RUSSIAN LITERATURE

BY
P. KROPOTKIN

NEW YORK
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
MCMV

Copyright, 1905, by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
Published, April, 1905

PREFACE

This book originated in a series of eight lectures on Russian Literature during the Nineteenth Century which I delivered in March, 1901, at the Lowell Institute, in Boston.

In accepting the invitation to deliver this course, I fully realised the difficulties which stood in my way. It is by no means an easy task to speak or to write about the literature of a country, when this literature is hardly known to the audience or to the readers. Only three or four Russian writers have been properly and at all completely translated into English; so that very often I had to speak about a poem or a novel, when it could have been readily characterised by simply reading a passage or two from it.

However, if the difficulties were great, the subject was well worth an effort. Russian literature is a rich mine of original poetic thought. It has a freshness and youthfulness which is not found to the same extent in older literatures. It has, moreover, a sincerity and simplicity of expression which render it all the more attractive to the mind that has grown sick of literary artificiality. And it has this distinctive feature, that it brings within the domain of Art—the poem, the novel, the drama—nearly all those questions, social and political, which in Western Europe and America, at least in our present generation, are discussed chiefly in the political writings of the day, but seldom in literature.

In no other country does literature occupy so influential a position as it does in Russia. Nowhere else does it exercise so profound and so direct an influence upon the intellectual development of the younger generation. There are novels of Turguéneff, and even of the less-known writers, which have been real stepping stones in the development of Russian youth within the last fifty years.

The reason why literature exercises such an influence in Russia is self-evident. There is no open political life, and with the exception of a few years at the time of the abolition of serfdom, the Russian people have never been called upon to take an active part in the framing of their country’s institutions.

The consequence has been that the best minds of the country have chosen the poem, the novel, the satire, or literary criticism as the medium for expressing their aspirations, their conceptions of national life, or their ideals. It is not to blue-books, or to newspaper leaders, but to its works of Art that one must go in Russia in order to understand the political, economical, and social ideals of the country—the aspirations of the history-making portions of Russian society.

As it would have been impossible to exhaust so wide a subject as Russian Literature within the limits of this book, I have concentrated my chief attention upon the modern literature. The early writers, down to Púshkin and Gógol—the founders of the modern literature—are dealt with in a short introductory sketch. The most representative writers in poetry, the novel, the drama, political literature, and art criticism, are considered next, and round them I have grouped the less prominent writers, of whom the most important are mentioned in short notes. I am fully aware that every one of the latter presents something individual and well worth knowing; and that some of the less-known authors have even succeeded occasionally in better representing a given current of thought than their more famous colleagues; but in a book which is intended to give only a broad, general idea of the subject, the plan I have pursued was necessary.

Literary criticism has always been well represented in Russia, and the views taken in this book must needs bear traces of the work of our great critics—Byelínskiy, Tchernyshévskiy, Dobrolúboff, and Písareff, and their modern followers, Mikhailóvsky, Arsénieff, Skabitchévskiy, Venguéroff, and others. For biographical data concerning contemporary writers I am indebted to the excellent work on modern Russian literature by the last named author, and to the eighty volumes of the admirable Russian Encyclopædic Dictionary.

I take this opportunity to express my hearty thanks to my old friend, Mr. Richard Heath, who was kind enough to read over all this book, both in manuscript and in proof.

Bromley, Kent,
January, 1905.

CONTENTS

PART I
Introduction: The Russian Language

CHAPTER I

The Russian Language—Early folk literature: Folk-lore—Songs—Sagas—Lay of Igor’s Raid—Annals—The Mongol Invasion; its consequences—Correspondence between John IV. and Kúrbiskíy—Split in the Church—Avvakúm’s Memoirs—The eighteenth century: Peter I. and his contemporaries—Tretiakóvsky—Lomonósoff—Sumarókoff—The times of Catherine II.—Derzhávin—Von Wízin—The Freemasons: Nóvikoff; Radíscheff—Early nineteenth century: Karamzín and Zhukóvskiy—The Decembrists—Ryléeff.

One of the last messages which Turguéneff addressed to Russian writers from his death-bed was to implore them to keep in its purity “that precious inheritance of ours—the Russian language.” He who knew in perfection most of the languages spoken in Western Europe had the highest opinion of Russian as an instrument for the expression of all possible shades of thought and feeling, and he had shown in his writings what depth and force of expression, and what melodiousness of prose, could be obtained in his native tongue. In his high appreciation of Russian, Turguéneff—as will often be seen in these pages—was perfectly right. The richness of the Russian language in words is astounding: many a word which stands alone for the expression of a given idea in the languages of Western Europe has in Russian three or four equivalents for the rendering of the various shades of the same idea. It is especially rich for rendering various shades of human feeling—tenderness and love, sadness and merriment—as also various degrees of the same action. Its pliability for translation is such that in no other language do we find an equal number of most beautiful, correct, and truly poetical renderings of foreign authors. Poets of the most diverse character, such as Heine and Béranger, Longfellow and Schiller, Shelley and Goethe—to say nothing of that favourite with Russian translators, Shakespeare—are equally well turned into Russian. The sarcasm of Voltaire, the rollicking humour of Dickens, the good-natured laughter of Cervantes are rendered with equal ease. Moreover, owing to the musical character of the Russian tongue, it is wonderfully adapted for rendering poetry in the same metres as those of the original. Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” (in two different translations, both admirable), Heine’s capricious lyrics, Schiller’s ballads, the melodious folk-songs of different nationalities, and Béranger’s playful chansonnettes, read in Russian with exactly the same rhythms as in the originals. The desperate vagueness of German metaphysics is quite as much at home in Russian as the matter-of-fact style of the eighteenth century philosophers; and the short, concrete and expressive, terse sentences of the best English writers offer no difficulty for the Russian translator.

Together with Czech and Polish, Moravian, Serbian and Bulgarian, as also several minor tongues, the Russian belongs to the great Slavonian family of languages which, in its turn—together with the Scandinavo-Saxon and the Latin families, as also the Lithuanian, the Persian, the Armenian, the Georgian—belongs to the great Indo-European, or Aryan branch. Some day—soon, let us hope: the sooner the better—the treasures of both the folk-songs possessed by the South Slavonians and the many centuries old literature of the Czechs and the Poles will be revealed to Western readers. But in this work I have to concern myself only with the literature of the Eastern, i. e., the Russian, branch of the great Slavonian family; and in this branch I shall have to omit both the South-Russian or Ukraïnian literature and the White or West-Russian folk-lore and songs. I shall treat only of the literature of the Great-Russians; or, simply, the Russians. Of all the Slavonian languages theirs is the most widely spoken. It is the language of Púshkin and Lérmontoff, Turguéneff and Tolstóy.

Like all other languages, the Russian has adopted many foreign words: Scandinavian, Turkish, Mongolian, and, lately, Greek and Latin. But notwithstanding the assimilation of many nations and stems of the Ural-Altayan or Turanian stock which has been accomplished in the course of ages by the Russian nation, her language has remained remarkably pure. It is striking indeed to see how the translation of the Bible which was made in the ninth century into the language currently spoken by the Moravians and the South Slavonians remains comprehensible, down to the present time, to the average Russian. Grammatical forms and the construction of sentences are indeed quite different now. But the roots, as well as a very considerable number of words, remain the same as those which were used in current talk a thousand years ago.

It must be said that the South-Slavonian had attained a high degree of perfection, even at that early time. Very few words of the Gospels had to be rendered in Greek—and these are names of things unknown to the South Slavonians; while for none of the abstract words, and for none of the poetical images of the original, had the translators any difficulty in finding the proper expressions. Some of the words they used are, moreover, of a remarkable beauty, and this beauty has not been lost even to-day. Everyone remembers, for instance, the difficulty which the learned Dr. Faust, in Goethe’s immortal tragedy, found in rendering the sentence: “In the beginning was the Word.” “Word,” in modern German, seemed to Dr. Faust to be too shallow an expression for the idea of “the Word being God.” In the old Slavonian translation we have “Slóvo,” which also means “Word,” but has at the same time, even for the modern Russian, a far deeper meaning than that of das Wort. In old Slavonian “Slóvo” included also the meaning of “Intellect”—German Vernunft; and consequently it conveyed to the reader an idea which was deep enough not to clash with the second part of the Biblical sentence.

I wish that I could give here an idea of the beauty of the structure of the Russian language, such as it was spoken early in the eleventh century in North Russia, a sample of which has been preserved in the sermon of a Nóvgorod bishop (1035). The short sentences of this sermon, calculated to be understood by a newly christened flock, are really beautiful; while the bishop’s conceptions of Christianity, utterly devoid of Byzantine gnosticism, are most characteristic of the manner in which Christianity was and is still understood by the masses of the Russian folk.

At the present time, the Russian language (the Great-Russian) is remarkably free from patois. Little-Russian, or Ukraïnian,[1] which is spoken by nearly 15,000,000 people, and has its own literature—folk-lore and modern—is undoubtedly a separate language, in the same sense as Norwegian and Danish are separate from Swedish, or as Portuguese and Catalonian are separate from Castilian or Spanish. White-Russian, which is spoken in some provinces of Western Russia, has also the characteristics of a separate branch of the Russian, rather than those of a local dialect. As to Great-Russian, or Russian, it is spoken by a compact body of nearly eighty million people in Northern, Central, Eastern, and Southern Russia, as also in Northern Caucasia and Siberia. Its pronunciation slightly varies in different parts of this large territory; nevertheless the literary language of Púshkin, Gógol, Turguéneff, and Tolstóy is understood by all this enormous mass of people. The Russian classics circulate in the villages by millions of copies, and when, a few years ago, the literary property in Púshkin’s works came to an end (fifty years after his death), complete editions of his works—some of them in ten volumes—were circulated by the hundred-thousand, at the almost incredibly low price of three shillings (75 cents) the ten volumes; while millions of copies of his separate poems and tales are sold now by thousands of ambulant booksellers in the villages, at the price of from one to three farthings each. Even the complete works of Gógol, Turguéneff, and Goncharóff, in twelve-volume editions, have sometimes sold to the number of 200,000 sets each, in the course of a single year. The advantages of this intellectual unity of the nation are self-evident.

EARLY FOLK-LITERATURE: FOLK-LORE—SONGS—SAGAS

The early folk-literature of Russia, part of which is still preserved in the memories of the people alone, is wonderfully rich and full of the deepest interest. No nation of Western Europe possesses such an astonishing wealth of traditions, tales, and lyric folk-songs—some of them of the greatest beauty—and such a rich cycle of archaic epic songs, as Russia does. Of course, all European nations have had, once upon a time, an equally rich folk-literature; but the great bulk of it was lost before scientific explorers had understood its value or begun to collect it. In Russia, this treasure was preserved in remote villages untouched by civilisation, especially in the region round Lake Onéga; and when the folk-lorists began to collect it, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they found in Northern Russia and in Little Russia old bards still going about the villages with their primitive string instruments, and reciting poems of a very ancient origin.

Besides, a variety of very old songs are sung still by the village folk themselves. Every annual holiday—Christmas, Easter, Midsummer Day—has its own cycle of songs, which have been preserved, with their melodies, even from pagan times. At each marriage, which is accompanied by a very complicated ceremonial, and at each burial, similarly old songs are sung by the peasant women. Many of them have, of course, deteriorated in the course of ages; of many others mere fragments have survived; but, mindful of the popular saying that “never a word must be cast out of a song,” the women in many localities continue to sing the most antique songs in full, even though the meaning of many of the words has already been lost.

There are, moreover, the tales. Many of them are certainly the same as we find among all nations of Aryan origin: one may read them in Grimm’s collection of fairy tales; but others came also from the Mongols and the Turks; while some of them seem to have a purely Russian origin. And next come the songs recited by wandering singers—the Kalíki—also very ancient. They are entirely borrowed from the East, and deal with heroes and heroines of other nationalities than the Russian, such as “Akib, the Assyrian King,” the beautiful Helen, Alexander the Great, or Rustem of Persia. The interest which these Russian versions of Eastern legends and tales offer to the explorer of folk-lore and mythology is self-evident.

Finally, there are the epic songs: the bylíny, which correspond to the Icelandic sagas. Even at the present day they are sung in the villages of Northern Russia by special bards who accompany themselves with a special instrument, also of very ancient origin. The old singer utters in a sort of recitative one or two sentences, accompanying himself with his instrument; then follows a melody, into which each individual singer introduces modulations of his own, before he resumes next the quiet recitative of the epic narrative. Unfortunately, these old bards are rapidly disappearing; but some five-and-thirty years ago a few of them were still alive in the province of Olónets, to the north-east of St. Petersburg, and I once heard one of them, whom A. Hilferding had brought to the capital, and who sang before the Russian Geographical Society his wonderful ballads. The collecting of the epic songs was happily begun in good time—during the eighteenth century—and it has been eagerly continued by specialists, so that Russia possesses now perhaps the richest collection of such songs—about four hundred—which has been saved from oblivion.

The heroes of the Russian epic songs are knights-errant, whom popular tradition unites round the table of the Kieff Prince, Vladímir the Fair Sun. Endowed with supernatural physical force, these knights, Ilyiá of Múrom, Dobrýnia Nikítich, Nicholas the Villager, Alexéi the Priest’s Son, and so on, are represented going about Russia, clearing the country of giants, who infested the land, or of Mongols and Turks. Or else they go to distant lands to fetch a bride for the chief of their schola, the Prince Vladímir, or for themselves; and they meet, of course, on their journeys, with all sorts of adventures, in which witchcraft plays an important part. Each of the heroes of these sagas has his own individuality. For instance, Ilyiá, the Peasant’s Son, does not care for gold or riches: he fights only to clear the land from giants and strangers. Nicholas the Villager is the personificatlon of the force with which the tiller of the soil is endowed: nobody can pull out of the ground his heavy plough, while he himself lifts it with one hand and throws it above the clouds; Dobrýnia embodies some of the features of the dragon-fighters, to whom belongs St. George; Sádko is the personification of the rich merchant, and Tchurílo of the refined, handsome, urbane man with whom all women fall in love.

At the same time, in each of these heroes, there are doubtless mythological features. Consequently, the early Russian explorers of the bylíny, who worked under the influence of Grimm, endeavoured to explain them as fragments of an old Slavonian mythology, in which the forces of Nature are personified in heroes. In Iliyá they found the features of the God of the Thunders. Dobrýnia the Dragon-Killer was supposed to represent the sun in its passive power—the active powers of fighting being left to Iliyá. Sádko was the personification of navigation, and the Sea-God whom he deals with was Neptune. Tchurílo was taken as a representative of the demoniacal element. And so on. Such was, at least, the interpretation put upon the sagas by the early explorers.

V. V. Stásoff, in his Origin of the Russian Bylíny (1868), entirely upset this theory. With a considerable wealth of argument he proved that these epic songs are not fragments of a Slavonic mythology, but represent borrowings from Eastern tales. Iliyá is the Rustem of the Iranian legends, placed in Russian surroundings. Dobrýnia is the Krishna of Indian folk-lore; Sádko is the merchant of the Eastern tales, as also of a Norman tale. All the Russian epic heroes have an Eastern origin. Other explorers went still further than Stásoff. They saw in the heroes of Russian epics insignificant men who had lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Iliyá of Múrom is really mentioned as a historic person in a Scandinavian chronicle), to whom the exploits of Eastern heroes, borrowed from Eastern tales, were attributed. Consequently, the heroes of the bylíny could have had nothing to do with the times of Vladímir, and still less with the earlier Slavonic mythology.

The gradual evolution and migration of myths, which are successively fastened upon new and local persons as they reach new countries, may perhaps aid to explain these contradictions. That there are mythological features in the heroes of the Russian epics may be taken as certain; only, the mythology they belong to is not Slavonian but Aryan altogether. Out of these mythological representations of the forces of Nature, human heroes were gradually evolved in the East.

At a later epoch when these Eastern traditions began to spread in Russia, the exploits of their heroes were attributed to Russian men, who were made to act in Russian surroundings. Russian folk-lore assimilated them; and, while it retained their deepest semi-mythological features and leading traits of character, it endowed, at the same time, the Iranian Rustem, the Indian dragon-killer, the Eastern merchant, and so on, with new features, purely Russian. It divested them, so to say, of the garb which had been put upon their mystical substances when they were first appropriated and humanised by the Iranians and the Indians, and dressed them now in a Russian garb—just as in the tales about Alexander the Great, which I heard in Transbaikalia, the Greek hero is endowed with Buryate features and his exploits are located on such and such a Transbaikalian mountain. However, Russian folk-lore did not simply change the dress of the Persian prince, Rustem, into that of a Russian peasant, Iliyá. The Russian sagas, in their style, in the poetical images they resort to, and partly in the characteristics of their heroes, were new creations. Their heroes are thoroughly Russian: for instance, they never seek for blood-vengeance, as Scandinavian heroes would do; their actions, especially those of “the elder heroes,” are not dictated by personal aims, but are imbued with a communal spirit, which is characteristic of Russian popular life. They are as much Russians as Rustem was Persian. As to the time of composition of these sagas, it is generally believed that they date from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, but that they received their definite shape—the one that has reached us—in the fourteenth century. Since that time they have undergone but little alteration.

In these sagas Russia has thus a precious national inheritance of a rare poetical beauty, which has been fully appreciated in England by Ralston, and in France by the historian Rambaud.

“LAY OF IGOR’S RAID”

And yet Russia has not her Iliad. There has been no poet to inspire himself with the exploits of Iliyá, Dobrýnia, Sádko, Tchurílo, and the others, and to make out of them a poem similar to the epics of Homer, or the “Kalevála” of the Finns. This has been done with only one cycle of traditions: in the poem, The Lay of Igor’s Raid (Slóvo o Polkú Igoreve).

This poem was composed at the end of the twelfth century, or early in the thirteenth (its full manuscript, destroyed during the conflagration of Moscow in 1812, dated from the fourteenth or the fifteenth century). It was undoubtedly the work of one author, and for its beauty and poetical form it stands by the side of the Song of the Nibelungs, or the Song of Roland. It relates a real fact that did happen in 1185. Igor, a prince of Kíeff, starts with his drúzhina (schola) of warriors to make a raid on the Pólovtsi, who occupied the prairies of South-eastern Russia, and continually raided the Russian villages. All sorts of bad omens are seen on the march through the prairies—the sun is darkened and casts its shadow on the band of Russian warriors; the animals give different warnings; but Igor exclaims: “Brothers and friends: Better to fall dead than be prisoners of the Pólovtsi! Let us march to the blue waters of the Don. Let us break our lances against those of the Pólovtsi. And either I leave there my head, or I will drink the water of the Don from my golden helmet.” The march is resumed, the Pólovtsi are met with, and a great battle is fought.

The description of the battle, in which all Nature takes part—the eagles and the wolves, and the foxes who bark after the red shields of the Russians—is admirable. Igor’s band is defeated. “From sunrise to sunset, and from sunset to sunrise, the steel arrows flew, the swords clashed on the helmets, the lances were broken in a far-away land—the land of the Pólovtsi.” “The black earth under the hoofs of the horses was strewn with bones, and out of this sowing affliction will rise in the land of the Russians.”

Then comes one of the best bits of early Russian poetry—the lamentations of Yaroslávna, Igor’s wife, who waits for his return in the town of Putívl:

“The voice of Yaroslávna resounds as the complaint of a cuckoo; it resounds at the rise of the sunlight.

“I will fly as a cuckoo down the river. I will wet my beaver sleeves in the Káyala; I will wash with them the wounds of my prince—the deep wounds of my hero.

“Yaroslávna laments on the walls of Putívl.

“Oh, Wind, terrible Wind! Why dost thou, my master, blow so strong? Why didst thou carry on thy light wings the arrows of the Khan against the warriors of my hero? Is it not enough for thee to blow there, high up in the clouds? Not enough to rock the ships on the blue sea? Why didst thou lay down my beloved upon the grass of the Steppes?

“Yaroslávna laments upon the walls of Putívl.

“Oh, glorious Dniéper, thou hast pierced thy way through the rocky hills to the land of Pólovtsi. Thou hast carried the boats of Svyatosláv as they went to fight the Khan Kobyák. Bring, oh, my master, my husband back to me, and I will send no more tears through thy tide towards the sea.

“Yaroslávna laments upon the walls of Putívl.

“Brilliant Sun, thrice brilliant Sun! Thou givest heat to all, thou shinest for all. Why shouldest thou send thy burning rays upon my husband’s warriors? Why didst thou, in the waterless steppe, dry up their bows in their hands? Why shouldest thou, making them suffer from thirst, cause their arrows to weigh so heavy upon their shoulders?”

This little fragment gives some idea of the general character and beauty of the Saying about Igor’s Raid.[2]

Surely this poem was not the only one that was composed and sung in those times. The introduction itself speaks of bards, and especially of one, Bayán, whose recitations and songs are compared to the wind that blows in the tops of the trees. Many such Bayáns surely went about and sang similar “Sayings” during the festivals of the princes and their warriors. Unfortunately, only this one has reached us. The Russian Church, especially in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, pitilessly proscribed the singing of all the epic songs which circulated among the people: it considered them “pagan,” and inflicted the heaviest penalties upon the bards and those who sang old songs in their rings. Consequently, only small fragments of this early folk-lore have reached us.

And yet even these few relics of the past have exercised a powerful influence upon Russian literature, ever since it has taken the liberty of treating other subjects than purely religious ones. If Russian versification took the rhythmical form, as against the syllabic, it was because this form was imposed upon the Russian poets by the folk-song. Besides, down to quite recent times, folk-songs constituted such an important item in Russian country life, in the homes alike of the landlord and the peasant, that they could not but deeply influence the Russian poets; and the first great poet of Russia, Púshkin, began his career by re-telling in verse his old nurse’s tales to which he used to listen during the long winter nights. It is also owing to our almost incredible wealth of most musical popular songs that we have had in Russia, since so early a date as 1835, an opera (Verstóvskiy’s Askóld’s Grave), based upon popular tradition, of which the purely Russian melodies at once catch the ear of the least musically-educated Russian. This is also why the operas of Dargomýzhsky and the younger composers are now successfully sung in the villages to peasant audiences and with local peasant choirs.

The folk-lore and the folk-song have thus rendered to Russia an immense service. They have maintained a certain unity of the spoken language all over Russia, as also a unity between the literary language and the language spoken by the masses; between the music of Glínka, Tchaykóvsky, Rímsky Kórsakoff, Borodín, etc., and the music of the peasant choir—thus rendering both the poet and the composer accessible to the peasant.

THE ANNALS

And finally, whilst speaking of the early Russian literature, a few words, at least, must be said of the Annals.

No country has a richer collection of them. There were, in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, several centres of development in Russia, Kíeff, Nóvgorod, Pskov, the land of Volhýnia, the land of Súzdal (Vladímir, Moscow[3]), Ryazán, etc., represented at that time independent republics, linked together only by the unity of language and religion, and by the fact that all of them elected their Princes—military defenders and judges—from the house of Rúrik. Each of these centers had its own annals, bearing the stamp of local life and local character. The South Russian and Volhýnian annals—of which the so-called Nestor’s Annals are the fullest and the best known, are not merely dry records of facts: they are imaginative and poetical in places. The annals of Nóvgorod bear the stamp of a city of rich merchants: they are very matter-of-fact, and the annalist warms to his subject only when he describes the victories of the Nóvgorod republic over the Land of Súzdal. The Annals of the sister-republic of Pskov, on the contrary, are imbued with a democratic spirit, and they relate with democratic sympathies and in a most picturesque manner the struggles between the poor of Pskov and the rich—the “black people” and the “white people.” Altogether, the annals are surely not the work of monks, as was supposed at the outset; they must have been written for the different cities by men fully informed about their political life, their treaties with other republics, their inner and outer conflicts.

Moreover, the annals, especially those of Kíeff, or Nestor’s Annals, are something more than mere records of events; they are, as may be seen from the very name of the latter (From whence and How came to be the Land of Russia), attempts at writing a history of the country, under the inspiration of Greek models. Those manuscripts which have reached us—and especially is this true of the Kíeff annals—have thus a compound structure, and historians distinguish in them several superposed “layers” dating from different periods. Old traditions; fragments of early historical knowledge, probably borrowed from the Byzantine historians; old treaties; complete poems relating certain episodes, such as Igor’s raid; and local annals from different periods, enter into their composition. Historical facts, relative to a very early period and fully confirmed by the Constantinople annalists and historians, are consequently mingled together with purely mythical traditions. But this is precisely what makes the high literary value of the Russian annals, especially those of Southern and South-western Russia, which contain most precious fragments of early literature.

Such, then, were the treasuries of literature which Russia possessed at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE

The Mongol invasion, which took place in 1223, destroyed all this young civilisation, and threw Russia into quite new channels. The main cities of South and Middle Russia were laid waste. Kíeff, which had been a populous city and a centre of learning, was reduced to the state of a straggling settlement, and disappeared from history for the next two centuries. Whole populations of large towns were either taken prisoners by the Mongols, or exterminated, if they had offered resistance to the invaders. As if to add to the misfortunes of Russia, the Turks soon followed the Mongols, invading the Balkan peninsula, and by the end of the fifteenth century the two countries from which and through which learning used to come to Russia, namely Servia and Bulgaria, fell under the rule of the Osmanlis. All the life of Russia underwent a deep transformation.

Before the invasion the land was covered with independent republics, similar to the mediæval city-republics of Western Europe. Now, a military State, powerfully supported by the Church, began to be slowly built up at Moscow, which conquered, with the aid of the Mongol Khans, the independent principalities that surrounded it. The main effort of the statesmen and the most active men of the Church was now directed towards the building up of a powerful kingdom which should be capable of throwing off the Mongol yoke. State ideals were substituted for those of local autonomy and federation. The Church, in its effort to constitute a Christian nationality, free from all intellectual and moral contact with the abhorred pagan Mongols, became a stern centralised power which pitilessly persecuted everything that was a reminder of a pagan past. It worked hard, at the same time, to establish upon Byzantine ideals the unlimited authority of the Moscow princes. Serfdom was introduced in order to increase the military power of the State. All Independent local life was destroyed. The idea of Moscow becoming a centre for Church and State was powerfully supported by the Church, which preached that Moscow was the heir to Constantinople—“a third Rome,” where the only true Christianity was now to develop. And at a later epoch, when the Mongol yoke had been thrown off, the work of consolidating the Moscow monarchy was continued by the Tsars and the Church, and the struggle was against the intrusion of Western influences, in order to prevent the “Latin” Church from extending its authority over Russia.

These new conditions necessarily exercised a deep influence upon the further development of literature. The freshness and vigorous youthfulness of the early epic poetry was gone forever. Sadness, melancholy, resignation became the leading features of Russian folk-lore. The continually repeated raids of the Tartars, who carried away whole villages as prisoners to their encampments in the South-eastern Steppes; the sufferings of the prisoners in slavery; the visits of the baskáks, who came to levy a high tribute and behaved as conquerors in a conquered land; the hardships inflicted upon the populations by the growing military State—all this impressed the popular songs with a deep note of sadness which they have never since lost. At the same time the gay festival songs of old and the epic songs of the wandering bards were strictly forbidden, and those who dared to sing them were cruelly persecuted by the Church, which saw in these songs not only a reminiscence of a pagan past, but also a possible link of union with the Tartars.

Learning was gradually concentrated in the monasteries, every one of which was a fortress built against the invaders; and it was limited, of course, to Christian literature. It became entirely scholastic. Knowledge of nature was “unholy,” something of a witchcraft. Asceticism was preached as the highest virtue, and became the dominant feature of written literature. Legends about the saints were widely read and repeated verbally, and they found no balance in such learning as had been developed In Western Europe in the mediæval universities. The desire for a knowledge of nature was severely condemned by the Church, as a token of self-conceit. All poetry was a sin. The annals lost their animated character and became dry enumerations of the successes of the rising State, or merely related unimportant details concerning the local bishops and superiors of monasteries.

During the twelfth century there had been, in the northern republics of Nóvgorod and Pksov, a strong current of opinion leading, on the one side, to Protestant rationalism, and on the other side to the development of Christianity on the lines of the early Christian brotherhoods. The apocryphal Gospels, the books of the Old Testament, and various books in which true Christianity was discussed, were eagerly copied and had a wide circulation. Now, the head of the Church in Central Russia violently antagonised all such tendencies towards reformed Christianity. A strict adherence to the very letter of the teachings of the Byzantine Church was exacted from the flock. Every kind of interpretation of the Gospels became heresy. All intellectual life in the domain of religion, as well as every criticism of the dignitaries of the Moscow Church, was treated as dangerous, and those who had ventured this way had to flee from Moscow, seeking refuge in the remote monasteries of the far North. As to the great movement of the Renaissance, which gave a new life to Western Europe, it did not reach Russia: the Church considered it a return to paganism, and cruelly exterminated its forerunners who came within her reach, burning them at the stake, or putting them to death on the racks of her torture-chambers.

I will not dwell upon this period, which covers nearly five centuries, because it offers very little interest for the student of Russian literature; I will only mention the two or three works which must not be passed by in silence.

One of them is the letters exchanged between the Tsar John the Terrible (John IV.), and one of his chief vassals, Prince Kúrbskiy, who had left Moscow for Lithuania. From beyond the Lithuanian border he addressed to his cruel, half-lunatic ex-master long letters of reproach, which John answered, developing in his epistles the theory of the divine origin of the Tsar’s authority. This correspondence is most characteristic of the political ideas that were current then, and of the learning of the period.

After the death of John the Terrible (who occupies in Russian history the same position as Louis XI. in French, since he destroyed by fire and sword—but with a truly Tartar cruelty—the power of the feudal princes), Russia passed, as is known, through years of great disturbance. The pretender Demetrius, who proclaimed himself a son of John, came from Poland and took possession of the throne at Moscow. The Poles invaded Russia, and were the masters of Moscow, Smolénsk, and all the western towns; and when Demetrius was overthrown, a few months after his coronation, a general revolt of the peasants broke out, while all Central Russia was invaded by Cossack bands, and several new pretenders made their appearance. These “Disturbed Years” must have left traces in popular songs, but all such songs entirely disappeared in Russia during the dark period of serfdom which followed, and we know of them only through an Englishman, Richard James, who was in Russia in 1619, and who wrote down some of the songs relating to this period. The same must be said of the folk-literature, which must have come into existence during the later portion of the seventeenth century. The definite introduction of serfdom under the first Romanoff (Mikhail, 1612-1640); the wide-spread revolts of the peasants which followed—culminating in the terrific uprising of Stepán Rázin, who has become since then a favourite hero with the oppressed peasants; and finally the stern and cruel persecution of the Non-conformists and their migrations eastward into the depths of the Uráls—all these events must have found their expression in folk-songs; but the State and the Church so cruelly hunted down everything that bore trace of a spirit of rebellion that no works of popular creation from that period have reached us. Only a few writings of a polemic character and the remarkable autobiography of an exiled priest have been preserved by the Non-conformists.

SPLIT IN THE CHURCH—MEMOIRS OF AVVAKÚM

The first Russian Bible was printed in Poland in 1580. A few years later a printing office was established at Moscow, and the Russian Church authorities had now to decide which of the written texts then in circulation should be taken for the printing of the Holy Books. The handwritten copies which were in use at that time were full of errors, and it was evidently necessary to revise them by comparing them with the Greek texts before committing any of them to print. This revision was undertaken at Moscow, with the aid of learned men brought over partly from Greece and partly from the Greco-Latin Academy of Kieff; but for many different reasons this revision became the source of a widely spread discontent, and in the middle of the seventeenth century a formidable split (raskól) took place in the Church. It hardly need be said that this split was not a mere matter of theology, nor of Greek readings. The seventeenth century was a century when the Moscow Church had attained a formidable power in the State. The head of it, the Patriarch Níkon, was, moreover, a very ambitious man, who intended to play in the East the part which the Pope played in the West, and to that end he tried to impress the people by his grandeur and luxury—which meant, of course, heavy impositions upon the serfs of the Church and the lower clergy. He was hated by both, and was soon accused by the people of drifting into “Latinism”; so that the split between the people and the clergy—especially the higher clergy—took the character of a wide-spread separation of the people from the Greek Church.

Most of the Non-conformist writings of the time are purely scholastic in character and consequently offer no literary interest. But the memoirs of a Non-conformist priest, Avvakúm (died 1681), who was exiled to Siberia and made his way on foot, with Cossack parties, as far as the banks of the Amúr, deserve to be mentioned. By their simplicity, their sincerity, and absence of all sensationalism, they have remained the prototype of Russian memoirs, down to the present day. Here are a few quotations from this remarkable work:

“When I came to Yeniséisk,” Avvakúm wrote, “another order came from Moscow to send me to Daúria, 2,000 miles from Moscow, and to place me under the orders of Páshkoff. He had with him sixty men, and in punishment of my sins he proved to be a terrible man. Continually he burnt, and tortured, and flogged his men, and I had often spoken to him, remonstrating that what he did was not good, and now I fell myself into his hands. When we went along the Angará river he ordered me, ‘Get out of your boat, you are a heretic, that is why the boats don’t get along. Go you on foot, across the mountains.’ It was hard to do. Mountains high, forests impenetrable, stony cliffs rising like walls—and we had to cross them, going about with wild beasts and birds; and I wrote him a little letter which began thus: ‘Man, be afraid of God. Even the heavenly forces and all animals and men are afraid of Him. Thou alone carest nought about Him.’ Much more was written in this letter, and I sent it to him. Presently I saw fifty men coming to me, and they took me before him. He had his sword in his hand and shook with fury. He asked me: ‘Art thou a priest, or a priest degraded?’ I answered, ‘I am Avvakúm, a priest, what dost thou want from me?’ And he began to beat me on the head and he threw me on the ground, and continued to beat me while I was lying on the ground, and then ordered them to give me seventy-two lashes with the knout, and I replied: ‘Jesus Christ, son of God, help me!’ and he was only the more angered that I did not ask for mercy. Then they brought me to a small fort, and put me in a dungeon, giving me some straw, and all the winter I was kept in that tower, without fire. And the winter there is terribly cold; but God supported me, even though I had no furs. I lay there as a dog on the straw. One day they would feed me, another not. Rats were swarming all around. I used to kill them with my cap—the poor fools would not even give me a stick.”

Later on Avvakúm was taken to the Amúr, and when he and his wife had to march, in the winter, over the ice of the great river, she would often fall down from sheer exhaustion. “Then I came,” Avvakúm writes, “to lift her up, and she exclaimed in despair: ‘How long, priest, how long will these sufferings continue?’ And I replied to her: ‘Until death even’; and then she would get up saying: ‘Well, then, priest; let us march on.’” No sufferings could vanquish this great man. From the Amúr he was recalled to Moscow, and once more made the whole journey on foot. There he was accused of resistance to Church and State, and was burned at the stake in 1681.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The violent reforms of Peter I., who created a military European State out of the semi-Byzantine and semi-Tartar State which Russia had been under his predecessors, gave a new turn to literature. It would be out of place to appreciate here the historical significance of the reforms of Peter I., but it must be mentioned that in Russian literature one finds, at least, two forerunners of Peter’s work.

One of them was Kotoshíkhin (1630-1667), an historian.[4] He ran away from Moscow to Sweden, and wrote there, fifty years before Peter became Tsar, a history of Russia, in which he strenuously criticised the condition of ignorance prevailing at Moscow, and advocated wide reforms. His manuscript was unknown till the nineteenth century, when it was discovered at Upsala. Another writer, imbued with the same ideas, was a South Slavonian, Kryzhánitch, who was called to Moscow in 1659, in order to revise the Holy Books, and wrote a most remarkable work, in which he also preached the necessity of thorough reforms. He was exiled two years later to Siberia, where he died.

Peter I., who fully realised the importance of literature, and was working hard to introduce European learning amongst his countrymen, understood that the old Slavonian tongue, which was then in use among Russian writers, but was no longer the current language of the nation, could only hamper the development of literature and learning. Its forms, its expressions, and grammar were already quite strange to the Russians. It could be used still in religious writings, but a book on geometry, or algebra, or military art, written in the Biblical Old Slavonian, would have been simply ridiculous. Consequently, Peter removed the difficulty in his usual trenchant way. He established a new alphabet, to aid in the introduction into literature of the spoken but hitherto unwritten language. This alphabet, partly borrowed from the Old Slavonian, but very much simplified, is the one now in use.

Literature proper little interested Peter I.: he looked upon printed matter from the strictly utilitarian point of view, and his chief aim was to familiarise the Russians with the first elements of the exact sciences, as well as with the arts of navigation, warfare, and fortification. Accordingly, the writers of his time offer but little interest from the literary point of view, and I need mention but a very few of them.

The most interesting writer of the time of Peter I. and his immediate successors was perhaps Procopóvitch, a priest, without the slightest taint of religious fanaticism, a great admirer of West-European learning, who founded a Greco-Slavonian academy. The courses of Russian literature also make mention of Kantemir (1709-1744), the son of a Moldavian prince who had emigrated with his subjects to Russia. He wrote satires, in which he expressed himself with a freedom of thought that was quite remarkable for his time.[5] Tkretiaóvskiy (1703-1769) offers a certain melancholy interest. He was the son of a priest, and in his youth ran away from his father, in order to study at Moscow. Thence he went to Amsterdam and Paris, travelling mostly on foot. He studied at the Paris University and became an admirer of advanced ideas, about which he wrote in extremely clumsy verses. On his return to St. Petersburg he lived all his after-life in poverty and neglect, persecuted on all sides by sarcasms for his endeavours to reform Russian versification. He was himself entirely devoid of any poetical talent, and yet he rendered a great service to Russian poetry. Up to that date Russian verse was syllabic; but he understood that syllabic verse does not accord with the spirit of the Russian language, and he devoted his life to prove that Russian poetry should be written according to the laws of rhythmical versification. If he had had even a spark of talent, he would have found no difficulty in proving his thesis; but he had none, and consequently resorted to the most ridiculous artifices. Some of his verses were lines of the most incongruous words, strung together for the sole purpose of showing how rhythm and rhymes may be obtained. If he could not otherwise get his rhyme, he did not hesitate to split a word at the end of a verse, beginning the next one with what was left of it. In spite of his absurdities, he succeeded in persuading Russian poets to adopt rhythmical versification, and its rules have been followed ever since. In fact, this was only the natural development of the Russian popular song.

There was also a historian, Tatíscheff (1686-1750), who wrote a history of Russia, and began a large work on the geography of the Empire—a hard-working man who studied a great deal in many sciences, as well as in Church matters, was superintendent of mines in the Uráls, and wrote a number of political works as well as history. He was the first to appreciate the value of the annals, which he collected and systematised, thus preparing materials for future historians, but he left no lasting trace in Russian literature. In fact, only one man of that period deserves more than a passing mention. It was Lomonósoff (1712-1765). He was born in a village on the White Sea, near Archángel, in a fisherman’s family. He also ran away from his parents, came on foot to Moscow, and entered a school in a monastery, living there in indescribable poverty. Later on he went to Kíeff, also on foot, and there he very nearly became a priest. It so happened, however, that at that time the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences applied to the Moscow Theological Academy for twelve good students who might be sent to study abroad. Lomonósoff was chosen as one of them. He went to Germany, where he studied natural sciences under the best natural philosophers of the time, especially under Christian Wolff,—always in terrible poverty, almost on the verge of starvation. In 1741 he came back to Russia, and was nominated a member of the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg.

The Academy was then in the hands of a few Germans who looked upon all Russian scholars with undisguised contempt, and consequently received Lomonósoff in a most unfriendly manner. It did not help him that the great mathematician, Euler, wrote that the work of Lomonósoff in natural philosophy and chemistry revealed a man of genius, and that any Academy might be happy to possess him. A bitter struggle soon began between the German members of the Academy and the Russian who, it must be owned, was of a very violent character, especially when he was under the influence of drink. Poverty, his salary being confiscated as a punishment; detention at the police station; exclusion from the Senate of the Academy; and, worst of all, political persecution—such was the fate of Lomonósoff, who had joined the party of Elizabeth, and consequently was treated as an enemy when Catharine II. came to the throne. It was not until the nineteenth century that Lomonósoff was duly appreciated.

“Lomonósoff was himself a university,” was Púshkin’s remark, and this remark was quite correct: so varied were the directions in which he worked. Not only was he a distinguished natural philosopher, chemist, physical geographer, and mineralogist: he laid also the foundations of the grammar of the Russian language, which he understood as part of a general grammar of all languages, considered in their natural evolution. He also worked out the different forms of Russian versification, and he created quite a new literary language, of which he could say that it was equally appropriate for rendering “the powerful oratory of Cicero, the brilliant earnestness of Virgil and the pleasant talk of Ovid, as well as the subtlest imaginary conceptions of philosophy, or discussing the various properties of matter and the changes which are always going on in the structure of the universe and in human affairs.” This he proved by his poetry, by his scientific writings, and by his “Discourses,” in which he combined Huxley’s readiness to defend science against blind faith with Humboldt’s poetical conception of Nature.

His odes were, it is true, written in the pompous style which was dear to the pseudo-classicism then reigning, and he retained Old Slavonian expressions “for dealing with elevated subjects”, but in his scientific and other writings he used the commonly spoken language with great effect and force. Owing to the very variety of sciences which he had to acclimatise in Russia, he could not give much time to original research; but when he took up the defence of the ideas of Copernicus, Newton, or Huyghens against the opposition which they met with on theological grounds, a true philosopher of natural science, in the modern sense of the term, was revealed in him. In his early boyhood he used to accompany his father—a sturdy northern fisherman—on his fishing expeditions, and there he got his love of Nature and a fine comprehension of natural phenomena, which made of his Memoir on Arctic Exploration a work that has not lost its value even now. It is well worthy of note that in this last work he had stated the mechanical theory of heat in such definite expressions that he undoubtedly anticipated by a full century this great discovery of our own time—a fact which has been entirely overlooked, even in Russia.

A contemporary of Lomonósoff, Sumarókoff (1717-1777,) who was described in those years as a “Russian Racine,” must also be mentioned in this place. He belonged to the higher nobility, and had received an entirely French education. His dramas, of which he wrote a great number, were entirely imitated from the French pseudo-classical school; but he contributed very much, as will be seen from a subsequent chapter, to the development of the Russian theatre. Sumarókoff wrote also lyrical verses, elegies, and satires—all of no great importance; but the remarkably good style of his letters, free of the Slavonic archaisms, which were habitual at that time, deserves to be mentioned.

THE TIMES OF CATHERINE II.

With Catherine II., who reigned from 1752 till 1796, commenced a new era in Russian literature. It began to shake off its previous dulness, and although the Russian writers continued to imitate French models—chiefly pseudo-classical—they began also to introduce into their writings various subjects taken from direct observation of Russian life. There is, altogether, a frivolous youthfulness in the literature of the first years of Catherine’s reign, when the Empress, being yet full of progressive ideas borrowed from her intercourse with French philosophers, composed—basing it on Montesquieu—her remarkable Instruction (Nakáz) to the deputies she convoked; wrote several comedies, in which she ridiculed the old-fashioned representatives of Russian nobility; and edited a monthly review in which she entered into controversy both with some ultra-conservative writers and with the more advanced young reformers. An academy of belles-lettres was founded, and Princess Vorontsóva-Dáshkova (1743-1819)—who had aided Catherine II. in her coup d’état against her husband, Peter III., and in taking possession of the throne—was nominated president of the Academy of Sciences. She assisted the Academy with real earnestness in compiling a dictionary of the Russian language, and she also edited a review which left a mark in Russian literature; while her memoirs, written in French (Mon Histoire) are a very valuable, though not always impartial, historical document.[6] Altogether there began at that time quite a literary movement, which produced a remarkable poet, Derzhávin (1743-1816); the writer of comedies, Von Wízin (1745-1792); the first philosopher, Nóvikoff (1742-1818); and a political writer, Radíschfef(1749-1802).

The poetry of Derzhávin certainly does not answer our modern requirements. He was the poet laureate of Catherine, and sang in pompous odes the virtues of the ruler and the victories of her generals and favourites. Russia was then taking a firm hold on the shores of the Black Sea, and beginning to play a serious part in European affairs; and occasions for the inflation of Derzhávin’s patriotic feelings were not wanting. However, he had some of the marks of the true poet; he was open to the feeling of the poetry of Nature, and capable of expressing it in verses that were positively good (Ode to God, The Waterfall). Nay, these really poetical verses, which are found side by side with unnatural, heavy lines stuffed with obsolete pompous words, are so evidently better than the latter, that they certainly were an admirable object-lesson for all subsequent Russian poets. They must have contributed to induce our poets to abandon mannerism. Púshkin, who in his youth admired Derzhávin, must have felt at once the disadvantages of a pompous style, illustrated by his predecessor, and with his wonderful command of his mother-tongue he was necessarily brought to abandon the artificial language which formerly was considered “poetical,”—he began to write as we speak.

The comedies of Von Wízin (or Fonvizin), were quite a revelation for his contemporaries. His first comedy, The Brigadier, which he wrote at the age of twenty-two, created quite a sensation, and till now it has not lost its interest; while his second comedy, Nédorosl (1782), was received as an event in Russian literature, and is occasionally played even at the present day. Both deal with purely Russian subjects, taken from every-day life; and although Von Wízin too freely borrowed from foreign authors (the subject of The Brigadier is borrowed from a Danish comedy of Holberg, Jean de France), he managed nevertheless to make his chief personages truly Russian. In this sense he certainly was a creator of the Russian national drama, and he was also the first to introduce into our literature the realistic tendency which became so powerful with Púshkin, Gógol and their followers. In his political opinions he remained true to the progressive opinions which Catherine II. patronised in the first years of her reign, and in his capacity of secretary to Count Pánin he boldly denounced serfdom, favouritism, and want of education in Russia.

I pass in silence several writers of the same epoch, namely, Bogdanóvitch (1743-1803), the author of a pretty and light poem, Dushenka; Hemnitzer (1745-1784), a gifted writer of fables, who was a forerunner of Krylóff; Kapníst (1757-1829), who wrote rather superficial satires in good verse; Prince Scherbátoff (1733-1790), who began with several others the scientific collecting of old annals and folk-lore, and undertook to write a history of Russia, in which we find a scientific criticism of the annals and other sources of information; and several others. But I must say a few words upon the masonic movement which took place on the threshold of the nineteenth century.

THE FREEMASONS: FIRST MANIFESTATION OF POLITICAL THOUGHT.

The looseness of habits which characterised Russian high society in the eighteenth century, the absence of ideals, the servility of the nobles, and the horrors of serfdom, necessarily produced a reaction amongst the better minds, and this reaction took the shape, partly of a widely spread Masonic movement, and partly of Christian mysticism, which originated in the mystical teachings that had at that time widely spread in Germany. The freemasons and their Society of Friends undertook a serious effort for spreading moral education among the masses, and they found in Nóvikoff (1744-1818) a true apostle of renovation. He began his literary career very early, in one of those satirical reviews of which Catherine herself took the initiative at the beginning of her reign, and already in his amiable controversy with “the grandmother” (Catherine) he showed that he would not remain satisfied with the superficial satire in which the empress delighted, but that, contrary to her wishes, he would go to the root of the evils of the time: namely, serfdom and its brutalising effects upon society at large. Nóvikoff was not only a well-educated man: he combined the deep moral convictions of an idealist with the capacities of an organiser and a business man; and although his review (from which the net income went entirely for philanthropic and educational purposes) was soon stopped by “the grandmother,” he started in Moscow a most successful printing and book-selling business, for editing and spreading books of an ethical character. His immense printing office, combined with a hospital for the workers and a chemist’s shop, from which medicine was given free to all the poor of Moscow, was soon in business relations with booksellers all over Russia; while his influence upon educated society was growing rapidly, and working in an excellent direction. In 1787, during a famine, he organised relief for the starving peasants—quite a fortune having been put for this purpose at his disposal by one of his pupils. Of course, both the Church and the Government looked with suspicion upon the spreading of Christianity, as it was understood by the freemason Friends; and although the metropolitan of Moscow testified that Nóvikoff was “the best Christian he ever knew,” Nóvikoff was accused of political conspiracy.

He was arrested, and in accordance with the personal wish of Catherine, though to the astonishment of all those who knew anything about him, was condemned to death in 1792. The death-sentence, however, was not fulfilled, but he was taken for fifteen years to the terrible fortress of Schüsselberg, where he was put in the secret cell formerly occupied by the Grand Duke Ivan Antonovitch, and where his freemason friend, Doctor Bagryánskiy, volunteered to remain imprisoned with him. He remained there till the death of Catherine. Paul I. released him, in 1796, on the very day that he became emperor; but Nóvikoff came out of the fortress a broken man, and fell entirely into mysticism, towards which there was already a marked tendency in several lodges of the freemasons.

The Christian mystics were not happier. One of them, Lábzin (1766-1825), who exercised a great influence upon society by his writings against corruption, was also denounced, and ended his days in exile. However, both the mystical Christians and the freemasons (some of whose lodges followed the Rosenkreuz teachings) exercised a deep influence on Russia. With the advent of Alexander I. to the throne the freemasons obtained more facilities for spreading their ideas; and the growing conviction that serfdom must be abolished, and that the tribunals, as well as the whole system of administration, were in need of complete reform, was certainly to a great extent a result of their work. Besides, quite a number of remarkable men received their education at the Moscow Institute of the Friends—founded by Nóvikoff—including the historian Karamzín, the brothers Turguéneff, uncles of the great novelist, and several political men of mark.

Radíscheff (1749-1802), a political writer of the same epoch, had a still more tragic end. He received his education in the Corps of Pages, and was one of those young men whom the Russian Government had sent in 1766 to Germany to finish there their education. He followed the lectures of Hellert and Plattner at Leipzig, and studied very earnestly the French philosophers. On his return, he published, in 1790, a Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the idea of which seems to have been suggested to him by Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. In this book he very ably intermingled his impressions of travel with various philosophical and moral discussions and with pictures from Russian life.

He insisted especially upon the horrors of serfdom, as also upon the bad organisation of the administration, the venality of the law-courts, and so on, confirming his general condemnations by concrete facts taken from real life. Catherine, who already before the beginning of the revolution in France, and especially since the events of 1789, had come to regard with horror the liberal ideas of her youth, ordered the book to be confiscated and destroyed at once. She described the author as a revolutionist, “worse than Pugatchóff”; he ventured to “speak with approbation of Franklin” and was infected with French ideas! Consequently, she wrote herself a sharp criticism of the book, upon which its prosecution had to be based. Radíscheff was arrested, confined to the fortress, later on transported to the remotest portions of Eastern Siberia, on the Olenek. He was released only in 1801. Next year, seeing that even the advent of Alexander the First did not mean the coming of a new reformatory spirit, he put an end to his life by suicide. As to his book, it still remains forbidden in Russia. A new edition of it, which was made in 1872, was confiscated and destroyed, and in 1888 the permission was given to a publisher to issue the work in editions of a hundred copies only, which were to be distributed among a few men of science and certain high functionaries.[7]

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

These were, then, the elements out of which Russian literature had to be evolved in the nineteenth century. The slow work of the last five hundred years had already prepared that admirable, pliable, and rich instrument—the literary language in which Púshkin would soon be enabled to write his melodious verses and Turguéneff his no less melodious prose. From the autobiography of the Non-conformist martyr, Avvakúm, one could already guess the value of the spoken language of the Russian people for literary purposes.

Tretiakóvskiy, by his clumsy verses, and especially Lomonósoff and Derzhávin by their odes, had definitely repelled the syllabic form that had been introduced from France and Poland, and had established the tonic, rhythmical form which was indicated by the popular song itself. Lomonósoff had created a popular scientific language; he had invented a number of new words, and had proved that the Latin and Old Slavonian constructions were hostile to the spirit of Russian, and quite unnecessary. The age of Catherine II. further introduced into written literature the forms of familiar everyday talk, borrowed even from the peasant class; and Nóvikoff had created a Russian philosophical language—still heavy on account of its underlying mysticism, but splendidly adapted, as it appeared a few decades later, to abstract metaphysical discussions. The elements for a great and original literature were thus ready. They required only a vivifying spirit which should use them for higher purposes. This genius was Púshkin. But before speaking of him, the historian and novelist Karamzín and the poet Zhukóvskiy[8] must be mentioned, as they represent a link between the two epochs.

Karamzín (1766-1826), by his monumental work, The History of the Russian State, did in literature what the great war of 1812 had done in national life. He awakened the national consciousness and created a lasting interest in the history of the nation, in the making of the empire, in the evolution of national character and institutions. Karamzín’s History was reactionary in spirit. He was the historian of the Russian State, not of the Russian people; the poet of the virtues of monarchy and the wisdom of the rulers, but not an observer of the work that had been accomplished by the unknown masses of the nation. He was not the man to understand the federal principles which prevailed in Russia down to the fifteenth century, and still less the communal principles which pervaded Russian life and had permitted the nation to conquer and to colonise an immense continent. For him, the history of Russia was the regular, organic development of a monarchy, from the first appearance of the Scandinavian varingiar down to the present times, and he was chiefly concerned with describing the deeds of monarchs in their conquests and their building up of a State; but, as it often happens with Russian writers, his foot-notes were a work of history in themselves. They contained a rich mine of information concerning the sources of Russia’s history, and they suggested to the ordinary reader that the early centuries of mediæval Russia, with her independent city-republics, were far more interesting than they appeared in the book.[9] Karamzín was not the founder of a school, but he showed to Russia that she has a past worth knowing. Besides, his work was a work of art. It was written in a brilliant style, which accustomed the public to read historical works. The result was, that the first edition of his eight-volume History—3,000 copies—was sold in twenty-five days.

However, Karamzín’s influence was not limited to his History: it was even greater through his novels and his Letters of a Russian Traveller Abroad. In the latter he made an attempt to bring the products of European thought, philosophy, and political life into circulation amidst a wide public; to spread broadly humanitarian views, at a time when they were most needed as a counterpoise to the sad realities of political and social life; and to establish a link of connection between the intellectual life of our country and that of Europe. As to Karamzín’s novels, he appeared in them as a true follower of sentimental romanticism; but this was precisely what was required then, as a reaction against the would-be classical school. In one of his novels, Poor Liza (1792), he described the misfortunes of a peasant girl who fell in love with a nobleman, was abandoned by him, and finally drowned herself in a pond. This peasant girl surely would not answer to our present realistic requirements. She spoke in choice language and was not a peasant girl at all; but all reading Russia cried about the misfortune of “poor Liza,” and the pond where the heroine was supposed to have been drowned became a place of pilgrimage for the sentimental youths of Moscow. The spirited protest against serfdom which we shall find later on in modern literature was thus already born in Karamzín’s time.

Zhukóvskiy (1783-1852) was a romantic poet in the true sense of the word, and a true worshipper of poetry, who fully understood its elevating power. His original productions were few. He was mainly a translator and rendered in most beautiful Russian verses the poems of Schiller, Uhland, Herder, Byron, Thomas Moore, and others, as well as the Odyssey, the Hindu poem of Nal and Ramayanti, and the songs of the Western Slavonians. The beauty of these translations is such that I doubt whether there are in any other language, even in German, equally beautiful renderings of foreign poets. However, Zhukóvskiy was not a mere translator: he took from other poets only what was agreeable to his own nature and what he would have liked to sing himself. Sad reflections about the unknown, an aspiration towards distant lands, the sufferings of love, and the sadness of separation—all lived through by the poet—were the distinctive features of his poetry. They reflected his inner self. We may object now to his ultra-romanticism, but this direction, at that time, was an appeal to the broadly humanitarian feelings, and it was of first necessity for progress. By his poetry, Zhukóvskiy appealed chiefly to women, and when we deal later on with the part that Russian women played half a century later in the general development of their country, we shall see that his appeal was not made in vain. Altogether, Zhukóvskiy appealed to the best sides of human nature. One note, however, was missing entirely in his poetry: it was the appeal to the sentiments of freedom and citizenship. This appeal came from the “Decembrist” poet, Ryléeff.

THE “DECEMBRISTS”

The Tsar Alexander I. went through the same evolution as his grandmother, Catherine II. He was educated by the republican, La Harpe, and began his reign as a quite liberal sovereign, ready to grant to Russia a constitution. He did it in fact for Poland and Finland, and made a first step towards it in Russia. But he did not dare to touch serfdom, and gradually he fell under the influence of German mystics, became alarmed at liberal ideas, and surrendered his will to the worst reactionaries. The man who ruled Russia during the last ten or twelve years of his reign was General Arakchéeff—a maniac of cruelty and militarism, who maintained his influence by means of the crudest flattery and simulated religiousness.

A reaction against these conditions was sure to grow up, the more so as the Napoleonic wars had brought a great number of Russians in contact with Western Europe. The campaigns made in Germany, and the occupation of Paris by the Russian armies, had familiarised many officers with the ideas of liberty which reigned still in the French capital, while at home the endeavours of Nóvikoff were bearing fruit, and the freemason Friends continued his work. When Alexander I., having fallen under the influence of Madame Krüdener and other German mystics, concluded in 1815 the Holy Alliance with Germany and Austria, in order to combat all liberal ideas, secret societies began to be formed in Russia—chiefly among the officers—in order to promote the ideas of liberty, of abolition of serfdom, and of equality before the law, as the necessary steps towards the abolition of absolute rule. Everyone who has read Tolstóy’s War and Peace must remember “Pierre” and the impression produced upon this young man by his first meeting with an old freemason. “Pierre” is a true representative of many young men who later on became known as “Decembrists.” Like “Pierre,” they were imbued with humanitarian ideas; many of them hated serfdom, and they wanted the introduction of constitutional guarantees; while a few of them (Péstel, Ryléef), despairing of monarchy, spoke of a return to the republican federalism of old Russia. With such ends in view, they created their secret societies.

It is known how this conspiracy ended. After the sudden death of Alexander I. in the South of Russia, the oath of allegiance was given at St. Petersburg to his brother Constantine, who was proclaimed his successor. But when, a few days later, it became known in the capital that Constantine had abdicated, and that his brother Nicholas was going to become emperor, and when the conspirators learned that they had been denounced in the meantime to the State police, they saw nothing else to do but to proclaim their programme openly in the streets, and to fall in an unequal fight. They did so, on December 14 (26), 1825, in the Senate Square of St. Petersburg, followed by a few hundred men from several regiments of the guard. Five of the insurgents were hanged by Nicholas I., and the remainder, i. e., about a hundred young men who represented the flower of Russian intelligence, were sent to hard labour in Siberia, where they remained till 1856. One can hardly imagine what it meant, in a country which was not over-rich in educated and well-intentioned men, when such a number of the best representatives of a generation were taken out of the ranks and reduced to silence. Even in a more civilised country of Western Europe the sudden disappearance of so many men of thought and action would have dealt a severe blow to progress. In Russia the effect was disastrous—the more so as the reign of Nicholas I. lasted thirty years, during which every spark of free thought was stifled as soon as it appeared.

One of the most brilliant literary representatives of the “Decembrists” was Ryléef (1795-1826), one of the five who were hanged by Nicholas I. He had received a good education, and in 1814 was already an officer. He was thus by a few years the elder of Púshkin. He twice visited France, in 1814 and 1815, and after the conclusion of peace became a magistrate at St. Petersburg. His earlier productions were a series of ballads dealing with the leading men of Russian history. Most of them were merely patriotic, but some already revealed the sympathies of the poet for freedom. Censorship did not allow these ballads to be printed, but they circulated all over Russia in manuscript. Their poetical value was not great; but the next poem of Ryléef, Voinaróvsky, and especially some fragments of unfinished poems, revealed in him a powerful poetical gift, which Ryléef’s great friend, Púshkin, greeted with effusion. It is greatly to be regretted that the poem Voinaróvsky has never been translated into English. Its subject is the struggle of Little Russia for the recovery of its independence under Peter I. When the Russian Tsar was engaged in a bitter struggle against the great northern warrior, Charles XII., then the ruler of Little Russia, the hétman Mazépa conceived the plan of joining Charles XII. against Peter I. for freeing his mother country from the Russian yoke. Charles XII., as is known, was defeated at Poltáva, and both he and the hétman had to flee to Turkey. As to Voinaróvsky, a young patriot friend of Mazépa, he was taken prisoner, and transported to Siberia. There, at Yakútsk, he was visited by the historian Müller, and Ryléeff makes him tell his story to the German explorer. The scenes of nature in Siberia, at Yakútsk, with which the poem begins; the preparations for the war in Little Russia and the war itself; the flight of Charles XII. and Mazépa; then the sufferings of Voinaróvsky at Yakútsk, when his young wife came to rejoin him in the land of exile, and died there—all these scenes are most beautiful, while in places the verses, by their simplicity and the beauty of their images, evoked the admiration even of Púshkin. Two or three generations have now read this poem, and it continues to inspire each new one with the same love of liberty and hatred of oppression.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Pronounce Ook-ra-ee-nian.

[2] English readers will find the translation of this poem in full in the excellent Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, by Leo Wiener, published in two volumes, in 1902, by G. P. Putnam & Sons, at New York. Professor Wiener knows Russian literature perfectly well, and has made a very happy choice of a very great number of the most characteristic passages from Russian writers, beginning with the oldest period (911), and ending with our contemporaries, Górkiy and Merezhkóvskiy.

[3] The Russian name of the first capital of Russia is Moskvà. However, “Moscow,” like “Warsaw,” etc., is of so general a use that it would be affectation to use the Russian name.

[4] In all names the vowels a, e, i, o, u have to be pronounced as in Italian (father, then, in, on, push).

[5] In the years 1730-1738 he was ambassador at London.

[6] In 1775-1782 she spent a few years at Edinburgh for the education of her son.

[7] Two free editions of it were made, one by Herzen at London: Prince Scherbátoff and A. Radíscheff, 1858; and another at Leipzig: Journey, in 1876. See A. Pypin’s History of Russian Literature, vol. iv.

[8] Pronounce Zh as a French j (Joukóvskiy in French).

[9] It is now known how much of the preparatory work which rendered Karamzín’s History possible was done by the Academicians Schlötzer, Müller, and Stritter, as well as by the above-mentioned historian Scherbátoff, who had thoroughly studied the annals and whose views Karamzín closely followed in his work.

PART II
Púshkin—Lérmontoff

CHAPTER II
PÚSHKIN AND LÉRMONTOFF

Púshkin: Beauty of form—Púshkin and Schiller—His youth; his exile; his later career and death—Fairy tales: Ruslán and Ludmíla—His lyrics—“Byronism”—Drama—Evghéniy Onyéghin—LÉRMONTOFF: Púshkin or Lérmontoff?—His life—The Caucasus—Poetry of Nature—Influence of Shelley—The Demon—Mtsyri—Love of freedom—His death—Púshkin and Lérmontoff as prose-writers—Other poets and novelists of the same epoch.

PÚSHKIN

Púshkin is not quite a stranger to English readers. In a valuable collection of review articles dealing with Russian writers which Professor Coolidge, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, put at my disposal, I found that in 1832, and later on in 1845, Púshkin was spoken of as a writer more or less familiar in England, and translations of some of his lyrics were given in the reviews. Later on Púshkin was rather neglected in Russia itself, and the more so abroad, and up to the present time there is no English translation, worthy of the great poet, of any of his works. In France, on the contrary—owing to Turguéneff and Prosper Mérimée, who saw in Púshkin one of the great poets of mankind—as well as in Germany, all the chief works of the Russian poet are known to literary men in good translations, of which some are admirable. To the great reading public the Russian poet is, however, nowhere well known outside his own mother country.

The reason why Púshkin has not become a favourite with West European readers is easily understood. His lyric verse is certainly inimitable: it is that of a great poet. His chief novel in verse, Evghéniy Onyéghin, is written with an easiness and a lightness of style, and a picturesqueness of detail, which makes it stand unique in European literature. His renderings in verses of Russian popular tales are delightful reading. But, apart from his very latest productions in the dramatic style, there is in whatever Púshkin wrote none of the depth and elevation of ideas which characterised Goethe and Schiller, Shelley, Byron, and Browning, Victor Hugo and Barbier. The beauty of form, the happy ways of expression, the incomparable command of verse and rhyme, are his main points—not the beauty of his ideas. And what we look for in poetry is always the higher inspiration, the noble ideas which can help to make us better. In reading Púshkin’s verses the Russian reader is continually brought to exclaim: “How beautifully this has been told! It could not, it ought not, to be told in a different way.” In this beauty of form Púshkin is inferior to none of the greatest poets. In his ways of expressing even the most insignificant remarks, and describing the most insignificant details of everyday life; in the variety of human feeling that he has expressed, and the delicate expression of love under a variety of aspects which is contained in his poetry; and finally, in the way he deeply impressed his own personality upon everything he wrote—he is certainly a great poet.

It is extremely interesting to compare Púshkin with Schiller, in their lyrics. Leaving aside the greatness and the variety of subjects touched upon by Schiller, and comparing only those pieces of poetry in which both poets speak of themselves, one feels at once that Schiller’s personality is infinitely superior, in depth of thought and philosophical comprehension of life, to that of the bright, somewhat spoiled and rather superficial child that Púshkin was. But, at the same time, the individuality of Púshkin is more deeply impressed upon his writings than that of Schiller upon his. Púshkin was full of vital intensity, and his own self is reflected in everything he wrote; a human heart, full of fire, is throbbing intensely in all his verses. This heart is far less sympathetic than that of Schiller, but it is more intimately revealed to the reader. In his best lyrics Schiller did not find either a better expression of feeling, or a greater variety of expression, than Púshkin did. In that respect the Russian poet decidedly stands by the side of Goethe.

Púshkin was born in an aristocratic family at Moscow. Through his mother he had African blood in his veins: she was a beautiful creole, the granddaughter of a negro who had been in the service of Peter I. His father was a typical representative of the noblemen of those times: squandering a large fortune, living all his life anyhow and anyway, amidst feasts, in a house half-furnished and half-empty; fond of the lighter French literature of the time, fond of entering into a discussion upon anything that he had just learned from the encyclopædists, and bringing together at his house all possible notabilities of literature, Russian and French, who happened to be at Moscow.

Púshkin’s grandmother and his old nurse were the future poet’s best friends in his childhood. From them he got his perfect mastership of the Russian language; and from his nurse, with whom he used to spend, later on, the long winter nights at his country house, when he was ordered by the State police to reside on his country estate, he borrowed that admirable knowledge of Russian folk-lore and Russian ways of expression which rendered his poetry and prose so wonderfully Russian. To these two women we thus owe the creation of the modern, easy, pliable Russian language which Púshkin introduced into our literature.

He was educated at St. Petersburg, at the Tsárskoe Seló Lyceum, and even before he left school he became renowned as a most extraordinary poet, in whom Derzhávin recognised more than a mere successor, and whom Zhukóvskiy presented was his portrait bearing the following inscription: “To a pupil, from his defeated teacher.” Unfortunately, Púshkin’s passionate nature drew him away from both the literary circles and the circles of his best friends—the Decembrists Púschin and Küchelbecker—into the circles of the lazy, insignificant aristocrats, amongst whom he spent his vital energy in orgies. Something of the shallow, empty sort of life he lived then he has himself described in Evghéniy Onyéghin.

Being friendly with the political youth who appeared six or seven years later, on the square of Peter I. at St. Petersburg, as insurgents against autocracy and serfdom, Púshkin wrote an Ode to Liberty, and numbers of small pieces of poetry expressing the most revolutionary ideas, as well as satires against the rulers of the time. The result was that in 1820, when he was only twenty years old, he was exiled to Kishinyóff, a very small town at that time, in newly annexed Bessarabia, where he led the most extravagant life, eventually joining a party of wandering gypsies. Happily enough he was permitted to leave for some time this dusty and uninteresting little spot, and to make, in company with the charming and educated family of the Rayévskys, a journey to the Crimea and the Caucasus, from which journey he brought back some of his finest lyrical works.

In 1824, when he had rendered himself quite impossible at Odessa (perhaps also from fear that he might escape to Greece, to join Byron), he was ordered to return to Central Russia and to reside at his small estate, Mikhaílovskoye, in the province of Pskov, where he wrote his best things. On December 14, 1825, when the insurrection broke out at St. Petersburg, Púshkin was at Mikhaílovskoye; otherwise, like so many of his Decembrist friends, he would most certainly have ended his life in Siberia. He succeeded in burning all his papers before they could be seized by the secret police.

Shortly after that he was allowed to return to St. Petersburg: Nicholas I. undertaking to be himself the censor of his verses, and later on making Púshkin a chamberlain of his Court. Poor Púshkin had thus to live the futile life of a small functionary of the Winter Palace, and this life he certainly hated. The Court nobility and bureaucracy could never pardon him that he, who did not belong to their circle, was considered such a great man in Russia, and Púshkin’s life was full of little stings to his self-respect, coming from these classes. He had also the misfortune to marry a lady who was very beautiful but did not in the least appreciate his genius. In 1837 he had to fight on her account a duel, in which he was killed, at the age of thirty-five.

One of his earliest productions, written almost immediately after he left school, was Ruslán and Ludmíla, a fairy tale, which he put into beautiful verse. The dominating element of this poem is that wonderland where “a green oak stands on the sea-beach, and a learned cat goes round the oak,—to which it is attached by a golden chain,—singing songs when it goes to the left, and telling tales when it goes to the right.” It is the wedding day of Ludmíla, the heroine; the long bridal feast comes at last to an end, and she retires with her husband; when all of a sudden comes darkness, thunder resounds, and in the storm Ludmíla disappears. She has been carried away by the terrible sorcerer from the Black Sea—a folk-lore allusion, of course, to the frequent raids of the nomads of Southern Russia. Now, the unhappy husband, as also three other young men, who were formerly suitors of Ludmíla, saddle their horses and go in search of the vanished bride. From their experiences the tale is made up, and it is full of both touching passages and very humorous episodes. After many adventures, Ruslán recovers his Ludmíla, and everything ends to the general satisfaction, as folk-tales always do.[10]

This was a most youthful production of Púshkin, but its effect in Russia was tremendous. Classicism, i. e. the pseudo-classicism which reigned then, was defeated for ever. Everyone wanted to have the poem, everyone retained in memory whole passages and even pages from it, and with this tale the modern Russian literature—simple, realistic in its descriptions, modest in its images and fable, earnest and slightly humouristic—was created. In fact, one could not imagine a greater simplicity in verse than that which Púshkin had already obtained in this poem. But to give an idea of this simplicity to English readers remains absolutely impossible so long as the poem is not translated by some very gifted English poet. Suffice it to say that, while its verses are wonderfully musical, it contains not one single passage in which the author has resorted to unusual or obsolete words—to any words, indeed, but those which everyone uses in common conversation.

Thunders came upon Púshkin from the classical camp when this poem made its appearance. We have only to think of the Daphnes and the Chloes with which poetry used to be embellished at that time, and the sacerdotal attitude which the poet took towards his readers, to understand how the classical school was offended at the appearance of a poet who expressed his thoughts in beautiful images, without resorting to any of these embellishments, who spoke the language which everyone speaks, and related adventures fit for the nursery. With one cut of his sword Púshkin had freed literature from the ties which were keeping it enslaved.

The tales which he had heard from his old nurse gave him the matter, not only for Ruslán and Ludmíla, but also for a series of popular tales, of which the verses are so natural that as soon as you have pronounced one word that word calls up immediately the next, and this the following, because you cannot say the thing otherwise than in the way in which Púshkin has told it. “Is it not exactly so that tales should be told?” was asked all over Russia; and, the reply being in the affirmative, the fight against pseudo-classicism was won forever.

This simplicity of expression characterised Púshkin in everything he afterwards wrote. He did not depart from it, even when he wrote about so-called elevated subjects, nor in the passionate or philosophical monologues of his latest dramas. It is what makes Púshkin so difficult to translate into English; because, in the English literature of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth is the only poet who has written with the same simplicity. But, while Wordsworth applied this simplicity mainly to the description of the lovely and quiet English landscape, Púshkin spoke with the same simplicity of human life, and his verses continued to flow, as easy as prose and as free from artificial expressions, even when he described the most violent human passions. In his contempt of everything exaggerated and theatrical, and in his determination to have nothing to do with “the lurid tragic actor who wields a cardboard sword,” he was thoroughly Russian: and at the same time he powerfully contributed towards establishing, in both the written literature and on the stage, that taste for simplicity and honest expression of feeling of which so many examples will be given in the course of this book.

The main force of Púshkin was in his lyric poetry, and the chief note of his lyrics was love. The terrible contradictions between the ideal and the real, from which deeper minds, like those of Goethe, or Byron, or Heine, have suffered, were strange to him. Púshkin was of a more superficial nature. It must also be said that a West-European poet has an inheritance which the Russian has not. Every country of Western Europe has passed through periods of great national struggle, during which the great questions of human development were at stake. Great political conflicts have produced deep passions and resulted in tragical situations; but in Russia the great struggles and the religious movements which took place in the seventeenth century, and under Pugatchóff in the eighteenth, were uprisings of peasants, in which the educated classes took no part. The intellectual horizon of a Russian poet is thus necessarily limited. There is, however, something in human nature which always lives and appeals to every mind. This is love, and Púshkin, in his lyric poetry, represented love under so many aspects, in such beautiful forms, and with such a variety of shades, as one finds in no other poet. Besides, he often gave to love an expression so refined, so high, that his higher comprehension of love left as deep a stamp upon subsequent Russian literature as Goethe’s refined types of women left in the world’s literature. After Púshkin had written, it was impossible for Russian poets to speak of love in a lower sense than he did.

In Russia Púshkin has sometimes been described as a Russian Byron. This appreciation, however, is hardly correct. He certainly imitated Byron in some of his poems, although the imitation became, at least in Evghéniy Onyéghin, a brilliant original creation. He certainly was deeply impressed by Byron’s spirited protest against the conventional life of European society, and there was a time when, if he only could have left Russia, he probably would have joined Byron in Greece.

But, with his light character, Púshkin could not fathom, and still less share, the depth of hatred and contempt towards post-revolutionary Europe which consumed Byron’s heart. Púshkin’s “Byronism” was superficial; and, while he was ready to defy “respectable” society, he knew neither the longings for freedom nor the hatred of hypocrisy which inspired Byron.

Altogether, Púshkin’s force was not in his elevating or freedom-inspiring influence. His epicureanism, his education received from French emigrés, and his life amidst the high and frivolous classes of St. Petersburg society, prevented him from taking to heart the great problems which were already ripening in Russian life. This is why, towards the end of his short life, he was no longer in touch with those of his readers who felt that to glorify the military power of Russia, after the armies of Nicholas I. had crushed Poland, was not worthy of a poet; and that to describe the attractions of a St. Petersburg winter-season for a rich and idle gentleman was not to describe Russian life, in which the horrors of serfdom and absolutism were being felt more and more heavily.

Púshkin’s real force was in his having created in a few years the Russian literary language, and having freed literature from the theatrical, pompous style which was formerly considered necessary in whatever was printed in black and white. He was great in his stupendous powers of poetical creation: in his capacity of taking the commonest things of everyday life, or the commonest feelings of the most ordinary person, and of so relating them that the reader lived them through; and, on the other side, constructing out of the scantiest materials, and calling to life, a whole historical epoch—a power of creation which, of those coming after him, only Tolstóy has to the same extent. Púshkin’s power was next in his profound realism—that realism, understood in its best sense, which he was the first to introduce in Russia, and which, we shall see, became afterwards characteristic of the whole of Russian literature. And it is in the broadly humanitarian feelings with which his best writings are permeated, in his bright love of life, and his respect for women. As to beauty of form, his verses are so “easy” that one knows them by heart after having read them twice or thrice. Now that they have penetrated into the villages, they are the delight of millions of peasant children, after having been the delight of such refined and philosophical poets as Turguéneff.

Púshkin also tried his hand at the drama; and, so far as may be judged from his latest productions, Don Juan and The Miser-Knight, he surely would have achieved great results had he lived to continue them. His Mermaid (Rusálka) unfortunately remained unfinished, but its dramatic qualities can be judged from what Darmýzhsky has made of it in his opera. His historical drama, Boris Godunóff, taken from the times of the pretender Demetrius, is enlivened here and there by most beautiful scenes, some of them very amusing, and some of them containing a delicate analysis of the sentiments of love and ambition; but it remains rather a dramatic chronicle than a drama. As to The Miser-Knight, it shows an extraordinary power of mature talent, and contains passages undoubtedly worthy of Shakespeare; while Don Juan, imbued with a true Spanish atmosphere, gives a far better comprehension of the Don Juan type than any other representation of it in any literature, and has all the qualities of a first-rate drama.

Towards the end of his very short life a note of deeper comprehension of human affairs began to appear in Púshkin’s writings. He had had enough of the life of the higher classes; and, when he began to write a history of the great peasant uprising which took place under Pugatchóff during the reign of Catherine II., he began also to understand and to feel the inner springs of the life of the Russian peasant-class. National life appeared to him under a much broader aspect than before. But at this stage of the development of his genius his career came to a premature end. He was killed, as already stated, in a duel with a society man.

The most popular work of Púshkin is his novel in verse, Evghéniy Onyéghin. In its form it has much in common with Byron’s Childe Harold, but it is thoroughly Russian, and contains perhaps the best description of Russian life, both in the capitals and on the smaller estates of noblemen in the country, that has ever been written in Russian literature. Tchaykóvsky, the musician, has made of it an opera which enjoys a great success on the Russian stage. The hero of the novel, Onyéghin, is a typical representative of what society people were at that time. He has received a superficial education, partly from a French emigré, partly from a German teacher, and has learned “something and anyhow.” At the age of nineteen he is the owner of a great fortune—consisting, of course, of serfs, about whom he does not care in the least—and he is engulfed in the “high-life” of St. Petersburg. His day begins very late, with reading scores of invitations to tea-parties, evening parties, and fancy balls. He is, of course, a visitor at the theatre, in which he prefers ballet to the clumsy productions of the Russian dramatists; and he spends a good deal of his day in fashionable restaurants, while his nights are given to balls, where he plays the part of a disillusioned young man, who is tired of life, and wraps himself in the mantle of Byronism. For some reason or other he is compelled to spend a summer on his estate, where he has for a neighbour a young poet, educated in Germany and full of German romanticism. They become great friends, and they make acquaintance with a squire’s family in their neighbourhood. The head of the family—the old mother—is admirably described. Her two daughters, Tatiána and Olga, are very different in nature: Olga is a quite artless girl, full of the joy of living, who worries herself with no questions, and the young poet is madly in love with her; they are going to marry. As to Tatiána, she is a poetical girl, and Púshkin bestows on her all the wonderful powers of his talent, describing her as an ideal woman: intelligent, thoughtful, and inspired with vague aspirations towards something better than the prosaic life which she is compelled to live. Onyéghin produces upon her, from the first, a deep impression: she falls in love with him; but he, who has made so many conquests in the high circles of the capital, and now wears the mask of disgust of life, takes no notice of the naïve love of the poor country girl. She writes to him and tells him her love with great frankness and in most pathetic words; but the young snob finds nothing better to do than to lecture her about her rashness, and seems to take great pleasure in turning the knife in her wound. At the same time, at a small country ball Onyéghin, moved by some spirit of mischief, begins to flirt in the most provoking way with the other sister, Olga. The young girl seems to be delighted with the attention paid to her by the gloomy hero, and the result is that the poet provokes his friend to a duel. An old retired officer, a true duelist, is mixed up in the affair, and Onyéghin, who cares very much about what the country gentlemen, whom he pretends to despise, may say about him, accepts the provocation and fights the duel. He kills his poet friend and is compelled to leave the country. Several years pass. Tatiána, recovered from an illness, goes one day to the house where formerly Onyéghin stayed and, making friends with an old keeper, spends days and months reading in his library; but life has no attraction for her. After insistent supplication from her mother, she goes to Moscow, and there she marries an old general. This marriage brings her to St. Petersburg, where she plays a prominent part in the Court circles. In these surroundings Onyéghin meets her once more, and hardly recognises his Tánya in the worldly lady whom he sees now; he falls madly in love with her. She takes no notice of him, and his letters remain unanswered. At last one day he goes, at an unseemly hour, into her house. He finds her reading his letters, her eyes full of tears, and makes her a passionate declaration of his love. To this Tatiána replies by a monologue which is so beautiful that it ought to be quoted here, if there existed an English translation which rendered at least the touching simplicity of Tatiána’s words, and consequently the beauty of the verses. A whole generation of Russian women have cried over this monologue, as they were reading these lines:

“Onyéghin, I was younger then, and better looking, I suppose; and I loved you” ... but the love of a country girl offered nothing new to Onyéghin. He paid no attention to her.... “Why then does he follow her now at every step? Why such display of his attention? Is it because she is now rich and belongs to the high society, and is well received at Court?

“Because my fall, in such condition,

Would be well noted ev’rywhere,

And bring to you an envied reputation?”

And she continues:

“For me, Onyéghin, all this wealth,

This showy tinsel of Court life,

All my successes in the world,

My well-appointed house and balls ...

For me are nought!—I gladly would

Give up these rags, this masquerade,

And all the brilliancy and din,

For a small shelf of books, a garden wild,

Our weather-beaten house so poor—

Those very places where I met

With you, Onyéghin, that first time;

And for the churchyard of our village,

Where now a cross and shady trees

Stand on the grave of my poor nurse.

And happiness was possible then!

It was so near!” ...

She supplicates Onyéghin to leave her. “I love you,” she says:

“Why should I hide from you the truth?

But I am given to another,

And true to him I shall remain.”[11]

How many thousands of young Russian women have later on repeated these same verses, and said to themselves: “I would gladly give up all these rags and all this masquerade of luxurious life for a small shelf of books, for life in the country, amidst the peasants, and for the grave of my old nurse in our village.” How many have done it! And we shall see how this same type of Russian girl was developed still further in the novels of Turguéneff—and in Russian life. Was not Púshkin a great poet to have foreseen and predicted it?

LÉRMONTOFF

It is said that when Turguéneff and his great friend, Kavélin, came together—Kavélin was a very sympathetic philosopher and a writer upon law—a favourite theme of their discussions was: “Púshkin or Lérmontoff?” Turguéneff, as is known, considered Púshkin one of the greatest poets, and especially one of the greatest artists, among men; while Kavélin must have insisted upon the fact that in his best productions Lérmontoff was but slightly inferior to Púshkin as an artist, that his verses were real music, while at the same time the inspiration of his poetry was of a much higher standard than that of Púshkin. When it is added that eight years was the entire limit of Lérmontoff’s literary career—he was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-six—the powers and the potentialities of this poet will be seen at once.

Lérmontoff had Scotch blood in his veins. At least, the founder of the family was a Scotchman, George Learmonth, who, with sixty Scotchmen and Irishmen, entered the service of Poland first, and afterwards, in 1613, of Russia. The inner biography of the poet remains still but imperfectly known. It is certain that his childhood and boyhood were anything but happy. His mother was a lover of poetry—perhaps a poet herself; but he lost her when he was only three years old—she was only twenty-one. His aristocratic grandmother on the maternal side took him from his father—a poor army officer, whom the child worshipped—and educated him, preventing all intercourse between the father and the son. The boy was very gifted, and at the age of fourteen had already begun to write verses and poems—first in French, (like Púshkin), and soon in Russian. Schiller and Shakespeare and, from the age of sixteen, Byron and Shelley were his favourites. At the age of sixteen Lérmontoff entered the Moscow University, from which he was, however, excluded next year for some offence against a very uninteresting professor. He then entered a military school at St. Petersburg, to become at the age of eighteen an officer of the hussars.

A young man of twenty-two, Lérmontoff suddenly became widely known for a piece of poetry which he wrote on the occasion of Púshkin’s death (1837). A great poet, as well as a lover of liberty and a foe of oppression, was revealed at once in this passionate production of the young writer, of which the concluding verses were especially powerful. “But you,” he wrote, “who stand, a haughty crowd, around the throne, You hang men of genius, of liberty, and fame! You have now the law to cover you, And justice must close her lips before you! But there is a judgment of God,—you, dissolute crowd! There is a severe judge who waits for you. You will not buy him by the sound of your gold.... And, with all your black blood, You will not wash away the stain of the poet’s pure blood!” In a few days all St. Petersburg, and very soon all Russia, knew these verses by heart; they circulated in thousands of manuscript copies.

For this passionate cry of his heart, Lérmontoff was exiled at once. Only the intervention of his powerful friends prevented him from being marched straight to Siberia. He was transferred from the regiment of guards to which he belonged to an army regiment in the Caucasus. Lérmontoff was already acquainted with the Caucasus: he had been taken there as a child of ten, and he had brought back from this sojourn an ineffaceable impression. Now the grandeur of the great mountain range impressed him still more forcibly. The Caucasus is one of the most beautiful regions on earth. It is a chain of mountains much greater than the Alps, surrounded by endless forests, gardens, and steppes, situated in a southern climate, in a dry region where the transparency of the air enhances immensely the natural beauty of the mountains. The snow-clad giants are seen from the Steppes scores of miles away, and the immensity of the chain produces an impression which is equalled nowhere in Europe. Moreover, a half-tropical vegetation clothes the mountain slopes, where the villages nestle, with their semi-military aspect and their turrets, basking in all the gorgeous sunshine of the East, or concealed in the dark shadows of the narrow gorges, and populated by a race of people among the most beautiful of Europe. Finally, at the time Lérmontoff was there the mountaineers were fighting against the Russian invaders with unabated courage and daring for each valley of their native mountains.

All these natural beauties of the Caucasus have been reflected in Lérmontoff’s poetry, in such a way that in no other literature are there descriptions of nature so beautiful, or so impressive and correct. Bodenstedt, his German translator and personal friend, who knew the Caucasus well, was quite right in observing that they are worth volumes of geographical descriptions. The reading of many volumes about the Caucasus does not add any concrete features to those which are impressed upon the mind by reading the poems of Lérmontoff. Turguéneff quotes somewhere Shakespeare’s description of the sea as seen from the cliffs of Dover (in King Lear), as a masterpiece of objective poetry dealing with nature. I must confess, however, that the concentration of attention upon small details in this description does not appeal to my mind. It gives no impression of the immensity of the sea as seen from the Dover cliffs, nor of the wonderful richness of colour displayed by the waters on a sunny day. No such reproach could ever be made against Lérmontoff’s poetry of nature. Bodenstedt truly says that Lérmontoff has managed to satisfy at the same time both the naturalist and the lover of art. Whether he describes the gigantic chain, where the eye loses itself—here in snow clouds, there in the unfathomable depths of narrow gorges; or whether he mentions some detail: a mountain stream, or the endless woods, or the smiling valleys of Georgia covered with flowers, or the strings of light clouds floating in the dry breezes of Northern Caucasia,—he always remains so true to nature that his picture rises before the eye in life-colours, and yet it is imbued with a poetical atmosphere which makes one feel the freshness of these mountains, the balm of their forests and meadows, the purity of the air. And all this is written in verses wonderfully musical. Lérmontoff’s verses, though not so “easy” as Púshkin’s, are very often even more musical. They sound like a beautiful melody. The Russian language is always rather melodious, but in the verses of Lérmontoff it becomes almost as melodious as Italian.

The intellectual aspect of Lérmontoff is nearer to Shelley than to any other poet. He was deeply impressed by the author of Prometheus Bound; but he did not try to imitate Shelley. In his earliest productions he did indeed imitate Púshkin and Púshkin’s Byronism; but he very soon struck a line of his own. All that can be said is, that the mind of Lérmontoff was disquieted by the same great problems of Good and Evil struggling in the human heart, as in the universe at large, which disquieted Shelley. Like Shelley among the poets, and like Schopenhauer among the philosophers, he felt the coming of that burning need of a revision of the moral principles now current, so characteristic of our own times. He embodied these ideas in two poems, The Demon and Mtsýri, which complete each other. The leading idea of the first is that of a fierce soul which has broken with both earth and heaven, and looks with contempt upon all who are moved by petty passions. An exile from paradise and a hater of human virtues, he knows these petty passions, and despises them with all his superiority. The love of this demon towards a Georgian girl who takes refuge from his love in a convent, and dies there—what more unreal subject could be chosen? And yet, on reading the poem, one is struck at every line by its incredible wealth of purely realistic, concrete descriptions of scenes and of human feelings, all of the most exquisite beauty. The dance of the girl at her Georgian castle before the wedding, the encounter of the bridegroom with robbers and his death, the galloping of his faithful horse, the sufferings of the bride and her retirement to a convent, nay, the love itself of the demon and every one of the demon’s movements—this is of the purest realism in the highest sense of the word: that realism with which Púshkin had stamped Russian literature once and for all.

Mtsýri is the cry of a young soul longing for liberty. A boy, taken from a Circassian village, from the mountains, is brought up in a small Russian monastery. The monks think that they have killed in him all human passions and longings; but the dream of his childhood is—be it only once, be it only for a moment—to see his native mountains where his sisters sang round his cradle, and to press his burning bosom against the heart of one who is not a stranger. One night, when a storm rages and the monks are praying in fear in their church, he escapes from the monastery, and wanders for three days in the woods. For once in his life he enjoys a few moments of liberty; he feels all the energy and all the forces of his youth: “As for me, I was like a wild beast,” he says afterwards, “and I was ready to fight with the storm, the lightning, the tiger of the forest.” But, being an exotic plant, weakened by education, he does not find his way to his native country. He is lost in the forests which spread for hundreds of miles round him, and is found a few days later, exhausted, not far from the monastery. He dies from the wounds which he has received in a fight with a leopard.

“The grave does not frighten me,” he says to the old monk who attends him. “Suffering, they say, goes to sleep there in the eternal cold stillness. But I regret to part with life.... I am young, still young.... hast thou ever known the dreams of youth? Or hast thou forgotten how thou once lovedst and hatedst? Maybe, this beautiful world has lost for thee its beauty. Thou art weak and grey; thou hast lost all desires. No matter! Thou hast lived once; thou hast something to forget in this world. Thou hast lived—I might have lived, too!” And he tells about the beauty of the nature which he saw when he had run away, his frantic joy at feeling free, his running after the lightning, his fight with a leopard. “Thou wishest to know what I did while I was free?—I lived, old man! I lived! And my life, without these three happy days, would have been gloomier and darker than thy powerless old age!” But it is impossible to tell all the beauties of this poem. It must be read, and let us hope that a good translation of it will be published some day.

Lérmontoff’s demonism or pessimism was not the pessimism of despair, but a militant protest against all that is ignoble in life, and in this respect his poetry has deeply impressed itself upon all our subsequent literature. His pessimism was the irritation of a strong man at seeing others round him so weak and so base. With his inborn feeling of the Beautiful, which evidently can never exist without the True and the Good, and at the same time surrounded—especially in the worldly spheres he lived in, and on the Caucasus—by men and women who could not or did not dare to understand him, he might easily have arrived at a pessimistic contempt and hatred of mankind; but he always maintained his faith in the higher qualities of man. It was quite natural that in his youth—especially in those years of universal reaction, the thirties—Lérmontoff should have expressed his discontent with the world in such a general and abstract creation as is The Demon. Something similar we find even with Schiller. But gradually his pessimism took a more concrete form. It was not mankind altogether, and still less heaven and earth, that he despised in his latter productions, but the negative features of his own generation. In his prose novel, The Hero of our Own Time, in his Thoughts (Duma), etc., he perceived higher ideals, and already in 1840—i. e., one year before his death—he seemed ready to open a new page in his creation, in which his powerfully constructive and critical mind would have been directed towards the real evils of actual life, and real, positive good would apparently have been his aim. But it was at this very moment that, like Púshkin, he fell in a duel.

Lérmontoff was, above all, a “humanist,”—a deeply humanitarian poet. Already at the age of twenty-three, he had written a poem from the times of John the Terrible, Song about the Merchant Kaláshnikoff, which is rightly considered as one of the best gems of Russian literature, both for its powers, its artistic finish, and its wonderful epic style. The poem, which produced a great impression when it became known in Germany in Bodenstedt’s translation, is imbued with the fiercest spirit of revolt against the courtiers of the Terrible Tsar.

Lérmontoff deeply loved Russia, but not the official Russia: not the crushing military power of a fatherland, which is so dear to the so-called patriots, and he wrote:

I love my fatherland; but strange that love,

In spite of all my reasoning may say;

Its glory, bought by shedding streams of blood,

Its quietness, so full of fierce disdain,

And the traditions of its gloomy past

Do not awake in me a happy vision....

What he loved in Russia was its country life, its plains, the life of its peasants. He was inspired at the same time with a deep love towards the natives of the Caucasus, who were waging their bitter fight against the Russians for their liberty. Himself a Russian, and a member of two different expeditions against the Circassians, his heart throbbed nevertheless in sympathy with that brave, warm-hearted people in their struggle for independence. One poem, Izmail-Bey, is an apotheosis of this struggle of the Circassians against the Russians; in another, one of his best—a Circassian is described as fleeing from the field of battle to run home to his village, and there his mother herself repudiates him as a traitor. Another gem of poetry, one of his shorter poems, Valérik, is considered by those who know what real warfare is as the most correct description of it in poetry. And yet, Lérmontoff disliked war, and he ends one of his admirable descriptions of fighting with these lines:

“I thought: How miserable is man! What does he want? The sky is pure, and under it there’s room for all; but without reason and necessity, his heart is full of hatred.—Why?”

He died in his twenty-seventh year. Exiled for a second time to the Caucasus (for a duel which he had fought at St. Petersburg with a Barrante, the son of the French ambassador), he was staying at Pyatigórsk, frequenting the shallow society which usually comes together in such watering places. His jokes and sarcasms addressed to an officer, Martýnoff, who used to drape himself in a Byronian mantle the better to capture the hearts of young girls, led to a duel. Lérmontoff, as he had already done in his first duel, shot sideways purposely; but Martýnoff slowly and purposely took his aim so as even to call forth the protests of the seconds—and killed Lérmontoff on the spot.

PÚSHKIN AND LÉRMONTOFF AS PROSE-WRITERS

Towards the end of his life Púshkin gave himself more and more to prose writing. He began an extensive history of the peasant uprising of 1773 under Pugatchóff, and undertook for that purpose a journey to East Russia, where he collected, besides public documents, personal reminiscences and popular traditions relating to this uprising. At the same time he also wrote a novel, The Captain’s Daughter, the scene of which was laid in that disturbed period. The novel is not very remarkable in itself. True, the portraits of Pugatchóff and of an old servant, as well as the description of the whole life in the small forts of East Russia, garrisoned at that time by only a few invalid soldiers, are very true to reality and brilliantly pictured; but in the general construction of the novel Púshkin paid a tribute to the sentimentalism of the times. Nevertheless, The Captain’s Daughter, and especially the other prose novels of Púshkin, have played an important part in the history of Russian literature. Through them Púshkin introduced into Russia the realistic school, long before Balzac did so in France, and this school has since that time prevailed in Russian prose-literature. I do not mean, of course, Realism in the sense of dwelling mainly upon the lowest instincts of man, as it was misunderstood by some French writers, but in the sense of treating both high and low manifestations of human nature in a way true to reality, and in their real proportions. Moreover, the simplicity of these novels, both as regards their plots and the way the plots are treated, is simply marvellous, and in this way they have traced the lines upon which the development of Russian novel writing has ever since been pursued. The novels of Lérmontoff, of Hérzen (Whose Fault?), and of Turguéneff and Tolstóy descend, I dare to say, in a much more direct line from Púshkin’s novels than from those of Gógol.

Lérmontoff also wrote one novel in prose, The Hero of our Own Time, of which the hero, Petchórin, was to some extent a real representative of a portion of the educated society in those years of romanticism. It is true that some critics saw in him the portraiture of the author himself and his acquaintances; but, as Lérmontoff wrote in his preface to a second edition of this novel—“The hero of our own time is indeed a portrait, but not of one single man: it is the portrait of the vices of our generation,”—the book indicates “the illness from which this generation suffers.”

Petchórin is an extremely clever, bold, enterprising man who regards his surroundings with cold contempt. He is undoubtedly a superior man, superior to Púshkin’s Onyéghin; but he is, above all, an egotist who finds no better application for his superior capacities than all sorts of mad adventures, always connected with love-making. He falls in love with a Circassian girl whom he sees at a native festival. The girl is also taken by the beauty and the gloomy aspect of the Russian. To marry her is evidently out of question, because her Mussulman relatives would never give her to a Russian. Then, Petchórin daringly kidnaps her, with the aid of her brother, and the girl is brought to the Russian fort, where Petchórin is an officer. For several weeks she only cries and never speaks a word to the Russian, but by and bye she feels love for him. That is the beginning of the tragedy. Petchórin soon has enough of the Circassian beauty; he deserts her more and more for hunting adventures, and during one of them she is kidnapped by a Circassian who loves her, and who, on seeing that he cannot escape with her, kills her with his dagger. For Petchórin this solution is almost welcome.

A few years later the same Petchórin appears amidst Russian society in one of the Caucasus watering towns. There he meets with Princess Mary, who is courted by a young man—Grushnísky,—a sort of Caucasian caricature of Byron, draped in a mantle of contempt for mankind, but in reality a very shallow sort of personage. Petchórin, who cares but little for the Princess Mary, finds, however, a sort of wicked pleasure in rendering Grushnítsky ridiculous in her eyes, and uses all his wit to bring the girl to his feet. When this is done, he loses all interest in her. He makes a fool of Grushnítsky, and when the young man provokes him to a duel, he kills him. This was the hero of the time, and it must be owned that it was not a caricature. In a society free from care about the means of living—it was of course in serfdom times, under Nicholas I.—when there was no sort of political life in the country, a man of superior ability very often found no issue for his forces but in such adventures as Petchórin’s.

It need not be said that the novel is admirably written—that it is full of living descriptions of Caucasus “society”; that the characters are splendidly delineated, and that some of them, like the old Captain Maxím Maxímytch, have remained living types of some of the best specimens of mankind. Through these qualities The Hero of our own Time, like Evghéniy Onyéghin, became a model for quite a series of subsequent novels.

OTHER POETS AND NOVELISTS OF THE SAME EPOCH KRYLÓFF

The fable-writer Krylóff (1768-1844) is perhaps the Russian writer who is best known abroad. English readers know him through the excellent work and translations of so great a connoisseur of Russian literature and language as Ralston was, and little can be added to what Ralston has said of this eminently original writer.

He stands on the boundary between two centuries, and reflects both the end of the one and the beginning of the other. Up to 1807 he wrote comedies which, even more than the other comedies of the time, were mere imitations from the French. It was only in 1807-1809 that he found his true vocation and began writing fables, in which domain he attained the first rank, not only in Russia, but among the fable-writers in all modern literatures. Many of his fables—at any rate, the best known ones—are translations from Lafontaine; and yet they are entirely original productions. Lafontaine’s animals are academically educated French gentlemen; even the peasants in his fables come from Versailles. There is nothing of the sort in Krylóff. Every animal in his fables is a character—wonderfully true to life. Nay, even the cadence of his verses changes and takes a special aspect each time a new animal is introduced—that heavy simpleton, the Bear, or the fine and cunning Fox, or the versatile Monkey. Krylóff knew every one of them intimately; he knew each of their movements, and above all he had noticed and enjoyed long since in his own self the humorous side of every one of the dwellers of the forests or the companions of Man, before he undertook to put them in his fables. This is why Krylóff may be taken as the greatest fable-writer not only of Russia—where he had a not to be neglected rival in Dmítreff (1760-1837)—but also of all nations of modern times. True, there is no depth, no profound and cutting irony, in Krylóff’s fables. Nothing but a good-natured, easy-going irony, which made the very essence of his heavy frame, his lazy habits, and his quiet contemplation. But, is this not the true domain of fable, which must not be confounded with satire?

At the same time there is no writer who has better possessed and better understood the true essence of the really popular Russian language, the language spoken by the men and women of the people. At a time when the Russian littérateurs hesitated between the elegant, Europeanised style of Karamzín, and the clumsy, half-Slavonic style of the nationalists of the old school, Krylóff, even in his very first fables, written in 1807, had already worked out a style which at once gave him a quite unique position in Russian literature, and which has not been surpassed even by such masters of the popular Russian language as was Ostróvskiy and some of the folk-novelists of a later epoch. For terseness, expressiveness and strict adherence to the true spirit of the popularly-spoken Russian, Krylóff has no rivals.

THE MINOR POETS

Several minor poets, contemporary of Púshkin and Lérmontoff, and some of them their personal friends, must be mentioned in this place. The influence of Púshkin was so great that he could not but call to life a school of writers who should try to follow in his steps. None of them reached such a height as to claim to be considered a world poet; but each of them has made his contribution in one way or another to the development of Russian poetry, each one has had his humanising and elevating influence.

Kózloff (1779-1840) has reflected in his poetry the extremely sad character of his life. At the age of about forty he was stricken with paralysis, losing the use of his legs, and soon after that his sight; but his poetical gift remained with him, and he dictated to his daughter some of the saddest elegies which Russian literature possesses, as also a great number of our most perfect translations. His Monk made everyone in Russia shed tears, and Púshkin hastened to acknowledge the strength of the poem. Endowed with the most wonderful memory—he knew by heart all Byron, all the poems of Walter Scott, all Racine, Tasso, and Dante,—Kozlóff, like Zhukóvskiy, with whom he had much in common, made a great number of translations from various languages, especially from the English idealists, and some of his translations from the Polish, such as The Crimean Sonnets of Mickiewicz, are real works of art.

Délwig (1798-1831) was a great personal friend of Púshkin, whose comrade he was at the Lyceum. He represented in Russian literature the tendency towards reviving ancient Greek forms of poetry, but happily enough he tried at the same time to write in the style of the Russian popular songs, and the lyrics which he wrote in this manner especially contributed to make of him a favourite poet of his own time. Some of his romances have remained popular till now.

Baratýnskiy (1800-1844) was another poet of the same group of friends. Under the influence of the wild nature of Finland, where he spent several years in exile, he became a romantic poet, full of the love of nature, and also of melancholy, and deeply interested in philosophical questions, to which he could find no reply. He thus lacked a definite conception of life, but what he wrote was clothed in a beautiful form, and in very expressive, elegant verses.

Yazýkoff (1803-1846) belongs to the same circle. He was intimate with Púshkin, who much admired his verses. It must be said, however, that the poetry of Yazýkoff had chiefly an historical influence in the sense of perfecting the forms of poetical expression. Unfortunately, he had to struggle against almost continual illness, and he died just when he had reached the full development of his talent.

Venevítinoff (1805-1822) died at a still younger age; but there is no exaggeration in saying that he promised to become a great poet, endowed with the same depth of philosophical conception as was Goethe, and capable of attaining the same beauty of form. The few verses he wrote during the last year of his life revealed the suddenly attained maturity of a great poetical talent, and may be compared with the verses of the greatest poets.

Prince Alexander Odóevskiy (1803-1839) and Polezháeff (1806-1838) are two other poets who died very young, and whose lives were entirely broken by political persecution. Odóevskiy was a friend of the Decembrists. After the 14th of December, 1825, he was arrested, taken to the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and then sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, whence he was not released till twelve years later, to be sent as a soldier to the Caucasus. There he became the friend of Lérmontoff, one of whose best elegies was written on Odóevskiy’s death. The verses of Odóevskiy (they were not printed abroad while he lived) lack finish, but he was a real poet and a patriot too, as is seen from his Dream of a Poet, and his historical poem, Vasilkó.

The fate of Polezháeff was even more tragic. He was only twenty years old—a brilliant student of the Moscow University—when he wrote an autobiographical poem, Sáshka, full of allusions to the evils of autocracy and of appeals for freedom. This poem was shown to Nicholas I., who ordered the young poet to be sent as a soldier to an army regiment. The duration of service was then twenty-five years, and Polezháeff saw not the slightest chance of release. More than that: for an unauthorised absence from his regiment (he had gone to Moscow with the intention of presenting a petition of release to the Tsar) he was condemned to receive one thousand strokes with the sticks, and only by mere luck escaped the punishment. He never succumbed to his fate, and in the horrible barracks of those times he remained what he was: a pupil of Byron, Lamartine, and Macpherson, never broken, protesting against tyranny In verses that were written in tears and blood. When he was dying from consumption in a military hospital at Moscow Nicholas I. pardoned him: his promotion to the grade of officer came when he was dead.

A similar fate befell the Little Russian poet Shevchénko (1814-1861), who, for some of his poetry, was sent in 1847 to a battalion as a common soldier. His epical poems from the life of the free Cossacks in olden times, heart rending poems from the life of the serfs, and lyrics, all written in Little Russian and thoroughly popular in both form and content, belong to the fine specimens of poetry of all nations.

Of prose writers of the same epoch only a few can be mentioned in this book, and these in a few lines. Alexander Bestúzheff (1797-1837), who wrote under the nom de plume of Marlínskiy—one of the “Decembrists,” exiled to Siberia, and later on sent to the Caucasus as a soldier—was the author of very widely-read novels. Like Púshkin and Lérmontoff he was under the influence of Byron, and described “titanic passions” in Byron’s style, as also striking adventures in the style of the French novelists of the Romantic school; but he deserves at the same time to be regarded as the first to write novels from Russian life in which matters of social interest were discussed.

Other favourite novelists of the same epoch were: Zagóskin (1789-1852), the author of extremely popular historical novels, Yúriy Miloslávskiy, Róslavleff, etc., all written in a sentimentally patriotic style; Naryézhnyi (1780-1825), who is considered by some Russian critics as a forerunner of Gógol, because he wrote already in the realistic style, describing, like Gógol, the dark sides of Russian life; and Lazhéchnikoff (1792-1868), the author of a number of very popular historical novels from Russian life.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The great composer Glínka has made of this fairy tale a most beautiful opera (Ruslán i Ludmíla), in which Russian, Finnish, Turkish, and Oriental music are intermingled in order to characterise the different heroes.

[11] For all translations, not otherwise mentioned, it is myself who is responsible.

PART III
Gógol

CHAPTER III
GÓGOL

Little Russia—Nights on a Farm near Dikánka, and Mírgorod—Village life and humour—How Iván Ivánovitch quarrelled with Iván Nikíforytch—Historical novel, Tarás Búlba—The Cloak—Drama, The Inspector-General—Its influence—Dead Souls: main types—Realism in the Russian novel.

With Gógol begins a new period of Russian literature, which is called by Russian literary critics “the Gógol period,” and which lasts to the present date.

Gógol was not a Great Russian. He was born in 1809, in a Little Russian or Ukraïnian nobleman’s family. His father had already displayed some literary talent and wrote a few comedies in Little Russian, but Gógol lost him at an early age. The boy was educated in a small provincial town, which he left, however, while still young, and when he was only nineteen he was already at St. Petersburg. At that time the dream of his life was to become an actor, but the manager of the St. Petersburg Imperial theatres did not accept him, and Gógol had to look for another sphere of activity. The Civil Service, in which he obtained the position of a subordinate clerk, was evidently insufficient to interest him, and he soon entered upon his literary career.

His début was in 1829, with little novels taken from the village-life of Little Russia. Nights on a Farm near Dikánka, soon followed by another series of stories entitled Mírgorod, immediately won for him literary fame and introduced him into the circle of Zhukóvskiy and Púshkin. The two poets at once recognised Gógol’s genius, and received him with open arms.

Little Russia differs considerably from the central parts of the empire, i. e., from the country round Moscow, which is known as Great Russia. It has a more southern position, and everything southern has always a certain attraction for northerners. The villages in Little Russia are not disposed in streets as they are in Great Russia, but the white-washed houses are scattered, as in Western Europe, in separate little farms, each of which is surrounded by charming little gardens. The more genial climate, the warm nights, the musical language, the beauty of the race, which probably contains a mixture of South Slavonian with Turkish and Polish blood, the picturesque dress and the lyrical songs—all these render Little Russia especially attractive for the Great Russian. Besides, life in Little-Russian villages is more poetical than it is in the villages of Great Russia. There is more freedom in the relations between the young men and the young girls, who freely meet before marriage; the stamp of seclusion of the women which has been impressed by Byzantine habits upon Moscow does not exist in Little Russia, where the influence of Poland was prevalent. Little Russians have also maintained numerous traditions and epic poems and songs from the times when they were free Cossacks and used to fight against the Poles in the north and the Turks in the south. Having had to defend the Greek orthodox religion against these two nations, they strictly adhere now to the Russian Church, and one does not find in their villages the same passion for scholastic discussions about the letter of the Holy Books which is often met with in Great Russia among the Non-conformists. Their religion has altogether a more poetical aspect.

The Little-Russian language is certainly more melodious than the Great Russian, and there is now a movement of some importance for its literary development; but this evolution has yet to be accomplished, and Gógol very wisely wrote in Great Russian—that is, in the language of Zhukóvskiy, Púshkin, and Lérmontoff. We have thus in Gógol a sort of union between the two nationalities.

It would be impossible to give here an idea of the humour and wit contained in Gógol’s novels from Little Russian life, without quoting whole pages. It is the good-hearted laughter of a young man who himself enjoys the fulness of life and himself laughs at the comical positions into which he has put his heroes: a village chanter, a wealthy peasant, a rural matron, or a village smith. He is full of happiness; no dark apprehension comes to disturb his joy of life. However, those whom he depicts are not rendered comical in obedience to the poet’s whim: Gógol always remains scrupulously true to reality. Every peasant, every chanter, is taken from real life, and the truthfulness of Gógol to reality is almost ethnographical, without ever ceasing to be poetical. All the superstitions of a village life on a Christmas Eve or during a mid-summer night, when the mischievous spirits and goblins get free till the cock crows, are brought before the reader, and at the same time we have all the wittiness which is inborn in the Little Russian. It was only later on that Gógol’s comical vein became what can be truly described as “humour,”—that is, a sort of contrast between comical surroundings and a sad substratum of life, which made Púshkin say of Gógol’s productions that “behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears.”

Not all the Little-Russian tales of Gógol are taken from peasant life. Some deal also with the upper class of the small towns; and one of them, How Iván Ivánovitch quarrelled with Iván Nikíforytch, is one of the most humorous tales in existence. Iván Ivánovitch and Iván Nikíforytch were two neighbours who lived on excellent terms with each other; but the inevitableness of their quarrelling some day appears from the very first lines of the novel. Iván Ivánovitch was a person of fine behaviour. He would never offer snuff to an acquaintance without saying: “May I dare, Sir, to ask you to be so kind as to oblige yourself.” He was a man of the most accurate habits; and when he had eaten a melon he used to wrap its seeds in a bit of paper, and to inscribe upon it: “This melon was eaten on such a date,” and if there had been a friend at his table he would add: “In the presence of Mr. So and So.” At the same time he was, after all, a miser, who appreciated very highly the comforts of his own life, but did not care to share them with others. His neighbour, Iván Nikíforytch, was quite the opposite. He was very stout and heavy, and fond of swearing. On a hot summer day he would take off all his clothes and sit in his garden, in the sunshine, warming his back. When he offered snuff to anyone, he would simply produce his snuff box saying: “Oblige yourself.” He knew none of the refinements of his neighbour, and loudly expressed what he meant. It was inevitable that two men, so different, whose yards were only separated by a low fence, should one day come to a quarrel; and so it happened.

One day the stout and rough Iván Nikíforytch, seeing that his friend owned an old useless musket, was seized with the desire to possess the weapon. He had not the slightest need of it, but all the more he longed to have it, and this craving led to a feud which lasted for years. Iván Ivánovitch remarked very reasonably to his neighbour that he had no need of a rifle. The neighbour, stung by this remark, replied that this was precisely the thing he needed, and offered, if Iván Ivánovitch was not disposed to accept money for his musket, to give him in exchange—a pig.... This was understood by Iván Ivánovitch as a terrible offence: “How could a musket, which is the symbol of hunting, of nobility, be exchanged by a gentleman for a pig!” Hard words followed, and the offended neighbour called Iván Ivánovitch a gander.... A mortal feud, full of the most comical incidents, resulted from these rash words. Their friends did everything to re-establish peace, and one day their efforts seemed to be crowned with success; the two enemies had been brought together—both pushed from behind by their friends; Iván Ivánovitch had already put his hand into his pocket to take out his snuff-box and to offer it to his enemy, when the latter made the unfortunate remark: “There was nothing particular in being called a gander; no need to be offended by that.”... All the efforts of the friends were brought to nought by these unfortunate words. The feud was renewed with even greater acrimony than before; and, tragedy always following in the steps of comedy, the two enemies, by taking the affair from one Court to another, arrived at old age totally ruined.

TARÁS BÚLBA—THE CLOAK

The pearl of Gógol’s Little-Russian novels is an historical novel, Tarás Búlba, which recalls to life one of the most interesting periods in the history of Little Russia—the fifteenth century. Constantinople had fallen into the hands of the Turks; and although a mighty Polish-Lithuanian State had grown in the West, the Turks, nevertheless, menaced both Eastern and Middle Europe. Then it was that the Little Russians rose for the defence of Russia and Europe. They lived in free communities of Cossacks, over whom the Poles were beginning to establish feudal power. In times of peace these Cossacks carried on agriculture in the prairies, and fishing in the beautiful rivers of Southwest Russia, reaching at times the Black Sea; but every one of them was armed, and the whole country was divided into regiments. As soon as there was a military alarm they all rose to meet an invasion of the Turks or a raid of the Tartars, returning to their fields and fisheries as soon as the war was over.

The whole nation was thus ready to resist the invasions of the Mussulmans; but a special vanguard was kept in the lower course of the Dniéper, “beyond the rapids,” on an island which soon became famous under the name of the Sícha. Men of all conditions, including runaways from their landlords, outlaws, and adventurers of all sorts, could come and settle in the Sícha without being asked any questions but whether they went to church. “Well, then, make the sign of the cross,” the hetman of the Sícha said, “and join the division you like.” The Sícha consisted of about sixty divisions, which were very similar to independent republics, or rather to schools of boys, who cared for nothing and lived in common. None of them had anything of his own, excepting his arms. No women were admitted, and absolute democracy prevailed.

The hero of the novel is an old Cossack, Tarás Búlba, who has himself spent many years in Sícha, but is now peacefully settled inland on his farm. His two sons have been educated at the Academy of Kíeff and return home after several years of absence. Their first meeting with their father is very characteristic. As the father laughs at the sons’ long clothes, which do not suit a Cossack, the elder son, Ostáp, challenges him to a good boxing fight. The father is delighted, and they fight until the old man, quite out of breath, exclaims: “By God, this is a good fighter; no need to test him further; he will be a good Cossack!—Now, son, be welcome; let us kiss each other.” On the very next day after their arrival, without letting the mother enjoy the sight of her sons, Tarás takes them to the Sícha, which—as often happened in those times—was quickly drawn into war, in consequence of the exactions which the Polish landlords made upon the Little Russians.

The life of the free Cossacks in the republic “beyond the rapids” and their ways of conducting war are wonderfully described; but, paying a tribute to the then current romanticism, Gógol makes Tarás’ younger son, a sentimentalist, fall in love with a noble Polish lady, during the siege of a Polish town, and go over to the enemy; while the father and the elder son continue fighting the Poles. The war lasts for a year or so, with varying success, till at length, in one of the desperate sorties of the besieged Poles, the younger son of Tarás is taken prisoner, and the father himself kills him for his treason. The elder son is next taken prisoner by the Poles and carried away to Warsaw, where he perishes on the rack; while Tarás, returning to Little Russia, raises a formidable army and makes one of those invasions into Poland with which the history of the two countries was filled for two centuries. Taken prisoner himself, Tarás perishes at the stake, with a disregard of life and suffering which were characteristic of this strong, fighting race of men. Such is, in brief, the theme of this novel, which is replete with admirable separate scenes.

Read in the light of modern requirements, Tarás Búlba certainly would not satisfy us. The influence of the Romantic school is too strongly felt. The younger son of Tarás is not a living being, and the Polish lady is entirely invented in order to answer the requirements of a novel, showing that Gógol never knew a single woman of that type. But the old Cossack and his son, as well as all the life of the Cossack camps, is quite real; it produces the illusion of real life. The reader is carried away in sympathy with old Tarás, while the ethnographer cannot but feel that he has before him a wonderful combination of an ethnographical document of the highest value, with a poetical reproduction—only the more real because it is poetical—of a bygone and most interesting epoch.

The Little-Russian novels were followed by a few novels taken from the life of Great Russia, chiefly of St. Petersburg, and two of them, The Memoirs of a Madman and The Cloak (Shinél) deserve a special mention. The psychology of the madman is strikingly drawn. As to The Cloak, it is in this novel that Gógol’s laughter which conceals “unseen tears” shows at its best. The poor life of a small functionary, who discovers with a sense of horror that his old cloak is so worn out as to be unfit to stand further repairs; his hesitation before he ventures to speak to a tailor about a new one; his nervous excitement on the day that it is ready and that he tries it on for the first time; and finally his despair, amidst general indifference, when night-robbers have robbed him of his cloak—every line of this work bears the stamp of one of the greatest artists. Sufficient to say that this novel produced at its appearance, and produces still, such an impression, that since the times of Gógol every Russian novel-writer has been aptly said to have re-written The Cloak.

THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL

Gógol’s prose-comedy, The Inspector-General (Revizór), has become, in its turn, a starting point for the Russian drama—a model which every dramatic writer after Gógol has always kept before his eyes. “Revizór,” in Russian, means some important functionary who has been sent by the ministry to some provincial town to inquire into the conditions of the local administration—an Inspector-General; and the comedy takes place in a small town, from which “you may gallop for three years and yet arrive nowhere.” The little spot—we learn it at the rising of the curtain—is going to be visited by an Inspector-General. The local head of the Police (in those times the head of the Police was also the head of the town)—the Gorodníchiy or Governor—has convoked the chief functionaries of the place to communicate to them an important news. He has had a bad dream; two rats came in, sniffed and then went away; there must be something in that dream, and so there is; he has just got this morning a letter from a friend at St. Petersburg, announcing that an inspector-general is coming, and—what is still worse—is coming incognito! Now, the honourable Governor advises the functionaries to put some order in their respective offices. The patients in the hospital walk about in linen so dirty that you might take them for chimney sweeps. The chief magistrate, who is a passionate lover of sport, has his hunting apparel hanging about in the Court, and his attendants have made a poultry-yard of the entrance hall. In short, everything has to be put in order. The Governor feels very uncomfortable. Up to the present day he has freely levied tribute upon the merchants, pocketed the money destined for building a church, and within a fortnight he has flogged the wife of a non-commissioned officer, which he had no right to do; and now, there’s the Inspector-General coming! He asks the postmaster “just to open a little” the letters which may be addressed from this town to St. Petersburg and, if he finds in them some reports about town matters, to keep them. The postmaster—a great student of human character—has always indulged, even without getting this advice, in the interesting pastime of reading the letters, and he falls in with the Governor’s proposal.

At that very moment enter Petr Iványch Dóbchinsky and Petr Iványch Bóbchinsky. Everyone knows them, you know them very well: they play the part of the town Gazette. They go about the town all day long, and as soon as they have learnt something interesting they both hurry to spread the news, interrupting each other in telling it, and hurrying immediately to some other place to be the first to communicate the news to someone else. They have been at the only inn of the town, and there they saw a very suspicious person: a young man, “who has something, you know, extraordinary about his face.” He is living there for a fortnight, never paying a penny, and does not journey any further. “What is his object in staying so long in town like ours?” And then, when they were taking their lunch he passed them by and looked so inquisitively in their plates—who may he be? Evidently, the Governor and all present conclude, he must be the Inspector-General who stays there incognito.... A general confusion results from the suspicion. The Governor starts immediately for the inn, to make the necessary enquiries. The womenfolk are in a tremendous excitement.

The stranger is simply a young man who is travelling to rejoin his father. On some post-station he met with a certain captain—a great master at cards—and lost all he had in his pocket. Now he cannot proceed any farther, and he cannot pay the landlord, who refuses to credit him with any more meals. The young man feels awfully hungry—no wonder he looked so inquisitively into the plates of the two gentlemen—and resorts to all sorts of tricks to induce the landlord to send him something for his dinner. Just as he is finishing some fossil-like cutlet enters the Gorodníchiy; and a most comic scene follows, the young man thinking that the Governor came to arrest him, and the Governor thinking that he is speaking to the Inspector-General who is trying to conceal his identity. The Governor offers to remove the young man to some more comfortable place. “No, thank you, I have no intent to go to a jail,” sharply retorts the young man.... But it is to his own house that the Governor takes the supposed Inspector, and now an easy life begins for the adventurer. All the functionaries appear in turn to introduce themselves, and everyone is only too happy to give him a bribe of a hundred roubles or so. The merchants come to ask his protection from the Governor; the widow who was flogged comes to lodge a complaint.... In the meantime the young man enters into a flirtation with both the wife and the daughter of the Governor; and, finally, being caught at a very pathetic moment when he is kneeling at the feet of the daughter, without further thought he makes a proposition of marriage. But, having gone so far, the young man, well-provided now with money, hastens to leave the town on the pretext of going to see an uncle; he will be back in a couple of days....

The delight of the Governor can easily be imagined. His Excellency, the Inspector-General, going to marry the Governor’s daughter! He and his wife are already making all sorts of plans. They will remove to St. Petersburg, the Gorodníchiy will soon be a general, and you will see how he will keep the other Gorodníchies at his door!... The happy news spreads about the town, and all the functionaries and the society of the town hasten to offer their congratulations to the old man. There is a great gathering at his house—when the postmaster comes in. He has followed the advice of the Governor, and has opened a letter which the supposed Inspector-General had addressed to somebody at St. Petersburg. He now brings this letter. The young man is no inspector at all, and here is what he writes to a Bohemian friend of his about his adventures in the provincial town:[12]

In short, the letter produces a great sensation. The friends of the Governor are delighted to see him and his family in such straits, all accuse each other, and finally fall upon the two gentlemen, when a police soldier enters the room and announces in a loud voice: “A functionary from St. Petersburg, with Imperial orders, wants to see you all immediately. He stays at the hotel.” Thereupon the curtain drops over a living picture of which Gógol himself had made a most striking sketch in pencil, and which is usually reproduced in his works; it shows how admirably well, with what a fine artistic sense, he represented to himself his characters.

The Inspector-General marks a new era in the development of dramatic art in Russia. All the comedies and dramas which were being played in Russia at that time (with the exception, of course, of Misfortune from Intelligence, which, however, was not allowed to appear on the stage) hardly deserved the name of dramatic literature: so imperfect and puerile they were. The Inspector-General, on the contrary, would have marked at the time of its appearance (1835) an epoch in any language. Its stage qualities, which will be appreciated by every good actor; its sound and hearty humour; the natural character of the comical scenes, which result from the very characters of those who appear in this comedy; the sense of measure which pervades it—all these make it one of the best comedies in existence. If the conditions of life which are depicted here were not so exclusively Russian, and did not so exclusively belong to a bygone stage of life which is unknown outside Russia, it would have been generally recognised as a real pearl of the world’s literature. This is why, when it was played a few years ago in Germany, by actors who properly understood Russian life, it achieved such a tremendous success.

The Inspector-General provoked such a storm of hostile criticism on the part of all reactionary Russia, that it was hopeless to expect that the comedy which Gógol began next, concerning the life of the St. Petersburg functionaries (The Vladimir Cross), could ever be admitted on the stage, and Gógol never finished it, only publishing a few striking scenes from it: The Morning of a Busy Man, The Law Suit, etc. Another comedy, Marriage, in which he represented the hesitation and terror through which an inveterate bachelor goes before a marriage, which he finally eludes by jumping out of a window a few moments before the beginning of the ceremony, has not lost its interest even now. It is so full of comical situations, which fine actors cannot but highly appreciate, that it is still a part of the current répertoire of the Russian stage.

DEAD SOULS

Gógol’s main work was Dead Souls. This is a novel almost without a plot, or rather with a plot of the utmost simplicity. Like the plot of The Inspector-General, it was suggested to Gógol by Púshkin. In those times, when serfdom was flourishing in Russia, the ambition of every nobleman was to become the owner of at least a couple of hundred serfs. The serfs used to be sold like slaves and could be bought separately. A needy nobleman, Tchítchikoff, conceives accordingly a very clever plan. A census of the population being made only every ten or twenty years, and every serf-owner having in the interval to pay taxes for every male soul which he owned at the time of the last census, even though part of his “souls” be dead since, Tchítchikoff conceives the idea of taking advantage of this anomaly. He will buy the dead souls at a very small expense: the landlords will be only too pleased to get rid of this burden and surely will sell them for anything; and after Tchítchikoff has bought two or three hundred of these imaginary serfs, he will buy cheap land somewhere in the southern prairies, transfer the dead souls, on paper, to that land, register them as if they were really settled there, and mortgage that new sort of estate to the State Landlords’ Bank. In this way he can easily make the beginnings of a fortune. With this plan Tchítchikoff comes to a provincial town and begins his operations. He makes, first of all, the necessary visits.

“The newcomer made visits to all the functionaries of the town. He went to testify his respects to the Governor, who like Tchítchikoff himself, was neither stout nor thin. He was decorated with a cross and was spoken of as a person who would soon get a star; but was, after all, a very good fellow and was fond of making embroideries upon fine muslin. Tchítchikoff’s next visits were to the Vice-Governor, to the Chief Magistrate, to the Chief of Police, the Head of the Crown Factories ... but it is so difficult to remember all the powerful persons in this world ... sufficient to say that the newcomer showed a wonderful activity as regards visits. He even went to testify his respects to the Sanitary Inspector, and to the Town Surveyor, and after that he sat for a long time in his carriage trying to remember to whom else he might pay a visit; but he could think of no more functionaries in the town. In his conversations with all these influential persons he managed to say something to flatter every one of them. In talking with the Governor he accidentally dropped the remark that when one enters this province one thinks of paradise—all the roads being quite like velvet; and that ‘governments which nominate wise functionaries surely deserve universal gratitude.’ To the Chief of the Police he said something very gratifying about the police force, and while he was talking to the Vice-Governor and to the presiding magistrate, who were only State-Councillors, he twice made the mistake of calling them ‘Your Excellency,’ with which mistake they were both immensely pleased. The result of all this was that the Governor asked Tchítchikoff to come that same day to an evening party, and the other functionaries invited him, some to dine with them, others to a cup of tea, and others again to a party of whist.

“About himself Tchítchikoff avoided talking, and if he spoke at all it was in vague sentences only, with a remarkable modesty, his conversation taking in such cases a rather bookish turn. He said that he was a mere nobody in this world and did not wish people to take any particular interest in him; that he had had varied experiences in his life, suffered in the service of the State for the sake of truth, had had many enemies, some of whom had even attempted his life, but that now, wishing to lead a quiet existence, he intended to find at last some corner to live in, and, having come to this town, he considered it his imperative duty to testify his respect to the chief functionaries of the place. This was all they could learn in town about the new person who soon made his appearance at the Governor’s evening party.

“Here, the newcomer once more produced the most favourable impression.... He always found out what he ought to do on every occasion; and he proved himself an experienced man of the world. Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also Tchítchikoff would make remarks to the point. If the conversation related to some inquest which was being made by the Government, he would show that he also knew something about the tricks of the Civil Service functionaries. When the talk was about billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, he knew all about brandy; as to Custom officers, he knew everything about them, as though he had himself been a Custom officer, or a detective; but the most remarkable thing was that he knew how to cover all this with a certain sense of propriety, and in every circumstance knew how to behave. He never spoke too loudly, and never in too subdued a tone, but exactly as one ought to speak. In short, take him from any side you like, he was a very respectable man. All the functionaries were delighted with the arrival of such a person in their town.”

It has often been said that Gógol’s Tchítchikoff is a truly Russian type. But—is it so? Has not every one of us met Tchítchikoff?—middle-aged; not too thick and not too thin; moving about with the lightness almost of a military man.... The subject he wishes to speak to you about may offer many difficulties, but he knows how to approach it and to interest you in it in a thousand different ways. When he talks to an old general he rises to the understanding of the greatness of the country and her military glory. He is not a jingo—surely not—but he has, just in the proper measure, the love of war and victories which are required in a man who wishes to be described as a patriot. When he meets with a sentimental reformer, he is sentimental and desirous of reforms, and so on, and he always will keep in view the object he aims at at any given moment, and will try to interest you in it. Tchítchikoff may buy dead souls, or railway shares, or he may collect funds for some charitable institution, or look for a position in a bank, but he is an immortal international type; we meet him everywhere; he is of all lands and of all times; he but takes different forms to suit the requirements of nationality and time.

One of the first landlords to whom Tchítchikoff spoke of his intention of buying dead souls was Maníloff—also a universal type, with the addition of those special features which the quiet life of a serf-owner could add to such a character. “A very nice man to look at,” as Gógol says; his features possessed something very pleasant—only it seemed as if too much sugar had been put into them. “When you meet him for the first time you cannot but exclaim after the first few minutes of conversation: ‘What a nice and pleasant man he is.’ The next moment you say nothing, but the next but one moment you say to yourself: ‘The deuce knows what he is,’ and you go away; but if you don’t, you feel mortally bored.” You could never hear from him a lively or animated word. Everyone has some point of interest and enthusiasm. Maníloff had nothing of the kind; he was always in the same mild temper. He seemed to be lost in reflection; but what about, no one knew. Sometimes, as he looked from his window on his wide courtyard and the pond behind, he would say to himself: “How nice it would be to have there an underground passage leading from the mansion to the pond, and to have across the pond a stone bridge, with pretty shops on both its sides, in which shops all sorts of things useful for the poor people could be bought.” His eyes became in this case wonderfully soft, and his face took on a most contented expression. However, even less strange intentions remained mere intentions. In his house something was always missing; his drawing room had excellent furniture covered with fine silk stuff, which probably had cost much money; but for two of the chairs there was not sufficient of the stuff, and so they remained covered with plain sack-cloth; and for many years in succession the proprietor used to stop his guests with these words: “Please, do not take that chair; it is not yet ready.” “His wife.... But they were quite satisfied with each other. Although more than eight years had passed since they had married, one of them would still occasionally bring to the other a piece of apple or a tiny sweet, or a nut, saying in a touchingly sweet voice which expressed infinite love: ‘Open, my dearest, your little mouth,—I will put into it this little sweet.’ Evidently the mouth was opened in a very charming way. For her husband’s birthday the wife always prepared some surprise—for instance, an embroidered sheath for his tooth-pick, and very often, sitting on the sofa, all of a sudden, no one knows for what reason, one of them would leave his pipe and the other her work, and impress on each other such a sweet and long kiss that during it one might easily smoke a little cigarette. In short, they were what people call quite happy.”

It is evident that of his estate and of the condition of his peasants Maníloff never thought. He knew absolutely nothing about such matters, and left everything in the hands of a very sharp manager, under whose rule Maníloff’s serfs were worse off than under a brutal landlord. Thousands of such Maníloffs peopled Russia some fifty years ago, and I think that if we look closer round we shall find such would-be “sentimental” persons under every latitude.

It is easy to conceive what a gallery of portraits Gógol was enabled to produce as he followed Tchítchikoff in his wanderings from one landlord to another, while his hero tried to buy as many “dead souls” as he could. Every one of the landlords described in Dead Souls—the sentimentalist Maníloff, the heavy and cunning Sobakévitch, the arch-liar and cheat Nózdreff, the fossilised, antediluvian lady Koróbotchka, the miser Plyúshkin—have become common names in Russian conversation. Some of them, as for instance the miser Plyúshkin, are depicted with such a depth of psychological insight that one may ask one’s self whether a better and more humane portrait of a miser can be found in any literature?

Towards the end of his life Gógol, who was suffering from a nervous disease, fell under the influence of “pietists”—especially of Madame O. A. Smirnóff (born Rossett), and began to consider all his writings as a sin of his life. Twice, in a paroxysm of religious self-accusation, he burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls, of which only some parts have been preserved, and were circulated in his lifetime in manuscript. The last ten years of his life were extremely painful. He repented with reference to all his writings, and published a very unwholesome book, Correspondence with Friends, in which, under the mask of Christian humility, he took a most arrogant position with respect to all literature, his own writings included. He died at Moscow in 1852.

It hardly need be added that the Government of Nicholas I. considered Gógol’s writings extremely dangerous. The author had the utmost difficulties in getting permission for The Inspector-General to be played at all on the stage, and the permission was only obtained by Zhukóvskiy, at the express will of the Tsar himself. Before the authorisation was given to print the first volume of Dead Souls, Gógol had to undergo most incredible trouble; and when the volume was out of print a second edition was never permitted in Nicholas I.’s reign. When Gógol died, and Turguéneff published in a Moscow paper a short obituary notice, which really contained absolutely nothing (“any tradesman might have had a better one,” as Turguéneff himself said), the young novelist was arrested, and it was only because of the influence of his friends in high position that the punishment which Nicholas I. inflicted upon him was limited to exile from Moscow and a forced residence on his estate in the country. Were it not for these influences, Turguéneff very probably would have been exiled, like Púshkin and Lérmontoff, either to the Caucasus or to Siberia.

The police of Nicholas I. were not wrong when they attributed to Gógol a great influence upon the minds of Russians. His works circulated immensely in manuscript copies. In my childhood we used to copy the second volume of Dead Souls—the whole book from beginning to end, as well as parts from the first volume. Everyone considered then this work as a formidable indictment against serfdom; and so it was. In this respect Gógol was the forerunner of the literary movement against serfdom which began in Russia with such force, a very few years later, during and especially after the Crimean War. Gógol never expressed his personal ideas about this subject, but the life-pictures of serf-owners which he gave and their relations to their serfs—especially the waste of the labour of the serfs—were a stronger indictment that if Gógol had related facts of brutal behaviour of landlords towards their men. In fact, it is impossible to read Dead Souls without being impressed by the fact that serfdom was an institution which had produced its own doom. Drinking, gluttony, waste of the serf’s labour in order to keep hundreds of retainers, or for things as useless as the sentimentalist Maníloff’s bridges, were characteristic of the landlords; and when Gógol wanted to represent one landlord who, at least, obtained some pecuniary advantage from the forced labour of his serfs and enriched himself, he had to produce a landlord who was not a Russian: in fact, among the Russian landlords such a man would have been a most extraordinary occurrence.

As to the literary influence of Gógol, it was immense, and it continues down to the present day. Gógol was not a deep thinker, but he was a very great artist. His art was pure realism, but it was imbued with the desire of making for mankind something good and great. When he wrote the most comical things, it was not merely for the pleasure of laughing at human weaknesses, but he also tried to awaken the desire of something better and greater, and he always achieved that aim. Art, in Gógol’s conception, is a torch-bearer which indicates a higher ideal; and it was certainly this high conception of art which induced him to give such an incredible amount of time to the working out of the schemes of his works, and afterwards, to the most careful elaboration of every line which he published.

The generation of the Decembrists surely would have introduced social and political ideas in the novel. But that generation had perished, and Gógol was now the first to introduce the social element into Russian literature, so as to give it its prominent and dominating position. While it remains an open question whether realism in the Russian novel does not date from Púshkin, rather even than from Gógol—this, in fact, is the view of both Turguéneff and Tolstóy—there is yet no doubt that it was Gógol’s writings which introduced into Russian literature the social element, and social criticism based upon the analysis of the conditions within Russia itself. The peasant novels of Grigoróvitch, Turguéneff’s Sportsman’s Notebook, and the first works of Dostoyévskiy were a direct outcome of Gógol’s initiative.

Realism in art was much discussed some time ago, in connection chiefly with the first writings of Zola; but we, Russians, who had had Gógol, and knew realism in its best form, could not fall in with the views of the French realists. We saw in Zola a tremendous amount of the same romanticism which he combated; and in his realism, such as it appeared in his writings of the first period, we saw a step backwards from the realism of Balzac. For us, realism could not be limited to a mere anatomy of society: it had to have a higher background; the realistic description had to be made subservient to an idealistic aim. Still less could we understand realism as a description only of the lowest aspects of life, because, to limit one’s observations to the lowest aspects only, is not to be a realist. Real life has beside and within its lowest manifestations its highest ones as well. Degeneracy is not the sole nor dominant feature of modern society, if we look at it as a whole. Consequently, the artist who limits his observations to the lowest and most degenerate aspects only, and not for a special purpose, does not make us understand that he explores only one small corner of life. Such an artist does not conceive life as it is: he knows but one aspect of it, and this is not the most interesting one.

Realism in France was certainly a necessary protest, partly against unbridled Romanticism, but chiefly against the elegant art which glided on the surface and refused to glance at the often most inelegant motives of elegant acts—the art which purposely ignored the often horrible consequences of the so-called correct and elegant life. For Russia, this protest was not necessary. Since Gógol, art could not be limited to any class of society. It was bound to embody them all, to treat them all realistically, and to penetrate beneath the surface of social relations. Therefore there was no need of the exaggeration which in France was a necessary and sound reaction. There was no need, moreover, to fall into extremes in order to free art from dull moralisation. Our great realist, Gógol, had already shown to his followers how realism can be put to the service of higher aims, without losing anything of its penetration or ceasing to be a true reproduction of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] There is a good English translation of The Inspector-General, from which, with slight revision, I take the following passage.

The Postmaster (reads): “I hasten to inform you, my dear friend, of the wonderful things which have happened to me. On my way hither an infantry captain had cleared me out completely, so that the innkeeper here intended to send me to jail, when, all of a sudden, thanks to my St. Petersburg appearance and costume, all the town took me for a Governor-General. Now I am staying at the Gorodníchiys’! I have a splendid time, and flirt awfully with both his wife and his daughter.... Do you remember how hard up we were, taking our meals where we could get them, without paying for them, and how one day, in a tea-shop, the pastry-cook collared me for having eaten his pastry to the account of the king of England?[13] It is quite different now. They all lend me money, as much as I care for. They are an awful set of originals: you would split of laughter. I know you write sometimes for the papers—put them into your literature. To begin with, the Governor is as stupid as an old horse....”

The Governor (interrupting): That cannot be there! There is no such thing in the letter.

Postmaster (showing the letter): Read it, then, yourself.

Governor (reads): “As an old horse....” Impossible! You must have added that.

Postmaster: How could I?

The Guests: Read! read!

The Postmaster (continues to read): “The Governor is as stupid as an old horse”....

Governor: The deuce! Now he must repeat it—as if it were not standing there already!

Postmaster (continues reading): Hm, Hm, yes! “an old horse. The postmaster is also a good man.”... Well, he also makes an improper remark about me....

Governor: Read it then.

Postmaster: Is it necessary?

Governor: The deuce! once we have begun to read it, we must read it all through.

Artémy Filípovitch (head of the philanthropic institutions): Permit me, please, I shall read (puts on his spectacles and reads): “The postmaster is quite like the old porter in our office, and the rascal must drink equally hard.”...

Postmaster: A naughty boy, who ought to be flogged—that’s all!

Art. Fil. (continues reading): “The head of the philanthropic in—in....”

Korobkin: Why do you stop now?

Art. Fil.: Bad writing. But, after all, it is quite evident that he is a scoundrel.

Korobkin: Give me the letter, please. I think, I have better eyes (tries to take the letter).

Art. Fil. (does not give it): No use at all. This passage can be omitted. Further on everything is quite readable.

Korobkin: Let me have it. I shall see all about it.

Art. Fil.: I also can read it. I tell you that after that passage everything is readable.

Postm.: No, no, read it all. Everything was read so far.

The Guests: Artémy Filípovitch, pass the letter over. (To Korobkin) Read it, read it!

Art. Fil.: All right, all right. (He passes the letter.) There it is; but wait a moment (he covers a part of it with his finger). Begin here (all surround him).

Postma.: Go on. Nonsense, read it all.

Korobkin (reads): “The head of the philanthropic institutions resembles a pig that wears a cap”....

Art. Fil. (to the audience): Not witty at all! A pig that wears a cap! Have you ever seen a pig wearing a cap?

Korobkin (continues reading): “The inspector of the schools smells of onions all through!”

The Inspector (to the audience): Upon my honour, I never touch onions.

The Judge (apart): Thank God, there is nothing about me.

Korobkin (reading): “The judge”....

The Judge: There!... (aloud): Well, gentlemen, I think the letter is much too long, and quite uninteresting—why the deuce should we go on reading that nonsense?

Insp. of Schools: No! no!

Postm.: No!—go on!

Art. Fil.: No, it must be read.