best known, was brought up by his mother’s parents. He had barely
entered school when his grandparents’ reverses caused him to be
apprenticed to a shoemaker. After that he tried himself in every
possible capacity--as an engraver, painter of holy images, cook,
hawker of apples, and so forth. In the meanwhile he had an opportunity
to learn to read, and he read any and all books he could procure.
Finally he fell in with a lawyer at Nízhni-Nóvgorod who did a great
deal for his awakening. Then he once more started out on his
wanderings, and in the Caucasus in 1893 wrote his first story,
entitled _Makár Chúdra_, for a local paper. The next year he returned
to Nízhni-Nóvgorod, and here he met the author Korolénko, under whose
guidance his literary career began. Górki draws his vagabonds with a
realism that surpasses all previous attempts in that field. Unlike
Uspénski, Zlatovrátski, and the other writers who have treated similar
subjects, he has no bias in any direction whatsoever, but depicts
elementary passions at full play, quite unconcerned about the results
to which they may lead. Not less characteristic are his pictures of
southern scenes, of the steppe, the sea, and the noisy quay.
In English translation have appeared: _Orloff Couple_, translated by
Emily Jakowleff and Dora B. Montefiore, London, 1901; _Orloff and his
Wife_, translated by I. F. Hapgood, New York, 1902; _Foma Gordyeeff_,
translated by I. F. Hapgood, New York, 1901; _Foma Gordeyev_,
translated by H. Bernstein, New York, 1901; _Twenty-six and One_, New
York, 1902; _Twenty-six Men and a Girl_, translated by B. Jakowleff
and D. B. Montefiore, London, 1902; _Tales from Gorky_, translated by
N. H. Bain, New York, 1902; _The Devil_, by L. Wiener, National
Magazine, 1901; _Makar Chudra_, by M. Mojaysky, Monthly Review, 1901;
_Tchelkache_, by Katherine Wylde, Fortnightly Review, and Living Age,
1901; _Song of the Falcon_, Contemporary Review, 1902; part of _The
Awakening of a Conscience_, by L. Wiener, in Garnett’s Universal
Anthology.
IN THE STEPPE
STORY OF A TRAMP
We left Perekóp in the worst possible mood,--we were as hungry as wolves
and angry with the whole world. For more than half a day we had
unsuccessfully applied all our talents and efforts to steal or earn
something, and when we at last convinced ourselves that we would fail in
both attempts, we decided to move on. Whither? That was a matter of
indifference, as long as we moved on. This was our unanimous resolution,
as we had expressed it to each other, but we were ready to proceed in
every respect upon the path of our actions upon which we had been
travelling quite a while,--that had been silently agreed to by everyone
of us and, though it was not spoken of in the hearing of all, it
sparkled clearly in the grim lustre of our hungry eyes.
There were three of us; we had but lately made each other’s
acquaintance, having met at Khérson, in a saloon on the bank of the
Dnieper.
One of us had been a soldier of a railroad battalion, later, as he
professed, a roadmaster with one of the Polish railways; he was a
red-haired, muscular man, with cold, grey eyes; he could speak German,
and possessed a very detailed knowledge of prison life.
People of our class don’t like to talk much about their past, generally
having more or less good reasons for not mentioning it; consequently we
all believed each other, at least outwardly, for inwardly we hardly
believed ourselves.
When our second companion, a small, wizened man with thin lips, that
were all the time skeptically compressed, said of himself that he had
been a student at the Moscow University,--the soldier and I accepted
this assertion as a fact. In reality, it was absolutely the same to us
whether he had ever been a student, a detective, or one of the
“orleans,”--the only important point was that at the time of our
acquaintanceship he was our equal: he was starving, he enjoyed in towns
the especial attention of the police, and in the country the suspicious
attitude of the peasants; he hated both with the hatred of a powerless,
persecuted, and hungry animal, and dreamt of a universal revenge upon
everybody and everything,--in short, by his position amidst the kings of
Nature and the potentates of life, and by his inclinations, he was a
bird of our feather.
Misfortune is the best cement to unite even the most contradictory
natures, and we were all convinced of our right to regard ourselves as
unfortunates.
I was the third. Out of modesty, which has been my characteristic ever
since my nails were grown, I will not say a word about my worth, and,
not wishing to appear naïve to you, I will keep silent about my faults.
However, to furnish you material for my characterisation, I will say
that I always regarded myself better than others, and that I still
successfully maintain this opinion.
So we left Perekóp and moved on, depending for that day upon the
shepherds, whom one may always ask for a piece of bread and who never
refuse it to pedestrians.
I walked by the side of the soldier, the “student” marched behind us.
Over his shoulders hung something that somewhat reminded of a
frock-coat; on his sharp-pointed, angular and clean-shaven head rested
the remnant of a broad-brimmed hat; grey trowsers with many-coloured
patches fitted tightly to his thin legs, and to the soles of his feet he
had fastened parts of a bootleg, which he had picked up on his way; he
held them in place by means of ropes which he had wound out of the
lining of his costume, and this affair he called sandals; he marched
silently, raising a great deal of dust and blinking with his small
greenish eyes. The soldier was dressed in a red fustian shirt which, to
use his words, he had by his own hand obtained at Khérson; over his
shirt there was a warm cotton jacket, and his head was adorned by a
soldier’s cap of indefinite colour, which was poised, according to the
military rule, “with a bend of the upper circle over the right brow”;
about his legs flapped broad Ukrainian carter’s pantaloons. He was
barefooted.
I was similarly dressed, and also barefooted.
We marched on, and all about us extended the steppe with a heroic sweep
and, being covered with the blue, burning cupola of a cloudless summer
sky, lay before us like an enormous black dish. The grey, dusty road cut
a broad swath across it, and burned our feet. Here and there we saw
bristly stretches of harvested grainfields that bore a striking
resemblance to the long-neglected cheeks of the soldier.
The soldier walked and sang with a hoarse voice:
“And we sing and praise Thy holy Sunday----”
During his military service he had been something like a sexton in the
battalion church, and he knew an endless number of hymns and chants,
which knowledge he misused every time our conversation did not flow
exactly right.
Ahead of us, on the horizon, rose some forms of soft contours and gentle
shades, from lilac to light pink.
“That ’s evidently the Crimean range,” said the student dryly.
“Mountains?” exclaimed the soldier. “It ’s mighty early, my friend, you
see them. Those are clouds, just clouds. You see what they look like?
Just like cranberry sauce with milk.”
I remarked that it would be exceedingly agreeable if the clouds really
consisted of cranberry sauce. This at once roused our hunger,--the great
question of the day.
“The devil!” cursed the soldier, and spit out. “If only a single living
soul came our way! Not a person---- We ’ll have to lick our own paws,
like bears in winter.”
“I said we ought to keep near inhabited places,” remarked the “student,”
moralising.
“You said!” said the soldier angrily. “That ’s why you are a learned
man, just to be a-talking. Where do you expect to find inhabited places
here? The devil knows where they are!”
The “student” grew silent and compressed his lips. The sun was going
down, and the clouds in the horizon displayed a variety of intangible
colours. The air smelled of land and salt.
This dry and appetising odour only increased our hunger.
There was a gnawing sensation in our stomachs. It was a strange and
disagreeable sensation: it felt as though the sap were flowing out of
all the muscles of the body, as though it evaporated, and the muscles
lost their vital flexibility. A sensation of stinging dryness filled the
cavity of the mouth and the throat; the head was dizzy, and dark spots
arose and flitted before the eyes. At times they assumed the form of
steaming pieces of meat, of big slices of bread; reminiscence furnished
these “visions of the past, silent visions” with their appropriate
aromas, and then it felt as though a knife were turning around in the
stomach.
We kept on marching, communicating to each other the description of our
sensations and being on a sharp lookout on both sides,--hoping to
discover somewhere a flock of sheep, or to hear the sharp creaking of a
Tartar’s cart taking fruit to an Armenian market.
But the steppe was deserted and speechless.
On the previous day we had eaten between us four pounds of rye bread and
some five melons, after having marched about forty versts,--there was a
discrepancy between assets and liabilities,--and, having fallen asleep
on the market place of Perekóp, we awoke from hunger.
The “student” had justly advised us not to lie down to sleep, but to go
to work in the night,--it is not considered proper in decent society to
speak aloud of the plans for trespassing on private property, and so I
shall keep silent. I only want to be truthful, and not vulgar, as
regards my own interests. I know that people are getting more and more
kind-hearted in these our highly cultured days and that when they take
their neighbour by the throat with the evident purpose of choking him,
they try to do so with the utmost politeness and with the observance of
all the proprieties, suited to the case. The experience of my own throat
compels me to notice this progress of manners, and I affirm with a
pleasant feeling of conviction that everything in this world is being
developed and perfected. This remarkable progress is, in particular,
sufficiently proved by the annual increase in prisons, saloons, and
“houses of toleration.”
So, swallowing our hungry spittle and attempting by a friendly
conversation to suppress the pain in our stomachs, we marched across the
deserted and speechless steppe, marched in the blood-red rays of the
declining sun, full of a dim hope of something. In front of us, the sun
was going down, gently descending into the soft clouds, which were
lavishly painted by its rays, and behind us and at our sides a bluish
mist, rising from the steppe towards heaven, narrowed down the
inhospitable horizon around us.
“Friends, collect material for a fire,” said the soldier, as he lifted a
stick by the wayside. “We will have to sleep out on the steppe, and
there is dew falling. Pick up dung chips and all kinds of dry stalks!”
We scattered on both sides of the road and began to collect dry weeds
and everything else that would burn. Every time I had to bend down, a
powerful desire to fall down upon the ground took possession of my body,
a desire to lie immovably and eat the rich, black earth, to eat a great
deal of it, to exhaustion, and then to fall asleep, even if it were to
fall asleep for ever, as long as there would be something to eat, and I
could chew and feel the thick, warm mass slowly passing from the mouth
over the dried-up œsophagus into the hungry and compressed stomach that
was burning with the desire of sucking something in.
“If we could only find some roots,” sighed the soldier. “There are some
edible roots.”
But there were no roots whatsoever in the black, ploughed-up earth. The
southern night came upon us rapidly, and the last sunbeam had not yet
gone out, when the stars began to glisten in the dark-blue vault, and
the dark shadows grew thicker around us, narrowing down the endless
extent of the steppe that held us.
“Friends,” said the “student” half-aloud, “there is a man lying to the
left of us.”
“A man?” doubted the soldier. “Why should he be lying there?”
“Go and ask him. No doubt, he has some bread, or he would not be camping
out in the steppe,” explained the “student.” The soldier looked aside,
where the man was lying, and, spitting out assertively, he said:
“Let us go to him!”
Only the “student’s” sharp green eyes could have discovered that the
dark mass that rose some three hundred and fifty feet to the left of the
road was a man. We started in that direction, swiftly striding over
clods of earth, and we felt the pang of hunger getting more acute in the
germinating hope of finding something to eat. We were near the place,
but the man did not move.
“Maybe that is not a man,” gloomily said the soldier, giving expression
to our common thought.
But our doubt was immediately dispersed, for the mass on the ground
moved, raised itself, and we saw that it was a real, live man who was
standing on his knees and stretching out his hands towards us.
He spoke to us with a dull and trembling voice:
“Not a step nearer, or I ’ll shoot!”
A dry, short click was heard in the murky air.
We stopped as commanded and kept silent for a few seconds, being dazed
by such an inhospitable reception.
“What a r-rascal!” muttered the soldier deliberately.
“Yes,” thoughtfully said the “student.” “He wanders about with a
revolver; evidently, the fish is full of spawn.”
“Oh there!” called out the soldier, having made up his mind for
something.
The man did not change his position and kept silent.
“Oh there! We will not touch you. Give us only some bread, if you have
any! For Christ’s sake, give us some, friend! Damn you, anathema!”
The last words the soldier spoke under his breath.
The man kept silent.
“Do you hear?” again spoke the soldier, with a tremor of anger and
despair. “Give us some bread, I say! We will not come near you. Throw
some to us!”
“All right!” said the man abruptly.
He might have said to us: “My dear brethren!” and if he had poured all
his holiest and purest sentiments into these three Christian words, they
would not have roused us so and would not have made us so human as this
dull and short:
“All right!”
“Don’t fear us, good man!” said the soldier softly and with a sweet
smile upon his face, though the man could not see his smile, for he was
separated from us by at least twenty paces.
“We ’re peaceable people, and are walking from Russia into the Kubán
country; we have spent our pennies on the way, and have eaten up our
provisions, and have n’t had a bite for two days.”
“Catch it,” said the good man, flourishing something in the air. A black
piece flashed by and fell not far from us on the ploughed field. The
“student” threw himself upon it.
“Catch again! Once more! That ’s all I have!”
When the “student” collected this original gift, it appeared that we had
about four pounds of stale wheat bread. It was all rolled in dirt and
very stale. The first did not detain our attention, the second pleased
us very much. Stale bread is more nourishing than fresh bread, because
there is less moisture in it.
“Here, and here, and here!” the soldier doled out the shares with
concentrated attention. “Hold on, the pieces are n’t equal! We ’ll have
to pinch off a piece of yours, learned man, or he will have too little.”
The “student” submitted without grumbling to the diminution of his piece
of bread by some five ounces; I took it and put it in my mouth.
I began to chew it, to chew it slowly, barely repressing the cramp-like
motion of my jaws that were ready to crush stones. It gave me an acute
pleasure to feel the palpitating cramps of my alimentary canal, and to
satisfy it slowly and by small drops. Swallow after swallow, warm and
inexpressibly, incomprehensibly appetising, penetrated into the burning
stomach and seemed immediately to be transformed into blood and brain.
Joy, such a strange, quiet, and vivifying joy, warmed my heart in the
measure as my stomach filled up, and my general condition was not unlike
a half-sleeping. I forgot those accursed days of my chronic hunger; I
forgot my companions, being all merged in the enjoyment by the
sensations through which I then passed.
But when I threw from my palm the last crumbs into my mouth, I felt that
I was deathly hungry.
“That accursed one has some bacon or some meat left,” grumbled the
soldier, sitting against me on the ground and rubbing his belly with his
hands.
“No doubt, for the bread smelled of meat. Yes, and he may have some
bread left, too,” said the “student” and softly added:
“If it were not for the revolver----”
“Who is he anyway?”
“Evidently, one of our kind.”
“A dog!” declared the soldier.
We were sitting closely together and kept looking askance at the place
where our benefactor was sitting with his revolver. Not a sound, nor a
sign of life proceeded from him.
Night was gathering around us her dark powers. There was a dead silence
in the steppe, and we could hear each other’s breathing. Now and then
the melancholy whistling of a gopher reached our ears. The stars--living
flowers of heaven--gleamed above us. We wanted to eat.
I say it proudly,--I was not worse nor better than my casual companions
in that somewhat strange night. I proposed to them that we should get up
and make for that man. We would not touch him, but we would eat up
anything he might have. He would shoot,--let him! He could hit but one
of us three, if he hit us at all; and even if he did, a bullet from a
revolver would hardly kill.
“Let us go!” said the soldier, jumping to his feet.
The “student” was slower in rising.
We started, we almost ran. The “student” kept towards one side, and
behind us.
“Partner!” cried the soldier to him reproachfully.
We were met with a dull grumbling and a sharp sound of a clicking
hammer. There was a flash of fire, and the dry sound of a shot was
heard.
“Missed!” joyfully exclaimed the soldier, reaching the man with one
bound. “Well, devil, I ’ll give it to you now!”
The “student” made a rush for his wallet.
The devil fell from his knees upon his back and, stretching out his
hands, began to snore.
“What the deuce!” wondered the soldier, who had already raised his foot
to give the man a kick. “Is it possible he has filled himself up with
lead? Oh, there, get up! Say, did you kill yourself, eh?”
“There is some bread, and some cakes, and bread--lots of it, friends!”
was heard the jubilant voice of the “student.”
“Well, the deuce take you, go to! Let us eat, friends!” cried the
soldier. I took the revolver out of the hands of the man, who had
stopped snoring and lay motionless. One barrel had a cartridge in it.
We ate again, and we ate in silence. The man lay silent, without moving
a limb. We paid no attention to him.
“Is it really so, my friends, that you did it all for the bread only?”
suddenly was heard a hoarse and quivering voice.
We all shuddered. The “student” even started up and, bending to the
ground, began to cough.
The soldier finished chewing and began cursing.
“You, soul of a dog, may you burst like a dry plank! What did you want
us to do? Take off your hide? What good would it do us? You stupid
snout, damned soul! I declare! Carrying arms, and shooting at people!
You anathema!”
He kept on cursing and eating, which latter fact much diminished the
expressiveness and strength of his curses.
“Just wait, when we are through eating, we ’ll square up with you,”
ominously threatened the “student.”
Then were heard, in the quiet of the night, howling sobs that frightened
us.
“Friends, how could I know? I fired because I was afraid. I am on my way
from New Afón to the Government of Orél. O Lord! The fever is undoing me
since the sun went down! It was the fever that made me leave Afón---- I
was doing some carpentering there---- I am a carpenter---- I have at
home a wife and two daughters--have n’t seen them these three years----
Friends! Eat everything----”
“We will, you need n’t ask us!” said the “student.”
“My Lord! If I had known that you were good, peaceable people, do you
suppose I would have fired at you? You see, my friends, it ’s the
steppe, and night--am I to be blamed, eh?”
As he said that, he wept, or to speak more correctly, emitted a
quivering, timorous howl.
“Hear him whine!” contemptuously said the soldier.
“He must have money about him,” declared the “student.”
The soldier blinked, looked at him, and smiled.
“You are a good guesser. Say: let us make a fire, and go to sleep!”
“And he?” inquired the “student.”
“The deuce take him! What do you want us to do--roast him?”
“We ought to!” the “student” shook his sharp-pointed head.
We went for the material which we had been gathering and which we had
thrown away where the carpenter had stopped us with his threatening
call; we brought it back, and soon we were sitting around a fire. It
glowed softly in the windless night and illuminated a small space which
we were occupying. We were feeling sleepy, though we could have supped
again.
“Friends!” cried out the carpenter. He was lying some three paces from
us, and at times it appeared to me that he was muttering something.
“Well?” said the soldier.
“May I move up to you, to the fire? My death is upon me, my bones are
aching. Lord! I don’t think I ’ll reach home.”
“Crawl up,” decided the “student.”
The carpenter slowly crawled along the ground towards the fire, as if
fearing to lose an arm or leg. He was a tall and dreadfully dried up
man: everything hung dreadfully loose about him, and his large dim eyes
reflected the pain that was consuming him. His wry face was bony and had
even in the light of the fire a kind of a yellowish earthy, deathly
color. He was all in a tremble and provoked a contemptuous pity. He
stretched out to the fire his long, lean hands, and rubbed his bony
fingers, but their joints bent lazily and slowly. In short, he was a
horrible sight.
“How is it you are in such a fix, and afoot? Are you so stingy?”
gloomily asked the soldier.
“They advised me not to go by sea, but to walk through the Crimea, on
account of the air. But I can’t walk, I am dying, brothers! I ’ll die
alone in the steppe--the birds will peck at me, and nobody will know
me---- My wife and daughters will be waiting---- I have written to
them--but the rains of the steppe will be bleaching my bones. My Lord,
my Lord!”
He whined with the melancholy whine of a wounded wolf.
“The devil,” cried out the soldier as he rose to his feet. “Don’t howl
so! Why don’t you give us people any rest? Are you dying? All right,
die, but keep quiet. Who wants you? Shut up!”
“Kick him in the pate!” proposed the “student.”
“Let us lie down to sleep,” said I. “And you, if you want to be by the
fire, don’t howl at least.”
“Did you hear?” sternly said the soldier. “Well, make a note of it. Do
you think we are going to pity you and look after you, for hurling bread
at us, and firing on us? You mean devil! Others----pah----”
The soldier grew silent and stretched himself out on the ground.
The “student” had lain down before. I lay down myself. The frightened
carpenter was all bent into a ball and moved to the fire, and looked at
it fixedly. I lay to the right of him and I could hear his teeth
chatter. The “student” was to the left of him and, it seemed, fell at
once asleep, having rolled up into a ball. The soldier put his hands
under his head and lay, face upwards, and looked at the sky.
“What a night! Lots of stars--warmth----” he turned to me after a time.
“What a sky! It ’s a coverlet, not a sky. I do love this life of a
tramp, my friend. You suffer cold and hunger, but it ’s a mighty free
life. There is no superior over you--you are master of your life. You
may chew off your head, and nobody will say a word to you. It ’s fine. I
have starved enough these days, and have had enough cause for anger, but
now I am lying and looking at the sky. The stars are twinkling to me, as
if to say: ‘Never mind, Lakútin, wander about over the earth and submit
to nobody.’ Yes---- And my heart feels light---- Oh, there, what do they
call you? Oh, there, carpenter! Don’t be angry with me, and have no
fear! As to our having eaten up your bread, that ’s nothing. You had
some bread, and we had none, so we ate up yours---- But you are a
savage, you fire off guns. Don’t you know that bullets may harm people?
It made me dreadfully mad, and if you had not fallen down, I would have
thrashed you, my friend, for your impudence. But as for the bread, you
will reach Perekóp to-morrow, and so you will buy some--I know you have
money---- How long is it since you caught the ague?”
The bass of the soldier and the quivering voice of the sick carpenter
resounded for quite a while in my ears. Dark, almost black night
descended more and more upon the earth, and the fresh, aromatic air
flowed into my breast.
From the fire came an even light and vivifying warmth. The eyes became
gluey, and before them was borne, through the drowsiness, something
soothing and purifying.
────────────────────────────────────
“Get up! Lively there! Let us go!”
I opened my eyes with a feeling of terror and swiftly jumped to my feet,
being helped by the soldier, who jerked me up from the ground.
“Lively there! Move on!”
His face was stern and agitated. I looked around me. The sun was rising,
and its rose-coloured beam lay upon the immovable and blue face of the
carpenter. His mouth was open, his eyes stood far out of their sockets
and stared with a glassy glance, expressive of terror. His dress was all
torn over his chest, and he lay in an unnaturally contorted position.
The “student” was gone.
“Well, what are you tarrying for? I told you to go!” said the soldier
persuasively, pulling me all the time by my arm.
“Is he dead?” asked I, shuddering from the morning freshness.
“Of course. You would die, too, if they choked you,” explained the
soldier.
“What, did the ‘student’?” cried I.
“Well, who else? Maybe, you? Or I? Yes. There you have a learned man----
He got away with the man, and left his companions in a nice fix. If I
had known that yesterday, I would have killed that ‘student.’ I would
have killed him with one stroke. I would have banged his temple with my
fist, and there would have been a villain less in the world. Do you
understand what he did? Now we are compelled to walk in such a way that
not a soul shall see us in the steppe. Do you understand? Because they
will find the carpenter to-day, and they will discover that he had been
choked to death and robbed. And they will be on the lookout for fellows
of our kind: Where do you come from, and where did you pass your night?
Yes, and they will catch us---- Though we have n’t a thing of his--yes,
I have his revolver in my bosom. It ’s a nice fix we are in!”
“Throw it away,” I advised the soldier.
“Throw it away,” said he, thoughtfully. “It ’s worth something. And
then, maybe they will not catch us. No, I won’t throw it away. Who knows
that the carpenter had a gun? I won’t throw it away. It ’s worth three
roubles. There is a bullet in it. I tell you, I would like to send it
a-flying into the ear of our dear companion! I wonder how much money
that dog got away with! Anathema!”
“Poor daughters of the carpenter,” said I.
“The daughters? What daughters? Oh, his. Well, they ’ll grow up, and
they won’t marry us, so there is no use talking about them. Come,
friend, let us be off. Where shall we go?”
“I don’t know---- Anywhere.”
“I don’t know either, and I know that it makes no difference. Come, let
us to the right, there must be the sea.”
We went to the right.
I turned back. Far away from us rose a dark mound in the steppe, and the
sun shone over it.
“Are you trying to see if he has arisen from the dead? Don’t be afraid,
he won’t be up after us. The learned fellow is evidently a man of
experience, he has done his job thoroughly. Well, he ’s a fine partner!
He has put us in a nice hole! Friend! People are getting worse from year
to year, they are getting worse!” said the soldier mournfully.
The deserted and speechless steppe, bathed by the bright morning sun and
mingling in the horizon with the sky, was unfolded around us in such a
bright, gentle, and abundant light that every black and unrighteous deed
seemed impossible amidst the great extent of this free plain that was
covered by the blue cupola of the sky.
“I feel like having something to eat, friend!” said my companion, as he
rolled himself a cigarette out of coarse tobacco.
“What shall we eat to-day, and where and how?”
It was a problem!
────────────────────────────────────
Having told me this, the storyteller, who was my neighbour in the
hospital, ended his narrative.
“That ’s all. The soldier and I got to be good friends, and we walked
together to the Kára territory. He was a good and very experienced
fellow, a typical barefoot tramp. I respected him. We walked together to
Asia Minor, and then I lost track of him.”
“Do you ever think of the carpenter?” asked I.
“As you see, or, as you heard.”
“Well, and--?”
He laughed.
“What am I to feel? It was not my fault what happened to him, not any
more than it is your fault what has happened to me. Nobody is to be
blamed for anything, because we are all alike--beasts.”
Dmítri Sergyéevich Merezhkóvski. (1865-.)
Merezhkóvski was born in 1865 and graduated from the university in
1886. He began early to write poetry, but met with no success. A novel
in verse, _Vyéra_, which he wrote in 1890, however, produced a
favourable impression. Since then Merezhkóvski has devoted himself
more especially to prose. He is opposed to the prevailing democratism
in literature, and preaches a return to the ideal of Púshkin. He has
evolved an unusually fine style for Russian literature, but his
conceptions are rather fantastic, and not always coherent. His chief
interest lies in the illustration of the struggle of two worlds, the
pagan and the Christian. This idea runs through all his critical
essays, in which he deplores the democratic spirit in literature since
Gógol, and through his trilogy of novels, of which the first deals
with Julian the Apostate, the second with Leonardo da Vinci, and the
third is to treat of Peter the Great.
In English translation have appeared: _The Death of the Gods_, _The
Resurrection of the Gods_, and _Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, the
Forerunner_, translated by H. French, London, 1902, the latter also
New York, 1902; _Julian the Apostate_, Philadelphia, 1902; _Tolstoi as
Man and Artist, with Essay on Dostoïevski_, New York, 1902.
FROM AN ESSAY ON “PÚSHKIN”
Not by sudden outbursts and by jerks, but premise after premise, step by
step, unavoidably and with dialectic precision, by evolving the one
sphere of Púshkin’s harmony, by sacrificing and killing the other, has
Russian literature at last reached that one-sidedness of Lev Tolstóy, so
suicidal for every artistic development.
Gógol, the nearest of Púshkin’s disciples, was the first to understand
and express the meaning of Púshkin for Russia, as no one after him has
been able to do. In his best creations, in the _Revizór_ and in the
_Dead Souls_, Gógol carried out the plans with which his teacher had
inspired him. It is difficult to find a case of closer adaptation in the
history of any literature. Gógol drew directly from Púshkin, that deep
and pure source of Russian harmony. Well? Did the disciple execute the
injunction of his teacher? Gógol was the first who unconsciously and
involuntarily betrayed Púshkin; he was the first who became a victim of
the great disorganisation, which was later more and more to take
possession of Russian poetry; he was the first to experience the attacks
of the all-devouring, sickly mysticism, which was to undermine also the
creative powers of others than himself.
It is a tragic fact in Russian literature that in departing with every
step more and more from Púshkin, that in destroying the most precious
creation of his spirit,--the co-ordination and equipoise of two
worlds,--it at the same time has regarded itself as the true guardian of
Púshkin’s legacies. Great men have no more dangerous enemies than their
nearest disciples,--those who recline upon their breast, for no one can,
loving and adoring, with such innocent cunning distort the real image of
their teacher.
Turgénev and Goncharóv made conscientious attempts to overcome the
incipient discord within them, the ill-omened dissonance of Lérmontov
and Gógol, to return to Púshkin’s objective calm and equipoise. If not
with their hearts, they understood with their minds the heroic deed of
Peter the Great, remaining strangers to the Slavophile pride of
Dostoévski, and they consciously, like Púshkin, bowed before the majesty
of Western culture. Turgénev appears in a certain measure as the legal
heir of Púshkin’s harmony, both on account of the perfect clearness of
the artistic architecture and the gentle grace of language.
But all that resemblance, all that harmony, is superficial and
deceptive. Neither Turgénev nor Goncharóv succeeded in the attempt to
conquer the approaching disorganisation, to return to Púshkin. A feeling
of great fatigue and satiety with all cultural forms, Schopenhauer’s
Buddhistic nirvana, Flaubert’s artistic nihilism, were much nearer to
Turgénev’s heart than Púshkin’s heroic wisdom. In Turgénev’s exceedingly
soft, feminine, and pliable language there is no longer Púshkin’s
manliness, his sturdy strength and simplicity. In Turgénev’s bewitching
melody you continually hear a penetrating, plaintive tone, like the
sound of a cracked bell,--a sign of a deepening spiritual discord,--the
terror of life, the terror of death, which Lev Tolstóy will later carry
to appalling limits.
Turgénev has created an endless gallery of what in his opinion are real
Russian heroes, that is, heroes of weakness, cripples, unsuccessful men.
He has surrounded his _Living Relics_ with an aureole of the same
Galilean poetry which surrounds the images of Tatyána, Tazít, the old
gipsy. He has reached the highest degree of his accessible inspiration,
by pointing out the superiority of weakness over strength, of the little
man over the great, and the humble over the proud, of Don Quixote’s
simple-minded insanity over Hamlet’s evil wisdom. The only strong
Russian in Turgénev is the nihilist Bazárov. Of course, the author of
_Fathers and Sons_ was enough of an objective artist to treat his hero
without anger or bias, but he nevertheless was afraid of him and could
not forgive him his strength. The poet seemed to say, as he pointed to
Bazárov, without noticing that he was not at all a hero, but just such
an abortion, just such an unsuccessful man, as the rest of his
superfluous people, who created nothing and who was doomed to ruin: “You
wanted to see a strong Russian,--here is a strong man! See for
yourselves what narrowness and limitation of will-power, which is
directed to destruction! What coarseness and awkwardness before the
tender mystery of love! What insignificance before the majesty of death!
That is what your heroes, your Russian strong men are like! Oh, do you
not a hundred times prefer my weak, superfluous, little, gentle heroes
of Russian wretchedness, indolence, and carelessness, my magnanimous
unsuccessful men and Don Quixotes?”
If a foreigner were to believe Gógol, Turgénev, and Goncharóv, the
Russian nation must represent itself to him as unique in history, as
denying the very essence of heroic will. If the depth of the Russian
spirit were exhausted by _only_ Christian meekness, _only_
self-sacrifice, _only_ the poetry of the pariahs, the humbled, and the
offended,--whence, then, comes that “Divine storm,” that blissful and
terrifying grandeur, that superabundance of success, will, and
merriment, that are felt in Peter and in Púshkin? How could arise these
two demoniac phenomena of infinite beauty and infinite love in the
country of Buddhistic nihilism and wretchedness, in the country of _Dead
Souls_ and _Living Relics_ in the Siloam pool of the maimed and the
halt? Or are Peter and Púshkin not our own, not Russians?
Goncharóv has gone even farther on this dangerous path The critics saw
in _Oblómov_ a satire, a moral. But Goncharóv’s novel is more venomous
and more terrible than any satire. For the poet himself there is in that
all-embracing artistic synthesis of Russian helplessness and Russian
“do-nothingness,” neither praise, nor blame, but there is only a full
justice, the representation of Russian reality in all its terror and in
all its beauty. In his best moments Oblómov, a bookish dreamer who with
the childlike serenity and azure chastity of his infinitely deep and
simple heart is unfit for too coarse a human existence, is surrounded
with the same aureole of quiet poetry, as the _Living Relics_ of
Turgénev. Goncharóv would, perhaps, have liked to be unjust to Oblómov,
but he could not, because he loved him; he, no doubt, intended to be
just to Stolz, but he could not, because he secretly hated him. The
German hero (he did not try to represent a Russian hero, so unnatural
did such a phenomenon seem to him) came out dead, cold, and formless.
Art reveals the secret feeling which the poet dares not express: is not
the resignation from stern life, the primitive simplicity, the wise
inactivity of the gentle hero of Russian indolence a thousand times more
noble than the prosaic bustle of the hero of German precision? From
Mahomet, Napoleon, Byron, the Bronze Rider, to a puny, hoarding,
bourgeois German, and to a gawky seminarist, a provincial tempting
demon, Mark Volokhóv,--what a sad metamorphosis, what a fall of the
Pushkin demigod!
But that is not yet the lowest step. Gógol, Turgénev, and Goncharóv
appear as writers full of objective equipoise, health, and harmony in
comparison with Dostoévski and Lev Tolstóy. The emaciated and half-dead
Russian heroes, the Russian strong men, Bazárov and Mark Volokhóv, come
once more to life in the person of Raskólnikov, Iván Karamázov, in the
monstrous visions of the _Devils_, in order to undergo the last
degrading punishment, the most refined, hellish torture,--in the
terrible hands of that demon of wretchedness and torment, the great
inquisitor Dostoévski.
How much stronger and more truthful he was than Turgénev and Goncharóv!
Dostoévski did not hide his dissonance, his discord, did not deceive
himself, nor the reader, did not make vain attempts to re-establish the
disturbed equilibrium,--the harmony of Púshkin’s form. And yet he valued
and understood this harmony with more penetration than Turgénev and
Goncharóv,--he loved Púshkin, as the most inaccessible, the most
opposite to his nature, just as the mortally ill man values health,--he
loved him, but no longer strove after that harmony.
The author of _Brothers Karamázov_ has maimed and violated the artistic
form of the epos, has with unheard-of audacity transformed it into a
terrible instrument of psychological torture. It is hard to believe that
the language that still possesses such vernal freshness and chaste
serenity in Púshkin has been so transformed as to serve for the
representation of the horrible nightmares and gloomy, fiery visions of
Dostoévski.
Dostoévski was more consistent than Turgénev and Goncharóv in even
another respect: he did not hide his immeasurable Slavophile pride,--he
did not ogle the civilisation of the West. Hellenic beauty was to him
Sodom, and Roman force the kingdom of the Antichrist. What could meek,
youthful, God-harbouring Russia learn from the haughty, decrepit,
Godless West? The Russian nation is not to strive after the ideal of the
West, that is, after universal paganism, but the West is to strive after
the ideal of the Russian nation, that is, after universal Christianity.
Nevertheless, as an artist he is nearer to Púshkin than Turgénev and
Goncharóv. He is the only one of the Russian authors who consciously
reproduces the struggle of two worlds. It is even possible that his
dualism is deeper than Púshkin’s. Yet it is withal, to its very depths,
a discord, a struggle, a torment. Dostoévski’s great soul is like a
battle-field, agitated, bloody, full of gnashing of teeth and sobbing of
the wounded, a field on which two irreconcilable foes have met. Who will
be the victor? No one, never. It is a hopeless, unending struggle. On
whose side is the poet? We only know on whose side he wants to be. But
in those very moments when you most trust his Christian humility, his
wretchedness, and his chastity,--there suddenly happens something
unusual and evil somewhere in the dark, dangerous corner of the author’s
psychological labyrinth where he slowly, like a spider, entices and
entangles the inexperienced reader, so that you look, and hardly know
whether it is he or not, and whether it really is, or you only imagine
it to be, a terrible were-wolf, a double, or a wolf in a sheepskin. And
the great inquisitor whispers with scarcely audible, insane laughter,
which sends a chill through your body, and through the meekness of the
martyr flickers the unlimited conceit of the devil, through the
wretchedness and chastity of the pious sufferer the lustful cruelty of
the devil.
To such monstrous insanity, to such epileptic fits of demonism has been
changed the beneficent dualism of Púshkin, the harmony of two worlds,
the divine music of the spheres that unite their voices to glorify the
One. Such is the vengeance of the vilified pagan gods.
It would seem the limit was reached, and that one could go no farther.
But Lev Tolstóy has proved that one may go farther on the same
road,--into the abyss, into self-torment, into the terror of dualism,
into the Titanic disorganisation.
Dostoévski to his last breath suffered, thought, struggled, and died,
without finding what he sought most in life,--spiritual peace. Lev
Tolstóy no longer seeks or struggles, or, at least, he wishes to assure
himself and others that he has nothing to struggle for, nothing to seek.
This calm, this silence and petrifaction of a whole subdued world, which
once was free and beautiful, but from the present standpoint of its
creator is to its very depths pagan and criminal, a world which
majestically evolved itself before us in _Ánna Karénin_ and _War and
Peace_,--that tranquillity of _The Kingdom of God_ produces a more
disquieting, a more oppressive impression than the sanguinary struggle,
contrition, sobs, and eternal agony of Dostoévski. Of course, Lev
Tolstóy did not suddenly, and not without painful efforts, reach the
final tranquillity, the final victory over the pagan world. But even in
_War and Peace_ and _Ánna Karénin_ we are present at a very strange
phenomenon: two elements there meet, without running together, like two
streams of one river. Where paganism is, all is life and passion, luxury
and ardour of physical sensations. Outside of good and evil,--as if good
and evil had never existed,--the poet expresses with infinite
truthfulness, with a childish and divine inability of being ashamed, of
hiding the nakedness of his heart, a thirsty, unsatisfiable love for
everything mortal and transitory,--a love for this great billowing ocean
of matter, for everything which from the Christian standpoint ought to
appear as vain and sinful,--for powerful physical health, for country,
glory, woman, and children.
Here is the whole gamut of physical pleasures, and they are told with
fearless openness, such as has never been in any other literature: the
sensation of muscular strength, the charm of field labour in the fresh
air, the gentleness of a child’s sleep, the intoxication with the first
games, with the mirth of youthful banquets, with the tranquil manliness
in sanguinary battles, with the speechlessness of eternal Nature, with
the bracing cold of Russian snows, with the aromatic warmth of the deep
summer grass.
Here is the whole gamut of physical pain, told with the same inexorable
candour, which sometimes rises to cynical coarseness and
shamelessness,--all the terrors of pain, beginning with the inhuman
cries of a beloved woman, dying in the agony of childbirth, up to the
terrible, crushing sound, when the spine of the horse racing in the
hippodrome is broken. What a terror, what an intoxication of unlimited
sensuality!
How could he himself, how could others believe in the icy, reflective
Christianity, and how did they not recognise in him a great, hidden
pagan? This paganism is proclaimed in all the best productions of
Tolstóy by all the voices of the human flesh, which is fresh and joyous
in the baby in its mother’s embrace, covered with the sweat of the agony
and half rotten on the terrible bed of Iván Ilích, blooming and lusty in
Ánna Karénin, and racked and bloody under the knives of the surgeons on
the operating tables of the military hospitals. Flesh everywhere, the
pagan soul of flesh, the one of the two struggling souls of which Goethe
sings:
“Die eine hält in derber Liebeslust
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen.”
But in these very productions there come also to the surface insipid and
offensive parts that are connected by no inner tie with the artistic
woof of the production, as if written by a different man. Such are the
murderous sophistry of Pierre Bezúkhov, and the childishly clumsy and
unnatural Christian regenerations of Konstantín Levín. In these dead
pages the mighty carnal life, which had just been welling up in a
stream, suddenly becomes stark and frozen. The very language which had
reached Púshkin’s simplicity and clearness, the greatest in Russian
literature, abruptly changes: as though a gloomy ascetic took vengeance
upon him for his recent candour, his un-Christian luxury and audacity,
with which but a moment ago had been described the torments and
pleasures of sinful flesh. The ascetic unsparingly violates the
language, breaks, maims, stretches out, and forces into the Procrustean
bed towering, intricate syllogisms. “Two souls,” that were united in
Púshkin, that struggled in Gógol, Goncharóv, Turgénev, and Dostoévski,
for ever abandon each other in Tolstóy, so that the one does not see,
nor hear, nor answer the other.
We are at present past our suffering, we have become accustomed to all
monstrosity and dissonance, or else we certainly should have felt the
barbarity and unseemliness of the artist who, in killing himself and
blasphemously treading on God’s gift within himself, publicly recants
the best of his productions as a crime: “What is it you admire in _Ánna
Karénin_?” says he to the people: “do you not know it is a debauch, a
pagan nastiness of my soul?” The weakness of the great artist lies in
his unconsciousness, because he is a pagan not of the bright, heroic
type, but of the dark, elementary, barbarous type, the son of ancient
Chaos, _a blind Titan_. The small meek one came and placed a cunning
trap for the great one,--the terror of death, the terror of pain,--and
the blind Titan was caught; the meek one enmeshed him with the finest
nets of moral sophisms and Galilean wretchedness, and he overcame and
vanquished him. A few more agonising convulsions, desperate struggles
and outbursts,--and everything was for ever silenced and dead,--there
began the tranquillity of _The Kingdom of God_. Only rarely, amidst
monkish hymns and prayers, among icy, Puritanic discourses about the use
of tobacco, about the brotherhood of the nations, about corporal
punishment and chastity, are heard in the depth of depths a subterranean
din and hollow thunderclaps: it is the voice of the blind Titan, of
indomitable Chaos,--of the pagan love of physical life and pleasures, of
the pagan terror of physical pain and death.
Lev Tolstóy is the antipode, the complete opposite and negation of
Púshkin in Russian literature. And, as often happens, opposites deceive
the superficial observers by their external resemblances. Both in
Púshkin and in our Lev Tolstóy there is oneness, equilibrium, peace. But
Púshkin’s oneness is based on the harmonious union of two worlds; the
oneness of Tolstóy is based on the complete disunion, disruption, and
violence, committed against one of the two equally great, equally divine
elements. Púshkin’s calm and tranquillity witness to a fulness of life;
Lev Tolstóy’s calm and tranquillity witness to a petrified immobility,
to a deadening of the whole world. In Púshkin the thinker and artist are
welded into one being; in Lev Tolstóy the thinker despises the artist,
and the artist does not care for the thinker. Púshkin’s chastity
presupposes passion subject to the feeling of divine moderation; Lev
Tolstóy’s chastity flows from a desperate ascetic negation of love for a
woman. Púshkin’s hope, like Peter the Great’s, was Russia’s
participation in the universal life of the spirit, in universal
civilisation; but for that participation neither Púshkin nor Peter
denied the native element, the peculiarities of the Russian spirit. Lev
Tolstóy, an anarchist without violence, preaches the amalgamation of the
warring nations into a universal brotherhood; but for that brotherhood
he renounces love of country,--that jealous tenderness that filled the
hearts of Púshkin and Peter; and with unsparing haughtiness despises
those peculiar, for him too impassioned, pagan features of the separate
nations, which he would like to weld like the living colours of the
rainbow into one white, dead colour--into a cosmopolitan abstraction.
It is significant that the greatest of Tolstóy’s productions discrowns
that last incarnation of the heroic spirit in history, which for good
reasons had an irresistible charm for all those who in the democracy of
the nineteenth century had preserved a spark of the Promethean
fire,--Byron, Goethe, Púshkin, and even Lérmontov and Heine. Napoleon,
the Delphic god of strength, anger, and glory, “that wondrous man, the
messenger of Providence, the fateful executor of the nameless order,
that vanished king, vanished like a dream, like the shadow of the dawn,”
is transformed in Tolstóy not even into the nihilist Raskólnikov, not
even into one of the monstrous devils of Dostoévski, who are still
surrounded with the aureole of terror, but into a puny, low-born
parvenu, a self-satisfied and prosaic bourgeois, perfumed with
eau-de-Cologne, with fat calves, a pusillanimous and coarse-souled
French shopkeeper, into a comic general Bonaparte of the Moscow
chap-books. That is where the last step into the abyss has been reached,
when it is not possible to go any farther, for here the spirit of the
mob, the spirit of triumphant vulgarity blasphemes the Divine Spirit,
the sanctity of fate, the beneficent and awful appearance of the hero.
The most insinuating and modern of all the devils, the devil of
equality, the devil of the small and numberless, whose name is _Legion_,
has possessed the last great artist, the blind Titan, in order to
proclaim with his thunderous voice to the whole world: “Behold, here is
your hero, your god,--_he is as small as we, as vulgar as we!_”
Everybody has understood Tolstóy, everybody has accepted that watchword
of the mob! Not Púshkin, but Tolstóy is the representative of Russian
literature before the masses of the universe. Tolstóy, the victor over
Napoleon, is himself a Napoleon of the numberless democratic army of the
small, the miserable, the lamenting, and the crushed. They dispute with
Tolstóy, they hate and fear him: this is a sign that his fame is alive
and growing. Púshkin’s fame is becoming ever more academic and distant,
ever more unintelligible to the crowd. Who disputes with Púshkin, who in
Europe knows of Púshkin more than his name? We learn him by heart on our
school-benches, and his verses appear to us as cold and unnecessary for
active Russian life as the choirs of the Greek tragedies or the formulas
of higher mathematics. The most inaccessible and mysterious of all the
books is called the book of the vulgar, the “Vulgate.” Púshkin has
become the Vulgate of Russian literature. Everybody is ready to honour
him with dead lips, with dead laurels,--who honours him with his soul
and spirit? The crowd purchases in the acknowledgment of the great the
right of ignoring them, and avenges its too noble enemies by a memorial
plate in the academic Pantheon, and by oblivion in fame. Who would
believe that this god of the teachers of Russian literature is not only
more alive, more modern, but, from the standpoint of bourgeois
vulgarity, even more dangerous, more audacious than Lev Tolstóy? Who
would believe that the irreproachably aristocratic Púshkin, the singer
of the Bronze Rider, the nursling of his old nurse Arína, is nearer to
the heart of the Russian people, than the herald of universal
brotherhood, the merciless Puritan in the sheepskin coat of the Russian
peasant?
To what extent the heroic side of Púshkin’s poetry is not understood and
despised, is evident from the fact that two of the greatest of Púshkin’s
admirers, Gógol and Dostoévski, as if by common agreement, do not attach
the slightest importance to it. However strange it may be, if we leave
out of consideration the text-books and the dead academic recognition,
Púshkin, the only bard of the only hero in the country of Lev Tolstóy
and of Dostoévski, in the country of Russian nihilism and Russian
democracy, is a forgotten bard of a forgotten hero.
INDEX.
Abrék, its definition, 105
Aksákov, S. T., biographical sketch and extract, 216 _seq._; _and see_
19, 236
Alexander I., and his period, 5; his liberalism, 12, 16; _and see_ 240
Alexander II. and his period, 4, 5
Alexis Mikháylovich, 40, 239
American Constitution and Alexander I., 12
American War and Karamzín, 32
Analysis, in literature, 20; in Dostoévski, 21
_Ánna Karénin_, 5, 391 _seq._; and see _L. N. Tolstóy_
Arína Rodiónovna, Púshkin’s nurse, 122, 493
Art for art’s sake, in literature, 16, 20; criticised by Písarev, 386
_seq._
Baratýnski, E. A., Púshkin’s influence on, 17; biographical sketch and
extracts, 149 _seq._
Bátyushkov, K. N., estimate of, 13 _seq._; biographical sketch and
extracts, 73 _seq._; _and see_ 16, 81
Beecher-Stowe, Russian, 297
Belles-lettres, peculiar course of, in Russia, 6 _seq._
Bestúzhev, A. A., biographical sketch and extract, 102 _seq._; _and
see_ 4
Boborýkin, 5
_Borís Godunóv_, by Púshkin, 143 _seq._; _and see_ 16
Bowring, Sir John, not the first translator from the Russian, v
Boyán, 70
Bronze Rider, The, Peter the Great so called, 123, 493
Byelínski, V. G., and the Natural School, 4, 19; and Koltsóv, 176;
biographical sketch and extract, 205 _seq._; _and see_ 5, 6, 9, 186,
389, 492
Bylínas, by A. K. Tolstóy, 246
Byron, his influence, on Russian literature, 8, 10, 16, 17; on
Púshkin, 16; on Kozlóv, 68; on Lérmontov, 155
Byzantine period, 18
Catherine II., 12, 239
Censorship, and literature, 6; after 1848, 20; _and see_ 303
Chékhov, A. P., biographical sketch and extract, 459 _seq._; _and see_
5
Chernyshévski, 5, 389
Church-Slavic, and Shishkóv, 12; and Karamzín, 28
_Cloak, The_, prototype of later novels, 19
Comedy, Griboyédov’s, 17; and see _Griboyédov_, _Gógol_
Cosmopolitanism of the newer Russian literature, 23
_Crime and Punishment_, 5; and see _Dostoévski_
Crimean War and literature, 5
Criminals, portrayed in literature, 21; and see _Dostoévski_
Critics, evolution of, 5; and see _Byelínski_, _Dobrolyúbov_,
_Merezhkóvski_, _Písarev_
Culture in nineteenth century, 7
Danilévski, 22
_Dead Souls_, 4, 18; and see _Gógol_
Death, early, of literary men, 6
Decembrist conspiracy, marking an epoch, 5; and Rylyéev, 86; _and see_
15, 102
Délvig, A. A., Púshkin’s influence on, 17; predecessor of Koltsóv, 18;
biographical sketch and extracts, 120 _seq._
Democracy, Russian, defined, 9; in the forties, 20, 21; Dostoévski’s,
21; and Nekrásov, 22
Democratic critics, their effect on poetry, 4
Democratisation of Russian society, 9
_Demon, The_, 17; and see _Lérmontov_
Derzhávin, 12, 16
Desyatína = various land measures, from 3-5 acres, _passim_
Didacticism passing away, 23
Disenchantment in Russian literature, 10 _seq._
Dmítriev, and Karamzín, 27; _and see_ 16, 176, 208
Dobrolyúbov, N. A., and _Oblómov_, 9; biographical sketch and extract,
271 _seq._; _and see_ 5, 6, 389
Dolgorúki, I. M., 16
Dolgorúki, Princess, 68
_Domostróy_, 238
Dostoévski, F. M., estimate of, 21; biographical sketch and extract,
322 _seq._; _and see_ 4, 5, 19, 81, 296
Drama, Ostróvski’s, 22, 369 _seq._; Chékhov’s, 459; and see _Comedy_
Eighteenth century in literature, 12
Eighties, characterisation of period since, 11
Emancipation of serfs, due to literary propaganda, 6; and Turgénev, 21
England, 73 _seq._
English, literature compared with Russian, 3; aristocracy compared
with Russian nobility, 8; and Russian literary styles, 13; people
and Karamzín, 32
Enthusiasm, in Russian literature, 8; of Russian youths, 10
_Evgéni Onyégin_, 16, 17; and see _Púshkin_
Fables and Krylóv, 14, 41 _seq._
_Family Chronicle, The_, 19; and see _Aksákov_
_Fathers and Sons_, 4, 8, 9; and see _Turgénev_
Fet, 4, 17, 391; and see _Shenshín_
Fifties, the, 4
Filarét, 40
Flaubert, 484
Folktales, naturalism in, 18
Fon-Vízin, 27
Forties, the novelists of the, 4
Forty years, apogee reached by literary men at, 6
France, its influence on Russian literature, 19
French, and Russian literary styles, 13; realism, compared with
Russian, 20
Gaj, 241
Garshín, V. M., biographical sketch and extract, 443 _seq._; _and see_
6
German, Romanticism in Russia, 8; influence, 15, 19; philosophy in the
forties, 20
Gértsen, A. I., biographical sketch and extract, 236 _seq._; estimate
by Dobrolyúbov, 272 _seq._; _and see_ 242
Glínka, F. N., 78 _seq._
Gnyédich, 14
Goethe, 492
Gógol, N. V., novelist of the forties, 4; obscuring Púshkin, 16;
estimate of, 18; marks end of older writers, 20; compared with
Tolstóy, 21; and Naryézhny, 49; biographical sketch and extracts,
185 _seq._; and Byelínski, 206 _seq._; and Turgénev, 281; and
Dostoévski, 323; estimate of, by Merezhkóvski, 483 _seq._; _and see_
4, 111, 156, 206, 217, 310, 369, 379
Goncharóv, I. A., estimate of, 21; biographical sketch and extract,
259 _seq._; and Dobrolyúbov, 271 _seq._; estimate of, by
Merezhkóvski, 484 _seq._; _and see_ 4, 9, 339
Górki, M., 5, 23; and see _Pyeshkóv_
Government and progress, 10
Gray’s _Elegy_ and Zhukóvski, 54
Griboyédov, A. S., estimate of, 17; biographical sketch and extract,
92 _seq._; _and see_ 4, 9
Grigoróvich, D. V., and peasant in literature, 5; biographical sketch
and extract, 296 _seq._
Hamlets in Russian life, 21
Hegel, his influence on Russian literature, 19; and Byelínski, 206
Heine, 492
_Hero of our Time_, 17; and see _Lérmontov_
Herzen, see _Gértsen_
History and Karamzín, 27
_Iliad_ in Russian, 14
_Intelligence Comes to Grief_, 17; and see _Griboyédov_
Italian poetry, in Russian, 14
Ivan III., 40, 112
Ivan IV., 40, 246 _seq._
Izmáylov, A. B., biographical sketch and extracts, 46 _seq._; _and
see_ 14
Jefferson, Thomas, and Alexander I., 12
_Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow_, 12
Juvenal, Nekrásov called the Russian, 347
Karamzín, N. M., compared with Púshkin, 3; and Shishkóv, 4; and
literary style, 13; biographical sketch and extracts, 27 _seq._;
_and see_ 5, 12, 14-16, 55, 81, 208, 217, 240
Khomyakóv, A. S., and Slavophiles, 19; biographical sketch and
extracts, 229 _seq._; _and see_ 236, 239
Koltsóv, A. V., estimate of, 18; biographical sketch and extracts,
176; _and see_ 22, 120, 361
Korolénko, V. G., biographical sketch and extracts, 436; _and see_ 5,
468
Kozlóv, I. I., biographical sketch and extracts, 67 _seq._
Krylóv, I. A., biographical sketch and extracts, 41 _seq._; _and see_
14, 16
La Fontaine and Krylóv, 14
Lazhéchnikov, I. I., biographical sketch and extract, 111 _seq._; _and
see_ 4
Lérmontov, M. Y., estimate of, 17; biographical sketch and extracts,
155 _seq._; compared with Ogarév, 242; and Dobrolyúbov, 272 _seq._;
estimate of, by Merezhkóvski, 484 _seq._; _and see_ 3, 4, 6, 123
Levítov, A. I., biographical sketch and extract, 417 _seq._; _and see_
22
Lewis, W. D., first translator into English from the Russian, v
Literary language and Karamzín, 13
Literature and progress, 10
Little-Russian authors, 18, 49, 185
Lyapunóv, 240
Lyceum at Tsárskoe-Seló, 7
Marlínski, see _Bestúzhev_
Masonic societies, 12, 27
Maturity, early, of literary talent, 6
Máykov, A. N., biographical sketch and extracts, 339 _seq._;
criticised by Písarev, 386 _seq._; _and see_ 4, 17
Máykov, V. I., 339
_Memoirs of a Huntsman_, and liberation of serfs, 6; and see
_Turgénev_
Merezhkóvski, D. S., and didacticism, 23; biographical sketch and
extract, 482 _seq._
Merzlyakóv, 16
Middle class, and culture, 8; in literature, 22
Moscow, circles in the forties, 19; merchant class, 22, 369
Muravév, 73
Nádson, S. Y., biographical sketch and extracts, 457 _seq._; _and see_
6
Napoleon, in Russian literature, 63 _seq._; _and see_ 14 _seq._, 492
Naryézhny, V. T., biographical sketch and extract, 49 _seq._; _and
see_ 18
Natural School, and Byelínski, 4; and Gógol, 186; defined by
Byelínski, 206 _seq._; _and see_ 18
Naturalism in Russian literature, 18
Negation, in Russian literature, 5, 8; and Tolstóy, 21
Nekrásov, N. A., his influence on poetry, 4; and democracy, 22;
biographical sketch and extracts, 347 _seq._; _and see_ 120, 234,
361, 365
Neledínski, 16
Nicholas I., literature under, 3, 5; and reaction, 20; and
Slavophilism, 240 _seq._; _and see_ 240
Nihilism defined, by Turgénev, 283 _seq._; by Merezhkóvski, 485
Nikítin, Afanási, 114
Nikítin, I. S., biographical sketch and extracts, 361 _seq._; _and
see_ 6, 22
Nobility and culture, 7
Novel, the Russian, 17, 18
Novelists, of the forties, 4; of the people, 22
Nóvikov, 27
_Oblómov_, as a type of Russians, 9; and see _Goncharóv_
Ogarév, N. P., biographical sketch and extracts, 242 _seq._; _and see_
236
Optimism in Russian literature, 448
Ostróvski, A. N., biographical sketch and extract, 369 _seq._; _and
see_ 22
Ózerov, 12, 241
Pan, a Little-Russian (and Polish) word = Mr., 49 _seq._
Panslavism, 238 _seq._; and see _Slavophilism_
Peasant, in literature, 5; in Turgénev’s sketches, 20; and Byelínski,
213 _seq._; and Uspénski, 408 _seq._; _and see_ 176
People, its definition, 22 _seq._
Periods, in literature, 3 _seq._; by reigns, 5
Pessimism, in the forties, 20; and Baratýnski, 149
Peter the Great, estimate of, by Merezhkóvski, 483 _seq._; _and see_
7, 18, 40, 64, 123, 341
Philosophy, its weakness in Russian literature, 9
Písarev, D. I., biographical sketch and extract, 385 _seq._; _and see_
6, 9
Písemski, A. F., biographical sketch and extract, 310 _seq._; _and
see_ 4, 22
Pleshchéev, A. N., biographical sketch and extracts, 365 _seq._
Poetry, Zhukóvski’s conception of, 55; _and see_ 4
Politics and literature, 6, 11
Polónski, Y. P., biographical sketch and extracts, 303 _seq._; _and
see_ 4, 17
Pomyalóvski, and peasant in literature, 5
Populists, 10
Potápenko, I. N., biographical sketch and extract, 448 _seq._; _and
see_ 5
Progress, carried by youths, 9 _seq._; and Turgénev, 20; of Russian
literature in nineteenth century, 23
Protest an important note in Russian literature, 8
Pud, measure of weight = about 36 lbs., _passim_
Púshkin, A. S., and Byron, 10; estimate, 16 _seq._; renewal of his
cult, 17; and naturalism, 18; and Merezhkóvski, 23; and Bátyushkov,
73; his death, and Lérmontov, 156; biographical sketch and extracts,
122 _seq._; and Dobrolyúbov, 272 _seq._; estimate of, by
Merezhkóvski, 483 _seq._; _et passim_
Pyeshkóv, A. M., biographical sketch and extract, 467 _seq._
Radíshchev, 12
Reaction, periods of, in literature, 11; after 1848, 20
Realism and Turgénev, 20
_Revizór, The_, 188; and see _Gógol_
Romanticism, and novels, 4; early, in Russia, 8; and Zhukóvski, 14,
54; and Púshkin, 16; and Gógol, 19; and Bestúzhev, 102; and
Byelínski, 207; and Turgénev, 280
Russian language, 13, 28
Russian literature compared with English, 3
Ryeshétnikov, 22
Rylyéev, K. F., and Decembrist conspiracy, 15; Púshkin’s influence on,
17; biographical sketch and extracts, 86 _seq._; _and see_ 14, 102
Saltykóv, M. B., and satire, 22; and Dobrolyúbov, 272 _seq._;
biographical sketch and extract, 379 _seq._; and Písarev, 391; _and
see_ 386
Satire and Saltykóv, 22; and see _Saltykóv_
Scepticism in the forties, 20
Schaden’s school, 27
Schelling, his influence on Russian literature, 19, 205
Schools and culture, 7
Schopenhauer, 484
Scott, Sir Walter, his influence on Russian novel, 4
Sentimentalism, 27
Seventies in literature, 22
Shakspere, his influence on Púshkin, 16; and Karamzín, 31
Shchedrín, see _Saltykóv_
Shcherbátov, 13, 27
Shebúyev, 240
Shenshín, A. A., biographical sketch and extracts, 319 _seq._
Shishkóv, his antiquated style, 4; and Church-Slavic, 12, 28; and
Aksákov, 217
Slavophiles, their enthusiasm, 10; studying customs, 22; defined by
Gértsen, 237 _seq._; and Ostróvski 369; _and see_ 13, 236, 484
Slavophilism due to German philosophy, 19
Soilers, 10
Sons and fathers, 10
Styles of language, 12 _seq._; _and see_ 5
Talent not concentrated, 9
Tasso and Bátyushkov, 14, 73, 75 _seq._
Tatíshchev, 27
Theatre and Ostróvski, 369
Theology and literature, Khomyakóv’s, 230
Tolstóy, A. K., biographical sketch and extracts, 245
Tolstóy, L. N., novelist of the forties, 4; departing from reality, 5;
as negator, 9; estimate of, 21; biographical sketch and extracts,
391 _seq._; estimate of, by Merezhkóvski, 483 _seq._; _and see_ 19,
81
Tolstóyists, 392
Tradition, absence of, in home life, 7; in school, 8
Tsárskoe-Seló, lyceum at, 7
Tugendbund in Russia, 15
Turgénev, I. S., novelist of the forties, 4; and emancipation of the
slaves, 6; a Westerner, 19; estimate of, 20 _seq._; and style, 21;
and Dobrolyúbov, 272 _seq._; biographical sketch and extracts, 280
_seq._; estimate of, by Merezhkóvski, 484 _seq._; _and see_ 9, 234,
303, 385
Tyútchev, F. I., biographical sketch and extracts, 234; _and see_ 417
Uspénski, G. I., and peasant in literature, 5; biographical sketch and
extract, 408 _seq._; _and see_ 22, 428, 468
Uvárov, Count S. S. (lived 1786-1855), famous for his perfervid
loyalty to the throne, 241
Venevítinov, 17
Vyázemski, P. A., his literary death, 4; biographical sketch and
extracts, 81 _seq._
_War and Peace_, 391 _seq._; and see _L. N. Tolstóy_
Western ideals, in Russia, 7, 19; and Turgénev, 20
_Word of Igor’s Armament, The_, modernised by Máykov, 340
Yazýkov, N. M., Púshkin’s influence on, 17; biographical sketch and
extract, 152 _seq._
Young men, and school traditions, 7; in cultural movements, 9
Zagóskin, 240
Zhukóvski, V. A., and Romanticism, 14; biographical sketch and
extracts, 54 _seq._; _and see_ 3, 16, 67, 68, 81, 152, 186
Zlatovrátski, N. N., biographical sketch and extracts, 427 _seq._;
_and see_ 22, 468
WORKS IN LITERATURE
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