«w ill Jm hsms mmm ■■.■.'■■■'■■ m ■■•:■':' The Library of Literary History *{re iSbrarjj ai JjRteratB Pbtnrg 1. A LITERARY HISTORY OF INDIA. By R. W. Frazer, LL.B. 2. A LITERARY HISTORY OF IRELAND. By Douglas Hyde, LL.D. 3. A LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA. By Barrett Wendell. 4. A LITERARY HISTORY OF PERSIA. From the Earliest Times until Firdawsi. By Edward G. Browne, M.A. 5. A LITERARY HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By J. H. Millar, LL.B. 6. A LITERARY HISTORY OF PERSIA. From Firdawsi until Sa'di. By Edward G. Browne, M.A. 7. A LITERARY HISTORY OF FRANCE. By Emile Faguet. 8. A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE ARABS. By Reynold A. Nicholson, M.A. 9. A LITERARY HISTORY OF RUSSIA. By A. Brückner. Other Volumes in Preparation. A LITERARY HISTORY OF ROME. By J. Wight Duff, M.A. A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE JEWS. By Israel Abrahams, M.A. etc. etc. etc. THE LIBRARY OF LITERARY HISTORY A Literary History of Russia S. LUKE. From the Gospels written for Ostromir. Governor of Novgorod, A.D. 1056-7 — the oldest Russo-Slavonic M.S. The style is purely Byzantine. The inscrip- tions mean : " S. Luke." " Under this form of a calf the Holy Ghost appeared to Luke. " (37 natural size.) A Literary History of Russia By A. Brückner M Professor of Slavonic Languages and Literature in the University of Berlin Edited by Ellis H. Minns, M.A. Late Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge Translated by H. Havelock, M.A. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons London : T. Fisher Unwin 1908 i 2D£S7> (All rights reserved.) Table of Contents PAGE INTRODUCTION ...... XÜi TRANSLITERATION OF RUSSIAN WORDS . . . xix CHAPTER I EARLY PERIOD . . . . . .1 Country and people — Founding of the State and the Church — Old Russian life : its period of prosperity in the eleventh and twelfth, its decay in the following, centuries — State of culture and society — The sixteenth century : assimilation of the material progress of Europe — Lack of mental culture. CHAPTER II THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . . .36 Premature reform movement under Demetrius — Stubbornness of the Moscow reaction — The Russian schism — Polish influence and Kiev intervention — Schools and literature, the printed and the written — Direct influence of the West — Close of the Russian Middle Age, and summary. CHAPTER III " TRANSFORMED " RUSSIA . . . . . 60 Peter's work of reform and its importance externally — Influence on literature — His clerical allies ; Theophan Prokopovich, viii CONTENTS Pososhkov — The second third of the century — Rise of a secular literature — Its French tendency — Kantemir, Trediakovsky and Sumarökov — Its German tendency — Tatishchev and Lomonosov, with the services of the latter to science and the language. CHAPTER IV CATHERINE II. AND HER TIME . . . . QO The personality of the dilettante Empress, her comedies — Two literary currents, the French with pure reason (von Vizin, satires and fables), the German with mystical and sentimental trends — The Freemasons : Novikov, Radishchev, Karamzin — Complete change of spirit — Persecution of all liberal thought. CHAPTER V THE AGE OF ALEXANDER I. .... 139 The new ruler — Digging up of Catherine's mummies —Their battle against the modern tendency — Shishkov and Karamzin — Batyushkov — St. Petersburg literature — Ryleev and Griboedov — The Muscovites, Karamzin the historian : Zhukovsky the translator — Russia's classical studies — Narezhny and his novels. CHAPTER VI PUSHKIN . . . . . . .178 His youth — His schoolboy verses — As an Anacreontist and epigrammatist — His banishment — As a Byronist —His epic and dramatic poetry — Result of December 14th — As a prose-writer and lyric poet — His relations with the public and the critics — Death of the poet— His place in literature. CHAPTER VII g THE ROMANTIC POETS . . . . .211 The Pushkin Pleiad : Delvig, Yazykov, Baratynsky, Venevitinov, Kozlov, Podolinsky, Polezhaev — Lermontov, his youth, and out- side influences — Social themes — Pessimism — Poetical Romances — Dramas — His position — Koltsov and the Folk-song. CONTENTS ix CHAPTER VIII PAGE THE NOVEL AND GOGOL ..... 237 The satirical and historical novel of Bulgarin and Zagoskin, Marlinsky and Polevoy— Comedy— Restricting influence of the Censorship— Gogol, his youthful works— The divine laughter of the "Revizor" and "Dead Souls "— Gogol's turn towards religion — The verdicts of his contemporaries. CHAPTER IX ROMANTIC CRITICISM — BELl'NSKY .... 267 Previous condition of criticism— Its appearance since 1820— The Romanticist critics, Venevitinov, Bestuzhev, Vyäzemsky, Polevoy, Nadezhdin — The debut of Belinsky — His aesthetic and philo- sophical, his journalistic criticism — His influence — Reaction grows stronger — Persecutions of ideas and men — The Petrashevtsy. CHAPTER X SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS. ALEXANDER HERZEN . 288 First appearance of the Slavophiles — Transfer of a philological style to a political party — Mental disagreement — Westernisers with and without Catholic leanings — Chaadaev, Kireevsky — The religious, political, and social creed of the Slavophiles — The Westernisers at Moscow — Herzen — His youth — First appearance of Iskander — His novel — His expatriation — Activity abroad, and return to Russian activity — His memoirs — Other memoir- writers of the time — Aksäkov's family chronicle. CHAPTER XI MODERN TIMES (1855-I905). CRITICISM . . . 312 On the eve of reform — Influence of Herzen, journalist and author — Reforms : standstill in the same — Reaction : enhancing of the same up to the White Terror — Influence of criticism in the fifties and sixties, of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolübov and Pisarev — The organic criticism of Grigoriev and Strakhov — The aesthetic and idealistic criticism of Volynsky and Merezhkovsky — Some ex- positions of the History of Literature. x CONTENTS CHAPTER XII PAGE THE NOVEL. TURGENEV AND GONCHAROV . . 338 The Turgenevs — Ivan Sergeevich as a poet, as the author of the "Annals of a Sportsman" — His foreignness — Appreciation of the author — His various works: "Rüdin," "A Nest of Gentlefolk," " On the Eve," " Fathers and Sons " — Controversy concerning the novel : What was planned and what attained ? — Fiasco of the succeeding novels, especially of " Virgin Soil " — Close con- tact with Goncharov in the choice of subjects and heroes — Goncharov's trilogy of the men of the forties : " An Ordinary Story," "Oblomov," "The Landslip." CHAPTER XIII TOLSTOY ....... 364 Apparent contradictions and "crises" in his evolution: its directness and logicalness — His work and autobiography — His youthful writings : " War and Peace," " Anna Karenina " — Abandons his purely literary activity — Theological controversy : " Confessions " — Popular literature : "The Power of Darkness " — Separate short stories : " The Kreuzer Sonata," &c. — " Resur- rection" — Tolstoy's moral position more important than his " teaching " — The realist and opponent of all mysticism. CHAPTER XIV DOSTOEVSKY ...... 39O The Mystic and Prophet in contrast to the great Realists — His first productions give no promise of future development — Alteration in his tendency after the "Dead House" and especially since "Crime and Punishment" — "The Idiot" — "The Devils " — "The Brothers Karamazov" — His peculiar note and significance : the disturbing quality of his productions ; his orthodox bias. CHAPTER XV MEN OF LETTERS OF THE SECOND RANK . . . 417 Other men of letters of the " forties," Grigorövich and Pisemsky — The novel with a purpose — Radical and Conservative — The men of letters of the sixties and seventies — The " Narodniki," Reshetnikov, Levitov, Uspensky, and Zlatovratsky — Pomyalovsky — Modern belles lettrcs as represented by Boborykin or Dan- chenko — The historical novel — Modern women writers. CONTENTS xi CHAPTER XVI PAGE SATIRE. SALTYKOV ...... 452 The satire of the sixties — Saltykov's first attempts, "Sketches from the Provinces" — How his voice has become the chorus of contemporary Russian tragedies — His enforced silence and taking refuge in pure literature — Separate works — " The history of Glüpov" — "From the domain of moderation and exactness" — "Contemporary Idylls" — The "Old Days of Poshekhonia" — The ".Messrs. Golovlov " — Significance of his satire. CHAPTER XVII THE DRAMA ....... 476 Ostrovsky and his plays from the " Realm of Darkness " — His " reforming " plays — Desertion of the stage and composing of historical plays — Return to the modern stage without further decisive successes — His school — Other playwrights — Potekhin — Historical drama — Tolstoy and Averkiev — The modern stage. CHAPTER XVIII LYRIC POETS ...... 498 Voicelessness of poetry, especially in the sixties and seventies — Poets of pure art : Tyutchev, Maikov, Foeth, Polonsky — Poets with a Purpose : Nekräsov — Poets of the People : Nikitin, Surikov — Recent pessimistic poets: Nadson — Lyric poets and decadents of recent years. CHAPTER XIX THE WRITERS OF SHORT STORIES .... 525 Exhaustion of literature — Prevalence of smaller forms, especially the short story and the sketch — Retirement of the " Narödniki " — Pessimistic tale-writers, like Garshin — Korolenko and Potäpenko — Chekhov and Gorky — Andreev — Conclusion. INDEX ....... 547 Introduction Western Europe has hitherto lacked any satisfactory account of Russian literature as a whole : there have not been want- ing brilliant studies of single writers ; much has been written upon Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and especially upon Tolstoy, and isolated chapters upon most of the other well-known authors, but the development which led up to these, the environment which produced them and the lesser writers whose work throws light upon theirs, has remained obscure. What should have enabled a country which every one had regarded as not less behindhand in literature than in the other adornments of civilisation, suddenly to produce a series of writers who antici- pated a point of view to which the foremost literatures of Europe were gradually working their way (for Gogol was the first realist), has been hidden from all but the few who have made a serious study, not merely of Russian literature during the last sixty years, but of the whole psychological evolution which the Russian people went through under their political and social conditions. Of the few who had studied this in the country itself and had entered into the spiritual life of a people that differs in so many ways from the Western Europeans, none seems to have been capable of playing the interpreter. It is perhaps natural that, when found, the interpreter should prove to be a Pole, a hereditary member of the European world, yet as a Slav capable of entering into the minds of fellow-Slavs. His interpretation was addressed in the first place to Germans, xüi xiv INTRODUCTION but is sufficient for any Western Europeans. For as against Russia Western Europe is one, and there is no hope of as complete a revelation made to Englishmen direct. For a Pole, however, it is difficult to be quite fair to the Old Russia with which Old Poland carried on a life and death struggle for so many centuries ; especially is it hard for him to do justice to the Church with its Byzantine traditions. The opposition of Old and New Rome has, as our author says, been fatal to the Slavs, who had to take sides in a quarrel which was not of their making ; but take sides they did, and though a Pole may not love Rome he will scarcely have any sympathy with Byzance or anything that springs therefrom. Hence the hostile view of Cyril and Methodius which here he hints at, and sets out at length in an article {Archiv für Slavische Philologie, xxviii., 1906, p. 186, sqq.) in which he makes the two missionaries to have had nothing less at heart than the good of the Slavs to whom they gave their lives, and among whom their work is still held in high veneration. Hence, too, he hurries through the whole early period, under-estimating what intellectual movements there were (Russia had its heretics even in the fourteenth century, and heresy must mean some independent thought), and all along fails to bring out the good side of the Church, which, in spite of its Byzantine origin and traditions, became a national institution and stood for the unity of the nation when the State had fallen into fragments, thereby keep- ing it alive through the long night of the Tartar domination, and again through the scarcely less danger of the troublous times when the Poles were the chief enemies : the pressure of the Church and the autocracy was then necessary to stiffen the national resistance. However, the mediaeval literature is, perhaps, not what the general reader requires, yet he mig have been interested in a fuller presentment of the songs Old Russia, but these are so accessible to the English read in Mr. Ralston's and Miss Hapgood's translations, that it h not been thought well to lengthen the book by adding a fuller treatment of them. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the anticipations of coming reform are well brought out, bi INTRODUCTION xv again we miss a sympathetic appreciation of the picturesque side of Old Russian life — the strange literature, craftsmanship, and costume, which formed an artistic whole, though under- lying this appearance there was no doubt a reality of mental and physical servitude. The portrait of Peter the Great is excellent ; we are shown how small a change of principle there was between the orthodox Ivan the Terrible and the introducer of all manner of unhallowed Western novelties. It is difficult for a foreigner to be attracted by the Russian literature of the eighteenth century. It produced scarcely anything readable ; the struggle to bend to a literary purpose a language, not merely uncultivated, but deformed both by the archaic dialect of the Church and by the mixed jargon of the Petrine translations, is not to be appreciated by the outsider, and a series of clumsy imitations of outworn pseudo-classical models can scarcely have for us even an historical interest. What there is the author has well set forth. The same holds good of the first quarter of the last century. Even the school of Pushkin has not much to say to us. The Russian finds in Pushkin what we find in our great poets, but when we come to him there is little new for us ; yet even a foreigner can feel the wonderful melody of his verse to which no translation can do justice. Our author traces admirably the reaction of politics upon letters from the time of Gogol to that of Gorky ; he gives by far the best picture of the growth of Russian literature extant, showing the causes it served (Russian books have always served a cause, if only that of "Art for Art's sake"), its prominent personalities, the lesser figures that surrounded them, and the background upon which they stood out. It remains to be seen whether the English reader, to whom things Russian are so unfamiliar, and who has such meagre translations at his dis- posal, can be made to care about the biting satire of Saltykov, whose name he has never heard, or even about Gogol, to say nothing of Goncharov, Nekrasov, the writers who de- scribed peasant life, Ostrovsky the playwright, and Chekhov, whose stories have been so strangely overlooked by the translators, xvi INTRODUCTION So the narrative has been brought down to the beginning of the revolutionary period. For the last three years a confusion has reigned in literature, which, while a faithful mirror of the confusion reigning throughout the country, has not been reduced to order in the least : we cannot see what are the true lines of movement, and it has been thought best to abstain from any attempt to bring the last chapter absolutely up to date. The Editor is responsible for the verse translations, which have in every case been made direct from the Russian ; while more conscious of their shortcomings than any one else can be, he felt that in dealing with poetical quotations the author's prose scarcely put the reader into the frame of mind to judge of poetical thought, so that some kind of metrical rendering was desirable. The original measure has been followed as far as possible, but it was beyond him to reproduce the rhymes and double rhymes which the structure of Russian makes com- paratively easy. The Translator has endeavoured to give the sense of his original as exactly as possible, and this has, perhaps, caused him to keep somewhat closely to its sentences at the risk of making his own style heavy, but it is too much to hope that a transla- tion from the German shall not betray itself. The names of the Russian authors have been transliterated on a fairly consistent system according to the annexed table, which the reader is earnestly requested to study ; at the risk of leaving certain nuances unexpressed, an attempt has been made to render the Russian sounds with as small an aggregation of letters as possible. On the other hand, every name has, at the cost of much labour, been accented, and if the reader will lay sufficient stress upon the accented syllable the others will not much matter. A few references have been made in the occasional notes, but on the whole the Editor has followed the author in not encumbering the pages of a popular book with indications of the sources of every statement. Something has been done to guide the reader to translations of the books dealt with ; more in this way may be found in Professor L. Wiener's " Anthology of Russian Literature" (Putnam's), which gives specimens of INTRODUCTION xvii most of the authors mentioned. But translations are never satisfactory, and the Editor hopes that many may be tempted to learn for themselves a language whose difficulty has been much exaggerated and whose richness and beauty are worthy of the literature which in it has found expression. E. H. M. DIRECTIONS FOR PRONOUNCING RUSSIAN NAMES AS TRANSLITERATED IN THIS BOOK. Pronounce b, d, f, k, m, n, p, t as in English. a, as in father ; ai as in Italian mai= Eng. my. ch, as in church. e, at the beginning of all but a few foreign words, as ye in yet, or ya in Yale ; after a consonant the y is less distinct but is always present except after sh, ch, zh, and is. e, a special letter whose sound is identical with that of e, ey as yea. Accented e is sometimes pronounced yo, o, but e never, g, always hard as in gate. i, as in machine. kh, as Scotch or German ch in loch, ach. 1, " hard," between / and w, as in people : " soft," between / and y, as in Fr. ville. o, accented open as oa in broad ; unaccented as a in balloon, r, strongly trilled, when soft between r and y, but not like ry. s, always as s in size, case, never as in cheese. sh, as in shut ; shch as in Ashchurch. u, as in rule, rarely as in tube, v, as in English, at the end of words like/, y, English usage has necessitated an inconsistent employment of y. As a vowel it has been used to denote a peculiar sound between i and u, not unlike its value in rhythm ; immediately after a labial the u element can be clearly heard. As a consonant it has been used to denote its sound in year, Goodyer, boy. When combinations such as iy or yy would logically have resulted, y alone has been written as this gives the sound fairly well. z, as in English {not = ts). zh = Fr. j, Eng. z in azure or si in vision. Consonants before a, o, u, vowel y are mostly pronounced " hard," i.e., more or less as in English ; before i, e, and consonant y, " soft " —that is, run together with a y sound, but this must not be overdone. Names derived from foreign words have been allowed to retain the foreign or familiar spelling. The accented syllable is very strongly brought out, the others rather slurred over. Literary History of Russia CHAPTER I EARLY PERIOD Country and people — Founding of the State and the Church — Old Russian life : its period of prosperity in the eleventh and twelfth, its decay in the following, centuries — State of culture and society — The sixteenth century : assimilation of the material progress of Europe — Lack of mental culture. The history of Russian Literature must claim full attention in a special degree. Not by its age, for it is the youngest of the great literatures ; not by its perfection, for it often foregoes aesthetic effects ; but certainly by its peculiar character, the high humanity of its content, its naturalness and sincerity, its soaring idealism, the depth and pathos of its effects, and lastly the significance it claims in the mental life of the nation. To Englishmen or Frenchmen, Germans or Italians, polite litera- ture is only one form for the expression of national feeling and thought : to the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without the liberty of assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion, literature became the last refuge of his freedom of thought, the only means of propagating higher ideas. He expected and demanded of his country's literature not merely aesthetic recreation : he placed it at the service of everything noble and good, of his aspirations, of the enlighten- ing and emancipation of the spirit. Hence the striking 2 l 2 EARLY PERIOD partiality, nay unfairness, displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own literature where they did not answer to the aims or the expectations of their party or their day. A purely aesthetic handling of the subject would not gain it full acceptance. The historic treatment is indispensable owing to the peculiar nature of our subject, a peculiarity which has its root in Russian soil, in the temperament of the people, in the external, alien influences which totally transformed national feeling. A knowledge of the conditions under which the modern Russian spirit has developed is an indispensable preliminary to a just appreciation of its literature, the fullest and most unrestrained expression of that society. The action of these conditions reaches back into the farthest past, extends over centuries during which there is no sort of literature, nay, not even any substitute for such, and which, nevertheless, the literary historian cannot pass over if he does not want to find himself in the nineteenth century face to face with riddles he cannot solve. But as a knowledge of Russian progress — it is not now a question of any names or dates — cannot be taken for granted as possessed by the average reader, the salient points of this progress must first be indicated. About the Russian of to-day there is much that is alien, beginning with his alphabet, originally designed for another language and not Russian, and ending with the name of his country in its double form, the popular Rus (Chaucer's Ruce) and the official and antiquated Rossiya or Ross. Once every- thing was quite different. In the ancient home of the Slavs between the Oder and the Don, from the Carpathians to the Valdai and the Baltic, were settled in the eastern portion of it, from the Bugh and the San on, numerous small tribes speaking one dialect. Later differentiations resulted in a sort of triple partition into a Southern, Little Russian, Ruthenian or Ukraine dialect, a North- Western or White Russian, and a Northern or Great Russian. The latter, by position farthest advanced eastward and northward, and once also the most confined in point of space, acquired from Novgorod the Great, and later VARIOUS SLAVS— THE VARANGS 3 from Moscow, its exceptional expansion and final central position, and extended farthest to east and north ; the Moscow- dialect then became the written language — in short, Russian. This Russian or Great Russian also became subject to dia- lectical deviations, though these may be regarded as infini- tesimal when we consider the vast territories which the language has made its own ; the differences of local speech to which the German, the Frenchman, or the Italian is accus- tomed are not to be found within the pale of Russian. The Russian was a Slav, i.e., a born anarchist, a hater of all restrictions to his freedom, unable or indisposed to construct out of his own means a firmer form of constitution. True, loyal poetry speaks throughout of the " brave and faithful Russ," and even liberal thinkers such as Kavelin endowed him with a " wonderful love of the State." Unfalsified history, however, only knows Slavs who killed their own victorious leaders so that their own liberty might not be endangered by them ; com- pare with this the esteem in which victorious chieftains were held among the Teutons. Thus the East-Slavonic tribes lived at feud with each other, slightly dependent on the Khazars, but otherwise wholly free under various names : on the Dnepr round Kiev, once a ferry village, the Poles, " Polane," or " people of the fields " ; on the Sozh the Radimichi ; and on the Oka the Vyatichi — i.e., sons of Radim and Vyatko, or Wences- las,the more direct ancestors of the Great Russians ; round Great Novgorod the " Slovenes " ; around these and others in the east and north were seated, as free and independent, Finnish tribes. Northmen, also called V-arangs (Varyagi), from the Swedish coast and the Gulf of Bothnia, subjugated these Finnish and Slav tribes. They were the successors of Rurik, who ruled from Novgorod past Kiev as far as the Steppe, from the San and the Bugh to the Oka. The fact of the conquest was disguised by legend as a voluntary summoning of these Varyags, which would have been of no consequence had not the Slavophiles, and others too, misused the fact in the nineteenth century and grounded upon it their dogma of the peculiar nature of the Russian Constitution. Whilst in Europe people and ruling class, i.e., the conquered (provincials 4 EARLY PERIOD to wit) and conquerors (Franks or Goths), had to bargain and wrangle over Constitutions, in Russia the people trustfully- surrendered all power into the hands of the Government, which is alone responsible for the use of that power — one of the many Russian legends which are intended to make all insight into unedifying, nay intolerable, circumstances impossible. As these Northmen united the Finnish and Slav tribes into a State, so they gave them for the first time a common name — Rus — borrowed from the Finnish way of designating the Swedes. The further extension of the territory and the name was the care of Heaven, which had bestowed the most favourable locality possible on these East Slavs. Other Slavs in their expansion encountered the sea, great ranges of mountains, formidable foes ; these had to meet but apathetic Finns, who gave way to the slightest pressure. Thus the Great Russians managed, without any real conflicts, to occupy the boundless wooded plains up to the Frozen Ocean and the Ural ; and when in the sixteenth century they crossed this low range of mountains, all Siberia once more lay at their feet in the same way — i.e. y almost without a blow struck. It was the foreign conquest and the favourable geographical situation, no subtle statecraft or merit of her own, that brought about the conditions of Russia's growth and greatness. Thrice was there a transference of the centre of Russian power. The present centre — St. Petersburg — is only two centuries old, and stands in the midst of old Finnish sur- roundings. But even the one before it — Moscow — lay on the extreme verge of Slav soil, and was a recent settlement of the Vyatichi : the first alone, Kiev in the south, side by side with which in the north Novgorod early secured autonomy, was a very old Slav centre. Hence Kiev alone is the " mother " of Russian cities, and to her and her Grand Ducal throne go back Russian history, culture, and literature. The Russian north and east only shares passively in it : only in the South, i.e. y among the present Little Russians, did the old Russian life come into being. Muscovite Russia has only the merit of having preserved what was created in the south between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Its THREE CAPITALS— THE LITURGY 5 own contribution may almost be described as infinitesimal. Even Novgorod's share, at least in the literature, was very- modest. Moscow and after it St. Petersburg are thus only the heirs of the Kiev heritage. When the State had been organised by foreigners the Church, once more through foreigners, became prosperous at Kiev. With the hand of the Greek Emperor's daughter Prince Volodimir received baptism, and thus with his people came under a spell from which deliverance was not to be found until half a thousand years later, and then once more at the hand of a Greek princess. The introduction of the Greek Church and the Slavonic Liturgy was the most fateful moment in the development of Russia, which then bartered her European birthright for a mess of pottage. One of the most ingenious moves that ever were made on the chessboard of the world's history was the devising of the Slavonic Liturgy by the two Greek brothers from Saloniki, Constantine or Cyril and Methodius. That which to-day the Slavs are vainly striving after, a Panslavic language — which, after all, is quite unnecessary, as there is no Pangermanic or Panromance — that these brothers accomplished in the ninth century : they simply conferred their Macedonian dialect on the Western Slavs, primarily in Moravia, with the avowed intention of gradually forcing it on all the remaining Slavs in one and the same form. Therefore they made no concessions to the special linguistic usage in Moravia, and in order to fill to the brim the measure of their arbitrary conduct, their Byt po semuj- they also devised a special and very crabbed character. 2 This national language of religion and literature was the bait to lure the Slavs from all contact with Rome, which even in the Balkan Peninsula, among the Bulgarians, was at that time endeavouring to deprive Byzantium of its supremacy. 1 " So let it be," the formula endorsing a decree used by the Tsar, like our Droit soit faict. 2 The so-called Glagolitic. There is no reason to credit the Apostles of the Slavs with ulterior objects in its invention or adaptation from Greek cursive. In fact, it is among the Roman Catholic Croats that Jiis alphabet has survived.— E. H. M. 6 EARLY PERIOD The ingenious plan to a large extent succeeded, thanks to Slav simplicity and vanity. The Moravians, to be sure after some hesitation, bowed the changeling out of their country ; all the more zealously did the Southern Slavs, especially the Bulgarians, adopt it, for it lay nearer to them even in a purely linguistic respect, the Macedonian dialect being next-of-kin to the Bulgarian, only they finally abolished the hocus-pocus of the special character, ugly and difficult as it was, in favour of a purely Greek alphabet only, augmented by a few signs for Slavonic sounds. 1 Thus the Slavs acquired a thing neither possessed nor known by either Celts or Teutons, an ecclesias- tical and written language of their own, and created for them- selves in a few decades a stately store of works, although most of them were only translations from the Greek, patristic lore, encyclopaedias, or chronicles. Unhappily, unfavourable external conditions soon stopped all further development of this old Slavonic, i.e., old Bulgarian, literature. Bulgaria and the Bulgarians were well known to the Russians even before a.d. 988. In spite of the fact that they had now been Christianised by the Greeks, and were during four and a half centuries for the most part to draw their higher hierarchy from Greece, the Slavonic Liturgy of the Bulgarians could, of course, not be withheld from them as Slavs. Thus they acquired all of a sudden a ready-made literature and a written language in the Bulgaro-Macedonian dialect, to which they still partly adhere to-day in orthography, phonetics, and vocabulary. Most important was the encroachment of Bul- garisms, such as Vladimir for Volodimir, nuzhda for nuzha, &c. The Russian orthography, or more properly cacography, suffers to this day incurably from a system which was partly antiquated even in the ninth century and in Macedonia. Thus the Russians all at once distanced their neighbours — Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary — and rejoiced in a written language which in the main was intelligible to them, and a literature which extended their mental horizon at one stroke. Prince Vladimir had the young taught the alphabet, even though their mothers bewailed as dead the little ones taken 1 The so-called Cyrillic, based on Greek uncials. BULGARIAN INFLUENCE— THE SCHISM 7 away for the purpose. The eleventh century thus marked a prosperous period in old Russian life : numerous churches and monasteries arose, while Kiev shone out in almost fabulous splendour, at least according to the traditions of foreign countries. Vladimir's son, Yaroslav, whose Christian name was Yuri, whence Yuryev-Dorpat, which he founded, married his daughters to the kings of France, Hungary and Norway, and the Prince of Poland. Even Kaiser Heinrich IV. married a Russian princess. The East and West seemed destined to effect a direct exchange ; nay, even later Russian architects, or at least religious painters, found their way to Breslau. Of Yarosläv himself the chronicler records how he devoted him- self to books, constantly reading in them day and night, how he brought together many clerks and made them translate from Greek into Slavonic. We still possess MSS. of the eleventh century which were made for Grand Dukes and men of rank. But the further development did not correspond with the brilliant opening. Between Russia and Europe, Nature had erected no geo- graphical barriers ; even ethnographically it would not always be easy to separate Poles and Russians, for instance. An insurmountable, impenetrable Wall of China was built instead, slowly, but all the more surely, by religious belief. To the middle of the eleventh century belongs the schism of the Churches, which had been preparing for centuries, furthered by Photius and the brothers of Saloniki, and finally carried through by the Erastian Cerularios. Since then Rome and Byzantium have cursed each other yearly, and the costs of the dispute have had to be paid by the Slavs, whom it did not at all concern. The Slav was always most tolerant in matters of belief, hence the readiness with which he adopted Christianity — except, or course, where, as on the Elbe or the Oder, it was a cloak for political oppression ; fanaticism, hatred, and contempt for the " heathen," i.e., the Latins, were first instilled into the Russians by the Greeks. They guarded their new sheep jealously from the infection of Romish heresy, and the simple Russians soon outdid their teachers, and reproached the Romans with honouring matter as their mother, confusing materies with 8 EARLY PERIOD the Slavonic mater = mother ; declaring also that a false Peter as Pope had destroyed the old holy faith in Rome, and so on. Thus arose in the Russians the aversion to everything Latin and European. But at home also the conditions of cultured life kept changing for the worse. If, as with the Celts, Teutons, and Bohemians, a wholly alien tongue, say Greek, had in the case of the Russians become the language of the Church and the Liturgy, there would necessarily have been schools in which that tongue could be learned ; and it was not only in the Middle Ages that grammar lessons were the beginning of all instruc- tion and knowledge. The Slavonic liturgical language, on the contrary, demanded no sort of teaching ; it was enough for the pope's son to learn reading of his father for him then to be ordained. Thus there were in old Russia no schools and no instruction, save in the most perfunctory reading, but seldom in writing as well ; hence all knowledge consisted in a certain familiarity with Holy Writ, especially the Psalter, in exceptional cases coupled with some acquaintance with patristic literature ; the knowledge of Greek became extra- ordinarily rare. That knowledge, moreover, was confined exclusively to Christian literature ; if the names of a Homer or a Demos- thenes are mentioned, they are only known from late and scanty excerpts. Even in Christian literature the circle was not very extended ; a mere selection of sermons and the like did duty for Chrysostom, for instance. The store acquired in Bulgaria had not been further enriched on Russian soil. Moreover, the Greeks imparted to the Russians their obstinate clinging to the letter, their intolerance, and the one-sidedness of a dry-as-dust, ascetic view of the world to which all worldly action was an abomination ; and thus resulted slowly a breach between the youthful, strongly pulsing life of the unsophisticated people and its gloomy and woe-begone literature, taken from monks who fled the world and preached scourgings and mortification — the sharp division between preaching and practice bringing in its train an unnatural but inevitable hypocrisy, feigning, and deceit. SCANTINESS OF KNOWLEDGE 9 In the eleventh, and even the twelfth, century the beginnings of this total estrangement between Russia and Europe, between national life and literature, had as yet taken but little hold. The people was passing through its heroic age ; the Scandi- navian princes and their followers had long since become Slav, even though at first they continued to do homage to their northern Thor, and to bear their Norse names — e.g., Olga (Helga), Oleg (Helgi), and Igor (Ingvar). The Grand Duke and the paladins of his Round Table risked their lives cheerfully in warding off the wild peoples on the frontier, for the widows and children at home, for the holy churches. The simple way of living knew no sharp limits of rank or caste ; and a distant echo of the Homeric poems greets us in the Sagas, or " Byliny," 1 which still, even though in an altered guise, survive in the farthest districts, the Olonets Government on Lake Onega, round Archangel, and in Siberia. Epic amplitude, breadth, and repetitions are their characteristics ; the subjects, far from being taken from frontier warfare only, are drawn from the most varied romantic themes : conflict between father and son, a husband helped by a wife in men's clothing, adultery and the punishment of the seducer, separation of man and wife, scenes of recognition and the like. The principal heroes are unknown to history itself. Not the generous, kind-hearted, somewhat weak-willed Vladimir and his wicked, whimsical spouse, occupy the centre of the stage. There you have Ilya of Murom, the popular hero, not unknown to German legend, the peasant's son, who, mis- understood and slighted, at the moment of greatest danger puts forth his superhuman strength — these songs know no bounds — not on behalf of the Prince or Princess, who do not matter to him because he is never loyal, but on that of the country and its hapless inhabitants, puts the enemy to flight, and as a reward for three years drinks his fill in the Tsar's "kabäks" (taverns) of "green" (i.e., brandy) wine. This altruistic and democratic personage embodies the Russian ideals, which, thoroughly opposed to Greek and Teutonic, are to us 1 For specimens of "Byliny" v. I. F. Hapgood, "The Epic Songs of Russia," New York, 1886. io EARL Y PERIOD much more sympathetic and human. The other heroes — Dobrynya of the golden belt, a sort of " Noble Moringer," the Don Juan Churilo, Ivänushka, with his wonderful horse, which is just as little to look at as most heroes — are less significant. Certainly it is somewhat strange to speak of these poems, which, in their wandering from the south (Kiev) to the north in the course of so many centuries have suffered considerably, under the eleventh and twelfth centuries ; but decidedly they spring from that age and its conditions. The latest versions of them, which only date back to the seventeenth century, are simpler, more restrained, and jumble different themes together less. To the Slavs as such rhapsodies of that kind were unknown. Among the West Slavs, for instance, they are never found ; here, we may say, external influence may partly have been at work, for the tribes of the Steppe are already full of the song of their forefathers, and the Norse princes were accompanied by their skalds. There are also special Novgorod songs. To the twelfth century belong the most interesting memorials of Kiev literature, by the side of which the later Muscovite has nothing to place, although it imitates it or takes it up. The beginning of the century saw the final shaping of the Kiev chronicle. It arose in the cloister, proceeds to strictly ascetic contemplation of the course of the world, indulges in extensive instructions in belief, is fond of piecing in prayers and moral homilies ; but the natural, fresh, plastic narration, the epic lingering over details, the same democratic touch as in the "byliny," the love of truth, the fulness and exactness of the tradition, make every nation envy the Russians their chronicle. The Southern Slavs have nothing at all of the kind to record, and even the chronicles of neighbouring countries lag behind far, in spite of their better composition, their more artistic style, and the greater learning of their compilers. And what especially strikes us is the exact conception of the unity and the branching off of the whole Slavonic world, which they had at Kiev and nowhere else. This chronicle by the so-called Nestor is the basis for all later Russian chronographical continuations and compila- KIEV LITERATURE— ABBOT DANIEL n tions : amongst them a work of the thirteenth century, West Russian, belonging to Halich in Volhynia, stands out, thanks to its epic fulness and the amplitude of its narrations. Let a small specimen of it suffice. "When Prince Mono- makh drank of the Don out of his golden helmet one of the Princes of the Polovtses fled towards the Caucasus. After Monomakh's death the other sent his bard to him. c Bid him now return to our land, tell him my words, sing to him the songs of the Polovtses, and if even then he will not, let him smell the steppe-herb yevshän.' So when the Khan would not return, nor listened to the songs, the bard handed to him the yevshan ; the Khan smelt it, then burst into tears and cried, c It is better to sacrifice one's bones on native soil than to be famous on foreign,' and returned home " (theme of a well-known ballad of Maikov's). We are charmed as with the magic of a glorious epic song by the description of an expedition of Prince Danilo's against the heathen East Prussians and the like. As compared with this conspicuous fulness the Northern chronicles (not excepting those of Novgorod) contrast very unfavourably by their dryness and stiffness : those of Moscow have already quite an official colouring — i.e. 9 they carefully avoid any unpleasant truth. About 1 1 io also Abbot Daniel described his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre and thus inaugurated a rich type of literature, which lasted on to the eighteenth century, afforded an abundance of native and Greek reports, and by the abundance of copies — some texts are forthcoming by hundreds — demonstrated the extraordinary interest taken by Old Russia in such writing. The oldest of these " Palmers " is to me the most interesting ; the naivete of the South Russian, the true devotion to his country, makes one take greatly to him, though proper description of travel is far from him. The pious wight tells the pious at home all the wonders which he made his guides dish up to him ; he tells all that there is to see as if the Lord and His disciples were still on earth ; scarcely does a sigh escape him over the marauding sons of Hagar. With the later narrators the wonders only increase ; the most incredible relics are enumerated, such as 12 EARLY PERIOD the planks of Noah's ark, the palms planted by Christ, and so on. Still later writers tell of the gold that flows down from the mountains of Arabia, of the Jordan, whose water flows up and down, of the city of " Egypt," meaning Cairo, with its 14,000 royal dramshops and 14,000 streets leading to 10,000 courtyards ; in Jerusalem they are shown the navel of the earth, or the entrance to Purgatory, in Constantinople the Cross swinging in the air. They purposely say nothing about "Latin" relics. To the end of the twelfth century belongs also the " Tale of the Raid of Igor," against the Polovtses in 1185. 1 The event was of small significance in itself, although not without a romantic touch : ambitious young princes undertake a venture against the bandits of the Steppes, gain advantages, are surrounded by superior numbers and cut down, one of them, Prince Igor, being taken prisoner, but escaping fortunately to his own. The narrative is somewhat cursory, only dwelling on the principal moments at which lyrical sentiment finds expression, such as the " troubled " dream ot the Grand Duke with its foreboding of evil, the lament of Igor's wife, which the wind carries over the Steppe from the stockade of Putivl ; like a cuckoo will she fly down the Don, wet her beaver sleeve in the river Kayala in order to wash the bleeding wounds of the Prince ; she implores the wind which has blown asunder her joy on the steppes, the Dnepr to rock her husband back to her, the sun which in the drought scorched those she loved with his glow. With the mournful laments over the quarrels of the feudal princes — how Russia must groan when it thinks of the times and princes of its prime ! — the joyful tone at the end contrasts doubly ; heavy is the head without shoulders, ill is it with the body without a head, with Russia without Igor. But now the countryside is gay, the castles rejoice, singing songs first to the old princes, then to the young. This "Tale of Igor," composed in prose that is rhythmical in places, differs materially in tone and subject from the other ascetic literature ; by its 1 Translated by L. Wiener, " Anthology of Russian Literature," New York, 1902, vol. i., p. 81. "IGOR'S RAID"— DECLINE OF KIEV 13 uniqueness as well as defective tradition it presents difficulties to the understanding, which are increased by the far-fetched, artificial language, by references to still more remote events, and the weaving in of obscure names from myths and legends. This product of Kiev and the South, whose author belongs to the following of the princes and appeals to them, was later imitated merely outwardly and without comprehension by North Russia. Still, we may allow it the merit of having preserved for us in a late MS. collection, burnt in the fire of Moscow, this peculiar little work, which, perhaps, echoes the turns of the contemporary popular epic. To the people of the day when the narrative was first made public (1800) it was welcomed as the Ossianic song of a Slav bard. The merit of North Russian literature, indeed, lay mainly in preserving for us the products of the richer and more variegated age of Kiev ; for the South there was now opening a period of horrors, of confusions and dissensions, and of ultimate weakening. Up to the twelfth century Russian life flows in an un- divided stream ; it is concentrated in the South, and only sends out weak feelers to North and East. But in the constant feuds of the princes the importance of the old centre, Kiev, declines ; passing from hand to hand, it is at last no longer desired, and a fresh grouping of Russian territories arises, furthered by external influences. The dreadful invasions of the Tartars, the capture and destruction of Kiev in 1240, depopulated city and territory ; the Church is the last to suffer from the changed conditions, yet in 1299 t ^ le Kiev Metro- politan migrates northwards to Vladimir. Thus the South is abandoned, but even in the North- West the wretched folk in bast shoes, the Lithuanians, now venture out of their woods and swamps and found at the expense of the West Russian princes a kingdom of their own, in which, to be sure, the Lithuanian element is quite inferior to the Russian in civilisation and weight. They have conflicts with the Poles concerning the heritage of the extinct princes of Halich and Volhynia, till, in 1386, a personal union is concluded between Lithuania and Poland. Thus this portion of Russia separates entirely from the East, and in time also achieves its ecclesiastical 14 EARLY PERIOD independence, in the setting up of a new Metropolitan See of Kiev. To match with this disruption in the West ensued the rallying of the eastern principalities round a new centre. They had partly been founded on non-Slavonic soil, that of the Finnish tribes Müroma and Mordvä, &c, in the eleventh century, and extended in the twelfth ; the territory had no historic traditions, and the power of the new princes was unlimited. The most important of these princedoms was Vladimir-Suzdal, the centre of which was transferred to Moscow, and in the end the Moscow princes won the supre- macy from those of Riazän, Tver, &c, when the former Metropolitan of Kiev transferred his see to Moscow, in 1328. Much as the Greek Church, with its Erastianism, had stiffened the back of the power of the Russian princes, it now acquired exceptional importance through the incursions of the Tartars. Civil and lay life in the South was quite destroyed, the Russian princes bound to acknowledge the Horde and pay tribute ; only the Russian Church escaped through the tolerance of the Tartars, increased her wealth, established her influence, and at last threw it wholly into the scale of Moscow. Thus the latter became, even in the four- teenth century, the leading State in the East, the political and spiritual heir of Kiev. A succession of tenacious and crafty princes, who seem to us just like Orientals, ruthlessly selfish, cunning and dis- trustful, revengeful and insincere, hard and cruel, had laid the foundation of Moscow's greatness ; basely they crouched before the Horde — in slavish submission even licked off the ground and the mane of his horse the milk drops which the plenipotentiary of the Tartar Khan expressly let fall from the cup of welcome. Thus they secured their rear and a free hand against their brethren, and used it with ruthless vigour by intriguing and bribery and denouncing them to the Horde. The Church had never let go the idea of unity, and the Metro- politan at Moscow claimed authority over the South- Western Dioceses, and in the same way the Moscow Grand Dukes adopted this aim of the Church, claiming to be successors and MOSCOW SUCCEEDS 15 heirs of the Kiev princes and entitled to issue the summons for the " unification of Russian soil," The destructive con- flicts among the Tartar hordes themselves facilitated their task, and at the end of this period, about 1480, it was already notorious that neither Tartars nor Lithuanian Poles could contend with the superior power of Moscow ; the eastern princedoms had all been already absorbed, and their princes become vassals of Moscow, the two commercial republics Novgorod (the " Naugard " of German legend) and Plescow- Pskov forced to acknowledge its overlordship. Lithuania could no longer assert any claims, soon losing ground of its own ; the grave of the old Russian freedom and independence had long since been dug. A new era was dawning of cruel arbitrariness and tyranny, of spiritual one-sidedness and in- tolerance, of hatred and fear of novelty and of every idea, and of Byzantine stagnation in outworn grooves. Now for the first time the dragon's seed sown by Cyril and Methodius bore fruit. The disasters of the thirteenth century had awakened anew the ascetic sentiment which was quite wanting to old Russia ; the connection with Greece, which soon (after the invasion of the Latins) could no longer hold its own against the Ottomans, was broken off; Russia was left to her own spiritual powers, and their scanty development dwindled still more. Soon they fed almost entirely on the traditional reli- gious literature. This consisted of mostly bad and literal, slavishly exact, translations of Holy Writ, the whole of which, for that matter, was not completed until 1499, and of select works of the Fathers ; of some compilations of canon law and history, and some polemical treatises against Latins and Jews, partly of their own fabrication. Their history, in the same way, was only " religious," for it consisted of that of the Bible with a Byzantine continuation into which various episodes were interpolated of an anecdotic or rather story-book charac- ter about the Georgian queen Tamara and the like. Belles lettres were confined to the story of Alexander the Great, of the struggles for Troy, of Barlaam and Josaphat (a Buddha 16 EARLY PERIOD legend), of the wise Akir (maxims), fables (of "Physio- logus," a natural history), and the Oriental collection of fables, the Ikhnilät. The want of belles lettres was re- placed by apocryphal literature which captivated hearts and minds almost more than the canonical. From the Old and New Testament Apocrypha the Rus- sian learned of Satan's share in the Creation, his rivalry with God. The number of the fallen angels was to be filled up by men, hence Satan's fury and envy, hence Satanaial wheedles out of Adam the assignment of his race. Paradise is not destroyed : in it dwell Enoch and Elias, walking with God, and the malefactor of the cross ; Möyslav of Novgorod, and his companions once got quite close to it. Satan resisted the building of Noah's ark with all his might, and it was then that he enticed him into drunkenness, and that cat and mouse became enemies. The thickest jungle of legends, however, surrounded Solomon ; even as a child he displays his wisdom, and is in vain persecuted by his wicked stepmother, whose practices he unmasks ; there are more of his judgments given. The most interesting tells us of the building of the Temple with the aid of the Kitovras (Centaur), how Kitövras carried off his wife, and how, under the very gallows, Solomon avenged himself; then of him and the Sibyl of Sheba. By far more numerous and important were the legends of the Saviour and the Virgin Mary : how Mary was announced to her mother, how she served in the Temple, how her betrothed was found by a miracle with a staff, how her virginity was proof against all trials (that of the expiatory water, &c), how the birth of the Saviour was announced by miracle in Persia. Concerning Christ what especially charmed were the tales of His childhood, with the numerous miracles, especially during the flight into Egypt, and later at Nazareth : how He was chosen one of the priests, how He corresponded with King Abgarus of Edessa, entered into brotherhood with Probus, and how He ploughed. What the canonical Gospels expressly narrate remains untouched ; it is only into the gaps that Fancy intrudes ; e.g., they tell of the Harrying of Hell, of the chaining of Satan, and still more APOCRYPHA AND SCRIPTURAL LEGENDS 17 exactly of the rescuing of the Fathers : CEdipus-Judas, who murdered his father and lives hideously with his mother, as also the German Pilate — had not the two Suzdal popes, on their journey to Florence in 1439, visited his native town near Bamberg ? — amplify the accounts of the Passion with new details. Then the interest again turns to the Virgin — her later life in Jerusalem, her Uspenie, or Assumption, for which her Son comes down and all Apostles, even to the doubter and hesitator, assembled, and how the Jews were punished for disturbing the funeral procession. Less thick was the web of legend around the Apostles, their conflicts with one another and Simon Magus, their wonderful journeys, partings, and meetings again (quite in the style of the Old Greek romance). With these Apocrypha about the Apostles which were partly concerned with Church Law, vied the legends of saints, especially of the most efficacious patron by water and land, Nikola — when God dies he will be God ; of George the Dragon-slayer, Russia's patron saint, specially the saint on the Russian coat of arms, honoured by the Northern founders of Moscow ; of Andrew, the Apostle of the Slavs, who, coming to Novgorod, wondered mightily at the arrangement of the Russian " bänya" or bath. The series ended with eschatological Apocrypha, touching the appearance of Antichrist with the furnace, his victory and fall ; the wanderings of the Virgin or the Apostle Paul through hell, their visions of future torments, and Mary's intercession. Especially beloved were also " Con- versations of the Holy Fathers," particularly Basil, Gregory, and Chrysostom, which simply degenerate into religious riddles : what trade is the oldest on earth ? (tailoring — witness Adam and Eve) ; what mother suckles her own children ? (the sea, the rivers) ; when did the fourth part of the world perish ? (when Cain slew Abel) ; when did the whole world rejoice? (when Noah came out of the ark); what creatures were wanting in the ark ? (fish) ; who was born bearded before Adam ? (the goat) ; and so on. These were no products of Russian fancy, all these writings which gave information exactly on the points which most attracted 3 1 8 EARLY PERIOD the pious reader ; they were one and all translations from the Greek, and some replace lost Greek originals such as the Book of Enoch. They were for the most part still produced among the Southern Slavs and only multiplied in Russia. The representatives of the Church themselves often could not well draw the line between the genuine and the spurious books, and not till the contents of the Apocrypha had long since sunk into the memory of the people did they cry out against the lies which they laid at the door of the Bogomile Bul- garian Pope Jeremias (the Bogomiles were the forebears of the Albigenses) falsely, as they are certainly Greek productions. With the growth of asceticism in Russian life the "stikhi," the pious ballads which beggars and pilgrims sang, slowly elbowed out the national and epical " byliny," although they adopted much of their tone and expression. These stikhi are still sung — e,g.) that of the handsome Joseph, and of the Dove Book (in lieu of Deep), i.e., the enigmatical converse of the three saints and the like (Golubinaya Kniga). The literature just cited, with the addition of anthologies, and collections of maxims under titles such as " Golden Well " or " Chain," formed the whole stock of Russian knowledge. A science of astronomy, mathematics, geography, or medicine there was none among these scanty beginnings : for the Russian the flat earth rested on four whales ; the machinery of heaven was wound up by the angels ; God caused storms ; they knew the four rivers of paradise, but for Europe and European used only the term " Frank " ; the Pole was confused with the " Lithuanian " as a heathen. Physiology was just as little complex : Adam was formed by God out of elements, his bones of stone, his body of earth, his eyes of the sun, &c. ; into the complete body, when the dog was not watching, the devil thrust seventy diseases ; twelve tremblers or fevers constantly plague him. The remedies were prayers, incantations to exorcise the evil look or word, herbs, and the " bani " (baths). The Russian had a horror of purgings and clysters as devilish inventions even in the seventeenth century. Astronomy was represented by the Easter table and the various wind- and thunder-books, explain- VIEW OF UNIVERSE— ORTHODOXY 19 ing what it means when the phases of the moon fall on such and such days, or when it thunders on Monday, &c. Gram- matical first principles were to some extent known from the books of John Damascene, but all instruction was wanting in the ecclesiastical language, which was putting on an ever more Russian garb of sound and forms. The texts themselves kept falling into still more hopeless confusion ; every new copyist only added to the mistakes of the MSS., and the clergy soon found itself compelled to interfere. They drove the devil out by Beelzebub. The Southern Slavs who were summoned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Russia for that purpose (it was known that culture had come from Bulgaria) brought corrected versions with them, but elimi- nated the popular expressions that were creeping into the written language, and so purified the text and defaced it on their own account by incredibly artificial and flowery language which undermined all that was valuable — nay, in the end the whole meaning. The arts of the scribe could be discerned in the " cunning weaving " of words behind which, in the end, the author had no longer any real meaning. The written language suffered from these revisions, disguisings, and falsi- fications till far into the seventeenth century. Often in the description of the most interesting events, e.g., of the time of the " troubles " or struggles of the false Demetrius, one can only just guess the sense. At that time they even metamorphosed the expression for their own people and Church. Hitherto they had rightly been styled " pravover- nye," or right believers ; henceforth they were known as " pravoslävnye," the official term — an absurdity, wrongly translated from " orthodoxos," " doxa " = glory, slava instead of vera y faith. As it was with regard to Knowledge so it was with Art. Buildings of size were only erected by foreign architects, Greek or " Frank," for what the Russian built fell in. Painting, exclusively religious, clung anxiously to prescrip- tion, always painted the same brown, narrow ovals, the long arms, the Old Roman or Byzantine drapery ; the art of the sculptor, as being heathen, was unknown, as was 20 EARLY PERIOD that of the medallist. Church music did not exist ; only a long-drawn singing in choir was practised. To the gloomy and obstinate asceticism more and more urgently preached by the clergy every expression of sociable delight in life was a blasphemous, fiendish abomination ; against secular song, dancing, and play the arbiters of conscience intervened with all conceivable threats. Even in 1647 all games, songs, and customs were forbidden in the name of the State ; even in the seventeenth century the Russian was exercised concerning European dances, this seeking of corners where one had lost nothing : it was only for fools to amuse their masters with such antics. In spite of the pains of hell folks did homage to dice and chess, even in carriages on a journey. Young women delighted in song and dance with the immemorial clapping of hands in rhythm, and even this seemed to the priest a product of hell. More particularly they loved swinging, alone or in the great wheel-swing which Baron Herberstein (15 18) so wondered at. The increasing intru- sion of Oriental in place of European habits forced on women an increasing seclusion from all outward intercourse and, in spite of monogamy, they led a life akin to that of the harem. Even in the seventeenth century, when the French ambas- sador desired to wait on the Tsaritsa, his request was declined, to his great vexation, on the ground of indisposition. The simple Frenchman did not suspect that no strange man might see the Empress or any other high-born Russian woman, and later special arrangements had to be made in order that she might witness a "comedy." The only sociable amusements of the lower class consisted in boxing and bear-fights ; the profligate jugglers and bear-leaders afforded them their only distraction, except that on certain days in the year they could get drunk to their hearts' desire. Even by the sixteenth century " green wine " — *.*., brandy — was one of the plagues of Russia which did not spare the clergy or women. German soldiers of fortune at Vilna grossly mocked the popes as they lay drunk in the gutter. All the more arrogant and intolerant the while became Orthodoxy, the Moscow pravosldvie, especially with reference MOSCOW BECOMES SUPREME 21 to Rome. In the thirteenth century certain West Russian princes, true only from political considerations (to get a crown from the Pope), had made advances to Rome. At last the danger from the Turks forced even the Greeks to sacrifice their orthodox soul in order to save their body. Emperor, Patriarch, and Bishops began the negotiations for union which at Florence led to the desired end, but at home were wrecked by the unanimous resistance of the populace and the lower clergy. The Moscow Metropolitan who took part in these negotiations and assured the Pope that the Russian bishops were not versed in the Scriptures, lost on his return both his see and his liberty, and in the fall of Constantinople they saw at once the just punishment of Heaven for the Greeks having wished to leave the true faith. And when to boot Hagia Sophia was transformed and the Patriarch had become a Turkish slave who had to purchase his see for a heavy price, Moscow proclaimed itself the third and last Rome, the last and strongest refuge of true belief, and was soon confirmed in doing so by the Greeks. Forced thereto by the weight of political relations, the West Russian Church shut itself off less sharply from the West and from Rome. When the Lithuanian Grand Duke at Kiev succeeded in setting up a new Metro- politan independent of Moscow, the latter soon waited at Constance on Pope Martin V. : the Southern Slav, surrounded by Russian Basilian monks, brought in by the Polish bishops, made a Bohemian read out a Latin translation of his address : thus came to pass as early as 141 8 the first and so far the only real Panslavic Council. The exclusion of the freer and more advanced South with its political traditions avenged itself bitterly ; nothing now was able to furnish a counterpoise to the growing despotism of Moscow. This now transformed itself quite after a Tartaro- Mongolian pattern, borrowing from the Tartars not only expressions (e.g., for horses), dress, institutions (the post, tolls, &c), but above all their spirit : it slowly degraded the whole people into slaves ; ripening in the hard school of the Tartars, it demanded blind submission and was unconditionally supported in it by the Erastian proclivities of the clergy. 22 EARLY PERIOD Therein lay the only tangible outcome of the Tartar domi- nation, though it certainly has been spoken of quite differently. First it was held responsible for the almost total want of old South Russian MSS., which one and all have been preserved for us only in North Russian copies, and the loss of unsuspected literary treasures lamented. This assumption can easily be shown to be false : the Tartar inroads laid waste and destroyed the stores of literary material only as to quantity, not quality. At least we miss nothing worthy of attention ; the receptive, generally quite passive, North seems to have preserved every- thing for us. Less generally approved is another deeper-reaching assump- tion : it hurt the feelings of Moscow in the nineteenth century that the original stock of literature had sprung up in the South, in Little Russian, " tufted " Kiev, that Nestor's Chronicle, the Tale of Igor — i.e., almost all old Russian litera- ture — had come into being without any assistance from the " bearded " Great Russians ; and in order to salve wounded patriotism they invented the legend that the Tartar incursions had quite transformed the old ethnographical picture : up to 1 240 the Kiev people, the Southerners, had been Great Russians, and it was only in fear of the Tartars that these had migrated with their literature and epic poems (" byliny ") to the North : nor till later did new-comers from the " Forest Country," Polesie, Volhynia, &c, take their place who were Little Russians. The favourite argument for this thesis was that only the far North, Olonets, &c, had preserved the old " byliny," whereas the Little Russians of Kiev, ever since the seventeenth century, exclusively cultivate their peculiar " dümy," or songs of conflicts with the Poles and the Tartars, which differ wholly in subject, nay, even in style, from the " byliny." They forgot meanwhile that Moscow and the central Governments also have no " byliny," and thus their survival in the far North must have another and special reason, that history knows nothing of such wholesale migrations, and that such assump- tions are contradicted by later experiences, seeing that at the end of the fifteenth century Kiev suffered from the Tartars it may be even more. The masses scatter indeed for the moment SOCIAL HOLLOWNESS 23 before the Tartars, only to close up again after the attack. Hence the attempt of the Great Russians to filch from the Little Russians in the nineteenth century their ancient literary possessions, as they did their political freedom in the seven- teenth century and in the eighteenth the social freedom of their farmers, has failed : the old Russian literature was essentially the work of the Little Russians — this name cropped up in the fourteenth century in opposition to Muscovite Great Russia — but it became the common basis for all Russians : the Great Russians only built higher upon it. For the moment — and that moment lasted centuries — the further building was very problematical, and consisted rather in deserting the eminence once occupied ; the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries indeed laid unshakable foundations for the political supremacy of Moscow, but as to culture the country sank decidedly ; and for this the Tartars are not responsible, for all interference in the inner life and doings of a people was quite alien to them, the only sensible and humane trait in the Tartars and one in which the autocratic regime of Russia naturally does not imitate them ; for this decadence the Great Russians and their national Church are alone responsible. 1 It became apparent that that Church was unable to perform its simplest tasks ; the people remained at bottom strangers to Christianity, while observing the strict fasts prescribed and celebrating the noisy festivals. The alien Latin Church could point to quite different results within its pale. For the Russian there was no preaching, no joint singing by the congregation : his service, as an apt proverb declared, was the ringing of the bell, his prayers genuflexions : otherwise he was the " double believer " against whom the official Church had had to take measures, not only in the frontier districts ; he clung firmly to his superstitious practices, and only held Christianity quite from the outside. With such spiritual and cultural equipment did Russia enter on the new era. It begins here, not in 1501 but in 1472, on the day when the new Tsaritsa, the Palaeologa Zoe (Sophia), 1 This requires modification, as the Church undoubtedly kept nationa feeling alive under the Tartar yoke. — E. H. M. 24 EARLY PERIOD entered Moscow in state. The alliance had been set going and furthered by the Greek, Cardinal Bessarion, and the Pope, with the express intention of promoting the union of the two creeds ; they had no idea that they were making it impossible for ever. For now Ivan III. openly entered on the inheritance of the orthodox Byzantine emperors ; he adopted for the State coat of arms the Byzantine double eagle, the Grand Duke became Tsar (Caesar) and soon raised a claim to the title of Emperor, and Moscow received the last consecration when its Metropolitan became Patriarch : the Oriental Patriarchs fed by their begging embassies the unbearable Muscovite arrogance. But with Zoe were inherited, not only the Byzantine aspirations and traditions (new grist to the mill of the autocracy) : with her also came into the country Italian builders, such as the archi- tect of the Kremlin, artisans who were soon joined by other foreigners. Now began the process which at last Peter the Great was to bring to a conclusion. From this time on Moscow sought to take part in the material benefits of European civilisation : physicians and apothecaries, primarily to be sure only for the royal family, founders of bells and cannon, gunsmiths and powder-makers, and handicraftsmen of all kinds came into the country. In the long run the old armament in which one might cope with the Tartars did not suffice against the Knights of Livonia and the Lithuanians, and after the total decline of the Hordes these became the real enemy. For one thing the " ruler of all Russia " came forward as uniter of the " ancestral " territories and claimed Kiev, proceeding later to demand Vilna and Galicia also ; on the other hand he must force a passage to the sea, for the neighbours threatened with death whoever tried to get through to Moscow by land. As the Black Sea remained closed for centuries yet, the struggle for the near Baltic began even in the sixteenth century : for the time the Muscovites had to be content with the daring Englishmen who found round Norway an arduous route to Archangel. They travelled through the country, laid hands upon the commerce and reported at home about everything ; the customs and ORIENTAL DEGENERACY 25 ways ot thinking that they chanced upon were quite remarkable. 1 For the more determined Moscow was to take advantage ot Europe's material progress the more anxiously did it defend its Oriental, Orthodox exclusiveness against any infringement. It was now that this system arrived at its fullest perfection. Under the Eastern despotism the slavish people lost all ideas of honour or manly dignity : the carrying of arms was for- bidden, seldom was an insult avenged with the fist, as a rule by denunciation to a Court which was always venal. The first dignitary of the country did not venture to sign a communica- tion to the Tsar with his Christian name, Ivan or the like : he "beat before him with his forehead" (i.e., did obeisance to the ground) with the dog's name of Ivashka, and this was not abolished till the eighteenth century. The dignitaries could be flogged out of hand ; in conferring with some foreign ambassadors one of them had boasted in the most foolish manner that everything, palms and tigers and so on, flourished at Moscow, whereupon the other corrected him. They were both thereupon flogged, and excused their absence to the ambassadors by saying they had fallen out of their sledges. Lies and talebearing were daily bread ; in what way this Oriental Moscow affected the whole land is described by Maximilian's envoy, Baron Herberstein. The two once great commercial republics, Novgorod and Pskov, he says, were at one time distinguished for decency and humanity, exceptional sincerity, and uprightness ; in buying, for instance, they cheated no man there, and always kept their word, once given. But now (15 18) the Moscow pest has changed all 1 A good general account of the early voyages of the English to Russia is given by Dr. J. Hamel, "England and Russia" (London, 1854 ; tr. J. S. Leigh). The original authority is Hakluyt, who tells of Sir Hugh Willoughby and R. Chancellor, Anthony Jenkinson and others. Many details of Russian life are furnished by the rhymed letters of George Turberville, a companion of the latter. These accounts have been edited for the Hakluyt Society by Mr. Delmar Morgan. More important in- formation we find in Giles Fletcher's " Of the Russe Commonwealth," and the travels of Sir Jerome Horsey, Knt., Queen Elizabeth's Ambassador to Ivan IV. These latter were edited by Dr. E. A. Bond for the Hakluyt Society (1856). 26 EARLY PERIOD this, and the people is corrupt to the bottom. In Moscow, too, as soon as they begin to protest and swear be on your guard, for it is only done for treachery and deception. With regard to this unreliability folks, both at home and abroad, have always told the same story. About 1630 Prince Khvorostfnin composed the first verses at Moscow on the theme, "the Moscow folks sow corn and yet live only on deception and lies," while Turgenev and Pisemsky still write on the text " the Russian lies." The last remnant of self-respect was driven out of the people by the rule of Ivan the Terrible ; whatever seemed to betray independent aspirations was stifled in its own blood. Novgorod's dignity and wealth, which even in the fifteenth century had been carried off to Moscow, sank for ever ; the ambition of the old boyar families, among which the last descendants of the old appanage princes were enrolled, culminated exclusively in not losing their places in the army or at the Tsar's table ; and these disputes as to pre- cedence at last infected the merchant class, so that even in the nineteenth century the Moscow Governor-General when in- viting guests had to be most exact, for a guest would rather creep under the table than occupy a place lower than was his through his father. In return all were bound to observe the same implicit and slavish obedience towards the Tsar, and were equally his peasants, i.e., serfs, so that now the Russian practised, instead of all the other virtues, one only, the heroism of slavery. The mental condition corresponded with the moral. All Russians appeared to strangers people of similar (mental) growth, and the greater their ignorance became, the prouder they were of their orthodoxy. Thus, of the sons of the Greek Church in 1580 at Moscow not one could read the printed Greek Testament ; at Vologda the Bishop (Abbot ?) did not know the number of the Evangelists, and when an English visitor gave him the beginning of the Gospel of St. Matthew to read he could not imagine what text he had before him. They could not give information about the simplest article of faith, except to answer such questions as " Why was Mary Mag- PRIESTLY IGNORANCE 27 dalen so honoured ?" with "Because she had once given her love gratis to one who asked in Christ's name." While Wycliffe and the Hussites were struggling for liberty of conscience and Luther and Calvin shaking the dogmas of the Church, Russian Churchmen were plaguing themselves with the question whether the Alleluia should be repeated twice or three times, whether when consecrating a church the course of the pro- cession should be directed with or against the sun, whether to sing " Ospodi " or " O Ghospodi," and so on ; in the same way the non-shaving of the beard assumed a dogmatic character. Thus there were abbots who replaced the unintelligible names in the Gospel, e.g., Barjona, by Slavonic words ("speak of them "). At the end of the fifteenth century at least an attempt at the formation of a sect had taken place ; the " Judaizers " at Novgorod, who even found a hearing with the Metropolitan at Moscow and the Tsar's Court, seem to have gone some way towards being a rationalistic sect, and even to have denied the Resurrection ; after a certain hesitation, how- ever, Orthodoxy plucked up heart and crushed the movement by violent measures. The tendency which had conquered this false doctrine at once and with equal success attacked humane and pious ideas. Some did hold that heretics should be con- verted by persuasion and not by the sword, required poverty and manual labour of the monks, who were stifling in their riches, and did not regard all the works of " Holy Writ " (i.e., the whole of patristic literature) as equally binding. But this freer tendency was suppressed, and, if no Inquisition tribunal were brought into play, the reason lay, not in the want of judges of heretics, but of heretics to judge. The ignorance was total and stupendous. In vain individual Princes of the Church called for schools ; the Russian dreaded all knowledge for fear of becoming a heretic. To put a stop to the increasing inaccuracy of MSS. the Metropolitan Macarius established a press, but at his death the populace fell on the devil's work and wrecked and burned it, and the two (Great Russian) printers had to flee to Lithuania ; in this case to be sure the dread of the copyists that their lucrative calling might come to a stop had a large share in the matter. Thus the 28 EARLY PERIOD Russian fenced himself in against heathenism, i.e., Europe, in his vanity regarding himself as the only " true believer " on earth, and looking distrustfully even on the Greeks because of their contact with the Hagarenes. The Tsar, when at an audience a foreign ambassador had kissed his hand, at once washed off from it the contact of the heathen ; and a Russian church was held desecrated if a Latin or a dog found his way into it. The country itself was carefully guarded ; no one was allowed to pass in or out ; towards foreign books they acted on Omar's principle : the nobleman who wanted to learn Latin did so under greater precautions than a conspiracy against the life of the Tsar would have demanded. Moreover, no Russian went abroad of his own accord, convinced that by doing so his soul's welfare would be impaired ; yet of the young people whom Boris Godunov sent abroad at the turn of the century not one allowed himself to be enticed back to Moscow. In spite of this self-confidence there were dark spots. Those who were sworn to belief in the letter felt the ground quake under them because that letter became more and more unreliable, and corruption of the Scripture crept in ; being themselves devoid of any knowledge of language or text, they could undertake no sort of correction. Moreover, people knew how widely spread the apocryphal literature was, how the village priest read in his collection the most heretical prayers and legends, about Mary asking Christ for money in vain, and wonders of that kind, and promulgated them. In this quandary they hurried to the monastery at Athos, begging earnestly for a reliable translator. Even over the Slav and orthodox Balkan, however, thick obscurity already brooded, Servia and Bulgaria were falling into their sleep of centuries ; the Athos brethren hence sent only three Greeks. With one of them, the most important, Maxim, begins the martyrology of Russian literature. He was a well educated man, a pupil of Greek and Italian schools, who knew and honoured Savonarola, which did not hinder him as a true Greek from despising everything "Latin" alike, were it Pope or Luther. He possessed MAXIM THE FIRST MARTYR 29 theological and philological knowledge such as no man had in Russia, an independent and strong character, zealous faith, and glowing love for his Greece, which could hope for freedom only from Orthodox Russia, yet regarded askance the usurped independence, the autocephaly of the Moscow Church. His acquirements, his character, and his love wrought his ruin. At first, indeed, his activity in editing was received with delight ; as he did not know Church Slavonic as yet he translated his Greek into Latin for the official interpreters, the "diaks," who dictated it in Russian to the scribes. But soon his prospects darkened. The Greek who learned to thread the mazes of the most tangled style could not do right ; without hesitation he altered the sacred texts ; but by them the holy Bishops had still saved their souls, and in so doing he brought accusations against them. At the trial one of the writers confessed that Maxim had on one occasion caused him simply to strike out some spurious lines in the holy text, and how trembling and terror overcame the writer in the process. There were other gravamina besides, as that he had ventured to rebuke abuses, that he was on the side of those who wanted to suppress monastic property, and that he had consorted with suspicious people. The alarmed Greek now begged permission to return to Athos, but, innocent as he was, he was flung into prison ; the Patriarchs of the East espoused his cause and begged for his liberation, but he was only fettered all the more heavily ; he appealed to the Moscow Metropolitan, who wrote back, "We kiss thy fetters as those of a saint, but can do nothing to help thee." Not till after thirty years' imprison- ment — Herberstein believed that they had drowned the Greek — was his captivity relaxed, towards the end of his life ; he could not be set free, for he had acquired too thorough a knowledge of Russia. And yet while languishing in the harshest prison the Greek stood for a moral authority in Russia such as no man else possessed, gave decisions in matters of conscience, compiled numerous writings, carried on controversies with Latins, Lutherans, Jews, Armenians, Mahomedans, and Greeks (i.e., as to their heathen wisdom) ; took arms against outward and 30 EARLY PERIOD ceremonial belief which might be coupled with all sorts of wickedness, usury, and the like ; fought against superstition, urged the improvement of the texts and the necessity of schools, as to which he cited the example of Paris, and ex- pounded texts. He did not despise rhetorical ornament and made use of allegory, yet his style suffers from hard, angular, forced expressions ; the stiff diction refrains from every conces- sion to the living popular language, and makes it its task to elevate it, instead of allowing itself to be purified and vivified by it. His ideas fell upon fruitful soil, and he found unquestioning admirers, one of whom they also buried in a cloister, while another was Prince Kurbsky. Some of his work the whole Church recognised. How little, however, the stubborn hold- ing fast to the old could be broken through about the middle of the century is shown by the " Hundred Paragraphs " of 155 1 (" Stoglav"), which even sanctioned wrong usages, such as crossing with two and not three fingers ; as also by the attempts to gather together the whole of the old Russian tradi- tion, and thus for ever secure the stronghold of spiritual culture. This was undertaken by the Metropolitan Macarius, who, in the 11,000 leaves of his "Readings" for the Church year, had collected all the lives of saints, sermons and writings of the Fathers, and by that means preserved many a relic from destruction ; to his time dates back the historic compilation of the "Book of Degrees," in which the course of events is chronicled in very far-fetched language and a hypocritical tone of piety, with ascetic insertions ; it is arranged according to the seventeen degrees of descent from Vladimir to Ivan IV. ; the work enjoyed for a whole century the greatest reputation, was continued and abbreviated. Historic occurrences of the age found special description, e.g. y the fall of the Kazan Tartar kingdom is told by a cleric who had lived for years in captivity there, in places in an epical strain : we are reminded of the style of the Psalms by an eye-witness's doleful narrative of Pskov's fall in 15 10, of the overthrow of its " antiquity " and its freedom, with the apostrophe at the end, " Oh most glorious city, great Pskov, why dost thou lament DOMOSTROY— KURBSKY AND IVAN IV 31 and weep ? " And the wondrously fair town of Pskov replies, " How should I not lament, how should I not weep and sorrow for my laying waste ? Of a truth there swooped down on me the many-winged eagle with the lion's claws in his wings and took from me my three cedars of Libanus, my beauty, my wealth, and my nobility." Thus was old Russian freedom carried to the grave for ever. Yet soon men got used to the new conditions of life, to the uniformity of the Moscow yoke for all, and exactly defined in the "Domostroy" or Household Management, with extracts from patristic literature, the character and duties of the master of a house, the using of the whip to wife, children, and servants, devout prostration before the powerful, greatest possible prudence, most judicious management, greatest piety — only it must always be displayed before everybody : such are, briefly, the principles of this im- moral book. Even here every amusement, however innocent, is tabooed. In one breath we find damned gluttony, adultery, witchcraft, soothsaying, hunting with hound and hawk, horse- racing, dancing and skipping, drums and trumpets, chess and draughts — all these alike remain work hateful to God and service of the devil. One feels really sorry to know that with this codification of hypocrisy, all merely for show, only for the eye, are coupled the names of Adashev, the gentle adviser of Ivan IV., and of proud, free, rich Novgorod. The characteristic memorial of the age, a thing unique in its kind, is the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky. When the able and gallant general was defeated in the Livonian war he fled from the wrath of the Tsar to Lithuania in 1564. Ivan called on him to return and Kurbsky attacked him for his inhumanity ; as he read this letter Ivan nailed the bearer's foot to the ground with his sharp iron stick. Irony and sarcasm, a favourite weapon of Russian literature, breathe from Ivan's letters, from his biblical quotations, collected in furious wrath, from the turbid and roaring floods of his eloquence. Kurbsky's answers were more moderate and re- strained : the real reckoning with Ivan is given in his some- what emphatic " Chronicle of the Grand Duchy," written after the model of Chrysostom, extending from Ivan's youth 32 EARLY PERIOD to 1578, the first work of Russian History that was prag- matical, had a purpose and at the same time a system, as remote from the incoherence and often only seeming objec- tivity of the earlier Chronicles as the eventful life of the fugitive himself from the contemplative existence and hypocrisy of the monkish chroniclers. Ivan and Kurbsky were the most cultivated men of their day ; Ivan could hold his own with and answer even Evangelical pastors. Others of his letters also breathe the same troubled, restless, passionate spirit, the same exclusive knowledge of the Scripture and the Fathers, the same distrust and mockery. Kurbsky also shares at bottom this point of view, the indifference or actual opposition to all other knowledge as secular, of Aristotle and Plato ; he himself had indeed learnt Latin in his later years, but only in order to get more easy access to the works of the Greek Fathers, whom the Latins alone knew how to publish properly, and to straighten out the " Bulgarian Fables," i.e., Apocrypha, which puzzled Russian heads, such as the Gospel of Nicodemus about our Lord's Descent into Hell and the like. Kurbsky is the first protesting personality that appears in the literature, and therefore interesting. What the Tsar and the banished boyar at bottom had in their thoughts was formulated energetically by a Little Russian monk on Athos, Ivan of Vishnya, in glowing devotion to his country and her Orthodox religion, in passionate struggling against Rome and its arts. According to him the devil aimed especially at " Slavonic," i.e., the Church language, because it was the most fruitful and pleasing to God ; for without any heathenish devices such as Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, and other vain devilries it led by simple reading directly to God. His pro- gramme of the training of youth embraced instead of lying dialectic the true and devout Breviary, in place of artful syllogisms and verbose rhetoric the devout Psalter ; instead of philosophy the wine-gladdened and didactic Book of Songs, and if you would also learn the subtleties of courtly wisdom what hinders you from reading Sirach or Solomon's Proverbs ? Only do not betake yourself to heathen teachers and glozing Latin lies, else will you lose your faith. The compiler boasts IVAN OF V/SHNYA—THE JESUITS 33 that he never had any part in the art of rhetorical practice, the profession of the Greek or Latin philosophers, or learnt anything of their artful syllogisms. And impregnably did the authority of the Orthodox Church seem established, and for ever shut in behind these Chinese walls seemed spiritual life, stifled by the barbarism of the darkest ages ; and yet a new age was already heralded by precisely those to whom the patriotic and democratic monk of distant Athos addressed his passionate epistles. In Polish and Lithuanian Russia, in Lemberg, Kiev, and Vilna matters stood as ill or in reality still worse because the clergy, especially the higher, was wholly without discipline ; notorious sinners and assassins, grown old in wickedness, were nominated bishops by the king's will and the fish stank like the head of it ; the lower clergy, wholly sunk into peasants, were deeply despised ; the state of the Orthodox Church, especially measured by the brilliancy and importance of the Polish or Latin, was hopelessly sunken. Precisely, the com- parison with the consideration, knowledge, and power of the Polish clergy could not fail to make the Orthodox question whether by adhesion to Rome — thoughts of union had never been quite eradicated — better conditions, a spiritual revival, schools and teachers, an increase in discipline and dignity, could not be gained. On the other hand, Rome and its new instrument, the Jesuit order, were almost forced of themselves into wondering whether this Orthodox Church in Poland might not be won for the United Church ; it might then furnish a bridge for further steps, for the Utopian scheme of securing Moscow itself and Constantinople. The Orthodox Church in Lithuania and Poland had not much more time for delay : the wholesale desertion of the nobility, the Radziwils, Sapiehas, &c, to Catholicism (or Protestantism) was already causing very serious harm. Thus Jesuits and Orthodox bishops met each other half-way, and the Church, in return for the retention of its language, Liturgy, and the marriage of priests, acknowledged the Roman Papacy and dogma. This step, however, met with no unconditional welcome ; various magnates and even more the people, 4 34 EARLY PERIOD especially in the towns, fought against it most emphatically. The battle, however, must mainly be fought with spiritual weapons, and for that knowledge and schools were indis- pensable. The first intercourse with Polish-Latin literature and teaching had come about long since ; even the Court of the Yagellons (only the first Yagellon loved all that was Russian, language, " bänya," and paintings, all the rest were Polish from head to foot, and the mansions of the magnates followed the example of the Court) worked for and demanded Western culture. Russians and Lithuanians learned Latin and Polish ; translations from the latter begin at the end of the fifteenth century. At first these are again interesting Apocrypha : the^ Book of the Three Kings, by Johannes of Hildesheim, the Tundalus Vision of the Tortures in Purgatory, although Or- thodoxy acknowledges no Purgatory and the like, legends of the saints (Alexis, &c), and ascetic writings (the Dialogue of Death, &c), found their way into Russian. Francis Skorina, of Polotsk, who though Orthodox was forced to adopt Catholicism in order to pursue his studies, the first Russian to obtain the degree of Doctor of Medicine in Italy, printed at Prague and afterwards at Vilna between 151 8 and 1525 Books of the Scriptures, the Breviary, and others to satisfy the needs of his countrymen ; the language of his texts in some degree accommodated itself to the West Russian. The Protestant propaganda also wanted to make use of Russian, but soon gave up its attempts, after the issue of a catechism; for the populace remained through ignorance and unshakable adherence to the Faith of their fathers inaccessible to it, while the easily-won nobility only read and wrote Polish. The Orthodox Brotherhoods, established on Western models for pious and charitable purposes at Lemberg and Vilna, as also Constantine of Ostrog, one of the richest and most powerful princes in the world, provided schools, teachers, and means ; and as nothing could be done with Graeco-Slavonic alone, they based on the Latin of the Polish schools their programme and their whole curriculum. Thus Russia acquired after fully six hundred years the first POLES AND PROTESTANTS 35 establishments which deserved the name of schools and not mere spelling-classes. The Prince himself kept up a Press (the first complete Slavonic Bible appeared at Ostrog in 158 1 ; the text is drawn from Old Russian sources) and schools, built monasteries and churches, and ordered of Polish Protestants, as his Russians were as yet not strong enough, the polemical writings for the defence of Orthodoxy against Jesuits and Catholics, which were then translated into Russian. Soon, however, his schools bore excellent fruit ; there proceeded from them brilliant controversialists, the first grammarians and lexicographers. And in the same way worked the schools ot the Brotherhood. But the foundation of their culture, Polish and Latin, took them wholly away from Russian soil, to which they were only attached by their creed : they wrote by the by almost exclusively Polish, like Smotritsky, the most brilliant among them, compiler of a grammar which for a century and a half regulated the laws of Church Slavonic ; even their Russian writings are thought out in Polish and crammed so full of Polonisms that one would think one had Polish printed in Cyrillic before one. From Lemberg, Ostrog, and Vilna this movement, half religious, half scholastic, spread and finally transplanted itself to Kiev, which had begun at length to recover from the desolation of centuries, and was destined to raise itself once more to its former leading position in Russian spiritual life ; for it was Kiev that was to pave the way for the entry of the Latin-Polish school and its scholastic methods into Moscow itself. CHAPTER II THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Premature reform movement under Demetrius — Stubbornness of the Moscow reaction — The Russian schism — Polish influence and Kiev intervention — Schools and literature, the printed and the written — Direct influence of the West — Close of the Russian Middle Age, and summary. At the beginning of the seventeenth century it seemed certainly as if there would be no need of Kiev intervention to introduce Western life, art, and knowledge into Moscow. The native dynasty had died out, the Tartar scion Boris, after setting aside the last heir to the throne (Demetrius), had himself elected Tsar and anointed ; and although he trod wholly in the footsteps of the late rulers, posed as quite as pious and proceeded quite as ruthlessly against all " suspicious folk," exerted himself honestly for Russia's prosperity, and to please the nobility deprived the peasants of their right of transfer, he seems to have anticipated the needs of the new age and to have been more ready to make concessions to them. But he was allowed no time to do so : a conspiracy set up against him a supposed son of Ivan, that Demetrius whom he had had murdered at Uglich, and, supported by Polish and Cossack help as well as by the discontented peasants flocking to him, Grishka Otrepiev entered Moscow as Tsar Dmitri. The former pupil of Moscow monastic schools had in the best years of his youth sojourned in Kiev and Volhynia, con- sorted with religious freethinkers or Arians, and allowed the splendour of Polish life and customs to have its effect on him ; 36 THE FALSE DEMETRIUS— FANATICISM 37 of his having in Poland gone over to Catholicism people cer- tainly knew nothing at Moscow ; his autograph declaration to the Pope has recently come to light out of the Vatican archives. What a century later Peter the Great was only to carry through with the help of iron determination and most terrible cruelty the frivolous youth thought that he could do in sport. He fell — not because of the falseness of his birth, for that point was quite secondary, and has been made pro- minent by Schiller quite contrary to the facts. Even the most genuine scion of Rurik would infallibly have come to grief over roast veal, table music, and not washing oneself in the " bänya" before going to church. In spite of his vanity Demetrius was really eager to know and thirsted for European knowledge, and the Jesuits who accompanied him could not serve him fast enough in that respect : he contemplated the immediate opening of High Schools in Moscow, even if he fetched the scholars at first from abroad. By this over-great eagerness for what was new, which did not go hand in hand with the necessary strictness and seriousness, he dug his own grave, wounded the religious feelings of his subjects, the only ones that they had, and irritated them into revolts which with his leniency and want of foresight had only too easy work of it. The attempt to let in freely the customs and knowledge of the West through widely opened gates was destined to fail this time. Nay, in consequence of fresh conflicts, of the threatening of Russian independence by the possibility of a Polish domination, which was only prevented by the putting forth of the whole powers of the nation, an orthodox reaction developed which seemed to throw the nation quite back into the times of the " Stoglav " and the " Domostroy " ; the exceptional activity of the years 1603-13 caused indeed a whole flood of writings and counter-writings to appear, in which often among the tawdry phrases of ecclesiastical eloquence the basis of facts was there, though obscured as much as possible, but soon everything seemed to fall back into the old dead grooves. What fanatical intolerance and ignorance still prevailed was shown at the Moscow Synod of 16 18. The Abbot of the Trinity Monastery, Dionysius, had been entrusted with the " purging " of the text 38 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY of a Book of Ritual : after a year and a half's work he handed it to the Deputy Metropolitan. He had on the strength of old MSS. and Greek texts made many corrections ; amongst others in the prayer for the consecration of water he had set aside an absurd addition to " Enlighten this water with Thy spirit" — " and fire," because it was wanting in the Greek original and in good Slavonic texts. For this he was found guilty of heresy, excommunicated, starved and smoked, and flogged. On holy days he was brought in chains before the Metro- politan, then tied up in the courtyard and exposed to the mockings and blows of the populace. Only by energetic intercession with the Tsar and Patriarch the Patriarch of Jeru- salem saved the hapless man, whom they at the same time made to expiate other equally uncommitted sins. Naturally Moscow Orthodoxy met the Kiev people also with similar mistrust : when one of them laid his newly worked out catechism before the Moscovites, he and his work failed to stand the test ; he had amongst other things included in it an explanation of clouds, storms, and the like, which they rejected as "Hellenic," heathen, and Aristotelian subleties. To his indignant rejoinder " How then could the matter be explained ? " they referred him to the work of the angels ascending and descending ! This backwardness of clergy and people was to avenge itself most painfully, even to the present day. Even in the last decades of the century Moscow presented in many ways a replica of Constantinople or towns in Asia Minor in the fourth century, when temple and market re- echoed with theological wranglings, the people streamed out of the church in horror when the Patriarch failed to use the epithet Qeotokoq, and the vegetable-women instead of selling their wares tore each other's hair over Christ's double nature. Theological disputes as to the precise words of the priest at which the transubstantiation of bread and wine took place, and when the bell should be rung, gave the masses no rest ; all culminating in a movement which to this day keeps millions of Russians aloof from the life of the nation in general, the so-called Old Believers, or Raskolniks (from THE OLD BELIEVERS 39 Raskbl) schism), at the same time the first resisters of official constraint of conscience. The burning question of the amending of the Liturgical Texts was pressing for solution ; the despotic and self-willed Patriarch Nicon, who later came into violent antagonism with the Tsar, persisted in energetic and prompt action. When this was at length carried through (1653-7) and the texts had been amended according to the Greek originals, even to the orthography of the names, a portion of the clergy and the bulk of the people raised the keenest opposition ; those who clung to the old forms unchanged simply recognised the seal of Antichrist in the new spelling advocated of Jisus instead of the older Isus, Nikolai instead of Nikola, and Paraskeva for Praskovia. They were filled with horror at the coats of arms and dedications preceding the books themselves ; with alarm at the ruthless persecution of the people who crossed them- selves with two instead of three fingers as Nicon " according to the heresy of Pope Formosus " ordained : the introduction of the new melodious Kiev chanting desecrated the churches for them. With some spirit of compromise and consideration the dispute might have been arranged, but these are things un- known in autocratic Russia, whose only wisdom lies in Byt po semü — " So be it," hence things came to a catastrophe. The most important among the opponents of Nicon's reforms was the Protopope Avvakum, who tells us about his life himself, and besides advocates his point of view in more than thirty petitions and the like. It is the first forcible and vigorous Great Russian that one finds to read, in places of exceptional outspokenness ; with implacable anger he pursues the Patriarch and his work. What he suffered for it — hunger, flogging, years of imprisonment, the tortures of Siberia — would have broken down the most iron constitution ; he emerged un- shaken from these incredible tortures, and remained so to the end, until they buried his wife and children alive and burned himself ; even at the stake he crossed himself with two fingers and thus defied his adversaries. For the official Church dealt unmercifully with the Old Believers who wished to adhere to the old books and forms : hanging, dismembering, tearing out 40 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY of the tongue, and burning alive were the approved methods of official zeal for conversion. " Why go to Persia to attain the martyr's crown ? " jested Avvakum. " You have but to cross yourself at Moscow with two fingers and at once the kingdom of Heaven will be open to you." And the outcome of this slaying and burning ? That even to-day millions of Russians stand outside the official Church and the national life ; that, starting from the simplest foundations of faith, they have at last strayed into the wildest bypaths of sectarian practice and split up into a countless number of opinions, even to the castration of the Skoptsy and the vagaries of the Dukhobors ; and moreover it was the flower of the Russian people, its most serious and stable members, that was harried by the fanatical intolerance of the Church into a fanaticism which even found vent in numerous self-burnings, so as to avoid contact or communion with the Antichrist ; the only ones that profited were the clergy and the officials, to whom the word Raskbl represented the perpetual milch-cow. The most determined persecutor of the Raskölniks was the last Patriarch of Moscow but one, Joachim (1674-1690), in reality himself the worst of Dissenters, a monster of ignorance and fanaticism, in whom, for the last time, the old national prejudice against all that was humane and reasonable was per- sonified. He refused to sit at the same table as a man of different religion (the Tsar's General Gordon) ; when he fell ill he would not allow the physicians (foreigners, for there were no Russians for a long time yet) even to enter his room ; in his will he implored Peter the Great to allow no inter- course of the true believers with the Church-condemned Latins, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Tartars, as being enemies of God and despisers of the Church, and to forbid wearing foreign garments. Shaving the beard made man's godlike face the mask of an ape, thought the Russian, and to wear cut-out clothes, z.£., trousers uncovered, seemed to him the height of immorality. In Joachim, as in his successor Adrian, was em- bodied once more the Russian Middle Age, gloomy, super- stitious, ignorant, intolerant, and fanatical, which, in contrast to that of Europe, extends to the year 1700. When Adrian died THE PATRIARCH JOACHIM 41 in that year, Peter never again allowed the office of Patriarch to be held ; at Petersburg there was no use for such a thing, and at Moscow it would have involuntarily become the centre of opposition to the new order, supposing that the torture- chamber allowed of such a thing. Not till two hundred years later (1905) was the Russian clergy, the most easily cowed of all classes, to demand earnestly the election of a new Patriarch. In contradistinction to the preceding centuries, however, the conception of the world and its course, narrowly orthodox, childishly absurd, and yet self-sufficient, was in the seventeenth century no longer the only one ; the Chinese Wall had begun already to show its first gaps. Slowly the Russian gained his first insight into other and higher spiritual life, not exclusively ascetic and theological, learned to know other men and customs, found them better, and even imitated them, to the horror of the incarnate reactionaries, to whom even the Greeks and Little Russians seemed not reliable, or not pure enough. It had in any case been easier to drive the Polish garrison out of the Kreml, where, after devouring all the rats and corpses, it boiled the Greek MSS. to broth and consumed them, than the Polish spirit out of Russia. Russians learned to know and appreciate Polish customs and culture from direct observation ; with every decade Polish influence increased in secular circles at Court and among the nobility, and reached its culmination under Tsar Theodore. When he was still Heir- Apparent a Kievite dedicated to his father, Tsar Alexis, a book in Polish with the explanation : " I have published the book in Polish because I know that the Tsarevich reads books not only in our native tongue but also in Polish . . . The Senate of your Majesty also does not despise that language, but reads Polish books and narratives with pleasure." The Tsar's wife was the daughter of a Polish nobleman from Smolensk : we read of her that " she brought much good to Moscow ; first of all she induced the people to lay aside their hideous, womanish loose garments, which the tyrannical Tsar had forced upon them as a punishment for cowardly flight from his army — a legendary reason, common to the traditions of many people, explaining the Oriental garb of the old Russians ; then to cut 42 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY their hair and beards, as the father of Ivan IV. had done to please his Polish wife, but had found no imitators then ; next to wear sabres at their sides ; to wear Polish outer coats (the 7 ontusz\ and other things of the kind ; they began to set up Polish and Latin schools at Moscow, which some praised, while others in dispraise declared they would soon bring Polish religion and disputes into Moscow." Personal influence was also exerted by highly-placed Polish prisoners who were detained for years, such as the author and Voevode Paul Potocki. The Regent Sophia and her favourite, the highly- cultivated Prince Golitsyn, were particularly inclined to things Polish. The second half of the century was thus marked by a regular invasion of Polish books, either circulated in the original or translated. But should any one seek for these traces in Russian biblio- graphies he would find himself wofully disappointed. During the whole of the seventeenth century printing is still ex- clusively the affair of the clergy : Moscow has a single press at the Court of the Patriarch, and there only religious books are printed in the strictest Church language ; everything secular is completely excluded. But we are in the Middle Ages : written literature goes side by side with printed, as if printing were not yet discovered (the number of readers was of course very small), and from it we learn what was in favour. We learn this, for that matter, from other sources also : the splendid version of the whole Psalter by the Pole Kochanowski was so liked at Moscow, even among people who did not fully under- stand Polish, that Simeon Polotsky, the Tsar's Court poet, in 1674 undertook a poetical rendering of his own in order to oust the Polish text. At the outset the supply of belles lettres was replenished from Polish. They had at first been most scantily represented ; to the old stock of the religious romance some classical romances and sagas, such as the Alexandreis, fables, and some Oriental sub- jects, the riddles of the merchant Basargä, with the dinouement like that of Semiramis and Ninus, and the Judgment of Shemyaka were added in the fifteenth century ; brought from Lombardy by the agency of the Southern Slavs and POLISH CHAP-BOOKS 43 White Russia, the legend of the king's son's Bovä, which be- came a favourite work of the Russian people, otherwise Buovo d'Ancona, our Bevis of Hampton, from the Carolingian " Chansons de geste," and " Tristan," which, however, found no proper echo. Now the old chap-books poured in the Polish version over Russia, many being translated from the Bohemian : " The fair Magellone and her true Knight," " The Serpent-woman Melusina," " Emperor Otto and his Innocent Wife," "The Seven Wise Men," the "Gesta Romanorum," a collection of Oriental and Middle Age legends and anecdotes, in places of most unedifying con- tents, though always with an edifying and allegorical explanation ; facetiae, selected from a Polish collection. Only " Eulenspiegel," which was such a favourite in Poland, found no purchaser ; evidently the half townish, half bucolic material was repellent. With these precursors of the novel Russia made acquaintance at a time when in Europe a higher stage of it had been reached. For true imagina- tion they had as yet no inclination ; people chose what was instructive, translated the tedious fables of Paprocki from the Dialogus Creaturarum ; the ethical maxims of Zabczyc ; apothegms and anecdotes from the Classical Antiquity of Budny. They were not all afraid of Catholic asceticism, so translated with abridgements the gigantic " Great Mirror of Examples," mostly stories of miracles from the Middle Ages, as edited by the Polish Jesuits ; Thomas ä Kempis's " Imitation of Christ," the writings of the Jesuits Bellarmine and Drechsel ; allegories, those of St. Augustine and Pope Innocent III., down to simple prayers. Stronger meat was also in request ; historical literature in particular was held in esteem ; thus folks read the Universal Chronicle of Bielski, the Lithuanian of Stryjkowski, Boter's Narratives, and others of the kind. They took interest in political writings, and translated the Economics of Aristotle in the amplified Polish version, and Modrzewski's books on State Reform ; Polish descriptions of journeys to the Promised Land and Starowolski's description of Turkish institutions were greatly appreciated. They translated calen- 44 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY dars, medical works, the old herbals, the physiological and fabulous "Problems" of Aristotle, the book of E. Sixt on hot springs, and mathematical and grammatical treatises. In addition, many kinds of works were translated from the Latin, or even from the Dutch direct, e.g., the great Middle Age collection of sermons of the Hungarian Meffreth, at the desire of Tsar Alexis, but side by side with it the excellent seleno- graphy of the astronomer Hevelius, who worked in Poland. The old and the modern, knowledge and fable, from deeply learned works to merry tales of Boccaccio or simple dream- books of Daniel, were welded together in an intellectual repertoire such as earlier Russia had not even dreamed of for comprehensiveness and many-sidedness ; for the first time writing ceased to be placed solely at the service of the Church and asceticism. If the Russian had in previous centuries hesitated to tread on a piece of parchment which had been written on because the matter was sure to be sacred, now, for the first time, written as well as printed literature emancipated itself from these leading strings of the Church. The Church itself had lent a hand to this, though not, in- deed, that of the Patriarchs Joachim and Adrian. This move- ment also went directly back to Poland. There the Orthodox Church in its struggle against the Union forced upon it had been obliged to overcome by education and schooling its pre- vious condition of spiritual nonage, in which it was unable even to give an account of its own belief. All Russian schools were soon outdone by that of the Kiev Metropolitan Mohila, a Wallachian who had become quite a Pole, the Collegium Mohileanum, expanded after the pattern of the Polish colleges out of a monastery school. The curriculum of it was roughly modelled on that of the Jesuit schools, Latin with poetics and rhetoric, scholastic philosophy and theological courses to crown the studies ; they not only borrowed from them laudatory verses and ornate orations to the glorification of their patrons, and to celebrate festivals, but even the Jesuit school dramas, although they limited them with greater exclusiveness to scriptural subjects and Christmas plays. At this school worked and from it issued all the theologians, or in other words men MOHILA—KIEV AND MOSCOW 45 of letters, of Western Russia, who were soon to set the fashion in Moscow itself. Teaching and method were those of the Middle Age, Latin and scholastic ; they delighted in preaching, not the simple edifying word, but the far-fetched allegorical exposition which culled the most remote themes from Ancient History, from imaginary Natural History, in order to dazzle by something new, to give the most startling explanations, to stimulate the hearer by the most remote conjunctions. Especi- ally the younger generation knew and delighted in the Classics, wrote Latin, and printed both in Polish and Russian ; it belongs to both literatures. This West Russian culture, the new Kiev activity, had by no means escaped notice in Moscow, but people regarded it at first with growing distrust. They saw in this Latin, rhetoric and scholastic only defection from the true Orthodoxy ; they denied this to people who possibly had been baptized, not by immersion, but by mere sprinkling ; they even went so far, at Moscow, as to rebaptize those so baptized as if they were heathen, and yet in the end, without the help of these "sprinkled," the Cherkasses (or Circassians) as the Little Russians were called from a town on the Dnepr, it was quite impossible to introduce the simplest innovation into Moscow. Greek refugees and begging emissaries of the Oriental Patriarchs opened the eyes of the Russians as to their incredible antiquatedness. These Greeks noticed the difference between Kiev and Moscow in their own persons. In the former they felt themselves free, in the latter as if in a cage ; they were even watched through the keyhole ; in the Ukraine among the Cossacks people loved to attend the schools, in Moscow there were none. And ever more urgent sounded the demand of these Greeks for schools. When the people at last consented to them at Moscow, when the revision of the ecclesiastical books became more and more urgent, except the Little Russians there was no one who could conduct the schools or prepare the texts for printing ; hence with the middle of the century begins the extensive exodus of Kiev scholars to Moscow. Though their know- ledge might seem to Westerns one-sided and obsolete, as 46 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY compared with Moscow ignorance it signified the tardy libera- tion of the spirit from mere belief in the letter, it worked for the first time with logical categories, had at command a wide knowledge of literature, and transferred the Polish-Latin models to Moscow. The spiritual life and literature of the second half of the century is materially affected by them. The most prominent among them were E. Slavinetsky — who, to be sure, was person- ally little to the fore, and hid himself modestly in the back- ground of the school and the press, as the real reviser of the liturgical texts — and more particularly one Simeon Polotsky, who, a skilful courtier to boot, managed to hold his own against all attacks in a sort of confidential post under Tsar Alexis Theodore, whose tutor he was, and the Regent Sophia till his death. He is the first Russian poet, at once of the Court and religion. His verses in their rhythmical construction incline towards Polish, a language rhythmically quite differently con- stituted, and run counter to the Russian ; they are syllabic so-called, because instead of their being founded on any rhythm only the syllables are counted, and quite inexact rhymes, for the most part merely grammatical, are used ; these monstrous, wooden, inharmonious verses held their own up to the thirties and forties of the eighteenth century. Ethically the most important Kievite was a gentle Christian, the pious and saintly Demetrius, later Bishop of Rostov, a patient worker, who did especially good service to edifying literature by his " Menaea," * Lives of Saints, partly based on those of the famous Polish Jesuit Skarga, which might have become a real popular book, and by his sermons, and to Russia by his solicitude for the school at his Rostov ; against Dissent he engaged in controversy, but only in writing. Another Kievite, Gizel, compiled a Russian chronicle, which, in spite of its harsh, strictly ecclesiastical language and other material defects, for a whole century enjoyed undeserved authority. Others, without leaving their beloved Ukraine, helped by their works to create the earliest literature, however one-sided it might be — the preacher Radivilovsky, the controversialist (in 1 I.e., readings for the months. PETER FAVOURS THE KI EVANS 47 theological matters, of course) Galatovsky, the poet Arch- bishop Baranovich, who persistently put into rhyme every- thing impossible, legends, dogmatic disputes, and ascetic maxims, up to his ninetieth year ; this love of metre was outdone only by another Metropolitan, Maximovich, who sang the praises of Mary in 25,000 of the most halting verses. The advancement of the Kievans was regarded at Moscow askance. The Old Believers were sworn enemies of those in whom they suspected only renegades, but even at the Patriarchate they were not in favour. People begrudged them their strivings after ecclesiastical independence (for their city) ; they were suspected of Catholic inclinations ; they were accused of heresy, as regards the inception of Transubstantia- tion, over which the Kievans simply held fast to an older standpoint of Orthodoxy. No one, indeed, ventured to attack Simeon Polotsky, so firmly did he stand in the Tsar's favour, but they vented their anger on his devoted pupil, Medvedev, the first great Russian scholar, even if only of the Kiev type ; his knowledge, his devotion to his teachers, whom he imitated in his poems, nay plundered, he had to pay for on the scaffold ; alleged political offences had to serve to hide the personal and fanatical animosity as regards the doctrine of Transubstantia- tion. After the execution the Kiev movement seemed suppressed. In conscious opposition to it, and its Latin pro- clivities, they tried at Moscow to call into existence Graeco- Slavonic schools, with the assistance of the Greek Lichudes ; as the attempt failed they returned to the Latino-Slavonic school type of the Kievans. Though persuaded to consent to the execution of Medvedev, Peter leant upon the Kievans and made them his instruments in his conflict with Dissent, with superstition, and with the theoretical cravings of the Moscow clergy, and used them in particular to crush down the Orthodox Church in the State to a mere police agency, as which it still acts, without life, dignity, or importance of its own. Not only life and the Church, literature and thought, but even the language, was for the first time lastingly smitten as 4 8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY by an alien wave, through the translations and the Kievans. Hitherto the written language had remained untouched by inter- course and life ; men spoke the Great Russian dialect among themselves, in the Courts and in the saloons of the Ambassadors' Office, a sort of Foreign Office, where the instructions for the Ambassadors were worked out and their reports received ; but they wrote only Church Slavonic and pronounced it, following the tradition, in the Little Russian way, "h" for "g," and so forth. The differences between the two languages were so considerable that even in 1683 the Psalter was translated from Church Slavonic into Great Russian for the common good ; but the Patriarch forbade the printing, and still, apart from the forbidden texts produced abroad, the Russian does not possess the Scriptures in his own language, but in the alien Church Slavonic, which, however, seems to him only antiquated, not foreign, so much has the usage of centuries modified the ear of the people. The differences may in some cases be rather considerable ; e.g., the title of " Quo Vadis ? " Sienkiewicz's celebrated novel, is in the translation "Kamo Gryad£shi," which in Russian would be " Kudä Idyosh." In the sixteenth century a MS. translation from the Scriptures into Little Russian was made, while Skorina and the Protestant Tya- pinsky printed some in White Russian, but these attempts to make them familiar to the mouths of the people remained fruitless. This strict division of the languages permeates the whole of the old literature, but its completeness varies considerably ; thus the synopsis of Gizel is written in a more exclusive Church Slavonic than the Kiev Chronicle, which is six centuries older. The former practice remained in vogue, and thus there were really two languages — the written and the spoken. Into these the Polish now found its way, and although these influences soon had to yield to other and higher ones, has, even to this day, left a deep mark on Russian. It is especially the terminology of the various ranks, citizens, coats of arms, and the like, of the army, rank and weapons, of grammar and philology, of objects of finer cultivation, from State apartments to the names of daily wants in clothes and food, even expres- CHURCH SLAVONIC— THE SLOBODÄ 49 sions of politeness, in which the Polish element, often un- suspected by the Russian himself, survives since the seventeenth century. Even the Latin borrowed words in Russian which so puzzle the foreigner, spind, lund, &c, came in through the medium of Polish, and in the same way many German words, e.g., tyurrna (prison), or Thurm, püshka (cannon), or Büchse reached Moscow first by Poland and Lithuania, and through Polish forms. However the Kiev people might try they could never quite get rid of the Polish they had got accustomed to at home. The eighteenth century first slowly eliminated many Polish words, which are still noticeable in the correspondence of Peter the Great, just as it had long since mastered the Polish influence. Yet a third period is at hand — that of the influence of the West, as it was displayed at Moscow without any Polish mediation. It centred itself in the Sloboda (Liberty) near Moscow, which at the end of the seventeenth century went forth to subdue the capital, and in the foreign regiments of the Tsars. Even in 1472 Westerns had trodden Russian soil, and their coming never wholly ceased during the sixteenth century; it was furthered by the necessity for foreign soldiers and officers, such as General Gordon, or Lefort the Swiss, of whom we hear in Peter's early history. They made their abode in the Slobodä, which was a horror to the "true believers." Here, too, Peter, who was but little watched, early made his appearance and learned to value Western ways and despise the Russian ; how bitterly, for instance, he mocked the Russian clergy, and what parodies he allowed himself, though indeed only in the narrowest circle, of things that were most sacred to the Russian ! Of course, in the seventeenth century the Sloboda as yet made no formal appearance in literature, apart from products in foreign languages, e.g., the interesting diary of Gordon, and yet it already takes a place here and there. Thus to it we owe the first Russian theatre. When the first Russian envoys, e.g., the two Suzdalers in 1483, were sent to Europe, they were present at the performance of Mysteries, and later on, at Warsaw, of operas, comedies, and dramas, and revelled in the 5 50 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY remembrance of what they had seen, but it got no farther. True, the false Demetrius would have brought in the theatre like other mumming, but they only stuck Italian masks on his corpse. Masqueradings were an abomination to the Orthodox. His Church Service indeed furnished some occasion for the making of Mysteries (the entry on an ass on Palm Sunday), but with the immobility of the Church any further development was impossible. It was the Kiev school drama that broke the ice, but Tsar Alexis demanded a regular comedy, with professional players. Luckily for him Byzantine Emperors used to attend games in the circus, thus affording an Orthodox precedent, and making it admissible to bring players in from abroad. In 1672 Colonel von Staden hired at Riga Paulsen's troupe, but it never actually came to a performance, and they at last con- tented themselves with getting the Protestant pastor of the Sloboda, Gregori, to train first Germans and then Russians to perform in comedies. The chief reliance of the Gregorian repertoire was therefore on sacred pieces, "Judith and Esther," together with operettas and ballets : a contemporary notice sets forth that in 1674 there was comedy before H.M. at the village of Preobrazhenskoe, and foreigners entertained H.M. with how the Empress Alaferra (!) cut off the Kaiser's head ; the dramas are in prose, in five acts, with varied airs. Gregori was succeeded by another theatre-manager, the Pole Czyzynski, though we know no particulars of his repertoire. The death of the Tsar prevented a further development of this undertaking. Thus old and new strove with each other. Now sharp prohibitions were issued of the Polish dress, for instance ; now orders were given to appear at Court only in the short Polish garb, a vacillation characteristic of the age. In 1649, through the efforts of Rtishchev, the Monastery School at Moscow was founded, and entrusted to Kiev monks, but in 1650 one of their pupils writes : " Through fear of Rtishchev I deceive him, but in future I will no case learn ; he who learns Latin will certainly miss the way of salvation," and so on. The number of those, however, from whose eyes the scales fell grew KOTOSHIKHIN— FOREIGN ACCOUNTS 51 visibly ; especially among the great dignitaries there were to be found several of higher culture, such as Rtishchev, Ordin- Nashchokin, who had his son taught by Polish tutors, A. Matveev, who also fostered the theatrical proclivities of the Tsar, and Golitsyn. Others even ventured, from the safety of foreign soil it is true, to acknowledge the truth about Russia. G. Kotoshikhin, diak or clerk, who had been flogged once already because he had omitted a word in the title of the Tsar, had reason to fear still worse on a second offence, and preferred to flee altogether, through Poland, to Sweden, where fate, nevertheless, overtook him, as he was executed for man- slaughter. At Stockholm he composed a work on Russia, as if for the instruction of foreign countries, dealing in thirteen chapters with everything, the Court, justice, the army, &c, down to private life. Before him there were only numberless accounts by foreigners of Russia, where true and false, unavoidable errors and misunderstandings, hate and contempt, wonder and pity, produced an often distorted picture of this " barbarism," of this " Persia " or " Abyssinia," as it is still called in the conceptions of a Leibnitz ! — from the detailed account of a Herberstein, through the English of a Fletcher, which even in the nineteenth century could not pass the Russian censorship, through French, Dutch, and Polish, back to German in an Olearius. Now for the first time a competent judge lifted his voice in "The Truth about Russia," and might have chosen for his work the famous motto of Gogol's " Revizor," " Don't blame the looking-glass if your mouth is crooked." They are brief but eloquent chapters concerning the boundless ignorance and insufferable arrogance of the Russian, how the boyars in the Council of State only know how to stick out their beards, of the falsehood and deception in every calling and walk of life, the stupidity of the women, how marriages are concluded without the young people having caught sight of each other, and what deceptions crop up in the process. Other Russians who had fled their beloved country before Kotoshikhin shared these views with him ; but he, the precursor of Herzen, first defined them in writing, though his account did not see the light till the 52 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY nineteenth century. People wanted to belittle him, they accused him of exaggeration and violent prejudice, but at bottom the same tale looks out of the writings of that most ardent admirer, the Croat Yurii Krizhanich. The fate of this man reminds one to some extent of that of an older martyr, Maxim the Greek ; he too paid the penalty, this time in Siberia, for crimes he had not committed, because he seemed dangerous. His preference for Russia is explained, as in the case of Bohemia in the nineteenth century, by the oppressed conditions of his narrower home and the subjection of the Slavs to the Germans, Greeks, and Turks ; only the most powerful of all States gave promise of a change in the situation, a deliverance. Krizhanich advocates the union of all Slavs, especially Russians and Poles ; the religious differences have only been brought by Greece and Rome into the Slavonic world. He even advocates a Panslavic language, a mixed dialect, based on Church Slavonic, and combats most passionately the xenomania of the Slavs, their love of imitating what is foreign and valuing and placing it above what is their own. Yet this by no means hinders him from recognising other defects of the Russians, their back- wardness, nay, the necessity of learning from those very foreigners they hate, and even making proposals for the increase of prosperity and the improvement of agriculture. To him, too, knowledge is power, does not evoke heresies, but removes them, and is that which is most worth striving for ; in addition he preaches self-knowledge and mistrust of foreigners. In polite literature, too, if the expression may be used, Old and New join hands, but original productions are few to vanishing point. In the spirit of the religious folk-song, the Stikh, we find an allegory of how misery pursues a youth because he heedlessly disregards the commands of his parents, exposes him to temptation, robs him of everything. In the West such generally ended with the ruin of the hero, but for the " pious " Russian there is a way open, the cloister at whose gates Gore (Misery) must fall back powerless, and let fall its certain prey. The features of this« Stikh are exceed- THE STIKHI "TRAVESTIES" 53 ingly marked. There is no want of legends which strike us by their historical, yet fantastic background, such as that of Savva Grudtsyn and the compact with the devil which a "holy man," of course without knowing its extent, takes over. Here, again, the devil must watch the cloister gates close protectingly behind his certain prey, while the mention of the conflicts with the Poles and the siege of Smolensk lends a semi-real aspect to the pious legend. Quite adapted to Russian life is the " History of the Russian Nobleman, Frol Skobeev, and Annushka, daughter of the Sewer Nardin Nashchokin," the name we have already come across. A theme from " Don Juan " — a boy dressed as a girl wins a girl whom he could otherwise not approach— is not unskilfully transferred to Moscow, and how the cunning fellow in the end mollifies the father and mother in-law, who are horrified at the mesalliance^ is told not without humour — a harbinger of later Russian realism. The bulk of what was produced was theological and polemical in substance, either in favour of or against Dissent. Even such works are limited in number and extent, and the whole Moscow literature cannot bear the slightest comparison with that of Kiev, which displayed an abundance of knowledge and industry, nay, of intelligence and method and European forms, even if they were antiquated (like the "Mysteries of the man of God Alexis," &c), and did not content itself with the mere copying of old and pious literature, did not neglect realities, and even gave proof of some historical interest. The best and the most of what was achieved at Moscow was, in fact, of Kievan origin. Thus Old Russia was finishing its course. Towards the end of the century the dull pressure upon it begins to relax. We stand before a rapid and complete liquidation of the whole of the past, a complete breach with it. What is the significance of that past ? Its political significance was above all question : Russia had become the great Slavonic State. There were no others. Poland was at once to sink to a Russian dependency, and Peter was already so sure of the fact that, quite contrary to 54 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY his father, he was already able to devote his chief exertions to other things — the winning of the coasts and the destruction of the Turks. Russia now gathered in the profits of its advantageous geographical position ; in a hundred and fifty years it had increased six-fold, and has kept the instinct of ever greater expansion to this day. But no development of culture corresponded to this gigantic outward increase. The latter had chiefly been acquired at the expense of Orientals. Numerous Tartar Mirzas were directly absorbed into the Russian nobility (Saltykovs, Turgenevs, Aksäkovs, Derzhä- vins, &c). Russia was greatly orientalised from its clothing on to its conduct of life, the want of mental interests, coupled with indolence, the inclination to acts of violence, and the love for dogs, falcons, and horses. Russians produced on Europeans in the seventeenth century the same impression as Persians do on us to-day. Russian Ambassadors, for instance, behaved throughout the whole century mostly as the Persians of abominable memory in the nineteenth, so that people would have liked to assign them pigsties and stamped them at once as mezze bestie (half beasts); bound- less drunkenness, excesses, the most furious fits of cursing, were the order of the day with the staff, their ignorance being only exceeded by their arrogance. Towns there were none in this great peasant empire except Moscow ; the rest were villages or fortresses. Of course there was no citizen class. The merchant class, peasant-like in its way of living and oriental in its cunning and unscrupulous- ness, plundered by the Tsar's voevodes and their di&ks, embodied the ideals of the Domostroy as rich householders (Samodür) or drank itself to death. Handicrafts were mostly carried on by peasants, any perfecting of them being thus excluded. The towns, from Moscow downwards, had only wooden buildings. The Kreml and the churches alone were of stone and walled round ; elsewhere the fortifications often consisted merely of wooden stockades. In the open country there were, of course, only wooden buildings, beginning with the churches, though indeed the hard winter could be got over well in them. In their wooden AN AGRARIAN EMPIRE 55 homesteads the nobles abode with their numerous servants, regarding in the oriental fashion all activity as something degrading. Their descendants boasted even in the nineteenth century that they had never in their lives even drawn on their socks {vide Oblomov). They were the vassals of the Tsar, and their object was to make the official estates (pomestia) heredi- tary, which they succeeded in doing (hence pomeshchik^ lord of a manor). The boyar (in the Council) was such in virtue of his office, not his family, and to be styled " prince " as well seemed to him a sheer insult. There were no degrees of nobility (counts and the like), coats of arms, or primogeniture — anything that characterised the European nobility. In order to support this nobility the " little man " (" bonhomme," or muzhik) laboured. The free man had long since become unfree, and as he wished to escape the load by flight or seeking other service, he was chained to the' soil, so that the oppression grew with every decade until the man had been degraded into a beast of burden. The Government placed itself ever more rigidly on the side of the nobility. The secular clergy grew like peasants ; only the monks, from among whom came the bishops, secured for themselves increasing landed property and a certain degree of culture. About other countries no one knew anything ; travel was forbidden, except the official journeys of Ambassadors, or monks' pilgrimages to Athos or Jerusalem in search of manuscripts or their souls' welfare. Every other journey, like knowledge itself, endangered the spiritual weal of the Orthodox, for which the devil lay in wait at all corners and points — excepting the holy churches and monasteries. Knowledge, except rudimentary theology, and arts, out- side the traditional Byzantine daubing of saints and the illuminating of manuscripts, did not exist. Thus Russian envoys wondered at separate scenes in the theatre without suspecting any connection between them ; for sculpture they had no eye whatever. In return the country was pious, but even the piety was fanatical and quite external. Even abroad the Russian interested himself mostly in relics, and worshipped holy water-pots from Cana or pieces of St. Peter's chain, but 56 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY foreigners noticed how absent he was at his devotions. It was only externals, trivialities, that alienated the Raskol from the Established Church. Every book was reckoned pious to start with, so none should be carried lower than in the breast- pocket. Every change made them uneasy, everything un- accustomed alarmed them. The knowledge of foreigners was accounted devilish, and intercourse with them exposed men to dangerous suspicion. The mere presence of foreign officers accounted to the Orthodox for the failure of Russian arms. Sociableness or free intercourse was unknown. The women stayed in the secluded back rooms, of which the master of the house always kept the key in his pocket. Any one who accidentally caught sight of the Tsaritsa was punished, and there were many courtiers who never set eyes on a female member of the Tsar's family. Thus " weak " woman, at the same time the vessel of the devil, was carefully excluded from all contact with the outer world. In the train- ing of children blows played the principal part. Even the grown-up never lost the feeling of fear, and the Russian Ambassador specially noticed that in Venice, for instance, " the people lived without fear, every man did what he would, and did not trouble himself about others." All thought was centred on externals. The Ambassador studied for days together bowings and all sorts of titles, but often had no idea what answer he had been given in writing, hence he lied in his reports home, or noticed only names and distances. Byzantine observance of forms in religion and knowledge, blind senseless obedience to every command or arbitrariness, the killing of all pride or higher feeling and the tabooing of all thought were the marks of the men and the age. And yet even the seventeenth century made deep breaches in the Chinese Wall behind which Russia vegetated medita- tively. It was in vain that the alarm was raised by patriarchs and abbots and the Moscow Streits^ (lit. archers), who so bitterly hated everything foreign, and whose destruction so much reminds one of the Janissaries, only that in Russia they LOVE OF APPEARANCES— -THE REVOLT 57 were cleared out of the way one hundred and ten years earlier. Nay, temporary successes of the reactionaries, as, for instance, that the foreigners were relegated to the Slobodä outside Moscow, that the influence of the Kievans was for the time broken, or the demand that if Russians were not to be spared learning, they should at least learn of Greeks, signified nothing. Because concessions had had to be made to the material re- quirements of the age, at length the spiritual also found a way in. The introduction of uniform and drilling of the army after the European model was only the precursor of a similar uniform handling and rough-hewing of men's minds. True, the latter could not be so quickly or thoroughly carried through, and in part has not been arrived at even yet. Already everything proclaimed the approaching revolution. The Tsarevna, instead of entering a convent, whither all Tsar's daughters had had to go — they could not on account of their dignity be married to native grandees, and foreign countries were closed to them — swayed the reins of govern- ment, if only as Regent for her brothers, for years. Her favourite dreamed already of freeing the peasants and giving them land. To meet the threatening revulsion the re- actionaries, with the Patriarch at their head, rallied round Peter, and fell from the frying-pan into the fire. Even his parents, the gentle Alexis and his pleasure-loving spouse, were no longer the rigid idols of an earlier day, and as for the son, about whom for a long time no one properly troubled himself, and who grew up among the grooms, his energy suddenly broke out in an unexpected way. He was no house-hugger who hung his head. Instead of good books and theological knowledge, what attracted him were realities and the World, of which no one had yet thought at the Kreml. Instead of pious monks he preferred to consort with the two Dutchmen, and tinkered at the old English boat until he ventured out in it on the Yauza. Such was to be the inception of the Russian Fleet. Russian envoys had before his time seen globes, and in their simplicity described them as " apples." To him the globes, astrolabes, compasses, and other instruments were interesting — nay, everything technical, if it was only child's 58 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY play for the time, such as a firework. The playing became earnest when he encountered the two condottieri, the Scotch- man Gordon, that old, experienced, and adroit man, and Lefort the Swiss, the breezy companion, and with them drilled his soldiers at Preobrazhenskoe — nomen omen (preobrazhinie= transfiguration, after which church and village were named), and through them found delight in the European doings in the Sloboda. The Orthodox Tsar consorting with u heathens," standing godfather to their children, driving away his lawful spouse a few weeks after the wedding, and having heathen women — Anna Mons among them — as mistresses ! And Peter kept speaking and thinking still more slightingly of his Patri- arch, and kept feeling the impulse to see the West itself, the land of technical wonders, of learned and civilised men who would furnish him with the means of carrying out his ambi- tious plans. At length, in 1697, an embassy under Lefort and Golovfn, a patron of the arts and sciences, was sent abroad. Its political task was insignificant and its success nily but thirty-five " volunteers " were attached to it. Peter chose them from the young Court favourites, the Stolniki and Spalniki (Gentlemen of the Table and the Bedchamber), and they were to learn " navigation " abroad. They were arranged in tens, with a decurion over each, one of them being the young Tsar himself. Ben Akiba went near to being refuted. And yet he was not so ; Peter was just merely Ivan IV. amid new surroundings — the same barbarian, worthy of the mezze bestte over whom he had to rule, just as sensual and cruel as Ivan, as heartless and fond of violence, identifying himself with the State in the same way and demanding of all his subjects devotion to the service of the same, trampling down and mutilating whoever in any way resisted his levelling or enslaving men to most primitive State demands. Thus he carried through the turning of all peasants, without distinction, into serfs and put the same poll-tax on them all. Thus too he transformed the whole nobility, which had to serve in the army, about Court, or in the civil service into a troop of servants graduated into fourteen classes ; everything breathes the Byzantine (or is it the Chinese ?) spirit. And if Ivan's FIRST REAL EMBASSY 59 Ghurch Services bordered very nearly on blasphemy, Peter's " most foolish Church Assembly," with its popes, cardinals, and bishops, was the most open contemning of all religion. The differences between the two concern little but trifles. Peter indeed laid aside Ivan's tartufferie ; the Fathers and incense were an abomination to him and tobacco smoke his favourite tickling of the nostrils, while the wisdom of the Slobodä was to him far more than that of Chrysostom. In certain points the comparison even turns out in favour of Ivan, for at least he did not deliberately murder his son and heir as Peter did. Peter was not drawn more strongly towards the sea than Ivan, only the latter met with more resistance ; the Poland of Batory was not a corpse as was that of Augustus II. ; both did the same towards the autocratising of Russia. To be sure one dif- ference there was : the women whom Ivan loved, if you can speak of " love " in connection with him, he married one and all against the principles of the Church : Peter refrained from doing so, except in the case of his last mistress. It was not to the men, their characters and their temperaments, but to the Age that the differences were principally to be ascribed. CHAPTER III Peter's work of reform and its importance externally — Influence on Literature— l His clerical allies ; Theophan Prokopövich, Pososhkov — The second third of the century — Rise of a secular Literature — Its French tendency — Kantemir, Tredia- kovsky and Sumarökov — Its German tendency — Tatishchev and Lomonosov, with the services of the latter to science and the language. The conception that Peter the Great was the Jupiter from whose head the Minerva of Reform sprang fully equipped has long since been rejected. Peter was not her creator, he only carried on the work of days that went before. His special importance does not lie in that ; unwearyingly did he accelerate the speed of the work of reform with a super- human and at times quite senseless energy ; he, moreover, materially altered the direction it took. Under Alexis, Theodore, and Sophia no sharp rupture with the old Moscow tradition had been made ; although as com- pared with their vacillating father, who kept plaguing himself with all kinds of scruples, his eldest son and daughter advanced a considerable way, yet it was Peter that first set such a speed that the Old Believers justly thought that they heard Anti- christ himself raving. To be sure this w r as not all at once, for to begin with he troubled himself but little about the Government, leaving everything as it was, and only con- cerned himself with the creation of a Fleet and the European organising of his Army. After the victory of Poltava he drank to the health of his instructors, the conquered 60 PETER'S LIGHTNING METHODS 61 Swedes. But, as is wont to be the case in Russia in the pursuit of material and egotistic plans, tasks of a higher order presented themselves spontaneously. What he learned on his first journey abroad in 1697-9, wnat m other countries were regarded as mere whims and vagaries, strange customs and arrangements, all that seemed practical and worth imitating he wanted now to transplant to Russia all at once, from the cut of clothes and the shaving of beards, which he or his buffoons performed summarily on the grandees, to the founding of museums and academies, the creation of a literature, and the revolutionising of the secular and clerical government itself. This transformation was of gigantic dimensions, the tale of his resources very restricted, lengthy and not very successful wars called for time and means ; no wonder, then, that his reform remained partial, that sham flaunted itself at the expense of reality. Another resulting phenomenon was more alarming. Until 1700 the national life had remained thoroughly harmonious ; even the separating of the Raskol had scarcely been able to shake this unity : the vassal led the same life as his master, spoke the same language, and thought the same thoughts, or more properly did not think at all. To this homogeneous way of living and regarding things, this uniform roughness and want of culture, an end was put almost at one blow. The nobility whom Peter had forced out of their musings and dreamings on their estates into his service — grades in that service and rank went before all privi- leges of birth — laid aside its native garb, habits, and language, associated, with foreigners, travelled about abroad for years, smoked and cursed, and read and thought godless things ; the women deserted the gloomy cells, put on French clothing, learned to dance and play, and must needs frequent "assemblies." Officers and officials, i.e., the nobility and numerous foreigners, Swedes, men of the Baltic, and Germans, now separated them- selves entirely by their way of life, cultivation, feeling, and thinking from the " common people," and there set in and increased with every decade an estrangement between the thin layer of enlightened people and the millions of the popu- 62 «TRANSFORMED" RUSSIA lace that were groping about in the old darkness. The price that had to be paid for civilisation and parade was a very- high one. With the swiftness of the wind Peter sought to make up for what had been left undone in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and with admirable determination made everything subserve his aims. The old capital of the country was for- mally deprived of its rights in favour of the new one on the sea ; from the Church was taken its head — its visible crown — and the guidance of it entrusted to a pliant body, the Holy Synod. All share of the people or its representatives (in the Zemsky Sobor or National Council) in the control of the colleges or departmental boards was put a stop to. The slightest resistance, nay even the most groundless suspicion of such, was punished in the most terrible way ; the Tsar did not refrain from playing the executioner with his own august hands and cutting off the heads of his subjects : the "Justice" of that age is a blood-bespattered monster, the crimes committed by her without number. The common murderer or robber when led to the place or execution need only utter the terrible password that he knew of some political ("tsarish") speech or matter to obtain deferment of execution and denounce some innocent man for some word or other, whereupon the torture-chamber at once came into play and the catastrophe broke over the guiltless and unsuspecting victim. Nay more, when Peter saw that his only son had thrown back to the pious nature of the earlier Tsars, when he found he could not hope for any energetic furthering of his life's work from him, he did not hesitate to bring him to trial, to condemn him to death, to torture him, and to have the sentence of death executed upon him. That the Tsar who calmly had his own son and heir butchered did not spare goods or blood of his subjects was a matter of course : in the Petersburg swamps one hundred thousand Russian peasants left their bones. There was no longer any possibility of resistance ; Russia had again lost its will as in the year 962, and handed itself over, bound hand and foot, to the new conqueror, Progress. PETER TURNS TO THE WEST 63 More decisive even than the uncanny rapidity of Reform was its altered tendency ; Peter was a stranger to the mental activity of Poland and Kiev, with its Scholastic, its Theology, its Latin, and its aversion to the realities which alone held him. In spite of its free and unpolitical life Poland had lagged behind the remainder of the West, and was sinking lower from decade to decade ; it drew on the large store of civilisation garnered in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries without replacing or increasing it. Over the heads of Poles and Little Russians Peter turned directly to that West which ensured him the realisation of his wishes : any one interested in navigation or fortification — and that was Peter's case exclusively — neither Warsaw nor Kiev had anything to offer ; he went to Amsterdam, to Vauban, or the arsenals of Venice. Thus it was decided that Peter, unlike his immediate predecessors (Theodore and Sophia), took for his instructor not the one-sided Latin and Catholic culture of Poland, but the practical culture of the Germans, Dutch, English, and French ; and that, placing the old teachers of the Russians entirely in the background, he secured for his people direct mental contact with Western Europe, and, at least externally, at once left Poland itself far behind him. Thus to the contemporaries of Peter, Russia appeared " newly transformed " ; those that were farther away could not guess how often this " transformation " remained purely external. This is most clearly noticeable in that province in which we should soonest expect a complete revolution, that of literature ; the literature of Peter the Great's day, the first quarter of the new century, is just as unripe, unoriginal, and wretchedly poor as that of the pre- ceding quarter had been. In Literature and Art the barbarian felt no interest, and he furthered them only in so far as they directly answered his purposes, /.JC And long for this shall I be dear unto the people, That noble sentiments I by the lyre awoke, That in our cruel age 1 I celebrated Freedom And mercy for the fall'n bespoke. To God's command, my Muse, in all things be resigned. Thou insult need'st not fear, seeking no crown of laurel : Praise and detraction bear with unaffected mind, Nor with the blockhead pick a quarrel." This indifference, to be sure, was not quite sincerely meant. He that in his youth had been so spoilt by applause felt the visibly increasing indifference, and found the adverse judg- 1 In the original " That in Radishchev's steps." THE POETS CALLING. TURNS TO PROSE 199 ments bitter, for in all ways the poet was quite unlike the man. He spoke his mind plainly. " As long as Apollo " — he never could quite renounce mythological arabesques — " does not need his poet for the holy sacrifice, he smiles meanly among the cares of the vain world, his sacred lute is silent, and his soul sleeps coldly, and among all the vain children of the world perhaps none is more vain than he." We are not astonished at his bitter complaints of life. "Gift without use, gift made by chance, Life, wherefore art thou given me ? Or wherefore art thou doomed to end By fate's mysterious decree ? Who was it used a hostile power From nothingness to call me out With passion fill my soul for me And agitate my mind with doubt ? No purpose is before me set, Empty my heart, my mind is bare ; Life's clattering monotony Wearies me with a dull despair." Even in 1829 premonitions of an early death crop up. The more seldom Pushkin in his later years had to call on his poetry, the more eagerly he turned to despised prose. He believed, something like Gogol, in his calling as a historian, yet nothing came of it beyond the collecting of materials for " Peter the Great " and " Pugachov's Revolt." However, he tried his hand at prose stories, not without success. The former poet of Onegin turned from contemporary problems more and more decidedly. Modern and truly Russian themes occupied him indeed, but he either waived them in favour of others [e.g.^ Gogol) or let the pieces drop when scarcely begun. On the other hand, historical romance attracted him, but he had not the necessary confidence in his prose to be the Russian Scott. With the powerful swing of his verse the clear but carefully groping and unadorned diction of his stories con- trasts sharply. The subjects he always chose from the epochs that were most familiar to him — how Peter wooed 200 PUSHKIN the Boyar's daughter for his negro (incomplete, with an interesting anecdotic appendix) and from the time of the revolt of Pugachov "The Captain's Daughter," with the virtuous hero and his stereotyped reward ; the surround- ings are most characteristically reproduced. The "Tales of Belkin " are rather anecdotes, of a gruesome or senti- mental nature, told not without charm. "The Queen 01 Spades," a gambling story, reminds us of Hoffmann, who was soon to be all the rage in Russia ; it found the largest circle of readers. The most interesting, if they did not break off so abruptly, would be the " Annals of the Village of Gorokhino," which throws light on serfdom. Even dearer to him than these historical studies, richly endowed by Imperial favour, and attempts in elegant literature, were his journalistic ven- tures. He had a share in Moscow and St. Petersburg papers, and at length received permission to publish the non-political and purely literary Contemporary, which was named on the principle of cams a non canendo, in which he wished to create a shrine of authoritative literary criticism, to wrest the same from pedants and meddling hands. He had no success with his quarterly, although he gathered the best men of letters about him. Not till years later, when the Contemporary came into the hands of young men, was it destined to attain the unforeseen and dominating influence which attaches inseparably to that name. Without the poet suspecting it, without accounting to him- self for it, he was in a fair way to become, step by step, but without cessation — the true Russian transformation of the poet of freedom — a belauder of the police. In vain he strove against it, and declared the poet was born, not for the tangles of life, for self-seeking, and conflict, but for inspiration, dulcet tones, and prayers. The shelving track, once he had entered on it, carried him ever deeper downwards. It was less so, to be sure, in his poetry, the spring of which already began slowly to dry up as he grew prematurely old. Vyazemsky judged differently and more rightly of this flunkey poetising on one's knees, of this singing the praises of the hangmen. So, too, did Mickiewicz, who fears for his sometime friends lest, dishonoured by titles THE CONTEMPORARY. RECALL 201 or orders, and selling their free souls to the Tsar, they should celebrate his triumphs with venal tongues. But all the more was it true of his prose. True, he was refused all journalistic activity such as must in the end have associated Grech and Bulgarin with him, but his efforts towards a reasonable compro- mise with the inexorable reality of the Nicolaitan system led him away into the most questionable concessions. To him there was already no longer any disgrace in unconditional devotion to the Autocracy, in so far as it respects and furthers national wants. What we read about Autocracy in his pages before the banquet was quite different. This political sloughing of Pushkin's, the most unlovely of his sloughings, had come about in the following way : — We broke off his biography at his banishment to the South. Disputes with his new superior, Count Vorontsov, on whom he fashioned the imperishable epigram — " Half- my lord, half -tradesman, half-sage, and half-dunce, Half-knave, there's a hope he'll be whole for this once " ; and a blasphemy intercepted in a letter brought about the rele- gation of " the incorrigible " to his paternal property. In its solitude he found concentration and the necessary leisure for extensive historical and literary studies, in order to put himself on a level with the age. Here he tided over the Decembrist dis- turbance and its first consequences, and from here petitioned for the reversal of his outlawry. A month later the messenger of the Tsar fetched him to Moscow (September, 1826), where he had an outspoken explanation with Nicholas. The latter spoke of him as one of the ablest men in Russia, and entrusted him with a memorandum on popular education, offered to act him- self as censor of his writings, and soon after gave him leave to reside in the two capitals. In the end the tokens of Imperial favour increased ; he was again attached to the Foreign Office, obtained access to the archives, and visited the scenes of Pugachov's revolt, all by permission. When on one occasion he travelled from St. Petersburg to Moscow without it he was admonished by the Third Section. In 1833 he actually became Gentleman of the Bedchamber 202 PUSHKIN i.e., the same at thirty-three that his friend Vyazemsky was at eighteen. Pushkin slowly reconciled himself to the new system, for his fancy played the poet an ill-turn. The chivalrous conduct of the Emperor, his constancy and goodwill, the outward splendour of Russia and its boundless prestige, dazzled and bribed the patriot and the Conservative, who soon adopted a tone worthy of Derzhavin ; thus, in 1831, he hurled at Europe the invectives : "You threaten us with words, try it in deeds ! Or is it that the word of the Russian Tsar has become powerless ? Is it something new for us to contend with Europe, or has the Russian grown unused to victory, or are there too few of us ? Will not from Derm even to Tauris, from Finland's cold rocks to fiery Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to the walls of immovable China, Russia arise, blazing with its bristles of steel ? Only send us, you praters, your angry sons, we have room for them on Russia's fields among graves that are not strange to them." Thus was completed the desertion of the ex-Decembrist — he openly confessed to the Emperor that he had been one of " them " — to the official camp. An easy process it was not. Even the Emperor's act of grace in serving as censor meant for him a new burden, fettered him beforehand, and at most insured him the satisfac- tion that his " Boris Godunov " came out without erasures, in other respects the difficulties with the Censorship and the Third Section remained the same : there was the same secret police supervision ; no devices were any good, such as abusing Radishchev, whom he so highly respected, just for the sake of being able to discuss the name and the work publicly. And yet Pushkin, to whom we owe the biting poetical epistles "To the Censor," could maintain that the Censorship was some- thing rational or justifiable ! Thus it was that his Conserva- tism overrode logic and reality. He passed through the stages of a Karamzin and emerged at last as the same worshipper of autocracy and its inseparable attributes, the knout and the Censorship, a deeply religious and hotly Conservative champion. Russian Liberalism is apt to lose colour sadly, not only with TURNS COURTIER. THE REVULSION 203 such riffraff as Bulgarin and Grech. Class pride and aristo- cratic, reactionary and bigoted ideals now formed the basis of his social, political, and religious character. We do not so greatly doubt the sincerity of his transformation, we only lament that the singer of freedom should place himself without any reserve at the service of the Tsar instead of that of the country (though that confusion is constant in Russia). A kindly fate preserved him in the end from the last humiliation. Pushkin was in the best way to obtain the coveted title of Chamberlain, fresh pensions and orders, gout and the in- difference, if not contempt, of every decent man, when the bullet of a vulgar adventurer put an end to his restless and chequered life. He had to pay a bitter penalty for having tasted the tree of knowledge ; the recoil after 1825, when all fled shamefully to cover, by no means spared him any more than others. That December day avenged itself not only on its immediate victims, but on Russia, whose progress was thrown back for decades, and on her best sons, who, forced out of their proper course, fell into apathy or in restless, nervous haste as devotees of art, science, or philanthropy, tried to deceive themselves as to the purposelessness of their pursuit — the Princes Orlov (the "chemist," once general, the Rhine of the "Arzamas"), and Odoevsky, Alexander Turgenev, and so on. Others lost themselves in mysticism, like Kiichelbeker, the younger Odoevsky, and Ivashev (the last three are Decembrites), or made ready for a platonic perversion to Catholicism, like Chaadaev, or actually became Catholics, like the Jesuits Pechorin and Gagarin. Others sought oblivion in orgies and gambling, which method Pushkin also tried, while all of them lost their moral standby, though in return they were now delivered from the " pitiful spirit of doubt and denial," the "cold scepticism of French philosophy, the intoxicating and harmful dreams which had had such a dreadful influence on the fairest flower of the preceding generation " — all this is his own saying. By it he imposed only on himself, and that not completely. The last ten years of his life, apart from a few bright spots — notably too arduous literary activity made him 204 PUSHKIN forget everything in the autumn months, his favourite time for production, as at Boldino in 1830 — simply wore him out prematurely through constant unrest, the taking up of the most various plans, sharing in warlike operations, journeys, &c, continually changing his place of abode, daily growing more discontented with himself and with his whole surround- ings, which at last brought on the catastrophe. Even his literary work afforded less and less satisfaction, for the applause of a few that were like-minded could not make up to him for the total estrangement of the great public. The reasons for this were by no means arbitrary, accidental, or unfounded. People could not accustom themselves to the idea that the advanced singer of Opposition and Revolution had become the lamblike supporter of Orthodoxy and Aris- tocracy ; they saw in it an apostasy and scented, though unjustly, egotistic motives. The poems in which Pushkin defended himself against the accusation of having become a flatterer remained, like what was most valuable in his produc- tions, for the time unpublished. In another way the whole aim of the poet was disappointing, seeing folks were still under the spell of romantic exaggerations which had been imposed precisely by the " Prisoner in the Caucasus " and " The Fountain of Baghchisarai." The progress of the poet, who soon shook himself free of these excesses, was not shared by them ; such a public would never have allowed to pass current Pushkin's own opinion that " Ruslän " is tame, " The Prisoner " immature, and in face of the poetry of the Caucasus the sheerest Golikov prose, while the Khan in the " Fountain " is absurdly melodramatic. The riper, clearer, more objec- tive and perfect in form Pushkin's creations grew, the less did they answer to the artless, melodramatically romantic trend of the age ; his lyrical note seemed hushed ; for its fairest out- come, the verses to the Emperor and to Mickiewicz, remained unpublished. The epic and dramatic productions that ap- peared after " Poltava " met with more and more decisive rejection ; the wretched pedlar's wares of a Bulgarin or Zagoskin proved far more attractive. Thus the ways of the poet and the public diverged more and more. The tragical LOST POPULARITY. FOR AND AGAINST 205 unlooked-for loss, the general realisation of foreign and sordid intrigues, which alone were responsible for the death of the poet, first reconciled the public once more to their former darling, and beside his bier the old affection blazed up brightly once again. Thus, even with his contemporaries, the verdict concerning the poet oscillated, and the contest around Pushkin remained important even for posterity. In the forties the critic Belinsky pointed out the beauties of his works as their enthusiastic admirer, but even he dwelt on the art of the author as purely historical and an exclusive devotion to the beautiful, not to the time and its requirements. When these demands grew louder and more one-sided journalistic criticism rated the importance of the author lower and lower, while the purely aesthetic did not allow itself to be turned from its admira- tion ; in the excitement the criticism of a Pisarev then allowed itself to be led into the greatest breaches of modera- tion and good taste. Not till 188 1, at the unveiling of the Moscow Memorial to the poet, was there a unanimous and overwhelming ovation accorded by the cultured world, even though not quite without exaggerations, such as Dostoevsky's, who had always been the deepest and most ardent admirer of that " world-genius." Only since then can one speak of a fixed estimate of the great Moscovite. Pushkin is the national poet of the Russians, although his poetry is by no means national. Not without justice did people call him the Peter the Great of poetry, for Peter's influence too was alien. Both learned from other countries, but it was not they that first recognised the necessity of this view or carried it out — they only helped it on towards decisive success. Pushkin was an imitator like his predecessors, but as compared with their mostly but mediocre talents, and often one-sided, undeterminate courses he first appeared as the poetic genius which carries away the reluctant, and in the service of the beautiful develops into a moral force with which even rulers on the throne seek to come to terms. All narrowness is alien to him, and the power of adaptation or transformation 206 PUSHKIN of this virtuoso of form becomes simply astounding. He begins with roguish and easy glorification of enjoyment, an Epicurean among poets, apparently avoiding all seriousness, but the Sybarite becomes a rallier in the political struggle, and lends to indignation and mockery the most flaming language. We find him soon at the feet of Byron ; through this romantic poetry he approaches the true and finds in the end paths of his own ; thus he becomes the most artistic poet of the Russians. In certain scenes of " Godunov," in the later cantos of " Onegin," and some of his lyrics he creates what is imperishable, the great models without which a literature can never become great. For the first time the others take example by him, while till now every one went his own way, z.^., imitated this or that foreigner, but Pushkin founded a school ; even in the older writers, who were once his teachers, one sees his influence. It is essentially one of form ; not wealth of ideas, but the mastery of " Pushkin's verse," which has become simply an aesthetic definition, is aimed at, mostly to no purpose, by his successors. The indescribable music of verse, its full sensuousness, plasticity too, with nothing blurred or indistinct, as with Zhukovsky, are coupled with genuine and deep feeling, sincere melancholy, and lively whims ; if he lacks the passionate glow of love as of hate, yet in his crea- tions he always achieves that balance which he so painfully missed in life. He gives quite the impression of a classical poet, and especially in his later work one forgets his romantic antecedents, and throughout it is the perfection of his form which begets these illusions. It seems to us a natural ex- pression, as if it had been born with the matter or the idea ; but behind the apparent ease and absence of effort lurks con- scientious, untiring work, polishing and shaping, above all shortening and compressing of the diction, which now drapes the body like a heavy rustling dress of state, now floats about like a loose wrapping. Krylov's and Zhukovsky's styles are original indeed, but how Pushkin, who commands all stops, outdoes the onesidedness of one and the other ! It is no easy task to speak of Pushkin ; involuntarily one feels oneself facing a riddle, and dreads to be unjust to him. A TRUE CLASSICIST. "CAGED" 207 Thus we dwelt on his historical dramas, epics, and novels, without really believing that they completed Pushkin's calling. He is also the poet of the present, as witness his " Onegin " and "Annals of the Village of Gorokhino" (" Peasham "). These give us the idea that they were written by a Shchedrin, or were a chapter from a story with a purpose of complaint. The good-natured ridiculing of the literary paces of his "Belkin" was followed by jesting that was by no means good-natured, on the pleasures and pains of Russian village life. But was there any possibility of continuing such a story in face of the Censorship, of the Emperor, the police, the Ministers of Education, and lastly of an Uvarov, whom Pushkin justly despised so bitterly, and on whom he wrote the most scathing of his satires, which is said to have partly led to the final catastrophe ? Before this brazen wall Pushkin recoiled, let " Gorokhino " and all wise, present-day plans drop, and wasted much time and strength in the emptiest historical researches, from which nothing but boredom could result. Here at least he was safe from the triple Censorship and the police. " Sing, birdie, Sing ! " cries the cat in Krylov's fable to the nightingale, which she holds in her claws. The fable is meant for Pushkin and the Russian system. And Pushkin felt this lamentable pressure, and wrote in despair to his wife, "The devil must have been in me to be born in Russia, and with talent ! " How often he doubtless longed to be out of his gilded cage at St. Petersburg, and in the poverty-stricken freedom of his great opponent in Paris ! Slowly but surely " they " broke his pinions, and only the growing unrest of the poet betrays the pangs of his conscience. And then sudden death ! It is always worth while and enticing to speak of Pushkin ; a more genuine artist the world has not seen. He is no dramatist or epic poet, and never can he put large masses in motion. Only compare his " Onegin " with the contem- porary " Pan Tadeusz " of Mickiewicz. He is a lyric poet, but as such the echo of Russia. What sound of home he him- self heard in the " Song of the Postilion " is repeated by him. Now unbridled joy, now deep gloom of heart ; with years 208 PUSHKIN and experience the one is lost, the other grows. When he had renounced " the light-winged revelry, the light-winged love, the sweet far niente " of his early youth, he desired " to devote to the Fatherland the highest flight of his soul." "Oh, could my voice but flutter others' hearts ! Why burns a profitless glow in my breast ? Why did the orator's great gift not fall to my lot ? Shall I ever, friends, see the people unoppressed, slavery fall at the nod of the Tsar, and will the glorious Dawn of enlightened Freedom some day at last break over my country ? " In place or that his " Arion " needs must sing — " Many of us there were upon our craft, And some of us were hoisting up the sails, Others were dipping deep the mighty oars And pulled together in the quietness. Leaning against the helm our steersman wise In silence guided the deep-laden craft, And I, filled full of careless confidence, Sang to the sailors. Sudden a loud squall Flew down and crumpled all the water's breast. Perished the steersman and the sailors too, And I alone, singer mysterious, Was cast up by the storm upon the shore. I sing my former hymns and in the sun Beneath a rock I dry my dripping garb." Even so he deceived himself again ; there was no longer any possibility of singing the former hymns, nor that his incorruptible voice should remain the echo of the nation. True, he did not " by unlawful treachery abase his proud conscience, his unbending lute," he became no flatterer, but drew back upon himself, conjured his Muse to visit him that his soul might not grow cold and stifF, and moulder in the midst of the soulless pride, the glittering stupidity, among Godfearing coquettes, willing slaves, amid commonplace scenes of fashion, gentle learned treachery, the cold deci- sions of hard-hearted vanity, the vexatious emptiness of calculated thinking and prating. Soon he frankly owned to himself " extinct merriment of mad years weighs on me heavily, like dreary crapulousness. But, even as wine, the A FALSE POSITION. A LOWER FLIGHT 209 pain of past days strengthens with age. Mournful is my path. The wild-tossing sea of the future proffers me troubles and sorrow. And yet I would not die, friends — nay, live, to think and to endure. And I know enjoyment falls to my lot among all the sorrow, cares, and adversity. Once more will I intoxicate myself with harmony, burst out into tears over what I have devised, and perhaps Love will brighten into a farewell smile over my hapless ending." To this pro- gramme, /.*?., his own nature, he remained true. He found the new notes for his songs, he brought the language of poetry down from its stilts, although prejudiced criticism accused him of using "low burläk" (bargee) " words." Nor was this enough. " A sower of freedom in the wilderness, I went forth early, before the morning star, with pure, unsullied hand to sow the nourishing seed in the furrows of slavery. Yet I only lost my time, my good intentions, and my trouble." After he had fought sufficiently against the current, he at last swam with it, till his bark of life was dashed to pieces. On this short voyage there was further revealed to him the poetry of the monotonous Russian landscape, which as yet was quite beyond his contemporaries, the poetry of the Russian people, which was not romantic enough for them. It is given to no country that in it should more than once be revealed a man of such varied and high qualities, which generally exclude each other. Pushkin astonished his hearers by the vivacity, clearness, and fineness of his mind ; he had an exceptional memory, a sure judgment, and a cultivated taste. " I knew him right well and long ; I looked on him as a man of sensitive, at times frivolous, but always sincere, noble, and open character. His failings seemed to arise from the cir- cumstances and society amongst which he lived, but the good in him came from his own heart," wrote his great friend and rival Mickiewicz, when the pistol-bullet had shattered the expectations that his admirers built up on his long silence as a poet, a silence they had interpreted only as a happy augury for Literature. Perhaps this opinion was an erroneous one, like so many others on Pushkin. People had once expected him to 15 2IO PUSHKIN play a political and Radical part, and had made a thorough mistake ; it was not in the least in his blood, but had been forced on the easily swayed man by youthful friends, whereas he was fundamentally Conservative. Nay, more, Pushkin's hatred of innovation is by no means a rare phenomenon, especially with authors of genius. The revolutionaries, the innovators in the sphere of mind, knowledge, or art are all the more reserved in all other spheres, as if in this way a sort of balance was to be restored in them and contradictions removed. Pushkin is only the servant of the beautiful, only seeks the beautiful ; hence the contrast of life and poetry with him. How little significant, for instance, was she, how little he esteemed her in reality, to whom he addressed his noblest love-poems ! Thus his art refined and idealised the sordid and the paltry. Over times in which the cult of the beautiful has to retire into the background, as in the Russia of 1 86 1, which was settling matters that were vital, Pushkin accord- ingly loses his power. When the social waves draw seaward again, men return devoutly to their extolling of beauty : the magic that it radiates is indeed imperishable. CHAPTER VII THE ROMANTIC POETS The Pushkin Pleiad : Delvig, Yazykov, Baratynsky, Venevitinov Kozlov, Podolinsky, Polezhaev — Lermontov, his youth, and outside influences — Social themes — Pessimism — Poetical Ro- mances — Dramas — His position — Koltsov and the Folk-song. Whoever, leaving the exotic and mystical blooms of German, French, and English Romanticism, approaches the Russian, remains disappointed. The longing for the fleur bleue, the fantastic ride into wonderland, allegories heavy with meaning, pantheistic or social dreams, mystical transports, are all essen- tially alien to Russian literature as to the Russian tempera- ment. Both are by nature very sober, clinging to the clod of reality, and do not roam among the stars. Sound sense — how rich Pushkin was in it ! — a mind tinged with scepticism, for the Russian only laughs at German enthusiasm and exaggera- tion ; a very moderate feeling for Nature, for only men interest the Russian — his landscapes are much too lacking in variety and charm ; a direct aversion from abstractions, for hitherto Russia has produced no noteworthy philosopher, though it has theologians and moralists. Such conditions, I say, are most unfavourable to the flourishing of flowers of romance. How soon Pushkin came to his senses, how few Russian poems there are that move in the flaunting garb of Romanticism, with all its lilies and stars ! At this day we see that the re-birth of poetry, symbolical, decadent, or philosophical, is in Russia a most difficult matter, and reaps rather cheap ridicule than serious consideration. 212 THE ROMANTIC POETS Russian Romanticism — one must force oneself to use the expression — differs in other material points from European. It is characterised by a quite unromantic restraint of the mind, and seems extraordinarily cramped and petty, without boldness or depth, and that was due not only to temperament, but to the age and the regime of Nicholas ; it smells regularly of Arakcheev's hereditary machines, a Romanticism of sergeant- majors and clerks. Doubtless hangmen are necessary, but to sing of them is neither needful nor nice. This maxim, formu- lated by the tact of Vyäzemsky, does not exist for Pushkin, Polezhaev, and others, who calmly send forth their heroes against Circassians or Poles, and abuse the latter, as if the Circassians had not heroically defended the freedom of their mountains against fearfully superior numbers. Lermontov alone is in this, as in other respects, an honourable exception. How wretched the Russian Byrons look as compared with their model ! How he clears his throat, how he spits, they have learned and imitated; but his championship of freedom and truth is not incumbent on them. Their protests against the Catechism and other dogmas always end with a laudabiliter se subjecit. Podolinsky even brings it about that his Peri converts Div, which A. de Vigny would not even have ventured on with his Eloa. Their opposition, as with Pushkin before them, ends in passive quietism. Their supposed compromises are unconditional surrenders ; they at most reserve for them- selves feeble pessimism ; the Titans collapse much too speedily into pygmies, and do not even ruffle the authority of a rent- collector. To be sure there is one exception. No wonder, then, that even in the Pushkin " Pleiad " no' Romanticist of the true breed is to be found ; and with several of them one is disposed generally to question his belonging there, otherwise than nominally. Take, to begin with, the young " Slav, a Greek in mind, a Teuton by blood," Baron Delvig, the fellow-student of Pushkin, who, in reality, never got farther than the initial stage out of which Pushkin passed in 1820. He loved to represent himself as spoiled and petted by Muses and Graces, as if idleness and indolence were the most indispensable qualities of the poet. Like Bätyushkov, PSEUDO-ROMANTICISM. YAZfKOV 213 he imitated the antique in his idylls and elegies, and attained to a high degree of tenderness ; but he became best known by his imitations of the national song, by far the most successful and therefore most popular in their day, i.e., before Koltsov came on the scene. He was not prolific, but noted for good taste, and Pushkin constantly consulted him and fully trusted his judgment : hence the whole circle expected much of the Literary Gazette which Delvig began to publish in 1830 — after many previous Almanacs, " Flowers of the North," "Snowdrops," &c. — and which avowedly was to be the mouth- piece of an organised aristocratic criticism. The acceptance of a strophe after Delavigne on the victims of the Days of July at once put an end to the journal, and ere long the life of the editor, too, in January, 1831. The pleasing prospect of serving the Autocracy journalistically Pushkin found himself unable to realise either in this journal or in his Contemporary. Of longer duration, though without being much more productive, was the activity of Yazykov, whom Pushkin inspired, especially when he visited him in his exile at Mikhailovskoe in 1826. After Yazykov had failed to learn anything in all sorts of professional schools, he continued the same study at Dorpat, where, as first Russian "old stager," he, in German student fashion, cultivated wine, women, and song, not merely platonically, like Pushkin and Delvig. In this most dissipated student life there was only one bright episode — the silent, chaste devotion to an angel upon earth, Professor Voeykov's wife, sister of Zhukövsky's flame, the wife of Professor Moyer. These youthful songs of Yazykov's were marked by unsimulated feeling ; the joys of Bacchus and of Eros were celebrated in verse naturally poor in ideas, but all the richer in the diction of sensuality. He was the first that knew how to depict female beauty, and he succeeded also in certain pictures from Nature. With the strains of this mostly rollicking but often most picturesque poetry mingled others that were graver, not only in the lines to his Muse, Mme. Voeykov, but in the first prayers and poetic imitations of the Old Testament, which later were to divert him to purely religious lyric poetry. His youthful dreams found an abrupt and 214 THE ROMANTIC POETS mournful end, be it said, and when, after a lengthy pause, the poet again came on the scene he had " become a Tartuffe through illness and by relationship a Slavophile." Now the repentant sinner caused the poet, in moments of terror and trembling, to rise above the dust of earth, listen to choirs of angels, and from the heights of heaven bear down prayers to the trembling that we may take them to heart and be saved by our faith — witness "The Earthquake" in 1844 — and at the same time he wrote the indictment in verse, " Not Ours," in which he charged Chaadaev with apostasy from Orthodoxy, the radical Professor of History, Granovsky, with heresy and leading the young astray, Herzen of wearing the brilliant liveries of the West, and all of traitorousness towards their country. Even the Slavophil Aksakov was indignant at these " Slavonic policemen in Jesus Christ's name." Of greater conceptions neither Delvig nor Yaz^kov nor the other Romantics were capable, all being at bottom lyrical poets, even the most gifted among them whom Pushkin placed highest, Prince Baratynsky, although he tried his hand at narrative poems, which were all composed on the same pattern, only differing in the localities : " Eda," the seduced and deserted Finnish girl, with descriptions of scenery in her home, which Baratynsky knew from serving there for several years, " The Ball " in Moscow drawing-rooms, and " The Gypsy." He is before all things a melancholy man ; he flees from life to poetry, laments the want of harmony between the ideal and reality, and lets himself be led into complaints against the latter, in which imprudent sayings about the destructive power of knowledge and the undimmed happiness of the simple, the child of Nature, fall from him. Truth becomes a funeral torch ; disappointment and pessimism take possession of him, and at last he grows enthusiastic over death, the solution of all riddles and loosing of all chains, exalting him quite in the antique way as the son of iEther, who, with his cool breath, tames the exuberance of life : he even sings of the last death on earth, the extinction of all life when over the void only a mist curls like a purifying sacrifice. " For our heavy lot is during the appointed time to nourish ourselves with sickly life, to BAR A T &NSK Y. VENE VtTINO V 215 love the disease of existence and coax and dread the comforter Death : though truth never show itself to the poet in life, may it at least do so at the last moment, open his eyes and enlighten his understanding, so that, having seen through life, he may de- scend without murmuring into the abode of Night." Schopen- hauer and water in verse ! Like Yazykov, he was silent a long time, and not till 1842 did he come forward with a new collection of more philosophical poems under the significant title " Evening Twilight," repeating the same ideas with greater perfection in the diction, in pale, shadowy outlines. Not with the idle, stupefied herd, which only responds to hollow, con- ventional notes, will the word echo that has passed beyond passion and the earthly. Here were uttered later the words touching the emptiness and vanity of knowledge, and how the heart of Nature closes before the inquiring spirit, that vexed the Radical critic. The resigned and melancholy pessimism of Baratynsky produces no impression on his fellows, for he became silent at the passionate protest of another pessimist. Just as philosophically, but not pessimistically attuned was the idealistic lute of the Moscovite Venevitinov, who died in his twenty-second year, the Schellingite ; it seemed as to form to belong in its chasteness and tenderness rather to antiquity than to Romanticism, although the theoretical dila- tations of the author were sharply at variance with the con- ventional trammels and confident ignorance of the French : he was, however, rather a philosopher and critic than a poet. He was independent of Pushkin properly, and the same was the case with the eldest among them, Kozlov, who, at an advanced age, first crippled and then blinded, became the poet of resignation, of a surrender which, as is often the case with the blind, was gently cheerful and deliberate, not induced by pain or imposed by force. There arose a peculiar philosophy or even apotheosic of suffering which reminds one of Zhukovsky : as there is no happiness that does not change, and only the remembrance of happiness enjoyed comforts us, what else but suffering calls this remembrance back to us ? So he bears his cross with a thankful mind, yet he admires Byron, but that must of course have been not for his protests and passions but 2i6 THE ROMANTIC POETS for his seeking after truth and justice. In his "Tale of Kiev " " The Monk," which enjoyed the greatest popularity and was translated into the most various languages (twice into French, into Italian, and so on), he imitated Byron, it is true : his hero also kills the man who wrecks his happiness, but it takes place in an outburst of fury. This crime it is that for ever banishes the happiness of resignation which he had already achieved — for with the Cross comes also hope — and restlessly he rolls about in his cell, no Byronic hero now. The gentle, meek Kozlov pre- ferred heroines who bear their fate calmly, follow the beloved to death, even when he has deceived and deserted them, and do not curse but bless him. In spite of his enthusiastic admira- tion for Byron, he turned for this reason from his bitterness to the more cheerful muse of Scott. No remarkable genius he, except perhaps with regard to form, for the most part only an imitator and translator : from his name and fate Zhukovsky and Madame Voeykov, Pushkin and Mickiewicz, are insepar- able ; he was indebted to them for consolation and inspiration, and gratefully sang their praises. Romanticists, in a worse sense of the word, were Chodolinsky, the composer of blood-curdling poems — his Othello, Borsky, killed his innocent Desdemona ; but his jealousy was not even genuine, only the mere outcome of Byronic disillusionment» His Romanticism, the most tedious and unimportant, is quite financial, as is that of Bene- diktov, author of political and patriotic songs, ostentatious, artificial, doing violence to language as to logic, dazzling simple people and decried by the critics, such as Belinsky, who warned people against this hollow rhetoric, and even more by Dobrolübov when he came to the fore again towards the end of the fifties. Of a large band of poets and poetesses let me mention here one who early came to grief, a man of in- disputable talent, whose tragic fate is so characteristic of Nicholas's Russia and its patriarchal regime, Polezhaev. As a Moscow student he had already made for himself a certain name by his rollicking verses, of course only in MS., which his humorous narrative poem, " Sashka," a regular parody of " Onegin," telling of wild students' pranks and debauchery and of fighting with the Police, could only en- KOZLÖV. POLEZHÄEV 217 hance. During the visit of the Emperor to Moscow the Police handed him the corpus delicti. The Emperor, an enemy of the universities, which he regarded as hot-beds of mental vice, and from attending which he held back the pupils of the privileged institutions, saw in it a remnant of Decembrism, had the student summoned before himself and the Minister of In- struction, so as to show him what came of his schools, and made him at the dead of night, which seems set apart for all administrative surprises in Russia, read "Säshka" aloud. Picture to yourself the scene — the hotly indignant Emperor, the sleepy greyheaded Minister, the student, at first quite terrorised, but at length quite carried away by the racy swing of his smooth, admirable verses on the white satin shanks of his fair one. The Emperor kissed the student like a father, and put him for his moral purification in that great House of Correction the army, with permission, in case of necessity, to appeal to the Emperor by letter. When his letters remained unanswered he deserted in order to present them in person, was taken and condemned to run the gauntlet (see " The Prisoner "). The Emperor let him off the punishment and despatched him to the Caucasus, but in that God-forsaken wilderness Polezhaev, who showed no inclination to be a police-poet, began to drink, simply to forget ("To Vodka"). He was indeed retransferred to Moscow in 1833, but con- sumption and spirits completed their work of destruction : the soldier was already dead, but the rats gnawed off his leg in the hospital cellar. The collection of his poems, in which, of course, the startlingly gloomy ones as well as the indecent were omitted, gave his picture in officer's uniform because the Censorship would not allow private's uniform. And it was a real talent which fell a victim to the " Spässkia Kazarmy " (barracks, so-called from being near the Cathedral of the Saviour, "Spas"), once more only lyrical talent, for his soldier stories are uninteresting. He is distinguished by a vigorous, manly diction which preferred short verses, well coupled with the sappy material of his descriptive and lyrical poems, over which mists of despair and embitterment lowered, yet he accused — as became a loyal Russian — only himself and his wickedness. 2i8 THE ROMANTIC POETS The true Romanticist and Byronist is not Pushkin, and still less Zhukovsky, but Mikhail Yürievich Lermontov, who in Germany is associated with the name of Bodenstedt, who knew, admired, and translated him : the great hater and passion- ate accuser, the embittered and protesting pessimist, who in the heavy atmosphere of Nicholas's reign was too little valued, but gained every succeeding ten years in importance and popularity : with Pushkin the second great poetical genius of Russia, yet, unlike Pushkin, it was not granted him to impart to us all that moved his breast. His song was abruptly and early cut short ; after but eight-and-twenty years the bullet of his friend and rival put an untimely end to his life in a duel. We involuntarily enter on the contemplation of his work with a feeling of mournful dissatisfaction — far more than with Push- kin are doubts admissible how and what he might have had to say — or do we deceive ourselves here again ? He astonishes us by the extraordinary precocity of his mind and by the tenacity with which he clings to the problems he has once attacked. He was born at Moscow, October 2, 1814. His childhood went by calmly in the peace of the manor, interrupted only by an early journey (1826) to the Caucasus: in spite of Pushkin's " Prisoner," Lermontov is the true bard of the Caucasus. His grandmother (his mother he lost early) secured the best Franco-English education for her only and dearly-loved Michel. The melancholy boy, left to himself, plunged early into reading, especially poets, soon wrote himself — of course, to begin with, French verses, then as early as his twelfth year Russian — at first only copying, then adding to and paraphrasing, e.g. Pushkin. At thirteen he went to Moscow to the University School, then to the College itself, but had to leave it in 1832 on account of disputes with his teachers. Then at eighteen years of age, having hitherto served only literature, he entered the Guards' Cadet School at St. Petersburg, leaving it two years later as an officer. He chose the military career because it would at least lead him by the shortest road, if not to the first literary goal, yet to the final one of all that exists : for it is better to die with the bullet in your breast than of the slow decay of age. A LERMONTOV. EARLY DROLLERIES 219 year before this he wrote (1831 ) : " No, I am not Byron ; I am another chosen one, as yet unknown, like him a stranger persecuted by the world, yet with the soul of a Russian. I began sooner and shall end sooner ; my mind will not com- plete much." Thus he anticipated his early death. Ten years later, in 1841, he described it plainly in the " Dream " : " In the glow of mid-day I lay in the Daghestan valley motion- less, with the lead in my breast ; the deep wound still smoked, my blood oozed drop by drop, I lay all alone on the sand of the valley." On July 15 th of that same year he actually died so. The two years at the Cadets' School he characterised as fearful. He plunged into the whirl of amusements and dissi- pations, and devoted — a second Barkov (the pornographer of the eighteenth century) — his pen to the same theme as Polezhäev in "Säshka," though the setting was different : love adventures in a garrison, on the march, and in camp, told with cynical candour and extraordinary skill. Written copies were circulated by his comrades among the jeunesse doree of the capital of " The Peterhof Fete," " The Lancer's Wife," "Mongo," and lastly, in 1836, "The Cashier's Wife." To these promptings of a lewd muse were added many small songs of the same kind. Let us only mention that in " Mongo " the adventures of his friend Stolypin (" Mongo ") and himself ("Maioshka") are depicted — notably their flight from the villa of a leading dancer before a superior number of drunken civilians. He gives a very unflattering character of both heroes, talks of his own idleness, the law of his life, of his calm arguing as the fruit of his unrestraint, how in his young heart he hid the germ of coming sorrow, how he was prudent in words, hot in action, silent at meals, a godless prater when fasting. In "The Cashier's Wife," in the metre of " Onegin," he narrated an episode of his garrison life at Tambov — how the lancer seduces the pretty young wife of the old gambler and wins her of him at play, with the favourite digressions, interruptions, and apostrophisings of himself and the reader which we know to satietv from " Beppo " and " Don Juan." To this class belonged also his own " Säshka," that of love stories with abundant auto- 220 THE ROMANTIC POETS biographical details and detached verses especially charac- teristic of Lermontov, such as " For what or whither life may lead us, that our poor mind cannot fathom ; but excepting two or three days and childhood it remains undoubtedly a heritage of woe." Compare years later the confession in "Irksome and Grievous" (1840) — "And life, if one looks round with cold attention, Is such an empty and a stupid jest." As an officer Lermontov felt himself in his element, indulged in the distractions of the beau monde, and even later on found the entry into high society which he had so long painfully missed, for which the old descent of his family, said to be from the Scotch Learmouth of which Scott sings, and the wealth and connections of his grandmother marked him out ; he avoided dealings with men of letters as if they were mauvais ton y and prided himself on the part of lady-killer, having great success in spite of his uncomely exterior. If at first he was shy and lacked the key to the leaders of Society, "perhaps thank God ! " this afterwards gave way to a mockingly ironical tone and demeanour : his declarations of love were immediately followed by bearishness. This at any rate was new ; for that matter, he loved woman less than love, the first budding feeling, to just smell at the bud and throw it away that another might take it up. He is always busy and boils over, but his heart remains cold ; he is perfectly weary not only of others but himself. If he has an idea he only asks where he read it ; he will never be fit for anything — first it is the opportunity that is lacking, then the daring. His apparently brilliant future is flat and empty, and nothing will survive "de cette ame brulante et jeune que Dieu m'a donne'e fort mal ä propos." The letters from which these quotations are taken are of course all French. Hence this bustle is repugnant to him ; nay, he often forgets himself in this cold, false, motley crowd ; seeks, lost in dreams, for the clear tones of past years, and when he awakes the desire comes over him to disturb the calm of those about him in order to hurl in their faces his iron verse, tempered with bitterness and SOCIAL TRIUMPHS. A CHANGELING 221 malice. This he actually did ; he fluttered with his flaming verse the aunts and cousins and fops of the Court and expiated it by being transferred to Georgia ; when he got back to St. Petersburg his duel with the son of the French Ambassador drove him for the third time to the Caucasus. Once more, in 1841, he returned to the capital, but left it soon and betook himself back to the Caucasus, where he then forced his friend by constant vexations — for he was a most unpleasant companion — into the duel in which he fell at the feet of the mountains he had sung so splendidly. He was indeed the " Hero of Our Day," the Pechorin of his own novel which bears so many traits of the author, although he sedulously denied this identity while the public as sedulously sought it ; it was just the same with Pushkin's " Onegin," but that exhausts the resemblance between the two. The poet is the product of the Nicholas regime, and in that lies the difference between his disposition and Pushkin's. The latter, coming from the milder, freer Alexandrine epoch, was possessed by political and social dreams and lost them but slowly in the new and repellent reality. Lermontov, on the other hand, did not grow up till after the fateful day in December. As these dreamings were for years banished from society, there was nothing that could foster the germs of protest that slumbered in his breast. Later chance encounters with Decembrists were unable to change this at all. Hence Lermontov is the most anti-social Russian poet and his pessimism the most hopeless ; there is no escape for him, for the mere possibility of living for mankind, for humane objects, never enters his mind. His longing for an ideal, for a heaven and light, remains quite fruitless and therefore all the more desperate. The dense loyalty of his time and surroundings, the servile atmosphere, draws a few loyal turns from him too, but that in no way alters the dominant key. He cannot deal with the present : he despises it and flees from it, the most exotic of Russian poets ; hence his love for the Caucasus. If for Zhukovsky the outer world scarcely existed, God and poetry were as one, and the " world beyond " made up for the struggles and sorrows here below. If Pushkin achieved, 222 THE ROMANTIC POETS if not in life at least in his poetry, in which he took refuge from the trials of life, the smoothing over of contradictions, spiritual balance, the objective calm which so impresses us, and which seemed frigid to his romantic contemporaries, for Lermontov there was no bridging over of the gaping antagonisms between the ideal and the real ; only earthly troubles were real to him, only momentarily could the return to childishly simple faith ease his heart, laden with doubt and trouble. Instantly the dreadful unsolved questions cropped up, and he departed this life without having even paved the way in his art for the much longed-for atonement, for spiritual peace. His poetry is thus exclusively the poetry of doubt and pessimism, of discontent and protest ; and as a God gave him words to say what he suffered, his contemporaries winced and shuddered under his reproaches and outcries. To be sure, his poetry is mainly egotistical, owing to his own world-weariness, as also to his high romantic estimate of the poet. This estimate he compares to a Circassian's dagger, which when unadorned was once its master's true servant in battle, and now hangs a mere ornament in a gilded sheath. " Thus did the poet once in battle fire others ; his voice was needful to the mass as the goblet to the meal or i ncense to the altar. There floated over the crowd the echo of noble thoughts like the bells of the tocsin in days of danger or disaster, but thy simple proud speech was tedious to us. We desire deceit and gauds : the poet is despised, the blade rusted." And the fate of the "Prophet" in his last poem of 1 84 1 ? He whom God inspired, who dared to proclaim pure doctrine of love and truth, must flee mankind and dwell in the wilderness, despised, pointed out as a warning example to children when he does hasten through the streets. Accordingly, in the " Dialogue between a Writer, a Journalist, and a Reader," a variation on one of Pushkin's themes, the poet asks, " What shall I write ? The promptings of enthusiasm, when on the strong thoughts the words string themselves like beads, the world through the glorious dream seems transfigured, but will laugh at them and forget. The promptings of sleepless nights when reproaches gnaw at me, PESSIMISM. "PUSHKIN'S DEATH" 223 when I, inexorable and hard, despise vice under the mask of virtue, will conjure up for me hatred and anger, or even lead the weak astray." And yet he did hesitate to do it. Particularly in the noble lament "On the Death of the Poet" (Pushkin), which suddenly made his name known, when he alone boldly said out what others scarcely dared shyly to hint at. He was the mouthpiece of the public conscience. " Perished is the poet, slave of honour, He fell by rumour slandered; With lead in breast and thirst for vengeance He downward drooped his haughty head. The Poet's soul could not endure Of petty slights the shameful pain ; He rose against what pleased the world, Lone as before, and he is slain. The murderer with icy blood — Rescue was barred — his aim could take ; An empty heart beats evenly, His hand the pistol does not shake. What wonder ? From some distant state, Like hundreds of such tramps in chase Of fortune or official place, He drifted now by will of fate. The sounds of wondrous lays are still, Such shall be heard again not yet, Narrow and grim the singer's home, And on his lips a seal is set. But as for you, ye insolent descendants Of sires well known for famous hospitude, Who with your slavish heels have trampled down What's left of names brought low by play of chance — You that in greedy throng stand round the throne, Hangmen of freedom, genius, and fame — You hid beneath the shelter of the law, Before you right and justice, all be dumb. But God has Justice, minions of vice, He has an awful Justice and she waits ; She cannot be approached with chink of gold, And she beforehand knows both thoughts and deeds. In vain then will you run to calumny, 224 THE ROMANTIC POETS It will not help you any more ; You will not wash away with all the dirty flood Of your black gore The murdered poet's righteous blood." Stronger chords no Russian poet has struck. And not less severely did he sit in judgment on his own generation in the "Duma" ("A thought") of almost the same date. "To good and bad alike disgracefully indiff'rent, We starting our career shall fade without a fight, In face of perils we are shamefully discouraged, And, despicable slaves, bow to the face of might. The hate and love we feel are both but accidental, We sacrifice deny to hate and love in turn; There reigns within our soul a kind of secret coldness, E'en though within our blood the iron burn. A gloomy, visaged crowd and soon to be forgotten, We shall go through the world without a voice or trace ; No fructifying thought, no work begun with genius, Shall we throw forward for the race. Posterity as judge and citizen with harshness Our ashes shall insult in some contemptuous verse, As bitter jibes a son, deceived and disappointed, Over a spendthrift father's hearse." Such notes, however, are rare and isolated. Particularly must we mention also, with its burning pathos, the "Last Transfer," on the removal of Napoleon's body to Paris, where he would fain say to the French : — "Thou empty, miserable nation . . . And if the leader's spirit haste to see The new tomb where his ashes lie, in him What indignation at the sight shall boil ! How much he will regret in weary grief The parching island under distant skies Where guarded him, like him invincible, And great like him, the Ocean." «THOUGHT" AND "TRANSFER" IDYLLS 225 Even Russians, and amongst them Pushkin, were no strangers to the Napoleon-worship of the age. To native glory he but once did honour in his " Borodino," where in a popular strain a hero, let us say from Tushin's Battery in "Peace and War," plainly, yet vigorously, tells us of the ever memorable struggle, " where the enemy tasted not a little what the Russian's desperate fighting means — his fighting hand to hand." In other ways, he loves his home with wondrous love. " I love my country, but with a strange love, This love my reason cannot overcome : 'Tis not the glory bought at price of blood, Nor quiet, full of haughty confidence, Nor dark antiquity's untouched traditions, That move in me a happy reverie. But I do love, why I know not myself, The cold, deep silence of my country's fields, Her sleeping forests waving in the wind, Her rivers flowing widely like the sea. I love to haste through byways on a cart, And with slow gaze piercing the shade of night, And sighing for night's lodging, on each side To meet the twinkling lights of wretched thorpes. I love the smoke above the parching harvest The nomad train of waggons on the steppe, And on the hill amid the yellow crops, A single pair of birches shining white. I see with joy that many cannot know A well-filled rickyard and a wooden cabin Straw-thatched with window shutters neatly carved ; And of a saint's day in the dewy eve Till midnight I am ready to look on At dancing, with the stamping and the yells Accompanied by drunken peasant's talk." But similar scenes pleased Pushkin also most in Russia. In return the Caucasus enticed Lermontov. Here he will portray in " Valerik " a warlike episode, there make the mother sing by the cradle of the little Cossack her song, which tells of her great trouble. He will in bold personification make the mountains pass in review the countless hordes of the White Tsar, and sing of the " Gifts of Terek." 16 226 THE ROMANTIC POETS In one respect Lermontov does not differ from the Pushkin Pleiad : he is a subjective poet and a lyrical above all. The life around him is taken into account only quite by exception. He for the most part keeps aloof from it, like Zhukovsky and Pushkin before him, and Baratynsky and Yazykov at the same time. Hence also the narrowness of the circle out of which he rarely steps ; quite unlike the sorcerer Pushkin, who tries his hand at all possible forms, styles, and matters, and embodies himself in all possible shapes of the world's literature, Ler- montov remains always the same. Hence the question of his independence of foreign models, i.e.^ Byron — to Pushkin he owed but little, the first impulse, say — is rather superfluous, firstly, because he was great without Byron, because there applies to him what Baratynsky sang of another favoured of God : — "When I discover thee, inspired Mickiewicz, At Byron's feet, I think, 'Abased admirer, Arise ; bethink thee, thou'rt thyself a god.' " Secondly, because his so-called " Byronism," his weariness of the world, is not borrowed or temporary, as with Pushkin or Mickiewicz, but genuine and permanent ; Byron only made it easier for him to find the outward moulding for it, the expression and form. Anyhow, let us distinguish between Lermontov the novice and the master. If even as a boy of fourteen or fifteen he sings amain his lack of feeling, his dis- illusionment, his satiety of the world and all its vices, and his longing for the lost innocence of childhood, these are but fruits of his reading, reminiscences, morbid witchery of his fancy ; even the obstinacy with which he fairly hangs on like a bulldog to themes once, often early, chosen by him, showed how much they were congenial to his temperament. This is especially true of the " Demon," in which he has taken a very ordinary Romantic subject, the love of a demon for a mortal woman, who is betrayed into loving him by her pity for the fallen angel — Alfred de Vigny's " Eloa " was very near akin — and localised it in the Caucasus through his heroine Tamara. He began to work at it in 1829, and kept on up to 1840, going back and LYRICISM. THE "DEMON" 227 remodelling or adding to it. The lad already identified himself with the demon. " Like my demon, I am the elect of the Evil One ; like him, I have a haughty spirit, and am among men a careless wanderer, a stranger as in heaven so on earth." And in 1841 he confessed, "My youthful mind used to be disturbed by a mighty figure ; among the other visions he gleamed like an Emperor, silent and proud, in such enchant- ingly fair beauty that it was terrible, and my soul shuddered painfully. This wild dream pursued my mind for many years, but when I had dismissed the other illusions I rid myself of him by verse." The latter statement outran the facts, for Lermontov never got quit of his demon. He remained proud, strong, and passionate like him, and knew as little as he how to press towards a particular goal. To be sure, in Nicholas's time there was no goal except the table of rank. From his path, which led nowhere, he allowed himself repeatedly to be drawn astray by the passion which the sight of the beautiful and the innocent kindles. Only Eloa would have gone near to converting her demon to repentance and God. Lermontov 's was less pliant, although he, too, is by no means Byron's Lucifer or Satan in person, no embodiment of evil, denial, or rebellion, only the defiantly unyielding spirit, who will not bend his back — a very appropriate ideal for that age of lackeys. We are thus in the fullest tide of Romanticism, which in Russia had hitherto had nothing similar to record; hence the strong impression which the copies of the " Demon " evoked. The Censorship did not sanction its printing till well on into the sixties. The exceptional nature of the matter was en- hanced by the un usualness of the form. Such pomp and splendour of versification or descriptions Pushkin hardly knew. And at these romantic themes, with one and the same localising in the Caucasus, the poet's epic strain halted. In the manu- script " Izmail Bey," the Circassian, disgusted by civilisation and its hollowness, returns to his mountains : a renegade from his own in everything, religion and the rest, he will still fight for their freedom though without hope, since he knows it is bound to perish. Izmail, the hero, bears plainly the Byronic 228 THE ROMANTIC POETS lineaments, even to the trampling on women's hearts. The poet sinned particularly against all reality in the " Boyar Orsha." Polevoy was thereby thoroughly justified when he prescribed in his " New Painter " as a receipt for a new poem : " Take the contents of the ' Giaour,' shift the scene to the Caucasus, put at the beginning the dialogue between Romeo and Juliet, then bring in Mignon abducted by the Circassians." However the scene of " Orsha," for a wonder, was not laid among the Circassians, where, to be sure, it might have been more possible. For all these uncompleted attempts that often failed in the conception we are repaid by that pearl " Mtsyri," or " The Novice." The theme of a man caged in a monastery and longing for freedom had already been touched on by Lermontov in " Orsha," and whole verses of it transferred to "The Novice," as it was not intended for publication. Some Russians have handed over the orphan little Circassian to the monks to educate. Within these loveless, gloomy walls he grows up, yearning day and night for freedom, a prisoner like LeYmontov himself and most of his heroes. At an unguarded moment he flees, genuinely without an object, to his own people in the mountains ; then after three days' wandering, privations, and struggles with savage beasts, he returns to the monastery with the seeds of death in his breast. We listen to the confession of a dying youth. The plot could not be more simply conceived; it has but one character, for the image of a fair one only rustles by as a dream ideal, but what treasures of descriptive poetry, what a burning glow in the passionate laments of the novice ! Pushkin, too, described the Caucasus, but how colourless and poor are the tints of his palette compared with this ample splendour of colour ! There lay the novice, weary to death, in the scorching mid-day glow, the deepest silence and lifelessness around, save that a snake, rustling in the dry brushwood, gliding along with its yellow back like X sword-blade covered with golden damascening, furrowing the loose sand, slid cautiously. Now playing and toying over him, it wound itself in a threefold spiral, now flung away as if singed, darted and hid itself in "ORSHA." THE "NOVICE." PLAYS 229 the broad bushes. In the heat of fever, like to perish of thirst, he dreamed he lay in a stream and was sipping the cold water. Fishes played over him ; one nestled to him or circled over his head and sang with a silvery voice, " My child, stay here with me ; in the water is pleasant life, cool- ness, and rest. I will call my sisters together : in a mazy dance will we delight thy dim glance and weary spirit [cf. "The Erlking "]. Fall into slumber ; soft is thy couch, transparent the coverlet. To the rustle of wondrous dreams years shall pass by, nay, centuries. O sweet one, I disguise it not that I love thee, love as the free wave, love as my life." The youthful dramas of the poet betray no especial dramatic talent. L£rmontov was too subjective to clothe himself in alien shapes, accordingly he makes only the principal figure, i.e., himself, stand out clearly ; the others are merely shadows. An interesting fact about them is that after a quite romantic tragedy, of course from the Promised Land of Romance, Spain, the poet turns to native actuality and his own family quarrel, although he swells it out tragically at pleasure, thus in a play trenching on actuality, which he elsewhere studiously avoids. Here Schiller and " The Robbers " come by their rights, one of the plays even bearing a German title, " Men and Passions." But side by side with tirades like Karl Moor's we have utterances more pregnant, as in the meeting of students, where to the question, " When will the Russians become Russians ? " Cheläev answers, " When they go back together a hundred years and fashion themselves afresh and on sound lines," a repudiation of the St. Petersburg period, which would come from the heart of every Slavophile. The latest of these plays, " The Masquerade," shows considerable progress, and was after some years put on the stage, but its hero is again only the demon. He has no wishes and no hopes left, but has been banished from the circle of noisy life with the unbearable memory of the irrevocable years, a gloomy, crazed sufferer. Even the crowning loss of his loving and beloved wife he bears with contemptuous indifference — in the second edition. In the first he (Arbenin) avenged the supposed unfaithfulness of his wife by murder. 230 THE ROMANTIC POETS But totally different from all these variations of the same character proved the " Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the young ' Oprichnik ' (life-guardsman) and the bold merchant Kaläshnikov," 1837. The merchant avenges the honour of his wife on the " Oprichnik," and is executed, a vision of the past as clear and distinct as is scarcely attained by the " Boris Godunov" which Karamzin prompted, told in such a popular strain, after the manner of the "Byliny," that none of Pushkin's ballads, not to mention Zhukövsky or Ryleev, at most some few of the popular legends, remind us of this genuineness of native style and spirit. It strikes us as if this were a mere tour de force, as if Lermontov only wanted to show how his poetry can master even objective and realistic portraiture, if only drawn from times long gone by. Lermontov is further distinguished from the Romantics by his love for despised prose. Zhukövsky and Pushkin, not to mention others, could not make up their minds to it. Pushkin did indeed leave behind him short stories and novels, i.e., the outlines of such, but he executed very little. He also, for the most part, let it lie for years in his portfolio, and it did not become known till after his death ; only as a journalist and critic did he condescend to prose. Lermontov, apart from a youthful play in prose, will renounce without more ado the language of the gods and his Byron, unlike " Onegin," for themes of the day. The " Hero of Our Day," which was preceded by an incomplete tale akin to it, he completed and published in 1839 ; a promised sequel never appeared. The story at once came out in a new edition, and excited greater interest than the poet's verses. The coming reign of Prose was already proclaiming itself. This is the first Russian psychological novel, for Gogol's a Dead Souls " is not psychology, and Pushkin's are rather anecdotes. It was a story of good society such as Marlinsky and Sologub wrote, although watering-places in the Caucasus and garrisons were hardly the proper meeting-place of such society. To be sure, Pechorin, the " Hero," found his way there accidentally. It is also, properly speaking, no novel, but a series of episodes from the life of a young man, " TSAR IVAN." PECHORIN 231 hence it could be continued at pleasure. We learn nothing of the past, we have no idea of the future of the hero ; we only make acquaintance with him at a certain point or turning-point of his life. None the less, we are in doubt about nothing, for Pechorin is Lermontov as he was in 1839, and as such the public took him, and saw in the work the author's own experiences. It was in vain that he protested against this in his Preface to the second edition, and declared that Pechorin was not the portrait of an individual, but pieced together out of the vices of that whole generation in their full development. He wanted to draw the man of the day as to his own misfortune he had so often encountered him. He would only point out this disease, but how it was to be healed God alone knew. In reality there was no escape from Pechorin's hopelessness. The hero is a Byron in a Russian cloak, i.e. y without any trace of a political, nay, social mission, which very greatly narrows of itself the English original type. He is disillusioned, but has got used to that disillusionment, deliberately resigned to any future, lives passively, or more properly vegetates. And yet the powers he feels within himself show him that he was born to something higher. His best qualities, his love of the truth and the world, for want of response and comprehension, change into their opposites. The poet makes the heroes of his youthful dramas and Ismail Bey alike make the same confession. " As he was removed from deceit he was deceived, and only dreaded to trust because he had once believed everything." Now he hides tame and nerveless despair behind a pleasant smile ; what matter men's sorrows and joys to him who is indifferent to all save himself? He lives only for himself out of sheer habit. He lives out of sheer curiosity ; he forbids himself all sym- pathy ; he becomes a fatalist. Out of the furnace of passion he has issued hard and cool as iron, but without the fairest hue of life, the foible of noble impulses. Now he plays at best the part of the axe in the hands of Fate. That is all Pechorin in reality. As a contrast to him is opposed Grushnltsky in " Princess Mary," the romantic poser, who wished to be all that, who wished to garb himself seriously 2 3 2 THE ROMANTIC POETS in unusual feelings, lofty passion and exclusive distress, merely in order to become the hero of a novel, and impressed this so often on others that at last he became convinced of it himself : a sort of involuntary self-criticism by Pechörin Lermontov. But Pechorin is by no means a spiteful man, although he often seems to feed on the pains of others. He is thoroughly capable of noble feelings ; he makes himself out worse than he really is. His chief defect is at bottom only " cette froide ironie, qui se glisse dans mon ame irresistible- ment, comme l'eau qui entre dans un bateau brise," as we find in a letter of the poet's of 1835. Whether there was any escape for the poet and which way he might have chosen we cannot well say — he might quite well have given up Literature altogether. For, unfortunately, his own words apply far better to himself than to Pushkin : — " The sounds of wondrous lays are still, Such shall be heard again not yet ; Narrow and grim the singer's home, And on his lips a seal is set." With Lermontov Russian song became silent for decades ; it had lost the ear of the nation, which now thought of other things. Almost at the same time Russia's greatest folk-poet was carried to the grave. With him was rolled up a picture out of darkest Russia, where all mental activity, if not directly aiming at earning money, was exposed to the greatest distrust and hindrances of all kinds. Koltsov, son of a petty tradesman and cattle-dealer, was at the District School at Voronezh only initiated into the elements, so remained quite uncultured. As companion to his father he learned to know the people and their songs, and his own troubles made him all the more receptive of melodious versification, the secrets of which he slowly acquired, so that he soon tried his hand at the like, and was able to get single poems into papers, until a young Maecenas, Stankievich, made it possible for him to have printed a whole small volume of songs (1835). By this, Koltsov suddenly became known, nay, in high request. He KOLTSÖV. DANlLOV. " BYLINY" 233 now exerted himself to make up for lost ground, and lend his fresh natural songs a philosophical meaning, which suc- ceeded but ill. The greatest ill-success in contending with his own family, coupled with a health early undermined, put a premature end to the Russian Burns in 1842. The taste for the national song, historical as well as lyrical, had been aroused long before him. The famous collection of Kirshä Danilov, which even Lermontov knew, furnished the basis for the " Byliny," which were first ampli- fied by the rich finds in the North-West, in the Govern- ment of Olonets, by Rybnikov, and later by Hilferding. Songs of the people, or what purported to be such, had found their way into the manuscript song books of the eighteenth century and the first printed ones. They guided Trediakovsky in his metre and were imitated even by Sumarokov. More successful were the contributions of Prince Neledinsky- Meletsky, Professor Merzlakov, and lastly Baron Delvig. To be sure, these were rather foreigners in Russian garb. The shortness of the metre was imitated and there was no rhyme. The parallel between Nature and individual feelings was strictly carried out, e.g. — " Sang, sang the bird | and fell silent, The heart knew of joys | and forgot them. Why, singer bird, | f elPst thou silent ? How, heart, cam'st thou | to know black grief?" People sang these ballads, which only outwardly caught the tone of the people, very generally, and artless souls persuaded themselves of their being of the soil. It was Koltsov first, who once admired Delvig and imitated him, that destroyed this illusion and produced songs that were not only curled in Russian fashion, but seemed sprung from the very feelings of the people. He did not trouble himself about the parallelism of form project. The mincing sugariness of those ballads he avoided altogether. As little did he fall into a whining strain of lament for the hard life of the peasant, but refrained from sentimental catching at effect. Even when sore trouble presses him to the earth his peasant remains firm and free, as if 234 THE ROMANTIC POETS serfdom and slavery had glanced without a trace past his mental aspect. Joy in life and courage to live speak out of every song, as it cannot fail to be»with the mighty people, for it is as if grown one with the earth, lives and loves with it : the tilling of the soil with its phases regulates not only its activity but its feeling. How his heart shrinks when long drought weighs upon his land ; how willingly he offers tapers to the picture of the Mother of God, if only he may at last bring home a rich harvest ; how he feels his loneliness on the dark, cold days ; how full of hope he fares afield in spring ! And if he complains that he was born on an unlucky day, at a fatal hour, without the "shift of luck," because the rich old curmudgeon has refused the powerful, energetic youth his fair daughter, yet he buys himself a new scythe — not to cut his throat with : he is going to the Don, to its rich " slobodas " (villages), where the variegated steppe spreads to the Black Sea : — "As a guest to thee Not alone I come ; One of two come I, With my scythe so keen. Long ago I wished To and fro to stroll On the grassy steppe With my scythe so keen. Shoulder, stir yourself ; Swing you out, my arm. Blow you in my face, Wind from out the south ; Freshen into waves All the steppe's expanse. Scythes begin to swish, Glitter all about : Rustle, grass mown down ; Flowers, bow you low : Bow your heads to earth. With the grass you'll pine, As for Grunya I Pine in prime of youth. Many cocks I'll rake, Many ricks I'll pile, THE PRAISE OF THE COUNTRY 235 Cossack's wife will give Both hands full of coin : I'll sew up the gold, I will keep the gold, Come back to the thorpe Straight to the village Head. Could not move his heart By my poverty ; I shall move his heart By my golden coin ! " Even the reproaches to'the sluggard who lets everything go to rack are not without a humorous strain, as if everything might easily improve would the peasant but bethink himself. Yes, even the quite forsaken is not embittered ; he sits at the table and ponders how the lonely man lives in the world. The young man has no young wife, he has no trusty friend, no treasure of gold, no warm corner, no plough or harrow, no plough-horse. " Together with poverty my father bequeathed me only one gift, great strength, and even that, as if by design, bitter necessity has already made me wholly expend among strangers." These songs breathe a hearty hopefulness, a love of life, a strength which we should seek in vain among the edu- cated, in Lermontov or Pushkin. The endurance of the agricultural people, which on its broad shoulders has calmly borne through the centuries the Tartar yoke and the bureaucrats' yoke, the unfavourableness of the weather or the blows of fate, the whims of masters or the vexations of the Village Elder, its optimism, which seems to us frivolity ; its resignedness, which reminds us of Eastern fatalism — all these have found in these songs, with the inter- change of rural occupations, their poetical »expression. To be sure Koltsov's range of vision is narrow, if one may call the steppe which it embraces narrow. His wings refuse their office when he determines on a philosophical flight, ques- tions of existence and such. But this " home," for which Pushkin's and Ldrmontov's hearts alone beat, this savour of the harvest, these swelling crops, the holiday delight of the 236 THE ROMANTIC POETS peasants, we find illumined by poetry only in Koltsov. These are Russian idylls, after the diction of which artificial poetry strove in vain. Because he sang what he knew — Nature and men, for which alone he had eye, ear, and heart — the peasant poet, long before Prose ventured on it, gave us a vivid, even if idealised, picture of the struggling and resting, hoping and suffering, of the simple Russian on his broad expanse of land. He was the first that brought the husbandman into Literature and added the national touch which in previous Literature, even that of Pushkin and Lermontov, we have missed almost everywhere. These either gave us themselves, i.e., quite definite individuals, or imitated what was exotic. Koltsov portrayed the Russian peasant, especially of the more southern districts, with their richer nature and freer men, and once again Poetry sped ahead of Prose. Soon the peasant and his songs, and the debt which the cultivated had to discharge to him in the greatest rural and pastoral empire in the world, were to become the centre of all planning and all endeavour. Russia's new birth and modernisation were inseparable from the emancipation of almost nine-tenths of her population. During this process it was no longer Poetry, but the realism and naturalism of comedy and above all of the novel, of artistic Prose and its criticism, that were to take over the leading part. CHAPTER VIII THE NOVEL AND GOGOL The satirical and historical novel of Bulgarin and Zagoskin, Marlinsky and Polevoy — Comedy — Restricting influence of the Censorship — Gogol, his youthful works — The divine laughter of the " Revizor " and "Dead Souls" — Gogol's turn towards religion —The verdicts of his contemporaries. It was not till the thirties that Russian original novels began to satisfy the home-bred desire for reading, which hitherto had had to put up with translations. The quite isolated and in part not properly appreciated phenomena of an Izmäilov, and yet more a Narezhny, neither had any cohesion nor created a literary tradition. True, there was not very much that was original about the new novels, nay, such a bold attempt as the half satirical, half allegorical novel of Narezhny, which for the sake of its author's safety was not published till after his death — "The Year of Disaster ; or, The Princes of the Mountains," 1829, professedly laid in Georgia, but portraying Russians at work — was not again undertaken. The new novel was for the most part either the old moralisingly satirical one or the his- torical romance after the manner of Scott, in both cases with a most complicated plot, with all possible extraordinary complica- tions, for the gratification of the artless reader, whose curiosity was kept at the greatest tension. In both manners shone the renegade Pole Bulgarin, now long forgotten, but about 1830 so popular that he shared with Pushkin the favour of the reading public. His satirico-moral chef d'auvre was " Ivan Vyzhigin," 1829; his main object "well-disposed satire, for 237 238 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL the blooming of which in Russia our wise Government has always been labouring," i.e., that which always laughed, which took exception to trifles and passed timidly by what was important, with constant compliments for the ever- watchful eye of sage and just authority. About the peasant question Bulgarin, since he dragged his hero all through Russia, could not of course keep dead silence. He solved it by belauding the model establishment of Mr. Rossiäninov — the name being chosen because every u Rossi- änin " should be so with his teachers, M. Instruit and Herr Gutmann, for all the names are as yet labels. The joy of the " right-minded " author at his success with " the Russians, who excel all the world in reason, kindness, and gratitude," was somewhat embittered by the epigrams of Pushkin, to whom Bulgarin was only a police terrier and V^zhigin an ox, as also the parodies of the poor parasite Orlov, who traced the genealogy of the latter back to Vanka Kain, the arch-brigand. On the other hand, his patriotical novels, although they reeked of patriotism, had no success — they were far too commonplace for that ; here others hit the bull's-eye. Zagöskin passed from comedy to the novel. His " Yuri Miloslävsky " was received with enthusiasm, at least by the public, passed through eight editions in twenty years, and has frequently been translated. Turgenev and even Alexander III. grew enthusiastic over this novel, which was sentimental and patriotic but not historical. Its popularity was insured by the love intrigue, the smaller characters, such as the servant Kirsha, more interesting than his master Yuri, and the crazy beggar, Mitya, with their pithy language. The attempt to treat the events of 1812 in " Roslavlev ; or, The Russians in 1 8 12" in the same way turned out a good deal less interesting, and "Askold's Barrow," which went back to the times of Vladimir the Great, was also the grave of Zagoskin's fame. He went back later to the theatre, also writing new novels on the days of Peter the Great, wherein as a true Moscovite, hater of everything foreign — it was not for nothing that his forebears came from the Golden Horde — he SATIRE AND SCOTT. TORY CONTRASTS 239 idealised the adherents of the old regime. He is interesting as the first, and for that matter quite artless, glorifier of patriotic and rural Old Russianism in his comedies, warning his aristo- crats against the capital and its extravagance, as well as against foreign countries and their ideas ; when they are abroad he makes them anxious for their country ; in his great work " Moscow and the Moscowites," he plays the enthusiastic cicerone of the "city of the first throne." Quite his opposite is Kükolnik, in whose novels the Tories of the eighteenth century are all scoundrels, while the virtuous heroes are to be found among the fashionable youth. Otherwise the two could shake hands as writers of plays and novels, yet in the endless stories of Kükolnik are represented mainly foreign themes, Lithuanian, Prussian, French, and so on. More sym- pathetic than either was the merchant's son, Lazhechnikov, who, after his "Memoirs of a Russian Officer," 18 12-15, depicting his own experiences and impressions, took his most readable productions from the eighteenth century, e.g., "The Ice-palace," though to be sure he did not get much beyond the purely material interest of a skilfully-woven intrigue. Although a writer of the old school, he retained understanding and feeling for the new, and was one of the few that frankly welcomed it. The most interesting of them all, and for a long time the favourite story-teller, was the talented, versatile, passionate Bestüzhev. A brilliant officer of the Guards and conqueror of hearts, to whom even as a political " criminal " at Yakutsk and private soldier in the Caucasus the ladies' hearts flew directly, he concerned himself, apart from his fair ones, only with literature, and found himself among the Decembrists much like Pilate in the Creed. His literary activity, which he began in St. Petersburg, particu- larly as a critic and romancer, he carried forward in exile and from the seat of war as " Marlinsky." Unlike his fellows, he wrote no novels in several volumes, and soon aban- doned the historical line — in which he, again in contrast to Zagoskin and his kind, handled not Russian, but Lapland and other subjects (" Leave the Germans and turn to us, the Orthodox," Pushkin begged him) — so as to depict contempo- 240 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL rary social life. He also dealt in the Oriental, borrowed from the Caucasus, in " Ammalat Beg," " Mullah Nur," and the like. " Marlinsky " is perfect Romanticism in prose ; each of his tales a crackling firework ; the heroes of the most un- curbed and wildest passionateness ; the diction of an exaggera- tion that might at times pass as a successful parody on the Romantic style, if it was not all meant most seriously. The cramped and forced expression, his constant hyperboles, and the heroes with their incredible outbursts of feeling, impressed the public directly, and besides there was in it a good slice of the author, his own vehemence and own bravery — he was soon afterwards (1837) so cut to pieces by Circassian sabres that the body could not be found — his own love of women ; what seems impossible to us was mostly genuine. Yet there were not wanting in his literary remains simpler narratives as well ; his undisputed speciality was in soldier stories in which, beside the officer, for the first time the private was faithfully depicted with his doings and ways. In this genre he remained unsurpassed up to the time of Tolstoy's Sebastopol sketches. The abundance of these dramatic portraitures, in all possible variations of place and time, is quite astonishing. In spite of many temporary successes, the most to be pitied of all these writers of tales was Polevoy, who was a born journalist, but had his magazine suppressed for a sensible criticism on a play of Kukolnik's, equally stupid and patriotic, and so much esteemed in St. Petersburg. As a poor plebeian who trembled before every tax-collector, to earn a livelihood for him and his he was by the unfavourable circumstances of the period driven into the career of a literary potboiler, a purveyor of sham novels and dramas. What to him was much worse, but lately the leader of the young generation, of the literary revival, he now saw himself overtaken and forced back into the ranks of his worst enemies on one level with Bulgarin and Senkowski ; for, like Marlinsky, up to the last moment, he held high the flag of the old, artless Romanticism : his heroes remained the eccentric and misunderstood characters which rebel against barriers and prejudices. He sets himself against the new current of the age, which tends towards actual BOLD CRITICISM. TRANSIENT TASTE 241 fact and cannot understand it. To this narrowness is added his productivity, in which he wholly buried a not inconsiderable talent. He was even not wanting in humour and irony, as his Painter of 1832, a collection of essays in the manner of the old Novikov satirical journal, shows sufficiently, in which he cuts up squires, officials — one sketch anticipated the " Revizor " — ladies, and more particularly literary men and literature, which he would not take seriously — to expect literature of folks who could hardly read ! Proper insight also marked his best historical story, " The Oath at the Lord's Sepulchre" (in Jerusalem), a comprehensive picture of Russia in. the fifteenth century and the struggles for the throne of Moscow between Basil the Blind and Shemiaka, with the mysterious character of the Singer, forming the centre of the action, the only fictitious one in the story, which otherwise adheres fairly strictly to history. In deliberate opposition to the over-abundance of the love story in " Yüri," Polevoy followed after the " Cinq-Mars " of de Vigny and after Scott, pushed the love-making quite into the background, and tried to infuse into language and manners the life of the seventeenth century from the farmer's croft to the Kremlin at Moscow. Interesting is his uncompleted artist-novel " Abbadonna," re- ceived on its first appearance in 1835 by the critics, notably Belinsky, with ecstasy, whereas at the second edition the same Belinsky sneered — things went fast in Russia then. It was not his only story of artist life : his contemporaries were enthusiastic above all over the contrast between him who fell from heaven and the child of earth, between the ever dis- satisfied idealist and the prose of his environment. But Polevoy made his "Abbadonna," in which the artist Reichenbach tried in vain to rescue the actress Eleanora out of the slough of despond, take place in Germany at any rate : Kiikolnik, on the other hand, put in the mouth of the dying Tasso verses on the future greatness of Russia, and those Derzhavin's. A quite different attitude was adopted by Prince Odo£vsky. By family the last of a branch of Rurik's descendants, he belonged to the highest circles, not only in literature : his knowledge, his intelligence, his humane disposition (his 17 242 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL busy philanthropic activity after 1844 totally elbowed aside his literary) make him one of the most fascinating personalities of Russia under Nicholas. His kindly nature made him prefer to cultivate literature for the people and for children, such as "Gaffer Irinei " (Irenaeus), but he could also write fairy stories for grown-up children : he preferred allegories, philosophical tales, in the opening scene : "There is no man without sin ; that was so arranged by God, and it is no use the Voltairians raging against it." The teacher makes nothing but grimaces, but the inspector at once gets censured : " Why are free-thinking ideas inculcated in the young ? " The thoughtless public took the comedy as a farce and looked about with laughter — its vis comica was and is to this day unsurpassed. The splenetic, cool Great Russsian was not capable of it ; it lay in the temperament of the good-natured but cunning Little Russian. Others laughed purposely; others again cried out at the undermining of authority. The author, to whom his comedy from a mere tickling of the risible muscles had become a great and serious business, protested against all fault-findings six years later (1842) in his one-act piece, " On leaving the Theatre after the Performance of a new Comedy," where he characterised with inspired skill the most varied spectators and their opinion, or want of one. The small people he makes instinctively hit the correcter views ; the higher are indifferent or hostile. At last the author opens his mouth in defence of the one honourable personage in his comedy, Laughter, which was nothing mean and in which sparks of deep feeling were to be found : who laughs most often also sheds deep and heartfelt tears. This de- fence was in itself superfluous ; whoever did not purposely shut his eyes must even from the furious final outcry of the deceived Chief of Police have gathered the significance of the supposed farce. The being made a fool of was not enough : "There will yet come a quill-driver, a paper-smearer, and put you in a comedy ; that hurts deeply ; he will spare neither rank nor repute, and all will gnash their teeth and applaud." (Turning to the public) : " Why do you laugh ? You are laughing at yourselves. Ah — you ! I should like to all these paper- 256 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL stainers — Ugh ! Quill-drivers, Liberals, accursed brood of the devil. ... I would pop you all in a mortar and grind you all to flour and give you to the devil to make a lining for his cap." The highly-strained expectations of the morbidly nervous author were least of all satisfied by the first impressions of the acting (for the actors interpreted everything as a farce) and reception by the public, and he fled hastily from Russia "to divert his distress, to thoroughly think over his duties as an author and his future works and come back refreshed and a new man." He had long since had another subject in hand and had already read aloud to Pushkin the first chapters of his prose novel, " Dead Souls," the first part of which appeared in 1842 ; only he felt himself when abroad more free as regards his country. It is true his heart drew him, the longing for home, but his stay in it only too soon unnerved him. People who in practice prove very unskilful show themselves masters in theory, and so Pushkin had hit on the following : The revision of the lists of peasants took place every ten years and during that time the lord had to pay the poll-tax for the " souls " that had died meanwhile (i.e. men, for women and children did not count) ; these dead souls were a burden to him. If a sharper could be found who would take these dead souls off him and pay the poll-tax for them, the lord would be relieved. The trickster in his turn could mortgage at the Board of Guardians the souls which of course he represented as living to some desert place in the Crimea at one hundred roubles apiece and make off with the result. Thus Gogol's Chichikov travels through Russia to beat up such dead souls for such a transaction. We go with him to a largish provincial capital, from which as a centre he " draws " a whole system of estates. His visits to the various manors, the success or failure of his transaction, which breaks down because suspicious people want first to inquire the price of dead souls in town, the description of the same and its " dear " officials — here the hatred of the bureaucracy breaks through again — form the substance of the " poem." " In what metre is it written then ? " inquires Senkowski mockingly. DEAD SOULS. CONFLICTING VERDICTS 257 " Amid the triumphs of mediocrity and want of talent, phari- saical patriotism, and sweetly colourless bidding for popularity there suddenly appears a genuinely Russian work, as true to life as patriotic, mercilessly tearing the veil from reality, breathing passionate love for the fruitful essence of Russian life, an immeasurably artistic creation in conception and execution, in the characters of the dramatis persona and the details of Russian life, and at the same time deep in its ideas, social and historical." Thus did the somewhat exaggerated criticism of the democratic Westerniser Belinsky welcome the work which to the same extent delighted the Slavophiles and made them by the mouth of Aksäkov place Gogol beside Homer and Shakespeare and talk of a Russian "Iliad," while others went into raptures even in the case of Chichikov's coachman Selifän over the depicting of unadulterated Russian life, because forsooth Selifan spoke kindly to his horses and got senselessly drunk with every *' decent " man. Only the " watchers of Sion " of official right-thinking complained : " What will foreigners say to it ? All the heroes of the story are either knaves or blockheads ; there is no body to it, the diction is often common and defec- tive ; the author is far below Paul de Kock, is a realist of the fifteenth class." Others consoled themselves with the thought that what Gogol described did not occur at all in Nature, was a caricature of the present, the creation of a frolicsome fancy. Thus the verdicts contradicted each other even more glaringly than over the " Revizor." What had the author intended ? He had now become very loquacious, dreaded misinterpretations, and interpolated comments of his own. " I have made no model of virtue my hero, because it is at last nearly time to give the poor paragon a rest : because the word " virtuous " is used idly ; because the " virtuous man " has become a hobby and is ridden by every author and urged on with the knout or whatever else he gets in his hand ; because people have already so exhausted the paragon that no shadow of virtue is any more to be seen on him and only bones and skin remain instead of flesh : because people hypocritically summon the paragon, and because folks no longer honour him. No, it was time at length to put the rascal in the shafts as 18 258 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL well." And if one asks who Chichikov is, morally considered, the answer is at hand, " A rascal." " Why a rascal then ? why should one be so hard on others ? There are no longer any rascals among us, none but well-disposed peasant people : of those that to public disgrace would turn their cheek to a public smiting one finds at most one or two and even these speak of virtue. It would be more just to call Chichikov an economist, a seeker of gain : it is the acquiring of gain that is to blame for all." The author was only oppressed by the conviction that all would have received his hero gladly as a most interesting man if the author had not gazed so deep into his soul, if he had only showed him as he appeared outwardly. To be sure, then his image would not be as clear to their eyes, but in return nothing would have disturbed the soul of the reader ; people might have gone back quietly to the card-table, the delight of all Russia. The reader just did not want to see human suffering. What was the good ? Let him rather forget, show him something beautiful and attractive. " Moreover so- called patriots will find fault with the author, those that in their corners follow their businesses and enrich themselves at the expense of others, but as soon as a book appears with a new and better truth in it creep out ot all the corners, like spiders in whose web a fly is entangled, and straightway raise the cry, c Is it nice to represent anything of the sort ? ' This sort of patriotism dreads a deeply piercing glance. It likes to glide over everything with a thoughtless eye ; it will even laugh heartily at Chichikov, nay, praise the author : ' There is much that he has observed to the life — must be a jolly fellow ! ' And it adds self-complacently : ' To be sure there are odd and ridiculous people in the provinces, and great rascals as well,' instead of asking whether it too has not a good share of Chichikov in it." True, Gogol envies the author who from the great whirl of daily pictures has chosen some few exceptions, has never once lowered the high key of his lute, or descended from his heights to his poor, insignificant fellows, while he, Gogol, has ventured to call up all that we have every moment before our eyes, which only the indifferent eye does not see, the whole appal- CHjfCHIKOV'S AND PUSHKIN'S VIEWS 259 ling, fearsome slough of pettinesses which twine about our life, the whole flight of cold, supple, every-day characters which swarm across our bitter, wearisome, earthly way, and has ventured with the whole skill of his chisel to place them before the pitiless eyes of all clearly and distinctly. "And long was it decreed for me, by a wondrous power, to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, to contemplate life in its giant course, to view it through the world's visible laughter and unseen, unknown tears. . . . Empty and abject will the hypocritical contemporary in his harsh judgment call these creations, and assign them a despised corner among the writers who revile mankind, for he does not realise that the glasses which observe the sun are no more wonderful than those that display the movements of invisible infusoria ; for his judgment does not recognise how much mental profundity is needed to enlighten a picture taken from humble life and raise it into a pearl of creation : it does not realise that high and enthu- siastic laughter is worthy to stand on the same level with high lyrical aspiring, and that a whole gulf separates such laughter from the grimaces of a clown at a fair." " When I read to Pushkin the first chapter of ' Dead Souls '" — Gogol was an unsurpassable reader aloud, as also a comic genius of the first water — " the expression of Pushkin, who at other times always laughed at my reading (and he loved laughing), gradually became darker and darker, and at last clouded over altogether. When I came to an end he broke out into the words, * God, what a sad country Russia is ! ' " Herzen, too, gave utterance to a bitter reproach against Russia as a whole. In reality there are nothing but " dead souls," sunk in the flattest commonplace, without a Divine spark, and the sight of them must be crushing, particularly for the Romanticist. For the Gogol of " The Revizor," and " Dead Souls," and "Petersburg Tales," hates these shallow, vapid ways. He sees the harm which is done on the one hand by this hollowness, indolence, and indifference to evil, on the other by coarse self-sufficiency, boasting, and the rottenness of moral principles ; and he seeks to shake their undisturbed supremacy with the weapons of humour. To be sure the 26o THE NOVEL AND GOGOL humour of " Dead Souls " was several shades deeper than that of the "Revizor" : if in the former jovial, unforced laughter at the topsy-turvy world, the laughter of the Ukrainer made itself felt, here it is simply suppressed, there lies over it a veil of Great Russian caustic irony. Realism, nay Naturalism, celebrates its highest triumph : the most exact observation and the most careful reproduction of the things seen, the abund- ance of figures, each distinct, lifelike, surely portrayed with but few touches. Only a little something betrays the Roman- ticist, as in the " Revizor " the dash of the grotesque, where his own description goes to the head of Khlestakov, so here the part of that Harpagon Plushkin, in whom the harmless "love of acquisition" has grown into a demoniac power, which sucks the whole man dry, and makes him a violation of humanity. But, like the famous English caricaturist, Gogol takes fright at his own figures : the Romanticist in him, hitherto always overmastered and slumbering deep in him, claims his rights. He can no longer content himself with all these distortions of the Divine image, he is so full of the importance of his calling, which Pushkin's circle, with its conception of the poet-prophet, the chosen vessel of Mercy, set before him, that he regards himself as a preacher and teacher of his fellow-men, and that he makes ready to show them directly the way of salvation. This he cannot do with his commonplace, low-comedy heroes. The power of holy laughter suffices him no longer, he will create something positive. The Russian Gil Bias novel, without love adven- tures to be sure, which was without beginning or end — fresh : pictures of squires and other episodes could be added to it at pleasure — furnished only the prelude to quite a different work. In the second part Chichikov's conversion, in the third his purification, were to be represented ; well-defined heroes, virtuous governors-general, brandy contractors, and great landowners were to come on the scene as the providential instruments of this Russian Purgatory and Paradise. Illusions had always played a great part with Gogol ; he confused what he had planned and what he had carried out. No wonder, then, that even in the eleven chapters of the first volume, " an A HOGARTH. B&UNSKYS DICTUM 261 unimportant entry into a- great city," we are given glorious prospects of the colossal pictures, the hidden moving-springs of a full-blown novel. " It may be that in the same tale will be heard other chords not yet struck, there will be revealed the boundless wealth of Russian intellect, there will pass over the stage the man endowed with god-like virtues, or the Russian maid such as she is to be found nowhere else in the world, with all the wondrous beauty of her woman's soul, wholly compact of high-hearted endeavour and self-sacrifice ; and all the virtuous men of other nations will seem dead in face of them, as a book is dead in face of the living word : it will be seen how deeply imbedded in the nature of the Slavs is what merely slides off the nature of other peoples." " The time is still far when the storm of enthusiasm will arise from the head crowned with holy terror and lightning, and men will listen in confused trembling to the majestic thunder of other words." Hence came the style, anticipating all this, of " Poem " for the whole. The Slavophiles were enchanted over these announcements ; they consequently magnanimously forgave the poet the one- sidedness of the first volume. When the first intoxication of delight over the work had subsided in the Westerner Belinsky, this music of the future made him mistrustful ; he wrote : " Much, only too much, is promised as to the continu- ation, so much that from no quarter can one gather how these promises could be fulfilled, for this reason — that there is as yet nothing of the sort in the world. We are absolutely frightened by the thought that the first part, in which all is comic, might remain a regular tragedy, and the other two, in which the tragic is to come to the fore, turn out comical, at least in the pathetic passages." The brilliant penetration of Belinsky was not mistaken ; it turned out as he had prophesied. And in other places also he protested against these and similar effu- sions in " Dead Souls," against its lyrical digressions, as he would against defects or blots in the painting of a great master. At the second and third parts Gogol now went on working up to the end of his life, in 1852. He twice flung the work, when completed, into the fire. We possess to-day only plans 262 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL and fragments. Some of it is splendid, the chapters in the style of the first part, the new encounters with Tentetni- kov, &c. The virtuous figures are mere fictions, Rossi- aninovs out of the " Vyzhigin " of Bulgarin, lay figures, not men. Like Dostoevsky, Gogol continued to owe us the descrip- tion of the " regeneration." We are fully satisfied with the Chichikov of the First Part ; not so the author, who vainly spent himself in embodying his new ideals. The tragedy of the man had begun even before that of the artist. The chief religious feature of his nature, the firm belief in Providence which guided every step of him, its Elect, the high estimate of his calling, and not least the trend of the age, whose religious interest had awakened again, resulted together, especially with the Roman isolation of the author, in a turning inwards, an aversion from the world and its doings which must in the end lead to asceticism and reclusedom. This struck people, and was remarkable, particularly in Russian society, to which religion frequently is something quite outward, simply meaning a coating of the bureaucratic whitewash, to which religiousness coincides with Pharisaism and hypocrisy, and religion becomes merely a uniform, put on on certain occasions — with the people it is simply synonymous with superstition. In face of this society, so indifferent to religion, there awoke in Gogol a holy zeal ; in the conscious- ness of his intellectual importance and his ascetic temper, he took upon himself to be a judge of consciences, an adviser and an expert counsellor, acting the father confessor to his friends and acquaintances, urging them to the Christian virtues of humility, resignation, mercy, and gentleness : not to resist authority, to withstand the temptations of an enticing intelli- gence, to become contrite Christians, and to perfect them- selves, when all else must of itself be added unto them. And in order to allow as many as possible to share the blessings and results of his words, instead of the second volume of " Dead Souls," which refused to get any more forward, he published, somewhat prematurely, the " Select Passages from a Corre- spondence with Friends" (1847). Even to this the Censorship had many objections to make. HIS EARNESTNESS. ITS RESULTS 263 The effect of the book was annihilating to Gogol. The man who hitherto, in spite of Gogol's express attempts to prevent him, had simply idolised him, Belinsky, wrote to him from Salzbrunn, where he was staying for the good of his lungs, the celebrated letter of renunciation of July 15, 1847. The possession of a copy of this letter or to read it out put one in danger of one's life, and contributed to Dostoevsky's being condemned to death ! In this letter he apostrophised his former idol, " Proclaimer of the Knout, Apostle of Ignorance, Aider and Abettor of Obscurantism and of the Fury of Darkness, Panegyrist of Tartar Customs, what are you doing ? . . . The great writer who, with his wondrously artistic, deeply lifelike creations has contributed so mightily to Russia's self-know- ledge, giving it the possibility to look at itself as in a mirror, comes forward with a book in which, in the name of Christ and of the Church, he teaches the barbarian squires to extract still mere from the peasants, the ' unwashed muzzles.' A Voltaire who by his raillery extinguishes the fires of fanaticism is more the son of Christ than all your priests, Bishops, Metropolitans, and Patriarchs of East and West." Belinsky was alwa/s all passion ; his pious wrath and deep sorrow for the picture Uat lay shattered at his feet may make the violence of this indictment seem explicable. Gogol was sacredly serious about his outbursts, but the arrogant, haughty tone of them and the s'ing of many of his assertions he softened down in a subsequert " Confession of the Author." If the moralist had already killed the artist in him, the ascetic now wholly took his place. Gogol went a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre of the Saviour, vas charitable especially to poor students, scourged himself, md prayed, watched, and fasted until a nervous fever carried oT this wholly exhausted ecstatic. As little as the writer knsw how to create his incarnated ideals could the man bring aboat or devise the reconciliation with Life. Nobody dealt such heavy blows at Romanticism as this disguised Romantic, who, in contradiction to himself, insisted on simplicity and naturalness, and hence deeply despised the Romantic flood of words of such a one as Kükolnik. Even at the begiining of his career (1832) he had declared to an 26 4 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL acquaintance : " The comic is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his Art, on the stage say, we shall roll about with laughter and only wonder we did not notice it before." To this principle he remained true, the great Realist who with justice prefixed to his comedy the motto a Don't blame the mirror if your mouth is crooked." To hold a mirror up to Russia is just what he did ; he did not flatter, he did not caricature. Hence the fury of the one party, Bulgarin and his fellows, who saw that their colourless ware no longer found custom ; the indignation of the old Romanticists, such as Polevoy, to whom this naturalness seemed treachery to Art : let it be remembered that for the first time in Russia a comedy and a novel were doing without a love-story. Even to-day and in other countries love is as much part of a play as paint and wigs and of a novel as paper and printer's ink. The old desire of Peter for a sensible piece without love had at last been fulfilled. All the more frantic was the applause of the young and of the Liberals who, by a crass misunderstanding, simply appropriated this arch-Conservative and did not recognise their error until late. The desire of the critics for a truly national work was gratified, not by Pushkin or Lermontov, but first bv Gogol, although just the loudest shouters in the struggle did not at all acknowledge the work. Free not only from all imitation but even prompting by others, drawn from Russia's innermost, it could say of itself, " Here is Russia, here it savours of Russia." And this realism, masterly both in image and word, for which its opponents at once coined the name of " Natural School," which Belinsky readily caught up, a natural tendency in contrast with an unnatural — /.*., fictitious — at a tine when Europe as yet had not thought of Realism or Nituralism, became an example to whole generations which derive directly from Gogol and carry on his incomplete work, which lacks not only women, priests, the army, and so on, but even the people. At length Russia had found itself. The fact that Gogol lost himself again, so that we have to protect his own works against him, did not alter this at all. Thus he even managed to attach a mystic significance to his THE "NATURAL SCHOOL." 265 " Revizor." This little town with its officials " is our town of the Soul, and lies in each of us. The true Inspector is thus the conscience: Khlestakov is the false, windy, worldly, corrupt conscience which allows itself to be led by the nose by the passions. By the laughter which is inspired by love of our fellows, not the vain laughter of the idle world, we will drive away the spiritual evildoers." In the same way as we know the theologians of the Middle Ages succeeded in interpreting every story in the Bible in a threefold allegorical sense, in the same way we should defend Chichikov against Gogol's attack : why, we know his bringing-up, how the " well-regu- lated " father always taught his little Paul : "Try to please your teachers ; do not have to do with schoolfellows unless they are rich ; treat nobody, rather let them treat you ; above all watch your penny, the truest and only friend. " Even the regenera- tion of a Plushkin, who at least is capable of one passion, if it is only that of avarice, would seem more credible to us than that of our hero, devoid of any passion, commonplace and shallow, but all the more lifelike. Gogol is psychologically an exceptionally interesting prob- lem, full of apparent contradictions, and least known by those who thought they knew him best. He has had many sincere friends and admirers, but to none did he ever grant full insight into his complicated spiritual lite ; he concealed from them even the details of his scourgings. His death came unexpectedly, tore him away from apparently his freshest spell of creation. The dread of death seems, owing to a loss that touched him very closely (that of Khomyakov's wife), to have given his shattered constitution the last blow, but even in his latest days we have nothing but riddles before us. Why, for instance, did he burn in that disastrous night (of Feb- ruary nth) the second volume of " Dead Souls " ? He main- tained that he did so by an error ; he meant only to burn part of it and burnt the whole, through the Evil One having played him a trick. He consoled himself by his being able to replace the loss. But that might be only misleading and repelling of troublesome inquirers. Quite other motives have been ascribed to him ; people even talked of a deliberate sacrifice 266 THE NOVEL AND GOGOL of his dearest treasure, somewhat as Abraham offered Isaac to the Lord. In any case, the decision seems to have come suddenly. Only that idea must be rejected which folks most often accept, that he did it out of dissatisfaction with his work. On the contrary, we know from his own telling what wide prospects spread before him in respect of this very work, even though in many ways it was one of necessity. He had long counted on it as a compensation for the failure of the " Correspondence." Pushkin had brought Russian poetry, as regards diction and matter, down from its stilts, had shown what treasures can be acquired in the simple life around us, among peasants, and on the monotonous broad plain, and had also created incarnate ideals, in his "Tanya," for instance. Gogol effected the same for the novel, only that his ideals were hardly successful ; he, too, refrained from History, from exceptional complications and inflated artists, and, avoiding all flat didactics, showed what simple, everyday life offers. Pushkin cleared his way for himself. His critics, who stuck out about the smallest externals — the use of a case, and so on — had nothing to say of him, could at most admire or calumniate him. Gogol's lot was cast in a more advanced period ; those were by then forth- coming who were able to point out the meaning of his works to the simple reader. Since then creation and criticism go hand in hand, whether they fight against or support each other. CHAPTER IX ROMANTIC CRITICISM B&LINSKY Previous condition of criticism — Its appearance since 1820 — the Romanticist critics, Venevitinov, Bestuzhev, Vyäzemsky, Polevoy, Nadezhdin — The debut of Belinsky — His aesthetic and philosophical, his journalistic criticism — His influence — Reaction grows stronger — Persecutions of ideas and men — The Petrashevtsy. Criticism anticipated the development of elegant literature. True it was a long while before one that was aesthetically and philosophically trained made its appearance at all ; we do not meet with it till after 1820. The old Russian " Parnassus," with its strictly recognised authorities, its firmly marked out provinces, and the inviolable principles of La- harpe and Batteux, brooked, like every autocracy, no sort of criticism, only laudatory recognition. Karamzin had assigned the former a space in his Moscow Journal^ but afterwards banished it from his European Messenger (Vestnik) in order not to scare away the few literary men. Even of the writers of the eighteenth century there was no sort of systematic appreciation, except an essay of Karamzin's on Bogdanovich. Prince Shalikov, for instance, the editor of the Ladys Journal of fashions, &c, complained that overstrained criticism might dishearten our budding geniuses ; they would fall and wither like spring flowers before a storm ! " Critical " disputes there were before 1820, not about literature, but language, between the followers of Shishkov and Karamzin. In 18 15 one single performance of consequence had been produced, a criticism 267 268 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— bAl/NSKY of Kheräskov's "Rossiad," by the arch-classicist, sworn to Eschenburg's project of a theory and literature of the humaner sciences — the Moscow professor Merzlakov. Instead of criticism there were parodies of Odes, including Derzh&vin's, by Märin and others, humorous poems, Batyushkov's against the Shishkovites, their kingdoms of moths and mice, their vendetta against all who sharpened epigrams against them, who write as they speak, who are read by ladies, or couplets and epigrams which were concocted at the Moscow evenings of Prince Vyazemsky and others. The Romanticists were above all the first to effect a change in the previous estimate of all literary values ; they came to the decision that there was as yet no Russian Literature. Only one party proclaimed this more harshly, the others more delicately ; but in doing so they at times did not spare Roman- ticism either, protested against the imposition of a German or English yoke instead of a French, and raised a cry for a national Literature. The most philosophically trained among them was the Moscow " Apprentice to the Archives," Venevitinov. His arguments are of the most general kind, and culminate in the proposition, " Self-knowledge is the aim and crown of man, the enlightenment that grows on native soil." Russia got everything from abroad, an external form of culture raised without any foundation, a seeming edifice of Literature without the exertion of her own inward powers. The in- activity of her thought is the cause of her weakness ; the false rules of the French they have now replaced by the want of any rules, hence the general mania for metre, a sign of spiritual frivolity. He called, lastly, for more reflection than production, a philosophical training which was to be obtained at the cost of the latter, even ir people produced nothing for decades. Others proposed less radical measures, like the Decembrist and subsequent mystic Küchelbeker, who attacked the Romantists for their imitation of imitation, for their melancholy : " Read a single one of our elegies, and you know them all." The Decembrist and romancer Bestuzhev, who as the editor of a very popular " Almanac " did not want to quarrel with any one, and spoke flatteringly of all, neverthe- EAGER PROTESTS. VYÄZEMSKY 269 less asked in the same strain : " When shall we at last find our own path ? When shall we write Russian direct ? God alone knows." Prince Vyäzemsky at times employed himself as a critic, one of the many Russian great noblemen who, unlike the Ger- man, were so fond of practising literature. He attained the age of a very Methuselah ; his youth belongs to the period of unrestricted Classicism — in 1808 he was already printing verses — and he remained active in a literary way till his death in 1878. From the French he inherited his love for smooth, witty expression, and coined sarcastic remarks which passed all round Russia. Although he defended Pushkin and Romanticism, he remained at bottom a Classicist. A keen, clear intellect of the most comprehensive cultivation, he was averse to all prejudice and exaggeration, whereas, as a rule, the Russians "indulge to excess in settled ideas, so that they are never free from a sort of periodical delirium tremens, and when they have slept their fill they often cannot remember their own attack " ; he declared at last even against the verdict of the jury. He gave way to no illusions. When expounding Pushkin's works he said in the well-known Preface to the "Fountain of Baghchi-Sarai " in 1824: "Hitherto a small number of good writers has just managed to give some sort of shape to our language ; we confess with humility, but also with hope, that there is indeed a Russian language, but no literature, no worthy expression of a powerful and manly people. We have as yet no Russian " mode " in Literature ; perhaps we shall never have it, because it does not exist." This scepticism is characteristic of the cool intellect, passionless and therefore by no means qualified for a critic ; it is more drawn towards historical contemplation. Thus we owe him the first correct estimate of Derzhävin and Dmitriev, and the first solid historical study, that on Von Vizin in 1849. Vyäzemsky cultivated, in addition, the art of poetry for decades, and at times verged on prose in descriptive poems, such as " The First Snow " (18 1 7), especially in the deeply-felt elegy on Pushkin's death. " The Young Epicurean" made haste to live and to feel, just like Bätyushkov, but he also struck political chords, urged 270 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELINSKY Zhukovsky (! !) into the " civil " career, apostrophised " In- dignation," and declared : "Freedom ! With burning enthusiasm I made bold, the first in Russian poetry, to call on thee and awaked the silence," and so on. To be sure, the Asmodeus of the Arzamas confessed in his old age : " In my youth I let myself be ruled by the Liberal ideas of the day, in my manhood by considerations of the public service, and lastly by the cares and vexations of age " ; thus his Radicalism faded soon and thoroughly. He even wholly loses himself in by- paths, as in the famous " Holy Russia," 1850, which delighted Zhukovsky, in which he extolled the monarchic and religious genius, i.e., Nicholas, after the suppression of the Hungarians, "he who saved Russia from Revolutions," also in his patriotic soldier-songs during the Crimean War. He is such a charac- teristic phenomenon that it is still worth while to linger a moment over him. This scion of Rurik and pupil of the St. Petersburg Jesuit College, then the best place of education in Russia, where the sons of the great nobles met, passed through the same transi- tion from Liberalism to crass High Toryism as Pushkin, only that no poetical endowment excuses him for it. He at first took delight in opposition, railed in his letters at persons and conditions — the post in those days was not intended for the forwarding of letters but the reading of them, and the Chief of Police's reproof of the postmaster in the " Revizor " for un- justifiable opening of letters sounds quite simple-minded — and clenched his fist in his pocket over the hideously unjust decision against the Decembrists, threatening to go into exile. But soon this mild Radical intoxication, in the course of which he, together with others, had petitioned Alexander I. for the liberation of the peasants, passed off. Satirical poems, before he changed his mount, made him known, as also Radical ones like Pushkin's, though written with less vehemence. There was also a comparison between St. Petersburg and Moscow, humorous descriptions of the Russian Carnival, and so on, with outbursts against foreigners. Otherwise this Frenchman was a regular Russ of the eighteenth-century pattern, convinced of the omnipotence of the State, which to him was identified TURNS HIS COAT. POLEVÖY 271 with Russia, hence looking down on other Slavs with contempt and Poland with lofty pity. There was in his blood the "Pamphletist," and side by side with it unquestioning admiration for Karamzin, the innovator in words and Conservative in politics, and lastly the literary man, but one of a very peculiar order ; for Turgenev and Tolstoy he did not know how to appreciate at all. The old veteran of Borodino protested most strongly against the killing off of the Russian Generals by Tolstoy, for he was as narrowly Conserva- tive and strictly autocratic in his historical views as in matters of politics and taste. Belinskyand the men of the forties were an abomination to him ; a living anachronism, overgrown with moss and mildew, he looked out on the present and complained that he was deliberately forgotten, which was a matter of course, as he had never written anything really great. He was advantageously raised above the surroundings of the fifties and the years that followed by aristocratic sentiment, tact, and contempt for the petty policy of pin-pricks and the rage for uniformity — a rage which is yet to rise higher, against the presumption of poplars and limes growing instead of Russian birches and pines. Some obligation was laid on him by his Voltairianism. In other respects he got no farther than epigrams and whole volumes of detached jottings. His comprehension of Romanticism, although he translated B. Constant's novel, and was enthusiastic about Byron, may have been very problematical, but he was allured by the prospect of a fight ; and so he descended into the journalistic arena, if only to disturb the St. Petersburg triumvirate, Bulgarin, Grech, and Voeykov, whose part was soon to be taken by Senkowski, in their monopoly, and thus it came about that the critic Vyäzemsky ior some time went hand in hand with Nicholas Polevoy, although the contrasts could not conceivably have been sharper. Polevoy was a plebeian and self-taught, without tact or sense of form, one-sided and violent. He was the first Russian journalist by vocation, though not a journalist to European notions, for politics remained wholly tabooed — the Government would not suffer even laudatory mention of its doings j whatever of Science or Litera- 272 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELfNSKY ture he had read or learned of the Germans or French, Schlegel and Niebuhr, Cousin and Guizot, he served it up hot to the public, in simple and intelligible form ; attacked remorselessly- all that stood in his way or was antiquated ; without a trace of respect mocked at the " Authorities " ; championed with fiery- zeal modern Romanticism and the Pushkin of the twenties ; in his Moscow Telegraph (1825-1834), which numbered two thousand subscribers, while others had to content themselves with a hundred or a hundred and fifty, he put through and celebrated the victory of Romanticism. He raised his hand against everything and wrote, in opposition to Karamzm's " History of the Russian State," a " History of the Russian People," which, however, only came down to the middle of the sixteenth century ; in this, after the example of German historians — his work is dedicated to Niebuhr — he eliminated morality and didacticism as well as fable and prejudice or accident from his description, and in- sisted on historical necessity, organic coherence, and making men and times live again from all points of view ; thus he fell out with the admirers of Karamzin. Far more recklessly did he deal with other contemporary " great men " — the two Dmitrievs, Zhukovsky, to whom he denied the name of Romanticist, and others. On the other hand, he honoured foreign Romanticism and Pushkin up to 1830, though he fought against it in Russia because of its clumsiness and dependence ; he no longer understood Pushkin after 1830, when he seemed to him to have become " monotonous," and to have lost the charm of novelty. Even far less did he find himself at ease with Gogol's realism ; the romantic raconteur he had welcomed, but to the inveterate Romanticist the realism of the " Revizor," which Prince Vyazemsky, for instance, knew how to value exceptionally accurately, and that of " Dead Souls," was an abomination. He attacked the latter as a libel on Russia, ridiculed the opinion of the author as to the moral value of his work, placed him below Dickens, whom he also hated, in spite of certain bright pages in his stories, and on a level with Paul de Kock. He had already lived beyond his time and could no longer keep pace with the age. The arbitrary close of his AN ARDENT CHAMPION. OVERTHROWN 273 career by the sudden prohibition of the Telegraph made this feeling of being behind the times weigh on him all the more. His enemies triumphed. The significance of the Telegraph as a revival of extinct Russian journalism, as a popularising of modern Western knowledge, and a critical revision of all unfounded estimates of Russian Classicists and Romanticists, a plea for "independence," although Polevoy did not succeed very well in defining that term, was now a thing of the past, and its editor, bereft of influence, had for twelve years longer to slave for journeyman's pay, and that for his former opponents. Against the Romantic critic who had unmerci- fully ridiculed the Russian " Theocritovs, Anacreonovs, Hamletovs, Demischillerovs, Obezianins {i.e., Apes), Orienta- lins, Epithetins," and so forth, to whom the fair and highly promising beginnings of Russian Romanticism, i.e., Pushkin, had ended in " wearisome nothingness," who had only wished to joke and play with Russian literary men "because one cannot be seriously angry with children," his opponents, including, alas ! Pushkin, directed not only epigrams and mockeries of his old status and calling — " He should buy brandy of him who wishes to come off well with him" — and denunciations, but even set younger assailants in motion. Especially keen against him and the whole Romantic movement, for the moral harm it had caused as a creation of the Revolution, of the Byron of " Cain," was Nadezhdin, afterwards Professor at Moscow, who, in spite of these prejudiced exaggerations in literary as in historical questions, often displayed a sound judg- ment and one in advance of the age. His presentiment that Holy Russia, called to the leading part in the new drama of nations, would create for itself a poetry of its own which, enriched by the treasures of Classicism and Romanticism, would grow strong enough for vigorous independence of action was, indeed, to be realised. For the moment he saw in the Russian literary wilderness only stray alien phenomena, trans- lations and imitations, servile labour of the Russians for their foreign master, rapid withering of all efforts, a mad order of things, a "yellow house," i.e., asylum of the devotees of Romanticism. 19 2;4 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELINSKY Far more serious was the message of the Moscow disciple of Schelling, Kireevsky; to be sure, it did not only regard elegant literature, but went deeper, to the whole system which hung together with it, the dependence of Russian advanced thought in general. "To the admirer and disciple of the West our nationality has hitherto been an uncultured, rough, and stagnant one like the Chinese ; the elements of our develop- ment we must draw from Europe, as we possess none of our own. Let us only go sedulously to the school of Europe ; it teaches us nothing but good : other people's thoughts may then awaken our own. Let us learn at present above all respect for reality : we expect nowadays of literature compre- hension of the present ; even philosophy and religion draw nearer to life, become practical and positive ; poetry must try to achieve the same." Of course, he sees the want of this, particularly in the Russians, in the unnatural predominance of all possible foreigners, from which only a good genius can deliver them. For the carrying out of his ideas Kireevsky destined a new magazine, the European, the first number of which opened, in 1832, with his essay, "The Nineteenth Century." He had the best collaborators — Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, and others. But Count Benkendorf, chief of the "Third Section," considered that the essay, although ostensibly only dealing with literature, dealt in higher politics, and meant by enlightenment "freedom," by mental activity " revolution," and by an artificially determined mean " Con- stitution " : the author, therefore, was not " right-thinking." The magazine was at once forbidden, the Censor, Aksakov, who had allowed it to pass, deprived of his office, and Kireevsky deported from Moscow : Zhukovsky's mediation kept him from worse. The real creator of Russian literary and journalistic criticism, who in the impossibility of any other critical pronouncement possesses an exceptional importance paralleled nowhere else, is not to be sought for among professors or aristocratic dilettanti. A plebeian driven away from the University, almost self- taught, knowing no German for instance, a victim of con- sumption, who, struggling and starving under the most KIR&EVSKY. THE RUSSIAN LESSING 275 unfavourable conditions, secured for himself the most modest existence, and who, when he had escaped want, was handed over to the talons of the " Third Section," from which only premature death released him, did ever so much more for the mental revival of Russia than all the Ministers and Com- mittees and titled and bestarred gentry together. We mean the " Russian Lessing " ; the bad practice of such labels was taken over by the nineteenth century from the eighteenth. How far Belinsky stands below Lessing in knowledge, critical spirit, and philosophical capacity and training, how high he overtops him by the living effect of his word ! While his name, even at the beginning of Alexander II.'s reign, might not be mentioned publicly, his essays formed the whole mental capital of the time ; especially in the provinces, the young men were mad about him. Decades later Volynsky, for having sought somewhat to shake his authority, had to pay by almost unanimous ostracism (1894). In order to do justice to him, let us first recall the conditions and contrasts of the literature of the thirties in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In the former, where the licensed pronouncer on all literary phenomena, the Chief of the Gendarmes, Count Benkendorf, without principles, but in return of the greatest conceivable brusqueness, issued the necessary directions to the Minister of Education, Count Uvarov, and guided the chief of the Censorship, there existed only a literature wholly cut off from life and reality. It was divided into two camps — the aristocratic, which had the entry to the drawing-rooms, e.g. y that of Karamzin's widow, the Pushkins, Sologiibs, &c, and was ashamed of the literary men and disowned them, Prince Odoevsky alone excepted, and the plebeian, the journey- men of literature, the translators, &c, who lived only for it and thought of nothing but it, to whom France, for instance, in spite of the literary fashion and its political life, was absolutely indifferent, who looked down contemptuously on the crowd and its interests, unquestioningly respected authori- ties, placed poets, artists, and learned men on an exceptionally high pedestal, and only recognised Art for Art's sake. For Kukolnik, for instance, and for Polevoy after his change, 276 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELlNSKY Pushkin had let himself down much too far ; they called for exclusive handling of heroic and brilliant figures and incidents, despised reality and the present, and flung phrases about them as to the sacredness of Art ; Polevoy, before his change, at Moscow, seemed to them so dangerous that Uvärov declared that under his pen even the Paternoster would come out revolutionary. Into this airless and lightless atmosphere, where everything kow-towed to Uvärov's dogma of the Russian Trinity, Orthodoxy, Autocracy, i.e, Serfdom and a State language, only from Moscow, and notably from its University, came there a breath of life. At that University many things had changed. The times before the " Burning," when there was antagonism between the learned but pedantic German professors, apathetic towards everything Russian, and the Russian, servile, coarse, and ignorant, alumni of the clergy-schools, were gone for ever. Young and able men, especially the physicist Pävlov, who himself, as the Chair of Philosophy must remain unoccupied, lectured on Oken and Schelling ; Nadezhdin, also a disciple of Schelling, Pogödin the historian, Shevyryov the literary his- torian, philologists also, and later the idol of the young men, the mild and humane Professor of History, Liberal and faithful to his convictions, Granovsky, gathered full audiences, and found in their Warden, Count Ströganov, after those that preceded him had troubled themselves only about buttons, close-cropped hair, and the morality of the students, or demanded, in the interests of order, that in case of a professor falling ill the one next to him in rank should lecture for him, a defender even before the Emperor's self. Far more important was the influence of the students on each other. They came from all parts of Russia, distinctions of birth were not regarded, and they divided off into groups, not by provinces or wealth, but according to mental interests. Thus there grew up round Stankevich, a pupil of Pävlov and Nadezhdin, and first a Schellingite, then a Kantian, and finally a Hegelian, a philosophical circle from which proceeded Belfnsky, Bakunin, whose very name was later to make every German policeman's soul shudder, and Katkov. Stankevich is MOSCOW'S BEACON. DMITRI KALININ 277 one of those Russians who, without having published anything themselves, are far more important to the annals of litera- ture and interesting than many voluminous writers. He died young, a most tender, sensitively organised nature, a mind trained in strict logic, well versed in "systems," prescribing Hegel not merely externally ; he inspired the enthusiastic admiration of the German philosophers and literature which decided Belinsky 's early career. The latter, who made a living by translating Paul de Kock and giving lessons, had been excluded from the University on the ground of his play " Dmitri Kalinin," in which, after the fashion of " The Robbers," the sharpest protest against serfdom with reproaches against God and all due deference to the wise and just Government, which yet did not save the author, were uttered. The passion which breathed from this unsuccessful play Belinsky kept throughout life ("The madness and pride to starve and to die will never be wanting to me") for his criticisms, with which he soon made his debut in Nadezhdin's magazine, in the Moscow Telescope^ and in the Mhlva [Report). His " Literary Dreamings " aroused attention, though at bottom they offered nothing new, repeating what criticism and notably Nadezhdin had dwelt on — that Russia had no literature ; but this was uttered with pathos and enthusiasm, though with relentless frankness. These criticisms bore witness to a sure aesthetic sense, as in condemning as a mere maker of phrases the lyric poet Benediktov, who delighted the whole world. To be sure, Belinsky and Bakunin soon ran away with a quite one-sided conception of Hegel's philo- sophy : they took the proposition of the compatibility of everything actual with Reason literally. Belinsky learned from it the necessity of reconciling oneself to any (instead of any reasonable) reality, the illegality of all protest, the exclusive beatification of Conservatism, the remoteness from the present and its cares of Art, an incarnation of the abso- lute ; he cursed its negative tendency, Satire and Comedy, rejected the patriotic when adopted by a conquered people, as in the case of Mickiewicz ; vociferated against French art because of its social character and because of the propaganda 278 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELINSKY of subversive and emancipating ideas, as with Georges Sand ; was enthusiastic only for unconsciously creative objective Art, that of Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe ; put Schiller down in the scale, and left Heine not a sound lock. In this onesidedness, for which Hegel was not in the least to blame, Belinsky was not to persist for long. The Moscow magazines on which he worked all ceased to exist and he gladly answered to a call to St. Petersburg, where he ended by taking over the critical portion of the "Annals of the Father- land," which was meant to break the monopoly of Bulgarin, Green, and Senkowski. In any case it was easier among a circle of sympathisers at Moscow to spin around one a web of deductions and constructions and refuse to open one's eyes to the world than in the sobering St. Petersburg atmosphere to shut out reality and its very plain speech. Slowly there be- came evident Belinsky's total defection from what he did not understand — "Yegor Theödorovich Gegel" (Hegel) "and his philosophical nightcap" — and his transition to the French modern practice of Art as a mighty social lever and to the worship of Schiller and Heine. And soon the passionate, excited, heaven-storming critic falls into another extreme : Art becomes a mere excuse to him and literary work is sub- jected, not to an aesthetic but a purely journalistic inquiry as to what may be deduced from it for Society, Progress, and Humanity, how far it awakes these feelings in the reader, educates him socially, and inculcates humane thoughts as to woman, slavery, &c. To be sure, he is forced by the thought of the Argus eyes of the gendarmes into as much self-restraint as possible, into making a pretext of aesthetic interests ; but Belinsky lets the mask drop at times, and simply confesses how tedious it would be not to be allowed to speak of anything but Art. Such was the transformation of Belinsky ; he served the new Truth even more passionately than the old, and now attained in the second period of his activity, 1 841-8, far higher results. Now for the first time he spoke as pleased the hearts of all the young. France, of which but lately a literary man had declared " Let it fall right through the earth ; OLD AND NEW TRUTH. STERN VERDICTS 279 what does that concern me ? " became in the forties the one country in which in thought the Petersburger spent all his time, whereas at home he went about his business purely mechanically. Having such a conception of Art, Belfnsky was bound to place the realistic in the foreground. As Polevoy once did for Pushkin, so he now defends, explains, and admires Gogol, the " Revizor," and the " Dead Souls " ; so, too, he now takes under his protection every new display of talent in which he scents a modern touch, such as the " Poor Folk " of Dostoevsky and the first attempts of a Goncharov, Herzen, Grigorovich, &c. It was entirely under his blessing that the whole literature which followed grew up ; it felt his impelling power and always gratefully acknowledged it and extolled him as its greatest teacher. He urged on Koltsov, brought L6r- montov nearer to the reader, and above all expounded the older literature. For he did not content himself with discussing the current writers — especially authoritative were his reviews of the year, which he took up again after Marlinsky-Bestüzhev — but reached back to Pushkin and Griboedov, Zhukovsky and Bätyushkov, and still farther. For him as for his teacher, Nadezhdin, the history of Russia began with Peter the Great ; old literature did not interest him save as a curiosity in a museum, while to that in dialect, e.g. y Little Russian, he stood opposed as to a splitting-up of strength ; the problem attracted him how in Russian, a purely imitative, hence hothouse and exotic, Literature the approach to reality and life was slowly brought about, how it grew more truthful. Yet he did not neglect the aesthetic side, lingering especially over Pushkin, on whom he really supplied a consecutive commentary, expounding and demonstrating the significance and beauty of every single work, nay, poem. His judgments have since remained authoritative ; they are mostly correct, though not complete. What is especially pertinent is his rejection of what is artificial and far-fetched, of all straining after effect and bombast. Thus he was inexorable towards Marlinsky, Polevoy, Kukolnik, and Benediktov, and destroyed for ever their hollow reputations. That he made for himself bitter enemies, who did not spare him and whom he did not 28o ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELtNSKY leave unanswered, is a matter of course. Even when he did not mention names everybody recognised in his articles (P. Buldogov's) in the Pedant, the knight of the yellow gauntlets, Shevyryov the Professor of Literature, and in the "literary cynic" the other editor of the Slavophile Mosk- vitydnin^ Professor Pogodin, whose peddling antiquities bring him the reputation of a scholar, while his living in a cask gets him houses and villages. After his entire renouncement of his youthful idealism, after having taken as his motto "Art for Life's sake," as against his former maxim of " Art for Art's sake," the enthusiastic fighter was led away in the heat of the struggle into displays of prejudice, nay injustices. Thus he shattered his idol Gogol when he learned his falling away from " Life." To be objec- tive, to do justice to any opponent, to distinguish true and false in him, becomes impossible to him ; thus he was the most prejudiced, but at the same time most passionate, opponent of the Slavophiles, and even protested when his Moscow friends did not at once break off personal relations with their opponents. This perversity also decidedly influenced his final estimate of Pushkin and L£rmontov, which then remained authoritative for generations, not without injury to Russian criticism, which learned to neglect the aesthetic and idealistic factor. But lately he wanted to eliminate trom poetry the subjective, the temporary, and only wished that it should aim at a harmonious reconciling of all contradictions. Now he misses in Pushkin the holy indignation, the resent- ment, which so attracts him in Lermontov, the connection with the present. Pushkin is exclusively an artist, serves Art for Art's sake, and can thus no longer suffice us, hence our cooling towards him. In the more important and greater portion of his production he belongs wholly to his age, which to us is already the past; a new Pushkin, even though he possessed even greater talents, would be able to achieve no more successes. Poetic mirroring of life without comment constitutes his art ; his Muse is indeed human through and through, and suffers deeply under the discords and contradictions of life ; but she resignedly makes up "FOR LIFE'S SAKE." MISJUDGMENTS 281 her mind to them, she recognises, as it were, the justification of them, and does not bear within herself the ideal of another and better reality. And even more unjust and one-sided does Belinsky become in details — e.g., in passing judgment on " Onegin," particularly Tatiana. One fancies oneself listening to one of the later "accusing critics" — so Belinsky christened this prejudiced tendency — when one reads his act of indictment against this most glorious creation of Pushkin's. To him she is a motionless Egyptian mummy ; her spirit sleeps, her inner life is only filled with love-longing, her days are not divided between work and leisure, the alternation of which alone holds the moral forces in equilibrium. As a maiden she is only a moral embryo, and reminds us involuntarily of those "ideal" damsels who are so apt to be commonplace and a little laughable. As a woman she has not the courage to yield to the dictates of her heart, kept down by propriety, fearing the judg- ment of that great world which, after all, she only despises, and thus she stands below the women who reject that compulsion and follow their nature. Thus Belinsky with Pushkin as with LeVmontov places the chronological factor, the psychological moment, too much in the background, does not ask whether both might not be deeper, more comprehensive, and lasting embodiments of the Russian national spirit, judges them too hastily and partially from the standpoint of progressive and Westernising propaganda, and thus sets the example for all later and perhaps more prejudiced, nay fantastic, condemnation of the kind. Thus this exceptionally impulsive, passionate, and fanatical adherent of what he recognised as truth on both occasions shot beyond the mark. We must indeed not forget that after 1840 he was not at all inclined to play the objective and aesthetic referee ; that, on the contrary, he wished to mould his critical part of the magazine into a kind of social and political tribunal under the eyes of the " Third Section " ; and that he was in- finitely more concerned with the emancipation of women and the working classes, the English Constitution, and the institu- tions of the United States than any literary or aesthetic questions. Hence the numerous contradictions in him. He demanded ideas 282 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELINSKY in the artist ; e.g., that as in Gogol the moralising should gradually increase at the expense of the act of creation, whereas he had but just extolled Gogol for bringing nothing exotic into Russian reality, but simply making it objective, thus lighten- ing its darkness. Again he contemptuously excluded the " pure " artists and dilettanti from contemporary literature. Nay, he did not even trouble about the fact that his almost purely utilitarian new principle was at variance with his metaphysical older definitions of art and the beautiful, nor about the question how far the two should wholly cover each other — whether beauty consists only in the correspondence of idea and form and Art in the reproduction of the beautiful, and whether by the new principle Art was not turned away from its proper task. These points he now touched on no longer, but persisted in the new tendency, nay, raised it even more into an exclusive apotheosis of the " Natural " school when he passed from Memoirs of the Fatherland (" Otechestvennyia Zapiski ") to his Contemporary^ once Pushkin's and Pletnyov's, now Nekrasov's and Panaev's. His substitute in the "Me- moirs," the youthful V. Maikov, set up a new definition of Art, its displaying the " affecting " (sympathetic) side of every- thing, while the "interesting" constituted the domain of Science ; but his early death in 1847 interrupted the working out of that idea. Thus triumphed the purposeful didactic tendency in criticism. Even in 1842 Belinsky had been able to exclaim : "The spirit of our age is such that even the greatest creative power can astonish us only momentarily if it confines itself to c a bird's singing,' i.e., does not come down to us and our interests, but abides in its own world of fancy and poetry. The works of a power of that kind, however gigantic they may be, have no place in life and will evoke no enthusiasm or sympathy either in contemporaries or posterity ; with natural talent alone one cannot accomplish much, a matter must touch the reason. . . . Creative freedom can easily be brought into harmony with the service of the contemporary spirit. Therefore one need not force oneself to write on fixed subjects nor do violence to one's DIDACTICISM. DEATH AND ECLIPSE 283 fancy ; therefore it is only necessary to be a citizen, the child of one's society and time, make its interests one's own, and let one's own aims flow with the current of the age ; in addition you want only sympathy, love and a sound, practical sense of truth which does not separate conviction from act, work from life." And in good sooth after 1840 a Radical and progressive gust passed over Russia. It was noticed even in the barracks, where the terrible strictness and the triumphs of the art of manoeuvring relaxed ; it was noticed in aristocratic and official saloons, where at grand dinners " Nihilism " was actually engendered ; it was noticed in middle-class circles of officials and University men, where in particular French socialistic literature found rapid entree. People began to form debating and reading clubs, and soon St. Petersburg, the progressive, put itself at the head of the movement. Moscow hung back, lazy and inert, in true Slav fashion. All this development was suddenly cut short in 1848, and for seven whole years was quite at a standstill. Belinsky died, and with him died down the outcries and warnings of journalistic criticism. The " Author of the Studies on Pushkin," so his tabooed name was distorted, was appealed to more and more seldom ; his teachings were forgotten — though not by the young or in the provinces, where the rising teachers knew his letter to Gogol by heart and owed him their mental life. Criticism was non-existent, or opportunism only ; the return to asstheticism, and the principle of Art for Art's sake, the exclusion of psychology and the spirit of the day, unconditional instead of critical admiration of Pushkin, endless bibliographical and biographical researches and con- troversies, and dry, strictly technical, original investigations filled out the scientific portion of the Contemporary^ of Memoirs of the Fatherland^ and Senkowski's Reader's Library. Druzhinin and Annenkov, very respectable, cultivated, aesthetically discerning, and even gifted critics, who wanted only the feeling for the demands of the age, were the leading speakers, and rejoiced in the withdrawal of "purposes" and — men of talent. These were no longer spurred on by any fiery work from Belinsky ; the more prominent 284 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— bAl/NSKY vanished or became wholly silent. Even before 1848 the great swarm of the new " Gogols " had come on the scene, Dostoevsky, Herzen, Goncharov, Grigorovich, Druzhinin, with his " Polinka Sachs," a novel of St. Petersburg official life which had exceptional success ; the tame, honest, humane man, averse to all tyranny, brings up his doll-like choice, who accordingly, though she had banged the house-door behind her, comes back penitently, at least in thought ; the calm inclina- tion triumphs over romantic ebullitions, but Druzhinin soon gave up elegant literature after this first realistic success. After 1848 they were all violently torn away from literature, pined in disciplinary companies like Dostoevsky and Pleshcheev, or were banished like Saltykov to the provinces ; emigrated like Herzen, of whose not a line could be printed, even under a pseudonym, or remained under police supervision, at first secret and afterwards avowed, like all the Moscow Slavophiles ; or imposed voluntary silence upon themselves and turned their attention elsewhere. The place of social novels or novelettes was now taken by endless monster novels that dragged out for years — those of a Zotov, a Nekrasov, in conjunction with Madame Panaev, " Stanitskaya " (Stanitsa " — a Cossack town- ship), in imitation of Eugene Sue. Then came the novels of the beau monde — those of Vonlarlärsky, who in two years con- cocted any amount of volumes, and Eugenia Tur, Countess Sallias de Tournemir, who after 1856 gave up writing novels and later on won for herself a fresh reputation as a writer for children ; Countess Rostopchin, once famous as a poetess in the thirties and forties, and welcomed even by Belinsky, now a purveyoress of novels, and soon held up to ridicule by Chernyshevsky and Dobrolübov. The laughter of a Gogol, so dangerous, the sympathy with the wretched and with serfs of a Dostoevsky and Grigorovich, the sketches of "super- fluous " beings by a Goncharov and a Druzhinin — all was forgotten in favour of fresh Marlinskiads, romantic, grasping at sentiment, and the endless twining and untwining of knots in fairy stories for grown-up children. The object of the Censorship was attained : the " exaggerated " panegyrics of Gogol, his realistic school seemed about to come to an end. FOISON OF NOVELS 285 As it fared with criticism and belles lettres, so it did with every other kind of mental and intellectual activity, only that the pace of the hunting down of every uncensured human idea increased rapidly. Even the unprincipled Uvärov, the Minister of Education on the drill-sergeant pattern, and the more moderate Moscow Warden, Stroganov, laid down their posts in order not to play the part of executioner to the Universities. The proposal was mooted to do away with the Universities and replace them by Technical Schools. In two years, for reasons of all kinds, the number of students sank by a fourth ; the new Minister of Education thought he had done his duty when he merely conveyed the directions of the Third Section to the " Wardens." x The Chairs of Philosophy were abolished. Thus Katkov, hitherto Professor of Philosophy, was forced out of a learned into a journalistic career, in the shape of the editorship of the Moscow News^ where he was to become a sort of ruling spirit of Russian reaction. Theologians had to supply the lectures on Logic and Psychology, in order to protect the innocent Russians against possible " slips " of these "tottery" branches of knowledge (the Minister's words). Not less sharply were the motions of History watched. The deeply learned (and tedious) "Lectures" (given by the Moscow Historical Society) were suspended because the givers had ventured to print the work of the Englishman Fletcher on old Russia, dated 1 590. Of Aksakov's historical study on the life of the ancient Slavs and Russians the Minister thus adversely reported : "It takes for granted that old Russia had democratic principles ; this we can on no account allow, seeing that we must protect ourselves to the best of our power against these tendencies which are spreading in foreign States. Besides, the view is false ; ancient Russia knew no democratic principle, and if we find anything of the sort at Novgorod or Pskov, it is in consequence of their commercial relations with Germany." Less absurd proved the decision about the same work of the Secret Committee, i.e. y Buturlin's (only the cholera could save Russia in 1849 fr° m tn ^ s Terrorist of 1 German Kurator, Russian Popechitel—i.e. f " Guardian." An official exterior to the University, charged with its regulation. 286 ROMANTIC CRITICISM— BELINSKY Reaction). The Committee admitted the possibility of democratic principles in ancient Russia, but the bitter consequence thereof and chastisement for it was the invasion of the Tartars ; and it was the duty of the historian in the same way to set forth the transformation of these principles into aristocratic, as the one foundation of the prosperity and peace of Russia. As he had omitted to do so his picture was incomplete, and, therefore, the study might on no account be printed. Such was the aspect of philosophical and historical criticism in the Ministries and Committees. The Censors, who had to answer for every omission, were seized with a panic ; even in their dreams they performed only heroic exploits in red ink. We know, forsooth, the dreams of the Censor Krasovsky, "my watch-dog," as UväVov called him, " who has to watch that I may sleep in peace." The said Krasovsky was, during sixty-one years' service, the pattern of a Censor ; insisting above all on morality, would only permit in books pictures of women when they were clothed from the knee to the chin, forbade the expression " ardent prayer," and, aided by his worthy colleague, Krylov, the renegade from the Liberal views he had held when at Moscow University, reduced even the infamous Bulgarin to utter despair. The Slavophiles Aksäkov, Cherkassky, and others were forbidden to write in any way whatever, for they were seen to be rebellious against Peter and the great expenditure which the introduction of European ways into Russia had im- posed on her successors. No better did it fare with rebellious Westernisers ; and here we must, because of its direct consequences to literature, record the unheard-of severity with which the " Petrashevtsy " were suppressed. Petrashevsky, a Foreign Office official, was already suspected by the Third Section in 1845 as a Radical and the compiler of a dictionary, of course in MS., of words borrowed by the Russian language, with biting, satirical ex- planations. On Fridays he was visited by youthful politicians, among them DostoeVsky. They read aloud works by Oven and Fourrier, the " Paroles d'un Croyant " of Lamennais, and Belfnsky's letter to Gogol ; they debated and meditated the REPRESSION. THE "PETRASHEVTSY" 287 establishment of a secret press or lithographic establishment. The meetings of this Society, which entered into connection with certain foreign coteries of a similar kind, were frequented not only by officers, but still more by students, civil servants, and bourgeois. Socialistic and anti-religious currents predominated over political and constitutional ; they were thinking already of a propaganda among the masses, but no one had got beyond mere thoughts and proposals. The Minister Perovsky — from whose family issued later the famous Nihilist Sophia Perovskaya — who had got wind of it, succeeded in smuggling in his agent, who then founded a special Association among them. The ever-memorable feat of unmasking and convicting these harmless people was the chef cCceuvre of Liprandi ; whilst Herzen always, and with justice, maintained that they were punished not because of any offences, but because of their opinions. The punishment was, even for Russia, a terrible, nay, a brutal one. On April 23, 1 849, the " nest of malefactors " was broken up and carried to the Fortress of Peter and Paul. On December 22nd the sentence was read aloud at the place of execution ; twenty-one "malefactors," Dostoevsky being the fourth among them, were to suffer death by shooting. After waiting for death almost half an hour they were respited and sent to the mines or companies of delinquents, and later stuck among the soldiers as privates. Even the Amnesty at the accession of Alexander II. did not extend to any of them. Dostoevsky obtained his ulti- mate liberation chiefly through the intervention of a former fellow-student, Todleben, the defender of Sebastopol. Thus in Russia was an end made even of truth and humanity. Saltykov's " Triumphant Swine," although he first dreamed it in Paris in 1881, had now become naked reality, and the first human voice that rose above the grunting sounded across the frontier from abroad. CHAPTER X SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS. ALEXANDER HERZEN First appearance of the Slavophiles — Transfer of a philological style to a political party — Mental disagreement — Westernisers with and without Catholic leanings — Chaadäev, Kireevsky — The religious political, and social creed of the Slavophiles — The Westernisers at Moscow — Herzen — His youth — First appearance of Iskander — His novel — His expatriation — Activity abroad, and return to Russian activity — His memoirs — Other memoir-writers of the time — Aksäkov's family chronicle. Already, in the last years of Alexander I., under the eyes of such Censors as Krasovsky and Birukov, to whom Pushkin addressed his well-known letters in verse, every critical thought had had to flee from printed to manuscript literature and to private conversations. Under Nicholas the Russians were to be altogether relieved from the burden of thinking ; to all its other monopolies the Government added this one, as it had but lately, by the establishment of the Government Intelligencer^ secured to itself the monopoly of prating. The introduction of it, to the despair of the officials entrusted with it, originated with the " Arzamasite " Count Bludov, the continuer of Karamzin's History, who wrote not a line more of it, and compiler of the Report on December 14, 1825, which "had better have been left wholly unwritten" (Herzen). And yet criticism or the present as of the past could not be suppressed ; Russians visited Europe, and Europeans came among them and described what they saw, Joseph de Maistre, de Custine, and Baron Haxthausen, who under Aksakov's guid- ance displayed the Russian "Mir" (Commune) and common THE "MOSCOW TELESCOPE" 289 tenure before an astonished world. De Custine's book (1849) was in particular a bitter pill ; his revelations concerning Peter and the comedy of Catherine IL, the "Empire de facades," Russie policee non ctvilisee^ hit the right spot, his eyes saw insultingly much. The apology for official Russia by Grech, like Catherine's old refutation of Chappe's Report, was, on the other hand, contemptible. The aims and sympathies of thinking Russians, which in the eighteenth century were still harmonious and differed scarcely by shades, now branched off in opposite directions. The most unfruitful course and least frequented was the one tending to Catholicism, which took its rise from Joseph de Maistre and the St. Petersburg Jesuits. The latter had always com- plained that Russia had evaded the salutary influence of Rome, and thrown herself into the arms de ces miserables Grecs du Bas Empire^ that the new reform had been nurtured on the blasphemies of the Encyclopaedists. This idea Chaadaev took in part, and developed out of it his own, which he laid down in his " Lettres sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire " addressed to a lady. The first letter Nadezhdin published in Russian in his Moscow Telescope in 1836; since Griboedov's satire nothing has had such an electrifying effect. He envied the Catholic world its glorious past, its traditions, the continuity of its development, and stated the fact of Russian poverty, discontinuity, and alien condition. " Nous ne sommes ni de l'Occident ni de l'Orient, et nous n'avons les traditions ni de Tun ni de l'autre. Places comme en dehors des temps, l'education universelle du genre humain ne nous a pas atteint. Nous ne vivons que dans le present le plus etroit, sans passe et sans avenir, au milieu d'un calme . . . plat. Isolds par une destinee etrange du mouvement universel de Thumanite, nous n'avons rien recueilli non plus des idees traditives du genre humain. ... II n'y a point chez nous de developpe- ment intime, de progres naturels, les nouvelles idees balayent les anciennes, parce qu'elles ne viennent pas de celles-lä et qu'elles nous tombent je ne sais d'ou ... les meilleures idees, faute de liaison on de suite, steriles eblouissements se paralysent dans nos cerveaux. . . . Solitaires dans le monde nous n'avons 20 2 9 o SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS rien donne au monde, nous n'avons rien appris au monde, nous n'avons pas verse une seule idee dans la masse des idees humaines, nous n'avons en rien contribu£ au progres de 1' esprit humain, et tout ce qui nous est revenu de ce progres nous l'avons defigur£ . . . pas une pensee utile n'a germe sur le sol stenle de notre patrie, pas une verite grande ne s'est elancee du milieu de nous." It was the unvarnished truth, the eloquent indictment of Society — the Government was expressly excepted, because it concerned itself with this progres to the best of its power — its thoughtlessness and frivolity. In the country where even quicksilver congeals there is no set idea, and, accordingly, the letter was dated from Nekropolis, i.e. y Moscow. The con- centration, the weight of this indictment, struck terror ; it was not to be refuted, therefore it angered people all the more. The consequences of this letter are already known to us. It was also — out of "consideration " for the author, once the hero of Kulm (1813), who wrote the "Defence of a Fool," and objected to the trailing of his idea in the street — ordained that he should not expose himself to the harmful effects of the prevailing cold and damp weather. Thus Herzen's contention was justified that the only polite man in St. Petersburg was Dubbelt, and he was chief of the gendarmes. It did not at all occur to Chaadäev, as his poet-denouncer asserted, to hate all holy Russian traditions, to pusillanimously renounce them and kiss the Pope's toe. Others did that, ladies such as the authoress and patroness, Princess Volk6nsky, who entertained Gogol at Rome, and great noblemen, e.g.. Prince Gagarin (afterwards a Jesuit, and editor of the works of Chaadäev), who became Catholics. Such a thing, be it said, occurred but seldom, for in Russia there is entire freedom of conscience ; i.e. y whoever leaves the Established Church finds his way to Siberia, and loses the rights of his rank and his fortune, which falls to those who denounce him. 1 Chaadäev was not a secret Catholic, but originally a 1 Persons were allowed to remain by their own or their ancestral creeds, but if Orthodox, even only by force or in name, must not give up Orthodoxy. Real freedom has, it is said, lately been granted. — E. H. M. CA THOLIC CON VER TS. " SLA VOPHILISM " 29 1 " Westerner," only with a leaning towards the clerical. Kireevsky said much the same as he in his " Nineteenth Century " ; complained of the Chinese Wall that, in spite of Peter and Catherine, still separated his countrymen from Europe, setting forth what elements of culture their past offered them and their relations to that of Europe ; that the States that participated in the same had their elements in themselves, and these were bound up with the nationality itself, whereas with Russia they could only be introduced by a violent breach with tradition and nationality, and from without. To seek what is national there means seeking the uncultured ; to cultivate the national at the expense of novel European importations means driving away enlighten- ment, for where else than from Europe could they derive their elements ? Of this work also they already know the result ; in his involuntary banishment Kireevsky then committed moral suicide, and returned years later to Moscow a sworn Slavophile. Even his essay of 1832 was directed against "Slavophiles," against the more and more numerous accusers of the great Reformer, who talk about national and home-grown culture, blame what is borrowed, and want to lead men back to the indigenous and Old Russian. Already he made the acute remark that these antique leanings rest only on misunder- stood repetition of foreign and Western ideas, which have a meaning there indeed but can have none in Russia. This was the first open denouncing and combating of " Slavophilism." The expression was unhappily chosen, and devised in order to ridicule the arch-reactionary Shishkov and his " Slavonic " word monsters, and acquired a political and national meaning instead of a philological. Instead of "Slavophiles" one should rather say "Graecophiles," seeing that the Catholic Slavs, for instance, are an abomination to them as renegades from the real, i.e., orthodox, Slavdom : Graecophiles, for even the Westernisers are Russophiles ; the " Slavophiles " have not a monopoly of patriotism, and the name " reactionary," which Shishkov deserves, does not exactly fit the " teaching." Instead of looking for others, such 2Q2 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS as anti-European or Nationalist, we will make use of the con- ventional title. A short description of Slavophile ideas — which, according to Herzen, but lately crept out of graves and had not grown more sensible under the moist earth — is indispensable ; since, for one thing, many of the leading elegant writers were under their influence, temporarily or permanently, and for another the conflict between them and the "Westernisers" fills important pages in Russian history, and one feels, when all were beaten down, at least from the Slavophile camp humane impulses, democratic principles, and a breath of protest against the official model and its sole way of salvation. Out of Shcherbatov's moral indignation at the meanness of his contemporaries, out of Karamzin's ultra-Conservative protest against all progress, out of Shishkov's reactionary hatred against modern ideas, had resulted that first ogling of the good old times, a fable convenue, in which one thinks to find the traces of Slavophilism. To this was added just dislike of the alien rule. When Alexander I. asked the deserving Yerm61ov what reward or distinction he desired, the General said, " Make me a German, Gosudar" (Sire). " Les Russes me font toujours du guignon," * was the saying of Nicholas, who preferred the foreigners. Self-deception and national overrating, with deliberate or innocent falsification of all history, then caused the Slavophile Fata Morgana to arise. Romanticism, which deliberately cultivated local colour, the traditional and popular, and German metaphysics did their honest best to help, especially the latter. If ideas embody themselves in nations, and consequently in their literature as well, if at the same time, as was the case precisely in Europe in the forties, people inquired after the " Idea " of Slavdom, it was pardonable ambition that this idea should be conceived to be as great and brilliant as possible, as a reconciling of all the contradictions that disturbed Europe. The deliverance was to come from the East. That was believed by Chaadaev as much as by Herzen or by the leaders of the Slavophiles, Khomyakov, Kireevsky, and Aksakov, though by each of 1 " Bad luck."— Tr. THE "FATA MORGANA" 293 them, to be sure, on different grounds. To Herzen, Belinsky, and Chaadäev, Russia was the blank scroll, the country which is to make its own the experience of the West without its struggles and labours, death and disruption, and in spite of all hindrances to perfect it. The Slavophiles saw Russia already in full possession of all elixirs of life : to get rid of all its maladies the West had but to learn from the Russians. These miracles of Russia were its Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Communal Ownership. Whereas in Catholicism the despotism of the Church, which set itself above the State, and in Protestantism the tyranny of reason, which killed all feeling, distorted true Christianity, the latter had survived in its greatest purity in the truly humble and deeply-believing Orthodox Church, founded on the community, not the domination of the patri- archs and on democratic principles. While Western States came into being by conquest, and subsequently constitutions — i.e., contracts — controlled the mutual distrust and jealousy of conquerors and conquered, the Russians called in their masters of their own accord, in full confidence entrusted to them all power and entire responsibility, and only reserved for themselves the necessary burdens, free life and acquisition, and moral independence. In Europe the constitution of houses and families leads, of necessity, to the feudal and aristocratic State : the system of majorities oppresses the minorities. In Russia the communal system could only lead up to a National Assembly with its decisions unanimous, not those of a majority, and a merely consultative Zemsky Sobor could allow of no aristocracy arising and would secure the preponderance to altruistic tendencies. Even the wife in Old Russia enjoyed an independence which her Western sister was bound to envy her. This theory put forth good shoots, and was consequently regarded as opposition to the intolerant prevailing system and remorselessly suppressed. The Censorship pursued Slavo- phile publications to the utmost ; only that for these noble shoots the disguising in the " mürmolka " (old Russian cap), letting the trousers down over the high boots, and the whole theological, philosophical, historical frippery were fairly super- 294 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS flous. Freedom of opinions and conscience, the rights of woman, love and comprehension of the people did not need to be quickened by fabulous tales about calling in the Varangs, Byzantine Christianity, &c. Moreover, the Slavo- philes strongly reminded people of Chichikov in the Second Part : he has had enough of the " Dead Souls " ; he repents of them so bitterly that he means to buy property out of the money paid for them, and henceforward lead a highly moral life. In the same way they abused and cursed Peter's reforms, yet they retained the result of them undiminished, and only wanted to set up in " Old Russian " fashion on Catherine's and Peter's acquisitions. Real respect, except for their own love of independence, which was not to be turned aside by mockery or persecutions, is deserved only by their " Conscious- ness of a living soul in the people," which for a Belinsky was quite impossible, in whose eyes the people, the rough, uncouth mass, must first be moulded and kneaded by the lettered. "Their feelings were more penetrating than their under- standing and conscience ; in many Essays in Slavophile periodicals there is a perfect reek of torture-chambers, torn- out nostrils, excommunication and penance, and Monasteries of Solovki ; if they had the power they would outdo the Third Section. These are werewolves and corpses ; from their demesne no living soul replies ; they have wrenched their understanding, Procrustes-like, by feigned Orthodoxy and artificial cult of the people" (Herzen). However, some distinction must be drawn among Slavo- philes. There were some at St. Petersburg, Burachkov, for instance, editor of the Mayäk (Beacon), who interpreted Kopernik (Copernicus) as w Pokornik," because it was only in his Slav " pokora," or humility, that, by the grace of God, he was illumined before the haughty Europeans ! Above such an idiot the Muscovites stood high, for only in Necropolis could the u dead " theory prosper. Even among them there were, again, degrees : the Siamese twins, Shevyryov-Pogodin, editors of the Moskvityanin, paid court to the Government most assiduously. Pogodin and Bodyansky further interested themselves, moreover, in all sorts of other Slavs, but their dry, THE SHAM EXPOSED. KHOMYAKOV 295 half-official Panslavism did not properly impress people. The younger staff of the Moskvityanin, including the talented writers Ostrovsky and Pisemsky and the critics Grigoriev and Edelson, the poet Almazov, who came to the fore in the sixties with satirical poems and parodies (especially poisonous was his incompleted Epic Pamphlet, " The Socialists," with its ridicule of the Seminarists, their patrons and patronesses), had since 1851 totally renounced Panslavism and laid stress on the national Russian element and its " foundations." The Slavophiles proper, as a factor of opposition to the St. Petersburg regime, were represented in the first instance by Khomyakov, a man of extraordinary cultivation and power of will, the official poet and divine of the party, a dialectician of the first rank, and a sophist to whom debating in itself was a pleasure ; his theological tracts, the defence of saving Ortho- doxy, could at first only be printed abroad. Wearisome are his two tragedies of " Yermak " and "The Pseudo-Demetrius," while some of his poems cannot be denied lyric swing. We choose one, that " To Russia." The poet warns her against bombast : — " ' Be proud ! ' to thee have flatterers said, [But the Slavophiles were just the worst of them.] Land with the crown upon thy head. More dread than thou was mighty Rome, Lord of the Seven-ridged Hill, Realisation of a dream Of iron force and savage will. Unbearable the fire of steel In the hands of Altai's savage brood, All buried in her heaps of gold The Empress of the Western flood. And what is Rome ? The Mongols, where ? And Albion, feeble intrigues making, Hides in her breast a dying groan And o'er the precipice is shaking. [This on the eve of the Crimean War, when the Russia of Nicholas toppled into the abyss !] 296 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS Unfruitful is all spirit of pride, Untrusty's gold and steel gives way : But firm is holiness' clear world And strong the hand of them that pray. But in that, with humility, With true childlike simplicity, With the heart's silence over all, Thy Maker's message thou didst take. To thee He gave a special call, For thee a brighter lot did make- To hold for all the world a store Of sacrifice and action pure, 1 ° keep the races' brotherhood, Of hvcxj i ove a vessel sure, The richL,. of a fl aming faith And right a M j ust i ce cleansed of blood. ***** Oh, think on thinv exalted lot The past within thv breast revive> The spirit of life that +here a bides Deep hidden, well to qu, stion strive< Listen to that, and then e*^ race With thy deep love each oth v na ti Q n Tell it the mystery of freedom, Pour on it faith's illumination. So thou in wondrous fame shalt si j Above the sons of every land, As that caerulean vault the sky, Clear covering of God on high." To this dominant note the whole Panslavic lyric Doetrv f a Khomyakov, Tyutchev, Almäzov, and Ivan A s ^ ov was attuned. Added to this were appeals to the you R a glets the Bulgars, Serfs, and Croats, to sever with braze t u ea ]j. s t u e chains of Ottoman tyranny; to the Northern ea^ e ! t p- ree t them loudly, in order that in the night of the^slavej-y tne bright light of freedom may comfort them ; fi na n v t u e summons to unity of belief, which the Slav reneo . ac { es f tne West had forfeited by following sinful R,^ wkh complaints that at the pilgrimages to Kiev's h jly places the Uniate brethren from Galicia and Volhynj did not appear5 haying been burnt at Poland's savage stakes or cajoled by ks A LYRICAL MODEL. TYUTCHEV 297 uproarious feasts. That about the " stakes " was a falsehood, but Volhynia soon put in an appearance at Kiev. Hussar generals and gendarmes, Siberia, and Diocletian persecutions brought about this work of Charity and Faith. This patriotic and didactic poetry breathes an idealising of Russia which wholly disregards the present and actual condi- tions, and rocks itself in haschish dreams of a rosy future. Khomyakov and Aksakov, too, were at least so far sincere that they demanded of their chosen people self-examination, penance, and repentance for the yoke of slavery, for the black injustice of its courts, and for other Russian complaints, before that people should enter on its great mission of conferring on Europe true Christian freedom and enlightenment (those of the Third Section, the Censorship, and the most holy Synod ?). And whence did these idealist enthusiasts derive the pledge of this mission ? From the humility and patience, the smirenie and dolgoterpenie, of the Russian people as opposed to the haughtiness of the West. Nay, for Tyutchev the Lord of Heaven, passing from one end to the other of it in Slavish guise, blessed Russia. That is indeed making a virtue of necessity ! The Saviour as a Russian serf (not for nothing is the peasant simply called " Khrestianin," perhaps to distinguish him from the masters as heathens?) is for that matter some decades in advance of Uhde's workman Saviour. Into this choir of banded Slavs there came a glaring dis- sonance. Khomyakov and Aksakov mostly disregarded it. Not so Tyutchev, who in 1831 sang of the Fall of Warsaw, and in 1863 of the Polish "Revolt," in different strains to be sure, the first time with words of comforting brotherly love, the second with hatred in his mouth, but essentially taking for granted or demanding the same — the death of the people. And when he welcomed the Slavonic Congress of 1867 he also spoke of a traitorous Judas who went his own way — evidently the Poles. The Slavophile interpretations of Slavonic brotherly love and Russia's world-mission are thus merely Charlatanism. To these " Idealists," strutting in their false humility, and plucking out European motes while dis- regarding Russian beams, we at any rate prefer the Russian 298 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS pessimists, who cling duly to Russian reality instead of to phantasmagorias, and would not even accept the Saviour if He came as a slave. However, Ivan Aksakov soon gave up verse. A far louder echo, in Europe even, was the prose of the President of the Slav Committee to find during the seventies, before and during the war in the East ; Tyutchev alone remained true to poetry, but he was a true lyrist, not a tribune of the people and publicist like Aksakov. Thus the Slavophile lyric poetry is something as conventional as their Theology and History, which was dealt with en famille. It was not by mere chance that they formed one great family. Aksakov married Tyutchev's daughter ; Khomyakov's mother was a Kireevsky. We must mention also the two brothers Kireevsky : Ivan, who, by reason of the European^ was under restraint and constantly suspected ; and Peter, who brought back from his travels in the West deep disillusionment and the conviction of the incurable rottenness of the West and the soundness of the East, both essential dogmas of the Slavophile creed. Then there was the enthusiastic Constantine Aksakov, who was a recruit from the philosophical circle of StankeVich and their historian, together with Y. Samarin, their politician and jurist. From the end- less debates at Moscow at the Yelägins', where the mother of the Kireevskys did not share the " Slavic devilry " of her sons, and at the Aksakovs', these theories first slowly found their way into the periodicals of the forties — the Moskvityänin and others. Unfortunately, they also attacked matters which could not be openly defended by the champions of Western ideas and their salutary and indispensable significance to Russia, by Belinsky, who, like Aksakov, had belonged to the followers of Stankevich and Herzen. Beside the philosophical circle of students at the University, there was also a socio-political one, which owned itself the heir and continuer of the work of the Decembrists, but its advanced convictions were soon materially modified by St. Simonism and Socialism. To this belonged Herzen, Ogary6v, and others. They soon excited suspicion, and drew down perse- cutions on themselves. The circle was scattered, but gathered A FAMILY CO MP LOT. HERZEN 299 itself together again later on, and enrolled more members, such as the Moscow Professor Granovsky ; but even here schisms were not wanting. Herzen and Belfnsky were the most logical, becoming sheer atheists and Socialists, while Granovsky and others held fast to the immortality of the soul and other Romantic tenets. The most important representative of the Westernising tendency, one who had no equal in Russia for wit and keenness, was Alexander Herzen. Had he been only a politician and partisan, we should scarcely notice him here, but he was a writer of eloquent literature and at the same time one of the most notable writers of Memoirs, not only of Russia, but of the nineteenth century, and deserves to be placed on a level with the great Russian names such as Turg6nev. Alexander Herzen (or Yäkovlev, for his father, a nobleman and wealthy, married in Germany, but did not legalise the marriage in Russia, consequently his children counted as illegitimate, and might not bear their father's name, but were known as Herzen, as their father called their mother) has, in spite of his German name and his German mother, not a particle of German temperament. He is a Frenchman, something like Griboedov, a Russian Voltaire, or like Paul Louis Courier, the noted pamphleteer. His first reading consisted of French novels and comedies in his father's library ; then, with the melancholy poetical lad Ogaryov (a noted lyric poet, later an kmigrk like Herzen : the bond of friendship lasted their life- times), he became enthusiastic for Karl Moor and Posa. The transition from Moros with the dagger in his robe and Tell at Kiisznacht to December 14th and Nicholas I. was an easy one. Owing to his fondness for Natural Science he entered, in 1829, the Physical and Mathematical Faculty at the Uni- versity. To that study he owes the exactness of his method and his dislike of all mysticism. Not very much, indeed, was learned ; but, on the other hand, Liberal tenets and for- bidden literature were zealously propagated. People grew enthusiastic over the Brussels, Paris, and Warsaw insurrec- tions. All his life Herzen retained from this period his 300 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS holy admiration for the Decembrists, for the great minds of 1792 and 1793, and his sympathy with the Poles, which he paid for in 1863 with the ruin of his "K61okol " («Bell"). But soon St. Simonism quite drove away the " BeVanger " leanings. The emancipation of woman and la rehabilitation de la chair, the freeing of humanity from monasticism, the justification and redemption of the flesh, the purifying baptism of the flesh as a Mass for dead Christianity, Herzen from that same period made the leading idea of his activity. The young people had not, either at the University or after leaving it, made any attempt at any political association or union, although their almost exclusively oral propaganda continued. By means of letters and the like the police ferreted out this connection. At length Herzen was trans- ferred to a distant Governmental capital, Perm, and after- wards to Vyatka, in civil employ, and under the supervision of the local authorities. Through Zhukövsky he then suc- ceeded in getting to Vladimir, then to Petersburg, where he had a fresh unpleasant difference with the gen- darmes, and finally to Moscow. In January, 1847, ^ e obtained, on the ground of the delicacy of Natasha, his cousin, whom he had abducted and married, a passport for abroad. He swore to himself never to return to St. Petersburg, that city "of the arbitrary rule, of blue, green, and motley polices, of bureaucratic disorder, of flunkeyish impudence, and of gendarme poetry." He never saw Russia again. When he left it he was already a well-known author, under the feigned name of Iskander. He began to write early, trying his hand at the dramatic branch and the telling of stories. At Vyätka an incipient lean- ing to religious enthusiasm made itself apparent. He wrote scenes of a Nero and a William Penn play, with religious dis- sensions, in stilted tirades. But " it was not allotted to me to raise myself to the third heaven. I was born a complete child of earth. The daylight of the idea is more akin to me than the moonlike radiance of Fancy." He was hindered in all mysticism by his sciences, "without which the modern SELF-EXILED. THE EDUCATION RIDDLE 301 man cannot find salvation. Without this wholesome suste- nance, strict training of thought by facts, this nearness to the life around us, without humiliation before his independence there remains somewhere in his soul a monk's cell, and in it a mystical seed from which can grow and spread conceit as to his understanding." He rose higher in his stories, especially in his novel, " Who Is To Blame ? " (the blame consists in one following the im- pulse of the heart, i.e., in fine, sheer chance). All are in the right, and the key of the situation is the impossibility of any way out, as he himself demonstrated on the strength of a kindred theme which had engaged his attention before. The hero of the work, Beltov, is one of the best portraitures of a " superfluous " man of the Nicholas period, such as Tur- genev again and again introduced into his novels — a man of honour, full of the best intentions, cultivated, clever, enter- prising, and yet totally futile, unable to become anything or grasp anything, to whose self it remains an unsolved riddle why exactly he goes on living. His misfortune begins even at his bringing up, which the honest Swiss directs on the common humanity principle, as if that were suitable to Russia. This quite " average " man then confesses to his teacher : "We Russians most frequently begin afresh, inherit- ing from our fathers only their property, movable and fixed, and even that we look after badly. If we wish to do any- thing, we find ourselves entering on a boundless steppe. In all directions roads lie open to us, only when you take them you do not arrive anywhere. Such, then, is our many-sided inactivity, our busy idleness." The " common humanity " tendency still held good at the University, where young men of like principles banded together in visionary fashion for life and ideals that were totally alien to it. At length, somewhat gratingly, the doors that led into life opened to them, but here only disappointments awaited them. The reality of an office or the barrack could only frighten off these independent, self-confident idealists. Beltov afterwards goes abroad, where he spends ten years, and during that time begins on everything, or almost every- 302 SLAVOPhlLES AND WESTERNISERS thing, and carries out nothing, or almost nothing — has been a doctor aspirant, an artist, and so forth, astonished the Germans by his versatility and the French by his depth. But while these Germans and Frenchmen worked and created, he achieved nothing. He is over thirty years old, his ideas have grown manly, but he himself yet remains in his nonage, constantly preparing for life like a sixteen-year-old lad instead of living. It is impossible for him to adapt himself to men and circumstances, or use his powers and attainments to good purpose. He will on his return, as a most interesting and misunderstood hero, irresistibly attract like a magnet the pretty wife of the honest pedant of the Grammar School, will shatter the happiness of her life, and depart again. This clever and delightful story holds a crowd of personal reminiscences : his own tutor, his father, his Natasha in some of the traits of Lubov (" Love "), with her most sensi- tive nature, and her emancipation from prejudices, which comes about apparently easily and gaily, but in reality not without internal struggles ; above all, Herzen himself is B61tov, even to his medical studies and to repetitions of his very words — e.g., concerning the tricks of Fate, human perversity, which allows the happiness of the moment to slip through its fingers, and so on, all from Herzen's own diaries. It is almost a sort of autobiography, like L6rmontov's in "A Hero of Our Day." In spite of all the well-earned success of this interest- ing and realistic novel, Herzen did not deceive himself for a moment. " I do not know the way to write stories," he con- fesses in one place, and in a later passage he does not recount his hero's love-story — " The Muses have denied me the power of depicting Love. O Hatred, thee will I sing." Indeed, he often interrupts the narrative by the insertion of psychological biographies of his characters, every one drastic, vivid, and instructive, but, as it were, falling out of the framework of the whole. On the other hand, with short sketches he suc- ceeded admirably. When after some years he tried his hand at a fresh story, "Duty Before All," with its masterly descrip- tion of the panic on the sudden arrival of the new squire in the village, his friend, very rightly, expressed the opinion that SELF-DEPICTION. DISILLUSIONMENT 303 he would not finish it nor write another. Besides being a born tribune of the people, Herzen was too much alive to the interests of the moment for quiet objective creation to satisfy him. On the other hand, the desire of his heart was to make a mock of all sorts of oafish Slavophiles, to parody their style, to ridicule the " raw-edged, ungarnished " Pogodins, as also the sweetish but flavourless Shevyryovs, like a blancmange that has not set and has no bitter almonds, the Burachkovs and Yaz/kovs ; and at the same time he purposed publishing scientific and philosophical letters full of matter. When he had at last shaken the dust of Russia off his feet his course lay towards the French Eldorado, but his corre- spondence from the Avenue Marigny soon showed his dreadful disappointment, and soon too the possibility ceased of printing any sort of a line in Russia. Italy's spring of liberty enticed him irresistibly, yet he goes back to France again to see his last hopes shattered ; and cured for ever of all Liberal illusions, he proceeds to England. His frame of mind — for heavy per- sonal losses fell on him too, such as deaths ; nay, in one case Beltov himself became Crucifersky, and lost, like him, his Lubov — became constantly more embittered and splenetic. What he wrote was mostly in philosophical and political brochures, which appeared in translations in German. He was to end like Beltov — one wholly "unnecessary" and "disabled" man more. On March 1, 1849, he addressed a farewell to his friends in Russia, explaining why he never would return : " An invincible disinclination, a strong inward voice that forebodes something, keeps me from passing the boundaries of the realm of mists, of arbitrariness, of silent withering away, of unnoted perishing, of tortures with the mouth gagged. I tear myself free from my people, and yet I remain with it, in its whole life I sympathise only with the bitter cry of its proletarian and the desperate courage of his friends. I sacrifice everything to the dignity of man and freedom of speech. Here in a foreign land I am your uncensured speech^ your free voice. Also, it is nearly time to make Europe acquainted with Russia. They shall know 304 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS what they dread." He had, he said, let himself be carried away by events in Paris and Italy, had " sacrificed much time, feeling, strength, and means to the cause of the West ; now he felt himself superfluous in it" (1853). He was by no means disappointed by the ideas of the West, i.e., those on universal History, which he too loved and con- sidered indispensable to Russia, but by the " corrupt West " itself he was disenchanted as much as any Slavophile. He confused, that is, the West, with its bourgeoisie, with that " conglomerated mediocrity " which he hated like the plague, and looked on as a destruction of Art as well ; it must lead to a Chinese state of things, and on its absence in Russia he congratulated his countrymen. Like the Slavophiles and Chernyshevsky, he was enthusiastic about the communal ownership of land, the " Mir," and its elections, for this survival of patriarchalism, "from which a new social life may grow up which is as wanting to Europe as our black soil." No less did he delight in Russian emanci- pation, absence of precedent, and lack of the historical fetters cannon-balls which the ■ Western drags after him, thanks to historic tradition. "The Russian is hindered by no fence, no prohibition, no gravestone, no boundary-stone. He can go where he will, and knows nothing but wastes and ex- panses. We are free because we begin with our own liberation, independent, have nothing to love or to honour. A Russian will never be a Protestant nor juste milieu. ' The barbarians have lizards' eyes,' said even Herodotus, for in comparison with the West — the Romans — we are the bar- barians, the Teutons. Our civilisation is external, our corrupt morals quite crude. Under the powder the bristles show out ; under the paint the brownness breaks through. We dispose of an infinity of the cunning of savages and the shrinking of slaves. We are ready to give a box on the ears at haphazard, and fall on our knees without fault. But I repeat persistently that we have fallen behind the devouring fineness, resting on hereditary infection, of Western corrup- tion. Cultivation with us has served as a purgatory and a guarantee . . . and has formed a dividing line which has HATES BOURGEOISIE. PAINTS HIMSELF 305 separated off much that was disgusting." * One sees what an optimist lay hid in Herzen, and sees at the same time what close relations this Westerniser had with the Slavophiles. His friends of that persuasion directly accused him of under- mining the respect for the West that was so necessary to Russia and of going ahead too fast. Such are the fundamental ideas which run through his French and German letters and pamphlets of the years 1847-52, which we refrain from speaking of more in detail, nay, even mentioning. His personal losses did not break him ; for, as he (never suspecting how nearly it touched himself) laid down, even in 1842, in an essay that kept a friend of his from suicide, " The individual in us, the heart, should not exclusively claim the man ; his mind should hover between it and the Idea, general human interests, and not be based only on the sand of personal love." Thus when, in 1852, in the solitude of the world's capital he proceeded to examine his past reproachfully and sadly, he grew strong in doing so, and plucked up courage for fresh work, wanted to submit everything to the judgment of " his own " ; and thus came into being his autobiographical and, at the same time, principal work, a gem of Russian literature, " Byloe i Dumy " (" My Past and my Thoughts ") — "a tombstone and a confes- sion, occurrences and meditations, biography and reflection, things heard and things seen, that have given pain and been lived through, reminiscences and again reminiscences, a repeti- tion of life that rises up pallid in word and memory," written for the most part between 1852 and 1855, with appendices as well, in five parts. Yet the most important is in the fifth part, that on account of which all the rest was written, which, to Turgenev's thinking, was written with tears and his heart's blood, but not printed. Will the family always keep from us this portion of the history of Natasha ? Herzen himself had led us to expect it. It was not for the first time that he tried his hand at auto- biography. As early as 1838 he wrote " Memoirs of a Young 1 This is a summary of Herzen's views, not his actual words ; the inverted commas are put in to make direct speech possible. — E. H. M. 21 306 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERN/SEES Man," i.e., himself, in three parts — Childhood, Youth (the chapter on the University had to be left out), and Years of Roaming, with the satire on Vyätka-Malinov ; all of it 5 especially the third part, was in the style and tone of Heine's " Reisebilder," and he printed it in 1841. Its success incited him to his novel. Afterwards he kept for a time a voluminous diary of his reading. His present work differed by its tone from the crudity of the diary and from the " Memoirs," which he could not use. He wrote them at that time to while away his absence from Natasha. Now he had no reason to hurry. Much time had been needed for his varied experience to clear to a transparent thought, not comforting, rather melancholy, but reconciling through comprehension, without which there may be sincerity, but no truth. The book was to be no historic monograph, only a reflection of History in the man who had accidentally come in its way. Hence, especially towards the end, it entirely frays out into single sketches, as if the author were afraid by methodical remodelling from a single casting to obliterate the proper tone and mood of the first casting, hence these buildings out and added storeys and wings, and yet a certain unity in the whole. The most exact cohesion is observed by the first two volumes (vi. and vii. in the collected edition). These Memoirs, although they have for their subject no particular complications or catastrophes, only everyday incidents and encounters with men that are not everyday, can be read like the most thrilling novel ; the masterly portraitures of a Chaadaev, of the Slavophiles, of the architect Wilberg at Vyätka, of the Poles at Perm, of his colleagues at the University, and the various victims of administrative arbitrariness. The author also dwells particularly on the Moscow philanthropist Dr. Haas, active as Prince Nekhludov in " Resurrection " — " whose memory shall not be stifled under the rank weeds of official obituaries, which celebrate the virtues of the two highest classes which do not come to light until their bodies are mouldering." Then the pictures of Russian trials, prisons, justice ; how the incendiaries at Moscow were suborned, and the impressive funeral of the VYATKA DEPICTED. ST PETERSBURG 307 Jewish boy-colonist ; of the town of Vyätka and its officials and statisticians, who, under the heading "Moral Observa- tions," make the entry, " There are no Jews here," and so on, to performances at the theatre at Moscow and Granovsky's lectures. On the same level come the pictures of London and Paris, of the magnates of the European Revolutionary Com- mittee, of Count Worzel, of the Russian " splenetic " people as successors of the "superfluous," behind whom again the uncultured Seminarists crop up. The observer proceeds with absolutely scientific exactness, probes every phenomenon to the bottom, unveils their relations and importance, restores the cohesion, puts life into everything and explains it regularly — he supplies no brutal photographs, subsequently painted over gaudily, but harmoniously toned-down pictures, which in every stroke betray the hand of the master, everything couched in diction of wonderful precision, with French clear- ness and French wit. Delightful are his numerous ironical and sarcastic remarks, his reckoning with the system of Nicholas, from the letter of apology which he makes the Tsar and the merchant of the First Guild write to Rothschild, down to his generals, " the contemporary actors of the Drill Book and the dramatis persona of the Court Guide, for whom a place can be found in Ministries or in disciplinary companies, but certainly not in a story," in contrast to the generals of 1812. Especially he hated St. Petersburg, of which he writes in a diary that it was a wonderful victory over Nature. " Three degrees northward begins the healthy north, three degrees southward a temperate zone ; the six that lie between with the agreeable neighbourhood of the sea and of all sorts of rivers, lakes, swamps, and healing or poisonous waters, its easterly position, and with the Winter Palace, eight Ministries, and three Polices close at hand, not to mention the most holy Synod and all the exalted family with their German relatives, the whole forming a region of eternal damp- ness, moral and physical vapour, mental and bodily fog." A special essay on St. Petersburg praised the city in which are to be seen various strata of men — men who write incessantly, i.e. y civil servants ; men who write hardly ever, i.e. y our literary men; 308 SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS and men who not only never write, but never read, i.*'., the superior and subaltern officers of the Household ; lions and lionesses, tigers and tigresses ; folks that are unlike any animal or even any man and yet feel themselves as much at home in St. Petersburg as a fish in water. Lastly are to be seen poets in the Third Section of the Private Chancery and the same Third Section as it was when dealing with poets. A fine reminder falls especially to Uvarov, " also a Prometheus de nos jours , who stole light not from Jupiter, but from men, not sung of by Glinka " (before he had been talking of Humboldt at Moscow and his being serenaded by Glinka), "but by Pushkin" (in the bloodthirsty satire on Licinius Recovering), " a true com- mercial traveller in the mart of enlightenment, who retains in his memory the patterns of all the Sciences." Thus one pillar after another of the system is placed in the pillory and branded. Herzen's Memoirs are an unsurpassed contribution to the illuminating of the age, as well as a psychological and artistic chef d'ceuvre of the first rank. We might now treat of other memoir-writers of that time. The abundance of such literature is almost in- exhaustible — jottings of the Decembrists, which Herzen took a special delight in publishing in London ; reminiscences of Ryleev, Yakushkin, and others, or of the voluntary informers like Wigel, the informer Chaadaev, or the Censors — of Professor Nikit£nko, e.g., who daily jotted down the official attacks on thought, knowledge, and writers. Out of this abundance, let us mention only one work which, although radically different in matter, tone, and style, might be placed opposite the Herzen Memorial — the Family Chronicle of the elder Aksakov, the father of the two Moscow Slavophiles — if it could even in the remotest way be compared in fulness of ideas with the life- creation of the great emigrant. To be sure, the Family Chronicle was first published in 1856, but Aksäkov began to write it before that ; the first portions of it came out as early as 1847, anc * we ma y with justice ascribe them to the Epoch of Nicholas. At bottom they belong to the eighteenth century and the age of Alexander. Before the eyes of the old man awoke his early childhood, OTHER MEMOIRS. THE ELDER AKSÄKO V 309 the beauty of the Orenburg country, the peculiarities of his ancestors, his grandfather, his great-aunt, her husband, life in the provincial town of Ufa in winter, at the High School and the newly-opened University of Kazan, which sent its alumnus to St. Petersburg with brilliant certificates for subjects which were not taught there. Already at the High School Aksäkov had taken part in a school paper, Arcadian Shepherd-lads^ and continued his rhyming at St. Petersburg, but the sentimental admirer of Karamzin went over to Shishkov, and tells the loveliest things about the " Slavenophile Beseda," where mediocrity and tediousness combined ; Derzhavin awaited immortality from his impossible plays and more possible Anacreontics ; Count Khvost6v, the poet, accepted the most biting epigrams of his cousin as sheer praise ; where the criticisms were even shallower than the panegyrics, where the artless Slavophile Shishkov, whose first wife was a Lutheran and his second a Catholic and a Pole, yet who hated every- thing Catholic and Polish, expounded detached lines of the " Petriad " of Prince Shikhmatov, and was charmed by the beauty and purity of its language, without noticing that he evoked only the utterest mockery ; for instance, he raved about " The Wiles of Earthly Needs," where the modern reader would understand Dung-heap. We are in antediluvian times simply, and consort with the " patriot " Glinka, who, with all his exceptional fondness for the French language and versi- fication, opened the patriotic crusade against the French, and poured over every one of his verses and poems the same sauce of "Faith, Fidelity, and Dontsy " (Don Cossacks) — with Slavophiles who are convinced that the time of Peter and Catherine II. meant the Heroic Age and the true Old Russia. The later jottings, which grew more and more loose, were disappointing. Aksäkov lingered far too long about literary grandees like Shatrov, the descendant of a Persian ; the blind Nikolev, who, like the King of Hanover, denied his blindness, and talked of the cleanness of his linen to the amusement of those present ; Ilyin, who was crazy on the head of aristo- cratic acquaintances, and so on. Whoever takes an interest in paradisiacal relations, such as Grigorovich has depicted in his 3io SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNISERS " Country Roads," will happen here upon a quarry of anec- dotes and curiosities. On the other hand, the reader was entranced by the perfectly simple description, made without any literary pretension, and hence with the most striking success — portraits of the people of the "good old times," tyrants and despots, often simple criminals like Kurotesov (/.*., Kuroedov), unaccountable in their caprices, before whom their families, servants, and peasants trembled : even the old lady flew before the fury of the " old man " into the woods, though he was deceived and led by the nose by the most foolish. The glimpse of the manners and views of that patriarchal time is beyond price : the good-nature and rough- ness of these men of the steppes, the unculturedness of the surroundings, the primitiveness and naturalness of all. The meaning of the picture, however, is first determined for him- self by the reader. Aksäkov contents himself just with observation and reproducing what he has observed. He is himself a backwoodsman, for he lived forty years in the Oren- burg region, with the sharpened senses belonging thereto, and has written whole books on the taking of fishes and butterflies, on hunting with falcon and hawk (we are half in Asia), with nets and traps, and on the life and habits of beasts of the chase ; these might be set beside the best chapters of White's Selborne, and passed through several editions. The picturesqueness and vividness of his diction, a pearl of Russian descriptive and narrative prose, vied with the ampleness and exactness of his observations. Thus the author, as an enthu- siastic admirer of the " classical " theatre, had begun with translations from Moliere, with " Russian " transpositions of Boileau's Satires, what he himself afterwards characterised as nonsense, and with epigrams, agreed with Pisarev in finding in the vaudeville the acme of human Art, until, under the influence of Gogol, he turned to reality, and out of his Oren- burg reminiscences he brought to light first the " Snowstorm " (like Tolstoy), and then other treasures. His pictures offer no history, for they are history itself. No sharper contrast is conceivable than between this wholly objective " Homeric " reproduction of things seen and experienced and the sub- A BACKWOODSMAN. OLD RUSSIA ENDED 311 jective, ironical, " been through it all," indignant manner of Herzen. And yet both are illumined with the radiance of true poetry beneath the veil of melancholy and longing for the irrevocable days of youth. In both, also, antediluvian Russia is finally buried — the Russia of serfdom and barrack drills, of the " fear of God " and stupidity, of boundless caprice of bureaucrats and peculation which began directly the threshold of the Imperial workroom was crossed, of the silence of the grave, and endless suffering. Under the armour of snow and ice all reasonable humane life in this wilderness seemed turned to stone for ever. CHAPTER XI MODERN TIMES (1855-I905). CRITICISM. On the eve of reform — Influence of Herzen, journalist and author — Reforms : standstill in the same — Reaction : enhancing of the same up to the White Terror — Influence of criticism in the fifties and sixties, of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolübov and Pisarev — The organic criticism of Grigoriev and Strakhov — The aesthetic and idealistic criticism of Volynsky and Merezhkovsky — Some expositions of the History of Literature. Like the Epic, the history of Russia loves repetitions. The reign of the humane pupil of Zhukovsky, Alexander IL, recalls startlingly that of Alexander I., as the later years of Nicholas, at least as regards literature, signified the return of Paul's reign of terror. They repaid Russia the Western revolutions of 1848, just as the former had once, not less innocently, had to expiate the French. An external catastrophe, this time the Crimean War, made imperative the alteration of the official "Time Table." The need for sweeping reforms was universally felt ; above all, a stop had to be put to the hitherto favourite plan of throttling all truth, stifling every decent word. What harm this suppression of opinion had wrought people were all agreed : the most loyal circles (even the gendarmerie officer Gromeka) cursed it heartily, and one must read the subsequent accusations of the Slavophiles — Ivan Aksakov, for instance — against this mental Terror, in order to realise how, years later, the sheer remembrance of it angered the best and most conservative men. A relaxing of the gag of the Censorship was indispensable, if only because the truth about Russian conditions, and in its most undesirable form, 312 CRIMEA. "POLAR STAR" AND "BELL" 313 was told without hindrance abroad, and, partly through Polish agency, found its way into Russia. Herzen had never been able wholly to lose himself in individual life, else his sojourn at Moscow would have amply satisfied him. When the heaviest blows of Fate now fell on him his salvation was — Russia ; the service of the community soothed his personal sufferings. A theorist and a critic, he was not born for a politician or for a propaganda of action, but circumstances forced upon him a political role. Behind him stood no political party ; the great effect he produced is explained by the coincidence of his personal sympathies with the temper of men's minds in Russia. He only formulated clearly and sharply what was in the air, what all the pro- gressives demanded, what the Government itself recognised : at first in the 'Polar Star, recalling the Decembrists, with chapters out of his memoirs and so-called forbidden poems and reminiscences ; and from July 1, 1857 on in the Bell (Kolokol) with the inscription Vivos voco. This monthly, afterwards weekly, paper counted in 1863 some 2,500 sub- scribers in Russia, among them the Emperor. In the Preface to the first number Herzen claimed only the freeing of speech from the Censorship, of the peasant from the landowner, of the tax-paying classes from the stick. But his language grew still sharper when the work of reform seemed not to get beyond good intentions and fine words, and this brusquerie was made a complaint against Herzen by moderate Liberals like Chicherin. They also had no approval for his keen criticism of " dying " Europe, or the sapping of a faith which they believed to be essential to Russia. Moreover, they were satisfied in their demands by the official reforms, the great work of Liberation of February 19, 1861, which turned over twenty-one millions of "souls" into men ; the great judicial reform of 1864 with its advocates and juries, the abolition of severe floggings in 1863, the University Statute of 1863, which, however, was less satisfactory ; the establishment of local self-government in the Zemstvo (Local Council) in 1864; the new Valüev Statute on the Censorship of 1865, which to be sure was the least satisfactory of all : the Censorship 3i4 MODERN TIMES had meanwhile been transferred from the Ministry of Instruc- tion to that of the Interior. To Herzen, on the other hand, all this was a mere instalment — the first preparatory steps. He became still more extreme under the influence of that Moscow member of the Philosophical Club, the Hegelian Bakünin, who, having escaped from Kamchatka, became one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Europe. Now for the first time people in Russia turned against Herzen, Katk6v taking the lead in the Russian Messenger in 1862. The rising in Poland in 1863 brought on the crisis. Out of a mere feeling of justice, Herzen had always been a friend of the Polish cause, although he never con- cealed from himself that it was only ostensibly revolutionary, but in reality embodied a purely national idea, hence supplying nothing new to the complicated, laboriously-to-be- worked-out formula of the future social order. It might, indeed, awaken warm sympathies in others, but never could become their own work ; for only non-national interests can, by their nature, be the possession of all. According to his practice, what he had written in 1853 he printed in 1863 — at the wrong time. Katkov at once adopted the extreme patriotic standpoint, and carried by his energetic words all public opinion along with him, even victoriously sustaining the struggle with Valüev and his Censorship, as the conduct of the Government seemed to him much too lukewarm. The number of subscribers to the Moscow News doubled, that of the Bell sank from 2,500 to 500, and never rose again properly. Herzen's part was played out. Only in the KSlokol had it been possible before to throw light on the doings of individuals — his correspondents went as high as the highest spheres — to deal with the Pänins and Zakrevskys. This exceptional position now came to an end with the increase of freedom of the Press at home : the attempt to publish the Kolokol in French proved fruitless. His political propaganda fell silent ; it would no longer have found any response. Even the revolutionary party placed itself in sharp opposition to him. When he reprobated Karakozov's attempt on the Tsar, and denounced all political assassinations as something barbaric HERZEN DONE FOR 315 or decadent, the Moscow and Paris revolutionary centres issued a most solemn protest against him. The reason for his estrangement from the revolutionaries, and the coups de main in the Bakünin style, to which Ogaryov also had become a complete convert, lay deeper. After the Polish fiasco Herzen revised other things also, what he called his " Wheelabouts a contre-coeur" in which he unwillingly did what he wanted not to do, notably the axioms of Bakunin's cate- chism in his " Letters to an Old Comrade." He emphasised his fondness for slow, gradual development, and repudiated the violent revolutionary methods : " You cannot set peoples free against their will : only our enemy, not we, is well equipped, we must not irritate him. The old order is strong through general recognition : to bid people c Believe not ' is as forcible as * Believe.' For the representatives of the old truth which has become present untruth to be called to account for it would be foolish, considering that property, family, Church and State, have been powerful educating formulas in human liberation and development : one must only show them that because of the awakened consciousness of those without property their further reign is impossible, must show them the danger and the possibility of salvation. But out of the old world all that deserves it shall be preserved ; everything exceptional, many-sided, that is not a hindrance, may be left to its fate. Instead of needlessly destroying the power of the State, let us utilise it for the solution of the social problem ; the social question has already lost its ideal character, has passed from the stage of youth and religious veneration into that of full age." Herzen thus does not believe at all in the seriousness of people who prefer the rough violence of destruction to development and compromises. Needful is his sermon to his own and to his enemies, a great work of love, which may preserve the mental heritage of mankind against which the forces of destruction would turn. In this respect Christianity, Islam, and the French Revolution, like true iconoclasts, sinned sufficiently : a feud against knowledge and art as something aristocratic was to him an abomination. To give utterance to such talk and own to it in the circle 3i6 MODERN TIMES in which Herzen lived required more self-reliance and courage than to grasp at extremes in all questions. Thus Herzen slowly withdrew from the revolutionary propaganda and intended again to devote himself exclusively to literary work. Alas ! his days were already numbered : he died while yet in full vigour, January 21, 1870. But from his last years we possess wonderful instances of his knowledge of men and the perfect depiction of social and national types. His picture of the Petrashevtsy, those mistrustful, weary, passionate self- observers and self-accusers without sincerity — this " crippled," lost Nicholaitan generation — is classical. And then the descrip- tion of the emigration after 1862, these young people who wanted nothing to do with cultivation, or Art, or ideas, and recognised nothing outside their range of thought, who, when they asked for a programme of Herzen, merely understood by it a formulating of their own ideas, and who looked down on Herzen and his like as on respectable veterans. Thus was fulfilled what Polevoy had once prophesied to Herzen with a shake of the head, when he had dubbed him a Conservative for treating St. Simonism as a mere chimera. " The time will come when to you, too, as a reward for a whole lifetime of exertion and labour some youth will say, smiling, < Get you away, antiquated being ! '" " Stripping off all to the last clout, our enfants terribles showed themselves proudly just as their mothers bore them : but they bore them badly, not at all like ordinary sturdy youths, but as heirs of the bad and unwhole- some life of the lower order of St. Petersburg. Instead of athletic muscles and youthful nudity there were displayed sad traces of hereditary anaemia, traces of long-standing diseases, and various types of fetters and neck-chains. Few of them proceeded from the people : the antechamber, the barrack, the seminary, the granges of small landowners, topsy- turvied to the extreme, remained preserved in blood and brain without forfeiting their distinguishing marks : nakedness did not cover them, but uncovered them. It laid bare that their systematic brusquerie, their coarse and impudent language, had nothing in common with the harmless and artless roughness of the peasant, but very much indeed with the acquired habits of LATTER PORTRAITS. LULL IN LETTERS 317 the coterie of the clerks, of the market booth, or the servants' hall of a gentleman's house. Our black soil still needs much draining." With this influence of the " Free Russian Typography" in London — where Herzen had secret memoirs and forbidden poems, i.e., such as had been circulating in manuscript, printed — went side by side after 1856 the so-called "Indict- ment Literature," which in verse and prose exposed rooted evil usages and the patriarchal jog-trot, and indulged in rosy hopes on the theme how far progress had already gone, and how far the ripening process had advanced. Everything, to be sure, gave way before the great work of liberating the peasants, that peaceful revolution which, like every other in Russia, was inaugurated from above, and in spite of all secret and obstinate opposition carried through. He who should only judge of this struggle by the Press and literature of the day would certainly find himself disappointed. For after the good old evil custom, what kept all astir, made the young enthusiastic, and the nobility complain of undeserved lessening of its property, remained excluded from public life and relegated to secret committees and memoirs. Society and public opinion had for years, until the final deliverance, only this one interest ; but the Kolokol alone spoke openly concerning the " baptized chattels " of the masters, that blot and eyesore of Russian life " which forces us to own, red with shame and with downcast eyes, that we stand lower than any nation in Europe" — on the necessity for speedy action, so that the disappointed peasant might not himself have recourse to the axe. This threat of the axe was repeated again in i860 by his correspondents from Russia when an unreliable man (Panin) was chosen to preside over the committee. But at length Milutin's work was got under cover. The son had accomplished what the father (and some of his advisers, especially Count Kiselov) had regarded as indispensable without their having ventured on the great work. " Nunc dimittis ! " cried the Kiselovs, the elder Turgenev in his Paris exile, and the Liberals. Although some sacrifices might now be made to the embittered old Conservatives, such as removing Milutin, the work of 3i8 MODERN TIMES liberation itself was not to be undone ; but this, according to the idea of some, was only to be the beginning of a complete reconstruction of Russia, and here there was at once a diver- gence of opinion. For the impatient, Radical youth the "Indictment Literature," commonplace rhetoric following little aims with great means, could not suffice ; the malcontents rallied round the Contem- porary of Nekräsov, round Chernyshevsky and Dobrolübov, and later round the Russian Word and Pisarev. Here " Nihilism " took shape — a cause which owned no fixed revo- lutionary, political, or social programme, but exerted itself in a religious and philosophical sphere : atheists and materialists, the keenest critics and repudiators of the existing state of affairs, advocating the emancipation of the sexes, with re- publican leanings, but, above all, concerned with the culti- vation of their own personality, with the watchwords of the guild (artel), and the enlightening of the people as panaceas for all ills. The younger generation was on their side, leaving the seminaries and streaming to the University : free lectures brought together the most motley audiences of both sexes. Never since then has St. Petersburg displayed so much interest even in learned disputations. In Sunday Schools the young taught the people in the Radical spirit : in the assemblies of the nobility the call already rang out for a Constitution. To be sure dampers were soon put on this stormy movement. The Sunday Schools, reading-rooms, and chess clubs were closed, the Contemporary suspended, prominent Radicals imprisoned — Mikhailov, for whom they even ventured to put a petition in circulation, Chernyshevsky, and Pfsarev ; Dobrolübov was already dead. The liberty of the students was curtailed : Katkov could openly attack Herzen's u Utopias." The rejoinder was not wanting — disorders among the students, the St. Petersburg fires in May, 1862, proclama- tions by a Central Revolutionary Committee, which called for revenge and murder. The Polish insurrection made the situation worse. In face of the wavering of the Radicals, Katkov's summons of patriotism into the lists attained thoroughgoing success 5 after which Katkov, convinced that PlS ARE V AND KA TKÖ V. NE W RE A CTION 3 1 9 Nihilism and Herzenism were only methods of the Polish (!) propaganda to weaken the Throne, hunted down all internal traitors as worse than any enemies from without. Still the work of reform was pushed forward, still the Liberals went with the Government. But the flood of Progress ebbed visibly ; already voices were heard crying that the reforms were premature and went too far — University and Press were given up as the first scapegoats. With the year 1866 the real reaction began to set in again. Karakozov's alarming attempt gave the excuse for making it appear that religion, property, and law were threatened by the party of subversion. The Contemporary and the Russian Word were abolished : Dmitri Tolstoy, as Minister of Obscuration, did all honour to Shishköv and the other men of darkness of days gone by. Freedom of speech fled again to other countries, where, under the influence -of Bakunin, it quite occupied the ground of the International and anarchy. In Russia itself the enthusiasm for natural sciences, so characteristic of Nihilism (compare Pisarev), declined, while in return Socialism spread among the young men : the study of social science became similarly the hall-mark of an advanced journalist of the seventies and eighties, such as Mikhailovsky. Katkov placed himself at the head of reactionary journalism, with his Russian Messenger and the Moscow Gazette ; Nekrasov and Saltykov defended the more Radical theory against him in the Annals of the Fatherland (Otechestvennyia Zapiski) ; while the Messenger of Europe of Stäsyulevich and the literary historian Pypin and the Go los (Voice) of Kraevsky represented the moderate Liberal view. Tolstoy gagged the Universities further, and carried the classical system through in the Grammar Schools. Nothing, or what was of slight importance, was altered in it by his successor, the Armenian Delänov — his countrymen were proud of the fact that the stupidest Armenian was good enough to be Minister of Education to the Russians — and the generals. In consequence of this system all the higher educational establishments in Russia are idle : every bond between teachers and taught is long since severed, but the wardens and " inspectors " flourished, police terriers, 320 MODERN TIMES on the staffs of the universities. 1 As the young men that were in opposition were deprived of all possibility of any sort of activity, they gave their exclusive attention to foreign literature, German social democracy, and the watchwords of Bakunin, and endeavoured to mix with the people, to carry on a propaganda with manifestoes, which the people could not even read, let alone understand : such attempts often ended as Turgenev describes in " Virgin Soil." Soon, however, the crusade was extended to more receptive strata, to artisans and the intellectuals, and advanced formally from reprisals against the increasingly stern repression on the part of the Government to the crusade of action, assassinations and demonstrations, and terrorist organisations. The war of 1877 brought a quickening of political interest and life. The voluntary sacrifices in the cause of the oppressed brethren in the Balkans, indignation at the frantic Turkish atrocities, the eddying phases of the struggle, kept the people on the strain. The anger at the surrender of so much that had already been won only lessened the prestige of the Govern- ment : the Radical and Constitutional tide was again visibly in process of rising. Rash attempts at assassination hindered this movement, and it was totally shattered by the disastrous ist of March, 1881, the blackest day in Russian history : like December 14th, it threw all progress back for decades. Of the Constitution which was already granted there was now and for a long while to come no question. All the more increased the influence of the Grand Inquisitor Pobedo- nostsev and his accomplices. Suppressions, regulations of all kinds, administrative caprice, and the banishing of thousands formed the quintessence of the science of government of the White Terror. Saltykov's Annals of the Fatherland were suppressed, public opinion was silent, enslaved and colourless as never before. A fresh change on the throne brought no relief ; on the contrary, the twentieth century began with Plehve's system and his White Terror, which, mutatis mutandis, might remind one of the days of Paul and the close of Nicholas's reign. One instance which closely 1 Written in 1905 ; things are better now. — E. H. M. ALL PROGRESS CHECKED 321 concerns Literary History also may cast light on the raging of this official Terror. One of the most favourite writers of feuilletons was latterly the " Old Gentleman," Alexander Amphiteatrov. One fine morning he was suddenly arrested, and since then nothing has been heard of him. He lived, no doubt, at Minusinsk or some other equally delightful, rather less remote spot, where a man has the choice between suicide and alcoholic poisoning. And the reason ? Harmless feuilletons. The first especially was quite insignificant, the second and third, which the Rossla did not produce, were considered more caustic — an account of the death of old Obmänov (" Cheat ") and the " Accession and First Oratorical Performance with the Senseless Dream- ings" of the youthful Nika Obmänov, his marriage and so forth. This was an allegory transparent to clumsiness, but people had got accustomed to Russian " allegories " since Shchedrin and the " Story of Glupov." When Ryleev directly attacked Arakcheev, though, to be sure, without actually naming the name, in his Roman "allegory," and no one, from the man himself onward, was in doubt as to who the favourite was, Arakcheev, the most corrupt of mortals, remained silent over the terrible attack, as if it did not apply to him, and that was the wisest thing that he could do. So, too, " The Obmanovs " only attracted atten- tion when the senseless persecution of Amphiteatrov and his paper drew public attention to it ; but for this Asiatic barbarism a cock would scarcely have crowed over it, and he and his many writings — novels, short stories, and the like — would soon have been forgotten for ever : now he was immortal, and with him the system that went so gloriously far. " New Russia " thus ended exactly in the same way as the old one of Nicholas. Just as in 1855, again in 1905 a disaster from without brought about a new, and let us hope this time a more thorough, alteration of the " Time Table." We premise these stray remarks, which were only meant to recall to the foreign reader certain dates, in order to bring the nature of the journals and critics, their effect upon society and 22 322 MODERN TIMES their influence, into some relation with one another and with the period itself. It was the ungagging of the Press that first created a Press in Russia ; before that there were only colour- less sheets and gullible readers : attempts at a purpose, whether Westernising or Slavophile, were stifled by the Benkendorfs and Dubbelts. Belinsky was saved from Dubbelt's attentions by death and Herzen by flight, but in return the Contemporary had become quite colourless. It gained colour after 1855, and with it the new periodicals that appeared — the Russian Speech, Russian Messenger, Sec. This colour was given them less by their belles lettres than by their critical portion, which, indeed, was the outcome of the former but aimed at objects which had nothing to do with it — this is the strength and weak- ness of Russian criticism. Its strength in that the ostensibly "literary" or even "aesthetic" criticism became a moral and socio-political power : it delighted in making use of those literary productions which were suited to the spreading of its ideas and deliberately neglected others often far more impor- tant in a literary sense ; it relegated aesthetics to ladies' society, and turned its critical report into a sort of pulpit for moral and social preaching. This most " warlike " criticism, one-sided and purposeful, achieved a colossal effect among the young men, to whom the essays of a Chernyshevsky, Dobrolubov, and a Pisarev became revelations, the language of eloquent and fiery agitators, not critics. Therein also lay its weakness, prejudice, and perverseness. One must never let oneself be deceived by its judgments : it extolled or decried the author and his work, as Antonovich did Turgenev in the Contem- porary because of his Bazarov, not because of the value or no value of his performance, but for his opinions, his ideas — nay, for the journal in which he published his work. Thus this criticism is often, in spite of all its giftedness, its zeal and fire, only a mockery of all criticism. The work only serves as a peg on which to hang their own views. An example of this unliterary criticism of literary works, this purely journalistic sort, had been given already by Belinsky as far as the way he was gagged admitted of it. His successors no longer put restraint upon themselves. This is no reproach ; we simply «ETHICAL" CRITICISM & ITS OPPOSITE 323 state the fact and fully recognise the necessity and useful- ness of the method. With a backward society and its mental nonage, its childish dread of dogmas and authorities, this criticism was a means which was sanctified by the end — the spreading of modern and free opinions, the establishment of new ideals. Unhappily, Russian literary criticism has remained till to-day almost solely journalistic, i.e. y didactic and partisan. See how even now it treats the most interesting, exceptional, and mighty of all Russians, Dostoevsky, merely because he does not fit into the Radical mould ! how unjust it has been towards others ! how it has extolled to the clouds the representatives of its own camp ! True, there was also a literary and aesthetic criticism, but against the journalistic, the "real," it could not properly hold its own. The most important among the "aesthetics" were Druzhinin and Annenkov. The former, author of " Polinka Sachs," a pro- minent feuilletonist, died prematurely. He was especially noted also as founder of the society, still working, for the support of necessitous literary men and scholars. He took up the cudgels above all against the onesidedness of criticism, against its want of consideration, or total ignorance, e.g., of English literature, against the adherence to pattern of its judgment, its dense repetition instead of a due investigation of current and too hasty judgments, and its love for a moral. He greeted the new men of talent, the new poets, and extolled the energy of Literature and the soundness of its trend. More weighty was the word of Annenkov, the admirer of G6gol and Turgenev's friend, who is prominent in the annals of Literature by his editing of Pushkin's works and the materials for his biography, to whom we also owe a series of " literary " reminiscences of Gogol at Rome, of Pisemsky, and other writers of the forties. In his criticisms he dwelt on the neces- sary and natural connection (apart from any set purpose of the artist's) between works of art and thought and life, the distin- guishing marks of every genuine work of art, the onesidedness of utilitarianism, didacticism in light literature, and the preju- dices of BeKnsky ; yet it cannot be denied that he at times, in his outcry for the setting free of Art from the bondage of 324 MODERN TIMES ideas, was himself biassed, and placed the purely aesthetic principle too much in the foreground. Hence his aesthetic proclivity met with contradiction, especially from the talented, high-spirited — nay, passionate and ungoverned — Apollon Grigoriev, a thoroughly Russian figure. When he reached a certain step of development his pressing forward ceased : he contented himself with repetition, with plagiarising from himself; a reckless life, with the up and down of wildest excesses and most painful self-accusation, went together with the most ideal endeavour and moral sincerity. He is the founder of " organic " criticism in contrast to the purely aestheticising and to the " historical " or realistic. To him a work of art is the organic product of popular life and the historic moment ; hence emphasising of the national principle, hence enthusiasm for Gogol and the plays of Ostrovsky, in which he quite rightly recognised more than a mere satirical, condemnatory purpose. Owing to this dwelling on the co-ordination of Art and the national soil, even though Slavo- phile and fellow-worker of Pogodin on the Moskvityanin y he will not adopt the whole teaching, with its Byzantinism, its future world-wide part for Russia ; he contracts it, limits it to the Russian pochva — i.e., " soil " or foundation — and gives the impulse to the teaching of the pochvenniki Dostoevsky, Strakhov, and Danilevsky. The unboundedness of his admiration for Ostrovsky, the prolixity and dimness of his diction, the strangeness of his terminology, notably diminished the value of his considerable achievements to his contemporaries (he died in 1864). He was often not taken wholly in earnest, yet his influence on Dostoevsky was decisive. From him dates that opposition or division of men into the marauding and the gentle type which we constantly meet with in Dostoevsky : he followed up these types, not only in life and literature, but even among literary men, could never quite reconcile himself to protest or satire, which reminded him of the bird of prey type as opposed to the dove type, and in order to countenance his enthusiasm for Gogol leant on his longing for the ideal, for self-perfection, and, for all his laughter, the viewless tears which the shallow public did not GRIGÖRIE V. CHERN YSH& VSK Y 325 perceive. Above all, he demanded from Art sincerity, as being its very life. The same demand, though in a different sense, was made on Art by the realist critics, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolubov, and Pfsarev. The succession of these names is not merely a chronological one, it also denotes the rising scale of their talents : all these have in common their blameless, morally ideal life ; they are admirable as sheer characters, martyrs to their convictions, especially Chernyshevsky, upon whom the most terrible and unprincipled persecution fell. The Inter- national Literary Conference of 188 1 petitioned, once again in vain, the Russian Government for a mitigation of his fate, which was not granted till after twenty years' " Siberia," mines and fetters ; and Pisarev also wrote the greater part of his Essays in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. His crime was a mere offence against the Censorship, while Chernyshevsky's at least consisted in alleged relations with Herzen. Katkov triumphed, Russia was saved from the " Nihilist " hydra, but the reckoning for Chernyshevsky and Pisarev was paid in the attempts on the Tsar. If we talk of a rising scale of talent, we mean only literary, else Dobrolubov and Pfsarev could not bear comparison with Chernyshevsky, " the great scholar " (so Marx says). He himself, however, gave up his literary activity speedily and gladly when he found a suitable substitute in Dobrolubov. He felt attracted by journalistic and socialistic propaganda ; but this side of his activity — his combating of all metaphysics, his advocacy of materialism, of the importance of natural science, his criticism of Mill, his championship of the Russian village community — do not come within the scope of our inquiry. Questions of literary criticism were only dealt with in his thesis for his degree, " The ^Esthetic Relations of Art and Reality," and his first studies in the Contemporary on Gogol and the criticism of his contemporaries, Belinsky, Lessing, and on some points of current literature. Little as this is, it gives the keynote to the whole of journalistic criticism : Dobrolubov and Pisarev simply followed suit. After the rejection of all metaphysics Chernyshevsky decides 326 MODERN TIMES that the beautiful is life ; hence Art has only to subserve the illustrating of life, and can never replace or come up to reality. This restricting of the beautiful and subordination of Art was authoritative to his disciples. To the passionate, headlong controversialist who despised no means of confounding his opponent or taking him by surprise, the cool, sober, solid Dobrolübov was inferior in originality of conception, in solidity of historical attainment (Chernyshevsky translated Schlosser's " Universal History " and after his return from Siberia the great "Weber" as well), and in breadth of view, but was far his superior in clearness, logicalness, vividness of description, and aesthetic feeling (he himself had a poetic gift), and in wit and humour as well. Even his literary interests were primarily journalistic : pedagogical and philosophical literature— nay, even the political phenomena of foreign countries (Montalembert and Cavour) attracted him in reality more than poems, novels, and comedies, but his analyses of Goncharov's " Oblomov," Turgenev's " On the Eve," and Ostrovsky's comedies are among the most brilliant of his writings ; only they are not literary or aesthetic analyses in our sense. Let an example show what they are. Turgenev's charming short story, " Asya," afforded Cher- nyshevsky a pretext to accuse Russian society of a total want of will or higher interests. People act differently in other countries, but then they are other countries. The proper meaning and purpose of this brilliant criticism, however, lay somewhere else ; it was an allegory ; for just as the " Russian at the Rendezvous " (the title of the sketch) showed himself quite unworthy of the occasion, doffed the Romeo and the Max, and stood revealed a mere Zakhär Sidorich, who has no heed for anything but "preference " at a kopeck a point, so the nobility proves on the eve of the emancipation of the peasants, when the suit of many hundred years' standing was at length to be decided, that it was not equal to the occasion. In the same style, roughly, are the " Reviews " of Dobrolübov. The women in Oblomov, for instance, do not concern him at all, as he does not wish to be a judge of HIS STRICTURES. PfSAREV 327 women's hearts. In return he seeks out the Oblomov type all through literature, and shows that Chatsky, Onegin, Pechorin, and Rüdin are but Oblomovs in disguise. He gave it all out so clearly and convincingly that he made the young generation enthusiastic, for it recognised in this realism, this condemning of all idealism, the only security for successful development. Dobrolubov early worked himself to death ; he died in 1 86 1, at the age of twenty-four. His successor was not to be the one chosen out by Chernyshevsky, and coming, like them all, from clerical schools, Antonovich, who was not wanting in culture and zeal, but in literary talent, tact, and moderation — compare his scandalous controversy with the " younger men " of the Russian Speech — but precisely the antagonist of the Contemporary and chief pillar of the Russian Speech, Pisarev. In literary talent and aesthetic feeling the iconoclast of all aestheticism and thorn in the flesh of Pushkin excelled them all. In his brusquely partial way, he only followed out to its consequences Chernyshevsky's non-aesthetic theory. He tabooed poetry and light literature, advising Saltykov to give up art and write popular pamphlets — of course, scientific ones. He denied any profit from poetry, Pushkin and the rest. Even for that reason it is not worth while to press home here these gross exaggerations and paradoxes because Pisarev did not take them very seriously. He had allowed himself once to be led away into them in the heat of the conflict, and then went on because he meant his sledge-hammer blows not so much for poetry itself, as for the Conservatives, who made it a pre- text, and their reactionary epicureanism — indeed he had for real poetry more and higher appreciation than many of its confessed admirers. Also his critical essays had for their purpose making the way clear for the type of the "think- ing realist." He recognised his incarnation in Turgenev's " Bazarov " ; and whereas Antonovich in the Contemporary, and after him to this day the representatives of " Liberal " criticism, recognise in " Bazärov " a box on the ears dealt to the youth of the day, he got so enthusiastic over the 328 MODERN TIMES "Nihilists" of Turgenev's story that he wrote regular com- mentaries on the type and as if in the same sense. The reaction of 1866 strangled indeed both conflicting Radical organs, the Contemporary being already notoriously on the decline. In 1868 Pisarev died, aged twenty-seven — "Whom the gods love dies young." They preserved him from many a disillusionment. A similar influence to Belinsky, Dobrolubov, or Pisarev no Russian critic since them has attained. We can thus pass over the remainder briefly. The most important name in the Progressist camp was that of Mikhailovsky, who died in 1904 — for years the critic of the Annals of the Father- land^ up to its suppression, he reminds us so far of Cher- nyshevsky that he, too, is essentially a sociologist and critic of Spencer and Darwin, not a literary critic. His solid learning, the originality of his mind, his upholding of the subjective principle against the English, the blamelessness, earnestness, and zeal of his almost forty years' journalistic service, and his humanity enforce our respect. Whether his literary judg- ment, e.g., of Dostoevsky, was equally accurate and impartial, whether he did not rate too high phenomena of the " Nation- alist " persuasion who appealed to him, we can here leave out of the count. Other representatives of this school — Proto- popov, &c. — are far less prominent. Skabichevsky needs mentioning, not because of his most narrow-minded judg- ment, but because of his collecting of rich material, for his reliable and conscientious labour, as in his " History of the Most Recent Russian Literature," i.e., from 1848 onwards, a work which has attained to four editions, on the data of which I largely rely, and his " Sketches from the History of the Russian Censorship, 1 700-1 863." The Conservative and Slavophile camp has no sort of noteworthy critics to point to after Grigoriev ; the most important would be Strakhov, whom one must allow to have a fine literary sense. He, too, was not a literary critic, but a journalist. His article on the Polish Question, when denounced by Katköv, led to the suppression of Dostoevsky's Age, on which he was a collaborator. He is specially well known by his "Struggle MINOR CRITICS. STRÄKHOV 329 with the West in Russian Literature," in which was a detailed estimate of Herzen. As representative and con- tinuator of the Grigorievs' principles he was naturally the sworn opponent of Nihilism, of Antonovich, and the whole Contemporary writing under the pseudonym " Kositsa." His aesthetic views were shared by the St. Petersburg Professor of Literature, Orest Miller, a most attractive and kindly per- sonality, in whose case the partisan Liberal criticism has on its conscience the ostracism of a man who was himself to become a victim of the police. His lectures on recent Russian literature are a very meritorious performance. Rozanov and others are less characteristic. Strakhov's name is inseparably coupled with that of Dani- levsky, one of the former Petrashevtsy, whose book, which remained unnoticed at its first appearance in 1869, he pub- lished afresh, and attracted general attention to it. It is the last word of Slavophilism, "Russia and Europe." The fanciful notions of brotherhood and a mission no longer play a part. Emphasis is laid on the difference and aloofness of Russia from Europe, the unalterableness of the cultural types, which do not allow of being transferred from one people to another. Danilevsky asserted and defended this fixity of type even against Darwin. From this fixity results the necessity of being and remaining a Russian, of rejecting all foreign altera- tions in Russian dress and way of living, all foreign innova- tions, conceptions, and ideas. There was a sharp contro- versy between Danilevsky (or, rather, his editor, Strakhov) and Vladimir Soloviov (younger son of the well-known Moscow historian), whose scientific career was cut short for ever by one of those accidents peculiar to Russia and incomprehensible to the foreigner, as in the case of the well-known sociologist and ethnologist Kovalevsky. The moral philosopher and theo- logian Soloviov is one of the most interesting phenomena of modern Russia and its mental fermentation — a fearless, fiery proclaimer of the truth, without thought for himself, unselfish, serving only the idea, lastly a contrast to all. His great merit is in times of absolute positivism, nay, indifference to all theory and to metaphysics, to have drawn attention to the " eternal " 330 MODERN TIMES questions. This believing Christian — not indeed in the strictly- dogmatical sense — proclaimed a revising restoration of the ailing Church which, in his view, was only to be had at the price of the recognition of Rome by Moscow, a new union of the Church. Himself once a Slavophile, he combated most keenly the modern, narrow-minded Slavophilism. He distin- guished, indeed, the various grades of that doctrine, its " Fathers," Khomyak6v and Aksäkov, with their demand for freedom of thought and conscience, with their aversion from unfruitful cosmopolitanism, with their demand for that living intercourse with his own people which alone rescues a man from the killing isolation of egotistical vegetation. With these he had much in common ; all the more harshly did he turn on Nationalists of the type of Katkov, the brutal admirers of brute force, hammering at them alone, and against the youngest Slavophiles like Danilevsky, who would like to deify ethnographical peculiarities. True, he too had a high faith in Russia. In a poem — for he was poetically gifted also, and a collection passed through several editions — called " Ex Oriente Lux " he asks — " O Russia, in prevision lofty Thou art by a proud thought enticed : Which is the East at which thou aimest, The East of Xerxes or of Christ?" For Russia's existence he is naturally unconcerned ; he demands a worthy existence. The fault of the Slavophiles did not lie in their ascribing a great mission to Russia, only in their laying too little stress on the moral conditions of that mission. They might call the Russians more loudly a collective Messiah, only they should have borne in mind that a Messiah must act as such, not as a Barabbas. Hence the importance to his patriotism of the inquiry after Russia's sins, whereas in Slavophilism there cast its slough a zoological patriotism, which freed the nation from serving ideals, and made of it an object of worship. His enthusiastic and eloquent voice became silent early ; in 1900 the tired wanderer passed into that eternal rest which he had so often hailed. SOLOVIÖV. EARLY DEATH 331 "In morning mist, with unsure steps, I went Towards mysterious and wondrous shores. The dawn still battled with the last few stars, Dreams still were flying, and, possessed by dreams, My soul was praying unto unknown gods. In the cold light of day my lonely path, As erst, I tread towards an unknown land, The mist has cleared, and plainly sees the eye How hard the uphill road and still how far, How far away all that was in my dreams. And until midnight, with no timid steps, I shall go on towards the wished-for shores To where upon the hill beneath new stars, All flaming bright with fires of victory, There stands awaiting me my promised fane." It was not granted him to carry his great works of moral philosophy on a religious basis to an end. His high-flown plans — a commentary on the Scriptures, a translation of Plato — were abruptly nipped in the bud. There only appeared his " Justification of Good," his most important work, together with his " National Question in Russia " and the " Moral Principles of Life," with his cry for modesty towards oneself, which leads to asceticism ; for pity towards one's fellows, which becomes altruism, i.e., truth and justice ; for piety towards the supernatural element which is developed in religion. The defence of great moral principles in lofty poetic language with the glow of inner conviction, with brilliant dialectic and ample knowledge is his greatest merit, doubly great in a country whose own moral and philosophical literature, whose mental inertness, makes friends most easily with the latest and most vapid truth, and intoxicates itself with it (cf. the words of Vyazemsky above), as was the case with the positivism of the sixties and seventies and the Marxism of the nineties. Indeed, for a long time the latter seemed to be going to sweep away all nationalism and subjectivism for ever. To-day it has ebbed again. In spite of the Slav Charity Committee, of the publicist Komarov and the Slavist Laman- sky, the Slavophile movement seems finally buried, at least in 332 MODERN TIMES so far as it extended to the " Slav brothers." People have now far nearer and far more important tasks to perform. An isolated position in modern Russian Literature is occupied by Votynsky (Flekser), the critical idealist and enthusiastic champion of the cult of poetry, aesthetics, and philosophy. Thorough philosophical training of the mind is wanting to most Russian critics, hence their depreciation of abstract think- ing, of theoretic bases in the knowledge and estimating of the beautiful. The translator and commentator of Spinoza and Kant, the thorough judge of Hegel and Schopenhauer, who even to Chernyshevsky were in many cases merely names, subjected from his idealistic standpoint the history of Russian criticism to its keenest test since Belinsky, showed how even the latter, only superficially acquainted with Hegel's philosophy, was bound to be false to idealism, and forced literary criticism into false paths along which Chernyshevsky and others, with greater knowledge, but without his poetical temperament, followed him blindly. He proved the vaunting, the injustice, the misunderstandings, of this school, how it confused idealism with sentimentalism and fought against it. He made patent the monstrosities of Chernyshevsky's disser- tation and Pisarev's iconoclasm, the gaps in their knowledge, the superficiality of their argument, the ignoring or ridiculing to death of inconvenient opponents. His studies appeared in the Northern Messenger •, and were reprinted from it in 1896, under the title " Russian Critics." Because the critic has pre- served his independence, awakened the Liberal tradition out of its sleep, and ventured to tell it unpleasant truths, he has been regularly tabooed by the Press, and after the Northern Messenger was suppressed they made it impossible for him to get a hearing in a magazine, and he had to adopt book-form. In this he wrote his deeply perspicacious studies on the " Book of Wrath," /.■.'.■; ■■■■ : - ■-■■■■; -"^ .. : --.": ■UP ■ I ■_ ü sHHIHr mi .■'•■■.■■' V-