“There is still something around us and within that baffles and
surprises us. Events happen which are as mysterious after our glib
explanations as they were before. Changes for good or ill take place in
the heart of man for which his intellect gives no reason.”
These words of Dr. Henry Van Dyke, written among others to preface
his latest collected short fictions, apply right well to our attempts
at literary criticism. Mathematics differ from life in this: after a
proposition in number or in form-theory is demonstrated the last word
has been said; the height of finality is reached; for any one to argue
the point might amaze, though it would not interest us. But with life,
who can name a fixed and infallible answer to its problems? Here is
ever the unknown quantity, irreducible to precise terms, and varying in
all sorts of perplexing ratios.
Is it not exactly because literature is the literate expression of
life that we approach its subtler problems with the same sense of
futility as the issues of life arouse in us? Yet the eternal challenge
to discover the _why_, born, as it is, with our own babyhood, dies not
with our manhood’s strength, but still calls us to try our “literary
discernment” once more, and yet once more, to see if we may not by some
magic of penetration find the true causes which move back among the
shadows.
So, with some degree of assurance we lay our fingers upon the causes in
a given literary career which seem to us to be calculable--parentage,
birth, early environment, education, chosen occupation, and all
the rest. Yet a considerable proportion of the results must remain
unaccountable, because the actuating forces are, after all,
imponderable. We find motives and standards of conduct, or ideals,
clearly expressed in the man’s own words; but did he understand
himself? Here we find one acknowledged fact, here a second, and here a
third. But by what law of causation may we say that three-times-one is
three and not six, or sixty, or even six myriads?
No, in seeking to estimate the weight of the inner things we are
calculating the incalculable; it is like trying to clothe in cumbersome
workaday garb a being that is too subtle for material restrictions.
Especially, then, in seeking to enter the penetralia of a man of
Garshin’s varying moods and tenses, let us confess anew to ourselves
how tentative must be our guesses at truth. His mind--like that of
not a few other literary artists--fluttered between normality and
abnormality. However, only the literal, prosaic, practical, uninventive
mind is sane, and that is but a shorter way of spelling uninteresting.
There is still a strong argument to be made for the essential
seer-quality--perhaps the “second sight,” perhaps the inner light--of
many a one whom the sober world has adjudged as of unsound mind. But
this again brings us up facing another great and tantalizing _x_ of
life.
* * * * *
Wsewolod Michailovich Garshin was born in February, 1855, of good
family. His south-of-Russia parentage marked his physique. He was
good-looking, almost dark, fiery of eye, and in temperament sweet,
impressionable, and sympathetic--a combination rare enough in a man to
make it noteworthy.
Like Pushkin, he spent his very early life on the family estates, his
father having retired from the army when the boy was three years old.
At nine, however, the child was placed at school in the inevitable
St. Petersburg, with the object of his preparing for the study of
medicine. But the parental ambitions were not realized, for the lad
was so abnormally nervous that he became subject to vagaries and
hallucinations, so that while yet but seventeen years of age, and
already writing remarkable bits of realistic self-revelation, it was
found best to place him under restraint. The effects of this clouded
period are to be traced in much of his later work.
Happily, in about a year he recovered his balance, took up study anew,
and finished his preparatory course with credit, entering the Institute
of Mining Engineers in 1874, at the age of nineteen--for in everything
Garshin was precocious.
From this point on, Garshin’s career may plainly be read in his
writings. He wrote only about twenty-five stories in all, and
practically without exception they are autobiographical. The two
great dominant motifs grew out of his two great life-experiences:
war--but war from a special viewpoint--and what I may call the border
consciousness, experiences of the mind when its poise is either
uncertain or completely upset.
I have said that Garshin viewed war in an unusual way. This is true
not alone of his fiction but of his life. In 1876 the Russo-Turkish
war broke out, and Garshin considered it his sacred duty to go. The
horrors of war had always deeply affected his sensitive nature. The
intoxicating blare, the thrill of glory, the call of the spectacle,
all meant nothing to him, except revulsion. But duty was a word of
serious meaning, and it won from him a serious response. This pupil of
Tolstoi could detest and denounce an institution to whose claims he
felt bound to bow in time of national need.
It is always interesting to observe how two artists, especially
contemporary artists, interpret the same theme. Guy de Maupassant,
incomparably the greater literator, but destined to the same sad end
as met Garshin, has worked out a motive in “A Coward” similar to the
Russian author’s “Coward,” though the stories themselves could not be
more dissimilar.
Maupassant simply unclothes a human soul face to face with the idea of
suicide. Relentlessly he strips shred after shred of illusion from the
introspective thinker who is meditating upon his own cowardice. But
when the end does come the reader is half in doubt as to how to judge
the wretch.
Garshin’s impressionistic sketch is tremendously cumulative. In
soliloquy the Person of the story weighs the war, its appeals, its
repulsions, the motives that lead men to go, the awful casualties, and
finally tells how that he is considered a coward for his inaction.
Am I a coward or not?
To-day I was told that I am a coward. Certainly it was a very
shallow-minded person who said so when I declared in her presence
my unwillingness to go to the war, and expressed a fear that they
will call me up to serve. Her opinion did not distress me, but
raised the question, Am I really a coward? Perhaps all my aversion
against what every one else considers a great matter arises only
from fear of my skin! Is it really worth while to worry about any
one unimportant life in view of a great matter? And am I capable of
subjecting my life to danger generally for the sake of any matter?
At length--just as it was with Garshin, who joined a regiment at
Kishinev-of-terrible-memory--the “coward” goes to war, and after a
story-within-a-story is told, his act of heroism closes the picture.
* * * * *
Ever since I was old enough to attempt just thinking, I have always had
much sympathy for a coward--I suppose because I have been afraid so
often myself at moments when heroes are said to feel no trepidation.
And do we not all feel keenly with Garshin?--for a man of his
temperament, and one finding nothing admirable in war, it must have
required genuine courage to go, even while he was repelled and afraid.
But this was only one more phase of a contradictory character--as all
characters are in whom the inner life and the outer do not coördinate.
In “The Signal,” we have a perfectly-wrought short-story with as
dramatic a surprise as ever capped a climax.
* * * * *
While serving in the army, as servant to an officer, the health of
Simon Ivanoff had broken down, and all that was left to him was a minor
post as linesman on the railway. One day, while walking the tracks,
he met for the first time his neighboring linesman, whom he found to
be quite repellent in his manner. The simple-minded Simon, however,
eventually pressed an acquaintance upon both the linesman, Vassili
Stepanich Spiridoff, and his young wife, and found that Vassili had
been much embittered by reflecting upon the inequalities of life, and
especially those of his own hard position.
One day, the traffic inspector came along and forced Vassili to tear up
his little garden, merely because he had planted it without permission;
and, besides, he reported him for his technical irregularity. Shortly
after this, the district chief arrived and showed animosity, evidently
founded upon the report against Vassili, and when the man protested,
the chief struck him brutally.
The next day Simon met Vassili, stick and bundle over his shoulder, and
his cheek bound up in a handkerchief.
“Where are you off to, Neighbor?” cried Simon.
Vassili came close, but was quite pale, white as chalk, and his
eyes had a wild look.
Almost choking, he muttered, “To the town--to Moscow--to the Head
Office.”
“Head Office? Ah, you are going, I suppose, to complain. Give it
up, Vassili Stepanich. Forget it.”
“No, Mate, I will not forget. It is too late. See! He struck me in
the face--drew blood. So long as I live, I will not forget.”
Simon vainly attempted to dissuade him, and the man at length passed on.
On the day following, Simon left his wife at home to meet the six
o’clock train, and, taking his knife, started off to the forest to
get some reeds out of which to make flutes, which he used to sell for
two copecks apiece. As he walked along, he fancied that he heard the
clang of iron striking iron. Since there were no repairs going on, he
wondered, but as he came out on the fringe of the wood he saw a man
squatting on the roadbed, busily engaged in loosening a rail.
A mist came before Simon’s eyes; he wanted to cry out, but he could
not. It was Vassili!... Simon scrambled up the bank as Vassili,
with crowbar and wrench, slid headlong down the other side.
“Vassili Stepanich! For the love ... Old friend! Come back! Give
me the crowbar. We will put the rail back; no one will know. Come
back! Save your soul from this sin!”
Vassili did not look back, but disappeared into the wood.
Simon stood before the rail which had been torn up. He threw down
his bundle of sticks. A train was due; not a goods train, but a
passenger train. And he had nothing with which to stop it, no flag.
He could not replace the rail, and could not drive in the spikes
with his bare hands. It was necessary to run to the hut for some
tools. “God help me,” he murmured.
He ran toward his hut, faltering every now and then in his
eagerness, but he soon realized that he would be too late. What
should he do! In desperation, he turned back to the spot where the
rail threatened disaster to the on-coming train. As he reached it,
he heard the even tremor of the rails.
Then an idea came into his head, literally like a ray of light.
Pulling off his cap, he took out of it a cotton scarf, drew his
knife out of the upper part of his boot, and crossed himself,
muttering, “God bless me!”
He buried the knife into his left arm above the elbow; the blood
spurted out, flowing in a hot stream. In this he soaked his scarf,
smoothed it out, tied it to the stick, and hung out his red flag.
He stood waving his flag. The train was already in sight. The
driver will not see him--will come close up, and a heavy train
cannot be pulled up in a hundred _sajenes_.
And the blood kept on flowing. Simon kept pressing the sides of
the wound together, wanting to close it, but the blood did not
diminish. Evidently he had cut his arm very deeply. His head
commenced to swim, black spots began to dance before his eyes, and
then it became dark. There was a ringing in his ears. He could not
see the train or hear the noise. Only one thought possessed him: “I
shall not be able to keep standing up. I shall fall and drop the
flag; the train will pass over me.... Help me, O Lord!...”
All became quite black before him, his mind became a blank, and he
dropped the flag; but the blood-stained banner did not fall to the
ground. A hand seized it and held it high to meet the approaching
train. The engine-driver saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed
steam. The train came to a standstill.
People jumped out of the carriages and collected in a crowd.
Looking, they saw a man lying senseless on the footway, drenched in
blood, and another man standing beside him with a blood-stained rag
on a stick.
Vassili looked around at all; then, lowering his head, said, “Bind
me; I have pulled up a rail!”
In “Four Days,” which follows in an original translation for this
series, we have another autobiographical story of singular penetration.
It must be remembered that Garshin’s convictions of duty led him to
unusual length--he enlisted as a private, when his family connections
would have warranted something better. So he writes from close to the
people--in this respect differing from Tolstoi, with whose memorable
Sevastopol sketches Garshin’s “Four Days” has been seriously compared
by critics. It was at the engagement of Aislar that Garshin received
his incapacitating bullet-wound, after real gallantry in action, and
Aislar is the battle of the story.
After recovering from his wound, our author became desperately absorbed
in trying to save one of his friends from execution for having
attempted the life of Loris Melikov, but Garshin failed, and soon
afterward it again became necessary to confine him in an asylum.
From this seizure he recovered, and married a young lady who devoted
her life to a beautiful service--that of healing his mind and
preventing a recurrence of his malady; but, sadly enough, without
success. He never shook off the boding pall of the madhouse. One needs
only to read his “Red Flower” to feel the haunting presence of that
pathetic colony of abnormal minds and spirits coming to sit with him in
hours when he sought happiness in forgetfulness. Half-memories of days
of half-self-possession are indeed shapes that haunt the dusk! To quote
Waliszewski’s vivid summary: “The story describes a demented person,
half-conscious of his condition, who wears himself out in superhuman
efforts to gain possession of a red-poppy--reddened, as he imagines, by
the blood of all the martyrdoms of the human race. If the flower were
only destroyed, he thinks, humanity would be saved.”
In 1887, in physical and mental suffering too combinedly torturing
to be borne, Garshin eluded the watchers by his bedside and flung
himself down a stone staircase, sustaining injuries from which he never
recovered. The consciousness of his act caused him to brood still more
painfully over his state, and he died in a hospital the next year,
1888, at the age of only thirty-three.
If one may venture to be analytical, there are three kinds of stories:
those told of life as it exists apart from the narrator; those dealing
with events intimately associated with the narrator; and those that are
purely evoked from the inner life of the story-teller himself.
These last-named--spun of gossamer thread, intangible as the dawn,
airy, floating, subtle--are the highest type. To this height Garshin
did not perfectly attain. His stories were rather of the second sort,
drawn from his own experiences. That they were touched with mysterious
moods and vague, unnamable potencies must have been due to the author’s
pitiful journeys into that shadowy, distraught land which we so
confidently call the Insane.
* * * * *
Garshin’s realism grew out of his need for writing his own
experiences. Though some of his descriptions of the dead Turk, in the
following sketch, “Four Days,” are so revoltingly real as to justify
the excisions made in the magazine version, I have retained them here,
for Garshin’s realism, as a rule, lacks disgusting detail. But it is as
faithful to fact as a canvas by Verestchagin, whose paintings, indeed,
might be said to exhibit the same method which Garshin applied to
literature.
Garshin is a pessimist--of course, one is almost forced to add. His
heroes are not idealized, even in the hour of their victory. But there
is nobility--that priceless tone in literature!--in much of his work,
and the body takes its true place in life, as an expression of spirit,
and not as the master of the house.
All in all, Garshin was a great writer, doing pitifully wonderful
things under such stress as makes us love him for his brave, losing
fight against black foes within and without.
FOUR DAYS
_By Wsewolod Garshin_
I remember how we ran through the wood, how the bullets whizzed past
us, how the twigs that were hit by them snapped and fell, how we
scrambled through the bushes. The firing grew heavier. Looking through
to the outer edge, I could see little flashes of red here and there.
Sidorov, a young private of Company I--“How did he come to fall into
our line?” was the thought that flashed through my head--suddenly sat
down on the ground and silently looked at me with open, terrified eyes.
A stream of blood trickled from his mouth. Yes, that too I remember
well. I also remember how when almost on the edge of the wood I first
saw ... _him_ in the thick bushes. He was an enormous, corpulent Turk,
but I ran straight at him, although I am weak and small. Something
burst, something huge seemed to fly past me; there was a ringing in my
ears. “He has shot me,” was my thought. But he, with a cry of terror,
pressed his back against the dense foliage. He could have gone around
it without difficulty, but in his fright he lost his presence of mind
completely, and he tried to crawl through the prickly bushes.
With a blow, I knocked the gun out of his hand; I followed this by a
thrust with my bayonet. There was an outcry: a roar that died into
a moan. I ran on farther. Our soldiers cried, “Hurrah!” fell low,
and discharged their guns. I remember that I too fired several times
after we had left the wood and were in the field. Suddenly the cry of
“Hurrah!” grew louder, and we all in a body moved forward. That is,
not we, but my comrades; I remained behind. That seemed strange to me.
Still stranger was the fact that suddenly everything vanished; all
the cries and firing died away. I could hear nothing, but saw only
something blue, which I concluded was the sky. Afterwards, that too
passed out of my senses.
* * * * *
Never before have I found myself in such a strange situation. I am
lying, it seems, on my stomach, and I see before me only a small clod
of earth. A few blades of grass, an ant climbing down one of these head
downwards, bits of litter from last year’s grass--that is my whole
world. And I can see with only one eye, because the other is obstructed
by some hard substance, perhaps a twig upon which my head rests. I
feel terribly uncomfortable, and I wish to stir; it is incomprehensible
to me why I cannot. So the time passes. I hear the noise of the
grasshoppers and the humming of bees. Nothing more. At last I make an
effort, and, extracting my right arm from under me, I press both my
hands against the earth and try to rise to my knees.
Something sharp and rapid like lightning shoots across my entire body
from the knees to my chest and head, and I collapse to the ground.
Again darkness, again nothingness.
* * * * *
I am awake once more. Why do I see stars, which shine so brightly in
the dark-blue Bulgarian sky? Am I in my tent? Why have I crawled out of
it? I make a movement, and feel an agonizing pain in my legs.
Yes, I have been wounded in battle. Dangerously or not? I catch hold
of my legs, there where the pain is. And both the right and the
left legs are covered with clotted blood. When I touch them with my
hands, the pain becomes even more intense. It is like a protracted
toothache, gnawing at the very soul. There is a ringing in the ears,
an oppressiveness in the head. I vaguely understand that I have been
wounded in both legs. But it is all incomprehensible. Why have I not
been picked up? Have the Turks really beaten us? I try to recall what
has happened to me; at the beginning things seem a bit confused, but
they gradually become clearer, and I come to the conclusion that we
have not been beaten. And simply because I fell on the little field on
top of the slope. In any case, how it all happened is difficult for me
to remember; but I do recall how they all rushed forward, and that I
alone could not run; and that only something blue remained before my
eyes. Somewhat earlier our captain pointed towards this hillock. “Boys,
we will get there!” he cried in his sonorous voice. And we got there;
it is clear we have not been beaten.... Why, then, was I not picked
up? This is such an open spot, and everything is visible. There must
be others lying here. The shots came so thick. I must turn my head
to look. It is easier to do this now, because when I first came to
consciousness and I saw the grass, and the ant crawling head downwards,
I tried to rise, and I fell back, not into my former position, but
turned over on my spine. That explains why I see the stars.
I try to rise to a sitting position. This is very difficult, when both
legs are wounded. After several attempts I begin to despair; at last,
however, with tears in my eyes, forced out by the pain, I manage it.
Overhead I see a spot of dark-blue sky, in which are visible a large
star and a number of small ones; and around me something dark and
tall--the bushes. I am in the bushes--that is why I have not been found!