LANDMARKS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

• With the Russians in Manchuria
• A Year in Russia
• Russian Essays and Stories

LANDMARKS IN
RUSSIAN LITERATURE

BY
MAURICE BARING

SECOND EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

DEDICATED
TO
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

PREFACE

The chapters in this book on Tolstoy and Tourgeniev, and those on Chekov and Gogol have appeared before. That on Tolstoy and Tourgeniev in The Quarterly Review; those on Chekov and Gogol in The New Quarterly; my thanks are due to the Editors and Proprietors concerned for their kindness in allowing me to reprint these chapters here.

The chapter on Russian Characteristics appeared in St. George’s Magazine; the rest of the book is new. In writing it I consulted, besides many books and articles in the Russian language, the following:

The Works of Turgeniev. Translated by Constance Garnett. Fifteen vols. London: Heinemann, 1906.

The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy. Translated and edited by Leo Wiener. Twenty-four vols. London: Dent, 1904-5.

Le Roman Russe. By the Vicomte E. M. de Vogüé. Paris: Plon, 1897.

Tolstoy as Man and Artist: with an Essay on Dostoievski. By Dimitri Merejkowski. London: Constable, 1902.[1]

Ivan Turgeniev: la Vie et l’Œuvre. By Émile Haumant. Paris: Armand Colin, 1906.

The Life of Tolstoy. First Fifty Years. By Aylmer Maude. London: Constable, 1908.

A Literary History of Russia. By Prof. A. Brückner. Edited by Ellis H. Minns. Translated by H. Havelock. London and Leipsic: Fisher Unwin, 1908.

Realities and Ideals of Russian Literature. By Prince Kropotkin.

Russian Poetry and Progress. By Mrs. Newmarch. John Lane.

By far the best estimate of Tolstoy’s work I have come across in England in the last few years was a brilliant article published in the Literary Supplement of the Times, I think in 1907, which, it is to be hoped, will be republished.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This is an abridgment of a larger book by the author.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A book dealing with the literature of a foreign country appeals to a double audience: the narrow circle of people who are intimately familiar with that literature in its original tongue, and the large public which is imperfectly acquainted even with translations of some of its books. One of these audiences must necessarily be sacrificed. For if you address yourself exclusively to the specialists, the larger public will be but faintly interested; while if you have the larger public in view alone, the narrower circle of those who are familiar with the language will hear nothing from you which they do not already know too well. In the case of a literature such as Russian, it is obvious which audience has the claim to the greater consideration; but while this book is addressed to those who are interested in but not intimately familiar with Russian literature, I entertain the hope that these essays may not prove entirely uninteresting to the closer students of Russian. I have tried to make a compromise, and while especially addressing myself to the majority, not to lose sight of the minority altogether.

The standpoint from which I approach Russian literature is less that of the scholar than of an admiring and sympathetic friend. I have tried to understand what the Russians themselves think about their own literature, and in some manner to reflect their point of view as it struck me either in their books or in conversation with many men and women of many classes throughout several years.

It has always seemed to me that there are two ways of writing about a foreign literature: from the outside and from the inside. Take a language like French, for instance, and the study of French poetry in particular. Many English students of French poetry seem to me to start from the point of view that although much French verse has many excellent qualities, those qualities which are peculiarly French and which the French themselves admire most are not worth admiring. Thus it is that we have had many excellent critics telling us that although the French poetry of the Renaissance is admirable and the French Romantic epoch produced men of astounding genius, yet the poets of another sort, whom the French set up on a permanent pinnacle as models of classic perfection, such as Racine or La Fontaine, are not poets at all. Some critics have even gone further, and have maintained that admirable as the French language is as an instrument for writing prose, it cannot properly be used as a vehicle for writing poetry, and that French poetry cannot be considered as being in the same category or on the same footing as the verse of other nations. This is what I call the outside view, and I am not only not persuaded of its truth, but I am convinced that it is false, for two reasons:—

First, because I cannot help thinking that the natives of a country must be the best judges of their own tongue and of its literature, and that foreign critics, however acute, may fail to appreciate certain shades of meaning and sound which particularly appeal to the native—for instance, I am sure it is more difficult for a foreigner to appreciate the music of Milton’s diction than for an Englishman. Secondly, since I learnt French at the same time as I learnt English, and became familiar with French verse long before I was introduced to the works of English poets, from my childhood up to the present day French poetry has seemed to me to be just as beautiful as the poetry of any other country, and the verse of Racine as musical as that of Milton. I have, moreover, sometimes suspected that the severe sentences I have seen passed on the French classics by English critics were perhaps due to imperfect familiarity with the language in question, and that it even seemed possible that in condemning French verse they were ignorant of the French laws of metre and scansion; such ignorance would certainly prove a serious obstacle to proper appreciation.

This digression is to make clear what I mean when I say that I have tried to approach my subject from the inside; that is to say, I have tried to put myself into the skin of a Russian, and to look at the literature of Russia with his eyes, and then to explain to my fellow-countrymen as clearly as possible what I have seen. I do not say I have succeeded, but I have been greatly encouraged in the task by having received appreciative thanks for my former efforts in this direction from Russians who are, in my opinion, the only critics competent to judge whether what I have written about their people and their books hits the mark or not.

One of the great difficulties in writing studies of various Russian writers is the paradoxical thread that runs through the Russian character. Russia is the land of paradoxes. The Russian character and temperament are baffling, owing to the paradoxical elements which are found united in them. It is for this reason that a series of studies dealing with different aspects of the Russian character often have the appearance of being a series of contradictory statements. I have therefore in the first chapter of this book stated what I consider to be the chief paradoxical elements of the Russian character. It is the conflicting nature of these elements which accounts for the seemingly contradictory qualities that we meet with in Russian literature. For instance, there is a passive element in the Russian nature; there is also something unbridled, a spirit which breaks all bounds of self-control and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy. The result is that at one moment one is pointing out the matter-of-fact side of the Russian genius which clings to the earth and abhors extravagance; and at another time one is discoursing on the passion certain Russian novelists have for making their characters wallow in abstract discussions; or, again, the cheerfulness of Gogol has to be reconciled with the “inspissated gloom” of certain other writers. All this makes it easy for a critic to bring the charge of inconsistency against a student whose object is to provide certain side-lights on certain striking examples, rather than a comprehensive view of the whole, a task which is beyond the scope and powers of the present writer.

The student of Russian literature who wishes for a comprehensive view of the whole of Russian literature and of its historic significance and development, cannot do better than read Professor Brückner’s solid and brilliant Literary History of Russia, which is admirably translated into English.

The object of my book is to interest the reader in Russia and Russian literature, and to enable him to make up his mind as to whether he wishes to seek after a more intimate knowledge of the subject.

The authors whose work forms the subject of this book belong to the period which began in the fifties and ended before the Russo-Japanese War. The work of Tchekov represents the close of that epoch which began with Gogol. After Tchekov the dawn of a new era was marked by the startling advent of Maxim Gorky into Russian literature. Then came the war, and with it a torrent of new writers, of new thoughts, of new schools, of new theories of art. The most remarkable of these writers is no doubt Andreev; but in order to discuss his work as well as that of other writers who followed in his train, it would be necessary to write another book. The student of Russian literature will notice that I have omitted many Russian authors who are well known in the epoch which I have chosen. I have omitted them for reasons which I have already stated at the beginning of this Introduction, namely, that there is not in England a large enough circle of readers interested in Russian literature to the extent of wishing to read about its less well-known writers. I think the authors I have chosen are typical of the generations they represent, and I hope that this book may have the effect of leading readers from books about Russia and Russian literature, to the country itself and its books, so that they may be able to see with their own eyes and to correct the impressions which they have received secondhand.

LANDMARKS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

CHAPTER I
RUSSIAN CHARACTERISTICS

The difficulty in explaining anything to do with Russia to an English public is that confusion is likely to arise owing to the terms used being misunderstood. For instance, if one describes a Russian officer, a Russian bureaucrat, a Russian public servant, or a Russian schoolmaster, the reader involuntarily makes a mental comparison with corresponding people in his own country, or in other European countries where he has travelled. He necessarily fails to remember that there are certain vital differences between Russians and people of other countries, which affect the whole question, and which make the Russian totally different from the corresponding Englishman. I wish before approaching the work of Russian writers, to sketch a few of the main characteristics which lie at the root of the Russian temperament by which Russian literature is profoundly affected.

The principal fact which has struck me with regard to the Russian character, is a characteristic which was once summed up by Professor Milioukov thus: “A Russian,” he said, “lacks the cement of hypocrisy.” This cement, which plays so important a part in English public and private life, is totally lacking in the Russian character. The Russian character is plastic; the Russian can understand everything. You can mould him any way you please. He is like wet clay, yielding and malleable; he is passive; he bows his head and gives in before the decrees of Fate and of Providence. At the same time, it would be a mistake to say that this is altogether a sign of weakness. There is a kind of toughness in the Russian character, an irreducible obstinacy which makes for strength; otherwise the Russian Empire would not exist. But where the want of the cement of hypocrisy is most noticeable, is in the personal relations of Russians towards their fellow-creatures. They do not in the least mind openly confessing things of which people in other countries are ashamed; they do not mind admitting to dishonesty, immorality, or cowardice, if they happen to feel that they are saturated with these defects; and they feel that their fellow-creatures will not think the worse of them on this account, because they know that their fellow-creatures will understand. The astounding indulgence of the Russians arises out of this infinite capacity for understanding.

Another point: This absence of hypocrisy causes them to have an impatience of cant and of convention. They will constantly say: “Why not?” They will not recognise the necessity of drawing the line somewhere, they will not accept as something binding the conventional morality and the artificial rules of conduct which knit together our society with a bond of steel. They may admit the expediency of social laws, but they will never prate of the laws of any society being divine; they will merely admit that they are convenient. Therefore, if we go to the root of this matter, it comes to this: that the Russians are more broadly and widely human than the people of other European or Eastern countries, and, being more human, their capacity of understanding is greater, for their extraordinary quickness of apprehension comes from the heart rather than from the head. They are the most humane and the most naturally kind of all the peoples of Europe, or, to put it differently and perhaps more accurately, I should say that there is more humanity and more kindness in Russia than in any other European country. This may startle the reader; he may think of the lurid accounts in the newspapers of massacres, brutal treatment of prisoners, and various things of this kind, and be inclined to doubt my statement. As long as the world exists there will always be a certain amount of cruelty in the conduct of human beings. My point is this: that there is less in Russia than in other countries, but the trouble up to the last two years has been that all excesses of any kind on the part of officials were unchecked and uncontrolled. Therefore, if any man who had any authority over any other man happened to be brutal, his brutality had a far wider scope and far richer opportunities than that of a corresponding overseer in another country.

During the last three years Russia has been undergoing a violent evolutionary process of change, what in other countries has been called a revolution; but compared with similar phases in other countries, and taking into consideration the size of the Russian Empire, and the various nationalities which it contains, I maintain that the proportion of excesses has been comparatively less. There are other factors in the question which should also be borne in mind; firstly, that politically Russia is about a century behind other European countries, and the second is that Russians accept the fact that a man who does wrong deserves punishment, with a kind of Oriental fatality, although the pity which is inherent in them causes them to have a horror of capital punishment.

Now, let us take the first question, and just imagine for a moment what the treatment of the poor would be in England were there no such thing as a habeas corpus. Imagine what the position of the police would be, if it held a position of arbitrary dominion; if nobody were responsible; if any policeman could do what he chose, with no further responsibility than that towards his superior officers. I do not hesitate to say that were such a state of things to exist in England, the position of the poor would be intolerable. Now, the position of the poor in Russia is not intolerable; it is bad, owing to the evils inseparable from poverty, drink, and the want of control enjoyed by public servants. But it is not intolerable. Were it intolerable, the whole of the Russian poor, who number ninety millions, would have long ago risen to a man. They have not done so because their position is not intolerable; and the reason of this is, that the evils to which I have alluded are to a certain extent mitigated by the good-nature and kindness inherent in the Russian temperament, instead of being aggravated by an innate brutality and cruelty such as we meet with in Latin and other races.

Again, closely connected with any political system which is backward, you will always find in any country a certain brutality in the matter of punishments. Perhaps the cause of this—which is the reason why torture was employed in the Middle Ages, and why it is employed in China at the present day—is that only a small percentage of the criminal classes are ever arrested; therefore when a criminal is caught, his treatment is often unduly severe. If you read, for instance, the sentences of corporal punishment, etc., which were passed in England in the eighteenth century by county judges, or of the punishments which were the rule in the Duke of Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War, they will make your hair stand on end by their incredible brutality; and England in the eighteenth century was politically more advanced than Russia is at the present day.

With regard to the second point, the attitude of Russians towards the question of punishments displays a curious blend of opinion. While they are more indulgent than any other people when certain vices and defects are concerned, they are ruthless in enforcing and accepting the necessity of punishment in the case of certain other criminal offences. For instance, they are completely indulgent with regard to any moral delinquencies, but unswervingly stern in certain other matters; and although they would often be inclined to let off a criminal, saying: “Why should he be punished?” at the same time if he is punished, and severely punished, they will accept the matter as a part of the inevitable system that governs the world. On the other hand, they are indulgent and tolerant where moral delinquencies which affect the man himself and not the community are concerned; that is to say, they will not mind how often or how violently a man gets drunk, because the matter affects only himself; but they will bitterly resent a man stealing horses, because thereby the whole community is affected.

This attitude of mind is reflected in the Russian Code of Laws. The Russian Penal Code, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu points out in his classic book on Russia, is the most lenient in Europe. But the trouble is, as the Liberal members of the Duma are constantly repeating, not that the laws in Russia are bad, but that they are overridden by the arbitrary conduct of individual officials. However, I do not wish in this article to dwell on the causes of political discontent in Russia, or on the evils of the bureaucratic régime. My object is simply to point out certain characteristics of the Russian race, and one of these characteristics is the leniency of the punishment laid down by law for offences which in other countries are dealt with drastically and severely; murder, for instance. Capital punishment was abolished in Russia as long ago as 1753 by the Empress Elizabeth; corporal punishment subsisted only among the peasants, administered by themselves (and not by a magistrate) according to their own local administration, until it was abolished by the present Emperor in 1904. So that until the revolutionary movement began, cases of capital punishment, which only occurred in virtue of martial law, were rare, and from 1866 to 1903 only 114 men suffered the penalty of death throughout the whole of the Russian Empire, including the outlying districts such as Caucasus, Transbaikalia, and Turkestan;[2] and even at the present moment, when the country is still practically governed by martial law, which was established in order to cope with the revolutionary movement, you can in Russia kill a man and only receive a few years’ imprisonment. It is the contrast of the lenient treatment meted out to non-political prisoners with the severity exercised towards political offenders which strikes the Russian politician to-day, and it is of this contradiction that he so bitterly complains. The fact, nevertheless, remains—in spite of the cases, however numerous, which arose out of the extraordinary situation created by the revolutionary movement, that the sentence of death, meted out by the judicial court, is in itself abhorrent to the Russian character.

I will now give a few minor instances illustrating the indulgent attitude of the Russian character towards certain moral delinquencies. In a regiment which I came across in Manchuria during the war there were two men; one was conscientious, brave to the verge of heroism, self-sacrificing, punctilious in the performance of his duty, and exacting in the demands he made on others as to the fulfilment of theirs, untiringly energetic, competent in every way, but severe and uncompromising. There was another man who was incurably lax in the performance of his duty, not scrupulously honest where the Government money was concerned, incompetent, but as kind as a human being can be. I once heard a Russian doctor who was attached to this regiment discussing and comparing the characters of the two men, and, after weighing the pros and cons, he concluded that as a man the latter was superior. Dishonesty in dealings with the public money seemed to him an absolutely trifling fault. The unswerving performance of duty, and all the great military qualities which he noted in the former, did not seem to him to count in the balance against the great kindness of heart possessed by the latter; and most of the officers agreed with him. It never seemed to occur to these men that any one set of qualities, such as efficiency, conscientiousness, or honesty, were more indispensable, or in any way superior to any other set of qualities. They just noticed the absence of them in others, or, as often happened, in themselves, and thought they were amply compensated for by the presence of other qualities, such as good-nature or amiability. And one notices in Russian literature that authors such as Dostoievsky are not content with showing us the redeeming points of a merely bad character, that is to say, of a man fundamentally good, but who indulges in vice or in crime; but they will take pleasure in showing you the redeeming points of a character which at first sight appears to be radically mean and utterly despicable. The aim of these authors seems to be to insist that, just as nobody is indispensable, so nobody is superfluous. There is no such thing as a superfluous man; and any man, however worthless, miserable, despicable and mean he may seem to be, has just as much right to be understood as any one else; and they show that, when he is understood, he is not, taking him as a whole, any worse than his fellow-creatures.

Another characteristic which strikes one in Russian literature, and still more in Russian life, especially if one has mingled in the lower classes, is the very deeply rooted sense of pity which the Russians possess. An Englishman who is lame, and whom I met in Russia, told me that he had experienced there a treatment such as he had never met before in any other country. The people, and especially the poor, noticed his lameness, and, guessing what would be difficult for him to do, came to his aid and helped him.

In the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg you rarely see beggars beg in vain; and I have observed, travelling third class in trains and in steamers, that when the poor came to beg bread for food from the poor, they were never sent empty away. During the war I always found the soldiers ready to give me food, however little they had for themselves, in circumstances when they would have been quite justified in sending me about my business as a pestilential nuisance and camp-follower. It is impossible for a man to starve in Russia. He is perfectly certain to find some one who will give him food for the asking. In Siberia the peasants in the villages put bread on their window-sills, in case any fugitive prisoners should be passing by. This fundamental goodness of heart is the most important fact in the Russian nature; it, and the expression of it in their literature, is the greatest contribution which they have made to the history of the world. It is probably the cause of all their weakness. For the defects indispensable to such qualities are slackness, and the impossibility of conceiving self-discipline to be a necessity, or of recognising the conventional rules and prejudices which make for solidity, and which are, as Professor Milioukov said, as cement is to a building.

The result of the absence of this hard and binding cement of prejudice and discipline is that it is very difficult to attain a standard of efficiency in matters where efficiency is indispensable. For instance, in war. In a regiment with which I lived for a time during the war there was a young officer who absolutely insisted on the maintenance of a high standard of efficiency. He insisted on his orders being carried out to the letter; his fellow-officers thought he was rather mad. One day we had arrived in a village, and one of the younger officers had ordered the horses to be put up in the yard facing the house in which we were to live. Presently the officer to whom I have alluded arrived, and ordered the horses to be taken out and put into a separate yard, as he considered the arrangement which he found on his arrival to be insanitary—which it was. He went away, and the younger officer did not dream of carrying out his order.

“What is the use?” he said, “the horses may just as well stay where they are.”

They considered this man to be indulging in an unnecessary pose, but he was not, according to our ideas, in the least a formalist or a lover of red tape; he merely insisted on what he considered to be an irreducible minimum of discipline, the result being that he was a square peg in a round hole. Moreover, when people committed, or commit (and this is true in any department of public life in Russia), a glaring offence, or leave undone an important part of their duty, it is very rare that they are dealt with drastically; they are generally threatened with punishment which ends in platonic censure. And this fact, combined with a bureaucratic system, has dangerous results, for the official often steps beyond the limits of his duty and takes upon himself to commit lawless acts, and to exercise unlawful and arbitrary functions, knowing perfectly well that he can do so with impunity, and that he will not be punished. And one of the proofs that a new era is now beginning in Russia is a series of phenomena never before witnessed, and which have occurred not long ago—namely, the punishment and dismissal of guilty officials, such as, for instance, that of Gurko, who was dismissed from his post in the Government for having been responsible for certain dishonest dealings in the matter of the Famine Relief.

Of course such indulgence, or rather the slackness resulting from it, is not universal. Otherwise the whole country would go to pieces. And yet so far from going to pieces, even through a revolution things jogged on somehow or other. For against every square yard of slackness there is generally a square inch of exceptional capacity, and a square foot of dogged efficiency, and thus the balance is restored. The incompetency of a Stoessel, and a host of others, is counterbalanced not only by the brilliant energy of a Kondratenko, but by the hard work of thousands of unknown men. And this is true throughout all public life in Russia. At the same time, the happy-go-lucky element, the feeling of “What does it matter?” of what they call nichevo, is the preponderating quality; and it is only so far counterbalanced by sterner qualities as to make the machine go on. This accounts also for the apparent weakness of the revolutionary element in Russia. The ranks of these people, which at one moment appear to be so formidable, at the next moment seem to have scattered to the four winds of heaven. They appear to give in and to accept, to submit and be resigned to fate. But there is nevertheless an undying passive resistance; and at the bottom of the Russian character, whether that character be employed in revolutionary or in other channels, there is an obstinate grit of resistance. Again, one is met in Russian history, from the days of Peter the Great down to the present day, with isolated instances of exceptional energy and of powers of organisation, such as Souvorov, Skobelieff, Kondratenko, Kilkov, and, to take a less known instance, Kroustalieff (who played a leading part in organising the working classes during the great strike in 1905).

The way in which troops were poured into Manchuria during the war across a single line, which was due to the brilliant organisation of Prince Kilkov, is in itself a signal instance of organisation and energy in the face of great material difficulties. The station at Liaoyang was during the war under the command of a man whose name I have forgotten, but who showed the same qualities of energy and resource. On the day Liaoyang was evacuated, and while the station was being shelled, he managed to get off every train safely, and to leave nothing behind. There were many such instances which are at present little known, to be set against the incompetence and mismanagement of which one hears so much.

It is perhaps this blend of opposite qualities, this mixture of softness and slackness and happy-go-lucky insouciance (all of which qualities make a thing as pliant as putty and as yielding as dough) with infinite capacity for taking pains, and the inspiring energy and undefeated patience in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, which makes the Russian character difficult to understand. You have, on the one hand, the man who bows his head before an obstacle and says that it does not after all matter very much; and, on the other hand, the man who with a few straws succeeds in making a great palace of bricks. Peter the Great was just such a man, and Souvorov and Kondratenko were the same in kind, although less in degree. And again, you have the third type, the man who, though utterly defeated, and apparently completely submissive, persists in resisting—the passive resister whose obstinacy is unlimited, and whose influence in matters such as the revolutionary propaganda is incalculable.

It has been constantly said that Russia is the land of paradoxes, and there is perhaps no greater paradox than the mixture in the Russian character of obstinacy and weakness, and the fact that the Russian is sometimes inclined to throw up the sponge instantly, while at others he becomes himself a tough sponge, which, although pulled this way and that, is never pulled to pieces. He is undefeated and indefatigable in spite of enormous odds, and thus we are confronted in Russian history with men as energetic as Peter the Great, and as slack as Alexeieff the Viceroy.

People talk of the waste of Providence in never making a ruby without a flaw, but is it not rather the result of an admirable economy, which never deals out a portion of coffee without a certain admixture of chicory?

FOOTNOTES:

[2] See Tagantseff, Russian Criminal Law.

CHAPTER II
REALISM OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

The moment a writer nowadays mentions the word “realism” he risks the danger of being told that he is a disciple of a particular school, and that he is bent on propagating a peculiar and exclusive theory of art. If, however, Russian literature is to be discussed at all, the word “realism” cannot be avoided. So it will be as well to explain immediately and clearly what I mean when I assert that the main feature of both Russian prose and Russian verse is its closeness to nature, its love of reality, which for want of a better word one can only call realism. When the word “realism” is employed with regard to literature, it gives rise to two quite separate misunderstandings: this is unavoidable, because the word has been used to denote special schools and theories of art which have made a great deal of noise both in France and England and elsewhere.

The first misunderstanding arises from the use of the word by a certain French school of novelists who aimed at writing scientific novels in which the reader should be given slices of raw life; and these novelists strove by an accumulation of detail to produce the effect of absolute reality. The best known writers of this French school did not succeed in doing this, although they achieved striking results of a different character. For instance, Emile Zola was entirely successful when he wrote prose epics on subjects such as life in a mine, life in a huge shop, or life during a great war; that is to say, he was poetically successful when he painted with a broad brush and set great crowds in motion. He produced matchless panoramas, but the effect of them at their best was a poetic, romantic effect. When he tried to be realistic, and scientifically realistic, when he endeavoured to say everything by piling detail on detail, he merely succeeded in being tedious and disgusting. And so far from telling the whole truth, he produced an effect of distorted exaggeration such as one receives from certain kinds of magnifying and distorting mirrors.

The second misunderstanding with regard to the word “realism” is this. Certain people think that if you say an author strives to attain an effect of truth and reality in his writings, you must necessarily mean that he is without either the wish or the power to select, and that his work is therefore chaotic. Not long ago, in a book of short sketches, I included a very short and inadequate paper on certain aspects of the Russian stage; and in mentioning Tchekov, the Russian dramatist, I made the following statement: “The Russian stage simply aims at one thing: to depict everyday life, not exclusively the brutality of everyday life, nor the tremendous catastrophes befalling human beings, nor to devise intricate problems and far-fetched cases of conscience in which human beings might possibly be entangled. It simply aims at presenting glimpses of human beings as they really are, and by means of such glimpses it opens out avenues and vistas into their lives.” I added further that I considered such plays would be successful in any country.

A reviewer, commenting on this in an interesting article, said that these remarks revealed the depth of my error with regard to realism. “As if the making of such plays,” wrote the reviewer, “were not the perpetual aim of dramatists! But a dramatist would be putting chaos and not real life on the stage if he presented imitations of unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments. The idea which binds the drama together, an idea derived by reason from experience of life at large, is the most real and lifelike part in it, if the drama is a good one.”

Now I am as well aware as this reviewer, or as any one else, that it is the perpetual aim of dramatists to make such plays. But it is an aim which they often fail to achieve. For instance, we have had, during the last thirty years in England and France, many successful and striking plays in which the behaviour of the characters although effective from a theatrical point of view, is totally unlike the behaviour of men and women in real life. Again, when I wrote of the Russian stage, I never for a moment suggested that the Russian dramatist did, or that any dramatist should, present imitations of unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments. As my sketch was a short one, I was not able to go into the question in full detail, but I should have thought that if one said that a play was true to life, and at the same time theatrically and dramatically successful, that is to say, interesting to a large audience, an ordinary reader would have taken for granted (as many of my readers did take for granted) that in the work of such dramatists there must necessarily have been selection.

Later on in this book I shall deal at some length with the plays of Anton Tchekov, and in discussing that writer, I hope to make it clear that his work, so far from presenting imitations of unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments, are imitations of selected but real people, doing selected but probable things at selected but interesting moments. But the difference between Tchekov and most English and French dramatists (save those of the quite modern school) is, that the moments which Tchekov selects appear at first sight to be trivial. His genius consists in the power of revealing the dramatic significance of the seemingly trivial. It stands to reason, as I shall try to point out later on, that the more realistic your play, the more it is true to life; the less obvious action there is in it, the greater must be the skill of the dramatist; the surer his art, the more certain his power of construction, the nicer his power of selection.

Mr. Max Beerbohm once pointed this out by an apt illustration. “The dramatist,” he said, “who deals in heroes, villains, buffoons, queer people who are either doing or suffering either tremendous or funny things, has a very valuable advantage over the playwright who deals merely in humdrum you and me. The dramatist has his material as a springboard. The adramatist must leap as best he can on the hard high road, the adramatist must be very much an athlete.”

That is just it: many of the modern (and ancient) Russian playwriters are adramatists. But they are extremely athletic; and so far from their work being chaotic, they sometimes give evidence, as in the case of Tchekov, of a supreme mastery over the construction and architectonics of drama, as well as of an unerring instinct for what will be telling behind footlights, although at first sight their choice does not seem to be obviously dramatic.

Therefore, everything I have said so far can be summed up in two statements: Firstly, that Russian literature, because it deals with realism, has nothing in common with the work of certain French “Naturalists,” by whose work the word “realism” has achieved so wide a notoriety; secondly, Russian literature, although it is realistic, is not necessarily chaotic, and contains many supreme achievements in the art of selection. But I wish to discuss the peculiar quality of Russian realism, because it appears to me that it is this quality which differentiates Russian literature from the literature of other countries.

I have not dealt in this book with Russian poets, firstly, because the number of readers who are familiar with Russian poetry in its original tongue is limited; and, secondly, because it appears to me impossible to discuss Russian poetry, if one is forced to deal in translations, since no translation, however good, can give the reader an idea either of the music, the atmosphere, or the charm of the original. But it is in Russian poetry that the quality of Russian realism is perhaps most clearly made manifest. Any reader familiar with German literature will, I think, agree that if one compares French or English poetry with German poetry, and French and English Romanticism with German Romanticism, one is conscious, when one approaches the work of the Germans, of entering into a more sober and more quiet dominion; one leaves behind one the exuberance of England: “the purple patches” of a Shakespeare, the glowing richness of a Keats, the soaring rainbow fancies of a Shelley, the wizard horizons of a Coleridge. One also leaves behind one the splendid sword-play and gleaming decision of the French: the clarions of Corneille, the harps and flutes of Racine, the great many-piped organ of Victor Hugo, the stormy pageants of Musset, the gorgeous lyricism of Flaubert, the jewelled dreams of Gautier, and all the colour and the pomp of the Parnassians. One leaves all these things behind, and one steps into a world of quiet skies, rustling leaves, peaceful meadows, and calm woods, where the birds twitter cheerfully and are answered by the plaintive notes of pipe or reed, or interrupted by the homely melody, sometimes cheerful and sometimes sad, of the wandering fiddler.

In this country, it is true, we have visions and vistas of distant hills and great brooding waters, of starlit nights and magical twilights; in this country, it is also true that we hear the echoes of magic horns, the footfall of the fairies, the tinkling hammers of the sedulous Kobolds, and the champing and the neighing of the steeds of Chivalry. But there is nothing wildly fantastic, nor portentously exuberant, nor gorgeously dazzling; nothing tempestuous, unbridled, or extreme. When the Germans have wished to express such things, they have done so in their music; they certainly have not done so in their poetry. What they have done in their poetry, and what they have done better than any one else, is to express in the simplest of all words the simplest of all thoughts and feelings. They have spoken of first love, of spring and the flowers, the smiles and tears of children, the dreams of youth and the musings of old age—with a simplicity, a homeliness no writers of any other country have ever excelled. And when they deal with the supernatural, with ghosts, fairies, legends, deeds of prowess or phantom lovers, there is a quaint homeliness about the recital of such things, as though they were being told by the fireside in a cottage, or being sung on the village green to the accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy. To many Germans the phantasy of a Shelley or of a Victor Hugo is essentially alien and unpalatable. They feel as though they were listening to men who are talking too loud and too wildly, and they merely wish to get away or to stop their ears. Again, poets like Keats or Gautier often produce on them the impression that they are listening to sensuous and meaningless echoes.

Now Russian poetry is a step farther on in this same direction. The reader who enters the kingdom of Russian poetry, after having visited those of France and England, experiences what he feels in entering the German region, but still more so. The region of Russian poetry is still more earthy. Even the mysticism of certain German Romantic writers is alien to it. The German poetic country is quiet and sober, it is true; but in its German forests you hear, as I have said, the noise of those hoofs which are bearing riders to the unknown country. Also you have in German literature, allegory and pantheistic dreams which are foreign to the Russian poetic temperament, and therefore unreflected in Russian poetry.

The Russian poetical temperament, and, consequently, Russian poetry, does not only closely cling to the solid earth, but it is based on and saturated with sound common sense, with a curious matter-of-fact quality. And this common sense with which the greatest Russian poet, Pushkin, is so thoroughly impregnated, is as foreign to German Schwärmerei as it is to French rhetoric, or the imaginative exuberance of England. In Russian poetry of the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of the enthusiasm kindled in certain Russian poets by the romantic scenery of the Caucasus, there is very little feeling for nature. Nature, in the poetry of Pushkin, is more or less conventional: almost the only flower mentioned is the rose, almost the only bird the nightingale. And although certain Russian poets adopted the paraphernalia and the machinery of Romanticism (largely owing to the influence of Byron), their true nature, their fundamental sense, keeps on breaking out. Moreover, there is an element in Russian Romanticism of passive obedience, of submission to authority, which arises partly from the passive quality in all Russians, and partly from the atmosphere of the age and the political régime of the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus it is that no Russian Romantic poet would have ever tried to reach the dim pinnacles of Shelley’s speculative cities, and no Russian Romantic poet would have uttered a wild cry of revolt such as Musset’s “Rolla.” But what the Russian poets did do, and what they did in a manner which gives them an unique place in the history of the world’s literature, was to extract poetry from the daily life they saw round them, and to express it in forms of incomparable beauty. Russian poetry, like the Russian nature, is plastic. Plasticity, adaptability, comprehensiveness, are the great qualities of Pushkin. His verse is “simple, sensuous and impassioned”; there is nothing indistinct about it, no vague outline and no blurred detail; it is perfectly balanced, and it is this sense of balance and proportion blent with a rooted common sense, which reminds the reader when he reads Pushkin of Greek art, and gives one the impression that the poet is a classic, however much he may have employed the stock-in-trade of Romanticism.

Meredith says somewhere that the poetry of mortals is their daily prose. It is precisely this kind of poetry, the poetry arising from the incidents of everyday life, which the Russian poets have been successful in transmuting into verse. There is a quality of matter-of-factness in Russian poetry which is unique; the same quality exists in Russian folklore and fairy tales; even Russian ghosts, and certainly the Russian devil, have an element of matter-of-factness about them; and the most Romantic of all Russian poets, Lermontov, has certain qualities which remind one more of Thackeray than of Byron or Shelley, who undoubtedly influenced him.

I will quote as an example of this one of his most famous poems. It is called “The Testament,” and it is the utterance of a man who has been mortally wounded in battle.

“I want to be alone with you,[3]
A moment quite alone.
The minutes left to me are few,
They say I’ll soon be gone.
And you’ll be going home on leave,
Then tell ... but why? I do believe
There’s not a soul, who’ll greatly care
To hear about me over there.
And yet if some one asks you, well,
Let us suppose they do—
A bullet hit me here, you’ll tell,—
The chest,—and it went through.
And say I died and for the Tsar,
And say what fools the doctors are;—
And that I shook you by the hand,
And thought about my native land.
My father and my mother, there!
They may be dead by now;
To tell the truth, I wouldn’t care
To grieve them anyhow.
If one of them is living, say
I’m bad at writing home, and they
Have sent us to the front, you see,—
And that they needn’t wait for me.
They’ve got a neighbour, as you know,
And you remember I
And she.... How very long ago
It is we said good-bye!
She won’t ask after me, nor care,
But tell her ev’rything, don’t spare
Her empty heart; and let her cry;—
To her it doesn’t signify.”

The words of this poem are the words of familiar conversation; they are exactly what the soldier would say in such circumstances. There is not a single literary or poetical expression used. And yet the effect in the original is one of poignant poetical feeling and consummate poetic art. I know of no other language where the thing is possible; because if you translate the Russian by the true literary equivalents, you would have to say: “I would like a word alone with you, old fellow,” or “old chap,”[4] or something of that kind; and I know of no English poet who has ever been able to deal successfully (in poetry) with the speech of everyday life without the help of slang or dialect. What is needed for this are the Russian temperament and the Russian language.

I will give another instance of what I mean. There is a Russian poet called Krilov, who wrote fables such as those of La Fontaine, based for the greater part on those of Æsop. He wrote a version of what is perhaps La Fontaine’s masterpiece, “Les Deux Pigeons,” which begins thus:

“Two pigeons, like two brothers, lived together.
They shared their all in fair and wintry weather.
Where the one was the other would be near,
And every joy they shared and every tear.
They noticed not Time’s flight. Sadness they knew;
But weary of each other never grew.”

This last line, translated literally, runs: “They were sometimes sad, they were never bored.” It is one of the most poetical in the whole range of Russian literature; and yet how absolutely untranslatable!—not only into English, but into any other language. How can one convey the word “boring” so that it shall be poetical, in English or in French? In Russian one can, simply from the fact that the word which means boring, “skouchno,” is just as fit for poetic use as the word “groustno,” which means sad. And this proves that it is easier for Russians to make poetry out of the language of everyday than it is for Englishmen.

The matter-of-fact quality of the Russian poetical temperament—its dislike of exaggeration and extravagance—is likewise clearly visible in the manner in which Russian poets write of nature. I have already said that the poets of the early part of the nineteenth century reveal (compared with their European contemporaries) only a mild sentiment for the humbler aspects of nature; but let us take a poet of a later epoch, Alexis Tolstoy, who wrote in the fifties, and who may not unfairly be called a Russian Tennyson. In the work of Tolstoy the love of nature reveals itself on almost every page. His work brings before our eyes the landscape of the South of Russia, and expresses the charm and the quality of that country in the same way as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” evokes for us the sight of England. Yet if one compares the two, the work of the Russian poet is nearer to the earth, familiar and simple in a fashion which is beyond the reach of other languages. Here, for instance, is a rough translation of one of Alexis Tolstoy’s poems:

“Through the slush and the ruts of the road,
By the side of the dam of the stream;
Where the wet fishing nets are spread,
The carriage jogs on, and I muse.
I muse and I look at the road,
At the damp and the dull grey sky,
At the shelving bank of the lake,
And the far-off smoke of the villages.
By the dam, with a cheerless face,
Is walking a tattered old Jew.
From the lake, with a splashing of foam,
The waters rush through the weir.
A little boy plays on a pipe,
He has made it out of a reed.
The startled wild-ducks have flown,
And call as they sweep from the lake.
Near the old crumbling mill
Labourers sit on the grass.
An old worn horse in a cart,
Is lazily dragging some sacks.
And I know it all, oh! so well,
Although I have never been here;
The roof of that house over there,
And that boy, and the wood, and the weir,
And the mournful voice of the mill,
And the crumbling barn in the field—
I have been here and seen it before,
And forgotten it all long ago.
This very same horse plodded on,
It was dragging the very same sacks;
And under the mouldering mill
Labourers sat on the grass.
And the Jew, with his beard, walked by,
And the weir made just such a noise.
All this has happened before,
Only, I cannot tell when.”

I have said that Russian fairy tales and folk stories are full of the same spirit of matter-of-factness. And so essential do I consider this factor to be, so indispensable do I consider the comprehension of it by the would-be student of Russian literature, that I will quote a short folk-story at length, which reveals this quality in its essence. The reader will only have to compare the following tale in his mind with a French, English, or German fairy tale to see what I mean.

The Fool

Once upon a time in a certain kingdom there lived an old man, and he had three sons. Two of them were clever, the third was a fool. The father died, and the sons drew lots for his property: the clever sons won every kind of useful thing; the fool only received an old ox, and that was a lean and bony one.

The time of the fair came, and the clever brothers made themselves ready to go and do a deal. The fool saw them doing this, and said:

“I also, brothers, shall take my ox to the market.”

And he led his ox by a rope tied to its horn, towards the town. On the way to the town he went through a wood, and in the wood there stood an old dried-up birch tree. The wind blew and the birch tree groaned.

“Why does the birch tree groan?” thought the fool. “Does it perhaps wish to bargain for my ox? Now tell me, birch tree, if you wish to buy. If that is so, buy. The price of the ox is twenty roubles: I cannot take less. Show your money.”

But the birch tree answered nothing at all, and only groaned, and the fool was astonished that the birch tree wished to receive the ox on credit.

“If that is so, I will wait till to-morrow,” said the fool.

He tied the ox to the birch tree, said good-bye to it, and went home.

The clever brothers came to him and began to question him.

“Well, fool,” they said, “have you sold your ox?”

“I have sold it.”

“Did you sell it dear?”

“I sold it for twenty roubles.”

“And where is the money?”

“I have not yet got the money. I have been told I shall receive it to-morrow.”

“Oh, you simpleton!” said the clever brothers.

On the next day, early in the morning, the fool got up, made himself ready, and went to the birch tree for his money. He arrived at the wood; the birch tree was there, swaying in the wind, but the ox was not there any more,—the wolves had eaten him in the night.

“Now, countryman,” said the fool to the birch tree, “pay me the money. You promised you would pay it to-day.”

The wind blew, the birch tree groaned, and the fool said:

“Well, you are an untrustworthy fellow! Yesterday you said, ‘I will pay the money to-morrow,’ and to-day you are trying to get out of it. If this is so I will wait yet another day, but after that I shall wait no longer, for I shall need the money myself.”

The fool went home, and his clever brothers again asked him: “Well, have you received your money?”

“No, brothers,” he answered, “I shall have to wait still another little day.”

“Whom did you sell it to?”

“A dried old birch tree in the wood.”

“See what a fool!” said the brothers.

On the third day the fool took an axe and set out for the wood. He arrived and demanded the money.

The birch tree groaned and groaned.

“No, countryman,” said the fool, “if you always put off everything till the morrow, I shall never get anything from you at all. I do not like joking, and I shall settle matters with you at once and for all.”

He took the axe and struck the tree, and the chips flew on all sides.

Now in the tree was a hollow, and in this hollow some robbers had hidden a bag of gold. The tree was split into two parts, and the fool saw a heap of red gold; and he gathered the gold together in a heap and took some of it home and showed it to his brothers.

And his brothers said to him:

“Where did you get such a lot of money, fool?”

“A countryman of mine gave it to me for my ox,” he said, “and there is still a great deal left. I could not bring half of it home. Let us go, brothers, and get the rest of it.”

They went into the wood and found the money, and brought it home.

“Now look you, fool,” said the clever brothers, “do not tell any one that we have so much money.”

“Of course not,” said the fool, “I will not tell any one, I promise you.”

But soon after this they met a deacon.

“What are you bringing from the wood, children?” said the deacon.

“Mushrooms,” said the clever brothers.

But the fool interrupted and said: “They are not telling the truth—we are bringing gold. Look at it if you will.”

The deacon gasped with astonishment, fell upon the gold, and took as much as he could and stuffed his pockets full of it.

But the fool was annoyed at this, and struck him with an axe and beat him till he was dead.

“Oh fool, what have you done?” said his brothers. “You will be ruined, and ruin us also. What shall we do now with this dead body?”

They thought and they thought, and then they took it to an empty cellar and threw it into the cellar.

Late in the evening the eldest brother said to the second: “This is a bad business. As soon as they miss the deacon the fool is certain to tell them all about it. Let us kill a goat and hide it in the cellar and put the dead body in some other place.”

They waited until the night was dark; then they killed a goat, threw it into the cellar, and took the body of the deacon to another place and buried it in the earth.

A few days passed; people looked for the deacon everywhere, and asked everybody they could about him. And the fool said to them:

“What do you want of him? I killed him with an axe, and my brothers threw the body into the cellar.”

They at once seized the fool and said to him:

“Take us and show us.”

The fool climbed into the cellar, took out the head of the goat, and said:

“Was your deacon black?”

“Yes,” they said.

“And had he got a beard?”

“Yes, he had a beard.”

“And had he got horns?”

“What sort of horns, you fool?”

“Well, look!” And he threw down the head.

The people looked and saw that it was a goat, and they spat at the fool and went home.

This story, more than pages of analysis and more than chapters of argument, illustrates what I mean: namely, that if the Russian poet and the Russian peasant, the one in his verse, the other in his folk tales and fairy stories, are matter-of-fact, alien to flights of exaggerated fancy, and above all things enamoured of the truth; if by their closeness to nature, their gift of seeing things as they are, and expressing these things in terms of the utmost simplicity, without fuss, without affectation and without artificiality,—if, I say, all this entitles us to call them realists, then this realism is not and must never be thought of as being the fad of a special school, the theory of a limited clique, or the watchword of a literary camp, but it is rather the natural expression of the Russian temperament and the Russian character.

I will try throughout this book to attempt to illustrate this character and this temperament as best I can, by observing widely different manifestations of it; but all these manifestations, however different they may be, contain one great quality in common: that is, the quality of reality of which I have been writing. And unless the student of Russian literature realises this and appreciates what Russian realism consists of, and what it really means, he will be unable to understand either the men or the literature of Russia.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] This translation is in the metre of the original. It is literal; but hopelessly inadequate.

[4] In the Russian, although every word of the poem is familiar, not a word of slang is used.

CHAPTER III
GOGOL AND THE CHEERFULNESS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

The first thing that strikes the English reader when he dips into translations of Russian literature, is the unrelieved gloom, the unmitigated pessimism of the characters and the circumstances described. Everything is grey, everybody is depressed; the atmosphere is one of hopeless melancholy. On the other hand, the first thing that strikes the English traveller when he arrives in Russia for the first time, is the cheerfulness of the Russian people. Nowhere have I seen this better described than in an article, written by Mr. Charles Hands, which appeared in the summer of 1905 in The Daily Mail. Mr. Hands summed up his idea of the Russian people, which he had gathered after living with them for two years, both in peace and in war, in a short article. His final impression was the same as that which he received on the day he arrived in Russia for the first time. That was in winter; it was snowing; the cold was intense. The streets of St. Petersburg were full of people, and in spite of the driving snow, the bitter wind, and the cruel cold, everybody was smiling, everybody was making the best of it. Nowhere did you hear people grumbling, or come across a face stamped with a grievance.

I myself experienced an impression of the same kind, one evening in July 1906. I was strolling about the streets of St. Petersburg. It was the Sunday of the dissolution of the Duma; the dissolution had been announced that very morning. The streets were crowded with people, mostly poor people. I was walking with an Englishman who had spent some years in Russia, and he said to me: “It is all very well to talk of the calamities of this country. Have you ever in your life seen a more cheerful Sunday crowd?” I certainly had not.

The Russian character has an element of happy consent and submission to the inevitable; of adapting itself to any circumstance, however disagreeable, which I have never come across in any other country. The Russians have a faculty of making the best of things which I have never seen developed in so high a degree. I remember once in Manchuria during the war, some soldiers, who were under the command of a sergeant, preparing early one morning, just before the battle of Ta-Shi-Chiao, to make some tea. Suddenly a man in command said there would not be time to have tea. The men simply said, “To-day no tea will be drunk,” with a smile; it did not occur to any one to complain, and they put away the kettle, which was just on the boil, and drove away in a cart. I witnessed this kind of incident over and over again. I remember one night at a place called Lonely Tree Hill. I was with a battery. We had just arrived, and there were no quarters. We generally lived in Chinese houses, but on this occasion there were none to be found. We encamped on the side of a hill. There was no shelter, no food, and no fire, and presently it began to rain. The Cossacks, of whom the battery was composed, made a kind of shelter out of what straw and millet they could find, and settled themselves down as comfortably and as cheerfully as if they had been in barracks. They accomplished the difficult task of making themselves comfortable out of nothing, and of making me comfortable also.

Besides this power of making the best of things, the Russians have a keen sense of humour. The clowns in their circuses are inimitable. A type you frequently meet in Russia is the man who tells stories and anecdotes which are distinguished by simplicity and by a knack of just seizing on the ludicrous side of some trivial episode or conversation. Their humour is not unlike English humour in kind, and this explains the wide popularity of our humorous writers in Russia, beginning with Dickens, including such essentially English writers as W. W. Jacobs and the author of The Diary of a Nobody, and ending with Jerome K. Jerome, whose complete works can be obtained at any Russian railway station.[5]

All these elements are fully represented in Russian literature; but the kind of Russian literature which is saturated with these qualities either does not reach us at all, or reaches us in scarce and inadequate translations.

The greatest humorist of Russian literature, the Russian Dickens, is Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol. Translations of some of his stories and of his longest work, Dead Souls, were published in 1887 by Mr. Vizetelly. These translations are now out of print, and the work of Gogol may be said to be totally unknown in England. In France some of his stories have been translated by no less a writer than Prosper Mérimée.

Gogol was a Little Russian, a Cossack by birth; he belonged to the Ukraine, that is to say, the frontier country, the district which lies between the north and the extreme south. It is a country of immense plains, rich harvests, and smiling farms; of vines, laughter, and song. He was born in 1809 near Poltava, in the heart of the Cossack country. He was brought up by his grandfather, who had been the regimental chronicler of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who live in the region beyond the falls of the Dnieper. His childhood was nursed in the warlike traditions of that race, and fed with the tales of a heroic epoch, the wars against Poland and the deeds of the dwellers of the Steppes. Later he was sent to school, and in 1829, when he was twenty years old, he went to St. Petersburg, where after many disillusions and difficulties he obtained a place in a Government office. The time that he spent in this office gave him the material for one of his best stories. He soon tired of office work, and tried to go on the stage, but no manager would engage him. He became a tutor, but was not a particularly successful one. At last some friends obtained for him the professorship of History at the University, but he failed in this profession also, and so he finally turned to literature. By the publication of his first efforts in the St. Petersburg press, he made some friends, and through these he obtained an introduction to Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, who was at that time in the fullness of his fame.

Pushkin was a character devoid of envy and jealousy, overflowing with generosity, and prodigal of praise. Gogol subsequently became his favourite writer, and it was Pushkin who urged Gogol to write about Russian history and popular Russian scenes. Gogol followed his advice and wrote the Evenings in a Farmhouse on the Dikanka. These stories are supposed to be told by an old beekeeper; and in them Gogol puts all the memories of his childhood, the romantic traditions, the fairy tales, the legends, the charming scenery, and the cheerful life of the Little Russian country.

In these stories he revealed the twofold nature of his talent: a fantasy, a love of the supernatural, and a power of making us feel it, which reminds one of Edgar Allan Poe, of Hoffmann, and of Robert Louis Stevenson; and side by side with this fantastic element, the keenest power of observation, which is mixed with an infectious sense of humour and a rich and delightful drollery. Together with these gifts, Gogol possessed a third quality, which is a blend of his fantasy and his realism, namely, the power of depicting landscape and places, with their colour and their atmosphere, in warm and vivid language. It is this latter gift with which I shall deal first. Here, for instance, is a description of the river Dnieper:

“Wonderful is the Dnieper when in calm weather, smooth and wilful, it drives its full waters through the woods and the hills; it does not whisper, it does not boom. One gazes and gazes without being able to tell whether its majestic spaces are moving or not: one wonders whether the river is not a sheet of glass, when like a road of crystal azure, measureless in its breadth and unending in its length, it rushes and swirls across the green world. It is then that the sun loves to look down from the sky and to plunge his rays into the cool limpid waters; and the woods which grow on the banks are sharply reflected in the river.

“The green-tressed trees and the wild flowers crowd together at the water’s edge; they bend down and gaze at themselves; they are never tired of their own bright image, but smile to it and greet it, as they incline their boughs. They dare not look into the midst of the Dnieper; no one save the sun and the blue sky looks into that. It is rare that a bird flies as far as the midmost waters. Glorious river, there is none other like it in the world!

“Wonderful is the Dnieper in the warm summer nights when all things are asleep: men and beasts and birds, and God alone in His majesty looks round on the heaven and the earth and royally spreads out His sacerdotal vestment and lets it tremble. And from this vestment the stars are scattered: the stars burn and shine over the world, and all are reflected in the Dnieper. The Dnieper receives them all into its dark bosom: not one escapes it. The dark wood with its sleeping ravens, and the old rugged mountains above them, try to hide the river with their long dark shadows, but it is in vain: there is nothing in all the world which could overshadow the Dnieper! Blue, infinitely blue, its smooth surface is always moving by night and by day, and is visible in the distance as far as mortal eye can see. It draws near and nestles in the banks in the cool of the night, and leaves behind it a silver trail, that gleams like the blade of a sword of Damascus. But the blue river is once more asleep. Wonderful is the Dnieper then, and there is nothing like it in the world!

“But when the dark clouds gather in the sky, and the black wood is shaken to its roots, the oak trees tremble, and the lightnings, bursting in the clouds, light up the whole world again, terrible then is the Dnieper. The crests of the waters thunder, dashing themselves against the hills; fiery with lightning, and loud with many a moan, they retreat and dissolve and overflow in tears in the distance. Just in such a way does the aged mother of the Cossack weep when she goes to say good-bye to her son, who is off to the wars. He rides off, wanton, debonair, and full of spirit; he rides on his black horse with his elbows well out at the side, and he waves his cap. And his mother sobs and runs after him; she clutches hold of his stirrup, seizes the snaffle, throws her arms round her son, and weeps bitterly.”

Another characteristic description of Gogol’s is the picture he gives us of the Steppes:

“The farther they went, the more beautiful the Steppes became. At that time the whole of the country which is now Lower New Russia, reaching as far as the Black Sea, was a vast green wilderness. Never a plough had passed over its measureless waves of wild grass. Only the horses, which were hidden in it as though in a wood, trampled it down. Nothing in Nature could be more beautiful than this grass. The whole of the surface of the earth was like a gold and green sea, on which millions of flowers of different colours were sprinkled. Through the high and delicate stems of grass the cornflowers twinkled—light blue, dark blue, and lilac. The yellow broom pushed upward its pointed crests; the white milfoil, with its flowers like fairy umbrellas, dappled the surface of the grass; an ear of wheat, which had come Heaven knows whence, was ripening.

“At the roots of the flowers and the grass, partridges were running about everywhere, thrusting out their necks. The air was full of a thousand different bird-notes. Hawks hovered motionless in the sky, spreading out their wings, and fixing their eyes on the grass. The cry of a flock of wild geese was echoed in I know not what far-off lake. A gull rose from the grass in measured flight, and bathed wantonly in the blue air; now she has vanished in the distance, and only a black spot twinkles; and now she wheels in the air and glistens in the sun.”

Of course, descriptions such as these lose all their beauty in a translation, for Gogol’s language is rich and native; full of diminutives and racial idiom, nervous and highly-coloured. To translate it into English is like translating Rabelais into English. I have given these two examples more to show the nature of the thing he describes than the manner in which he describes it.

Throughout this first collection of stories there is a blend of broad farce and poetical fancy; we are introduced to the humours of the fair, the adventures of sacristans with the devil and other apparitions; to the Russalka, a naiad, a kind of land-mermaid, or Loreley, which haunts the woods and the lakes. And every one of these stories smells of the South Russian soil, and is overflowing with sunshine, good-humour, and a mellow charm. This side of Russian life is not only wholly unknown in Europe, but it is not even suspected. The picture most people have in their minds of Russia is a place of grey skies and bleak monotonous landscape, weighed down by an implacable climate. These things exist, but there is another side as well, and it is this other side that Gogol tells of in his early stories. We are told much about the Russian winter, but who ever thinks of the Russian spring? And there is nothing more beautiful in the world, even in the north and centre of Russia, than the abrupt and sudden invasion of springtime which comes shortly after the melting snows, when the woods are carpeted with lilies-of-the-valley, and the green of the birch trees almost hurts the eye with its brilliance.

Nor are we told much about the Russian summer, with its wonderful warm nights, nor of the pageant of the plains when they become a rippling sea of golden corn. If the spring and the summer are striking in northern and central Russia, much more is this so in the south, where the whole character of the country is as cheerful and smiling as that of Devonshire or Normandy. The farms are whitewashed and clean; sometimes they are painted light blue or pink; vines grow on the walls; there is an atmosphere of sunshine and laziness everywhere, accompanied by much dancing and song.

Once when I was in St. Petersburg I was talking to a peasant member of the Duma who came from the south. After he had declaimed for nearly twenty minutes on the terrible condition of the peasants in the country, their needs, their wants, their misery, their ignorance, he added thoughtfully: “All the same we have great fun in our village; you ought to come and stay there. There is no such life in the world!” The sunshine and laughter of the south of Russia rise before us from every page of these stories of Gogol. Here, for instance, is a description of a summer’s day in Little Russia, the day of a fair:

“How intoxicating, how rich, is a summer’s day in Little Russia! How overwhelmingly hot are those hours of noonday silence and haze! Like a boundless azure sea, the dome of the sky, bending as though with passion over the world, seems to have fallen asleep, all drowned in softness, and clasps and caresses the beautiful earth with a celestial embrace. There is no cloud in the sky; and the stream is silent. Everything is as if it were dead; only aloft in the deeps of the sky a lark quivers, and its silvery song echoes down the vault of heaven, and reaches the lovesick earth. And from time to time the cry of the seagull or the clear call of the quail is heard in the plain.

“Lazily and thoughtlessly, as though they were idling vaguely, stand the shady oaks; and the blinding rays of the sun light up the picturesque masses of foliage, while the rest of the tree is in a shadow dark as night, and only when the wind rises, a flash of gold trembles across it.

“Like emeralds, topazes and amethysts, the diaphanous insects flutter in the many-coloured fruit gardens, which are shaded by stately sun-flowers. Grey haycocks and golden sheaves of corn stand in rows along the field like hillocks on the immense expanse. Broad boughs bend under their load of cherries, plums, apples, and pears. The sky is the transparent mirror of the day, and so is the river, with its high green frame of trees.... How luscious and how soft is the summer in Little Russia!

“It was just such a hot day in August 18—, when the road, ten versts from the little town of Sorochinetz, was seething with people hurrying from all the farms, far and near, to the fair. With the break of day an endless chain of waggons laboured along, carrying salt and fish. Mountains of pots wrapped in hay moved slowly on as if they were weary of being cut off from the sunshine. Only here and there some brightly-painted soup tureen or earthenware saucepan proudly emerged on the tilt of the high-heaped waggon, and attracted the eyes of lovers of finery; many passers-by looked with envy on the tall potter, the owner of all these treasures, who with slow steps walked beside his goods.”

Why are we never told of these azure Russian days, of these laden fruit-trees and jewelled insects?

In 1832, Gogol published a continuation of this series, entitled Stories of Mirgorod. This collection contains the masterpieces of the romantic, and the fantastic side of Gogol’s genius. His highest effort in the romantic province is the historical history of Taras Bulba, which is a prose epic. It is the tale of an old Cossack chieftain whose two sons, Ostap and Andrii, are brought up in the Zaporozhian settlement of the Cossacks, and trained as warriors to fight the Poles. They lay siege to the Polish city of Dubno, and starve the city. Andrii, the younger son, discovers that a girl whom he had loved at Kiev, before his Cossack training, is shut up in the city. The girl’s servant leads him into Dubno by an underground passage. Andrii meets his lady-love and abandons the Cossack cause, saying that his fatherland and his country is there where his heart is.

In the meantime the Polish troops arrive, reinforce the beleagured garrison; Andrii is for ever lost to Cossack chivalry, and his country and his father’s house shall know him no more. News then comes that in the absence of the Cossacks from their camp in the Ukraine, the Tartars have plundered it. So they send half their army to defend it, while half of it remains in front of the besieged city. The Poles attack the Cossacks who are left.

There is a terrific battle, in which Andrii fights against the Cossacks. He is taken prisoner by his own father, who bids him dismount. He dismounts obediently, and his father addresses him thus: “I begot you, and now I shall kill you.” And he shoots him dead.

Immediately after this incident Taras Bulba and his elder son, Ostap, are attacked by the enemy. Ostap, after inflicting deadly losses on the enemy, is separated from his father,—who falls in a swoon, and owing to this escapes,—and taken prisoner. Ostap is taken to the city and tortured to death. In the extremity of his torment, after having endured the long agonies without a groan, he cries out: “Father, do you hear me?” And from the crowd a terrible voice is heard answering: “I hear!” Later, Taras raises an army of Cossacks to avenge the death of his son, and lays waste the country; but at the end he is caught and put to death by the Poles.

This story is told with epic breadth and simplicity; the figure of the old warrior is Homeric, and Homeric also is the character of the young traitor Andrii, who, although he betrays his own people, never loses sympathy, so strong is the impression you receive of his brilliance, his dash, and his courage.

In the domain of fantasy, Gogol’s masterpiece is to be found in this same collection. It is called Viy. It is the story of a beautiful lady who is a witch. She casts her spell on a student in theology, and when she dies, her dying will is that he shall spend three nights in reading prayers over her body, in the church where her coffin lies. During his watch on the first night, the dead maiden rises from her coffin, and watches him with glassy, opaque eyes. He hears the flapping of the wings of innumerable birds, and in the morning is found half dead from terror. He attempts to avoid the ordeal on the second night, but the girl’s father, an old Cossack, forces him to carry out his daughter’s behest, and three nights are spent by the student in terrible conflict with the witch. On the third night he dies. The great quality of this story is the atmosphere of overmastering terror that it creates.

With these two stories, Taras Bulba and Viy, Gogol took leave of Romanticism and Fantasy, and started on the path of Realism. In this province he was what the Germans call a bahnbrecher, and he discovered a new kingdom. It may be noticed that Gogol, roughly speaking, began where Dickens ended; that is to say, he wrote his Tale of Two Cities first, and his Pickwick last. But already in this collection of Mirgorod tales there are two stories in the humorous realistic vein, which Gogol never excelled; one is called Old-fashioned Landowners, and the other How Ivan Ivanovitch quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovitch.

Old-fashioned Landowners is a simple story. It is about an old couple who lived in a low-roofed little house, with a verandah of blackened tree-trunks, in the midst of a garden of dwarfed fruit-trees covered with cherries and plums. The couple, Athanasii Ivanovitch and his wife Pulcheria Ivanovna, are old. He is sixty, she is fifty-five. It is the story of Philemon and Baucis. Nothing happens in it, except that we are introduced to these charming, kind, and hospitable people; that Pulcheria dies, and that after her death everything in the house becomes untidy and slovenly, because Athanasii cannot live without her; and after five years he follows her to the grave, and is buried beside her. There is nothing in the story, and there is everything. It is amusing, charming, and infinitely pathetic. Some of the touches of description remind one strongly of Dickens. Here, for instance, is a description of the doors of the house where the old couple lived:

“The most remarkable thing about the house was the creaking of the doors. As soon as day broke, the singing of these doors was heard throughout the whole house. I cannot say why they made the noise: either it was the rusty hinges, or else the workman who made them hid some secret in them; but the remarkable thing was that each door had its own special note. The door going into the bedroom sang in a delicate treble; the door going into the dining-room had a hoarse bass note; but that which led into the front hall made a strange trembling, groaning noise, so that if you listened to it intently you heard it distinctly saying, ‘Batiushka, I am so cold!’”

The story of the two Ivans is irresistibly funny. The two Ivans were neighbours; one of them was a widower and the other a bachelor. They were the greatest friends. Never a day passed without their seeing each other, and their greatest pleasure was to entertain each other at big, Dickens-like meals. But one day they quarrelled about a gun, and Ivan Nikiforovitch called Ivan Ivanovitch a goose. After this they would not see each other, and their relations were broken off. Hitherto, Ivan Nikiforovitch and Ivan Ivanovitch had sent every day to inquire about each other’s health, had conversed together from their balconies, and had said charming things to each other. On Sundays they had gone to church arm in arm, and outdone each other in mutual civilities; but now they would not look at each other.

At length the quarrel went so far that Ivan Ivanovitch lodged a complaint against Ivan Nikiforovitch, saying that the latter had inflicted a deadly insult on his personal honour, firstly by calling him a goose, secondly by building a goose-shed opposite his porch, and thirdly by cherishing a design to burn his house down. Ivan Nikiforovitch lodged a similar petition against Ivan Ivanovitch. As bad luck would have it, Ivan Ivanovitch’s brown sow ate Ivan Nikiforovitch’s petition, and this, of course, made the quarrel worse.

At last a common friend of the pair attempts to bring about a reconciliation, and asks the two enemies to dinner. After much persuasion they consent to meet. They go to the dinner, where a large company is assembled; both Ivans eat their meal without glancing at each other, and as soon as the dinner is over they rise from their seats and make ready to go. At this moment they are surrounded on all sides, and are adjured by the company to forget their quarrel. Each says that he was innocent of any evil design, and the reconciliation is within an ace of being effected when, unfortunately, Ivan Nikiforovitch says to Ivan Ivanovitch: “Permit me to observe, in a friendly manner, that you took offence because I called you a goose.” As soon as the fatal word “goose” is uttered, all reconciliation is out of the question, and the quarrel continues to the end of their lives.

In 1835, Gogol retired definitely from the public service. At this point of his career he wrote a number of stories and comedies, of a varied nature, which he collected later in two volumes, Arabesques, 1834, and Tales, 1836. It was the dawn of his realistic phase, although he still indulged from time to time in the fantastic, as in the grotesque stories, The Nose—the tale of a nose which gets lost and wanders about—and The Coach. But the most remarkable of these stories is The Overcoat, which is the highest example of Gogol’s pathos, and contains in embryo all the qualities of vivid realism which he was to develop later. It is the story of a clerk who has a passion for copying, and to whom caligraphy is a fine art. He is never warm enough; he is always shivering. The ambition, the dream of his life, is to have a warm overcoat. After years of privation he saves up the sum necessary to realise his dream and buy a new overcoat; but on the first day that he wears it, the coat is stolen from him.

The police, to whom he applies after the theft, laugh at him, and the clerk falls into a black melancholy. He dies unnoticed and obscure, and his ghost haunts the squalid streets where he was wont to walk.

Nearly half of modern Russian literature descends directly from this story. The figure of this clerk and the way he is treated by the author is the first portrait of an endless gallery of the failures of this world, the flotsam and jetsam of a social system: grotesque figures, comic, pathetic, with a touch of tragedy in them, which, since they are handled by their creator with a kindly sympathy, and never with cruelty or disdain, win our sympathy and live in our hearts and our affections.

During this same period Gogol wrote several plays, among which the masterpiece is The Inspector. This play, which is still immensely popular in Russia, and draws crowded houses on Sundays and holidays, is a good-humoured, scathing satire on the Russian Bureaucracy. As a translation of this play is easily to be obtained, and as it has been performed in London by the Stage Society, I need not dwell on it here, except to mention for those who are unacquainted with it, that the subject of the play is a misunderstanding which arises from a traveller being mistaken for a government inspector who is expected to arrive incognito in a provincial town. A European critic in reading or seeing this play is sometimes surprised and unreasonably struck by the universal dishonesty of almost every single character in the play. For instance, one of the characters says to another: “You are stealing above your rank.” One should remember, however, that in a translation it is impossible not to lose something of the good-humour and the comic spirit of which the play is full. It has often been a matter of surprise that this play, at the time when Gogol wrote it, should have been passed by the censorship. The reason of this is that Gogol had for censor the Emperor of Russia himself, who read the play, was extremely amused by it, commanded its immediate performance, was present at the first night, and led the applause.

Hlestakov, the hero of The Inspector, is one of the most natural and magnificent liars in literature. Gogol himself, in his stage directions, describes him as a man “without a Tsar in his head,”—a man who speaks and acts without the slightest reflection, and who is not capable of consecutive thought, or of fixing his attention for more than a moment on any single idea.

In 1836, Gogol left Russia and settled in Rome. He had been working for some time at another book, which he intended should be his masterpiece, a book in which he intended to say everything, and express the whole of his message. Gogol was possessed by this idea. The book was to be divided into three parts. The first part appeared in 1842, the second part, which was never finished, Gogol threw in the fire in a fit of despair. It was, however, subsequently printed from an incomplete manuscript which had escaped his notice. The third part was never written. As it is, the first fragment of Gogol’s great ambition remains his masterpiece, and the book by which he is best known. It is called Dead Souls. The hero of this book is a man called Chichikov. He has hit on an idea by which he can make money by dishonest means. Like all great ideas, it is simple. At the time at which the book was written the serfs in Russia had not yet been emancipated. They were called “souls,” and every landlord possessed so many “souls.” A revision of the list of peasants took place every ten years, and the landlord had to pay a poll-tax for the souls that had died during that period, that is to say, for the men; women and children did not count. Between the periods of revision nobody looked at the lists. If there was any epidemic in the village the landlord lost heavily, as he had to continue paying a tax for the “souls” who were dead.

Chichikov’s idea was to take these “dead souls” from the landlords, and pay the poll-tax, for them. The landlord would be only too pleased to get rid of a property which was fictitious, and a tax which was only too real. Chichikov could then register his purchases with all due formality, for it would never occur to a tribunal to think that he was asking them to legalise a sale of dead men; he could thus take the documents to a bank at St. Petersburg or at Moscow, and mortgage the “souls,” which he represented as living in some desert place in the Crimea, at one hundred roubles apiece, and then be rich enough to buy living “souls” of his own.

Chichikov travelled all over Russia in search of “dead souls.” The book tells us the adventures he met with; and the scheme is particularly advantageous to the author, because it not only enables him to introduce us to a variety of types, but the transaction itself, the manner in which men behave when faced by the proposition, throws a searchlight on their characters. Chichikov starts from a large provincial town, which he makes his base, and thence explores the country; the success or failure of his transactions forms the substance of the book. Sometimes he is successful, sometimes the system breaks down because the people in the country want to know the market value of the “dead souls” in the town.

The travels of Chichikov, like those of Mr. Pickwick, form a kind of Odyssey. The types he introduces us to are extraordinarily comic; there are fools who give their “souls” for nothing, and misers who demand an exorbitant price for them. But sometimes Chichikov meets with people who are as clever as himself, and who outwit him. One of the most amusing episodes is that where he comes across a suspicious old woman called Korobotchka. Chichikov, after arriving at her house late at night, and having spent the night there, begins his business transactions cautiously and tentatively. The old woman at first thinks he has come to sell her tea, or that he has come to buy honey. Then Chichikov comes to the point, and asks her if any peasants have died on her land. She says eighteen. He then asks her to sell them to him, saying that he will give her money for them. She asks if he wishes to dig them out of the ground. He explains that the transaction would only take place upon paper. She asks him why he wants to do this. That, he answers, is his own affair.

“But they are dead,” she says.

“Whoever said they were alive?” asked Chichikov. “It is a loss to you that they are dead. You pay for them, and I will now save you the trouble and the expense, and not only save you this, but give you fifteen roubles into the bargain. Is it clear now?”

“I really can’t say,” the old woman replies. “You see I never before sold dead ‘souls.’” And she keeps on repeating: “What bothers me is that they are dead.”

Chichikov again explains to her that she has to pay a tax on them just as though they were alive.

“Don’t talk of it!” she says. “Only a week ago I had to pay one hundred and fifty roubles.”

Chichikov again explains to her how advantageous it would be for her to get them off her hands, upon which she answers that she has never had occasion to sell dead souls; if they were alive, on the other hand, she would have been delighted to do it.

“But I don’t want live ones! I want dead ones,” answers Chichikov.

“I am afraid,” she says, “that I might lose over the bargain—that you may be deceiving me.”

Chichikov explains the whole thing over again, offering her fifteen roubles, and showing her the money; upon which she says she would like to wait a little, to find out what they are really worth.

“But who on earth will buy them from you?” asks Chichikov.

“They might be useful on the estate,” says the old woman.

“How can you use dead souls on the estate?” asks Chichikov.

Korobotchka suggests that she would rather sell him some hemp, and Chichikov loses his temper.

Equally amusing are Chichikov’s adventures with the miser Plushkin, Nozdref, a swaggering drunkard, and Manilov, who is simply a fool. But when all is said and done, the most amusing person in the book is Chichikov himself.

At the end of the first volume, Gogol makes a defence of his hero. After having described the circumstances of his youth, his surroundings, and all the influences which made him what he was, the author asks: “Who is he?” And the answer he gives himself is: “Of course a rascal: but why a rascal?” He continues:

“Why should we be so severe on others? We have no rascals among us now, we have only well-thinking, pleasant people; we have, it is true, two or three men who have enjoyed the shame of being thrashed in public, and even these speak of virtue. It would be more just to call him a man who acquires; it is the passion for gain that is to blame for everything. This passion is the cause of deeds which the world characterises as ugly. It is true that in such a character there is perhaps something repulsive. But the same reader who in real life will be friends with such a man, who will dine with him, and pass the time pleasantly with him, will look askance at the same character should he meet with him as the hero of a book or of a poem. That man is wise who is not offended by any character, but is able to look within it, and to trace the development of nature to its first causes. Everything in man changes rapidly. You have scarcely time to look round, before inside the man’s heart a hateful worm has been born which absorbs the vital sap of his nature. And it often happens that not only a great passion, but some ridiculous whim for a trivial object, grows in a man who was destined to better deeds, and causes him to forget his high and sacred duty, and to mistake the most miserable trifle for what is most exalted and most holy. The passions of mankind are as countless as the sands of the sea, and each of them is different from the others; and all of them, mean or beautiful, start by being subject to man, and afterwards become his most inexorable master. Happy is the man who has chosen for himself a higher passion ... but there are passions which are not chosen by man: they are with him from the moment of his birth, and strength is not given him to free himself from them. These passions are ordered according to a high plan, and there is something in them which eternally and incessantly summons him, and which lasts as long as life lasts. They have a great work to accomplish; whether they be sombre or whether they be bright, their purpose is to work for an ultimate good which is beyond the ken of man. And perhaps in this same Chichikov the ruling passion which governs him is not of his choosing, and in his cold existence there may be something which will one day cause us to humble ourselves on our knees and in the dust before the Divine wisdom.”

I quote this passage at length because it not only explains the point of view of Gogol towards his creation, but also that which nearly all Russian authors and novelists hold with regard to mankind in general. Gogol’s Dead Souls is an extremely funny book; it is full of delightful situations, comic characters and situations. At the same time it has often struck people as being a sad book. When Gogol read out to Pushkin the first chapter, Pushkin, who at other times had always laughed when Gogol read his work to him, became sadder and sadder, and said when Gogol had reached the end: “What a sad country Russia is!”

It is true, as Gogol himself says at the end of the first volume of Dead Souls, that there is probably not one of his readers who, after an honest self-examination, will not wonder whether he has not something of Chichikov in himself. And if at such a moment such a man should meet an acquaintance in the street, whose rank is neither too exalted for criticism nor too obscure for notice, he will nudge his companion, and say with a chuckle: “There goes Chichikov!” Perhaps every Russian feels that there is something of Chichikov in him, and Chichikov is a rascal, and most of the other characters in Dead Souls are rascals also; people who try to cheat their neighbours, and feel no moral scruples or remorse after they have done so. But in spite of all this, the impression that remains with one after reading the book is not one of bitterness or of melancholy. For in all the characters there is a vast amount of good-nature and of humanity. Also, as Gogol has pointed out in the passage quoted above, the peculiar blend of faults and qualities on which moralists may be severe, may be a special part of the Divine scheme.

However this may be, what strikes the casual student most when he has read Dead Souls, is that Gogol is the only Russian author who has given us in literature the universal type of Russian; the Russian “man in the street.” Tolstoy has depicted the upper classes. Dostoievsky has reached the innermost depths of the Russian soul in its extremest anguish and at its highest pitch. Tourgeniev has fixed on the canvas several striking portraits, which suffer from the defect either of being caricatures, or of being too deeply dyed in the writer’s pessimism and self-consciousness. Gorky has painted in lurid colours one side of the common people. Andreev has given us the nightmares of the younger generation. Chekov has depicted the pessimism and the ineffectiveness of the “intelligenzia.”[6] But nobody except Gogol has given us the ordinary cheerful Russian man in the street, with his crying faults, his attractive good qualities, and his overflowing human nature. In fact, it is the work of Gogol that explains the attraction which the Russian character and the Russian country exercise over people who have come beneath their influence. At first sight the thing seems inexplicable. The country seems ugly, dreary and monotonous, without art, without beauty and without brilliance; the climate is either fiercely cold and damp, or excruciatingly dry and hot; the people are slow and heavy; there is a vast amount of dirt, dust, disorder, untidiness, slovenliness, squalor, and sordidness everywhere; and yet in spite of all this, even a foreigner who has lived in Russia (not to speak of the Russians themselves), and who has once come in contact with its people, can never be quite free from its over-mastering charm, and the secret fascination of the country.

In another passage towards the end of Dead Souls, Gogol writes about this very thing as follows:

“Russia” (he writes), “I see you from the beautiful ‘far away’ where I am. Everything in you is miserable, disordered and inhospitable. There are no emphatic miracles of Nature to startle the eye, graced with equally startling miracles of art. There are no towns with high, many-windowed castles perched on the top of crags; there are no picturesque trees, no ivy-covered houses beside the ceaseless thunder and foam of waterfalls. One never strains one’s neck back to look at the piled-up rocky crags soaring endlessly into the sky. There never shines, through dark and broken arches overgrown with grapes, ivy, and a million wild roses,—there never shines, I say, from afar the eternal line of gleaming mountains standing out against transparent and silver skies. Everything in you is open and desert and level; like dots, your squatting towns lie almost unobserved in the midst of the plains. There is nothing to flatter or to charm the eye. What then is the secret and incomprehensible power which lies hidden in you? Why does your aching melancholy song, which wanders throughout the length and breadth of you, from sea to sea, sound and echo unceasingly in one’s ears? What is there in this song? What is there that calls and sobs and captures the heart? What are the sounds which hurt as they kiss, pierce my very inmost soul and flood my heart? Russia, what do you want of me? What inexplicable bond is there between you and me?”

Gogol does not answer the question, and if he cannot put his finger on the secret it would be difficult for any one else to do so. But although he does not answer the question directly, he does so indirectly by his works. Any one who reads Gogol’s early stories, even Dead Souls, will understand the inexplicable fascination hidden in a country which seems at first sight so devoid of outward and superficial attraction, and in a people whose defects are so obvious and unconcealed. The charm of Russian life lies in its essential goodness of heart, and in its absence of hypocrisy, and it is owing to this absence of hypocrisy that the faults of the Russian character are so easy to detect. It is for this reason that in Gogol’s realistic and satirical work, as in The Inspector and Dead Souls, the characters startle the foreign observer by their frank and almost universal dishonesty. The truth is that they do not take the trouble to conceal their shortcomings; they are indulgent to the failings of others, and not only expect but know that they will find their own faults treated with similar indulgence. Faults, failings, and vices which in Western Europe would be regarded with uncompromising censure and merciless blame, meet in Russia either with pity or good-humoured indulgence.

This happy-go-lucky element, the good-natured indulgence and scepticism with which Russians regard many things which we consider of grave import, are, no doubt, to a great extent the cause of the evils which exist in the administrative system of the country—the cause of nearly all the evils of which Russian reformers so bitterly complain. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that this same good-humour and this same indulgence, the results of which in public life are slackness, disorder, corruption, irresponsibility and arbitrariness, in private life produce results of a different nature, such as pity, charity, hospitality and unselfishness; for the good-humour and the good-nature of the Russian proceed directly from goodness, and from nothing else.

Gogol never finished Dead Souls. He went on working on the second and third parts of it until the end of his life, in 1852; and he twice threw the work, when it was completed, into the fire. All we possess is an incomplete copy of a manuscript of the second part, which escaped destruction. He had intended the second part to be more serious than the first; his ambition was to work out the moral regeneration of Chichikov, and in doing so to attain to a full and complete expression of his ideals and his outlook on life. The ambition pursued and persecuted him like a feverish dream, and not being able to realise it, he turned back upon himself and was driven inward. His nature was religious to the core, since it was based on a firm and unshaken belief in Providence; and there came a time when he began to experience that distaste of the world which ultimately leads to a man becoming an ascetic and a recluse.

He lived in Rome, isolated from the world; he became consumed with religious zeal; he preached to his friends and acquaintances the Christian virtues of humility, resignation and charity; he urged them not to resist authority, but to become contrite Christians. And in order that the world should hear him, in 1847 he published passages from a correspondence with friends. In these letters Gogol insisted on the paramount necessity of spiritual life; but instead of attacking the Church he defended it, and preached submission both to it and to the Government.

The book created a sensation, and raised a storm of abuse. Some of the prominent Liberals were displeased. It was, of course, easy for them to attack Gogol; for here, they said, was the man who had, more than any other, satirised and discredited the Russian Government and Russian administration, coming forward as an apostle of orthodoxy and officialdom. The intellectual world scorned him as a mystic, and considered the matter settled; but if the word “mystic” had the significance which these people seem to have attached to it, then Gogol was not a mystic. There was nothing extravagant or uncommon in his religion. He gave up writing, and devoted himself to religion and good works; but this does not constitute what the intellectuals seem to have meant by mysticism. Mysticism with them was equivalent to madness. If, on the other hand, we mean by mysticism the transcendent common sense which recognises a Divine order of things, and the reality of an invisible world, then Gogol was a mystic. Therefore, when Gogol ceased to write stories, he no more became a mystic than did Pascal when he ceased going into society, or than Racine did when he ceased to write plays. In the other sense of the word he was a mystic all his life; so was Racine.

At the age of thirty-three his creative faculties had dried up, and at the age of forty-three, in February 1852, he died of typhoid fever. The place of Gogol in Russian literature is a very high one. Prosper Mérimée places him among the best English humorists. Gogol’s European reputation is less great than it should be, because his subject-matter is more remote. But of all the Russian prose writers of the last century, Gogol is perhaps the most national. His work smells of the soil of Russia; there is nothing imitative or foreign about it. When he published The Inspector, the motto which he appended to it was: “If your mouth is crooked, don’t blame the looking-glass.” He was a great humorist. He was also a great satirist. He was a penetrating but not a pitiless observer; in his fun and his humour, there is often a note of sadness, an accent of pathos, and a tinge of wistful melancholy. His pathos and his laughter are closely allied one to another, but in his sadness there is neither bitterness nor gloom; there is no shadow of the powers of darkness, no breath of the icy terror which blows through the works of Tolstoy; there is no hint of the emptiness and the void, or of a fear of them. There is nothing akin to despair. For his whole outlook on life is based on faith in Providence, and the whole of his morality consists in Christian charity, and in submission to the Divine.

In one of his lectures, Gogol, speaking of Pushkin, singles out, as one of the qualities of Russian literature, the pity for all who are unfortunate. This, he says, is a truly Russian characteristic.

“Think,” he writes, “of that touching spectacle which our people afford when they visit the exiles who are starting for Siberia, when every man brings something, either food or money, or a kind word. There is here no hatred of the criminal; no quixotic wish to make him a hero, or to ask for his autograph or his portrait, or to regard him as an object of morbid curiosity, as often happens in more civilised Europe. Here there is something more: it is not the desire to whitewash him, or to deliver him from the hands of the law, but to comfort his broken spirit, and to console him as a brother comforts a brother, or as Christ ordered us to console each other.”

This sense of pity is the greatest gift that the Russian nation possesses: it is likewise the cardinal factor of Russian literature, as well as its most precious asset; the inestimable legacy and contribution which Russian authors have made to the literature of the world. It is a thing which the Russians and no other people have given us. There is no better way of judging of this quality and of estimating its results, than to study the works of Russia’s greatest humorist, satirist, and realist. For if realism can be so vivid without being cruel, if satire can be so cruel without being bitter, and a sense of the ridiculous so broad and so strong without being ill-natured, the soil of goodness out of which these things all grow must indeed be rich and deep, and the streams of pity with which it is watered must indeed be plentiful.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] I met a Russian doctor in Manchuria, who knew pages of a Russian translation of Three Men in a Boat by heart.

[6] The highly educated professional middle class.

CHAPTER IV
TOLSTOY AND TOURGENIEV

The eightieth birthday of Count Tolstoy, which was celebrated in Russia on August 28 (old style), 1908, was closely followed by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Tourgeniev, who died on September 3, 1883, at the age of sixty-five. These two anniversaries followed close upon the publication of a translation into English of the complete works of Count Tolstoy by Professor Wiener; and it is not long ago that a new edition of the complete works of Tourgeniev, translated into English by Mrs. Garnett, appeared. Both these translations have been made with great care, and are faithful and accurate. Thirty years ago it is certain that European critics, and probable that Russian critics, would have observed, in commenting on the concurrence of these two events, that Tolstoy and Tourgeniev were the two giants of modern Russian literature. Is the case the same to-day? Is it still true that, in the opinion of Russia and of Europe, the names of Tolstoy and Tourgeniev stand pre-eminently above all their contemporaries?

With regard to Tolstoy the question can be answered without the slightest hesitation. Time, which has inflicted such mournful damage on so many great reputations in the last twenty-five years, has not only left the fame of Tolstoy’s masterpieces unimpaired, but has increased our sense of their greatness. The question arises, whose work forms the complement to that of Tolstoy, and shares his undisputed dominion of modern Russian literature? Is it Tourgeniev? In Russia at the present day the answer would be “No,” it is not Tourgeniev. And in Europe, students of Russian literature who are acquainted with the Russian language—as we see in M. Emile Haumant’s study of Tourgeniev’s life and work, and in Professor Brückner’s history of Russian literature—would also answer in the negative, although their denial would be less emphatic and not perhaps unqualified.

The other giant, the complement of Tolstoy, almost any Russian critic of the present day without hesitation would pronounce to be Dostoievsky; and the foreign critic who is thoroughly acquainted with Dostoievsky’s work cannot but agree with him. I propose to go more fully into the question of the merits and demerits of Dostoievsky later on; but it is impossible not to mention him here, because the very existence of his work powerfully affects our judgment when we come to look at that of his contemporaries. We can no more ignore his presence and his influence than we could ignore the presence of a colossal fresco by Leonardo da Vinci in a room in which there were only two other religious pictures, one by Rembrandt and one by Vandyck. For any one who is familiar with Dostoievsky, and has felt his tremendous influence, cannot look at the work of his contemporaries with the same eyes as before. To such a one, the rising of Dostoievsky’s red and troubled planet, while causing the rays of Tourgeniev’s serene star to pale, leaves the rays of Tolstoy’s orb undiminished and undimmed. Tolstoy and Dostoievsky shine in the firmament of Russian literature like two planets, one of them as radiant as the planet Jupiter, the other as ominous as the planet Mars. Beside either of these the light of Tourgeniev twinkles, pure indeed, and full of pearly lustre, like the moon faintly seen in the east at the end of an autumnal day.

It is rash to make broad generalisations. They bring with them a certain element of exaggeration which must be discounted. Nevertheless I believe that I am stating a fundamental truth in saying that the Russian character can, roughly speaking, be divided into two types, and these two types dominate the whole of Russian literature. The first is that which I shall call, for want of a better name, Lucifer, the fallen angel. The second type is that of the hero of all Russian folk-tales, Ivan Durak, Ivan the Fool, or the Little Fool. There are innumerable folk-tales in Russian which tell the adventures of Ivan the Fool, who, by his very simplicity and foolishness, outwits the wisdom of the world. This type is characteristic of one Russian ideal. The simple fool is venerated in Russia as something holy. It is acknowledged that his childish innocence is more precious than the wisdom of the wise. Ivan Durak may be said to be the hero of all Dostoievsky’s novels. He is the aim and ideal of Dostoievsky’s life, an aim and ideal which he fully achieves. He is also the aim and ideal of Tolstoy’s teaching, but an aim and ideal which Tolstoy recommends to others and only partly achieves himself.

The first type I have called, for want of a better name, since I can find no concrete symbol of it in Russian folk-lore, Lucifer, the fallen angel. This type is the embodiment of stubborn and obdurate pride, the spirit which cannot bend; such is Milton’s Satan, with his

“Courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.”

This type is also widely prevalent in Russia, although it cannot be said to be a popular type, embodied, like Ivan the Fool, in a national symbol. One of the most striking instances of this, the Lucifer type, which I have come across, was a peasant called Nazarenko, who was a member of the first Duma. He was a tall, powerfully built, rugged-looking man, spare and rather thin, with clear-cut prominent features, black penetrating eyes, and thick black tangled hair. He looked as if he had stepped out of a sacred picture by Velasquez. This man had the pride of Lucifer. There was at that time, in July 1905, an Inter-parliamentary Congress sitting in London. Five delegates of the Russian Duma were chosen to represent Russia. It was proposed that Nazarenko should represent the peasants. I asked him once if he were going. He answered:

“I shan’t go unless I am unanimously chosen by the others. I have written down my name and asked, but I shall not ask twice. I never ask twice for anything. When I say my prayers, I only ask God once for a thing, and if it is not granted, I never ask again. So it is not likely I would ask my fellow-men twice for anything. I am like that. I leave out that passage in the prayers about being a miserable slave. I am not a miserable slave, either of man or of Heaven.”

Such a man recognises no authority, human or divine. Indeed he not only refuses to acknowledge authority, but it will be difficult for him to admire or bow down to any of those men or ideas which the majority have agreed to believe worthy of admiration, praise, or reverence.

Now, while Dostoievsky is the incarnation of the first type, of Ivan the Fool, Tolstoy is the incarnation of the second. It is true that, at a certain stage of his career, Tolstoy announced to the world that the ideal of Ivan Durak was the only ideal worth following. He perceives this aim with clearness, and, in preaching it, he has made a multitude of disciples; the only thing he has never been able to do is to make the supreme submission, the final surrender, and to become the type himself.

We know everything about Tolstoy, not only from the biographical writings of Fet and Behrs, but from his own autobiography, his novels, and his Confession. He gives us a panorama of events down to the smallest detail of his long career, as well as of every phase of feeling, and every shade and mood of his spiritual existence. The English reader who wishes to be acquainted with all the important facts of Tolstoy’s material and spiritual life cannot do better than read Mr. Aylmer Maude’s Life of Tolstoy, which compresses into one well-planned and admirably executed volume all that is of interest during the first fifty years of Tolstoy’s career. In reading this book a phrase of Tourgeniev’s occurs to one. “Man is the same, from the cradle to the grave.” Tolstoy had been called inconsistent; but the student of his life and work, far from finding inconsistency, will rather be struck by the unvarying and obstinate consistency of his ideas. Here, for instance, is an event recorded in Tolstoy’s Confession (p. 1):

“I remember how, when I was about eleven, a boy, Vladimir Miliutin, long since dead, visited us one Sunday, and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school. The discovery was that there is no God at all, and all we are taught about Him is a mere invention. I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news. They called me to their council, and we all, I remember, became animated, and accepted the news as something very interesting and fully possible.”

There is already the germ of the man who was afterwards to look with such independent eyes on the accepted beliefs and ideas of mankind, to play havoc with preconceived opinions, and to establish to his own satisfaction whether what was true for others was true for himself or not. Later he says:

“I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and all through my boyhood and youth. Before I left the university, in my second year, at the age of eighteen, I no longer believed anything I had been taught.”[7]

A Russian writer, M. Kurbski, describes how, when he first met Tolstoy, he was overwhelmed by the look in Tolstoy’s eyes. They were more than eyes, he said; they were like electric searchlights, which penetrated into the depths of your mind, and, like a photographic lens, seized and retained for ever a positive picture. In his Childhood and Youth, Tolstoy gives us the most vivid, the most natural, the most sensitive picture of childhood and youth that has ever been penned by the hand of man. And yet, after reading it, one is left half-unconsciously with the impression that the author feels there is something wrong, something unsatisfactory behind it all.

Tolstoy then passes on to describe the life of a grown-up man, in The Morning of a Landowner, in which he tells how he tried to work in his own home, on his property, and to teach the peasants, and how nothing came of his experiments. And again we have the feeling of something unsatisfactory, and something wanting, something towards which the man is straining, and which escapes him.

A little later, Tolstoy goes to the Caucasus, to the war, where life is primitive and simple, where he is nearer to nature, and where man himself is more natural. And then we have The Cossacks, in which Tolstoy’s searchlights are thrown upon the primitive life of the old huntsman, the Cossack, Yeroshka, who lives as the grass lives, without care, without grief, and without reflection. Once more we feel that the soul of the writer is dissatisfied, still searching for something he has not found.

In 1854, Tolstoy took part in the Crimean War, which supplied him with the stuff for what are perhaps the most truthful pictures of war that have ever been written. But even here, we feel he has not yet found his heart’s desire. Something is wrong. He was recommended for the St. George’s Cross, but owing to his being without some necessary official document at the time of his recommendation, he failed to receive it. This incident is a symbol of the greater failure, the failure to achieve the inward happiness that he is seeking—a solid ground to tread on, a bridge to the infinite, a final place of peace. In his private diary there is an entry made at the commencement of the war, while he was at Silistria, which runs as follows:

“I have no modesty; that is my great defect.... I am ugly, awkward, uncleanly, and lack society education. I am irritable, a bore to others, not modest; intolerant, and as shamefaced as a child.... I am almost an ignoramus. What I do know I have learnt anyhow, by myself, in snatches, without sequence, without a plan, and it amounts to very little. I am incontinent, undecided, inconstant, and stupidly vain and vehement, like all characterless people. I am not brave.... I am clever, but my cleverness has as yet not been thoroughly tested on anything.... I am honest; that is to say, I love goodness.... There is a thing I love more than goodness, and that is fame. I am so ambitious, and so little has this feeling been gratified, that, should I have to choose between fame and goodness, I fear I may often choose the former. Yes, I am not modest, and therefore I am proud at heart, shamefaced, and shy in society.”

At the time that Tolstoy wrote this he was a master, as Mr. Aylmer Maude points out, of the French and German languages, besides having some knowledge of English, Latin, Arabic, and Turco-Tartar. He had published stories which had caused the editors of the best Russian magazines to offer him the rate of pay accorded to the best-known writers. Therefore his discontent with his position, both intellectual and social, was in reality quite unfounded.

After the Crimean War, Tolstoy went abroad. He found nothing in Western Europe to satisfy him. On his return he settled down at Yasnaya Polyana, and married; and the great patriarchal phase of his life began, during which every gift and every happiness that man can be blessed with seemed to have fallen to his lot. It was then that he wrote War and Peace, in which he describes the conflict between one half of Europe and the other. He takes one of the largest canvases ever attacked by man; and he writes a prose epic on a period full of tremendous events. His piercing glance sees through all the fictions of national prejudice and patriotic bias; and he gives us what we feel to be the facts as they were, the very truth. No detail is too small for him, no catastrophe too great. He traces the growth of the spreading tree to its minute seed, the course of the great river to its tiny source. He makes a whole vanished generation of public and private men live before our eyes in such a way that it is difficult to believe that these people are not a part of our actual experience; and that his creations are not men and women we have seen with our own eyes, and whose voices we have heard with our own ears.

But when we put down this wonderful book, unequalled as a prose epic, as a panorama of a period and a gallery of a thousand finished portraits, we are still left with the impression that the author has not yet found what he is seeking. He is still asking why? and wherefore? What does it all mean? why all these horrors, why these sacrifices? Why all this conflict and suffering of nations? What do these high deeds, this heroism, mean? What is the significance of these State problems, and the patriotic self-sacrifice of nations? We are aware that the soul of Tolstoy is alone in an awful solitude, and that it is shivering on the heights, conscious that all round it is emptiness, darkness and despair.

Again, in War and Peace we are conscious that Tolstoy’s proud nature, the “Lucifer” type in him, is searching for another ideal; and that in the character of Pierre Bezuhov he is already setting up before us the ideal of Ivan Durak as the model which we should seek to imitate. And in Pierre Bezuhov we feel that there is something of Tolstoy himself. Manners change, but man, faced by the problem of life, is the same throughout all ages; and, whether consciously or unconsciously, Tolstoy proves this in writing Anna Karenina. Here again, on a large canvas, we see unrolled before us the contemporary life of the upper classes in Russia, in St. Petersburg, and in the country, with the same sharpness of vision, which seizes every outward detail, and reveals every recess of the heart and mind. Nearly all characters in all fiction seem bookish beside those of Tolstoy. His men and women are so real and so true that, even if his psychological analysis of them may sometimes err and go wrong from its oversubtlety and its desire to explain too much, the characters themselves seem to correct this automatically, as though they were independent of their creator. He creates a character and gives it life. He may theorise on a character, just as he might theorise on a person in real life; and he may theorise wrong, simply because sometimes no theorising is necessary, and the very fact of a theory being set down in words may give a false impression; but, as soon as the character speaks and acts, it speaks and acts in the manner which is true to itself, and corrects the false impression of the theory, just as though it were an independent person over whom the author had no control.

Nearly every critic, at least nearly every English critic,[8] in dealing with Anna Karenina, has found fault with the author for the character of Vronsky. Anna Karenina, they say, could never have fallen in love with such an ordinary commonplace man. Vronsky, one critic has said (in a brilliant article), is only a glorified “Steerforth.” The answer to this is that if you go to St. Petersburg or to London, or to any other town you like to mention, you will find that the men with whom the Anna Kareninas of this world fall in love are precisely the Vronskys, and no one else, for the simple reason that Vronsky is a man. He is not a hero, and he is not a villain; he is not what people call “interesting,” but a man, as masculine as Anna is feminine, with many good qualities and many limitations, but above all things alive. Nearly every novelist, with the exception of Fielding, ends, in spite of himself, by placing his hero either above or beneath the standard of real life. There are many Vronskys to-day in St. Petersburg, and for the matter of that, mutatis mutandis, in London. But no novelist except Tolstoy has ever had the power to put this simple thing, an ordinary man, into a book. Put one of Meredith’s heroes next to Vronsky, and Meredith’s hero will appear like a figure dressed up for a fancy-dress ball. Put one of Bourget’s heroes next to him, with all his psychological documents attached to him, and, in spite of all the analysis in the world, side by side with Tolstoy’s human being he will seem but a plaster-cast. Yet, all the time, in Anna Karenina we feel, as in War and Peace, that the author is still unsatisfied and hungry, searching for something he has not yet found; and once again, this time in still sharper outline and more living colours, he paints an ideal of simplicity which is taking us towards Ivan Durak in the character of Levin. Into this character, too, we feel that Tolstoy has put a great deal of himself; and that Levin, if he is not Tolstoy himself, is what Tolstoy would like to be. But the loneliness and the void that are round Tolstoy’s mind are not yet filled; and in that loneliness and in that void we are sharply conscious of the brooding presence of despair, and the power of darkness.

We feel that Tolstoy is afraid of the dark; that to him there is something wrong in the whole of human life, a radical mistake. He is conscious that, with all his genius, he has only been able to record the fact that all that he has found in life is not what he is looking for, but something irrelevant and unessential; and, at the same time, that he has not been able to determine the thing in life which is not a mistake, nor where the true aim, the essential thing, is to be found, nor in what it consists. It is at this moment that the crisis occurred in Tolstoy’s life which divides it outwardly into two sections, although it constitutes no break in his inward evolution. The fear of the dark, of the abyss yawning in front of him, was so strong that he felt he must rid himself of it at all costs.

“I felt terror” (he writes) “of what was awaiting me, though I knew that this terror was more terrible than my position itself; I could not wait patiently for the end; my horror of the darkness was too great, and I felt I must rid myself of it as soon as possible by noose or bullet.”

This terror was not a physical fear of death, but an abstract fear, arising from the consciousness that the cold mists of decay were rising round him. By the realisation of the nothingness of everything, of what Leopardi calls “l’infinita vanità del tutto,” he was brought to the verge of suicide. And then came the change which he describes thus in his Confession: “I grew to hate myself; and now all has become clear to me.” This was the preliminary step of the development which led him to believe that he had at last found the final and everlasting truth. “A man has only got not to desire lands or money, in order to enter into the kingdom of God.” Property, he came to believe, was the source of all evil. “It is not a law of nature, the will of God, or a historical necessity; rather a superstition, neither strong nor terrible, but weak and contemptible.” To free oneself from this superstition he thought was as easy as to stamp on a spider. He desired literally to carry out the teaching of the Gospels, to give up all he had and to become a beggar.

This ideal he was not able to carry out in practice. His family, his wife, opposed him: and he was not strong enough to face the uncompromising and terrible sayings which speak of a man’s foes being those of his own household, of father being divided against son, and household against household, of the dead being left to bury their dead. He put before him the ideal of the Christian saints, and of the early Russian martyrs who literally acted upon the saying of Christ: “Whoso leaveth not house and lands and children for My sake, is not worthy of Me.” Tolstoy, instead of crushing the spider of property, shut his eyes to it. He refused to handle money, or to have anything to do with it; but this does not alter the fact that it was handled for him, so that he retained its advantages, and this without any of the harassment which arises from the handling of property. His affairs were, and still are, managed for him; and he continued to live as he had done before. No sane person would think of blaming Tolstoy for this. He was not by nature a St. Francis; he was not by nature a Russian martyr, but the reverse. What one does resent is not that his practice is inconsistent with his teaching, but that his teaching is inconsistent with the ideal which it professes to embody. He takes the Christian teaching, and tells the world that it is the only hope of salvation, the only key to the riddle of life. At the same time he neglects the first truth on which that teaching is based, namely, that man must be born again; he must humble himself and become as a little child. It is just this final and absolute surrender that Tolstoy has been unable to make. Instead of loving God through himself, and loving himself for the God in him, he hates himself, and refuses to recognise the gifts that God has given him. It is for this reason that he talks of all his great work, with the exception of a few stories written for children, as being worthless. It is for this reason that he ceased writing novels, and attempted to plough the fields. And the cause of all this is simply spiritual pride, because he was unwilling “to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him.” Providence had made him a novelist and a writer, and not a tiller of the fields. Providence had made him not only a novelist, but perhaps the greatest novelist that has ever lived; yet he deliberately turns upon this gift, and spurns it, and spits upon it, and says that it is worth nothing.

The question is, has a human being the right to do this, especially if, for any reasons whatever, he is not able to make the full and complete renunciation, and to cut himself off from the world altogether? The answer is that if this be the foundation of Tolstoy’s teaching, people have a right to complain of there being something wrong in it. If he had left the world and become a pilgrim, like one of the early Russian saints, not a word could have been said; or if he had remained in the world, preaching the ideals of Christianity and carrying them out as far as he could, not a word could have been said. But, while he has not followed the first course, he has preached that the second course is wrong. He has striven after the ideal of Ivan Durak, but has been unable to find it, simply because he has been unable to humble himself; he has re-written the Gospels to suit his own temperament. The cry of his youth, “I have no modesty,” remains true of him after his conversion. It is rather that he has no humility; and, instead of acknowledging that every man is appointed to a definite task, and that there is no such thing as a superfluous man or a superfluous task, he has preached that all tasks are superfluous except what he himself considers to be necessary; instead of preaching the love of the divine “image of the King,” with which man is stamped like a coin, he has told us to love the maker of the coin by hatred of His handiwork, quite regardless of the image with which it is stamped.

This all arises from the dual personality in the man, the conflict between the titanic “Lucifer” and the other element in him, for ever searching for the ideal of Ivan Durak. The Titan is consumed with desire to become Ivan Durak; he preaches to the whole world that they should do so, but he cannot do it himself. Other proud and titanic natures have done it; but Tolstoy cannot do what Dante did. Dante was proud and a Titan, but Dante divested himself of his pride, and seeing the truth, said: “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.” Nor can Tolstoy attain to Goethe’s great cry of recognition of the “himmlische Mächte,” “Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass.” He remains isolated in his high and terrible solitude:

“In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb.”

Tourgeniev said of Tolstoy, “He never loved any one but himself.” Merejkowski, in his Tolstoy as Man and Artist, a creative work of criticism, is nearer the truth when he says, He has never loved any man, “not even himself!” But Merejkowski considers that the full circle of Tolstoy’s spiritual life is not closed. He does not believe he has found the truth which he has sought for all his life, nor that he is, as yet, at rest.

“I cannot refuse to believe him” (he writes) “when he speaks of himself as a pitiable fledgling fallen from the nest. Yes, however terrible, it is true. This Titan, with all his vigour, is lying on his back and wailing in the high grass, as you and I and all the rest of us. No, he has found nothing; no faith, no God. And his whole justification is solely in his hopeless prayer, this piercing and plaintive cry of boundless solitude and dread.... Will he at last understand that there is no higher or lower in the matter; that the two seemingly contradictory and equally true paths, leading to one and the same goal, are not two paths, but one path which merely seems to be two; and that it is not by going against what is earthly or fleeing from it, but only through what is earthly, that we can reach the Divine; that it is not by divesting ourselves of the flesh, but through the flesh, that we can reach that which is beyond the flesh? Shall we fear the flesh? we, the children of Him who said, ‘My blood is drink indeed, and My flesh is meat indeed’; we, whose God is that God whose Word was made flesh?”[9]

Yet, whatever the mistakes of Tolstoy’s teaching may be, they do not detract from the moral authority of the man. All his life he has searched for the truth, and all his life he has said exactly what he thought; and though he has fearlessly attacked all constituted authorities, nobody has dared to touch him. He is too great. This is the first time independent thought has prevailed in Russia; and this victory is the greatest service he has rendered to Russia as a man.

Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky could endure Tourgeniev; their dislike of him is interesting, and helps us to understand the nature of their work and of their artistic ideals, and the nature of the distance that separates the work of Tourgeniev from that of Tolstoy. “I despise the man,” Tolstoy wrote of Tourgeniev to Fet. Dostoievsky, in his novel The Possessed,[10] draws a scathing portrait of Tourgeniev, in which every defect of the man is noted but grossly exaggerated. This portrait is not uninstructive.

“I read his works in my childhood,” Dostoievsky writes, “I even revelled in them. They were the delight of my boyhood and my youth. Then I gradually grew to feel colder towards his writing.” He goes on to say that Tourgeniev is one of those authors who powerfully affect one generation, and are then put on the shelf, like the scene of a theatre. The reason of this dislike, of the inability to admire Tourgeniev’s work, which was shared by Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, is perhaps that both these men, each in his own way, reached the absolute truth of the life which was round them. Tolstoy painted the outer and the inner life of those with whom he came in contact, in a manner such as has never been seen before or since; and Dostoievsky painted the inner life (however fantastic he made the outer machinery of his work) with an insight that has never been attained before or since. Now Tourgeniev painted people of the same epoch, the same generation; he dealt with the same material; he dealt with it as an artist and as a poet, as a great artist, and as a great poet. But his vision was weak and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoievsky. His characters, beside those of Tolstoy, seem caricatures, and beside those of Dostoievsky they are conventional.

In Europe no foreign writer has ever received more abundant praise from the most eclectic judges than has Tourgeniev. Flaubert said of him: “Quel gigantesque bonhomme que ce Scythe!” George Sand said: “Maître, il nous faut tous aller à votre école.” Taine speaks of Tourgeniev’s work as being the finest artistic production since Sophocles. Twenty-five years have now passed since Tourgeniev’s death; and, as M. Haumant points out in his book, the period of reaction and of doubt, with regard to his work, has now set in even in Europe. People are beginning to ask themselves whether Tourgeniev’s pictures are true, whether the Russians that he describes ever existed, and whether the praise which was bestowed upon him by his astonished contemporaries all over Europe was not a gross exaggeration.

One reason of the abundant and perhaps excessive praise which was showered on Tourgeniev by European critics is that it was chiefly through Tourgeniev’s work that Europe discovered Russian literature, and became aware that novels were being written in which dramatic issues, as poignant and terrible as those of Greek tragedy, arose simply out of the clash of certain characters in everyday life. The simplicity of Russian literature, the naturalness of the characters in Russian fiction, came like a revelation to Europe; and, as this revelation came about partly through the work of Tourgeniev, it is not difficult to understand that he received the praise not only due to him as an artist, but the praise for all the qualities which are inseparable from the work of any Russian.

Heine says somewhere that the man who first came to Germany was astonished at the abundance of ideas there. “This man,” he says, “was like the traveller who found a nugget of gold directly he arrived in El Dorado; but his enthusiasm died down when he discovered that in El Dorado there was nothing but nuggets of gold.” As it was with ideas in Germany, according to Heine, so was it with the naturalness of Tourgeniev. Compared with the work of Tolstoy and that of all other Russian writers, Tourgeniev’s naturalness is less astonishing, because he possesses the same qualities that they possess, only in a less degree.

When all is said, Tourgeniev was a great poet. What time has not taken away from him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry in his work. Every Russian schoolboy has read the works of Tourgeniev before he has left school; and every Russian schoolboy will probably continue to do so, because Tourgeniev’s prose remains a classic model of simple, beautiful, and harmonious language, and as such it can hardly be excelled. Tourgeniev never wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, the Sportsman’s Sketches. In this book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression. One does not know which to admire more—the delicacy of the art in choosing and recording his impressions, or the limpid and musical utterance with which they are recorded. To the reader who only knows his work through a translation, three-quarters of the beauty are lost; yet so great is the truth, and so moving is the poetry of these sketches, that even in translation they will strike a reader as unrivalled.

There is, perhaps, nothing so difficult in the world to translate as stories dealing with Russian peasants. The simplicity and directness of their speech are the despair of the translator; and to translate them properly would require literary talent at once as great and as delicate as the author’s. Mrs. Garnett’s version of Tourgeniev’s work is admirable; yet in reading the translation of the Sportsman’s Sketches, and comparing it with the original, one feels that the task is an almost impossible one. Some writers, Rudyard Kipling for instance, succeed in conveying to us the impression which is made by the conversation of men in exotic countries. When Rudyard Kipling gives us the speech of an Indian, he translates it into simple and biblical English. There is no doubt this is the right way to deal with the matter; it is the method which was adopted with perfect success by the great writers of the eighteenth century, the method of Fielding and Smollett in dealing with the conversation of simple men. One cannot help thinking that it is a mistake, in translating the speech of people like Russian peasants, or Indians, or Greeks, however familiar the speech may be, to try to render it by the equivalent colloquial or slang English. For instance, Mrs. Garnett, in translating one of Tourgeniev’s masterpieces, The Singers, turns the Russian words “nie vryosh” (Art thou not lying?) by “Isn’t it your humbug?” In the same story she translates the Russian word “molchat” by the slang expression “shut up.” Now “shut up” might, in certain circumstances, be the colloquial equivalent of “molchat”; but the expression conveyed is utterly false, and it would be better to translate it simply “be silent”; because to translate the talk of the Russian peasant into English colloquialisms conveys precisely the same impression, to any one familiar with the original, which he would receive were he to come across the talk of a Scotch gillie translated into English cockney slang.

This may seem a small point, but in reality it is the chief problem of all translation, and especially of that translation which deals with the talk and the ways of simple men. It is therefore of cardinal importance, when the material in question happens to be the talk of Russian peasants; and I have seen no translation in which this mistake is not made. How great the beauty of the original must be is proved by the fact that even in a translation of this kind one can still discern it, and that one receives at least a shadow of the impression which the author intended to convey. If the Sportsman’s Sketches be the masterpiece of Tourgeniev, he rose to the same heights once more at the close of his career, when he wrote the incomparable Poems in Prose. Here once more he touched the particular vibrating string which was his special secret, and which thrills and echoes in the heart with so lingering a sweetness.

So much for Tourgeniev as a poet. But Tourgeniev was a novelist, he was famous as a novelist, and must be considered as such. His three principal novels, A House of Gentlefolk, Fathers and Sons, and Virgin Soil, laid the foundation of his European fame. Their merits consist in the ideal character of the women described, the absence of tricks of mechanism and melodrama, the naturalness of the sequence of the events, the harmony and proportion of the whole, and the vividness of the characters. No one can deny that the characters of Tourgeniev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Tourgeniev is this: that Tourgeniev’s characters are as living as any characters ever are in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland, and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Tourgeniev’s characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them; and that they are permeated by the faults of the author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self-consciousness. M. Haumant points out that the want of backbone in all Tourgeniev’s characters does not prove that types of this kind must necessarily be untrue or misleading pictures of the Russian character, since Tourgeniev was not only a Russian, but an exceptionally gifted and remarkable Russian. Tourgeniev himself divides all humanity into two types, the Don Quixotes and the Hamlets. With but one notable exception, he almost exclusively portrayed the Hamlets. Feeble, nerveless people, full of ideas, enthusiastic in speech, capable by their words of exciting enthusiasm and even of creating belief in themselves, but incapable of action and devoid of will; they lack both the sublime simplicity and the weakness of Ivan Durak, which is not weakness but strength, because it proceeds from a profound goodness.

To this there is one exception. In Fathers and Sons, Tourgeniev drew a portrait of the “Lucifer” type, of an unbending and inflexible will, namely, Bazarov. There is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive; and nothing that he wrote ever aroused so much controversy and censure as this figure. Tourgeniev invented the type of the intellectual Nihilist in fiction. If he was not the first to invent the word, he was the first to apply it and to give it currency. The type remains, and will remain, of the man who believes in nothing, bows to nothing, bends to nothing, and who retains his invincible pride until death strikes him down. Here again, compared with the Nihilists whom Dostoievsky has drawn in his Possessed, we feel that, so far as the inner truth of this type is concerned, Tourgeniev’s Bazarov is a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be; and that Dostoievsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth. Tourgeniev never actually saw the real thing as Tolstoy might have seen it and described it; nor could he divine by intuition the real thing as Dostoievsky divined it, whether he saw it or not. But Tourgeniev evolved a type out of his artistic imagination, and made a living figure which, to us at any rate, is extraordinarily striking. This character has proved, however, highly irritating to those who knew the prototype from which it was admittedly drawn, and considered him not only a far more interesting character than Tourgeniev’s conception, but quite different from it. But whatever fault may be found with Bazarov, none can be found with the description of his death. Here Tourgeniev reaches his high-water mark as a novelist, and strikes a note of manly pathos which, by its reserve, suggests an infinity of things all the more striking for being left unsaid. The death of Bazarov is one of the great pages of the world’s fiction.

In Virgin Soil, Tourgeniev attempts to give a sketch of underground life in Russia—the revolutionary movement, helpless in face of the ignorance of the masses and the unpreparedness of the nation at large for any such movement. Here, in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter-day critics who have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the real thing.[11] Nevertheless, in spite of Tourgeniev’s limitations, these three books, A House of Gentlefolk, Fathers and Sons, and Virgin Soil, must always have a permanent value as reflecting the atmosphere of the generation which he paints, even though his pictures be marred by caricatures, and feeble when compared with those of his rivals.

Of his other novels, the most important are On the Eve, Smoke, Spring Waters, and Rudin (the most striking portrait in his gallery of Hamlets). In Spring Waters, Tourgeniev’s poetry is allowed free play; the result is therefore an entrancing masterpiece. With regard to On the Eve, Tolstoy writes thus:[12]

“These are excellent negative characters, the artist and the father. The rest are not types; even their conception, their position, is not typical, or they are quite insignificant. That, however, is always Tourgeniev’s mistake. The girl is hopelessly bad. ‘Ah, how I love thee!... Her eyelashes were long.’ In general it always surprises me that Tourgeniev, with his mental powers and poetic sensibility, should, even in his methods, not be able to refrain from banality. There is no humanity or sympathy for the characters, but the author exhibits monsters whom he scolds and does not pity.”

Again, in writing of Smoke, Tolstoy says:[13]

“About Smoke, I think that the strength of poetry lies in love; and the direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength of love there is no poetry; but strength falsely directed—the result of the poet’s having an unpleasant, weak character—creates dislike. In Smoke there is hardly any love of anything, and very little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive.”

These criticisms, especially the latter, may be said to sum up the case of the “Advocatus Diaboli” with regard to Tourgeniev. I have quoted them because they represent what many educated Russians feel at the present day about a great part of Tourgeniev’s work, however keenly they appreciate his poetical sensibility and his gift of style. The view deserves to be pointed out, because all that can be said in praise of Tourgeniev has not only been expressed with admirable nicety and discrimination by widely different critics of various nationalities, but their praise is constantly being quoted; whereas the other side of the question is seldom mentioned. Yet in the case of On the Eve, Tolstoy’s criticism is manifestly unfair. Tolstoy was unable by his nature to do full justice to Tourgeniev. Perhaps the most impartial and acute criticism of Tourgeniev’s work that exists is to be found in M. de Vogüé’s Roman Russe. M. de Vogüé is not indeed blind to Tourgeniev’s defects; he recognises the superiority both of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but he nevertheless gives Tourgeniev his full meed of appreciation.

The lapse of years has only emphasised the elements of banality and conventionality which are to be found in Tourgeniev’s work. He is a masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without convention. His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes, and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any elemental pictures of nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he rings the changes on delicate arrangements of wood, cloud, mist and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures, after the manner of Corot. This does not detract from the beauty of his pictures, and our admiration for them is not lessened; but all temptation to exaggerate its merits vanishes when we turn from his work to that of stronger masters.

To sum up, it may be said that the picture of Russia obtained from the whole of Tourgeniev’s work has been incomplete, but it is not inaccurate; and such as it is, with all its faults, it is invaluable. In 1847, Bielinski, in writing to Tourgeniev, said: “It seems to me that you have little or no creative genius. Your vocation is to depict reality.” This criticism remained true to the end of Tourgeniev’s career, but it omits his greatest gift, his poetry, the magical echoes, the “unheard melodies,” which he sets vibrating in our hearts by the music of his utterance. The last of Tourgeniev’s poems in prose is called “The Russian Language.” It runs as follows:

“In days of doubt, in the days of burdensome musing over the fate of my country, thou alone art my support and my mainstay, oh great, mighty, truthful, and unfettered Russian language! Were it not for thee, how should I not fall into despair at the sight of all that is being done at home? But how can I believe that such a tongue was given to any but a great people?”

No greater praise can be given to Tourgeniev than to say that he was worthy of his medium, and that no Russian prose writer ever handled the great instrument of his inheritance with a more delicate touch or a surer execution.

When Tourgeniev was dying, he wrote to Tolstoy and implored him to return to literature. “That gift,” he wrote, “came whence all comes to us. Return to your literary work, great writer of our Russian land!”

All through Tourgeniev’s life, in spite of his frequent quarrels with Tolstoy, he never ceased to admire the works of his rival. Tourgeniev had the gift of admiration. Tolstoy is absolutely devoid of it. The “Lucifer” spirit in him refuses to bow down before Shakespeare or Beethoven, simply because it is incapable of bending at all. To justify this want, this incapacity to admire the great masterpieces of the world, Tolstoy wrote a book called What is Art? in which he condemned theories he had himself enunciated years before. In this, and in a book on Shakespeare, he treats all art, the very greatest, as if it were in the same category with that of æsthetes who confine themselves to prattling of “Art for Art’s sake.” Beethoven he brushes aside because, he says, such music can only appeal to specialists. “What proportion of the world’s population,” he asks, “have ever heard the Ninth Symphony or seen ‘King Lear’? And how many of them enjoyed the one or the other?” If these things be the highest art, and yet the bulk of men live without them, and do not need them, then the highest art lacks all claim to such respect as Tolstoy is ready to accord to art. In commenting on this, Mr. Aylmer Maude writes: “The case of the specialists, when Tolstoy calls in question the merits of ‘King Lear’ or of the Ninth Symphony, is an easy one.”

But the fallacy does not lie here. The fallacy lies in thinking the matter is a case for specialists at all. It is not a case for specialists. Beethoven’s later quartettes may be a case for the specialist, just as the obscurer passages in Shakespeare may be a case for the specialist. This does not alter the fact that the whole of the German nation, and multitudes of people outside Germany, meet together to hear Beethoven’s symphonies played, and enjoy them. It does not alter the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are translated into every language and enjoyed, and, when they are performed, are enjoyed by the simplest and the most uneducated people. The highest receipts are obtained at the Théâtre Français on holidays and feast days, when the plays of Molière are given. Tolstoy leaves out the fact that very great art, such as that of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Beethoven, Mozart, appeals at the same time, and possibly for different reasons, to the highly trained specialist and to the most uncultivated ignoramus. This, Dr. Johnson points out, is the great merit of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and a child knows nothing more amusing. This is also true of Paradise Lost, an appreciation of which is held in England to be the highest criterion of scholarship. And Paradise Lost, translated into simple prose, is sold in cheap editions, with coloured pictures, all over Russia,[14] and greedily read by the peasants, who have no idea that it is a poem, but enjoy it as a tale of fantastic adventure and miraculous events. It appeals at the same time to their religious feeling and to their love of fairy tales, and impresses them by a certain elevation in the language (just as the chants in church impress them) which they unconsciously feel does them good.

It is this inability to admire which is the whole defect of Tolstoy, and it arises from his indomitable pride, which is the strength of his character, and causes him to tower like a giant over all his contemporaries. Therefore, in reviewing his whole work and his whole life, and in reviewing it in connection with that of his contemporaries, one comes to this conclusion. If Tolstoy, being as great as he is, has this great limitation, we can only repeat the platitude that no genius, however great, is without limitations; no ruby without a flaw. Were it otherwise—Had there been combined with Tolstoy’s power and directness of vision and creative genius, the large love and the childlike simplicity of Dostoievsky—we should have had, united in one man, the complete expression of the Russian race; that is to say, we should have had a complete man—which is impossible.

Tourgeniev, on the other hand, is full to the brim of the power of admiration and appreciation which Tolstoy lacks; but then he also lacks Tolstoy’s strength and power. Dostoievsky has a power different from Tolstoy’s, but equal in scale, and titanic. He has a power of admiration, an appreciation wider and deeper than Tourgeniev’s, and the humility of a man who has descended into hell, who has been face to face with the sufferings and the agonies of humanity and the vilest aspects of human nature; who, far from losing his faith in the divine, has detected it in every human being, however vile, and in every circumstance, however hideous; and who in dust and ashes has felt himself face to face with God. Yet, in spite of all this, Dostoievsky is far from being the complete expression of the Russian genius, or a complete man. His limitations are as great as Tolstoy’s; and no one was ever more conscious of them than himself. They do not concern us here. What does concern us is that in modern Russian literature, in the literature of this century, leaving the poets out of the question, the two great figures, the two great columns which support the temple of Russian literature, are Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. Tourgeniev’s place is inside that temple; there he has a shrine and an altar which are his own, which no one can dispute with him, and which are bathed in serene radiance and visited by shy visions and voices of haunting loveliness. But neither as a writer nor as a man can he be called the great representative of even half the Russian genius; for he complements the genius of neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky. He possesses in a minor degree qualities which they both possessed; and the qualities which are his and his only, exquisite as they are, are not of the kind which belong to the greatest representatives of a nation or of a race.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Life of Tolstoy, p. 38.

[8] Matthew Arnold is a notable exception.

[9] Tolstoy as Man and Artist, pp. 93, 95. This passage is translated from the Russian edition.

[10] It should be said that this portrait is so unfair, and yet contains elements of truth so acutely observed, that for some people it spoils the whole book.

[11] With the exception of Marianna, one of his most beautiful and noble characters.

[12] Life, p. 189.

[13] Life, p. 312.

[14] The popular edition of Paradise Lost in Russian prose, with rough coloured pictures, is published by the Tipografia, T. D. Sitin, Piatnitzkaia Oolitza, Moscow.