In introducing the volumes of this series which deal with the work
of French fictionists I commented upon the real distinction existing
between the French short-story and the short-story in French, asserting
that the former is a precise term because the greater number of worthy
short-stories in French really exhibit the typical French spirit and
are therefore French.
The Russian short-story is even more pronouncedly national in
theme, in tone, and in treatment than is its French contemporary;
indeed, Muscovite literature is the most markedly national of any
in Europe. This would not be so significant a statement were modern
Russian literature--by which I mean all such literature which really
counts--more than a century old; but this ancient, remote, and
self-sufficient people really lived for so long a time apart from the
great highways of Continental thought that they were not nationally
conscious of those titanic upheaving and levelling passions whose
fitful and at times appalling force shook France, England, and even
Poland to the very heart and forced their thinkers to express the
spirit of the revolutionary era in undying prose.
Instead, Russian writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries occupied their pens with imitations of foreign--chiefly
French--literature, or wrote minute local descriptions which were
important not so much for what they were as for what they pointed to--a
new national consciousness.
* * * * *
But in order to get an understanding of modern Russian literature we
turn backward in our swift survey. When Peter the Great, that much
magnified and more maligned potentate, ascended the throne, he found
Russia the home of bigotry, prejudice, and barbarism. But before his
unceremonious blows the doors swung reluctantly open, and from the
west a steady concourse of European ideas, often accompanied in person
by their thinkers, moved through the gates and penetrated every upper
circle. Naturally, literature was the first of the arts to throb
with this infusion of outside blood, and naturally, also, its first
expressions were in that form of flattery which is alleged to be most
sincere.
But when national consciousness is awakened, national pride soon
begins to utter lusty sounds, and its theme is certain to be as
national as its form of expression. So, with the dawn of the nineteenth
century--Lomonosoff, Kantemier, Sumarakov, the Empress Catherine,
Von Viezin, Derzhavin, Karamsin, and Zhukovski having in the previous
century done fine service in poetry, history, and the drama--there
opened a new era: the period of artistic Russian fiction. The barbaric
richness and fearless crudity of the old poetry were exchanged for
sophisticated prose.
Kriloff deserves special mention here, even though to Gogol and Pushkin
must go the trail-blazers’ honor. His fables and tales were distinctly
in advance of previous similar work, but the real fictive creators were
yet to come. Kriloff was at once the last of the old and the first of
the new prose-writers.
* * * * *
It is a curious coincidence that the youngest two literatures of the
world, American and Russian, should each have contributed so materially
to the development of the short-story. During the eighteenth century
American literature was compassing a slow growth; but in Russia
literature was virtually sleeping. Later, both come to effective
expression at about the same time. While Irving, Hawthorne, Poe,
Harte, Stockton, James, and O. Henry were telling wonderful stories in
our land, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Korolenko,
Garshin, Chekhov, Andreev, and Gorki were doing the like in Russia.
The balance dips toward America for literary art, but for sheer
strength it unmistakably drops on the side of the Slav. Thus throughout
the nineteenth century and till now the short-story has been a form to
be reckoned with in any adequate estimate of Russian writers, just as
in the two other literatures whose recent development follows similar
lines--American and French.
When the modern short-story was born in its technical perfection
in America, France, and Russia almost simultaneously, the French
Revolution had worn out most of its evil effects and the New Spirit was
beneficently at work in every enlightened land. The superior value of
human beings, the benumbing effects of slavery, the priceless qualities
of real liberty, and the absolute necessity for an enlightenment which
should be something more than education, became ideals worth fighting
and dying for.
It is important to note here that great short-stories from that day to
this have developed themes vital to the people for whom and by whom
they were written.
* * * * *
But we must look deeper than the spirit of an _era_ if we are to
account for a national tone in any given literature, and in the
characteristic Russian temperament we shall in this case find the
inspiring cause.
The word _Slav_ has given to the world our word _slave_. In the
pathetic and expressive phrase of Waliszewski, “The Slav race, the
latest comer into the world of civilization, has always been at school,
always under some rod or sway. Whether it be the Oriental and material
conquests of the thirteenth century, or the Western and moral one of
the eighteenth, it merely undergoes a change of masters.” Yet in the
face of all this the Russian people has persistently maintained, and
even accentuated, its personality. To me, this personality is marked
by six great characteristics: _hugeness_, _passion_, _simplicity_,
_religiousness_, _suffering_, and _fatalism_. Herzen said that
“sadness, skepticism, irony, are the three strings of Russian
literature--the skepticism is not typical; the other qualities are.”
In looking for the typical and distinctive elements of national
character in Russian literature we must remember that they are more to
be observed in the tone of the author considered than in the characters
he portrays, and this for a perfectly obvious reason: Russia is a land
of extremes, not alone of condition but of advancement. One class
outrivals the Parisian in refinement of desires, while no people in
Europe can surpass the remoter peasant in his stolidity; the greatest
wealth is just across the way from the most tax-oppressed poverty;
high-minded patriotism sits on the same park-bench with a Red maniac;
skepticism and religious credulity run to astounding contra extremes.
Of course, the Russian composite character is modified by the antipodal
nature of its society, but its literature is enriched by a vast variety
of types, and when, as in the stories of Tolstoi, these types appear in
dramatic juxtaposition; the effect is unique.
It would be interesting to trace here each of these six nationally
characteristic traits, but all are either dwelt upon in the succeeding
introductory studies or are clearly illustrated in the accompanying
stories; it may therefore be enough to point out in brief how naturally
each takes its place in the sum total of Russian temperament.
The physical vastness of this self-sufficient land, with its sweep of
continent-wide, continent-long domain, must at once suggest the bigness
of its spirit. Even its people grow big and Norse-like in frame, while
the centuries of indifference to the outlanders’ views and ideals
culminate readily in direct, fearless self-expression.
Passion, too, finds a similar origin, encouraged by Tartar fire,
Cossack physicality, and the composite life bred of oriental contact.
Simplicity is often in our day written down as the sign of ignorance,
or at least of inexperience of the great world; but in the Russian
character it has mainly a nobler origin. What need for hesitation,
finesse, caution in word and attitude, when one is certain of being the
chosen of Heaven? Not even the Jew is more firmly convinced and poised
than the Muscovite.
The essential religiousness--the mystical religiousness--of the Slav
is as old as his history. In fact, his Aryan origin, so often boasted
of, points to the Hindu origin of his religious attitude of mind. True,
many of his matter-of-fact appeals to divine things are habitual rather
than reverential and often have too close association with base dealing
to be convincing; still the peasant particularly is colored in all his
life by his church and her tenets.
The Russian countenance is typically sad, almost despairing. The yoke
worn for so many ages by the masses, the bitterness of a life devoted
to service for the “big man,” the hopelessness born of petty and major
oppressions, result for the Russian, as for all barbaric peoples--for
Russia is still largely barbaric--in a resigned suffering which has not
yet begun to be mitigated by the great increase of revolutionary ideas
among the people. Indeed, protest against the ruling order has thus
far yielded only greater present sadness, how hopeful soever the future
may be.
And lastly we have that most terrible, most pathetic, most depressing
temper--fatalism. And yet this is not the precise word, for no single
English word expresses the pessimism, the apathy, the expectation of
nothing, the anticlimax of ambition in which a whole race begins as a
Napoleon and--peters out.
All this may sound unlovely. And doubtless it is, for loveliness is not
the tone of Nihilism, nor is beauty the consort of despair. Yet the
towering ambition that ends in puny deeds shows even now signs of a
more effective result, and larger liberties, the outgrowth of contact
with the world without, must sooner or later bring to life a more
ardent and hope-cherishing Russia.
* * * * *
The short-story of today in Russia is strong--terribly strong, for the
most part, for it is not charming, certainly. But as an augury of what
the Russian people will yet become it has a thousand-fold more promise
than may be found in the perfumed politeness of an anæmic fiction such
as floods the magazines of England and America. Notwithstanding all her
gloom, Russia’s strength is her bow of promise.