ARTZIBASHEF
I
Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: "Whereas, it is far away
from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of most
of us flow on, and the tears of men are silent to-day, and
invisible, and almost spiritual...." This is a plea for his own
spiritualised art, in which sensations are attenuated, and emotions
within emotions, the shadow of the primal emotions, are spun into
crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to follow the example of
the Belgian dreamer, and since the advent of the new century there
has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic violence, that
must be disconcerting to Maeterlinck.
It is particularly the case with Russian poetry, drama, and fiction.
That vast land of promise and disillusionment is become a trying-out
place for the theories and speculations of western Europe; no other
nation responds so sensitively to the vibrations of the Time-Spirit,
no other literature reflects with such clearness the fluctuations of
contemporary thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most
emotional among living peoples.
Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is the key-note of much
Russian literature; but it was the clash of events; the march of
ideas which precipitated young Russia into the expression of revolt,
pessimism, and its usual concomitant, materialism. There were
bloodshed, battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears, tangible, not
invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters,
Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled the minds of
the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new
fermentation.
Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales of mean, colourless
lives, Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic
Andreiev, the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin, Ivanov,
Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch (I select a few of the
romancers)--not to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and
Ivanov--are the men who are fighting under various banners but
always for complete freedom.
Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young
man named Michael Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring
of trumpets, has taken the centre of the stage and still holds it.
He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy,
though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. Of Gogol's
overwhelming humour he has not a trace; instead, a corroding irony
which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky,
despite his "bitter" nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared
with Artzibashef. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only
swears by Max Stirner, but some of his characters are Stirnerism
incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the
middle-class and proletarian.
To Andre Villard, his friend and one of his translators, the new
Russian novelist told something of his life, a life colourless,
dreary, bare of dramatic events. Born in a small town in southern
Russia (1878), Michael Artzibashef is of Tatar, French, Georgian,
and Polish blood. His great-grandfather on the maternal side was the
Polish patriot Kosciusko. His father, a retired officer, was a small
landowner. In the lad there developed the seeds of tuberculosis. His
youth was a wretched one. At school he was unhappy because of its
horrors--he has written of them in his first story, Pasha
Tumanow--and he drifted from one thing to another till he wrote for
a literary weekly in the provinces founded by a certain Miroliuboff,
to whom he ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors at
the time were Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreiev, Kuprin, and other young
men who, like Artzibashef, have since "arrived."
His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It brought him
recognition. This was in 1904. But the year before he had finished
Sanine, his masterpiece, though it did not see publication till
1908. This was three years after the revolution of 1905, so that
those critics were astray who spoke of the book as a naturally
pessimistic reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism was born
in the bones of the author and he needed no external stimulus to
provoke such a realistic study as Sanine. Whether he is happier,
healthier, whether he has married and raised a family, we know not.
Personal as his stories are said to be, their art renders them
objective.
The world over Sanine has been translated. It is a significant book,
and incorporates the aspirations of many young men and women in the
Russian Empire. It was not printed at first because of the
censorship, and in Germany it had to battle for its life.
It is not only written from the standpoint of a professed
immoralist, but the Russian censor declared it pernicious because of
its "defamation of youth," its suicidal doctrine, its depressing
atmosphere. The sex element, too, has aroused indignant protests
from the clergy, from the press, from society itself.
In reply to his critics Artzibashef has denied libelling the younger
generation. "Sanine," he says, "is the apology for individualism:
the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still
new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong
representative of the new Russia." And then he adds his own protest
against the imitators of Sanine, who "flooded the literary world
with pornographic writings." Now, whatever else it may be, Sanine is
not pornographic, though I shall not pretend to say that its
influence has been harmless. We should not forget Werther and the
trail of sentimental suicides that followed its publication. But
Sanine is fashioned of sterner stuff than Goethe's romance, and if
it be "dangerous," then all the better.
Test all things, and remember that living itself is a dangerous
affair. Never has the world needed precepts of daring, courage,
individualism more than in this age of cowardly self-seeking, and
the sleek promises of altruism and its soulless well-being. Sanine
is a call to arms for individualists. And recall the Russian saying:
Self-conceit is the salt of life.
II
That Artzibashef denies the influence of Nietzsche while admitting
his indebtedness to Nietzsche's forerunner, Max Stirner, need not
particularly concern us. There are evidences scattered throughout
the pages of Sanine that prove a close study of Nietzsche and his
idealistic superman. Artist as is Artzibashef, he has densely spun
into the fabric of his work the ideas that control his characters,
and whether these ideas are called moral or immoral does not
matter. The chief thing is whether they are propulsive forces in the
destiny of his puppets.
That he paints directly from life is evident: he tells us that in
him is the debris of a painter compelled by poverty to relinquish
his ambitions because he had not money enough to buy paper, pencil,
colour. Such a realistic brush has seldom been wielded as the brush
of Artzibashef. I may make one exception, that of J.-K. Huysmans.
The Frenchman is the greater artist, the greater master of his
material, and, as Havelock Ellis puts it, the master of "the
intensest vision of the modern world"; but Huysmans lacks the
all-embracing sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of suffering
mankind that distinguishes the young Russian novelist, a love that
is blended with an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both men
prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the vilest aspects of life.
The general ideas of Artzibashef are few and profound. The leading
motive of his symphony is as old as Ecclesiastes: "The thing that
hath been, it is that which shall be." It is not original, this
theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity; but it has been
orchestrated anew by Artzibashef, who, like his fellow countrymen,
Tschaikovsky and Moussorgsky, contrives to reveal to us, if no
hidden angles of the truth, at least its illusion in terms of
terror, anguish, and deadly nausea produced by mere existence. With
such poisoned roots Artzibashef's tree of life must soon be blasted.
His intellectual indifferentism to all that constitutes the solace
and bravery of our daily experience is almost pathological. The aura
of sadism hovers about some of his men. After reading Artzibashef
you wonder that the question, "Is life worth living?" will ever be
answered in the affirmative among these humans, who, as old Homer
says, hasten hellward from their birth.
The corollary to this leading motive is the absolute futility of
action. A paralysis of the will overtakes his characters, the
penalty of their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev, in an
essay on Hamlet, who declared that the Russian character is composed
of Hamlet-like traits. Man is the only animal that cannot live in
the present; a Norwegian philosopher, Soeren Kierkegaard, has said
that he lives forward, thinks backward; he aspires to the future.
An idealist, even when close to the gorilla, is doomed to
disillusionment. He discounts to-morrow.
Russian youth has not always the courage of its chimera, though it
fraternises with the phantasmagoria of its soul. Its Golden Street
soon becomes choked with fog. The political and social conditions of
the country must stifle individualism, else why should Artzibashef
write with such savage intensity? His pen is the pendulum that has
swung away from the sentimental brotherhood of man as exemplified
in Dostoievsky, and from the religious mania of Tolstoy to the
opposite extreme, individual anarchy. Where there is repression
there is rebellion. Max Stirner represents the individualism which
found its vent in the Prussia of 1848; Nietzsche the reaction from
the Prussia of 1870; Artzibashef forestalled the result of the 1905
insurrection in Russia.
His prophetic soul needed no proof; he knew that his people, the
students and intellectuals, would be crushed. The desire of the clod
for the cloud was extinguished. Happiness is an eternal hoax. Only
children believe in life. The last call of the devil's dinner-bell
has sounded. In the scenery of the sky there is only mirage. The
moonlit air is a ruse of that wily old serpent, nature, to arouse
romance in the breast of youth and urge a repetition of the life
processes. We graze Schopenhauer, overhear Leopardi, but the
Preacher has the mightiest voice. Naturally, the novelist says none
of these things outright. The phrases are mine, but he points the
moral in a way that is all his own.
What, then, is the remedy for the ills of this life? Is its misery
irremediable? Why must mankind go on living if the burden is so
great? Even with wealth comes ennui or disease, and no matter how
brilliant we may live, we must all die alone. Pascal said this
better. In several of his death-bed scenes the dying men of
Artzibashef curse their parents, mock at religion, and--here is a
novel nuance--abuse their intellectual leaders. Semenow the student,
who appears in several of the stories, abuses Marx and Nietzsche. Of
what use are these thinkers to a man about to depart from the world?
It is the revolt of stark humanity from the illusions of brotherly
love, from the chiefest illusion--self.
Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With
a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch
he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls
emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God's will
be done, not the roseate dream of a future life, only--why must I
die? though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life.
But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather than
annihilation! In the portrayal of these damned creatures Artzibashef
is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky.
He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy (also to Goethe, Hugo,
Dostoievsky, and much to Tchekov), but his characters are usually
failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the great moralist
and expounder of "non-resistance." He simply explodes the torpedo of
truth under the ark of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan
Lande--now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire--where we
see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the
love of his fellows.
It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus
can you save your soul. Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your
other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter, and
heartily. However, naught avails, you must die, and die like a dog,
a star, or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to
the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who,
in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. (A
ferocious advocate of pessimism and a disciple of Arthur
Schopenhauer, by name Mainlander, preached world destruction through
race suicide.)
But all these pessimists seem well fed and happy when compared to
the nihilists of Artzibashef. He portrays every stage of
disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is
worth the trouble of a despairing gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist
or royalist--your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of
silence--a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love a
brief sensation. Death a certainty. For such nihilism we must go to
the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence, some fanatic
fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity.
III
But if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead, there is the world
of the five senses, and a glorious world it may prove if you have
only the health, courage, and contempt for the Chinese wall with
which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws, except to
be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the
blue sky, brother, and the air on the heath, brother! Drop the
impedimenta and lead a free, roving life. How the world would wag
without work no one tells us. Not didactic, the novelist disdains to
draw a moral.
There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in Sanine, who is a handsome
young chap, a giant, and a "blond barbarian." It is the story of the
return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his
mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister
Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sanine is
surprised to note her development. He admires her--too much so for
our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the
moral and mental make-up of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a
type, but I don't believe in types; there are only humans. His motto
might be: What's the difference? He is passive, not with the
fatalism of Oblomov, Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of
Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of Frederic Moreau; he
displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes
him seem an idler on the scene.
When the time arrives for action he is no skulker. His sister
has been ruined by a frivolous officer in garrison, and she
attempts suicide. Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but
philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words.
Ruined! Very well, marry and forget! However, he drives the officer
to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches
his head, and the silly soldier with his silly code of honour blows
out his brains. A passive role is Sanine's in the composition of
this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us
as to its polyphonic complexity. He remains in the background while
about him play the little destinies of little souls. Yet he is
always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind
whether Sanine is a great man or a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both.
A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artzibashef. I first read
him (1911) in French, the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his
style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly because of the
language. In the German translation he is not so appealing; again
perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I
am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea
of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translating into
Russian the Three Tales of his friend Flaubert.
Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech the genius of
Artzibashef shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss
the caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-toned
Russian language: The English versions are excellent, though,
naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must
protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point
which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in
which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the
monastery, there to end his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we
could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it
was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the
nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain
to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given
fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's,
whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his
genius.
The very air of America makes for optimism; our land of milk and
honey may never produce such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef,
unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the
courageous manner--and artistic, too--with which the Russian pursues
the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a
psychologist as well as a painter, the exquisite recoil of the
cerebral cells upon themselves which we call consciousness.
Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being, in the least
sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a
flowing brush and a fine sense of character values. But he will
never bend the bow of Balzac.
Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful portrait. In the book
there are several persons: the disgraced student Yourii, who is
self-complacent to the point of morbidity; his lovely sister, and
her betrothed. The officers are excellently delineated and
differentiated, while the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the
teacher, are extremely attractive.
Karsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless
Hebrew who desires light on the mystery of life could not be
bettered by Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is partially
indebted to Dostoievsky for certain traits of Ivan Lande--who is
evidently patterned from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Wherever
Sanine passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the
evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make
love to pretty girls. But as he goes he snuffs out ideals like
candles.
As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must not be supposed that
the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay
episodes, sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party,
and pastorals done in a way which would have extorted the
admiration of Turgenev. Thomas Hardy has done no better in his
peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a
meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement--related with
blasting irony--and drinking festivals which are masterly in their
sense of reality; add to these pages of nature descriptions,
landscapes, pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises,
revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You
fairly smell the frosty air of his Winter days.
Little cause for astonishment that Sanine at its appearance provoked
as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did Fathers
and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov
the anarchist, but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the new
order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch
who lazily mutters: "Let the world wag; I don't care so that it
minds its own business and lets me alone." With few exceptions most
latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with
Artzibashef's rich, red-blooded genius.
I have devoted so much attention to Sanine that little space is left
for the other books, though they are all significant. Revolutionary
Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sanine, the portrait of
the metal-worker Schevyrjoy, who is a revolutionist in the literal
sense. His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression. The
end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in
one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef does not
paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yesteryear, nor yet
the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving
family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment). Few outcasts of this
sort are to be found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly
etched, as, for example, the ladies in The Millionaire.
This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sanine, is Tolstoyian
in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its
interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to
self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tumanow is
autobiographical, and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar
schools where suicides among the scholars are anything but
infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young
people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic
conclusions. The two girl students end badly, one a suicide, the
other a prisoner of the police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A
stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling.
The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province
town. You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot
down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It is
a time for tears; though I cannot quite believe in this doctor,
who, while not a Jew, so sympathises with them that he lets die the
Chief of Police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar
intensity, called Nina in the English translation, fills us with
wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only
interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions
or their causes.
Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary Tales is The Blood
Stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again we are confronted by
the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right,
ever was, ever will be. Again the victims of lying propagandists and
the cruel law lie "on stretchers, with white eyes staring upward. In
these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and
despair." Always despair, in life or death, is the portion of these
poor. [This was written in 1915, before the New Russia was born.
Since the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served in the field
and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, War, has
been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest
story, The Woman Standing in the Midst, has not yet appeared here.]
Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plan
in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not
confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor
details in his novel Breaking Point. The canvas is large and
crowded, the motivation subtly managed. As is the case with his
novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the
steppes, where the inhabitants would certainly commit suicide if the
place were half as dreary as depicted. Some of them do so, and you
are reminded of that curious, nervous disease, indigenous to
Siberia, named by psychiatrists "myriachit," or the epidemic of
imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumow, preaches the greyness
and folly of living, and this "Naumowism" sets by the ears three or
four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin
or its equivalent. Naumow recalls a character in The Possessed, also
the sinister hero of The Synagogue of Satan by the dramatic Polish
writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central point the
"chorus" of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch,
and has a birdlike way of piping about matters philosophical.
There are oceans of talk throughout the novels, talks about death.
Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all till you
meet them and discover what normal people they are. (It should not
be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight
deformation of facts.) The student watches the comedy and tragedy of
the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of
mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect on the uselessness of
suffering from self-privation so that some proletarian family may
eat roast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually he succumbs to
the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a
nail in the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful
to the last--they, Dickens-like, are shown from the start.
There is a nihilistic doctor--the most viable character of all about
whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy--a particularly fascinating
actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by
a young painter (a Sanine type, _i. e._, Max Stirnerism in action),
while the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly
pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin
in Dostoievsky's The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily
vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder, drunkenness, and
boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most
poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose
complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called Suicide Symphony. Browning is
reversed. Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world! Yet
it compels reflection and rereading. Why?
Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable, and granting
the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject, it is
lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The
little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the Seven Sorrows.
However, in it, as in Sanine, there is many an oasis of consolation
where sanity and cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But
I am loath to believe that young Russia, Holy Russia, as the
mystagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that
most count; above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray
as prayed Des Esseintes in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: "Take pity, O
Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to
believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night,
beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient
faith."