The writings of Vladimir Korolenko have been likened to “a fresh breeze
blowing through the heavy air of a hospital.” The hospital is the
pessimistic literature of the modern Russian intellectuals; the fresh
breeze is the voice of the simple-hearted children of “Mother Russia.”
These are for the most part tillers of the soil and conquerors of waste
places; peasants, pioneers, and Siberian exiles; they often belong to
the great class of “the insulted and the injured”: they suffer untold
hardships, but their heads are unbowed and their hearts are full of
courage and the desire for justice. Among them the great writer’s early
life was spent.
Vladimir Korolenko was born on June 15th, 1853, in Zhitomir, a
small town in Southwestern or Little Russia. On his father’s side
he came of an old Cossack family, his mother was the daughter of a
Polish landowner of Zhitomir. The boy’s early life was spent amidst
picturesque surroundings; he grew up among the Poles, Jews, and
light-hearted, dark-eyed peasants that make up the population of Little
Russia, and he never lost the poetic love of nature and the wholesome
sense of humour that were nurtured in him under those warm, bright
skies. In his story entitled “In Bad Company” he has vividly described
the romantic little town that was the home of his childhood. The stern
but just judge of that tale is more or less the prototype of his own
father. The elder Korolenko was distinguished for an impeccable honesty
of practice rare in an official of those times; consequently, when he
died in 1870, he left his widow and five children without the slightest
means of support. Thanks, however, to the energy of his heroic mother,
Vladimir was enabled at seventeen to enter the School of Technology in
Petrograd.
Then followed three years of struggle to combine his schooling with the
necessity for earning a living, during which Korolenko himself says
that he does not know how he managed to escape starvation. Even a cheap
dinner of eighteen copecks or nine cents was such a luxury to him in
those days that he only treated himself to it six or seven times during
the course of one whole year.
In 1874 the young student went to Moscow with ten hard-earned roubles
in his pocket and entered the Petrovski Academy, but he was soon
expelled from that seat of learning for presenting a petition from
his fellow-students to the Director of the College. He returned to
Petrograd where his family were now living, and he and his brother
made a desperate attempt to support themselves and their brothers and
sisters by proof-reading. The future author began sending articles
to the newspapers and magazines, and it was then that occurred the
first of the series of arrests to which he was subjected for what
were considered his advanced social doctrines. He was sent first to
Kronstadt for a year and then to Viatka; thence he travelled to Perm,
and from Perm to Tomsk; at last he was finally exiled to the distant
eastern Siberian province of Yakutsk.
There he spent nearly six years, the most valuable, to him, of his
whole life. The vast forest that clothes those far northeastern
marshes, grand, gloomy, and held forever in the grip of a deadly cold,
made an indelible impression on the imagination of the young artist.
He was profoundly moved by the sorrows of the half-savage pioneers
inhabiting its trackless solitudes, by the indomitable spirit of
his fellow-exiles, and by the adventurous life of the “brodiagi” or
wanderers, convicts escaped from prison who return secretly on foot
to their “Mother Russia” across the whole breadth of the Siberian
continent.
Korolenko was released from exile in 1885, and immediately on his
return to Russia published his beautiful “Makar’s Dream.”
The success of the story was immediate, the fame of the author was
at once assured. No politics, no social doctrines were here; the
appeal of Makar’s plea was universal; liberal and conservative critics
alike united in a chorus of praise. The Russian reading public was
charmed by the originality of the subject, the radiant conciseness
of the author’s style, and the lyric beauty of the story’s end which
illuminates with deep significance every detail that has gone before.
Poor Makar, most lonely dweller in the Siberian forest, leading a life
of incredible labour and hardship, finally dies, and for his sins is
condemned at the Judgment of the Great Toyon, or Chief, to suffer in
the life hereafter sorrows and toil more grievous than any he has known
on earth. Here is the type of “the insulted and the injured” beloved of
Dostoievsky and Tolstoi, but with one supreme difference: Makar does
not suffer misfortune in passive dejection, he protests. He protests
indignantly against the injustice of the judgment of the Great Toyon.
Life for him has been desperately hard; it is unjust to judge him by
the standards set for the righteous whom the Toyon loves, “whose faces
are bathed in perfume and whose garments are sewn by other hands than
their own.” This protest, combined with a warm love for all humanity,
was to become the keynote of Korolenko’s writings.
His next story, “In Bad Company,” appeared in the same year, and added
still more to the young author’s popularity. It is a general favourite
in Russia to this day. Though its style is slightly tainted with a
flowery Polish exuberance, the descriptions of the old feudal ruins
are full of poetry, the children are drawn with sympathy and insight,
and the vagabond Turkevich, in his tragi-comic rôle of the Prophet
Jeremiah, sounds an unmistakable note of protest.
“The Murmuring Forest” was published in 1886, and is a darkly romantic
tale of the dreaming pine forests of Southern Russia, written in the
style of an ancient legend. Here the protest of the Cossack Opanas and
the forester Raman is blind and rude and brings death to their highborn
oppressor, but the plot is laid in feudal times and the need of the
serfs was great. The voice of the wind in the tree-tops dominates
the unfolding of the simple story like a resonant chord, and when at
last fierce justice is done to the tyrant Count, its advent seems as
inevitable as the breaking of the thunder-storm that, during the whole
course of the tale, has been brewing over the forest.
“The Day of Atonement” is one of Korolenko’s lightest and gayest
stories. In describing the merry life of the South, the Little
Russian’s kindly humour joins hands with his glowing imagination, and
we have a vivid glimpse of a cosy village surrounded by cherry gardens
and bathed in warm moonlight; of black-eyed girls, of timid, bustling
Jews, of superstitious townsmen, of a canny miller; in short, of all
the busy, active life of a town within the Jewish Pale.
But grave or gay, merry or sad, Korolenko is above all things an
optimist in his outlook on the world. Through thick and thin, through
sorrow and misfortune, the poor, artless heroes of his stories all
turn their faces towards the light. The writer’s kind heart never
ceases its search for the “eternally human” in every man, and deeply
does he sympathise with mankind’s unquenchable desire for freedom and
justice, which can face evil unafraid. He himself has said in a letter
to a friend: “The Universe is not the sport of accidental forces.
Determinism, Evolution, and all other theories lead one to confess that
there is a law which is drawing us toward something; toward something
which we call ‘good’ in all its manifestations, that is to say toward
kindness, truth, right, beauty, and justice.”
That is the burden of Korolenko’s message to the world, embodied in all
his writings.
On his return from Siberia, Korolenko went to live in Nijni-Novgorod
and there took an active part in bettering the conditions of life among
“the insulted and the injured” whom he loved. In a year of famine he
worked hard to organise free kitchens for the starving poor, and many
energetic articles from his pen were published in the papers. He also
continued to produce stories, sketches, and several longer novels, of
which the best known is the “Blind Musician.”
In 1894 he made a journey to England and America, and on his return
wrote an amusing record of his travels entitled: “Without a Tongue.”
In 1895 he became the editor of the magazine, _Russkoye Bogatsvo_, and
since that date the great story writer has definitely devoted himself
to journalism, and has now become one of Russia’s greatest publicists.
The Russian heart is essentially charitable and full of human kindness.
Thoroughly democratic in their relations with one another, the Russian
people have the misfortune to labour under the harshest political
régime in Europe. Like many of his countrymen, Korolenko now devotes
his life to the cause of the suffering and the downtrodden, and to
helping those who are the victims of social and political injustice.