Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoievsky,
Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics. As long as Russian, sonorous and
beautiful tongue, is spoken, they will never die. And their
successors? What is the actual condition of Russian literature at the
present time? It is the bare truth to say that a period of stagnation
set in during the decade after Turgenieff's death. Emigration carried
with it the best brains of the land. We need not dwell upon the
publicists, nor yet stir the muddy stream of agitation. It has been
the misfortune of Russian literary men to be involved in dangerous
political schisms and revolutionary movements; their misfortune, and
perhaps their good luck. For dramatic material they have never been at
a loss, though their art has suffered, and depth of feeling has been
gained at a sad waste of other qualities. That grand old humourist
Gogol has had no successors. Humour in Russia is a suspected thing.
Even if there were a second Gogol he would never be allowed to put on
the boards a second Revizor. We do not mean to assert that humour has
died out altogether in literature, but it is not the special gift of
those who write nowadays. Since Gogol or coeval with him, only men of
secondary importance have been humourists: Uspenski, Ostrovski,
Saltykov (Chtchedrine), or the author of the novel Oblomov,
Gontcharov by name.
Maikov, Nadsohn, Polonski, Garchin, Korolenko, Tchekov were all men of
talent; the last in particular, preceptor and friend to Gorky in his
days of want, was a novelist of high artistic if morbid powers. He is
dead. It is when we turn to the living that we realise what a flatland
is Russian literature now. A writer and critic, Madame Z. Hippius,
attempted in the Paris _Mercure de France_ to give an idea of the
situation. She admitted the inadequacy of her sketch. The troubled
political map of Russia has not been conducive to ripe artistic
production. As she says, even the writers who refused to meddle with
politics are marked men; politics in the shape of the secret police
comes to them. Madame Hippius makes the assertion that literature in
Russian has never existed in the sense of a literary _milieu_, as an
organic art possessing traditions and continuity; for her, Tolstoy,
Dostoievsky, and Turgenieff are but isolated men of genius. A glance
back at the times and writings of such critics as Bielinski,
Dobroliubov, and Nekrasov--a remarkable poet--disproves this
statement. Without a Gogol the later novelists would be rather in the
air. He first fashioned the bricks and mortar of native fiction. Read
Kropotkin, Osip-Luri, E. Semenov, Walizewski, Melchior de Voguee, and
Leo Wiener if you doubt the wealth and variety of this literature.
Among living prose writers two names are encountered: Maxim Gorky and
Leonide Andreiev. Of the neurotic Gorky there is naught to be said
that is encouraging. He was physically ill when in America and as an
artist in plain decadence. He had shot his bolt in his tales about his
beloved vagabonds. He had not the long-breathed patience or artistic
skill for a novel. His novels, disfigured by tirades and dry attempts
at philosophical excursions, are all failures. When his tramps begin
to spout Nietzsche on their steppes the artificial note is too
apparent. His plays are loose episodes without dramatic action or
climax, sometimes moving, as in the case of Nachtasyl, and discordant
in The Children of the Sun. Gorky had a natural talent; in his stories
a submerged generation became eloquent. And he became a doctrinaire.
Nietzsche finished the ruin that Marx had begun; his art, chiefly
derived from Dostoievsky and Tchekov, succumbed to a sentimental
socialism.
Andreiev is still strong, though enveloped in "mystic anarchism." He
is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His
play, Les Tenebres, reveals the influences of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy.
It is a shocking arraignment of self-satisfied materialism. A young
revolutionary is the protagonist. The woman in the case belongs to the
same profession as Dostoievsky's Sonia. Not encouraging, this. Yet
high hopes are centred upon Andreiev. For the rest there is Vladimir
Soloviev, who is a poet-metaphysician with a following. He has mystic
proclivities. Scratch a Russian writer and you come upon a mystic. He
is against clericalism and believes in an "anti-clerical church"!
There is a little circle at Moscow, where a Muscovite review, _La
Balance_ (founded 1903), is the centre of the young men. V. Brusoff, a
poet, is the editor. Balmont and Sologub write for its pages, as do
Rosanow and Merejkowski. In 1898 there was a review started called
_Mir Iskousstva_. Its director was Serge Diaghilev, and it endured
until 1904. Sologub is one of the most promising poets. Block,
Remisov, Ivanov are also poets of much ability. There are romancers
such as Zensky, Kuzmin, Ivanov, Ropshin, Chapygin, Serafimovitch,
Zaitzeff, Volnoff; some of these wrote on risky themes. But when the
works of these new writers are closely scrutinised their lack of
originality and poverty of invention are noticeable.
The "poisonous honey" of French decadents and symbolists has attracted
one party; and the others are being swallowed up in the pessimistic
nebula of "mystic anarchy" and fatalism. "Russian pity" suffuses their
work. There is without doubt a national sentiment and a revolt against
western European culture, particularly the French. Russia for the
Russians is the slogan of this group. But thus far nothing in
particular has come of their patriotic efforts; no overwhelming
personality has emerged from the rebellious froth of new theories. If
ever the "man on horseback" does appear in Russia, it is very doubtful
if he will bestride a Pegasus.
Of bigger and sterner calibre than any of the productions of the
others is Sanine, a novel by Michael Artzibaschev, that is being
widely read not only in Russia but in all the world. It was written as
long ago as 1903 the author tells us. He is of Tartar origin, born
1878, of parents in whose veins flowed Russian, French, Georgian, and
Polish blood. He is of humble origin, as is Gorky, and being of a
consumptive tendency, he lives in the Crimea. He began as a
journalist. His photograph reveals him as a young man of a fine,
sensitive type, truly an apostle of pity and pain. He passionately
espouses the cause of the poor and downtrodden, as his extraordinary
revolutionary short stories--The Millionaire among the rest--show.
Since Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons, no tale like Metal Worker
Schevyrjow has appeared in European literature. In it the bedrock of
Slavic fatalism, an anarchistic pessimism is reached. It has been done
into French by Jacques Povolozky. The Russian author reveals plentiful
traces of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoievsky, and Gorky in his pages;
Tchekov, too, is not absent. But the new note is the influence of Max
Stirner. Michael Artzibaschev calmly grafts the disparate ideas of
Dostoievsky and Max Stirner in his Sanine, and the result is a hero
who is at once a superman and a scoundrel--or are the two fairly
synonymous? This clear-eyed, broad-shouldered Sanine passes through
the little town where he was born, leaving behind him a trail of
mishaps and misfortunes. He is depicted with a marvellous art, though
it is impossible to sympathise with him. He upsets a love-affair of
his sister's, he quarrels with and insults her lover, who commits
suicide; he also drives to self-destruction a wretched little Hebrew
who has become a freethinker and can't stand the strain of his
apostasy; he is the remote cause of another suicide, that of a
weakling, a student full of "modern" ideas, but whose will is quite
sapped. Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons is recalled more than once,
especially the character of Bazarov, the nihilist. Furthermore, when
this student fails to reap the benefit of a good girl's love, Sanine
steps in and ruins her. Even incest is hinted at. All this sounds
incredible in our bare recital, but in the flow and glow of the richly
coloured narrative everything is plausible, nay, of the stuff of life.
As realists the Russians easily lead all other nations in fiction.
There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from
Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the
bacchanal in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a
realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have
pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoievsky; there is an old mujik who seems
to have stepped out of Dostoievsky, yet is evidently a portrait taken
from life. The weak mother, the passionate sister, the sweet womanly
quality of the deceived girl, these are portraits worthy of a master.
Sanine is not the Rogoszin, and his sister is not the Nastasia
Philipovna, of Dostoievsky's The Idiot; for all that they are distinct
and worthy additions to the vast picture-gallery of Russian fiction.
Sanine himself hardly appeals to our novel readers, for whom a
golf-stick and a motor-car are symbols of the true hero. In a word, he
is real flesh and blood. He goes as mysteriously as he came. The novel
that followed, Breaking Point, is a lugubrious orgy of death and
erotic madness, a symphony of suicide and love and the disgust of
life. Artzibaschev is now in English garb. Thus far Sanine is his
masterpiece.
V