It was out of these elements and out of West European models that

the Russian drama evolved, when the theatre became, in the middle

of the eighteenth century, a permanent institution. It is most

interesting to note, that it was not in either of the capitals, but

in a provincial town, Yarosláv, under the patronage of the local

tradesmen, that the first permanent Russian theatre was founded, in

1750, and also that it was by the private enterprise of a few actors:

the two brothers Vólkoff, Dmitrévsky, and several others. The Empress

Elisabeth--probably following the advice of Sumarókoff, who himself

began about that time to write dramas--ordered these actors to move to

St. Petersburg, where they became “artists of the Imperial Theatre,” in

the service of the Crown. Thus, the Russian theatre became, in 1756, an

institution of the Government.

SUMARÓKOFF (1718-1777), who wrote, besides verses and fables (the

latter of real value), a considerable number of tragedies and

comedies, played an important part in the development of the Russian

drama. In his tragedies he imitated Racine and Voltaire. He followed

strictly their rules of “unity,” and cared even less than they did for

historical truth; but as he had not the great talent of his French

masters, he made of his heroes mere personifications of certain virtues

or vices, figures quite devoid of life, and indulging in endless

pompous monologues. Several of his tragedies (_Hórev_, written in 1747,

_Sináv and Trúvor_, _Yaropólk and Dílitza_, _Dmítri the Impostor_) were

taken from Russian history; but after all their heroes were as little

Slavonian as Racine’s heroes were Greek and Roman. This, however, must

be said in favour of Sumarókoff, that he never failed to express in his

tragedies the more advanced humanitarian ideas of the times--sometimes

with real feeling, which pierced through even the conventional forms

of speech of his heroes. As to his comedies, although they had not the

same success as his serious dramas, they were much nearer to life.

They contained touches of the real life of Russia, especially of the

life of the Moscow nobility, and their satirical character undoubtedly

influenced Sumarókoff’s followers.

KNYAZHNÍN (1742-1791) followed on the same lines. Like Sumarókoff he

translated tragedies from the French, and also wrote imitations of

French tragedies, taking his subjects partly from Russian history

(_Rossláv_, 1784; _Vadím of Nóvgorod_, which was printed after his

death and was immediately destroyed by the Government on account of its

tendencies towards freedom).

OZEROFF (1769-1816) continued the work of Knyazhnín, but introduced

the sentimental and the romantic elements into his pseudo-classical

tragedies (_Oedipus in Athens_, _Death of Olèg_). With all their

defects these tragedies enjoyed a lasting success, and powerfully

contributed to the development of both the stage and a public of

serious playgoers.

At the same time comedies also began to be written by the same authors

(_The Brawler_, _Strange People_, by Knyazhnín) and their followers,

and although they were for the most part imitations of the French,

nevertheless subjects taken from Russian everyday life began to be

introduced. Sumarókoff had already done something in this direction,

and he had been seconded by CATHERINE II., who contributed a couple of

satirical comedies, taken from her surroundings, such as _The Fête of

Mrs. Grumbler_, and a comic opera from Russian popular life. She was

perhaps the first to introduce Russian peasants on the stage; and it is

worthy of note that the taste for a popular vein on the stage rapidly

developed--the comedies, _The Miller_ by ABLESÍMOFF, _Zbítenshik_ (_The

Hawker_), by Knyazhnín, and so on, all taken from the life of the

people, being for some time great favourites with the playgoers.

VON-WIZIN has already been mentioned in a previous chapter, and it is

sufficient here to recall the fact, that by his two comedies, _The

Brigadier_ (1768) and _Nédorosl_ (1782), which continued to be played

up to the middle of the nineteenth century he became the father of

the realistic satirical comedy in Russia. _Denunciation_ (_Yábeda_),

by KAPNÍST, and a few comedies contributed by the great fable-writer

KRYLÓFF belong to the same category.

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

During the first thirty years of the nineteenth century the Russian

theatre developed remarkably. The stage produced, at St. Petersburg and

at Moscow, a number of gifted and original actors and actresses, both

in tragedy and in comedy. The number of writers for the stage became so

considerable that all the forms of dramatic art were able to develop

at the same time. During the Napoleonic wars patriotic tragedies,

full of allusions to current events, such as _Dmítri Donskói_ (1807),

by Ozeroff, invaded the stage. However, the pseudo-classical tragedy

continued to hold its own. Better translations and imitations of

Racine were produced (KATÉNIN, KOKÓSHKIN) and enjoyed a certain

success, especially at St. Petersburg, owing to good tragic actors of

the declamatory school. At the same time translations of KOTZEBUE had

an enormous success, as also the Russian productions of his sentimental

imitators.

Romanticism and pseudo-classicalism were, of course, at war with each

other for the possession of the stage, as they were in the domains

of poetry and the novel; but, owing to the spirit of the time,

and patronised as it was by KARAMZÍN and ZHUKÓVSKIY, romanticism

triumphed. It was aided especially by the energetic efforts of Prince

SHAHOVSKÓY, who wrote, with a good knowledge of the stage, more than

a hundred varied pieces--tragedies, comedies, operas, vaudevilles

and ballets--taking the subjects for his dramas from Walter Scott,

Ossian, Shakespeare, and Púshkin. At the same comedy, and especially

satirical comedy, as also the vaudeville (which approached comedy by a

rather more careful treatment of characters than is usual in that sort

of literature on the French stage), were represented by a very great

number of more or less original productions. Besides the excellent

translations of HMELNÍTZKIY from Molière, the public enjoyed also the

pieces of ZAGÓSKIN, full of good-hearted merriment, the sometimes

brilliant and always animated comedies and vaudevilles of Shahovskóy,

the vaudevilles of A. I. PÍSAREFF, and so on. True, all the comedies

were either directly inspired by Molière or were adaptations from the

French into which Russian characters and Russian manners had been

introduced. But as there was still some original creation in these

adaptions, which was carried a step further on the stage by gifted

actors of the natural, realist school, it all prepared the way for the

truly Russian comedy, which found its embodiment in Griboyédoff, Gógol

and Ostróvskiy.

GRIBOYÉDOFF.

GRIBOYÉDOFF (1795-1829) died very young, and all that he left was one

comedy, _Misfortune from Intelligence_ (_Góre ot Umá_), and a couple of

scenes from an unfinished tragedy in the Shakespearean style. However,

the comedy is a work of genius, and owing to it alone, Griboyédoff may

be described as having done for the Russian stage what Púshkin has done

for Russian poetry.

Griboyédoff was born at Moscow, and received a good education at home

before he entered the Moscow University, at the age of fifteen. Here

he was fortunate enough to fall under the influence of the historian

Schlötzer and Professor Buhle, who developed in him the desire for a

thorough acquaintance with the world-literature, together with habits

of serious work. It was consequently during his stay at the University

(1810-1812) that Griboyédoff wrote the first sketch of his comedy, at

which he worked for the next twelve years.

In 1812, during the invasion of Napoleon, he entered the military

service, and for four years remained an officer of the hussars, chiefly

in Western Russia. The spirit of the army was quite different then from

what it became later on, under Nicholas I.: it was in the army that the

“Decembrists” made their chief propaganda, and Griboyédoff met among

his comrades men of high humanitarian tendencies. In 1816 he left the

military service, and, obeying the desire of his mother, entered the

diplomatic service at St. Petersburg, where he became friendly with the

“Decembrists” Tchaadáeff (see Ch. VIII.), Ryléeff, and Odóevskiy (see

Ch. I. and II.).

A duel, in which Griboyédoff took part as a second, was the cause

of the future dramatist’s removal from St. Petersburg. His mother

insisted upon his being sent as far as possible from the capital, and

he was accordingly despatched to Teheran. He travelled a good deal

in Persia, and, with his wonderful activity and liveliness, took a

prominent part in the diplomatic work of the Russian Embassy. Later on,

staying at Tiflís, and acting as a secretary to the Lieutenant of the

Caucasus, he worked hard in the same diplomatic domain; but he worked

also all the time at his comedy, and in 1824 he finished it, while he

was for a few months in Central Russia. Owing to a mere accident the

manuscript of _Misfortune from Intelligence_ became known to a few

friends, and the comedy produced a tremendous sensation among them. In

a few months it was being widely read in manuscript copies, raising

storms of indignation amongst the old generation, and provoking the

greatest admiration among the young. All efforts, however, to obtain

its production on the stage, or even to have it represented once in

private, were thwarted by censorship, and Griboyédoff returned to the

Caucasus without having seen his comedy played at a theatre.

There, at Tiflís, he was arrested a few days after the 14th of

December, 1825 (see Ch. I.), and taken in all speed to the St.

Petersburg fortress, where his best friends were already imprisoned.

It is said in the Memoirs of one of the Decembrists that even in

the gloomy surroundings of the fortress the habitual brightness of

Griboyédoff did not leave him. He used to tell his unfortunate friends

such amusing stories by means of taps on the walls that they rolled on

their beds, laughing like children.

In June, 1826, he was set free, and sent back to Tiflís. But after the

execution of some of his friends--Ryléeff was among them--and the harsh

sentence to hard labour for life in Siberian mines, which was passed

upon all the others, his old gaiety was gone forever.

At Tiflís he worked harder than ever at spreading seeds of a better

civilisation in the newly conquered territory; but next year he had

to take part in the war of 1827-1828 against Persia, accompanying

the army as a diplomatic agent, and after a crushing defeat of the

Shah, Abbas-mirza, it was he who concluded the well-known Turkmanchái

treaty, by which Russia obtained rich provinces from Persia and gained

such an influence over her inner affairs. After a flying visit to St.

Petersburg, Griboyédoff was sent once more to Teheran--this time as an

ambassador. Before leaving, he married at Tiflís a Georgian princess

of remarkable beauty, but he felt, as he left the Caucasus for Persia,

that his chances of returning alive were few: “Abbas Miraz,” he wrote,

“will never pardon me the Turkmanchái treaty”--and so it happened. A

few months after his arrival at Teheran a crowd of Persians fell upon

the Russian embassy, and Griboyédoff was killed.

For the last few years of his life, Griboyédoff had not much time nor

taste for literary work. He knew that nothing he desired to write

could ever see the light. Even _Misfortune from Intelligence_ had been

so mutilated by censorship that many of its best passages had lost

all sense. He wrote, however, a tragedy in the romantic style, _A

Georgian Night_, and those of his friends who had read it in full rated

extremely high its poetic and dramatic qualities; but only two scenes

from this tragedy and the outline of its contents have reached us. The

manuscript was lost--perhaps at Teheran.

_Misfortune from Intelligence_ is a most powerful satire, directed

against the high society of Moscow in the years 1820-1830. Griboyédoff

knew this society from the inside, and his types are not invented. Real

men gave him the foundations for such immortal types as Fámusoff, the

aged nobleman, and Skalozúb, the fanatic of militarism, as well as for

all the secondary personages. As to the language in which Griboyédoff’s

personages speak, it has often been remarked that up to his time only

three writers had been such great masters of the truly Russian spoken

language: Púshkin, Krylóff, and Griboyédoff. Later on, Ostróvskiy could

be added to these three. It is the true language of Moscow. Besides,

the comedy is full of verses so strikingly satirical and so well said,

that scores of them became proverbs known all over Russia.

The idea of the comedy must have been suggested by Molière’s

_Misanthrope_, and the hero, Tchátskiy, has certainly much in common

with Alceste. But Tchátskiy is, at the same time, so much Griboyédoff

himself, and his cutting sarcasms are so much the sarcasms which

Griboyédoff must have launched against his Moscow acquaintances, while

all the other persons of the comedy are so truly Moscow people--so

exclusively Moscow nobles--that apart from its leading motive, the

comedy is entirely original and most thoroughly Russian.

Tchátskiy is a young man who returns from a long journey abroad, and

hastens to the house of an old gentleman, Fámusoff, whose daughter,

Sophie, was his playmate in childhood, and is loved by him now.

However, the object of his vows has meanwhile made the acquaintance

of her father’s secretary--a most insignificant and repulsive young

man, Moltchálin, whose rules of life are: First, “moderation and

punctuality,” and next, to please everyone in the house of his

superiors, down to the gatekeeper and his dog, “that even the dog may

be kind to me.” Following his rules, Moltchálin courts at the same

time the daughter of his principal and her maid: the former, to make

himself agreeable in his master’s house, and the latter, because she

pleases him. Tchátskiy is received in a very cold way. Sophie is afraid

of his intelligence and his sarcasm, and her father has already found

a partner for her in Colonel Skalozúb--a military man full six feet

high in his socks, who speaks in a deep bass voice, exclusively about

military matters, but has a fortune and will soon be a general.

Tchátskiy behaves just as an enamoured young man would do. He sees

nothing but Sophie, whom he pursues with his adoration, making in her

presence stinging remarks about Moltchálin, and bringing her father to

despair by his free criticism of Moscow manners--the cruelty of the old

serf-owners, the platitudes of the old courtiers, and so on; and as a

climax, at a ball, which Fámusoff gives that night, he indulges in long

monologues against the adoration of the Moscow ladies for everything

French. Sophie, in the meantime, offended by his remarks about

Moltchálin, retaliates by setting afloat the rumour that Tchátskiy is

not quite right in his mind, a rumour which is taken up with delight by

Society at the ball, and spreads like wildfire.

It has often been said in Russia that the satirical remarks of

Tchátskiy at the ball, being directed against such a trifling matter

as the adoration of foreigners, are rather superficial and irrelevant.

But it is more than probable that Griboyédoff limited himself to such

innocent remarks because he knew that no others would be tolerated by

the censorship; he must have hoped that these, at least, would not be

wiped out by the censor’s red ink. From what Tchátskiy says during

his morning call in Fámusoff’s study, and from what is dropped by

other personages, it is evident that Griboyédoff had far more serious

criticisms to put into his hero’s mouth.

Altogether, a Russian satirical writer is necessarily placed under a

serious disadvantage with foreigners. When Molière gives a satirical

description of Parisian society this satire is not strange to the

readers of other nations: we all know something about life in Paris;

but when Griboyédoff describes Moscow society in the same satirical

vein, and reproduces in such an admirable way purely Moscow types--not

even typical Russians, but Moscow types (“On all the Moscow people,”

he says, “there is a special stamp”)--they are so strange to the

Western mind that the translator ought to be half-Russian himself, and

a poet, in order to render Griboyédoff’s comedy in another language.

If such a translation were made, I am sure that this comedy would

become a favourite on the stages of Western Europe. In Russia it has

been played over and over again up to the present time, and although

it is now seventy years old, it has lost nothing of its interest and

attractiveness.

THE MOSCOW STAGE.

In the forties of the nineteenth century the theatre was treated

everywhere with great respect--and more than anywhere else was this

the case in Russia. Italian opera had not yet reached the development

it attained at St. Petersburg some twenty years later, and Russian

opera, represented by poor singers, and treated as a step-daughter by

the directors of the Imperial Theatres, offered but little attraction.

It was the drama and occasionally the ballet, when some star like

Fanny Elsler appeared on the horizon, which brought together the best

elements of educated society and aroused the youth of all classes,

including the university students. The dramatic stage was looked

upon--to speak in the style of those years--as “a temple of Art,” a

centre of far-reaching educational influence. As to the actors and

actresses, they endeavoured, in their turn, not merely to render on

the stage the characters created by the dramatist; they did their best

to contribute themselves, like Cruickshank in his illustrations of

Dickens’s novels, to the final creation of the character, by finding

its true personification.

Especially at Moscow did this intellectual intercourse between the

stage and society go on, and a superior conception of dramatic art

was there developed. The intercourse which Gógol established with

the actors who played his _Inspector-General_, and especially with

SCHÉPKIN; the influence of the literary and philosophical circles

which had then their seat at Moscow; and the intelligent appreciation

and criticism of their work which the actors found in the Press--all

this concurred in making of the Moscow Mályi Teátr (Small Theatre) the

cradle of a superior dramatic art. While St. Petersburg patronised

the so-called “French” school of acting--declamatory and unnaturally

refined--the Moscow stage attained a high degree of perfection in the

development of the naturalistic school. I mean the school of which Duse

is now such a great representative, and to which Lena Ashwell owed her

great success in _Resurrection_; that is, the school in which the actor

parts with the routine of conventional stage tradition, and provokes

the deepest emotions in his audience by the depth of his own real

feeling and by the natural truth and simplicity of its expression--the

school which occupies the same position on the stage that the realism

of Turguéneff and Tolstóy occupies in literature.

In the forties and the early fifties this school had attained

its highest perfection at Moscow, and had in its ranks such

first-class actors and actresses as Schépkin--the real soul

of this stage--MOTCHÁLOFF, SADÓSKIY, S. VASÍLIEFF, and MME.

NIKÚLINA-KOSSÍTSKAYA, supported by quite a pleiad of good secondary

aids. Their _répertoire_ was not very rich; but the two comedies

of Gógol (_Inspector-General_ and _Marriage_), occasionally

Griboyédoff’s great satire; a comedy, _The Marriage of Kretchínsky_,

by SUKHOVÓ-KOBÝLIN, which gave excellent opportunities for displaying

the best qualities of the artists just named; now and then a drama of

Shakespeare,[22] plenty of melodramas adapted from the French, and

vaudevilles which came nearer to light comedy than to farce--this was

the ever varied programme of the Small Theatre. Some plays were played

to perfection--combining the _ensemble_ and the “go” which characterise

the Odéon with the simplicity and naturalness already mentioned.

The mutual influence which the stage and dramatic authors necessarily

exercise upon each other was admirably illustrated at Moscow. Several

dramatists wrote specially for this stage--not in order that this or

that actress might eclipse all others, as happens nowadays in those

theatres where one play is played scores of nights in succession,

but for this given _stage_ and its actors as a whole. OSTRÓVSKIY

(1823-1886) was the one who best realised this mutual relation between

the dramatic author and the stage, and thus he came to hold with regard

to the Russian drama the same position that Turguéneff and Tolstóy hold

with regard to the Russian novel.

OSTRÓVSKIY: “POVERTY--NO VICE”

Ostróvskiy was born at Moscow in the family of a poor clergyman, and,

like the best of the younger generation of his time, he was from the

age of seventeen an enthusiastic visitor of the Moscow theatre. At

that age, we are told, his favourite talk with his comrades was the

stage. He went to the University, but two years later he was compelled

to leave, in consequence of a quarrel with a professor, and he became

an under clerk in one of the old Commercial tribunals. There he had

the very best opportunities for making acquaintance with the world

of Moscow merchants--a quite separate class which remained in its

isolation the keeper of the traditions of old Russia. It was from

this class that Ostróvskiy took nearly all the types of his first and

best dramas. Only later on did he begin to widen the circle of his

observations, taking in various classes of educated society.

His first comedy, _Pictures of Family Happiness_, was written in 1847,

and three years later appeared his first drama, _We shall settle

it among Ourselves_, or _The Bankrupt_, which at once gave him the

reputation of a great dramatic writer. It was printed in a review, and

had a great vogue all over Russia (the actor Sadóvskiy read it widely

in private houses at Moscow), but it was not allowed to be put on the

stage. The Moscow merchants even lodged a complaint with Nicholas I.

against the author, and Ostróvskiy was dismissed from the civil service

and placed under police supervision as a suspect. Only many years

later, four years after Alexander II. had succeeded his father--that

is, in 1860--was the drama played at Moscow, and even then the

censorship insisted upon introducing at the end of it a police officer

to represent the triumph of justice over the wickedness of the bankrupt.

For the next five years Ostróvskiy published nothing, but then

he brought out in close succession (1853 and 1854) two dramas of

remarkable power--_Don’t take a seat in other People’s Sledges_, and

_Poverty--No Vice_. The subject of the former was not new: a girl

from a tradesman’s family runs away with a nobleman, who abandons

and ill-treats her when he realises that she will get from her

father neither pardon nor money. But this subject was treated with

such freshness, and the characters were depicted in positions so

well-chosen, that for its literary and stage-qualities the drama is

one of the best Ostróvskiy has written. As to _Poverty--No Vice_,

it produced a tremendous impression all over Russia. We see in it a

family of the old type, the head of which is a rich merchant--a man

who is wont to impose his will upon all his surroundings and has

no other conception of life. He has, however, taken outwardly to

“civilisation”--that is, to restaurant-civilisation: he dresses in the

fashions of Western Europe and tries to follow Western customs in his

house--at least in the presence of the acquaintances he makes in the

fashionable restaurants. Nevertheless, his wife is his slave, and his

household trembles at his voice. He has a daughter who loves, and is

loved by, one of her father’s clerks, Mítya, a most timid but honest

young man, and the mother would like her daughter to marry this clerk;

but the father has made the acquaintance of a more or less wealthy

aged man--a sort of Armenian money-lender, who dresses according to

the latest fashion, drinks champagne instead of rye-whiskey, and

therefore plays among Moscow merchants a certain rôle of authority in

questions of fashion and rules of propriety. To this man the girl must

be married. She is saved, however, by the interference of her uncle,

Lubím Tortsóff. Lubím was once rich, like his brother, but he was

not satisfied with the dull Philistine life of his surroundings, and

seeing no way out of it and into a better social atmosphere, he took

to drink--to unmitigated drunkenness, such as was to be seen in olden

times at Moscow. His wealthy brother has helped him to get rid of his

fortune, and now, in a ragged mantle, he goes about the lower class

taverns, making of himself a sort of jester for a chance glass of gin.

Penniless, dressed in his rags, cold and hungry, he comes to the young

clerk’s room, asking permission to stay there over night.

The drama goes on at Christmas time, and this gives Ostróvskiy

the opportunity for introducing all sorts of songs and Christmas

masquerades, in true Russian style. In the midst of all this merriment,

which has been going on in his absence, Tortsóff, the father, comes in

with the bridegroom of his choice. All the “vulgar” pleasures must now

come to an end, and the father, full of veneration for his fashionable

friend, curtly orders his daughter to marry the man he has chosen for

her. The tears of the girl and her mother are of no avail: the father’s

orders must be obeyed. But there enters Lubím Tortsóff, in his rags and

with his jester’s antics--terrible in his degradation, and yet a man.

The father’s terror at such a sight can easily be imagined, and Lubím

Tortsóff, who during his wanderings has heard all about the Armenian’s

past, and who knows of his brother’s scheme, begins to tell before the

guests what sort of man the would-be bridegroom is. The latter, holding

himself insulted in his friend’s house, affects great anger and leaves

the room, while Lubím Tortsóff tells his brother what a crime he is

going to commit by giving his daughter to the old man. He is ordered to

leave the room, but he persists and, standing in the rear of the crowd,

he begins piteously to beg: “Brother, give your daughter to Mítya”

(the young clerk): “he, at least, will give me a corner in his house.

I have suffered enough from cold and hunger. My years are passing: it

becomes hard for me to get my piece of bread by performing my antics

in the bitter frost. Mítya will let me live honestly in my old age.”

The mother and daughter join with the uncle, and finally the father,

who resents the insults of his friend, exclaims: “Well, do you take me,

then, for a wild beast? I won’t give my daughter to that man. Mítya,

marry her!”

The drama has a happy end, but the audience feels that it might have

been as well the other way. The father’s whim might have ended in

the life-long misery and misfortune of the daughter, and this would

probably have been the outcome in most such cases.

Like Griboyédoff’s comedy, like Gontcharóff’s _Oblómoff_, and many

other good things in Russian literature, this drama is so typically

Russian that one is apt to overlook its broadly human signification.

It seems to be typically Moscovite; but, change names and customs,

change a few details and rise a bit higher or sink a bit lower in the

strata of society; put, instead of the drunkard Lubím Tortsóff, a poor

relation or an honest friend who has retained his common sense--and

the drama applies to any nation and to any class of society. It is

deeply human. This is what caused its tremendous success and made it

a favourite on every Russian stage for fifty years. I do not speak,

of course, of the foolishly exaggerated enthusiasm with which it was

received by the so-called nationalists, and especially the Slavophiles,

who saw in Lubím Tortsóff the personification of the “good old times”

of Russia. The more sensible of Russians did not go to such lengths;

but they understood what wonderful material of observation, drawn from

real life, this and the other dramas of Ostróvskiy were offering. The

leading review of the time was _The Contemporary_, and its leading

critic, Dobrolúboff, wrote two long articles to analyse Ostróvskiy’s

dramas, under the significant title of _The Kingdom of Darkness_; and

when he had passed in review all the darkness which then prevailed in

Russian life as represented by Ostróvskiy, he produced something which

has been one of the most powerful influences in the whole subsequent

intellectual development of the Russian youth.

“THE THUNDERSTORM”

One of the best dramas of Ostróvskiy is _The Thunderstorm_ (translated

by Mrs. Constance Garnett as _The Storm_). The scene is laid in a small

provincial town, somewhere on the upper Vólga, where the manners of

the local trades-people have retained the stamp of primitive wildness.

There is, for instance, one old merchant, Dikóy, very much respected

by the inhabitants, who represents a special type of those tyrants

whom Ostróvskiy has so well depicted. Whenever Dikóy has a payment

to make, even though he knows perfectly well that pay he must, he

stirs up a quarrel with the man to whom he is in debt. He has an old

friend, Madame Kabanóva, and when he is the worse for drink, and in a

bad temper, he always goes to her: “I have no business with you,” he

declares, “but I have been drinking.” Following is a scene which takes

place between them:

_Kabanóva_: I really wonder at you; with all the crowd of folks in

your house, not a single one can do anything to your liking.

_Dikóy_: That’s so!

_Kabanóva_: Come, what do you want of me?

_Dikóy_: Well, talk me out of my temper. You’re the only person in the

whole town who knows how to talk to me.

_Kabanóva_: How have they put you into such a rage?

_Dikóy_: I’ve been so all day since the morning.

_Kabanóva_: I suppose they’ve been asking for money.

_Dikóy_: As if they were in league together, damn them! One after

another, the whole day long they’ve been at me.

_Kabanóva_: No doubt you’ll have to give it them, or they wouldn’t

persist.

_Dikóy_: I know that; but what would you have me do, since I’ve a

temper like that? Why, I know that I must pay, still I can’t do

it with a good will. You’re a friend of mine, and I’ve to pay you

something, and you come and ask me for it--I’m bound to swear at you!

Pay I will, if pay I must, but I must swear too. For you’ve only to

hint at money to me, and I feel hot all over in a minute; red-hot all

over, and that’s all about it. You may be sure at such times I’d swear

at anyone for nothing at all.

_Kabanóva_: You have no one over you, and so you think you can do as

you like.

_Dikóy_: No, you hold your tongue! Listen to me! I’ll tell you the

sort of troubles that happen to me. I had fasted in Lent, and was all

ready for Communion, and then the Evil One thrusts a wretched peasant

under my nose. He had come for money, for wood he had supplied us.

And, for my sins, he must needs show himself at a time like that! I

fell into sin, of course; I pitched into him, pitched into him finely,

I did, all but thrashed him. There you have it, my temper! Afterwards

I asked his pardon, bowed down to his feet, upon my word I did. It’s

the truth I’m telling you, I bowed down to a peasant’s feet. That’s

what my temper brings me to: on the spot there, in the mud I bowed

down to his feet; before everyone, I did.[23]

Madame Kabanóva is well matched with Dikóy. She may be less primitive

than her friend, but she is an infinitely more tyrannical oppressor.

Her son is married and loves, more or less, his young wife; but he

is kept under his mother’s rule just as if he were a boy. The mother

hates, of course, the young wife, Katerína, and tyrannises over her as

much as she can; and the husband has no energy to step in and defend

her. He is only too happy when he can slip away from the house. He

might have shown more love to his wife if they had been living apart

from his mother; but being in this house, always under its tyrannical

rule, he looks upon his wife as part of it all. Katerína, on the

contrary, is a poetical being. She was brought up in a very good

family, where she enjoyed full liberty, before she married the young

Kabanóff, and now she feels very unhappy under the yoke of her terrible

mother-in-law, having nobody but a weakling husband to occasionally say

a word in her favour. There is also a little detail--she has a mortal

fear of thunderstorms. This is a feature which is quite characteristic

in the small towns on the upper Vólga: I have myself known well

educated ladies who, having once been frightened by one of these sudden

storms--they are of a terrific grandeur--retained a life-long fear of

thunder.

It so happens that Katerína’s husband has to leave his town for a

fortnight. Katerína, in the meantime, who has met occasionally on the

promenade a young man, Borís, a nephew of Dikóy, and has received some

attention from him, partly driven to it by her husband’s sister--a

very flighty girl, who is wont to steal from the back garden to meet

her sweethearts--has during these few days one or two interviews with

the young man, and falls in love with him. Borís is the first man who,

since her marriage, has treated her with respect; he himself suffers

from the oppression of Dikóy, and she feels half-sympathy, half-love

towards him. But Borís is also of weak, irresolute character, and as

soon as his uncle Dikóy orders him to leave the town he obeys and has

only the usual words of regret that “circumstances” so soon separate

him from Katerína. The husband returns, and when he, his wife, and

the old mother Kabanóva are caught by a terrific thunderstorm on the

promenade along the Vólga, Katerína, in mortal fear of sudden death,

tells in the presence of the crowd which has taken refuge in a shelter

on the promenade what has happened during her husband’s absence. The

consequences will best be learned from the following scene, which I

quote from the same translation. It also takes place on the high bank

of the Vólga. After having wandered for some time in the dusk on the

solitary bank, Katerína at last perceives Borís and runs up to him.

_Katerína_: At last I see you again! (_Weeps on his breast. Silence._)

_Borís_: Well, God has granted us to weep together.

_Katerína_: You have not forgotten me?

_Borís_: How can you speak of forgetting?

_Katerína_: Oh, no, it was not that, not that! You are not angry?

_Borís_: Angry for what?

_Katerína_: Forgive me! I did not mean to do you any harm. I was not

free myself. I did not know what I said, what I did.

_Borís_: Don’t speak of it! Don’t.

_Katerína_: Well, how is it with you? What are you going to do?

_Borís_: I am going away.

_Katerína_: Where are you going?

_Borís_: Far away, Kátya, to Siberia.

_Katerína_: Take me with you, away from here.

_Borís_: I cannot, Kátya. I am not going of my free will; my uncle is

sending me, he has the horses waiting for me already; I only begged

for a minute, I wanted to take a last farewell of the spot where we

used to see each other.

_Katerína_: Go, and God be with you! Don’t grieve over me. At first

your heart will be heavy, perhaps, poor boy, but then you will begin

to forget.

_Borís_: Why talk of me! I am free at least; how about you? what of

your husband’s mother?

_Katerína_: She tortures me, she locks me up. She tells everyone, even

my husband: “Don’t trust her, she is sly and deceitful.” They all

follow me about all day long, and laugh at me before my face. At every

word they reproach me with you.

_Borís_: And your husband?

_Katerína_: One minute he’s kind, one minute he’s angry, but he’s

drinking all the while. He is loathsome to me, loathsome; his kindness

is worse than his blows.

_Borís_: You are wretched, Kátya?

_Katerína_: So wretched, so wretched, that it were better to die!

_Borís_: Who could have dreamed that we should have to suffer such

anguish for our love! I’d better have run away then!

_Katerína_: It was an evil day for me when I saw you. Joy I have known

little of, but of sorrow, of sorrow, how much! And how much is still

before me! But why think of what is to be! I am seeing you now, that

much they cannot take away from me; and I care for nothing more. All I

wanted was to see you. Now my heart is much easier; as though a load

had been taken off me. I kept thinking you were angry with me, that

you were cursing me....

_Borís_: How can you! How can you!

_Katerína_: No, that is not what I mean; that is not what I wanted to

say! I was sick with longing for you, that’s it; and now, I have seen

you....

_Borís_: They must not come upon us here!

_Katerína_: Stay a minute! Stay a minute! Something I meant to say

to you! I’ve forgotten! Something I had to say! Everything is in

confusion in my head, I can remember nothing.

_Borís_: It’s time I went, Kátya!

_Katerína_: Wait a minute, a minute!

_Borís_: Come, what did you want to say?

_Katerína_: I will tell you directly. (_Thinking a moment._) Yes! As

you travel along the highroads, do not pass by one beggar, give to

everyone, and bid them pray for my sinful soul.

_Borís_: Ah, if these people knew what it is to me to part from you!

My God! God grant they may one day know such bitterness as I know now.

Farewell, Kátya! (_Embraces her and tries to go away._) Miscreants!

monsters! Ah, if I were strong!

_Katerína_: Stay, stay! Let me look at you for the last time (_gazes

into his face_). Now all is over with me. The end is come for me. Now,

God be with thee. Go, go quickly!

_Borís_: (_Moves away a few steps and stands still._) Kátya, I feel a

dread of something! You have something fearful in your mind? I shall

be in torture as I go, thinking of you.

_Katerína_: No, no! Go in God’s name! (_Borís is about to go up to

her._) No, no, enough.

_Borís_: (_Sobbing._) God be with thee! There’s only one thing to pray

God for, that she may soon be dead, that she may not be tortured long!

Farewell!

_Katerína_: Farewell!

(_Borís goes out. Katerína follows him with her eyes and stands for

some time, lost in thought._)

SCENE IV.

KATERÍNA (_alone_).

Where am I going now? Home? No, home or the grave--it is the same.

Yes, home or the grave!... the grave! Better the grave.... A little

grave under a tree ... how sweet.... The sunshine warms it, the sweet

rain falls on it ... in the spring the grass grows on it, soft and

sweet grass ... the birds will fly in the tree and sing, and bring

up their little ones, and flowers will bloom; golden, red and blue

... all sorts of flowers, (_dreamingly_) all sorts of flowers ... how

still! how sweet! My heart is as it were lighter! But of life I don’t

want to think! Live again! No, no, no use ... life is not good!... And

people are hateful to me, and the house is hateful, and the walls are

hateful! I will not go there! No, no, I will not go! if I go to them,

they’ll come and talk, and what do I want with that? Ah, it has grown

dark! And there is singing again somewhere! What are they singing? I

can’t make out.... To die now.... What are they singing? It is just

the same whether death comes, or of myself ... but live I cannot! A

sin to die so!... they won’t pray for me! If anyone loves me, he will

pray ... they will fold my arms crossed in the grave! Oh, yes.... I

remember. But when they catch me, and take me home by force.... Ah,

quickly, quickly! (_Goes to the river bank. Aloud._) My dear one! My

sweet! Farewell!

(_Exit._)

(_Enter Mme. Kabanóva, Kabanóv, Kulíghin and workmen with torches._)

_The Thunderstorm_ is one of the best dramas in the modern répertoire

of the Russian stage. From the stage point of view it is simply

admirable. Every scene is impressive, the drama develops rapidly,

and every one of the twelve characters introduced in it is a joy

to the dramatic artist. The parts of Dikóy, Varvára (the frivolous

sister), Kabanóff, Kudryásh (the sweetheart of Varvára), an old

artisan-engineer, nay even the old lady with two male-servants, who

appears only for a couple of minutes--each one will be found a source

of deep artistic pleasure by the actor or actress who takes it; while

the parts of Katerína and Mme. Kabanóva are such that no great actress

would neglect them.

Concerning the main idea of the drama, I shall have to repeat

here what I have already said once or twice in the course of these

sketches. At first sight it may seem that Mme. Kabanóva and her son

are exclusively Russian types--types which exist no more in Western

Europe. So it was said, at least, by several English critics. But such

an assertion seems to be hardly correct. The submissive Kabanóffs may

be rare in England, or at least their sly submissiveness does not go

to the same lengths as it does in _The Thunderstorm_. But even for

Russian society Kabanóff is not very typical. As to his mother, Mme.

Kabanóva, every one of us must have met her more than once in English

surroundings. Who does not know, indeed, the old lady who for the mere

pleasure of exercising her power will keep her daughters at her side,

prevent their marrying, and tyrannise over them till they have grown

grey-haired? or in thousands or other ways exercise her tyranny over

her household? Dickens knew Mme. Kabanóva well, and she is still alive

in these Islands, as everywhere else.

OSTRÓVSKIY’S LATER DRAMAS

As Ostróvskiy advanced in years and widened the scope of his

observations of Russian life, he drew his characters from other circles

besides that of the merchants, and in his later dramas he gave such

highly attractive, progressive types as _The Poor Bride_, Parásha (in

a beautiful comedy, _An Impetuous Heart_), Agniya in _Carnival has its

End_, the actor Neschastlívtseff (Mr. Unfortunate) in a charming idyll,

_The Forest_, and so on. And as regards his “negative” (undesirable)

types, taken from the life of the St. Petersburg bureaucracy or from

the millionaire and “company-promoters” circles, Ostróvskiy deeply

understood them and attained the artistic realisation of wonderfully

true, coldly-harsh, though apparently “respectable” types, such as no

other dramatic writer has ever succeeded in producing.

Altogether Ostróvskiy wrote about fifty dramas and comedies, and every

one of them is excellent for the stage. There are no insignificant

parts in them. A great actor or actress may take one of the smallest

parts, consisting of perhaps but a few words pronounced during a few

minutes’ appearance on the stage--and yet feel that there is material

enough in it to create a character. As for the main personages,

Ostróvskiy fully understood that a considerable part in the creation

of a character must be left to the actor. There are consequently parts

which without such a collaboration would be pale and unfinished,

while in the hands of a true actor they yield material for a deeply

psychological and profoundly dramatic personification. This is why

a lover of dramatic art finds such a deep æsthetic pleasure both in

playing in Ostróvskiy’s dramas and in reading them aloud.

Realism, in the sense which already has been indicated several times

in these pages--that is, a realistic description of characters and

events, subservient to ideal aims--is the distinctive feature of all

Ostróvskiy’s dramas. As in the novels of Turguéneff, the simplicity

of his plots is striking. But you see life--true life with all its

pettinesses--developing before you, and out of these petty details

grows insensibly the plot.

“One scene follows another, and all of them are so commonplace, such

an everyday matter!--and yet, out of them, a terrible drama has quite

imperceptibly grown into being. You could affirm that it is not a

comedy being played before you, but life itself unrolled before your

eyes--as if the author had simply opened a wall and shown you what is

going on inside this or that house.” In these just words one of our

critics, Skabitchévskiy, has described Ostróvskiy’s work.

In his dramas Ostróvskiy introduced an immense variety of characters

taken from all classes of Russian life; but he once for all abandoned

the old romantic division of human types into “good” and “bad” ones.

In real life these two divisions are blended together and merge into

another; and while even now an English dramatic author cannot conceive

a drama without “the villain,” Ostróvskiy never felt the need of

introducing that conventional personage. Nor did he feel the need of

resorting to the conventional rules of “dramatic conflict.” To quote

once more from the same critic:

“There is no possibility of bringing his comedies under some

general principle, such as a struggle of duty against inclination,

or a collision of passions which calls forth a fatal result, or an

antagonism between good and evil, or between progress and ignorance.

His comedies represent the most varied human relations. Just as we

find it in life, men stand in these comedies in different obligatory

relations towards each other, which relations have, of course, their

origin in the past; and when these men have been brought together,

conflicts necessarily arise between them, out of these very relations.

As to the outcome of the conflict, it is, as a rule quite unforeseen,

and often depends, as usually happens in real life, upon mere

accidents.”

Like Ibsen, Ostróvskiy sometimes will not even undertake to say how the

drama will end.

And finally, Ostróvskiy, notwithstanding the pessimism of all his

contemporaries--the writers of the forties--was not a pessimist. Even

amidst the most terrible conflicts depicted in his dramas he retained

the sense of the joy of life and of the unavoidable fatality of many

of the miseries of life. He never recoiled before painting the darker

aspects of the human turmoil, and he has given a most repulsive

collection of family-despots from the old merchant class, followed by a

collection of still more repulsive types from the class of industrial

“promoters.” But in one way or another he managed either to show

that there are better influences at work, or, at least, to suggest

the possible triumph of some better element. He thus avoided falling

into the pessimism which characterised his contemporaries, and he had

nothing of the hysterical turn of mind which we find in some of his

modern followers. Even at moments when, in some one of his dramas,

life all round wears the gloomiest aspect (as, for instance, in _Sin

and Misfortune may visit everyone_, which is a page from peasant life

as realistically dark, but better suited for the stage, than Tolstóy’s

_Power of Darkness_), even then a gleam of hope appears, at least, in

the contemplation of nature, if nothing else remains to redeem the

gloominess of human folly.

And yet, there is one thing--and a very important one--which stands in

the way of Ostróvskiy’s occupying in international dramatic literature

the high position to which his powerful dramatic talent entitled him,

and being recognised as one of the great dramatists of our century. The

dramatic conflicts which we find in his dramas are all of the simpler

sort. There are none of the more tragical problems and entanglements

which the complicated nature of the educated man of our own times and

the different aspects of the great social questions are giving birth

to in the conflicts arising now in every stratum and class of society.

But it must also be said that the dramatist who can treat these modern

problems of life in the same masterly way in which the Moscow writer

has treated the simpler problems which he saw in his own surroundings,

is yet to come.

HISTORICAL DRAMAS--A. K. TOLSTÓY.

At a later period of his life Ostróvskiy turned to historical drama,

which he wrote in excellent blank verse. But, like Shakespeare’s

plays from English history, and Púshkin’s _Borís Godunóff_, they have

more the character of dramatised chronicles than of dramas properly

speaking. They belong too much to the domain of the epic, and the

dramatic interest is too often sacrificed to the desire of introducing

historical colouring.

The same is true, though in a lesser degree, of the historical dramas

of Count ALEXÉI KONSTANTÍNOVITCH TOLSTÓY (1817-1875). A. K. Tolstóy

was above all a poet; but he also wrote a historical novel from the

times of John the Terrible, _Prince Serébryanyi_, which had a very

great success, partly because in it for the first time censorship had

permitted fiction to deal with the half-mad Tsar who played the part

of the Louis XI. of the Russian Monarchy, but especially on account

of its real qualities as a historical novel. He also tried his talent

in a dramatic poem, _Don Juan_, much inferior, however, to Púshkin’s

drama dealing with the same subject; but his main work was a trilogy of

three tragedies from the times of John the Terrible and the imposter

Demetrius: _The Death of John the Terrible_, _The Tsar Theódor

Ivánovitch_, and _Borís Godunóff_.

These three tragedies have a considerable value; in each the situation

of the hero is really highly dramatic, and treated in a most impressive

way, while the settings in the palaces of the old Moscow Tsars are

extremely decorative and impressive in their sumptuous originality.

But in all three tragedies the development of the dramatic element

suffers from the intrusion of the epical descriptive element, and

the characters are either not quite correct historically (Borís

Godunóff is deprived of his rougher traits in favour of a certain quiet

idealism which was a personal feature of the author), or they do not

represent that entireness of character which we are accustomed to find

in Shakespeare’s dramas. Of course, the tragedies of Tolstóy’s are

extremely far from the romanticism of the dramas of Victor Hugo; they

are, all things considered, realistic dramas; but in the framing of the

human characters some romanticism is felt still, and this is especially

evident in the construction of the character of John the Terrible.

An exception must, however, be made in favour of _The Tsar Theódor

Ivánovitch_. A. K. Tolstóy was a devoted personal friend of Alexander

II. and, refusing all administrative posts of honour which were offered

him, he preferred the modest position of a Head of the Imperial Hunt,

which permitted him to retain his independence, while remaining in

close contact with the Emperor. Owing to this intimacy he must have had

the best opportunities for observing, especially in the later years of

Alexander II.’s reign, the struggles to which a good-hearted man of

weak character is exposed when he is a Tsar of Russia. Of course the

Tsar Theódor is not in the least an attempt at portraying Alexander

II.--this would have been beneath an artist--but the weakness of

Alexander’s character must have suggested those features of reality in

the character of Theódor which makes it so much better painted than

either John the Terrible or Borís Godunóff. The Tsar Theódor is a

really living creation.

OTHER DRAMATIC WRITERS

Of other writers for the stage, we can only briefly mention the most

interesting ones.

TURGUÉNEFF wrote, in 1848-1851, five comedies, which offer all the

elements for refined acting, are very lively and, being written in a

beautiful style (Turguéneff’s prose!), are still the source of æsthetic

pleasure for the more refined playgoers.

SUKHOVÓ-KOBÝLIN has already been mentioned. He wrote one comedy, _The

Marriage of Kretchínskiy_, which made its mark and is still played

with success, and a trilogy, _The Affair_, which is a powerful satire

against bureaucracy, but is less effective on the stage than the former.

A. PÍSEMSKIY, the novelist (1820-1881), wrote, besides a few good

novels and several insignificant comedies, one remarkably good

drama--_A Bitter Fate_, from the peasants’ life, which he knew well

and rendered admirably. It must be said that Leo Tolstóy’s well known

_Power of Darkness_--taken also from peasant life--notwithstanding all

its power, has not eclipsed the drama of Písemskiy.

The novelist A. A. POTYÉKHIN (1829-1902) also wrote for the stage,

and must not be omitted even in such a rapid sketch of the Russian

drama as this. His comedies, _Tinsel_, _A Slice Cut-off_, _A Vacant

Situation_, _In Muddy Waters_, met with the greatest difficulties as

regards censorship, and the third was never put on the stage; but

those which were played were always a success, while the themes that

he treated always attracted the attention of our critics. The first of

them, _Tinsel_, can be taken as a fair representative of the talent of

Potyékhin.

This comedy answered a “question of the day.” For several years Russian

literature, following especially in the steps of SCHEDRIN (see Ch.

VIII.), delighted in the description of those functionaries of the

Government boards and tribunals who lived (before the reforms of the

sixties) almost entirely upon bribes. However, after the reforms had

been carried through, a new race of functionaries had grown up, “those

who took no bribes,” but at the same time, owing to their strait-laced

official rigorism, and their despotic and unbridled egotism, were even

worse specimens of mankind than any of the “bribe-takers” of old. The

hero of _Tinsel_ is precisely such a man. His character, with all its

secondary features--his ingratitude and especially his love (or what

passes for love in him)--is perhaps too much blackened for the purposes

of the drama: men so consistently egotistical and formalistic are

seldom, if ever, met with in real life. But one is almost convinced by

the author of the reality of the type--with so masterly a hand does he

unroll in a variety of incidents the “correct” and deeply egotistic

nature of his hero. In this respect the comedy is very clever, and

offers full opportunity for excellent acting.

A dramatic writer who enjoyed a long-standing success was A. I. PALM

(1823-1885). In 1849 he was arrested for having frequented persons

belonging to the circle of Petrashévskiy (see DOSTOYÉVSKIY), and from

that time his life was a series of misfortunes, so that he returned

to literary activity only at the age of fifty. He belonged to the

generation of Turguéneff, and, knowing well that type of noblemen, whom

the great novelist has depicted so well in his _Hamlets_, he wrote

several comedies from the life of their circles. _The Old Nobleman_ and

_Our Friend Neklúzheff_ were till lately favourite plays on the stage.

The actor, I. E. TCHERNYSHÓFE, who wrote several comedies and one

serious drama, _A Spoiled Life_, which produced a certain impression

in 1861; N. SOLOVIÓFF, and a very prolific writer, V. A. KRYLÓFF

(ALEXÁNDROFF), must also be mentioned in this brief sketch.

And finally, two young writers have brought out lately comedies and

dramatic scenes which have produced a deep sensation. I mean ANTON

TCHÉHOFF, whose drama _Ivánoff_ was a few years ago the subject of

the most passionate discussions, and MAXÍM GÓRKIY, whose drama, _The

Artisans_, undoubtedly reveals a dramatic talent, while his just

published “dramatic scenes,” _At the Bottom_--they are only scenes,

without an attempt at building a drama--are extremely powerful, and

even eclipse his best sketches. More will be said of them in the next

chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] Shakespeare has always been a great favourite in Russia, but his

dramas require a certain wealth of scenery not always at the disposal

of the Small Theatre.

[23] Taken from the excellent translation of Mrs. C. Garnett (_The

Storm_, London, Duckworth & Co., 1899).

PART VII

Folk-Novelists

CHAPTER VII

FOLK-NOVELISTS

Their Position in Russian Literature--The

Early Folk-Novelists:--Grigoróvitch--Márko

Vovtchók--Danilévskiy--Intermediate Period:

Kókoreff--Písemskiy--Potyékhin--Ethnographical Researches--The

Realistic School:--Pomyalóvskiy--Ryeshétnikoff--Levítoff--Gleb

Uspénskiy--Zlatovrátskiy and other

Folk-Novelists--Naúmoff--Zasódimskiy--Sáloff--Nefédoff--Modern

Realism: Maxím Górkiy.

An important division of Russian novelists, almost totally unknown in

Western Europe, and yet representing perhaps the most typical portion

of Russian literature, are the “Folk-Novelists.” It is under this name

that we know them chiefly in Russia, and under this name the critic

Skabitchévskiy has analysed them--first, in a book bearing this title,

and then in his excellent _History of Modern Russian Literature_ (4th

ed. 1900). By “Folk-Novelists” we mean, of course, not those who write

_for_ the people, but those who write _about_ the people: the peasants,

the miners, the factory workers, the lowest strata of population in

towns, the tramps. Bret Harte in his sketches of the mining camps, Zola

in _L’Assommoir_ and _Germinal_, Mr. Gissing in _Liza of Lambeth_, Mr.

Whiting in _No. 5 John Street_, belong to this category; but what is

exceptional and accidental in Western Europe is organic in Russia.

Quite a number of talented writers have devoted themselves during the

last fifty years, some of them entirely, to the description of this

or that division of the Russian people. Every class of the toiling

masses, which in other literatures would have appeared in novels as the

background for events going on amidst educated people (as in Hardy’s

_Woodlanders_), has had in the Russian novel its own painter. All

great questions concerning popular life which are debated in political

and social books and reviews have been treated in the novel as well.

The evils of serfdom and, later on, the struggle between the tiller

of the soil and growing commercialism; the effects of factories upon

village life, the great coöperative fisheries, peasant life in certain

monasteries, and life in the depths of the Siberian forests, slum life

and tramp life--all these have been depicted by the folk-novelists, and

their novels have been as eagerly read as the works of the greatest

authors. And while such questions as, for instance, the future of the

village-community, or of the peasants’ Common Law Courts, are debated

in the daily papers, in the scientific reviews and the journals of

statistical research, they are also dealt with by means of artistic

images and types taken from life in the folk-novel.

Moreover, the folk-novelists, taken as a whole, represent a great

school of realism in art, and in true realism they have surpassed

all those writers who have been mentioned in the preceding chapters.

Of course, Russian “realism,” as the reader of this book is already

well aware, is something quite different from what was represented as

“naturalism” and “realism” in France by Zola. As already remarked,

Zola, notwithstanding his propaganda of realism, always remained an

inveterate romantic in the conception of his leading characters,

both of the “saint” and of the “villain” type; and no doubt because

of this--perhaps feeling it himself--he gave, as a compensation,

such an exaggerated importance to speculations about physiological

heredity and to the accumulation of pretty descriptive details, many

of which, especially amongst his repulsive types, might have been

omitted without depriving the characters of any really significant

feature. In Russia the “realism” of Zola has always been considered

too superficial, too outward, and while our folk-novelists also have

often indulged in an unnecessary profusion of detail--sometimes

decidedly ethnographical--they have aimed nevertheless at that _inner_

realism which appears in the construction of such characters as are

really representative of life taken as a whole. Their aim has been to

represent life without distortion--whether that distortion consists in

introducing petty details, which may be true, but are accidental, or

in endowing heroes with virtues or vices which are indeed met with here

and there, but ought not to be generalised. Several novelists, as will

be seen presently, have objected even to the usual ways of describing

_types_ and relating the individual dramas of a few typical heroes.

They have made the extremely bold attempt of describing _life itself_,

in its succession of petty actions, moving on amidst its grey and dull

surroundings, introducing only that dramatic element which results

from the endless succession of petty and depressing details and wonted

circumstances; and it must be owned that they have not been quite

unsuccessful in striking out this new line of art--perhaps the most

tragical of all. Others, again, have introduced a new type of artistic

representation of life, which occupies an intermediate position between

the novel, properly so-called, and a demographic description of a given

population. Thus, Gleb Uspénskiy knew how to intermingle artistic

descriptions of typical village-people with discussions belonging to

the domain of folk-psychology in so interesting a manner that the

reader willingly pardons him these digressions; while others like

Maxímoff succeeded in making out of their ethnographical descriptions

real works of art, without in the least diminishing their scientific

value.

THE EARLY FOLK-NOVELISTS

One of the earliest folk-novelists was GRIGORÓVITCH (1822-1899), a

man of great talent, who sometimes is placed by the side of Tolstóy,

Turguéneff, Gontcharóff and Ostróvskiy. His literary career was very

interesting. He was born of a Russian father and a French mother,

and at the age of ten hardly knew Russian at all. His education was

entirely foreign--chiefly French--and he never really lived the village

life amidst which Turguéneff or Tolstóy grew up. Moreover, he never

gave himself exclusively to literature: he was a painter as well as a

novelist, and at the same time a fine connoisseur of art, and for the

last thirty years of his life he wrote almost nothing, but gave all

his time to the Russian Society of Painters. And yet this half-Russian

was one of those who rendered the same service to Russia before the

abolition of serfdom that Harriet Beecher Stowe rendered to the United

States by her description of the sufferings of the negro slaves.

Grigoróvitch was educated in the same military school of engineers

as was Dostoyévskiy, and after having finished his education there,

he took a tiny room from the warder of the Academy of Arts, with the

intention of giving himself entirely to art. However, in the studios he

made the acquaintance of the Little Russian poet Shevtchénko, and next

of Nekrásoff and Valerián Máykoff (a critic of great power, who died

very young), and through them he found his vocation in literature.

In the early forties he was known only by a charming sketch, _The

Organ Grinders_, in which he spoke with great warmth of feeling of

the miserable life of this class of the St. Petersburg population.

Russian society, in those years, felt the impression of the Socialist

revival of France, and its best representatives were growing impatient

with serfdom and absolutism. Fourier and Pierre Leroux were favourite

writers in advanced intellectual circles, and Grigoróvitch was carried

on by the growing current. He left St. Petersburg, went to stay for a

year or two in the country, and in 1846 he published his first novel

dealing with country life, _The Village_. He depicted in it, without

any exaggeration, the dark sides of village life and the horrors of

serfdom, and he did it so vividly that Byelínskiy, the critic, at once

recognised in him a new writer of great power, and greeted him as such.

His next novel, _Antón the Unfortunate_, also drawn from village life,

was a tremendous success, and its influence was almost equal to that

of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. No educated man or woman of his generation or

of ours could have read the book without weeping over the misfortunes

of Antón, and finding better feelings growing in his heart towards the

serfs. Several novels of the same character followed in the next eight

years (1847 to 1855)--_The Fishermen_, _The Immigrants_, _The Tiller_,

_The Tramp_, _The Country Roads_--and then Grigoróvitch came to a

stop. In 1865 he took part with some of our best writers--Gontcharóff,

Ostróvskiy, Maxímoff (the ethnographer), and several others--in a

literary expedition organised by the Grand Duke Constantine for the

exploration of Russia and voyages round the world on board ships of the

Navy. Grigoróvitch made a very interesting sea-voyage; but his sketches

of travel--_The Ship Retvizan_--cannot be compared with Gontcharóff’s

_Frigate Pallas_. On returning from the expedition he abandoned

literature to devote himself entirely to art, and he subsequently

brought out only a couple of novels and his _Reminiscences_. He died in

1899.

Grigoróvitch thus published all his chief novels between the years 1846

and 1855. Opinion about his work is divided. Some of our critics speak

of it very highly, but others--and they are the greater number--say

that his peasants are not quite real. Turguéneff made also the

observation that his descriptions are too cold: the heart is not felt

in them. This last remark may be true, although the average reader who

did not know Grigoróvitch personally hardly would have made it: at any

rate, at the time of the appearance of _Antón_, _The Fishermen_, etc.,

the great public judged the author of these works differently. As to

his peasants, I will permit myself to make one suggestion. Undoubtedly

they are slightly idealised; but it must also be said that the Russian

peasantry does not present a compact, uniform mass. Several races have

settled upon the territory of European Russia, and different portions

of the population have followed different lines of development. The

peasant from South Russia is quite different from the Northerner, and

the Western peasants differ in every respect from the Eastern ones.

Grigoróvitch described chiefly those living directly south of Moscow,

in the provinces of Túla and Kalúga, and they are exactly that mild

and slightly poetical, downtrodden and yet inoffensive, good-hearted

race of peasants that Grigoróvitch described in his novels--a sort of

combination of the Lithuanian and the Little-Russian poetical mind,

with the Great-Russian communal spirit. Ethnographers themselves see

in the populations of this part of Russia a special ethnographical

division.

Of course, Turguéneff’s peasants (Túla and Oryól) are more real, his

types are more definite, and every one of the modern folk-novelists,

even of the less talented, has gone much further than Grigoróvitch

did into the depths of peasant character and life. But such as they

were, the novels of Grigoróvitch exercised a profound influence on a

whole generation. They made us love the peasants and feel how heavy

was the indebtedness towards them which weighed upon us--the educated

part of society. They powerfully contributed towards creating a

general feeling in favour of the serfs, without which the abolition of

serfdom would have certainly been delayed for many years to come, and

assuredly would not have been so sweeping as it was. And at a later

epoch his work undoubtedly contributed to the creation of that movement

“towards the people” (_v naród_) which took place in the seventies.

As to the literary influence of Grigoróvitch, it was such that it may

be questioned whether Turguéneff would ever have been bold enough to

write as he did about the peasants, in his _Sportsman’s Note Book_, or

Nekrásoff to compose his passionate verses about the people, if they

had not had a forerunner in him.

Another writer of the same school, who also produced a deep impression

on the very eve of the liberation of the serfs, was MME. MARIE

MÁRKOVITCH, who wrote under the pseudonym of MÁRKO VOVTCHÓK. She was

a Great Russian--her parents belonged to the nobility of Central

Russia--but she married the Little-Russian writer, MÁRKOVITCH, and

her first book of stories from peasant-life (1857-58) was written

in excellent Little Russian. (Turguéneff translated them into Great

Russian.) She soon returned, however, to her native tongue, and her

second book of peasant stories, as well as her subsequent novels from

the life of the educated classes, were written in Great Russian.

At the present time the novels of Márko Vovtchók may seem to be

too sentimental--the world-famed novel of Harriett Beecher Stowe

produces the same impression nowadays--but in those years, when the

great question for Russia was whether the serfs should be freed or

not, and when all the best forces of the country were needed for the

struggle in favour of their emancipation--in those years all educated

Russia read the novels of Márko Vovtchók with delight, and wept over

the fate of her peasant heroines. However, apart from this need of

the moment--and art is bound to be at the service of society in

such crises--the sketches of Márko Vovtchók had serious qualities.

Their “sentimentalism” was not the sentimentalism of the beginning

of the nineteenth century, behind which was concealed an absence

of real feeling. A loving heart throbbed in them; and there is in

them real poetry, inspired by the poetry of the Ukraïnian folklore

and its popular songs. With these, Mme. Márkovitch was so familiar

that, as has been remarked by Russian critics, she supplemented her

imperfect knowledge of real popular life by introducing in a masterly

manner many features inspired by the folklore and the popular songs

of Little Russia. Her heroes were invented, but the atmosphere of

a Little-Russian village, the colours of local life, are in these

sketches; and the soft poetical sadness of the Little-Russian peasantry

is rendered with the tender touch of a woman’s hand.

Among the novelists of that period DANILÉVSKIY (1829-1890) must also

be mentioned. Although he is better known as a writer of historical

romances, his three long novels, _The Runaways in Novoróssiya_ (1862),

_Freedom, or The Runways Returned_ (1863), and _New Territories_

(1867)--all dealing with the free settlers in Bessarabia--were widely

read. They contain lively and very sympathetic scenes from the life

of these settlers--mostly runaway serfs--who occupied the free lands,

without the consent of the central government, in the newly annexed

territories of southwestern Russia, and became the prey of enterprising

adventurers.

INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

Notwithstanding all the qualities of their work, Grigoróvitch and Márko

Vovtchók failed to realise that the very fact of taking the life of the

poorer classes as the subject of novels, ought to imply the working out

of a special literary manner. The usual literary technique evolved for

the novel which deals with the leisured classes--with its mannerism,

its “heroes,” poetised now, as the knights used to be poetised in

the tales of chivalry--is certainly not the most appropriate for

novels treating the life of American squatters or Russian peasants.

New methods and a different style had to be worked out; but this was

done step by step only, and it would be extremely interesting to

show this gradual evolution, from Grigoróvitch to the ultra-realism

of Ryeshétnikoff, and finally to the perfection of form attained

by the realist-idealist Górkiy in his shorter sketches. Only a few

intermediate steps can, however, be indicated in these pages.

I. T. KÓKOREFF (1826-1853), who died very young, after having written a

few tales from the life of the petty artisans in towns, had not freed

himself from the sentimentalism of a benevolent outsider; but he knew

this life from the inside: he was born and brought up in great poverty

among these very people; consequently, the artisans in his novels are

real beings, described, as Dobrolúboff said, “with warmth and yet with

tender restraint, as if they were his nearest kin.” However, “No shriek

of despair, no mighty wrath, no mordant irony came out of this tender,

patiently suffering heart.” There is even a note of reconciliation with

the social inequalities.

A considerable step in advance was made by the folk-novel in A. TH.

PÍSEMSKIY (1820-1881), and A. A. POTYÉKHINN (born 1829), although

neither of them was exclusively a folk-novelist. Písemskiy was a

contemporary of Turguéneff, and at a certain time of his career it

seemed as if he were going to take a place by the side of Turguéneff,

Tolstóy and Gontcharóff. He undoubtedly possessed a great talent.

There was power and real life in whatever he wrote, and his novel, _A

Thousand Souls_, appearing on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs

(1858), produced a deep impression. It was fully appreciated in Germany

as well, where it was translated the next year. But Písemskiy was not a

man of principle, and this novel was his last serious and really good

production. When the great Radical and Nihilist movement took place

(1858-1864), and it became necessary to take a definite position amidst

the sharp conflict of opinions, Písemskiy, who was deeply pessimistic

in his judgment of men and ideas, and considered “opinions” as a mere

cover for narrow egotism of the lowest sensual sort, took a hostile

position towards this movement, and wrote such novels as _The Unruly

Sea_, which were mere libels upon the young generation. This was, of

course, the death of his by no means ordinary talent.

Písemskiy wrote also, during the early part of his literary career, a

few tales from the life of the peasants (_The Carpenters’ Artel_, _The

St. Petersburg Man_, etc.), and a drama, from village life, _A Bitter

Fate_, all of which have a real literary value. He displayed in them a

knowledge of peasant life and a mastery of the spoken, popular Russian

language, together with a perfectly realistic perception of peasant

character. There was no trace of the idealisation which is so strongly

felt in the later productions of Grigoróvitch, written under the

influence of George Sand. The steady, common-sense peasant characters

that Písemskiy pictured are taken from a real, sound observation of

life, and rival the best peasant characters of Turguéneff. As to the

drama of Písemskiy (he was, by the way, a very good actor), it loses

nothing from comparison with the best dramas of Ostróvskiy, and is more

tragic than any of them, while in powerful realism it is by no means

inferior to Tolstóy’s _Power of Darkness_, with which it has much in

common, and which it perhaps surpasses in its stage qualities.

The chief work of Potyékhin was his comedies, mentioned in the

preceding chapter. All of them are from the life of the educated

classes, but he wrote also a few less known dramas from the peasant

life, and twice--in his early career in the fifties, and later on in

the seventies--he turned to the writing of short stories and novels

from popular life.

These stories and novels are most characteristic of the evolution of

the folk-novel during those years. In his earlier tales Potyékhin was

entirely under the spell of the then prevailing manner of idealising

the peasants; but in his second period, after having lived through the

years of realism in the sixties, and taken part in the above-mentioned

ethnographic expedition, he changed his manner. He entirely got rid of

benevolent idealisation, and represented the peasants as they were. In

the creation of individual characters he was undoubtedly successful,

but the life of the village--the _mir_--without which Russian

village-life cannot be represented, and which so well appears in the

works of the later folk-novelists, is yet missing. Altogether one feels

that Potyékhin knew well the outer symptoms of the life of the Russian

peasants, including their way of talking, but that he had not yet

grasped the real soul of the peasant. This came only later on.

ETHNOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH

Serfdom was abolished in 1861, and the time for mere lamentation

over its evils was gone. Proof that the peasants were human beings,

accessible to all human feelings, was no longer needed. New and far

deeper problems concerning the life and ideals of the Russian people

rose before every thinking Russian. Here was a mass of nearly fifty

million people, whose manners of life, whose creed, ways of thinking,

and ideals were totally different from those of the educated classes,

and who at the same time were as unknown to the would-be leaders of

progress as if these millions spoke a quite different language and

belonged to a quite different race.

Our best men felt that all the future development of Russia would be

hampered by that ignorance, if it continued--and literature did its

best to answer the great questions which besieged the thinking man at

every step of his social and political activity.

The years 1858-1878 were years of the ethnographical exploration

of Russia on such a scale that nowhere in Europe or America do we

find anything similar. The monuments of old folklore and poetry; the

common law of different parts and nationalities of the Empire; the

religious beliefs and the forms of worship, and still more the social

aspirations characteristic of the many sections of dissenters; the

extremely interesting habits and customs which prevail in the different

provinces; the economical conditions of the peasants; their domestic

trades; the immense communal fisheries n southeastern Russia; the

thousands of forms taken by the popular coöperative organisations

(the _Artels_); the “inner colonisation” of Russia, which can only be

compared with that of the United States; the evolution of ideas of

landed property, and so on--all these became the subjects of extensive

research.

The great ethnographical expedition organised by the Grand Duke

Constantine, in which a number of our best writers took part, was

only the forerunner of many expeditions, great and small, which were

organised by the numerous Russian scientific societies for the detailed

study of Russia’s ethnography, folklore, and economics. There were men

like YAKÚSHKIN (1820-1872), who devoted all his life to wandering on

foot from village to village, dressed like the poorest peasant, and

without any sort of thought of to-morrow; drying his wet peasant cloth

on his shoulders after a day’s march under the rain, living with the

peasants in their poor huts, and collecting folk-songs or ethnographic

material of the highest value.

A special type of the Russian “intellectuals” developed in the

so-called “Song-Collectors,” and “Zemstvo Statisticians,” a group of

people, old and young, who during the last twenty-five years have as

volunteers and at a ridiculously small price, devoted their lives to

house-to-house inquiry in behalf of the County Councils. (A. Oertel has

admirably described these “Statisticians” in one of his novels.)

Suffice it to say that, according to A. N. PÝPIN, the author of an

exhaustive _History of Russian Ethnography_ (4 vols.), not less than

4000 large works and bulky review articles were published during the

twenty years, 1858-1878, half of them dealing with the economical

conditions of the peasants, and the other half with ethnography in its

wider sense; and research still continues on the same scale. The best

of all this movement has been that it has not ended in dead material

in official publications. Some of the reports, like MAXÍMOFF’S _A

Year in the North_, _Siberia and Hard Labour_, and _Tramping Russia_,

AFANÁSIEFF (_Legends_), ZHELEZNÓFF’S _Ural Cossacks_, MÉLNIKOFF’S

(PETCHÉRSKY), _In the Woods_ and _On the Mountains_, or MORDÓVTSEFF’S

many sketches, were so well written that they were as widely read as

the best novels; while the dry statistical reports were summed up in

lively review articles (in Russia the reviews are much more bulky, and

the articles much longer than in England), which were widely read and

discussed all over the country. Besides, admirable researches dealing

with special classes of people, regions, and institutions were made

by men like PRUGÁVIN, ZASÓDIMSKIY, PYZHÓFF (_History of the Public

Houses_, which is in fact a popular history of Russia).

Russian educated society, which formerly hardly knew the peasants

otherwise than from the balcony of their country houses, was thus

brought in a few years into a close intercourse with all divisions of

the toiling masses; and it is easy to understand the influence which

this intercourse exercised, not only upon the development of political

ideas, but also upon the whole character of Russian literature.

The idealised novel of the past was now outgrown. The representation

of “the dear peasants” as a background for opposing their idyllic

virtues to the defects of the educated classes was possible no more.

The taking of the people as a mere material for burlesque tales, as

NICHOLAS USPÉNSKIY and V. A. SLYEPTSÓFF tried to do, enjoyed but a

momentary success. A new, eminently realistic school of folk-novelists

was wanted. And the result was the appearance of quite a number of

writers who broke new ground and, by cultivating a very high conception

concerning the duties of art in the representation of the poorer,

uneducated classes, opened, I am inclined to think, a new page in the

evolution of the novel for the literature of all nations.

POMYALÓVSKIY

The clergy in Russia--that is, the priests, the deacons, the cantors,

the bell-ringers--represent a separate class which stands between

“the classes” and “the masses”--much nearer to the latter than to the

former. This is especially true as regards the clergy in the villages,

and it was still more so some fifty years ago. Receiving no salary,

the village priest, with his deacon and cantors, lived chiefly by

the cultivation of the land that was attached to the village church;

and in my youth, in our Central Russia neighbourhood, during the hot

summer months when they were hay-making or taking in the crops, the

priest would always hurry through the mass in order to return to their

field-work. The priest’s house was in those years a log-house, only a

little better built than the houses of the peasants, alongside which it

stood sometimes thatched, instead of being simply covered with straw,

that is, held in position by means of straw ropes. His dress differed

from that of the peasants more by its cut than by the materials it was

made of, and between the church services and the fulfilment of his

parish duties the priest might always be seen in the fields, following

the plough or working in the meadows with the scythe.

All the children of the clergy receive free education in special

clerical schools, and later on, some of them, in seminaries; and it

was by the description of the abominable educational methods which

prevailed in these schools in the forties and fifties that POMYALÓVSKIY

(1835-1863) acquired his notoriety. He was the son of a poor deacon in

a village near St. Petersburg, and had himself passed through one of

these schools and a seminary. Both the lower and the higher schools

were then in the hands of quite uneducated priests--chiefly monks--and

the most absurd learning by rote of the most abstract theology was the

rule. The general moral tone of the schools was extremely low, drinking

went on to excess, and flogging for every lesson not recited by heart,

sometimes two or three times a day, with all sorts of refinements

of cruelty--was the chief instrument of education. Pomyalóvskiy

passionately loved his younger brother and wanted at all hazards to

save him from such an experience as his own; so he began to write for

a pedagogical review, on the education given in the clerical schools,

in order to get the means to educate his brother in a gymnasium. A

most powerful novel, evidently taken from real life in these schools,

followed, and numbers of priests, who had themselves been the victims

of a like “education,” wrote to the papers to confirm what Pomyalóvskiy

had said. Truth, without any decoration, naked truth, with an absolute

negation of art for art’s sake, were the distinctive features of

Pomyalóvskiy, who went so far in this direction as even to part with

the so-called heroes. The men whom he described were not sharply

outlined types, but, if I may be permitted to express myself in this

way, the “neutral-tint” types of real life: those indefinite, not too

good and not too bad characters of whom mankind is mostly composed, and

whose inertia is everywhere the great obstacle to progress.

Besides his sketches from the life of the clerical schools,

Pomyalóvskiy wrote also two novels from the life of the poorer

middle classes: _Philistine Happiness_, and _Mólotoff_--which is

autobiographic to a great extent--and an unfinished larger novel,

_Brother and Sister_. He displayed in these works the same broad

humanitarian spirit as Dostoyévskiy had for noticing humane redeeming

features in the most degraded men and women, but with the sound

realistic tendency which made the distinctive feature of the young

literary school of which he was one of the founders. And he depicted

also, in an extraordinarily powerful and tragic manner, the hero

from the poorer classes--who is imbued with hatred towards the upper

classes and toward all forms of social life which exist for their

advantage--and yet has not the faith in his own possibilities, which

knowledge gives, and which a real force always has. Therefore this

hero ends, either in a philistine family idyll, or, this failing, in a

propaganda of reckless cruelty and of contempt towards all mankind, as

the only possible foundation for personal happiness.

These novels were full of promise, and Pomyalóvskiy was looked upon

as the future leader of a new school of literature; but he died, even

before he had reached the age of thirty.

RYESHÉTNIKOFF

RYESHÉTNIKOFF (1841-1871) went still further in the same direction,

and, with Pomyalóvskiy, he may be considered as the founder of the

ultra-realistic school of Russian folk-novelists. He was born in the

Uráls and was the son of a poor church cantor who became a postman. The

family was in extreme poverty. An uncle took him to the town of Perm,

and there he was beaten and thrashed all through his childhood. When he

was ten years old they sent him to a miserable clerical school, where

he was treated even worse than at his uncle’s. He ran away, but was

caught, and they flogged the poor child so awfully that he had to lie

in a hospital for two months. As soon as he was taken back to school

he ran away a second time, joining a band of tramping beggars. He

suffered terribly during his peregrinations with them, and was caught

once more, and again flogged in the most barbarous way. His uncle

also was a postman, and Ryeshétnikoff, having nothing to read, used

to steal newspapers from the Post Office, and after reading them, he

destroyed them. This was, however, discovered, the boy having destroyed

some important Imperial manifesto addressed to the local authorities.

He was brought before a Court and condemned to be sent to a monastery

for a few months (there were no reformatories then). The monks were

kind to him, but they led a most dissolute life, drinking excessively,

over-eating, and stealing away from the monastery at night, and they

taught the boy to drink. In spite of all this, after his release from

the monastery Ryeshétnikoff passed brilliantly the examinations in the

district school, and was received as a clerk in the Civil Service, at

a salary of six shillings, and later on, half-a-guinea per month. This

meant, of course, the most wretched poverty, because the young man

took no bribes, as all clerks in those times were accustomed to do.

The arrival of a “revisor” at Perm saved him. This gentleman employed

Ryeshétnikoff as a copyist, and, having come to like him, gave him

the means to move to St. Petersburg, where he found him a position as

clerk in the Ministry of Finance at almost double his former salary.

Ryeshétnikoff had begun to write already, at Perm, and he continued to

do so at St. Petersburg, sending contributions to some of the lesser

newspapers, until he made the acquaintance of Nekrásoff. Then he

published his novel, _Podlípovtsy_, in _The Contemporary_ (_Ceux de

Podlipnaïa_, in a French translation).

Ryeshétnikoff’s position in literature is quite unique. “The sound

truth of Ryeshétnikoff”--in these words Turguéneff characterised his

writings. It is truth, indeed, nothing but truth, without any attempt

at decoration or lyric effects--a sort of diary in which the men

with whom the author lived in the mining works of the Uráls, in his

Permian village, or in the slums of St. Petersburg, are described.

“Podlípovtsy” means the inhabitants of a small village Podlípnaya, lost

somewhere in the mountains of the Uráls. They are Permians, not yet

quite Russified, and are still in the stage which so many populations

of the Russian Empire are living through nowadays--namely the early

agricultural. Few of them have for more than two months a year pure

rye-bread to eat: the remaining ten months they are compelled to add

the bark of trees to their flour in order to have “bread” at all. They

have not the slightest idea of what Russia is, or of the State, and

very seldom do they see a priest. They hardly know how to cultivate the

land. They do not know how to make a stove, and periodical starvation

during the months from January to July has taken the very soul and

heart out of them. They stand on a lower level than real savages.

One of their best men, Pilá, knows how to count up to five, but the

others are unable to do so. Pilá’s conceptions of space and time are

of the most primitive description, and yet this Pilá is a born leader

of his semi-savage village people, and is continually making something

for them. He tells them when it is time to plough; he tries to find a

sale for their small domestic industries; he knows how to go to the

next town, and when there is anything to be done there, he does it. His

relations with his family, which consists of an only daughter, Apróska,

are at a stage belonging to prehistorical anthropology, and yet he and

his friend Sysói love that girl Apróska so deeply, that after her death

they are ready to kill themselves. They abandon their village to lead

the hard life of boatmen on the river, dragging the heavy boats up the

current. But these semi-savages are deeply human, and one feels that

they are so, not merely because the author wants it, but in reality;

and one cannot read the story of their lives and the sufferings which

they endure, with the resignation of a patient beast, without being

moved at times even more deeply than by a good novel from our own life.

Another novel of Ryeshétnikoff, _The Glúmoffs_, is perhaps one of

the most depressing novels in this branch of literature. There is

nothing striking in it--no misfortunes, no calamities, no dramatic

effects; but the whole life of the ironworkers of the Uráls, who are

described in this novel, is so gloomy, there is so little possibility

of possible escape from this gloominess, that sheer despair seizes

you, as you gradually realise the immobility of the life which this

novel represents. In _Among Men_ Ryeshétnikoff tells the story of his

own terrible childhood. As to his larger two-volume novel--_Where

is it Better?_--it is an interminable string of misfortunes which

befell a woman of the poorer classes, who came to St. Petersburg in

search of work. We have here (as well as in another long novel, _One’s

Own Bread_) the same shapelessness and the same absence of strongly

depicted characters as in _The Glúmoffs_, and we receive the same

gloomy impression.

The literary defects of all Ryeshétnikoff’s work are only too

evident. Yet in spite of them, he may claim to be considered as the

initiator of a new style of novel, which has its artistic value,

notwithstanding its want of form and the ultra-realism of both its

conception and structure. Ryeshétnikoff certainly could not inspire a

school of imitators; but he has given hints to those who came after

him as to what must be done to create the true folk-novel, and what

must be avoided. There is not the slightest trace of romanticism

in his work; no heroes; nothing but that great, indifferent,

hardly individualised crowd, among which there are no striking

colours, no giants; all is small; all interests are limited to a

microscopically narrow neighbourhood. In fact, they all centre round

the all-dominating question, Where to get food and shelter, even at the

price of unbearable toil. Every person described has, of course, his

individuality; but all these individualities are merged into one single

desire: that of finding a living which shall not be sheer misery--shall

not consist of days of well-being alternating with days of starvation.

How lessen the hardships of work which is beyond a man’s forces? how

find a place in the world where work shall not be done amid such

degrading conditions? these questions make the unanimity of purpose

among all these men and women.

There are, I have just said, no heroes in Ryeshétnikoff’s novels: that

means, no “heroes” in our usual literary sense; but you see before you

real Titans--real heroes in the primitive sense of the word--heroes of

endurance--such as the species must produce when, a shapeless crowd,

it bitterly struggles against frost and hunger. The way in which

these heroes support the most incredible physical privations as they

tramp from one part of Russia to another, or have to face the most

cruel deceptions in their search for work--the way they struggle for

existence--is already striking enough; but the way in which they

die, is perhaps even more striking. Many readers remember, of course,

Tolstóy’s _Three Deaths_: the lady dying from consumption, and cursing

her illness; the peasant who in his last hours thinks of his boots, and

directs to whom they shall be given, so that they may go to the toiler

most in need of them; and the third--the death of the birch tree. For

Ryeshétnikoff’s heroes, who live all their lives without being sure of

bread for the morrow, death is not a catastrophe: it simply means less

and less force to get one’s food, less and less energy to chew one’s

dry piece of bread, less and less bread, less oil in the lamp--and the

lamp is blown out.

Another most terrible thing in Ryeshétnikoff’s novels is his picture

of how the habit of drunkenness takes possession of men. You see it

coming--see how it must come, organically, necessarily, fatally--how

it takes possession of the man, and how it holds him till his death.

This Shakespearian fatalism applied to drink--whose workings are only

too well known to those who know popular life--is perhaps the most

terrible feature of Ryeshétnikoff’s novels. Especially is it apparent

in _The Glúmoffs_, where you see how the teacher in a mining town,

because he refuses to join the administration in the exploitation of

children, is deprived of all means of living and although he marries in

the long run a splendid woman, sinks at last into the clutches of the

demon of habitual drunkenness. Only the women do not drink, and that

saves the race from utter destruction; in fact, nearly every one of

Ryeshétnikoff’s women is a heroine of persevering labour, of struggle

for the necessities of life, as the female is in the whole animal

world; and such the women are in real popular life in Russia.

If it is very difficult to avoid romantic sentimentalism, when

the author who describes the monotony of the everyday life of a

middle-class crowd intends to make the reader sympathise nevertheless

with this crowd, the difficulties are still greater when he descends

a step lower in the social scale and deals with peasants, or, still

worse, with those who belong to the lowest strata of city life. The

most realistic writers have fallen into sentimentalism and romanticism

when they attempted to do this. Even Zola in his last novel, _Work_,

falls into the trap. But that is precisely what Ryeshétnikoff never

did. His writings are a violent protest against æsthetics, and even

against all sorts of conventional art. He was a true child of the

epoch characterised by Turguéneff in Bazároff. “I do not care for the

form of my writings: truth will speak for itself,” he seems to say

to his readers. He would have felt ashamed if, even unconsciously,

he had resorted anywhere to dramatic effects in order to touch his

readers--just as the public speaker who entirely relies upon the beauty

of the thought he develops would feel ashamed if some merely oratorical

expression escaped his lips.

For myself, I think that a great creative genius was required in order

to pick, as Ryeshétnikoff did, out of the everyday, monotonous life

of the crowd, those trifling expressions, those exclamations, those

movements expressive of some feelings or some idea without which his

novels would have been quite unreadable. It has been remarked by one

of our critics that when you begin to read a novel of Ryeshétnikoff

you seem to have plunged into a chaos. You have the description of

a commonplace landscape, which, in fact, is no “landscape” at all;

then the future hero or heroine of the novel appears, and he or she

is a person whom you may see in every crowd--with no claims to rise

above this crowd, with hardly anything even to distinguish him or her

from the crowd. This hero speaks, eats, drinks, works, swears, as

everyone else in the crowd does. He is not a chosen creature--he is

not a demoniacal character--a Richard III. in a fustian jacket; nor

is she a Cordelia or even a Dickens’ “Nell.” Ryeshétnikoff’s men and

women are exactly like thousands of men and women around them; but

gradually, owing to those very scraps of thought, to an exclamation,

to a word dropped here and there, or even to a slight movement that is

mentioned--you begin to feel interested in them. After thirty pages

you feel that you are already decidedly in sympathy with them and

you are so captured that you read pages and pages of these chaotic

details with the sole purpose of solving the question which begins

passionately to interest you: Will Peter or Anna find to-day the piece

of bread which they long to have? Will Mary get the work which might

procure her a pinch of tea for her sick and half crazy mother? Will

the woman Praskóvia freeze during that bitterly cold night when she is

lost in the streets of St. Petersburg or will she be taken at last to

a hospital where she may have a warm blanket and cup of tea? Will the

postman abstain from the “fire-water,” and will he get a situation, or

not?

Surely, to obtain this result with such unconventional means reveals

a very great talent; it means, to possess that power of moving one’s

readers--of making them love and hate--which makes the very essence of

literary talent; and this is why those shapeless, and much too long,

and much too dreary novels of Ryeshétnikoff make a landmark in Russian

literature, and are the precursors not only of a Górkiy, but, most

surely, of a greater talent still.

LEVÍTOFF

Another folk-novelist of the same generation was LEVÍTOFF (1835 or

1842-1877). He described chiefly those portions of southern Middle

Russia which are in the borderland between the wooded parts of the

country and the treeless prairies. His life was extremely sad. He

was born in the family of a poor country priest in a village of the

province of Tambóf, and was educated in a clerical school of the type

described by Pomyalóvskiy. When he was only sixteen he went on foot

to Moscow, in order to enter the university, and then moved to St.

Petersburg. There he was soon involved in some “students’ affair,”

and was exiled, in 1858, to Shenkúrsk, in the far north, and next

removed to Vólogda. Here he lived in complete isolation from everything

intellectual, and in awful poverty verging on starvation. Not until

three years later was he allowed to return to Moscow, and, being

absolutely penniless, he made all the journey from Vólogda to Moscow on

foot, earning occasionally a few shillings by clerical work done for

the cantonal Board of some village. These years of exile left a deep

trace upon all his subsequent life, which he passed in extreme poverty,

never finding a place where he could settle, and drowning in drink the

sufferings of a loving, restless soul.

During his early childhood he was deeply impressed by the charm and

quiet of village life in the prairies, and he wrote later on: “This

quietness of village life passes before me, or rather flies, as

something really living, as a well defined image. Yes, I distinctly see

above our daily life in the village, somebody gliding--a little above

the cross of our church, together with the light clouds--somebody light

and soft of outline, having the mild and modest face of our prairie

girls. ... Thus, after many years spent amidst the untold sufferings of

my present existence, do I represent to myself the genius of country

life.”

The charm of the boundless prairies of South Russia--the Steppes--is

so admirably rendered by Levítoff that no Russian author has surpassed

him in the poetical description of their nature, excepting Koltsóff

in his poetry. Levítoff was a pure flower of the Steppes, full of

the most poetical love of his birthplace, and he certainly must have

suffered deeply when he was thrown amidst the intellectual proletarians

in the great, cold, and egotistic capital of the Nevá. Whenever he

stayed at St. Petersburg or at Moscow he always lived in the poorest

quarters, somewhere on the outskirts of the town: they reminded him

of his native village; and when he thus settled amongst the lowest

strata of the population, he did so, as he wrote himself, “to run away

from the moral contradictions, the artificiality of life, the would-be

humanitarianism, and the cut and dried imaginary superiority of the

educated classes.” He could not live, for even a couple of months in

succession, in relative well-being: he began to feel the gnawings of

conscience, and it ended in his leaving behind his extremely poor

belongings and going somewhere--anywhere where he would be poorer

still, amidst other poor who live from hand to mouth.

I do not even know if I am right in describing Levítoff’s works as

novels. They are more like shapeless, lyrical-epical improvisations in

prose. Only in these improvisations we have not the usual hackneyed

presentment of the writer’s compassion for other people’s sufferings.

It is an epical description of what the author has lived through in

his close contact with all classes of people of the poorest sort,

and its lyric element is the sorrow that he himself knew--not in

imagination--as he lived that same life; the sorrow of want, of

family troubles, of hopes unsatisfied, of isolation, of all sorts of

oppression, and of all sorts of human weakness. The pages which he has

given to the feelings of the drunken man and to the ways in which this

disease--drunkenness--takes possession of men, are something really

terrible. Of course, he died young--from an inflammation of the lungs

caught one day in January, as he went in an old summer coat to get ten

shillings from some petty editor at the other end of Moscow.

The best known work of Levítoff is a volume of _Sketches from the

Steppes_; but he has also written scenes from the life of the towns,

under the title of _Moscow Dens and Slums_, _Street Sketches_, etc.,

and a volume to which some of his friends must have given the title

of _Sorrows of the Villages, the High Roads, and the Towns_. In the

second of these works we find a simply terrifying collection of tramps

and outcasts of the large cities--of men sunk to the lowest level of

city slum-life, represented without the slightest attempt at idealising

them--and yet deeply human. _Sketches from the Steppes_ remains his

best work. It is a collection of poems, written in prose, full of the

most admirable descriptions of prairie nature and of tiny details

from the life of the peasants, with all their petty troubles, their

habits, customs, and superstitions. Plenty of personal reminiscences

are scattered through these sketches, and one often finds in them a

scene of children playing in the meadows of the prairies and living

in accordance with the life of nature, in which every little trait is

pictured with a warm, tender love; and almost everywhere one feels the

unseen tears of sorrow, shed by the author.

Amongst the several sketches of the life and work of Levítoff there is

one--written with deep feeling and containing charming idyllic features

from his childhood as well as a terrible account of his later years--by

A. Skabitchévskiy, in his _History of Modern Russian Literature_.

GLEB USPÉNSKIY

GLEB USPÉNSKIY (1840-1902) widely differs from all the preceding

writers. He represents a school in himself, and I know of no writer in

any literature with whom he might be compared. Properly speaking, he is

not a novelist; but his work is not ethnography or demography either,

because it contains, besides descriptions belonging to the domain of

folk-psychology, all the elements of a novel. His first productions

were novels with a leaning towards ethnography. Thus, _Ruin_ is a novel

in which Uspénskiy admirably described how all the life of a small

provincial town, which had flourished under the habits and manners of

serfdom, went to ruin after the abolition of that institution: but his

later productions, entirely given to village life, and representing the

full maturity of his talent, had more the character of ethnographic

sketches, written by a gifted novelist, than of novels proper. They

began like novels. Different persons appear before you in the usual

way, and gradually you grow interested in their doings and their life.

Moreover, they are not offered you haphazard, as they would be in the

diary of an ethnographer; they have been chosen by the author because

he considers them typical of those aspects of village life which he

intends to deal with. However, the author is not satisfied with merely

acquainting the reader with these types: he soon begins to discuss them

and to talk about their position in village life and the influence

they must exercise upon the future of the village; and, being already

interested in the people, you read the discussions with interest. Then

some admirable scene, which would not be out of place in a novel of

Tolstóy or Turguéneff, is introduced; but after a few pages of such

artistic creation Uspénskiy becomes again an ethnographer discussing

the future of the village-community. He was too much of a political

writer to always think in images and to be a pure novelist, but he was

also too passionately impressed by the individual facts which came

under his observation to calmly discuss them, as the merely political

writer would do. In spite of all this, notwithstanding this mixture of

political literature with art, because of his artistic gifts, you read

Uspénskiy just as you read a good novelist.

Every movement among the educated classes in favour of the poorer

classes begins by an idealisation of the latter. It being necessary to

clear away, first of all, a number of prejudices which exist among the

rich as regards the poor, some idealisation is unavoidable. Therefore,

the earlier folk-novelist takes only the most striking types--those

whom the wealthier people can better understand and sympathise with;

and he lightly passes over the less sympathetic features of the life of

the poor. This was done in the forties in France and England, and in

Russia by Grigoróvitch, Márko Vovtchók, and several others. Then came

Ryeshétnikoff with his artistic Nihilism: with his negation of all the

usual tricks of art, and his objectivism; his blunt refusal to create

“types” and his preference for the quite ordinary man; his manner

of transmitting to you his love of his people, merely through the

suppressed intensity of his own emotion. Later on, new problems arose

for Russian literature. The readers were now quite ready to sympathise

with the individual peasant or factory worker; but they wanted to know

something more: namely, what were the very foundations, the ideals,

the springs of village life? what were they worth in the further

development of the nation? what, and in what form, could the immense

agricultural population of Russia contribute to the further development

of the country and the civilised world altogether? All such questions

could not be answered by the statistician alone; they required the

genius of the artist, who must decipher the reply out of the thousands

of small indications and facts, and our folk-novelists understood this

new demand of the reader. A rich collection of individual peasant types

having already been given, it was now the life of the village--the

_mir_, with its advantages and drawbacks, and its promises for the

future--that the readers were anxious to find in the folk-novel. These

were the questions which the new generation of folk-novelists undertook

to discuss.

In this venture they were certainly right. It must not be forgotten

that in the last analysis every economical and social question is

a question of psychology of both the individual and the social

aggregation. It cannot be solved by arithmetic alone. Therefore, in

social science, as in human psychology, the poet often sees his way

better than the physiologist. At any rate, he too has his voice in the

matter.

When Uspénskiy began writing his first sketches of village life--it

was in the early seventies--Young Russia was in the grip of the

great movement “towards the people,” and it must be owned that in

this movement, as in every other, there was some idealisation. Those

who did not know village-life at all cherished exaggerated, idyllic

illusions about the village-community. In all probability Uspénskiy,

who was born in a large industrial town, Túla, in the family of a

small functionary and hardly knew country life at all, shared these

illusions to some extent, very probably in their most extreme aspect;

and still preserving them he went to a province of southeastern Russia,

Samára, which had lately become the prey of modern commercialism, and

where, owing to a number of peculiar circumstances, the abolition of

serfdom had been accomplished under conditions specially ruinous to the

peasants and to village-life altogether. Here he must have suffered

intensely from seeing his youthful dreams vanishing; and, as artists

often do, he hastened to generalise; but he had not the education of

the thorough ethnographer, which might have prevented him from making

too hasty ethnological generalisations from his limited materials,

and he began to write a series of scenes from village-life, imbued

with a deep pessimism. It was only much later on, while staying in a

village of Northern Russia, in the province of Nóvgorod, that he came

to understand the influences which the culture of the land and life in

an agricultural village may exercise upon the tiller of the soil; then

only had he some glimpses of what are the social and moral forces of

land cultivation and communal life, and of what free labour on a free

soil might be. These observations inspired Uspénskiy with perhaps the

best thing he wrote, _The Power of the Soil_ (1882). It will remain, at

any rate, his most important contribution in this domain--the artist

appearing here in all the force of his talent and in his true function

of explaining the inner springs of a certain mood of life.

ZLATOVRÁTSKIY AND OTHER FOLK-NOVELISTS

One of the great questions of the day for Russia is, whether we shall

abolish the communal ownership of the land, as it has been abolished

in Western Europe, and introduce instead of it individual peasant

proprietorship; or whether we shall endeavour to retain the village

community, and do our best to develop it further in the direction of

coöperative associations, both agricultural and industrial. A great

struggle goes on accordingly among the educated classes of Russia

upon this question, and in his first Samára sketches, entitled _From

a Village Diary_, Uspénskiy paid a great deal of attention to this

subject. He tried to prove that the village community, such as it is,

results in a formidable oppression of the individual, in a hampering

of individual initiative, in all sorts of oppression of the poorer

peasants by the richer ones, and, consequently, in general poverty. He

omitted, however, all the arguments which these same poorer peasants,

if they should be questioned, would bring forward in favour of the

present communal ownership of the land; and he attributed to this

institution what is the result of other general causes, as may be seen

from the fact that exactly the same poverty, the same inertia, and the

same oppression of the individual, are found in an even greater degree

in Little Russia, where the village community has ceased to exist long

since. Uspénskiy thus expressed--at least in those sketches which dealt

with the villages of Samára--the views which prevail among the middle

classes of Western Europe, and are current in Russia among the growing

village _bourgeoisie_.

This attitude called forth a series of replies from another

folk-novelist of an equally great talent, ZLATOVRÁTSKIY (born 1845),

who answered each sketch of Uspénskiy’s by a novel in which he took the

extreme opposite view. He had known peasant life in Middle Russia from

his childhood; and the less illusions he had about it, the better was

he able, when he began a serious study of the peasants, to see the good

features of their lives, and to understand those types of them who take

to heart the interests of the village as a whole--types that I also

well knew in my youth in the same provinces.

Zlatovrátskiy was accused, of course, of idealising the peasants; but

the reality is, that Uspénskiy and Zlatovrátskiy complement each other.

Just as they complement each other geographically--the latter speaking

for the truly agricultural region of Middle Russia, while Uspénskiy

spoke for the periphery of this region--so also they complement each

other psychologically. Uspénskiy was right in showing the drawbacks

of the village community institution--deprived of its vitality by an

omnipotent bureaucracy; and Zlatovrátskiy was quite right, too, in

showing what sort of men are nevertheless bred by the village-communal

institutions and by attachment to the land, and what services they

could render to the rural masses under different conditions of liberty

and independence.

Zlatovrátskiy’s novels are thus an important ethnographical

contribution, and they have at the same time an artistic value. His

_Everyday Life in the Village_, and perhaps even more his _Peasant

Jurymen_ (since 1864, the peasant heads of households have acted in

turn as jurors in the law courts), are full of the most charming

scenes of village-life; while his _Foundations_ represents a serious

attempt at grasping in a work of art the fundamental conceptions of

Russian rural life. In this last work we also find types of men, who

personify the revolt of the peasant against both external oppression

and the submissiveness of the mass to that oppression--men, who, under

favourable conditions might become the initiators of movements of a

deep purport. That types have not been invented will be agreed by

everyone who knows Russian village-life from the inside.

* * * * *

The writers who have been named in the preceding pages are far from

representing the whole school of folk-novelists. Not only has every

Russian novelist of the past, from Turguéneff down, been inspired in

some of his work by folk life, but some of the best productions of

the most prominent contemporary writers, such as Korolénko, Tchéhoff,

Oertel and many others (see next chapter), belong to the same category.

There are besides quite a number of novelists distinctively of this

class, who would be spoken of at some length in any course of Russian

literature, but whom, unfortunately, I am compelled to mention in but a

few lines.

NAÚMOFF was born at Tobólsk (in 1838) and, settling in Western Siberia

after he had received a university education at St. Petersburg, he

wrote a series of short novels and sketches in which he described life

in West Siberian villages and mining towns. These stories were widely

read, owing to their expressive, truly popular language, the energy

with which they were imbued, and the striking pictures they contained

of the advantage taken of the poverty of the mass by the richer

peasants, known in Russia as “_mir_-eaters” (_miroyéd_).

ZASÓDIMSKIY (born 1843) belongs to the same period. Like many of

his contemporaries, he spent years of his youth in exile, but he

remains still the same “populist” that he was in his youth, imbued

with the same love of the people and the same faith in the peasants.

His _Chronicle of the Village Smúrino_ (1874) and _Mysteries of the

Steppes_ (1882) are especially interesting, because Zasódimskiy

made in these novels attempts at representing types of intellectual

and protesting peasants, true to life, but usually neglected by

our folk-novelists. Some of them are rebels who revolt against the

conditions of village-life, chiefly in their own, personal interest,

while others are peaceful religious propagandists, and still others are

men who have developed under the influence of educated propagandists.

Another writer who excelled in the representation of the type of

“_mir_-eaters” in the villages of European Russia is SÁLOFF (1843-1902).

PETROPÁVLOVSKIY (1857-1892), who wrote under the pseudonym of KARÓNIN,

was, on the other hand, a real poet of village-life and of the

cultivation of the fields. He was born in southeastern Russia, in the

province of Samára, but was early exiled to the government of Tobólsk,

in Siberia, where he was kept many years, and from which he was

released only to die soon after from consumption. He gave in his novels

and stories several very dramatic types of village “ne’er-do-well’s,”

but the novel which is most typical of his talent is _My World_. In

it he tells how an “intellectual,” “rent in twain” and nearly losing

his reason in consequence of this dualism, finds inner peace and

reconciliation with life when he settles in a village and works in the

same almost superhuman way that the peasants do, when hay has to be

mown and the crops to be carried in. Thus living the life they live,

he is loved by them, and finds a healthy and intelligent girl to love

him. This is, of course, to some extent an idyll of village life; but

so slight is the idealisation, as we know from the experience of those

“intellectuals” who went to the villages as equals coming among equals,

that the idyll reads almost as a reality.

Several more folk-novelists ought to be mentioned. Such are L. MELSHIN

(born 1860), the pseudonym of an exile “P. YA.,” who is also a poet,

and who, having been kept for twelve years at hard labour in Siberia

as a political convict, has published two volumes of hard-labour

sketches, _In the World of the Outcasts_ (a work to put by the side

of Dostoyévskiy’s _Dead House_); S. ELPÁTIEVSKIY (born 1854), also

an exile, who has given good sketches of Siberian tramps; NEFÉDOFF

(1847-1902), an ethnographer who has made valuable scientific

researches and at the same time has published excellent sketches of

factory and village life, and whose writings are thoroughly imbued

with a deep faith in the store of energy and plastic creative power

of the masses of the country people; and several others. Every one of

these writers deserves, however, more than a short notice, because

each has contributed something, either to the comprehension of this

or that class of the people, or to the working out of those forms of

“idealistic realism” which are best suited for dealing with types taken

from the toiling masses, and which has lately made the literary success

of Maxím Górkiy.

MAXÍM GÓRKIY

Few writers have established their reputation so rapidly as MAXÍM

GÓRKIY. His first sketches (1892-95) were published in an obscure

provincial paper of the Caucasus, and were totally unknown to the

literary world, but when a short tale of his appeared in a widely-read

review, edited by Korolénko, it at once attracted general attention.

The beauty of its form, its artistic finish, and the new note of

strength and courage which rang through it, brought the young writer

immediately into prominence. It became known that “Maxím Górkiy” was

the pseudonym of a quiet young man, A. PYÉSHKOFF, who was born in 1868

in Níjniy Nóvgorod, a large town on the Vólga; that his father was a

merchant or an artisan, his mother a remarkable peasant woman, who

died soon after the birth of her son, and that the boy, orphaned when

only nine, was brought up in a family of his father’s relatives. The

childhood of “Górkiy” must have been anything but happy, for one day he

ran away and entered into service on a Vólga river steamer. This took

place when he was only twelve. Later on he worked as a baker, became

a street porter, sold apples in a street, till at last he obtained

the position of clerk at a lawyer’s. In 1891 he lived and wandered on

foot with the tramps in South Russia, and during these wanderings he

wrote a number of short stories, of which the first was published in

1892, in a newspaper of Northern Caucasia. The stories proved to be

remarkably fine, and when a collection of all that he had hitherto

written was published in 1900, in four small volumes, the whole of a

large edition was sold in a very short time, and the name of Górkiy

took its place--to speak of living novelists only--by the side of those

of Korolénko and Tchéhoff, immediately after the name of Leo Tolstóy.

In Western Europe and America his reputation was made with the same

rapidity as soon as a couple of his sketches were translated into

French and German, and re-translated into English.

It is sufficient to read a few of Górkiy’s short stories, for instance,

_Málva_, or _Tchelkásh_, or _The Ex-Men_, or _Twenty-Six Men and One

Girl_, to realise at once the causes of his rapidly won popularity.

The men and women he describes are not heroes: they are the most

ordinary tramps or slum-dwellers; and what he writes are not novels in

the proper sense of the word, but merely sketches of life. And yet,

in the literature of all nations, including the short stories of Guy

de Maupassant and Bret Harte, there are few things in which such a

fine analysis of complicated and struggling human feelings is given,

such interesting, original, and new characters are so well depicted,

and human psychology is so admirably interwoven with a background of

nature--a calm sea, menacing waves, or endless, sunburnt prairies. In

the first-named story you really _see_ the promontory that juts out

into “the laughing waters,” that promontory upon which the fisherman

has pitched his hut; and you understand why Málva, the woman who loves

him and comes to see him every Sunday, loves that spot as much as she

does the fisherman himself. And then at every page you are struck by

the quite unexpected variety of fine touches with which the love of

that strange and complicated nature, Málva, is depicted, or by the

unforeseen aspects under which both the ex-peasant fisherman and his

peasant-son appear in the short space of a few days. The variety of

strokes, refined and brutal, tender and terribly harsh, with which

Górkiy pictures human feelings is such that in comparison with his

heroes the heroes and heroines of our best novelists seem so simple--so

simplified--just like a flower in European decorative art in comparison

with a real flower.

Górkiy is a great artist; he is a poet; but he is also a child of

all that long series of folk-novelists whom Russia has had for the

last half century, and he has utilised their experience: he has

found at last that happy combination of realism with idealism for

which the Russian folk-novelists have been striving for so many

years. Ryeshétnikoff and his school had tried to write novels of an

ultra-realistic character without any trace of idealisation. They

restrained themselves whenever they felt inclined to generalise, to

create, to idealise. They tried to write mere diaries, in which events,

great and small, important and insignificant, were related with an

equal exactitude, without even changing the tone of the narrative. We

have seen that in this way, by dint of their talent, they were able to

obtain the most poignant effects; but like the historian who vainly

tries to be “impartial,” yet always remains a party man, they had

not avoided the idealisation which they so much dreaded. They could

not avoid it. A work of art is always personal; do what he may, the

author’s sympathies will necessarily appear in his creation, and he

will always idealise those who answer to them. Grigórovitch and Márko

Vovtchók had idealised the all-pardoning patience and the all-enduring

submissiveness of the Russian peasant; and Ryeshétnikoff had quite

unconsciously, and maybe against his will, idealised the almost

supernatural powers of endurance which he had seen in the Uráls and

in the slums of St. Petersburg. Both had idealised something: the

ultra-realist as well as the romantic. Górkiy must have understood the

significance of this; at all events he does not object in the least

to a certain idealisation. In his adherence to truth he is as much

of a realist as Ryeshétnikoff; but he idealises in the same sense as

Turguéneff did when he pictured Rúdin, Helen, or Bazároff. He even

says that we _must_ idealise, and he chooses for idealisation the type

he admired most among those tramps whom he knew--the rebel. This made

his success; it appeared to be exactly what the readers of all nations

were unconsciously calling for as a relief from the dull mediocrity and

absence of strong individuality all about them.

* * * * *

The stratum of society from which Górkiy took the heroes of his first

short stories--and in short stories he appears at his best--is that

of the tramps of Southern Russia: men who have broken with regular

society, who never accept the yoke of permanent work, labouring only as

long as they want to, as “casuals” in the sea-ports on the Black Sea;

who sleep in doss-houses or in ravines on the outskirts of the cities,

and tramp in the summer from Odessa to the Crimea, and from the Crimea

to the prairies of Northern Caucasia, where they are always welcome at

harvest time.

That eternal complaint about poverty and bad luck, that helplessness

and hopelessness which were the dominant notes with the early

folk-novelists, are totally absent from Górkiy’s stories. His tramps do

not complain. “Everything is all right,” one of them says; “no use to

whine and complain--that would do no good. Live and endure till you are

broken down, or if you are so already--wait for death. This is all the

wisdom in the world--do you understand?”

Far from his whining and complaining about the hard lot of his tramps,

a refreshing note of energy and courage, which is quite unique in

Russian literature, sounds through the stories of Górkiy. His tramps

are miserably poor, but they “don’t care.” They drink, but there

is nothing among them nearly approaching the dark drunkenness of

despair which we saw in Levítoff. Even the most “down-trodden” one of

them--far from making a virtue of his helplessness, as Dostoyévskiy’s

heroes always did--dreams of reforming the world and making it rich.

He dreams of the moment when “we, once ‘the poor,’ shall vanish, after

having enriched the Crœsuses with the richness of the spirit and the

power of life.” (_A Mistake_, I, 170.)

Górkiy cannot stand whining; he cannot bear that self-castigation

in which other Russian writers so much delight: which Turguéneff’s

sub-Hamlets used to express so poetically, of which Dostoyévskiy has

made a virtue, and of which Russia offers such an infinite variety

of examples. Górkiy knows the type, but he has no pity for such men.

Better anything than one of those egotistic weaklings who gnaw all the

time at their own hearts, compel others to drink with them in order to

perorate before them about their “burning souls”; those beings, “full

of compassion” which, however, never goes beyond self-commiseration,

and “full of love” which is never anything but self-love. Górkiy knows

only too well these men who never fail to wantonly ruin the lives

of those women who trust them; who do not even stop at murder, like

Raskólnikoff, or the brothers Karamázoff, and yet whine about the

circumstances which have brought them to it. “What’s all this talk

about circumstances!” he makes Old Izerghil say. “Everyone makes his

own circumstances! I see all sorts of men--but the strong ones--where

are they? There are fewer and fewer noble men!”

Knowing how much the Russian “intellectuals” suffer from this disease

of whining, knowing how rare among them are the aggressive idealists,

the real _rebels_, and how numerous on the other hand are the

Nezhdánoffs (Turguéneff’s _Virgin Soil_), even among those “politicals”

who march with resignation to Siberia, Górkiy does not take his types

from among “the intellectuals,” for he thinks that they too easily

become “the prisoners of life.”

In _Váreñka Olésova_ Górkiy expresses all his contempt for the average

“intellectual” of our own days. He introduces to us the interesting

type of a girl, full of vitality; a most primitive creature, absolutely

untouched by any ideals of liberty and equality, but so full of an

intense life, so independent, so much herself, that one cannot but feel

greatly interested in her. She meets with one of those “intellectuals”

who know and admire higher ideals, but are weaklings, utterly devoid of

the nerve of life. Of course, Váreñka laughs at the very idea of such a

man’s falling in love with her; and these are the expressions in which

Górkiy makes her define the usual hero of Russian novels:

“The Russian hero is always silly and stupid,” she says; “he is always

sick of something; always thinking about something that cannot be

understood, and is himself so miserable, so mi-i-serable! He will

think, think, then talk, then he will go and make a declaration of

love, and after that he thinks, and thinks again, till he marries....

And when he is married, he talks all sorts of nonsense to his wife,

and then abandons her.” (_Váreñka Olésova_, II, 281.)

Górkiy’s favourite type is the “rebel”--the man in full revolt against

Society, but at the same time a strong man, a power; and as he has

found among the tramps with whom he has lived at least the embryo of

this type, it is from this stratum of society that he takes his most

interesting heroes.