook a complete study of Christianity,
irrespective of the teachings of the different churches, including
a careful revision of the translations of the gospels, with the
intention of finding out what was the real meaning of the Great
Teacher’s precepts, and what had been added to it by his followers. In
a remarkable, most elaborate work (_Criticism of Dogmatic Theology_),
he demonstrated how fundamentally the interpretations of the Churches
differed from what was in his opinion the true sense of the words
of the Christ. And then he worked out, quite independently, an
interpretation of the Christian teaching which is quite similar to the
interpretations that have been given to it by all the great popular
movements--in the ninth century in Armenia,--later on by Wycliff, and
by the early Anabaptists, such as Hans Denck,[19] laying, however, like
the Quakers, especial stress on the doctrine of non-resistance.
HIS INTERPRETATION OF THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING
The ideas which Tolstóy thus slowly worked out are explained in a
succession of three separate works: (1) _Dogmatic Theology_, of which
the Introduction is better known as _Confession_ and was written
in 1882; (2) _What is my Faith?_ (1884); and (3) _What is then to
be Done?_ (1886), to which must be added _The Kingdom of God in
Yourselves, or Christianity, not as a mystic Teaching but as a new
Understanding of Life_ (1900) and, above all, a small book, _The
Christian Teaching_ (1902), which is written in short, concise,
numbered paragraphs, like a catechism, and contains a full and definite
exposition of Tolstóy’s views. A number of other works dealing with the
same subject--such as _The Life and the Teachings of the Christ_, _My
Reply to the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication_, _What is Religion_, _On
Life_, etc., were published during the same year. These books represent
the work of Tolstóy for the last twenty years, and at least four of
them (_Confession_, _My Faith_, _What is to be Done_, and _Christian
Teaching_) must be read in the indicated succession by everyone who
wishes to know the religious and moral conceptions of Tolstóy and
to extricate himself from the confused ideas which are sometimes
represented as Tolstóyism. As to the short work, _The Life and the
Teaching of Jesus_, it is, so to speak, the four gospels in one, told
in a language easy to be understood, and free of all mystical and
metaphorical elements; it contains Tolstóy’s reading of the gospels.
These works represent the most remarkable attempt at a rationalistic
interpretation of Christianity that has ever been ventured upon.
Christianity appears in them devoid of all gnosticism and mysticism,
as a purely spiritual teaching about the universal spirit which guides
man to a higher life--a life of equality and of friendly relations with
all men. If Tolstóy accepts Christianity as the foundation of his
faith, it is not because he considers it as a revelation, but because
its teaching, purified of all the additions that have been made to it
by the churches, contains “the very same solution of the problem of
life as has been given more or less explicitly by the best of men, both
before and since the gospel was given to us--a succession which goes
on from Moses, Isaiah, and Confucius, to the early Greeks, Buddha, and
Socrates, down to Pascal, Spinoza, Fichte, Feuerbach, and all others,
often unnoticed and unknown, who, taking no teachings on mere trust,
have taught us, and spoken to us with sincerity, about the meaning of
life”[20]; because it gives “an explanation of the meaning of life”
and “a solution of this contradiction between the aspiration after
welfare and life, and the consciousness of their being unattainable”
(_Chr. Teach._ §13)--“between the desire for happiness and life on the
one hand, and the increasingly clear perception of the certainty of
calamity and death on the other” (_ibid._, §10).
As to the dogmatic and mystical elements of Christianity, which he
treats as mere additions to the real teaching of Christ, he considers
them so noxious that even he makes the following remark: “It is
terrible to say so (but sometimes I have this thought): if the teaching
of Christ, together with the teaching of the Church that has grown upon
it, did not exist at all--those who now call themselves Christians
would have been nearer to the teachings of Christ--that is, to an
intelligent teaching about the good of life--than they are now. The
moral teachings of all the prophets of mankind would not have been
closed for them.”[21]
Putting aside all the mystical and metaphysical conceptions which
have been interwoven with Christianity, he concentrates his main
attention upon the moral aspects of the Christian teaching. One of the
most powerful means--he says--by which men are prevented from living
a life in accordance with this teaching is “religious deception.”
“Humanity moves slowly but unceasingly onward, towards an ever
higher development of consciousness of the true meaning of life, and
towards the organisation of life in conformity with this development
of consciousness;” but in this ascendant march all men do not move
at an equal pace, and “the less sensitive continue to adhere to the
previous understanding and order of life, and try to uphold it.” This
they achieve mainly by means of the religious deception which consists
“in the intentional confusion of faith with superstition, and the
substitution of the one for the other.” (_Chr. Teach._, §§181, 180.)
The only means to free one’s self from this deception is--he says--“to
understand and to remember that the only instrument which man possesses
for the acquisition of knowledge is reason, and that therefore every
teaching which affirms that which is contrary to reason is a delusion.”
Altogether, Tolstóy is especially emphatic upon this point of the
importance of reason. (See _The Christian Teaching_, §§206, 214.)
Another great obstacle to the spreading of the Christian teaching he
sees in the current belief in the immortality of the soul--such as it
is understood now. (_My Belief_, p. 134 of Tchertkoff’s Russ. ed.) In
this form he repudiates it; but we can--he says--give a deeper meaning
to our life by making it to be a service to men--to mankind--by merging
our life into the life of the universe; and although this idea may
seem less attractive than the idea of individual immortality, “though
little, it is sure.” (_Chr. Teaching._)
In speaking of God he takes sometimes a pantheistic position, and
describes God as Life, or as Love, or else as the Ideal which man is
conscious of in himself (_Thoughts about God_, collected by V. and
A. Tchertkoff); but in his last work (_Christian Teaching_, ch. VII.
and VIII.) he prefers to identify God with “the universal desire for
welfare which is the source of all life.” “So that, according to the
Christian teaching, God is that Essence of life which man recognises
both within himself and in the whole universe as the desire for
welfare; it being at the same time the cause by which this Essence
is enclosed and conditioned in individual and corporal life” (§36).
Every reasoning man--Tolstóy adds--comes to a similar conclusion. A
desire for _universal_ welfare appears in every reasoning man, after
his rational consciousness has been awakened at a certain age; and
in the world around Man the same desire is manifest in all separate
beings, each of whom strives for his own welfare (§37). These two
desires “converge towards one distinct purpose--definite, attainable,
and joyful for man.” Consequently, he concludes, Observation, Tradition
(religious), and Reason, all three, show him “that the greatest welfare
of man, towards which all men aspire, can only be obtained by perfect
union and concord among men.” All three show that the immediate work of
the world’s development, in which he is called upon to take part, is
“the substitution of union and harmony for division and discord.” “The
inner tendency of that spiritual being--love--which is in the process
of birth within him, impels him in the same direction.”
Union and harmony, and steady, relentless effort to promote them, which
means not only _all_ the work required for supporting one’s life, but
work also for increasing universal welfare--these are, then, the two
final accords in which all the discords, all the storms, which for
more than twenty years had raged in the distraught mind of the great
artist, all the religious ecstasies and the rationalistic doubts
which had agitated his superior intelligence in its insistent search
for truth finally found their solution. On the highest metaphysical
heights the striving of every living being for its own welfare, which
is Egoism and Love at the same time because it is Self-Love, and
rational Self-Love must embrace all congeners of the same species--this
striving for individual welfare by its very nature tends to comprise
all that exists. “It expands its limits naturally by love, first for
one’s family--one’s wife and children--then for friends, then for one’s
fellow-countrymen; but Love is not satisfied with this, and tends to
embrace all” (_ibid._, §46).
MAIN POINTS OF THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS
The central point of the Christian teaching Tolstóy sees in
non-resistance. During the first years after his crisis he preached
absolute “non-resistance to evil”--in full conformity with the verbal
and definite sense of the words of the gospel, which words, taken
in connection with the sentence about the right and the left cheek,
evidently mean complete humility and resignation. However, he must have
soon realised that such a teaching not only was not in conformity with
his above-mentioned conception of God, but that it also amounted simply
to abetting evil. It contains precisely that license to evil which
always has been preached by the State religions in the interest of the
ruling classes, and Tolstóy must have realised this. He tells us how
he once met in a train the Governor of the Túla province at the head
of a detachment of soldiers who were armed with rifles and provided
with a cart-load of birch-rods. They were going to flog the peasants
of a village in order to enforce an act of sheer robbery passed by the
Administration in favour of the landlord and in open breach of the
law. He describes with his well-known graphical powers how, in their
presence, a “Liberal lady” openly, loudly and in strong terms condemned
the Governor and the officers, and how they were ashamed. Then he
describes how, when such an expedition began its work, the peasants,
with truly Christian resignation, would cross themselves with trembling
hand and lie down on the ground, to be martyrised and flogged till the
heart of the victim stopped beating, without the officers having been
touched in the least by that Christian humility. What Tolstóy did when
he met the expedition, we don’t know: he does not tell us. He probably
remonstrated with the chiefs and advised the soldiers not to obey
them--that is, to revolt. At any rate, he must have felt that a passive
attitude in the face of this evil--the non-resistance to it--would have
meant a tacit approval of the evil; it would have meant giving support
to it. Moreover, a passive attitude of resignation in the face of evil
is so contrary to the very nature of Tolstóy, that he could not remain
for a long time a follower of such a doctrine, and he soon altered
his interpretation of the text of the gospel in the sense of: “Don’t
resist evil by violence.” All his later writings have consequently been
_a passionate resistance against the different forms of evil_ which he
has seen round about himself in the world. Continually he makes his
mighty voice resound against both evil and evil-doers; he only objects
to physical force in resisting evil because he believes that works harm.
The other four points of the Christian teaching, always according to
Tolstóy’s interpretation of it, are: Do not be angry, or, at least,
abstain from anger as much as you can: Remain true to the one woman
with whom you have united your life, and avoid all that excites
passion: Do not take oaths, which in Tolstóy’s opinion means: Never tie
your hands with an oath; oath-taking is the means resorted to by all
governments to bind men in their _consciences_ to do whatever they bid
them do; and finally, Love your enemies; or, as Tolstóy points it out
in several of his writings: Never judge, and never prosecute another
before a tribunal.
To these five rules Tolstóy gives the widest possible interpretation
and he deducts from them all the teachings of free communism. He proves
with a wealth of arguments that to live upon the work of others,
and not to earn one’s own living, is to break the very law of all
nature; it is the main cause of all social evils, as also of nearly
all personal unhappiness and discomforts. He shows how the present
capitalistic organisation of labour is as bad as slavery or serfdom has
ever been.
He insists upon the simplification of life--in food, dress, and
dwelling--which results from one’s taking to manual work, especially
on the land, and shows the advantages that even the rich and idle of
to-day would find in such labour. He shows how all the evils of present
misgovernment result from the fact that the very men who protest
against bad government make every effort to become a part of that
government.
As emphatically as he protests against the Church, he protests against
the State, as the only real means for bringing to an end the present
slavery imposed upon men by this institution. He advises men to refuse
having anything to do with the State. And finally, he proves with a
wealth of illustrations in which his artistic powers appear in full,
that the lust of the rich classes for wealth and luxury--a lust which
has no limits, and can have none--is what maintains all this slavery,
all these abnormal conditions of life, and all the prejudices and
teachings now disseminated by Church and State in the interest of the
ruling classes.
On the other hand, whenever he speaks of God, or of immortality,
his constant desire is to show that he needs none of the mystical
conceptions and metaphysical words which are usually resorted to. And
while his language is borrowed from religious writings, he always
brings forward, again and again, the rationalistic interpretation of
religious conceptions. He carefully sifts from the Christian teaching
all that cannot be accepted by followers of other religions, and brings
into relief all that is common to Christianity as well as to other
positive religions; all that is simply humane in them and thus might be
approved by reason, and therefore be accepted by disbelievers as well
as by believers.
In other words, in proportion as he has lately studied the teachings of
different founders of religions and those of moral philosophers, he has
tried to determine and to state _the elements of a universal religion_
in which all men could unite--a religion, however, which would have
nothing supernatural in it, nothing that reason and knowledge would
have to reject, but would contain a moral guidance for all men--at
whatever stage of intellectual development they may halt. Having thus
begun, in 1875-77, by joining the Greek Orthodox religion--in the
sense in which Russian peasants understand it--he came finally in _The
Christian Teaching_ to the construction of a Moral Philosophy which,
in his opinion, might be accepted by the Christian, the Jew, the
Mussulman, the Buddhist, and so on, and the naturalist philosopher as
well--a religion which would retain the only substantial elements of
all religions: namely, a determination of one’s _relation towards the
universe_ (_Weltanschaung_), in accordance with present knowledge, and
_a recognition of the equality of all men_.
Whether these two elements, one of which belongs to the domain of
knowledge and science and the other (justice) to the domain of ethics,
are sufficient to constitute a _religion_, and need no substratum of
mysticism--is a question which lies beyond the scope of this book.
LATEST WORKS OF ART
The disturbed conditions of the civilised world, and especially of
Russia, have evidently more than once attracted the attention of
Tolstóy, and induced him to publish a considerable number of letters,
papers, and appeals on various subjects. In all of them he advocates,
first of all, and above all, an attitude of negation towards Church and
State. Never enter the service of the State, even in the provincial
and urban institutions, which are granted by the State only as a
snare. Refuse to support exploitation in any form. Refuse to perform
military service, whatever the consequences may be: for this is the
only method of being truly anti-militarist. Never have anything to do
with Courts, even if you are offended or assailed;--nothing but evil
results from them. Such a negative and eminently sincere attitude, he
maintains, would better promote the cause of true progress than any
revolutionary means. As a first step, however, towards the abolition of
modern slavery, he also recommends the nationalisation, or rather the
municipalisation, of land.
It is manifest that the works of art which he wrote during the last
five-and-twenty years, after 1876, must bear deep traces of his new
point of view. He began, first, by writing for the people, and although
most of his small stories for popular reading are spoiled to some
extent by the too obvious desire of drawing a certain moral, and a
consequent distortion of facts, there are a few among them--especially
_How much Land is required for a Man_--which are wonderfully artistic.
_The Death of Iván Illýtch_ need only be named to recall the profound
impression produced by its appearance.
In order to speak to a still wider audience in the theatres for the
people, which began to be started in Russia about that time, he wrote
_The Power of Darkness_,--a most terrible drama from the life of the
peasants, in which he aimed at producing a deep impression by means
of a Shakespearian or rather Marlowian realism. His other play--_The
Fruits of Civilisation_--is in a comical vein. The superstitions of
the “upper classes” as regards spiritualism are ridiculed in it. Both
plays (the former--with alterations in the final scene) are played with
success on the Russian stage.
However, it is not only the novels and dramas of this period which
are works of Art. The five religious works which have been named on a
preceding page are also works of art in the best sense of the word, as
they contain descriptive pages of a high artistic value; while the very
ways in which Tolstóy explains the economical principles of Socialism,
or the No-Government principles of Anarchism, are as much masterpieces
as the best socialistic and anarchistic pages of William Morris--far
surpassing the latter in simplicity and artistic power.
_Kreutzer Sonata_ is surely, after _Anna Karénina_, the work of Tolstóy
which has been the most widely read. However, the strange theme of this
novel and the crusade against marriage altogether which it contains
so much attract the attention of the reader and usually become the
subject of so passionate a discussion among those who have read it,
that the high artistic qualities of this novel and the analysis of life
which it contains have hardly received the recognition they deserve.
The moral teaching that Tolstóy has put in _Kreutzer Sonata_ hardly
need be mentioned, the more so since the author himself has withdrawn
it to a very great extent. But for the appreciation of Tolstóy’s work
and for the comprehension of the artist’s inner life this novel has a
deep meaning. No stronger accusation against marriage for mere outer
attraction, without intellectual union or sympathy of purpose between
husband and wife, has ever been written; and the struggle that goes
on between Kóznysheff and his wife is one of the most deeply dramatic
pages of married life that we possess in any literature.
Tolstóy’s _What is Art?_ is mentioned in Chapter VIII. of this
book. His greatest production of the latest period is, however,
_Resurrection_. It is not enough to say that the energy and
youthfulness of the septuagenarian author which appear in this novel
are simply marvellous. Its absolute artistic qualities are so high
that if Tolstóy had written nothing else but _Resurrection_ he would
have been recognised as one of the great writers. All those parts
of the novel which deal with Society, beginning with the letter of
“Missie,” and Missie herself, her father, and so on, are of the same
high standard as the best pages of the first volume of _War and Peace_.
Everything which deals with the Court, the jurymen, and the prisons
is again of the same high standard. It may be said, of course, that
the principal hero, Neklúdoff, is not sufficiently living; but this
is quite unavoidable for a figure which is meant to represent, if not
the author himself, at least his ideas or his experience: this is
a drawback of all novels containing so much of an autobiographical
element. As regards all the other figures, however, of which so immense
a number pass under our eyes, each of them has its own character in
striking relief, even if the figure (like one of the judges or of the
jurymen, or the daughter of a jailer) appears only on a single page,
never to reappear again.
The number of questions which are raised in this novel--social,
political, party questions, and so on--is so great that a whole
society, such as it is, living and throbbing with all its problems and
contradictions, appears before the reader, and this is not Russian
Society only, but Society the civilised world over. In fact, apart from
the scenes which deal with the political prisoners, _Resurrection_
applies to all nations. It is the most international of all works of
Tolstóy. At the same time the main question: “Has Society the right
to judge? Is it reasonable in maintaining a system of tribunals and
prisons?” this terrible question which the coming century is bound to
solve, is so forcibly impressed upon the reader that it is impossible
to read the book without, at least, conceiving serious doubts about our
system of punishments. _Ce livre pèsera sur la conscience du siècle._
(“This book will weigh upon the conscience of the century”) was the
remark of a French critic, which I heard repeated. And of the justice
of this remark I have had the opportunity of convincing myself during
my numerous conversations in America with persons having anything to do
with prisons. The book weighs already on their consciences.
The same remark applies to the whole activity of Tolstóy. Whether his
attempt at impressing upon men the elements of a universal religion
which--he believes--reason trained by science might accept, and which
man might take as guidance for his moral life, attaining at the same
time towards the solution of the great social problem and all questions
connected with it--whether this bold attempt be successful or not, can
only be decided by time. But it is absolutely certain that no man since
the times of Rousseau has so profoundly stirred the human conscience as
Tolstóy has by his moral writings. He has fearlessly stated the moral
aspects of all the burning questions of the day, in a form so deeply
impressive that whoever has read any one of his writings can no longer
forget these questions or set them aside; one feels the necessity of
finding, in one way or another, some solution. Tolstóy’s influence,
consequently, is not one which may be measured by mere years or decades
of years: it will last long. Nor is it limited to one country only.
In millions of copies his works are read in all languages, appealing
equally to men and women of all classes and all nations, and everywhere
producing the same result. Tolstóy is now the most loved man--the most
touchingly loved man--in the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] The only exception to be made is the scene with the two old people
in _Virgin Soil_. It is useless and out of place. To have introduced it
was simply “a literary whim.”
[15] Taken from the excellent translation by Mrs. Constance Garnett, in
Heinemann’s edition of Turguéneff’s works.
[16] This has struck most critics. Thus, speaking of _War and Peace_,
Písareff wrote: “The images he has created have their own life,
independently of the intentions of the author; they enter into direct
relations with the readers, speak for themselves, and unavoidably bring
the reader to such thoughts and conclusions as the author never had in
view and of which he, perhaps, would not approve.” (_Works, VI._ p.
420.)
[17] _Introduction to the Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and to an
Analysis of the Christian Teaching_, or _Confession_; Vol. 1 of
Tchertkoff’s edition of _Works prohibited by the Russian Censorship_
(in Russian), Christchurch, 1902, p. 13.
[18] “That which some people told me, and of which I sometimes had
tried to persuade myself--namely, that a man should desire happiness,
not for himself only, but for others, his neighbours, and for all men
as well: this did not satisfy me. Firstly, I could not sincerely desire
happiness for others as much as for myself; secondly, and chiefly,
others, in like manner as myself, were doomed to unhappiness and death,
and therefore all my efforts for other people’s happiness were useless.
I despaired.” The understanding that personal happiness is best found
in the happiness of all did not appeal to him, and the very striving
towards the happiness of all, and an advance towards it, he thus found
insufficient as a purpose in life.
[19] See _Anabaptism from its Rise at Zwickau to its Fall at Münster_,
1521-1536, by Richard Heath (_Baptist Manuals_, I, 1895).
[20] _The Christian Teaching_, Introduction, p. vi. In another similar
passage he adds Marcus Aurelius and Lao-tse to the above-mentioned
teachers.
[21] _What is my Belief_, ch. X, p. 145 of Tchertkoff’s edition of
_Works prohibited by Russian Censorship_. On pp. 18 and 19 of the
little work, _What is Religion and What is its Substance_. Tolstóy
expresses himself even more severely about “Church Christianity.”
He also gives us in this remarkable little work his ideas about the
substance of religion altogether, from which one can deduct its
desirable relations to science, to synthetic philosophy, and to
philosophical ethics.
PART V
Goncharóff, Dostoyévskiy, Nekrásoff
CHAPTER V
GONCHARÓFF--DOSTOYÉVSKIY--NEKRASOFF
Goncharóff--_Oblómoff_--The Russian Malady of Oblómoffdom--Is
it exclusively Russian?--_The Precipice_--Dostoyévskiy--His
first Novel--General Character of his Work--_Memoirs from a Dead
House_--_Down-trodden and Offended_--_Crime and Punishment_--_The
Brothers Karamázoff_--Nekrasoff--Discussions about his Talent--His
Love of the People--Apotheosis of Woman--Other Prose-writers of the
same Epoch--Serghéi Aksákoff--Dahl--Ivan Panaeff--Hvoschinskaya (V.
Krestovskiy-pseudonyme). Poets of the same Epoch--Koltsoff--Nikitin
Pleschéeff. The Admirers of Pure Art: Tutcheff--A.
Maykoff--Scherbina--Polonskiy--A. Fet--A. K. Tolstóy--The Translators.
GONCHARÓFF.
Goncharóff occupies in Russian literature the next place after
Turguéneff and Tolstóy, but this extremely interesting writer is almost
entirely unknown to English readers. He was not a prolific writer
and, apart from small sketches, and a book of travel (_The Frigate
Pallas_), he has left only three novels: _A Common Story_ (translated
into English by Constance Garnett), _Oblómoff_, and _The Precipice_, of
which the second, _Oblómoff_, has conquered for him a position by the
side of the two great writers just named.
In Russia Goncharóff is always described as a writer of an eminently
objective talent, but this qualification must evidently be taken with
a certain restriction. A writer is never entirely objective--he has
his sympathies and antipathies, and do what he may, they will appear
even through his most objective descriptions. On the other hand, a
good writer seldom introduces his own individual emotions to speak for
his heroes: there is none of this in either Turguéneff or Tolstóy.
However, with Turguéneff and Tolstóy you feel that they live with
their heroes, that they suffer and feel happy with them--that they
are in love when the hero is in love, and that they feel miserable
when misfortunes befall him; but you do not feel that to the same
extent with Goncharóff. Surely he has lived through every feeling of
his heroes, but the attitude he tries to preserve towards them is
an attitude of strict impartiality--an attitude, I hardly need say,
which, properly speaking, a writer can never maintain. An epic repose
and an epic profusion of details certainly characterise Goncharóff’s
novels; but these details are not obtrusive, they do not diminish the
impression, and the reader’s interest in the hero is not distracted
by all these minutiæ, because, under Goncharóff’s pen, they never
appear insignificant. One feels, however, that the author is a person
who takes human life quietly, and will never give way to a burst of
passion, whatsoever may happen to his heroes.
The most popular of the novels of Goncharóff is _Oblómoff_, which,
like Turguéneff’s _Fathers and Sons_, and Tolstóy’s _War and Peace_
and _Resurrection_, is, I venture to say, one of the profoundest
productions of the last half century. It is thoroughly Russian, so
Russian indeed that only a Russian can fully appreciate it; but it is
at the same time universally human, as it introduces a type which is
almost as universal as that of Hamlet or Don Quixote.
Oblómoff is a Russian nobleman, of moderate means--the owner of six
or seven hundred serfs--and the time of action is, let us say, in
the fifties of the nineteenth century. All the early childhood of
Oblómoff was such as to destroy in him any capacity of initiative.
Imagine a spacious, well-kept nobleman’s estate in the middle of
Russia, somewhere on the picturesque banks of the Vólga, at a time when
there were no railways to disturb a peaceful patriarchal life, and no
“questions” that could worry the minds of its inhabitants. A “reign
of plenty,” both for the owners of the estate and the scores of their
servants and retainers, characterises their life. Nurses, servants,
serving boys and maids surround the child from its earliest days, their
only thoughts being how to feed it, make it grow, render it strong, and
never worry it with either much learning or, in fact, with any sort of
work. “From my earliest childhood, have I myself ever put on my socks?”
Oblómoff asks later on. In the morning, the coming mid-day meal is
the main question for all the household; and when the dinner is over,
at an early hour of the day, sleep--a reign of sleep, sleep rising to
an epical degree which implies full loss of consciousness for all the
inhabitants of the mansion and its dependencies--spreads its wings for
several hours from the bedchamber of the landlord even as far as the
remotest corner of the retainers’ dwellings.
In these surroundings Oblómoff’s childhood and youth were passed. Later
on, he enters the University; but his trustworthy servants follow
him to the capital, and the lazy, sleepy atmosphere of his native
‘Oblómovka’ (the estate) holds him even there in its enchanted arms. A
few lectures at the university, some elevating talk with a young friend
in the evening, some vague aspiration towards the ideal, occasionally
stir the young man’s heart; and a beautiful vision begins to rise
before his eyes--these things are certainly a necessary accompaniment
of the years spent at the university; but the soothing, soporific
influence of Oblómovka, its quietness and laziness, its feeling of a
fully guaranteed, undisturbed existence, deaden even these impressions
of youth. Other students grow hot in their discussions, and join
“circles.” Oblómoff looks quietly at all that and asks himself: “What
is it for?” And then, the moment that the young student has returned
home after his university years, the same atmosphere again envelops
him. “Why should you think and worry yourself with this or that?” Leave
that to “others.” Have you not there your old nurse, thinking whether
there is anything else she might do for your comfort?
“My people did not let me have even a wish,” Goncharóff wrote in his
short autobiography, from which we discovered the close connection
between the author and his hero: “all had been foreseen and attended
to long since. The old servants, with my nurse at their head, looked
into my eyes to guess my wishes, trying to remember what I liked best
when I was with them, where my writing table ought to be put, which
chair I preferred to the others, how to make my bed. The cook tried to
remember which dishes I had liked in my childhood--and all could not
admire me enough.”
Such was Oblómoff’s youth, and such was to a very great extent
Goncharóff’s youth and character as well.
The novel begins with Oblómoff’s morning in his lodgings at St.
Petersburg. It is late, but he is still in bed; several times already
he has tried to get up, several times his foot was in the slipper;
but, after a moment’s reflection, he has returned under his blankets.
His trusty Zakhár--his old faithful servant who formerly had carried
him as a baby in his arms--is by his side, and brings him his glass
of tea. Visitors come in; they try to induce Oblómoff to go out, to
take a drive to the yearly First of May promenade; but--“What for?” he
asks. “For what should I take all this trouble, and do all this moving
about?” And he remains in bed.
His only trouble is that the landlord wants him to leave the lodgings
which he occupies. The rooms are dull, dusty--Zakhár is no great
admirer of cleanliness; but to change lodgings is such a calamity for
Oblómoff that he tries to avoid it by all possible means, or at least
to postpone it.
Oblómoff is very well educated, well-bred, he has a refined taste, and
in matters of art he is a fine judge. Everything that is vulgar is
repulsive to him. He never will commit any dishonest act; he cannot. He
also shares the highest and noblest aspirations of his contemporaries.
Like many others, he is ashamed of being a serf-owner, and he has
in his head a certain scheme which he is going to put some day into
writing--a scheme which, if it is only carried out, will surely improve
the condition of his peasants and eventually free them.
“The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him”--Goncharóff
writes; “the miseries of mankind were not strange to him. Sometimes
he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human sorrows. He
felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire of going
somewhere far away,--probably into that world towards which his
friend Stoltz had tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears
would then flow upon his cheeks. It would also happen that he would
himself feel hatred towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the
evil which is spread all over the world; and he would then feel the
desire to show mankind its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within
him, rolling in his head like waves in the sea; they would grow into
decisions which would make all his blood boil; his muscles would be
ready to move, his sinews would be strained, intentions would be on
the point of transforming themselves into decisions.... Moved by a
moral force he would rapidly change over and over again his position
in his bed; with a fixed stare he would half lift himself from it,
move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ... the inspiration
would seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself into an act
of heroism, and then, what miracles, what admirable results might one
not expect from so great an effort! But--the morning would pass away,
the shades of evening would take the place of the broad daylight,
and with them the strained forces of Oblómoff would incline towards
rest--the storms in his soul would subside--his head would shake off
the worrying thoughts--his blood would circulate more slowly in his
veins--and Oblómoff would slowly turn over, and recline on his back;
looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly with
his eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neighbouring
house--and how many times had he thus followed with his eyes that
sunset!”
In such lines as these Goncharóff depicts the state of inactivity
into which Oblómoff had fallen at the age of about thirty-five. It is
the supreme poetry of laziness--a laziness created by a whole life of
old-time landlordism.
Oblómoff, as I just said, is very uncomfortable in his lodgings;
moreover, the landlord, who intends to make some repairs in the
house, wants him to leave; but for Oblómoff to change his lodgings is
something so terrific, so extraordinary, that he tries by all sorts
of artifices to postpone the undesirable moment. His old Zakhár tries
to convince him that they cannot remain any longer in that house, and
ventures the unfortunate word, that, after all, “others” move when they
have to.
“I thought,” he said, “that others are not worse than we are, and that
they move sometimes; so we could move, too.”
“What, what?” exclaimed Oblómoff, rising from his easy chair, “what is
it that you say?”
Zakhár felt very ashamed. He could not understand what had provoked
the reproachful exclamation of his master, and did not reply.
“Others are not worse than we are!” repeated Iliyá Iliych (Oblómoff)
with a sense of horror. “That is what you have come to. Now I shall
know henceforth that I am for you the same as ‘the others’.”
After a time Oblómoff calls Zakhár back and has with him an explanation
which is worth reproducing.
“Have you ever thought what it meant--‘the others,’” Oblómoff began.
“Must I tell you what this means?”
Poor Zakhár shifted about uneasily, like a bear in his den, and sighed
aloud.
“‘Another’--that means a wild, uneducated man; he lives poorly,
dirtily, in an attic; he can sleep on a piece of felt stretched
somewhere on the floor--what does that matter to him?--Nothing! He
will feed on potatoes and herrings; misery compels him continuously to
shift from one place to another. He runs about all day long--_he_, he
may, of course, go to new lodgings. There is Lagáeff; he takes under
his arm his ruler and his two shirts wrapped in a handkerchief, and he
is off. ‘Where are you going?’ you ask him.--‘I am moving’, he says.
That is what ‘the others’ means.--Am I one of those others, do you
mean?”
Zakhár threw a glance upon his master, shifted from one foot to the
other, but said nothing.
“Do you understand now what ‘another’ means?” continued Oblómoff.
“‘Another,’ that is the man who cleans his own boots, who himself puts
on his clothes--without any help! Of course, he may sometimes look
like a gentleman, but that is mere deceit: he does not know what it
means to have a servant--he has nobody to send to the shop to make his
purchases; he makes them himself--he will even poke his own fire, and
occasionally use a duster.”
“Yes,” replied Zakhár sternly, “there are many such people among the
Germans.”
“That’s it, that’s it! And I? do you think that I am one of them?”
“No, you are different,” Zakhár said, still unable to understand what
his master was driving at.... “But God knows what is coming upon
you....”
“Ah! I am different! Most certainly, I am. Do I run about? do I
work? don’t I eat whenever I am hungry? Look at me--am I thin? am
I sickly to look at? Is there anything I lack? Thank God, I have
people to do things for me. I have never put on my own socks since I
was born, thank God! Must I also be restless like the others?--What
for?--And to whom am I saying all this? Have you not been with me from
childhood?... You have seen it all. You know that I have received
a delicate education; that I have never suffered from cold or from
hunger,--never knew want--never worked for my own bread--have never
done any sort of dirty work.... Well, how dare you put me on the same
level as the ‘others’?”
Later on, when Zakhár brought him a glass of water, “No, wait a
moment,” Oblómoff said. “I ask you, How did you dare to so deeply
offend your master, whom you carried in your arms while he was a
baby, whom you have served all your life, and who has always been a
benefactor to you?” Zakhár could not stand it any longer--the word
benefactor broke him down--he began to blink. The less he understood
the speech of Iliyá Iliych, the more sad he felt. Finally, the
reproachful words of his master made him break into tears, while Iliyá
Iliych seizing this pretext for postponing his letter-writing till
to-morrow, tells Zakhár, “you had better pull the blinds down and
cover me nicely, and see that nobody disturbs me. Perhaps I may sleep
for an hour or so, and at half past five wake me for dinner.”
About this time Oblómoff meets a young girl, Olga, who is perhaps one
of the finest representatives of Russian women in our novels. A mutual
friend, Stoltz, has said much to her about Oblómoff--about his talents
and possibilities, and also about the laziness of his life, which would
surely ruin him if it continued. Women are always ready to undertake
rescue work, and Olga tries to draw Oblómoff out of his sleepy,
vegetative existence. She sings beautifully, and Oblómoff, who is a
great lover of music, is deeply moved by her songs.
Gradually Olga and Oblómoff fall in love with each other, and she tries
to shake off his laziness, to arouse him to higher interests in life.
She insists that he shall finish the great scheme for the improvement
of his peasant serfs upon which he is supposed to have been working for
years. She tries to awaken in him an interest for art and literature,
to create for him a life in which his gifted nature shall find a field
of activity. It seems at first as if the vigour and charm of Olga
are going to renovate Oblómoff by insensible steps. He wakes up, he
returns to life. The love of Olga for Oblómoff, which is depicted in
its development with a mastery almost equalling that of Turguéneff,
grows deeper and deeper, and the inevitable next step--marriage--is
approaching.... But this is enough to frighten away Oblómoff. To take
this step he would have to bestir himself, to go to his estate, to
break the lazy monotony of his life, and this is too much for him. He
lingers and hesitates to make the first necessary steps. He postpones
them from day to day, and finally he falls back into his Oblómoffdom,
and returns to his sofa, his dressing gown, and his slippers. Olga is
ready to do the impossible; she tries to carry him away by her love
and her energy; but she is forced to realise that all her endeavours
are useless, and that she has trusted too much to her own strength:
the disease of Oblómoff is incurable. She has to abandon him, and
Goncharóff describes their parting in a most beautiful scene, from
which I will give here a few of the concluding passages:
“Then we must part?” she said.... “If we married, what would come
next?” He replied nothing. “You would fall asleep, deeper and deeper
every day--is it not so? And I--you see what I am--I shall not grow
old, I shall never be tired of life. We should live from day to day
and year to year, looking forward to Christmas, and then to the
Carnival; we should go to parties, dance, and think about nothing at
all. We should lie down at night thanking God that one day has passed,
and next morning we should wake up with the desire that to-day may be
like yesterday; that would be our future, is it not so? But is that
life? I should wither under it--I should die. And for what, Iliyá?
Could I make you happy?”
He cast his eyes around and tried to move, to run away, but his feet
would not obey him. He wanted to say something, but his mouth was dry,
his tongue motionless, his voice would not come out of his throat.
He moved his hand towards her, then he began something, with lowered
voice, but could not finish it, and with his look he said to her,
“Good-bye--farewell.”
She also wanted to say something, but could not--moved her hand in his
direction, but before it had reached his it dropped. She wanted to say
“Farewell,” but her voice broke in the middle of the word and took a
false accent. Then her face quivered, she put her hand and her head on
his shoulder and cried. It seemed now as if all her weapons had been
taken out of her hand--reasoning had gone--there remained only the
woman, helpless against her sorrow. “Farewell, Farewell” came out of
her sobbings....
“No,” said Olga, trying to look upon him through her tears, “it is
only now that I see that I loved in you what I wanted you to be, I
loved the future Oblómoff. You are good, honest, Iliyá, you are tender
as a dove, you put your head under your wing and want nothing more,
you are ready all your life to coo under a roof ... but I am not so,
that would be too little for me. I want something more--what, I do
not know; can you tell me what it is that I want? give me it, that I
should.... As to sweetness, there is plenty of it everywhere.”
They part, Olga passes through a severe illness, and a few months
later we see Oblómoff married to the landlady of his rooms, a very
respectable person with beautiful elbows, and a great master in kitchen
affairs and household work generally. As to Olga, she marries Stoltz
later on. But this Stoltz is rather a symbol of intelligent industrial
activity than a living man. He is invented, and I pass him by.
The impression which this novel produced in Russia, on its appearance
in 1859, was indescribable. It was a far greater event than the
appearance of a new work by Turguéneff. All educated Russia read
_Oblómoff_ and discussed “Oblómoffdom.” Everyone recognised something
of himself in Oblómoff, felt the disease of Oblómoff in his own veins.
As to Olga, thousands of young people fell in love with her: her
favourite song, the “Casta Diva,” became their favourite melody. And
now, forty years afterwards, one can read and re-read “Oblómoff” with
the same pleasure as nearly half a century ago, and it has lost nothing
of its meaning, while it has acquired many new ones: there are always
living Oblómoffs.
At the time of the appearance of this novel “Oblómoffdom” became a
current word to designate the state of Russia. All Russian life, all
Russian history, bears traces of the malady--that laziness of mind and
heart, that right to laziness proclaimed as a virtue, that conservatism
and inertia, that contempt of feverish activity, which characterise
Oblómoff and were so much cultivated in serfdom times, even amongst the
best men in Russia--and even among the malcontents. “A sad result of
serfdom”--it was said then. But, as we live further away from serfdom
times, we begin to realise that Oblómoff is not dead amongst us: that
serfdom is not the only thing which creates this type of men, but that
the very conditions of wealthy life, the routine of civilised life,
contribute to maintain it.
“A racial feature, distinctive of the Russian race,” others said;
and they were right, too, to a great extent. The absence of a love
for struggle; the “let me alone” attitude, the want of “aggressive”
virtue; non-resistance and passive submission--these are to a great
extent distinctive features of the Russian race. And this is probably
why a Russian writer has so well pictured the type. But with all
that, the Oblómoff type is not limited to Russia: It is a universal
type--a type which is nurtured by our present civilisation, amidst its
opulent, self-satisfied life. It is the conservative type. Not in the
political sense, but in the sense of the conservatism of well-being. A
man who has reached a certain welfare or has got it by inheritance is
not willingly moved to undertake anything new, because it might mean
introducing something unpleasant and full of worries into his quiet and
smooth existence. Therefore he lingers in a life devoid of the true
impulses of real life, from fear that these might disturb the quietness
of his vegetative existence.
Oblómoff knows the value of Art and its impulses; he knows the higher
enthusiasms of poetical love: he has felt both. But--“What is the use?”
he asks again. “Why all this trouble of going about and seeing people?
What is it for?” He is not a Diogenes who has no needs. Far from that.
If his meat be served too dry and his fowl be burned, he resents it.
It is the higher interests which he thinks not worth the trouble they
occasion. When he was young he thought of setting his serfs free--in
such a way that the step should not much diminish his income. But
gradually he has forgotten all about that, and now his main thought is,
how to shake off all the worries of the management of his estate. “I
don’t know”--he says--“what obligatory work is, what is farmer’s work,
what ownership means, what a poor farmer is and what a rich one; what
makes a quarter of wheat, when wheat has to be sown and reaped, or when
it has to be sold.” And when he dreams of country life on his estate he
thinks of pretty greenhouses, of picnics in the woods, of idyllic walks
in company with a goodly, submissive and plump wife, who looks into
his eyes and worships him. The question of why and how all this wealth
comes to him, and why all these people must work for him, never worries
his mind. But--how many of those all over the world, who own factories,
wheat fields and coal mines, or hold shares in them, ever think of
mines, wheat fields and factories otherwise than in the way Oblómoff
thought of his country seat--that is, in an idyllic contemplation of
how others work, without the slightest intention of sharing their
burdens?
The city-bred Oblómoffs may take the place of the country-bred, but
the type remains. And then comes the long succession of Oblómoffs
in intellectual, social, nay even in personal, life. Everything new
in the domain of the intellect makes them restless, and they are
only satisfied when all men have accepted the same ideas. They are
suspicious of social reform, because the very suggestion of a change
frightens them. Love itself frightens them. Oblómoff is loved by Olga;
he, too, loves her; but to take that step--marriage--frightens him. She
is too restless. She wants him to go about and to see pictures; to read
and to discuss this and that; to throw him into the whirl of life. She
loves him so much that she is ready to follow him without asking any
questions. But this very power of love, this very intensity of life,
frightens an Oblómoff.
He tries to find pretexts for avoiding this irruption of life into
his vegetative existence; he prizes so much his little material
comfort that he dares not love--dares not take love with all its
consequences--“its tears, its impulses, its life,” and soon falls back
into his cosy Oblómoffdom.
Decidedly, Oblómoffdom is not a racial disease. It exists on both
continents and in all latitudes. And besides the Oblómoffdom which
Goncharóff has so well depicted, and which even Olga was powerless
to break through, there is the squire’s Oblómoffdom, the red-tape
Oblómoffdom of the Government offices, the scientist’s Oblómoffdom and,
above all, the family-life Oblómoffdom, to which all of us readily pay
so large a tribute.
THE PRECIPICE
The last and longest novel of Goncharóff, _The Precipice_, has not the
unity of conception and workmanship which characterise _Oblómoff_. It
contains wonderful pages, worthy of a writer of genius; but, all said,
it is a failure. It took Goncharóff full ten years to write it, and
having begun to depict in it types of one generation, he remodelled
later on these types into types from the next generation--at a time
when the sons differed totally from their fathers: he has told this
himself in a very interesting critical sketch of his own work. As a
result there is no wholeness, so to speak, in the main personages of
the novel. The woman upon whom he has bestowed all his admiration,
Vyéra, and whom he tries to represent as most sympathetic, is
certainly interesting, but not sympathetic at all. One would say that
Goncharóff’s mind was haunted by two women of two totally different
types when he pictured his Vyéra--the one whom he tried--and failed--to
picture in Sophie Byelovódova, and the other--the coming woman of the
sixties, of whom he saw some features, and whom he admired, without
fully understanding her. Vyéra’s cruelty towards her grandmother, and
towards Ráisky, the hero, render her most unsympathetic, although you
feel that the author quite adores her. As to the Nihilist, Vólokhoff,
he is simply a caricature--taken perhaps from real life,--even
seemingly from among the author’s personal acquaintances,--but
obviously drawn with the desire of ventilating personal feelings of
dislike. One feels a personal drama concealed behind the pages of
the novel. Goncharóff’s first sketch of Vólokhoff was, as he wrote
himself, some sort of Bohemian Radical of the forties who had retained
in full the Don Juanesque features of the “Byronists” of the preceding
generation. Gradually, however, Goncharóff, who had not yet finished
his novel by the end of the fifties, transformed the figure into a
Nihilist of the sixties--a revolutionist--and the result is that one
has the sensation of the double origin of Vólokhoff, as one feels the
double origin of Vyéra.
The only figure of the novel really true to life is the grandmother of
Vyéra. This is an admirably painted figure of the simple, commonsense,
independent woman of old Russia, while Martha, the sister of Vyéra, is
an excellent picture of the commonplace girl, full of life, respectful
of old traditions--to be one day the honest and reliable mother of
a family. These two figures are the work of a great artist; but all
the other figures are made-up, and consequently are failures; and yet
there is much exaggeration in the tragical way in which Vyéra’s fall is
taken by her grandmother. As to the background of the novel--the estate
on a precipice leading to the Vólga--it is one of the most beautiful
landscapes in Russian literature.
DOSTOYÉVSKIY
Few authors have been so well received, from their very first
appearance in literature, as Dostoyévskiy was. In 1845 he arrived in
St. Petersburg, a quite unknown young man who only two years before had
finished his education in a school of military engineers, and after
having spent two years in the engineering service had then abandoned
it with the intention of devoting himself to literature. He was only
twenty-four when he wrote his first novel, _Poor People_, which his
school-comrade, Grigoróvitch, gave to the poet Nekrásoff, offering it
for a literary almanack. Dostoyévskiy had inwardly doubted whether
the novel would even be read by the editor. He was living then in a
poor, miserable room, and was fast asleep when at four o’clock in the
morning Nekrásoff and Grigoróvitch knocked at his door. They threw
themselves on Dostoyévskiy’s neck, congratulating him with tears in
their eyes. Nekrásoff and his friend had begun to read the novel late
in the evening; they could not stop reading till they came to the
end, and they were both so deeply impressed by it that they could not
help going on this nocturnal expedition, to see the author and tell
him what they felt. A few days later Dostoyévskiy was introduced to
the great critic of the time, Byelínskiy, and from him he received
the same warm reception. As to the reading public, the novel produced
quite a sensation. The same must be said about all subsequent novels of
Dostoyévskiy. They had an immense sale all over Russia.
The life of Dostoyévskiy was extremely sad. In the year 1849, four
years after he had won his first success with _Poor People_, he became
mixed up in the affairs of some Fourierists (members of the circles of
Petrashévskiy), who used to meet together to read the works of Fourier,
commenting on them, and talking about the necessity of a Socialistic
movement in Russia. At one of these gatherings Dostoyévskiy read, and
copied later on, a certain letter from Byelínskiy to Gógol, in which
the great critic spoke in rather sharp language about the Russian
Church and the State; he also took part in a meeting at which the
starting of a secret printing office was discussed. He was arrested,
tried (of course with closed doors), and, with several others, was
condemned to death. In December, 1849, he was taken to a public
square, placed on the scaffold, under a gibbet, to listen there to a
profusedly-worded death-sentence, and only at the last moment came a
messenger from Nicholas I., bringing a pardon. Three days later he was
transported to Siberia and locked up in a hard-labour prison at Omsk.
There he remained for four years, when owing to some influence at St.
Petersburg he was liberated, only to be made a soldier. During his
detention in the hard-labour prison he was submitted, for some minor
offence, to the terrible punishment of the cat-o’-nine-tails, and from
that time dates his disease--epilepsy--which he never quite got rid
of during all his life. The coronation amnesty of Alexander II. did
not improve Dostoyévskiy’s fate. Not until 1859--four years after the
advent of Alexander II. to the throne--was the great writer pardoned
and allowed to return to Russia. He died in 1883.
Dostoyévskiy was a rapid writer, and even before his arrest he had
published ten novels, of which _The Double_ was already a forerunner of
his later psycho-pathological novels, and _Nétochka Nezvánova_ showed a
rapidly maturing literary talent of the highest quality. On his return
from Siberia he began publishing a series of novels which produced
a deep impression on the reading public. He opened the series by a
great novel, _The Downtrodden and Offended_, which was soon followed
by _Memoirs from a Dead-House_, in which he described his hard-labour
experience. Then came an extremely sensational novel, _Crime and
Punishment_, which lately was widely read all over Europe and America.
_The Brothers Karamázoff_, which is considered his most elaborate work,
is even more sensational, while _The Youth_, _The Idiot_, _The Devils_
are a series of shorter novels devoted to the same psycho-pathological
problems.
If Dostoyévskiy’s work had been judged from the purely æsthetic
point of view, the verdict of critics concerning its literary value
would have been anything but flattering. Dostoyévskiy wrote with
such rapidity and he so little cared about the working out of his
novels, that, as Dobrolúboff has shown, the literary form is in many
places almost below criticism. His heroes speak in a slipshod way,
continually repeating themselves, and whatever hero appears in the
novel (especially is this so in _The Downtrodden_), you feel it is the
author who speaks. Besides, to these serious defects one must add the
extremely romantic and obsolete forms of the plots of his novels, the
disorder of their construction, and the unnatural succession of their
events--to say nothing of the atmosphere of the lunatic asylum with
which the later ones are permeated. And yet, with all this, the works
of Dostoyévskiy are penetrated with such a deep feeling of reality,
and by the side of the most unreal characters one finds characters so
well known to every one of us, and so real, that all these defects
are redeemed. Even when you think that Dostoyévskiy’s record of the
conversations of his heroes is not correct, you feel that the men whom
he describes--at least some of them--were exactly such as he wanted to
describe them.
The _Memoirs from a Dead-House_ is the only production of Dostoyévskiy
which can be recognised as truly artistic: its leading idea is
beautiful, and the form is worked out in conformity with the idea; but
in his later productions the author is so much oppressed by his ideas,
all very vague, and grows so nervously excited over them that he cannot
find the proper form. The favourite themes of Dostoyévskiy are the
men who have been brought so low by the circumstances of their lives,
that they have not even a conception of there being a possibility of
rising above these conditions. You feel moreover that Dostoyévskiy
finds a real pleasure in describing the sufferings, moral and physical,
of the down-trodden--that he revels in representing that misery of
mind, that absolute hopelessness of redress, and that completely
broken-down condition of human nature which is characteristic of
neuro-pathological cases. By the side of such sufferers you find a few
others who are so deeply human that all your sympathies go with them;
but the favourite heroes of Dostoyévskiy are the man and the woman who
consider themselves as not having either the force to compel respect,
or even the right of being treated as human beings. They once have
made some timid attempt at defending their personalities, but they
have succumbed, and never will try it again. They will sink deeper and
deeper in their wretchedness, and die, either from consumption or from
exposure, or they will become the victims of some mental affection--a
sort of half-lucid lunacy, during which man occasionally rises to the
highest conceptions of human philosophy--while some will conceive an
embitterment which will bring them to commit some crime, followed by
repentance the very next instant after it has been done.
In _Downtrodden and Offended_ we see a young man madly in love with
a girl from a moderately poor family. This girl falls in love with a
very aristocratic prince--a man without principles, but charming in
his childish egotism--extremely attractive by his sincerity, and with
a full capacity for quite unconsciously committing the worst crimes
towards those with whom life brings him into contact. The psychology
of both the girl and the young aristocrat is very good, but where
Dostoyévskiy appears at his best is in representing how the other young
man, rejected by the girl, devotes the whole of his existence to being
the humble servant of that girl, and against his own will becomes
instrumental in throwing her into the hands of the young aristocrat.
All this is quite possible, all this exists in life, and it is all told
by Dostoyévskiy so as to make one feel the deepest commiseration with
the poor and the down-trodden; but even in this novel the pleasure
which the author finds in representing the unfathomable submission
and servitude of his heroes, and the pleasure they find in the very
sufferings and the ill-treatment that has been inflicted upon them--is
repulsive to a sound mind.
The next great novel of Dostoyévskiy, _Crime and Punishment_, produced
quite a sensation. Its hero is a young student, Raskólnikoff, who
deeply loves his mother and his sister--both extremely poor, like
himself--and who, haunted by the desire of finding some money in
order to finish his studies and to become a support to his dear ones,
comes to the idea of killing an old woman--a private money-lender
whom he knows and who is said to possess a few thousand roubles. A
series of more or less fortuitous circumstances confirms him in this
idea and pushes him this way. Thus, his sister, who sees no escape
from their poverty, is going at last to sacrifice herself for her
family, and to marry a certain despicable, elderly man with much
money, and Raskólnikoff is firmly decided to prevent this marriage.
At the same time he meets with an old man--a small civil service
clerk and a drunkard who has a most sympathetic daughter from the
first marriage, Sónya. The family are at the lowest imaginable depths
of destitution--such as can only be found in a large city like St.
Petersburg, and Raskólnikoff is brought to take interest in them.
Owing to all these circumstances, while he himself sinks deeper and
deeper into the darkest misery, and realises the depths of hopeless
poverty and misery which surround him, the idea of killing the old
money-lending woman takes a firm hold of him. He accomplishes the crime
and, of course, as might have been foreseen, does not take advantage
of the money: he even does not find it in his excitement; and, after
having lived for a few days haunted by remorse and shame--again under
the pressure of a series of various circumstances which add to the
feeling of remorse--he goes to surrender himself, denouncing himself as
the murderer of the old woman and her sister.
This is, of course, only the framework of the novel; in reality it
is full of the most thrilling scenes of poverty on the one hand
and of moral degradation on the other, while a number of secondary
characters--an elderly gentleman in whose family Raskólnikoff’s
sister has been a governess, the examining magistrate, and so on--are
introduced. Besides, Dostoyévskiy, after having accumulated so many
reasons which might have brought a Raskólnikoff to commit such a
murder, found it necessary to introduce another theoretical motive.
One learns in the midst of the novel that Raskólnikoff, captivated
by the modern, current ideas of materialist philosophy, has written
and published a newspaper article to prove that men are divided into
superior and inferior beings, and that for the former--Napoleon being a
sample of them--the current rules of morality are not obligatory.
Most of the readers of this novel and most of the literary critics
speak very highly of the psychological analysis of Raskólnikoff’s
soul and of the motives which brought him to his desperate step.
However, I will permit myself to remark that the very profusion of
accidental causes accumulated by Dostoyévskiy shows how difficult he
felt it himself to prove that the propaganda of materialistic ideas
could in reality bring an honest young man to act as Raskólnikoff did.
Raskólnikoffs do not become murderers under the influence of such
theoretical considerations, while those who murder and invoke such
motives, like Lebiès at Paris, are not in the least of the Raskólnikoff
type. Behind Raskólnikoff I feel Dostoyévskiy trying to decide whether
he himself, or a man like him, might have been brought to act as
Raskólnikoff did, and what would be the psychological explanation if he
had been driven to do so. But such men do _not_ murder. Besides, men
like the examining magistrate and M. Swidrigailoff are purely romantic
inventions.
However, with all its faults, the novel produces a most powerful
effect by its real pictures of slum-life, and inspires every honest
reader with the deepest commiseration towards even the lowest sunken
inhabitants of the slums. When Dostoyévskiy comes to them, he becomes a
realist in the very best sense of the word, like Turguéneff or Tolstóy.
Marmeládoff--the old drunken official--his drunken talk and his death,
his family, and the incidents which happen after his burial, his wife
and his daughter Sónya--all these are living beings and real incidents
of the life of the poorest ones, and the pages that Dostoyévskiy gave
to them belong to the most impressive and the most moving pages in any
literature. They have the touch of genius.
_The Brothers Karamázoff_ is the most artistically worked out of
Dostoyévskiy’s novels, but it is also the novel in which all the inner
defects of the author’s mind and imagination have found their fullest
expression. The philosophy of this novel--incredulous Western Europe;
wildly passionate, drunken, unreformed Russia; and Russia reformed
by creed and monks--the three represented by the three brothers
Karamázoff--only faintly appears in the background. But there is
certainly not in any literature such a collection of the most repulsive
types of mankind--lunatics, half-lunatics, criminals in germ and in
reality, in all possible gradations--as one finds in this novel. A
Russian specialist in brain and nervous diseases finds representatives
of all sorts of such diseases in Dostoyévskiy’s novels, and especially
in _The Brothers Karamázoff_--the whole being set in a frame which
represents the strangest mixture of realism and romanticism run wild.
Whatsoever a certain portion of contemporary critics, fond of all sorts
of morbid literature, may have written about this novel, the present
writer can only say that he finds it, all through, so unnatural, so
much fabricated for the purpose of introducing--here, a bit of morals,
there, some abominable character taken from a psycho-pathological
hospital; or again, in order to analyse the feelings of some purely
imaginary criminal, that a few good pages scattered here and there
do not compensate the reader for the hard task of reading these two
volumes.
Dostoyévskiy is still very much read in Russia; and when, some twenty
years ago, his novels were first translated into French, German and
English, they were received as a revelation. He was praised as one
of the greatest writers of our own time, and as undoubtedly the one
who “had best expressed the mystic Slavonic soul”--whatever that
expression may mean! Turguéneff was eclipsed by Dostoyévskiy, and
Tolstóy was forgotten for a time. There was, of course, a great deal
of hysterical exaggeration in all this, and at the present time sound
literary critics do not venture to indulge in such praises. The
fact is, that there is certainly a great deal of power in whatever
Dostoyévskiy wrote: his powers of creation suggest those of Hoffman;
and his sympathy with the most down-trodden and down-cast products of
the civilisation of our large towns is so deep that it carries away the
most indifferent reader and exercises a most powerful impression in the
right direction upon young readers. His analysis of the most varied
specimens of incipient psychical disease is said to be thoroughly
correct. But with all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are
incomparably below those of any one of the great Russian masters:
Tolstóy, Turguéneff, or Gontcharóff. Pages of consummate realism are
interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy only of the most
incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling interest are interrupted
in order to introduce a score of pages of the most unnatural
theoretical discussions. Besides, the author is in such a hurry that he
seems never to have had the time himself to read over his novels before
sending them to the printer. And, worst of all, every one of the heroes
of Dostoyévskiy, especially in his novels of the later period, is a
person suffering from some psychical disease or from moral perversion.
As a result, while one may read some of the novels of Dostoyévskiy
with the greatest interest, one is never tempted to re-read them, as
one re-reads the novels of Tolstóy and Turguéneff, and even those of
many secondary novel writers; and the present writer must confess that
he had the greatest pain lately in reading through, for instance, _The
Brothers Karamázoff_, and never could pull himself through such a novel
as _The Idiot_. However, one pardons Dostoyévskiy everything, because
when he speaks of the ill-treated and forgotten children of our town
civilisation he becomes truly great through his wide, infinite love of
mankind--of man, even in his worst manifestations. Through his love
of those drunkards, beggars, petty thieves and so on, whom we usually
pass by without even bestowing upon them a pitying glance; through
his power of discovering what is human and often great in the lowest
sunken being; through the love which he inspires in us, even for the
least interesting types of mankind, even for those who never will make
an effort to get out of the low and miserable position into which life
has thrown them--through this faculty Dostoyévskiy has certainly won
a unique position among the writers of modern times, and he will be
read--not for the artistic finish of his writings but for the good
thoughts which are scattered through them, for their real reproduction
of slum life in the great cities--and for the infinite sympathy which a
being like Sónya can inspire in the reader.
NEKRÁSOFF
With Nekrásoff we come to a poet whose work has been the subject of
a lively controversy in Russian Literature. He was born in 1821--his
father being a poor army officer who married a Polish lady for love.
This lady must have been most remarkable, because in his poems
Nekrásoff continually refers to his mother in accents of love and
respect, such as perhaps have no parallel in any other poet. His
mother, however, died very early, and their large family, which
consisted of thirteen brothers and sisters, must have been in great
straits. No sooner had Nicholas Nekrásoff, the future poet, attained
his sixteenth year, than he left the provincial town where the family
were staying and went to St. Petersburg, to enter the University,
where he joined the philological department. Most Russian students
live very poorly--mostly by lessons, or entering as tutors in families
where they are paid very little, but have at least lodgings and food.
But Nekrásoff experienced simply black misery: “For full three years,”
he said at a later period, “I felt continually hungry every day.” “It
often happened that I entered one of the great restaurants where people
may go to read newspapers, even without ordering anything to eat, and
while I read my paper I would draw the bread plate towards myself and
eat the bread, and that was my only food.” At last he fell ill, and
during his convalescence the old soldier from whom he rented a tiny
room, and to whom he had already run into debt, one cold November
night refused to admit his lodger to his room. Nekrásoff would have
had to spend the night out of doors, but a passing beggar took pity
on him and took him to some slums on the outskirts of the town, to
a “doss-house,” where the young poet found also the possibility of
earning fifteen farthings for some petition that he wrote for one of
the inmates. Such was the youth of Nekrásoff; but during it he had the
opportunity of making acquaintance with the poorest and lowest classes
of St. Petersburg, and the love towards them which he acquired during
these peregrinations he retained all his life. Later on, by means of
relentless work, and by editing all sorts of almanacks, he improved
his material conditions. He became a regular contributor to the chief
review of the time, for which Turguéneff, Dostoyévskiy, Hérzen, and all
our best writers wrote, and in 1846 he even became the owner of this
review, _The Contemporary_, which for the next fifteen years played so
important a part in Russian literature. In _The Contemporary_ he came,
in the sixties, into close contact and friendship with two remarkable
men, Tchernyshévskiy and Dobrolúboff, and about this time he wrote his
best verses. In 1875 he fell seriously ill, and the next two years his
life was simply agony. He died in December, 1877, and thousands of
people, especially the University students, followed his body to the
grave.
Here, over his grave, began the passionate discussion which has never
ended, about the merits of Nekrásoff as a poet. While speaking over
his grave, Dostoyévskiy put Nekrásoff by the side of Púshkin and
Lérmontoff (“higher still than Púshkin and Lérmontoff,” exclaimed some
young enthusiast in the crowd), and the question, “Is Nekrásoff a great
poet, like Púshkin and Lérmontoff?” has been discussed ever since.
Nekrásoff’s poetry played such an important part in my own development,
during my youth, that I did not dare trust my own high appreciation
of it; and therefore to verify and support my impressions and
appreciations I have compared them with those of the Russian critics,
Arsénieff, Skabitchévskiy, and Venguéroff (the author of a great
biographical dictionary of Russian authors).
When we enter the period of adolescence, from sixteen years to twenty,
we need to find words to express the aspirations and the higher
ideas which begin to wake up in our minds. It is not enough to have
these aspirations: we want _words_ to express them. Some will find
these words in those of the prayers which they hear in the church;
others--and I belonged to their number--will not be satisfied with this
expression of their feelings: it will strike them as too vague, and
they will look for something else to express in more concrete terms
their growing sympathies with mankind and the philosophical questions
about the life of the universe which pre-occupy them. They will look
for poetry. For me, Goethe on the one side, by his philosophical
poetry, and Nekrásoff on the other, by the concrete images in which he
expressed his love of the peasant masses, supplied the words which the
heart wanted for the expression of its poetical feelings. But this is
only a personal remark. The question is, whether Nekrásoff can really
be put by the side of Púshkin and Lérmontoff as a great poet.
Some people repudiate such a comparison. He was not a poet, they say,
because he always wrote with a purpose. However, this reasoning, which
is often defended by the pure æsthetics, is evidently incorrect.
Shelley also had a purpose, which did not prevent him from being a
great poet; Browning has a purpose in a number of his poems, and this
did not prevent him from being a great poet. Every great poet has a
purpose in most of his poems, and the question is only whether he
has found a beautiful form for expressing this purpose, or not. The
poet who shall succeed in combining a really beautiful form, _i. e._,
impressive images and sonorous verses, with a grand purpose, will be
the greatest poet.
Now, one certainly feels, on reading Nekrásoff, that he had difficulty
in writing his verses. There is nothing in his poetry similar to
the easiness with which Púshkin used the forms of versification for
expressing his thoughts, nor is there any approach to the musical
harmony of Lérmontoff’s verse or A. K. Tolstóy’s. Even in his best
poems there are lines which are not agreeable to the ear on account of
their wooden and clumsy form; but you feel that these unhappy verses
could be improved by the change of a few words, without the beauty of
the images in which the feelings are expressed being altered by that.
One certainly feels that Nekrásoff was not master enough of his words
and his rhymes; but there is not one single poetical image which does
not suit the whole idea of the poem, or which strikes the reader as a
dissonance, or is not beautiful; while in some of his verses Nekrásoff
has certainly succeeded in combining a very high degree of poetical
inspiration with great beauty of form. It must not be forgotten that
the _Yambs_ of Barbier, and the _Châtiments_ of Victor Hugo also leave,
here and there, much to be desired as regards form.
Nekrásoff was a most unequal writer, but one of the above-named critics
has pointed out that even amidst his most unpoetical “poem”--the one
in which he describes in very poor verses the printing office of a
newspaper--the moment that he touches upon the sufferings of the
workingman there come in twelve lines which for the beauty of poetical
images and musicalness, connected with their inner force, have few
equals in the whole of Russian literature.
When we estimate a poet, there is something general in his poetry
which we either love or pass by indifferently, and to reduce literary
criticism exclusively to the analysis of the beauty of the poet’s
verses or to the correspondence between “idea and form” is surely to
immensely reduce its value. Everyone will recognise that Tennyson
possessed a wonderful beauty of form, and yet he cannot be considered
as superior to Shelley, for the simple reason that the general tenor
of the latter’s ideas was so much superior to the general tenor
of Tennyson’s. It is on the general contents of his poetry that
Nekrásoff’s superiority rests.
We have had in Russia several poets who also wrote upon social subjects
or the duties of a citizen--I need only mention Pleschéeff and
Mináyeff--and they attained sometimes, from the versifier’s point of
view, a higher beauty of form than Nekrásoff. But in whatever Nekrásoff
wrote there is an inner force which you do not find in either of
these poets, and this force suggests to him images which are rightly
considered as pearls of Russian poetry.
Nekrásoff called his Muse, “A Muse of Vengeance and of Sadness,” and
this Muse, indeed, never entered into compromise with injustice.
Nekrásoff is a pessimist, but his pessimism, as Venguéroff remarks,
has an original character. Although his poetry contains so many
depressing pictures representing the misery of the Russian masses,
nevertheless the fundamental impression which it leaves upon the reader
is an elevating feeling. The poet does not bow his head before the sad
reality: he enters into a struggle with it, and he is sure of victory.
The reading of Nekrásoff wakes up that discontent which bears in itself
the seeds of recovery.
The mass of the Russian people, the peasants and their sufferings, are
the main themes of our poet’s verses. His love to the people passes
as a red thread through all his works; he remained true to it all his
life. In his younger years that love saved him from squandering his
talent in the sort of life which so many of his contemporaries have
led; later on it inspired him in his struggle against serfdom; and
when serfdom was abolished he did not consider his work terminated,
as so many of his friends did: he became the poet of the dark masses
oppressed by the economical and political yoke; and towards the end of
his life he did not say: “Well, I have done what I could,” but till his
last breath his verses were a complaint about not having been enough of
a fighter. He wrote: “Struggle stood in the way of my becoming a poet,
and songs prevented me from becoming a fighter,” and again: “Only he
who is serviceable to the aims of his time, and gives all his life to
the struggle for his brother men--only he will live longer than his
life.”
Sometimes he sounds a note of despair; however, such a note is not
frequent in Nekrásoff. His Russian peasant is not a man who only sheds
tears. He is serene, sometimes humourous, and sometimes an extremely
gay worker. Very seldom does Nekrásoff idealise the peasant: for the
most part he takes him just as he is, from life itself; and the poet’s
faith in the forces of that Russian peasant is deep and vigorous. “A
little more freedom to breathe--he says--and Russia will shew that she
has men, and that she has a future.” This is an idea which frequently
recurs in his poetry.
The best poem of Nekrásoff is _Red-nosed Frost_. It is the apotheosis
of the Russian peasant woman. The poem has nothing sentimental in it.
It is written, on the contrary, in a sort of elevated epic style, and
the second part, where Frost personified passes on his way through the
wood, and where the peasant woman is slowly freezing to death, while
bright pictures of past happiness pass through her brain--all this is
admirable, even from the point of view of the most æsthetic critics,
because it is written in good verses and in a succession of beautiful
images and pictures.
_The Peasant Children_ is a charming village idyll. The “Muse of
Vengeance and Sadness”--one of our critics remarks--becomes wonderfully
mild and gentle as soon as she begins to speak of women and children.
In fact, none of the Russian poets has ever done so much for the
apotheosis of women, and especially of the mother-woman, as this
supposedly severe poet of Vengeance and Sadness. As soon as Nekrásoff
begins to speak of a mother he grows powerful; and the strophes he
devoted to his own mother--a woman lost in a squire’s house, amidst
men thinking only of hunting, drinking, and exercising their powers as
slave owners in their full brutality--these strophes are real pearls in
the poetry of all nations.
His poem devoted to the exiles in Siberia and to the Russian
women--that is, to the wives of the Decembrists--in exile, is excellent
and contains really beautiful passages, but it is inferior to either
his poems dealing with the peasants or to his pretty poem, _Sasha_, in
which he describes, contemporaneously with Turguéneff, the very same
types as Rúdin and Natásha.
It is quite true that Nekrásoff’s verses often bear traces of a
painful struggle with rhyme, and that there are lines in his poems
which are decidedly inferior; but he is certainly one of our most
popular poets amidst the masses of the people. Part of his poetry
has already become the inheritance of all the Russian nation. He is
immensely read--not only by the educated classes, but by the poorest
peasants as well. In fact, as has been remarked by one of our critics,
to understand Púshkin a certain more or less artificial literary
development is required; while to understand Nekrásoff it is sufficient
for the peasant simply to know reading; and it is difficult to imagine,
without having seen it, the delight with which Russian children in the
poorest village schools are now reading Nekrásoff and learning full
pages from his verses by heart.
OTHER PROSE WRITERS OF THE SAME EPOCH
Having analysed the work of those writers who may be considered as
the true founders of modern Russian literature, I ought now to review
a number of prose-writers and poets of less renown, belonging to the
same epoch. However, following the plan of this book, only a few words
will be said, and only some of the most remarkable among them will be
mentioned.
A writer of great power, quite unknown in Western Europe, who
occupies a quite unique position in Russian literature, is SERGHÉI
TIMOFÉEVITCH AKSÁKOVV (1791-1859), the father of the two Slavophile
writers, Konstantín and Iván Aksákoff. He is in reality a contemporary
of Púshkin and Lérmontoff, but during the first part of his career
he displayed no originality whatever, and lingered in the fields of
pseudo-classicism. It was only after Gógol had written--that is,
after 1846--that he struck a quite new vein, and attained the full
development of his by no means ordinary talent. In the years 1847-1855
he published his _Memoirs of Angling_, _Memoirs of a Hunter with
his Fowling Piece in the Government of Orenbúrg_, and _Stories and
Remembrances of a Sportsman_; and these three works would have been
sufficient to conquer for him the reputation of a first-rate writer.
The Orenbúrg region, in the Southern Uráls, was very thinly inhabited
at that time, and its nature and physiognomy are so well described in
these books that Aksákoff’s work reminds one of the _Natural History of
Selbourne_. It has the same accuracy; but Aksákoff is moreover a poet
and a first-rate poetical landscape painter. Besides, he so admirably
knew the life of the animals, and he so well _understood_ them, that
in this respect his rivals could only be Krylóff on the one hand, and
Brehm the elder and Audubon among the naturalists.
The influence of Gógol induced S. T. Aksákoff to entirely abandon
the domain of pseudo-classical fiction. In 1846 he began to describe
real life, and the result was a large work, _A Family Chronicle
and Remembrances_ (1856), soon followed by _The Early Years of
Bagróff-the-Grandchild_ (1858), which put him in the first ranks among
the writers of his century. Slavophile enthusiasts described him even
as a Shakespeare, nay, as a Homer; but all exaggeration apart, S. T.
Aksákoff has really succeeded not only in reproducing a whole epoch in
his _Memoirs_, but also in creating real types of men of that time,
which have served as models for all our subsequent writers. If the
leading idea of these _Memoirs_ had not been so much in favour of the
“good old times” of serfdom, they would have been even much more widely
read than they are now. The appearance of _A Family Chronicle_--in
1856--was an event, and the marking of an epoch in Russian literature.
* * * * *
V. DAL (1801-1872) cannot be omitted even from this short sketch. He
was born in Southeastern Russia, of a Danish father and a Franco-German
mother, and received his education at the Dorpat university. He was
a naturalist and a doctor by profession, but his favourite study
was ethnography, and he became a remarkable ethnographer, as well
as one of the best connoisseurs of the Russian spoken language and
its provincial dialects. His sketches from the life of the people,
signed KOZAK LUGANSKIY (about a hundred of them are embodied in a
volume, _Pictures from Russian Life_, 1861), were very widely read in
the forties and the fifties, and were highly praised by Turguéneff
and Byelínskiy. Although they are mere sketches and leaflets from a
diary, without real poetical creation, they are delightful reading.
As to the ethnographical work of Dal it was colossal. During his
continual peregrinations over Russia, in his capacity of a military
doctor attached to his regiment, he made most wonderful collections of
words, expressions, riddles, proverbs, and so on, and embodied them in
two large works. His main work is _An Explanatory Dictionary of the
Russian Language_, in four quarto volumes (first edition in 1861-68,
second in 1880-1882). This is really a monumental work and contains
the first and very successful attempt at a lexicology of the Russian
language, which, notwithstanding some occasional mistakes, is of the
greatest value for the understanding and the etymology of the Russian
tongue as it is spoken in different provinces. It contains at the same
time a precious and extremely rich collection of linguistic material
for future research, part of which would have been lost by now if Dal
had not collected it, fifty years ago, before the advent of railways.
Another great work of Dal, only second to the one just mentioned, is a
collection of proverbs, entitled _The Proverbs of the Russian People_
(second edition in 1879).
A writer who occupies a prominent place in the evolution of the Russian
novel, but has not yet been sufficiently appreciated, is IVAN PANÁEFF
(1812-1862), who was a great friend of all the literary circle of
the _Sovreménnik_ (_Contemporary_). Of this review he was co-editor
with Nekrásoff, and he wrote for it a mass of literary notes and
_feuilletons_ upon all sorts of subjects, extremely interesting for
characterising those times. In his novels Panáeff, like Turguéneff,
took his types chiefly from the educated classes, both at St.
Petersburg and in the provinces. His collection of “Swaggerers”
(_hlyschí_), both from the highest classes in the capitals, and from
provincials, is not inferior to Thackeray’s collection of “snobs.”
In fact, the “swaggerer,” as Panáeff understood him, is even a much
broader and much more complicated type of man than the snob, and cannot
easily be described in a few words. The greatest service rendered by
Panáeff was, however, the creation in his novels of a series of such
exquisite types of Russian women that they were truly described by
some critics as “the spiritual mothers of the heroines of Turguéneff.”
A. HERZEN (1812-1870) also belongs to the same epoch, but he will be
spoke of in a subsequent chapter.
A very sympathetic woman writer, who belongs to the same group
and deserves in reality much more than a brief notice, is N. D.
HVOSCHINSKAYA (1825-1869; Zaionchkóvskaya after her marriage). She
wrote under the masculine _nom-de-plume_ of V. KRESTOVSKIY, and in
order not to confound her with a very prolific writer of novels in the
style of the French detective novel--the author of _St. Petersburg
Slums_, whose name was VSEVOLOD KRESTOVSKIY--she is usually known in
Russia as “V. Krestóvskiy-pseudonyme.”
N. D. Hvóschinskaya began to write very early, in 1847, and her novels
were endowed with such an inner charm that they were always admired by
the general public and were widely read. It must, however, be said that
during the first part of her literary career the full value of her work
was not appreciated, and that down to the end of the seventies literary
criticism remained hostile to her. It was only towards the end of her
career (in 1878-1880) that our best literary critics--Mihailóvskiy,
Arsénieff and the novelist Boborýkin--recognised the full value of this
writer, who certainly deserves being placed by the side of George Eliot
and the author of _Jane Eyre_.
N. D. Hvóschinskaya certainly was not one of those who conquer their
reputation at once; but the cause of the rather hostile attitude of
Russian critics towards her was that, having been born in a poor
nobleman’s family of Ryazán, and having spent all her life in the
province, her novels of the first period, in which she dealt with
provincial life and provincial types only, suffered from a certain
narrowness of view. This last defect was especially evident in those
types of men for whom the young author tried to win sympathy, but who,
after all, had no claims to it, and simply proved that the author felt
the need of idealising somebody, at least, in her sad surroundings.
Apart from this defect, N. D. Hvóschinskaya knew provincial life very
well and pictured it admirably. She represented it exactly in the same
pessimistic light in which Turguéneff saw it in those same years--the
last years of the reign of Nicholas I. She excelled especially in
representing the sad and hopeless existence of the girl in most of the
families of those times.
In her own family she meets the bigoted tyranny of her mother and the
“let-me-alone” egotism of her father, and among her admirers she finds
only a collection of good-for-nothings who cover their shallowness with
empty, sonorous phrases. Every novel written by our author during this
period contains the drama of a girl whose best self is crushed back in
such surroundings, or it relates the still more heart-rending drama of
an old maid compelled to live under the tyranny, the petty persecutions
and the pin-prickings of her relations.
When Russia entered into a better period, in the early sixties, the
novels of N. D. Hvóschinskaya also took a different, much more hopeful
character, and among them _The Great Bear_ (1870-71) is the most
prominent. At the time of its appearance it produced quite a sensation
amidst our youth, and it had upon them a deeper influence, in the very
best sense of the word, than any other novel. The heroine, Kátya,
meets, in Verhóvskiy, a man of the weakling type which we know from
Turguéneff’s _Correspondence_, but dressed this time in the garb of a
social reformer, prevented only by “circumstances” and “misfortunes”
from accomplishing greater things. Verhóvskiy, whom Kátya loves and
who falls in love with her--so far, at least, as such men can fall in
love--is admirably pictured. It is one of the best representatives in
the already rich gallery of such types in Russian literature. It must
be owned that there are in _The Great Bear_ one or two characters which
are not quite real, or, at least, are not correctly appreciated by the
author (for instance, the old Bagryánskiy); but we find also a fine
collection of admirably painted characters; while Kátya stands higher,
is more alive, and is more fully pictured, than Turguéneff’s Natásha or
even his Helen. She has had enough of all the talk about heroic deeds
which “circumstances” prevent the would-be heroes from accomplishing,
and she takes to a much smaller task: she becomes a loving school
mistress in a village school, and undertakes to bring into the
village-darkness her higher ideals and her hopes of a better future.
The appearance of this novel, just at the time when that great movement
of the youth “towards the people” was beginning in Russia, made it
favourite reading by the side of MORDÓVTSEFF’S _Signs of the Times_,
and Spielhagen’s _Amboss und Hammer_ and _In Reih und Glied_. The warm
tone of the novel and the refined, deeply humane, poetical touches of
which it is full--all these added immensely to the inner merits of _The
Great Bear_. In Russia it has sown many a good idea, and there is no
doubt that if it were known in Western Europe, it would be, here as
well, a favourite with the thinking and well inspired young women and
men.
A third period may be distinguished in the art of N. Hvóschinskaya,
after the end of the seventies. The novels of this period--among
which the series entitled _The Album: Groups and Portraits_ is the
most striking--have a new character. When the great liberal movement
which Russia had lived through in the early sixties came to an end,
and reaction had got the upper hand, after 1864, hundreds and hundreds
of those who had been prominent in this movement as representatives
of advanced thought and reform abandoned the faith and the ideals of
their best years. Under a thousand various pretexts they now tried
to persuade themselves--and, of course, those women who had trusted
them--that new times had come, and new requirements had grown up; that
they had only become “practical” when they deserted the old banner and
ranged themselves under a new one--that of personal enrichment; that to
do this was on their part a necessary self-sacrifice, a manifestation
of “virile citizenship,” which requires from every man that he should
not stop even before the sacrifice of his ideals in the interest of
his “cause.” “V. Krestovskiy,” as a woman who had loved the ideals,
understood better than any man the real sense of these sophisms. She
must have bitterly suffered from them in her personal life; and I doubt
whether in any literature there is a collection of such “groups and
portraits” of deserters as we see in _The Album_, and especially in
_At the Photographer’s_. In reading these stories we are conscious of
a loving heart which bleeds as it describes these deserters, and this
makes of “The groups and portraits” of N. D. Hvóschinskaya one of the
finest pieces of “subjective realism” we possess in our literature.
Two sisters of N. D. Hvóschinskaya, who wrote under the _noms-de-plume_
of ZIMAROFF and VESENIEFF, were also novelists. The former wrote a
biography of her sister Nathalie.
POETS OF THE SAME EPOCH
Several poets of the epoch described in the last two chapters ought to
be analysed at some length in this place, if this book pretended to be
a Course in Russian literature. I shall have, however, to limit myself
to very short notes, although most of the poets could not have failed
to be favourites with other nations if they had written in a language
better known abroad than Russian.
Such was certainly KOLTSOFF (1808-1842), a poet from the people, who
has sung in his songs, so deeply appealing to every poetical mind, the
borderless steppes of Southern Russia, the poor life of the tiller of
the soil, the sad existence of the Russian peasant woman, that love
which is for the loving soul only a source of acute suffering, that
fate which is not a mother but a step-mother, and that happiness which
has been so short and has left behind only tears and sadness.
The style, the contents, the form--all was original in this poet of
the Steppes. Even the form of his verse is not the form established in
Russian prosody: it is something as musical as the Russian folk-song
and in places is equally irregular. However, every line of the poetry
of the Koltsóff of his second period--when he had freed himself from
imitation and had become a true poet of the people--every expression
and every thought appeal to the heart and fill it with poetical love
for nature and men. Like all the best Russian poets he died very young,
just at the age when he was reaching the full maturity of his talent
and deeper questions were beginning to inspire his poetry.
NIKITIN (1824-1861) was another poet of a similar type. He was born
in a poor artisan’s family, also in South Russia. His life in this
family, of which the head was continually under the influence of drink,
and which the young man had to maintain, was terrible. He also died
young, but he left some very fine and most touching pieces of poetry,
in which, with a simplicity that we shall find only with the later
folk-novelists, he described scenes from popular life, coloured with
the deep sadness impressed upon him by his own unhappy life.
A. PLESCHÉEFF (1825-1893) has been for the last thirty years of his
life one of the favourite Russian poets. Like so many other gifted
men of his generation, he was arrested in 1849 in connection with the
affair of the “Petrashévskiy circles,” for which Dostoyévskiy was
sent to hard labour. He was found even less “guilty” than the great
novelist, and was marched as a soldier to the Orenbúrg region, where he
probably would have died a soldier, if Nicholas I. had not himself died
in 1856. He was pardoned by Alexander II., and permitted to settle at
Moscow.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Pleschéeff never let himself be
crushed by persecution, or by the dark years which Russia has lately
lived through. On the contrary, he always retained that same note of
vigour, freshness, and faith in his humanitarian though perhaps too
abstract ideals, which characterised his first poetical productions in
the forties. Only towards his very latest years, under the influence
of ill-health, did a pessimistic note begin to creep into his verses.
Besides writing original poetry he translated very much, and admirably
well, from the German, English, French and Italian poets.
* * * * *
Besides these three poets, who sought their inspiration in the
realities of life or in higher humanitarian ideals, we have a group
of poets who are usually described as admirers of “pure beauty” and
“Art for Art’s sake.” TH. TYÚTCHEFF (1803-1873) may be taken as the
best, or, at any rate, the eldest representative of this group.
Turguéneff spoke of him very highly--in 1854--praising his fine and
true feeling for nature and his fine taste. The influence of the epoch
of Púshkin upon him was evident, and he certainly was endowed with the
impressionability and sincerity which are necessary in a good poet.
With all that, his verses are not much read, and seem rather dull to
our generation.
APOLLON MAYKOFF (1821-1897) is often described as a poet of pure art
for art’s sake; at any rate, this is what he preached in theory; but
in reality his poetry belonged to four distinct domains. In his youth
he was a pure admirer of antique Greece and Rome, and his chief work,
_Two Worlds_, was devoted to the conflict between antique paganism
and natureism and Christianity--the best types in his poem being
representatives of the former. Later on he wrote several very good
pieces of poetry devoted to the history of the Church in mediæval
times. Still later, in the sixties, he was carried away by the liberal
movement in Russia and in Western Europe, and his poems were imbued
with its spirit of freedom. He wrote during those years his best poems,
and made numbers of excellent translations from Heine. And finally,
after the liberal period had come to an end in Russia, he also changed
his opinions and began to write in the opposite direction, losing more
and more both the sympathy of his readers and his talent. Apart from
some of the productions of this last period of decay, the verses of
Máykoff are as a rule very musical, really poetical, and not devoid
of force. In his earlier productions and in some pieces of his third
period, he attained real beauty.
N. SCHERBINA (1821-1869), also an admirer of classical Greece, may be
mentioned for his really good anthological poetry from the life of
Greek antiquity, in which he even excelled Máykoff.
POLONSKIY (1820-1898), a contemporary and a great friend of Turguéneff,
displayed all the elements of a great artist. His verses are full of
true melody, his poetical images are rich, and yet natural and simple,
and the subjects he took were not devoid of originality. This is why
his verses were always read with interest. But he had none of that
force, or of that depth of conception, or of that intensity of passion
which might have made of him a great poet. His best piece, _A Musical
Cricket_, is written in a jocose mood, and his most popular verses are
those which he wrote in the style of folk-poetry. One may say that they
have become the property of the people. Altogether Polonskiy appealed
chiefly to the quiet, moderate “intellectual” who does not much care
about going to the bottom of the great problems of life. If he touched
upon some of these, it was owing to a passing, rather than to a life
interest in them.
One more poet of this group, perhaps the most characteristic of it, was
A. SHENSHIN (1820-1892), much better known under his _nom-de-plume_ of
A. FET. He remained all his life a poet of “pure art for art’s sake.”
He wrote a good deal about economical and social matters, always in
the reactionary sense, but--in prose. As to verses, he never resorted
to them for anything but the worship of beauty for beauty’s sake. In
this direction he succeeded very well. His short verses are especially
pretty and sometimes almost beautiful. Nature, in its quiet, lovely
aspects, which lead to a gentle, aimless sadness, he depicted sometimes
to perfection, as also those moods of the mind which can be best
described as indefinite sensations, slightly erotic. However, taken as
a whole, his poetry appears monotonous.
To the same group one might add A. K. TOLSTÓY, whose verses attain
sometimes a rare perfection and sound like the best music. The feelings
expressed in them may not be very deep, but the form and the music
of the verses are delightful. They have, moreover, the stamp of
originality, because nobody could write poems in the style of Russian
folk-poetry better than Alexéi Tolstóy. Theoretically, he preached art
for art’s sake. But he never remained true to this canon and, taking
either the life of old epical Russia, or the period of the struggle
between the Moscow Tsars and the feudal boyars, he developed his
admiration of the olden times in very beautiful verses. He also wrote a
novel, _Prince Serébryanyi_, from the times of John the Terrible, which
was very widely read; but his main work was a trilogy of dramas from
the same interesting period of Russian history (see Ch. VI).
* * * * *
Almost all the poets just mentioned have translated a great deal,
and they have enriched Russian literature with such a number of
translations from all languages--so admirably done as a rule--that
no other literature of the world, not even the German, can claim
to possess an equally great treasury. Some translations, beginning
with Zhukóvskiy’s rendering of the _Prisoner of Chillon_, or the
translations of _Hiawatha_, are simply classical. All Schiller, most of
Goethe, nearly all Byron, a great deal of Shelley, all that is worth
knowing in Tennyson, Wordsworth, Crabbe, all that could be translated
from Browning, Barbier, Victor Hugo, and so on, are as familiar in
Russia as in the mother countries of these poets, and occasionally
even more so. As to such favourites as Heine, I really don’t know
whether his best poems lose anything in those splendid translations
which we owe to our best poets; while the songs of Béranger, in the
free translation of _Kúrotchkin_, are not in the least inferior to the
originals.
We have moreover some excellent poets who are chiefly known for their
translations. Such are: N. GERBEL (1827-1883), who made his reputation
by an admirable rendering of the _Lay of Igor’s Raid_ (see Ch. I.), and
later on, by his versions of a great number of West European poets. His
edition of _Schiller, translated by Russian Poets_ (1857), followed by
similar editions of Shakespeare, Byron, and Goethe, was epoch making.
MIKHAIL MIKHÁILOFF (1826-1865), one of the most brilliant writers of
the _Contemporary_, condemned in 1861 to hard labour in Siberia, where
he died four years later, was especially renowned for his translations
from Heine, as also for those from Longfellow, Hood, Tennyson, Lenan,
and others.
P. WEINBERG (born 1830) made his reputation by his excellent
translations from Shakespeare, Byron (_Sardanapal_), Shelley (_Cenci_),
Sheridan, Coppe, Gutzkow, Heine, etc., and for his editions of the work
of Goethe and Heine in Russian translations. He still continues to
enrich Russian literature with excellent versions of the masterpieces
of foreign literatures.
L. MEY (1822-1862), the author of a number of poems from popular life,
written in a very picturesque language, and of several dramas, of which
those from old Russian life are especially valuable and were taken by
RÍMSKY KORSÁKOFF as the subjects of his operas, has also made a great
number of translations. He translated not only from the modern West
European poets--English, French, German, Italian, and Polish--but also
from Greek, Latin, and Old Hebrew, all of which languages he knew to
perfection. Besides excellent translations of Anacreon and the idylls
of Theocritus, he wrote also beautiful poetical versions of the _Song
of Songs_ and of various other portions of the Bible.
D. MINÁYEFF (1835-1889), the author of a great number of satirical
verses, also belongs to this group of translators. His renderings from
Byron, Burns, Cornwall, and Moore, Goethe and Heine, Leopardi, Dante,
and several others, were, as a rule, extremely fine.
And finally I must mention one, at least, of the prose-translators,
VVEDÉNSKIY (1813-1855), for his very fine translations of the chief
novels of Dickens. His renderings are real works of art, the result of
a perfect knowledge of English life, and of such a deep assimilation
of the genius of Dickens that the translator almost identified himself
with the original author.
PART VI
The Drama
CHAPTER VI
THE DRAMA
Its Origin--The Tsars Alexei and Peter
I.--Sumarókoff--Pseudo-classical Tragedies: Knyazhnín, Ozeroff--First
Comedies--The First Years of the Nineteenth Century--Griboyedoff--The
Moscow Stage in the Fifties--Ostróvskiy; his first Dramas--“The
Thunderstorm”--Ostróvskiy’s later Dramas--Historical Dramas: A. K.
Tolstóy--Other Dramatic Writers.
The Drama in Russia, as everywhere else, had a double origin. It
developed out of the religious “mysteries” on the one hand and the
popular comedy on the other, witty interludes being introduced into the
grave, moral representations, the subjects of which were borrowed from
the Old or the New Testament. Several such mysteries were adapted in
the seventeenth century by the teachers of the Graeco-Latin Theological
Academy at Kíeff for representation in Little Russian by the students
of the Academy, and later on these adaptations found their way to
Moscow.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century--on the eve, so to speak,
of the reforms of Peter I.--a strong desire to introduce Western
habits of life was felt in certain small circles at Moscow, and the
father of Peter, the Tsar Alexis, was not hostile to it. He took a
liking to theatrical representations, and induced some foreigners
residing at Moscow to write pieces for representation at the palace.
A certain Gregory undertook this task and, taking German versions of
plays, which used to be called at that time “English Plays,” he adapted
them to Russian tastes. _The Comedy of Queen Esther and the Haughty
Haman_, _Tobias_, _Judith_, etc., were represented before the Tsar.
A high functionary of the Church, SIMEON PÓLOTSKIY, did not disdain
to write such mysteries, and several of them have come down to us;
while a daughter of Alexis, the princess Sophie (a pupil of Simeon),
breaking with the strict habits of isolation which were then obligatory
for women, had theatrical representations given at the palace in her
presence.
This was too much for the old Moscow Conservatives, and after the
death of Alexis the theatre was closed; and so it remained a quarter
of a century, _i. e._, until 1702, when Peter I., who was very fond
of the drama, opened a theatre in the old capital. He had a company
of actors brought for the purpose from Dantsig, and a special house
was built for them within the holy precincts of the Kremlin. More
than that, another sister of Peter I., Nathalie, who was as fond of
dramatic performances as the great reformer himself, a few years later
took all the properties of this theatre to her own palace, and had the
representations given there--first in German, and later on in Russian.
It is also very probable that she herself wrote a few dramas--perhaps
in collaboration with one of the pupils of a certain Doctor Bidlo, who
had opened another theatre at the Moscow Hospital, the actors being the
students. Later on the theatre of Princess Nathalie was transferred to
the new capital founded by her brother on the Nevá.
The _répertoire_ of this theatre was pretty varied, and included,
besides German dramas, like _Scipio the African_, _Don Juan and Don
Pedro_, and the like, free translations from Molière, as also German
farces of a very rough character. There were, besides a few original
Russian dramas (partly contributed, apparently, by Nathalie), which
were compositions drawn from the lives of the Saints, and from
some Polish novels, widely read at that time in Russian manuscript
translations.