THE EPOCH OF REFORM
For seven years after the death of Belinsky in 1848, all literary
development ceased. This period was the darkest hour before the dawn
of the second great renascence of Russian literature. Criticism was
practically non-existent; the Slavophiles were forbidden to write; the
Westernizers were exiled. An increased severity of censorship, an
extreme suspicion and drastic measures on the part of the Government
were brought about by the fears which the Paris revolution of 1848 had
caused. The Westernizers felt the effects of this as much as the
Slavophiles; a group of young literary men, schoolmasters and
officers, the Petrashevtsy, called after their leader, a Foreign
Office official PETRASHEVSKY, met together on Fridays and debated on
abstract subjects; they discussed the emancipation of the serfs, read
Fourier and Lamennais, and considered the establishment of a secret
press: the scheme of a popular propaganda was thought of, but nothing
had got beyond talk--and the whole thing was in reality only
talk--when the society was discovered by the police and its members
were punished with the utmost severity. Twenty-one of them were
condemned to death, among whom was Dostoyevsky, who, being on the army
list, was accused of treason. They were reprieved on the scaffold;
some sent into penal servitude in Siberia, and some into the army.
This marked one of the darkest hours in the history of Russian
literature. And from this date until 1855, complete stagnation
reigned. In 1855 the Emperor Nicholas died during the Crimean War; and
with the accession of his son Alexander II, a new era dawned on
Russian literature, the Era of the Great Reforms. The Crimean War and
the reforms which followed it--the emancipation of the serfs, the
creation of a new judicial system, and the foundation of local
self-government--stabbed the Russian soul into life, relieved it of
its gag, produced a great outburst of literature which enlarged and
enriched the literature of the world, and gave to the world three of
its greatest novelists: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky.
IVAN TURGENEV (1816-83), whose name is of Tartar origin, came of an
old family which had frequently distinguished itself in the annals of
Russian literature by a fearless outspokenness. He began his literary
career by writing verse (1843); but, like Maupassant, he soon
understood that verse was not his true vehicle, and in 1847 gave up
writing verse altogether; in that year he published in _The
Contemporary_ his first sketch of peasant life, _Khor and Kalinych_,
which afterwards formed part of his _Sportsman's Sketches_,
twenty-four of which he collected and published in 1852. The
Government rendered Turgenev the same service as it had done to
Pushkin, in exiling him to his own country estate for two years. When,
after the two years, this forced exile came to an end, he went into
another kind of exile of his own accord; he lived at first at Baden,
and then in Paris, and only reappeared in Russia from time to time;
this accounts for the fact that, although Turgenev belongs
chronologically to the epoch of the great reforms, the Russia which he
paints was really more like the Russia before that epoch; and when he
tried to paint the Russia that was contemporary to him his work gave
rise to much controversy.
His _Rudin_ was published in 1856, _The Nest of Gentlefolk_ in 1859,
_On the Eve_ in 1860, _Fathers and Sons_ in 1862, _Smoke_ in 1867.
Turgenev did for Russian literature what Byron did for English
literature; he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout all
Europe. And in Europe his work reaped a glorious harvest of praise.
Flaubert was astounded by him, George Sand looked up to him as to a
Master, Taine spoke of his work as being the finest artistic
production since Sophocles. In Turgenev's work, Europe not only
discovered Turgenev, but it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the
naturalness of the Russian character; and this came as a revelation.
For the first time, Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin
was the first to paint; for the first time Europe came into contact
with the Russian soul; and it was the sharpness of this revelation
which accounts for the fact of Turgenev having received in the West an
even greater meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled to.
In Russia, Turgenev attained almost instant popularity. His
_Sportsman's Sketches_ made him known, and his _Nest of Gentlefolk_
made him not only famous but universally popular. In 1862 the
publication of his masterpiece _Fathers and Sons_ dealt his reputation
a blow. The revolutionary elements in Russia regarded his hero,
Bazarov, as a calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary elements in
Russia looked upon _Fathers and Sons_ as a glorification of Nihilism.
Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. This, perhaps,
could only happen in Russia to this extent; and for the same reason as
that which made Russian criticism didactic. The conflicting elements
of Russian society were so terribly in earnest in fighting their
cause, that any one whom they did not regard as definitely for them
was at once considered an enemy, and an impartial delineation of any
character concerned in the political struggle was bound to displease
both parties. If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must either be a hero
or a scoundrel, if either the revolutionaries or the reactionaries
were to be pleased. If in England the militant suffragists suddenly
had a huge mass of educated opinion behind them and a still larger
mass of educated public opinion against them, and some one were to
draw in a novel an impartial picture of a suffragette, the same thing
would happen. On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes are
concerned, it has happened in the case of Mr. Wells. But, if
Turgenev's popularity suffered a shock in Russia from which it with
difficulty recovered, in Western Europe it went on increasing.
Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that was
eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hall-mark of good taste.
In Russia, Turgenev's work recovered from the unpopularity caused by
his _Fathers and Sons_ when Nihilism became a thing of the past, and
revolution took an entirely different shape; but, with the growing up
of new generations, his popularity suffered in a different way and for
different reasons. A new element came into Russian literature with
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and later with Gorky, and Turgenev's work began
to seem thin and artificial beside the creations of these stronger
writers; but in Russia, where Turgenev's work has the advantage of
being read in the original, it had an asset which ensured it a
permanent and safe harbour, above and beyond the fluctuations of
literary taste, the strife of political parties, and the conflict of
social ideals; and that was its art, its poetry, its style, which
ensured it a lasting and imperishable niche among the great classics
of Russian literature. And there it stands now. Turgenev's work in
Russia is no longer disputed or a subject of dispute. It is taken for
granted; and, whatever the younger generation will read and admire,
they will always read and admire Turgenev first. His work is a
necessary part of the intellectual baggage of any educated man and,
especially, of the educated adolescent.
The position of Tennyson in England offers in a sense a parallel to
that of Turgenev in Russia. Tennyson, like Turgenev, enjoyed during
his lifetime not only the popularity of the masses, but the
appreciation of all that was most eclectic in the country. Then a
reaction set in. Now I believe the young generation think nothing of
Tennyson at all. And yet nothing is so sure as his permanent place in
English literature; and that permanent place is secured to him by his
incomparable diction. So it is with Turgenev. One cannot expect the
younger generation to be wildly excited about Turgenev's ideas,
characters, and problems. They belong to an epoch which is dead. At
the same time, one cannot help thinking that the most advanced of the
symbolist writers would not have been sorry had he happened by chance
to write _Bezhin Meadow_ and the _Poems in Prose_. Just so one cannot
help thinking that the most modern of our poets, had he by accident
written _The Revenge_ or _Tears, Idle Tears_, would not have thrown
them in the fire!
There is, indeed, something in common between Tennyson and Turgenev.
They both have something mid-Victorian in them. They are both idyllic,
and both of them landscape-lovers and lords of language. They neither
of them had any very striking message to preach; they both of them
seem to halt, except on rare occasions, on the threshold of passion;
they both of them have a rare stamp of nobility; and in both of them
there is an element of banality. They both seem to a certain extent to
be shut off from the world by the trees of old parks, where cultivated
people are enjoying the air and the flowers and the shade, and where
between the tall trees you get glimpses of silvery landscapes and
limpid waters, and soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of course,
there is more than this in Turgenev, but this is the main impression.
Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he describes beautifully
from the outside, making you feel its existence, but not convincing
you that he felt it himself; but on the other hand what an artist he
is! How beautifully his pictures are painted; and how rich he is in
poetic feeling!
Turgenev is above all things a poet. He carried on the work of
Pushkin, and he did for Russian prose what Pushkin did for Russian
poetry; he created imperishable models of style. His language has the
same limpidity and absence of any blur that we find in Pushkin's work.
His women have the same crystal radiance, transparent simplicity, and
unaffected strength; his pictures of peasant life, and his country
episodes have the same truth to nature; as an artist he had a severe
sense of proportion, a perfect purity of outline, and an absolute
harmony between the thought and the expression. Now that modern Europe
and England have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is possible
that a reaction will set in to the detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a
certain extent this reaction has set in in Western Europe, as M.
Haumant, one of Turgenev's ablest critics and biographers, pointed out
not long ago. And, as the majority of Englishmen have not the
advantage of reading him in the original, they will be unchecked in
this reaction, if it comes about, by their appreciation of what is
perhaps most durable in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev
adequately, it would require an English poet gifted with a sense of
form and of words as rare as that of Turgenev himself. However this
may be, there is no doubt about the importance of Turgenev in the
history of Russian literature, whatever the future generations in
Russia or in Europe may think of his work. He was a great novelist
besides being a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed his early
_Sportsman's Sketches_ in freshness of inspiration and the perfection
of artistic execution.
His _Bezhin Meadow_, where the children tell each other bogey stories
in the evening, is a gem with which no other European literature has
anything to compare. _The Singers_, _Death_, and many others are
likewise incomparable. _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, to which Turgenev
owed his great popularity, is quite perfect of its kind, with its
gallery of portraits going back to the eighteenth century and to the
period of Alexander I; its lovable, human hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a
fit descendant of Pushkin's Tatiana, radiant as a star. All Turgenev's
characters are alive; but, with the exception of his women and the
hero of _Fathers and Sons_, they are alive in bookland rather than in
real life.
George Meredith's characters, for instance, are alive, but they belong
to a land or rather a planet of his own making, and we should never
recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the street, but we do meet women
sometimes who remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia Jane. The
same is true with regard to Turgenev, although it is not another
planet he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch to which his
books exclusively belong, and which some critics say never existed at
all. That is of no consequence. It exists for us in his work.
But perhaps what gave rise to accusations of unreality and caricature
against Turgenev's characters, apart from the intenser reality of
Tolstoy's creations, by comparison with which Turgenev's suffered, was
that Turgenev, while professing to describe the present, and while
believing that he was describing the present, was in reality painting
an epoch that was already dead. _Rudin_, _Smoke_, and _On the Eve_
have suffered more from the passage of time. _Rudin_ is a pathetic
picture of the type that Turgenev was so fond of depicting, the _génie
sans portefeuille_, a latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his heart
with words, and with his eloquence persuade others to believe in him,
and succeed even in persuading himself to believe in himself, until
the moment for action comes, when he breaks down. The subjects of
_Smoke_ and _Spring Waters_ are almost identical; but, whereas _Spring
Waters_ is one of the most poetical of Turgenev's achievements,
_Smoke_ seems to-day the most banal, and almost to deserve Tolstoy's
criticism: "In _Smoke_ there is hardly any love of anything, and very
little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and
therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." _On the Eve_, which
tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of the liberation of his country,
suffers from being written at a time when real Russians were hard at
work at that very task; and it was on this account that the novel
found little favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside the
reality.
It was followed by Turgenev's masterpiece, for which time can only
heighten one's admiration. _Fathers and Sons_ is as beautifully
constructed as a drama of Sophocles; the events move inevitably to a
tragic close. There is not a touch of banality from beginning to end,
and not an unnecessary word; the portraits of the old father and
mother, the young Kirsanov, and all the minor characters are perfect;
and amidst the trivial crowd, Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the
strongest--the only strong character--that Turgenev created, the first
Nihilist--for if Turgenev was not the first to invent the word, he was
the first to apply it in this sense.
Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer type that recurs again and
again in Russian history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the meek
humble type of Ivan Durak. Lermontov's Pechorin was in some respects
an anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many Russian rebels. He is
the man who denies, to whom art is a silly toy, who detests
abstractions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; he believes in
nothing; he bows to nothing; he can break, but he cannot bend; he does
break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, he retains his
invincible pride, and
"not cowardly he puts off his helmet,"
and he dies "valiantly vanquished."
In the pages which describe his death Turgenev reaches the high-water
mark of his art, his moving quality, his power, his reserve. For manly
pathos they rank among the greatest scenes in literature, stronger
than the death of Colonel Newcome and the best of Thackeray. Among
English novelists it is, perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such
strong, piercing chords, nobler than anything in Daudet or Maupassant,
more reserved than anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the great
poets, of the tragic pathos of Goethe and Dante. The character of
Bazarov, as has been said, created a sensation and endless
controversy. The revolutionaries thought him a caricature and a libel,
the reactionaries a scandalous glorification of the Devil; and
impartial men such as Dostoyevsky, who knew the revolutionaries at
first hand, thought the type unreal. It is possible that Bazarov was
not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in any case as a figure in
fiction, whatever the fact may be, he lives and will continue to live.
In _Virgin Soil_, Turgenev attempted to paint the underground
revolutionary movement; here, in the opinion of all Russian judges, he
failed. The revolutionaries considered their portraits here more
unreal than that of Bazarov; the Conservatives were grossly
caricatured; the hero Nezhdanov was a type of a past world, another
Rudin, and not in the least like--so those who knew them tell us--the
revolutionaries of the day. Solomin, the energetic character in the
book, was considered as unreal as Nezhdanov. The wife of the
reactionary Sipyagin is a _pastiche_ of the female characters of that
type in his other books; cleverly drawn, but a completely conventional
book character. The redeeming feature in the book is Mariana, the
heroine, one of Turgenev's finest ideal women; and it is full, of
course, of gems of descriptive writing. The book was a complete
failure, and after this Turgenev went back to writing short stories.
The result was a great disappointment to Turgenev, who had thought
that, by writing a novel dealing with actual life, he would please and
reconcile all parties. To this later epoch belong his matchless _Poems
in Prose_, one of the latest melodies he sounded, a melody played on
one string of the lyre, but whose sweetness contained the essence of
all his music.
Turgenev's work has a historic as well as an artistic value. He
painted the Russian gentry, and the type of gentry that was
disappearing, as no one else has done. His landscape painting has been
dwelt on; one ought, perhaps, to add that, beautiful as it is, it
still belongs to the region of conventional landscape painting; his
landscape is the orthodox Russian landscape, and is that of the age of
Pushkin, in which no bird except a nightingale is mentioned, no flower
except a rose. This convention was not really broken in prose until
the advent of Gorky.
Reviewing Turgenev's work as a whole, any one who goes back to his
books after a time, and after a course of more modern and rougher,
stormier literature, will, I think, be surprised at its excellence
and perhaps be inclined to heave a deep sigh of relief. Some of it
will appear conventional; he will notice a faint atmosphere of
rose-water; he will feel, if he has been reading the moderns, as a
traveller feels who, after an exciting but painful journey, through
dangerous ways and unpleasant surroundings, suddenly enters a cool
garden, where fountains sob between dark cypresses, and swans float
majestically on artificial lakes. There is an aroma of syringa in the
air; the pleasaunce is artistically laid out, and full of fragrant
flowers. But he will not despise that garden for its elegance and its
tranquil seclusion, for its trees cast large shadows; the nightingale
sings in its thickets, the moon silvers the calm statues, and the
sound of music on the waters goes to the heart. Turgenev reminds one
of a certain kind of music, beautiful in form, not too passionate and
yet full of emotion, Schumann's music, for instance; if Pushkin is the
Mozart of Russian literature, Turgenev is the Schumann; not amongst
the very greatest, but still a poet, full of inspired lyrical feeling;
and a great, a classic artist, the prose Virgil of Russian literature.
What Turgenev did for the country gentry, GONCHAROV (1812-91) did for
the St. Petersburg gentry. The greater part of his work deals with the
forties. Goncharov, a noble (_dvoryanin_) by education, and according
to his own account by descent, though according to another account he
was of merchant extraction, entered the Government service, and then
went round the world in a frigate, a journey which he described in
letters. Of his three novels, _The Everyday Story_, _Oblomov_, and
_The Landslip_, _Oblomov_ is the most famous: in it he created a type
which became immortal; and Oblomov has passed into the Russian
language just as Tartuffe has passed into the French language, or
Pecksniff into the English language. A chapter of the book appeared in
1849, and the whole novel in 1859.
Oblomov is the incarnation of what in Russia is called _Halatnost_,
which means the propensity to live in dressing-gown and slippers. It
is told of Krylov, who was an Oblomov of real life, and who spent most
of his time lying on a sofa, that one day somebody pointed out to him
that the nail on which a picture was hanging just over the sofa on
which he was lying, was loose, and that the picture would probably
fall on his head. "No," said Krylov, not getting up, "the picture will
fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle." The apathy of Oblomov,
although to the outward eye it resembles this mere physical inertness,
is subtly different. Krylov's apathy was the laziness of a man whose
brain brought forth concrete fruits; and who feels neither the
inclination nor the need of any other exercise, either physical or
intellectual. Oblomov's apathy is that of a brain seething with the
burning desires of a _vie intime_, which all comes to nothing owing to
a kind of spiritual paralysis, "une infirmité morale." It is true he
finds it difficult to put on his socks, still more to get up, when he
is awake, impossible to change his rooms although the ceiling is
falling to bits, and impossible not to lie on the sofa most of the
day; but the reason of this obstinate inertia is not mere physical
disinclination, it is the result of a mixture of seething and
simmering aspirations, indefinite disillusions and apprehensions, that
elude the grasp of the will. Oblomov is really the victim of a dream,
of an aspiration, of an ideal as bright and mobile as a
will-o'-the-wisp, as elusive as thistledown, which refuses to
materialize.
The tragedy of the book lies in the effort he makes to rise from his
slough of apathy, or rather the effort his friends encourage him to
make. Oblomov's heart is made of pure gold; his soul is of transparent
crystal; there is not a base flaw in the paste of his composition; yet
his will is sapped, not by words, words, words, but by the inability
to formulate the shadows of his inner life. His friend is an energetic
German-Russian. He introduces Oblomov to a charming girl, and together
they conspire to drag him from his apathy. The girl, Olga, at first
succeeds; she falls in love with him, and he with her; he wants to
marry her, but he cannot take the necessary step of arranging his
affairs in a manner which would make that marriage possible; and
gradually he falls back into a new stage of apathy worse than the
first; she realizes the hopelessness of the situation, and they agree
to separate. She marries the energetic friend, and Oblomov sinks into
the comforts of a purely negative life of complete inaction and
seclusion, watched over by a devoted housekeeper, whom he ultimately
marries.
The extraordinary subtlety of the psychology of this study lies, as
well as in other things, in the way in which we feel that Olga is not
really happy with her excellent husband; he is the man whom she
respects; but Oblomov is the man whom she loves, till the end; and she
would give worlds to respect him too if he would only give her the
chance. Oblomov often defends his stagnation, while realizing only too
well what a misfortune it is; and we sometimes feel that he is not
altogether wrong. The chapter that tells of his dream in which his
past life and childhood arise before him in a haze of serene laziness
is one of the masterpieces of Russian prose. The book is terribly
real, and almost intolerably sad.
Goncharov's third and last novel deals with the life of a landed
proprietor on the Volga, and its main idea is the contrast between the
old generation before the reforms and the new generation of Alexander
II's day--a paler _Fathers and Sons_.
To go back to criticism, the name of BAKUNIN, the apostle of
destruction and the incarnation of Russian Nihilism, belongs to
history; that of GRIGORIEV must be mentioned as founding a school of
thought which preached the union of arts with the national soil; he
exercised a strong influence over Dostoyevsky. KATKOV, whose influence
was at one time immense, originally belonged to the circle of Herzen
and Bakunin; he became a professor of philosophy, but was driven from
his chair in the reaction of '48, and, being banished from erudition,
he took up a journalistic career and became the Editor of the _Moscow
News_. He was a Slavophile, and when the rising in Poland broke out,
he headed the great wave of nationalist feeling which passed over the
country at that time; he doubled the number of his subscribers, and
dealt a death-blow to Herzen's _Bell_. After 1866, he headed
reactionary journalism and became a Nationalist of the narrowest kind;
but he was of a higher calibre than the Nationalists of later days.
Slavophile critics of another kind were STRAKHOV and DANILEVSKY, like
Dostoyevsky, disciples of Grigoriev, who preached the last word of
Slavophilism and were opposed to all foreign innovations.
On the Radical side the leaders were CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and
PISAREV. Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart Mill, and
published a treatise on the æsthetic relations of art and reality,
served a sentence of seven years' hard labour and of twenty years'
exile. His criticism--socialist propaganda, and an attack on all
metaphysics--does not belong to literature, but his novel _Shto
dielat_--"What is to be done?"--had an immense influence on his
generation. It deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died when he was
twenty-four, belonged to the same realistic school. His main theory
was that Russian literature is dominated by Oblomov; that Chatsky,
Pechorin, and Rudin are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
followed Chernyshevsky in his realistic philosophy, in his rejection
of metaphysics, in his theory that beauty is to be sought in life
only, and that the sole duty of art is to help to illustrate life.
Pisarev recognized that Turgenev's Bazarov was a picture of himself,
and he was pleased with the portrait. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
died young.
VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as well as poet, moral
philosopher, and theologian, is one of the most interesting figures in
Russian literature. What is most remarkable about him, and what makes
him stand out, a radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his
absolute independence. He belonged to no camp; he was a slave to no
party cry; utterly unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the truth
for the sake of truth, and to proclaim it. In an age of positivism, he
was a believing Christian, and the dream of his life was a union of
the Eastern and Western Churches. He deals with this idea in a book
which he wrote in French and published in Paris: _L'Église Russe et
l'Église Universelle_. He admired the older Slavophiles, but he
severely attacked the Nationalists, such as Katkov. His range of
subjects was great, and his style was brilliant; like many great
thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and in his criticism of the
_Intelligentsia_ anticipated some tendencies, which have become
visible since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one at times of Mr.
A. J. Balfour, and even of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose
"orthodoxy" he would have much sympathy; and he deals with questions
such as Woman's Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present day.
He never became a Catholic, holding that the Eastern Church _qua_
Church had never been cut off from the West, and that only one
definite schism had been condemned; but he believed in the necessity
of a universal Church. He was the first intellectual Russian to point
out to a generation which took atheism as a matter of course that they
were possibly inferior instead of superior to religion. He believed in
Russia; he had nothing against the Slavophile theory that Russia had a
divine mission; only he wished to see that mission divinely performed.
He believed in the East of Christ, and not in that of Xerxes. He died
in 1900, before he had finished his _Magnum Opus_, a work on moral
philosophy written on a religious basis. He preached self-effacement;
pity towards one's fellow men; and reverence towards the supernatural.
His whole work is a defence of moral principles, written with the soul
of a poet, the knowledge of a scholar, and the brilliance of a
dialectician. It is only lately that his books have gained the
appreciation which they deserve; they are certainly more in harmony
with the present generation than with that of the sixties and the
seventies. His _Three Conversations_ has been translated into English.
Vladimir Soloviev stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the
crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, and his prematurity; he
was _intempestivus_.
To the same epoch belong four other important writers, each occupying
a place apart from the current stream of literary or political
influences: one because he was a satirist, one because he wrote for
the stage, and the two others because one impartially, and the other
bitterly, dared to criticize the Radicals.
MICHAEL SALTYKOV (1826-89), who wrote under the name of Shchedrin,
holds a unique place in Russian literature, not only because he is a
writer of genius, but because he is one of the world's great
satirists. Unlike Russian satirists before him, Krylov, Gogol, and
Griboyedov, good-humoured irony or sharp rapier thrusts of wit do not
suffice him; he has in himself the _saeva indignatio_, and he
expresses it with all the concentrated spite that he can muster, which
is all the more deadly from being used with perfect control. His work
is bulky, and fills eleven thick volumes; some of it is quite out of
date and at the present day almost unintelligible; but all that deals
with the fundamental essentials of the Russian character, and not with
the passing episodes of the day, has the freshness of immortality. At
the outset of his career, he was banished to Vyatka, where he remained
from 1848-56, an exile, which gave him a rich store of priceless
material. His experiences appeared in his _Sketches of Provincial
Life_ in 1886-7.
He describes the good old times and the officials of the good old
times, with diabolic malice and with an unequalled eye for the
ironical, the comic, the topsy-turvy, and the true; and while he is as
observant as Gogol, he is as bitter as Swift. He puts his characters
on the stage and makes them relate their experiences; thus we hear how
the collector of the dues manages to combine the maximum amount of
robbery with the minimum amount of inconvenience. In his pictures of
prison life, the prisoners tell their own stories, sometimes with
unaffected frankness, sometimes with startling cynicism, and sometimes
the story is obscured by a whole heap of lies. The prisoners are of
different classes; one is an ex-official who states that he was a
statistician who got into trouble over his figures; wishing to levy
dues on a peasant's property, he had demanded the number, not of
their bee-hives, but of their bees, and wrote in his list: "The
peasant Sidorov possesses two horses, three cows, nine sheep, one
calf, and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven bees."
Unfortunately he was betrayed by the police inspector.
Saltykov's satire deals entirely with the middle class, the high
officials, the average official, and the minor public servants; and
his best-known work, and one that has not aged any more than Swift has
aged, is his _History of a City according to the original documents_.
In this he tells of the city of _Glupov_, _Fool-City_, where the
people were such fools that they were not content until they found
some one to rule them who was stupider than they were themselves. The
various phases Russia had gone through are touched off; the mania for
regulations, the formalism, the official red-tape, the persecution of
independent thought, and the oppression of original thinkers and
writers; the ultimate ideal is that introduced by the last ruler of
Glupov (the history lasts from 1731 to 1826), of turning the country
into barracks and reducing every one and everything to one level--in
which the régime of the period of Nicholas I is satirized; until in
the final picture, as fine in its way as Pope's close of the
_Dunciad_, the stream rises, and refusing to be stopped by the dam,
carries everything away. The style parodies that of the ancient
chroniclers; and its chief intent lies not in the satirizing of any
particular events or person, but in the shafts of light, sometimes
bitter, and sometimes inexpressibly droll, it throws on the Russian
system of administration and on the Russian character.
In his _Pompaduri_, Saltykov dissects and vivisects the higher
official,--the big-wig,--and in his sketches from the "Domain of
Moderation and Accuracy," he writes, in little, the epic of the minor
public servant--the man who is never heard of, who is included in the
term of "the rest," but who, nevertheless, is a cogwheel in the
machinery, without which the big-wigs cannot act or execute. No more
supreme piece of art than this piece of satire exists. The typical
minor official is drawn in all the variations of his miserable and
pitiable species, and in all the phases of his ignoble and sometimes
tragical career, with a pen dipped in scorn and stinging malice, not
unblent with a grave pity, which always exists in the work of the
greatest satirists--"Peace to all such, but there was one ..." for
instance--and wielded with terrible certainty of touch. This epic of
the _Molchalins_ of life--the typical officials who cease to be
men--was the story of a great part of the Russian population; and in
its essence, a great deal of it remains true to-day, while all of it
remains artistically enjoyable.
Saltykov continued to write during the whole of his long life. His
field of satire ranges from the days before serfdom to the epoch of
the reforms, extends to the days of the Russo-Turkish War, and passes
the frontier into the West. It is impossible here even to name all his
works; but there is one, written in the decline of his life, which has
a solid historical as well as a rich and varied artistic interest.
This is his _Poshenkhonskaya Starina_; it is practically the history
of his childhood, his upbringing, and the state of affairs which
existed at that time, the life lived by his parents and their
neighbours, the landed proprietors and their serfs. With amazing
impartiality, without exaggeration, and yet with evidences of deep
feeling and passionate indignation, all the more striking from being
both rare and expressed with reserve, he paints on a large and crowded
canvas the life of the masters and their serfs. A long gallery of men
and women is opened to one; tragedy, comedy, farce, all are here--in
fact, life--life as it was then in a remote corner of the country.
Here Saltykov's spite and malice give way to higher strokes of tragic
irony and pity; and the work has dignity as well as power In the bulk
of Saltykov's early work there is much dross, much venom, and much
ephemeral tinsel that has faded; the stuff of this book is stern and
enduring; its subject-matter would not lose a particle of interest in
translation. The Russians have been ungrateful towards Saltykov, and
have been inclined to neglect his work, the lasting element of which
is one of the most original, precious, and remarkable possessions of
Russian literature.
The complement of Saltykov is LESKOV (or, as he originally called
himself, _Stebnitsky_). The character of his work, its reception by
the reading public on the one hand, and by the professional critics on
the other, is one of the most striking object-lessons in the history
of Russian literature and Russian literary criticism. Leskov has been
long ago recognized by educated Russia as a writer of the first rank;
what is best in his work, which is bulky and unequal, has the
unmistakable hall-mark of the classics; he is with Gogol and Saltykov,
and the novelists of the first rank. Educated Russia is fully aware of
this. Nobody disputes Leskov his place, nor denies him his supreme
artistic talent, his humour, his vividness, his colour, his satire,
the depth of his feeling, the richness of his invention. In spite of
this, there is no Russian writer who has so acutely suffered from the
didactic and partisan quality of Russian criticism.
His literary career began in 1860. Like Saltykov, he paints the period
of transition that followed the epoch of the great Reforms. In spite
of this, as late as 1902, no critical biography, no serious work of
criticism, had been devoted to his books. All Russia had read him, but
literary criticism had ignored him. It is as if English literary
criticism had ignored Dickens until 1900.
The reason of this neglect is not far to seek. Saltykov was an
independent thinker; he belonged to no literary or political camp; he
criticized the partisans of both camps with equal courage; and the
partisans could not and did not forgive him. Like Saltykov, Leskov saw
what was going on in Russia; with penetrating insight and observation
he realized the evils of the old order; like Saltykov, he was filled
with indignation, and perhaps to a greater degree than Saltykov, he
was filled with pity. But, whereas Saltykov's work was purely
destructive--an onslaught of brooms in the Augean stables--Leskov
begins where Saltykov ends. Like Saltykov and like Gogol before him,
the old order inspires him with laughter, sometimes with bitter
laughter, at the absurdities of the old régime and its results; but he
does not confine himself to destructive irony and sapping satire. With
PISEMSKY, another writer of first-class talent, of the same epoch,
Leskov was the first Russian novelist--Griboyedov had already
anticipated such criticism in _Gore ot Uma_, in his delineation of
Chatsky,--to have the courage to criticize the reformers, the men of
the new epoch; and his criticism was not only negative but creative;
he realized that everything must be "reformed altogether." He then
asked himself whether the new men, who were engaged in the task of
reform, were equal to their task. He came to the conclusion not only
that they were inadequate, but that they were setting about the
business the wrong way, and he had the courage to say so. He was the
first Russian novelist to say he disbelieved in Liberals, although he
believed in Liberalism; and this was a sentiment which no Liberal in
Russia could admit then, and one which they can scarcely admit now.
His criticism of the Liberals was creative, and not negative, in this:
that, instead of confining himself to pointing out their weakness and
the mistaken course they were taking, he did his best to point out the
right path. Dostoyevsky was likewise subjected to the same ostracism.
Turgenev suffered from it; but the genius of Dostoyevsky and the art
of Turgenev overstepped the limits of all barriers and frontiers.
Europe acclaimed them. Leskov's criticism being more local, the
ostracism, although powerless to prevent the popularity of his work in
Russia, succeeded for a time in keeping him from the notice of
Western Europe. This barrier is now being broken down. One of Leskov's
masterpieces, _The Sealed Angel_, was lately translated into English;
but he is one of the most difficult authors to translate because he is
one of the most native.
A far bitterer and more pessimistic note is heard in the work of
Pisemsky. He attacks the new democracy mercilessly, and not from any
predilection towards the old. His most important work, _The Troubled
Sea_ (1862), was a terrific onslaught on Radical Russia; and Pisemsky
paid the same price for his pessimistic analysis as Leskov did for his
impartiality, namely social ostracism.
The work of OSTROVSKY (1823-86) belongs to the history of the Stage,
to which he brought slices of real life from the middle class; the
townsmen, the minor public servants, merchants great and small, and
rogues, a _milieu_ which he had observed in his youth, his father
having been an attorney to a Moscow merchant. Ostrovsky may be called
the founder of modern Russian realistic comedy and drama. In spite of
the epoch at which his plays were written (the fifties and the
sixties), there is not a trace of _Scribisme_, no tricks, no effective
exits or curtains; he thus anticipated the form of the quite modern
drama by about seventy years. His plays hold the stage now in Russia,
and form part of the stock repertories every season. They give,
moreover, just the same lifelike impression whether read or seen
acted; and they are as interesting from a literary as they are from a
historical or dramatic point of view, interesting because they are
intensely national, and as Russian as beer is English.
This brief summary of the epoch would be still more incomplete than it
is without the mention of yet another novelist, GRIGOROVICH. Although
on a lower level of art and creative power than Pisemsky and Leskov,
he was the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant literature. He
anticipated Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_, and for the first time
made Russian readers cry with sympathy over the annals of the peasant.
Like Turgenev, he was a great landscape painter. In his "Fishermen" he
paints the peasant and the artisan's life, and in his "Country Roads"
he gives a picture of the good old times--replete with rich humour,
and in sharp contrast to Saltykov's sunless and trenchant etching of
the same period. Humour, the pathos of the poor, landscape--these are
his chief qualities.