with limitless power of will, and the women characterised by weakness.
The four women in the story, Sanin's sister Lyda, the pretty
school-teacher Karsavina, Jurii's sister, engaged to a young
scientist, who during the engagement cordially invites her brother to
accompany him to a house of ill-fame, and the mother of Sanin, are all
thoroughly conventional, and are meant to be. They are living under
what Sanin regards as the tyranny of social convention. He treats his
mother's shocked amazement with brutal scorn; he ridicules Lyda's
shame at being enceinte; he seduces Karsavina, at the very time when
she is in love with Jurii, and reasons with cold patience against her
subsequent remorse. It is clear that Artsybashev believes that for
some time to come women will not accept the gospel of uncompromising
egoism.
The most interesting character in the book, apart from the hero, is
Jurii, who might easily have been a protagonist in one of Turgenev's
tragedies. He is the typical Russian, the highly educated young man
with a diseased will. He is characterised by that indecision which has
been the bane of so many Russians. All through the book he seeks in
vain for some philosophy of life, some guiding principle. He has
abandoned faith in religion, his former enthusiasm for political
freedom has cooled, but he simply cannot live without some leading
Idea. He is an acute sufferer from that mental sickness diagnosed by
nearly all writers of Russia. He envies and at the same time despises
Sanin for his cheerful energy. Finally, unable to escape from the
perplexities of his own thinking, he commits suicide. His friends
stand about his grave at the funeral, and one of them foolishly asks
Sanin to make some appropriate remarks. Sanin, who always says exactly
what he thinks, and abhors all forms of hypocrisy, delivers the
following funeral oration--heartily endorsed by the reader--in one
sentence: "The world has now one blockhead the less." The
horror-stricken consternation of his friends fills Sanin with such
scorn that he leaves the town, and we last see him in an open field in
the country, giving a glad shout of recognition to the dawn.
The motto that Artsybashev has placed at the beginning of the novel is
taken from Ecclesiastes vii. 29: "God hath made man upright: but they
have sought out many inventions." This same text was used by Kipling
as the title of one of his books, but used naturally in a quite
different way. The Devil has here cited Scripture for his purpose. The
hero of the novel is an absolutely sincere, frank, and courageous
Advocatus Diabou. He is invariably calm and collected; he never loses
his temper in an argument; he questions the most fundamental beliefs
and principles with remorseless logic. Two of his friends are arguing
about Christianity; "at least," says one, "you will not deny that its
influence has been good." "I don't deny that," says the other. Then
Sanin remarks quietly, "But I deny it!" and he adds, with a calmness
provoking to the two disputants, "Christianity has played an
abominable role in history, and the name of Jesus Christ will for some
time yet oppress humanity like a curse."
Sanin insists that it is not necessary to have any theory of life, or
to be guided by any principle; that God may exist or He may not; He
does not at any rate bother about us. The real rational life of man
should be exactly like a bird. He should be controlled wholly by the
desire of the moment. The bird wishes to alight on a branch, and so he
alights; then he wishes to fly, so he flies. That is rational,
declares Sanin; that is the way men and women should live, without
principles, without plans, and without regrets. Drunkenness and
adultery are nothing to be ashamed of, nor in any sense to be called
degrading. Nothing that gives pleasure can ever be degrading. The love
of strong drink and the lust for woman are not sins; in fact, there is
no such thing as sin. These passions are manly and natural, and what
is natural cannot be wrong. There is in Sanin's doctrine something of
Nietzsche and more of Rousseau.
Sanin himself is not at all a contemptible character. He is not
argumentative except when dragged into an argument; he does not
attempt to convert others to his views. He has the inner light which
we more often associate with Christian faith. In the midst of his
troubled and self-tortured comrades, Sanin stands like a pillar, calm,
unshakable. He has found absolute peace, absolute harmony with life.
He thinks, talks, and acts exactly as he chooses, without any regard
whatever to the convenience or happiness of any one else. There is
something refreshing about this perfectly healthy, clear-eyed, quiet,
composed, resolute man--whose way of life is utterly unaffected by
public opinion, who simply does not care a straw for anything or
anybody but himself. Thus he recognises his natural foe in
Christianity, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in His Russian
interpreter, Leo Tolstoi. For if Christianity teaches anything, it
teaches that man must live contrary to his natural instincts. The
endeavour of all so-called "new religions" is rootless, because it is
an attempt to adapt Christianity to modern human convenience. Much
better is Sanin's way: he sees clearly that no adaptation is possible,
and logically fights Christianity as the implacable enemy of the
natural man.
There are many indications that one of the great battle-grounds of
Christianity in the near future is to be the modern novel. For many
years there have been plenty of attacks on the supernatural side of
Christianity, and on Christianity as a religion; nearly all its
opponents, however, have treated its ethics, its practical teachings,
with respect. The novel "Sanin" is perhaps the boldest, but it is only
one of many attacks that are now being made on Christianity as a
system of morals; as was the case with the Greeks and Romans,
scepticism in morals follows hard on scepticism in religion. Those who
believe in Christianity ought to rejoice in this open and fair fight;
they ought to welcome it as a complete unmasking of the foe. If the
life according to "Sanin" is really practicable, if it is a good
substitute for the life according to the Christian Gospel, it is
desirable that it should be clearly set forth, and its working
capacity demonstrated. For the real test of Christianity, and the only
one given by its Founder, is its practical value as a way of life. It
can never be successfully attacked by historical research or by
destructive criticism--all such attacks leave it precisely as they
found it. Those who are determined to destroy Christianity, and among
its relentless foes have always been numbered men of great courage and
great ability, must prove that its promises of peace and rest to those
who really follow it are false, and that its influence on society and
on the individual is bad.
IX
ANDREEV
Leonid Andreev is at this moment regarded by many Russians as the
foremost literary artist among the younger school of writers. He was
born at Orel, the birthplace of Turgenev, in 1871, and is thus only
two years younger than Gorki. He began life as a lawyer at Moscow, but
according to his own statement, he had only one case, and lost that.
He very soon abandoned law for literature, as so many writers have
done, and his rise has been exceedingly rapid. He was appointed
police-court reporter on the Moscow "Courier," where he went through
the daily drudgery without attracting any attention. But when he
published in this newspaper a short story, Gorki sent a telegram to
the office, demanding to know the real name of the writer who signed
himself Leonid Andreev. He was informed that the signature was no
pseudonym. This notice from Gorki gave the young man immediate
prominence. Not long after, he published another story in the Russian
periodical "Life;" into the editor's rooms dashed the famous critic
Merezhkovski, who enquired whether it was Chekhov or Gorki that had
selected this assumed name.
Andreev himself says that he has learned much from Tolstoi, the great
Tolstoi of the sixties and seventies, also from Nietzsche, whom he
reads with enthusiasm, and whose most characteristic book, "Also
Sprach Zarathustra," he translated into Russian. He has read Poe with
profit, but he testifies that his greatest teacher in composition is
the Bible. In a letter to a young admirer, he wrote: "I thank you for
your kind dedication. . . . I note that in one place you write about
the Bible. Yes, that is the best teacher of all--the Bible."*
*Most of the biographical information in this paragraph I have taken
from an interesting article in "The Independent" for 29 July 1909, by
Ivan Lavretski.
Andreev has the gift of admiration, and loves to render homage where
homage is due, having dedicated his first book to Gorki, and his story
of "The Seven Who Were Hanged" to Tolstoi. His style, while marked by
the typical yet always startling Russian simplicity, is nevertheless
entirely his own, and all his tales and plays are stamped by powerful
individuality. He is fast becoming an international celebrity. His
terrible picture of war, "The Red Laugh," has been translated into
German, French, and English, two of his dramas, "Anathema" and "To the
Stars," have been published in America, and other of his short stories
are known everywhere in Germany.
The higher the scale in human intelligence, the more horrible and the
more ridiculous does war appear. That men engaged in peaceful and
intellectual pursuits should leave their families, their congenial
work, their pleasant associations, and go out to torture and murder
men of similar tastes and activities, and become themselves
transformed into hideous wild beasts, has a combination of horror and
absurdity that peculiarly impresses a people so highly sensitive, so
thoroughly intellectual, and so kind-hearted as the Russians. All
Russian war-literature, and there is much of it, points back to
Tolstoi's "Sevastopol," where the great novelist stripped warfare of
all its sentiment and patriotic glitter, and revealed its dull, sordid
misery as well as its hellish tragedies. What Tolstoi did for the
Crimean War, Garshin did for the war with Turkey in the seventies. I
have not seen it mentioned, but I suspect that Andreev owes much to
the reading of this brilliant author. Garshin was an unquestionable
genius; if he had lived, I think he might have become the real
successor to Tolstoi, a title that has been bestowed upon Chekhov,
Gorki, and Andreev, and has not yet been earned by any man. But like
nearly all Russian authors, he suffered from intense melancholia, and
in 1888 committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. His short story
"Four Days on the Field of Slaughter" first brought him into public
notice. One cannot read Andreev's "Red Laugh" to-day without thinking
of it.
"On the edge of the wood there was visible something red, floating
here and there. Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at me
in silence with great, terrified eyes. Out of his mouth poured a
stream of blood. Yes, I remember it very well." This is the "red
laugh" of Andreev, though until the appearance of his book it lacked
the appropriate name. Garshin describes how a Russian soldier stabs a
Fellah to death with his bayonet, and then, too badly injured to move,
lies for four days and nights, in shivering cold and fearful heat,
beside the putrefying corpse of his dead antagonist. "I did that. I
had no wish to do it. I wished no one evil, as I left home for the
war. The thought that I should kill a man did not enter my head. I
thought only of my own danger. And I went to him and did this. Well,
and what happened? O fool, O idiot! This unfortunate Egyptian is still
less guilty. Before they packed them on a steamer like herrings in a
box, and brought them to Constantinople, he had never heard of Russia,
or of Bulgaria. They told him to go and he went."
In the "Diary of Private lvanov," Garshin gave more pictures of the
hideous suffering of war, with a wonderful portrait of the commander
of the company, who is so harshly tyrannical that his men hate him,
and resolve to slay him in the battle. But he survives both open and
secret foes, and at the end of the conflict they find him lying
prostrate, his whole body shaken with sobs, and saying brokenly,
"Fifty-two! Fifty-two!" Fifty-two of his company had been killed, and
despite his cruelty to them, he had loved them all like children.
Garshin wrote other tales, among them a poetically beautiful story of
a tree, "Attalea Princeps," that reminds one somewhat of Bjornson. But
his chief significance is as a truthful witness to the meaningless
maiming and murder of war, and his attitude is precisely similar to
that of Andreev, and both follow Tolstoi.
Andreev's "Red Laugh" ought to be read in America as a contrast to our
numerous war stories, where war is pictured as a delightful and
exciting tournament. This book has not a single touch of patriotic
sentiment, not a suggestion of "Hurrah for our side!" The soldiers are
on the field because they were sent there, and the uninjured are too
utterly tired, too tormented with lack of sleep, too hungry and
thirsty to let out a single whoop. The first sight of the "Red Laugh"
reminds us of the picturesque story of Napoleon's soldier that
Browning has immortalised in the "Incident of the French Camp."
Tolstoi mentions the same event in "Sevastopol," and his version of it
would have pleased Owen Wister's Virginian more than Browning's. In
Andreev there is no graceful gesture, no French pose, no "smiling
joy"; but there is the nerve-shattering red laugh. The officer who
tells the story in the first half of the book narrates how a young
volunteer came up to him and saluted. The appearance of his face was
so tensely white that the officer enquires, "Are you afraid?" Suddenly
a stream of blood bursts from the young man's body, and his deadly
pale face turns into something unspeakable, a toothless laugh--the red
laugh.
In this gruesome tale of the realities of war, Andreev has given
shocking physical details of torn and bleeding bodies, but true to the
theme that animates all his books, he has concentrated the main
interest on the Mind. Soldiers suffer in the flesh, but infinitely
more in the mind. War points chiefly not to the grave, nor to the
hospital, but to the madhouse. All forms of insanity are bred by the
horror and fatigue of the marches and battles: many shoot themselves,
many become raging maniacs, many become gibbering idiots. Every man
who has studied warfare knows that the least of all perils is the
bullet of the enemy, for only a small proportion are released by that.
The innumerable and subtle forms of disease, bred by exposure and
privation, constitute the real danger. Andreev is the first to show
that the most common and awful form of disease among Russian soldiers
is the disease of the brain. The camp becomes a vast madhouse, with
the peculiar feature that the madmen are at large. The hero of the
story loses both his legs, and apparently completely recovered in
health otherwise, returns home to his family, and gazes wistfully at
his bicycle. A sudden desire animates him to write out the story of
the Japanese war; in the process he becomes insane and dies. His
brother then attempts to complete the narrative from the scattered,
confused notes, but to his horror, whenever he approaches the desk,
the phantom of the dead man is ever there, busily writing: he can hear
the pen squeak on the paper.
No more terrible protest against war has ever been written than
Andreev's "Red Laugh." It shows not merely the inexpressible horror of
the battlefield and the dull, weary wretchedness of the men on the
march, but it follows out the farthest ramifications flowing from the
central cause: the constant tragedies in the families, the letters
received after the telegraph has announced the death of the writer,
the insane wretches who return to the homes they left in normal
health, the whole accumulation of woe.
The first two words of the book are "Madness and Horror!" and they
might serve as a text for Andreev's complete works. There seems to be
some taint in his mind which forces him to dwell forever on the
abnormal and diseased. He is not exactly decadent, but he is decidedly
pathological. Professor Bruckner has said of Andreev's stories, "I do
not recall a single one which would not get fearfully on a man's
nerves." He has deepened the universal gloom of Russian fiction, not
by descending into the slums with Gorki, but by depicting life as seen
through the strange light of a decaying mind. He has often been
compared, especially among the Germans, with Edgar Allan Poe. But he
is really not in the least like Poe. Poe's horrors are nearly all
unreal fantasies, that vaguely haunt our minds like the shadow of a
dream. Andreev is a realist, like his predecessors and contemporaries.
His style is always concrete and definite, always filled with the
sense of fact. There is almost something scientific in his collection
of incurables.
The most cheerful thing he has written is perhaps "The Seven Who Were
Hanged." This is horrible enough to bring out a cold sweat; but it is
redeemed, as the work of Dostoevski is, by a vast pity and sympathy
for the condemned wretches. This is the book he dedicated to Tolstoi,
in recognition of the constant efforts of the old writer to have
capital punishment abolished. No sentimental sympathy with murderers
is shown here; he carries no flowers to the cells where each of the
seven in solitude awaits his fate. Nor are the murderers in the least
degree depicted as heroes--they are all different men and women, but
none of them resembles the Hero-Murderer of romance.
The motive underlying this story is shown plainly by the author in an
interesting letter which he wrote to the American translator, and
which is published at the beginning of the book. "The misfortune of us
all is that we know so little, even nothing, about one another--neither
about the soul, nor the life, the sufferings, the habits, the inclinations,
the aspirations, of one another. Literature, which I have the honour to
serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself
is that of wiping out boundaries and distances." That is, the aim of
Andreev, like that of all prominent Russian novelists, is to study the
secret of secrets, the human heart. And like all specialists in humanity,
like Browning, for example, he feels the impossibility of success.
"About what's under lock and key,
Man's soul!"
Farther on in his letter, we read: "My task was to point out the
horror and the iniquity of capital punishment under any circumstances.
The horror of capital punishment is great when it falls to the lot of
courageous and honest people whose only guilt is their excess of love
and the sense of righteousness--in such instances, conscience revolts.
But the rope is still more horrible when it forms the noose around the
necks of weak and ignorant people. And however strange it may appear,
I look with a lesser grief and suffering upon the execution of the
revolutionists, such as Werner and Musya, than upon the strangling of
ignorant murderers, miserable in mind and heart, like Yanson and
Tsiganok." Spoken like Dostoevski!
These seven are an extraordinary group, ranging from calm, courageous,
enlightened individuals to creatures of such dull stupidity that one
wonders if they ever once were men. Each spends the intervening days
in his cell in a different manner. One goes through daily exercises of
physical culture. One receives a visit from his father and mother,
another from his old mother alone. There is not a false touch in the
sentiment in these painful scenes. The midnight journey to the place
of execution is vividly portrayed, and the different sensations of
each of the seven are strikingly indicated. At the last, Musya, who is
a typical Russian heroine in her splendid resolution and boundless
tenderness, becomes the soul of the whole party, and tries to help
them all by her gentle conduct and her words of love. The whole spirit
of this book is profoundly Christian. One feels as if he were taken
back in history, and were present at the execution of a group of early
Christian martyrs. There are thousands of women in Russia like Musya,
and they are now, as they were in the days of Turgenev, the one hope
of the country.
In Merezhkovski's interesting work "Tolstoi as Man and Artist," the
author says: "We are accustomed to think that the more abstract
thought is, the more cold and dispassionate it is. It is not so; or at
least it is not so with us. From the heroes of Dostoevski we may see
how abstract thought may be passionate, how metaphysical theories and
deductions are rooted, not only in cold reason, but in the heart,
emotions, and will. There are thoughts which pour oil on the fire of
the passions and inflame man's flesh and blood more powerfully than
the most unrestrained license. There is a logic of the passions, but
there are also passions in logic. And these are essentially OUR new
passions, peculiar to us and alien to the men of former civilisations.
. . . They feel deeply because they think deeply; they suffer
endlessly because they are endlessly deliberate; they dare to will
because they have dared to think. And the farther, apparently, it is
from life--the more abstract, the more fiery is their thought, the
deeper it enters into their lives. O strange young Russia!"
Merezhkovski is talking of the heroes of Dostoevski; but his remark is
applicable to the work of nearly all Russian novelists, and especially
to Chekhov and Andreev. It is a profound criticism that, if once
grasped by the foreign reader, will enable him to understand much in
Russian fiction that otherwise would be a sealed book. Every one must
have noticed how Russians are hag-ridden by an idea; but no one except
Merezhkovski has observed the PASSION of abstract thought. In some
characters, such as those Dostoevski has given us, it leads to deeds
of wild absurdity; in Andreev, it usually leads to madness.