Book III.

RISE OF THE RUSSIAN NOVEL.

I.

The Beginnings of Russian Literature.

From this state of anguish, of unrest, of uncertainty, has been brought

forth, like amber from the salt sea, a most interesting literature. Into

this relatively peaceful domain we are about to penetrate. But before

speaking of the novel itself I must mention as briefly as possible the

sources and vicissitudes of Russian letters up to the time when they

assumed a national and at the same time a social and political

character.

I will avoid tiresome details, and the repetition of Russian names which

are formidable and harsh to our senses, besides being confusing and at

first sight all very much alike, and much given to terminating in

_of_,--a syllable which on Russian lips is nevertheless very euphonious

and sweet. I will also avoid the mention of books of secondary

importance; for as this is not a course of Russian literature, it would

be pedantry to refer to more than those I have read from cover to

cover. I will mention in passing only a few authors of lesser genius

than the four whom Melchior de Voguié very correctly estimates as the

perfect national types; namely, Gogol, Turguenief, Dostoiëwsky, and

Tolstoï, and I will give only a succinct review of the primitive period,

the classicism and romanticism, the satire and comedy antecedent to

Gogol, this much being necessary in order to bring out the

transformation due to the prodigious genius of this founder of realism,

and consummated in the contemporary novel.

Literature, considered not as rhetorical feats or as the art of speaking

and writing well, but as a manifestation of national life or of the

peculiar inclinations of a people, exists from the time when the spirit

of the people is spontaneously revealed in legends, traditions,

proverbs, and songs. The fertility of Russian popular literature is well

known to students of folk-lore. Critics have demonstrated to us that

between the primitive oral, mythical, and poetical literature of Russia

and the present novel (which is profoundly philosophical in character,

and inspired by that austere muse, the Real) there is as close a

relationship as between the gray-haired grandfather who has all his life

followed the plough, and his offspring who holds a chair in a

university. Russian literature was born beside the Danube, in the

fatherland of the Sclavonic people. The various tribes dispersed

themselves over the Black Sea, and the Russian Sclavs, following the

course of the Dnieper, began to elaborate their heroic mythology with

feats of gods and demi-gods against the forces of Nature, and monsters

and other fantastic beings. A warlike mode of life and a semi-savage

imagination are reflected in their legends and songs. All this period is

covered by the _bilinas_, a word which is explained by Russian etymology

to mean _songs of the past_. These epics tell of the exploits of ancient

warriors who personify the blind and chaotic forces of Nature and the

elements. _Esviatogor_, for example, represents a mountain; _Volk_ may

mean a wolf, a bull, or an ant; there is a godlike tiller of the soil

who stands for Russian agriculture, and who is the popular and

indigenous hero, in opposition to the fighting and adventurous hero

_Volga_, who stands for the ruling classes. Perhaps these _bilinas_ and

the Finnish Kalevala are the only primitive epics in which the laborer

plays a first part and puts the fighting hero into the shade. In these

national poems of a people descended from the Scythians, who in the days

of Herodotus were proud of calling themselves _farmers_ or _laborers_,

the two most attractive figures are the heroes of the plough, Mikula and

Ilia; it is as though the singers of long ago started the worship of the

peasant, which is the dogma of the present novel, or as though the

apotheosis of agriculture were an idea rooted in the deepest soil of the

national thought of Russia.

Next after this primitive cycle comes the age of chivalry, known under

the name of Kief cycle, which has its focus in the Prince Vladimir

called the Red Sun; but even in this Round Table epic we find the

heroic _mujik_, the giant Cossack, Ilias de Moron. The splendor of the

hero-mythical epoch faded after the advent of Christianity, and the

heroes of Kief and Novgorod fell into oblivion; one _bilina_ tells now

"the paladins of Holy Russia disappeared; a great new force that was not

of this world came upon them," and the paladins, unable to conquer it,

and seeing that it multiplied and became only more powerful with every

stroke, were afraid, and ran and hid themselves in the caverns, which

closed upon them forever. Since that day there are no more paladins in

Holy Russia.

In every _bilina_, and also in songs which celebrate the seed-time, the

pagan feast of the summer solstice, and the spring-time, we notice the

two characteristics of Russian thought,--a lively imagination and a

dreamy sadness, which is most evident in the love-songs. On coming in

contact with Christianity the pagan tale became a legend, and the

clergy, brought from Byzantium by Valdimir the Baptizer, gave the people

the Gospel in the Sclavonic tongue, translated by two Greek brothers,

Cyril and Methodius, and the day of liturgical and sacred literature was

at hand. The apostles of Christianity arranged the alphabet of

thirty-eight letters, which represent all the sounds in the Sclav

language, and founded also the grammar and rhetoric. As in every other

part of Christendom, these early preachers were the first to enlighten

the people, bringing ideas of culture entirely new to the barbarous

Sclavonic tribes; and the poor monk, bent over his parchment, writing

with a sharp-pointed reed, was the first educator of the nation. In the

eleventh century the first Russian literary efforts began to take shape,

being, like all early-written literature, of essentially clerical origin

and character,--such as epistles, sermons, and moral exhortations. The

chief writers of that time were the monk Nestor, the metropolitan

Nicephorous, and Cyril the Golden-Mouthed, who imitated the florid

Byzantine eloquence. At the side of ecclesiastical literature history

was born; the lives of the saints prepared the ground for the

chroniclers, and Nestor's Chronicle, the first book on Russian history,

was written. The early essays in profane history, which took the form of

fables and trenchant sayings disclosing a vein of satire, still smack of

the ecclesiastical flavor, although they contain the instincts of a laic

and civil literature.

The people had their epic, the clergy accumulated their treasures, but

the warriors and knights, who with the sovereign formed a separate

society, must have their heroic cycle also; and bards and singers were

found to give it to them in fragmentary pieces, among which the most

celebrated is the "Song of the Host of Igor," which relates the

victories of a prince over the savage tribes of the steppes. The poem is

a mixture of pagan and Christian wonders, which is only natural, since

in the twelfth century (the era of its composition) Christianity, while

triumphant in fact, had not yet succeeded in driving out the old

Sclavonic deities.

In the eighth century the Tartar invasion interrupted the course of

civil literature. Russia then had no time for the remembrance of

anything but her disasters, and the Church became again the only

depository of the civilization brought from Byzantium, and of the

intellectual riches of the nation; for the Khans, who destroyed

everything else, regarded the churches and images with superstitious

respect. The little then written expresses the grief of Russia over her

catastrophe, but in sermon form, presenting it as a punishment from

Heaven, and a portent of the end of the world; it was the universal

panic of the Middle Ages arrived in Russia three centuries late. Until

the fourteenth century there was no revival of historical narrations in

sufficient numbers to show the preponderance of the epic spirit in the

Russian people. In the fifteenth century, for the first time, oral

literature really penetrated into the domain of the written; but the

inevitable and tiresome mediæval stories of Alexander the Great and the

Siege of Troy, the Thousand and One Nights, and others, entering by way

of Servia and Bulgaria, appear among the literature of the southern

Sclavs; and tales of chivalry from Byzantium are also rearranged and

copied,--an element of imitation and artificiality which never took deep

root in Russia, however. Aside from some few tales, the only germs of

vitality are to be found in the apocryphal religious narratives, which

were an early expression of the spirit of mysticism and exegesis,

natural to Muscovite thought; and in the songs, also religious, chanted

by pilgrims on their way to visit the shrines, and by the people also,

but probably the work of the monks. These are still sung by beggars on

the streets, and the people listen with delight.

In the sixteenth century there were Maximus the Greek (the Savonarola of

Russia), the priest Silvester, author of "Domostrof," a book which was

held to contain the model of ancient Russian society, and lastly the

Czar, Ivan the Terrible himself, who wrote many notable epistles, models

of irony. The songs of the people still flourished, and they were

provided with subject-matter by the awful figure and actions of the

emperor, who was beloved by the people, because, like Pedro the Cruel of

Castile, he dared to bridle the nobles. The popular poet describes him

as giving to a potter the insignia and dignity of a Boyar. This tyrant,

the most ferocious that humanity ever endured, busied himself with

establishing the art of printing in Russia, with the help of Maximus the

Greek, who was a great friend of Aldus the Venetian, the famous printer.

According to the Metropolitan Macarius, God himself from his high throne

put this thought into the heart of the Czar. On the 1st of May, 1564,

the first book printed in Russia, "The Acts of the Apostles," made its

appearance.

The Russian theatre grew out of the symbolic ceremonies of the church

and the representations given by the Polish Jesuits in the colleges; and

through Poland, in the seventeenth century, by means of translations or

imitations, came also that kind of literary recreations known in France

and Italy during the fourteenth century under the name of novels and

facetias. But these did not intercept the natural course of the

national spirit, nor drown the popular voice,--the _duma_, or

meditation, the religious canticle, the satire, and especially the

incessant reiteration of the _bilinas_, which were now devoted to

relating the heroic conquests of the Cossacks. The impulse communicated

to Russian thought by Peter the Great at last obliterated the chasm

between popular and written literature. Peter established in Russia a

school of translators; whatever he thought useful and beneficial he had

correctly translated, and then he established the academy. He set up the

first regular press and founded the first periodical paper. Not having

much confidence in ecclesiastical literature, he commanded that the

monks should be deprived of pen, ink, and paper; and on the other hand

he revived the theatre, which was apparently dead, and under the

influence of his reforms there arose the first Russian writer who can

properly be called such,--Lomonosof, the personification of academical

classicism, who wrote because he thought it his business, in a

well-ordered State, to write incessantly, to polish and perfect the

taste, the speech, and even the characters of his fellow-countrymen; he

was always a rhetorician, a censor, a corrector, and we seem to see him

always armed with scissors and rule, pruning and shaping the myrtles in

the garden of literature. The Czar pensioned this ornamental poet, after

the fashion of French monarchs, and he in turn bequeathed to his

country, of course, a heroic poem entitled "Petriada." His best service

to the national literature was in the line of philology; he found a

language unrefined and hampered by old Sclavonic forms, and he refined

it, softened it, made it more flexible, and ready to yield sweeter

melody to those who played upon it thereafter.

Semiramis, in her turn, was not less eager to forward the cause of

letters; she had also her palace poet, Derjavine, the Pindar of her

court; and not being satisfied with this, her imperial hands grasped the

foils and fought out long arguments in the periodicals, to which she

contributed for a long time. Woman, just at that time emerging from

Oriental seclusion, as during the Renaissance in Europe, manifested an

extraordinary desire to learn and to exercise her mind. Catherine became

a journalist, a satirist, and a dramatic author; and a lady of her

court, the Princess Daschkof, directed the Academy of Sciences, and

presided over the Russian Academy founded by Catherine for the

improvement and purification of the language, while three letters in the

new dictionary are the exclusive work of this learned princess.

Catherine effectively protected her literary men, being convinced that

letters are a means of helping the advancement of a barbarous people, in

fact the highways of communication; and under her influence a literary

Pleiad appeared, among whom were Von-Vizine, the first original Russian

dramatist; Derjavine, the official bard and oracle; and Kerakof, the

pseudo-classic author of the "Rusiada." Court taste prevailed, and

Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot ruled as intellectual

masters of a people totally opposed to the French in their inmost

thoughts.

The thing most grateful to the Russian poet in Catherine's time was to

be called the Horace or the Pindar of his country; the nobles hid their

Muscovite ruggedness under a coat of Voltairian varnish, and even the

seminaries resounded with denunciations of _fanaticism_ and _horrid

superstition_. Other nations have been known to go thus masked unawares.

But new currents were undermining the possessions of the Encyclopedists.

During the last years of Catherine's reign the theosophical doctrines

from Sweden and Germany infiltrated Russia; mysticism brought

free-masonry, which finally mounted the throne with Alexander I., the

tender friend of the sentimental Valeria; and even had Madame Krudener

never appeared to shape in her visions the protest of the Russian soul

against the dryness and frivolity of the French philosophers, the fresh

lyric quality of Rousseau, Florian, and Bernardin Saint-Pierre would

still have flowed in upon the people of the North by means of that

eminent man and historian, Karamzine.

Before achieving the title of the Titus Livius of Russia, Karamzine,

being a keen intellectual observer of what was going on abroad, founded,

by means of a novel, the _emotional school_, declaring that the aim of

art is "to pour out floods of grateful impressions upon the realms of

the sentimental." This sounds like mere jargon, but such was their mode

of speech at the time; and that their spirits demanded just such food is

proved by the general use of it, and by the tears that rained upon the

said novel, in which the Russian _mujik_ appears in the disguise of a

shepherd of Arcadia. These innocent absurdities, which were the delight

of our own grandmothers, prepared the way for Romanticism, and the

appearance of Lermontof and Puchkine.

II.

Russian Romanticism.--the Lyric Poets.

The period of lyric poetry represented by these two excellent poets,

Lermontof and Puchkine, was considered the most glorious in Russian

literature, and there are yet many who esteem it as such in spite of the

contemporary novel. Undoubtedly rhyme can do wonders with this rich

tongue in which words are full of color, melody, and shape, as well as

ideas. A fine critic has said that Russian poetry is untranslatable, and

that one must feel the beauty of certain stanzas of Lermontof and

Puchkine sensually, to realize why they are beyond even the most

celebrated verses in the world.

At the beginning of the century classicism was in its decline; Russia

was leaving her youth behind her, and after 1812 she became totally

changed. The Napoleonic wars caused the alliance with Germany, and

secret societies of German origin flourished under the favor of the

versatile Alexander I. Weary of the artificial literature imposed by

the iron will of Peter the Great, and stirred by a great desire for

independence, like all the other nations awakened by Napoleon, Russia

held her breath and listened to the birdlike song of the harbingers of a

new era, to the great romantic poets who, almost simultaneously and with

marvellous accord, burst forth in England, Italy, France, Spain, and

Russia. The air was full of melody like the sudden twang of harp-strings

in the darkness of the night; and perhaps the autocratic severity of

Nicholas I. by forcing attention from public affairs and concentrating

it upon literature, was a help rather than a hindrance to this

revelation and development.

Alexander Puchkine, the demi-god of Russian verse, carried African as

well as Sclavonic blood in his veins, being the grandson of an

Abyssinian named Abraham Hannibal, a sort of Othello upon whom Peter the

Great bestowed the rank of general and married him to a lady of the

court. During the poet's childhood an old servant beguiled him with

legends, fables, and popular tales, and the seed fell upon good ground.

He left home at the age of fourteen, having quarrelled with all his

family and become an out-and-out Voltairian; his professor at the

Lyceum--of whom no more needs be said than that he was a brother of

Marat--had instilled into his youthful mind the superficial atheism then

the fashion; his other tutors declared that this impetuous and fanciful

child was throwing away body and soul; yet, when the occasion came,

Puchkine remembered all that his old nurse had told him, and found

himself with an exquisite æsthetic instinct, in touch with the popular

feeling.

When Nicholas I., in December, 1825, mounted the throne vacated by the

death of Alexander I. and the renunciation of the Grand-Duke

Constantine, Puchkine, then scarcely more than twenty-six years of age,

found himself in exile for the second time. His first appearance in

public life coincided with the reactionary mood of Alexander I. and the

favoritism of the retrogressive minister, Count Arakschef; and the young

men from the Lyceum, who had been steeping their souls in liberalism,

found themselves defrauded of their expectations of active life,

discussions closed, meetings prohibited, and Russia again in a trance of

Asiatic immobility. The young nobility began to entertain themselves

with conspiracy; and those who had no talent for that, spent their time

in drinking and dissipation. Puchkine was as much inclined toward the

one as the other. His passionate temperament led him into all sorts of

adventures; his eager imagination and his literary tastes incited him to

political essays, though under pain of censure. Living amid a whirl of

amusement, and coveting an introduction to aristocratic circles, he

launched his celebrated poem of "Russia and Ludmilla," which placed him

at once at the head of the poets of his day, who had formed themselves

into a society called "Arzamas," which was to Russian Romanticism what

the Cénacle was to the French,--a centre of attack and defence against

classicism; but at length their literary discussions overstepped the

forbidden territory of politics, and certain ideas were broached which

ended in the conspiracy of December. If Puchkine was not himself a

conspirator, he was at least acquainted with the movement; his ode to

liberty alarmed the police, and the Czar said to the director of the

Lyceum, "Your former pupil is inundating Russia with revolutionary

verses, and every boy knows them by heart." That same afternoon the Czar

signed the order for Puchkine's banishment,--a great good-fortune for

the poet; for had he not been banished he might have been implicated in

the conspiracy about to burst forth, and sent to Siberia or to the

quicksilver mines. He was expelled from Odessa, which was his first

place of confinement, because his Byronic bravado had a pernicious

influence upon the young men of the place, and he was sent home to his

father, with whom he could come to no understanding whatever. While

there he heard of the death of Alexander and the events of December.

Upon knowing that his friends were all compromised and under arrest, he

started for St. Petersburg, but having met a priest and seen a hare

cross his path, he considered these ill omens, and, yielding to

superstition, he turned back. Soon afterward he wrote to the new Czar

begging reprieve of banishment, which was granted. The Iron Czar sent

for him to come to the palace, and held with him a conversation or

dialogue which has become famous in the annals of the historians:

"If you had found yourself in St. Petersburg on the 25th of December,

where would you have been?" asked Nicholas.

"Among the rebels," answered the poet.

Far from being angry, the sovereign was pleased with his reply, and he

embraced Puchkine, saying: "Your banishment is at an end; and do not let

fear of the censors spoil your poetry, Alexander, son of Sergius, for I

myself will be your censor."

This is not the only instance of this inflexible autocrat's

warm-heartedness. More than once his imperial hand stayed the sentence

of the censors and gave the wing to genius. Nicholas was not afraid of

art, and was, besides, an intelligent amateur of literature. We shall

see how he protected even the satire of Gogol. And so, with a royal

suavity which softens the most selfish character, Nicholas gained to his

side the first poet of Russia, and forever alienated him from the cause

for which his friends suffered in gloomy fortresses and in exile, or

perished on the scaffold. Puchkine had no other choice than to accept

the situation or forfeit his freedom,--to make peace with the emperor or

to go and vegetate in some village and bury his talent alive. He chose

his vocation as poet, accepted the imperial favor, and returned to St.

Petersburg, where he found a remnant of the Arzamas, but now languid and

without creative fire. Being restored to his place in high society, he

tasted the delights of living in a sphere with which his refined and

aristocratic nature was in harmony. He was a poet; he enjoyed the

privileges and immunities of a demi-god, the just tribute paid to the

productive genius of beauty. And yet at times the pride and independence

hushed within his soul stirred again, and he thought with horror upon

the hypocrisy of his position as imperial oracle. But he found himself

at the height of his glory, doing his best work, seldom annoyed by the

censorial scissors, thanks to the Czar; and so, flattered by the throne,

the court, and the public, he led to the altar his "brown-skinned

virgin," his beautiful Natalia, with whom he was so deeply in love.

Having satisfied every earthly desire, he must needs, like Polycrates,

throw his ring into the sea.

All his happiness came to a sudden end, and not only his happiness, but

his life, went to pay his debt to that high society which had received

him with smiles and fair promises. Puchkine's end is as dramatic as any

novel. A certain French Legitimist who had been well received by the

nobility at St. Petersburg took advantage of the chivalrous customs then

in vogue there, to pay court to the poet's beautiful wife, electing her

as the lady of his thoughts without disguise. Society protected this

little skirmish, and assisted the gallant to meet his lady at every

entertainment and in every _salon_; and as Puchkine, though quite

unsuspicious, showed plainly that he did not enjoy the game, they amused

themselves with exciting and annoying him, ridiculing him, and making

him the butt of epigrams and anonymous verses. The marriage of

"Dante"--as the adorer of his wife was called--with his wife's sister,

far from calming his nerves, only irritated him the more, and he

believed it to be a stratagem on the lover's part, a means of

approaching the nearer to his desires. Becoming desperate, he sought and

obtained a challenge to a duel, and fell mortally wounded by a ball from

his adversary. Two days later he died, having just received a letter

from the emperor, saying:--

"Dear Alexander, Son of Sergius,--If it is the will of

Providence that we should never meet again in this world, I

counsel you to die like a Christian. Give yourself no

anxiety for your wife and children; I will care for them."

Russia cried out with indignation at the news of his death, accusing

polite society in round terms of having taken the part of the

professional libertine against the husband,--of the French adventurer

against their illustrious compatriot; and Lermontof voiced the national

anger in some celebrated lines to this effect:--

"Thy last days were poisoned by the vicious ridicule of low

detractors; thou hast died thirsting for vengeance, moaning

bitterly to see thy most beautiful hopes vanished; none

understood the deep emotion of thy last words, and the last

sigh of thy dying lips was lost."

But I agree with those who, in spite of this fine elegy, do not regret

the premature end of the romantic poet. His life, exuberant, brilliant,

fecund, passionate, like that of Byron, could have no more appropriate

termination than a pistol-shot. He died before the end of

romanticism--his tragic history lent him a halo which lifts his figure

above the mists of time. I have seen Victor Hugo and our own Zorilla in

their old age, and I was not guilty of wishing them anything but long

life and prosperity; but, æsthetically speaking, it seemed to me that

both of them had lived forty years too long, and that Alfred de Musset,

Espronceda, and Byron were well off in their glorious tombs.

Puchkine belongs undeniably to the great general currents of European

literature; only now and then does he manifest the peculiar genius of

his country which was so strongly marked in Gogol. But it would be

unjust to consider him a mere imitator of foreign romanticists, and some

even claim that he always had one foot upon the soil of classicism,

taking the phrase in the Helenic sense, as particularly shown in his

"Eugene Oneguine," and that, were he to live again, his talents would

undergo a transformation and shine forth in the modern novel and the

national theatre. Besides being a lyric poet of first rank, Puchkine

must also be considered a superb prose writer, having learned from

Voltaire a harmony of arrangement, a discreet selection of details, and

a concise, clear, and rapid phrasing. His novel, "The Captain's

Daughter," is extremely pretty and interesting, at times amusing, or

again very touching, and in my opinion preferable in its simplicity to

the interminable narratives of Walter Scott. But Puchkine has one

remarkable peculiarity, which is, that while he had a keen sympathy

with the popular poetry, and was fully sensible of the revelation of it

by Gogol, which he applauded with all his heart, yet the author of

"Boris Godonof" was so caught in the meshes of romanticism that he never

could employ his faculties in poetry of a national character. Puchkine's

works have no ethnical value at all. His melancholy is not the

despairing sadness of the Russian, but the romantic _morbidezza_

expressed often in much the same words by Byron, Espronceda, and de

Musset. The phenomenon is common, and easily explained. It lies in the

fact that romanticism was always and everywhere prejudicial to the

manifestation of nationality, and made itself a nation apart, composed

of half-a-dozen persons from every European country. Realism, with its

principles--whether tacitly or explicitly accepted--of human verities,

heredity, atavism, race and place influences, etc., became a necessity

in order that writers might follow their natural instincts and speak in

their own mother tongue.

Within the restricted circle of poets who hovered around Puchkine, one

deserves especial mention, namely, Lermontof. He is the second lyric

poet of Russia, and perhaps embodies the spirit of romanticism even more

than Puchkine; he is the real Russian Byron. His life is singularly like

that of Puchkine, he having also been banished to the Caucasus, and for

the very reason of having written the elegy upon Puchkine's death; like

him he was also killed in a duel, but still earlier in life, and before

he had reached the plenitude of his powers.

Lermontof became the singer of the Caucasian region. At that time it was

really a great favor to send a poet to the mountains, for there he came

in contact with things that reclaimed and lifted his fancy,--air, sun,

liberty, a wooded and majestic landscape, picturesque and charming

peasant-maidens, wild flowers full of new and virginal perfume like the

Haydees and Fior d'Alizas sung of by our Western poets. There they

forgot the deceits of civilization and the weariness of mind that comes

of too much reading; there the brain was refreshed, the nerves calmed,

and the moral fibre strengthened. Puchkine, Lermontof, and Tolstoï, each

in his own way, have lauded the regenerative virtue of the snow-covered

mountains. But Lermontof in particular was full of it, lived in it, and

died in it, after his fatal wound at the age of twenty-six, when public

opinion had just singled him out as Puchkine's successor. He had drunk

deeply of Byron's fountain, and even resembled Byron in his discontent,

restlessness, and violent passions, which more than Byron's were tinged

with a stripe of malice and pride, so that his enemies used to say that

to describe Lucifer he needed only to look at himself in the glass.

There is an unbridled freedom, a mocking irony, and at times a deep

melancholy at the bottom of his poetic genius; it is inferior to

Puchkine's in harmony and completeness, but exceeds it in an almost

painful and thrilling intensity; there was more gall in his soul, and

therefore more of what has been called subjectivity, even amounting to

a fierce egoism. Lermontof is the high-water mark of romanticism, and

after his death it necessarily began to ebb; it had exhausted curses,

fevers, complaints, and spleens, and now the world of literature was

ready for another form of art, wider and more human, and that form was

realism.

I am sorry to have to deal in _isms_, but the fault is not mine; we are

handling ideas, and language offers no other way. The transition came by

means of satire, which is exceptionally fertile in Russia. A genius of

wonderful promise arose in Griboiëdof, a keen observer and moralist, who

deserves to be mentioned after Puchkine, if only for one comedy which is

considered the gem of the Russian stage, and is entitled (freely

rendered) "Too Clever by Half." The hero is a misanthropic patriot who

sighs for the good old times and abuses the mania for foreign education

and imitation. This shows the first impulse of the nation to know and to

assert itself in literature as in everything else. Being prohibited by

the censor, the play circulated privately in manuscript; every line

became a proverb, and the people found their very soul reflected in it.

Five years later, when Puchkine was returning from the Caucasus, he met

with a company of Georgians who were drawing a dead body in a cart: it

was the body of Griboiëdof, who had been assassinated in an

insurrection.

Between the decline of the romantic period and the appearance of new

forms inspired by a love of the truth, there hovered in other parts of

Europe undefined and colorless shapes, sterile efforts and shallow

aspirations which never amounted to anything. But not so in Russia.

Romanticism vanished quickly, for it was an aristocratic and artificial

condition, without root and without fruit conducive to the well-being of

a nation which had as yet scarcely entered on life, and which felt

itself strong and eager for stimulus and aim, eager to be heard and

understood; realism grew up quickly, for the very youth of the nation

demanded it. Russia, which until then had trod with docile steps upon

the heels of Europe, was at last to take the lead by creating the

realistic novel.

She had not to do violence to her own nature to accomplish this. The

Russian, little inclined to metaphysics, unless it be the fatalist

philosophy of the Hindus, more quick at poetic conceptions than at

rational speculations, carries realism in his veins along with

scientific positivism; and if any kind of literature be spontaneous in

Russia it is the epic, as shown now in fragmentary songs and again in

the novels. Before ever they were popular in their own country, Balzac

and Zola were admired and understood in Russia.

The two great geniuses of lyric poetry, Puchkine and Lermontof, confirm

this theory. Though both perished before the descriptive and observing

faculties of their countrymen were matured, they had both instinctively

turned to the novel, and perhaps the possible direction of their genius

was thus shadowed forth as by accident. Puchkine seems to me endowed

with qualities which would have made him a delightful novel-writer. His

heroes are clearly and firmly drawn and very attractive; he has a

certain healthy joyousness of tone which is quite classic, and a

brightness and freedom of coloring that I like; in the short historic

narrative he has left us we never see the slightest trace of the lyric

poet. As to Lermontof, is it not marvellous that a man who died at the

age of twenty-six years should have produced anything like a novel? But

he left a sort of autobiography, which is extremely interesting,

entitled "A Contemporary Hero," which hero, Petchorine by name, is

really the type of the romantic period, exacting, egotistical, at war

with himself and everybody else, insatiable for love, yet scorning life,

a type that we meet under different forms in many lands; now swallowing

poison like De Musset's Rolla, now refusing happiness like Adolfo, now

consumed with remorse like Réné, now cocking his pistol like Werther,

and always in a bad humor, and to tell the truth always intolerable. "My

hero," writes Lermontof, "is the portrait of a generation, not of an

individual." And he makes that hero say, "I have a wounded soul, a fancy

unappeased, a heart that nothing can ease. Everything becomes less and

less to me. I have accustomed myself to suffering and joy alike, and I

have neither feelings nor impressions; everything wearies me." But there

are many fine pages in the narratives of Lermontof besides these

poetical declamations. Perhaps the novel might also have offered him a

brilliant future.

The sad fate of the writers during the reign of Nicholas I. is

remarkable, when we consider how favorable it was to art in other

respects. Alexander Herzen calculated that within thirty years the three

most illustrious Russian poets were assassinated or killed in a duel,

three lesser ones died in exile, two became insane, two died of want,

and one by the hand of the executioner. Alas! and among these dark

shadows we discern one especially sad; it is that of Nicholas Gogol, a

soul crushed by its own greatness, a victim to the noblest infirmity and

the most generous mania that can come upon a man, a martyr to love of

country.

III.

Russian Realism: Gogol, its Founder.

Gogol was born in 1809; he was of Cossack blood, and first saw the light

of this world amid the steppes which he was afterward to describe so

vividly. His grandfather, holding the child upon his knee, amused him

with stories of Russian heroes and their mighty deeds, not so very long

past either, for only two generations lay between Gogol and the Cossack

warriors celebrated in the _bilinas_. Sometimes a wandering minstrel

sang these for him, accompanying himself on the _bandura_. In this

school was his imagination taught. We may imagine the effect upon

ourselves of hearing the Romance of the Cid under such circumstances.

When Gogol went to St. Petersburg with the intention of joining the

ranks of Russian youth there, though ostensibly to seek employment, he

carried a light purse and a glowing fancy. He found that the great city

was a desert more arid than the steppes, and even after obtaining an

office under the government he endured poverty and loneliness such as no

one can describe so well as himself. His position offered him one

advantage which was the opportunity of studying the bureaucratic world,

and of drawing forth from amid the dust of official papers the material

for some of his own best pages. On the expiration of his term of office

he was for a while blown about like a dry leaf. He tried the stage but

his voice failed him; he tried teaching but found he had no vocation for

it. Nor had he any aptitude for scholarship. In the Gymnasium of Niejine

his rank among the pupils was only medium; German, mathematics, Latin,

and Greek were little in his line; he was an illiterate genius. But in

his inmost soul dwelt the conviction that his destiny held great things

in store for him. In his struggle with poverty, the remembrance of the

hours he had passed at school reading Puchkine and other romantic poets

began to urge him to try his fortune at literature. One day he knocked

with trembling hand at Puchkine's door; the great poet was still asleep,

having spent the night in gambling and dissipation, but on waking, he

received the young novice with a cordial welcome, and with his

encouragement Gogol published his first work, called "Evenings at the

Farm." It met with amazing success; for the first time the public found

an author who could give them a true picture of Russian life. Puchkine

had hit the mark in advising him to study national scenes and popular

customs; and who knows whether perhaps his conscience did not reproach

him with shutting his own eyes to his country and the realities she

offered him, and stopping his ears against the voice of tradition and

the charms of Nature?

Gogol's "Evenings at the Farm" is the echo of his own childhood; in

these pages the Russia of the people lives and breathes in landscapes,

peasants, rustic customs, dialogues, legends, and superstitions. It is a

bright and simple work, not yet marked with the pessimism which later on

darkened the author's soul; it has a strong smell of the soil; it is

full of dialect and colloquial diminutive and affectionate terms, with

now and then a truly poetical passage. Is it not strange that the

intellect of a nation sometimes wanders aimlessly through foreign lands

seeking from without what lies handier at home, and borrowing from

strangers that of which it has a super-abundance already? And how sweet

is the surprise one feels at finding so beautiful the things which were

hidden from our understanding by their very familiarity!

"The Tales of Mirgorod," which followed the "Evenings at the Farm,"

contain one of the gems of Gogol's writings, the story of "Taras

Boulba." Gogol has the quality of the epic poet, though he is generally

noted only for his merits as a novelist; but judging from his greatest

works, "Taras Boulba" and "Dead Souls," I consider his epic power to be

of the first class, and in truth I hold him to be, rather more than a

modern novelist, a master poet who has substituted for the lyric poetry

brought into favor by romanticism the epic form, which is much more

suited to the Russian spirit. He is the first who has caught the

inspiration of the _bilinas_, the hero-songs, the Sclavonic poetry

created by the people. The novel, it is true, is one manifestation of

epic poetry, and in a certain way every novelist is a rhapsodist who

recites his canto of the poem of modern times; but there are some

descriptive, narrative fictions, which, imbued with a greater amount of

the poetic element united to a certain large comprehensive character,

more nearly resemble the ancient idea of the epopee; and of this class I

may mention "Don Quixote," and perhaps "Faust," as examples. By this I

do not mean to place Gogol on the same plane as Goethe and Cervantes;

yet I associate them in my mind, and I see in Gogol's books the

transition from the lyric to the epic which is to result in the true

novel that begins with Turguenief.

All the world is agreed that "Taras Boulba" is a true prose poem,

modelled in the Homeric style, the hero of which is a people that long

preserved a primitive character and customs. Gogol declared that he

merely allowed himself to reproduce the tales of his grandfather, who

thus becomes the witness and actor in this Cossack Iliad.

One charming trait in Gogol is his love for the past and his fidelity

to tradition; they have as strong an attraction for him certainly as the

seductions of the future, and both are the outcome of the two sublime

sentiments which divide every heart,--retrospection and anticipation.

Gogol, who is so skilful in sketching idyllic scenes of the tranquil

life of country proprietors, clergy, and peasants, is no less skilful in

his descriptions of the adventurous existence of the Cossack; sometimes

he is so faithful to the simple grandeur of his grandfather's style,

that though the action in "Taras Boulba" takes place in recent times, it

seems a tale of primeval days.

The story of this novel--I had almost said this poem--unfolds among the

Cossacks of the Don and the Dnieper, who were at that time a

well-preserved type of the ancient warlike Scythians that worshipped the

blood-stained sword. Old Taras Boulba is a wild animal, but a very

interesting wild animal; a rude and majestic warrior-like figure cast in

Homeric mould. There is, I confess, just a trace of the leaven of

romanticism in Taras. Not all in vain had Gogol hidden Puchkine's works

under his pillow in school-days; but the whole general tone recalls

inevitably the grand naturalism of Homer, to which is added an Oriental

coloring, vivid and tragical. Taras Boulba is an Ataman of the Cossacks,

who has two young sons, his pride and his hope, studying at the

University of Kief. On a declaration of war between the savage Cossack

republic and Poland, the old hawk calls his two nestlings and commands

them to exchange the book for the sword. One of the sons, bewitched by

the charms of a Polish maiden, deserts from the Cossack camp and fights

in the ranks of the enemy; he at length falls into the power of his

enraged father, who puts him to death in punishment for his treason.

After dreadful battles and sieges, starvation and suffering, Taras dies,

and with him the glory and the liberty of the Cossacks. Such is the

argument of this simple story, which begins in a manner not unlike the

Tale of the Cid. The two sons of Taras arrive at their father's house,

and the father begins to ridicule their student garb.

"'Do not mock at us, father,' says the elder.

"'Listen to the gentleman! And why should I not mock at

you, I should like to know?'

"'Because, even though you are my father, I swear by the

living God, I will smite you.'

"'Hi! hi! What? Your father?' cries Taras, receding a step

or two.

"'Yes, my own father; for I will take offence from nobody

at all.'

"'How shall we fight then,--with fists?' exclaims the

father in high glee.

"'However you like.'

"'With fists, then,' answers Taras, squaring off at him.

'Let us see what sort of fellow you are, and what sort of

fists you have.'"

And so father and son, instead of embracing after a long absence, begin

to pommel one another with naked fists, in the ribs, back, and chest,

each advancing and receding in turn.

"'Why, he fights well,' exclaims Taras, stopping to take

breath. 'He is a hero,' he adds, readjusting his clothes. 'I

had better not have put him to the proof. But he will be a

great Cossack! Good! my son, embrace me now.'"

This is like the delight of Diego Lainez in the Spanish Romanceros, when

he says, "Your anger appeases my own, and your indignation gives me

pleasure."

Could Gogol have been acquainted with the Tale of the Cid and the other

Spanish Romanceros? I do not think it too audacious to believe it

possible, when we know that this author was a delighted reader of "Don

Quixote," and really drew inspiration from it for his greatest work. But

let us return to "Taras Boulba." Another admirable passage is on the

parting of the mother and sons. The poor wife of Taras is the typical

woman of the warlike tribes, a gentle and miserable creature amid a

fierce horde of men who are for the most part celibates,--a creature

once caressed roughly for a few moments by her harsh husband, and then

abandoned, and whose love instincts have concentrated themselves upon

the fruits of his early fugitive affection. She sees again her beloved

sons who are to spend but one night at home,--for at break of day the

father leads them forth to battle, where perhaps at the first shock some

Tartar may cut off their heads and hang them by the hair at his

saddle-girths. She watches them while they sleep, kept awake herself by

hope and fear.

"'Perhaps,' she says to herself, 'when Boulba awakes he will

put off his departure one or two days; perhaps he was drunk,

and did not think how soon he was taking them away from

me.'"

But at dawn her maternal hopes vanish; the old Cossack makes ready to

set off.

"When the mother saw her sons leap to horse, she rushed

toward the younger, whose face showed some trace of

tenderness; she grasped the stirrup and the saddle-girth,

and would not let go, and her eyes were wide with agony and

despair. Two strong Cossacks seized her with firm but

respectful hands, and bore her away to the house. But

scarcely had they released her upon the threshold, when she

sprang out again quicker than a mountain-goat, which was the

more remarkable in a woman of her age; with superhuman

effort she held back the horse, gave her son a wild,

convulsive embrace, and again was carried away. The young

Cossacks rode off in silence, choking their tears for fear

of their father; and the father, too, had a queer feeling

about his heart, though he took care that it should not be

noticed."

In another place I have translated his magnificent description of the

steppe, and I should like to quote the admirable paragraphs on

starvation, on the killing of Ostap Boulba, and the death of Taras. As

an example of the extreme simplicity with which Gogol manages his most

dramatic passages and yet obtains an intense and powerful effect, I will

give the scene in which Taras takes the life of his son by his own

hand,--a scene which Prosper Mérimée imitated in his celebrated sketch

of "Mateo Falcone."

Andry comes out of the city, which was attacked by the Cossacks.

"At the head of the squadron galloped a horseman, handsomer

and haughtier than the others. His black hair floated from

beneath his bronze helmet; around his arm was bound a

beautifully embroidered scarf. Taras was stupefied on

recognizing in him his son Andry. But the latter, inflamed

with the ardor of combat, eager to merit the prize which

adorned his arm, threw himself forward like a young hound,

the handsomest, the fleetest, the strongest of the pack....

Old Taras stood a moment, watching Andry as he cut his way

by blows to the right and the left, laying the Cossacks

about him. At last his patience was exhausted.

"'Do you strike at your own people, you devil's whelp?' he

cried.

"Andry, galloping hard away, suddenly felt a strong hand

pulling at his bridle-rein. He turned his head and saw

Taras before him. He grew pale, like a child caught idling

by his master. His ardor cooled as though it had never

blazed; he saw only his terrible father, motionless and

calm before him.

"'What are you doing?' exclaimed Taras, looking at the

young man sharply. Andry could not reply, and his eyes

remained fixed upon the ground.

"'How now, my son? Have your Polish friends been of much

use to you?' Andry was dumb as before.

"'You commit felony, you barter your religion, you sell

your own people.... But wait, wait.... Get down.' Like an

obedient child Andry alighted from his horse, and, more

dead than alive, stood before his father.

"'Stand still. Do not move. I gave you life, I will take

your life away,' said Taras then; and going back a step he

took the musket from his shoulder. Andry was white as wax.

He seemed to move his lips and to murmur a name. But it

was not his country's name, nor his mother's, nor his

brother's; it was the name of the beautiful Polish maiden.

Taras fired. As the wheat-stalk bends after the stroke of

the sickle, Andry bent his head and fell upon the grass

without uttering a word. The man who had slain his son

stood a long time contemplating the body, beautiful even in

death. The young face, so lately glowing with strength and

winsome beauty, was still wonderfully comely, and his

eyebrows, black and velvety, shaded his pale features.

"'What was lacking to make him a true Cossack?' said

Boulba. 'He was tall, his eyebrows were black, he had a

brave mien, and his fists were strong and ready to fight.

And he has perished, perished without glory, like a

cowardly dog.'"

In the opinion of Guizot there is perhaps no true epic poem in the

modern age besides "Taras Boulba," in spite of some defects in it and

the temptation to compare it with Homer to its disadvantage. But Gogol's

glory is not derived solely from his epopee of the Cossacks. His

especial merit, or at least his greatest service to the literature of

his country, lies in his having been what neither Lermontof nor Puchkine

could be; namely, the centre at which romanticism and realism join

hands, the medium of a smooth and easy transition from lyric poetry,

more or less imported from abroad, and the national novel; the founder

of the _natural school_, which was the advance sentinel of modern art.

This tendency is first exhibited in a little sketch inserted in the same

volume with Taras Boulba, and entitled "The Small Proprietors of Former

Times," also translated as "Old-fashioned Farmers," or "Old-time

Proprietors,"--a story of the commonplace, full of keen observations and

wrought out in the methods of the great contemporary novelists. About

the year 1835, at the height of the romantic period, Gogol gave up his

official employment forever, exclaiming, "I am going to be a free

Cossack again; I will belong to nobody but myself." He then published a

little volume of _Arabesques_,--a collection of disconnected articles,

criticisms, and sketches, chiefly interesting because by him. His short

stories of this period are the stirrings of his awakening realism; and

among them the one most worthy of notice is "The Cloak," which is filled

with a strain of sympathy and pity for the poor, the ignorant, the

plain, and the dull people,--social zeros, so different from the proud

and aristocratic ideal of romanticism, and who owe their title of

citizenship in Russian literature to Gogol. The hero of the story is an

awkward, half-imbecile little office-clerk, who knows nothing but how to

copy, copy, copy; a martyr to bitter cold and poverty, and whose dearest

dream is to possess a new cloak, for which he saves and hoards sordidly

and untiringly. The very day on which he at last fulfils his desire,

some thieves make off with his precious cloak. The police, to whom he

carries his complaint, laugh in his face, and the poor fellow falls a

victim to the deepest melancholy, and dies of a broken heart shortly

after.

"And," says Gogol, "St. Petersburg went on its way without

Acacio, son of Acacio, just exactly as though it had never

dreamed of his existence. This creature that nobody cared

for, nobody loved, nobody took any interest in,--not even

the naturalist who sticks a pin through a common fly and

studies it attentively under a microscope,--this poor

creature disappeared, vanished, went to the other world

without anything in particular ever having happened to him

in this.... But at least once before he died he had welcomed

that bright guest, Fortune, whom we all hope to see; to his

eyes she appeared under the form of a cloak. And then

misfortune fell upon him as suddenly and as darkly as it

ever falls upon the great ones of the earth."

"The Cloak" and his celebrated comedy, "The Inspector," also translated

as "The Revizor," are the result of his official experiences. Men who

have been a good deal tossed about, who have drunk of life's cup of

bitterness, who have been bruised by its sharp corners and torn by its

thorns, if they have an analytical mind and a magnanimous heart, human

kindness and a spark of genius, become the great satirists, great

humorists, and great moralists. "The Inspector" is a picture of Russian

public customs painted by a master hand; it is a laugh, a fling of

derision, at the baseness of a society and a political regimen under

which bureaucracy and official formalism can descend to incredible vice

and corruption. It seems at first a mere farce, such as is common enough

on the Russian or any stage; but the covert strength of the satire is so

far-reaching that the "Inspector" is a symbolical and cruel work. The

curtain rises at the moment when the officials of a small provincial

capital are anxiously awaiting the Inspector, who is about to make them

a visit incognito. A traveller comes to the only hotel or inn of the

town, and all believe him to be the dreaded governmental attorney. It

turns out that the traveller who has given them such a fright is neither

more nor less than an insignificant employee from St. Petersburg, a

madcap fellow, who, having run short of money, is obliged to cut his

vacation journey short. When he is apprised of a visit from the

governor, he thinks he is about to be arrested. What is his astonishment

when he finds that, instead of being put in prison, a purse of five

hundred rubles is slipped into his hand, and he is conducted with great

ceremony to visit hospitals and schools. As soon as he smells the _quid

pro quo_ he adapts himself to the part, dissimulates, and plays the

protector, puts on a majestic and severe demeanor, and after having

fooled the whole town and received all sorts of obsequious attentions,

he slips out with a full purse. A few minutes afterward the real

Inspector appears and the curtain falls.

Gogol frankly confesses that in this comedy he has tried to put together

and crystallize all the evil that he saw in the administrative affairs

of Russia. The general impression it gave was that of a satire, as he

desired; the nation looked at itself in the glass, and was ashamed. "In

the midst of my own laughter, which was louder than ever," says Gogol,

"the spectator perceived a note of sorrow and anger, and I myself

noticed that my laugh was not the same as before, and that it was no

longer possible to be as I used to be in my works; the need to amuse

myself with innocent fictions was gone with my youth." This is the

sincere confession of the humorist whose laughter is full of tears and

bitterness.

This rough satire on the government of the autocrat Nicholas, this

terrible flagellation of wickedness in high places raised to a venerated

national institution, was represented before the court and applauded by

it, and the satirical author of it was subjected to no censor but the

emperor himself, who read the play in manuscript, burst into roars of

laughter over it, and ordered his players to give it without delay; and

on the first night Nicholas appeared in his box, and his imperial hands

gave the signal for applause. The courtiers could not do otherwise than

swallow the pill, but it left a bad taste and a bitter sediment in their

hearts, which they treasured up against Gogol for the day of revenge.

On this occasion the terrible autocrat acted with the same exquisite

delicacy and truly royal munificence which he had shown toward Puchkine.

On allowing Gogol a pension of five thousand rubles, he said to the

person who presented the petition, "Do not let your protégé know that

this gift is from me; he would feel obliged to write from a government

standpoint, and I do not wish him to do that." Several times afterward

the Emperor secretly sent him such gifts under cover of his friend

Joukowsky the poet, by which means he was able to defray his journeys to

Europe.

Without apparent cause Gogol's character became soured about the year

1836; he became a prey to hypochondria, probably, as may be deduced

from a passage in one of his letters, on account of the atmosphere of

hostility which had hung over him since the publication of "The

Inspector." "Everybody is against me," he says, "officials, police,

merchants, literary men; they are all gnashing and snapping at my

comedy! Nowadays I hate it! Nobody knows what I suffer. I am worn out in

body and soul." He determined to leave the country, and he afterward

returned to it only occasionally, until he went back at last to languish

and die there. Like Turguenief, and not without some, truth, he declared

that he could see his country, the object of his study, better from a

distance; it is the law of the painter, who steps away from his picture

to a certain distance in order to study it better. He went from one

place to another in Europe, and in Rome he formed a close friendship

with the Russian painter Ivanof, who had retired to a Capuchin convent,

where he spent twenty years on one picture, "The Apparition of Christ,"

and left it at last unfinished. Some profess to believe that Gogol was

converted to Catholicism, and with his friend devoted himself to a life

of asceticism and contemplation of the hereafter, toward which vexed and

melancholy souls often feel themselves irresistibly drawn.

Gogol felt a strong desire to deal with the truth, with realities; he

longed to write a book that would tell _the whole truth_, which should

show Russia as she was, and which should not be hampered by influences

that forced him to temporize, attenuate, and weigh his words,--a book

in which he might give free vent to his satirical vein, and put his

faculties of observation to consummate use. This book, which was to be a

_résumé_ of life, a _chef d'oeuvre_, a lasting monument (the

aspiration of every ambitious soul that cannot bear to die and be

forgotten), at last became a fixed idea in Gogol's mind; it took

complete possession of him, gave him no repose, absorbed his whole life,

demanded every effort of his brain, and finally remained unfinished. And

yet what he accomplished constitutes the most profoundly human book that

has ever been written in Russia; it contains the whole programme of the

school initiated by Gogol, and compels us to count the author of it

among the descendants of Cervantes. "Don Quixote" was in fact the model

for "Dead Souls," which put an end to romanticism, as "Quixote" did to

books of chivalry. That none may say that this supposition is dictated

by my national pride, I am going to quote literally two paragraphs, one

by Gogol himself, the other by Melchior de Voguié, the intelligent

French critic whose work on the Russian novel has been so useful to me

in these studies.

"Puchkine," says Gogol, "has been urging me for some time to

undertake a long and serious work. One day he talked to me

of my feeble health, of the frequent attacks which may cause

my premature death; he mentioned as an example Cervantes,

the author of some short stories of excellent quality, but

who would never have held the place he is awarded among the

writers of first rank, had he not undertaken his 'Don

Quixote.' And at last he suggested to me a subject of his

own invention on which he had thought of making a poem, and

said he would tell it to nobody but me. The subject was 'The

Dead Souls.' Puchkine also suggested to me the idea of 'The

Inspector.'"

"In spite of this frank testimony," adds Voguié, "equally

honorable to both friends, I must continue to believe that

the true progenitor of 'Dead Souls' was Cervantes himself.

On leaving Russia Gogol turned toward Spain, and studied at

close quarters the literature of this country, especially

'Don Quixote,' which was always his favorite book. The

Spanish humorist held up to him a subject marvellously

suited to his plans, the adventures of a hero with a mania

which leads him into all regions of society, and who serves

as the pretext to show to the spectator a series of

pictures, a sort of human magic-lantern. The near

relationship of these two works is indicated at all

points,--the cogitative, sardonic spirit, the sadness

underlying the laughter, and the impossibility of

classifying either under any definite literary head. Gogol

protested against the application of the word 'novel' to

his book, and himself called it a poem, dividing it, not

into chapters but into cantos. Poem it cannot be called in

any rigorous sense of the term; but classify 'Don Quixote,'

and Gogol's masterpiece will fall into the same category."

I read "Dead Souls" before reading Voguié's criticism, and my impression

coincided exactly with his. I said to myself, "This book is the nearest

like 'Don Quixote' of any that I have ever read." There are important

differences--how could it be otherwise?--and even discounting the loss

to Gogol by means of translation, a marked inferiority of the Russian

to Cervantes; but they are writers of the same species, and even at the

distance of two centuries they bear a likeness to each other. And the

intention to take "Don Quixote" as a model is evident, even though Gogol

had never set foot in Spain, as some of his compatriots affirm.

"Dead Souls" may be divided into three parts: the first, which was

completed and published in 1842; the second, which was incomplete and

rudimentary, and cast into the flames by the author in a fit of

desperation, but published after his death from notes that had escaped

this holocaust; and the third, which never took shape outside the

author's mind.

Even the contrast between the heroes of Cervantes and Gogol--the

Ingenious Knight Avenger of Wrongs, and the clever rascal who goes from

place to place trying to carry out his extravagant schemes--illustrates

still more clearly the Cervantesque affiliation of the book. Undoubtedly

Gogol purposely chose a contrast, because he wished to embody in the

story the wrath he felt at the social state of Russia, more lamentable

and hateful even than that of Spain in Cervantes' time. No more profound

diatribe than "Dead Souls" has ever been written in Russia, though it is

a country where satire has flourished abundantly. Sometimes there is a

ray of sunshine, and the poet's tense brows relax with a hearty laugh.

In the first chapter is a description of the Russian inns, drawn with no

less graceful wit than that of the inns of La Mancha. It is not

difficult to go on with the parallel.

In "Dead Souls," as in "Don Quixote," the hero's servants are important

personages, and so are their horses, which have become typical under the

names of Rocinante and Rucio; the dialogues between the coachman Selifan

and his horses remind one of some of the passages between Sancho and his

donkey. As in "Don Quixote," the infinite variety of persons and

episodes, the physiognomy of the places, the animated succession of

incidents, offer a panorama of life. As in "Don Quixote," woman occupies

a place in the background; no important love-affair appears in the whole

book. Gogol, like Cervantes, shows less dexterity in depicting feminine

than masculine types, except in the case of the grotesque, where he also

resembles the creator of Maritornes and Teresa Panza. As in "Don

Quixote," the best part of the book is the beginning; the inspiration

slackens toward the middle, for the reason, probably, that in both the

poetic instinct supersedes the prudent forecasting of the idea, and

there is in both something of the sublime inconsistency common to

geniuses and to the popular muse. And in "Don Quixote," as in "Dead

Souls," above the realism of the subject and the vulgarity of many

passages there is a sort of ebullient, fantastic life, something

supersensual, which carries us along under full sail into the bright

world of imagination; something which enlivens the fancy, takes hold

upon the mind, and charms the soul; something which makes us better,

more humane, more spiritual in effect.

The subject of "Dead Souls"--so strange as never to be forgotten--gives

Gogol a wide range for his pungent satire. Tchitchikof--there's a name,

indeed!--an ex-official, having been caught in some nefarious affair,

and ruined and dishonored by the discovery, conceives a bright idea as

to regaining his fortune. He knows that the serfs, called in Russia by

the generic name of _souls_, can be pawned, mortgaged, and sold; and

that on the other hand the tax-collector obliges the owners to pay a

_per capita_ tax for each soul. He remembers also that the census is

taken on the Friday before Easter, and in the mean time the lists are

not revised, seeing that natural processes compensate for losses by

death. But in case of epidemic the owner loses more, yet continues to

pay for hands that no longer toil for him; so it occurs to Tchitchikof

to travel over the country buying at a discount a number of _dead souls_

whose owners will gladly get rid of them, the buyer having only to

promise to pay the taxes thereon; then, having provided these dead souls

(though to all legal intents still living) with this extraordinary

nominal value, he will register them as purchased, take the deed of sale

to a bank in St. Petersburg, mortgage them for a good round sum, and

with the money thus obtained, buy real live serfs of flesh and blood,

and by this clever trick make a fortune. No sooner said than done. The

hero gives orders to harness his _britchka_, takes with him his coachman

and his lackey,--two delicious characters!--and goes all over Russia,

ingratiating himself everywhere, finding out all about the people and

the estates, meeting with all sorts of proprietors and functionaries,

and falling into many adventures which, if not quite as glorious as

those of the Knight of La Mancha, are scarcely less entertaining to read

about. And where is such another diatribe on serfdom as this lugubrious

burlesque furnishes, or any spectacle so painfully ironical as that of

these wretched corpses, who are neither free nor yet within the narrow

liberty of the tomb,--these poor bones ridiculed and trafficked for even

in the precincts of death?

This remarkable book, which contains a most powerful argument against

the inveterate abuses of slavery, unites to its value as a social and

humanitarian benefactor that of being the corner-stone of Russian

realism,--the realism which, though already perceptible in the prose

writings of the romantic poets, appears in Gogol, not as a confused

precursory intuition, nor as an instinctive impulsion of a national

tendency, but as a rational literary plan, well based and firmly

established. A few quotations from "Dead Souls," and some passages also

from Gogol's Letters, will be enough to prove this.

"Happy is the writer,"[1] he says sarcastically, "who

refrains from depicting insipid, disagreeable, unsympathetic

characters without any charms whatever, and makes a study of

those more distinguished, refined, and exquisite; the writer

who has a fine tact in selecting from the vast and muddy

stream of humanity, and devoting his attention to a few

honorable exceptions to the average human nature; who never

once lowers the clear, high tone of his lyre; who never puts

his melodies to the ignoble use of singing about folk of no

importance and low quality; and who, in fact, taking care

never to descend to the too commonplace realities of life,

soars upward bright and free toward the ethereal regions of

his poetic ideal!... He soothes and flatters the vanity of

men, casting a veil over whatever is base, sombre, and

humiliating in human nature. All the world applauds and

rejoices as he passes by in his triumphal chariot, and the

multitude proclaims him a great poet, a creative genius, a

transcendent soul. At the sound of his name young hearts

beat wildly, and sweet tears of admiration shine in gentle

eyes.... Oh, how different is the lot of the unfortunate

writer who dares to present in his works a faithful picture

of social realities, exactly as they appear to the naked

eye! Who bade him pay attention to the muddy whirlpool of

small miseries and humiliations, in which life is perforce

swallowed up, or take notice of the crowd of vulgar,

indifferent, bungling, corrupt characters, that swarm like

ants under our feet? If he commit a sin so reprehensible,

let him not hope for the applause of his country; let him

not expect to be greeted by maidens of sixteen, with heaving

bosom and bright, enthusiastic eyes.... Nor will he be able

to escape the judgment of his contemporaries, a tribunal

without delicacy or conscience, which pronounces the works

it devours in secret to be disgusting and low, and with

feigned repugnance enumerates them among the writings which

are hurtful to humanity; a tribunal which cynically imputes

to the author the qualities and conditions of the hero whom

he describes, allowing him neither heart nor soul, and

belittling the sacred flame of talent which is his whole

life.

"Contemporary judgment is not yet able or willing to

acknowledge that the lens which discloses the habits and

movements of the smallest insect is worthy the same

estimation as that which reaches to the farthest limits of

the firmament. It seems to ignore the fact that it needs a

great soul indeed to portray sincerely and accurately the

life that is stigmatized by public opinion, to convert clay

into precious pearls through the medium of art.

Contemporary judgment finds it hard to realize that frank,

good-natured laughter may be as full of merit and dignity

as a fine outburst of lyric passion. Contemporary judgment

pretends ignorance, and bestows only censure and

depreciation upon the sincere author,--knows him not,

disdains him; and so he is left wretched, abandoned,

without sympathy, like the lonely traveller who has no

companion but his own indomitable heart.

"I understand you, dear readers; I know very well what you

are thinking in your hearts; you curse the means that shows

you palpable, naked human misery, and you murmur within

yourselves, 'What is the use of such an exhibition? As

though we did not already know enough of the absurd and

base actions that the world is always full of! These things

are annoying, and one sees enough of them without having

them set before us in literature. No, no; show us the

beautiful, the charming; that which shall lift us above the

levels of reality, elevate us, fill us with enthusiasm.'

And this is not all. The author exposes himself to the

anger of a class of would-be patriots, who, at the least

indication of injury to the country's decorum, at the first

appearance of a book that dwells on some bitter truths,

raise a dreadful outcry. 'Is it well that such things

should be brought to light?' they say; 'this description

may apply to a good many people we know; it might be you,

or I, or our friend there. And what will foreigners say? It

is too bad to allow them to form so poor an opinion of us.'

Hypocrites! The motive of their accusations is not

patriotism, that noble and beautiful sentiment; it is mean,

low calculation, wearing the mask of patriotism. Let us

tear off the mask and tread it under foot. Let us call

things by their names; it is a sacred duty, and the author

is under obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth."

These passages just quoted are sufficiently explicit; but the following,

taken from one of Gogol's letters concerning "Dead Souls," is still more

so.

"Those who have analyzed my talents as a writer have not

been able to discover my chief quality. Only Puchkine

noticed it, and he used to say that no author had, so much

as I, the gift of showing the reality of the trivialities of

life, of describing the petty ways of an insignificant

creature, of bringing out and revealing to my readers

infinitesimal details which would otherwise pass unnoticed.

In fact, there is where my talent lies. The reader revolts

against the meanness and baseness of my heroes; when he

shuts the book he feels as though he had come up from a

stifling cellar into the light of day. They would have

forgiven me if I had described some picturesque theatrical

knave, but they cannot forgive my vulgarity. The Russians

are shocked to see their own insignificance."

"My friend," he writes again, "if you wish to do me the

greatest favor that I can expect from a Christian, make a

note of every small daily act and fact that you may come

across anywhere. What trouble would it be to you to write

down every night in a sort of diary such notes as

these,--To-day I heard such an opinion expressed, I spoke

with such a person, of such a disposition, such a

character, of good education or not; he holds his hands

thus, or takes his snuff so,--in fact, everything that you

see and notice from the greatest to the least?"

What more could the most modern novelist say,--the sort that carries a

memorandum-book under his arm and makes sketches, after the fashion of

the painters?

Thus we see that a man gifted with epic genius became in 1843, before

Zola was dreamt of, and when Edmond de Goncourt was scarcely twenty, the

founder of realism, the first prophet of the doctrine not inexactly

called by some the doctrine of literary microbes, the poet of social

atoms whose evolution at length overturns empires, changes the face of

society, and weaves the subtle and elaborate woof of history. I will not

go so far as to affirm with some of the critics that this light

proceeded from the Orient, and that French realism is an outcome of

distant Russian influence; for certainly Balzac had a large influence in

his turn upon his Muscovite admirers. But it is undeniable that Gogol

did anticipate and feel the road which literature, and indeed all forms

of art, were bound to follow in the latter half of the nineteenth

century.

Certain critics see, in this doctrine of literary microbes preached by

Gogol in word and deed, nothing less than an immense evolution,

characteristic of and appropriate to our age. It is the advent of

literary democracy, which was perhaps foreseen by the subtle genius of

those early novelists who described the beggar, the lame, halt, and

blind, thieves and robbers, and creatures of the lowest strata of

society; with the difference that to-day, united to this spirit of

æsthetic demagogy, there is a shade of Christian charity, compassion,

and sympathy for wretchedness and misery which sometimes degenerates, in

less virile minds than Gogol's, into an affected sentimentality. George

Eliot, that great author and great advocate of Gogol's own theories, and

the patroness of realism of humblest degree, speaks in words very like

those used by the author of "Taras," of the strength of soul which a

writer needs to interest himself in the vulgar commonplaces of life, in

daily realities, and in the people around us who seem to have nothing

picturesque or extraordinary about them. If there be any who could carry

out this rehabilitation of the miserable with charity and tenderness, it

would be the Saxon and the Sclav rather than the refined and haughty

Latin, and in both these the seed scattered by Gogol has brought forth

fruit abundantly. Modern Russian literature is filled with pity and

sincere love toward the poorer classes; one might almost term it

evangelical unction; at the voice of the poet (I cannot refuse this

title to the author of "Taras") Russia's heart softened, her tears fell,

and her compassion, like a caressing wave, swept over the toiling

_mujik_, the ill-clad government clerk, the ragged, ignorant beggar, the

political convict in the grasp of the police, and even the criminal, the

vulgar assassin with shaven head, mangled shoulders, blood-stained

hands, and manacled wrists. And more; their pity extends even to the

dumb beasts, and the death of a horse mentioned by one great Russian

novelist is more touching than that of any emperor.

Gogol is the real ancestor of the Russian novel; he contained the germs

of all the tendencies developed in the generation that came after him;

in him even Turguenief the poet and artist, Tolstoï the philosopher, and

Dostoiëwsky the visionary, found inspiration. There are writers who seem

possessed of the exalted privilege of uniting and accumulating all the

characteristics of their race and country; their brain is like a cave

filled with wonderful stalactites formed by the deposits of ages and

events. Gogol is one of these. The peculiarities of the Russian soul,

the melancholy dreaminess, the satire, the suppressed and resigned

soul-forces, are all seen in him for the first time.

To quote from "Dead Souls" would be little satisfaction. One must read

it to understand the deep impression it made in Russia. After looking it

through, Puchkine exclaimed, "How low is our country fallen!" and the

people, much against their will, finally acknowledged the same

conviction. After a hard fight with the censors, the work of art came

off at last victorious; it captured all classes of minds, and became,

like "Don Quixote," the talk of every drawing-room, the joke of every

meeting-place, and a proverb everywhere. The serfs were now virtually

set free by force of the opinion created, and the whole nation saw and

knew itself in this æsthetic revelation.

But the man who dares to make such a revelation must pay for his

temerity with his life. Gogol returned from Rome intent upon the

completion of the fatal book; but his nerves, which were almost worn

out, failed him utterly at times, his soul overflowed with bitterness

and gall, and at last in a fit of rage and desperation he burned the

manuscript of the Second Part, together with his whole library. His

darkened mind was haunted by the question in Hamlet's monologue, the

problem concerning "that bourn from which no traveller returns;" his

meditations took a deeply religious hue, and his last work, "Letters to

my Friends," is a collection of edifying epistles, urging the necessity

of the consideration of the hereafter. To these exhortations he added

one on Sclavophile nationalism, exaggerated by a fanatical devotion; and

in the same breath he heralds the spirit of the Gospels and

anathematizes the theories imported from the Occident, and declares that

he has given up writing for the sake of dedicating his time to

self-introspection and the service of his neighbor, and that henceforth

he recognizes nothing but his country and his God. The public was

exasperated; it was Gogol's fate to rouse the tiger. Who ever heard of a

satirist turning Church father? It began to be whispered that Gogol had

become a devotee of mysticism; and it is quite true that on his return

from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem he lived miserably, giving all he had to

the poor. He was hypochondriac and misanthropic, excepting when with

children, whose innocent ways brought back traces of his former

good-nature. His death is laid to two different causes. The general

story is that during the Revolution of 1848 he lost what little

intelligence remained to him, under the conviction that there was no

remedy for his country's woes; and at last, weighed down by an incurable

melancholy and despair, and terrified by visions of universal

destruction and other tremendous catastrophes, he fell on his knees and

fasted for a whole day before the holy pictures that hung at the head of

his bed, and was found there dead. Recent writers modify this statement,

and claim to know on good authority that Gogol died of a typhoid fever,

which, with his chronic infirmities, was a fatal complication. Whatever

may have been the illness which took him out of the world, it is certain

that the part of Gogol most diseased was his soul, and his sickness was

a too intense love of country, which could not see with indifferent

optimism the ills of the present or the menace of the future. Gogol had

no heart-burdens except the suffering he endured for the masses; he was

unmarried, and was never known to have any passion but a love of country

exaggerated to a dementia.

It is a strange thing that Gogol--the sincere reactionist, the admirer

of absolutism and of autocracy, the Pan-Sclavophile, the habitual enemy

of Western paganism and liberal theories--should have been the one to

throw Russian letters into their present mad whirl, into the path of

nihilism and into the currents of revolution,--a course which he seems

to have described once in allegory, in one of the most admirable pages

of "Dead Souls," where he compares Russia to a _troïka_. I will quote

it, and so take my farewell of this Russian Cervantes:--

"Rapidity of motion [in travel] is like an unknown force, a

hidden power which seizes us and carries us on its wings; we

skim through the air, we fly, and everything else flies too;

the verst-stones fly; the tradesmen's carts fly past on one

side and the other; forests with dark patches of pines rush

by, and the noise of destroying axes and the cawing of

hungry crows; the road flies by and is lost in the distance

where we can distinguish neither object nor form nor color,

unless it be a bit of the sky or the moon continually

crossed by patches of flying cloud. O troïka, troïka,

bird-troïka! There is no need to ask who invented thee! Thou

couldst not have been conceived save in the breast of a

quick, active people, in the midst of a gigantic territory

that covers half the globe, and where nobody dares count the

verst-stones on the roads for fear of vertigo! Thou art not

graceful in thy form, O telega, rustic britchka, kibitka,

thou carriage for all roads in winter or summer! No, thou

art not an object of art made to please the eye; dry wood, a

hatchet, a chisel, a clever arm,--with these thou art set

up; there is not a peasant in Yaroslaf that knows not how to

construct thee. Now the troïka is harnessed. And where is

the man? What man? The driver? Aha! it is this same peasant!

Very well, let him put on his boots and get up on his seat.

Did you say his boots? This is no German postilion; he needs

no boots nor any foot-gear at all. All that he needs is

mittens for his hands and a beard on his chin! See him

balancing himself; hear him sing. Now he pulls away like a

whirlwind; the wheels seem a smooth circle from centre to

circumference, and the tires are invisible; the ground

rushes to meet the clattering hoofs; the foot-traveller

leaps to one side with a cry of fright, then stops and opens

his mouth in astonishment; but the vehicle has passed, and

on it flies, on it flies, and far away a little whirl of

dust rises, spreads out, divides, and disappears in gauzy

patches, falling gently upon the sides of the road. It is

all gone; nothing remains of it.

"Thou art like the troïka, O Russia, my beloved country!

Dost thou not feel thyself carried onward toward the

unknown like this impetuous bird which nobody can overtake?

The road is invisible under thy feet, the bridges echo and

groan, and thou leavest everything behind thee in the

distance. Men stop and gaze surprised at this celestial

portent. Is it the lightning? Is it the thunderbolt from

heaven itself? What causes this movement of universal

terror? What mysterious and incomprehensible force spurs on

thy steeds? They are Russian steeds, good steeds. Doth the

whirlwind sometimes nestle in their manes? The signal is

given: three bronze breasts expand; twelve ready feet start

with simultaneous impetus, their light hoofs scarce

striking the ground; three horses are changed before, our

very eyes into three parallel lines which fly like a streak

through the tremulous air. The troïka flies, sails, bright

as a spirit of God. O Russia, Russia! whither goest thou?

Answer! But there is no response; the bell clangs with a

supernatural tone; the air, beaten and lashed, whistles and

whirls, and rushes off in wide currents; the troïka cuts

them all on the wing, and nations, monarchies, and empires

stand aside and let her pass."

[1] I could take this passage bodily from the translation of "Dead

Souls" made by Isabella Hapgood directly from the Russian, but there are

some discrepancies in which the Spanish writer seems to be in the right,

as in the use of the word _writer_ for _reader_.--Tr.