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It affords me great pleasure to link my name with that of Vladimir
Korolenko by writing a few words in the form of an introduction to the
translation of that gifted young author’s “Blind Musician,” which is now
to appear for the first time in English.
I knew Korolenko by reputation and by his work long before I made his
personal acquaintance. While engaged in making an investigation of the
exile system in Siberia, I met many of his banished friends and comrades;
and my attention was first called by them to the series of graphic
sketches of Siberian life and experience that he was then publishing
in “Russian Thought,” “The Northern Messenger,” the “Annals of the
Fatherland,” and other Russian periodicals. I read them carefully, and
formed from them at once a high opinion of the author’s character and
talent.
Upon my return from Siberia in the summer of 1886, I stopped for a few
days in the old Tartar town of Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga (where Mr.
Korolenko was then living), for the express purpose of calling upon a
writer whose life and whose work had so deeply interested me. I need
not describe the impression that he made upon me further than to say,
that a feeling of warm personal regard and esteem for the man was
soon added to the admiration that I already had for him as a literary
artist. Mr. Korolenko seems to me to represent the most liberal, the
most progressive, and the most sincerely patriotic type of young
Russian manhood. The influence that he has exerted, personally and by
his writings, has always been on the side of liberty, humanity, and
justice; and there could hardly be a more significant commentary upon the
existing form of government in Russia than the fact that this talented
author, before he was thirty-five years of age, had been four times
banished from his home to remote parts of the empire, without even the
form of a judicial trial, and had twice been sent as a political exile to
Siberia. If he had been an active revolutionist like Lopatin, or even a
writer upon prohibited social and political subjects like Chernishèfski,
his banishment to Siberia would have been more comprehensible; but
he was neither one nor the other. He was removed to the province of
Vòlogda, and afterward to the province of Viatka, merely because the
police regarded him as a “neblagonadëzhni” (politically untrustworthy
person), and then he was exiled to Siberia as a result of a stupid
police blunder. When, after years of hardship and privation, he finally
returned to his home, he was called upon to take the oath of allegiance
to Alexander III., and to swear that he would betray every one of his
friends or acquaintances whom he knew to be engaged in revolutionary or
anti-Government work. No conscientious and self-respecting man could take
such an oath, and Mr. Korolenko, of course, declined to do it. He was
thereupon exiled by administrative process to the East-Siberian province
of Yakutsk, where in a wretched Yakut “ooloos” he lived for three years,
and where he made some of the character studies, such as “The Vagrant”
and “Makàr’s Dream,” that first attracted to him the attention of the
Russian reading public.
Mr. Korolenko has not thus far published anything like a long and
carefully worked out novel of Russian life; but the fault is not his own.
He wrote such a novel under the title “Pròkhor and the Students” in 1886
or 1887, and the first chapters of it were printed in the well-known
magazine “Russian Thought” in 1888. As soon however as the plot began to
develop and the nature and tendency of the story became apparent, the
censor interposed with his veto; and the publishers of the magazine were
compelled to announce to its readers that “on account of circumstances
beyond their control” the remainder of the novel could not be printed.
Mr. Korolenko’s short stories, sketches, and studies of character
show so much talent, originality, and artistic skill that if he were
untrammelled, and could work out his ideas and conceptions in his
own way, there would be every reason to predict for him a useful and
brilliant literary career. Unfortunately, however, all Russian authors
are forced to work within the bounds set for them by an arbitrary and
often stupid censorship; and the most promising career may be utterly
ruined by the caprice of an ignorant official, or by a sentence of
exile for life or for a long term of years to the sub-arctic province
of Yakutsk. I can recall the names of a dozen young Russian authors,
journalists, or poets, among them Korolenko, Màchtet, Lessèvitch,
Volkhòfski, Petropàvlovski, Chudnòfski, Klemens, Ivanchìn-Pìsaref, and
Staniukòvitch, who are in Siberia now, or have spent there some of the
best years of their young manhood.
One can only wonder at and admire the courage, the energy, and the
persistence of men like Korolenko, who, although gagged by the censor,
imprisoned, and banished to the remotest parts of Siberia, work on with
heroic patience, and finally make their names known and respected, not
only in their native country but throughout the civilized world.