REALISM OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
The moment a writer nowadays mentions the word “realism” he risks the
danger of being told that he is a disciple of a particular school,
and that he is bent on propagating a peculiar and exclusive theory of
art. If, however, Russian literature is to be discussed at all, the
word “realism” cannot be avoided. So it will be as well to explain
immediately and clearly what I mean when I assert that the main
feature of both Russian prose and Russian verse is its closeness to
nature, its love of reality, which for want of a better word one can
only call realism. When the word “realism” is employed with regard to
literature, it gives rise to two quite separate misunderstandings:
this is unavoidable, because the word has been used to denote special
schools and theories of art which have made a great deal of noise both
in France and England and elsewhere.
The first misunderstanding arises from the use of the word by a certain
French school of novelists who aimed at writing scientific novels
in which the reader should be given slices of raw life; and these
novelists strove by an accumulation of detail to produce the effect of
absolute reality. The best known writers of this French school did not
succeed in doing this, although they achieved striking results of a
different character. For instance, Emile Zola was entirely successful
when he wrote prose epics on subjects such as life in a mine, life
in a huge shop, or life during a great war; that is to say, he was
poetically successful when he painted with a broad brush and set great
crowds in motion. He produced matchless panoramas, but the effect of
them at their best was a poetic, romantic effect. When he tried to be
realistic, and scientifically realistic, when he endeavoured to say
everything by piling detail on detail, he merely succeeded in being
tedious and disgusting. And so far from telling the whole truth, he
produced an effect of distorted exaggeration such as one receives from
certain kinds of magnifying and distorting mirrors.
The second misunderstanding with regard to the word “realism” is this.
Certain people think that if you say an author strives to attain an
effect of truth and reality in his writings, you must necessarily mean
that he is without either the wish or the power to select, and that his
work is therefore chaotic. Not long ago, in a book of short sketches,
I included a very short and inadequate paper on certain aspects of the
Russian stage; and in mentioning Tchekov, the Russian dramatist, I made
the following statement: “The Russian stage simply aims at one thing:
to depict everyday life, not exclusively the brutality of everyday
life, nor the tremendous catastrophes befalling human beings, nor to
devise intricate problems and far-fetched cases of conscience in which
human beings might possibly be entangled. It simply aims at presenting
glimpses of human beings as they really are, and by means of such
glimpses it opens out avenues and vistas into their lives.” I added
further that I considered such plays would be successful in any country.
A reviewer, commenting on this in an interesting article, said that
these remarks revealed the depth of my error with regard to realism.
“As if the making of such plays,” wrote the reviewer, “were not the
perpetual aim of dramatists! But a dramatist would be putting chaos and
not real life on the stage if he presented imitations of unselected
people doing unselected things at unselected moments. The idea which
binds the drama together, an idea derived by reason from experience of
life at large, is the most real and lifelike part in it, if the drama
is a good one.”
Now I am as well aware as this reviewer, or as any one else, that it is
the perpetual aim of dramatists to make such plays. But it is an aim
which they often fail to achieve. For instance, we have had, during the
last thirty years in England and France, many successful and striking
plays in which the behaviour of the characters although effective from
a theatrical point of view, is totally unlike the behaviour of men
and women in real life. Again, when I wrote of the Russian stage, I
never for a moment suggested that the Russian dramatist did, or that
any dramatist should, present imitations of unselected people doing
unselected things at unselected moments. As my sketch was a short one,
I was not able to go into the question in full detail, but I should
have thought that if one said that a play was true to life, and at the
same time theatrically and dramatically successful, that is to say,
interesting to a large audience, an ordinary reader would have taken
for granted (as many of my readers did take for granted) that in the
work of such dramatists there must necessarily have been selection.
Later on in this book I shall deal at some length with the plays
of Anton Tchekov, and in discussing that writer, I hope to make it
clear that his work, so far from presenting imitations of unselected
people doing unselected things at unselected moments, are imitations
of selected but real people, doing selected but probable things at
selected but interesting moments. But the difference between Tchekov
and most English and French dramatists (save those of the quite modern
school) is, that the moments which Tchekov selects appear at first
sight to be trivial. His genius consists in the power of revealing the
dramatic significance of the seemingly trivial. It stands to reason,
as I shall try to point out later on, that the more realistic your
play, the more it is true to life; the less obvious action there is
in it, the greater must be the skill of the dramatist; the surer his
art, the more certain his power of construction, the nicer his power of
selection.
Mr. Max Beerbohm once pointed this out by an apt illustration. “The
dramatist,” he said, “who deals in heroes, villains, buffoons, queer
people who are either doing or suffering either tremendous or funny
things, has a very valuable advantage over the playwright who deals
merely in humdrum you and me. The dramatist has his material as a
springboard. The adramatist must leap as best he can on the hard high
road, the adramatist must be very much an athlete.”
That is just it: many of the modern (and ancient) Russian playwriters
are adramatists. But they are extremely athletic; and so far from their
work being chaotic, they sometimes give evidence, as in the case of
Tchekov, of a supreme mastery over the construction and architectonics
of drama, as well as of an unerring instinct for what will be telling
behind footlights, although at first sight their choice does not seem
to be obviously dramatic.
Therefore, everything I have said so far can be summed up in two
statements: Firstly, that Russian literature, because it deals with
realism, has nothing in common with the work of certain French
“Naturalists,” by whose work the word “realism” has achieved so wide
a notoriety; secondly, Russian literature, although it is realistic,
is not necessarily chaotic, and contains many supreme achievements
in the art of selection. But I wish to discuss the peculiar quality
of Russian realism, because it appears to me that it is this quality
which differentiates Russian literature from the literature of other
countries.
I have not dealt in this book with Russian poets, firstly, because the
number of readers who are familiar with Russian poetry in its original
tongue is limited; and, secondly, because it appears to me impossible
to discuss Russian poetry, if one is forced to deal in translations,
since no translation, however good, can give the reader an idea either
of the music, the atmosphere, or the charm of the original. But it
is in Russian poetry that the quality of Russian realism is perhaps
most clearly made manifest. Any reader familiar with German literature
will, I think, agree that if one compares French or English poetry
with German poetry, and French and English Romanticism with German
Romanticism, one is conscious, when one approaches the work of the
Germans, of entering into a more sober and more quiet dominion; one
leaves behind one the exuberance of England: “the purple patches” of
a Shakespeare, the glowing richness of a Keats, the soaring rainbow
fancies of a Shelley, the wizard horizons of a Coleridge. One also
leaves behind one the splendid sword-play and gleaming decision of the
French: the clarions of Corneille, the harps and flutes of Racine, the
great many-piped organ of Victor Hugo, the stormy pageants of Musset,
the gorgeous lyricism of Flaubert, the jewelled dreams of Gautier, and
all the colour and the pomp of the Parnassians. One leaves all these
things behind, and one steps into a world of quiet skies, rustling
leaves, peaceful meadows, and calm woods, where the birds twitter
cheerfully and are answered by the plaintive notes of pipe or reed, or
interrupted by the homely melody, sometimes cheerful and sometimes sad,
of the wandering fiddler.
In this country, it is true, we have visions and vistas of distant
hills and great brooding waters, of starlit nights and magical
twilights; in this country, it is also true that we hear the echoes
of magic horns, the footfall of the fairies, the tinkling hammers of
the sedulous Kobolds, and the champing and the neighing of the steeds
of Chivalry. But there is nothing wildly fantastic, nor portentously
exuberant, nor gorgeously dazzling; nothing tempestuous, unbridled,
or extreme. When the Germans have wished to express such things, they
have done so in their music; they certainly have not done so in their
poetry. What they have done in their poetry, and what they have done
better than any one else, is to express in the simplest of all words
the simplest of all thoughts and feelings. They have spoken of first
love, of spring and the flowers, the smiles and tears of children,
the dreams of youth and the musings of old age--with a simplicity, a
homeliness no writers of any other country have ever excelled. And when
they deal with the supernatural, with ghosts, fairies, legends, deeds
of prowess or phantom lovers, there is a quaint homeliness about the
recital of such things, as though they were being told by the fireside
in a cottage, or being sung on the village green to the accompaniment
of a hurdy-gurdy. To many Germans the phantasy of a Shelley or of a
Victor Hugo is essentially alien and unpalatable. They feel as though
they were listening to men who are talking too loud and too wildly,
and they merely wish to get away or to stop their ears. Again, poets
like Keats or Gautier often produce on them the impression that they
are listening to sensuous and meaningless echoes.
Now Russian poetry is a step farther on in this same direction. The
reader who enters the kingdom of Russian poetry, after having visited
those of France and England, experiences what he feels in entering the
German region, but still more so. The region of Russian poetry is still
more earthy. Even the mysticism of certain German Romantic writers is
alien to it. The German poetic country is quiet and sober, it is true;
but in its German forests you hear, as I have said, the noise of those
hoofs which are bearing riders to the unknown country. Also you have in
German literature, allegory and pantheistic dreams which are foreign to
the Russian poetic temperament, and therefore unreflected in Russian
poetry.
The Russian poetical temperament, and, consequently, Russian poetry,
does not only closely cling to the solid earth, but it is based on
and saturated with sound common sense, with a curious matter-of-fact
quality. And this common sense with which the greatest Russian poet,
Pushkin, is so thoroughly impregnated, is as foreign to German
_Schwärmerei_ as it is to French rhetoric, or the imaginative
exuberance of England. In Russian poetry of the early part of the
nineteenth century, in spite of the enthusiasm kindled in certain
Russian poets by the romantic scenery of the Caucasus, there is very
little feeling for nature. Nature, in the poetry of Pushkin, is more or
less conventional: almost the only flower mentioned is the rose, almost
the only bird the nightingale. And although certain Russian poets
adopted the paraphernalia and the machinery of Romanticism (largely
owing to the influence of Byron), their true nature, their fundamental
sense, keeps on breaking out. Moreover, there is an element in Russian
Romanticism of passive obedience, of submission to authority, which
arises partly from the passive quality in all Russians, and partly from
the atmosphere of the age and the political régime of the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Thus it is that no Russian Romantic poet would
have ever tried to reach the dim pinnacles of Shelley’s speculative
cities, and no Russian Romantic poet would have uttered a wild cry of
revolt such as Musset’s “Rolla.” But what the Russian poets did do,
and what they did in a manner which gives them an unique place in the
history of the world’s literature, was to extract poetry from the daily
life they saw round them, and to express it in forms of incomparable
beauty. Russian poetry, like the Russian nature, is plastic.
Plasticity, adaptability, comprehensiveness, are the great qualities
of Pushkin. His verse is “simple, sensuous and impassioned”; there is
nothing indistinct about it, no vague outline and no blurred detail; it
is perfectly balanced, and it is this sense of balance and proportion
blent with a rooted common sense, which reminds the reader when he
reads Pushkin of Greek art, and gives one the impression that the poet
is a classic, however much he may have employed the stock-in-trade of
Romanticism.
Meredith says somewhere that the poetry of mortals is their daily
prose. It is precisely this kind of poetry, the poetry arising
from the incidents of everyday life, which the Russian poets have
been successful in transmuting into verse. There is a quality of
matter-of-factness in Russian poetry which is unique; the same quality
exists in Russian folklore and fairy tales; even Russian ghosts, and
certainly the Russian devil, have an element of matter-of-factness
about them; and the most Romantic of all Russian poets, Lermontov, has
certain qualities which remind one more of Thackeray than of Byron or
Shelley, who undoubtedly influenced him.
I will quote as an example of this one of his most famous poems. It is
called “The Testament,” and it is the utterance of a man who has been
mortally wounded in battle.
“I want to be alone with you,[3]
A moment quite alone.
The minutes left to me are few,
They say I’ll soon be gone.
And you’ll be going home on leave,
Then tell ... but why? I do believe
There’s not a soul, who’ll greatly care
To hear about me over there.
And yet if some one asks you, well,
Let us suppose they do--
A bullet hit me here, you’ll tell,--
The chest,--and it went through.
And say I died and for the Tsar,
And say what fools the doctors are;--
And that I shook you by the hand,
And thought about my native land.
My father and my mother, there!
They may be dead by now;
To tell the truth, I wouldn’t care
To grieve them anyhow.
If one of them is living, say
I’m bad at writing home, and they
Have sent us to the front, you see,--
And that they needn’t wait for me.
They’ve got a neighbour, as you know,
And you remember I
And she.... How very long ago
It is we said good-bye!
She won’t ask after me, nor care,
But tell her ev’rything, don’t spare
Her empty heart; and let her cry;--
To her it doesn’t signify.”
The words of this poem are the words of familiar conversation; they are
exactly what the soldier would say in such circumstances. There is not
a single literary or poetical expression used. And yet the effect in
the original is one of poignant poetical feeling and consummate poetic
art. I know of no other language where the thing is possible; because
if you translate the Russian by the true literary equivalents, you
would have to say: “I would like a word alone with you, old fellow,” or
“old chap,”[4] or something of that kind; and I know of no English poet
who has ever been able to deal successfully (in poetry) with the speech
of everyday life without the help of slang or dialect. What is needed
for this are the Russian temperament and the Russian language.
I will give another instance of what I mean. There is a Russian poet
called Krilov, who wrote fables such as those of La Fontaine, based
for the greater part on those of Æsop. He wrote a version of what is
perhaps La Fontaine’s masterpiece, “Les Deux Pigeons,” which begins
thus:
“Two pigeons, like two brothers, lived together.
They shared their all in fair and wintry weather.
Where the one was the other would be near,
And every joy they shared and every tear.
They noticed not Time’s flight. Sadness they knew;
But weary of each other never grew.”
This last line, translated literally, runs: “They were sometimes
sad, they were never bored.” It is one of the most poetical in
the whole range of Russian literature; and yet how absolutely
untranslatable!--not only into English, but into any other language.
How can one convey the word “boring” so that it shall be poetical, in
English or in French? In Russian one can, simply from the fact that the
word which means boring, “skouchno,” is just as fit for poetic use as
the word “groustno,” which means sad. And this proves that it is easier
for Russians to make poetry out of the language of everyday than it is
for Englishmen.
The matter-of-fact quality of the Russian poetical temperament--its
dislike of exaggeration and extravagance--is likewise clearly visible
in the manner in which Russian poets write of nature. I have already
said that the poets of the early part of the nineteenth century reveal
(compared with their European contemporaries) only a mild sentiment for
the humbler aspects of nature; but let us take a poet of a later epoch,
Alexis Tolstoy, who wrote in the fifties, and who may not unfairly be
called a Russian Tennyson. In the work of Tolstoy the love of nature
reveals itself on almost every page. His work brings before our eyes
the landscape of the South of Russia, and expresses the charm and the
quality of that country in the same way as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”
evokes for us the sight of England. Yet if one compares the two, the
work of the Russian poet is nearer to the earth, familiar and simple
in a fashion which is beyond the reach of other languages. Here, for
instance, is a rough translation of one of Alexis Tolstoy’s poems:
“Through the slush and the ruts of the road,
By the side of the dam of the stream;
Where the wet fishing nets are spread,
The carriage jogs on, and I muse.
I muse and I look at the road,
At the damp and the dull grey sky,
At the shelving bank of the lake,
And the far-off smoke of the villages.
By the dam, with a cheerless face,
Is walking a tattered old Jew.
From the lake, with a splashing of foam,
The waters rush through the weir.
A little boy plays on a pipe,
He has made it out of a reed.
The startled wild-ducks have flown,
And call as they sweep from the lake.
Near the old crumbling mill
Labourers sit on the grass.
An old worn horse in a cart,
Is lazily dragging some sacks.
And I know it all, oh! so well,
Although I have never been here;
The roof of that house over there,
And that boy, and the wood, and the weir,
And the mournful voice of the mill,
And the crumbling barn in the field--
I have been here and seen it before,
And forgotten it all long ago.
This very same horse plodded on,
It was dragging the very same sacks;
And under the mouldering mill
Labourers sat on the grass.
And the Jew, with his beard, walked by,
And the weir made just such a noise.
All this has happened before,
Only, I cannot tell when.”
I have said that Russian fairy tales and folk stories are full of the
same spirit of matter-of-factness. And so essential do I consider this
factor to be, so indispensable do I consider the comprehension of it by
the would-be student of Russian literature, that I will quote a short
folk-story at length, which reveals this quality in its essence. The
reader will only have to compare the following tale in his mind with a
French, English, or German fairy tale to see what I mean.
THE FOOL
Once upon a time in a certain kingdom there lived an old man, and he
had three sons. Two of them were clever, the third was a fool. The
father died, and the sons drew lots for his property: the clever sons
won every kind of useful thing; the fool only received an old ox, and
that was a lean and bony one.
The time of the fair came, and the clever brothers made themselves
ready to go and do a deal. The fool saw them doing this, and said:
“I also, brothers, shall take my ox to the market.”
And he led his ox by a rope tied to its horn, towards the town. On the
way to the town he went through a wood, and in the wood there stood an
old dried-up birch tree. The wind blew and the birch tree groaned.
“Why does the birch tree groan?” thought the fool. “Does it perhaps
wish to bargain for my ox? Now tell me, birch tree, if you wish to buy.
If that is so, buy. The price of the ox is twenty roubles: I cannot
take less. Show your money.”
But the birch tree answered nothing at all, and only groaned, and the
fool was astonished that the birch tree wished to receive the ox on
credit.
“If that is so, I will wait till to-morrow,” said the fool.
He tied the ox to the birch tree, said good-bye to it, and went home.
The clever brothers came to him and began to question him.
“Well, fool,” they said, “have you sold your ox?”
“I have sold it.”
“Did you sell it dear?”
“I sold it for twenty roubles.”
“And where is the money?”
“I have not yet got the money. I have been told I shall receive it
to-morrow.”
“Oh, you simpleton!” said the clever brothers.
On the next day, early in the morning, the fool got up, made himself
ready, and went to the birch tree for his money. He arrived at the
wood; the birch tree was there, swaying in the wind, but the ox was not
there any more,--the wolves had eaten him in the night.
“Now, countryman,” said the fool to the birch tree, “pay me the money.
You promised you would pay it to-day.”
The wind blew, the birch tree groaned, and the fool said:
“Well, you are an untrustworthy fellow! Yesterday you said, ‘I will pay
the money to-morrow,’ and to-day you are trying to get out of it. If
this is so I will wait yet another day, but after that I shall wait no
longer, for I shall need the money myself.”
The fool went home, and his clever brothers again asked him: “Well,
have you received your money?”
“No, brothers,” he answered, “I shall have to wait still another little
day.”
“Whom did you sell it to?”
“A dried old birch tree in the wood.”
“See what a fool!” said the brothers.
On the third day the fool took an axe and set out for the wood. He
arrived and demanded the money.
The birch tree groaned and groaned.
“No, countryman,” said the fool, “if you always put off everything till
the morrow, I shall never get anything from you at all. I do not like
joking, and I shall settle matters with you at once and for all.”
He took the axe and struck the tree, and the chips flew on all sides.
Now in the tree was a hollow, and in this hollow some robbers had
hidden a bag of gold. The tree was split into two parts, and the fool
saw a heap of red gold; and he gathered the gold together in a heap and
took some of it home and showed it to his brothers.
And his brothers said to him:
“Where did you get such a lot of money, fool?”
“A countryman of mine gave it to me for my ox,” he said, “and there is
still a great deal left. I could not bring half of it home. Let us go,
brothers, and get the rest of it.”
They went into the wood and found the money, and brought it home.
“Now look you, fool,” said the clever brothers, “do not tell any one
that we have so much money.”
“Of course not,” said the fool, “I will not tell any one, I promise
you.”
But soon after this they met a deacon.
“What are you bringing from the wood, children?” said the deacon.
“Mushrooms,” said the clever brothers.
But the fool interrupted and said: “They are not telling the truth--we
are bringing gold. Look at it if you will.”
The deacon gasped with astonishment, fell upon the gold, and took as
much as he could and stuffed his pockets full of it.
But the fool was annoyed at this, and struck him with an axe and beat
him till he was dead.
“Oh fool, what have you done?” said his brothers. “You will be ruined,
and ruin us also. What shall we do now with this dead body?”
They thought and they thought, and then they took it to an empty cellar
and threw it into the cellar.
Late in the evening the eldest brother said to the second: “This is a
bad business. As soon as they miss the deacon the fool is certain to
tell them all about it. Let us kill a goat and hide it in the cellar
and put the dead body in some other place.”
They waited until the night was dark; then they killed a goat, threw it
into the cellar, and took the body of the deacon to another place and
buried it in the earth.
A few days passed; people looked for the deacon everywhere, and asked
everybody they could about him. And the fool said to them:
“What do you want of him? I killed him with an axe, and my brothers
threw the body into the cellar.”
They at once seized the fool and said to him:
“Take us and show us.”
The fool climbed into the cellar, took out the head of the goat, and
said:
“Was your deacon black?”
“Yes,” they said.
“And had he got a beard?”
“Yes, he had a beard.”
“And had he got horns?”
“What sort of horns, you fool?”
“Well, look!” And he threw down the head.
The people looked and saw that it was a goat, and they spat at the fool
and went home.
* * * * *
This story, more than pages of analysis and more than chapters of
argument, illustrates what I mean: namely, that if the Russian poet
and the Russian peasant, the one in his verse, the other in his folk
tales and fairy stories, are matter-of-fact, alien to flights of
exaggerated fancy, and above all things enamoured of the truth; if by
their closeness to nature, their gift of seeing things as they are, and
expressing these things in terms of the utmost simplicity, without
fuss, without affectation and without artificiality,--if, I say, all
this entitles us to call them realists, then this realism is not and
must never be thought of as being the fad of a special school, the
theory of a limited clique, or the watchword of a literary camp, but
it is rather the natural expression of the Russian temperament and the
Russian character.
I will try throughout this book to attempt to illustrate this character
and this temperament as best I can, by observing widely different
manifestations of it; but all these manifestations, however different
they may be, contain one great quality in common: that is, the quality
of reality of which I have been writing. And unless the student of
Russian literature realises this and appreciates what Russian realism
consists of, and what it really means, he will be unable to understand
either the men or the literature of Russia.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] This translation is in the metre of the original. It is literal;
but hopelessly inadequate.
[4] In the Russian, although every word of the poem is familiar, not a
word of slang is used.