novelist, though his plays are only beginning to be known outside of
his native land. They resemble the dramatic work of Gorki, Andreev,
and for that matter of practically all Russian playwrights, in being
formless and having no true movement; but they contain some of his
best Russian portraits, and some of his most subtle interpretations of
Russian national life. Russian drama does not compare for an instant
with Russian fiction: I have never read a single well-constructed
Russian play except "Revizor." Most of them are dull to a foreign
reader, and leave him cold and weary. Mr. Baring, in his book
"Landmarks in Russian Literature," has an excellent chapter on the
plays of Chekhov, which partially explains the difficulties an
outsider has in studying Russian drama. But this chapter, like the
other parts of his book, is marred by exaggeration. He says,
"Chekhov's plays are as interesting to read as the work of any
first-rate novelist." And a few sentences farther in the same
paragraph, he adds, "Chekhov's plays are a thousand times more
interesting to see on the stage than they are to read." Any one who
believes Mr. Baring's statement, and starts to read Chekhov's dramas
with the faith that they are as interesting as "Anna Karenina," will
be sadly disappointed. And if on the stage they are a thousand times
more interesting to see than "Anna Karenina" is to read, they must
indeed be thrilling. It is, however, perfectly true that a foreigner
cannot judge the real value of Russian plays by reading them. We ought
to hear them performed by a Russian company. That wonderful actress,
Madame Komisarzhevskaya, who was lately followed to her grave by an
immense concourse of weeping Russians, gave a performance of "The
Cherry Garden" which stirred the whole nation. Madame Nazimova has
said that Chekhov is her favourite writer, but that his plays could
not possibly succeed in America, unless every part, even the minor
ones, could be interpreted by a brilliant actor.
Chekhov is durch und durch echt russisch: no one but a Russian would
ever have conceived such characters, or reported such conversations.
We often wonder that physical exercise and bodily recreation are so
conspicuously absent from Russian books. But we should remember that a
Russian conversation is one of the most violent forms of physical
exercise, as it is among the French and Italians. Although Chekhov
belongs to our day, and represents contemporary Russia, he stands in
the middle of the highway of Russian fiction, and in his method of art
harks back to the great masters. He perhaps resembles Turgenev more
than any other of his predecessors, but he is only a faint echo. He is
like Turgenev in the delicacy and in the aloofness of his art. He has
at times that combination of the absolutely real with the absolutely
fantastic that is so characteristic of Gogol: one of his best stories,
"The Black Monk," might have been written by the author of "The Cloak"
and "The Portrait." He is like Dostoevski in his uncompromising
depiction of utter degradation; but he has little of Dostoevski's
glowing sympathy and heartpower. He resembles Tolstoi least of all.
The two chief features of Tolstoi's work--self-revelation and moral
teaching--must have been abhorrent to Chekhov, for his stories tell us
almost nothing about himself and his own opinions, and they teach
nothing. His art is impersonal, and he is content with mere diagnosis.
His only point of contact with Tolstoi is his grim fidelity to detail,
the peculiar Russian realism common to every Russian novelist. Tolstoi
said that Chekhov resembled Guy de Maupassant. This is entirely wide
of the mark. He resembles Guy de Maupassant merely in the fact that,
like the Frenchman, he wrote short stories.
Among recent writers Chekhov is at the farthest remove from his friend
Gorki, and most akin to Andreev. It is probable that Andreev learned
something from him. Unlike Turgenev, both Chekhov and Andreev study
mental disease. Their best characters are abnormal; they have some
fatal taint in the mind which turns this goodly frame, the earth, into
a sterile promontory; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
into a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Neither Chekhov nor
Andreev have attempted to lift that black pall of despair that hangs
over Russian fiction.
Just as the austere, intellectual beauty of Greek drama forms striking
evidence of the extraordinarily high average of culture in Athenian
life, so the success of an author like Chekhov is abundant proof of
the immense number of readers of truly cultivated taste that are
scattered over Holy Russia. For Chekhov's stories are exclusively
intellectual and subtle. They appeal only to the mind, not to the
passions nor to any love of sensation. In many of them he deliberately
avoids climaxes and all varieties of artificial effect. He would be
simply incomprehensible to the millions of Americans who delight in
musical comedy and in pseudo-historical romance. He wrote only for the
elect, for those who have behind them years of culture and habits of
consecutive thought. That such a man should have a vogue in Russia
such as a cheap romancer enjoys in America, is in itself a significant
and painful fact.
Chekhov's position in the main line of Russian literature and his
likeness to Turgenev are both evident when we study his analysis of
the Russian temperament. His verdict is exactly the same as that given
by Turgenev and Sienkiewicz--slave improductivite. A majority of his
chief characters are Rudins. They suffer from internal injuries,
caused by a diseased will. In his story called "On the Way" the hero
remarks, "Nature has set in every Russian an enquiring mind, a
tendency to speculation, and extraordinary capacity for belief; but
all these are broken into dust against our improvidence, indolence,
and fantastic triviality."*
*The citations from Chekhov are from the translations by Long.
The novelist who wrote that sentence was a physician as well as a man
of letters. It is a professional diagnosis of the national sickness of
mind, which produces sickness of heart.
It is absurd to join in the chorus that calls Turgenev old-fashioned,
when we find his words accurately, if faintly, echoed by a Russian who
died in 1904! Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and wishes
have always been the legitimate fathers of thoughts. My friend and
colleague, Mr. Mandell, the translator of "The Cherry Garden,"* says
that the play indicates that the useless people are dying away, "and
thus making room for the regenerated young generation which is full of
hope and strength to make a fruitful cherry garden of Russia for the
Russian people . . . the prospects of realisation are now bright. But
how soon will this become a practical reality? Let us hope in the near
future!" Yes, let us hope, as Russians hoped in 1870 and in 1900.
Kropotkin says that Chekhov gave an "impressive parting word" to the
old generation, and that we are now on the eve of the "new types which
already are budding in life." Gorki has violently protested against
the irresolute Slav, and Artsybashev has given us in Jurii the Russian
as he is (1903) and in Sanin the Russian as he ought to be. But a
disease obstinately remains a disease until it is cured, and it cannot
be cured by hope or by protest.
*Published at Yale University by the "Yale Courant."
Chekhov was a physician and an invalid; he saw sickness without and
sickness within. Small wonder that his stories deal with the unhealthy
and the doomed. For just as Artsybashev's tuberculosis has made him
create the modern Tamburlaine as a mental enjoyment of physical
activity, so the less turbulent nature of Chekhov has made him
reproduce in his creatures of the imagination his own sufferings and
fears. I think he was afraid of mental as well as physical decay, for
he has studied insanity with the same assiduity as that displayed by
Andreev in his nerve-wrecking story "A Dilemma."
In "Ward No. 6," which no one should read late at night, Chekhov has
given us a picture of an insane asylum, which, if the conditions there
depicted are true to life, would indicate that some parts of Russia
have not advanced one step since Gogol wrote "Revizor." The patients
are beaten and hammered into insensibility by a brutal keeper; they
live amidst intolerable filth. The attending physician is a typical
Russian, who sees clearly the horror and abomination of the place, but
has not sufficient will-power to make a change. He is fascinated by
one of the patients, with whom he talks for hours. His fondness for
this man leads his friends to believe that he is insane, and they
begin to treat him with that humouring condescension and pity which
would be sufficient in itself to drive a man out of his mind. He is
finally invited by his younger colleague to visit the asylum to
examine a strange case; when he reaches the building, he himself is
shoved into Ward No. 6, and realises that the doors are shut upon him
forever. He is obliged to occupy a bed in the same filthy den where he
has so often visited the other patients, and his night-gown has a
slimy smell of dried fish. In about twenty-four hours he dies, but in
those hours he goes through a hell of physical and mental torment.
The fear of death, which to an intensely intellectual people like the
Russians, is an obsession of terror, and shadows all their literature,
--it appears all through Tolstoi's diary and novels,--is analysed in
many forms by Chekhov. In "Ward No. 6" Chekhov pays his respects to
Tolstoi's creed of self-denial, through the lips of the doctor's
favourite madman. "A creed which teaches indifference to wealth,
indifference to the conveniences of life, and contempt for suffering
is quite incomprehensible to the great majority who never knew either
wealth or the conveniences of life, and to whom contempt for suffering
would mean contempt for their own lives, which are made up of feelings
of hunger, cold, loss, insult, and a Hamlet-like terror of death. All
life lies in these feelings, and life may be hated or wearied of, but
never despised. Yes, I repeat it, the teachings of the Stoics can
never have a future; from the beginning of time, life has consisted in
sensibility to pain and response to irritation."
No better indictment has ever been made against those to whom
self-denial and renunciation are merely a luxurious attitude of the
mind.
Chekhov's sympathy with Imagination and his hatred for commonplace
folk who stupidly try to repress its manifestations are shown again
and again in his tales. He loves especially the imagination of
children; and he shows them as infinitely wiser than their practical
parents. In the short sketch "An Event" the children are wild with
delight over the advent of three kittens, and cannot understand their
father's disgust for the little beasts, and his cruel indifference to
their welfare. The cat is their mother, that they know; but who is the
father? The kittens must have a father, so the children drag out the
wooden rocking-horse, and place him beside his wife and offspring.
In the story "At Home" the father's bewilderment at the creative
imagination and the curious caprices of his little boy's mind is
tenderly and beautifully described. The father knows he is not
bringing him up wisely, but is utterly at a loss how to go at the
problem, having none of the intuitive sympathy of a woman. The boy is
busy with his pencil, and represents sounds by shapes, letters by
colours. For example, "the sound of an orchestra he drew as a round,
smoky spot; whistling as a spiral thread." In making letters, he
always painted L yellow, M red, and A black. He draws a picture of a
house with a soldier standing in front of it. The father rebukes him
for bad perspective, and tells him that the soldier in his picture is
taller than the house. But the boy replies, "If you drew the soldier
smaller, you wouldn't be able to see his eyes."
One of Chekhov's favourite pastimes was gardening. This, perhaps,
accounts for his location of the scene in his comedy "The Cherry
Garden," where a business-like man, who had once been a serf, just
like the dramatist's own father, has prospered sufficiently to buy the
orchard from the improvident and highly educated owners; and for all
the details about fruit-gardening given in the powerful story "The
Black Monk." This story infallibly reminds one of Gogol. A man has
repeatedly a vision of a black monk, who visits him through the air,
with whom he carries on long conversations, and who inspires him with
great thoughts and ideals. His wife and friends of course think he is
crazy, and instead of allowing him to continue his intercourse with
the familiar spirit, they persuade him he is ill, and make him take
medicine. The result is wholesale tragedy. His life is ruined, his
wife is separated from him; at last he dies. The idea seems to be that
he should not have been disobedient unto the heavenly vision.
Imagination and inspiration are necessary to life; they are what
separate man from the beasts that perish. The monk asks him, "How do
you know that the men of genius whom all the world trusts have not
also seen visions?"
Chekhov is eternally at war with the practical, with the
narrow-minded, with the commonplace. Where there is no vision, the
people perish.
Professor Bruckner has well said that Chekhov was by profession a
physician, but an artist by the grace of God. He was indeed an
exquisite artist, and if his place in Russian literature is not large,
it seems permanent. He does not rank among the greatest. He lacks the
tremendous force of Tolstoi, the flawless perfection of Turgenev, and
the mighty world-embracing sympathy of Great-heart Dostoevski. But he
is a faithful interpreter of Russian life, and although his art was
objective, one cannot help feeling the essential goodness of the man
behind his work, and loving him for it.
VIII
ARTSYBASHEV
Not the greatest, but the most sensational, novel published in Russia
during the last five years is "Sanin," by Artsybashev. It is not
sensational in the incidents, though two men commit suicide, and two
girls are ruined; it is sensational in its ideas. To make a sensation
in contemporary Russian literature is an achievement, where pathology
is now rampant. But Artsybashev accomplished it, and his novel made a
tremendous noise, the echoes of which quickly were heard all over
curious and eclectic Germany, and have even stirred Paris. Since the
failure of the Revolution, there has been a marked revolt in Russia
against three great ideas that have at different times dominated
Russian literature: the quiet pessimism of Turgenev, the Christian
non-resistance religion of Tolstoi, and the familiar Russian type of
will-less philosophy. Even before the Revolution Gorki had expressed
the spirit of revolt; but his position, extreme as it appears to an
Anglo-Saxon, has been left far behind by Artsybashev, who, with the
genuine Russian love of the reductio ad absurdum, has reached the
farthest limits of moral anarchy in the creation of his hero Sanin.
In an admirable article in the "Westminster Gazette," for 14 May 1910,
by the accomplished scholar and critic, Mr. R. C. Long, called "The
Literature of Self-assertion," we obtain a strong smell of the
hell-broth now boiling in Russian literature. "In the Spring of 1909,
an exhibition was held in the Russian ministry of the Interior of
specimen copies of all books and brochures issued in 1908, to the
number of 70,841,000. How many different books were exhibited the
writer does not know, but he lately came upon an essay by the critic
Ismailoff, in which it was said that there were on exhibition a
thousand different sensational novels, classed as 'Nat Pinkerton and
Sherlock Holmes literature,' with such expressive titles as 'The
Hanged,' 'The Chokers,' 'The Corpse Disinterred,' and 'The
Expropriators.' Ismailoff comments on this as sign and portent. Russia
always had her literature of adventure, and Russian novels of manners
and of psychology became known to Westerners merely because they were
the best, and by no means because they were the only books that
appeared. The popular taste was formerly met with naive and outrageous
'lubotchniya'-books. The new craze for 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock
Holmes' stories is something quite different. It foreshadows a
complete change in the psychosis of the Russian reader, the decay of
the literature of passivity, and the rise of a new literature of
action and physical revolt. The literature of passivity reached its
height with the (sic) Chekhov. The best representative of the
transition from Chekhov to the new literature of self-assertion is
Maxim Gorki's friend, Leonid Andreev. . . .
"These have got clear away from the humble, ineffectual individual,
'crushed by life.' Full of learned philosophies from Max Stirner and
Nietzsche, they preach, in Stirner's words, 'the absolute independence
of the individual, master of himself, and of all things.' 'The death
of "Everyday-ism,"' the 'resurrection of myth,' 'orgiasm,' 'Mystical
Anarchism,' and 'universalist individualism' are some of the
shibboleths of these new writers, who are mostly very young, very
clever, and profoundly convinced that they are even cleverer than they
are.
"Anarchism, posing as self-assertion, is the note in most recent
Russian literature, as, indeed, it is in Russian life."
The most powerful among this school of writers, and the only one who
can perhaps be called a man of genius, is Michael Artsybashev. He came
honestly by his hot, impulsive temperament, being, like Gogol, a man
of the South. He was born in 1878. He says of himself: "I am Tartar in
name and in origin, but not a pure-blooded one. In my veins runs
Russian, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. I am glad to name as one
of my ancestors the famous Pole, Kosciusko, who was my maternal
great-grandfather. My father, a retired officer, was a landed
proprietor with very little income. I was only three years old when my
mother died. As a legacy, she bequeathed to me tuberculosis. . . . I
am now living in the Crimea and trying to get well, but with little
faith in my recovery."
"Sanin" appeared at the psychological moment, late in the year 1907.
The Revolution was a failure, and it being impossible to fight the
government or to obtain political liberty, people in Russia of all
classes were ready for a revolt against moral law, the religion of
self-denial, and all the conventions established by society,
education, and the church. At this moment of general desperation and
smouldering rage, appeared a work written with great power and great
art, deifying the natural instincts of man, incarnating the spirit of
liberty in a hero who despises all so-called morality as absurd
tyranny. It was a bold attempt to marshal the animal instincts of
humanity, terrifically strong as they are even in the best citizens,
against every moral and prudential restraint. The effect of the book
will probably not last very long,--already it has been called an
ephemeral sensation,--but it was immediate and tremendous. It was
especially powerful among university students and high school boys and
girls--the "Sanin-morals" of undergraduates were alluded to in a
speech in the Duma.
But although the book was published at the psychological moment, it
was written with no reference to any post-revolution spirit. For
Artsybashev composed his novel in 1903, when he was twenty-four years
old. He tried in vain to induce publishers to print it, and
fortunately for him, was obliged to wait until 1907, when the time
happened to be exactly ripe.
The novel has been allowed to circulate in Russia, because it shows
absolutely no sympathy with the Revolution or with the spirit of
political liberty. Men who waste their time in the discussion of
political rights or in the endeavour to obtain them are ridiculed by
Sanin. The summum bonum is personal, individual happiness, the
complete gratification of desire. Thus, those who are working for the
enfranchisement of the Russian people, for relief from the
bureaucracy, and for more political independence, not only have no
sympathy with the book--they hate it, because it treats their efforts
with contempt. Some of them have gone so far as to express the belief
that the author is in a conspiracy with the government to bring
ridicule on their cause, and to defeat their ever living hopes of
better days. However this may be, Sanin is not in the least a
politically revolutionary book, and critics of that school see no real
talent or literary power in its pages.
But, sinister and damnable as its tendency is, the novel is written
with extraordinary skill, and Artsybashev is a man to be reckoned
with. The style has that simplicity and directness so characteristic
of Russian realism, and the characters are by no means sign-posts of
various opinions; they are living and breathing human beings. I am
sorry that such a book as Sanin has ever been written; but it cannot
be black-balled from the republic of letters.
It is possible that it is a florescence not merely of the author's
genius, but of his sickness. The glorification of Sanin's bodily
strength, of Karsavina's female voluptuousness, and the loud call to
physical joy which rings through the work may be an emanation of
tuberculosis as well as that of healthy mental conviction. Shut out
from active happiness, Artsybashev may have taken this method of
vicarious delight.
The bitterness of his own enforced resignation of active happiness and
the terror inspired by his own disease are incarnated in a decidedly
interesting character, Semionov, who, although still able to walk
about when we first see him, is dying of consumption. He has none of
the hopefulness and cheerfulness so often symptomatic of that malady;
he is peevish, irritable, and at times enraged by contact with his
healthy friends. After a frightful attack of coughing, he says: "I
often think that soon I shall be lying in complete darkness. You
understand, with my nose fallen in and my limbs decayed. And above me,
where you are on the earth, everything will go on, exactly as it does
now, while I still am permitted to see it. You will be living then,
you will look at this very moon, you will breathe, you will pass over
my grave; perhaps you will stop there a moment and despatch some
necessity. And I shall lie and become rotten."
His death at the hospital in the night, with his friends looking on,
is powerfully and minutely described. The fat, stupid priest goes
through the last ceremonies, and is dully amazed at the contempt he
receives from Sanin.
Sanin's beautiful sister Lyda is ruined by a worthless but entirely
conventional officer. Her remorse on finding that she is with child is
perfectly natural, but is ridiculed by her brother, who saves her from
suicide. He is not in the least ashamed of her conduct, and tells her
she has no reason for loss of pride; indeed, he does not think of
blaming the officer. He is ready to commit incest with his sister,
whose physical charm appeals to him; but she is not sufficiently
emancipated for that, so he advises her to get married with a friend
who loves her, before the child is born. This is finally
satisfactorily arranged. Later, Sanin, not because he disapproves of
the libertine officer's affair with his sister, but because he regards
the officer as a blockhead, treats him with scant courtesy; and the
officer, hidebound by convention, sees no way out but a challenge to a
duel. The scene when the two brother officers bring the formal
challenge to Sanin is the only scene in the novel marked by. genuine
humour, and is also the only scene where we are in complete sympathy
with the hero. One of the delegates has all the stiff courtesy and
ridiculous formality which he regards as entirely consistent with his
errand; the other is a big, blundering fellow, who has previously
announced himself as a disciple of Tolstoi. To Sanin's philosophy of
life, duelling is as absurd as religion, morality, or any other stupid
conventionality; and his cold, ruthless logic makes short work of the
polite phrases of the two ambassadors. Both are amazed at his positive
refusal to fight, and hardly know which way to turn; the disciple of
Tolstoi splutters with rage because Sanin shows up his inconsistency
with his creed; both try to treat him like an outcast, but make very
little progress. Sanin informs them that he will not fight a duel,
because he does not wish to take the officer's life, and because he
does not care to risk his own; but that if the officer attempts any
physical attack upon him in the street, he will thrash him on the
spot. Enraged and bewildered by Sanin's unconventional method of
dealing with the difficulty, the discomfited emissaries withdraw.
Later, the challenger meets Sanin in the street, and goaded to frenzy
by his calm and contemptuous stare, strikes him with a whip; he
immediately receives in the face a terrible blow from his adversary's
fist, delivered with all his colossal strength. A friend carries him
to his lodgings, and there he commits suicide. From the conventional
point of view, this was the only course left to him.