CABBAGE SOUP
We have been following the fortunes of a pioneer people breaking into
the field of world culture. Let us now travel part way round the earth
in either direction, and watch another pioneer people doing the same
thing.
The differences between America and Russia are many and striking, and
before we enter upon a study of Russian literature we must understand
Russian life. Voltaire tells us that virtue and vice are products like
vinegar, and we shall find this applies also to the Russian soul with
its mysticism and melancholy. When the sun almost disappears for six
months at a time, and icy blizzards rage, human beings have a tendency
to stay by the fire and develop their inner natures; also they develop
congested livers, and brood upon the futility of life.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Don’t forget that it often gets cold in New England.”
“Yes, and there is both mysticism and melancholy in New England art. But
the difference is that the people of New England escaped from the cradle
of despotism in Asia many centuries earlier than the Russians. So the
brooding of the New England colonist took the form of calling a town
meeting to plan for the building of a new road in the spring. But the
Russian could not do things for himself; he had to get the permission of
officials. If he tried to act for himself, they would strip him and beat
him with knouts until he swooned. So the Russian’s brooding turned to
despair, and he got drunk, and got into a fight and killed his neighbor,
and then tried to make up his mind whether God would forgive him, or
damn him to hell fire forever; he fretted over this problem until he
went insane or wrote a novel--”
“Or both,” says Mrs. Ogi.
The dominant fact in Russian art of the nineteenth century was
despotism. Here was a vast empire of a hundred million people, energetic
and aspiring; and the ruling class dreamed that they could introduce
modern material civilization, while keeping out the modern mind and
soul. Young Russians travelled, and learned to think as the rest of
Europe thought; then they came home, to find that the slightest attempt
to teach or to organize was met by imprisonment, torture, exile, hard
labor, or the scaffold. Wave after wave of rebellion swept Russia, to be
met by wave after wave of repression. Intellectual activity which New
England honored was in Russia a secret and criminal conspiracy; the
youth of the country was broken in a torture chamber; and so we have the
misery and distortion and impotence which we regard as characteristic
Slavic qualities.
The Russian was supposed to be incapable of action, incapable of keeping
an appointment on time, incapable of doing anything but drinking a
hundred cups of tea and shedding tears over the fate of man. But now
comes the revolution, and in a flash we discover that all that was
buncombe. The Russians begin to act precisely like other men; they cease
to get drunk, they learn to keep appointments, they discover a sudden
admiration for those qualities we call Yankee--hustle and efficiency,
the adjusting of one’s desires to what can be immediately accomplished.
The Russian peasant, supposed to be a grown-up and bearded cherub,
lifting his eyes in adoration to his Little Father in the Winter Palace
and his Big Father in Heaven, is discovered to have precisely the same
desires as every other farmer in the world--that is to say, more land,
and fewer tax-collectors.
Russian literature is a great literature, because it voices the hopes
and resolves of a great people groping their way to freedom and
understanding. It is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a literature
of revolt. It is full of ideas, because it has to take the place of the
prohibited subjects, science, politics, economics, and social
psychology. It is desperately serious, because it is produced by people
who are suffering. Some twenty years ago I remember meeting in New York
the adopted son of Maxim Gorki, who was earning his living as a printer
by day and studying our civilization by night. I recall his remark:
“Americans do not know what the intellectual life means.” The young man
had in mind a country where you adopted ideas with the knowledge that
they might cost you your liberty, and even your life. Under such
circumstances you think hard before you come to a decision. A lot of
Americans have had an opportunity to test their ideas that way during
the past ten years, and so they are now taking the intellectual life
seriously, and producing literature in many ways resembling the Russian.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Sherwood Anderson says it is because he was raised on
cabbage soup.”
“People will read that,” says Ogi, “and think it a flash of humor; very
few will consider seriously the effect of a starvation diet upon the
soul of a sensitive boy. Neither will they stop to think about three
boys sleeping in one bed as a source of abnormal sexual imaginings,
which constitute one of the original elements in Sherwood Anderson’s
books. To me this seems a law: that wherever you have widespread and
long-continued poverty, maintained by policemen’s clubs, there you will
have a literature, extremely painful to its creators, but delightful to
high-brow critics, who will hail it as ‘strong,’ and up to the standard
of the great Russian masters.”