questionings, his total dissatisfaction and condemnation of artificial
social life in the cities, his spiritual despair, and his final
release from suffering at the magic word of the peasant are strictly
autobiographical. When the muzhik told Levin that one man lived for
his belly, and another for his soul, he became greatly excited, and
eagerly demanded further knowledge of his humble teacher. He was once
more told that man must live according to God--according to truth. His
soul was immediately filled, says Tolstoi, with brilliant light. He
was indeed relieved of his burden, like Christian at the sight of the
Cross. Now Tolstoi's subsequent doctrinal works are all amplifications
of the conversation between Levin and the peasant, which in itself
contains the real significance of the whole novel.
Even "Anna Karenina," with all its titanic power, is not an artistic
model of a story. It contains much superfluous matter, and the
balancing off of the two couples, Levin and Kitty, with Vronsky and
Anna, is too obviously arranged by the author. One Russian critic was
so disgusted with the book that he announced the plan of a
continuation of the novel where Levin was to fall in love with his
cow, and Kitty's resulting jealousy was to be depicted.
It has no organic plot--simply a succession of pictures. The plot does
not develop--but the characters do, thus resembling our own individual
human lives. It has no true unity, such as that shown, for example, by
the "Scarlet Letter." Our interest is largely concentrated in Anna,
but besides the parallel story of Kitty, we have many other incidents
and characters which often contribute nothing to the progress of the
novel. They are a part of life, however, so Tolstoi includes them. One
might say there is an attempt at unity, in the person of that sleek
egotist, Stepan--his relation by blood and marriage to both Anna and
Kitty makes him in some sense a link between the two couples. But he
is more successful as a personage than as the keystone of an arch. The
novel would really lose nothing by considerable cancellation. The
author might have omitted Levin's two brothers, the whole Kitty and
Levin history could have been liberally abbreviated, and many of the
conversations on philosophy and politics would never be missed. Yes,
the work could be shortened, but it would take a Turgenev to do it.
Although we may not always find Art in the book, we always find Life.
No novel in my recollection combines wider range with greater
intensity. It is extensive and intensive--broad and deep. The
simplicity of the style in the most impressive scenes is so startling
that it seems as if there were somehow no style and no language there;
nothing whatever between the life in the book and the reader's mind;
not only no impenetrable wall of style, such as Meredith and James
pile up with curious mosaic, so that one cannot see the characters in
the story through the exquisite and opaque structure,--but really no
medium at all, transparent or otherwise. The emotional life of the men
and women enter into our emotions with no let or hindrance, and that
perfect condition of communication is realised which Browning believed
would characterise the future life, when spirits would somehow
converse without the slow, troublesome, and inaccurate means of
language.
I believe that the average man can learn more about life by reading
"Anna Karenina" than he can by his own observation and experience. One
learns much about Russian life in city and country, much about human
nature, and much about one's self, not all of which is flattering, but
perhaps profitable for instruction.
This is the true realism--external and internal. The surface of things,
clothes, habits of speech, manners and fashions, the way people enter
a drawing-room, the way one inhales a cigarette,--everything is truthfully
reported. Then there is the true internal realism, which dives below
all appearances and reveals the dawn of a new passion, the first faint
stir of an ambition, the slow and cruel advance of the poison of jealousy,
the ineradicable egotism, the absolute darkness of unspeakable remorse.
No caprice is too trivial, no passion too colossal, to be beyond the
reach of the author of this book.
Some novels have attained a wide circulation by means of one scene. In
recollecting "Anna Karenina," powerful scenes crowd into the
memory--introspective and analytic as it is, it is filled with
dramatic climaxes. The sheer force of some of these scenes is almost
terrifying. The first meeting of Anna and Vronsky at the railway
station, the midnight interview in the storm on the way back to
Petersburg, the awful dialogue between them after she has fallen
(omitted from the first American translation), the fearful excitement
of the horse race, the sickness of Anna, Karenin's forgiveness, the
humiliation of Vronsky, the latter's attempt at suicide, the steadily
increasing scenes of jealousy with the shadow of death coming nearer,
the clairvoyant power of the author in describing the death of Anna,
and the departure of Vronsky, where the railway station reminds him
with intrusive agony of the contrast between his first and last view
of the woman he loved. No one but Tolstoi would ever have given his
tragic character a toothache at that particular time; but the
toothache, added to the heartache, gives the last touch of reality. No
reader has ever forgotten Vronsky, as he stands for the last time by
the train, his heart torn by the vulture of Memory, and his face
twisted by the steady pain in his tooth.
Every character in the book, major and minor, is a living human being.
Stepan, with his healthy, pampered body, and his inane smile at
Dolly's reproachful face; Dolly, absolutely commonplace and absolutely
real; Yashvin, the typical officer; the English trainer, Cord; Betsy,
always cheerful, always heartless, probably the worst character in the
whole book, Satan's own spawn; Karenin himself, not ridiculous, like
an English Restoration husband, but with an overwhelming power of
creating ennui, in which he lives and moves and has his being.
From the first day of his acquaintance with Anna, Vronsky steadily
rises, and Anna steadily falls. This is in accordance with the
fundamental, inexorable moral law. Vronsky, a handsome man with no
purpose in life, who has had immoral relations with a large variety of
women, now falls for the first time really in love, and his love for
one woman strengthens his mind and heart, gives him an object in life,
and concentrates the hitherto scattered energies of his soul. His
development as a man, his rise in dignity and force of character, is
one of the notable features of the whole book. When we first see him,
he is colourless, a mere fashionable type; he constantly becomes more
interesting, and when we last see him, he has not only our profound
sympathy, but our cordial respect. He was a figure in a uniform, and
has become a man. Devotion to one woman has raised him far above
trivialities.
The woman pays for all this. Never again, not even in the transports
of passion, will she be so happy as when we first see her on that
bright winter day. She grows in intelligence by the fruit of the tree,
and sinks in moral worth and in peace of mind. Never, since the time
of Helen, has there been a woman in literature of more physical charm.
Tolstoi, whose understanding of the body is almost supernatural, has
created in Anna a woman, quite ordinary from the mental and spiritual
point of view, but who leaves on every reader an indelible vision of
surpassing loveliness. One is not surprised at Vronsky's instant and
total surrender.
As a study of sin, the moral force of the story is tremendous. At the
end, the words of Paul come irresistibly into the mind. To be carnally
minded is death; to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
One can understand Tolstoi's enthusiasm for the Gospel in his later
years, and also the prodigious influence of his parables and
evangelistic narratives, by remembering that the Russian mind, which,
as Gogol said, is more capable than any other of receiving the
Christian religion, had been starved for centuries. The Orthodox
Church of Russia seems to have been and to be as remote from the life
of the people as the political bureaucracy. The hungry sheep looked up
and were not fed. The Christian religion is the dominating force in
the works of Gogol, Tolstoi, and Dostoevski. How eager the Russian
people are for the simple Gospel, and with what amazing joy they now
receive it, remind one of the Apostolic age. Accurate testimony to
this fact has lately been given by a dispassionate German observer:--
"In the second half of the nineteenth century the Bible followed in
the track of the knowledge of reading and writing in the Russian
village. It worked, and works, far more powerfully than all the
Nihilists, and if the Holy Synod wishes to be consistent in its policy
of spiritual enslavement, it must begin by checking the distribution
of the Bible. The origin of the 'Stunde,' from the prayer hour of the
German Menonites and other evangelical colonist meetings, is well
known. The religious sense of the Russian, brooding for centuries over
empty forms, combined with the equally repressed longing for spiritual
life,--these quickly seized upon the power of a simple and practical
living religious doctrine, and the 'Stundist' movement spread rapidly
over the whole south of the Empire. Wherever a Bible in the Russian
language is to be found in the village, there a circle rapidly forms
around its learned owner; he is listened to eagerly, and the Word has
its effect. . .
"Pashkov, a colonel of the Guards, who died in Paris at the beginning
of 1902, started in the 'eighties' a movement in St. Petersburg, which
was essentially evangelical, with a methodistical tinge, and which
soon seized upon all the strata of the population in the capital.
Substantially it was a religious revival from the dry-as-dust Greek
church similar to that which in the sixteenth century turned against
the Romish church in Germany and in Switzerland. The Gospel was to
Pashkov himself new, good tidings, and as such he carried it into the
distinguished circles which he assembled at his palace on the Neva,
and as such he brought it amongst the crowds of cabmen, labourers,
laundresses, etc., whom he called from the streets to hear the news.
Pashkov's name was known by the last crossing-sweeper, and many
thousands blessed him, some because they had been moved by the
religious spirit which glowed in him, others because they knew of the
many charitable institutions which he had founded with his own means
and with the help of rich men and women friends. I myself shall never
forget the few hours which I spent in conversation with this man,
simple in spirit as in education, but so rich in religious feeling and
in true humility. To me he could offer nothing new, for all that to
him was new I, the son of Lutheran parents, had known from my
childhood days. But what was new to me was the phenomenon of a man who
had belonged for fifty years to a Christian Church and had only now
discovered as something new what is familiar to every member of an
evangelical community as the sum and substance of Christian teaching.
To him the Gospel itself was something new, a revelation.
"This has been the case of many thousands in the Russian Empire when
they opened the Bible for the first time. The spark flew from village
to village and took fire, because the people were thirsting for a
spiritual, religious life, because it brought comfort in their
material misery, and food for their minds. Holy Vladimir, with his
Byzantine priests, brought no living Christianity into the land, and
the common Russian had not been brought into contact with it during
the nine hundred years which have elapsed since. Wherever it
penetrates to-day with the Bible, there its effect is apparent. It is
such as the best Government could not accomplish by worldly means
alone. But it is diametrically opposed to the State Church; it leads
to secession from orthodoxy, and the State has entered upon a crusade
against it."*
*"Russia of To-day," by Baron E. von der Bruggen. Translated by M.
Sandwith, London, 1904. Pages 165-167.
In "The Power of Darkness, "Ivan Ilyich," and the "Kreuzer Sonata."
Tolstoi has shown the way of Death. In "Resurrection" he has shown the
way of Life. The most sensational of all his books is the "Kreuzer
Sonata;" it was generally misunderstood, and from that time some of
his friends walked no more with him. By a curious freak of the powers
of this world, it was for a time taboo in the United States, and its
passage by post was forbidden; then the matter was taken to the
courts, and a certain upright judge declared that so far from the book
being vicious, it condemned vice and immorality on every page. He not
only removed the ban, but recommended its wider circulation. The
circumstances that gave rise to its composition are described in an
exceedingly interesting article in the New York "Sun" for 10 October
1909, "A Visit to Count Leo Tolstoi in 1887," by Madame Nadine Helbig.
The whole article should be read for the charming picture it gives of
the patriarchal happiness at Yasnaya Polyana, and while she saw
clearly the real comfort enjoyed by Tolstoi, which aroused the fierce
wrath of Merezhkovski, she proved also how much good was accomplished
by the old novelist in the course of a single average day.
"Never shall I forget the evening when the young Polish violinist,
whom I have already mentioned, asked me to play with him Beethoven's
sonata for piano and violin, dedicated to Kreuzer, his favourite
piece, which he had long been unable to play for want of a good piano
player.
"Tolstoi listened with growing attention. He had the first movement
played again, and after the last note of the sonata he went out
quietly without saying, as usual, good night to his family and guests.
"That night was created the 'Kreuzer Sonata' in all its wild force.
Shortly afterward he sent me in Rome the manuscript of it. Tolstoi was
the best listener whom I have ever had the luck to play to. He forgot
himself and his surroundings. His expression changed with the music.
Tears ran down his cheeks at some beautiful adagio, and he would say,
'Tania, just give me a fresh handkerchief; I must have got a cold
to-day.' I had to play generally Beethoven and Schumann to him. He did
not approve of Bach, and on the other hand you could make him raving
mad with Liszt, and still more with Wagner."
Many hundreds of amateur players have struggled through the music of
the "Kreuzer Sonata," trying vainly to see in it what Tolstoi declared
it means. Of course the significance attached to it by Tolstoi existed
only in his vivid imagination, Beethoven being the healthiest of all
great composers. If the novelist had really wished to describe sensual
music, he would have made a much more felicitous choice of "Tristan
und Isolde."
Although his own married life was until the last years happy as man
could wish, Tolstoi introduced into the "Kreuzer Sonata" passages from
his own existence. When Posdnichev is engaged, he gives his fiancee
his memoirs, containing a truthful account of his various liaisons.
She is in utter despair, and for a time thinks of breaking off the
engagement. All this was literally true of the author himself. When a
boy, the hero was led to a house of ill-fame by a friend of his
brother, "a very gay student, one of those who are called good
fellows." This reminds us of a precisely similar attempt described by
Tolstoi in "Youth." Furthermore, Posdnichev's self-righteousness in
the fact that although he had been dissipated, he determined to be
faithful to his wife, was literally and psychologically true in
Tolstoi's own life.
The "Kreuzer Sonata" shows no diminution of Tolstoi's realistic power:
the opening scenes on the train, the analysis of the hero's mind
during the early years of his married life, and especially the murder,
all betray the familiar power of simplicity and fidelity to detail.
The passage of the blade through the corset and then into something
soft has that sensual realism so characteristic of all Tolstoi's
descriptions of bodily sensations. The book is a work of art, and
contains many reflections and bitter accusations against society that
are founded on the truth.
The moral significance of the story is perfectly clear--that men who
are constantly immoral before marriage need not expect happiness in
married life. It is a great pity that Tolstoi did not let the powerful
little novel speak for itself, and that he allowed himself to be
goaded into an explanatory and defensive commentary by the thousands
of enquiring letters from foolish readers. Much of the commentary
contains sound advice, but it leads off into that reductio ad absurdum
so characteristic of Russian thought.
Many of the tracts and parables that Tolstoi wrote are true works of
art, with a Biblical directness and simplicity of style. Their effect
outside of Russia is caused fully as much by their literary style as
by their teaching. I remember an undergraduate, who, reading "Where
Love is there God is Also," said that he was tremendously excited when
the old shoemaker lost his spectacles, and had no peace of mind till
he found them again. This is unconscious testimony to Tolstoi's power
of making trivial events seem real.
The long novel, "Resurrection," is, as Mr. Maude, the English
translator, shows, not merely a story, but a general summary of all
the final conclusions about life reached by its author. The English
volume actually has an "Index to Social Questions, Types," etc.,
giving the pages where the author's views on all such topics are
expressed in the book. Apart from the great transformation wrought in
the character of the hero, which is the motive of the work, there are
countless passages which show the genius of the author, still burning
brightly in his old age. The difference between the Easter kiss and
the kiss of lust is one of the most powerful instances of analysis,
and may be taken as a symbol of the whole work. And the depiction of
the sportsman's feelings when he brings down a wounded bird, half
shame and half rage, will startle and impress every man who has
carried a gun.
"Resurrection" teaches directly what Tolstoi always taught--what he
taught less directly, but with even greater art, in "Anna Karenina."
In reading this work of his old age, we cannot help thinking of what
Carlyle said of the octogenarian Goethe: "See how in that great mind,
beaming in mildest mellow splendour, beaming, if also trembling, like
a great sun on the verge of the horizon, near now to its long
farewell, all these things were illuminated and illustrated."
VI
GORKI
Gorki went up like the sky-rocket, and seems to have had the
traditional descent. From 1900 to 1906 everybody was talking about
him; since 1906 one scarcely hears mention of his name. He was
ridiculously overpraised, but he ought not to be forgotten. As an
artist, he will not bear a moment's comparison with Andreev; but some
of his short stories and his play, "The Night Asylum," have the
genuine Russian note of reality, and a rude strength much too great
for its owner's control. He has never written a successful long novel,
and his plays have no coherence; but, after all, the man has the real
thing--vitality.
Just at the moment when Chekhov appeared to stand at the head of young
Russian writers, Gorki appeared, and his fame swept from one end of
the world to the other. In Russia, his public was second in numbers
only to Tolstoi's; Kuprin and Andreev both dedicated books to him; in
Germany, France, England, and America, he became literally a household
word. It is probable that there were a thousand foreigners who knew
his name, to one who had heard of Chekhov. Compared with Chekhov, he
had more matter and less art.
His true name, which comparatively few have ever heard, is Alexei
Maximovich Peshkov. "This name," said M. de Vogue, "will remain
forever buried in the parish register." He chose to write under the
name Gorki, which means "bitter," a happy appellation for this modern
Ishmaelite. He was born in 1869, at Nizhni Novgorod, in a dyer's shop.
He lost both father and mother when he was a child, but his real
mother was the river Volga, on whose banks he was born, and on whose
broad breast he has found the only repose he understands. The little
boy was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but ran away, as he did from a
subsequent employer. By a curious irony of fate, this atheist learned
to read out of a prayer-book, and this iconoclast was for a time
engaged in the manufacture of ikons, holy images. As the aristocrat
Turgenev learned Russian from a house servant, Gorki obtained his love
for literature from a cook. This happened on a steamer on the great
river, where Gorki was employed as an assistant in the galley. The
cook was a rough giant, who spent all his spare moments reading,
having an old trunk full of books. It was a miscellaneous assortment,
containing Lives of Saints, stories by Dumas pere, and fortunately
some works by Gogol. This literature gave him a thirst for learning,
and when he was sixteen he went to Kazan, a town on the Volga, where
Tolstoi had studied at the University. He had the notion that
literature and learning were there distributed free to the famished,
like bread in times of famine. He was quickly undeceived; and instead
of receiving intellectual food, he was forced to work in a baker's
shop, for a miserable pittance. These were the darkest days of his
life, and in one of his most powerful stories he has reflected the
wretched daily and nightly toil in a bakery.
Then he went on the road, and became a tramp, doing all kinds of odd
jobs, from peddling to hard manual labour on wharves and railways. At
the age of nineteen, weary of life, he shot himself, but recovered.
Then he followed the Volga to the Black Sea, unconsciously collecting
the material that in a very few years he was to give to the world. In
1892, when twenty-three years old, he succeeded in getting some of his
sketches printed in newspapers. The next year he had the good fortune
to meet at Nizhni Novgorod the famous Russian author Korolenko.
Korolenko was greatly impressed by the young vagabond, believed in his
powers, and gave timely and valuable help. With the older man's
influence, Gorki succeeded in obtaining the entree to the St.
Petersburg magazines; and while the Russian critics were at a loss how
to regard the new genius, the public went wild. He visited the capital
in 1899, and there was intense curiosity to see and to hear him. A
great hall was engaged, and when he mounted the platform to read, the
young people in the audience went into a frenzy.
Gorki has been repeatedly imprisoned for his revolutionary ideas and
efforts; in 1906, at the very apex of his fame, he came to the United
States to collect funds for the cause. The whole country was eager to
receive and to give, and his advent in New York was a notable
occasion. He insisted that he came, not as an anarchist, but as a
socialist, that his mission in the world was not to destroy, but to
fulfil. At first, he was full of enthusiasm about America and New
York, and American writers; he was tremendously impressed by the
sky-scrapers, by the intense activity of the people, and by the Hudson
River, which, as he regarded from his hotel windows, reminded him of
the Volga. He said America would be the first nation to give mankind a
true government, and that its citizens were the incarnation of
progress. He declared that Mark Twain was even more popular in Russia
than in America, that it was "a part of the national Russian
education" to read him, and that he himself had read every translation
of his books.
Incidentally he spoke of his favourite world-authors. Shakespeare he
put first of all, saying he was "staggering," an opinion quite
different from that of Tolstoi. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the
philosophers he liked the best. Byron and Heine he read in preference
to most other poets, for there is an invincible strain of lyric
romanticism in this Russian tramp, as there was in his master Gogol.
Flaubert, Goethe, and Dumas pere he read with delight.