and inasmuch as all present were ignorant of the next day's
catastrophe, the account given of this love-feast in the New York
"Sun" is worth quoting. "Mark Twain and Gorki recognised each other
before they were introduced, but neither being able to understand the
language of the other, they simply grasped hands and held on more than
a minute. . . . Gorki said he had read Mark Twain's stories when he
was a boy, and that he had gotten much delight from them. Mark
declared that he also had been a reader and admirer of Gorki. The
smile of Gorki was broader and not so dry as the smile of Mark, but
both smiles were distinctly those of fellow-humorists who understood
each other. Gorki made a little speech which was translated by a
Russian who knew English. Gorki said he was glad to meet Mark Twain,
'world famous and in Russia the best known of American writers, a man
of tremendous force and convictions, who, when he hit, hit hard. I
have come to America to get acquainted with the American people and
ask their aid for my suffering countrymen who are fighting for
liberty. The despotism must be overthrown now, and what is needed is
money, money, money!' Mark said he was glad to meet Gorki, adding, 'If
we can help to create the Russian republic, let us start in right away
and do it. The fighting may have to be postponed awhile, but meanwhile
we can keep our hearts on the matter and we can assist the Russians in
being free.'"
A committee was formed to raise funds, and then came the explosion,
striking evidence of the enormous difference between the American and
the Continental point of view in morals. With characteristic Russian
impracticability, Gorki had come to America with a woman whom he
introduced as his wife; but it appeared that his legal wife was in
Russia, and that his attractive and accomplished companion was
somebody else. This fact, which honestly seemed to Gorki an incident
of no importance, took on a prodigious shape. This single mistake cost
the Russian revolutionary cause an enormous sum of money, and may have
altered history. Gorki was expelled from his hotel, and refused
admittance to others; unkindest cut of all, Mark Twain, whose absence
of religious belief had made Gorki believe him to be altogether
emancipated from prejudices, positively refused to have anything more
to do with him. As Gorki had said, "When Mark Twain hit, he hit hard."
Turn whither he would, every door was slammed in his face. I do not
think he has ever recovered from the blank amazement caused by the
American change of front. His golden opportunity was gone, and he
departed for Italy, shaking the dust of America off his feet, and
roundly cursing the nation that he had just declared to be the
incarnation of progress. The affair unquestionably has its ludicrous
side, but it was a terrible blow to the revolutionists. Many of them
believed that the trap was sprung by the government party.
Gorki's full-length novels are far from successful works of art. They
have all the incoherence and slipshod workmanship of Dostoevski,
without the latter's glow of brotherly love. His first real novel,
"Foma Gordeev," an epic of the Volga, has many beautiful descriptive
passages, really lyric and idyllic in tone, mingled with an incredible
amount of drivel. The character who plays the title-role is a typical
Russian windbag, irresolute and incapable, like so many Russian
heroes; but whether drunk or sober, he is destitute of charm. He is
both dreary and dirty. The opening chapters are written with great
spirit, and the reader is full of happy expectation. One goes farther
and fares worse. After the first hundred pages, the book is a
prolonged anti-climax, desperately dull. Altogether the best passage
in the story is the description of the river in spring, impressive not
merely for its beauty and accuracy of language, but because the Volga
is interpreted as a symbol of the spirit of the Russian people, with
vast but unawakened possibilities.
"Between them, in a magnificent sweep, flowed the broad-breasted
Volga; triumphantly, without haste, flow her waters, conscious of
their unconquerable power; the hill-shore was reflected in them like a
dark shadow, but on the left side she was adorned with gold and
emerald velvet by the sandy borders of the reefs, and the broad
meadows. Now here, now there, on the hills, and in the meadows,
appeared villages, the sun sparkled in the window-panes of the
cottages, and upon the roofs of yellow straw; the crosses of the
churches gleamed through the foliage of the trees, the gray wings of
the mills rotated lazily through the air, the smoke from the chimneys
of a factory curled skyward in thick black wreaths. . . . On all sides
was the gleaming water, on all sides were space and freedom,
cheerfully green meadows, and graciously clear blue sky; in the quiet
motion of the water, restrained power could be felt; in the heaven
above it shone the beautiful sun, the air was saturated with the
fragrance of evergreen trees, and the fresh scent of foliage. The
shores advanced in greeting, soothing the eye and the soul with their
beauty, and new pictures were constantly unfolded upon them.
"On everything round about rested the stamp of a certain sluggishness:
everything--nature and people--lived awkwardly, lazily; but in this
laziness there was a certain peculiar grace, and it would seem that
behind the laziness was concealed a huge force, an unconquerable
force, as yet unconscious of itself, not having, as yet, created for
itself clear desires and aims. And the absence of consciousness in
this half-somnolent existence cast upon its whole beautiful expanse a
shade of melancholy. Submissive patience, the silent expectation of
something new and more active was audible even in the call of the
cuckoo, as it flew with the wind from the shore, over the river."*
*Isabel Hapgood's translation.
The novel Varenka Olessova is a tedious book of no importance. The
hero is, of course, the eternal Russian type, a man of good education
and no backbone: he lacks resolution, energy, will-power, and will
never accomplish anything. He has not even force enough to continue
his studies. Contrasted with him is the girl Varenka, a simple child
of nature, who prefers silly romances to Russian novels, and whose
virgin naivete is a constant puzzle to the conceited ass who does not
know whether he is in love with her or not. Indeed, he asks himself if
he is capable of love for any one. The only interesting pages in this
stupid story are concerned with a discussion on reading, between
Varenka and the young man, where her denunciation of Russian fiction
is, of course, meant to proclaim its true superiority. In response to
the question whether she reads Russian authors, the girl answers with
conviction: "Oh, yes! But I don't like them! They are so tiresome, so
tiresome! They always write about what I know already myself, and know
just as well as they do. They can't create anything interesting; with
them almost everything is true. . . . Now with the French, their
heroes are real heroes, they talk and act unlike men in actual life.
They are always brave, amorous, vivacious, while our heroes are simple
little men, without any warm feelings, without any beauty, pitiable,
just like ordinary men in real life. . . In Russian books, one cannot
understand at all why the men continue to live. What's the use of
writing books if the author has nothing remarkable to say?"
The long novel "Mother" is a good picture of life among the
working-people in a Russian factory, that is, life as seen through
Gorki's eyes; all cheerfulness and laughter are, of course, absent,
and we have presented a dull monotone of misery. The factory itself is
the villain of the story, and resembles some grotesque wild beast,
that daily devours the blood, bone, and marrow of the throng of
victims that enter its black jaws. The men, women, and children are
represented as utterly brutalised by toil; in their rare moments of
leisure, they fight and beat each other unmercifully, and even the
little children get dead drunk. Socialist and revolutionary propaganda
are secretly circulated among these stupefied folk, and much of the
narrative is taken up with the difficulties of accomplishing this
distribution; for the whole book itself is nothing but a revolutionary
tract. The characters, including the pitiful Mother herself, are not
vividly drawn, they are not alive, and one forgets them speedily; as
for plot, there is none, and the book closes with the brutal murder of
the old woman. It is a tedious, inartistic novel, with none of the
relief that would exist in actual life. Turgenev's poorest novel,
"Virgin Soil," which also gives us a picture of a factory, is
immensely superior from every point of view.
But if "Mother" is a dull book, "The Spy" is impossible. It is full of
meaningless and unutterably dreary jargon; its characters are sodden
with alcohol and bestial lusts. One abominable woman's fat body
spreads out on an arm-chair "like sour dough." And indeed, this novel
bears about the same relation to a finished work of art that sour
dough bears to a good loaf of bread. The characters are poorly
conceived, and the story is totally without movement. Not only is it
very badly written, it lacks even good material. The wretched boy,
whose idiotic states of mind are described one after the other, and
whose eventual suicide is clear from the start, is a disgusting whelp,
without any human interest. One longs for his death with murderous
intensity, and when, on the last page, he throws himself under the
train, the reader experiences a calm and sweet relief.
Much of Gorki's work is like Swift's poetry, powerful not because of
its cerebration or spiritual force, but powerful only from the
physical point of view, from its capacity to disgust. It appeals to
the nose and the stomach rather than to the mind and the heart. From
the medicinal standpoint, it may have a certain value. Swift sent a
lady one of his poems, and immediately after reading it, she was taken
violently sick. Not every poet has sufficient force to produce so
sudden an effect.
One man, invariably before reading the works of a famous French
author, put on his overshoes.
A distinguished American novelist has said that in Gorki "seems the
body without the soul of Russian fiction, and sodden with despair. The
soul of Russian fiction is the great thing." This is, indeed, the main
difference between his work and that of the giant Dostoevski. In the
latter's darkest scenes the spiritual flame is never extinct.
Gorki lacks either the patient industry or else the knowledge
necessary to make a good novel. He is seen at his best in short
stories, for his power comes in flashes. In "Twenty-six Men and a
Girl," the hideous tale that gave him his reputation in America, one
is conscious of the streak of genius that he undoubtedly possesses.
The helpless, impotent rage felt by the wretched men as they witness
the debauching of a girl's body and the damnation of her soul, is
clearly echoed in the reader's mind. Gorki's notes are always the most
thrilling when played below the range of the conventional instrument
of style. This is not low life, it is sub-life.
He is, after all, a student of sensational effect; and the short story
is peculiarly adapted to his natural talent. He cannot develop
characters, he cannot manage a large group, or handle a progressive
series of events. But in a lurid picture of the pit, in a flash-light
photograph of an underground den, in a sudden vision of a heap of
garbage with unspeakable creatures crawling over it, he is impressive.
I shall never forget the performance of "The Night Asylum, Nachtasyl,"
which I saw acted in Munich by one of the best stock companies in the
world, a combination of players from the "Neues" and "Kleines"
theaters in Berlin. In reading this utterly formless and incoherent
drama, I had been only slightly affected; but when it was presented on
the stage by actors who intelligently incarnated every single
character, the thing took on a terrible intensity. The persons are
all, except old Luka, who talks like a man in one of Tolstoi's recent
parables, dehumanised. The woman dying of consumption before our eyes,
the Baron in an advanced stage of paresis who continually rolls
imaginary cigarettes between his weak fingers, and the alcoholic actor
who has lost his memory are impossible to forget. I can hear that
actor now, as with stupid fascination he continually repeats the
diagnosis a physician once made of his case: "Mein Organismus ist
durch und durch mit Alcool vergiftet!"
Gorki, in spite of his zeal for the revolutionary cause, has no remedy
for the disease he calls Life. He is eaten up with rage at the world
in general, and tries to make us all share his disgust with it. But he
teaches us nothing; he has little to say that we can transmute into
anything valuable. This is perhaps the reason why the world has
temporarily, at any rate, lost interest in him. He was a new
sensation, he shocked us, and gave us strange thrills, after the
manner of new and unexpected sensations. Gorki came up on the literary
horizon like an evil storm, darkening the sky, casting an awful shadow
across the world's mirth and laughter, and making us shudder in the
cold and gloom..
Gorki completely satisfied that strange but almost universal desire of
well-fed and comfortable people to go slumming. In his books men and
women in fortunate circumstances had their curiosity satisfied--all
the world went slumming, with no discomfort, no expense, and no fear
of contagion. With no trouble at all, no personal inconvenience, we
learned the worst of all possible worsts on this puzzling and
interesting planet.
But we soon had enough of it, and our experienced and professional
guide failed to perceive the fact. He showed us more of the same
thing, and then some more. Such sights and sounds--authentic visions
and echoes of hell--merely repeated, began to lose their uncanny
fascination. The man who excited us became a bore. For the worst thing
about Gorki is his dull monotony, and vice is even more monotonous
than virtue, perhaps because it is more common. Open the pages of
almost any of his tales, it is always the same thing, the same
criminals, the same horrors, the same broken ejaculations and brutish
rage. Gorki has shown no capacity for development, no power of variety
and complexity. His passion for mere effect has reacted unfavourably
on himself.*
*His play "Die Letzten" was put on at the "Deutsches Theater," Berlin,
6 September 1910. The press despatch says, "The father is a police
inspector, drunkard, gambler, briber, bribe-taker, adulterer, and
robber."
Is it possible that success robbed him of something? He became a
popular author in conventional environment, surrounded by books and
modern luxuries, living in the pleasant climate of Italy, with no
anxiety about his meals and bed. Is it possible that wealth, comfort,
independence, and leisure have extinguished his original force? Has he
lost something of the picturesque attitude of Gorki the penniless
tramp? He is happily still a young man, and perhaps he may yet achieve
the masterpiece that ten years ago we so confidently expected from his
hands.
He is certainly not a great teacher, but he has the power to ask
awkward questions so characteristic of Andreev, Artsybashev, and
indeed of all Russian novelists. We cannot answer him with a shrug of
the shoulders or a sceptical smile. He shakes the foundations of our
fancied security by boldly questioning what we had come to regard as
axioms. As the late M. de Vogue remarked, when little children sit on
our knee and pelt us with questions that go to the roots of our
philosophy, we get rid of the bother of it by telling the children to
go away and play; but when a Tolstoi puts such questions, we cannot
get rid of him so easily. Russian novelists are a thorn in the side of
complacent optimism.
And yet surely, if life is not so good, as it conceivably might be, it
is not so darkly bitter as the Bitter One would have us believe. In a
short article that he wrote about one of the playgrounds of America,
he betrayed his own incurable jaundice. In the New York "Independent"
for 8 August 1907, Gorki published a brilliant impressionistic sketch
of Coney Island, and called it "Boredom." Gorki at Coney Island is
like Dante at a country fair. Thomas Carlyle was invited out to a
social dinner-party once upon a time, and when he came home he wrote
savagely in his diary of the flippant, light-hearted conversation
among the men and women about the festive board, saying, "to me
through those thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sat glaring." What a
charming guest he must have been on that particular occasion!
Gorki speaks poetically in his article of the "fantastic city all of
fire" that one sees at night. But as he mingles with the throng,
disgust fills his lonely heart.
"The public looks at them silently. It breathes in the moist air, and
feeds its soul with dismal ennui, which extinguishes thought as a wet,
dirty cloth extinguishes the fire of a smouldering coal."
Describing the sensations of the crowd before the tiger's cage, he
says:--
"The man runs about the cage, shoots his pistol and cracks his whip,
and shouts like a madman. His shouts are intended to hide his painful
dread of the animals. The crowd regards the capers of the man, and
waits in suspense for the fatal attack. They wait; unconsciously the
primitive instinct is awakened in them. They crave fight, they want to
feel the delicious shiver produced by the sight of two bodies
intertwining, the splutter of blood and pieces of torn, steaming human
flesh flying through the cage and falling on the floor. They want to
hear the roar, the cries, the shrieks of agony. . . . Then the crowd
breaks into dark pieces, and disperses over the slimy marsh of
boredom.
". . . You long to see a drunken man with a jovial face, who would
push and sing and bawl, happy because he is drunk, and sincerely
wishing all good people the same. . .
"In the glittering gossamer of its fantastic buildings, tens of
thousands of grey people, like patches on the ragged clothes of a
beggar, creep along with weary faces and colourless eyes. . . .
"But the precaution has been taken to blind the people, and they drink
in the vile poison with silent rapture. The poison contaminates their
souls. Boredom whirls about in an idle dance, expiring in the agony of
its inanition.
"One thing alone is good in the garish city: you can drink in hatred
to your soul's content, hatred sufficient to last throughout life,
hatred of the power of stupidity!"
This sketch is valuable not merely because of the impression of a
distinguished foreign writer of one of the sights of America, but
because it raises in our minds an obstinate doubt of his capacity to
tell the truth about life in general. Suppose a person who had never
seen Coney Island should read Gorki's vivid description of it, would
he really know anything about Coney Island? Of course not. The crowds
at Coney Island are as different from Gorki's description of them as
anything could well be. Now then, we who know the dregs of Russian
life only through Gorki's pictures, can we be certain that his
representations are accurate? Are they reliable history of fact, or
are they the revelations of a heart that knoweth its own bitterness?
VII
CHEKHOV
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, like Pushkin, Lermontov, Bielinski, and
Garshin, died young, and although he wrote a goodly number of plays
and stories which gave him a high reputation in Russia, he did not
live to enjoy international fame. This is partly owing to the nature
of his work, but more perhaps to the total eclipse of other
contemporary writers by Gorki. There are signs now that his delicate
and unpretentious art will outlast the sensational flare of the
other's reputation. Gorki himself has generously tried to help in the
perpetuation of Chekhov's name, by publishing a volume of personal
reminiscences of his dead friend.
Like Gogol and Artsybashev, Chekhov was a man of the South, being born
at Taganrog, a seaport on a gulf of the Black Sea, near the mouth of
the river Don. The date of his birth is the 17 January 1860. His
father was a clever serf, who, by good business foresight, bought his
freedom early in life. Although the father never had much education
himself, he gave his four children every possible advantage. Anton
studied in the Greek school, in his native city, and then entered the
Faculty of Medicine at the University of Moscow. "I don't well
remember why I chose the medical faculty," he remarked later, "but I
never regretted that choice." He took his degree, but entered upon no
regular practice. For a year he worked in a hospital in a small town
near Moscow, and in 1892 he freely offered his medical services during
an epidemic of cholera. His professional experiences were of immense
service to him in analysing the characters of various patients whom he
treated, and his scientific training he always believed helped him
greatly in the writing of his stories and plays, which are all
psychological studies.
He knew that he had not very long to live, for before he had really
begun his literary career signs of tuberculosis had plainly become
manifest. He died in Germany, the 2 July 1904, and his funeral at
Moscow was a national event.
Chekhov was a fine conversationalist, and fond of society; despite the
terrible gloom of his stories, he had distinct gifts as a wit, and was
a great favourite at dinner-parties and social gatherings. He joked
freely on his death-bed. He was warm-hearted and generous, and gave
money gladly to poor students and overworked school-teachers. His
innate modesty and lack of self-assertion made him very slow at
personal advertisement, and his dislike of Tolstoi's views prevented
at first an acquaintance with the old sage. Later, however, Tolstoi,
being deeply interested in him, sought him out, and the two writers
became friends. At this time many Russians believed that Chekhov was
the legitimate heir to Tolstoi's fame.
In 1879, while still in the University of Moscow, Chekhov began to
write short stories, of a more or less humorous nature, which were
published in reviews. His first book appeared in 1887. Some critics
sounded a note of warning, which he heeded. They said "it was too bad
that such a talented young man should spend all his time making people
laugh." This indirect advice, coupled with maturity of years and
incipient disease, changed the writer's point of view, and his best
known work is typically Russian in its tragic intensity.
In Russia he enjoyed an enormous vogue. Kropotkin says that his works
ran through ten to fourteen editions, and that his publications,
appearing as a supplement to a weekly magazine, had a circulation of
two hundred thousand copies in one year. Toward the end of his life
his stories captivated Germany, and one of the Berlin journalists
cried out, as the Germans have so often of Oscar Wilde, "Chekhov und
kein Ende!"