partial psychology, of his tramp hero:--“An ‘intellectual’ amongst
those whom fate has ill-used--amongst the ragged, the hungry and
embittered half-men and half-beasts with whom the city slums
teem.”--“Usually a being that can be included in no order,” the man
who has “been torn from all his moorings, who is hostile to everything
and ready to turn upon anything the force of his angry, embittered
scepticism” (II, 23). His tramp feels that he has been defeated in
life, but he does not seek excuse in circumstances. Konováloff, for
instance, will not admit the theory which is in such vogue among the
educated ne’er-do-well, namely, that he is the sad product of adverse
conditions. “One must be faint-hearted indeed,” he says, “to become
such a man.” “I live, and something goads me on” ... but “I have no
inner line to follow ... do you understand me? I don’t know how to say
it. I have not that spark in my soul, ... force, perhaps? Something is
missing; that’s all!” And when his young friend who has read in books
all sorts of excuses for weakness of character mentions “the dark
hostile forces round you,” Konováloff retorts: “Then make a stand!
take a stronger footing! find your ground, and make a stand!”
Some of Górkiy’s tramps are, of course, philosophers. They think about
human life, and have had opportunities to know what it is. “Everyone,”
he remarks somewhere, “who has had a struggle to sustain in his life,
and has been defeated by life, and now feels cruelly imprisoned amidst
its squalor, is more of a philosopher than Schopenhauer himself; for
abstract thought can never be cast into such a correct and vivid
plastic form as that in which is expressed the thought born directly
out of suffering.” (I, p. 31.) “The knowledge of life among such men is
striking,” he says again.
Love of nature is, of course, another characteristic feature of the
tramp--“Konováloff loved nature with a deep, inarticulate love, which
was betrayed only by a glitter in his eyes. Every time he was in the
fields, or on the river bank, he became permeated with a sort of peace
and love which made him still more like a child. Sometimes he would
exclaim looking at the sky: ‘Good!’ and in this exclamation there was
more sense and feeling than in the rhetoric of many poets.... Like all
the rest, poetry loses its holy simplicity and spontaneity when it
becomes a profession.” (I, 33-4.)
However, Górkiy’s rebel-tramp is not a Nitzscheite who ignores
everything beyond his narrow egotism, or imagines himself a “man”; the
“diseased ambition” of “an intellectual” is required to create the true
Nitzscheite type. In Górkiy’s tramps, as in his women of the lowest
class, there are flashes of greatness of character and a simplicity
which is incompatible with the super-man’s self-conceit. He does not
idealise them so as to make of them real heroes; that would be too
untrue to life: the tramp is still a defeated being. But he shows how
among these men, owing to an inner consciousness of strength, there are
moments of greatness, even though that inner force be not strong enough
to make out of Orlóff (in _The Orlóffs_) or Iliyá (in _The Three_) a
real power, a real hero--the man who fights against those much stronger
than himself. He seems to say: Why are not you, intellectuals, as truly
“individual,” as frankly rebellious against the Society you criticise,
and as strong as some of these submerged ones are?
In his short stories Górkiy is great; but like his two contemporaries,
Korolénko and Tchéhoff, whenever he has tried to write a longer novel,
with a full development of characters, he has not succeeded. Taken as
a whole, _Fomá Gordéeff_, notwithstanding several beautiful and deeply
impressive scenes, is weaker than most of Górkiy’s short stories; and
while the first portion of _The Three_--the idyllic life of the three
young people, and the tragical issues foreshadowed in it--makes us
expect to find in this novel one of the finest productions in Russian
literature--its end is disappointing. The French translator of _The
Three_ has even preferred to terminate it abruptly, at the point where
Iliyá stands on the grave of the man whom he has killed, rather than to
give Górkiy’s end of the novel.
Why Górkiy should fail in this direction is, of course, too delicate
and too difficult a question to answer. One cause, however, may be
suggested. Górkiy, like Tolstóy, is too honest an artist to “invent” an
end which the real lives of his heroes do not suggest to him, although
that end might have been very picturesque; and the class of men whom
he so admirably depicts is not possessed of that consistency and that
“oneness” which are necessary to render a work of art perfect and to
give it that final accord without which it is never complete.
Take, for instance, Orlóff in _The Orlóffs_. “My soul burns within
me,” he says. “I want space, to give full swing to my strength. I feel
within me an indomitable force! If the cholera, let us say, could
become a man, a giant--were it Iliyá Múromets himself--I would meet it!
‘Let it be a struggle to the death,’ I would say; ‘you are a force, and
I, Gríshka Orlóff, am a force, too: let us see which is the better!’”
But that power, that force does not last. Orlóff says somewhere that
“he is torn in all directions at once,” and that his fate is to be--not
a fighter of giants, but merely a tramp. And so he ends. Górkiy is
too great an artist to make of him a giant-killer. It is the same
with Iliyá in _The Three_. This is a powerful type, and one feels
inclined to ask, Why did not Górkiy make him begin a new life under the
influence of those young propagandists of socialism whom he meets?
Why should he not die, let us say, in one of those encounters between
workingmen on strike and soldiers which took place in Russia precisely
at the time Górkiy was finishing this novel? But here, too, Górkiy’s
reply probably would be that such things do not happen in real life.
Men, like Iliyá, who dream only of the “clean life of a merchant,”
do not join in labour movements. And he preferred to give a very
disappointing end to his hero--to make him appear miserable and small
in his attack upon the wife of the police-officer, so as to turn the
reader’s sympathies towards even this woman--rather than to make of
Iliyá a prominent figure in a strike-conflict. If it had been possible
to idealise Iliyá so much, without over-straining the permissible
limits of idealisation, Górkiy probably would have done it, because he
is entirely in favour of idealisation in realistic art; but this would
have been pure romanticism.
Over and over again he returns to the idea of the necessity of an ideal
in the work of the novel-writer. “The cause of the present opinion (in
Russian Society) is,” he says, “the neglect of idealism. Those who have
exiled from life all romanticism have stripped us so as to leave us
quite naked: this is why we are so uninteresting to one another, and so
disgusted with one another.” (_A Mistake_, I. 151.) And in _The Reader_
(1898), he develops his æsthetic canons in full. He tells how one of
his earliest productions, on its appearance in print, is read one night
before a circle of friends. He receives many compliments for it, and
after leaving the house is tramping along a deserted street, feeling
for the first time in his existence the happiness of life, when a
person unknown to him, and whom he had not noticed among those present
at the reading, overtakes him, and begins to talk about the duties of
the author.
“You will agree with me,” the stranger says, “that the duty of
literature is to aid man in understanding himself, to raise his faith
in himself, to develop his longing for truth; to combat what is bad
in men; to find what is good in them, and to wake up in their souls
shame, anger, courage, to do everything, in short, to render men
strong in a noble sense of the word, and capable of inspiring their
lives with the holy spirit of beauty.” (III, 271.) “It seems to me,
we need once more to have dreams, pretty creations of our fancy and
visions, because the life we have built up is poor in colour, is dim
and dull.... Well, let us try, perhaps imagination will help man to
rise for a moment above the earth and find his true place on it, which
he has lost.” (245.)
But further on Górkiy makes a confession which explains perhaps why
he has not yet succeeded in creating a longer character-novel: “I
discovered in myself,” he says, “many good feelings and desires--a
fair proportion of what is usually called good; but _a feeling which
could unify all this_--a well-founded, clear thought, embracing all the
phenomena of life--I did not find in myself.” And on reading this, one
at once thinks of Turguéneff, who saw in such a “freedom,” in such a
unified comprehension of the universe and its life, the first condition
for being a great artist.
“Can you,” the _Reader_ goes on to ask, “create for men ever so
small an illusion that has the power to raise them? No!” “All of
you teachers of the day take more than you give, because you speak
only about faults--you see only those. But there must also be good
qualities in men: you possess some, don’t you?... Don’t you notice
that owing to your continual efforts to define and to classify them,
the virtues and the vices have been entangled like two balls of black
and white thread which have become grey by taking colour from each
other?”... “I doubt whether God has sent you on earth. If he had sent
messengers, he would have chosen stronger men than you are. He would
have lighted in them the fire of a passionate love of life, of truth,
of men.”
“Nothing but everyday life, everyday life, only everyday people,
everyday thoughts and events!” the same pitiless _Reader_ continues.
“When will you, then, speak of ‘the rebel spirit,’ of the necessity of
a new birth of the spirit? Where is, then, the calling to the creation
of a new life? where the lessons of courage? where the words which
would give wings to the soul?”
“Confess you don’t know how to represent life, so that your pictures
of it shall provoke in a man a redemptive spirit of shame and a
burning desire of creating new forms of life.... Can you accelerate
the pulsation of life? Can you inspire it with energy, as others have
done?”
“I see many intelligent men round about me, but few noble ones among
them, and these few are broken and suffering souls. I don’t know why
it should be so, but so it is: the better the man, the cleaner and
the more honest his soul, the less energy he has; the more he suffers
and the harder is his life.... But although they suffer so much from
feeling the want of something better, they have not the force to
create it.”
“One thing more”--said after an interval my strange interlocutor.
“Can you awake in man a laughter full of the joy of life and at the
same time elevating to the soul? Look, men have quite forgotten good
wholesome laughter!”
“The sense of life is not in self-satisfaction; after all, man is
better than that. The sense of life is in the beauty and the force
of striving towards some aim; every moment of being ought to have
its higher aim.” “Wrath, hatred, shame, loathing, and finally a grim
despair--these are the levers by means of which you may destroy
everything on earth.” “What can you do to awake a thirst for life when
you only whine, sigh, moan, or coolly point out to man that he is
nothing but dust?”
“Oh, for a man, firm and loving, with a burning heart and a powerful
all-embracing mind. In the stuffy atmosphere of shameful silence, his
prophetic words would resound like an alarm-bell, and perhaps the mean
souls of the living dead would shiver!” (253.)
These ideas of Górkiy about the necessity of something better than
everyday life--something that shall elevate the soul, fully explain
also his last drama, _At the Bottom_, which has had such a success at
Moscow, but played by the very same artists at St. Petersburg met with
but little enthusiasm. The idea is the same as that of Ibsen’s _Wild
Duck_. The inhabitants of a doss-house, all of them, maintain their
life-power only as long as they cherish some illusion: the drunkard
actor dreams of recovery in some special retreat; a fallen girl takes
refuge in her illusion of real love, and so on. And the dramatic
situation of these beings with already so little to retain them in
life, is only the more poignant when the illusions are destroyed. The
drama is powerful. It must lose, though, on the stage on account of
some technical mistakes (a useless fourth act, the unnecessary person
of a woman introduced in the first scene and then disappearing); but
apart from these mistakes it is eminently dramatic. The positions are
really tragical, the action is rapid, and as to the conversations of
the inhabitants of the doss-house and their philosophy of life, both
are above all praise. Altogether one feels that Górkiy is very far
yet from having said his last word. The question is only whether in
the classes of society he now frequents he will be able to discover
the further developments--undoubtedly existing--of the types which he
understands best. Will he find among them further materials responding
to the æsthetic canons whose following has hitherto been the source of
his power?
PART VIII
Political Literature, Satire,
Art Criticism,
Contemporary Novelists,
Bibliography
CHAPTER VIII
POLITICAL LITERATURE: SATIRE: ART CRITICISM: CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS
Political Literature--Difficulties of Censorship--The
Circles--Westerners and Slavophiles--Political Literature
abroad: Herzen--Ogaryóff--Bakunin--Lavróff--Stepniak--_The
Contemporary_ and Tchernyshévskiy--SATIRE: Schedrin
(Saltykoff)--ART CRITICISM: Its Importance in
Russia--Byelinskiy--Dobrolúboff--Písareff--Mihailóvskiy--Tolstóy’s
_What is Art?_--CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS--Otel--Korolenko--Present Drift
of Literature--Merezherovskiy--Boborykin--Potápenko--Tchehoff.
POLITICAL LITERATURE
To speak of political literature in a country which has no political
liberty, and where nothing can be printed without having been
approved by a rigorous censorship, sounds almost like irony. And
yet, notwithstanding all the efforts of the Government to prevent
the discussion of political matters in the Press, or even in private
circles, that discussion goes on, under all possible aspects and under
all imaginable pretexts. As a result it would be no exaggeration
to say that in the necessarily narrow circle of educated Russian
“intellectuals” there is as much knowledge, all round, of matters
political as there is in the educated circles of any other European
country, and that a certain knowledge of the political life of other
nations is wide-spread among the reading portion of Russians.
It is well known that everything that is printed in Russia, even up
to the present time, is submitted to censorship, either before it
goes to print, or afterwards. To found a review or a paper the editor
must offer satisfactory guarantees of not being “too advanced” in
his political opinions, otherwise he will not be authorised by the
Ministry of the Interior to start the paper or the review and to act
in the capacity of its editor. In certain cases a paper or a review,
published in one of the two capitals but never in the provinces, may
be allowed to appear without passing through the censor’s hands before
going to print; but a copy of it must be sent to the censor as soon as
the printing begins, and every number may be stopped and prevented from
being put into circulation before it has left the printing office, to
say nothing of subsequent prosecution. The same condition of things
exists for books. Even after the paper or the book has been authorised
by the censor it may be subject to a prosecution. The law of 1864 was
very definite in stating the conditions under which such prosecution
could take place; namely, it had to be made before a regular court,
within one month after publication; but this law was never respected
by the Government. Books were seized and destroyed--reduced to
pulp--without the affair ever being brought before a Court, and I
know editors who have been plainly warned that if they insisted
upon this being done, they would simply be exiled, by order of the
administration, to some remote province. This is not all, moreover. A
paper or a review may receive a first, a second, and a third warning,
and after the third warning it is suspended, by virtue of that warning.
Besides, the Ministry of the Interior may at any time prohibit the sale
of the paper in the streets and the shops, or deprive the paper of the
right of inserting advertisements.
The arsenal of punishments is thus pretty large; but there is still
something else. It is the system of ministerial circulars. Suppose a
strike takes place, or some scandalous bribery has been discovered in
some branch of the administration. Immediately all papers and reviews
receive a circular from the Ministry of the Interior prohibiting them
to speak of that strike, or that scandal. Even less important matters
will be tabooed in this way. Thus a few years ago an anti-Semitic
comedy was put on the stage at St. Petersburg. It was imbued with the
worst spirit of national hatred towards the Jews, and the actress who
was given the main part in it refused to play. She preferred to break
her agreement with the manager rather than to play in that comedy.
Another actress was engaged. This became known to the public, and at
the first representation a formidable demonstration was made against
the actors who had accepted parts in the play, and also against the
author. Some eighty arrests--chiefly of students and other young
people and of litterateurs--were made from among the audience, and
for two days the St. Petersburg papers were full of discussions of
the incident; but then came the ministerial circular prohibiting any
further reference to the subject, and on the third day there was not a
word said about the matter in all the Press of Russia.
Socialism, the social question altogether, and the labour movement are
continually tabooed by ministerial circulars--to say nothing of Society
and Court scandals, or of the thefts which may be discovered from
time to time in the higher administration. At the end of the reign of
Alexander II. the theories of Darwin, Spencer, and Buckle were tabooed
in the same way, and their works were prevented from being kept by the
circulating libraries.
This is what censorship means nowadays. As to what was formerly, a very
amusing book could be made of the antics of the different censors,
simply by utilising Skabitchévskiy’s _History of Censorship_. Suffice
it to say that when Púshkin, speaking of a lady, wrote: “Your divine
features,” or mentioned “her celestial beauty,” the censorship would
cross out these verses and write, in red ink on the MS., that such
expressions were offensive to divinity and could not be allowed. Verses
were mutilated without any regard to the rules of versification; and
very often the censor introduced, in a novel, scenes of his own.
Under such conditions political thought had continually to find new
channels for its expression. Quite a special language was developed
therefore in the reviews and papers for the treatment of forbidden
subjects and for expressing ideas which censorship would have found
objectionable; and this way of writing was resorted to even in works
of art. A few words dropped by a Rúdin, or by a Bazároff in a novel by
Turguéneff, conveyed quite a world of ideas. However, other channels
besides mere allusion were necessary, and therefore political thought
found its expression in various other ways: first of all, in literary
and philosophical circles which impressed their stamp on the entire
literature of a given epoch; then, in art-criticism, in satire, and in
literature published abroad, either in Switzerland or in England.
THE “CIRCLES”--WESTERNERS AND SLAVOPHILES
It was especially in the forties and fifties of the nineteenth century
that “the circles” played an important part in the intellectual
development of Russia. No sort of expression of political thought
in print was possible at that time. The two or three semi-official
newspapers which were allowed to appear were absolutely worthless;
the novel, the drama, the poem, had to deal with the most superficial
matters only, and the heaviest books of science and philosophy were
as liable to be prohibited as the lighter sort of literature. Private
intercourse was the only possible means of exchanging ideas, and
therefore all the best men of the time joined some “circle,” in which
more or less advanced ideas were expressed in friendly conversation.
There are even men like STANKÉVITCH (1817-1840) who are mentioned in
every course of Russian literature, although they have never written
anything, simply for the moral influence they exercised within their
circle. (Turguéneff’s _Yákov Pásynkoff_ was inspired by such a
personality.)
It is quite evident that under such conditions there was no room for
the development of political parties properly speaking. However, from
the middle of the nineteenth century two main currents of philosophical
and social thought, which took the name of “Western” and “Slavophile,”
were always apparent. The Westerners were, broadly speaking, for
Western civilisation. Russia--they maintained--is no exception in the
great family of European nations. She will necessarily pass through the
same phases of development that Western Europe has passed through, and
consequently her next step will be the abolition of serfdom and, after
that, the evolution of the same constitutional institutions as have
been evolved in Western Europe. The Slavophiles, on the other side,
maintained that Russia has a mission of her own. She has not known
foreign conquest like that of the Normans; she has retained still the
structure of the old clan period, and therefore she must follow her
own quite original lines of development, in accordance with what the
Slavophiles described as the three fundamental principles of Russian
life: the Greek Orthodox Church, the absolute power of the Tsar, and
the principles of the patriarchal family.
These were, of course, very wide programmes, which admitted of many
shades of opinion and gradations. Thus, for the great bulk of the
Westerners, Western liberalism of the Whig or the Guizot type was the
highest ideal that Russia had to strive for. They maintained moreover
that everything which has happened in Western Europe in the course of
her evolution--such as the depopulation of the villages, the horrors of
freshly developing capitalism (revealed in England by the Parliamentary
Commissions of the forties), the powers of bureaucracy which had
developed in France, and so on, must necessarily be repeated in Russia
as well: they were unavoidable _laws_ of evolution. This was the
opinion of the rank-and-file “Westerner.”
The more intelligent and the better educated representatives of this
same party--Byelínskiy, Hérzen, Turguéneff, Tchernyshévskiy, who were
all under the influence of advanced European thought, held quite
different views. In their opinion the hardships suffered by workingmen
and agricultural labourers in Western Europe from the unbridled
power won in the parliaments, by both the landlords and the middle
classes, and the limitations of political liberties introduced in the
continental States of Europe by their bureaucratic centralisation, were
by no means “historical necessities.” Russia--they maintained--need not
necessarily repeat these mistakes; she must on the contrary, profit
by the experience of her elder sisters, and if Russia succeeds in
attaining the era of industrialism without having lost her communal
land-ownership, or the autonomy of certain parts of the Empire, or the
self-government of the _mir_ in her villages, this will be an immense
advantage. It would be therefore the greatest political mistake to
go on destroying her village community, to let the land concentrate
in the hands of a landed aristocracy, and to let the political life
of so immense and varied a territory be concentrated in the hands of
a central governing body, in accordance with the Prussian, or the
Napoleonic ideals of political centralisation--especially now that the
powers of Capitalism are so great.
Similar gradations of opinion prevailed among the Slavophiles. Their
best representatives--the two brothers AKSÁKOFF, the two brothers
KIRÉEVSKIY, HOMYAKÓFF, etc., were much in advance of the great bulk of
the party. The average Slavophile was simply a fanatic of absolute rule
and the Orthodox Church, to which feelings he usually added a sort of
sentimental attachment to the “old good times,” by which he understood
all sorts of things: patriarchal habits of the times of serfdom,
manners of country life, folk songs, traditions, and folk-dress. At a
time when the real history of Russia had hardly begun to be deciphered
they did not even suspect that the federalist principle had prevailed
in Russia down to the Mongol invasion; that the authority of the
Moscow Tsars was of a relatively late creation (15th, 16th and 17th
centuries); and that autocracy was not at all an inheritance of _old_
Russia, but was chiefly the work of that same Peter I. whom they
execrated for having violently introduced Western habits of life.
Few of them realised also that the religion of the great mass of
the Russian people was _not_ the religion which is professed by the
official “Orthodox” Church, but a thousand varieties of “Dissent.”
They thus imagined that they represented the ideals of the Russian
_people_, while in reality they represented the ideals of the Russian
_State_, and the Moscow _Church_, which are of a mixed Byzantine,
Latin, and Mongolian origin. With the aid of the fogs of German
metaphysics--especially of Hegel--which were in great vogue at that
time, and with that love of abstract terminology which prevailed in the
first half of the nineteenth century, discussion upon such themes could
evidently last for years without coming to a definite conclusion.
However, with all that, it must be owned that, through their best
representatives, the Slavophiles powerfully contributed towards the
creation of a school of history and law which put historical studies
in Russia on a true foundation, by making a sharp distinction between
the history and the law of the Russian _State_ and the history and
the law of the Russian _people_. KOSTOMÁROFF (1818-1885), ZABYÉLIN
(born 1820) and BYELÁEFF (1810-1873), were the first to write the real
history of the Russian people, and of these three, the two last were
Slavophiles; while the former--an Ukraïnian nationalist--had also
borrowed from the Slavophiles their scientific ideas. They brought
into evidence the federalistic character of early Russian history.
They destroyed the legend, propagated by Karamzín, of an uninterrupted
transmission of royal power, that was supposed to have taken place for
a thousand years, from the times of the Norman Rúrik till to-day. They
brought into evidence the violent means by which the princes of Moscow
crushed the independent city-republics of the pre-Mongolian period,
and gradually, with the aid of the Mongol Khans, became the Tsars of
Russia; and they told (especially Byeláeff, in his _History of the
Peasants in Russia_) the gruesome tale of the growth of serfdom from
the seventeenth century, under the Moscow Tsars. Besides, it is mainly
to the Slavophiles that we owe the recognition of the fact that two
different codes exist in Russia--the Code of the Empire, which is the
code of the educated classes, and the Common Law, which is (like the
Norman law in Jersey) widely different from the former, and very often
preferable, in its conceptions of land-ownership, inheritance, etc.,
and is the law which prevails among the peasants, its details varying
in different provinces. The recognition of this fact has already had
far-reaching consequences in the whole life of Russia and her colonies.
In the absence of political life the philosophical and literary
struggles between the Slavophiles and the Westerners absorbed the
minds of the best men of the literary circles of St. Petersburg and
Moscow in the years 1840-1860. The question whether or not each
nationality is the bearer of some pre-determined mission in history,
and whether Russia has some such special mission, was eagerly discussed
in the circles to which, in the forties, belonged Bakúnin, the critic
Byelínskiy, Hérzen, Turguéneff, the Aksákoffs and the Kiréevskiys,
Kavélin, Bótkin, and, in fact, all the best men of the time. But when
later on serfdom was being abolished (in 1857-63) the very realities
of the moment established upon certain important questions the most
remarkable agreement between Slavophiles and Westerners, the most
advanced socialistic Westerners, like Tchernyshévskiy, joining
hands with the advanced Slavophiles in their desire to maintain the
really fundamental institutions of the Russian peasants: the village
community, the common law, and the federalistic principles; while the
more advanced Slavophiles made substantial concessions as regards the
“Western” ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and
the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was to these years (1861)
that Turguéneff alluded when he said that in _A Nobleman’s Retreat_,
in the discussion between Lavrétskiy and Pánshin, he--“an inveterate
Westerner”--had given the superiority in argument to the defender of
Slavophile ideas because of the deference to them then in real life.
At present the struggle between the Westerners and the Slavophiles has
come to an end. The last representative of the Slavophile school, the
much-regretted philosopher, V. SOLOVIÓFF (1853-1900), was too well
versed in history and philosophy, and had too broad a mind to go to
the extremes of the old Slavophiles. As to the present representatives
of this school, having none of the inspiration which characterised
its founders, they have sunk to the level of mere Imperialistic
dreamers and warlike Nationalists, or of Orthodox Ultramontanes,
whose intellectual influence is _nil_. At the present moment the main
struggle goes on between the defenders of autocracy and those of
freedom; the defenders of capital and those of labour; the defenders
of centralisation and bureaucracy, and those of the republican
federalistic principle, municipal independence, and the independence of
the village community.
POLITICAL LITERATURE ABROAD
One great drawback in Russia has been that no portion of the Slavonian
countries has ever obtained political freedom, as did Switzerland
or Belgium, so as to offer to Russian political refugees an asylum
where they would not feel quite separated from their mother country.
Russians, when they have fled from Russia, have had therefore to go
to Switzerland or to England, where they have remained, until quite
lately, absolute strangers. Even France, with which they had more
points of contact, was only occasionally open to them; while the two
countries nearest to Russia--Germany and Austria--not being themselves
free, remained closed to all political refugees. In consequence, till
quite lately political and religious emigration from Russia has been
insignificant, and only for a few years in the nineteenth century has
political literature published abroad ever exercised a real influence
in Russia. This was during the times of Hérzen and his paper _The Bell_.
HÉRZEN (1812-1870) was born in a rich family at Moscow--his mother,
however, being a German--and he was educated in the old-nobility
quarter of the “Old Equerries.” A French emigrant, a German tutor, a
Russian teacher who was a great lover of freedom, and the rich library
of his father, composed of French and German eighteenth century
philosophers--these were his education. The reading of the French
encyclopædists left a deep trace in his mind, so that even later on,
when he paid, like all his young friends, a tribute to the study of
German metaphysics, he never abandoned the concrete ways of thought and
the naturalistic turn of mind which he had borrowed from the French
eighteenth century philosophers.
He entered the Moscow university in its physical and mathematical
department. The French Revolution of 1830 had just produced a deep
impression on thinking minds all over Europe; and a circle of young
men, which included Hérzen, his intimate friend, the poet Ogaryóff,
Pássek, the future explorer of folklore, and several others, came to
spend whole nights in reading and discussing political and social
matters, especially Saint-Simonism. Under the impression of what
they knew about the Decembrists, Hérzen and Ogaryóff, when they were
mere boys, had already taken “the Hannibal oath” of avenging the
memory of these forerunners of liberty. The result of these youthful
gatherings was that at one of them some song was sung in which there
was disrespectful allusion to Nicholas I. This reached the ears of the
State police. Night searchings were made at the lodgings of the young
men, and all were arrested. Some were sent to Siberia, and the others
would have been marched as soldiers to a battalion, like Polezháeff and
Shevtchénko, had it not been for the interference of certain persons
in high places. Hérzen was sent to a small town in the Uráls, Vyátka,
and remained full six years In exile.
When he was allowed to return to Moscow, in 1840, he found the literary
circles entirely under the influence of German philosophy, losing
themselves in metaphysical abstractions. “The absolute” of Hegel,
his triad-scheme of human progress, and his assertion to the effect
that “all that exists is reasonable” were eagerly discussed. This
last had brought the Hegelians to maintain that even the despotism of
Nicholas I. was “reasonable,” and even the great critic Byelínskiy
had been smitten with that recognition of the “historical necessity”
of absolutism. Hérzen too had, of course, to study Hegel; but this
study brought him, as well as his friend MIKHAIL BAKÚNIN (1824-1876),
to quite different conclusions. They both acquired a great influence
in the circles, and directed their studies toward the history of the
struggles for liberty in Western Europe, and to a careful knowledge of
the French Socialists, especially Fourier and Pierre Leroux. They then
constituted the left wing of “the Westerners,” to which Turguéneff,
Kavélin and so many of our writers belonged; while the Slavophiles
constituted the right wing which has already been mentioned on a
preceding page.
In 1842 Hérzen was exiled once more--this time to Nóvgorod, and only
with great difficulties could he obtain permission to go abroad. He
left Russia in 1847, never more to return. Bakúnin and Ogaryóff were
already abroad, and after a journey to Italy, which was then making
heroic efforts to free itself from the Austrian yoke, he soon joined
his friends in Paris, which was then on the eve of the Revolution of
1848.
He lived through the youthful enthusiasm of the movement which embraced
all Europe in the spring of 1848, and he also lived through all the
subsequent disappointments and the massacre of the Paris proletarians
during the terrible days of June. The quarter where he and Turguéneff
stayed at that time was surrounded by a chain of police-agents who
knew them both personally, and they could only rage in their rooms as
they heard the volleys of rifle-shots, announcing that the vanquished
workingmen who had been taken prisoners were being shot in batches by
the triumphing _bourgeoisie_. Both have left most striking descriptions
of those days--Hérzen’s _June Days_ being one of the best pieces of
Russian literature.
Deep despair took hold of Hérzen when all the hopes raised by the
revolution had so rapidly come to nought and a fearful reaction had
spread all over Europe, re-establishing Austrian rule over Italy and
Hungary, paving the way for Napoleon III. at Paris, and sweeping away
everywhere the very traces of a wide-spread Socialistic movement.
Hérzen then felt a deep despair as regards Western civilisation
altogether, and expressed it in most moving pages, in his book _From
the other Shore_. It is a cry of despair--the cry of a prophetic
politician in the voice of a great poet.
Later on Hérzen founded, at Paris, with Proudhon, a paper, _L’Ami du
Peuple_, of which almost every number was confiscated by the police
of Napoleon the Third. The paper could not live, and Hérzen himself
was soon expelled from France. He was naturalised in Switzerland,
and finally, after the tragic loss of his mother and his son in a
shipwreck, he definitely settled at London in 1857. Here the first
leaf of a free Russian Press was printed that same year, and very soon
Hérzen became one of the strongest influences in Russia. He started
first a review, the name of which, _The Polar Star_, was a remembrance
of the almanack published under this name by Ryléeff (see Ch. I.);
and in this review he published, besides political articles and
most valuable material concerning the recent history of Russia, his
admirable memoirs--_Past Facts and Thoughts_.
Apart from the historical value of these memoirs--Hérzen knew all the
historical personages of his time--they certainly are one of the best
pieces of poetical literature in any language. The descriptions of men
and events which they contain, beginning with Russia in the forties and
ending with the years of exile, reveal at every step an extraordinary,
philosophical intelligence; a profoundly sarcastic mind, combined with
a great deal of good-natured humour; a deep hatred of oppressors and a
deep personal love for the simple-hearted heroes of human emancipation.
At the same time these memoirs contain such fine, poetical scenes from
the author’s personal life, as his love of Nathalie--later his wife--or
such deeply impressive chapters as _Oceano Nox_, where he tells about
the loss of his son and mother. One chapter of these memoirs remains
still unpublished, and from what Turguéneff told me about it, it
must be of the highest beauty. “No one has ever written like him,”
Turguéneff said: “it is all written in tears and blood.”
A paper, _The Bell_, soon followed the _Polar Star_, and it was through
this paper that the influence of Hérzen became a real power in Russia.
It appears now, from the lately published correspondence between
Turguéneff and Hérzen, that the great novelist took a very lively part
in _The Bell_. It was he who supplied his friend Hérzen with the most
interesting material and gave him hints as to what attitude he should
take upon this or that subject.
These were, of course, the years when Russia was on the eve of the
abolition of serfdom and of a thorough reform of most of the antiquated
institutions of Nicholas I., and when everyone took interest in
public affairs. Numbers of memoirs upon the questions of the day were
addressed to the Tsar by private persons, or simply circulated in
private, in MS.; and Turguéneff would get hold of them, and they would
be discussed in _The Bell_. At the same time _The Bell_ was revealing
such facts of mal-administration as it was impossible to bring to
public knowledge in Russia itself, while the leading articles were
written by Hérzen with a force, an inner warmth, and a beauty of form
which are seldom found in political literature. I know of no West
European writer with whom I should be able to compare Hérzen. _The
Bell_ was smuggled into Russia in large quantities and could be found
everywhere. Even Alexander II. and the Empress Marie were among its
regular readers.
Two years after serfdom had been abolished, and while all sorts of
urgently needed reforms were still under discussion--that is, in
1863--began, as is known, the uprising of Poland; and this uprising,
crushed in blood and on the gallows, brought the liberation movement
in Russia to a complete end. Reaction got the upper hand; and the
popularity of Hérzen, who had supported the Poles, was necessarily
gone. _The Bell_ was read no more in Russia, and the efforts of Hérzen
to continue it in French brought no results. A new generation came then
to the front--the generation of Bazároff and of “the populists,” whom
Hérzen did not understand from the outset, although they were his own
intellectual sons and daughters, dressed now in a new, more democratic
and realistic garb. He died in isolation in Switzerland, in 1870.
The works of Hérzen, even now, are not allowed to be circulated in
Russia, and they are not sufficiently known to the younger generation.
It is certain, however, that when the time comes for them to be read
again Russians will discover in Hérzen a very profound thinker, whose
sympathies were entirely with the working classes, who understood the
forms of human development in all their complexity, and who wrote in
a style of unequalled beauty--the best proof that his ideas had been
thought out in detail and under a variety of aspects.
Before he had emigrated and founded a free press at London, Hérzen had
written in Russian reviews under the name of ISKANDER, treating various
subjects, such as Western politics, socialism, the philosophy of
natural sciences, art, and so on. He also wrote a novel, _Whose Fault
is it?_ which is often spoken of in the history of the development
of intellectual types in Russia. The hero of this novel, Béltoff,
is a direct descendant from Lérmontoff’s Petchórin, and occupies an
intermediate position between him and the heroes of Turguéneff.
The work of the poet OGARYÓFF (1813-1877) was not very large, and
his intimate friend, Hérzen, who was a great master in personal
characteristics, could say of him that his chief life-work was the
working out of such an ideal personality as he was himself. His private
life was most unhappy, but his influence upon his friends was very
great. He was a thorough lover of freedom, who, before he left Russia,
set free his ten thousand serfs, surrendering all the land to them,
and who, throughout all his life abroad remained true to the ideals of
equality and freedom which he had cherished in his youth. Personally,
he was the gentlest imaginable of men, and a note of resignation, in
the sense of Schiller’s, sounds throughout his poetry, amongst which
fierce poems of revolt and of masculine energy are few.
As to MIKHAIL BAKÚNIN (1824-1876), the other great friend of
Hérzen, his work belongs chiefly to the International Working Men’s
Association, and hardly can find a place in a sketch of Russian
literature; but his personal influence on some of the prominent writers
of Russia was very great. Suffice it to say that Byelínskiy distinctly
acknowledged in his letters that Bakúnin was his “intellectual father,”
and that it was in fact he who infused the Moscow circle, of which
I have just spoken, and the St. Petersburg literary circles with
socialistic ideas. He was the typical revolutionist, whom nobody could
approach without being inspired by a revolutionary fire. Besides,
if advanced thought in Russia has always remained true to the cause
of the different nationalities--Polish, Finnish, Little Russian,
Caucasian--oppressed by Russian tsardom, or by Austria, it owes this
to a very great extent to Ogaryóff and Bakúnin. In the international
labour movement Bakúnin became the soul of the left wing of the great
Working Men’s Association, and he was the founder of modern Anarchism,
or anti-State Socialism, of which he laid down the foundations upon his
wide historical and philosophical knowledge.
Finally I must mention among the Russian political writers abroad,
PETER LAVRÓFF (1823-1901). He was a mathematician and a philosopher who
represented, under the name of “anthropologism,” a reconciliation of
modern natural science materialism with Kantianism. He was a colonel
of artillery, a professor of mathematics, and a member of the St.
Petersburg newly-formed municipal government, when he was arrested
and exiled to a small town in the Uráls. One of the young Socialist
circles kidnapped him from there and shipped him off to London, where
he began to publish in the year 1874 the Socialist review _Forward_.
Lavróff was an extremely learned encyclopædist who made his reputation
by his _Mechanical Theory of the Universe_ and by the first chapters
of a very exhaustive history of mathematical sciences. His later work,
_History of Modern Thought_, of which unfortunately only the four
or five introductory volumes have been published, would certainly
have been an important contribution to evolutionist philosophy, if
it had been completed. In the socialist movement he belonged to the
social-democratic wing, but was too widely learned and too much of a
philosopher to join the German social-democrats in their ideals of
a centralised communistic State, or in their narrow interpretation
of history. However, the work of Lavróff which gave him the greatest
notoriety and best expressed his own personality was a small work,
_Historical Letters_, which he published in Russia under the pseudonym
of MÍRTOFF and which can now be read in a French translation. This
little work appeared at the right moment--just when our youth, in
the years 1870-73, were endeavouring to find a new programme of
action amongst the people. Lavróff stands out in it as a preacher of
activity amongst the people, speaking to the educated youth of their
indebtedness to the people, and of their duty to repay the debt which
they had contracted towards the poorer classes during the years they
had passed in the universities--all this, developed with a profusion of
historical hints, of philosophical deductions, and of practical advice.
These letters had a deep influence upon our youth. The ideas which
Lavróff preached in 1870 he confirmed by all his subsequent life. He
lived to the age of 82, and passed all his life in strict conformity
with his ideal, occupying at Paris two small rooms, limiting his daily
expenses for food to a ridiculously small amount, earning his living by
his pen, and giving all his time to the spreading of the ideas which
were so dear to him.
NICHOLAS TURGUÉNEFF (1789-1871) was a remarkable political writer,
who belonged to two different epochs. In 1818 he published in Russia
a _Theory of Taxation_--a book, quite striking for its time and
country, as it contained the development of the liberal economical
ideas of Adam Smith; and he was already beginning to work for the
abolition of serfdom. He made a practical attempt by partly freeing
his own serfs, and wrote on this subject several memoirs for the use
of Emperor Alexander I. He also worked for constitutional rule, and
soon became one of the most influential members of the secret society
of the Decembrists; but he was abroad in December, 1825, and therefore
escaped being executed with his friends. After that time N. Turguéneff
remained in exile, chiefly at Paris, and in 1857, when an amnesty was
granted to the Decembrists, and he was allowed to return to Russia, he
did so for a few weeks only.
He took, however, a lively part in the emancipation of the serfs, which
he had preached since 1818 and which he had discussed also in his
large work, _La Russie et les Russes_, published in Paris in 1847. Now
he devoted to this subject several papers in _The Bell_ and several
pamphlets. He continued at the same time to advocate the convocation
of a General Representative Assembly, the development of provincial
self-government, and other urgent reforms. He died at Paris in 1871,
after having had the happiness which had come to few Decembrists--that
of taking, towards the end of his days, a practical part in the
realisation of one of the dreams of his youth, for which so many of our
noblest men had given their lives.
I pass over in silence several other writers, like PRINCE DOLGORÚKIY,
and especially a number of Polish writers, who emigrated from Russia
for the sake of free speech.
I omit also quite a number of socialistic and constitutional papers
and reviews which have been published in Switzerland or in England
during the last twenty years, and will only mention, and that only in
a few words, my friend STEPNIAK (1852-1897). His writings were chiefly
in English, but now that they are translated into Russian they will
certainly win for him an honourable place in the history of Russian
literature. His two novels, _The Career of a Nihilist_ (_Andréi
Kozhuhóff_ in Russian) and _The Stundist Pável Rudénko_, as also
his earlier sketches, _Underground Russia_, revealed his remarkable
literary talent, but a stupid railway accident put an end to his young
life, so rich in vigour and thought and so full of promises. It must
also be mentioned that the greatest Russian writer of our own time,
LEO TOLSTÓY, cannot have many of his works printed in Russia, and that
therefore his friend, V. TCHERTKOFF, has started in England a regular
publishing office, both for editing Tolstóy’s works and for bringing to
light the religious movements which are going on now in Russia, and the
prosecutions directed against them by the Government.
TCHERNYSHÉVSKIY AND “THE CONTEMPORARY”
The most prominent among political writers in Russia itself has
undoubtedly been TCHERNYSHÉVSKIY (1828-1889), whose name is
indissolubly connected with that of the review, _Sovreménnik_ (_The
Contemporary_). The influence which this review exercised on public
opinion in the years of the abolition of serfdom (1857-62) was equal
to that of Hérzen’s _Bell_, and this influence was mainly due to
Tchernyshévskiy, and partly to the critic Dobrolúboff.
Tchernyshévskiy was born in Southeastern Russia, at Sarátoff--his
father being a well educated and respected priest of the cathedral--and
his early education he received, first at home, and next in the
Sarátoff seminary. He left the seminary, however, in 1844, and two
years later entered the philological department of the St. Petersburg
University.
The quantity of work which Tchernyshévskiy performed during his
life, and the immensity of knowledge which he acquired in various
branches, was simply stupendous. He began his literary career by
works on philology and literary criticism; and he wrote in this last
branch three remarkable works, _The Æsthetical Relations between Art
and Reality_, _Sketches of the Gógol period_, and _Lessing and his
Time_, in which he developed a whole theory of æsthetics and literary
criticism. His main work, however, was accomplished during the four
years, 1858-62, when he wrote in _The Contemporary_, exclusively
on political and economical matters. These were the years of the
abolition of serfdom, and opinion, both in the public at large and in
the Government spheres, was quite unsettled even as to the leading
principles which should be followed in accomplishing it. The two
main questions were: should the liberated serfs receive the land
which they were cultivating for themselves while they were serfs, and
if so--on what conditions? And next--should the village community
institutions be maintained and the land held, as of old, in common--the
village community becoming in this case the basis for the future
self-government institutions? All the best men of Russia were in favour
of an answer in the affirmative to both these questions, and even in
the higher spheres opinion went the same way; but all the reactionists
and “esclavagist” serf-owners of the old school bitterly opposed
this view. They wrote memoirs upon memoirs and addressed them to the
Emperor and the Emancipation Committees, and it was necessary, of
course, to analyse their arguments and to produce weighty historical
and economical proofs against them. In this struggle Tchernyshévskiy,
who was, of course, as was Hérzen’s _Bell_, with the advanced party,
supported it with all the powers of his great intelligence, his wide
erudition, and his formidable capacity for work; and if this party
carried the day and finally converted Alexander II. and the official
leaders of the Emancipation Committees to its views, it was certainly
to a great extent owing to the energy of Tchernyshévskiy and his
friends.
It must also be said that in this struggle _The Contemporary_ and
_The Bell_ found a strong support in two advanced political writers
from the Slavophile camp: KÓSHELEFF (1806-1883) and YÚRIY SAMARIN
(1819-1876). The former had advocated, since 1847--both in writing
and in practise--the liberation of the serfs “with the land,” the
maintenance of the village community, and peasant self-government, and
now Kósheleff and Samarin, both influential landlords, energetically
supported these ideas in the Emancipation Committees, while
Tchernyshévskiy fought for them in _The Contemporary_ and in his
_Letters without an Address_ (written apparently to Alexander II. and
published only later on in Switzerland).
No less a service did Tchernyshévskiy render to Russian Society by
educating it in economical matters and in the history of modern times.
In this respect he acted with a wonderful pedagogical talent. He
translated Mill’s _Political Economy_, and wrote _Notes_ to it, in a
socialistic sense; moreover, in a series of articles, like _Capital and
Labour_, _Economical Activity and the State_, he did his best to spread
sound economic ideas. In the domain of history he did the same, both in
a series of translations and in a number of original articles upon the
struggle of parties in modern France.
In 1863 Tchernyshévskiy was arrested, and while he was kept in the
fortress he wrote a remarkable novel, _What is to be Done?_ From the
artistic point of view this novel leaves much to be desired; but for
the Russian youth of the times it was a revelation, and it became a
programme. Questions of marriage, and separation after marriage in
case such a separation becomes necessary, agitated Russian society
in those years. To ignore such questions was absolutely impossible.
And Tchernyshévskiy discussed them in his novel, in describing
the relations between his heroine, Vyéra Pávlovna, her husband
Lopukhóff and the young doctor with whom she fell in love after her
marriage--indicating the only solutions which perfect honesty and
straightforward common sense could approve in such a case. At the same
time he preached--in veiled words, which were, however, perfectly well
understood--Fourierism, and depicted in a most attractive form the
communistic associations of producers. He also showed in his novel what
true “Nihilists” were, and in what they differed from Turguéneff’s
Bazároff. No novel of Turguéneff and no writings of Tolstóy or any
other writer have ever had such a wide and deep influence upon Russian
Society as this novel had. It became the watchword of Young Russia,
and the influence of the ideas it propagated has never ceased to be
apparent since.
In 1864 Tchernyshévskiy was exiled to hard labour in Siberia, for
the political and socialist propaganda which he had been making;
and for fear that he might escape from Transbaikália he was soon
transported to a very secluded spot in the far North of Eastern
Siberia--Vilúisk--where he was kept till 1883. Then only was he allowed
to return to Russia and to settle at Astrakhán. His health, however,
was already quite broken. Nevertheless, he undertook the translation
of the _Universal History_ of Weber, to which he wrote long addenda,
and he had translated twelve volumes of it when death overtook him in
1889. Storms of polemics have raged over his grave, although his name,
even yet, cannot be pronounced, nor his ideas discussed, in the Russian
Press. No other man has been so much hated by his political adversaries
as Tchernyshévskiy. But even these are bound to recognise now the great
services he rendered to Russia during the emancipation of the serfs,
and his immense educational influence.
THE SATIRE: SALTYKÓFF
With all the restrictions imposed upon political literature in Russia,
the satire necessarily became one of the favourite means of expressing
political thought. It would take too much time to give even a short
sketch of the earlier Russian satirists, as in order to do that one
would have to go back as far as the eighteenth century. Of Gógol’s
satire I have already spoken; consequently I shall limit my remarks
under this head to only one representative of modern satire, SALTYKÓFF,
who is better known under his _nom-de-plume_ of SCHEDRIN (1826-1889).
The influence of Saltykóff in Russia was very great, not only with the
advanced section of Russian thought, but among the general readers
as well. He was perhaps one of Russia’s most popular writers. Here I
must make, however, a personal remark. One may try as much as possible
to keep to an objective standpoint in the appreciation of different
writers, but a subjective element will necessarily interfere, and
I personally must say that although I admire the great talent of
Saltykóff, I never could become as enthusiastic over his writings as
the very great majority of my friends did. Not that I dislike satire:
on the contrary; but I like it much more definite than it is in
Saltykóff. I fully recognise that his remarks were sometimes extremely
deep, and always correct, and that in many cases he foresaw coming
events long before the common reader could guess their approach; I
fully admit that the satirical characterisations he gave of different
classes of Russian society belong to the domain of good art, and that
his types are really typical--and yet, with all this, I find that
these excellent characterisations and these acute remarks are too
much lost amidst a deluge of insignificant talk, which was certainly
meant to conceal their point from the censorship, but which mitigates
the sharpness of the satire and tends chiefly to deaden its effect.
Consequently, I prefer, in my appreciation of Saltykóff to follow
our best critics, and especially K. K. ARSÉNIEFF, to whom we owe two
volumes of excellent _Critical Studies_.
Saltykóff began his literary career very early and, like most of our
best writers, he knew something of exile. In 1848 he wrote a novel,
_A Complicated Affair_, in which some socialistic tendencies were
expressed in the shape of a dream of a certain poor functionary. It
so happened that the novel appeared in print just a few weeks after
the February revolution of 1848 had broken out, and when the Russian
Government was especially on the alert. Saltykóff was thereupon exiled
to Vyátka, a miserable provincial town in East Russia, and was ordered
to enter the civil service. The exile lasted seven years, during which
he became thoroughly acquainted with the world of functionaries grouped
around the Governor of the Province. Then in 1857 better times came for
Russian literature, and Saltykóff, who was allowed to return to the
capitals, utilised his knowledge of provincial life in writing a series
of _Provincial Sketches_.
The impression produced by these _Sketches_ was simply tremendous.
All Russia talked of them. Saltykóff’s talent appeared in them in
its full force, and with them was opened quite a new era in Russian
literature. A great number of imitators began in their turn to dissect
the Russian administration and the failure of its functionaries.
Of course, something of the sort had already been done by Gógol,
but Gógol, who wrote twenty years before, was compelled to confine
himself to generalities, while Saltykóff was enabled to name things by
their names and to describe provincial society as it was--denouncing
the venal nature of the functionaries, the rottenness of the whole
administration, the absence of comprehension of what was vital in the
life of the country, and so on.
When Saltykóff was permitted to return to St. Petersburg, after his
exile, he did not abandon the service of the State, which he had
been compelled to enter at Vyátka. With but a short interruption he
remained a functionary till the year 1868, and twice during that time
he was Vice-Governor, and even Governor of a province. It was only
then that he definitely left the service, to act, with Nekrásoff, as
co-editor of a monthly review, _Otéchestvennyia Zapíski_, which became
after _The Contemporary_ had been suppressed, the representative of
advanced democratic thought in Russia, and retained this position till
1884, when it was suppressed in its turn. By that time the health of
Saltykóff was broken down, and after a very painful illness, during
which he nevertheless continued to write, he died in 1889.
The _Provincial Sketches_ determined once for all the character of
Saltykóff’s work. His talent only deepened as he advanced in life, and
his satires went more and more profoundly into the analysis of modern
civilised life, of the many causes which stand in the way of progress,
and of the infinity of forms which the struggle of reaction against
progress is taking nowadays. In his _Innocent Tales_ he touched upon
some of the most tragic aspects of serfdom. Then, in his representation
of the modern knights of industrialism and plutocracy, with their
appetites for money-making and enjoyments of the lower sort, their
heartlessness, and their hopeless meanness, Saltykóff attained the
heights of descriptive art; but he excelled perhaps even more in the
representation of that “average man” who has no great passions, but for
the mere sake of not being disturbed in the process of enjoyment of his
philistine well-being will not recoil before any crime against the best
men of his time, and, if need be, will lend a ready hand to the worst
enemies of progress. In flagellating that “average man,” who, owing to
his unmitigated cowardice, has attained such a luxurious development in
Russia, Saltykóff produced his greatest creations. But when he came to
touch those who are the real geniuses of reaction--those who keep “the
average man” in fear, and inspire reaction, if need be, with audacity
and ferocity--then Saltykóff’s satire either recoiled before its task,
or the attack was veiled in so many funny and petty expressions and
words that all its venom was gone.
When reaction had obtained the upper hand, in 1863, and the carrying
out of the reforms of 1861 and of those still to be undertaken fell
into the hands of the very opponents of these reforms, and the former
serf-owners were doing all they could in order to recall serfdom once
again to life, or, at least, so to bind the peasant by over-taxation
and high rents as to practically enslave him once more, Saltykóff
brought out a striking series of satires which admirably represented
this new class of men. _The History of a City_, which is a comic
history of Russia, full of allusions to contemporary currents of
thought. _The Diary of a Provincial in St. Petersburg_, _Letters from
the Provinces_, and _The Pompadours_ belong to this series; while in
_Those Gentlemen of Tashkent_ he represented all that crowd which
hastened now to make fortunes by railway building, advocacy in reformed
tribunals, and annexation of new territories. In these sketches, as
well as in those which he devoted to the description of the sad and
sometimes psychologically unsound products of the times of serfdom
(_The Gentlemen Golovlóffs_, _Poshekhónsk Antiquity_), he created
types, some of which, like Judushka, have been described as almost
Shakespearian.
Finally, in the early eighties, when the terrible struggle of the
terrorists against autocracy was over, and with the advent of Alexander
III. reaction was triumphant, the satires of Schedrin became a cry of
despair. At times the satirist becomes great in his sad irony, and his
_Letters to my Aunt_ will live, not only as an historical but also as a
deeply human document.
It is also worthy of note that Saltykóff had a real talent for writing
tales. Some of them, especially those which dealt with children under
serfdom, were of great beauty.
LITERARY CRITICISM
The main channel through which political thought found its expression
in Russia during the last fifty years was literary criticism, which
consequently has reached with us a development and an importance
that it has in no other country. The real soul of a Russian monthly
review is its art-critic. His article is a much greater event than the
novel of a favourite writer which may appear in the same number. The
critic of a leading review is the intellectual leader of the younger
generation; and it so happened that throughout the last half-century
we have had in Russia a succession of art-critics who have exercised
upon the intellectual aspects of their own times a far greater, and
especially a far more wide-spread influence than any novelist or
any writer in any other domain. It is so generally true that the
intellectual aspect of a given epoch can be best characterised by
naming the art-critic of the time who exercised the main influence.
It was Byelínskiy in the thirties or forties, Tchernyshévskiy and
Dobrolúboff in the fifties and the early sixties, and Písareff in
the later sixties and seventies, who were respectively the rulers of
thoughts in their generation of educated youth. It was only later
on, when real political agitation began--taking at once two or three
different directions, even in the advanced camp--that Mihailóvskiy, the
leading critic from the eighties until the present time, stood not for
the whole movement but more or less for one of its directions.
This means, of course, that literary criticism has in Russia certain
special aspects. It is not limited to a criticism of works of art from
the purely literary or æsthetic point of view. Whether a Rúdin or a
Katerína are types of real, living beings, and whether the novel or
the drama is well built, well developed, and well written--these are,
of course, the first questions considered. But they are soon answered;
and there are infinitely more important questions, which are raised in
the thoughtful mind by every work of really good art: the questions
concerning the position of a Rúdin or a Katerína in society; the part,
bad or good, which they play in it; the ideas which inspire them, and
the value of these ideas; and then--the actions of the heroes, and the
causes of these actions, both individual and social. In a good work of
art the actions of the heroes are evidently what they would have been
under similar conditions in reality; otherwise it would not be good
art. They can be discussed as facts of life.
But these actions and their causes and consequences open the widest
horizons to a thoughtful critic, for an appreciation of both the ideals
and the prejudices of society, for the analysis of passions, for a
discussion of the types of men and women which prevail at a given
moment. In fact, a good work of art gives material for discussing
nearly the whole of the mutual relations in a society of a given type.
The author, if he is a thoughtful poet, has himself either consciously
or often unconsciously considered all that. It is his life-experience
which he gives in his work. Why, then, should not the critic bring
before the reader all those thoughts which must have passed through the
author’s brain, or have affected him unconsciously when he produced
these scenes, or pictured that corner of human life?
This is what Russian literary critics have been doing for the last
fifty years; and as the field of fiction and poetry is unlimited, there
is not one of the great social and human problems which they must not
thus have discussed in their critical reviews. This is also why the
works of the four critics just named are as eagerly read and re-read
now at this moment as they were twenty or fifty years ago: they have
lost nothing of their freshness and interest. If art is a school of
life--the more so are such works.
It is extremely interesting to note that art-criticism in Russia
took from the very outset (in the twenties) and quite independently
of all imitation of Western Europe, the character of _philosophical
æsthetics_. The revolt against pseudo-classicism had only just begun
under the banner of romanticism, and the appearance of Púshkin’s
_Ruslán and Ludmíla_ had just given the first practical argument
in favour of the romantic rebels, when the poet VENEVÍTINOFF (see
Ch. II.), soon followed by NADÉZHDIN (1804-1856) and POLEVÓY
(1796-1846)--the real founder of serious journalism in Russia--laid the
foundations of new art-criticism. Literary criticism, they maintained,
must analyse, not only the æsthetic value of a work of art, but, above
all, its leading idea--its “philosophical,”--its social meaning.
Venevítinoff, whose own poetry bore such a high intellectual stamp,
boldly attacked the absence of higher ideas among the Russian
romantics, and wrote that “the true poets of all nations have always
been philosophers who reached the highest summits of culture.” A poet
who is satisfied with his own self, and does not pursue aims of general
improvement, is of no use to his contemporaries.[24]
Nadézhdin followed on the same lines, and boldly attacked Púshkin for
his absence of higher inspiration and for producing a poetry of which
the only motives were “wine and women.” He reproached our romantics
with an absence of ethnographical and historic truth in their work,
and the meanness of the subjects they chose in their poetry. As to
Polevóy, he was so great an admirer of the poetry of Byron and Victor
Hugo that he could not pardon Púshkin and Gógol the absence of higher
ideas in their work. Having nothing in it that might raise men to
higher ideas and actions, their work could stand no comparison whatever
with the immortal creations of Shakespeare, Hugo, and Goethe. This
absence of higher leading ideas in the work of Púshkin and Gógol so
much impressed the last two critics that they did not even notice
the immense service which these founders of Russian literature were
rendering to us by introducing that sound naturalism and realism which
have become since a distinctive feature of Russian art, and the need of
which both Nadézhdin and Polevóy were the first to recognise. It was
Byelínskiy who had to take up their work, to complete it, and to show
what was the technique of really good art, and what its contents ought
to be.
To say that BYELÍNSKIY (1810-1848) was a very gifted art-critic would
thus mean nothing. He was in reality, at a very significant moment of
human evolution, a teacher and an educator of Russian society, not
only in art--its value, its purport, its comprehension--but also in
politics, in social questions, and in humanitarian aspirations.
He was the son of an obscure army-surgeon, and spent his childhood in
a remote province of Russia. Well prepared by his father, who knew
the value of knowledge, he entered the university of St. Petersburg,
but was excluded from it in 1832 for a tragedy which he wrote, in the
style of Schiller’s _Robbers_, and which was an energetic protest
against serfdom. Already he had joined the circle of Hérzen, Ogaryóff,
Stankévitch, etc., and in 1834 he began his literary career by a
critical review of literature which at once attracted notice. From that
time till his death he wrote critical articles and bibliographical
notes for some of the leading reviews, and he worked so extremely hard
that at the age of thirty-eight he died from consumption. He did not
die too soon. The revolution had broken out in Western Europe, and when
Byelínskiy was on his deathbed an agent of the State-police would call
from time to time to ascertain whether he was still alive. The order
was given to arrest him, if he should recover, and his fate certainly
would have been the fortress and at the best--exile.
When Byelínskiy first began to write he was entirely under the
influence of the idealistic German philosophy. He was inclined to
maintain that Art is something too great and too pure to have anything
to do with the questions of the day. It was a reproduction of “the
general idea of the life of nature.” Its problems were those of the
Universe--not of poor men and their petty events. It was from this
idealistic point of view of Beauty and Truth that he exposed the main
principles of Art, and explained the process of artistic creation. In a
series of articles on Púshkin he wrote, in fact, a history of Russian
literature down to Púshkin, from that point of view.
Holding such abstract views, Byelínskiy even came, during his stay
at Moscow, to consider, with Hegel, that “all that which exists is
reasonable,” and to preach “reconciliation” with the despotism of
Nicholas I. However, under the influence of Hérzen and Bakúnin he
soon shook off the fogs of German metaphysics, and, removing to St.
Petersburg, opened a new page of his activity.
Under the impression produced upon him by the realism of Gógol, whose
best works were just appearing, he came to understand that true poetry
is real: that it must be a poetry of life and of reality. And under
the influence of the political movement which was going on in France
he arrived at advanced political ideas. He was a great master of
style, and whatever he wrote was so full of energy, and at the same
time bore so truly the stamp of his most sympathetic personality, that
it always produced a deep impression upon his readers. And now all
his aspirations towards what is grand and high, and all his boundless
love of truth, which he formerly had given in the service of personal
self-improvement and ideal Art, were given to the service of man
within the poor conditions of Russian reality. He pitilessly analysed
that reality, and wherever he saw in the literary works which passed
under his eyes, or only felt, insincerity, haughtiness, absence of
general interest, attachment to old-age despotism, or slavery in any
form--including the slavery of woman--he fought these evils with all
his energy and passion. He thus became a political writer in the best
sense of the word at the same time that he was an art-critic; he became
a teacher of the highest humanitarian principles.
In his _Letter to Gógol_ concerning the latter’s _Correspondence with
Friends_ (see Ch. III.) he gave quite a programme of urgent social
and political reforms; but his days were numbered. His review of the
literature for the year 1847, which was especially beautiful and deep,
was his last work. Death spared him from seeing the dark cloud of
reaction in which Russia was wrapped from 1848 to 1855.
* * * * *
VALERIÁN MÁYKOFF (1823-1847), who promised to become a critic of great
power on the same lines as Byelínskiy, died unfortunately too young,
and it was Tchernyshévskiy, soon followed by Dobrolúboff, who continued
and further developed the work of Byelínskiy and his predecessors.
The leading idea of TCHERNYSHÉVSKIY was that art cannot be its own
aim; that life is superior to art; and that the aim of art is _to
explain life_, _to comment upon it_, and _to express an opinion about
it_. He developed these ideas in a thoughtful and stimulating work,
_The Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality_, in which he demolished the
current theories of æsthetics, and gave a realistic definition of the
Beautiful. The sensation--he wrote--which the Beautiful awakens in us
is a feeling of bright happiness, similar to that which is awakened by
the presence of a beloved being. It must therefore contain something
dear to us, and that dear something is _life_. “To say that that which
we name ‘Beauty’ is life; that that being is beautiful in which we see
life--life as it ought to be according to our conception--and that
object is beautiful which speaks to us of life--this definition, we
should think, satisfactorily explains all cases which awaken in us
the feeling of the beautiful.” The conclusion to be drawn from such
a definition was that the beautiful in art, far from being superior
to the beautiful in life, can only represent that conception of the
beautiful which the artist has borrowed from life. As to the aim of
art it is much the same as that of science, although its means of
action are different. The true aim of art is to remind us of what
is interesting in human life, and to teach us how men live and how
they ought to live. This last part of Tchernyshévskiy teachings was
especially developed by Dobrolúboff.
DOBROLÚBOFF (1836-1861) was born in Nízhniy Nóvgorod, where his
father was a parish priest, and he received his education first in
a clerical school, and after that in a seminarium. In 1853 he went
to St. Petersburg and entered the Pedagogical Institute. His mother
and father died the next year, and he had then to maintain all his
brothers and sisters. Lessons, for which he was paid ridiculously
low prices, and translations, almost equally badly paid--all that
in addition to his student’s duties--meant working terribly hard,
and this broke down his health at an early age. In 1855 he made the
acquaintance of Tchernyshévskiy and, having finished in 1857 his
studies at the Institute, he took in hand the critical department of
_The Contemporary_, and again worked passionately. Four years later, in
November, 1861, he died, at the age of twenty-five, having literally
killed himself by overwork, leaving four volumes of critical essays,
each of which is a serious original work. Such essays as _The Kingdom
of Darkness_, _A Ray of Light_, _What is Oblómoffdom?_ _When comes the
Real Day?_ had especially a profound effect on the development of the
youth of those times.
Not that Dobrolúboff had a very definite criterion of literary
criticism, or that he had a very distinct programme as to what
was to be done. But he was one of the purest and the most solid
representatives of that type of new men--the realist-idealist, whom
Turguéneff saw coming by the end of the fifties. Therefore, in whatever
he wrote one felt the thoroughly moral and thoroughly reliable,
slightly ascetic “rigourist” who judged all facts of life from the
standard of--“What good will they bring to the toiling masses?” or,
“How will they favour the creation of men whose eyes are directed
that way?” His attitude towards professional æsthetics was most
contemptuous, but he felt deeply himself and enjoyed the great works
of art. He did not condemn Púshkin for his levity, or Gógol for his
absence of ideals. He did not advise anyone to write novels or poems
with a set purpose: he knew the results would be poor. He admitted that
the great geniuses were right in creating unconsciously, because he
understood that the real artist creates only when he has been struck
by this or that aspect of reality. He asked only from a work of art,
whether it truly and correctly reproduced life, or not? If not, he
passed it by; but if it did truly represent life, then he wrote essays
_about this life_; and his articles were essays on moral, political or
economical matters--the work of art yielding only the facts for such
a discussion. This explains the influence Dobrolúboff exercised upon
his contemporaries. Such essays written by such a personality were
precisely what was wanted in the turmoil of those years for preparing
better men for the coming struggles. They were a school of political
and moral education.
PÍSAREFF (1841-1868), the critic who succeeded, so to speak,
Dobrolúboff, was a quite different man. He was born in a rich family
of landlords and had received an education during which he had
never known what it meant to want anything; but he soon realised
the drawbacks of such a life, and when he was at the St. Petersburg
university he abandoned the rich house of his uncle and settled with
a poor student comrade, or lived in an apartment with a number of
other students--writing amidst their noisy discussions or songs. Like
Dobrolúboff, he worked excessively hard, and astonished everyone by his
varied knowledge and the facility with which he acquired it. In 1862,
when reaction was beginning to reappear, he permitted a comrade to
print in a secret printing office an article of his--the criticism of
some reactionary political pamphlet--which article had not received the
authorisation of the censorship. The secret printing office was seized,
and Písareff was locked for four years in the fortress of St. Peter and
St. Paul. There he wrote all that made him widely known in Russia. When
he came out of prison his health was already broken, and in the summer
of 1868 he was drowned while bathing in one of the Baltic sea-side
resorts.
Upon the Russian youth of his own time, and consequently on whatever
share, as men and women later on, they brought to the general progress
of the country, Písareff exercised an influence which was as great
as that of Byelínskiy, Tchernyshévskiy, and Dobrolúboff. Here again
it is impossible to determine the character and the cause of this
influence by merely referring to Písareff’s canons in art criticism.
His leading ideas on this subject can be explained in a few words;
his ideal was “the thoughtful realist”--the type which Turguéneff had
just represented in Bazároff, and which Písareff further developed in
his critical essays. He shared Bazároff’s low opinion of art, but,
as a concession, demanded that Russian art should, at least, reach
the heights which art had reached with Goethe, Heine and Börne in
elevating mankind--or else that those who are always talking of art,
but can produce nothing approaching it, should rather give their
forces to something more within their reach. This is why he devoted
most elaborate articles to depreciating the futile poetry of Púshkin.
In ethics he was entirely at one with the “Nihilist” Bazároff, who
bowed before no authority but that of his own reason. And he thought
(like Bazároff in a conversation with Pável Petróvitch) that the
main point, _at that given moment_, was to develop the _thorough,
scientifically-educated realist_, who would break with all the
traditions and mistakes of the olden time, and would work, looking
upon human life with the sound common-sense of a realist. He even did
something himself to spread the sound natural science knowledge that
had suddenly developed in those years, and wrote a most remarkable
exposition of Darwinism in a series of articles entitled _Progress in
the World of Plants and Animals_.
But--to quote the perfectly correct estimate of Skabitchévskiy--“all
this does not, however, determine Písareff’s position in Russian
literature. In all this he only embodied a certain moment of the
development of Russian youth, with all its exaggerations.” The real
cause of Písareff’s influence was elsewhere, and may be best explained
by the following example. There appeared a novel in which the author
had told how a girl, good-hearted, honest, but quite uneducated, quite
commonplace as to her conceptions of happiness and life, and full of
the current society-prejudices, fell in love, and was brought to all
sorts of misfortunes. This girl--Písareff at once understood--was not
invented. Thousands upon thousands of like girls exist, and their lives
have the same run. They are--he said--“Muslin Girls.” Their conception
of the universe does not go much beyond their muslin dresses. And he
reasoned, how with their “muslin education” and their “muslin-girl
conceptions,” they must unavoidably come to grief. And by this article,
which every girl in every educated family in Russia read, and reads
still, he induced thousands upon thousands of Russian girls to say to
themselves: “No, never will I be like that poor muslin girl. I will
conquer knowledge; I will think; and I will make for myself a better
future.” Each of his articles had a similar effect. It gave to the
young mind the first shock. It opened the young man’s and the young
woman’s eyes to those thousands of details of life which habit makes us
cease to perceive, but the sum of which makes precisely that stifling
atmosphere under which the heroines of “Krestóvskiy-pseudonym” used to
wither. From that life, which could promise only deception, dulness
and vegetative existence, he called the youth of both sexes to a life
full of the light of knowledge, a life of work, of broad views and
sympathies, which was now opened for the “thoughtful realist.”
The time has not yet come to fully appreciate the work of MIHAILÓVSKIY
(1842-1904), who in the seventies became the leading critic, and
remained so till his death. Moreover, his proper position could not
be understood without my entering into many details concerning the
character of the intellectual movement in Russia for the last thirty
years, and this movement has been extremely complex. Suffice it to say
that with Mihailóvskiy literary criticism took a philosophical turn.
Within this period Spencer’s philosophy had produced a deep sensation
in Russia, and Mihailóvskiy submitted it to a severe analysis from the
anthropological standpoint, showing its weak points and working out
his own _Theory of Progress_, which will certainly be spoken of with
respect in Western Europe when it becomes known outside Russia. His
very remarkable articles on _Individualism_, on _Heroes and the Crowd_,
on _Happiness_, have the same philosophical value; while even from the
few quotations from his _Left and Right Hand of Count Tolstóy_, which
were given in a preceding chapter, it is easy to see which way his
sympathies go.
Of the other critics of the same tendencies I shall only name
SKABITCHÉVSKIY (born 1838), the author of a very well written history
of modern Russian literature, already mentioned in these pages; K.
ARSÉNIEFF (born 1837), whose _Critical Studies_ (1888) are the more
interesting as they deal at some length with some of the less known
poets and the younger contemporary writers; and P. POLEVÓY (1839-1903),
the author of many historical novels and of a popular and quite
valuable _History of the Russian Literature_; but I am compelled to
pass over in silence the valuable critical work done by DRUZHÍNIN
(1824-1864) after the death of Byelínskiy, as also A. GRIGÓRIEFF
(1822-1864), a brilliant and original critic from the Slavophile
camp. They both took the “æsthetical” point of view and combated the
utilitarian views upon Art, but had no great success.
TOLSTÓY’S “WHAT IS ART?”
It is thus seen that for the last eighty years, beginning with
Venevítinoff and Nadézhdin, Russian art-critics have worked to
establish the idea that art has a _raison d’être_ only when it is “in
the service of society” and contributes towards raising society to
higher humanitarian conceptions--by those means which are proper to
art, and distinguish it from science. This idea which so much shocked
Western readers when Proudhon developed it has been advocated in Russia
by all those who have exercised a real influence upon critical judgment
in art matters. And they were supported _de facto_ by some of our
greatest poets, such as Lérmontoff and Turguéneff. As to the critics of
the other camp, like Druzhínin, Annenkoff and A. Grigórieff, who took
either the opposite view of “art for art’s sake,” or some intermediate
view--who preached that the criterium of art is “The Beautiful” and
clung to the theories of the German æsthetical writers--they have had
no hold upon Russian thought.
The metaphysics of the German æsthetical writers was more than
once demolished in the opinion of Russian readers--especially
by Byelínskiy, in his _Review of Literature for 1847_, and by
Tchernyshévskiy in his _Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality_. In
this _Review_ Byelínskiy fully developed his ideas concerning Art in
the service of mankind, and proved that although Art is not identical
with Science, and differs from it by the way it treats the facts of
life, it nevertheless has with it a common _aim_. The man of science
_demonstrates_--the poet _shows_; but both _convince_; the one by his
arguments, the other--by his scenes from life. The same was done by
Tchernyshévskiy when he maintained that the aim of Art is not unlike
that of History: that it _explains to us life_, and that consequently
Art which should merely reproduce facts of life without adding to our
compensation of it would not be Art at all.
These few remarks will explain why Tolstóy’s _What is Art?_ produced
much less impression in Russia than abroad. What struck us in it was
not its leading idea, which was quite familiar to us, but the fact that
the great artist also made it his own, and was supporting it by all the
weight of his artistic experience; and then, of course, the literary
form he gave the idea. Moreover, we read with the greatest interest
his witty criticisms of both the “decadent” would-be poets and the
librettos of Wagner’s operas; to which latter, let me add by the way,
Wagner wrote, in places, wonderfully beautiful music, as soon as he
came to deal with the universal _human passions_,--love, compassion,
envy, the joy of life, and so on, and forgot all about his fairy-tale
background.
_What is Art?_ offered the more interest in Russia because the
defenders of pure Art and the haters of the “nihilists in Art” had
been accustomed to quote Tolstóy as of their camp. In his youth indeed
he seems not to have had very definite ideas about Art. At any rate,
when, in 1859, he was received as a member of the Society of Friends
of Russian Literature, he pronounced a speech on the necessity of
_not_ dragging Art into the smaller disputes of the day, to which the
Slavophile Homyakóff replied in a fiery speech, contesting his ideas
with great energy.
“There are moments--great historic moments”--Homyakóff said--“when
self-denunciation (he meant on the part of Society) has especial,
incontestable rights.... The ‘accidental’ and the ‘temporary’ in the
historical development of a nation’s life acquire then the meaning of
the universal and the broadly human, because all generations and all
nations can understand, and do understand, the painful moans and the
painful confessions of a given generation or a given nation.” ... “An
artist”--he continued--“is not a theory; he is not a mere domain of
thought and cerebral activity. He is a man--always a man of his own
time--usually one of its best representatives.... Owing to the very
impressionability of his organism, without which he would not have
been an artist, he, more than the others, receives both the painful
and the pleasant impressions of the Society in the midst of which he
was born.”
Showing that Tolstóy had already taken just this standpoint in some of
his works; for example, in describing the death of the horse-driver in
_Three Deaths_, Homyakóff concluded by saying: “Yes, you have been, and
you will be one of those who denounce the evils of Society. Continue to
follow the excellent way you have chosen.”[25]
At any rate, in _What is Art?_ Tolstóy entirely breaks with the
theories of “Art for Art’s sake,” and makes an open stand by the side
of those whose ideas have been expounded in the preceding pages. He
only defines still more correctly the domain of Art when he says that
the artist always aims at communicating to others the same feelings
which he experiences at the sight of nature or of human life. Not to
_convince_, as Tchernyshévskiy said, but to _infect_ the others with
his own _feelings_, which is certainly more correct. However, “feeling”
and “thought” are inseparable. A feeling seeks words to express itself,
and a feeling expressed in words is a thought. And when Tolstóy says
that the aim of artistic activity is to transmit “the highest feelings
which humanity has attained” and that Art must be “religious”--that
is, wake up the highest and the best aspirations--he only expresses in
other words what all our best critics since Venevítinoff, Nadézhdin
and Polevóy have said. In fact, when he complains that nobody teaches
men _how to live_, he overlooks that that is precisely what good Art
is doing, and what our art-critics have always done. Byelínskiy,
Dobrolúboff and Písareff, and their continuators have done nothing but
_to teach men how to live_. They studied and analysed life, as it had
been understood by the greatest artists of each century, and they drew
from their works conclusions as to “how to live.”
More than this. When Tolstóy, armed with his powerful criticism,
chastises what he so well describes as “counterfeits of Art,” he
continues the work that Tchernyshévskiy, Dobrolúboff and especially
Písareff had done. He sides with Bazároff. Only, this intervention of
the great artist gives a more deadly blow to the “Art for Art’s sake”
theory still in vogue in Western Europe than anything that Proudhon or
our Russian critics, unknown in the West, could possibly have done.
As to Tolstóy’s idea concerning the value of a work of Art being
measured by its accessibility to the great number, which has been so
fiercely attacked on all sides, and even ridiculed--this assertion,
although it has perhaps not yet been very well expressed, contains, I
believe, the germs of a great idea which sooner or later is certain
to make its way. It is evident that every form of art has a certain
conventional way of expressing itself--its own way of “infecting others
with the artist’s feelings,” and therefore requires a certain training
to understand it. Tolstóy is hardly right in overlooking the fact that
some training is required for rightly comprehending even the simplest
forms of art, and his criterion of “universal understanding” seems
therefore far-fetched.
However, there lies in what he says a deep idea. Tolstóy is certainly
right in asking why the Bible has not yet been superseded, as a work of
Art accessible to everyone. Michelet had already made a similar remark,
and had said that what was wanted by our century was _Le Livre, The
Book_, which shall contain in a great, poetical form accessible to
all, the embodiment of nature with all her glories and of the history
of all mankind in its deepest human features. Humboldt had aimed at
this in his _Cosmos_; but grand though his work is, it is accessible to
only the very few. It was not he who should transfigure science into
poetry. And we have no work of Art which even approaches this need of
modern mankind.
The reason is self-evident: _Because Art has become too artificial_;
because, being chiefly for the rich, it has too much specialised its
ways of expression, so as to be understood by the few only. In this
respect Tolstóy is absolutely right. Take the mass of excellent works
that have been mentioned in this book. How very few of them will ever
become accessible to a large public! The fact is, that a new Art is
indeed required. And it will come when the artist, having understood
this idea of Tolstóy’s, shall say to himself: “I may write highly
philosophical works of art in which I depict the inner drama of the
highly educated and refined man of our own times; I may write works
which contain the highest poetry of nature, involving a deep knowledge
and comprehension of the life of nature; but, if I can write such
things, I must also be able, if I am a true artist, to speak to all:
to write other things which will be as deep in conception as these,
but which everyone, including the humblest miner or peasant, will be
able to understand and enjoy!” To say that a folk-song is _greater_ Art
than a Beethoven sonata is not correct: we cannot compare a storm in
the Alps, and the struggle against it, with a fine, quiet mid-summer
day and hay-making. But truly great Art, which, notwithstanding its
depth and its lofty flight, will penetrate into every peasant’s hut and
inspire everyone with higher conceptions of thought and life--such an
Art is really wanted.
SOME CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS
It does not enter into the plan of this book to analyse contemporary
Russian writers. Another volume would be required to do them justice,
not only on account of the literary importance of some of them, and
the interest of the various directions in Art which they represent,
but especially because in order to properly explain the character of
the present literature, and the different currents in Russian Art, it
would be necessary to enter into many details concerning the unsettled
conditions under which the country has been living during the last
thirty years. Moreover, most of the contemporary writers have not yet
said their last word, and we can expect from them works of even greater
value than any they have hitherto produced. I am compelled, therefore,
to limit myself to brief remarks concerning the most prominent living
novelists of the present day.
OERTEL (born 1855) has unfortunately abandoned literature during the
last few years, just at a time when his last novel, _Smyéna_ (_Changing
Guards_), had given proofs of a further development of his sympathetic
talent. He was born in the borderland of the Russian Steppes, and was
brought up on one of the large estates of this region. Later on he
went to the university of St. Petersburg and, as a matter of fact,
was compelled to leave it after some “students’ disorders,” and was
interned in the town of Tver. He soon returned, however, to his native
Steppe region, which he cherishes with the same love as Nikítin and
Koltsóff.
Oertel began his literary career by short sketches which are now
collected in two volumes under the name of _Notebook of a Prairie-Man_,
and whose manner suggests Turguéneff’s _Sportsman’s Notebook_. The
nature of the prairies is admirably described in these little stories,
with great warmth and poetry, and the types of peasants who appear
in the stories are perfectly true to nature, without any attempts at
idealisation, although one feels that the author is no great admirer
of the “intellectuals” and fully appreciates the general ethics of
rural life. Some of these sketches, especially those which deal with
the growing _bourgeoisie du village_, are highly artistic. _Two
Couples_ (1887), in which the parallel stories of two young couples in
love--one of educated people and the other of peasants--are given, is
a story evidently written under the influence of the ideas of Tolstóy,
and bearing traces of a preconceived idea, which spoils in places the
artistic value of the novel. There are nevertheless admirable scenes,
testifying to very fine powers of observation.
However, the real force of Oertel is not in discussing psychological
problems. His true domain is the description of whole regions, with
all the variety of types of men which one finds amidst the mixed
populations of South Russia, and this force appears at its best in _The
Gardénins, their Retainers, their Followers, and their Enemies_, and
in _Changing Guards_. Russian critics have, of course, very seriously
and very minutely discussed the young heroes, Efrem and Nicholas,
who appear in _The Gardénins_, and they have made a rigorous inquiry
into the ways of thinking of these young men. But this is of a quite
secondary importance, and one almost regrets that the author, paying a
tribute to his times, has given the two young men more attention than
they deserve, being only two more individuals in the great picture
of country life which he has drawn for us. The fact is, that just as
we have in Gógol’s tales quite a world opening before us--a Little
Russian village, or provincial life--so also here we see, as the very
title of the novel suggests, the whole life of a large estate at the
times of serfdom, with its mass of retainers, followers and foes, all
grouped round the horse-breeding establishment which makes the fame of
the estate and the pride of all connected with it. It is the life of
that crowd of people, the life at the horse-fairs and the races, not
the discussions or the loves of a couple of young men, which makes the
main interest of the picture; and that life is really reproduced in as
masterly a manner as it is in a good Dutch picture representing some
village fair. No writer in Russia since Serghéi Aksákoff and Gógol has
so well succeeded in painting a whole corner of Russia with its scores
of figures, all living and all placed in those positions of relative
importance which they occupy in real life.
The same power is felt in _Changing Guards_. The subject of this novel
is very interesting. It shows how the old noble families disintegrate,
like their estates, and how another class of men--merchants and
unscrupulous adventurers--get possession of these estates, while
a new class made up of the younger merchants and clerks, who are
beginning to be inspired with some ideas of freedom and higher culture,
constitutes already the germ of a new stratum of the educated classes.
In this novel, too, some critics fastened their attention chiefly
on the undoubtedly interesting types of the aristocratic girl, the
Non-conformist peasant whom she begins to love, the practical Radical
young merchant--all painted quite true to life; but they overlooked
what makes the real importance of the novel. Here again we have quite
a region of South Russia (as typical as the Far West is in the United
States), throbbing with life and full of living men and women, as it
was some twenty years after the liberation of the serfs, when a new
life, not devoid of some American features, was beginning to appear.
The contrast between this young life and the decaying mansion is very
well reproduced, too. In the romances of the young people--the whole
bearing the stamp of the most sympathetic individuality of the author.
* * * * *
KOROLÉNKO was born (in 1853) in a small town of Western Russia,
and there he received his first education. In 1872 he was at the
Agricultural Academy of Moscow, but was compelled to leave after having
taken part in some students’ movement. Later on he was arrested as a
“political,” and exiled, first to a small town of the Uráls, and then
to Western Siberia, and from there, after his refusal to take the
oath of allegiance to Alexander III., he was transported to a Yakút
encampment several hundred miles beyond Yakútsk. There he spent several
years, and when he returned to Russia in 1886, not being allowed to
stay in University towns, he settled at Nízhniy Nóvgorod.
Life in the far north, in the deserts of Yakútsk, in a small encampment
buried for half the year in the snow, produced upon Korolénko an
extremely deep impression, and the little stories which he wrote about
Siberian subjects (_The Dream of Makár_, _The Man from Sakhalín_,
etc.), were so beautiful that he was unanimously recognised as a true
heir to Turguéneff. There is in the little stories of Korolénko a
force, a sense of proportion, a mastery in depicting the characters,
and an artistic finish, which not only distinguish him from most of his
young contemporaries, but reveal in him a true artist. _What the Forest
Says_, in which he related a dramatic episode from serfdom times in
Lithuania, only further confirmed the high reputation which Korolénko
had already won. It is not an imitation of Turguéneff, and yet it
at once recalled, by its comprehension of the life of the forest,
the great novelist’s beautiful sketch, _The Woodlands_ (_Polyesie_).
_In Bad Society_ is evidently taken from the author’s childhood, and
this idyll among tramps and thieves who concealed themselves in the
ruins of some tower is of such beauty, especially in the scenes with
children, that everyone found in it a truly “Turguéneff charm.” But
then Korolénko came to a halt. His _Blind Musician_ was read in all
languages, and admired--again for its charm; but it was felt that the
over-refined psychology of this novel is hardly correct; and no greater
production worthy of the extremely sympathetic and rich talent of
Korolénko has appeared since, while his attempts at producing a larger
and more elaborate romance were not crowned with success.
This is somewhat striking, but the same would have to be said of all
the contemporaries of Korolénko, among whom there are men and women
of great talent. To analyse the causes of this fact, especially with
reference to so great an artist as Korolénko, would certainly be a
tempting task. But this would require speaking at some length of the
change which took place in the Russian novel during the last twenty
years or so, in connection with the political life of the country.
A few hints will perhaps explain what is meant. In the seventies
quite a special sort of novel had been created by a number of young
novelists--mostly contributors of the review, _Rússkoye Slóvo_. The
“thoughtful realist”--such as he was understood by Písareff--was
their hero, and however imperfect the technique of these novels
might have been in some cases, their leading idea was most honest,
and the influence they exercised upon Russian youth was in the right
direction. This was the time when Russian women were making their first
steps towards higher education, and trying to conquer some sort of
economical and intellectual independence. To attain this, they had
to sustain a bitter struggle against their elders. “Madame Kabanóva”
and “Dikóy” (see Ch. VI.) were alive then in a thousand guises, in
all classes of society, and our women had to struggle hard against
their parents and relatives, who did not understand their children;
against “Society” as a whole, which hated the “emancipated woman”; and
against the Government, which only too well foresaw the dangers that
a new generation of educated women would represent for an autocratic
bureaucracy. It was of the first necessity, then, that at least in the
men of the same generation the young fighters for women’s rights should
find helpers, and not that sort of men about whom Turguéneff’s heroine
in _Correspondence_ wrote (see Ch. IV.). In this direction--especially
after the splendid beginning that was made by two women writers,
SOPHIE SMIRNÓVA (_The Little Fire_, _The Salt of the Earth_) and OLGA
SHAPÍR--our men-novelists have done good service, both in maintaining
the energy of women in their hard struggle and in inspiring men with
respect towards that struggle and those who fought in it.
Later on a new element became prominent in the Russian novel. It was
the “populist” element--love to the masses of toilers, work among
them in order to introduce, be it the slightest spark of light and
hope, into their sad existence. Again the novel contributed immensely
to maintain that movement and to inspire men and women in that sort
of work, an instance of which has been given on a preceding page, in
speaking of _The Great Bear_. The workers in both these fields were
numerous, and I can only name in passing MORDÓVTSEFF (in _Signs of
the Times_), SCHELLER, who wrote under the name of A. MIKHÁILOFF,
STANUKÓVITCH, NOVODVÓRSKIY, BARANTSÉVITCH, MATCHTÉTT, MÁMIN, and the
poet, NÁDSON, who all, either directly or indirectly, worked through
the novel and poetry in the same direction.
However, the struggle for liberty which was begun about 1857, after
having reached its culminating point in 1881, came to a temporary end,
and for the next ten years a complete prostration spread amidst the
Russian “intellectuals.” Faith in the old ideals and the old inspiring
watchwords--even faith in men--was passing away, and new tendencies
began to make their way in Art--partly under the influence of this
phase of the Russian movement, and partly also under the influence of
Western Europe. A sense of fatigue became evident. Faith in knowledge
was shaken. Social ideals were relegated to the background. “Rigourism”
was condemned, and “popularism” began to be represented as ludicrous,
or, when it reappeared, it was in some religious form, as Tolstóyism.
Instead of the former enthusiasm for “mankind,” the “rights of the
individual” were proclaimed, which “rights” did not mean equal rights
for all, but the rights of the few over all the others.
In these unsettled conditions of social ideas our younger
novelists--always anxious to reflect in their art the questions of the
day--have had to develop; and this confusion necessarily stands in the
way of their producing anything as definite and as complete as did
their predecessors of the previous generation. There have been no such
complete individualities in society; and a true artist is incapable of
inventing what does not exist.
* * * * *
DMITRIY MEREZHKÓVSKIY (born 1866) may be taken to illustrate the
difficulties which a writer, even when endowed with a by no means
ordinary talent, found in reaching his full development under the
social and political conditions which prevailed in Russia during the
period just mentioned. Leaving aside his poetry--although it is also
very characteristic--and taking only his novels and critical articles,
we see how, after having started with a certain sympathy, or at least
with a certain respect, for those Russian writers of the previous
generation who wrote under the inspiration of higher social ideals,
Merezhkóvskiy gradually began to suspect these ideals, and finally
ended by treating them with contempt. He found that they were of no
avail, and he began to speak more and more of “the sovereign rights of
the individual,” but not in the sense in which they were understood
by Godwin and other eighteenth century philosophers, nor in the sense
which Písareff attributed to them when he spoke of the “thoughtful
realist”; Merezkhóvskiy took them in the sense--desperately vague, and
narrow when not vague--attributed to them by Nietzsche. At the same
time he began to speak more and more of “Beauty” and “the worship of
the Beautiful,” but again not in the sense which idealists attributed
to such words, but in the limited, erotic sense in which “Beauty” was
understood by the “Æsthetics” of the leisured class in the forties.
The main work which Merezhkóvskiy undertook offered great interest.
He began a trilogy of novels in which he intended to represent the
struggle of the antique pagan world against Christianity: on the one
hand, the Hellenic love and poetic comprehension of nature, and its
worship of sound, exuberant life; and on the other, the life-depressing
influences of Judaic Christianity, with its condemnation of the
study of nature, of poetry, art, pleasure, and sound, healthy life
altogether. The first novel of the trilogy was _Julian the Apostate_,
and the second, _Leonardo da Vinci_ (both have been translated into
English). They were the result of a careful study of the antique Greek
world and the Renaissance, and notwithstanding some defects (absence
of real feeling, even in the glorification of the worship of Beauty,
and a certain abuse of archæological details), both contained really
beautiful and impressive scenes; while the fundamental idea--the
necessity of a synthesis between the poetry of nature of the antique
world and the higher humanising ideals of Christianity--was forcibly
impressed upon the reader.
Unfortunately, Merezhkóvskiy’s admiration of antique “Naturism” did
not last. He had not yet written the third novel of his trilogy when
modern “Symbolism” began to penetrate into his works, with the result
that notwithstanding all his abilities the young author seems now to be
drifting straight towards a hopeless mysticism, like that into which
Gógol fell towards the end of his life.
* * * * *
It may seem strange to the West Europeans, and especially to English
readers, to hear of such a rapid succession of different moods of
thought in Russian society, sufficiently deep to exercise such an
influence upon the novels as has just been mentioned. And yet so it is,
in consequence of the historical phase which Russia is living through.
There is even a very gifted novelist, BOBORÝKIN (born 1836), who has
made it his peculiar work to describe in novels the prevailing moods of
Russian educated society in their rapid succession for the last thirty
years. The technique of his novels is always excellent (he is also the
author of a good critical work, just published, on the influences of
Western romance upon the Russian novel). His observations are always
correct; his personal point of view is that of an honest advanced
progressive; and his novels can always be taken as true and good
pictures of the tendencies which prevailed at a given moment amongst
the Russian “intellectuals.” For the history of thought in Russia they
are simply invaluable; and they must have helped many a young reader to
find his or her way amidst the various facts of life; but the variety
of currents which have been chronicled by Boborýkin would appear simply
puzzling to a Western reader.
Boborýkin has been reproached by some critics with not having
sufficiently distinguished between what was important in the facts of
life which he described and what was irrelevant or only ephemeral,
but this is hardly correct. The main defect of his work lies perhaps
elsewhere; namely, in that the individuality of the author is hardly
felt in it at all. He seems to record the kaleidoscope of life without
living with his heroes, and without suffering or rejoicing with them.
He has noticed and perfectly well observed those persons whom he
describes; his judgment of them is that of an intelligent, experienced
man; but none of them has impressed him enough to become part of
himself. Therefore they do not strike the reader with any sufficient
depth of impression.
One of our contemporary authors, also endowed with great talent, who
is publishing a simply stupefying quantity of novels, is POTÁPENKO. He
was born in 1856, in South Russia, and after having studied music, he
began writing in 1881, and although his later novels bear traces of
too hasty work, he still remains a favourite writer. Amidst the dark
colours which prevail now amongst the Russian novelists, Potápenko is
a happy exception. Some of his novels are full of highly comic scenes,
and compel the reader to laugh heartily with the author. But even when
there are no such scenes, and the facts are, on the contrary, sad,
or even tragical, the effect of the novel is not depressing--perhaps
because the author never departs from his own point of view of a
satisfied optimist. In this respect Potápenko is absolutely the
opposite of most of his contemporaries, and especially of Tchéhoff.
A. P. TCHÉHOFF
Of all the contemporary Russian novelists A. P. Tchéhoff (1860-1904)
was undoubtedly the most deeply original. It was not a mere originality
of style. His style, like that of every great artist, bears of course
the stamp of his personality; but he never tried to strike his readers
with some style-effects of his own: he probably despised them, and
he wrote with the same simplicity as Púshkin, Turguéneff and Tolstóy
have written. Nor did he choose some special contents for his tales
and novels, or appropriate to himself some special class of men. Few
authors, on the contrary, have dealt with so wide a range of men
and women, taken from all the layers, divisions and subdivisions of
Russian society as Tchéhoff did. And with all that, as Tolstóy has
remarked, Tchéhoff represents something of his own in art; he has
struck a new vein, not only for Russian literature, but for literature
altogether, and thus belongs to all nations. His nearest relative is
Guy de Maupassant, but a certain family resemblance between the two
writers exists only in a few of their short stories. The manner of
Tchéhoff, and especially the mood in which all the sketches, the short
novels, and the dramas of Tchéhoff are written, are entirely his own.
And then, there is all the difference between the two writers which
exists between contemporary France and Russia at that special period of
development through which our country has been passing lately.
The biography of Tchéhoff can be told in a few words. He was born in
1860, in South Russia, at Taganróg. His father was originally a serf,
but he had apparently exceptional business capacities, and freed
himself early in his life. To his son he gave a good education--first
in the local gymnasium (college), and later on at the university of
Moscow. “I did not know much about faculties at that time,” Tchéhoff
wrote once in a short biographical note, “and I don’t well remember why
I chose the medical faculty; but I never regretted that choice later
on.” He did not become a medical practitioner; but a year’s work in a
small village hospital near Moscow, and similar work later on, when
he volunteered to stand at the head of a medical district during the
cholera epidemics of 1892, brought him into close contact with a wide
world of men and women of all sorts and characters; and, as he himself
has noticed, his acquaintance with natural sciences and with the
scientific method of thought helped him a great deal in his subsequent
literary work.
Tchéhoff began his literary career very early. Already during the first
years of his university studies--that is, in 1879, he began to write
short humorous sketches (under the pseudonym of Tcheónte) for some
weeklies. His talent developed rapidly; and the sympathy with which his
first little volumes of short sketches was met in the Press, and the
interest which the best Russian critics (especially Mikhailóvskiy) took
in the young novelist, must have helped him to give a more serious turn
to his creative genius. With every year the problems of life which he
treated were deeper and more complicated, while the form he attained
bore traces of an increasingly fine artistic finish. When Tchéhoff
died last year, at the age of only forty-four, his talent had already
reached its full maturity. His last production--a drama--contained such
fine poetical touches, and such a mixture of poetical melancholy with
strivings towards the joy of a well-filled life, that it would have
seemed to open a new page in his creation if it were not known that
consumption was rapidly undermining his life.
No one has ever succeeded, as Tchéhoff has, in representing the
failures of human nature in our present civilisation, and especially
the failure, the bankruptcy of the educated man in the face of
the all-invading meanness of everyday life. This defeat of the
“intellectual” he has rendered with a wonderful force, variety, and
impressiveness. And there lies the distinctive feature of his talent.
When you read the sketches and the stories of Tchéhoff in chronological
succession, you see first an author full of the most exuberant
vitality and youthful fun. The stories are, as a rule, very short;
many of them cover only three or four pages; but they are full of the
most infecting merriment. Some of them are mere farces; but you cannot
help laughing in the heartiest way, because even the most ludicrous
and impossible ones are written with an inimitable charm. And then,
gradually, amidst that same fun, comes a touch of heartless vulgarity
on the part of some of the actors in the story, and you feel how
the author’s heart throbs with pain. Slowly, gradually, this note
becomes more frequent; it claims more and more attention; it ceases
to be accidental, it becomes organic--till at last, in every story,
in every novel, it stifles everything else. It may be the reckless
heartlessness of a young man who, “for fun,” will make a girl believe
that she is loved, or the heartlessness and absence of the most
ordinary humanitarian feeling in the family of an old professor--it is
always the same note of heartlessness and meanness which resounds, the
same absence of the more refined human feelings, or, still worse--the
complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of “the intellectual.”
Tchéhoff’s heroes are not people who have never heard better words, or
never conceived better ideas than those which circulate in the lowest
circles of the Philistines. No, they have heard such words, and their
hearts have beaten once upon a time at the sound of such words. But the
common-place everyday life has stifled all such aspirations, apathy
has taken its place, and now there remains only a haphazard existence
amidst a hopeless meanness. The meanness which Tchéhoff represents is
the one which begins with the loss of faith in one’s forces and the
gradual loss of all those brighter hopes and illusions which make the
charm of all activity, and, then, step by step, this meanness destroys
the very springs of life: broken hopes, broken hearts, broken energies.
Man reaches a stage when he can only mechanically repeat certain
actions from day to day, and goes to bed, happy if he has “killed” his
time in any way, gradually falling into a complete intellectual apathy,
and a moral indifference. The worst is that the very multiplicity of
samples which Tchéhoff gives, without repeating himself, from so many
different layers of society, seems to tell the reader that it is the
rottenness of a whole civilisation, of an epoch, which the author
divulges to us.
Speaking of Tchéhoff, Tolstóy made the deep remark that he was one
of those few whose novels are willingly re-read more than once.
This is quite true. Every one of Tchéhoff’s stories--it may be the
smallest bagatelle or a small novel, or it may be a drama--produces
an impression which cannot easily be forgotten. At the same time they
contain such a profusion of minute detail, admirably chosen so as to
increase the impression, that in re-reading them one always finds a new
pleasure. Tchéhoff was certainly a great artist. Besides, the variety
of the men and women of all classes which appear in his stories,
and the variety of psychological subjects dealt in them, is simply
astounding. And yet every story bears so much the stamp of the author
that in the most insignificant of them you recognise Tchéhoff, with his
proper individuality and manner, with his conception of men and things.
Tchéhoff has never tried to write long novels or romances. His domain
is the short story, in which he excels. He certainly never tries to
give in it the whole history of his heroes from their birth to the
grave: this would not be the proper way in a short story. He takes
one moment only from that life, only one episode. And he tells it
in such a way that the reader forever retains in memory the type of
men or women represented; so that, when later on he meets a living
specimen of that type, he exclaims: “But this is Tchéhoff’s Ivánoff,
or Tchéhoff’s Darling!” In the space of some twenty pages and within
the limitations of a single episode there is revealed a complicated
psychological drama--a world of mutual relations. Take, for instance,
the very short and impressive sketch, _From a Doctor’s Practice_. It
is a story in which there is no story after all. A doctor is invited
to see a girl, whose mother is the owner of a large cotton mill. They
live there, in a mansion close to, and within the enclosure of, the
immense buildings. The girl is the only child, and is worshipped by her
mother. But she is not happy. Indefinite thoughts worry her: she is
stifled in that atmosphere. Her mother is also unhappy on account of
her darling’s unhappiness, and the only happy creature in the household
is the ex-governess of the girl, now a sort of lady-companion, who
really enjoys the luxurious surroundings of the mansion and its rich
table. The doctor is asked to stay over the night, and tells to his
sleepless patient that she is not bound to stay there: that a really
well-intentioned person can find many places in the world where she
would find an activity to suit her. And when the doctor leaves next
morning the girl has put on a white dress and has a flower in her
hair. She looks very earnest, and you guess that she meditates already
about a new start in her life. Within the limits of these few traits
quite a world of aimless philistine life has thus been unveiled before
your eyes, a world of factory life, and a world of new longings making
an irruption into it, and finding support from the outside. You read
all this in the little episode. You see with a striking distinctness
the four main personages upon whom light has been focused for a short
moment. And in the hazy outlines which you rather guess than see on the
picture round the brightly lighted spot, you discover quite a world
of complicated human relations, at the present moment and in times to
come. Take away anything of the distinctness of the figures in the
lighted spot, or anything of the haziness of the remainder--and the
picture will be spoiled.
Such are nearly all the stories of Tchéhoff. Even when they cover some
fifty pages they have the same character.
Tchéhoff wrote a couple of stories from peasant life. But peasants and
village life are not his proper sphere. His true domain is the world
of the “intellectuals”--the educated and the half-educated portion
of Russian society--and these he knows in perfection. He shows their
bankruptcy, their inaptitude to solve the great historical problem of
renovation which fell upon them, and the meanness and vulgarity of
everyday life under which an immense number of them succumb. Since the
times of Gógol no writer in Russia has so wonderfully represented human
meanness under its varied aspects. And yet, what a difference between
the two! Gógol took mainly the outer meanness, which strikes the eye
and often degenerates into farce, and therefore in most cases brings a
smile on your lips or makes you laugh. But laughter is always a step
towards reconciliation. Tchéhoff also makes you laugh in his earlier
productions, but in proportion as he advances in age, and looks more
seriously upon life, the laughter disappears, and although a fine
humour remains, you feel that he now deals with a kind of meanness and
philistinism which provokes, not smiles but suffering in the author.
A “Tchéhoff sorrow” is as much characteristic of his writings as the
deep furrow between the brows of his lively eyes is characteristic of
his good-natured face. Moreover, the meanness which Tchéhoff depicts
is much deeper than the one which Gógol knew. Deeper conflicts are now
going on in the depths of the modern educated men, of which Gógol knew
nothing seventy years ago. The “sorrow” of Tchéhoff is also that of a
much more sensitive and a more refined nature than the “unseen tears”
of Gógol’s satire.
Better than any Russian novelist, Tchéhoff understands the fundamental
vice of that mass of Russian “intellectuals,” who very well _see_
the dark sides of Russian life but have no force to join that small
minority of younger people who dare to rebel against the evil. In this
respect, only one more writer--and this one was a woman, Hvóschinskaya
(“Krestóvskiy-pseudonyme”), who can be placed by the side of Tchéhoff.
He knew, and more than knew--he felt with every nerve of his poetical
mind--that, apart from a handful of stronger men and women, the true
curse of the Russian “intellectual” is the weakness of his will, the
insufficient strength of his desires. Perhaps he felt it in himself.
And when he was asked once (in 1894) in a letter--“What should a
Russian desire at the present time?” he wrote in return: “Here is my
reply: desire! He needs most of all desire--force of character. We have
enough of that whining shapelessness.”
This absence of strong desire and weakness of will he continually,
over and over again, represented in his heroes. But this predilection
was not a mere accident of temperament and character. It was a direct
product of the times he lived in.
Tchéhoff, we saw, was nineteen years old when he began to write in
1879. He thus belongs to the generation which had to live through,
during their best years, the worst years which Russia has passed
through in the second half of the nineteenth century. With the tragic
death of Alexander II. and the advent to the throne of his son,
Alexander III., a whole epoch--the epoch of progressive work and
bright hopes had come to a final close. All the sublime efforts of
that younger generation which had entered the political arena in the
seventies, and had taken for its watchword the symbol: “Be with the
people!” had ended in a crushing defeat--the victims moaning now in
fortresses and in the snows of Siberia. More than that, all the great
reforms, including the abolition of serfdom, which had been realised in
the sixties by the Hérzen, Turguéneff, and Tchernyshévskiy generation,
began now to be treated as so many mistakes, by the reactionary
elements which had now rallied round Alexander III. Never will a
Westerner understand the depth of despair and the hopeless sadness
which took hold of the intellectual portion of Russian society for the
next ten or twelve years after that double defeat, when it came to the
conclusion that it was incapable to break the inertia of the masses, or
to move history so as to fill up the gap between its high ideals and
the heartrending reality. In this respect “the eighties” were perhaps
the gloomiest period that Russia lived through for the last hundred
years. In the fifties the intellectuals had at least full hope in their
forces; now--they had lost even these hopes. It was during those very
years that Tchéhoff began to write; and, being a true poet, who feels
and responds to the moods of the moment, he became the painter of that
breakdown--of that failure of the “intellectuals” which hung as a
nightmare above the civilised portion of Russian society. And again,
being a great poet, he depicted that all-invading philistine meanness
in such features that his picture will live. How superficial, in
comparison, is the philistinism described by Zola. Perhaps, France even
does not know that disease which was gnawing then at the very marrow of
the bones of the Russian “intellectual.”
With all that, Tchéhoff is by no means a pessimist in the proper
sense of the word; if he had come to despair, he would have taken the
bankruptcy of the “intellectuals” as a necessary fatality. A word,
such as, for instance, “_fin de siècle_,” would have been his solace.
But Tchéhoff could not find satisfaction in such words because he
firmly believed that a better existence was possible--and would come.
“From my childhood”--he wrote in an intimate letter--“I have believed
in progress, because the difference between the time when they used
to flog me, and when they stopped to do so [in the sixties] was
tremendous.”
There are three dramas of Tchéhoff--_Ivánoff_, _Uncle Ványa_ (_Uncle
John_), and _The Cherry-Tree Garden_, which fully illustrate how his
faith in a better future grew in him as he advanced in age. Ivánoff,
the hero of the first drama, is the personification of that failure of
the “intellectual” of which I just spoke. Once upon a time he had had
his high ideals and he still speaks of them, and this is why Sásha, a
girl, full of the better inspirations--one of those fine intellectual
types in the representation of which Tchéhoff appears as a true heir
of Turguéneff--falls in love with him. But Ivánoff knows himself that
he is played out; that the girl loves in him what he is no more; that
the sacred fire is with him a mere reminiscence of the better years,
irretrievably past; and while the drama attains its culminating point,
just when his marriage with Sásha is going to be celebrated, Ivánoff
shoots himself. Pessimism is triumphant.
_Uncle Ványa_ ends also in the most depressing way; but there is
some faint hope in it. The drama reveals an even still more complete
breakdown of the educated “intellectual,” and especially of the main
representative of that class--the professor, the little god of the
family, for whom all others have been sacrificing themselves, but
who all his life has only written beautiful words about the sacred
problems of art, while all his life he remained the most perfect
egotist. But the end of this drama is different. The girl, Sónya, who
is the counterpart of Sásha, and has been one of those who sacrificed
themselves for the professor, remains more or less in the background
of the drama, until, at its very end she comes forward in a halo of
endless love. She is neglected by the man whom she loves. This man--an
enthusiast--prefers, however, a beautiful woman (the second wife of the
professor) to Sónya, who is only one of those workers who bring life
into the darkness of Russian village life, by helping the dark mass to
pull through the hardships of their lives.
The drama ends in a heart-rending musical accord of devotion and
self-sacrifice on behalf of Sónya and her uncle. “It cannot be
helped”--Sónya says--“we must live! Uncle John, we shall live. We shall
live through a long succession of days, and of long nights; we shall
patiently bear the sufferings which fate will send upon us; we shall
work for the others--now, and later on, in old age, knowing no rest;
and when our hour shall have come, we shall die without murmur, and
there, beyond the grave * * * we shall rest!”
There is, after all, a redeeming feature in that despair. There remains
the faith of Sónya in her capacity to work, her readiness to face the
work, even without personal happiness.
But in proportion as Russian life becomes less gloomy; in proportion
as hopes of a better future for our country begin to bud once more
in the youthful beginnings of a movement amongst the working classes
in the industrial centres, to the call of which the educated youth
answer immediately; in proportion as the “intellectuals” revive again,
ready to sacrifice themselves in order to conquer freedom for the
grand whole--the Russian people--Tchéhoff also begins to look into the
future with hope and optimism. _The Cherry-Tree Garden_ was his last
swan-song, and the last words of this drama sound a note full of hope
in a better future. The cherry-tree garden of a noble landlord, which
used to be a true fairy garden when the trees were in full bloom, and
nightingales sang in their thickets, has been pitilessly cut down by
the money-making middle class man. No blossom, no nightingales--only
dollars instead. But Tchéhoff looks further into the future: he sees
the place again in new hands, and a new garden is going to grow instead
of the old one--a garden where all will find a new happiness in new
surroundings. Those whose whole life was for themselves alone could
never grow such a garden; but some day soon this will be done by beings
like Anya, the heroine, and her friend, “the perpetual student”....
The influence of Tchéhoff, as Tolstóy has remarked, will last, and will
not be limited to Russia only. He has given such a prominence to the
short story and its ways of dealing with human life that he has thus
become a reformer of our literary forms. In Russia he has already a
number of imitators who look upon him as upon the head of a school;
but--will they have also the same inimitable poetical feeling, the same
charming intimacy in the way of telling the stories, that special form
of love of nature, and above all, the beauty of Tchéhoff’s smile amidst
his tears?--all qualities inseparable from his personality.
As to his dramas, they are favourites on the Russian stage, both in the
capitals and in the provinces. They are admirable for the stage and
produce a deep effect; and when they are played by such a superior cast
as that of the Artistic Theatre at Moscow--as the _Cherry-Tree Garden_
was played lately--they become dramatic events.
In Russia Tchéhoff is now perhaps the most popular of the younger
writers. Speaking of the living novelists only, he is placed
immediately after Tolstóy, and his works are read immensely. Separate
volumes of his stories, published under different titles--_In
Twilight_, _Sad People_ and so on--ran each through ten to fourteen
editions, while full editions of Tchéhoff’s _Works_ in ten and fourteen
volumes, sold in fabulous numbers: of the latter, which was given as a
supplement to a weekly, more than 200,000 copies were circulated in one
single year.
In Germany Tchéhoff has produced a deep impression; his best stories
have been translated more than once, so that one of the leading Berlin
critics exclaimed lately: “Tschéchoff, Tschéchoff, und kein Ende!”
(Tchéhoff, Tchéhoff, and no end.) In Italy he begins to be widely
read. And yet it is only his stories which are known beyond Russia.
His dramas seem to be too “Russian,” and they hardly can deeply move
audiences outside the borders of Russia, where such dramas of inner
contradiction are not a characteristic feature of the moment.
If there is any logic in the evolution of societies, such a writer as
Tchéhoff had to appear before literature could take a new direction
and produce the new types which already are budding in life. At any
rate, an impressive parting word had to be pronounced, and this is what
Tchéhoff has done.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES