RUSSIAN critics never
cease lamenting the dearth of good literature. Turgeneff, Dostoyevsky,
Pisemsky, Goncharoff, and Pomialovsky are dead; Tolstoy, the only survivor of
the great constellation of the sixties and seventies, is a very old man and has
"sworn off;" while the younger generation of novelists has so far
failed to produce a single work of lasting value. The productions of the masters
were inspired by the noble enthusiasms of their time: they were the æsthetic
offspring of the abolitionist movement and of the renaissance which followed
the emancipation of the serfs. "Does the poverty of our literature of
to-day denote a lack of ideals?" ask the critics.
This literary famine,
however, is limited to the novel; for the list of short story-tellers in Russia
is considerable in length, and includes several men of uncommon power, some of
whom deserve a place in the foremost ranks of modern authors. Of these younger
Russian writers Vladimir Korolenko is perhaps, the only one with whom
English-speaking readers are more or less familiar; Chekhoff, Potapenko, Gorki,
and Veresayeff being almost unknown in Anglo-Saxon countries.
All these are realists.
Indeed, no other species of fiction would be considered literature in Russia,
where the story of adventure and plot is looked upon as the æsthetic diet of
children, and where "decadent" influences have never been able to
obtain even a temporary footing. Lifelikeness clothed in the simplest forms of
expression, and artistic sincerity reflecting the self-criticisms and the
melancholy moods of the Russian people -- which the critics have taught the
public to exact from its story-writers since Pushkin -- are still the sine qua
non of literature.
"One thing is immortal in art as well as in life, and that is
truth," reads a recent testimonial addressed to Modest Ivanovitch
Pisareff, the St. Petersburg actor. "The love of truth is the hall-mark of
real talent. You, Modest Ivanovitch, are truly Russian in your art. The whole
character of our nation, with all our merits and faults, rises lifelike in your
artistic interpretation. The stormy passions of the Russian's soul, his
reckless pluck and abandon, his self-lashings and his sadness -- the
characteristic sadness of the Russian people -- all this has found in you a
fruitful and talented impersonator. You are one of those to whom the truth is
dearer than applause. Guard it, then, from all that is insincere and garish."
The testimonial was signed by some
of the leading Russian writers of to-day; and the note which rings through it
is the keynote of the Russian short story as well as of the Russian drama.
The list of living
authors, omitting the name of Count Tolstoy, is headed by Vladimir
Galaktionovitch Korolenko and Anton Pavlovitch Chekhoff; and the relative
standing of these two men, better than anything else, perhaps, illustrates the
general literary situation of their country. Korolenko is popular for his views
on the social question; Chekhoff, in spite of his having none.
The peculiar conditions
under which Russian literature has grown up have brought about a close intimacy
between the political ideals of the cultured classes, on the one hand, and
their fiction, on the other. Silenced by the censor, the reformer is forced to
call upon the novel to convey his message. This is the characteristic feature
of Russian letters. It involves a point of view which countries otherwise
circumstanced may find it difficult to appreciate, and that accounts for the
unusual seriousness with which the educated Russian takes his fiction.
No nation has a theory
of art so clearly defined, nor one so firmly imbedded in the traditions of the
intelligent classes, as is the theory which forms the underlying principle of
Russian criticism; and one of the essential points of this theory is, that a
work of art must also be a work of education. "Art for art's sake" is
out of the question in a country where the poem must take the place of the editorial,
and where the story-teller, who does not make his fiction a criticism of life,
is looked upon as something like a public officer who betrays his trust.
A literary creed such
as this would seem to be fatal to art, and the fiction based upon it doomed to
degenerate into that species of sermon-novel which is a bad sermon and a worse
novel. Yet, so far as Russia is concerned, the curse has turned out to be a
blessing. Sermonizing is just what the censor will not allow; so the novelist
must try to make his pictures talk, to let life expose its own wounds. For,
like those well-bred ladies of whom Thackeray tells us that they did not mind
looking at the trousers of hundreds of men, though they would have been shocked
to hear the word uttered, the censor, as a rule, does not prevent a subject of
the Czar from painting a spade, but he will not let him call it by its name.
To make a story such a
vehicle of expression two things are necessary. It must be a faithful
transcript of life, and it must be a work of art; that is, not a dead
"protocol" of events, nor yet a series of re-touched photographs, but
a picture vivified by the breath of genius and carrying the illusion of
pulsating reality. A "purpose novel," where the sails of the narrative
are trimmed to suit the wind which blows in the direction of the author's
preconceived moral, is in Russia in far worse odor than it is here. Indeed,
this sort of fiction usually defeats its own "purpose;" for it is
prevented, by its artificiality, and made-to-order effect, from directing
attention to the phase of life in question, so that, instead of exclaiming,
"How true!" the reader exclaims, "Oh, it's only a story!"
"A work of art," says Dobroluboff, the great critic of the
sixties -- those palmy days of the Russian novel -- "may be the exponent
of an idea, not because the author conceives this idea upon addressing himself
to his task, but because he has been struck by those facts of life from which
the idea follows as a natural inference. . . The office of literature is one of
propaganda, and its value depends on what and how it propagates. . . Thinking,
as we do, that to educate is the chief function of literature, we require of it
one thing, without which it can have no worth whatever, and that is
truth." This is the sum and
substance of the literary doctrine which holds sway over the great Northern
Empire. Like Molière's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," who was agreeably
surprised to discover that what he had spoken all his life was prose, Russia
had been writing realism long before she was acquainted with the term. While in
France, for example, this school of fiction made its appearance in the natural
course of literary evolution, in Russia it was forced upon the enlightened
classes by the political conditions of their country.
In the above sense
Turgeneff was a propagandist. His every novel was written with a purpose; and
yet they are anything but "novels with a purpose," as the term is
used in American and English criticism. Turgeneff's works are the artistic
incarnation of social ideas; so are Pisemsky's, Tolstoy's, Dostoyevsky's,
Ostrovsky's; and so are the stories and sketches of Vladimir Korolenko.
Korolenko is of an
affectionate, self-sacrificing nature. He thinks the present order of things in
his country unjust, and his heart goes out to every victim of it. He has
suffered for the sympathies which form the groundwork of his art; and the
public and the critics love him as much for his sacrifices as for his talent.
In short, Korolenko is a radical; and the "facts of life which strike
him" most keenly, and which he portrays in his works, are such as,
according to the critics, contain his advanced views. Not so Chekhoff, who is
neither a radical nor a conservative, but a man without convictions, who writes
for no other "purpose" than the pleasure which he takes in his work.
As a result, the applause which his genius received in the early days of his
career was half-hearted and accompanied by howls of disapproval.
He made his bow to the
public in the latter part of the eighties as a writer of short sketches for
newspapers; and he had not been known a year, before it became evident that a
great, new star had appeared on the literary horizon of Russia. But then he was
a man without social ideas; so the critics took a tone with him which made it
appear as if they begrudged him his powers and challenged his title to them.
That he has overcome all the obstacles in his way to fame, and has been
universally recognized as the greatest master of the Russian short story and the
most powerful living writer in his country after Tolstoy, is one of the proofs
of the magnitude of his genius.
Speaking of Chekhoff's
earlier sketches, Skabichevsky, in his "History of Recent Russian
Literature," remarks that they
"reveal a vigorous talent and bristle with art and humor, but
suffer from one vital shortcoming, and that is their lack of a unifying idea.
The author abandons himself to fleeting impressions which he hastens to convey
within the space of some two hundred newspaper lines. The upshot of it is that
next to a heart-wringing life-drama he will offer you a series of vaudeville
scenes obviously written for the sole purpose of making his readers laugh. His
longer stories, as, for example, 'The Steppe' and 'Flames,' are characterized
by the same kaleidoscopic quality and by the absence of any central idea."
Since 1892, when the above
passage was written, Chekhoff has taken himself more seriously. His "Ward
No. 6," where a country physician -- a lonely thinker and passionate
reader, misunderstood by his neighbors -- is locked up as a madman by his rival
physician; "The Black Friar," which portrays the picturesque
hallucinations of an overworked professor and his misery upon recovering from
his blissful megalomania; "The Butterfly," which is the quiet tragedy
of a good-natured man of science married to an unsuccessful painter, who,
unable to appreciate her husband's gifts and the importance of his work, is
abandoned to the recklessness of Bohemian life till she violates her plighted troth;
"The Kiss," which a shy bachelor received in a dark room from a
charming woman, who mistook him for her lover, and the tragic-comic effect it
had upon his psychology; "The Peasants," where the grim truth of
village life in Russia is laid bare -- these and many other short stories and
sketches are irresistible works of art, strong, deep, true, and beautiful. But
they, too, are devoid of "underlying ideas;" and so, while the
critics have come to agree that the appearance of a new story by Chekhoff is an
important event in the literary history of Russia, they still frown upon him as
a kind of political heathen.
Nicolai
Constantinovitch Michailovsky, the leading critical authority of the present
generation, who is one of the irreconcilable literary enemies of the younger
master, points to the following passage in "A Dull Story," by
Chekhoff, as true of the author himself.
"In all my ideas and feelings of men and things," says the
hero of the narrative, "there is a lack of that unifying something which
might link them into an organic whole. Each sensation and each thought lives in
me by itself, and all my reasonings upon science, literature, the drama, as
well as all the images in my mind, are detached and independent of one another;
so that the most ingenious analyst would fail to discover in them that which is
called 'unifying idea' or 'the God in the living man.' Now, where this is
lacking all real interest in life is lacking." "Chekhoff has talent and the power of
observation," declares Michailovsky, "but he lacks 'that which is
called unifying idea or the God in the living man.' This is the key to the
riddle why we all, who respect his gifts, are firmly convinced that he will
never develop them to the full extent of their potential vigor."
The hero of "A
Dull Story" and his author are representatives of a type which is quite
common in Russia and Poland. Turgeneff has portrayed several varieties of this
Hamlet of our times in his stories; and Sienkewitcz has made him the subject of
his best psychological novel, "Without Dogma." As to Chekhoff, his
"Dull Story" is not the only production in which his leading
character is a man without a dogma. Several of his other tales have this type
for their central figures. The rest treat of other types; each story "living
by itself," and all of them reflecting the state of mind which is
characteristic of their time.
Another critic who
finds fault with Chekhoff's social views observes apropos his
"Peasants:"
"But Chekhoff becomes a really remarkable master when, casting all
ideas to the winds and obeying his artistic instincts alone, he sets out to
paint life in his own objective and simple way. It is a long time since Russian
literature congratulated itself upon the appearance of a piece of art like 'The
Peasants.'" Verisimilitude,
then, is a first consideration; and no amount of cleverness and fine writing
can atone for the lack of it. To win the attention of the educated Russian, it
is absolutely necessary that the author should have the gift of making things
seem real. Chekhoff possesses this gift in a marvellous degree. One of the
striking features of his stories is their absolute naturalness. Korolenko,
Potapenko, Gorki, and a score of lesser lights are endowed with a sense of
character and can draw a lifelike picture; but Chekhoff, of all Russian writers
of the younger generation, seems to tell a true story. It is impossible to read
half a dozen sentences in any of his tales without beginning to feel that all
was only spirited gossip about people with whom author and reader are
personally acquainted. Chekhoff seems to be too keenly interested in these
people, and too anxious to tell you about them, to indulge in a prettily turned
phrase, a jest, or a piece of rhetoric. Indeed, his works teem with
irresistible humor; his style is a model of grace; a few simple words sketch
off the character so that it lives and moves before the reader; and, above all,
almost every sentence exposes to view some interesting nook of the human soul.
But all these results are achieved in a most casual way. The author enjoys his
gossip too intensely to be aware of his own cleverness.
The stories mentioned,
except "The Peasants," have been selected, because they belong to
those of Chekhoff's productions in which something happens, so that the
"point" or the simple little plot can be presented in a nutshell. The
typical Chekhoff story, however, the one which shows his genius at its best, is
so absolutely storyless that there is not enough even to fill a nutshell. From
five to ten thousand words are bestowed upon the most trivial bit of every-day
life. But then it is life itself, not a mere réchauffé of it; and the plain,
hum-drum people and things, to whom nothing out of the ordinary happens, turn
out to be thrillingly interesting.
The great point of
Chekhoff's genius is his wonderful artistic memory for the caprices and
fleeting trifles of reality -- for the wanton dissimilarities as well as for
the similarities of life. Almost everything the author says sets the reader
wondering how it ever occurred to him to mention such a thing at all. It seems
to have so little in common with what writers, good or bad, usually put in
their descriptions or dialogues. It is one of those evanescent flinders of life
which one can neither remember nor invent, and which are as fresh and
unexpected, in every instance, as they are characteristic of the period and
place to which they relate. His stories are full of these little surprises, and
the illusion is entrancingly complete. Tolstoy is the only writer who possesses
this quality in a higher degree for psychical analysis; but even he yields
first place to Chekhoff in the description of external phenomena.
It is ordinary,
commonplace conditions, too, which have furnished Korolenko, the humane
prose-poet of Russian literature of to-day, with some of his most fascinating
creations; but, like Gorki, he sometimes departs from this realism sans phrases
to write a species of fairy tales or fables. These, however, can hardly be
called romance in the sense in which the term is applied to the novels of
Crockett, Weyman, or Anthony Hope; for while the English romancer will make it
his business to put ordinary mortals through experiences that are anything but
ordinary, the fantasies referred to deal with actualities under the guise of
the supernatural, in common mortals masked as fairies, devils, or angels.
Korolenko's "Judgment Day," which is a satire upon the government's
discriminative policy regarding the Jews, is, perhaps, the best example of this
class of realistic poetry. The devil of the story is a pretty human sort of
devil, just as Makar's "Dream" of his experiences after death is
quite a wakeful vision of throbbing earthly life.
Korolenko's natural
bent seems to be in the direction of the mysterious and the weird. He is
indisputably the greatest master of Russian composition since Turgeneff and
Goncharoff. His style is rich in color and exquisitely finished; but instead of
the soft, enravishing splendor of Turgeneff's diction, it has a lethargic,
uncanny glow which pleases but does not move. Were he an Englishman his art
would, perhaps, have developed some of the qualities of Stevenson and Du
Maurier. As it is, he often seeks for the quaint and the bizarre in real life;
now penetrating the depths of a "Rustling Forest" for a story of old
serfdom days; now descending into the subterranean refuge of beggars to study
the feelings of a boy "In Bad Company;" now ascending to the
bell-tower of a village church where a superannuated, life-long
"Bell-ringer" gasps his last amid the reverberations of his own
chimes.
Korolenko is best known
to English readers as the author of "The Blind Musician," which it is
customary to call his masterpiece. This is scarcely fair to the gifted writer;
for, with all its high merits, this story is not altogether free from a certain
premeditated effect which is absent from his other works, notably, "In Bad
Company." This tale treats of life among the drink-crazed outcasts of a
southern town, and of the touching friendship between the young son of the
local judge and the sickly little daughter of one of the social waifs. Abandoned
to his gnawing grief over the loss of his wife, the judge neglects his
motherless boy; letting him roam around the streets, make excursions to the
vaults of the abandoned castle, and visit the church where the tramps of the
town find shelter. The lonely little nobleman thirsts for the caressing hand of
a parent; and in his yearnings he finds consolation in his secret devotion to
the beggar girl. The story is thoroughly convincing, and offers a striking
example of a disagreeable subject made beautiful through artistic truth
inspired by human sympathy. The several outcasts in the story are among the
strongest creations in modern literature.
Korolenko's later
stories have all appeared in "Russkoye Bogatstvo" (Russian Riches),
of which he and Michailovsky, the critic, are the editors. His contributions
are rather far between. So are Chekhoff's. The most prolific of the noted
writers of short stories is Ignati Nicolaïevitch Potapenko. This, however, has
anything but an enviable effect upon his literary status. He has written
several tales which should entitle him to a place in the front rank. "The
Private Secretary of His Excellency" is an inimitable portrait of a man
who wears out his nerves and dies of heart-failure; overworking himself for the
glory of his worthless time-server of an employer; "Practical Common
Sense" may not be a model of construction, but it is full of human
interest and irresistible humor. Besides these two, Potapenko has written a
dozen or so of other stories and sketches which have in them the elements of
enduring literature; but all these are lost in scores of "potboilers"
quite unworthy of his talent.
All his stories,
without exception, are, however, extremely readable; and running through them
all there is a chord of human sympathy and of an undimmed optimism, coupled
with that spirit of criticism which is a necessary element of success in
Russian fiction. Sometimes the humanitarian idea is given expression in a
species of semi-idealized images, whose flesh and blood are of a questionable
quality, as is the case in his "General's Daughter" and "Active
Service;" at other times it betrays him into false notes like those which
jar upon the reader of his story of newspaper life in Odessa; but in his
happier moods he is free from all these faults. At his best he is very good
indeed. Unfortunately, however, he is too often at his worst.
The clerical and the
Bohemian world are his specialty; but he has a close acquaintance with almost
every walk of life, particularly in the southern provinces; and the ten or
twelve volumes of short stories he has published cover the widest range of type
and circumstance. He has neither the tender-hearted poetry of Korolenko nor the
divine clairvoyance of Chekhoff; but he knows the world thoroughly, and has a
lively sense of its comedies and tragedies. One of the secrets of his wide
popularity is his inexhaustible stock of most interesting themes. As the reader
lays down a new story by Potapenko, he thinks it curious that the subject
should so long have been overlooked by literature. It seems just the thing to
make a story of, and, at the same time, it is such a familiar phase of our
every-day experience, that one cannot help wondering how it escaped the notice
of all other writers.
As to Gorki and
Veresayeff, they "arrived" so recently that their position has not
yet been clearly defined. Both are endowed with the power of description, and
both have sense of character; but while Veresayeff has attracted attention as a
promising disciple of Turgeneff, Gorki has sprung into sudden prominence
through his most original and extremely vigorous sketches of life among social
waifs. His "unifying idea" strongly suggests Nietzsche.
Piotr Dmitrievitch
Boborykin, who trains his literary camera upon the latest tendencies and fads
of his country, and Dmitri Nikanorovitch Mamin, who hunts for "local
color" among the tribes of the Ural Mountains and Western Siberia, are
novelists. Both have the art of projecting their figures, and both are widely
read -- particularly Boborykin, who belongs to an older generation. But neither
of them is capable of arousing enthusiasm in a country where the word novelist
is associated in the public mind with the names of Tolstoy, Turgeneff,
Dostoyevsky, and Goncharoff.
Of the young women who
contribute stories to the leading magazines, Viera Mikoulich has attracted
considerable notice. Other young writers, also, have done good work; and, like
those mentioned above, they draw their themes from the actualities of their own
environment.
The peculiar history of
Russian literature, from Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontoff down to our time, and
the "characteristic sadness" and introspective,
"self-lashing" propensities of the educated classes have developed a
passionate interest in the artistic study of character and human motive. The
five or six magazines published in the two capitals, and the influential
newspapers of the Empire, give much space to this kind of literature. Not
contented with the home product, they also print a translation of anything to
be found in the way of realistic fiction in foreign countries; provided the
realism is art, and the analysis is not a long-drawn-out discussion, but a
"picture of the soul."
But then the Russian
magazines will also give space to stories of foreign authors who are not
realists. Generally speaking, they are far more tolerant with writers of the
"decaying West" than they are with their own. They limit themselves,
however, to the best representatives of literature in each country; so that,
upon the whole, the fiction printed in the Russian magazines is of an unusually
high order. This would not be the case, perhaps, if the magazine-reading public
in Russia were as large as it is in countries where education is much more
evenly distributed than it is in the dominions of the Czar. But the Russian
monthlies cater to a small, intellectual minority -- the circulation of the
"Messenger of Europe," the best-established magazine in St.
Petersburg, is, according to its own figures, from 7,000 to 8,000 -- and the
average of tastes they have to deal with is exceedingly high.
The publications in
question are all of the "Revue des Deux Mondes" type; each combining
the elements of a review, such as THE FORUM, and a literary magazine. In Russia
they are, broadly speaking, the substitutes for political parties. Not that the
matter published is limited by any definite programme or necessarily colored by
partisan bias -- for, indeed, topics covering the widest range of thought are
given fair and exhaustive treatment, and the fiction, though often saddled with
a purpose, is in the majority of instances good literature -- but the writers
grouped about a magazine are, for the most part, banded together by the ties of
political persuasion; and their belief, more or less directly advocated in special
articles, crops out in the trend of the literary discussions as well as in the
stories and the poetry.
A. CAHAN.