Kropotkin - Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature

IDEALS AND REALITIES
IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE
P-KROPOTKIN
NEW YORK - ALFRED A KNOPF - 1919

COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF
Fourth Printing
nUMTED IN THE XmiTED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE
book originated in a series of eight lectures on
Russian Literature during the Nineteenth Century
THIS which I delivered in March, 1901, at the Lowell
Institute, in Boston.
In accepting the invitation to deliver this course, I fully
realised the difficulties which stood in my way. It is by no
means an easy task to speak or to write about the literature of
a country, when this literature is hardly known to the audi-
ence or to the readers. Only three or four Russian writers
have been properly and at all completely translated into Eng-
lish; so that very often I had to speak about a poem or a
novel, when it could have been readily characterised by
simply reading a passage or two from it.
However, if the difficulties were great, the subject was
well worth an effort. Russian literature is a rich mine of
original poetic thought. It has a freshness and youth fulness
which is not found to the same extent in older literatures. It
has, moreover, a sincerity and simplicity of expression which
render it all the more attractive to the mind that has grown
sick of literary artificiality. And it has this distinctive feature,
that it brings within the domain of Art the poem, the novel,
the drama nearly all those questions, social and political,
which in Western Europe and America, at least m our
present generation, are discussed
chiefly in the
political
writings of the day, but seldom in literature.
In no other country does literature occupy so influential a
position as it does in Russia. Nowhere else does it exercise so
profound and so direct an influence upon the intellectual
development of the younger generation. There are novels of
Turgueneff, and even of the less-known writers, which have
VI PREFACE
been real stepping stones in the development of Russian
youth within the last fifty years.
The reason why literature exercises such an influence in
Russia is self-evident. There is no open political life, and with
the exception of a few years at the time of the abolition of
serfdom, the Russian people have never been called upon to
take an active part in the framing of their country's institu-
tions.
The
consequence has been that the best minds of the coun-
try have chosen the poem, the novel, the satire, or liter-
ary criticism as the medium for expressing their aspirations,
their conceptions of national life, or their ideals. It is not to
blue-books, or to newspaper leaders, but to Its works of Art
that one must go in Russia in order to understand the politi-
cal, economical, and social ideals of the country the aspira-
tions of the history-making portions of Russian society.
As it would have been Impossible to exhaust so wide a
subject as Russian Literature within the limits of this book,
1 have concentrated my chief attention upon the modern
literature. The early writers, down to Pushkin and Gogol
the founders of the modern literature are dealt with in a
short introductory sketch. The most representative writers in
poetry, the novel, the drama, political literature, and art
criticism, are considered next, and round them I have grouped
the less prominent writers, of whom the most important are
mentioned In short notes. I am fully aware that every one
of the latter presents something Individual and weU worth
knowing; and that some of the less-known authors have even
succeeded occasionally In better representing a given current
of thought than their more famous colleagues; but in a book
which is Intended to give only a broad, general idea of the
subject, the plan I have pursued was necessary.
Literary criticism has always been well represented In
Russia, and the views taken in this book must needs bear
traces of the work of our great criticsByelinskiy, Tcherny-
shevskiy, Dobroluboff, and Pisareff, and their modern fol-
lowers, Mikhailovsky, Arsenieff, Skabltchevsky, Vengueroff,
and others. For biographical data concerning contemporary
writers I am indebted to the excellent work on modern
Russian literature by the last named author, and to the
PREFACE vli
eighty volumes of the admirable Russian Encyclopadic Dic-

tionary.
I take this opportunity to express my hearty thanks to
my old friend, Mr. Richard Heath, who was kind enough
to read over all this book, both in manuscript and in proof.
Bromley,
'
Kent,
January, 1905.
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter I : Introduction i
The Russian Language Early folk literature: Folklore

Songs Sagas Lay of Igor's Raid Ânnals Mongolian
Invasion its consequences Correspondence between John
;
IV. and Kurbskiy Religious splitting Avvakum's Me-

moirs The eighteenth century Peter I. and his con-
temporaries Tretiakovskiy Lomonosoff Sumarokoff
:
The times of Catherine II: Derzhavin Von Wizin The

Freemasons: Novikoff Radischeff Early nineteenth cen-
tury: Karamzin and Zhukovskiy ^The Decembrists
Ryleeff.
Chapter II: Pushkin; Lermontoff . .

.39
Pushkin Beauty Pushkin and Schiller His
of form
youth; his exile; his later career and death Fairy
" "
tales Ruslan and Ludmila His lyrics
:
Byronism
Drama Evgheniy Onyeghin Lermontoff Pushkin or
Lermontoff? His life The Caucasus Poetry of nature
Influence of Shelley The Demon Mtsyri Love of Free-
dom Pushkin and Lermontoff as prose-writers Other
poets and novelists of the same epoch.
Chapter III : Gogol .67

Little Russia Nights on a Farm near Dikanka and Mir-
gorod Village life and humour How Ivan Ivanovitch
quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforytch Historical novel: Taras
Bulba The Cloak Drama: The Inspector-General
Its influence Dead Souls: Main types Realism in the
Russian novel.
Chapter IV: Turgu^neff; ToLSTdv ...

J
88
Turgueneff The Character of his art Sportsman's
Note-book Pessimism in his early novels His scries of
novels representing the leading types of Society: Rudin
CONTENTS
Lavretskiy Helen and InsaroflF BazaroflE Why Fathers
and Sons was misunderstood Hamlet and Don Quixote
Virgin Soil Movement towards the people Tolstoy
Childhood and Boyhood During and after the Crimean
War Youth: in search of an ideal Small stories The
Cossacks Educational work War and Peace Anna
Karenina Religious crisis His interpretation of the Chris-
tian teaching Main points of Christian ethics Latest
works of art Kreutzer Sonata Resurrection.
Chapter V: Gontcharoff; Dostoyevskiy; Nek-

rAsoff 151
Gontcharofif Oblomoff The
Russian malady of Oblo-
moflFdom Is it exclusively Russian? The Precipice Dos-
toyevskiy His first novel General character of his work
Memoirs from a Dead House Down-trodden and
Offended Crime and Punishment The Brothers Kara-
mazoff Nekrasof? Discussions about his talent His love
of the people Apotheosis of Woman
Other prose-
-
writers of the same epoch Serghei Aksakoff Dal Ivan
Panaeff Hvoschinskaya (V. Krestovskiy-pseudonyme)
Poets of the same epoch Koltsoff Nikitin Plescheef?
The admirers of pure art: Tutchefif; A. MaykoflF;
Scherbina; A. Fet A. K. Tolstoy ^The Translators.
Chapter VI: The Drama 191

Its origin The Tsars Alexei and Peter I. Sumarokoff
Pseudo-classical tragedies: Knyazhnin; Ozeroff First
comedies The first years of the nineteenth century Gri-
boyedoff The Moscow stage in the fifties Ostrovskiy:
his first dramas The Thunderstorm Ostrovskiy 's later
dramas Historical dramas: A. K. Tolstoy Other dra-
matic writers.
Chapter VII: Folk-Novelists . . . .221

Their position in Russian literature ^The early folk-
novelists Grigirovitch Marko Vovtchok Danilevskiy
Intermediate period: Kokorefl; Pisemskiy; Potyekhin
Ethnographical researches ^The realistic school: Pomya-
lovskiy Ryeshetnikoflf Levitoff Gleb Uspenskiy Zlato-
vratskiy and other folk-novelists: Naumoff Zasodimskiy
Saloff Nefedoff Modern realism: Maxim Gorkiy.
CONTENTS
Chapter VIII; Political Literature; Satire;
Art-Criticism; Contemporary Novelists 263 .
Political Literature Difficulties of censorship The

circles: Westerners and Slavophiles Political literature
abroad Herzen Ogaryoff Balcunin Lavroff Stepniak
:
The Contemporary and Tchernyshevskiy Satire: Sche-

drin (Saltykoff) Art-Criticism Its importance in Rus-
sia Byelinskiy Dobroluboff Pisareff Mihailovskiy
Tolstoy's What is Art? Contemporary Novelists:
Oertel Korolenko Present drift of literature Merez-
hovskiy Boborykin Potapenko TchehoflF.
Bibliographical Notes 319
Index .. . : .321
PART I
Introduction: The Russian Language

CHAPTER I
THE Russian Language Early folk literature: Folk-lore

Songs Sagas Lay of Igor's Raid Annals ^The Mongol
Invasion ; its consequences Correspondence between John IV.
and Kurbiskiy Split in the Church Avvakum's Memoirs
The eighteenth century: Peter I. and his contemporaries Tre-
tiakovsky Lomonosoff Sumarokoff The times of Catherine
II. Derzhavin Von Wizin The Freemasons: Novikoff;
Radischeflf Early nineteenth century: Karamzin and Zhukov-
skiy The Decembrists Ryleeff.
of the last messages which Turgueneff addressed

Russian writers from his death-bed was to
to
ONE I
implore them to keep in its purity

cious inheritance of ours
"
that pre-
the Russian language." He
.
who knew in perfection most of the languages spoken in

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

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

Like all other languages, the Russian has adopted many
foreign words: Scandinavian, Turkish, Mongolian and,
lately, Greek and Latin. But notwithstanding
the assimila-
tion of many nations and stems of the Ural-Altayan or
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 5
Turanian stock which has been accomplished in the course
of ages by the Russian nation, her language has remained
remarkably pure. It is striking indeed to see how the trans-
lation of the Bible which was made in the ninth century into
the language currently spoken by the Moravians and the
South Slavonians remains comprehensible, down to the
present time, to the average Russian. Grammatical forms
and the construction of sentences are indeed quite different
now. But the roots, as well as a very considerable number
of words, remain the same as those which were used in
current talk a thousand years ago.
It must be said that the South-Slavonian had attained a
high degree of perfection, even at that early time. Very
few words of the Gospels had to be rendered in Greek
and these are names of things unknown to the South Slavon-
ians; while for none of the abstract words, and for none of
the poetical images of the original, had the translators any
difficulty in finding the proper expressions. Some of the
words they used are, moreover, of a remarkable beauty, and
this beauty has not been lost even to-day. Everyone remem-
bers, for instance, the difficulty which the learned Dr. Faust,
in Goethe's immortal tragedy, found in rendering the
sentence: "In the beginning was the Word." "Word,"
in modern German, seemed to Dr. Faust to be too shallow
"
an expression for the idea of the Word being God." In
"
the old Slavonian translation we have Slovo," which also
"
means Word," but has at the same time, even for the
modern Russian, a far deeper meaning than that of das
" "
Wort. In old Slavonian Slovo included also the mean-
" "
ing of Intellect German Vernunft; and consequently it
conveyed to the reader an idea which was deep enough not to
clash with the second part of the Biblical sentence.
I wish that I could give here an idea of the beauty of the
structure of the Russian language, such as it was spoken early
in the eleventh century in North Russia, a sample of which
has been preserved in the sermon of a Novgorod bishop
( 1035 ). The short sentences of this sermon, calculated to be
understood by a newly christened flock, are really beautiful;
while the bishop's conceptions of Christianity, utterly devoid
of Byzantine gnosticism, are most characteristic of the
manner in which Christianity was and is still understood by
the masses of the Russian folk.
At the present time, the Russian language (the Great-
Russian) is remarkably free from patois. Lktle-Russian, or
Ukrainian,* which is spoken by nearly 15,000,000 people,
and has its own literature folk-lore and modern is
undoubtedly a separate language, in the same sense as
Norwegian and Danish are separate from Swedish, or as

Portuguese and Catalonian are separate from Castilian or
White-Russian, which is spoken in some
Spanish. provinces
of Western Russia, has also the characteristics of a separate
branch of the Russian, rather than those of a local dialect.
As to Great-Russian, or Russian, it is spoken by a compact
body of nearly eighty million people in Northern, Central,
Eastern, and Southern Russia, as also in Northern Caucasia
and Siberia. Its pronunciation slightly varies in different
parts of this large territory; nevertheless the literary
language of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgueneff, and Tolstoy is
understood by all this enormous mass of people. The Rus-
sian classics circulate in the villages by millions of copies, and
when, a few years ago, the literary property in Pushkin's
works came to an end (fifty years after his death), complete
editions of his works some of them in ten volumes were
circulated by the hundred-thousand, at the almost incredibly
low price of three shillings (75 cents) the ten volumes; while
millions of copies of his separate poems and tales are. sold
now by thousands of ambulant booksellers in the villages, at
the price of from one to three farthings each. Even the
complete works of Gogol, Turgueneff, and Goncharoff, in
twelve-volume editions, have sometimes sold to the number
of 200,000 sets each, in the course of a single year. The
advantages of this intellectual unity of the nation are self-
evident.
Pronounce Ook-ra-ee-nian,
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 7
EARLY FOLK-LITERATURE: FOLK-LORE SONGS SAGAS
The early folk-literature of Russia, part of which is still
preserved in the memories of the people alone, is wonder-
fully rich and full of the deepest interest. No nation of

Western Europe possesses such an astonishing wealth of
traditions, tales, and lyric folk-songs some of them of the
greatest beauty and such a rich cycle of archaic epic songs,
as Russia does. Of course, all European nations have had,
once upon a time, an equally rich folk-literature; but the
great bulk of it was lost before scientific explorers had under-
stood its value or begun to collect it. In Russia, this treasure
was preserved in remote villages untouched by civilisation,
especially in the region round Lake Onega; and when the
folk-lorists began to collect it, in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, they found in Northern Russia and in
Little Russia old bards still going about the villages with
their primitive string instruments, and reciting poems of a
very ancient origin.
Besides, a variety of very old songs are sung still by the
village folk themselves. Every annual holiday Christmas,
Easter, Midsummer Day has its own cycle of songs, which
have been preserved, with their melodies, even from pagan
times. At each marriage, which is accompanied by a very
complicated ceremonial, and at each burial, similarly old
songs are sung by the peasant women. Many of them have,
of course, deteriorated in the course of ages; of many others
mere fragments have survived; but, mindful of the popular
"
saying that never a word must be cast out of a song," the
women in many localities continue to sing the most antique
songs in full, even though the meaning of many of the words
has already been lost.
There are, moreover, the tales. Many of them are certainly
the same as we find among all nations of Aryan origin one :
may read them in Grimm's collection of fairy tales; but

others came also from the Mongols and the Turks; while
some of them seem to have a purely Russian origin. And next
come the songs recited by wandering singers the Kaliki
also very ancient. They are entirely borrowed from the
East, and deal with heroes and heroines of other nationalities
"
than the Russian, such as Akib, the Assyrian King," the
beautiful Helen, Alexander the Great, or Rustem of Persia.
The interest which these Russian versions of Eastern legends
and tales offer to the explorer of folk-lore and mythology
is self-evident.
Finally, there are the epic songs: the byliny, which cor-
respond to the Icelandic sagas. Even at the present day they
are sung in the villages of Northern Russia by special
bards who accompany themselves with a special instrument,
also of very ancient origin. The old singer utters in a
sort of recitative one or two sentences, accompanying him-
self with his instrument; then follows a melody, into which
each individual singer introduces modulations of his own,
before he resumes next the quiet recitative of the epic narra-
tive. Unfortunately, these old bards are rapidly disappear-
ing; but some five-and-thirty years ago a few of them were

still alive in the province of Olonets, to the north-east of
St. Petersburg, and I once heard one of them, whom A.
Hilferding had brought to the capital, and who sang before

the Russian Geographical Society his wonderful ballads. The
collecting of the epic songs was happily begun in good time
during the eighteenth century and it has been eagerly
continued by specialists, so that Russia possesses now perhaps
the richest collection of such songs about four hundred
which has been saved from oblivion.
The heroes of the Russian epic songs are knights-errant,
whom popular tradition unites round the table of the Kieff
Prince, Vladimir the Fair Sun. Endowed with supernatural
physical force, these knights, Ilyla of Murom, Dobrynia
Niki'tich, Nicholas the Villager, Alexel the Priest's Son, and
so on, are represented going about Russia, clearing the coun-
try of giants, who Infested the land, or of Mongols and
Turks. Or else they go to distant lands to fetch a bride for
the chief of their schola, the Prince Vladimir, or for them-
selves; and they meet, of course, on their journeys, with all
sorts of adventures. In which witchcraft plays an Important
part. Each of the heroes of these sagas has his own indi-
viduality. For instance, Ilyia, the Peasant's Son, does not
care for gold or riches: he fights only to clear the land
of giants and strangers. Nicholas the Villager is the per-
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 9
sonlfication of the force with which the tiller of the soil is
endowed: nobody can pull out of the ground his heavy
plough, while he himself lifts it with one hand and throws it
above the clouds; Dobrynia embodies some of the features
of the dragon-fighters, to whom belongs St. George; Sadko
is the personification of the rich merchant, and Tchurilo of
the refined, handsome, urbane man with whom all women
fall in love.
At the same time, in each of these heroes, there are doubt-
less mythological features. Consequently, the early Russian
explorers of the byliny, who worked under the influence of
Grimm, endeavoured to explain them as fragments of an
old Slavonian mythology, in which the forces of Nature are
personified in heroes. In Iliya they found the features of the
God of the Thunders. Dobrynia the Dragon-Killer was
supposed to represent the sun in its passive power the
active powers of fighting being left to Iliya. Sadko was the
personification of navigation, and the Sea-God whom he
deals with was Neptune. Tchurilo was taken as a representa-
tive of the demoniacal element. And so on. Such was, at
least, the interpretation put upon the sagas by the early
explorers.
V. V. StAsoff, in his Origin of the Russian Byliny
(1868), entirely upset this theory. With a considerable
wealth of argument he proved that these epic songs are not
fragments of a Slavonic mythology, but represent borrowings
from Eastern tales. Iliya is the Rustem of the Iranian
legends, placed in Russian surroundings. Dobrynia is the
Krishna of Indian folk-lore; Sadko Is the merchant of the
Eastern tales, as also of a Norman tale. All the Russian epic
heroes have an Eastern origin. Other explorers went still
further than Stasoff. They saw in the heroes of Russian epics
insignificant men who had lived in the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries (Iliya of Murom is really mentioned as a
historic person in a Scandinavian chronicle), to whom the
exploits of Eastern heroes, borrowed from Eastern tales,
were attributed. Consequently, the heroes of the byliny could
have had nothing to do with the times of Vladimir, and still
less with the earlier Slavonic mythology.
The gradual evolution and migration of myths, which are
lo RUSSIAN LITERATURE
successively fastened upon new and local persons as they
reach new countries, may perhaps aid to explain these con-
tradictions. That there are mythological features in the
heroes of the Russian epics may be taken as certain; only,
the mythology they belong to is not Slavonian but Aryan al-
together. Out of these mythological representations of the
forces of Nature, human heroes were gradually evolved in
the East.
At a later epoch when these Eastern traditions began
to spread in Russia, the exploits of their heroes were attrib-
uted to Russian men, who were made to act in Russian
surroundings. Russian folk-lore assimilated them; and, while
it retained their deepest semi-mythological features and
leading traits of character, it endowed, at the same time, the
Iranian Rustem, the Indian dragon-killer, the Eastern mer-
chant, and so on, with new features, purely Russian. It
divested them, so to say, of the garb which had been put
upon their mystical substances when they were first appro-
priated and humanised by the Iranians and the Indians, and
dressed them now in a Russian garb just as in the tales
about Alexander the Great, which I heard in Transbaikalia,
the Greek hero is endowed with Buryate features and his
exploits are located on such and such a Transbaikalian moun-
tain. However, Russian folk-lore did not simply change the
dress of the Persian prince, Rustem, into that of a Russian
peasant, Iliya. The Russian sagas, m their style, in the poet-
ical images they resort to, and partly in the characteristics of
their heroes, were new creations. Their heroes are thoroughly
Russian for instance, they never seek for blood-vengeance,
:
as Scandinavian heroes would do; their actions, especially

"
those of the elder heroes," are not dictated by personal aims,
but are imbued with a communal spirit, which is characteris-
tic of Russian popular life. They are as much Russians as
Rustem was Persian. As to the time of composition of these
sagas, it is generally believed that they date from the tenth,
eleventh, and twelfth centuries, but that they received their
definite shape the one that has reached us in the four-
teenth century. Since that time they have undergone but little
alteration.
In these sagas Russia has thus a precious national inherit-
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE ii
ance of a rare poetical beauty, which has been fully

appreciated in England by Ralston, and in France by the
historian Rambaud.
" "
LAY OF IGOR's RAID
And yet Russia has not her Iliad. There has been no
poet to inspire himself with the exploits of Iliya, Dobrynia,
Sadko, Tchurilo, and the others, and to make out of them
" "
a poem similar to the epics of Homer, or the Kalevala of
the Finns. This has been done with only one cycle of tradi-
tions: in the poem, The Lay of Igor's Raid {Slovo o Polku
Igor eve) .
This poem was composed at the end of the twelfth cen-

tury, or early in the thirteenth (its full manuscript, destroyed
during the conflagration of Moscow in 1812, dated from the
fourteenth or the fifteenth century) It was undoubtedly the
.
work of one author, and for its beauty and poetical form it
stands by the side of the Song of the Nibelungs, or the Song
of Roland. It relates a real fact that did happen in 1185.
Igor, a prince of Kieff, starts with his druzhina (schola) of
warriors to make a raid on the Polovtsi, who occupied the
prairies of South-eastern Russia, and continually raided the
Russian villages. All sorts of bad omens are seen on the
march through the prairies the sun is darkened and casts
its shadow on the band of Russian warriors; the animals give
"
different warnings; but Igor exclaims: Brothers and
friends Better to fall dead than be prisoners of the Polovtsi
: I
Let us march to the blue waters of the Don. Let us break our
lances against those of the Polovtsi. And either I leave there
my head, or I will drink the water of the Don from my
golden helmet." The march is resumed, the Polovtsi are met
with, anda great battle is fought.
The description of the battle, in which all Nature takes
part the eagles and the wolves, and the foxes who bark
after the red shields of the Russians is admirable.
Igor's
"
band is defeated. From sunrise to sunset, and from sunset
to sunrise, the steel arrows flew, the swords clashed on the
helmets, the lances were broken in a far-away land the land
"
of the Polovtsi." The black earth under the hoofs of the
horses was strewn with bones, and out of this sowing afflic-
tion will rise in the land of the Russians."
Then comes one of the best bits of early Russian poetry
the lamentations of Yaroslavna, Igor's wife, who waits for
his return in the town of Putivl :
"
The voice of Yaroslavna resounds as the complaint of a cuckoo ;
It resounds at the rise of the sunlight.

"
I will fly as a cuckoo down the river. I will wet my beaver
sleeves in the Kayala ; I will wash with them the wounds of my
prince the deep wounds of my hero.
"
Yaroslavna laments on the walls of Putivl.
"
Oh, Wind, terrible Wind
Why dost thou, my master, blow so
!
strong? Why on thy light wings the arrows of the

didst thou carry
Khan against the warriors of my hero? Is it not enough for thee to
blow there, high up in the clouds? Not enough to rock the ships
on the blue sea? Why didst thou lay down my beloved upon the
grass of the Steppes?
"
Yaroslavna laments upon the walls of Putivl.
"
Oh, glorious Dnieper, thou hast pierced thy way through the
rocky hills to the land of Polovtsi. Thou hast carried the boats of
Svyatoslav as they went to fight the Khan Kobyak. Bring, oh, my
master, my husband back to me, and I will send no more tears through
thy tide towards the sea.
"
Yaroslavna laments upon the walls of Putivl.
"
Brilliant Sun, thrice brilliant Sun Thou givest heat to all,
!
thou shinest for all. Why shouldest thou send thy burning rays
upon my husband's warriors? Why didst thou, in the waterless
steppe,dry up their bows in their hands? Why shouldest thou,
making them suffer from"
thirst, cause their arrows to weigh so heavy
upon their shoulders ?
This little fragment gives some idea of the general charac-

ter and beauty of the Saying about Igor's Raid. *
*
English readers will find the translation of this poem In full In
the excellent Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest
Period to the Present Time, by Leo Wiener, published in two volumes,
in 1902, by G. P. Putnam &
Sons, at New York. Professor Wiener
knows Russian literature perfectly well, and has made a very happy
choice of a very great number of the most characteristic passages from
Russian writers, beginning with the oldest period (911), and ending
with our contemporaries, Gorkly and Merezhkovskly.
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 13
Surely this poem was not the only one that was composed
and sung in those times. The introduction itself speaks of
bards, and especially of one, Baydn, whose recitations and
songs are compared to the wind that blows in the tops of the
trees. Many such Bayans surely went about and sang similar
*' "
Sayings during the festivals of the princes and their
warriors. Unfortunately, only this one has reached us. The
Russian Church, especially in the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, pitilessly proscribed the singing of all
the epic songs which circulated among the people: it con-
"
sidered them pagan," and inflicted the heaviest penalties
upon the bards and those who sang old songs in their rings.
Consequently, only small fragments of this early folk-lore
have reached us.
And yet even these few relics of the past have exercised
a powerful influence upon Russian literature, ever since it
has taken the liberty of treating other subjects than purely
religious ones. If Russian versification took the rhythmical
form, as against the syllabic, it was because this form was
imposed upon the Russian poets by the folk-song. Besides,
down to quite recent times, folk-songs constituted such an im-
portant item in Russian counjry life, in the homes alike of
the landlord and the peasant, that they could not but deeply
influence the Russian poets; and the first great poet of Russia,
Pushkin, began his career by re-telling in verse his old
nurse's tales to which he used to listen during the long winter
nights. It is also owing to our almost incredible wealth
of most musical popular songs that we have had in Russia,
since so early a date as 1835, an opera (Verstovskiy's
Askold's Grave) based upon popular tradition, of which the
^
purely Russian melodies at once catch the ear of the least

musically-educated Russian. This is also why the operas of
Dargomyzhsky and the younger composers are now success-
fully sung in the villagesto peasant audiences and with local
peasant choirs.
The folk-lore and the folk-song have thus rendered to
Russia an immense service. They have maintained a certain
unity of the spoken language all over Russia, as also a unity
between the literary language and the language spoken by
the masses; between the music of Glinka, Tchaykovsky,
Ri'msky Korsakoff, Borodin, etc., and the music of the
peasant choir thus rendering both the poet and the com-
poser accessible to the peasant.
THE ANNALS
And whilst speaking of the early Russian litera-
finally,
ture, a at least, must be said of the Annals.
few words,
No country has a richer collection of them. There were,
in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, several centres of
development in Russia, Kieff, Novgorod, Pskov, the land of
Volhynia, the land of Suzdal (Vladimir, Moscow*), Rya-
zan, etc., represented at that time independent republics,
linked together only by the unity of language and religion,
and by the fact that all of them elected their Princes mili-
tary defenders and judges from the house of Rurik. Each
of these centers had its own annals, bearing the stamp of
local life and local character. The South Russian and Vol-
hynian annals of w'hich the so-called Nestor's Annals are
the fullest and the best known, are not merely dry records of
facts they are imaginative and poetical in places. The annals
:
of Novgorod bear the stamp of a city of rich merchants they :
are very matter-of-fact, and the annalist warms to his sub-

ject only when he describes the victories of the Novgorod
republic over the Land of Suzdal. The Annals of the sister-
republic of Pskov, on the contrary, are imbued with a demo-
cratic spirit, and they relate with democratic sympathies and
in a most picturesque manner the struggles between the poor
" " "
of Pskov and the rich the black people and the white
people." Altogether, the annals are surely not the work of
monks, as was supposed at the outset; they must have been
written for the different cities by men fully informed about
their political life, their treaties with other republics, their
inner and outer conflicts.
Moreover, the annals, especially those of Kieff, or Nes-
tor^s Annals, are something more than mere records of
events; they are, as may be seen from the very name of the
* The
Russian name of the first capital of Russia is Moskva. How-
" "
ever, Moscow," like Warsaw," etc., is of so general a use that
it would be affectation to use the Russian name.
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 15
latter {From whence and How
came, to be the Land of Rus-
sia) attempts
y
at writing a history of the country, under the
inspiration of Greek models. Those manuscripts which have
reached us and especially is this true of the Kieff annals
have thus a compound structure, and historians distin-
" "
guish in them several superposed layers dating from dif-
ferent periods. Old traditions; fragments of early historical
knowledge, probably borrowed from the Byzantine histor-
ians; old treaties; complete poems relating certain episodes,
such as Igor's raid; and local annals from different periods,
enter into their composition. Historical facts, relative to a
very early period and fully confirmed by the Constantinople
annalists and historians, are consequently mingled together
with purely mythical traditions. But this is precisely what
makes the high literary value of the Russian annals,
especially those of Southern and South-western Russia, which
contain most precious fragments of early literature.
Such, then, were the treasuries of literature which Russia
possessed at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE
The Mongol which took place in 1223, destroyed
invasion,
all this young and threw Russia into quite new
civilisation,
channels. The main cities of South and Middle Russia were
laid waste. Kieff, which had been a populous city and a
centre of learning, was reduced to the state of a straggling
settlement, and disappeared from history for the next two
centuries. Whole populations of large towns were either
taken prisoners by the Mongols, or exterminated, if they
had offered resistance to the invaders. As if to add to the
misfortunes of Russia, the Turks soon followed the Mon-
gols, invading the Balkan peninsula, and by the end of the
fifteenth century the two countries from which and through
which learning used to come to Russia, namely Servia and
Bulgaria, fell under the rule of the Osmanlis. All the life of
Russia underwent a deep transformation.
Before the invasion the land was covered with independ-
ent republics, similar to the mediseval city-republics of
Western Europe. Now, a military State, powerfully sup-
\6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
ported by the Church, began to be slowly built up at Moscow,
which conquered, with the aid of the Mongol Khans, the in-
dependent principalities that surrounded it. The main effort
of the statesmen and the most active men of the Church was
now directed towards the building up of a powerful kingdom
which should be capable of throwing off the Mongol yoke.
State ideals were substituted for those of local autonomy and
federation. The Church, in its effort to constitute a Christian
nationality, free from all intellectual and moral contact with

the abhorred pagan Mongols, became a stern centralised
power which pitilessly persecuted everything that was a re-
minder of a pagan past. It worked hard, at the same time,
to establish upon Byzantine ideals the unlimited authority
of the Moscow princes. Serfdom was introduced in order to
increase the military power of the State. All independent
local life was destroyed. The idea of Moscow becoming a
centre for Church and State was powerfully supported by the
Church, which preached that Moscow was the heir to Con-
"
stantinople a third Rome," where the only true Chris-
tianity was now to develop. And at a later epoch, when the
Mongol yoke had been thrown off, the work of consolidat-
ing the Moscow monarchy was continued by the Tsars and
the Church, and the struggle was against the intrusion of
" "
Western influences, in order to prevent the Latin Church
from extending its authority over Russia.
These new conditions necessarily exercised a deep influence
upon the further development of literature. The freshness
and vigorous youthfulness of the early epic poetry was gone
forever. Sadness, melancholy, resignation became the leading
features of Russian folk-lore. The continually repeated raids
of the Tartars, who carried away whole villages as prisoners
to their encampments in the South-eastern Steppes; the suffer-
ings of the prisoners in slavery; the visits of the baskdks,
who came to levy a high tribute and behaved as conquerors
in a conquered land; the hardships inflicted upon the popula-
tions by the growing military State all this impressed the
popular songs with a deep note of sadness which they have

never since lost. At the same time the gay festival songs of
old and the epic songs of the wandering bards were strictly
forbidden, and those who dared to sing them were cruelly
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 17
persecuted by the Church, which saw in these songs not only
a reminiscence of a pagan past, but also a possible link of
union with the Tartars.
Learning was gradually concentrated in the monasteries,
every one of which was a fortress built against the invaders;
and it was limited, of course, to Christian literature. It
became entirely scholastic. Knowledge of nature was *' un-
holy," something of a witchcraft. Asceticism was preached
as the highest virtue, and became the dominant feature of
written literature. Legends about the saints were widely
read and repeated verbally, and they found no balance in
such learning as had been developed in Western Europe in
the mediaeval universities. The desire for a knowledge of
nature was severely condemned by the Church, as a token
of self-conceit. All poetry was a sin. The annals lost their
animated character and became dry enumerations of the
successes of the rising State, or merely related unimportant
details concerning the local bishops and superiors of
monasteries.
During the twelfth century there had been, in the northern
republics of Novgorod and Pksov, a strong current of
opinion leading, on the one side, to Protestant rationalism,
and on the other side to the development of Christianity on
the lines of the early Christian brotherhoods. The apocryphal
Gospels, the books of the Old Testament, and various books
inwhich true Christianity was discussed, were eagerly copied
and had a wide circulation. Now, the head of the Church in
Central Russia violently antagonised all such tendencies
towards reformed Christianity. A strict adherence to the very
letter of the teachings of the Byzantine Church was exacted
from the flock. Every kind of interpretation of the Gospels
became heresy. All intellectual life in the domain of religion,
as well as every criticism of the dignitaries of the Moscow
Church, was treated as dangerous, and those who had ven-
tured this way had to flee from Moscow, seeking refuge
in the remote monasteries of the far North. As to the great
movement of the Renaissance, which gave a new life to
Western Europe, it did not reach Russia: the Church con-
sidered it a return to paganism, and cruelly exterminated its

forerunners who came within her reach, burning them at the
1 8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
stake, or putting them to death on the racks of her torture-
chambers.
I will not dwell upon this period, which covers nearly five
centuries, because it offers very little interest for the student

of Russian literature; I will only mention the two or three
works which must not be passed by in silence.
One of them is the letters exchanged between the Tsar
John the Terrible (John IV.), and one of his chief vassals,
Prince Kurbskiy, who had left Moscow for Lithuania. From
beyond the Lithuanian border he addressed to his cruel, half-
lunatic ex-master long letters of reproach, which John an-
swered, developing in his epistles the theory of the divine
origin of the Tsar's authority. This correspondence is most
characteristic of the political ideas that were current then,
and of the learning of the period.
After the death of John the Terrible (who occupies in
Russian history the same position as Louis XI. in French,
since he destroyed by fire and sword but with a truly Tartar
cruelty the power of the feudal princes), Russia passed, as
is known, through years of great disturbance. The pretender
Demetrius, who proclaimed himself a son of John, came

from Poland and took possession of the throne at Moscow.
The Poles invaded Russia, and were the masters of Moscow,
Smolensk, and all the western towns; and when Demetrius
was overthrown, a few months after his coronation, a general
revolt of the peasants broke out, while all Central Russia was
invaded by Cossack bands, and several new pretenders made
" "
their appearance. These Disturbed Years must have left
traces in popular songs, but all such songs entirely disappeared
in Russia during the dark period of serfdom which followed,
and we know of them only through an Englishman, Richard
James, who was in Russia in 1619, and who wrote down some
of the songs relating to this period. The same must be said of
the folk-literature, which must have come into existence dur-
ing the later portion of the seventeenth century. The definite
introduction of serfdom under the first Romanoff (Mikhail,
1
612-1640) the wide-spread revolts of the peasants which
;
followed culminating in the terrific uprismg of Stepan

Razin, who has become since then a favourite hero with the
oppressed peasants; and finally the stern and cruel persecu-
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 19
tion of the Non-conformists and their migrations eastward
into the depths of the Urals all these events must have
found their expression in folk-songs; but the State and the
Church so cruelly hunted down everything that bore trace
of a spirit of rebellion that no works of popular creation
from that period have reached us. Only a few writings of a
polemic character and the remarkable autobiography of an
exiled priest have been preserved by the Non-conformists.
SPLIT IN THE CHURCH MEMOIRS OF AVVAkOm

The first Russian Bible was printed in Poland in 1580. A
few years later a printing office was established at Moscow,
and the Russian Church authorities had now to decide which
of the written texts then in circulation should be taken for the
printing of the Holy Books. The handwritten copies which
were in use at that time were full of errors, and it was evi-
dently necessary to revise them by comparing them with the
Greek texts before committing any of them to print. This
revision was undertaken at Moscow, with the aid of learned
men brought over partly from Greece and partly from the
Greco-Latin Academy of Kieff; but for many different rea-
sons this revision became the source of a widely spread dis-
content, and in the middle of the seventeenth century a for-
midable split (raskol) took place in the Church. It hardly
need be said that this split was not a mere matter of theology,
nor of Greek readings. The seventeenth century was a century
when the Moscow Church had attained a formidable power
in the State. The head of it, the Patriarch Nikon, was,
moreover, a very ambitious man, who intended to play
in the East the part which the Pope played in the West, and
to that end he tried to impress the people by his grandeur
and luxury which meant, of course, heavy impositions
upon the serfs of the Church and the lower clergy. He was
hated by both, and was soon accused by the people of drift-
" "
ing into Latinism ;so that the split between the people and
the clergy especially the higher clergy took the character
of a wide-spread separation of the people from the Greek
Church.
Most of ihe Non-conformist writings of the time are purely
scholastic incharacter and consequently offer no literary
But the memoirs of a Non-conformist priest, Av-
interest.
VAKUM (died 1681), who was exiled to Siberia and made
his way on foot, with Cossack parties, as far as the banks
of the Amur, deserve to be mentioned. By their simplicity,
their sincerity, and absence of all sensationalism, they have
remained the prototype of Russian memoirs, down to the
present day. Here are a few quotations from this remarka-
ble work:
" "
When I came to Yeniseisk," Awakum wrote, another order
came from Moscow to send me to Daiiria, 2,000 miles from Moscow,
and to place me under the orders of PashkoflF. He had with him sixty
men, and in punishment of my sins he proved to be a terrible man.
Continually he burnt, and tortured, and flogged his men, and I had
often spoken to him, remonstrating that what he did was not good,
and now I fell myself into his hands. When we went along the
'
Angara river he ordered me, Get out of your boat, you are a heretic,
that why the boats don't get along. Go you on foot, across the
is
mountains.' It was hard to do. Mountains high, forests impenetrable,

stony cliffs rising like walls and we had to cross them, going about
with wild beasts and birds; and I wrote him a little letter which
'
began thus: Man, be afraid of God. Even the heavenly forces and
all animals and men are afraid of Him. Thou alone carest nought
about Him.' Much more was written in this letter, and I sent it
to him. Presently I saw fifty men coming to me, and they took me
before him. He had his sword in his hand and shook with fury.
'
He asked me: Art thou a priest, or a priest degraded? I answered,
*
* '
I am Awakum, a priest, what dost thou want from me ? And he

began to beat me on the head and he threw me on the ground, and
continued to beat me while I was lying on the ground, and then
ordered them to give me seventy-two lashes with the knout, and
I replied: 'Jesus Christ, son of God, help me!' and he was only
the more angered that I did not ask for mercy. Then they brought
me and put me in a dungeon, giving me some straw,
to a small fort,
and all the winter I was kept in that tower, without fire. And the
winter there is terribly cold but God supported me, even though I
;
had no furs. I lay there as a dog on the straw. One day they would
feed me, another not. Rats were swarming all around. I used to kill
them with my cap the poor fools would not even give me a stick."
Later on Awakum was taken to the Amur, and when he

and his wife had to march, in the winter, over the ice of the
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 2i
great river, she would often fall down from sheer exhaus-
" "
tion. came," Avvakum writes,
Then I tolift her up,
and she exclaimed in despair How long, :
'
priest, how
'
long
will these sufferings continue?
'
And I replied to her: Until
' '
death even ; and then she would get up saying :
Well,
"
then, priest; let usmarch on.' No sufferings could van-
quish this great man. From the Amur he was recalled to
Moscow, and once more made the whole journey on foot.
There he was accused of resistance to Church and State, and
was burned at the stake in 1681.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The violent reforms of Peter I., who created a military
European State out of the semi-Byzantine and semi-Tartar
State which Russia had been under his predecessors, gave a
new turn to literature. It would be out of place to appre-
reforms of Peter I.,
ciate here the historical significance of the
but it must be mentioned that in Russian literature one finds,
at least, two forerunners of Peter's work.
One of them was Kotoshikhin (i 6301 667), an his-
torian.* He ran away from Moscow to Sweden, and wrote
there, fifty years before Peter became Tsar, a history of Rus-
sia, in which he strenuously criticised the condition of ignor-
ance prevailing at Moscow, and advocated wide reforms.
His manuscript was unknown till the nineteenth century,
when it was discovered at Upsala. /Another writer, imbued
with the same ideas, was a South Slavonian, KryzhAnitch,
who was called to Moscow in 1659, in order to revise the
Holy Books, and wrote a most remarkable work, in which
he also preached the necessity of thorough reforms. He
was exiled two years later to Siberia, where he died.
Peter I., who fully realised the importance of literature,
and was working hard to introduce European learning
amongst his countrymen, understood that the old Slavonian
tongue, which was then in use among Russian writers, but
was no longer the current language of the nation, could only
hamper the development of literature and learning. Its
* In all names the vowels u have to be pronounced as in
a, e, i, 0,
Italian {father, then, in, on, push).
22 RUSSFAN LITERATURE
forms, Its expressions, and grammar were already quite
strange to the Russians. It could be used still in religious
writings, but a book on geometry, or algebra, or military
art, written in the Biblical Old Slavonian, would have been
simply ridiculous. Consequently, Peter removed the diffi-
culty in his usual trenchant way. He established a new
alphabet, to aid in the introduction into literature of the
spoken but hitherto unwritten language. This alphabet,
partly borrowed from the Old Slavonian, but very much
simplified, is the one now in use.
Literature proper little interested Peter I. : he looked upon
printed matter from the strictly utilitarian point of view,
and his chief aim was to familiarise the Russians with the
first elements of the exact sciences, as well as with the arts
of navigation, warfare, and fortification. Accordingly, the
writers of his time offer but little interest from the liter-
ary point of view, and I need mention but a very few of
them.
The most interesting writer of the time of Peter I. and
his immediate successors was perhaps Procopovitch, a
priest, without the slightest taint of religious fanaticism,
a great admirer of West-European learning, who founded a
Greco-Slavonian academy. The courses of Russian literature
also make mention of Kantemir (1709- 1744), the son of
a Moldavian prince who had emigrated with his subjects to
Russia. He wrote satires, in which he expressed himself
with a freedom of thought that was quite remarkable for
his time.* Tkretia6vsky (1703-1769) offers a certain
melancholy interest. He was the son of a priest, and in his
youth ran away from his father, in order to study at Mos-
cow. Thence he went to Amsterdam and Paris, travelling
mostly on foot. He studied at the Paris University and be-
came an admirer of advanced ideas, about which he wrote
in extremely clumsy verses. On his return to St. Petersburg
he lived all his after-life in poverty and neglect, persecuted on
all sides by sarcasms for his endeavours to reform Russian
versification. He was himself entirely devoid of any poetical
talent, and yet he rendered a great service to Russian poetry.
In the years 1730-1738 he was ambassador at London.

RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 23
Up to that date Russian verse was syllabic; but he under-
stood that syllabic verse does not accord with the spirit of
the Russian language, and he devoted his life to prove that
Russian poetry should be written according to the laws of
rhythmical versification. If he had had even a spark of
talent, he would have found no difficulty in proving his
thesis; but he had none, and consequently resorted to the
most ridiculous artifices. Some of his verses were lines of
the most incongruous words, strung together for the sole
purpose of showing how rhythm and rhymes may be
obtained. If he could not otherwise get his rhyme, he did not
hesiiate to split a word at the end of a verse, beginning the
next one with what was left of it. In spite of his absurdities,
he succeeded in persuading Russian poets to adopt rhythmi-
cal versification, and its rules have been followed ever since.
In fact, this was only the natural development of the Rus-
sian popular song.
There was also a historian, Tatischeff (i 686-1 750),
who wrote a history of Russia, and began a large work
on the geography of the Empire a hard-working man
who studied a great deal in many sciences, as well as
in Church matters, was superintendent of mines in the
Urals, and wrote a number of political works as well
as history. He was the first to appreciate the value of
the annals, which he collected and systematised, thus pre-
paring materials for future historians, but he left no last-
ing trace in Russian literature. In fact, only one man of
that period deserves more than a passing mention. It was
LoMONOSOFF (17 1 2-1 765). He was born in a village
on the White Sea, near Archangel, in a fisherman's family.
He also ran away from his parents, came on foot to Mos-
cow, and entered a school in a monastery, living there in
indescribable poverty. Later on he went to Kieff, also on
foot, and there he very nearly became a priest. It so hap-
pened, however, that at that time the St. Petersburg
Academy of Sciences applied to the Moscow Theological
Academy for twelve good students who might be sent to
study abroad. Lomonosoff was chosen as one of them. He
went to Germany, where he studied natural sciences under
the best natural philosophers of the time, especially under
Christian Wolff, always In terrible poverty, almost on the
verge of starvation. In 1741 he came back to Russia, and
was nominated a member of the Academy of Sciences at St.
Petersburg.
The Academy ;vas then in the hands of a few Germans
who looked upon all Russian scholars with undisguised con-
tempt, and consequently received Lomonosoff in a most
unfriendly manner. It did not help him that the great mathe-
matician, Euler, wrote that the work of Lomonosoff in
natural philosophy and chemistry revealed a man of genius,
and that any Academy might be happy to possess him. A
bitter struggle soon began between the German members
of the Academy and the Russian who, it must be owned,
was of a very violent character, especially when he was
under the influence of drink. Poverty, his salary being con-
fiscated as a punishment; detention at the police station;
exclusion from the Senate of the Academy; and, worst of
all, political persecution such was the fate of Lomonosoff,
who had joined the party of Elizabeth, and consequently
was treated as an enemy when Catharine II. came to the
throne. It was not until the nineteenth century that Lom-
onosoff was duly appreciated.
"
Lomonosoff was himself a university," was Pushkin's
remark, and this remark was quite correct: so varied were
the directions in which he worked. Not only was he a dis-
tinguished natural philosopher, chemist, physical geographer,
and mineralogist: he laid also the foundations of the gram-
mar of the Russian language, which he understood as part
of a general grammar of all languages, considered in their
natural evolution. He also worked out the different forms
of Russian versification, and he created quite a new literary
language, of which he could say that it was equally appro-
"
priate for rendering the powerful oratory of Cicero, the
brilliant earnestness of Virgil and the pleasant talk of Ovid,
as well as the subtlest imaginary conceptions of philosophy,
or discussing the various properties of matter and the
changes which are always going on in the structure of the
universe and in human affairs." This he proved by his
"
poetry, by his scientific writings, and by his Discourses," in
which he combined Huxley's readiness to defend science
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 25
against blind faith with Humboldt's poetical conception of
Nature.
His odes were, it is true, written in the pompous style which
was dear to the pseudo-classicism then reigning, and he
*'
retained Old Slavonian expressions for dealing with ele-
vated subjects, but in his scientific and other writings he
used the commonly spoken language with great effect and
force. Owing to the very variety of sciences which he had
to acclimatise in Russia, he could not give much time to
original research; but when he took up the defence of the
ideas of Corpernicus, Newton, or Huyghens against the
opposition which they met with on theological grounds, a
true philosopher of natural science, in the modern sense of
the term, was revealed in him. In his early boyhood he used
to accompany his father a sturdy northern fisherman
on his fishing expeditions, and there he got his love of
Nature and a fine comprehension of natural phenomena,
which made of his Memoir on Arctic Exploration a work
that has not lost its value even now. It is well worthy of
note that in this last work he had stated the mechanical
theory of heat in such definite expressions that he un-
doubtedly anticipated by a full century this great discovery
of our own time a fact which has been entirely overlooked,
even in Russia.
A contemporary of Lomonosoff, Sumarokoff" (1717-
1777,) who was described in those years as a Russian
Racine," must also be mentioned in this place. He belonged
to the higher nobility, and had received an entirely French
education. His dramas, of which he wrote a great number,
were entirely imitated from the French pseudo-classical
school; but he contributed very much, as will be seen from
a subsequent chapter, to the development of the Russian
theatre. Sumarokoff wrote also lyrical verses, elegies, and
satires all of no great importance but the remarkably good
;
style of his letters, free of the Slavonic archaisms, which were

habitual at that time, deserves to be mentioned.
THE TIMES OF CATHERINE II.
With Catherine II., who

reigned from 1752 till 1796,
commenced a new Russian literature. It began to
era in
shake off its previous dulness, and although the Russian
writers continued to imitate French models chiefly pseudo-
classical they began also to introduce into their writings
various subjects taken from direct observation of Russian
life. There is, altogether, a frivolous youthfulness in the
literature of the first years of Catherine's reign, when the
Empress, being yet full of progressive ideas borrowed from
her intercourse with French philosophers, composed
basing it on remarkable Instruction
Montesquieu her
(Nakdz) to the deputies she convoked; wrote several com-
edies, in which she ridiculed the old-fashioned representa-
tives of Russian nobility; and edited a monthly review in
which she entered into controversy both with some ultra-
conservative writers and with the more advanced young
reformers. An academy of belles-lettres was founded, and
Princess VoRONTs6vA-DAsHKOVA (1743-18 19) ^who had
aided Catherine II. in her coup d'etat against her hus-
band, Peter III., and in taking possession of the throne
was nominated president of the Academy of Sciences. She
assisted the Academy with real earnestness in compiling a
dictionary of the Russian language, and she also edited a
review which left a mark in Russian literature; while her
memoirs, written in French (Mon Histoire) are a very valu-
able, though not always impartial, historical document.*
Altogether there began at that time quite a literary move-
ment, which produced a remarkable poet, DerzhAvin
(1743-18 1 6) the writer of comedies. Von Wizin (1745-
;
1792) the first philosopher, Novikoff (1742-18 18) ; and

;
a political writer, Radischeff (1749-1802).

The poetry of Derzhavin certainly does not answer our
modern requirements. He was the poet laureate of Cath-
erine, and sang in pompous odes the virtues of the ruler and
the victories of her generals and favourites. Russia was
* In 1 775-1 782 she spent a few years at Edinburgh for the educa-
tion of her son.
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 27
then taking a firm hold on the shores of the Black Sea, and
beginning to play a serious part in European affairs; and
occasions for the inflation of Derzhavin's patriotic feelings
were not wanting. However, he had some of the marks
of the true poet; he was open to the feeling of the poetry
of Nature, and capable of expressing it in verses that were
positively good {Ode to God, The Waterfall). Nay, these
really poetical verses, which are found side by side with
unnatural, heavy lines stuffed with obsolete pompous words,
are so evidently better than the latter, that they certainly
were an admirable object-lesson for all subsequent Russian
poets. They must have contributed to induce our poets to
abandon mannerism. Pushkin, who in his youth admired
Derzhavin, must have felt at once the disadvantages of a
pompous style, illustrated by his predecessor, and with his
wonderful command of his mother-tongue he was necessarily
brought to abandon the artificial language which formerly
was considered " poetical," he began to write as we speak.
The comedies of Von Wizin (or Fonvizin), were
quite a revelation for his contemporaries. His first comedy.
The Brigadier, which he wrote at the age of twenty-two^
created quite a sensation, and till now it has not lost its
interest; while his second comedy, Nedorosl (1782), was
received as an event in Russian literature, and is occa-
sionally played even at the present day. Both deal with
purely Russian subjects, taken from every-day life; and
although Von Wizin too freely borrowed from foreign
authors (the subject of The Brigadier is borrowed from a
Danish comedy of Holberg, Jean de France), he managed
nevertheless to make his chief personages truly Russian. In
this sense he certainly was a creator of the Russian national
drama, and he was also the first to introduce into our litera-
ture the realistic tendency which became so powerful with
Pushkin, Gogol and their followers. In his political opinions
he remained true to the progressive opinions which Cath-
erine II. patronised in the first years of her reign, and in his
capacity of secretary to Count Panin he bol(Sy denounced
serfdom, favouritism, and want of education in Russia.
I pass in silence several writers of the same
epoch, namely,
Bogdan6vitch (1743- 1 803), the author of a pretty and
lightpoem, Dusheiika; Hemnitzer (1745-1784), a gifted
who was a forerunner of ICryloff; Kapnist
writer of fables,
(1757-1829), who wrote rather superficial satires in good
verse; Prince ScherbAtoff (1733-1790), who began with
several others the scientific collecting of old annals and folk-
lore, and undertook to write a history of Russia, in which we
find a scientific criticism of the annals and other sources of
information and several others. But I must say a few words
;
upon the masonic movement which took place on the

threshold of the nineteenth century.
THE FREEMASONS: FIRST MANIFESTATION OF POLITICAL

THOUGHT.
The looseness of habits which characterised Russian high
society in the eighteenth century, the absence of ideals, the
servility of the nobles, and the horrors of serfdom, neces-
sarily produced a reaction amongst the better minds, and
this reaction took the shape, partly of a widely spread
Masonic movement, and partly of Christian mysticism, which
originated in the mystical teachings that had at that time
widely spread in Germany. The freemasons and their
Society of Friends undertook a serious effort for spreading
moral education among the masses, and they found in
N6viK0FF (1744-18 1 8) a true apostle of renovation. He
began his literary career very early, in one of those satiri-
cal reviews of which Catherine herself took the initiative at
the beginning of her reign, and already in his amiable con-
troversy with "the grandmother" (Catherine) he showed
that he would not remain satisfied with the superficial satire
in which the empress delighted, but that, contrary to her
wishes, he would go to the root of the evils of the time:
namely, serfdom and its brutalising effects upon society at
large. Novikoff was not only a well-educated man:
he com-
bined the deep moral convictions of an idealist with the
capacities of an organiser and a business man;
and although
his review (from which the net income went entirely for
philanthropic and educational purposes) was soon stopped
"
by the grandmother," he started in Moscow a most suc-
cessful printing and book-selling business, for editing and
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 29
spreading books of an ethical character. His immense print-
ing office, combined with a hospital for the workers and a
chemist's shop, from which medicine was given free to all
the poor of Moscow, was soon in business relations with
booksellers all over Russia; while his influence upon edu-
cated society was growing rapidly, and working in an excel-
lent direction. In 1787, during a famine, he organised relief
for the starving peasants guite a fortune having been put
for this purpose at his disposal by one of his pupils. Of
course, both the Church and the Government looked with
suspicion upon the spreading of Christianity, as it was under-
stood by the freemason Friends; and although the metro-
"
politan of Moscow testified that Novikoff was the best
Christian he ever knew," Novikoff was accused of political
conspiracy.
He was and in accordance with the personal
arrested,
wish of Catherine, though to the astonishment of all
those who knew anything about him, was condemned to
death in 1792. The death-sentence, however, was not ful-
filled, but he was taken for fifteen years to the terrible
fortress of Schiisselburg, where he was put in the secret cell
formerly occupied by the Grand Duke Ivan Antonovitch, and
where his freemason friend, Doctor Bagryanskiy, volun-
teered to remain imprisoned with him. He remained there
tillthe death of Catherine. Paul I. released him, in 1796,
on the very day that he became emperor; but Novikoff came
out of the fortress a broken man, and fell entirely into
mysticism, towards which there was already a marked tend-
ency in several lodges of the freemasons.
The Christian mystics were not happier. One of them,
LAbzin (1766-1825), who exercised a great influence upon
society by his writings against was also de-
corruption,
nounced, and ended his days However, both the
in exile.
mystical Christians and the freemasons (some of whose

lodges followed the Rosenkreuz teachings) exercised a deep
influence on Russia. With the advent of Alexander I. to the
throne the freemasons obtained more facilities for spread-
ing their ideas; and the growing conviction that serfdom must
be abolished, and that the tribunals, as well as the whole
system of administration, were in need of complete reform,
was certainly to a great extent a result of their work. Be-
sides, quite a number of remarkable men received their edu-
cation at the Moscow Institute of the Friends founded by
Novikoff including the historian Karamzin, the brothers
Turgueneff, uncles of the great novelist, and several political
men of mark.
Radischeff (1749- 1 802), a political writer of the
same epoch, had a still more tragic end. He received his
education Corps of Pages, and was one of those young
in the
men whom the Russian Government had sent in 1766 to
Germany to finish there their education. He followed the
lectures of Hellert and Plattner at Leipzig, and studied very
earnestly the French philosophers. On his return, he pub-
lished, in 1790, a Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,
the idea of which seems to have been suggested to him by
Sterne's Sentimental Journey. In this book he very ably inter-
mingled his impressions of travel with various philosoph-
ical and moral discussions and with pictures from Russian
life.
He upon the horrors of serfdom, as also
insisted especially
upon bad
the organisation of the administration, the ve-
nality of the law-courts, and so on, confirming his general
condemnations by concrete facts taken from real life. Cath-
erine, whoalready before the beginning of the revolution in
France, and especially since the events of 1789, had come to
regard with horror the liberal ideas of her youth, ordered
the book to be confiscated and destroyed at once. She
"
described the author as a revolutionist, worse than Pugat-
choff "; he ventured to "speak with approbation of Franklin"
and was infected with French ideas! Consequently, she wrote
herself a sharp criticism of the book, upon which its prosecu-
tion' had to be based. Radischeff was arrested, confined to
the fortress, later on transported to the remotest portions
of Eastern Siberia, on the Olenek. He was released only in
1 80 1. Next
year, seeing that even the advent of Alexander the
First did not mean the coming of a new reformatory spirit,
he put an end to his life by suicide. As to his book, it still
remains forbidden in Russia. A new edition of it, which was
made 1872, was confiscated and destroyed, and in 1888
in
the permission was given to a publisher to issue the work in
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 31
editions of a hundred copies only, which were to be dis-
tributed among a few men of science and certain high func-
tionaries.*
THE FIRST YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

These were, then, the elements out of which Russian
literaturehad to be evolved in the nineteenth century. The
slow work of the last five hundred years had already pre-
pared that admirable, pliable, and rich instrument the liter-
ary language in which Pushkin would soon be enabled to
write his melodious verses and Turgueneff his no less
melodious prose. From the autobiography of the Non-con-
formist martyr, Avvakum, one could already guess the value
of the spoken language of the Russian people for literary
purposes.
Tretiakovskiy, by his clumsy verses, and especially Lom-
onosoff and Derzhavin by their odes, had definitely repelled
the syllabic form that had been introduced from France
and Poland, and had established the tonic, rhythmical
form which was indicated by the popular song itself.
Lomonosoff had created a popular scientific language; he
had invented a number of new words, and had proved that
the Latin and Old Slavonian constructions were hostile to
the spirit of Russian, and quite unnecessary. The age of Cath-
erine II. further introduced into written literature the forms
of familiar everyday talk, borrowed even from the peasant
class; and Novikoff had created a Russian philosophical
language still heavy on account of its underlying mys-
ticism, but splendidly adapted, as it appeared a few decades
later, to abstract metaphysical discussions. The elements for
a great and original literature were thus ready. They re-
quired only a vivifying spirit which should use them for
higher purposes. This genius was Pushkin. But before speak-
ing of him, the historian and novelist Karamzin and the
Two free editions of it were made, one by Herzcn at London :

Prince Scherbdtoff and A. Radischeff, 1858; and another at Leip-
zig: Journey, in 1876. See A. Pypin's History of Russian Liter '
ature, vol. iv.
*
must be mentioned, as they represent a
poet Zhukovskiy
link between the two epochs.
Karamzin ( 1 766-1 826), by his monumental work, The
History of the Russian State, did in literature what the great
war of 18 12 had done in national life. He awakened the
national consciousness and created a lasting interest in the
history of the nation, in the making of the empire, in the
evolution of national character and institutions. Karamzin's
History was reactionary in spirit. He was the historian
of the Russian State, not of the Russian people; the poet
of the virtues of monarchy and the wisdom of the rulers, but
not an observer of the work that had been accomplished by
the unknown masses of the nation. He was not the man to
understand the federal principles which prevailed in Russia
down to the fifteenth century,and still less the communal
principles which pervaded Russian life and had permitted the
nation to conquer and to colonise an immense continent. For
him, the history of Russia was the regular, organic develop-
ment of a monarchy, from the first appearance of the
Scandinavian varingiar down to the present times, and he
was chiefly concerned with describing the deeds of monarchs
in their conquests and their building up of a State; but, as
it often happens with Russian writers, his foot-notes were a
work of history in themselves. They contained a rich mine of

information concerning the sources of Russia's history, and
they suggested to the ordinary reader that the early centuries
of mediaeval Russia, with her independent city-republics,
were far more interesting than they appeared in the book.f
Karamzin was not the founder of a school, but he showed
to Russia that she has a past worth knowing. Besides, his
work was a work of art. It was written in a brilliant style,
which accustomed the public to read historical works. The
result was, that the first edition of his eight-volume History
3,000 copies was sold in twenty-five days.
Pronounce Zh as a. French ; (Joukovskiy in French).

t It is now known how much of the preparatory work which
rendered Karamzin's History possible was done by the Academicians
Schlotzer, Miiller, and Stritter, as well as by the above-mentioned
historian ScherbatofF, who had thoroughly studied the annals and
whose views Karamzin closely followed in his work.
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 33
However, Karamzin's influence was not limited to his
History: it was even greater through his novels and his
Letters of a Russian Traveller Abroad. In the latter he
made an attempt to bring the products of European thought,
philosophy, and political life into circulation amidst a wide
public; to spread broadly humanitarian views, at a time when
they were most needed as a counterpoise to the sad realities
of political and social life; and to establish a link of connec-
tion between the intellectual life of our country and that of
Europe. As to Karamzin's novels, he appeared in them as a
true follower of sentimental romanticism; but this was pre-
cisely what was required then, as a reaction against the
would-be classical school. In one of his novels. Poor Liza
(1792), he described the misfortunes of a peasant girl who
fell in love with a nobleman, was abandoned by him, and
finally drowned herself in a pond. This peasant girl surely

would not answer to our present realistic requirements. She
spoke in choice language and was not a peasant girl at all;
"
but all reading Russia cried about the misfortune of poor
Liza," and the pond where the heroine was supposed to have
been drowned became a place of pilgrimage for the senti-
mental youths of Moscow. The spirited protest against
serfdom which we shall find later on in modern literature
was thus already born in Karamzin's time.
Zhuk6vskiy (1783-1852) was a romantic poet in the
true sense of the word, and a true worshipper of poetry, who
fully understood its elevating power. His original produc-
tions were few. He was mainly a translator and rendered in
most beautiful Russian verses the poems of Schiller, Uhland,
Herder, Byron, Thomas Moore, and others, as well as the
Odyssey, the Hindu poem of Nal and Ramayanti, and the
songs of the Western Slavonians. The beauty of these trans-
lations is such that I doubt whether there are in any other
language, even in German, equally beautiful renderings of
foreign poets. However, Zhukovskiy was not a mere trans-
lator: he took from other poets only what was agreeable to
his own nature and what he would have liked to sing himself.
Sad reflections about the unknown, an aspiration towards dis-
tant lands, the sufferings of love, and the sadness of
separation all lived through by the poet ^were the dis-
tinctive features of his poetry. They reflected his inner self.
We may object now to his ultra-romanticism, but this direc-
was an appeal to the broadly humanitarian
tion, at that time,
feelings, and it was of first necessity for progress. By his
poetry, Zhukovskiy appealed chiefly to women, and when we
deal later on with the part that Russian women played half
a century later in the general development of their country,
we shall see that his appeal was not made in vain. Altogether,
Zhukovskiy appealed to the best sides of human nature. One
note, however, was missing entirely in his poetry it was the
:
appeal to the sentiments of freedom "

and citizenship. This
"
appeal came from the Decembrist poet, Ryleeff.
THE "DECEMBRISTS"
The Tsar Alexander went through the same evolution as
I.
his grandmother, CatherineII. He was educated by the
republican. La Harpe, and began his reign as a quite liberal

sovereign, ready to grant to Russia a constitution. He did
it in fact for Poland and Finland, and made a first step
towards it in Russia. But he did not dare to touch serfdom,
and gradually he fell under the influence of German mystics,
became alarmed at liberal ideas, and surrendered his will to
the worst reactionaries. The man who ruled Russia during
the last ten or twelve years of his reign was General
Arakcheeff a maniac of cruelty and militarism, who main-
tained his influence by means of the crudest flattery and
simulated religiousness.
A
reaction against these conditions was sure to grow up,
the more so as the Napoleonic wars had brought a great
number of Russians in contact with Western Europe. The
campaigns made in Germany, and the occupation of Paris by
the Russian armies, had familiarised many officers with the
ideas of liberty which reigned still in the French capital,
while at home the endeavours of Novikoff were bearing
fruit, and the freemason Friends continued his work. When
Alexander I., having fallen under the influence of Madame
Kriidener and other German mystics, concluded in 1815 the
Holy Alliance with Germany and Austria, in order to combat
all liberal ideas, secret societies began to be formed in Russia
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 35
chiefly among the officers in order to promote the ideas
of liberty, of abolition of serfdom, and of equality before the
law, as the necessary steps towards the abolition of absolute
rule. Everyone who has read Tolstoy's War and Peace must
" "
remember Pierre and the impression produced upon this
young man by his first meeting with an old freemason.
" "
Pierre is a true representative of many young men who
" "
later on became known as Decembrists." Like Pierre,"
they were imbued with humanitarian ideas; many of them
hated serfdom, and they wanted the introduction of consti-
tutional guarantees; while a few of them (Pestel, Ryleef),
despairing of monarchy, spoke of a return to the republican
federalism of old Russia. With such ends in view, they
created their secret societies.
It is known how this conspiracy ended. After the sudden
death of Alexander I. in the South of Russia, the oath of
allegiance was given at St. Petersburg to his brother Con-
stantine, who was proclaimed his successor. But when, a
few days became known in the capital that Constan-
later, it
tine had abdicated, and that his brother Nicholas was going
to become emperor, and when the conspirators learned that
they had been denounced in the meantime to the State police,
they saw nothing else to do but to proclaim their programme
openly in the streets, and to fall in an unequal fight. They did
so, on December 14 (26), 1825, in the Senate Square of St.
Petersburg, followed by a few hundred men from several
regiments of the guard. Five of the insurgents were hanged
by Nicholas I., and the remainder, /. e., about a hundred
young men who represented the flower of Russian intelligence,
were sent to hard labour in Siberia, where they remained till
1856. One can hardly imagine what it meant, in a country
which was not over-rich in educated and well-intentioned
men, when such a number of the best representatives of a
generation were taken out of the ranks and reduced to
silence. Even in a more civilised country of Western Europe
the sudden disappearance of so many men of thought and
action would have dealt a severe blow to progress. In
Russia the effect was disastrous the more so as the reign
of Nicholas I. lasted thirty years, during which every spark
of free thought was stifled as soon as it appeared.
One of the most brilliant literary representatives of the
"
Decembrists" was Ryleef (1795-1826), one of the five
who were hanged by Nicholas I. He had received a good
education, and in 18 14 was already an officer. He was thus
by a few years the elder of Pushkin. He twice visited France,
in 1 8 14 and 181 5, and after the conclusion of peace became
a magistrate at St. Petersburg. His earlier productions were
a series of ballads dealing with the leading men of Russian
history. Most of them were merely patriotic, but some al-
ready revealed the sympathies of the poet for freedom.
Censorship did not allow these ballads to be printed, but
they circulated all over Russia in manuscript. Their poetical
value was not great; but the next poem of Ryleef, Foin-
arovsky, and especially some fragments of unfinished poems,
revealed in him a powerful poetical gift, which Ryleef's
great friend, Pushkin, greeted with effusion. It is greatly to
be regretted that the poem V oinarovsky has never been
translated into English. Its subject is the struggle of Little
Russia for the recovery of its independence under Peter I.
When the Russian Tsar was engaged in a bitter struggle
against the great northern warrior, Charles XII., then the
ruler of Little Russia, the hetman Mazepa conceived the
plan of joining Charles XII. against Peter I. for freeing his
mother country from the Russian yoke. Charles XII., as is
known, was defeated at Poltava, and both he and the hetman
had to flee to Turkey. As to Voinarovsky, a young patriot
friend of Mazepa, he was taken prisoner, and transported
to Siberia. There, at Yakutsk, he was visited by the historian
Miiller, and Ryleeff makes him tell his story to the German
explorer. The scenes of nature in Siberia, at Yakutsk, with

which the poem begins; the preparations for the war in Little
Russia and the war itself; the flight of Charles XII. and
Mazepa; then the sufferings of Voinarovsky at Yakutsk,
when his young wife came to rejoin him in the land of
exile, and died there all these scenes are most beautiful,
while in places the verses, by their simplicity and the beauty
of their images, evoked the admiration even of Pushkin.
Two or three generations have now read this poem, and
it continues to inspire each new one with the same love of
liberty and hatred of oppression.

PART II
Pushkin LermontofF
CHAPTER II
PUSHKIN AND LERMONTOFF
PUSHKIN: Beauty of form Pushkin and Schiller His youth;

and death Fairy tales: Ruslan and
his exile; his later career
" "
Ludmila-j-H\s lyrics Byronism Drama Evgheniy Onye-
Âm LERMONTOFF: Pushkin or Lermontoff ? His life
The Caucasus Poetry of Nature Influence of Shelley The
Demon Mtzyr'i Love of freedom His death Pushkin
and Lermontof? as prose-writers Other poets and novelists of
the same epoch.
PUSHKIN
Is not quite a stranger to English readers.
In a valuable collection of review articles dealing with

PUSHKINRussian writers which Professor Coolidge, of Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, put at my disposal, I found that
in 1832, and later on in 1845, Pushkin was spoken of as a
writer more or less familiar in England, and translations of
some of his lyrics were given in the reviews. Later on Push-
kin was rather neglected in Russia itself, and the more so
abroad, and up to the present time there is no English trans-
lation, worthy of the great poet, of any of his works. In
France, on the contrary owing to Turgueneff and Prosper
Merimee, who saw in Pushkin one of the great poets of man-
kind as well as in Germany, all the chief works of the
Russian poet are known to literary men in good transla-
tions, of which some are admirable. To the great reading
public the Russian poet is, however, nowhere well known
outside his own mother country.
The reason why Pushkin has not become a favourite with
West European readers is easily understood. His lyric verse
is
certainly inimitable: it is that of a great poet. His chief
39
novel in verse, Evgheniy Onyeghin, is written with an easi-
ness and a lightness of style, and a picturesqueness of detail,
which makes it stand unique in European literature. His
renderings in verses of Russian popular tales are delightful
reading. But, apart from his very latest productions in the
dramatic style, there is in whatever Pushkin wrote none of
the depth and elevation of ideas which characterised Goethe
and Schiller, Shelley, Byron, and Browning, Victor Hugo
and Barbier. The beauty of form, the happy ways of ex-
pression, the incomparable command of verse and rhyme,
are his main points not the beauty of his ideas. And what
we look for in poetry is always the higher inspiration, the
noble ideas which can help to make us better. In reading
Pushkin's verses the Russian reader is continually brought
to exclaim: "How beautifully this has been told! It could
not, it ought not, to be told in a different way." In this beauty
of form Pushkin is inferior to none of the greatest poets.
In his ways of expressing even the most insignificant remarks,
and describing the most insignificant details of everyday life;
in the variety of human feeling that he has expressed, and
the delicate expression of love under a variety of aspects
which is contained in his poetry; and finally, in the way he
deeply impressed his own personality upon everything he
wrote he is certainly a great poet.
It is extremely interesting to compare Pushkin with Schil-
ler, in their lyrics. Leaving aside the greatness and the
variety of subjects touched upon by Schiller, and comparing

only those pieces of poetry in which both poets speak of
themselves, one feels at once that Schiller's personality is
infinitely superior, in depth of thought and philosophical
comprehension of life, to that of ^he bright, somewhat spoiled
and rather superficial child that Pushkin was. But, at the
same time, the individuality of Pushkin is more deeply im-
pressed upon his writings than that of Schiller upon his.
Pushkin was full of vital intensity, and his own self is re-
flected in everything he wrote; a human heart, full of fire,
is throbbing intensely in all his verses. This heart is far less
sympathetic than that of Schiller, but it is more intimately

revealed to the reader. In his best lyrics Schiller did not
find cither a better expression of feeling, or a greater variety
PtJSHKIN 41
of expression, than Pushkin did. In that respect the Russian
poet decidedly stands by the side of Goethe.
Pushkin was born in an aristocratic family at Moscow.
Through his mother he had African blood in his veins she :
was a beautiful creole, the granddaughter of a negro who

had been in the service of Peter I. His father was a typical
representative of the noblemen of those times squandering
:
a large fortune, living all anyhow and anyway,

his life
amidst feasts, in a house half-furnished and half-empty;
fond of the lighter French literature of the time, fond of
entering into a discussion upon anything that he had just
learned from the encyclopaedists, and bringing together at
his house all possible notabilities of literature, Russian and
French, who happened to be at Moscow.
Pushkin's grandmother and his old nurse were the future
poet's best friends in his childhood. From them he got his
perfect mastership of the Russian language; and from his
nurse, with whom he used to spend, later on, the long
winter nights at his country house, when he was ordered by
the State police to reside on his country estate, he borrowed
that admirable knowledge of Russian folk-lore and Russian
ways of expression which rendered his poetry' and prose so
wonderfully Russian. To these two women we thus owe the
creation of the modern, easy, pliable Russian language which
Pushkin introduced into our literature.
He was educated at St. Petersburg, at the Tsarskoe Selo
Lyceum, and even before he left school he became- renowned
as a most extraordinary poet, in whom Derzhavin recognised
more than a mere successor, and whom Zhukovsky presented
was his portrait bearing the following inscription " To a :
pupil, from his defeated teacher." Unfortunately, Pushkin's

passionate nature drew him away from both the literary
circles and the circles of his best friends the Decembrists
Puschin and Kiichelbecker into the circles of the lazy, in-
significant aristocrats, amongst whom he spent his vital
energy in orgies. Something of the shallow, empty sort of
life he lived then he has himself described in
Evgheniy
Onyeghin.
Being friendly with the political youth who appeared six
or seven years later, on the square of Peter I. at St. Peters-
burg, as insurgents against autocracy and serfdom, Pushkin
wrote an Ode to Liberty, and numbers of small pieces of
poetry expressing the most revolutionary ideas, as well as
satires against the rulers of the time. The result was that in
1820, when he was only twenty years old, he was exiled to
Kishinyoff, a very small town at that time, in newly annexed
Bessarabia, where he led the most extravagant life, even-
tually joining a party of wandering gypsies. Happily enough
he was permitted to leave for some time this dusty and un-
interesting little spot, and to make, in company with the
charming and educated family of the Rayevskys, a journey
to the Crimea and the Caucasus, from which journey he
brought back some of his finest lyrical works.
In 1824, when he had rendered himself quite impossible
at Odessa (perhaps also from fear that he might escape to
Greece, to join Byron), he was ordered to return to Central
Russia and to reside at his small estate, Mikhailovskoye, in
the province of Pskov, where he wrote his best things. On
December 14, 1825, when the insurrection broke out at St.
Petersburg, Pushkin was at Mikhailovskoye; otherwise, like
so many of his Decembrist friends, he would most certainly
have ended his life in Siberia. He succeeded in burning all
his papers before they could be seized by the secret police.
Shortly after that he was allowed to return to St. Peters-
burg: Nicholas I. undertaking to be himself the censor of
his verses, and later on making Pushkin a chamberlain of his
Court. Poor Pushkin had thus to live the futile life of a
small functionary of the Winter Palace, and this life he
certainly hated. The Court nobility and bureaucracy could
never pardon him that he, who did not belong to their circle,
was considered such a great man in Russia, and Pushkin's
life was full of little stings to his self-respect, coming from
these classes. He had also the misfortune to marry a lady who
was very beautiful but did not in the least appreciate his
genius. In 1837 he had to fight on her account a duel, in
which he was killed, at the age of thirty-five.
One of his earliest productions, written almost imme-
diately after he left school, was Rusldn and Ludmila, a fairy
tale, which he put into beautiful verse. The dominating ele-
"
ment of this poem is that wonderland where a green oak
PUSHKIN 43
stands on the sea-beach, and a learned cat goes round the
oak, to which it is attached by a golden qhain, singing
songs when it goes to the left, and telling tales when it goes
to the right." It is the wedding day of Ludmila, the heroine;
the long bridal feast comes at last to an end, and she retires
with her husband; when all of a sudden comes darkness,
thunder resounds, and in the storm Ludmila disappears. She
has been carried away by the terrible sorcerer from the Black
Sea a folk-lore allusion, of course, to the frequent raids of
the nomads of Southern Russia. Now, the unhappy husband,
as also three other young men, who were formerly suitors of
Ludmila, saddle their horses and go in search of the vanished
bride. From their experiences the tale is made up, and it is
full of both touching passages and very humorous episodes.
After many adventures, Ruslan recovers his Ludmila, and
everything ends to the general satisfaction, as folk-tales
always do.*
This was a most youthful production of Pushkin, but its
effect in Russia was tremendous. Classicism, i. e. the pseudo-
classicism which reigned then, was defeated for ever. Every-
one wanted to have the poem, everyone retained in memory
whole passages and even pages from it, and with this tale the
modern Russian literature simple, realistic in its descrijv
tions, modest in its images and fable, earnest and
slightly
humouristic was created. In fact, one could not imagine a
greater simplicity in verse than that which Pushkin had
already obtained in this poem. But to give an idea of this sim-
plicity to English readers remains absolutely impossible so
long as the poem is not translated by some very gifted English
poet. Suffice it to say that, while its verses are wonderfully
musical, it contains not one single passage in which the author
has resorted to unusual or obsolete words to any words,
indeed, but those which everyone uses in common conver-
sation.
Thunders came upon Pushkin from the classical camp
when this poem made its appearance. We have only to think
*The great composer Glinka has made of this fairy tale a most
beautiful opera (Rustan i Ludmila), in which Russian, Finnish, Turk-
ish, and Oriental music are intermingled in order to characterise
the different heroes.
of the Daphnes and the Chloes with which poetry used to be
embellished at that time, and the sacerdotal attitude which
the poet took towards his readers, to understand how
the classical school was offended at the appearance of a poet
who expressed his thoughts in beautiful images, without
resorting to any of these embellishments, who spoke the
language which everyone speaks, and related adventures fit
for the nursery. With one cut of his sword Pushkin had freed
literature from the ties which were keeping it enslaved.
The tales which he had heard from his old nurse gave him
the matter, not only for Rusldn and Ludmila, but also for
a series of popular tales, of which the verses are so natural
that as soon as you have pronounced one word that word
calls up immediately the next, and this the following, be-
cause you cannot say the thing otherwise than in the way in
"
which Pushkin has told it. Is it not exactly so that tales
"
should be told? was asked all over Russia; and, the reply
being in the affirmative, the fight against pseudo-classicism
was won forever.
This simplicity of expression characterised Pushkin in
everything he afterwards wrote. He did not depart from it,
even when he wrote about so-called elevated subjects, nor in

the passionate or philosophical monologues of his latest
dramas. It is what makes Pushkin so diflicult to translate
into English; because, in the English literature of the nine-
teenth century, Wordsworth is the only poet who has written
with the same simplicity. But, while Wordsworth applied this
simplicity mainly to the description of the lovely and quiet
English landscape, Pushkin spoke with the same simplicity
of human life, and his verses continued to flow, as easy as
prose and as free from artificial expressions, even when he
described the most violent human passions. In his contempt
of everything exaggerated and theatrical, and in his deter-
"
mination to have nothing to do with the lurid tragic actor
who wields a cardboard sword," he was thoroughly Russian:
and at the same time he powerfully contributed towards
establishing, in both the written literature and on the stage,
that taste for simplicity and honest expression of feeling of
which so many examples will be given in the course of this
book.
PUSHKIN 45
The main force of Pushkin was in his lyric poetry, and the
chief note of his lyrics was love. The terrible contradictions
between the ideal and the real, from which deeper minds,
like those of Goethe, or Byron, or Heine, have suffered, were
strange to him. Pushkin was of a more superficial nature. It
must also be said that a West-European poet has an inherit-
ance which the Russian has not. Every country of Western
Europe has passed through periods of great national
struggle, during which the great questions of human de-
velopment were at stake. Great political conflicts have pro-
duced deep passions and resulted in tragical situations; but
in Russia the great struggles and the religious movements
which took place in the seventeenth century, and under
Pugatchoff in the eighteenth, were uprisings of peasants, in
which the educated classes took no part. The intellectual
horizon of a Russian poet is thus necessarily limited. There
is, however, something in human nature which always lives
and appeals to every mind. This is love, and Pushkin, in his
lyric poetry, represented love under so many aspects, in such
beautiful forms, and with such a variety of shades, as one
finds in no other poet. Besides, he often gave to love an ex-
pression so refined, so high, that his higher comprehension of
love left as deep a stamp upon subsequent Russian literature
as Goethe's refined types of women left in the world's litera-
ture. After Pushkin had written, it was impossible for
Russian poets to speak of love in a lower sense than he did.
In Russia Pushkin has sometimes been described as a Rus-
sian Byron. This appreciation, however, is hardly correct.
He certainly imitated Byron in some of his poems, although
the imitation became, at least in Evgheniy Onyeghin, a bril-
liant original creation. He certainly was deeply impressed by
Byron's spirited protest against the conventional life of
European society, and there was a time when, if he only
could have left Russia, he probably would have joined Byron
inGreece.
But, with his light character, Pushkin could not fathom,
and still less share, the depth of hatred and contempt
towards post-revolutionary Europe which consumed Byron's
" "
heart. Pushkin's Byronism was superficial; and, while
he was ready to defy "
respectable society, he knew
neither the longings for freedom nor the hatred of hypoc-
risy which inspired Byron.
Altogether, Pushkin's force was not in his elevating or
freedom-inspiring influence. His epicureanism, his education
received from French emigres, and his life amidst the high
and frivolous classes of St. Petersburg society, prevented
him from taking to heart the great problems which were al-
ready ripening in Russian life. This is why, towards the end
of his short life, he was no longer in touch with those of
his readers who felt that to glorify the military power of
Russia, after the armies of Nicholas I. had crushed Poland,
was not worthy of a poet; and that to describe the attractions
of a St. Petersburg winter-season for a rich and idle gentle-
man was not to describe Russian life, in which the horrors
of serfdom and absolutism were being felt more and more
heavily.
Pushkin's real force was in his having created in a few
years the Russian literary language, and having freed litera-
ture from the theatrical, pompous style which was formerly
considered necessary in whatever was printed in black and
white. He was great in his stupendous powers of poetical
creation in his capacity of taking the commonest things of
:
everyday life, or the commonest feelings of the most ordi-

nary person, and of so relating them that the reader lived
them through and, on the other side, constructing out of the
;
scantiest materials, and calling to life, a whole historical

epoch power of creation which, of those coming after him,
a
only Tolstoy has to the same extent. Pushkin's power was
next in his profound realism that realism, understood in its
best sense, which he was the first to introduce in Russia, and
which, we shall see, became afterwards characteristic of the
whole of Russian literature. And it is in the broadly human-
itarian feelings with which his best writings are permeated,
in his bright love of life, and his respect for women. As to
"
beauty of form, his verses are so easy that one knows
them by heart after having read them twice or thrice. Now
that they have penetrated into the villages, they are the
delight of millions of peasant children, after having been the
delight of such refined and philosophical poets as Turgueneff.
Pushkin also tried his hand at the drama; and, so far as
PUSHKIN 47
may be judged from his latest productions, Don Juan and
The Miser-Knight, he surely would have achieved great re-
sults had he lived to continue them. His Mermaid (Ru-
sdlka) unfortunately remained unfinished, but its dramatic
qualities can be judged from what Darmyzhsky has made of
it in his opera. His historical drama, Boris Godunof, taken
from the times of the pretender Demetrius, is enlivened here

and there by most beautiful scenes, some of them very amus-
ing, and some of them containing a delicate analysis of the
sentiments of love and ambition; but it remains rather a
dramatic chronicle than a drama. As to The Miser-Knight,
it shows an extraordinary power of mature talent, and con-
tains passages undoubtedly worthy of Shakespeare; while

Don Juan, imbued with a true Spanish atmosphere, gives a
far better comprehension of the Don Juan type than any
other representation of it in any literature, and has all the
qualities of a first-rate drama.
Towards the end of his very short life a note of deeper
comprehension of human affairs began to appear in Push-
kin's writings. He had had enough of the life of the higher
classes; and, when he began to write a history of the great
peasant uprising which took place under Pugatchoff during
the reign of Catherine II., he began also to understand and
to feel the inner springs of the life of the Russian peasant-
class. National life appeared to him under a much broader
aspect than before. But at this stage of the development of

his genius his career came to a premature end." He was
killed, as already stated, in a duel with a society man.
The most popular work of Pushkin is his novel in verse,
Evgheniy Onyeghin. In its form it in common with
has much
Byron's Childe Harold, but it is thoroughly Russian, and
contains perhaps the best description of Russian life, both in
the capitals and on the smaller estates of noblemen in the
country, that has ever been written in Russian literature.
Tchaykovsky, the musician, has made of it an opera which
enjoys a great success on the Russian stage. The hero of the
novel, Onyeghin, is a typical representative of what society
people were at that time. He has received a superficial edu-
cation, partly from a French emigre, partly from a Ger-
man teacher, and has learned " something and anyhow." At
the age of nineteen he is the owner of a great fortune con-
sisting, of course, of serfs, about whom he does not care in
" "
the least and he is engulfed in the high-life of St. Peters-
burg. His day begins very late, with reading scores of invi-
tations to tea-parties, evening parties, and fancy balls. He is,
of course, a visitor at the theatre, in which he prefers ballet
to the clumsy productions of the Russian dramatists; and
he spends a good deal of his day in fashionable restaurants,
while his nights are given to balls, where he plays the part
of a disillusioned young man, who is tired of life, and wraps
himself in the mantle of Byronism. For some reason or other
he is compelled to spend a summer on his estate, where he
has for a neighbour a young poet, educated in Germany and
full of German romanticism. They become great friends,
and they make acquaintance with a squire's family in their
neighbourhood. The head of the family the old mother
is admirably described. Her two daughters, Tatiana and
Olga, are very different in nature: Olga is a quite artless

girl, full of the joy of living, who worries herself with no
questions, and the young poet is madly in love with her; they
are going to marry. As to Tatiana, she is a poetical girl, and
Pushkin bestows on her all the wonderful powers of his
talent, describing her as an ideal woman: intelligent,
thoughtful, and inspired with vague aspirations towards
something better than the prosaic life which she is compelled
to live. Onyeghin produces upon her, from the first, a deep
impression :she falls in love with him
; but he, who has made
so many conquests in the high circles of the capital, and now
wears the mask of disgust of life, takes no notice of the
naive love of the poor country girl. She writes to him and
tells him her love with great frankness and in most pathetic
words: but the young snob finds nothing better to do than to
lecture her about her rashness, and seems to take great
pleasure in turning the knife in her wound. At the same time,
at a small country ball Onyeghin, moved by some spirit of
mischief, begins to flirt in the most provoking way with the
other sister, Olga. The young girl seems to be delighted with
the attention paid to her by the gloomy hero, and the result
is that the poet
provokes his friend to a duel. An old retired
officer, a true duelist, is mixed up in the affair, and Onyeghin,
PUSHKIN 49
who much about what the country gentlemen,
cares very
whom he pretends to despise, may say about him, accepts the
provocation and fights the duel. He kills his poet friend and is
compelled to leave the country. Several years pass. Tatiana,
recovered from an illness, goes one day to the house where
formerly Onyeghin stayed and, making friends with an old
keeper, spends days and months reading in his library; but
life has no attraction for her. After insistent supplication
from her mother, she goes to Moscow, and there she marries
an old general. This marriage brings her to St. Petersburg,
where she plays a prominent part in the Court circles. In
these surroundings Onyeghin meets her once more, and
hardly recognises his Tanya in the worldly lady whom he sees
now; he falls madly in love with her. She takes no notice of
him, and his letters remain unanswered. At last one day he
goes, at an unseemly hour, into her house. He finds her read-
ing his letters, her eyes full of tears, and makes her a
passionate declaration of his love. To this Tatiana replies
by a monologue which is so beautiful that it ought to be
quoted here, if there existed an English translation which
rendered at least the touching simplicity of Tatiana's words,
and consequently the beauty of the verses. A
whole genera-
tion of Russian women have cried over this monologue, as
they were reading these lines:
"
Onyeghin, I was younger then, and better looking, I
suppose; and I loved you "...
but the love of a country
girl offered nothing new to Onyeghin. He paid no- attention
to her. ..." Why then does he follow her now at every
step? Why such display of his attention? Is it because she
is now rich and belongs to the high society, and is well
received at Court?
"
Because my fall, in such condition.
Would be well noted everywhere.
And bring to you an envied reputation?"
And she continues:
"
For me, Onyeghin, all this wealth.
This showy tinsel of Court life.
All my successes in the world.
My well-appointed house and balls . ,
For me are nought! I gladly would
Give up these rags, this masquerade,
And all the brilliancy and din.
For a small shelf of books, a garden wild.
Our weather-beaten house so poor
Those very places where I met
fVith you, Onyeghin, that first time;
And for the churchyard of our village.
Where now a cross and shady trees
Stand on the grave of my poor nurse.
And happiness was possible then!

"
It was so near! . . .
"
She supplicates Onyeghin to leave her. I love you,"
she says:
"
Why should I hide from you the truth?
But I am given to another.
And true to him I shall remain." *
How many thousands of young Russian women have later "

on repeated these same verses, and said to themselves I :
would gladly give up all these rags and all this masquerade
of luxurious life for a small shelf of books, for life in the
country, amidst the peasants, and for the grave of my old
nurse in our village." How many have done it! And we
shall see how this same type of Russian girl was developed
still further in the novels of Turgueneff and in Russian
life. Was not Pushkin a great poet to have foreseen and
predicted it?
L^RMONTOFF
when Turgueneff and his great friend,
It is said that
Kavelin, came together Kavelin was a very sympathetic
philosopher and a writer upon law a favourite theme of
their discussions was: "Pushkin or Lermontoff?" Tur-
* For who
all translations, not otherwise mentioned, it is myself
is responsible.
L^RMONTOFF 51
gueneff, as Is known, considered Pushkin

one of the greatest
poets, and especially one of the greatest artists, among men ;
while Ravelin must have insisted upon the fact that in his
best productions Lermontoff was but slightly inferior to
Pushkin as an that his verses were real music, while
artist,
at the inspiration of his poetry was of a much
same time the
higher standard than that of Pushkin. When it is added that
eight years was the entire limit of LermontofF's literary
career he was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-six
the powers and the potentialities of this poet will be seen
at once.
Lermontoff had Scotch blood in his veins. At least, the
founder of the family was a Scotchman, George Learmonth,
who, with sixty Scotchmen and Irishmen, entered the service
of Poland first, and afterwards, in 1 613, of Russia. The inner
biography of the poet remains still but imperfectly known. It
is certain that his childhood and boyhood were anything but
happy. His mother was a lover of poetry perhaps a poet

herself; but he lost her when he was only three years old
she was only twenty-one. His aristocratic grandmother
on the maternal side took him from his father a poor
army officer, whom the child worshipped and educated
him, preventing all intercourse between the father and the
son. The boy was very gifted, and at the age of fourteen had
already begun to write verses and poems first in French,
(like Pushkin), and soon in Russian. Schiller and Shake-

speare and, from the age of sixteen, Byron and Shelley were
his favourites. At the age of sixteen Lermontoff entered
the Moscow University, from which he was, however, ex-
cluded next year for some offence against a very uninteresting
professor. He then entered a military school at St. Peters-
burg, to become at the age of eighteen an officer of the
hussars.
A young man of twenty-two, Lermontoff suddenly became
widely known for a piece of poetry which he wrote on the
occasion of Pushkin's death (1837). A great poet, as well
as a lover of liberty and a foe of oppression, was revealed at
once in this passionate production of the young writer, of
which the concluding verses were especially powerful. " But
"
you," he wrote, who stand, a haughty crowd) around the
throne, You hang men of genius, of liberty, and fame You !
have now the law to cover you, And justice must close her lips
before you But there is a judgment of God,
!
you, dissolute
crowd There is a severe judge who waits for you. You will
1
not buy him by the sound of your gold. And, with all
. .
your black blood, You will not wash away the

stain of the
"
poet's pure blood ! In a few days all St. Petersburg, and
very soon all Russia, knew these verses by heart; they cir-
culated in thousands of manuscript copies.
For this passionate cry of his heart, Lermontoff was
exiled at once. Only the intervention of his powerful friends
prevented him from being marched straight to Siberia. He
was transferred from the regiment of guards to which he
belonged to an army regiment in the Caucasus. Lermontoff
was already acquainted with the Caucasus: he had been
taken there as a child of ten, and he had brought back from
-this sojourn an ineffaceable impression. Now the grandeur
of the great mountain range impressed him still more forci-
bly. The Caucasus is one of the most beautiful regions on
earth. It is a chain of mountains much greater than the Alps,
surrounded by endless forests, gardens, and steppes, situated
in a sounthern climate, in a dry region where the trans-
parency of the air enhances immensely the natural beauty

of the mountains. The snow-clad giants are seen from
the Steppes scores of miles away, and the immensity of the
chain produces an impression which is equalled nowhere in
Europe. Moreover, a half-tropical vegetation clothes the
mountain slopes, where the villages nestle, with their semi-
military aspect and their turrets, basking in all the gorgeous
sunshine of the East, or concealed in the dark shadows of
the narrow gorges, and populated by a race of people among
the most beautiful of Europe. Finally, at the time Lermon-
toff was there the mountaineers were fighting against the
Russian invaders with unabated courage and daring for
each valley of their native mountains.
All these natural beauties of the Caucasus have been re-
flected in Lermontoff's poetry, in such a way that in no other
literature are there descriptions of nature so beautiful, or so
impressive and correct. Bodenstedt, his German translator
and personal friend, who knew the Caucasus well, was quite
L^RMONTOFF 53
right in observing that they are worth volumes of geographi-
cal descriptions. The reading of many volumes about the
Caucasus does not add any concrete features to those which
are impressed upon the mind by reading the poems of Ler-
montoff. Turgueneff quotes somewhere Shakespeare's de-
scription of the sea as seen from the cliffs of Dover (in King
Lear), as a masterpiece of objective poetry dealing with
nature. I must confess, however, that the concentration of
attention upon small details in this description does not
appeal to my mind. It gives no impression of the immensity
of the sea as seen from the Dover cliffs, nor of the won-
derful richness of colour displayed by the waters on a
sunny day. No such reproach could ever be made against
Lermontoff's poetry of nature. Bodenstedt truly says that
Lermontoff has managed to satisfy at the same time both
the naturalist and the lover of art. Whether he describes
the gigantic chain, where the eye loses itself here in snow
clouds, there in the unfathomable depths of narrow gorges;
or whether he mentions some detail: a mountain stream,
or the endless woods, or the smiling valleys of Georgia
covered with flowers, or the strings of light clouds floating
in the dry breezes of Northern Caucasia, he always
remains so true to nature that his picture rises before the.
eye in life-colours, and yet it is imbued with a poetical
atmosphere which makes one feel the freshness of these
mountains, the balm of their forests and meadows, the purity
of the air. And all this is written in verses wonderfully
" "
musical. Lermontoff's verses, though not so easy as Push-
kin's, are very often even more musical. They sound like a
beautiful melody. The Russian language is always rather
melodious, but in the verses of Lermontoff it becomes
almost as melodious as Italian.
The intellectual aspect of Lermontoff is nearer to Shelley
than to any other poet. He was deeply impressed by the
author of Prometheus Bound; but he did not try to imitate
Shelley. In his earliest productions he did indeed imitate
Pushkin and Pushkin's Byronism; but he very soon struck
a line of his own. All that can be said is, that the mind
of Lermontoff was disquieted by the same great problems
of Good and Evil struggling in the human heart, as in
the universe at large, which disquieted Shelley. Like
Shelley among the poets, and like Schopenhauer among
the philosophers, he felt the coming of that burning need
of a revision of the moral principles now current, so
characteristic of our own times. He embodied these ideas
in two poems. The Demon and Mtsyri, which complete each
other. The leading idea of the first is that of a fierce soul
which has broken with both earth and heaven, and looks
with contempt upon all who are moved by petty passions.
An exile from paradise and a hater of human virtues, he
knows these petty passions, and despises them with all his
superiority. The love of this demon towards a Georgian girl
who takes refuge from his love in a convent, and dies there
what more unreal subject could be chosen? And yet, on
reading the poem, one is struck at every line by its incredible
wealth of purely realistic, concrete descriptions of scenes
and of human feelings, all of the most exquisite beauty. The
dance of the girl at her Georgian castle before the wedding,
the encounter of the bridegroom with robbers and his death,
the galloping of his faithful horse, the sufferings of the bride
and her retirement to a convent, nay, the love itself of the
demon and every one of the demon's movements this is of
the purest realism in the highest sense of the word: that
realism with which Pushkin had stamped Russian literature
once and for all.
Mtsyri is the cry of a young soul longing for liberty. A
boy, taken from a Circassian village, from the mountains,
is brought up in a small Russian monastery. The monks think
that they have killed in him all human passions and long-
ings; but the dream of his childhood is be it only once, be
it only for a moment to see his native mountains where
his sisters sang round his cradle, and to press his burning
bosom against the heart of one who is not a stranger. One
night, when a storm rages and the monks are praying in
fear in their church, he escapes from the monastery, and
wanders for three days in the woods. For once in his life he
enjoys a few moments of liberty he feels all the energy and
;
"
all the forces of his youth :As for me, I was like a wild
"
beast," he says afterwards, and I was ready to fight with
the storm, the lightning, the tiger of the forest." But, being
Ll^RMONTOFF 55
an exotic plant, weakened by education, he does not find his
way to his native country. He is lost in the forests which

spread for hundreds of miles round him, and is found a few
days later, exhausted, not far from the monastery. He dies
from the wounds which he has received in a fight with a
leopard.
"
The grave does not frighten me," he says to the old
monk who attends him. " Suffering, they say, goes to sleep
there in the eternal cold stillness. But I regret to part with
life .... I am young, still young .... hast thou ever
known the dreams of youth ? Or hast thou forgotten how thou
once lovedst and hatedst? Maybe, this beautiful world has
lost for thee its beauty. Thou art weak and grey; thou hast
lost all desires. No matter! Thou hast lived once; thou hast
something to forget in this world. Thou hast lived I might

"
have lived, too And he tells about the beauty of the nature
!
which he saw when he had run away, his frantic joy at feeling
free, his running after the lightning, his fight with a leopard.
"Thou wishest to know what I did. while I was free? I
lived, old man! I lived! And my life, without these three
happy days, would have been gloomier and darker than thy
powerless old age!" But it is impossible to tell all the
beauties of this poem. It must be read, and let us hope that a
good translation of it will be published some day.
Lermontoff's demonism or pessimism was not the pessi-
mism of despair, but a militant protest against all that is
ignoble in life, and in this respect his poetry has deeply im-
pressed itself upon all our subsequent literature. His pessi-
mism was the irritation of a strong man at seeing others
round him so weak and so base. With his inborn feeling of
the Beautiful, which evidently can never exist without the
True and the Good, and at the same time surrounded espe-
cially in the worldly spheres he lived in, and on the Caucasus
by men and women who could not or did not dare to
understand him, he might easily have arrived at a pessimistic
contempt and hatred of mankind; but he always maintained
his faith in the higher qualities of man. It was quite natural
that in his youth especially in those years of universal reac-
tion, the thirties Lermontoff should have expressed his
discontent with the world in such a general and abstract crea-
56 KUSSIAN LITERATURE
tion as The Demon. Something similar wc find even with
is
Schiller.But gradually his pessimism took a more concrete

form. It was not mankind altogether, and still less heaven
and earth, that he despised in his latter productions, but the
negative features of his own generation. In his prose novel,
The Hero of our Own Time, m
his Thoughts (Duma), etc.,
he perceived higher ideals, and already in 1840 i. e., one
year before his death he seemed ready to open a new page
in his creation, in which his powerfully constructive and criti-
cal mind would have been directed towards the real evils of
actual life, and real, positive good would apparently have
been his aim. But it was at this very moment that, like Push-
kin, he fell in a duel.
"
Lermontoff was, above all, a humanist," a deeply
humanitarian poet. Already at the age of twenty-three, he
had written a poem from the times of John the Terrible,
Song about the Merchant Kaldshnikoff, which is rightly con-
sidered as one of the best gems of Russian literature, both for
its powers, its artistic finish, and its wonderful epic style. The
poem, which produced a great impression when it became

known in Germany in Bodenstedt's translation, is imbued
with the fiercest spirit of revolt against the courtiers of the
Terrible Tsar.
Lermontoff deeply loved Russia, but not the official
Russia : not the crushing military power of a fatherland,
which is so dear to the so-called patriots, and he wrote :
/ love my fatherland ; but strange that love,

In spite of all my reasoning may say;
Its glory, bought by shedding streams of blood.
Its quietness, so full of fierce disdain.
And the traditions of its gloomy past
Do not awake in me a happy vision. . . .
What he loved in Russia was its country life, its plains, the
life of its peasants. He
inspired at the same time with a
was
deep love towards the natives of the Caucasus, who were
waging their bitter fight against the Russians for their liberty.
Himself a Russian, and a member of two different expeditions
against the Circassians, his heart throbbed nevertheless in
LfiRMONTOFF 57
sympathy with that brave, warm-hearted people in their
struggle for independence. One poem, Izmail-Bey, is an
apotheosis of this struggle of the Circassians against the Rus-
sians; in another, one of his best a Circassian is described
as fleeing from the field of battle to run home to his
village, and there his mother herself repudiates him as a
traitor. Another gem of poetry, one of his shorter poems,
Valerik, is considered by those who know what real warfare
is as the most correct description of it in poetry. And yet,
Lermontoff disliked war, and he ends one of his admirable

descriptions of fighting with these lines:
"
I thought : How miserable is man ! What does he want ? The
sky pure, and under it there's room for all ; but without reason
is and
"
necessity, his heart is full of hatred. ^Why ?
He died in his twenty-seventh year. Exiled for a second

time to the Caucasus ( for a duel which he had fought at St.
Petersburg with a Barrante, the son of the French ambassa-
dor), he was staying at Pyatigorsk, frequenting the shallow
society which usually comes together in such watering places.
His jokes and sarcasms addressed to an oflicer, MartynofF,
who used to drape himself in a Byronian mantle the better to
capture the hearts of young girls, led to a duel. Lermontoff,
as he had already done in his first duel, shot sideways pur-
posely; but Martynoff slowly and purposely took his aim so
as even to call forth the protests of the seconds and killed
Lermontoff on the spot.
PUSHKIN AND LERMONTOFF AS PROSE-WRITERS

Towards the end of his life Pushkin gave himself more and
more to prose writing. He began an extensive history of the
peasant uprising of 1773 under Pugatchoff, and undertook
for that purpose a journey to East Russia, where he collected,
besides public documents, personal reminiscences and popular
traditions relating to this uprising. At the same time he also
wrote a novel. The Captain's Daughter, the scene of which
was laid in that disturbed period. The novel is not very
remarkable in itself. True, the portraits of Pugatchoff and of
an old servant, as well as the description of the whole life
in the small forts of East Russia, garrisoned at that time
by
only a few invalid soldiers, are very true to reality
and bril-
liantly pictured; but in the general construction of the novel
Pushkin paid a tribute to the sentimentalism of the times.
Nevertheless, The Captain's Daughter, and especially the
other prose novels of Pushkin, have played an important part
in the history of Russian literature. Through them Pushkin
introduced into Russia the realistic school, long before
Balzac did so in France, and this school has since that time
prevailed in Russian prose-literature. I do not mean, of
course, Realism in the sense of dwelling mainly upon the
lowest instincts of man, as it was misunderstood by some
French writers, but in the sense of treating both high and
low manifestations of human nature in a way true to reality,
and in their real proportions. Moreover, the simplicity of
these novels, both as regards their plots and the way the
plots are treated. Is simply marvellous, and in this way they
have traced the lines upon which the development of Russian
novel writing has ever since been pursued. The novels of
Lermontoff, of Herzen (Whose Faultf)^ and of Turgueneff
and Tolstoy descend, I dare to say, in a much more direct
line from Pushkin's novels than from those of Gogol.
Lermontoff also wrote one novel in prose, The Hero of our
Own Time, of which the hero, Petchorin, was to some ex-
tent a real representative of a portion of the educated society
in those years of romanticism. It is true that some critics
saw in him the portraiture of the author himself and his
acquaintances; but, as Lermontoff wrote in his preface to
"
a second edition of this novel The hero or our own
time is indeed a portrait, but not of one single man: it
is the portrait of the vices of our generation," the
"
book indicates the illness from which this generation
suffers."
Petchorin is an extremely clever, bold, enterprising man
who regards his surroundings with cold contempt. He is

undoubtedly a superior man, superior to Pushkin's Onyeghin;
but he is, above all, an egotist who finds no better application
for his superior capacities than all sorts of mad adventures,
always connected with love-making. He falls in love with a
Ll^RMONTOFF 59
Circassian girl whom he sees at a native festival. The girl is
also taken by the beauty and the gloomy aspect of the Rus-
sian. To marry her is evidently out of question, because her
Mussulman relatives would never give her to a Russian.
Then, Petchorin daringly kidnaps her, with the aid of her
brother, and the girl is brought to the Russian fort, where
Petchorin is an officer. For several weeks she only cries and
never speaks a word to the Russian, but by and bye she
feels love for him. That is the beginning of the tragedy.
Petchorin soon has enough of the Circassian beauty; he
deserts her more and more for hunting adventures, and dur-
ing one of them she is kidnapped by a Circassian who loves
her, and who, on seeing that he cannot escape with her, kills
her with his dagger. For Petchorin this solution is almost
welcome.
A few years later the same Petchorin appears amidst Rus-
sian society in one of the Caucasus watering towns. There
he meets with Princess Mary, who is courted by a young man
Grushnisky, a sort of Caucasian caricature of Byron,
draped in a mantle of contempt for mankind, but in reality a
very shallow sort of personage. Petchorin, who cares but
little for the Princess Mary, finds, however, a sort of wicked
pleasure in rendering Grushnitsky ridiculous in her eyes, and

uses all his wit to bring the girl to his feet. When this is done,
he loses all interest in her. He makes a fool of Grushnitsky,
and when the young man provokes him to a duel, he kills him.
This was the hero of the time, and it must be owned that it
was not a caricature. In a society free from care about the
means of living it was of course in serfdom times, under
Nicholas I. when there was no sort of political life in the
country, a man of superior ability very often found no issue
for his forces but in such adventures as Petchorin's.
It need not be said that the novel is admirably written
that it is full of living descriptions of Caucasus "society";
that the characters are splendidly delineated, and that some
of them, like the old Captain Maxim Maximytch, have re-
mained living types of some of the best specimens of mankind.
Through these qualities The Hero of our own Time, like
Evgheniy Onyeghin, became a model for quite a series of
subsequent novels.
6o RUSSIAN LITERATURE
other poets and novelists of the same epoch
kryl6ff
The fable-writer Kryl6ff (1768-1844) is perhaps the
Russian writer who is best known abroad. English readers
know him through the excellent work and translations of so

great a connoisseur of Russian literature and language as
Ralston was, and little can be added to what Ralston has said
of this eminently original writer.
He stands on the boundary between two centuries, and
reflects both the end of the one and the beginning of the other.
Up to 1807 he wrote comedies which, even more than the

other comedies of the time, were mere imitations from the
French. It was only in 1 807-1 809 that he found his true voca-
tion and began writing fables, in which domain he attained
the first rank, not only in Russia, but among the fable-writers
in all modern literatures. Many of his fables at any rate,
the best known ones are translations from Lafontaine; and
yet they are entirely original productions. Lafontaine's ani-
mals are academically educated French gentlemen; even the
peasants in his fables come from Versailles. There is nothing
of the sort in Kryloff. Every animal in his fables is a charac-
ter wonderfully true to life. Nay, even the cadence of his
verses changes and takes a special aspect each time a new ani-
mal is introduced that heavy simpleton, the Bear, or the
fine and cunning Fox, or the versatile Monkey. Kryloff knew
every one of them intimately; he knew each of their move-

ments, and above all he had noticed and enjoyed long since
in his own self the humorous side of every one of the
dwellers of the forests or the companions of Man, before
he undertook to put them in his fables. This is why Kryloff
may be taken as the greatest fable-writer not only of Russia
where he had a not to be neglected rival in Dmitreff
(1760-1837) but also of all nations of modern times.
True, there is no depth, no profound and cutting irony, in
Kryloff's Nothing but a good-natured, easy-going

fables.
irony, which made the very essence of his heavy frame, his
lazy habits, and his quiet contemplation. But, is this not the
true domain of fable, which must not be confounded with
satire?
L^RMONTOFF 6i
At the same time there is no writer who has better pos-
sessed and better understood the true essence of the really
popular Russian language, the language spoken by the men
and women of the people. At a time when the Russian lit-
terateurs hesitated between the elegant, Europeanised style of
Karamzin, and the clumsy, half-Slavonic style of the nation-
alists of the old school, Kryloff, even in his very first fables,
written in 1807, had already worked out a style which at
once gave him a quite unique position in Russian literature,
and which has not been surpassed even by such masters of the
popular Russian language as was Ostrovskiy and some of the
folk-novelists of a later epoch. For terseness, expressive-
ness and strict adherence to the true spirit of the popularly-
spoken Russian, Kryloff has no rivals.
THE MINOR POETS

Several minor poets, contemporary of Pushkin and Ler-
montoff, and some of them their personal friends, must be
mentioned in this place. The influence of Pushkin was so
great that he could not but call to life a school of writers who
should try to follow in his steps. None of them reached such
a height as to claim to be considered a world poet; but each
of them has made his contribution in one way or another to
the development of Russian poetry, each one has had his
humanising and elevating influence.
KozLOFF (1779-1840) has reflected in his poetry the ex-
tremely sad character of his life. At the age of about forty he
was stricken with paralysis, losing the use of his legs, and
soon after that his sight; but his poetical gift remained with
him, and he dictated to his daughter some of the saddest
elegies which Russian literature possesses, as also a great
number of our most perfect translations. His Monk made
everyone in Russia shed tears, and Pushkin hastened to ac-
knowledge the strength of the poem. Endowed with the
most wonderful memory he knew by heart all Byron, all
the poems of Walter Scott, all Racine, Tasso, and Dante,
Kozloff, like Zhukovskiy, with whom he had much in com-
mon, made a great number of translations from various
languages, especially from the English idealists, and some of
his translationsfrom the Polish, such as The Crimean Son-
nets of Mickiewicz, are real works of art.
D^LWIG ( 1 798-1 831) was a great personal friend of
Pushkin, whose comrade he was at the Lyceum. He repre-
sented in Russian literature the tendency towards reviving
ancient Greek forms of poetry, but happily enough he tried
at the same time to write in the style of the Russian popular
songs, and the lyrics which he wrote in this manner especially
contributed to make of him a favourite poet of his own time.
Some of his romances have remained popular till now.
Barat^nskiy ( 1 800-1 844) was another poet of the same
group of friends. Under the influence of the wild nature of
Finland, where he spent several years in exile, he became a
romantic poet, full of the love of nature, and also of melan-
choly, and deeply interested in philosophical questions, to
which he could find no reply. He thus lacked a definite con-
ception of life, but what he wrote was clothed in a beautiful
form, and in very expressive, elegant verses.
Yazykoff ( 1 803-1 846) belongs to the same circle. He
was intimate with Pushkin, who much admired his verses. It
must be said, however, that the poetry of Yazykoff had
chiefly an historical influence in the sense of perfecting the
forms of poetical expression. Unfortunately, he had to
struggle against almost continual illness, and he died just
when he had reached the full development of his talent.
Venevitinoff (1805-1822) died at a still younger age;
but there is no exaggeration in saying that he promised to
become a great poet, endowed with the same depth of
philosophical conception as was Goethe, and capable of
attaining the same beauty of form. The few verses he wrote
during the last year of his life revealed the suddenly attained
maturity of a great poetical talent, and may be compared
with the verses of the greatest poets.
Prince Alexander Od6evskiy (i 803-1839) and
PolezhAeff ( 1 806-1 838) are two other poets who died
very young, and whose lives were entirely broken by political
persecution. Odoevskiy was a friend of the Decembrists.

After the 14th of December, 1825, he was arrested, taken to
the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and then sentenced to
hard labour in Siberia, whence he was not released till twelve
L^RMONTOFF 63
years later, to be sent as a soldier to the Caucasus.
There he
became the friend of Lermontoff, one of whose best elegies
was written on Odoevskiy's death. The verses of Odoevskiy
but
(they were not printed abroad while he lived) lack finish,
he was a real poet and a patriot too, as is seen from his
Dream of a Poet, and his historical poem, Vasilko.
The fate of Polezhaeff was even more tragic. He was
only twenty years old a brilliant student of the Moscow
University when he wrote an autobiographical poem,
Sdshka, full of allusions to the evils of autocracy and of
appeals for freedom. This poem was shown to Nicholas I.,

who ordered the young poet to be sent as a soldier to an army
regiment. The duration of service was then twenty-five years,
and Polezhaeff saw not the slightest chance of release. More
than that: for an unauthorised absence from his regiment
(he had gone to Moscow with the intention of presenting a
petition of release to the Tsar) he was condemned to receive
one thousand strokes with the sticks, and only by mere luck
escaped the punishment. He never succumbed to his fate, and
in the horrible barracks of those times he remained what he
was: a pupil of Byron, Lamartine, and Macpherson, never
broken, protesting against tyranny in verses that were written
in tears and blood. When he was dying from consumption in
a military hospital at Moscow Nicholas I. pardoned him:
his promotion to the grade of officer came when he was dead.
A similar fate befell the Little Russian poet Shevchenko
(1814-1861), who, for some of his poetry, was sent in
1847 ô ^ battalion as a common soldier. His epical poems
from the life of the free Cossacks in olden times, heart rend-
ing poems from the life of the serfs, and lyrics, all written in
Little Russian and thoroughly popular in both form and con-
tent, belong to the fine specimens of poetry of all nations.
Of prose writers of the same epoch only a few can be men-
tioned in this book, and these in a few lines. Alexander
Bestuzheff ( 1 797-1 837), who wrote under the nont de
"
plume of Marlinskiy one of the Decembrists," exiled
to Siberia, and later on sent to the Caucasus as a soldier was
the author of very widely-read novels. Like Pushkin and Ler-
montoff he was under the influence of Byron, and described
" "
titanic passions in Byron's style, as also striking adven-
turcs in the style of the French novelists of the Romantic
school; but he deserves at the same time to be regarded as the
first to write novels from Russian life in which matters of
social interest were discussed.
Other favourite novelists of the same epoch were:
Zagoskin (1789-1852), the author of extremely popular
historical novels, Yuriy Alilosldvskiy, Roslavleff, etc., all
written a sentimentally patriotic style; Naryezhnyi
in
( 1
780- 825), who is considered by some Russian critics as a
1
forerunner of Gogol, because he wrote already in the realistic

style, describing, like Gogol, the dark sides of Russian life;
and Lazhechnikoff ( 1 792-1 868), the author of a number
of very popular historical novels from Russian life.
PART III
Gdgol
CHAPTER III
GOGOL
LITTLE RUSSIA Nights on a Farm near Dikonka, and Mir-

gorod Village and humour How Ivan Ivdnovitch quar-
life
relled with Ivan Nikiforytch Historical novel, Taras Bulba
The Cloak Drama, The Inspector-General Its influence
Dead Souls: main types Realism in the Russian novel.
"^ ^
TITH Gogol begins a new period of Russian litera-
%/% / ture, which called by Russian literary critics " the
is
T Gogol period," and which lasts to the present date.

Gogol was not a Great Russian. He was bom In 1809, in
a Little Russian or Ukrainian nobleman's family. His father
had already displayed some literary talent and wrote a few
comedies In Little Russian, but Gogol lost him at an early
age. The boy was educated In a small provincial town, which
he left, however, while still young, and when he was only
nineteen he was already at St. Petersburg. At that time the
dream of his life was to become an actor, but the manager
of the St. Petersburg Imperial theatres did not accept him,
and Gogol had to look for another sphere of actl-vlty. The
Civil Service, In which he obtained the position of a subordi-
nate clerk, was evidently Insufficient to Interest him, and he
soon entered upon his literary career.
His debut was in 1829, with little novels taken from the
village-life of Little Russia. Nights on a Farm near Di-
kdnka, soon followed by another series of stories entitled Mir-
gorod, Immediately won for him literary fame and Introduced
him Into the circle of Zhukovskly and Pushkin. The two poets
at once recognised Gogol's genius, and received him with
open arms.
Little Russia differs considerably from the central parts
of the empire, i. e., from the country round Moscow, which
is known as Great Russia. It has a more southern
position,
67
'68 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
and everytliing southern has always a certain attraction
for northerner. The villages in Little Russia are not dis-
posed in streets as they are in Great Russia, but the white-
washed houses are scattered, as in Western Europe, in
separate little farms, each of which is surrounded by charm-
ing little gardens. The more genial climate, the warm nights,
the musical language, the beauty of the race, which probably
contains a mixture of South Slavonian with Turkish and
Polish blood, the picturesque dress and the lyrical songs all
these render Little Russia especially attractive for the Great
Russian. Besides, life in Little-Russian villages is more poeti-
cal than it is in the villages of Great Russia. There is more
freedom in the relations between the young men and the
young girls, who freely meet before marriage; the stamp of
seclusion of the women which has been impressed by Byzan-
tine habits upon Moscow does not exist in Little Russia,
where the influence of Poland was prevalent. Little Russians
have also maintained numerous traditions and epic poems and
songs from the times when they were free Cossacks and used
to fight against the Poles in the north and the Turks in the
south. Having had to defend the Greek orthodox religion
against these two nations, they strictly adhere now to the
Russian Church, and one does not find in their villages the
same passion for scholastic discussions about the letter of
the Holy Books which is often met with in Great Russia
among the Non-conformists. Their religion has altogether
a morepoetical aspect.
The
Little-Russian language is certainly more melodious
than the Grtat Russian, and there is now a movement of some
importance for its literary development; but this evolution
has yet to be accomplished, and Gogol very wisely wrote in
Great Russian that is, in the language of Zhukovskiy,
Pushkin, and Lermontoff. We have thus in Gogol a sort of
union between the two nationalities.
It would be impossible to give here an idea of the humour
and wit contained in Gogol's novels from Little Russian life,
without quoting whole pages. It is the good-hearted laughter
of a young man who himself enjoys the fulness of life and
himself laughs at the comical positions into which he has put
his heroes: a village chanter, a wealthy peasant, a rural
g(5gol 69
matron, or a village smith. He is full of happiness; no dark
apprehension comes to disturb his joy of life. However, those
whom he depicts are not rendered comical in obedience to the
poet's whim Gogol always remains scrupulously true to real-
:
ity. Every peasant, every chanter, is taken from real life,

and the truthfulness of Gogol to reality is almost ethnographi-
cal, without ever ceasing to be poetical. All the superstitions
of a village life on a Christmas Eve or during a midsummer
night, when the mischievous spirits and goblins get free till
the cock crows, are brought before the reader, and at the
same time we have all the wittiness which is inborn in the
Little Russian. It was only later on that Gogol's comical vein
"
became what can be truly described as humour," that is, a
sort of contrast between comical surroundings and a sad sub-
stratum of life, which made Pushkin say of Gogol's produc-
"
tions that behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears."
Not all the Little-Russian tales of Gogol are taken from
peasant life. Some deal also with the upper class of the small
towns; and one of them. How Ivan Ivdnovitch quarrelled
with Ivan Nikiforytch, is one of the most humorous tales in
existence. Ivan Ivanovitch and Ivan Nikiforytch were two
neighbours who lived on excellent terms with each other but;
the inevitableness of their quarrelling some day appears from

the very first lines of the novel. Ivan Ivanovitch was a person
of fine behaviour. He would never offer snuflf to an acquaint-
"
ance without saying: May I dare. Sir, to ask you to be so
kind as to oblige yourself." He was a man of the most ac-
curate habits; and when he had eaten a melon he used to wrap
"
its seeds in a bit of paper, and to inscribe upon it : This
melon was eaten on such a date," and if there had been a
"
friend at his table he would add: In the presence of Mr.
So and So." At the same time he was, after all, a miser, who
appreciated very highly the comforts of his own life, but did
not care to share them with others. His neighbour, Ivan
Nikiforytch, was quite the opposite. He was very stout and
heavy, and fond of swearing. On a hot summer day he would
take off all his clothes and sit in his garden, in the sunshine,
warming his back. When he offered snuff to anyone, he would
Oblige yourself." He
*'
simply produce his snuff box saying:
knew none of the refinements of his neighbour, and loudly
expressed what he meant. It was inevitable that two men, so
different, whose yards were only separated by a low fence,
should one day come to a quarrel; and so it happened.
One day the stout and rough Ivan Nikiforytch, seeing that
his friend owned an old useless musket, was seized with the
desire to possess the weapon. He had not the slightest need of
it, but all the more he longed to have it, and this craving led
to a feud which lasted for years. Ivan Ivanovitch remarked
very reasonably to his neighbour that he had no need of a
rifle. Theneighbour, stung by this remark, replied that this
was precisely the thing he needed,and offered, if Ivan Ivano-
vitch was not disposed to accept money for his musket, to
give him in exchange a pig. . .This was understood by
.
"
Ivan Ivanovitch as a terrible offence How could a musket,
:
which is the symbol of hunting, of nobility, be exchanged by

"
a gentleman for a pig! Hard words followed, and the
offended neighbour called Ivan Ivanovitch a gander
A mortal feud, full of the most comical incidents, resulted
from these rash words. Their friends did everything to
re-establish peace, and one day their efforts seemed to be
crowned with success; the two enemies had been brought
together both pushed from behind by their friends; Ivan
Ivanovitch had already put his hand into his pocket to take
out his snuff-box and to offer it to his enemy, when the latter
made the unfortunate remark: "There was nothing par-
ticular in being called a gander; no need to be offended by
that." .... All the efforts of the friends were brought to
nought by these unfortunate words. The feud was renewed
with even greater acrimony than before; and, tragedy always
following in the steps of comedy, the two enemies, by taking
the affair from one Court to another, arrived at old age
totally ruined.
tArAs b6lBA THE CLOAK
The pearl of Gogol's Little-Russian novels is an historical
novel, Tards Bulba, which recalls to life one of the most in-
teresting periods in the history of Little Russia the fifteenth
century. Constantinople had fallen into the hands of the
Turks; and although a mighty Polish-Lithuanian State had
grown in the West, the Turks, nevertheless, menaced both
G(3G0L 71
Eastern and Middle Europe. Then it was that the Little
Russians rose for the defence of Russia and Europe. They
lived in free communities of Cossacks, over whom the Poles
were beginning to establish feudal power. In times of peace
these Cossacks carried on agriculture in the prairies, and fish-
ing in the beautiful rivers of Southwest Russia, reaching at
times the Black Sea; but every one of them was armed, and
the whole country was divided into regiments. As soon as
there was a military alarm they all rose to meet an invasion
of the Turks or a raid of the Tartars, returning to their
fields and fisheries as soon as the war was over.
The whole nation was thus ready to resist the invasions
of the Mussulmans; but a special vanguard was kept in the
"
lower course of the Dnieper, beyond the rapids," on an
island which soon became famous under the name of the
Secha. Men of all conditions, including runaways from their
landlords, outlaws, and adventurers of all sorts, could come
and settle in the Secha without being asked any questions but
whether they went to church. "Well, then, make the sign
"
of the cross," the hetman of the Secha said, and join the
division you like." The Secha consisted of about sixty divi-
sions, which were very similar to independent republics, or
rather to schools of boys, who cared for nothing and lived in
common. None of them had anything of his own, excepting
his arms. No women were admitted, and absolute democ-
racy prevailed.
The hero of the novel is an old Cossack, Taras Bulba, who
has himself spent many years in Secha, but is now peace-
fully settled inland on his farm. His two sons have been
educated at the Academy of Kieff and return home after
several years of absence. Their first meeting with their father
is very characteristic. As the father laughs at the sons' long
clothes, which do not suit a Cossack, the elder son, Ostap,

challenges him to a good boxing fight. The father is de-
lighted, and they fight until the old man, quite out of breath,
*'
exclaims :
By God, this is a good fighter; no need to test him
further; he will be a good Cossack! Now, son, be wel-
come; let us kiss each other." On the very next day after their
arrival, without letting the mother enjoy the sight of her
sons, Taras takes them to the Secha, which as often hap-
pened those times
in was quickly drawn into war, in conse-
quence of the exactions which the Polish landlords made upon
the Little Russians.
"
The life of the free Cossacks in the republic beyond the
"
rapids and their ways of conducting war are wonderfully
described; but, paying a tribute to the then current romanti-
cism, Gogol makes Taras' younger son, a sentimentalist, fall
in love with a noble Polish lady, during the seige of a Polish
town, and go over to the enemy; while the father and the
elder son continue fighting the Poles. The war lasts for a
year or so, with varying success, till at length, in one of the
desperate sorties of the besieged Poles, the younger son of
Taras is taken prisoner, and the father himself kills him for
his treason. The
elder son is next taken prisoner by the Poles
and carried away to Warsaw, where he perishes on the rack;
while Taras, returning to Little Russia, raises a formidable
army and makes one of those invasions into Poland with
which the history of the two countries was filled for two cen-
turies. Taken prisoner himself, Taras perishes at the stake,
with a disregard of life and suffering which were character-
istic of this strong, fighting race of men. Such is, in brief, the
theme of this novel, which is replete with admirable separate
scenes.
Read of modern requirements, Taras Bulba
in the light
certainly would not The influence of the Romantic

satisfy us.
school is too strongly felt. The younger son of Taras is not
a living being, and the Polish lady is entirely invented in
order to answer the requirements of a novel, showing that
Gogol never knew a single woman of that type. But the old
Cossack and his son, as well as all the life of the Cossack
camps, is quite real; it produces the illusion of real life. The
reader is carried away in
sympathy with old Taras, while the
ethnographer cannot but feel that he has before him a
wonderful combination of an ethnographical document of
the highest value, with a poetical reproduction only the
more real because it is poetical of a bygone and most
interesting epoch.
The Little-Russian novels were followed by a few novels

waken from the life of Great Russia, chiefly of St. Petersburg,
g6G0L 73
and two of them, The Memoirs of a Madman and The Cloak
(Shinel) deserve a special mention.The psychology of the
madman is
strikingly drawn. As to The Cloak, it is in this
" "
novel that Gogol's laughter which conceals unseen tears
shows at its best. The poor life of a small functionary, who
discovers with a sense of horror that his old cloak is so worn
out as to be unfit to stand further repairs; his hesitation
before he ventures to speak to a tailor about a new one; his
nervous excitement on the day that it is ready and that he tries
it on for the first time; and finally his despair, amidst general
indifference, when night-robbers have robbed him of his cloak

every line of this work bears the stamp of one of the great-
est artists. Sufficient to say that this novel produced at its
appearance, and produces still, such an impression, that since
the times of Gogol every Russian novel-writer has been aptly
said to have re-written The Cloak.
THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL
Gogol's prose-comedy. The Inspector-General (Revizor) ^
has become, in its turn, a starting point for the Russian

drama a model which every dramatic writer after Gogol
"
has always kept before his eyes. Revizor," in Russian,
means some important functionary who has been sent by
the ministry to some provincial town to inquire into the con-
ditions of the local administration an Inspector-General;
and the comedy takes place in a small town, from which
"
you may gallop for three years and yet arrive nowhere."
The little spot we learn it at the rising of the curtain
is going to be visited by an Inspector-General. The local
head of the Police (in those times the head of the Police
was also the head of the town) the Gorodni'chiy or Gover-
nor has convoked the chief functionaries of the place to
communicate to them an important news. He has had a
bad dream; two rats came in, sniffed and then went away;
there mUvSt be something in that dream, and so there is; he
has just got this morning a letter from a friend at St. Peters-
burg, announcing that an inspector-general is coming, and
what is still worse is coming incognito! Now, the honour-
able Governor advises the functionaries to put some order in
their respective offices. The patients in the hospital walk
about in linen so dirty that you might take them for chimney
sweeps. The chief magistrate, who is a passionate lover
of
sport, has his hunting apparel hanging about in the Court,
and his attendants have made a poultry-yard of the entrance
hall. In short, everything has to be put in order. The Gover-
nor feels very uncomfortable. Up to the present day he has
freely levied tribute upon the merchants, pocketed the money
destined for building a church, and within a fortnight he
has flogged the wife of a non-commissioned officer, which he
had no right to do; and now, there's the Inspector-General
" "
coming! He asks the postmaster just to open a little the
letters which may be addressed from this town to St. Peters-
burg and, if he finds in them some reports about town matters,
to keep them. The postmaster a great student of human
character has always indulged, even without getting this
advice, in the interesting pastime of reading the letters, and
he falls in with the Governor's proposal.
At that very moment enter Petr Ivanych Dobchinsky and
Petr Ivanych Bobchinsky. Everyone knows them, you
know them very well: they play the part of the town
Gazette. They go about the town all day long, and as soon as
they have learnt something interesting they both hurry to
spread the news, interrupting each other in telling it, and
hurrying immediately to some other place to be the first to
communicate the news to someone else. They have been at
the only inn of the town, and there they saw a very suspicious
person: a young man, "who has something, you know,
extraordinary about his face." He is living there for a fort-
night, never paying a penny, and does not journey any
"
further. What is his object in staying so long in town like
"
ours ? And then, when they were taking theirlunch he passed
them by and looked so inquisitively in their plates who may
he be? Evidently, the Governor and all present conclude, he
must be the Inspector-General who stays there incog-
nito. ... A general confusion results from the suspicion.
The Governor starts immediately for the inn, to make the
necessary enquiries. The womenfolk are in a tremendous
excitement.
The stranger is
simply a young man who is travelling to
G(5gOL 75
rejoin his father. On some post-station
he met with a certain
captain a great master at cards and lost all he had in
his pocket. Now he cannot proceed any farther, and he
cannot pay the landlord, who refuses to credit him with any
more meals. The young man feels awfully hungry no won-
der he looked so inquisitively into the plates of the two
gentlemen and resorts to all sorts of tricks to induce the
landlord to send him something for his dinner. Just as he is
finishing some fossil-like cutlet enters the Gorodnichiy; and
a most comic scene follows, the young man thinking that
the Governor came to arrest him, and the Governor think-
ing that he is speaking to the Inspector-General who is trying
to conceal his identity. The Governor offers to remove the
"
young man to some more comfortable place. No, thank
you, have no intent to go to a jail," sharply retorts the
I
young man. . But it is to his own house that the Gov-

. .
ernor takes the supposed Inspector, and now an easy life

begins for the adventurer. All the functionaries appear in
turn to introduce themselves, and everyone is only too happy
to give him a bribe of a hundred roubles or so. The mer-
chants come to ask his protection from the Governor; the
widow who was flogged comes to lodge a complaint. . . .
In the meantime the young man enters into a flirtation with

both the wife and the daughter of the Governor; and, finally,
being caught at a very pathetic moment when he is kneeling
at the feet of the daughter, without further thought he
makes a proposition of marriage. But, having gone so far,
the young man, well-provided now with money, hastens to
leave the town on the pretext of going to see an uncle; he
will be back in a couple of days. . . .
The delight of the Governor can easily be imagined. His

Excellency, the Inspector-General, going to marry the Gov-
ernor's daughter He and his wife are already
1
making all
sorts of plans. They will remove to St. the
Petersburg,
Gorodnichiy will soon be a general, and you will see how
he will keep the other Gorodnichies at his door! . . . The
happy news spreads about the town, and all the functionaries
and the society of the town hasten to offer their congratula-
tions to the old man. There is a great
gathering at his
house when the postmaster comes in. He has followed the
advice of the Governor, and has opened a letter which the
supposed Inspector-General had addressed to somebody at
St. Petersburg. He now brings this letter. The young man
isno inspector at all, and here is what he writes to a Bo-
hemian friend of his about his adventures in the provincial
town :*
In short, the letter produces a great sensation. The friends
There is a good English translation of The Inspector-General,

from which, with slight revision, I take the following passage.
"
The Postmaster (reads) : I hasten to inform you, my dear friend,
of the wonderful things which have happened to me. On my way
hither an infantry captain had cleared me out completely, so that
the innkeeper here intended to send me to jail, when, all of a sudden,
thanks to my St. Petersburg appearance and costume, all the town
took me for a Governor-General. Now
I am staying at the Gorod-
nichiy's! I have a splendid time, and flirt awfully with both his wife
and his daughter. . . . Do you remember how hard up we were,
taking our meals where we could get them, without paying for them,
and how one day, in a tea-shop, the pastry-cook collared me for hav-
ing eaten his pastry to the account of the king of England?! It
is quite different now. They all lend me money, as much as I care
for. They are an awful set of originals: you would split of laughter.
I know you write sometimes for the papers put them into your
literature. To begin with, the Governor is as stupid as an old
horse. . . ."
The Governor {interrupting): That cannot be there! There is
no such thing in the letter.

Postmaster {showing the letter) : Read it, then, yourself.
Governor {reads): "As an old horse" . , . Impossible! You
must have added that.
Postmaster: How could I?
The Guests: Read! read!
The Postmaster {continues to read) : " The Governor is as stupid
as an old horse "...
Governor: The deuce! Now he must repeat it as if it were not
standing there already!
Postmaster {continues reading): Hm, Hm, yes! "an old horse.
The postmaster is also a good man." . , . Well, he also makes
an improper remark about me. . ,^ .
Governor: Read it then.
Postmaster : Is it necessary? %l^
tThis wa* in those times an expression which
mt^ "without paying."
g6GOL 77
of the Governor are delighted to see him and his family in
such straits, all accuse each other, and finally fall upon the
two gentlemen, when a police soldier enters the room and
"
announces in a loud voice A functionary from St. Peters-
:
burg, with Imperial orders, wants to see you all immediately.

He stays at the hotel." Thereupon the curtain drops over a
living picture of which Gogol himself had made a most strik-
ing sketch in pencil, and which is usually reproduced in his
works; it shows how admirably well, with what a fine artistic
sense, he represented to himself his characters.
The Inspector-General marks a new era in the develop-
ment of dramatic art in Russia. All the comedies and dramas
which were being played in Russia at that time (with the
exception, of course, of Misfortune from Intelligence, which,
however, was not allowed to appear on the stage) hardly
deserved the name of dramatic literature: so imperfect and
puerile they were. The Inspector-General, on the contrary,
would have marked at the time of its appearance ( 1835) ^^
Governor: The deuce! once we have begun to read it, we must

read it all through.
Artemy Filipovitch {head of the philanthropic institutions) Per- :
"
mit me, please, I shall read {puts on his spectacles and reads) The :
postmaster is quite like the old porter in our office, and the rascal
must drink equally hard." . . .
Postmaster: A naughty boy, who ought to be flogged that's all!

Jrt. Fil. {tontinues reading): "The head of the philanthropic
in in ...
Korobkin: Why do you stop now?
Art. Fil. Bad writing. But, after all, it is quite evident that he is a
scoundrel.
Korobkin: Give me
the letter, please. I think, I have better eyes
{tries to take the letter).
Art. Fil. {does not give it) : No
use at all. This passage can be
omitted. Further on everjthing is quite readable.
Korobkin : Let me have it. I shall see all about it.
Art. Fil: I also can read it. I tell you that after that passage every-
thing is readable.
Postm. : No, no, read it all. Everything was read so far.
The Guests: Artemy Filipovitch, pass the letter over. (To Ko-
robkin) Read it, read it!
Art. Fil.: All right, all right. {He passes the letter.) There it
epoch in any language. Its stage qualities, which will be
appreciated by every good actor; its sound and hearty

humour; the natural character of the comical scenes, which
result from the very characters of those who appear in this
comedy; the sense of measure which pervades it all these
make it one of the best comedies in existence. If the condi-
tions of life which are depicted here were not so exclusively
Russian, and did not so exclusively belong to a bygone stage
of life which is unknown outside Russia, it would have
been generally recognised as a real pearl of the world's litera-
ture. This is why, when it was played a few years ago in
Germany, by actors who properly understood Russian life,
itachieved such a tremendous success.
The Inspector-General provoked such a storm of hostile
criticism on the part of all reactionary Russia, that it was
hopeless to expect that the comedy which Gogol began next,
concerning the life of the St. Petersburg functionaries {The
Vladimir Cross), could ever be admitted on the stage, and
is; but wait a moment {he covers a part of it with his finger). Be-
gin here (all surround him).

Postma.: Go on. Nonsense, read it all.
"
Korobkin {reads) The head of the philanthropic institutions
:
"
resembles a pig that wears a cap . . . .
Art. Fil. {to the audience)'. Not witty at all! pig that wears A
a cap! Have you
ever seen a pig wearing a cap?
Korobkin {continues reading): "The inspector of the schools
"
smells of onions all through !
The Inspector {to the audience) : Upon my honour, I never touch

onions.
The Judge {apart) Thank God, there is nothing about me.
:
" "
Korobkin {reading) : The judge . . . .
The Judge: There! . {aloud) Well, gentlemen, I think

. . :
the letter is much too long, and quite uninteresting why the deuce
should we go on reading that nonsense?
Insp. of Schools: No! no!
Postm.: No! go on!
Art. Fil. :
No, it must be read.
"
Korobkin: {continues) The judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin is extremely
:
mauvais ton." (Stops.) That must be a French word?

"
The Judge: The deuce knows what it means. If it were only a
robber," then it would be all right, but it may be something worse.
G(5gOL 79
Gogol never finished it, only publishing a few striking scenes
from it: The Morning of a Busy Man, The Law Suit, etc.
Another comedy, Marriage, in which he represented the
hesitation and terror through which an inveterate bachelor
goes before a marriage, which he finally eludes by jumping
out of a window a few moments before the beginning of the
ceremony, has not lost its interest even now. It is so full of
comical situations, which fine actors cannot but highly appre-
ciate, that it is still a part of the current repertoire of the
Russian stage.
DEAD SOULS
Gogol's main work was Dead Souls. This is a novel almost
without a plot, or rather with a plot of the utmost simplicity.
Like the plot of The Inspector-General, it was suggested
to Gogol by Pushkin. In those times, when serfdom was
flourishing in Russia, the ambition of every nobleman was
to become the owner of at least a couple of hundred serfs.
The serfs used to be sold like slaves and could be bought
separately. A
needy nobleman, Tchitchikoff, conceives accord-
ingly a very clever plan. A
census of the population being
made only every ten or twenty years, and every serf-owner
having in the interval to pay taxes for every male soul which
he owned at the time of the last census, even though part of
" "
his souls be dead since, Tchitchikoff conceives the idea
of taking advantage of this anomaly. He will buy the dead
souls at a very small expense: the landlords will be only
too pleased to get rid of this burden and surely will sell them
for anything; and after Tchitchikoff has bought two or three
hundred of these imaginary serfs, he will buy cheap land
somewhere in the southern prairies, transfer the dead souls,
on paper, to that land, register them as if they were really
settled there, and mortgage that new sort of estate to the
State Landlords' Bank. In this way he can easily make the
beginnings of a fortune. With this plan Tchitchikoff comes
to a provincial town and begins his operations. He makes,
first of all, the
necessary visits.
"
The newcomer made visits to all the functionaries of the town.
He went to testify his respects to the Governor, who like Tchitchikoff
himself, stout nor thin. He was decorated with a cross
was neither
and was spoken of as a person who would soon get a star; but was,
after all, a very good fellow and was fond of making embroideries
upon fine muslin. Tchitchikoff's next visits were to the Vice-Gov-
emor, to the Chief Magistrate, to the Chief of Police, the Head
of the Crown Factories . . . but it is so difficult to remember
all the powerful persons in this world . . . sufficient to say that
the newcomer showed a wonderful activity as regards visits. He
even went to testify his respects to the Sanitary Inspector, and to
the Town Surveyor, and after that he sat for a long time in his
carriage trying to remember to whom else he might pay a visit;
but he could think of no more functionaries in the town. In his
conversations with all these influential persons he managed to say
something to flatter every one of them. In talking with the Governor

he accidentally dropped the remark that when one enters this province
one thinks of paradise all the roads being quite like velvet; and
*
that governments which nominate wise functionaries surely de-
serve universal gratitude.' To the Chief of the Police he said some-
thing very gratifying about the police force, and while he was talk-
ing to the Vict-Governor and to the presiding magistrate, who were
only State-Coimcillors, he twice made the mistake of calling them
*
Your Excellency,' with which mistake they were both immensely
pleased. The result of all this was that the Governor asked Tchitchi-
koff to come that same day to an evening party, and the other func-
tionaries invited him, some to dine with them, others to a cup of tea,
and others again to a party of whist.
"
About himself Tchitchikoff avoided talking, and if he spoke at
all it was in vague sentences only, with a remarkable modesty, his
conversation taking in such cases a rather bookish turn. He said
that he was a mere nobody in this world and did not wish people to
take any particular interest in him that he had had varied experiences
;
in his life, suffered in the service of the State for the sake of truth,
had had many enemies, some of whom had even attempted his life,
but that now, wishing to lead a quiet existence, he intended to find
at last some corner to live in, and, having come to this town, he con-
sidered it his imperative duty to testify his respect to the chief func-
tionaries of the place. This was all they could learn in town about
the new person who soon made his appearance at the Governor's
evening party.
"
Here, the newcomer once more produced the most favourable
impression. . . He always found out what he ought to do on
.
every occasion; and he proved himself an experienced man of the

world. Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew
how to support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about
g6gol 8 I
horses; if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also
Tchitchikoff would make remarks to the point. If the conversation

related to some inquest which was being made by the Government,
he would show that he also knew something about the tricks of the
Civil Service functionaries. When the talk was about billiards, he
showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if people talked
about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with tears in his eyes;
and if the conversation turned on making brandy, he knew all about
brandy; as to Custom officers, he knew everything about them, as
though he had himself been a Custom officer, or a detective; but the
most remarkable thing was that he knew how to cover all this with
a certain sense of propriety, and in every circumstance knew how to
behave. He never spoke too loudly, and never in too subdued a tone,
but exactly as one ought to speak. In short, take him from any side
you like, he was a very respectable man. All the functionaries were
delighted with the arrival of such a person in their town."
It has often been said that Gogol's Tchitchikofi is a truly

Russian type. But is it so? Has not every one of us met
Tchitchikoff ? middle-aged; not too thick and not too thin;

moving about with the lightness almost of a military man.
. . The subject he wishes to speak to you about may offer
.
many difficulties, but he knows how to approach It and to

interest you In it In a thousand different ways. When he talks
to an old general he rises to the understanding of the great-
ness of the country and her military glory. He Is not a jingo
surely not but he has, just In the proper measure, the
love of war and victories which are required In a man who
wishes to be described as a patriot. When he meets with a
sentimental reformer, he is sentimental and desirous of
reforms, and so on, and he always will keep In view the
object he aims at at any given moment, and will try to Interest
you In It. Tchitchikoff may buy dead souls, or railway shares,
or he may collect funds for some charitable Institution, or
look for a position In a bank, but he Is an Immortal inter-
national type; we meet him everywhere; he is of all lands
and of all times; he but takes different forms to suit the
requirements of nationality and time.
One of the first landlords to whom Tchitchikoff spoke of
his Intention of buying dead souls was Maniloff also a
universal type, with the addition of those special features
which the quiet life of a serf-owner could add to such a
character. "A
very nice man to look at," as Gogol says;
his features possessed something very pleasant only it
*'
seemed as if too much sugar had been put into them. When
you meet him for the first time you cannot but exclaim after
'
the first few minutes of conversation What a nice and
:
pleasant man he is.' The next moment you say nothing, but
the next but one moment you say to yourself The deuce :
'
knows what he is,' and you go away; but if you don't, you
feel mortally bored." You could never hear from him a
lively or animated word. Everyone has some point of interest

and enthusiasm. Maniloff had nothing of the kind; he was
always in the same mild temper. He seemed to be lost in
reflection; but what about, no one knew. Sometimes, as he
looked from his window on his wide courtyard and the pond
"
behind, he would say to himself: How
nice it would be to
have there an underground passage leading from the man-
sion to the pond, and to have across the pond a stone bridge,
with pretty shops on both its sides, in which shops all sorts
of things useful for the poor people could be bought." His
eyes became in this case wonderfully soft, and his face took
on a most contented expression. However, even less strange
intentions remained mere intentions. In his house something
was always missing; his drawing room had excellent furni-
ture covered with fine silk stufi^, which probably had cost
much money; but for two of the chairs there was not sufficient
of the stuff, and so they remained covered with plain sack-
cloth; and for many years In succession the proprietor used
"
to stop his guests with these words :
Please, do not take that
"
chair; not yet ready."
it is His wife But they were
. . .
quite satisfied with each other. Although more than eight

years had passed since they had married, one of them would
still
occasionally bring to the other a piece of apple or a
tiny sweet, or a nut, saying in a touchingly sweet voice which
'
expressed infinite love Open, my dearest, your little mouth,
:
I will put into it this little sweet.' Evidently the mouth

was opened in a very charming way. For her husband's birth-
day the wife always prepared some surprise for instance,
an embroidered sheath for his tooth-pick, and very often,
sitting on the sofa, all of a sudden, no one knows for what
g6gol 83
reason, one of them would leave his pipe and the other her
work, and impress on each other such a sweet and long kiss
that during it one might easily smoke a little cigarette. In
short, they were what people call quite happy."
It is evident that of his estate and of the condition of his
peasants Maniloff never thought. He knew absolutely noth-

ing about such matters, and left everything in the hands of a
very sharp manager, under whose rule Maniloff's serfs were
worse off than under a brutal landlord. Thousands of
such Maniloffs peopled Russia some fifty years ago, and I
think that if we look closer round we shall find such would-be
" "
sentimental persons under every latitude.
It is easy to conceive what a gallery of portraits Gogol
was enabled to produce as he followed Tchitchikoff in his
wanderings from one landlord to another, while his hero tried
*' "
to buy as many dead souls as he could. Every one of the
landlords described in Dead Souls the sentimentalist Mani-
loff, the heavy and cunning Sobakevitch, the arch-liar and
cheat Nozdreff, the fossilised, antediluvian lady Koro-
botchka, the miser Plyushkin have become common names
in Russian conversation. Some of them, as for instance the
miser Plyushkin, are depicted with such a depth of psycho-
logical insight that one may ask one's self whether a better
and more humane portrait of a miser can be found in any
literature?
Tdwards the end of his life Gogol, who was" suffering "
from a nervous under the influence of pietists
disease, fell
especially of Madame O. A. Smirnoff (born Rossett) and ,
began to consider all his writings as a sin of his life. Twice,

in a paroxysm of religious self-accusation, he burned the
manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls, of which

only some parts have been preserved, and were circulated
in his lifetime in manuscript. The last ten years of his life
were extremely painful. He repented with reference to all
his writings, and published a very unwholesome book. Cor-
respondence with Friends, in which, under the mask of
Christian humility, he took a most arrogant position with
respect to all literature, his own writings included. He died
at Moscow in 1852.
hardly need be added that the Government of Nicholas
It
I. considered Gogol's writings extremely dangerous. The
author had the utmost difficulties in getting permission for
The Inspector-General to be played at all on the stage, and
the permission was only obtained by Zhukovskiy, at the
express will of the Tsar himself. Before the authorisation was
given to print the first volume of Dead Souls, Gogol had to
undergo most incredible trouble; and when the volume
was out of print a second edition was never permitted in
Nicholas I.'s reign. When Gogol died, and Turgueneff
published in a Moscow paper a short obituary notice, which
really contained absolutely nothing (" any tradesman might
have had a better one," as Turgueneff himself said), the
young novelist was arrested, and it was only because of the
influence of his friends in high position that the punishment
which Nicholas I. inflicted upon him was limited to exile
from Moscow and a forced residence on his estate in the
country. Were it not for these influences, Turgueneff very
probably would have been exiled, like Pushkin and Ler-
montoff, either to the Caucasus or to Siberia.
The police of Nicholas I. were not wrong when they
attributed to Gogol a great influence upon the minds of
Russians. His works circulated Immensely in manuscript
copies. In my childhood we used to copy the second volume
of Dead Souls the whole book from beginning to end, as
well as parts from the first volume. Everyone considered then
this work as a formidable indicment against serfdom; and
so it was. In this respect Gogol was the forerunner of the
literary movement against serfdom which began In Russia
with such force, a very few years later, during and especially
after the Crimean War. Gogol never expressed his personal
ideas about this subject, but the life-pictures of serf-owners
which he gave and their relations to their serfs^-especially
the waste of the labour of the serfs were a stronger
indictment that if Gogol had related facts of brutal
behaviour of landlords towards their men. In fact, it is im-
possible to read Dead Souls without being impressed by the
fact that serfdom was an institution which had produced its
own doom. Drinking, gluttony, waste of the serf's labour
in order to keep hundreds of retainers, or for things as useless
GOdOL 85
ts the sentimentalist Maniloff's bridges, were characteristic
of the landlords; and when Gogol wanted to represent one
landlord who, at least, obtained some pecuniary advantage
from the forced labour of his serfs and enriched himself, he
had to produce a landlord who was not a Russian: in fact,
among the Russian landlords such a man would have been
a most extraordinary occurrence.
As to the literary influence of Gogol, It was immense, and
it continues down to the present day. Gogol was not a deep
thinker, but he was a very great artist. His art was pure
realism, but it was imbued with the desire of making for
mankind something good and great. When he wrote the most
comical things, it was not merely for the pleasure of laugh-
ing at human weaknesses, but he also tried to awaken the
desire of something better and greater, and he always
achieved that aim. Art, in Gogol's conception, is a torch-
bearer which indicates a higher ideal; and it was certainly
this high conception of art which induced him to give such
an incredible amount of time to the working out of the
schemes of his works, and afterwards, to the most careful
elaboration of every line which he published.
The generation of the Decembrists surely would have
introduced social and political ideas in the novel. But that
generation had perished, and Gogol was now the first to
introduce the social element into Russian literature, so as to
give it its prominent and dominating position. While it
remains an open question whether realism in the Russian

novel does not date from Pushkin, rather even than from
Gogol this, in fact, is the view of both Turgueneff and
Tolstoy there is yet no doubt that it was Gogol's writings
which introduced into Russian literature the social element,
and social criticism based upon the analysis of the conditions
within Russia itself. The peasant novels of Grigorovitch,
Turgueneff's Sportsman's Notebook, and the first works of
Dostoyevskiy were a direct outcome of Gogol's initiative.
Realism in art was much discussed some time ago, in con-
nection chiefly with the first writings of Zola; but we,
Russians, who had had Gogol, and knew realism in its best
form, could not fall in with the views of the French realists.
We saw in Zola a tremendous amount of the same romanti-
cism which he combated; and In his realism, such as it
appeared in his writings of the first period, we saw a step
backwards from the realism of Balzac. For us, realism could
not be limited to a mere anatomy of society: it had to have
a higher background; the realistic description had to be made
subservient to an idealistic aim. Still less could we under-
stand realism as a description only of the lowest aspects of
life, because, to limit one's observations to the lowest aspects
only, is not to be a realist. Real life has beside and within

its lowest manifestations its highest ones as well. Degeneracy
is not the sole nor dominant feature of modern society, if
we look at it as a whole. Consequently, the artist who limits

his observations to the lowest and most degenerate aspects
only, and not for a special purpose, does not make us under-
stand that he explores only one small corner of life. Such
an artist does not conceive life as it is: he knows but one
aspect of it, and this is not the most interesting one.
Realism in France was certainly a necessary protest, partly
against unbridled Romanticism, but chiefly against the ele-
gant art which glided on the surface and refused to glance
at the oftenmost Inelegant motives of elegant acts the art
which purposely ignored the often horrible consequences of
the so-called correct and elegant life. For Russia, this protest
was not necessary. Since Gogol, art could not be limited to
any class of society. It was bound to embody them all, to
treat them all realistically, and to penetrate beneath the sur-
face of social relations. Therefore there was no need of the
exaggeration which in France was a necessary and sound
reaction. There was no need, moreover, to fall into extremes
in order to free art from dull morallsation. Our great realist,
Gogol, had already shown to his followers how realism can
be put to the service of higher aims, without losing anything
of its penetration or ceasing to be a true reproduction of
life.
PART IV
Turgueneff Tolstoy
CHAPTER IV
TURGUENEFF TOLST6y
TURGUENEFF: The main features of his Art A Sportsman's

Notebook Pessimism of his early novels His series of novels
representing the leading types of Russian society Rudin Lav-
retskiy Helen and Insaroff Bazaroff ^Why Fathers and Sons
was misunderstood Hamlet and Don Quixote Virgin ^H-
movement towards the people Verses in Prose. TOLSTOY:
Childhood and Boyhood During and after the Crimean War
Youth: In search of an ideal Small stories The Cossacks
Educational work War and Peace Anna Karenina
Religious crisis His interpretation of the Christian teaching
Main points of the Christian ethics Latest works of Art
Kreutzer Sonata Resurrection.
TURGU]&NEFF
.USHKIN, and Gogol were the real

Lermontoff,
P Western Europe
creators of Russian literature; but to
they remained nearly total strangers. It was only
Turgueneff and Tolstoy the two greatest novelists of
Russia, if not of their century altogether and, to some
extent, Dostoyevskiy, who broke down the barrier of lan-
guage which had kept Russian writers unknown to West
Europeans. They have made Russian literature familiar and
popular outside Russia they have exercised and still exercise
;
their share of influence upon West-European thought and

art; and owing to them, we may be sure that henceforward
the best productions of the Russian mind will be part of the
general intellectual belongings of civilised mankind.
For the artistic construction, the finish and the beauty of
his novels, Turgueneff was very probably the greatest novel-
writer of his century. However, the chief characteristic of
his poetical genius lay not only in that sense of the beautiful
09
which he possessed to so high a degree, but also in the
highly intellectual contents of his creations. His novels arc
not mere stories dealing at random with this or that type of
men, or with some particular current of life, or accident
happening to fall under the author's observation. They arc
intimately connected with each other, and they give the suc-
cession of the leading intellectual types of Russia which have
impressed their own stamp upon each successive generation.
The novels of Turgueneff, of which the first appeared in
1845, cover a period of more than thirty years, and during
these three decades Russian society underwent one of the
deepest and the most rapid modifications ever witnessed in
European history. The leading types of the educated classes
went through successive changes with a rapidity which was
only possible in a society suddenly awakening from a long
slumber, casting away an institution which hitherto had
permeated its whole existence (I mean serfdom), and rush-
ing towards a new life. And this succession of "history-
"
making types was represented by Turgueneff with a depth
of conception, a fulness of philosophical and humanitarian
understanding, and an artistic insight, almost equal to fore-
sight, which are found in none of the modern writers to the
same extent and in that happy combination.
Not that he would follow a preconceived plan. " All these
' ' '
discussions about tendency and 'unconsciousness in art,"
"
he wrote, are nothing but a debased coin of rhetorics. . . .
Those only who cannot do better will submit to a precon-

ceived programme, because a truly talented writer is the
condensed expression of life itself, and he cannot write either
a panegyric or a pamphlet: either would be too mean for
him." But as soon as a new leading type of men or women
appeared amidst the educated classes of Russia, it took pos-
session of Turgueneff. He was haunted by it, and haunted
until he had succeeded in representing it to the best of his
understanding in a work of art, just as for years Murillo was
haunted by the image of a Virgin in the ecstasy of purest love,
until he finally succeeded in rendering on the canvas his full
conception.
When some human problem had thus taken possession of
Turgueneff's mind, he evidently could not discuss it in terms
turgu]neff 91
of logic would have been the manner of the political
this
writer he conceived it in the shape of images and scenes.
Even in his conversation, when he intended to give you an
idea of some problem which worried his mind, he used to
do it by describing a scene so vividly that it would for
ever engrave itself in the memory. This was also a marked
trait in his writings. His novels are a succession of scenes
some of them of the most exquisite beauty each of
which helps him further to characterise his heroes. There-
fore all his novels are short, and need no plot to sustain the
reader's attention. Those who have been perverted by sensa-
tional novel-reading may, of course, be disappointed with a
want of sensational episode; but the ordinary intelligent
reader feels from the very first pages that he has real and
interesting men and women before him, with really human
hearts throbbing in them, and he cannot part with the book
before he has reached the end and grasped the characters in
full. Simplicity of means for accomplishing far-reaching ends
that chief feature of truly good art is felt in everything
Turgueneff wrote.
George Brandes, in his admirable study of Turgueneff (In
Moderne Geister), the best, the deepest, and the most
poetical of all that has been written about the
great novelist,
makes the following remark:
"
It not easy to say quite definitely what makes of TurgueneflE an
Is
artist of the first rank. . . . That he has in the highest degree

the capacity which makes a true poet, of producing living human be-
ings, does not, after all, comprise everything. What makes the reader
feel so much his artistic superiority is the concordance one feels
between the interest taken by the poet in the person whom he depicts,
or the poet's judgment about this person, and the impression which the
reader himself gets; because it is in this point the relation of the
artist to his own creations that every weakness of either the man or
the poet must necessarily appear."
The reader feels every such mistake at once and keeps the
remembrance of it, notwithstanding all the efforts of the
author to dissipate its impression.
"
What reader of Balzac, or of Dickens, or of Auerbach to
"
speak of the great dead only does not know this feeling! Brandes
"
continues. When
Balzac swims in warmed-up excitement, or when
Dickens becomes childishly touching, and Auerbach intentionally
naive, the reader feels repulsed by the untrue, the unpleasant. Never
do we meet with anything artistically repulsive in Turgueneff."
This remark of the great critic is absolutely true, and only

a few words need be added to it, with reference to the
wonderful architecture of all Turgueneflf's novels. Be it a
small novel, or a large one, the proportion of the parts is
"
wonderfully held; not a single episode of a merely ethno-
"
graphical character comes in to disturb or to slacken the
development of the inner human drama; not one feature, and
certainly not one single scene, can be omitted without de-
stroying the impression of the whole; and the final accord,
which seals the usually touching general impression, is always
worked out with wonderful finish.
*
And then the beauty of the chief scenes. Every one of

them could be made the subject of a most artistic and tell-
ing picture. Take, for instance, the final scenes of Helen
and Insaroff In Venice: their visit to the picture gallery,
which made the keeper exclaim, as he looked at them,
Poveretti! or the scene in the theatre, where in response to
the imitated cough of the actress (who played Violetta in
Traviata) resounded the deep, real cough of the dying
Insaroff. The actress herself, with her poor dress and bony
shoulders, who yet took possession of the audience by the
warmth and reality of her feeling, and created a storm of
enthusiasm by her cry of dying joy on the return of Alfred;
nay, I should even say, the dark harbour where one sees the
gull drop from rosy light into the deep blackness of the
night each of these scenes comes to the imagination on
canvas. In his lecture, Hamlet and Don Quixote, where
he speaks of Shakespeare and Cervantes being contem-
poraries, and mentions that the romance of Cervantes was
translated Into English In Shakespeare's lifetime, so that
he might have read It, Turgueneff exclaims: "What a
picture, worthy of the brush of a thoughtful painter: Shake-
The only exception to be made Is the scene with the two old
people in Virgin Soil. It is useless and out of place. To have intro-
"
duced it was simply a literary whim."
TURGU^NEFF 93
"
speare reading Don Quixote! would
It seem as if in these
lines he betrayed the secret of the wonderful beauty the
pictorial beauty of such a number of his scenes. He must
have imagined them, not only with the music of the feeling
that speaks in them, but also as pictures, full of the deepest
psychological meaning and in which all the surroundings of
the main figures the Russian birch wood, or the German
town on the Rhine, or the harbour of Venice are in har-
mony with the feeling.
Turgueneff knew the human heart deeply, especially the
heart of a young, thoroughly honest, and reasoning girl when
she awakes to higher feelings and ideas, and that awakening
takes, without her realising it, the shape of love. In the
description of that moment of life Turgueneff stands quite
unrivalled. On the whole, love is the leading motive of all
his novels; and the moment of its full development is the
moment when his hero he may be a political agitator or
a modest squire appears in full light. The great poet knew
that a human type cannot be characterised by the daily work
in which such a man is engaged however important that
work may be and still less by a flow of words. Conse-
quently, when he draws, for instance, the picture of an
agitator in Dmitri Rudin, he does not report his fiery
speeches for the simple reason that the agitator's words
would not have characterised him. Many have pronounced
the same appeals to Equality and Liberty before him, and
many more will pronounce them after his death. But" that
special type of apostle of equality and liberty the man
"
of the word, and of no action which he intended to
represent in Rudin is characterised by the hero's relations
to different persons, and particularly, above all, by his love.

By his love because it is in love that the human being
appears in full, with its individual features. Thousands of
men have made " propaganda by word," all very much in
the same expressions, but each of them has loved in a dif-
ferent way. Mazzini and Lassalle did similar work; but how
different they were in their loves! You do not know Lassalle
unless you know his relations to the Countess of Hatzfeld.
In common with all great writers, Turgueneff combined
the qualities of a pessimist and a lover of mankind.
"
There flows a deep and broad stream of melancholy in 'I ur-
"
gueneff's mind," remarks Brandes, and therefore it flows also
through all his works. Though his description be objective and im-
personal, and although he hardly ever introduces into his novels lyric
poetry, nevertheless they produce on the whole the impression of lyrics.
There is so much of Turgueneff's own personality expressed in them,
and this personality is always sadness a specific sadness without a
touch of sentimentality. Never does Turguenef? give himself up
entirely to his feelings: he impresses by restraint; but no West Euro-
pean novelist is so sad as he is. The great melancholists of the Latin
race, such as Leopardi and Flaubert, have hard, fast outlines in their
style; the German sadness is of a caustic humour, or it is pathetic, or
sentimental but TurgueneflE's melancholy is, in its substance, the mel-
;
ancholy of the Slavonian races in its weakness and tragical aspect, it is

a descendant in a straight line from the melancholy of the Slavonian
folk-song. . . . When Gogol is melancholy, it is from despair.
When Dostoyevskiy expresses the same feeling, it is because his heart
bleeds with sympathy for the down-trodden, and especially for great
sinners. melancholy has its foundation in his religious
Tolstoy's
is a philosopher.
fatalism. TurgueneflF alone . He loves man, . .
even though he does not think much of him and does not trust him
very much."
The of Turgueneff's talent appeared already in

full force
his earlier productions that is, in the series of short sketches
from village life, to which the misleading title of A
Sportsman's Note-Book was given in order to avoid the
rigours of censorship. Notwithstanding the simplicity of their
contents and the total absence of the satirical element, these
sketches gave a decided blow to serfdom. Turgueneff did
not describe In them such atrocities of serfdom as might
have been considered mere exceptions to the rule; nor did
he idealise the Russian peasant; but by giving life-portraits
of sensible, reasoning, and loving beings, bent down under
the yoke of serfdom, together with life-pictures of the
shallowness and meanness of the life of the serf-owners
even the best of them he awakened the consciousness of
the wrong done by the system. The social influence of these
sketches was very great. As to their artistic qualities, suflice
it to say that in these short sketches we find in a few
pages most vivid pictures of an incredible variety of human
characters, together with most beautiful sketches of nature.
TURGUfeNEFF 95
Contempt, admiration, sympathy, or deep sadness are im-
pressed in turns on the reader at the will of the young author
each time, however, in such a form and by such vivid
scenes that each of these short sketches is worth a good
novel.
In the series of short novels, A Quiet Corner, Correspond-
ence, Ydkov Pdsynkov, Faust, znaÂ sy a, all dated 1854 and
1855, the genius of Turgueneff revealed itself fully: his

manner, his inner self, his powers. deep sadness pervades A
these novels. A
sort of despair in the educated Russian,
who, even in his love, appears utterly incapable of a strong
feeling which would carry away all obstacles, and always
manages, even when circumstances favour him, to bring the
woman who loves him to grief and despair. The follow-
ing lines from Correspondence characterise best the leading
idea of three of these novels: Quiet Corner, Correspond- A
ence, and Asya. It is a girl of twenty-six who writes to a
friend of her childhood :
"
Again I repeat that I do not speak of the girl who finds it dif-
ficult and hard to think. She looks round, she
. . .
expects, and
asks herself, the one whom her soul is
when longing for will come.
. . . At
he appears: she is carried away by him; she is like
last
soft wax in his hands. Happiness, love, thought all these come now
in streams; all her unrest is settled, all doubts resolved by him;
truth itself seems to speak through his lips. She worships him, she
feels ashamed of .her own happiness, she learns, she loves. Great is
his power over her at that time! . . . If he were a hero he could

have fired her, taught her how to sacrifice herself, and all sacrifices
would have been easy for her! But there are no heroes nowadays.
. . . . Still, he leads her wherever he likes; she takes to what
interests him; each of his words penetrates into her soul she does
not know yet how insignificant and empty, how false, words can be,
how little they cost the one who pronounces them, how little they can
be trusted. Then, following these first moments of happiness and
hopes, comes usually owing to circumstances (circumstances are
always the fault) comes usually the separation. I have heard it
said that there have been cases when the two kindred souls have
united immediately; I have also heard that they did not always find
happiness in that . . . however, I will not speak of what I have
not seen myself. But ^the fact that calculation of the pettiest sort
and the most miserable prudence can live in a young heart by the
side of the most passionate exaltation,this I have unfortunately
learned from experience. So, the separation comes. . . .
Happy
the girl who at once sees that this is the end of all, and will not
soothe herself by expectations! But you, brave and just men, you
mostly have not the courage, nor the desire, to tell us the truth . ..
it is easier for you to deceive us . . . or, after all, I am ready

to believe that, together with us, you deceive yourselves."
A complete despair in the capacity for action of the

educated man in Russia runs through all the novels of this
period. Those few men who seem to be an exception
those who have energy, or simulate it for a short time,
generally end their lives in the billiard room of the public
house, or spoil their existences in some other way. The years
1854 and 1855, when these novels were written, fully explain
the pessimism of Turgueneff. In Russia they were perhaps
the darkest years of that dark period of Russian history
the reign of Nicholas I. and in Western Europe, too, the
years closely following the coup d'etat of Napoleon III.
were years of a general reaction after the great unrealised
hopes of 1848.
Turguenefif, who came very near being marched to Siberia
in 1852 for having printed at Moscow his innocent necrolog-
ical note about Gogol, after it had been forbidden by the St.
Petersburg censorship, was compelled to live now on his

estate,beholding round him the servile submissiveness of all
those who had formerly shown some signs of revolt. Seeing
all round the triumph of the supporters of serfdom and
despotism, he might easily have been brought to despair. But

the sadness which pervades the novels of this period was not
a cry of despair; it was not a satire either; it was the gentle
touch of a loving friend, and that constitutes their main
charm. From the artistic point of view, Asya and Corre-
spondence are perhaps the finest gems which we owe to
Turgueneflf.
To judge of the importance of Turgueneff's work one

must read in succession so he himself desired his six
novels: Dmitri Rudin, A Nobleman's Retreat ( Une nichee de
Gentilshommes, or, Liza, in Mr. Ralston's version). On the
Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Firgin Soil. In them^ one
TURGUJ^NEFF 97
sees his poetical powers in full at the same time one gets an
;
insight into the different aspects which intellectual life took

in Russia from 1848 to 1876, and one understands the poet's
attitude towards the best representatives of advanced thought
in Russia during that most interesting period of her develop-
ment. In some of his earlier short tales Turgueneff had already
touched upon Hamletism in Russian life. In his Hamlet of
the Schigrovsky District, and his Diary of a Useless Man, he
had already given admirable sketches of that sort of man.
But it was in Rudin (1855) that he achieved the full artis-
tic representation of that type which had grown upon Rus-
sian soil with especial profusion at a time when our best men
were condemned to inactivity and words. Turgueneff did
not spare men of that type; he represented them with their
worst features, as well as with their best, and yet he treated
them with tenderness. He loved Rudin, with all his defects,
and in this love he was at one with the best men of his gen-
eration, and of ours, too.
"
Rudin was a man of the forties," nurtured upon Hegel's
philosophy, and developed under the conditions which pre-
vailed under Nicholas I., when there was no possibility what-
ever for a thinking man to apply his energy, unless he chose
to become an obedient functionary of an autocratic, slave-
owning State. The scene is laid in one of the estates in
middle Russia, in the family of a lady who takes a super-
ficial interest in all sorts of novelties, reads books that are
prohibited by censorship, such as Tocqueville's Democ-

racy in America; and must always have round her,
whether it be in her salon in the capital or on her estate, all
sorts of men of mark. It is in her drawing-room that Rudin
makes his first appearance. In a few moments he becomes
master of the conversation, and by his intelligent remarks to
the point wins the admiration of the hostess and the sym-
pathy of the younger generation. The latter is represented
by the daughter of the lady and by a young student who is the
tutor of her boys. Both are entirely captivated by Rudin.
When he speaks, later on in the evening, of his student years,
and touches upon such taking subjects as liberty, free thought,
and the struggles in Western Europe for freedom, his words
arc full of so much fire, so much poetry and enthusiasm, that
the two younger people listen to him with a feeling which
approaches worship. The evident; Natasha, the
result is
daughter, falls in love with him. Rudin is much older than

Natasha silver streaks already appear in his beautiful hair,
and he speaks of love as of something which, for him,
"
belongs to the past. Look at this oak," he says; " the last
autumn's leaves still cover it, and they will never fall off until
the young green leaves have made their appearance."
Natasha understands this in the sense that Rudin's old love
can only fade away when a new one has taken its place
and gives him her love. Breaking with all the traditions of
the strictly correct house of her mother, she gives an inter-
view to Rudin in the early morning on the banks of a remote
pond. She is ready to follow him anywhere, anyhow, without
making any conditions; but he, whose love is more in his
brain than in his heart, finds nothing to say to her but to talk
about the impossibility of obtaining the permission of her
mother for this marriage. Natasha hardly listens to his
words. She would follow him with or without the consent of
" "
her mother, and asks: "What is then to be done? To
submit," is Rudin's reply.
The hero who spoke so beautifully about fighting against
all possible obstacles has broken down before the first obsta-
cle that appeared in his way. Words, words, and no actions,
was indeed the characteristic of these men, who in the for-
ties represented the best thinking element of Russian society.
Later on we meet Rudin once more. He has still found no
work for himself, neither has he made peace with the con-
ditions of life at that time. He remains poor, exiled by the
government from one town to another, till at last he goes
abroad, and during the insurrection of June, 1848, he is
killed on a barricade in Paris. There is an epilogue to the
novel, and that epilogue is so beautiful that a few passages
from it must be produced here. It is Lezhneff, formerly
Rudin's enemy, who speaks.
"
I know him well," continued Lezhneff, " I am aware of his
faults. They are the more conspicuous because he is not to be regarded
on a small scale."
" "
His is a character of genius! cried Bassistoff.
TURGUfeNEFF 99
" " "
Genius, very likely he has I replied Lezhneff, but as for char-
acter. . . . That's just his misfortune: there's no force of
character in him. . . . But I want to speak of what is good,
of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and, believe me, who
am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality
in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indif-
ferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to anyone
who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you
remember, Sasha, once when I was talking to you about him, I
blamed him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. The
coldness is in his blood that is not his fault and not in his head. He
is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he
lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child.
. . Yes; no doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want;
.
but are we to throw stones at him for that? He never does anything
himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood but who has the
;
right to say that he has not been of use, that his words have not
scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has not de-
nied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying
out their own ideas? Indeed, I myself, to begin with, have gained
all that I have from him. Sasha knows what Rudin did for me in
my youth. I also maintained, I recollect, that Rudin's words could

not produce an effect on men; but I was speaking then of men like
myself, at my present age, of men who have already lived and been
broken in by life. One false note in a man's eloquence, and the whole
harmony is spoiled for us; but a young man's ear, happily, is not
so over-fine, not so trained. If the substance of what he hears seems
fine to him, what does he care about the intonation? The intonation
"
he will supply for himself !
" " "

Bravo, bravo! cried Bassistoff, that is justly spoken! And as
regards Rudin's influence, I swear to you, that man not only knows
how to move you, he lifts you up, he does not let you stand still,
he stirs you to the depths and sets you on fire "*
!
However, with such men as Rudin further progress in

Russia would have been impossible new men had to appear.
:
And so they did: we find them in the subsequent novels of

Turgueneff but they meet with what difficulties, what pains
they undergo This we see in Lavretskiy and Liza {A Noble-
!
man's Retreat) who belonged to the intermediate period.
Taken from the excellent translation by Mrs. Constance Gar-

nett, in Heinemann's edition of Turgueneff's works.
loo RUSSIAN LITERATURE
Lavretskiy could not be satisfied with Rudin's role of an
errant apostle; he tried his hands at practical activity; but he
also could not find his way amidst the new currents of life.
He had the same artistic and philosophical development as
Riidin; he had the necessary will; but his powers of action
were palsied not by his power of analysis in this case, but
by the mediocrity of his surroundings and by his unfortunate
marriage. Lavretskiy ends also in wreck.
A Nobleman's Retreat was an immense success. It was said
that, together with the autobiographic tale, First Love, it
was the most artistic of Turgueneff's works. This, however, is
hardly so. Its great success was surely due, first of all, to the
wide circle of readers to whom it appealed. Lavretskiy has
married most unfortunately a lady who soon becomes a sort
of a second-rate Parisian lioness. They separate; and then
he meets with a girl, Liza, in whom Turgueneff has given the
best impersonation imaginable of the average, thoroughly
good and honest Russian girl of those times. She and Lavret-
skiy fall in love with each other. For a moment both she
and Lavretskiy think that the latter's wife is dead so it
stood, at least, in a Paris feuilleton; but the lady reappears
bringing with her all her abominable atmosphere, and Liza
goes to a convent. Unlike Rudin or Bazaroff, all the persons
of this drama, as well as the drama itself, are quite familiar
to the average reader, and for merely that reason the
novel appealed to an extremely wide circle of sympathisers.
Of course, the artistic powers of Turgueneff appear with
a wonderful force in the representation of such types as
Liza and Lavretskiy 's wife, Liza's old aunt, and Lavretskiy
himself. The note of poetry and sadness which pervades the
novel carries away the reader completely. And yet, I may
venture to say, the following novel, On the Eve, far super-
seded the former both in the depth of its conception and the
beauty of its workmanship.
Already, in Natasha, Turgueneff had given a life-picture
of a Russian girl who has grown up in the quietness of village
life, but has in her heart, and mind, and will the germs of
that which moves human beings to higher action. Rudin's
spirited words, his appeals to what is grand and worth living
for, inflamed her. She was ready to follow him, to support
TURGU6NEFF ioi
him in the great work which he so eagerly and uselessly
searched for, but it was he who proved to be her inferior.
Turgueneff thus foresaw, since 1855, the coming of that type
of woman who later on played so prominent a part in the
revival of Young Russia. Four years later, in On the Eve,
he gave, in Helen, a further and fuller development of the
same type. Helen is not satisfied with the dull, trifling life in
her own family, and she longs for a wider sphere of action.
"
To be good is not enough; to do good yes; that is the
great thing in life," she writes in her diary. But whom does
she meet in her surroundings? Shubin, a talented artist, a
" "
spoiled child, a butterfly which admires itself Berseneff,
;
a future professor, a true Russian nature an excellent man,

most unselfish and modest, but wanting inspiration, totally
lacking in vigour and initiative. These two are the best. There
is a m.oment when Shubin, as he rambles on a summer night
"
with his friend Berseneff, says to him I love Helen, but
:
Helen loves you. Sing, sing louder, if you can; and if

. . .
you cannot, then take off your hat, look above, and smile
to the stars. They all look upon you, upon you alone: they
always look on those who are in love." But "Berseneff returns
to his small room, and opens Raumer's History of the
Hohenstauffens," on the same page where he had left it the
last time. . . .
Thereupon comes Insaroff, a Bulgarian patriot, entirely

absorbed by one idea the liberation of his mother-country;
a man steel, rude to the touch, who has cast away all
of
melancholy philosophical dreaming, and marches straight
forward, towards the aim of his life and the choice of
Helen is settled. The pages given to the awakening of her
feeling and to its growth are among the best ever written by
Turgueneff. When Insaroff suddenly becomes aware of his
own love for Helen, his first decision is to leave at once the
suburb of Moscow, where they are all staying, and Russia as
well. He goes to Helen's house to announce there his depar-
ture. Helen asks him to promise that he will see her again
to-morrow before he leaves, but he does not promise. Helen
waits for him, and when he has not come in the afternoon,
she herself goes to him. Rain and thunder overtake her on
the road, and she steps into an old chapel by the roadside.
There she meets Insaroff, and the explanation between the
shy, modest girl who perceives that Insaroff loves her, and
the patriot, who discovers in her the force which, far from
standing in his way, would only double his own energy,
terminates by Insaroff exclaiming: "Well, then, welcome,
"
my wife before God and men I
In Helen we have the true type of that Russian woman

who a few years later joined heart and soul in all movements
for Russian freedom : the woman who conquered her right
to knowledge, totally reformed the education of children,
fought for the liberation of the toiling masses, endured un-
broken in the snows and gaols of Siberia, died if necessary on
the scaffold, and at the present moment continues with un-
abated energy the same struggle. The high artistic beauty of
this novel has already been incidentally mentioned. Only one
reproach can be made to it: the hero, Insaroff, the man of
action, Is not sufficiently living. But both for the general
architecture of the novel and the beauty of Its separate
scenes, beginning with the very first and ending with the last.
On the Eve stands among the highest productions of the sort
in all literatures.
The next novel of Turgueneff was Fathers and Sons. It

was writen In 1859 when, instead of the sentimentalists and
" "
aesthetical people of old, quite a new type of man was
making Its appearance In the educated portion of Russian
society the nihilist. Those who have not read Turgueneff's
" "
works will perhaps associate the word nihilist with the
struggle which took place in Russia in 1 879-1 881 between
the autocratic power and the terrorists; but this would be a
" " "
great mistake. Nihilism Is not terrorism," and the type
of the nihilist Is Infinitely deeper and wider than that of a
terrorist. Turgueneff's Fathers and Sons must be read in
order to understand it. The representative of this type In the
*'
novel Is a young doctor, Bazaroff a man who bows before
no authority, however venerated it may be, and accepts of no
principle unproved." Consequently he takes a negative atti-
tude towards all the Institutions of the present time and he
throws overboard all the conventionalities and the petty lies
of ordinary society life. He comes on a visit to his old parents
TURGU^NEFF 103
and stays also at the country house of a young friend of his,
whose father and uncle are two typical representatives of the
old generation. This gives to Turgueneff the possibility of
illustrating in a series of masterly scenes the conflict between
" " "
the two generations the fathers and the sons." That
conflict was going on in those years with bitter acrimony all
over Russia.
One of the two brothers, Nikolai Petrovitch, is an excel-
lent, slightly enthusiastic dreamer who in his youth was fond
of Schiller and Pushkin, but never took great interest in
practical matters; he now lives, on his estate, the lazy life of
a landowner. He would like, however, to show to the young
people that he, too, can go a long way with them he tries to
:
read the materialistic books which his son and Bazaroff read,
and even to speak their language; but his entire education
" "
stands in the way of a true realistic comprehension of the
real state of affairs.
The elder brother, Peter Petrovitch, is, on the contrary, a
direct descendant from Lermontoff's Petchorin that is, a
thorough, well-bred egotist. Having spent his youth in
high society circles, he, even now in the dulness of the small
" "
country estate, considers it as a duty to be always prop-
"
erly dressed as a perfect gentleman," strictly to obey the
"
rules of Society," to remain faithful to Church and State,
and never to abandon his attitude of extreme reserve which
he abandons, however, every time that he enters into a dis-
" " '' "
cussion about principles with Bazaroff. The nihilist
Inspires him with hatred.
The nihilist Is, of course, the out-and-out negation of all
" "
the principles of Peter Petrovitch. He does not believe
in the established principles of Church and State, and openly
professes a profound contempt for all the established forms

of society-life. He does not see that the wearing of a clean
collar and a perfect necktie should be described as the per-
formance of a duty. When he speaks, he says what he
thinks. Absolute sincerity not only in what he says, but
also towards himself and a common sense standard of
judgments, without the old prejudices, are the ruling features
of his character. This leads, evidently, to a certain assumed
roughness of expression, and the conflict between the two
generations must necessarily take a tragical aspect. So it
was everywhere in Russia at that time. The novel expressed
the real tendency of the time and accentuated it, so that as
has been remarked by a gifted Russian critic, S. Vengueroff
the novel and the reality mutually influenced each other.
Fathers and Sons produced a tremendous impression.
Turgueneff was assailed on all sides:
" by the old generation,
which reproached him with being a nihilist himself "; and
by the youth, which was discontented at being identified with
Bazaroff. The truth is that, with a
very few exceptions,
among whom was the great critic, Pisaren, we do not prop-
erly understand Bazaroff. Turgueneff had so much ac-
customed us to a certain poetical halo which surrounded his
heroes, and to his own tender love which followed them, even
when he condemned them, that finding nothing of the sort in
his attitude towards Bazaroff, we saw in the absence of these
features a decided hostility of the author towards the hero.
Moreover, certain features of Bazaroff decidedly displeased
us. Why should a man of his powers display such a harsh-
ness towards his old parents: his loving mother and his
father the poor old village-doctor who has retained, to
old age, faith in his science. Why
should Bazaroff fall in
love with that most uninteresting, self-admiring lady,
Madame Odintsoff, and fail to be loved, even by her? And
then why, at a time when in the young generation the seeds of
a great movement towards freeing the masses were already
ripening, why make Bazaroff say that he is ready to work for
the peasant, but if somebody comes and says to him that he
is bound to do so, he will hate that peasant? To which Bazar-
off adds, in a moment of reflection: "And what of that?

Grass will grow out of me when this peasant acquires well-
"
being 1 We
did not understand this attitude of Turgueneff's
nihilist, and was only on re-reading Fathers and Sons much
it
later on, that we

noticed, in the very words that so offended
us, the germs of a realistic philosophy of solidarity and duty
which only now begins to take a more or less definite shape.
In i860 we, the young generation, looked on it as Turgue-
neff's desire to throw a stone at a new type with which he did
not sympathise.
And yet, as Plsareff understood at once, Bazaroff was a
TURGU^NEFF 105
real representative of the young generation. Turgueneff, as
" "
he himself wrote later on, merely did not add syrup to
make his hero appear somewhat sweeter.
" "
BazarofF," he wrote, puts all the other personalities of my
novel in the shade. He is honest, straightforward, and a democrat
of the purest water, and you find no good qualities in him! The duel
with Petr Petrovitch is only introduced to show the intellectual
emptiness of the elegant, noble knighthood in fact, I even exag-
;
gerated and made it ridiculous. Myconception of Bazaroff is such as

to make him appear throughout much superior to Petr Petrovitch.
Nevertheless, when he calls himself nihilist you must read revolu-
tionist. To draw on one side a functionary who takes bribes, and on
the other an ideal youth I leave it to others to make such pictures.
My aim was much higher than that. I conclude with one remark: If
the reader is not won by Bazaroff, notwithstanding his roughness,
absence of heart, pitiless dryness and terseness, then the fault is with
me I have missed my aim but to sweeten him with syrup ( to use
;
Bazaroff's own language), this I did not want to do, although per-
haps through that I would have won Russian youth at once to my
side."
The true key to the understanding of Fathers and Sons,

and, in fact, of whatever Turgueaeff wrote, is given, I will
permit myself to suggest, in his admirable lecture, Hamlet
and Don Quixote (i860). I have already elsewhere in-
timated this but I am bound to repeat it here, as I think that,
;
better than any other of Turgueneif's writings, this lecture

enables us to look into the very philosophy of the great
novelist. Hamlet and Don Quixote Turgueneff wrote per-
sonify the two opposite particularities of human nature. All
men belong more or less to the one or to the other of these
two types. And, with his wonderful powers of analysis, he
thus characterised the two heroes:
"
Don Quixote is imbued with devotion towards his ideal, for
which he ready to suffer all possible privations, to sacrifice his life;

is
life itself he values only so far as it can serve for the incarnation
of the ideal, for the promotion of truth, of justice on Earth. . . .
He opposing the forces hostile to mankind :

lives for his brothers, for
the witches, the giants that is, the oppressors. . . Therefore
.
he is fearless, patient; he is satisfied with the most modest food, the

io6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
poorest cloth: he has other things to think of. Humble in his heart,
he great and daring in his mind."
is ..."
And who is Hamlet?
Analysis, first of all, and egotism, and therefore no faith. He lives
entirely for himself, he is an egotist; but to believe in one's self even
an egotist cannot do that: we can believe only in something which is
outside us and above us ... As he has doubts

of everything, Hamlet
evidently does not spare himself; his intellect is too developed to re-
main satisfied with what he finds in himself: he feels his weakness,
but each self -consciousness is a force wherefrom results his irony,
the opposite of the enthusiam of Don Quixote." ..."
Don
Quixote, a poor man, almost a beggar, without means and relations,
old, isolated undertakes to redress all the evils and to protect op-
pressed strangers over the whole earth. What does it matter to him that
his first attempt at freeing the innocent from his oppressor falls twice
as heavy upon the head of the innocent himself? . . . What does
it matter that, thinking that he has to deal with noxious giants, Don
Quixote attacks useful windmills? .

Nothing of the sort can
. .
ever happen with Hamlet: how could he, with his perspicacious, re-
fined, sceptical mind, ever commit such a mistake! No, he will not
fight with windmills, he does not believe in giants . . but he .
would not have attacked them even if they did exist. . . And .
yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic, although he disbelieves in good,

he does not believe in evil. Evil and deceit are his inveterate enemies.
"
His scepticism is not indiflferentism." . . . But in negation, as
in fire, there is a destructive power, and how to keep it in bounds,
how where to stop, when that which it must destroy, and
to tell it
that which must spare are often inseparably welded together?

it
Here it is that the often-noticed tragical aspect of human life comes

in: for action we require will, and for action we require thought;
but thought and will have parted from each other, and separate
every day more and more. . . .
"
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought. . . ."
This lecture fully explains, I believe, the attitude of Tur-

gueneff towards Bazaroff. He himself belonged to a great
extent to the Hamlets. Among them he had his best friends.
He loved Hamlet; yet he admired Don Quixote the man
of action. He felt his superiority; but, while describing this
second type of men, he never could surround it with that
tender poetical love for a sick friend which makes the irresis-
tible attraction of those of his novels which deal with one
TURGUfeNEFF 107
or other of the Hamlet type. Headmired Bazaroff his
roughness as well as his power; Bazaroff overpowered him;

but he could by no means have for him the tender feelings
which he had had for men of his own generation and his
own refinement. In fact, with Bazaroff they would have been
out of place.
This we did not notice at that time, and therefore we did
not understand Turgueneff's intention of representing the
"
tragic position of Bazaroff amidst his surroundings. I
"
entirely share Bazaroff's ideas," he wrote later on. All of
**
them, with the exception of his negation of art." I loved
Bazaroff; I will prove it to you by my diary," he told me once
in Paris. Certainly he loved him but with an intellectually
admiring love, quite different from the compassionate love
which he had bestowed upon Rudin and Lavretskiy. This dif-
ference escaped us, and was the chief cause of the misunder-
standing which was so painful for the great poet.
Turgueneff's next novel, Smoke ( 1 867 ) need not be dwelt

,
upon. One object he had in it was to represent the powerful

type of a Russian society lioness, which had haunted him for
years, and to which he returned several times, until he finally
succeeded in finding for it, in Spring Flood, the fullest and
the most perfect artistic expression. His other object was to
picture in its true colours the shallowness nay, the silliness,
of that society of bureaucrats into whose hands Russia fell
for the next twenty years. Deep despair in the future of
Russia after the wreck of that great reform movement which
had given to us the abolition of serfdom pervades the novel;
a despair which can by no means be attributed entirely, or
even chiefly, to the hostile reception of Fathers and Sons by
the Russian youth, but must be sought for in the wreck of the
great hopes which Turgueneff and his best friends had laid in
the representatives of the reform movement of 1 859-1 863.
"
This same despair made Turgueneff write Enough; from
the Memoirs of a Dead Artist" (1865), and the fantastic
sketch, '^Ghosts" (1867), and he recovered from It only
when he saw the birth in Russia of a new movement,
** "
towards the people ! which took place amongst our youth
in the early seventies.
io8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
This movement he represented in his last novel of the
above-mentioned series, Firgin Soil (1876). That he was
fully sympathetic with it is self-evident; but the question,
whether his novel gives a correct idea of the movement, must
be answered to some extent in the negative even though
Turgueneff had, with his wonderful intuition, caught some of
the most striking features of the movement. The novel was
finished in 1876 (we read it, in a full set of proofs, at the
house of P. L. Lavroff, in London, in the autumn of that
year) that means, two years before the great trial of those
who were arrested for this agitation took place. And in 1876
no one could possibly have known the youth of our circles
unless he had himself belonged to them. Consequently, Fir-
gin Soil could only refer to the very earliest phases of the
movement: misconception of the peasantry, the peculiar inca-
did not meet with any of the best representativs of it. Much
of the novel is true, but the general impression it conveys is
not precisely the impression which Turgueneff himself would
have received if he had better known the Russian youth at
that time.
With allthe force of his immense talent, he could not
supply by knowledge. And yet he under-
intuition the lack of
stood two characteristic features of the earliest part of the
movement: misconception of the peasantry, the peculiar inca-
pacity of most of the early promoters of the movement
to understand the Russian peasant, on account of the bias
of their false literary, historical, and social education; and
"
the Hamletism: the want of resolution, or rather reso-
lution sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought," which really
characterised the movement at its outset. If Turgueneff had
lived a few years more he surely would have noticed coming
into the arena the new type of men of action the new modi-
fication of Insaroff's and Bazaroff's type, which grew up in
proportion as the movement was taking firm root. He had
already perceived them through the dryness of official records
"
of the trial of the hundred-and-ninety three," and in 1878
he asked me to tell him all I knew about Myshkin, one of the
most powerful individualities of that trial.
He did not live to accomplish this.
"
A disease which nobody
understood and was mistaken for gout," but which was in
TURGUfeNEFF 109
reality a cancer of the spinal cord, kept him for the last few
years of his life an invalid, rivetted to his couch. Only his
letters, fullof thought and life, where sadness and merriment
go on in turn, are what remains from his pen during that
period of life, when he seems to have meditated upon several
novels which he left unfinished or perhaps unwritten. He died
at Paris in 1883 at ^ê age of sixty-five.
In conclusion, a few words, at least, must be said about
"
his Poems in Prose," or "Senilia" (1882). These are
"
flying remarks, thoughts, images," which he wrote down
from 1878 onwards under the impression of this or that fact
of his own personal life, or of public life. Though written in
prose, they are true pieces of excellent poetry, some of them
real gems; some deeply touching and as impressive as the
best verses of the best poets (Old JVoman; The Beggar;
Mas ha; How Beautiful, how Fresh were the Roses) wnilc
;
others {Nature, The Dog) are more characteristic of

Turgueneff's philosophical conceptions than anything else
he has written. And finally, in On the Threshold, written a
few months before his death, he expressed in most poetical
accents his admiration of those women who gave their lives
for the revolutionary movement and went on the scaffold,
without being even understood at the time by those for whom
they died.
T0LSt6y CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD

More than half a century ago, i. e. in 1852, the first story
of Tolstoy, Childhood, soon followed by Boyhood, made its
appearance in the monthly review, The Contemporary, with
"
the modest signature, L. N. T." The little story was a
great success. It was imbued with such a charm it had such
;
freshness, and was so free of all the mannerism of the literary

trade, that the unknown author at once became a favourite,
and was placed by the side of Turgueneff and Gontcharoff.
There are excellent children stories in all languages. Child-
hood is the period of life with which many authors have best
succeeded in dealing. And yet no one, perhaps, has so well
described the life of children from within, from their own
point of view, as Tolstoy did. With him, it is the child itself
no RUSSIAN LITERATURE
which expresses its childish feelings, and it does this so as to
compel the reader to judge full-grown people with the child's
point of view. Such is the realism of Childhood and Boy-
hood that is, their richness in facts caught from real life
that a Russian critic, Pisareff, developed quite a theory of
education chiefly on the basis of the data contained in these
two stories of Tolstoy's.
It is related somewhere that one day, during their rambles
in the country, Turgueneff and Tolstoy came across an old
hack of a horse which was finishing its days in a lonely field.
Tolstoy entered at once into the feelings of the horse and
began to describe its sad reflections so vividly, that Tur-
gueneff, alluding to the then new ideas of Darwinism, could
"
not help exclaiming, I am sure, Lyov Nikolaevitch, that
"
you must have had horses among your ancestors! In the
capacity of entirely identifying himself with the feelings and
the thoughts of the beings of whom he speaks, Tolstoy has
but few rivals; but with children this power of identification
attains its highest degree. The moment he speaks of children,
Tolstoy becomes himself a child.
Childhood and Boyhood are, it is now known, autobio-
graphical stories, in which only small details are altered, and
in the boy Irteneff we have a glimpse of what L. N. Tolstoy
was in his childhood. He was born in 1828, in the estate of
Yasnaya Polyana, which now enjoys universal fame, and for
the first fifteen years of his life he remained, almost without
interruption, an inhabitant of the country. His father and
grandfather so we are told by the Russian critic, S. Ven-
gueroff are described in fVar and Peace, in Nicholas Ros-
toff and the old Count Rostoff respectively; while his mother,
who was born a Princess Volkhonskaya, is represented as
Mary Bolkonskaya. Leo Tolstoy lost his mother at the age
of two, and his father at the age of nine, and after that time
his education was taken care of by a woman relative, T. A.
Ergolskaya, in Yasnaya Polyana, and after 1840, at Kazan,
by his aunt P. I. Yushkova, whose house, we are told, must
have been very much the same as the house of the Rostoffs'
in fVar and Peace.
Leo Tolstoy was only fifteen when he entered the Kazan
University, where he spent two years in the Oriental faculty
tolst(5y 1 1 1
and f .wo yearsIn the faculty of Law. However, the teaching-

staffof both faculties was so feeble at that time that only a
single professor was able to awaken in the young man some
passing interest in his subject. Four years later, that is in
1847, when he was only nineteen, Leo Tolstoy had already
left the University and was making at Yasnaya Polyana some
attempts at improving the conditions of his peasant serfs, of

which attempts he has told us later on, with such a striking
sincerity, in The Morning of a Landlord.
The next four years of his life he spent, externally, like
most young men of his aristocratic circle, but internally, in a
continual reaction against the life he was leading. An insight
into what he was then slightly exaggerated, of course, and
dramatised we can get from the Notes of a Billiard
Marker. Happily he could not put up with such paltry sur-
roundings and in 1851, he suddenly renounced the life he
had hitherto led that of an idle aristocratic youth and
following his brother Nicholas, he went to the Caucasus, in
order to enter military service. There he stayed first at
Pyatigorsk the place so full of reminiscences of Lermon-
toff until, having passed the necessary examinations, he
was received as a non-commissioned officer (yunker) in the
artillery and went to serve in a Cossack village on the banks
of the Terek.
His experiences and reflections in these new surroundings,
we know from But it was there also that in the
his Cossacks.
face of the beautiful nature which had so powerfully inspired
Pushkin and Lermontoff he found his true vocation. He
sent to the Contemporary his first literary experiment,
Childhood, and this first story, as he soon learned from a
letter of the poet Nekrasoff, editor of the review, and from
the critical notes of Grigorieff, Annenkoff, Druzhinin, and
Tchernyshevskiy (they belonged to four different jesthetical
schools) proved to be a chef d'ceuvre.
,
DURING AND AFTER THE CRIMEAN WAR

However, the great Crimean war began towards the end
of the next year (1853), and L. N. Tolstoy did not want to
remain inactive in the Caucasus army. He obtained his trans-
fer to the Danube army, took part in the siege of Silistria,
and later on in the battle of Balaklava, and from November,
1854, August, 1855," remained besieged in Sebastopol
till
partly in the terrible Fourth bastion," where he lived

through all the dreadful experiences of the heroic defenders
of that fortress. He has therefore the right to speak of War:
he knows it from within. He knows what it is, even under its
very best aspects, in such a significant and inspired phase as
was the defence of these forts and bastions which had grown
up under the enemy's shells. He obstinately refused during
the siege to become an officer of the Staff, and remained with
his battery in the most dangerous spots.
I perfectly well remember, although I was only twelve
or thirteen, the profound impression which his sketch, Sebas-
topol in December, 1854, followed, after the fall of the fort-
ress, by two more Sebastopol sketches produced in Russia.
The very character of these sketches was original. They were
not leaves from a diary, and yet they were as true to reality
as such leaves could be in fact, even more true, because they
;
were not representing one corner only of real life the

corner which accidentally fell under the writer's observa-
tions but the whole life, the prevailing modes of thought
and the habits of life in the besieged fortress. They repre-
sented and this is characteristic of all subsequent works of
Tolstoy an interweaving of Dichtung and Wahrheit, of
poetry and truth, truth and poetry, containing much more
truth than is usually found in a novel, and more poetry, more
poetical creation, than occurs in most works of pure fiction.
Tolstoy apparently never wrote in verse; but during the
siege of Sebastopol he composed, in the usual metre and
language of soldiers' songs, a satirical song in which he
described the blunders of the commanders which ended in
the Balaklava disaster. The song, written in an admirable
popular style, could not be printed, but it spread over Russia
in thousands of copies and was widely sung, both during
and immediately after the campaign. The name of the author
also leaked out, but there was some uncertainty as to whether
it was the author of the Sebastopol sketches or some other
Tolstoy.
On his return from Sebastopol and the conclusion of
tolst6y 113
peace (1856) Tolstoy stayed partly at St. Petersburg and
partly at Yasnaya Polyana. In the capital he was received
with open arms by all classes of society, both literary and
" "
worldly, as a Sebastopol hero and as a rising great
writer. But of the life he lived then he cannot speak now
otherwise than with disgust: it was the life of hundreds of
young men officers of the Guard and jeunesse doree of his
own class which was passed in the restaurants and cafes
chantants of the Russian capital, amidst gamblers, horse
dealers, Tsigane choirs, and French adventuresses. He be-
came at that time friendly with Turgueneff and saw much of
him, both at St. Petersburg and at Yasnaya Polyana the
estates of the two great writers being not very far from each
other but, although his friend Turgueneff was taking then a
;
lively part in co-editing with Herzen the famous revolution-

ary paper, The Bell (see Chapter VIII.), Tolstoy, seems to
have taken no interest in it; and while he was well acquainted
with the editing staff of the then famous review. The Con-
temporary, which was fighting the good fight for the libera-
tion of the peasants and for freedom in general, Tolstoy, for
one reason or another, never became friendly with the Radical
leaders of that review Tchernyshevsky, Dobroluboff, Mik-
hailoff, and their friends.
Altogether, the great intellectual and reform movement
which was going on then in Russia seems to have left him
cold. He did not join the party of reforms. Still less was he
inclined to join those young Nihilists whom Turgueneff had
portrayed to the best of his ability in Fathers and Sons, or
later on in the seventies, the youth whose watchword be-
"
came: Be the people," and with whom Tolstoy has so much
in common at the present time. What was the reason of that
estrangement we are unable to say. Was it that a deep

chasm separated the young epicuraean aristocrat from the
ultra-democratic writers, like Uobroluboff, who worked at
spreading socialistic and democratic ideas in Russia, and still
more from those who, like Rakhmetoff in Tchernyshevsky's
novel fVhat is to be done, lived the life of the peasant, thus
then what Tolstoy began to preach twenty years
ater?
{)ractising
Or, was it the difference between the two generations
the man
of thirty or more, which Tolstoy was, and the
young people in their early twenties, possessed of all the
haughty intolerance of youth, which kept them aloof from
each other. And was it not, in addition to all this, the result of
theories? namely, a fundamental difference in the conceptions
of the advanced Russian Radicals, who at that time were
mostly admirers of Governmental Jacobinism, and the
Populist, the No-Government man which Tolstoy must have
already then been, since it distinctly appeared in his negative
attitude towards Western civilisation, and especially in the
educational work which he began in 1861 in the Vasnaya
Polyana school?
The novels which Tolstoy brought out during these years,
1 856-1 862, do not throw much light upon his state of mind,
because, even though they are to a great extent autobio-

graphical, they mostly relate to earlier periods of his life.
Thus, he published two more of his Sebastopol war-sketches.
All his powers of observation and war-psychology, all his
deep comprehension of the Russian soldier, and especially of
the plain, un-theatrical hero who really wins the battles, and
a profound understanding of that inner spirit of an army
upon which depend success and failure: everything, in short,
which developed into the beauty and the truthfulness of fVar
and Peace was already manifested in these sketches, which
undoubtedly represented a new departure in war-literature
the world over.
YOUTH IN SEARCH OF AN IDEAL

:
Youth, The Morning of a Landed Proprietor, and Lu-

cerne appeared during the same years, but they produced
upon us readers, as well as upon the literary critics, a strange
and rather unfavourable impression. The great writer re-
mained; and his talent was showing evident signs of growth,
while the problems of life which he touched upon were deep-
ening and widening; but the heroes who seemed to represent
the ideas of the author himself could not entirely win our
sympathies. In Childhood and Boyhood we had had before
us the boy Irteneff. Now, in Youth, Irteneff makes the ac-
quaintance of Prince Nekludoff; they become great friends,
tolst6y 115
and promise, without the slightest reservation, to confess to
each other their moral failings. Of course, they do not
always keep this promise; but it leads them to continual self-
probing, to a repentance one moment which is forgotten the
next, and to an unavoidable duality of mind which has the
most debilitating effect upon the two young men's character.
The ill results of these moral endeavours Tolstoy did not
conceal. He detailed them with the greatest imaginable sin-
cerity, but he seemed nevertheless to keep them before his
readers as something desirable; and with this we could not
agree.
Youth is certainly the age when higher moral Ideals find
their way into the mind of the future man or woman; the
years when one strives to get rid of the imperfections of boy-
hood or girlhood; but this aim is never attained in the
ways recommended at monasteries and Jesuit schools. The
only proper way is to open before the young mind new,
broad horizons; to free it from superstitions and fears; to
grasp man's position amidst Nature and Mankind; and
especially to feel at one with some great cause and to nurture
one's forces with the view of being able some day to struggle
for that cause. Idealism that is, the capacity of conceiving
a poetical love towards something great, and to prepare for
it is the
only sure preservation from all that destroys the
vital forces of man : vice, dissipation, and so on. This inspira-
tion, this love of an ideal, the Russian youth used to find in
the student circles, of which Turgueneff has left us such
spirited descriptions. Instead of that, Irteneff and Nekludoff,
remaining during their university years in their splendid
aristocratic isolation, are unable to conceive a higher ideal
worth living for, and spent their forces in vain endeavours of
semi-religious moral improvement, on a plan that may per-
haps succeed in the isolation of a monastery, but usually ends
in failure amidst the attractions lying round a young man
of the world. These failures Tolstoy relates, as usual, with
absolute earnestness and sincerity.
The Morning of a Landed Proprietor produced again a
strange impression. The story deals with the unsuccessful
philanthropic endeavours of a serf-owner who tries to make
his serfs happy and wealthy without ever thinking of begin-
ii6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
ning where he ought to begin: namely, of setting his slaves
free. In those years of liberation of the serfs and enthusiastic
hopes, such a story sounded as an anachronism the more

so as it was not known at the time of its appearance that it
was a page from Tolstoy's earlier autobiography relating to
the year 1847, when he settled in Yasnaya Polyana, im-
mediately after having left the University, and when
extremely few thought of liberating the serfs. It was one of
those sketches of which Brandes has so truly said that in them
" "
Tolstoy thinks aloud about some page of his own life. It
thus produced a certain mixed, undefined feeling. And yet
one could not but admire in it the same great objective talent
that was so striking in Childhood and the Sebastopol sketches.
In speaking of peasants who received with distrust the mea-
sures with which their lord was going to benefit them, it
would have been so easy, so humanly natural, for an educated
man to throw upon their ignorance their unwillingness to
accept the threshing machine (which, by the way, did not
work), or the refusal of a peasant to accept the free gift of
a stone house (v/hich was far from the village) But
not a shade of that sort of pleading in favour of the landlord
is to be found in the story, and the thinking reader neces-
sarily concludes in favour of the common sense of the

peasants.
Then came Lucerne. It is told in that story how the same
Nekludoff, bitterly struck by the indifference of a party of
English tourists who sat on the balcony of a rich Swiss hotel
and refused to throw even a few pennies to a poor singer
to whose songs they had listened with evident emotion, brings
the singer to the hotel, takes him to the dining-hall, to the
great scandal of the English visitors, and treats him there to
a bottle of champagne. The feelings of Nekludoff are cer-
tainly very just; but while reading this story one suffers all
the while for the poor musician, and experiences a sense of
anger against the Russian nobleman who uses him as a rod ta
chastise the tourists, without even noticing how he makes the
old man miserable during this lesson in morals. The worst of
it is that the author, too, seems not to remark the false note
which rings in the conduct of Nekludoff, nor to realise how a

man with really humane feelings would have taken the singet
TOLSTdY 117
to some small wine-shop and would have had with him a
friendly talk over a picholette of common wine. Yet we see
again all Tolstoy's force of talent. He so honestly, so fully,
and so truly describes the uneasiness of the singer during the
whole scene that the reader's unavoidable conclusion is that
although the young aristocrat was right in protesting against
stone-heartedness, his ways were as unsympathetic as those of
the self-contented Englishmen at the hotel. Tolstoy's artistic
power carries him beyond and above his theories.
This is not the only case where such a remark may be made
concerning Tolstoy's work. His appreciation of this or that
action, of this or that of his heroes, may be wrong; his own
" "
philosophy may be open to objection; but the force of his
descriptive talent and his literary honesty are always so
great, that he will often make the feelings and actions of his
heroes speak against their creator, and prove something very
different from what he intended to prove.* This Is probably
why Turgueneff, and apparently other literary friends, too,
" '
told him: Don't put your philosophy into your art.' Trust
to your artistic feeling, and you will create great things." In
fact, notwithstanding Tolstoy's distrust of science, I must say
that I always feel In reading his works that he Is possessed
of the most scientific insight I know of among artists. He may
be wrong in his conclusions, but never is he wrong in his
statement of data. True science and true art are not hostile to
each other, but always work in harmony.
SMALL STORIES THE COSSACKS

Several of Tolstoy's novels and stories appeared in the
years 1857-1862 {The Snow-Storm, The Two Hussars,
Three Deaths, The Cossacks) and each one of them won
new admiration for his talent. The first is a mere trifle, and
* This has struck most
critics. Thus, speaking of JVor and Peace,
Pisareff wrote: "Theimages he has created have their own life,
independently of the intentions of the author; they enter into direct
relations with the readers, speak for themselves, and unavoidably
bring the reader to such thoughts and conclusions as the author
never had in view and of which he, perhaps, would not approve."
{Works, VI. p. 420.)
ii8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
it is a gem of art; it concerns the
yet wanderings of a traveller
during a snow-storm, in the plains of Central Russia. The
same remark is true of the Two Hussars, in which two gen-
erations are sketched on a few pages with striking accuracy.
As to the deeply pantheistic Three Deaths, in which the death
of a rich lady, a poor horse-driver, and a birch-tree are con-
trasted, it is a piece of poetry in prose that deserves a place
beside Goethe's best pieces of pantheistic poetry, while for its
social significance it is already a forerunner of the
Tolstoy of
the later epoch.
The Cossacks is an autobiographical novel, and relates to
the time, already mentioned on a previous page, when Tol-
stoy at twenty-four, running away from the meaningless life
he was living, went to Pyatigorsk, and then to a lonely Cos-
sack village on the Terek, hunted there in company with the
old Cossack Yeroshka and the young Lukashka, and found
in the poetical enjoyment of a beautiful nature, in the plain
life of these squatters, and in the mute adoration of a Cos-
sack girl, the awakening of his wonderful literary genius.
The appearance of this novel, in which one feels a most
genuine touch of genius, provoked violent discussions. It
was begun in 1852, but was not published till i860, when
all Russia was awaiting with anxiety the results of the work
of the Abolition of Serfdom Committees, foreseeing that
when serfdom should be done away with a complete destruc-
tion of all other rotten, obsolete, and barbarous institutions of
past ages would have to begin. For this great work of reform
Russia looked to Western civilisation for inspiration and for
teachings. And there came a young writer who, following in
the steps of Rousseau, revolted against that civilisation and
preached a return to nature and the throwing off of the
artificialities we call civilised life, which are in reality a poor
substitute for the happiness of free work amidst a free na-
ture. Everyone knows by this time the dominant idea of The
Cossacks. It is the contrast between the natural life of these
sons of the prairies and the artificial life of the young oflScer
thrown in their midst. He tells of strong men who are similar
to the American squatters, and have been developed in the
Steppes at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, by a perilous
life, in which force, endurance, and calm courage are a first
tolst6y 119
necessity. Into their midst comes one of the sickly products
of our semi-intellectual town life, and at every step he feels
himself the inferior of the Cossack Lukashka. He wishes to
do something on a grand scale, but has neither the intellectual
nor the physical force to accomplish it. Even his love is not
the strong healthy love of the prairie man, but a sort of
slight excitement of the nerves, which evidently will not last,
and which only produces a similar restlessness in the Cossack
girl, but cannot carry her away. And when he talks to her of
love, in the force of which he himself does not believe, she
sends him off with the words:
"
Go away, you weakling " I
Some saw in that powerful novel such glorification of the

semi-savage state as that in which writers of the eighteenth
century', and especially Rousseau, are supposed to have in-
dulged. There is in Tolstoy nothing of the sort, as there was
nothing of the sort in Rousseau. But Tolstoy saw that in the
life of the Cossacks there is more vitality, more vigour, more
power, than in his well-born hero's life and he told it in a

beautiful and impressive form. His hero like whom there
are thousands upon thousands ^has none of the powers that
come from manual work and struggle with nature; and
neither has he those powers which knowledge and true civil-
isation might have given him. A real intellectual power is
"
not asking itself at every moment,
"
Am I right, or am I
wrong? It feels that there are principles in which it is not

wrong. The same is true of a moral force: it knows that to
such an extent it can trust to itself. But, like so many thou-
sands of men in the so-called educated classes, Nekludoff has
neither of these powers. He is a weakling, and Tolstoy
brought out his intellectual and moral frailty with a distinct-
ness that was bound to produce a deep impression.
. EDUCATIONAL WORK
In the years 1 859-1 862 the struggle between the
" " " "
fathers and the sons which called forth violent at-
"
tacks against the young generation, even from such an ob-
"
jective writer as Gontcharoff to say nothing of Pisemskiy
and several others, was going on all over Russia. But we
do not know which side had Tolstoy's sympathy. It must be
I20 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
said, though, that most of this time he was abroad, with his
cider brother Nicholas, who died of consumption in the south
of France. All we know is that the failure of Western civilisa-
tion in attaining any approach to well-being and equality for

the great masses of the people deeply struck Tolstoy; and
we are told by Vengueroff that the only men of mark whom
he went to see during this journey abroad were Auerbach,
who wrote at that time hisSchwartzwald stories from the life
of the peasants and edited popular almanacks, and Proudhon,
who was then in exile at Brussels. Tolstoy returned to Russia
at the moment when the serfs were freed, accepted the posi-
tion of a mirovoy posrednik, or arbitrator of peace between
the landlords and the freed serfs, and, settling at Yasnaya
Polyana, began there his work of education of children. This
he started on entirely independent lines, that is, on purely
anarchistic principles, totally free from the artificial methods
of education which had been worked out by German pedagog-
ists, and were then greatly admired in Russia. There was no
sort of discipline in his school. Instead of working out pro-
grammes according to which the children are to be taught, the
teacher, Tolstoy said, must learn from the children them-
selves what to teach them, and must adapt his teaching to the
individual tastes and capacities of each child. Tolstoy carried
this out with his pupils, and obtained excellent results. His
methods, however, have as yet received but little attention;
and only one great writer another poet, William Morris,
has advocated (in News from Nowhere) the same free-
dom in education. But we may be sure that some day Tol-
stoy's Yasnaya Polyana papers, studied by some gifted
teacher, as Rousseau's Emile was studied by Froebel, will
become the starting point of an educational reform much
deeper than the reforms of Pestalozzi and Froebel.
It is now known that a violent end to this educational
experiment was put by the Russian Government. During

Tolstoy's absence from his estate a searching was made by
the gendarmes, who not only frightened to death Tolstoy's
old aunt (she fell ill after that) but visited every corner of
the house and read aloud, with cynical comments, the most
intimate diary which the great writer had kept since his
youth. More searchings were promised, so that Tolstoy
TOLSTOY 121
Intended to emigrate for ever to London, and warned Alexan-
der IL, through the Countess A. A. Tolstaya that he kept
a loaded revolver by his side and would shoot down the first
police officer who would dare to enter his house. The school
had evidently to be closed.
WAR AND PEACE

In the year 1862 Tolstoy married the young daughter
of a Moscow doctor, Bers; and, staying nearly without
interruption on his Tula estate, he gave his time, for the
next fifteen or sixteen years, to his great work. War and
Peace, and next to Atina Karenina. His first intention was to
write (probably untilising some family traditions and docu-
ments) a great historical novel. The Decembrists (see Chap-
ter L) and he finished in 1863 the first chapters of this novel
,
(Vol. IIL of his Works, in Russian; Moscow, loth edition).

But in trying to create the types of the Decembrists he must
have been taken back in his thoughts to the great war of
1 81 2. He had heard so much about it in the family tradi-
tions of the Tolstoys and Volkhonskys, and that war had so

much in common with the Crimean war through which he
himself had lived that he came to write this great epopee.
War and Peace, which has no parallel in any literature.
A whole epoch, from 1805 to 18 12, is reconstituted in
these volumes, and its meaning appears not from the con-
ventional historian's point of view, but as it was understood
then by those who lived and acted in those years. All the
Society of those times passes before the reader, from its
highest spheres, with their heart-rending levity, conventional
ways of thinking, and superficiality, down to the simplest
soldier in the army, who bore the hardships of that terrible
conflict as a sort of ordeal that was sent by a supreme power
upon the Russians, and who forgot himself and his own suf-
A
ferings in the life and sufferings of the nation. fashionable
drawing-room at St. Petersburg, the salon of a person who
is admitted into the intimacy of the dowager-empress; the
quarters of the Russian diplomatists in Austria and the

Austrian Court; the thoughtless life of the Rostoff family at
Moscow and on their estate; the austere house of the old
general, Prince Bolkonskiy; then the camp life of the Rus-
sian General Staff and of Napoleon on the one hand, and on
the other, the inner life of a simple regiment of the hussars
or of a field-battery; then such world-battles as Schongraben,
the disaster of Austerlitz, Smolensk, and Borodino; the
abandonment and the burning of Moscow; the life of those
Russian prisoners who had been arrested pell-mell during the
conflagration and were executed in batches; and finally the
horrors of the retreat of Napoleon from Moscow, and the
guerilla warfare all this immense variety of scenes, events,
and small episodes, interwoven with romance of the deepest
interest, is unrolled before us as we read the pages of this
epopee of Russia's great conflict with Western Europe.
We make acquaintance with more than a hundred differ-
ent persons, and each of them is so well depicted, each has his
or her own human physiognomy so well determined, that each
one appears with his or her own individuality, distinct
amongst the scores of actors in the same great drama. It is
not so easy to forget even the least important of these figures,
be it one of the ministers of Alexander I. or any one of the
ordinances of the calvary officers. Nay, every anonymous
soldier of various rank the infantryman, the hussar, or the
artilleryman has his own physiognomy; even the different
chargers of Rostoff, or of Deni'soff, stand out with individual
features. When you think of the variety of human characters
which pass under your eyes on these pages, you have the real
sensation of a vast crowd of historical events that you seem
to have lived through of a whole nation roused by a calam-
ity; while the impression you retain of human beings whom
you have loved in fFar and Peace, or for whom you have suf-
fered when misfortune befell them, or when they themselves
have wronged others (as for instance, the old countess Rostoff
and Sonitchka) the impression left by these persons, when
they emerge in your memory from the crowd, gives to that
crowd the same illusion of reality which little details give to
the personality of a hero.
The great difl'iculty in an historical novel lies not so much
in the representation of secondary figures as in the
painting
great historical personalities the chief actors of the histori-
cal drama so as to make of them real, living beings. But this
TOLSTOY 123
Is exactly where Tolstoy has succeeded most wonderfully. His
Bagration, his Alexander I., his Napoleon, and his Kutiizoff
are living men, so realistically represented that one sees them
and is tempted to seize the brush and paint them, or to
imitate their movements and ways of talking.
The " philosophy of war " which Tolstoy had devel-
oped in fVar and Peace has provoked, as is well known, pas-
sionate discussion and bitter criticism and yet its correctness
;
cannot but be recognised. In fact, it is recognised by such as

know war from within, or have witnessed human mass-
actions. Of course, those who know war from newspaper
reports, especially such officers as, after having recited many
" "
times over an improved report of a battle as they would
have likedit to be, giving themselves a leading role such
men will not agree with Tolstoy's ways of dealing with
"heroes"; but it is sufficient to read, for instance, what
Moltke and Bismarck wrote in their private letters about the
war of 1870-71, or the plain, honest descriptions of some his-
torical event with which we occasionally meet, to understand
Tolstoy's views of war and his conceptions of the extremely
" "
limited part played by heroes in historical events. Tolstoy
did not invent the artillery officer Timokhin who had been
forgotten by his superiors in the centre of the Schongraben
position, and who, continuing all day long to use his four
guns with initiative and discernment, prevented the battle
from ending in disaster for the Russian rearguard: he
knew only too well of such Timokhins in Sebastopol. They
compose the real vital force of every army in the world; and
the success of an army depends infinitely more upon its num-
ber of Timokhins than upon the genius of its high com-
manders. This is where Tolstoy and Moltke are of one
"
mind, and where they entirely disagree with the war-
"
correspondent and with the General Staff historians.
In the hands of a writer possessed of less genius than
Tolstoy, such a thesis might have failed to appear convincing;
but in JVar and Peace it appears almost with the force of self-
evidence. Tolstoy's Kutuzoff is as he was in reality quite
an ordinary man; but he was a great man for the precise rea-
son, that, forseeing the unavoidable and almost fatal drift of
events, instead of pretending that he directed them, he simply
did his best to utilise the vital forces of his army in order to
avoid still greater disasters.
It hardly need be said that IVar and Peace is a powerful
indictment against war. The effect which the great writer has
exercised in this direction upon his generation can be actually
seen in Russia. It was already apparent during the great
Turkish war of 1877-78, when it was absolutely impossible
to find in Russia a correspondent who would have described
how ''^we have peppered the enemy with grape-shot," or how
"we shot them down like nine-pins." If a man could have
been found to use in his letters such survivals of savagery, no
paper would have dared to print them. The general character
of the Russian war-correspondent had grown totally different;
and during the same war there came to the front such a novel-
ist as Garshin and such a painter as Vereschagin, with whom
to combat war became a life work.
Everyone who has read JVar and Peace remembers, of
course, the hard experiences of Pierre, and his friendship
with the soldier Karataeff. One feels that Tolstoy is full of
admiration for the quiet philosophy of this man of the people,
a typical representativê of the ordinary, common-sense Rus-
sian peasant. Some literary critics concluded that Tolstoy was
preaching in Karataeff a sort of Oriental fatalism. In the
present w riter's opinion there is nothing of the sort. Karataeff,
who is a consistent pantheist, simply knows that there are
natural calamities, which it is impossible to resist; and he
knows that the miseries which befall him his personal
sufferings, and eventually the shooting of a number of
prisoners among whom to-morrow he may or may not be
included are the unavoidable consequences of a much
greater event: the armed conflict between nations, which,
once it has begun, must unroll itself with all its revolting
but absolutely ungovernable consequences. Karataef? acts as
one of those cows on the slope of an Alpine mountain, men-
tioned by the philosopher Guyau, which, when it feels that
itbegins to slip down a steep mountain slope, makes at first
desperate efforts to hold its ground, but when it sees that
no effort can arrest its fatal gliding, lets itself quietly
be dragged down into the abyss. Karataeff accepts the
inevitable; but he is not a fatalist. If he had felt that
TOLSTdY 125
his efforts prevent war, he would have exerted
could
them. In fact, towards the end of the work, when Pierre tells
his wife Natasha that he is going to join the Decembrists (it
is told in veiled words, on account of censorship, but a
Russian reader understands nevertheless), and she asks

him: "Would Platon Karataeff approve of it?" Pierre,
"
after a moment's reflection, answers decidedly, Yes, he
would."
I know what a Frenchman, and Englishman, or a
don't
German when he reads f^Far and Peace I have heard
feels
educated Englishmen telling me that they found it dull but
I know that for educated Russians the reading of nearly
every scene fVar and Peace is a source of indescribable

in
Having, like so many Russians, read the

aesthetic pleasure.
work many times, I could not, if I were asked, name the
scenes which delight me most: the romances among the
children, the mass-effects in the war scenes, the regimental
life, the inimitable scenes from the life of the Court, aristoc-
racy, the tiny details concerning Napoleon or.Kutuzoff, or

the life of the Rostoffs the dinner, the hunt, the departure
from Moscow, and so on.
Many felt offended, in reading this epopee, to see their
hero, Napoleon, reduced to such small proportions, and even
ridiculed. But the Napoleon who came to Russia was no
longer the man who had inspired the armies of the sans-
culottes in their first steps eastwards for the abolition of
serfdom, absolutism, and inquisition. All men in high posi-
tions are actors to a great extent as Tolstoy so wonderfully
shows in so many places of his great work and Napoleon
surely was not the least actor among them. And by the time
he came to Russia, an emperor, now spoiled by the adula-
tion of the courtiers of all Europe and the worship of the
masses, who attributed to him what was attributable to the
vast stir of minds produced by the Great Revolution, and
consequently saw in him a half-god by the time he came
to Russia, the actor in him had got the upper hand over the
man in whom there had been formerly incarnated the youth-
ful energy of the suddenly-awakened French nation, in whom
had appeared the expression of that awakening, and through
whom its force had been the further increased. To these
was due the fascination which the
original characteristics
name of Napoleon upon his contemporaries. At
exercised
Smolensky, Kutuzoff himself must have experienced that fas-
cination when, rather than rouse the lion to a desperate battle,
he opened before him the way to retreat.
ANNA KAR^NINA,
Of all the Tolstoy's novels, Anna Karenina is the one
which has been the most widely read in languages. As
all
a work of art it is a master-piece. From the very first appear-
ance of the heroine, you feel that this woman must bring
with her a drama; from the very outset her tragical end is
as inevitable as it is in a drama of Shakespeare. In that
sense the novel is true to life throughout. It is a corner of
real life that we have before us. As a rule, Tolstoy is not
at his best in picturing women with the exception of very
young girls and I don't think that Anna Karenina herself
is as deep, as psychologically complete, and as living a crea-
tion as she might have been; but the more ordinary woman,
Dolly, is simply teeming with life. As to the various scenes
of the novel the ball scenes, the races of the officers, the
inner family life of Dolly, the country scenes on Levin's
estate, the death of his brother, and so on all these are
depicted in such a way that for its artistic qualities Anna

Karenina stands foremost even amongst the many beautiful
things Tolstoy has written.
And yet, notwithstanding all that, the novel produced in
Russia a decidedly unfavourable impression, which brought
to Tolstoy congratulations from the reactionary camp and
a cool reception from the advanced portion of society.
very
The fact is, that the question of marriage and of an eventual
separation between husband and wife had been most earnestly
debated in Russia by the best men and women, both in litera-
ture and in life. It is self-evident that such indifferent levity
towards marriage as is continually unveiled before the Courts
" "
in Society divorce cases was absolutely and uncondition-
ally condemned; and that any form of deceit, such as makes
the subject of countless French novels and dramas, was ruled
out of question in any honest discussion of the matter. But
TOLSTdY 127
after the above levity and deceit had been severely branded,
the rights of a new love, serious and deep, appearing after
years of happy married life, had only been the more seri-
ously analysed. Tchernyshevsky's novel, fVhat is to be done,
can be taken as the best expression of the opinions upon
marriage which had become current amongst the better
portion of the young generation. Once you are married,
it was said, don't take lightly to love affairs, or so-called
flirtation. Every fit of passion does not deserve the name

of a new love; and what is sometimes described as love is
in a very great number of cases nothing but temporary
desire. Even if it were real love, before a real and deep
love has grown up, there is in most cases a period when
one has time to reflect upon the consequences that would
follow if the beginnings of his or her new sympathy should
attain the depth of such a love. But, with all that, there
are cases when a new love does come, and there are cases
when such an event must happen almost fatally, when, for
instance, a girl has been married almost against her will,
under the continued insistence of her lover, or when the
two have married without properly understanding each other,
or when one of the two has continued to progress in his or
her development towards a higher ideal, while the other,
after having worn for some time the mask of idealism, falls
into the Philistine happiness of warmed slippers. In such
cases separation not only becomes inevitable, but it often is to
the interest of both. It would be much better for both to live
through the sufferings which a separation would involve
(honest natures are by such sufferings made better) than to
spoil the entire subsequent existence of the one in most
cases, of both and to face moreover the fatal results that
living together under such circumstances would necessarily
mean for the children. This was, at least, the conclusion to
which both Russian literature and the best all-round portion
of our society had come.
And now came Tolstoy with Anna Karenina, which bears
"
the menacing biblical epigraph :
Vengeance is mine, and I
will repay it," and in which the biblical revenge falls upon
the unfortunate Karenina, who puts an end by suicide to her
sufferings after her separation from her husband. Russian
critics evidently could not accept Tolstoy's views. The case
of Karenina was one of those where there could be no ques-
"
tion of vengeance." She was married as a young girl to an
old and unattractive man. At that time she did not know
exactly what she was doing, and nobody had explained it to
her. She had never known love, and learned it for the first
time when she saw Vronskiy. Deceit, for her, was absolutely
out of the question; and to keep up a merely conventional
marriage would have been a sacrifice which would not have
made her husband and child any happier. Separation, and a
new life with Vronskiy, who seriously loved her, was the only
possible outcome. At any rate, if the story of Anna Karenina
had to end in tragedy, it was not in the least in consequence
of an act of supreme justice. As always, the honest artistic
genius of Tolstoy had itself indicated another cause the
real one. It was the inconsistency of Vronskiy and Karenina.
"
After having separated from her husband and defied public
"
opinion that is, the opinion of women who, as Tolstoy
shows it himself, were not honest enough to be allowed any
voice in the matter neither she nor Vronskiy had the cour-
age of breaking entirely with that society, the futility of
\^hich Tolstoy knows and describes so exquisitely. Instead of
that, when Anna returned with Vronskiy to St. Petersburg,
her own and Vronskiy's chief preoccupation was How
Betsey and other such women would receive her, if she made
her appearance among them. And it was the opinion of the
Betsies surely not Superhuman Justice which brought
Karenina to suicide.
RELIGIOUS CRISIS
Everyone knows the profound change which took place

in Tolstoy's fundamental conceptions of life in the years
1
875-1 878, when he had reached the age of about fifty. I do
not think that one has the right to discuss publicly what has
been going on in the very depths of another's mind; but, by
telling us himself the inner drama and the struggles which
he has lived through, the great writer has, so to say, invited
us to verify whether he was correct in his reasonings and
conclusions; and limiting ourselves to the psychological
tolst6y 129
material which he has given us, we may discuss it without
undue intrusion into the motives of his actions.
It is most striking to find, on re-reading the earlier works
of Tolstoy, how the ideas which he advocates at the present
time were always cropping up in his earlier writings.
Philosophical questions and questions concerning the moral
foundations of life interested him from his early youth. At
the age of sixteen he used to read philosophical works, and
"
during his university years, and even through the stormy
days of passion," questions as to how we ought to live rose
with their full importance before him. His autobiographical
novels, especially Youth, bear deep traces of that inner work
of his mind, even though, as he says in Confession, he has
never said all he might have said on this subject. Nay, it is
evident that although he describes his frame of mind in those
"
years as that of a philosophical Nihilist," he had never
parted, in reality, with the beliefs of his childhood.* He
always was an admirer and follower of Rousseau. In his
papers on education (collected in Vol. IV. of the tenth
Moscow edition of his Works) one finds treated in a very
radical way most of the burning social questions which he
has discussed in his later years. These questions even then
worried him so much that, while he was carrying on his school
work in Yasnaya Polyana and was a Peace Mediator that
is, in the years 1861-62 he grew so disgusted with the
unavoidable dualism of his position of a benevolent landlord,
"
that to quote his own words I should have come then,
perhaps, to the crisis which I reached fifteen years later, if

there had not remained one aspect of life which promised me
^salvation namely, married life." In other words, Tolstoy
was already very near to breaking with the privileged class
point of view on Property and Labour, and to joining the
great populistic movement which was already beginning in
Russia. This he probably would have done, had not a new
world of love, family life, and family interests, which he
*Introduction to the Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and to

an Analysis of the Christian Teaching, or Confession; Vol. I of
Tchertkoff's edition of fVorks prohibited by the Russian Censorship
(in Russian), Christchurch, 1902, p. 13.
embraced with the usual intensity of his passionate nature,
fastened the ties that kept him attached to his own class.
Art, too, must have contributed to divert his attention from
the social problem at least, from its economic aspects. In
JVar and Peace he developed the philosophy of the masses
versus the heroes, a philosophy which in those years would
have found among the educated men of all Europe very
few persons ready to accept it. Was it his poetical genius
which revealed to him the part played by the masses in the
great war of 1812, and taught him that they the masses,
and not the heroes had accomplished all the great things in
history? Or, was it but a further development of the ideas
which inspired him in his Yasnaya Polyana school, in opposi-
tion to all the educational theories that had been elaborated
by Church and State in the interest of the privileged classes?
At any rate. War and Peace must have offered him a problem
great enough to absorb his thoughts for a number of years;
and in writing this monumental work, in which he strove to
promote a new conception of history, he must have felt that
he was working in the right way. As to Anna Karenina, which
had no such reformatory or philosophical purpose, it must
have offered to Tolstoy the possibility of living through once
more, with all the intensity of poetical creation, the shallow
life of the leisured classes, and to contrast it with the life of
the peasants and their work. And it was while he was finishing
this novel that he began to fully realise how much his own
life was opposition to the ideals of his earlier years.
in
A must have been going on then in the
terrible conflict
mind of the great writer. The communistic feeling which had
induced him to put in italics the fact about the singer at
Lucerne, and to add to it a hot indictment against the civilisa-
tion of the moneyed classes the trend of thought which had
;
dictated his severe criticisms against private property in

Holstomyer: the History of a Horse; the anarchistic ideas
which had brought him, in his Yasnaya Polyana educational
articles, to a negation of a civilisation based on Capitalism
and State; and, on the other hand, his individual property
conceptions, which he tried to conciliate with his communistic
leanings (see the conversation between the two brothers
Levin in Anna Karenina) ; his want of sympathy with the
tolst6y 131
parties which stood in opposition to the Russian Government
and, at the same time, his profound, deeply rooted dislike of
that Government, all these tendencies must have been in an
irreconcilable conflict in the mind the great writer, with all
the passionate intensity which is characteristic of Tolstoy, as
with all men of genius. These constant contradictions were so
apparent that while less perspicacious Russian critics and the
Moscow Gazette defenders of serfdom considered Tolstoy
as having joined their reactionary camp, a gifted Russian
critic, Mihailovskiy, published in 1875 ^ series of remark-
able articles, entitled The Right Hand and the Left Hand of
Count Tolstoy, in which he pointed out the two men who
constantly were in conflict in the great writer. In these articles,
the young critic, a great admirer of Tolstoy, analysed the
advanced ideas which he had developed in his educational
articles, which were almost quite unknown at that time, and
contrasted them with the strangely conservative ideas which
he had expressed in his later writings. As a consequence,
Mihailovskiy predicted a crisis to which the great writer
was inevitably coming.
" "
I will not speak," he wrote, of Anna Karenina, first of all
because it is not yet terminated, and second, because one must speak
of it very much, or not at all. I shall only remark that in this novel
much more superficially, but for that very reason perhaps even more
distinctly than anywhere else one sees the traces of the drama which
is going on in the soul of the author. One asks oneself what such a
man is to do, how can he live, how shall he avoid that poisoning
of his consciousness which at every step intrudes into the pleasures
of a satisfied need? Most certainly he must, even though it may be
instinctively, seek for a means to put an end to the inner drama
of his soul, to drop the curtain; but how to do it? I think that if
an ordinary man were in such a position, he would have ended in
suicide or in drunkenness. A man of value will, on the contrary,
seek for other issues, and of such issues there are several." (Ote-
chestvennyia Zapiski, a review, June, 1875; also Mihailovskiy's
Works, Vol. Ill, p. 491.)
One of these issues Mihailovskiy continued would be

to write for the people. Of course, very few arc so happy as
to possess the talent and the faculties which are necessary
for that :
"
But once he (Tolstoy) is persuaded that the nation consists of
* *
two halves, and that even the innocent pleasures of the one half
are to the disadvantage of the other half why should he not devote
his formidable forces to this immense task? It is even difficult to
imagine that any other theme could interest the writer who carries
in his soul such a terrible drama as the one that Count Tolstoy carries.
So deep and so serious is it, so deeply does it go to the root of all
literary activity, that it must presumably destroy all other interests,
just as the creeper suffocates all other plants. And, is it not a suffi-
' '
ciently high aim in life, always to remind Society that its pleasures
and amusements are not the pleasures and the amusements of all
' '
mankind, to explain to Society the true sense of the phenomena of

progress, to wake up, be it only in the few, the more impressionable,
the conscience and the feeling of justice? And is not this field wide
enough for poetical creation? . . .
"
The drama which going on in Count Tolstoy's soul is my
is
"
hypothesis," Mihailovskiy concluded, but it is a legitimate hypo-
thesis without which it is impossible to understand his writings."
{Works, III, 496.)
It Is now known how much Mihailovskiy's hypothesis was

a prevision. In the years 1875-76, as Tolstoy was finishing
Anna Karenina, he began fully to realise the shallowness and
*'
the duality of the life that he had hitherto led. Something
"
strange," he says, began to happen within me I began to :
experience minutes of bewilderment, of arrest of "

life, as if I
did not know how to live and what to do." What for?
What next? " were the questions which *'
began to rise before
him. "Well," he said to himself, you will have 15,000
acres of land in Samara, 3000 horses but what of that?
And I was bewildered, and did not know what to think next."
Literary fame had lost for him its attraction, now that he
had reached the great heights to which War and Peace had
brought him. The little picture of Philistine family-happiness
which he had pictured in a novel before his marriage {Family
Happiness) he had now lived through, but it no longer
satisfied him. The life of Epicureanism which he had led
"
hitherto had lost all sense for him. I felt," he writes
"
in Confession, that what I had stood upon had broken
TOLSrdY 133
down; that there was nothing for me to stand upon; that
what I had lived by was no more, and that there was nothing
left me to live by. My life had come to a stop." The so-called
** "
family duties had lost their interest. When he thought
*'
of the education of his children, he asked himself, What
"
for? and very probably he felt that in his landlord's sur-
roundings he never would be able to give them a better
education than his own, which he condemned; and when he
began thinking of the well-being of the masses he would all
of a sudden ask himself: "What business have I to think
of it?"
He felt that he had nothing to live for. He even had no
"
wishes which he could recognise as reasonable. If a fairy
had come to me, and offered to satisfy my wish, I should not
have known what to wish ... I even could not wish to
know Truth, because I had guessed of what it would consist.
The Truth was, that life is nonsense." He had no aim in
life, no purpose, and he realised that without a purpose, and
with its unavoidable sufferings, life is not worth living {Coti'
fes5ion,\\,\n). "
He had not to use his own expression the moral
"
bluntness of imagination which would be required not to
have his Epicureanism poisoned by the surrounding misery;
and yet, like Schopenhauer, he had not the Will that was
necessary for adjusting his actions in accordance with the
dictates of his reason. Self-annihilation, death, appeared
therefore as a welcome solution.
However, Tolstoy was too strong a man to end his life in
suicide. He found an outcome, and that outcome was in-
dicated to him by a return to the love which he had cherished
"
in his youth the love of the peasant masses.
: Was it in con-
sequence of a strange, so to say a physical love of the truly
working people," he writes or of some other cause? but
he understood at last that he must seek the sense of life
among the millions who toil all their life long. He began to
examine with more attention than before the life of these
"
millions. And I began," he says, " to love these people."
And the more he penetrated into their lives, past and present,
"
the more he loved them, and the easier it was for me to
live." As to the life of the men of his own circle the wealthy
"
and I not bnly felt disgust for it
cultured, it lost all sense
:
in eyes." He understood that if he did

my "
not see what life
was worth living for, it was his own life in exclusive condi-
"
tions of epicureanism which had obscured the truth.
" " '
question, What is life?
'
I understood," he continues,
'
that my
and my reply to it, Evil,' were quite correct. I was only wrong
in applying them to life altogether. To the question,
'
What is life ? ' I
*
had got the reply, Evil and nonsense ! And so it was.
'
own My
life a life of indulgence in passions was void of sense and full of
evil, but this was true of my life only, not of the life of all men.
Beginning with the birds and the lowest animals, all live to maintain
life and to secure it for others besides themselves, while I not only did
not secure it for others: I did not secure it even for myself. I lived
as a parasite, and, having put to myself the question, What do I '
' * "
live for? I got the reply, For no purpose.'
Theconviction, then, that he must live as the millions live,

earning his own livelihood; that he must toil as the millions
toil; and that such a life is the only possible reply to the ques-
tions which had brought him to despair the only way to
escape the terrible contradictions which had made Schopen-
hauer preach self-annihilation, and Solomon, Sakiamuni, and
so many others preach their gospel of despairing pessimism,
this conviction, then, saved him and restored to him lost
energy and the will to live. But that same idea had inspired
thousands of the Russian youth, in those same years, and had
induced them to start the great movement
" "
"
F narod! "
Towards the people; be the people !
Tolstoy has told us in an admirable book, What is, then, to

be done? the impressions which the slums of Moscow pro-
duced upon him in 1881, and the influence they had upon the
ulterior development of his thoughts. But we do not yet know
what facts and impressions made him so vividly realise in
1875-81 the emptiness of the life which he had been hitherto
leading. Is it then presuming too much if I suggest that it
"
was this very same movement, towards the people," which
had inspired so many of the Russian youth to go to the
villages and the factories, and to live there the life of the
people, which finally brought Tolstoy, also,
to reconsider his
position as a rich landlord?
tolstc5y 135
That he knew of this movementnot the slightest
there is
doubt. The trial of the Netchaeff groups in 1871 was printed

in full in the Russian newspapers, and one could easily read
through all the youthful immatuj-ity of the speeches of the
accused the high motives and the love of the people which
inspired them. The trial of the Dolgushin groups, in 1875,
produced a still deeper impression in the same direction; but
especially the trial, m March, 1877, of those of transcendent
"
worth, girls Bardina, Lubatovitch, the sisters Subbotin, the
'*
Moscow Fifty were named in the circles, who, all
as they
from wealthy had led the life of factory girls, in the
families,
horrible f actor}'-barracks, working fourteen and sixteen hours
a day, in order to be with the working people and to teach
them. . . And then the trial of the " Hundred-and-
.
"
Ninety-Three and of Vera Zasulitch in 1878. However
great Tolstoy's dislike of revolutionists might have been, he
must have felt, as he read the reports of these trials, or heard
what was said about them at Moscow and in his province of
Tula, and witnessed round him the impression they had
produced he, the great artist, must have felt that this youth
was much nearer to what he himself was in his earlier days,
in 1861-62, than to those among whom he lived now the
"
Katkoffs, the Fets," and the like. And then, even if he
knew nothing about these trials and had heard nothing
"
about the Moscow Fifty," he knew, at least, Turgue-
neff's Virgin Soil, which was published in January, 1877,
and he must have felt, even from that imperfect picture,
so warmly greeted by young Russia, what this young Russia
was.
If Tolstoy had been in his twenties, he might possibly have
joined the movement, in one form or another, nothwithstand-
ing all the obstacles. Such as he was, in his surroundings, and
especially with his mind already preoccupied by the prob-
"
lem Where is the lever which would move human hearts
at large, and become the source of the deep moral reform of
"
every individual? with such a question on his mind, he had
to live through many a struggle before he was brought con-
sciously to take the very same step. For our young men and
women, the mere statement that one who had got an educa-
tion, thanks to the work of the masses, owed it therefore to
these masses to work in return for them this simple
statement was sufficient. They wealthy houses, took
left their
to the simplest life, hardly different from that of a working-
man, and devoted their lives to the people. But for many
reasons such as education, habits, surroundings, age, and,
perhaps, the great philosophical question he had in his
mind, Tolstoy had to live through the most painful struggles,
before he came to the very same conclusion, but in a different
way that is to say, before he concluded that he, as the bearer
:
of a portion of the divine Unknown, had to fulfil the will

of that Unknown, which will was that everyone should work
for the universal welfare.*
The moment, however, that he came to this conclusion, he
did not hesitate to act in accordance with it. The difficulties
he met in his way, before he could follow the injunction of
his conscience, must have been immense. We
can faintly guess
them. The sophisms he had to combat especially when all
those who understood the value of his colossal talent began
to protest against his condemnation of his previous writing
we can also easily imagine. And one can but admire the force
of his convictions, when he entirely reformed the life he had
hitherto led.
The small room he took in his rich mansion is well known
through a world-renowned photograph. Tolstoy behind the
plough, painted by Ryepin, has gone the round of the world,
and Is considered by the Russian Government so dangerous
an image that it has been taken from the public gallery where
it was exhibited. Limiting his own living to the strictly
necessary minimum of the plainest sort of food, he did his
* " That which some

people told me, and of which I sometimes
had tried to persuade myself namely, that a man should desire
happiness, not for himself only, but for others, his neighbours, and
for all men as well: this did not satisfy me. Firstly, I could not sin-
cerely desire happiness for others as much as for myself; secondly,
and chiefly, others, in like manner as myself, were doomed to un-
happiness and death, and therefore all my efforts for other peo-
ple's happiness were useless. I despaired." The understanding that
personal happiness is best found in the happiness of all did not appeal
to him, and the very striving towards the happiness of all, and an
advance towards it, he thus found insufficient as a purpose in life.
TOLSTOY 137
best, solong as his physical forces lasted, to earn that little
by physical work. And for the last years of his life he has
been writing even more than he ever did in the years of his
greatest literary productivity.
The effects of this example which Tolstoy has given man-
kind everyone knows. He believes, however, that he must
give also the philosophical and religious reasons for his
conduct, and this he did in a series of remarkable works.
Guided by the idea that millions of plain working people
realised the sense of life, and found it in life itself, which
"
they considered as the accomplishment of the will of the
Creator of the universe," he accepted the simple creed of the
masses of the Russian peasants, even though his mind was
reluctant to do so, and followed with them the rites of the
Greek Orthodox Church. There was a limit, however, to such
a concession, and there were beliefs which he positively could
not accept. He felt that when he was, for instance, solemnly
declaring during the mass, before communion, that he took

the latter in the literal sense of the words not figuratively
he was affirming something which he could not say in full
conscience. Besides, he soon made the acquaintance of the
Non-conformist peasants, Sutyaeff and Bondaryoff, whom he
deeply respected, and he saw, from his intercourse with them,
that by joining the Greek Orthodox Church he was lending
a hand to all its abominable prosecutions of the Non-conform-
ists that he was a party to the hatred which all Churches
profess towards each other.
Consequently, he undertook a complete study of Chris-
tianity, irrespective of the teachings of the different churches,
including a careful revision of the translations of the gospels,
with the intention of finding out what was the real meaning
of the Great Teacher's precepts, and what had been added to
it by his followers. In a remarkable, most elaborate work
(Criticism of Dogmatic Theology), he demonstrated how

fundamentally the interpretations of the Churches differed
from what was in his opinion the true sense of the words of
the Christ. And then he worked out, quite independently, an
interpretation of the Christian teaching which is quite similar
to the interpretations that have been given to it by all the
great popular movements in the ninth century in Armenia,
later on by Wycliff, and by the early Anabaptists, such as
Hans Denck,* laying, however, like the Quakers, especial
stress on the doctrine of non-resistance.
HIS INTERPRETATION OF THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING

The ideas which Tolstoy thus slowly worked out are
explained in a succession of three separate works ( i ) Dog-
:
matic Theology, of which the Introduction is better known as

Confession and was written in 1882; (2) What is my Faithf
(1884); and (3) IV hat is then to be Done? (1886), to
which must be added The Kingdom of God in Yourselves, or
Christianity, not as a mystic Teaching but as a new Under-
standing of Life (1900) and, above all, a small book, The
Christian Teaching (1902), which is written in short, con-
cise, numbered paragraphs, like a catechism, and contains a
full and definite exposition of Tolstoy's views. A
number of
other works dealing with the same subject such as The Life
and the Teachings of the Christ, My
Reply to the Synod^s
Edict of Excommunication, fVhat is Religion, On Life, etc.,
were published during the same year. These books represent
the work of Tolstoy for the last twenty years, and at least
four of them (Confession, Faith, What is to be Done,
My
and Christian Teaching) must be read in the indicated suc-
cession by everyone who wishes to know the religious and
moral conceptions of Tolstoy and to extricate himself from
the confused ideas which are sometimes represented as Tol-
stoyism. As to the short work. The Life and the Teaching of
Jesus, it is, so to speak, the four gospels in one, told in a
language easy to be understood, and free of all mystical and
metaphorical elements; it contains Tolstoy's reading of the
gospels.
These works represent the most remarkable attempt at a
rationalistic interpretation of Christianity that has everbeen
ventured upon. Christianity appears in them devoid of all
gnosticism and mysticism, as a purely spiritual teaching about
the universal spirit which guides man to a higher life a life
of equality and of friendly relations with all men. If Tolstoy
Sc Anabaptism from its Rise at Zwickau to its Fall at Miin-

iter, 1521-1536, by Richard Heath {Baptist Manuals, I, 1895).
tolst6y 139
accepts Christianity as the foundation of his faith, not
it is
because he considers it as a revelation, but because its teach-

ing, purified of all the additions that have been made to it
"
by the churches, contains the very same solution of the
problem of life as has been given more or less explicitly by
the best of men, both before and since the gospel was given to
us a succession which goes on from Moses, Isaiah, and
Confucius, to the early Greeks, Buddha, and Socrates, down
to Pascal, Spinoza, Fichte, Feuerbach, and all others, often
unnoticed and unknown, who, taking no teachings on mere
trust, have taught us, and spoken to us with sincerity, about
the meaning of life"*; because it gives "an explanation
" "
of the meaning of life and a solution of this contradic-
tion between the aspiration after welfare and life, and the
"
consciousness of their being unattainable (Chr. Teach.
13) "between the desire for happiness and life on the
one hand, and the increasingly clear perception of the cer-
"
tainty of calamity and death on the other (ibid., 10) .
As to the dogmatic and mystical elements of Christianity,

which he treats as mere additions to the real teaching of
Christ, he considers them so noxious that even he makes the
"
following remark: It is terrible to say so (but sometimes I
have this thought) : if the teaching of Christ, together with
the teaching of the Church that has grown upon it, did not
exist at all those who now call themselves Christians would
have been nearer to the teachings of Christ that is, to an
intelligent teaching about the good of life than they are
now. The moral teachings of all the prophets of mankind
would not have been closed for them." t
* The Christian
Teaching, Introduction, p. vi. In another similar
passage he adds Marcus Aurelius and Lao-tse to the above-men-
.
tioned teachers.
t fVhat is my Belief, ch. X, p. 145 of Tcliertkofi's edition of
Works prohibited by Russian Censorship. On pp. 18 and 19 of the
little work, What is Religion and What is its Substance. Tolstoy
"
expresses himself even more severely about Church Christianity."
He also gives us in this remarkable little viôrk his ideas about the
substance of religion altogether, from which one can deduct its
desirable relations to science, to synthetic philosophy, and to philo-
sophical ethics.
Putting aside all the mystical and metaphysical conceptions
which have been interwoven with Christianity, he concentrates
his main attention upon the moral aspects of the Christian
teaching. One of the most powerful means he says by
which men are prevented from living a life in accordance
" "
with this teaching is religious deception." Humanity
moves slowly but unceasingly onward, towards an ever higher
development of consciousness of the true meaning of life, and
towards the organisation of life in conformity with this
"
development of consciousness; but in this ascendant march
"
all men do not move at an equal pace, and the less sensitive
continue to adhere to the previous understanding and order
of life, and try to uphold it." This they achieve mainly by
"
means of the religious deception which consists in the inten-
tional confusion of faith with superstition, and the substitu-
tion of the one for the other." (Chr. Teach., i8i, i8o.)
The only means to free one's self from this deception is he
*'
says to understand and to remember that the only instru-
ment which man possesses for the acquisition of knowledge
is reason, and that therefore every teaching which affirms
that which is contrary to reason is a delusion." Altogether,

Tolstoy is especially emphatic upon this point of the impor-
tance of reason. (See TheChristian Teaching, 206, 214.)
Another great obstacle to the spreading of the Christian
teaching he sees in the current belief in the immortality of
the soul such as it is understood now. {My Belief, p. 134
of Tchertkoff's Russ. ed.) In this form he repudiates it; but
we can he says give a deeper meaning to our life by mak-
ing it to be a service to men to mankind by merging our
life into the life of the universe; and although this idea may
seem less attractive than the idea of individual immortality,
*'
though little, it is sure." (Chr. Teaching.)
In speaking of God he takes sometimes a pantheistic posi-
tion, and describes God as Life, or as Love, or else as the
Ideal which man is conscious of in himself ( Thoughts about
God, collected by V. and A. Tchertkoff ) but in his last work
;
{Christian Teaching, ch. VII. and VIII.) he prefers to iden-

"
tify God with the universal desire for welfare which is the
*'
source of all life." So that, according to the Christian teach-
ing, God is that Essence of life which man recognises both
tolst6y 141
within himself and in the whole universe as the desire for wel-
fare; it being at the same time the cause by which this Essence
"
is enclosed and conditioned in individual and corporal life
(36). Every reasoning man Tolstoy adds comes to a

similiar conclusion. Adesire for universal welfare appears in
every reasoning man, after his rational consciousness has been
awakened at a certain age; and in the world around Man
the same desire is manifest in all separate beings, each of
whom strives for his own welfare (37). These two desires
'*
converge towards one distinct purpose definite, attainable,
and joyful for man." Consequently, he concludes. Observa-
tion, Tradition (religious), and Reason, all three, show him
"
that the greatest welfare of man, towards which all men
aspire, can only be obtained by perfect union and concord
among men." All three show that the immediate work of the
world's dev-elopment, in which he is called upon to take part,
"
is the substitution of union and harmony for division and
"
discord." The inner tendency of that spiritual being love
which is in the process of birth within him, impels him in
the same direction."
Union and harmony, and steady, relentless effort to pro-
mote them, which means not only all the work required for
supporting one's life, but work also for increasing universal
welfare these are, then, the two final accords in which all
the discords, all the storms, which for more than twenty years
had raged in the distraught mind of the great artist, all the
religious ecstasies and the rationalistic doubts which had
agitated his superior intelligence in its insistent search for
truth finally found their solution. On the highest metaphysi-
cal heights the striving of every living being for its own wel-
fare, which is Egoism and Love at the same time because it is
Self- Love, and rational Self-Love must embrace all congeners
of the same species this striving for individual welfare by
"
its very nature tends to comprise all that exists. It expands
its limits naturally by love, first for one's family one's wife
and children then for friends, then for one's fellow-country-
men but Love is not satisfied with this, and tends to embrace
;
all" {ibid.,U6).
MAIN POINTS OF THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS
The central point of the Christian teaching Tolstoy sees
in non-resistance. During the first years after his crisis he
" "
preached absolute non-resistance to evil in full con-
formity with the verbal and definite sense of the words of the
gospel, which words, taken in connection with the sentence
about the right and the left cheek, evidently mean complete
humility and resignation. However, he must have soon
realised that such a teaching not only was not in conformity
with his above-mentioned conception of God, but that it also
amounted simply to abetting evil. It contains precisely that
license to evil which always has been preached by the State
religions in the interest of the ruling classes, and Tolstoy
must have realised this. He tells us how he once met in a
train the Governor of the Tula province at the head of a
detachment of soldiers who were armed with rifles and pro-
vided with a cart-load of birch-rods. They were going to
flog the peasants of a village in order to enforce an act of
sheer robbery passed by the Administration in favour of the
landlord and in open breach of the law. He describes with
his well-known graphical powers how, in their presence, a
" "
Liberal lady openly, loudly and in strong terms con-
demned the Governor and the officers, and how they were
ashamed. Then he describes how, when such an expedition
began its work, the peasants, with truly Christian resignation,
would cross themselves with trembling hand and lie down on
the ground, to be martyrised and flogged till the heart of the
victim stopped beating, without the officers having been
touched in the least by that Christian humility. What Tol-
stoy did when he met the expedition, we don't know: he does
not tell us. He probably remonstrated with the chiefs and
advised the soldiers not to obey them that is, to revolt. At
any rate, he must have felt that a passive attitude in the face
of this evil the non-resistance to it would have meant a
tacit evil it would have meant giving support
approval of the ;
to it. Moreover, a passive attitude of resignation in the face

of evil is so contrary to the very nature of Tolstoy, that he
could not remain for a long time a follower of such a doctrine,
and he soon altered his interpretation of the text of the gospel
TOLSTdY 143
"
in the sense of: Don't resist evil by violence." All his later
writings have consequently been a passionate resistance

against the different forms of evil which he has seen round
about himself in the world. Continually he makes his mighty
voice resound against both evil and evil-doers; he only
objects to physical force in resisting evil because he believes
that works harm.
The other four points of the Christian teaching, always
according to Tolstoy's interpretation of it, are: Do not be
angry, or, at least, abstain from anger as much as you can:
Remain true to the one woman with whom you have
united your life, and avoid all that excites passion: Do not
take oaths, which in Tolstoy's opinion means Never tie your
:
hands with an oath; oath-taking is the means resorted to by

all governments to bind men in their consciences to do what-
ever they bid them do; and finally. Love your enemies; or, as
Tolstoy points it out in several of his writings Never judge,
:
and never prosecute another before a tribunal.

To these five rules Tolstoy gives the widest possible inter-
pretation and he deducts from them all the teachings of free
communism. He proves with a wealth of arguments that to
live upon the work of others, and not to earn one's own living,
is to break the very law of all nature; it is the main cause of
all social evils, as also of nearly all personal unhappiness

and discomforts. He shows how the present capitalistic
organisation of labour is as bad as slavery or serfdom has
ever been.
He insists upon the simplification of life in food, dress,
and dwelling which results from one*s taking to manual
work, especially on the land, and shows the advantages
that even the rich and idle of to-day would find in such
labour. He shows how all the evils of present misgovernment
result from the fact that the very men who protest against
bad government make every effort to become a part or that
government.
As emphatically as he protests against the Church, he
protests against the State, as the only real means for bringing
to an end the present slavery imposed upon men by this
institution. He advises men to refuse having anything to do
with the State. And finally, he proves with a wealth of illus-
tratlons in which his artistic powers
appear in full, that the
lust of the rich classes for wealth and luxury a lust which
has no limits, and can have none
what maintains all this
is
slavery, all these abnormal conditions of

life, and all the
prejudices and teachings now disseminated by Church and

State in the interest of the ruling classes. ^
On the other hand, whenever he speaks of God, or of

immortality, his constant desire is to show that he needs none
of the mystical conceptions and metaphysical words which are
usually resorted to. And while his language is borrowed from
religious writings, he always brings forward, again and again,
the rationalistic interpretation of religious conceptions. He
carefully sifts from the Christian teaching all that cannot be
accepted by followers of other religions, and brings into relief
all that is common to Christianity as well as to other positive
religions all that is simply humane in them and thus might be

;
approved by reason, and therefore be accepted by dis-

believers as well as by believers.
In other words, in proportion as he has lately studied the
teachings of different founders of religions and those of
moral philosophers, he has tried to determine and to state
the elements of a universal religion in which all men could
unite a religion, however, which would have nothing super-
natural in it, nothing that reason and knowledge would have
to reject, but would contain a moral guidance for all men at
whatever stage of intellectual development they may halt.
Having thus begun, in 1875-77, by joining the Greek Ortho-
dox religion in the sense in which Russian peasants under-
stand it he came finally in The Christian Teaching to the
construction of a Moral Philosophy which, in his opinion,
might be accepted by the Christian, the Jew, the Mussulman,
the Buddhist, and so on, and the naturalist philosopher as
well a religion which would retain the only substantial ele-
ments of all religions: namely, a determination of one's rela-
tion towards the universe (fFeltanschauung)/m accordance
with present knowledge, and a recognition of the equality of
all men.
Whether these two elements, one of which belongs to the
domain of knowledge and science and the other (justice) to
the domain of ethics, are sufficient to constitute a religion,
1
tolst6y 145
and need no substratum of mysticism is a question which
lies beyond the scope of this book.
LATEST WORKS OF ART

The disturbed conditions of the civilised world, and
especially of Russia, have evidently more than once attracted
the attention of Tolstoy, and induced him to publish a con-
siderable number of letters, papers, and appeals on various
subjects. In all of them he advocates, first of all, and above
all, an attitude of negation towards Church and State. Never
enter the service of the State, even in the provincial and
urban institutions, which are granted by the State only as a
snare. Refuse to support exploitation in any form. Refuse to
perform military service, whatever the consequences may be :
for this is the only method of being truly anti-militarist.

Never have anything to do with Courts, even if you are
offended or assailed; nothing but evil results from them.
Such a negative and eminently sincere attitude, he maintains,
would better promote the cause of true progress than any
revolutionary means. As a first step, however, towards the
abolition of modern slavery, he also recommends the national-
isation, or rather the municipalisation, of land.
It is manifest that the works of art which he wrote during
the last five-and-twenty years, after 1876, must bear deep
traces of his new point of view. He began, first, by writing for
the people, and although most of his small stories for popular
reading are spoiled to some extent by the too obvious desire
of drawing a certain moral, and a consequent distortion of
facts, there are a few among them especially much How
Land is required for a Man which are wonderfully artistic.
The Death of Ivan Illytch need only be named to recall the
profound impression produced by its appearance.
In order to speak to a still wider audience in the theatres
for the people, which began to be started in Russia about that
time, he wrote The Power of Darkness, a most terrible
drama from the life of the peasants, in which he aimed at
producing a deep impression by means of a Shakespearian or
rather Marlowian realism. His other play The Fruits of
Civilisation Is in a comical vein. The superstitions of the
*' "
upper classes as regards spiritualism are ridiculed in It.
Both plays (the former with alterations in the final scene)
are played with success on the Russian stage.
However, it is not only the novels and dramas of this
period which are works of Art. The five religious works
which have been named on a preceding page are also works
of art in the best sense of the word, as they contain
descrip-
tive pages of a high artistic value; while the very ways m
which Tolstoy explains the economical principles of Social-
Ism, or the No-Governm.ent principles of Anarchism, are as
much masterpieces as the best socialistic and anarchistic pages
of William Morris far surpassing the latter in simplicity
and artistic power.
Kreutzer Sonata is surely, after Anna Karenina, the work
of Tolstoy which has been the most widely read. However,
the strange theme of this novel and the crusade against
marriage altogether which it contains so much attract the
attention of the reader and usually become the subject of so
passionate a discussion among those who have read it, that
the high artistic qualities of this novel and the analysis
of life which it contains have hardly received the recognition
they deserve. The moral teaching that Tolstoy has put in
Kreutzer Sonata hardly need be mentioned, the more so since
the author himself has withdrawn it to a very great extent.
But for the appreciation of Tolstoy's work and for the
comprehension of the artist's inner life this novel has
a deep meaning. No
stronger accusation against marriage
for mere outer attraction, without intellectual union or sym-
pathy of purpose between husband and wife, has ever been
written; and the struggle that goes on between Koznysheff
and his wife is one of the most deeply dramatic pages of
married life that we possess in any literature.
Tolstoy's What is Art? is mentioned in Chapter VIII. of
this book. His greatest production of the latest period Is,
however. Resurrection. It is not enough to say that the energy
and youthfulness of the septuagenarian author which appear
In this novel are simply marvellous. Its absolute artistic
qualities are so high that if Tolstoy had written nothing else
but Resurrection he would have been recognised as one of
the great writers. All those parts of the novel which deal with
tolst6y 147
"
Society, beginning with the letter of Missie," and Missie
herself, her father, and so on, are of the same high standard
as the best pages of the first volume of War and Peace.
Everything which deals with the Court, the jurymen, and the
prisons is again of the same high standard. It may be said,
of course, that the principal hero, Nekludoff, is not sufficiently
living; but this is quite unavoidable for a figure which is meant
to represent, if not the author himself, at least his ideas or
his experience this is a drawback of all novels containing so
:
much of an autobiographical element. As regards all the

other figures, however, of which so immense a number pass
under our eyes, each of them has its own character in striking
relief, even if the figure (like one of the judges or of the
jurymen, or the daughter of a jailer) appears only on a
single page, never to reappear again.
The number of questions which are raised in this novel
social, political,party questions, and so on is so great that
a whole society, such as it is, living and throbbing with all its
problems and contradictions, appears before the reader, and
this is not Russian Society only, but Society the civilised world
over. In fact, apart from the scenes which deal with the
political prisoners. Resurrection applies to all nations. It is
the most international of all works of Tolstoy. At the same

time the main question: "Has Society the right to judge?
Is it reasonable in maintaining a system of tribunals and
"
prisons? this terrible question which the coming century is
bound to solve, is so forcibly impressed upon the reader that
it is
impossible to read the book without, at least, conceiving
serious doubts about our system of punishments. Ce livre
pesera sur la conscience dti siecle. ("This book will weigh
upon the conscience of the century ") was the remark of a
French critic, which I heard repeated. And of the justice
of this remark I have had the opportunity of convincing
myself during my numerous conversations in America with
persons having anything to do with prisons. The book
weighs already on their consciences.
The same remark applies to the whole activity of Tolstoy.
Whether his attempt at impressing upon men the elements
of a universal religion which he believes reason trained
by science might accept, and which man might take as guid-
ance for his moral life, attaining at the same time towards
the solution of the great social problem and all questions
connected with it whether this bold attempt be successful
or not, can only be decided by time. But it is absolutely
certain that no man since the times of Rousseau has so
profoundly stirred the human conscience as Tolstoy has
by his moral writings. He has fearlessly stated the moral
aspects of all the burning questions of the day, in a form
so deeply impressive that whoever has read any one of his
writings can no longer forget these questions or set them
aside; one feels the necessity of finding, in one way or
another, some solution. Tolstoy's influence, consequently, is
not one which may be measured by mere years or decades
of years: it will last long. Nor is it limited to one country
only. In millions of copies his works are read in all languages,
appealing equally to men and women of all classes and all
nations, and everywhere producing the same result. Tolstoy
is now the most loved man the most touchingly loved man
in the world.
PART V
Goncharoff, Dostoy^vskiy, Nekrasoff
CHAPTER V
GONCHAR6fF DOSTOYivSKI NEKRASOFP
GONCHAROFF 0*/o2o^ TheRussian Malady of Oblomov-

ism Is it exclusively Russian ?The Precipice Dostoyevskiy
His first Novel General Character of his Work Memoirs
from a Dead House Down-trodden and O ifended Crime and
Punishment The Brothers Karatnazoff Nekrasoff Discus-
sions about his Talent His Love of the People Apotheosis of
Woman Other Prose-writers of the same Epoch Serghei
Aksakoff Dahl Ivan Panaeff Hvoschinskaya (V. Krestov-
skiy-pseudonyme). Poets of the same Epoch KoltsoflF Nikitin
Plescheelf. The Admirers of Pure Art: Tutcheff A Maykoff
Scherbina Polonskiy A. Fet A. K. Tolstoy ^The Trans-
lators.
gonchar6ff.
G ONCHAROFF occupies in Russian literature the

next place after Turgueneff and Tolstoy, but this
extremely interesting writer is almost entirely
unknown to English readers. He was not a prolific writer
and, apart from small sketches, and a book of travel ( The
Frigate Pallas)^ he has left only three novels: Com- A
mon Story (translated into English by Constance" Garnett),
Oblomoff, and The Precipice, of which the second, Oblomoff,
has conquered for him a position by the side of the two
great writers just named.
In Russia Goncharoff is always described as a writer of
an eminently objective talent, but this qualification must
evidently be taken with a certain restriction. A
writer is never
entirely objective he has his sympathies and antipathies,
and do what he may, they will appear even through his most
objective descriptions. On the other hand, a good writer
seldom introduces his own Individual emotions to speak for
his heroes there is none of this In either Turguenefl or Tol-
:
151
stoy. However, with Turgueneff and Tolstoy you feel that
they livewith their heroes, that they suffer and feel happy
with them that they are in love when the hero is in love,
and that they feel miserable when misfortunes befall him;
but you do not feel that to the same extent with Goncharoff.
Surely he has lived through every feeling of his heroes, but
the attitude he tries to preserve towards them is an attitude
of strict impartiality an attitude, I hardly need say, which,
properly speaking, a writer can never maintain. An epic
repose and an epic profusion of details certainly characterise
Goncharoff 's novels; but these details are not obtrusive, they
do not diminish the impression, and the reader's interest in
the hero is not distracted by all these minutiae, because, under
Goncharoff's pen, they never appear insignificant. One feels,
however, that the author is a person who takes human life
quietly, and will never give way to a burst of passion, what-
soever may happen to his heroes.
The most popular of the novels of Goncharoff is Oblomoff,
which, like Turgueneff's Fathers and Sons, and Tolstoy's
fVar and Peace and Resurrection, is, I venture to say, one
of the profoundest productions of the last half century. It
is thoroughly Russian, so Russian indeed that
only a Russian
can fully appreciate it; but it is at the same time universally
human, as it introduces a type which is almost as universal
as that of Hamlet or Don Quixote.
Oblomoff is a Russian nobleman, of moderate means the
owner of six or seven hundred serfs and the time of action
is, let us say, in the fifties of the nineteenth century. All the
early childhood of Oblomoff was such as to destroy in him

any capacity of initiative. Imagine a spacious, well-kept
nobleman's estate in the middle of Russia, somewhere on
the picturesque banks of the Volga, at a time when there
were no railways to disturb a peaceful patriarchal life, and no
" "
questions that could worry the minds of its inhabitants.
"
A reign of plenty," both for the owners of the estate and
the scores of their servants and retainers, characterises their
life. Nurses, servants, serving boys and maids surround the
child from its earliest days, their only thoughts being how
to feed it, make it grow, render it strong, and never worry
it with either much learning or, in fact, with
any sort of
gonchar6ff 153
"
work. From my earliest childhood, have I myself ever put
"
on my socks? Oblomoiif asks later on. In the morning, the
coming mid-day meal is the main question for all the house-
hold; and when the dinner is over, at an early hour of the
day, sleep a reign of sleep, sleep rising to an epical degree
which implies full loss of consciousness for all the inhabitants
of the mansion and its dependencies spreads its wings for
several hours from the bedchamber of the landlord even as
far as the remotest corner of the retainers' dwellings.
In these surroundings Oblomoff's childhood and youth
were passed. Later on, he enters the University but his trust- ;
worthy servants follow him to the capital, and the lazy,

' '
sleepy atmosphere of his native Oblomovka (the estate)

holds him even there in its enchanted arms. A
few lectures
at the university, some elevating talk with a young friend in
the evening, some vague aspiration towards the ideal, occa-
sionally stir the young man's heart; and a beautiful vision
begins to rise before his eyes these things are certainly a
necessary accompaniment of the years spent at the univer-
sity; but the soothing, soporific influence of Oblomovka, its
quietness and laziness, its feeling of a fully guaranteed, undis-
turbed existence, deaden even these impressions of youth.
Other students grow hot in their discussions, and join
"
circles." Oblomoff looks quietly at all that and asks him-
self:
"
What is it for? " And then, the moment that the young
student has returned home after his university years, the
"
same atmosphere again envelops him. Why
should you
"
think and worry yourself with this or that? Leave that
"
to others." Have you not there your old nurse, thinking
whether there is anything else she might do for your
comfort?
"
My people did not let me have
even a wish," Goncharoff wrote
in his short autobiography,from which we discovered the close con-
"
nection between the author and his hero: all had been foreseen and
attended to long since. The old servants, with my nurse at their head,
looked into my eyes to guess my wishes, trying to remember what I
liked best when I was with them, where my writing table ought to
be put, which chair I preferred to the others, how to make my bed.
The cook tried to remember which dishes I had liked in my childhood
and all could not admire me enough."
Such was Oblomoff's youth, and such was to a very great
extent Goncharoff's youth and character as well.
The novel begins with Oblomoff's morning in his lodgings
at St. Petersburg. It is late, but he is still in bed; several
times already he has tried to get up, several times his foot
was in the slipper; but, after a moment's reflection, he has
returned under his blankets. His trusty Zakhar his old faith-
ful servant who formerly had carried him as a baby in his
arms is by his side, and brings him his glass of tea. Visitors
come in; tney try to induce Oblomoff to go out, to take a
"
drive to the yearly First of May promenade; but What
" "
for? he asks. For what should I take all this trouble, and
"
do all this moving about? And he remains in bed.
His only trouble is that the landlord wants him to leave
the lodgings which he occupies. The rooms are dull, dusty
Zakhar is no great admirer of cleanliness; but to change
lodgings is such a calamity for Oblomoff that he tries to
avoid it by ail possible means, or at least to postpone it.
Oblomoff is very well educated, well-bred, he has a refined
taste, and in matters of art he is a fine judge. Everything
that is vulgar is repulsive to him. He never will commit
any dishonest act; he cannot. He also shares the highest
and noblest aspirations of his contemporaries. Like many
others, he is ashamed of being a serf-owner, and he has in
his head a certain scheme which he is going to put some
day into writing a scheme which, if it is only carried out,

will surely improve the condition of his peasants and even-
tually free them.
"
The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him" Gon-
"
charoflF writes; the miseries of mankind were not strange to him.
Sometimes he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human
sorrows. He felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a
desire of going somewhere far away, probably into that world
towards which his friend Stoitz had tried to take him in his younger
days. Sweet tears would then flow upon his cheeks. It would also
happen that he would himself feel hatred towards human vices,
towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread all over the world;
and he would then feel the desire to show mankind its diseases.
Thoughts would then bum within him, rolling in his head like
waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make
gonchar6ff 155
all his blogd boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sineu's
would be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming
themselves into decisions. . . .Moved by a moral force he
would rapidly change over and over again his position in his bed ;
with a fixed stare he would half lift himself from it, move his hand,
look about with inspired eyes . . . the inspiration would
seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself into an act of heroism,
and then, what miracles, what admirable results might one not expect
from so great an effort! But the morning would pass away, the
shades of evening would take the place of the broad daylight, and with
them the strained forces of Oblomoff would incline towards rest
the storms in his soul would subside his head would shake off the
worrying thoughts his blood would circulate more slowly in his

veins and Oblomoff would slowly turn over, and recline on his
back looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly
;
with his eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neigh-
bouring house and how many times had he thus followed with his
"
eyes that sunset 1
In such lines as these Gonhar6ff depicts the state of

inactivity into which Oblomoff had fallen at the age of ahout
thirty-five. It is the supreme poetry of laziness a laziness
created by a whole life of old-time landlordism.
Oblomoff, as I just said, is very uncomfortable in his
lodgings moreover, the landlord, who intends to make some
;
repairs in the house, wants him to leave; but for Oblomoff

to change his lodgings is something so terrific, so extraordi-
nary, that he tries by all sorts of artifices to postpone the
undesirable moment. His old Zakhar tries to convince him
that they cannot remain any longer in that house, and ven-
" "
tures the unfortunate word, that, after all, others move
when they have to.
" "
thought," he said,
I that others are not worse than we arc, and
that they move sometimes so we could move, too."
;
" "
What, what? exclaimed Oblomoff, rising from his easy chair,
" "
what is it that you say?
Zakhar felt very ashamed. He could not understand what had
provoked the reproachful exclamation of his master, and did not
reply.
"
Others are not worse than we are! " repeated Iliya Iliych (Oblo-
"
moff) with a sense of horror. That is what you have come to. Now
I shall know henceforth that I am for you the same as the othera '.**
'
After a time Oblomoff calls Zakhar back and has with him
an explanation which is worth reproducing.
" ' "
Have you ever thought what it meant the others,' Oblomoff
" "
began. Must I tell you what this means?
Poor Zakhar shifted about uneasily, like a bear in his den, and
sighed aloud.
" ' '
Another means a wild, uneducated man he lives poorly,
that ;
dirtily, in an attic he can sleep on a piece of felt stretched somewhere

;
on the floor what does that matter to him? Nothing! He will feed
on potatoes and herrings; misery compels him continuously to shift
from one place to another. He runs about all day long he, he may,
of course, go to new lodgings. There is Lagaefi; he takes under his
arm his ruler and his two shirts wrapped in a handkerchief, and he
' ' '
is off. Where are you going ? you ask him. I am moving ', he
says.That is what the others
"
' '
means. Am I one of those others,
do you mean ?
Zakhar threw a glance upon his master, shifted from one foot to
the other, but said nothing.
"Do you understand now "what 'another' means?" continued
" *
Oblomoff. Another,' that is the man who cleans his own boots,
who himself puts on his clothes without any help! Of course, he
may sometimes look like a gentleman, but that is mere deceit: he does
not know what it means to have a servant he has nobody to send to
the shop to make his purchases; he makes them himself he will even
poke his own fire, and occasionally use a duster."
" "
Yes," replied Zakhar sternly, there are many such people
among the Germans."
"
That's it, that's it And I ? do you think that I am one of
!
them?"
"
No, you are different," Zakhar said, still
"
unable to understand
what his master was driving at. . . . But God knows what is
coming upon you. ." . .
"
Ah ! I am different ! Most certainly, I am. Do I run about ? do
I work? don't am hungry? Look at me am I thin?
I eat whenever I
am I sickly to look at? Is there anything I lack? Thank God, I have

people to do things for me. I have never put on my own socks since
I was born, thank God! Must I also be restless like the others?
What for? And to whom am I saying all this? Have you not been
with me from childhood? You have seen it all. You know
. . .
that have received a delicate education; that I have never suffered

I
from cold or from hunger, never knew want never worked
for my own bread have never done any sort of dirty work. . . .
" * '
Well, how dare you put me on the same level as the others ?
gonchar(5ff 157
"
Later on, when Zakhar brought him a glass of water, No, wait
"
a moment," Oblomoff said. I ask you, How did you dare to so
deeply
offend your master, whom you carried in your arms while he was a
baby, whom you have served all your life, and who has always been
a benefactor to you?" Zakhar could not stand it any longer the
word benefactor broke him down he began to blink. The less he
understood the speech of Iliya Iliych, the more sad he felt. Finally,
the reproachful words of his master made him break into tears, while
Ilya Iliych seizing this pretext for postponing his letter-writing till
"
to-morrow, tells Zakhar, you had better pull the blinds down and
cover me nicely, and see that nobody disturbs me. Perhaps I may sleep
for an hour or so, and at half past five wake me for dmner."
About this time Oblomoff meets a young girl, Olga, who

is perhaps one of the finest representatives of Russian women
in our novels. A mutual friend, Stoltz, has said much to her
about Oblomoff about his talents and possibilities, and also
about the laziness of his life, which would surely ruin him
if it continued. Women are always ready to undertake rescue
work, and Olga tries to draw Oblomoff out of his sleepy,

vegetative existence. She sings beautifully, and Oblomoff,
who is a great lover of music, is deeply moved by her
songs.
Gradually Olga and Oblomoff fall in love with each other,
and she tries to shake off his laziness, to arouse him to higher
interests in life. She insists that he shall finish the great
scheme for the improvement of his peasant serfs upon which
he is supposed to have been working for years. She tries
to awaken in him an interest for art and literature, to create
for him a life in which his gifted nature shall find a field
of activity. It seems at first as if the vigour and charm of
Olga are going to renovate Oblomoff by insensible steps. He
wakes up, he returns to life. The love of Olga for Oblomoff,
which is depicted in its development with a mastery almost
equalling that of Turgueneff, grows deeper and deeper, and
the inevitable next step marriage is approaching. . . .
But this is enough to frighten away Oblomoff. To take this

step he would have to bestir himself, to go to his estate, to
break the lazy monotony of his life, and this is too much
for him. He lingers and hesitates to make the first necessary
steps. He postpones them from day to day, and finally he
fallsback into his Oblomoffdom, and returns to his sofa, his
dressing gown, and his slippers. Olga is ready to do the
impossible; she tries to carry him away by her love and her
energy; but she is forced to realise that all her endeavours
are useless, and that she has trusted too much to her own
strength: the disease of Oblomoff is incurable. She has to
abandon him, and Goncharoff describes their parting in a
most beautiful scene, from which I will give here a few of
the concluding passages :
"
"Then we must part?" she said. . . . If we married,
" "
what would come next? He replied nothing. You would fall asleep,
deeper and deeper every day îs it not so ? And I you see what I
am I shall not grow old, I shall never be tired of life. We should
live from day to day and year to year, looking forward to Christmas,
and then to the Carnival we ; should go to parties, dance, and think
about nothing at all. We
should lie down at night thanking God
that one day has passed, and next morning we should wake up with
the desire that to-day may be like yesterday; that would be our future,
is it not so? But is that life? I should wither under it I should die.
"
And Could I make you happy?
for what, Iliya?
He around and tried to move, to run away, but his
cast his eyes
feet would not obey him. He wanted to say something, but his mouth
was dry, his tongue motionless, his voice would not come out of his
throat. He moved his hand towards her, then he began something,
with lowered voice, but could not finish it, and with his look he said
"
to her, Good-bye farewell."
She also wanted to say something, but could not moved her hand
in his direction, but before it had reached his it dropped. She wanted
"
to say Farewell," but her voice broke in the middle of the word and
took a false accent. Then her face quivered, she put her hand and her
head on his shoulder and cried. It seemed now as if all her weapons
had been taken out of her hand reasoning had gone there remained
" "
only the woman, helpless against her sorrow. Farewell, Farewell
came out of her sobbings. . . .
" "
No," said Olga, trying to look upon him through her tears, it is
only now that I see that I loved in you what I wanted you to be, I
loved the future Oblomoff. You are good, honest, Iliya, you are tender
as a dove, you put your head under your wing and want nothing more,
you are ready all your life to coo under a roof . . but I am not
.
so, that would be too little for me. I want something more what, I
do not know; can you tell me what it is that I want? give me it, that
I should. ... As to sweetness, there is plenty of it everywhere."
GONCHARdFF 159
They part, Olga passes through a severe Illness, and a
few months later we see Oblomoff married to the landlady
of his rooms, a very respectable person with beautiful elbows,
and a great master in kitchen affairs and household work
generally. As to Olga, she marries Stoltz later on. But this
Stoltz is rather a symbol of intelligent industrial activity
than a living man. He is Invented, and I pass him by.
The impression which this novel produced in Russia, on
its appearance in 1859, was indescribable. It was a far
greater event than the appearance of a new work by Tur-

gueneff. All educated Russia read Oblomoff and discussed
"
Oblomovlsm." Everyone recognised something of himself
in Oblomoff, felt the disease of Oblomoff In his own veins.
As to Olga, thousands of young people fell in love with
"
her: her favourite song, the Casta Diva," became their
favourite melody. And now, forty years afterwards, one can
" "
read and re-read Oblomoff with the same pleasure as
nearly half a century ago, and It has lost nothing of its
meaning, while it has acquired many new ones: there are

always living Oblomoffs.
At the time of the appearance of this novel " Oblomoff-
dom " became a current word to designate the state of
Russia. All Russian life, all Russian history, bears traces of
the malady that laziness of mind and heart, that right
to laziness proclaimed as a virtue, that conservatism and
inertia, that contempt of feverish activity, which characterise
Oblomoff and were so much cultivated in serfdom times,
even amongst the best men In Russia and even among the
malcontents.
"
A sad result of serfdom " it was said then.
But, as we live further away from serfdom times, we begin
to realise that Oblomoff is not dead amongst us: that serf-
dom Is not the only thing which creates this type of men,
but that the very conditions of wealthy life, the routine of
civilised life, contribute to maintain It.
"
A racial feature, distinctive of the Russian race," others
said; and they were right, too, to a great extent. The absence
" "
of a love for struggle; the let me alone attitude, the want
of "aggressive" virtue; non-resistance and passive submis-
sion these are to a great extent distinctive features of
the Russian race. And this Is probably why a Russian writer
i6o RUSSIAN LITERATURE
has so well pictured the type. But with all that, the Oblomofif
type is not limited to Russia: it is a universal type a type
which is nurtured by our present civilisation, amidst its
opulent, self-satisfied life. It is the conservative type. Not
in the political sense, but in the sense of the conservatism
of well-being. A man who has reached a certain welfare or
has got it by inheritance is not willingly moved to under-
take anything new, because it might mean introducing some-
thing unpleasant and full of worries into his quiet and
smooth existence. Therefore he lingers in a life devoid of
the true impulses of real life, from fear that these might
disturb the quietness of his vegetative existence.
Oblomoff knows the value of Art and its impulses; he
knows the higher enthusiams of poetical love: he has felt
both. But
"
What is the use? " he asks again. " Why all
this trouble of going about and seeing people? What is it
"
for? He is not a Diogenes who has no needs. Far from
that. If his meat be served too dry and his fowl be burned,
he resents it. It is the higher interests which he thinks not
worth the trouble they occasion. When he was young he
thought of setting his serfs free in such a way that the
step should not much diminish his income. But gradually

he has forgotten all about that, and now his main thought
is, how to shake off all the worries of the management of
" " "
his estate. I don't know he says what obligatory
work is, what is farmer's work, what ownership means, what
a poor farmer is and what a rich one what makes a quarter
;
of wheat, when wheat has to be sown and reaped, or when it

has to be sold." And when he dreams of country life on his
estate he thinks of pretty greenhouses, of picnics in the woods,
of idyllic walks in company with a goodly, submissive and
plump wife, who looks into his eyes and worships him. The
question of why and how all this wealth comes to him, and
why all these people must work for him, never worries his
mind. But how many of those all over the world, who own
factories, wheat fields and coal mines, or hold shares in them,
ever think of mines, wheat fields and factories otherwise than
in the way Oblomoff thought of his country seat that is, in
an idyllic contemplation of how others work, without the
slightest intention of sharing their burdens?
GONCHARdFF i6i
The city-bred Oblomoffs may take the place of the country-
bred, but the type remains. And then comes the long succes-
sion of Oblomoffs in intellectual, social, nay even in personal,
life. Everything new in the domain of the intellect makes
them restless, and they are only satisfied when all men have
accepted the same ideas. They are suspicious of social reform,
because the very suggestion of a change frightens them. Love
itself frightens them. Oblomoff is loved by Olga; he, too,
loves her; but to take that step marriage frightens him.
She is too restless. She wants him to go about and to see
pictures; to read and to discuss this and that; to throw him
into the whirl of life. She loves him so much that she is ready
to follow him without asking any questions. But this very
power of love, this very intensity of life, frightens an
Oblomoff.
He tries to avoiding this irruption of
find pretexts for
life into his
vegetative existence; he prizes so much his
little material comfort that he dares not love dares not take
'*
love with all its consequences its tears, its impulses, its
life," and soon falls back into his cosy Oblomovism.

Decidedly, Oblomovism is not a racial disease. It exists
on both continents and in all latitudes. And besides the
Oblomovism which Gontcharoff has so well depicted, and
which even Olga was powerless to break through, there is the
squire's Oblomovism, the red-tape Oblomovism of the
Government offices, the scientist's Oblomovism and, above
all, the family-life Oblomovism, to which all of us readily
pay so large a tribute.
THE PRECIPICE
The last and longest novel of Gontcharoff, The Precipice,
has not the unity of conception and workmanship which
characterise Oblomoff. It contains wonderful pages, worthy
of a writer of genius; but, all said, it is a failure. It took
Goncharoff full ten years to write it, and having begun to
depict in it types of one generation, he remodelled later on
these types into types from the next generation at a time
when the sons differed totally from their fathers: he has
told this himself in a very interesting critical sketch of his
own work. As a result there is no wholeness, so to speak,
in themain personages of the novel. The woman upon
whom he has bestowed all his admiration, Vyera, and
whom he tries to represent as most sympathetic, is certainly
interesting, but not sympathetic at all. One would say that
Goncharoff's mind was haunted by two women of two totally
different types when he pictured his Vyera the one whom
he tried and failed to picture in Sophie Byelovodova,
and the other the coming woman of the sixties, of whom he
saw some features, and whom he admired, without fully
understanding her. Vyera's cruelty towards her grandmother,
and towards Raisky, the hero, render her most unsympa-
thetic, although you feel that the author quite adores her. As
to the Nihilist, Volokhoff, he is simply a caricature taken
perhaps from real life, even seemingly from among the
author's personal acquaintances, but obviously drawn with
the desire of ventilating personal feelings of dislike. One
feels a personal drama concealed behind the pages of the
novel. Goncharoff's first sketch of Volokhoff was, as he
wrote himself, some sort of Bohemian Radical of the forties
who had retained in full the Don Juanesque features of the
" "
Byronists of the preceding generation. Gradually, how-
ever, Goncharoff, who had not yet finished his novel by the
end of the fifties, transformed the figure into a Nihilist of the
sixties a revolutionist and the result is that one has
the sensation of the double origin of Volokhoff, as one feels
the double origin of Vyera.
The only figure of the novel really true to life is the grand-
mother of Vyera. This is an admirably painted figure of the
simple, commonsense, independent woman of old Russia,
while Martha, the sister of Vyera, is an excellent picture of
the commonplace girl, full of life, respectful of old traditions
to be one day the honest and reliable mother of a family.
These two figures are the work of a great artist; but all the
other figures are made-up, and consequently are failures; and
yet there is much exaggeration in the tragical way in which
Vyera's fall is taken by her grandmother. As to the back-
ground of the novel the estate on a precipice leading to the
Volga it is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Russian
literature.
DOSTOYEVSKIY 163
dostoy^vskiy
Few authors have been so well received, from their very
first appearancein literature, as Dostoyevskiy was. In 1845
he arrived in St. Petersburg, a quite unknown young man who
only two years before had finished his education in a school
of military engineers, and after having spent two years in
the engineering service had then abandoned it with the inten-
tion of devoting himself to literature. He was only twenty-
four when he wrote his first novel, Poor People, which his
school-comrade, Grigorovitch, gave to the poet Nekrasoff,
offering it for a literary almanack. Dostoyevskiy had
inwardly
doubted whether the novel would even be read by the editor.
He was living then in a poor, miserable room, and was fast
asleep when at four o'clock in the morning Nekrasoff and
Grigorovitch knocked at his door. They threw themselves on
Dostoyevskiy's neck, congratulating him with tears in their
eyes. Nekrasoff and his friend had begun to read the novel
late in the evening; they could not stop reading till they came
to the end, and they were both so deeply impressed by it that
they could not help going on this nocturnal expedition, to sec
the author and tell him what they felt. A few days later
Dostoyevskiy was introduced to the great critic of the time,
Byeli'nskiy, and from him he received the same warm recep-
tion. As to the reading public, the novel produced quite a
sensation. The same must be said about all subsequent novels
of Dostoyevskiy. They had an immense sale all over Russia.
The life of Dostoyevskiy was extremely sad. In the year
1849, ô"^ years after he had won his first success with Poor
People, he became mixed up in the affairs of some Fourierists
(members of the circles of Petrashevskiy), who used to meet
together to read the works of Fourier, commenting on them,
and talking about the necessity of a Socialistic movement in
Russia. At one of these gatherings Dostoyevskiy read, and
copied later on, a certain letter from Byeh'nskiy to Gogol, in
which the great critic spoke in rather sharp language about
the Russian Church and the State; he also took part in a meet-
ing at which the starting of a secret printing office was dis-
cussed. He was arrested, tried (of course with dosed doors),
and, with several others, was condemned to death. In Decern-
i64 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
ber, 1849, he was taken to a public square, placed on the scaf-
fold, under a gibbet, to listen there to a profusedly-worded
death-sentence, and only at the last moment came a messenger
from Nicholas I., bringing a pardon. Three days later he was
transported to Siberia and locked up in a hard-labour prison
at Omsk. There he remained for four years, when owmg to
some influence at St. Petersburg he was liberated, only to be
made a soldier. During his detention in the hard-labour prison
he was submitted, for some minor offence, to the terrible
punishment of the cat-o'-nine-tails, and from that time dates
his disease epilepsy which he never quite got rid of during
all his life. The coronation amnesty of Alexander II. did not
improve Dostoyevskiy's fate. Not until 1859 four years

after the advent of Alexander II. to the throne was the
great writer pardoned and allowed to return to Russia. He
died in 1883.
Dostoyevskiy was a rapid writer, and even before his
arrest he had published ten novels, of which The Double was
already a forerunner of his later psycho-pathological novels,
and Netochka Nezvdnova showed a rapidly maturing literary
talent of the highest quality.On from Siberia he
his return
began publishing a series of novels whichproduced a deep
impression on the reading public. He opened the series by
a great novel. The Downtrodden and Offended, which was
soon followed by Memoirs from a Dead-House, in which he
described his hard-labour experience. Then came an extremely
sensational novel, Crime and Punishment, which lately was
widely read all over Europe and America. The Brothers
Karamdzoff, which is considered his most elaborate work, is
even more sensational, while The Youth, The Idiot, The
Devils are a series of shorter novels devoted to the same
psycho-pathological problems.
If
Dostoyevskiy's
work had been judged from the purely
aesthetic pomt of view, the verdict of critics concerning its
literary value would have been anything but flattering.
Dostoyevskiy wrote with such rapidity and he so little cared
about the working out of his novels, that, as Dobroluboff
has shown, the literary form is in many places almost below
criticism. His heroes speak in a slipshod way, continually
repeating themselves, and whatever hero appears in the
DOSTOYJ^VSKIY 165
novel (especially is this so in The Downtrodden) you ^
feel
it
is the author who speaks. Besides, to these serious defects one
must add the extremely romantic and obsolete forms of the

plots of his novels, the disorder of their construction, and
the unnatural succession of their events to say nothing of the
atmosphere of the lunatic asylum with which the later ones
are permeated. And yet, with all this, the works of Dostoyev-
skiy are penetrated with such a deep feeling of reality, and by
the side of the most unreal characters one finds characters so
well known to every one of us, and so real, that all these
defects are redeemed. Even when you think that Dostoyev-
skiy's record of the conversations of his heroes is not correct,
you feel that the men whom he describes at least some of
them were exactly such as he wanted to describe them.
The Memoirs from a Dead-House is the only production
of Dostoyevskiy which can be recognised as truly artistic its :
leading idea is beautiful, and the form is worked out in con-

formity with the idea but in his later productions the author
;
is so much oppressed by his ideas, all very vague, and grows

so nervously excited over them that he cannot find the
proper form. The favourite themes of Dostoyevskiy are the
men who have been brought so low by the circumstances of
their lives, that they have not even a conception of there
being a possibility of rising above these conditions. You feel
moreover that Dostoyevskiy finds a real pleasure in describ-
ing the sufferings, moral and physical, of the down-trod-
den that he revels in representing that misery of mind,
that absolute hopelessness of redress, and that completely
.
broken-down condition of human nature which is character-

istic of neuro-pathological cases. By the side of such sufferers
you find a few others who are so deeply human that all your
sympathies go with them; but the favourite heroes of Dos-
toyevskiy are the man and the woman who consider them-
selves as not having either the force to compel respect, or even
the right of being treated as human beings. They once have
made some timid attempt at defending their personalities, but
they have succumbed, and never will try it again. They will
sink deeper and deeper in their wretchedness, and die, either
from consumption or from exposure, or they will become the
victims of some mental affection a sort of half-lucid lunacy,
during which man occasionally rises to the highest concep-
tions of human philosophy while some will conceive an
cmbitterment which will bring them to commit some crime,
followed by repentance the very next instant after it has been
done.
In Downtrodden and Offended we see a young man madly
in love with a girl from a moderately poor family. This girl
falls in love with a very aristocratic prince a man without
principles, but charming in his childish egotism extremely
attractive his sincerity, and with a full capacity for quite
by
unconsciously committing the worst crimes towards those with
whom life brings him into contact. The psychology of both
the girl and the young aristocrat is very good, but where
Dostoyevskiy appears at his best is in representing how the
other young man, rejected by the girl, devotes the whole of
his existence to being the humble servant of that girl, and
against his own will becomes instrumental in throwing her
into the hands of the young aristocrat. All this is quite possi-
ble, all this exists in life, and it is all told by Dostoyevskiy so
as to make one feel the deepest commiseration with the poor
and the down-trodden; but even In this novel the pleasure
which the author finds in representing the unfathomable sub-
mission and servitude of his heroes, and the pleasure they
find in the very sufferings and the ill-treatment that has been
inflicted upon them is repulsive to a sound mind.
The next great novel of Dostoyevskiy, Crime and Punish-

ment, produced quite a sensation. Its hero is a young student,
Raskolnikoff, who deeply loves his mother and his sister
both extremely poor, like himself and who, haunted by the
desire of finding some money in order to finish his studies
and to become a support to his dear ones, comes to the idea
of killing an old woman a private money-lender whom he
knows and who is said to possess a few thousand roubles. A
series of more or less fortuitous circumstances confirms him
in this idea and pushes him this way. Thus, his sister, who sees
no escape from their poverty, is going at last to sacrifice her-
self for her family, and to marry a certain despicable, elderly
man with much money, and Raskolnikoff is firmly decided to
prevent this marriage. At the same time he meets with an old
man a small civil service clerk and a drunkard who has a
DOSTOYEVSKIY 167
most sympathetic daughter from the first marriage, Sonya.
The family are at the lowest imaginable depths of destitution

such as can only be found in a large city like St. Petersburg,
and Raskolnikoff is brought to take interest in them. Owing
to all these circumstances, while he himself sinks deeper and
deeper into the darkest misery, and realises the depths of
hopeless poverty and misery which surround him, the idea of
killing the old money-lending woman takes a firm hold of
him. He accomplishes the crime and, of course, as might
have been foreseen, does not take advantage of the money:
he even does not find it in his excitement; and, after having
lived for a few days haunted
by remorse and shame again
under the pressure of a series of various circumstances which
add to the feeling of remorse he goes to surrender himself,
denouncing himself as the murderer of the old woman and
her sister.
This is, of course, only the framework of the novel; In
reality it is full of the most thrilling scenes of poverty on the
one hand and of moral degradation on the other, while a
number of secondary characters an elderly gentleman in
whose family Raskolnikoff's sister has been a governess, the
examining magistrate, and so on are introduced. Besides,
Dostoyevskiy, after having accumulated so many reasons
which might have brought a Raskolnikoff to commit such a
murder, found it necessary to introduce another theoretical
motive. One learns in the midst of the novel that Raskol-
nikoff, captivated by the modern, current ideas of materialist
philosophy, has written and published a newspaper article to
prove that men are divided into superior and inferior beings^
and that for the former Napoleon being a sample of them
the current rules of morality are not obligatory.
Most of the readers of this novel and most of the literary
critics speak very highly of the psychological analysis of
Raskolnikoff's soul and of the motives which brought him to
his desperate step. However, I will permit myself to remark
that the very profusion of accidental causes accumulated by
Dostoyevskiy shows how difficult he felt it himself to prove
that the propaganda of materialistic ideas could in reahty
bring an honest young man to act as Raskolnikoff did. Ras-
kolnikoffs do not become murderers under the influence of
such theoretical considerations, while those who murder and
invoke such motives, like Lebies at Paris, are not in the least
of the Raskolnikoff type. Behind Raskolnikoff I feel Dos-
toyevskiy trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like
him, might have been brought to act as Raskolnikoff did, and
what would be the psychological explanation if he had been
driven to do so. But such men do not murder. Besides,
men like the examining magistrate and M. Swidrigailoff are
purely romantic inventions.
However, with all its faults, the novel produces a most
powerful effect by its real pictures of slum-life, and inspires
every honest reader with the deepest commiseration towards
even the lowest sunken inhabitants of the slums. When Dos-
toyevskiy comes to them, he becomes a realist in the very best
sense of the word, like Turgueneff or Tolstoy. Marmeladoff
the old drunken official his drunken talk and his death,
his family, and the incidents which happen after his burial,
his wife and his daughter Sonya all these are living beings
and real incidents of the life of the poorest ones, and the
pages that Dostoyevskiy gave to them belong to the most
impressive and the most moving pages in any literature. They
have the touch of genius.
The Brothers Karamdzoff is the most artistically worked
out of Dostoyevskiy's novels, but it is also the novel in which
all the inner defects of the author's mind and imagination
have found their fullest expression. The philosophy of this
novel incredulous Western Europe; wildly passionate,-
drunken, unreformed Russia and Russia reformed by creed
;
and monks the three represented by the three brothers

Karamdzoff only faintly appears in the background. But
there certainly not in any literature such a collection of the
is
most repulsive types of mankind lunatics, half-lunatics,

criminals in germ and in reality, in all possible
gradations
as one finds in this novel. A Russian specialist m brain and
nervous diseases finds representatives of all sorts of such dis-
eases in Dostoyevskiy's novels, and especially in The Brothers
Karamdzoff the whole being set in a frame which represents
the strangest mixture of realism and romanticism run wild.
Whatsoever a certain portion of contemporary critics, fond
of all sorts of morbid literature, may have written about this
DOSTOY^VSKIY 169
novel, the present writer can only say that he finds it, all
through, so unnatural, so much fabricated for the purpose of
introducing here, a bit of morals, there, some abominable
character taken from a psycho-pathological hospital; or
again, in order to analyse the feelings of some purely imagi-
nary criminal, that a few good pages scattered here and there
do not compensate the reader for the hard task of reading
these two volumes.
Dostoyevskiy is still very much read in Russia and when,
;
some twenty years ago, his novels were first translated into
French, German and English, they were received as a revela-
tion. He was praised as one of the greatest writers of our
own time, and as undoubtedly the one who " had best
"
expressed the mystic Slavonic soul whatever that expres-
sion may mean Turgueneff was eclipsed by Dostoyevskiy,
!
and Tolstoy was forgotten for a time. There was, of course,

a great deal of hysterical exaggeration in all this, and at the
present time sound literary critics do not venture to indulge
in such praises. The fact is, that there is certainly a great
deal of power in whatever Dostoyevskiy wrote his powers
:
of creation suggest those of Hoffman and his sympathy with

;
the most down-trodden and down-cast products of the civilisa-

tion of our large towns is so deep that it carries away the
most indifferent reader and exercises a most powerful
impression in the right direction upon young readers.
His analysis of the most varied specimens of incipient
psychical disease is said to be thoroughly correct. But with
all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are incomparably
below those of any one of the great Russian masters Tolstoy,
:
Turgueneff, or Gontcharoff. Pages of consummate realism

are interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy
only of the most incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling
interest are interrupted in order to introduce a score of pages
of the most unnatural theoretical discussions. Besides, the
author is in such a hurry that he seems never to have had the
time himself to read over his novels before sending them to
the printer. And, worst of all, every one of the neroes of
Dostoyevskiy, especially in his novels of the later period, is
a person suffering from some psychical disease or from moral
perversion. As a result, while one may read some of the
novels of Dostoyevskiy with the greatest interest, one is never
tempted to re-read them, as one re-reads the novels of Tol-
stoy and Turgueneff, and even those of many secondary novel
writers; and the present writer must confess that he had the
greatest pain lately in reading through, for instance, The
Brothers Karamdzoff, and never could pull himself through
such a novel as The Idiot. However, one pardons Dostoyev-
skiy everything, because when he speaks of the ill-treated and
forgotten children of our town civilisation he becomes truly
great through his wide, infinite love of mankind of man,
even in his worst manifestations. Through his love of those
drunkards, beggars, petty thieves and so on, whom we usually
pass by without even bestowing upon them a pitying glance;
through his power of discovering what is human and often
great in the lowest sunken being; through the love which he
inspires in us, even for the least interesting types of mankind,
even for those who never will make an effort to get out of the
low and miserable position into which life has thrown them
through this faculty Dostoyevskiy has certainly won a
unique position among the writers of modern times, and he
will be read not for the artistic finish of his writings but for
the good thoughts which are scattered through them, for
their real reproduction of slum life in the great cities and
for the infinite sympathy which a being like Sonya can inspire
in the reader.
nekrAsoff
With Nekrasoff wc come to a poet whose work has been
the subject of a lively controversy in Russian Literature. He
was bom in 1821 his father being a poor army officer who
married a Polish lady for love. This lady must have been
most remarkable, because in his poems Nekrasoff continually
refers to his mother in accents of love and respect, such as
perhaps have no parallel in any other poet. His mother, how-
ever, died very early, and their large family, which consisted
of thirteen brothers and sisters, must have been in great
straits. No sooner had Nicholas Nekrasoff, the future poet,
attained his sixteenth year, than he left the provincial town
where the family were staying and went to St. Petersburg,
NEKRASOFF 171
to enter the University, where he joined the philological
department. Most Russian students live very poorly mostly
by lessons, or entering as tutors in families where they are
paid very little, but have at least lodgings and food. But
Nekrasoff experienced simply black misery: " For full three
"
years," he said at a later period, I felt continually
hungry
every day."" It often happened that I entered one of the great
restaurants where people may go to read newspapers, even
without ordering anything to eat, and while I read my paper
I would draw the bread
plate towards myself and eat the
bread, and that was my only food." At last he fell ill, and
during his convalescence the old soldier from whom he rented
a tiny room, and to whom he had already run into debt, one
cold November night refused to admit his lodger to his
room. Nekrasoff would have had to spend the night out of
doors, but a passing beggar took pity on him and took him to
some slums on the outskirts of the town, to a " doss-house,"
where the young poet found also the possibility of earning
fifteen farthings for some petition that he wrote for one of
the inmates. Such was the youth of Nekrasoff; but during it
he had the opportunity of making acquaintance with the
poorest and lowest classes of St. Petersburg, and the love
towards them which he acquired during these peregrinations
he retained all his life. Later on, by means of relentless work,
and by editing all sorts of almanacks, he improved his mate-
rial conditions. He became a regular contributor to the
chief review of the time, for which Turgueneff, Dostoyevskiy,
Herzen, and all our best writers wrote, and in 1 846 he even
became the owner of this review, The Contemporary, which
for the next fifteen years played so important a part in
Russian literature. In The Contemporary he came, in the
contact and friendship with two remarkable
sixties, into close
men, Tchernyshevskiy and Dobroluboff, and about this time
he wrote his best verses. In 1875 he fell seriously ill, and the
next two years his life was simply agony. He died in Decem-
ber, 1877, and thousands of people, especially the University
students, followed his body to the grave.
Here, over his grave, began the passionate discussion which
has never ended, about the merits of Nekrasoff as a poet.
While speaking over his grave, Dostoyevskiy put Nekrasoff
by the side of Pushkin and Lermontoff (" higher still than
Pushkin and Lermontoff," exclaimed some young enthusiast
in the crowd), and the question, "Is Nekrasoff a great
"
poet, like Pushkin and Lermontoff? has been discussed ever
since.
Nekrasoff's poetry played such an important part in my
own development, during my youth, that I did not dare trust
my own high appreciation of it; and therefore to verify and
support my impressions and appreciations I have compared
them with those of the Russian critics, Arsenieff, Skabitchev-
skiy, and Vengueroff (the author of a great biographical
dictionary of Russian authors).
When we enter the period of adolescence, from sixteen
years to twenty, we need to find words to express the
aspirations and the higher ideas which begin to wake up in
our minds. It is not enough to have these aspirations: we
want words to express them. Some will find these words in
those of the prayers which they hear in the church; others
and I belonged to their number will not be satisfied with
this expression of their feelings: it will strike them as too
vague, and they will look for something else to express in
more concrete terms their growing sympathies with mankind
and the philosophical questions about the life of the universe
which pre-occupy them. They will look for poetry. For me,
Goethe on the one side, by his philosophical poetry, and
Nekrasoff on the other, by the concrete images in which he
expressed his love of the peasant masses, supplied the words
which the heart wanted for the expression of its poetical feel-
ings. But this is only a personal remark. The question is,
whether Nekrasoff can really be put by the side of Pushkin
and Lermontoff as a great poet.
Some people repudiate such a comparison. He was not a
poet, they say, because he always wrote with a purpose. How-
ever, this reasoning, which is often defended by the pure
aesthetics, is evidently incorrect. Shelley also had a purpose,
which did not prevent him from being a great poet; Brown-
ing has a purpose in a number of his poems, and this did not
prevent him from being a great poet. Every great poet
has a
purpose in most of his poems, and the question is only whether
he has found a beautiful form for expressing this purpose, or
NEKRASOFF 173
not. The
poet who shall succeed in
combining a really beauti-
ful form, i. e., impressive images and sonorous verses, with a
grand purpose, will be the greatest poet.
Now, one certainly feels, on reading Nekrasoff, that he
had difficulty in There is nothing in his
writing his verses.
poetry similar to the easiness with which Pushkin used the
forms of versification for expressing his thoughts, nor is there
any approach to the musical harmony of Lermontoff's verse
or A. K. Tolstoy's. Even in his best poems there are lines
which are not agreeable to the ear on account of their wooden
and clumsy form; but you feel that these unhappy verses
could be improved by the change of a few words, without the
beauty of the images in which the feelings are expressed
being altered by that. One certainly feels that Nekrasoff was
not master enough of his words and his rhymes but there is
;
not one single poetical image which does not suit the whole
idea of the poem, or which strikes the reader as a dissonance,
or is not beautiful; while in some of his verses Nekrasoff has
certainly succeeded in combining a very high degree of poeti-
cal inspiration with great beauty of form. It must not be
forgotten that the Yambs of Barbier, and the Chdtiments of

Victor Hugo also leave, here and there, much to be desired
as regards form.
Nekrasoff was a most unequal writer, but one of the above-
named critics has pointed out that even amidst his most
" "
unpoetical poem the one in which he describes in very
poor verses the printing office of a newspaper the moment
that he touches upon the sufferings of the workingman there
come in twelve lines which for the beauty of poetical images
and musicalness, connected with their inner force, have few
equals in the whole of Russian literature.
When we estimate a poet, there is something general in his
poetr>' which we either love or pass by indifferently, and to
reduce literary criticism exclusively to the analysis of the
beauty of the poet's verses or to the correspondence between
" "
idea and form is surely to immensely reduce its value.
Everyone will recognise that Tennyson possessed a wonderful

beauty of form, and yet he cannot be considered as superior
to Shelley, for the simple reason that the general tenor of
the latter's ideas was so much superior to the general tenor
of Tennyson's. It is on the general contents of his
poetry
that Nekrasoff's superiority rests.
Wehave had in Russia several poets who also wrote upon
social subjects or the duties of a citizen I need
only mention
Plescheefif and Minayeff and they attained sometimes, from
the versifier's point of view, a higher beauty of form than
Nekrasoff. But in whatever Nekrasoff wrote there is an inner
force which you do not find in either of these poets, and this
force suggests to him images which are rightly considered as
pearls of Russian poetry. "
Nekrasoff called his Muse, A
Muse of Vengeance and of
Sadness," and this Muse, indeed, never entered into com-
promise with injustice. Nekrasoff is a pessimist, but his
pessimism, as Vengueroff remarks, has an original character.
Although his poetry contains so many depressing pictures rep-
resenting the misery of the Russian masses, nevertheless the
fundamental impression which it leaves upon the reader is an
elevating feeling. The poet does not bow his head before
the sad reality: he enters into a struggle with it, and he is
sure of victory. The reading of Nekrasoff wakes up that dis-
content which bears in itself the seeds of recovery.
The mass of the Russian people, the peasants and their
sufferings, are the main themes of our poet's verses. His love
to the people passes as a red thread through all his works;
he remained true to it all his life. In his younger years that
love saved him from squandering his talent in the sort of life
which so many of his contemporaries have led; later on it
inspired him
in his struggle against serfdom; and when serf-
dom was abolished he did not consider his work terminated,
as so many of his friends did he became the poet of the dark
:
masses oppressed by the economical and political yoke; and

"
towards the end of his life he did not say: Well, I have
done what I could," but till his last breath his verses were a
complaint about not having been enough of a fighter. He
"
wrote :
Struggle stood in the way of my becoming a poet,
and songs prevented me from becoming a fighter," and again :
"
Only he who serviceable to the aims of his time, and gives
is
all his life to the struggle for his brother men only he will
live longer than his life."
Sometimes he sounds a note of despair; however, such a
NEKRAsOFF 175
note not frequent in Nekrasoflf. His Russian peasant is not
is
a man who only sheds tears. He is serene, sometimes humour-

ous, and sometimes an extremely gay worker. Very seldom
does Nekrasoflf idealise the peasant: for the most part he
takes him just as he is, from life itself; and the poet's faith in
"
the forces of that Russian peasant is deep and vigorous. A
little more freedom to breathe he says and Russia will
shew that she has men, and that she has a future." This is an
idea which frequently recurs in his poetry.
The best poem of Nekrasoflf is Red-nosed Frost. It is the
apotheosis of the Russian peasant woman. The poem has
nothing sentimental in it. It is written, on the contrary, in a
sort of elevated epic style, and the second part, where Frost
personified passes on his way through the wood, and where
the peasant woman Is slowly freezing to death, while bright
pictures of past happiness pass through her brain all this
is admirable, even from the point of view of the most
aesthetic critics, because It Is written In good verses and in a

succession of beautiful Images and pictures.
The Peasant Children Is acharming village idyll. The
" "
Muse of Vengeance and Sadness one of our critics
remarks becomes wonderfully mild and gentle as soon as
she begins to speak of women and children. In fact, none of
the Russian poets has ever done so much for the apotheosis
of women, and especially of the mother-woman, as this sup-
posedly severe poet of Vengeance and Sadness. As soon as
Nekrasoflf begins to speak of a mother he grows powerful;
and the strophes he devoted to his own mother a woman
lost in a squire's house, amidst men thinking only of hunting,
drinking, and exercising their powers as slave owners in their
full brutality these strophes are real pearls in the poetry of
all nations.
His poem devoted to the exiles in Siberia and to the Rus-
sian women that Is, to the wives of the Decembrists in
exile, is excellent and contains really beautiful passages, but it
is inferior to either his poems dealing with the
peasants or to
his prettypoem, Sasha, in which he describes, contemporane-
ously with Turgueneflf, the very same types as Riidln and
Natasha.
It is quite true that Nekrasoflf's verses often bear traces of
a painful struggle with rhyme, and that there are lines in
his poems which are decidedly inferior; but he is certainly
one of our most popular poets amidst the massesof the people.
Part of his poetry has already become the inheritance or all
the Russian nation. He is
immensely read not only by the
educated classes, but by the poorest peasants as well. In fact,
as has been remarked by one of our critics, to under-
stand Pushkin a certain more or less artificial literary develop-
ment is required; while to understand Nekrasoff it is sufficient
for the peasant simply to know reading; and it is difficult
to imagine, without having seen it, the delight with which
Russian children in the poorest village schools are now read-
ing Nekrasoff and learning full pages from his verses by
heart.
OTHER PROSE WRITERS OF THE SAME EPOCH
Having analysed the work of those writers who may be

considered as the true founders of modern Russian literature,
I ought now to review a number of prose-writers and
poets
of less renown, belonging to the same epoch. However, fol-
lowing the plan of this book, only a few words will be said,
and only some of the most remarkable among them will be
mentioned.
A writer of great power, quite unknown in Western
Europe, who occupies a quite unique position in Russian
literature, is Sergiiei Timofeevitch AksAkoff (1791-
1859), the father of the two Slavophile writers, Konstantin
and Ivan Aksakoff. He is in reality a contemporary of Push-
kin and Lermontoff, but during the first part of his career
he displayed no originality whatever, and lingered in the
fields of pseudo-classicism. It was only after Gogol had
written that is, after 1846 that he struck a quite new vein,
and attained the full development of his by no means ordi-
nary talent. In the years 1 847-1 855 he published his Memoirs
of Angling, Memoirs of a Hunter with his Fowling Piece in
the Government of Orenburg, and Stories and Remembrances
of Sportsman; and these three works would have been suffi-
a
cient to conquer for him the reputation of a first-rate writer.
The Orenburg region, in the Southern Urals, was very thinly
NEKRAsOFF 177
inhabited at that time, and its nature and physiognomy are so
well described in these books that Aksakoff's work reminds
one of the Natural History of Selbourne. It has the same
accuracy; but Aksakoff is moreover a poet and a first-rate
poetical landscape painter. Besides, he so admirably knew the
life of the animals, and he so well understood them, that
in this respect his rivals could only be Kryloff on the one
hand, and Brehm the elder and Audubon among the natu-
ralists.
The influence of Gogol induced S. T. Aksakoff to entirely
abandon the domain of pseudo-classical fiction. In 1846
he began to describe real life, and the result was a large
work, A Family Chronicle and Remembrances (1856), soon
followed by The Early Years of Bagroff-the-Grandchild
(1858), which put him in the first ranks among the writers
of his century. Slavophile enthusiasts described him even
as a Shakespeare, nay, as a Homer; but all exaggeration
apart, S. T. Aksakoff has really succeeded not only in
reproducing a whole epoch in his Memoirs, but also in
creating real types of men of that time, which have served
as models for all our subsequent writers. If the leading
idea of these Memoirs had not been so much in favour
" "
of the good old times of serfdom, they would have
been even much more widely read than they are now.
The appearance of J Family Chronicle in 1856
was an event, and the marking of an epoch in Russian
literature.
V. Dal ( 1 801-1872) cannot be omitted even from this

short sketch. He was born in Southeastern Russia, of a
Danish father and a Franco-German mother, and received
his education at the Dorpat university. He was a naturalist
and a doctor by profession, but his favourite study was
ethnography, and he became a remarkable ethnographer, as
well as one of the best connoisseurs of the Russian spoken
language and its provincial dialects. His sketches from the
life of the people, signed Kozak Luganskiy (about a hun-
dred of them are embodied in a volume, Pictures from
Russian Life, 186 1), were very widely read in the forties
and the fifties, and were highly praised by Turgueneff and
Byelinskiy. Although they are mere sketches and leaflets
from a diary, without real poetical creation, they are delight-
ful reading. As to the ethnographical work of Dal it was
colossal. During his continual peregrinations over Russia, in
his capacity of a military doctor attached to his regiment, he
made most wonderful collections of words, expressions,
riddles, proverbs, and so on, and embodied them in two large
works. His main work is An Explanatory Dictionary of the
Russian Language, in four quarto volumes (first edition in
1861-68, second in 1880-1882). This is really a monumental
work and contains the first and very successful attempt at
a lexicology of the Russian language, which, notwithstanding
some occasional mistakes, is of the greatest value for the
understanding and the etymology of the Russian tongue as
it is spoken in different provinces. It contains at the same
time a precious and extremely rich collection of linguistic

material for future research, part of which would have been
lost by now if Dal had not collected it, fifty years ago, before
the advent of railways. Another great work of Dal, only
second to the one just mentioned, is a collection of proverbs,
entitled The Proverbs of the Russian People (second edition
in 1879).
A
writer who occupies a prominent place In the evolution
of the Russian novel, but has not yet been sufficiently appre-
ciated, is Ivan Panaeff (18 12-1862), who was a great
friend of the literary circle of the Sovremennik [Contem-
all
porary). Of this review he was co-editor with Nekrasoff,

and he wrote for It a mass of literary notes and feuilletons
upon all sorts of subjects, extremely interesting for charac-
terising those times. In his novels Panaeff, like Turgueneff,
took his types chiefly from the educated classes, both at St.
"
Petersburg and in the provinces. His collection of Swag-
"
gerers (hlyschi) both from the highest classes in the
,
capitals, and from provincials, Is not Inferior to Thackeray's

" "
collection of snobs." In fact, the swaggerer," as Panaeff
understood him, is even a much broader and much more com-
plicated type of man than the snob, and cannot easily be
described in a few words. The greatest service rendered by
Panaeff was, however, the creation in his novels of a series
of such exquisite types of Russian women that they were
NEKRASOFF 179
"
truly described by some critics as the spiritual mothers of
the heroines of Turgueneff."
A. Herzen ( 18 12-1870) also belongs to the same epoch,
but he will be spoke of in a subsequent chapter.
A very sympathetic woman writer, who belongs to the
same group and deserves in reality much more than a brief
is N. D. Hvoschinskaya
notice, (1825-1869; Zaionch-
kovskaya after her marriage). She wrote under the mascu-
line nom-de-plume of V. Krestovskiy, and in order not to
confound her with a very prolific writer of novels in the
style of the French detective novel the author of St. Peters-
burg Slums, whose name was "Vsevolod Krestovskiy she
is usually known in Russia as V. Krestovskiy-pseudonyme."
N. D. Hvoschinskaya began to write very early, in 1847,
and her novels were endowed with such an inner charm that
they were always admired by the general public and were
widely read. It must, however, be said that during the first
part of her literary career the full value of her work was
not appreciated, and that down to the end of the seventies
literary criticism remained hostile to her. It was only towards
the end of her career (in 187 8- 18 80) that our best literary
critics Mihailovskiy, Arsenieff and the novelist Boborykin
recognised the full value of this writer, who certainly
deserves being placed by the side of George Eliot and the
author of Jane Eyre.
N. D. Hvoschinskaya certainly was not one of those who
conquer their reputation at once but the cause of the rather
;
hostile attitude of Russian critics towards her was that,

having been bom in a poor nobleman's family of Ryazan,
and having spent all her life in the province, her novels of
the first period, in which she dealt with provincial life and
provincial types only, suffered from a certain narrowness of
view. This last defect was especially evident in those
types
of men for whom the young author tried to win sympathy,
but who, after all, had no claims to it, and simply proved
that the author felt the need of idealising somebody, at least,
in her sad surroundings.
Apart from this defect, N. D. Hvoschinskaya knew pro-
vincial life very well and pictured it admirably. She repre-
sented it exactly in the same pessimistic Jight in which
i8o RUSSIAN LITERATURE
Turgueneflf saw it in those same years the last years of
the reign of Nicholas I. She excelled especially in representing
the sad and hopeless existence of the girl in most of the
families of those times.
In her own family she meets the bigoted tyranny of her
" "
mother and the let-me-alone egotism of her father, and
among her admirers she finds only a collection of good-for-
nothings who cover their shallowness with empty, sonorous
phrases. Every novel written by our author during this
period contains the drama of a girl whose best self is crushed
back in such surroundings, or it relates the still more heart-
rending drama of an old maid compelled to live under the
tyranny, the petty persecutions and the pin-prickings of her
relations.
When Russia entered into a better period, in the early
sixties, the novels of N. D. Hvoschinskaya also took a
much more hopeful
different, character, and among them
The Great Bear (1870-71) is the most prominent. At the
time of its appearance it produced quite a sensation amidst
our youth, and it had upon them a deeper influence, in the
very best sense of the word, than any other novel. The
heroine, Katya, meets, in Verhovskiy, a man of the weakling
type which we know from Turgueneff's Correspondence, but
dressed this time in the garb of a social reformer, prevented
" " " "
only by circumstances and misfortunes from accom-
plishing greater things. Verhovskiy, whom Katya loves and
who falls in love with her so far, at least, as such men can
fall in love admirably pictured.
is It is one of the best
representatives in the already rich gallery of such types in
Russian literature. It must be owned that there are in The
Great Bear one or two characters which are not quite real,
or, at least, are not correctly appreciated by the author (for
instance, the old Bagryanskiy) but we find also a fine col-
;
lection of admirably painted characters; while Katya stands

higher, is more alive, and is more fully pictured, than Tur-
gueneff's Natasha or even his Helen. She has had enough "
"
of all the talk about heroic deeds which circumstances
prevent the would-be heroes from accomplishing, and she
takes to a much smaller task: she becomes a loving school
mistress in a village school, and undertakes to bring into the
NEKRASOFF i8i
village-darkness her higher ideals and her hopes of a better

future. The appearance of this novel, just at the time when
" "
that great movement of the youth towards the people
was beginning in Russia, made it favourite reading by the
side of Mordovtseff's Signs of the Times, and Spielhagen's
Amboss und Hammer and In Reih und Glied. The warm
tone of the novel and the refined, deeply humane, poetical
touches of which it is full all these added immensely to
the inner merits of The Great Bear. In Russia it has sown
many a good idea, and there is no doubt that if it were known
in Western Europe, it would be, here as well, a favourite
with the thinking and well inspired young women and men.
A third period may be distinguished in the art of N.
Hvoschinskaya, after the end of the seventies. The novels
of this period among which the series entitled The Album:
Groups and Portraits is the most striking have a new char-
acter. When the great liberal movement which Russia had
lived through in the early sixties came to an end, and
reaction had got the upper hand, after 1864, hundreds and
hundreds of those who had been prominent in this movement
as representatives of advanced thought and reform aban-
doned the faith and the ideals of their best years. Under a
thousand various pretexts they now tried to persuade them-
selves and, of course, those women who had trusted them
that new times had come, and new requirements had grown
up; that they had only become "practical" when they
deserted the old banner and ranged themselves under a new
one that of personal enrichment; that to do this was on
"
their part a necessary self-sacrifice, a manifestation of virile
citizenship," which requires from every man that he should

not stop even before the sacrifice of his ideals in the interest
" "
of his cause." V. Krestovskiy," as a woman who had
loved the ideals, understood better than any man the real
sense of these sophisms. She must have bitterly suffered from
them in her personal life; and I doubt whether in any litera-
" "
ture there is a collection of such groups and portraits of
deserters as we see in The Album, and especially in At the
Photographer^ s. In reading these stories we are conscious of
a loving heart which bleeds as it describes these deserters,
and this makes of
"
The groups and portraits " of N. D.
Hvoschinskaya one of the finest pieces of " subjective
"
realism we possess in our literature.
Two sisters of N. D. Hvoschinskaya, who wrote under
the noms-de-plume of ZlMAROFF and Vesenieff, were also
novelists. The former wrote a biography of her sister
Nathalie.
POETS OF THE SAME EPOCH

Several poets of the epoch described in the last two
chapters ought to be analysed at some length in this place,
if this book pretended to be a Course in Russian literature.
I shall have, however, to limit myself to
very short notes,
although most of the poets could not have failed to be
favourites with other nations if they had written in a
language better known abroad than Russian.
Such was certainly Koltsoff (1808- 1842), a poet from
-the people,who has sung in his songs, so deeply appealing
to every poetical mind, the borderless steppes of Southern
Russia, the poor life of the tiller of the soil, the sad existence
of the Russian peasant woman, that love which is for the
loving soul only a source of acute suffering, that fate which
is not a mother but a step-mother, and that happiness which
has been so short and has left behind only tears and sadness.
The style, the contents, the form all was original in this
poet of the Steppes. Even the form of his verse is not the
form established in Russian prosody: it is something as
musical as the Russian folk-song and in places is equally
irregular. However, every line of the poetry of the Koltsoff
of his second period when he had freed himself from
imitation and had become a true poet of the people every
expression and every thought appeal to the heart and fill it
with poetical love for nature and men. Like all the best Rus-
sian poets he died very young, just at the age when he was
reaching the full maturity of his talent and deeper questions
were beginning to inspire his poetry.
NiKlTiN ( 1 824-1 861 ) was another poet of a similar type.
He was born in a poor artisan's family, also in South Russia.
His life in this family, of which the head was continually
under the influence of drink, and which the young man had
NEKRASOFF 183
to maintain, was terrible. He also died young, but he left
some very fine and most touching pieces of poetry, in which,
with a simplicity that we shall find only with the later folk-
novelists, he described scenes from popular life, coloured
with the deep sadness impressed upon him by his own
unhappy life.
A. Pleschêff (1825-1893) has been for the last thirty
years of his life one of the favourite Russian poets. Like so
many other gifted men of his generation, he "
was arrested
in 1849 ^^ connection with the affair of the Petrashevskiy
circles," for which Dostoyevskiy was sent to hard labour. He
" "
was found even less guilty than the great novelist, and
was marched as a soldier to the Orenburg region, where he-
probably would have died a soldier, if Nicholas I. had not
himself died in 1856. He was pardoned by Alexander II.,
and permitted to settle at Moscow.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Plescheeff never let
himself be crushed by persecution, or by th dark years which
Russia has lately lived through. On the contrary, he always
retained that same note of vigour, freshness, and faith in his
humanitarian though perhaps too abstract ideals, which char-
acterised his first poetical productions in the forties. Only
towards his very latest years, under the influence of ill-health,
did a pessimistic note begin to creep into his verses. Besides
writing original poetry he translated very much, and admira-
bly well, from the German, English, French and Italian
poets.
Besides these three poets, who sought their inspiration

in the realities of life or in higher humanitarian ideals, we
have a group of poets who are usually described as admirers
" " "
of pure beauty and Art for Art's sake." Th. Tyi^-
CHEFF (1803-1873) may be taken as the best, or, at any
rate, the eldest representative of this group. Turgueneff
spoke of him very highly in 1854 praising his fine and
true feeling for nature and his fine taste. The influence of the
epoch of Pushkin upon him was evident, and he certainly was
endowed with the impressionability and sincerity which are
necessary in a good poet. With all that, his verses are not
much read, and seem rather dull to our generation.
Apollon Maykoff ( 1 821-1897) is often described as
a poet of pure art for art's sake; at any rate, this is what
he preached in theory; but in reality his poetry belonged to
four distinct domains. In his youth he was a pure admirer
of antique Greece and Rome, and his chief work, Two
fVorlds, was devoted to the conflict between antique paganism
and natureism and Christianity the best types in his poem
being representatives of the former. Later on he wrote
several very good pieces of poetry devoted to the history
of the Church in mediaeval times. Still later, in the sixties,
he was carried away by the liberal movement in Russia and
in Western Europe, and his poems were imbued with its spirit
of freedom. He wrote during those years his best poems, and
made numbers of excellent translations from Heine. And
finally, after the liberal period had come to an end in Russia,
he also changed his opinions and began to write in the
opposite direction, losing more and more both the sympathy
of his readers and his talent. Apart from some of the pro-
ductions of this last period of decay, the verses of Maykoff
are as a rule very musical, really poetical, and not devoid
of force. In his earlier productions and in some pieces of
his third period, he attained real beauty.
N. SCHERBINA ( 1 821-1869), also an admirer of classical
Greece, may be mentioned for his really good anthological
poetry from the life of Greek antiquity, in which he even
excelled Maykoff.
POLONSKIY (1820-1898), a contemporary and a great
friend of Turgueneff, displayed all the elements of a great
artist. His verses are full of true melody, his poetical images
are rich, and yet natural and simple, and the subjects he took
were not devoid of originality. This is why his verses were
always read with interest. But he had none of that force, or
of that of conception, or of that intensity of passion
depth
which might have made of him a great poet. His best piece,
A Musical Cricket, is written in a jocose mood, and his most
popular verses are those which he wrote in the style of folk-
poetry. One may say that they have become the property of
the people. Altogether Polonskiy appealed chiefly to the
*' "
quiet, moderate intellectual who does not much care about
going to the bottom of the great problems of life. If he
NEKRXsOFF 185
touched upon some of these, it was owing to a passing, rather
than to a them.
life interest in
One more poet of this group, perhaps the most character-
istic of it, was A. Shenshin (i 820-1 892), much better
known under his nom-de-plume of A. Fet. He remained all
"
his life a poet of pure art for art's sake." He wrote a
good deal about economical and social matters, always in
the reactionary sense, but in prose. As to verses, he never
resorted to them for anything but the worship of beauty
for beauty's sake. In this direction he succeeded very well.
His short verses are especially pretty and sometimes almost
beautiful. Nature, in its quiet, lovely aspects, which lead to
a gentle, aimless sadness, he depicted sometimes to perfection,
as also those moods of the mind which can be best described
as indefinite sensations, slightly erotic. However, taken as a
whole, his poetry appears monotonous.
To the same group one might add A. K. Tolst6y, whose
verses attain sometimes a rare perfection and sound like the
best music. The feelings expressed in them may not be very
deep, but the form and the music of the verses are delightful.
They have, moreover, the stamp of originality, because
nobody could write poems in the style of Russian folk-poetry
better than Alexei Tolstoy. Theoretically, he preached art
for art's sake. But he never remained true to this canon and,
taking either the life of old epical Russia, or the period of
the struggle between the Moscow Tsars and the feudal
boyars, he developed his admiration of the olden times in
very beautiful verses. He also wrote a novel, Prince Sere-
bryanyi, from the times of John the Terrible, which was very
widely read; but his main work was a trilogy of dramas from
the same interesting period of Russian history (see Ch. VI).
Almost all the poets just mentioned have translated a great

deal,and they have enriched Russian literature with such a
number of translations from all languages so admirably
done as a rule that no other literature of the world, not
even the German, can claim to possess an equally great
treasury. Some translations, beginning with Zhukovskiy's
rendering of the Prisoner of Chillon, or the translations of
Hiawatha, are simply classical. All Schiller, nip.st of Goethe,
nearly all Byron, a great deal of Shelley, all that is worth
knowing inTennyson, Wordsworth, Crabbe, all that could
be translated from Browning, Barbier, Victor Hugo, and so
on, are as familiar in Russia as in the mother countries of
these poets, and occasionally even more so. As to such
favourites as Heine, I really don't know whether his best
poems lose anything in those splendid translations which we
owe to our best poets; while the songs of Beranger, in the
free translation of Kurotchkin, are not in the least inferior to
the originals.
We have moreover some excellent poets who are chiefly
known for their translations. Such are: N. Gerbel (1827-
1883), who made his reputation by an admirable rendering
of the Lay of Igor's Raid (see Ch. I.), and later on, by his
versions of a great number of West European poets. His
edition of Schiller, translated by Russian Poets (1857), fol-
lowed by similar editions of Shakespeare, Byron, and Goethe,
was epoch making.
Mikhail Mikhailoff (i 826-1 865), one of themost
brilliant writers of the Contemporary, condemned in 1861
to hard labour in Siberia, where he died four years later, was
especially renowned for his translations from Heine, as also
for those from Longfellow, Hood, Tennyson, Lenan, and
others.
P. Weinberg (born 1830) made his reputation by his
excellent translations from Shakespeare, Byron (Sardana-
pal)y Shelley (Cenci), Sheridan, Coppe, Gutzkow, Heine,
etc., and for his editions of the work of Goethe and Heine
in Russian translations. He still continues to enrich Russian
literature with excellent versions of the masterpieces of for-
eign literatures.
L. Mey ( 1 822-1 862), the author of a number of poems
from popular life, written in a very picturesque language, and
of several dramas, of which those from old Russian life are
especially valuable and were taken by Rimskiy Korsakoff
as the subjects of his operas, has also made a great number of
translations. He
translated not only from the modern West
European poets English, French, German, Italian, and
Polish but also from Greek, Latin, and Old Hebrew, all
of which languages he knew to perfection. Besides excellent
NEKRXsOFF 187
translations of Anacreon and the idylls of Theocritus, he
wrote also beautiful poetical versions of the Song of Songs
and of various other portions of the Bible.
D. MiNAYEFF ( 1 835-1 889), the author of a great num-
ber of satirical verses, also belongs to this group of trans-
His renderings from Byron, Burns, Cornwall, and
lators.
Moore, Goethe and Heine, Leopardi, Dante, and several
others, were, as a rule, extremely fine.
And finally I must mention one, at least, of the prose-
translators, VvED^NSKiY (18 13-1855), for his very fine
translations of the chief novels of Dickens. His renderings
are real works of art, the result of a perfect knowledge of
English life, and of such a deep assimilation of the genius of
Dickens that the translator almost identified himself with the
original author.
PART VI
The Drama
CHAPTER VI
THE DRAMA
ITS Origin ^The Tsars Alexei and Peter I. Sumarokoff Pseudo-

classical Tragedies: Knyazhnin, Ozeroff First Comedies ^The
First Years of the Nineteenth Century Griboyedoff ^Thc
Moscow Stage in the Fifties Ostrovskiy; his first Dramas
"
The Thunderstorm " Ostrovskiy's later Dramas Historical
Dramas A. K. Tolstoy
: Other Dramatic Writers.
Drama in Russia, as everywhere else, had a
THE
comedy
double origin. It developed out of the religious
"
mysteries
on the
"
on the one hand and the popular
other, witty Interludes being introduced
into the grave, moral representations, the subjects of which
were borrowed from the Old or the New Testament.
Several such mysteries were adapted in the seventeenth cen-
tury by the teachers of the Graeco-Latin Theological Acad-
emy at Kieff for representation in Little Russian by the
students of the Academy, and later on these adaptations
found their way to Moscow.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century on the eve,
so to speak, of the reforms of Peter I. a strong desire to
Introduce Western habits of life was felt In certain small
circles at Moscow, and the father of Peter, the Tsar Alexis,
was not hostile to It. He took a liking to theatrical representa-
tions, and induced some foreigners residing at Moscow to
write pieces for representation at the palace. A
certain Gre-
gory undertook this task and, taking German versions of
"
plays, which used to be called at that time English Plays,"
he adapted them to Russian tastes. The Comedy of Queen
Esther and the Haughty Haman, Tobias, Judith, etc., were
represented before the Tsar. A high functionary of the
Church, Simeon Polotskiy, did not disdain to write such
mysteries, and several of them have come down to us while ;
191
a daughter of Alexis, the princess Sophie (a pupil of
Simeon), breaking with the strict habits of isolation which
were then obligatory for women, had theatrical representa-
tions given at the palace in her presence.
This was too much for the old Moscow Conservatives, and
after the death of Alexis the theatre was closed; and so it
remained a quarter of a century, i. e., until 1702, when Peter
I., who was very fond of the drama, opened a theatre in the
old capital. He had a company of actors brought for the
purpose from Dantsig, and a special house was built for them
within the holy precints of the Kremlin. More than that,
another sister of Peter I., Nathalie, who was as fond of
dramatic performances as the great reformer himself, a few
years later took all the properties of this theatre to her own
palace, and had the representations given there first in
German, and later on in Russian. It is also very probable that

she herself wrote a few dramas perhaps in collaboration
with one of the pupils of a certain Doctor Bidlo, who had
opened another theatre at the Moscow Hospital, the actors
being the students. Later on the theatre of Princess Nathalie
was transferred to the new capital founded by her brother on
the Neva.
The repertoire of this theatre was pretty varied, and
included, besides German dramas, like Scipio the African,
Don Juan and Don Pedro, and the like, free translations
from Moliere, as also German farces of a very rough char-
acter. There were, besides a few original Russian dramas
(partly contributed, apparently, by Nathalie), which were
compositions drawn from the lives of the Saints, and from
some Polish novels, widely read at that time in Russian
manuscript translations.
It was out of these elements and out of West European
models that the Russian drama evolved, when the theatre
became, in the middle of the eighteenth century, a permanent
institution. It is most interesting to note, that it was not in
either of the capitals, but in a provincial town, Yaroslav,
under the patronage of the local tradesmen, that the first
permanent Russian theatre was founded, in 1750, and also
that it was by the private enterprise of a few actors the two
:
brothers Volkoff, Dmitrevsky, and several others. The Em-

THE DRAMA 193
press Elisabeth probably following the advice of Sumaro-
koff, who himself began about that time to write dramas
ordered these actors to move to St. Petersburg, where they
"
became artists of the Imperial Theatre," in the service of
the Crown. Thus, the Russian theatre became, in 1756, an
institution of the Government.
SuMAROKOFF (1718-1777), who wrote, besides verses
and fables (the latter of real value), a considerable number
of tragedies and comedies, played an important part in the
development of the Russian drama. In his tragedies he imi-
tated Racine and Voltaire. He followed strictly their rules of
"
unity," and cared even less than they did for historical
truth; but as he had not the great talent of his French
masters, he made of his heroes mere personifications of cer-
tain virtues or vices, figures quite devoid of life, and indulging
in endless pompous monologues. Several of his tragedies
(Horev, written in 1747, Sinav and Truvor, Yaropolk and
Dilitza, Dmitri the Impostor) were taken from Russian his-
tory; but after all their heroes were as little Slavonian
as Racine's heroes were Greek and Roman. This, however,
must be said in favour of Sumarokoff, that he never failed
to express in his tragedies the more advanced humanitarian
ideas of the times sometimes with real feeling, which
pierced through even the conventional forms of speech of his
heroes. As to his comedies, although they had not the same
success as his serious dramas, they were much nearer to life.
They contained touches of the real life of Russia, especially
of the life of the Moscow nobility, and their satirical char-
acter undoubtedly influenced Sumarokoff's followers.
Knyazhnin (1742- 1 791) followed on the same lines.
Like Sumarokoff he translated tragedies from the French,
and also wrote imitations of French tragedies, taking his sub-
jects partly from Russian history {Rossldv, 1784; Vadim of
Novgorod, which was printed after his death and was
immediately destroyed by the Government on account of its
tendencies towards freedom).
OzEROFF (1769-18 16) continued the work of Knyazh-
nin, but introduced the sentimental and the romantic
elements into his pseudo-classical tragedies {Oedipus in
Athens, Death of Oleg). With all their defects these
tragedies enjoyed a lasting success, and powerfully contrib-
uted to the development of both the stage and a public of
serious playgoers.
At the same time comedies also began to be written by the
same authors ( The Brawler, Strange People, by Knyazhnin)
and their followers, and although they were for the most part
imitations of the French, nevertheless subjects taken from
Russian everyday life began to be introduced. Sumarokoflf
had already done something in this direction, and he had been
seconded by Catherine .11., who contributed a couple of
satiricalcomedies, taken from her surroundings, such as The
Fete of Mrs. Grumbler, and a comic opera from Russian
popular life. She was perhaps the first to introduce Russian
peasants on the stage; and it is worthy of note that the taste
for a popular vein on the stage rapidly developed the
comedies, The Miller by Ablesimoff, Zbitenshik {The
Hawker)^ by Knyazhnin, and so on, all taken from the life
of the people, being for some time great favourites with the
playgoers.
VoN-WiziN has already been mentioned in a previous
chapter, and it is sufficient here to recall the fact, that
by
his two comedies. The Brigadier (1768) and Nedorosl
(1782), which continued to be played up to the middle of
the nineteenth century he became the father of the realistic
satirical comedy in Russia. Denunciation {Ydbeda)^ by Kap-
NiST, and a few comedies contributed by the great fable-

writer Kryl6ff belong to the same category.
THE FIRST YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

During the first thirty years of the nineteenth century the
Russian theatre developed remarkably. The stage produced,
at St. Petersburg and at Moscow, a number of gifted and
original actors and actresses, both in tragedy and in
comedy. The number of writers for the stage became so
considerable that all the forms of dramatic art were able to
develop at the same time. During the Napoleonic wars
patriotic tragedies, full of allusions to current events, such as
Dmitri Donskoi (1807), by Ozeroff, invaded the stage.
However, the pseudo-classical tragedy continued to hold its
THE DRAMA 195
own. Better translations and imitations of Racine were pro-
duced (Katenin, Kokoshkin) and enjoyed a certain
success, especially at St. Petersburg, owing to good tragic
actors of the declamatory school. At the same time transla-
tions of KoTZEBUE had an enormous success, as also the Rus-
sian productions of his sentimental imitators.
Romanticism and pseudo-classicalism were, of course, at
war with each other for the possession of the stage, as they
were in the domains of poetry and the novel; but, owing to
the spirit of the time, and patronised as it was by Karamzin
and Zhukovskiy, romanticism triumphed. It was aided
especially by the energetic efforts of Prince Shahovskoy,
who wrote, with a good knowledge of the stage, more than a
hundred varied pieces tragedies, comedies, operas, vaude-
villes and ballets taking the subjects for his dramas from
Walter Scott, Ossian, Shakespeare, and Pushkin. At the same
comedy, and especially satirical comedy, as also the vaudeville
(which approached comedy by a rather more careful treat-
ment of characters than is usual in that sort of literature on
the French stage), were represented by a very great number
of more or less original productions. Besides the excellent
translations of Hmelnitzkiy from Moliere, the public en-
joyed also the pieces of Zagoskin, full of good-hearted
merriment, the sometimes brilliant and always animated
comedies and vaudevilles of Shahovskoy, the vaudevilles of
A. I. PisAREFF, and so on. True, all the comedies were either
directly inspired by Moliere or were adaptations from the
French into which Russian characters and Russian manners
had been Introduced. But as there was still some original
creation in these adaptions, which was carried a step
further on the stage by gifted actors of the natural, realist
school, it all prepared the way for the truly Russian comedy,
which found its embodiment in Griboyedoff, Gogol and
Ostrovskiy.
GRIBOY^DOFF.
Griboyedoff ( 1 795-1 829) died very young, and all that
he was one comedy, Misfortune from Intelligence (Gore
left
ot Umd) and a couple of scenes from an unfinished tragedy
,
in the Shakespearean style. However, the comedy is a work

of genius, and owing to it alone, Griboyedoff may be de-
scribed as having done for the Russian stage what Pushkin
has done for Russian poetry.
Griboyedoff was born at Moscow, and received a good
education at home before he entered the Moscow University,
at the age of fifteen. Here he was fortunate enough to fall
under the influence of the historian Schlotzer and Professor
Buhle, who developed in him the desire for a thorough ac-
quaintance with the world-literature, together with habits of
serious work. It was consequently during his stay at the
University (1810-1812) that Griboyedoff wrote the first
sketch of his comedy, at which he worked for the next twelve
years.
In 1
during the invasion of Napoleon, he entered the
8 12,
military service, and for four years remained an oflicer of the

hussars, chiefly in Western Russia. The spiritof the army was
quite different then from what it became later on, " under
"
Nicholas I. it was in the army that the
: Decembrists made
their chief propaganda, and Griboyedoff met among his
comrades men of high humanitarian tendencies. In 18 16 he
left the military service, and, obeying the desire of his
mother, entered the diplomatic service at St. Petersburg,
"
where he became friendly with the Decembrists" Tchaa-
daeff (see Ch. VIII.), Ryleeff, and Odoevskiy (see Ch.
I. and II.).
A duel, in which Griboyedoff took part as a second, was

the cause of the future dramatist's removal from St. Peters-
burg. His mother insisted upon his being sent as far as pos-
sible from the capital, and he was accordingly despatched to
Teheran. He travelled a good deal in Persia, and, with his
wonderful activity and liveliness, took a prominent part in the
diplomatic work of the Russian Embassy. Later on, staying at
Tiflis, and acting as a secretary to the Lieutenant of the
Caucasus, he worked hard in the same diplomatic domain;
THE DRAMA 197
but he worked also all the time at his
comedy, and in 1824 he
finished it, while he was for a few months in Central Russia.
Owing to a mere accident the manuscript of Misfortune from
Intelligence became known to a few friends, and the comedy
produced a tremendous sensation among them. In a few
months it was being widely read in manuscript copies, raising
storms of indignation amongst the old generation, and pro-
voking the greatest admiration among the young. All efforts,
however, to obtain its production on the stage, or even to have
it represented once in private, were thwarted by the censor-
ship, and Griboyedoff returned to the Caucasus without hav-

ing seen his comedy played at a theatre.
There, at Tifli's, he was arrested a few days after the 14th
of December, 1825 (see Ch. I.), and taken in all speed to the
St. Petersburg fortress, where his best friends were already
imprisoned. It is said in the Memoirs of one of the Decem-

brists that even in the gloomy surroundings of the fortress
the habitual brightness of Griboyedoff did not leave him. He
used to tell his unfortunate friends such amusing stories by
means of taps on the walls that they rolled on their beds,
laughing like children.
In June, 1 826, he was set free, and sent back to Tiflis. But
after the execution of some of his friends Ryleeff was
among them and the harsh sentence to hard labour for life
in Siberian mines, which was passed upon all the others, his
old gaiety was gone forever.
At Tiflis he worked harder than ever at spreading seeds
of a better civilisation in the newly conquered territory; but
next year he had to take part in the war of 1 827-1 828 against
Persia, accompanying the army as a diplomatic agent, and
after a crushing defeat of the Shah, Abbas-mirza, it was he
who concluded the well-known Turkmanchai treaty, by which
Russia obtained rich provinces from Persia and gained such
an influence over her inner affairs. After a flying visit to St.
Petersburg, Griboyedoff was sent once more to Teheran

this time as an ambassador. Before leaving, he married at
Tiflis a Georgian princess of remarkable beauty, but he felt,
as he left the Caucasus for Persia, that his chances of return-
" **
ing alive were few : Abbas Miraz," he wrote, will never
pardon me the Turkmanchai treaty" and so it happened. A
few months after his arrival at Teheran a crowd of Persians
fell upon the Russian embassy, and Griboyedoff was killed.
For the last few years of his life, Griboyedoff had not
much time nor taste for literary work. He knew that nothing
he desired to write could ever see the light. Even Misfortune
from Intelligence had been so mutilated by censorship that
many of its best passages had lost all sense. He wrote, how-
ever, a tragedy in the romantic style, A Georgian Night, and
those of his friendswho had read it in full rated extremely
high itspoetic and dramatic qualities; but only two scenes
from this tragedy and the outline of its contents have reached
us. The manuscript was lost perhaps at Teheran.
Misfortune from Intelligence is a most powerful satire,
directed against the high society of Moscow in the years
1 820-1 830. Griboyedoff knew this society from the inside,
and his types are not invented. Real men gave him the
foundations for such immortal types as Famusoff, the aged
jiobleman, and Skalozub, the fanatic of militarism, as well as
for all the secondary personages. As to the language in which
Griboyedoff's personages speak, it has often been remarked
that up to his time only three writers had been such great
masters of the truly Russian spoken language Pushkin, Kry-
:
loff, and Griboyedoff. Later on, Ostrovskiy could be added to

these three. It is the true language of Moscow. Besides, the
comedy is full of verses so strikingly satirical and so well said,
that scores of them became proverbs known all over Russia.
The idea of the comedy must have been suggested by
Moliere's Misanthrope, and the hero, Tchatskiy, has cer-
tainly much in common with Alceste. But Tchatskiy is, at the
same time, so much Griboyedoff himself, and his cutting
sarcasms are so much the sarcasms which Griboyedoff must
have launched against his Moscow acquaintances, while all
the other persons of the comedy are so truly Moscow people
so exclusively Moscow nobles that apart from its leading
motive, the comedy is entirely original and most thoroughly
Russian.
Tchatskiy is a young man who returns from a long jour-
ney abroad, and hastens to the house of an old gentleman,
Famusoff, whose daughter, Sophie, was his playmate in child-
hood, and is loved by him now. However, the object of his
THE DRAMA 199
vows has meanwhile made the accqualntance of her father's
secretary a most insignificant and repulsive young man,
"
Moltchalin, whose rules of life are: First, moderation and
punctuality," and next, to please everyone in the house
"
of his
superiors, down to the gatekeeper and his dog, that even
the dog may be kind to me." Following his rules, Moltchalin
courts at the same time the daughter of his principal and her
maid the former, to make himself agreeable in his master's
:
house, and the latter, because she pleases him. Tchatskiy is

received in a very cold way. Sophie is afraid of his intelligence
and his sarcasm, and her father has already found a partner
for her in Colonel Skalozub a military man full six feet
high in his socks, who speaks in a deep bass voice, exclusively
about military matters, but has a fortune and will soon be
a general.
Tchatskiy behaves just as an enamoured young man would
do. He sees nothing but Sophie, whom he pursues with his
adoration, making in her presence stinging remarks about
Moltchalin, and bringing her father to despair by his free
criticism of Moscow manners the cruelty of the old serf-
owners, the platitudes of the old courtiers, and so on; and as
a climax, at a ball, which Famusoff gives that night, he in-
dulges in long monologues against the adoration of the Mos-
cow ladies for everything French. Sophie, in the meantime,
offended by his remarks about Moltchalin, retaliates by set-
ting afloat the rumour that Tchatskiy is not quite right in his
mind, a rumour which is taken up with delight by Society at
the ball, and spreads like wildfire.
It has often been said in Russia that the satirical remarks
of Tchatskiy at the ball, being directed against such a trifling
matter as the adoration of foreigners, are rather superficial
and irrelevant. But it is more than probable that Griboyedoff
limited himself to such innocent remarks because he knew
that no others would be tolerated by the censorship; he must
have hoped that these, at least, would not be wiped out by the
censor's red ink. From what Tchatskiy says during his morn-
ing call in Famusoff's study, and from what is dropped by
other personages, it is evident that Griboyedoff had far more
serious criticisms to put into his hero's mouth.
Altogther, a Russian satirical writer is necessarily placed
under a serious disadvantage with foreigners. When Moliere
gives a satirical description of Parisian society this satire is
not strange to the readers of other nations: we all know
something about life in Paris; but when Griboyedoff describes
Moscow society in the same satirical vein, and reproduces in
such an admirable way purely Moscow types not even
typical Russians, but Moscow types ("On all the Moscow
"
people," he says, there is a special stamp ") they are so
strange to the Western mind that the translator ought to
be half-Russian himself, and a poet, in order to render
Griboyedoff 's comedy in another language. If such a trans-
lation were made, I am sure that this comedy would become
a favourite on the stages of Western Europe. In Russia it
has been played over and over again up to the present time,
and although it is now seventy years old, it has lost nothing of
its interest and attractiveness.
THE MOSCOW STAGE.

In the forties of the nineteenth century the theatre was
treated everywhere with great respect and more than any-
where else was this the case in Russia. Italian opera had not
yet reached the development it attained at St. Petersburg
some twenty years later, and Russian opera, represented by
poor singers, and treated as a step-daughter by the directors
of the Imperial Theatres, offered but little attraction. It was
the drama and occasionally the ballet, when some star like
Fanny Elsler appeared on the horizon, which brought to-
gether the best elements of educated society and aroused the
youth of all classes, including the university students. The
dramatic stage was looked upon to speak in the style of
"
those years as a temple of Art," a centre of far-reaching
educational influence. As to the actors and actresses, they
endeavoured, in their turn, not merely to render on the stage
the characters created by the dramatist; they did their best to
contribute themselves, like Cruickshank in his illustrations
of Dickens's novels, to the final creation of the character, by
finding its true personification.
Especially at Moscow did this intellectual intercourse be-
tween the stage and society go on, and a superior conception
THE DRAMA 201
of dramatic art was there developed. The Intercourse which
Gogol established with the actors who played his Inspector-
General, and especially with Schepkin; the influence of the
literary and philosophical circles which had then their seat at
Moscow; and the intelligent appreciation and criticism of
their work which the actors found in the Press all this con-
curred in making of the Moscow Malyi Teatr (Small
Theatre) the cradle of a superior "dramatic "art. While St.
Petersburg patronised the so-called French school of act-
ing declamatory and unnaturally refined the Moscow
stage attained a high degree of perfection in the develop-
ment of the naturalistic school. I mean the school of which
Duse is now such a great representative, and to which Lena
Ashwell owed her great success in Resurrection; that is, the
school in which the actor parts with the routine of conven-
tional stage tradition, and provokes the deepest emotions in
his audience by the depth of his own real feeling and by the
natural truth and simplicity of its expression the school
which occupies the same position on the stage that the realism
of Turgueneff and Tolstoy occupies in literature.
In the forties and the early fifties this school had attained
its highest perfection at Moscow, and had in its ranks such
first-class actors and actresses as Schepkin the real soul of

this stage MotchAloff, Sadoskiy, S. Vasilieff, and
Mme. Nikulina-Kossitskaya, supported by quite a pleiad
of good secondary aids. Their repertoire was not very rich;
but the two comedies of Gogol {Inspector-General and Mar-
riage)^ occasionally Griboyedoff's great satire ;-â comedy,
The Marriage of Kretchinsky, by SuKHOVO-KoBYLiN, which
gavê excellent opportunities for displaying the best qualities
of the artists just named; now and then a drama of Shake-
speare,* plenty of melodramas adapted from the French, and
vaudevilles which came nearer to light comedy than to farce
this was the ever varied programme of the Small Theatre.
Some plays were played to perfection combining the
" "
ensemble and the go which characterise the Odeon with
the simplicity and naturalness already mentioned.
*
Shakespeare has always been a great favourite in Russia, but his
dramas require a certain wealth of scenery not always at the disposal
of the Small Theatre.
The mutual influence which the stage and dramatic authors
necessarily exercise upon each other was admirably illus-
trated at Moscow. Several dramatists wrote specially for this
stage not in order that this or that actress might eclipse all
others, as happens nowadays in those theatres where one play
is played scores of nights in succession, but for this given stage
and its actors as a whole. Ostrovskiy (i 823-1 886) was the

one who best realised this mutual relation between the
dramatic author and the stage, and thus he came to hold with
regard to the Russian drama the same position that Tur-
gueneff and Tolstoy hold with regard to the Russian novel.
*' "
ostr6vskiy: poverty no vice
Ostrovskiy was born at Moscow in the family of a poor
clergyman, and, like the best of the younger generation of his
time, he was from the age of seventeen an enthusiastic visitor
of the Moscow theatre. At that age, we are told, his favourite
talk with his comrades was the stage. He went to the Univer-
sity, but two years later he was compelled to leave, in conse-
quence of a quarrel with a professor, and he became an under
clerk in one of the old Commercial tribunals. There he had
the very best opportunities for making acquaintance with the
world of Moscow merchants a quite separate class which
remained in its isolation the keeper of the traditions of old
Russia. It was from this class that Ostrovskiy took nearly all
the types of his first and best dramas. Only later on did he
begin to widen the circle of his observations, taking in various
classes of educated society.
His first comedy Pictures of Family Happiness, vj^s written
^
in 1847, and three years later appeared his first drama, JVe
shall settle it among Ourselves, or The Bankrupt, which at
once gave him the reputation of a great dramatic write. It
was printed in a review, and had a great vogue all over Rus-
sia (the actor Sadovskiy read it widely in private houses at
Moscow), but it was not allowed to be put on the stage.

The Moscow merchants even lodged a complaint with
Nicholas I. against the author, and Ostrovskiy was dismissed
from the civil service and placed under police supervision
as a suspect. Only many years later, four years after
THE DRAMA 203
Alexander II. had succeeded his father that is, in i860
was the drama played at Moscow, and even then the
censorship insisted upon introducing at the end of it a
police officer to represent the triumph of justice over the
wickedness of the bankrupt.
For the next five years Ostrovskiy published nothing, but
then he brought out in close succession (1853 ^î^ 1^54) *wo
dramas of remarkable power Don't take a seat in other
People's Sledges, and Poverty No Vice. The subject
of the former was not new: a girl from a tradesman's
family runs away with a nobleman, who abandons and ill-
treats her when he realises that she will get from her father
neither pardon nor money. But this subject was treated with
such freshness, and the characters were depicted in positions
so well-chosen, that for its literary and stage-qualities the
drama is one of the best Ostrovskiy has written. As to
Poverty No Vice, it produced a tremendous impression all
over Russia. We see in it a family of the old type, the head of
which is a rich merchant a man who is wont to impose his
will upon all his surroundings and has no other conception of
" "
life. He has, however, taken outwardly to civilisation
that is, to restaurant-civilisation he dresses in the fashions of
:
Western Europe and tries to follow Western customs in his

house at least in the presence of the acquaintances he makes
in the fashionable restaurants. Nevertheless, his wife is his
slave, and his household trembles at his voice. He has a
daughter who loves, and is loved by, one of her father's
clerks, Mitya, a most timid but honest young man, and the
mother would like her daughter to marry this clerk; but the
father has made the acquaintance of a more or less wealthy
aged man a sort of Armenian money-lender, who dresses
according to the latest fashion, drinks champagne instead of
rye-whiskey, and therefore plays among Moscow merchants
a certain role of authority in questions of fashion and rules
of propriety. To this man the girl must be married. She is
saved, however, by the interference of her uncle, Lubim Tort-
soff. Lubim was once rich, like his brother, but he was not
satisfied with the dull Philistine life of his surroundings, and
seeing no way out of it and into a better social atmosphere, he
took to drink to unmitigated drunkenness, such as was to be
seen in olden times at Moscow. His wealthy brother has
helped him to get rid of his fortune, and now, in a ragged
mantle, he goes about the lower class taverns, making of
himself a sort of jester for a chance glass of gin. Penniless,
dressed in his rags, cold and hungry, he comes to the young
clerk's room, asking permission to stay there over night.
The drama goes on at Christmas time, and this gives
Ostrovskiy the opportunity for introducing all sorts of songs
and Christmas masquerades, in true Russian style. In the
midst of all this merriment, which has been going on in his
absence, Tortsoff, the father, comes in with the bridegroom
" "
of his choice. All the vulgar pleasures must now come to
an end, and the father, full of veneration for his fashionable
friend, curtly orders his daughter to marry the man he has
chosen for her. The tears of the girl and her mother are of no
avail: the father's orders must be obeyed. But there enters
Lubim Tortsoff, in his ragsand with his jester's antics
terrible in his degradation,and yet a man. The father's terror
at such a sight can easily be imagined, and Lubim Tortsoff,
who during his wanderings has heard all about the Arme-
nian's past, and who knows of his brother's scheme, begins to
tell before the guests what sort of man the would-be bride-
groom is. The latter, holding himself insulted in his friend's
house, affects great anger and leaves the room, while Lubim
Tortsoff tells his brother what a crime he is going to commit
by giving his daughter to the old man. He is ordered to leave
the room, but he persists and, standing in the rear of the
"
crowd, he begins piteously to beg : Brother, give your
" "
daughter to Mitya (the young clerk) :
he, at least, will
give me a corner in his house. I have suffered enough from
cold and hunger. My years are passing it becomes hard for
:
me to get my piece of bread by performing my antics in the

bitter frost. Mitya will let me live honestly in my old age."
The mother and daughter join with the uncle, and finally the
"
father, who resents the insults of his friend, exclaims: Well,
do you take me, then, for a wild beast? I won't give my
"
daughter to that man. Mitya, marry her I
The drama has a happy end, but the audience feels that it
might have been as well the other way. The father's whim
might have ended in the life-long misery and misfortune of
'
THE DRAMA 205
the daughter, and this would probably have been the outcome
in most such cases.
Like Griboyedoff's comedy, like Gontcharoff's Oblomojf,
and many other good things in Russian literature, this drama
is so typically Russian that one
is
apt to overlook its broadly
human seems to be typically Moscovite; but,
signification. It
change names and customs, change a few details and rise a
bit higher or sink a bit lower in the strata of society; put,
instead of the drunkard Lubim Tortsoff, a poor relation or an
honest friend who has retained his common sense and the
drama applies to any nation and to any class of society. It
is deeply human. This is what caused its tremendous success
and made it a favourite on every Russian stage for fifty years.

I do not speak, of course, of the foolishly exaggerated enthu-
siasm with which it was received by the so-called nationalists,
and especially the Slavophiles, who saw in Lubim Tortsoff
" "
the personification of the good old times of Russia. The
more sensible of Russians did not go to such lengths; but
they understood what wonderful material of observation,
drawn from real life, this and the other dramas of Ostrovskly
were offering. The leading review of the time was The Con-
temporary, and its leading critic, Dobroluboff, wrote two
long articles to analyse Ostrovskiy's dramas, under the signifi-
cant title of The Kingdom of Darkness; and when he had
passed in review all the darkness which then prevailed in
Russian life as represented by Ostrovskiy, he produced some-
thing which has been one of the most powerful influences in
the whole subsequent intellectual development of. the Russian
youth.
"
THE THUNDERSTORM
One of the best dramas of Ostrovskiy is The Thunder-
storm (translated by Mrs. Constance Garnett as The Storm).
The scene is laid in a small provincial town, somewhere on
the upper Volga, where the manners of the local trades-
people have retained the stamp of primitive wildness. There
is, for instance, one old merchant, Dikoy, very much re-
spected by the inhabitants, who represents a special type of

those tyrants whom Ostrovskiy has so well depicted. When-
ever Dikoy has a payment to make, even though he knows
2o6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
perfectly well that pay he must, he stirs up a quarrel with the
man to whom he is in debt. He has an old friend, Madame
Kabanova, and when he is the worse "
for drink, and in a bad
I have no business with
temper, he always "goes to her:
you," he declares, but I have been drinking." Following
is a scene which takes place between them :
Kabanova: I really wonder at you; with all the crowd of folks in

your house, not a single one can do anything to your liking.
Dikoy: That's so!
Kabanova: Come, what do you want of me?
Dikoy: Well, talk me out of my temper. You're the only person
in the whole town who knows how to talk to me.
Kabanova: How have they put you into such a rage?
Dikoy: I've been so all day since the morning.
Kabanova: I suppose they've been asking for money.
Dikoy: As if they were in league together, damn them! One after
another, the whole day long they've been at me.
Kabanova: No doubt you'll have to give it them, or they wouldn't
persist.
Dikoy: I know that; but what would you have me do, since I've a
temper like that? Why, I know that 1 must pay, still I can't do it
with a good will. You're a friend of mine, and I've to pay you some-
thing, and you come and ask me for it I'm bound to swear at you!
Pay I will, if pay I must, but I must swear too. For you've only to
hint at money to me, and I feel hot all over in a minute; red-hot all
over, and that's all about it. You may be sure at such times I'd swear
at anyone for nothing at all.
Kabanova: You have no one over you, and so you think you can do
as you like.
Dikoy: No, you hold your tongue! Listen to me! I'll tell you the
sort of troubles thathappen to me. I had fasted in Lent, and was all
ready for Communion, and then the Evil One thrusts a wretched
peasant under my nose. He had come for money, for wood he had
supplied us. And, for my sins, he must needs show himself at a time
like that! I fell into sin, of course; I pitched intohim, pitched into
him but thrashed him. There you have it, my temper!
finely, I did, all
Afterwards I asked his pardon, bowed down to his feet, upon my
word I did. It's the truth I'm telling you, I bowed down to a peasant's
feet. That's what my temper brings me to: on the spot there, in the
mud I bowed down to his feet ; before everyone, I did.*
Taken from the excellent translation of Mrs. C. Gamett {The

Storm, London, Duckworth & Co., 1899).
THE DRAMA 207
Madame Kabanova is well matched with Dikoy. She may
be less primitive than her friend, but she is an infinitely more
tyrannical oppressor. Her son is married and loves, mor6 or
less, his young wife; but he is kept under his mother's rule
just as if he were a boy. The mother hates, of course, the
young wife, Katerina, and tyrannises over her as much as she
can and the husband has no energy to step in and defend her.
;
He is only too happy when he can slip away from the house.
He might have shown more love to his wife if they had been
living apart from his mother; but being in this house, always
under its tyrannical rule, he looks upon his wife as part of it
all. Katerina, on the contrary, is a poetical being. She was
brought up in a very good family, where she enjoyed full

liberty, before she married the young Kabanoff, and now she
feels very unhappy under the yoke of her terrible mother-in-
law, having nobody but a weakling husband to occasionally
say a word in her favour. There is also a little detail she has
a mortal fear of thunderstorms. This is a feature which is
quite characteristic in the small towns on the upper Volga I :
have myself known well educated ladies who, having once

been frightened by one of these sudden storms they are of
a terrific grandeur retained a life-long fear of thunder.
It so happens that Katerina's husband has to leave his town
for a fortnight. Katerina, in the meantime, who has met
occasionally on the promenade a young man, Boris, a nephew
of Dikoy, and has received some attention from him, partly
driven to it by her husband's sister a very flighty girl, who
is wont to steal from the back garden to meet her sweethearts
has during these few days one or two interviews with the
young man, and falls in love with him. Boris is the first man
who, since her marriage, has treated her with respect; he
himself suffers from the opression of Dikoy, and she feels
half-sympathy, half-love towards him. But Boris is also of
weak, irresolute character, and as soon as his uncle Dikoy
orders him to leave the town he obeys and has only the usual
" "
words of regret that circumstances so soon separate him
from Katerina. The husband returns, and when he, his wife,
and the old mother Kabanova are caught by a terrific thunder-
storm on the promenade along the Volga, Katerina, in mortal
fear of sudden death, tells in the presence of the crowd
which has taken refuge in a shelter on the promenade what
has happened during her husband's absence. The consequences
will best be learned from the following scene, which I quote"
from the same translation. It also takes place on the high
bank of the Volga. After having wandered for some time in
the dusk on the solitary bank, Katerina at last perceives Boris
and runs up to him.
Katerina: At last I see you again 1 (Weeps on his breast. Silence.)

Boris: Well, God has granted us to weep together.
Katerina: You have not forgotten me?
Boris: How can you speak of forgetting?
Katerina: Oh, no, it was not that, not that! You are not angry?
Boris: Angry for what?
Katerina: Forgive me! I did not mean to do you any harm. I was
not free myself. I did not know what I said, what I did.
Boris: Don't speak of it! Don't,
Katerina: Well, how is it with you? What are you going to do?
Boris: I am going away.
Katerina: Where are you going?
Boris: Far away, Katya, to Siberia.
Katerina: Take me with you, away from here.
Boris: I cannot, Katya. I am not going of my free will; my uncle
is sending me, he has the horses waiting for me already; I only begged
for a minute, I wanted to take a last farewell of the spot where we

used to see each other.
Katerina: Go, and God be with you! Don't grieve over me. At first
your heart will be heavy, perhaps, poor boy, but then you will begin
to forget.
Boris: Why talk of me! I am free at least how about you? what of
;
your husband's mother?

Katerina: She tortures me, she locks me up. She tells everyone, even
"
my husband : Don't trust her, she is sly and deceitful." They all
follow me about all day long, and laugh at me before my face. At
every word they reproach me with you.
Boris: And your husband?
Katerina: One minute he's kind, one minute he's angry, but he's
drinking all the while. He is loathsome to me, loathsome; his kindness
is worse than his blows.
Boris: You are wretched, Katya?

Katerina: So wretched, so wretched, that it were better to die!
Boris: Who could have dreamed that we should have to suffer such
anguish for our love! I'd better have run away then*'.
THE DRAMA 209
Katerina: It was an evil day for me when I saw you. Joy I have
known little of, but of sorrow, of sorrow, how much! And how
much is still before me! But why think of what is to be! I am seeing
you now, that much they cannot take away from me; and I care
for nothing more. All I wanted was to see you. Now my heart is
much easier; as though a load had been taken off me. I kept thinking
you were angry with me, that you were cursing me. . . .
Boris: How can you! How can you!

Katerina: No, that is not what I mean; that is not what I wanted
to say! I was sick with longing for you, that's it; and now, I have
seen you. . . .
Boris: They must not come upon us here!

Katerina: Stay a minute! Stay a minute! Something I meant to say
to you! I've forgotten! Something I had to say! Everything is in con-
fusion in my head, I can remember nothing.
Boris: It's time I went, Katya!
Katerina: Wait a minute, a minute!
Boris: Come, what did you want to say?
Katerina: I will tell you directly. (Thinking a moment.) Yes! As
you travel along the highroads, do not pass by one beggar, give to
everyone, and bid them pray for my sinful soul.
Boris: Ah, if these people knew what it is to me to part from you!
My God God grant they may one day know such bitterness as I know
!
now. Farewell, Katya! {Embraces her and tries to go away.) Mis-

creants! monsters! Ah, if I were strong!
Katerina: Stay, stay! Let me look at you for the last time {gazes
into his face). Now
all is over with me. The end is come for me.
Now, God be with thee. Go, go quickly !

Boris: {Moves away a few steps and stands still.) Katya, I feel a
dread of something! You have something fearful in your mind? I
shall be in torture as I go, thinking of you.
Katerina: No, no! Go
in God's name! {Boris is about to go up to
her.) No, no, enough.
Boris: (Sobbing.) God be with thee! There's only one thing to
pray God for, that she may soon be dead, that she may not be tortured
long! Farewell!
Katerina: Farewell!
{Boris goes out. Katerina follows him with her eyes and stands for
some time, lost in thought.)
2IO .
RUSSIAN LITERATURE
SCENE IV.
Katerina {alone).
Where am I going now ? Home ? No, home or the grave it is the

same. Yes, home or the grave ! . . . the grave Better the grave.
!
. . . A grave under a tree . . . how sweet. . . .

little
The sunshine warms it, the sweet rain falls on it in the ...
spring the grass grows on it, soft and sweet grass . . the birds .
will fly in the tree and sing, and bring up their little ones, and flowers
will bloom; golden, red and blue ... all sorts of flowers,
{dreamingly) all sorts of flowers . . . how still! how sweet!

My heart iswere lighter! But of life I don't want to think! Live
as it
again! No, no, no use life is not good!

. . . And . . .
people are hateful to me, and the house is hateful, and the walls are
hateful! I will not go there! No, no, I will not go! If I go to them,
they'll come and talk, and what do I want with that? Ah, it has
grown dark! And there is singing again somewhere! What are they
singing? I can't make out, To die now. . . . . What . .
are they singing? It is just the same whether death comes, or of

myself . but live I cannot!
. . sin to die so! . . . A
they
won't pray for me! If anyone loves me, he will pray . . . they
will fold my arms crossed in the grave! Oh, yes. I remem- ...
ber. But when they catch me, and take me home by force. . . .
Ah, quickly, quickly! {Goes to the river bank. /iloud)M.y dear one!
My sweet Farewell
! !
(Exit.)
{Enter Mme. Kabanova, Kabanov, Kulighin and workmen with
torches.)
The Thunderstorm is one of the best dramas in the modern
repertoire of the Russian stage. From the stage point of view

it is simply admirable.
Every scene is impressive, the drama
develops rapidly, and everyone of the twelve characters intro-
duced in it is a joy to the dramatic artist. The parts of DIkoy,
Varvara (the frivolous sister), Kabanoff, Kudryash (the
sweetheart of Varvara), an old artisan-engineer, nay even
the old lady with two male-servants, who appears only for a
couple of minutes each one will be found a source of deep
artistic pleasure by the actor or actress who takes it; while
the parts of Katerina and Mme. Kabanova are such that no
great actress would neglect them.
Concerning the main idea of the drama, I shall have to
THE DRAMA 211
repeat here what I have already said once or twice in the
course of these sketches. At first sight it may seem that Mme.
Kabanova and her son are exclusively Russian types types
which no more in Western Europe. So it was said, at
exist
least,by several English critics. But such an assertion seems
to be hardly correct. The submissive Kabanoffs may be rare
in England, or at least their sly submissiveness does not go
to the same lengths as it does in The Thunderstorm. But even
for Russian society Kabanoff is not very typical. As to
his mother, Mme. Kabanova, every one of us must have
met her more than once in English surroundings. Who does
not know, indeed, the old lady who for the mere pleasure of
exercising her power will keep her daughters at her side, pre-
vent their marrying, and tyrannise over them till they have
grown grey-haired? or in thousands or other ways exercise
her tyranny over her household? Dickens knew Mme.
Kabanova well, and she is still alive in these Islands, as every-
where else.
OSTROVSKIY^S LATER DRAMAS
As Ostrovskiy advanced in years and widened the scope of
his observations of Russian life, he drew his characters from
other circles besides that of the merchants, and in his later
dramas he gave such highly attractive, progressive types as
The Poor Bride, Parasha (in a beautiful comedy, Jn Impetu-
ous Heart) Agniya in Carnival has its End, the actor Nes-
,
chastlivtseff (Mr. Unfortunate) in a " charming idyll, The

Forest, and so on. And as regards his
'-'
negative (undesir-
able) types, taken from the life of the St. Petersburg bureau-
" "
cracy or from the millionaire and company-promoters
circles, Ostrovskiy deeply understood them and attained the
artistic realisation of wonderfully true, coldly-harsh, though
'* "
apparently respectable types, such as no other dramatic
writer has ever succeeded in producing.
Altogether Ostrovskiy wrote about fifty dramas and
comedies, and every one of them is excellent for the stage.
There are no insignificant parts in them. A
great actor or
actress may take one of the smallest parts, consisting of per-
haps but a few words pronounced during a few minutes'
appearance on the stage and yet feel that there is material
enough in it to create a character. As for the main personages,
Ostrovskiy fully understood that a considerable part in the
creation of a character must be left to the actor. There are
consequently parts which without such a collaboration would
be
pale
and unfinished, while in the hands of a true actor they
yield material for a deeply psychological and profoundly
dramatic personification. This is why a lover of dramatic art
finds such a deep sesthetic pleasure both in playing in Ostrov-
skiy's dramas and in reading them aloud.
Realism, in the sense which already has been indicated
several times in these pages that is, a realistic description
of characters and events, subservient to ideal aims is the dis-
tinctive feature of all Ostrovskiy's dramas. As in the novels

of Turgueneff, the simplicity of his plots is striking. But you
see life true life with all its pettinesses developing before
you, and out of these petty details grows insensibly the
plot.
"
One scene follows another, and all of them are so com-
monplace, such an everyday matter! and yet, out of them,
a terrible drama has quite imperceptibly grown into being.
You could affirm that it is not a comedy being played before
you, but life itself unrolled before your eyes as if the
author had simply opened a wall and shown you what is
going on inside this or that house." In these just words one
of our critics, Skabitchevskiy, has described Ostrovskiy's
work.
In his dramas Ostrovskiy introduced an immense variety
of characters taken from all classes of Russian life; but he
once for all abandoned the old romantic division of human
" " " "
types into good and bad ones. In real life these two
divisions are blended together and merge into another; and
while even now an English dramatic author cannot conceive a
"
drama without the villain," Ostrovskiy never felt the need
of introducing that conventional personage. Nor did he feel
"
the need of resorting to the conventional rules of dramatic
conflict." To quote once more from the same critic:
"
There is no possibility of bringing his comedies under some gen-
eral principle, such as a struggle of duty against inclination, or a
collision of passions which calls forth a fatal result, or an antagonism
THE DRAMA 213,
between good and evil, or between progress and Ignorance. His com-
edies represent the most varied human relations. Just as we find it in
life, men stand in these comedies in different obligatory relations
towards each other, which relations have, of course, their origin in the
past; and when these men have been brought together, conflicts neces-
sarily arise between them, out of these very relations. As to the out-
come of the conflict, it is, as a rule quite unforeseen, and often
depends, as usually happens in real life, upon mere accidents."
Like Ibsen, sometimes will not even undertake
Ostrovskiy
to say how the drama will end.
And finally, Ostrovskiy, notwithstandingthe pessimism of
all his contemporaries the writers of the forties was not a
pessimist. Even amidst the most terrible conflicts depicted in
his dramas he retained the sense of the joy of life and of the
unavoidable fatality of many of the miseries of life. He never
recoiled before painting the darker aspects of the human tur-
moil, and he has given a most repulsive collection of family-
despots from the old merchant class, followed by a col-
lection of still more repulsive types from the class of Indus-
"
trial promoters." But in one way or another he managed
either to show that there are better Influences at work, or, at
least, tosuggest the possible triumph of some better element.
He thus avoided falling into the pessimism which charac-
terised his contemporaries, and he had nothing of the hysteri-
cal turn of mind which we find In some of his modem follow-
ers. Even at moments when, in some one of his dramas, life
all round wears the gloomiest aspect (as, for Instance, In Sin
and Misfortune may visit everyone, which is a page from
peasant as realistically dark, but better suited for the
life
stage, than Tolstoy's Power of Darkness), even then a gleam

of hope appears, at least, in the contemplation of nature,
if nothing else remains to redeem the gloominess of human
folly.
And yet, there is one thing and a very important one
which stands in the way of Ostrovskiy's occupying in inter-
national dramatic literature the high position to which his
powerful dramatic talent entitled him, and being recognised
as one of the great dramatists of our century. The dramatic
conflicts which we find in his dramas are all of the simpler
sort. There are none of the more tragical problems and
entanglements which the complicated nature of the educated
man of our own times and the different aspects of the great
social questions are giving birth to in the conflicts arising now
in every stratum and class of society. But it must also be said
that the dramatist who can treat these modern problems of
life in the same masterly way in which the Moscow writer
has treated the simpler problems which he saw in his own
surroundings, is yet to come.
HISTORICAL DRAMAS A. K. T0LST6y.
At a later period of his life Ostrovskiy turned to historical

drama, which he wrote in excellent blank, verse. But, like
Shakespeare's plays from English history, and Pushkin's

Boris Godunof, they have more the character of dramatised
chronicles than of dramas properly speaking. They belong
too much to the domain of the epic, and the dramatic interest
is too often sacrificed to the desire of introducing historical
colouring.
The same is true, though in a lesser degree, of the historical
dramas of Count Alexei Konstantinovitch Tolst6y
(1817-1875). A. K. Tolstoy was above all a poet; but he also
wrote a historical novel from the times of John the Terrible,
Prince Serebryanyi, which had a very great success, partly
because in it for the first time censorship had permitted fiction
to deal with the half-mad Tsar who played the part of the
Louis XI. of the Russian Monarchy, but especially on account
of its real qualities as a historical novel. He
also tried his
talent in a dramatic poem, Don Juan, much inferior, however,
to Pushkin's drama dealing with the same subject; but his
main work was a trilogy of three tragedies from the times of
John the Terrible and the imposter Demetrius The Death of
:
John the Terrible, The Tsar Theodor Ivdnovitch, and Boris

Godunof.
These three tragedies have a considerable value; in each
the situation of the hero is really highly dramatic, and treated
in a most impressive way, while the settings in the palaces of
the old Moscow Tsars are extremely decorative and impres-
sive in their sumptuous originality. But in all three tragedies
the development of the dramatic element suffers from the
THE DRAMA 215
intrusion of the epical descriptive element, and the characters
are either not quite correct historically (Bon's Godunoff is
deprived of his rougher traits in favour of a certain quiet
idealism which was a personal feature of the author) or they
,
do not represent that entireness of character which we are

accustomed to find in Shakespeare's dramas. Of course, the
tragedies of Tolstoy's are extremely far from the romanticism
of the dramas of Victor Hugo; they are, all things considered,
realistic dramas; but in the framing of the human characters
some romanticism is felt still, and this is especially evident
in the construction of the character of John the Terrible.
An exception must, however, be made in favour of The
Tsar Theodor Ivdnovitch. A. K. Tolstoy was a devoted per-
sonal friend of Alexander II. and, refusing all administrative
posts of honour which were offered him, he preferred the
modest position of a Head of the Imperial Hunt, which per-
mitted him to retain his independence, while remaining in
close contact with the Emperor. Owing to this intimacy he
must have had the best opportunities for observing, especially
in the later years of Alexander II. 's reign, the struggles to
which a good-hearted man of weak character is exposed when
he is a Tsar of Russia. Of course the Tsar Theodor is not in
the least an attempt at portraying Alexander II. this would
have been beneath an artist but the weakness of Alexander's
character must have suggested those features of reality in the
character of Theodor which makes it so much better painted
than either John the Terrible or Boris Godunoff. The Tsar
Theodor is a really living creation.
OTHER DRAMATIC WRITERS

Of Other writers for the stage, we can only briefly mention
the most interesting ones.
TuRGU^NEFF wrote, in 1848-185 1, five comedies, which
offer all the elements for refined acting, are very lively and,
being written in a beautiful style (Turgueneff's prose I) are
still the source of aesthetic pleasure for the more refined play-
goers.
SuKHOv6-KoBYLiN has already been mentioned. He wrote
one comedy, The Marriage of Kretchinskiy, which made
2i6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
its mark and played with success, and a trilogy, The
is still
A fair, which is a powerful satire against bureaucracy, but is

less effective on the stage than the former.
A. PisEMSKiY, the novelist (i 820-1881), wrote, besides
a few good novels and several insignificant comedies, one
remarkably good drama A Bitter Fate, from the peasants'
life, which he knew well and rendered admirably. It must be
said that Leo Tolstoy's well known Pozver of Darkness
taken also from peasant life notwithstanding all its power,
has not eclipsed the drama of Pisemskiy.
The novelist A. A. Potyekhin (1829-1902) also wrote
for the stage, and must not be omitted even in such a rapid
sketch of the Russian drama as this. His comedies, Tinsel,
A Slice Cut-of, A
Vacant Situation, In Muddy Waters, met
with the greatest difficulties as regards censorship, and the
third was never put on the stage; but those which were played
were always a success, while the themes that he treated always
attracted the attention of our critics. The first of them, Tinsel,
can be taken as a fair representative of the talent of
Potyekhin.
"
This comedy answered a question of the day." For sev-
eral years Russian literature, following especially in the
steps of ScHEDRiN (see Ch. VIII.), delighted in the descrip-
tion of those functionaries of the Government boards and
tribunals who lived (before the reforms of the sixties) al-
most entirely upon bribes. However, after the reforms had
been carried through, a new race of functionaries had grown
"
up, those who took no bribes," but at the same time, owing
to their strait-laced official rigorism, and their despotic and
unbridled egotism, were even worse specimens of mankind
" "
than any of the bribe-takers of old. The hero of Tinsel is
precisely such a man. His character, with all its secondary
features his ingratitude and especially his love (or what
passes for love in him) is perhaps too much blackened for
the purposes of the drama men so consistently egotistical and

:
formalistic are seldom, if ever, met with in real life. But one
is almost convinced by the author of the reality of the type
with so masterly a hand does he unroll in a variety of

" "
incidents the correct and deeply egotistic nature of his
hero.
THE DRAMA 217
In this respect the comedy is very clever, and offers full op-
portunity for excellent acting.
A dramatic writer who enjoyed a long-standing success was
A. I. Palm (i 823-1 885). In 1849 he was arrested for
having frequented persons belonging to the circle of Petra-
shevskiy (see Dostoyevskiy), and from that time his life
was a series of misfortunes, so that he returned to literary
activity only at the age of fifty. He belonged to the genera-
tion of Turguenefif and, knowing well that type of noblemen,
,
whom the great novelist has depicted so well in his Hamlets,

he wrote several comedies from the life of their circles. The
Old Nobleman and Our Friend Nekluzheff were till lately
favourite plays on the stage. The actor, I. E. Tcherny-
SHOFF, who wrote several comedies and one serious drama,
A Spoiled Life, which produced a certain impression in 1 861 ;
N. SoLOViOFF, and a very prolific writer, V. A. Kryloff

(AlexAndroff), must also be mentioned in this brief
sketch.
And finally, two young writers have brought out lately
comedies and dramatic scenes which have produced a deep
sensation. Imean Anton Tchehoff, whose drama Ivanof
was a few years ago the subject of the most passionate discus-
sions, and Maxim Gorkiy, whose drama, The Artisans, un-
doubtedly reveals a dramatic talent, while his just published
"
dramatic scenes," At the Bottom they are only scenes,
without an attempt at building a drama are extremely
powerful, and even eclipse his best sketches. More will be
said of them in the next chapter.
PART VII
Folk-Novelists
CHAPTER VII
FOLK-NOVELISTS
THEIR Position in Russian Literature The Early Folk-Novelists:

Grigorovitch Marko Vovtchok Danilevskiy Intermediate
Period: Kokoreff Pisemskiy Potyekhin Ethnographical Re-
searches The Realistic School :
Pomyalovskiy Ryeshetnikoif
Levitoff Gleb
Uspenskiy Zlatovratskiy and other Folk-
Novelists Naumoff Zasodimskiy Saloff Nefedoff Modern
Realism: Maxim Gorkiy.
AN important division of Russian novelists, almost totally

/\ unknown in Western Europe, and yet representing
^ \ perhaps
"
the most typical portion of Russian literature,
are the Folk-Novelists." It is under this name that we
know them chiefly in Russia, and under this name the critic
Skabitchevskiy has analysed them first, in a book bearing
this title, and then in his excellent History of Modem
Russian Literature (4th ed. 1900). By "Folk-Novelists"
we mean, of course, not those who write for the people, but
those who write about the people: the peasants, the miners,
the factory workers, the lowest sti ata of population in towns,
the tramps. Bret Harte in his sketches of the mining camps,
Zola in L' Assommoir and Germinal, Mr. Gissing in Liza of
Lambeth, Mr. Whiting in No. 5 John Street, belong to this
category; but what is exceptional and accidental in Western
Europe is organic in Russia.
Quite a number of talented writers have devoted them-

selves during the last fifty years, some of them entirely, to the
description of this or that division of the Russian people.
Every class of the toiling masses, which in other literatures
would have appeared in novels as the background for events
going on amidst educated people (as in Hardy's fVood-
landers), has had in the Russian novel its own painter. All
231
great questions concerning popular life which are debated in
political and social books and reviews have been treated in
the novel as well. The evils of serfdom and, later on, the
struggle between the tiller of the soil and growing commer-
cialism; the effects of factories upon village life, the great
cooperative fisheries, peasant life in certain monasteries, and
life in the depths of the Siberian forests, slum life and tramp
life all these have been depicted by the folk-novelists, and
their novels have been as eagerly read as the works of the
greatest authors. And while such questions as, for instance,
the future of the village-community, or of the peasants' Com-
mon Law Courts, are debated in the daily papers, in the
scientific reviews and the journals of statistical research, they
are also dealt with by means of artistic images and types
taken from life in the folk-novel.
Moreover, the folk-novelists, taken as a whole, represent
a great school of realism in art, and in true realism they have
surpassed all those writers who have been" mentioned in the
preceding chapters. Of course, Russian realism," as the
reader of this book is already well aware, is something quite
" "
different from what was represented as naturalism and
** "
realism in France by Zola. As already remarked, Zola,
notwithstanding his propaganda of realism, always re-

mained an inveterate romantic in die conception of his
" " " "
leading characters, both of the saint and of the villain
type and no doubt because of this
; perhaps feeling it him-
self he gave, as a compensation, such an exaggerated im-
portance to speculations about physiological heredity and
to the accumulation of pretty descriptive details, many of
which, especially amongst his repulsive types, might have been
omitted without depriving the characters of any really signif-
" "
icant feature. In Russia the realism of Zola has always
been considered too superficial, too outward, and while our
folk-novelists also have often indulged in an unnecessary
profusion of detail sometimes decidedly ethnographical
they have aimed nevertheless at that inner realism which
appears in the construction of such characters as are really
representative of life taken as a whole. Their aim has been
to represent life without distortion whether that distortion
consists in introducing petty details, which may be true, but
FOLKNOVELISTS 223
are accidental, or in endowing heroes with virtues or vices
which are indeed met with here and there, but ought not to
be generalised. Several novelists, as will be seen presently,
have objected even to the usual ways of describing types and
relating the individual dramas of a few typical heroes. They
have made the extremely bold attempt of describing life itself,
in its succession of petty actions, moving on amidst its grey
and dull surroundings, introducing only that dramatic element
which results from the endless succession of petty and de-
pressing details and wonted circumstances; and it must be
owned that they have not been quite unsuccessful in striking
out this new hne of art perhaps the most tra^cal of alL
Others, again, have introduced a new type of artistic repre-
sentation of life, wiiich occupies an intermediate position be-
tween the novel, properly so-called, and a demographic de-
scription of a given population. Thus, Gleb Usf>enskiy knew
how to intermingle artistic descriptions of typical village-peo-
ple with discussions belonging to the domain of folk-psychol-
ogy in so interesting a manner that the reader willingly
pardons him these digressions; while others like Maximoff
succeeded in making out of their ethnographical descriptions
real works of art, without in the least diminishing their
scientific value.
THE EARLY FOLK-NOVEUSTS

One of the earliest folk-novelists was Grigor6vitch
(1822-1899), a man of great talent, who sometimes is
placed by the side of Tolstoy, Turgueneff, Gontcharoff and
Ostr6\'Îay. His literary career was very interesting. He was
bom of a Russian father and a French mother, and at the
age of ten hardly knew Russian at all. His education was
entirely foreign chiefly French and he never really lived
the village life amidst which Turgueneff or Tolstoy grew up.
Moreover, he never gave himself exclusively to literature:
he was a painter as well as a novelist, and at die same time
a fine connoisseur of art, and for the last thirty years of his
life he wrote almost nothing, but gavê all his time to the
Russian Society of Painters. And yet this half-Russian was
one of those who rendered the same service to Russia before
the abolition of serfdom that Harriet Beecher Stowe
rendered to the United States by her description of the
sufferings of the negro slaves.
Grigorovitch was educated in the same military school of
engineers as was Dostoyevskiy, and after having finished his
education there, he took a tiny room from the warder of the
Academy of Arts, with the intention of giving himself en-
tirely to art. However, in the studios he made the acquaint-
ance of the Little Russian poet Shevtchenko, and next of
Nekrasoff and Valerian Maykoft (a critic of great power,
who died very young), and through them he found his voca-
tion in literature.
In the early forties he was known only by a charming
sketch. The Organ Grinders, in which he spoke with great
warmth of feeling of the miserable life of this class of the
St. Petersburg population. Russian society, in those years,
felt the impression of the Socialist revival of France, and
itsbest representatives were growing impatient with serfdom
and absolutism. Fourier and Pierre Leroux were favourite
writers in advanced intellectual circles, and Grigorovitch was
carried on by the growing current. He left St. Petersburg,
went to stay for a year or two in the country, and in 1846
he published his first novel dealing with country life, The
Village. He depicted in it, without any exaggeration, the

dark sides of village life and the horrors of serfdom, and
he did it so vividly that Byelinskiy, the critic, at once recog-
nised in him a new writer of great power, and greeted him
as such. His next novel, Anton the Unfortunate, also drawn
from village life, was a tremendous successs, and its influence
was almost equal to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. No
educated man or woman of his generation or of ours could
have read the book without weeping over the misfortunes
of Anton, and finding better feelings growing in his heart
towards the serfs. Several novels of the same character fol-
lowed in the next eight years (1847 ô 1855) The Fisher-
men, The Immigrants, The Tiller, The Tramp, The Country
Roads and then Grigorovitch came to a stop. In 1865 he
took part with some of our best writers Gontcharoff,
Ostrovskiy, Maxi'moff (the ethnographer), and several
others in a literary expedition organised by the Grand
FOLK-NOVELISTS 225
Duke Constantine for the exploration of Russia and voyages
round the world on board ships of the Navy. Grigorovitch
made a very interesting sea-voyage but his sketches of travel
;
The Ship Retvizan cannot be compared with Gon-

tcharoff's Frigate Pallas. On
returning from the expedition
he abandoned literature to devote himself entirely to art,
and he subsequently brought out only a couple of novels and
his Reminiscences. He died in 1899.
Grigorovitch thus published all his chief novels between
the years 1846 and 1855. Opinion about his work is divided.
Some of our critics speak of it very highly, but others and
they are the greater number say that his peasants are not
quite real. Turgueneff made also the observation that his
descriptions are too cold: the heart is not felt in them. This
last remark may be true, although the average reader who
did not know Grigorovitch personally hardly would have
made it: at any rate, at the time of the appearance of Anton,
The Fishermen, etc., the great public judged the author of
these works differently. As to his peasants, I will permit
myself to make one suggestion. Undoubtedly they are slightly
idealised; but it must also be said that the Russian peasantry
does not present a compact, uniform mass. Several races have
settled upon the territory of European Russia, and different
portions of the population have followed different lines of
development. The peasant from South Russia is quite dif-
ferent from the Northerner, and the Western peasants
differ in every respect from the Eastern ones. Grigorovitch
described chiefly those living directly south of Moscow, in
the provinces of Tula and Kaluga, and they are exactly that
mild and slightly poetical, downtrodden and yet inoffensive,
good-hearted race of peasants that Grigorovitch described in
his novels a sort of combination of the Lithuanian and
the Little-Russian poetical mind, with the Great-Russian
communal spirit. Ethnographers themselves see in the pop-
ulations of this part of Kussia a special ethnographical
division.
Of course, Turgueneff's peasants (Tula and Oryol) are
more real, his types are more definite, and every one of the
modern folk-novelists, even of the less talented, has gone
much further than Grigorovitch did into the depths of
peasant character and life. But such as they were,
the novels
of Grigorovitch exercised a profound influence on a whole
generation. They made us love the peasants and feel how
heavy was the indebtedness towards them which weighed
upon us the educated part of society. They powerfully con-
tributed towards creating a general feeling in favour of the
serfs, without which the abolition of serfdom would have
certainly been delayed for man)^ years to come, and assuredly
would not have been so sweeping as it was. And at a later
epoch his work" undoubtedly contributed to the creation of
"
that movement towards the people {v narod) which took
place in the seventies. As to the literary influence of Grigoro-
vitch, it was such that it may be questioned whether Tur-
gueneff would ever have been bold enough to write as he

did about the peasants, in his Sportsman' s Note Book, or
Nekrasoff to compose his passionate verses about the people,
if they had not had a forerunner in him.
Another writer of the same school, who also produced
a deep impression on the very eve of the liberation of the
serfs, was Mme. Marie Markovitch, who wrote under the
pseudonym of MArko Vovtch6k. She was a Great Rus-
sian her parents belonged to the nobility of Central Russia
but she married the Little-Russian writer, MArkovitch,
and her first book of stories from peasant-life (1857-58)
was written in excellent Little Russian. (Turgueneff trans-
lated them into Great Russian.) She soon returned, however,
to her native tongue, and her second book of peasant stones,
as well as her subsequent novels from the life of the educated
classes, were written in Great Russian.
At the present time the novels of Marko Vovtchok may
seem to be too sentimental the world-famed novel of Har-
riett Beecher Stowe produces the same impression nowadays
but in those years, when the great question for Russia was
whether the serfs should be freed or not, and when all the
best forces of the country were needed for the struggle
in favour of their in those years all edu-
emancipation
cated Russia read the novels of Marko Vovtchok with
delight, and wept over the fate of her peasant heroines.
However, apart from this need of the moment and art
Is bound to be at the service of the
society in such crises
FOLK-NOVELISTS 227
sketches of Marko Vovtchok had serious qualities. Their
*' "
sentimentalism was not the sentimentalism of the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, behind which was con-
cealed an absence of real feeling. A
loving heart throbbed in
them; and there is in them real poetry, inspired by the poetry
of the Ukrainian folklore and its popular songs. With these,
Mme. Markovitch was so familiar that, as has been remarked
by Russian critics, she supplemented her imperfect knowledge
of real popular life by introducing in a
masterly manner
many features inspired by the folklore and the popular songs
of Little Russia. Her heroes were invented, but the atmo-
sphere of a Little-Russian village, the colours of local life,
are in these sketches; and the soft poetical sadness of the
Little-Russian peasantry is rendered with the tender touch
of a woman's hand.
Among the novelists of that period Danil^vskiy (1829-
1890) must also be mentioned. Although he is better known
as a writer of historical romances, his three long novels, The
Runaways in Novorossiya (1862), Freedom, or The Run-
ways Returned (1863), and New Territories {iS6'j)2l\\
dealing with the free settlers in Bessarabia were widely
read. They contain lively and very sympathetic scenes from
the life of these settlers mostly runaway serfs who occu-
pied the free lands, without the consent of the central govern-
ment, in the newly annexed territories of southwestern
Russia, and became the prey of enterprising adventurers.
INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
Notwithstanding all the qualities of their work, Grigoro-
vitch and Marko Vovtchok failed to realise that the very
fact of taking the life of the poorer classes as the subject of
novels, ought to imply the working out of a special literary
manner. The usual literary technique evolved for the novel
which deals with the leisured classes with its mannerism,
"
its heroes," poetised now, as the knights used to be poetised
in the tales or chivalry is certainly not the most appropri-
ate for novels treating the life of American squatters or Rus-
sian peasants. New methods and a different style had to be
worked out; but this was done step by step only, and it would
be extremely Interesting to show this gradual evolution, from
Grigorovitch to the ultra-realism of Ryeshetnikoff, and finally
to the perfection of form attained by the realist-idealist
Gorkly In his shorter sketches. Only a few Intermediate steps
can, however, be Indicated in these pages.
I. T. K6K0REFF (1826- 1 8 53), who died very young,
after having written a few tales from the life of the petty
artisans In towns, had not freed himself from the senti-
mentalism of a benevolent outsider; but he knew this life
from the inside he was born and brought up in great poverty
:
among these very people; consequently, the artisans "in his

novels are real beings, described, as Dobroluboff said, with
warmth and yet with tender restraint, as If they were his
"
nearest kin." However, No shriek of despair, no mighty
wrath, no mordant irony came out of this tender, patiently
suffering heart." There is even a note of reconciliation with
the social Inequalities.
A considerable step in advance was made by the folk-
novelin A. Th. PisEMSKiY (1820-1881), and A. A. Po-
TYEKHIN (bom 1829), although neither of them was exclu-
sively a folk-novelist. Pisemskly was a contemporary of
Turgueneff, and at a certain time of his career It seemed
as If he were going to take a place by the side of Turgue-
neff, Tolstoy and Gontcharoff. He undoubtedly possessed
a great talent. There was power and real life In whatever
he wrote, and his novel, A Thousand Souls, appearing on the
eve of the emancipation of the serfs (1858), produced a
deep impression. It was fully appreciated in Germany as
well, where was
it translated the next year. But Pisemskly
was not a man of principle, and this novel was his last serious
and really good production. When the great Radical and
Nihilist movement took place (i 858-1 864), and it became
necessary to take a definite position amidst the sharp conflict
of opinions, Pisemskly, who was deeply pessimistic In his
" "
judgment of men and Ideas, and considered opinions as
a mere cover for narrow egotism of the lowest sensual sort,
took a hostile position towards this movement, and wrote
such novels as The Unruly Sea, which were mere libels
upon the young generation. This was, of course, the death
of his by no means ordinary talent.
FOLK-NOVELISTS 229
Pisemskiy wrote during the early part of his literary
also,
career, a few tales from the life of the peasants {The Car-
penters' Artel, The St. Petersburg Man, etc.), and a drama,
from village life, A
Bitter Fate, all of which have a real
literary value. He displayed in them a knowledge of peasant
life and a mastery of the spoken, popular Russian language,
together with a perfectly realistic perception of peasant char-

acter. There was no trace of the idealisation which is so
strongly felt in the later productions of Grigorovitch, written
under the influence of George Sand. The steady, common-
sense peasant characters that Pisemskiy pictured are taken
from a real, sound observation of life, and rival the best
peasant characters of Turgueneff. As to the drama of
Pisemskiy (he was, by the way, a very good actor), it loses
nothing from comparison with the best dramas of Ostrovskiy,
and is more tragic than
any of them, while in powerful
realism it
by no
is means inferior to Tolstoy's Power of
Darkness, with which it has much in common, and which it
perhaps surpasses in its stage qualities.
The chief work of Potyekhin was his comedies, mem-
tioned in the preceding chapter. All of them are from the
life of the educated classes, but he wrote also a few less
known dramas from the peasant life, and twice in his early
career in the fifties, and later on in the seventies he turned
to the writing of short stories and novels from popular
life.
These stories and novels are most characteristic of the evo-
lution of the folk-novel during those years. In his earlier tales
Potyekhin was entirely under the spell of the then prevailing
manner of idealising the peasants; but in his second period,
after having lived through the years of realism in the sixties,
and taken part in the above-mentioned ethnographic expedi-
tion, he changed his manner. He
entirely got rid of benevo-
lent idealisation,. and represented the peasants as they were.
In the creation of individual characters he was undoubtedly
successful, but the life of the village the mir without
which Russian village-life cannot be represented, and which
so well appears in the works of the later folk-novelists, is
yet missing. Altogether one feels that Potyekhin knew well
the outer symptoms of the life of the Russian peasants,
including their way of talking, but that he had not yet
grasped the real soul of the peasant. This came only later on.
ETHNOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH
Serfdom was abolished in 1861, and the time for mere
lamentation over was gone. Proof that the peasants
its evils
were human beings, accessible to all human feelings, was

no longer needed. New and far deeper problems concerning
the life and ideals of the Russian people rose before every
thinking Russian. Here was a mass of nearly fifty million
people, whose manners of life, whose creed, ways of think-
ing, and ideals were totally different from those of the
educated classes, and who at the same time were as unknown
to the would-be leaders of progress as if these millions spoke
a quite different language and belonged to a quite different
race.
Our best men felt that all the future development of
Russia would be hampered by that ignorance, if it con-
tinued and literature did its best to answer the great
questions which besieged the thinking man at every step
of his social and political activity.
The years 1 858-1 878 were years of the ethnographical
exploration of Russia on such a scale that nowhere in Europe
or America do we find anything similar. The monuments of
old folklore and poetry; the common law of different parts
and nationalities of the Empire; the religious beliefs and
the forms of worship, and still more the social aspira-
tions characteristic of the many sections of dissenters; the
extremely interesting habits and customs which prevail in
the different provinces; the economical conditions of the
peasants; their domestic trades; the immense communal fish-
eries in southeastern Russia; the thousands of forms taken
by the organisations (the Artels) the
" popular cooperative
"
;
inner colonisation of Russia, which can only be compared

with that of the United States; the evolution of ideas of
landed property, and so on all these became the subjects
of extensive research.
The great ethnographical expedition organised by the
Grand Duke Constantine, in which a number of our best
FOLK-NOVELISTS 231
writers took part, was only the forerunner of many expedi-
tions, great and small, which were organised by the numerous
Russian scientific societies for the detailed study of Russia's
ethnography, folklore, and economics. There were men like
Yakushkin (1820-1872), who devoted all his life to wan-
dering on foot from village to village, dressed like the
poorest peasant, and without any sort of thought of to-mor-
row; drying his wet peasant cloth on his shoulders after a
day's march under the rain, living with the peasants in
their poor huts, and collecting folk-songs or ethnographic
material of the highest value.
" "
A special type of the Russian
"
intellectuals
" developed
in the so-called Song-Collectors," and Zemstvo Statisti-
cians," a group of people, old and young, who during the
last twenty-five years have as volunteers and at a ridicu-
lously small price, devoted their lives to house-to-house

inquiry in behalf of the County
"
Councils. (A. Oertel has
"
admirably described these Statisticians in one of his
novels.)
Suffice it to say that, according to A. N. PyPIN, the author
of an exhaustive History of Russian Ethnography (4 vols.),
not less than 4000 large works and bulky review articles
were published during the twenty years, 1 858-1 878, half
of them dealing with the economical conditions of the
peasants, and the other half with ethnography in its wider
sense; and research still continues on the same scale. The
best of all this movement has been that it has not ended in
dead material in official publications. Some of the reports, like
MaxImoff's J Year in the North, Siberia and Hard Labour,
and Tramping Russia, AfanAsieff {Legends)^ Zhelez-
noff's Ural Cossacks, Melnikoff's (Petchersky), In
the fVoods and On the Mountains, or Mordovtseff's many
sketches, were so well written that they were as widely read
as the best novels; while the dry satistical reports were
summed up in lively review articles (in Russia the reviews
are much more bulky, and the articles much longer than in
England), which were widely read and discussed all over
the country. Besides, admirable researches dealing with
special classes of people, regions, and institutions were made
by men like PrugAvin, Zas6dimskiy, Pyzh6ff {History
of the Public Houses, which is in fact a popular history of
Russia).
Russian educated society, which formerly hardly knew the
peasants otherwise than from the balcony of their country
houses, was thus brought in a few years into a close inter-
course with all divisions of the toiling masses; and it is easy
to understand the influence which this intercourse exercised,
not only upon the development of political ideas, but also
upon the whole character of Russian literature.
The idealised novel of the past was now outgrown. The
" "
representation of the dear peasants as a background for
opposing their idyllic virtues to the defects of the educated
classes was possible no more. The taking of the people as
a mere material for burlesque tales, as Nicholas Uspenskiy
and V. A. Slyeptsoff tried to do, enjoyed but a momentary
success. A new, eminently realistic school of folk-novelists
was wanted. And the result was the appearance of quite a
number of writers who broke new ground and, by cultivating
a very high conception concerning the duties of art in the
representation of the poorer, uneducated classes, opened, I
am inclined to think, a new page in the evolution of the
novel for the literature of all nations.
pomyal6vskiy
The clergy in Russia that is, the priests, the deacons, the
cantors, the bell-ringers represent a separate class which
" " " "
stands between the classes and the masses much
nearer to the latter than to the former. This is especially true
as regards the clergy in the villages, and it was still more so
some fifty years ago. Receiving no salary, the village priest,
with his deacon and cantors, lived chiefly by the cultivation
of the land that was attached to the village church; and in
my youth, in our Central Russia neighbourhood, during the
hot summer months when they were hay-making or taking in
the crops, the priest would always hurry through the mass in
order to return to their field-work. The priest's house was
in those years a log-house, only a little better built than the
houses of the peasants, alongside which it stood sometimes
thatched, instead of being simply covered with straw, that is,
FOLK-NOVELISTS 233
held In position by means of straw ropes. His dress differed
from that of the peasants more by its cut than by the ma-
terials it was made of, and between the church services and
the fulfilment of his parish duties the priest might always be
seen in the fields, following the plough or working in the
meadows with the scythe.
All the children of the clergy receive free education in
special clerical schools, and later on, some of them, in
seminaries; and it was by the description of the abominable
educational methods which prevailed in these schools in
the forties and fifties that Pomyalovskiy (1835-1863)
acquired his notoriety. He was the son of a poor deacon
in a village near St. Petersburg, and had himself passed
through one of these schools and a seminary. Both the lower
and the higher schools were then in the hands of quite unedu-
cated priests chiefly monks and the most absurd learning
by rote of the most abstract theology was the rule. The
general moral tone of the schools was extremely low, drink-
ing went on to excess, and flogging for every lesson not
recited by heart, sometimes two or three times a day, with
all sorts of refinements of cruelty was the chief instru-
ment of education. Pomyalovskiy passionately loved his
younger brother and wanted at all hazards to save him from
such an experience as his own; so he began to write for a
pedagogical review, on the education given in the clerical
schools, in order to get the means to educate his brother in
a gymnasium. A most powerful novel, evidently taken from
real life in these schools, followed, and numbers of priests,
"
who had themselves been the victims of a like education,"
wrote to the papers to confirm what Pomyalovskiy had said.
Truth, without any decoration, naked truth, with an absolute
negation of art for art's sake, were the distinctive features
of Pomyalovskiy, who went so far in this direction as even
to part with the so-called heroes. The men whom he described
were not sharply outlined types, but, if I may be permitted
" "
to express myself in this way, the neutral-tint types of
real life: those indefinite, not too good and not too bad
characters of whom mankind is mostly composed, and whose
inertia is everywhere the great obstacle to progress.
Besides his sketches from the life of the clerical schools,
Pomyalovskiy wrote also two novels from the life of the
poorer middle classes Philistine Happiness, and Molotoff
:
which is autobiographic to a great extent and an unfinished

larger novel, Brother and Sister. He displayed in these works
the same broad humanitarian spirit as Dostoyevskiy had for
noticinghumane redeeming features in the most degraded
men and women, but with the sound realistic tendency which
made the distinctive feature of the young literary school of
which he was one of the founders. And he depicted also, in
an extraordinarily powerful and tragic manner, the hero
from the poorer classes who is imbued with hatred towards
the upper classes and toward all forms of social life which
exist for their advantage and yet has not the faith in his
own possibilities, which knowledge gives, and which a real
force always has. Therefore this hero ends, either in a philis-
tine family idyll, or, this failing, in a propaganda of reckless
cruelty and of contempt towards all mankind, as the only
possible foundation for personal happiness.
These novels were full of promise, and Pomyalovskiy was
looked upon as the future leader of a new school of litera-
ture; but he died, even before he had reached the age of
thirty.
RYESHETNIKOFF
Ryeshi&tnikoff (1841-1871) went still further in the

same direction, and, with Pomyalovskiy, he may be con-
sidered as the founder of the ultra-realistic school of Russian
folk-novelists. He was born in the Urals and was the son of
a poor church cantor who became a postman. The family was
in extreme poverty. An uncle took him to the town of Perm,
and there he was beaten and thrashed all through his child-
hood. When he was ten old they sent him to a
years
miserable clerical school, wnere he was treated even worse
He ran away, but was caught, and they
than at his uncle's.
flogged the poor child so awfully that he had to lie in a
hospital for two months. As soon as he was taken back to
school he ran away a second time, joining a band of tramp-
ing beggars. He suffered terribly during his peregrinations
with them, and was caught once more, and again flogged in
FOLK-NOVELISTS 235
the most barbarous way. His uncle also was a postman, and
Ryeshetnikoff, having nothing to read, used to steal news-
papers from the Post Office, and after reading them, he de-
stroyed them. This was, however, discovered, the boy having
destroyed some important Imperial manifesto addressed to
the local authorities. He was brought before a Court and
condemned to be sent to a monastery for a few months (there
were no reformatories then). The monks were kind to him,
but they led a most dissolute life, drinking excessively, over-
eating, and stealing away from the monastery at night, and
they taught the boy to drink. In spite of all this, after his
release from the monastery Ryeshetnikoff passed brilliantly
the examinations in the district school, and was received as
a clerk in the Civil Service, at a salary of six shillings, and
later on, half-a-guinea per month. This meant, of course, the
most wretched poverty, because the young man took no
bribes, as all clerks in those times were accustomed to do.
The arrival of a " revisor " at Perm saved him. This gentle-
man employed Ryeshetnikoff as a copyist, and, having come
to like him, gave him the means to move to St. Petersburg,
where he found him a position as clerk in the Ministry of
Finance at almost double his former salary. Ryeshetnikoff
had begun to write already, at Perm, and he continued to do
so at St. Petersburg, sending contributions to some of the
lesser newspapers, until he made the acquaintance of Nekra-
Then he published his novel, Podlipovtsy, in The Con-'
soff.
temporary (Ceux de Podlipna'ia, in a French translation).

"
Ryeshetnikoff's position in literature is quite unique. The
"
sound truth of Ryeshetnikoff in these words Turgue-
neff characterised his writings. It is truth, indeed, nothing
but truth, without any attempt at decoration or lyric effects
a sort of diary in which tne men with whom the author
lived in the mining works of the Urals, in his Permian village,
or in the slums of St. Petersburg, are described. " Podli-
"
povtsy means the inhabitants of a small village Podlipnaya,
lost somewhere in the mountains of the Urals. They are
Permians, not yet quite Russified, and are still in the stage
which so many populations of the Russian Empire are living
through nowadays namely the early agricultural. Few of
them have for more than two months a year pure rye-bread
to eat: the remaining ten months they are compelled to
" "
add the bark of trees to their flour in order to have bread
at all. They have not the slightest idea of what Russia is,
or of the State, and very seldom do they see a priest. They
hardly know how to cultivate the land. They do not know
how to make a stove, and periodical starvation during the
months from January to July has taken the very soul and
heart out of them. They stand on a lower level than real
savages.
One of their best men, Pila, knows how to count up
to five, but the others are unable to do so. Pila's concep-
tions of space and time are of the most primitive descrip-
tion, and yet this Pila is a born leader of his semi-savage
village people, and is continually making something for them.
He them when it is time to plough; he tries to find a
tells
sale for their small domestic industries; he knows how to
go to the next town, and when there is anything to be done
there, he does it. His relations with his family, which consists
of an only daughter, Aproska, are at a stage belonging to
prehistorical anthropology, and yet he and his friend Sysoi
love that girl Aproska so deeply, that after her death they
are ready to kill themselves. They abandon their village to
lead the hard life of boatmen on the river, dragging the
heavy boats up the current. But these semi-savages are deeply
human, and one feels that they are so, not merely because
the author wants it, but in reality; and one cannot read the
story of their lives and the sufferings which they endure, with
the resignation of a patient beast, without being moved at
times even more deeply than by a good novel from our own
life.
Another novel of Ryeshetnikoff, The Glumoffs, is perhaps
one of the most depressing novels in this branch of literature.
There is nothing striking in it no misfortunes, no calami-
ties, no dramatic effects; but the whole life of the ironworkers
of the Urals, who are described in this novel,
is so gloomy,
there is so little possibility

possible
ofescape from this
gloominess, that sheer despair seizes you, as you gradually
realise the immobility of the life which this novel represents.
In Among Men Ryeshetnikoff tells the story of his own
terrible childhood. As to his larger two-volume novel
FOLK-NOVELISTS 237
Where is it Better? an interminable string of misfor-
it is
tunes which befell a woman of the poorer classes, who came

to St. Petersburg in search of work. We have here (as well
as in another long novel, One's Own Bread) the same shape-
lessness and the same absence of strongly depicted characters
as in The Glutnoffs, and we receive the same gloomy im-
pression.
The literary defects of all Ryeshetnikoff's work are only
too evident. Yet in spite of them, he may claim to be con-
sidered as the initiator of a new style of novel, which has its
artistic value, notwithstanding its want of form and the ultra-
realism of both its conception and structure. Ryeshetnikoflf
certainly could not inspire a school of imitators; but he has
given hints to those who came after him as to what must be
done to create the true folk-novel, and what must be avoided.
There is not the slightest trace of romanticism in his work; no
heroes; nothing but that great, indifferent, hardly individual-
ised crowd, among which there are no striking colours, no
giants; all is small; all interests are limited to a microscopi-
cally narrow neighbourhood. In fact, they all centre round
the all-dominating question. Where to get food and shelter,
even at the price of unbearable toil. Every person described
has, of course, his individuality; but all these individualities
are merged into one single desire: that of finding a living
which shall not be sheer misery shall not consist of days of
well-being alternating with days of starvation. How lessen
the hardships of work which is beyond a man's forces? how
find a place in the world where work shall not be done amid
such degrading conditions? these questions make the unan-
imity of purpose among all these men and women.
There are, I have just said, no heroes in Ryeshetnikoff's
" "
novels: that means, no heroes in our usual literary sense;
but you see before you real Titans real heroes in the
primitive sense of the word heroes of endurance such as
the species must produce when, a shapeless crowd, it bitterly
struggles against frost and hunger. The way in which these
heroes support the most incredible physical privations as
they tramp from one part of Russia to another, or have to
face the most cruel deceptions in their search for work the
way they struggle for existence is already striking enough;
but the way in which they die, is perhaps even more striking.
Many readers remember, of course, Tolstoy's Three Deaths:
the lady dying from consumption, and cursing her illness, the
peasant who in his last hours thinks of his boots, and directs
to whom they shall be given, so that they may go to the toiler
most in need of them; and the third the death of the birch
tree. For Ryeshetnikoff's heroes, who live all their lives with-
out being sure of bread for the morrow, death is not a catas-
trophe: it simply means less and less force to get one's
food, less and less energy to chew one's dry piece of bread,
less and less bread, less oil in the lamp and the lamp is
blown out.
Another most terrible thing in Ryeshetnikoff's novels is
his picture of how the habit of drunkenness takes possession
of men. You see it coming see how it must come, organ-
ically, necessarily, fatally how
takes possession of the
it
man, and how it holds him till his death. This Shakespearian
fatalism applied to drink whose workings are only too well
known to those who know popular life is perhaps the most
terrible feature of Ryeshetnikoff's novels. Especially is it
apparent in The Glumofjfs, where you see how the teacher in
a mining town, because he refuses to join the administration
in the exploitation of children, is deprived of all means of liv-
ing and although he marries in the long run a splendid

woman, sinks at last into the clutches of the demon of habitual
drunkenness. Only the women do not drink, and that saves
the race from utter destruction; in fact, nearly every one of
Ryeshetnikoff's women is a heroine of persevering labour,
of struggle for the necessities of life, as the female is in the
whole animal world; and such the women are in real popular
life in Russia.
If it is very difficult to avoid romantic sentimentalism,
when the author who describes the monotony of the everyday

life of a middle-class crowd intends to make the reader sym-
pathise nevertheless with this crowd, the difficulties are still

greater when he descends a step lower in the social scale and
deals with peasants, or, still worse, with those who belong to
the lowest strata of city life. The most realistic writers have
fallen into sentimentalism and romanticism when they
attempted to do this. Even Zola in his last novel, JVork,
FOLK-NOVELISTS 239
falls into the trap. But that Is precisely what Ryeshetnikoff
never did. His writings are a violent protest against aesthet-
ics, and even against all sorts of conventional art. He was a
true child of the epoch characterised by Turgueneff in Bazar-
"
off
. I do not care for the form of my writings truth:
will speak for itself," he seems to say to his readers. He

would have felt ashamed if, even unconsciously, he had
resorted anywhere to dramatic effects in order to touch
his readers just as the public speaker who entirely relies
upon the beauty of the thought he develops would feel
ashamed if some merely oratorical expression escaped his lips.
For myself, I think that a great creative genius was
required in order to pick, as Ryeshetnikoff did, out of the
everyday, monotonous life of the crowd, those trifling expres-
sions, those exclamations, those movements expressive of
some feelings or some idea without which his novels would
have been quite unreadable. It has been remarked by one
of our critics that when you begin to read a novel of Rye-
shetnikoff you seem to have plunged into a chaos. You have
the description of a commonplace landscape, which, in fact,
" "
is no landscape at all then the future hero or heroine of
;
the novel appears, and he or she is a person whom you

may
see in every crowd with no claims to rise above this crowd,
with hardly anything even to distinguish him or her from the
crowd. This hero speaks, eats, drinks, works, swears, as
everyone else in the crowd does. He is not a chosen creature
he is not a demoniacal character a Richard III. in a
fustian jacket; nor is she a Cordelia or even a Dickens'
"
Nell." Ryeshetnikoff's men and women are exactly like
thousands of men and women around them; but gradually,
owing to those very scraps of thought, to an exclamation,
to a word dropped here and there, or even to a slight move-
ment that is mentioned you begin to feel interested in them.
After thirty pages you feel that you are already decidedly in
sympathy with them and you are so captured that you read
pages and pages of these chaotic details with the sole pur-
pose of solving the question which begins passionately to
interest Will Peter or Anna find to-day the
you: piece of
bread which they long to have? Will Mary get the work
which might procure her a pinch of tea for her sick and
half crazy mother? Will the woman Praskovia freeze dur-
ing that bitterly cold night when she is lost in the streets of
St. Petersburg or will she be taken at last to a hospital where
she may have a warm blanket and cup of tea? Will the post-
man abstain from the " fire-water," and will he get a situa-
tion, or not?
Surely, to obtain this result with such unconventional
means reveals a very great talent; it means, to possess that
power of moving one's readers of making them love and
hate which makes the very essence of literary talent; and
this is why those shapeless, and much too long, and much
too dreary novels of Ryeshetnikoff make a landmark in Rus-
sian literature, and are the precursors not only of a Gorkiy,
but, most surely, of a greater talent still.
LEVITOFF
Another folk-novelist of the same generation was LEvfr-
OFF (1835 or 1842-1877). He described chiefly those
portions of southern Middle Russia which are in the border-
land between the wooded parts of the country and the tree-
less prairies. His life was extremely sad. He was born in
the family of a poor country priest in a village of the
province of Tambof, and was educated in a clerical school of
the type described by Pomyalovskiy. When he was only six-
teen he went on foot to Moscow, in order to enter the univer-
sity, and then moved to St. Petersburg. There he was soon
"
involved in some students' affair," and was exiled, in
1858, to Shenkursk, in the far north, and next removed to
Vologda. Here he lived in complete isolation from every-
thing intellectual, and in awful poverty verging on starvation.

Not until three years later was he allowed to return to
Moscow, and, being absolutely penniless, he made all the
journey from Vologda to Moscow on foot, earning occasion-
ally a few shillings by clerical work done for the cantonal
Board of some village. These years of exile left a deep trace
upon all his subsequent life, which he passed in extreme
poverty, never finding a place where he could settle, and
drowning in drink the sufferings of a loving, restless soul.
During his early childhood he was deeply impressed by
FOLK-NOVELISTS 241
the charm and quiet of village the prairies, and he
life in
"
wrote later on: This quietness of village life passes before
me, or rather flies, as something really living, as a well defined
image. Yes, I distinctly see above our daily life in the village,
somebody gliding a little above the cross of our church,
together with the light clouds somebody light and soft of
outline, having the mild and modest face of our prairie girls.
"... Thus, after many years spent amidst the untold
sufferings of my present existence, do I represent to myself
the genius of country life."
The charm of the boundless prairies of South Russia the
is so admirably rendered by Levi'toff that no Rus-
Steppes
sian author has surpassed him in the poetical description
of their nature, excepting Koltsoff in his poetry. Levitoff
was a pure flower of the Steppes, full of the most poetical
love of his birthplace, and he certainly must have suffered
deeply when he was thrown amidst the intellectual proleta-
rians in the great, cold, and egotistic capital of the Neva.
Whenever he stayed at St. Petersburg or at Moscow he
always lived in the poorest quarters, somewhere on the out-
skirts of the town: they reminded him of his native village;
and when he thus settled amongst the lowest strata of the
"
population, he did so, as he wrote himself, to run away
from the moral contradictions, the artificiality of life, the
would-be humanitarianism, and the cut and dried imaginary
superiority of the educated classes." He could not live, for
even a couple of months in succession, in relative well-being:
he began to feel the gnawings of conscience, and it ended in
his leaving behind his extremely poor belongings "and going
somewhere anywhere where he would be poorer still,
amidst other poor who live from hand to mouth.
I do not even know if I am right in describing Levitoff 's
works as novels. They aremore like shapeless, lyrical-epical
improvisations in
prose. Only in these improvisations we have
not the usual hackneyed presentment of the writer's com-
passion for other people's sufferings. It is an epical descrip-
tion of what the author has lived through in his close contact
with all classes of people of the poorest sort, and its lyric
clement is the sorrow that he himself knew not in imagina-
tion as he lived that same life; the sorrow of want, of
family troubles, of hopes unsatisfied, of isolation, of all sorts
of oppression, and of all sorts of human weakness. The pages
which he has given to the feelings of the drunken man and
to the ways in which this disease drunkenness takes pos-
session of men, are something really terrible. Of course, he
died young from an inflammation of the lungs caught one
day in January, as he went in an old summer coat to get
ten shillings from some petty editor at the other end of
Moscow.
The best known work of Levitoff is a volume of Sketches
from the Steppes; but he has also written scenes from the
life of the towns, under the title of Moscow Dens and Slums,
Street Sketches, etc., and a volume to which some of his
friends must have given the title of Sorrows of the Villages,
the High Roads, and the Towns. In the second of these
works we find a simply terrifying collection of tramps and
outcasts of the large cities of men sunk to the lowest level
of city slum-life, represented without the slightest attempt at
idealising them and yet deeply human. Sketches from the
Steppes remains his best work. It is a collection of poems,
written in prose, full of the most admirable descriptions of
prairie nature and of tiny details from the life of the peasants,
with all their petty troubles, their habits, customs, and super-
stitions. Plenty of personal reminiscences are scattered
through these sketches, and one often finds in them a scene of
children playing In the meadows of the prairies and living
in accordance with the life of nature, in which every little
trait Is pictured with a warm, tender love; and almost every-
where one feels the unseen tears of sorrow, shed by the
author.
Amongst the several sketches of the life and work of
Levitoff there Is one written with deep feeling and con-
taining charming Idyllic features from his childhood as well
as a terrible account of his later years by A. Skabltchevskiy,
in his History of Modern Russian Literature.
FOLK-NOVELISTS 243
GLEB USPJ^NSKIY
Gleb Uspenskiy (1840- 1 902) widely differs from all
the preceding writers. He represents a school in himself, and
I know of no writer in any literature with whom he might be
compared. Properly speaking, he is not a novelist; but his

work is not enthnography or demography either, because it
contains, besides descriptions belonging to the domain of

folk-psychology, all the elements of a novel. His first produc-
tions were novels with a leaning towards ethnography. Thus,
Ruin is a novel in which Uspenskiy admirably described how
all the life of a small provincial town, which had flourished
under the habits and manners of serfdom, went to ruin after
the abolition of that institution: but his later productions,
entirely given to village life, and representing the full matu-
rity of his talent, had more the character of ethnographic
sketches, written by a gifted novelist, than of novels proper.
They began like novels. Different persons appear before you
in the usual way, and gradually you grow interested in their
doings and their life. Moreover, they are not offered you
haphazard, as they would be in the diary of an ethnographer;
they have been chosen by the author because he considers
them typical of those aspects of village life which he intends
to deal with. However, the author is not satisfied with merely
acquainting the reader with these types: he soon begins to
discuss them and to talk about their position in village life
and the influence they must exercise upon the future of the
village and, being already interested in the people, you read
;
the discussions with interest. Then some admirable scene,

which would not be out of place in a novel of Tolstoy or Tur-
gueneff, is introduced; but after a few pages of such artistic
creation Uspenskiy becomes again an ethnographer discuss-
ing the future of the village-community. He was too much
of a political writer to always think in images and to be a
pure novelist, but he was also too passionately impressed by
the individual facts which came under his observation to
calmly discuss them, as the merely political writer would do.
In spite of all this, notwithstanding this mixture of political
literature with art, because of his artistic gifts, you read
Uspenskiy just as you read a good novelist.
Every movement among the educated classes in favour of
the poorer classes begins by an idealisation of the latter. It
being necessary to clear away, first of all, a number of prej-
udices which exist among the rich as regards the poor, some
idealisation is unavoidable. Therefore, the earlier folk-novel-
ist takes only the most striking types those whom the
wealthier people can better understand and sympathise with;
and he lightly passes over the less sympathetic features of the
life of the poor. This was done in the forties in France and
England, and in Russia by Grigorovitch, Marko Vovtchok,

and several others. Then came Ryeshetnikoff with his artistic
Nihilism with his negation of all the usual tricks of art, and
:
" "
his objectivism; his blunt refusal to create types and his
preference for the quite ordinary man; his manner of trans-
mitting to you his love of his people, merely through the sup-
pressed intensity of his own emotion. Later on, new problems
arose for Russian literature. The readers were now quite
ready to sympathise with the individual peasant or factory
worker; but they wanted to know something more: namely,
what were the very foundations, the ideals, the springs of
village life? what were they worth in the further development
of the nation? what, and in what form, could the immense
agricultural population of Russia contribute to the further
development of the country and the civilised world
altogether? All such questions could not be answered by the
of the artist, who
statistician alone; they required the genius
must decipher the reply out of the thousands of small indica-
tions and facts, and our folk-novelists understood this new
demand of the reader. A rich collection of individual peasant
types having already been given, it was now the life of the
village the mir, with its advantages and drawbacks, and its
promises for the future that the readers were anxious to
find in the folk-novel. These were the questions which the
new generation of folk-novelists undertook to discuss.
In this venture they were certainly right. It must not be
forgotten that in the last analysis every economical and
social question is a question of psychology of both the indi-
vidual and the social aggregation. It cannot be solved
by arithmetic alone. Therefore, in social science, as in
human pyschology, the poet often sees his way better than
FOLK-NOVELISTS 245
the physiologist. At any rate, he too has his voice in the
matter.
When Uspenskiy began writing of village
his first sketches
life it was in the early seventies
Young Russia was in the
"
grip of the great movement towards the people," and it
must be owned that in this movement, as in every other, there

was some idealisation. Those who did not know village-life at
all cherished exaggerated, idyllic illusions about the village-
community. In all probability Uspenskiy, who was born in a

large industrial town, Tula, in the family of a small function-
ary and hardly knew country life at all, shared these illusions
to some extent, very probably in their most extreme aspect;
and still preserving them he went to a province of southeast-
em Russia, Samara, which had lately become the prey of
modern commercialism, and where, owing to a number of
peculiar circumstances, the abolition of serfdom had been ac-
complished under conditions specially ruinous to the peasants
and to village-life altogether. Here he must have suffered
intensely from seeing his youthful dreams vanishing; and, as
artists often do, he hastened to generalise but he had not the
;
education of the thorough ethnographer, which might have

prevented him from making too hasty ethnological general-
isations from his limited materials, and he began to write a
series of scenes from village-life, imbued with a deep pessim-
ism. It was only much later on, while staying in a village of
Northern Russia, in the province of Novgorod, that he came
to understand the influences which the culture of the land
and life in an agricultural village may exercise upon the tiller
of the soil; then only had he some glimpses of what are the
social and moral forces of land cultivation and communal
life, and of what free labour on a free soil might be. These
observations inspired Uspenskiy with perhaps the best thing
he wrote. The Power of the Soil ( 1882) It will remain, at
.
any rate, his most important contribution in this domain

the artist appearing here in all the force of his talent and in
his true function of explaining the inner springs of a certain
mood of life.
zlatovrAtskiy and other folk-novelists
One of the great questions of the da/ for Russia is,
whether we shall abolish the communal ownership of the
land, as it has been abolished in Western Europe, and intro-
duce instead of it individual peasant proprietorship; or
whether we shall endeavour to retain the village community,
and do our best to develop it further in the direction of co-
operative associations, both agricultural and industrial. A
great struggle goes on accordingly among the educated classes
of Russia upon this question, and in his first Samara sketches,
entitled From a Village Diary, Uspenskiy paid a great deal
of attention to this subject. He tried to prove that the village
community, such as it is, results in a formidable oppression
of the individual, in a hampering of individual initiative, in
all sorts of oppression of the poorer peasants by the richer
ones, and, consequently, in general poverty. He omitted, how-
ever, all the arguments which these same poorer peasants,
if they should be questioned, would bring forward in favour
of the present communal ownership of the land; and he
attributed to this institution what is the result of other general
causes, as may be seen from the fact that exactly the same
poverty, the same inertia, and the same oppression of the
individual, are found in an even greater degree in Little
Russia, where the village community has ceased to exist long
since. Uspenskiy thus expressed at least in those sketches
which dealt with the villages of Samara the views which
prevail among the middle classes of Western Europe, and
are current in Russia among the growing village bourgeoisie.
This attitude called forth a series of replies from another
folk-novelist of an equally great talent, ZlatovrAtskiy
(born 1845), who answered each sketch of Uspenskiy's by
a novel in which he took the extreme opposite view. He had
known peasant life in Middle Russia from his childhood;
and the less illusions he had about it, the better was he able,
when he began a serious study of the peasants, to see the good
features of their lives, and to understand those types of them
who take to heart the interests of the village as a whole
types that I also well knew in my youth in the same provinces.
Zlatovratskiy was accused, of course, of idealising the
FOLK-NOVELISTS 247
peasants; but the reality is, that Uspenskiy and Zlatovratskiy
complement each other. Just as they complement each other
geographically the latter speaking for the truly agricultural
region of Middle Russia, while Uspenskiy spoke for the
periphery of this region so also they complement each other
psychologically. Uspenskiy was right in showing the draw-
backs of the village community institution deprived of its
vitality by an omnipotent bureaucracy; and Zlatovratskiy
was quite right, too, in showing what sort of men are never-
theless bred by the village-communal institutions and by
attachment to the land, and what services they could render
to the rural masses under different conditions of liberty and
independence.
Zlatovratskiy's novels are thus an important ethnographi-
cal contribution, and they have at the same time an artistic
value. His Everyday Life in the Village, and perhaps even
more his Peasant Jurymen (since 1864, the peasant heads of
households have acted in turn as jurors in the law courts),
are full of the most charming scenes of village-life; while his
Foundations represents a serious attempt at grasping in a
work of art the fundamental conceptions of Russian rural
life. In this last work we also find types of men, who per-
sonify the revolt of the peasant against both external oppres-

sion and the submissiveness of the mass to that oppression
men, who, under favourable conditions might become the
initiators of movements of a deep purport. That types have
not been invented will be agreed by everyone who knows
Russian village-life from the inside.
The writers who have been named in the preceding pages

are far from representing the whole school of folk-novelists.
Not only has every Russian novelist of the past, from Tur-
gueneff down, been inspired in some of his work by folk life,
but some of the best productions of the most prominent con-
temporary writers, such as Korolenko, Tchehoff, Oertel and
many others (see next chapter), belong to the same cate-
gory. There are besides quite a number of novelists dis-
tinctively of this class, who would be spoken of at some length
in any course of Russian literature, but whom, unfortunately,
I am compelled to mention in but a few lines.
NAtJMOFF was born at Tobolsk (in 1838) and, settling
in Western Siberia after he had received a university educa-
tion at St. Petersburg, he wrote a series of short novels and
sketches in which he described life in West Siberian villages
and mining towns. These stories were widely read, owing to
their expressive, truly popular language, the energy with
which they were imbued, and the striking pictures they con-
tained of the advantage taken of the poverty of the mass by
" '
the richer peasants, known in Russia as wir-eaters
(miroyed).
Zas6dimskiy (born 1843) belongs to the same period.
Like many of his contemporaries, he spent years of his youth
" "
in exile, but he remains still the same populist that he
was in his youth, imbued with the same love of the people and
the same faith in the peasants. His Chronicle of the Village
Smiirino (1874) and Mysteries of the Steppes (1882) are
especially interesting, because Zasodimskiy made in these
novels attempts at representing types of intellectual and pro-
testing peasants, true to life, but usually neglected by our
folk-novelists. Some of them are rebels who revolt against
the conditions of village-life, chiefly in their own, personal
interest, while others are peaceful religious propagandists,
and still others are men who have developed under the influ-
ence of educated propagandists.
Another writer who excelled in the representation of the
" "
type of Tnir-eaters in the villages of European Russia is
SAloff ( 1 843-1902).
PetropAvlovskiy ( 1 857-1 892), who wrote under the
pseudonym of Kar6nin, was, on the other hand, a real poet
of village-life and of the cultivation of the fields. He was
born in southeastern Russia, in the province of Samara, but
was early exiled to the government of Tobolsk, in Siberia,
where he was kept many years, and from which he was
released only to die soon after from consumption. He gave
in his novels and stories several very dramatic types of
"
village ne'er-do-well's," but the novel which is most typical
"
of his talent is
" My fVorld. In it he tells how an
"
intellec-
tual," rent in twain and nearly losing his reason in
consequence of this dualism, finds inner peace and recon-
ciliation with life when he settles in a village and works in
FOLK-NOVELISTS 249
the same almost superhuman way that the peasants do, when
hay has to be mown and the crops to be carried in. Thus
living the life they live, he is loved by them, and finds a
healthy and intelligent girl to love him. This is, of course,
to some extent an idyll of village life; but so slight is the
"
idealisation, as we know from the experience of those intel-
"
lectuals who went to the villages as equals coming among
equals, that the idyll reads almost as a reality.
Several more folk-novelists ought to be mentioned. Such
are L. Melshin (born i860), the pseudonym of an exile
"
P. Ya.," who is also a poet, and who, having been kept
for twelve years at hard labour in Siberia as a political con-
vict, has published two volumes of hard-labour sketches. In
the World of the Outcasts (a work to put by the side of
Dostoyevskiy's Dead House) S. ElpAtievskiy (born
;
1854) also an
,
who has given good sketches of Siberian
exile,
tramps; Nefedoff (1847- 1902), ^" ethnographr who has
made valuable scientific researches and at the same time has
published excellent sketches of factory and village life, and
whose writings are thoroughly imbued with a deep faith
in the store of energy and plastic creative power of the
masses of the country people; and several others. Every one
of these writers deserves, however, more than a short notice,
because each has contributed something, either to the com-
prehension of this or that class of the people, or to the work-
" "
ing out of those forms of idealistic realism which are
best suited for dealing with types taken from the toiling
masses, and which has lately made the literary success of
Maxim Gorkiy.
MAxiM g6rkiy
Few writers have established their reputation so rapidly as
Maxim G6RKtY. His first sketches (1892-95) were pub-
lished in an obscure provincial paper of the Caucasus, and
were totally unknown to the literary world, but when a short
tale of his appeared in a widely-read review, edited
by Koro-
lenko, it at once attracted general attention. The beauty of
its form, its artistic finish, and the new note of
strength and
courage which rang through it, brought the young writer
"
immediately into prominence. became known that Maxim
It
"
Gorkiy was the pseudonym of a quiet young man, A.
Pyi^shkoff, who was born in 1868 in Nijniy Novgorod, a
large town on the Volga; that his father was a merchant or an
artisan, his mother a remarkable peasant woman, who died
soon after the birth of her son, and that the boy, orphaned
when only nine, was brought up in a family of his father's
" "
relatives. The childhood of Gorkiy must have been any-
thing but happy, for one day he ran away and entered into
service on a Volga river steamer. This took place when he
was only twelve. Later on he worked as a baker, became a
street porter, sold apples in a street, till at last he obtained
the position of clerk at a lawyer's. In 1891 he lived and
wandered on foot with the tramps in South Russia, and during
these wanderings he wrote a number of short stories, of which
the first was pubished in 1892, in a newspaper of Northern
Caucasia. The stories proved to be remarkably fine, and when
a collection of all that he had hitherto written was published
in 1900, in four small volumes, the whole of a large edition
was sold in a very short time, and the name of Gorkiy took
its place to speak of living novelists only ^by the side of
those of Korolenko and Tchehoff, immediately after the name
of Leo Tolstoy. In Western Europe and America his reputa-
tion was made with the same rapidity as soon as a couple of
his sketches were translated into French and German, and
re-translated into English.
It is sufficient to read a few of Gorkiy's short stories, for
instance,Mdlva, or Tchelkdsh, or The Ex-Men, or Twenty-
Six Men and One Girl, to realise at once the causes of his
rapidly won popularity. The men and women he describes
are not heroes: they are the most ordinary tramps or slum-
dwellers; and what he writes are not novels in the proper
sense of the word, but merely sketches of life. And yet, in the
literature of all nations, including the short stories of Guy
de Maupassant and Bret Harte, there are few things in
which such a fine analysis of complicated and struggling
human feelings is given, such interesting, original, and new
characters are so well depicted, and human psychology is
so admirably interwoven with a background of nature
a calm sea, menacing waves, or endless, sunburnt prairies.
FOLK-NOVELISTS 251
In the first-named story you really see the promontory that
'*
juts out into the laughing waters," that promontory upon
which the fisherman has pitched his hut; and you understand
why Malva, the woman who loves him and comes to see
him every Sunday, loves that spot as much as she does the
fisherman himself. And then at every page you are struck
by the quite unexpected variety of fine touches with which
the love of that strange and complicated nature, Malva, is
depicted, or by the unforeseen aspects under which both the
ex-peasant fisherman and his peasant-son appear in the short
space of a few days. The variety of strokes, refined and
brutal, tender and terribly harsh, with which Gorkiy pictures
human feelings is such that in comparison with his heroes
the heroes and heroines of our best novelists seem so simple
so simplified just like a flower in European decorative art
in comparison with a real flower.
Gorkiy is a great artist; he is a poet; but he is also a
child of all that long series of folk-novelists whom Russia
has had for the last half century, and he has utilised their
experience: he has found at last that happy combination of
realism with idealism for which the Russian folk-novelists
have been striving for so many years. Ryeshetnikoff and his
school had tried to write novels of an ultra-realistic charac-
ter without any trace of idealisation. They restrained them-
selves whenever they felt inclined to generalise, to create, to
idealise. They tried to write mere diaries, in which events,
great and small, important and insignificant, were related with
an equal exactitude, without even changing the tone of the
narrative. We have seen that in this way, by dint of their
talent, they were able to obtain the most poignant effects;
"
but like the historian who vainly tries to be impartial,"
yet always remains a party man, they had not avoided the
idealisation which they so much dreaded. They could not
avoid it. A
work of art is always personal do what he may,
;
the author's sympathies will necessarily appear in his crea-

tion, and he will always idealise those who answer to them.
Grigorovitch and Marko Vovtchok had idealised the all-
pardoning patience and the all-enduring submissiveness of
the Russian peasant; and Ryeshetnikoff had quite uncon-
sciously, and maybe against his will, idealised the almost
supernatural powers of endurance which he had seen In the
Urals and in the slums of St. Petersburg. Both had ideahsed
something: the ultra-realist as well as the romantic. Gorkiy
must have understood the significance of this; at all events
he does not object in the least to a certain idealisation. In his
adherence to truth he is as much of a realist as Ryeshetni-
koff; but he idealises in the same sense as Turgueneff did
when he pictured Rudin, Helen, or Bazaroff. He even says
that we must idealise, and he chooses for idealisation the type
he admired most among those tramps whom he knew the
rebel. This made his success; it appeared to be exactly what
the readers of all nations were unconsciously calling for as
a relief from the dull mediocrity and absence of strong indi-
viduality all about them.
The stratum of society from which Gorkiy took the heroes

of his firstshort stories and in short stories he appears at
iiis best is that of the tramps of Southern Russia :men who
have broken with regular society, who never accept the yoke
of permanent work, labouring only as long as they want to,
" "
as casuals in the sea-ports on the Black Sea; who sleep
in doss-houses or in ravines on the outskirts of the cities, and
tramp in the summer from Odessa to the Crimea, and from

the Crimea to the prairies of Northern Caucasia, where they
are always welcome at harvest time.
That eternal complaint about poverty and bad luck, that
helplessness and hopelessness which were the dominant notes
with the early folk-novelists, are totally absent from Gorkiy's
"
stories. His tramps do not complain. Everything is all
"
right," one of them says; no use to whine and complain
that would do no good. Live and endure till you are broken
down, or if you are so already wait for death. This is all
"
the wisdom in the world do you understand?
Far from his whining and complaining about the hard lot
of his tramps, a refreshing note of energy and courage, which
is quite unique in Russian literature, sounds through the
stories of Gorkiy. His tramps are miserably poor, but they
*'
don't care." They drink, but there is nothing among them
nearly approaching the dark drunkenness of despair which we
" "
saw in Levitoff. Even the most down-trodden one of them
FOLK-NOVELISTS 253
from making a virtue of his helplessness, as Dostoyev-
far
skiy's heroes always did dreams of reforming the world
"
and making it rich. He dreams of the moment when we,
'
once the poor,' shall vanish, after having enriched the
Croesuses with the richness of the spirit and the power of
life." {A Mistake, I, 170.)
Gorkiy cannot stand whining; he cannot bear that self-
castigation in which other Russian writers so much delight:
which Turgueneff's sub-Hamlets used to express so poetic-
ally, of which Dostoyevskiy has made a virtue, and of
which Russia offers such an infinite variety of examples.
Gorkiy knows the type, but he has no pity for such men.
Better anything than one of those egotistic weaklings who
gnaw all the time at their own hearts, compel others to drink
with them in order to perorate before them about their
*' " " "
burning souls those beings,; full of compassion which,
"
however, never goes beyond self-commiseration, and full
of love" which is never anything but self-love. Gorkiy knows
only too well these men who never fail to wantonly ruin the
lives of those women who trust them; who do not even stop
at murder, like Raskolnikoff, or the brothers Karamazoff,
and yet whine about the circumstances which have brought
"
them to it. " What's all this talk about circumstances he !
*'
makes Old Izerghil say. Everyone makes his own
circumstances ! of men but the strong ones
I see all sorts
"
where are they? There are fewer and fewer noble men!
'* "
Knowing how much the Russian intellectuals suffer
from this disease of whining, knowing how rare among them
are the aggressive idealists, the real rebels, and how numer-
ous on the other hand are the Nezhdanoffs (Turgueneff's
** "
Virgin Soil) even among those
, politicals who march
with resignation to Siberia, Gorkiy does not take his types
"
from among the intellectuals," for he thinks that they too
easily become "the prisoners of life."
In Vdrenka Olesova Gorky expresses all his contempt for
" "
the average intellectual of our own days. He introduces
to us the interesting type of a girl, full of vitality; a most
primitive creature, absolutely untouched by any ideals of
liberty and equality, but so full of an intense life, so inde-
pendent, so much herself, that one cannot but feel greatly
" "
interested in her. She meets with one of those intellectuals
who know and admire higher ideals, but are weaklings,
utterly devoid of the nerve of life. Of course, Varenka laughs
at the very idea of such a man's falling in love with her; and
these are the expressions in which Gorkiy makes her define
the usual hero of Russian novels :
" *'
The always silly and stupid," she says
Russian hero is he is ;
always sick of something; always thinking about something that can-

not be understood, and is himself so miserable, so mi-i-serable He will
!
think, think, then talk, then he will go and make a declaration of love,
and after that he thinks, and thinks again, till he marries.
And when he is married, he talks all sorts of nonsense to his wife,
and then abandons her." (Varenka Olesova, II, 281.)
" "
Gorkiy's favourite type is the rebel the man in full
revolt against Society, but at the same time a strong man, a
power; and as he has found among the tramps with whom
he has lived at least the embryo of this type, it is from this
stratum of society that he takes his most interesting heroes.
In Konovdloff Gorkiy himself gives the psycnology, or,
"
rather, a partial psychology, of his tramp hero An :
amongst those whom fate has ill-used

* '
intellectual
amongst the ragged, the hungry and embittered "half-men
and half-beasts with whom the city slums teem." Usually
a being that can be included in no order," the man who has
"
been torn from all his moorings, who is hostile to every-
thing and ready to turn upon anything the force of his angry,
embittered scepticism" (II, 23). His tramp feels that he
has been defeated in life, but he does not seek excuse in
circumstances. Konovdloff, for instance, will not admit the
theory which is in such vogue among the educated ne'er-do-
well, namely, that he is the sad product of adverse condi-
tions.
"
One must be faint-hearted indeed," he says, " to
"
become such a man." I live, and something goads me
" "
on . but. I have no inner line to follow. ... do you
.
understand me? I don't know how to say it. I have not that
spark in my" soul, .
force, perhaps? Something is missing;
. .
that's all 1 And when his young friend who has read in
books all sorts of excuses for weakness of character men-
"
tions the dark hostile forces round you," Konovaloff
FOLK-NOVELISTS 255
retorts: "Then make stand! take a stronger footing I
a
"
find your ground, and make a stand !
Some of Gorkiy's tramps are, of course, philosophers.

They think about human **
life, and have had opportunities
to know what it is. Everyone," he remarks somewhere,
"
who has had a struggle to sustain in his life, and has been
defeated by life, and now feels cruelly imprisoned amidst
its squalor, is more of a philosopher than Schopenhauer him-
self; for abstract thought can never be cast into such a

correct and vivid plastic form as that in which is expressed
"
the thought born directly out of suffering." (I, p. 31.) The
knowledge of life among such men is striking," he says
again.
Love of nature of course, another characterstic feature
is,
"
of the tramp Konovaloff loved nature with a deep,
inarticulate love,which was betrayed only by a glitter in
his eyes. Every time he was in the fields, or on the river
bank, he became permeated with a sort of peace and love

which made him still more like a child. Sometimes he would
'
exclaim looking at the sky Good : !

'
and in this exclama-
tion there was more sense and feeling than in the rhetoric
of many poets. . Like all the rest, poetry loses its holy
. .
simplicity and spontaneity when it becomes a profession."

(I' 33-4.)
However, Gorkiy's rebel-tramp is not a Nietzsche who
ignores everything beyond his narrow egotism, or imagines
" " " "
himself a man "; the diseased ambition of an intel-
"
lectual required to create the true Nietzsche type. In
is
Gorkiy's tramps, as in his women of the lowest class, there

are flashes of greatness of character and a simplicity which
is incompatible with the super-man's self-conceit. He does
not idealise them so as to make of them real heroes; that

would be too untrue to life: the tramp is still a defeated
being. But he shows how among these men, owing to an
inner consciousness of strength, there are moments of great-
ness, even though that inner force be not strong enough to
make out of Orloff (in The Orlops) or Iliya (in The Three)
a real power, a real hero the man who fights against those
much stronger than himself. He seems to say: Why are not
"
you, intellectuals, as truly individual," as frankly rebellious
against the Society you criticise, and as strong as some of
these submerged ones are?
In his short stories Gorkiy is great; but like his two
contemporaries, Korolenko and Tchehoff, whenever he has

tried to write a longer novel, with a full development of
characters, he has not succeeded. Taken as a whole, Fomd
Gordeeff, notwithstanding several beautiful and deeply im-
pressive scenes, is weaker than most of Gorkiy's short stories;
and while the first portion of The Three the idyllic life of
the three young people, and the tragical issues foreshadowed
in it makes us expect to find in this novel one of the finest
productions Russian literature
in its end is disappointing.
The French translator of The Three has even preferred to
terminate it abruptly, at the point where Iliya stands on the
grave of the man whom he has killed, rather than to give
Gorkiy's end of the novel.
Why Gorkiy should fail in this direction is, of course, too
delicate and too diflicult a question to answer. One cause,
however, may be suggested. Gorkiy, like Tolstoy, is too
'* "
honest an artist to invent an end which the real lives of
his heroes do not suggest to him, although that end might
have been very picturesque; and the class of men whom he
so admirably depicts is not possessed of that consistency and
" "
that oneness which are necessary to render a work of
art perfect and to give it that final accord without which it
is never complete.
"
Take, for instance, Orloff in The Orloffs.
*'
My soul burns
within me," he says. I want space, to give full swing to
my strength. I feel within me an indomitable force If the I
cholera, let us say, could become a man, a giant were it Iliya

'
Muromets himself I would meet it! Let it be a struggle
'
to the death,' I would say; you are a force, and I, Grishka
" '
Orloff, am a force, too: let us see which is the better!

But that power, that force does not last. Orloff says some-
"
where that he is torn in all directions at once," and that
his fate is to be not a fighter of giants, but merely a tramp.
And so he ends. Gorkiy is too great an artist to make of him
a giant-killer. It is the same with Iliya in The Three. This
is a powerful type, and one feels inclined to ask, Why did not
Gorkiy make him begin a new life under the influence of

FOLK-NOVELISTS 257
those young propagandists of socialism whom he meets?
Why should he not die, let us say, in one of those encounters
between workingmen on strike and soldiers which took place
in Russia precisely at the time Gorkiy was finishing this
novel? But here, too, Gorkiy's reply probably would be that
such things do not happen in real life. Men, like Iliya, who
*'
dream only of the clean life of a merchant," do not join
in labour movements. And he preferred to give a very dis-
appointing end to his hero to make him appear miserable

and small in his attack upon the wife of the police-officer, so
as to turn the reader's sympathies towards even this woman
rather than to make of Iliya a prominent figure in a strike-
conflict. If it had been possible to idealise Iliya so much,
without over-straining the permissible limits of idealisation,
Gorkiy probably would have done it, because he is entirely
in favour of idealisation in realistic art; but this would have
been pure romanticism.
Over and over again he returns to the idea of the necessity
"
of an ideal in the work of the novel-writer. The cause of
"
the present opinion (in Russian Society) is," he says, the
neglect of idealism. Those who have exiled from life all
romanticism have stripped us so as to leave us quite naked:
this is why we are so uninteresting to one another, and so
disgusted with one another." {A Mistake, I. 151.) And in
The Reader (1898), he develops his aesthetic canons in full.
He tells how one of his earliest productions, on its appear-
ance in print, is read one night before a circle of friends. He
receives many compliments for it, and after leaving the
house is tramping along a deserted street, feeling for the
first time in his existence the happiness of life, when a person
unknown to him, and whom he had not noticed among those
present at the reading, overtakes him, and begins to talk
about the duties of the author.
" "
You will agree with me," the stranger says, that the duty of
literature is to aid man in understanding himself, to raise his faith in
himself, to develop his longing for truth; to combat what is bad in
men; to find what is good in them, and to wake up in their souls
shame, anger, courage, to do everything, in short, to render men
strong in a noble sense of the word, and capable of inspiring their
"
lives with the holy spirit of beauty." (Ill, 271.) It seems to me, we
258 RUSSIAN' LITERATURE
need once more to have dreams, pretty creations of our fancy and
visions, because the life we have built up is poor in colour, is dim and
dull. . . . Well, let us try, perhaps imagination will help man
to rise for a moment above the earth and find his true place on it,
which he has lost." (245.)
But further on Gorkiy makes a confession which explains

perhaps he has not yet succeeded in creating a longer
why
" *'
character-novel I discovered in myself," he says,
:
many
good feelings and desires a fair proportion of what is
usually called good but a feeling which could unify all this
;
a well-founded, clear thought, embracing all the phenomena

of did not find in rnyself." And on reading this, one
life I
"
at once thinks of Turgueneft, who saw in such a freedom,"
in such a unified comprehension of the universe and its life,
the first condition for being a great artist.
" "
Can
you," the Reader goes on to ask, create for men ever so
"
small an illusion that has the power to raise them ? No I "All of
you teachers of the day take more than you give, because you speak
only about faults you see only those. But there must also be good
qualities in men: you possess some, don't you? . Don't you
. .
notice that owing to your continual efforts to define and to classify

them, the virtues and the vices have been entangled like two balls of
black and white thread which have become grey by taking colour from
each other?
"
..." I doubt whether God has sent you on earth.
If he had sent messengers, he would have chosen stronger men than
,you are. He would have lighted in them the fire of a passionate love
of of truth, of men."
life,
"
Nothing but everyday life, everyday life, only everyday people,
everyday thoughts and events!" the same pitiless Reader continues.
**
When *
will you, then, speak of the rebel spirit,' of the necessity of
a new birth of the spirit? Where is, then, the calling to the creation
of a new life? where the lessons of courage? where the words which
"
would give wings to the soul ?
"
Confess you don't know how to represent life, so that your pic-
tures of it shall provoke in a man a redemptive spirit of shame and a
burning desire of creating new forms of life. . . . Can you
accelerate the pulsation of life? Can you inspire it with energy, as
"
others have done?
**
I see many intelligent men round about me, but few noble ones
among them, and these few are broken and suffering souls. I don't
know why it should be so, but so it is: the better the man, the cleaner
FOLK-NOVELISTS 259
and the more honest his soul, the less energy he has; the more he
suffers and the harder is his life. . . . But although they suffer
so much from feeling the want of something better, they have not the
force to create it."
" "
One thing more said after an interval
my strange interlocutor.
"
Can you awake in man
a laughter full of the joy of life and at the
same time elevating to the soul ? Look, men have quite forgotten good
"
wholesome laughter !
"
The sense of life is not in self-satisfaction after all, man is
;
better than that. The sense of life is in the beauty and the force of
striving towards some aim; every moment of being ought to have
"
its higher aim." Wrath, hatred, shame, loathing, and finally a grim
despair these are the levers by means of which you may destroy
"
everything on earth." What can you do to awake a thirst for life
when you only whine, sigh, moan, or coolly point out to man that he
"
is nothing but dust?
"
Oh, for a man, firm and loving, with a burning heart and a
powerful all-embracing mind. In the stuffy atmosphere of shameful
silence, his prophetic words would resound like an alarm-bell, and
"
perhaps the mean souls of the living dead would shiver! (253.)
These ideas of Gorkiy about the necessity of something

better than everyday life something that shall elevate the
soul, fully explain also his last drama, At the Bottom, which
has had such a success at Moscow, but played by the very same
artists at St. Petersburg met with but little enthusiasm. The
idea is the same as that of Ibsen's Wild Duck. The inhabi-
tants of a doss-house, all of them, maintain their life-power
only as long as they cherish some illusion the drunkard :
actor dreams of recovery in some special retreat;, a fallen

girl takes refuge In her illusion of real love, and so on. And
the dramatic situation of these beings with already so little
to retain them In life. Is only the more poignant when the
Illusions are destroyed. The drama Is powerful. It must lose,
though, on the stage on account of some technical mistakes
(a useless fourth act, the unnecessary person of a woman
introduced In the first scene and then disappearing) but apart ;
from these mistakes It Is eminently dramatic. The positions

are really tragical, the action Is rapid, and as to the con-
versations of the Inhabitants of the doss-house and their
philosophy of life, both are above all praise. Altogether one
feels that Gorkiy is very far yet from having said his last
word. The question is only whether in the classes of society
he now frequents he will be able to discover the further
developments undoubtedly existing of the types which
he understands best. Will he find among them further
materials responding to the aesthetic canons whose following
has hitherto been the source of his power?
PART VIII
Political Literature, Satire,
Art Criticism,
Contemporary Novelists,
Bibliography
CHAPTER VIII
POLITICAL LITERATURE :SATIRE ART CRITICISM CONTEM-

: :
PORARY NOVELISTS
POLITICAL LITERATURE Difficulties of Censorship The

Circles Westerners and Slavophiles Political Literature
abroad Herzen
:
Ogaryoff Bakunin Lavroff Stepniak
The Contemporary and Tchernyshevskiy Satire: Schedrin
(Saltykoff) Art Criticism: Its Importance in Russia Bye-
linskiy Dobroluboff Pisareff Mihailovskiy Tolstoy's
What is Art? Contemporary Novelists Otel Koro-
lenko Present Drift of Literature Merezherovskiy Bobo-
rykin Potapenko ^Tchehoff.
POLITICAL LITERATURE
speak of political literature in a country which
TO has no political liberty, and vi^here nothing can be

printed without having been approved by a rigorous
censorship, sounds almost like irony. And yet, notwith-
standing all the efforts of tlie Government to prevent the
discussion of political matters in the Press, or even in private
circles, that discussion goes on, under all possible aspects and
under imaginable pretexts. As a result it would be no
all
exaggeration to say that in the necessarily narrow circle of

" "
educated Russian intellectuals there is as much knowl-
edge, all round, of matters political as there is in the educated
circles of any other European country, and that a certain
knowledge of the political life of other nations is wide-spread
among the reading portion of Russians.
It is well known that everything that Is printed in Russia,
even up to the present time, is submitted to censorship, either
before it goes to print, or afterwards. To found a review
or a paper the editor must offer satisfactory guarantees of
" "
not being too advanced in his political opinions, other-
a63
wise he will not be authorised by the Ministry of the Interior
to start the paper or the review and to act in the capacity of
its editor. In certain cases a paper or a review,
published in
one of the two capitals but never in the provinces, may be
allowed to appear without passing through the censor's hands
before going to print; but a copy of it must be sent to the
censor as soon as the printing begins, and every number may
be stopped and prevented from being put into circulation
before it has left the printing office, to say nothing of subse-
quent prosecution. The same condition of things exists for
books. Even after the paper or the book has been authorised
by the censor it may be subject to a prosecution. The law of
1864 was very definite in stating the conditions under which
such prosecution could take place namely, it had to be made
;
before a regular court, within one month after publication;

but this law was never respected by the Government. Books
were seized and destroyed reduced to pulp without the
affair ever being brought before a Court, and I know editors
who have been plainly warned that if they insisted upon this
being done, they would simply be exiled, by order of the
administration, to some remote province. This is not all,
moreover. A paper or a review may receive a first, a second,
and a third warning, and after the third warning it is sus-
pended, by virtue of that warning. Besides, the Ministry of
the Interior may at any time prohibit the sale of the paper
in the streets and the shops, or deprive the paper of the right
of inserting advertisements.
The arsenal of punishments is thus pretty large but there
;
is still something else. It is the system of ministerial circulars.
Suppose a strike takes place, or some scandalous bribery

has been discovered in some branch of the administration.
Immediately all papers and reviews receive a circular from
the Ministry of the Interior prohibiting them to speak of
that strike, or that scandal. Even less important matters will
be tabooed in this way. Thus a few years ago an anti-Semitic
comedy was put on the stage at St. Petersburg. It was imbued
with the worst spirit of national hatred towards the Jews,
and the actress who was given the main part in it refused
to play. She preferred to break her agreement with the man-
ager rather than to play in that comedy. Another actress
POLITICAL LITERATURE 265
was engaged. This became known and at the
to the public,
first representation a formidable demonstration was made
against the actors who had accepted parts in the play, and
also against the author. Some eighty arrests chiefly of stu-
dents and other young people and of litterateurs were made
from among the audience, and for two days the St. Peters-
burg papers were full of discussions of the incident; but then
came the ministerial circular prohibiting any further refer-
ence to the subject, and on the third day there was not a word
said about the matter in all the Press of Russia.
Socialism, the social question altogether, and the labour
movement are continually tabooed by ministerial circulars
to say nothing of Society and Court scandals, or of the thefts
which may be discovered from time to time in the higher
administration. At the end of the reign of Alexander II. the
theories of Darwin, Spencer, and Buckle were tabooed in the
same way, and their works were prevented from being kept
by the circulating libraries.
This is what censorship means nowaday. As to what was
formerly, a very amusing book could be made of the antics
of the different censors, simply by utilising Skabitchevskiy's
History of Censorship. Suffice it to say that when Pushkin,
"
speaking of a lady, wrote : Your divine features," or men-
"
tioned her celestial beauty," the censorship would cross out
these verses and write, in red ink on the MS., that such
expressions were offensive to divinity and could not be
allowed. Verses were mutilated without any regard to the
rules of versification and very often the censor introduced,
;
in a novel, scenes of his own.

Under such conditions political thought had continually
to find new channels for its expression. Quite a special
language was developed therefore in the reviews and papers
for the treatment of forbidden subjects and for expressing
ideas which censorship would have found objectionable; and
this way of writing was resorted to even in works of art. A
few words dropped by a Riidln, or by a Bazaroff in a novel
by Turgueneff, conveyed quite a world of ideas. However,
other channels besides mere allusion were necessary, and
therefore political thought found its expression in various
other ways: first of all, in literary and philosophical circles
which impressed their stamp on the entire literature of a
given epoch; then, in art-criticism, in satire, and in literature
published abroad, either in Switzerland or in England.
THE " CIRCLES "

WESTERNERS AND SLAVOPHILES
It wasespecially in the forties and fifties of the nineteenth
" "
century that the circles played an important part in the
Intellectual development of Russia. No sort of expression of
political thought in print was possible at that time. The two
or three semi-official newspapers which were allowed to
appear were absolutely worthless; the novel, the drama, the
poem, had to deal with the most superficial matters only, and
the heaviest books of science and philosophy were as liable
to be prohibited as the lighter sort of literature. Private Inter-
course was the only possible means of exchanging Ideas, and
"
therefore all the best men of the time joined some circle,"
In which more or less advanced Ideas were expressed in
friendly conversation. There are even men like Stankevitch

(1817-1840) who are mentioned in every course of Russian
literature, although they have never written anything, simply
for the moral influence they exercised within their circle.
(Turgueneff's Ydkov Pdsynkoff was inspired by such a
personality.)
It Is quite evident that under such conditions there was no
room for the development of political parties properly speak-
ing. However, from the middle of the nineteenth century
two main currents of philosophical and social thought, which
" "
took the name of Western and " Slavophile," were
always apparent. The Westerners were, broadly speaking, for
Western civilisation. Russia they maintained is no excep-
tion the great family of European nations. She will

In
necessarily pass through the same phases of development that

Western Europe has passed through, and consequently her
next step will be the abolition of serfdom and, after that, the
evolution of the same constitutional institutions as have been
evolved in Western Europe. The Slavophiles, on the other
side, maintained that Russia has a mission of her own. She
has not known foreign conquest like that of the Normans;
she has retained still the structure of the old clan period, and
therefore she must follow her own quite original lines of
development, in accordance with what the Slavophiles de-
scribed as the three fundamental principles of Russian life:
the Greek Orthodox Church, the absolute power of the Tsar,
and the principles of the patriarchal family.
These were, of course, very wide programmes, which
admitted of many shades of opinion and gradations. Thus,
for the great bulk of the Westerners, Western liberalism of
the Whig or the Guizot type was the highest ideal that
Russia had to strive for. They maintained moreover that
everything which has happened in Western Europe in the
course of her evolution such as the depopulation of the
villages, the horrors of freshly developing capitalism (re-
vealed in England by the Parliamentary Commissions of the
forties), the powers of bureaucracy which had developed in
France, and so on, must necessarily be repeated in Russia as
well they were unavoidable laws of evolution. This was the
:
"
opinion of the rank-and-file Westerner."
The more intelligent and the better educated representa-
tives of this same party Byelinskiy, Herzen, Turgueneff,
Tchernyshevskiy, who were all under the influence of ad-
vanced European thought, held quite different views. In
their opinion the hardships suffered by workingmen and
agricultural labourers in Western Europe from the unbridled
power won in the parliaments, by both the landlords and the
middle classes, and the limitations of political liberties
introduced in the continental States of Europe by their
"
bureaucratic centralisation, were by no means historical
necessities." Russia they maintained need not necessarily
repeat these mistakes she must on the contrary, profit by the
;
experience of her elder sisters, and if Russia succeeds in at-

taining the era of industrialism without having lost her
communal land-ownership, or the autonomy of certain parts
of the
Empire, or the self-government of the mir in her
villages, this will be an immense advantage. It would be
therefore the greatest political mistake to go on destroying
her village community, to let the land concentrate in the
hands of a landed aristocracy, and to let the political life of
so immense and varied a territory be concentrated in the
hands of a central governing body, in accordance with the
Prussian, or the Napoleonic ideals of political centralisation
especially now that the powers of Capitalism are so great.
Similar gradations of opinion prevailed among the Slavo-
philes. Their best representatives the two brothers AksA-
KOFF, the two brothers Kireevskiy, Homyakoff, etc.,
were much in advance of the great bulk of the party. The
average Slavophile was simply a fanatic of absolute rule
and the Orthodox Church, to which feelings he usually added
"
a sort of sentimental attachment to the old good times,"
by which he understood all sorts of things: patriarchal habits
of the times of serfdom, manners of country life, folk, songs,
traditions, and folk-dress. At a time when the real history of
Russia had hardly begun to be deciphered they did not even
suspect that the federalist principle had prevailed in Russia
down to the Mongol invasion; that the authority of the
Moscow Tsars was of a relatively late creation (15th, i6th
and 17th centuries) and that autocracy was not at all an
;
inheritance of old Russia, but was chiefly the work of that

same Peter I. whom they execrated for having violently intro-
duced Western habits of life. Few of them realised also that
the religion of the great mass of the Russian people was not
" "
the religion which is professed by the official Orthodox
"
Church, but a thousand varieties of Dissent." They thus
imagined that they represented the ideals of the Russian
people, while in reality they represented the ideals of the
Russian State, and the Moscow Church, which are of a
mixed Byzantine, Latin, and Mongolian origin. With the
aid of the fogs of German metaphysics especially of Hegel
which were in great vogue at that time, and with that love
of abstract terminology which prevailed in the first half of
the nineteenth century, discussion upon such themes could
evidently last for years without coming to a definite
conclusion.
However, with all that, it must be owned that, through
their best representatives, the Slavophiles powerfully con-
tributed towards the creation of a school of history and law
which put historical studies in Russia on a true foundation,
by making a sharp distinction between the history and the law
of the Russian State and the history and the law of the
Russian people. KostomAroff (18 18-1885), Zaby^lin
(born 1820) and ByelAeff (18 10-1873), were the
first to write the real history of the Russian people, and of
these three, the two last were Slavophiles; while the former
an Ukrainian nationalist had also borrowed from the
Slavophiles their scientific ideas. They brought into evidence
the federalistic character of early Russian history. They de-
stroyed the legend, propagated by Karamzin, of an unin-
terrupted transmission of royal power, that was supposed to
have taken place for a thousand years, from the times of
the Norman Rurik till to-day. They brought into evidence the
violent means by which the princes of Moscow crushed the
mdependent cit>^-republics of the pre-Mongolian period, and
gradually, with the aid of the Mongol Khans, became the
Tsars of Russia; and they told (especially Byelaeff, in his
History of the Peasants in Russia) the gruesome tale of
the growth of serfdom from the seventeenth century, under
the Moscow Tsars. Besides, it is mainly to the Slavophiles
that we owe the recognition of the fact that two different
codes exist in Russia the Code of the Empire, which is the
code of the educated classes, and the Common Law, which is
(like the Norman law in Jersey) widely different from the
former, and very often preferable, in its conceptions of land-
ownership, inheritance, etc., and is the law which prevails
among the peasants, its details varying in different provinces.
The recognition of this fact has already had far-reaching
consequences in the whole life of Russia and her colonies.
In the absence of political life the philosophical and
literary strugglesbetween the Slavophiles and the Westerners
absorbed the minds of the best men of the literary circles of
St. Petersburg and Moscow in the
years 1 840-1 860. The
question whether or not each nationality is the bearer of some
pre-determined mission in history, and whether Russia has
some such special mission, was eagerly discussed in the circles
to which, in the forties, belonged Bakunin, the critic Byelin-
skiy, Herzen, Turgueneff, the Aksakoffs and the Kireevskiys,
Kavelin, Botkin, and, in fact, all the best men of the time.
But when later on serfdom was being abolished (in 1857-
63) the very realities of the moment established upon certain
important questions the most remarkable agreement between
Slavophiles and Westerners, the most advanced socialistic
Westerners, likeTchemyshevskiy, joining hands with the
advanced Slavophiles in their desire to maintain the really
fundamental institutions of the Russian peasants: the village
community, the common law, and the federalistic prf'nciples;
while the more advanced Slavophiles made substantial con-
*' "
cessions as regards the Western ideals embodied in the
Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the
Rights of Man. It was to these years (1861) that Turgue-
neff alluded when he said that in A Nobleman's Retreat, in
"
the discussion between Lavretskiy and Panshin, he an
"
inveterate Westerner had given the superiority in argu-
ment to the defender of Slavophile ideas because of the
deference to them then in real life.
At present the struggle between the Westerners and the
Slavophiles has come to an end. The last representative of
the Slavophile school, the much-regretted philosopher, V.
SOLOVIOFF (1853-1900), was too well versed in history and
philosophy, and had too broad a mind to go to the extremes
of the old Slavophiles. As to the present representatives of
this school, having none of the inspiration which charac-
terised its founders, they have sunk to the level of mere
Imperialistic dreamers and warlike Nationalists, or of Ortho-
dox Ultramontanes, whose intellectual influence is nil. At
the present moment the main struggle goes on between the
defenders of autocracy and those of freedom; the defenders
of capital and those of labour; the defenders of centralisation
and bureaucracy, and those of the republican federalistic
and the independence of
principle, municipal independence,
the village community.
POLITICAL LITERATURE ABROAD
One great drawback in Russia has been that no portion of

the Slavonian countries has ever obtained political freedom,
as did Switzerland or Belgium, so as to offer to Russian polit-
ical refugees an asylum where they would not feel quite
separated from their mother country. Russians, when they
have fled from Russia, have had therefore to go to Switzer-
land or to England, where they have remained, until quite
lately, absolute strangers. Even France, with which they had
more points of contact, was only occasionally open to them ;
while the two countries nearest to Russia Germany and
Austria not being themselves free, remained closed to all
political refugees. In consequence, till quite lately political
and religious emigration from Russia has been insignificant,
and only for a few years in the nineteenth century has politi-
cal literature published abroad ever exercised a real influence
in Russia. This was during the times of Herzen and his paper
The Bell.
HiERZEN (18 12-1870) was born in a rich family at Mos-
cow his mother, however, being a German and he was
"
educated in the old-nobility quarter of the Old Equerries."
A French emigrant, a German tutor, a Russian teacher who
was a great lover of freedom, and the rich library of his
father, composed of French and German eighteenth century
philosophers these were his education. The reading of the
French encyclopaedists left a deep trace in his mind, so that
even later on, when he paid, like all his young friends, a
tribute to the study of German metaphysics, he never
abandoned the concrete ways of thought and the natural-
istic turn of mind which he had borrowed from the French
eighteenth century philosophers.

He entered the Moscow university in its physical and
mathematical department. The French Revolution of 1830
had just produced a deep impression on thinking minds all
over Europe; and a circle of young men, which included
Herzen, his intimate friend, the poet OgaryofiF, Passek,
the future explorer of folklore, and several others, came to
spend whole nights reading and discussing political and
in
social matters, especially Saint-Simonism. Under the impres-
sion of what they knew about the Decembrists, Herzen and
"
Ogaryoff, when they were mere boys, had already taken the
"
Hannibal oath of avenging the memory of these fore-
runners of liberty. The result of these youthful gatherings
was that at one of them some song was sung in which there
was disrespectful allusion to Nicholas I. This reached the
ears of the State police. Night searchings were made at the
lodgings of the young men, and all were arrested. Some were
sent to Siberia, and the others would have been marched as
soldiers to a battalion, like Polezhaeff and Shcvtchenko, had
it not been for the interference of certain persons in high
places.
Herzen was sent to a small town in the Urals,
Vyatka, and remained full six years in exile.
When he was allowed to return to Moscow, in 1840, he
found the literary circles entirely under the influence of Ger-
man philosophy, losing themselves in metaphysical abstrac-
"
tions. The absolute " of Hegel, his triad-scheme of human
*'
progress, and
"
his assertion to the effect that all that exists is
reasonable were eagerly discussed. This last had brought
the Hegelians to maintain that even the despotism of
"
Nicholas I. was reasonable," and even the great critic Bye-
"
linskiy had been smitten with that recognition of the his-
"
torical necessity of absolutism. Herzen too had, of course,
to but this study brought him, as well as his
study Hegel;
friend Mikhail Bakunin (1824-1876), to quite different
conclusions. They both acquired a great influence in the
circles, and directed their studies toward the history of the
struggles for liberty in Western Europe, and to a careful
knowledge of the French Socialists, especially Fourier" and
Pierre Leroux. They then constituted the left wing of the
Westerners," to which Turgueneff, Kavelin and so many of
our writers belonged; while the Slavophiles constituted the
right wing which has already been mentioned on a preceding
page.
In 1842 Herzen was exiled once more this time to Nov-
gorod, and only with great difliculties could he obtain

permission to go abroad. He left Russia in 1847, never more
to return. Bakunin and Ogaryoff were already abroad, and
after a journey to Italy, which was then making heroic efforts
to free itself from the Austrian yoke, he soon joined his
friends in Paris, which was then on the eve of the Revolution
of 1848.
He through the youthful enthusiasm of the move-
lived
ment which embraced all Europe in the spring of 1848, and
he also lived through all the subsequent disappointments and
the massacre of the Paris proletarians during the terrible
days of June. The quarter where he and Turgueneff stayed
at that time was surrounded by a chain of police-agents who
knew them both personally, and they could only rage in their
rooms as they heard the volleys of rifle-shots, announcing
that the vanquished workingmen who had been taken
prisoners were being shot in batches by the triumphing
bourgeoisie. Both have left most striking descriptions of
those days Herzen's June Days being one of the best pieces
of Russian literature.
Deep despair took hold of Herzen when all the hopes
raised by the revolution had so rapidly come to nought and
a fearful reaction had spread all over Europe, re-establishing
Austrian rule over Italy and Hungary, paving the way for
Napoleon III. at Paris, and sweeping away everywhere the
very traces of a wide-spread Socialistic movement. Herzen
then felt a deep despair as regards Western civilisation alto-
gether, and expressed it in most moving pages, in his book
From the other Shore. It is a cry of despair the cry of a
prophetic politician in the voice of a great poet.
Later on Herzen founded, at Paris, with Proudhon, a
paper, UAmi dn Peuple, of which almost every number was
confiscated by the police ofNapoleon the Third, The paper
could not live, and Herzen himself was soon expelled from
France. He was naturalised in Switzerland, and finally, after
the tragic loss of his mother and his son in a shipwreck, he
definitely settled at London in 1857. Here the first leaf of a
free Russian Press was printed that same
year, and very soon
Herzen became one of the strongest influences in Russia. He
started first a review, the name of which. The Polar Star, was
a remembrance of the almanack published under this name
by Ryleeft (see Ch. I.) and in this review he published,
;
besides political articles and most valuable material concern-

ing the recent history of Russia, his admirable memoirs
Past Facts and Thoughts.
Apart from the historical value of these memoirs Herzen
knew allthe historical personages of his time they certainly
are one of the best pieces of poetical literature in any
language. The descriptions of men and events which they con-
tain, beginning with Russia in the forties and ending with the
years of exile, reveal at every step an extraordinary, philo-
sophical intelligence; a profoundly sarcastic mind, combined
with a great deal of good-natured humour; a deep hatred of
oppressors and a deep personal love for the simple-hearted
heroes of human emancipation. At the same time these
memoirs contain such fine, poetical scenes from the author's
personal life, as his love of Nathalie later his wife or

such deeply impressive chapters as Oceano Nox, where he
tells about the loss of his son and mother. One chapter of
these memoirs remains still unpublished, and from what Tur-
gueneff told me about it, it must be of the highest beauty.
"
No one has ever written like him," Turgueneff said: " it
is all written in tears and blood."
Apaper, The Bell, soon followed the Polar Star, and it
was through this paper that the influence of Herzen became a
real power in Russia. It appears now, from the lately pub-
lished correspondence between Turgueneff and Herzen, that
the great novelist took a very lively part in The Bell. It was
he who supplied his friend Herzen with the most interesting
material and gave him hints as to what attitude he should
take upon this or that subject.
These were, of course, the years when Russia was on the
eve of the abolition of serfdom and of a thorough reform of
most of the antiquated institutions of Nicholas I., and when
everyone took interest in public affairs. Numbers of memoirs
upon the questions of the day were addressed to the Tsar
by private persons, or simply circulated in private, in MS. ;
and Turgueneff would get hold of them, and they would be

discussed in The Bell. At the same time The Bell was reveal-
ing such facts of maladministration as it was impossible to
bring to public knowledge in Russia itself, while the leading
articles were written by Herzen with a force, an inner
warmth, and a beauty of form which are seldom found in
political literature. I know of no West European writer with
whom I should be able to compare Herzen. The Bell was
smuggled into Russia in large quantities and could be found
everywhere. Even Alexander II. and the Empress Marie were
among its regular readers.
Two years after serfdom had been abolished, and while
all sorts of urgentlyneeded reforms were still under dis-
cussion that 1863 began, as is known, the uprising
is, in
of Poland; and this uprising, crushed in blood and on the
gallows, brought the liberation movement in Russia to a com-
plete end. Reaction got the upper hand; and the popularity
of Herzen, who had supported the Poles, was necessarily
gone. The Bell was read no more in Russia, and the efforts
of Herzen to continue it in French brought no results. Anew
generation came then to the front the generation of Baza-
"
roff and of the populists," whom Herzen did not under-
stand from the outset, although they were his own intellectual
sons and daughters, dressed now in a new, more democratic
and realistic garb. He died in isolation in Switzerland, in
1870.
The works of Herzen, even now, are not allowed to be
circulated in Russia, and they are not sufficiently known to
the younger generation. It is certain, however, that when
the time comes for them to be read again Russians will
discover in Herzen a very profound thinker, whose
sympathies were entirely with the working classes, who
understood the forms of human development in all their com-
plexity, and who wrote in a style of unequalled beauty the
best proof that his ideas had been thought out in detail and
under a variety of aspects.
Before he had emigrated and founded a free press at
London, Herzen had written in Russian reviews under the
name of Iskander, treating various subjects, such as West-
ern politics, socialism, the philosophy of natural sciences, art,
and so on. He also wrote a novel, fVhose Fault is it f which
is often spoken of in the
history of the development of intel-
lectual types in Russia. The hero of this novel, Beltoff, is a
direct descendant from Lermontoff's Petchorin, and occupies
an intermediate position between him and the heroes of
Turgueneff.
The work of the poet Ogaryoff (1813-1877) was not
very large, and his intimate friend, Herzen, who was a great
master in personal characteristics, could say of him that his
chief life-work was the working out of such an ideal person-
ality as he was himself. His private life was most unhappy,
but his influence upon his friends was very great. He was a
thorough lover of freedom, who, before he left Russia, set
free his ten thousand serfs, surrendering all the land to
them, and who, throughout all his life abroad remained
true to the ideals of equality and freedom which he had
cherished in his youth. Personally, he was the gentlest imag-
inable of men, and a note of resignation, in the sense of
Schiller's, sounds throughout his poetry, amongst which
fierce revolt and of masculine energy are few.
poems of
As to Mikhail Bakunin (i 824-1 876), the other great
friend of Herzen, his work belongs chiefly to the Interna-
tional Working Men's Association, and hardly can find a
place in a sketch of Russian literature; but his personal influ-
ence on some of the prominent writers of Russia was very
great. Suffice it to say that Byelinskiy distinctly acknowledged
*'
in his letters that Bakunin was his intellectual father," and
that it was in fact he who infused the Moscow circle, of which
I have and the St. Petersburg literary circles
just spoken,
with He was the typical revolutionist, whom
socialistic ideas.
nobody could approach without being inspired by a revolu-

tionary fire. Besides, if advanced thought in Russia has
always remained true to the cause of the different nationali-

ties Polish, Finnish, Little Russian, Caucasian oppressed
by Russian tsardom, or by Austria, it owes this to a very great
extent to Ogaryoff and Bakunin. In the international labour
movement Bakunin became the soul of the left wing of the
great Working Men's Association, and he was the founder
of modern Anarchism, or anti-State Socialism, of which he
laid down the foundations upon his wide historical and
philosophical knowledge.
Finally I must mention among the Russian political
writers abroad, Peter Lavroff (i 823-1901). He was a
mathematician and a philosopher who represented, under the
"
name of anthropologism," a reconciliation of modern
natural science materialism with Kantianism. He was a
colonel of artillery, a professor of mathematics, and a mem-
ber of the St. Petersburg newly-formed municipal govern-
ment, when he was arrested and exiled to a small town in the
Urals. One of the young Socialist circles kidnapped him from
there and shipped him off to London, where he began to
publish in the year 1874 the Socialist review Forivard. Lav-
roff was an extremely learned encyclopaedist who made his
reputation by his Mechanical Theory of the Universe and by

the first chapters of a very exhaustive history of mathematical
sciences. His later work. History of Modern Thought, of
which unfortunately only the four or five introductory
volumes have been published, would certainly have been an
important contribution to evolutionist philosophy, if it had
been completed. In the socialist movement he belonged to the
social-democratic wing, but was too widely learned and too
much of a philosopher to join the German social-democrats
in their ideals of a centralised communistic State, or in their
narrow interpretation of history. However, the work of
Lavroff which gave him the greatest notoriety and best
expressed his own personality was a small work. Historical
Letters, which he published in Russia under the pseudo-
nym of MiRTOFF and which can now be read in a French
translation. This little work appeared at the right moment
just when our youth, in the years 1870-73, were endeavour-
ing to find a new programme of action amongst the people.
Lavroff stands out in it as a preacher of activity amongst the
people, speaking to the educated youth of their indebtedness
to the people, and of their duty to repay the debt which they
had contracted towards the poorer classes during the years
they had passed in the universities all this, developed with
a profusion of historical hints, of philosophical deductions,
and of practical advice. These letters had a deep influence
upon our youth. The ideas which Lavroff preached in 1870
he confirmed by all his subsequent life. He lived to the age
of 82, and passed all his life in strict conformity with his
ideal, occupying at Paris two small rooms, limiting his daily
expenses for food to a ridiculously small amount, earning his
living by his pen, and giving all his time to the spreading of
the ideas which were so dear to him.
Nicholas Turgueneff (1789-1871) was a remarkable
political writer, who belonged to two different -epochs. In
18 1 8 he published in Russia a Theory of Taxation a book,
quite striking for its time and country, as it contained the
development of the liberal economical ideas of Adam Smith;
and he was already beginning to work for the abolition of
serfdom. He made a practical attempt by partly freeing his
own serfs,and wrote on this subject several memoirs for the
use of Emperor Alexander I. He also worked for constitu-
tional rule, and soon became one of the most influential mem-
bers of the secret society of the Decembrists; but he was
abroad in December, 1825, and therefore escaped being
executed with his friends. After that time N. Turgueneff
remained In exile, chiefly at Paris, and in 1857, when an
amnesty was granted to the Decembrists, and he was allowed
to return to Russia, he did so for a few weeks only.
He took, however, a lively part in the emancipation of
the serfs, which he had preached since 18 18 and which he
had discussed also in his large work. La Russ'te et les Russes,
published in Paris in 1847. Now he devoted to this subject
several papers in The Bell and several pamphlets. He con-
tinued at the same time to advocate the convocation of a
General Representative Assembly, the development of pro-
vincial self-government, and other urgent reforms. He died
at Paris in 1871, after having had the happiness which had
come to few Decembrists that of taking, towards the end
of his days, a practical part in the realisation of one of the
dreams of his youth, for which so many of our noblest men
had given their lives.
I pass over in silence several other writers, like Prince
DoLGOR^KiY, and especially a number of Polish writers,
who emigrated from Russia for the sake of free speech.
I omit also quite a number of socialistic and constitutional
papers and reviews which have been published in Switzerland

or in England during the last twenty years, and will only
mention, and that only in a few words, my friend Stepniak
(1852-1897). His writings were chiefly in English, but now
that they are translated into Russian they will certainly win
for him an honourable place in the history of Russian litera-
ture. His two novels. The Career of a Nihilist {Andrei
Kozhuhoff in Russian) and The Stiindist Pavel Rudenko, as
also his earlier sketches. Underground Russia, revealed his
remarkable literary talent, but a stupid railway accident put
an end to his young life, so rich in vigour and thought and
so full of promises. It must also be mentioned that the great-
est Russian writer of our own time, Leo Tolst6y, cannot
have many of his works printed in Russia, and that there-
fore his friend, V. Tchertk6ff, has started in England a
regular publishing office, both for publishing Tolstoy's works
and for bringing to light the religious movements which are
going on now in Russia, and the prosecutions directed against
them by the Government.
TCHERNYSHEVSKIY AND " THE CONTEMPORARY *'
The most prominent among political writers in Russia

itself has undoubtedly been Tchernyshevskiy (1828-
1889), whose name is indissolubly connected with that of the
review, Sovremennik {The Contemporary). The influence
which this review exercised on public opinion in the years of
the abolition of serfdom (1857-62) was equal to that of
Herzen's Bell, and this influence was mainly due to Tcherny-
shevskiy, and partly to the critic Dobroluboff.
Tchernyshevskiy was born in Southeastern Russia, at
Saratoff his father being a well educated and respected
priest of the cathedral and his early education he received,
first at home, and next in the Saratoff seminary. He left the
seminary, however, in 1844, and two years later entered the

philological department of the St. Petersburg University.
The quantity of work which Tchernyshevskiy performed
during his life, and the immensity of knowledge which he
acquired in various branches, was simply stupendous. He
began his literary career by works on philology and literary
criticism; and he wrote in this last branch three remarkable
works, The /Esthetical Relations between Art and Reality,
Sketches of the Gogol period, and Lessing and his Time, in
which he developed a whole theory of aesthetics and literary
criticism. His main work, however, was accomplished during
the four years, 1858-62, when he wrote in The Contempo-
rary, exclusively on political and economical matters. These
were the years of the abolition of serfdom, and opinion, both
in the public at large and in the Government spheres, was
quite unsettled even as to the leading principles which should

be followed in accomplishing it. The two main questions
were: should the liberated serfs receive the land which they
were cultivating for themselves while they were serfs, and if
so on what conditions? And next should the village com-
munity institutions be maintained and the land held, as of old,
in common the village community becoming in this case the
basis for the future self-government institutions? All the best
men of Russia were
favour of an answer in the afllirmative
in
to both these questions,and even in the higher spheres
opinion went the same way; but all the reactionists and
" "
esdavagist serf-owners of the old school bitterly opposed
this view. They wrote memoirs upon memoirs and addressed
them to the Emperor and the Emancipation Committees, and
it was necessary, of course, to analyse their arguments and to
produce weighty historical and economical proofs against
them. In this struggle Tchernyshevskiy, who was, of course,
as was Herzen's Bell, with the advanced party, supported it
with all the powers of his great intelligence, his wide erudi-
tion, and his formidable capacity for work; and if this party
carried the day and finally converted Alexander II. and the
official leaders of the Emancipation Committees to its views,
it was certainly to a great extent
owing to the energy of
Tchernyshevskiy and his friends.
It must also be said that in this struggle The Contemporary
and The Bell found a strong support in two advanced politi-
cal writers from the Slavophile camp: K6sheleff (1806-
1883) and YuRiY Samarin (1819-1876). The former had
advocated, since 1847 'ôth in writing and in practise the
"
liberation of the serfs with the land," the maintenance of
the village community, and peasant self-government, and
now Kosheleff and Samarin, both influential landlords, ener-
getically supported these ideas in the Emancipation Commit-
tees, while Tchernyshevskiy fought for them in The Contem-
porary and in his Letters without an Address (written
apparently to Alexander II. and published only later on in
Switzerland).
No less a service did Tchernyshevskiy render to Russian
Society by educating it in economical matters and in the

history of modern times. In this respect he acted with a won-
derful pedagogical talent. He translated Mill's Political
Economy, and wrote Notes to it, in a socialistic sense more-;
over, in a series of articles, like Capital and Labour, Econom-

ical Activity and the State, he did his best to spread sound
economic ideas. In the domain of history he did the same,
both in a series of translations and in a number of original
articles upon the struggle of parties in modern France.
In 1863 Tchernyshevskiy was arrested, and while he was
kept in the fortress he wrote a remarkable novel, What is to
be Done ? From the artistic point of view this novel leaves
much to be desired; but for the Russian youth of the times it
was a revelation, and it became
a programme. Questions of
marriage, and separation after marriage in case such a separ-
ation becomes necessary, agitated Russian society in those
years. To ignore such questions was absolutely impossible.
And Tchemyshevskiy discussed them in his novel, in describ-
ing the relations between his heroine, Vyera Pavlovna, her
husband Lopukhoff and the young doctor with whom she fell
in love after her marriage indicating the only solutions
which perfect honesty and straightforward common sense
could approve in such a case. At the same time he preached
in veiled words, which were, however, perfectly well
understood Fourierism, and depicted in a most attractive
form the communistic associations of producers. He also
showed in his novel what true " Nihilists " were, and in what
they differed from Turgueneff's Bazaroff. No novel of Tur-
gueneff and no writings of Tolstoy or any other writer have
ever had such a wide and deep influence upon Russian Society
as this novel had. It became the watchword of Young Rus-
sia, and the influence of the ideas it propagated has never
ceased to be apparent since.
In 1864 Tchemyshevskiy was exiled to hard labour in
Siberia, for the political and socialist propaganda which he
had been making; and for fear that he might escape from
Transbaikalia he was soon transported to a very secluded
spot in the far North of Eastern Siberia Viluisk where
he was kept till 1883. Then only was he allowed to return
to Russia and to settle at Astrakhan. His health, however,
was already quite broken. Neverthekss, he undertook the
translation of the Universal History of Weber, to which he
wrote long addenda, and he had translated twelve volumes
of it when death overtook him in 1889. Storms of polemics
have raged over his grave, although his name, even yet,
cannot be pronounced, nor his ideas discussed, in the Russian
Press. No other man has been so much hated by his political
adversaries as Tchemyshevskiy. But even these are bound
to recognise now the great services he rendered to Russia
during the emancipation of the serfs, and his immense
educational influence.
THE SATIRE: SALTYKOFF
With the restrictions imposed upon political literature
all
in Russia, the satire necessarily became one of the favourite
means of expressing political thought. It would take too
much time to give even a short sketch of the earlier Russian
satirists, as in order to do that one would have to go back
as far as the eighteenth century. Of Gogol's satire I have
already spoken ;consequently I shall limit my remarks under
this head to only one representative of modern satire,
Saltyk6ff, who is better known under his nom-de-plume
ofScHEDRiN (1826-1889).
The influence of Saltykoff in Russia was very great, not
only with the advanced section of Russian thought, but
among the general readers as well. He was perhaps one of
Russia's most popular writers. Here I must make, however,
a personal remark. One may try as much as possible to
keep
to an objective standpoint in the appreciation of different
writers, but a subjective element will necessarily interfere,
and I personally must say that although I admire the great
talent of Saltykoff, I never could become as enthusiastic over
his writings as the very great majority of my friends did.
Not that I dislike satire: on the contrary; but I like it much
more definite than it is in Saltykoff. I fully recognise that his
remarks were sometimes extremely deep, and always correct,
and that in many cases he foresaw coming events long before
the common reader could guess their approach; I fully
admit that the satirical characterisations he gave of different
classes of Russian society belong to the domain of good art,
and that his types are really typical and yet, with all this,
I find that these excellent characterisations and these acute
remarks are too much lost amidst a deluge of insignificant
talk, which was certainly meant to conceal their point from
the censorship, but which mitigates the sharpness of the
satire and tends chiefly to deaden its effect. Consequently,
I prefer, in my appreciation of Saltykoff to follow our best
critics, and especially K. K. Arsenieff, to whom we owe

two volumes of excellent Critical Studies.
Saltykoff began his literary career very early and, like
most of our best writers, he knew something of exile. In
SATIRE 283
1848 he wrote a novel, A
Complicated Affair, in which some
socialistic tendencieswere expressed in the shape of a dream
of a certain poor functionary. It so happened that the novel
appeared in print just a few weeks after the February revo-
lution of 1848 had broken out, and when the Russian
Government was especially on the alert. Saltykoff was there-
upon exiled to Vyatka, a miserable provincial town in East
Russia, and was ordered to enter the civil service. The exile
lasted seven years, during which he became thoroughly
acquainted with the world of functionaries grouped around
the Governor of the Province. Then in 1857 better times
came for Russian literature, and Saltykoff, who was allowed
to return to the capitals, utilised his knowledge of provincial
writing a series of Provincial Sketches.
life in
The impression produced by these Sketches was simply
tremendous. All Russia talked of them. Saltykoff's talent
appeared in them in its full force, and with them was opened
quite a new era in Russian literature. A
great number of
imitators began in their turn to dissect the Russian admin-
istration and the failure of its functionaries. Of course,
something of the sort had already been done by Gogol, but
Gogol, who wrote twenty years before, was compelled to
confine himself to generalities, while Saltykoff was enabled
to name things by their names and to describe provincial
society as it was denouncing the venal nature of the func-
tionaries, the rottenness of the whole administration, the
absence of comprehension of what was vital in the life of
the country, and so on.
When Saltykoff was permitted to return to St.- Petersburg,
after his exile, he did not abandon the service of the State,
which he had been compelled to enter at Vyatka. With but
a short interruption he remained a functionary till the year
1868, and twice during that time he was Vice-Governor,
and even Governor of a province. It was only then that he
definitely left the service, to act, with Nekrasoff, as co-editor
of a monthly review, Otechestvennyia Zapiski, which became
after The Contemporary had been suppressed, the repre-
sentative of advanced democratic thought in Russia, and
retained this position till 1884, when it was suppressed in
its turn. By that time the health of Saltykoff was broken
dowTi, and after a very painful illness, during which he
nevertheles continued to write, he died in 1889.
The Provincial Sketches determined once for all the char-
acter of Saltykoff's work. His talent only deepened as he
advanced in life, and his satires went more and more pro-
foundly into the analysis of modern civilised life, of the
many causes which stand in the way of progress, and of
the infinity of forms which the struggle of reaction against
progress is taking nowadays. In his Innocent Tales he
touched upon some of the most tragic aspects of serfdom.
Then, in his representation of the modern knights of indus-
trialism and plutocracy, with their appetites for money-
making and enjoyments of the lower sort, their heartless-
ness, and their hopeless meanness, Saltykoff attained the
heights of descriptive art; but he excelled
"
perhaps" even
more in the representation of that average man who
has no great passions, but for the mere sake of not being
disturbed in the process of enjoyment of his philistine well-
being will not recoil before any crime against the best men
of his time, and, if need be, will lend a ready hand to the
"
worst enemies of progress. In flagellating that average
man," who, owing to his unmitigated cowardice, has attained
such a luxurious development in Russia, Saltykoff produced
his greatest creations. But when he came to touch those who
"
are the real geniuses of reaction those who keep the
"
average man in fear, and inspire reaction, if need be,
with audacity and ferocity then Saltykoff's satire either
recoiled before its task, or the attack was veiled in so many
funny and petty expressions and words that all its venom
was gone.
When reaction had obtained the upper hand, in 1863,
and the carrying out of the reforms of 1861 and of those
still to be undertaken fell into the hands of the very oppo-
nents of these reforms, and the former serf-owners were
doing all they could in order to recall serfdom once again
to at least, so to bind the peasant by over-taxation
life, or,
and high rents as to practically enslave him once more,
Saltykoff brought out a striking series of satires which admir-
ably represented this new class of men. The History of a
City, which is a comic history of Russia, full of allusions to
SATIRE 285
contemporary currents of thought. The Diary of a Provincial
in St. Petersburg, Letters from the Provinces, and The Pom-
padours belong to this series; while in Those Gentlemen of
Tashkent he represented all that crowd which hastened
now to make fortunes by railway building, advocacy in
reformed tribunals, and annexation of new territories. In
these sketches, as well as in those which he devoted to
the description of the sad and sometimes psychologically
unsound products of the times of serfdom ( The Gentlemen
Golovloffs, Poshekhonsk Antiquity), he created types, some
of which, like Judushka have been described as almost
Shakespearian.
Finally, in the early eighties, when the terrible struggle
of the terrorists against autocracy was over, and with the
advent of Alexander III. reaction was triumphant, the
satires of Schedrin became a cry of despair. At times the
satirist becomes great in his sad Irony, and his Letters to
my Aunt will live, not only as an historical but also as a

deeply human document.
It is also worthy of note that Saltykoff had a real talent
for writing tales. Some of them, especially those which dealt
with children under serfdom, were of great beauty.
LITERARY CRITICISM
The main channel through which political thought found
Its expression In Russia during the last fifty years was liter-
ary criticism, which consequently has reached with us a
development and an Importance that it has in no other
country. The real soul of a Russian monthly review is its art-
critic. His article is a much greater event than the novel of a
favourite writer which may appear in the same number. The
critic of a leading review Is the Intellectual leader of the
younger generation; and It so happened that throughout

the last half-century we have had in Russia a succession of
art-critics who have exercised upon the intellectual aspects of
their own times a far greater, and especially a far more wide-
spread influence than any novelist or any writer In any other
domain. It Is so generally true that the intellectual aspect of a
given epoch can be best characterised by naming the art-critic
of the time who exerdsed the main influence. It was Bych'n-
skiy in the thirties or forties, Tchernyshevskiy and Dobro-
lubofif in the fifties and the early sixties, and Pisareff in the
later sixties and seventies, who were respectively the rulers
of thoughts in their generation of educated youth. It was
only later on, when real political agitation began taking at
once two or three different directions, even in the advanced
camp that Mihailovskiy, the leading critic from the eighties
until the present time, stood not for the whole movement
but more or less for one of its directions.
This means, of course, that literary criticism has in Russia
certain special aspects. It is not limited to a criticism of works
of art from the purely literary or aesthetic point of view.
Whether a Rudin, or a Katerina are types of real, living
beings, and whether the novel or the drama is well built,
well developed, and well written these are, of course, the
first questions considered. But they are soon answered; and
there are infinitely more important questions, which are
raised in the thoughtful mind by every work of really good
art: the questions concerning the position of a Rudin or a
Katerina in society; the part, bad or good, which they play
in it; the ideas inspire them, and the value of these
which
ideas; and then the actions of the heroes, and the causes
of these actions, both individual and social. In a good work
of art the actions of the heroes are evidently what they would
have been under similar conditions in reality; otherwise it
would not be ^
good art. They' can be discussed as facts of
life.
But these actions and their causes and consequences open
the widest horizons to a thoughtful critic, for an appre-
ciation of both the Ideals and the prejudices of society, for
the analysis of passions, for a discussion of the types of men
and women which prevail at a given moment. In fact, a good
work of art gives material for discussing nearly the whole
of the mutual relations in a society of a given type. The
author. If he Is a thoughtful poet, has himself either con-
sciously or often unconsciously considered all that. It Is his
life-experience In his work. Why, then, should
which he gives
not the bring before the reader all those thoughts
critic
which must have passed through the author's brain, or have
LITERARY CRITICISM 287
affected him unconsciously when he produced these scenes,
or pictured that corner of human life?
This is what Russian literary critics have been doing for
the last fifty years; and as the field of fiction and poetry is
unlimited, there is not one of the great social and human
problems which they must not thus have discussed in their
critical reviews. This is also why the works of the four
critics just named are as eagerly read and re-read now at
this moment as they were twenty or fifty years ago: they
have lost nothing of their freshness and interest. If art is
a school of life the more so are such works.
It is extremely interesting to note that art-criticism in
Russia took from the very outset (in the twenties) and quite
independently of all imitation of Western Europe, the char-
acter of philosophical esthetics. The revolt against pseudo-
classicism had only just begun under the banner of romanti-
cism, and the appearance of Pushkin's Rusldn and Ludmila
had just given the first practical argument in favour of the
romantic rebels, when the poet Venevitinoff (see Ch.
II.), soon followed by Nadezhdin (1804-1856) and Pole-
VOY (1796-1846) the real founder of serious journalism
in Russia laid the foundations of new art-criticism. Liter-
ary criticism, they maintained, must analyse, not only the
aesthetic value of a work of art, but, above all, its leading
"
idea its philosophical," its social meaning.
Venevitinoff, whose own poetry bore such a high intel-

lectual stamp, boldly attacked the absence of higher ideas
"
among the Russian romantics, and wrote that the true
poets of all nations have always been philosophers who
reached the highest summits of culture." A
poet who is satis-
fied with his own self, and does not pursue aims of general
improvement, of no use to his contemporaries.*
is
Nadezhdin followed on the same lines and boldly ,
attacked Pushkin for his absence of higher inspiration and

for producing a poetry of which the only motives were
"
wine and women." He reproached our romantics with
* I borrow these remarks about the

predecessors of Byelinskiy from
an article on Literary Criticism in Russia, by Professor Ivanoff, in the
Russian Encyclopedic Dictionary, Vol. 32, 771.
an absence of ethnographical and historic truth in their
work, and the meanness of the subjects they chose in their
poetry. As to Polevoy, he was so great an admirer of the
poetry of Byron and Victor Hugo that he could not pardon
Pushkin and Gogol the absence of higher ideas in their work.
it that might raise men to higher ideas
in
Having nothing
and work could stand no comparison whatever
actions, their
with the immortal creations of Shakespeare, Hugo, and
Goethe. This absence of higher leading ideas in the work
of Pushkin and Gogol so much impressed the last two critics
that they did not even notice the immense service which these
founders of Russian literature were rendering to us by intro-
ducing that sound naturalism and realism which have
become since a distinctive feature of Russian art, and the
need of which both Nadezhdin and Polevoy were the first
to recognise. It was Byelinskiy who had to take up their
work, to complete it, and to show what was the technique
of really good art, and what its contents ought to be.
To say that Byelinskiy (1810-1848) was a very gifted
art-critic would thus mean nothing. He was in reality, at
a very significant moment of human
evolution, a teacher and
an educator of Russian society, not only in art its value, its
purport, its comprehension but also in politics, in social
questions, and in humanitarian aspirations.
He was the son of an obscure army-surgeon, and spent
his childhood in a remote province of Russia. Well prepared
by his father, who knew the value of knowledge, he entered
the university of St. Petersburg, but was excluded from it
in 1832 for a tragedy which he wrote, in the style of
Schiller's Robbers, and which was an energetic protest
against serfdom. Already he had joined the circle of
Herzen, Ogaryoff, Stankevitch, etc., and in 1834 he began
his literary career by a critical review of literature which
at once attracted notice. From that time till his death he
wrote critical articles and bibliographical notes for some
of the leading reviews, and he worked so extremely hard
that at the age of thirty-eight he died from consumption. He
did not die too soon. The revolution had broken out in West-
cm Europe, and when Byelinskiy was on his deathbed an
agent of the State-police would call from time to time to
ascertain whether he was still alive. The order was given to
arrest him, if he should recover, and his fate certainly would
have been the fortress and at the best exile.
When Byeli'nskiy first began to write he was entirely
under the influence of the idealistic German philosophy. He
was inclined to maintain that Art is something too great and
too pure to have anything to do with the questions of the
"
day. It was a reproduction of the general idea of the life
of nature." Its problems were those of the Universe not
of poor men and their petty events. It was from this idealistic
point of view of Beauty and Truth that he exposed the main
principles of Art, and explained the process of artistic crea-
tion. In a series of articles on Pushkin he wrote, in fact, a
history of Russian literature down to Pushkin, from that
point of view.
Holding such abstract views, Byeli'nskiy even came, "dur-
ing his stay at Moscow, to consider, with Hegel, "
that all
that which exists is reasonable," and to preach reconcilia-
"
tion with the despotism of Nicholas I. However, under
the influence of Herzen and Bakunin he soon shook off the
fogs of German metaphysics, and, removing to St. Peters-
burg, opened a new page of his activity.
Under the impression produced upon him by the realism
of Gogol, whose best works were just appearing, he came to
understand that true poetry is real that it must be a poetry
:
of life and of reality. And under the influence of the political

movement which was going on in France he arrived at
advanced political ideas. He was a great master of style,
and whatever he wrote was so full of energy, and at the
same time bore so truly the stamp of his most sympathetic
personality, that it always produced a deep impression upon
his readers. And now all his aspirations towards what Is
grand and high, and all his boundless love of truth, which
he formerly had given in the service of personal self-
improvement and ideal Art, were given to the service of
man within the poor conditions of Russian reality. He
pitilessly analysed that reality, and wherever he saw in the
literary works which passed under his eyes, or only felt,
insincerity, haughtiness, absence of general interest, attach-
ment to old-age despotism, or slavery in any form Includ*
ing the slavery of woman he fought these evils with all
his energy and passion. He
thus became a political writer in
the best sense of the word at the same time that he was an
art-critic; he became a teacher of the highest humanitarian
principles.
Gogol concerning the latter's Correspond-
In his Letter to
ence with Friends (see Ch. III.) he gave quite a programme
of urgent social and political reforms; but his days were
numbered. His review of the literature for the year 1847,
which was especially beautiful and deep, was his last work.
Death spared him from seeing the dark cloud of reaction
in which Russia was wrapped from 1848 to 1855.
ValeriAn MAykoff (1823-1847), who promised to

become a of great power on the same lines as Byelin-
critic
skiy, died unfortunately too young, and it was Tchernyshev-

skly, soon followed by Dobroluboff, who continued and
further developed the work of Byelinskiy and his prede-
cessors.
The leading idea of Tchernyshevskiy was that art can-
not be its own aim; that life is superior to art; and that the
aim of art is to explain life, to comment upon it, and to
express an opinion about it. He developed these ideas in a
thoughtful and stimulating work, The Esthetic Relations of
Art to Reality, in which he demolished the current theories of
aesthetics, and gave a realistic definition of the Beautiful.
The sensation he wrote which the Beautiful awakens in
us is a feeling of bright happiness, similar to that which
is awakened by the presence of a beloved being. It must
therefore contain something dear to us, and that dear some-

" '
thing is life. To say that that which we name Beauty'
is life; that that being is beautiful in which we see life

life as it ought to be according to our conception and that
object is beautiful which speaks to us of life this defini-
tion, we should think, satisfactorily explains all cases which
awaken in us the feeling of the beautiful." The conclusion
to be drawn from such a definition was that the beautiful
in art, far from being superior to the beautiful in life, can
only represent that conception of the beautiful which the

artist has borrowed from life. As to the aim of art it is
much the same as that of science, although its means of
action are different. The true aim of art is to remind us of
what is interesting in human life, and to teach us how men
live and how they ought to live. This last part of Tcherny-
shevskiy teachings was especially developed by Dobroliiboff.
DoBROLUBOFF (1836-1861) was born in Nizhniy Nov-
gorod, where his father was a parish priest, and he received
his education first in a clerical school, and after that in a
seminarium. In 1853 he went to St. Petersburg and entered
the Pedagogical Institute. His mother and father died the
next year, and he had then to maintain all his brothers and
sisters. Lessons, for which he was paid ridiculously low
prices, and translations, almost equally badly paid all that

in addition to his student's duties meant working terribly
hard, and this broke down his health at an early age. In
1855 he made the acquaintance of Tchernyshevskly and,
having finished In 1857 his studies at the Institute, he took
in hand the critical department of The Contemporary, and
again worked passionately. Four years later, In November,

1 861, he died, at the
age of twenty-five, having literally killed
himself by overwork, leaving four volumes of critical essays,
each of which Is a serious original work. Such essays as The
Kingdom of Darkness, A Ray of Light, What is Oblomov-
ism? When comes the Real Day ? had especially a profound
effect on the development of the youth of those times.
Not that Dobroluboff had a very definite criterion of
literary criticism, or that he had a very distinct programme
as to what was to be done. Put he was one of the
'
purest and the most solid representatives of that type

of new men the realist-idealist, whom Turgueneff saw
coming by the end of the fifties. Therefore, in whatever he
wrote one felt the thoroughly moral and thoroughly reliable,
*' "
slightly ascetic rigourist who judged all facts of life from
the standard
"
of"
"
What good will they bring to the toiling
masses? or, How will they favour the creation of men
whose eyes are directed that way?" His attitude towards
professional aesthetics was most contemptuous, but he felt
deeply himself and enjoyed the great works of art. He did
not condemn Pushkin for his levity, or Gogol for his absence
of ideals. He did not advise anyone to write novels or poems
with a set purpose: he knew the results would be poor. He
admitted that the great geniuses were right in creating uncon-
sciously, because he understood that the real artist creates
only when he has been struck by this or that aspect of reality.
He asked only from a work of art, whether it truly and cor-
rectly reproduced life, or not? If not, he passed it by; but
if it did truly represent life, then he wrote essays about this
life; and his articles were essays on moral, political or

economical matters the work of art yielding only the facts
for such a discussion. This explains the influence Dobro-
liiboff exercised upon his contemporaries. Such essays written
by such a personality were precisely what was wanted In

the turmoil of those years for preparing better men for the
coming struggles. They were a school of political and moral
education.
PisAREFF (1841-1868), the critic who succeeded, so to
speak, Dobroluboff, was a quite different man. He was bom
In a rich family of landlords and had received an education
during which he had never known what It meant to want

anything; but he soon realised the drawbacks of such a life,
and when he was at the St. Petersburg university he aban-
doned the rich house of his uncle and settled with a poor
student comrade, or lived In an apartment with a number
of other students writing amidst their noisy discussions or
songs. Like Dobroluboff, he worked excessively hard, and
astonished everyone by his varied knowledge and the facility
with which he acquired It. In 1862, when reaction was begin-
ning to reappear, he permitted a comrade to print In a secret
printing office an article of his the criticism of some reac-
tionary political pamphlet which article had not received
the authorisation of the censorship. The secret printing office
was seized, and Pisareff was locked for four years in the
fortress of St, Peter and St. Paul. There he wrote all that
made him widely known In Russia. When he came out of
prison his health was already broken, and in the summer of
1868 he was drowned while bathing in one of the Baltic
sea-side resorts.
Upon the Russian youth of his own time, and consequently
on whatever share, as men and women later on, they brought
to the general progress of the country, Pisareff exercised an
Influencewhich was as great as that of Byelinskiy, Tcherny-
shcvskiy, and Dobroluboff. Here again it is impossible to
determine the character and the cause of this influence by
merely referring to Pisareff's canons in art criticism. His
leading ideas on this subject can be explained in a few
words; his ideal was "the thoughtful realist" the type
which Turgueneff had just represented in Bazaroff, and
which Pisareff further developed in his critical essays. He
shared Bazaroff's low opinion of art, but, as a concession,
demanded that Russian art should, at least, reach the heights
which art had reached with Goethe, Heine and Borne in
elevating mankind or else that those who are always talk-
ing of art, but can produce nothing approaching it, should
rather give their forces to something more within their
reach. This is why he devoted most elaborate articles to
depreciating the futile poetry of Pushkin. In ethics he was
" "
entirely at one with the Nihilist Bazaroff, who bowed
before no authority but that of his own reason. And he
thought (like Bazaroff in a conversation with Pavel Petro-
vitch) that the main point, at that given moment, was to
develop the thorough, scientifically-educated realist, who
would break with all the traditions and mistakes of the olden
time, and would work, looking upon human life with the
sound common-sense of a realist. He even did something
himself to spread the sound natural science knowledge that
had suddenly developed in those years, and wrote a most
remarkable exposition of Darwinism in a series of articles
entitled Progress in the World of Plants and Animals.
But to quote the perfectly correct estimate of Ska-
"
bitchevskiy all this does not, however, determine
Pisareff's position in Russian literature. In all this he only
embodied a certain moment of the development of Russian
youth, with all its exaggerations." The real cause of Pisa-
reff's influence was elsewhere, and
may be best explained
by the following example. There appeared a novel in which
the author had told how a girl, good-hearted, honest, but
quite uneducated, quite commonplace as to her conceptions
of happiness and life, and full of the current society-
prejudices, fell in love, and was brought to all sorts of mis-
fortunes. This girl Pisareff at once understood was not
invented. Thousands Upon thousands of like girls exist, and
"
their lives have the same run. They are he said Muslin
Girls." Their conception of the universe does not go much
beyond their muslin dresses. And he reasoned, how with
" " "
their muslin education and their muslin-girl concep-
tions," they must unavoidably come to grief. And by this
article, which every girl in every educated family in Russia
read, and reads still, he induced thousands upon thousands
of Russian girls to say to themselves: "No, never will I
be like that poor muslin girl. I will conquer knowledge; I
will think; and I will make for myself a better future." Each
of his articles had a similar effect. It gave to the young mind
the first shock. It opened the young man's and the young
woman's eyes to those thousands of details of life which
habit makes us cease to perceive, but the sum of which makes
precisely that stifling atmosphere under which the heroines
" "
of Krestovskiy-pseudonym used to wither. From that
life, which could promise only deception, dulness and vege-
tative existence, he called the youth of both sexes to a life
full of the light of knowledge, a life of work, of broad
views and sympathies, which was now opened for the
"
thoughtful realist."
The time has not yet come to fully appreciate the work of
Mihail6vskiy (1842-1904), who in tne seventies became
the leading critic, and remained so till his death. Moreover,
his proper position could not be understood without my enter-
ing into many details concerning the character of the intel-
lectual movement in Russia for the last thirty years, and this
movement has been extremely complex. Suffice it to
say
that
with Mihailovskiy literary criticism took a philosophical turn.
Within this period Spencer's philosophy had produced a
deep sensation in Russia, and Mihailovskiy submitted it to
a severe analysis from the anthropological standpoint, show-
ing its weak points and working out his own Theory of
Progress, which will certainly be spoken of with respect in
Western Europe when it becomes known outside Russia.
His very remarkable articles on Individualism, on Heroes
and the Crowd, on Happiness, have the same philosophical
value; while even from the few quotations from his Left
and Right Hand of Count Tolstoy, which were given in
a preceding chapter, it is easy to see which way his sym-
pathies go.
Of the other critics of the same tendencies I shall only
name Skabitchevskiy (born 1838), the author of a very
well written history of modern Russian literature, already
mentioned in these pages; K. Arsenieff (born 1837),
whose Critical Studies (1888) are the more interesting as
they deal at some length with some of the less known poets
and the younger contemporary writers; and P. PoLEVOY
(1839- 1 903), the author of many historical novels and of
a popular and quite valuable History of the Russian Litera-
ture; but I am compelled to pass over in silence the valuable
critical work done by Druzhinin (1824-1864) after the
death of Byelinskiy, as also A. Grigorieff (1822-1864),
a brilliant and original critic from the Slavophile camp. They
" "
both took the aesthetical point of view and combated the
utilitarian views upon Art, but had no great success.
Tolstoy's "what is art.?"

It is thus seen that for the last eighty years, beginning
with Venevitinoff and Nadezhdin, Russian art-critics have
worked to establish the idea that art has a raison d'etre only
when it is " in the service of society " and contributes
towards raising society to higher humanitarian conceptions
by those means which are proper to art, and distinguish
it from science. This idea which so much shocked Western
readers when Proudhon developed it has been advocated

in Russia by all those who have exercised a real" influence
upon critical judgment in art matters. And they were sup-
ported de facto by some of our greatest poets, such as

Lermontoff and Turgueneff. As to the critics of the other
camp, like Druzhinin, Annenkoff "and A. Grigorieff, who
took either the opposite view of art for art's sake," or
some intermediate view who preached that the criterium
of art is
"
The Beautiful " and clung to the theories of the
German assthetical writers they have had no hold upon
Russian thought.
The metaphysics of the German aesthetical writers was
more than once demolished in the opinion of Russian readers
296 RUSSIAN IJTERATURE
by Byeli'nskiy, in his Review of Literature for
especially
1847^ and by Tchernyshcvskiy in his /Esthetic Relations of
Art to Reality. In this Review Byeli'nskiy fully developed
his ideas concerning Art in the service of mankind, and
proved that although Art is not identical with Science, and
differs from it by the way it treats the facts of life, it never-
theless has with it a common aim. The man of science demon-
strates the poet shows; but both convince; the one by his
arguments, the other by his scenes from life. The same was
done by Tchernyshcvskiy when he maintained that the aim
of Art is not unlike that of History that it explains to us life,
:
and that consequently Art which should merely reproduce

facts of life without adding to our compensation of it
would not be Art at all.
These few remarks will explain why Tolstoy's What is
Art? produced much less impression in Russia than abroad.
What struck us in it was not its leading idea, which was
quite familiar to us, but the fact that the great artist also
made it his own, and was supporting it by all the weight
of his artistic experience; and then, of course, the literary

form he gave the idea. Moreover, we read with the greatest
" "
interest his witty criticisms of both the decadent would-be
poets and the librettos of Wagner's operas; to which latter,
let me add by the way, Wagner wrote, in places, wonderfully
beautiful music, as soon as he came to deal with the univer-
sal human passions, love, compassion, envy, the joy of life,
and so on,and forgot all about his fairy-tale background.
fVhat Art? offered the more interest in Russia because
is
"
the defenders of pure Art and the haters of the nihilists
"
in Art had been accustomed to quote Tolstoy as of their
camp. In his youth indeed he seems not to have had very
definite ideas about Art. At any rate, when, in 1859, he was
received as a member of the Sociey of Friends of Russian
Literature, he pronounced a speech on the necessity of not
dragging Art into the smaller disputes of the day, to which
the Slavophile Homyakoff replied in a fiery speech, contest-
ing his ideas with great energy.
" "
There are moments great historic moments Homyakoff
"
said when self-denunciation (he meant on the part of Society)
* *
has especial, incontestable rights. . . . The accidental and the
* '
temporary in the historical development of a nation's life acquire

then the meaning of the universal and the broadly human, because
all generations and all nations can understand, and do understand,
the painful moans and the painful confessions of a given generation
or a given nation." ..." An artist " he continued " is not
a theory; he is not a mere domain of thought and cerebral activity.
He is a man always a man of his own time usually one of its best
representatives . . . Owing to the very impressionability of his
organism, without which he would not have been an artist, he, more
than the others, receives both the painful and the pleasant impressions
of the Society in the midst of which he was bom."
Showing that Tolstoy had already taken just this stand-

point in some of his works; for example, in describing the
death of the horse-driver in Three Deaths, Homyakoff con-
"
cluded by saying: Yes, you have been, and you will be one
of those who denounce the evils of Society. Continue to
follow the excellent way you have chosen."*
At any rate, in What is Art? Tolstoy entirely breaks with
"
the theories of Art for Art's sake," and makes an open
stand by the side of those whose ideas have been expounded
in the preceding pages. He only defines still more correctly
the domain of Art when he says that the artist always aims
at communicating to others the same feelings which he
experiences at the sight of nature or of human life. Not to
convince, as Tchernyshevskly said, but to infect the others
with his own feelings, which Is certainly more correct. How-
" " " "
ever, feeling and thought are Inseparable.. feeling A
seeks words to express Itself, and a feeling expressed In words
is a thought. And when Tolstoy says that the aim of artistic
"
activity Is to transmit the highest feelings which humanity
*The speech of HomyakofI is reproduced in Skabitchevskiy's His-

tory (1. c), I was very anxious to get Tolstoy's speech, because I
"
think that the ideas he expressed about the permanent in Art, the
"
iiniversal hardly did exclude the denunciation of the ills from which
a society suffers at a given moment. Perhaps he meant what NekrasofP
also meant when he described the literature to which Schedrin's
"
Provincial Sketches had given origin as a flagellation of the petty
thieves for the pleasure of the big ones." Unfortunately, this speech
was not printed, and the manuscript of it could not be found.
"
has attained and that Art must be " religious " ^that is,
wake up the highest and the best aspirations he only
expresses in other words what all our best critics since Vene-
vitinoff, Nadezhdin and Polevoy have said. In fact, when he
complains that nobody teaches men how to live, he overlooks
that that is precisely what good Art is doing, and what our
art-critics have always done. Byelinskiy, Dobroluboff and
Pisareff, and their continuators have done nothing but to
teach men how to live. They studied and analysed life, as
it had been understood by the
greatest artists of each cen-
*'
tury, and they drew from their works conclusions as to how
to live."
More than this. When Tolstoy, armed with his powerful
"
criticism, chastises what he so well describes as counter-
feits of Art," he continues the work that Tchernyshevskiy,
Dobroluboff and especially Pisareff had done. He sides with
Bazaroff. Only, this intervention of the great artist gives a
more deadly blow to the *' Art for Art's sake " theory still
in vogue in Western Europe than anything that Proudhon
or our Russian critics, unknown in the West, could possibly
have done.
As to Tolstoy's idea concerning the value of a work of
Art being measured by its accessibility to the great number,
which has been so fiercely attacked on all sides, and even
ridiculed this assertion, although it has perhaps not yet
been very well expressed, contains, I believe, the germs of a
great idea which sooner or later is certain to make its way.
It is evident that every form of art has a certain conven-
"
tional way ofexpressing itself its own way of infecting
others with the artist's feelings," and therefore requires a
certain training to understand it. Tolstoy is hardly right in
overlooking the fact that some training is required for rightly
comprehending even the simplest forms of art, and his
" "
criterion of universal understanding seems therefore far-
fetched.
However, there lies in what he says
a deep idea. Tolstoy
is asking why
certainly right in the Bible has not yet been
superseded, as a work of Art accessible to everyone. Michelet
had already made a similar remark, and had said that what
was wanted by our century was Le Livre, The Book, which
shall contain in a great, poetical form accessible to all, the
embodiment of nature with all her glories and of the his-
tory of all mankind in its deepest human features. Humboldt
had aimed at this in his Cosmos; but grand though his work
Is, It is accessible to only the very few. It was not he who
should transfigure science into poetry. And we have no work
of Art which even approaches this need of modern mankind.
The reason is self-evident: Because Art has become too
artificial; because, being chiefly for the rich, it has too much
specialised its expression, so as to be understood
ways of
by the few only. In this respect Tolstoy is absolutely right.
Take the mass of excellent works that have been mentioned
in this book. How
very few of them will ever become acces-
sible to a large public The fact is, that a new Art is Indeed
!
required. And come when the artist, having under-

It will
"
stood this Idea of Tolstoy's, shall say to himself: I may
write highly philosophical works of art in which I depict
the Inner drama of the highly educated and refined man of
our own times I may write works which contain the highest
;
poetry of nature. Involving a deep knowledge and com-

prehension of the life of nature; but. If I can write such
things, I must also be able. If I am a true artist, to speak
to all: to write other things which will be as deep In con-
ception as these, but which everyone. Including the humblest
miner or peasant, will be able to understand and enjoy " I
To say that a folk-song Is greater Art than a Beethoven

sonata Is not correct: we cannot compare a storm in the
Alps, and the struggle against it, with a fine, quite mid-
summer day and hay-making. But truly great Art, which,
notwithstanding its depth and Its lofty flight, will penetrate
into every peasant's hut and inspire everyone with higher
conceptions of thought and life such an Art is really
wanted.
SOME CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS
does not enter into the plan of this book to analyse
It
contemporary Russian writers. Another volume would be

required to do them justice, not only on account of the
literary importance of some of them, and the interest of
the various directions in Art which they represent, but
especially because in order to properly explain the char-
acter of the present literature, and the different currents in
Russian Art, it would be. necessary to enter into many details
concerning the unsettled conditions under which the country
has been living during the last thirty years. Moreover, most
of the contemporary writers have not yet said their last
word, and we can expect from them works of even greater
value than any they have hitherto produced. I am compelled,
therefore, to limit myself to brief remarks concerning the
most prominent living novelists of the present day.
Oertel (born 1855) has unfortunately abandoned liter-
ature during the last few years, just at a time when his last
novel, Smyena {Changing Guards)^ had given proofs of a
further development of his sympathetic talent. He was born
in the borderland of the Russian Steppes, and was brought
up on one of the large estates of this region. Later on he

went to the university of St. Petersburg and, as a matter of
"
fact, was compelled to leave it after some students' dis-
orders," and was interned in the town of Tver. He soon
returned, however, to his native Steppe region, which he
cherishes with the same love as Nikitin and Koltsoff.
Oertel began his literary career by short sketches which
are now collected in two volumes under the name of Note-
book of a Prairie-Man, and whose manner suggests Tur-
Notebook. The nature of the prairies
gueneff's Sportsman' s
is admirably described in these little stories, with great
warmth and poetry, and the types of peasants who appear
in the stories are perfectly true to nature, without any
attempts at idealisation, although one feels that the author
" "
is no great admirer of the intellectuals and fully appre-
ciates the general ethics of rural life. Some of these sketches,
especially those which deal with the growing bougeoisie du
village, are highly artistic. Two Couples (1887), in which
CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS 301
the parallel stories of two young couples In love one of
educated people and the other of peasants are given, is a
story evidently written under the influence of the ideas of
Tolstoy, and bearing traces of a preconceived idea, which
spoils in places the artistic value of the novel. There are
nevertheless admirable scenes, testifying to very fine powers
of observation.
However, the real force of Oertel is not in discussing
psychological problems. His true domain is the description
of whole regions, with all the variety of types of men
which one finds amidst the mixed populations of South
Russia, and this force appears at its best in The Gardenins,
their Retainers, their Followers, and their Enemies, and in
Changing Guards. Russian critics have, of course, very seri-
ously and very minutely discussed the young heroes, Efrem
and Nicholas, who appear in The Gardenins, and they have
made a rigorous inquiry intc the ways of thinking of these
young men. But this *3 of a quite secondary importance, and
one almost regrets that the author, paying a tribute to his
times, has given the two young men more attention than they
deserve, being only two more individuals in the great picture
of country life which he has drawn for us. The fact is, that
just as we have in Gogol's tales quite a world opening before
us a Little Russian village, or provincial life so also here
we see, as the very title of the novel suggests, the whole life
of a large estate at the times of serfdom, with its mass of
retainers, followers and foes, all grouped round the horse-
breeding establishment which makes the fame of the estate
and the pride of all connected with it. It is the life of that
crowd or people, the life at the horse-fairs and the races, not
the discussions or the loves of a couple of young men, which
makes the main interest of the picture; and that life is really
reproduced in as masterly a manner as it is in a good Dutch
picture representing some village fair. No
writer in Russia
since Serghei Aksakoff and Gogol has so well succeeded in
painting a whole comer of Russia with its scores of figures,
all living and all placed in those positions of relative
impor-
tance which they occupy in real life.
The same power is felt in Changing Guards. The subject
of this novel is very interesting. It shows how the old noble
families disintegrate, like their estates, and how another
class of men merchants and unscrupulous adventurers get
possession of these estates, while a new class made up of the
younger merchants and clerks, who are beginning to be
inspired with some ideas of freedom and higher culture, con-
stitutes already the germ of a new stratum of the educated
classes. In this novel, too, some critics fastened their atten-
tion chiefly on the undoubtedly interesting types of the
aristocratic girl, the Non-conformist peasant whom she
begins to love, the practical Radical young merchant all
painted quite true to life; but they overlooked what makes

the real importance of the novel. Here again we have quite
a region of South Russia (as typical as the Far West is in
the United States), throbbing with life and full of living
men and women, as it was some twenty years after the libera-
tion of the serfs, when a new life, not devoid of some
American features, was beginning to appear. The contrast
between this young life and the decaying mansion is very
well reproduced, too, in the romances of the young people
the whole bearing the stamp of the most sympathetic indi-
viduality of the author.
KoROLENKO was born (in 1853) in a small town of West-

ern Russia, and there he received his first education. In
1872 he was at the Agricultural Academy of Moscow, but
was compelled to leave after having taken part in some
"
students' movement. Later on he was arrested as a politi-
cal," and exiled, first to a small town of the Urals, and then
to Western Siberia, and from after his refusal to
there,
take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., he was trans-
to a Yakut encampment several hundred miles beyond
'akutsk. There he spent several years, and when he returned
?orted
to Russia in 1886, not being allowed to stay in University
towns, he settled at Nizhniy Novgorod.
Life in the far north, in the deserts of Yakutsk, in a small
encampment buried for half the year in the snow, produced
upon Korolenko an extremely deep impression, and the little
stories which he wrote about Siberian subjects ( The Dream
of Makdr, The Manfrom Sakhalin, etc.), were so beautiful
that he was unanimously recognised as a true heir to Tur-
gueneff. There is in the little stories of Korolenko a force,
a sense of proportion, a mastery in depicting the characters,
and an artistic finish, which not only distinguish him from
most of his young contemporaries, but reveal in him a true
artist. JVhat the Forest Says, in which he related a dramatic
episode from serfdom times in Lithuania, only further con-

firmed the high reputation which Korolenko had already
won. It is not an imitation of Turgueneff, and yet it at
once recalled, by its comprehension of the life of the
forest, the great novelist's beautiful sketch. The IFoodlands
(Polyesie). In Bad Society is evidently taken from the
author's childhood, and this idyll among tramps and thieves
who concealed themselves in the ruins of some tower is of
such beauty, especially in the scenes with children, that
"
everyone found in it a truly Turgueneff charm." But then
Korolenko came to a halt. His Blind Musician was read in
all languages, and admired again for its charm; but it was
felt that the over-refined psychology of this novel is hardly
correct; and no greater production worthy of the extremely
sympathetic and rich talent of Korolenko has appeared since,
while his attempts at producing a larger and more elaborate
romance were not crowned with success.
This is somewhat striking, but the same would have to
be said of all the contemporaries of Korolenko, among whom
there are men and women of great talent. To analyse the
causes of this fact, especially with reference to so great an
artist as Korolenko, would certainly be a tempting task. But
this would require speaking at some length of the change
which took place in the Russian novel during the last twenty
years or so, in connection with the political life of the coun-
try. A few hints will perhaps explain what is meant. In the
seventies quite a special sort of novel had been created by a
number of young novelists mostly contributors of the
" "
review, Russkoye Slovo. The thoughtful realist such as
he was understood by Pisareff was their hero, and however
imperfect the technique of these novels might have been in
some cases, their leading idea was most honest, and the
influence they exercised upon Russian youth was in the right
direction. This was the time when Russian women were
making their first steps towards higher education, and trying
to conquer some
sort of economical and intellectual Inde
pendence. To
attain this, they had to sustain a bitter struggle
"
against their elders. Madame Kabanova " and " Dikoy "
(see Ch. VI.) were alive then in a thousand guises, in all
classes of society, and our women had to struggle hard
against their parents and relatives, who did not understand
their children; against "Society" as a whole, which hated
" "
the emancipated woman and against the Government,
;
which only too well foresaw the dangers that a new genera-
tion of educated women would represent for an autocratic
bureaucracy. It was of the first necessity, then, that at least
in the men of the same generation the young fighters for
women's rights should find helpers, and not that sort of
men about whom Turgueneff's heroine in Correspondence
wrote (see Ch. IV.). In this direction especially after the
splendid beginning that was made by two women writers,
Sophie Smirn6va ( The Little Fire, The Salt of the Earth)
and Olga Shapir our men-novelists have done good serv-
ice, both inmaintaining the energy of women in their hard
struggle and in inspiring men with respect towards that
struggle and those who fought in it.
Later on a new element became prominent in the Rus-
" "
sian novel. It was the populist element love to the
masses of toilers, work among them in order to introduce,
be it the slightest spark of light and hope, into their sad
existence. Again the novel contributed immensely to maintain
that movement and to inspire men and women in that sort
of work, an instance of which has been given on a preceding
page, in speaking of The Great Bear. The workers in both
these fields were numerous, and I can only name in passing
MoRDOVTSEFF (in Signs of the Times), Scheller, who
wrote under the name of A. MikhAiloff, Stanuk6vitch,
NovoDvoRSKiY, Barantsevitch, Matchtett, MAmin,
and the poet, NAdson, who all, either directly or indirectly,
worked through the novel and poetry in the same direction.
However, the struggle for liberty which was begun about
1857, after having reached its culminating point in 188 1,
came temporary end, and for the next ten

to a a com-
" years
plete prostration spread amidst the Russian intellectuals."
Faith in the old ideals and the old inspiring watchwords
even faith In men was passing away, and new tendencies
began to make their way In Art partly under the Influence
of this phase of the Russian movement, and partly also under
the Influence of Western Europe. A
sense of fatigue became
evident. Faith In knowledge was shaken. Social ideals were
" "
relegated to the background. RIgourism was condemned,
" "
and popularism began to be represented as ludicrous, or,
when it reappeared, It was In some religious form, as Tol-
"
stoylsm. Instead of the former enthusiasm
"
for mankind,"
*'
the rights of the individual were proclaimed, which
" "
rights did not mean equal rights for all, but the rights
of the few over all the others.
In these unsettled conditions of social ideas our younger
novelists always anxious to reflect In their art the ques-
tions of the day have had to develop; and this confusion
necessarily stands in the way of their producing anything
as definite and as complete as did their predecessors of the
previous generation. There have been no such complete indi-
vidualities In society; and a true artist is incapable of
inventing what does not exist.
Dmitriy Merzhkovskiy (bom 1866) may be taken to

which a writer, even when endowed
illustrate the difllicultles
with a by no means ordinary talent, found In reaching his
fulldevelopment under the social and political conditions
which prevailed In Russia during the period just mentioned.
Leaving aside his poetry although It Is also very character-
istic and taking only his novels and critical articles, we see
how, after having started with a certain sympathy, or at least
with a certain respect, for those Russian writers of the pre-
vious generation who wrote under the inspiration of higher
social Ideals, Merezhkovskiy gradually began to suspect these
ideals, and finally ended by treating them with contempt.
He found that they were of no avail, and he began to speak
more and more of " the sovereign rights of the individual,"
but not in the sense In which they were understood by Godwin
and other eighteenth century philosophers, nor In the sense
which Pisareff attributed to them when he spoke of the
"thoughtful reahst"; Merezhovskly took them in the
sense desperately vague, and narrow when not vague
attributed to them by Nietzsche. At the same time he began
" " "
to speak more and more of Beauty and the worship of
the Beautiful," but again not in the sense which idealists
attributed to such words, but in the limited, erotic sense in
" " " "
which Beauty was understood by the i?sthetics of
the leisured class in the forties.
The main work which Merezhkovskiy undertook offered
great interest. He began a trilogy of novels in which he
intended to represent the struggle of the antique pagan world
against Christianity on the one hand, the Hellenic love and
:
poetic comprehension of nature, and its worship of sound,

exuberant life; and on the other, the life-depressing influ-
ences of Judaic Christianity, with its condemnation of the
study of nature, of poetry, art, pleasure, and sound, healthy
life altogether. The first novel of the trilogy was Julian the
Apostate, and the second, Leonardo da Vinci (both have

been translated into English). They were the result of a
careful study of the antique Greek world and the Renais-
sance, and notwithstanding some defects (absence of real
feeling, even in the glorification of the worship of Beauty,
and a certain abuse of archaeological details), both contained
really beautiful and impressive scenes; while the fundamental
idea the necessity of a synthesis between the poetry of
nature of the antique world and the higher humanising
ideals of Christianity ^was forcibly impressed upon the
reader.
Merezhkovskiy's admiration of antique
" Unfortunately,
"
Naturism did not last. He had not yet written the third
" "
novel of his trilogy when modern Symbolism began to
penetrate into his works, with the result that notwithstand-
ing all his abilities the young author seems now to be drift-
ing straight towards a hopeless mysticism, like that into
which Gogol fell towards the end of his life.
It may seem strange to the West Europeans, and especially

to English readers, to hear of such a rapid succession of
different moods of thought in Russian society, sufficiently
deep to exercise such an influence upon the novels as has just
been mentioned. And yet so it is, in consequence of the his-
torical phase which Russia is living through. There is even
a very gifted novelist, Boborykin (born 1836), who has
made it his peculiar work to describe in novels the prevailing
moods of Russian educated society in their rapid succession
for the last thirty years. The technique of his novels is always
excellent (he is also the author of a good critical work, just
published, on the influences of Western romance upon the
Russian novel). His observations are always correct; his
personal point of view is that of an honest advanced progres-
sive; and his novels can always be taken as true and good
pictures of the tendencies which prevailed at a given moment
"
amongst the Russian intellectuals." For the history of
thought in Russia they are simply invaluable and they must
;
have helped many a young reader to find his or her way

amidst the various facts of life; but the variety of currents
which have been chronicled by Boborykin would appear
simply puzzling to a Western reader.
Boborykin has been reproached by some critics with not
having sufficiently distinguished between what was important
in the facts of life which he described and what was irrele-
vant or only ephemeral, but this is hardly correct. The
main defect of his work lies perhaps elsewhere; namely, in
that the individuality of the author is hardly felt in it at
all. He seems to record the kaleidoscope of life without
living with his heroes, and without suffering or rejoicing

with them. He has noticed and perfectly well observed those
persons whom he describes; his judgment of them is that of
an intelligent, experienced man; but none of them has
impressed him enough to become part of himself.. Therefore
they do not strike the reader with any suflicient depth of
impression.
One of our contemporary authors, also endowed with
great talent, who is publishing a simply stupefying quantity
of novels, is PotApenko. He was born in 1856, in South
Russia, and after having studied music, he began writing in
188 1, and although his later novels bear traces of too hasty
work, he still remains a favourite writer. Amidst the dark
colours which prevail now amongst the Russian novelists,
Potapenko is a happy exception. Some of his novels are full
of highly comic scenes, and compel the reader to laugh
heartily with the author. But even when there are no such
scenes, and the facts are, on the contrary, sad, or even
tragical, the effect of the novel is not depressing perhaps
because the author never departs from his own point of
view of a satisfied optimist. In this respect Potapenko is
absolutely the opposite of most of his contemporaries, and
especially of Tchehoff.
A. P. TCHEHOFF
Of all the contemporary Russian novelists A. P. Tchehoff
( 1 860-1904) was undoubtedly the most deeply original.

It was not a mere originality of stlye. His style, like that
of every great artist, bears of course the stamp of his per-
sonality; but he never tried to strike his readers with some
style-effects of his own: he probably despised them, and
he wrote with the same simplicity as Pushkin, Turgueneff
and Tolstoy have written. Nor did he choose some special
contents for his tales and novels, or appropriate to himself
some special class of men. Few authors, on the contrary, have
dealt with so wide a range of men and women, taken from all
the layers, divisions and subdivisions of Russian society as
Tchehoff did. And with all that, as Tolstoy has remarked,
Tchehoff represents something of his own in art; he has
struck a new vein, not only for Russian literature, but for
literature altogether, and thus belongs to all nations. His
nearest relative is Guy de Maupassant, but a certain family
resemblance between the two writers exists only in a few of
their short stories. The manner of Tchehoff, and especially
the mood in which all the sketches, the short novels, and the
dramas of Tchehoff are written, are entirely his own. And
then, there is all the difference between the two writers which
exists between contemporary France and Russia at that
special period of development through which our country has
been passing lately.
The biography of Tchehoff can be told in a few words. He
was born in i860, in South Russia, at Taganrog. His father
was originally a serf, but he had apparently exceptional busi-
ness capacities, and freed himself early in his life. To his
son he gave a good education first in the local gymnasium
"
(college), and later on at the university of Moscow. I did
not know much about faculties at that timer," Tchehoff
"
wrote once in a short biographical note, and I don't well
remember why chose the medical faculty; but I never
I
regretted that choice later on." He did not become a medical

practitioner; but a year's work in a small village hospital
near Moscow, and similar work later on, when he volun-
teered to stand at the head of a medical district during the
cholera epidemics of 1892, brought him into close contact
with a wide world of men and women of all sorts and char-
acters; and, as he himself has noticed, his acquaintance with
natural sciences and with the scientific method of thought
helped him a great deal in his subsequent literary work.
Tchehoff began his literary career very early. Already
during the first years of his university studies that is, in
1879, he began to write short humorous sketches (under the
pseudonym of Tchehonte) for some weeklies. His talent
developed rapidly; and the sympathy with which his first
little volumes of short sketches was met in the Press, and the
interest which the best Russian critics (especially Mikhailov-
skiy) took in the young novelist, must have helped him to
give a more serious turn to his creative genius. With every
year the problems of life which he treated were deeper and
more complicated, while the form he attained bore traces of
an increasingly fine artistic finish. When Tchehoff died last
year, at the age of only forty-four, his talent had already
reached its full maturity. His last production a drama
contained such fine poetical touches, and such a mixture of
poetical melancholy with strivings towards the joy of a well-
filled life, that it would have seemed to open a new page in
his creation if it were not known that consumption was
rapidly undermining his life.
No one has ever succeeded, as Tchehoff has, in represent-
ing the failures of human nature in our present civilisation,
and especially the failure, the bankruptcy of the educated
man in the face of the all-invading meanness of everyday life.
" "
This defeat of the intellectual he has rendered with a
wonderful force, variety, and impressiveness. And there lies
the distinctive feature of his talent.
When you read the sketches and the stories of Tchehoff
in chronological succession, you see first an author full of
3IO RUSSIAN LITERATURE
the most exuberant vitality and youthful fun. The stones
are, as a rule, very short; many of them cover only three or
four pages; but they are full of the most infecting merri-
ment. Some of them are mere farces; but you cannot help
laughing in the heartiest way, because even the most ludi-
crous and impossible ones are written with an inimitable
charm. And then, gradually, amidst that same fun, comes a
touch of heartless vulgarity on the part of some of the actors
in the story, and you feel how the author's heart throbs with
pain. Slowly, gradually, this note becomes more frequent; it

claims more and more attention it ceases to be accidental, it
;
becomes organic at last, in every story, in every novel,

till
it stifles everything else. It may be the reckless heartlessness

*'
of a young man who, for fun," will make a girl believe that
she is loved, or the heartlessness and absence of the most
ordinary humanitarian feeling in the family of an old pro-
fessor it is always the same note of heartlessness and mean-
ness which resounds, the same absence of the more refined

human feelings, or, worse the complete intellectual and
still
"
moral bankruptcy of the intellectual."
Tchehoff's heroes are not people who have never heard
better words, or never conceived better ideas than those which
circulate in the lowest circles of the Philistines. No, they have
heard such words, and their hearts have beaten once upon a
time at the sound of such words. But the common-place every-
day life has stifled all such aspirations, apathy has taken its
place, and now there remains only a haphazard existence

amidst a hopeless meanness. The meanness which Tchehoff
represents is the one which begins with the loss of faith in
one's forces and the gradual loss of all those brighter hopes
and illusions which make the charm of all activity, and, then,
step by step, this meanness destroys the very springs of life:
broken hopes, broken hearts, broken energies. Man reaches
a stage when he can only mechanically repeat certain actions
" "
from day to day, and goes to bed, happy if he has killed
his time in any way, gradually falling into a complete intel-
lectual apathy, and a moral indifference. The worst is that
the very multiplicity of samples which Tchehoff gives, with-
out repeating himself, from so many different layers of
society, seems to tell the reader that it is the rottenness of
a
whole civilisation, of an epoch, which the author divulges
to us.
Speaking of Tchehoff, Tolstoy made the deep remark that
he was one of those few whose novels are willingly re-read
more than once. This is quite true. Every one of Tchehoff's
stories it
may be the smallest bagatelle or a small novel, or
it may be a drama produces an impression which cannot
easily be forgotten. At the same time they contain such a pro-
fusion of minute detail, admirably chosen so as to increase
the impression, that in re-reading them one always finds a
new pleasure. Tchehoff was certainly a great artist. Besides,
the variety of the men and women of all classes which appear
in his stories, and the variety of psychological subjects dealt
in them, is simply astounding. And yet every story bears so
much the stamp of the author that in the most insignificant
of them you recognise Tchehoff, with his proper individuality
and manner, with his conception of men and things.
Tchehoff has never tried to write long novels or romances.
His domain is the short story, in which he excels. He certainly
never tries to give in it the whole history of his heroes from
their birth to the grave this would not be the proper way in
:
a short story. He takes one moment only from that life, only
one episode. And he tells it in such a way that the reader for-
ever retains in memory the type of men or women repre-
sented; so that, when later on he meets a living specimen of
"
that type, he exclaims: But this is Tchehoff's Ivanoff, or
Tchehoff's Darling!" In the space of some twenty pages
and within the limitations of a single episode there is revealed
a complicated psychological drama a world of mutual rela-
tions. Take, forInstance, the very short and impressive
sketch. Froma Doctor's Practice. It is a story in which
there is no story after all. A doctor is invited to see a girl,
whose mother is the owner of a large cotton mill. They live
there, in amansion close to, and within the enclosure of, the
immense buildings. The girl is the only child, and is
worshipped by her mother. But she is not happy. Indefinite
thoughts worry her: she is stifled in that atmosphere. Her
mother is also unhappy on account of her darling's unhappi-
ness, and the only happy creature in the household is the ex-
governess of the girl, now a sort of lady-cgpipanion, who
really enjoys the luxurious surroundings of the mansion and
its rich table. The doctor is asked to stay over the night, and
tells to his sleepless patient that she is not bound to stay
there: that a really well-intentioned person can find many
places in the world where she would find an activity to suit
her. And when the doctor leaves next morning the girl has
put on a white dress and has a flower in her hair. She looks
very earnest, and you guess that she meditates already about
a new start in her life. Within the limits of these few traits
quite a world of aimless philistine life has thus been unveiled
before your eyes, a world of factory life, and a world of new
longings making an irruption into it, and finding support
from the outside. You read all this in the little episode. You
see with a striking distinctness the four main personages upon
whom light has been focussed for a short moment. And in
the hazy outlines which you rather guess than see on the
picture round the brightly lighted spot, you discover quite a
world of complicated human relations, at the present moment
and in times to come. Take away anything of the distinctness
of the figures in the lighted spot, or anything of the haziness
of the remainder and the picture will be spoiled.
Such are nearly all the stones of Tchehoff. Even when
they cover some fifty pages they have the same character.
Tchehoff wrote a couple of stories from peasant life. But
peasants and village life are not"
his proper sphere. His true
"
domain is the world of the intellectuals the educated
and the half-educated portion of Russian society and these
he knows in perfection. He shows their bankruptcy, their
inaptitude to solve the great historical problem of renovation
which fell upon them, and the meanness and vulgarity of
everyday life under which an immense number of them suc-
cumb. Since the times of Gogol no writer in Russia has so
wonderfully represented human meanness under its varied
aspects. And yet, what a difference between the two! Gogol
took mainly the outer meanness, which strikes the eye and
often degenerates into farce, and therefore in most cases
brings a smile on your lips or makes you laugh. But laughter
is always a step towards reconcilation. Tchehoff also makes
you laugh in his earlier productions, but in proportion as he

advances in age, and looks more seriously upon life, the
laughter disappears, and although a fine humour remains,
you feel that he now deals with a kind of meanness and
philistinism which provokes, not smiles but suffering in the
author. A " Tchehoff sorrow " is as much characteristic of his
writings as the deep furrow between the brows of his lively
eyes is characteristic of his good-natured face. Moreover, the
meanness which Tchehoff depicts is much deeper than the
one which Gogol knew. Deeper conflicts are now going on in
the depths of the modern educated men, of which Gogol
" "
knew nothing seventy years ago. The sorrow of Tchehoff
is also that of a much more sensitive and a more refined
" "
nature dian the unseen tears of Gogol's satire.
Better than Russian novelist, Tchehoff understands
any "
the fundamental vice of that mass of Russian intellectuals,"
who very well see the dark sides of Russian life but have no
force to join that small minority of younger people who dare
to rebel against the evil. In this respect, only one more writer
and this one was a woman, Hvoschinskaya (" Krestovskiy-
pseudonyme "), who can be placed by the side of Tchehoff.
He knew, and more than knew he felt with every nerve of
mind that, apart from a handful of stronger
his poetical
"
men and women, the true curse of the Russian " intellectual
is the weakness of his will, the insufficient strength of his
desires. Perhaps he felt it in himself. And when he was asked
once (in 1894) in a letter "What should a Russian desire at
" "
the present time? he wrote in return: Here is my reply:
desire! He needs most of all desire force of character. We
have enough of that whining shapelessness."
This absence of strong desire and weakness of will he
continually, over and over again, represented in his heroes.
But this predilection was not a mere accident of tempera-
ment and character. It was a direct product of the times he
lived in.
Tchehoff, we saw, was nineteen years old when he began

to write in 1879. He thus belongs to the generation which
had to live through, during their best years, the worst years
which Russia has passed through in the second half of the
nineteenth century. With the tragic death of Alexander II.
and the advent to the throne of his son, Alexander III., a
whole epoch the epoch of progressive work and bright
hopes had come to a final close. All the sublime efforts of that
younger generation which had entered the political arena in
the seventies, and had taken for its watchword the symbol:
" "
Be with the people had ended in a crushing defeat the
1
victims moaning now in fortresses and in the snows of

Siberia. More than that, all the great reforms, including the
abolition of serfdom, which had been realised in the sixties
by the Herzen, Turgueneff, and Tchernyshevskiy generation,
began now to be treated as so many mistakes, by the reaction-
ary elements which had now rallied round Alexander III.
Never will a Westerner understand the depth of despair and
the hopeless sadness which took hold of the intellectual por-
tion of Russian society for the next ten or twelve years after
that double defeat, when it came to the conclusion that it was
incapable to break the inertia of the masses, or to move
history so as to fill up the gap between its high ideals and
" "
the heartrending reality. In this respect the eighties were
perhaps the gloomiest period that Russia lived through for
the last hundred years. In the fifties the intellectuals had at
least full hope in their forces; now they had lost even these
hopes. It was during those very years that Tchehoff began to
write; and, being a true poet, who feels and responds to the
moods of the moment, he became the painter of that break-
*' "
down of that failure of the intellectuals which hung as
a nightmare above the civilised portion of Russian society.
And again, being a great poet, he depicted that all-invading
philistine meanness in such features that his picture will live.
How superficial, in comparison, is the philistinism described
by Zola. Perhaps, France even does not know that disease
which was gnawing then at the very marrow of the bones
"
of the Russian intellectual."
With all that, Tchehoff is by no means a pessimist in the
proper sense of the word; if he had come "
to despair, he
"
would have taken the bankruptcy of the intellectuals as
a necessary fatality.
'*
A word, such as, for instance,
*'
/?
de
Steele would have been his solace. But Tchehoff could not
find satisfaction in such words because he firmly believed that
"
a better existence was possible and would come. From
" "
my childhood he wrote in an intimate letter I have
believed in progress, because the difference between the time
CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS 31^
wHen they used to flog me, and when they stopped to do so
[in the sixties] was tremendous."
There are three dramas of Tchehoff Ivdnojf, Uncle
Vdnya {Uncle John), and The Cherry-Tree Garden, which
fully illustrate how his faith in a better future grew in him as
he advanced in age. Ivanoff, the hero of the first drama, is
" "
the personification of that failure of the intellectual of
which I just spoke. Once upon a time he had had his high
ideals and he still speaks of them, and this is why Sasha, a
girl, full of the better inspirations one of those fine intellec-
tual types in the representation of which Tchehoff appears
as a true heir of Turgueneff falls in love with him. But
Ivanoff knows himself that he is played out; that the girl
loves in him what he is no more; that the sacred fire is with
him a mere reminiscence of the better years, irretrievably
past; and while the drama attains its culminating point, just
when his marriage with Sasha is going to be celebrated,
Ivanoff shoots himself. Pessinfiism is triumphant.
Uncle Vdnya ends also in the most depressing way; but
there is some faint hope in it. The drama reveals an even still
more complete breakdown of the educated " intellectual," and
especially of the main representative of that class the pro-
fessor, the little god of the family, for whom all others have
been sacrificing themselves, but who all his life has only
written beautiful words about the sacred problems of art,
while all his life he remained the most perfect egotist. But
the end of this drama is different. The girl, Sonya, who is the
counterpart of Sasha, and has been one of those who sacri-
ficed themselves for the professor, remains more or less in
the background of the drama, until, at its very end she comes
forward in a halo of endless love. She is neglected by the
man whom she loves. This man an enthusiast prefers,
however, a beautiful woman (the second wife of the pro-
fessor) to Sonya, who is only one of those workers who bring
life into the darkness of Russian village life, by helping the
dark mass to pull through the hardships of their lives.
The drama ends in a heart-rending musical accord of devo-
"
tion and self-sacrifice on behalf of Sonya and her uncle. It
"
cannot be helped Sonya says "we must live Uncle John,
I
we shall live. We shall live through a long succession of days,

3i6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE
and of long nights ;Ve shall patiently bear the sufferings
which fate will send upon us; we shall work for the others
now, and later on, in old age, knowing no rest; and when our
hour shall have come, we shall die without murmur, and
* * * we shall rest! "
there, beyond the grave
There is, after all, a redeeming feature in that despair.
There remains the faith of Sonya in her capacity to work,
her readiness to face the work, even without personal
happiness.
Butin proportion as Russian life becomes less gloomy;
in proportion as hopes of a better future for our country
begin to bud once more in the youthful beginnings of a move-
ment amongst the working classes in the industrial centres,
to the call of which the educated youth answer immediately ;
*' "
in proportion as the intellectuals revive again, ready to
sacrifice themselves in order to conquer freedom for the
grand whole the Russian people Tchehoff also begins to

look into the future with hope and optimism. The Cherry-
Tree Garden was his last swan-song, and the last words of
this drama sound a note full of hope in a better future. The
cherry-tree garden of a noble landlord, which used to be a
true fairy garden when the trees were in full bloom, and
nightingales sang in their thickets, has been pitilessly cut
down by the money-making middle class man. No blossom,
no nightingales only dollars instead. But Tchehoff looks
further into the future he sees the place again in new hands,
:
and a new garden is going to grow instead of the old one

a garden where all will find a new happiness in new surround-
ings. Those whose whole life was for themselves alone
could never grow such a garden; but some day soon this will
be done by beings like Anya, the heroine, and her friend,
" "...
the perpetual student
The influence of Tchehoff, as Tolstoy has remarked, will
last, and will not be limited to Russia only. He has given
such a prominence to the short story and its ways of dealing
with human life that he has thus become a reformer of our
literary forms. In Russia he has already a number of imi-
tators who look upon him as upon the head of a school but ;
will they have also the same inimitable poetical feeling, the
same charming intimacy in the way of telling the stories, that
special form of love of nature, and above all, the beauty of
Tchehoff's smile amidst his tears? all qualities inseparable
from his personality.
As to his dramas, they are favourites on the Russian stage,
both in the capitals and in the provinces. They are admirable
for the stage and produce a deep effect; and when they are
played by such a superior cast as that of the Artistic Theatre
at Moscow as the Cherry-Tree Garden was played lately
they become dramatic events.
In Russia Tchehoff is now perhaps the most popular of
the younger writers. Speaking of the living novelists only,
he is placed immediately after Tolstoy, and his works are
read immensely. Separate volumes of his stories, published
under different titles In Twilight, Sad People and so on
ran each through ten to fourteen editions, while full
editions of Tchehoff's fVorks in ten and fourteen volumes,
sold in fabulous numbers: of the latter, which was given as
a supplement to a weekly, more than 200,000 copies were
circulated in one single year.
In Germany Tchehoff has produced a deep impression;
his best stories have been translated more than once, so that
one of the leading Berlin critics exclaimed lately "Tschechoff,
:
"
Tschechoff, und kein Ende! (Tchehoff, Tchehoff, and no
end.) In Italy he begins to be widely read. And yet it is
only his stories "which are known beyond Russia. His dramas
seem to be too Russian," and they hardly can deeply move
audiences outside the borders of Russia, where such dramas
of inner contradiction are not a characteristic feature of the
moment.
If there is any logic in the evolution of societies, such a
writer as Tchehoff had to appear before literature could take
a new direction and produce the new types which already are
budding in life. At any rate, an impressive parting word had
to be pronounced, and this is what Tchehoff has done.
3i8 .
RUSSIAN LITERATURE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
While this book was being prepared for print a work of
great value for the English-speaking lovers of Russian
all
literatureappeared in America. I mean the Anthology of
Russian Literature from the earliest Period to the present
Time, by Leo Wiener, assistant professor of Slavic languages
at Harvard University, published in two stately volumes by
Messrs. Putnam's Sons at New York. The first volume (400
pages) contains a rich selection from the earliest documents
of Russian literature the annals, the epic songs, the lyric
folk-songs, etc., as also from the writers of the seventeenth
and the eighteenth centuries. It contains, moreover, a general
short sketch of the literature of the period and a mention is
made of all the English translations from the early Russian
literature. The second volume (500 pages) contains ab-
stracts, with short introductory notes and a full bibliography,
from all the chief authors of the nineteenth century, begin-
ning with Karamzin and ending with TchehofF, Gorkiy, and
Merezhkovskiy. All this has been done with full knowledge
of Russian literature and of every author; the choice of char-
acteristic abstracts hardly could be better, and the many
translations which Mr. Wiener himself has made are very
good. In this volume, too, all the English translations of
Russian authors are mentioned, and we must hope that their
number will now rapidly increase. Very many of the Russian
authors have hardly been translated at all, and in such cases
there Is nothing else left but to advise the reader to peruse
French or German translations. Both are much more nu-
merous than the English, a considerable number of the
German translations being embodied in the cheap editions of
Reklam.
A work concerning Malo-Russlan (Little- Russian) litera-
ture, on followed by Mr. Wiener, has
lines similar to those
appeared lately under the title, Vik; the Century, a Col-
lection of Malo-Russian Poetry and Prose published from
1708 to i8g8, 3 vols. (Kiev, Peter Barski) (analysed in
;
Athenaum, January 10, 1903.)

Of general works which may be helpful to the student
of Russian literature I shall name Ralston's Early Russian
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 319
History, Songs of the Russian People, and Russian Folk
Tales (1872-J874), as also his translation of Afanasieff's
Legends; Rambaud's La Russie epique (1876) and his
excellent History of Russia (Engl, trans.) Le roman russe,
;
by Vogue; Impressions of Russia, by George Brandes (trans-

lated by Eastman; Boston, 1889), ^"^ ^'^ Moderne Geister,
which contains an admirable chapter on Turgueneff.
Of general works in Russian, the following may be named :
History of Russian Literature in Biographies and Sketches,

by P. Polevoy, 2 vols., illustrated (1883; "^w edition,
enlarged, in 1903) and History of the New Russian Litera-
;
ture from 1848 to i8g8, by A. Skabitchevskiy, 4th ed., 1900,

with 52 portraits. Both are reliable, well written, and not
bulky works the former being rather popular in character,
while the second is a critical work which goes into the
analysis of every writer. The recently published Gallery of
Russian Writers, edited by I. Ignatoff (Moscow, 1901),
contains over 250 good portraits of Russian authors, accom-
panied by one page notices, quite well written, of their work.
A very exhaustive work is History of the Russian Literature
by A. Pypin, in 4 vols., (1889), beginning with the earliest
times and ending with Pushkin, Lermontoff, Gogol, and
Koltsoff. The same author has written a History of Russian
Ethnography, also in 4 vols. Among works dealing with por-
tions only of the Russian literature the following may be
mentioned: Tchernyshevskiy's Critical Articles, St. Peters-
burg, 1893 Annenkoff's Pushkin and His Time; O. Miller's
;
Russian Writers after Gogol; Merezhkovskiy's. books on

Pushkin and another on Tolstoy; and Arsenieff's Critical
Studies of Russian Literature, 2 vols., 1888 (mentioned in
the text) and above all, of course, the collections of Works
;
of our critics: Byelinskiy (12 vols.) Dobroluboflf (4 vols.),

;
Pisareflf(6 vols.), and Mihailovskiy (6 vols.), completed

by his Literary Reminiscences.
Awork of very great value, which is still in progress, is
the
Biographic Dictionary of Russian Writers, published and
nearly entirely written by S. Vengueroff, who is also the
editor of new, scientifically prepared editions of the complete
works of several authors (Byelinskiy is now published).
Excellent biographies and critical sketches of all Russian
writers will be found in the Russian Encyclopadia Dictionary
of Brockhaus-Efron. The first two volumes of this Dictionary
(they will be completed in an Appendix) were brought out
as a translation of the Lexikon of Brockhaus; but the direc-
tion was taken over in good time by a group of Russian men
of science, including Mendeleeff, Woieikoff, V. Solovioff, etc.,
who have made of the 82 volumes of this Dictionary,
completed in 1904 (at 6 sh. the volume) one of the best
encyclopaedias in Europe. Suffice it to say that all articles
on chemistry and chemical technics have been either written
or carefully revised by Mendeleeff.
Complete editions of the works of most of the Russian
writers have lately been published, some of them by the editor
Marks, in connection with his weekly illustrated paper, at
astoundingly low prices, which can only be explained by a
circulation which exceeds 200,000 copies every year. The
work of Gogol, Turgueneff, Gontcharoff, Ostrovskiy, Bo-
borykin, Tchehoff, and some minor writers, like Danilevskiy
and Lyeskoff , are in this case.
INDEX
INDEX
Abolition of serfdom committees, 1
19 prisoned in fortress of Schiissel-
Absolutism, historical necessity of, berg, 29
272 Antique Greek world, study of the,
Êsthetics, philosophical, 287
theories of, 290 Anti-Semitic comedy, reception of, in
of the leisured class, 306 St. Petersburg, 264
Agricultural Academy of Moscow, Apocryphal gospels, wide circulation
302 of, in Russia, 17
Agricultural labourers in Western Archaeological details, abuse of, 306
Europe, hardships of, 267 ArakcheefF, General, rules Russia
Agricultural population of Russia, during last ten years of reign of
immense, 244 Alexander I., 34
Agricultural village, life in an, 245 Arctic exploration, LomonosofF's
"Akib, the Assyrian King," 8 memoir on, 25
Aksakoff, Ivan, 176 Aristocratic girl, interesting tyj>es of
Konstanrin, 176 the, 302
SergheiTimofeevitch, prose writer, Armenian language, 4
176; a Slavophile, 268, 269, 301 Arsenal of punishments, 264
Alexander the Great, legends of, 8 ArsenieflF, K., critic, 172, 295
Alexander I., educated by La Harpe, K. K., writer of satires, 282
34; attempts to give Russia a Art and its impulses, 160
constitution, 34; grants one to Art, counterfeits of, 298

Poland and Finland, 34; influ- Art criticism, canons in, 293
ence of German mystics on, 34; foundations of new, 287
surrenders to the reactionists, in Russia, 287
34; influence of Madame Krii- "Art for Art's sake," 295, 297, 298
dener on, 34 poets of, 183-185
Alexei the priest's son, 8 Art in the service of mankind, 296
American features of a new life, 302 Art, latest works of, 145-148
American squatters, 119, 227 the main principles of, 289
Anarchism, no-govemment principles utilitarian views upon, 295
of, 146 Artels (co-operative organisations),
modem, founded by Mikhail 230
Bakunin, 276 Asceticism preached in Russia, 17
Annals, rich Russian collection of, 14 Audubon, John James, mentioned,
Antanovitch, Grand Duke Ivan, im- 77
323
324 INDEX
Aucrbach, Berthold, mentfcned, 91 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold,
Autocracy, evils of, 63 mentioned, 124
"
Awakum, Nonconformist priest, Black people" and "white people,"
memoirs of, 19-21; quotation 14
from, 20; exiled to Siberia, 20; Black Sea, Russia takes firm hold of.
taken to the Amur, 20; burned
at the stake, 20 Blood-vengeance of Scandinavian
heroes, 10
Bakunin, Mikhail, Russian revolu- Boborykin, novelist, sketch of, 307
tionist, 276 Bodenstedt, friend and German trans-
Balaklava disaster, Tolstoy's poems lator of LermontofF's poems, 52,
on, 113 53.56
Balkan peninsula, invasion of, by Bogdanovitch, poet, 27, 28
Turks, 15 Books, censorship on, in Russia, 264
Balzac, Honore de, mentioned, 58, Borodin, music of, 14
86,91 Brandes, George, his study of Tur-
Barantsevitch, novelist, 304 gueneff, 91, 94
Baratinskiy, romantic Russian poet, Bronte, Charlotte, mentioned, 179
62 Browning, Robert, menrioned, 40,
Barbier, Henri Auguste, mentioned, 186
40, 173, 186 Buckle, Henry Thomas, mentioned,
Bards of Northern and Little Rus- 265
sia, 7 Bulgaria falls under the rule of the
Bards, special, 8 Osmanlis, 15
Baskaks, visits of, to Russia, 16 Bulgarian language, 4
Bayan, Russian bard, 13 Bureaucratic centralisation, 267
Beautiful, realistic definition of the, Burial songs of peasant women, 7
290 ByeiaefF, historian, 269
the worship of the, 306 Byelinskiy, the greatest criric of his
Beauty and Truth, idealistic point of time, 163, 288 ancestry and
;
view of, 289 sketch of his writings, 288-290;

Belles-lettres, Academy of, founded mentioned, 178, 224, 267, 269,
by Catherine II., 26 272, 276, 287 n., 288, 289, 293,
Beranger, Pierre Jean de, mentioned, 296, 298
3,186 Byliny, early Russian explorers of, 9
chansonettes of, 4 epic songs of, 8
BestuzhefF, Alexander, prose writer, Byron, Lord George Gordon, men-
.
63 .
tioned, 33, 40, 42, 44, 45. 46,
Bible, Russian translation of, 5 47, 51, 61, 63, 186, 187, 288
the first Russian, 19 Byronism, mantle of, 48
why has not yet been super-
it Pushkin's, 45
seded, 298 Byronists, Don Juanesque features
Biblical Old Slavonian, little use of, of the, 162
22 Byzantine Church, teachings of, 17
Bibliographical notes, 318-320 Byzantine gnosticism, 5

INDEX
Byzantine habits of Moscow, 68 Christian nationality of Russian
Byzantine historians, 15 Church, 16
Byzantine ideals of the Russian Christian teaching, interpretation of,
Church, 16
moral aspects of, 140
Capitalism, powers of, 268 development
Christianity, of, 17
Cat-o'-nine-tails, punishment of the, rationalistic interpretation of, 139;
164 dogmatic elements of, 140

Catherine the early
II., literature in reformed, antagonism to, 17
part of her reign, 26; full of spread of, in Russia, 29
progressive ideas, 26; her inter- Christmas Eve, Russian village life
course with French philoso- on, 69

phers, 26; composes her remark- Church and State, attitude of nega-
able Instruction to the deputies, tion towards, 145
26; writes several comedies, 26; Church Christianity, 140 n.
edits a monthly review, 26; Church, lower clergy of the, imposi-
writes two satirical comedies tions on, 19
and a comic opera, 194 Church, Russian, throws off the
Caucasians, the most beautiful peo- Mongol yoke, 16
ple of Europe, 52 Churches, hatred of, towards each
Caucasus "society," descriptions of, other, 138
59 Cicero, powerful oratory of, 24
Caucasus, the, one of the most beau- Circassians, struggle of, against the
riful regions on earth, 52 Russians, 56, 57
Censorship of literature under Circles, the, important part played
Nicholas I., 36 by the, in the intellectual devel-
Censorship, rigorous Russian, 94, opment of Russia, 266

263 Citizen, the duties of a, 174
Central Russia, invaded by Cos- Civilisation based on Capitalism and
sacks, 18 State, 131
spoken language of, 6 Classicism in Russia, 43
Cervantes, Miguel de, good-natured Classics, Russian, circulation of, 6
laughter of, 4 Codes of the Empire and the Com-
Chansonnettes, playful, 4 mon Law, 269
Charles XII., of Sweden, ruler of Colonisation, inner, of Russia, 230
Little Russia, defeated at Pol- Commercialism, modem, the prey of,
tava, 36 245
Christ, the teachings of, 140 Common Law Courts, peasants',
Christian brotherhoods, early, 17 222
Christian ethics, main points of the, Communal landownership, 267
142-145 Communal principles in Russian
Christian humility, 143
mask
life,
Communal
32 _ of Russian popular
of, 83 spirit
Christian literature in Russia, 17 life, 10
Christian mysticism, 28 Communism, teachings of free, 144
326 INDKX
Constantine, Grand Dukt, explora- Degeneracy not the sole feature of
tion of Russia, 225, 230 modern society, 86
Constantine, proclaimed emperor, Delwig, Russian poet, personal
35; abdicates, 35 friend of Pushkin, 62
Constantinople annalists and histo- Demetrius, the pretender, takes f>os-

rians, 15 session of throne at Moscow, 18
Contemporary novelists, 300-317 Demon of habitual drunkenness, 238

Contemporary, The, a monthly re- Derzhavin, poet laureate to Cather-
view, Tolstoy contributes to, ine II., 26; his poetry of Nature,
110, 112; its fight for peasant 27; Ode to Go J, 27; The Water-
freedom, 114; NekrasofF edits fall, Z-J
and contributes to, 171, Ivan Dickens, Charles, references to, 91,
Panaeff, co-editor, 178; Tcher- 187; rollicking humour of, 4
nyshevskiy contributes to, 279; Discussions, unnatural theoretical,
suppressed, 283 169
Coolidge, Professor, of Cambridge, "Dissent," varieties of, 268
Mass., his review articles on "Disturbed Years," traces of, in
Russian writers, 39 popular songs, 18
Co-operative organisations, 230 DobrolubofF, literary critic, ancestry
Copernicus, mentioned, 25 and sketch of, 291
Cornwall, Barry, mentioned, 187 DobrolubofF, ultra-democratic writer,
Corps of Pages, 30 114; mentioned, 290, 293, 297
Cossacks, invade Central Russia, 10 Dobrynia, the dragon-killer, 9
their ways of conducting war, 72 Dolgorukiy, Prince, political writer,
County councils, 231 278
Criticism, literary, 285, 286 Dolgushin groups, trial of, 135
works of, early read, 287
Critics, Don, blue waters of the, 1 1
Czech language, 4 Dover, England, cliffs of, 52
Czechs, old literature of, 4 Dostoyevskiy, Russian author, sketch
of his life and works, 163-170;
Dal, v., ethnographer and prose writes Poor People when twenty-
writer, birth and ancestry, 177; four, 163 congratulated by
;
his main work a dictionary of NekrasofF and Grigorovitch,

the Russian language, 178 163; introduced to Byelinskiy,
Danilevskiy, historical novelist, 227 the critic, 163; his sad life,
Dante, Alighieri, mentioned, 61, 187 163; condemned to death, 163;
Dargomyzhsky, operas of, 13 pardoned, 164; death of, 164;

Darwin, Charles Robert, mentioned, description of his novels, 164-
265 170
Darwinism, exposition of, 293 Drama in Russia, its
origin, 191;
new ideas of, 1 10 Peter I.
opened a theatre in
"Decadent" would-be poets, 296 Moscow, 192; theatres become
Decembrists, the, 33-36; Nicholas I. a permanent institurion, 192
hangs five and exiles others to Dramatic art in Russia, development
Siberia, 35
INDEX 327
Drunkenness, Russian habits of, 238 Everyday life, 259
the terrible disease of, 242 Evil, physical force in resisting,
Druzhinin, critic, 295 H3.
Exact sciences, interest of Peter I.
Eastern heroes, exploits of, 9 in, 22

Eastern legends, Russian versions
of, 8 Factory girls, life of, 135
Eastern Russia, spoken language of, 6 Faust, Dr., 5
Eastern traditions, spread of, in Federal principles in Russia, 32, 268
Russia, 10 Finland, constitution granted to, by
Educated man in Russia, despair of Alexander I.,34
the, 96 Folk-literature, of European na-
Educated women, new generarion tions, 7
of, 304 of Russia, early, 7
Eighteenth century philosophers, 4 Folk-lore, leading features of Rus-
Eliot, George, mentioned, 179 sian, 16
Elpatievskiy, S., folk-novelist, 249 Folk-novelists, 221-260
Elsler, Fanny, ballet dancer,
appears realistic school of, 232
at the Imperial Theatre, Mos- their position in Russian literature,
cow, 200 221
Emancipated woman, the, 304 Fonvizin. See Wizin, Von
Emancipation committees, 280 Fourier, Francois, mentioned, 224,
Epic narrative, quiet recitative of, 8 272
Epic poetry, freshness and vigorous Fourierism, 281
youthfulness of the early, 16 Fourierists, 163
Epic songs, collecting of, 8; heroes Franklin, Benjamin, mentioned, 30
of, 8 Freemasons in Russia, their effort
of wandering bards, 16 for spreading moral education
proscribed by the Russian Church, among the people, 28; their deep
influence on Russia, 29; Alex-
Epicureanism, exclusive conditions ander I.
grants them more free-
of, 134 dom, 29
Equality and Liberty, appeals to, 93 Free thought stifled in Russia under
Equality of all men, recognition of, Nicholas I., 35
H5 French philosophers, Catherine II. *s
Ergolskaya, T. A., a woman relative intercourse with, 26
of Tolstoy's, III French Revolution of 1830,271; of
Ethnographical research in Russia, 1848, 272
230-232 French school of acting popular in
Euler, Leonhard, mathematician, 24 Moscow, 201

European society, conventional life French Socialists, 272
of, 45 Froebel, reforms of, 121
Everyday talk, forms of familiar, From Whence and Ho-r Came to be
introduced into Russian litera- the Land of Russia, early at-
ture, 31 tempt at writing history, 15

328 INDEX
Garshin, war novelist, 124 1
52-161; his youth and char-
Georgia, smiling valleys of, 53 acter, 154; extracts from Oblo-
Georgian language, 4 mojf, 154-159; description of
Gerbel, N., poetical translator, 186 The Precipice, 161, 162; men-
German aesthetical writers, meta- rioned, 6, 120, 169, 223, 224,
physics of, 295 228
German metaphysics, 4 Gorkiy, Maxim, author and dra-
German philosophy, idealistic, 289 matic writer, 217, 249; his
Glinka, music of, 13 childhood, 250; his reputation
God of the Thunders, 9 in America and Western Eu-
God, the essence of life, 141 rope, 250; sketch of the char-
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, refer- acters in his novels, 250-260;
ences to, 4, 5, 40, 4 1 45, 62, 1 72,
,
extracts from The Reader, 257-
185, 187, 288, 293 259 .
Gogol, Nicolai Vasilievitch, sketch of Gospels, inteq>retation of, heresy, 17

and works, 67-86; birth
his life Grammar of the Russian language,
and ancestry of, 67; humour foundation of, 24
and wit of, 68; his tales of the Great Russia, description of, 68
upper classes, 69; the plot of his Great-Russian language, 6
novel, Tar as Bulba, 70-72; his Greco-Latin Academy of KiefF, 19
prose-comedy The Inspector- Greco-Slavonian Academy founded,
General described, 73-76; ex- 22
tracts from, 76-81; hostile criti- Greek Church, wide-spread separa-
cism on The Inspector-General, tion of the people from the, 19
78; Dead Souls his main work, Greek models, inspiration of, 15
79; from, 79-81; he
extracts Greek Orthodox Church, 137, 138,
suffers from a nervous disease, 267
83; falls under the influence Gregory, an adapter of English
of the "pietists," 83; death of, plays, 191
84; his great influence on the Griboyedoff, comedy writer, bom in
minds of Russians, 84; fore- Moscow, 196; enters the diplo-
runner of the literary movement matic service, 196; sent to Te-
against serfdom, 84; literary in- heran, 196; arrested at Tiflis,
fluence of, 85; a great artist, 85; 197; set free, 197; in the Persian
first to introduce the social ele- war, 197; killed in Teheran, 198
ment into Russian liteiature, 85; GrigoriefF, A., criric, 295
references to, 6, 27, 58, 89, 96, Grigorovitch, peasant novels of, 85,
163, 176, 177, 201, 282, 283, 288, 229
30^319 Grimm's collection of fairy tales, 7
Goncharoff, talented Russian writer,

sketch of his life and works, 151- Hamlet and Don Quixote, 105
162; his attitude of impartiality Hamlctism in Russian life, 97, 108
to his heroes, 152; profusion of Hannibal oath, the, 271
details in novels, 152; de-
his Happiness, personal, where found,
scriprion of his novel Oblomoff, 137
INDEX 329
Harte, Bret, mentioned, 250 Human drama, development of the
Hatzfeld, Countess of, her relations inner, 92
to Lassalle, 93 Human nature, failures of, in our
Heat, mechanical theory of, 25 present civilisation, 309
Heine, Heinrich, references to, 3, 4, Humanitarian feeling in a family, 310
44, 186, 187, 293 Husband and wife, separation be-
Hellenic love and poetic compre- tween, debated in Russia, 127
hension of Nature, 306 Huxley, Thomas Henry, mentioned,
Hemnitzer, a writer of fables, 28 24
Herder, Johann Gottfried, men- Huyghens, Constantijn, menrioned,
tioned, 33 25.
Heredity, physiological, 222 Hvoschinskaya, N. D., woman prose
Herzen, Alexander, birth and ances- writer, 179; sketch of her writ-
try, 271 ; enters Moscow Univer- ings, I
79-1 8 I
sity,27 1 exiled to the Urals, 272 ;
;
returns to Moscow, 272; exiled Ibsen, Henrik, mentioned, 259

to Novgorod, 272; expelled from Icelandic sagas, 8
France, 273; naturalised in Idea and form in poetry, corre-
Switzerland, 273; starts his spondence between, 173
Polar Star in London, 273; starts Idealism, 116
The Bell, and becomes a real mask of, 128
power in Russia, 274; supports the neglect of, 257-
the Poles, 274; his death, 275; Idealistic realism, forms of, 249
mentioned, 267, 269, 289, 314 Ideas, means of exchanging, by the
High-life in St. Petersburg, 48 circles, 266
Highly educated, inner drama of the, Ilyia of Murom, 8
299 Imperial Theatre, St. Petersburg,
Hilferding, A., 8 established, 193
Historians, General Staff, 124 Individual, rights of the, 305
Historical dramas, 214, 215 Indo-European languages, 4
Historical novels, difficulties in writ- Industrialism, era of, 267
ing. 123 Intellectual life in Russia, from 1848
Holberg, Danish comedy writer, to 1876, 97
'Jean de France, 27 Intellectual unity of the Russian

Holiday cycle of songs, 7 nation, 6
Holy Alliance between Germany, Intellectuals, Russian, 253
Austria, and Russia, 34 educated, 263
Holy Books, prinring of the, 19 type of, 231
scholastic discussions on, 68 International Working Men's Asso-
Homer, epics of, 1 1 ciation, 276
HomyakofF (Slavophile), extract IvanofF, Professor, 287 .
from speech on Art, 296, 297

Hood, Thomas, menrioned, 186 Jacobinism, Governmental, 114
Hugo, Victor, mentioned, 40, 173, James, Richard, his songs relating to
186, 215, 288 dark period of serfdom, 18
330 INDEX
Jersey, Norman law in, 26^ Krestovskiy, Vsevolod, a woman
John the Terrible, letters of, to writer of detecrive stories, 1 79
Prince Kurbskiy, 18; rule of, in Kriidener, Madame, influence of,
Russia, 18 on Alexander I., 34
Journalism, serious, the founder of, Kryloff, V. A., playwright and fable
in Russia, 287 writer, 60; his translations from
Judaic Christianity, life-depressing Lafontaine, 60; his unique posi-

influences of, 306 tion in Russian literature, 61;
mentioned, 177, 194, 217
"Kalevala" of the Finns, 11 Kryzhanitch, South Slavonian writer,
Kaliki, wandering singers, 7 called to
Moscow, 21 revises the
;
Kantemir, writer of sarires, 22; Holy Books, 21; preaches re-

ambassador to London, 22 n. form, 21; exiled to Siberia and
Kapnist, writer of satires, 28 dies, 21
Karamzin, historian, poet, and Kurbskiy, Prince, letters to, from
novelist. The History of the John the Terrible, 18
Russian State, 32; a poet of the
virtues of monarchy, 32; his Labour movement in Russia, 265
history a work of art, 32; Labzin, a Christian mystic, writes

Letters of a Russian Traveller against corruption and is exiled,
Abroad, 33; his sentimental ro- 29
manticism, 33; his Poor Liza, -^y, La Harpe, French republican, edu-
spirited protest against serfdom, cates Alexander L, 34
Lake Onega, folk-literature at, 7
Kavelin, philosopher and writer on Land, municipalisation of, 146
law, 50 the communal ownership of, 246
KiefF,Annals of, 14, 15 Languages of Western Europe, 3
disappears from history for two Lassalle, Ferdinand, mentioned, 93
centuries, 15 Latin Church prevented from ex-
Knights of industry and plutocracy, tending its influence over Rus-
modem, 284 sia, 16
Knyazhnin, translator of tragedies, "Latinism," 19

193 Lavroff, Peter, political writer, 276;
KokorefF, T., folk-novelist, 228
I. a preacher of activity among the
KoltsofF, a poet from the people, 182 people, 277

Korolenko, novelist, sketch of, 302 Law of the Russian State and people,
Korsakoff, Rimsky, music of, 14 268
Kostomaroff, historian, 268 Lay of Igor's Raid, The, a twelfth
Kotoshikhin, historian, runs away century poem, 11
from Moscow to Sweden, 21; Lazhechnikoff, historical novelist, 64
writes a history of Russia, 21; Laziness, the poetry of, 155
advocates wide reforms, 21; his Legends of the saints widely read,
manuscripts discovered at Up-
sala, 21 Leroux, Pierre, mentioned, 224, 272
KozloiF, Russian poet, 61 LermontofF, Mikhail Yurievitch,
INDEX 331
sketch of his and works,
life new school of, 233; the duty
50-59 ; writes verses and poems of, 257
when a boy, 50; enters Moscow Lithuanian language, 4
University, 51 ; goes to a military Little-Russia, description of, 67, 68
school in St. Petersburg, 51; LomonosofF, historian, studies in
writes a popular poem on Moscow, 23; and at KiefF, 23;
Liberty and exiled to Siberia,
is sent to Germany and studied
52; transferred to the Caucasus, under Wolff, 23; returns to
52; plot of The Demon, 54; de- Russia, 23; writes a work on
scription of Mytsyri, 54; his Arctic exploration, 25
demonism or pessimism, 55; a Longfellow, William Wadsworth,
"humanist," 56; his love for references to, 3, 4, 186; his
Russia, 56; his dislike of war, Hiawatha mentioned, 4
57; death of, 57; The Captain s Love, discussion on, 127
Daughter described, 57, 58; plot
of his novel. The Hero of Our Maladministration in Russia, 274
Own Time, 58, 59; references Malo-Russian (Little-Russian) litera-
to, 4, 61, 63, 68, 84, 89, 112, ture, 318
172,173,176,295,319 Mamin, novelist, 304
LevitofF, folk-novelist, 240; his sad Mankind, repulsive types of, 168
life, 240-242 Markovitch, Mme. Marie, folk-
Liberty, culminating point in struggle novelist, 226
for, 304 Marriage and separation, questions
Life superior to Art, 290 of, 281
Life, the kaleidoscope of, 307 Marriage, accusation against, 147
the organisation of, 140 opinions upon, 127
the simplification of, 144 Marriages, complicated ceremony
Literary criticism, 285-299 of, 7
Literary language of Russia, 6 Matchtett, novelist, 304

Literary technique, 227 Maupassant, Guy de, mentioned,
Literature, a new vein in, 308; of 250,308
^
the Czechs, 4; of the Poles, 4; MaykofF, Af>ollon, poet of pure art
of the great Slavonian family, 4; for art's sake, 184
of the Great-Russians, 4; of the MaykofF, Valerian, critic, 224, 290
Little-Russians, 6; of the White- Mazepa, hetman, joins Charles XIL
Russians, 6; treasures of thii'- against Peter L, 36; flees to
teenth century Russian, 15; a Turkey, 36
new era for, 26; modem Russian Mazzini, Joseph, mentioned, 93
created, 43; Pushkin frees it Mediaeval literature of Russia, the,
from enslaving ties, 44; realism 15-19
of Russian, 46; introduction of Medizeval Russia, 32
the social element into, 85; true Melshin, L., folk-novelist, 249
founders of Russian literature, Merimee, Prosper, mentioned, 39
176; position of folk-novelists Merzhkovskiy, Dmitiy, poet and
in Russian literature, 221 ; a novelist, sketch of, 305
332 INDEX
Metaphysics, fogs of Gerrrfan, 268 Moscow, built up by aid of Mongol
Mey, L., poet and dramatist, 186 Khans, 16
Mihailoskiy, leading Russian critic, conflagration of, in 1812, 11
294 first
capital of Russia, 14 n.
Mihailovskiy, gifted Russian critic, serfdom introduced into, 16
131; extracts from his writings, becomes a centre for Church and
132 State, 16
Mikhail (the first RomanoflF) intro- the heir to Constantinople, 16
duces serfdom, 18 Poles capture, 18
MikhailofF, Mikhail, translator of first
printing oflice established in,
poems, 186 1.9.
MinayefF, poet, 174 revision of the Holy Books under-
MinayefF, D., writer of satirical taken at, 19
verses, 187 the slums of, 135
Ministerial circulars, system of, 264 Western habits of life introduced
Ministry of the Interior, Russian, into, 191
censorship of books and news- Moscow Church, criticism of digni-
papers by the, 263, 264 taries of, 17
Mir-eaters, 248 obtains a formidable power in
Misgovemment, evils of, 144 Russia, 19

Modem civilized life, analysis of, 'Moscow Fifty," trial of, 135, 136
284 Moscow Institute of the Friends
Moltke, Hellmuth Karl Bemhard, founded by NovikofF, 30
mentioned, 124 Moscow monarchy, consolidating
Monarchy, the virtues of, 32 the, 16
Monasteries, learning concentrated Moscow princes, unlimited authority
in, 17 of the, 16
Money-making middle class men, Moscow stage, the, 200-211
Moscow Theological Academy, 23
Mongol invasion of Russia, 15 Moscow tsars, authority of the, 268
Mongol Khans help to build up Murillo, Bartolome, mentioned, 90

Moscow, 16 "Muse of Vengeance and of Sad-
Mongols, tales from the, 7 ness, A," 174, 175
Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede, Muslin education, 294
mentioned, 26 "Muslin Girls," 294
Moore, Thomas, mentioned, 33, 187 Mystery plays, 191
Moral foundations of life, 129
Moral philosophy, construction of a, Nadezhdin, poet, 287
145 Nadson, poet, 304
Moral teachings of the prophets of Napoleon I. in Russia, 126
mankind, 140 horrorsof the retreat of, from
Morality, current rules of, 167 Moscow, 122
Moravian language, 4, 5 Napoleon III., coup d'etat of, 96
Morbid literature, 168 Napoleonic wars, effect of the, on
MordovtsefF, novelist, 304 Russian soldiers, 34
INDEX 333
Naryezhnyi, historical novelist, 64 Nicholas becomes emperor, 35;
I.,
Nation's life, the accidental and hangs some and exiles others of
temporary in the historical the Decembrists, 35
development of, 297 Nicholas the Villager, 8

Natural History of Selborne (White), Nihilism and Terrorism compared,
102
Naturalism and realism in France, Nihilist movement of 1858-64, 228
222 Nihilist, the, in Russian society, 102
Naturalism and realism, sound, 288 Nihilists, in art, 296
Nature, forces of, personified in true, 281
heroes, 9 Nikitich, Dobrynia, Knight, 8
Humboldt's poetical conception of, Nikitin, Russian poet, 182
25 Nikon, Patriarch, ambition of, 19
knowledge of "unholy," 17; Nineteenth century, first years of, in
severely condemned by the Russia, 31-34

Church, 17 Nobles, servility of the, 28
of NokikofF, first Russian
mythological representations philosopher,
forces of, 10 26
return to, 119 Nonconformist writings, 19
the highest poetry of, 299 Nonconformists, cruel persecution
the law of, 144 of, 18, 19
NaumoflF, folk-novelist, 248 Northern Caucasia, spoken language
NefedofF, folk-novelist, 249 of, 6
NekrasofF, Nicholas, poet, sketch of Northern Russia, spoken language
his life and works, 170-177; of, 6
editor of The Contemporary, Novgorod, annals of, 14
112; birth and ancestry of, 170; Novgorod republic, victories of the, 14
his black misery, 171; makes NovikofF, an apostle of renovation,
acquaintance with the lowest 28; his capacities for business
classes of St. Petersburg, 171; and organizing, 28; starts a suc-
death of, 171; his love of the cessful printing office in Mos-
peasant masses, 172; his inner cow, 28; his influence upon
force, 174; his pessimism, 174; educated society, 29; organises
his struggle against serfdom, relief for star\'ing peasants, 29;
174; his best poem, 175; his accused of political conspiracy,

poems to the exiles in Siberia 29; condemned to death, 29;
and the Russian women, 175; imprisoned in fortress of Schiis-
mentioned, 224, 226, 235, 298 selberg, 29; released by Paul I.,
Neptune, the Sea-God, 9 29; founds the* Moscow Insti-
Nestor^s Annals, 14 tute of Friends, 30
NetchaefF groups, the trial of,
135 Novodvorskiy, novelist, 304
"Neutral tint" types of real life, 233
Newspaper publishing, difficulties OblofFdom, laziness of mind and
of, in
Russia, 263, 264 heart, 159; not a racial disease,
Newton, Sir Isaac, mentioned, 25 161
334 INDEX
Odoevskiy, Prince Alexander, poet, Pestel, mentioned, 35
62 Peter 1., violent reforms of, 21; his-
Odyssey, the, mentioned, 33 torical significance of his re-
Oertel, prominent novelist, 300 ; forms, 21; realizes importance

sketch of, 300-302 of literature, 21 ; introduces
Ogaryoff, poet, 275 European learning to his coun-

Old Testament, books of, wide cir- trymen, 21; establishes a new
culation of, in Russia, 17 alphabet, 22; little interest in
Olonets, province of, bards of, 8 literature, 22; his love of the
Orenburg, Southern Urals, 176 drama, 192

Organ-grinders, miserable life of, in Peter III., coup </'//fl/ of Catherine II.
St. Petersburg, 224 against, 26
Osmanlis, rule of the, over Servia Petropavlovskiy, a poet of village
and Bulgaria, 15 life, 248
Ostrovskiy, Russian playwright and Philistine family happiness, 133
actor, sketch of, 202; description Philosophical Nihilist, a, 129
of his plays, 203; extracts from Philosophical thought, main currents
his drama of The Thunder stormy of, 266
205-210; his prolific work, 211; Philosophy of war, 123

mentioned, 223, 224, 229 PisarefF, literary critic, sketch of,
Overtaxation of peasants, 284 118,292,298,303
Ovid, mentioned, 24 Ksemskiy, A. Th,, folk-novelist, 216,
OzerofF, translator of plays, 193 228
Plescheefe, A., Russian f)oet, 174;
"
Paganism, return to, 17 arrested with the Petrashev-
Painters, Russian Society of, 223 skiy circles," 183; imprisoned.
Palm, A. I., dramatic writer, 217
PanaefF, Ivan, Russian novelist, 178 Poetical beauty of Russian sagas, 1 1
Paris, occupation of, by Russian Poetical love, higher enthusiasms of,
armies, 34 160
Parliamentary commissions in Eng- Poet, Russian, intellectual horizon
land, 267 of, 45
Patriarchal family, principles of the, Poets, the minor, of Russia, 62-64
267 Poland, Alexander I.
grants consri-
Peasant character and life, 225 tution to, 34
Peasant choir,music of the, 14 uprising of, in 1863, 274
Peasant proprietorship of land, 246 Polar Star, The, Herzen's review, 273
Peasant woman, the, apotheosis of Poles invade Russia and capture
the Russian, 175 Moscow, 18
Peasants, revolt of, 18 Poles, old literature of, 4
Peasantry, Russian, 225 Polevoy, P., historical writer, 295
Permians of the Urals, 235, 236 Polevoy, poet, 287
Persian language, 4 Polezhaeff, poet, 62, 63
Pesariff, Russian critic, 104 Polish landlords, exactions of, 72
Pestalozzi, reforms of, 121 Polish language, 4
INDEX 335
Political literature, 263-281 Provincial life in a Little-Russian
abroad, 270-278 village, 301
in Russia, restrictions imposed on, Pseudo-classicism, revolt against,
282 287
with art,mixture of, 243 Pskov, republic of, annals of, 14;
Political and moral education, school struggles between the poor and
of, 292 rich of, 14
Political parties, development of, 266 Psychical disease, specimens of in-
Political thought, channels for, 265 cipient, 169
first manifestation of, in Russia, 28 PugatchofF, leads peasant revolt
Polonskiy, Russian poet, 184 against Catherine II., 47; his-

Polotskiy, Simeon, a mystery play- tory of, by Lermontoff, 57
writer, 191 Punishments, Russian system of, 148
Polovtsi, raid on the, II Pushkin, Alexander, Russian poet,
Poltava, Charles XII., of Sweden, sketch of his life and works,
defeated at, 36 39-50; his lyrics familiar in
Pomyalovskiy, folk-novelist, 233; his England, 39; neglected inRus-

sketches from the life of clerical sia, 39; appreciated in France
schools, 233 and Germany, 39 his beauty ;
Pope, an Eastern, 19 of form, 40; his individuality

Popular song, development of the and vital intensity, 40; his birth
Russian, 23 and ancestry, 41; his perfect
Popularism, ludicrousness of, 305 mastership of the Russian lan-
"Populist" element in the Russian guage, 41; his knowledge of
novel, 304 folklore, 41 ; describes his shal-
Populists, the, 275 low life in Evgheniy Onyeghtriy
Potapenko, novelist, 307 41 ; exiled to KishmyofF, 42;

Potyekhin, A. A., comedy writer and joins the gypsies, 42; journeys
folk-novelist, 216, 228, 229 to the Crimea and the Cau-
Prairies, village life in the, 241 ; casus, 42; ordered to return to
charm of the South Russian, 241 Central Russia, 42; returns to
Press of Russia, muzzling of, 265 St. Petersburg and becomes
Priest's house in Central Russia, a, chamberlain to Nicholas I., 42;
232 marries, 42; fights a duel and is
Printing office established in Mos- killed, 42; his early producdons,
cow, 19 42, 43; his simplicity in verse,
Privileged classes, educational 43; frees literature from enslave-
theories in the. interest of, 130 ment, 44; his lyric love poems,
Procopovitch, priest and writer, 22; 45; called the Russian Byron,
founds the Greco-Slavonian 45; his Epicureanism, 46; his
Academy, 22 stupendous f)owers of poetical
Proletarians, massacre of the Paris, creation, 46; his dramas, 47; his
272 comprehension of human affairs,
Protestant rarionalism in Novgorod 47; his most popular work, 47;
and Pskov, 17 references to, 4, 6, 13, 24, 27,
33^ INDEX
3^ 36, 5^ 53. 54, 5^ 61, 63, Rigourism condemned, 305
67, 68, 6g, 79, 84, 85, 89, 103, Romantic school, influence of the, 72
112,172,173,176,195,265,287, French novelists of the, 64
288, 289, 293, 308, 319 Romantic sentimcntalism, 238
Pyeshkoff, A. (Maxim Gorkiy), 250. Romanticism, German, 48
See Gorkiy, Maxim. unbridled, 86
Pypin, A. N., ethnographical writer, Romanticism and pseudo-classical-
231 ism contend for possession of
the Russian stage, 195; triumph
Racine, Jean Baptiste, mentioned, 61 of romanticism, 195
Radicals, conceptions of advanced Rousseau, Jean Jacques, mentioned,
Russian, 114 119, 121, 130, 148
Radischeff, political writer, 26; re- Royal power, uninterrupted trans-
ceives his education in the mission of, 269
Corps of Pages, 30; his Journey Rurik, house of, 14
from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Russia, centres of development in, 14
30; transported to Siberia, 30; exploration of, 225, 230^232
commits suicide, 30 her firm hold of the Black Sea, 27
Ralston, English translator of Rus- begins to play a serious part in
sian sagas, II European affairs, 27
Rambaud, French historian, 1 1
independent republics of, 15
Razin, Stepan, terrific uprising of, 18 invasion of, by Turks, 15
Reaction, real geniuses of, 284; tri- main cities of South and Middle,
umphant, 285 laid waste by Mongols, 15
Realism, how put to service of unity of the spoken language of,

higher aims, 86 13
in art, 85 Russian administration, rottenness
in France, 86 of,283
in the Russian novel, 85 Russian annals, high literary value
of Balzac, 86 of, 15
of Russian literature, 46, 222 Russian Art, different currents in, 300
Realism and romanticism, mixture Russian Church, split in the, 19-21
of, 168 Russian diplomatists in Austria, 122
Realism, Shakesperian, 146 Russian drama, the, 191-217
Realist, the thoughtful, 303, 305 Russian dramatists, clumsy produc-
Realistic school introduced into Rus- tions of, 48
sia by Pushkin, 58 Russian epic heroes, Eastern origin
Religious deception, 140 of, 9
Religious propagandists, 248 Russian epics, mythological features

Renaissance, movement of, did not of heroes of, 10
reach Russia, 17 Russian folk-lore, 10
Republican federalism of old Russia, Russian functionaries, venal nature
return to, 35 of, 283
Rich classes, lust of, for wealth and Russian Geographical Society, 8
luxuty, 144 Russian Intellectuals, 304, 307;
INDEX 337
moral bankruptcy of, 310, 314, Sadko, personification of naviga-
tion, 9
Russian language, 3-36; richness of, St. George, 9
3; its
pliability for translation, St.
Petersburg Academy of Sciences,
3; musical character of the, 4; 23, 24
many words adopted
foreign St. Petersburg winter season, attrac-
in, 4 remarkable purity of,
;
tions of, 46
5; grammatical forms of, 5; Saint-Simonism, 271

roots of unchanged, 5; beauty of SaltikofF {nom-de-plume Schedrin),
structure of, 5; remarkably free satirist, 282
from patois, 6; unity of the Sand, George, mentioned, 229
spoken, 13; foundation of the Satire, a favourite means of express-
grammar of, 24; dictionary of, ing political thought, 282
compiled by Academy of Sci- Satire, writers of, 282-285
ences, 26; melodiousness of, 53 Saying about Igor's Raid, extracts
Russian literature, a new era in, 283 from, 12
Russian novel, change in the, 303 Scandinavo-Saxon language, 4
Russian philosophical language, 31 Scheller {nom-de-plume A. Mik-
Russian sagas, 10 hailofF), novelist, 304
Russian society, influence of ScherbatofF, Prince, collector of
Tchemyshevskiy's novels upon, annals and folk-lore, writes a
281 history of Russia, 28
intellectual portion of, 314 Scherbina, N., anthological poet, 184
Russian theatre in the first years of Schiller, Johann Christoph, refer-
the nineteenth century, 194, 195 ences to, 4, 33, 40, 51, 56, 103,
Russian verse, old, 22 185, 276, 288
Russian versification, rhythmical Schopenhauer, Arthur, mentioned,
form of, 13 54, 134, 13s. 255 .
Russian women, higher education of, Scott, Sir Walter, mentioned, 61, 195
Sebastopol, Tolstoy's sketches of
Russian youth, development of, 293 siege of, 1 12, 113
Russians, traditions, tales, and folk- Secret societies begin to be formed in
songs of, 7 Russia, 34

Rustem of Persia, legends of, 8 Self-love, rational, 142
Ryepin's picture of Tolstoy behind Serbian language, 4
the plough, 137 Serfdom, abolition of, 224
Ryeshetnikoff, folk-novelist, 234; atrocities of, 94
description of his novels, 236- energetic protest against, 288
240; literary defects of his works, evils of, 222
^237 .
growth of, 269
Ryleeff, literary representative of the horrors of, 28, 224, 230
Decembrists, 35, 36; his ballads introduced into Moscow, 16
circulate in Russia in manu- introduction of, into Russia, 18
script, 36; powerful poetical literary movement against, 84
gift of, 36 Serfs, general feeling in favour of, 226

33^ INDEX
Serfs of the Church, 19 Socialistic movement in Russia, 163
Serfs sold like slaves, 79 Society, agitated Russian, 281
Servia falls under the rule of the Society and Court scandals, 265
Osmanhs, 15 "Society" divorce cases in Russia,
Shahovskoy, Prince, a writer for the 127
Russian stage, 195 Society, looseness of habits in Rus-
Shakespeare, William, references to, sian, 28
4, 47, 51, 52, 126, 195, 201 n.y Society of Friends, assist Freemasons
215, 288 in spreading moral education, 28
Shakespearian fatalism, 238 Society of Friends of Russian litera-

Shapir, Olga, novelist, 304 ture, 296
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, references to, Society, Russian educated, 232
4, 51. 53. 172, 186 Society, the rebel against, 254
Shenshin, A. {nom-de-plume A. Fet), Solidarity, germs of a realistic phi-
Russian poet, 185 losophy of, 104
Shevchenko, poet, 63 Solovioff, N., playwright, 217
Shevtchenko, Little-Russian poet, Solovioff, v., philosopher, 270
224 Song-collectors, 231
Short story, the, and its ways of Song of the Ntbelungs, II
dealing with human life, 316 Song of Roland, II
Siberia, spoken language of, 6 Songs, burial, 7; antique, 7
Siberian forests, life in the depths of, South Russian annals, 14
222 South Slavonian language, high de-
Skabitchevskiy, critic and historian, gree of perfection of, 5; remark-
172,295 able beauty of, 5
Slavery, abolition of modern, 146 South Slavonians, folk-songs of, 4

Slavonian family of languages, 4 mixture of, with Turkish and
Slavonian mythology, old, 9 Polish blood in Little-Russia, 68
Slavonic archaisms, 25 Southeastern Steppes, Tartar en-
Slavonic mythology, early, 10 campments in the, 16
Slavophiles, 266-270; fanatics of Southern Russia, spoken language

absolute rule, 268, 272 of, 6
Slum-life, pictures of, 168 Spencer, Herbert, mentioned, 265

Smirnoff, Madame O. A. (nee Ros- deep sensation of, in Russia, 294
sett), pietist, Gogol falls under Stanukovitch, novelist, 304
her influence, 83 Stasoff, V. v., his theory of epic
Smimova, Sophie, novelist, 304 songs of Slavonic mythology, 9
Smith, Adam, mentioned, 277 State religions in the interest of the
Smolensk, captured by Poles, 18 ruling classes, 142
Social evils, the main cause of, 144 Stepniak, political writer, 278
Social ideas, unsettled condition of, Sterne, Laurence, mentioned, 30
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, mentioned,
.305
Socialism, economic principles of, 224, 226
146 Sukhovo-Kobylin, playwright, 215,
Socialist revival in France, 224 216
INDEX 339
SumarokofF, historian, the Russian at Moscow, 22; travels to Am-
Racine, 25; wrote dramas and sterdam and Paris, 22; studies at
contributed to the development the Paris University, 22; his
of the Russian theatre, 25; helps services to Russian f>oetry, 22
to develop the Russian drama, Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in
193 America, censored in Russia, 97
Suzdal, Land of, 14 Tolstoy, Count Alexei Konstantino-
Swaggerers, collection of, 178 vitch, f>oet, historical novelist,
and playwright, 185, 214, 215;
Tales, Russian, 7 becomes Head of the Imperial
Tartars, raids of, into Russia, 16 Hunt, 215
Tasso, Torquato, mentioned, 61 Tolstoy, LyofF Nicolaievich, sketch
TatischefF, historian, superintendent of his life and works, 1 10-148;
of mines in the Urals, 23; wrote his contributions to The Contem-
a number of political works, 23; porary, 110; birth and ancestry
collects and systematises the of, m;
loses his father and
Annals, 23 mother when young, in; edu-

Tchaykovsky, musician, music of, cated by relatives, in; enters
13; composes an opera from military service in the Caucasus,
Pushkin's Evghemy Onyeghin, 112; his life during and after the
47; plot of the opera, 48-50 Crimean War, 112-115; takes
TchehofF, Anton, dramatic writer, part in the siege of Silistria and
217 the battle of Balaklava, 112;
TchehofF (pseudonym Tcheonte), besieged in Sebastopol, ii2;
novelist, sketch of, 308-317 goes to St. Petersburg, n3; be-
Tchemyshevskiy, Nicolai, political comes acquainted with Turgue-
writer, 279; his birth and ances- nefF, 113; co-edits The Bell, 113;
try, 279; contributes to The in search of an ideal, 115-118;

Contemporary, 279; arrested and his artistic power, 117; his
confined, 280; his influence on descriptive talent, 117; his small

Russian Society, 281; exiled to stories, II 8-1 21; his educational
Siberia, 281; returns to Russia work, I20-I2i;.his marriage,
and settles in Astrakhan, 281; 121; family traditions,122;
his death, 281; referred 10,290, sketch of his JVar and Peace,
291, 293, 296, 297, 298, 314 125; of his Anna Karenina, 126,
I. E., actor and
Tchemyshofe, play- 127; his honest artistic genius,
1 28 his religious crisis, 1 29-1 38 ;
wright, 217 ;
Tennyson, Sir Alfred, mentioned, his views on property and labor,
173, 174, 186 130; his dislike of the Russian

Terrorism and Nihilism compared, Government, 131 his thoughts
;
102 on suicide, 134; his love of the

Thackeray, William Makepeace, peasant masses, 134; his idea of
mentioned, 178 earning his own living, 135;
Thought, advanced European, 267 reforms his life, 137; his plain
Tkretiaovskiy, son of a priest, studies food, 137; philosophical reasons
340 INDEX
for his conduct, 137; bis inter- movement, 107; his death in
pretation of the Christian teach- Paris, 109; references to, 4, 6,
ing, 138-142; his influence, 148; 31. 39. 46, 50. 52, 58, 84, 85,
references to, 4, 6, 35, 58, 151, 110,118,151,152, 157,169,171,
152, 169, 201, 202, 223, 228, 229, 175. ^77> 179. 180, 201, 202, 212,
250, 278, 281, 296, 297, 298, 300, 215, 223, 225, 226, 228, 239, 247,
308, 319 252, 253, 258, 265, 267, 269, 272,
Tolstoy, Nicholas, dies of consump- 274, 275, 281, 291, 293, 295, 300,
tion, 120 302,303,304,308,314,315
Tolstoya, Countess A. A., 1 21 Turkish War of 1877, 124
Tolstoyism, 305 Turks, tales from the, 7
Tramps and thieves, idyll of, 303 TyutchefF, Th., Russian poet, 183
Tramps and outcasts of Russian
large cities, 242 Uhland, Ludwig, mentioned, 33
Tramps, Gorkiy's species of, 255 Ultramontanes, Orthodox, 270
Tramps of Southern Russia, 252 Ultra-realistic school of Russian folk-
Transbaikalian folk-lore, 10 novelists, 234
Tsar, absolute power of the, 267 Universal religion, elements of a, 144,
Tsar's authority, divine origin of, 18
Turanian language, 5 Universal understanding, criterion
TurguenefF, Nicholas, political writer, 298

of,
277; memberof the Decembrists, Universal welfare, a desire for, 141
277 Upper classes, superstitions of the,

TurguenefF, Ivan Sergeyevich, last 146
message of, to Russian writers, Ural-Altayan language, 4
3; sketch of his life and works, Uspensky, Gleb, folk-novelist, artis-
89-109; the greatest novel writer tic descriptions of, 222; his
of his century, 89; his high sense ethnographic sketches, 243; his
of the beautiful, 89; his novels a views on ownership of land, 246
succession of scenes, 91 ; the
qualities of a pessimist and lover Varingiar, the Scandinavian, 32
of mankind combined in him, Vaudeville on the Russian stage,
93; extract from his Correspond- 195
ence, 95, 96; his pessimism, 96; VcnevitinofF, poet, 62, 287
threatened with being sent to Vengeance, question of, 128
Siberia, 96; a sketch of his VcnguerofF, S., gifted Russian critic,
Rudin, 97, 98; extracts from, 104, 172; author of biographical
98, 99; his most artistic work, A dictionary of Russian authors,
Nobleman's Retreat, lOO; his 172
life-picture of a Russian girl, Vereschagin, Vasili, Russian painter,
100; extracts from his Fathers 124
and Sons, and Hamlet and Don Versification, forms of, 173
Quixote, 105, 106; his attitude laws of rhythmical, 23
towards BazarofF, 106, 107; Verstovskiy's Askold's Grave (opera),
wreck of his hopes in reform 13
INDEX 341
Village-community, future of the, 222 from the Earliest Period to the
Village communities, idyllic illusions Present Time, 12 n.
about, 245; drawbacks of, 247 Wine and women, an inspiration for
Village life, foundations of, 244 producing poetry, 287
dark sides of, 224 Wizin, Von (Fonvizin), writer of
Village life and humour, 69 comedies, 26; The Brigadier,
Village people, typical, 222 27; Nedorosl, 27; creator of the
Virgil,mentioned, 24 Russian national drama, 27; his
Vladimir, the Fair Sun, KiefF Prince, realistic tendency, 27; Secretary
table of, 8 to Count Panin, 27, 194
Voinarsoky, Russian patriot, exiled Wolfi^, Christian, natural philoso-
to Siberia, 36 pher, 23
Volhynian annals, 14 Women, energy of Russian, 304
Volkhonskaya, Princess, Tolstoy's slavery of, 290
mother, in Women in Russian revolutionary
Voltaire, Francois, sarcasm of, 4; movements, 109
mentioned, 193 Women, their part in the develop-
Vorontsova-Dashkova, Princess, aids ment of Russia, 33
Catherine II. in her coup-d'etat, Women's rights, fighters for, 304
26; nominated President of the Wordsworth, William, mentioned,
Academy of Sciences, 26; assists 44,186
in compiling a Russian diction-
ary, 26 Yaroslavni, lamentations of, 12

Vovtchok, Marko, folk-novelist, 226 Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate,
Vvedenskiy, prose translator, 187 III, 113, 116, 130

YazykofF, poet, 62
Wagner's operas, librettos of, 296 Young men, reckless heartlessness
War correspondents, 124 of, 310
Weinberg, P., translator of poems, 186 Young Russia, 136
Welfare of man, the greatest, 141 revival of, 10 1
West Siberian villages, life in, 248 Yushkova, P. I., Tolstoy's aunt, in
Western civilization, Russia looked
to, for inspiration, 119 Zabyelin, historian, 268
Western Europe, languages of, 3 Zagoskin, historical novelist, 64
mediaeval city-republics of, 15 Zasodimskiy, folk-novelist, 248
struggles for freedom in, 97, 272 Zasulitch, Vera, trial of, 135
Russia's great conflict with, 122 Zemstvo Statisticians, 231
influence of, on Russian art, 305 Zhukovskiy, romantic poet, 32;
Western influences, struggle against translates works of European
intrusion of, in Russia, 16 poets and the classics, 33; his
Westerners, 266, 269, 270 ultraromanticism, 33; his ap-
White-Russian literature, 6 peal to human nature, 33
Wiener, Leo, great knowledge of Zlatovratskiy, folk-novelist, 246
Russian literature, 12 n.; An- Zola, ^mile, realism in first writings
thology of Russian Literature of, 85; mentioned, 222, 238, 314
( LIBRARY o
j
nrr n C onnc

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IDEALS AND REALITIES

NEW YORK - ALFRED A KNOPF - 1919

nUMTED IN THE XmiTED STATES OF AMERICA

eighty volumes of the admirable Russian Encyclopadic Dic-

The Russian Language Early folk literature: Folklore

IV. and Kurbskiy Religious splitting Avvakum's Me-

The times of Catherine II: Derzhavin Von Wizin The

Chapter II: Pushkin; Lermontoff . .

Chapter III : Gogol .67

Chapter IV: Turgu^neff; ToLSTdv ...

Chapter V: Gontcharoff; Dostoyevskiy; Nek-

Chapter VI: The Drama 191

Chapter VII: Folk-Novelists . . . .221

Political Literature Difficulties of censorship The

The Contemporary and Tchernyshevskiy Satire: Sche-

Bibliographical Notes 319

Introduction: The Russian Language

THE Russian Language Early folk literature: Folk-lore

of the last messages which Turgueneff addressed

implore them to keep in its purity

who knew in perfection most of the languages spoken in

terse sentences of the best English writers offer no difficulty

L^rmontoff, Turgueneff and Tolstoy.

Norwegian and Danish are separate from Swedish, or as

fully rich and full of the deepest interest. No nation of

may read them in Grimm's collection of fairy tales; but

ing; but some five-and-thirty years ago a few of them were

Hilferding had brought to the capital, and who sang before

as Scandinavian heroes would do; their actions, especially

ance of a rare poetical beauty, which has been fully

This poem was composed at the end of the twelfth cen-

It resounds at the rise of the sunlight.

strong? Why on thy light wings the arrows of the

This little fragment gives some idea of the general charac-

purely Russian melodies at once catch the ear of the least

of Novgorod bear the stamp of a city of rich merchants they :

are very matter-of-fact, and the annalist warms to his sub-

nationality, free from all intellectual and moral contact with

popular songs with a deep note of sadness which they have

sidered it a return to paganism, and cruelly exterminated its

centuries, because it offers very little interest for the student

Demetrius, who proclaimed himself a son of John, came

followed culminating in the terrific uprismg of Stepan

SPLIT IN THE CHURCH MEMOIRS OF AVVAkOm

mountains.' It was hard to do. Mountains high, forests impenetrable,

I am Awakum, a priest, what dost thou want from me ? And he

Later on Awakum was taken to the Amur, and when he

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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

style of his letters, free of the Slavonic archaisms, which were

With Catherine II., who

1792) the first philosopher, Novikoff (1742-18 18) ; and

a political writer, Radischeff (1749-1802).

upon the masonic movement which took place on the

THE FREEMASONS: FIRST MANIFESTATION OF POLITICAL

mystical Christians and the freemasons (some of whose