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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 No. 93 
 
 Editors: 
 
 HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
 Pror. GILBERT MURRAY, LitT.D., 
 LL.D., F.B.A. 
 
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THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
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 LITERATURE AND ART 
 Already Published 
 
 SHAKESPEARE ...... . . By JoHNn Maserierp 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE— 
 
 MODERINM Aimar ctr ten sillatiioltc nemisy Geret a MATE 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE— 
 
 MEDIEVAL. . “A eet ey Wes SER, 
 LANDMARKS IN FRENCH 
 
 LIT BRAT URED cscs tele en by Gil. STRACHEY 
 ARCHITECTURE, (3 0. % By W. R. Lereasy 
 
 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. . By L. PEArsatt SmitH 
 WRITING ENGLISH PROSE . . By W. T. Brewster 
 
 GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS . By W. P. Trent and Joun 
 ERSKINE 
 
 DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE By Joun Battery 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LIT- 
 RCA SE RAE ei imeiremiatitetie tee cikes . By G, K. CHEsTERTON 
 
 THE Re OF GER- 
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 See ee GODWIN, AND THEIR 
 
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 WILLIAM MORRIS: HIS WORK 
 AND MUNELUENCHE i. severe By A. C. Brock 
 
 THEGRENATSSAN CE ase) cmeweue By Epiru SicHer 
 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE . By J. M. Robertson 
 
 Future Issues 
 
 ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAIS- 
 SANCE . . By Rocer E. Fry 
 
 SCANDINAVIAN HISTORY AND 
 
 O08: Ole Od \0) OP Ole ec ee ene: 
 
 EITERATURE 2.75 es ee Byad aC aONOW. 
 HISTORY -AND LATER ATURE 
 
 OPMSBALNGH Wy tae ree . .. By J. Frrzmavrice-Ketty 
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 GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA . By C. T. Hacserc Wricut 
 MIERO NU etn.) Buds Wagt AF o Na thes Jeux BatLey 
 
AN OUTLINE OF 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 MAURICE BARING 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 “WITH THE RUSSIANS IN MANCHURIA,’’ “‘A YEAR IN RUSSIA,”’ 
 ““ THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE,’’ ETC. 
 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 LONDON 
 WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
 

 
PREFACE 
 
 Tue chief difficulty which Englishmen have 
 experienced in writing about Russia has, up 
 till quite lately, been the prevailing ignorance 
 of the English public with regard to all that 
 concerns Russian affairs. A singularly in- 
 telligent Russian, who is connected with the 
 Art Theatre at Moscow, said to me that he 
 feared the new interest taken by English 
 intellectuals with regard to Russian literature 
 and Russian art. He was delighted, of course, 
 that they should be interested in Russian 
 affairs, but he feared their interest was in 
 danger of being crystallized in a false shape 
 and directed into erroneous channels. 
 
 This ignorance will always remain until 
 English people go to Russia and learn to 
 know the Russian people at first hand. It 
 is not enough to be acquainted with a certain 
 number of Russian writers; I say a certain 
 
 number advisedly, because, although it is true 
 Vv 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 that such writers as Tolstoy and Turgenev 
 have long been naturalized in England, it is 
 equally true that some of the greatest and 
 most typical of Russian authors have not yet 
 been translated. 
 
 There is in England no complete trans- 
 lation of Pushkin. This is much the same 
 as though there were in Russia no complete 
 translation of Shakespeare or Milton. I do 
 not mean by this that Pushkin is as great a 
 poet as Shakespeare or Milton, but I do mean 
 that he is the most national and the most 
 important of all Russian writers. There is 
 no translation of Saltykov, the greatest of 
 Russian satirists; there is no complete trans- 
 lation of Leskov, one of her greatest novelists, 
 while Russian criticism and philosophy, as 
 well as almost the whole of Russian poetry, is 
 completely beyond the ken of England. The 
 knowledge of what Russian civilisation, with 
 its glorious fruit of literature, consists in, is still 
 a sealed book so far as England is concerned. 
 
 M. B. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 I THE ORIGINS : : : : : 9 
 II THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN : : sie oO) 
 
 III LERMONTOY . ‘ A : } Beal OL 
 IV THE AGE OF PROSE : 2 “ #126 
 Vv THE EPOCH OF REFORM : x welog 
 VI TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY . é EY 
 
 VII THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY, . 226 
 
 CONCLUSION : fs 4 4 . 243 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE , Been 
 INDEX ‘ * 5 - 5 . 254 
 

 
AN OUTLINE OF 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE ORIGINS 
 
 For the purposes of the average Russian, 
 and still more for the purposes of the foreigner, 
 Russian literature begins with the nineteenth 
 century, that is to say with the reign of 
 Alexander I. It was then that the literary 
 fruits on which Russia has since fed were 
 born. The seeds were sown, of course, 
 centuries earlier; but the history of Russian 
 literature up to the nineteenth century is not 
 a history of literature, it is the history of 
 Russia. It may well be objected that it is 
 difficult to separate Russian literature from 
 Russian history; that for the understanding 
 of Russian literature an understanding of 
 Russian history is indispensable. This is 
 
 probably true; but, in a sketch of this dimen- 
 9 
 
10 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 sion, it would be quite impossible to give even 
 an adequate outline of all the vicissitudes in 
 the life of the Russian people which have 
 helped and hindered, blighted and fostered 
 the growth of the Russian tree of letters. 
 All that one can do is to mention some of 
 the chief landmarks amongst the events which 
 directly affected the growth of Russian 
 literature until the dawn of that epoch when 
 its fruits became palpable to Russia and to 
 the world. 
 
 The first of these facts is the existence of 
 a Slav race on the banks of the Dnieper in 
 the seventh and eighth centuries, and the 
 growth of cities and trade centres such as 
 Kiev, Smolensk, and Novgorod, which seem 
 already to have been considerable settlements 
 when the earliest Russian records were 
 written. Of these, from the point of view 
 of literature, Kiev was the most important. 
 Kiev on the Dnieper was the mother of 
 Russian culture; Moscow and St. Petersburg 
 became afterwards the heirs of Kiev. 
 
 Another factor of vital historical import- 
 ance which had an indirect effect on the his- 
 tory of Russian literature was the coming of 
 the Norsemen into Russia at the beginning of 
 
THE ORIGINS 11 
 
 the ninth century. They came as armed mer- 
 chants from Scandinavia; they founded and 
 organized principalities; they took Novgorod 
 and Kiev. The Scandinavian Viking became 
 the Russian Kniaz, and the Varanger princi- 
 pality of Kiev became the kernel of the Russian 
 State. In the course of time, the Norsemen 
 became merged in the Slavs, but left traces 
 of their origin in the Sagas, the Byliny, which 
 spread from Kiev all over Russia, and still 
 survive in some distant governments. Hence 
 the Norse names Oleg (Helgi), Olga (Helga), 
 Igor (Ingvar). The word Russian, Rus, the 
 origin and etymology of which are shrouded 
 in obscurity, was first applied to the men-at- 
 arms who formed the higher class of society 
 in the early Varanger states. 
 
 The next determining factor in the early 
 history of Russian literature is the Church. 
 Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, married the sister 
 of the Emperor of Byzantium and was bap- 
 tized; henceforward Christianity began to 
 spread (987-8), but the momentous fact is 
 that it was the Christianity of the East. The 
 pearl of the Gospels, says Soloviev, was 
 covered over with the dust of Byzantium, 
 and Russia was committed to the Greek 
 
12 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tradition, the Greek rivalry with the West, 
 and was consequently excluded from the 
 civilization of the West and the great intel- 
 lectual community of which Rome was the 
 centre. This fact is of far-reaching and 
 momentous importance. No less important 
 was the introduction of the Slavonic liturgy, 
 which was invented by two Greek brothers 
 from Saloniki, in the ninth century, who 
 tried to force their Macedonian dialect on 
 all the Slavs, and succeeded in the case 
 of Bulgaria and Servia. A century or so 
 later it reached the Russian Slavs. Through 
 Bulgaria, the Russians acquired a ready- 
 made literature and a written language in a 
 dialect which was partly Bulgarian and 
 partly Macedonian, or rather Macedonian 
 with Bulgarian modifications. The posses- 
 sion of a written language acted as a lever 
 as far as culture was concerned. In the 
 eleventh century, Kiev was one of the most 
 enlightened cities in Europe. 
 
 The rulers of Kiev were at this time related 
 to the Kings of France, Hungary, Norway, 
 and even England. The Russian MSS. of the 
 eleventh century equal the best MSS. of 
 Western Europe of the same period. The 
 
THE ORIGINS 13 
 
 city of Kiev was a home of wealth, learning, 
 and art. Byzantine artists went to Kiev, 
 and Kiev sent Russian painters to the West. 
 There seemed at this time to be no barrier 
 between East and West. Nothing could be 
 more promising than such a beginning; but the 
 course of Russian history was not destined to 
 run smooth. In the middle of the eleventh 
 century, the foundations of a durable barrier 
 between Russia and Western Europe were 
 laid. This was brought about by the schism 
 of the Eastern and Western Churches. The 
 schism arose out of the immemorial rivalry 
 between the Greeks and the Latins, a rivalry 
 which ever since then has continued to exist 
 between Rome and Byzantium. The Slavs, 
 whom the matter did not concern, and who 
 were naturally tolerant, were the victims of 
 a racial hatred and a rivalry wholly alien 
 to them. It may seem unnecessary to dwell 
 upon what some may regard as an ancient 
 and trivial ecclesiastical dispute. But, in 
 its effects and in its results, this ‘‘ Querelle 
 de Moine,”’ as Leo X said when he heard of 
 Luther’s action, was as momentous for the 
 East as the Reformation was for the West. 
 Sir Charles Eliot says the schism of the 
 
14 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Churches ranks in importance with the 
 foundation of Constantinople and the Corona- 
 tion of Charlemagne as one of the turning 
 points in the relations of West and East. He 
 says that for the East it was of doleful import, 
 since it prevented the two great divisions 
 from combining against the common enemy, 
 the Turk. It was of still more doleful import 
 for Russia, for the schism erected a barrier, 
 which soon became formidable, between it 
 and the civilizing influences of Western 
 Kurope. 
 
 But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, 
 the existence of this growing barrier was not 
 yet perceptible. The eleventh and twelfth 
 centuries in Russia were an age of Sagas and 
 ‘“‘ Byliny,” already clearly stamped with the 
 democratic character and ideal that is at 
 the root of all Russian literature, and which © 
 offer so sharp a contrast to Greek and 
 Western ideals. In the Russian Sagas, the 
 most popular hero is the peasant’s son, who 
 is despised and rejected, but at the critical 
 moment displays superhuman strength and 
 saves his country from the enemy; and in 
 return for his services is allowed to drink his 
 fill for three years in a tavern. 
 
THE ORIGINS 15 
 
 But by far the most interesting remains of 
 the literature of Kiev which have reached 
 posterity are the Chronicle of Kiev, often 
 called the Chronicle of Nestor, finished at the 
 beginning of the twelfth century, and the Story 
 of the Raid of Prince Igor. The Chronicle of 
 Kiev, written in a cloister, rich in that epic 
 detail and democratic quality that charac- 
 terize the Sagas, is the basis of all later 
 chronicles dealing with the early history of 
 Russia. The Story of the Raid of Prince Igor, 
 which also belongs to the twelfth century, a 
 prose epic, is not only one of the most re- 
 markable memorials of the ancient written 
 language of Russia; but by virtue of its 
 originality, its historical truth, its vividness, 
 it holds a unique place in the literary history 
 of Europe, and offers an interesting contrast 
 to the Chanson de Roland. 
 
 The Story of the Raid of Igor tells of an 
 expedition made in the year 1185 against the 
 Polovtsy, a tribe of nomads, by Igor the son 
 of Sviatoslav, Prince of Novgorod, together 
 with other Princes. The story tells how the 
 Princes set out and raid the enemy’s country ; 
 how, successful at first, they are attacked by 
 overwhelming numbers and defeated; how 
 
16 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Igor is taken prisoner; and how in the end 
 he escapes and returns home. The story is 
 written in rhythmical prose, with passages 
 where the rhythm has a more strongly 
 accentuated quality as of unrhymed verse. 
 All the incidents recorded in the epic agree 
 in every respect with the narrative of the 
 same events which is to be found in the 
 Chronicle of Kiev. It is only the manner of 
 presenting them which is different. What 
 gives the epic a unique interest is that the 
 author must indubitably have belonged to 
 the militia of Sviatoslav, Grand Duke of 
 Kiev; and, if he was not an eye-witness of 
 the events he describes with such wealth of 
 detail, his knowledge was at any rate first- 
 hand and intimate. 
 
 But the epic is as remarkable for the quality 
 of its style as it is for the historical interest of . 
 its subject-matter. It plunges, after a short 
 introduction, in medias res, and the narrative 
 ss concentrated on the dramatic moments 
 which give rise to the expression of lyrical 
 feeling, pathos and description—such as the 
 battle, the defeat, the ominous dream of the 
 Grand Duke, and the lament of the wife of 
 Igor on the walls of Putivl— 
 
THE ORIGINS 17 
 
 “T will fly ’—she says— 
 ** Like the cuckoo down the Don; 
 I will wet my beaver sleeve 
 In the river Kayala; 
 I will wash the bleeding wounds of the Prince, 
 The wounds of his ee eg 
 
 a 0 Wind, little Na 
 
 Why, Sir, 
 
 Why do you blow so fiercely ? 
 
 Why, on your light wings 
 
 Do you blow the arrows of the robbers against 
 my husband’s warriors ? 
 
 ‘Is it not enough for you to blow high beneath 
 the clouds, 
 
 To rock the ships on the blue sea? 
 
 Why, Sir, have you scattered my joy on the 
 grassy plain? ” 
 
 Throughout the poem, Nature plays an 
 active part in the events. When Igor is 
 defeated, the grasses bend with pity and the 
 trees are bowed to the earth with grief. 
 When Igor escapes, he talks with the river 
 Don as le fords it, and when the bandits 
 follow him, the woodpeckers tell them the 
 way with their tapping. The poem, which 
 
 B 
 
18 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 contains much lamentation over the quarrels 
 of the Princes and the injury ensuing from 
 them to the Russian people, ends in the 
 major key. Igor is restored to his native 
 soil, he goes to Kiev to give thanks in the 
 Church, and the people acclaim the old 
 Princes and then the young Princes with 
 song. 
 
 A transcript of the poem, made probably 
 at the end of the fourteenth century, was 
 first discovered in 1795 by Count Musin- 
 Pushkin, and first published in 1800, when it 
 made the same kind of impression as the 
 publication of the Songs of Ossian. It was 
 not, however, open to Dr. Johnson’s objec- 
 tion—‘‘ Show me the originals ”’—for the 
 fourteenth century transcript of the original 
 then existed and was inspected and considered 
 unmistakably genuine by Karamzin and 
 others, but was unfortunately burnt in the 
 fire of Moscow.1 The poem has been trans- 
 lated into English, French and German, and 
 has given rise to a whole literature of com- 
 mentaries. “ 
 
 _ 7} Another copy of it was found in 1864 hmongst the 
 
 papers of Catherine I. Pushkin left a remarkable analysis 
 of the epic. 
 
THE ORIGINS 19 
 
 Up to the twelfth century, Russian life 
 was concentrated in the splendid and _pro- 
 sperous centre of Kiev; but in the thirteenth 
 century came a crushing blow which was 
 destined to set back the clock of Russian 
 culture for three hundred years, namely, the 
 Tartar invasion. Kiev was destroyed in 
 1240. After this, the South was abandoned; 
 Lithuania and Poland became entirely separ- 
 ated from the East; the Eastern principalities 
 centred round Moscow; the Metropolitan of 
 Kiev transferred his see to Moscow in 13828; 
 and by the fourteenth century Moscow had 
 taken the place of Kiev, and had become the 
 kernel of Russian life and culture. Russia 
 under the dominion of the Tartar yoke was 
 intellectually stagnant. The Church alone 
 retained its independence, and when Con- 
 stantinople fell, Moscow declared itself to be 
 the third and last Rome: but the inde- 
 pendence of the Church, although it kept 
 national feeling alive under the Tartar yoke, 
 made for stagnation rather than progress, 
 and the barrier between Russia and the 
 culture of the West was now solid and visible. 
 
 From the fourteenth century until the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian 
 
20 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 literature, instead of being a panorama of 
 various and equally splendid periods of 
 production, such as the Elizabethan epoch, 
 the Jacobean epoch, and the Georgian epoch, 
 or, as in France, the Renaissance, the Grand 
 Siécle, and the philosophic era of the eight- 
 eenth century, has nothing to show at all. 
 to the outward world; for during all this 
 time the soil from which it was to grow 
 was merely being prepared, and gradually, 
 with difficulty and delay, gaining access to 
 such influences as would make any growth 
 possible. All that is important, as far as 
 literature is concerned, in this period, are 
 those events and factors which had the effect 
 of making breaches in the wall which shut 
 Russia off from the rest of Europe; in letting 
 in that light which was necessary for any 
 literary plants to grow, and in removing those 
 obstacles which prevented Russia from enjoy- 
 ing her rightful heritage among the rest of her 
 sister European nations: a heritage which 
 she had well employed in earlier days, and 
 which she had lost for a time owing to the 
 barbarian invasion. 
 
 The first event which made a breach in the 
 wall was the marriage of Ivan III, Tsar of 
 
THE ORIGINS 21 
 
 Moscow, to Sophia Palzeologa, the niece of the 
 last of the Byzantine Emperors. She brought 
 with her Italian architects and other foreigners, 
 and the work of Peter the Great, of opening 
 a window in Russia on to Europe, was begun. 
 
 The first printing press was established in 
 Moscow during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, 
 and the first book was printed in 1564. But 
 literature was still under the direct control 
 of the Church, and the Church looked upon 
 all innovations and all foreign learning with 
 the deepest mistrust. At the beginning of 
 the seventeenth century, Peter the Great 
 had a strange forerunner in the shape of that 
 enigmatic historical personage, the false 
 Demetrius, who claimed to be the murdered 
 son of Ivan the Terrible, and who, in spite 
 of his western ideas, Polish manners, and 
 Latin culture, succeeded in occupying the 
 throne of Moscow for a year. His ideal was 
 one of progress; but he came too soon, and 
 paid for his prematurity with his life. 
 
 But it was from Kiev and Poland that the 
 fruitful winds of enlightenment were next to 
 blow. Kiev, re-risen from its ruins and re- 
 covered from its long slumber, became a 
 centre of learning, and possessed a college 
 
22 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 whose curriculum was modelled on the Jesuit 
 schools; and although Moscow looked upon 
 Kiev with mistrust, an imperative demand for 
 schools arose in Moscow. In the meantime a 
 religious question had arisen fraught with 
 consequences for Russia: namely that of the 
 revision of the Liturgical books, into the text 
 of which, after continuous copying and re- 
 copying, errors had crept. The demand for 
 revision met with great opposition, and ended 
 ultimately in producing a great schism in the 
 Russian Church, which has never been healed. 
 But, with the exception of the Little Russians, 
 there was no one at Moscow capable of pre- 
 paring texts for printing or of conducting 
 schools. The demand for schools and the 
 decision to revise the texts were simul- 
 taneous. The revision was carried out be- 
 tween 1653-7, and a migration of Kiev scholars 
 to Moscow came about at the same time. In 
 1665 Latin was taught in Moscow by SimEon 
 PoLotTsKy, who was the first Russian verse- 
 maker. It is impossible to call him a poet; 
 he wrote what was called syllabic verse: the 
 number of syllables taking the place of rhythm. 
 As a pioneer of culture, he deserves fame; but 
 in the interest of literature, it was a misfortune 
 
THE ORIGINS 28 
 
 that his tradition was followed until the 
 middle of the eighteenth century. 
 
 In the latter half of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, another influence besides that of Kiev 
 and Poland made itself felt. A fresh breach 
 in the wall came from another quarter. The 
 German suburb in Moscow in the seventeenth 
 century, called the Sloboda, became a centre 
 of European culture. Here dwelt the foreign 
 officers and soldiers, capitalists and artisans, 
 who brought with them the technical skill 
 and the culture of Western Europe. It was 
 here that the Russian stage was born. The 
 Protestant pastor of the Sloboda, Gregory, 
 was commanded to write a comedy by the 
 Tsar Alexis, in 1672, on the occasion of the 
 birth of the Tsarevitch. A theatre was built 
 in the village of Preobrazhenskoe (Transfigura- 
 tion), and a play on the subject of Esther and 
 Ahasuerus was produced there. It was here 
 also in 1674 that the ballet was introduced. 
 A regular company was formed; several 
 plays translated from the German were pro- 
 duced, and the first original play written in 
 Russia was The Prodigal Son, by Simeon 
 Polotsky. 
 
 Thus, at the end of the seventeenth century, 
 
24 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Russia was ready for any one who should 
 be able to give a decisive blow to the 
 now crumbling wall between herself and the 
 West. For, by the end of the seventeenth 
 century, Russia, after having been centralized 
 in Moscow by Ivan III, and enlarged by 
 Ivan IV, had thrown off the Tartar yoke. 
 She had passed through a period of intestine 
 strife, trouble, anarchy, and pretenders, not 
 unlike the Wars of the Roses; she had fought 
 Poland throughout the whole of the seven- 
 teenth century, from her darkest hour of 
 anarchy, when the Poles occupied Moscow. 
 It was then that Russia had arisen, expelled 
 the invaders, reasserted her nationality and 
 her independence, and finally emerged out 
 of all these vicissitudes, the great Slavonic 
 state; while Poland, Russia’s superior in 
 culture and civilization, had sunk into the 
 position of a dependency. 
 
 The man whom the epoch needed was forth- 
 coming. His name was Peter. He carried 
 on the work which had been begun, but in 
 quite an original manner, and gave it a 
 different character. He not only made a 
 breach in the wall, but he forced on his 
 stubborn and conservative subjects the habits 
 
THE ORIGINS 25 
 
 and customs of the West. He revolutionized 
 the government and the Church, and turned 
 the whole country upside down with his 
 explosive genius. He abolished the Russian 
 Patriarchate, and crushed the power of the 
 Church once and for all, by making it en- 
 tirely depend on the State, as it still does. 
 He simplified the Russian script and the 
 written language; he caused to be made 
 innumerable translations of foreign works on 
 history, geography, and jurisprudence. He 
 founded the first Russian newspaper. But 
 Peter the Great did not try to draw Russia 
 into an alien path; he urged his country with 
 whip, kick, and spur to regain its due place, 
 which it had lost by lagging behind, on the 
 path it was naturally following. Peter the 
 Great’s reforms, his manifold and _ super- 
 human activity, produced no immediate fruits 
 in literature. How could it? To blame him 
 for this would be like blaming a gardener for 
 not producing new roses at a time when he 
 was relaying the garden. He was completely 
 successful in opening a window on to Europe, 
 through which Western influence could stream 
 into Russia. This was not slow in coming 
 about; and the foreign influence from the end 
 
26 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of the reign of Peter the Great onwards divided 
 directly into’ two different currents: the 
 French and the German. The chief repre- 
 sentatives of the German influence in the 
 eighteenth century were TaTisHcHEv, the . 
 founder of Russian history, and MicHarL 
 Lomonosov. 
 
 Michael Lomonosov (1714-1765), a man 
 with an incredibly wide intellectual range, 
 was a mathematician, a chemist, an astro- 
 nomer, a political economist, a historian, an 
 electrician, a geologist, a grammarian and 
 a poet. The son of a peasant, after an 
 education acquired painfully in the greatest 
 privation, he studied at Marburg and Frei- 
 burg. He was the Peter the Great of the 
 Russian language; he scratched off the crust 
 of foreign barbarisms, and still more by his 
 example than his precepts—which were pe- 
 dantic—he displayed it in its native purity, 
 and left it as an instrument ready tuned for 
 a great player. He fought for knowledge, 
 and did all he could to further the founding 
 of the University of Moscow, which was done 
 in 1755 by the Empress Elizabeth. This last 
 event is one of the most important landmarks 
 in the history of Russian culture. 
 
THE ORIGINS 27 
 
 The foremost representative of French 
 influence was Prince KantTemir (1708-44), 
 who wrote the first Russian literary verse— 
 satires—in the pseudo-classic French manner, 
 modelled on Boileau. But by far the most 
 abundant source of French ideas in Russia 
 during the eighteenth century was Catherine 
 II, the German Princess. During Catherine’s 
 reign, French influence was predominant in 
 Russia. The Empress was the friend of 
 Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot. Diderot 
 came to St. Petersburg,’ and the Russian 
 military schools were flooded with French 
 teachers. Voltaire and Rousseau were the 
 fashion, and cultured society was platonically 
 enamoured of the Rights of Man. Catherine 
 herself, besides being a great ruler and diplo- 
 matist, was a large-minded philosopher, an 
 elegant and witty writer. But the French 
 Revolution had a damping effect on all liberal 
 enthusiasm, for the one thing an autocrat, 
 however enlightened, finds difficulty in under- 
 standing, is a revolution. 
 
 This change of point of view proved dis- 
 astrous for the writer of what is the most 
 thoughtful book of the age: namely Rapt- 
 SHCHEV, an official who wrote a book in twenty- 
 
28 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 five chapters called A Journey from St. 
 Petersburg to Moscow. Radishchev gave a. 
 simple and true account of the effects of serf- 
 dom, a series of pictures drawn without 
 exaggeration, showing the appalling evils of . 
 the system, and appealing to the conscience 
 of the slave-owners; the book contained 
 also a condemnation of the Censorship. It 
 appeared in 1790, with the permission of the 
 police. It was too late for the times; for in 
 1790 the events in France were making all 
 the rulers of Europe pensive. Radishchev was 
 accused of being a rebel, and was condemned 
 to death. The sentence was commuted to 
 one of banishment to Eastern Siberia. He was 
 pardoned by the Emperor Paul, and reinstated 
 by the Emperor Alexander; but he ultimately 
 committed suicide on being threatened in jest 
 with exile once more. Until 1905 it was very — 
 difficult to get a copy of this book. Thus 
 Radishchev stands out as the martyr of Rus- 
 sian literature; the first writer to suffer for 
 expressing opinions at the wrong moment : 
 opinions which had they been stated in this 
 case twenty years sooner would have coincided 
 with those published by the Empress herself. 
 
 Catherine’s reign, which left behind it many 
 
THE ORIGINS 29 
 
 splendid results, and had the effect of be- 
 stowing European culture on Russia, pro- 
 duced hardly a single poet or prose-writer 
 whose work can be read with pleasure to-day, 
 although a great importance was attached to 
 the writing of verse. There were poets in 
 profusion, especially writers of Odes, the best 
 known of whom was DERZHAVIN (1743-1816), 
 a brilliant master of the pseudo-classical, in 
 whose work, in spite of its antiquated con- 
 vention, elements of real poetical beauty are 
 to be found, which entitle him to be called the 
 first Russian poet. But so far no national 
 literature had been produced. French was 
 the language of the cultured classes. Litera- 
 ture had become an artificial plaything, to be 
 played with according to French rules; but 
 the Russian language was waiting there, a 
 language which possessed, as Lomonosov 
 said, ‘‘ the vivacity of French, the strength of 
 German, the softness of Italian, the richness 
 -and powerful conciseness of Greek and Latin ” 
 —waiting for some one who should have the 
 desire and the power to use it. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 
 
 Tue value of Russian literature, its peculiar 
 and unique message to the world, would not 
 be sensibly diminished, had everything it 
 produced from the twelfth to the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century perished, with.the 
 exception of The Raid of Prince Igor. With 
 the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
 and the accession of Alexander I, the New 
 Age began, and the real dawn of Russian 
 literature broke. It was soon to be followed 
 by a glorious sunrise. The literature which 
 sprang up now and later, was profoundly 
 affected by public events; and public events 
 during this epoch were intimately linked with 
 the events which were happening in Western 
 Kurope. It was the epoch of the Napoleonic 
 wars, and Russia played a vital part in that 
 drama. Public opinion, after enthusiasm had 
 
 been roused by the deeds of Suvorov, was 
 30 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN © 31 
 
 exasperated and humiliated by Napoleon’s 
 subsequent victories over Russian arms. But 
 when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, a 
 wave of patriotism swept over the country, 
 and the struggle resulted in an increased sense 
 of unity and nationality. Russia emerged 
 stronger and more solid from the struggle. 
 As far as foreign affairs were concerned, 
 the Emperor Alexander I—on whom every- 
 thing depended—played his national part 
 well, and he fitly embodied the patriotic 
 movement of the day. At the beginning of 
 his reign he raised great hopes of internal 
 reform which were never fulfilled. He was 
 a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time; 
 a pupil of La Harpe, the Swiss Jacobin, who 
 instilled into him aspirations towards liberty, 
 truth and humanity, which throughout re- 
 mained his ideals, but which were too vague 
 to lead to anything practical or definite. His 
 reign was thus a series of more or less 
 undefined and fitful struggles to put the 
 crooked straight. He desired to give Russia 
 a constitution, but the attempts he made to 
 do so proved fruitless; and towards the end 
 of his life he is said to have been considerably 
 influenced by Metternich. It is at any rate 
 
32 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 _a fact that during these years reaction once 
 more triumphed. 
 
 Nevertheless windows had been opened 
 which could not be shut, and the light which 
 had streamed in produced some remarkable 
 fruits. 
 
 When Alexander I came to the throne, the 
 immediate effect of his accession was the un- 
 gageing of literature, and the first writer of 
 importance to take advantage of this new 
 state of things was KaRramzin (1726-1826). 
 In 1802 he started a new review called the 
 Messenger of Europe. This was not his début. 
 In the reign of Catherine, Karamzin had been 
 brought to Moscow from the provinces, and 
 initiated into German and English literature. 
 In 1789-90 he travelled abroad and visited 
 Switzerland, London and Paris. On _ his 
 return, he published his impressions in the | 
 shape of ‘“‘ Letters of a Russian Traveller ” 
 in the Moscow Journal, which he founded 
 himself. His ideals were republican; he was 
 an enthusiastic admirer of England and 
 the Swiss, and the reforms of Peter the 
 Great. But his importance in Russian 
 literature lies in his being the first Russian 
 to write unstudied, simple and natural prose, 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 33 
 
 Russian as spoken. He published two senti- 
 mental stories in his Journal, but the reign 
 of Catherine II which now came to an 
 end (1796) was followed by a period of un- 
 mitigated censorship, which lasted through- 
 out the reign of the Emperor Paul, until 
 Alexander I came to the throne. The new 
 review which Karamzin then started differed 
 radically from all preceding Russian reviews 
 in that it dealt with politics and made belles 
 lettres and criticism a permanent feature. 
 As soon as Karamzin had put this review on 
 a firm basis, he devoted himself to historical 
 research, and the fruit of his work in this 
 field was his History of the Russian Dominion, 
 in twelve volumes; eight published in 1816, 
 the rest in 1821-1826. The Russian language 
 was, as has been said, like an instrument wait- 
 ing for a great player to play on it, and to make 
 use of all its possibilities. Karamzin accom- 
 plished this, in the domain of prose. He 
 spoke to the Russian heart by speaking 
 Russian, pure and unmarred by stilted and 
 alien conventionalisms. 
 
 The publication of Karamzin’s history was 
 epoch-making. In the first place, the success 
 
 of the work was overwhelming. It was the 
 c 
 
34 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 first time in Russian history that a prose work 
 had enjoyed so immense a success. Not only 
 were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian 
 language revealed to the Russians in the style, 
 but the subject-matter came as a surprise. 
 Karamzin, as Pushkin put it, revealed Russia 
 to the Russians, just as Columbus discovered 
 America. He made the dry bones of history 
 live, he wrote a great and glowing prose epic. 
 His influence on his contemporaries was 
 enormous. His work received at once the 
 consecration of a classic, and it inspired 
 Pushkin with his most important if not his 
 finest achievement in dramatic verse (Boris 
 Godunov). 
 
 The first Russian poet of national import- 
 ance belongs likewise to this epoch, namely 
 Krytov (17691-1844), although he had 
 written a great deal for the stage in the pre- . 
 ceding reigns, and continued to write for a 
 long time after the death of Alexander I. 
 Krylov is also a Russian classic, of quite a 
 different kind. The son of an officer of the 
 line, he started by being a clerk in the pro- 
 vincial magistrature. Many of his plays 
 
 1 Not 17638, as generally stated in his biographies. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 35 
 
 were produced with success, though none of 
 them had any durable qualities. But it was 
 not until 1805 that he found his vocation, 
 which was to write fables. The first of these 
 were published in 1806 in the Moscow 
 Journal; from that time onward he went on 
 writing fables until he died in 1844. 
 
 His early fables were translations from La 
 Fontaine. They imitate La Fontaine’s free 
 versification and they are written in iambics 
 of varying length. They were at once success- 
 ful, and he continued to translate fables from 
 the French, or to adapt from A%sop or other 
 sources. But as time went on, he began to 
 invent fables of his own; and out of the two 
 hundred fables which he left at his death, 
 forty only are inspired by La Fontaine and 
 seven suggested by Alsop: the remainder 
 are original. Krylov’s translations of La 
 Fontaine are not so much translations as 
 re-creations. He takes the same subject, and 
 although often following the original in every 
 single incident, he thinks out each motif 
 for himself and re-creates it, so that his trans- 
 lations have the same personal stamp and 
 the same originality as his own inventions. 
 
 This is true even when the original is a 
 
36 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 masterpiece of the highest order, such as La 
 Fontaine’s Deux Pigeons. You would think 
 the opening lines— 
 
 ** Deux pigeons s’amoient d’amour tendre, 
 L’un d’eux s’ennuyant au logis 
 Fut assez fou pour entreprendre 
 Un voyage en lointain pays ’’— 
 
 were untranslatable; that nothing could be 
 subtracted from them, and that still less 
 could anything be added; one ray the more, 
 one shade the less, you would think, would 
 certainly impair their nameless grace. But 
 what does Krylov do? He re-creates the 
 situation, expanding La Fontaine’s first line 
 into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps 
 on it the impress of his personality and his 
 nationality. Here is a literal translation of 
 the Russian, inrhyme. (Iam not ambitiously — 
 trying a third English version.) 
 
 ““Two pigeons lived like sons born of one 
 mother. 
 Neither would eat nor drink without the 
 other ; 
 Where you see one, the other’s surely near, 
 And every joy they halved and every tear; 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 37 
 
 They never noticed how the time flew by, 
 They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh.” 
 
 This gives the sense of Krylov’s poem word 
 for word, except for what is the most import- 
 ant touch of all in the last line. The trouble 
 is that Krylov has written six lines which 
 are as untranslatable as La Fontaine’s four; 
 and he has made them as profoundly Russian 
 as La Fontaine’s are French. Nothing could 
 be more Russian than the last line, which it 
 is impossible to translate; because it should 
 run— 
 
 “They were sometimes sad, but they never 
 
 felt ennui ”— 
 
 literally, “it was never boring to them.” 
 The difficulty is that the word for boring in 
 Russian, skuchno, which occurs with the 
 utmost felicity in contradistinction to sad, 
 grustno, cannot be rendered in English in its 
 poetical simplicity. There are no six lines 
 more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly 
 poetical in the whole of Russian literature. 
 Krylov’s fables, like La Fontaine’s, deal with 
 animals, birds, fishes and men; the Russian 
 peasant plays a large part in them; often 
 they are satirical; nearly always they are 
 
38 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 bubbling with humour. A writer of fables 
 is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is 
 sometimes to convey pregnant sense, keen 
 mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled 
 manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human 
 foibles, or to express wisdom ‘in the form of 
 wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. 
 But Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in 
 remaining a poet. It has been said that his 
 images are conventional and outworn—that 
 is to say, he uses the machinery of Zephyrs, 
 Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,—and that 
 his conceptions are antiquated. But what 
 splendid use he makes of this machinery! 
 When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is 
 a Zephyr blowing, for instance, as when 
 the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze. 
 Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse 
 he conveys a picture, and more than a - 
 picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and 
 the Mole, in the first lines of which he 
 makes you see and hear the eagle and his 
 mate sweeping to the dreaming wood, and 
 swooping down on to the oak-tree. Or again, 
 in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, 
 he gives in a few words the sense of 
 height and space, as if you were looking down 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 39 
 
 from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over 
 the mountains of the Caucasus, sees the end 
 of the earth, the rivers meandering in the 
 plains, the woods, the meadows in all their 
 spring glory, and the angry Caspian Sea, 
 darkling like the wing of a raven in the 
 distance. But his greatest triumph, in this 
 respect, is the fable of the Ass and the Nightin- 
 gale, in which the verse echoes the very trills 
 of the nightingale, and renders the stillness and 
 the delighted awe of the listeners,—the lovers 
 and the shepherd. Again a convention, if 
 you like, but what a felicitous convention ! 
 The fables are discursive like La Fontaine’s, 
 and not brief like Ausop’s; but like La Fon- 
 taine, Krylov has the gift of summing up a 
 situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect 
 by the sudden evocation of a whole picture in 
 a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable of 
 the Peasants and the River: the peasants go 
 to complain to the river of the conduct of the 
 streams which are continually overflowing 
 and destroying their goods, but when they 
 reach the river, they see half their goods 
 floating on it. ‘‘ They looked at each other, 
 and shaking their heads,” says Krylov, 
 ** went home.”? The two words “ went home ” 
 
40 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 in Russian (poshli domoi) express their hope- 
 lessness more than pages of rhetoric. This is 
 just one of those terse effects such as La 
 Fontaine delights in. 
 Krylov in his youth lived much among the 
 poor, and his language is peculiarly native, 
 racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the 
 language of the people and of the peasants, 
 and it abounds in humorous turns. He is, 
 moreover, always dramatic, and his fables 
 are for this reason most effective when read 
 aloud or recited. He is dramatic not only 
 in that part of the fable which is narrative, 
 but in the prologue, epilogue, or moral—- 
 the author’s commentary; he adapts himself 
 to the tone of every separate fable, and be- 
 comes himself one of the dramatis persone. 
 Sometimes. his fables deal with political 
 events—the French Revolution, Napoleon’s » 
 invasion of Russia, the Congress of Vienna; 
 the education of Alexander I by La Harpe, 
 in the well-known fable of the Lion who sends 
 his son to be educated by the Eagle, of whom 
 he consequently learns how to make nests. 
 Sometimes they deal with internal evils and 
 abuses: the administration of justice, in fables 
 such as that of the peasant who brings a 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 41 
 
 case against the sheep and is found guilty 
 by the fox; the censorship is aimed at in 
 the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing 
 in the cat’s claws; the futility of bureau- 
 cratic regulations in the fable of the sheep 
 who are devoured by their superfluous watch- 
 dogs, or in that of the sheep who are told 
 solemnly and pompously to drag any offending 
 wolf before the nearest magistrate ; or, again, 
 in that of the high dignitary who is admitted 
 immediately into paradise because on earth 
 he left his work to be done by his secretaries— 
 for being obviously a fool, had he done his 
 work himself, the result would have been 
 disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they 
 deal merely with human follies and affairs, 
 and the idiosyncrasies of men. 
 
 Krylov’s fables have that special quality 
 which only permanent classics possess of 
 appealing to different generations, to people 
 of every age, kind and class, for different 
 reasons; so that children can read them 
 simply for the story, and grown-up people for 
 their philosophy; their style pleases the 
 unlettered by its simplicity, and is the envy 
 and despair of the artist in its supreme 
 art. Pushkin calls him “le plus national et 
 
42 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 le plus populaire de nos poétes”’ (this was 
 true in Pushkin’s day), and said his fables 
 were read by men of letters, merchants, 
 men: of the world, servants and children. 
 His work bears the stamp of ageless modernity 
 just as The Pilgrim’s Progress or Cicero’s 
 letters seem modern. It also has the pecu- 
 liarly Russian quality of unexaggerated real- 
 ism. He sees life as it is, and writes down 
 what he sees. It is true that although his 
 style is finished and polished, he only at 
 times reaches the high-water mark of what 
 can be done with the Russian language: his 
 style, always idiomatic, pregnant and natural, 
 is sometimes heavy, and even clumsy; but 
 then he never sets out to be anything more 
 than a fabulist. In this he is supremely 
 successful, and since at the same time he 
 gives us snatches of exquisite poetry, the 
 greater the praise to him. But, when all is 
 said and done, Krylov has the talisman which 
 defies criticism, baffles analysis, and defeats 
 time: namely, charm. His fables achieved 
 an instantaneous popularity, which has never 
 diminished until to-day. 
 
 Internal political events proved the next 
 factor in Russian literature; a factor out of 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 43 
 
 which the so-called romantic movement was 
 to grow. 
 
 During the Napoleonic wars a great many 
 Russian officers had lived abroad. They came 
 back to Russia after the Congress of Vienna 
 - in 1815, teeming with new ideas and new 
 ideals. They took life seriously, and were 
 called by Pushkin the Puritans of the North. 
 Their aim was culture and the public welfare. 
 They were not revolutionaries; on the con- 
 trary, they were anxious to co-operate with 
 the Government. They formed for their pur- 
 pose a society, in imitation of the German 
 Tugendbund, called The Society of Welfare: 
 its aims were philanthropic, educational, and 
 economic. It consisted chiefly of officers of 
 the Guard, and its headquarters were at St. 
 Petersburg. All this was known and approved 
 of by the Emperor. But when the Govern- 
 ment became reactionary, this peaceful pro- 
 gressive movement changed its character. The 
 Society of Welfare was closed in 1821, and its 
 place was taken by two new societies, which, 
 instead of being political, were social and revo- 
 lutionary. The success of the revolutionary 
 movements in Spain and in Italy encouraged 
 these societies to follow their example. 
 
44. RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 The death of Alexander I in 1825 forced 
 them to immediate action. The shape it took 
 was the “‘ Decembrist ” rising. Constantine, 
 the Emperor’s brother, renounced his claim to 
 the throne, and was succeeded by his brother 
 Nicholas. December 14 (O.S.) was fixed 
 for the day on which the Emperor should 
 receive the oath of allegiance of his troops. 
 An organized insurrection took place, which 
 was confined to certain regiments. The — 
 Emperor was supported by the majority of 
 the Guards regiments, and the people showed 
 no signs of supporting the rising, which was at 
 once suppressed. 
 
 One hundred and twenty-five of the con- 
 spirators were condemned. Five of them 
 were hanged, and among them the poet 
 RYLEEV (1795-1826). But although the 
 political. results of the movement were nil,. 
 the effect of the movement on literature was 
 far-reaching. Philosophy took the place otf 
 politics, and liberalism was diverted into 
 the channel of romanticism; but out of this 
 romantic movement came the spring-tide of 
 Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the 
 soul of the Russian people found adequate 
 expression. And the very fact that polities 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 45 
 
 were excluded from the movement proved, in 
 one: sense, a boon to literature: for it gave 
 Russian men of genius the chance to be writers, 
 artists and poets, and prevented them from 
 exhausting their whole energy in being in- 
 efficient politicians or unsuccessful revolu- 
 tionaries. I will dwell on the drawbacks, on 
 the dark side of the medal, presently. 
 
 As far as the actual Decembrist movement 
 is concerned, its concrete and direct legacy 
 to literature consists in the work of Ryleev, 
 and its indirect legacy in the most famous 
 comedy of the Russian stage, Gore otf Uma, 
 “The Misfortune of being Clever,” by 
 GRIBOYEDOV (1795-1829). 
 
 Ryleev’s life’ was cut short before his 
 poetical powers had come to maturity. It is 
 idle to speculate what he might have achieved 
 had he lived longer. The work which he 
 left is notable for its pessimism, but still 
 suffers from the old rhetorical conventions 
 of the eighteenth century and the imitation 
 of French models; moreover he looked on 
 literature as a matter of secondary import- 
 ance. ‘I am not a poet,” he said, “I am 
 a citizen.” In spite of this, every now and 
 then there are flashes of intense poetical 
 
46 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 inspiration in his work; and he struck one 
 or two powerful chords—for instance, in his 
 stanzas on the vision of enslaved Russia, 
 which have a tense strength and fire that 
 remind one of Emily Bronté. He was a poet 
 as well as a citizen, but even had he lived to 
 a prosperous old age and achieved artistic 
 perfection in his work, he could never have 
 won a brighter aureole than that which his 
 death gained him. The poems of his last 
 days in prison breathe a spirit of religious 
 humility, and he died forgiving and praying 
 for his enemies. His name shines in Russian 
 history and Russian literature, as that of a 
 martyr to a high ideal. 
 
 Griboyedov, the author of Gore ot Uma, a 
 writer of a very different order, although not 
 a Decembrist himself, is a product of that 
 period. His comedy still remains the un- 
 surpassed masterpiece of Russian comedy, 
 and can be compared with Beaumarchais’ 
 Figaro and Sheridan’s School for Scandal. 
 
 Griboyedov was a Foreign Office official, 
 and he was murdered when Minister Pleni- 
 potentiary at Teheran, on January 380, 1829. 
 He conceived the plot of his play in 1816, 
 and read aloud some scenes in St. Petersburg 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN A7 
 
 in 1828-24. They caused a sensation in 
 literary circles, and the play began to circulate 
 rapidly in MSS. Two fragments of the drama 
 were published in one of the almanacs, which 
 then took the place of literary reviews. But 
 beyond this, Griboyedov could neither get 
 his play printed nor acted. Thousands of 
 copies circulated in MSS., but the play was 
 not produced on the stage until 1831, and 
 then much mutilated; and it was not printed 
 until 1833. 
 
 Gore ot Uma is written in verse, in iambics 
 of varying length, like Krylov’s fables. The 
 unities are preserved. The action takes place 
 in one day and in the same house—that of 
 Famusoy, an elderly gentleman of the Moscow 
 upper class holding a Government appoint- 
 ment. He is a widower and has one daughter, 
 Sophia, whose sensibility is greater than her 
 sense; and the play opens on a scene where 
 the father discovers her talking to his secretary, 
 Molchalin, and says he will stand no nonsense. 
 Presently, the friend of Sophia’s childhood, 
 Chatsky, arrives after a three years’ absence 
 abroad; Chatsky is a young man of inde- 
 pendent ideas whose misfortune it is to be 
 clever. He notices that Sophia receives him 
 
48 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 coldly, and later on he perceives that she is 
 in love with Molchalin,—a wonderfully drawn 
 type, the perfect climber, time-server and 
 place-seeker, and the incarnation of con- 
 vention,—who does not care a rap for Sophia. 
 Chatsky declaims to Famusov his contempt 
 for modern Moscow, for the slavish. worship 
 by society of all that is foreign, for its 
 idolatry of fashion and official rank, its 
 hollowness and its convention. Famusov, the 
 incarnation of respectable conventionality,does 
 not understand one word of what he is saying. 
 At an evening party given at Famusov’s 
 house, Chatsky is determined to find out whom 
 Sophia loves. He decides it is Molchalin, and 
 lets fall a few biting sarcasms about him to 
 Sophia; and Sophia, to pay him back for his 
 sarcasm, lets it be understood by one of the 
 guests that he is mad. The half-spoken hint 
 spreads like lightning; and the spreading of 
 the news is depicted in a series of inimitable 
 scenes. Chatsky enters while the subject 
 is being discussed, and delivers a long tirade 
 on the folly of Moscow society, which only 
 confirms the suspicions of the guests; and he 
 finds when he gets to the end of his speech 
 that he is speaking to an empty room. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 49 
 
 In the fourth act we see the guests leaving 
 the house after the party. Chatsky is waiting 
 for his carriage. Sophia appears on the stair- 
 case and calls Molchalin. Chatsky, hearing 
 _ her voice, hides behind a pillar. Liza, Sophia’s 
 maid, comes to fetch Molchalin, and knocks at 
 hisdoor. Molchalin comes out, and not know- 
 ing that Sophia or Chatsky are within hearing, 
 makes love to Liza and tells her that he only 
 loves Sophia out of duty. Then Sophia ap- 
 pears, having heard everything. Molchalin 
 falls on his knees to her: she is quite inexor- 
 able. Chatsky comes forward and begins to 
 speak his mind—when all is interrupted by the 
 arrival of Famusov, who speaks his. Chatsky 
 shakes the dust of the house and of Moscow 
 off his feet, and Sophia is left without Chatsky 
 and without Molchalin. 
 
 The Gore ot Uma is a masterpiece of satire 
 rather than a masterpiece of dramatic comedy. 
 That is to say that, as a satire of the Moscow 
 society of the day and of the society of 
 yesterday, and of to-morrow, it is immortal, 
 and forms a complete work : but as a comedy 
 it does not. Almost every scene separately 
 is perfect in itself, but dramatically it does 
 
 not group itself round one central idea or 
 D 
 
50 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 one mainspring of action. Judged from the 
 point of view of dramatic propriety, the 
 behaviour of the hero is wildly improbable 
 throughout; there is no reason for the spec- 
 tator to think he should be in love with Sophia; 
 if he is, there is no reason for him to behave 
 as he does; if a man behaved like that, de- 
 claiming at an evening party long speeches on 
 the decay of the times, the most frivolous of 
 societies would be justified in thinking him 
 mad. 
 
 Pushkin hit on the weak point of the play 
 as a play when he wrote: “In The Mis- 
 fortune of being Clever the question arises, 
 Who is clever? and the answer is Griboyedov. 
 Chatsky is an honourable young man who 
 has lived for a long time with a clever man 
 (that is to say with Griboyedov), and learnt 
 his clever sarcasms; but to whom does he 
 say them? To Famusov, to the old ladies 
 at the party. This is unforgivable, because 
 the first sign of a clever man is to know at 
 once whom he is dealing with.”’ 
 
 But what makes the work a masterpiece 
 is the naturalness of the characters, the 
 dialogue, the comedy of the scenes which 
 represent Moscow society. It is extra- 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 51 
 
 ordinary that on so small a scale, in four short 
 acts, Griboyedov should have succeeded in 
 giving so complete a picture of Moscow 
 society, and should have given the dialogue, 
 in spite of its being in verse, the stamp of 
 _ conversational familiarity. The portraits are 
 all full-length portraits, and when the play 
 is produced now, the rendering of each part 
 raises as much discussion in Russia as a 
 revival of one of Sheridan’s comedies in 
 England. 
 
 As for the style, nearly three-quarters of 
 the play has passed into the Russian language. 
 It is forcible, concise, bitingly sarcastic, it is 
 as neat and dry as W. S. Gilbert, as elegant 
 as La Fontaine, as clear as an icicle, and as 
 clean as the thrust of a sword. But perhaps 
 the crowning merit of this immortal satire is 
 its originality. It is a product of Russian 
 life and Russian genius, and as yet it is with- 
 out a rival. 
 
 Outside the current of politics and political 
 aspirations, there appeared during this same 
 epoch a poet who exercised a considerable 
 influence over Russian literature, and who 
 devoted himself exclusively to poetry. This 
 was Basin ZuHuKovsky (1783-1852). He 
 
52 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 opened the door of Russian literature on the 
 fields of German and English poetry. The 
 first poem he published in 1802 was a transla- 
 tion of Gray’s Elegy; this, and an imitation 
 of Biirger’s Leonore, which affected all Slav 
 literatures, brought him fame. Later, he 
 translated Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, his 
 ballads, some of the lyrics of Uhland, Gocthe, 
 Hebbel, and a great quantity of other foreign 
 poems. His translations were faithful, but 
 in spite of this he gave them the stamp of 
 his own dreamy personality. He was made 
 tutor to the Tsarevitch Alexander—afterwards 
 Alexander II,—and for a time his production 
 ceased; but when this task was finished, he 
 braced himself in his old age to translate The 
 Odyssey, and this translation appeared in 
 1848-50. In this work he obeyed the first 
 great law of translation, ‘Thou shalt not 
 turn a good poem into a bad one.” He pro- 
 duced a beautiful work; but he also did what 
 all other translators of Homer have done; 
 he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky, 
 and with it something sentimental, elegiac, 
 and didactic. 
 
 Zhukovsky’s greatest service to Russian 
 literature consisted in his exploding the 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 53 
 
 superstition that the literature of France was 
 the only literature that counted, and intro- 
 ducing literary Russia to the poets of England 
 and Germany rather than of France. But 
 apart from this, he is the first and best 
 translator in European literature, for what 
 Krylov did with some of La Fontaine’s fables, 
 he did for all the literature he touched—he 
 re-created it in Russian, and made it his own. 
 In his translation of Gray’s Elegy, for instance, 
 he not only translates the poet’s meaning 
 into musical verse, but he conveys the 
 intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape, 
 and the poignant accent which makes that 
 poem the natural language of grief. It is 
 characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years 
 after he translated the poem, he visited Stoke 
 Poges, re-read Gray’s Elegy there, and made 
 another translation, which is still more 
 faithful than the first. 
 
 The Russian language was by this time 
 purified from all outward excrescences, re- 
 leased from the bondage of convention and 
 the pseudo-classical, open to all outside in- 
 fluences, and only waiting, like a ready-tuned 
 instrument, on which Krylov and Zhukovsky 
 had already sounded sweet notes and deep 
 
54 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tones, and which Karamzin had proved to be 
 a magnificent vehicle for musical and per- 
 spicuous prose, for a poet of genius to come 
 and sound it from its lowest note to the top 
 of its compass, for there was indeed much 
 music and excellent voice to be plucked from 
 it. At the appointed hour the man came. 
 It was Pusuxin. He arrived at a time when 
 a battle of words was raging between the so- 
 called classical and romantic schools. The 
 pseudo-classical, with all its mythological 
 machinery and conventional apparatus, was 
 totally alien to Russia, and a direct and slavish 
 imitation of the French. On the other hand, 
 the utmost confusion reigned as to what con- 
 stituted romanticism. To each single writer it 
 meant a different thing: “‘ Enfoncez Racine,” 
 and the unities, in one case; or ghosts, 
 ballads, legends, local colour in another; or 
 the defiance of morality and society in another. 
 Zhukovsky, in introducing German romanti- 
 cism into Russia, paved the way for its death, 
 and for the death of all exotic fashions and 
 models; for he paved the way for Pushkin to 
 render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating 
 models of his own and by founding a national 
 literature. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 55 
 
 Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, at 
 Moscow. He was of ancient lineage, and 
 inherited African negro blood on his mother’s 
 side, his mother’s grandmother being the 
 daughter of Peter the Great’s negro, Hannibal. 
 Until he was nine years old, he did not show 
 signs of any unusual precocity ; but from then 
 onwards he was seized with a passion for 
 reading which lasted all his life. He read 
 Plutarch’s Lives, the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 in a translation. He then devoured all the 
 French books he found in his father’s library. 
 Pushkin was gifted with a photographic mem- 
 ory, which retained what he read immediately 
 and permanently. His first efforts at writing 
 were in French,—comedies, which he per- 
 formed himself to an audience of his sisters. 
 He went to school in 1812 at the Lyceum of 
 Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St. Petersburg. His 
 school career was not brilliant, and his leayv- 
 ing certificate qualifies his achievements as 
 mediocre, even in Russian. But during the 
 six years he spent at the Lyceum, he continued 
 to read voraciously. His favourite poet at 
 this time was Voltaire. He began to write 
 verse, first in French and then in Russian; 
 some of it was printed in 1814 and 1815 in 
 
56 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 reviews, and in 1815 he declaimed his Recol- 
 lections of Tsarskoe Selo in public at the 
 Lyceum examination, in the presence of 
 Derzhavin the poet. 
 
 The poems which he wrote at school ater 
 wards formed part of his collected works. In 
 these poems, consisting for the greater part of 
 anacreontics and epistles, although they are 
 immature, and imitative, partly of contempo- 
 rary authors such as Derzhavin and Zhukov- 
 sky, and partly of the French anacreontic 
 school of poets, such as Voltaire, Gresset and 
 Parny, the sound of a new voice was unmis- 
 takable. Indeed, not only his contempor- 
 aries, but the foremost representatives of the 
 Russian literature of that day, Derzhavin, 
 Karamzin and Zhukovsky, made no mistake 
 about it. They greeted the first notes of this 
 new lyre with enthusiasm. Zhukovsky used 
 to visit the boy poet at school and read out 
 his verse to him. Derzhavin was enthusiastic 
 over the recitation of his Recollections of 
 Tsarskoe Selo. Thus fame came to Pushkin 
 as easily as the gift of writing verse. He had 
 lisped in numbers, and as soon as he began 
 to speak in them, his contemporaries imme- 
 diately recognized and hailed the new voice. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 57 
 
 He did not wake up and find himself famous 
 like Byron, but he walked into the Hall of 
 Fame as naturally as a young heir steps into 
 his lawful inheritance. If we compare 
 Pushkin’s school-boy poetry with Byron’s 
 Hours of Idleness, it is easy to understand 
 how this came about. In the Hours of 
 Idleness there is, perhaps, only one poem 
 which would hold out hopes of serious pro- 
 mise; and the most discerning critics would 
 have been justified in being careful before 
 venturing to stake any great hopes on so 
 slender a hint. But in Pushkin’s early verse, 
 although the subject-matter is borrowed, 
 and the style is still irregular and careless, 
 it is none the less obvious that it flows 
 from the pen of the author without effort 
 or strain; and besides this, certain coins of 
 genuine poetry ring out, bearing the image 
 and superscription of a new mint, the mint of 
 Pushkin. 
 
 When the first of his poems to attract the 
 attention of a larger audience, Ruslan and 
 Ludmila, was published, in 1820, it was 
 greeted with enthusiasm by the public; but 
 it had already won the suffrages of that 
 circle which counted most, that is to say, 
 
58 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the leading men of letters of the day, who 
 had heard it read out in MSS. For as soon 
 as Pushkin left school and stepped into the 
 world, he was received into the literary circle 
 of the day on equal terms. After he had read 
 aloud the first cantos of Ruslan and Ludmila 
 at Zhukovsky’s literary evenings, Zhukovsky 
 gave him his portrait with this inscription : 
 “To the pupil, from his defeated master ”’; 
 and BATYUSHKOV, a poet who, after having 
 been influenced, like Pushkin, by Voltaire and 
 Parny, had gone back to the classics, Horace 
 and Tibullus, and had introduced the classic 
 anacreontic school of poetry into Russia, was 
 astonished to find a young man of the world 
 outplaying him without any trouble on the 
 same lyre, and exclaimed, “Oh! how well 
 the rascal has started writing ! ” 
 
 The publication of Ruslan and Ludmila 
 sealed Pushkin’s reputation definitely, as far 
 as the general public was concerned, although 
 some of the professional critics treated the 
 poem with severity. The subject of the poem 
 was a Russian fairy-tale, and the critics blamed 
 the poet for having recourse to what they 
 called Russian folk-lore, which they con- 
 sidered to be unworthy of the poetic muse. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 59 
 
 One review complained that Pushkin’s choice 
 of subject was like introducing a bearded 
 unkempt peasant into a drawing-room, while 
 others blamed him for dealing with national 
 stuff in a flippant spirit. But the curious 
 thing is that, while the critics blamed him 
 for his choice of subject, and his friends and 
 the public defended him for it, quoting all 
 sorts of precedents, the poem has absolutely 
 nothing in common, either in its spirit, style 
 or characterization, with native Russian 
 folk-lore and fairy-tales. Much later on in 
 his career, Pushkin was to show what he 
 could do with Russian folk-lore. But Ruslan 
 and Ludmila, which, as far as its form is con- 
 cerned, has a certain superficial resemblance 
 to Ariosto, is in reality the result of the 
 French influence, under which Pushkin had 
 been ever since his cradle, and which in this 
 poem blazes into the sky like a rocket, and 
 bursts into a shower of sparks, never to 
 return again. 
 
 There is no passion in the poem and no 
 irony, but it is young, fresh, full of sensuous, 
 not to say sensual images, interruptions, 
 digressions, and flippant epigrams. Pushkin 
 wondered afterwards that nobody noticed 
 
60 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the coldness of the poem; the truth was that 
 the eyes of the public were dazzled by the 
 fresh sensuous images, and their ears were 
 taken captive by the new voice: for the im- 
 portance of the poem lies in this—that the 
 new voice which the literary pundits had 
 already recognized in the Lyceum of Tsarskoe 
 Selo was now speaking to the whole world, 
 and all Russia became aware that a young 
 man was among them “ with mouth of gold 
 and morning in his eyes.” Ruslan and 
 Ludmila has just the same sensuous richness, 
 fresh music and fundamental coldness as 
 Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. After finishing 
 the poem, Pushkin added a magnificent and 
 moving Epilogue, written from the Caucasus 
 in the year of its publication (1820); and when 
 the second edition was published in 1828, he 
 added a Prologue in his finest manner which 
 tells of Russian fairy-land. 1 
 
 After leaving school in 1817, until 1820, 
 Pushkin plunged into the gay life of St. 
 Petersburg. He wanted to be a Hussar, but 
 his father could not afford it. In default 
 he became a Foreign Office official; but he did 
 not take this profession seriously. He con- 
 sorted with the political youth and young 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 61 
 
 Liberals of the day; he scattered stinging 
 epigrams and satirical epistles broadcast. 
 He sympathized with the Decembrists, but 
 took no part in their conspiracy. He would 
 probably have ended by doing so; but, luckily 
 for Russian literature, he was transferred in 
 1820 from the Foreign Office to the Chancery 
 of General Inzov in the South of Russia; 
 and from 1820 to 1826 he lived first at Kishi- 
 nev, then at Odessa, and finally in his own 
 home at Pskov. This enforced banishment 
 was of the greatest possible service to the 
 poet; it took him away from the whirl and 
 distractions of St. Petersburg; it prevented 
 him from being compromised in the drama 
 of the Decembrists; it ripened and matured 
 his poetical genius; it provided him, since it 
 was now that he visited the Caucasus and the 
 Crimea for the first time, with new subject- 
 matter. 
 
 During this period he learnt Italian and 
 English, and came under the influence of 
 André Chénier and Byron. André Chénier’s 
 influence is strongly felt in a series of lyrics 
 in imitation of the classics; but these 
 lyrics were altogether different from the 
 anacreontics of his boyhood. Byron’s in- 
 
62 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 fluence is first manifested in a long poem 
 The Prisoner of the Caucasus. It is Byronic 
 in the temperament of the hero, who talks in 
 the strain of the earlier Childe Harold; he is 
 young, but feels old; tired of life, he seeks for 
 consolation in the loneliness of nature in the 
 Caucasus. He is taken prisoner by moun- 
 tain tribesmen, and set free by a girl who 
 drowns herself on account of her unrequited 
 love. Pushkin said later that the poem was 
 immature, but that there were verses in it 
 that came from his heart. There is one 
 element in the poem which is by no means 
 immature, and that is the picture of the 
 Caucasus, which is executed with much 
 reality and simplicity. Pushkin annexed the 
 Caucasus to Russian poetry. The Crimea 
 inspired him with another tale, also Byronic 
 in some respects, The Fountain of Baghchi-— 
 Sarai, which tells of a Tartar Khan and his 
 Christian slave, who is murdered out of 
 jealousy by a former favourite, herself drowned 
 by the orders of the Khan. Here again the 
 descriptions are amazing, and Pushkin draws 
 out a new stop of rich and voluptuous music. 
 
 In speaking of the influence of Byron over 
 Pushkin it is necessary to discriminate. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 63 
 
 Byron helped Pushkin to discover himself; 
 Byron revealed to him his own powers, 
 showed him the way out of the French 
 garden where he had been dwelling, and acted 
 as a guide to fresh woods and pastures new. 
 But what Pushkin took from the new provinces 
 to which the example of Byron led him was 
 entirely different from what Byron sought 
 there. Again, the methods and workmanship 
 of the two poets were radically different. 
 Pushkin is never imitative of Byron; but 
 Byron opened his eyes to a new world, 
 and indeed did for him what Chapman’s 
 Homer did for Keats. It frequently happens 
 that when a poet is deeply struck by the 
 work of another poet he feels a desire to 
 write something himself, but something dif- 
 ferent. Thus Pushkin’s mental intercourse 
 with Byron had the effect of bracing the 
 talent of the Russian poet and spurring him 
 on to the conquest of new worlds. 
 Pushkin’s six years’ banishment to his own 
 country had the effect of revealing to him 
 the reality and seriousness of his vocation 
 as a poet, and the range and strength of his 
 gifts. It was during this period that besides 
 the works already mentioned he wrote some 
 
64 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of his finest lyrics, The Conversation between 
 the Bookseller and the Poet—perhaps the most 
 perfect of his shorter poems—it contains four 
 lines to have written which Turgenev said he 
 would have burnt the whole of his works—a 
 larger poem called The Gypsies ; his dramatic 
 chronicle Boris Godunov, and the beginning 
 of his masterpiece Onegin; several ballads, 
 including The Sage Oleg, and an unfinished 
 romance, the Robber Brothers. 
 
 Not only is the richness of his output 
 during this period remarkable, but the variety 
 and the high level of art maintained in all 
 the different styles which he attempted and 
 mastered. The Gypsies (1827), which was 
 received with greater favour by the public 
 than any of his poems, either earlier or later, 
 is the story of a disappointed man, Aleko, 
 who leaves the world and takes refuge with 
 gypsies. A tragically ironical situation is the 
 result. The anarchic nature of the Byronic 
 misanthrope brings tragedy into the peaceful 
 life of the people, who are lawless because 
 they need no laws. Aleko loves and marries 
 the gypsy Zemfira, but after a time she tires 
 of him, and loves a young gypsy. Aleko 
 surprises them and kills them both. Then 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 65 
 
 Zemfira’s father banishes him from the 
 gypsies’ camp. He, too, had been deceived. 
 When his wife Mariula had been untrue and 
 had left him, he had attempted no vengeance, 
 but had brought up her daughter. 
 
 ** Leave us, proud man,” he says to Aleko. 
 “We are a wild people; we have no laws, 
 we torture not, neither do we punish; we 
 have no use for blood or groans; we will not 
 live with a man of blood. Thou wast not 
 made for the wild life. For thyself alone 
 thou claimest licence; we are shy and good- 
 natured; thou art evil-minded and presump- 
 tuous. Farewell, and peace be with thee!” 
 
 The charm of the poem lies in the descrip- 
 tions of the gypsy camp and the gypsy life, 
 the snatches of gypsy song, and the character- 
 ization of the gypsies, especially of the women. 
 It is not surprising the poem was popular; it 
 breathes a spell, and the reading of it conjures 
 up before one the wandering life, the camp- 
 fire, the soft speech and the song; and makes 
 one long to go off with “the raggle-taggle 
 gypsies O!” 
 
 Byron’s influence soon gave way to that 
 of Shakespeare, who opened a still larger 
 
 field of vision to the Russian poet. In 1825 
 E 
 
66 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 he writes : ““ Quel homme que ce Shakespeare ! 
 Je n’en reviens pas. Comme Byron le tra- 
 gique est mesquin devant lui! Ce Byron qui 
 n’a jamais concu qu’un seul caracteére et c’est 
 le sien . . . ce Byron done a partagé entre 
 ses personages tel et tel trait de son carac- 
 tére: son orgeuil 4 l’un, sa haine 4 lautre, 
 sa mélancolie au _ troisiéme, ete., et c’est 
 ainsi d’un caractére plein, sombre et énergique, 
 il a fait plusieurs caractéres insignifiants; ce 
 n’est pas la de la tragédie. On a encore une 
 manie. Quand on a concu un caractére, tout 
 ce qu’on lui fait dire, méme les choses les plus 
 étranges, en porte essentiellement l’empreinte, 
 comme les pédants et les marins dans les 
 vieux romans de Fielding. Voyez le haineux 
 de Byron . . . et la-dessus lisez Shakespeare. 
 Il ne craint jamais de compromettre son 
 personage, il le fait parler avec tout l’abandon 
 de la vie, car il est str en temps et lieu, de 
 lui faire trouver le langage de son caractére. 
 Vous me demanderez : votre tragédie est-elle 
 une tragédie de caractére ou de costume? 
 J’ai choisi le genre le plus aisé, mais j’ai taché 
 de les unir tous deux. J’écris et je pense. La 
 plupart des scénes ne demandent que du 
 raisonnement; quand j’arrive a une scéne qui 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 67 
 
 demande de Jinspiration, j’attends ou je 
 passe dessus.” 
 
 I quote this letter because it throws light, 
 firstly, on Pushkin’s matured opinion of 
 Byron, and, secondly, on his methods of 
 work; for, like Leonardo da Vinci, he formed 
 the habit, which he here describes, of leaving 
 unwritten passages where inspiration was 
 needed, until he felt the moment of bien 
 étre when inspiration came; and this not 
 only in writing his tragedy, but henceforward 
 in everything that he wrote, as his note-books 
 testify. 
 
 The subject-matter of Boris Godunov was 
 based on Karamzin’s history: it deals with 
 the dramatic episode of the Russian Perkin 
 Warbeck, the false Demetrius who pretended 
 to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. 
 The play is constructed on the model of 
 Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, but in a still 
 more disjointed fashion, without a definite 
 beginning or end : when Mussorgsky made an 
 opera out of it, the action was concentrated 
 into definite acts; for, as it stands, it is not 
 a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had 
 not the power of conceiving and executing 
 a drama which should move round one idea to 
 
68 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 an inevitable close. He had not the gift 
 of dramatic architectonics, and still less that 
 of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the 
 scenes, whether they be tragic and poetical, 
 or scenes of common life, are as vivid as any 
 in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive, 
 and they speak a language which is at the 
 same time ancient, living, and convincing. 
 
 In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of 
 stage architectonics and stage carpentry, it 
 is not merely meant that he lacked the gift 
 of arranging acts that would suit the stage, 
 or that of imagining stage effects. His whole 
 play is not conceived as a drama; a subject 
 from which a drama might be written is taken, 
 but the drama is left unwritten. We see 
 Boris Godunov on the throne, which he has 
 unlawfully usurped ; we know he feels remorse ; 
 he tells us so in monologues; we see his soul 
 stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of 
 fire, and we watch the wheel revolve; and 
 that is all the moral and spiritual action that 
 the part contains; he is static and not dynamic, 
 he never has to make up his mind; his will 
 never has to encounter the shock of another 
 will during the whole play. Neither does the 
 chronicle centre round the Pretender. It is 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 69 
 
 true that we see the idea of impersona- 
 ting the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind; 
 and it is also true that in one scene with his 
 Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically 
 moving in a dramatic situation. She loves him 
 because she thinks he is the son of an anointed 
 King. He loves her too much to deceive her, 
 and tells her the truth. She then says she 
 will have nothing of him; and then he rises 
 from defeat and shame to the height of the 
 situation, becomes great, and, not unlike. 
 Browning’s Sludge, says: “ Although I am 
 an impostor, I am born to be a King all the 
 same; I am one of Nature’s Kings; and I 
 defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell 
 every one what Ihave told you. Nobody will 
 -believe you.” And Marina is conquered once 
 more by his conduct and bearing. 
 
 This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict 
 of two wills and two souls. But there the 
 matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken, 
 and we are shown a series of different patterns, 
 in which the heroine plays no part at all, and 
 in which the hero only makes a momentary 
 appearance. The fact is there is neither hero 
 nor heroine in the play. It is not a play, but 
 a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame 
 
70 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never 
 attempted. As a chronicle, a series of de- 
 tached scenes, it is supremely successful. 
 There are certain scenes which attain to 
 sublimity : for instance, that in the cell of 
 the monastery, where the monk is finishing 
 his chronicle; and the monologue in which 
 Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying 
 speech to his son. The verse in these scenes 
 is sealed with the mark of that God-gifted 
 ease and high seriousness, which belong only 
 to the inspired great. They are Shake- 
 spearean, not because they imitate Shakespeare, 
 but because they attain to heights of imagina- 
 tive truth to which Shakespeare rises more 
 often than any other poet; and the language 
 in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitable- 
 ness, an absence of all conscious effort and of 
 all visible art and artifice, a closeness of 
 utterance combined with a width of suggestion 
 which belong only to the greatest artists, to 
 the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to Dante. 
 
 Boris Godunov was not published until 
 January 1, 1831, and passed, with one 
 exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. 
 Like so many great works, it came before its 
 time; and it was not until years afterwards 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 71 
 
 that the merits of this masterpiece were 
 understood and appreciated. 
 
 In 1826 Pushkin’s banishment to the 
 country came to an end; in that year he was 
 allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St. 
 Petersburg. In 1826 his poems appeared in 
 one volume, and the second canto of Onegin 
 (the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827 
 The Gypsies, and the third canto of Onegin ; 
 in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth cantos of 
 Onegin ; in 1829 Graf Nulin, an admirably 
 told Conte such as Maupassant might have 
 written, of a deceived husband and a wife who, 
 finding herself in the situation of Lucretia, 
 gives the would-be Tarquin a box on the 
 ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in being un- 
 faithful with some one else—the Cottage of 
 Kolomna is another story in the same vein— 
 and in the same year Poltava. 
 
 This poem was written in one month, 
 in St. Petersburg. The subject is Mazepa, 
 with whom the daughter of his hereditary 
 enemy, Kochubey, whom he afterwards tor- 
 tures and kills, falls in love. But it is in 
 reality the epic of Peter the Great.t| When 
 
 1 The poem was originally called Mazepa: Pushkin 
 changed the title so as not to clash with Byron. It is 
 
72 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the poem was published, it disconcerted the 
 critics and the public. It revealed an en- 
 tirely new phase of Pushkin’s style, and it 
 should have widened the popular conception 
 of the poet’s powers and versatility. But at 
 the time the public only knew Pushkin 
 through his lyrics and his early tales; Boris 
 Godunov had not yet been published; more- 
 over, the public of that day expected to find 
 in a poem passion and the delineation of 
 the heart’s adventures. This stern objective 
 fragment of an epic, falling into their senti- 
 mental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses and 
 cupids, like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan 
 and executed by a god, met with little appre- 
 
 ciation. The poet’s verse which, so far as the 
 fi cas 
 
 interesting to see what Pushkin says of Byron’s poem, 
 In his notes there is the following passage— 
 
 “ Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire’s history of 
 Charles XII. He was struck solely by the picture of a 
 man bound to a wild horse and borne over the steppes. 
 A poetical picture of course; but see what he did with it. 
 What a living creation! What abroad brush! But do 
 not expect to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual 
 gloomy Byronic hero. Byron was not thinking of him. 
 He presented a series of pictures, one more striking than 
 the other. Had his pen come across the story of the 
 seduced daughter and the father’s execution, it is im- 
 probable that anyone else would have dared to touch 
 the subject.” 
 
 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 73 
 
 public knew it, had hitherto seemed like 
 a shining and luscious fruit, was exchanged 
 for a concentrated weighty tramp of ringing 
 rhyme, martelé like steel. It is as if Tennyson 
 had followed up his early poems in a style 
 as concise as that of Pope and as concentrated 
 as that of Browning’s dramatic lyrics. The 
 poem is a fit monument to Peter the Great, 
 and the great monarch’s impetuous genius 
 and passion for thorough craftsmanship seem 
 to have entered into it. 
 
 In 1829. Pushkin made a second journey to 
 the Caucasus, the result of which was a 
 harvest of lyrics. On his return to St. 
 Petersburg he sketched the plan of another 
 epic poem, Galub, dealing with the Caucasus, 
 but this remained a fragment. 
 
 In 1881 he finished the eighth and last 
 canto of Onegin. Originally there were nine 
 cantos, but when the work was published one 
 of the cantos dealing with Onegin’s travels 
 was left out as being irrelevant. Pushkin 
 had worked at this poem since 1823. It 
 was Byron’s Beppo which gave him the 
 idea of writing a poem on modern life; but 
 here again, he made of the idea some- 
 thing quite different from any of Byron’s 
 
74 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 work. Onegin is a novel. Eugene Onegin 
 is the name of the hero. It is, moreover, 
 the first Russian novel; and as a novel it 
 has never been surpassed. It is as real as 
 Tolstoy, as finished in workmanship and 
 construction as Turgenev. It is a realistic 
 novel; not realistic in the sense that Zola’s 
 work was mis-called realistic, but realistic in 
 the sense that Miss Austen is realistic. The 
 hero is the average man about St. Petersburg; 
 his father, a worthy public servant, lives 
 honourably on debts and gives three balls a 
 year. Onegin is brought up, not too strictly, 
 by ‘“‘ Monsieur Abbé”; he goes out in the 
 world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in 
 French, and able to dance the Mazurka. 
 Onegin can touch on every subject, can 
 hold his tongue when the conversation becomes 
 too serious, and make epigrams. He knows 
 enough Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk 
 about Juvenal, and put “ Vale!” at the end 
 of his letters, and he can remember two lines 
 of the Aineid. He is severe on Homer and 
 Theocritus, but has read Adam Smith. The 
 only art in which he is proficient is the ars 
 amandi as taught by Ovid. He is a patron 
 of the ballet: he goes to balls; he eats beef- 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 75 
 
 steaks and paté de foie gras. In spite of all 
 this—perhaps because of it—he suffers from 
 spleen, like Childe Harold, the author says. 
 His father dies, leaving a lot of debts behind 
 him, but a dying uncle summons him to the 
 country; and when he gets there he finds his 
 uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the 
 estate. In the country, he is just as much 
 bored as he was in St. Petersburg. A new 
 neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a 
 young man fresh from Germany, an enthusi- 
 ast and a poet, and full of Kant, Schiller, 
 and the German writers. Lensky introduces 
 Onegin to the neighbouring family, by name 
 Larin, consisting of a widow and two daughters. 
 Lensky is in love with the younger daughter, 
 Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a 
 round face, as Onegin says, like the foolish 
 moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less 
 pretty; shy and dreamy, she conceals under 
 her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut 
 character and a strong will. 
 
 Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen’s 
 heroines; as alive as Fielding’s Sophia Western, 
 and as charming as any of George Meredith’s 
 women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as 
 Juliet. Turgenev, with all his magic, and 
 
76 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours 
 of life, never created a truer, more radiant, 
 and more typically Russian woman. She is 
 the type of all that is best in the Russian 
 woman; that is to say, of all that is best in 
 Russia; and it is a type taken straight from 
 life, and not from fairy-land—a type that 
 exists as much to-day as it did in the days 
 of Pushkin. She is the first of that long 
 gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, 
 Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky have given us, and 
 which are the most precious jewels of Russian 
 literature, because they reflect the crowning 
 glory of Russian life. Tatiana falls in love 
 with Onegin at first sight. She writes to him 
 and confesses her love, and in all the love 
 poetry of the world there is nothing more 
 touching and more simple than this confession. 
 It is perfect. If Pushkin had written this and 
 this alone, his place among poets would be 
 unique and different from that of all other 
 poets. 
 
 Possibly some people may think that there 
 are finer achievements in the love poetry of 
 the world; but nothing is so futile and so 
 impertinent as giving marks to the great 
 poets, as if they were passing an examination. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 77 
 
 If a thing is as good as possible in itself, what 
 is the use of saying that it is less good or 
 better than something else, which is as good 
 as possible in itself also. Nevertheless, placed 
 beside any of the great confessions of love in 
 poetry—Francesca’s story in the Inferno, 
 Romeo and Juliet’s leavetaking, Phédre’s 
 declaration, Don Juan Tenorio’s letter—the 
 beauty of Tatiana’s confession would not be 
 diminished by the juxtaposition. Of the rest 
 of Pushkin’s work at its best and highest, of 
 the finest passages of Boris Godunov, for 
 instance, you can say: This is magnificent, 
 but there are dramatic passages in other 
 works of other poets on the same lines and 
 as fine; but in Tatiana’s letter Pushkin has 
 created something unique, which has no 
 parallel, because only a Russian could have 
 written it, and of Russians, only he. It is 
 a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as 
 spontaneous as a blackbird’s song. 
 
 Onegin tells Tatiana he is not worthy of 
 her, that he is not made for love and marriage ; 
 that he would cease to love her at once; that 
 he feels for her like a brother, or perhaps a 
 little more tenderly. It then falls out that 
 Onegin, by flirting with Olga at a ball, makes 
 
78 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Lensky jealous. They fight a duel, and 
 Lensky is killed. Onegin is obliged to leave 
 the neighbourhood, and spends years in travel. 
 Tatiana remains true to her first love; but she 
 is taken by her relatives to Moscow, and 
 consents at last under their pressure to marry 
 a rich man of great position. In St. Peters- 
 burg, Onegin meets her again. Tatiana has 
 become a great lady, but all her old charm 
 is there. Onegin now falls violently in love 
 with her; but she, although she frankly con- 
 fesses that she still loves him, tells him that 
 it is too late; she has married another, and 
 she means to remain true to him. And there 
 the story ends. 
 
 Onegin is, perhaps, Pushkin’s most char- 
 acteristic work; it is undoubtedly the best 
 known and the most popular; like Hamlet, 
 it is all quotations. Pushkin in his Onegin 
 succeeded in doing what Shelley urged 
 Byron to do—to create something new 
 and in accordance with the spirit of the age, 
 which should at the same time be beauti- 
 ful. He did more than this. He succeeded 
 in creating for Russia a poem that was purely 
 national, and in giving his country a classic, 
 a model both in construction, matter, form, 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 79 
 
 and inspiration for future generations. Per- 
 haps the greatest quality of this poem is its 
 vividness. Pushkin himself speaks, in taking 
 leave, of having seen the unfettered march 
 of his novel in a magic prism. This is just 
 the impression that the poem gives; the scenes 
 are as clear as the shapes in a crystal; nothing 
 is blurred ; thereare no hesitating notes, nothing 
 a peu pres ; every stroke comes off; the nail 
 is hit on the head every time, only so easily 
 that you do not notice the strokes, and all 
 labour escapes notice. Apart from this the 
 poem is amusing; it arrests the attention as 
 a story, and it delights the intelligence with 
 its wit, its digressions, and its brilliance. It 
 is as witty as Don Juan and as consummately 
 expressed as Pope; and when the occasion 
 demands it, the style passes in easy transition 
 to serious or tender tones. Onegin has been 
 compared to Byron’s Don Juan. There is 
 this likeness, that both poems deal with 
 contemporary life, and in both poems the 
 poets pass from grave to gay, from severe to 
 lively, and often interrupt the narrative to 
 apostrophize the reader. But there the like- 
 ness ends. On the other hand, there is a 
 vast difference. Onegin contains no adven- 
 
80 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tures. It is a story of everyday life. More- 
 over, it is an organic whole : so well constructed 
 that it fits into a stage libretto—Tchaikovsky 
 made an opera out of it—without difficulty. 
 There is another difference—a difference 
 which applies to Pushkin and Byron in 
 general. There is no unevenness in Pushkin; 
 his work, as far as craft is concerned, is always 
 on the same high level. You can admire the 
 whole, or cut off any single passage and it 
 will still remain admirable; whereas Byron 
 must be taken as a whole or not at all—the 
 reason being that Pushkin was an impeccable 
 artist in form and expression, and that Byron 
 was not. 
 
 In the winter of 1882 Pushkin sought a 
 new field, the field of historical research; and 
 by the beginning of 1833 he had not only 
 collected all the materials for a history of 
 Pugachev, the Cossack who headed a rising 
 in the reign of Catherine II; but his literary 
 activity was so great that he had also written 
 therough sketch of a long story in prose dealing 
 with the same subject, The Captain’s Daughter, 
 another prose story of considerable length, 
 Dubrovsky, and portions of a drama, Rusalka, 
 The Water Nymph, which was never finished. 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 81 
 
 Besides Boris Godunov and the Rusalka, 
 Pushkin wrote a certain number of dramatic 
 scenes, or short dramas in one or more scenes. 
 Of these, one, The Feast in the Time of Plague, 
 is taken from the English of John Wilson (The 
 City of the Plague), with original additions. 
 In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast 
 between the genius which does what it must 
 and the talent which does what it can. The 
 story is based on the unfounded anecdote 
 that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri out of 
 envy. This dramatic and beautifully written 
 episode has been set to music as it stands by 
 Rimsky-Korsakov. 
 
 The Covetous Knight, which bears the 
 superscription, “From the tragi-comedy of 
 Chenstone ’”—an unknown English original— 
 tells of the conflict between a Harpagon and 
 his son: the delineation of the miser’s ima- 
 ginative passion for his treasures is, both in 
 conception and execution, in Pushkin’s finest 
 manner. This scene has been recently set to 
 music by Rakhmaninov. The Guest of Stone, 
 the story of Don Juan and the statua gentil- 
 issima del gran Commendatore, makes Don 
 Juan life. A scene from Faust between 
 Faust and Mephistopheles is original and not 
 
 F 
 
82 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of great interest; Angelo is the story of 
 Measure for Measure told as a narrative with 
 two scenes in dialogue. Rusalka, The Water 
 Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the 
 sham province of national legend, and it is 
 tantalizing that this poetic fragment remained 
 a fragment. 
 
 Pushkin’s prose is in some respects as 
 remarkable as his verse. Here, too, he 
 proved a pioneer. Dubrovsky is the story of 
 a young officer whose father is ousted, like 
 Naboth, from his small estate by his neigh- 
 bour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, 
 becomes a highway robber so as to revenge 
 himself, and introduces himself into the family 
 of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes 
 his revenge because he falls in love with his 
 enemy’s daughter. In this extremely vivid 
 story he anticipates Gogol in his life-like 
 pictures of country life. The Captain’s 
 Daughter is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev 
 has nothing stagey or melodramatic about 
 him, nothing of Harrison Ainsworth. Of his 
 shorter stories, such as The Blizzard, The 
 Pistol Shot, The Lady-Peasant, the most 
 entertaining, and certainly the most popular, 
 3s The Queen of Spades, which was so admirably 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 83 
 
 translated by Mérimée, and formed the sub- 
 ject of one of Tchaikovsky’s most successful 
 operas. As an artistic work The Egyptian 
 Nights, written in 1828, is the most interesting, 
 and ranks among Pushkin’s masterpieces. It 
 tells of an Italian improvisatore who, at a 
 party in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on 
 Cleopatra and her lovers. The story is 
 written to lead up to this poem, which gives 
 a gorgeous picture of the pagan world, and 
 is another example of Pushkin’s miraculous 
 power of assimilation. Pushkin’s prose has 
 the same limpidity and ease as his verse; the 
 characters have the same vitality and reality 
 as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, 
 and had he lived longer he might have 
 become a great novelist. As it is, he fur- 
 nished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made 
 in 1832) with the subject of two of his master- 
 pieces—Dead Souls and The Revisor. 
 
 The province of Russian folk-lore and 
 legend from which Pushkin took the idea of 
 Rusalka was to furnish him with a great 
 deal of rich material. It was in 18381 that 
 in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he wrote 
 his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian 
 
 popular style, The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Up 
 
84 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 till now he had written only a few ballads 
 in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a 
 brilliant success as a pastiche ; but it was a 
 pastiche and not quite the real thing, as 
 cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of 
 epigram here and there, which indeed makes 
 it delightful reading. He followed it by another 
 in the comic vein, The Tale of the Pope and 
 his Man Balda, and by two more Mdrchen, 
 The Dead Tsaritsa and The Golden Cock ; but 
 it was not until two years later that he wrote 
 his masterpiece in this vein, The Story of the 
 Fisherman and the Fish. It is the same 
 story as Grimm’s tale of the Fisherman’s 
 wife who wished to be King, Emperor, and 
 then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting 
 ambition. The tale is written in unrhymed 
 rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines; 
 all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such 
 as might have been handed down by oral 
 tradition in some obscure village out of the 
 remotest past; it has the real Volkston ; the 
 good-nature and simplicity and unobtrusive 
 humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects of 
 all these stories were told to Pushkin by his 
 nurse, Anna Rodionovna, who also furnished 
 him with the subject of his ballad, The 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 85 
 
 Bridegroom. In Pushkin’s note-books there 
 are seven fairy-tales taken down hurriedly 
 from the words of his nurse; and most likely 
 all that he wrote dealing with the life of the 
 people came from the same source. Pushkin 
 called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, 
 and said that he was indebted to her for 
 counteracting the effects of his first French 
 education. 
 
 In 1833 he finished a poem called The 
 Brazen Horseman, the story of a man who 
 loses his beloved in the great floods in St. 
 Petersburg in 1834, and going mad, imagines 
 that he is pursued by Falconet’s equestrian 
 statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains 
 a magnificent description of St. Petersburg. 
 During the last years of his life, he was 
 engaged in collecting materials for a history 
 of Peter the Great. His power of production 
 had never run dry from the moment he left 
 school, although his actual work was inter- 
 rupted from time to time by distractions and 
 the society of his friends. 
 
 All the important larger works of Pushkin 
 have now been mentioned; but during the 
 whole course of his career he was always 
 pouring out a stream of lyrics and occasional 
 
86 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 pieces, many of which are among the most 
 beautiful things he wrote. His variety and 
 the width of his range are astonishing. Some 
 of them have a grace and perfection such as 
 we find in the Greek anthology; others— 
 ** Recollections,” for instance, in which in the 
 sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pass 
 _ before him the blotted scroll of his past deeds, 
 which he is powerless with all the tears in the 
 world to wash out—have the intensity of 
 Shakespeare’s sonnets. This poem, for in- 
 stance, has the same depth of feeling as 
 ‘* Tired with all these, for restful death I 
 cry,” or “ The expense of spirit in a waste 
 of shame.” Or he will write an elegy as 
 tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture 
 of a sledge in a snow-storm, and give you the 
 plunge of the bewildered horses, the whirling 
 demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the 
 quiet spaces of snow, in intoxicating rhythms 
 which E. A. Poe would have envied; or again 
 he will write a description of the Caucasus 
 in eleven short lines, close in expression and 
 vast in suggestion, such as “‘ The Monastery 
 on Kazbek ”’; or he will bring before you the 
 smell of the autumn morning, and the hoofs 
 ringing out on the half-frozen earth: or he 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 87 
 
 will write a patriotic poem, such as To the 
 Slanderers of Russia, fraught with patriotic 
 indignation without being offensive; in this 
 poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of 
 Russia: ‘‘ Will not,” he says, “‘ from Perm to 
 the Caucasus, from Finland’s chill rocks to the 
 flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to 
 the unshaken walls of China, glistening with 
 its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise? ” 
 Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance 
 and as humble in spirit as one of the old 
 Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as 
 Musset and as playful as Heine: he will 
 translate you the spirit of Horace and the 
 spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure 
 the restraint of André Chénier, and the 
 impetuous gallop of Byron. 
 
 Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin’s 
 poems is the poem which expresses his view 
 of life in the elegy— 
 
 * As bitter as stale aftermath of wine 
 Is the remembrance of delirious days; 
 But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs 
 The past more sorely, as my days decline. 
 My path is dark. The future lies in wait, 
 A gathering ocean of anxiety, 
 But oh ! my friends ! to suffer, to create, 
 
88 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 That is my prayer; to live and not to die! 
 
 I know that ecstasy shall still lie there 
 
 In sorrow and adversity and care. | 
 
 Once more I shall be drunk on strains 
 divine, 
 
 Be moved to tears by musings that are 
 mine; ‘ 
 
 And haply when the last sad hour draws 
 nigh 
 
 Love with a farewell smile shall light the 
 sky.” 
 
 But the greatest of his short poems is prob- 
 ably “‘ The Prophet.” This is a tremendous 
 poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin 
 only attained once. It is Miltonic in concep- 
 tion and Dantesque in expression ; the syllables 
 ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a 
 silver clarion. It is, as it were, the Pillars of 
 Hercules of the Russian language. Nothing: 
 finer as sound could ever be compounded 
 with Russian vowels and consonants; nothing 
 could be more perfectly planned, or present, 
 in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the 
 imagination. Even a rough prose translation 
 will give some idea of the imaginative splen- 
 dour of the poem— 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 89 
 
 “My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, 
 and I was astray in the dark wilderness. 
 And the Seraphim with six wings appeared 
 to me at the crossing of the ways: And he 
 touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as 
 soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle 
 that is frightened my prophetic eyes were 
 awakened. He touched my ears and he filled 
 them with noise and with sound: and I 
 heard the Heavens shuddering and the 
 flight of the angels in the height, and the 
 moving of the beasts that are under the 
 waters, and the noise of the growth of the 
 branches in the valley. He bent down over 
 me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore 
 out my sinful tongue, and he took away that 
 which is idle and that which is evil with his 
 right hand, and his right hand was dabbled 
 with blood; and he set there in its stead, 
 between my perishing lips, the tongue of a 
 wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder 
 with a sword, and he plucked out my trem- 
 bling heart, and in my cloven breast he set 
 a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the 
 desert I lay, and the voice of God called 
 and said unto me, ‘ Prophet, arise, and take 
 heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and 
 
90 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 go forth over the sea and over the land and 
 set light with My word to the hearts of the 
 people.’ ” , 
 
 In 1837 came the catastrophe which brought 
 about Pushkin’s death. It was caused by 
 the clash of evil tongues engaged in frivolous 
 gossip, and Pushkin’s own susceptible and vio- 
 lent temperament. A guardsman, Heckeren- 
 Dantes, had been flirting with his wife. 
 Pushkin received an anonymous letter, and 
 being wrongly convinced that Heckeren- 
 Dantes was the author of it, wrote him a 
 violent letter which made a duel inevitable. 
 A duel was fought on the 27th of February, 
 1837, and Pushkin was mortally wounded. 
 Such was his frenzy of rage that, after lying 
 wounded and unconscious in the snow, on 
 
 regaining consciousness, he insisted on going on 
 
 with the duel, and fired another shot, giving a 
 great cry of joy when he saw that he had 
 wounded his adversary. It was only a slight 
 wound in the hand. It was not until he reached 
 home that his anger passed away. He died 
 on the 29th of February, after forty-five hours 
 of excruciating suffering, heroically borne; 
 he forgave his enemies; he wished no one to 
 avenge him; he received the last sacraments: 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 91 
 
 and he expressed feelings of loyalty and 
 gratitude to his sovereign. He was thirty- 
 seven years and eight months old. 
 
 Pushkin’s career falls naturally into two 
 divisions: his life until he was thirty, and 
 his life after he was thirty. Pushkin began 
 his career with liberal aspirations, and he 
 disappointed some in the loyalty to the throne, 
 the Church, the autocracy, and the established 
 order of things which he manifested later; 
 in turning to religion; in remaining in the 
 Government service; in writing patriotic 
 poems; in holding the position of Gentleman 
 of the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in 
 fact, what is called a reactionary. But it 
 would be a mistake to imagine that Pushkin 
 was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause 
 of liberty for a handful of silver and a riband 
 to stick in his coat. The liberal aspirations 
 of Pushkin’s youth were the very air that the 
 whole of the aristocratic youth of that day 
 breathed. Pushkin could not escape being 
 influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel 
 then, than he was a reactionary afterwards, 
 when again the very air which the whole of 
 educated society breathed was conservative 
 and nationalistic. It may be a pity that it 
 
92 - RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 was so; but soit was. There was no liberal 
 atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and 
 the radical effervescence of the Decembrists 
 was destroyed by the Decembrists’ premature 
 action. It is no good making a revolution 
 if you have nothing to make it with. The 
 Decembrists were in the same position as 
 the educated élite of one regiment at Versailles 
 would have been, had it attempted to destroy 
 the French monarchy in the days of Louis 
 XIV. The Decembrists by their premature 
 action put the clock of Russian political pro- 
 gress back for years. The result was that 
 men of impulse, aspiration, talent and origin- 
 ality had in the reign of Nicholas to seek 
 an outlet for their feelings elsewhere than in 
 politics, because politics then were simply 
 non-existent. | 
 
 But apart from this, even if the oppor- 
 tunities had been there, it may be doubted 
 whether Pushkin would have taken them. 
 He was not born with a passion to reform the 
 world.. He was neither a rebel nor a re- 
 former; neither a liberal nor a conservative; 
 he was a democrat in his love for the whole of 
 the Russian people; he was a patriot in his 
 love of his country. He resembled Goethe 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 93 
 
 rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or Byron; 
 although, in his love of his country and in 
 every other respect, his fiery temperament 
 both in itself and in its expression was far 
 removed from Goethe’s Olympian calm. He 
 was like Goethe in his attitude towards society, 
 and the attitude of the social and official 
 world towards him resembles the attitude of 
 Weimar towards Goethe. 
 
 During the first part of his career he gave 
 himself up to pleasure, passion, and self- 
 indulgence; after he was thirty he turned his 
 mind to more serious things. It would not 
 be exact to say he became deeply religious, 
 because he was religious by nature, and he 
 soon discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism; 
 but in spite of this he was a victim of amour- 
 propre ; and he wavered between contempt 
 of the society around him and a petty resent- 
 ment against it which took the shape of 
 scathing and sometimes cruel epigrams. It 
 was this dangerous amour-propre, the fact of 
 his being not only passion’s slave, but petty 
 passion’s slave, which made him a victim of 
 frivolous gossip and led to the final catas- 
 trophe. 
 
 “In Pushkin,” says Soloviev, the philo- 
 
94 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 sopher, “according to his own testimony 
 there were two different and separate beings : 
 the inspired priest of Apollo, and the most 
 frivolous of all the frivolous children of the 
 world.” It was the first Pushkin—the in- 
 spired priest—who predominated in the latter 
 part of his life; but who was unable to expel 
 altogether the second Pushkin, the frivolous 
 Weltkind, who was prone to be exasperated 
 by the society in which he lived, and when 
 exasperated was dangerous. There is one 
 fact, however, which accounts for much. 
 The more serious Pushkin’s turn of thought 
 grew, the more objective, purer, and stronger 
 his work became, the less it was appreciated ; 
 for the public which delighted in the com- 
 paratively inferior work of his youth was not 
 yet ready for his more mature work. What 
 pleased the public were the dazzling colours, 
 the sensuous and sometimes libidinous images 
 of his early poems; the romantic atmosphere ; 
 especially anything that was artificial in 
 them. They had not yet eyes to appreciate 
 the noble lines, nor ears to appreciate the 
 simpler and more majestic harmonies of his 
 later work, Thus it was that they passed Boris 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 95 
 
 Godunov by, and were disappointed in the 
 later cantos of Onegin. This was, of course, 
 discouraging. Nevertheless, it is laughable 
 to rank Pushkin amongst the misunderstood, 
 among the Shelleys, the Millets, of Literature 
 and Art; or to talk of his sad fate. To talk 
 of him as one of the victims of literature is 
 merely to depreciate him. 
 
 He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus, 
 which gave him inspiration: to his own 
 country home, which gave him leisure. He 
 was censored. Yes: but the Emperor under- 
 took to do the work himself. Had he lived 
 in England, society—as was proved in the 
 case of Byron—would have been a far severer 
 censor of his morals and the extravagance of 
 his youth, than the Russian Government. 
 Besides which, he won instantaneous fame, 
 and in the society in which he moved he was 
 surrounded by a band not only of devoted but 
 distinguished admirers, amongst whom were 
 some of the highest names in Russian literature 
 —Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol. 
 
 Pushkin is Russia’s national poet, the Peter 
 the Great of poetry, who out of foreign 
 material created something new, national 
 
96 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and Russian, and left imperishable models for 
 future generations. The chief characteristic 
 of his genius is its universality. There 
 appeared to be nothing he could not under- 
 stand nor assimilate. And it is just this all- 
 embracing humanity—Dostoyevsky calls him 
 savav0oewsoc—this capacity for understanding 
 everything and everybody, which makes him 
 so profoundly Russian. He is a poet of every- 
 day life: a realistic poet, and above all things 
 a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as 
 an epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief 
 and produce a noble fragment, he cannot set 
 crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians 
 the beauty of their landscape and the poetry 
 of their people; and they, with ears full of 
 pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and 
 romantic stage properties, did not understand 
 what he was doing: but they understood 
 later. For a time he fought against the 
 stream, and all in vain; and then he gave 
 himself up to the great current, which took 
 him all too soon to the open sea. 
 
 He set free the Russian language from the 
 bondage of the conventional; and all his life 
 he was still learning to become more and more 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 97 
 
 intimate with the savour and smell of the 
 people’s language. Like Peter the Great, 
 he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and 
 his whole energies in craftsmanship. He was 
 a great artist; his style is perspicuous, plastic, 
 and pure; there is never a blurred outline, 
 never a smear, never a halting phrase or a 
 hesitating note. His concrete images are, as 
 it were, transparent, like Donne’s description 
 of the woman whose 
 
 “ , .. . pure and eloquent blood 
 Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought, 
 That you might almost think her body 
 
 thought.” 
 
 His diction is the inseparable skin of the 
 thought. You seem to hear him thinking. 
 He was gifted with divine ease and unpre- 
 meditated spontaneity. His soul was sincere, 
 noble, and open; he was frivolous, a child 
 of the world and of his century; but if he 
 was worldly, he was human; he was a citizen 
 as well as a child of the world; and it is that 
 which makes him the greatest of Russian 
 
 poets. 
 G 
 
98 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 His career was unromantic; he was rooted 
 to the earth; an aristocrat by birth, an official 
 by profession, a lover of society by taste. At 
 the same time, he sought and served beauty, 
 strenuously and faithfully; he was perhaps 
 too faithful a servant of Apollo; too exclusive 
 a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find 
 none of the piteous cries, no beauty of soaring 
 and bleeding wings as in Shelley, nor the 
 sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no 
 tempest of defiant challenge, no lightnings 
 of divine derision, as in Byron; his is neither 
 the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that 
 “brave soldier in the war of the liberation 
 of humanity,” nor the agonized passion of a 
 suffering Catullus. He never descended into 
 Hell. Every great man is either an artist or 
 a fighter ; and often poets of genius, Byron 
 and Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently 
 fighters than they are artists. Pushkin was 
 an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what 
 makes even his love-poems cold in comparison 
 with those of other poets. Although he was 
 the first to make notable what was called the 
 romantic movement; and although at the 
 beginning of his career he handled romantic 
 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 99 
 
 subjects in a more or less romantic way, he 
 was fundamentally a classicist—a classicist 
 as much in the common-sense and realism and 
 solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the 
 perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form. 
 And he soon cast aside even the vehicles 
 and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively 
 followed reality. ‘‘ He strove with none, for 
 none was worth his strife.” And when his 
 artistic ideals were misunderstood and de- 
 preciated, he retired into himself and wrote 
 to please himself only; but in the inner court 
 of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired 
 he created imperishable things; for he loved 
 nature, he loved art, he loved his country, 
 and he expressed that love in matchless 
 song. 
 
 For years, Russian criticism was either 
 neglectful of his work or unjust towards it; 
 for his serene music and harmonious design 
 left the generations which came after him, who 
 were tossed on a tempest of social problems and 
 political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when 
 Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin’s memorial at 
 Moscow, the homage which he paid to the 
 dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of 
 
100 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the whole of Russia. His work is beyond 
 the reach of critics, whether favourable or 
 unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of 
 his countrymen, and chiefly upon the lips of 
 the young. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 LERMONTOV 
 
 THE romantic movement in Russia was, as 
 far as Pushkin was concerned, not really a 
 romantic movement at all. Still less was it 
 so in the case of the Pléiade which followed 
 him. And yet, for want of a better word, one 
 is obliged to call it the romantic movement, as 
 it was a new movement, a renascence that 
 arose out of the ashes of the pseudo-classical 
 eighteenth century convention. Pushkin was 
 followed by a Pléiade. 
 
 The claim of his friend and fellow-student, 
 Baron Detvic, to fame, rests rather on his 
 friendship with Pushkin (to whom he played 
 the part of an admirable critic) than on his 
 own verse. He died in 1831. Yazyxov, 
 PrincE BaRIATINSKY, VENEVITINOY, and 
 POLEZHAEY, can all be included in the Pléiade; 
 all these are lyrical poets of the second order, 
 
 and none of them—except Polezhaev, whose 
 101 
 
102 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 real promise of talent was shattered by cir- 
 cumstances (he died of drink and consumption 
 after a career of tragic vicissitudes)—has 
 more than an historical interest. 
 
 Pushkin’s successor to the throne of Russian 
 letters was Lermontov: no unworthy heir. 
 The name Lermontov is said to be the same 
 as the Scotch Learmonth. The story of his 
 short life is a simple one. He was born at 
 Moscow in 1814. He visited the Caucasus 
 when he was twelve. He was taught English 
 by a tutor. He went to school at Moscow, 
 and afterwards to the University. He left 
 in 1832 owing to the disputes he had with the 
 professors. At the age of eighteen, he entered 
 the Guards’ Cadet School at St. Petersburg; 
 and two years later he became an officer in 
 the regiment of the Hussars. In 1887 he was 
 transferred to Georgia, owing to the scandal 
 caused by the outspoken violence of his verse; 
 but he was transferred to Novgorod in 18388, 
 and was allowed to return to St. Petersburg 
 in the same year. In 1840 he was again 
 transferred to the Caucasus for fighting a duel 
 with the son of the French Ambassador; 
 towards the end of the year, he was once more 
 allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In 1841 
 
LERMONTOV 103 
 
 he went back for a third time to the Caucasus, 
 where he forced a duel on one of his friends 
 over a perfectly trivial incident, and was killed, 
 on the 15th of July of the same year. 
 
 In all the annals of poetry, there is no more 
 curious figure than Lermontov. He was like 
 a plant that above all others needed a sym- 
 pathetic soil, a favourable atmosphere, and 
 careful attention. As it was, he came in the 
 full tide of the régime of Nicholas I, a régime 
 of patriarchal supervision, government inter- 
 ference, rigorous censorship, and iron discip- 
 line,—a grey epoch absolutely devoid of all 
 ideal aspirations. Considerable light is thrown 
 on the contradictory and original character of 
 the poet by his novel, 4 Hero of Our Days, the 
 first psychological novel that appeared in 
 Russia. The hero, Pechorin, is undoubtedly 
 a portrait of the poet, although he himself 
 said, and perhaps thought, that he was merely 
 creating a type. 
 
 The hero of the story, who is an officer in 
 the Caucasus, analyses his own character, 
 and lays bare his weaknesses, follies, and 
 faults, with the utmost frankness. “J am 
 incapable of friendship,” he says. ‘‘ Of two 
 friends, one is always the slave of the other, 
 
104 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 although often neither of them will admit it; 
 I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a 
 tiring business.”” Or he writes: “I have an 
 innate passion for contradiction. . . . The 
 presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and 
 intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament 
 would turn me into a passionate dreamer.” 
 Speaking of enemies, he says: “I love 
 enemies, but not after the Christian fashion.” 
 And on another occasion: “ Why do they 
 all hate me? Why? MHave I offended any 
 one? No. Do I belong to that category of 
 people whose mere presence creates anti- 
 pathy?” Again: “I despise myself some- 
 times, is not that the reason that I despise 
 others? I have become incapable of noble 
 impulses. Iam afraid of appearing ridiculous 
 to myself.” ; 
 
 On the eve of fighting a duel Pechorin writes 
 as follows— 
 
 *“ If I die it will not be a great loss to the 
 world, and as for me, I am sufficiently tired 
 of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, 
 who does not go home to bed because the 
 carriage is not there, but as soon as the carriage 
 is there, Good-bye ! ” . 
 
 *“T review my past and I ask myself, Why 
 
LERMONTOV 105 
 
 have I lived? Why was I born? and I think 
 there was a reason, and I think I was called 
 to high things, for I feel in my soul the presence 
 of vast powers; but I did not divine my high 
 calling; I gave myself up to the allurement 
 of shallow and ignoble passions; I emerged 
 from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, 
 but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble 
 aspirations, the flower of life. And since then 
 how often have I played the part of the axe 
 in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the 
 executioner I have fallen on the necks of the 
 victims, often without malice, always without 
 pity. My love has never brought happiness, 
 because I have never in the slightest degree 
 sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. I 
 loved for my own sake, for my own pleasure. ... 
 And if I die I shall not leave behind me one 
 soul who understood me. Some think I am 
 better, others that I am worse than I am. 
 Some will say he was a good fellow; others he 
 was a blackguard.” 
 
 It will be seen from these passages, all of 
 which apply to Lermontov himself, even if 
 they were not so intended, that he must have 
 been a trying companion, friend, or acquaint- 
 ance. He had, indeed, except for a few 
 
106 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 intimate friends, an impossible temperament; 
 he was proud, overbearing, exasperated and ex- 
 asperating, filled with a savage amour-propre ; 
 and he took a childish delight in annoying; 
 he cultivated “le plaisir aristocratique de 
 déplaire ’’; he was envious of what was least 
 enviable in his contemporaries. He could 
 not bear not to make himself felt, and if he 
 felt that he was unsuccessful in accomplishing 
 this by pleasant means, he resorted to un- 
 pleasant means. And yet, at the same time, 
 he was warm-hearted, thirsting for love and 
 kindness, and capable of giving himself up 
 to love—if he chose. 
 
 During his period of training at the Cadet 
 School, he led a wild life; and when he 
 became an officer, he hankered after social 
 and not after literary success. He did not 
 achieve it immediately; at first he was not 
 noticed, and when he was noticed he was not 
 liked. His looks were unprepossessing, and 
 one of his legs was shorter than the other. His 
 physical strength was enormous—he could 
 bend a ramrod with his fingers. Noticed he 
 was determined to be; and, as he himself 
 says in one of his letters, observing that 
 every one in society had some sort of pedestal 
 
LERMONTOV 107 
 
 —wealth, lineage, position, or patronage—he 
 saw that if he, not pre-eminently possessing 
 any of these,—though he was, as a matter of 
 fact, of a good Moscow family,—could suc- 
 ceed in engaging the attention of one person, 
 others would soon follow suit. This he set 
 about to do by compromising a girl and 
 then abandoning her: and he acquired the 
 reputation of a Don Juan. Later, when 
 he came back from the Caucasus, he was 
 treated as a lion. All this does not throw a 
 pleasant light on his character, more especially 
 as he criticized in scathing tones the society 
 in which he was anxious to play a part, and 
 in which he subsequently enjoyed playing 
 a part. But perhaps both attitudes of mind 
 were sincere. He probably sincerely enjoyed 
 society, and hankered after success in it; and 
 equally sincerely despised society and himself 
 for hankering after it. 
 
 As he grew older, his pride and the ex- 
 asperating provocativeness of his conduct 
 increased to such an extent that he seemed 
 positively seeking for serious trouble, and for 
 some one whose patience he could overtax, and 
 on whom he could fasten a quarrel. And 
 this was not slow to happen. 
 
108 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a 
 deep-seated disgust with himself and with the 
 world in general, and a complete indifference 
 to life, resulting from large aspirations which 
 could not find an outlet, and so recoiled upon 
 himself. The epoch, the atmosphere and the 
 society were the worst possible for his peculiar 
 nature; and the only fruitful result of the 
 friction between himself and the society and 
 the established order of his time, was that he 
 was sent to the Caucasus, which proved to be 
 a source of inspiration for him, as it had 
 been for Pushkin. One is inclined to say, 
 “Tf only he had lived later or longer”; yet 
 it may be doubted whether, had he been born 
 in a more favourable epoch, either earlier in 
 the milder régime of Alexander I, or later, 
 in the enthusiastic epoch of the reforms, he 
 would have been a happier man and produced 
 finer work. 
 
 The curious thing is that his work does not 
 reveal an overwhelming pessimism like Leo- 
 pardi’s, an accent of revolt like Musset’s, or of 
 combat like Byron’s; but rather it testifies to 
 a fundamental indifference to life, a concen- 
 trated pride. If it be true that you can 
 roughly divide the Russian temperament into 
 
LERMONTOV 109 
 
 two types—the type of the pure fool, such as 
 Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, and a type of uncon- 
 querable pride, such as Lucifer—then Ler- 
 montov is certainly a fine example of the 
 second type. You feel that he will never 
 submit or yield; but then he died young; and 
 the Russian poets often changed, and not 
 infrequently adopted a compromise which was 
 the same thing as submission. 
 
 Lermontov was, like Pushkin, essentially 
 a lyric poet, still more subjective, and pro- 
 foundly self-centred. His attempts at the 
 drama (imitations of Schiller and an attempt 
 at the manner of Griboyedov) were failures. 
 But, unlike Pushkin, he was a true romantic; 
 and his work proves to us how essentially 
 different a thing Russian romanticism is from 
 French, German or English romanticism. 
 He began with astonishing precocity to write 
 verse when he was twelve. His earliest 
 efforts were in French. He then began to 
 imitate Pushkin. While at the Cadet School 
 he wrote a series of cleverly written, more or 
 less indecent, and more or less Byronic—the 
 Byron of Beppo—tales in verse, describing 
 his love adventures, and episodes of garrison 
 life. What brought him fame was his ‘‘ Ode 
 
110 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 on the Death of Pushkin,” which, although 
 unjustified by the actual facts—he represents 
 Pushkin as the victim of a _ bloodthirsty 
 society—strikes strong and bitter chords. 
 Here, without any doubt, are “thoughts 
 that breathe and words that burn ’’>— 
 
 ‘** And you, the proud and shameless progeny 
 
 Of fathers famous for their infamy, 
 
 You, who with servile heel have trampled 
 down 
 
 The fragments of great names laid low by 
 chance, 
 
 You, hungry crowd that swarms about the 
 throne, 
 
 Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory, 
 
 You hide behind the shelter of the law, 
 
 Before you, right and justice must be dumb! 
 
 But, parasites of vice, there’s God’s assize; 
 
 There is an awful court of law that waits. 
 
 You cannot reach it with the sound of gold; 
 
 It knows your thoughts beforehand and 
 your deeds; 
 
 And vainly you shall call the lying witness; 
 
 That shall not help you any more; 
 
 And not with all the filth of all your gore 
 
 Shall you wash out the poet’s righteous 
 blood.” 
 
LERMONTOV 111 
 
 He struck this strong chord more than once, 
 especially in his indictment of his own genera- 
 tion, called “ A Thought”; and in a poem 
 written on the transfer of Napoleon’s ashes 
 to Paris, in which he pours scorn on the 
 French for deserting Napoleon when he lived 
 and then acclaiming his ashes. 
 
 But it is not in poems such as these that 
 Lermontov’s most characteristic qualities are 
 to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to 
 his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, 
 and still less to foreign models. It is true 
 that, as a schoolboy, he wrote verses full of 
 Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these 
 were merely echoes of his reading. The 
 gloom of spirit which he expressed later on 
 was a permanent and innate feature of his 
 own temperament. Later, the reading of 
 Shelley spurred on his imagination to emula- 
 tion, but not to imitation. He sought his 
 own path from the beginning, and he remained 
 in it with obdurate persistence. He remained 
 obstinately himself, indifferent as a rule to 
 outside events, currents of thought and 
 feeling. And he clung to the themes which 
 he chose in his youth. His mind to him a 
 kingdom was, and he peopled it with images 
 
112 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and fancies of his own devising. The path 
 which he chose was a narrow one. It was a 
 romantic path. He chose for the subject of 
 the poem by which he is perhaps most widely 
 known, The Demon, the love of a demon for 
 a woman. The subject is as romantic as any 
 chosen by Thomas Moore; but there is nothing 
 now that appears rococo in Lermontov’s work. 
 The colours are as fresh to-day as when they 
 were first laid on. The heroine is a Circassian 
 woman, and the action of the poem is in the 
 Caucasus. 
 
 The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that 
 denies of Goethe, nor Byron’s Lucifer, looking 
 the Almighty in His face and telling him that 
 His evil is not good; nor does he cherish— 
 
 ‘the study of revenge, immortal hate,” 
 
 of Milton’s Satan; but he is the lost angel of 
 a ruined paradise, who is too proud to accept 
 oblivion even were it offered to him. He 
 dreams of finding in Tamara the joys of the 
 paradise he has foregone. “I am he,” he 
 says to her, “ whom no one loves, whom 
 every human being curses.” He declares 
 that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, 
 that he desires to be reconciled with Heaven, 
 to love, to pray, to believe in good. And he 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 LERMONTOV 113 
 
 pours out to her one of the most passionate 
 love declarations ever written, in couplet after 
 couplet of words that glow like jewels and 
 tremble like the strings of a harp. Tamara 
 yields to him, and forfeits her life; but her 
 soul is borne to Heaven by the Angel of 
 Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, 
 and the Demon is left as before alone in a 
 loveless lampless universe. The poem is 
 interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, 
 which are as glowing and splendid as the 
 impassioned utterance of the Demon. They 
 put Pushkin’s descriptions in the shade. 
 Lermontov’s landscape-painting compared 
 with Pushkin’s is like a picture of Turner 
 compared with a Constable or a Bonnington. 
 
 Lermontov followed up his first draft of 
 The Demon (originally planned in 1829, but 
 not finished in its final form until 1841) with 
 other romantic tales, the scene of which for 
 the most part is laid in the Caucasus: such as 
 Izmail Bey, Hadji-Abrek, Orsha the Boyar—the 
 last not a Caucasian tale. These were nearly all 
 of them sketches in which he tried the colours 
 of his palette. But with Misyri, the Novice, 
 in which he used some of the materials of the 
 
 former tales, he produced a finished picture. 
 H 
 
114 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Mtsyri is the story of a Circassian orphan 
 who is educated in aconvent. The child grows 
 up home-sick at heart, and one day his longing 
 for freedom becomes ungovernable, and he 
 escapes and roams about in the mountains. 
 He loses his way in the forest and is brought 
 back to the monastery after three days, dying 
 from starvation, exertion, and exhaustion. 
 Before he dies he pours out his confession, 
 which takes up the greater part of the poem. 
 He confesses how in the monastery he felt 
 his own country and his own people forever 
 calling, and how he felt he must seek his own 
 people. He describes his wanderings: how 
 he scrambles down the mountain-side and 
 hears the song of a Georgian woman, and 
 sees her as she walks down a narrow path witha 
 pitcher on her head and draws water from the 
 stream. At nightfall he sees the light of a 
 dwelling-place twinkling like a falling star; 
 but he dares not seek it. He loses his way 
 in the forest, he encounters and kills a 
 panther. In the morning, he finds a way out 
 of the woods when the daylight comes; he 
 lies in the grass exhausted under the blinding 
 noon, of which Lermontov gives a gorgeous 
 and detailed description— 
 
LERMONTOV 115 
 
 *“ And on God’s world there lay the deep 
 And heavy spell of utter sleep, 
 Although the landrail called, and I 
 Could hear the trill of the dragonfly 
 Or else the lisping of the stream .. . 
 Only a snake, with a yellow gleam 
 Like golden lettering inlaid 
 From hilt to tip upon a blade, 
 
 Was rustling, for the grass was dry, 
 And in the loose sand cautiously 
 
 It slid, and then began to spring 
 
 And roll itself into a ring, 
 
 Then, as though struck by sudden fear, 
 Made haste to dart and disappear.” 
 
 Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and 
 delirium overtake him, and he fancies that 
 he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, 
 where speckled fishes are playing in the 
 crystal waters. One of them nestles close to 
 him and sings to him with a silver voice a 
 lullaby, unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and 
 alluring like the call of the Erl King’s 
 daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches 
 the high-water mark of his descriptive powers. 
 Its pages glow with the splendour of the 
 Caucasus, 
 
116 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 To his two masterpieces, The Demon 
 and Mtsyri, he was to add a third: The 
 Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprich- 
 nik (bodyguardsman), and the Merchant 
 Kalashnikov. The Oprichnik insults the 
 Merchant’s wife, and the Merchant challenges 
 him to fight with his fists, kills him, and 
 is executed for it. This poem is written as a 
 folk-story, in the style of the Byliny, and it 
 in no way resembles a pastiche. It equals, if 
 it does not surpass, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov 
 as a realistic vision of the past; and as an 
 epic tale, for simplicity, absolute appropriate- 
 ness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and 
 terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian 
 literature to compare with it. Besides these 
 larger poems, Lermontov wrote a quantity 
 of short lyrics, many of which, such as “‘ The 
 Sail,” “The Angel,’’ “The Prayer,” every 
 Russian child knows by heart. 
 
 When we come to consider the qualities of 
 Lermontov’s romantic work, and ask ourselves 
 in what it differs from the romanticism of the 
 West—from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, 
 Musset, Espronceda—we find that in Ler- 
 montov’s work, as in all Russian work, there 
 is mingled with his lyrical, imaginative, and 
 
LERMONTOV 117 
 
 descriptive powers, a bed-rock of matter-of- 
 fact common-sense, a root that is deeply 
 embedded in reality, in the life of everyday. 
 He never escapes into the “ intense inane ” 
 of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never 
 lost in the dim twilight of Coleridge. Roman- 
 tic he is, but one note of Heine takes us into 
 a different world : ‘for instance, Heine’s quite 
 ordinary adventures in the Harz Mountains 
 convey a spell and glamour that takes us 
 over a borderland that Lermontov never 
 crossed. 
 
 Nothing could be more splendid than 
 Lermontovy’s descriptions; but they are, com- 
 pared with those of Western poets, concrete, 
 as sharp as views in a camera obscura. He 
 never ate the roots of “relish sweet, the 
 honey wild and manna dew ”’ of the “ Belle 
 Dame Sans Merci ’’; he wrote of places where 
 Kubla Khan might have wandered, of “ an- 
 cestral voices prophesying war,” but one has 
 only to quote that line to see that Lermontov’s 
 poetic world, compared with Coleridge’s, is 
 solid fact beside intangible dream. 
 
 - Compared even with Musset and Victor 
 Hugo, how much nearer the earth Lermontov 
 is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealt 
 
118 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 with just the same themes; but in Lermontov, 
 the most splendid painter of mountains 
 imaginable, you never hear 
 
 ** Le vent qui vient 4 travers la montagne,” 
 
 and you know that it will never drive the 
 Russian poet to frenzy. On the other hand, 
 you never get Victor Hugo’s extravagance 
 and absurdities. Or take Musset; Musset 
 dealt with romantic themes s2 quis alius ; but 
 when he deals with a subject like Don Juan, 
 which of all subjects belonged to the age of 
 Pushkin and Lermontov, he writes lines like 
 these— 
 
 “* Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin 
 d’autrui; 
 
 Kt ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son 4me, 
 
 Comme un luth éolien, aux lévres de la nuit.” 
 
 Here again we are confronted with a different 
 kind of imagination. Or take a bit of sheer 
 description— 
 
 ‘“* Pale comme l’amour, et de pleurs arrosée, ° 
 La nuit aux pieds d’argent descend dans la 
 rosée.”’ 
 
 You never find the Russian poet impersonat- 
 
LERMONTOV 119 
 
 ing nature like this, and creating from objects 
 such as the “ yellow bees in the ivy bloom ” 
 _ forms more real than living man. The objects 
 themselves suffice. Lermontov sang of dis- 
 appointed love over and over again, but never 
 did he create a single image such as— 
 
 ** Elle aurait aimé, si l’orgueil 
 Pareil & la lampe inutile 
 Qu’on allume prés d’un cercueil, 
 N’eut veillé sur son coeur stérile.” 
 
 In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; 
 but Byron was far less romantic and far less 
 imaginative than Lermontov, although he 
 invented Byronism, and shattered the crumb- 
 ling walls of the eighteenth century that 
 surrounded the city of romance, and dallied 
 with romantic themes in his youth. All his 
 best work, the finest passages of Childe 
 Harold, and the whole of Don Juan, were 
 slices of his own life and observation, choses 
 vues ; he never created a single character that 
 was not a reflection of himself; and he never 
 entered into the city whose walls he had 
 stormed, and where he had planted his flag. 
 This does not mean that Lermontov is 
 inferior to the Western romantic poets. It 
 
120 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 simply means that the Russian poet is—and 
 one might add the Russian poets are—different. 
 And, indeed, it is this very difference,—what 
 he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his 
 composition,—that constitutes his unique ex- 
 cellence. So far from its being a vice, he made it 
 into his especial virtue. Lermontov sometimes, 
 in presenting a situation and writing a poem 
 on a fact, presents that situation and that 
 fact without exaggeration, emphasis, adorn- 
 ment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any 
 kind, in the language of everyday life, and at 
 the same time he achieves poetry. This was 
 Wordsworth’s ideal, and he fulfilled it. 
 
 A case in point is his long poem on the 
 Oprichnik, which has been mentioned; and 
 some of the most striking examples of this 
 unadorned and realistic writing are to be 
 found in his lyrics. In the “‘ Testament,” for. 
 example, where a wounded officer gives his 
 last instructions to his friend who is going 
 home on leave— 
 
 **T want to be alone with you, 
 A moment quite alone. 
 The minutes left to me are few, 
 They say Ill soon be gone. 
 
LERMONTOV 121 
 
 And you’ll be going home on leave, 
 Then say ... but why? I do believe 
 There’s not a soul, who’ll greatly care 
 To hear about me over there. 
 
 And yet if some one asks you there, 
 Let us suppose they do— 
 Tell them a bullet hit me here, 
 The chest,—and it went through. 
 And say I died and for the Tsar, 
 And say what fools the doctors are ;— 
 And that I shook you by the hand, 
 And thought about my native land. 
 
 My father and my mother, too! 
 They may be dead by now; 
 To tell the truth, it wouldn’t do 
 To grieve them anyhow. 
 If one of them is living, say 
 I’m bad at writing home, and they 
 Have sent us to the front, you see,— 
 And that they needn’t wait for me. 
 
 We had a neighbour, as you know, 
 And you remember I 
 
 And she . . . How very long ago 
 It is we said good-bye ! 
 
122 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 She won’t ask after me, nor care, 
 But tell her ev’rything, don’t spare 
 Her empty heart; and let her cry ;— 
 To her it doesn’t signify.” 
 
 The language is the language of ordinary 
 everyday conversation. Every word the officer 
 says might have been said by him in ordinary 
 life, and there is not a note that jars ; the speech 
 is the living speech of conversation without 
 being slang: and the result is a poignant 
 piece of poetry. Another perhaps still more 
 beautiful and touching example is the cradle- 
 song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, 
 in which again every word has the native 
 savour and homeliness of a Cossack woman’s 
 speech, and every feeling expressed is one 
 that she would have felt. A third example is 
 ** Borodino,”’ an account of the famous battle 
 told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. 
 Lermontov’s fishes never talk like big whales. 
 
 All Russian poets have this gift of reality 
 of conception and simplicity of treatment in 
 a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none has 
 it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. 
 The difference between Pushkin’s style and 
 Lermontov’s is that, when you read Pushkin, 
 
LERMONTOV 123 
 
 you think: “‘ How perfectly and how simply 
 that is said! How in the world did he 
 do it?” You admire the “magic hand of 
 chance.” In reading Lermontov at his 
 simplest and best, you do not think about 
 the style at all, you simply respond to what 
 is said, and the style escapes notice in 
 its absolute appropriateness. Thus, what 
 Matthew Arnold said about Byron and Words- 
 worth is true about Lermontov—there are 
 moments when Nature takes the pen from 
 his hand and writes for him. 
 
 In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; 
 but there is a great deal that is flat and 
 sullen. But if one reviews the great amount 
 of work he produced in his short life, one is 
 struck, not by its variety, as in the case of 
 Pushkin,—it is, on the contrary, limited and 
 monotonous in subject,—but by his authentic 
 lyrical inspiration, by the strength, the in- 
 tensity, the concentration of his genius, the 
 richness of his imagination, the wealth of 
 his palette, his gorgeous colouring and the 
 high level of his strong square musical verse. 
 And perhaps more than by anything else, 
 one is struck by the blend in his nature 
 and his work which has just been discussed, 
 
124 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of romantic imagination and stern reality, of 
 soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as 
 though we had before us the temperament of 
 a Thackeray with the wings of a Shelley. 
 Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you 
 take him, one of the most astonishing figures, 
 and certainly the greatest purely lyrical 
 Erscheinung in Russian literature. 
 
 With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the 
 springtide of national song that began in the 
 reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for 
 the only poet he left behind him did not 
 survive him long. This was his contemporary 
 Ko.tsov (1809-42), the greatest of Russian 
 folk-poets. The son of a cattle-dealer, after 
 a fitful and short-lived primary education at 
 the district school of Voronezh, he adopted 
 his father’s trade, and by a sheer accident a 
 cultivated young man of Moscow came across 
 him and his verses, and raised funds for their 
 publication. 
 
 Koltsov’s verse paints peasant life as it is, 
 without any sentimentality or rhetoric; it is 
 described from the inside, and not from the 
 outside. This is the great difference between 
 Koltsov and other popular poets who came 
 later. Moreover, he caught and reproduced 
 
LERMONTOV 125 
 
 the true Volkston in his lyrics, so that they are 
 indistinguishable in accent from real folk- 
 poetry. Koltsov sings of the woods, and the 
 rustling rye, of harvest time and sowing; the 
 song of the love-sick girl reaping; the lonely 
 grave; the vague dreams and desires of the 
 peasant’s heart. His pictures have the dignity 
 and truth of Jean Francois Millet, and his 
 ** lyrical cry ” is as authentic as that of Burns. 
 His more literary poems are like Burns’ 
 English poems compared with his work in the 
 Scots. But he died the year after Lermontov, 
 of consumption, and with his death the cur- 
 tain was rung down on the first act of Russian 
 literature. When it was next rung up, it was 
 on the age of prose. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE AGE OF PROSE 
 
 WHEN the curtain again rose on Russian 
 literature it was on an era of prose; and 
 the leading protagonist of that era, both 
 by his works of fiction and his dramatic 
 work, was NicHoLas GoGoL [1809-52]. It is 
 true that in the thirties Russia began to 
 produce home-made novels. In Pushkin’s 
 story The Queen of Spades, when somebody 
 asks the old Countess if she wishes to read a 
 Russian novel, she says “‘ A Russian novel? 
 Are there any?” This stage had been 
 passed; but the novels and the plays that 
 were produced at this time until the advent 
 of Gogol have been—deservedly for the 
 greater part—forgotten. And, just as Ler- 
 montov was the successor of Pushkin in the 
 domain of poetry, so in the domain of satire 
 Gogol was the successor of Griboyedov; and 
 in creating a national work he was the heir 
 
 of Pushkin. 
 126 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 127 
 
 Gogol was a Little Russian. He was born 
 in 1809 near Poltava, in the Cossack country, 
 and was brought up by his grandfather, a 
 Cossack; but he left the Ukraine and settled 
 in 1829 in St. Petersburg, where he obtained 
 a place in a Government office. After an 
 unsuccessful attempt to go on the stage, and 
 a brief career as tutor, he was given a pro- 
 fessorship of History; but he failed here also, 
 and finally turned to literature. The publica- 
 tion of his first efforts gained him the acquaint- 
 ance of the literary men of the day, and he 
 became the friend of Pushkin, who proved a 
 valuable friend, adviser, and critic, and urged 
 him to write on the life of the people. He 
 lived in St. Petersburg from 1829 to 1886; 
 and it was perhaps home-sickness which 
 inspired him to write his Little Russian 
 sketches—Evenings on a Farm on the Dikanka,— 
 which appeared in 18382, followed by Mir- 
 gorod, a second series, in 1834. 
 
 Gogol’s temperament was romantic. He 
 had a great deal of the dreamer in him, a 
 touch of the eerie, a delight in the super- 
 ‘natural, an impish fancy that reminds one 
 sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of 
 R. L. Stevenson, as wel] as a deep religious 
 
128 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 vein which was later on to dominate and oust 
 all his other qualities. But, just as we find 
 in the Russian poets a curious mixture of 
 romanticism and realism, of imagination and 
 common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with 
 his imaginative gifts, which were great, there 
 is a realism based on minute observation. 
 In addition to this, and tempering his pene- 
 trating observation, he had a rich streak 
 of humour, a many-sided humour, ranging 
 from laughter holding both its sides, to a 
 delicate and half melancholy chuckle, and in 
 his later work to biting irony. 
 
 In the very first story of his first bock, 
 *‘ The Fair of Sorochinetz,”’ we are plunged into 
 an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way 
 that no other Russian book has ever yet 
 savoured of the soil. We are plunged into the 
 South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is 
 standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at 
 the fair; and the fair, with its noise, its smell 
 and its colour, rises before us as vividly as 
 Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupas- 
 sant, or Scotland from the pages of Stevenson. 
 And just as Andrew Lang once said that : 
 probably only a Scotsman, and a Lowland 
 Scotsman. could know how true to life the 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 129 
 
 characters in Kidnapped were, so it is probable 
 that only a Russian, and indeed a Little Rus- 
 sian, appreciates to the full how true to life are 
 the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the 
 tales of Gogol. And then we at once get that 
 hint of the supernatural which runs like a 
 scarlet thread through all these stories; the 
 rumour that the Red Jacket has been observed 
 in the fair; and the Red Jacket, so the gossips 
 say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned 
 out of Hell as a punishment for some mis- 
 demeanour—probably a goodintention—estab- 
 lished himself in a neighbouring barn, and 
 from home-sickness took to drink, and drank 
 away all his substance; so that he was obliged 
 to pawn his red jacket for a year to a Jew, 
 who sold it before the year was out, where- 
 upon the buyer, recognizing its unholy origin, 
 cut it up into bits and threw it away, 
 after which the Devil appeared in the shape 
 of a pig every year at the fair to find the 
 pieces. It is on this Red Jacket that the 
 story turns. 
 
 In this first volume, the supernatural plays 
 a predominant part throughout; the stories 
 tell of water-nymphs, the Devil, who steals 
 
 the moon, witches, magicians, and men who 
 I 
 
130 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 traffic with the Evil One and lose their souls. 
 In the second series, Mirgorod, realism comes 
 to the fore in the stories of “ The Old- 
 Fashioned Landowners ” and “ The Quarrel 
 of the Two Ivans.”’ These two stories con- 
 tain between them the sum and epitome of 
 the whole of one side of Gogol’s genius, the 
 realistic side. In the one story, “ The Old- 
 Fashioned Landowners,’’ we get the gentle 
 good humour which tells the charming tale 
 of a South Russian Philemon and Baucis, 
 their hospitality and kindliness, and the lone- 
 liness of Philemon when Baucis is taken away, 
 told with the art of La Fontaine, and with 
 many touches that remind one of Dickens. 
 The other story, “ The Quarrel of the Two 
 Ivans,’’ who are bosom friends and quarrel 
 over nothing, and are, after years, on the 
 verge of making it up when the mere mention 
 of the word “ goose ”’ which caused the quarrel 
 sets alight to it once more and irrevocably, 
 is in Gogol’s richest farcical vein, with just a 
 touch of melancholy. 
 
 And in the same volume, two nouvelles, 
 Tarass Bulba and Viy, sum up between them 
 the whole of the other side of Gogol’s genius. 
 Tarass Bulba, a short historical novel, with 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 131 
 
 its incomparably vivid picture of Cossack life, 
 is Gogol’s masterpiece in the epic vein. It is 
 as strong and as direct as a Border ballad. 
 Viy, which tells of a witch, is the most 
 creepy and imaginative of his supernatural 
 stories. 
 
 Later, he published two more collections of 
 stories: Arabesques (1834) and Tales (1836). 
 In these, poetry, witches, water-nymphs, 
 magicians, devils, and epic adventure are all 
 left behind. The element of the fantastic 
 still subsists, as in the ‘“ Portrait,’? and of the 
 grotesque, as in the story of the major who 
 loses his nose, which becomes a separate 
 personality, and wanders about the town. 
 But his blend of realism and humour comes 
 out strongly in the story of ‘‘ The Carriage,” 
 and his blend of realism and pathos still 
 more strongly in the story of “The Over- 
 coat,’’ the story of a minor public servant 
 who is always shivering and whose dream 
 it is to have a warm overcoat. After years 
 of privation he saves enough money to 
 buy one, and on the first day he wears it, it 
 is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his 
 ghost haunts the streets. This story is the 
 only begetter of the large army of pathetic 
 
132 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 figures of failure that crowd the pages of 
 Russian literature. 
 
 While Gogol had been writing and publishing 
 these tales, he had also been steadily writing 
 for the stage; but here the great difficulty 
 and obstacle was the Censorship, which was 
 almost as severe as it was in England at the 
 end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a 
 curious paradox, the play, which you would 
 have expected the Censorship to forbid before 
 all other plays, The Revisor, or Inspector- 
 General, was performed. This was owing to 
 the direct intervention of the Emperor. The 
 Revisor is the second comic masterpiece of the 
 Russian stage. The plot was suggested to 
 Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an obscure 
 country town hear the startling news that a 
 Government Inspector is arriving incognito 
 to investigate their affairs. A traveller from 
 St. Petersburg—a fine natural liar—is taken 
 for the Inspector, plays up to the part, 
 and gets away just before the arrival of the 
 real Inspector, which is the end of the play. 
 The play is a satire on the Russian bureau- 
 cracy. Almost every single character in it 
 is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and 
 irrelevant hero, with his magnificent talent 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 133 
 
 for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The 
 play at once became a classic, and retains all 
 its vitality and comic force to-day. There is 
 no play which draws a larger audience on 
 holidays in St. Petersburg and Moscow. 
 
 After the production of The Revisor, Gogol 
 left Russia for ever and settled in Rome. He 
 had in his mind a work of great importance 
 on which he had already been working for 
 some time. This was his Dead Souls, his 
 most ambitious work, and his masterpiece. It 
 was Pushkin who gave him the idea of the 
 book. The hero of the book, Chichikov, 
 conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord 
 possessed so many serfs, called “ souls.” 
 A revision took place every ten years, and 
 the landlord had to pay for poll-tax on 
 the ‘‘souls’’ who had died during that period. 
 Nobody looked at the lists between the 
 periods of revision. Chichikov’s idea was to 
 take over the dead souls from the landlord, 
 who would, of course, be delighted to be rid 
 of the fictitious property and the real tax, 
 to register his purchases, and then to mortgage 
 at a bank at St. Petersburg or Moscow, the 
 *“ souls,” which he represented as being in 
 some place in the Crimea, and thus make 
 
134 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 money enough to buy “souls” of, his own. 
 
 The book tells of the adventures of Chichikov 
 as he travels over Russia in search of dead 
 ** souls,” and is, like Mr. Pickwick’s adventures, 
 an Odyssey, introducing us to every kind and 
 manner of man and woman. The book was 
 to be divided in three parts. The first 
 part appeared in 1842. Gogol went on 
 working at the second and third parts until 
 1852, when he died. He twice threw the 
 second part of the work into the fire when it 
 was finished; so that all we possess is the 
 first part, and the second part printed from an 
 incomplete manuscript. The second part was 
 certainly finished when he destroyed it, and 
 it is probable that the third part was sketched. 
 He had intended in the second part to work 
 out the moral regeneration of Chichikov, and 
 to give to the world his complete message. 
 Persecuted by a dream he was unable to realize 
 and an ambition which he was not able to 
 fulfil, Gogol was driven inwards, and his natural 
 religious feeling grew more intense and made 
 him into an ascetic and a recluse. This break 
 in the middle of his career is characteristic of 
 Russia. Tolstoy, of course, furnishes the most 
 typical example of the same thing. But it is 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 135 
 
 a common Russian characteristic for men 
 midway in a successful career to turn aside 
 from it altogether, and seek consolation in 
 the things which are not of this world. 
 Gogol’s Dead Souls made a deep impression 
 upon educated Russia. It pleased the en- 
 thusiasts for Western Europe by its reality, 
 its artistic conception and execution, and by its 
 social ideas; and it pleased the Slavophile 
 Conservatives by its truth to life, and by its 
 smell of Russia. When the first chapter was 
 read aloud to Pushkin, he said, when Gogol 
 had finished: “God, what a sad country 
 Russia is!” And it is certainly true, that 
 amusing as the book is, inexpressibly comic 
 as so many of the scenes are, Gogol does 
 not flatter his country or his countrymen; 
 and when Russians read it at the time it 
 appeared, many must have been tempted 
 to murmur “ doux pays !”—as they would, 
 indeed, now, were a writer with the genius 
 of a Gogol to appear and describe the ad- 
 ventures of a modern Chichikov; for, though 
 circumstances may be entirely different, al- 
 though there are no more “souls” to be 
 bought or sold, Chichikov is still alive— 
 and as Gogol said, there was probably not 
 
136 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 one of his readers who after an honest self- 
 examination, would not wonder if he had 
 not something of Chichikov in him, and who 
 if he were to meet an acquaintance at that 
 moment, would not nudge his companion and 
 say: “There goes Chichikov.” ‘‘ And who 
 and what is Chichikov?”’ Theansweris: “A 
 scoundrel.’ But such an entertaining scoun- 
 drel, so abject, so shameless, so utterly devoid 
 of self-respect, such a magnificent liar, so 
 plausible an impostor, so ingenious a cheat, 
 that he rises from scoundrelism almost to 
 greatness. 
 
 There is, indeed, something of the greatness 
 of Falstaff in this trafficker of dead “ souls.” 
 His baseness is almost sublime. Hein any 
 case merits a place in the gallery of humanity’s 
 typical and human rascals, where Falstaff, 
 Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign. 
 He has the great saving merit of being human; 
 nor can he be accused of hypocrisy. His 
 coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every 
 ‘“* decent man,” is worthy of the creator of 
 Sam Weller. But what distinguishes Gogol 
 in his Dead Souls from the great satirists of 
 other nations, and his satire from the sacva 
 indignatio of Swift, for instance, is that, after 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 137 
 
 laying bare to the bones the rascality of his 
 hero, he turns round on his audience and tells 
 them that there is no cause for indignation ; 
 Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling passion 
 —gain; perhaps, indeed, in the chill exist- 
 ence of a Chichikov, there may be something 
 which will one day cause us to humble our- 
 selves on our knees and in the dust before the 
 Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with 
 indulgence; his sleepless observation is tem- 
 pered by fundamental charity. He sees what 
 is mean and common clearer than any one, 
 but he does not infer from it that life, or man- 
 kind, or the world is common or mean. He 
 infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no 
 lower morally than he would put Napoleon, 
 Harpagon, or Don Juan—all of them victims 
 of a ruling passion, and all of them great by 
 reason of it—for Chichikov is also great in 
 rascality, just as Harpagon was great in 
 avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. 
 And this large charity blent with biting irony 
 is again peculiarly Russian. 
 
 Dead Souls is a deeper book than any of 
 Gogol’s early work. It is deep in the same 
 way as Don Quixote is deep; and like Don 
 Quixote it makes boys laugh, young men 
 
138 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 think, and old men weep. Apart from its 
 philosophy and ideas, Dead Souls had a great 
 influence on Russian literature as a work of 
 art. Just as Pushkin set Russian poetry free 
 from the high-flown and the conventional, so 
 did Gogo] set Russian fiction free from the 
 dominion of the grand style. He carried 
 Pushkin’s work—the work which Pushkin 
 had accomplished in verse and adumbrated 
 in prose—much further; and by depicting 
 ordinary life, and by writing a novel without 
 any love interest, with a Chichikov for a 
 hero, he created Russian realism. He de- 
 scribed what he saw without flattery and 
 without exaggeration, but with the masterly 
 touch, the instinctive economy, the sense of 
 selection of a great artist. 
 
 This, at the time it was done, was a revolu- 
 tion. Nobody then would have dreamed it 
 possible to write a play or a novel without 
 a love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed 
 to Russia that there was such a thing as 
 Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one 
 better, revealed the fascination, the secret 
 and incomprehensible power that lay in the 
 flat monotony of the Russian country, and the 
 inexhaustible source of humour, absurdity, 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 139 
 
 irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the 
 everyday life of the ordinary people. So 
 that, however much his contemporaries might 
 differ as to the merits or demerits, the harm 
 or the beneficence, of his work, he left his 
 nation with permanent and classic models of 
 prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin 
 had bequeathed to them permanent models 
 of verse. 
 
 Gogol wrote no more fiction after Dead 
 Souls. In 1847 Passages from a Correspond- 
 ence with a Friend was published, which 
 created a sensation, because in the book 
 Gogol preached submission to the Govern- 
 ment, both spiritual and temporal. The 
 Western enthusiasts and the Liberals in 
 general were highly disgusted. One can 
 understand their disgust; it is less easy to 
 understand their surprise; for Gogol had 
 never pretended to be a Liberal. He showed 
 up the evils of Bureaucracy and the follies and 
 weaknesses of Bureaucrats, because they were 
 there, just as he showed up the stinginess 
 of misers and the obstinacy of old women. 
 But it is quite as easy for a Conservative 
 to do this as it is for a Liberal, and quite as 
 easy for an orthodox believer as for an atheist. 
 
140 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 But Gogol’s contemporaries had not realized 
 the tempest that had been raging for a long 
 time in Gogol’s soul, and which he kept to 
 himself. He had always been religious, and 
 now he became exclusively religious; he made 
 a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; he spent his 
 substance in charity, especially to poor 
 students; and he lived in asceticism until he 
 died, at the age of forty-three. What a waste, 
 one is tempted to say—and how often one is 
 tempted to say this in the annals of Russian 
 literature—and yet, one wonders ! 
 
 What we possess of the second part of 
 Dead Souls is in Gogol’s best vein, and of 
 course one cannot help bitterly regretting that 
 the rest was destroyed or possibly never 
 written; but one wonders whether, had he 
 not had within him the intensity of feeling 
 which led him ultimately to renounce art, 
 he would have been the artist that he was; 
 whether he would have been capable of creat- 
 ing so many-coloured a world of characters, 
 and whether the soil out of which those works 
 grew was not in reality the kind of soil out 
 of which religious renunciation was at last 
 bound to flower. However that may be, 
 Gogol left behind him a rich inheritance. He 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 141 
 
 is one of the great humorists of European 
 literature, and whoever gives England a 
 really fine translation of his work, will do 
 his country a service. Mérimée places Gogol 
 among the best English humorists. His 
 humour and his pathos were closely allied; 
 but there is no acidity in his irony. His work 
 may sometimes sadden you, but (as in the 
 case of Krylov’s two pigeons) it will never 
 bore you, and it will never leave you with a 
 feeling of stale disgust or a taste as of sharp 
 alum, for his work is based on charity, and it 
 has in its form and accent the precious gift 
 of charm. Gogol is an author who will always 
 be loved even as much as he is admired, and 
 his stories are a boon to the young; to 
 many a Russian boy and girl the golden gates 
 of romance have been opened by Gogol, the 
 destroyer of Russian romanticism. the in- 
 augurator of Russian realism. 
 
 Side by side with fiction, another element 
 grew up in this age of prose, namely criticism. 
 Karamzin in the twenties had been the first 
 to introduce literary criticism, and critical 
 appreciations of Pushkin’s work appeared 
 from time to time in the European Messenger. 
 PRINCE VyAzEMSsKy, whose literary activity 
 
142 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 lasted from 1808-78, was a critic as well 
 as a poet and a satirist, a fine example of the 
 type of great Russian nobles so frequent in 
 Russian books, who were not only satur- 
 ated with culture but enriched literature with 
 their work, and carried on the tradition of 
 cool, clear wit, clean expression, and winged 
 phrase that we find in Griboyedov. PoLEvoy, 
 a self-educated man o! humble extraction, 
 was the first professional journalist, and 
 created the tradition of violent and fiery 
 polemics, which has lasted till this day in 
 Russian journalism. But the real founder of 
 Russian esthetic, literary, and journalistic 
 criticism was Bernsky (1811-1847). 
 
 Like Polevoy, he was of humble extraction 
 and almost entirely self-educated. He lived 
 in want and poverty and ill-health. His life 
 was a long battle against every kind of 
 difficulty and obstacle; his literary produc- 
 tion was more than hampered by the Censor-— 
 ship, but his influence was far-reaching and 
 deep. He created Russian criticism, and 
 after passing through several phases—a Ger- 
 man phase of Hegelian philosophy, Gallo- 
 phobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and 
 Goethe and for objective art, a French 
 
Eee << =” 
 
 THE AGE OF PROSE 143 
 
 phase of enthusiasm for art as practised in 
 France, ended finally in a didactic phase of 
 which the watchword was that Life was more 
 important than Art. 
 
 The first blossoms of the new generation 
 of writers, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Herzen, 
 and others, grew up under his encouragement. 
 He expounded Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, 
 Griboyedov, Zhukovsky and the writers of the 
 past. His judgments have remained authori- 
 tative; but some of his final judgments, which 
 were unshaken for generations, such as for 
 instance his estimates of Pushkin and Lermon- 
 tov, were much biassed and coloured by his 
 didacticism. He burnt what he had adored 
 in the case of Gogol, who, like Pushkin, became 
 for him too much of an artist, and not enough 
 of asocial reformer. Whatever phase Belinsky 
 went through, he was passionate, impulsive, 
 and violent, incapable of being objective, or of 
 doing justice to an opponent, or of seeing two 
 sides to a question. He was a polemical and 
 fanatical knight errant, the prophet and 
 propagandist of Western influence, the bitter 
 enemy of the Slavophiles. 
 
 The didactic stamp which he gave to Russian 
 zesthetic and literary criticism has remained 
 
144 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 on it ever since, and differentiates it from the 
 literary and esthetic criticism of the rest of 
 Europe, not only from that school of criticism 
 which wrote and writes exclusively under the 
 banner of ‘*‘ Art for Art’s Sake,” but from 
 those Western critics who championed the 
 importance of moral ideas in literature, just as 
 ardently as he did himself, and who deprecated 
 the theory of Art for Art’s sake just as strongly. 
 Thus it is that, from the beginning of Russian 
 criticism down to the present day, a truly 
 objective criticism scarcely exists in Russian 
 literature. Austhetic criticism becomes a 
 political weapon. “ Are you in my camp?” 
 if so, you are a good writer. ‘Are you in 
 my opponent’s camp?” then your god-gifted 
 genius is mere dross. 
 
 The reason of this has been luminously stated 
 by Professor Briickner: ‘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 freedom of thought, the only 
 means of propagating higher ideas. He ex- 
 pected of his country’s literature not merely 
 esthetic recreation; he placed it at the service 
 of his aspirations. . .. Hence the striking 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 145 
 
 partiality, nay unfairness, displayed by the 
 Russians towards the most perfect works of 
 their own literature, when they did not re- 
 spond to the aims or expectations of their 
 party or their day.” And speaking of the 
 criticism that was produced after 1855, he 
 says: “ This criticism is often, in spite of all 
 its giftedness, its ardour and fire, only a 
 mockery of all criticism. The work only 
 serves as an example on which to hang the 
 critics’ own views. . .. This is no reproach; we 
 simply state the fact, and fully recognize the 
 necessity and usefulness of the method. With 
 a backward society, . . . this criticism was a 
 means which was sanctified by the end, the 
 spreading of free opinions. . . . Unhappily, 
 Russian literary criticism has remained till 
 to-day almost solely journalistic, 7. e. didactic 
 and partisan. See how even now it treats 
 the most interesting, exceptional, and mighty 
 of all Russians, Dostoyevsky, 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 
 ofitsowncamp!’’ I quote Professor Briickner, 
 lest I should be myself suspected of being 
 
 partial in this question. The question, per- 
 K 
 
146 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 haps, may admit of further expansion. It is 
 not that the Russian critics were merely con- 
 vinced it was all-important that art should 
 have ideas at the roots of it, and had no 
 _ patience with a merely shallow estheticism. 
 They went further; the ideas had to be of 
 one kind. <A definite political tendency had 
 to be discerned; and if the critic disagreed 
 with that political tendency, then no amount 
 of qualities—not artistic excellence, form, 
 skill, style, not even genius, inspiration, depth, 
 feeling, philosophy—were recognized. 
 
 Herein lies the great difference between 
 Russian and Western critics, between Sainte- 
 Beuve and Belinsky ; between Matthew Arnold 
 and his Russian contemporaries. Matthew 
 Arnold defined the highest poetry as being a 
 criticism of life; but that would not have 
 prevented him from doing justice either to 
 a poet so polemical as Byron, or to a poet so 
 completely unpolitical, so sheerly esthetic 
 as Keats; to Lord Beaconsfield as a novelist, 
 to Mr. Morley or Lord Acton as historians, 
 because their “‘ tendency ”’ or their “‘ politics ” 
 were different from his own. The most 
 biassed of English or French critics is broad- 
 minded compared to a Russian critic. Had 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 147 
 
 Keats been a Russian poet, Belinsky would 
 have swept him away with contempt; Words- 
 worth would have been condemned as re- 
 actionary ; and Swinburne’s politics alone 
 would have been taken into consideration. 
 At the present day, almost ten years after Pro- 
 fessor Briickner wrote his History of Russian 
 Literature, now that the press is more or less 
 free, save for occasional pin-pricks, now that 
 literary output is in any case unfettered, and . 
 the stage freer than it is in England, the same 
 criticism still applies. Russian literary criti- 
 cism is still journalistic. There are and there 
 always have been brilliant exceptions, of 
 course, two of the most notable of which are 
 VoLynsky and MEREZHKOVSKyY; but as arule 
 the political camp to which the writer be- 
 longs is the all-important question ; and I know 
 cases of Russian politicians who have been 
 known to refuse to write, even in foreign re- 
 views, because they disapproved of the “ ten- 
 dency ” of those reviews, the tendency being 
 non-existent—as is generally the case with 
 English reviews,—and the review harbouring 
 opinions of every shade and tendency. You 
 would think that narrow-mindedness could no 
 further go than to refuse to let your work 
 
148 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 appear in an impartial organ, lest in that same 
 organ an opinion opposed to your own might 
 appear also. But the cause of this is the same 
 now as it used to be, namely that, in spite of 
 there being a greater measure of freedom in 
 Russia, political liberty does not yet exist. 
 Liberty of assembly does not exist; liberty of 
 conscience only partially exists; the press is 
 annoyed and hampered by restrictions; and 
 the great majority of Russian writers are still 
 engaged in fighting for these things, and 
 therefore still ready to sacrifice fairness for 
 the greater end,—the achievement of political 
 freedom. 
 
 Thus criticism in Russia became a question 
 of camps, and the question arises, what were 
 these camps? From the dawn of the age of 
 pure literature, Russia was divided into two 
 great camps: The Slavophiles and _ the 
 Propagandists of Western Ideas. 
 
 The trend towards the West began with 
 the influence of Joseph Le Maistre and the 
 St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 18386, CHAapaAry, 
 an ex-guardsman who had served in the 
 Russian campaign in France and travelled a 
 great deal in Western Kurope, and who shared 
 Joseph Le Maistre’s theory that Russia had 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 149 
 
 suffered by her isolation from the West and 
 through the influence of the former Byzantine 
 Empire, published the first of his Lettres sur 
 la Philosophie de Histoire in the Telescope of 
 Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. 
 He glorified the tradition and continuity of the 
 Catholic world. He said that Russia existed, 
 as it were, outside of time, without the tradition 
 either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that 
 the universal culture of the human race had 
 not touched it. ‘“‘ The atmosphere of the 
 West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, 
 order; we have given nothing to the world 
 and taken nothing from it; ... we have 
 not contributed anything to the progress of 
 humanity, and we have disfigured everything 
 we have taken from that progress. Hostile 
 circumstances have alicnated us from the 
 general trend in which the social idea of 
 Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise 
 our faith, and begin our education over again 
 on another basis.”’ The expression of these 
 incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the 
 exile of the editor of the Telescope, the dis- 
 missal of the Censor, and in the official 
 declaration of Chaadaev’s insanity, who was 
 put under medical supervision for a year. 
 
150 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Chaadaev made disciples who went further 
 than he did, Princess VoLKoNSKy, the 
 authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox 
 Church, and Prince GAcaRIn, who both be- 
 came Catholics. This was one branch of Wes- 
 ternism. Another branch, to which Belinsky 
 belonged, had no Catholic leanings, but 
 sought for salvation in socialism and atheism. 
 The most important figure in this branch is 
 ALEXANDER HERZEN (1812-1870). His real 
 name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy 
 nobleman, married in Germany, but did not 
 legalize his marriage in Russia, so his children 
 took their mother’s name. 
 
 Herzen’s career belongs rather to the history 
 of Russia than to the history of Russian litera- 
 ture; were it not that, besides being one of the 
 greatest and most influential personalities of 
 his time, he was a great memoir-writer. He 
 began, after a mathematical training at the 
 University, with fiction, of which the best 
 example is a novel Who is to Blame? which 
 paints the génie sans portefeuille of the 
 period that Turgenev was so fond of depicting. 
 Herzen was exiled on account of his oral pro- 
 paganda, first to Perm, and then to Vyatka. 
 In 1847, he left Russia for ever, and lived 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE Pol 
 
 abroad for the rest of his life, at first in Paris, 
 and aiterwards in London, where he edited a 
 newspaper called The Bell. 
 
 Herzen was a Socialist. Western Europe 
 he considered to be played out. He looked 
 upon Socialism as a new religion and a new 
 form of Christianity, which would be to the 
 new world what Christianity had been to the 
 old. The Russian peasants would play the 
 part of the Invasion of the Barbarians; and 
 the functions of the State would be taken 
 over by the Russian Communes on a basis of 
 voluntary and mutual agreement—the prin- 
 ciple of the Commune, of sharing all posses- 
 sions in common, being so near the funda- 
 mental principle of Christianity. 
 
 ** A thinking Russian,” he wrote, “is the 
 most independent being in the world. What 
 can stop him? Consideration for the past? 
 But what is the starting-point of modern 
 Russian history if it be not a total negation 
 of nationalism and tradition? . . . What do 
 we care, disinherited minors that we are, for 
 the duties you have inherited? Can your 
 worn-out morality satisfy us? Your morality 
 which is neither Christian nor human, which 
 is used only in copybooks and for the ritual 
 
152 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of the law?” Again: ‘“‘ We are free because 
 we begin with our own liberation; we are 
 independent; we have nothing to lose or to 
 honour. A Russian will never be a protestant, 
 or follow the juste milieu... our civiliza- 
 tion is external, our corrupt morals quite 
 crude.” 
 
 The great point Herzen was always making 
 was that Russia had escaped the baleful tradi- 
 tion of Western Europe, and the hereditary 
 infection of Western corruption. Thus, in his 
 disenchantment with Western society and 
 his enthusiasm for the communal ownership 
 of land, he was at one with the Slavophiles; 
 where he differed from them was in accepting 
 certain Western ideas, and in thinking that a 
 new order of things, a new heaven and 
 earth, could be created by a social revolution, 
 which should be carried out by the Slavs. 
 His influence—he was one of the precursors 
 of Nihilism, for the seed he sowed, falling on 
 the peculiar soil where it fell, produced the 
 whirlwind as a harvest—belongs to history. 
 What belongs to literature are his memoirs, 
 My Past and my Thoughts (Byloe 1 Dumy), 
 which were written between 1852 and 1855. 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 153 
 
 These memoirs of everyday life and encounters 
 with all sorts and conditions of extraordinary 
 men are in their subject-matter as exciting 
 as a novel, and, in their style, on a level with 
 the masterpieces of Russian prose, through 
 their subtle psychology, interest, wit, and 
 artistic form. 
 
 Herzen lived to see his ideas bearing fruit 
 in the one way which of all others he would 
 have sought to avoid, namely in “‘ militancy ” 
 and terrorism. When in 1866, an attempt was 
 made by Karakozov to assassinate Alex- 
 ander II, and Herzen wrote an article repudiat- 
 ing all political assassinations as barbarous, the 
 revolutionary parties solemnly denounced him 
 and his newspaper. The Bell, which had 
 already lost its popularity owing to Herzen’s 
 pro-Polish sympathies in 18638, ceased to have 
 any circulation. Thus he lived to see his vast 
 hopes shattered, the seed he had sown bearing 
 a fruit he distrusted, his dreams of regenera- 
 tion burst like a bubble, his ideals exploited 
 by unscrupulous criminals. He died in 1870, 
 leaving a name which is as great in Russian 
 literature as it is remarkable in Russian 
 history. 
 
154 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Turning now to the Slavophiles, their idea 
 was that Russia was already in possession of 
 the best possible institutions,—orthodoxy, 
 autocracy, and communal ownership, and 
 that the West had everything to learn from 
 Russia. They pointed to the evils arising 
 from the feudal and aristocratic state, the 
 system of primogeniture in the West, the 
 higher legal status of women in Russia, and 
 the superiority of a communal system, which 
 leads naturally to a Consultative National 
 Assembly with unanimous decisions, over 
 the parliaments and party systems of the 
 West. 
 
 The leader of the Slavophiles was Hom- 
 YAKOV, a man of great culture; a dialectician, 
 a poet, and an impassioned defender of 
 orthodoxy. The best of his lyrics, which are 
 inspired by a profound love of his country 
 and belief in it, have great depth of feeling. 
 Besides Homyakov, there were other poets, 
 such as TyuTcHEV and Ivan AxsaKkov. Just 
 as the camp of Reform produced in Herzen 
 a supreme writer of memoirs, that of the 
 Slavophiles also produced a unique memoir 
 writer in the Serce Axsaxov, the father of 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 155 
 
 the poet (1791-1859), who published his 
 Family Chronicle in_1856, and who describes 
 the life of the end of the eighteenth century, 
 and the age of Alexander. This book, one of 
 the most valuable historical documents in 
 Russian, and a priceless collection of bio- 
 graphical portraits, is also a gem of Russian 
 prose, exact in its observation, picturesque 
 and perfectly balanced in its diction. 
 
 Aksakov remembered with unclouded dis- 
 tinctness exactly what he had seen in his child- 
 hood, which he spent in the district of Orenburg. 
 He paints the portraits of his grandfather and 
 his great-aunt. We see every detail of the 
 life of a backwoodsman of the days of 
 Catherine II. We see the noble of those days, 
 simple and rustic in his habits as a peasant, 
 almost entirely unlettered, and yet a gentle- 
 man through and through, unswerving in 
 maintaining the standard of morals and 
 traditions which he considers due to his ancient 
 lineage. We see every hour of the day of his 
 life in the country; we hear all the details of 
 the family life, the marriage of his son, the 
 domestic troubles of his sister. 
 
 What strikes one most, perhaps, besides 
 
156 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the contrast between the primitive simplicity 
 of the habits and manners of the life described, 
 and the astoundingly gentlemanlike feelings of 
 the man who leads this quiet and rustic life in 
 remote and backward conditions, is that there 
 is not a hint or suspicion of anything anti- 
 quated in the sentiments and opinions we see 
 at play. The story of Aksakov’s grandfather 
 might be that of any country gentleman in 
 any country, at any epoch, making allowances 
 for a certain difference in manners and 
 customs and conditions which were peculiar 
 to the epoch in question, the existence of 
 serfdom, for instance—although here, too, the 
 feeling with regard to manners described is 
 startlingly like the ideal of good manners of 
 any epoch, although the meurs are sometimes 
 different. The story is as vivid and as inter- 
 esting as that of any novel, as that of the 
 novels of Russian writers of genius, and it 
 has the additional value of being true. And 
 yet we never feel that Aksakov has a thought 
 of compiling a historical document for the 
 sake of its historical interest. He is making 
 history unawares, just as Monsieur Jourdain 
 talked prose without knowing it; and, 
 
THE AGE OF PROSE 157 
 
 whether he was aware of it or not, he wrote 
 perfect prose. No more perfect piece of 
 prose writing exists. The style flows on like 
 a limpid river; there is nothing superfluous, 
 and not a hesitating touch. It is impossible 
 to put down the narrative after once be- 
 ginning it, and I have heard of children who 
 read it like a fairy-tale. One has the sensa- 
 tion, in reading it, of being told a story by 
 some enchanting nurse, who, when the usual 
 question, “Is it true?” is put to her, could 
 truthfully answer, “‘ Yes, it is true.’ The 
 pictures of nature, the portraits of the people, 
 all the good and all the bad of the good and 
 the bad old times pass before one with epic 
 simplicity and the magic of a fairy-tale. One 
 is spellbound by the charm, the dignity, the 
 good-nature, the gentle, easy accent of the 
 speaker, in whom one feels convinced not only 
 that there was nothing common nor mean, 
 but to whom nothing was common or mean, 
 who was a gentleman by character as well 
 as by lineage, one of God’s as well as one of 
 Russia’s nobility. 
 
 There is no book in Russian which, for its 
 entrancing interest as well as for its historical 
 
158 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 value, so richly deserves translation into 
 English; only such a translation should be 
 made by a stylist—that is, by a man who 
 knows how to speak and write his mother 
 tongue perspicuously and simply. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE EPOCH OF REFORM 
 
 For seven years after the death of Belinsky 
 in 1848, all literary development ceased. This 
 period was the darkest hour before the dawn 
 of the second great renascence of Russian 
 literature. Criticism was practically non- 
 existent; the Slavophiles were forbidden to 
 write; the Westernizers were exiled. An 
 increased severity of censorship, an extreme 
 suspicion and drastic measures on the part 
 of the Government were brought about by 
 the fears which the Paris revolution of 1848 
 had caused. The Westernizers felt the 
 effects of this as much as the Slavophiles; 
 a group of young literary men, schoolmasters 
 and officers, the Petrashevtsy, called after 
 their leader, a Foreign Office official Perra- 
 SHEVSKy, met together on Fridays and de- 
 bated on abstract subjects; they discussed 
 the emancipation of the serfs, read Fourier 
 
 and Lamennais, and considered the estab- 
 159 
 
160 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 lishment of a secret press: the scheme of a 
 popular propaganda was thought of, but 
 nothing had got beyond talk—and the whole 
 thing was in reality only talk—when. the 
 society was discovered by the police and its 
 members were punished with the utmost 
 severity. Twenty-one of them were con- 
 demned to death, among whom was Dostoyev- 
 sky, who, being on the army list, was accused 
 of treason. They were reprieved on the scaf- 
 fold; some sent into penal servitude in Siberia, 
 and some into the army. This marked one of 
 the darkest hours in the history of Russian 
 literature. And from this date until 1855, 
 complete stagnation reigned. In 1855 the 
 Kmperor Nicholas died during the Crimean 
 War; and with the accession of his son 
 Alexander ITI, a new era dawned on Russian 
 literature, the Era of the Great Reforms. 
 The Crimean War and the reforms which 
 followed it—the emancipation of the serfs, 
 the creation of a new judicial system, and 
 the foundation of local self-government— 
 stabbed the Russian soul into life, relieved 
 it of its gag, produced a great outburst of 
 literature which enlarged and enriched the 
 literature of the world, and gave to the 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 161 
 
 world three of its greatest novelists : Turgenev, 
 Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. 
 
 Ivan TuRGENEV (1816-83), whose name is 
 of Tartar origin, came of an old family which 
 had frequently distinguished itself in the 
 annals of Russian literature by a fearless 
 outspokenness. He began his literary career 
 by writing verse (1843); but, like Maupassant, 
 he soon understood that verse was not his 
 true vehicle, and in 1847 gave up writing 
 verse altogether; in that year he published 
 in The Contemporary his first sketch of 
 peasant life, Khor and Kalinych, which after- 
 wards formed part of his Sportsman’s Sketches, 
 twenty-four of which he collected and pub- 
 lished in 1852. The Government rendered 
 Turgenev the same service as it had done to 
 Pushkin, in exiling him to his own country 
 estate for two years. When, after the two 
 years, this forced exile came to an end, he 
 went into another kind of exile of his own 
 accord; he lived at first at Baden, and then 
 in Paris, and only reappeared in Russia from 
 time to time; this accounts for the fact that, 
 although Turgenev belongs chronologically 
 to the epoch of the great reforms, the Russia 
 
 which he paints was really more like the 
 L 
 
162 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Russia before that epoch; and when he tried 
 to paint the Russia that was contemporary to 
 him his work gave rise to much controversy. 
 
 His Rudin was published in 1856, The 
 Nest of Gentlefolk in 1859, On the Eve in 1860, 
 Fathers and Sons in 1862, Smoke in 1867. 
 Turgenev did for Russian literature what 
 Byron did for English literature; he led 
 the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage through- 
 out all Europe. And in Europe his work 
 reaped a glorious harvest of praise. Flaubert 
 was astounded by him, George Sand looked 
 up to him as to a Master, Taine spoke of his 
 work as being the finest artistic production 
 since Sophocles. In Turgenev’s work, Europe 
 not only discovered Turgenev, but it dis- 
 covered Russia, the simplicity and the natural- 
 ness of the Russian character; and this came 
 as a revelation. For the first time, Europe 
 came across the Russian woman whom Push- 
 kin was the first to paint; for the first time 
 Kurope came into contact with the Russian 
 soul; and it was the sharpness of this revela- 
 tion which accounts for the fact of Turgenev 
 having received in the West an even greater 
 meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled 
 to. 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 163 
 
 In Russia, Turgenev attained almost in- 
 stant popularity. His Sportsman’s Sketches 
 made him known, and his Nest of Gentlefolk 
 made him not only famous but universally 
 popular. In 1862 the publication of his 
 masterpiece Fathers and Sons dealt his repu- 
 tation a blow. The revolutionary elements 
 in Russia regarded his hero, Bazarov, as a 
 calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary 
 elements in Russia looked upon Fathers and 
 Sons as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he 
 satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. 
 This, perhaps, could only happen in Russia 
 to this extent; and for the same reason as 
 that which made Russian criticism didactic. 
 The conflicting elements of Russian society 
 were so terribly in earnest in fighting their 
 cause, that any one whom they did not regard 
 as definitely for them was at once considered 
 an enemy, and an impartial delineation of 
 any character concerned in the political 
 struggle was bound to displease both parties. 
 If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must either be 
 a hero or a scoundrel, if either the revolution- 
 aries or the reactionaries were to be pleased. 
 If in England the militant suffragists suddenly 
 had a huge mass of educated opinion behind 
 
164 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 them and a still larger mass of educated public 
 opinion against them, and some one were to 
 draw in a novel an impartial picture of a 
 suffragette, the same thing would happen. 
 On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes 
 are concerned, it has happened in the case 
 of Mr. Wells. But, if Turgenev’s popularity 
 suffered a shock in Russia from which it with 
 difficulty recovered, in Western Europe it 
 went on increasing. Especially in England, 
 Turgenev became the idol of all that was 
 eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a 
 hall-mark of good taste. 
 
 In Russia, Turgenev’s work recovered from 
 the unpopularity caused by his Fathers and 
 Sons when Nihilism became a thing of the 
 past, and revolution took an entirely different 
 shape; but, with the growing up of new 
 generations, his popularity suffered in a 
 different way and for different reasons. A 
 new element came into Russian literature with 
 Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and later with Gorky, 
 and Turgenev’s work began to seem thin and 
 artificial beside the creations of these stronger 
 writers; but in Russia, where Turgenev’s 
 work has the advantage of being read in the 
 original, it had an asset which ensured it a 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 165 
 
 permanent and safe harbour, above and 
 beyond the fluctuations of literary taste, the 
 strife of political parties, and the conflict of 
 social ideals; and that was its art, its poetry, 
 its style, which ensured it a lasting and im- 
 perishable niche among the great classics of 
 Russian literature. And there it stands now. 
 Turgenev’s work in Russia is no longer dis- 
 puted or a subject of dispute. It is taken 
 for granted; and, whatever the younger 
 generation will read and admire, they will 
 always read and admire Turgenev first. His 
 work is a necessary part of the intellectual 
 baggage of any educated man and, especially, 
 of the educated adolescent. 
 
 The position of Tennyson in England offers 
 in a sense a parallel to that of Turgenev in 
 Russia. Tennyson, like Turgenev, enjoyed 
 during his lifetime not only the popularity 
 of the masses, but the appreciation of all that 
 was most eclectic in the country. Then a 
 reaction set in. Now I believe the young 
 generation think nothing of Tennyson at all. 
 And yet nothing is so sure as his permanent 
 place in English literature; and that per- 
 manent place is secured to him by his in- 
 comparable diction. So it is with Turgenev. 
 
166 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 One cannot expect the younger generation 
 to be wildly excited about Turgenev’s ideas, 
 characters, and problems. They belong to an 
 epoch which is dead. At the same time, one 
 cannot help thinking that the most advanced 
 of the symbolist writers would not have been 
 sorry had he happened by chance to write 
 Bezhin Meadow and the Poems in Prose. 
 Just so one cannot help thinking that the 
 most modern of our poets, had he by accident 
 written The Revenge or Tears, Idle Tears, 
 would not have thrown them in the fire ! 
 There is, indeed, something in common 
 between Tennyson and Turgenev. They both 
 have something mid-Victorian in them. They 
 are both idyllic, and both of them landscape- 
 lovers and lords of language. They neither of 
 them had any very striking message to preach ;_ 
 they both of them seem to halt, except on rare 
 occasions, on the threshold of passion; they 
 both of them have a rare stamp of nobility ; and 
 in both of them there is an element of banality. 
 They both seem to a certain extent to be shut 
 off from the world by the trees of old parks, 
 where cultivated people are enjoying the air 
 and the flowers and the shade, and where 
 between the tall trees you get glimpses of 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 167 
 
 silvery landscapes and limpid waters, and 
 soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of 
 course, there is more than this in Turgenev, 
 but this is the main impression. 
 
 Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he 
 describes beautifully from the outside, making 
 you feel its existence, but not convincing you 
 that he felt it himself; but on the other hand 
 what an artist he is! How beautifully his 
 pictures are painted; and how rich he is in 
 poetic feeling ! 
 
 Turgenev is above all things a poet. He 
 carried on the work of Pushkin, and he did 
 for Russian prose what Pushkin did for 
 Russian poetry; he created imperishable 
 models of style. His language has the same 
 limpidity and absence of any blur that we 
 find in Pushkin’s work. His women have 
 the same crystal radiance, transparent sim- 
 plicity, and unaffected strength; his pictures 
 of peasant life, and his country episodes 
 have the same truth to nature; as an artist 
 he had a severe sense of proportion, a per- 
 fect purity of outline, and an absolute har- 
 mony between the thought and the expres- 
 sion. Now that modern Europe and England 
 have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is 
 
168 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 possible that a reaction will set in to the 
 detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a certain 
 extent this reaction has set in in Western 
 Europe, as M. Haumant, one of Turgenev’s 
 ablest critics and biographers, pointed out not 
 long ago. And, as the majority of English- 
 men have not the advantage of reading 
 him in the original, they will be unchecked 
 in this reaction, if it comes about, by their 
 appreciation of what is perhaps most durable 
 in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev ade- 
 quately, it would require an English poet 
 gifted with a sense of form and of words as 
 rare as that of Turgenev himself. However 
 this may be, there is no doubt about the 
 importance of Turgenev in the history of 
 Russian literature, whatever the future genera- 
 tions in Russia or in Europe may think of his 
 work. He was a great novelist besides being 
 a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed 
 his early Sportsman’s Sketches in freshness 
 of inspiration and the perfection of artistic 
 execution. 
 
 His Bezhin Meadow, where the children 
 tell each other bogey stories in the evening, 
 is a gem with which no other European litera- 
 ture has anything to compare. The Singers, 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 169 
 
 Death, and many others are likewise incom- 
 parable. The Nest of Gentlefolk, to which — 
 Turgenev owed his great popularity, is quite 
 perfect of its kind, with its gallery of portraits 
 going back to the eighteenth century and to 
 the period of Alexander I; its lovable, human 
 hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a fit descendant of 
 Pushkin’s Tatiana, radiant as a star. All 
 Turgenev’s characters are alive; but, with 
 the exception of his women and the hero of 
 Fathers and Sons, they are alive in bookland 
 rather than in real life. 
 
 George Meredith’s characters, for instance, 
 are alive, but they belong to a land or rather 
 a planet of his own making, and we should 
 never recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the 
 street, but we do meet women sometimes who 
 remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia 
 Jane. The same is true with regard to 
 Turgeney, although it is not another planet 
 he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch 
 to which his books exclusively belong, and 
 which some critics say never existed at all. 
 That is of no consequence. It exists for us 
 in his work. 
 
 But perhaps what gave rise to accusations 
 of unreality and caricature against Turgenev’s 
 
170 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 characters, apart from the intenser reality 
 of Tolstoy’s creations, by comparison with 
 which Turgenev’s suffered, was that Turgenev, 
 while professing to describe the present, and 
 while believing that he was describing the 
 present, was in reality painting an epoch 
 that was already dead. Rudin, Smoke, and 
 On the Eve have suffered more from the 
 passage of time. Rudin is a pathetic pic- 
 ture of the type that Turgenev was so fond 
 of depicting, the génie sans porte-feuille, a 
 latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his 
 heart with words, and with his eloquence 
 persuade others to believe in him, and suc- 
 ceed even in persuading himself to believe 
 in himself, until the moment for action 
 comes, when he breaks down. The subjects 
 of Smoke and Spring Waters are almost 
 identical; but, whereas Spring Waters is one 
 of the most poetical of Turgenev’s achieve- 
 ments, Smoke seems to-day the most banal, 
 and almost to deserve Tolstoy’s criticism: 
 *“In Smoke there is hardly any love of any- 
 thing, and very little pity; there is only love 
 of light and playful adultery; and therefore 
 the poetry of that novel is repulsive.” On the 
 Eve, which tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 171 
 
 the liberation of his country, suffers from 
 being written at a time when real Russians 
 were hard at work at that very task; and it 
 was on this account that the novel found little 
 favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside 
 the reality. 
 
 It was followed by Turgenev’s master- 
 piece, for which time can only heighten one’s 
 admiration. Fathers and Sons is as beauti- 
 fully constructed as a drama of Sophocles; 
 the events move inevitably to a tragic close. 
 There is not a touch of banality from beginning 
 to end, and not an unnecessary word; the 
 portraits of the old father and mother, the 
 young Kirsanoyv, and all the minor char- 
 acters are perfect; and amidst the trivial 
 crowd, Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the 
 strongest—the only strong character—that 
 Turgenev created, the first Nihilist—for if 
 Turgenev was not the first to invent the word, 
 he was the first to apply it in this sense. 
 
 Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer 
 type that recurs again and again in Russian 
 history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the 
 meek humble type of Ivan Durak. Ler- 
 montov’s Pechorin was in some respects an 
 anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many 
 
172 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Russian rebels. He is the man who denies, 
 to whom art is a silly toy, who detests abstrac- 
 tions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; 
 he believes in nothing; he bows to nothing; 
 he can break, but he cannot bend; he does 
 break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, 
 he retains his invincible pride, and 
 
 “not cowardly he puts off his helmet,” 
 
 and he dies “ valiantly vanquished.” 
 
 In the pages which describe his death Tur- 
 genev reaches the high-water mark of his art, 
 his moving quality, his power, his reserve. 
 For manly pathos they rank among the 
 greatest scenes in literature, stronger than the 
 death of Colonel Newcome and the best of 
 Thackeray. Among English novelists it is, 
 perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such 
 strong, piercing chords, nobler than anything 
 in Daudet or Maupassant, more reserved than 
 anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the 
 great poets, of the tragic pathos of Goethe and 
 Dante. The character of Bazarov, as has been 
 said, created a sensation and endless con- 
 troversy. The revolutionaries thought him a 
 caricature and a libel, the reactionaries a 
 scandalous glorification of the Devil; and im- 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 1738 
 
 partial men such as Dostoyevsky, who knew 
 the revolutionaries at first hand, thought the 
 type unreal. It is possible that Bazarov was 
 not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in 
 any case as a figure in fiction, whatever the 
 fact may be, he lives and will continue to live. 
 
 In Virgin Soil, Turgenev attempted to 
 paint the underground revolutionary move- 
 ment; here, in the opinion of all Russian 
 judges, he failed. The revolutionaries con- 
 sidered their portraits here more unreal than 
 that of Bazarov; the Conservatives were 
 grossly caricatured; the hero Nezhdanov 
 was a type of a past world, another Rudin, 
 and not in the least like—so those who knew 
 them tell us—the revolutionaries of the day. 
 Solomin, the energetic character in the book, 
 was considered as unreal as Nezhdanov. 
 The wife of the reactionary Sipyagin is a 
 pastiche of the female characters of that type 
 in his other books; cleverly drawn, but a 
 completely conventional book character. The 
 redeeming feature in the book is Mariana, the 
 heroine, one of Turgenev’s finest ideal women; 
 and it is full, of course, of gems of descriptive 
 writing. The book was a complete failure, 
 and after this Turgenev went back to writing 
 
174 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 short stories. The result was a great dis- 
 appointment to Turgenev, who had thought 
 that, by writing a novel dealing with actual 
 life, he would please and reconcile all parties. 
 To this later epoch belong his matchless 
 Poems in Prose, one of the latest melodies 
 he sounded, a melody played on one string 
 of the lyre, but whose sweetness contained the 
 essence of all his music. 
 
 Turgenev’s work has a historic as well as 
 an artistic value. He painted the Russian 
 gentry, and the type of gentry that was dis- 
 appearing, as no one else has done. His 
 landscape painting has been dwelt on; one 
 ought, perhaps, to add that, beautiful as it 
 is, it still belongs to the region of conventional 
 landscape painting; his landscape is the 
 orthodox Russian landscape, and is_ that 
 of the age of Pushkin, in which no bird 
 except a nightingale is mentioned, no flower 
 except a rose. This convention was not 
 really broken in prose until the advent of 
 Gorky. 
 
 Reviewing Turgenev’s work as a whole, 
 any one who goes back to his books after a 
 time, and after a course of more modern and 
 rougher, stormier literature, will, I think, be 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 175 
 
 surprised at its excellence and perhaps be 
 inclined to heave a deep sigh of relief. Some 
 of it will appear conventional; he will notice 
 a faint atmosphere of rose-water; he will 
 feel, if he has been reading the moderns, as a 
 traveller feels who, after an exciting but 
 painful journey, through dangerous ways and 
 unpleasant surroundings, suddenly enters a 
 cool garden, where fountains sob between 
 dark cypresses, and swans float majestically 
 on artificial lakes. There is an aroma of 
 syringa in the air; the pleasaunce is artistic- 
 ally laid out, and full of fragrant flowers. 
 But he will not despise that garden for its 
 elegance and its tranquil seclusion, for its 
 trees cast large shadows; the nightingale 
 sings in its thickets, the moon silvers the calm 
 statues, and the sound of music on the waters 
 goes to the heart. Turgenev reminds one of 
 a certain kind of music, beautiful in form, not 
 too passionate and yet full of emotion, Schu- 
 mann’s music, for instance; if Pushkin is the 
 Mozart of Russian literature, Turgenev is the 
 Schumann; not amongst the very greatest, 
 but still a poet, full of inspired lyrical feeling; 
 and a great, a classic artist, the prose Virgil 
 of Russian literature. 
 
176 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 What Turgenev did for the country gentry, 
 GONCHAROV (1812-91) did for the St. 
 Petersburg gentry. The greater part of his 
 work deals with the forties. Goncharov, a 
 noble (dvoryanin) by education, and according 
 to his own account by descent, though accor- 
 ding to another account he was of merchant 
 extraction, entered the Government service, 
 and then went round the world in a frigate, 
 a journey which he described in letters. Of 
 his three novels, The Everyday Story, Oblomov, 
 and The Landslip, Oblomov is the most 
 famous: in it he created a type which became 
 immortal; and Oblomov has passed into the 
 Russian language just as Tartuffe has passed 
 into the French language, or Pecksniff into 
 the English language. A chapter of the book 
 appeared in 1849, and the whole novel in 
 1859. 
 
 Oblomov is the incarnation of what in 
 Russia is called Halatnost, which means the 
 propensity to live in dressing-gown and 
 slippers. It is told of Krylov, who was an 
 Oblomov of real life, and who spent most of his 
 time lying on a sofa, that one day somebody 
 pointed out to him that the nail on which 
 a picture was hanging just over the. sofa 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM Wee 
 
 on which he was lying, was loose, and that the 
 picture would probably fall on his head. “No,” 
 said Krylov, not getting up, “the picture will 
 fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle.” 
 The apathy of Oblomoy, although to the out- 
 ward eye it resembles this mere physical inert- 
 ness, is subtly different. Krylov’s apathy was 
 the laziness of a man whose brain brought 
 forth concrete fruits; and who feels neither 
 the inclination nor the need of any other 
 exercise, either physical or intellectual. Ob- 
 lomov’s apathy is that of a brain seething 
 with the burning desires of a vie intime, 
 which all comes to nothing owing to a kind 
 of spiritual paralysis, ‘‘ une infirmité morale.” 
 It is true he finds it difficult to put on 
 his socks, still more to get up, when he 
 is awake, impossible to change his rooms 
 although the ceiling is falling to bits, and 
 impossible not to lie on the sofa most of the 
 day; but the reason of this obstinate inertia 
 is not mere physical disinclination, it is the 
 result of a mixture of seething and simmering 
 aspirations, indefinite disillusions and appre- 
 hensions, that elude the grasp of the will. 
 Oblomoy is really the victim of a dream, of 
 
 an aspiration, of an ideal as bright and mobile 
 M 
 
178 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 as a will-o’-the-wisp, as elusive as thistle- 
 down, which refuses to materialize. 
 
 The tragedy of the book lies in the effort 
 he makes to rise from his slough of apathy, 
 or rather the effort his friends encourage him 
 to make. Oblomov’s heart is made of pure 
 gold; his soul is of transparent crystal; there 
 is not a base flaw in the paste of his composi- 
 tion; yet his will is sapped, not by words, 
 words, words, but by the inability to formu- 
 late the shadows of his inner life. His friend 
 is an energetic German-Russian. He intro- 
 duces Oblomov to a charming girl, and together 
 they conspire to drag him from his apathy. 
 The girl, Olga, at first succeeds; she falls in 
 love with him, and he with her; he wants to 
 marry her, but he cannot take the necessary 
 step of arranging his affairs in a manner 
 which would make that marriage possible; and 
 gradually he falls back into a new stage of 
 apathy worse than the first; she realizes the 
 hopelessness of the situation, and they agree 
 to separate. She marries the energetic friend, 
 and Oblomov sinks into the comforts of a 
 purely negative life of complete inaction and 
 seclusion, watched over by a devoted house- 
 keeper, whom he ultimately marries. 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 179 
 
 The extraordinary subtlety of the psycho- 
 logy of this study lies, as well as in other 
 things, in the way in which we feel that Olga 
 is not really happy with her excellent husband ; 
 he is the man whom she respects ; but Oblomov 
 is the man whom she loves, till the end; and 
 she would give worlds to respect him too if he 
 would only give her the chance. Oblomov 
 often defends his stagnation, while realizing 
 only too well what a misfortune it is; and 
 we sometimes feel that he is not altogether 
 wrong. The chapter that tells of his dream 
 in which his past life and childhood arise 
 before him in a haze of serene laziness is 
 one of the masterpieces of Russian prose. 
 The book is terribly real, and almost intoler- 
 ably sad. 
 
 Goncharov’s third and last novel deals 
 with the life of a landed proprietor on the 
 Volga, and its main idea is the contrast 
 between the old generation before the reforms 
 and the new generation of Alexander II’s 
 day—a paler Fathers and Sons. 
 
 To go back to criticism, the name of 
 Bakunin, the apostle of destruction and the 
 incarnation of Russian Nihilism, belongs to 
 history; that of GricorreEv must be men- 
 
180 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tioned as founding a school of thought which 
 preached the union of arts with the national 
 soil; he exercised a strong influence over 
 Dostoyevsky. Katxov, whose influence was 
 at one time immense, originally belonged 
 to the circle of Herzen and Bakunin; he 
 became a professor of philosophy, but was 
 driven from his chair in the reaction of ’48, 
 and, being banished from erudition, he took up 
 a journalistic career and became the Editor 
 of the Moscow News. He was a Slavophile, 
 and when the rising in Poland broke out, 
 he headed the great wave of nationalist 
 feeling which passed over the country at that 
 time; he doubled the number of his sub- 
 seribers, and dealt a death-blow to Herzen’s 
 Bell. After 1866, he headed reactionary 
 journalism and became a Nationalist of the 
 narrowest kind; but he was of a higher 
 calibre than the Nationalists of later days. 
 Slavophile critics of another kind were Stra- 
 KHOvV and DaniLEevsxy, like Dostoyevsky, 
 disciples of Grigoriev, who preached the last 
 word of Slavophilism and were opposed to all 
 foreign innovations. 
 
 On the Radical side. the leaders were 
 CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and PISAREV. 
 
\ 
 
 THE EPOCH OF REFORM 181 
 
 Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart 
 Mill, and published a treatise on the esthetic 
 relations of art and reality, served a sentence 
 of seven years’ hard labour and of twenty 
 years’ exile. His criticism—socialist propa- 
 ganda, and an attack on all metaphysics— 
 does not belong to literature, but his novel 
 Shto dielat—‘‘ What is to be done? ”—had 
 an immense influence on his generation. It 
 deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died 
 when he was twenty-four, belonged to the 
 same realistic school. His main theory was 
 that Russian literature is dominated by 
 Oblomov; that Chatsky, Pechorin, and Rudin 
 are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Do- 
 brolyubov followed Chernyshevsky in his 
 realistic philosophy, in his rejection of meta- 
 physics, in his theory that beauty is to be 
 sought in life only, and that the sole duty of 
 art is to help to illustrate life. Pisarev recog- 
 nized that Turgenev’s Bazarov was a picture 
 of himself, and he was pleased with the portrait. 
 Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov died young. 
 VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as 
 well as poet, moral philosopher, and theo- 
 logian, is one of the most interesting figures in 
 Russian literature. What is most remarkable 
 
182 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 about him, and what makes him stand out, a 
 radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his 
 absolute independence. He belonged to no 
 camp; he was a slave to no party cry; utterly 
 unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the 
 truth for the sake of truth, and to proclaim 
 it. In an age of positivism, he was a be- 
 lieving Christian, and the dream of his life 
 was a union of the Eastern and Western 
 Churches. He deals with this idea in a book 
 which he wrote in French and published in 
 Paris: L’Eglise Russe et ? Eiglise Universelle. 
 He admired the older Slavophiles, but he 
 severely attacked the Nationalists, such as 
 Katkov. His range of subjects was great, 
 and his style was brilliant; like many great 
 thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and 
 in his criticism of the Intelligentsia anticipated 
 some tendencies, which have become visible 
 since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one 
 at times of Mr. A. J. Balfour, and even of 
 Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose “‘ ortho- 
 doxy ’”? he would have much sympathy; and 
 he deals with questions such as Woman’s 
 Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present 
 day. He never became a Catholic, holding 
 that the Eastern Church gua Church had 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 183 
 
 never been cut off from the West, and that 
 only one definite schism had been condemned ; 
 but he believed in the necessity of a uni- 
 versal Church. He was the first intellectual 
 Russian to point out to a generation which 
 took atheism as a matter of course that they 
 were possibly inferior instead of superior to 
 religion. He believed in Russia; he had 
 nothing against the Slavophile theory that 
 Russia had a divine mission; only he wished 
 to see that mission divinely performed. He 
 believed in the East of Christ, and not in that 
 of Xerxes. He died in 1900, before he had 
 finished his Magnum Opus, a work on moral 
 philosophy written on a religious basis. He 
 preached self-effacement; pity towards one’s 
 fellow men; and reverence towards the super- 
 natural. His whole work is a defence of 
 moral principles, written with the soul of 
 a poet, the knowledge of a scholar, and 
 the brilliance of a dialectician. It is only 
 lately that his books have gained the appre- 
 ciation which they deserve; they are certainly 
 more in harmony with the present genera- 
 tion than with that of the sixties and the 
 seventies. His Three Conversations has been 
 translated into English. Vladimir Soloviey 
 
184 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the 
 crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, 
 and his prematurity; he was intempestivus. 
 To the same epoch belong four other impor- 
 tant writers, each occupying a place apart 
 from the current stream of literary or political 
 influences: one because he was a satirist, 
 one because he wrote for the stage, and the 
 two others because one impartially, and the 
 other bitterly, dared to criticize the Radicals. 
 MIcHAEL SALTYKOV (1826-89), who wrote 
 under the name of Shchedrin, holds a unique 
 place in Russian literature, not only because 
 he is a writer of genius, but because he is one 
 of the world’s great satirists. Unlike Russian 
 satirists before him, Krylov, Gogol, and 
 Griboyedoy, good-humoured irony or sharp 
 rapier thrusts of wit do not suffice him; he 
 has in himself the saeva indignatio, and he 
 expresses it with all the concentrated spite 
 that he can muster, which is all the more 
 deadly from being used with perfect control. 
 His work is bulky, and fills eleven thick 
 volumes; some of it is quite out of date and 
 at the present day almost unintelligible; but 
 all that deals with the fundamental essentials 
 of the Russian character, and not with the 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 185 
 
 passing episodes of the day, has the freshness 
 of immortality. At the outset of his career, 
 he was banished to Vyatka, where he remained 
 from 1848—56, an exile, which gave him a rich 
 store of priceless material. His experiences 
 appeared in his Sketches of Provincial Life 
 in 1886-7. 
 
 He describes the good old times and the 
 officials of the good old times, with diabolic 
 malice and with an unequalled eye for the 
 ironical, the comic, the topsy-turvy, and the 
 true; and while he is as observant as Gogol, 
 he is as bitter as Swift. He puts his char- 
 acters on the stage and makes them relate 
 their experiences; thus we hear how the 
 collector of the dues manages to combine 
 the maximum amount of robbery with the 
 minimum amount of inconvenience. In his 
 pictures of prison life, the prisoners tell 
 their own stories, sometimes with unaffected 
 frankness, sometimes with startling cynicism, 
 and sometimes the story is obscured by 
 a whole heap of lies. The prisoners are of 
 different classes; one is an ex-official who 
 states that he was a statistician who got into 
 trouble over his figures; wishing to levy dues 
 on a peasant’s property, he had demanded 
 
186 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the number, not of their bee-hives, but of 
 their bees, and wrote in his list: ‘ The 
 peasant Sidorov possesses two horses, three 
 cows, nine sheep, one calf, and thirty-nine 
 thousand nine hundred and _ninety-seven 
 bees.” Unfortunately he was betrayed by 
 the police inspector. 
 
 Saltykov’s satire deals entirely with the 
 middle class, the high officials, the average 
 official, and the minor public servants; and his 
 best-known work, and one that has not aged 
 any more than Swift has aged, is his History 
 of a City according to the original documents. 
 
 In this he tells of the city of Glupov, Fool- 
 City, where the people were such fools that 
 they were not content until they found some 
 one to rule them who was stupider than they 
 were themselves. The various phases Russia 
 had gone through are touched off; the mania 
 for regulations, the formalism, the official red- 
 tape, the persecution of independent thought, 
 and the oppression of original thinkers and 
 writers; the ultimate ideal is that introduced 
 by the last ruler of Glupov (the history lasts 
 from 1731 to 1826), of turning the country into 
 barracks and reducing every one and every- 
 thing to one level—in which the régime of 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 187 
 
 the period of Nicholas I is satirized; until in 
 the final picture, as fine in its way as Pope’s 
 close of the Dunciad, the stream rises, and 
 refusing to be stopped by the dam, carries 
 everything away. The style parodies that 
 of the ancient chroniclers; and its chief 
 intent lies not in the satirizing of any particular 
 events or person, but in the shafts of light, 
 sometimes bitter, and sometimes inexpressibly 
 droll, it throws on the Russian system of 
 administration and on the Russian character. 
 
 In his Pompaduri, Saltykov dissects and 
 vivisects the higher official,—the big-wig,— 
 and in his sketches from the ‘‘ Domain of 
 Moderation and Accuracy,” he writes, in 
 little, the epic of the minor public servant— 
 the man who is never heard of, who is included 
 in the term of “the rest,’ but who, never- 
 theless, is a cogwheel in the machinery, without 
 which the big-wigs cannot act or execute. 
 No more supreme piece of art than this piece 
 of satire exists. The typical minor official 
 is drawn in all the variations of his miserable 
 and pitiable species, and in all the phases 
 of his ignoble and sometimes tragical career, 
 with a pen dipped in scorn and stinging 
 malice, not unblent with a grave pity, which 
 
188 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 always exists in the work of the greatest 
 satirists—‘‘ Peace to all such, but there was 
 one...” for instance—and wielded with 
 terrible certainty of touch. This epic of the 
 Molchalins of life—the typical officials who 
 cease to be men—was the story of a great 
 part of the Russian population; and in its 
 essence, a great deal of it remains true to-day, 
 while all of it remains artistically enjoyable. 
 Saltykov continued to write during the 
 whole of his long life. His field of satire 
 ranges from the days before serfdom to 
 the epoch of the reforms, extends to the 
 days of the Russo-Turkish War, and passes 
 the frontier into the West. It is impossible 
 here even to name all his works; but there 
 is one, written in the decline of his life, which 
 has a solid historical as well as a rich and 
 varied artistic interest. This is his Poshen- 
 khonskaya Starina; it is practically the 
 history of his childhood, his upbringing, and 
 the state of affairs which existed at that 
 time, the life lived by his parents and 
 their neighbours, the landed proprietors and 
 their serfs. With amazing impartiality, with- 
 out exaggeration, and yet with evidences 
 of deep feeling and passionate indignation, 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 189 
 
 all the more striking from being both rare and 
 expressed with reserve, he paints on a large 
 and crowded canvas the life of the masters 
 and their serfs. A long gallery of men and 
 women is opened to one; tragedy, comedy, 
 farce, all are here—in fact, life—life as it was 
 then in a remote corner of the country. Here 
 Saltykov’s spite and malice give way to higher 
 strokes of tragic irony and pity; and the 
 work has dignity as well as power. In the 
 bulk of Saltykov’s early work there is much 
 dross, much venom, and much ephemeral 
 tinsel that has faded; the stuff of this book is 
 stern and enduring; its subject-matter would 
 not lose a particle of interest in translation. 
 The Russians have been ungrateful towards 
 Saltykov, and have been inclined to neglect 
 his work, the lasting element of which is one 
 of the most original, precious, and remarkable 
 possessions of Russian literature. 
 
 The complement of Saltykov is Lesxov (or, 
 as he originally called himself, Stebnitsky). 
 The character of his work, its reception by 
 the reading public on the one hand, and by 
 the professional critics on the other, is one 
 of the most striking object-lessons in the 
 history of Russian literature and Russian 
 
190 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 literary criticism. Leskov has been long 
 ago recognized by educated Russia as a writer 
 of the first rank; what is best in his work, 
 which is bulky and unequal, has the unmistak- 
 able hall-mark of the classics; he is with 
 Gogol and Saltykov, and the novelists of the 
 first rank. Educated Russia is fully aware 
 of this. Nobody disputes Leskov his place, 
 nor denies him his supreme artistic talent, 
 his humour, his vividness, his colour, his 
 satire, the depth of his feeling, the richness 
 of his invention. In spite of this, there is no 
 Russian writer who has so acutely suffered 
 from the didactic and partisan quality of 
 Russian criticism. 
 
 His literary career began in 1860. Like 
 Saltykov, he paints the period of transition 
 that followed the epoch of the great Reforms. 
 In spite of this, as late as 1902, no critical 
 biography, no serious work of criticism, had 
 been devoted to his books. All Russia had 
 read him, but literary criticism had ignored 
 him. It is as if English literary criticism had 
 ignored Dickens until 1900. 
 
 The reason of this neglect is not far to 
 seek. Saltykov was an independent thinker; 
 
 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 191 
 
 he belonged to no literary or political camp; 
 he criticized the partisans of both camps 
 with equal courage; and the partisans could 
 not and did not forgive him. Like Saltykov, 
 Leskov saw what was going on in Russia; 
 with penetrating insight and observation 
 he realized the evils of the old order; like 
 Saltykov, he was filled with indignation, 
 and perhaps to a greater degree than Saltykov, 
 he was filled with pity. But, whereas Salty- 
 kov’s work was purely destructive—an on- 
 slaught of brooms in the Augean stables— 
 Leskov begins where Saltykov ends. Like 
 Saltykov and like Gogol before him, the old 
 order inspires him with laughter, sometimes 
 with bitter laughter, at the absurdities of the 
 old régime and its results ; but he does not con- 
 fine himself to destructive irony and sapping 
 satire. With Pisemsxy, another writer of first- 
 class talent, of the same epoch, Leskov was 
 the first Russian novelist—Griboyedov had 
 already anticipated such criticism in Gore ot 
 Uma, in his delineation of Chatsky,—to have 
 the courage to criticize the reformers, the 
 men of the new epoch; and his criticism was 
 not only negative but creative; he realized 
 
192 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 that everything must be “reformed alto- 
 gether.”” He then asked himself whether the 
 new men, who were engaged in the task of 
 reform, were equal to their task. He came 
 to the conclusion not only that they were 
 inadequate, but that they were setting about 
 the business the wrong way, and he had the 
 courage to say so. He was the first Russian 
 novelist to say he disbelieved in Liberals, 
 although be believed in Liberalism; and this 
 was a sentiment which no Liberal in Russia 
 could admit then, and one which they can 
 scarcely admit now. 
 
 His criticism of the Liberals was creative, 
 and not negative, in this: that, instead of 
 confining himself to pointing out their weak- 
 ness and the mistaken course they were taking, 
 he did his best to point out the right path. 
 Dostoyevsky was likewise subjected to the 
 same ostracism. Turgenev suffered from it; 
 but the genius of Dostoyevsky and the art 
 of Turgenev overstepped the limits of all 
 barriers and frontiers. Europe acclaimed 
 them. Leskov’s criticism being more local, 
 the ostracism, although powerless to prevent 
 the popularity of his work in Russia, suc- 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 193 
 
 ceeded for a time in keeping him from the 
 notice of Western Europe. This barrier is now 
 being broken down. One of Leskov’s master- 
 pieces, The Sealed Angel, was lately translated 
 into English; but he is one of the most difficult 
 authors to translate because he is one of the 
 most native. 
 
 A far bitterer and more pessimistic note is 
 heard in the work of Pisemsky. He attacks 
 the new democracy mercilessly, and not 
 from any predilection towards the old. His 
 most important work, The Troubled Sea (1862), 
 was a terrific onslaught on Radical Russia; 
 and Pisemsky paid the same price for his 
 pessimistic analysis as Leskov did for his 
 impartiality, namely social ostracism. 
 
 The work of Ostrovsky (1823-86) belongs 
 to the history of the Stage, to which he brought 
 slices of real life from the middle class; the 
 townsmen, the minor public servants, mer- 
 chants great and small, and rogues, a milieu 
 which he had observed in his youth, his father 
 having been an attorney toa Moscow merchant. 
 Ostrovsky may be called the founder of 
 modern Russian realistic comedy and drama. 
 In spite of the epoch at which his plays were 
 
 N 
 
194 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 written (the fifties and the sixties), there is 
 not a trace of Scribisme, no tricks, no effective 
 exits or curtains; he thus anticipated the 
 form of the quite modern drama by about 
 seventy years. His plays hold the stage now 
 in Russia, and form part of the stock reper- 
 tories every season. They give, moreover, just 
 the same lifelike impression whether read or 
 seen acted; and they are as interesting from 
 a literary as they are from a historical or 
 dramatic point of view, interesting because 
 they are intensely national, and as Russian 
 as beer is English. 
 
 This brief summary of the epoch would be 
 still more incomplete than it is without the 
 mention of yet another novelist, GRIGOROVICH. 
 Although on a lower level of art and creative 
 power than Pisemsky and Leskov, he was 
 the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant 
 literature. He anticipated Turgenev’s S‘ports- 
 man’s Sketches, and for the first time made 
 Russian readers cry with sympathy over the 
 annals of the peasant. Like Turgenev, he 
 was a great landscape painter. In his 
 *‘ Fishermen ” he paints the peasant and the 
 artisan’s life, and in his “‘ Country Roads” 
 he gives a picture of the good old times— 
 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 195 
 
 replete with rich humour, and in sharp con- 
 trast to Saltykov’s sunless and trenchant 
 etching of the same period. Humour, the 
 pathos of the poor, landscape—these are his 
 chief qualities. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 
 
 Wirn Toustoy and DosTovEvsKy, we 
 come not only to the two great pillars of 
 modern Russian literature which tower above 
 all others like two colossal statues in the 
 desert, but to two of the greatest figures in the 
 literature of the world. Russia has not given 
 the world a universal poet, a Shakespeare, 
 a Dante, a Goethe, or a/Moliére; for Pushkin, 
 consummate artist and inspired poet as he 
 was, lacks that peculiar greatness which 
 conquers all demarcations of frontier and 
 difference of language, and produces work 
 which becomes a part of the universal in- 
 heritance of all nations; but Russia has given 
 us two prose-writers whose work has done 
 this very thing. And between them they sum 
 up in themselves the whole of the Russian 
 soul, and almost the whole of the Russian 
 
 character; I say almost the whole of the 
 196 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 197 
 
 Russian character, because although between 
 them they sum up all that is greatest, deepest, 
 and all that is weakest in the Russian soul, 
 there is perhaps one element of the Russian 
 character, which, although they understood it 
 well enough, their genius forbade them to 
 possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the 
 Great, Dostoyevsky’s Mwyshkin—the idiot, 
 the pure fool who is wiser than the wise—and 
 the hero of Gogol’s Revisor, Hlestyakov the har 
 and wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these 
 elements, reconstitute any Russian who has 
 ever lived. That is to say, you will find that 
 every single Russian is compounded either of 
 one or more of these elements. 
 
 For instance, mix Peter the Great with a 
 sufficient dose of Hlestyakov, and you get 
 Boris Godunov and Bakunin; leave the 
 Peter the Great element unmixed, and you 
 get Bazarov, and many of Gorky’s heroes; 
 mix it slightly with Hlestyakov, and you get 
 Lermontov; let the Hlestyakov element pre- 
 dominate, and you get Griboyedov’s Mol- 
 chalin ; let the Mwyshkin element predominate, 
 with a dose of Hlestyakov, and you get Father 
 Gapon; let it predominate without the dose 
 of Hlestyakov, and you get Oblomov; mix 
 
198 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 it with a dose of Peter the Great, you get 
 Herzen, Chatsky; and so on. Mix all the 
 elements equally, and you get Onegin, the 
 average man. I do not mean that there are 
 necessarily all these elements in every Russian, 
 but that you will meet with no Russian in 
 whom there is not to be found either one or 
 more than one of them. 
 
 Now, in Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element 
 dominates, with a dose of Mwyshkin, and a 
 vast but unsuccessful aspiration towards the 
 complete characteristics of Mwyshkin; while 
 in Dostoyevsky the Mwyshkin predominates, 
 blent with a fiery streak of Peter the Great; 
 but in neither of them is there a touch of 
 Hlestyakov. In Russia, it constantly happens 
 that a man in any class, be he a soldier, sailor, 
 tinker, tailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, 
 or thief, will suddenly leave his profession and 
 avocation and set out on the search for God 
 and for truth. ‘These men are called Bogois- 
 kateli, Seekers after God. The one fact that 
 the whole world knows about Tolstoy is that, 
 in the midst of his great and glorious artistic 
 career, he suddenly abjured literature and art, 
 denounced worldly possessions, and said that 
 truth was to be found in working like a 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 199 
 
 peasant, and thus created a sect of Tolstoyists. 
 The world then blamed him for inconsistency 
 because he went on writing, and lived as before, 
 with his family and in hisown home. But in 
 reality there was no inconsistency, because 
 there was in reality no break. Tolstoy had 
 been a Bogoiskatel, a seeker after truth and 
 God all his life; it was only the manner of 
 his search which had changed; but the quest 
 itself remained unchanged; he was unable, 
 owing to family ties, to push his premises to 
 their logical conclusion until just before his 
 death; but push them to their logical con- 
 clusion he did at the last, and he died, as we 
 know, on the road to a monastery. 
 
 Tolstoy’s manner of search was extra- 
 ordinary, extraordinary because he was pro- 
 vided for it with the eyes of an eagle which 
 enabled him to see through everything; and, 
 as he took nothing for granted from the day 
 he began his career until the day he died, he 
 was always subjecting people, objects, ideas, to 
 the searchlight of his vision, and testing them 
 to see whether they were true or not; more- 
 over, he was gifted with the power of describ- 
 ing what he saw during this long journey 
 through the world of fact and the world of 
 
200 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 ideas, whether it were the general or the 
 particular, the mass or the detail, the vision, 
 the panorama, the crowd, the portrait or the 
 miniature, with the strong simplicity of a 
 Homer, and the colour and reality of a 
 Velasquez. This made him one of the world’s 
 greatest writers, and the world’s greatest 
 artist in narrative fiction. Another peculiarity 
 of his search was that he pursued it with 
 eagle eyes, but with blinkers. 
 
 In 1877 Dostoyevsky wrote: “ In spite of 
 his colossal artistic talent, Tolstoy is one of 
 those Russian minds which only see that which 
 is right before their eyes, and thus press to- 
 wards that point. They have not the power 
 of turning their necks to the right or to the 
 left to see what lies on one side; to do this, 
 they would have to turn with their whole 
 bodies. If they do turn, they will quite 
 probably maintain the exact opposite of what 
 they have been hitherto professing; for they 
 are rigidly honest.” It is this search carried 
 on by eyes of unsurpassed penetration be- 
 tween blinkers, by a man who every now and 
 then did turn his whole body, which accounts 
 for the many apparent changes and contra- 
 dictions of Tolstoy’s career. 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 201 
 
 Another source of contradiction was that 
 by temperament the Lucifer element pre- 
 dominated in him, and the ideal he was for 
 ever seeking was the humility of Mwyshkin, 
 the pure fool, an ideal which he could not 
 reach, because he could not sufficiently humble 
 himself. Thus when death overtook him, 
 he was engaged on his last and his greatest 
 voyage of discovery; and there is something 
 solemn and great about his having met with 
 death at a small railway station. 
 
 Tolstoy’s works are a long record of this 
 search, and of the memories and experiences 
 which he gathered on the way. There is not a 
 detail, not a phase of feeling, not a shade or 
 mood in his spiritual life that he has not told 
 us of in his works. In his Childhood, Boyhood 
 and Youth, he recreates his own childhood, 
 boyhood and youth, not always exactly as it 
 happened in reality; there is Dichtung as well 
 as Wahrheit; but the Dichtung is as true as 
 the Wahrheit, because his aim was to recreate 
 the impressions he had received from his early 
 surroundings. Moreover, the searchlight of 
 his eyes even then fell mercilessly upon every- 
 thing that was unreal, sham and conventional. 
 
 As soon as he had finished with his youth, 
 
202 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 he turned to the life of a grown-up man in 
 The Morning of a Landowner, and told how 
 he tried to live a landowner’s life, and 
 how nothing but dissatisfaction came of it. 
 He escapes to the Caucasus, and seeks re- 
 generation, and the result of the search here 
 is a masterpiece, The Cossacks. He goes back 
 to the world, and takes part in the Crimean 
 war; he describes what he saw in a battery; 
 his eagle eye lays bare the splendeurs et 
 miséres of war more truthfully perhaps than 
 a writer on war has ever done, but less sym- 
 pathetically than Alfred de Vigny—the differ- 
 ence being that Alfred de Vigny is innately 
 modest, and that Tolstoy, as he wrote himself, 
 at the beginning of the war, “had no 
 modesty.” 
 
 After the Crimean war, he plunges again 
 into the world and travels abroad; and on his 
 return to Russia, he settles down at Yasnaya 
 Polyana and marries. The hero of his novel - 
 Domestic Happiness appears to have found his 
 heart’s desire in marriage and country life. 
 It was then that he wrote War and Peace, 
 which he began to publish in 1865. He always 
 had the idea of writing a story on the Decem- 
 brist movement, and War and Peace was 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 203 
 
 perhaps the preface to that unwritten work, 
 for it ends when that movement was beginning. 
 In War and Peace, he gave the world a modern 
 prose epic, which did not suffer from the 
 drawback that spoils most historical novels, 
 namely, that of being obviously false, because 
 it was founded on his own recollection of his 
 parents’ memories. He gives us what we feel 
 to be the very truth; for the first time in an 
 historical novel, instead of saying “ this is 
 very likely true,”’ or “* what a wonderful work 
 of artistic reconstruction,’’ we feel that we 
 were ourselves there; that we knew those 
 people; that they are a part of our very own 
 past. He paints a whole generation of people; 
 and in Pierre Bezukhov, the new landmarks 
 of his own search are described. Among 
 many other episodes, there is nowhere in 
 literature such a true and charming picture 
 of family life as that of the Rostovs, and no- 
 where a more vital and charming personality 
 than Natasha; a creation as living as Push- 
 kin’s Tatiana, and alive with a reality even 
 more convincing than Turgenev’s pictures 
 of women, since she is alive with a different 
 kind of life; the difference being that while 
 you have read in Turgenev’s books about 
 
204 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 noble and exquisite women, you are not 
 sure whether you have not known Natasha 
 yourself and in your own life; you are not 
 sure she does not belong to the borderland of 
 your own past in which dreams and reality 
 are mingled. War and Peace eclipses all 
 other historical novels; it has all Stendhal’s 
 reality, and all Zola’s power of dealing with 
 crowds and masses. ‘Take, for instance, a 
 masterpiece such as Flaubert’s Salammbé ; 
 it may and very likely does take away your 
 breath by the splendour of its language, its 
 colour, and its art, but you never feel that, 
 even in a dream, you had taken part in the 
 life which is painted there. The only bit of 
 unreality in War and Peace is the figure of 
 Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately 
 unfair. Another impression which Tolstoy 
 gives us in War and Peace is that man is in 
 reality always the same, and that changes 
 of manners are not more important than 
 changes in fashions of clothes. That is why 
 it is not extravagant to mention Salammbé 
 in this connection. One feels that, if Tolstoy 
 had written a novel about ancient Rome, we 
 should have known a score of patricians, 
 senators, scribblers, clients, parasites, matrons, — 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 205 
 
 courtesans, better even than we know Cicero 
 from his letters; we should not only feel that 
 we know Cicero, but that we had actually 
 known him. This very task—namely, that of 
 reconstituting a page out of Pagan history— 
 was later to be attempted by Merezhkovsky; 
 but brilliant as his work is, he only at times 
 and by flashes attains to Tolstoy’s power of 
 convincing. . 
 Anna Karenina appeared in 1875-76. And 
 here Tolstoy, with the touch of a Velasquez and 
 upon a huge canvas, paints the contemporary 
 life of the upper classes in St. Petersburg and 
 in the country. Levin, the hero, is himself. 
 Here, again, the truth to nature and the reality 
 is so intense and vivid that a reader unac- 
 quainted with Russia will] in reading the book 
 probably not think of Russia at all, but will 
 imagine the story has taken place in his own 
 country, whatever that may be. He shows 
 you everything from the inside, as well as 
 from the outside. You feel, in the picture of 
 the races, what Anna is feeling in looking on, 
 and what Vronsky is feeling in riding. And 
 with what reality, what incomparable skill 
 the gradual dawn of Anna’s love for Vronsky 
 is described ; how painfully real is her pompous 
 
206 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and excellent husband ; and how every incident 
 in her love affair, her visit to her child, her 
 appearance at the opera, when, after having 
 left her husband, she defies the world, her 
 gradual growing irritability, down to the final 
 catastrophe, bears on it the stamp of some- 
 thing which must have happened just in that 
 very way and no other. 
 
 But, as far as Tolstoy’s own development 
 is concerned, Levin is the most interesting 
 figure in the book. This character is another 
 landmark in Tolstoy’s search after truth; he 
 is constantly putting accepted ideas to the 
 test; he is haunted by the fear of sudden 
 death, not the physical fear of death in 
 itself, but the fear that in the face of death 
 the whole of life may be meaningless ; a peasant 
 opens a new door for him and furnishes him 
 with a solution to the problem—to live for 
 one’s soul : life no longer seems meaningless. 
 
 Thus Levin marks the stage in Tolstoy’s — 
 evolution of his abandoning materialism and 
 of seeking for the truth in the Church. But 
 the Church does not satisfy him. He rejects 
 its dogmas and its ritual; he turns to the 
 Gospel, but far from accepting it, he revises it. 
 He comes to the conclusion that Christianity 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 207 
 
 as it has been taught is mere madness, and 
 that the Church is a superfluous anachronism. 
 Thus another change comes about, which is 
 generally regarded as the change cutting 
 Tolstoy’s life in half; in reality it is only 
 a fresh right-about-turn of a man who is 
 searching for truth in blinkers. In _ his 
 Confession, he says: “ I grew to hate myself; 
 and now all has become clear.”” He came to 
 believe that property was the source of all 
 evil; he desired literally to give up all he had. 
 This he was not able to do. It was not that 
 he shrank from the’ sacrifice at the last; but 
 that circumstances and family ties were too 
 strong for him. But his final flight from home 
 in the last days of his life shows that the 
 desire had never left him. 
 
 Art was also subjected to his new standards 
 and found wanting, both in his own work and 
 in that of others. Shakespeare and Beet- 
 hoven were summarily disposed of; his own 
 masterpieces he pronounced to be worthless. 
 This more than anything shows the pride of 
 the man. He could admire no one, not even 
 himself. He scorned the gifts which were 
 given him, and the greatest gifts of the 
 greatest men. But this landmark of Tolstoy’s 
 
208 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 evolution, his turning his back on the Church, 
 and on his work, is a landmark in Russian 
 history as well as in Russian art. For far 
 less than this Russian thinkers and writers 
 of high position had been imprisoned and 
 exiled. Nobody dared to touch Tolstoy. He 
 fearlessly attacked all constituted authority, 
 both spiritual and temporal, in an epoch of 
 reaction, and such was his prestige that 
 official Russia raised no finger. His authority 
 was too great, and this is perhaps the first 
 great victory of the liberty of individual 
 thought over official tyranny in Russia. 
 There had been martyrs in plenty before, but 
 no conquerors. 
 
 After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, who gave 
 up literature for a time, but for a time only, 
 nevertheless continued to write ; at first he only 
 wrote stories for children and theological and 
 polemical pamphlets; but in 1886 he pub- 
 lished the terribly powerful peasant drama: 
 The Powers of Darkness. Water came the 
 Kreutzer Sonata, the Death of Ivan Ilitch, and 
 Resurrection. Were the hero Nehludov is a 
 lifeless phantom of Tolstoy himself; the 
 episodes and details have the reality of 
 his early work, so has Maslova, the heroine; 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 209 
 
 but in the squalor and misery of the prisons 
 he shows no precious balms of humanity and 
 love, as Dostoyevsky did; and the book has 
 neither the sweep and epic swing of War and 
 Peace, nor the satisfying completeness of 
 Anna Karenina. Since his death, some post- 
 humous works have been published, among 
 them a novel, and a play : The Living Corpse. 
 He died, as he had lived, still searching, and 
 perhaps at the end he found the object of his 
 quest. 
 
 Tolstoy, even more than Pushkin, was 
 rooted to the soil; all that is not of the soil— 
 anything mystic or supernatural—was totally 
 alientohim. He was the oak which could not 
 bend; and being, as he was, the king of realistic 
 fiction, an unsurpassed painter of pictures, 
 portraits, men and things, a penetrating analyst 
 of the human heart, a genius cast in a colossal 
 mould, his work, both by its substance and 
 its artistic power, exercised an influence be- 
 yond his own country, affected all European 
 nations, and gives him a place among the great 
 creators of the world. Tolstoy was not a rebel 
 but a heretic, a heretic not only to religion and 
 the Church, but in philosophy, opinions, art, 
 
 and even in food; but what the world will 
 re) 
 
210 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 remember of him are not his heretical theories 
 but his faithful practice, which is orthodox in 
 its obedience to the highest canons, orthodox 
 as Homer and Shakespeare are orthodox, and 
 like theirs, one of the greatest earthly examples 
 of the normal and the sane. 
 
 To say that DostoYEvsxy is the antithesis 
 to Tolstoy, and the second great pillar of 
 Russian prose literature, will surprise nobody 
 now. Had one been writing ten years ago, 
 the expression of such an opinion would have 
 met with an incredulous smile amongst the 
 majority of English readers of Russian litera- 
 ture, for Dostoyevsky was practically un- 
 known save for his Crime and Punishment, 
 and to have compared him with Turgenev 
 would have seemed sacrilegious. Now when 
 Dostoyevsky is one of the shibboleths of our 
 intelligentsia, one can boldly say, without fear 
 of being misunderstood, that, as a creator 
 and a force in literature, Dostoyevsky is in 
 another plane than that of Turgenev, and as 
 far greater than him as Leonardo da Vinci 
 is greater than Vandyke, or as Wagner is 
 greater than Gounod, while some Russians 
 consider him even infinitely greater than 
 Tolstoy. Let us say he is his equal and 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 211 
 
 complement. He is in any case, in almost 
 every respect, his antithesis. Tolstoy was the 
 incarnation of health, and is above all things 
 and pre-eminently the painter of the sane and 
 the earthly. Dostoyevsky was an epileptic, the 
 painter of the abnormal, of criminals, madmen, 
 degenerates, mystics. Tolstoy led an even, 
 uneventful life, spending the greater part of 
 it in his own country house, in the midst of 
 a large family. Dostoyevsky was condemned 
 to death, served a sentence of four years’ 
 hard labour in a convict settlement in 
 Siberia, and besides this spent six years in 
 exile; when he returned and started a news- 
 paper, it was prohibited by the Censorship; 
 a second newspaper which he started came to 
 grief; he underwent financial ruin; his first 
 wife, his brother, and his best friend died; 
 he was driven abroad by debt, harassed by the 
 authorities on the one hand, and attacked by 
 the liberals on the other; abused and misunder- 
 stood, almost starving and never well, work- 
 ing under overwhelming difficulties, always 
 pressed for time, and ill requited for his 
 toil. That was Dostoyevsky’s life. 
 
 Tolstoy was a heretic; at first a materialist, 
 and then a seeker after a religion of his own; 
 
212 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Dostoyevsky was a practising believer, a 
 vehement apostle of orthodoxy, and died 
 fortified by the Sacraments of the Church. 
 Tolstoy with his broad unreligious opinions 
 was narrow-minded. Dostoyevsky with his 
 definite religious opinions was the most 
 broad-minded man who ever lived. Tolstoy 
 hated the supernatural, and was alien to all 
 mysticism. Dostoyevsky seems to get nearer 
 to the unknown, to what lies beyond the 
 flesh, than any other writer. In Tolstoy, the 
 Peter the Great element of the Russian 
 character predominated ; in Dostoyevsky that 
 of Mwyshkin, the pure fool. Tolstoy could 
 never submit and humble himself. Submission 
 and humility and resignation are the keynotes 
 and mainsprings of Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy 
 despised art, and paid no homage to any of 
 the great names of literature; and this was 
 not only after the so-called change. As early 
 as 1862, he said that Pushkin and Beethoven 
 could not please because of their absolute 
 beauty. Dostoyevsky was catholic and cos- 
 mopolitan, and admired the literature of 
 foreign countries—Racine as well as Shake- 
 speare, Corneille as well as Schiller. The 
 essence of Tolstoy is a magnificent intolerance. 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 213 
 
 The essence of Dostoyevsky is sweet reason- 
 ableness. Tolstoy dreamed of giving up all he 
 . had to the poor, and of living like a peasant; 
 Dostoyevsky had to share the hard labour 
 of the lowest class of criminals. Tolstoy 
 theorized on the distribution of food; but 
 Dostoyevsky was fed like a beggar. Tolstoy 
 wrote in affluence and at leisure, and re-wrote 
 his books; Dostoyevsky worked like a literary 
 hack for his daily bread, ever pressed for time 
 and ever in crying need of money. 
 
 These contrasts are not made in disparage- 
 ment of Tolstoy, but merely to point out the 
 difference between the two men and between 
 their circumstances. Tolstoy wrote about 
 himself from the beginning of his career to the 
 end; nearly all his work is autobiographical, 
 and he almost always depicts himself in all 
 his books. We know nothing of Dostoyevsky 
 from his books. He was an altruist, and 
 he loved others better than himself. 
 
 Dostoyevsky’s first book, Poor Folk, pub- 
 lished in 1846, is a descendant of Gogol’s 
 story The Cloak, and bears the influence, to 
 a slight extent, of Gogol. In this, the story 
 of a minor public servant battling against 
 want, and finding a ray of light in correspond- 
 
214 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 ing with a girl also in poor circumstances, but 
 who ultimately marries a rich middle-aged 
 man, we already get all Dostoyevsky’s peculiar 
 sweetness; what Stevenson called his “ lovely 
 goodness,” his almost intolerable pathos, his 
 love of the disinherited and of the failures 
 of life. His next book, Letters from a Dead 
 House, has a far more universal interest. It 
 is the record of his prison experiences, which 
 is of priceless value, not only on account of 
 its radiant moral beauty, its perpetual dis- 
 covery of the soul of goodness in things evil, 
 its human fraternity, its complete absence 
 of egotism and pose, and its thrilling human 
 interest, but also on account of the light it 
 throws on the Russian character, the Russian 
 poor, and the Russian peasant. 
 
 In 1866 came Crime and Punishment, 
 which brought Dostoyevsky fame. This book, 
 Dostoyevsky’s Macbeth, is so well known in 
 the French and English translations that it. 
 hardly needs any comment. Dostoyevsky 
 never wrote anything more -tremendous than 
 the portrayal of the anguish that seethes in the 
 soul of Raskolnikov, after he has killed the old 
 woman, “‘mechanically forced,” as Professor 
 Brickner says, ‘‘ into performing the act, as 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 215 
 
 if he had gone too near machinery in motion, 
 had been caught by a bit of his clothing and 
 cut to pieces.”” And not only is one held 
 spellbound by every shifting hope, fear, and 
 doubt, and each new pang that Raskolnikov 
 experiences, but the souls of all the subsidiary 
 characters in the book are revealed to us just 
 as clearly : the Marmeladov family, the honest 
 Razumikhin, the police inspector, and the 
 atmosphere of the submerged tenth in St. 
 Petersburg—the steaming smell of the city 
 in the summer. There is an episode when 
 Raskolnikov kneels before Sonia, the prosti- 
 tute, and says to her: “It is not before you 
 I am kneeling, but before all the suffering of 
 mankind.” That is what Dostoyevsky does 
 himself in this and in all his books; but in 
 none of them is the suffering of all mankind 
 conjured up before us in more living colours, 
 and in none of them is his act of homage in 
 kneeling before it more impressive. 
 
 This book was written before the words 
 ‘* psychological novel ”’ had been invented; 
 but how all the psychological novels which 
 were written years later by Bourget and 
 others pale before this record written in blood 
 and tears! Crime and Punishment was fol- 
 
216 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 lowed by The Idiot (1868). The idiot is 
 Mwyshkin, who has been alluded to already, 
 the wise fool, an epileptic, in whom irony 
 and arrogance and egoism have been anni- 
 hilated; and whose very simplicity causes him 
 to pass unscathed through a den of evil, a 
 world of liars, scoundrels, and thieves, none 
 of whom can escape the influence of his 
 radiant personality. He is the same with 
 every one he meets, and with his unsuspicious 
 sincerity he combines the intuition of utter 
 goodness, so that he can see through people 
 and read their minds. In this character, 
 Dostoyevsky has put all his sweetness; it is 
 not a portrait of himself, but it is a portrait 
 of what he would have liked to be, and 
 reflects all that is best in him. In contrast 
 to Mwyshkin, Rogozhin, the merchant, is the 
 incarnation of undisciplined passion, who 
 ends by killing the thing he loves, Nastasia, 
 also a creature of unbridled impulses,—because. 
 he feels that he can never really and fully 
 possess her. The catastrophe, the description 
 of the night after Rogozhin has killed Nastasia, 
 is like nothing else in literature; lifelike in 
 detail and immense, in the way in which it 
 makes you listen at the keyhole of the soul, 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 217 
 
 immense with the immensity of a great revela- 
 tion. The minor characters in the book are 
 also all of them remarkable; one of them, 
 the General’s wife, Madame Epanchin, has an 
 indescribable and playful charm, 
 
 The Idiot was followed by The Possessed, 
 or Devils, printed in 1871-72, called thus after 
 the Devils in the Gospel of St. Luke, that 
 left the possessed man and went into the 
 swine; the Devils in the book are the hangers- 
 on of Nihilism between 1862 and 1869. The 
 book anticipated the future, and in _ it 
 Dostoyevsky created characters who were 
 identically the same, and committed identi- 
 cally the same crimes, as men who actually 
 lived many years later in 1871, and later 
 still. The whole book turns on the exploita- 
 tion by an unscrupulous, ingenious, and iron- 
 willed knave of the various weaknesses of a 
 crowd of idealist dupes and disciples. One of 
 them is a decadent, one of them is one of those 
 idealists ‘*‘ whom any strong idea strikes all of 
 a sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes for 
 ever ”; one of them is a maniac whose single 
 idea is the production of the Superman which 
 he thinks will come, when it will be immaterial 
 to a man whether he lives or dies, and when 
 
218 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 he will be prepared to kill himself not out of 
 fear but in order to kill fear. That man will be 
 God. Not the God-man, but the Man-God. 
 The plan of the unscrupulous leader, Peter 
 Verkhovensky, who was founded on Nechaev, a 
 Nihilist of real life, is to create disorder, and 
 amid the disorder to seize the authority; he 
 imagines a central committee of which he 
 pretends to be the representative, organizes 
 a small local committee, and persuades his 
 dupes that a network of similar small com- 
 mittees exist all over Russia; his aim being 
 to create them gradually, by persuading people 
 in every plot of fresh ground that they exist 
 everywhere else. 
 
 Thus the idea of the book was to show that 
 the strength of Nihilism lay, not in high 
 dogmas and theories held by a large and well- 
 organized society, but in the strength of the 
 will of one or two men reacting on the weaker 
 herd and exploiting the strength, the weak- 
 ness, and the one-sidedness of its ideals, a 
 herd which was necessarily weak owing to 
 that very one-sidedness. In order to bind his 
 disciples with a permanent bond, Verkhoven- 
 sky exploits the zdée fixe of suicide and the 
 superman, which is held by one of his dupes, 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 219 
 
 to induce him to commit a crime before he 
 kills himself, and thus make away with another 
 member of the committee who is represented 
 as being aspy. Once this is done, the whole 
 committee will be jointly responsible, and 
 bound to him by the ties of blood and fear. 
 But Verkhovensky is not the hero of the book. 
 The hero is Stavrogin, whom Verkhovensky 
 regards as his trump card, because of the 
 strength of his character, which leads him to 
 commit the most outrageous extravagances, 
 and at the same time to remain as cold as 
 ice; but Verkhovensky’s whole design is shat- 
 tered on Stavrogin’s character, all the murders 
 already mentioned are committed, the whole 
 scheme comes to nothing, the conspirators are 
 discovered, and Peter escapes abroad. 
 
 When Devils appeared in 1871, it was looked 
 upon as a gross exaggeration, but real life in 
 subsequent years was to produce characters 
 and events of the same kind, which were more 
 startling than Dostoyevsky’s fiction. The 
 book is the least well-constructed of Dostoyey- 
 sky’s; the narrative is disconnected, and the 
 events, incidents, and characters so crowded 
 together, that the general effect is confused ; 
 on the other hand, it contains isolated scenes 
 
220 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 which Dostoyevsky never surpassed; and in 
 its strength and in its limitations it is perhaps 
 his most characteristic work. 
 
 From 1873-80 Dostoyevsky went back to 
 journalism, and wrote his Diary of a Writer, 
 in which he commented on current events. 
 In 1880, he united all conflicting and hostile 
 parties and shades of public opinion, by the 
 speech he made at the unveiling of Pushkin’s 
 memorial, in one common bond of enthusiasm. 
 At the end of the seventies, he returned 
 to a work already begun, The Brothers 
 Karamazov, which, although it remains the 
 longest of his books, was never finished. It 
 is the story of three brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, 
 and Alyosha; their father is a cynical sen- 
 sualist. The eldest brother is an undisci- 
 plined, passionate character, who expiates his 
 passions by suffering; the second brother is 
 a materialist, the tragedy of whose inner life 
 forms a greater part of the book; the third 
 brother, Alyosha, is a lover of humanity, and 
 a believer in God and man. He seeks a 
 monastery, but his spiritual father sends him 
 out into the world, to live and to suffer. He 
 is to go through the furnace of the world and 
 experience many trials; for the microbe of 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 221 
 
 lust that is in his family is dormant in him 
 also. The book was called the History of a 
 Great Sinner, and the sinner was to be Alyosha. 
 But Dostoyevsky died before this part of the 
 subject is even approached. 
 
 He died in January 1881; the crowds of 
 men and women of all sorts and conditions of 
 life that attended his funeral, and the ex- 
 tent and the sincerity of the grief manifested, 
 gave it an almost mythical greatness. The 
 people gave him a funeral such as few kings 
 or heroes have ever had. Without fear of 
 controversy or contradiction one can now say 
 that Dostoyevsky’s place in Russian literature 
 is at the top, equal and in the opinion of some 
 superior-to that of Tolstoy in greatness. He 
 is also one of the greatest writers the world has 
 ever produced, not because, like Tolstoy, he 
 saw life steadily and saw it whole, and painted 
 it with the supreme and easy art of a Velasquez; 
 nor because, like Turgenev, he wove exquisite 
 pictures into musical words. Dostoyevsky 
 was not an artist; his work is shapeless; his 
 books are like quarries where granite and 
 dross, gold and ore are mingled. He paid no 
 attention to style, and yet so strong and vital 
 is his spoken word that when the Moscow Art 
 
222 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Theatre put some scenes in The Brothers 
 Karamazov and Devils on the stage, they 
 found they could not alter one single syllable; 
 and sometimes his words have a power beyond 
 that of words, a power that only music has. 
 There are pages where Dostoyevsky expresses 
 the anguish of the soul in the same manner 
 as Wagner expressed the delirium of dying 
 Tristram. Ishould indeed put the matter the 
 other way round, and say that in the last act 
 of Tristram, Wagner is as great as Dostoyev- 
 sky. But Dostoyevsky is great because of 
 the divine message he gives, not didactically, 
 not by sermons, but by the goodness that 
 emanates, like a precious balm, from the 
 characters he creates; because more than any 
 other books in the world his books reflect not 
 only the teaching and the charity, but the 
 accent and the divine aura of love that is in 
 the Gospels. 
 
 ‘*T am not talking to you now through the 
 medium of custom, conventionalities, or even 
 of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses 
 your spirit, just as if both had passed through 
 the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal 
 —as we are!” These words, spoken by 
 Charlotte Brénte’s Jane Eyre, express what 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 223 
 
 Dostoyevsky’s books do. His spirit addresses 
 our spirit. “Be no man’s judge; humble 
 love is a terrible power which effects more 
 than violence. Only active love can bring 
 out faith. Love men, and do not be afraid 
 of their sins; love man in his sin; love all 
 the creatures of God, and pray God to make 
 you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and 
 as the birds.” This was Father Zosima’s 
 advice to Alyosha. And that is the gist of 
 Dostoyevsky’s message to mankind. “ Life,” 
 Father Zosima also says to Alyosha, “ will 
 bring you many misfortunes, but you will be 
 happy on account of them, and you will bless 
 life and cause others to bless it.” Here we 
 have the whole secret of Dostoyevsky’s great- 
 ness. He blessed life, and he caused others 
 to bless it. 
 
 It is objected that his characters are 
 abnormal; that he deals with the diseased, 
 with epileptics, neurasthenics, criminals, sensu- 
 alists, madmen; but it is just this very fact 
 which gives so much strength and value to 
 the blessing he gave to life; it is owing to 
 this fact that he causes others to bless life; 
 because he was cast in the nethermost circle 
 of life’s inferno; he was thrown together with 
 
224 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the refuse of humanity, with the worst of men 
 and with the most unfortunate; he saw the 
 human soul on the rack, and he saw the vilest 
 diseases that afflict the human soul; he faced 
 the evil without fear or blinkers; and there, 
 in the inferno, in the dust and ashes, he 
 recognized the print of divine footsteps and 
 the fragrance of goodness; he cried from the 
 abyss : ‘“‘ Hosanna to the Lord, for He is just!” 
 and he blessed life. It is true that his char- 
 acters are taken almost entirely from the 
 Despised and Rejected, as one of his books 
 was called, and often from the ranks of the 
 abnormal; but when a great writer wishes to 
 reveal the greatest adventures and the deepest 
 experiences which the soul of man can undergo, 
 it is in vain for him to take the normal type; 
 it has no adventures. The adventures of the 
 soul of Fortinbras would be of no help to man- 
 kind; but the adventures of Hamlet are of 
 help to mankind, and the adventures of Don 
 Quixote; and neither Don Quixote nor Hamlet 
 are normal types. 
 
 Dostoyevsky wrote the tragedy of life and 
 of the soul, and to do this he chose circum- 
 stances as terrific as those which unhinged 
 the reason of King Lear, shook that of Hamlet, 
 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 225 
 
 and made (idipus blind himself. His books 
 resemble Greek tragedies by the magnitude 
 of the spiritual adventures they set forth; 
 they are unlike Greek Tragedies in the 
 Christian charity and the faith and the hope 
 which goes out of them; they inspire the 
 reader with courage, never with despair, 
 although Dostoyevsky, face to face with the 
 last extremities of evil, never seeks to hide it 
 or to shun it, but merely to search for the 
 soul of goodness in it. He did not search in 
 vain, and just as, when he was on his way to 
 Siberia, a conversation he had with a fellow- 
 prisoner inspired that fellow-prisoner with the 
 feeling that he could go on living and even 
 face penal servitude, so do Dostoyevsky’s 
 books come to mankind as a message of hope 
 from a radiant country. That is what con- 
 stitutes his peculiar greatness. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 
 
 Tue fifties, the sixties, and the seventies 
 were, all over Europe, the epoch of Parnassian 
 poetry. In England, Tennyson was pouring 
 out his ‘“‘ fervent and faultless melodies,” 
 Matthew Arnold was playing his plaintive 
 harp, and the Pre-Raphaelites were weaving 
 their tapestried dreams; in France, Gautier 
 was carving his cameos, Banville’s Harle- 
 quins and Columbines were dancing on a 
 Watteau-like stage in the silver twilight of 
 Corot, Baudelaire was at work on his sombre 
 bronze, Sully-Prudhomme twanged his ivory 
 lyre, and Leconte de Lisle was issuing his 
 golden coinage. It was, in poetry, the epoch 
 of art for art’s sake. 
 
 Russian poetry did not escape the universal 
 tendency; but in Russia everything was con- 
 spiring to put poetry, and especially that kind 
 of poetry, in the shade. In the first place, 
 
 226 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 227 
 
 events of great magnitude were happening— 
 the wide reforms, the emancipation of the 
 serfs, the growth of Nihilism, which was the 
 product of the disillusion at the result of the 
 reforms : in the second place, criticism under 
 the influence of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and 
 Dobrolyubov was entirely realistic and posi- 
 tivist, preaching not art for life’s sake only, 
 but the absolute futility of poetry; and, in 
 the third place, work of the supremest kind 
 was being done in narrative fiction; in the 
 fourth place, no prophet-poet was forth- 
 coming whose genius was great enough to 
 voice national aspirations. All this tended 
 to put poetry in the shade, especially as such 
 poets as did exist were, with one notable 
 exception, Parnassians, whose talent dwelt 
 aloof from the turbid stream of life, and who 
 sought to express the adventures of their 
 souls, which were emotional and artistic, either 
 in dreamy music or in exquisite shapes and 
 colours. This neglect of verse lasted right 
 up until the end of the seventies. When, how- 
 ever, in the eighties, the wave of political crisis 
 reached its climax and, after the assassina- 
 tion of Alexander II, rolled back into a sea 
 of stagnant reaction, the poets, who had been 
 
228 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 hitherto neglected, and quietly singing all the 
 while, were discovered once more, and the 
 shares in poetry continued to rise as time 
 went on; thus the poets of the sixties reaped 
 their due meed of appreciation. 
 
 A proof of how widespread and deep this 
 neglect was is that TyutrcHEv, whose work 
 attracted no attention whatever until 1854, 
 and met with no wide appreciation until a 
 great deal later, was four years younger than 
 Pushkin, and a man of thirty when Goethe 
 died. He went on living until 1873, and can 
 be called the first of the Parnassians. Politi- 
 cally, he was a Slavophile, and sang the 
 ‘“‘ resignation ” and “ long-suffering ”’ of the 
 Russian people, which he preferred to the 
 stiff-neckedness of the West. But the value 
 of his work lies less in his Slavophile aspira- 
 tions than in its depth of thought and lyrical 
 feeling, in the contrast between the gloomy 
 forebodings of his imagination and the sun- 
 like images he gives of nature. His verse is 
 like a spring day, dark with ominous thunder- 
 clouds, out of which a rainbow and a shaft 
 of sunlight fall on a dewy orchard and light 
 it with a silvery smile. His verse is, on the 
 one hand, full of foreboding and terror at the 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 229 
 
 fate of man and the shadow of nothingness, 
 and, on the other hand, it twitters like a bird 
 over the freshness and sunshine of spring. 
 He sings the spring again and again, and no 
 Russian poet has ever sung the glory, the 
 mystery, the wonder, and the terror of night 
 as he has done; his whole work is com- 
 pounded of glowing pictures of nature and a 
 world of longing and of unutterable dreams. 
 
 The dreamy dominion of the Parnassian 
 age, on whose threshold Tyutchev stood, was 
 to be disturbed by the notes of a harsher and 
 stronger music. 
 
 NEKRASOV (1821-77), Russia’s “ sternest 
 painter,” and certainly one of her best, drew 
 his inspiration direct from life, and sang the 
 sufferings, the joys, and the life of the people. 
 He is a Russian Crabbe; nature and man are 
 his subjects, but nature as the friend and foe 
 of man, as a factor, the most important factor 
 in man’s life, and not as an ideal storehouse 
 from which a Shelley can draw forms more 
 real than living man, nurslings of immortality, 
 or a Wordsworth reap harvests of the inward 
 eye. He called his muse the “ Muse of 
 Vengeance and of Grief.” He is an uncom- 
 promising realist, like Crabbe, and idealizes 
 
230 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 nothing in his pictures of the peasant’s life. 
 Like Crabbe, he has a deep note of pathos, 
 and a keen but not so minute an eye for 
 landscape. 
 
 On the other hand, he at times attains to 
 imaginative sublimity in his descriptions, as, 
 for instance, in his poem called The Red-nosed 
 Frost, where King Frost approaches a peasant 
 widow who is at work in the winter forest, 
 and freezes her to death. As Daria is gra- 
 dually freezing to death, the frost comes to her 
 like a warrior; and his semblance and attri- 
 butes are drawn in a series of splendid stanzas. 
 He sings to her of his riches that no profusion 
 can decrease, and of his kingdom of silver and 
 diamonds and pearls : then, as she freezes, she 
 dreams of a hot summer’s day, and of the rye 
 harvest and of the familiar songs— 
 
 ‘** Away with the song she is soaring, 
 She surrenders herself to its stream, 
 In the world there is no such sweet singing 
 As that which we hear in a dream.” 
 
 His longest and most ambitious work was 
 a kind of popular epic, Who is Happy in 
 Russia? written in short lines which have 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 231 
 
 the popular ring and accent. Some peasants 
 start on a pilgrimage to find out who is happy 
 in Russia. They fly on a magic carpet, and 
 interview representatives of the different 
 classes of society, the pope, the landowner, 
 the peasant woman, each new interview 
 producing a whole series of stories, some- 
 times idyllic and sometimes tragic, and all 
 showing their genius as intimate pictures of 
 various phases of Russian life. Here, again, 
 the analogy with Crabbe suggests itself, for 
 Nekrasov’s tales, taking into consideration the 
 difference between the two countries, have a 
 marked affinity, both in their subject matter, 
 their variety, their stern realism, their pathos, 
 their bitterness, and their observation of 
 nature, with Crabbe’s stories in verse. 
 
 Two of Nekrasov’s long poems tell the story 
 in the form of reminiscence,—and here again 
 the naturalness and appropriateness of the 
 diction is perfect,—of the Russian women, 
 Princess Volkonsky and Princess Trubetzkoy, 
 who followed their husbands, condemned to 
 penal servitude for taking part in the Decem- 
 brist rising, to Siberia. Here, again, Nekrasov 
 strikes a note of deep and poignant pathos, 
 
232 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 all the more poignant from thie absolute 
 simplicity with which the tales are told. 
 Nekrasov towers among the Parnassians of 
 the time and has only one rival, whom we 
 shall describe presently 
 
 The Parnassians are represented by three 
 poets, Markov (1821-97), Fer (1820-98), 
 and PoLonsky (1820-98), all three of whom 
 began to write about the same time, in 1840; 
 none of these three poets was didactic, and 
 all three remained aloof from political or 
 social questions. 
 
 Maikov is attracted by classical themes, by 
 Italy and also by old ballads, but his strength 
 lies in his plastic form, his colour, and his 
 pictures of Russian landscape; he writes, for 
 instance, an exquisite reminiscence of a day’s 
 fishing when he was a boy. 
 
 The quality of Fet’s muse, in contrast to 
 Maikov’s concrete plasticity, is illusiveness; 
 his lyrics express intangible dreams and im- 
 pressions; delicate tints and shadows tremble 
 and flit across his verse, which is soft as the 
 orient of a pearl; and his fancy is as delicate as 
 a thread of gossamer: he lives in the border- 
 land between words and music, and catches 
 the vague echoes of that limbo. 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY ~~ 23838 
 
 “‘ The world in shadow slipped away 
 And, like a silent dream took flight, 
 Like Adam, I in Eden lay 
 Alone, and face to face with night.” 
 
 He sings about the southern night amidst 
 the hay; or again about the dawn— 
 
 ** A whisper, a breath, a shiver, 
 The trills of the nightingale, 
 A silver light and a quiver 
 And a sunlit trail. 
 The glimmer of night and the shadows of 
 night | 
 In an endless race, 
 Enchanted changes, flight after flight, 
 On the loved one’s face. 
 The blood of the roses tingling 
 In the clouds, and a gleam in the grey, 
 And tears and kisses commingling— 
 The Dawn, the Dawn, the Day!” 
 
 Polonsky’s verse, in contrast to Fet’s gentle 
 epicurean temperament, his delicate half- 
 tones and illusive whispers, is made of sterner 
 stuff; and, in contrast to Maikov’s sculptural 
 lines, it is pre-eminently musical, and reflects 
 a fine and charming personality. His area 
 
234 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of subjects is wide; he can write a child’s poem 
 as transparent and simple as Hans Andersen 
 —as in his conversation between the sun and 
 the moon—or call up the “glory that was 
 Greece,”’ as in the poem when his “ Aspasia ” 
 listens to the crowds acclaiming Pericles, and 
 waits in rapturous suspense for his return— 
 an evocation that Browning would have 
 envied for its life and Swinburne for its 
 sound. 
 
 But neither Maikov, Fet, nor Polonsky, 
 exquisite as much of their writing is, produced 
 anything of the calibre of Nekrasov, even in 
 their own province; that is to say, they were 
 none of them as great in the artistic field as 
 he was in his didactic field. Compared with 
 him, they are minor poets. There is one 
 poet of this epoch who does rival Nekrasov 
 in another field, and that is Count ALExIs 
 Toutstoy (1817-75), who was also a Par- 
 nassian and remained aloof from didactic 
 literature; yet, under the pseudonym of 
 Kuzma Prutkov, he wrote a satire, a collection 
 of platitudes, that are household words in 
 Russia; also a short history of Russia in 
 consummately neat and witty satirical verse. 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 2385 
 
 As well as his satires, he wrote an historical 
 novel, Prince Serebryany, and more important 
 still, a trilogy of plays, dealing with the most 
 dramatic epoch of Russian history, that of 
 Ivan the Terrible. The trilogy, written in 
 verse, consists of the ‘‘ Death of Ivan the 
 Terrible,” ‘The Tsar Feodor Ivanovitch” 
 and “Tsar Boris.” They are all of them 
 acting plays, form part of the current classical 
 repertory, and are effective, impressive and 
 arresting when played on the stage. 
 
 But it is as a poet and as a lyrical poet that 
 Alexis Tolstoy is most widely known. Ver- 
 satile with a versatility that recalls Pushkin, 
 he writes epical ballads on Russian, Northern, 
 and even Scottish themes, and dramatic 
 poems on Don Juan, St. John Damascene, 
 and Mary Magdalene; and, besides these, a 
 whole series of personal lyrics, which are full 
 of charm, tenderness, music and _ colour, 
 harmonious in form and transparent. No 
 Russian poet since Pushkin has written such 
 tender love lyrics, and nobody has sung the 
 Russian spring, the Russian summer, and 
 the Russian autumn with such tender 
 lyricism. His poem on the early spring, 
 
236 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 when the fern is still tightly curled, the shep- 
 herd’s note still but half heard in the morning, 
 and the birch trees just green, is one of the 
 most tender, fresh, and perfect expressions 
 of first love, morning, spring, dew, and dawn 
 in the world’s literature. His songs have 
 inspired Tchaikovsky and other composers. 
 The strongest and highest chord he struck is 
 in his St. John Damascene; this contains 
 a magnificent dirge for the dead which can 
 bear comparison even with the Dies Ire 
 for majesty, solemn pathos, and _ plangent 
 rhythm. 
 
 His pictures of landscapes have a peculiar 
 charm. The following is an attempt at a 
 translation— 
 
 “Through the slush and the ruts of the 
 highway, 
 By the side of the dam of the stream, 
 Where the fisherman’s nets are drying, 
 The carriage jogs on, and I dream. 
 
 I dream, and I look at the highway, 
 At the sky that is sullen and grey, 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 237 
 
 At the lake with its shelving reaches, 
 And the curling smoke far away. 
 
 By the dam, with a cheerless visage 
 Walks a Jew, who is ragged and sere. 
 With a thunder of foam and of splashing, 
 
 The waters race over the weir. 
 
 A boy over there is whistling 
 On a hemlock flute of his make; 
 
 And the wild ducks get up in a panie 
 And call as they sweep from the lake. 
 
 And near the old mill some workmen 
 Are sitting upon the green ground, 
 
 With a wagon of sacks, a cart horse 
 Plods past with a lazy sound. 
 
 It all seems to me so familiar, 
 Although I have never been here, 
 The roof of that house out yonder, 
 And the boy, and the wood, and the weir. 
 
 And the voice of the grumbling mill-wheel, 
 And that rickety barn, I know, 
 
 I have been here and seen this already, 
 And forgotten it all long ago. 
 
238 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 The very same horse here was dragging 
 Those sacks with the very same sound, 
 And those very same workmen were sitting 
 
 By the rickety mill on the ground. ~ 
 
 And that Jew, with his beard, walked past 
 me, 
 And those waters raced through the weir; 
 Yes, all this has happened already, 
 But I cannot tell when or where.” 
 
 The people also produced a poet during 
 this epoch and gave Koltsov a successor, in 
 the person of Nixitin; his themes are taken 
 straight from life, and he became known 
 through his patriotic songs written during the 
 Crimean War; but he is most successful in 
 his descriptions of nature, of sunset on the 
 fields, and dawn, and the swallow’s nest in 
 the grumbling mill. Two other poets, whose 
 work became well known later, but passed — 
 absolutely unnoticed in the sixties, were 
 SLUCHEVSKY, a philosophical poet, whose 
 verse, excellent in description, suffers from 
 clumsiness in form, and APUKHTIN, whose 
 collected poems and ballads, although he 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 239 
 
 began to write in 1859, were not published 
 until 1886. Apukhtin is a Parnassian. The 
 bulk of his work, though perfect in form, is 
 uninteresting; but he wrote one or two lyrics 
 which have a place in any Russian Golden 
 Treasury, and his poems are largely read 
 now. | 
 
 In the eighties, a reaction against the anti- 
 poetical tendency set in, and poets began to 
 spring up like mushrooms. Of these, the 
 most popular and the most remarkable is 
 Napson (1862-87); he died when he was 
 twenty-four, of consumption. Since then his 
 verse has gone through twenty-one editions, 
 and 110,000 copies have been sold; ten edi- 
 tions were published in his own lifetime. And 
 there are innumerable musical settings by 
 various composers to his lyrics. His verse 
 inaugurates a new epoch in Russian poetry, 
 the distinguishing features of which are a 
 great attention to form and technique, a 
 Parnassian love of colour and shape, and a 
 deep melancholy. 
 
 Nadson sings the melancholy of youth, the 
 dreams and disillusions of adolescence, and 
 the hopelessness of the stagnant atmosphere 
 
240 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of reaction to which he belonged. This last 
 fact accounted in some measure for his 
 extraordinary popularity. But it was by no 
 means its sole cause ;. his verse is not only 
 exquisite but magically musical, to an extent 
 which makes the verse of other poets seem 
 a stuff of coarser clay, and his pictures of 
 nature, of spring, of night, and especially of 
 night in the Riviera (with a note of pas- 
 sionate home-sickness), have the aromatic, 
 intoxicating sweetness of syringa. Verse such 
 as this, sensitive, ultra-delicate, morbid, 
 nervous, and pessimistic, is bound to have 
 the defects of its qualities, in a marked de- 
 gree; one is soon inclined to have enough 
 of its sultry, oppressive atmosphere, its deli- 
 cate perfume, its unrelieved gloom and its 
 music, which is nearly always not only in 
 a minor key but in the same key. Nobody 
 was more keenly aware of this than Nadson 
 himself, and one of his most beautiful poems © 
 begins thus— 
 
 ** Dear friend, I know, I know, I only know 
 too well 
 That my verse is barren of all strength, and 
 pale, and delicate, 
 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 241 
 
 And often just because of its debility I 
 suffer 
 
 And often weep in secret in the silence of 
 the night.” 
 
 And in another poem he writes his apology. 
 He has never used verse as a toy to chase 
 tedium; the blessed gift of the singer has 
 often been to him an unbearable cross, and 
 he has often vowed to keep silent; but, if 
 the wind blows, the AXolian harp must needs 
 respond, and streams of the hills cannot help 
 rushing to the valley if the sun melts the snow 
 on the mountain tops. This apologia more 
 than all criticism defines his gift. His tem- 
 perament is an Adolian harp, which, whether 
 it will or no, is sensitive to the breeze; its 
 strings are few, and tuned to one key; never- 
 theless some of the strains it has sobbed have 
 the stamp of permanence as well as that of 
 ethereal magic. 
 
 The poets that come after Nadson belong 
 to the present day; there are many, and 
 they increase in number every year. The so- 
 called “‘ decadent ”’ school were influenced by 
 Shelley, Verlaine, and the French symbolists ; 
 
 but there is nothing which is decadent in the 
 Q 
 
242 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 ordinary sense of the word in their verse. 
 Their influence may not be lasting, but they 
 are factors in Russian literature, and some 
 of them, SoLocus, Brusov, BaLmont, and 
 Ivanov, have produced work which any school 
 would be glad to claim. This is also true of 
 ALEXANDER Buiocu, one of the most original 
 as well as one of the most exquisite of living 
 Russian poets. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 Wirth the death of Turgenev and Dostoyev- 
 sky, the great epoch of Russian literature 
 came to anend. A period of literary as well 
 as of political stagnation began, which lasted 
 until the Russo-Japanese War. This was 
 followed by the revolutionary movement, 
 which, in its turn, produced a literary as well 
 as a political chaos, the effect of which and 
 of the manifold reactions it brought about are 
 still being felt. It was only natural, if one 
 considers the extent and the quality of the 
 productions of the preceding epoch, that the 
 soil of literary Russia should require a rest. 
 
 As it is, one can count the writers of 
 prominence which the epoch of stagnation 
 produced on one’s fingers—CHEKHOV, GARSHIN. 
 KOROLENKO, and at the end of the period 
 MAXIME Gorky, and apart from them, in a 
 by-path of his own, MerezHKoysxy. Of 
 
 these Chekhov and Gorky tower above the 
 243 
 
244 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 others. Chekhov enlarged the range of Rus- 
 sian literature by painting the middle-class 
 and the Intelligentsia, and brought back to 
 Russian literature the note of humour; and 
 Gorky broke altogether fresh ground by paint- 
 ing the vagabond, the artisan, the tramp, the 
 thief, the flotsam and jetsam of the big town 
 and the highway, and by painting in a new 
 manner. 
 
 Gorky’s work came like that of Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling to England, as a revelation. Not 
 only did his subject matter open the doors 
 on dominions undreamed of, but his attitude 
 towards life and that of his heroes towards life 
 seemed to be different from that of all Russian 
 novelists before his advent ; and yet the differ- 
 ence between him and his forerunners is not 
 so great as it appears at first sight. It is 
 true that his rough and rebellious heroes, in- 
 stead of playing the Hamlet, or of finding the 
 solution of life in charity and humility or sub- 
 mission, are partisans of the survival of the 
 fittest with a vengeance, the survival of the 
 strongest fist and the sharpest knife; yet are 
 these new heroes really so different from the 
 uncompromising type that we have already 
 seen sharing one half of the Russian stage, 
 
CONCLUSION 245 
 
 right through the story of Russian literature, 
 from Bazarov back to Peter the Great, and 
 on whose existence was founded the remark 
 that Peter the Great was one of the ingredients 
 in the Russian character? Put Bazarov on the 
 road, or Lermontov, or even Peter the Great, 
 and you get Gorky’s barefooted hero. 
 
 Where Gorky created something absolutely 
 new was in the surroundings and in the man- 
 ner of life which he described, and in the way 
 he described them; this is especially true of 
 his treatment of nature: for the first time in 
 Russian prose literature, we get away from 
 the “orthodox” landscape of convention, 
 and we are face to face with the elements. 
 We feel as if a new breath of air had entered 
 into literature; we feel as people accustomed 
 to the manner in which the poets treated 
 nature in England in the eighteenth century 
 must have felt when Wordsworth, Byron, 
 Shelley and Coleridge began to write. 
 
 Chekhov worked on older lines. He de- 
 scends directly from Turgenev, although his 
 field is a different one. He, more than any 
 other writer and better than any other writer, 
 painted the epoch of stagnation, when Russia, 
 as a Russian once said, was playing itself to 
 
246 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 death at vindt (an older form of Bridge). 
 The tone of his work is grey, and indeed 
 resembles, as Tolstoy said, that of a photo- 
 grapher, by its objective realism as well as by 
 its absence of high tones; yet if Chekhov is a 
 photographer, he is at the same time a supreme 
 artist, an artist in black and white, and his 
 pessimism is counteracted by two other fac- 
 tors, his sense of humour and his humanity ; 
 were it not so, the impression of sadness one 
 would derive from the sum of misery which 
 his crowded stage of merchants, students, 
 squires, innkeepers, waiters, schoolmasters, 
 magistrates, popes, officials, make up between 
 them, would be intolerable. Some of Chek- 
 hov’s most interesting work was written for 
 the stage, on which he also brought Scenes of 
 Country Life, which is the sub-title of the play 
 Uncle Vanya. 'There are the same grey tints, 
 the same weary, amiable, and slack people, 
 bankrupt of ideals and poor in hope, whom we | 
 meet in the stories; and here, too, behind 
 the sordid triviality and futility, we hear 
 the “still sad music of humanity.” But 
 in order that the tints of Chekhov’s delicate 
 living and breathing photographs can be effec- 
 tive on the stage, very special acting is neces- 
 
CONCLUSION 247 
 
 sary, in order to convey the quality of atmo- 
 sphere which is his special gift. Fortunately 
 he met with exactly the right technique and 
 the appropriate treatment at the Art Theatre 
 at Moscow. 
 
 Chekhov died in 1904, soon after the Russo- 
 Japanese War had begun. Apart from the 
 main stream and tradition of Russian fiction 
 and Russian prose, Merezhkovsky occupies a 
 unique place, a place which lies between 
 criticism and imaginative historical fiction, 
 not unlike, in some respects—but very different 
 in others—that which is occupied by Walter 
 Pater in English fiction. His best known 
 work, at least his best known work in Europe, 
 is a prose trilogy, ‘“‘ The Death of the Gods ” 
 (a study of Julian the apostate), ‘“‘ The 
 Resurrection of the Gods” (the story of 
 Leonardo da Vinci), and “‘ The Antichrist ” (the 
 story of Peter the Great and his son Alexis), 
 which has been translated into nearly every 
 European language. This trilogy is an essay 
 in imaginative historical reconstitution; it 
 testifies to a real and deep culture, and it is 
 lit at times by flashes of imaginative inspira- 
 tion which make the scenes of the past live; 
 it is alive with suggestive thought; but it is 
 
248 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 not throughout convincing, there is a touch 
 of Bulwer Lytton as well as a touch of Goethe 
 and Pater init. Merezhkovsky is perhaps more 
 successful in his purely critical work, his books 
 on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol, which 
 are infinitely stimulating, suggestive, and 
 original, than in his historical fiction, although, 
 needless to say, his criticism appeals to a far 
 narrower public. He is in any case one of 
 the most brilliant and interesting of Russian 
 modern writers, and perhaps the best known 
 outside Russia. 
 
 During the war, a writer of fiction made his 
 name by a remarkable book, namely Kuprin, 
 who in his novel, The Duel, gave a vivid and 
 masterly picture of the life of an officer in 
 the line. Kuprin has since kept the promise 
 of his early work. At the same time, Leontp 
 ANDREEV came forward with short stories, 
 plays, a description of war (The Red Laugh), 
 moralities, not uninfluenced by Maeterlinck, © 
 and a limpid and beautiful style in which 
 pessimism seemed to be speaking its last 
 word. 
 
 In 1905 the revolutionary movement broke 
 out, with its great hopes, its disillusions, its 
 period of anarchy on the one hand and repres- 
 
CONCLUSION 249 
 
 sion on the other; out of the chaos of events 
 came achaos of writing rather than literature, 
 and in its turn this produced, in literature 
 as well as in life, a reaction, or rather a series 
 of reactions, towards symbolism, szstheticism, 
 mysticism on the one hand, and towards 
 materialism—not of theory but of practice—on 
 the other. But since these various reactions 
 are now going on, and are vitally affecting 
 the present day, the revolutionary movement 
 of 1905 seems the right point to take leave 
 of Russian literature. In 1905 a new era 
 began, and what that era will ultimately 
 produce, it is too soon even to hazard a 
 guess. 
 
 Looking back over the record of Russian 
 literature, the first thing which must strike 
 us, if we think of the literature of other 
 countries, is its comparatively short life. 
 There is in Russian literature no Middle Ages, 
 no Villon, no Dante, no Chaucer, no Renais- 
 sance, no Grand Stécle. Literature begins 
 in the nineteenth century. The second thing 
 which will perhaps strike us is that, in spite 
 of its being the youngest of all the litera- 
 tures, it seems to be spiritually the oldest. 
 In some respects it seems to have become 
 
250 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 over-ripe before it reached maturity. But 
 herein, perhaps, lies the secret of its greatness, 
 and this may be the value of its contribution 
 to the soul of mankind. It is— 
 
 ** Old in grief and very wise in tears ”’: 
 
 and its chief gift to mankind is an expression, 
 made with a naturalness and sincerity that 
 are matchless, and a love of reality which is 
 unique,—for all Russian literature, whether 
 in prose or verse, is rooted in reality—of that 
 grief and that wisdom; the grief and wisdom 
 which come from a great heart; a heart that 
 is large enough to embrace the world and to 
 drown all the sorrows therein with the im- 
 mensity of its sympathy, its fraternity, its 
 pity, its charity, and its love. 
 
1113. 
 1692. 
 
 1703. 
 1725. 
 
 1744. 
 1750. 
 1755. 
 1762. 
 1765. 
 a L790. 
 1796. 
 1800. 
 
 1802. 
 
 ~~ 1806. 
 1816. 
 
 ~~ 1819. 
 _.. 1820. 
 1823. 
 
 ~ 1895. 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 The Chronicle of Nestor. 
 
 First play produced in Russia, Gregory. 
 
 Simon Polotsky’s The Prodigal Son acted. 
 
 The first Russian newspaper, Zhe Russian News, 
 appears. 
 
 Death of Peter the Great. 
 
 Foundation of the Academy of Science. 
 
 Death of Kantemir. 
 
 Death of Tatishchev. 
 
 University of Moscow founded. 
 
 Accession of Catherine the Great. 
 
 Death of Lomonosov. chet 
 
 Radishchev’s Journey Through Russia published. 
 
 Death of Catherine the Great. 
 
 First edition of T’he Story of the Raid of Prince Igor 
 published. 
 
 Zhukovsky translates Gray’s Hlegy. 
 
 Death of Radishchev. 
 
 Krylov’s first fables published. 
 
 Death of Derzhavin. 
 
 History of the Russian State, by Karamzin, published. 
 
 University of St. Petersburg founded. 
 
 Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila published. 
 
 Griboyedov’s Misfortune of Being Clever circulated. 
 
 First Canto of Eugene Onegin published. 
 
 The Decembrist Attempt. 
 
 251 
 
252 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 1826 Rileev hanged. 
 Death of Karamzin. 
 -1827. Pushkin’s Gypsies published. 
 1829. Death of Griboyedov. 
 Pushkin’s Poltava published. 
 1831. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov published. 
 Complete version of Hugene Onegin published. 
 1832. Gogol’s Hvening on the Farm near the Dikanka published. 
 1834. Gogol’s Mirgorod published. 
 - 1835. Gogol’s Revisor produced on the stage. 
 1836. Chaadaev’s letters published. 
 1837. Death of Pushkin. 
 1841. Death of Lermontov. 
 1842. Death of Koltsov. 
 Gogol’s Dead Souls published. 
 1844. Death of Krylov. 
 1847. Gogol’s correspondence published. 
 Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches published. 
 Death of Belinsky. 
 1849. Dostoyevsky imprisoned. 
 1856-7. Saltykov’s Government Sketches appear. 
 1859. Ostrovsky’s Storm produced. 
 Goncharov’s Oblomov published. 
 1860. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons published. 
 1861. Emancipation of the Serfs. 
 1862. Pisemsky’s T'roubled Sea published. 
 1863. Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? published. 
 1865. Leskov’s No Way Out published. 
 » 1865-1872. Tolstoy’s War and Peace appeared. 
 
 ~~ 1866. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment published. 
 
 1868. Dostoyevsky’s Idiot published. 
 
 1875. Death of Count Alexis Tolstoy. 
 
 ~ 1875-6. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina published. 
 1877. Death of Nekrasov. 
 
 1881. Death of Dostoyevsky. 
 
 1883. Death of Turgenev. 
 
 1886. Death of Ostrovsky. 
 
1887. 
 1889. 
 1900. 
 - 1904, 
 
 1910. 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 Death of Nadson. 
 Death of Saltykov. 
 Death of Soloviev. 
 
 Production of Chekhovw’s Chaika (Seagull). 
 
 Production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. 
 Death of Chekhov. 
 Death of Tolstoy. 
 
 2538 
 
INDEX 
 
 AoTOoN, LORD, 146 
 
 Ainsworth, Harrison, 82 
 Aksakov, Ivan, 154 
 
 ——, Serge, 154 f. 
 
 Alexander I, 9, 80f., 44, 124, 169 
 — IT, 52, 153, 160, 179, 327 
 Alexis, Tsar, 23° 
 
 Andreev, Leonid, 248 
 
 Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’ 8, 205 f. 
 Apukhtin, 238 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 123, 146, 226 
 Atheism and Socialism, 150 f. 
 
 Bakunin, aa ay 
 
 Balfour, Mr. A. J,, 182 
 
 Balmont, 242 — 
 
 Bariatinsky, Ene, 101 
 
 Batyushkov, 5 
 
 Baudelaire, 226 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, 146 
 
 Belinsky, 142, 150 
 
 Bell, The, Herzen edits, 151, 153, 
 180 
 
 Bloch, Alexander, 242 
 Bogoiskateli, 198, 199 
 
 Bronté, Sete 222 
 
 , Emily, 
 
 Briickner, Tprot, 144, 145, 147, 
 
 Rint 242 
 
 Bulgaria, 12 
 
 Bulgaria, liberation of, 170, 171 
 
 Biirger’s Leonore translated into 
 Russian, 52 
 
 Burns, Boren 125 
 
 Byron, 61 f., 66, 67, 71, 72 
 Npegae pte 73, 98, 119, 123, 
 
 4 
 Byzantium, Emperor of, 11 
 
 Catherine I, 18 (footnote) 
 — II, 27, 32, 38, 80, 155 
 Chaadaev, 148 
 Chekhov, 243, 244 f. 
 Chernyshevsky, 180, 181, 227 
 Chesterton, Mr. G. Ke 182 
 Christianity of the East, aia 
 Chronicle of Kiev, the, 15 f. 
 Chronicle of Nestor, the, 15 f. 
 Church, the, influence on Russia 
 literature, 11, 21 
 Constantine, 44 
 
 
 
 54 
 
 Corot, 226 
 Crabbe, Nekrasov and, 229f. 
 Crimean War, the, 160, 202, 238 
 
 Danilevsky, 180 
 
 Daudet, 172 
 
 “ Decembrist ” rising, the, 44, 
 45, 61, 92 
 
 Delvig, Baron, 101 
 
 Demetrius, 21, 67 
 
 Derzhavin, 29, 56 
 
 Diderot, 27 
 
 Dobrolyubov, 180, 181, 227 
 
 Donne, John, 97 
 
 Dostoyevsky, 96, 99, 109, 143, 
 145, 160, 161, 164, 167, 173, 
 180, 192, 196 f., 200, 210 £5 
 220 £. 
 
 Eastern and Western Churches, 
 schism of, 13, 22, 182, 183 
 
 Eliot, Sir Charles, 13 
 
 Elizabeth, Empress, 26 
 
 Emancipation of the serfs, the, 
 160, 227 
 
 Falconet’s equestrian statue of 
 peter rhe reat, 85 
 
 Fet, 2: 
 
 Abert 162, 204 
 
 French influence in Russia, 26 
 
 Eras Revolution, the, 27, 40, 
 
 Gagarin, Prince, 150 
 
 Garshin, 243 
 
 Gautier, 226 
 
 German influence in Russia, 26 
 
 Goethe, death of, 228 
 
 [soa eae resemblance to 
 
 Gogol, Nicholas, 126 f., 190 
 
 Goncharov, 143, 176 f 
 
 Gorky, Maxime, 164, 243, 244 f. 
 
 Gray’s Elegy, ‘Russian transla- 
 tions of, 52, 53 
 
 Gregory, Protestant pastor of the 
 Sloboda, 23 
 
 Griboyedov, eae 126, 191 
 
 Grigoriev, 179, 1 30 
 
 Grigorovich, 194, 195 
 
 Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 84 
 
INDEX 
 
 Haumant, M., 168 
 
 Heckeren-Dantes’ 
 Pushkin 90 
 
 Heine, 98 
 
 Here Alexander, 148, 150f., 
 1 
 
 Hoffmann, 127 
 Homyakoy, 154 
 Hugo, Victor, 117, 118, 172 
 
 Ivan ITI, 20, 21, 24 
 
 —— IV (“The Terrible ”), 24, 
 67, 235 
 
 Ivanov, 242 
 
 Jane Eyre cited, 222 
 
 Kantemir, Prince, 27 
 
 Karakozov, 153 
 
 Karamzin, 18, 32f., 141 
 
 Katkov, 180, 182 
 
 Keats, 146 
 
 Kidnapped (Stevenson’s), 129 
 
 Kiev, destruction of, 19; rebuild- 
 ing of, 21 
 
 —,the mother of Russian 
 culture, 10 f. 
 
 Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, 244 
 
 Koltsov, 124f 
 
 Korolenko, 243 
 
 Krylov, 34f., 176 f. 
 
 Kuprin, 248 
 
 duel with 
 
 La Fontaine, 35 f. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 128 
 
 Latin language taught in Mos- 
 cow, 22 
 
 Le Maistre, Joseph, 148, 149 
 
 Leo X, 13 
 
 Lermontov, 102 f., 126 
 
 Leskov, vi, 189 f. 
 
 Lisle, Leconte de, 226 
 
 Literary criticism, 141 
 Liturgical books, revision of, 22 
 Lomonosov, Michael, 26, 29 
 Luther, 13 
 
 Lytton, Bulwer, 248 
 
 Maikov, 232 
 
 Maupassant, 128, 172 
 
 Meredith, George, 169, 172 
 erg a 147, 205, 243 
 
 Mérimée, 83, 141 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 181 
 Mickiewicz, the Pole, 87 
 Montesquieu, 27 
 Morley, John, 146 
 Moscow, 10, 19, 21 
 
 255 
 
 Moscow Art Theatre, the, v, 221, 
 222, 247 
 
 ——., European culture in, 23 
 
 Moscow Journal founded by Ka- 
 ramzin, 32 
 
 Moscow, Pushkin’s memorial at 
 99, 220 
 
 ——,, schools in, 22 
 
 ——,, the fire of, 18 
 
 , University of, 26 
 
 More of Russian literature, the, 
 
 Musin-Pushkin, Count. See Push- 
 
 kin. 
 Musset, 118, 119 
 Mussorgsky, 67 
 
 Nadson, 2389 f. 
 
 Napoleon, 30 f., 40, 111, 204 
 
 Nechaev, 218 
 
 Nekrasov, 229 f., 234 
 
 Nicholas, 44 
 
 Nicholas, Emperor, 160 
 
 Nicholas I, 103 
 
 Nihilism, 152, 163, 171, 173, 179, 
 217, 218, 227 
 
 Nikitin, 238 
 
 Norsemen in Russia, 10 
 
 
 
 Mg bad the, Russian translation 
 ot, 
 Ostrovsky, 193 f. 
 
 Paleologa, Sophia, 21 
 Paris revolution of 1848, the, 159 
 hood apatite poetry, the epoch of, 
 
 26 f. 
 Pater, Walter, 247, 248 
 Paul, Emperor, 33 
 Peter the Great, 21, 24 f., 71, 85, 
 
 97 
 — of Poetry, the, 95 
 Petrashevsky and his followers, 
 159, 160 
 Pisarev, 180, 181, 227 
 Pisemsky, 191, 193 
 Poe, E. A., 86 
 Poland, 21, 24 
 Poland, the rising in, 180 
 Poles occupy Moscow, 24 
 Polevoy, 142 
 Polezhaev, 101 
 Polonsky, 232, 233 f. 
 Polotsky, Simeon, 22 f. 
 Preobrazhenskoe and its theatre, 
 
 23 
 Pre-Raphaelites, the, 226 
 Printing press, the first, 21 
 Propagandists of Western Ideas, 
 the, 148 f. 
 
 
 
256 
 
 Prutkov, Kusama. See Tolstoy, 
 Count Alexis. 
 
 Pugachev and the Cossack rising, 
 80 
 
 Pushkin vi, 18, 34, 41, 43, 50, 
 54f., 109, 110, 123, 126, 132, 
 135, 138, 143 162, 167, 220 
 
 Radishchev, 27 f. 
 
 Rakhmaninov, 81 
 
 Rimsky-Korsakov, 81 
 
 Rodionovna, Anna, 84, 85 
 
 Rome, Gogol settles in, 133 
 
 Rousseau, 27 ‘ 
 
 Russia and political liberty, 148 
 
 , Norsemen in, 10, 11 
 
 , Tartar invasion of, 19, 24 
 
 —, the revolutionary move- 
 ment of 1905, 243, 248, 249 
 
 Russian literature, beginnings 
 of, 9 f. 
 
 ——,, dawn of, 30f. 
 
 , second renascence of, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 159 
 —— ——, the age of prose, 126f. 
 , the second age of 
 poetry, 226 f. 
 — newspaper, the first, 25 
 — Nihilism. See Nihilism. 
 —— trade centres, 10 
 Russia’s national poet, 95 
 Russo-Japanese War, the, 243 
 Ryleev, 44 . 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 146 
 
 St. Petersburg, 10 
 
 Jesuits, the, 148 
 
 ——., the great floods of 1834, 85 
 a Pane Michael, vi, 184 7., 
 
 Sand, George, 162 
 
 Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, Rus- 
 sian translation of, 52 
 
 Schumann of Russian literature, 
 the, 175 
 
 Seekers after God, 198 
 
 pee emancipation of the, 160, 
 
 Shakespeare, Pushkin on, 65, 66 
 
 Shchedrin. See Saltykov. 
 
 Siberia, Dostoyevsky at, 160 
 213, 225 
 
 ——,, Radishchev at, 28 
 
 Slav race, the, 10 f. 
 
 Slayoule liturgy, introduction of, 
 
 Slavophiles, the, 148, 148, 152, 
 154, 159, 180, 228 
 Sluchevsky, 238 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Socialism and Atheism, 150 f. 
 Society of Welfare, the, 43 
 Sologub, 242 
 
 Soloviev, Vladimir, 11, 93, 181 f. 
 Stebnitsky. See Leskov. 
 Stendhal, 204 
 
 peveueous R. L., 127, 128, 129 
 
 Strakhov, 180 
 Suffragettes, 163, 164 
 Sully-Prudhomme, 226 
 Suvorov, 30 
 Sviatoslav, 15, 16 
 
 Taine, 162 
 Tartar invasion of Russia, the, 
 ; the Tartar yoke thrown off, 
 
 Tatishchev, 26 
 
 Tchaikovsky, 80, 236 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, 165, 166, 226 
 
 Thackeray, 172 
 
 Tolstoy, Count Alexis, 234 f. 
 
 , Count Leo, 134, 161, 164 
 170, 196 f., 211, 246 
 
 Turgenev, Ivan, 64, 161 f., 192 
 
 Tyutchev, 154, 228 
 
 Universal church, 
 views on, 182-183 
 University of Moscow, the, 26, 251 
 
 
 
 Soloviev’s 
 
 Venevitinov, 101 
 
 Vienna, Congress of, 40, 43 
 Vigny, Alfred de, 202 
 
 Vinci, Leonardo da, 67 
 
 Virgil of Russian prose, the, 175 
 Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, 11 
 Volkonskyv, Princess, 150 
 Voltaire, 27 
 
 Volynsky, 147 
 
 ee Saltykov banished to 
 
 Vyazemsky, Prince, 141 
 Rein Peace, publication of 
 Wells, Mr., 164 
 
 Wilson, John, 81 
 Woman’s Suffrage, 182. C7. Suf- 
 
 fragettes. 
 Wordsworth, 120, 123 
 Yakovlev. Of. Herzen, Alex- 
 ander. 
 
 Yazykov, 101 
 Zhukovsky, Basil, 51 f., 83 
 
 . Zola, 74, 204 
 

 
 
 
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 By Joun Masertretp. ‘“‘One of the very few indispensable adjuncts 
 to a Shakespearean Library.”—Boston Transcript. 
 
 31. Landmarks in French Literature. 
 
 By G. L. Srracuey, Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. “For a 
 survey of the outstanding figures of French literature with an acute 
 analysis of the contribution which each made to his time and to the 
 general mass there has been no book as yet published so judicially 
 interesting.’”—The Chautauquan. 
 
 38. Architecture. 
 
 By Pror. W. R. Leruasy. An introduction to the history and 
 theory of the art of building. ‘‘Professor Lethaby’s scholarship and 
 extraordinary knowledge of the most recent discoveries of archzxa- 
 logical research provide the reader with a new outlook and with new 
 facts.’—The Athenaeum. 
 
 66. Writing English Prose. 
 
 By Witttam T. Brewster, Professor of English, Columbia Univer- 
 sity. ‘“‘Should be put into the hands of every man who is beginning 
 to write and of every teacher of English that has brains enough to 
 understand sense.”’—New York Sun, 
 
 83. William Morris: His Work and Influence. 
 
 By A. Cruttron Brock, author of Shelley: The Man and the Poet. 
 William Morris believed that the artist should toil for love of his 
 work rather than the gain of his employer, and so he turned from 
 making works of art to remaking society. 
 
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