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Short Histories of the Literatures 
 of the World 
 
 Edited by Edmund Gosse 
 
LITERATURES OF THE WORLD. 
 
 Edited by EDMUND GOSSE. 
 
 Hon. M. A. of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 A succession of attractive volumes dealing- with the his- 
 tory of literature in each country. Each volume w^ill contain 
 about three hundred and fifty i2mo pages, and will treat an 
 entire literature, giving a uniform impression of its develop- 
 ment, history, and character, and of its relation to previous 
 and to contemporary work. 
 
 Each, i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 
 NOW READY. 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE. By K. Waliszewski. 
 BOHEMIAN LITERATURE. By Fkancis, Count LOtzow, 
 
 author of" Bohemia: An Historical Skeich." 
 JAPANESE LITERATURE. By W. G Aston, C. M. G., 
 
 M, A., late Acting Secretary at the British Legation at Tokio. 
 SPANISH LITERATURE. By J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Mem- 
 ber of the Spanish Academy. 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE. By Richard Garnett, C. B., 
 
 LL D., Keeper of Printed Books in the British Museum. 
 ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE. By Gilbert Murray, 
 
 M. A., Professor of Greek in the University of Glasgow. 
 FRENCH LITERATURE. By Edwakd D(iwden, D. C. L., 
 
 LL. D., Professor of English Literature at the University of 
 
 Dublin. 
 
 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE. By the Editor. 
 
 IN PREPARATION. 
 
 American Literature. By Prof. W. P. Trent, of the Univer- 
 sity of the Sou'-h. 
 
 German Literature. 
 
 Hungarian Literature. By Dr. Zoltan BeOthy, Professor 
 of Hungarian Literature at the University of Budapest. 
 
 Latin Literature. By Dr. Arthur Woolgar-Verrall, Fellow 
 and Senior Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 Modern Scandinavian Literature. By Dr. Georg Brandes, 
 of Copenhagen. 
 
 Sanskrit Literature. By A. A. Macdonell, M. A., Deputy 
 Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. 
 
A HISTORY OF 
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 K. WALISZEWSKI 
 
 OF THE ROMANCE OF AN 
 PETER THE GK.EAT, ETC. 
 
 AUTHOR OF THE ROMANCE OF AN EMPRESS, 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 
 1900 
 
/\iz{pj::^ G 
 
 Authorized Edition 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In the year 1834 the great Bi^linski, on his maiden 
 appearance as a literary critic, bestowed the following 
 epigraph, borrowed from one of his fellow-critics, Sen- 
 kowski, on his first essay : — 
 
 "Do we' possess a literature ?" 
 " No, we have nothing but a book-trade ! " 
 Eighteen months later, he began to publish a half- 
 yearly Review under this somewhat confusing title,— 
 Nothings about Nothing. 
 
 Hence we may conceive what the country of Pouch- 
 kine, of Gogol, of Tourgueniev, and of Tolstoi has gained 
 by the labour of the past half-century. 
 
 For this labour has not confined itself to the amass- 
 ing of a treasure-house of conceptions, exquisite or 
 stately. It has endowed the nation that conceived them, 
 and Bielinski himself as well, with the conscious pos- 
 session of a national genius, the anterior manifestations 
 of which had escaped appreciation, because they had 
 been judged from the aesthetic point of view only, 
 and not from that historical standpoint which alone be- 
 fitted them. In Russia, more even than elsewhere, the 
 theory of evolution, applied by Taine— in how brilliant 
 a manner we all know — to English literature, remains 
 the only one whereby the sense of a literary develop- 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 ment which, during the march of history, has experi- 
 enced such strange checks and forward impulses, can be 
 efficiently revealed. The volume of the literary patri- 
 mony of Russia, increasing in proportion to the political 
 fortunes of the country, attracted first the curiosity, and 
 presently the admiration, of Western Europe. 
 
 It is a far cry, now, to the days when Sir John Bow- 
 ring's articles in the Foreign Quarterly Review came as a 
 revelation. But the notoriety then so rapidly acquired 
 is still unfairly apportioned. The works of Krylov have 
 been translated into twenty-one languages. Those of 
 Pouchkine still await a worthy translator, both in 
 England, in France, and in Germany. Such authors 
 as Lermontov and Chtchedrine are practically unknown 
 to foreign readers. 
 
 These special circumstances have dictated the plan 
 of my work. I have thought it right to avoid excessive 
 generalisation. Russian literature has not yet acquired, 
 in the eyes of the European public, that remoteness 
 which would permit of my summing it up in certain 
 given works and salient figures. I have likewise felt 
 unable to avoid a certain amount of detail. It is 
 not possible to speak to English readers of a Eugene 
 Onieguine, as I should speak to them of Hamlet. My 
 Russian readers, if such there be, will doubtless reproach 
 me with having paid too scant attention to some one or 
 other of their favourite authors. My excuse is, that even 
 in such a book as this, I have not chosen to speak of 
 anything save that which I personally know, and am 
 capable of judging. 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 I expect to elicit yet other reproaches, in this direc- 
 tion. The form assumed, in the lapse of time, by such 
 personages as Hamlet or Eugene Onidguine, is the two- 
 fold outcome of an original individual conception, and of 
 a subsequent and collective process. These, first super- 
 posed, become inter-pervading, and end, to the popular 
 imagination, in complete fusion. This collaborative 
 process, the secret and existence of which escape the 
 notice of the great majority, constitutes a great difficulty 
 for a writer addressing a public other than that in the 
 midst of which the types he evokes have sprung into 
 being. Try to forget all that the lapse of years, and 
 the action of endless commentaries, the ingenuity, the 
 tenderness, the worship of millions of readers, have added 
 and altered, in such a figure as that of Gretchen. You 
 will see how much of the original remains, and you will 
 realise my difficulty in speaking to my readers of Tatiana, 
 if by chance (and it is a very likely chance) the charac- 
 ter of Tatiana be unknown to them. I dare not venture 
 to flatter myself I have completely overcome this diffi- 
 culty. 
 
 Further, I do not close my eyes to my own de- 
 ficiencies as an interpreter between two worlds, in each 
 of which I myself am half a stranger. While other 
 qualifications for the part may fail me, I bring to it, 
 I hope, a freshness of impression, and an indepen- 
 dence of judgment, which may, to a certain extent, 
 justify the Editor of this series in the selection with 
 which he has been good enough to honour me. 
 
 Will Mr. Gosse allow me to associate with him, in 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 this expression of my gratitude, those Russian friends 
 who have helped me towards the accompHshment of 
 my undertaking, — among them MM. Onieguine and 
 Chtchoukine, to whom a double share of thanks is due. 
 Their knowledge and their courtesy have proved as 
 inexhaustible as their libraries, which rank among the 
 wonders of this fair city of Paris, where they have fixed 
 their home, and where I myself have been so happy as 
 to be able to write this book. 
 
 K. WALISZEWSKL 
 
 December 1899 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION I 
 
 I. THE EPIC AGE .... ... 8 
 
 II. THE RENAISSANCE 47 
 
 III. THE FORGING OF THE LANGUAGE . . 65 
 
 IV. THE BONDAGE OF THE \Vp:ST— CATHERINE II. . . 88 
 V. THE TRANSITION PERIOD — KARAMZINE AND JOU- 
 
 KOVSKI 128 
 
 VI. THE NATIONAL EVOLUTION — POUCHKINE . . .154 
 
 VII. THE EMANCIPATING MOVEMENT— THE DOCTRINAIRES 189 
 
 VIII. LERMONTOV, GOGOL, AND TOUEGUliNIEV . . 227 
 IX. THE CONTROVERSIALISTS — HERZEN AND CHTCHE- 
 
 DRINE 299 
 
 X. THE PREACHERS — DOSTOIEVSKI AND TOLSTOI . . 330 
 
 XI. CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 403 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY .... . . 441 
 
 INDEX 447 
 
A HISTORY OF 
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The Slavs, like the Latins, the Celts, and the Germans, 
 belong to the Aryan or Indo-European race. Oppressed 
 for many years by the Western peoples, which drew the 
 word slave from the appellation " Slav," scorned by their 
 German neighbours, who would not regard their race in 
 any other light but that of " ethnological matter " {ethno- 
 logischer 5/(7^), they probably owed their inferiority solely 
 to their geographical position. Modern civilisation, like 
 that of the ancients, built itself up almost independently of 
 the Slavs. Yet they have raised their protest against a 
 too absolute decree of exclusion, and they have right on 
 their side. The Slav nation did not, indeed, hollow out 
 the channels of the double movement, intellectual or 
 religious. Renaissance and Reform, from which the 
 modern era issued, but it opened them in two directions. 
 Copernicus and John Huss were both Slavs. 
 
 The Slav race, the latest comer into the world of 
 civilisation, has always been at school, always under 
 some rod or sway. Whether it be the Oriental and 
 material conquest of the thirteenth century, or the West- 
 ern and moral one of the eighteenth, it merely under- 
 goes a change of masters. Thus the evolution of the 
 
2 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 individuality of the race was no easy matter. Modern 
 Russia still labours at the task, and it has other work to 
 do as well. Modern Russia is an empire a thousand 
 years old, and a colony, the age of which is not, indeed, 
 as has been asserted, that of one hundred and fifty years, 
 but of four centuries precisely. And the colonists of 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who recom- 
 menced, in the neighbourhood of Perm and towards 
 the Upper Kama, the interrupted work of the old Novgo- 
 rod merchants, have made but little relative progress. 
 Odessa, with its 405,000 inhabitants, dates from 1794. 
 
 Between the Novgorod merchants and their sixteenth- 
 century successors came the Mongol invasion. This 
 does not suffice to explain the prolonged check in the 
 organic development of the huge body which it left in 
 life. Previously, indeed, gaps, periodic suppressions of 
 growth and evolution, had been manifest, and they were 
 repeated after the disappearance of this particular cause. 
 They would seem to be the result of some constitutional 
 vice, connected as much with race and climate as with 
 the course of historical events. Under these inclement 
 skies, history appears to have brought about an acci- 
 dental mingling of elements, the ill-controlled action of 
 which, when they chanced to harmonise, gave birth to 
 violent outbreaks of energy, while, when they disagreed, 
 the result became apparent in sudden stoppages of pro- 
 gress. The outcome has something of the American in 
 it, and yet something of the Turkish. Thanks to its geo- 
 graphical situation betwixt Europe and Asia, thanks to its 
 historical position betwixt a series of anvils, whereon 
 the Byzantine priest, the Tartar soldier, and the German 
 free-lance have taken turns to hammer out its genius, 
 Russia, young and old at once, has not yet found its 
 
THE RUSSIAN RACE 
 
 3 
 
 orbit not- its true balance. Here we see a waste ; there 
 extreme refinement. Men have called it rotten ere it 
 was ripe. But that must not be said. Prematurely ripe 
 on one side, indeed, with a distracting medley of savage 
 instincts and ideal aspirations, of intellectual riches and 
 moral penury. But Nature must be given time to per- 
 fect her own work. 
 
 There is much for her to do. The mixture of races, 
 and their strugglesagainst hostile conditions of existence, 
 against the climate, against foreign invasion, have called 
 another problem into existence. How to fuse into one 
 amalgam such contradictory elements as strength and 
 weakness, tenacity and elasticity, ruggedness and good- 
 nature,insensibilityand kindness. Theperpetual struggle 
 which has tempered and hardened the Russian to his 
 inmost soul has rendered him singularly susceptible to 
 external emotions. He knows — no man better — how to 
 suffer. No man knows better than he what suffering 
 costs; and this makes him compassionate. Under an 
 exterior that is often coarse enough you may find a 
 man of infinite tenderness. But press him not too far. 
 Count not too much upon him. He is prone to terrible 
 revulsions ! 
 
 The same causes have developed his practical inclina- 
 tions. In his case — in art as in life — realism is no 
 theory ; it is the application of natural instincts. Even 
 in poetry and in religion the Russian has a horror of 
 abstractions. No metaphysical spirit, no sentimentality 
 whatsoever; great resourcefulness, perfect tact as regards 
 both men and matters, and in all his ideas, his habits, 
 and his literature, a positivism carried to the point of 
 brutality. This, in brief, appears to me to be Russian 
 psychology. But to all this, and from the same causes 
 
4 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 always, is linked a marked proneness to melancholy, 
 "Sadness, scepticism, irony," said Herzen, "are the 
 three strings of Russian literature." He added, " Our 
 laugh is but a sickly sneer ! " Some weep ; some dream. 
 In these last, their melancholy inclines them to a hazy 
 mysticism, which either triumphs over the realistic in- 
 stincts, or else allies itself with them in strangest union. 
 Of such a union Dostoievski was the product. 
 
 Finally, we must inquire of the climate, of the race, 
 and of its history, wherefore this Russian, who is a 
 conceiver of ideas, a realiser of artistic forms, should 
 be possessed of scant originality in his methods of 
 thought, while showing much in his methods of trans- 
 lating the thoughts of others, in his sentiments, his 
 tastes, his gestures. In such matters, indeed, his origi- 
 nality reaches the point of oddity, and goes beyond it, 
 even as far as that indigenous sanwdourstvo which, in 
 certain of its forms, borders closely on madness. This, 
 again, is natural, because psychological development has 
 degrees of its own, and the emotional faculties are here 
 naturally on a lower plane. 
 
 To sum it up. A people and a literature standing 
 apart; geographically, ethnographically, historically, out- 
 side the Western European community. No doubt the 
 three great elements of Western civilisation, the Chris- 
 tian, the Grzeco-Norman, and the German, are to be 
 found at the base of this eccentric formation, but in very 
 different proportion, combination, and depth. Both the 
 nation and its literature have, indeed, alike received the 
 triple baptism which freed Russia from all the primitive 
 barbarisms — the apostolate of Cyril and Methodius, the 
 Varegian conquest, the Byzantine civilization. But the 
 hold of the conquerors, whether of Norman or of German 
 
THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 5 
 
 origin, was weak and transient ; so weak and so tran- 
 sient, indeed, that their very origin is now disputed. 
 Cyril and Methodius bore with them the germ of the 
 Eastern Schism, and by that schism, as well as by the 
 influence of Byzantium, Russia was actually cut off 
 from the Western European world, and isolated in a 
 solitude which was to endure for centuries. From the 
 Crusades down to the Revolution, bhe bore no part in 
 any of the manifestations of European life. She slum- 
 bered on, hard by. 
 
 All .this will be recognised by my readers in the 
 literature we are about to study together. Somewhat 
 of it is evident even in the language used by Dosto'i- 
 evski and Tolstoi. A wondrous instrument it is, the 
 most melodious, certainly, in the Slavonic circle, one of 
 the most melodious in the universe ; flexible, sono- 
 rous, graceful, lending itself to every tone and every 
 style, simple or elegant at will, subtle and refined, 
 energetic, picturesque. In its diversity of form and 
 construction, partly due to its frequent inversions, 
 it resembles the classic languages and German. Its 
 power of embodying a whole figure in one word marks 
 its kinship with the Oriental tongues. The extreme 
 variability of the tonic accent, which lends itself to every 
 rhythmic combination, a markedly intuitive character, 
 and a wonderful plasticity, combine to form a language 
 unrivalled, perhaps, in its poetic qualities. But the in- 
 strument was made but yesterday. There are gaps in 
 it ; some parts are borrowed ; we find discords here and 
 there which the centuries have not yet had time to fill, 
 to harmonise, to resolve. This tongue finds soft and 
 caressing words even for those things which partake 
 the least of such a character. Votna stands for war ; 
 
6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 voine for the warrior. But should the warrior be 
 called to defend his country, threatened by an in- 
 vader, he becomes Khrabryi, Zachtchichtchaiouchtchyi 1 
 Can we not hear the hoarse whistling yell of the bar- 
 barians ? 
 
 This language is the offspring, too, of Peter the Great 
 and the Reform. Later on I shall speak of its origin. 
 In its alphabet we recognise perverted forms of both 
 Greek and Roman letters, and others of strange appear- 
 ance, which neither these two classic alphabets nor that 
 of the German tongue possess ; and a residuum, also 
 perverted, from the ancient liturgic or Cyrillic Slav 
 alphabet — the Tower of Babel, never-ending. 
 
 Modern Russia belongs to the Oriental family of 
 the Slavonic languages ; but of all these languages it is 
 the one which contains the greatest number of elements 
 pertaining to other families. Thus the vowel a, spe- 
 cially characteristic of the Finnish tongue, has replaced, 
 in many words, the primitive o of the Slavonic roots. 
 The Tartar invasion has left its impress both on words 
 and on the construction of sentences. In the depart- 
 ment of science, the German invader has won a decided 
 victory ; and Dobrolioubov, the great critic of the 
 " fifties," was able to say, and without undue exaggera- 
 tion, that the literary language of his country had 
 nothing Russian about it. 
 
 But the Russian tongue it is ; and being also the lan- 
 guage of a colonising nation, it admits of no divergence 
 nor any provincial corruption. There is hardly any 
 patois in the country. But it is a new language, without 
 any deep root in the country's history, and the literature 
 of which it is the organ is likewise new, and devoid of 
 historic depth. Hence, apart even from the manifold 
 
. THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 7 
 
 causes already enumerated, we have an alternation of 
 periods of rich and rapid expansion with others of the 
 sterility born of exhaustion. Of this fact we shall see 
 clear evidence. Hence also a predisposition to new 
 formulae, and to the wiping out of the old ones, to 
 thorough-going radicalism in things literary, to haughty 
 scorn of all traditions and conventions, and even of 
 propriety. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE EPIC AGE 
 
 Popular Poetry 
 
 In Russia the epic age was prolonged up to the threshold 
 of the present century. The heroic legend of Platov 
 and his Cossacks pursuing the retreat of the hated 
 Khrantzous (Frenchman) is still in the mouth of the 
 popular bard, the strings of whose rustic lyre yet ring 
 in certain remote corners of the country, in defiance 
 of Pouchkine and his followers. This phenomenon is 
 natural enough. From the point oT view of literary 
 evolution, five or six centuries lie between Russia and 
 the other countries possessed of European culture. At 
 the period when Duns Scotus, William of Wykeham, and 
 Roger Bacon were barring the West with that streak of 
 light whereat such men as Columbus, Descartes, Galileo, 
 and Newton were soon to kindle their torches, Russia 
 still lay wrapped in darkness. An explanation of this 
 long-continued gloom has been sought even among the 
 skulls lately unearthed in the neighbourhood of Moscow. 
 These appear to have revealed that, in the primitive in- 
 habitants of that country, the sensual elements were so 
 excessively developed as to exclude the rest. 
 
 The Tartar conquest of the thirteenth century should 
 be a much more trustworthy event on which to reckon, 
 in this connection. It destroyed the budding civilisation 
 
THE DAWN OF CHRISTIANITY 9 
 
 of the sphere influenced by Kiev. But even then, the 
 empire of the Vladimirs and the Jaroslavs followed far 
 indeed behind the progress of the European world. In 
 1240, when the hordes of Baty thundered at the gates 
 of Kiev, nothing within them portended the approach- 
 ing birth of a Dante, and no labours such as those 
 of a Duns Scotus, nor even of a Villehardouin, suf- 
 fered interruption. The tardy dawn of Christianity 
 in these quarters, together with the baptism of Vladi- 
 mir (988), and the Byzantine hegemony, which was its 
 first-fruit, in themselves involved a falling behind the 
 hour marked by the European clock. The Byzantine 
 culture had a value of its own. Previous to the Renais- 
 sance, it imposed itself even upon the West. But it had 
 little communicative power. To the outer world its only 
 effulgence was that of a centre of religious propaganda, 
 and this fervour, strongly tinctured with asceticism, 
 checked, more than it favoured, any intellectual soarings. 
 Here we find the explanation of another phenomenon — 
 that the poetry of this epoch, and even of later times, 
 has only been handed down to us by word of mouth. 
 In this part of the world, and up till the close of the 
 seventeenth century writing and printing were con- 
 trolled by the Church — a Church resolute in her 
 hostility to every element of profane culture. In the 
 Domestic Code {domostro'i) of Pope Sylvester, a con- 
 temporary of Ivan the Terrible, the national poetry 
 is still treated as devilry — pagan, and consequently 
 damnable. 
 
 Thus the harmonious offspring of the national genius 
 has lived on in the memories of succeeding generations. 
 But hunted, even in this final refuge, by ecclesiastical 
 anathemas, it has retreated, step by step, towards the 
 
lO RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 lonely and bitter regions of the extremest North. When 
 modern science sought to wake the echoes of the old 
 songs first warbled under the " Golden Gate" of Kiev, 
 the only answer came from the huts and taverns of the 
 White Sea. The oldest of all the collections of Rus- 
 sian verse, that of Kircha Danilov, dates from the eigh- 
 teenth century only, and is of dubious value. The wave 
 of melody has rolled across time and space, gathering, 
 as it passed, local legends, passing inspirations, and the 
 enigmatic fruit of foreign fiction and lyrics. Then it has 
 divided, evaporated, and lost itself, finally, in the sand 
 and mud. 
 
 The work done for the West by the Icelandic Sagas 
 was thus delayed, in Russia, by some four or five cen- 
 turies. The only written traces of the glory of Ilia 
 of Mourom, the great hero of the cycle of Kiev, are to 
 be found in German, Polish, or Scandinavian manu- 
 scripts. It was an English traveller, Richard James, 
 whose curiosity induced him, at the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century (1619), to note down the original 
 forms of the Russian lyric ; and as a crowning disgrace, 
 the first imitators (in the following centur}') of this Eng- 
 lish collector (Novikov, Tchoulkov, Popov, Bogdano- 
 vitch) were forgers. They took upon themselves to 
 correct the outpourings of the popular inspiration ! 
 
 Did ancient Russia possess concurrently with this 
 oral poetry a literary verse, allied with the Nibclungcn- 
 lied and the Chansons de Geste ? One specimen exists, the 
 famous "Story of the Band of Igor." But this is but 
 a solitary ruin. I shall refer to it later. 
 
 In our own day, the popular poetry brought to light 
 by the labours of such Russian savants as kiri6ievski, 
 Sakharov, Rybnikov, and Hilferding, and revealed to 
 
POPULAR POETRY II 
 
 the Western world by the translations and studies of 
 Ralston, Bistrom, Damberg, lagic, and Rambaud, has 
 emerged in all its wealth. It was an astonishment and 
 a delight. The fragments of French popular songs 
 collected in 1853, the gwerziou of Lower Brittany, the 
 Chants des Pauvres of the Velay and the Forez, the 
 national poetry of Languedoc and Provence, form but 
 a poverty-stricken treasury in comparison. But there 
 is no possibility of any comparison. The prolongation 
 of the epic period in the lower strata of the Russian 
 world, until the moment of its paradoxical encounter 
 with the sudden development, literary and scientific, 
 which took place in the upper strata, has produced a 
 result which I believe to be unprecedented in human 
 history. At the gates of Archangel the Russian col- 
 lectors found themselves face to face with the authentic 
 depositaries of a poetic heritage dating from prehistoric 
 epochs. One night in a railway train still carries them 
 into the heart of the twelfth century. 
 
 But this inheritance, rich though it be, is not abso- 
 lutely intact. Some Russian savants, such as Mr. Srez- 
 niewski, have gone so far as to doubt its authenticity. It 
 was the absence of certain historic links, the presence of 
 certain features corresponding with the popular poetry, 
 and even with the poetical literature, of other nations 
 which stirred their scepticism. We find no symptom, in- 
 deed, of the recorded historic life of the period anterior 
 to the Tartar conquest, and that conquest itself is only 
 reflected in imagery of excessive faintness. On the other 
 hand, we easily recognise in Polkane, one of the heroes 
 of the poetic legend of Bova, the PuUcane of the Reali 
 di Francia, a collection of Italian epic poetry. 
 
 Mr. Khalanski has gone so far as to contest the 
 
12 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 commonly accepted fact of the migration of this poetry 
 from south to north. He founds his theory on the 
 absence of any corresponding movement among the 
 Southern peoples. But no German emigrants were needed 
 to carry the songs of the Edda across the continent 
 of Europe ; and as to the phenomena of concord, or even 
 fusion, with the poetry of the West, they are sufficiently 
 accounted for by the special character of the Russian 
 epopee. This epopee was, until quite recent times, a living 
 being, who dwelt, like all living beings, in communion 
 with the world about him. 
 
 To sum it up, Russian popular poetry, as we know it, 
 is neither homogeneous in character nor precise in date. 
 It is the complex product of a series of centuries, and of 
 an organic development which has continued down to 
 our own days. It reflects both the ancient Russian life of 
 the Kiev period, the later Muscovite period, and even the 
 St. Petersburg period of modern times. It has likewise 
 absorbed some features of Western life. 
 
 As to form, we find two chief phases — the polymor- 
 phous metre, of seven, eight, or nine feet, and the line of 
 three or six feet, in which the simple trochee is followed 
 by the dactyl : — 
 
 As to substance, we have three leading categories — 
 heroic tales or bylines, songs on special subjects, and 
 historical songs ; all with one common characteristic, the 
 predominance of the Pagan spirit. The influence of Chris- 
 tianity is hardly to be discerned. And this one feature, both 
 from the point of view of culture, and more particularly 
 from that of literary evolution, opens an abyss between 
 Russia and Europe. The anathema of the Church falls 
 
THE BYLINES 13 
 
 on every legend, Christian or Pagan, with equal severity. 
 Hence, partly, arises that profound and imperturbable 
 realism which seems to have saturated the national lite- 
 rature from the outset, and which still predominates in 
 its development. 
 
 The Bylines. 
 
 The word byline seems to be derived from bylo, "has 
 been." Sakharov was, indeed, the first person to use it, 
 after an ancient manuscript which has now disappeared. 
 Yet it is found in the "Story of the Band of Igor" as 
 equivalent to the expression " narrative." In the seven- 
 teenth-century texts the word used is j/'«;y«« =" anti- 
 quity." 
 
 The bylines gravitate in two distinct cycles round the 
 two centres of ancient Russian life — Kiev and Novgorod. 
 In the Kiev cycle, the legendary figures cluster round 
 Vladimir. Yet a certain number of bylines evoke yet 
 more ancient heroes, of origin and prowess alike fabulous. 
 Volga Sviatoslavitch is the son of a princess by a serpent ; 
 he is the personification of wisdom and cunning. In the 
 case of Sviatogor the ruling quality is strength. He is 
 so htige that the earth can scarcely carry him — a feature 
 also to be found in the Rustem of Persian story. These 
 personages, like the Titans of the Greek legend, symbolise 
 the struggle of man with the elements. But this Slav 
 myth is far from possessing the fulness of those which 
 have descended to us from the Germans and Scandi- 
 navians. There was no priestly caste among the Slav 
 pagans to garner up those religious traditions which 
 have formed the basis of every great school of poetry. 
 
 With Vladimir, a gleam of chivalry appears. He and 
 those about him are giants, but jolly companions and 
 
14 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 mighty drinkers as well. At this point the epic links 
 itself with history, for the Vladimir known to history 
 actually was a great feast-giver. Yet the link is a frail 
 one. The bylines know naught either of this sovereign's 
 introduction of Christianity, or of the energy and skill 
 which, according to the chroniclers, marked his initiatory 
 efforts. The Vladimir of poetry confines himself to per- 
 petually inventing fresh exploits for his heroes, to feed- 
 ing them royally, and to marrying them off. He has no 
 personal heroism. His deeds of prowess do not exist, 
 and his usual bearing strikes us as somewhat effeminate, 
 and even cowardly. When the Tartars besiege Kiev, he 
 almost goes on his knees to Ilia, the destined saviour of 
 the empire. Ilia requires a good deal of pressing, and 
 is not far wrong, for the sovereign's behaviour betrays 
 a general lack of generosity, not to speak of common 
 honesty. 
 
 He covets the spouse of one of his heroes, and drives 
 husband and wife to despair and death. This legend is 
 evidently a mere variation of the biblical story of David 
 and the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and the polygamous 
 Vladimir bears the sins of a whole series of sovereigns, 
 down to Ivan the Terrible. But the inspiration of the 
 poem is all the more significant. 
 
 Ilia is a peerless comrade, the favourite hero of the 
 bylines. His personal appearance, qualities, and brave 
 deeds, are generally supposed to typify the ideal personi- 
 fication of the national temperament and genius. The 
 peculiarities of the hero warrant this belief. In the first 
 place, he is of peasant blood ; and at the feast he forces 
 the lords of Vladimir's court to give place before the 
 moujiks of his company. This humility of origin is not 
 exceptional in the circle about the prince. Another 
 
VLADIMIR 15 
 
 member of it, Aliocha, is the son of a pope ; and an- 
 -other, Soloviel Boudimirovitch, the son of a shopkeeper. 
 Both of these fraternise with Dobrynia, who belongs 
 to a princely family. Ilia and Dobrynia exchange their 
 crosses as a sign of friendship. These traits are true to 
 the instincts and traditions of a nation in whose bosom 
 a real aristocracy has never succeeded in taking root. 
 
 Ilia — like one of his forerunners in the prehistoric 
 cycle, Mikoula Selianinovitch — is a cultivator of the 
 soil, and except for the Russian bard, I believe none but 
 the rhapsodist of the Finnish Kalevala would have be- 
 stowed a leading heroic r61e on a tiller of the ground. Yet 
 in some other traits of character, and certain of his exploits. 
 Ilia so nearly approaches the epic and mythologic world 
 of neighbouring countries, as to seem merged in more 
 than one of their representatives. Until the age of thirty, 
 he remains inactive ; and here the influence of the 
 Christian myth is clearly visible. Later on he fights 
 with a fabulous robber, Soloviei (the Nightingale), who 
 has wings, and bends the- mightiest oaks by the mere 
 weight of his body. But danger alarms Ilia, and the 
 expedients he invents to escape it carry our minds 
 to Hector fleeing before Achilles, and to Rama, seized 
 with terror in the presence of Kabhanda. At the time 
 of his greatest feats, Ilia is no longer young, and his 
 white beard reminds us of Roland. He hesitates long 
 before he succours Ki^v ; he is perpetually disputing 
 with Vladimir, and with and around him the whole turbu- 
 lent and quarrelsome band of the legendary heroes of 
 Europe and Asia, Rustem, Achilles, Sigurd, Siegfried, 
 Arthur, with all the Olympian demi-gods, from the 
 Hindoo Indra to the Thor-Wotan of the Germans, and 
 the Peroune of the Russians, rise before our eyes. But 
 
1 6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 dissimilarities crop up forthwith. When, at long last, 
 Ilia consents to deliver Ki6v, it is neither lest he should 
 be accused of cowardice, like Rustem, nor to wreak a 
 personal vengeance, like Achilles. He is too much of a 
 philosopher, too good-natured, for that. The Palatine 
 Ogier, whose son has been slain by Charlemagne, de- 
 mands the murderer's head as the price of his co-opera- 
 tion against the Saracens. Ilia is incapable of making 
 such a bargain ; nor does he obey any instinct of per- 
 sonal devotion to Vladimir. Indifferent alike to the point 
 of honour and to the hope of glory, he raises his eyes 
 above them both. That redoubtable arm is only lifted 
 to defend the widow and the orphan, or for the common 
 weal. 
 
 The manner in which this conception has been 
 utilised by the Slavophil party will be easily divined. 
 And assuredly the comparison which certain Western 
 writers, following their lead, have delighted to establish 
 with the Greek heroes and the noblest paladins of the 
 Cliansons de Geste, redounds to Ilia's advantage. Yet even 
 here the comparison is irrelevant. The Greek heroes 
 were not Christians, and the paladins were the merest 
 miscreants. This latter type only assumes an ideal 
 aspect in the Romances of the Round Tabic, and there 
 it at once appears in conjunction with that pregnant 
 belief, the source of true Christian chivalry, that the 
 noblest fashion of employing strength is for the defence 
 of the weak. Ilia, too, has his origin in this belief. The 
 final elaboration of his type is certainly of later date than 
 the Romances of the Round Tabic, and in its best, which 
 are not always its most apparent features, it undoubtedly 
 is a Christian type. 
 
 Apart, in fact, from his humanitarian instincts, there 
 
ILIA 17 
 
 is nothing knightly about Ilia. He is too coarse for that, 
 too commonplace, and, above all, too pacifically inclined. 
 He only fights under compulsion, and when it is inevi- 
 table — never for the pleasure of the thing. And this 
 peculiarity makes him the faithful representative of a race 
 the accidents of whose historical fate has rendered it 
 warlike, but which has never been swept away by one 
 of those floods of martial ardour which stirred the 
 Western countries during the Middle Ages. 
 
 Ilia is a mighty eater and a heavy drinker. On the 
 very eve of a battle we see him get drunk, and remain 
 for twelve days in a state of vinous stupefaction and 
 consequent incapability of action. If his wine does not 
 actually overwhelm his senses, he grows noisy and in- 
 tolerable. When sober he is cautious and calculating, not 
 caring either to exert his strength unnecessarily, or to 
 expose it to ordeals involving too much risk. When he 
 has once made up his mind to face a danger, and has 
 contrived to surmount the shudder which, in his case, 
 always accompanies such a decision, he is much given to 
 joke and banter, a trait which survives in the Russian 
 peasant to this day. 
 
 The type, on the whole, is a sympathetic one — but 
 quite exceptional even in the legend — set far up on the 
 height of the popular inspiration. Ilia's followers do not 
 reach his ankle. They are lost below him — very much 
 below him — in a confused medley of rogues, blunderers, 
 boasters, and cowards, of whom he himself has but a 
 poor opinion, seeing he generally has to do their work 
 for them. Their merit is their strength — a physical 
 vigour which enables them to triumph over everything, 
 even over common sense. They run their heads against 
 fortress walls, and the walls crumble before them. 
 
8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 >arren of ideals as of ideas, they represent, in the popu- 
 ir conception, the lower grade of heroism, the elemen- 
 iry forces of Nature, of the earth, of the wind, of the 
 eavy fist. 
 
 Tourgueniev has placed this terrible declaration in 
 le mouth of Potioughine, the grumbler in Smoke: 
 What is known as our 'epic literature' is the only one 
 1 Europe or Asia which does not afford a single 
 xample of a typical pair of lovers. The hero of Holy 
 'ussia always begins his relations with the being to 
 rhose destiny fate has linked his own. by mercilessly ill- 
 •eating her. . . . Look into our legends. Love never 
 ppears in them but as the result of a charm or spell. 
 ; is absorbed with the liquor that brings forgetfulness ; 
 s effect is compared with soil that is dried up, or 
 •ozen." 
 
 Yet numerous female figures flit across these legends, 
 'hey possess but little charm. They are triumphant, 
 ften, with an air of superiority which raises them above 
 le masculine element ; but this they owe neither to 
 leir attraction nor to the love they inspire. Ilia of 
 [oijrom is overthrown by a giant Polenitsa {Polenitsas 
 the generic title of these viragos), who prowls over 
 le steppe, shouldering a club weighing several thou- 
 md pounds, defying the bohatyry (heroes) — and who 
 irns out to be his own daughter. Vassilissa, the 
 aughter of Mikoula, combines strength with cunning 
 ) rescue her husband, Stavre Godounovitch ; but the 
 igend is dumb as to her beauty and that of her fellow- 
 omen. And this neglect suffices to distinguish the 
 'olenitsas from the Amazons, as well as from the Val- 
 yries. Men fight with them, they are frequently over- 
 Dme by them, but they never pay court to them. 
 
RUSSIAN WOMEN 19 
 
 The woman of modern Russia does not share this 
 pecuHarity of her legendary predecessor. Yet certain 
 features of the legendary type do appear, even in 
 the most recent, artistic creations, both in poetry and 
 romance. Whether the author be Pouchkine, Tour- 
 gueniev, or Tolstoi, whether it be a question of love or 
 of action, of doing good or of finding the right way, the 
 initiative is most frequently allotted to the woman. She 
 inspires, guides, rectifies — and is fond of putting herself 
 forward. 
 
 But this type is not the only one, either in history or 
 legend. It proceeds from the pagan tradition. Byzan- 
 tine Christianity has added the woman of the Terein. 
 This lady has " long hair and a short understanding," a 
 narrow intelligence and an erring flesh. The Penelope 
 of these parts, Nastasia, wife of Dobrynia, wearies of 
 waiting for the husband whom the war keeps from the 
 conjugal hearth, much more quickly than the fair Greek, 
 and forgets all too soon that she has sworn she will not 
 marry Aliocha. 
 
 The figures evoked by the cycle of Novgorod are 
 quite different — a race of merchants, of pilgrims to 
 he Holy Land, of navigators, and builders of towns. 
 Quarrelsome and pugnacious they still are, but only 
 within the walls of their own city ; and they still lead 
 expeditions into Moslem countries, but only for the sake 
 of traffic. "The Venetians of the Russian Crusade," 
 a certain writer has justly called them. Their history is 
 embodied in two legends, of which many variations 
 exist. That of Sadko only shows us the somewhat vulgar 
 figure of a devout and pushing merchant. The hero of 
 another, Vassili or Vaska, son of Bousslai, is a burgher, 
 unsurpassed even by Ilia in stormy and quarrelsome 
 
RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 3mper, who makes the town ring with the tumult of his 
 ■eaks and bloodthirsty rages. Just as he is about to 
 estroy his fellow-citizens, his father intervenes. Where- 
 pon Vaska shuts him up in a cellar. Vaska's whole 
 fe is one tissue of follies and crimes. To expiate these, 
 e goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and dies, on his 
 2turn, by attempting a dangerous leap and striking 
 gainst a rock — tlie image of the fate his pride has 
 ourted. 
 
 Popular Songs. 
 
 The first singers of bylines are believed to have been 
 rofessional bards, attached to the court of the Varegian 
 rinces. Their tradition seems to have been carried on 
 y the skoromokhy of the Muscovite epoch, against whom 
 le pious and scrupulous Tsar Alexis waged merciless 
 'ar. For a long period they were the great entertain- 
 lent of the noble houses. Their present descendants 
 re only to be found in the huts and taverns of the 
 rovince of Olonetz. 
 
 In hut and tavern, from one end of Russia to the 
 ther, simple melodies are still sung, recalling or accom- 
 anying the recital, in a confused traditional medley, of 
 le common events of the popular life and of Christian 
 nd Pagan festivals. Christmas Koliada, Roussalnaia, 
 
 1 honour of the Slavonic nymphs {roussalki), harvest 
 3ngs {dojinki), betrothal songs {svadicbiiyic piesni), and 
 ineral songs [pokhoronnyie). 
 
 Incantations [sagovory) against drought and fire hold 
 
 considerable place in this national poetry, and so do 
 
 ddles izagadki) and proverbs {posslovitsy), which en- 
 
 irme the popular wisdom as drawn from all its nume- 
 
 Dus sources— half Pagan^ half Christian, ancient, modern. 
 
SONGS 21 
 
 To these the bylines bring their share, as do the Scrip- 
 tures, more especially the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, and 
 further and more recent contributions are supplied by 
 the epigrams of Kapnist, the fables of Krylov, and the 
 humoristic verses of Gogol. 
 
 It may easily be conceived that these songs, resound- 
 ing as they do all over a huge stretch of territory. Great 
 Russia, Little Russia, White Russia, are not absolutely 
 uniform. They reproduce the divergences of historical 
 existence. Their common feature is a profound melan- 
 choly, which broods even over the betrothal songs, and 
 of which we perceive the echo in most of the modern 
 poets. 
 
 " We all sing in sadnesss. . . . The Russian song is a 
 melancholy plaint," so writes Pouchkine. 
 
 Nature and history have alike dealt hardly with this 
 people. A severe climate, an ungrateful soil, an unattrac- 
 tive landscape, poverty, serfdom, the Byzantine yoke, 
 the autocratic regime, have all combined to make up a 
 troubled existence, a rugged fatherland, a home devoid 
 of charm. For a lengthened period, the only remedy the 
 Russian could discover against these many enemies was 
 that he found in his glass — intoxication. The primi- 
 tive bards have lovingly sung the praises of this arch- 
 consoler. The poets who have succeeded them — their 
 superiors in inspiration and culture — have sought 
 some other expedient, and have discovered none — save 
 death. 
 
 Yet the nation endowed with this ungrateful country, 
 this inhospitable home, has loved both with a tenderness 
 which I do not fear to call unexampled — so strong, so 
 passionate, so jealous, so devoted does it appear to me. 
 Perhaps this is because, in order to love what has so 
 
22 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 little that is lovable about it, the Russian has been con- 
 strained to idealise the object of his love, to re-create 
 it, as it were, by faith and imagination ; and he has thus 
 succeeded in converting his love into a religion, a wor- 
 ship, a fanaticism. 
 
 The national literature, like the popular poetry, is 
 saturated with this principle. 
 
 Historical Narratives. 
 
 These gravitate round Moscow, reconstructing more 
 especially the dramatic period dominated by the great 
 figure of Ivan the Terrible. Certain anecdotes reported 
 by Collins in his Travels in Russia in the middle of the 
 seventeenth century are founded on ancient skazki 
 (recitals) concerning this sovereign. Some, indeed, of 
 these narratives plunge even into the Tartar epoch, and 
 are thus connected with the Kiev cycle. The form is 
 almost that of the bylines, and the inspiration is fre- 
 quently analogous — the mythical element being wedded 
 to the historical groundwork. Ivan keeps open table 
 like Vladimir, and some of his boyards perform fabulous 
 exploits as improbable as those ascribed to Ilia. 
 
 In every poetic evocation of the " Terrible," the ruling 
 idea is the glorification of his conquest. To the poets he 
 is above all things the Tsar who captured Kazan, Riazan, 
 and Astrakhan. Yet the popular inspiration is not con- 
 tent with mere commonplace and superficial praise. It 
 dissects the Tsar's character, lays bare his personal psy- 
 chology, and does not ignore its contradictions and 
 dissonances ; but it makes the best of them. It is 
 fully aware of the man's cruelty, and even takes care 
 to depict it in frightful colours, but at the same time 
 
HISTORICAL NARRATIVES 23 
 
 justifies it. It finds the explanation for this cruelty 
 in the Tsar's struggle against the aristocratic oligarchy. 
 In this quarrel the whole heart of the people goes with 
 the sovereign and against the boyards ; and indeed his 
 Russian surname {Grozny i) does not so much mean the 
 "Terrible" as the "Dreaded." 
 
 The popular poets rise in arms against the false 
 Demetrius, and hold him up as a traducer of the national 
 beliefs and customs. Their descriptions of the siege of 
 the monastery of Solovietsk in the time of Alexis, betray 
 a certain sympathy with the raskol. Other ballads of 
 the same epoch celebrate the exploits of Stenka Razine, 
 the Cossack rebel. These form part of a whole pictur- 
 esque cycle, enshrining a series of similar exploits, in 
 which the followers of the famous partisan (mere rob- 
 bers, in fact) play the heroes' parts, after the quaintest 
 and most suggestive fashion. 
 
 In Kiri6ievski's collection, one whole volume is de- 
 voted to Peter the Great ; but the popular verse has not 
 done justipe to the Reformer. None but the external 
 features of his mighty work — such as his sanguinary 
 extermination of the Streltsy and his wars — are noticed, 
 and only one attractive phase of his character — his sim- 
 plicity — is extolled. 
 
 Seated on the main staircase of the Kreml, the 
 Krasnoie-Kryltso, the Tsar challenges the nobles sur- 
 rounding him to single combat with their fists. The boy- 
 ards make no answer. One young soldier, only, accepts 
 the challenge. But the Tsar lays down his conditions. 
 
 " If I win, thy head will be cut off ! " 
 
 "So be it." 
 
 The soldier wins. The vanquished Tsar offers to 
 reward him with lands and gold. The hero's reply is 
 
24 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 typical, and identical with that of the legendary bohatyr, 
 Potok, to Vladimir, in similar circumstances. 
 
 " All I ask is permission to drink without payment 
 in the Tsar's taverns ! " 
 
 As the modern era approaches, this poetic current 
 narrows, loses its depth, its freshness, and its brightness. 
 When Alexander I.'s time comes, we have nought but a 
 turbid stream, rolling down formless heaps of mud — not 
 a reflection of Austerlitz, Friedland, or Tilsit. Moscow 
 appears, like a flash, in the flames kindled by the hand 
 of the Khrantzouz. The popular imagination lingers lov- 
 ingly over the rugged figures of the Hetman Platov and 
 his Cossacks. They are the heroes of the great historic 
 drama. But historical truth, sincere emotion, and even 
 originality, are utterly lacking in these ballads. The 
 death of Alexander I. inspires one of these poet-narrators 
 with a mere transcription of the Marlborough song, 
 which had been already applied, in the form of a filthy 
 parody, to the death of Patiomkine. Artistic poetry de- 
 layed long in coming to claim the inheritance of these 
 degenerate bards. 
 
 Religious Verse. 
 
 The religious songs contemporary with this last 
 evolution of popular poetry possess a special character, 
 for they have their springs in written literature, and like 
 it, they belong to the Church. And indeed they do not 
 date earlier than from the seventeenth century. These 
 songs, concerning the beginning and end of the world, 
 the last judgment, St. George, are for the most part — like 
 the above-mentioned literature, which was first popu- 
 larised in the Southern Provinces — of Southern origin. 
 One string of this lyre — and it is constantly struck — is 
 
THE BAND OF IGOR 25 
 
 sacred to the Raskol, and is used, more especially, to call 
 up the figure of Antichrist. Invisibly, and even visibly, 
 according to the teaching of certain sects, the reign of 
 Antichrist begins, in Church and Empire alike, from the 
 seventeenth century onward. 
 
 One form taken by this poetry is that of legends, 
 prose narratives of a religious nature, drawn indifferently 
 from the Holy Books and from apocryphal sources. 
 The Devil hindering Noah from building his ark, Solomon 
 taking into his head to found a monastery in hell, and 
 such incidents, furnish forth these recitals. I have re- 
 served a special place for the " Story of the Band of 
 Igor." This ballad cannot indeed be classed with others. 
 It is unique. 
 
 The Ballad of the Band of Igor. 
 
 It has been, and is still, a subject of passionate 
 discussion. The text of the poem was not discovered 
 until 1795, in a fourteenth or early fifteenth century 
 manuscript, and this nothing but a copy— since the work 
 is believed, by those who accept it as authentic, to date 
 from the twelfth century. The copy itself no longer 
 exists. It was burnt, together with the whole Moussine- 
 Pouchkine library, in the year 181 2. A transcript was 
 made for the Empress Catherine II., and this is all 
 that remains to us — little enough, in the case of so 
 priceless a relic, the sole remaining waif and witness of 
 a vanished and shadowy literary past. 
 
 Is it the work of a single author who has failed to 
 leave his name behind him ? Or does it, like the bylines, 
 represent the conjoint labour of several generations of 
 poets ? These questions afford matter for cogitation. 
 
26 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 At the present day, the hypothesis of an individual 
 authorship prevails, coupled with the admission of the 
 existence of an ingenious grouping of elements, common 
 to all the popular poetry of that period. This would 
 not appear to be an isolated case. An almost equal 
 variety of subject, coupled with a curiously similar 
 inspiration, has been remarked in an old work known 
 as the Khalitcho-Volhynian Chronicle. The very form 
 of the poem seems to indicate it as the work of an 
 individual. The author is constantly speaking in the 
 first person, sometimes to invoke the memory of some 
 forerunner of his own — whom he calls Boiane, and 
 our knowledge of whose existence we owe to him — • 
 and sometimes to express his own admiration or sorrow, 
 for he has not a touch of the Homeric calm. 
 
 He tells us the story of the expedition led by Igor, 
 Prince of Novgorod-Sidvierski, charged by Sviatoslav, 
 Prince of Kidv, to drive back the Polovtsy. Up to 
 the time of the Tartar invasion, the Polovtsy were the 
 greatest enemies of Russia. Igor begins vi^ith a victory, 
 but, in a decisive battle, he is utterly beaten and carried 
 into captivity. This event is attributed, in the chronicle 
 known as that of Ipatiev, to the year 1185, and in that of 
 Lavrentil', to the following one. Both chronicles agree 
 with the poet in ascribing the responsibility for the 
 disaster to a quarrel between the princes. The poet 
 adds some inventions of his own. Sviatoslav, who has 
 not left Kiev — these Kiev princes are stay-at-home fellows, 
 and generally send some one else when there is fighting 
 to be done — sees the awful disaster in a dream. He hears 
 the moans of the vanquished, mingled with the croaking 
 of the ravens. Waking, he learns the facts, does not 
 bestir himself, but sends messengers to the other neigh- 
 
THE BAND OF IGOR 27 
 
 bouring princes beseeching them to rise, "for the sake 
 of the Russian soil and the wounds of Igor." Mean- 
 while, laroslavna, the wife of Igor, shut up in the castle 
 of Poutivl, mounts the walls, and " mourns like a lonely 
 cuckoo at sunrise." She is ready enough to go forth ! 
 " I will fly like a bird towards the EaSibe. I will dip 
 my sleeve of otter-skin into its waters, and I will lave 
 the wounds on the mighty body of Igor ! " 
 
 The denouement is a triumph, though not of an 
 over-heroic nature. Igor escapes from his prison. The 
 Polovtsy pursue him, but Nature herself abets his flight. 
 The woodpeckers, tapping on the tree-trunks, show him 
 the way to the Doniets ; the nightingales warn him of 
 the approach of dawn. He reaches his home, and the 
 Danube bears the voices of the daughters of Russia, 
 singing the universal joy, across the sea to Ki6v {sic). 
 
 Though this arrangement of the episode is weak 
 enough, both historically and geographically, it proves 
 great wealth of imagination, and a tolerably intense 
 poetic feeling. Certainly there has been an exaggera- 
 tion as to the sentiments of a higher order — the love 
 of the Russian Fatherland, the aspirations towards 
 national unity — which some have chosen to discover in 
 the work. Yet I cannot share the absolute scepticism 
 of certain commentators as to these points. Surprising 
 as the idea that such conceptions and emotions should 
 have existed round about Kiev and Novgorod, towards 
 the year 11 85, may now appear to us, we are forced to 
 admit that the Chronicle of Nestor shows us something 
 of the same nature, at a much earlier date. 
 
 And apart from this, the poem, whether its authorship 
 be individual or collective, is a work of art, and occa- 
 sionally of very subtle art. Its methods of expression 
 
28 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 are classic ; in the descriptive portions similes are fre- 
 quent. The rolling telegas (waggons) of the Polovtsy 
 scream in the darkness like a flight of wild swans. The 
 invading army is likened to a cloud, which pours a 
 murderous rain of arrows. 
 
 Another favourite poetic artifice is the personification 
 of the elements. After Igor's defeat, the grass withers, 
 the trees bend under the weight of the mourning that 
 overshadows Russian soil. laroslovna confides her grief 
 to the sun, to the wind, to the Dnieper. There is a fine 
 lyric flow in her lament. 
 
 Some other passages, though they appear instinct 
 with an equally seductive inspiration, are almost unin- 
 telligible. Even to Russian readers, other than archaeo- 
 logists, the poem is only accessible nowadays through 
 translations. The considerable divergence between the 
 language of the original and that which obtains in 
 modern Russia, the probable corruptions existing in 
 the text, and the allusions it contains to contemporary 
 events now scarcely known, have crammed it with in- 
 comprehensible enigmas. 
 
 Thus indeed may we explain the doubts which have 
 arisen as to the authenticity, the nature, and even the 
 literary value of the work. Some competent judges 
 have imagined the whole thing to be an imposture, like 
 that which victimised Pouchkine when, in all good faith, 
 he translated Merimee's Serviati Songs — a modern work 
 in the pseudo-classic style, or even an imitation of Ossian. 
 They have pointed out suspicious features, evocations of 
 Stribog, the sea-god, and Dajbog, the sun-god — neither 
 of them very probable on the part of a court poet writing 
 two centuries after the introduction of Christianity. This 
 mythological element runs through the whole texture of 
 
THE BAND OF IGOR 29 
 
 the work, round the figure of Trofane, — whom some critics 
 beHeve to be the Tsar-Trolan of Bulgarian and Servian 
 legend, contemporary with the elfs and the roussalky ; 
 while others see in him the Roman Trajan, whose 
 memory lingered long in Dacia, near the home of the 
 Southern Slavs. And what, we are asked, is to be 
 thought of certain features evidently borrowed from 
 Greek literature ? The invocation to Boiane, with which 
 the poem opens, is almost a reproduction of a passage 
 from Euripides. 
 
 If I may give my own impression, I would first of all 
 put aside, in common with all Russian critics, the purely 
 personal conjectures of the learned Professor Leger, of 
 the College of France, who sees in this Story of the Band 
 of Igor an imitation of the Zadonchtchina. 
 
 This latter work is generally, and, as I believe, justly, 
 taken to be an oral popular production of the Tartar 
 epoch, but, unlike it, inspired by the Slovo o Polkou 
 Igori^vi^. I agree with the majority, as to the authenti- 
 city of the Slovo, though it has been greatly tampered 
 with by copyists, translators, and commentators. Like 
 Bi^linski, and contrary, this time, to the majority, I re- 
 fuse to regard the Story of the Band of Igor as a second 
 Iliad. I do not even place it, as a work of art, on a par 
 with the poems of the Round Table Cycle. This work, 
 as it stands at present, excels them in that simple wild- 
 flower freshness, full of colour and perfume, which made 
 so great an impression on Bielinski. It is behind them 
 too — far behind, especially as regards the principal 
 figure, that of Igor, which is utterly lifeless and dim. On 
 the whole, it shows great wealth of form, and an abso- 
 lute poverty of idea. Russian life in the twelfth century 
 could furnish but little of that. 
 
30 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 None the less does this poem constitute an infinitely 
 precious link between the oral poetry and the written 
 literature of the epoch preceding that of Peter the Great, 
 of which I must now give a brief summary. 
 
 Written Literature Prior to the Reign of 
 Peter the Great. 
 
 The value of this literary inheritance is almost purely 
 historical. As art, it has hardly any at all. Written 
 literature and Christianity, one bearing the other with 
 it, entered Russia from Byzantium, by way of Bulgaria, 
 with the apostles of the ninth century, Cyril and Metho- 
 dius. They translated the Holy Books into the Slav 
 language, and invented the Slav alphabet, or Kirillitsa, 
 so called to distinguish it from the Glagolitsa (Glagol, 
 the word), another and more complicated alphabet, 
 adopted by the South- Western Slavs. 
 
 The Gospel of Ostromir, prepared about 1050 by the 
 Scribe Gregory for a Novgorod burgher, and the re- 
 ligious works of SviATOSLAV (1073-1076), are the most 
 ancient existing monuments of the Slavo-ecclesiastic lan- 
 guage and the national literature. During this period 
 the national education was entirely concentrated in the 
 churches and monasteries, and was consequently im- 
 pressed with the religious and Byzantine stamp. From 
 the literary point of view, the Greek influence continued 
 down to the close of the sixteenth century, at which 
 period Western and European culture entered Moscow 
 through Poland. 
 
 The first writers proceeding from this school were 
 monks and compilers. They do indeed mention the 
 presence among them of learned men and philosophers, 
 
RELIGIOUS LITERATURE 31 
 
 but it would hardly be safe to take this for an established 
 fact. The Sborniki (Collections) of Sviatoslav, which 
 possess a very high reputation, the Zlatooust ("Golden 
 Sayings " of Chrysostom), the Ismaragd (emerald), the 
 Margarit (jewel), the Ptchely (bees), are a mere farrago 
 of orisons and homilies. 
 
 Another group (called Paleia, from the ancient Greek 
 paSapa) consists of versions of biblical history, in which 
 the apocryphal books occupy a considerable space. 
 
 These versions preserved their authoritative quality 
 till the very threshold of the eighteenth century. 
 
 Some of these ancient works, however, bear signs of 
 a certain amount of artistic culture. They give evidence 
 of a study of rhetoric. Certain passages in the Slovo 
 (discourse) of the Metropolitan Hilarion (middle of the 
 twelfth century) are masterly, and we must go to Karam- 
 zine to find anything to compare with them. This dis- 
 course, and the Story of the Band of Igor, constitute the 
 gem of this period. 
 
 The essential feature of this religious literature, from 
 the earliest sermons to Peter the Great's famous Eccle- 
 siastical Regulations, is the struggle of Church teaching 
 against Pagan tradition, and the superstitions and heresies 
 therewith connected, and also against the dualistic cur- 
 rent which flowed from the Latin Church. The Raskol 
 of the eighteenth century has deep roots that run full 
 four centuries back. The Strigolniki of the fourteenth 
 century and the Jidovstvouiouchtchyie (Hebraists) of the 
 fifteenth century may be looked on as the ancestors 
 of the modern dissenters. Hence in all the writings of 
 this period, even those on profane subjects, we perceive 
 a controversial tendency. 
 
 Amongst the profane writers of the epoch prior to 
 
32 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the Tartar conquest (eleventh to thirteenth century), 
 the foremost place belongs to Nestor. Unhappily we 
 are not sure that the chronicle which bears his name 
 was written by him. 
 
 He was born about the year 1050. At the age of 
 seventeen he was in the Pie'tchersky-Monastyr {"MondLsiery 
 of the Caves") at Kiev, and had assumed monastic garb. 
 In 1091 he was commissioned, with two other monks, to 
 exhume the relics of St. Xheodosius. He died about 
 HOC. These few lines contain all that we know of his 
 biography. The works presumed to be his are Tke Life 
 of Boris and of Gleb, the Life of Theodosius, and the Russian 
 Chronicle {Poviest vreniiennykh Lief). 
 
 His right to the title of the first of the Lietopisiets 
 (chroniclers) has been contested by Tatichtchev. This 
 historian, a contemporary of Peter the Great, has repro- 
 duced, in his own History of Russia, -a fragment of a 
 chronicle called that of Joachim, discovered by himself 
 in an eighteenth-century copy, and which is said to 
 be the first chronicle of Novgorod down to the year 
 1016. This Joachim, Bishop of Novgorod, died there in 
 1030. The original of the chronicle has never been 
 found. But this is also the case as regards the chronicle 
 ascribed to Nestor, whose name, indeed, only appears on 
 a single copy, that known under the name of Khliebnikov, 
 and dating from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. This 
 supposed work by Nestor is a history of the beginnings 
 of Russia, starting, after the Greek pattern, with the 
 Deluge. The ruling spirit of the chronicle, and the 
 quality which renders it a singularly expressive docu- 
 ment, is a mixture — amazing for that epoch — of the 
 deepest religious feeling with the most ardent patriotism. 
 This fact is worth remembering. Russian literature, and 
 
NESTOR 33 
 
 Modern Russia herself, are both the daughters of this 
 union. Nestor beheves that every country has its guar- 
 dian angel, and that the wings of the angel which watches 
 over the fate of his own land are of exceptional span. 
 The chronicler is something of a poet too. Hear what 
 he says of the death of Saint Olga : " She beamed on 
 Christendom like a morning star. She shed over it a gentle 
 dawn. Amidst the infidels she shone like the moon in the 
 darkness. . . . Now she has risen before us to the Russian 
 heaven, where, worshipped by the sons of Russia, she prays 
 God on their behalf y 
 
 The poet has epic power. His story unrolls itself 
 slowly, calmly, with numerous digressions. He uses 
 the Slavo-ecclesiastic or Old Bulgarian tongue, with 
 some traces — more especially in the passages recording 
 the local legends — of the old popular languages of the 
 North. 
 
 This chronicle goes no farther than the year iiio. 
 The continuation of its story, to be found in the 
 Collection of Ipatiev, is the anonymous Chronicle of 
 Kiev (down to 1200). For the years between 1201 and 
 1292 we have the Volhynian Chronicle, also anonymous, 
 the earher portion of which is supposed to have been 
 lost. And after 1292 the Chronicle of Souzdal, or 
 Chronicle of the North, is our chief historical authority. 
 The complete collection of the Lietopisy also contains 
 four chronicles of Novgorod, covering the period between 
 1016 and 1716. 
 
 All these works possess the same character. Every 
 event is considered from the religious standpoint, and all 
 comments are of a moralising tendency. If, according 
 to Nestor, the Guardian Angel permitted the Polovtsy to 
 invade his country, it was as a punishment for the sins 
 
34 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 committed by her sons. This primitive bond of resem- 
 blance fades out after the division of the country into 
 principahties {pudidy), and the consequent development 
 of local colour among its chroniclers. The Novgorod 
 chroniclers are curt, dry, precise. They talk like busi- 
 ness men. Those of the Southern regions abound in 
 picturesque imagery, and their story is full of detail. 
 
 After the unification of the principalities under the 
 Muscovite hegemony, a new type appears — the An- 
 nals of Sophia (^Sofiiskii Vremiennik), and the chronicles 
 known as the Chronicle of Nicone, and that of the Resur- 
 rection ( Vosskressenskaid). The resolute and far-seeing 
 political spirit which created this hegemony is strongly 
 discernible in these chronicles. The Nestorian Chronicle 
 contains certain poetic legends which have been taken 
 by some persons to be the relics of an ancient epic, and 
 the Volhynian Chronicle mentions bards who sang the 
 exploits of their princes. 
 
 Until the Tartars appeared, all literary culture was 
 concentrated at Ki^v and Novgorod. After the Tartar 
 invasion, we find signs of it in the North-East, at Vladimir, 
 Rostov, Mourom, laroslavl, Tver, and Riazan. But still 
 it only existed in monastic life. What with the universal 
 turmoil, the Mongol tyranny, and the quarrels between 
 the various princes, the monastery was its only possible 
 refuge. In the fourteenth century there were two hun- 
 dred of these establishments, the only spots where men 
 read, and even where books existed. But books, and 
 the spirit they inspired, were alike instinct with an ever- 
 growing and savage asceticism, which went far to sup- 
 press secular literature of any kind. 
 
 In the fifteenth century, Moscow was a metropolis 
 in two senses, the political and religious ; but it had 
 
MOSCOW 35 
 
 hard work to become a centre of intellectual activity. 
 There was, indeed, some stirring of men's souls just at 
 this period ; the terrible conditions of existence, both 
 public and private, provoked a certain uprising of the 
 critical spirit. The stock-in-trade of the literature of 
 that day consists of religious precepts and epistles {poout- 
 chenia, posslanid). The Metropolitan Fotif (1410-1431) 
 excelled in this line. He was a malcontent, not a writer. 
 Besides, he was Greek by birth, and by no means skilful 
 in the use of the Russian tongue. In the sixteenth 
 century, another Albanian Greek, Maximus, summoned 
 to Russia to catalogue the Grand-Duke's library, and 
 translate books into the Slav language, travelled much 
 farther along the road thus opened by his fellow- 
 countryman. Maximus the Greek, summing up the 
 work of his predecessors, gives us a full catalogue of 
 all the shortcomings, religious, moral, and intellectual, 
 under which the contemporary life of the country 
 laboured. 
 
 Born in 1480, he had lived at Florence just after the 
 execution of Savonarola. Better for him if he had 
 forgotten it. Accused of having corrupted the sacred 
 books, he was imprisoned in monasteries for five-and- 
 twenty years, and died unnoticed in 1556, at the Laura 
 of St. Sergius. His justification is enshrined, even more 
 clearly than in his compositions in his own defence, in 
 the reports of the Council convoked at Moscow in 1551 
 by Ivan the Terrible, according to his agreement with 
 the metropolite Macarius. 
 
 These are known as the Stoglav (the Hundred Chap- 
 ters), All the Bishops in Russia assembled, at this 
 Council, listened to the address, divided into thirty- 
 seven heads, with which the Tsar saw fit to open the 
 
36 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 debate, and they might have fancied they heard Maximus 
 speaking through the sovereign's mouth. He repro- 
 duced every item of the plea formulated by the foreign 
 monk. The decision of the Council was a foregone 
 conclusion. Maximus was left in prison, but the 
 creation of a certain number of schools was decided 
 on in principle, and the opening of a printing-press was 
 decreed by ukase. From this press issued, between 
 1563 and 1565, a Book of the Apostles and a Book of 
 Hours. But the Muscovites, docile followers of their 
 monkish teachers, took printing to be a work of the 
 devil, and the following year saw the press destroyed by 
 fire, during a riot. The two printers, Ivan Feodorov and 
 Peter Timeofi^iev, only avoided death by crossing over 
 the frontier. They first of all worked at Zabloudov, 
 under the protection of the Polish Hetman Chodkiewicz, 
 then successively at Lemberg and Vilna, and finally 
 at Ostrog, where the first Slav Bible was printed in 
 1581. But a new printing-press had already been set 
 up at Moscow, where a Psalter appeared in 1568. 
 
 At the same time the monastic spirit won a triumph 
 by the popularisation of a book the authorship of 
 which was long attributed to a contemporary of Ivan 
 the Terrible — the Pope Sylvester. According to the 
 latest investigations, only the fifty-second and closing 
 chapter of the Domostroi can properly be ascribed to 
 this priest. The others were put together at various 
 periods, and arranged in order before the composition 
 of the last. The ideas and principles expressed reflect 
 those of several centuries of historical life. The word 
 Domostroi signifies " House-master." Compared with 
 the works of the same nature originating in other 
 Western countries (such as Regimento delle Donne, and 
 
IVAN THE TERRIBLE 37 
 
 the Menagier de Paris (1393), the Domostroi is distin- 
 guished by a far more comprehensive moral teaching, 
 and also by a very special utilitarian tendency. The 
 directions and counsels it contains, which cover the 
 whole of Russian life, spiritual, domestic, and social, 
 are all founded on essentially practical motives. A 
 man should not get drunk, because that involves a 
 risk of spoiling one's clothes and being robbed of one's 
 money. The Domostroi even goes the length of recom- 
 mending the use of certain innocent deceptions. It 
 defines, after the most exact fashion, the respective 
 duties and positions of husband and wife. The wife is 
 to be kind, silent, hard-working, obedient, and she is 
 to submit to physical punishment, administered by her 
 husband, gently and without anger, "while he holds her 
 decently by the hand" and always in private, so that 
 nobody shall see or know of it. The husband has 
 supreme power over the house and family, but all the 
 internal government is in his wife's hands. She is the 
 first to rise in the morning ; she rouses the servants, 
 and sets every one an example of hard work. 
 
 The Domostroi ^2.s not printed until 1849. Ivan the 
 Terrible himself made an attempt in the same direc- 
 tion, after having left posterity a literary legacy of 
 quite a different order. His Code, or Precept, was in- 
 tended for the Monastery of St. Cyril at Bidloziersk. 
 This was a place of exile for disgraced Boyards and 
 Kniazi, who, as a rule, carried their lay customs with 
 them, and disseminated them largely. The Tsar opens 
 with a modest and pious expression of his doubts as 
 to the propriety of his intervention. Can it be right 
 that he, " stinking dog " that he is, should teach God's 
 servants a lesson ? But he forthwith recalls the fact 
 
38 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 that during a visit to the monastery he had an- 
 nounced his intention of some day retiring to it him- 
 self. The monks, therefore, must surely count him as 
 one of themselves. That is their clear duty ! And 
 thereupon he starts off hot-foot, his pen, as sharp as 
 any hunting-spear, pouring forth a violent diatribe 
 against the dissolute life of the community, in which, 
 no doubt, he suspects his latest condemned exiles, 
 Chdremetiev and Khabarov, to be deeply involved. 
 
 More interesting from the historical, and even from 
 the literary point of view, is Ivan's correspondence with 
 Prince Kourbski, one of his principal collaborators, who 
 had fled to Lithuania after being defeated in battle. 
 The commanders who served Ivan the Terrible, like the 
 generals of the French Republic, went to the scaffold if 
 they failed to march to victory. 
 
 The free country of Poland was at that period a 
 land of refuge for her Muscovite neighbours. Kourbski 
 did his best, during his exile, to spread the Orthodox 
 Faith, but with this effort he combined certain classical 
 studies. He applied his mind to Latin, grammar, rhe- 
 toric, and dialectics, and thus armed, he addressed his 
 former sovereign in letters intended to impress him 
 with his own ignorance, and with the injustice of his 
 behaviour. Ivan was not the man to be overawed by 
 such learning. His replies utterly scorn the example of 
 oratorical artifice set him by his correspondent. With- 
 out affectation, and careless of all style, they simply pour 
 out his rage and hatred in a torrent of passionate in- 
 vective, and we perceive that the master of rhetoric, 
 the triumphant dialectician, is the Tsar. What Kourbski 
 and such traitors say of his cruelty is puerile, and thei-r 
 claim to call down God's judgment on him is absurd. 
 
IVAN THE TERRIBLE 39 
 
 He loathes bloodshed, and would never permit it, if the 
 crime of Kourbski and his like did not force his hand. 
 God will discern the true culprit ! 
 
 " What you write me," answers Koursbi, " is ridicu- 
 lous, and it is indecent to send such writings into a 
 country where men know grammar, rhetoric, and philo- 
 sophy." 
 
 The correspondence extends over a period of sixteen 
 years, from 1563 to 1579, and comprises four letters from 
 Kourbski and two of Ivan's replies. The post travelled 
 slowly in those days ! There has been much splitting 
 of hairs over the value of the arguments advanced in this 
 epistolary tournament, and the process still continues. 
 
 Kourbski also wrote a History of Ivan the Terrible, 
 which is interesting as being the first Russian attempt 
 at learned composition modelled on the classics. The 
 work is full of detail, and has a picturesqueness of style 
 which recommends it, but it lacks calm, and is totally 
 devoid of impartiality. 
 
 From the close of the seventeenth century onwards, 
 a new influence becomes evident in the intellectual 
 development of Russia. The presence of the Jesuits, 
 brought to Kiev by the Polish conquest, makes that city 
 a centre of culture of a comparatively enlarged nature, 
 and the seat of a school of advanced teaching, trans- 
 formed, after 1701, into an ecclesiastical college. 
 
 One curious peculiarity of the teaching of Ki^v, and 
 of the literary movement which preceded it, is that 
 though both were Latin and Roman in origin, they both 
 fought chiefly against Rome. Their chief aim was the 
 defence of orthodoxy. Apart from that, they are essen- 
 tially scholastic in character. Like everything Polish of 
 that epoch, they pertain to the Middle Ages. Beside the 
 
40 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 rhetoric, so beloved of Kourbski, poetry holds an hon- 
 oured place at Kiev, and gives birth to a bevy of com- 
 positions wherein religious drama (mysteries) holds the 
 most prominent position. This particular element soon 
 penetrates as far as AIoscow. 
 
 Towards the middle of the seventeenth century,- 
 Southern Russia is severed from Poland. Then the 
 intellectual and literary influence of the southern focus 
 takes the migratory form. In 1649, during the reign 
 of Alexis Michailovitch, the Boyard Rtychtchev sends 
 for Little-Russian monks to manage a school he has 
 established near the monastery of St. Andrew. But 
 before long the local orthodoxy takes fright at these 
 instructors. A struggle begins between the Greek and 
 the Latin system of instruction, and lasts until Peter 
 the Great decides in favour of the latter, and re-models 
 the Greek Academy at Moscow on the Kievian lines. 
 This institution, founded in 1682 by the Tsar Fiodor 
 Alexieidvitch, appears fated to undergo periodic changes 
 of name and management. In its Greek period it was 
 chiefly occupied — under the direction of the famous 
 Patriarch Nicone, assisted by one of the monks sum- 
 moned by Rtychtchev, Epiphane Slavetsky — with in- 
 augurating the correction of the Sacred Books. The 
 result of this work, which its opponents held to be 
 suspicious and irreverent, was the Raskol. 
 
 At last, with the appearance of the learned men of 
 Kiev and the establishment of schools, profane science 
 took root at Moscow. Its first steps were modest indeed. 
 Literally, it had to begin with the alphabet. The first 
 national alphabet had been published at Vilna in 1596. 
 It was not till 1648 that the grammar of ]\Ieletii Smotrytski 
 was printed at Moscow. This was followed, early in the 
 
KOTOCHIKHINE 41 
 
 eighteenth century, by those of Fiodor Pohkarpov (1721) 
 and P^iodor Maksimov (1723), which remained the authori- 
 ties until the publication of Lomonossov's work (1755). 
 
 A few attempts at bibliography and lexicography 
 accompany these elementary productions, together with 
 some accounts of travel, chronicles, and the Tchcti-AIind'i 
 (" Ecclesiastical Years"), a very popular work of encyclo- 
 paedic haj4iography, by Danilo Touptala (St. Demetrius 
 of Rostov). It seems, in this liook, as though Orthodox 
 and ascetic Russia, standing on the threshold of a new 
 epoch, were casting back a glance fraught willi terror 
 and regret, ^'ct even in these pages the modern spirit 
 stirs. The author follows Western models. He has 
 both Simeon the Metaphrast and the Bollandists under 
 his hand. Danilo, indeed, who was born in 165 1, in the 
 province of Kiev, of a noble Cossack family, and lived 
 both at Vilna and at Sloutsk, was himself the child of 
 Little-Kussian soil and Polish culture. The foreign and 
 Western element also made itself evident in two literary 
 productions of very dissimilar natures. Russia under 
 A/rxis Lliklhi'ilovitch, liy Kotochikhine, and 'I he Russian 
 Eiiipirc in tlic Middle of the Eighteenth Century, by 
 Jouril' Krijanitch. 
 
 Kotochikhine and Krijanitch. 
 
 Kotochikhine, an employi^ in the Foreign Office 
 {Possolskoi R/-i/iyrse), who took refuge at a later period in 
 Poland, and afterwards in Sweden, where he wrote his 
 book, is a second Kourbski, with a wider intelligence. 
 He struck the first note in that literary concert of accusa- 
 tion and divulgation which in our day has made the name 
 of such men as Her/.en, Chtch^drine, and Pissemski. 
 
42 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 He boldly lays his hand even on the family matters of 
 his sovereign, revealing his moral poverty, his coarse 
 habits, his lack of education. He denounces the ignor- 
 ance, the bad faith, the robbery, rampant on every step 
 of the social ladder. He has been taxed, in Russia, with 
 spite and prejudice ; but he is too objective and too cold 
 to deserve this reproach. He never declaims, he merely 
 quotes facts, and he is authoritatively confirmed in two 
 quarters — by Pope Sylvester with his Domostro'i, and by 
 Peter the Great with his reforms. His end was tragic. 
 In 1667, when he was only thirty-seven, he went to the 
 scaffold in expiation of a murder committed in Stock- 
 holm, the circumstances of which have never been 
 clearly ascertained. The manuscript of his book was 
 only discovered in the Upsala Library in 1837. 
 
 Kotochikhine, like his modern imitators, confined 
 himself to pointing out the evil without suggesting any 
 remedy. The Servian Krijanitch, on the contrary, is a 
 doctor for every disease, ready with both diagnosis and 
 prescription. He was a reformer, a Catholic priest 
 who had studied at Agram, at Vienna, and at Rome, 
 where, while writing a book on the great Schism, he was 
 bitten with the mania for reuniting the two Churches. 
 He reached Moscow in 1658, bubbling over with splen- 
 did plans. Three years later we find him at Tobolsk, 
 in the depths of Siberia. What caused this disgrace ? 
 We know not. It lasted till 1676, and in his distant exile 
 the unhappy man composed all his works — a grammar 
 and a book on politics, which was published, but not 
 until i860, by Bezsonov, under the title already men- 
 tioned. It gives us, in a series of dialogues, a complete 
 plan of political and social reorganisation on Western 
 lines, and a fancy picture of a reformed Russia. 
 
KRIJANITCH 43 
 
 Krijanitch's work being, like that of Kotochikhine, 
 proscribed and ignored, counted for naught in the intel- 
 lectual movement of the times. Yet it heralded the 
 advent of a new world. When the Protopope Avva- 
 koume raised his protest against the correction of the 
 Sacred Books, the knell of ancient Russia was ringing 
 in his ears. The purging of the original texts was only 
 one of the many signs of the crumbling of the old foun- 
 dations, religious and social. When this was under- 
 taken, the critical spirit entered the charmed circle 
 wherein for centuries the national spirit had slumbered 
 on its bed of idleness, of ignorance, and of superstition, 
 and the outer air swept in through the breach opened 
 towards Europe. The Russia of Alexis woke to the 
 memory of a past when she had seen Greek artists at 
 Ki6v, German artisans at Novgorod and Pskov, Italian 
 architects even in far distant Vladimir, and held fami- 
 liar intercourse with the Christian princes of the West. 
 The foreign immigration had recommenced even under 
 Ivan III., at the close of the fifteenth century. The 
 thread of tradition was taken up again, when that Tsar 
 chose Sophia Paleologus, a Greek princess brought up 
 at Rome, to be his partner. When she brought over 
 Fioravantij the Italian architect, Western art once more 
 lookup its quarters on Russian soil. Early in the follow- 
 ing century, Herberstein already mentions a beginning 
 of European life at Moscow — the German " Faubourg." 
 One of the most curious traits in the character of Ivan 
 the Terrible is his mania for things English. At one 
 time we find him dreaming of an interview with Queen 
 Elizabeth, and obstinately clinging to his dream. Later, 
 and this at the close of his life, his heart is set on marry- 
 ing Mary Hastings. At certain moments of moral con- 
 
44 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 vulsion, the idea of retiring permanently to England 
 tempted him, and even haunted his fevered brain. 
 
 Under Alexis, the German, or rather the cosmopohtan 
 " Faubourg," attained civic rights. Its special life be- 
 came an integral part of the local existence. Yet the 
 civilising influence still needed a conductor, and the part 
 devolved on the Little-Russian element. This possessed 
 a twofold principle of relative knowledge and anti- 
 catholicism, which facilitated its mission. The first 
 workers of the renaissance which was to transform 
 Moscow issued from this group, but their labour must 
 be judged more by the spirit than by the letter of their 
 writings. 
 
 The Renaissance. 
 
 One of the Little-Russian priests who arrived in the 
 capital at this period, Simeon Polotski, had all the air 
 of a court abbe. He gave lessons in literature in the 
 sovereign's family, and wrote verses for special occa- 
 sions. These monks of Kiev introduced the art of 
 poetry as well as the elements of Western science. 
 Simeon, who was tutor to Alexis, and then to his brother 
 Fiodor, also wielded a decisive influence over the 
 education of Sofia, sister of Peter the Great, and his 
 predecessor at the head of the state. His books on 
 religious controversy are interspersed with scientific 
 digressions. His views on cosmology are somewhat 
 peculiar. He believed the sky to be a great crystal 
 sphere, wherein the stars are fixed. He also thought he 
 knew the sun to be a hundred times larger than the 
 earth, and that the universe measured exactly 428,550 
 versts. He was a poet, and wrote plays — NchMcJiadiic%:zar 
 and The Prodigal Son, which were played at court and in 
 
ROMANCES 45 
 
 the schools. In The Prodigal Son we have a thinly veiled 
 criticism of the over-despotic conditions of family life. 
 In 1672, Johann Gottfried Gregori, a German, installed 
 himself in the Faubourg with his troupe of performers. 
 Moscow had a theatre, and before long she had a school 
 of dramatic art. Natalia Narychkine, the second wife of 
 Alexis, opened the gates of the Kremlin to the actors. 
 Unknown rivals and forerunners of Racine set the story 
 of Esther and Ahasuerus on the stage, and Sofia intro- 
 duced the works of Moliere. 
 
 After the drama comes the novel. This form of 
 narrative had long been familiar and popular in Russia. 
 Until the sixteenth century, it preserved the Byzantine 
 type, in 'the form of adaptations of the apocryphal 
 legends, which had a large circulation. It ultimately 
 underwent the Western influence, and received, by way 
 of Poland, the elements, strangely corrupted and traves- 
 tied, of the Romance of Chivalry. But presently, in a 
 group of anonymous works, of which The Adventures of 
 Frol Skobieiev, the seducer of Annouchka, daughter of the 
 Stolnik {dapifer^ Nachtchokine, is the most characteristic, 
 we observe a perfectly fresh type. Not a trace of 
 fancy have we here, but the sharpest observation of 
 contemporary life, a reproduction, faithful to triviality, 
 of its least attractive aspects — in a word, all the essen- 
 tial features of the modern realists. Frol, a profes- 
 sional pettifogger, openly dubbed a thief and rogue by 
 Annouchka's father, attains his end by dint of boldness, 
 cunning, and bribery. He carries off the fair lady and 
 wins the pardon of the indignant Boyard, who leaves 
 him all his fortune. In spite of the evident influence of 
 the German Schelnien-Roinane, we here find an undoubted 
 vein of originality, which, checked by the general current 
 
46 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of foreign importation, will scarcely reappear until the 
 time of Gogol. Frol Skobieiev is the lineal ancestor of 
 Tchitchikov in Dead Souls ; and this Russian romance of 
 the seventeenth century may be taken to be a literary 
 treasure not equalled by any other works of the periods 
 of Peter the Great and of the great Catherine. 
 
 In any case, it constitutes an extremely interesting and 
 significant phenomenon. It consummates the rupture, 
 partial at all events, with those superannuated traditions 
 which trammelled the Russian genius for so long a 
 period. The evolution which in Italy was foreshadowed 
 by Dante and realised by Petrarch, the conquest of 
 literature by life and our common humanity, with all 
 its contingent circumstances, is accomplished, in the 
 Fatherland of Peter the Great, on the very eve of the 
 advent of the great Reformer, while the special tendencies 
 to which Gogol, Tourgueniev, and Dostolevski were to 
 impart their full scope begin, already and simultaneously, 
 to make themselves felt. 
 
 Simeon Polotski, dying in 1680, was replaced as court 
 poet by his own pupil, Sylvester Miedviediev, who had 
 spent a considerable time in Poland. 
 
 Following his predecessor's lead, he founded a school 
 for the teaching of Latin, and he also succeeded him as 
 leader of the party opposed to the Greek tradition. 
 
 The end of the struggle was tragic and unexpected. 
 Miedviediev, the favourite of Sofia, was mixed up in the 
 quarrel between the Regent and her brother, and in it 
 he lost his life. The Greek party enjoyed a momentary 
 triumph. I have demonstrated elsewhere the manner 
 in which this transient victory brought the victors to 
 confusion. I will here describe how Miedviediev was 
 avenged by the author of his punishment. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 The thinking world of Russia at the end of the seven- 
 teenth century, has been compared to a great raft 
 floating unanchored, drawn, indeed, eastward towards 
 Asia, by the current of its natural traditions, but sud- 
 denly cast in an opposite direction by some violent and 
 merciless eddy. This idea still lingers in Western litera- 
 ture. It is as false as most stereotyped assertions of 
 the kind. The eastward tendency is, on the contrary, 
 a quite modern phenomenon in the history of Russian 
 civilisation. It dates from yesterday, and its nature, 
 so far, remains purely political, economic, and industrial. 
 From a more general point of view, the tendency of 
 the national life, though drawn even at Kiev, as at 
 Novgorod, from the Byzantine East, was to develop 
 itself in quite the contrary direction. Kiev entered 
 into relations with Germany, and even with France. 
 Novgorod opened the Baltic roads towards the West. 
 The Tartar invasion checked all these puttings forth, 
 but it did not replace them with any in a different 
 direction. The "intellectuals" of the sixteenth century 
 did not attempt, during their quarrel with the despotism 
 resulting from the Mongol conquest, to seek refuge in 
 Asia. We know whither Kourbski fled. In the follow- 
 ing century, Peter the Great neither sent for the 
 Italian artists, who had then already rebuilt Moscow, 
 
48 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 nor for the Little Russian monks, who, before his time, 
 had laboured to reform the schools. He simply hurried 
 forward, with his eager spirit, the slow progress which 
 was already carrying his bark steadily westward. He 
 swelled the sails, he made the rowers pant for breath, 
 and grasped the helm with steady hand ; but the vessel's 
 course was laid already. 
 
 Some impenitent Slavophils do indeed still cast as a 
 crime in the great Reformer's teeth, that he broke the 
 link which should, according to their view, have bound 
 the progress of their country's civilisation to the original 
 manifestations of the national genius. But this rupture 
 is purely imaginary. The threads which bound the 
 Russia of the seventeenth century to her semi-oriental 
 origin bind her to it still. We shall trace them even 
 in the Russian literature of this present century. They 
 are scarcely apparent in that which was contemporary 
 with Peter the Great. But this is the common story 
 of every modern literature. There is not one which, 
 like that of the Greeks, is the direct and organic out- 
 come of the national inspiration. The Renaissance 
 makes them all, in the first place, the adopted children 
 of Rome and Athens, and after this each goes back to, 
 and discovers, the secret of its own origin. Russia has 
 perforce followed this law. In her case, the period of 
 Peter the Great was no more than the hasty accom- 
 plishment of that tardy Renaissance, the first symp- 
 toms of which I have described in the preceding 
 chapter. Yet one difference exists, and one cause of 
 inferiority, between the Russian evolution and that of 
 its Western rivals. The Greek culture, instead of per- 
 colating through the Latin medium alone, has been 
 fain to reach the Muscovite through several — the 
 
PETER THE GREAT 49 
 
 Polish influence, then the German, the French and 
 EngHsh. 
 
 The personal share of the Reformer in this process 
 is clearly expressed and summed up in the great scien- 
 tific institution which he planned, and which was nof 
 established until after his death. The Slavo- Latin 
 Academy at Moscow did not satisfy him. He desired 
 to have another at St. Petersburg, modelled on Euro- 
 pean lines, and according to the plan suggested to him 
 by Leibnitz. But his second German adviser, Wolff, 
 was in favour of a university, and a third argued that 
 in a country where schools were lacking it might be 
 wise to begin with a Gymnasium. After prolonged 
 hesitation, which must have tried a man of his tem- 
 perament severely, Peter resolved to combine all these 
 desiderata, and planned an institution to combine all 
 the three types suggested. But the university remained 
 a mere paper plan, and the gymnasium met with woeful 
 difficulties. In 1730 there were only thirty-six pupils 
 on the books, and twenty of them were non-attendants, 
 for Peter, always short of men, was employing them 
 elsewhere. In 1736 the roll dwindled to nineteen. The 
 academy alone prospered. Academicians are always 
 to be had. Some came from Germany, and some even 
 from France. 
 
 These, in the Reformer's eyes, were pioneers, whom 
 he expected to open up the country to cultivation. In 
 the furrows they ploughed, the seed for future harvests 
 was to be sown broadcast. First he would have trans- 
 lations, — and the great man worked at them himself, 
 swearing at German prolixity meanwhile. To the native 
 writers he assigned, for the moment, a less dignified part. 
 They were, like himself, to put themselves to the Western 
 
so RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 school, and then to second his efforts to bring the lessons 
 there learnt into practice. Every branch of literary pro- 
 duction was forced to serve this double end. Thus a 
 dramatic piece played in the Red Square at Moscow 
 was nothing but a paraphrase of the official announce- 
 ment of a victory over the Swedes, and a sermon preached 
 in the Cathedral of the Assumption was a commentary 
 on a decree published the day before its delivery. 
 
 Sometimes these theatrical representations slipped 
 from the hand which generally directed them, and went 
 into opposition ; this more especially in the case of the 
 " interludes," burlesque dialogues, which were generally 
 played in private houses, though, following the demo- 
 cratic habits of the place, the public of every class had 
 free access to the performance. On these occasions the 
 popular opposition to the reforms, and chiefly to the 
 reform in the national dress, so hateful to the lower 
 classes, was expressed in the boldest sallies. Peter took 
 no heed, and rather challenged his adversaries on their 
 own ground than gave any hint of the future severities 
 of the censorship. However much his temperament, 
 his taste for rough undignified amusements, his inclina- 
 tion to exaggeration, may have led him in the direction 
 of those masquerades and buffooneries and those licen- 
 tious parodies, wherein he spent his wits and prostituted 
 his dignity (and I have elsewhere admitted the excess of 
 which he was guilty in this respect), he certainly nursed 
 thoughts of a higher nature through it all. He desired 
 to drag his people out of the old Byzantine rut. He 
 meant to enfranchise the public mind, even at the expense 
 of horrid profanation. The national genius sat huddled 
 under the shade of the national cathedrals. Peter was 
 resolved to drag out the priest, even if he had to cast him 
 
PROKOPOVITCH : JAVORSKI 5 i 
 
 into the kennel. The most eminent writer, even of that 
 period, was still a bishop, a prelate given to worldly 
 matters, suspected of being a Protestant, if not a free- 
 thinker. The one literary work which stands out above 
 the contemporary medley of compilations and hasty 
 adaptations is the Ecclesiastical Regulations. This is, above 
 all things, a pamphlet directed against the monastic life 
 of that epoch. The name of its author was Feofan 
 PROKOPOVITCH. 
 
 In this struggle within the very walls of the temple, 
 two priests, of similar origin, widely different in feeling 
 and education, stood face to face. Stephen Javorski 
 (1658-1722), a Little-Russian by birth, brought up in the 
 Polish schools at Lemberg and Posen, succeeded the last 
 Patriarch, Adrian, in 1702, as "temporary guardian" of 
 a throne that was never to be filled again. A man of 
 poor education, except in church matters, he began by 
 swimming with the new current. Then, taking fright, he 
 fought against it, calling all the dignity of his sacerdotal 
 vestments, and of the traditions they represented, to his 
 aid. Peter was thus fain to seek some more determined 
 adept in reforming ideas to oppose this backslider. 
 
 Feofan Prokopovitch (1681-1736), the son of a Ki^v 
 merchant, had also made a stay in Poland, and even went 
 so far as to accept the union, with the habit of the 
 Basilian Fathers at Witepsk. Yet he was deemed worthy 
 of Rome and of the Missionary College of St. Athanasius. 
 But the neighbourhood of St. Peter's influenced his 
 borrowed Catholicism in a manner very different from 
 that which had been expected. Within two years Feofan 
 went back to Ki^v and to the bosom of the Orthodox 
 Church. Yet not in vain had he travelled across Europe, 
 and been brought into touch with her intellectual life. 
 
5 2 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 He taught theology at Kidv, but he forsook the scholastic 
 methods, and followed those of the Protestant doctors. 
 Gerhard was his master, and he drew his inspiration from 
 Auerstedt. At the same time, he utilised his leisure time 
 in composing verses, plays, and a dissertation on poetry, 
 which was pubhshed after his death in 1756. 
 
 We must observe, that at this moment Peter was 
 only just beginning his career, and that no sign of his 
 future work had yet appeared. The helm of the great 
 ship, still worked by a temporary crew, had hitherto felt 
 no strong hand upon it. And yet this lonely monk was 
 already steering his frail bark towards the light. It was 
 not until 1709 that he attracted the Tsar's attention, by a 
 sermon preached on the occasion of the victory of Pol- 
 tava. He was summoned to St. Petersburg, and from 
 that time we see him the Tsar's mouthpiece in the pulpit 
 and the press, the semi-official interpreter and apolo- 
 gist of his master's policy. He will help him in all his 
 plans for reform. Preaching on the Tsarevitch's birth- 
 day, October 18, 1706, he will sum up the work already 
 accomplished, and compare the ancient condition of 
 Russia with her present state. To establish the sove- 
 reign's right to choose his own successor, he will write 
 that Pravda voli Monarclie'i ("Truth of the Sovereign's 
 Will ") which has become the corner-stone of the political 
 edifice left by the Reformer to his heirs ; and in 1721, in 
 his Ecclesiastical Regulations, which prefaced the final 
 suppression of the Patriarchate and the institution of the 
 Holy Synod, he will lay the foundations of the reor- 
 ganisation of the Russian clergy. 
 
 Appointed Bishop of Pskov in 171 8 (against Javorski's 
 will), he became the second member of the Holy Svnod 
 in 1721, and in 1724 he was made Archbishop of Nov- 
 
PROKOPOVITCH S3 
 
 gordd. His position in the Church, supported as he 
 was by the Tsar's favour and authority, was really un- 
 rivalled. He succeeded in obtaining the suppression of 
 the Kamieqne Vieri ("Stone of the Faith"), a religious con- 
 troversial work in which Javorski formulated the protest 
 of the ancient Church against her would-be reformers. 
 The author was to have his revenge. In 1729, when 
 Peter was dead, the Kamieqne was published, and made 
 a stir which was felt beyond the Russian frontier. Two 
 Germans, Buddseus and Mosheim, replied to the argu- 
 ments of a Spanish Dominican, Ribeira, who had followed 
 the Duke of Liria, ambassador of the Most Catholic King, 
 to St. Petersburg, in a dispute which was destined to last 
 over the whole of the first half of the eighteenth century. 
 This was a direct blow at Prokopovitch. To defend the 
 position thus threatened, he deliberately threw himself 
 into the thick of the struggles and political intrigues which 
 were another legacy from the great Tsar's reign, and 
 which were to continue till the accession of Catherine 
 II. Nevertheless he remained in the forefront of the 
 intellectual movement of his day — not without a certain 
 alarm and simple surprise at the unforeseen extent of 
 the horizon he himself was labouring to unveil, and the 
 knowledge thereby acquired, together with a different 
 and altogether secular sense of anxiety with regard to the 
 mystery beyond this life, which his newly-awakened ima- 
 gination painted in colours hitherto unknown. 
 
 " Oh, head ! head! thou hast grown drunk with learn- 
 ing ; where wilt thou rest thee now ? " Thus he was heard 
 to murmur on his death-bed. He had lived the life 
 of a modern man in his fine house on the Karpovka, 
 an affluent of the Neva, on whose waters a flotilla 
 of boats always lay, in readiness to transport him to 
 
54 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 some one of his other residences. At Karpovka he had 
 a Hbrary of 30,000 volumes, and a school for secondary- 
 education, which was the best of that period. Here 
 he received the most eminent men of the day— D. M. 
 Gahtsine, Tatichtchev, Kant(^mir, and the foreign mem- 
 bers of the Academy, one of whom, Baier, dedicated his 
 Musewn Sinicum to him. Up to the very end, he never 
 ceased to take his part in every manifestation of literary 
 and scientific activity ; he wrote verses to greet the 
 dawn of a new art in Kantemir's first satire, and he 
 was the protector of Lomonossov. The only thing lack- 
 ing to his glory was to have known and appreciated 
 Possochkov. 
 
 In Possochkov we have another Russian who turned 
 to the West without waiting for Peter and his reforms. 
 He was a peasant, born about 1673, in a village near 
 Moscow. How did he learn to read, to write, to think ? 
 It is a mystery. He felt the stirring of the springs 
 of water destined to flow over this remote country, 
 hidden under its crust of barbarism, and forthwith 
 he too launched his little boat. Instinct made him a 
 mechanician and a naturalist. He was soon to be a 
 philosopher. Meanwhile, while he eagerly studied the 
 properties of sulphur, of asphalt, of naphtha, he earned 
 an honest competency by selling brandv. He came of 
 an industrious race. By 1724, Possochkov had bought 
 a landed property and set up a factory. Thus, though 
 unknown to the Reformer, he was bearing his share in 
 the Reform — I mean, in the general progress which was 
 its aim. Yet he was conservative, after his own fashion. 
 In the Precepts for my Son, which constitute his first 
 attempt at authorship, he still appears wedded to the 
 traditions of the Domostroi, and exalts ancient, at the 
 
POSSOCHKOV 5 5 
 
 expense of modern, Russia, wherein many things, and 
 more especially the pre-eminence given to foreigners, 
 displease him. But these very Precepts were a sort 
 of vade mecum for the use of his son during a tour in 
 Europe, which he proposes to make with his father's 
 full consent. 
 
 And Possochkov went further yet. As the close of the 
 great Tsar's reign approached, he seemed to rouse himself 
 out of the half-slumbei- which had prevented him from 
 realising the new world created around him. And we 
 see him paying homage to Peter in a book which is a 
 creation in itself — a book dealing with poverty and riches ! 
 We must not forget that at this moment Adam Smith 
 had only just seen the light in England, and that the 
 physiocratic school had not yet appeared in France. In 
 spite of its strange medley of bold ideas, truisms, and 
 absurdities, Possochkov's work is absolutely original. 
 It was a bold stroke on his part to found his argu- 
 ment on the principle that the wealth of all empire lies, 
 not in the sovereign's treasury, but in the possessions 
 of his subjects. To increase these last in Russia, the 
 former adherent of the Domostroi now deems a radical 
 reform in manners and customs indispensable. His 
 study of the national resources has convinced him that 
 idleness, drunkenness, and theft constitute an intolerable 
 obstacle to their natural development. But how is this 
 obstacle to be removed ? By the means conceived by 
 Peter himself. Schools ! Schools everywhere, for every 
 one. Like all other theorists, whether autodidact or 
 neophyte, Possochkov is a Radical. He demands com- 
 pulsory and universal education. He does not even 
 except his brother peasants. He considers, besides, the 
 question of improving their condition. By suppressing 
 
S6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 serfdom ? No, he does not go those lengths. Himself 
 a landed proprietor and a factory-owner, he owns serfs, 
 and could not well do without them. So he juggles 
 with the difficulty, and comes to the very odd conclu- 
 sion that in this matter the best way of easing the law 
 is to strengthen it ! If the serf becomes the master's 
 chattel even more completely than before, he stands the 
 chance of better treatment ! 
 
 Some indulgence must be granted to neophytes. 
 None the less did Possochkov deserve a welcome from 
 the great man whose views he had come to share, 
 though somewhat tardily. But it was too late ! Peter 
 was dying. And in the eyes of his successors the man 
 who cared so little for the Imperial Treasury was no 
 better than a traitor. Possochkov was arrested, shut up 
 in a casemate in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, 
 and there died the following year. Peter, who had thus 
 missed his co-operation, was chiefly assisted in matters 
 of national economy by Vassili Nikititch Tatichtchev. 
 
 Tatichtchev was a i?z>7<2^'2>/ (literally, a maker), a com- 
 pletely new type, with all the constitutional qualities and 
 faults of his kind, which have endured down to the present 
 day. An engineer, an administrator, a geographer and 
 historian, whose lengthy sojourns in foreign countries 
 (more especially in Germany) had brought him into 
 close touch with the intellectual progress of the West, 
 Vassili Nikititch Tatichtchev (1685-1750) was rich in 
 gifts and resources. But he stands convicted, during 
 his mission in the province of Orenburg, of an in- 
 curable taste for peculation, and the only defence he 
 can make is to quote this maxim, " If a man judges 
 justly, it is only fair he should be paid." After being 
 sent in semi-disgrace to Stockholm, and having exposed 
 
TATICHTCHEV 57 
 
 himself to fresh judicial proceedings at Astrakan, whither 
 he was despatched as governor by Elizabeth, Tatichtchev 
 died just as he had snatched an acquittal from the too 
 facile good-nature of his sovereign. Russians know how 
 to die. This national virtue has been splendidly ex- 
 tolled and illustrated by Tolstoi and Garchine. The 
 believer performs the final duties of his faith as calmly 
 and serenely as if he were going to a baptism or a mar- 
 riage. Even amongst atheists, we seldom see a case in 
 which the terrors of death drive a man to deny his con- 
 victions. Tatichtchev, perceiving that his end drew 
 near, set his domestic affairs in order, and then, mount- 
 ing his horse, betook himself to the neighbouring ceme- 
 tery to choose his grave and warn the priest. The next 
 day he passed away. His death had been better ordered 
 than his life. 
 
 In his works, both literary and scientific, we notice a 
 lack of rule and proportion which was still common among 
 the writers and savants of his country. At one moment 
 he conceived a plan for a National Geography, so huge 
 that his spirit recoiled in alarm from the idea of carrying 
 it into execution. At another he undertook to produce 
 a lexicon of history, geography, and politics. He car- 
 ried it no further than the letter L. As a historian he 
 was more especially a collector of materials, and his 
 work is still valuable, because it contains fragments of 
 chronicles, the originals of which have entirely disap- 
 peared. 
 
 His views are those of a self-taught man, who has 
 done no preparatory work, and has had to fight his own 
 way. But he was the first man in Russia to realise the 
 necessity of including, in any history, the whole life of 
 the country concerned, its habits, customs, and tradi- 
 
5 8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tions. This fact places a great gulf between Tatichtchev 
 and his immediate forerunners, the ancient chroniclers. 
 
 His contemporaries considered him a free-thinker, 
 and Peter has the credit of having combated certain 
 slips of judgment noticed in his collaborator by argu- 
 ments of his own, not unconnected with the employment 
 of his legendary doubina (thick stick). Yet Tatichtchev's 
 scepticism does not appear to have gone beyond that of 
 which Prokopovitch himself showed himself capable in 
 the discussion of the authenticity of a certain icon, attri- 
 buted to the brush of St. Methodius. He clung to his 
 Western Rationalism, and combined with it a constant 
 effort to reconcile faith with reason. Walch's Dictionary 
 of Philosophy, then popular in Germany, was the expres- 
 sion, and marked the limit, of his boldness. 
 
 He also wrote commentaries on the ancient Russian 
 laws — the Rousskaia Pravda and the Soudiebnik. The 
 gifts of his fellow-countrymen were still essentially of 
 the polygraphic and encyclopedic order. But the most 
 complete expression of the ideas of Tatichtchev is to be 
 found in his Conversation ivitk Friends on the Utility of 
 Knowledge and of Schools, and his Will — further pre- 
 cepts given by a father to a son. In the first of these 
 works he indicates the existence of a twofold opposition 
 to the diffusion of light among the masses — one that of 
 the clergy ; the other that of a certain school of poli- 
 ticians who look on ignorance as a guarantee of docility. 
 Boldly he strikes at these twin adversaries, invoking, to 
 confound the first, the example of Christ and his apos- 
 tles, who were all teachers, and demanding of the last, 
 " Would you take fools and ignorant folk to manage and 
 wait on your household ? " Both on this point and on 
 others his Precepts, which are contemporary with those 
 
UTILITARIAN LITERATURE $9 
 
 of Possochkov (1719 and 1725), speak out boldly. Tati- 
 chtchev, though he always regards religion as the neces- 
 sary foundation for education, whether public or private, 
 turns his back resolutely on the Domostro'i. Domes- 
 tic authority, as represented by the whip — even when 
 used gently and in private — is utterly repugnant to him. 
 He divides life into three parts — military service, civil 
 sei-vice, and finally retirement to the country, to be 
 employed in caring for whatever property a man may 
 possess. This leads him to formulate certain teachings, 
 which show his agreement with Possochkov's view of 
 the necessary connection between the economic progress 
 of a country and the raising of its intellectual level. 
 
 My readers will observe the utilitarian character of 
 all this literature. This is the special mark of the 
 period in which art has not, as yet, its appointed place. 
 One event occurs, however, and one current is formed, 
 which, from the literary and artistic point of view, would 
 appear to indicate that the process of evolution was 
 approaching its natural close. 1 referred to this event 
 when I mentioned a contemporary theatrical migration. 
 
 From the German Faubourg the actors found their 
 way into the court. From the Kreml they passed on to 
 the public square. After 1702, the new German troupe, 
 led by Johann Kunscht of Dantzig, gave performances 
 in the Red Square at Moscow, and was obliged to use 
 the Russian language. The repertory consisted, for the 
 most part, of translations, but Peter commanded that 
 allusions to contemporary events, in a sense favour- 
 able to his policy, should be interpolated. Vladimir, a 
 tragi-comedy by Prokopovitch, which was performed at 
 Ki^v in 1702 and at Moscow in 1705, teems with such 
 allusions. 
 
6o RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Had Prokopovitch any knowledge of Shakespeare ? 
 Possibly, through Philipps' Theatrum Poetarimt (1675). 
 In the religious drama, the comic element only appears 
 as an accessory, in the form of burlesque interludes, but 
 it is an integral part of the work of the bishop-playwright. 
 The interest of this piece is concentrated on the struggle 
 in Vladimir's soul between the habits and beliefs of 
 paganism and the teachings of the new faith, and con- 
 stitutes a bona-fide attempt at psychological drama. 
 
 The current to which I have adverted is the appear- 
 ance, on the heels of the translators employed by Peter, 
 of the Imitators. It, too, had an earlier source. Of this 
 I have indicated some symptoms in the time of Ivan the 
 Terrible. All the Reformer did was to hurry it forward 
 and increase it. His personal genius was, as is well 
 known, imitative to the highest degree, and literature 
 was fain to follow his lead. 
 
 This period was one of Indian file, and the honour of 
 leading the way fell to a foreigner. The poetic work 
 of the Moldavian prince, Kantemir, whose father allied 
 himself with Peter in 1709, and thereby lost his prin- 
 cipality, is of a date posterior to that of the great Tsar's 
 reign. In his days, men fought and were beaten too often 
 to leave much time for sacrificing to Apollo. The man 
 of letters had no chance of asserting himself among 
 the bevy of soldiers and craftsmen whom the mighty 
 fighter carried in his train. Antiochus Dmitri£vitch 
 KANTfiMiK, who was born at Constantinople in 1708, 
 and died in Paris, after a sojourn of some years in Lon- 
 don, in 1744, was himself no more than a dilettante. By 
 profession he was a diplomatist. His first literary at- 
 tempt was a satire. Through all the vicissitudes of future 
 times, this form of expression was to predominate in the 
 
KANTEMIR 6i 
 
 literature of his adopted country, and to afford, in every 
 period, proofs of superior originality and more direct 
 inspiration. In an engraving inspired by the death of 
 Peter the Great, and representing a cat borne to the 
 tomb by mice, the celebrated iconographist Rovinski 
 has discovered a number of features which bear no re- 
 semblance to the Western models. Pictorial details and 
 letterpress are alike of local growth, from the mouse of 
 Riazan, Siva {" grey one "), which, draped in a saraphane, 
 weeps as it skips v prissiadkou (bending its knees), and 
 seems to symbolise the hypocrisy of the priesthood, to 
 the reminiscences, so evident in the funeral cortege, of 
 the burlesque masquerades which were one of the pecu- 
 liarities of the famous reign. 
 
 Kantemir's first satire, composed in 1729, attacked 
 the opponents of education, and more particularly the 
 personal enemies of Prokopovitch, whose pupil the 
 author was. The young man found himself forthwith 
 enrolled under the banner of progress, and torn between 
 politics and literature. This did not hinder him, two 
 years later, from joining Tatichtchev in the composition 
 of the famous address in which the Russian nobles, after 
 having raised the shadow of an agitation in favour of 
 constitutional reform, besought the Empress Anne to 
 take up autocratic power once more, and cut off men's 
 heads according to her own goodwill and pleasure. But 
 to this adventure the master urged his pupil, and it 
 ensured Kant^mir the prospect of a brilliant career. At 
 the age of two-and-twenty he started for London, with 
 the rank of Resident. There he did little diplomatic 
 work, but he translated Anacreon, Horace, and Jus- 
 tinian. In 1738 he passed on to Paris, made the acquaint- 
 ance of Montesquieu, and worked at a Russian version 
 
62 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of the Lettres Persanes. But soon Maupertuis gave him 
 ideas for an essay on algebra, and Fontenelle tempted 
 him, in his turn, to translate his work on the " Plurality 
 of Worlds." He was fast losing himself in this labyrinth 
 when death laid its hand upon him. 
 
 He had begun by moving in the track of Boileau, 
 while he believed and declared himself to be following 
 Horace and Juvenal. The philosophic ideal of Horace, 
 vaguely floating betwixt the doctrine of the Stoics and 
 that of the Epicureans, gave birth to his sixth and eighth 
 satires. To be content with little, to live apart, " with the 
 Greek and Latin poets for company," to reflect on events 
 and their causes, and steer a wise middle course in all 
 matters — this was his fancy. The Empress Elizabeth's 
 method of government made it somewhat of a necessity. 
 The poet had no fortune of his own, and his salary was 
 most irregularly paid. 
 
 His poetry is chiefly valuable from the historical point 
 of view. I discern a certain amount of imagination in it, 
 but no charm of any kind. Occasionally his language is 
 strong, but for the most part it is trivial even to the point 
 of vulgarity. Further — and this may be forgiven in a 
 foreigner — he has not a shadow of originality, not a touch 
 of personal sentiment nor of national feeling. Though 
 superior to most of his Russian contemporaries in his 
 power of understanding and appreciating the Western 
 world, and capable of grasping and appreciating the 
 real meaning of the civilisations he studied, Kant^mir 
 was unable to add anything of his own to them. 
 The form of verse he employs, a syllabic metre of 
 twelve feet, is clumsy and stiff. But let us not forget 
 that at that moment Trediakovski was engaged on the 
 first study ever made of the elementary principles of 
 
KANTEMIR 63 
 
 Russian versification, and had just realised the necessity 
 of replacing the syllabic by the tonic line. And even 
 he could not succeed in adding example to precept. 
 Kantemir attempted it, with some measure of success, in 
 his fifth satire, and thereafter, in his Letter to a Friend on 
 the Composition of Russian Poetry, he took his turn at 
 theory instead of practice, and was much less suc- 
 cessful. 
 
 He made attempts on other lines, philosophic odes, 
 odes on special subjects, fables, epigrams. He even 
 began a Petreid, which, mercifully perhaps for the 
 Reformer's reputation, was never finished. He always 
 came back to his satires, with the sensation, so he 
 declared, " of swimming in familiar waters, never making 
 his readers yawn . . . flying like a general to victory ! " 
 His chief victory was that he came in first in the race, 
 and had no competitors. The soil of Russia, though 
 cleared for cultivation by the efforts of Peter the Great, 
 must needs undergo two further processes before the 
 art of poetry could spread and blossom freely on its 
 bosom. I refer to the patient preparation involved in the 
 labours of Trediakovski, and of that other gifted toiler in 
 the field of intellect, Lomonossov. It was by no means 
 an ungrateful soil. I have before me, as I write, some 
 lines written by an unknown poet, in 1724, on the subject 
 of the tragic fate of Mons, Catherine the First's beheaded 
 lover. In them I find, long before Rousseau's time, real 
 feeling, lyric and sentimental, grown up, like a wild 
 flower, how we cannot tell, — a garden spot in this land 
 of brutal realism. But this would appear to be a very 
 isolated instance. 
 
 Russia, as she drew closer to the Western countries, 
 was necessarily forced to obey the Western laws of lite- 
 
64 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 rary development, and follow her predecessors through 
 the same regular course and series of culture. The 
 establishment of a court and a court aristocracy was 
 destined, just at this precise period, to favour the birth 
 of a form of literature which, in France, reached its 
 highest point during the reign of Louis XIV. — the 
 Classic. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FORGING OF THE LANGUAGE 
 
 One winter evening in 1732, in a room in the wooden 
 palace where the Empress Anne held her court, a man 
 knelt beside the fireplace, close to which the sovereign's 
 armchair had been drawn on account of the bitter cold. 
 He was reading aloud a set of verses, half-panegyric, 
 half-madrigal. When his voice ceased, her Majesty beck- 
 oned him towards her. He obeyed without changing 
 his posture, dragging himself along on his knees. The 
 Empress gave him a friendly tap on the cheek, and he 
 retired backwards, followed by glances half-scornful, 
 half-jealous, from the assembled company. Once in his 
 own chamber, he noted the event in his journal. It 
 was destined to become the depository of less pleasant 
 memories. A few years later, he attended at court to 
 take orders for a poem to celebrate some special occa- 
 sion. A Minister whose anger he had roused had his face 
 slapped in far rougher fashion, and his body most merci- 
 lessly beaten. Half-dead with pain and fright, he was 
 left to spend his night in prison, and there compose the 
 lines commanded by his employer. Then the following 
 day, with his face swelled out of knowledge and his back 
 beaten raw, he was forced to put on some burlesque 
 disguise, take part in a court display, and there recite his 
 poem. He died poor and forgotten, and was only re- 
 membered by the next generation as the author of the 
 
66 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 unlucky Teleniachida, the lines of which Catherine II. 
 caused the habitual members of her circle at the Hermi- 
 tage to recite as a task. 
 
 This man was Vassili Kirillovitch Tr£diakovski 
 (1703-1769). Compare the biographical details given 
 above with what we know of the behaviour of Swift, who 
 wrung an apology from Harley and then "restored him 
 to his favour," and refused the advances of the Duke of 
 Buckingham, and at once we realise the gulf between 
 these two provinces of the literary world ! The man thus 
 handled by his contemporaries and their descendants 
 deserved a better fate. Born at Astrakan, on the con- 
 fines of Asia, in 1703, we find him, in 1728, plodding 
 along the road from the Hague to Paris, wild with the 
 longing to see and learn, living we know not how, begging 
 for knowledge, rather than for bread. He was the son of 
 a pope, had been taught at Astrakhan by the Capuchin 
 missionaries, and had afterwards studied at the Slavo- 
 Grseco-Latin Academy at Moscow, where he wrote two 
 plays, a Jason and a Titus, which were performed by 
 the pupils of the establishment, and an elegy on the 
 death of Peter the Great. A disagreement with his 
 superiors — he was always quarrelsome — pecuniary diffi- 
 culties, and the irresistible charm of the nev/ outlook 
 opened to him by the Reform, combined to drive him 
 abroad. By the favour of the Russian Minister in Paris, 
 Kourakine, he attended the lectures delivered at the 
 University by Rollin, and won his diploma. This enabled 
 him to snap his fingers at the Muscovite Academy. He 
 returned to Russia, and found employment of the kind 
 indicated in the opening lines of this chapter. It was not 
 till 1733 that he was appointed secretary of the St. Peters- 
 burg Academy, and this dignity did not screen him 
 
TR^DIAKOVSKI 67 
 
 from the ministerial bludgeon, for the terrible experience 
 I have related above took place in 1740. In 1735 a 
 " Society of the Friends of the Russian Language " was 
 formed in connection with the St. Petersburg Academy, 
 and Tr^diakovski inaugurated its proceedings by an 
 address on " The Purity of the Russian Tongue." He was 
 the first to point out to his comrades the necessity for a 
 good grammar and an authoritative system of rhetoric 
 and poetry. Ten years later, under Elizabeth, we find him 
 higher up the ladder. Professor of Latin and of Russian 
 Elocution at the Academy and University ; but nothing 
 but his sovereign's imperative command obtained his 
 nomination to this post, contrary to the will of the Com- 
 mittee of the Academy, entirely composed of foreigners, 
 who "did not choose to have a Russian in their com- 
 pany." For eighteen years Trediakovski gave the greater 
 part of his time and all his best efforts to his professional 
 duties. He trained Popov and Barsov, the first Russian 
 professors of the University of Moscow, and, like Lomo- 
 nossov, did his utmost to serve the interests of science 
 and of the national education. 
 
 He wrote as well, unluckily ! He translated Boileau's 
 Art Po^iique, Telemaque, and some of /Esop's fables into 
 verse, and did Horace's De Arte Poetica and Tallemant's 
 Voyage a I lie dAmour into prose. He produced an 
 ode on the taking of Danzig, and various other poems 
 on special occasions, besides a considerable number of 
 essays on the art of poetry, on versification, the Russian 
 tongue, and various historical subjects. 
 
 Both verse and prose have been the theme of his 
 fellow-countrymen's spiteful wit down to the time of 
 Pouchkine, who was the first to understand and plainly 
 say, that underneath the poet, at whom all men scoffed, 
 
68 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 there lurked a philologist and grammarian of the fore- 
 most rank. According to the author of Eugene Onieguine, 
 Trediakovski's views on versification are more profound 
 and more correct than those of Lomonossov himself. 
 And even as a poet, the author of the Telemachida is 
 superior to Soumarokov and Kheraskov, the two literary 
 stars of the succeeding period. 
 
 Nevertheless, for over fifty years the hexameters of 
 the Telemachida were the bugbear of several generations 
 of poets, and in 1790, Gnieditch, the Russian translator 
 of the Iliad, was extolled for having dared to " snatch 
 the verse of Homer and Virgil from the stake of infamy 
 to which Trediakovski had nailed it." 
 
 Trediakovski was essentially a theorist, gifted with a 
 quite remarkable intuitive power. His public advocacy 
 of the use of the tonic accent {oudarenie^ in poetic metre 
 is sufficient proof of my assertion. He lacked inspira- 
 tion and aesthetic feeling ; but what an ungrateful task 
 was his, when we recollect that he was driven to explain 
 to his readers that when he spoke of the God of Love 
 he did not intend any disrespect to the doctrine of the 
 Trinity 1 His literary faith was that of Boileau. Poetry, 
 according to him, began with the Greeks, passed through 
 a brilliant period with the Romans, and ..." at last 
 Malherbe appeared." He believed this. While he wove 
 laborious lines in the tongue of Malherbe, he felt himself 
 a proud participator in the glories of a modern Athens. 
 And had he desired to use his own language, what diffi- 
 culties still lay in his path ! 
 
 Which language was he to employ, in the first place ? 
 There were three in current use — the old Slavonic tongue 
 of the Church, the popular speech, which differed from 
 it considerably, and the official language, one of Peter 
 
LOMONOSSOV 6g 
 
 the Great's creations, originally adopted at his Foreign 
 Office, stuffed full, by the scribes employed there, with 
 German, Dutch, and French words, and forced by supe- 
 rior orders on the translators of foreign books. It was 
 a second Tower of Babel, and within it Trediakovski 
 and his partners struggled desperately, till Lomonossov 
 appeared upon the scene. 
 
 The personal character of the unhappy Popovitch 
 {" son of a priest ") also affected both his life and his re- 
 putation. He felt outrage cruelly, and was incapable 
 of raising himself above it by his consciousness of real 
 dignity and worth. Thus he sought compensation of a 
 less legitimate nature, was servile to his superiors, and 
 unbearably arrogant in his dealings with others. The 
 advent of Lomonossov and the successes of Soumarokov 
 were more bitter to him than the cudgellings of his earlier 
 days. He had grown into the habit, amidst his many 
 insults, of proclaiming himself the foremost of living 
 poets. He lost his head now, quarrelled with his 
 rivals, insulted, and finally denounced them. In 1759, 
 thoroughly beaten, he retired from the Academy, and 
 led the life of a recluse, almost of an outcast, until 
 1769. 
 
 The career and work of Lomonossov are, in a sense, 
 the continuation of the career and the revolutionary 
 work of Peter the Great. But to render this continua- 
 tion possible, a second revolution was necessary. The 
 inheritance left by the Reformer was built up by foreign 
 hands, out of materials largely foreign in their origin. 
 After his death, under a prolonged gynocracy, with one 
 Empress who came from Livonia or Poland, another 
 from Germany, these foreign auxiliaries broke their ranks, 
 pushed to the front, made themselves the masters. We 
 
70 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 have seen how they would have shut the door in Tr6- 
 diakovski's face. It was not until 1741 that the native 
 element rose in revolt and recovered the upper hand, 
 driving out the Brunswick family and placing Eliza- 
 beth, Peter's own daughter, in power. In 1746, a Little- 
 Russian named Razoumovski was appointed president 
 of the Academy of Sciences, and a year later, a fresh 
 regulation admitted Russians to this learned assembly. 
 Without this distinct order they would have remained 
 outside ! At the same time, Latin and Russian were 
 declared the only official languages of the institution. 
 Thus its doors were opened to the native Russians. 
 Trediakovski 'entered with Lomonossov ; then came 
 Krachennikov, a botanist; Kotidlnikov, a mathematician; 
 and others besides, such as Popov and Kozitski. The 
 foreign members shrieked with horror, and some asked 
 leave to quit a country in which the natives actually 
 claimed to be at home. 
 
 There was some slight excuse for their protests. 
 Razoumovski, who had been deputed to preside over 
 their labours, was only eighteen years of age, and his 
 sole merit consisted in having a brother who, on private 
 occasions, did not go to the trouble of taking off his 
 dressing-gown to dine with the Empress. His place 
 was filled — and the change was for the better — during 
 the second half of her reign, by I. I. Chouvalov, whose 
 behaviour may indeed have been as informal, but who 
 did take a serious interest in intellectual matters. He 
 was known as the " Russian Maecenas." Brought up 
 in French schools, a great gentleman and a courtier, 
 Chouvalov felt the need of some one to plan under- 
 takings which were beyond the natural scope of his own 
 powers and occupations, and help him to carry them 
 
LOMONOSSOV 71 
 
 through. He did not find it necessary to seek such a 
 man abroad. The being for whose appearance Peter 
 had longed, when he expressed his hope that the mer- 
 cenaries, scientific and Hterary, whom he had gathered 
 from the four corners of the earth, might be replaced, 
 at some not too far distant time, by sons of the Russian 
 soil, was under his hand. The whole process of evolu- 
 tion which produced our modern Russia — the work 
 of several centuries previous to the first reforms, the 
 gradual awakening of the mighty sleeper to a new 
 existence, the first contact with the Western world, the 
 gropings after the road that led towards the future — all 
 these things are personified in the advent and career of 
 this astounding moujik. 
 
 A fisherman's family, a cabin close to the White Sea, 
 far away in the distant north-east, beyond Archangel ; 
 a corner of the earth wrapped in the twofold darkness 
 of the Northern winter and of a rude and coarse exist- 
 ence ; a lad helping his father to cast his nets. There 
 you have the home, the country, the childhood of 
 Michael Vassili:£vitch Lomonossov(i7ii-i765). The 
 region was not utterly dark and barbarous. Occasional 
 rays of light had fallen upon it from time to time. 
 Peter had passed through it on his way to serve his 
 first sea-apprenticeship in the inhospitable haven where 
 Chancellor cast his anchor. Already, at a yet earlier date, 
 British sailors had carried a breath of European civilisa- 
 tion to the spot. The inclement sky, the thankless soil, 
 the boisterous sea, had bred a strong and hardy race 
 of workers, among whom remoteness and isolation in 
 the depths of an historic particularism had perpetuated 
 the traditions of a freedom which had long escaped 
 
 the miseries of serfdom. The fisherman's son found a 
 6 
 
72 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 peasant, Ivan Choubine, who knew enough to teach the 
 boy to act as reader in the church. From these humble 
 beginnings the child imbibed, and never lost, an intimate 
 knowledge of the Slavo-ecclesiastic language, and a deep 
 sense of religion. In the house of another peasant he 
 found Smotrytski's Slav grammar, Magnitski's arithmetic, 
 Simeon Polotski's Psalter in rhyme, and beyond the 
 foggy horizon that hemmed his humble existence, strange 
 lights, half guessed at, beckoned him more and more 
 imperiously. 
 
 At seventeen Lomonossov could bear it no longer, 
 persuaded Choubine to give him a warm kaftan and three 
 roubles, slipped out of his father's house, and started 
 for Moscow — for the light ! Conceive his journey, and 
 his arrival in the great town, where he did not know a 
 soul ! It was in January 173 1, in the bitter cold. He 
 spent his first night in the fish-market, where he found 
 shelter in an empty sledge. We know not what provi- 
 dence carried him into the Academy school. The story 
 goes, that to rouse interest, he declared himself the son 
 of a priest. The Academy supported its scholars, giving 
 each of them an altine a day (a coin worth three kopeks 
 = three-halfpence). For three years Lomonossov lived on 
 his pay. Half a kopek for bread, half a kopek for kwass, 
 the rest he spent on his clothes, on paper, ink, and books. 
 He bought books. He prospered. By the end of the 
 third year he looked like a Hercules, and he had learnt 
 Latin. He was sent to Kiev to complete his education 
 and study philosophy and natural science. Perhaps the 
 authorities were glad to get rid of him. He was hard- 
 working, but turbulent. He fell out with the teaching 
 authorities at Kiev, came back to Moscow, and was 
 thinking of taking orders, not knowing how else to 
 
LOMONOSSOV 73 
 
 provide for himself, when a sudden message from St. 
 Petersburg commanded that twelve of the best Academy 
 students should be sent thither. The Gymnasium be- 
 longing to the Academy of the new capital was starved 
 for want of pupils. Lomonossov formed one of the 
 batch, and a few months later he was again chosen to 
 be sent across the frontier, and cast into the lap of the 
 German schools. He went to Marburg, then to Freiburg 
 in Saxony, studied physics, philosophy, and logic, but 
 contracted, meanwhile, those habits of dissipation and 
 debauchery which were to ruin his robust constitution 
 and hasten his death. 
 
 At the same time, he felt the poetic faculty stir within 
 him. The quite phenomenal scope and grasp of a mind 
 open to every impression made him the most powerful and 
 perfect type of those Russian intellects the capacity and 
 facility of which so astound us, even at the present day. 
 One is almost tempted to believe that the long period of 
 inaction imposed upon the race has caused it, so to speak, 
 to accumulate and lay up a store of potential activity 
 in connection with these faculties, which, where earlier 
 developed, seem blunted by the wear and tear of cen- 
 turies. While Lomonossov listened to the teaching of 
 Wolff and Henkel he wove rhymes. 
 
 In 1740 he sent to St. Petersburg an ode, after the 
 style of Giinther, on the subject of the taking of Chocim 
 by the Russians. It made a great stir. A dissertation 
 on Russian versification accompanied the poem, elicited 
 a reply from Tr^diakovski, and was laid before the Aca- 
 demic Areopagus. This assembly, consisting of Germans 
 and Frenchmen, saw nothing in it. But in the outer 
 world every one blamed Tr6diakovski, and acclaimed 
 the advent of a great poet. Lomonossov won fame in 
 
74 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Russia, but in Germany he had debts, and a wife who 
 did not help him to economise. He had married his 
 landlord's daughter. He narrowly escaped going to jail, 
 wandered for a while from one region to another, and 
 finally, near Dlisseldorf, fell in with a Prussian recruiting 
 party, who made him drunk and carried him off to the 
 fortress of Wesel. His height and his broad shoulders 
 made him a welcome prize. He escaped, and contrived 
 to get back to St. Petersburg, leaving his wife and child 
 behind him in Germany. His father-in-law was a tailor, 
 and able to provide for them. At the end of two years, 
 having obtained the post of Assistant-Professor of Phy- 
 sical Science, he was able to send for his family, which 
 his chosen spouse, Elizabeth-Christine Zilch, like the 
 good German she was, forthwith increased. He taught 
 physics and chemistry as well, besides natural history, 
 geography, versification, and the laws of style. In 1745, 
 on the departure of Gmelin, a German, he succeeded to 
 the chair of Chemistry. In 1757, he entered the Chancery 
 of the Academy, and instantly challenged the Germans 
 who still remained, and claimed to continue to rule it. 
 He invented all sorts of reforms and contrivances, cal- 
 culated to deprive them of the management of the 
 institution. 
 
 The death of Elizabeth, which ruined Chouvalov's 
 credit, and restored, to a certain degree, the power of the 
 foreign party, checked all these plans and ambitions. 
 Lomonossov's boldness in the struggle had only been 
 equalled by his activity, and the support he had received 
 from Chouvalov had never been of a nature which in- 
 volved any compromise with his own dignity. Swift 
 himself might have been responsible for the terms in 
 which he repulsed an attempt made by his " Mscenas " 
 
LOMONOSSOV 75 
 
 to reconcile him with Soumarokov : " I will not look 
 like a dourak (fool), not only before the great men of 
 the earth, but before God himself ! " But he had been 
 more quarrelsome, and, above all, more violent, than 
 Tr^diakovski himself, breaking out perpetually into 
 insults and boorish sallies which betrayed the native 
 coarseness of the man. He was once temporarily ex- 
 cluded from the Academy, and deprived of part of his 
 salary, for having abused his German colleagues and told 
 them they were thieves. The salary amounted to fifteen 
 roubles (;£3) a month, and his injured colleagues, who 
 were less poorly paid, would have preferred his receiving 
 some corporal punishment. But to this Elizabeth would 
 not consent. He died in the enjoyment of a reputation 
 destined to a fate the very opposite of that of Tr^dia- 
 kovski. In each case, Pouchkine has intervened, and 
 revised the ill-founded judgment passed by a public 
 opinion insufficiently instructed, even at the present day. 
 In his lifetime, Lomonossov heard himself likened to 
 Cicero, to Virgil, to Pindar, to Malherbe. To his imme- 
 diate posterity he was the greatest national poet and 
 writer, " an eagle," " a demi-god." Even Pouchkine gives 
 him liberal praise, declaring he constituted in his own 
 person, "the first Russian University." But he refuses 
 to acknowledge his poetic gifts. He will only allow his 
 verse to be an awkward imitation of German poets, 
 already discredited in their own country, and will not 
 ascribe merit to any of his poems, except certain transla- 
 tions from the Psalms, and a few imitations of the grand 
 poetry of the Sacred Books, whence the former church 
 reader drew a happy inspiration. Lomonossov, it must 
 be said, regarded this portion of his own work with 
 considerable scorn, whence Pouchkine argues that its 
 
•je RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 influence on the national literature could not be other- 
 wise than harmful. 
 
 This, if I may dare to say it, shows a lack of instinct, 
 both psychological and historical. The best work is 
 often unconscious work. Lomonossov, by profession a 
 naturalist, a chemist, and, above all, a teacher of physics, 
 was a man of letters in his rare leisure moments only. 
 And it is worth while to notice the care taken to arrange 
 how those moments were to be employed. 
 
 On April 20, 1748, an order from court desires Pro- 
 fessor Lomonossov to translate into Russian verse, and 
 within eight-and-forty hours, a German ode by the 
 Academician Staehlin, which was wanted " for an illu- 
 mination." On September 29, 1750, Trediakovski and 
 Lomonossov receive orders, after the same fashion, to 
 produce a tragedy. 
 
 It is not for me to estimate, in this place, the value of 
 the latter as a savant. His theories as to the propagation 
 of light would appear, at the present day, to be false ; 
 but others, on the formation of coal, have been accepted 
 by modern scientists. In an essay on electric pheno- 
 mena, published in 1753, he seems to have outstripped 
 Franklin. During the later half of his life, he applied 
 himself specially to the study of the national language, 
 literature, and history, and it is more particularly as a 
 poet that he has dwelt in the memory of the two or 
 three generations that came after him. Both in litera- 
 ture and in poetry he is a harbinger, and the sonorous 
 and harmonious verse which is the pride and delight of 
 the readers of Eugene Onieguine, is simply the verse of 
 Lomonossov quickened by a superior inspiration. There 
 is the same full tone, the same masculine power, the 
 same rhythm. 
 
LOMONOSSOV "jy 
 
 The didactic spirit general at that period, the pre- 
 dominance of reflection over inspiration, the classical 
 allusions, Mars and Venus, Neptune and Apollo, offend 
 our modern taste. But tastes will alter. Over and above 
 that, the mighty breath of poetry sweeps through the 
 whole of Lomonossov's work — odes, epigrams, epistles, 
 satires, and even the inevitable Petreid, which the poet 
 commenced, and in which he exhausted every form of 
 the poetic art. He was not an artist, but he belonged 
 to a heroic period — a period of enthusiasm, of pas- 
 sionate patriotism, and virile energy. He succeeded in 
 giving these feelings a popular expression, and from this 
 expression, in its best and most inspiring forms, the soul 
 of Pouchkine himself has drawn breath and sustenance. 
 
 To this mere moujik Pouchkine owed the very lan- 
 guage of which he made so magnificent a use. The 
 peasant came on the scene just in time to blend the 
 three heterogeneous elements infused into the national 
 literature by history, the Church, and the reforms, into 
 one harmonious stream. And in this respect, also, he 
 performed his work unconsciously. Theoretically, he 
 believed himself to be perpetuating the separation of 
 these elements, by classifying all discourses into three 
 orders of style — the highest, the middle, and the lower 
 style, each with its own suitable choice of words and 
 expressions. On the first level he naturally placed the 
 pompous panegyrics, carefully formulated in the lengthy 
 periods demanded by the Latin syntax, which he com- 
 posed for Peter and Elizabeth, and which were to draw 
 down Pouchkine's displeasure. But in his scientific writ- 
 ings, his notes, his draughts, even in some of his poems, 
 he forgot his theory, chose the words and expressions 
 best suited to his purpose, regardless of the limits within 
 
78 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 which he himself had undertaken to restrict them, and, 
 hke Monsieur Jourdain, ended, without being aware of 
 it, by writing a language drawn from every source, 
 which spontaneously mingled and harmonised every 
 contribution, simple, curt, vigorous, opulent — that which 
 has become the language of Pouchkine, and of every 
 other Russian. 
 
 He wrote a book on rhetoric after that of Gottsched, 
 and, like him, only succeeded in formulating the pseudo- 
 classic principles of that period. But on this work 
 followed a Grammar (1755), in which the author proved 
 himself an original thinker, recognising that languages 
 are living organisms, and deducing other principles, far 
 in advance of his times, from this conception. 
 
 Lomonossov's attempts at history were merely inci- 
 dental, undertaken at the request of Elizabeth or of 
 Chouvalov. But he could do nothing by halves. He 
 soon installed himself as master on this new ground, 
 and thence defied MuUer, who would have described 
 Rurik as a Scandinavian prince. The ancestors of the 
 founder of the Russian Empire could not have been any- 
 thing but Romans 1 Lomonossov undertook to convince 
 his opponent, and also to prevent him from dubbing 
 the famous Siberian leader, Yermak, a robber, or choos- 
 ing, as the subject of his essays, a period so distressing 
 to the national feelings as that of the " Demetrius " im- 
 postors. He has left us a History of Russia carried, on 
 these principles, up to the death of Jaroslav, and a short 
 chronological and genealogical manual. He deserves that 
 this should not be too much remembered, nor his tra- 
 gedies either. The great playwright of those days was 
 Soumarokov, and he was no Corneille. 
 
 The vocation of Alexis Petrovitch Soumarokov 
 
SOUMAROKOV 79 
 
 (1718-1777) was decided by the theatrical performances 
 which were the chief entertainment of the court of 
 Anne I. These were given, as a rule, by Italian actors. 
 But on Sundays an addition was made in the shape of 
 Russian "interludes," specially written for the occasion, 
 and played by the pupils of the Cadet Corps. This, until 
 the later half of the eighteenth century, was the only 
 school in which the elements of a general education were 
 to be found. There Soumarokov, with many of his com- 
 rades, pursued the study of the French classics ; later 
 on he joined the army, and served until 1747, when a 
 tragedy of his composition, which was acted by other 
 cadets, won him the reputation of a great writer. 
 
 Elizabeth's courtiers and officials were forced, on 
 pain of punishment, to attend these theatrical perfor- 
 mances. Yet, until 1756, there was no stage in the 
 capital specially affected to the Russian drama. The 
 first theatre of this nature was opened in the provincial 
 city of Jaroslav. There a man named Volkov, the son 
 of a shopkeeper, engaged a troupe of actors, and built a 
 room large enough to hold a thousand spectators. He was 
 summoned to St. Petersburg, and kept there. Soumaro- 
 kov, who had meanwhile produced three more tragedies, 
 one of them a Hamlet, was appointed manager of the 
 Russian theatre thus tardily opened. In reality the 
 management was in the hands of the Imperial Procura- 
 tor. Soumarokov fell out with him, migrated, in 1760, to 
 Moscow, quarrelled with the governor there (P. S. Salty- 
 kov), and deafened Catherine II., who had succeeded 
 Elizabeth, with his complaints. She sent him word, at 
 last, that she would open no more of his letters, for that she 
 "would rather see the effect of passion in his plays than 
 in his correspondence." He died poor and forsaken. 
 
So RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 In spite of their Slav or Varegian names, there is even 
 less connection between his heroes and the ancient Rus- 
 sian world, than between those of Racine and Voltaire 
 and the old Greeks and Romans. They are Frenchmen 
 in essence, the Frenchmen of Corneille, of Racine, of 
 Voltaire, minus the masterly disguise cast over them by 
 those authors. The imitation of French models is the 
 keynote of all Soumarokov's work. From Shakespeare, 
 whom he only knew, indeed, through German transla- 
 tions, he borrowed no more than the semblance of a 
 subject just then becoming popular. Apart, indeed, 
 from the soliloquy in the first act, his Hamlet bears 
 no resemblance to that of the English poet. From 
 Corneille, from Racine, from Voltaire, he borrows their 
 hasty psychology, carrying it even farther from Nature 
 than in their case. His Khorev, his Trouvor, his Deme- 
 trius, are mere abstractions, artificial personifications of 
 some single idea or sentiment, which probably has no 
 correspondence whatever with their natural or probable 
 physionomy. 
 
 In the same way he exaggerates and parodies Moliere, 
 till comedy becomes a farce, criticism of habits and 
 customs degenerates into mere pamphleteering, and 
 epigram develops into insult. 
 
 Yet it is only just to remember his education and 
 surroundings, and Pouchkine's severe treatment of him 
 betrays a further forgetfulness of the laws of histori- 
 cal perspective. Foreign literature in the Russia of the 
 eighteenth century was not a bud carefully grafted on 
 the native trunk. It was the plant itself, suddenly set in 
 a soil that was poorly prepared for its reception. In 
 spite of this drawback, it was to grow, and grow vic^or- 
 ously, and, as it absorbed and assimilated the juices of the 
 
SOUMAROKOV 8i 
 
 earth in which it was planted, it was speedily to eliminate 
 all foreign elements near it. But we cannot wonder that 
 the earliest fruits were unsatisfactory, ugly to look at, 
 scentless, and flavourless. 
 
 The literary attempts of Soumarokov and his contem- 
 poraries, it must be further observed, fell on a period of 
 transition in Western literature, during which the pseudo- 
 classic style itself was growing corrupt and debased. 
 Soumarokov was far more haunted by the glory of 
 Voltaire than he was disturbed by the successes of his 
 rival Lomonossov. Though he composed odes to the 
 number of eighty, so as to outstrip Lomonossov in that 
 respect, though, like him, he translated Psalms, and ex- 
 ceeded him in piling up platitudes, couched in fervent 
 dithyrambs, in honour of the virtues of Elizabeth, it was 
 on Voltaire that his mind was set when he wandered 
 from the lyric drama to the eclogue, from idyl to 
 madrigal, from epigram to epitaph. There is perhaps 
 much to criticise in this. But criticism did not exist 
 in a society which, intellectually speaking, was in the 
 embryonic state, which possessed far more appetite than 
 taste, and looked less at the quality than at the quan- 
 tity of the dishes set before it. In 1759 Soumarokov 
 conceived the idea of founding a literary periodical, the 
 first seen in his country, modelled on those of Steele and 
 Addison, and thus opened a path which was not to be 
 retrodden till Bielinski appeared upon the scene, nearly 
 a century later. The best Soumarokov could achieve 
 in this publication was to imitate Boileau, in a purely 
 external criticism, directed against faults of language, of 
 grammar and syntax, and strongly coloured by personal 
 likes and dislikes. Thus Lomonossov was most fre- 
 quently attacked, for having turned the language of 
 
82 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Moscow into an "Archangel patois" and Soumaro- 
 kov's temper, which was swayed by his wounded vanity, 
 was allowed its full play. 
 
 But it was vanity alone that had made him a man 
 of letters, and how exasperating were the conditions, 
 moral and material, under which he worked ! He edited 
 a review. His occasional collaborators, Tr^diakovski, 
 Kozitski, Poletika, generally left all the labour to him, 
 and at the end of the first year his subscribers had all 
 deserted him. He managed a theatre. Out of his salary 
 of 5000 roubles he had to bear all the expenses of pro- 
 duction, and three parts of the seats were occupied by a 
 non-paying audience ! One day he was fain to warn 
 Chouvalov that there would be no performance, be- 
 cause there was no costume for "Trouvor" to put on ! 
 The public, whether it paid or not, was coarse in its beha- 
 viour, talked loud, and " cracked nuts " during the per- 
 formance, and took much more interest in the dresses 
 of the actors and the persons of the actresses, than in 
 the action of the piece. 
 
 These causes aggiavated Soumarokov's natural sus- 
 ceptibility until it became a real malady. He took it 
 into his head to compile a book of comparative extracts 
 from his own odes and those of Lomonossov, to prove 
 that he himself was the only person who knew how to 
 imitate Malherbe and Rousseau. In 1755 the Mercure 
 de France published a detailed and very laudatory 
 account of one of his tragedies. This sufficed to con- 
 vince him that in future he would take rank with Vol- 
 taire. He sent some of his works to Ferney, received 
 a batch of compliments in return, and thought himself 
 qualified to share the throne of the literary world with 
 its master. In Russia, at all events, he claimed despotic 
 
SOUMAROKOV 83 
 
 powers. In 1764 he desired leave to travel abroad at the 
 expense of the Crown. " If Europe were described by 
 such a pen as mine, an outlay of 300,000 would seem 
 small. . . . What has been seen at Athens, what is now 
 to be seen in Paris, is also seen in Russia, by my care. 
 ... In Germany, a crowd of poets has not produced 
 what I have succeeded in doing by my own effort." 
 
 His effort, great as it was, received a poor reward. 
 Chance did Soumarokov a bad turn when it made him 
 a would-be rival of Racine and Voltaire. His true 
 literary vocation was quite different. In the course of 
 his many attempts in different directions, he touched on 
 the form of literature in which Kant6mir so delighted, 
 and himself found it to possess a strong and inspiring 
 charm. There is nothing very wonderful about the form 
 of his satires, fables, and apologues ; yet there is such 
 distinctness in his pictures, such vigour in his ideas, such 
 intensity in his feeling, that even in the present day the 
 national genius betrays his influence in traits which have 
 become proverbial. He draws us pictures of local life, 
 thrust clumsily enough into the setting already borrowed 
 by Kantemir from Boileau, but far fresher and more 
 lively — his ideas — the humanitarian notions of his own 
 period, quite unsuited to the native Russian system, 
 introduced, nevertheless, some conception of liberty, 
 of tolerance, of intellectual progress, and, through 
 everything runs a deep, sincere, ingenuous feeling of 
 patriotism, attachment to his fatherland, and national 
 pride. 
 
 Notice, in the Chorus to the Corrupt World, the 
 story of the bird that flies back from foreign climes, 
 " where men are not sold like cattle . . . where patri- 
 monies are not staked on a single card. . . . Yet the bird 
 
84 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 returns as fast as its wings will carry it, and joyfully 
 perches on the branch of a Russian birch-tree." 
 
 The description of the death of "Trouvor" is a mere 
 transcription of that of Theramene. The soliloquy of 
 Demetrius (" The diadem of the Tsars seems to tremble 
 on my brow ") recalls that of Richard III., which Pouch- 
 kine, in his turn, was to remember. Yet the author of 
 Trouvor and Demetrius has not scrupled to direct his 
 satire against the combination of French habits and 
 literature which had taken root in his country. Lomo- 
 nossov's works, jealous though he was of him, convinced 
 him that the national literature was nearing a brighter 
 future. He perceived the rise of the new sap, rich 
 in originality. And it may be, indeed, that but for the 
 approaching period of exaggerated occidentalism arising 
 out of another German reign, that of Catherine the Great, 
 of Anhalt and Zerbst, his own effort might have won a 
 different result, and the nationalisation of the patrimony 
 created by the moujik of Archangel might have been 
 accelerated by half a century. 
 
 Soumarokov himself had no direct heirs. His colla- 
 borators in the department of the drama were Fiodor 
 Volkov (1729-1763) and Dmitrievski. Of the literary 
 work of the first named (who also distinguished himself 
 as an actor, an architect, a decorator, and stage-carpen- 
 ter), the only specimen remaining to us is a masquerade, 
 The Triumph of Alifierva, published in 1763. Dmit- 
 rievski began by playing the female parts in Volkov's 
 company. After having spent two years abroad, he suc- 
 ceeded the manager as leading actor. I find him some 
 time later a member of the " Academy of Science," of 
 the " Free Society of Economy," and of the " Society of 
 Friends of Russian Literature." A man who had trodden 
 
PRINCESS DOLGOROUKAIA 85 
 
 the soil on which Voltaire first saw the light could not 
 remain a mere player. He composed plays, made adap- 
 tations, and wrote a History of the Theatre in Russia, the 
 original of which has been lost, but on which another 
 actor, J. Nossov, founded a summary which has been 
 highly valued. 
 
 The scientific movement of this period, being distinct 
 from the literary, does not come within the scope of these 
 pages. Apart from the labours of Lomonossov and 
 Soumarokov, it is only represented by the work and 
 originating effort of a few meritorious foreigners — 
 Miiiler, Schlozer, Bilfinger. 
 
 A good many memoirs have come down to us from 
 the reign of Anna Ivanovna. The most deserving of 
 mention are those of Princess Dolgoroukaia, Prince 
 Chakhofskor (1705-1772), Nachtchokine (died 1761), and 
 Danilov. Natalia Borissovna Dolgoroukaia (1713- 
 1770) was the heroine of a drama which drew many a tear 
 from Russian eyes, and inspired a whole pleiad of poets, 
 Kozlov among the number. She was likewise the proto- 
 type of an historical element wherein some observers 
 have perceived — and, it may be, rightly perceived — the 
 ideal side of modern Russia — the sublime counterbalance 
 to certain moral failings which mar the glory of her 
 mighty progress. She seems, almost a century before 
 their time, to herald the appi^oach of those wives of the 
 Decembrists of 1825, who besought permission to follow 
 their husbands to Siberia and share their fate. She 
 was the daughter of Field-Marshal Boris Ch^remetiev, 
 the valiant comrade in arms of Peter the Great, and up 
 to the eve of the catastrophe which was to render her an 
 object of eternal pity, her future promised brilliaintly. 
 She was eighteen, radiantly beautiful, one of the greatest 
 
86" RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 heiresses in Russia, and betrothed to Ivan Dolgorouki, 
 the prime favourite of the reigning Tsar, Peter II. 
 Before her vi^edding-day dawned, all these joys had been 
 swept away. The Tsar's death, the favourite's disgrace, 
 the persecution th:it overwhelmed his entire family, con- 
 fiscation, banishment, cast the unhappy woman on to a 
 path of misery, which she was to tread, through sorrow 
 upon sorrow, until her life closed. She followed her 
 betrothed, whom she was resolved to make her husband, 
 to Berezov, a village far away on the Siberian moors. 
 She slipped furtively into the dungeon — a mere hole 
 dug in the frozen earth — where he was slowly dying of 
 hunger, bringing him food and her caresses. Not long 
 after, she saw him die in unspeakable anguish at Nov- 
 gorod, and she herself lived on, that the two children 
 born of their few hours of love might not be left mother- 
 less. 
 
 Elizabeth's accession recalled her to Moscow, but 
 the world saw her no more. As soon as her children's 
 education was completed, she repaired to Kiev, cast her 
 betrothal ring into the Dnieper, and took the veil. Her 
 memoirs were written in her convent cell. We look in 
 vain for a complaint ; only in the few lines she wrote 
 when she felt her end approaching, we read, " I hope 
 every Christian soul will rejoice at my death, and say, 
 ' Her weeping is ended.' " Insensitive ? No 1 Nor a pas- 
 sive victim either ! Proud, indeed, passionate, very irri- 
 table, incapable of forgetting that she was a Dolgoroukaia, 
 nor that Biron, the favourite of Anne, whom she believed 
 to be the author of all her sorrows, had made her uncle's 
 boots, a detail, by the way, in which her memory played 
 her false. Passing along the Oka River on her way to 
 Siberia, she bought a live sturgeon, and made it swim 
 
MEMOIRS 87 
 
 behind her boat, so, she declared, as to have a companion 
 in her captivity. But though she never lost her feminine 
 sensitiveness and her patrician pride, she did not rebel. 
 She proved herself a true Christian by her resignation 
 and by her endurance ; she showed herself the worthy 
 daughter of a race which centuries of torture have in- 
 structed in the art of suffering'. We shall find this trait 
 repeated. 
 
 The most striking feature of the other memoirs to 
 which I have referred is the alarming vacuum as regards 
 things moral, in which the authors, and the whole society 
 they describe in their reminiscences, appear to have lan- 
 guished. 
 
 The personages drawn by Danilov seem to have 
 served Von Visine and Catherine II. as models for the 
 comic types to which I shall presently refer. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE BONDAGE OF THE WEST— CATHERINE 11. 
 
 Even in certain manuals published in foreign countries, 
 the reign of the Northern Semiramis is described as the 
 "Golden Age" of Russian literature. The only justifica- 
 tion for this title lies in the amount of gold distributed by 
 the Tsarina among her French and German panegyrists. 
 The period of her reign is filled by a twofold labour, the 
 beginnings of which date farther back, and fiave been 
 already indicated in these pages. In the first place, we 
 have the hasty and feverish absorption of the huma- 
 nitarian ideas, symptoms of which we have already 
 noticed in the works of Soumarokov. The national 
 mind comes into contact, though still indirectly, and 
 by percolation through other countries, with English 
 thought. This external process is accompanied by 
 another, internal, or more secret, whereby a conscious 
 national individuality is gradually elaborated. This 
 development is assisted by the philosophical ideas 
 which have been imported from abroad. Soumaro- 
 kov's quarrels with individual foreigners generally led 
 him into wholesale opposition to France. His suc- 
 cessors showed more discretion. They summed up the 
 total of their exotic importations, and separated those 
 worth keeping from those which, even in their native 
 home, had already been cast aside. The natural conse- 
 quence was a feeling of disenchantment and self-exami- 
 
CATHERINE 89 
 
 nation. This found expression, among the learned, by 
 the publication of chronicles and other documents bear- 
 ing on the past history of the nation, and of books 
 containing the collected treasures of its literature ; the 
 foundation of a " Russian Academy," charged with the 
 duty of preparing a dictionary and a grammar of its 
 language ; and the organisation of exploratory journeys 
 throughout the interior of the country. The same cause 
 gave rise, in the domain of literature, to a number of 
 works inspired by national subjects and idealising them 
 beyond all measure. 
 
 Thus two currents were formed, which, under the 
 names of Occidentalism, and of Nationalism, or Slavo- 
 philism, continue to flow even in the present day. In 
 the celebrated Set of Questions addressed to Catherine 
 by Von Visine, and looked on as an indiscretion by 
 the Tsarina, the disquieting problem arising out of 
 them — that of reconciling these two extremes — was 
 made apparent. The Tsarina knew nothing, and cared 
 little, about it. She began by favouring both move- 
 ments ; then, when they grew inconvenient, she opposed, 
 and even checked them absolutely, or something very 
 near it. Especially she encouraged the pseudo-classic 
 literature at the expense of those original produc- 
 tions springing from the popular instinct, of which 
 we have noticed the first-fruits in Frol Skobiei^v. It 
 would not be just to cast the whole responsibility on 
 her. The same phenomenon may be observed in all 
 quarters, as the natural and inevitable result of the Re- 
 naissance, and the artificial culture it imposed. In this 
 manner Germany went so far as to forget her own native 
 language. For two centuries, German authors wrote 
 first in Latin and then in French. And the intellectual 
 
go RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 capital of the country, richer than that of Russia, suf- 
 fered even more by this neglect. Yet, under an 
 autocratic regime like the Russian, every phase of life 
 depends more or less on the sovereign — either on his 
 influence or on his will. And when the ruler is himself 
 a writer, he has power, at all events, to regulate the pro- 
 gress of literature with a despotic hand, even if he does 
 not absolutely determine the direction of its develop- 
 ment. Russia was bound to go through her classical edu- 
 cation, but the stage need not have been such a long 
 one, and might have been less prejudicial to her natural 
 faculties. 
 
 Like the worthy descendant of Peter the Great she 
 claimed to be, Catherine began by opening her doors 
 and windows to every wind of heaven. She defied the 
 tempest, held disputations with Novikov, and admitted 
 Diderot to her most intimate circle. When the Ency- 
 clopedist's violent gestures grew displeasing to her, she 
 held her familiar conversations with him across a table, 
 and so continued to enjoy the ideas he communicated 
 to her. To her all this was a mere intellectual sport, 
 useful for the entertainment of leisure hours. The only 
 places, indeed, that were open to this current of fresh 
 air were her own palace, and those of a few of the 
 nobles who surrounded her. The people's huts, and 
 even the dwellings of the country gentlemen who had 
 been attracted to St. Petersburg, were still impene- 
 trable, hermetically sealed, every chink closed by tradi- 
 tion, bigotry, and ignorance. The outer breeze might 
 blow in, therefore, and do no harm. Within those 
 luxurious halls, it could always draw jeering notes 
 from Frederick II.'s flute, and weave them into some 
 gay country dance. Liberty, when it entered that 
 
CATHERINE 91 
 
 circle, became mere license, an elegant screen for 
 debauchery. 
 
 But presently the West began to thunder in real 
 earnest. Instantly Catherine took fright. Let every- 
 thing be closed! Shutters, padlocks, triple locks on 
 every door ! Let no one move abroad 1 One man, 
 Badichtchev, a candid earnest soul, persisted in remain- 
 ing out of doors, listening eagerly to the whirlwind, 
 noting down the clamour, which now terrified the 
 sovereign. "To prison with him!" she cried. He was 
 condemned to death. She commuted his sentence, 
 sent him to Siberia, and the Western and humanitarian 
 current was stopped short. The other, the Nationalist 
 current, still remained, and the reaction now begun 
 seemed likely to be favourable to it. Unfortunately, 
 among Slavophils of the stamp of Novikov there existed 
 a compromising leaven of humanitarian views. Novikov 
 was a " populariser." He distributed pamphlets and 
 founded schools. So he, too, went to prison, and 
 Catherine breathed freely once more. She was to have 
 peace at last. By the end of her reign scarcely any 
 one wrote. Under Paul I. nobody dared to speak. 
 
 This epoch corresponds, in the history of the evolu- 
 tion of the national genius, to a childish illness, natural 
 in itself, but aggravated by accidental circumstances ; 
 the most harmful of which was acclaimed by contem- 
 porary philosophers, and is acclaimed by some of their 
 present descendants, as a benefit sent from heaven. 
 Even during the period of great literary activity which 
 preceded the final check, Catherine's excessive Occi- 
 dentalism interfered with the normal development of 
 the tree, which was disturbed by the constant and exag- 
 gerated system of grafts imposed upon it. Catherine 
 
92 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 was only a German, who had learnt Russian while she 
 ran barefoot about her room, but who knew French 
 far better. She wrote a great deal, she shared the 
 literary itch of her time, and in this sense she certainly 
 did a useful work of propagation. But in vain do we 
 seek for a single original idea in all her writings. She 
 gives us an heroic imitation of Voltaire, and even of 
 Shakespeare, and is surrounded by a legion of plagiarists, 
 all the humble slaves of Encyclopedic philosophy, of 
 Ossianic poetry, of bourgeois comedy, and of a whole 
 seraglio of foreign Muses, upon whom they wait as 
 shrill-voiced eunuchs, and no more. Even Didrjavine 
 has none of the dash, the conviction, of Lomonossov, 
 nor his sonorous language. 
 
 The first specimen of the Tsarina's literary activity 
 was a "Miscellany" [Vssiakai'a Vssyatchind), a news- 
 paper published under her direction (1769-1770) by her 
 private secretary, Gregory Vassilievitch Kozitski. At a 
 later period she turned her attention to the drama, wrote 
 a series of comedies, plays, and operas, and, in 1783, went 
 back to journalism, and inserted satirical articles, notably 
 the Realities and Fictions {Byli i Niebylilsy) published 
 in The Interlocutor {Sobie'ssi/dnik) and in other journals. 
 When the French Revolution broke out, Semiramis put 
 away her inkstand. 
 
 There is a literary character about a great deal of 
 her private correspondence, and she composed for her 
 grandsons a little library (the Alexandro-Constantinc, as 
 she called it), wherein figured instructive tales inspired by 
 Montaigne, Locke, Basedow, and Rousseau, a collection 
 of proverbs, and some allegorical stories founded on the 
 national legends. 
 
 In her Notes on Russian Histoiy, and in a refutation 
 
CATHERINE 93 
 
 of the Abb^ Chappe's Voyage in Siberia, published under 
 the title of The Antidote, she also touched on science. 
 She must have had numerous collaborators, for she 
 could never write with ease in any language. Novikov 
 is supposed to have had a hand in some — the least in- 
 ferior — of her comedies ; and this hypothesis would 
 seem to find confirmation in the history of her relations 
 with the celebrated writer. 
 
 Her plays numbered about thirty, I believe. All that 
 now remain to us are eleven comedies and dramas, 
 seven operas, and five proverbs. In spite of Diderot's 
 assertion to the contrary, none of these possess the 
 smallest artistic value. 
 
 Catherine gave out, in fact, that in these dramatic 
 efforts of hers she only pursued three objects. First, 
 her own amusement ; second, the feeding of the national 
 repertory, which was sorely starved ; third, a means 
 of opposing Freemasonry. "O Temporal O Mores!" 
 gives us the picture of a sham devotee, Mme. Khanjak- 
 hina, who kneels in wrapt devotion before the sacred 
 pictures when her creditors come to ask for their 
 money, beats her servant-girls with her missal, and 
 runs from one church to another to collect gossip. 
 All this is easily recognised as a pleading in self-defence, 
 directed against those who were scandalised by the 
 free and joyous life led by the august writer. Another 
 comedy, Mme. Vortchalkhind s Wedding-Day, repeats this 
 theme with some variations. The remainder, all of them 
 written after the author's quarrel with Novikov, are much 
 weaker. In one of these. The History of a Linen-Basket, 
 Catherine has adapted some scenes from The Merry 
 Wives of Windsor. 
 
 At the head of two of her pieces, Rurik and Oleg, she 
 
94 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 has written Imitated from Shakespeare. She had read 
 the English tragedian in Eschenberg's German transla- 
 tion, and had done her best to reproduce as much of her 
 model as she had been able to comprehend — no more 
 than some purely external features. Apart from these, 
 her Rurik, composed during her anti-revolutionary 
 period, is the outcome of the Encyclopedic spirit, and 
 expresses ideas and sentiments as foreign to the soul 
 of Shakespeare, probably, as to that of any Varegian 
 prince. 
 
 The other plays, written at the period of those 
 dreams of expansion which the Tsarina and Patiomkine 
 nursed in company, belongs more to the domain of 
 politics than to that of art or national history. In it we 
 are shown Oleg making his victorious entry within the 
 walls of Constantinople. 
 
 This was yet another way of fighting the Turks. To 
 wage war with the Freemasons both in the press and on 
 the stage, Catherine went back to the fortress of her 
 "enlightened despotism." The Freemasons who ven- 
 tured to found schools and hospitals struck her in the 
 light of most presumptuous rivals. Was not that her 
 affair ? She did not treat her enemies fairly, and was 
 apt to confound such men as Novikov with Cagliostro. 
 Three of her comedies, Chamane of Siberia, The Deceiver, 
 and The Deceived, belonged to this category. 
 
 The sovereign's relations with Novikov had their 
 origin in a somewhat lively controversy between the 
 Micellanies and The Drone {Troutkgne). Novikov edited 
 this last journal. Catherine was anxious to win over 
 the laughers to her side. Naturally cheerful, with- 
 out a shadow of sentimentality, and a marked taste for 
 buffoonery, she worshipped Lesage, preferred Moliere 
 
CATHERINE 95 
 
 to Racine, and especially enjoyed the comic element in 
 Shakespeare. When Novikov, in The Drone, attacked 
 the traditional vices of the political and social life of 
 Russia, which the Reform had done nothing to extirpate, 
 Catherine acknowledged the justice of his complaint, but 
 objected to the tragic view he took of matters. The 
 officials did wrong to steal, that was certain, and the 
 judges did wrong to take bribes ; but all the poor 
 wretches were exposed to so many temptations ! When 
 argument failed her she grew angry, reminded her 
 opponent that not so very long ago his behaviour 
 would have brought him into imminent risk of making 
 acquaintance with the country of Chmnane, and answered 
 him in the most conclusive manner by suppressing The 
 Drone (1770). 
 
 The publicist, thus silenced, grew convinced, more 
 or less sincerely, that bitter criticism, pitiless satire, 
 acrimony and anger, were not the best moralising agents 
 he could choose. He made overtures of reconciliation, 
 to which Catherine willingly responded. They met, they 
 came to an understanding, and collaborated in a new 
 publication, The Painter {Jivopisie'ts), and also, probably, 
 in the comedies O Tempora ! O Mores ! and The Wedding- 
 Day, in both of which Novikov's pet ideas, his hatred of 
 Gallomania and his anxiety concerning the miserable 
 condition of the Russian peasant, are clearly seen. 
 
 But this work in double harness was not destined to 
 be of long duration. In 1774 The Painter, accused 
 of being connected with Freemasonry, was suppressed 
 in its turn, and the budding progress of the Russian 
 press suffered a check. The St. Petersburg Messenger, 
 which began to appear in 1779, shared its predecessor's 
 fate before two years were out ; and the Interlocutor of 
 
g6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 /Ae Friends of the Russian Tongue, which replaced it in 
 1783, marks a return to the official journalism of the 
 preceding period. In this publication Catherine in- 
 serted one of her most curious works, under the title of 
 Realities and Fictions. In it we find a series of hard- 
 hitting articles, with no connecting link save a general 
 tone of humorous banter directed against the society of 
 that day. They are always full of gaiety, go, and youth, 
 — the imperial authoress was then fifty — of wit which 
 entertains itself, and seems sure (sometimes without 
 sufficient reason) that it will amuse others, together with 
 a close knowledge of every social circle, even the lowest, 
 and an evident moral intention which surprises us in 
 the case of the heroine of a romance which had already 
 reached so many chapters. The satirical touch seems 
 heavier here than in the comedies ; the morality more 
 easy-going. We are far from the days of Novikov. 
 
 But Catherine must have some one to contradict 
 her. The journal was supposed to be a tilt-yard, where 
 all opinions were free to meet. She found Von Visine. 
 He drew up his famous Set of Questions, and inquired, 
 among other things, "Why buffoons, wags, and harle- 
 quins, who in times gone by had no occupation except 
 to amuse people, were now given places and honours 
 which did not seem intended for them ? " The question 
 was a direct thrust at Narychkine, one of the sovereign's 
 intimate friends. She considered it very impertinent, 
 and the author was obliged to apologise humbly, and 
 to renounce all- future efforts of the kind. Princess 
 Dachkov, who now entered the lists, fared no better. 
 At the first thrust, Catherine put a stop to the encounter. 
 'She wrote to Grimm, "This journal will not be so good 
 in future, because the buffoons have quarrelled with the 
 
CATHERINE 97 
 
 editors. These last cannot fail to suffer. It was the 
 delight of the court and the town." 
 
 The buffoons — her own self — grew serious and grave, 
 replaced Realities and Fictions by Notes on Russian 
 History, and the journal did actually lose the greater part 
 of its readers. The spirit of these articles is that of 
 The Antidote, with the same evident anxiety to defend 
 the threatened prestige of the nation, and the same 
 use of scientific arguments which are quite beside the 
 mark. Thus she wanders on, irrationally and impertur- 
 bably, till the year 1784, when her taste for literature 
 is quenched, for some considerable time, by the death 
 of the handsome Lanskof. The pedagogic works to 
 which I have already referred belong to the last period 
 of the Tsarina's life. In them she drew liberally on 
 Locke and Rousseau, while simultaneously applying the 
 theory of the superiority of education over teaching, 
 borrowed from the two great writers, to the bringing 
 up of her grandsons. 
 
 Catherine served the cause of science and literature 
 less by her writings than by an initiatory instinct which 
 was frequently happy, and by her really royal gift of 
 grouping individual efforts. The famous Dictionary of 
 Languages and Dialects, published at St, Petersburg in 
 1787-1789, with the assistance of the Russian Academician 
 and traveller Pallas, the German bookseller and critic 
 Nicolai, Bacmeister, and Arndt, was produced in this 
 way, and is a landmark in the history of linguistic study. 
 Further, though in a limited circle, and under the form 
 of a somewhat capricious dilettantism, she propagated 
 a taste for science and literature among people whose 
 favourite pastime had hitherto consisted in watching 
 wild beasts fight, or fighting with their own fists. And 
 
98 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 finally — though for only too short a time — she inaugu- 
 rated a regime of liberty in press matters, which Russia 
 was never to know again. 
 
 I have already explained the manner in which Cathe- 
 rine's intervention and her influence may have been 
 harmful. A consideration of the works of Von Visine 
 will enable my readers to judge this point more clearly. 
 
 The greatest writer of this period was a German. 
 His ancestors served under the banner of the Teutonic 
 Order of the Sword-bearers, and were numbered among 
 the most doughty foes of the Slav race. The family 
 settled in Russia in the days of Ivan the Terrible, 
 and Denis Ivanovitch von Visine (1744-1792) was 
 born at Moscow. To another German, at whom, in 
 a biographical essay, he pokes rather spiteful fun, he 
 probably owed the fact of his becoming a playwright. 
 A performance of a piece by the Danish dramatist, 
 Holberg, given in St. Petersburg during the reign of 
 Elizabeth, appears to have settled his vocation. In 
 1766, while performing the functions of Secretary to 
 the Minister, I. P. lelaguine, he wrote his Brigadier. 
 
 The reading of this comedy met with so brilliant a 
 success that all the great people in St. Petersburg, in- 
 cluding the Empress, desired to hear it. But the author 
 was at that moment in the throes of a religious crisis, 
 which is said to have been brought about by the discourse 
 of the Procurator of the Holy Synod, Tch^bichev, who, 
 though he represented the highest ecclesiastical authority 
 in the country, was an atheist. His influence over Von 
 Visine's mind was successfully overcome by that of 
 Samuel Clarke, in whose theological works the writer 
 delighted. He even went so far as to translate some 
 chapters of the Treatise on the Existence of God, and 
 
VON VISINE 99 
 
 ew calmer in the process. But idleness fell upon his 
 ;n. He climbed the professional ladder, became sec- 
 tary to the Minister for Foreign Afifairs, N. S. Panine, 
 
 1769, grew rich, and travelled abroad. He sojourned 
 
 Leipzig, at Lyons, at Montpellier, and finally at Paris, 
 bence he wrote Panine a series of letters which have 
 tracted much attention, but which do not constitute 
 
 masterpiece. It was not till 1782, after an eclipse 
 3ting sixteen years, that he reappeared on the literary 
 )rizon, with the Set of Questions which so upset Cathe- 
 le's temper, followed by another comedy. The Minor, 
 hich at once carried him to the very front. A year 
 ter he was abroad again ; the death of Panine, the 
 spleasure of the Empress, and other worries, together 
 ith his own dissipated life, had ruined his health. At 
 rty he was a mere wreck. Paralysis laid its hand on 
 m ; then, in 1786, he planned a fresh attempt at inde- 
 indent journalism, was checked by a formal veto from 
 e censorship, and died at last in 1792, in the midst 
 
 a second crisis of moral prostration and religious 
 laticism, resembling that which was to mark the last 
 ys of Gogol. 
 
 Von Visine's talent is essentially satirical. Even when 
 
 was a student at the Moscow University, his witty 
 y^ings won him constant successes, and his Brigadier 
 ly be taken as a prelude to Gogol's manner, though 
 th much less art, and a complete absence of the ideal, 
 le sense of his satire strikes us as being purely negative, 
 le author has intended to demonstrate the fatal effect 
 
 French habits and education, but he overwhelms 
 I characters, whether representing the ancient or the 
 )dern society, whether affected by this education or not, 
 th an equal share of ridicule for their moral baseness. 
 
loo RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 The Brigadier himself," a type of the old school, who 
 reads nothing but the " Military Regulations," and never 
 thinks of anything but his tchine, is not very likely to 
 attract much sympathy. The figure of his wife places 
 us in the difficulty of not knowing whether to admire 
 her for her goodness and simplicity, or to despise her for 
 her folly and stinginess. The character placed in con- 
 trast with these unattractive types — Ivanouchka, the 
 Brigadier's son, brought up by French tutors — has no 
 solid qualities to serve as background to his ludicrous 
 features. The intrigue is weak, and vulgar farce takes 
 the place of comic power. In this copy of seventeenth- 
 century models, Holberg and Dryden, Von Visine only 
 contrives to give the impression of his own laborious 
 search after coarse effect, and a revelation of a condition 
 of easy morals, the effect of which, from the beneficial 
 point of view, is hard to discover. 
 
 The Minor follows on The Brigadier, just as the second 
 part of Dead Souls was to follow on its predecessor, as 
 the result of a similar effort on the author's part to fill 
 up the void caused by the negative system which, in the 
 first instance, they both employed. In this second play 
 we have, besides Mme. Prostakova, who has learnt no- 
 thing and forgotten nothing, and who is shocked when 
 she hears that one of her female serfs has ventured, 
 being ill, to go to bed (" she actually has the impudence 
 to think she has birth ! ") ; and besides her son, Mitro- 
 fanouchka (the Minor), who has gained nothing from his 
 coarse and stupid tutors except an absolute absence of 
 the moral sense, other more ideal figures — Sofia, a young 
 lady intended to become the wife of Mitrofanouchka, 
 but who reads Fdn61on's book on education, and dreams 
 of a very different kind of husband ; her uncle, Staro- 
 
VON VISINE loi 
 
 me, who has perused the Instructions to the Legis- 
 )e Commission, and absorbed all the principles therein 
 tained ; and, finally, Pravdine, the good tchinovik, the 
 ■esentative of "enlightened despotism," who inter- 
 2S at the close of the play, like a Deus ex machind, 
 :lear up the plot and put everything in its place, 
 uckily, while in The Brigadier we were left to choose 
 ween two equally repulsive realities, our choice in 
 ' Minor must be made, to all appearances, between 
 ity and fiction. Mme. Prostakova and her son are crea- 
 ;s of flesh and blood, frequently to be met with in the 
 ety of that day. But a consultation of the memoirs 
 the period suffices to convince us of the unlikeli- 
 d of the existence of such a character as Sofia — not 
 xiention the young lady's insufferable pedantry — or 
 vdine, a model functionary, who finds himself sorely 
 zled to reconcile his ideas with his tastes, and his 
 chment to the good old times with his enthusiasm 
 the Reform. This will also be noticed in the case 
 rogol's heroes. 
 
 As regards workmanship, the play gives proof of a 
 ■e thorough study of the Western models, and hence 
 Dmewhat resembles a harlequin's cloak. The geo- 
 Dhical examination, during which Mitrofanouchka 
 ;als his stupidity, is copied from Voltaire's Jeannot et 
 in. 
 
 The ideas expressed by Starodoume belong in great 
 isure to the Nationalist doctrines of that period, and 
 2 much in common with those of the modern Slavo- 
 theory. The view taken of the Western world is 
 espondingly .narrow and imperfect. Von Visine him- 
 only regarded the philosophical current of his time, 
 :h both attracted and alarmed him, as a corrupting 
 
I02 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 element, and quite overlooked the principle of freedom 
 it involved. Thus, when he first meets it, he " invokes 
 every text in the Bible to exorcise the foreign devil," 
 as Dostolevski puts it. His letters from France betray 
 this mental inclination, and the determination at which 
 he had already arrived to set up a new sun, to rise over 
 the Eastern plains in opposition to the setting sun of the 
 West. "We are beginning. They are near their end. 
 To us belongs the future, and the choice of a form of 
 national existence appropriate to our national genius." 
 Here we have the watchword of the Akssakovs and 
 Khomiakovs of the future. As a traveller. Von Visine 
 was much what he was as a dramatist. We notice the 
 same lack of direct observation, and the same industrious 
 effort to replace this want by easy plagiarism. His criti- 
 cisms of and invectives against French society, which 
 have been admired as specimens of the straightforward- 
 ness and clearsightedness of the Russian mind, are simply 
 copied from Duclos' Considerations sur les Maeurs du Siecle, 
 from Diderot's Pensees Philosophiques, and from some pam- 
 phlets emanating from the German press of that period. 
 
 As a journalist. Von Visine has given us his best effort 
 in the Set of Questions, to which I have already referred. 
 In the articles prepared for the newspaper, the publi- 
 cation of which was stopped by the censor, Starodoume 
 reappears on the scene, full of naive astonishment be- 
 cause the Instructions to the Legislative Commission have 
 not resulted in the framing of any law. The future had 
 yet other surprises in store for him. Even in this depart- 
 ment Von Visine was an incorrigible imitator. The 
 letters of Dourikine, which he intended for the same 
 newspaper, may be found word for word in the works of 
 Rabener, from which they were copied. 
 
LOUKINE 103 
 
 The success of The Minor was stupendous. After the 
 performance, Patiomkine called out to the author, 
 e now, at once ! — or never write again ! " Such tri- 
 )hs were not to be repeated on the Russian stage for 
 ly a day. 
 
 [n the hands of Jakov Borissovitch Kniajnine (1747- 
 [), the author of a Dido copied from Metastasio and 
 ■anc de Perpignan, and of some pseudo-classic works, 
 1 as Rosslav and Vadim, the Russian drama fell 
 k into the rut in which Soumarokov had run. And 
 ;ed Kniajnine was Soumarokov's son-in-law. Vadim 
 ined the undeserved honour of attracting Catherine's 
 ileasure. The play celebrated the exploits of a mili- 
 • leader who fought with Rurik for the independence 
 "Novgorod. Kniajnine's comedies are mere adapta- 
 s of French pieces. 
 
 [n Chicanery, by Vassili lakovlevitch Kapnist (1757- 
 \), a piece which shared the ill-luck of Vadim, and 
 Id not be presented to the public till after Catherine's 
 ;h, there are some pleasing features. But it is 
 so much a play as a pamphlet in dialogue, contain- 
 a bold and violent attack against the judicial circles 
 he day. Paul I., who liked violence of any kind, 
 lorised its performance, and considered it " did a 
 lie service." But though the play entertained the 
 lie vastly, and though a considerable number of its 
 5, which lashed the members of the national magis- 
 y severely, have become proverbs, history does not 
 us that a bribe the less has passed into the Russian 
 istrates' hands since its sensational appearance, 
 "ar more interesting, from the artistic point of view, 
 he contemporary attempt of Vladimir IgnatiE- 
 :h Loukine (1757-1824) to acchmatise " middle-class 
 
I04 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 comedy" in Russia. The idea might well seem strange 
 in a country which, at that time, possessed no middle 
 class whatever. But this effort was concerned with sub- 
 ject rather than with form, and especially with the with- 
 drawal of the classic buskin, and the continuation of that 
 process of evolution of which Richardson had been the 
 inaugurator, and Diderot the kindly theorist. With these 
 Loukine also associated an inkling of independent lean- 
 ings in the direction of the Nationalist movement. He 
 thought it desirable that a man of the people should 
 speak from the stage in his own tongue, and not in 
 that of Racine as transposed by Soumarokov. This 
 view he ventured to express in his prefaces, prefixed, 
 unluckily, to translations and adaptations from the 
 French. For he was nothing but an imitator, after all, 
 " serving up Campistron, Marivaux, and Beaumarchais 
 in the Russian style," as Novikov puts it. He did not 
 know how to put his own theory into practice. Though 
 he fought with the holders of the old formulas, he never 
 could succeed in drawing his own feet out of their shoes, 
 and he suffered, besides, from the inferiority, not of his 
 talent — for that, on both sides, was poor or altogether 
 lacking — but of his social status. He was of humble 
 birth, his rank in the official hierarchy was modest, and in 
 Russia, until quite lately, literature has been an essen- 
 tially aristocratic province. 
 
 Loukine's fate strongly resembled that of Trediakovski, 
 and the struggle he commenced was not to be decided in 
 favour of his views until the appearance of Karamzine, 
 who, appealing to Lessing and Shakespeare, succeeded 
 in introducing, or rather reintroducing, the first element 
 of realism, the germ of all future growth, into the litera- 
 ture of his country. 
 
DIERJAVINE 105 
 
 'et this essentially national and popular element did 
 rive, even in Catherine's lifetime, and with some 
 t help from her, to make its appearance on the stage 
 ;r another form, exceedingly fashionable at that 
 )d — the comic opera. Thus labelled, the satirical 
 t of the race, and that love of parody which in all 
 lians, as in Peter the Great himself, is but another 
 I of the critical spirit, gave birth to a succession of 
 cs closely allied with the type produced in later days 
 iffenbach. We see the same grotesque and facetious 
 ;sty of the ancients, the same light and cynical opinion 
 lankind, the same kindly and sympathetic glance, 
 
 in spite of all, on the lower strata of the populace, 
 whole effect is confused. Lessons to proprietors on 
 
 duties to their serfs are mingled with the defence 
 irfdom itself. But this chaos of feeling and ideas 
 ins in all the literature of the day. Ablessimov 
 ^-1784) was for many years the favourite writer in 
 line. Dierjavine himself tried his hand at it, but 
 i was nothing of the playwright about the author of 
 sa. 
 
 'he glory of Didrjavine, like that of Lomonossov, 
 with varying fortunes. To-day the latter is held the 
 :est of the Russian poets of the eighteenth century, 
 full justice is not done to Lomonossov unless we 
 class him among men of science. Until the advent 
 juchkine, that great demolisher of reputations, Dier- 
 e's importance was steadily on the increase. The 
 [s "great poet" were pronounced regardless of 
 nology and comparison, and he was even called 
 od." Pouchkine fell upon the idol, and Bielinski's 
 lit was still more violent. The "god" was torn 
 
 Olympus, and was denied even the title of " artist." 
 
io6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 As a matter of truth, he was, like all the writers of his 
 generation, a dilettante, who only haunted Parnassus 
 from time to time, as other more tempting or more 
 lucrative vocations — those of the courtier or the minis- 
 terial functionary — permitted. In these circles he has 
 left regrettable memories, which have served as weapons 
 for the severity of his posthumous detractors. The 
 publication of his Memoirs, in 1857 (their frankness 
 is great, even too great), cast a flood of light on this 
 part of his career, and darkened the shadow that already 
 brooded over the rest. 
 
 Gabriel Romanovitch Di£rjavine (1743-1816), the 
 scion of an ancient Tartar family, made his first studies at 
 the Gymnasium of Kazan, where, if his recollection may 
 be depended on, " religion was taught without a catechism, 
 languages without grammar, and music without notes ! " 
 Yet here he learnt sufficient German to enable him to 
 go through a complete course of poets — Gellert, Hage- 
 dorn. Heller, Kleist, Herder, and Klopstock — in the 
 original. This done, and his general studies completed, 
 he entered the army, like everybody else, and spent 
 twelve years in the barracks of the Preobrajenski Regi- 
 ment. 
 
 His Odes to Tchitalgai (a mountain of that name), 
 inspired by, or even translated from, Frederick II. (Fre- 
 derick II.'s verses were the wretched poet's model!), 
 an Epistle to Michelsohn, the victor of Pougatchov, 
 and the beginnings of an epic poem entitled The 
 Pougatchovclitchina, all belong to this period. Follow- 
 ing the plan drawn up by Tatichtchev, the author of 
 these efforts passed into the ranks of the civil em- 
 ployes of the Government, and made rough draughts 
 of financial regulations, while he sang the charms of 
 
DifiRjAVlNE 107 
 
 lire, a fair Portuguese whose happy husband he 
 ime. In 1778 he contributed to the St Petersburg 
 senger, inserting in its columns two rhymed pane- 
 cs of Peter the Great, an epistle to Chouvalov, and 
 famous Ode to Sovereigns, which was later to earn 
 the reputation of a Jacobin. His literary reputa- 
 was not established until the publication, in 1782, of 
 tsa — a poem founded on a tale by Catherine II., in 
 :h a good fairy of that name, who represents Happi- 
 ;, rewards a virtuous young prince. This good fairy 
 Id be none other than Catherine herself. Dierjavine 
 ed the fact, and was rewarded with a gold snuff-box 
 taining five hundred ducats. Soon afterwards, how- 
 ■, Felitsa invited the poet to retire from the adminis- 
 ve career, wherein he did not show sufficient docility. 
 ;t him write verses ! " He wrote them for Zoubov 
 for Patiomkine, the rival favourites, and by this 
 iy device contrived to gain forgiveness, and even to 
 :r the sovereign's intimate circle as her private sec- 
 ry. But one day, as he was working with her, the 
 ind secretary, Popov, was called in. 
 ' Remain here ; this gentleman is too free with his 
 ds." 
 
 2oubov and Patiomkine sufficed Catherine at the 
 nent. Yet she forgave him, but fancied such an act 
 lemency deserved another laudatory poem. None 
 e. On close acquaintance, Felitsa ceased to inspire 
 poet. They parted, and Dierjavine, banished to the 
 ite, climbed the slippery slope no more, until the days 
 'aul and Alexander I. He had grown wise. The 
 . who had been called a Jacobin, the apologist of the 
 lanitarian ideas attributed to " Felitsa," President of 
 College of Commerce in 1800, Minister of Justice in 
 
io8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 1802, sent forth verses against the- enfranchisement of the 
 serfs, and succeeded, in 1803, in getting himself dismissed 
 as a "reactionary" ! He spent the last thirteen years of 
 his life on his own property of Zvanka, where he wrote 
 his Memoirs, and, when more than sixty years of age, 
 turned his attention to the stage. In 181 1 he founded, 
 at St. Petersburg, in conjunction with A. S. Chichkov, 
 the "Society of Friends of the Russian Tongue," which 
 in itself was an attempt to react against the new literary 
 tendencies, represented by Karamzine and Joukovski. 
 He is said to have realised the inanity of this attempt 
 before he died. On the 8th of January 1815, at a public 
 gathering at the College of Tsarskoie-Sielo, he heard one 
 of the pupils read some verses of his own composition. 
 He congratulated the young author, and sighed, " My 
 day is past ! " The pupil's name was Pouchkine. I 
 greatly fear the story must be ascribed to some accom- 
 modating flight of the imagination, for when we read 
 the verses in question, we find that they contain a 
 lofty eulogy of Catherine II., her grandson, and of Dier- 
 javine himself. The workmanship is in Dierjavine's 
 own style, and nothing about it betokens the future 
 author of Eugene Onieguine. 
 
 In Catherine's time poetry was not — it has scarcely 
 been, even up to the present day, in Russia — what 
 other conditions of existence have made it in other 
 countries — the natural blossoming of the national life, a 
 delight, an ornament. In its origin especially, it was a 
 weapon of attack and defence, which some chosen 
 spirits took up against the calamities of the common life. 
 Thus it is that satire is the dominant note, that com- 
 plaint runs through and pervades its every accent, that 
 the gloomiest pessimism underlies it all. And even this 
 
DIERJAVINE 109 
 
 !d not have prevented Di6rjavine from becoming a 
 at poet. But he was, above all things, a man of 
 
 own time. His work is like a mirror, wherein we 
 
 every aspect and every phase of Catherine's reign 
 ected. This being so, it gives us an equal proportion 
 patches of light and pools of darkness, much spirit, 
 certain dignity, no personal feeling for beauty, and 
 
 moral sense whatever. Didrjavine only saw beauty 
 ough other men's eyes, and frequently lost sight of 
 jdness altogether. Now and then his voice rings with 
 
 accent of dignity, but he always produces the sen- 
 ion that we are listening to a well-conned lesson. 
 ;ener yet his muse seems to havS wandered into evil 
 orts, where degradation of character is swiftly followed 
 debauch of talent. 
 
 Until he wrote F^litsa, he remained the pupil of 
 fdiakovski and the imitator of Lomonossov. But 
 ) last author towered far above the stature of his imi- 
 )r's talent. Dierjavine had the sense to acknowledge 
 md, advised by some of his friends, he condescended 
 \nacreon, taking Horace and Ossian on his way. He 
 ;w neither Latin, Greek, nor English. His friends, 
 3v, Kapnist, and Dmitriev, more educated, though 
 I gifted, than himself, set themselves to overcome 
 ; difficulty. Their assistance even extended to very 
 lious corrections, which may still be traced on the 
 :t's manuscripts. 
 
 Felitsa, like most of his poems, is a mixture of satire 
 1 ode. Catherine is extolled, contemporary habits are 
 icised. The general tone betrays the humourist. 
 ; goddess of Happiness descends from heaven and 
 omes a Tartar princess, whose virtues are sung by a 
 yza. This mursa, who reappears in another poem 
 
no RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 (The Vision of the Miirza, 1783), was, we are told, sin- 
 cere. Was this still true when, at a later date, he lauded 
 the exploits of " the Russian Mars " (Patiomkine) and of 
 Zoubov ? It would be hardly safe, indeed, to seek the 
 origin of this personage on the Russian steppe. I think 
 we are more likely to find it in two numbers of the 
 Spectator (159 and 604), where, under the same title, 
 The Vision of Mirsa, Addison has used the same allegory 
 to convey an identical idea, — the luminous transparence 
 of life under the light of the imagination. 
 
 In the Odes on the Capture of Warsaw (1794) and the 
 poems dealing with Souvarov's exploits in Italy, the 
 imitation of Ossian is closer yet. In fact, the poet "of 
 the clouds and seas" is actually mentioned by name. 
 At the same time we perceive a progressive accentuation 
 of the note of melancholy philosophy and philosophic 
 moralising, of the inclination to ponder on the mysteri- 
 ous depths of human existence, of longings for a higher 
 ideal of greatness and happiness, of meditation on death 
 and eternity, and appeals to truth, justice, and good- 
 ness. This is the dominant tone in the Epistles ad- 
 dressed to his early and life-long friends Lvov, Kapnist, 
 Chouvalov, Narychkine, and Khrapovitski. Taking his 
 work as a whole, a poetic festival at which the mock 
 Scottish bard thus elbows Horace, Anacreon really rules 
 the feast, and Diogenes, screened by Epicurus, often 
 makes himself far too much at home. 
 
 In the dramatic efforts which Dierjavine sent forth at 
 the very end of his lif^, his views were of the most ambi- 
 tious nature. He dreamt of a theatre which should be a 
 school like that of Greece, and he claimed to establish 
 it on a wide popular basis, drawn alike from the history 
 and the poetry of the nation. The publication, in 1804, 
 
DifiRJAVINE III 
 
 I collection of Bylines by Klioutcharev inspired him 
 he composition of a Dobrynia, in the fourth act of 
 ich he introduced a chorus of young Russian girls, 
 the same time, to the great scandal of the " Society 
 Friends of the Russian Tongue," the veteran poet, like 
 kovski, went so far as to compose ballads on popular 
 jects. But his heart was with the classics, and he 
 not withstand the temptation to clap a mask, hor- 
 ded from Corneille, upon his Dobrynia, and so dis- 
 ire the character completely. But indeed, as I have 
 ;ady said, he had no scenic talent. 
 Still, when Pouchkine denies him, generally and 
 olutely, every artistic gift, he goes too far. The ex- 
 nadier's language gives him a splendid opening, 
 idrjavine," he writes, "knew nothing either of the 
 mmar or the spirit of the Russian tongue (in this he 
 i inferior to Lomonossov) ; he had no idea of style nor 
 mony, nor even of the rules of versification. . . . 
 iding his work, you would think you were read- 
 a bad translation of an uncouth original. Truly his 
 id worked in Tartar, and never had time to learn to 
 te Russian " (Letters to Baron Delwig). 
 I feel a natural shyness about contradicting such an 
 lority. Yet the "Tartar's" language strikes me, in 
 :es, at all events, as being very expressive, plastic, and 
 ^erful, if not exceedingly correct. His verse, though 
 full than Lomonossov's, has more simplicity, more 
 dom, much greater flexibility, and, in the use of the new 
 res, which broke the old classic uniformity, a fertility 
 esource by which Pouchkine himself appears to me 
 lave profited. I believe that the man himself, the 
 tovnik, the courtier, has compromised the poet's cause 
 le eyes of this judge. 
 
112 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 In the department of lyric poetry, Dierjavine has had 
 a host of imitators, most of them forgotten at the present 
 day, such as Kostrov (lermiel Ivanovitch, died 1796), 
 Petrov (Vassili Petrovitch, died 1800), an imitator of 
 Addison, and, as a result of five years spent in England 
 while translating Milton's Paradise Lost, a fervent ad- 
 mirer of English poetry. The bard of Felitsa wrote 
 no epic, though the whole of his literary work may be 
 regarded as an historical evocation of Catherine's reign. 
 He left the honour of following in Homer's footsteps to 
 Kheraskov. 
 
 If we desired, with a view to comparative study, to 
 possess a map whereon the style of the Iliad, that of 
 the ^neid, that of Jerusalem Delivered, and possibly 
 of the Henriade as well, are set forth side by side, with- 
 out the employment of the smallest artifice likely to 
 result in their confusion, we could do no better than 
 to glance at the Rossiad or the Vladimir of MICHAEL 
 Matvi£i£vitch Kh£raskov (1733-1807). 
 
 This poet has conscientiously made his zephyrs blow 
 and his dryads weep in the forests round Kazan, and 
 industriously amalgamated the features of Agamemnon 
 and Godefroi de Bouillon in the person of Ivan the 
 Terrible. The Rossiad is a history of the conquest 
 of Kazan, with which the writer has connected the 
 more modern enterprises of Catherine's reign, and to 
 this bond a great proportion of its success was due. 
 Kheraskov was a scholar, an academic student, who had 
 strayed into the domain of poetry. He had been a 
 soldier (he belonged to an old Wallachian family), 
 curator of the Moscow University, and director of the 
 theatre of that city, and wielded considerable literary 
 influence by means of two periodical publications, to 
 
NOVELS 1 1 3 
 
 ich the best writers of the time contributed. In 
 '5 he became a Freemason and supported the propa- 
 ida of Novikov and his German master, Schwartz, 
 :aining a professorial chair for the first, and farming 
 
 printing of the University to the second. His epic 
 ;ms have a strong flavour of mysticism. In the 
 <;siad there is a struggle between good and evil ; 
 
 Vladimir, a struggle between Pagan instincts and 
 ristian faith, with, here and thefe, a victory won by 
 
 better element, thanks to the intervention of occult 
 ces, less connected with the Gospel than with the 
 bala, which put forward in the most unevangelical 
 bion, and on the esoteric principle of the opposing of 
 1 by evil, the struggle of lie against lie, working out 
 
 final triumph of truth and virtue. 
 Those who have the curiosity to look will find the 
 le ideas and tendencies in numerous novels by Khera- 
 v, imitated from Fenelon and Marmontel. They are 
 ) to be observed, in a generalised and popularised 
 n, in the strange application by other contemporary 
 3sian writers of their studies of the sensualist novels 
 )orted from France. It must not be forgotten that 
 Russia Gogol was destined to be taken for an imitator 
 -"aul de Kock ! These Russian adapters accept these 
 els as satires, and superadd a moral intention. Thus 
 see Tchoulkov and Ismailov making astonishingly 
 istic attempts to Russify the popular type of Faublas. 
 Richardson's novels also found many Russian readers, 
 
 some few imitators, at this period. Among these 
 
 was Fiodor Emine, author of the Adventures of 
 ■amond, which some have taken to be an autobio- 
 3hy. Miramond is a sort of Telemachus, travelling 
 er the care of a mentor, a near relation, it would 
 
114 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 seem, of the author's. The journey is an eventful one; 
 master and pupil find it hard to agree, and the internal 
 discord which is the general and characteristic feature 
 of contemporary literature becomes very evident. The 
 strife and distressing contradiction between what the 
 writer has culled from every foreign hand, and what he 
 desires to retain of his own native possessions, is still 
 more visible in the Douchenka (" Little Psyche ") by Hyp- 
 politus Fiodorovitch- Bogdanovitch (1743-1803), a poem 
 which made a tremendous stir at the time of its appear- 
 ance, and had the honour, at a later period, of inspiring 
 one of Pouchkine's first poetic efforts. 
 
 The Douchenka proves, on a closer examination, to be 
 nothing but a versified adaptation of the "Amours de 
 Psyche et de Cupidon " of La Fontaine, who, as we 
 know, borrowed his subject from "The Golden Ass" of 
 Apuleius. To this Bogdanovitch has merely added a 
 few episodes of revolting obscenity, together with a cer- 
 tain personal sentiment in his conception of Psyche. 
 Douchenka is a depraved and vulgar flirt, to whom 
 Zeus consents to restore her physical loveliness for the 
 sake of the beauty of a soul which charms him, even as 
 it is, and does not appear to be without charm in the 
 poet's eyes. Bogdanovitch lived on intimate terms. with 
 Kheraskov, Novikov, and Schwartz. Vassili Ivanovitch 
 Maikov (1728-1778), who, writing in the same heroi- 
 comic style, has descended to indecent parody, was 
 also a membev of this circle. His lelssei (or " Angry 
 Bacchus ") is a mere piece of filthiness. 
 
 La Fontaine had a better pupil in the person of 
 Ivan Ivanovitch Khdmnitzer (1745-1784), the first of the 
 Russian fabulists, if the fables of Kantemir and Sou- 
 marokov are taken for what they really are — satires. 
 
FOREIGN INFLUENCES 115 
 
 is foreigner — he came of a German family, probably 
 onging to Chemnitz, in Silesia, who wrote German 
 ses in his youth, and developed into a mere dilettante 
 Russian literature in his riper age (he was Consul- 
 neral at Smyrna when he died) — shared his French 
 ster's peculiarities, his almost childish nature, his 
 ewd intelligence, and his simple good-heartedness. 
 Simpler, less of an artist than La Fontaine, less senti- 
 ntal than Gellert, he is almost the only Russian fable- 
 iter who possesses a touch of originality. 
 Foreign literature was at that time rolling into 
 ssia like the flood after a storm, in foam-flecked 
 ves, which stirred the mud upon the soil beneath, 
 i hollowed out great pits upon its surface. From 
 
 year 1768 onwards, Catherine allotted 5000 roubles 
 irly from her privy purse, for translations from foreign 
 guages. She put a hand to the work herself, in a 
 islation of Marmontel's Bdisaire, and Von Visine, 
 iajnine, and Kh^raskov shared the labour. A per- 
 nent committee of translators sat at the Academy 
 Sciences. Various societies were formed for the 
 le purpose. Rekhmaninov, a land-owner in the 
 i^ernment of Tambov, translated and published the 
 rks of Voltaire. The director of the College of Kazan, 
 evkine, undertook the whole of Diderot's Encyclo- 
 Ha. Russian extracts from French authors, The 
 rit of Voltaire, of Rousseau, of Helvetius, had a large 
 ;ulation. This propaganda had no political effect, 
 
 its humanitarian value strikes us, at this distance 
 ime, as utterly insignificant. The very noblemen who 
 wded to pay their court at Ferney, and pressed their 
 1 hospitality on Rousseau, protested against the 
 ■anchisement of the serfs, prematurely proposed by 
 
ii6" RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 two members of the " Legislative Commission," Korovine 
 and Protassov. The negative side of French philo- 
 sophy, its religious scepticism, was the only real attrac- 
 tion it held for them. This involved no sacrifice on 
 their part. At the close of the eighteenth century no- 
 thing in the political and social organisation of Russia 
 had changed, but the country swarmed with free-thinkers, 
 and this state of mind brought about a natural reaction, 
 a sudden swelling of the mystic current which accident 
 had momentarily driven into the muddy bed of local 
 Freemasonry. Radichtchev and Novikov personified 
 these two phases of the intellectual life of the period. 
 
 Born of a noble family, and educated in the Pages' 
 School, Alexander Nikolai£vitch Radichtchev (1749- 
 1802) is a typical though somewhat eccentric specimen 
 of a generation of well-born men, who drank from 
 the goblet of philosophy, and turned giddy in conse- 
 quence. At Leipzig he spent four years. While lend- 
 ing an inattentive ear to the instructions of Gellert 
 and Platner, he was applying his whole strength to the 
 study of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, and Mably. After 
 his return to Russia, a perusal of the Abbe Raynal's 
 Histoire des Indes and of Sterne's Se?tiimental Journey 
 threw him into a state of violent excitement, wherein 
 good judges, Pouchkine among the number, have 
 thought they perceived symptoms of madness. His 
 Journey to St. P etersbu7'g and Moscow, published in 1790, 
 was the expression of these feelings. The author has 
 borrowed the general form of his narrative, and even 
 some characteristic episodes — such as that of the monk 
 of Calais, easily recognised under the lineaments of a 
 philosophic church chorister — from Sterne. From Vol- 
 taire he draws his libertine scepticism, his hatred of 
 
RADICHTCHEV 117 
 
 .ticism, and scorn of prejudice. His philanthropy 
 les from Rousseau and Raynal ; his cynicism from 
 erot. If to these we add, and reconcile as best 
 may, his professions of orthodoxy, joined to tirades 
 nst the priests and their never-ending impositions on 
 lan credulity, and his apologies for autocratic power 
 )wed by revolutionary outpourings, we obtain a com- 
 e idea of the book. 
 
 Radichtchev goes farther than Voltaire and Rousseau, 
 would grant the freed serfs the ownership of the soil 
 
 I till, but he leaves the carrying out of this reform to 
 Samodierjavie, and, except in the matter of date, he 
 i7es himself a true prophet. He shows a great deal of 
 ipathy for the lower classes, declaring his conviction 
 
 their morality is higher than that of their superiors ; 
 
 this does not prevent him from expressing astonish- 
 it when a peasant woman is faithful to her word. Such 
 ,se, he avers, is rare in that class. He is full of contra- 
 ions, and the object to be attained never seems to 
 :lear before his mind. But had he really any object 
 
 II ? He cannot have believed that Catherine would 
 nit the circulation of his treatise in the year 1790. 
 
 days of her dalliance with philosophy were long gone 
 
 She might have suppressed the book without touch- 
 
 the writer, who was, as he afterwards proved him- 
 
 harmless enough. But the widow of Peter III., a 
 
 woman at times, in spite of her fondness for being 
 
 :d Catherine the Great, crushed this fly with a sledge- 
 
 mer. Radichtchev spent ten years in Siberia, where 
 
 mployed his time, after permission to write had been 
 
 )red to him, in composing another work, filled with 
 
 :ations from Locke, Newton, and Rousseau, entitled 
 
 Man, on Death, and Immortality, and which might 
 
ii8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 surely have sufficed to mollify the sovereign. He was 
 recalled to Russia by Paul I., and Alexander I. appointed 
 him to a new Commission on Legislation, for which he 
 drew up a plan of judicial reform, embodying trial by 
 jury. It was his fate to be always either before or be- 
 hind his time. Zavadovski, president of the commis- 
 sion, inquired with a savage smile, whether he pined for 
 the Siberian landscape. The unhappy man, whose ima- 
 gination was overwrought, and whose nerves had not 
 recovered from his past sufferings, lost his head. He 
 went home and poisoned himself (September 2, 1802) 
 by swallowing a huge glass of alcohol at a draught. 
 
 He had wielded no influence. When he was sent to 
 Siberia, hardly any one noticed the disappearance of the 
 humble Custom-House employe. His work had lain in 
 those regions. His departure made no more stir than 
 a stone when it falls into the water. Pouchkine was 
 to pass through a short period of youthful infatuation 
 and enthusiasm for the. Journey. On cooler reflection, he 
 compared the work to a broken mirror, which deforms 
 everything it reflects. He made reservations as to its 
 substance, and applied harsh judgments to its form, 
 which was perhaps superfluous. Radichtchev did not 
 know how to write, and had never given himself time to 
 learn to think. He was always a dilettante, and a man of 
 ill-balanced intellect, quite unfit to perform the work of 
 an apostle. 
 
 A genuine apostle, with all the faults and all the 
 virtues of his office, was Nicholas Ivanovitch Novikov 
 (1744-1818). He was a born preacher. He began by 
 preaching a crusade against the enslavement of the 
 national intellect by its Western teachers. But he met 
 the fate which was inevitably to overtake the members 
 
NOVIKOV 119 
 
 e extreme Nationalist party. His absolute and 
 nent denial of the existence of any loan borrowed 
 a foreign source led him, by way of the clear sheet 
 sisted on, to utter vacancy. He took alarm, and 
 d for refuge into religious mysticism, without caring 
 ime to inquire whether the edifice which sheltered 
 had been built by foreign hands or not. At the 
 time he realised that before Russia could possess 
 original culture, the national soil must be stirred to 
 ;ry depths. Under the influence of this idea, the 
 ist in Novikov made way for the man of action, 
 ublisher bowed before the educator, and thus began 
 nest period of a career which, if it had lasted longer, 
 t have advanced the progress of a work which 
 11 in its preliminary stage, by a good half-century. 
 Novikov was stopped half-way. I will endeavour 
 m up his history ; it was full of incident, and much 
 is still obscure. 
 
 have already described the early disagreement 
 sen the editor of the Drone and Catherine II. 
 kov, a man of noble birth, like Radichtchev, had 
 ously served in the army, and had acted as Secretary 
 e Commission of Legislation. In 1769, journalism 
 a to attract, and soon entirely absorbed him. The 
 ian periodical press of Elizabeth's time, although 
 ;lled on that of England, France, and Germany, 
 irved an officially academic character, which con- 
 it exclusively to literary and scientific subjects. 
 ;rine cast it headlong into the social and political 
 x. The first blows exchanged between these inex- 
 nced warriors missed their aim. With arms bor- 
 d from Addison and Steele, they fought against 
 mills — I mean for or against men and things who 
 9 
 
120 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 belonged to a foreign and absent community. If, taking 
 Catherine's Miscellanies, we look closely at the list of 
 prejudices to be eradicated in the Zamoskvorie'tchie (a 
 suburb of the ancient capital, beyond the Moskva), we 
 shall find it a hastily arranged plagiarism on the Spec- 
 tator, wherein the embroidery swears with the canvas 
 of its foundation. Novikov was the first to touch the 
 raw place. In his Drone (1769-1770) he attacked actual 
 and surrounding realities, official venality, judicial cor- 
 ruption, the general demoralisation. His hand was 
 heavy, his drawing coarse. "A Russian sucking-pig, 
 who has travelled through foreign countries to improve 
 his mind, is generally no more than a full-grown pig 
 when he comes home." His blows fell in such a pitiless 
 shower that Catherine thought it time to interfere. As 
 soon as the game grew earnest, it ceased to entertain 
 her ; and besides, Novikov forgot to spare the sovereign's 
 friends the philosophers, whom she still regarded with 
 affection. When he tested their doctrines by his own 
 half-savage common-sense, he made discoveries which 
 were very annoying to Voltaire's imperial pupil. A truce 
 was commanded ; and that over, the fight, favoured by 
 fresh intermissions in the Tsarina's liberalism, went on 
 from 1769 to 1774, supported on each side by an almost 
 equal number of combatants, some of whom, indeed, 
 frequently passed over from one camp to the other. 
 The whole of this satirical press, the literary vassal of 
 the Tatler and Spectator, was swept in one direction 
 by the same insurrectionary tendency. Just as in Eng- 
 land there was a general uprising against Pope and 
 Dryden, so in Russia there was a revolt against Gallo- 
 mania and French classicism, and in this matter both 
 parties stood on common ground. After 1774 there was 
 
NOVIKOV 121 
 
 her truce, for which Novikov himself was respon- 
 . He was passing through the mental convulsion 
 hich I have already adverted. In the last numbers 
 he Purse (KocMlek) he had reached practical Nihilism, 
 pily Schwartz stood close beside him, ready to hold 
 the hand which saved him at the very edge of the 
 s. 
 
 'he introduction of Freemasonry into Russia dates 
 I the time of Elizabeth, but the first Grand Lodge 
 not opened in St. Petersburg until 1772. It was 
 lected with the Scottish Masons, and the rites fol- 
 d the Scottish form, the simplest and purest of all. 
 vartz introduced Continental forms, which, though 
 ed with illuminism and charlatanism, were better 
 d, by their mystic tendency, to the bent of the Rus- 
 nation. Novikov had been affiliated to the English 
 herhood since 1772, and its influence had already 
 ;ted him into that path of fruitful activity which has 
 ered him the most meritorious toiler of an epoch 
 relative value of the workers in which has not yet 
 fairly apportioned. He had made some attempts 
 opularise knowledge, had published an Historical 
 -.oil of Russian Writers, a Russian Hydrography, and, 
 r the title oi An Ancient Russian Library, a col- 
 )n of historical documents. Schwartz, whose ac- 
 itance he made in 1779, after his removal from St. 
 ■sburg to Moscow, was the very guide needed to 
 ■ out his best efforts and full powers in this direc- 
 The spark which fires all grand enthusiasms was 
 ed in the Russian's breast by the enthusiastic Ger- 
 dreamer. 
 
 f a sudden, Novikov began to found schools, print- 
 works, and bookshops, and to disseminate religious 
 
122 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 handbooks. He was a forerunner of Tolstoi, and more 
 practical than he, for hospitals and dispensaries were in- 
 cluded in his programme. At the same time he managed 
 the Moscow Gazette, and saw its subscribers increase from 
 600 to 4000. In 1782 he founded the " Society of the 
 Friends of Learning," which, taking advantage of the 
 short period of literary freedom, inaugurated in 1783 
 by a ukase soon to be rescinded, was transformed, two 
 years later, into the " Typographical Society." There 
 were swarms of printing-presses at Moscow, and 
 Novikov used them to produce an enormous mass of 
 pamphlets, which inculcated his new tenets : the possi- 
 bility of agreement between faith and reason, between 
 intelligence and sentiment, the necessity of agreement 
 between religion and instruction. To this anything but 
 original doctrine he added some bold and novel ideas 
 of his own, proclaiming, amongst other things, the right 
 of the weaker sex to a superior education. His own 
 belief, as a whole, always lacked clearness and con- 
 sistency, while his brother-masons, among whom Ivan 
 Vladimirovitch Lapoukhine (1756-1816) was the most 
 remarkable, lost themselves in a heavy fog of theo- 
 sophic fancies and obscure, though artistic, allegories. 
 Yet, taken altogether, they did introduce a vivifying and 
 healthy principle of self-examination, mental effort, and 
 independence, into the national existence. 
 
 Catherine herself encouraged their exertions, until 
 the day when she fancied she perceived a mysterious 
 correspondence between them and the revolutionary 
 movement beyond her borders. It was a grievous and 
 unpardonable mistake in a woman who piqued her- 
 self on her clear-sightedness. The Freemasonry of 
 that period, essentially international here as elsewhere. 
 
NOVIKOV 123 
 
 ned in Russia a frankly reactionary character, the 
 nt pietism of its members driving it in exactly 
 opposite direction to the philosophic and humani- 
 1 current which was to bring about the Revolu- 
 Catherine, who was quite at her ease, and sure 
 ;r way amidst the shabby windings of ministerial 
 ceries, was utterly incapable of steering a course 
 st the far more complex mazes of the moral 
 omena that shook the very soul of her century, 
 moment came at last, when agitation of every 
 grew hateful to her. Orders were given that no- 
 should budge. And in January 1792 Novikov was 
 ted at his country-house at Avdotino, whither he 
 gone to rest, and conducted, between two hussars, 
 e fortress of Schliisselburg. His philanthropic in- 
 ions, his printing-woi"ks, his bookshops, were all 
 bly driven out. Paul I. at the beginning of a reign 
 h was to increase the population of the Russian 
 eons, was moved to open the noble martyr's prison 
 3. Legend goes so far as to assert that he im- 
 d his pardon on bended knee. Extravagant the 
 sounds, and it can hardly be true, for of all he 
 lost, the only thing Novikov recovered, besides his 
 :y, was leave to end his life in idleness at Avdotino. 
 [e had no forerunners, and no direct heirs, in his 
 country. A fraction of his inspiration, minus his 
 morality, descended to that friend of Catherine's 
 r days. Princess Dachkov, who was another of 
 victims, and on whom, nevertheless, devolved the 
 ur — a strange one — of leading the scientific move- 
 of her time, 
 he movement to which I refer was restricted in 
 : and poor in result. Although the reactionary 
 
124 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 current had triumphed at the St. Petersburg University, 
 and native teachers, Sokolov, Zouiev, Ozieretskovski, 
 Protassov, Devnitski, Zybeline, Veniaminov, Trebotarev, 
 Tretiakov, and Strakhov, had taken the place of the old 
 foreign staff, no literary works appeared to replace those 
 of Miiller and Bernouilli, Speeches on great occasions, 
 and the scientific propaganda of the periodical press, 
 exhausted the efforts of these new savants. Yet the 
 existence of a scientific press, and the creation, in 1785, 
 of the " Russian Academy " for " the purification and 
 perfecting of the national language," constitute a con- 
 siderable step forward, for the times, and in this pro- 
 gress the chief share belongs to Catherine Romanovna, 
 Princess Dachkov (1743-1810). 
 
 This lady, the daughter of General R. I. Vorontsov, 
 and the intellectual pupil of Bayle, Voltaire, and Montes- 
 quieu, had galloped at Catherine's side, in 1762, along 
 that road from St. Petersburg to Peterhof which was 
 to lead the future Semiramis of the North to power and 
 glory. She subsequently contributed to several news- 
 papers, wrote a comedy by command of the Empress 
 for the Hermitage Theatre, and, without any such com- 
 mand, dabbled feverishly in politics, a department in 
 which Semiramis considered herself all-suffichig. A 
 coldness resulted, and in 1769 the Princess was seized 
 with a strong inclination for foreign travel. She 
 visited Paris, made a longer stay in Scotland, where 
 she knew Robertson and Adam Smith, and where her 
 son obtained a University degree. In 1781 she re- 
 turned to Russia, and, as she began her meddling 
 again, Catherine, in 1783, offered her, as "a bone to 
 gnaw," the Presidency of the Academy of Science. 
 She showed considerable coyness, but ended by accept- 
 
PRINCESS DACHKOV 125 
 
 and held the post for twelve years, combining 
 its duties those of the editorship of the Inter- 
 'r, and, at a later date, those of the Presidency 
 le " Russian Academy," which was, in a sense, an 
 oot of the journal in question. The Interlocutor 
 ;d fresh disagreements between the Princess and 
 sovereign, and the publication of Vadime, in 1795, 
 pleted the quarrel. The Tsarina's quondam friend 
 3d to the country in disgrace, and there wrote her 
 loirs, the French manuscript of which was pre- 
 ;d by Miss Wilmot (later Mrs. Bradford), a dame de 
 agnie, whom she had brought back with her from 
 ;en. She published an English version of the work 
 ■40. 
 
 'he author of these Memoirs is remembered as hav- 
 possessed a disagreeable temper, but a soul open to 
 oble feelings. She did all that lay in her power to 
 urage a school of history, of which, at this period, 
 herbatov and Boltine were the most eminent ex- 
 nts. I have not mentioned her beauty, because I 
 nothing agreeable to say on that subject.' 
 le school to which I have just referred was more 
 :oversial than scientific in its essence. Its chief 
 ion was to support the author of The Antidote, by 
 iding the defamed past of the nation against all the 
 : Chappes of the West. Prince Michael Mikhai- 
 :h Chtcherbatov (1733-1790) was, as his History of 
 iafroin the Most Ancient Times, and more especially 
 Qore popular essay On the Corruption of Russian 
 ners (which did not see the light until 185^), will 
 3, the theorist of the group. And his theories led 
 much farther than the author of The Antidote de- 
 — even so far as the wholesale condemnation of the 
 
126 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 work of Catherine and Peter the Great, the defence of 
 which was forthwith undertaken by another historian, 
 GoHkov, in ten huge volumes, flanked by eighteen supple- 
 ments. Chtcherbatov's point of view is very much that 
 of the modern Slavophils, and also that of Dierjavine, 
 as exemplified in some of his odes. As for Golikov, he 
 is nothing but another dilettante, without knowledge, 
 method, or critical instinct. Chtcherbatov has a certain 
 amount of knowledge, and a great deal more judgment. 
 He has studied the history of other nations, and intro- 
 duces the comparative method into the historiography of 
 his country. He has kept company with the best authors, 
 and can quote Hume more or less appropriately ; but 
 his judgment is obscured by his uncompromising dog- 
 matism, and his knowledge is counterbalanced by a style 
 at once incorrrect and insufferably dull. 
 
 Ivan Nikitich Boltine (1735-1792), Patioumkine's fav- 
 ourite comrade, has added lustre to his name by the 
 publication of two volumes of notes on Chtcherbatov's 
 Russian History, and two more on the Ancient and 
 Modern Russian History written by a French physician 
 named Leclercq. He belonged to an ancient family of 
 Tartar origin, was an eager collector of ancient manu- 
 scripts, edited the Rousskaia Pravda (Ancient Russian 
 Code) with Idlaguine and Moussine-Pouchkine, and 
 may be described as the sophist of the Slavophilism of 
 his day. 
 
 The Slavophil theory had fervent advocates at this 
 period, but its opponents were not less passionately 
 eager. Among these, the youthful Karamzine, who was 
 ultimately to change his views, was a prominent figure. 
 Partial justification of the theory certainly exists in the 
 numerous memoirs which have come down to us from 
 
PRINCESS DACHKOV 127 
 
 period of the great Tsar's reign, and give us an in- 
 ctive picture of a moral corruption which might 
 invalidate the idea that any good was likely to result 
 1 the labours of Peter and Catherine. The recol- 
 lons of Princess Dachkov and of Di^rjavine present 
 icular interest in this connection, but their state- 
 its must be accepted with caution. The memory of 
 lerine's former friend may have been confused by 
 er, and that of Dierjavine by the weariness of old 
 
 Taking it all in all, this " Golden Age," except in the 
 artment of history, can only be marked in the annals 
 earning by leanings, presumptions, and pretensions, 
 e of which it ultimately justified. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE TRANSITION PERIOD— KARAMZINE AND 
 JOUKOVSKI 
 
 According to the terminology sanctioned by long use, 
 the period at which we have now arrived is currently 
 denominated the Romantic Epoch. I still have some diffi- 
 culty in admitting the appropriateness of this title. The 
 literary evolution so described in Western countries does, 
 indeed, possess certain analogies and affinities with the 
 current which tended, at the same period, to drag Russian 
 literature out of the classic rut and borrowed paths in 
 which it had hitherto trod. But from the very outset 
 this current took, and kept, a quite special and distinct 
 direction. My readers know what the Romantic move- 
 ment was in England, in Germany, and in France, and 
 how it successively and contradictorily combined a return, 
 purely literary in the first instance, to the traditions of 
 chivalry and of the Middle Ages, with the defence of the 
 liberal and humanitarian ideal against the anti-revolu- 
 tionary reaction, in the first place, and with the defence 
 of the national principle against the cosmopolitanism re- 
 sulting from the Revolution, in the second. None of the 
 elements of this combination existed in Russia, or, at 
 all events, none of them had the same character there. 
 To the Russians chivalry was only known through French 
 romances, and their sole memory of the Middle Ages was 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 129 
 
 , gloomy abyss in which the national existence was 
 iilfed, and suffered agonising trial. 
 The conflict between the liberal and the reactionary 
 ciple also assumed quite a different complexion in 
 sia. Instead of working from the bottom upwards, 
 vas the case elsewhere, the emancipating current 
 'ed from the upper strata of society to the lower. 
 
 have seen Catherine at the head of the philosophic 
 paganda. Alexander I. was to follow her in the 
 :, during the earlier portion of his reign, and the 
 osition he then met with came from the literary 
 les of the country. In Russia, until towards the 
 die of the present century, literature was the spe- 
 
 field of a small class, imbued, by its aristocratic 
 in, with a strongly conservative spirit. And finally, 
 1 the point of departure and the general direction 
 he nationalist current in Russia were totally dif- 
 nt from those taken by the same movement in other 
 ntries. This current was evident even under Cathe- 
 's rule, when the political integrity of the empire 
 
 not threatened in any way. It corresponded, not 
 I the need to defend the house against intruders, but 
 I the desire to possess a house at all. Of the three 
 ary leaders who, at the moment now under observa- 
 , were preparing the way for Pouchkine — Karamzine, 
 iovski, and Batiouchkov — the first two belonged, for 
 tical purposes, to the camp of reaction, while the 
 i belonged to no camp at all. In literature, the first 
 
 a pupil of the sentimental school, the second was an 
 ctic, the third a classic of a special type. All three 
 ly belong to a period of transition, which was to lead 
 o the evolution of the approaching future, 
 he intellectual life of Russia is so closely interwoven 
 
I30 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 with its political and social existence, both in this period 
 and that which follows upon it, that this chapter must 
 begin with a comprehensive glance at the incidents com- 
 mon to them all. 
 
 Intellectual and Social Evolution. 
 
 We all know how Paul I., after having been carried 
 away, for a moment, by that wave of chimerical liberalism 
 on which his frail bark had floated in the days of his 
 presumptive heirship to the Russian crown, promptly 
 cast anchor in a shallow which proved to cover the 
 most dangerous of reefs. The history of this eccentric 
 sovereign has yet to be written, and his real personal 
 psychology evolved from the present chaos of contra- 
 dictory interpretations. One fact seems clear. But for 
 the coup d'etat which strangled his regime, that regime 
 would have choked the intellectual life of Russia. The 
 death-rattle was already in the throat of the latter. 
 Alexander I. inspired it with the breath of his young 
 enthusiastic soul, so ill prepared for the responsibility 
 power involves, and gave it air. Europe, long exiled, 
 returned once more to the house she had for a moment 
 thought her own. But the expression of her face had 
 changed, and so, she fancied, had the expression of 
 her host's. On both sides, ideas which had formerly 
 hovered in the spiritual regions of the absolute were 
 suddenly embodied in the real and contingent, rendering 
 every contact more tangible, every inevitable shock more 
 painful. Then came hostile meetings and bloody en- 
 counters on other battlefields than those on which pre- 
 ceding generations had exchanged innocuous blows. 
 
 Nothing is so realistic as war, and for a long time 
 
ENGLISH INFLUENCES 131 
 
 ander I. was almost the only person who did not 
 se the new, positive, concrete element imported 
 t into the national life. He dallied with his dream, 
 to about 1 82 1 he played with liberalism, much as 
 lerine had played with Voltairianism. Until 181 1 
 efended Speranski and his reforms against the mili- 
 party, which represented the conservative element, 
 was supported by the whole, or very nearly the 
 le, of the best intelligence of the country. Speranski 
 always an isolated figure, and when the passage of the 
 nen and the conflagration of Moscow had proved the 
 nphant military party in the right, all sides were soon 
 d in one outbreak of warlike enthusiasm. Conser- 
 ves, liberals, nationalists, mystics, all rubbed shoulders 
 tie ranks of the army that marched on Paris. At 
 Is Alexander I. held on his way, and publicly an- 
 nced, in Mme. de Stael's drawing-room, the approach- 
 abolition of serfdom. At the Congress of Aix, in 
 !, he was still full of his dreams, and openly expressed 
 idea that Governments should place themselves at 
 head of the liberal movement. That very year he 
 ;ed Novossiltsov to draw up a plan of liberal insti- 
 )ns for Russia. At the same time he favoured the 
 ision of knowledge and the creation of popular 
 lols on the Lancaster model. The English agents 
 he Bible Society, which had established itself in 
 iia, had given him the first idea of these institutions, 
 
 •"rom this epoch we may date the predominance of 
 lish influence in the literature of the country. It 
 exercised, in the first instance, in a manner more 
 tical than literary. Nicholas Tourgueniev and 
 liral Mordvinov studied English authors — the one 
 
132 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 for the preparation of his Essay on the Theory of Taxa- 
 tion, the other for his widely-known plans for economic 
 reform. Walter Scott and Byron followed, in Russia, 
 the footsteps of Adam Smith. German poets and philo- 
 sophers — Posa with his humanitarian tirades, Kleist 
 and Korner with their political fancies, Schelling with 
 his theories — travelled in their wake. There was a 
 generation of Russian G'dttingenists, and French influ- 
 ence had for the moment entirely disappeared. It was 
 only to know a- partial recovery in the persons of Ber- 
 anger and Lamartine, of Paul-Louis Courier and Saint- 
 Simon. 
 
 Until 182 1, Alexander I. lived in perfect amity with 
 this fresh irruption of foreign elements, and the conse- 
 quent intellectual ferment within a somewhat restricted 
 sphere. His tolerance, and even his protection, were 
 extended even to those semi-literary and semi-political 
 secret societies, the inception of which seemed a con- 
 tinuation of his own dream. There were more poets, 
 like Ryleiev, than men of action in their ranks, and 
 poets did not alarm him ; they were comrades of his own. 
 In fact, since 181 1, Araktcheiev had taken Speranski's 
 place, and the Holy Alliance dates from 1815. The 
 man and the facts ruled the situation, and the effort 
 to reconcile their presence with tendencies which, else- 
 where, the sovereign always appeared to regard with 
 favour was singularly paradoxical. But Alexander made 
 no such effort. He dreamt his dream alone, on the 
 empyrean heights of his autocracy, and left the realities 
 below him to fight it out, only stipulating that there 
 should be no disturbance of his own personal peace. 
 All the reforming projects, whether of Speranski or of 
 the foreign philosophers, were mere plans, and there- 
 
KARAMZINE 133 
 
 e, still and always, dreams. Not one of them, indeed, 
 i been put into actual practice. It was not until 
 !i that the military party succeeded in convincing 
 : sovereign that Ryleiev and his friends would soon 
 Lse to confine themselves to chanting the dawn of a 
 AT era in inferior poetry. Then Catherine's grandson 
 ik fright, loosed Araktcheiev, like a watch-dog, on 
 : harmless band of singers, and himself sought refuge 
 the arms of Mme. de Kriidener. 
 
 In this shelter death overtook him, and a fresh 
 astrophe was the result. Ryleiev and his friends con- 
 ced themselves that the moment for putting their 
 ;ams into action had arrived. Hence the unhappy 
 idents of December 25, 1825, — a childish attempt at a 
 p d'etat, put down with a savage hand, a gallows or 
 ), a long procession of exiles along the Siberian roads, 
 1 the accession of Nicholas I. 
 
 One of those who blamed the attempt and applauded 
 repression was Nicholas Mikhailovitch Karamzine 
 66-1826). Born of a noble Tartar family {Karamurza), 
 entered the halls of literature in 1785, by the gate 
 Freemasonry, the cloudy and sentimental aspect of 
 ich was to attract his feeble arid undecided character. 
 
 was the friend of Novikov, and assisted him with 
 popular publications. Already his taste for English 
 rature was increasing. Among the members of the 
 mjeskoie Obchtchestvo (Society of Friends of the 
 isian Tongue) he was nicknamed Ramsay. In 1789, 
 visited foreign countries, the bearer, it has been 
 ught, of a Freemasonic mission and subsidies. He 
 elled through Germany and Switzerland, sojourned 
 i^rance and England, and wrote some Letters from a 
 sian Traveller, the publication of which, in the Moscow 
 
134 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Journal, which he began to edit just at that time (1791), 
 attracted considerable notice to their author. They 
 prove his powers of observation to have been singularly 
 scanty and hazy. All the traveller discovered in Ger- 
 many was a succession of worthy individuals — not a 
 symptom of the philosophic and literary life of the 
 period. He met Kant, but confused him with Lavater, 
 just as he confused Rousseau with Thomson. He 
 turned his whole attention to the manners and customs 
 of the ancien regime in France, and utterly ignored the 
 Revolution. But wherever he went, he waxed enthusi- 
 astic and melted into tenderness, after the fashion of his 
 time, and did not forget, while in Switzerland, to read 
 Heloise again, and drop tears upon the pages. 
 
 The spirit of the future historian is also manifest in 
 these letters. We note a determination to look on the 
 past history of the nation as the subject of a romance, 
 and discover a succession of charming pictures in its 
 incidents. He was convinced that the application of 
 the methods of Robertson to the study of Nestor 
 and Nicone would bring about a most alluring result. 
 Russia had her own Charlemagne — Vladimir ; her Louis 
 XI. — the Tsar Ivan Vassilievitch ; her Cromwell — 
 Godeonov ; and over and above all these, a sovereign 
 such as no other country had possessed — Peter the 
 Great. 
 
 Two novels, published one after the other, in 1792, 
 Natalia, the Boyard s Daughter, and Poor Lisa, are a partial 
 exposition of this patriotic faith. In them Karamzine 
 drew up a complete code of sentimentalism, inspired by 
 Richardson and Sterne, and accepted by several succeed- 
 ing generations. Nothing is wanting here : we have the 
 correct love of Nature and of rustic life, scorn for wealth 
 
KARAMZINE 135 
 
 d greatness, thirst for immortal glory, melancholy, 
 nderness. And all this is discovered in the daily life 
 
 the old Boyards, — the author deliberately overlook- 
 g the existftnce of the Terem, within whose narrow 
 ison walls Natalia would not have found it easy to 
 perience the sudden thunderclap of emotion which 
 uses her to fall in love with Alexis. Historically 
 eaking, all the characters and habits of life depicted in 
 e first of these two novels are absolutely false, and the 
 adest, dreamy Lisa, whose story is revealed to us in the 
 :ond — 'the humble flower-girl courted by the great 
 bleman, who desires to cast himself and her into the 
 ms of Nature, is not a vision very likely to appear on 
 3 banks of the Moskva. Yet Lisa has drawn tears 
 )m many eyes, and for many a year the lake near the 
 Dnastery of St. Simon, where her dream found its 
 ding, was a place of pilgrimage. 
 
 Apart from the matter of truthfulness, to which, 
 ubtless, the novelist hardly gave a thought, other good 
 alities, already evident in the Letters froin a Traveller, 
 tify, in a measure, his great success. These are a very 
 ;ly and delicate feeling for Nature, a great charm in 
 
 descriptions of landscape, and, above all, a simpli- 
 /•, vigour, warmth, and luminosity of style, such as no 
 ssian pen had up to that date produced. On this 
 ;ount alone, the appearance of these novels was a 
 1 event. Karamzine, like the true virtuoso he was, 
 iched the language of Lomonossov with a bevy of 
 eign expressions and phrases for which he discovered 
 livalents in the popular tongue and in the literary 
 ;uments of past times. This attempt of his was not 
 )wed to pass without vehement opposition, apparently 
 
 by Alexander Siemionovitch Chichkov (1754-1 841). 
 
136 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 He, however, was supported by authorities of far 
 greater weight, among them the great Krylov himself, by 
 a powerful organisation within the ranks of the Society 
 of Friends of Russian Literature, and a aiiUtant news- 
 paper. The reactionary order of things inaugurated, just 
 at this period, by Catherine was another indirect support. 
 The arrest of Novikov in 1792 brought about the sup- 
 pression of the Moscow Gazette, in the columns of which 
 paper Karamzine's first work had appeared. The author 
 of Poor Lisa replaced his newspaper by publications of a 
 more purely literary character — The Aglaia (1794-1795), 
 The Aontdes {i'j<)6-Tjc)f)), both of them imitations of the 
 poetic almanacs then common abroad. In these Pouch- 
 kine printed his earliest poems. But even the poets 
 " found the censure, like a bear, barring their path " 
 (the phrase is Karamzine's). He greeted the dawn of 
 Alexander I.'s liberating rule with two odes. And mean- 
 while his talent was tending in a fresh direction, where 
 it \vas to find a more complete and definite development. 
 In the Ewopean Messenger, published by the inde- 
 fatigable editor in 1802, another novel, The Regent Marf a, 
 or the Submission of Novgorod, appeared simultaneously 
 with purely historic essays from the same pen. At that 
 moment the young writer was still employed in trans- 
 lating Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar from Letourneur's 
 French version, and the English poet's influence is 
 visible in Marf a. But the novelist was already giving 
 place to the savant, and the general direction of his 
 thought was altering completely. Hitherto his pubhshed 
 work had always, even when touched with republicanism, 
 tended to the defence of liberal and humanitarian views. 
 "The blood of a Novgorod burgher flows in my veins," 
 he would say. This liberalism, which was very genuine, 
 
KARAMZINE 1 3 7 
 
 ivented him from leaning too pronouncedly in the 
 ionalist direction. "We must be men, not Slavs, 
 ore all else," he was heard to assert. I believe, 
 ieed, that his sincerity on this point was not untouched 
 
 that spirit of opposition which has always been a 
 u^acteristic and generic trait in the most autocratically 
 rerned of all the civilised nations. As liberalism had 
 iched the highest spheres of the government, the 
 position must necessarily change its tone. And of a 
 iden, Karamzine came to regard Russia, past and 
 2sent, as a world apart, which was not only severed 
 m the European West by the special conditions of 
 
 historical existence, but which ought so to remain, 
 d, aided by his power of fancy as a novelist, and his 
 owledge and feeling as a scholar, he set himself to trans- 
 rt that poetic and ideal view of the reality which had 
 .de the fortune of his artistic work, into the history 
 i politics of his country. People talked to him of 
 ; abolition of serfdom. But was the condition of the 
 fs really so wretched ? When the barbarity of the 
 ;ient customs which had forged their chain was 
 med, he grew indignant. Safe in his triple armour 
 heroic optimism, soaring patriotism, and romantic 
 lucination, he took his way athwart the gloomy 
 Tors of past centuries, to confound their detractors 
 calling up the national ideal in all the glory of an 
 )theosis. 
 
 Journalism had long been a weariness to him, but he 
 I married without possessing any private fortune, and 
 lended for most of his income on this source. He 
 ceeded in obtaining the post of historiographer to 
 
 crown, with a salary of 2000 roubles, retired to 
 afi^vo, a property belonging to his father-in-law, and 
 
138 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 fell furiously to work. His course was somewhat un- 
 certain, frequently diverted and driven into byways 
 by contemporary events. In 1811, at the request of 
 Alexander's sister, the Grand-Duchess Catherine Pav- 
 lovna, he presented his famous Memoir on Ancient and 
 Modern Russia to the Tsar. This was a return to the 
 militant and active policy invoked by all Sp^ranski's 
 opponents. Struck, in the course of his studies, by the 
 long periods of inertia which characterised his country's 
 past history, Karamzine had erected this condition into 
 a law of its existence. He was the author of that strange 
 theory of "historic patience" which has since been 
 incorporated with the Slavophil doctrine. The main- 
 tenance of the autocratic system was an integral part 
 of this theory, v^hich barred the way to all constitutional 
 reforms. 
 
 Alexander was at once offended and flattered. Thanks 
 to the influence of Catherine Pavlovna, the latter senti- 
 ment won the day, and Karamzine's intervention counted 
 for something in Speranski's fall, and the collapse of 
 his plans. 
 
 In 1812, the historian's house at Moscow was burnt, 
 and in it the library he had spent a quarter of a century 
 in collecting. All he saved was a couple of copies of 
 his history. " Camoens has saved his Lusiad" he wrote 
 to a friend. The Empress Marie Feodorovna offered 
 him the use of one of the imperial country-houses near 
 St. Petersburg. He hesitated. Now that his theories 
 had won the day and were personified by Araktcheiev, 
 they seemed less close to the ideal he had conceived. 
 He allowed himself to be persuaded, however, and reached 
 St. Petersburg in February 1816, with eight volumes of 
 his General History of Russia, and a firm resolution to 
 
KARAMZINE 139 
 
 lore the all-powerful favourite of the period. But 
 aktcheiev was not the man to permit this. The Em- 
 ror refused Karamzine an audience, and the grant of 
 ,000 roubles necessary for the printing of his book 
 peared to depend on a preliminary visit to the favou- 
 s. Karamzine demurred at first. " We will sell our 
 ids," he wrote to his wife. But he thought the matter 
 er, and ended by doing more than submit. Another 
 ter, written just after his visit to Araktcheiev, de- 
 ires his conviction that he had found in him " an 
 elligent and high-principled man." He received his 
 ,000 roubles, and the ribbon of St. Anne into the 
 rgain. And his recantation does not appear to have 
 en indispensable, for in a little over three weeks the 
 ition of the first three volumes of his History, number- 
 l three thousand copies, was all bought up. 
 
 The historian's character resembles that of the man. 
 1 enormous amount of analytical labour, a very notice- 
 le art in the employment of the material collected, and 
 
 excellent moral intention. These are the qualities we 
 ist place to the credit of his work. We find quite twice 
 
 many - defects. His view of the past is invariably 
 iuenced by his pi^esent sensations ; he is absolutely 
 ;olved on a sentimental idealisation — the optimism of 
 ibnitz as parodied by Thomson (Karamzine had trans- 
 ed T/ie Seasons) ; and he is almost utterly oblivious of 
 ; internal development and the moral and intellectual 
 ! of the masses. From this last point of view, Karam- 
 e is inferior to Tatichtchev. Yet his work, with its 
 ssic architecture and pompous rhetoric, holds a con- 
 erable place in the literature of his country. For 
 ,ny years it served as a model. It influenced Pouch- 
 e, and even Ostrovski. Four more volumes appeared 
 
I40 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 between 1816 and 1826, carrying the story up to the 
 accession of the first Romanov in the seventeenth century. 
 A short time before the publication of the fourth volume, 
 Karamzine passed quietly away, surrounded with marks 
 of kindness from the imperial family. Nicholas bestowed 
 a pension of 50,000 roubles on the widow and children, 
 and on his tomb Joukovski's fervent verse celebrates 
 " the holy name of Karamzine." 
 
 His influence on Russian literature may be compared 
 to that of Catherine on Russian society. It was a 
 humanising influence. He introduced a philosophic 
 standpoint, a high moral sense, philanthropic views, and 
 tender feelings : all this without any unity or ruling 
 thought, and without any deep conviction. His direct 
 literary heirs, who carried on in poetry the work his 
 novels had sketched in prose, were Dmitriev and 
 Ozierov. 
 
 Ivan Ivanovitch Dmitriev (1760-1837) has left an 
 autobiography which reveals a curious two-sidedness in 
 his career. On the one side we have his public life, on 
 the other his literary existence, the two never mingling, 
 as in Pouchkine's case, but each running its own course, 
 and hardly ever coming into contact wdth the other. In 
 1794 we see the poet on the banks of the Volga, fishing 
 and dreaming, and bringing home sterlets and verses to 
 his sister, who copies them and sends them to Karamzine 
 for one of his publications. Thus appeared the Patriot's 
 Voice, the Ode on the Capture of Warsaw, Yerinak — a 
 narrative in rhyme of the conquest of Siberia — and a 
 few fables. The following year the poet disappears, 
 and until 1802 we have only the tcJiinovuik, employed first 
 in the Senate, and afterwards as assistant to the Minister 
 of Crown Lands. Then comes a change of residence, 
 
OZIEROV 141 
 
 neeting with Karamzine at Moscow, and the Muses 
 ;onquer their adorer. He translates La Fontaine's 
 )les. This is the pearl of his literary performances, 
 d a considerable factor in the artistic improvement of 
 ; language. At this point a fresh whimsical adventure 
 curs to complicate the translator's life. He, Karam- 
 le's pupil, finds himself suddenly adopted by Chichkov's 
 cle as the champion of the classic tradition and the 
 lool of Dierjavine, against Karamzine and the new 
 lool, which he at that moment appears to represent ! 
 s absolute lack of individuality favoured this usurpa- 
 n of his person. The worst of it is, that to it he owed 
 »reat portion of his renown, and even of his success in 
 ; administrative career. In 1807, he became curator of 
 ; University of Moscow, and in 181 1, he was appointed 
 inister of Justice. He had then ceased to write, and 
 
 never was to take up the pen again. 
 
 Ladislas Alexandrovitch Ozierov (1769-1816) 
 gan by writing French verses, and afterwards produced 
 issian odes, epistles, and fables. These continued till 
 58, when his first tragedy, laropolk and Oleg — a mere 
 igiarism of French models in the style of Soumarokov 
 i Kniajnine — was performed. The cold reception 
 en it by the audience was calculated to warn the author 
 it he was behind his times. He fell back on Richard- 
 1 and Duels for his CEdipus at Athens, and next, in 
 )5, on Macpherson for his unlucky Fingal, and at 
 t attained success, in 1807, with his Dmitri Dojzsko'i. 
 is is certainly the worst of all his tragedies, but it 
 irms with allusions to contemporary events. Every 
 3 recognised Alexander I. in the character of Dmitri, 
 o successfully repulses the Tartar onslaught, and 
 poleon I. in that of Mamai. When 181 2 came. 
 
142 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the work appeared prophetic, and was lauded to the 
 skies. As a presentment of history it is utterly silly. 
 Will my readers imagine a tender-hearted and philo- 
 sophic paladin warbling with a virtuous and sentimen- 
 tal cliatelaine, and then convince themselves that their 
 appropriate names are Dmitri and Xenia, and their 
 correct location and period somewhere between Souz- 
 dal and Moscow, during the fourteenth century ? 
 
 Ozierov was never to repeat this triumph. Tried by 
 many vexations, including an unhappy love affair, he 
 buried himself in the country, wrote a play, Polyxena, 
 followed by another entitled Medea, and passed away, 
 at last, in a state of partial lunacy. It was only right 
 that his name and work should be mentioned here. By 
 his choice of subjects and his manner of handling them, 
 and in spite of a very moderate talent, he contributed 
 almost as much as Joukovski to the development of 
 which Pouchkine was shortly to become the definite 
 exponent. 
 
 The glory of having introduced Romanticism into 
 Russia was claimed by Vassili Andr£ievitch Joukovski 
 (1786-1852). This was a mere illusion. Can my readers 
 imagine a writer of the Romantic school who winds up 
 his literary career with a translation of the Odyssey? 
 The only features of that school which Joukovski was 
 capable of understanding and assimilating, were those 
 which, as exemplified by Tieck, Novalis, or Fouque, cor- 
 responded with the dreamy melancholy of his own tem- 
 perament. The great aims and objects attributed to 
 the new poetry by the two Schlegels escaped him en- 
 tirely, and the scepticism of Byron and the irony of 
 Heine, in later years, were both sealed books to him. 
 His love of vague distances, of the terrible and the fan- 
 
JOUKOVSKI 143 
 
 :ic, his intense mysticism, which betokened an exces- 
 ; development of feeling at the expense of reason, 
 sed his eyes to these horizons of contemporary 
 ught. 
 
 Practically, he simply carried on the work of Karam- 
 i, whose political ideas and didactic and moralising 
 dency he shared. Thus it came about that in 1830 
 found himself left out of the current on which the 
 mger generation of literary men was floating. He 
 ijudged Gogol, and only met the author of Dead 
 lis after the period of his intellectual bankruptcy, 
 the common ground of a pietism not far removed 
 m madness. The only quality of the Romantic poet 
 ich he possessed was his subjectivity, but this was his 
 a remarkable degree, and in such a manner as to 
 ke him the first Russian writer who gave ideal ex- 
 ission to the subjective life of the human heart, 
 his eyes, poetry and real life were one — the external 
 rid and the intellectual world mingled in one match- 
 > sensation of beauty and harmony. 
 The very birth of Joukovski was a page of romance. 
 ;ountry land-owner, Bounine, of the obsolete type of 
 ancient Russian Boyard, owned a Turkish slave 
 ned Salkha. A child was born, and adopted by a 
 lily friend, Andrew Grigorovitch Joukovski. The 
 r was afterwards entrusted to the care of his natural 
 ler's sister, Mme. louchkov, who resided at Toula. 
 ; lived in a literary and ai'tistic circle, in which 
 icerts and plays were frequently organised. Before 
 mg Joukovski had thoroughly mastered the principles 
 Russian grammar, he had become a dramatic author, 
 'ing written two plays, Camilla, or Rome Delivered, and 
 ul and Virginia, both of which were duly performed. 
 
144 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 In 1797 Mme. louchkov sent him to the University School 
 at Moscow, and not long afterwards his first verses began 
 to appear in the literary miscellanies of the day. They 
 were sad and melancholy even then. The death of 
 Mme. louchkov, which occurred just at this time, in- 
 spired the youthful poet with an imitation of Gray's 
 Elegy under the title of Thoughts on a Tomb. But verses 
 had a poor sale. The editors gave translations a far 
 warmer welcome. To bring in a little money, Joukovski 
 translated all Kotzebue's plays and several of his novels. 
 After this he tried the administrative career, and failing 
 in it, took refuge for a while with his adoptive family, 
 returning to Moscow in time to undertake the editorship 
 of the European Messenger. According to the custom of 
 the period, he filled the whole paper with his own work 
 — literary criticisms, more translations from Schiller, 
 Parny, and Dryden, and a few original compositions, 
 romances, epistles, and ballads. In 1810, the generosity 
 of Bounine enabled him to buy a small landed property 
 to which he retired, and there, for a while, he lived a 
 splendid idyl. His near neighbour, Pletcheiev, a rich 
 land-owner with a mania for music, was the possessor 
 of a theatre and an orchestra. Joukovski wrote verses, 
 which Pletcheiev set to music, and Mme. Pletcheiev 
 sang. There was an uninterrupted series of concerts, 
 plays, and operas. 
 
 Suddenly the idyl turned to elegy. The melancholy 
 poet fell in love with one of his nieces, Marie Andreievna 
 Protassov, and soon he was fain to shed genuine tears. 
 The young girl's mother would not hear of an illegiti- 
 mate son as her daughter's husband. The terrible year 
 181 2 opened, and she insisted on his entering a regiment 
 of the National Guard. He did not distinguish himself 
 
JOUKOVSKI 145 
 
 the Borodino, but after the battle he wrote his first 
 at poem, The Bard in the Russian Camp, which opened 
 gates of glory to him. 
 
 It was only an imitation, and a somewhat clumsy 
 !, of Gray's Bard, with a strange medley of romantic 
 timent and classic imagery — lyres that rang warlike 
 )rds and warriors dressed in armour. But the public 
 
 not look too closely at such trifles, and its enthusiasm 
 3 increased, after the taking of Paris in 1814, by the 
 )earance of an Epistle of five hundred lines addressed 
 :he victorious Tsar. The Empress, surrounded by her 
 lily and intimate circle, desired to hear it, and the 
 der, A. I. Tourgudniev, could hardly get to the end 
 lis task. His voice was drowned in sobs and plaudits ; 
 was sobbing himself ; and throughout the country 
 
 cry went up that another great poet had risen in 
 
 footsteps of Lomonossov, and there would be fresh 
 ster-pieces for all men to admire. 
 But the country waited long. Tourgueniev even 
 it so far as to chide Lomonossov's poetic heir, 
 ou have Milton's imagination and Petrarch's ten- 
 eess — and you write us ballads ! " At that moment 
 kovski was forced to play the great man rather 
 inst his will. In spite of himself, he was pushed to 
 
 head of the Karamzine party, then in full warfare 
 h Chichkov's BiessiMa, and became the pillar of the 
 \ society of the Arzamas. He drew up its reports 
 burlesque hexameters, which seem to indicate that, 
 his case, melancholy was much more a matter of 
 lion than of temperament. But the great work 
 ch was obstinately demanded of him came not. 
 tied at court, first as reader to the Empress, and 
 r as tutor to her children, Joukovski gradually 
 
146 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 built up his reputation as an excellent pedagogue, and 
 continued to prove his ability, conscientiousness, and 
 good taste as a translator. From 1817 to 1820 he super- 
 intended the education of Alexander II. Between 1827 
 and 1840 he translated, from Riickert's German version, 
 Magharabati's Indian poem, Nal and Diamaianti. In 
 1841, overwhelmed with kindnesses, and considerably 
 enriched in pocket, he went abroad, married, at sixty, 
 the daughter of the painter Reutern — she was nineteen 
 — fell into a nest of pietists, was on the brink of con- 
 version to the Catholic faith, and finally plunged into 
 mysticism. His ill-starred passion for Mdlle. Protassov 
 may have had something to do with this catastrophe. 
 
 In 1847, nevertheless, he gave the world his fine 
 translation of the Odyssey, and two years later that of 
 an episode in Firdusi's Persian poem {Skak Mamet), 
 Rustem and Zorav — this also after Riickert. Death over- 
 took him at Baden-Baden, just as he was beginning work 
 upon the Iliad. 
 
 He was a distinguished scholar and a noble-souled 
 man. Joukovski's was the hearth at which the flame 
 which burnt and shone in the heart of the " Liberator 
 Tsar " during the earlier part of his reign, was kindled. 
 Did he possess and conceal a poetic genius the revelation 
 of which was prevented by some unexplained circum- 
 stance ? This has been believed. I doubt it. Joukovski's 
 lack of originality amounted to an entire absence of 
 national sentiment. The ancient chronicles of his coun- 
 try inspired him with only one feeling — horror ; the 
 Slavonic language of the sacred books, "that tongue 
 of mandarins, slaves, and Tartars," exasperated him; and 
 even that he used, with its crabbed chas and cktchas, 
 sometimes struck him as barbarous. 
 
BATIOUCHKOV 147 
 
 He wrote no master-piece, but by interpreting and 
 ieminating those of English and German Hterature, 
 largely contributed to the literary education of his 
 intry. And Alexander II, was not his only pupil, 
 jchkine, after having risen in revolt against the blank 
 se adopted by this master, adopted it, in later years, 
 his favourite method of expression, and Batiouchkov 
 3d more than mere instruction to the great poet, 
 never made his mark, but who was something 
 ter than a genius — a kind, and generous, and helpful 
 nd. 
 
 Although CONSTANTINE NlCQIvAlfiVITCH BATIOUCHKOV 
 87-1855) moved in the same orbit as Joukovski and 
 ramzine, he belongs to a separate category. As a prose 
 ter he follows Karamzine, but as a poet, and even as 
 •anslator of anthological or erotic works, he goes his 
 n way. He stands alone. He has none of Joukovski's 
 timental idealism. He is a classic, but of the pure 
 ;ek type, in love with Nature as she is, conscious of 
 real beauty, treading the ground firmly, and enjoy- 
 life, even to its bitterness, like some intoxicating 
 erage. In his person, as in that of Krylov, soon 
 ;r, the national poetry at last reaches the stratum of 
 tful soil in which it was to take root and blossom 
 ;h. Batiouchkov only skims along the surface of 
 ^oil, but though his life was long, how short was 
 career ! His was the first in that series of unhappy 
 !S of which Joukovski's haunting thoughts of tombs 
 [ weeping shades would seem to have been the 
 sage. He has himself compared his condition to 
 t of the most unhappy of modern poets, and his 
 !S on the dying Tasso are almost an autobiography. 
 First of all, war laid its hand on Batiouchkov, and 
 
148 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 dragged him across Europe. He was of noble family, 
 and therefore, of necessity, a soldier. He was struck by 
 a bullet at Heidelberg ; and at Leipzig, in 1813, he saw 
 his best friend, Petine, fall dead beside him. From time 
 to time he had sent fine, though somewhat free, transla- 
 tions from Parny, Tibullus, and Petrarch to the European 
 Messenger, and had also sung an unhappy love affair 
 of his own, in verse still somewhat halting, and in 
 which " slopes gilded by the hand of Ceres," and very 
 archaic in form, look clumsy enough, wedded to the 
 first expression of an exceedingly beautiful poetic in- 
 spiration. All through Germany, and afterwards in Paris, 
 whither victory led him, he lived in a dream of triumph, 
 celebrating the crossing of the Rhine or the ruins of 
 some manor-house laid waste, and moved to pity for 
 France, " who paid so dearly for her glory." His return 
 home, after a short visit to England, was a sad one. 
 Araktcheiev inspired him with the conviction that the 
 net cost of victory is the same in every country. His 
 dejection soon reached such a pitch that he felt himself 
 incapable of giving happiness to the young girl he loved, 
 and he betrayed the first symptoms of a mental distress 
 which was destined to increase. In 1816 he published 
 a few more verses in the Messenger, and in the following 
 year a complete collection of his poetry ; but he was 
 already looking about for means of leaving a country 
 the air of which, thanks to Araktcheiev and his likes, 
 choked him — so he declared. In 1818, thanks to 
 Joukovski's influence, he was nominated to a position 
 in the Russian Legation at Naples, and returned thence, 
 four years later, a hopeless lunatic. Joukovski took the 
 tenderest care of him, but all his efforts were, unhappily, 
 in vain. No ray of reason ever crossed the gloom, and 
 
KRYLOV 149 
 
 three-and-thirty years the poet's miserable existence 
 gged on. 
 
 Though still farther removed than Batiouchkov from 
 literary group from which the genius of Pouchkine was 
 spring, Ivan Andr£ievitch Krylov (1768-1844) was 
 ertheless the undoubted product of the same sap, the 
 le intellectual germination in the national soil, and 
 iirectly connected, in his best work, with the popular 
 id, of which Frol Skobtiev was an expression. Born of 
 loor family at Moscow — his father was a subaltern 
 cer, and his mother, we are told, supported the whole 
 lily by reading the prayers for the dead in the houses 
 the rich merchants of the city — he belonged, by his 
 ^in, to the people. Yet, considering his surroundings, 
 was singularly precocious. His Kofeinitsa (fortune- 
 sr by coffee-grounds), a comic opera which some 
 ics think superior in originality to his later produc- 
 is, was written before he was fourteen. This work, 
 ch did not at present attain the honour of publication, 
 was exchanged with a bookseller for a bundle of 
 nch books, including Racine, Moliere, and Boileau, 
 to be the parent, some five years later, of a Philomena 
 a Cleopatra, both of them sad failures. The .author, 
 )se works were now printed, and more or less read, 
 ;ed in the circle of Kniajnine and revolved in the 
 it of Novikov, bonowed from foreign authors with 
 first, and decried them with the second. The two 
 ledies signed with his name in 1793 and 1794, The 
 ues and The Author, are nothing more than adapta- 
 s. 
 
 [n 1797 we find him in the country, in the house of 
 ice S. F. Galitsine, where he occupied an indefinite 
 tion, half salaried tutor, half family friend. Four 
 
ISO RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 years afterwards he was dismissed, and disappeared. He 
 had, and always was to have, the instincts of luxury, 
 something of that free-living nature so common among 
 his compatriots. At this period, so the story goes, he 
 began to gamble, in consequence of having won a con- 
 siderable sum (30,000 roubles), and led a wandering life, 
 going from the gaming-tables of one town to those of 
 another. He was not to reappear till 1806, and then 
 with his first three fables, imitations, it must be said, of 
 La Fontaine. Like La Fontaine, Krylov was slow to 
 find his true path ; like him, he was never to leave it, once 
 found, except for some theatrical attempts which were 
 not crowned with success. 
 
 Yet he resembles the French fabulist more by his 
 career, his temperament, and character than by the 
 nature of his intelligence. There was the same care- 
 lessness and improvidence in both cases. If the Russian 
 fable-writer did not squander his fortune, it was only 
 because he was born a beggar. La Fontaine's favourite 
 weakness was a too great devotion to the fair sex. Krylov 
 died of an indigestion, after living (riches came to him 
 with glory) the life of a sybarite. He was lazy, greedy, 
 selfish, careless in his dress, neither lovable nor loved, 
 in spite of the popularity his fables won him. But he 
 was never a dreamer, like La Fontaine. He was far 
 more positive, and had not even the indulgent good- 
 nature of his master. He is never taken in. He lifts 
 all masks, and looks into the bottom of men's hearts. 
 Finally, and especially, he is essentially a satirist, and 
 this feature, which distinguishes him from most fabulists, 
 seals him an original and national writer. Epigram, in 
 La Fontaine's case, is a smile. Krylov's epigrams grind 
 their teeth. The first are almost a caress ; the second are 
 
KRYLOV 151 
 
 lething like a bite. The Frenchman's fables are quite 
 )ersonal ; the Russian's teem with transparent allu- 
 is to contemporary individuals and things. Krylov 
 ws us a " quartette of musicians " — a monkey, a goat, 
 onkey, and a bear — who only succeed in making a 
 fening discord. Nobody hesitates to identify the party 
 ti the " Society of Friends of the Russian Tongue," 
 h its four coteries and its habitual quarrels. Then 
 gives us Demiane and his well-known soup, with 
 Lch he plies his guests till they are sick, and every 
 ! recognises the most verbose poet of the day. 
 La Fontaine's archness is thus turned into asperity, 
 I in this, again, Krylov gives proof of a powerful 
 finality, more Russian than humane, and essentially 
 listic. Even in his imitations he remains true to the 
 ional spirit, to its simple, practical, commonplace con- 
 tion of the world. With his very scanty education 
 [ very narrow intellectual horizon, he not only knows 
 life of the mass of the people down to its most secret 
 ners, with all its habits, ideas, and prejudices, but all 
 36 habits, ideas, and prejudices are his own. His 
 ^inal fables are, as it were, a counterpart of the pro- 
 bs and legends of his country. His language, plastic 
 [ vigorous, with a touch of coarseness, is absolutely 
 t of the people, without the smallest infusion of book 
 
 This original quality of Krylov's was so striking, 
 t when the question of his monument was mooted, 
 )roved stronger than the classical tradition, in a 
 ntry where even the effigy of Souvorov, that most 
 final of men, was set up for the admiration of pos- 
 ty, in a public square, disguised as the god Mars! 
 DOdy dared to dress up Krylov as Apollo! Care- 
 
I 52 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 lessly seated on a bench in the Summer Garden, his 
 figure retains, even in the bronze, the massive features, 
 the ungraceful outline, and the huge frock-coat which 
 concealed his vast proportions. 
 
 Among his two hundred fables, not fewer than forty- 
 six are borrowed directly from yEsop, Ph^drus, La 
 Fontaine, Gellert, and Diderot. At the head of most 
 editions. The Fox and the Raven closely follows La Fon- 
 taine's text, with descriptive amplifications and poetic 
 developments which greatly mar the simplicity of the 
 original. Krylov, like Pouchkine, took great pains to 
 find sources of inspiration, and equal pains to conceal 
 them. The subject of The Three Moujiks has been 
 detected in an old French fabliau, which had already 
 enriched Imbert's collection. In the case of The Brag- 
 gart, the original idea has been attributed both to Gellert 
 and to Imbert. I do not feel disposed to blame the 
 Russian fabulist on this account. La Fontaine himself 
 drew on ^sop's fables, and, as for originality, those of 
 La Motte, which are original, are none the better for 
 that. Krylov has stamped his work, in a very sufficient 
 manner, with his own personal genius. His best fables 
 may be said to demonstrate certain ideas which can 
 fairly be called his own. The Lion's Education, The 
 Peasant and the Snake, and The Ducat reflect his ideas 
 on education, which, as will be readily imagined, are 
 not very broad. In the days of Araktchdiev and his 
 acolyte, Magnitski, Krylov warned his fellow-citizens 
 against the dangers of too much learning ! A second 
 category, to which The Oracle and The Peasants and the 
 River belong, shows up the faults of the national ad- 
 ministrative and judicial system. A third touches, in 
 artless glimpses that bewray the philosophy learnt in 
 
KRYLOV 153 
 
 over which the tide of invasion swept, on current 
 ical events, and on the figure of the great Napoleon, 
 his series. The Waggon and The Wolf and the Dog- 
 tel are the most characteristic specimens. 
 
 am forced to confine myself to these few remarks, 
 ov's works have been translated into twenty-one 
 uages — all the Indo-European and several Eastern 
 ues. There are seventy-two French translations, 
 y-two German, and only twelve English. He was 
 )duced to English readers by W. R. S. Ralston, but 
 most complete English version is that of Mr. Harri- 
 J1884). The first national poet of Russia was also the 
 whose genius conquered the world at large. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE NATIONAL EVOLUTION— POUCHKINE 
 
 The first verses of Alexander Sergui]6ievitch Pouch- 
 KINE (1799-1837) were written in 1814, At that moment 
 the whole literary and political world, from one end of 
 Europe to the other, was in a ferment. In England, 
 Byron — in whose voice spoke, if we may so say, the 
 voices of Godwin, of Paine, of Burns, of Landor — was 
 raising his mighty cry of liberty. In Italy, Manzoni and 
 Ugo Foscolo were re-creating Dante's dream of unity. 
 In France, wounded national pride and the rebellious 
 spirit of independence sought consolation and revenge 
 in the poetic fictions of Chateaubriand, Benjamin Con- 
 stant, Senancourt, and Madame de Stael. In Germany, 
 a people still wild with pride and joy was celebrating its 
 enfranchisement over Wieland's newly-made grave. All 
 this was of the very essence of Romanticism, and of all 
 this, in Russia, there was hardly a sign. There the world, 
 intellectual and literary, had remained in a state of in- 
 coherence, wherein the gross sensualism and epicurism 
 of the French sceptics, the naturalist philosophy of 
 Schelling and Oken, Slavophilism, and mysticism, rubbed 
 shoulders with the ideal humanitarianism of Schiller, the 
 teachings of Adam Smith, and vague notions of consti- 
 tutional liberalism. But in the midst of this chaos, a 
 new language had arisen, a wondrous instrument, which 
 only awaited the master-hand that was to attune it to 
 
POUCHKINE 15 5 
 
 ry voice, external and internal ; and out of its bosom 
 I sprung a new mental personality, with its own 
 cial method of being, thought, and feeling — Russia, 
 ;ady embodied in the genius of Krylov, and soon to 
 seen in Pouchkine, Gogol, and Tourgueniev. 
 Did Pouchkine really represent this personality ? 
 ;re have been prolonged doubts on the subject, even 
 i^ussia. With the exception of Gogol, the poet's con- 
 iporaries and his natural judges, like the first literary 
 ics in Russia, Nadiejdine and Polevoi, have not 
 ked on him as inuch more than imitator, a Westerner, 
 a German, Varnhagen von Ense, belongs the honour 
 having declared his conviction of the falsehood of 
 ; verdict, and it has been reversed, by degrees, in 
 
 opinion of the country. Russia, as I write, is pre- 
 ing to celebrate the poet's centenary, amidst a general 
 icourse of enthusiastic homage, which has never been 
 eeded in the history of the glories of any nation, 
 i^ertheless, a French writer has recently reopened the 
 3, and has ventured to come to a definite conclusion, 
 ch, in his own words, " should sever the poet from 
 
 own nationality, and restore him to humanity at 
 
 je." 
 
 M. de Vogue will permit me to say that I fail to per- 
 ■e the interest of such a restitution. I incline, in 
 , to the opinion that the more personal, original, and 
 onal the creator of ideas and images is, the more 
 ly is he to interest the human community in general, 
 itever may be the country to which he belongs. And 
 ppears to me that to deny the possession of these 
 lities to Pouchkine, is simply to degrade him to- 
 rank of such writers as Soumarokov. He deserves; 
 er than this. His work is, indeed, so heterogeneous, 
 
156 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 so charged with foreign elements, and so naturally 
 affected by the transition period of which I have just 
 given a sketch, as to justify, to a certain extent, the con- 
 tradictory judgments to which it constantly gives rise. 
 But, on the other hand, it is ruled, and in a sense 
 saturated, by one capital creation, Eugene Oni^guine, 
 which alone occupied nine years (1822 to 1831) of a life 
 that was all too short. Now failure to comprehend 
 the essentially national character of this poem is, pro- 
 perly speaking — I do not fear contradiction on this point 
 from any Russian living — failure to understand it at all. 
 I will explain myself later on this subject. 1 must now 
 begin with a few features of the poet's biography. 
 
 The poet's life is indissolubly bound up with his 
 work. He lived every line he wrote. And indeed his 
 character, his temperament, his racial features, are as 
 powerfully evident in his origin as in some of his writings. 
 He was a Russian with a trace of African blood in his 
 veins. His maternal grandfather, as we all know, was 
 Peter the Great's famous Negro, Hannibal, whose adven- 
 tures he undertook to relate. The poet's father, Sergius 
 Lvovitch, a typical nobleman of the time of Catherine II., 
 with fine manners, varied knowledge, Voltairian opinions, 
 and the perfect docility of the true courtier, gave him 
 French tutors at a very early age, and these did their 
 work so well, that in 1831, at the age of thirty-two, their 
 pupil could still write to Tchadai'ev, " 1 will speak to 
 you in the language of Europe ; it is more familiar to 
 me than our own." This boast of his was a slander on 
 himself. My readers shall judge. At ten years of age, 
 when living at Moscow, in a very literary circle, and see- 
 ing daily, in his father's house, such men as Karamzine, 
 Dmitriev, and Batiouchkov, the urchin, as was to be 
 
POUCHKINE IS7 
 
 jected, wrote French verses and borrowed from the 
 nriade. At fifteen, at the College of Tsarskold-Sidlo, 
 institution devoted to the education of the youth of 
 ! aristocracy, he was still rhyming in French : — 
 
 Vrai demon par Vespieglerie, 
 Vrai singe par sa mine, 
 Beaucoup et trop d itotcrderie, 
 Mafoi! voild, Pouchkine ! 
 
 ere were still French masters in this college, among 
 ;m one De Boudry, who, under this name, concealed 
 very compromising kinship ; he was own brother 
 
 Marat, and his views coincided with his family rela- 
 nship. 
 
 But in 1814 the European Messenger published imita- 
 ns in Russian verse of Ossian and Parny, the initials at 
 ; foot of which scarcely concealed the identity of one 
 the most insubordinate pupils in the College. There 
 s much more writing than studying done in that 
 ablishment. Even periodical sheets were edited by its 
 ;mbers. Among a group of young men who subse- 
 ently made their mark either in politics or literature 
 ^. M. Gortchakov, the future Chancellor, and A. A. 
 Iwig, the future poet, both belonged to it — Pouchkine 
 tinguished himself by his indefatigable diligence as a 
 blicist, and his excessive idleness as a student. Karam- 
 e and Joukovski thought highly of his verses, but his 
 .chers opined that he " had not much of a future be- 
 e him." In his own family circle this latter opinion 
 :essarily prevailed. When " M. de Boudry's" pupil 
 t college in 1817, he was at once received into the 
 ■zamas, and so plunged into the thick of the political 
 d literary fray. Ryleiev belonged to the coterie, and 
 
IS8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the time he spent in it was by no means occupied in 
 opposing Chichkov and his classic theories. 
 
 Yet Pouchkine's position in the cHque was chiefly 
 connected with Hterature. In 1818 he read his com- 
 rades the opening verses of Rousslane and Lioudmila. 
 Joukovski and Batiouchkine were astounded. "This is 
 something new ! " they cried. The Chichkov party 
 raised an indignant outcry. "A parody of Kircha 
 Danilov ! " they declared. But the poem was more 
 than that. Some years previously, in a still childish 
 effort entitled The Little Town [Gorodok), Pouchkine, 
 like Byron in the celebrated note published by Moore, 
 had been moved to make a list of the books he had 
 read, and of his own favourite writers. In it Moliere 
 is bracketed with Chdnier, and Beranger with Ossian. 
 All these are to be traced in Rousslane and Lioudmila, 
 but with them many other things — reminiscences of 
 Wieland and Herder, to wit, and the evident influence 
 of the Italian poets. The groundwork of the poem is 
 borrowed much more from Ariosto's humorous epic 
 than from the Kircha Danilov collection. Mere mar- 
 queterie, on the whole, and only moderately good. 
 Where was the novelty, then ? Herein : the application 
 of the Italian poet's ironic method to a national legend, 
 an attempt at which had already been made by Hamil- 
 ton and others in England ; but Hamilton, in his fairy 
 tales, had only made use of a fantastic element already 
 worn thin by fashion. Pouchkine— and this was his 
 mistake — undervalued the treasure he had just dis- 
 covered. Growing wiser as time went on, he was to 
 hit upon the true method of the popular story-teller — 
 simplicity. 
 
 The poem was not published until 1820, and before 
 
POUCHKINE 159 
 
 appeared a thunderbolt had fallen on the young 
 hor's head. Numerous other manuscript verses of 
 
 were in general circulation, among them an Ode to the 
 gger, suggested by the execution of Karl Sand, who 
 i murdered Kotzebue, epigrams on Araktchdiev, and a 
 bridid, imitated from Parny's War of the Gods, which, 
 
 profane and licentious obscenity, far surpassed its 
 idel, but which departed from it, more especially, in 
 total freedom from any ulterior philosophic intention, 
 etry of this description, simply and coarsely ribald, 
 
 alas ! of very frequent occurrence in Pouchkine's 
 rk, though it does not appear in any of the " complete 
 tions." In these the erotic poems are either omitted, 
 
 so much expurgated, by dint of pruning and arbi- 
 ry correction, that the original sense is completely 
 ;red. Thus in the four-line stanza addressed to 
 incess Ouroussov, the line — 
 
 " / have never believed in the Trinity " 
 
 urned into — 
 
 '' I have never believed in the Three Graces" ! 
 
 Some special collections of the poet's erotic verse 
 /e been printed abroad with his name on the cover ; 
 1 however his biographers may have endeavoured to 
 Juise the fact, it is certain that his disgrace in 1820 
 3 largely connected with the Gabrielid. Parny's imi- 
 3r narrowly escaped Siberia. By Karamzine's good 
 ces, his punishment was commuted to banishment to 
 Southern Provinces, and the adventure, in the result, 
 an aureole of glory on the exile's brow. Pouchkine's 
 ssian contemporaries, like Voltaire's in France, were 
 DOsed to confuse liberty with license. But the young 
 
i6o RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 man's retirement from St. Petersburg had a most salutary 
 effect, removing him from very harmful company, and 
 replacing its influence by two others of a very different 
 nature — the Caucasus and Byron. Between 1820 and 
 1824, the great poet of the future was destined to reveal 
 his power in works which were to cast a merciful shadow 
 over his early errors. All of these, The Prisoner of the 
 Caucasus, The Fountain of Baktchissarai, The Gipsies, and 
 the first cantos of Eugkne Onieguine, are the result of this 
 twofold inspiration. 
 
 It would be too much to say that the manner in 
 which he has drawn upon them shows perfect discern- 
 ment. He belonged too entirely to his period, his race, 
 and his surroundings for that. He certainly had better 
 stuff in him than that which goes to the making of a 
 sybarite in life and poetry. He had noble instincts, 
 splendid flights of enthusiasm. His education, his origin, 
 his surroundings, were always to conspire together to 
 clip his wings. From the Caucasus, this time, he takes 
 the scenery of his poem, fascinating but cold, with no 
 apparent hold either on the soul of the man who de- 
 scribes it, nor on the characters he sets down in its 
 midst. From Byron he borrows elements of expression, 
 occasionally elaborate, but still simple in form — sub- 
 jects, phrases, and tricks. At Kichdniev and at Odessa 
 he scandalised the inhabitants, and drove the authorities 
 to desperation, by his eccentric demeanour and his 
 pseudo-Byronic freaks, his adventurous rides across 
 the mountains, his gambling, his duels, his excess and 
 violence of every kind. There is a legend that during a 
 duel with an officer (Zoubov) he ate cherries under his 
 opponent's fire. This trait appears in one of the tales 
 included in the Stories of Bidkine (1830), one of his 
 
POUCHKINE i6i 
 
 3st popular works, and would thus seem to be 
 tobiographic. The details of his last and fatal meet- 
 l with Dantes-Heckeren prove that he was quite 
 pable of it. His physical courage was foolhardy and 
 iomitable. He is also reported to have lived for some 
 ae with a tribe of gipsies. And in all this I see more 
 travagance and wildness — Abyssinian or Muscovite — 
 at> romantic fancy. Byron was never either a gambler 
 
 a bully. He would never have bitten a woman's 
 oulder in a crowded theatre, in a fit of frantic jealousy, 
 ir punted at a gambling-table with kts own verses at the 
 te of five roubles for an alexandrine ! His Russian 
 /al was always, for the reasons I have stated, to 
 end his vital energy in feats of this description, and 
 appear after them, worn out and exhausted, just when 
 e noblest causes appealed to him for help. 
 
 The Prisoner of the Caucasus is a Childe Harold with 
 ore human nature about him, who allows himself to 
 lid tender converse with a fair Circassian. The dra- 
 itic struggle between the harem system and a man's 
 re for a single woman forms the subject of The Foun- 
 In of Baktchissarai, and it is also the subject of the 
 'aour. Aleko, the hero of the Gipsies, who flies from 
 e lying conventionalities of society, is Byron himself, 
 t a disfigured Byron, capable of introducing all the 
 ;aknesses and prejudices of the world from which he 
 s banished himself, into the gipsy camp. In this fact 
 )uchkine's apologists have endeavoured to discover a 
 pudiation of the Byronian ethics, and the poet's con- 
 rsion to nationalism. He never gave it a thought ! 
 riting to Joukovski in 1825, he says, "You ask what 
 my object in The Gipsies? My object is poetry." 
 3 had imitated Byron externally, because he was 
 
1 62 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Byron-mad at that particular moment. He had not 
 followed him in the internal development of his poem, 
 because he never was to comprehend the real founda- 
 tion of the Byronic inspiration. 
 
 The English poet was a man of the eighteenth century, 
 in love with a humanitarian ideal, bitterly surprised to 
 see it bespattered with blood and mud, and venting his 
 disappointment on humanity at large. Pouchkine was 
 a Russian of the nineteenth century, in love, for a pass- 
 ing moment, with liberty, because Chenier had sung its 
 praises in verse which he thought beautiful ; ready, when 
 he left St. Petersburg, to overthrow the whole world 
 because his banishment had been preceded — so it was 
 said — by an application of corporal punishment, the re- 
 ports concerning which, more than the thing itself, drove 
 him furious ; but who soon calmed down, confined his 
 ambition to a constitutional monarchy, and, after 1825, 
 became an unconditional supporter of the monarchical 
 system — politically speaking, in fact, a thoroughgoing 
 opportunist. From the ethical point of view, all that he 
 was ever to assimilate of Byron's spirit was his individual 
 independence with regard to social tradition and habits, 
 and some tricks besides, such as the mania for not 
 appearing a professional, the affectation of talking about 
 cards, horses, and women, instead of about literature, and 
 certain strong pretensions to aristocratic descent, con- 
 cerning which he explains himself in the celebrated piece 
 of writing entitled My Genealogy {Moia Rodoslovnaia), in 
 which he proudly claims the title of boui-geois, but of a 
 line that could reckon back six centuries in the annals of 
 his country. 
 
 The Gipsies, indeed, corresponds, in the poet's career, 
 to a turning-point which was to lead him far alike from 
 
POUCHKINE 163 
 
 y^ron and from Southern climes ; and this coincidence 
 doubtless not merely accidental. The influence of 
 rroundings always affected this impressionable nature 
 "ongly. When about to leave Odessa, he bade farewell 
 the sea, and to " the poet of the sea, powerful, deep, 
 oomy, unconquerable, even as the sea itself," in lines 
 lich are among the finest he ever wrote ; and thus he 
 vealed the mysterious link which, in his poetic thought, 
 )und the man and the element together. Fresh dis- 
 ace awaited him. At St. Petersburg he had outdone 
 irny ; at Odessa an English traveller introduced him 
 Shelley, and soon he went farther than the author 
 Prometheus Unbound. He felt strong leanings to "ab- 
 lute atheism," and was so imprvident as to state the 
 ct in a correspondence which, naturally, was inter- 
 pted. He was treated as a hardened offender, and 
 nt in disgrace to the care of his father, who lived in a 
 nely village in the Government of Pskov. 
 
 This banishment was infinitely more severe. Mikhai- 
 rekol6 Vi-as very different from Odessa, and the elder 
 3uchkine took his responsibility as jailer quite seriously, 
 le poet's letters were opened. He was obliged to give 
 I seeing his friends. At last Joukovski interfered, and 
 such purpose that the son was at all events left alone 
 the village, his father taking his departure, and leaving 
 3 local police to watch the behaviour of his perverted 
 ild, with whom he refused to hold any intercourse 
 latever. Friends began to make their appearance, 
 d the poet was able to mingle some entertainment 
 th his literary labours, which still continued. His 
 ison with Mme. Kern dates from this period. At the 
 lie time he was passing The Gipsies through the 
 ess, beginning his Boris Godounov and carrying on 
 
1 64 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 his Eugene Oni^guine. I am eager to reach this latter 
 poem. 
 
 The subject is slight. Spread out over seven thousand 
 lines, it gives us a confused sense of emptiness. In a 
 country place, where Onieguine has retired for the sake 
 of solitude, he encounters the artless love of Tatiana, a 
 young girl living in a neighbouring manor-house. He is 
 inclined to look down upon her ; she takes the initiative, 
 and writes to him, offering her love. Here we have a 
 first indication of national originality, the direct outcome 
 of local tradition. See the Bylines. Onieguine is not 
 touched. In the most correct fashion, he contrives a 
 tete-a-tete with the young girl, and sententiously informs 
 her, " I am not the man for you." They part, lose sight 
 of each other for several years, until, at a second meeting, 
 the scornful hero finds himself in the presence of a fair 
 princess, flanked by a gouty husband and surrounded 
 by a circle of adorers. He recognises Tatiana. This 
 time it is he who writes, and the sense of his letter may 
 be easily divined. She replies in her turn, " I cannot 
 give myself to you. I have loved you, I love you still. 
 But I am married, and I will keep my faith." 
 
 There we have the whole story, if we add the episode 
 of the duel with Lenski, Onieguine's friend and the 
 betrothed of Tatiana's sister, whom the hero kills, nobody 
 quite knows why, unless it be to demonstrate that he 
 could be odious, which might have been suspected with- 
 out this incident. Can any one conceive an epic poem 
 (for this is very nearly what we have here) in French, 
 German, or English on such a theme? But it was 
 written in Russian. It could not have been written in 
 any other language. The subject is like those land- 
 scapes on the steppe, into which God has put so little. 
 
POUCHKINE i6s 
 
 in which men who know how to dream can see 
 luch. ' 
 
 -*ouchkine's poem is full of digressions, a constant 
 mentary on the story, apparently very Byronic, but 
 eality very different, both in substance and in form, 
 tn and substance are affected, in the case of both 
 :s, by the fact that one belonged to a country where 
 I speak much and unconstrainedly, and the other to 
 )untry where expression is rare and reserved. The 
 Hers on the steppe are, as a rule, a silent race, 
 asionally some special circumstance may unseal their 
 ; then comes something like a torrent which has 
 ien its banks. They grow talkative and prolix to 
 ;ss. But they are doomed to continue within the 
 ow and commonplace intellectual horizon that hems 
 n in, with all the paltry ideas and interests it involves. 
 There was no Hellespont for Pouchkine to cross at 
 hallovskold. The only water he met with on his 
 cs was a narrow rivulet, which he could cross dry 
 ed. We see the consequence in a strong touch of 
 commonplace in parts of his work. To European 
 lers the interest of his poem centres in the character 
 tnieguine. Now this "Muscovite dressed up as Childe 
 old" — as Tatiana is fain to call him, wondering 
 ther she has not to deal with "a parody" — this 
 tichanted man of pleasure, is neither Childe Harold 
 Manfred, neither Obermann nor Charles Moor ; he 
 Eugene Onieguine, a character so thoroughly and 
 ifically Russian that no equivalent to it can be found 
 le literature of any other country. In Russian litera- 
 
 on the contrary, it constantly appears. It appears 
 ;r the name of Tchatski in the work of Griboi^dov, as 
 '.horine in Lermontov's, as Oblomov in Gontcharov's, 
 
1 66 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and Peter Besouchov in Tolstoi's. And always we see the 
 same man. What man ? A Russian, I reply — a type which, 
 under Tourgueniev's hand, again, is to incarnate a whole 
 social category, the innumerable army of the Lichnyiie 
 lioudi, — superfluous men, — outside the ranks, and unem- 
 ployed, in a society within which they do not know what 
 to do with themselves, and outside which they would 
 know still less ; a man of noble birth, whose ancestors 
 were enrolled in the active service of the Tsar, and who, 
 freed from that service, is as much puzzled how to use 
 his liberty as an African native would be if he were 
 presented with an instrument for wireless telegraphy. 
 This Onieguine, this Tchatski, this Pietchorine feels he 
 is, and will be, a superfluity in the sphere in which his 
 birth has placed him, and cannot conceive how he is 
 to escape from it. He begins everything, and per- 
 severes in nothing. He tempts life, and even death, 
 with the idea that what lies beyond may be something 
 better. He is always waiting for something ; nothing 
 comes ; life slips by ; and when, at five-and-twenty, he 
 would fain fall back on love, the answer falls, "Too 
 late 1 Look in thine own face. Already it is full of 
 wrinkles 1 " 
 
 Dostoievski, who identifies this type with that of 
 Aleko, recognises in it, further, the eternal vagabondage 
 of the civilised Russian, parted by his civilisation from 
 the mass of his own countrymen. We see him wan- 
 dering hither and thither, taking refuge in Socialism or 
 Nihilism — like Aleko in the gipsy camp — and then cast- 
 ing them aside, in his pursuit of an ideal he will never 
 attain. The character will bear many other interpreta- 
 tions, so expressive, so comprehensive is it, and at the 
 same time so vague and undecided. Pouchkine, at all 
 
POUCHKINE 167 
 
 its, has modelled it in the true clay, drawn from the 
 7 heart of the national life and history. 
 I cannot share Dostolevski's opinion of Tatiana. Her 
 re is charming. Is it really and essentially typical, 
 
 Russian ? In its mingling of resolution with grace 
 
 tenderness, it may be, although the famous letter 
 which she reveals her love is borrowed from the 
 cvelle Heloise. In several places Pouchkine has simply 
 islated from Rousseau. In her profound devotion to 
 y, again, I will admit it. This trait in Tatiana's char- 
 ;r is the legacy of distant ancestors. The obligatory 
 . universal military service which for centuries called 
 ry man of the free classes away from his own fire- 
 ;, had, as its inevitable consequence, the development 
 certain qualities within the home, and the exaltation 
 certain virtues in the women of the country. But 
 Dostoievski's view, Tatiana's great originality lies in 
 
 final feature, that of her heroic adherence to her 
 jugal fidelity ; and I fear this presumption may call 
 nile to my reader's countenance. 
 Pouchkine, after he had composed the first few cantos 
 Eugene Onie'guine, wrote thus to one of his friends, 
 have begun a poem in the style of Don Juan!' A 
 r later he writes, " I see nothing in common between 
 ^ene Onieguine and Don Juan ! " These changes 
 ifiew are common among poets. But Pouchkine was 
 it — the second time ! In vain do we seek, in the 
 ;sian poet's work, for the religious, social, and political 
 losophy which is the basis of all the English poet wrote. 
 
 do not find a symptom of Byron's vehement protest 
 inst the cankers of modern civilisation, poverty, war, 
 potism, the desperate struggles of ambition and appe- 
 , The picture of the soldier robbing the poor peasant 
 
1 58 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of what remained in his porringer never haunted the 
 brain of the recluse of Mikallovskoie. In him Byron's 
 excessive individuaHsm, at war with society, was replaced 
 by a savage worship of his own individual self. In 
 Onieguine's eyes, as a Russian critic (Pissarev) has ob- 
 served, life signifies to walk on the boulevards, to dine at 
 Talon's, to go to theatres and balls. " Feeling " is to envy 
 the waves the privilege of lapping the feet of a pretty 
 woman. Looking fairly at the matter, the hero's disgust 
 with life is very like what Germans denominate Katzen- 
 jammer. And if, as Bi61inski affirms, the poem is " an 
 encyclopasdia of Russian life," we must conclude that 
 Russian life, in those days, consisted in eating, drinking, 
 dancing, going to the play, being bored, falling in love 
 out of sheer idleness, and suffering — either from boredom 
 or from some love-affair. In the aristocratic sphere to 
 which the poet's observation was confined, this picture 
 may, historically speaking, be pretty nearly correct. 
 
 On the other hand, it was not Don Juan, but rather 
 Beppo, which Pouchkine had in view when he com- 
 menced his work, not without memories of Sterne, and 
 even of Rabelais. But by the time the first thousand 
 lines were finished, he had forgotten Byron. At that 
 moment there was a revulsion in the poet's ideas, arising 
 out of his experiences at Mikha'i'lovskoie, and contem- 
 porary events in general. The catastrophe of the 25th 
 December 1825 found him still in his enforced retire- 
 ment. Most of its victims were his relations or his 
 friends. If he had been at St. Petersburg, he would 
 certainly have made common cause with them. Not 
 content with blessing the providential chance which had 
 saved him from this fresh adventure, he bethought him- 
 self that it would be as well never to run such risks 
 
POUCHKINE 169 
 
 lin. He tore himself finally away from the gipsies, 
 ons of the desert and of liberty," and sought shelter 
 the theory of Art for art' s sake. 
 
 This was to lead him to Goethe, and from Goethe to 
 akespeare. No more verses like those of Solitude, 
 itten at Mikhallovskole, were to brand the name 
 
 "serfdom" with disgrace. No more appeals for 
 ellectual union with Sand or Radichtchev. The rup- 
 e with the past was utter and complete. Sometimes 
 vas to cause the poet pain, as when the "enlightened 
 spotism," of which he had become an adherent, laid 
 
 iron fingers on his own brow. "The devil," he was 
 
 write, " has caused me to be born, in this country, 
 :h talent and a heart." But in vain was the turmoil of 
 )ught and aspiration and revolt, in which he had once 
 ired, to call upon him to return. He never descended 
 m his Olympus. 
 
 Silence, mad nation, slave of need and toil ! 
 Thine insolent murmtirings are hateful to me / 
 
 To the study of Shakespeare, into which he now threw 
 aself with avidity, he added that of Karamzine. In 
 : solitude of Mikhailovskoie the poet laboured to supply 
 inadequacy of his "cursed education." An old nurse, 
 na Rodionovna, guided him, meanwhile, through the 
 nderful mazes of the national legends. This resulted 
 the conception of Boris Godounov. In the figure of 
 j throned parveizu Pouchkine has endeavoured to 
 rge the features of Shakespeare's Richard III., Mac- 
 h, and Henry IV. Certain scenes in the play— the 
 :tion scene, and that in which Boris gives his parting 
 msels to his son — are directly taken from the English 
 ywright. Taken as a whole, it is only a chapter out 
 
I70 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of Karamzine, arranged in dialogue form after Shake- 
 speare's style, and written in blank verse iambics of five 
 feet — a metre familiar to English and German poets. 
 But all that is best in it — the scenes in which Pouchkine 
 puts his old nurse's tales into his own words, introducing 
 the popular element, with its simple temperament and 
 wit and speech, the only ones which stand out with real 
 life and colour — must be ascribed to Arina Rodionovna. 
 The character of the impostor Demetrius, which has 
 brought bad luck to every one who has attempted it, 
 including Merimee, whatever Brandes may say, is a com- 
 plete failure. Side by side with that mysterious puppet 
 Pouchkine had a vision — his letters prove it — of a Marina 
 who may have been historically genuine, and who cer- 
 tainly is psychologically interesting. " She had but one 
 passion, and this was ambition, but this to a degree of 
 energy and fury luhich it is difficult to express. Behold 
 her I after she has tasted the sweets of royalty, drunk with 
 her own fancy, prostitute herself to one adventurer after 
 another, now sharing the loathsome bed of a Jew, now 
 the tent of some Cossack, always ready to give herself to 
 any one who can offer her the faintest hope of a throne 
 whicli exists no longer . . . braving poverty and shame, 
 and at the same time treating with the king of Poland 
 as his equal!" The portrait is sketched with a master- 
 hand. Unfortunately, not a trace of it appears in the 
 single scene, clumsy and improbable, wherein the poet 
 brings the daughter of the Palatine of Sandomir face to 
 face with her adventurous betrothed. The two figures 
 in the play are the faintest of sketches, and, except for 
 Eugine Onieguine, the whole of Pouchkine's work, poems, 
 plays, and novels, is no more than a series of sketches. 
 Poltava was written in the course of a few weeks, the 
 
POUCHKINE 171 
 
 author, it would seem, having thus endeavoured to rid 
 himself of a remnant of his Byronian ballast, although 
 his Mazeppa has nothing in common with Byron's. The 
 only Mazeppa Byron knew was the Mazeppa of Voltaire. 
 If the English poet had been aware — so Pouchkine him- 
 self declares — of the love, the mutual love, between the 
 aged Hetman and the daughter of Kotchoubey, no one 
 would have dared to lay a finger on the subject after 
 him ; but in Poltava this love, unexplained, without any 
 psychological reason about it, merely gives us the sensa- 
 tion of being brought face to face with another irritating 
 and useless enigma. All this time, Pouchkine was still 
 working at his Oni^guine. He could only work when 
 the work flowed easily. If inspiration failed him, he 
 put the subject aside for a while, and looked about for 
 another. Thus, at this moment, Shakespeare's Lucretia 
 gave him the idea of a burlesque parody, which de- 
 veloped into Count Nouline — a very unpleasing story, 
 as I should think it, of a nobleman who has his ears 
 heartily boxed by a lady just as he lays his hand upon 
 her bed. This incident caught the attention of the St. 
 Petersburg censure. The Emperor himself interfered, 
 and the author was forced to cast a veil over Count 
 Nouline's performances. 
 
 It was only a literary bauble, although, in later days, 
 some critics have chosen to discover in it a deep inten- 
 tion, a prelude to Gogol's novels on social subjects, and 
 a criticism of the habits of the day. In Onieguine 
 and Boris Godounov Pouchkine was putting out all his 
 strength, and already a new life was dawning for him, at 
 once an apotheosis and an abyss, in which his splendid 
 powers were to be prematurely engulfed. 
 
 On 2nd September 1826, a courier from the Tsar 
 
1/2 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 arrived at MikhaYlovskoie, made the poet get into a post- 
 chaise, carried him off, full gallop, no one knew 
 whither, — and the villagers wondered, filled with terror. 
 Some weeks previously, Pouchkine had written to the 
 sovereign, beseeching his forgiveness in humble, nay, 
 even in humiliating terms. This was the Tsar's reply. 
 The courier and his companion travelled straight to St. 
 Petersburg, and once there, the poet was obliged, before 
 resting or changing his clothes, to wait upon the sove- 
 reign. There was a story, in later days, that in his 
 agitation he dropped a very compromising document — 
 an affecting address to the Decembrists — upon the 
 palace stairs. It is just possible. The poet frequently 
 behaved like a madcap. And the verses are still in ex- 
 istence. They would not, I imagine, have affected the 
 Tsar's inclination to mercy. Their optimism is anything 
 but fierce. The author, having backed out of the busi- 
 ness himself, was very ready to fancy it would turn out 
 well for everybody concerned. The interview was cour- 
 teous on the imperial side, humble and repentant enough 
 on the poet's, and he received permission to live in 
 Moscow or St. Petersburg, as best it suited him. 
 
 Alas ! his admirers were soon to regret Mikhailov- 
 skoi'd. He plunged into a life of dissipation and debau- 
 chery, — nights spent over cards and in orgies of every 
 kind, with here and there, when disgust fell upon his 
 soul, short periods of retirement to his former place of 
 exile, where inspiration came no more to visit him. 
 It was not till his betrothal to Natalia Nicolaievna 
 Gontcharov (1830) that he passed into a short period 
 of meditation, and experienced a fresh flow of crea- 
 tive power. He was able to carry on his Onieguine, 
 and, while writing a great number of lyric verses, to pro- 
 
POUCHKINE 173 
 
 duce those popular tales in rhyme of which so many 
 illustrated editions now exist, and some of which, such as 
 The Legend of Tsar Saltane, are master-pieces. The little 
 dramatic fancies entitled The Stingy Knight, Mozart and 
 Salieri, and Tlie Stone Landlord, also belong to this pro- 
 ductive period. Their value seems to me to have been 
 overrated. 
 
 But once more, alas 1 The marriage proved disas- 
 trous. The poet, who so sadly described himself as an 
 "atheist" concerning happiness, and cynically referred 
 to his engagement as his " hundred and third love," was 
 evidently not suited to domestic joys. After a curtailed 
 honeymoon, the young couple plunged into the whirl- 
 pool of social gaiety, each going his or her own way, and 
 seeking amusement that was less and less shared by the 
 other. Soon anxiety was added to indifference. Pouch- 
 kine, who recklessly spent all he earned — very consi- 
 derable sums for that period — was in constant financial 
 straits. He accepted a well-paid sinecure, under the 
 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and aspired to be Karam- 
 zine's successor as historiographer to the crown. His 
 desire was attained, and he plunged into the archives, 
 intending to produce a history of Peter the Great. But 
 Catherine's more recent reign, and the dramatic episode 
 of Pougatchov's rebellion were destined to take hold of 
 his imagination. On this subject he successively pro- 
 duced an historical narrative and a novel. The Captain's 
 Daughter. The narrative is dry. The novel has interest 
 and charm, both arising from its great simplicity and 
 intense feeling for reality. The figure, as exquisite as 
 it is real, of the old mentor serving-man, Savelitch, has 
 its niche in the gallery of types which will go down to 
 posterity. But whether influenced by Walter Scott, or 
 
174 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 out of respect to the official authority with which he 
 had just been invested, the author never leaves the 
 track of ordinary commonplace. Of the political and 
 social problems which surged through the gloomy epi- 
 sode, of the eddies of popular passion which swept the 
 " Marquis of Pougatchov " to the front, the poet either 
 perceived, or hinted, nothing. 
 
 This period of Pouchkine's life was fertile in plans 
 and sketches, wherein the influence of English litera- 
 ture seems decisive, but wherein the poet's own creative 
 power and literary tact are too often at a loss. At one 
 moment he had an idea of imitating Bulwer and his 
 Pelham in a novel of contemporary manners, which, 
 with its chronicle of the doings of several generations, 
 would have been a precursor of War and Peace. Again, 
 he drew up in French, and with many mistakes, both in 
 spelling and grammar, the outlines of a play or poem 
 with Pope Joan for its heroine. The play seemed too like 
 Faust, so the author inclined to a poem, to be written in 
 the style of Coleridge's Christabel. But the plan was 
 never put into execution, and we are not tempted to 
 regret it. 
 
 The author of Eugene Onieguine was visibly approach- 
 ing mental exhaustion. In his new surroundings, his 
 inspiration was failing him, and his mental horizon nar- 
 rowing. In 1831, the sympathy stirred in the West by the 
 Polish insurrection inspired him with an apostrophe in 
 rhyme, addressed to the " Calumniators of Russia," and 
 this is all he can find to put them to silence : " Know you 
 how many we are, from the frozen rocks of Finland to the 
 burning sands of Colchis ? " A mere appeal to brute 
 numbers, such as the present Emperor of China might 
 be tempted to make against a European coalition ; and, 
 
POUCHKINE 17 S 
 
 after all, no more than a paraphrase of the well-known 
 sally by the same author, "Naturally I despise my 
 country, from its head to its feet ; but that foreigners 
 should share this sentiment displeases me ! " 
 
 In the course of the following years a few rare flashes 
 of powerful and original inspiration, such as the Bronze 
 Horseman, dedicated to Peter the Great, are preceded and 
 followed by more and more frequent returns to imitation 
 and adaptation. Meanwhile, the poet's letters, hke his 
 verses, prove him to be in the grip of a steadily strength- 
 ening despair, and haunted by the gloomiest fancies. He 
 chose the place for his grave ; he prayed God not to 
 deprive him of his reason — " anything rather than that." 
 In 1834 he wrote The Queen of Spades, a fantastic tale 
 after Hoffman, and the weakest of all his works. In 
 1836 he tried militant journalism with a paper. The Con- 
 temporary, the editorship of which he undertook. It was 
 a barren sheet, uninteresting, colourless, and flavour- 
 less. The Government historiographer, who frequently 
 solicited pecuniary assistance, which never seemed to get 
 him out of his difficulties, champed his bit, and often 
 flew into a fury. His pleasures, his passions, his bad 
 companions, could not blind his eyes to the degra- 
 dation of his position as a self-surrendered rebel, and a 
 domestic prophet. It drove him frantic, and yet he had 
 not sufficient energy to shake himself clear. This tem- 
 pestuous condition of mind was sure to end in a catas- 
 trophe. It might have been that plunge into mental 
 darkness at the idea of which he shuddered, thinking, 
 doubtless, of Batiouchkine ; but it came by the bullet 
 fired by Dantes, a French Legitimist of Dutch origin, 
 the adopted son of the Dutch Minister, Baron von 
 Heeckeren. On January 27, 1837, after having received 
 
176 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 anonymous letters reflecting on his domestic honour, 
 Pouchkine went out to fight his last duel. Mortally 
 wounded, he still had strength to deliver his own fire, 
 and to give a cry of triimiphant rage when he saw his 
 adversary drop upon the snowy ground. At the risk 
 of being dubbed sacrilegious by many of my Russian 
 readers, I venture to express my conviction that this 
 tragic end of a career that was already hopelessly com- 
 promised did not rob Russia of a great poet, and this, 
 too, was the opinion of the best informed among his 
 contemporaries. Bielinski had declared that career 
 closed in 1835, from the artistic point of view, and had 
 indicated Gogol as the writer destined to replace the 
 author of Eugene Onieguine at the head of the literature 
 of his country. He never retracted this opinion. 
 
 In his own country, Pouchkine's glory, though un- 
 rivalled during his lifetime, has, like that of his prede- 
 cessors, undergone various vicissitudes since his death. 
 In the first instance, there came a period of natural and 
 inevitable obscuration, during the great political and 
 intellectual crisis that filled up the years between i860 
 and 1880. It then necessarily became evident that the 
 poet had given no thought to the essential problems 
 which, even in his lifetime, had passionately interested 
 an increasing number of the best intelligences. At that 
 period, in the eyes of the eager youth who followed 
 the teachings of Bielinski and Dobrolioubov, Pouchkine 
 took on the appearance of a sybarite, at once scornful 
 and puerile. Later, when the theory of Art for arts sake 
 had recovered some followers, in a calmer condition of 
 society, where the delicate joys of existence were once 
 more enjoyed, his star rose again. It is now in its full 
 zenith. 
 
POUCHKINE 177 
 
 When we compare Pouchkine with his peers, we 
 must acknowledge that he certainly does not possess 
 either the depth of Shakespeare and Goethe, the strength 
 of Byron, Schiller, and Heine, the passion of Lermontov 
 and De Musset, the fulness of Hugo, nor even that gift 
 of communion with the very soul of the nation which 
 enabled Mickiewicz to say, " I am a million ! " Pouchkine 
 frequently, however, surpasses them all in the exception- 
 ally perfect harmony between his subject and his form, 
 a miraculous appropriateness of expression, a singularly 
 happy mingling of grace and vigour, and an almost in- 
 fallible feeling for rhythm. Once or twice he almost 
 touched the sublime, but he never ventured to cross the 
 terrible threshold where so many poets have stumbled on 
 the ridiculous. Except for a few fragments such as TJie 
 Prophet (1826), a superb though somewhat incoherent 
 paraphrase of some verses from Isaiah, which Dostoievski 
 was fond of declaiming, he is essentially a "graceful" 
 poet. 
 
 His ardent, violent, impetuous nature was mysteri- 
 ously combined with a singularly calm creative power, 
 which had complete control of itself and its subject. 
 The very act of creation freed the poet from all his 
 other intoxications. The classic ecstasy, the romantic 
 over-excitement, were replaced, in his case, by " the 
 cold-blooded inspiration " of which he speaks in an ad- 
 dress to Joukovski. And it is in this that he was essen- 
 tially a realist. In Shakespeare's work, he set Falstaff 
 above every other character, because it appeared to him 
 the crowning type, that in which the poet had most 
 thoroughly displayed the scope of his genius ; and the 
 effervescent temperament and sceptical demonism of the 
 Don Juan of the Southern legends were transformed, in 
 
178 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 his conception, into a voluptuous enjoyment of existence, 
 and a tranquil consciousness of beauty. 
 
 Did his work indicate, and even incarnate, the true 
 destiny of the Russian people, that harmonious fusion of 
 various and conflicting elements which is the dream of 
 some contemporary prophets ? Dostoievski thought so. 
 Grigoriev believed that nothing but the poet's death pre- 
 vented him from realising this compromise, the formula 
 of which, through gentleness and love, the national genius 
 would have been called to furnish. It is curious that in 
 this connection Dostoievski should have appealed to The 
 Banquet, which is merely a fairly close translation by 
 Pouchkine of some scenes from John Wilson's poem The 
 City of the Plague (1816). The aptitude and ease with 
 which the Russian poet reproduced these pictures of 
 English life, indicated, in his compatriot's view, an excep- 
 tional gift of comprehension. But among the couplets 
 with which the translator has enriched the original text, 
 I find a comparison of the plague with winter, which 
 certainly has no British character about it. 
 
 Pouchkine's universality, which has so exercised the 
 minds of some of his Russian admirers, is nothing more, 
 as it seems to me, than a feature of his Romanticism. 
 Romanticism, when it gave birth to historical poetry, 
 evolved a general conception that beside our present 
 ideal of beauty others may exist, in the limits of time 
 and space. This programme has been realised by Goethe 
 with his Tasso, his Iphigenia, his second Faust, the 
 fellow-citizen of every nation, the contemporary of every 
 age ; by Thomas Moore — with his descriptive odes on 
 the Bermudas, his sentimental Irish Melodies, his poetic 
 romance, the scene of which lies in Egypt, his romantic 
 poem on a Persian subject, — with a fulness which Pouch- 
 
DELWIG 179 
 
 kine does not even approach. None the less, he was one 
 of the greatest artists of any time, and to have possessed 
 him may well be a sufficient glory to a young nation, and 
 a literature still in its beginnings. 
 
 His language, rich, supple, and melodious as it is, 
 still betrays the nature of his education. M. Korch has 
 lately pointed out its numerous inaccuracies and fre- 
 quent Gallicisms. The influence of French models is less 
 apparent in his verse, than in his prose narratives. The 
 wording of The Captain's Daughter, curt, clear, a little 
 dry, is essentially Voltairian. The line generally used by 
 the poet is an eight-syllabled iambic, a metre common to , 
 much popular poetry. He also frequently uses rhyme, 
 and even the alternate masculine and feminine rhyme, 
 marked by the tonic accent {Jena, masculine rhyme ; 
 kniga, feminine rhyme), but in this respect he has not 
 shown remarkable artistic skill. As early as 1830 the 
 author of Eugene Onieguine was surrounded by a com- 
 pact group of pupils and imitators. Very severe on him- 
 self, inclined to be indulgent to others, affable as a rule, 
 except to a few St. Petersburg journalists, he considered 
 Baratinski's work superior to his own, and submitted 
 what he wrote himself to the judgment of Delwig. 
 
 Baron Antony Antonovitch Delwig (i 798-1 831) 
 left the College of Tsarskoie-Sielo at the same time as 
 Pouchkine, and after an examination the results of which 
 were almost as unsatisfactory. He, too, had spent his 
 time in rhyming verses, and, in 1814, made his first public 
 appearance in the European Messenger, with an ode on 
 the taking of Paris. Aided by the good-natured Krylov, 
 he found shelter for his unconquerable indolence and 
 precociovis epicurism in a modest appointment as sub- 
 librarian, and continued to feed the almanacks with his 
 
I So RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 lyric poems, of which Pouchkine held a high opinion, on 
 account — so he averred — of their wonderful divination of 
 Greek antiquity, through German translations and Italian 
 imitations. Delwig, of course, had learnt neither Greek 
 nor Latin at the college. In 1829, he was proposing to 
 publish a newspaper of literary criticism, but his health, 
 already weak, gave way completely, and he died of con- 
 sumption in quite early manhood. 
 
 Eugene Abramovitch Baratinski (1800-1844) began 
 life in stormy fashion, being obliged to leave the Pages' 
 Corps, and forbidden to follow any profession but that 
 of arms, and only as a private soldier. He was serving 
 in the Light Cavalry of the Guard when Delwig, without 
 even giving him notice of his intention, published some 
 of his verses. They were inspired by that specifically 
 Russian form of Byronism, mingled with Anglo-French 
 sentimentalism, which had been introduced by Joukovski, 
 and adopted by Pouchkine in his first productions, — a 
 dreamy, disenchanted, melancholy form it was. The 
 condition of things imposed on the country by the rule 
 of Araktcheiev was eminently calculated to encourage a 
 form of inspiration destined, in Lermontov's hands, to 
 attain such remarkable power and fulness. Before 
 Baratinski was promoted an officer, he was hailed as a 
 great poet. This did not take place until 1825, after he had 
 done a long spell of garrison duty in Finland, where he 
 wrote his poem Eda, which has a Finnish heroine. He 
 was never to lose the impression of the severe scenery 
 which had inspired this work. Two other poems of an 
 epic nature. The Ball and The Gipsy Girl, are dated from 
 Moscow, whither the author — having married a wife and 
 left the service — was able to retire, in 1827. But, after 
 his stern experiences in his own land, foreign countries 
 
BARATINSKI i8i 
 
 had an irresistible attraction for him. He had the de- 
 hght of spending the winter of 1843-44 ^'^ Paris, in 
 intimate intercourse with Vigny, Sainte Beuve, Nodier, 
 Merimee, Lamartine, Guizot, and Augustin Thierry, and 
 even of seeing Italy, — a dream he had cherished ever 
 since his childhood. He wrote little in those days, and 
 that little entirely in the lyric style. On his road to 
 Naples he wrote T/ie Steam-Boat, ono of his last poems, 
 and perhaps the best of all, and he died happy, as if in 
 realisation of the popular saying, on the shores of the 
 famous bay. 
 
 Pouchkine called him " our first elegiac poet." The 
 ingenious mingling of playfulness and passion, meta- 
 physics and sentiment, in The Ball, filled him with ad- 
 miration. " No writer has put more sentiment into his 
 thought, and more thought into his sentiment," he de- 
 clared, and twitted the public of his day with not appre- 
 ciating at its proper value a work the maturity of which 
 placed it above that public's level. The poet of The Ball 
 was, in Pouchkine's judgment, a thinker, and on this 
 account, especially, he held him to be a very great and 
 very original intelligence. This judgment we may fairly 
 ratify, although we must not overlook the surroundings 
 amidst which it was pronounced. I doubt whether 
 Baratinski's originality would have been much admired 
 in Paris. 
 
 Russia possessed, just at this time, another thinker, 
 of very different powers, who had not the good fortune 
 to be admired by Pouchkine. The orbit of this short- 
 lived star was not that in which such men as Baratinsld 
 and Delwig revolved. He might, perhaps, have drawn 
 closer to them, had not his course been so suddenly in- 
 terrupted. My readers will have guessed to whom I refer. 
 
1 82 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Alexander Sergui£i^vitch GRiBoi]iDOv(i795-i829) 
 had one advantage over Baratinski and Delwig, that of 
 a very thorough education. The year 1812 did, indeed, 
 break up his studies, and forced from him the subse- 
 quent remark that it had taken him four years to forget 
 the four he had spent in a hussar regiment. He cast 
 aside his uniform in 1817, but did not leave the social 
 circle in which his birth and his uniform had placed 
 him. And thus, when he began to think and write, he 
 naturally found himself far removed from the brilliant 
 constellation of which the Arzamas was the centre, and 
 Pouchkine the bright particular star. 
 
 The Biessieda held out inviting arms to him. Prince 
 ChakhofskoY, that insipid and prolific playwright, assisted 
 him in his first attempts, and the whole sheeplike band 
 of the Chichkovists attended on his steps. Before these 
 bonds could be broken, he was to leave St. Petersburg, 
 and enter the diplomatic career. 
 
 He went to Persia, then to Georgia, found time for 
 labour and meditation, and in 1823, the manuscript of 
 his comedy The Misfortune of being too Clever {Gore at 
 ouina) was passed from hand to hand in St. Petersburg. 
 The effect may be compared to that produced in 
 France, forty years previously, by Le Mariage de Figaro. 
 The circumstances, too, were similar. The play could 
 not be performed in public ; it was played in private 
 houses, and during the Carnival, the students gave scraps 
 of it in the open streets. For a moment, the success, 
 brilliant as it was, of the first cantos of Eugene Onieguine 
 found a rival, and Pouchkine seems to have felt 
 some annoyance ; for, prompt as his admiration for his 
 fellow-poets generally was, he spoke of this work with 
 great severity. His criticisms found a speedy echo, and 
 
GRIBOlfiDOV 183 
 
 Griboiedov, disheartened and embittered, betook himself 
 back to Georgia. He was arrested in 1826, on suspicion 
 of having connived at the attempt of the Decembrists, 
 was set at Hberty, served as Paskievitch's attach^ during 
 the Persian campaign, and only returned to St. Peters- 
 burg in 1828, armed with a treaty of peace and a tragedy 
 — The Georgian Night, inspired by Shakespeare, and 
 a very ordinary performance. He was sent back to 
 Persia as Minister Plenipotentiary, and was stabbed 
 to death during a popular insurrection at Teheran, on 
 January 30, 1829. 
 
 He had made his first appearance as a Shakespearian 
 translator, and long nursed a plan for adapting the 
 whole of the English playwright's work to the Russian 
 stage. But even as a schoolboy he was dreaming of 
 the comedy which has shed glory on his name, and 
 noted its analogy with Wieland's Dwellers in Abdera, 
 and Moliere's Misanthrope. The close of The Misfortune 
 of being too Clever is in fact copied, almost wholesale, 
 from the French dramatist's master-piece. " I go to 
 seek some spot in the universe where I may find a corner 
 which will shelter a feeling and wounded soul. My coach! 
 wy coach ! " And yet Tchatski, who speaks these lines, 
 is not a misanthropist. He is rather, as the modern 
 critic puts it, a misotchine. If, like Alceste, he has 
 conceived a "fearful hatred," it is less a hatred of 
 humanity, than a hatred of a certain social condition, 
 local in its essence, limited, and remediable. What 
 offends him in this condition, is the craze for foreign im- 
 portations, and the tyrannical influence of the tchine, both 
 of them absolutely contingent peculiarities, and which 
 strike him as odious because he has seen other states 
 of society in which these things do not exist at all, or 
 13 
 
1 84 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 at all events are not considered elements of happiness. 
 He is live-and-twenty, and has just left Germany and 
 France behind him. Alceste is forty, and has left 
 life behind him. Moliere's comedy, besides, may be 
 summed up as a study of character. The special feature 
 of Griboiedov's piece is its presentment, strongly carica- 
 tured, of a fashionable Muscovite drawing-room in the 
 year 1820. Into this drawing-room Tchatski falls like 
 a thunderbolt. What ideas does he bring with him ? 
 A confused medley, the pattern of the intellectual fer- 
 ment of that period. Thinkers and artists alike, in the 
 fatherland of Tchatski and of his creator, were then 
 attaining a more and more vivid perception of the truth, 
 and a more and more simple interpretation of what they 
 saw. It was the birth of original literature and of the 
 natural school — I do not use the word naturalist, for 
 that, in Russia, would be a heresy. But reality, in this 
 case, was not attractive. The clearer the consciousness, 
 the more evident became the sense of the national 
 deficiencies and blemishes, and the more eager the 
 longing to supply the first and wipe out the last. But 
 how ? A twofold answer came from the two currents, 
 Western and Nationalist, which still swayed men's 
 minds. 
 
 Should there be a concentric movement towards 
 European civilisation, with an appropriation of the tradi- 
 tional rules of its development ? Or should that civilisa- 
 tion be equalled, and even surpassed, by an independent 
 application of internal formulae ? Men hesitated as to 
 which horn of the dilemma should be grasped, but the 
 certainty and agreement as to the impossibility of main- 
 taining the status quo were absolute. Outside the walls 
 of Muscovite drawing-rooms, where idolatry of the tchine 
 
GRIBOIl^DOV 1 85 
 
 still reigned, the call for reform was universal. The pro- 
 gramme of both parties included the raising up of the 
 lower classes, now wedded to ignorance and barbarism, 
 under the bondage of serfdom. And thus the movement 
 towards the emancipation of the national literature was 
 complicated by social and political elements. Many 
 minds confused the intellectual current with the projects 
 of social reform it bore iipon its bosom. Griboiedov, 
 who makes his Tchatski proclaim his preference for the 
 national dress, his love for the past history of his country, 
 his admiration for the instances of heroism and moral 
 nobility it contains, bore the reputation of being a fore- 
 runner of Tchadaiev, that earnest Westerner whose voice 
 was shortly to be heard. In opinion, if not in fact, he 
 was certainly a Decembrist, the comrade of Ryleiev in 
 that secret society " The Salvation Alliance," which at 
 one time numbered all the best intelligences of the day 
 within its ranks. Here young officers, Pestel, Narych- 
 kine, Muraviov, Orlov, elbowed popular poets like Ryleiev 
 and Bestoujev, and aristocrats such as Obolenski, Trou- 
 betzkoi, Odoievski, Volkonski, Tchernichev — all soon to 
 be proscribed. 
 
 Ryleiev, when he joined the Russian army in Paris in 
 1813, seriously took himself to be a liberator. Some 
 years later he was to protest, in lines which, though 
 poetically weak, were full of ardent feeling, against the 
 infamy of the Holy Alliance, and appeal from Arak- 
 tcheiev to the free burghers of ancient Novgorod. The 
 suppression of the secret societies in 1821 had the natural 
 result of accentuating the political 'character of the ten- 
 dencies apparent in them, and which, as a rule, went 
 no further than a hazy constitutional liberalism. That 
 presided over by Ryleiev was secretly reconstituted and 
 
1 86 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 ramified in the provinces, in all directions, until the ill- 
 starred attempt of 1825. 
 
 A little of all this appears in Griboiedov's comedy, 
 though the medley is somewhat incoherent, and exces- 
 sively obscure. Any satisfactory examination of it pre- 
 supposes the use of a powerful lantern. I regard it as 
 an impossible play, for acting purposes, at the present 
 day, and one not easy even to read. It came too early 
 for its own contemporaries. In the Russian drawing- 
 room, where Tchatski breathlessly pours out his con- 
 fused notions, he is taken for a madman. Herein lies 
 the comic element of the piece. And it is a prophetic 
 element as well. Before very long, Tchadaiev was 
 actually to spend some months in a madhouse, and 
 before that time came, Ryleiev was to expiate on the 
 scaffold the " misfortune of having been too clever," in 
 a society not yet ripe for the shock of revolution. 
 
 Ryleiev himself was really no more of a revolution- 
 ary than Griboiedov. Revolutions are not made with 
 speeches, and, like Tchatski, neither of them knew how 
 to do more than preach. From 1823 to 1824 the famous 
 Decembrist was quietly occupied in editing, with Bestou- 
 jev, a literary paper call The Northern Star, which repro- 
 duced the artistic theories of the Globe, in the articles by 
 Sainte-Beuve and Jouffroy, then appearing in that paper, 
 and paid a periodical tribute to the " practical liberalism " 
 of the French and English Romanticists. Chance had a 
 great deal to do with that armed attempt, which was no 
 more than a scuffle, in the year 1825. 
 
 Griboiedov, more prudent, more easily disheartened, 
 too, having felt his way by means of his comedy, retired 
 discreetly into the background. It was not till after his 
 death that the piece was staged, and then only after~ 
 
GRIBOI^DOV 187 
 
 liberal cutting. If the truth must out, the friendly recep- 
 tion it received from the general public, both on its first 
 appearance and subsequently, was chiefly due to its ludi- 
 crous qualities, the caricature it offered of a well-known 
 social circle, the satisfaction it gave to the satirical instinct 
 of the majority. 
 
 But other prophets were at hand, less prone to failure 
 and compromise. Soon, over Pouchkine's tomb, the voice 
 of Lermontov was to rise, expressing, in more virile 
 accents, a new spirit of independence and revolt. The 
 current of emancipation, checked for a moment, was to 
 flow without further stoppage, in a stream of steady de- 
 velopment, towards undoubted if partial triumph. From 
 1830 to 1870 the whole literary and political history of 
 Russia is summed up in the victorious stages of this 
 march of justice, light, and liberty. I shall now endea- 
 vour to indicate them briefly, turning my attention, in 
 the first place, to those labourers in the great work who 
 have lavished on it the most arduous and most con- 
 scious effort. Scientists, philosophers, historians, literary 
 critics, or artists, poets, and novelists, I shall show their 
 common endeavour to seize and retain the truth, under its 
 thick-laid covering of ignorance and false conception, and 
 watch them as they gather, in the literature (now become 
 legendary) of divulgation and accusation, a sheaf of truths 
 — poignant, cruel, cutting as rods — which, day by day, 
 and year by year, are to uncover and probe and wither 
 the miseries, the baseness, the shameful spots, that stained 
 the nation's life. Then, following on these inquisitors, 
 these accusers, these judges, I will show the bearers of 
 a message of clemency, of peace and faith, preachers 
 who reply to these violent and despairing negations 
 with their own sure and resolute affirmations — prophets 
 
1 88 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of a new religion, which, they are firmly convinced, is 
 not only to raise the whole level of the nation, intellec- 
 tual and moral, but to lift it to a destiny far exceeding 
 that to which any other nation has yet aspired. 
 
 Chronologically speaking, the succession of pheno- 
 mena I have described is certainly not absolute. Yet it 
 is exact enough on the whole, and I shall adhere to it, 
 so as to bring out features which might otherwise appear 
 confused, and to give more clearness to the general pro- 
 cess of an evolution which has endued the fatherland 
 of Pouchkine and Lermontov with the intellectual and 
 moral physionomy it now wears in the eyes of all the 
 world. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE EMANCIPATING MOVEMENT— 
 THE DOCTRINAIRES 
 
 The intellectual ferment which had preceded the acces- 
 sion of Nicholas, and prepared the way for the attempt 
 of the Decembrists, was quenched in a flood of blood, and 
 hidden under a heavy stone. Seventeen distinct offices 
 of censure laboured in concert to bury the ferment of 
 budding thought. All discussion of political and social 
 questions was forbidden, and learning was hemmed 
 within the boundaries of official history, and a closely- 
 watched literary criticism. A most unnecessary pre- 
 caution ! Criticism, represented on the Northern Bee by 
 two renegade liberals, Gri^tch (i 787-1 867), and Boul- 
 garine (i 789-1 859), and on the Reader s Libi'ary by a 
 literary clown, Senkovski (1800-1858), who signed his 
 articles with such pseudonyms as "Baron Brambatis" 
 or Tioutioundji- Ogla, did much more in the way of 
 official service than in that of pronouncing literary 
 verdicts. Its whole endeavour was spent in combating 
 liberal ideas, and every manifestation of art or literature 
 which appeared to be connected with them. 
 
 Such were the first-fruits of the new regime. These 
 three stars long reigned over the official world of letters 
 in St. Petersburg. But at Moscow a nucleus of liberal 
 and pseudo-romantic opposition continued to subsist. 
 
I go RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 In The Son of the Fatherland, Alexander Bestoujev (1795- 
 1837), the friend of Ryleiev, and author — under the 
 nom de plume of Marlinski — of novels which caused the 
 sentimental maidens of the period to quiver vi^ith delight, 
 fought, and fought actively, in the cause of Pouchkine 
 and the younger literary school. In The Telegraph, a won- 
 derful self-taught writer, Nicholas Alexi^ievitch Polevoi 
 ( 1 796-1 846), who, until a ripe age, traded as a Siberian 
 merchant, and then suddenly felt the call of a literary 
 and scientific vocation, held lively controversy with 
 Nicholas Trofimovitch Katchenovski (1775-1842), a pro- 
 fessor of history, and founder of an historical school 
 steeped in scepticism, yet the official champion of pseudo- 
 classicism and of the statu quo in literature, politics, and 
 social matters. 
 
 Polevoi's scepticism went further, — too far, indeed. 
 His encyclopaedic excursions, just touched with liber- 
 alism, into literature, history, jurisprudence, music, 
 medicine, and the Sanskrit tongue, often led him to 
 confuse pedantry with knowledge, and then heap scorn 
 on both. Nevertheless, his Sketches of Russian Literature 
 mark an era, for they let in a first breath of fresh air 
 upon the mildewy routine of the old-fashioned aesthetic 
 formulee. His attempt at a history of the internal de- 
 velopment of the Russian people, after the manner of 
 Guizot and Niebuhr {History of the Russian People, 6 vols. 
 1829-33) 's, on the other hand, a failure. 
 
 And its author was not to remain true to his colours. 
 In 1834, The Telegraph was suppressed, in consequence 
 of an article which declared a play by Nestor Koukolnik, 
 to be a bad one. This Koukolnik (1809-1868) was a 
 poor playwright and a worse novelist. His piece, The 
 Hand of the Most High has Saved the Fatherland, was cer- 
 
POLEVOI 191 
 
 tainly not worth all the evil Polevoi took the trouble to 
 say of it. But Koukolnik, with his inflated rhetoric and 
 pompous patriotism, held the favour of the powers that 
 were. Polevoi had a family to support, and four thou- 
 sand subscribers whom he must keep, to that end. He 
 made up his mind to hide his colours in his pocket, de- 
 parted to St. Petersburg, and there rallied the band com- 
 prising Boulgarine and Gri^tch to the support of another 
 review. 
 
 Moscow lost nothing by his desertion. The Tele- 
 graph was speedily replaced by The Telescope, which, in 
 1836, published Tchadaiev's famous philosophic letter. 
 Already, since 1825, in the ancient capital — where the 
 terrorism of Nicholas I. was less apparent than in St. 
 Petersburg — a certain current of philosophical ideas and 
 studies, issuing from the great flow of contemporary 
 German thought, had been growing amidst the youth 
 of the university. The frontiers were not so well guarded 
 against the entry of contraband literature as to prevent 
 the doctrines of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel from elud- 
 ing the vigilant eyes of the officials, and under their 
 influence, the struggle between Occidentals and Slavo- 
 phils woke again, and grew hotter than ever. Not a 
 symptom of this appeared in the press. The secret was 
 concealed in whispered conversations, and in the more 
 or less inviolable intimacy of personal correspondence. 
 Then all of a sudden the voice of Tchadaiev broke, like 
 a clap of thunder, on the silence. Was it a cry of re- 
 ligious terror only, as some have asserted ? Not that, 
 indeed ! It was also, and above all other things, a cry 
 of protest against the conventional optimism of a society 
 insufficiently aware of its proper destiny, against the 
 official fiction of a civilisation still barren of ideals. It is 
 
192 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 impossible to overrate the sensation which this new and 
 surprising voice created in the coteries of Russia. 
 
 A man of the world and a traveller, like Tchatski, 
 Peter Iakovl£vitch Tchadaiev (1793-1855), had for 
 some time been carrying an intellect much inclined to 
 paradox, a discontented temper, and a brilliant humour, 
 from one drawing-room to another. Under cover of 
 a correspondence with a friend, a lady, he had already 
 made a partial sketch of his ideas. The letter published 
 by The Telescope was not his first. Others were already 
 being handed about in manuscript. In them their author 
 posed as the representative of the second great current 
 of French influence, which La Harpe, the teacher of 
 Alexander I., had been the means of introducing into 
 Russia, and which had impressed its mark on that 
 monarch's youthful liberalism, as well as on Speranski's 
 plans for reform. It contained the germ of a bitter 
 scepticism with regard to Russian life, combined with 
 a decided leaning to Catholicism. The Catholic propa- 
 ganda, which may be reckoned back to the reign of 
 Peter II., in the persons of the Abbe Jubet, Princess 
 Dolgoroukaia, and the Duke of Liria, had its hour of 
 brilliant triumph under Paul I. It had succeeded in 
 planting the influence of the sons of Loyola in the 
 sovereign's own circle. The split between the upper 
 class of society and the clergy, engendered by Peter 
 the Great's reforms, the religious and moral disorder 
 which produced the Raskol, favoured its action, and in 
 the minds of Russian readers of Le Maistre, Bonald, 
 and Chateaubriand, the Jesuit's doctrine was blended 
 with the idea of civilisation, and even with a certain 
 liberalism in which they would gladly have sought 
 satisfaction. 
 
TCHADAIEV 
 
 193 
 
 Tchadaiev had fought through Napoleon's wars. He 
 had spent the years between 1821 and 1826 abroad, 
 had lived on intimate terms with Schelling in Germany, 
 and entered into friendly relations with Lamennais, 
 Ballanche, and the Comte de Circourt, in Paris. The 
 conception of the past and future of his country, to 
 which he had allowed the influence of these surround- 
 ings to lead him, may be thus summed up : Up to the 
 present, Russia has been no more than a parasite branch 
 of the European tree, which has rotted because it drew 
 its sap from Byzantium, useless to the cause of civilisa- 
 tion, a stranger to the great religious structure of the 
 Western Middle Ages, and afterwards to the lay enfran- 
 chisement of modern society. '^ Alone in the world, we 
 have given it nothing, taken nothing from it, we have not 
 added one idea to the treasury of thinking humanity, we 
 have given no help towards the perfecting of human reason, 
 and we have vitiated everything that wisdom has bestowed 
 upon us. . . . We bear in our blood a principle that is 
 hostile and refractory to civilisation. We have been born 
 into the world like illegitimate children. . . . We grow, but 
 we do not ripen. . . . We advance, but sideways, and 
 towards no special goal. . . ." 
 
 Never in the history of the human conscience did the 
 instinct of self-study lead up to so severe a verdict. I have 
 related how and wherefore, in pamphlet or satire, detrac- 
 tion was destined to preside over the first lispings of free 
 thought in the midst of that great workshop of moral and 
 social reconstruction, which the Russia of Peter the Great 
 had now become. Everywhere the labourers who pull 
 down walls clear the way for the architect. Even Gogol 
 and his comrades belong to the first-named category. 
 Yet Tchadai'ev's pessimism was confined to that which 
 
194 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 concerns the present and the past. Russia, in his view — 
 I quote from one of his letters to Alexander Tourgueniev 
 — " is destined to supply, some day, the solution of all 
 the intellectual, social, and moral questions which Europe 
 now discusses." Already, in this Occidental, we note the 
 haughty schemes of the Slavophil, and the gorgeous 
 dreams of Dostoievski. Still one condition must be 
 fulfilled, he thinks, before this mission can be accom- 
 plished- — to enter into communion with the nations 
 of the West. But how ? By union with the Western 
 Church. This reconciliation, indeed, appears to his 
 imagination on a mighty scale, borrowed from the vision 
 of Dante ; he dreams of a pope and an emperor, of 
 equally enlightened faith and wisdom, who should join 
 hands, and so govern the whole world. 
 
 It might have been objected that his conception of a 
 European progress based on the unity of the Christian 
 Churches, had proved a failure as early as the sixteenth 
 century, and that Russia, in adopting a principle already 
 abandoned by a good half of Europe, ran a grave risk 
 of losing her bearings. But nobody argued. It was 
 thought simpler to take strong measures with him. The 
 Telescope was suppressed, the editor exiled to Vologda, 
 the censor who had allowed the letter to pass dismissed, 
 and its author made over to the care of a mad-doctor. 
 And even all this severity did not allay the almost general 
 irritation. Freed from his strait-waistcoat, the philo- 
 sopher sought refuge in Paris, and in A Madmaris 
 Apology, and other writings, which were not published 
 till after his death, he endeavoured to justify his con- 
 clusions, while he somewhat diminished the excessive 
 bluntness and paradoxical fulness of their expression. 
 He had taken such pains to strike hard, that he had 
 
TCHADAIEV 195 
 
 certainly failed to strike home. Even in the ranks of 
 the university students, his doctrines encountered pas- 
 sionate resistance and contradiction. But out of the 
 very crash a spark sprang forth which was to illumine the 
 intellectual horizon of that epoch. Herzen, Bi^linski, 
 and the Slavophils of the future, Khomiakov, Kiridievski, 
 and Akssakov, all felt the shock, and caught the flame. 
 A new impulse was imparted to the study of the national 
 history and of philosophy. After the year 1840, Moscow 
 had two Hegelian parties, and the national literature, in 
 the persons of Nadiejdine and Bielinski, soon mounted 
 to the highest peaks of contemporary thought. 
 
 Meanwhile the school of the independent Slavophils 
 — Khomiakov, the two Kirieievskis, and the two Akssa- 
 kovs — formed another body of teaching, the legacy of 
 which was to be gathered up and increased by two gene- 
 rations of thinkers. The current of ideas thus developed 
 was first of all to find its strongest and highest expression 
 in the domain of critical literature, because all other 
 fields of investigation were vetoed by the censure, and 
 because, under its watchful eye, discussions on artistic 
 subjects lent themselves better than any other form of 
 writing to that intellectual cryptography which even now 
 remains a law of necessity to the Russian press. For 
 the same reason, and with the same object of finding a 
 necessary outlet, the Russian novel has held, and still 
 holds, an exceptional position, by no means in harmony 
 with its natural destiny, in the national literature. 
 
 In 1836 The Telescope was edited by Nicholas Ivano- 
 vitch Nadiejdine (1804-1856). He had made his first 
 appearance as a writer in the European Messenger, under 
 the pseudonym of Niedoumko. His encyclopaedic know- 
 ledge, guided by a mind of excessive clearness, penetra- 
 
196 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tion, and strength, soon permitted him to treat various 
 branches of science, and ahiiost to equal the best Euro- 
 pean specialists of his day. The most varied subjects, 
 ethical and historical studies, philosophy, ethnography, 
 were handled by him with equal success. As a literary 
 critic, he long bore the reputation of being an impostor, 
 the savage and pedantic detractor of Pouchkine. He 
 did, in fact, judge that poet's earlier works, inspired by 
 his passion for Byron, with great severity. But he was 
 one of the first, on the other hand, to applaud Boi-is 
 Godounov. He was the pupil, in philosophy, of Oken 
 and Schelling, and was the first Russian who spoke of 
 thought as the soul of all artistic creation, and of art as 
 the association of thought with form. He was the first, 
 too, to conceive the idea that literature, as the expression 
 of the conscious feeling of a nation, is one of the powerful 
 forces which leads a people along the path of its natural 
 development. He was little understood ; he was another 
 Tchatski. 
 
 Stephen Petrovitch Chevirev (1806-1864), Professor 
 of Russian Literature at Moscow University, and fellow- 
 editor, with Pogodine, of the Muscovite, embodies the 
 very opposite extreme of contemporary criticism and the 
 philosophy of art, as then existing. His surroundings 
 and natural inclinations connected him with the Slavo- 
 phils. His lectures contain a well-balanced mixture of 
 fact and hypothesis, to both of which he attributed the 
 same dogmatic value. He asserted, with equal assurance, 
 that Vladimir Monomachus was the author of a curious 
 Precept intended for the use of his children, and that 
 Hegel's teaching was founded on a set of ideas developed 
 by Nikifor in an epistle to the said Vladimir. His History of 
 Poetry among Ancient and Modern Nations (Moscow, 1835) 
 
BIELINSKI 197 
 
 would be a useful compilation, if it were not marred by 
 a fantastic judgment and love of paradox, both of the 
 most disconcerting nature. These peculiarities Chevirev 
 applied, with equal severity, in his appreciations of con- 
 temporary literature. Pouchkine, he said, would have 
 done better to compose such an one of his poetical works 
 in prose. Gogol's talent, he averred, had sprung from 
 the influence of the Italian painters. Italian art was this 
 learned oddity's favourite hobbyhorse. To put it plainly, 
 he talked random nonsense. 
 
 The task of covering, under the guise of literary criti- 
 cism, the immense field thus opened, and in which 
 general intellectual chaos reigned, was too heavy for 
 the mind of the average man. Even the great Vissarion 
 GrigoriEvitch BifiLiNSKi (1810-1848) had difficulty, for 
 a while, in finding his true path. 
 
 The son of a military surgeon, he was a far from in- 
 dustrious student at the Moscow University, and an assi- 
 duous frequenter of the literary and philosophic coteries 
 which swarmed in and around its walls. The largest of 
 these was presided over by young Stankievitch— a rich 
 man, delicate in health, a dreamer, bitten with art and 
 humanitarian notions. The members met in his house, 
 and talked philosophy over the samovars. The kindly 
 host knew his Schelling and Hegel by heart, and guided 
 his guests through that world — so new to them — of 
 abstract conceptions. His works, in poetry and prose, 
 were not published until 1890. They prove his posses- 
 sion of a lofty spirit, a generous soul, a moderate intelli- 
 gence, and a middhng talent. According to the memory 
 of him preserved by his contemporaries, Stankidvitch's 
 ruling qualities were simplicity and kind - heartedness. 
 Herzen wrote of him that even Tolstoi could have de- 
 
198 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tected " no phrases in his mouth." He wrote little, — had 
 no time, alas ! in his short life, to pile volume on volume. 
 But he was the Maecenas, and the intellectual interpreter, 
 of a whole generation. 
 
 From 1834 onwards, Bielinski, with the Akssakov 
 brothers and the poets Kliouchnikov and Krassov, was 
 numbered among Stankievitch's guests. Bielinski was at 
 that time making his first appearances in literary criticism 
 in The Molva (" Rumour ") and The Telescope. He might 
 have been taken then to be a mere successor of Polevoi, 
 with the same romantic spirit, the same fashion of looking 
 on the artist or the poet as a being apart, — a believer 
 struggling with his own imagination and the general 
 stupidity ; the same instinct of general denial. 
 
 This, the great critic's first campaign, insufficiently 
 prepared and ill directed, was checked, in 1836, by the 
 suppression of The Telescope. The catastrophe left Bie- 
 linski without any means of support whatever. He fell 
 sick, contrived — thanks to the help of friends — to go 
 through a cure in the Caucasus, and did not reappeai" in 
 Moscow until 1838. During this interval, a little revo- 
 lution had taken place in the coterie of which Stanki^- 
 vitch still remained the centre. Schelling had been 
 dethroned by Hegel and Fichte, and every member was 
 expected to pay his homage to " concrete reality." 
 
 Dazzled by the brightness of the new revelation, 
 conquered by the powerful logic of its arguments, un- 
 able to recognise the essential contradictions it involved, 
 Bidlinski submitted blindly, took Chevirev's place as 
 editor of the Muscovite Observer, and set himself to 
 spread the new tenets. He took the famous phrase, 
 " Everything which is, is reasonable," in its literal sense, 
 and worshipped every manifestation of reality, including 
 
BIELINSKI 199 
 
 despotism and serfdom. He preached the dgctrine of 
 "Hindoo quietism," and tlie avoidance of all protest and 
 every struggle. He proscribed, in artistic matters, all 
 direct participation in surrounding life, whether political 
 or social. He would have excluded all satiric and even 
 all lyric poetry. The only works of art to which he 
 would ascribe an artistic value were those which em- 
 bodied the expression of an objective and Olympian view 
 of life. But he was soon to be forced to the conviction 
 that this doctrine was creating a void in the neighbour- 
 hood of The Observer. In 1839 there were no more sub- 
 scribers, and the review ceased to appear. Bi^linski, 
 to support himself, left Moscow, and accepted an invi- 
 tation to become a contributor to the Annals of the 
 Fatherland, in St. Petersburg. But yet another revela- 
 tion awaited him in the chief capital city of the Russian 
 Empire. 
 
 There he saw and touched a reality which nothing 
 on earth could make ideal, and which had not an 
 adorable quality about it. His first struggles with it 
 wounded him sorely, and broke down his faith. Bielinski 
 was of an age and temperament which made any con- 
 version both swift and easy. Suddenly the literary critic 
 took on the functions of an eager publicist, who, from 
 analysing works of art, proceeded to analyse the society 
 of which those works are but the expression, denouncing 
 and stigmatising its lack of intellectual interests, its spirit 
 of routine, the narrow selfishness of its middle class, the 
 dissipation of its provincial life, the general dishonesty 
 of its deahngs with inferiors. A not less radical but 
 logical change also occurred in his aesthetic views, and 
 in his literary sympathies and antipathies. He was 
 observed, not without astonishment, to praise contem- 
 14 
 
200 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 porary French writers for the interest they took in 
 current events, to fall into admiration before the works of 
 George Sand, whose talent he had hitherto utterly denied. 
 He went further ; he actually extolled Herzen ! He was 
 a follower of Hegel still, but with a new interpretation 
 of his doctrine, a new conception of the elements which 
 go to the constitution of any reality, and a new power 
 of making the necessary distinction between the evil 
 and the good therein. The doctrine, thus modified, 
 gave him the historic sense, taught him the laws of 
 literary development, of which he had hitherto been 
 ignorant, and made him repent of having so lately pro- 
 claimed that Russian literature had no real existence. 
 By the year 1844, he was in a position to appreciate 
 Pouchkine's work, and that of several of the poet's 
 predecessors, at their proper value ; and the eighth 
 volume of his works, which corresponds with this date, 
 comprises a complete history of the national literature 
 from Lomonossov's time down to that of the author of 
 Eugene Onieguine. 
 
 At this point he wielded considerable influence. It 
 may fairly be said that the constellation of great writers 
 of the day, among whom are numbered Gogol, Grigoro- 
 vitch, Tourgueniev, Gontcharov, Nekrassov, and Dos- 
 toievski, was trained in his school. And this school, 
 by virtue of the realistic tone which governs it, is likewise 
 the school of the great German philosopher, although in 
 Gogol's case, realism, as I have already endeavoured to 
 point out, must be regarded as being for the most part 
 an indigenous product of the author's nature. 
 
 The two currents met. In 1846, after a fresh visit 
 to Southern Russia, necessitated by the state of his 
 health, which was going from bad to worse, Bidlinski 
 
BI^LINSKI 20 1 
 
 gave his assistance in editing The Contemporary {Sov- 
 remiennik), which now employed the best literary 
 talent of the country, under the direction of N. A. 
 Nekrassov and I. I. Panaiev. In its columns, he broke 
 several lances in defence of Gogol, and the new artistic 
 formula of which he took the author of Evenings at the 
 Farm of Dikanka to be the bearer. But all this time, 
 he was drifting into sour and violent radicalism. His 
 enforced and unpleasant relations with official circles in 
 St. Petersburg, together with a longer and more practical 
 acquaintance with his own profession, made him more 
 and more clearly aware of the incompatibility between an 
 influential and independent literature, and the despotic 
 power of which he had formerly declared himself an ad- 
 herent. And as he could not renounce any principle 
 without deducing all that was conseqvient on the act, he 
 was led to adopt the demeanour of a revolutionary. He 
 was nicknamed "The Russian Marat," and the com- 
 mandant of St. Petersburg never met him without 
 jokingly inquiring, " When shall we have the pleasure 
 of seeing you ? I am keeping a good warm dungeon 
 for you ! " 
 
 The last years of his life were haunted by the terror 
 of this fate, and but for the consumptive malady which 
 carried him off in March 1848, at the age of thirty-eight, 
 it would certainly have become a reality. His was an 
 eager passionate nature. He always followed his con- 
 victions to the bitter end, and they were not less sincere 
 for being so often changed. According to the testimony 
 of his friend Panaiev, he never could see his own articles 
 of the previous year in the columns of the Annals of 
 the Fatherland without falling into a fury. He was par 
 excellence an idealist and speculative theorist. One day, 
 
202 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 in answer to a friend who reminded him of the dinner 
 hour, he broke out, "What! we have not yet settled 
 the question of God's existence, and you tallc about 
 eating ! " In his first stage. Romanticism led him to 
 the exaltation of individualism in himself and others, 
 and to a contempt for humanity. Then he lost himself 
 in Hegelian philosophy, as though in a forest. He may 
 well be excused. The whole of Germany shared his 
 condition for a while, and first-class intellects in every 
 country have hesitated as to the interpretation of a 
 system which, while it made art consist in the realisa- 
 tion of the ideas of beauty and truth — that is, in an 
 abstraction — claimed to establish the fact that beauty 
 and truth could not exist, except in concrete phenomena. 
 Such contradictions caused no difficulty to Skankievitch 
 and his friends. They were all young men, drunk with 
 philosophy. They accepted everything together — the 
 concrete nature of truth, the logical method of thought, 
 the law of logical development which was to unify all 
 the phenomena of life — and never troubled themselves 
 about the details. In the end Bielinski showed more 
 discernment ; but, after the obscurity of the doctrine 
 had kept him oscillating between absolute indifference 
 to social problems and passionate interest in them, it 
 drove him, at last, to confound society itself with litera- 
 ture. 
 
 He was always convinced he was right, and that, 
 when he altered his opinion, he was, in his own words, 
 "changing a kopek for a rouble." And amidst all the 
 chops and changes of his mobile, restless, and ill-con- 
 trolled mind, he succeeded not only in making great indi- 
 vidual progress, but in causing considerable progress in 
 those about him. To understand the relative value of 
 
TCHERNICHEVSKI 203 
 
 such a man as Dierjavine, and make others understand it, 
 was a great thing in itself. He did more. By his own 
 unaided intellectual labour he provided his countrymen 
 with a starting-point on every ulterior line of literary 
 criticism and artistic philosophy— the idealist and meta- 
 physical Hegelian School, of which the most striking 
 figures were Droujinine, Akhchsaroumov, N. Soloviov, 
 and Edelsohn ; the theory of organic criticism, wherein 
 some of the Slavophils, I. Kiri^ievski, C. Akssakov, and 
 especially A. Grigoridv, endeavoured to reconcile art 
 and the national element ; and the doctrine of the critical 
 publicists, which Dosto'ievski was to raise to the level 
 of his own talent, and which Pissarev, following after 
 Tchernichevski, was to cast into the lowest depths of 
 ribald controversy. 
 
 Two writers of very dissimilar value succeeded 
 him on The Contemporary. NICHOLAS Gavrillovitch 
 Tchernichevski (1828-1889), philosopher, economist, 
 critic, and novelist, has been called "the Robespierre 
 of Russia." He might have been more fairly compared 
 with Mill, Proudhon, or Lassalle. The man so described 
 has left us, in his scientific treatises, the theory or com- 
 pendium of Russian radicalism, and in a heavy novel 
 written in his prison, he has left us its poem or gospel. 
 
 For some time the Censure took no notice of him. 
 In face of the philosophic propaganda of which Herzen 
 had made London the centre, the Government had real- 
 ised that scissor-thrusts and sentences of banishment 
 were but a poor defence. To equalise the struggle, 
 it had become necessary to unbind the hands of the 
 writers already beyond the frontiers, and use them 
 against the terrible assault now being delivered from 
 without. Thus the press enjoyed a relative amount of 
 
204 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 liberty, and Tchernichevski, ungovernable as he was, 
 made heavy claims on the common freedom. As a re- 
 sult, there was a fresh contact with the West, and a fur- 
 ther influx of foreign influence — principally English — ■ 
 in consequence. Thanks to Herzen, still, London was 
 for some time the intellectual centre, whither men be- 
 took themselves in search of light. A considerable 
 number of novels on social subjects, and the works of 
 Mill, Buckle, Vogt, Moleschott, Ruge, and Feuerbach 
 were translated. 
 
 Tchernichevski did all he could to stimulate this cur- 
 rent, and, with the turn of mind to which I have referred, 
 the use he made of it may be easily divined. He pro- 
 gressively emphasised Bielinski's radicalism. In some 
 of his pamphlets, published at Vevey and Geneva, he 
 even went so far as to preach the annihilation of indi- 
 vidual property, the suppression of the aristocracy, and 
 the disbanding of the army. He was willing, as a pro- 
 visional arrangement, to maintain the existence of the 
 throne, but he would have hedged it round with demo- 
 cratic institutions. These pamphlets were not allowed 
 to reach the eye of the Censure, but a certain amount 
 of their teaching became apparent in articles in The Con- 
 temporary, and the Government made up its mind to 
 take proceedings. In 1862 the daring editor was sent 
 to Siberia, and there, in prison, he wrote his novel What 
 is to be done ? which was for years to be the gospel of the 
 revolutionary youth of his country. The only value of the 
 work, which is equally devoid of poetry and art, lies in the 
 doctrines it evolves, and these possess neither originality, 
 moderation, nor practicality. They are all in the sense of 
 equality and communism, and drawn from German, Eng- 
 lish, or French authors, their only spice of special flavour 
 
DOBROLIOUBOV 205 
 
 being due to that kind of mystic and visionary realism 
 which has since become the characteristic mark of Rus- 
 sian Nihihsm. Tchernichevski may fairly be considered, if 
 not as the creator, at all events as the most responsible 
 propagator of that mental condition which is born of the 
 two contrary leanings of the Russian national tempera- 
 ment : I mean realism, and the taste for the absolute. 
 
 This book was also his literary and political Will and 
 Testament. After twenty years in Siberia, seven of them 
 spent at hard labour in the mines, and the remainder in 
 one of the settlements nearest to the Polar Circle, there 
 could be no question of any recommencement of his 
 literary career when he was released in 1883. Aged, 
 broken in health, he spent the closing years of his life in 
 translating Weber's Universal History. By his literary 
 criticisms he had contributed to destroy that Hegelian 
 philosophy of beauty of which Bielinski himself had 
 already undertaken the destruction, after having pledged 
 it his faith. But he was totally devoid of the aesthetic 
 sense, and, after 1858, his contributions to The Contem- 
 porary in this department had been almost entirely re- 
 placed by those of another person. 
 
 It was Nicholas Alexandrovitch Dobrolioubov 
 (1836-1860) who followed him, for all too short a period. 
 His was one of the saddest destinies to be discovered 
 in the history of any nation. His childhood was joyless, 
 his youth knew no pleasures ; he led the life first of a 
 convict, and next of an ascetic. And then, after a few 
 years of excessive toil, which was to wear out the frail 
 husk of his over-eager spirit, death came. The knell of 
 every ambition sounded for him, just as the first rays of 
 glory touched that long-despised brow. 
 
 The writings of this unhappy man, gloomy and exag- 
 
2o6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 gerated in tone, bear the impress of this excess of misfor- 
 tune. It is the work of a monk who would fain draw 
 down the whole of humanity to the level of his own 
 renunciation. Dobrolioubov, to whom life had never 
 given anything, never seemed to realise that it might 
 have something to bestow on others. Self-immolation 
 for the common good was in his eyes not only an ideal, 
 but a law, which he desired to impose on every one. 
 His aesthetic notions lacked clearness, consistency, and, 
 as a rule, novelty. From Bielinski he borrowed his 
 last formula, " Art for art's sake " ; from Tchernichevski 
 his conception of an art ruled by science, and was 
 inspired by it to raise up poets who, like Shakespeare, 
 Dante, Goethe, and Byron, each represents, in his own 
 epoch, a level of human consciousness far above that of 
 common men. 
 
 But he had some original views of his own, as, for 
 example, on the permanent existence in analogous social 
 formations of certain social types. In this connection 
 his analysis of Gontcharov's novel Obloniov, and his two 
 articles on Ostrovski's plays, should be mentioned. 
 
 In his case, too, literary criticism was no more 
 than the dust-coloured mantle under which those who 
 attacked the social and political world of that period 
 endeavoured to escape the vigilant eyt, of the police. In 
 this matter he atoned for the frequent excesses of a 
 judgment which was severe and implacable even to in- 
 justice, by an intense depth of feeling, and an admirable 
 sincerity. It was as though he had dipped his pen in 
 his own blood. And if there is something irritating and 
 childish about his system of perpetual denial, applied to 
 all the hallowed formulae as well as to every established 
 authority— Pouchkine's in literature, Pirogov's in science 
 
PISSAREV 207 
 
 — his riot less constant pronouncements in favour of an 
 ideal world, to be reconstructed on the basis of reason, 
 nature, and humanity, mark out a programme which has 
 not proved utterly Utopian. It was to be partly realised 
 by his own generation. The reform of social relations 
 in Russia meant, before and above all other things, the 
 emancipation of the serfs. And Dobrolioubov died in 
 the very year during which one stroke of the pen called 
 twenty-five millions of slaves to liberty. 
 
 Fault has been found with the utilitarian nature of 
 his criticism ; and indeed this regrettable but inevitable 
 result of the forced marriage between art and politics 
 was to be perpetuated in contemporary journalism, and 
 to be carried therein to the worst and most extravagant 
 lengths. Dimitri Ivanovitch Pissarev (1840-1868), who 
 pushed this system of judging artistic production solely 
 by its social or political value — from the publishing and 
 not from the aesthetic point of view — to the utmost limit 
 of its necessary consequence, ended, like Dobrolioubov, 
 in aesthetic nihilism. In the eyes of this pamphleteer, 
 Lermontov and Pouchkine were " caricatures of poets," 
 " rhymesters for consumptive girls " ; and Goethe was 
 "a bloated aristocrat, who reasoned in rhyme on sub- 
 jects which possess no interest." The progress of natural 
 science he held to be the only thing that really concerned 
 the human race. The expressions "art" and "ideal" 
 were senseless words to him. This was to be very 
 nearly the standpoint taken up by Bazarov, the famous 
 prototype of the Nihilists in Tourgueniev's novel. When 
 it appeared, Pissarev did not fail to undertake the de- 
 fence of this character. He complacently played the 
 part of the journalistic enfant terrible, and therein dis- 
 played considerable talent, a fact which may be accepted 
 
2o8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 as an excuse for the huge success which greeted his 
 performances. 
 
 At the moment of his greatest popularity, which 
 coincided with that period of extreme agitation, political 
 and literary, known as that of "the Sixties," the nature 
 of which I shall later endeavour to define, he had rivals, 
 and was exposed to the literary criticism of such men as 
 Pypine, Galakhov, Tikhonravov, men of a very different 
 type, and of far more serious weight. 
 
 I shall endeavour to do them justice at the close of 
 this book, when I give my readers a general view of the 
 latest manifestations of intellectual life in Russia. I must 
 now return to the period preceding " the Forties," in 
 order to examine briefly another current of the great 
 march of ideas of which it witnessed the development — 
 I mean " Slavophilism." 
 
 Slavophilism. 
 
 I have already referred to the presence of Kirieidvski 
 and Akssakov in the coterie of Stankievitch and Bielinski. 
 The two schools possessed, in fact, one common start- 
 ing-point — the study of German philosophy and the 
 worship of the national element. This worship, of an- 
 cient origin, was quite independent of the Nationalist 
 movement, properly so called, which was diffused through 
 Europe in later years by the agency of the German philo- 
 sophy. But when the philosophy of Hegel and its 
 conception of the " National idea," which was to be 
 the basis of the historical development of nations, took 
 root in the University of Moscow, it necessarily drew 
 the local patriotic feeling closer to the great European 
 current. After 1820, this idea revohiticnised the whole 
 
SLAVOPHILISM 209 
 
 Continent, and even stirred the semi-barbarous popula- 
 tions of Greece. Was Russia to be the only country 
 that did not feel the concussion ? Was not she, too, 
 to find an idea to develop — her own idea — her intel- 
 lectual and ethical birthright, to be claimed in the face 
 of all the world ? 
 
 There is this peculiarity about the abstract world, 
 that we are always sure of finding what we want in it, 
 because imagination can always supply what reality 
 lacks. Trouble was lavished on every side, but by the 
 time success crowned the search, it had become evi- 
 dent that no concert existed between the parties. The 
 great schism between the Occidental and the Slavo- 
 phil had come into existence. In Tchadaiev's eyes, as 
 in those of Bidlinski, the separation between Russia and 
 the other European countries amounted purely and 
 simply to a difference of level, and the object they 
 would have pursued was to regulate this difference, 
 not by assimilation of the external forms of European 
 civilisation, but by appropriation of the inner principles 
 of its development. The pride of the founders of the 
 Slavophil school could not stomach this solution. They 
 desired an autonomous ideal. Just at this moment the 
 group accepted, with some grumbling, a new disciple 
 of the Hegelian doctrine, the youthful Timofei Nicolaid- 
 vitch Granovski (1813-1855), a friend of Bielinski and 
 Herzen, who, on his return from abroad (1843), had 
 made a sensation in Moscow by his pubHc lectures on 
 the history of the Middle Ages — a history in which the 
 ancient glories of Moscow and of the Orthodox Church 
 found no place at all. Might not Russia, if she grasped 
 the meaning and sense of her own existence, Slav and 
 Orthodox, lay the foundation, on her own account, of a 
 
2IO RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 new phase in human development ? Might she not 
 more legitimately aspire to the realisation of that com- 
 bination of the elements of national culture to which 
 Germany alone, according to Hegel, had been called ? 
 But why Russia ? On this point there was grave dis- 
 agreement, even in the bosom of the budding school. 
 Because, said some, she was tabula rasa, with no his- 
 torical traditions to stand in the way of unification. 
 Because, suggested others, the democratic and humani- 
 tarian ideal to be attained agreed with those historical 
 traditions whereby the Russia of Rurik, of Vladimir, 
 and Ivan, equally escaped the religious autocracy of 
 Rome and the political autocracy of the Western states, 
 and rather approached the communistic system on which 
 the social structure of the future will be based. 
 
 The providence which watches over all faiths pre- 
 vented an initial contradiction from prejudicing the 
 advent and doctrinal unity of this one. I. Kirieievski 
 declared his adhesion to the theory ; Khomiakov under- 
 took to state it dogmatically ; Valouiev, Samarine, and 
 C. Akssakov to justify it historically. The speculative ele- 
 ments of the new belief were to be found in abundance 
 in the teachings of Schelling and Hegel. For dogma- 
 tic questions, the Byzantine theologians were brought 
 under contribution. Karamzine's optimistic treatment of 
 history did the rest. 
 
 In The European, a publication which he edited from 
 1831 onwards, Ivan Vassili^vitch Kiridievski (1806-1856) 
 had made his first appearance in the character of a con- 
 firmed Occidental. The very name of his newspaper 
 proved the fact. The suppression of this sheet, owing 
 to the over-bold reflections on the future of the nine- 
 teenth century, and the general influence of his brother, 
 
KIRI^I^VSKI : KHOMIAKOV 
 
 21 I 
 
 Peter Kiri^ievski (1808-1846), an ethnographer and col- 
 lector of popular songs, drove the silenced publisher 
 in the direction of the Slavophil party. After 1856, this 
 party had its own special organ, the Russian Discourse 
 {liousskaia BiessiMd), and in two important critiques — 
 " On the Nature of European Culture " and " On the 
 Necessity and Possibility of New Philosophical Prin- 
 ciples" — published in its columns, Ivan Vassili^vitch for- 
 mulated a kind of Greco-Slav neo-philosophy. European 
 culture, he held, had reached the end of its career and 
 the limit of its development, without having succeeded 
 in giving humanity anything beyond a sense of self- 
 discontent and a consciousness of its inability to satisfy 
 its own longings. The antique world had already found 
 itself in the same condition of internal bankruptcy, 
 and had endeavoured to escape by borrowing fresh 
 vital principles from nations whose past history pos- 
 sessed no glorious pages. The modern European world 
 was to recommence this experience, and cast itself into 
 the arms of the Slavo- Greek, Russian, and Orthodox 
 communion. 
 
 Thus prophesied Kiriei^vski. Alexis St^fanovitch 
 Khomiakov (1804-1860) followed him, in an endeavour 
 to state the reasons of the prophet's dictum. Khomiakov 
 was a poet, and poets are never short of reasons. His 
 tragedies Yennak and The Mock Demetrius, written in 
 his youth, almost place him on the same level as Kou- 
 kolnik. We note the same pompous enthusiasm for 
 ancient Russia, with all its silly tendencies, and the same 
 stiff rhetoric. His poems give proof of greater maturity, 
 but of an utter absence of sentiment and art. Those 
 which attracted most attention were written during the 
 Crimean War, and contain an assortment of disserta- 
 
2 12 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tions on the theory of the union of all the Slav races 
 and the repudiation of "the Western yoke." The poet 
 loved argument. He was born to be a theologist. After 
 1855 he devoted himself entirely to that line, and pub- 
 lished abroad, in French and English, a series of books 
 and tracts, such as Some Woi'ds on the Western Churches, 
 by an Orthodox Christian (Leipzig, 1855) ; The Latin 
 Church and Protestantism from the Standpoint of the 
 Eastern Church (Leipzig, 1858, and Lausanne, 1872). L 
 Samarine, who was his publisher, treated the author as 
 a " Doctor of the Church," and in his own way, Kho- 
 miakov deserved the honour. To the moribund world 
 of the Romano-German (Catholic and Protestant) civi- 
 lisation, he opposed the "idea," still in course of de- 
 velopment, of the Greco -Slavonic world, which was 
 shortly to found a religious community within whose 
 bosom all the children of Europe should find shelter 
 — the heaven-sent instrument of a fusion which was to 
 harmonise all the bitter antagonisms of Russian life. 
 And as a further demonstration of the merits of this 
 perfect agreement with the traditions and habits of his 
 country, Khomiakov openly blamed the reforms of Peter 
 the Great, and boldly wore the kaftan and the mour- 
 molka, the symbolic value of which articles of dress he 
 had learnt from his friends Valoniev and L Samarine. 
 
 Dmitri Valoniev, who was prematurely cut off by 
 death in 1845, was the statistician and ethnographer 
 of the group. His study of comparative statistics had 
 brought him to the conclusion that the natural out- 
 come of Western civilisation must necessarily be moral 
 sybaritism, and from this conclusion he deduced the 
 necessity for Russia to move along some other path. 
 There was plenty of choice before her. At the very 
 
■THE AKSSAKOVS 213 
 
 starting-point of her history she had reaHsed the true 
 principle of a Christian society and a Christian state, of 
 which the Western form was a mere deformation. This 
 theory, sketched out by I. Samarine in The Muscovite, 
 in the course of a controversy with C. Kav6Hne, one of 
 the contributors to The Contemporary, was to take definite 
 shape under the pen of C. Akssakov. 
 
 According to Samarine (died iSyG^ Russian organisa- 
 tion has always been essentially based on the communal 
 system (pbchtchina), and thus assumed spontaneously, 
 and from the very outset, the form which only now, 
 when it is too late, is becoming the object and ideal of 
 Western society. This conception of the part which the 
 ancient Russian "commune" is destined to play in his- 
 tory was to exercise considerable influence over the 
 solution of the nvimerous problems connected with the 
 emancipation of the serfs, and it is on this ground that 
 Occidentals of the type of Herzen met I. Samarine, who, 
 as is well known, was one of the most active promoters 
 of this great work of freedom. He played his part both 
 in the labours of the Commission appointed by Alexan- 
 der II. in 1858, to study the reform, and in the contro- 
 versy on economic and social questions it engendered. 
 He was more a man of letters than a historian, was too 
 apt to supply the place of knowledge by imagination, 
 and was thus incapable of giving the doctrine that ap- 
 pearance of solidity indispensable to its acceptance by 
 the masses. 
 
 This work was accomplished by Constantine Serguidid- 
 vitch Akssakov (1817-1860). This man was an ideahst 
 par excellence, who looked at his idea with a lover's eyes, 
 and gave it all his devotion. The story goes, that he 
 never possessed any other mistress. The idea which he 
 
2 14 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 has succeeded in embodying, in a marvellously subtle 
 mixture of hallucination and real knowledge, is as follows. 
 It strikes one as a desperate paradox ; the word, perhaps, 
 is scarcely strong enough, but that is no fault of mine. 
 The Russian State, the outcome of a twofold act of free- 
 will — the appeal to the Varegian princes and the accept- 
 ance of the Christian faith — is, of all the European 
 states, the only one founded in its essential existence 
 and principle on liberty ! Unlike the Western states, 
 which all proceed from violence, and are led, by violence, 
 to political revolution and religious schism, the Russian 
 State, alone, owes the maintenance of the unity of the 
 faith and the willingly respected unity of power, to its 
 own liberty. It was Akssakov's pleasing task, as he 
 travelled over the whole history of the nation, to shed 
 light upon the successive manifestations of this excep- 
 tional phenomenon, the childlike docility with which it 
 accepted baptism, and the constant exemplifications of 
 the close union between the sovereign and his people, 
 bound together in a common faith and common customs. 
 
 To put life into his theory, he had recourse to poetry 
 and the drama, drawing in The Prince Loupouvitski 
 and in Moscow Delivered in 1812, the contrast between 
 the healthy naturalness of the people, and the corrupt 
 culture of the upper classes. There is more poetic 
 talent in his studies of history and literary critiques. 
 He died of consumption in the island of Zante, and left 
 the leadership of the Moscow group of the Slavophil 
 party to his brother Ivan (1823-1886), the least gifted, 
 certainly, but yet, thanks to his practical mind and first- 
 rate talent as a writer, the most popular and influential 
 member of his family. 
 
 Ivan Sergui^idvitch Akssakov, too, began as a poet, then 
 
THE AKSSAKOVS 215 
 
 collaborated with the Imperial Geographical Society, and 
 published an excellent monograph on the Ukraine fairs. 
 In 1861 he became editor of a succession of Slavo- 
 phil publications, all democratic and Panslavist in their 
 tendency, such as The Day, Moscow, &c., which dis- 
 appeared, one after the other, under the rod of the Cen- 
 sure. Not that they contained revolutionary teachings. 
 The fault found with Ivan Serguidi^vitch was rather that 
 he was more royalist than the king himself. He was 
 banished in consequence of a speech made on June 
 22, 1878, at a meeting of the " Slav Committee" of Mos- 
 cow. In it he had thundered against the "infamy" of 
 the Berlin Congress and the "treason" of the Russian 
 diplomats attending it, who had plotted the shame 
 of their country. After 1880 he directed The Rouss, a 
 weekly publication, in which he principally occupied 
 himself in waging war with the Liberalism of St. Peters- 
 burg. 
 
 The fundamental error of this school consists, as it 
 seems to me, in the origin it attributes to the " National 
 idea." 
 
 The Kiri6i6vskis have fancied they discovered this in 
 the reality of an historical past which had been care- 
 lessly studied, whereas it really was an abstract pro- 
 duct of their own imaginations, and more than half 
 Western, to boot,^ — ^the fruit of their intercourse with 
 foreign philosophy. Tchernichevski had undertaken to 
 convince them that this very portion of their theory, 
 which insisted on the corruption of the West and its 
 incapacity for any ulterior development, was itself of 
 Western origin, not borrowed, indeed, from the great 
 thinkers of France and Germany, but from the second- 
 rate philosophers of the Revue des Deux Mondes,iY.e Revue 
 15 
 
2i6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Contemporaine and the Revue de Paris. An idea, supported 
 by arguments drawn from this doubtful source, could not 
 stand the test of a more thorough study of the past. 
 No sooner did it come into contact with the truth of the 
 national history, as unveiled by Karamzine's successors, 
 than it faded out, killed by such facts as The Raskol, 
 which expressly demonstrates the impossibility of the 
 supposed existence, centuries old, of a state of religious 
 unity. And the only manner in which the Slavophil 
 school has been able to maintain its ideal, and deduce a 
 civilising principle from it, is by abstracting these reali- 
 ties and turning history into romance. 
 
 Every nation, indeed, has passed through the same 
 ideological crisis ; it is a disease connected with the 
 growth. In France it was very apparent during the 
 sixteenth century, when Hotman, a Swiss, advocated a 
 return to the traditions of ancient Gaul. Russian Slavo- 
 philism is also connected, by sympathy and synchrony, 
 with a huge wave of European movement ; — the national 
 renaissance in Bohemia, inaugurated by Dobrovski, 
 Szafarzyk, and Kollar ; the Illyrianism diffused among 
 the Southern Slavs by Louis Gay ; the patriotic mysti- 
 cism of Mickcewicz, Towianski, and Slowacki ; Germano- 
 philism, a century and a half old, but active still ; and 
 the struggle of the old national party against liberal- 
 ism in Denmark. Khomiakov had wound up his Euro- 
 pean tour by a visit to the Slav countries, and had 
 entered into personal relations with the principal leaders 
 of the national propaganda there. 
 
 His efforts, and those of his fellow-believers, have 
 not been entirely barren. If they have not, as some 
 of them have too ambitiously boasted, made the study 
 of the fundamental features of the national character 
 
SLAVOPHILISM 217 
 
 an indispensable feature of this period, they have, at 
 all events, imparted a fresh impulse to their consider- 
 ation. We have already noted that in artistic literature 
 a movement in that direction had taken place, pre- 
 viously and independently. And with the exception 
 of Dostoievski, the school has not, as yet, produced any 
 good writer in this particular line. Tourgueniev did not 
 belong to it, and when Gogol joined it, the sun of his 
 artistic power had set. But from the social and scientific 
 point of view, the Kirieievskis and the Akssakovs may 
 claim other titles to glory. It is much to have pointed 
 to the popular element as the basis of social develop- 
 ment, and the vital principle of the national life, at a 
 moment when the people of the country actually pos- 
 sessed no legal existence. The assertion caused a change 
 in the direction of the study of the nation's past, and the 
 great school of history, which, in the period between 1840 
 and 1870, brought this science in Russia to a level with 
 that of the West, was the result. 
 
 To this Slavophilism has contributed, even by its 
 errors. Its wanderings through the mazes of an imagi- 
 nary and fanciful history necessarily induced historical 
 criticism and reconstruction. Thus it was perceived, at 
 last, that Karamzine's work must be done again, and 
 also that of M. Pogodine (died 1873), the defender of the 
 " Norman theory," that is, the Norman origin of the first 
 Varegians, against V6neline (died 1839), and his disciples, 
 Saveliev-Rostislavitch and Morochkine. A Slavophil, a 
 Panslavist, and yet as fervid an admirer of Peter the 
 Great as N. Oustrialov himself, Pogodine, that " Clio 
 in uniform, with the collar of knighthood," as a German 
 critic called him, is the vassal, in some respects, of 
 the patriotically fervent mysticism which seems more or 
 
2i8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 less to saturate every contemporary school in Russia. 
 Oustrialov has the advantage over him, in being almost 
 free from it. In his History of Russia and in his six- 
 volumed biography (unfinished) of Peter the Great, both 
 of them carefully prepared, but devoid of any critical 
 instinct, he contents himself with being official. The 
 seven volumes of Pogodine's works published between 
 1846 and 1859 are exceedingly entertaining reading, but 
 bear traces of insufficient scientific preparation. 
 
 A great work was begun in this respect by the 
 establishment, under Nicholas I., of an Archeographical 
 Commission and Expedition ; by the institution of pro- 
 fessorships of Slav philology in the Universities, and 
 by the use made of foreign, and especially of German 
 Universities, for the training of such professors. The 
 result is seen in a new generation of historians, of whom 
 the most eminent were Kalatchov, Kaveline, Afanassiev, 
 Bousslaiev, Zabiehne, S. M. SOLOVIOV (1820-1879), and 
 N. I. KOSTOMAROV (1817-1885). This was. their pro- 
 gramme : To regard history as an organic whole, capable 
 of development according to certain laws to be fixed ; 
 to give the foremost place in the study of this organic 
 whole to the examination of its modes of existence, 
 political institutions, laws, economy, manners and cus- 
 toms. C. D. Kaveline (1818-1855), who strove to carry 
 out this programme in a series of brilliant treatises, has 
 touched on the most interesting questions of the political 
 and economic life, and also on the general culture of his 
 country. F. 1. Bousslaiev (1815-1870) not only imported 
 the comparative method into the study of the national 
 language, but also brought the moral basis of the popular 
 feeling, as expressed in the national poetry, into strong 
 relief. 
 
SOLOVIOV 219 
 
 Soloviov's treatise on The Relations between the Russian 
 Princes of the House of Rurik (1847) marked an era in 
 Russian historical literature. His great History of Russia 
 in twenty-nine volumes, begun in 1851, is to this day 
 a mine on which we all draw. The last volumes, especi- 
 ally, are no more than a hastily arranged collection of 
 material. Like a great number of his Russian rivals, 
 the author planned a task that was beyond human power. 
 His conception was too vast, and his strength giving out 
 before the work was completed, the house that he began 
 like an architect was finished as by a bricklayer's labourer. 
 But the material is of the finest, and in the earlier volumes 
 we see that it has been collected by a master-hand. The 
 writer, in fact, belonged to no party except that of truth. 
 There was nothing of the professional political writer 
 about him, no pushing of special tendencies and doc- 
 trines. Coldly, conscientiously, calmly, he draws up 
 his statement ; and his style suits his method — a little 
 dry, but admirably clear, sober, and tranquil. His 
 life matched his work ; it was one of retirement and 
 labour, utterly unconcerned with external events, shut in 
 between his study, his professorial chair at the Moscow 
 University, and his archives — the pure and noble figure 
 of a learned man. 
 
 N. I. Kostomarov, who, with M. Pogodine, was the 
 hero of the public tournament in the amphitheatre of 
 the St. Petersburg University, which caused such a stir 
 in ^arch i860, is a much more complex personage, with 
 a far more varied career. Author of a treatise on The 
 Historical Meanings of Popular Poetry (1843), and of a 
 Slav Mythology (1847), he devoted many of his nume- 
 rous monographs to literary and even dramatic subjects. 
 At the same time, he attempted novel-writing, with The 
 
220 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Son (1865), a fairly pretty tale on the subject of Stenka 
 Razine's Cossack rebellion, and Koudeiar (1875), an im- 
 portant historical narrative, founded on the political 
 troubles of the sixteenth century, which was a com- 
 plete failure. But contemporary politics also attracted 
 Kostomarov. Science, in his case, was an integral part of 
 life. His studies of Little-Russian poetry enticed him for 
 a moment into writing in the language of that country, 
 and in 1847 he was suspected, like Chevtchenko and 
 Koulich, of active participation in the separatist move- 
 ment. This earned him several months of imprison- 
 ment, a prolonged banishment to Saratov, and, in the 
 eyes of the youth of that period, the reputation of a 
 defender of liberalism, and a martyr to its cause. He 
 was pardoned in 1855, and proceeded to publish, in the 
 Annals of the Fatherland, that fine series of monographs, 
 Bogdane Khmelnitski, The Rebellion of Stenka Rasine, and 
 The Commerce of the Muscovite State in the Sixteenth and 
 Seventeenth Centuries, which has crowned his reputation 
 with glory. A little later, after a stay abroad, Kostmarov 
 took an active part in the labours which led up to the 
 enfranchisement of the serfs. For a short time he held 
 a professorship at the University of St. Petersburg, but 
 was obliged to vacate it in consequence of the disturb- 
 ances among the students in 1862. His active career 
 was now closed, but the writer remained. He pub- 
 lished, at the expense of the Archasographical Society, 
 eleven volumes of documents bearing on the history 
 of the south-west provinces, and continued to issue 
 his monographs, which number thirteen all told. They 
 have, for the most part, as much romance as history 
 in their composition, and are written, as a rule, with 
 the object of pushing some particular view. That de- 
 
KOSTOMAROV 221 
 
 voted to The Republics of Northern Russia reveals the 
 author's sympathy with free institutions, and the demo- 
 cratic ideal. In others he defends the ethnographic 
 autonomy of Little Russia with arguments more pas- 
 sionate than sound, but his theories are always served 
 by his first-rate talent as a story-teller. 
 
 Kostomarov supported the theory of the federa- 
 tive system in ancient Russia, in opposition to that of 
 C. Akssakov, which attributed a preponderating share 
 in the organisation of the country to the provincial par- 
 liaments. He broke more than one lance with Pogo- 
 dine concerning Rurik's Norman origin. He joined 
 with Slavophils of every shade in defending liberal 
 ideas. For from its earliest origin, the school was 
 liberal and progressive, even in the person of that 
 representative who, in our day and in its name, has 
 waved the banner of reaction higher than all other 
 men. I mean Michael Katkoff. And from this school 
 was sent out, after i860, that watchword, "Go out 
 amongst the people ' " which has since been so decried 
 and ridiculed, but which then stirred all that was best in 
 the social world — the expression of a deep and unerring 
 instinct, the fruit of a true conception — that of the neces- 
 sity for gathering every social force to labour for the 
 common salvation. P. Kiri^i^vski's collection of popular 
 songs was nothing but an excursion into the ranks of the 
 people, and so were Rybnikov's later journeys through 
 the province of Olonetz, continued by Hilferding, D. 
 Rovinski's labours in the field of popular iconography, 
 and Tolstoi's legendary work at lasnaia Poliana. 
 
 A short view of the political evolution which accom- 
 panied and occasioned these enterprises, between 1840 
 and 1880, now becomes indispensable. 
 
222 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Political Evolution. 
 
 Slavophilism, when it recognised a manifestation of 
 its " idea " in the twofold emancipatory movement which 
 parted the national literature from the Western models, 
 and at the same time brought the masses nearer to 
 the hour of their comparative freedom, rendered ser- 
 vice, direct or indirect, to each of these causes. Un- 
 til i860, Katkov and Herzen marched hand in hand, 
 though the Russian frontier lay between them. That 
 special form of the revolutionary movement which 
 Tourgu^niev is said to have dubbed, in 1862, with the 
 name of Nihilism — the origin of which, however, dates 
 from 1855 — <iid not divide them. " Nihilism only ap- 
 peared among us because we are all Nihilists," writes 
 Dostoievski. And indeed, before 1861, all the more im- 
 portant organs of the press had been gained over to the 
 ideas on which the movement so described was founded'. 
 So long as it confined itself to mere speculation, it alarmed 
 nobody, and seemed, indeed, to correspond with the 
 common aspirations of all liberals. 
 
 The liberation of the serfs in 1861 involved a sudden 
 leap from the empyrean heaven of ideas, into the world 
 of concrete fact, and the moment conception took tangible 
 shape it seemed alive with monstrous forms. Peasant 
 insurrections in the Volga region ; student riots at St. 
 Petersburg, at Kiev, at Kharkov ; the appearance of the 
 "red cock," — a rising en masse of incendiaries, followed by 
 others bearing bombs — there was some cause for alarm. 
 Meanwhile the press worked furiously. Following the 
 current of European thought, it had, since 1840, moved 
 towards a clearer conception of the problems calling 
 
KATKOV 223 
 
 for solution. It had assimilated the successive develop- 
 ments of the Hegelian theory, the teachings of the 
 Positivists, of political economy, and sociology. It had 
 now reached the stage of practical application. The 
 newspapers were not sufficiently numerous for the work 
 to be done. Besides the liberal or radical periodicals, 
 such as I. Akssakov's The Day, and Dostoievski's The 
 Times, revolutionary pamphlets and booklets poured 
 forth in streams — the echo of the tocsin which Herzen 
 continued to ring, deepening the universal mental con- 
 fusion and agitation. The Government strove to create 
 a reaction, sent out still more severe instructions to 
 the Censure, suppressed three newspapers, and arrested 
 Tchernichevski. It was all in vain. The local press was 
 silenced, but the tocsin beyond the frontier rang more 
 furiously than ever, and the circulation of numbers of 
 The Bell throughout the country, and even in the sove- 
 reign's own circle, proved a secret understanding with 
 English publicists. The very silence of the press organs 
 gagged by the Censure, which soon became voluntary 
 and systematic, tended to throw the public yet more 
 completely under the influence of this propaganda from 
 without. 
 
 At this moment, Michael Katkov (1820-1887) re- 
 vealed himself in a new and unexpected character. He 
 had begun in the teaching career as a professor at the 
 Moscow University, and had taken up journalism as the 
 editor of the Russian Messenger, the most liberal and 
 Anglomaniac organ of the period. This editorship he 
 combined, in and after 1861, with that of the Moscow 
 Gazette. In his paper he defended the cause of progress, 
 expatiated on the advantages of self-government and 
 decentralisation, and denounced the vices of despotism, 
 
224 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 with unprecedented boldness. He now became con- 
 vinced that Herzen, with his friends Ogariov and Bakou- 
 nine, were leading liberalism astray. And resolutely, 
 formally, he broke the alliance which had so long bound 
 him to the too adventurous champions of a cause 
 which, he believed, they were endangering. He openly 
 denounced them as being responsible for the unjustifiable 
 violence into which a portion of the progressive party 
 had allowed itself to be drawn, and also for the measures 
 of repression, too justly deserved, which had been elicited 
 by it. He laid passionate stress on the Utopian and 
 chimerical nature of the conception of society they pro- 
 mulgated. 
 
 The effect was striking. Instantly a nucleus of 
 conservative resistance gathered round the bold con- 
 troversialist. The Polish insurrection, which occurred 
 in the course of the following year, furnished him with 
 fresh arguments and a solid fulcrum, that of the resistance 
 and rebellion of the national feeling. At the same time, 
 it accentuated the retrograde tendency of his group. 
 Herzen, faithful to his own principles, risked his popu- 
 larity on the most dangerous of hazards, by making 
 common cause with the insurgents. The few liberal 
 organs spared by the Censure, true to their mutual under- 
 standing, betrayed a similar sympathy by their continued 
 silence. In the midst of the lull, Katkov's voice was 
 raised once more. In eloquent language he affirmed 
 the existence of a criminal, and, indeed, a somewhat 
 fictitious, agreement between the events actually taking 
 place at Warsaw and those with which the revolutionary 
 agitation nursed by London and Paris fanatics threatened 
 the peace of Russia. In the name of the national ideal, 
 the future of which was threatened, in the name even of 
 
KATKOV 22 5 
 
 the ancient popular rights, the reconstitution of which 
 in the Lithuanian provinces would be prevented by 
 the triumph of the Polish element, he demanded the 
 suppression of the insurrection, and the complete annexa- 
 tion of Poland. 
 
 Such a suggestion as Katkov's was sure to find 
 numerous and willing hearers. It was echoed even in 
 the foremost ranks of the liberal party. Before very long, 
 the Russification and nationalisation of all the hetero- 
 geneous elements composing Catherine II. 's mighty 
 inheritance was to be the common war-cry of all liberals, 
 and at their head, Katkov, whose neo-conservatism was 
 gradually gathering strength, exercised powers resem- 
 bling those of a dictator. The Government itself had 
 to submit, and did it, indeed, with a good grace. The 
 pretensions of a nobility which had suddenly fallen in 
 love with representative institutions, and the continua- 
 tion of the enterprises of the revolutionary party, which 
 culminated, in 1866, in Karakazov's attempt, forced it 
 into the most absolutely reactionary course. Mouraviov 
 had no sooner finished his work in Poland, than he 
 was summoned to repeat it on the Nihilists in Russia. 
 Ministers and functionaries of moderate views, Valouiev, 
 Golovine, Prince Souvorov, made way for others of the 
 most retrograde opinions, such as Prince Gagarin and 
 Count Chouvalov. An abyss yawned, into which the 
 whole of Katkov's past liberalism fell, and left not a trace 
 behind. The dictator was forced to obey the common 
 law of popular movements. Soon, leader though he 
 was, he had to follow his own soldiers, and he ended, 
 from the fervent autonomist he had once been, by being 
 the proscriber of all local initiative, as a sin against the 
 rights of absolute monarchy, as the sacrificer of every 
 
226 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 ethnographic autonomy on the altar of national unity, 
 and finally, alack ! as an officious informer, who scented 
 revolution and treason everywhere, and, with C. Leontiev, 
 as an educational reformer who would have all teaching 
 brought back to the classic traditions, and the superan- 
 nuated methods of a bygone period. So thoroughly did 
 he do his work, that not a sign remained, in his contem- 
 poraries' eyes, of the brilliant furrow he had traced, in 
 the early part of his career, across a period to which I 
 shall rejoice to return, in order to call up the memory 
 of its artistic and intellectual splendours. 
 
 Yet in so doing I shall not escape from some of those 
 political and scientific problems to which I have just 
 referred. One of the consequences of the regime im- 
 posed on the Russian press has been, and is, that all 
 investigations and discussions of this nature are forced 
 into a province not entirely fitted for them, that a veil of 
 romance or poetry must be east over things and subjects 
 most unsuited to this treatment, and that the imagination, 
 and all the temptations connected therewith, must be 
 mixed up in questions which should be treated by 
 methods of the severest simplicity. Art itself has had 
 reason to murmur against the authors of these adul- 
 terous unions, even when their names were Gogol and 
 Tourgudniev. Reason and truth have suffered even 
 more, when the writer who thus disguised them bore 
 the name of Tolstoi'. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 LERMONTOV, GOGOL, AND TOURGUENIEV 
 
 Last winter, in the Parisian drawing-room of a great 
 Russian lady, I was present at the reading of a French 
 translation of The Demon. The author's name was un- 
 known to half of the assembled audience. The trans- 
 lation, graceful and faithful as it was, could only very 
 partially render the beauties of the work. At first the 
 attitude of the company was somewhat careless, though 
 polite. But as the incidents of the drama were unfolded, 
 I read in the shining eyes and parted lips about me, that 
 the poet and his interpreter had won over that elegant 
 swarm of gay and blas^ beings. " What passion 1 " one 
 lady murmured. And she spoke truly. Called from the 
 wild slopes of the Caucasian mountains, by the vivid ima- 
 gination of Lermontov, a torrent of burning lava flowed 
 in waves of harmony into the hearts of his hearers. 
 
 Even prior to this experience, I had always declined 
 to follow tradition by placing this particular poet in the 
 same pleiad with Pouchkine. To me he seemed evidently 
 to belong to another intellectual group, that of Bielinski, 
 of Gogol, And of the Slavophil school. With a somewhat 
 childish instinct of defiance, he has chosen to take up a 
 certain number of the subjects already treated by the 
 author of Engine Onieguine. He, too, was resolved to 
 conjure up his Prophet, who has proved less of an Isaiah 
 than of a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel^the disregarded bearer 
 
228 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of sublime truths, at whom men cast stones, and at whom 
 the old point with their fingers, saying to the children, 
 " See how he is despised ! " Like Pouchkine, and within 
 similar limits, he has felt the Byronic influence, but, 
 unlike Pouchkine, he has never cut himself off from the 
 political and social progress of his time, and from the 
 problems therein to be found. His despair and melan- 
 choly arose, in part at least, more out of the common 
 sadness and alarm than out of his own selfish disgust, 
 and I am not inclined to think that if his life had been 
 prolonged, he would have accepted clemency, and even 
 favours, from Nicholas, nor would have appeared a 
 domesticated, submissive, and contented subject of the 
 Tsar. 
 
 But for Byron, Lermontov might perhaps have pro- 
 vided the Slavophil faith with that complement of artistic 
 expression it still lacks. The poem — I regard it as his 
 master-piece — in which he conjures up the figure of 
 Ivan Vassilievitch proves his possession of the requisite 
 powers. In those of his works (such as Ismail-Bey) 
 which are more directly inspired by the English poet, 
 the Natiofialist tendency is still visible ; the West, doomed 
 and depraved, gives way before the regenerating East. 
 In Sacha — a posthumous work, probably dating from 
 about 1838 — the 147th and 148th lines contain impre- 
 cations against Germany which might have been written 
 yesterday. Yet the poet never wholly accepts the doc- 
 trines of Kirieidvski and Akssakov. 
 
 Nor did it ever occur to him to calculate the greatness 
 of his country on the number of swords she could draw, 
 nor to become " the patriot of brutality," as Brandes 
 powerfully describes Pouchkine. But he was proud of 
 his race to the highest degree, and this in spite of the 
 
LERMONTOV 229 
 
 fact that a pretentiousness — -also the result of Byron's 
 influence — induced him to claim descent now from the 
 Spanish family of Lerma, and again from the Scottish 
 Learmonths, who owned an ancient tower on the Tweed, 
 near Sir Walter Scott's house of Abbotsford. But though 
 he was fond of talking about "leaving the country of 
 snows and police-agents " and going back to " my Scot- 
 land," he had all the distinctive features of the Russian — 
 his uneasy sensitiveness, his lofty imagination, his infinite 
 sadness. Tourgudniev remarked upon his eyes, " which 
 never laughed, even when he laughed himself ! " 
 
 The parents of Michael Iouri£vitch Lermontov 
 (1811-1841) possessed no castle, either on Tweed banks 
 or elsewhere. They were small nobles in the govern- 
 ment of Toula, and were really, if we may trust the poet's 
 biographers, of Scottish origin. One of their ancestors, 
 George Learmonth, is said to have left his country in the 
 seventeenth century, and taken service with the Tsar 
 Michael Fiodorovitch. Michael lourievitch received a 
 careful education, as those times went. He had a German 
 nurse, and even a French tutor, who taught him to worship 
 Napoleon, and inspired him with a taste for French 
 poetry, but who did not prevent him, in later years, from 
 envying Pouchkine his Arina Rodionovna, and the old 
 nurse's folk-tales, " which had more poetry in them than 
 the whole of French literature." Dismissed from the 
 University for some trifling escapade, he spent two 
 years in the military school, and lived the life of the 
 ordinary officer of the day, save that he put "a little 
 poetry into his champagne." His earliest efforts, The 
 Fete at Peterkof ditiA Oulancha (the handbooks of Russian 
 literature describe them as "epic" ; I should rather have 
 called them indelicate), belong to this period (1832-1834) 
 
230 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and bear its seal. He was a cornet in the Hussars of 
 the Guard when a St. Petersburg review published his 
 first Oriental sketch, Hadji- Abrek, which is essentially 
 Byronian in form. 
 
 In Russia the study of English literature and poetry 
 was always somewhat inadequate and fragmentary. The 
 subject was not considered in its completeness, nor was 
 any individual work studied in its entirety. Before the 
 advent of Byron, Walter Scott was for many years the 
 only English author at all generally known. At the 
 time of Lermontov's greatest devotion to Byron, he was 
 unacquainted with Shelley, and even of Byron himself ; 
 neither his imagination nor his inspiration imbibed more 
 than some special features. No Russian Anglomaniac of 
 that period ever dreamt of sacrificing himself, like Byron, 
 like Shelley, for Greece or for Ireland, or like Landor, for 
 Spain. And if there was no sign in the pages of Eugene 
 Onieguine of that mighty panorama of satire in which 
 the author of Don Juan and Childe Harold pilloried the 
 European world, with all the hypocrisies of its morals 
 and social organisation, neither do Lermontov's Oriental 
 sketches, nor even the more matured works of his later 
 days, such as The Demon and The Hero of our Own Times, 
 reflect more than some explosive flashes of the Byronic 
 sun — pride, free thought, sardonic laughter, and an 
 artificial cynicism and demonism. The humanitarian 
 ray is lacking. 
 
 The Russian and the Englishman could not fully 
 agree, even in their common worship of Napoleon. 
 While Byron reproached the " god of battles " for 
 his falsehood to the revolutionary idea, and really only 
 succeeded in adoring his idol after its fall, when he was 
 inspired with scorn and rage against the "jackals preying 
 
LERMONTOV 231 
 
 on the dying lion," it never occurred to Lermontov to 
 discuss his deity, and after the catastrophe he lays the 
 blame, naively and flatly, on the French nation, which , 
 he holds guilty of having betrayed and forsaken its 
 glorious hero, or rather — ^and how Russian is the touch ! 
 — its sovereign ! The pessimism of the author of The 
 Demon sprang partly from another, and, we must con- 
 fess, a less noble source. The cornet of hussars pos- 
 sessed none of the elegance and charm of his English 
 model. Ill-made, awkward in society, where, by his 
 own confession, he "could not utter a word," his in- 
 feriority, bitterly felt, made him sulky, cross-grained, 
 and vindictive. Men, as a rule, detested him. He made 
 love to the fair sex, but more especially, it would seem, 
 for the sake of the spiteful pleasure of forsaking the 
 woman whose favour he had won. Though quite as 
 self-conscious and self-centred as Byron, quite capable 
 of saying, " The person whose company gives me most 
 pleasure is myself ... I am my own best friend" — 
 quite as ambitious, "desiring to leave traces of his passage 
 everywhere" — Lermontov was utterly incapable of say- 
 ing, like Byron, " I love, thee, man, not less, but Nature 
 more 1 " or that to desire " to fly from, need not mean 
 to hate mankind." On the contrary, he deliberately gave 
 himself out to be a man-hater. The bits of blue sky over- 
 head, to which the English poet loved to raise his eyes, 
 had no existence for his Russian confrh-e. His horizon 
 was always gloomy, laden with clouds, heavy with 
 thunder. 
 
 We have been told that this deformed and half-starved 
 Byronism, by giving Lermontov, from the purely aesthetic 
 standpouit, a taste for the brilliant imagery, the sonorous 
 
 language, and the humour and pathos of the English 
 16 
 
232 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 poet, did him the service of snatching him from the 
 habits and surroundings of a mere cavalry officer, and 
 . reveahng to him a higher world of feeling and thought. 
 I should be much more disposed to blame it as having 
 tempted the Russian poet away from other springs 
 of inspiration, more suited to his powers and natural 
 temperament. He drew nearer to these, for a moment, 
 at the time of Pouchkine's death. He had " Byronised " 
 up till that time without much success, and led, mean- 
 while, a foolish roistering life, some incidents of which 
 he has chosen to relate in Mongo, and in The Princess 
 Ligovskaia. The tragic end of his rival, done to death 
 by a drawing-room conspiracy, roused him into a trans- 
 port of rage and judicial indignation — "The poet is 
 dead, the victim of honour ! " The verses, which, like 
 Pouchkine's epigrams, were circulated in manuscript, 
 earned Lermontov a year of exile to the Caucasus. 
 Here The Demon, the plan of which had been conceived 
 and sketched out some years before, was recast. The 
 subject is evidently suggested, indirectly, by Byron's 
 Heaven and Earth, and more directly by De Vigny's 
 Eloa ; but in the hands of the Russian poet the char- 
 acters and the setting of the story have both under- 
 gone a complete transformation. For the fanciful and, 
 to some extent, abstract landscape of the French writer, 
 he has substituted the real magnificence of Nature in the 
 Caucasus, which had already cast its spell over Pouch- 
 kine. But the scenes which by the latter were coldly, 
 and we may almost say topographically, described, rise 
 lifelike before us under the pen which, in Lermontov's 
 hand, seems to tremble under the breath of love. And 
 the heroine of his poem is no longer the symbolic virgin, 
 born of a tear dropped by the Christ, who held De 
 
LERMONTOV 233 
 
 Vigny's enamoured fancy, but a living passionate being 
 — a Jewess of the Babylonian Captivity in the first 
 sketch of the work — then a Spanish nun, and finally a 
 Georgian princess. She has less ideal nobility about 
 her than De Vigny's heroine, but she has more human 
 reality. She does not yield to the compassionate long- 
 ing to save her seducer by her love. She obeys the 
 imperious behest of love itself, the cry of her own heart 
 and senses. And she is only the secondary figure in 
 the poem. The leading part is that of the Demon 
 himself. 
 
 It is somewhat difficult to judge of the poet's concep- 
 tion on this point. All we have, indeed, is the mutilated 
 form to which it has been reduced by his own precau- 
 tion and reticence, with a view to the Censor, and by 
 the subsequent pruning executed by that functionary. 
 The hero, as he thus appears to us, has nothing in 
 common with Byron's " Lucifer " and Milton's " Satan," 
 both of them personifications of the Demon-thought 
 which raises man while it torments him. The seducer 
 of Tamara, the fair Circassian, though he calls himself 
 "king of knowledge and of liberty," does nothing to 
 justify his title, in no way proves his superiority in the 
 sphere of intellect, and gives no sign anywhere of that 
 spirit of revolutionary protest, that longing for power 
 and activity, which have set Byron's " Lucifer " at the 
 head of all the agitators and national leaders of the nine- 
 teenth century, just as Milton's "Satan" incarnates the 
 intellectual struggle of the seventeenth, and Carducci's 
 Inno arSatana represents 'dx&forza vindice delta rasione of 
 our own day. This sensual demon approaches much 
 more nearly to the type created by De Vigny. "_/'«/ 
 fonde mon empire de fiamme — dans les desirs du cceur 
 
2 34 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 — dans les reves de I'ame — dans les desirs du corps — ■ 
 attraits mysterieux." But in Lermontov's Demon this 
 last feature is worked up into an over-mastering eroti- 
 cism, which appears to have been the dominant note in 
 the poet's own temperament. 
 
 I must repeat that The Demon is a poem which should 
 not be judged unreservedly on its mere outward appear- 
 ance. Lermontov's general attitude was one of protest 
 couched in the form of literature, and under other con- 
 ditions he would certainly have been capable of giving a 
 much less commonplace expression to his thoughts. 
 
 To St. Petersburg, whither, thanks to powerful in- 
 tervention, he returned in 1838, he brought back, to- 
 gether with his Deinon, his Song on Ivan Vassilievitch, 
 which belongs to quite a different order of inspiration, 
 and seems to emanate from some far-away region, some 
 mysterious and inexplorable corner of his gloomy and 
 storm-tossed soul. In it, the figure of Ivan the Terrible, 
 with the features bestowed on him by popular legend 
 and verse, and the world of ideas and feelings with 
 which both have surrounded it, stand out in extraor- 
 dinary relief. At a tournament over which the Tsar 
 presides, a young Moscow merchant, Kalachnikov, chal- 
 lenges Kiribidievitch, one of the sovereign's boon com- 
 panions, who had violated his wife, to single combat 
 with their fists. Struck on the chest, according to the cour- 
 teous rules of the combat, Kalachnikov responds with a 
 fearful blow on the temple, which lays his adversary stone 
 dead at his feet. " Didst thou do the deed intentionally ? " 
 queries the Tsar. " Yes, orthodox Tsar," replies the 
 merchant ; " I killed him with my full will. But where- 
 fore—that 1 will not tell thee. I will tell that to God 
 alone." "Thou dost well," answers Ivan, "my little 
 
LERMONTOV 235 
 
 friend, bold wrestler, merchant's son, to have answered 
 me according to thy conscience. Thy young wife and 
 thy orphans shall receive largesse from my treasury. 
 To thy brothers I give permission from this day to traffic 
 over all the Russian empire, this huge empire, with- 
 out paying tax or toll. As for thee, my little friend, go 
 to the scaffold — take thither thy rebellious head. I will 
 cause the axe to be ground and sharpened — I will have 
 the headsman dressed and adorned — I will order the 
 great bell to be tolled, so that all the folk of Moscow 
 may be sure to know that thou, too, hast shared my 
 mercy." 
 
 And so it comes to pass. Kalachnikov, having bidden 
 farewell to wife and children, goes to the place of execu- 
 tion, there to die, cruelly and ignominiously. The poem 
 does not say "unjustly." 
 
 The story, the dialogue, the setting, are all admirable, 
 perfectly natural, exquisitely simple, powerfully original. 
 St. Petersburg, unfortunately, was to tempt Lermontov 
 back to his earlier and more artificial style, and at the 
 same time to a disorderly and empty mode of life which 
 soon weighed on him even more heavily than on Pouch- 
 kine himself. He was in despair, grew furious, declared 
 he would rather go anywhere, "to his regiment or to 
 the devil," was haunted, like Pouchkine, by a presenti- 
 ment of, even a desire for, a speedy death, and composed 
 that series of prose narratives which, collected together 
 under the title A Hero of our Own Time, have been taken 
 for his autobiography. I think it would be both cruel 
 and unjust to accept this supposition absolutely. Just as 
 Pouchkine has put some of himself into both Oni^guine 
 and Lenski, without exhausting his whole personality 
 in either character — so Pi^tchorine, the " Hero " in ques- 
 
236 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tion, is certainly not wholly representative of Lermontov. 
 The author of A Hero did certainly intend, like Musset 
 in his Confessions d'un Enfant du Siecle (a book which 
 doubtless influenced him), to lay bare the soul, generi- 
 cally speaking, of the man of his own epoch, and in it a 
 portion of his own. In this respect his work is interest- 
 ing as being an attempt at the psychological novel. But 
 Lermontov possessed neither the sincerity, the subtlety, 
 nor even the broad-mindedness of De Musset. His Piet- 
 chorine does certainly bear traces of the moral uneasi- 
 ness which tortured the best minds of that period. That 
 it is which makes him, like Onidguine and like Tchatski, 
 appear an exile from his country and from his own self, 
 unable to find shelter or repose anywhere on earth. But 
 he lacks both the judgment which would enable him to 
 recognise the causes of his mental disturbance, and the 
 determination to suppress such of them, external or in- 
 ternal, as depend on his own free-will. At bottom he is 
 a military dandy, almost an English lord suffering from 
 the spleen, aristocratic and sentimental, and at the same 
 time a barbarian, capable of all the coarse and violent 
 passions of the Tcherkess tribes, among whom he 
 took refuge ; a " Romantic '' with a delicate feeling for 
 Nature, a passionate love of liberty, and his mouth full 
 of quotations from Schiller and Walter Scott ; a Don 
 Juan filled with a vague longing for some ideal mistress, 
 and avenging on every woman he meets, be she Russian 
 princess or Tcherkess peasant, the disappointment he 
 finds in her ; a lover who knows neither faith nor 
 honour, a detestable comrade. His temperament, his 
 disposition, and even his external appearance are abso- 
 lutely in accord with the unpleasing memories which St. 
 Petersburg belles, and his own brother officers, retain of 
 
LERMONTOV 237 
 
 Lermontov. Read the portrait of his adventurous guest 
 traced by one of the heroes of the book, Maximus Maxi- 
 movitch, after having given him shelter on the steppe, 
 and compare it with Bodenstedt's hasty sketch of Ler- 
 montov, after a chance meeting. " Strongly built, but 
 exceedingly slight ; disorderly dress, but dazzlingly white 
 linen." The resemblance even extends to material details. 
 Such is the visible and apparent aspect of this per- 
 sonage, and I am willing to admit that it seems to 
 conceal something. But what that may be, remains an 
 unfathomable and deceptive riddle. Pidtchorine may 
 possibly be a Manfred. When, after reading Moore's 
 Life of Byron, Lermontov exclaimed — 
 
 }Ve have the same soul, the same torments j 
 Would that I might have the same fate ! 
 
 he expressed — of this I am convinced — a genuine feeling. 
 But his Manfred was always to stay on his mountain. 
 Never does his "hero's disdainful pride seem touched with 
 an aching compassion for those below. Once we see him 
 weep over the corpse of a horse, and this is all. And 
 his adventures, his seductions, his abductions, his duels, 
 are all pitifully commonplace. 
 
 They interest us ? Yes, just as certain not particu- 
 larly pretty women interest us — doubtless on account of 
 the exquisite naturalness of the story and the Caucasian 
 colouring, which is entirely beautiful. There is not a 
 trace of composition about the work. It has neither 
 beginning, nor middle, nor end. This peculiarity will 
 presently be noticed as belonging generally to the novels 
 of Gogol and his emulators. 
 
 Yet we must not forget that Lermontov was only 
 five-and-twenty when he wrote this book, that he was 
 
238 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 living the life of a hussar, and that to all appearance he 
 had not spoken his last word, nor even found his true 
 path in literature. Alas ! the moments left him to search 
 for it were numbered. In 1840 he fought a duel with 
 the son of Baron de Barante, the well-known historian, 
 then Minister of France at St. Petersburg, and for this 
 prank was sent back to the Caucasus. Sullenly he bade 
 farewell to "unwashed Russia, to the country of slaves, 
 to blue uniforms, and the people who submitted to their 
 law." " Perhaps," he added, " beyond the chain of the 
 free mountains I shall escape, O my country ! from thy 
 pachas, from their eyes that see everything, and their 
 ears that claim to hear everything ! " The next year 
 he reappeared for a short time at St. Petersburg, and 
 was killed in another duel with Martynov, his own 
 brother officer, of whom he was supposed to have drawn 
 a somewhat spiteful portrait in his Hero, under the title 
 of Grouchnitski. 
 
 Taken as a whole, the work of Lermontov is that of a 
 literary apprentice who drinks at every spring, and attempts 
 every style. In his tragedy called Ispantsy (the Spaniards), 
 written in 1830, we find reminiscences of NatJian der 
 Weise and Kaball und Liebe. In The Masquerade, a play 
 written in 1835, he appears to have laid Shakespeare 
 under contribution. On another play he has seen fit 
 to bestow a German title, Menschen und Leidetischaften. 
 But in all his work, and especially in the short sets of 
 verses, most of which were not published till after his 
 death, there is strong evidence of personal inspiration : 
 the cry of distress, the despairing complaint of a soul 
 that pines for a better world, and thanks God for 
 everything, "for scalding tears, for poisonous kisses," so 
 long as it may soon "cease to be thankful altogether." 
 
LERMONTOV 239 
 
 This is not Pouchkine's sceptical and often ironic 
 melancholy ; it is an anguish that is bitter to mad- 
 ness, a rebellion violent to fury, occasionally combined, 
 as in the figures of Pietchorine and of the modern 
 Othello in The Masquerade, with a power of analysis 
 which, though still somewhat limited, has a subtlety 
 and penetration that remind us of Stendhal. As 
 regards workmanship, the distinctive peculiarity of his 
 writing is its stereotyped quality. Subject, expression, 
 phrase, general form, are constantly reproduced, in every 
 one of his works. Thus the comparison of a human 
 heart to a ruined temple which the gods have forsaken 
 and where men dare not dwell (which had already been 
 used by Pouchkine, who may have borrowed it from 
 Mickiewicz), is reproduced by Lermontov in The Confes- 
 sion (1830), in The Boyard Orcha (1835), and in The Demon 
 (1838). His language, though less unvaryingly correct 
 and apt than Pouchkine's, frequently rises to a pitch 
 of sonorous music even more wonderful than his. He 
 bore a seven-stringed lyre, not a chord of which rang 
 false. Of what splendid hopes was Russia bereft when 
 a senseless bullet crashed into the instrument ! 
 
 Meanwhile, from popular depths unknown to Piet- 
 chorine, and even to Lermontov himself, other chords, 
 modulated in the same tones of complaint and mortal 
 sadness, though gentler indeed, and more resigned, began 
 to rise. 
 
 In 1809 there was born to a small cattle-dealer 
 {prassol) at Voroneje, a child who seemed destined by 
 fate to assist his parents in their humble and rustic 
 vocations. For four years he attended a local school ; 
 then he departed on to the steppe, to mount guard 
 over flocks of sheep and herds of oxen. But with him 
 
240 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 he carried a collection of popular verse, which was 
 to while away his long hours of solitude ; and in his 
 breast, too, he bore, as it proved, a poet's soul. 
 
 This youth was Alexis Vassili£vitch Koltsov 
 (1809-1842). The good-nature of a bookseller placed 
 other volumes within his reach, quite a little library, 
 including the works of Dmitriev, of Joukovski, of 
 Pouchkine, of Delwig. The first effect they had on 
 him was not to make him write verses, but to make 
 him fall in love. The heroine of this farci idyl was 
 a young serf called Douniacha. The hero's parents 
 considered such a marriage a mesalliance. They sent 
 the heir of their flocks and herds to a distance ; they 
 sold Douniacha for a sum of money and a bonus in salt 
 meat, and she utterly disappeared. Two years later, 
 after cruel treatment at the hands of her new proprietor, 
 who lived on the banks of the Don, she died. Koltsov 
 never saw her again. 
 
 In the midst of his sorrow new friends appeared on 
 the scene, holding out helping hands to him. First we 
 see Andrew Porfir6vitch Serebrianski, a young poet, 
 whose melancholy song, " Swift as the waves flow the 
 days of our life," had its hour of popularity. Then came 
 Stankidvitch, whom we know already, and whose father 
 was a land-owner in the neighbourhood of Voroneje. 
 Once more he played the part of Maecenas. By his 
 kindness the young herdsman was suddenly brought 
 into contact with the literary world at Moscow, and in 
 1835 ^ selection of his poetry appeared, published at the 
 expense of his generous protector. It was a revelation ! 
 The link which had hitherto existed between popular 
 and artistic poetry had been purely artificial. Koltsov 
 made that link a living bond. Under his pen the rustic 
 
KOLTSOV 241 
 
 songs — fresh, simple, whether with their brilliant colours 
 and bird-like warbling, or with their gloomy shadows and 
 melancholy voices — retained all their originality, and 
 gained an exquisite form. This was art, and at the same 
 time it was Nature to the very life. It was like breathing 
 the air of the meadows and drinking straight from the 
 rivulet. These verses should not be declaimed. They 
 must be sung to the music of some balalaika. 
 
 Koltsov did not, as may well be imagined, at once 
 attain a perfect mastery of this new art — this marvellous 
 fusion of diverse elements. In his earlier attempts, he 
 did not fail to drop from time to time into an imitation 
 of the Romantic style, and so did scurvy service to his 
 own talent ; and how scant was the space of time allotted 
 him wherein to establish and develop his gift ! 
 
 In 1835 the young poet was able to make some stay 
 in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and frequent the literary 
 circles gathered there ; but until 1840, although he kept 
 up his intercourse with Bielinski and his circle, he was 
 obliged to devote the greater part of his time to the 
 business by which he supported himself and his family. 
 Two years later Koltsov was dead — worn out, killed, at 
 three-and-thirty, by hard work and sorrow. 
 
 He has been called the Russian Burns. The resem- 
 blance, to ray thinking, is confined to some features of 
 his personal history. Like the Ayrshire poet, Koltsov 
 was born of the people, and knew what it was to be poor. 
 His poetic vocation sprang from the same source — a 
 thwarted love. He was more unhappy than Burns, for 
 he never married his Jean Armour. He was less hot- 
 blooded, and never stooped to debauchery ; his life and 
 his poetry were both chaste. But the work of Burns is 
 not a mere artistic transmutation of popular subjects. 
 
242 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 The Scottish poet is a great poet in the full sense of the 
 term — a leader in the twofold domain of art and thought. 
 Properly speaking, his work was not popular poetry : he 
 was ashamed of his origin ! He produced a new poetry, 
 wherein feeling, thought, and soul prevailed over form. 
 By this, as well as by the accent of rebellion and bitter- 
 ness which pervades his verse, he prepared the way for 
 a revolution ; he outstripped his century by forty years ; 
 he ushered in the advent of Byron. The peaceful bard 
 of Voroneje has nothing in common with these things. 
 
 Koltsov sings of poverty, of the fight for existence, of 
 the cruelty of unkind Fate. But all this in tones of 
 perfect resignation, and within a very narrow imaginative 
 sphere. When he leaves this and indulges in his Medita- 
 tions {Douiny), he loses himself in the most cloudy and 
 childish mysticism. 
 
 The philosophic and social import of this poetry lies 
 in the very fact of its existence. Von Visine's heroine, 
 Mme. Prostakova, could not conceive, but a short time 
 previously, that the peasants should dare to be ill. Yet 
 here we see them actually falling in love, and, interesting 
 people in their love affairs ; they venture to be poetic, 
 and even touching. And these are not the be-ribboned 
 shepherds of Florian, but Russian moujiks, redolent of 
 brandy and tar, rugged, often savage, always sad. Koltsov, 
 by virtue of the gift which enabled him to raise, to en- 
 noble, to idealise these boorish elements, has his share in 
 the twofold current of emancipation of that period. His 
 method may be summed up as follows : The popular 
 song invariably deals with the external aspect of things 
 alone. It has no conception of their internal meaning. 
 It makes a clumsy use of metaphors which it cannot 
 coherently develop. It gives rugged expression to rugged 
 
KOLTSOV 243 
 
 feelings. All this is transfigured in Koltsov's hands. He 
 lights up the facts by revealing the psychological element 
 they contain : he purifies the metaphors, he idealises the 
 sentiments. We see a poor " mower/' for instance, who 
 loves Grouniouchka and is loved in return. His request 
 for her hand is refused. The daughters of rich peasants 
 are not for penniless fellows such as he. He empties 
 his scanty purse to buy a well-sharpened scythe. Is he 
 going to kill himself ? Oh, no indeed ! He will go out 
 into the steppe, where the harvest is richest. He will 
 toil bravely, even cheerfully. He will come back with 
 his pockets full. He will rattle his silver roubles, and we 
 shall see whether Grouniouchka's father will not give in 
 at last ! What have we here ? A love story such as 
 may be found in any country place. Clothed in Koltsov's 
 language it is a splendid poem. 
 
 This language always adheres as closely as may be, 
 without actual coarseness, to the popular speech. It is 
 full of wonderful treasures in the way of words and 
 striking imagery, as, for instance, in the Season of Love 
 {Poralioubvi), where a young girl's white bosom is seen 
 heaving tempestuously, though she will not betray her 
 secret. " She will not cast up her foundation of sand," 
 says the poet. 
 
 I have before me, as I write, a still unpublished cor- 
 respondence between Tourgueniev and Ralston. This 
 privilege I owe to the kindness of M. Onidguine, the 
 owner of this inestimable treasure. In its pages the 
 great novelist congratulates the English critic on having 
 introduced the public of his native land to a work which 
 very probably has no parallel in any literature. " As 
 long as the Russian tongue exists," Tourgueniev writes, 
 " certain of Koltsov's songs will retain their popularity in 
 
244 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 his own country." He doubtless had in his mind the 
 poems entitled The Harvest, The Labourer's Song, The 
 Winds Blow, and The Forest. Other Russian critics have, 
 in my opinion, asci-ibed too much importance to certain 
 more ambitious compositions, such as The Little Farm 
 and Night — incidents of women surprised by jealous 
 husbands or lovers, scenes of savage anger and murder, 
 in which the author's dramatic power strikes me less 
 than the poverty and childishness of his execution. 
 Koltsov was quite ignorant of his craft. He knew no 
 more of the art of composition than of that of prosody. 
 He depended entirely on his ear and his intuition, and 
 this could only serve him in simple subjects. Intellec- 
 tually the poor prassol poet was always half-absorbed 
 into that " empire of darkness " from which Ostrovski 
 was to draw his most powerful effects of gloomy terror 
 and pity. 
 
 Not long after the death of the young poet, another 
 made his appearance in Voroneje. Ivan Savitch Nikitine 
 (1826-1861) also sprang from a commercial family, but 
 from one having some connection with the Church. 
 He attracted notice in 1853 by a patriotic poem, Russia, 
 inspired by the opening events of the Crimean War. A 
 collection of his lyric poems, published in 1856 by Count 
 D. N. Tolstoi', was somewhat coldly received. But two 
 years later the fame of Nikitine was established by a 
 great poem, Koulak, which bore testimony to his deep 
 knowledge of the life of the people and his remarkable 
 powers of expression. The word Koulak means "peasants' 
 money-lender." The poet's friends helped him to open a 
 bookshop in his native town. His business prospered, 
 and enabled him to work and create more freely. He 
 perfected his style, for, unlike Koltsov, Nikitine was a 
 
OGARIOV 245 
 
 scholar. He turned his attention to the roman de mceurs, 
 had prepared and half-completed two works, The Mayor 
 and A Seminarist's Journal, when consumption seized 
 him, and he died, like Pouchkine, at the age of thirty- 
 eight. 
 
 Lermontov and Koltsov were not destined to have any- 
 direct successors ; and in making this assertion I do 
 not think I shall offend the shade of Countess Eudoxia 
 Rostoptchine (1811-1858), nor even that of Nicholas 
 Platonovitch Ogariov (1813-1877). This writer, the friend 
 of Herzen and collaborator in The Bell, published, in 
 London, some poetry which has been highly appreciated 
 by the Russians, who delight in forbidden works, and 
 which, in the eyes of some hot-headed critics, places him 
 on a higher level than Ndkrassov. In my judgment it 
 betokens more fierce enthusiasm than poetic feeling, and 
 the author's best works, his Humour, his Nocturne, his 
 Soliloquy, his Winter's Day, present a strange medley 
 of Byronian pessimism and of an equally ill-founded 
 optimism. 
 
 As for Countess Rostoptchine, her poems, which 
 hardly anybody reads nowadays, and her novels, which 
 never found many readers, are full of elevated sentiments 
 and intellectual breadth. 
 
 The transition from poetry to prose, from the romantic 
 struggle against reality to the deliberate observation of 
 that reality which was unconquerable, is a feature common 
 to the literary evolution of this period in every European 
 country. In Russia, where *the reality is tougher and 
 more repulsive than elsewhere, this evolution was accom- 
 plished with special rapidity ; and to this result the 
 essentially realistic temperament of the nation was pecu- 
 liarly favourable. The spirit of nature which had been 
 
246 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 driven out by the pseudo-classic invasion swiftly came 
 home again. Between 1830 and 1840 the novel, as exem- 
 plified in the works of Zagoskine, Lajetchnikov, Dahl, 
 Weltman, N. A. Poldvoi, Prince V. OdoVevski, Pavlov, 
 Bestoujev, and Pogodine, drew more and more to the 
 front in literature. Some of these writers were still un- 
 conscious Romanticists, imitators of Sir Walter Scott ; 
 but in every one of them we notice a common tendency 
 to the representation of scenes from the national life, 
 whether historic or contemporary, together with a 
 constant seeking after comic effect, of a satiric and 
 somewhat humorous nature ; and before Thackeray and 
 Dickens had reached the Russian world, Gogol had 
 risen up within its borders. 
 
 Gogol. 
 
 We have arrived at the year 1831, and the literary exist- 
 ence of the country is passing through a season of sore 
 difficulty. According to the system finally elaborated by 
 Ouvarov, whom Nicholas 1. has chosen to be his Minister 
 of Public Instruction, an iron despotism and a censorship 
 worthy of Metternich are appointed the national and tra- 
 ditional basis of the constitution and development of the 
 Russian commonwealth. Here we have the inauguration 
 of official nationalism, and both press and society, with 
 some few exceptions, spontaneously adopt the formula. 
 In the Northern Bee we see literature walking hand in hand 
 with the police — Grietch, Boulgarine, and Senkowski, 
 all exceeding each other in dulness, obscurantism, and 
 servility. To a critic who accuses him of having written 
 to order, Koukolnik, one of the contributors to this paper, 
 replies, " I will play the part of an accoucheur to-morrow, 
 
GOGOL 247 
 
 if I am so directed." One branch of the Slavophil school, 
 under pretext of rehabilitating the national past, and find- 
 ing fresh ideals within it, applies itself, with Chevirev 
 and Pogodine, to transferring to that past the existing 
 depravity of modern ideas and habits, and ends by de- 
 ducing therefrom, as the traditional direction of all future 
 development, the decrease of individuality ! The culmi- 
 nating point of this teaching is the vehement repudiation 
 of the elementary principles of all civilisation. 
 
 Such was the moral atmosphere which surrounded the 
 cradle of Nicholas Vassili£vitch Gogol (1809-1852). 
 By one of those seeming miracles so frequent in literary 
 history, the future author of Dead Souls does not appear 
 to have suffered from it. 
 
 Born of a small land-owner's family in the govern- 
 ment of Poltava, where the old Cossack legends and 
 traditions were still fresh and strong, he brought with 
 him to his school at Niejine the temperament, the ima- 
 gination, and the intelligence of a true son of the steppe. 
 He loathed mathematics, affected to despise Greek and 
 Latin, and betrayed an equal objection to German. At a 
 later period he was to bestow the name of " Schiller " on 
 a character in one of his stories, a caricature of a German 
 settled in Russia, whose stinginess made him ready to 
 cut off his nose to save the use of snuff, and so metho- 
 dical that, for physiological reasons, he measured the 
 amount of pepper introduced into his food. This mania 
 did not prevent Gogol from reading the best French and 
 German authors with the help of dictionaries, and even 
 going so far as to imitate them. 
 
 At Niejine the fashions followed those of Tsarskoi^- 
 Si^lo. The pupils of the college prided themselves on 
 having a journal of their own, and in it Gogol published, 
 17 
 
248 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 in succession, a novel, Tlie Brothers Tvierdislavitchy, the 
 subject and form of which was borrowed from the 
 German almanacs of that period, a tragedy, The Robbers, 
 the source of which will be easily divined, and satires 
 and ballads, all of them equally devoid of originality. 
 When he left college in 1828, he was a young enthusiast 
 of the purest romantic cast, who dreamt of accomplish- 
 ing some mighty thing for his country, who looked 
 on himself as an ill-used genius, and already claimed — 
 at eighteen — to have suffered bitterly at the hands of his 
 fellow-men ! Two characteristic features, destined, as time 
 went by, to attain prodigious proportions — his ascetic 
 tastes and his love of power — complete this description 
 of Gogol's moral physiognomy. He departed to St. 
 Petersburg, to find employment. He secured a position 
 as copying-clerk in the Ministry of Domains, left it, not 
 until he had collected a number of bureaucratic types 
 of which he was to make vise latfer, was suddenly seized 
 with a desire to take a long journey, started, armed 
 with a sum of money given him by his mother for quite 
 a different purpose, reached Liibeck, turned back, and 
 began to form other plans. First he would be an actor, 
 then he bethought him of writing a poem on the subject 
 of a recent unhappy love affair of his own. This he 
 called Hans Kuchelgarten, and, in spite of all its preten- 
 sions, it is no more than a debased transcription of Voss's 
 Louise. The work, printed under the pseudonym of V. 
 Alov, elicited some jeering remarks from M. Polevoi in the 
 Moscow Telegraph. Otherwise it passed unnoticed. The 
 copies sent to the booksellers' shops waited in vain for 
 purchasers. Gogol took them all back, hired a room in 
 which to burn them, every one, and was suddenly seized 
 with a fit of home-sickness. 
 
GOGOL 249 
 
 These ups'and downs of feeling are common enough 
 among beginners, but they do not always lead to so for- 
 tunate an issue. The issue in this case was a book called 
 Evenings at the Farm of Dikanka, published in 183 1. 
 For a moment it struck the literary world into a kind of 
 stupor. Nothing of the sort had ever been seen before. 
 The Ukraine lived and moved in these stories, called up 
 in a vision at once miraculously precise and exquisitely 
 attractive, singing and ringing with the hearty laughter, 
 just touched with a spice of archness, which is the em- 
 bodiment of Little-Russian mirth. Was it a true picture ? 
 Not quite, as yet. Gogol had not been able, at the very 
 first, to cast off all his romantic trappings. Here and 
 there he over-poetised, and thus misrepresented his 
 Ukraine. And one thing was lacking in his picture, 
 sunny as it was, gay, alive with changing colour. There 
 were no tears in it. 
 
 But close on these Evenings came another series — 
 Mirgorod — jflid this time Pouchkine, in his delight, fell 
 on the author's neck. Perhaps the truth had revealed 
 itself to the young novelist on that morning when he 
 knocked at the great poet's door, and learnt to his 
 astonishment that Gogol was still sleeping. 
 
 " He must have spent the night in composing some 
 fresh work ! " Pouchkine said. 
 
 " He spent the night at cards," replied the servant. 
 
 In Mirgorod we hear the real human laughter of the 
 man who was to write Dead Souls — a laughter with tears 
 in it, and a note of irony. Yet the brilliant success of 
 his work did not satisfy Gogol. Like Tolstoi in later 
 days — an unconscious artist like himself — he was always, 
 from the heights of his dream-fancy, to cast off the chil- 
 dren of his own imagination as being unworthy of it. 
 
2 50 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 He now began to think of a History of Little Russia, and 
 also of a History of the Middle Ages, which was to reach 
 eight or nine volumes. He knew little beyond what his 
 father, a great retailer of legends, had taught him of the 
 past history of his native region. With feverish haste he 
 began to collect materials. Fortunately his imagination 
 proved too strong for him, and the result of his efforts 
 was Tarass Boulba, a prose poem, still very romantic in 
 tendency, based, historically and ethnographically, on a 
 hasty perusal of Beauplan and Scherer, but instinct with 
 powerful epic feeling, and full of striking and dramatic 
 episodes. The opening scenes, where Tarass wrestles 
 with his sons to try their strength, and where a young 
 Cossack, to assert his scorn for luxury, rolls in the 
 mud in the fine clothes which have been forced upon 
 him, are vigorous and truculent reproductions of local 
 manners. 
 
 Farther on, there are fights between Cossacks and 
 Poles, who hurl defiance and long speeches at each 
 other, quite in the Homeric manner. I am far less im- 
 pressed by the much-bepraised episode of the scaffold, 
 whereon the eldest son of Tarass, dying without a 
 murmur under frightful tortures, which make his bones 
 crack, is heard to whisper — 
 
 " Little father ! do you hear it ? " 
 
 And the old Cossack, standing disguised in the crowd, 
 replies — 
 
 "I hear!" 
 
 This is a mere melodramatic trick. 
 
 The History of the Middle Ages was never to get 
 beyond the planning stage. All Gogol did in this line 
 was to insert in his Arabesques a few apparently learned 
 essays, which Bielinski thought so damaging to the 
 
GOGOL 251 
 
 author's budding glory that he refused to look into them 
 seriously. But the presumptive historian was allotted a 
 professorial chair. His first lecture was very brilliant. He 
 possessed some of the gifts which go to make an orator — ■ 
 fare and expressive declamation. But when the second 
 lecture came, the matter was not there. The professor 
 had come to the end of his knowledge ! Within a year 
 and a half he resigned his position. An attempt at a 
 tragedy, founded on events in English history at the 
 time of the Norman Conquest, dates from the period of 
 this melancholy failure ; after which Gogol gave himself 
 up to his natural vocation. 
 
 Here he wavered, for some time, between the influ- 
 ence of the Romantics, as- exemplified in Vit, a mys- 
 terious tale concerning a lover bewitched by a cruel 
 mistress, and that of Hoffmann, as seen in The Portrait, a 
 not over-successful piece of jugglery — fantastic and cir- 
 cumstantial. It was not till 1834 and 1835 that a new 
 series of stories, almost uniform in character, and very 
 different from their predecessors in their nature, proved 
 his possession of a definite form, which was to be that 
 of the modern Russian novel. These were The Land- 
 owners of Old Days, The Quarrel of Ivan Ivanovitch and 
 Ivan Nikiforovitch, and The Mantle. "We have all," _ 
 writes one of his contemporaries, "issued from Gogol's 
 mantle." And Sergius Akssakov, who, after having 
 followed very different lines, set himself, when nearly 
 sixty years of age, to begin his literary career afresh 
 under the young writer's influence, might well apply 
 the assertion to his own case. 
 
 In these tales every detail, from the wardrobe of Ivan 
 Nikiforovitch, to the evil-smelling boots worn by the 
 moujiks who stamped up and down the Nevski Prospect, 
 
252 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 was drawn from nature. They give us a bit of real life in 
 all its trivial circumstances, and seasoned, more dexter- 
 ously than were the Evenings, with what some people have 
 chosen to denominate Russian, but which, properly speak- 
 ing, should be called English, humour — an equal mixture, 
 as in Dickens's case, of irony and good-nature, of malice 
 and wide sympathy, of sarcasm and intentional moralis- 
 ing. To this, Gogol adds a power of presenting things 
 and people as they are, without appearing to care 
 whether the effect they produce be good or bad. The 
 hero of The Mantle, Akakii Akakievitch, is a scribe, 
 with qualities both touching and grotesque. He has a 
 genius and a passion for copying ! " His copying work 
 was full, to him, of a world of delightful and varied im- 
 pressions. Some letters were his favourites. When these 
 had to be re- written he felt a real delight." 
 
 It has been truly observed, that this type strongly 
 resembles one of those created by Flaubert. But it has 
 also been remarked that the French novelist falls furiously 
 upon Pecuchet. He flouts and spurns him, pouring out 
 all his hatred of human folly on the idiot's head. Gogol 
 jokes with his simple fellow, and all the time we are aware 
 of an undercurrent of tenderness, such as one feels for a 
 child whose innocent ways amuse one, or go to one's 
 heart. Those who have seen fit to perceive in this 
 difference the abyss that lies between Russian and 
 French realism, between the laughter touched with 
 tears of the first, and the dry pitiless smile of the 
 second, have gone, in my opinion, much too far. They 
 have lost sight of the original genesis of each of these 
 literary movements, which were neither synchronic nor 
 parallel, seeing that the one sprang up in France, fol- 
 lowing on all the excesses of sentimentalism and roman- 
 
GOGOL 253 
 
 ticism — on soil which centuries of Christian culture had 
 saturated with idealism, and therefore naturally partook 
 of the exaggerated character of all reactions, while the 
 other appeared in Russia twenty years earlier, under the 
 full blaze of the sentimental and pseudo-romantic litera- 
 ture of the period, and in surroundings which were the 
 hereditary domain of the real, the simple, and the true. 
 Special historical conditions, which I have already en- 
 deavoured to explain, had produced in the Russia of 
 that period a peculiar mixture of idealism and realism. 
 The realist element represented the national genius. 
 The idealist doubtless corresponded with certain of its 
 natural instincts — for the ideal exists everywhere — but 
 it proceeded more directly from foreign sources. The 
 Mantle — I fear this may have been forgotten, even in 
 France — is contemporary with the first novels of George 
 Sand, on whom Dostolevski was to bestow the title of 
 "divine," because she perceived beauty in pity, in re- 
 signation, and in justice. And this, without the laughter, 
 is almost the very principle of The Mantle. It had been 
 left to George Sand to gather up the laughter, with 
 all the rest, in the legacy of her masters, Sterne and 
 Richardson. Laughter through tears ! That is the great 
 charm of the Sentimental Journey ! 
 
 From the publication of Tlie Mantle onwards, the 
 development of the Russian novel has been compara- 
 tively autonomous, though always strongly influenced 
 by the English realists on the one hand, and the French 
 romanticists on the other. Gogol studied Dickens ; 
 Dostolevski was to read Victor Hugo. Saltykov-Chtche- 
 drine himself, referring to the author of Consuelo in an 
 autobiographical fragment, wrote : " Everything good 
 and desirable, all our pity comes to us thence." And this 
 
2 54 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Russian realism, imbued with English sentimentalism, 
 was also to end in the inevitable reaction which was to 
 drive its last representatives first into the arms of Zola, 
 even before the author of L' Assommoir had converted 
 France to his naturalism, and then into the embrace of 
 Maupassant. Look at Chtchedrine. He still recognises 
 the value of pity, but he makes little use of it. Then 
 look at Tchekhov. He seldom weeps, and hardly ever 
 smiles. 
 
 In fact, if we are to admit that the tendency to pity 
 is a Russian quality (and, as I have shown, I have 
 nothing against the theory), if then, for this reason, the 
 note of tenderness found easy admittance to the national 
 literature, and has therein developed a great intensity, 
 there is still something besides pity in the complex senti- 
 ment with which such characters as Akakii Akakievitch 
 have inspired their authors. I will explain this matter ■ 
 later. The Mantle was published in 1835. A year later. 
 The Examiner appeared on the scene, and the modern 
 Russian drama came into being. The subject had been 
 suggested to Gogol by Pouchkine, who, while travelling 
 to Orenburg in search of information for his history of 
 the rebellion of Pougatchov, had been arrested by an 
 inspector making his rounds. It was a " vaudeville " 
 story, on the whole, turning on a very commonplace 
 blunder. Khlestakov, a good-for-nothing young fellow 
 from St. Petersburg, on his way to spend his holidays 
 with his relations in the country, finds himself stopped 
 by lack of funds in a small provincial town. He is in 
 imminent danger of going to the debtors' prison, when 
 the lively imagination of the local officials turns him into 
 a judge sent from head-quarters to demand an account 
 of their various peccadillos. 
 
GOGOL 25 s 
 
 Out of this scenario Gogol has constructed a master- 
 piece, filling it with figures which, in spite of their uni- 
 versal tendency to caricature, are admirably drawn, and 
 attacking all the officialdom of the period. The Governor, 
 with his reproaches to those who rob above their own 
 rank, was particularly a figure which struck the popular 
 imagination. Gogol flies boldly in the face of official 
 optimism, and uncovers the gaping wound of its constitu- 
 tion — the venality and despotism which reigned all over 
 the administrative and judiciary ladder, from the highest 
 to the lowest rung— a thoroughgoing attack, the whole 
 scope of which, as he afterwards proved, he did not 
 thoroughly realise. He snatched the branding-irons of 
 satire from the trembling hands of Kant^mir, Von Visine, 
 Krylov, and Griboiedov, and plunged them into the very 
 quick of the wound. What now strikes us as extraordi- 
 nary is that the operation made nobody scream. Nicholas 
 allowed the piece to be played, attended the first perfor- 
 mance, and led the applause. It was characteristic of 
 the man who said " Russia is governed by the Heads 
 of Departments," and let them do as they chose. The 
 public was merely entertained. The Governor and his 
 followers struck it as simply funny. The idea that the 
 order of things they represented was contrary to nature 
 and capable of alteration was scarcely beginning to 
 dawn upon it. And even nowadays the piece is fre- 
 quently played, and always raises a laugh. Elsewhere, 
 it would cause gnashing of teeth. 
 
 As I have said, the author himself shared, to a certain 
 extent, the lack of perception of his public. Already, 
 indeed, in his method of conceiving, and more especially 
 oi feeling the phenomena he described, another feature, 
 to which I have already alluded — and which, as it be- 
 
2 56 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 came general in the Russian novel, was to endue it with 
 a particular and very national character — was making 
 itself evident : I mean the satirist's indulgent attitude 
 towards the objects of his satire. He caricatures them, 
 even turns them into monsters ; he conceals nothing of 
 their ugliness and meanness ; he rather exaggerates them ; 
 but such as they are, his monsters inspire him with no 
 feelings of horror or disgust. He has a regard for them. 
 Sceptical philosophy, it has been called, or tender pity. 
 I should rather ascribe it to his being accustomed to the 
 sight of the evil. Public life in Russia is still so stamped 
 with this peculiarity as to leave no room for doubt upon 
 the subject. 
 
 From the purely artistic point of view. The Examine^' 
 possesses no great value, nor any originality what- 
 ever. The only really well-written scene, the closing 
 one, is directly borrowed from Le Misanthrope. Yet 
 none the less, the effect it produced placed Gogol in 
 quite a different position, and straightway the enthu- 
 siastic and mystic side of his nature rose to the surface, 
 and he felt himself called to play a new part, that of a 
 prophet and a preacher. He planned another work, — the 
 crowning effort of which every writer dreams, at some 
 period of his life. He travelled abroad, spent some time 
 in Spain, then went to Rome, and published, in 1842, the 
 first part of his Dead Souls. A poem he called it. The 
 very word proves how unconscious the creative genius 
 in him was. Any unwarned reader would surely expect 
 an elegy. Tchitchikov, the hero of the "poem," is a 
 scoundrel, a former custom-house official, dismissed for 
 smuggling, who, to repair his fallen fortunes, plans an 
 enormous swindle. The number of serfs owned by each 
 proprietor is ascertained by means of a periodical census. 
 
GOGOL 257 
 
 Between one census and another, the number is con- 
 sidered to be unchanging, and the souls — -that is, the 
 head of slaves tallying with it — are subject to all the 
 usual transactions, such as buying, selling, or pawning. 
 Tchitchikov's idea was to purchase, at a reduced figure, 
 the names of the serfs who had passed from life into 
 death, but who were still borne on the official lists, and to 
 pawn them to a bank for a considerable sum of money. 
 
 It may well be imagined that this circumstance is 
 only an excuse for describing Tchitchikov's progress in a 
 troika, driven by his coachman, Seliphane, among the 
 various land-owners and officials with whom the pur- 
 chaser of dead souls was to transact business. Gogol 
 has enlarged his field of observation, so as to include 
 almost the whole of the governing classes, and chosen 
 his subject with a view to the satirical scope of the work. 
 The new types which he adds to his gallery of social suf- 
 fering and shame correspond with this idea. Among 
 the serf-owners we have Manilov, who, with his family, 
 represents that kind of man who belongs to no special 
 category at all, without clearly-defined moral features, 
 principles, convictions, or character ; Nozdriov, the dash- 
 ing man of pleasure, who is on the most intimate terms 
 with everybody, cheats at cards, and has his guests 
 thrashed ; Sobaki^vitch, the substantial man, who does 
 not mind how doubtful a business is, so long as he finds 
 a profit in it ; and Kourobotchka, the old miser, who 
 reckons up her serfs and her roubles with equal avidity. 
 The officials and the middle-class folk are on a par with 
 this company. Sobakievitch says of the Procurator 
 that " he is the only decent-mannered man in the town, 
 — and even he is a pig." 
 
 The whole of provincial society, the whole of Russia, 
 
258 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 or very near it, figures in the picture. " Heavens ! what 
 a dreary place our Russia is ! " cried Pouchkine when 
 he had read the book. The picture it presents is extra- 
 ordin-arily clear and brilliant. The author possessed a 
 power of discerning everything, even the tiniest and 
 obscurest details, in every fold and corner of existence ; 
 a matchless gift of reproduction, a dazzling humour, and 
 a style, as a French critic described it, " that even Miche- 
 let might have envied, now popular, now eloquent, now 
 exact as any picture, now shadowy as a dream." 
 
 The author himself bears witness to the fact that 
 Pouchkine, by introducing him to the works of Cervantes, 
 had given him his first inkling of his subject. At Rome, 
 in 1840, a Russian traveller named Boutaiev noticed 
 Gogol sitting, book in hand, apart from the gay group of 
 artists in the Cafd Greco.- The book was one of Dickens's 
 novels. The frame of the picture was certainly supplied 
 by the great Spaniard, the canvas, the groundwork of 
 cheery good-nature, philosophic indulgence, and hearty 
 gaiety, by the gifted Englishman. Only, the Russian 
 novelist has altered the nature of what he borrowed from 
 Dickens, by his false application of it. For nobody ever 
 saw Dickens show indulgence, not to say sympathy, for 
 "wretches" of the stamp of Sobakievitch. Gogol sus- 
 pected this, but, like the Romantic he always remained, 
 and the theorist he was fast becoming, he justified this 
 modification, and even set it up as a principle. In it, in 
 fact, he perceived a trait of the national character — the 
 sentiment of pity for a fallen creature, no matter the 
 depth of vileness to which his fall may have lowered 
 him. 
 
 " Remember," he wrote to one of his friends, " the 
 touching sight our people offer when they bring help to 
 
GOGOL 259 
 
 the exiles travelling to Siberia. Each brings something 
 of his own, food, money, the consolation of a word of 
 Christian kindness." The picture is a true one ; but let 
 us not forget that it represents a country in which the 
 death penalty only exists in cases of political offences, and in 
 which common-law criminals are consequently identified 
 with all others, to an extent which naturally leads to con- 
 fusion in the simple minds and elementary feelings of the 
 populace. The idea that these exiles may be very honest 
 folk, even heroes and martyrs, is one of ancient origin. 
 The feelings with which it is connected are, happily, 
 common to every country. Gogol, when he ascribed an 
 exclusively national character to them, was making a 
 concession to the Slavophil crotchet, and when he applied 
 them to the vulgar scamps of his Dead Souls, he perverted 
 them altogether. When M. de Vogu6 describes them as 
 an original feature, " evangelic brotherhood, love for the 
 little ones, pity for the suffering," destined to appear all 
 through the course of Russian literature, and to " animate 
 the whole of Dostoievski's work," he certainly falls into 
 an historical error. The trait, as to Gogol, is derived 
 from Dickens. In Dostoievski's case it was to originate 
 in a different, though also a foreign quarter, which I 
 shall duly indicate. 
 
 Gogol has further allowed his gift for romantic 
 caricature to distort the accuracy of his vision, and 
 thus constantly exaggerate every feature. A society 
 made up of nothing bat such people as Manilov, 
 Nozdriov, and Sobakievitch, could not exist. The author 
 needed the assistance of Bielinski and Herzen, before 
 he realised this aspect of his creation, and the meaning 
 resulting from it. The two critics were more clear-sighted 
 than Nicholas, who had bestowed a travelling pension 
 
2 6o RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 on the novelist. The Examiner and Dead Souls con- 
 stituted the investigation and disclosure, which were to 
 end in the condemnation, before trial, of a guilty society. 
 It was some time before Gogol could grasp the reality 
 of the part of public accuser with which his work had 
 endued him. And when conviction came he was horri- 
 fied. What ! Avas this his work ? This the end of his 
 dream ? He had sought to serve his country, and he 
 had cast this shame upon her ! Ever since his visit to 
 Spain and Italy he had been sliding down the slope, 
 as Joukovski had slid before him. Let not my readers 
 forget that The Examiner had encountered Tchadaiev's 
 letter, which was now arousing a recrudescence and 
 outburst of fervent nationalism. Between the multiple 
 charms of Roman Occidentalism, the seductions of Mys- 
 ticism, and the blandishments of Slavophilism, Gogol's 
 reason beheld a great gulf. At first he would have 
 protested against the premature conclusions which were 
 being drawn from his Dead Souls. 'Yh.e, poem was to be 
 in three parts, and it was a slander on Russia to pre- 
 tend the first was a complete picture of the country. 
 Other aspects, bathed in ideal beauty, were yet to be 
 revealed. But before proceeding to that, he was resolved 
 to have an explanation with his readers, and for this 
 purpose he proposed to publish extracts from his own 
 correspondence. " Put all your business aside," he 
 Wrote in 1846 to his friend Pletniev, " and busy your- 
 jelf about this book ; everybody needs it." The book 
 thus heralded as a revelation, a new gospel, appeared 
 in the following year, and proved a bitter disappoint- 
 ment. Gogol, while claiming that his previous book 
 proved his prophetic authority and gift, actually repudi- 
 ated the natural meaning of that work. He under- 
 
GOGOL 261 
 
 look the apology of the poHtical, social, and religious 
 regime which had produced his Sobakidvitch and his 
 Nozdriov. His Letters to my Friends were epistles full 
 of ghostly advice, mingled with addresses on literary 
 subjects. They glorified the Tsar of Love and his des- 
 potic power, which softened the harshness of the law, 
 and healed the bitter sufferings of the people. They 
 jeered at the vain fancies of the Western philosophers, 
 and appealed from them to the National Church, the 
 only legitimate source of the necessary virtues. 
 
 The book also contained a sort of literary testament. 
 In it, the author announced his decision never to write 
 again, because his whole future existence was to be 
 devoted to the search after truth, both for the good of 
 his own soul and for the common welfare. But he still 
 held that what he had written deserved admiration, and 
 gave a lengthy explanation of the reasons on which he 
 based this opinion. He strengthened his argument by 
 the ingenvious assertion that Russia would lose a great 
 poet in the person of the author of Dead Souls. 
 
 Contrary to the Russian opinion of that day, which 
 seems to me still to obtain, M. de Vogiie denies the 
 mystic character of this protest, although he recognises 
 it as an echo of contemporary Slavophil teaching. " M. 
 Akssakov," he says, "and the leaders of the present 
 Slavophil school, expound the same doctrines, with 
 even greater fervour. Nobody in Russia accuses them 
 of mysticism." I fear this is no argument. Words and 
 ideas may well carry a different weight from elsewhere 
 in a country where even men are in the habit of calling 
 each other "my little pigeon" ! In a gathering of Russian 
 friends, most of them very practical men, I expressed my 
 astonishment at having found in such a writer as Tolstoi 
 
262 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the idea of the feminine character of the city of Moscow. 
 They were all, without exception, surprised at my 
 astonishment. " But it is quite natural. Moscow must 
 be feminine, just as St. Petersburg is masculine!" It 
 appeared quite evident to them. Gogol's last years 
 suffice, I think, to settle this dispute. In spite of his 
 solemn farewell to literature he wrote again, showed 
 some of his friends the second part of Dead Souls, and 
 once more his readers were disappointed. The reap- 
 pearance of Tchitchikov, his coachman, and of the troika 
 with its three lean horses, was gladly welcomed. But 
 the ideal Russia described, represented by the Prince- 
 Governor, "an enemy of fraud,'' who confounds the 
 dishonest officials, and brings back the law of liberty 
 to the town ; and by Mourassov, the rich and pious 
 manufacturer, a millionaire and a lay saint, who 
 preaches, pardons, and sets everything in order, is so 
 unexpected as to be disconcerting. Mourassov has 
 since been easily recognised as the M. Madeleine of 
 Les Miserables, and one still wonders where the author 
 found the rest of his story. 
 
 Gogol burnt his manuscript, wrote another, and burnt 
 it again. Nothing remains but a few fragments, which 
 were published after his death. At one moment he com- 
 mitted all his books and papers to the flames. At the 
 same time he was giving the whole of his Government 
 pension to the poor, and was himself in most distress- 
 ing financial straits. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage 
 to Jerusalem, and returned from it in a condition 
 of excitement which was steadily to increase. He 
 began wandering from house to house. His chance 
 entertainers used to see him arrive with a little valise 
 stuffed with pamphlets, newspaper articles, critiques, 
 
GOGOL 263 
 
 treatises relating to himself — his only possession. " He 
 was," writes one of his contemporaries, " a little man, 
 with legs too short for his body ; he walked crookedly, 
 clumsy, ill dressed, and rather ridiculous-looking, with 
 his great lock of hair flapping on his forehead, and his 
 lai-ge prominent nose." "A fox-like face," says Tour- 
 gueniev, " with something of the air of a professor in a 
 provincial town." He had altogether ceased writing 
 now, and scarcely spoke. He had periodical attacks of 
 fever, and fits of hallucination. He died in 1852, worn 
 out, according to many witnesses, by prayer and fasting, 
 found lifeless, according to some, before the holy pic- 
 tures, where he often spent his nights. He was in his 
 forty-fourth year. 
 
 The event attracted but little attention. To the mass 
 of the pubhc he had long been dead, swept away on that 
 fatal tide which so mercilessly pursued the writers of his 
 generation. This fact has been wrongly regarded as a 
 mystery. It was natural that a generation so suddenly 
 brought into contact with an ocean of new ideas should 
 turn giddy on the edge of the abyss, and lose its balance. 
 
 The Letters to my Friends have met with an unex- 
 pected piece of good fortune in these later days. Tolstoi 
 took it into his head to constitute himself their apologist, 
 and other admirers followed suit. M. P. Matvi^iev has 
 affirmed, in articles published in the Russian Messenger 
 of 1894, that the book had outstripped its own times. A 
 popular edition has recently appeared with the sugges- 
 tive title, Gogol as a Teacher of Life. When he drew up 
 this profession of faith, Gogol was certainly sincere. He 
 has expressed what Carlyle calls a man's "religion," 
 without attaching any dogmatic sense to the word. But 
 he was quite devoid of any philosophical education, and 
 18 
 
264 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the favour in which he is now held only proves how 
 insufficiently his posterity is provided in this respect. 
 
 Gogol's real merit is his plastic power. Nobody can 
 take him to be a serious thinker. At Rome he had no 
 eyes, no admiration, no sympathy for anything but the 
 pomps of the Papacy, and the superannuated glories of 
 its ceremonies and its street processions ; for the streets 
 themselves, narrow and dirty as they were ; for their half- 
 savage denizens ; for the local aristocracy, with its noisy 
 pleasures, its Corso, and its carnival. The religious ex- 
 citement which swallowed up his closing years only 
 accentuated and exaggerated, to the utmost extreme, a 
 very old tendency, dating, as his correspondence proves, 
 from his earliest youth. In his nature two contradic- 
 tory currents, of artistic inspiration and ascetic lean- 
 ings, always existed, doubtless derived, in this native of 
 Little Russia, from some mingled Muscovite ancestry. 
 To this first source of internal discord and mental 
 disturbance must be added a further contradiction, that 
 between his desire for social activity and the false concep- 
 tion of society which he owed to his family traditions. He 
 was never to understand anything of the intellectual pro- 
 gress which the German philosophy had developed about 
 him, and which, indeed, bore him onwards without his 
 knowing how or whither. He unconsciously performed 
 a work of revolution, while he himself, in his own soul, 
 remained essentially patriarchal and submissive. Thus, 
 for a prolonged period, he never cast a glance on the 
 deep and organic causes of the incidents of corruption 
 which he so artistically described. When his eyes were 
 finally opened, the emptiness of his own philosophical 
 ideas must have struck him, and moved him to accept the 
 teachings of others. He wavered for a moment between 
 
GOGOL: GONTCHAROV 265 
 
 Tchadaiev and Akssakov, decided, finally, in favour of the 
 latter, and ingenuously set himself up as a State moralist, 
 in the childish conviction that it would suffice for him to 
 reveal his scheme of morality to governors of cities and 
 such men as Nozdriov, to prevent the first-named cate- 
 gory from stealing, and the second from cheating at 
 cards. 
 
 Need I add that among the French critics who have 
 studied this writer, M. Hennequin, when he hails him 
 as the inventor of the modern tale, seems to have over- 
 looked not only all the English, French, and German 
 prose writers of the second half of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury and the beginning of the nineteenth, but also a 
 certain Boccaccio, who lived in the fourteenth century, 
 and whose Filicopo and Fiametta certainly hold a place 
 of some importance in the history of literature. Gogol 
 did create the Russian novel, and that is a sufficient title 
 to glory. In Russia, as a writer of prose and craftsman 
 of style, he outdoes Pouchkine himself. The Queen of 
 Clubs was written in 1834, and is a trifle. He won the 
 race easily, and nobody has equalled him since it was 
 run. Gontcharov and Grigorovitch were his direct heirs 
 in the department of novel-writing. Ostrovski was his 
 successor in the drama. 
 
 The Successors of Gogol. 
 
 Ivan Aleksandrovitch Gontcharov (1814-1891) 
 published his first book, A Common Story (1847), under 
 the auspices of Bi61inski, who said of him, " He is a poet 
 and an artist ; nothing more." He judged correctly. The 
 author was to mark the difference between his work 
 and that of Tourgueniev, Dostoievski, and Tolstoi, by its 
 
266 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 almost entire absence of reflection and analysis. His 
 view of life is absolutely archaic, and his ideas are those 
 of the time of the Flood. This first novel, which bears 
 some analogy to George Sand's Horace (1841), is, in fact, 
 a very common story of a young enthusiast struggling 
 with the realities of life — something of Balzac's Rastig- 
 nac, who brings his dreams and the freshness of his 
 youthful soul as a sacrifice to the Moloch of Parisian life. 
 The Russian hero's dream is modest, and the reality 
 which runs counter to it is of a very commonplace de- 
 scription. Is he to write verses and sigh for the love 
 of a portionless maiden, or is he to go into business and 
 marry an heiress ? The question is decided in favour of 
 the second alternative, and the author's sympathies are 
 with the first. The special feature and charm of his art 
 are to be found in this opposition. Gontcharov is a 
 realist, bent on reproducing Nature exactly, even in 
 her least seductive aspects, but with a wonderful power 
 of wrapping these last in a sort of poetic haze, which 
 softens their more unpleasing colours. The hero of the 
 book, Adouiev, has, indeed, no specifically Russian char- 
 acteristics. 
 
 In 1848, Gontcharov published some fragments of a 
 second novel, Oblomov, which was not to be finished for 
 another ten years. In the interim, the author travelled 
 round the world in the capacity of secretary to an 
 admiral, and indited the story of his voyage in two 
 volumes ; but his mind was always fixed on his Oblomov. 
 He was slow in conception, but prodigiously swift in 
 execution. It is asserted that the work he took ten years 
 to prepare was written in forty-seven days. And this 
 time he, too, succeeded in creating a type — a personi- 
 fication of that generic apathy which was, and still is, the 
 
GONTCHAROV 267 
 
 common product of the material and moral conditions 
 of Russian life, but which attained a special development 
 in the heart of the barchtchina, amongst the rural land- 
 owners, previous to the abolition of serfdom. The long 
 Russian winters naturally predispose the moujik to indo- 
 lence and inertia ; the despotic regime proscribes all' 
 individual effort, which, since Novikov's time, is gener- 
 ally credited with a Freemasonic or revolutionary origin. 
 But when the time for labour comes, the moujik is 
 occasionally obliged to shake off his torpor. Nothing 
 ever disturbs that of the land-owner. From his childhood 
 he has been accustomed to avoid, and, in fact, refuse to 
 undertake, any exertion which might appear to compro- 
 mise his dignity, by diminishing the labour of the ten 
 or twelve persons trained to make any effort on his part 
 unnecessary. Here then we behold him, doing nothing, 
 and having literally nothing to do. The influences of 
 heredity, of education, and of the common practice of 
 life have combined, by a fatal process of degeneration, 
 to render him incapable at once of any spontaneous 
 activity, and even of any save a purely passive resistance 
 to external pressure. 
 
 There is indeed a hidden thouglit, or rather a hidden 
 feeling, in this inertia. The Russian mind is full of 
 such reservations. To indicate its meaning, we must 
 have recourse to one of those infinitely comprehensive 
 and plastic expressions which are the characteristic 
 feature, and constitute the most precious wealth, of the 
 language of the country. Imagine a man who finds 
 himself on the railroad just as a train is rushing towards 
 him. He sees it coming ; he knows that if he stays 
 where he is, he will certainly be killed, and that a slight 
 movement will save him from the danger. And yet, 
 
268 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 out of a sort of half-conscious fatalism, a vague and 
 yet obstinate fancy that perhaps the train will stop or 
 run off the rails before it reaches him, he does not 
 budge. One single word, in the mouth of a slow and 
 obstinate peasant, suffices to express the whole world 
 of dim thoughts and unconscious feelings which corre- 
 spond with this particular state of mind — avos ! — per- 
 haps ? who knows ? And the trait produced by the habit, 
 common to both master and slave, of always depending 
 on some one or something else for the government of 
 their slightest action, occurs in both classes. 
 
 Gontcharov's first volume is entirely taken up with 
 the story of one day, spent by the hero in resisting the 
 various solicitations which conspire to drag him, first 
 from his bed, and then from the downy couch on which 
 he stretches his indolence and selfishness, both equally 
 incurable ; in getting rid of importunate visitors, and 
 making impossible plans, which he more than half sus- 
 pects will remain unfulfilled. The character thus drawn 
 is not altogether a new one. It is Eugene Onieguine 
 in another incarnation, corresponding with another 
 phase of the national life. And it is Pietchorine as well. 
 He was a restless man, indeed, and Oblomov was an 
 apathetic being, but neither the one nor the other have 
 ever, or will ever, do anything, because there is nothing 
 for them to do in the sphere in which their birth has 
 placed them. Even in their intercourse with women 
 their attitude is identical. They are both, like Onidguine, 
 very susceptible to the charms of the fair sex, and very 
 enterprising indeed in their dealings with it. But both 
 are inclined to give up all thoughts of love, the moment 
 its claims threaten to encroach on their liberty, their 
 indolence, or their selfish convenience. In the second 
 
GONTCHAROV 269 
 
 volume, Oblomov meets with the typical woman of the 
 Russian novel, the being of intelligence, tenderness, and 
 originating power, who alone would seem capable of 
 rousing this sluggard into a burst of energy. For a 
 moment she appears to succeed, but the organs of 
 activity and volition which she stirs in the young man's 
 soul soon prove hopelessly stunted, and withered by 
 neglect, and Oblomov goes back to his couch and his 
 famiente. 
 
 In addition to this brave and tender-hearted Olga, 
 who ,will soon find somebody to console her for her 
 failure, Gontcharov, like Gogol, has set himself to call 
 up an ideal figure, the personification of masculine 
 energy. My readers will be surprised to find he has 
 gone to Germany for this type, and yet more so that 
 all he should have discovered there is a business man, 
 active and hard-working. Olga's marriage with Stoltz 
 cannot be accepted as a final solution. 
 
 The first part of Oblomov produced rather a tiresome 
 effect. In its pages the author had given the first speci- 
 men of that minuteness of description which has since 
 been so much abused by the French realists. When his 
 hero has to write a letter, you learn to know even the 
 watermark upon his writing-paper, the colour of his 
 ink, and the external qualities and intrinsic virtues of 
 his pen. The second part made a great sensation. It 
 was published on the very eve of a great act of emanci- 
 pation, and constituted a fresh argument in favour of 
 the reform. The habit contracted by the public, of 
 reading between the lines, made it recognise many un- 
 spoken sentiments, of which the author would appear 
 to have been quite unconscious. He proved it some 
 years later, when he endeavoured to enter the intellectual 
 
270 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and political struggle of the day in the pages of his 
 Obryv (precipice). It was an utter failure. After that 
 period Goiitcharov only published a few sketches, and 
 an excellent analysis of The tlisfortune of being too Clever. 
 '^ As a painter of aristocratic or bourgeois society, 
 Dmitri Vassilievitch Grigorovitch (1822-1900) was 
 a mere collector of snapshots, and his pictures lack both 
 necessary precision and correct distribution of light 
 and shade. The only department in which he rose 
 above mediocrity was in his stories of the popular life. In 
 these he was Tourgueniev's forerunner, opening the way 
 before him, and making even a more direct and overt 
 attack than his, on the abuses of serfdom. His Village, 
 the first in order (1846) of a series of little master-pieces, 
 more or less directly inspired by George Sand, is remark- 
 able for its powerful expression and depth of feeling 
 with regard to this subject. The young wife of a rural 
 land-owner, just arrived in the country, has a fancy to see 
 a peasant wedding. To satisfy her desire, the first maiden 
 and the first young man to be found are desired to marry. 
 They are not acquainted, they each have another attach- 
 ment, they are quite unsuited to each other. But 
 none of these facts are allowed to be of the slightest 
 importance. This story, with Antony the Unlucky (1848) 
 and the Valley of SmiMov, made Grigorovitch's reputa- 
 tion as a Russian Beecher-Stowe. In The Fishei's (1853) 
 and The Colonists (1855) he enlarged his borders, and 
 set forth all the poverty-stricken existence of the peasants 
 of the Oka River, all the dreariness of factory life, and all 
 the detestable arbitrariness of the proprietors. 
 
 These studies still preserve their ethnographical value, 
 and the figures of Glieb, the fisherman, and Zakhar, the 
 factory-worker, have long been accepted as the most 
 
OSTROVSKI 271 
 
 exact and expressive reproductions of the popular charac- 
 teristics. But Grigorovitch was no psychologist. His 
 great strength lies in his narrative talent, which, ill 
 served as it is by a very poor skill in composition, is apt 
 to fritter itself away and lose its bearings, when its field 
 of execution becomes too extended. 
 
 I feel some embarrassment when I come to speak of 
 the great playwright, Ostrovski. His pieces have held the 
 Russian stage for half a century, and their reputation still 
 stands high. In his own country he is currently accepted, 
 not only as the creator of the national drama, but as the 
 renewer of the scenic art from a more general point of 
 view ; and I clearly see that, even in the West, his theory 
 is in course of acceptation. But in this theory, which 
 consists in knocking down a corner of the famous "wall 
 of private life," and revealing what lies behind it, in all 
 the natural complexity and apparent disorder which go 
 to make up this life, I recognise an absolute negation of 
 theatrical art, and of Nature herself. And this, because it 
 is founded on att appearance which is false, the impression 
 of disorder in Nature being merely a mistaken estimate 
 on our part. Ostrovski's characters come and go, talk on 
 indifferent subjects, until the moment when, all of a 
 sudden — for on the stage things must happen suddenly — - 
 the commonplaceness of their behaviour or of their 
 conversation reveals the comic or dramatic elements of 
 the "object of the scene." And I am told that this is 
 the process of real life ! Yes, indeed, of real life extend- 
 ing over a space of several years. But the playwright 
 reduces this real period to one of a few hours. By so 
 doing, he disturbs the natural balance of circumstance, 
 and the only method of re-establishing it, and escaping 
 a false presentment, is the use of art — that is to say, of 
 
272 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 interpretation. The drama lives by synthesis, and it is 
 going against its nature (for it has a nature of its own) 
 to attempt to introduce analytical methods, which belong 
 to a different order of creation, into its system. 
 
 The son of a general business agent at Moscow, 
 Alexander Nicolai£vitch Ostrovski (1824-1886), was 
 still devoid of even elementary education when he pub- 
 lished his first dramatic efforts in 1847. He filled up this 
 void by studying and adapting foreign models, and did not 
 always choose the best. Living in the Zamoskvorietchie, 
 and mixed up, in consequence of his father's profession, in 
 the life of the small Muscovite tradesmen, he set himself 
 to study and reproduce the manners and customs of that 
 class, and succeeded in attaining a point of realism similar 
 to that of Gogol in another sphere. The subject of his 
 first great comedy, Between ourselves, we shall settle 
 it {Svot lioudi sotchtiemsid), published in 1850, but not 
 performed till ten years later, was, like that of Dead 
 Souls, the story of a swindle as mean as it was impro- 
 bable. A shopkeeper, a kind of comic King Lear, takes 
 it into his head to make over his fortune to his clerk, 
 and to marry him to his own daughter — all to cheat his 
 creditors by means of a sham bankruptcy. He arranges 
 with his son-in-law to pay them 25 per cent., or more, if 
 necessary. But the rascal, once in possession of the 
 funds, refuses to pay anything at all, and allows his 
 miserable father-in-law to be haled to prison. The elder 
 man had no reason for committing the fraud ; his busi- 
 ness was a prosperous one ; and the author, to make 
 us realise the corruption of thought, the absence of prin- 
 ciple, and the demoralisation touched with despotic 
 fancy reigning in that sphere of underhand dealing, 
 draws him as, on the whole, a worthy fellow. 
 
OSTROVSKI 273 
 
 Ostrovski's second great success, Every one in his 
 own place {Nii v svoi sani nie sadis), played in i853,«gave 
 rise to a great deal of controversy. It also is concerned 
 with a samodour shopkeeper, that is to say, one who has 
 preserved the features of originality and despotic fan- 
 cifulness peculiar to the old Muscovite type — whose 
 daughter elopes with a nobly-born fortune-hunter. 
 The gentleman, learning that her father has disinherited 
 her, leaves her to her fate, and the poor creature re- 
 turns to the parental hearth, covered with confusion 
 and disappointment. The subject, it will be perceived, 
 is by no means novel, and the author's development 
 of it is not over-clear. Some critics have taken it to be 
 an apology for the patriarchal regime ; others regard 
 it as a condemnation of that system. 
 
 The treatment of a subject will not always atone for 
 its commonplace nature. Ostrovski, in pursuance of a 
 theory dear to Bidinski, depended on his actors for the 
 development of his characters, which he sketched very 
 lightly. He left them a great deal to do. 
 
 The most celebrated, and certainly the best of all his 
 plays, is The Storm. This brings us into the upper com- 
 mercial class in the provinces. During the absence of her 
 husband, who, both on account of business matters and to 
 avoid the tedium of life in a home rendered odious by the 
 presence of a severe and quarrelsome mother, leaves his 
 wife far too much alone, Catherine, a young woman 
 full of dreams and enthusiasms, is false to her marriage 
 vow. Ostrovski makes her public avowal of her sin, 
 under the influence of the nervous agitation caused by 
 a thunderstorm, which stirs all her religious terrors and 
 alarms, the culminating point and dramatic moment of 
 his piece. This idea was to be repeated by Tolstoi in his 
 
274 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Anna Kar^nine. The unhappy wife, cursed by her 
 mother-in-law and beaten by her husband, as is the 
 custom in that class, goes out and drowns herself. 
 In this play, Ostrovski's object was to depict the miser- 
 able condition of the Russian woman of the middle 
 class, in which, in his day, the traditions of the Domostrot 
 still held good, and the corruption existing in this class, 
 due, in part, to a latent process of decomposition, 
 under the action of the new ideas which were beginning 
 to percolate from without. Catherine is a romantic, 
 with leanings towards mysticism. She sins, and curses 
 her love and her lover even as she yields to them. Her 
 husband is a brute, with coarse instincts and some good 
 feeling. His mother is a domestic tyrant, brought up in 
 the school of Pope Sylvester. When, at the moment of 
 her indifferent husband's departure, Catherine, with a 
 presentiment of her impending fate, casts herself on his 
 breast, beseeching him to stay, or to take her with him, 
 the old woman interferes ; — ■ 
 
 " What is the meaning of this? Do you take him for 
 a lover ? At his feet, wretched creature ! cast yourself at 
 his feet I" ^ 
 
 And so Catherine seeks in another man's arms the 
 caress, the loving words, the tender clasp for which her 
 soul^ — the soul of a modern woman — hungers. 
 
 Dobrolioubov claimed to see other things, and many 
 more, in this play. According to him — he has covered 
 seventy pages with the demonstration of his idea — the 
 author has hugely advanced the literature of his country 
 by realising what all his predecessors, from Tourgueniev 
 to Gontcharov, had vainly attempted, responding to the 
 universal and pressing demand of the national conscience, 
 and filling the void in the national existence caused by 
 
OSTROVSKI 275 
 
 its repudiation of the ideas, customs, and traditions of 
 the past. He has created the ideal character and type 
 of the future. Which is it ? A woman's figure, of 
 course. A wonderful conception, according to Dobro- 
 lioubov, because woman has had to suffer most from the 
 past ; because woman has been the first and the greatest 
 victim ; because it was above all for woman that the 
 state of things had become impossible. But who is this 
 woman ? My readers will hardly guess her to be 
 Catherine. Dobrolioubov was only four-and-twenty 
 when he formulated this theory- — a somewhat disturb- 
 ing one for the possessors of romantic wives and dis- 
 agreeable mothers-in-law. His youth is his excuse. 
 And here is another. Dostoievski was to follow suit, 
 and apply the same theory to Pouchkine's Tatiana, after 
 z. fashion yet more far-fetched. 
 
 After i860, Ostrovski conceived the idea of walking in 
 Pouchkine's footsteps, and attempting historical drama 
 in the style of Shakespeare. He had already borrowed 
 much from the foreign stage. In his Lost Sheep we x&- 
 cognise Cicconi's Pecorel/e smarrzie J- in A Cafe', Goldoni's 
 Botiega del Caffe ; in The Slavery of Husbands, A. de 
 Leris's Les Maris sont Esclaves. His imitations of the 
 English dramatist were less successful. Two years be- 
 fore his death, having early quitted an administrative 
 career which brought him nothing but disappointment, 
 he undertook the management of the Moscow Theatre. 
 He was no blagonadiojnyi (a man possessing the confi- 
 dence of the Government). Though not directly con- 
 cerned in the events of his day, he shared in the general 
 ferment of reforming ideas. He followed the same 
 course as Gogol — the Gogol of The Examiner and the 
 first part of Dead Souls. His earlier plays, until 1854, 
 
276 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 seem to be systematically devoted to the representation 
 of types of perverted morality. After that date, and 
 influenced by the Slavophil movement, he betrays a 
 budding sympathy for certain phases of the national 
 life, the idealisation of which was henceforth to be his 
 endeavour. In Every Man in his own place he allots the 
 most sympathetic parts to persons belonging to the old 
 intellectual and moral regime, such as Roussakov, the 
 unpretentious and upright shopkeeper, and Avdotia 
 Maksimovna, the austere and simple-minded middle- 
 class woman. All the rest^ — -Vikhorev, Barantchevski, 
 Arina Fiodorovna — have been poisoned by Western 
 culture, and have carried the elements of disorder and 
 corruption into their own circle. When the reforms of 
 1861 drew near, the author's point of view underwent 
 another change, and he strove to bring out the back- 
 wardness and excessive folly, the obstinate samodourstro 
 of the patnie'cktchiki {rviT3.\ proprietors), as compared with 
 the enlightened spirit of the younger generation. 
 
 His plays, as a rule, are neither comedies nor dramas. 
 Dobrolioubov called them "representations of life." 'The 
 audience is not given anything to laugh at, nor yet any- 
 thing to cry over. The general setting of the piece is 
 some social sphere which has little or no connection 
 with the characters we see moving in it. These characters 
 themselves are neutral in tint — neither heroes nor male- 
 factors. Not one of them rouses direct sympathy. 
 They are all overwhelmed by a condition of things the 
 weight of which they might shake off, the danger of 
 which wovild vanish, if they showed some little energy. 
 But of this they have not a spark. And the struggle is 
 not between them, but between the facts, the fatal in- 
 fluence of which they undergo, for the most part, un- 
 
OSTROVSKI 277 
 
 consciously. A sort of gloomy fatalism presides over 
 this conception of mundane matters, an idea that any 
 man belonging to a particular moral type must act in a 
 particular manner. The natural deduction from this 
 theory is, that actions are not good or bad in themselves. 
 They are merely life. And so life itself is neither good 
 nor evil. It is as it is, and has no account to give to 
 anybody. Ostrovski's pieces have generally no denoue- 
 ment, or, if they have one, it is always of an uncertain 
 nature. The dramatic action never really closes, it is 
 broken off ; the author cutting it short, not by an effective 
 scene or phrase, but frequently, and deliberately, at the 
 most commonplace point, or in the middle of a rejoinder. 
 He seems to avoid effect just where it naturally would 
 occur in the situation. Ostrovski's admirers hold this to 
 be his manner of typifying real life, which, in Nature, 
 has neither beginning nor end. I have already made 
 my reservations on this head ; and I am glad indeed to 
 affirm that no other Russian writer, save Tolstoi, has 
 painted so great a number of types and circles corre- 
 sponding with almost every group in Russian society. 
 His language, full of power and fancy, constitutes, with 
 that of Krylov, the richest treasure-house of picturesque 
 and original expressions to be found in Russia. Pouch- 
 kine had already declared that the way to learn Russian 
 was by talking to the Moscow Prosvirnie' (the women 
 who make the sacred bread, prosfora). They taught 
 Ostrovski precious lessons. 
 
 Tourgu^niev also enriched the national stage with 
 several pieces which cannot be reckoned among his 
 master-pieces. Pissemski, in his Bitter Fate [Gorkata 
 soudbind), endowed it with the first realistic drama 
 founded on peasant life. I shall discuss it later. But, 
 
278 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 next to Ostrovski, the man who shed most glory on the 
 modern Russian stage was Count Alexis Tolstoi. 
 
 Even now the trilogy written by Alexis Constan- 
 TINOVITCH Tolstoi (1817-1875), The Death of Ivan the 
 Terrible, The Tsar Fiodor Ivanovitch, and The Tsar Boris, 
 enjoys a great, and, in some respects, a legitimate success 
 in the author's own country. Its historical feeling is deep 
 and generally correct. The gloomy spirit of despotism 
 and superstition hovers over these evocations of a distant 
 past, and breathes icily in the spectators' faces. But 
 the characters, as a rule, lack clearness, and the rhetoric 
 of the never-ending dialogues and soliloquies strains the 
 attention. In his Don Juan, dedicated to the memory 
 of Mozart and of Hoffmann, Tolstoi has endeavoured 
 to re-establish the French and Spanish type of this 
 character. To my thinking he has only placed the 
 mask of Faust over Don Juan's features, and the effect 
 of the effort is not worth the trouble it gave. 
 
 Alexis Constantinovitch also made his mark in Rus- 
 sian literature as a lyric and satiric poet. Another 
 Tolstoi, whose mighty work I shall presently approach, 
 was to introduce some really new characters upon the 
 national stage, and with them, a form of dramatic art full 
 of originality and fruitful in expression. But before his 
 advent, the national art had already attained its sovereign 
 expression by the fusion, which Gogol failed to realise, 
 of the artist's inspiration and the artist's conscious endea- 
 vour, in the novels of Tourgudniev. 
 
 TOURGU^NIEV. 
 
 Ivan Sergui^ievitch Tourgudniev(i8i8-i883)was born 
 of a family of country nobles in the government of Orel. 
 
TOURGU^NIEV 279 
 
 Among his ancestors he reckoned that Peter Tourgue- 
 niev who was executed on the lobnoie niihio for having 
 denounced the mock Demetrius, and that James Tour- 
 gueniev who was one of Peter the Great's jesters. In 
 1837, when he was passing through his third annual 
 course of studies at the St. Petersburg University, Ivan 
 Serguiei^vitch showed his professor of Hterature, P. A. 
 Pletniev, a fantastic drama in verse, Stenio, which that 
 gentleman easily recognised as an imitation of Byron's 
 Manfred. Though of no particular value, it showed 
 some promise of talent. It encouraged Pletniev, a few 
 months later, to publish some verses by the young author, 
 which struck him as being better inspired, in The Contem- 
 porary. But very soon Tourgu^niev departed to Berlin, 
 there to complete his studies, according to the custom of 
 the day. He describes himself as having "taken a header 
 into the German Sea," and come up "an Occidental" 
 for ever. In 1841, when on a visit to Moscow, where his 
 mother resided, he came into contact with the Slavophil 
 group, and at once experienced a feeling of hostility 
 to it which was steadily to increase. Tsarism, even as 
 idealised by the Akssakovs and the Kirieievskis, was always 
 to disgust him. He tried to adapt himself to the regime, 
 and took service in the Chancery of the Ministry of the 
 Interior. But he could not endure it. In 1843 the poet 
 bade farewell to the tchinovik, cast away official docu- 
 ir^ents, and published, over the initials T. L., a Paracha 
 in rhyme, of which Bidlinski spoke in terms of praise. 
 This resulted in a friendship, followed by some slight 
 coldness. Bi^Iinski, and rightly, as Tourgueniev after- 
 wards acknowledged, treated some other poetical attempts 
 which did not as yet foreshadow the gifts displayed in 
 A Sportsman s Sketches, in less tender fashion. A mere 
 19 
 
2 8q RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 chance, the difficulty in which Panaiev, the editor of 
 The Contemporary, found himself, with regard to filling 
 up one number of his publication, in 1847, acquainted its 
 readers with a prose story, Khor and Kalinitch, for which 
 Ivan Sergui^ievitch, who was already losing hope, had 
 not dared to hope such good fortune. It caused general 
 astonishment. To the title chosen by the author, Panaiev 
 had added that sub-title of his own, A Sportsman' s 
 Sketches, which was to become so widely known, and 
 thus the immortal series which was to lay the foundation 
 of Tourgueniev's glory was begun. 
 
 Success did not reconcile the author to social sur- 
 roundings in which his tender and dreamy nature was 
 exposed to so much that gave it pain. In the following 
 year he left Russia, without intending to return. The 
 continuation of his Sketches was written in Paris. There 
 is nothing original in the conception of the work. It 
 recalls Berthold Auerbach's village tales, and the pea- 
 sant stories of George Sand, of whom Tourgudniev used 
 to say, " She is one of my saints ! " Even in Russia it 
 had rivals, in the shape of Grigorovitch's tales and Nek- 
 rassov's poems, all of them founded, like it, on the popular 
 life, and saturated with the same spirit. But in this case 
 the subject was transformed by a personal art, and an 
 equally individual inspiration. The art was that of a 
 miniature painter, with the exquisite gift of merging 
 nature and man into one harmonious whole. The in- 
 spiration was that of a born revealer. Tourgueniev was 
 the first person in Russia to see in the Russian peasant 
 something more than a mere object of pity — a being who 
 could feel and think, with a soul like everybody else, 
 although his method of feeling and thought was especially 
 his own. Thus the soul that Gogol, the Slavophil, never 
 
TOURGUl^NIEV 281 
 
 recognised, was revealed to Russia by Tourgu^niev, the 
 Occidental ; and thus it was that the author of the 
 Sketches became one of the most active agents of the 
 emancipation. Not that he approached the problem of 
 the abolition of serfdom. He never referred to it. But 
 after having drawn, in Khor and Kalinitch, two peasants 
 who escape the consequences of their legal status, — one 
 because he lives apart in a swamp, and avoids com- 
 pulsory service by paying a fine, the other because he 
 has become one of his master's hunt-servants ; one of 
 them a realist, the other a dreamer, but good-hearted, 
 both of them ; one faithful and tender, the other cordial 
 and hospitable, — the novelist demonstrated, in a fresh 
 set of types, the various deformations which serfdom 
 could produce in the original character of the race, such 
 as a return to the savage state, wild temper, brutality, 
 ferocity, as in the case of lermolai, and stupid insensi- 
 bility, as in that of Vlass. 
 
 After a short visit to Russia, which cost him a month 
 in prison, for an article on the death of Gogol (1852), 
 Tourgu^niev, released by the good offices of Madame 
 Smirnova — " The Our Lady of Succour of Russian 
 literature," as she was called— settled at Baden-Baden, in 
 a villa close to that occupied by the Viardot-Garcia 
 family. He had met the famous singer of that name 
 in St. Petersburg, in 1845, and the liaison then begun 
 was destined to continue till he died. From this 
 period onward, his production, tales, stories, or serious 
 novels, flowed steadily and uninterruptedly. Up to the 
 year 1861, they may be divided into two principal 
 groups, purely artistic creations, love stories, true or 
 invented, and somewhat commonplace, such as The First 
 Love and The Three Meetings, without much moral 
 
282 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 scope, and no common feature save a groundwork of 
 scepticism and ultimate disenchantment ; and works 
 with a distinct tendency, which bring forward various 
 varieties of the same type, the superfluous man. This per- 
 sonage, as he appears in The Hamlet of the District of 
 Chtchigry, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, The Corre- 
 spondence, Faust, Rudin, Assia, and A House of Gentlefolk, 
 is a man in whom reflection overrides voHtion, and de- 
 stroys the power of action. 
 
 The heroes of these stories are aristocrats, like 
 Tourgueniev himself, Russian gentlemen, who have 
 completed their education abroad — well-informed, well- 
 mannered, well-bred folk, fit for nothing except for 
 making love. And even that must not reach the point 
 of passion ; for if it does, they take flight at once, like 
 the young man Assia met on the banks of the Rhine, 
 and who may very well have been nearly related to 
 the novelist himself. Rudin has more breadth, but, in 
 my opinion, much less real value. The character of 
 the hero has caused a great deal of discussion. His 
 first appearance, as the habitual guest of the mistress 
 of a country-house, whose daughter he seduces, is any- 
 thing but glorious ; and after this failure in upright- 
 ness, his courage fails him too, and he flies before his 
 rival. 
 
 At this juncture we take him to be both vile and 
 cowardly, and it is with a shock of surprise that we 
 learn, shortly afterwards, that he possesses a superior 
 cultivation of mind, and a soul full of the noblest aspira- 
 tions. He proves himself a thorough altruist, to whom 
 nothing is lacking save a practical spirit, and he dies 
 like a hero on the barricades, which he has gone to 
 Paris to seek, as there are none to be found in Russia. 
 
TOURGUENIEV 283 
 
 Taking him altogether, he is something vefy Hke the 
 deceptive phrase-maker whom Goutzkov has reproached 
 himself with idealising in Dankmars VVildungen, with a 
 touch, too, of Spielmann's problematical figures. 
 
 A House of Gentlefolk occupies a place of its own in 
 Tourgu^niev's work. In drawing the figure of Lavretski, 
 the hero of this book, the author has entered a sphere 
 of positive conceptions, to which, as a rule, he remained 
 a stranger. He also proposed to supply an answer to 
 Tchernichevski's famous question— What is to be done ? 
 Lavretski, a man of poor education, contrives to sur- 
 mount this disadvantage by the strength of the national 
 temperament. He has, or the author thinks he has, 
 good sense, a well-balanced system of morality, a healthy 
 mind, and an upright heart. How then does he contrive 
 to commit follies and produce the impression of being 
 an oddity ? Because he cannot decide or act at the 
 proper moment. Still, and always, he lacks energy. 
 
 Such types as Lavretski and Rudin are portraits. 
 Did Tourgudniev succeed, as was certainly his ambition, 
 in reproducing in them the features of the men of his 
 own time ? I doubt it. As the representative of the 
 " Forties," I infinitely prefer Beltov, in Herzen's novel 
 Whose Fault? The form of this work is very inferior 
 and much too didactic ; but, historically speaking, the 
 character strikes me as being far more true. It seems 
 to me to sum up the moral condition of the best intelli- 
 gence of that period in a less imaginary outline — know- 
 ledge, honourable feeling, eagerness to serve the father- 
 land, disinterestedness, a well-directed and even bold 
 intelligence — all jeopardised, alas ! by an utter lack of 
 wise management, a disastrous predisposition to swift 
 despondency, and a total absence of the practical spirit. 
 
284 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Towards i860, Tourgueniev, like Ostrovski and ail the 
 writers of their period, was swept away by the general 
 current that carried them towards the study of social 
 problems. In three successive novels, he made a fresh 
 attempt to respond to the general call for an ideal. 
 The response contained in On the Eve {Nakanounie) 
 almost smacks of irony. In his search for the man 
 who is wanted, after the series of men who were not, 
 Tourgudniev, imitating Gontcharov, who went to Ger- 
 many for his hero — sought his paladin in Bulgaria ! 
 And what a poor prize he finds there ! Inssarov, a col- 
 ossus of strength, and, in the moral sense, as resolute as 
 a rock, must have his cousin Helen (feminine influence 
 again !) to help him to reach his goal. And he does not 
 reach it ! He is only another Beltov. 
 
 The second novel of the series. Fathers and Children, 
 stirred up a storm the suddenness and violence of which 
 it is not easy, nowadays, to understand. The figure of 
 Bazarov, the first "Nihilist" — thus baptized by an in- 
 version of epithet which was to win extraordinary success 
 — is merely intended to reveal a mental condition which, 
 though the fact had been insufficiently recognised, had 
 already existed for some years. The epithet itself had 
 been in constant use since 1829, when Nadidjdine applied 
 it to Pouchkine, Polevoi', and some other subverters 
 of the classic tradition. Tourgueniev only extended its 
 meaning by a new interpretation, destined to be per- 
 petuated by the tremendous success of Fathers and Chil- 
 dren. There is nothing, or hardly anything, in Bazarov, 
 of the terrible revolutionary whom we have since learnt 
 to look for under this title. Tourgueniev was not the 
 man to call up such a figure. He was far too dreamy, 
 too gentle, too good-natured a being. Already, in the 
 
TOURGUENIEV 285 
 
 character of Roudine, he had failed, in the strangest 
 way, to catch the hkeness of Bakounine, that fiery orga- 
 niser of insurrection, whom all Europe knew, and whom 
 he had selected as his model. Conceive Corot or Millet 
 trying to paint some figure out of the Last Judgment 
 after Michael Angelo ! Bazarov is the Nihilist in his first 
 phase, " in course of becoming," as the Germans would 
 say, and he is a pupil of the German universities. When 
 Tourgudniev shaped the character, he certainly drew on 
 his own memories of his stay at Berlin, at a time when 
 Bruno Bauer was laying it down as a dogma that no edu- 
 cated man ought to have opinions on any subject, and 
 when Max Stirner was convincing the young Hegelians 
 that ideas were mere smoke and dust, seeing that the 
 only reality in existence was the individual E.go. These 
 teachings, eagerly received by the Russian youth, were 
 destined to produce a state of moral decomposition, the 
 earliest symptoms of which were admirably analysed by 
 Tourgu^niev. 
 
 Bazarov is a very clever man, but clever in thought, 
 and especially in word, only. He scorns art, women, 
 and family life. He does not know what the point of 
 honour means. He is a cynic in his love affairs, and 
 indifferent in his friendships. He has no respect even 
 for paternal tenderness, but he is full of contradictions, 
 even to the extent of fighting a duel about nothing at 
 all, and sacrificing his life for the first peasant he meets. 
 And in this the resemblance is true, much more gene- 
 ral, indeed, than the model selected would lead one to 
 imagine ; so general, in fact, that, apart from the ques- 
 tion of art, Tourgu^niev — he has admitted it himself — 
 felt as if he were drawing his own portrait ; and therefore 
 it is, no doubt, that he has made his hero so sympathetic. 
 
286 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Nevertheless, the picture has been considered an 
 insult and a caricature, and has exposed its author to 
 furious attacks. It is true that Katkov, in a letter which 
 was subsequently published, reproached him with having 
 set Bazarov on a pedestal. And the first person the 
 novelist met, on his arrival at St. Petersburg, addressed 
 him with the words, "Just see what your Nihilists are 
 doing ! They have almost gone so far as to burn the 
 town." He took up the glove, somewhat clumsily, and 
 very unjustly, in Smoke (1867), picturing revolutionary 
 dilettanteism and society conservatism, in presence of each 
 other, in a manner which, this time, really did amount 
 to a caricature. The persons and ideas in both camps 
 are no more than smoke, but it is dirty and evil-smelling 
 smoke. One enchanting figure — Irene — perhaps the 
 most exquisite bit of feminine psychology the author 
 has ever given us, stands out luminous against the 
 gloomy background — to which, nevertheless, she 
 clings with the tips of her pink-nailed fingers, — the 
 fingers of a coquette, selfish above all things, capable of 
 sacrificing love to mean calculation, but capable also 
 of loving a man, — a coquette who does not make her 
 sacrifice without a struggle, and goes to the very edge 
 of renunciation and of the abyss, and stirs our sym- 
 pathy too, after all. Her character is a master-piece 
 of analysis. Goubarev, the dubious reformer, and 
 Ratmirov, the mysterious official, are neither true nor 
 sympathetic representatives of the generation of the 
 " Sixties." The period was better than that. Before 
 mixing himself up in the discussions in which he took 
 so passionate an interest, Tourgueniev had been anxious 
 to return to Russia, and there edit a paper in which all 
 the problems connected with the coming reform might 
 
TOURGUlfeNIEV 287 
 
 have been ventilated. He met with suspicion and 
 hostility on the part of the higher powers at St. 
 Petersburg, remained abroad, and thus gradually lost 
 clearness of vision as to men and matters in his 
 own country. 
 
 In his last great novel. Virgin Soil {Nov), he once 
 more attempted to draw the figure of the man who was 
 wanted, and who would be able to solve the crowning 
 problem— that raised by the apparent impossibility of 
 maintaining the actual regime, and the equal impossi- 
 bility of its immediate overthrow. Salomine, the factory 
 owner — a strange type of the opportunist, revolutionary, 
 moderate, methodical, abstracted, a creature without 
 flesh and blood — has not been considered satisfactory 
 in this respect. His friend Ni^jdanov, Rudin's own 
 brother in nolonte, as Gambetta would have phrased 
 it — seems to have more reality and life. This was because 
 Tourgudniev had sketched him from Nature. Ni^jdanov 
 actually lived and breathed. He was one of the author's 
 closest and most devoted friends. He is still alive. But 
 in the novel he only gives us the impression of yet 
 another "superfluous man," a chamber-agitator, who, 
 when he undertakes to harangue the peasants in a tavern, 
 falls, dead drunk, at the first all-round bumper, and 
 kills himself afterwards. Some of his comrades are 
 made of tougher stuff, but they none of them show us 
 that extreme tension of will and energy ftf character 
 which has been remarked, when the moment for action 
 comes, in the real representatives of their kind. Two 
 charming feminine figures, Machourina, the student, 
 frightfully ugly and ridiculously in love, and Marianne, 
 graceful and coquettish, endue the picture with the 
 only artistic value it possesses. In one of his unpub- 
 
288 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 lished letters to Ralston, Tourgueniev remarks that in 
 his time most of the women who enrolled them- 
 selves under the Nihilist banner were physically more 
 like Marianne than like Machourina. And he adds that, 
 notwithstanding this fact, it was proved, in the course of 
 the arrests made in their party, that most of them pre- 
 served their virtue. 
 
 Towards the close of his life, Tourgueniev, too, passed 
 through his mental crisis. The colossus, healthy and 
 hearty as he appeared, tottered, in his turn, on the edge 
 of the giddy gulf which had swallowed up his elder's 
 reason. The sudden breaking of his health certainly 
 contributed to this condition. He had settled in Paris 
 just after the Franco-German war, and there he soon 
 felt the beginnings of a rare and cruel malady — a cancer 
 of the spinal marrow. The constant expectation of death 
 threw him, from that time forward, into a sort of fantastic 
 mysticism, which steadily increased. This appears in 
 two stories written at this period. The Song of Trium- 
 phant Love and Clare Miltitch, this last inspired, it is be- 
 lieved, by the tragic death of a famous Russian actress. 
 They both somewhat recall Hoffmann's manner. If my 
 readers will conceive a sceptic, desperately bent on pene- 
 trating the unknown, they will see Torgueniev as he 
 was in these last years. His Poems in Prose, which were 
 partly written under the influence of the same feelings, 
 have just be&n somewhat coldly received in Russia. Yet 
 sometimes they give us back the Tourgudniev of his best 
 days, with something beyond, in depth of thought and 
 intensity of feeling, and a language such as no man, 
 before or since, has spoken in Gogol's country. Gogol 
 is more expressive, more picturesque, more full of life. 
 Tourgueniev goes beyond life itself. These pages should 
 
TOURGUENIEV 2S9 
 
 be read by those who desire to know the heart of the 
 great poet and infinitely kind-hearted man who penned 
 them. 
 
 Though some of Tourgueniev's creations, such as his 
 Faust, Mouniou, The Living Mummy, are absolutely ori- 
 ginal, his work as an artist is founded, as a rule, on that 
 of the great English novelists Thackeray and Dickens. 
 His humanitarian and democratic leanings mark him the 
 pupil of George Sand and Victor Hugo, and his philo- 
 sophical views betray the influence of Schopenhauer. 
 The Russian does not possess the intellectual solidity 
 and the virile strength of the Anglo-Saxon. His irre- 
 solute soul is easily washed away by every current. Like 
 Dickens, Thackeray, and the German Jean-Paul, Tour- 
 gu^niev, having begun with sketches and pictures of 
 ordinary life, remained faithful to the genre style even in 
 his larger compositions. He is superior to Dickens in 
 the matter of proportion. With the English novelist, 
 fancy often reaches the point of hallucination. The 
 Russian novelist often declared that he himself had no 
 imagination at all. Like most of his fellow-countrymen, 
 he had the deepest feeling for Nature. He loved it, 
 understood it, with the heart of a hunter, the passionate 
 affection of a confirmed rambler in field and forest. 
 Compared with Dickens's descriptive master-pieces — the 
 sea-storm in David Copperfield, the land-storm in Martin 
 Chuzzlewit — Tourgueniev's descriptions appear somewhat 
 pale. But this is atoned for by the Russian novelist's 
 special gift of incarnating the spirit of a landscape in 
 one or two realistic though fantastic figures, such as 
 Kassiane (a brother, only still more wild and savage, of 
 Patience in Mauprat), who lives in intimate friendship 
 with the birds of the forest, imitates their songs, and 
 
290 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 knows how to cast a spell over the hunter's fowling-piece, 
 so as to save them from being killed. 
 
 Tourgueniev also gives us a fresh conception of 
 Nature, which he shares with Schopenhauer. Their 
 predecessors had lived more or less with Nature, but 
 had always looked upon her as something foreign to 
 themselves, with an existence separate from theirs. In 
 Tourgu^niev's case, this external intercourse becomes a 
 fusion, a mutual pervasion. He feels and recognises 
 portions of his own being in the wind that shakes the 
 trees, in the light that beams on surrounding objects, 
 and this gives him a pang of nervous terror which his 
 readers share. 
 
 In spite of Schopenhauer, perhaps, after all, on 
 Schopenhauer's account, any general philosophic ten- 
 dency in Tourgudniev's writings will be sought in vain. 
 One might as well expect to find it in a tale by Chaucer, 
 Boccaccio, or Cervantes. And this peculiarity distin- 
 guishes him from the majority of the modern novelists 
 in every country, his own included. He never attempts 
 to discover the meaning of life, because he is convinced 
 that none exists. Though a convinced and essentially 
 realistic follower of Schopenhauer, both in this feature 
 and also in the fact that he never touches, nor attempts 
 to touch, on any subject of which he has not had per- 
 sonal experience, he is a far greater pessimist than his 
 German master, as great a pessimist as Flaubert, though 
 with this difference, that he loves humanity as heartily 
 as Flaubert detests it. We may take him to be a mourner, 
 haunted by the sensation of the nothingness of existence, 
 yet hungry for happiness, and enjoying life with all its 
 illusions. Thus, in the closing hours, there rose in his 
 soul, weary of suffering and yet terrified by the dark 
 
TOURGU^NIEV 291 
 
 shadow which waits to swallow up our suffering, and our 
 power of feeling with it, that final death-shudder so elo- 
 quently expressed in certain pages of the Poems in Prose. 
 
 Tourgu^niev's pessimism is certainly not connected 
 with his realism, for the greatest realists. Goldsmith in 
 the last century, Thackeray, Balzac, Zola, Edmond de 
 Goncourt, Daudet, in this one, are no pessimists, nor 
 even Maupassant, at the bottom of his heart, nor Gont- 
 charov, Ostrovski, and Tolsto'f, in Russia. The pessimism 
 of the author of Smoke does not confine itself to one 
 particular idea of life. Its source seems to lie simply in 
 the circumstances which have rooted him up, made him 
 an exile. But it has doubtless contributed to his view 
 of love as a malady, an organic disorder, which obeys no 
 recognised law, inexplicable, incalculable. Tourgueniev's 
 female lovers are, for the most part, creatures of impulse 
 and caprice, like Irene in Smoke, and Princess Zen- 
 aide in First Love. They are enigmatic figures, too, 
 though their creator acknowledges that their caprices 
 are the result of internal conflicts, of the meaning of 
 which they themselves are unaware. They are fond of 
 playing with the feelings of others, because they are 
 conscious of being themselves the playthings of their 
 own. In the case of those female characters who have 
 not this capricious quality — Marie in Antchar, Vera in 
 Faust, Natalia in Rudin, and Elizabeth in A House of 
 Gentlefolk — love comes to them in a flash, like a fever, and 
 transforms these cold marble figures into blazing torches. 
 
 Tourgueniev's workmanship is superior to that of all 
 his Russian compeers. Alone, or almost alone, among 
 them all, he knows how to compose, to arrange his story 
 and balance its different parts. In this respect, once more, 
 he is essentially Western. But, on the other hand, and 
 
292 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 this is according to the literary tradition of his country, 
 he makes no attempt at finished style. Zola has told us, 
 in one of his critical studies, how Flaubert had Set him- 
 self one day to explain to him why Merimee's style was 
 bad, and how the Russian novelist, who was present at 
 the conversation, found it very difficult to understand 
 anything about the matter. His great art lay in his 
 power of evocation, of calling up clear, and, as it were, 
 familiar pictures. He was served, in this matter, by an 
 extremely well-developed psychological instinct, which 
 extracted the full value of the very simple methods he 
 employed. " / go to Oka. I find his house — that is to 
 say, not a house, a hut. I see a man in a blue jacket, 
 patched, torn, with his back turned to me, digging cabbages. 
 I go up to him and say, ' Are you such an one ? ' He turns, 
 and I szvear to you that in all my life I never saw such 
 piercing eyes. Besides them, a face no bigger than a man's 
 fist, a goaf s beard, not a tooth. He was a very old man." 
 The portrait is there before us, thrust in our faces. Here 
 is another of a man " who looks as if one day, long ago, 
 something had astonished him intensely, and he had never 
 been able to get over the wonder of it!' Then we have the 
 President of the Finance Office, who raves about Nature, 
 "especially when the busy bee levies its little tribute on every 
 little flower !" Elsewhere the method varies : by means 
 of reticences, half-hints, special tenses, pauses, inflexions, 
 introduced into his conversations, the artist builds up his 
 sketch just as we have watched a painter build up his 
 picture. For this, observe his portrait of Machourina. 
 
 Tourgudniev, like Balzac, has a splendid eye for 
 detail, but he never uses Balzac's microscope. And 
 he does not pose his characters ; he has no desire that 
 they should form a tableau. A Lear of the Steppes, 
 
TOURGUENIEV 
 
 293 
 
 the tragic story of a small country land-owner, who, 
 stripped and turned out by his daughters, avenges 
 himself by destroying the house they have stolen from 
 him, is a typical specimen of the mighty results of epic 
 dread obtained by the most natural means. 
 
 Tourgudniev, like Dostoievski (though by a more 
 laborious process), obtains a perfectly natural expression 
 by means of a sort of decomposition c f successive move- 
 ments, which recalls the system of the cinematograph. 
 The recomposition works of itself, and without any 
 effort on the reader's part. To explain Tourgueniev's 
 success in escaping the two reefs which endanger the 
 Realist school — the weariness consequent on the abuse 
 of description, and the disgust inspired by the medio- 
 crity of the individuals represented — M. Bourget has 
 cited "the profound identity existing between the out- 
 look of the Russian author and that of his heroes." 
 Dostoi'^vski, on the other hand, has complained of this 
 feature in Tourgueniev's work, as being false to the 
 principle of realism, and leading up to the construc- 
 tion of artificial landscapes, blue skies that smile on 
 scenes of love, and other absurdities of that description. 
 
 M. Bourget has further imagined a distinction be- 
 tween "the failures" {les rates) of the French, and the 
 " superfluous men " of the Russian novel, the latter class 
 striking him as less tiresome, because they are not so 
 much men who have failed, as men who are not complete. 
 This shade appears to me subtle, and hardly correct. 
 A commonplace individual is always likely to prove un- 
 interesting. The difference noticed by the French critic 
 arises entirely, I am disposed to think, out of a question, 
 not of subject, but of the manner in which the subje'ct 
 is presented — in other words, of talent. A Russian 
 
294 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 critic, M. Boborikine, has also justly observed, that such 
 men as Roudine and Lavretski may very well pass, in 
 the West, for persons of average calibre, consequently 
 commonplace and not particularly attractive. But in 
 Russia, where social conditions are far less highly devel- 
 oped, it is quite a different matter, and there they are 
 regarded as being quite out of the common. Roudine, 
 indeed, is not an essentially Russian type. There is 
 nothing specially national in a predominance of thought 
 over volition. That trait is rather Western in its origin. 
 The specifically Russian form of want of will, as seen in 
 the case of Oblomov, is quite a different thing. 
 
 This leads me to another inquiry. Was Tourgueniev 
 a creator of types in the sense of that synthesis of cer- 
 tain general and permanent features of humanity which 
 has made the glory of Shakespeare and Moliere ? The 
 question would be settled at once, if, according to the 
 opinion of Taine, registered by M. de Voglie, the author 
 of Smoke is to be regarded as one of the most perfect 
 artists the world has possessed since the days of the 
 ancient Greeks ; but I venture to put forward some 
 objections. Tourgueniev's care for true detail, and his 
 powers of evocation, have ensured him a high rank 
 among the great artists and the great realists of every 
 period. But with these qualities he united an equal 
 care and anxiety concerning things mysterious, un- 
 fathomable, and fantastic, and a strong proportion of 
 individuality. Thus all his creations contain a certain 
 amount of purely subjective reality, and a certain 
 amount of fancy. His characters are compacted of the 
 result of his observation, together with all his own inner 
 feelings, his loves and hates, his angers and disdains. 
 Listen to Potoughine in Smoke, wearing himself out 
 
TOURGUENIEV 295 
 
 with passionate tirades against the Slavophils ! Tour- 
 gu6niev himself speaks by his mouth. His gallery of 
 feminine portraits is exceedingly rich and attractive. 
 I do not share M. Boborikine's opinion that it repre- 
 sents the average of Russian women. I have reviewed 
 all the female figures that attend upon Irene. I cannot 
 find one to be compared to Marguerite or Juliet. 
 
 Tourgudniev is a fascinating artist. His chief charac- 
 teristics are his tenderness and grace, with a certain 
 Northern mistiness of colour, and an extreme daintiness 
 of touch, which has enabled him to approach the most 
 difficult subjects without any sign of indelicacy. What 
 subject could be more dangerous to handle than the 
 rivalry between the father and the son in First Love ? 
 In A Sportsman' s Sketches, the novelist's delicate touch 
 and his extreme intensity of restrained feeling have 
 worked marvels. Look at the serf who has not even 
 a past. " He was forgotten in the last census of 
 ' souls ' ! " and that other, the hero of Moumou, whose 
 only possession and love in life is a dog, which he goes 
 out to drown at his mistress's command. And the author 
 has barely sketched them in outline. Then read the 
 scene in A Lear of the Steppes, where the peasants of a 
 village are officially informed that their master is to be 
 changed. The magistrate, for formality's sake, inquires — 
 
 " Have you any objection to make?" 
 
 A dead silence. 
 
 " Come, sons of the devil, will you not answer?'" 
 
 At last an old soldier ventures to come forward. 
 
 " None, surely, your honour ! " 
 
 And his companions, gazing at him with admiration, 
 not unmixed with terror, whisper — 
 
 " There's a bold fellow !" 
 
296' RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Does not a whole world of misery and moral degra- 
 dation rise up suddenly before your eyes ? And it is 
 done out of nothing, and magnificently done ! But 
 even this is not the last word spoken by art, either in 
 Russia or elsewhere. Tolstoi is yet to come. 
 
 Tourgueniev's work has not enshrined the historic 
 moments and great events of modern life, even as it 
 has not embodied, in the true sense of the word, any 
 'general, comprehensive, lasting type of character. In 
 this connection I must briefly point out the appointed 
 office of the historical novel in his country. It came 
 into existence after 1830, under the influence of West- 
 ern Romanticism, and more particularly of Sir Walter 
 Scott. Its first period, as exemplified by Zagoskine, 
 Lajetchnikov, Koukolnik, and Zotov, was spent in bond- 
 age to this influence and to that of the historical school 
 of Karamzine. At that time, in novels as in history, 
 the evocation of the past came to a full stop at the 
 impassable barrier raised by the epoch of Peter the 
 Great. Lajetchnikov's TJie House of Ice, which broke 
 this rule by encroaching on the leign of the Empress 
 Anne, was suppressed at its second edition. The Cen- 
 sure even interfered v/ith books dealing with the earlier 
 period, and Pouchkine and Gogol were the only writers 
 who produced really interesting work in this closely- 
 watched field. After 1850, the intense anxieties of so 
 decisive a period in the national existence naturally 
 turned men's minds from such subjects. Actual events 
 absorbed every one. Yet, meanwhile, the great labours 
 of Soloviov and Kostomarov were enlarging the circle 
 of historical reconstruction, by the introduction of fresh 
 elements, customs, traditions, habits, beliefs, sympathies, 
 and antipathies, connected with the past life of the nation. 
 
HISTORICAL NOVELS 297 
 
 A little later the masses of documents published in and 
 after i860 in the Russian Archives (i860), Russian Anti- 
 quities (1870), Historical Messenger (1880), and the Anti- 
 quities of Kiev (1882), began to form a treasure-house 
 of which art was one day to take possession. Yet the 
 superiority of the later historical novel, thus richly 
 dowered, only made itself apparent in a greater variety 
 of subject, a freer method of treatment, and a more ex- 
 tensive knowledge of archaeology. The observation of 
 past history was just as superficial, and the mixture of 
 reality and fiction just as incoherent. Kostomarov him- 
 self set a bad, and even the worst, example in his Cremu- 
 tius Cordius, a play published in 1864, in which the story 
 of Brutus and Cassius was mixed up with episodes in his 
 own career ; and in a novel to which I have already 
 referred, and in which ^he hero, Koudeiar, an imaginary 
 and very enigmatic personage, bears a preponderat- 
 ing share in events contemporary with the time of Ivan 
 the Terrible. 
 
 In 1861, the Russian Messenger published a novel by 
 Prince Alexander Tolstoi', the action of which passes in 
 the same period. Prince Serebriany'i had a considerable 
 success. The character who gives his name to the book, 
 the champion of the nobility against the tyranny of the 
 Tsar and the excesses of his Opritchina (personal guard), 
 has a fine heroic swing. The descriptions, in Walter 
 Scott's style, of the sovereign's hunting-party, the camp 
 of his opponents, and the flight and death of young 
 Skouratov, a fugitive from the camp of the Opritcliiniki, 
 lack neither life nor truth. 
 
 But the admirers of this class of literature were 
 doomed to return, with G. P. Danilevski and his Miro- 
 vitch (1879) to the sphere of whimsical fancies and 
 
298 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 strange ramblings, as exemplified by the impressions of 
 the unhappy partisan of the unfortunate Ivan VI., the 
 victim of Elizabeth and Catherine II., after his decapi- 
 tation ! It is true that, as early as 1867, War and Peace 
 had appeared in the columns of the Russian Messenger. 
 
 The ethnographical novel, originally produced by 
 Koltsov, Grigorovitch, and Tourgu^niev, received a 
 popular and fairly attractive form at the hands of P. I. 
 Midlnikov (1819-1883), at one time better known under 
 his pseudonym of A. Pidtcherski. This writer made his 
 first appearance in 1839, when he published some recol- 
 lections of travel, which attracted great attention, in the 
 Annals of the Fatherland. He afterwards taught history 
 and statistics at Nijni-Novgorod, studied the Raskol, and 
 in 1847, joined '^^ ®*^^ ^^ ^^^ Governor, Prince Ouroussov, 
 to whom he had suggested very severe measures against 
 the dissenters. After some unsuccessful attempts at 
 psychological novel-writing, the experience thus acquired 
 helped him, somewhat late in life, between 1875 and 
 1883, to the best of all his literary performances — two 
 really interesting studies in novel form, which the Mes- 
 senger placed in the hands of its subscribers. These 
 narratives, entitled respectively In the Forests and In the 
 Mountains, though devoid of artistic value and psycho- 
 logical truth, though strongly tinged with fantastic 
 notions and a lamentable taste for the melodramatic, 
 and written from an entirely official point of view, are 
 nevertheless full of curious details, and are of great 
 value as a source of information. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALISTS— HERZEN AND 
 CHTCHEDRINE 
 
 In this chapter I propose to bring forward a group of 
 writers in whose case the artistic note, although of con- 
 siderable importance, is not altogether dominant. One 
 of these, Chtchddrine, has in certain of his creations, sur- 
 passed Tourgu^niev from the artistic point of view ; yet 
 even in his case, the artist has always remained subor- 
 dinate to the militant author. 
 
 At the period when the adepts of German philosophy 
 were gathering round young Stanki^vitch at Moscow, 
 a second intellectual current, as theoretical, though in 
 a different direction, was rising within another circle of 
 youthful students. This current, resulting, as in the 
 case of the Stankievitch group, from local conditions 
 of existence, and external influences wherein the Euro- 
 pean movement of the first quarter of our century, 
 Schiller's poetry, and the new Western literature, poli- 
 tical and social, mingled in a confused and at first un- 
 consciously assimilated mixture of directing impulses, 
 gradually deflected towards the study of political and soci- 
 ological problems. About the year 1840, the two groups 
 drew towards each other, and well-nigh fused together. 
 The Hegelian right was represented by Stankidvitch 
 and Bi^linski ; the left, by Herzen and Ogariov. In 
 
300 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 other words, there was a Moderate and a Radical party. 
 Finally the two groups definitely separated. Stankie- 
 vitch and Bielinski stirred up and propagated a fever 
 of artistic creation which strongly affected Gogol and 
 Tourgu(£niev. Herzen and Ogariov produced an intel- 
 lectual ferment which, by the double means of the lite- 
 rary pamphlet and of political agitation, was to lead up 
 to that effervescence of which the tragic incidents of the 
 conspiracy of Petrachevski and the persons accused with 
 him, in 1849, was to be the first alarming symptom. 
 Petrachevski, in his Dictionary of Foreign Expressions, 
 forged an engine of war which affected the over-excited 
 minds of his contemporaries in the same way as the 
 Philosophical Dictionary had once affected Voltaire's 
 readers. The so-called "plot" of 1849, an echo of the 
 February revolution, and the answer to the philanthropic 
 dreams of St. Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon, called 
 forth terrible reprisals. Dostoidvski went to Siberia 
 with the author of the dictionary. Saltykov (Chtche- 
 drine) was sent to Viatka, and a series of repressive 
 measures helped to cast the country back into that con- 
 dition of intellectual torpor which it had hardly shaken 
 off. The scientific missions to foreign countries, the pil- 
 grimages to German universities, were all suppressed. 
 The price of passports was raised to the exorbitant 
 figure of 500 roubles, and it was only with the greatest 
 difficulty that they could be obtained at all. The number 
 of pupils in the Imperial Universities was limited, and all 
 teaching of philosophy was forbidden. The number of 
 newspapers was reduced, and the Censure became so 
 severe that the word " liberty " was forbidden, as being re- 
 volutionary ! A man who lost a dog called " Tyrant " was 
 obliged to advertise for it under the name of " Fido." 
 
HERZEN 
 
 301 
 
 The idealists who had led the movement were sobered 
 by its results. The rising tide of reforming ideas was 
 followed by a violent reflux in the reactionary direction. 
 The reformers of yesterday accepted a patriotism "to 
 order," which found its natural outlet in the Crimean 
 war (1853 -1856). But here again disappointment 
 was their portion. The result of this outbreak of ultra- 
 patriotism soon revealed faults of organisation and 
 elements of weakness hitherto quite unsuspected. The 
 Slavophil idealists saw their proud dream shattered, and 
 in its fall, official "nationalism" was broken to pieces. 
 A renewed longing for self - chastisement seized on 
 this society, already so bitterly wounded in its ten- 
 derest illusions. A fresh outbreak of reforming ideas 
 and humanitarian impulses swept over the sovereign 
 himself, and for the first time, — with the inauguration 
 of a political era which in itself constituted a revolu- 
 tion, government and public opinion appeared associ- 
 ated in common action. The press, too, recovered a 
 certain amount of liberty. But it had already acquired, 
 from foreign sources, the means of speaking out and 
 making itself heard. The greatest publicist of the period 
 had for several years been living and writing in a for- 
 eign country. 
 
 Herzen. 
 
 The natural son of a rich nobleman named lakovlev, 
 and of a Stuttgardt lady called Louise Haag, Alexander 
 IVANOViTCH Herzen (1812-1870), bore his fancy name 
 as a love-token (Herzen's Kind, Child of the Heart). 
 Even quite lately this name might not be printed within 
 Russian frontiers. Exiled, first of all, to Viatka, in 1835, 
 and then a second time to Novgorod, in 1841, sent into 
 
302 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the service of a former rope-dancer, whom imperial favour 
 had transformed into the Governor of the province, the 
 young man soon convinced himself of the utter incom- 
 patibility of his character with any career in the country 
 ruled by the Toufiaiev, — thus was the Governor named. 
 One day, sitting in this official's Chancery, he heard a 
 poor serf woman, who besought the authorities not to 
 separate her from her little children, treated with rude- 
 ness and contempt. He left the room on plea of 
 illness, and never returned. He fell back on literature, 
 publishing first, in the Annals of the Fatherland, and 
 under the pseudonym of Iskander, some Letters on the 
 Study of Nature, which attracted a great deal of atten- 
 tion ; and between 1845 and 1846, two novels. Whose 
 Fault? and Doctor Kroupov. The letters contain a bril- 
 liant exposition of every philosophical system down to, 
 and including, that of Bacon, together with a searching 
 criticism of these systems from the point of view of con- 
 temporary knowledge. The work is interesting, but 
 incomplete. Herzen's intention, no doubt, had been 
 to develop his own cosmic ideas on this foundation, but 
 other interests turned him from the undertaking. In 
 Whose Fault? we find, under the name of Beltov, the 
 eternal " superfluous man," very much puzzled whai to do 
 with himself, until he meets with Liouba, who, by teach- 
 ing him what love means, acquaints him with the secret 
 of his destiny, but who is herself unfortunately bound 
 to his friend Krouciferski. The struggle of emotions 
 arising out of this situation is intended to indicate that 
 the society producing it is badly constituted and needs 
 a process of reconstruction. All the fault lies there. It 
 is a work of social physiology and pathology, composed 
 with extreme skill, and holds a position of capital impor- 
 
HERZEN 303 
 
 tance in the history of the intellectual progress of that 
 epoch. That personal and revolutionary fashion of re- 
 garding family and social relations, which Tolstoi' was to 
 make peculiarly his own, is already clearly indicated in 
 its pages. From the zesthetic point of view, and in spite 
 of the fact that the moral physiognomy of the little 
 world of which it treats has been searchingly investi- 
 gated by the author, the work has less value. The 
 figure of Liouba, strongly marked out in the style of 
 George Sand, is dry in drawing and poor in colour. 
 Herzen shows himself less the painter than the sur- 
 geon, handling his instruments with impassive skill. 
 The book owed the impression it made chiefly to the 
 picture drawn in its earlier pages of the patriarchal life 
 of ancient Russia, in its least honourable peculiarities, 
 thanks to which Liouba, who is a natural daughter, and 
 her mother, are both treated as pariahs in the house of 
 Negro v. 
 
 Herzen was to do better work than this. At that 
 very imoment the death of his father placed him in 
 poss?Jssion of a considerable fortune, and he left Russia, 
 never to return. In Paris he associated with French 
 socialists and Polish emigrants, contributed to Proud- 
 hon's Voice of the People, was banished, and, in 1850, 
 published — in German in the first place, and under the 
 title of Vom andern Ufer — the first book of his which 
 did not pass under the official censor's eye. This col- 
 lection of epistles and dissertations, composed under the 
 combined influence of the revolutionary notions of the 
 time, and of the doctrines of the Slavophil party, pro- 
 claimed, in somewhat audacious fashion, the near and 
 inevitable end of the political and social organisation 
 of the old European, Christian, and feudal world, and 
 
304 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 its regeneration by the agency of the Russian Com- 
 munity. Nothing else so paradoxical and so brilliant 
 occurs in the revolutionary literature of the period. 
 
 Herzen, who had grown intimate with Charles Vogt 
 and Herwegh, was at this time living at Nice. But a 
 lamentable catastrophe — the death of his mother and 
 two of his children, drowned between that town and 
 Marseilles — was soon to render this place of residence 
 too painful for him. In 1838 he had made a love mar- 
 riage, preceded by an elopement. Paris being closed 
 to him, he decided to go to London, but he found 
 himself as isolated there, at first, as he had been in 
 Russia. The Revolutionists of other countries could not 
 swallow his Slavophilism. He endeavoured to justify 
 it by the publication of a second book, On the Develop- 
 ment of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia (1853), but he 
 only succeeded in gaining the sympathy of the Polish 
 democratic party, and of its London chief, Worcell. 
 A printer belonging to the Polish printing-press in 
 London, Czernie9ki, helped him to found a Ri.ssian 
 printing-press. But just at this time the Crimean, war, 
 with its proofs of the superiority of ancient Europe, 
 began to shake the over-presumptuous convictions of 
 the banished Slavophil, and counselled him to leave 
 the "rotten" West to its fate, and to turn all his atten- 
 tion to questions affecting the internal economy of 
 Russia. To this decision his Polish intimacies contri- 
 buted, and the death of Nicholas in 1855, together with 
 the political confusion resulting from it, combined to 
 tempt him still further in this direction. Thus the 
 publication of The Polar Star was decided on. With 
 the first numbers of this periodical, wherein Herzen 
 placed the emancipation of the serfs at the head of 
 
HERZEN 305 
 
 the reforms he claimed, there appeared, in English, the 
 author's own Memoirs (My Exile, 1856), which pro- 
 duced a great sensation. In 1857, The Polar Star, 
 which was only published once in six months, became 
 insufficient for its purposes, and on the ist of July 
 in that year, The Bell, which was destined to meet 
 with such prodigious success, made its first weekly ap- 
 pearance. F'ive months later, on December 2, 1857, 
 Alexander II. published his famous rescript, calling on 
 the nobility to bring forward plans for the work of 
 emancipation ; and from that moment, The Bell took on, 
 for some time, the appearance of an informally official 
 organ, which supported the Government against the re- 
 sistance offered to the projected reform by a certain 
 section of the aristocracy. The paper, though officially 
 forbidden, circulated all over the empire. Copies of it 
 appeared even on the table of General Rostovtsov, Presi- 
 dent of the Commission charged with the preparation of 
 the act of enfranchisement. When, now and then, the 
 police thought itself obliged in decency to interfere, it 
 would confiscate — as on one occasion at the fair of 
 Nijni-Novgorod — a hundred thousand copies at once. 
 Herzen, meanwhile, contrived to obtain the most trust- 
 worthy, the most precise, and the earliest information as 
 to the affairs of the country. He would hold forth to his 
 readers concerning state secrets which were not known 
 to more than ten persons in the whole of Russia. He 
 gave the names of prisoners shut up in the dungeons of 
 St. Petersburg and the mines of Nertchinsk, whom their 
 very jailers knew only by their allotted numbers. 
 
 When the emancipation became an accomplished 
 fact, the 3rd of March 1861 was kept as a festival in 
 Herzen's house in the west end of London. Over the 
 
3o6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 entrance two great flags waved, with these inscriptions, 
 " Freedom of the Russian Peasants," " The Free Russian 
 Press." Herzen little dreamt that he was celebrating 
 the early downfall of The Bell. From this date the 
 prestige of the newspaper rapidly declined. Herzen, very 
 unadvisedly, sided with the peasant revolts which followed 
 closely on the reform, and imperilled the benefits thereby 
 obtained. At the same time, influenced by Bakounine, 
 he entered on a course of excessive revolutionism, which 
 was soon to cost him the great majority of his readers. 
 
 Michael Bakounine (1814-1876) had then just escaped 
 from Siberia by way of America. He was a revolutionary 
 of the type of Barbes, and loved his vocation with an 
 artist's love. "The passion for destruction," so he 
 averred, " is a creative passion." He had been an 
 Hegelian of the right and of the left ; he passed over 
 into Germany towards 1841, found it too full of 
 theorists to please him, moved on to Paris, joined the 
 Polish emigrants, was expelled by Guizot, and did not 
 return to the capital until the February revolution re- 
 opened its gates to him. Caussidiere used to say of him, 
 "The first day of a revolution he is a treasure ; the next 
 day he had better be shot." The authorities were con- 
 tent with turning him out. He betook himself to Prague, 
 where he preached socialist Panslavism, fought with the 
 rioters against the soldiers of Windischgratz, slipped 
 through the fingers of the Austrian police, and hurried 
 off to take his part in the Dresden revolution. Saxony 
 made him over to Austria, who abandoned him to Russia. 
 He was sent to the mines, escaped, as I have said, and 
 reached London in time to revolutionise Herzen's rela- 
 tively moderate propaganda, and crack his Bell. At a 
 later period his violence was to alarm Karl Marx himself 
 
HERZEN 307 
 
 and the workers of the International. After 1873 he was 
 forsaken by every one, and returned to private life. 
 Amongst his numerous publications, pamphlets, and 
 books, the tract entitled To my Russian and Polish 
 Friends (in French, Leipzig, 1862), and a study, pub- 
 lished in German, under the title Historische Entwickelung 
 der Internationale (Geneva, 1874), are the only two worthy 
 of mention. 
 
 In the company of this dangerous acolyte, Herzen 
 gradually lost all moderation and all political wisdom. 
 He attacked the person of the Emperor, which he 
 had hitherto always respected. " F'arewell, Alexander 
 Nicolai^vitch, good journey to you 1 " I have already 
 related how he succeeded in provoking Katkov's vehe- 
 ment protests. The Bell, deserted by its readers, and 
 removed to Geneva in 1865, degenerated, little" by little, 
 into an obscure pamphlet, which altogether disappeared 
 four years later ; and in the year after that, Herzen, too, 
 died in Paris. 
 
 His was one of the most remarkable intellectual orga- 
 nisations of any country and any period. He could 
 write correctly, and occasionally brilliantly, in Russian, 
 French, English, and German. To the ten volumes of 
 his works published in Russian at Geneva between 1875 
 and 1879, an enormous quantity of pamphlets must be 
 added. In one of these, France and England, published 
 in 1858, he discusses the problem of a Franco- Russian 
 alliance. His own preference was for England,- — the 
 only school, he said, which suited Russia — "A country 
 without centralisation, without a bureaucracy, without 
 prefectures, without gendarmes, without revolution, and 
 without reaction." In 1865, under the title of Camiccia 
 Rossa, he relates a curious episode of his residence in 
 
3o8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 London, — his meeting with Garibaldi. He also touched 
 on history, by his publication of the Memoirs of Cathe- 
 rine II. and of the Princess Dachkov (1859). In London 
 he kept open house. Of affable manners and a brilliant 
 talker, though by no means an orator, he attracted uni- 
 versal liking. 
 
 His character and his intellectual powers have been 
 the subject of very contradictory judgments. His com- 
 patriots have taken him, at one time and another, to be 
 either Hamlet or Don Quixote, — an idealist or a realist. 
 I am disposed to share the opinion of Vi^trinski {His- 
 torical and Literary Sketches, Moscow, 1899). Herzen 
 was, above all things, an exceedingly personal writer, 
 very impressionable, and very apt to change his impres- 
 sions. One only has been durable and dominant with 
 him, — a deep love of his country, of his country's spirit, 
 of its manner of existence and its methods of thought, 
 joined with a profound feeling of sadness, the reason 
 for which will be easily guessed. 
 
 The Russian printing-press which he founded in 
 London continued to work even after his departure 
 and his death. From it issued, between i860 and 1870, 
 General Fadidiev's Letters on Russian Society and the 
 Russian Army, Kav61ine's book The Nobility and the 
 Emancipation of the Serf, lelaguine's The Russian Clergy, 
 Kochelev's How can Russia Escape from her Present Posi- 
 tion ? Samarine's The Baltic Provinces, theological studies 
 by Gagarine and Khomiakov, various collections of his- 
 torical and biographical papers, and a number of revo- 
 lutionary newspapers and pamphlets, of a democratic 
 and social tendency. 
 
 The literary tradition of 'Herzen, combined, however, 
 with a marked leaning towards the school of Bakounine, 
 
CHTCHEDRINE 309 
 
 is carried on, in our day, by Lavrov, who edited the 
 Anarchist and revolutionary newspaper Forward from 
 1870 to 1880 ; by VeraZassoulitch, and by Prince Krapot- 
 kine, to whom the Nineteenth Century has had the 
 courage to entrust the duties of scientific reviewer, in 
 succession to the illustrious Huxley, The Socialism of 
 Little Russia has found what I may call a kind of auto- 
 nomous representative in the person of M. Dragomanovo, 
 who died quite recently. 
 
 It should be noted that the great Russian writers of 
 the middle of the present century, Tourgudniev, Gont- 
 charov, Dostoievski, and even Tolstoi himself, have really 
 exercised a very restricted influence on the intellectual 
 and social evolution of the years between i860 and 1880. 
 They were widely read, and even enthusiastically ad- 
 mired, but the public, for the most part, drew its ideas 
 and sentiments from a number of writers such as Pomia- 
 lovski, Slieptsov, Mikhailov (pseudonym Scheller), Mad- 
 ame Khvochtchinskaia (pseudonym V. Krestovski), who 
 did not even occupy the front rank among the secondary 
 novelists, and especially from the leaders of the litera- 
 ture of divulgation and accusation, romantic followers 
 of Herzen, and, like him the confessors and merciless 
 chastisers of a society which was tasting its hour of re- 
 pentance and expiation. The most eminent represen- 
 tatives of this group are Saltykov (Chtch^drine) and 
 Pissemski. 
 
 Michael Ievgrafovitch Saltykov (Chtch£drine) 
 (1826-1889) made his first appearance in literature simul- 
 taneously with Dostoievski, and somewhat later than 
 Nekrassov. In 1841, he published some verses in the 
 Reader s Library, and in 1847, under the pseudonym of 
 Nepanov, a novel, imitated from George Sand, and 
 
3IO RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 entitled Contradictions, in which the power of satire he 
 was afterwards to evince is by no means foreshadowed. 
 His wit and spirit were not to develop in this direction 
 until a later period, under the influence of Socialist ideas, 
 and probably, also, of the prolonged exile he had to 
 suffer. His novel, though considered harmless in 1847, 
 was looked on as criminal in 1848, and the author 
 was whirled away in a kibitka. He owed his liberty, 
 some eight years later, to the sort of liberal reaction 
 consequent on the disasters of the Crimean war. Then 
 appeared, in the Russian Messenger, his Sketches of 
 Governments, which seem to be a continuation of 
 Gogol's Dead Souls, with less humour and more bitter- 
 ness — a cruel wit, that whistled and bit like the thong 
 of a whip. The blows fell from above. The chastiser, 
 who already belonged to one of the noblest families in 
 the country, was now advanced to official dignity, first as 
 Governor of Riazan and afterwards as Governor of Tver. 
 The administrative career, it must be admitted, did 
 not retain him for long. It suited him ill, and he suited 
 it still worse. In 1868 it came to an end, and Saltykov, 
 the official, disappeared for ever behind Chtchedrine, 
 the contributor to the Contemporary, and, after the sup- 
 pression of that publication, the editor, with Nekrassov, 
 of the Annals of the Fatherland, which, in 1884, ceased in 
 their turn to appear. It is at this moment that his 
 literary personality took definite shape. He became, 
 and to the last stroke of his pen he was to remain, the 
 executioner of the press and society of his time, who 
 summoned every category, every shade of opinion, and 
 every section of society (including his own) into the 
 question chamber, where each culprit was duly casti- 
 gated, or branded with hot irons. 
 
chtch:^drine 311 
 
 In Chtch^drine's Sketches, the first group to pass 
 under the whip was the provincial bureaucracy, cujus 
 magna pars fuit. Note the historical incident of the 
 Boumaga (business document) which the tchinovniks of 
 the town of Kroutogorsk pass from hand to hand 
 without contriving to understand a word of it. At last 
 an archivist whom they call into consultation offers to 
 help them out of the difficulty. 
 
 " You understand it ?" 
 
 " No ; but T can answer it ! " 
 
 Peasants and merchants, upper and lower classes, 
 judicial and religious customs, all have their turn. Listen 
 to the confession of the examining magistrate. " What 
 right have I to a conviction ? On whose account is it 
 necessary that I should have one ? On one solitary occa- 
 sion, when speaking to the President, I ventured to say, 
 'as I understand it.' . . . He looked at me, and I never 
 did it again. Why should I want to know whether a 
 crime has really been committed or not ? Is the crime 
 proved? that is^ the whole question!' Beside this realist 
 magistrate we find another whose sympathy is with the 
 culprits, and who would fain believe them innocent. 
 His fancy brings him no luck. " Why don't you thrash 
 me ? " cries one of the rogues whom he is gently ques- 
 tioning. " Do thrash me ! then perhaps I will tell you 
 something!' Thus, from the top of the ladder to the 
 bottom, he sets forth the same, or almost the same, signs 
 of the perversion and degradation of the moral sense ; 
 a general lack of character, corruption and falsehood, 
 reproduced in various forms and on every level ; insolent 
 tyranny above, crawling slavery below. Everywhere a 
 life of mechanical formalism, with a thin varnish of 
 civilisation to cover all its horrors. Saltykov's perma- 
 
312 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 nent idea would seem to be that, at bottom, nothing has 
 changed in Russia since the eighteenth century. De- 
 moralisation, ignorance, and barbarism have all remained 
 stationary, and even the liberal measures of i860 have 
 only served to induce fresh phenomena of moral cor- 
 ruption. 
 
 His usual method, in these sketches, is one of cold 
 and unsmiling irony. Look at his inimitable picture 
 of that idyllic and patriarchal existence which consti- 
 tutes the delight of the inhabitants of Kroutogorsk. 
 " Heavenly powers ! what a paradise it would be if it 
 were not for the police-officers and the fleas ! " In his 
 subsequent works, the author broadens his manner and 
 extends his field of observation. After the Crimean war 
 he falls foul of the kind of intellectual and moral renais- 
 sance evoked by that fiasco of official patriotism. He 
 denounces its empty phraseology, and, progressive as he 
 is himself, he makes game of its cloudy ideas of progress, 
 mistily floating hither and thither. Between 1861 and 
 1867 he reviews the transition types created by the great 
 reform. Landowners who do not know what to make 
 of their new position ; brandy merchants, railway con- 
 tractors, and money-lenders, who turn the situation to 
 account, and are the only ones to benefit by the act of 
 emancipation ; a ruling class terrified by the conse- 
 quences of its own act, a literary class whose judgment 
 of that act varies from one day to another. Russia, with 
 her new representatives of the ruling classes — " the men 
 of culture" — which she now possesses, is like a vessel 
 which has been cleaned without, but which is full of 
 filth within. Such is the meaning of the Story of a 
 Town, of the Faces of our Times, and of the Journal of 
 a Country Gentleman. Listen to the complaint of the 
 
CHTCH:eDRINE 313 
 
 Pami^chtchik (rural land-owner) who has to pay, for his 
 place in the St. Petersburg theatre to hear Schneider 
 sing: The lady, pretty as she is, is not so fair as a 
 Palachka of the good old times. What pleasure can he 
 have in looking at her and listening to her ? He cannot 
 say to himself, ^^ She belongs to me ; I can do what I will 
 with her, to-morrow or at once. If I like I can have her 
 hair cut off ; or if I choose I can marry her to Antip, my 
 shepherd ! . . . A lack ! we can do no harm, to anybody now 
 — not even to a hen ! " 
 
 Between 1867 and t88i, we have a new series of 
 Sketches, in which the prevailing type is that of the 
 Gentlemen of Tachkent, "men of culture" of a special 
 kind, "champions of education without the alphabet," 
 and seekers after fortune for which they will not have 
 to work. At this period the town and neighbourhood 
 of Tachkent had become a sort of Klondyke. These 
 volumes are full of obscure allusions to contemporary 
 events, which, together with frequent and tedious diva- 
 gations, make them difficult and fatiguing to read, and 
 indeed the author's wit occasionally strikes one as being 
 somewhat forced. An exception must be made in the 
 case of The Golovlev Brothers, which belongs to this 
 series. This book is Chtchedrine's masterpiece. In it 
 he rises to a height of tragic power which is almost 
 Shakespearian. But at what a cost ! The story of the 
 Golovlev family is the most terrible accusation which 
 has ever been formulated against any society. The 
 author of La Terre and his French imitators have never 
 ventured on anything like it. Chtchedrine has deter- 
 mined, on this occasion, to show the remnants of the 
 old order, of the patriarchal form of life, and the special 
 culture appertaining to it, as perpetuated, after the reform. 
 
314 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 in the bosom of a family of Pami^chtchiki. We see three 
 brothers, left practically to themselves by an idiot father, 
 and a mother whose sole idea is to increase the common 
 patrimony. Once they are full grown, they are cast 
 upon life, with but a scanty provision, and left to take 
 their chance. If they fail, they will have food and 
 lodging at the farm. The eldest, in despair, takes to 
 drink and dies of it. The second follows his father, and 
 falls into a condition of semi-madness. The third is the 
 favourite son. His brothers call him "Little Judas" 
 (loudouchka) and " Blood-sucker." He skilfully per- 
 suades his mother to divide the fortune she has amassed, 
 obtains an undue portion in the first place, and finally 
 succeeds in securing the whole. He has two sons, who, 
 in their turn, have to make their way in the world as 
 best they can. One of them desires to make a love 
 marriage. "As you will," says the father. But as soon 
 as the couple are united, he cuts off their means of sub- 
 sistence. Another suicide ! The second son, an officer 
 in the army, comes home one night, pale and hag- 
 gard. He has gambled away money belonging to his 
 regiment. " That's unfortunate" observes loudouchka 
 calmly. " Let us go and have some tea!' 
 
 " But what am I to do ? " 
 
 " That's your business. I cannot know what resources 
 you reckoned on when you began to play. Let us go and 
 have some tea." 
 
 " But three thousand roubles are nothing to you I You 
 are a millionaire thrice told." 
 
 " That may be, but it has nothing to do with your prank. 
 Let us go and have some tea!' 
 
 And the unhappy wretch, cashiered and sent to hard 
 labour, dies in a convict hospital. 
 
CHTCHEDRINE 315 
 
 loudouchka has a mistress, the daughter of a Greek 
 priest, whom he has employed, in the first place, as his 
 housekeeper. He is warned that she is about to become 
 a mother, and is very ill pleased at being interrupted in 
 the middle of his prayers, for he is exceedingly devout. 
 
 " But what is to become of the child? " 
 
 " What child? " 
 
 " Your child. Eupraxia will soon be a mother." 
 
 "-I don't know, and I don't desire to know." 
 
 And the child is sent to a workhouse. 
 
 loudouchka has two nieces, who, finding they must 
 starve at home, become provincial actresses. The eldest 
 soon turns sick at heart, poisons herself, and tries to 
 induce her sister to do likewise. 
 
 " Drink ! coward that you are ! " 
 
 But the wretched girl's courage fails her, and when 
 all other resources are exhausted, she takes refuge with 
 her uncle. loudouchka brutally suggests that she should 
 occupy Eupraxia's place. She turns from him in horror, 
 and takes to flight. When she returns at last, she has 
 lost all her charm, her health is broken, and she has taken 
 to drink. One night, loudouchka surprises her alone with 
 Eupraxia, drinking glasses of brandy, and singing filthy 
 songs. He takes her away with him, and becomes the 
 companion of her nightly orgies. These two sit drinking 
 in his silent house, till they fall to quarrelling, and cast 
 horrible insults in each other's teeth. In the fumes of the 
 brandy, their past surges up before their eyes, full of 
 abominable memories, of shameful deeds and crimes, of 
 nameless suffering and humiliation, till, little by little, a 
 sort of half-conscience rises up in the haunted soul of 
 the " Blood-sucker," and he feels all the horror of the 
 responsibility he has incurred. It is terribly magnificent. 
 
3i6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 loudouchka, as I have already said, is a devotee. All 
 through the long lonely days, he never leaves his writing 
 table, and the laborious reckoning up of his income and 
 his gains, save to kneel, for long periods, before the holy 
 pictures. Chtch^drine has desired to realise a sort of 
 Tartuffe of his own, partly duped by his own hypocrisy, 
 who believes in God, but is incapable of connecting his 
 faith with any moral principle. The wild nights spent 
 with the niece whom he has cast into such a horrible 
 abyss, the reproaches with which she overwhelms him, 
 and the remorse with which she finally inspires him, end 
 by leading him first to the haunting idea of a necessary 
 expiation, and then to an intense longing for it. And so 
 one winter morning, after many prayers before a thorn- 
 crowned Christ, loudouchka goes out and kills himself 
 upon his mother's grave. 
 
 Such a picture only admits of one plausible explana- 
 tion. We see the end of the whole social group it is 
 supposed to represent — death without any possible re- 
 turn to life. The worms are crawling over it already — 
 decomposition, and nothingness beyond it. The idea is 
 false — at all events it is exaggerated. As a matter of fact, 
 the country land-owners of the period were no more than 
 a special category of " superfluous men," and this Chtched- 
 rine himself has understood, and admirably demonstrated, 
 in The Spleen {Dvorianskaia Khandrd), in which he depicts 
 the anguish of a Pami/chtckik who suddenly finds himself 
 useless, and buried alive, as it were, in his country home. 
 He has lost the right to need his peasants, and his 
 peasants have ceased to need him. He feels himself to 
 be despairingly useless. But this is all. And this in 
 itself is evidently a passing matter. The portrait of 
 loudouchka, and the personality of the figures sur- 
 
CHTCHEDRINE 317 
 
 rounding him, present features of profound observation, 
 and give proof of remarkable dramatic power. But the 
 author reveals himself as a poet rather than a, sociologist 
 — the poet of caricature. 
 
 Yet he never was a novelist in the proper meaning of 
 the word. He even goes so far, in the preface of his 
 Tachkentsy, as to condemn this literary form, as being 
 too limited, and no longer fulfilling the needs of the 
 period. And his stories, as a rule, contain no element of 
 romantic interest whatever. They are rather analytical 
 essays, and essays of social criticism, tainted by a con- 
 siderable amount of fancy, and an equal amount of 
 deliberate exaggeration. Yet this does not lead me so 
 far as to adopt Pissarev's opinion of his work, as being 
 nothing but " laughing for laughing's sake." 
 
 'After 1880, the prolific writer modified his manner 
 once again. A calm had fallen on the intellectual and 
 political turmoil of the preceding years. There were no 
 more mighty movements, no more bitter conflicts. And 
 when Chtchedrine composed his Trifles of Life, he seemed 
 to harmonise his note to the general tone. He set him- 
 self to show the part played in life by those small details 
 which absorb and eat it up. And after that, passing 
 from analysis to synthesis, he considered, in his Tales, 
 the general elements common to the existence of every 
 nation, and every period. In spite of some too evident 
 contradictions, this part of his work may be said to have 
 placed him on an equality with the greatest of European 
 writers. The general tone is that of a deep-seated scep- 
 ticism and pessimism, a lack of faith in humanity, and 
 an idea that the struggle for life is the supreme law of 
 existence. This certainly seems to be the meaning, for 
 instance, of the Poor Wolf, whom the author shows us 
 
3i8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 as being driven to steal and kill in order to live. Yet, in 
 the Christinas Tales, with their deep pathos and profound 
 religious feeling, the author strikes a very different note 
 — that faith in the Divine Love which lifts humanity out 
 of all its misery. 
 
 Towards the end of his life, Chtchedrine has seemed 
 to desire to atone for former contradictions and errors of 
 judgment by writing The Chronicle of Pocliikhonie — the 
 Russian Abdera. This, again, is a picture of the life of 
 rural proprietors before the reform, and this time we 
 have a history wherein traits of true humanity and Chris- 
 tian love atone for very occasional failures, and a few 
 absurdities. Both as regards its depth of thought and 
 its artistic form, if not for its absolute reliability, the 
 work is far superior to Akssakov's Family Chronicle. 
 
 The melancholy shade of Pissemski, and his numerous 
 admirers, will perhaps reproach me with having here 
 allotted him a position all unworthy of him. And I must 
 admit that of all his creations, whether plays or novels, 
 there is but one, and that not the best, to which we can 
 attribute any personally combative design. All the author 
 has ever set before himself, is to perform a true artist's 
 work, as the faithful interpreter, "objective and nai've," 
 as Dostolevski said, of Nature. But the nature and scope 
 of a work cannot be judged by the intentions of its 
 makei". It has been said of Pissemski, as it has been 
 said of Zola, "That he saw things through dirt," and 
 the result of this is that he must be classed, however 
 much against his own desire, amongst the most bitter 
 detractors, and the most merciless accusers, of his period. 
 The subjects and the heroes of his books frequently 
 bear a close resemblance to those which were so dear to 
 Tourgueniev, and even to Lermontov. The Batmanovof 
 
PISSEMSKI 319 
 
 the novel of that name, is closely related to Pi^tchorine, 
 but you would take it for a picture by Rembrandt, re- 
 painted by Teniers. 
 
 Like Saltykov-Chtchedrine, Alexis F£ofilaktovitch 
 PisSEMSKi (1820-1881) was born of an ancient noble 
 family, originally settled in the Government of Kostroma. 
 In 1582, one of his ancestors was sent to England by 
 Ivan the Terrible, in connection with a proposed marriage 
 between the Tzar and one of Queen Elizabeth's kins- 
 women. Alexis F^ofilaktovitch belonged to an impover- 
 ished branch of this aristocratic race. He has himself 
 related that his grandfather did not know how to read, 
 wore sandals {lapti), and tilled his own scrap of land. 
 His father, whom he has taken as the type of a veteran in 
 one of his stories, began by serving as a private soldier, 
 and never rose above the rank of major. These circum- 
 stances must have affected the education of the future 
 novelist. Pissemski, like Gogol and Dostoievski, never 
 possessed much general education, and like them, not 
 having been taught to think, he inclined strongly to 
 mysticism. When he left the University, he found his 
 father dead, his mother stricken with paralysis, and some- 
 thing very like destitution in his home. He attempted 
 to earn his livelihood by literature, and wrote his first 
 novel The Times of the Boyards {Boiarchtchind), a plea 
 in favour of free love, inspired by Indiana. Its pub- 
 lication was forbidden by the Censure. Pissemski 
 attempted the administrative career, but could make 
 nothing of it, and finally, in 1855, ^^ earned great suc- 
 cess with a second novel. The Muff {Tioufiak), a study of 
 a man without energy and without character, which he 
 followed by a succession of tales relating to provincial 
 incidents and touching, like those of Tourgueniev, on 
 
320 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 popular life. In these, Zola's mania for trivial detail is 
 aggravated by a peculiar stamp of pessimism, which 
 ascribes the complex motives of human nature to two 
 mainsprings and no more — cupidity in some cases, 
 sexual instinct in the rest. But the peasants he con- 
 jures up are generally admirably true to life. In 1858 
 there appeared, together with the Bo'iarchtchina, which 
 was now authorised by the Censure, the best of all 
 Pissemski's novels, A Thousand Souls (Tyssiatcha douck), 
 a gloomy picture, wherein the worst sides of Russian 
 existence before the reform are thrown into as strong, 
 and more cruel relief, than even in the work of Chtche- 
 drine. The hero of this book, Kalinovitch, a man of 
 talent and energy, climbs to fortune by sacrificing a 
 young girl who has devoted herself to him, and marry- 
 ing, according to a shameful bargain, the mistress of 
 a prince. He becomes governor of a province, and 
 endeavours to atone for his past by applying the rational 
 theories he has learnt at the university ; is stubbornly 
 resisted by an administrative and social organisation 
 founded on abuses of every kind ; and finally comes to 
 disgrace and ruin. He then meets once more with 
 Nastienka, the woman he has so shamefully deserted, 
 who has meanwhile become a provincial actress, marries 
 her, and shares with her the remnants of an ill-gotten 
 fortune, without any desire to attain anything more 
 in life. 
 
 In spite of some apparent contradictions, the char- 
 acter of Kalinovitch is carefully studied, and logically 
 constructed. The action of the story in which he plaj's 
 the principal part is interesting and well planned. The 
 author goes straight to his point, like a rifle-bullet, with- 
 out any discernible regard for aesthetics or morality. 
 
PISSEMSKI 321 
 
 His gloomy figures are sketched with broad, dry, heavy, 
 strokes, on a dark background. There is not a figure, 
 except that of Nastienka, which has a touch of light upon 
 it. And Nastienka herself, a provincial actress who pre- 
 serves her virtue, strikes one as a somewhat paradoxical 
 figure, even for Russia. The background, with its repre- 
 sentation of provincial life, recalls Chtch^drine, but many 
 of its features are still more repulsive. "A man must 
 possess a great reserve of courage to be able to live in 
 such society ! " so says Pissemski himself, in a novel of 
 a similar type, An Old Mans Sin. 
 
 Meanwhile, the author endowed the Russian theatre 
 with a play entitled Ci-uel Fate {Gorkaia Soudbina), the 
 first founded on popular life which earned any success in 
 the country before the appearance of Tolstoi's Power of 
 Darkness. This success must be more especially ascribed 
 to the manner in which the subject is presented, and 
 way in which the cruel fate of a half-emancipated serf, 
 who goes to seek his fortune in St. Petersburg, and 
 comes back to find his domestic happiness destroyed, 
 his wife become his master's concubine, and the mother 
 of a child who is the Barine's child, is described. Yet 
 its success is certainly surprising, for it undoubtedly 
 depends, to a great extent, firstly on melodramatic 
 effects of a somewhat coarse nature, the murder of 
 the child by the outraged husband, which takes place 
 almost on the stage, and then on an interpretation of the 
 law of serfdom and its consequences, which really is 
 strained, and anything but true. All the figures in the 
 play, whether owners or serfs, with the exception of the 
 officials of every rank, are good, generous, and tender- 
 hearted ; and yet the infernal law leads them on into 
 crime. 
 
322 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 In his later works, Pissemski endeavoured to make 
 amends for this lapse from his principles. The public 
 blamed him. In Russia, the years following on the great 
 act of emancipation were a troublous period, during 
 which the sentiment of reality was entirely obliterated 
 by a cloud of reforming dreams and Utopian fancies. 
 When Pissemski endeavoured to react against these, as 
 in his Furious Sea ( Vsbalamoutchennoie Morie), he only 
 succeeded in displeasing everybody. The Liberals ac- 
 cused him of apostasy, and, with the usual injustice of 
 political parties, ascribed his attitude to personal motives 
 which had no real existence. He was still showing things 
 as he saw them, and he could see nothing practical in 
 contemporary radicalism. Living in the midst of men 
 saturated with bookish theories, he exemplified the com- 
 monplace spirit of the provincial samodour. His last 
 years were saddened by periodical attacks of hypochon- 
 dria. He had lived too long. 
 
 The general spirit of his work resembles that of 
 Gontcharov, who, like him, struck a matter-of-fact note, 
 in opposition to the somewhat romantic realism of 
 Tourgu^niev, and, like him, cast ridicule and reproba- 
 tion upon people who have nothing to offer but ideas. 
 In Pissemski's eyes, as in Gontcharov' s, action is every- 
 thing. They are followers of Gogol, just as Tourgu^niev 
 is the follower of Pouchkine. The difference between 
 them and the author of A Hunter s Memories resides 
 more particularly in the fact that this last is, on the 
 whole, a describer of exceptional types, just as he is a 
 painter of magnificent landscapes. They, on the con- 
 trary, resolutely bestow all their attention on common 
 things, and ordinary men. Everything outside this cate- 
 gory strikes them as being either false or ridiculous. 
 
NEKRASSOV 323 
 
 Like Tourgu6niev, they consider the Hfe of their own 
 period both evil and unendurable ; but they do not share 
 his opinion that these vices can only be corrected by 
 men of special virtues, or by heroes. The everyday 
 vulgar man should suffice, if only he were not indolent. 
 Their favourite personages — Bielavine in A Thousand 
 Souls and Peter Ivanovitch in A Common Story — are men 
 who suit themselves to the times in which they live, set 
 an aim before them, and succeed in reaching it. They 
 bring in no new ideas ; they only bring in a manner of 
 existence which is new to the Russian man, a spirit of 
 practicality, of punctuality and energy. Thus they re- 
 present European culture far better than the great good- 
 for-nothing idlers depicted by Tourgueniev. Unluckily, 
 like them, they are only half-civilised men. They have 
 the substance, the others have the form. And the result 
 is very much the same, as negative in one case as in the 
 other. Gontcharov himself seems to have recognised 
 the failure of this generation of positive men, for his 
 Oblomov only obtains the common fate of the traditional 
 legne — idleness, inertia, a fatty heart, and apoplexy at 
 the close. 
 
 I now pass on to an undeniable representative of the 
 confraternity of literary chastisers of this period, a poet 
 who, like Chtchddrine, possessed all the instincts of the 
 executioner, and who at the same time was an extra- 
 ordinary type of the proletary — one who bore in his 
 soul, and vented on others, all the spites and furies and 
 hatreds of an outcast race, to which he did not himself 
 belong by right of blood. Nicholas Alexi£ievitch 
 NfiKRASSOV (1821-1876) was born in a small town in 
 Podolia, where his father was quartered. The family 
 circle was completed by a mother of Polish origin, 
 
324 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 (Zakrzewska), and a dozen brothers and sisters. It 
 belonged to the small provincial nobility. The father, 
 having led the ill-regulated life of the gentlemen of his 
 time, and dissipated a modest patrimony, had been ob- 
 liged to undertake the humble functions of a rural police 
 Commissary. Young Nicholas often accompanied him 
 on his rounds, and thus became acquainted with the 
 popular life, its habits, thoughts, and sufferings. When 
 the child grew into a youth he was sent into the Corps 
 of Cadets at St. Petersburg, but he was not to stay there. 
 His mother, a dreamy, passionate creature, had kindled 
 a spark within his heart, which the great city fanned 
 into a flame. Instead of preparing himself for the career 
 of arms, Nicholas Alexi^idvitch attended the university 
 lectures, and mingled in literary circles. Treated as a 
 rebellious son, and deprived of remittances, he gave 
 lessons, corrected proofs, supplied compilations to news- 
 papers, and often went hungry. " For three years I was 
 hungry every day," he would say, later ; and at the same 
 time, with that cynicism which is one of the least attrac- 
 tive features of his talent, he reproduced in one of his 
 poems the following autobiographical anecdote — that his 
 mistress went out, one night, dressed in the gayest attire, 
 and returned home carrying a tiny coffin for the baby 
 which had just died, and food for the father who had 
 been starving since the previous evening ! 
 
 Encouraged by N. A. Poldvoi, Nekrassov ended by 
 publishing some lines in the Literary Gazette and in the 
 Annals of the Fatherland. A little later a collection of 
 poems, entiled Dreams and Strains, greeted with friendly 
 appreciation by Polevoi and Joukovski, definitely opened 
 the literary career before him. But up till 1845, he was 
 to struggle with poverty, working ceaselessly at every kind 
 
NEKRASSOV 325 
 
 of style, and even attempting comic opera, under the 
 pseudonym of " Perepielski." Between 1845 and 1846, 
 the success of two other collections of his work, The 
 Physiology of St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg Mis- 
 cellany, together with Bidlinski's eulogistic verdict upon 
 them, brought him the beginnings of glory and ease. 
 Before long he joined Panaiev in the editorship of The 
 Contemporary, founded by Pouchkine, and in two years 
 he had grown rich. But here came a fresh disappoint- 
 ment. As fortune smiled upon him, his friends forsook 
 him. Various reports circulated concerning the origin 
 and constitution of the wealth so swiftly acquired. A 
 discord always existed between the poetic existence of 
 N^krassov, and his practical life, and some of his lyric 
 compositions bear traces of the fact. The future held 
 some compensations for him. The boldness he showed 
 in a series of new works, in which he touched on the 
 most sensitive sores of Russian life, the power of invec- 
 tive and satire which he there displayed, and the fresh 
 poetic elements which he succeeded in introducing, were, 
 towards 1870, to make him the idol of the youth of that 
 period. 
 
 He says of himself, several times over, that the only 
 source of inspiration known to him was indignation : 
 " / have no memory of any smiling and caressing Muse 
 who sang sweet songs beside my pillow. . . . I owed my 
 early inspiration to the Muse of sobs, of mourning, and of 
 pain — the Muse of the starving and the beggar ! " And in 
 one of his last poems, he speaks of his " old heart broken 
 down with hate." His satire is of the fiercest kind. He 
 is capable of dropping his cruel irony even on to the 
 cradle of a sleeping child. " Sleep, baby, sleep ! Good 
 news has come into the country. Your father, with all his 
 
326 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 crimes, has at last been brought to judgment ; but your father, 
 arrant rogue, will manage to escape. Sleep, youngster, 
 sleep while you are honest — sleep, baby, sleep I" His 
 gloomy poetry occasionally recalls that of Crabbe. 
 He pours forth a torrent of sarcasm, anathema, and 
 reproach, on every rank of Russian society. Occa- 
 sionally the lyric poet grows stronger than the satirist, 
 and he calls up figures which are not ideal indeed — he 
 is too realistic for that — but which possess a sympathetic 
 reality : princesses, who remind one of the ancient 
 Roman matrons ; men of the people, humble and 
 patient, but good and strong amidst the darkness about 
 them, the darkness of an " imderground prison without 
 a light" and such martyrs of the struggle for light as 
 Bielinski, Dobrolioubov, and Pissarev*. 
 
 But these are rare gleams of light. Even when 
 Nekrassov paints the popular life — his favourite subject, 
 his great love, his passion — he follows the twofold line 
 which corresponds in a manner to the positive and 
 negative poles of his talent, and always ends in an abyss 
 of the darkest desolation. In both cases the author's 
 method is the same. The initial theme is some corner of 
 Russian country, dreary and flat, with little that is pic- 
 turesque about it, the home of a certain number of human 
 beings, none of whom are marked by any very strik- 
 ing qualities. On this subject the artist's fancy seizes, 
 and gradually landscape and figures fill with an intense 
 life. They grow on us, taking on a mythical and legen- 
 dary aspect, until the whole of mighty Russia appears 
 before us in the frame of some rustic story. Thus, in the 
 Frost with the Red Nose (Morozk krasnyi noss), we have 
 a magnificent allegorical evocation of the Russian win- 
 ter, that terrible lord who reigns over a whole world of 
 
NEKRASSOV 327 
 
 misery and suffering. In The Tro'ika, again, we have the 
 complete legend of the destiny of woman under those 
 humble thatched roofs. And in each case the picture 
 leaves us with the same impression of sadness. Only 
 in the first, Daria, the wife of the moujik who is dying 
 of cold, is full of a calm and heroic beauty ; whereas, 
 in the second, the young girl whose eyes follow the 
 post-chaise out of which an officer has smiled to her, 
 is but a poor creature, the sport of a passing vision of 
 happiness. And the ray of light which falls on her for 
 that short moment, only to leave her once more in the 
 shadow, merely serves to throw out, in merciless oppo- 
 sition, the two sides of a destiny of which the best is 
 not for her : what that peasant girl might have become, 
 if she could have driven away in that carriage, and 
 what she must become if she remains in the village, 
 soon to be the wife of some drunken and quarrelsome 
 peasant, his slave and beast of burden, till a handful of 
 earth is thrown " on a bosom which no caress will ever have 
 warmed ! " 
 
 N6krassov has frequently been compared to DostoY- 
 evski. Yet an essential difference does exist between 
 this poet and all contemporary Russian novelists. This 
 difference, while constituting an element of originality, is 
 at the same time one of relative inferiority. We shall 
 not find, in his case, that basis of submissive mysticism, 
 and mystic love for those who suffer, which forms the 
 basis of the work of his fellows. Nekrassov was as 
 much of a publicist as of a poet, a man of positive 
 and atheistic mind, and he is a revolutionary in the 
 Western, and not in the Russian, sense. On this account 
 it is that he frequently falls into declamation. This fault 
 is very evident in the poem, Who Finds it Good to Live in 
 
328 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Russia? — one in which, having regard to its date (1864), 
 one would hardly expect to find it. Some peasants 
 sitting talking, when their work is over, complain of 
 their sufferings. To whom in Russia does life bring 
 joy and peace and liberty ? To solve the problem, these 
 ragged philosophers look hither and thither, search their 
 native country up hill and down dale, question every 
 one they meet — officials, landed proprietors, priests, 
 merchants, their own fellow-toilers. From every one 
 comes the same response, mournful and negative. Re- 
 garded as an accumulation of expressive pictures the 
 work is a fine one, but in conception it is exaggerated, 
 strained, and false. It reminds one of a newspaper con- 
 troversy, and recalls Chastisements, rather than The House 
 of the Dead. 
 
 When Nekrassov persuaded himself that his hatred 
 was nothing but love for the people driven inward, he 
 deceived himself. He did little practically to prove his 
 love ; and even poetically speaking, he has only given 
 it reasonable expression in the eight couplets, written 
 in 1861, to greet the new era inaugurated by the Eman- 
 cipation. After that, he continued, as if nothing had 
 happened, to rage and mourn and curse over an 
 evil which had no further existence. One judge — the 
 wisest and the least open to suspicion of his class — 
 has not been deceived. Violent as they were, the verses 
 written by this " Russian Vall^s," as M. de Vogiie has 
 called him — a Valles who grew rich by dubious specula- 
 tion — were always spared by the Censor. 
 
 As a thinker, Nekrassov lived on one idea, and one 
 only — the liberation of the serfs. He was so convinced 
 the idea was his own, and so incapable of replacing 
 it by another, that after 1861 he was very much 
 
NEKRASSOV 329 
 
 inclined to cry, " Stop, thief ! " And then he fell to 
 making fresh speeches on a topic which had lost 
 all interest. As an artist, his great gift was his mar- 
 vellous descriptive power. In the Unfortunates, into 
 which he has put a great deal of his own personality, 
 you will find a picture of St. Petersburg worthy to be 
 compared with the best of the same kind in Eugkne 
 Onieguine. And I should not be surprised if Ndkrassov 
 had the best of the comparison. But both pictures are 
 incomplete. Pouchkine saw nothing but the brilliant 
 and splendid aspects of the capital; Nekrassov, on his 
 side, only looked at the humbler folk, bowed down from 
 early dawn under the burden of their daily task. In 
 strength of drawing and power of representation the 
 second picture may perhaps be thought superior. The 
 " sick day," the slow foggy dawn which hangs over the 
 crowd of labourers and humble employes, and guides 
 them to their work, , and the whole description of the 
 early morning hours in the streets of the great city, is 
 exceedingly striking and truthful. 
 
 The poet himself declared himself lacking in the 
 creative genius needed for the substance of his work, 
 and recognised his artistic inadequacies in the matter 
 of form. " I do not flatter myself that any of my verses 
 will endure in the popular memory. . . . There is no 
 bold poetry in you, O my fierce and clumsy lines ! no 
 touch of creative genius." Nekrassov has left a gfeat 
 name, but he has left no school behind him. Among 
 his imitators, lahontov, Borovikovski, and Fiodorov, this 
 last, who wrote under the pseudonym of Omoulevski, 
 and died in 1883 of starvation and drink, was the most 
 original. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE PREACHERS— DOSTOIEVSKI AND TOLSTOI 
 
 Of the Pleiad which, after the year 1840, won so high 
 a position for the Russian novel in European literature, 
 three writers stand out and form a group apart. Ser- 
 gius Akssakov, Dostoievski, and Tolstoi. They form the 
 strongest contrast with the group I have just endea- 
 voured to describe. Instead of rising up in revolt 
 against contemporary realities, they are full of sympathy 
 with them. Far from dreaming of some ideal future, 
 they perceive the accomplishment of their dream in a 
 humble agreement with the present. Instead of search- 
 ing hither and thither for men "such as we need," — 
 heroes in thought or action, who should rule the herd, 
 and guide it to its proper destiny, they preach the insig- 
 nificance of the individual in regard to the majority, — 
 the impossibility of individual leadership, — the necessity 
 that every unit should bow before the truths which 
 the majority has accepted. This is the teaching of Aks- 
 sakov's Family Chronicle, Dostoievski's Brothers Kara- 
 niazov, and Tolstoi's Stories of Sevastopol. 
 
 This fundamental idea has found a specially eloquent 
 expression in the work of Tolstoi, but it is a common 
 bond between all three writers, though Akssakov, both 
 by his form and his expression, approaches nearer to 
 Tourgu6niev, and this in spite of his Slavophilism, 
 though Tolstoi is apparently quite uninfluenced by the 
 
AKSSAKOV 331 
 
 Slavophil theory, and though Dostoievski possesses none 
 of that objective plasticity which gives Tolstoi so high a 
 position among the great creators. All three have been 
 moved by one common thought, expressed, in Akssakov's 
 case, by his conception of a harmony of high qualities 
 and virtues realised in the bosom of an aristocratic 
 family ; in Dostoievski's, by a moral and religious teach- 
 ing saturated with mysticism ; and in Tolstoi's by his in- 
 stinctive and half-conscious notion of a " truth of life " 
 superior to all theoretical conceptions. 
 
 The author of the Family Chronicle, Sergius Timo- 
 Fl£i£viTCH Akssakov (1791-1859), Was the father of the 
 two famous Slavophils. His Memories of a Hunter, 
 which preceded those of Tourgueniev, give, with much 
 simplicity and humorous good-nature, a delightful and 
 highly idealised picture of the wild and romantic deni- 
 zens of the forest and the steppe, where the author had 
 spent his youth. He was close on old age when these 
 stories were published, in 1847. Up till that time he had 
 played a somewhat obscure part in the literary life of 
 his day, — partly as the friend of Chichkov, partly as the 
 resolute supporter of the classical traditions and forms, 
 and partly as a Censor. Fresh acquaintanceships, and the 
 enthusiasm of his son Constantine for the work of Gogol, 
 impelled him in a different direction. The success which 
 he attained seems to have acquainted him with the 
 nature of his own talent, and, between 1856 and 1858, a 
 fresh series of tales. The Family Chronicle, The Childish 
 Years of the Grandchildren of Bagrov, and Memories, — 
 which together make up a picture of patriarchal, and in a 
 sense, of elementary life, such as may have existed at the 
 beginning of this century in the government of Oufa, — 
 earned him the title of the Walter Scott, and even of the 
 
3 32 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Homer, of Russia. A peaceful life, without conflict or 
 struggle of any sort, was that over which old grand- 
 father Bagrov wielded an absolute authority, founded 
 not on any superiority either of mind or character, but 
 simply and solely on tradition. It is, in fact, an ideali- 
 sation of the old order of things, and the very quint- 
 essence of Slavophilism — which fact has not prevented 
 Dobrolioubov from drawing, from these very pages, a 
 picture of the " good old times " which does them extra- 
 ordinarily little credit. Akssakov piqued himself on put- 
 ting a certain amount of historical truth into this work, 
 which holds an intermediate place between the novel 
 and the memoir, and has introduced, with comments of 
 his own, various facts from which the revolutionary 
 critic was to draw quite different conclusions. But 
 Dostoievski and Tolstoi were already in existence, ready 
 to endow art and religion with a new and broader formula. 
 The father of FioDOR Mikhailovitch Dostoievski 
 (1822-1881) was a military surgeon, and thus it came about 
 that the future author first saw the light within the walls of 
 a hospital. He had an elder brother named Michael, who 
 earned some reputation for his translations of Schiller and 
 Goethe, and his editorship of two reviews. The Times and 
 The Epoch, both of which made their mark in the history 
 of the Russian press. Though his childhood was sickly, 
 subject to hallucinations, and, before long, to periodi- 
 cal attacks of epilepsy, he passed with brilliant success 
 through the St. Petersburg School of Engineering, and 
 took the third place in the final examination. A lucrative 
 career lay before him. But the literary fever of the 
 times had even reached the pupils of the military schools, 
 and the young engineer could not resist the call of his 
 vocation. 
 
DOSTOIEVSKI 333 
 
 The strange and romantic opening of the literary 
 life of one who was shortly to become a master of 
 the realist school has been frequently related. Another 
 beginner, Grigorovitch, introduced him to Nekrassov, 
 who was then preparing to publish a review, and was 
 looking about for contributors. Dostoievski, put out of 
 countenance by the poet's cold reception, thrust the 
 manuscript of his first novel into his hand, and fled like 
 a thief, without opening his lips. In his confusion and 
 despair, he sought distraction at one of the gatherings 
 very common at that period, at which a number of yoimg 
 inen of his own age were accustomed to spend the night 
 in reading the works of Gogol aloud. Coming home at 
 dawn — it was in mid-May^ — -and feeling wakeful, he sat 
 musing by his open window till he was startled by the 
 ringing of a bell. He opened his door, and found him- 
 self in the arms of Ndkrassov and of Grigorovitch, who, 
 on their side, had spent the night in reading his novel. 
 Those were heroic days ! The following morning, N<fk- 
 rassov carried the manuscript to Bidlinski. 
 
 " Let me announce the appearance of a new Gogol ! " 
 
 "They sprout like mushrooms nowadays," was the 
 critic's unencouraging reply. Yet he, too, read the manu- 
 script, and asked to see the author. 
 
 " Do you understand what you have written your- 
 self ?" 
 
 The book was called Poor Folks, and was published, 
 during 1846, in Nekrassov's Review. Its success was 
 so great that the author at once became a celebrity. 
 Dostoievski's work was at bottom nothing but a replica 
 of The Mantle. His hero, Makar Dievouchkine, was own 
 brother to Akakii Akakievitch. But Gogol had only 
 shown the external features of his quaint and touching 
 
334 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 figure, which never ceased to be comic, in spite of the 
 pity it inspired. In Makar Dievouchkine we are shown 
 the depths of a sensitive and suffering soul, and in this 
 case the gentleness and patience of the poor creature, 
 almost laughable in Akakii Akakievitch, become well-nigh 
 heroic, and this although the author has not specially 
 idealised the character. Dievouchkine is a drunkard, 
 coarse in habits and dull in mind. When his official 
 chief shakes hands with him, after having enriched him 
 with a hundred-rouble note, he is in the seventh heaven. 
 Yet even such a creature is capable, as the author con- 
 ceives him, of inspiring us not with pity only, but with 
 admiration ; and from this time forward the conception is 
 to be the ruling one in all the novelist's work. 
 
 From the purely artistic point of view, Poor Folks, 
 with its clumsy application of the epistolary form of 
 novel, the letters passing between a humble employe, 
 elderly and decidedly small-minded, and a Hcloise who 
 burns her hand with her smoothing-iron, frequently fails 
 both in probability and naturalness. But the details 
 are charming. And what powers of psychology we see 
 revealed by this writer, scarcely twenty years old ! What 
 precocious observation in the unconscious selfishness of 
 the young girl whose character he paints ! We behold 
 her loading the unhappy wretch who lives only for 
 her, and has stripped himself of everything for her sake, 
 with reproaches, and even with threats. How quickly, 
 when she hears of his spending a few coins at the tavern, 
 does she forget everything she owes him, even in the 
 matter of pecuniary sacrifices ! She sends him thirty 
 kopeks, but she warns him never to do it again I And 
 the commissions, the purchases of trumpery and trinkets 
 which she sends him to make, in view of a detestable 
 
DOSTOlEVSKI 335 
 
 marriage to which she has agreed, and which is to de- 
 prive him of the last remnants of happiness left him by 
 his miserable fate ! " Don't forget ! it must be good 
 tambour work, and I'll have no flat stitches ! " Then note 
 her occasional revulsions of pity and affectionate indul- 
 gence, while he is all constancy, inexhaustible resignation, 
 humble and unchanging adoration ! There are miracles 
 of intuition here, and marvels of delicate feeling ! 
 
 Bi^linski understood the young author thoroughly. 
 " He owes a great deal to Gogol, just as Lermontov owes 
 a great deal to Pouchkine ; but he is original. He begins 
 as no author before him has ever begun." Dostoievski, 
 thus encouraged, set to work once more, with all that 
 vehemence which was ultimately to endanger his health, 
 and that haste which was always the characteristic of, 
 and the drawback to, his creative power. He was only 
 moderately pleased with his second attempt, The Alter 
 Ego, which did not take its place in the complete 
 collection of his works until a much later period. But 
 he forthwith, and at one and the same time, undertook 
 ten other novels. Already he was beginning to compare 
 himself to a post-horse. But his course was suddenly 
 checked. On the 21st of April 1849, the iron-bound 
 doors of the dungeons of the Alexis ravelin in the citadel 
 of St. Petersburg closed on him, and on thirty-four 
 other members of the Petrachevski circle. 
 
 This society, formed of young men who held the 
 views of Fourier, and, like him, ascribed but very little 
 importance to political questions properly so called, was 
 not of a definitely revolutionary character. Dostoievski's 
 special function in connection with it was to preach the 
 Slavophil doctrine, according to which Russia, sociologi- 
 cally speaking, needed no Western models, because in 
 
336 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 her artels (workman's guilds) and her system of mutual 
 responsibility for the payment of taxes {Krougovala por- 
 oukd) she was already possessed of the means of realis- 
 ing a superior form of social arrangement. One evening, 
 he had gone so far as to declaim Pouchkine's Ode on the 
 Abolition of Serfdom, and when, amid the enthusiasm 
 stirred by the poet's lines, some one present expressed 
 a doubt of the possibility of obtaining the desired 
 reform, except by insurrectionary means, he is said to 
 have replied " Then insurrection let it be ! " No further 
 accusation could be brought against him, but this suf- 
 ficed. On the 22nd of December, after eight months' 
 imprisonment, he was conducted, with twenty-one other 
 prisoners, to the Siemionovski Square, where a scaffold 
 had been erected. The prisoners were all stripped to 
 their shirts (there were twenty-one degrees of frost), 
 and their sentence was read out — they were condemned 
 to death. Dostoievski thought it must be a horrible 
 dream. He had only just calmly communicated a plan 
 for some fresh literary composition to one of his fellow- 
 prisoners. " Is it possible that we are going to be exe- 
 cuted ? " he asked. The friend to whom he had addressed 
 the inquiry pointed to a cart laden with objects which, 
 even under the tarpaulin which covered them, looked 
 like coffins. The registrar descended from the scaffold, 
 and a priest ascended it, cross in hand, and exhorted 
 the condemned men to make their last confession. One 
 only, a man of the shopkeeping class, obeyed the sum- 
 mons, the others were content with kissing the cross. 
 In a letter addressed to his brother Michael, Dostoievski 
 has thus related the close of the tragic scene. "They 
 snapped swords over our heads, and they made us put 
 on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to 
 
DOSTOlEVSKI 337 
 
 death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, 
 to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I con- 
 cluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I 
 thought of you and your dear ones, and I contrived to 
 kiss Pletcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and 
 to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, 
 we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and 
 informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives." 
 
 The Tsar had reversed the judgment of the military 
 tribunal, and commuted the penalty of death to that of 
 hard labour. The cart contained convict uniforms, which 
 the prisoners had at once to put on. One of them, 
 Grigoriev, had lost his reason. 
 
 Dostoievski was more fortunate. He was always 
 convinced that but for this experience he would have 
 gone mad. By a singular process of reaction, the con- 
 vict prison strengthened him, both physically and 
 morally. The Muscovite nature, full, as it is, of obscure 
 atavism — the inheritance of centuries of suffering — has 
 an incalculable power of resistance. At the end of four 
 years the horrible "House of the Dead" opened its 
 gates, and the novelist returned to ordinary life, stronger 
 in body, calmer in nerve, better balanced in mind. He 
 had still three years to serve in a regiment as a private 
 soldier. When these were over, he was promoted to the 
 rank of officer, and was allowed to 'reside first at Tver, 
 and then at St. Petersburg. He contributed to The 
 Times — the review managed by his brother Michael, 
 published his collected works, and in i860 sent forth 
 another novel. The Humiliated and the Injured, which 
 was somewhat coldly received by his readers. This may 
 be easily understood. Vania and Natacha, the hero and 
 heroine of this book, are near relations of Dievouchkine, 
 
338 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 but they possess a peculiarity which makes the resignation 
 and gentleness with which they endure their sufferings 
 far less interesting — they are voluntary victims. Vania, 
 who loves Natacha with all his heart, urges her, no one 
 quite knows why, to marry young Prince Valkovski, 
 whose mistress she has already become. The part he 
 plays — that of the confidant who assists a love affair which 
 is driving him to despair — is either dubious or ridicu- 
 lous. Meanwhile, Natacha, though desperately in love 
 with her Prince, agrees to marry Vania. Her behaviour 
 is most confusing, and her lover's folly and blundering 
 render him a most improbable figure. Old Valkovski, 
 the father of the prince, fulfils the functions of the melo- 
 dramatic villain. Little Nellie, his natural daughter, and 
 his victim, is both graceful and charming, but, with her 
 English name, she is an evident importation from over 
 seas — redolent of Dickens. To sum the matter up, 
 Dostoi'evski, influenced by fresh and hasty perusals of 
 various authors, has simply written a sentimental novel 
 in the style of the eighteenth century, and introduced 
 certain reminiscences of Eugene Sue, who was always 
 one of his favourite authors. The book bears symptoms 
 of a certain amount of personal reminiscence as well. 
 
 These did the author no good service. But he was 
 soon to recover from this check. 
 
 Before long (i8l52) his Memories of the House of the 
 Dead were to appear, simultaneously with Victor Hugo's 
 Les Miserables. The general admiration excited, even in 
 the present day, by Dostoievski's description of that 
 gloomy place of suffering in which four years of his life 
 were spent, renders this portion of my task somewhat 
 difficult. I cannot, indeed, shake off the somewhat diffe- 
 rent impression which the perusal of his book left upon 
 
DOSTOlEVSKI 339 
 
 me, now many years ago. I have read it again, and I 
 still find admirable passages, and pictures of excessive 
 power, though of a realism the coarseness of which is at 
 times excessive, as, for instance, in the scene of the 
 prisoner's bath, and in that of the arrival of those 
 prisoners who have been beaten with rods, in the 
 hospital. I, too, admire the author's deep probing of 
 the human soul, simple and true in expression, to a point 
 from which the author of Les Mis&ables has too often 
 fallen away. But the rest of the book strikes me as 
 being both false and unacceptable. This, in the first 
 place, on account of the confusion — forced, I ann told, 
 but surely somewhat voluntary also — between the two 
 categories of prisoners in the establishment — the com- 
 mon-law criminals and the political culprits. We are 
 told that this confusion was imposed on the author by 
 the Censure. That may be. Yet in every country the 
 Censure leaves the author one resource, the use of which 
 is well understood in Russia, that "home of silence." But 
 the truth, and, if we chose to take it so, Dostoievski's 
 excuse, lies in the fact that he never for a moment 
 dreamt of cloaking his martyrdom with a mask of in- 
 famy. He did not believe in his own martyrdom, just as 
 he had no belief in the infamy of the common thieves 
 and murderers who were his companions in durance. 
 This confusion arose in his mind naturally, as the result 
 of a general tendency which leads his fellow-countrymen 
 to place the moral law and the political law on one and 
 the same conventional level, and to ascribe the same re- 
 lative, value to each. In their eyes, infractions of either 
 of these laws possess the same character, are of equal 
 importance, and may be paid for by a system of forfeits, 
 just as in a round game. Once the forfeit is paid, the 
 
340 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 individual is clear, and neither crime nor dishonour re- 
 mains. This feature reappears in Crime and Punishment. 
 Note the behaviour of the examining magistrate once 
 he is convinced that Raskolnikov is really guilty of the 
 crime — a murder followed by robbery — which has just 
 been committed. Afterwards, as before, he gives the 
 assassin his hand, and treats him as his friend. Even 
 Tourgu^niev, Occidental as he is, thinks, and, on this 
 point, feels as a Russian. No writer in any other country 
 would dream of assimilating the social position of a 
 natural child with that of the legitimate child of a father 
 sentenced to banishment for theft. This is the case of 
 Niejdanov and Marianne in Virgin Soil. The idea that 
 crime is not a fault, but a misfortune, and the idea of 
 the sovereign power of expiation, are the basis of 
 this method of thought and feeling. They pervade the 
 whole of Dostoievski's work, and his residence in the 
 convict prison only defined them more clearly in his 
 mind, and drove him to adopt their extreme though 
 logical consequences. The common-law prisoners whom 
 he met never dreamt, on their side, of giving him the 
 benefit of a superior position from the moral point of 
 view. He had broken one law, and they had broken 
 another. In their eyes it was all the same thing. This 
 fact made a deep impression upon Dostoievski. His 
 imagination was romantic, his power of feeling was very 
 keen, and he possessed no ground-work of philosophic 
 education. He was very easily affected by the moral 
 atmosphere of the place. It was full of floating ideas, 
 religious and mystic, drawn from the common basis of 
 Russian life in the popular classes. These influenced the 
 author, and through them he entered into communion 
 with the simple souls of a certain number of criminals 
 
DOSTOIEVSKI 
 
 341 
 
 resigned to their fate. The man who had refused to 
 make his confession on the scaffold, reads a Bible with 
 his fellow-prisoners — a Bible given them by the wife of a 
 Decembrist whom they had met on their road into exile, 
 the only book permitted within the prison walls. He 
 ends by not only submitting to his fate, but acknow- 
 ledging his guilt. This is the second false note in the 
 book. 
 
 By an error of interpretation which indicates the 
 danger of the cryptographic artifices forced on the lite- 
 rature of the country, the passages which express this 
 sentiment have been taken by certain critics to partake 
 of the nature of 3. protest. The mistake is evident. Dos- 
 toi'evski sympathises, that is clear, with his fellow-prisoners 
 of every kind. He has a sincere admiration for the 
 strength and brute energy of some of these wretches, 
 and endeavours to justify it by dwelling on the qualities 
 of goodness and generosity which he has discovered 
 under their rough exterior. But this is a mere echo of 
 the Romantic school and the humanitarian leanings of 
 the West. Apart from it, the book is all submission. It 
 presents the feelings of a man who not only uncomplain- 
 ingly accepts a punishment which is at all events out 
 of proportion to his offence, but who acknowledges its 
 justice and equity. And the whole of Dostoievski's sub- 
 sequent attitude proves the fact. Not only did he never 
 pose as a martyr, but he avoided all allusion to his painful 
 past, like a man who regarded it as nothing but a stain, 
 which had been wiped out and redeemed. 
 
 The subject of The House of the Dead has been re- 
 cently taken up again by Melchine, in some sketches 
 which have earned considerable success. 
 
 Between 1862 and 1866, Dostoievski lived through a 
 
342 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 somewhat difficult time. He made a prolonged stay 
 abroad, and did not turn his first acquaintance with 
 the Western world to the best advantage. Whither do 
 my readers suppose that the curiosity of this man, dedi- 
 cated twice over to the service of the ideal life by his 
 talent and his suffering, led him ? The barbarian that 
 lay at the bottom of his nature, and the grown-up child 
 he was always to remain, proved their existence on this 
 occasion. He went to Baden-Baden! and left everything 
 there, even to his wife's clothes ! Dostoievski was an in- 
 corrigible gambler, and until the period of his second mar- 
 riage, he was destined to remain in constant and terrible 
 money straits, which even his considerable earnings were 
 not sufficient to remove. At Florence the first few 
 moments in the Uffizi Gallery wearied him, and he left it. 
 He spent his whole time at the cafe, talking to a fellow- 
 traveller, and reading Les Miserables, which was then just 
 appearing. He devoured the book, and memories of it 
 are evident in Crime and Punishment. 
 
 In 1863 he lost his first wife, Marie Dmitrievna Isaiev, 
 who has been identified with the character of Natacha 
 in Poor Folks, and a year afterwards, the death of his 
 brother Michael, which left him alone in the manage- 
 ment of the Review they had edited together, brought 
 about his ruin. He had no business talents whatever. 
 He had come to the very end of his resources, when 
 the success of Crime and Punishment, in 1 866, lifted him 
 for a time out of a position which had grown desperate. 
 
 Raskolnikov, the student who claims the right to 
 murder and steal by virtue of his ill-applied scientific 
 theories, is not a figure the invention of which can be 
 claimed by the Russian novelist. It is probable that 
 before or after reading the works of Victor Hugo, Dos- 
 
DOSTOlEVSKI 343 
 
 toievski had perused those of Bulwer Lytton. Eugene 
 Aram, the English novelist's hero, is a criminal of a very 
 different order, and of a superior species. When he 
 commits his crime, he not only thinks, like Raskolnikov, 
 of a rapid means of attaining fortune, but also, and more 
 nobly, of a great and solemn sacrifice to science, of 
 which he feels himself to be the high-priest. Like 
 Raskolnikov, he draws no benefit from his booty. 
 Like him, too, he hides it, and like him, he is pur- 
 sued, not by remorse, but by regret ; — haunted by the 
 painful thought that men now have the advantage over 
 him, and that he no longer stands above their curi- 
 osity and their spite, — tortured by his consciousness of 
 the total change in his relations with the world. In 
 both cases, the subject and the story, save for the vol- 
 untary expiation at the close, appear identical in their 
 essential lines. This feature stands apart. Yet, properly 
 speaking, it does not belong to Dostoievski. In Tour- 
 gudniev's The Tavern {Postomlyi Dvor), the peasant 
 Akime, whom his wife has driven into crime, punishes 
 himself by going out to beg, in all gentleness and humble 
 submission. Some students, indeed, have chosen to 
 transform both subject and character, and have looked 
 on Raskolnikov as a political criminal, disguised after 
 the same fashion as Dostoievski himself may have been, 
 in his Memories of the House of the Dead. But this ver- 
 sion appears to me to arise out of another error. A few 
 days before the book appeared, a crime almost identical 
 with that related in it, and committed under the appa- 
 rent influence of Nihilist teaching, though without any 
 mixture of the political element, took place at St. Peters- 
 burg. These doctrines, as personified by Tourgueniev 
 in Bazarov, are, in fact, general in their scope. They 
 23 
 
344 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 contain the germs of every order of criminal attempt, 
 whether pubUc or private ; and Dostoievski's great merit 
 lies in the fact that he has demonstrated the likelihood 
 that the development of this germ in one solitary intelli- 
 gence may foster a social malady. In the domain of 
 social psychology and pathology, the great novelist owes 
 nothing to anybody ; and his powers in this direction 
 suffice to compensate for such imperfections as I shall 
 have to indicate in his work. 
 
 The "first cause" in this book, psychologically 
 speaking, is that individualism which the Slavophil 
 School has chosen to erect into a principle of the na- 
 tional life ; — an unbounded selfishness, in other words, 
 which, when crossed by circumstances, takes refuge in 
 violent and monstrous reaction. And indeed, Raskol- 
 nikov, like Bazarov, is so full of contradictions, some of 
 them grossly improbable, that one is almost driven to 
 inquire whether the author has not intended to depict a 
 condition of madness. We see this selfish being spend- 
 ing his last coins to bury Marmeladov, a drunkard picked 
 up in the street, whom he had seen for the first time in 
 his life only a few hours previously. From this point 
 of view Eugene Aram has more psychological consis- 
 tency, and a great deal more moral dignity. Raskol- 
 nikov is nothing but a poor half-crazed creature, soft in 
 temperament, confused in intellect, who carries about a 
 big idea, in a head that is too small to hold it. He be- 
 comes aware of this after he has committed his crime, 
 when he is haunted by hallucinations and wild terrors, 
 which convince him that his pretension to rank as a man 
 of power was nothing but a dream. Then the ruling 
 idea which has lured him to murder and to theft gives 
 place to another, — that of confessing his crime. And 
 
DOSTOlEVSKI 345 
 
 even here his courage and frankness fail him ; he can- 
 not run a straight course, and, after wandering round 
 and round the pohce station, he carries his confession 
 to Sonia. 
 
 This figure of Sonia is a very ordinary Russian type, 
 and strangely chosen for the purpose of teaching Ras- 
 kolnikov the virtue of expiation. She is a woman of the 
 town, chaste in mind though not in deed, and is redeemed 
 by one really original feature, her absolute humility It 
 may be inquired whether this element of moral redemp- 
 tion, in so far as it differs from those which so constantly 
 occur to the imagination of the author of Manon Lescaut, 
 and to that of all Dostoievski's literary forerunners, is 
 more truthful than the rest, and whether it must not 
 be admitted that certain moral, like certain physical 
 conditions, necessarily result in an organic and quite 
 incurable deformation of character. Sonia is like an 
 angel who rolls in the gutter every night, and whitens her 
 wings each morning by perusing the Holy Gospels. We 
 may just as well fancy that a coal-heaver could straighten 
 the back bowed by the weight of countless sacks of char- 
 coal by practising Swedish gymnastics ! 
 
 The author's power of evocation, and his gift for 
 analysing feeling, and the impressions which produce it, 
 are very great, and the effects of terror and compassion 
 he obtains cannot be denied. Yet, whether from the 
 artistic or from the scientific point of view (since some 
 of his admirers insist on this last), his method is open 
 to numerous objections. It consists in reproducing, or 
 very nearly, the conditions of ordinary life whereby we 
 gain acquaintance with a particular character. There- 
 fore, without taking the trouble of telling us who Ras- 
 kolnikov is, and in what his qualities consist, the story 
 
346 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 relates a thousand little incidents out of which the per- 
 sonal individuality of the hero is gradually evolved. And 
 as these incidents do not necessarily present themselves, 
 in real life, in any logical sequence, beginning with the 
 most instructive of the series, the novelist does not attempt 
 to follow any such course. As early as on the second 
 page of the book, we learn that Raskolnikov is making 
 up his mind to murder an old woman who lends out 
 money, and it is only at the close of the volume that we 
 become aware of the additional fact that he has published 
 a review article, in which he has endeavoured to set forth 
 a theory justifying this hideous design. 
 
 Apart from the weariness and the mental effort in- 
 volved in this method, the picture it produces is naturally 
 somewhat confused. It has another fault, which is shared 
 by the majority of Russian novelists. Their art resembles 
 the architectural style affected by the builder of the church 
 of St. Basil, at Moscow. The visitor to this church is as- 
 tonished to see five or six edifices interlaced one with the 
 other. There are at least as many distinct stories in Crime 
 and Punishment, all connected by a barely perceptible 
 thread. But this peculiarity is not exclusively national, and 
 I should be inclined to ascribe responsibility for it to the 
 English school. Observe George YX\o\!% Daniel Deronda. 
 To conclude, all Dostoievski's literary work bears traces 
 of the method invariably employed by him, except in Poor 
 Folks and some chapters of Tlie House of the Dead. This 
 is the method of the feuilletonist, who writes copy at his 
 utmost speed. Even in the present day, the line so clearly 
 drawn in France between the artistic novel and that other 
 — the sole object of whose existence is to attract and 
 keep up the number of general subscribers to widely cir- 
 culated i:iewspapers — cannot be said to exist in Slav coun- 
 
DOSTOiEVSKI 
 
 347 
 
 tries. Dostoievski, who was always short of money, and 
 always behind with his copy, looked about at last for a 
 shorthand writer, to help him to expedite matters. A 
 young girl, Anna Grigorevna Svitkine, was recommended 
 to him, and before long he made her his second wife. 
 His urgent desire to keep up constant communication 
 with the public, and his ambition to preserve his influence 
 over it, drove him into a feverish productiveness which 
 wore down his talent and his life. These drawbacks are 
 evident in Crime and Punishment. Compare the two 
 descriptions of Sonia in the beginning of the book ; on 
 the first occasion we think her pretty — on the second, she 
 has grown plain. 
 
 And things grow worse in Dostoievski's subsequent 
 works. The Idiot (1868), The Possessed {i^j'^), and more 
 especially in The Brothers Karamazov. The first book bears 
 traces of the influence of Tolstoi, and contains a somewhat 
 singular application of the gospel preached by the prophet 
 of lasnaia Poliana, and of the words of the Master, "Be ye 
 even as little children ! " The theory put forward in The 
 Idiot is, that a brain in which some of those springs which 
 we consider essential, and which only serve us for doing 
 evil, are weakened, may yet remain superior, both intel- 
 lectually and morally, to others less affected. To prove 
 his case, Dostoievski depicts, in the person of Prince 
 Muichkine, a type closely resembling that of the beings 
 known in country places as " Naturals," placed con- 
 siderably higher in the social scale, and scientifically 
 reconstructed on a physiological basis. The Idiot — and 
 there is a curious autobiographical touch about this — is 
 an epileptic. Here we have some elements of a serious 
 problem, the normality of the phenomena of madness, 
 and their classification in the order of the phenomena of 
 
348 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 passion ; but we have also, and more especially, a great 
 deal of childish trifling, and of those "psychological 
 mole-runs" of which Tourgu^niev has spoken, and in 
 which Dostoievski's fancy revelled. 
 
 The Possessed is an answer to Tourgvaeniev's Fathers 
 and Children, and that writer, together with Granovski 
 and some other representatives of Occidentalism, is de- 
 picted, and turned into ridicule, in its pages. Dostoievski 
 could not console himself for having been outstripped 
 in the general interpretation of a social phenomenon 
 such as Nihilism, of which his Raskolnikov had only been 
 a partial, and a partially comprehended picture. He 
 cannot be said to have entirely succeeded in the retalia- 
 tion at which he aimed. Stavroguine, the principal hero 
 of his novel, who turns revolutionist out of sheer idle- 
 ness, is an archaic, and by no means a specifically Russian 
 type. He is enigmatic and confusing, strongly tinged 
 with Romantic features, which the author seems to have 
 borrowed from every quarter — from Byron's Corsair, 
 from Victor Hugo's Hernani, and from the aristocratic 
 demagogues of George Sand, Eugene Sue, Charles Gutz- 
 kow, and Spielhagen. 
 
 The story is excessively complicated, and its close is 
 extravagantly melodramatic. But Dostoievski has con- 
 trived to see, and bring out, the essential feature which 
 escaped Tourgueniev, I mean the element which has con- 
 stituted the strength of active Nihilism. By showing 
 that this lies, not in the vague, confused, and ineffective 
 ideas of a handful of ill-balanced brains, nor in the ficti- 
 tious or incoherent organisation of an unstable political 
 party, but in the paroxysmal tension of a band of exas- 
 perated wills, he has done real service to the cause of 
 history. 
 
DOSTOIEVSKI 349 
 
 The Brothers Karamazov is a work that strongly 
 resembles an edifice of which nothing but the facade has 
 ever been built. The plan of this book had occurred to 
 the author as early as 1870, during a residence of some 
 months at Dresden. It was to have consisted of five 
 parts, and, under quite a different title — The Life of a 
 Great Sinner— li was to have represented the existence 
 of several generations following on that of Tchadaiev. 
 War and Peace had just appeared, and this time, Dostoi- 
 evski had to compete with Tolstoi. He finally reduced 
 the five parts to two, and never finished but the first, 
 which in itself consists of four thick volumes. In these 
 he has endeavoured to depict the intellectual progress of 
 " the Sixties," with all its excitement and its revolutionary 
 idealism. The two elder brothers are intended as a sym- 
 bolical personification of the two morbid phenomena 
 which marked this crisis — a sick will, as exemplified in 
 Dmitri, a man without morality ; and a sick mind, in the 
 case of Ivan, whose brain is deranged. The third brother, 
 Aliocha — believed to be a portrait of the philosopher 
 Soloviov, to whom I shall later refer — is the symbol of 
 the healthy Russian, who through love, and through his 
 national faith, escapes mental bankruptcy and moral 
 perversion ; he is a creature of unfailing gentleness and 
 indulgent goodness. Some readers (Dostoievski has with- 
 held all personal information) have thought they recog- 
 nised, in the two elder brothers, a twofold representation 
 of Russia Europeanised and Russia uncultured, and in 
 the third, the picture of the Russia of the future, when 
 she shall have harmonised the elements of her national 
 culture with the humanitarian ideas borrowed from the 
 West. But this idea was not to take clear shape until 
 the second part of the work was reached. In the first 
 
3 so RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 part, the figure of Aliocha still remains in the background, 
 and the interpreter of the philosophical, religious, and 
 social ideas preached by the author is Zosima, a monk 
 belonging to the monastery in which Aliocha spends his 
 novitiate. Now Zosima's desire is that the novice should 
 begin by a preliminary experience of the world, and to 
 this end, he advises him to marry. Here we perceive in 
 the author's mind the fundamental principle of his teach- 
 ing — the freedom of the moral and religious man, in his 
 effort to reach personal perfection. 
 
 I do not claim any great clearness for this exegetical 
 attempt of my own. My readers must excuse me. I 
 know but little of mysticism, and it would surprise me 
 very much if any one could prove that Dostoievski's 
 own views on the matter were very clear. Perhaps, if 
 he had reached the second part of his book, and could 
 have entered the seventh heaven with Aliocha, he might 
 have found means to enlighten us further. But in this 
 first part we are left in hell — a Dantesque hell, where 
 concentric circles mark the various maladies of soul 
 and mind, which struggle before the gates of the Paradise 
 whereof Aliocha holds the key. Instances of moral per- 
 version admit of a remedy, and a hopeful one — the 
 humble acceptance of a chastisement which may be 
 unjustly applied, but which has been earned by the 
 crime of a whole life spent in debauchery. This is the 
 fate of Dmitri, who is falsely accused of parricide and 
 sentenced. In the case of mental maladies, on the con- 
 trary, the words lasciate ogni speranza are written in 
 letters of fire. These infect the very conscience, and so 
 block the way to salvation. Thus Ivan, who is, intellectu- 
 ally speaking, the accomplice of the crime of which Dmitri 
 is to pay the penalty, appears far more guilty than he. 
 
DOSTOIEVSKI 351 
 
 The book contains an immense wealth of psychical 
 ideas. It is a complete symphony, which touches every 
 chord of the human soul, and a most invaluable treasury 
 of information concerning the contemporary life of Russia, 
 moral, intellectual, and social. But I doubt whether 
 this treasure may be accessible to the average European 
 reader. Dostoievski himself was conscious of the lack 
 of measure and proportion which, from the very outset, 
 endangered the balance of his work. Nevertheless, in 
 the legendary episode of the Inquisitor, it contains what 
 are probably the most powerful pages hitherto penned 
 by any Russian author. Amidst philosophical and reli- 
 gious discussions saturated with the true Byzantine 
 spirit, endless, complicated, full of quibbles and splitting 
 of hairs, we come upon a Spanish Inquisitor, who has 
 just given orders for an auto-da-fe, when Christ comes 
 back to earth for the second time. The crowd on the 
 public square, where the stake has been erected, recog- 
 nises the gentle Prophet. He is surrounded and acclaimed. 
 The Inquisitor causes Him to be arrested, and goes to 
 see Him in His prison. In imperious language he re- 
 proaches Him with having left His disciples a precept 
 which it is impossible to practise. "Thou earnest here 
 with empty hands ! Thou wouldst have none of Satan's 
 offers to turn the stones into bread ! Thou hast claimed 
 to govern men by love alone ! Behold whither this has 
 led them, and led us too ! They scoff at love and cry for 
 bread ; we give them bread, and they accept our chains. 
 To-morrow I will have Thee burnt ! JDixi." Only one 
 answer does the Christ vouchsafe the merciless priest. 
 He offers him His own pale lips, and the Inquisitor, 
 opening the dungeon door, cries out, " Go Thy way, and 
 never come back here — never ! " 
 
35 2 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Thanks to his second wife, who, though devoid 
 of any superior education, admirably understood her 
 duties in Hfe, and played the part of a real providence to 
 the careless writer, Dostoievski's closing years were rela- 
 tively happy. He paid his debts, and enjoyed a com- 
 fortable home. At the same time, through his periodical 
 publications of An Author's Note-Book (1873), and also 
 by his contributions to Prince Mechtcherski's Grajdanine 
 {The Citizen), he wielded considerable influence. The 
 success of a speech he delivered in 1880, on the occa- 
 sion of the raising of a monument to Pouchkine, 
 reached the proportions of an apotheosis. Since his 
 return from Siberia, the author of The House of the Dead 
 had been alternately classed as a Conservative and as a 
 Slavophil. As a matter of fact, his democratic leanings 
 parted him from the first, and the complete absence, in 
 connection with his literary creations, of any historio- 
 sophical element and any regard for idealism, from the 
 second. He made no attempt to endue the Russian 
 with any beauty ; he loved him, without claiming lovable 
 qualities for hiiti, not for his way of life, which he held 
 reprehensible in many respects, but for a nature which 
 he believed susceptible of something like perfection, 
 capable, above all things, of forgiveness as of repentance, 
 and thus rising to a moral dignity which the sordidness 
 of his material existence could not affect. 
 
 In the speech to which I have referred, this idea was 
 eloquently expressed, and Dostoievski added some novel 
 ideas which seem to have been inspired by his enjoyment 
 of a budding popularity ; for they bear a close resem- 
 blance to bets on probabilities, and are in contradiction 
 with some of his own most frequently expressed opinions. 
 One of these paradoxes consists in the claim to moral 
 
DOSTOlEVSKI 353 
 
 superiority, based on the humility and gentleness of the 
 Russian race. I have already set forth, in the earlier 
 pages of this book, my views as to the effect of the 
 historical, social, and climatic conditions of the national 
 development on the contradictory elements of a tempera- 
 ment still in course of formation. The new " elect 
 nation," called to realise the kingdom of God on earth, — 
 because she does not isolate herself proudly within her- 
 self, because she is disposed to see a brother in every 
 foreigner, and an unfortunate, rather than a malefactor, 
 in the greatest criminal, because she alone incarnates 
 the Christian idea of love and forgiveness, — the heiress 
 presumptive of the tribe of Judah, as described in Dos- 
 tolevski's speech, simply belongs to that cycle of Messi- 
 anic ideas in which the theory of Panslavism has become 
 finally merged. Yet on one point the orator accentuated 
 his disagreement with the Slavophils, by extolling that 
 national gift for assimilating foreign culture whereby the 
 Russian had succeeded, or was to succeed, in realising 
 that type of the Vsi^tMloviek (universal man), who has 
 since become the object of a good deal of joke, but 
 who, at that moment, thanks to Dostoievski's burning 
 words, evoked a transport of enthusiasm. This was 
 shared even by the Slavophils themselves, who forgave 
 the orator's lapse from the common creed, for the sake 
 of the share attributed to the Orthodox Faith in his 
 conception of the mighty destiny the nation was yet to 
 attain. 
 
 Ivan Karamazov, the martyr of doubt, would, how- 
 ever, seem to have originally represented some conscious 
 internal experiences of the author's own. There is 
 something doubtful about the orthodoxy of the legend 
 of the Inquisitor, and there is something still more 
 
3 54 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 expressive, in this connection, in the dialogue in The 
 Possessed, when Chatov asks Stavroguine whether he 
 beheves in God. 
 
 " I believe in Russia ; I believe in the Orthodox Church. 
 . . . I believe in the Body of Christ. . . . I believe that 
 Christ's second coming will be to Russia. . . . 
 
 ^^ But in God — in God? 
 
 " T . . . T will believe in God as well I " 
 
 At bottom, the Pravoslavie (Orthodox Faith) seems 
 to have been chiefly valuable, in Dostoievski's eyes, as an 
 element of the national consistency. Chatov says this 
 clearly : " There is no great historical people which does 
 not possess a National God'' But it is quite certain that 
 either before or after his residence in The House of the 
 Dead, the novelist had absolutely broken with the intel- 
 lectual Sturm und Drang of " the Sixties " and its accom- 
 panying materialism. 
 
 There was but one bond of union between him and 
 the revolutionaries of his period — a desire to find some 
 new truth, apart from the old tradition. This truth Dos- 
 toievski claimed to discover in external forms and social 
 habits, and thus it was that in his eyes, as in those of 
 Tolstoi, a public courtesan was capable of moral supe- 
 riority over a woman whose conduct, as regarded all 
 her external duties, was irreproachable. Raskolnikov, 
 Sonia, Dmitri, and the convicts of The House of the Dead, 
 exemplify almost every variety of vice or crime ; yet 
 they are all dear to the author. All his hatred is con- 
 centrated on individual pride, presumption, and false- 
 hood. And even these he is willing to pardon. He 
 forgives every one. He nearly forgives Smierdiakov, 
 the real parricide. And all this plenary indulgence con- 
 stitutes his real teaching, a new gospel, almost reduced 
 
DEATH OF DOSTOlEVSKI 355 
 
 to the three parables of the Repentant Thief, the Prodi- 
 gal Son, and the Woman taken in adultery. 
 
 The speech which made so much sensation was 
 published in the penultimate number of An Author's 
 Note-Book. The last appeared in January 1881, on the 
 very day of the great writer's public funeral. For a 
 considerable time previously, his existence had been that 
 of a bundle of nerves in a condition of ceaseless excite- 
 ment, supporting a body worn out by perpetual over- 
 work. The end came in the shape of a sudden and fatal 
 stroke. The students of St. Petersburg desired to carry 
 his convict chains behind his coffin. Nihilist attempts 
 were at that period very numerous. Only a month later, 
 one of them was to cost the sovereign his life, and Loris 
 Melikov's experiment in liberal government was just at 
 its height. He had sufficient good sense to forbid the 
 republication of a page of the author's life which his own 
 hand had torn out. Nevertheless, by a kind of ironical 
 contradiction, his burial was the occasion for a sort of 
 review of the revolutionary army, which there displayed 
 its strength, in preparation for the attempt which was 
 soon to manifest its power, and prepare its ruin. 
 
 Dostoievski's career may be divided, as regards his 
 intellectual development, into two very distinct stages. 
 Up till 1865, we have a period of progress and analysis, 
 generally in accord with the intellectual movement of 
 "the Forties." After 1865, we have a period of retro- 
 gression, and of controversial struggle with that very 
 movement. From this point of view, the Memories of the 
 House of the Dead occupy a special position. To begin 
 v/ith, they are much simpler in form than the rest of the 
 great author's work, and in substance, they are free from 
 any doctrinarianism whatsoever. The idea put forward 
 
356 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 by the author in later days, that the convict prison may 
 become an instrument of moral amendment, finds no 
 place in them whatsoever. Quite on the contrary, Dos- 
 toievski notes the absence of a trace of repentance in any 
 of the prisoners. He even positively asserts that the 
 prison is not calculated to improve them. This fact is 
 susceptible of explanation. The book was written be- 
 fore the author came to St. Petersburg, and was there 
 influenced by a group of Slavophils, which attracted, 
 though, as I have already mentioned, it never entirely 
 absorbed him. He joined it in the endeavour to dis- 
 cover the renovation of the Russian by " national means," 
 but he parted from it when he sought the elements of 
 this renovation — not in the traditions of the past and the 
 external forms of existence, habits, customs, and dress, 
 but in the national soul, the purity and clearness of 
 which he recognised under the coating of filth and the 
 curtain of ignorance with which past centuries had veiled 
 it. Yet in Dostoievskf and the Slavophils and Tolstoi one 
 common feature does exist. I refer to their repudiation 
 of Western civilisation as the one necessary principle which 
 must rule the development of the national culture, and 
 their appeal to the faith of the popular masses as the 
 indispensable complement of that development. On 
 these lines Tolstoi has reached an evangelical theory of 
 non-resistance to evil, and Dostoievski an evangelical 
 theory of atonement and rehabilitation through suffer- 
 ing. But at this point their roads were to part. By 
 virtue of one portion of this doctrine — and one which, 
 as we know, admits of a good deal of contradiction — ■ 
 Tolstoi is an individualist, whose supreme object is to 
 bring his inner man to a state of perfection. If reasons 
 of State are an obstacle in the way of this attain- 
 
DOSTOlEVSKI 357 
 
 ment, he declares himself ready to abolish the State. 
 Dostoievski is a thorough Communist. He cares little 
 for individual liberty and individual perfection, and is 
 quite ready to sacrifice both on the altar of that humani- 
 tarian idea which, in his mind, Russia, "the elect nation," 
 has been called to realise. This point of view is dia- 
 metrically opposed to that of Tolstoi ; yet, unlike the 
 Slavophils, with whom, in this respect, he would otherwise 
 seem to agree, Dostoievski feels neither scorn nor hatred 
 for the West. His desire is to reconcile the two prin- 
 ciples, the Western and the Eastern, and he holds it 
 Russia's mission to carry out the compromise ; and, 
 unlike his latest friends, he believes in the early and 
 almost immediate accomplishment of his dream. The 
 idea appears both in the Notice which preceded the 
 publication of The Times in 1861, and in the speech 
 delivered in 1880. 
 
 This constant anxiety to discover a " national soul " 
 in the moral distresses and dark places of ordinary 
 existence, has caused Dostoievski to become, above all 
 things, an analyser of the human conscience. His 
 novels contain but few descriptions of the external things 
 of this world, and such as do exist are generally some- 
 what unreal ; as in that scene in The Idiot, in which 
 Prince Muichkine sees his country house surrounded by 
 strangers, who insult him. Except in matters of psy- 
 chology, Dostoievski is nothing of a realist. On the 
 other hand, he belongs to the Romantic school by his 
 predilection for excessive and exceptional situations, and 
 yet more by his incessant subjectiveness, which leads 
 him to perpetually bring his own personality forward, 
 even as an object of medical observation. Vainly did 
 his doctors entreat him not to allow his mind to dwell 
 
3 58 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 on his periodical attacks of epilepsy ! He regarded him- 
 self as an absolute and essentially objective realist, for 
 if he drew everything from his own case, that surely 
 was a reality ! He considered that the phenomena of 
 moral degradation and depravation, which he delighted 
 to analyse, existed in his own person, and this in virtue 
 of the principle he was constantly proclaiming — that 
 every man has something of the murderer in him ; and 
 he was just as convinced that every man was at heart a 
 ruffian or a thief. "These phenomena," he would say, 
 " are of exceedingly common occurrence, only we pay 
 no attention to them.'' This theory has recently been 
 reproduced by Octave Mirbeau in Le Jar din des Supplices. 
 In Dostoievski's case it was connected, as in that of 
 Nekrassov, with his own need of personal confession, 
 and his taste for playing on his readers' nerves. He 
 always declared that his sensation during the paroxysms 
 of his terrible complaint was that of a great criminal 
 enduring the chastisement due to some fault. 
 
 To sum him up, he was a man subject to semi-hallu- 
 cinations, with a marvellous power of lucid observa- 
 tion of mental complaints, and a wonderful inspiration, 
 which made him the true poet of " the fever of the 
 mind." Most of his chief characters are seers. Aliocha 
 Karamazov can read men's souls and discover hidden 
 objects. Zosima, the monk, foreseeing that Dimitri will be 
 accused of the most horrible of crimes, and moved by a 
 feeling of Christian mysticism, bends the knee before him, 
 as being the most guilty, and therefore destined to be- 
 come the instrument of moral cure in the case of his own 
 brothers. M. Tchij, the well-known psychological expert, 
 has indeed admitted that quite one-fourth of these char- 
 acters are simply madmen, and on this account he extols 
 
DOSTOIEVSKI 359 
 
 the knowledge or intuition displayed by the author ; 
 while in a lecture delivered in 1881 before the Society 
 of Jurists of the St. Petersburg University, one of the 
 most distinguished of Russian criminalists, *M. Koni, 
 claimed him as a comrade. 
 
 Dostoievski, the child of the city and of the prole- 
 tariat, is less of an artist than the majority of his rivals, 
 who were most of them connected with the provincial 
 nobility. His workmanship is slack. Nothing delicate 
 nor highly finished comes from his pen. His style is 
 as confused as his cast of face — " masque de faubourien," 
 as it would be called in France — roughly hewn, clever, 
 vigorous, full of projections and folds, of lumps and 
 hollows. One significant feature there is about his whole 
 work : you will not find a single attractive female figure 
 in it. His rivals all delight in depicting feminine beauty, 
 physical and moral. Tourgudniev's women are perhaps 
 the more energetic, Tolstoi's the more graceful ; but in 
 Dostoievski's case all the women are coarse, if they 
 are of strong temperament, and inconsistent, if they are 
 gentle. He only excels in figures of young girls, such as 
 Nelly in The Humiliated and the Injured, and Lisa in The 
 Brothers Karamazov. And further, his mania for analy- 
 sis leads him into dubious allusions to the precocious 
 awakening of the sexual instinct in these young creatures, 
 which betoken a touch of unhealthy thought, to which 
 Tourgueniev, who had no affection for the author of 
 Crime and Ptinishment, has alluded in his correspondence. 
 
 But for all his prolixity and incoherence, Dostoievski 
 was a very great writer ; he had a noble mind, in spite of 
 his hallucinations ; and a proud spirit, although he did 
 not succeed in realising or maintaining the idea of a cer- 
 tain kind of pride which is indispensable to every one, 
 24 
 
36o RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and certain rebellions which are always legitimate. In 
 the whole field of contemporary literature there is only 
 one man, Tolstoi, who stands a step above him. 
 
 Tolstoi. 
 
 The master of lasnaia Poliana has been frequently 
 likened to a mighty oak, which stands alone in the midst 
 of the field of literature, and towers above all his fellows. 
 This picture does not strike me as being entirely correct, 
 and I shall endeavour to prove that the tree, majestic 
 though it be, has drawn its sap from the same soil as its 
 neighbours, and that its boughs touch the adjacent foliage. 
 I cannot, indeed, give any complete judgment of a life- 
 work which is not yet completed, which, even as I write, 
 is in course of increase, which commands universal ad- 
 miration by means of its last creation, and which, in 
 certain respects, it is not my province to appraise. I shall 
 divide it into three parts, and shall separate the artist 
 from the thinker and the man of learning. The artist is 
 one of the greatest who has ever appeared. To my mind,- 
 nothing can be found in any literature, whether as regards 
 truth, charm, or intensity of restrained emotion, superior 
 to certain of his pages, even to some in that Resurrection, 
 the perusal of which we have not yet been able to con- 
 clude. As long as men live on this earth, admiration 
 must, I believe, be felt for the description of that Easter 
 Mass during which Katioucha appears beside Nekhliou- 
 dov, and the exquisite simplicity of the scenes of love and 
 disappointment which follow on it. The thinker pos- 
 sesses great ingenuity, and, above all, great ingenuous- 
 ness. He makes his entry into the world of thought 
 with the air of a conquistador who discovers the wonders 
 
TOLSTOI 361 
 
 of Mexico, and sometimes — too often — like a Vandal 
 rushing over the plains of Rome. 
 
 It is curious that this last impression should be more 
 particularly produced by his book on art. From its 
 first page to its last, the author appears to be a simple- 
 minded barbarian, engaged in sacking a gorgeous palace 
 and throwing his booty hither and thither. He has no 
 suspicion that his views on the social part to be played 
 by art are a mere reproduction of the theories already 
 put forward by Guyau, a French writer with whom he 
 believes himself to be acquainted, and whose ideas he 
 merely disfigures with his own paradoxical fancies. 
 He does not realise that his own definition, according 
 to which the object of the work of art is to awake 
 identical or similar sentiments amongst men in general, 
 is as old as art itself, — though it has never been applied 
 except to those arts which the Greeks denominated 
 " musical," and in which they included poetry, — and never 
 could, on account of the partially utilitarian functions 
 which have devolved on them, be applied to the plastic 
 *arts, such as architecture and poetry. He does not realise 
 that the mission he ascribes to art, that of realising the fra- 
 ternal union of the human race, has been the watchword 
 of a whole century of French literature, from Jean-Jacques 
 Rousseau down to Victor Hugo. He does not realise 
 that his conception of art, as a means of communion 
 between jnen bound by the same feelings, may be just 
 as well applied to religion, to morality, to science, to 
 every form of action which has any social effect. 
 
 Face to face with a mighty problem which, so he 
 assures us, has claimed his attention and occupied his 
 wakeful hours for fifteen years, Tolstoi scarcely touches 
 the historical side of the question, yields to the tempta- 
 
362 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tion of telling us the story (and wonderfully he tells it) 
 of the impression made on him by a rehearsal of a play 
 in the Moscow theatre, and then wastes his time in dis- 
 cussing the fancies of Papus or of the Sar Peladan, 
 authors whom he confuses in an equal admiration (or 
 scorn) with Taine or Proudhon, just as he confuses, all 
 in one great anathema, Greek art, which he calls coarse ; 
 Michael Angelo's, which he regards as senseless ; Shake- 
 speare's, Beethoven's, and Wagner's, which he describes 
 as foolishness, with the whims and fancies of the decadents. 
 If sincerity is to be accepted as an excuse in such matters, 
 there can be no doubt concerning his. He does not 
 refuse to apply the artistic criterion he himself has in- 
 vented to his own master-pieces. This criterion is either 
 the power of the masses to comprehend works of art — 
 that is to say, the glorification of the Epinal painted 
 statuette — or, occasionally, some individual and accidental 
 impression. Returning one day in low spirits from a 
 country walk, his sadness is broken by a chorus of 
 peasant women singing (out of tune) before the balcony 
 of his house. This he at once pronounces to be art !* 
 A moment afterwards, a first-rate executant performs a 
 sonata by Beethoven, and is so unlucky as to keep the 
 author waiting when he desires to go to rest. This, he 
 declares, is not art ! The moujiks of lasnaia Poliana 
 understood nothing of the beauties oi Anna Karenina, and 
 forthwith he declares the book is rubbish, and begins to 
 write popular stories. In these he strives after a simplicity 
 and artlessness far beyond anything which has ever yet 
 been seen. He will not grant the existence of the artistic 
 quality in any writer who seeks for effect, and even goes 
 so far as to invert the natural order of the story, so that 
 the reader's attention may not be strained. But after 
 
TOLSTOI 363 
 
 having formulated this fiat, and used it to support a 
 whole theory, he takes up his pen to write the first 
 chapter of his Resurrection, shows us Katioucha haled 
 before the magistrates for murder followed by theft, and, 
 through a hundred pages, leaves us in ignorance of the 
 nature of the crime, the origin of the accusation, and the 
 painful incidents which have cast the innocent young 
 creature into this abyss of misery. We may be sure that 
 at some near future day he will discover that this, too, is 
 not art ! Perhaps he thinks so already. He is uncon- 
 scious, and " divinely artless," as one of his opponents 
 has declared, in the course of the inquiry initiated by 
 the Great Review into this work on art, which must be 
 reckoned amongst one of the most curious and most 
 deceptive manifestations of a mighty genius. 
 
 In presence of the learned translator and commenta- 
 tor of the Gospels, I must declare my own incompetency. 
 I should, indeed, incline to the adoption of Max Nordau's 
 opinion : " He speaks of science as a blind man might 
 speak of colours. He evidently has no suspicion of its 
 nature, of its duties, of its methods, and of the objects 
 with which it is concerned." Such a blind man, present 
 at a spectral analysis of the Milky Way, asks himself what 
 use it serves, finds no answer, and declares it to be a folly. 
 In 1894 Tolstoi opens his book on Christianity, notasaMystic 
 Religion, but as a New Theory of Life, with the candid ac- 
 knowledgment that having ten years previously, in What 
 I Believe, made a profession of faith which he believed 
 to be original, numerous letters from Methodists and 
 Quakers had informed him that his teaching had long 
 been known and disseminated under the name of Spiri- 
 tual Christianity. And he does not even now suspect 
 the contradiction and the childishness which mark 
 
364 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 this new attempt of his, in which he comments on the 
 sacred text, denounces all previous commentators as 
 sacrilegious, and founds a thoroughgoing attack on the 
 authority of the Church on documents which depend for 
 their validity on that authority alone. 
 
 But this is no affair of mine. The artist and the 
 thinker are all I have to do with, and I am painfully 
 certain that I am not worthy to do them justice. The 
 life-story of the most famous of all living writers is as 
 universally known as are his external appearance, and 
 his somewhat eccentric methods of life, of dress, and 
 of work. Thanks to the somewhat impertinent con- 
 fidences of Madame Seuron {Gt'af Leo Tolstoi, Intimes 
 aus seinen Leben, 1895), who had the good fortune of 
 spending some years in the author's family circle, and 
 the more recent work published by M. Serguienko {How 
 Count Tolstoi Lives and Works, i8g8, in Russian), we are 
 superabundantly supplied with details on the subject. 
 We have seen the great man walking along, carrying 
 his shoes on the end of a stick, ready to put on again 
 if he should be surprised by some indiscreet visitor ; 
 we have seen him on horseback and on his bicycle ; 
 in a workman's blouse, in a peasant's touloupe, and in 
 a lawn-tennis player's jacket ; we have seen him working 
 in his study, which looks like a dungeon ; wielding the 
 carpenter's awl, and reaping his own, or rather other 
 people's, corn. 
 
 The story runs, indeed, that Tolstoi wrote The Power 
 of Darkness in bed, where he was kept by over-fatigue 
 brought on by helping one of his humble village neigh- 
 bours to save his harvest. We know that he is a 
 vegetarian, and we know that he is forbidden to 
 smoke, although Madame Seuron declares she has 
 
TOLSTOI 365 
 
 caught him eating slices of roast beef on the sly, and 
 has discovered cigarette ends thrown away in corners 
 which could not escape the eagle eye of a governess. 
 No one will suspect me of desiring to attach any im- 
 portance to these details, whether true or false, concern- 
 ing an individuality which stands so high above the 
 common level. Not the less strange is it, that a man 
 who has so passionately and so sincerely set the discovery 
 of what is true, and simple, and natural before him, as the 
 one and only object of his life,, should have given rise, 
 by his adoption of surroundings which are incontestably 
 artificial and false, to observations of such a nature. I am 
 willing to admit that family reasons may have prevented 
 him from justifying this course by really taking his place 
 among the class whose dress he has adopted, and whose 
 habits and duties he occasionally chooses to assume. 
 None the less are we forced to perceive that their result 
 is a somewhat regrettable pose. But this is the usual 
 price of every kind of human greatness, and in the case 
 of this very great man, it is an atavic feature of the 
 national samodourstvo, which has not been eradicated by 
 education, — an education which, in his case, was originally 
 of the most hasty and superficial description. 
 
 As every man knows, Leo NicolaiKvitch Tolstoi 
 was born in 1828, at the village in the depths of the 
 Government of Toula which he still inhabits, and 
 whither visitors from every corner of the globe repair 
 to pay him homage. The property originally belonged 
 to his mother, a Volkonskaia, whose figure is conjured 
 up by the author of War and Peace, in the form of the 
 Princess Marie. This noble lady died before Tolstoi 
 was three years old, and a distant relative, Mdlle. Tatiana 
 Alexandrovna Ergolskaia, took charge of him and of 
 
366 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 his three elder brothers. Before long the father died 
 too, leaving all his affairs in confusion. For reasons 
 connected with economy, Leo Nicolaidvitch was re- 
 moved from the house in Moscow which had sheltered 
 the little family, and sent to the country, where his edu- 
 cation was seriously endangered at the hands of German 
 tutors and Russian seminarists. In 1841 his legal guar- 
 dian, Mme. Touchkov, became aware of this fact, and 
 took measures to enable the youth to continue his 
 studies, first at Kasan and afterwards at St. Petersburg. 
 He returned home in 1848, having obtained his Uni- 
 versity degree, but, according to his own testimony, as 
 it appears in Education and Instruction, " with no correct 
 knowledge of any subject." His literary vocation does 
 not appear to have revealed itself until two years later, 
 after a visit to the Caucasus, whither he went with his 
 brother Nicholas, whose military duty called him there. 
 In* his desire to remain in a country in which he de- 
 lighted, Leo Nicolaievitcir also entered the army, and 
 at the same time he conceived the plan of a great novel, 
 the subject-matter of which was to be drawn from his 
 own family recollections. The idea of Akssakov's C/tro- 
 nicle pervaded the atmosphere of that period ! The first 
 chapter of this work, which was never to be completed, 
 formed part of that autobiographical fragment known as 
 Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. 
 
 It was followed by a series of tales — A Morning in 
 the Life of a Landed Proprietor, I^ucerne, The Cossacks — 
 all of them reproducing that type, so dear to Lermon- 
 tov and Pouchkine, of the high-born dreamer, ^yhose 
 fanciful aspirations melt away to nothing at their first 
 contact with reality. Olenine, the hero of The Cossacks, 
 is another Aleko, or a second Pietchorine, onlv too happy 
 
TOLSTOI 367 
 
 to distract his boredom and weariness of the great world 
 in the depths of the wild beauty of the Caucasus, until 
 Marianka, the half-barbarous girl, makes him realise the 
 abyss that lies between his own civilised temperament 
 and those primitive elements with which he would fain 
 have mingled his existence. 
 
 This subject is identical, as my readers will recollect, 
 with that of Le Mariage de Loti, though no suspicion of 
 imitation can possibly arise. And this, besides, is of no 
 great importance. It is quite evident that in his earlier 
 creations Tolstoi depended on the common fund of the 
 National Literature. His first impressions of mystic re- 
 ligiosity also date from this period, and are connected 
 with an incident which he has confided to his friend 
 Pogodine. 
 
 After having promised never to touch a card again, 
 Tolstoi had played, and lost a sum which he could see 
 no means of procuring. Worn out and despairing, he 
 prayed fervently and fell asleep, trusting to Heaven to 
 lift him out of his difficulty. When he awoke, a Jetter, 
 which he had no reason of any kind to expect, brought 
 him the money he so sorely needed. 
 
 He remained in the Caucasus till 1853, taking his 
 -share in every expedition, and bearing all the fatigues 
 and privations of a private soldier. In 1854 and 1855 
 he fought through the Crimean campaign, on Prince 
 Gortschakoff's staff ; he was at the battle of the Tchernaia 
 and at the siege of Sevastopol. This page of his exist- 
 ence has been reproduced in three little masterpieces — 
 Sevastopol in December, in May, and in A ugust. 
 
 The author's mastery of his craft is already evident in 
 these pages ; his minute description of material details, and 
 his close analysis of psychological motives, — even in ^he 
 
368 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 midst of a bloody struggle, — are absolutely perfect. No 
 one, either before or after him, not even Stendhal, has 
 carried observation of the moral instincts on the field of 
 battle to such a pitch of acuteness. Tolstoi even shovi^s 
 us how the very man who has behaved like a hero under 
 fire, can, a moment afterwards, betray the meanest sel- 
 fishness. In spite of its truthfulness, this view or pre- 
 sentation of things and facts already betrays an equal 
 amount of fancy and ideology, both of them open to 
 question ; and I should not care to endorse the view 
 of certain Russian critics, who compare the contempo- 
 rary Letters front the Crimea of Sir William Russell, which 
 had its hour of fame, with " Illustrated Almanacks for 
 Children." There is less high-flown philosophy, per- 
 haps, in the Times correspondent's letters ; but was that 
 any loss to his readers ? I shall dwell on this subject 
 later, and with all the frankness due to mv own readers. 
 Tolstoi left the army in 1855, ^i'^<^> thenceforward 
 spent his summers at lasnaia Poliana, and his winters 
 between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The works to 
 which I have already referred had placed his reputation 
 on a level, in the public estimation, with those of Tour- 
 gueniev and Gontcharov, yet his attention to literature 
 continued to be of an intermittent nature. While Alex- 
 ander the Second's Commission was preparing the great 
 edict which was to emancipate the serfs, the Pamie- 
 chtchik of lasnaia Poliana had undertaken the task of 
 solving the problem of the popular schools, which had 
 never, as yet, advanced beyond the stage of empty pro- 
 ject. With this object, it would appear, he went abroad 
 twice over, between 1855 and 1861. The emancipation of 
 the serfs was somewhat against Tolstoi's personal convic- 
 tions, and some sign of this was to appear in War and 
 
TOLSTOI'S "WAR AND PEACE" 369 
 
 Peace. Yet, after the 19th of February 1861, he was one 
 of the few land-owners who decided to live in the country. 
 He remained at lasnaia Poliana, which had now be- 
 come his own property, zealously fulfilled the functions 
 of an "Umpire of Peace" {Mirovo'i Possrednik), showed 
 the deepest interest in popular education, and even 
 undertook the publication of an educational newspaper, 
 to which he gave the name of his own property, and in 
 which he displayed great originality of thought. In it he 
 mingled his ideas on national instruction with very para- 
 doxical views on education at large, on civilisation and 
 on progress. Progress, in his opinion, was only neces- 
 sary to a very restricted number of persons, who could 
 command leisure-time. For all others, he considered it 
 , not merely a superfluous, but an evil thing. In fact, he 
 preached Rousseau's doctrines over again. 
 
 In 1862 he married the daughter of a doctor, Sophia 
 Andr^ievna Bers, and gave himself up entirely to family 
 life, certain charming features of which he had not yet 
 begun to contemn. It was not till near 1870 that the 
 first chapters of his great novel. War and Peace, began 
 to appear ' in The Russian Messenger. My readers are 
 acquainted with the immense and universal success of 
 this work — a success which did not, however, tempt Leo 
 Nicolai^vitch from his other occupations. While the 
 whole of Russia was devouring and discussing the pages 
 which had just immortalised his name, their author's 
 time was spent in publishing alphabets and class-books 
 for the primary schools. A consideration of this collec- 
 tion of pamphlets is full of interest. It is curious to 
 observe that great intellect struggling with the infinite 
 smallness of rudimentary intelligences, performing pro- 
 digies of elementary ingenuity, and producing master- 
 
370 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 pieces of childish mnemonics. Not till the famine of 
 1873 brought desolation on the province of Samara, 
 could the mighty writer turn his mind from these humble 
 occupations. He travelled to the scenes of this disaster, 
 and published the result of his personal inquiries in the 
 Moscow Gazette. His report made an extraordinary stir. 
 The Government had been endeavouring to hide the facts, 
 so as to conceal its own responsibility. Tolstoi, without 
 phrases or rhetoric of any kind, simply recounted what 
 he had seen, and so forced the Government to join the 
 public in the organisation of that succour which had 
 become indispensable. 
 
 The publication, in 1875, of the author's second great 
 novel, Anna Karenina, was followed, as my readers 
 doubtless know, by a fresh rupture on his part with 
 artistic literature. In My Religion, Tolstoi explained the 
 reasons of the conversion of Levine, one of the heroes 
 of his novel, and then applied all his energies to setting 
 forth, in a series of pamphlets and books, the doctrines 
 of the new faith held by the convert, with whom he 
 appeared to identify himself. All hope of a continuance 
 of the fine work which had raised him so high seemed 
 lost, and Tourgueniev, lying on his death-bed, sent him 
 this eloquent appeal : " My friend, come back to your 
 literary work ! that gift has been sent to you by Him 
 who gives us all things. . . . My friend, great writer of 
 our Russian soil ! grant this prayer of mine ! " The 
 prayer was granted. There had been misunderstand- 
 ings and collisions between these two men, each so well 
 suited to value the other's work. Tolstoi had fallen 
 asleep, in Tourgu6niev's presence, over the manuscript 
 of Fathers and Children ; but at the moment of supreme 
 farewell, Tourgudniev forgot it all, and Tolstoi seemed 
 
TOLSTOI'S "WAR AND PEACE" 371 
 
 to bow before the parting wish of his great rival. In 
 spite of plunges, more and more risky, into exegesis, 
 theology, and mysticism, the course of which I find 
 myself less and less able to follow, the readers of the 
 wonderful author of War and Peace have welcomed him 
 back on such joyful occasions as those of the publication 
 of The Death of Ivan Illitch, The Kreutzer Sonata, Master 
 and Workman, and The Power of Darkness. It would 
 appear that we owe our present delight in reading Re- 
 surrection to the sect called the Doukhobortsy, and to the 
 interest with which they have inspired its writer. For 
 several years Tolstoi had ceased to claim his author's 
 rights. He has reclaimed them in the case of this new 
 novel, and has intended to apply the proceeds to assisting 
 the emigration of this clan of strange eccentrics, con- 
 cerning whom I shall have a few words to say. But I 
 must firgt endeavour to lay the whole of that literary 
 work, of which Resurrection is at present the last, and, 
 I should be inclined to think, the highest expression, 
 before my readers' eyes. They will realise that in so 
 short a study I can only touch on the general aspects 
 of the subject. 
 
 In Herr Reinholdt's very remarkable History of Rus- 
 sian Literature, he presents the author of War and Peace 
 as an instance, which, he considers, may be possibly unique, 
 "of the greatest artistic harmony, and of an absolutely 
 straightforward continuity of development, joined to the 
 highest possible degree of intellectual maturity." This 
 judgment Tolstoi himself contravenes, when, in My Reli- 
 gion, he indicates, with the most perfect sincerity, the 
 contradictions, flagrant indeed, into which the workings 
 of his mind have previously led him. These he then 
 ascribed to a mental crisis, the date of which he fixed as 
 
372 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 being towards 1875. But it would be very difficult to 
 accept this explanation. The lapses from that " straight- 
 forward continuity of development," of which the German 
 critic speaks, began at an earlier, and have recurred' at a 
 much later date. We could hardly, in fact, conceive a 
 line more capriciously broken. The very artist who shows 
 himself so full of the delight of life in his Childhood or 
 Boyhood, and in many passages of his War and Peace, 
 has gone further than any writer of his country in his 
 description of the terrors of death. And this appears 
 not only in The Death of Ivan Illitch and in The Kreutzer 
 Sonata, but even in his earliest literary attempts. Thus, 
 from the very first, the sincere optimist was as sincere a 
 pessimist. And this is not all. Watch this acute analyst 
 of the human soul, who discovers mere reflex action, 
 physical and unconscious, even in its most violent trans- 
 ports ; follow him when, on some page hard by, he depicts 
 the almost instantaneous transformation of the most 
 incredulous of men into a firm believer, under the influ- 
 ence of I know not what occult power ; surely this is 
 true mysticism ! And this other conversion shows us 
 Petei: Bezoukhov, a favourite hero of the olden days, 
 long previous to the mental crisis of 1875. 
 
 In spite of his world-wide reputation, Tolstoi has 
 been, and has remained, an essentially Russian writer, 
 and, as such, shares the general mental quality of his 
 country, of which one characteristic feature consists in 
 the inability to bring its beliefs and feelings into harmony. 
 In my references to Dostoievski's communistic feeling I 
 have pointed out that the author of War and Peace is a 
 dogmatic individualist ; all his teaching, religious and 
 philosophic, proves the truth of this definition. Never- 
 theless, the corpmon feature of all his artistic creations 
 
TOLSTOI 373 
 
 is, on the contrary, to be found in a constant feeling of 
 distrust of the individual, arising out of the conviction 
 that no individual is capable of attaining anything at all 
 by his own strength. When Tolstoi declared, in a pas- 
 sage of his Memories of Sevastopol, that truth was his one 
 and only hero, he certainly deceived himself. The true 
 and only hero, that in which he finds his invariable 
 delight, is the mob. In it, in its beliefs and tastes and 
 ideas, he perceives that truth which he claims to serve. 
 A good life is the ordinary life of the nation. To think 
 well, we must think like the people, for wisdom lies not 
 in knowledge, but in the unconscious feeling of the popu- 
 lar masses. We must not seek to guide these masses, 
 we should rather be led by them, for man is only power- 
 ful inasmuch as he is borne on the waves of that great 
 ocean. Those figures, fictitious or historical, which rise 
 above the common level, can only win Tolstoi's sym- 
 pathy if they represent a national idea, and make no 
 attempt to impose their conceptions upon others. In 
 his mind, Koutovisov, who mistrusted himself and those 
 who worked with him, and relied on the instinct of his 
 own people, is far greater than Napoleon. For Napoleon, 
 according to him, flattered himself for five-and-twenty 
 years that he was leading Europe, whereas he was simply 
 floating along, the mere toy of a mighty current of history. 
 Thus, in Anna Karenina, Levine, the good and 
 simple-hearted, finds the truth — that is to say, the solu- 
 tion of the problem of life — while Vronski, clever and 
 intelligent, only brings misfortune upon himself and 
 those belonging to him. The uselessness of heroism 
 and of struggling with life, and the necessity for resig- 
 nation, form a realistic feature in, which Tolstoi's work 
 agrees with that of Dostoievski. 
 
374 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 « 
 
 But the instances of resignation portrayed by Dostoi- 
 .evski all occur in persons of high moral development 
 ■who have been beaten in the battle of life, whereas 
 Tolstoi makes the recognition of a man's nothingness 
 in the face of Nature, in the face of society, and before 
 God, not the highest wisdom only, but also the road 
 which leads to happiness, and individual happiness, the 
 only end to be attained — whence other contradictions 
 arise. 
 
 In Tolstoi's nature there are, and always have been, 
 several men, whose development runs on parallel lines. 
 If the author has escaped that condition of internal con- 
 flict which has brought, and still brings, anguish to many 
 of his fellow-countrymen, he owes it both to the wide 
 embracing power of his talent, and also to the fate\vhich 
 has made him a creator of pictures. Had he been a 
 man of action, he would have been drawn, like so many 
 others, into the inevitable struggle between fact and idea. 
 Being, as he is, an artist, he has reflected, even as in a 
 mirror, faithful and unmoved, the life of his country in 
 all its many aspects. His power of universal refraction 
 is probably unequalled. He is just as much at his ease 
 in a peasant's cot as in a St. Petersburg drawing-room. 
 He is a born hunter on the marshes, where some readers 
 of Anna Karenina may have been occasionally bored, 
 but where all lovers of sporting exploits must have 
 enjoyed the most delightful experiences ; and he proves 
 himself versed in every detail touching the horse and 
 horsemanship when he takes Vronski into "Frou-Frou's " 
 box. It is his plural personality which has enabled him 
 to bring forward the most varied types, even though 
 he works, like every artist in bookmaking, after a single 
 model — his own self, analysed and reproduced ad infini~ 
 
TOLSTOI'S TYPES . 375 
 
 turn. In this matter he is to be distinguished from his 
 Western emulators, in that he makes no attempt to 
 idealise the features of his own character, but is rather 
 inclined to present them in the least favourable light. 
 This tendency, which was apparent in Pouchkine's case, 
 and is yet more evident in that of Dostoievski, is common 
 to the' whole Russian school, and constitutes what may 
 be considered its truest element of originality. 
 
 Tolstoi's characters, like those of Tourgueniev, may 
 be reduced to a certain number of general types. The 
 central type, which pervades his whole work, from 
 Nikolenka, the heiro of Childhood, down to Pozdnychev 
 in the Kreutzer Sonata, and Nekhlioudov in Resurrection, is 
 par excellence the autobiographical type. It possesses none 
 of the brilliant qualities with which Byron delighted to 
 invest his successive incarnations of his own haughty 
 individuality. It rather embodies a being of ordinary 
 and mediocre calibre, to whom life brings more evil 
 fortune than good-luck ; who not unfrequently makes 
 himself ridiculous, and has not even the resource re- 
 served to Tourgu6niev's heroes, of joking over his own 
 misadventures. Such figures as Vronski and Andrew 
 Volkonski, with their beauty, their superior gifts, and 
 the good fortune which attends their undertakings, are 
 put forward in contrast to these outcasts from fortune. 
 But the author^s preference is by no means with them, 
 and at some turn of the road, their lucky star is sure 
 to fail them. An intermediate type is represented by 
 Nicholas Rostov in War and Peace, and Stiva Oblonski 
 in Anna Karenina. These are men who possess happi- 
 ness because they do not look too high or too far to 
 seek it ; aimably selfish beings, in other words, on 
 whom Tolstoi' bestows a scornful smile. And now come 
 25 
 
376 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 his favourites, the men who have found the real inward 
 truth, who expect nothing from Hfe, because nothing 
 that Hfe can give will suit their need. Their joy and 
 contentment lies within their own soul — a soul full of 
 simplicity, humility, and indifference to worldly things. 
 Such are the poor musician in Luce7-ne, Platon Karataiev 
 in War and Peace, and the old nightman Akime, in the 
 Power of. Darkness. 
 
 The setting within which the author makes all these 
 figures live and move is a huge one. In his first begin-' 
 nings Tolstoi revealed himself as possessing a marvellous 
 and very realistic power of painting childhood. Even 
 while Nikolenka weeps tears of the sincerest grief over 
 his mother's tomb, he is thinking of many things which 
 have nothing to do with his sorrow, deep though it be. 
 Nikolenka's surroundings all belong to the aristocratic 
 sphere, and the author's picture of this society, touched 
 in with an air of the most complete indifference, bears 
 no sign of that anxiety on social matters which was 
 already stirring the contemporary mind. Tolstoi offers 
 no reply to the endless questions, such as "Whose 
 fault ?" and "What is to be done ?" put forward, just at 
 this period, by Herzen and Tchernichevski. He does 
 not seem to be aware of their existence. The Two 
 Hussars and Domestic Happiness belong to this cycle, 
 as well as Childhoocl., Boyhood, and Youth. 
 
 In Memories of Sevastopol, The Invasion, The Three 
 Deaths, The Cossacks, the scene changes. The stage 
 broadens, and the philosopher, hitherto concealed be- 
 neath the author, makes his entrance. He attacks the 
 real question and problem of life, how we must live if we 
 will die worthily. And here begins the teaching of the 
 theory of blissful unconsciousness. The true hero of 
 
TOLSTOI 377 
 
 the Crimean war is the private soldier, who is heroic 
 and great because he knows not how great a thing it is 
 to die for his country. This doctrine appears yet more 
 clearly in The Th'ee Deaths, the agonising death of a 
 nobly-born woman, the easy death of a man of humble 
 birth, ^nd the happy and unconscious death of a felled 
 tree. Following on the art of dying well, we see the 
 art, of living well, as taught in The Cossacks, in which 
 book Tolstoi, with his apology for elementary simplicity, 
 begins to put forward the theory which is to be the last 
 expression of his philosophy. Amongst all the forms of 
 happiness, or, in other words, of the satisfaction of natural 
 instincts, love of our neighbour and self-sacrifice are at 
 once the most legitimate and the most easily attained. 
 From this time forward, individualism and altruism are 
 to wage eternal war in the author's intelligence. 
 
 The struggle is less evident in War and Peace and 
 in Anna Karenina, because in these works, the thinker 
 is frequently overshadowed by the depictor of incident. 
 In their pages, deductions having a particular tendency 
 only appear as excrescences on the trunk of a mighty 
 tree ; and this to such an extent that an attempt has 
 been made to extract them from the original works and 
 form them into a separate appendix. The theory of un- 
 consciousness has a personal reason and justification in 
 the case of this admirable artist. He himself is really 
 great only when he creates unconsciously, by a process 
 of interna] and, as I might describe it, automatic trans- 
 formation of his external impressions. When he endea- 
 vours to analyse these impressions, or to reduce any 
 phenomenon to its elementary parts, or when, by an 
 inverse operation, he attempts a synthesis of the ele- 
 ments which go to make up the diversity of life, he loses 
 
378 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 himself in a maze of definitions, analogies, and demon- 
 strations, the logic of which he himself seems to be the 
 first to doubt. And at the same time, we notice in him 
 a trait of feminine intellectuality— a tendency to mingle 
 logical deduction with the sentiment of the moment, 
 and confound his reason with the dictates of his heart. 
 
 The outcome of this is yet another contradiction. 
 Now, from the point of view of general composition, War 
 and Peace belongs, as a whole, to an order of creation 
 which may be described as being in a sense instinctive. 
 The author's object is not so much to prove any parti- 
 cular theory, as to show us Russia as she was at the time 
 of the Napoleonic wars, and to reflect his country in a 
 mirror of huge scope, and sympathy that is wide indeed, 
 since it even embraces the law of serfdom. Everything 
 that is Russian is dear to Tolstoi', as it is, and just because 
 it is Russian. This must not be taken to be the Olympian 
 indifference of Goethe, nor the impassibility of a FYench 
 writer of the Naturalist school. It is rather a sort of 
 indulgent acknowledgment of human weakness and of 
 the nothingness of the highest life — a feeling which once 
 more brings the author into kinship with Dostoievski. 
 Yet in Tolstoi's case this sentiment is more restricted, 
 and does not extend to suffering and guilt. Not that 
 the author is more inclined to severity, but that in his 
 eyes suffering and crime are both very small matters, 
 concerning which it is not necessary to disturb one's self. 
 Here we have a sort of backward gleam of the old Greek 
 plays, in which the faults and afflictions of the heroes are 
 recognised to be only the result of the immutable will of 
 the gods. 
 
 After his own fashion, Tolstoi is a fatalist, and the 
 philosopher of the Memories of Sevastopol reappears un- 
 
TOLSTOi 379 
 
 fortunately, fi-om time to time, and hews out a part for 
 himself even in War and Peace, as when he deliberately 
 intervenes in the description of those bloody encounters 
 wherein the fortunes of Russia and Napoleon hung in 
 the balance. The author's fundamental idea in this 
 respect is indicated when Koutousov falls asleep at the 
 council of war, during which the plan of the battle of 
 Austerlitz is discussed, and is shown reading a novel on 
 the very eve of the battle of the Borodino. This proves 
 his wisdom, because he leaves events to work themselves 
 out without making any attempt to guide them. And 
 these events are accomplished, not by means of any 
 individual effort, but by the unconscious action of the 
 mass, which itself obeys a superior and superhuman 
 will. Men are nothing but automata. Any pretension 
 to guide them, or to find fault with them if they will 
 not move in the direction we desire, is equally absurd. 
 All we can aspire to is to analyse the psychological 
 process which takes place within their souls under occult 
 influences ; and here we see Tolstoi taking up, on a far 
 larger scale, the work he had already attempted under 
 the walls of Sevastopol. It is a process of miniature 
 painting and micrography which quite disconcerted the 
 earliest readers of War and Peace — I mean, its Russian 
 readers, for the book has been less discussed in the 
 West than in the author's own country. It is certain 
 that the resources at the disposal of the author of Me- 
 mories of Sevastopol ^&x& quite insufficient to warrant his 
 constituting himself the historian of the great Napoleonic 
 wars. He looked at the battlefields of Austerlitz and the 
 Borodino with the eyes, the experience, and the know- 
 ledge of the young artillery officer of 1854. No writer, 
 indeed, ever knew better how to depict a battery of 
 
38o RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 artillery or a squadron of cavalry in action under 
 fire. 
 
 But the young artillery officer had evidently failed to 
 perceive the connection of this particular action with 
 that of the other units engaged in the same struggle, 
 and the ingenuous artist has come to the conclusion that 
 no such connection existed. How was the battle of 
 Austerlitz lost on one side and gained on the other ? 
 Napoleon knew nothing of that, any more than Koutousov, 
 The head of a French column, which chanced to be on 
 a particular spot, blundered, thanks to the fog which 
 shrouded its movements, across the head of a Russian 
 column which ought to have been somewhere else. The 
 result was a panic, and all the rest. Tolstoi covers whole 
 pages with irrational statements of this kind. From the 
 military point of view it is mere childishness ; from the 
 artistic point of view it is over-generalisation, and leads 
 the painter to fill the hugest canvas with a multitude of 
 tiny sketches. His method is an absolute negation of 
 serious art. I go further, and say it is the negation of 
 truth. Here again we have the cinematographist's nega- 
 tive ; but the cinematograph is not merely a process of 
 decomposition; it recomposes, and gives us a mechanical 
 representation of connected movement. Now, as I have 
 shown, Tolstoi's idea, far from assisting his reader towards 
 this recomposition, after the manner of Tourgu^niev, 
 formally forbids him to attempt it. And I will add that 
 many of his snapshots lack accuracy and precision. The 
 abuse of detail inevitably leads to such mistakes as these. 
 He brings us on to a square in Moscow in 1812 ; a French 
 cook, suspected of being a spy, has just been flogged. 
 " The executioner" says Tolstoi', " unbound the prisoner 
 from the stake ; he was a big man zvith reddish whiskers, 
 
TOLSTOI 381 
 
 wearing dark blue stockings and a green coat" This 
 detail is most circumstantial, but it must be incorrect, 
 for at such a moment the culprit certainly had no coat 
 upon his back. 
 
 Looking at it from the philosophical standpoint, the 
 author's fatalist theoiy finds its most redoubtable con- 
 tradiction in his own person. The characters in War 
 and Peace may be divided into two categories — those who 
 consciously pursue some aim, such as the two emperors. 
 Prince Bolkonski and his old father, the Kouraguine 
 family, and the heroine of the story, Natacha Rostov, and 
 those who allow the current to sweep them away, such 
 as Peter Bezoukhov, old Rostov, the Princess Marie, 
 Platon, Karataiev, and Koutousov. Happiness and final 
 success are the portion of these last. But this happiness 
 does not strike us, on closer examination, as being parti- 
 cularly tempting. When I look at Bezoukhov, married to 
 a woman who plays him false, the ill-starred witness of 
 the battle of the Borodino, an occasion on which he 
 cannot discover either what he is doing or wherefore 
 he is there at all, then a half-delirious wanderer in the 
 streets of Moscow, where the French threaten to shoot 
 him for incendiarism, and finally a fugitive, straying in 
 the footsteps of Napoleon's army ; — the idea of his con- 
 dition offering any seduction to an imagination in quest 
 of felicity would indeed surpi'ise me. 
 
 And finally, from the historic point of view, Koutousov, 
 who vanquishes Napoleon by dint of sleeping or reading 
 novels, while his adversary plans his battles, is, fortunately 
 for history, not only an improbability, but a downright 
 falsehood. 
 
 In the composition of Anna Karenina, Tolstoi re- 
 mained faithful to his own theory and method. We 
 
382 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 find the same wealth of episode, in the more restricted 
 setting of family life, and the same contrast drawn 
 between the pride of individualism in its own strength, 
 and a humble submission to a superior and occult power. 
 A similar antagonism is brought into relief in the mental 
 condition of the principal hero, torn asunder by an 
 internal conflict, and in the comparison between the 
 tumultuous existence of great cities and the peaceful 
 conditions of country life. On one side we have men 
 of intelligence and tact ; on the other, men of simple 
 heart and kind good-nature. But these last always win 
 the day. Levine triumphs over Vronski. But Levine, 
 the intellectual descendant of Bezoukhov, is destined, 
 this time, to reveal the true prescription for the cure of 
 moral suffering, the secret of which has just been dis- 
 covered by the harvester of lasnaia Poliana — the healing 
 virtue of physical labour. At the same time we observe 
 the dawn of Socialist ideas, which seemed quite unknown 
 to the author of War and Peace, as, iTiore especially, in 
 that famous hunting scene in which Levine, during a 
 discussion with Oblonski, suddenly realises the injustice 
 of making use of another man's labour. Here we have 
 the germ of the whole of Tolstoi's later philosophic 
 teaching, afterwards to be so brilliantly developed and 
 put into practice. We may wonder that he should have 
 chosen Levine as the channel through which he bestows 
 these first-fruits on the outer world. This country gentle- 
 man, who forgets to go to the church on his wedding 
 day, and, when the elections come round, begs every one 
 to tell him how he should vote, is but a sorry prophet. 
 Tolstoi, indeed, desires we should believe him to be a 
 cultivated man, whose studies of German philosophy, 
 for which he nevertheless professes a hearty scorn, have 
 
TOLSTOI'S "ANNA KARENINA" 383 
 
 imbued him with a deep-seated scepticism. How then is 
 it that he presents such an appearance of brutish coarse- 
 ness ? And here is something wliich may astonish us 
 yet more. When Levine, wandering tlirough the mazes 
 of intellectual speculation, utterly loses his bearings and 
 knows not which way to turn, it is a peasant, with whom 
 he falls into conversation, who arrives just in time to 
 show him the true path. All he has to do is to go 
 straight forward, in humble trust that God will guide him 
 in the right direction. 
 
 How comes it that this dweller in the country has 
 not already stumbled upon this peasant, or some other, 
 just as capable of leading him on the right road ? Their 
 name is legion ! We have met the very same individual 
 in War and Peace ; there he bore the name of Karataiev, 
 and likewise preached a blind submission to the will of 
 God. But to what God ? A doubt was permissible then ; 
 but that is over now. The God to whom Levine is to 
 make over the government of his life is not the Christ. 
 This God is Buddha. I will not attempt to explain the 
 manner in which Tolstoi contrives to combine the doc- 
 trine of Nirvana and the divine law of labour, in his 
 own teaching. Regarding the case between town and 
 country life, which the prophet decides, as a matter of 
 course, in favour of the tillers of the soil, every writer 
 since Pouchkine has taken the same line, following that 
 of Rousseau and George Sand. Only Rousseau and 
 George Sand have been careful to strengthen their ver- 
 dict by more or less well-founded preambles. But Tolstoi 
 is less explicit. When, even in his later and purely 
 philosophical works, it becomes his duty to indicate the 
 nature of " the falsehood of civilised life,'' he gropes and 
 fumbles, sometimes formulating charges against science 
 
384 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 and sometimes bringing accusations against forms of 
 government. 
 
 The artistic qualities of Anna Karenina deserve the 
 same praise, with the same reservations, as those of War 
 and Peace. We observe the same sovereign mastery of 
 detail, description, and psychological analysis, the same 
 lack of unity, the same network of various stories which 
 draw the reader's attention along as many confusing 
 tracks, and the same fault of prolixity. The character 
 of the principal heroine is dissected to its inmost re- 
 cesses, with the most incomparable steadiness of hand. 
 Her incapability of realising her position when, after 
 having left her husband, she returns from abroad with 
 her lover, insists on appearing at the theatre, receives an 
 affront there, and turns upon the man who has done 
 everything in his power to prevent her carrying out her 
 whim ; and the struggle between her affection for her 
 lover and her maternal love, are miracles of observa- 
 tion and reproduction. There is little or no inven- 
 tion ; the only situation a little out of the common is 
 when the faithless wife, swayed by some violent emotion, 
 brutally casts the acknowledgment of her sin in her hus- 
 band's teeth ; and this idea Tolstoi may have found in 
 the work of Ostrovski, and even in that of Lermontov 
 (see A Hero of Our Times). But what a wealth of cold 
 clear-sightedness and burning emotion we find in the 
 description of Kitty Levine's confinement and of the 
 death of Nicholas Levine ! How ingenious is the manner 
 in which these two events — which place all those who 
 take part in them outside the ordinary conditions of life, 
 raising them to a higher level, carrying them into a mys- 
 terious sphere where they can hardly recognise each 
 other, their faces convulsed, and their souls wrung by 
 
TOLSTOI 38s 
 
 their common anguish — are brought into close connec- 
 tion ! The whole truth is here, and without a jarring 
 word. 
 
 It has been remarked that Tolstoi's works, previous 
 to War and Peace and Anna Karenina, contain no femi- 
 nine figures. But henceforward they come in crowds, 
 and all of them are charming. This pleasure we owe, 
 no doubt, to the, author's marriage, and to the influence 
 of Sophia Andreievna. But is it not strange, again, that 
 in his second novel the author should have made a vulgar 
 incident of adultery the foundation and starting-point 
 of his theory of social renovation ? 
 
 I have already said that, after this first expression of 
 his theory, the novelist seemed to have given place for 
 ever to the preacher. Since the publication of My Reli- 
 gion, the belief that the incident of Levine's conversion, 
 in Anna Karenina, is autobiographical, forces itself upon 
 us. In the course of a mental process experienced by 
 many great minds — Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Lewis, 
 to quote no others — before his time, Tolstoi' appears to 
 ■' have passed through rationalism into an immediate rela- 
 tion with Nature and Divinity. Up to this period, his 
 reason had struggled -with his heart, the first repeating 
 the lessons learnt from the masters of modern philosophy, 
 the second holding communion with nature, and drawing 
 thence its faith in the immortahty of the soul, and the 
 idea of a God. I suppose, and I have already explained 
 why, that the author has deceived himself as to the reality 
 of this crisis, but nevertheless he has acted as if it had 
 been real, and, having imagined that through it he had 
 arrived at the perception of a new truth, he has used all 
 his endeavours to shed its consoling light around him. 
 While in the two books, entitled My Confession and Aly 
 
386 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Religion, he pointed out the origin of his teaching, and 
 laid its foundations, he undertook two huge works, one a 
 thorough criticism of dogmatic theology, and the other a 
 new translation of the Four Gospels. The spirit in which 
 he approached this mighty task finds ingenuous expression 
 in the following passage from My Religion : " It was long 
 before I could accustom myself to the idea that after 
 eighteen centuries — during which the law of Jesus had 
 been professed by thousands of human beings — after 
 eighteen centuries, during the course of which thousands 
 of men had consecrated their lives to the study of that 
 law, I should myself have discovered it as some new 
 thing." The conquest of Mexico over again ! 
 
 To follow the author along this path, I am not quali- 
 fied. A perusal of Mf Religion has led me to the 
 conclusion that Tolstoi, following the example of Dos- 
 toievski, has reduced the teaching of Christ to five com- 
 mandments — " Never fall into a rage," " Do not commit 
 adultery," " Take no oath," " Use no violence in self- 
 defence," and " Make no war," and that from these he 
 has deduced the necessity for the almost wholesale de- 
 struction of existing social institutions, with their consti- 
 tuent elements — justice, army, taxes, and so forth. This, 
 too, would appear to be the explanation of Resurrection, 
 the subject of which story — in which we see a man 
 called to sit on a jury, and condemn a woman who has 
 been his own mistress, whom he has forsaken, and thus 
 driven into a life of vice — is said to have been suggested 
 to the author by M. Koni, the criminal expert. The 
 author's conclusion is that juries, as well as every species 
 of legal tribunal, should be suppressed. In the same 
 work we find a man called on to answer an accusation 
 of having stolen some brooms ; the owner of the brooms, 
 
TOLSTOI 387 
 
 when summoned as a witness, declares that the legal 
 action has already cost him twice the value of the stolen 
 brooms in travelling expenses. The author concludes 
 that thieves must be left to ply their trade in peace. But 
 I am not sure that I have thoroughly grasped his idea, 
 and, as far as Resurrection is concerned, I care not a 
 jot, so entrancing is Katioucha's figure, in spite of the 
 little cast in her eye ! The uncertainty under which 
 I labour with regard to the great writer's purely philoso- 
 phical works is a more serious matter. But here again 
 I console myself with the thought that it is very likely 
 shared by the author himself ; and, in fact, I have dis- 
 covered, in looking over one of his latest publications of 
 this nature, Religion and Morality (1893), that after having 
 admitted the existence of two typical conceptions of the 
 fundamental relations between man and the universe, he 
 has been weak enough to discover, even as he wrote, a 
 third conception, which, as deriving from the first, must 
 naturally claim the second place ; whereupon he has 
 turned his back on all three, and plunged headlong into 
 a refutation of an article by Huxley on Ethical Evolu- 
 tion, which he had no doubt been lately reading, and 
 the memory of which had thrown all his other ideas 
 into confusion. 
 
 The" success, and a very relative success it is, of 
 Tolstoi's preaching on these subjects is largely due to its 
 affinity with that sectarian spirit so common in the huge 
 empire, and also to the encouragement given by his doc- 
 trine to another ruling feature of the national character 
 — its indolence. 
 
 After a certain fashion, indeed, this propaganda has 
 served the interests of the State, by drawing revolu- 
 tionary currents, far more dangerous than itself, into 
 
388 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 its own channel. A doctrine which preaches abstinence 
 from evil-doing cannot cause real anxiety to any 
 government. 
 
 The author still shows the highest mastery of his 
 craft in those novels and tales with which, happily for 
 his readers, he. occasionally breaks the series of his 
 philosophical treatises and exegetical works, and in all 
 of which the same teaching, though under a different 
 form, is carefully instilled. He is too apt, indeed, to for- 
 get the precept which was Goethe's legacy to all artists, 
 " Depict, but do not speak ! " But we must make up 
 our minds to that. And in spite of that drawback, the 
 Kreutzer Sonata and TIu Death of Ivan Illitch — a two- 
 fold plea against marriage — are, to my mind, superior 
 to his preceding works. It has been denied that 
 Pozdnychev, the hero of the Kreutzer Sonata, who 
 murders, out of jealousy, the woman he has married in 
 sheer thoughtlessness, can be regarded as his creator's 
 mouthpiece. The selection may seem a strange one, but 
 in the treatise entitled Concerning Life, which was pub- 
 lished in the same year (1889), and in a postscript to the 
 Sonata, published a year later, in which Tolstoi per- 
 sonally repeats and develops this Othello's arguments, 
 he certainly seems to identify himself with the charac- 
 ter. He points out the opposition between our inner 
 consciousness of our own immortality and our material 
 surroundings, which all speak to us of death, and from 
 this he deduces, after a like fashion, the idea of the 
 huge paradox of Life. Our only resource, if we would 
 escape from this paradox, is to remove ourselves, as far 
 as possible, beyond the borders of the material world, 
 which serves as a temporary agent of transmission to 
 that inner consciousness of ours, destined to survive 
 
TOLSTOI 389 
 
 the world's destruction. If we betray any tenderness 
 for the physical element of our being, we condemn 
 ourselves to suffering and to the fear of death — which 
 is only a phy^cal fact. Therefore we must eliminate our 
 animal life, and, as a first necessity, those sexual relations 
 which are its foundation. This truth has already been 
 revealed by the Christ, but it has not- been realised. 
 There can be no Christian marriage, just aS there is no 
 Christian worship, no Christian army, no Christian jus- 
 tice, and no Christian State. A Christian cannot regard 
 any sexual relation except as a sin. He must not marry. 
 If he is married already he may keep his wife, but he 
 must treat her as his sister. Attractive as the theory 
 may appear to some husbands, its strict application is 
 certainly fraught with peril. But Tolstoi is delighted with 
 it. He breaks off the rolling series of his paradoxes, all of 
 which have already had their day in the novels of George 
 Sand, to exclaim, by the lips of Pozdnychev, "All this 
 was new, and astounded me sorely ! " Yet what a wealth 
 of psychological intuition we find side by side with this 
 simplicity ! "Ask an experienced coquette who has set 
 herself the task of leading a man astray, whether she 
 would rather be convicted in his sight of falsehood, per- 
 versity, and cruelty, or appear before him in an ill-fitting 
 gown. She will choose the first alternative ! " And 
 then what superb touches of realism ! Pozdnychev has 
 just killed his wife, and is about to throw himself upon 
 the lover, who has taken refuge in the neighbouring 
 room, when he notices that he has no boots upon his 
 feet. He has taken them off so as to creep unobserved 
 upon the guilty pair. A sense of his ridiculous position 
 overwhelms him, and he stops short. This is worth a 
 whole essay on philosophy. 
 
390 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 The Popular Stories, which were at one time Tolstoi's 
 own favourite works, have been somewhat severely 
 judged by Russian critics. They have complained that 
 the author has failed to attain the simplicity at which 
 he aimed, and I myself am inclined to think their art- 
 lessness somewhat artificial. One of the last tales pub- 
 lished before Resurrection, under the title of Master and 
 Workman, received a more kindly verdict. It embodies 
 the antique teaching of the vanity of riches. A timber 
 merchant — rough, coars^fe7-a«drfrard^lTearfea=goes to the 
 forest with his man, loses his way, and is caught in a 
 snowstorm. He unharnesses the horse, mounts it, and 
 rides away, leaving his humble companion to his fate. 
 The horse, failing to find its way through the tempest, 
 brings him back to the sledge on which the workman 
 is huddled, already stiff with cold, and half-buried in the 
 snow. With a rush, the uselessness of the cowardly 
 attempt he has just made to save his own life, and the 
 vanity of all his past^-efforts to accumulate riches, which 
 at such a moraent have lost all value in his eyes, surge 
 over the merchant's soul, sweep away the artificial 
 layer of selfishness, and stir his underlying instinct of 
 altruism and sympathy for his neighbour. His sole 
 idea, now, is to bring back warmth, with his fur coat 
 and with his own body, to the poor wretch to whom 
 he had not given a thought, a little while ago. He 
 stretches himself upon his body, and there, a few hours 
 later, he is found, in the same posture ; he has brought 
 his last undertaking to a successful issue. Death has 
 come to him, indeed, but the workman is alive. No one 
 can fail to admire the substance of the story, and as 
 regards form, it attains, in its descriptive portions, the 
 very pinnacle of art. But is there any psychological 
 
TOLSTOI 391 
 
 explanation of the revulsion which takes place within 
 the merchant's soul ? None, I fear, any more than in the 
 case of Prince Nekhlioudov in Resurrection, who, being 
 a retired officer of the Imperial Guard, a man about 
 town and a debauchee, bent on comfort and luxury, is 
 suddenly seized with a longing to marry his Katioucha, 
 whom he must take out of a convict prison and a house 
 of ill-fame. And what lack of proportion we note be- 
 tween the conception of Master and Workman and the 
 means chosen for its expression ! We have a whole 
 volume to lead us up to that one incident in the forest, 
 which embodies the whole substance of the book ! The 
 Kreutzer Sonatq, and The Death of Ivan Illitch both suffer 
 from the same fault of construction. 
 
 I am much disposed, on the other hand, to recognise 
 in The Power of Darkness one of the most perfect master- 
 pieces which ever graced any literature, and to per- 
 ceive that Tolstoi seems to have imported in it a new 
 form of popular drama, and one capable of universal 
 application. The idea that a fault may be atoned for 
 by voluntary confession and expiation is certainly 
 not a new one. But none of Tolstoi's predecessors 
 has succeeded, so far as my knowledge goes, in ex- 
 pressing it in so dramatic a fashion, nor with so much 
 true and simple grandeur. He gives us Nature herself, 
 as she lives and moves, taken from the rustic life, without 
 the smallest affectation, or the slightest touch of rhetoric. 
 Figures and surroundings, methods of speech and ways 
 of feeling, have all been observed, noted even to their 
 most delicate shades, and rendered in a fashion that is 
 miraculous. Though Nikita, the guilty peasant, speaks 
 the ordinary language of the populace, he uses some 
 phrases and expressions which reveal his knowledge of 
 26 
 
392 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 circles other than those of his own village. You realise 
 that a railway must have been made through the place, 
 and that the foam of city civilisation has thus been cast, by 
 way of the tavern, on to the threshold of the peasant's hut. 
 Great writer of the Russian soil ! give us more and 
 more of such works as these ! Forsake those scientific 
 inquiries and philosophic speculations for which Heaven 
 never intended you. I am no Tourgu^niev, but I know 
 that when I speak thus, I speak for several millions of your 
 readers ! By some miracle, your obstinate dallying with 
 ideology has not dimmed your imagination, yet, believe 
 me, you revolve within your speculations like a squirrel 
 in its cage, and you never gain a step ! But what of your 
 new revelation and its teachings ? you will cry. So far 
 as I can discern anything in your doctrine, it seems to 
 me to combine the two contradictory elements of your 
 first philosophical ideas, those evident in your earliest 
 literary efforts, the superiority of the masses over the 
 individual, and the virtue of isolation. And to these, 
 even then already, you were adding tirades against the 
 depravity of the culture of city life. Remember your 
 own Oldnine ! The original theory has been developed, 
 no doubt, but do you not realise that the least acceptable 
 feature of your prophetic vocation lies in the fact that you 
 are a prophet in perpetual motion ? Within your cage 
 there is a wheel, and that wheel goes round and round. 
 You have ended, in your Kreutzer Sonata, by condemning 
 marriage, and preaching the renunciation of carnal love 
 as the highest ideal. And doubtless you have never 
 dreamt, in your divine simplicity, of the comic side pre- 
 sented by this tardy conversion to asceticism in the case 
 of a man of your age and your position ! For you are, I 
 believe, the father of twelve -children ! 
 
TOLSTOI 393 
 
 I know, indeed, that no ridicule affects you, that you 
 make but httle effort to bring your own ideas into mutual 
 harmony, and still less to bring them into agreement 
 with your own life. The logic which extols physical 
 labour as the only legitimate means of acquisition, while 
 it brands any desire to increase possessions as illegiti- 
 mate, is not exceedingly self-evident. What can those 
 readers who recollect your Popular Tales, and the many 
 and varied resources for adding to the pleasures of life 
 therein indicated, think of these new precepts of life, 
 with their almost monkish austerity ? They may say the 
 wheel has turned. But they also think, you may be 
 sure, that the non-resistance to evil, which is the chief 
 dogma of your later gospel, is merely a fresh application 
 of your old theory of the superiority of the masses. The 
 mass, which constitutes an elementary being, approaches 
 more nearly to Nature than the individual, and Nature's 
 submission to every incident is passive. This, surely, is 
 your idea. Do you know that it comes perilously near 
 utter materialism ? You escape it, 1 admit, by your 
 acknowledgment of a moral debt; but does not the fresh 
 contradiction here involved occur to you ? Contradic- 
 tions are the most convenient things in the world for 
 those who do not concern themselves about them. But 
 such men stand on slippery ground, and thus it is that 
 you have slipped into that Buddhism which constitutes, 
 as I really believe, the only comparatively original phase 
 of your various evolutions. Apart from it, you have- 
 simply unwound a skein which runs through Leopardi 
 and Schopenhauer right back to the pessimism of Lord 
 Byron. And to conclude, you have obeyed the watch- 
 word " Go out among the people," which has led some 
 of your contemporaries into •other and worse follies. In 
 
394 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 your case, it is Buddhism, above all, which has cast you 
 into the quagmire, by leading you to condemn the very 
 principle of the State. It must certainly be wrong that 
 the State should interfere in everything, if it be true that 
 it should interfere in nothing. You would have no 
 judges, no police officials, no soldiers. If men were not 
 prevented from doing evil, they would not think of doing 
 it at all. But perhaps I am wrong in ascribing these 
 ideas of yours to Buddha. Should I not rather accuse 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau ? more especially when I see 
 you labouring, scythe in hand, to save your neighbour's 
 harvest. What are you doing there ? What do you 
 make of those examples which should be sacred in your 
 eyes, of the Fakir and the holy man, sitting crouched, 
 motionless, lost in meditation, and the contemplation of 
 their own toes ? But you are no Hindoo ! Your northern 
 blood, and the vital energy within you, carry the day, 
 and triumph over your fancies for imitation and inertia. 
 And again, I perceive that, according to your idea, the 
 State should never intervene in an agrarian quarrel, to 
 prevent the peasants from laying hands by force on the 
 soil which suits their purpose best. This, if I mistake 
 not, is the doctrine you expound in The Kingdom of God 
 is with You — the most complete of all the treatises on 
 religious philosophy to which your signature is appended. 
 Here you stand forsaken both by Buddha and by Jean 
 Jacques himself. And I will not say in whose company 
 you remain ! 
 
 To sum it up, when you condemn science, and econo- 
 mic and intellectual development, you condemn the very 
 essential idea of progress. You claim the right to reduce 
 us to live the primitive life of the Russian moujik, and 
 to find all our pleasure therein, like the real Karataiev 
 
TOLSTOI 395 
 
 •whom you once knew. His name was Soutaiev, a stone- 
 cutter, and he was your guest at Moscow some fifteen 
 years ago. The Boji^ Lioudi (men of God), the scanty 
 adherents of one of the innumerable sects which swarm 
 in Russia, looked up to him as their leader. In a very curi- 
 ous letter, addressed to one of your commentators, M. 
 Schroeder — the letter itself, I believe, has never been pub- 
 lished, but a rough draft of it in French has been sent 
 me by one of your most fervent admirers, M. Salomon, 
 whose kindness I here acknowledge — you deny that you 
 ever were the disciple of this master, or that you ever 
 accepted the teachings of Bondarev, another apostle of 
 the same stamp, who is also supposed to have taught you 
 his particular catechism. Not, you add, that you are 
 unwilling to owe anything to a humble moujik, but that 
 you are privileged to know and comprehend the teach- 
 ings of the greatest of all Masters, Jesus Christ. When 
 you quoted the names of these men of simple mind, your 
 only object was to testify that their conversation had given 
 you more glimpses of the truth than all the learned 
 books you had ever read. But does not this justify the 
 verdict of Max Nordau ? At the present moment your 
 preference lies with the Doukhobortsy (spiritual strugglers), 
 although your prejudice against the union of the sexes 
 would rather bring you into connection with the Theo- 
 dosians, and your ascetic habits draw you closer to the 
 Molokanes (milk-drinkers), another sect of the Raskol. 
 You are aware that this latter party also claims to have 
 rediscovered the true doctrine of Christ, and that the 
 teaching of the Doukhobortsy is extremely vague, so vague, 
 indeed, that when Professor Novitski, of the Ecclesias- 
 tical Academy at Ki^v, succeeded, in 1882, in collecting 
 some information on the subject, the book in which he 
 
39<5 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 embodied it was immediately adopted as its catechism by 
 the sect, so that the price ran up to fifty roubles per copy. 
 One of the officers whose duty it has been to enforce 
 reasonable behaviour on these unfortunate people, who, 
 as is well known, refuse to perform military service and to 
 pay taxes, and thus necessitate the employment of repres- 
 sive measures which the Government itself regrets more 
 than any one else, has described them to me in a manner 
 which places them in a tolerably favourable light. They 
 are a set of visionaries, not without sympathetic qualities, 
 and capable, in their ingenuous simplicity, of a certain 
 moral greatness. He related the following colloquy to 
 me : — 
 
 " You will be sent to Siberia, a terrible country^ where 
 not even a dog can find a living ! " 
 
 " Does God live there ? " 
 
 Send money to these honest folk if you will, but tell 
 us of Katioucha ! 
 
 I have said my say, and I well-nigh repent that I have 
 ventured to address you. For memory tells me that, for 
 the last twenty or thirty years, your teaching, if it has 
 occasionally flown in the face of reason, has held its own 
 against other and less patient authorities — authorities 
 which command millions of wills and millions of con- 
 sciences, and which no man before you has ever braved 
 with impunity. And I remember that your ideas and 
 even your art, marvellous as it is, count for little com- 
 pared with the example you have set, and the date you 
 have so nobly written in the history of your country. 
 With it you inaugurate the reign of that mighty power of 
 freedom which — whatever your Slavophils may say, and 
 whatever you yourself may think — has renewed the face 
 of the Western world, and is predestined to transfigure 
 
TOLSTOr 397 
 
 that of your beloved Russia. Your share in this work has 
 been magnificently borne. You are a very great man, 
 and my criticisms are infinitely small, but you will for- 
 give them, for the sake, and in the name, of the very 
 principle you represent. 
 
 A popular picture by Ridpine represents the master 
 of lasnaia Poliana, driving a plough drawn by a 
 white horse, across the plain, and leading another 
 horse, harnessed to a harrow, behind him. With his 
 white kaftan, open at the breast, his fur cap and high 
 boots, he looks like Ilia of Mourom, the great legendary 
 toiler, the clearer of the national soil. And something 
 of this there is in the reality with which the legend is 
 fused ; — waving harvests will grow, I doubt not, out 
 of the furrow ploughed by Leo Nicolai^vitch. But what 
 grain will he have sown, drawn from what heavenly 
 granary ? Doubt overwhelms me, or rather, I should 
 say, an all too evident sense of nothingness weighs me 
 down. And thus I reach the close of this too short in- 
 vestigation of the sphere of intellect in contemporary 
 Russia. The French writer who preceded me in this 
 work, now over ten years ago, built high hopes on its 
 result. " Days of famine and weakness," he wrote, 
 "have fallen upon the country of Pascal, Chateaubriand, 
 and Michelet. The Russians have come to us in the 
 nick of time. If any power of digestion remains to us, 
 we shall strengthen our blood at their expense. Let me 
 remind those inclined to blush at the idea of owing any- 
 thing to the Barbarians that the intellectual world is one 
 huge association for mutual help and charity. . . . May 
 Heaven grant that this Russian soul may do good service 
 to our own 1 " 
 
 Years have rolled on, and no apparent response has 
 
398 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 been made to M. de Vogue's expectation. Another writer 
 of the same nationahty has lately pointed out, that 
 though evident traces of the imitation of Russian models 
 do exist, as regards form, in the work of Bourget, Mau- 
 passant, and some other novelists, there has been no 
 corresponding incursion of fecundating thought into 
 French intelligence as a whole. " Whose fault " ? I 
 would inquire, in the words which form the title of cer- 
 tain studies of society, popular in Russia. The answer 
 seems to me to be contained in the closing pages of M. 
 de Vogue's volume — wherein, with a certain amount of 
 contradiction, but with most meritorious frankness, the 
 author casts away his earlier confidence, and registers 
 his final disappointments. Should any, among all those 
 creators of ideas on whose talents he had been led to 
 found his belief in the regenerative power of the " Rus- 
 sian Soul," have justified his confidence so fully as Tol- 
 stoi ? But here are his conclusions. " In vain do we 
 seek a single original idea in the revelation offered to us 
 by the apostle of Toula. We only find the first prattlings 
 of rationalism in religion, and of Communism in social 
 matters. The old dream of the Millennium, the tradition 
 preserved since the earliest Middle Ages, by the Vaudois, 
 the Lollards, and the Anabaptists. Happy Russia ! where 
 such chimeras still seem fresh and new." 
 
 Worn out chimeras, alas ! and valiant repetitions ! 
 Tolstoi sends us back what we ourselves have been able 
 to bestow upon his country, with a few rags of fresh 
 finery cast over our old tattered garments. There is 
 nothing surprising in the fact that under a disguise which 
 is often whimsical, and occasionally absurd, the West 
 failed to recognise some of the noblest fruits of its own 
 loins, even that human compassion which many of us, 
 
LI^SKOV 399 
 
 forgetful of the "divine" George Sand, have chosen 
 to ascribe to her Russian imitators. The extraordinary 
 thing is, that hideous caricatures should have been ac- 
 cepted as exquisite revelations. The Russians themselves 
 make no mistake about the matter, and Dostoievski, 
 rather than deny the paternity of the author of Consuelo, 
 has preferred to annex her to his own country, and deli- 
 berately call her " a Russian force." The expression will 
 be found in his writings. 
 
 Yet, amidst the common poverty of this poor huma- 
 nity of ours, the garment counts for something. And 
 my closing and personal dictum shall be as follows. 
 Modern Russia has produced men possessing a marvel- 
 lous power of calling up pictures. She has not, as yet, 
 produced an entirely original thinker. From the intel- 
 lectual point of view, she has lived, hitherto, on the capital 
 of the West, and even a century of effort has hardly en- 
 abled her to assimilate, with occasional perversions, the 
 heterogeneous elements thus obtained. Yet, on her own 
 side, she has contributed certain methods of thought, and 
 more especially certain methods of feeling, which her 
 European neighbours do not, up to the present moment, 
 appear capable of incorporating. But what is a century, 
 after all, in the evolution of a human race ? and how 
 much longer a period had to elapse before the West 
 itself could recreate and appropriate the intellectual 
 inheritance of ancient Greece or Rome ? 
 
 Tolstoi has not founded any literary school, properly 
 so called, in his own country. The Russian who, after 
 having previously followed in the steps of Chtch^drine, 
 appeared at one moment to have advanced farther than 
 any other in the path marked out by the " Prophet 
 of Toula," is an author who is scarcely known to 
 
400 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 foreign readers, and who deserves better fortune. 
 N. S. LifiSKOV (1831-1895), a very productive writer 
 and novelist, made a somewhat tardy appearance in 
 the world of letters. Until 1861, he travelled, both 
 in Russia and abroad, as the agent of an English 
 merchant, Mr. Scott. About this period he revealed 
 his powers of literary criticism in a somewhat severe 
 review of Tchernichevski's novel, What is to be Done? 
 Shortly afterwards two novels, published under the 
 pseudonym of Stebnitski, The Blind Alley {Nie'kouda), 
 and The Islanders {Ostrovitani^) proved him a resolute 
 opponent of revolutionary ideas, against which he en- 
 deavoured to set up an ideal of practical activity. This 
 ideal was somewhat misty in its nature, and is certainly 
 not attained by the heroine of one of his stories — a modern 
 Lady Macbeth, whose series of crimes, the object of 
 which is to bring her nearer to her lover, lead her on to 
 suicide. The general note struck in these early works 
 is somewhat melancholy ai:id pessimistic, and this deepens 
 in Good and Evil Fortune, and in The Bewitched Traveller 
 (Otcharovannyi Stranmk), in which a curious figure, a 
 kind of Russian Gil Bias, is made the pretext for an 
 exceedingly varied and interesting, but by no means flat- 
 tering, series of descriptions of the national life. In its 
 pages we meet with an "Arbiter of Peace," who serves 
 the cause of education by levying contributions on the 
 schools, and a provincial Governor, whose dream is to 
 conquer Europe, and transfer the seat of his administra- 
 tion to Paris ! Gogol and Saltykov themselves could 
 have given us nothing better. 
 
 Yet Lieskov is by no means a writer with a special 
 and deliberate tendency. When he began the great 
 novel which crowned his reputation, and endowed the 
 
LIl^SKOV 401 
 
 national literature with its first written description of 
 the life of the orthodox clergy, he certainly had no deli- 
 berate intention of finding fault. He was rather disposed 
 to sympathy and apology. In the person of the principal 
 character of The Priests {^Soborianii), the proto-pope, 
 Touberosov, he desired to draw an ideal ecclesiastic, 
 whose whole life and teaching were based on love of his 
 neighbour. Yet when we read this model priest's journal, 
 a painful impression of moral emptiness results. At the 
 beginning we find a few noble thoughts, but after these, 
 nothing but childishness, empty triflings, paltriness, and 
 not one single act of Christian charity. As a whole, it 
 constitutes a terrible bill of accusation. And Touberosov 
 does not stand alone. Close beside him we perceive 
 the deacon Achilles, a child of the Steppe, who hastily 
 casts off his sacerdotal garments, to betake himself to the 
 tavern, wrestle with strong men at a fair, or ride off 
 stark naked to the bath. And the strangely low level to 
 which this element of the national life appears to have 
 fallen inspires us with a fresh sensation of sadness and 
 disgust. 
 
 To escape from this himself, and satisfy his personal 
 religious feeling, which was very deep, Lieskov has been 
 tempted to go back to the earliest period of Christian 
 history for the subjects of his fine Egyptian legends, The 
 Mountain and The Fail' Aza, and here he has found him- 
 self on the same ground with Tolstoi. At the same 
 time, in a story entitled At the End of the World {Na 
 Kraiou Svi^td), he sketched the subject of Master and 
 Servant some twenty years before that tale appeared. 
 But Lieskov never dreams of excluding modern science 
 and culture from that practical activity of which he 
 conceives altruism to be the true foundation. On this 
 
402 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 point the divergence between his view and Tolstoi's is 
 clear and unmistakable. His legends are nothing but 
 allegories. He would like to see modern men full of 
 the spirit which animated the Christians of the heroic 
 times, but he believes this spirit can be adapted to the 
 forms of modern life, the superiority of which he does 
 not deny. 
 
 As a publicist, Lieskov showed particular activity in 
 and about the year 1880. He handled a great number of 
 questions, social, religious, and political ; and his studies 
 of the Rasko/ zttracted particular attention. 
 
 To such of my readers as may desire a sample of his 
 powers as a humorist, I would recommend Dear Love, 
 an entertaining portrait of a Russian country bumpkin, 
 who falls under the suspicion of Nihilism, because he 
 has fled across the frontier to escape the advances of 
 an English governess, who will insist on scenting him 
 with eau-de-Cologne ; with his wild beard, his mighty 
 appetite, and his half-savage instincts, he wanders up 
 and down the streets of Paris, discovering no charm 
 whatever in the marvels of civilisation he encounters. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 For the last ten years a sudden stoppage has taken place 
 in that intellectual current which had previously flowed 
 from Western to Eastern Europe, and whereby the 
 East had been giving back, under a new form, the ideas 
 drawn from the elder source. This system of exchange, 
 in which Western Europe certainly found an advantage 
 of its own, has now almost entirely disappeared. The 
 works of Tourgu^niev, Dostoievski, and Gontcharov still 
 are seen in the hands of French, English, and German 
 readers ; and Tolstoi's writings continue to find their way 
 across every frontier. But, even in these, foreign interest 
 is not so fresh and constant as in former days ; while 
 amongst the writers of the younger generation — and the 
 impression his writings have produced has been of a some- 
 what mixed description- — Tchekhov is almost the only one 
 whose work has even found admittance to foreign reviews. 
 All the rest remain utterly unknown. There is no de- 
 mand for anything they write. Have they nothing worth 
 offering ? The question is thus answered by a very 
 far-seeing critic, fellow-worker with M. Pypine in the 
 great History of Slav Literature, which has gained so 
 universal a reputation for its authors. In the European 
 Messenger, March 1888, M. Spasowicz writes as follows : — 
 " We have grown very poor in the matter of talent. 
 Our intellectual level has fallen. Our conception of the 
 
404 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 simplest problems of general existence has narrowed. 
 We have no ideal, whether in ethics or aesthetics ; utter 
 selfishness, naked and open, to the point of cynicism, 
 reigns supreme in our world of thought." 
 
 But where is the reason of this downfall ? I turn 
 to another Russian writer, M. Milioukov, a first-rate 
 historian, who acted for some years as literary critic to 
 the London AthencEum^ He likens the social life of his 
 own country to a river, the bed of which has been sud- 
 denly choked by some irremovable obstruction. And to 
 this he ascribes the consecutive phenomena of stagna- 
 tion, sterility, and corruption, apparent in the intellectual 
 and literary world. The existence of these phenomena 
 is only too evident. Even literary criticism has broken 
 with the glorious traditions of Bidlinski and Dobro- 
 lioubov. Messrs. Pypine and Skabitchevski forsake the 
 ungrateful soil of present-day production, and turn back 
 to the original sources of the national literature. Mik- 
 hailovski makes the character of Ivan the Terrible his 
 special study. And these princes of the critical art are 
 the elder men — the veterans of bygone literary battles. 
 The young ones do not even care to seek employment 
 for an activity which is steadily waning. Indifference 
 appears to overwhelm their souls, and a premature 
 senility seems the distinctive feature of their intellectual 
 temperament. Their organs, The Northern Messenger 
 and The Week, are devoted to the justification of this 
 state of mind, and the establishment of a theory on 
 which it may be based. One of them, M. Volynski, 
 in a thick volume published in 1895, has invoked the 
 teaching of Tolstoi in support of his repudiation of the 
 impassioned work of the great literary ancestors whose 
 names I have just mentioned, and his endeavour to steer 
 
STAGNATION 405 
 
 the younger generation into the path of the symbolists 
 and the decadents. 
 
 Frankly speaking, I have no belief in the existence 
 of the obstacle indicated by M. Milioukov — an obstacle 
 the nature of which may be easily divined — or, at all 
 events, I cannot admit the decisiveness of its effect on 
 surrounding circumstances. My readers will not suspect 
 me of any sympathy with the morally repressive system 
 which, under the reign of Nicholas II., recalls the 
 memories and examples left him by his dread ancestor. 
 But the very evocation of that bygone time prevents 
 me from sharing the view of the present held by the 
 brilliant contributor to the Athenmum. It was the reign 
 of Nicholas I., with all its severe measures, its Censor's 
 scissors, its handcuffs and its muzzles, the " cosy dun- 
 geons" reserved for Bielinski, the convict prisons that 
 opened their doors to Dostoievski, which witnessed the 
 mighty intellectual expansion to which Russian literature 
 owes its position in the civilised world. 
 
 His successor's rule has induced the recurrence of 
 another phenomenon, the consequences of which, as 
 regards the intellectual development of the country, are 
 somewhat serious. We observe a fresh stream of emi- 
 gration, similar to that which once carried such men 
 as Tchadaiev and Herzen to London and to Paris. 
 Milioukov, not so long ago, was teaching history at 
 Sophia. Kovalevski, who, like him, was reckoned one 
 of the most brilliant professors at the Moscow University, 
 has settled in France. A literary circle, comprising a 
 whole constellation of talent, driven far from its natural 
 centre, has gathered in Paris under the roof of M. Ivan 
 Chtchoukine, a young and learned man, whose future 
 seems full of brilliant promise. Here M. de Roberty, 
 
4o6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 whom M. Izoulet, the eminent professor of the College 
 de France, has lately hailed as one of his own masters, 
 expounds a somewhat subversive doctrine of sociology, 
 and a philosophy occasionally rather alarming in its 
 nature. Here M. Onieguine — the founder of a Pouch- 
 kine museum, which Parisian eyes have been the first 
 to behold — explains and comments on the works of his 
 beloved poet. Here may be met M. Skalkovski — a 
 statesman of importance, a writer enjoying great ad- 
 miration among his fellow-countrymen — with his spon- 
 taneous wit and inexhaustible stores of knowledge. 
 Thanks to these gentlemen, I have had three of the 
 richest possible Russian libraries at my command, on 
 the banks of the Seine. And a fourth, at Beaulieu, has 
 been collected by M. Kovalevski. I must not omit from 
 this list of self-made exiles the distinguished geographer. 
 General Venioukov, and M. Vyroubov, who at one time 
 collaborated with Littre, and edited the Revue de Philo- 
 sophie Positive with Robin (1867 to 1883). M. Vyroubov, 
 who is specially suited to the study of scientific prob- 
 lems, has devoted himself, latterly, to Natural Science. 
 One of the few Russians ,who, in recent times, has ac- 
 quired world-wide fame in connection with this last- 
 named branch of learning, M. Mietchnikov, has also 
 become a dweller in France. The Russian novel, too, has 
 representatives in that country, and it is in Paris and in 
 French that Countess Lydia Rostoptchine — daughter of 
 the Countess Eudoxia, referred to in an earlier chapter — 
 has published her latest stories. 
 
 But except for this resemblance, the present epoch 
 has nothing in common, from the intellectual point of 
 view, with the period the political traditions of which it 
 has reproduced. And hence, I believe, I have the right 
 
INERTIA 407 
 
 to conclude that these same traditions cannot be made 
 solely and directly responsible for the literary decadence 
 which has accompanied their present recrudescence. 
 The essential causes of this decadence appear to me to 
 h-e connected with a far more general order of things. 
 The method of progress which consists in an alternation 
 of forward leaps and stationary periods, is characteristic 
 both of the nature and of the known history of the 
 people once ruled by Peter the Great. In Russia, 
 when the elements of the national activity have been 
 worked up to an extreme point of tension and productive 
 energy, a sort of spontaneous decomposition always seems 
 to set in. The same phenomenon may be observed, 
 though on a more moderate scale, in western countries. 
 Recollect the period of comparative inertia and reaction 
 which followed, after 1850, on the intense intellectual 
 excitement of the preceding years in France. In Russia, 
 even as early as just after 1861, when the relatively liberal 
 system of Alexander II. was at its height, the Liberals 
 and the nai^odniki (friends of the people), otherwise the 
 agrarian socialists, who had marched shoulder to shoulder 
 under the banner of emancipation, fell apart, under the 
 influence of Slavophilism, which imparted its own special 
 colour to that love of the people more ostensibly pro- 
 fessed in one camp than in the other. 
 
 In the eyes of these Russian Socialists, who repudiate 
 all the history of their country subsequent to the reign of 
 Peter the Great, the populace, as it stands, constitutes the 
 Alpha and Omega of the national life. The Liberals, on 
 the other hand, look on the people as an ignorant and bar- 
 barous mass. The Liberals, therefore, sought political re- 
 forms, fitted to raise the intellectual level of the populace. 
 The Socialists cried out for social rtioxvn.%, and for the main- 
 27 
 
4o8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 tenance of the despotism founded on democracy. After 
 1871, a new group of Radical dissidents made its appear- 
 ance. This party held that to claim social reforms before 
 political reforms was to set the cart before the horse. It 
 adopted the theories of Karl Marx, and put forward the 
 principle that Capitalism was a necessary stage on the 
 road to Collectivism. Matters stood thus, when the 
 catastrophe of 1881 fell like a thunderbolt, literally choking 
 the nation's breath, and suspending its normal existence 
 for quite ten years, and the symptoms of decomposi- 
 tion already apparent grew worse and worse. In 1891, 
 the strain relaxed ; there was a kind of painful recoil, to 
 which society voluntarily adapted itself. A fresh out- 
 break of famine, another intervention on Tolstoi's part, 
 and the discussions arising therefrom, restored the public 
 mind to life. But at once the underhand conflict recom- 
 menced, between Vassili Vorontsov, editor of The Wealth of 
 Russia (Rousskoi^ Bogatstvo), Pypine, who contributed to 
 the European Messenger, and Soloviov, who forsook the 
 Slavophils for the Liberals, and declared himself an 
 agrarian individualist, a partisan of the system of great 
 properties, and an enemy of Collectivism. Then fresh 
 groups formed. There were Old CoUectivists or New 
 Collectivists, who, under Vorontsov's leadership, styled 
 themselves Populists, and endeavoured to prove that 
 Capitalism ruins the peasants by destroying their domestic 
 industries ; Individualists, followers of Marx and Engels, 
 and supporters of a philosophic doctrine known in Russia 
 as " Economic Materialism " ; Individualists, again, of the 
 new school of Soloviov, who preached a paradoxical 
 combination of Socialism and Materialism, supposed to 
 lead the modern world to a true understanding of the 
 Christian doctrine ; a philosophical Tower of Babel, 
 
DECADENCE 409 
 
 shaking on its foundations, and crumbling away in empty 
 arguments. Not one really productive idea, not a formula 
 that can be accepted by the general mind, always, and 
 in all places, division, molecular disaggregation, and, as 
 a necessary consequence, sheer inertia. 
 
 Another cause of this I see — also quite independent 
 of the political order of the day ; the development of 
 industrial enterprise, and the sudden rush of almost the 
 whole of the contemporary national force in that direc- 
 tion. The prodigies already performed are within general 
 knowledge. The valley of the Don has been transformed 
 into another Belgium ; the steel ribbon of the Trans- 
 Siberian railway rolls its length down to the very coasts 
 of the Pacific Ocean ! At the same time — and this is in 
 agreement with the present system of moral pressure 
 — the curriculum of the schools has been modified so 
 as to increase the amount of technical instruction, at the 
 expense of the time formerly given to general education ; 
 college pupils have no opportunity, now, for writing 
 verses. The statesmen who produced novels and com- 
 posed plays between two diplomatic missions have died 
 out. Nowadays, everybody builds factories ! 
 
 However that may be, at the present moment Russian 
 literature subsists principally on translations. In a 
 book published in 1892, and dealing with this decadence, 
 which nobody dreams of denying, the poet M^rechkovski 
 has made an effort of his own to lead the younger gene- 
 ration to adopt the esoteric formulae of the French sym- 
 bolism, in the hope that in them it may find the elements 
 of a fresh season, of springing growth. He appears to 
 have converted a few young writers. But they have 
 only found it still more difficult to catch the public ear. 
 My readers will guess that of the threefold inheritance 
 
4IO RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 left us by Pouchkine, Gogol, and Bi^linski, the legacy of 
 the first-named author is that which has suffered the 
 most noticeable loss. Speaking, in an earlier chapter, 
 of Nekrassov and Koltsov, I referred to the great lyric 
 current which issued from the intellectual whirlpool of 
 1840, and pointed out its limits. In the years between 
 1850 and i860, a subsidiary current appeared in the 
 satirical newspapers of that day — The Whistle, The 
 Spark, The Awakening — which seemed for a moment 
 to contain the germs of a school of political poetry in- 
 spired by Heine and Boerne. Towards 1870 this flood, 
 too, died away on the sand, and the whimsical work 
 of Kouzma Proutkov (the nom de plm7ie adopted by 
 Count A. Tolstoi and the brothers Jemtchoujnikov), 
 despite its popularity, is but a doubtful monument in 
 its honour, full of jokes and ironical artlessness, the point 
 of which is not always easily discovered. The editor of 
 The Whistle, V. S. Kourotchkine — the Henri Mounier of 
 Russia — has also won reputation by his translation of 
 Bdranger. This intellectual shrinkage, the symptoms 
 and causes of which I have endeavoured to explain, has, 
 on the other hand, given rise, in the domain of the 
 national poetry, to a phenomenon of which the literatures 
 of other European countries strike me as presenting no 
 example. 
 
 In an out-of-the-way corner — a sanctuary hemmed 
 about with silence and solitude — a knot of the elect still 
 carries on the worship of which, towards the close of 
 his career, Pouchkine had made himself High Priest. 
 These exponents of " art for art's sake," as he himself de- 
 scribed it, share his ignorance and scorn of the noise of the 
 outside world — the feelings and passions of that general 
 mass which, in its turn, knows naught of the mysteries 
 
THE SCHOOL OF POUCHKINE 411 
 
 they profess. What is the number of these worshippers? 
 I have made no close reckoning. The temple in which 
 they carry on their secret rite is certainly not a large 
 one. Our visit to it will not delay us long. On the 
 very threshold, a memory comes back to me, and a 
 shiver checks my forward course. Some years ago, I 
 went to pay a visit, in St. Petersburg, to a member of 
 the officiating priesthood of the tiny chapel. Just as 
 I was about to cross his threshold, my attention was 
 attracted by an inscription above the entrance-door. It 
 ran, Tiouremnoi^ OtdiMenie (Prisons Department), and I 
 was informed that the offices of the Prisons Adminis- 
 tration shared the edifice with those of the Censure — 
 and the Head of the Censure was the poet I had come 
 to seek ! Calling upon the shade of Lermontov, I beat 
 a hasty retreat ! I have been sorry for it since, for 
 in doing so I had turned my back on the sanctuary 
 itself. " What ? " you cry, " are all of them Censors, 
 jailers of human thought, carrying lyres in one hand 
 and scissors in the other, turning about from the altar 
 to sift out inappropriate pages ? " Yes ! Most of them, 
 alas ! and the most eminent ! Their art is delicate 
 indeed, but you cannot expect the sacred flame of their 
 inspiration to burn very high, seeing one of their chief 
 functions was to brandish the extinguisher ! None of 
 them are young at the present time. But were they ever 
 young ? Those in the first rank belong, or belonged 
 ■ — for death has made great gaps amongst them during 
 the last few years — to Bi61inski's generation. But no 
 one would suspect it, to so utterly different a world do 
 they appear to pertain. 
 
 In 1803, when Pouchkine was four years old, FlODOR 
 IvANOViTCH TiOUTCHEV was born, and he passed away in 
 
412 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 1876. What was he doing in 1822, when the author of 
 Eugene Oni^guine was passing into the starry orbit of 
 romanticism, and following the steps of Byron ? He 
 had just entered the diplomatic service, and left Russia, 
 whither he did not return till twenty ^'■ears later, when he 
 assumed the duties of Director of the Foreign Censorship. 
 During the interval, he published a translation of Horace, 
 and some poetry inserted in various periodicals, over the 
 signature of "T. T." 
 
 Up till the year 1854, his talents and his name were 
 equally unknown to the general public. But at that period, 
 Tourgueniev encouraged him to publish a work which 
 created a great sensation. Its dominant note, especially 
 in the pieces entitled Nature, Spring, An Autumn Even- 
 ing, and The Deserted Villa, is one of rigid and closely- 
 reasoned Pantheism. The poet never drops this note, 
 except in a few occasional pieces, in which his natural 
 frigidity appears to melt under the breath of Slavophilism. 
 In his address To my Slav Brothers, composed on the 
 occasion of the visit of the Slav deputies to the Ethnogra- 
 phical Exhibition at Moscow, in The Flag on the Bosphorus, 
 and in The Black Sea, he has given a bold support to Kho- 
 miakov. The famous dictum, "We cannot understand 
 Russia, we must believe in her," is his. The verses in 
 which it occurs lack neither strength nor beauty. Those 
 in which he has described Nature as it appears in Russia, 
 are almost equal to Pouchkine's best efforts in the same 
 style. But, to my thinking, they do not possess that name- 
 less something which constitutes the essential value of a 
 work of art ; there is no infectious emotion, no illumi- 
 nating power. And how wretched are those political 
 epigrams and aphorisms which have earned their author 
 the reputation of a wit ! To our modern ears, they 
 
TIOUTCHEV: MAIKOV 413 
 
 ring as false as an old-fashioned air played on a barrel 
 organ. 
 
 I may be mistaken in my judgment, for, though the 
 single volume which contains the author's complete work 
 left me cold and unresponsive, I have seen a Russian 
 reader shed tears over some of its pages. But the 
 number of his fellow-countrymen likely to share this 
 emotion is, I believe, a small one. Apart from his official 
 functions, and even in his manner of discharging them, 
 Tioutchev, so I have been assured, was a very honest 
 gentleman. In Russia, and even in France, he still re- 
 tains a certain following of admirers, who make up for 
 the smallness of their number by their fervour. He has 
 had a biographer, M. Akssakov, who has gone so far as 
 to describe him as a national ^odi, par excellence. I should, 
 no doubt, have some difficulty in convincing M. Akssakov 
 that a man who wrote French so well as to possess a 
 personal style of his own, and who neither boasted nor 
 slandered himself, like Pouchkine, when he declared that 
 he found it easiest to express himself in this language, 
 — that such an Occidental, in fact, cannot, in spite of his 
 undoubted talent, have been more than a skilful rhymester 
 in Russian. And M. Salomon, who is now preparing to 
 introduce the poet to French readers, by means of a 
 translation into which he has put all the conscientious- 
 ness and the art of his delicate literary talent, will not 
 thank me for expressing this conviction. 
 
 Last year witnessed the departure of one of Tioutchev's 
 most brilliant followers, Apollonius Nicolai£vitch 
 Maikov (1821-1898), who resided m Italy at the period of 
 the great literary struggles of the "forties,"could not make 
 up his mind whether he should take up painting or poetry, 
 and finally decided in favour of — the Directorship of the 
 
414 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Foreign Censure ! Yet his study of the Roman antiques 
 had inspired him with some attempts at art criticism 
 {Roman Sketches, 184.2), some anthological poetry, and 
 even certain more ambitious compositions in the epic style, 
 such as Savonarola, Clermont Cathedral, and The Queetis 
 Confession. They are frank imitations. After his return 
 to Russia, Maikov was absorbed by his professional duties. 
 The Censor's scissors were kept very busy just at that 
 period, until the Crimean War drove his ofHce into the 
 background and brought the poet down off the top of the 
 Column of Trajan, where he seemed to have fixed his home. 
 He published a book appropriate to the occasion, which he 
 called The Year 18^4., fell out with the West, and allowed 
 the Slavophil and Neo-Grecian current to carry him away. 
 This new stage of his literary career is marked by the 
 publication of two collections of Neo-Greek poetry, fol- 
 lowed, between i860 and 1880, by translations of old 
 Slavonic poems. By insensible degrees, Maikov was 
 drawn into the contemporary conflict of political thought 
 and passion. The Princess, the most original of his poetic 
 works, bears v'atness to this fact. A great Russian lady 
 has a daughter, the fruit of an intrigue with a Parisian 
 Jesuit. The girl, brought up away from her mother, 
 becomes a Nihilist. One evening, at a ball, the mis- 
 guided young creature comes to her mother, insists that 
 she shall supply her with certain important documents, and 
 threatens, if she refuses, to reveal the secret of her own 
 birth to the Third Section (the superior police). The 
 great lady faints away and dies — in stanzas of the most 
 correct description. I will not dwell upon the sub- 
 ject. The poet had certainly left his best inspiration on 
 the top of his column. He proved it, before his death, 
 by his completion of two lyric dramas, The Three Deaths, 
 
MAIKOV: FGETH 415 
 
 and The Two Worlds, the rough sketches of which had 
 I'emained among his papers since his Italian days, and 
 which may fairly be considered his best works. In both 
 these dramas, we see the struggle between the Greco- 
 Roman and the Christian world. In the first we have 
 the cold though well-modelled figures of three represen- 
 tatives of the expiring Pagan civilisation — Lucan, the poet; 
 Seneca, the philosopher ; and Lucius, the epicurean ; all 
 three condemned to death by Nero for their share in the 
 conspiracy of Piso. In The Two Worlds, the chief charac- 
 ters are Decius, the patrician, who poisons himself in 
 the midst of a banquet in his palace, and the tender and 
 dreamy Lida, who represents the Spirit of Christianity. 
 Between the two appears a witless Juvenal. It is a world 
 of statues, with all the polish and brilliancy of marble, 
 but soft and uncertain in outline. The artist's soul had 
 travelled back to the walls of Rome, but his hand seems 
 to have chiselled, not in the quarries of Carrara, but 
 in the ice of the Neva. The atmosphere of his gallery is 
 bitter cold. 
 
 Athanasius Athansidvitch Foeth (1815-1860), — his 
 father's name was Chenchine, and he was a natural son — 
 the author of translations, now forgotten, of Juvenal, 
 Horace, Goethe, and Shakespeare, stands, in his greater 
 delicacy and sentiment (French grace and German senti- 
 ment), a yet more isolated figure amongst the men and 
 things of his period. He cheerfully tuned his little flute 
 to the music of Petrarch, or Lessing, or that of the poet 
 of the rose gardens, the Persian Saadi. Forgetful, in his 
 retreat, of the tempest which was shaking most minds and 
 consciences, or unaware of its existence, he sang, for 
 thirty years, the beauty of fair women, the joy of life, the 
 charms of summer nights and winter landscapes {Even,' 
 
4i6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 ings and Nights and Snow-covered Fields), and wrote 
 madrigals for Ophelia. 
 
 Silence has fallen upon him. It has fallen, now, on 
 almost all those tuneful voices which till lately woke ever 
 so feeble an echo of the mighty harmonies of bygone 
 days. But a few months ago (October i8, 1898), death 
 laid his hand on James Petrovitch Polonski (1820-1898), 
 the friend of Tourgu^niev, the foster-child of the Idealist 
 circle at Moscow. His earliest collection of poetry, The 
 Scales, dates from 1844. Later he resided for a lengthened 
 period in the Caucasus, where he edited an official news- 
 paper, and published three more books, the last of which 
 bears the Georgian title of Sazandar ( The Bard). From 
 1856 to i860 he lived in Rome and Paris, and prepared 
 himself to imitate Tioutchev and Maikov by undertaking, 
 in his turn, the duties of the Censorship of the Foreign 
 Press, and sitting on the General Council of Press 
 Management. This did not prevent him from sending 
 poetical contributions to most of the literary organs of 
 the period, all of which welcomed him heartily, for he 
 belonged to no party. His earliest literary associations 
 had left him with a vague belief in the progressive 
 perfectibility of the national existence. He shared the 
 general disappointment, but found a melancholy con- 
 solation in a world of dreams which his fancy peopled 
 with ideals as delicate and fragile as children's toys. 
 Several of his poems, full of melody and ring, very 
 innocent, and so simple that the memory of a boy of 
 twelve years old may easily retain them, run a fair chance 
 of remaining popular. The most celebrated, which re- 
 minds one somewhat of Othon Roquette's Le Voyage de 
 Noces du Mattre Forestier, is entitled The Alusical Cricket. 
 The cricket falls in love with a nightingale's voice, con- 
 
NADSOHN 417 
 
 trives to discover the whereabouts of the bewitching bird, 
 joins company with it, and is promptly devoured ! In his 
 more ambitious compositions, Polonski's breath fails him. 
 He imitates Pouchkine's somewhat bourgeois style of 
 describing epic subjects — the Russian method, since the 
 publication of Eugene Oni^guine, but he possesses none 
 of that conviction of the superiority of poetic truth over 
 reflection which is the secret of the great master's power. 
 When he follows his own inspiration and his natural 
 humour, he occasionally stumbles on powerful and 
 original ideas. 
 
 And now the temple, haunted by the shade of the 
 great poet, takes on, more and more, the appearance of a 
 necropolis. But a few short years ago some sound and 
 tumult did re-echo across its dreary threshold. The 
 guardians of the sanctuary cast out the intruders, whom 
 the outer world would have borne in triumph beneath 
 its roof, and for whom plaudits still rang without the 
 walls. The face of one of these — reminding one of a 
 Christ in agony — still hovers before my eyes. His name 
 was Simon lakovl^vitch Nadsohn (1862-1886). Like his 
 comrades, Minski and Frug, he was a Jew. The last 
 edition of his poems, dated 1897, now lies upon my table. 
 It is the fifteenth ! So great a success is unprecedented 
 in the history of his country. Is it justifiable ? M. 
 Bour^nine would not forgive me if I said so. I will 
 merely affirm that it is natural. There is no strong per- 
 sonality either in his ideas or in his poetic form, but he 
 has fire, a ring of sincerity, a supple rhythm. The general 
 public asks nothing more. Is it in the wrong ? Are we 
 in a position to judge of that ? Nadsohn has won the 
 public heart. He has one capital fault — monotony. But 
 is that a fault, in Russia ? We seem to listen to some 
 
41 8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 single-stringed instrument from which the musician can 
 only draw one solitary note — a long-drawn sob. " Ah ! 
 I ask but little of fate ^ ..." There is an anguish more 
 terrible than torture." . . . " T think I am going mad." 
 . . . "/ have dreamed of death." . . . " Muse ! I die — a 
 foolish and impious death" . . . " / know a corner in 
 the graveyard hard by." . . . Conceive four hundred 
 pages of poetry all in this vein ! but the poet was only 
 twenty, and he knew himself doomed to the merciless 
 and tragic fate of his peers — ^the fate of Lermontov, and 
 Koltsov, and Garchine. He felt he was dying, and that 
 mud would be cast upon his half-closed tomb. Not his 
 talent only, but his honour was attacked. And further, 
 what better excuse could he have had than the enthu- 
 siastic reception given him by the public ? Has not 
 M. Bourdnine divined its true meaning ? Can he hesi- 
 tate to accept it as proof that the single note of a 
 lyre so soon to be broken, that bitter cry of despair and 
 death agony, touched a sympathetic chord, one which no 
 criticism can silence, in many thousands of human souls. 
 The unhappy young man betook himself to Yalta, to seek 
 relief from a pulmonary malady. The treacherous attacks 
 and insinuations showered upon him tended largely, so 
 the doctors have declared, to hurry on his end ; and by 
 the first and last favour of that Fortune who was to him 
 a cruel stepmother, the steamship Pouchkine carried back 
 his ashes to Odessa. His grave, close to those of Dos- 
 toievski and Bidlinski, swallowed up yet another vanished 
 hope. And silence, darker and more gloomy than ever, 
 fell round the forsaken temple. 
 
 The series of catastrophes, which, from Batiouchkov 
 onwards, have checked the upward flight of so many 
 brilliant careers, can hardly be attributed to mere chance. 
 
GARCHINE 419 
 
 They bear all the appearance of what we may call a 
 regular phenomenon, induced by permanent causes, a 
 wind of destruction, which sweeps across the huge plain 
 on which Nadsohn's complaint found so persistent an 
 echo. I turn from poetry, to follow the most recent 
 exemplifications of the novelist's art, and once again I 
 stumble across a grave. 
 
 When I said that Leo Tolstoi had founded no school 
 in his own country, I did not dream of overlooking the 
 influence he has exercised, more especially from the 
 artistic point of view. This influence is evident in the first 
 literary efforts of VsifivOLOD Michailovitch Garchine 
 (1855-1885). I do not refer to an Essay on Death, a 
 school-boy composition written when he was seventeen, 
 and remarkable for a sense of realism astonishing for 
 that age. " Well, I must die ! and then ? it is time to 
 go to rest. Only it is a pity I cannot finish my theme. 
 Supposing you did it for me, you are a mathematician ! 
 . . . E. F. was dying of an illness which has been the 
 death of many men, kind and clever, strong and weak. 
 He was a terrible drunkard. . . . He was a very little man, 
 very ugly, with a cadaverous complexion." . . . Garchine 
 was an infant prodigy, and at a very early period 
 the balance of his mental faculties was in danger. As 
 a young man he was a prey to hallucinations, and fits 
 of unhealthy excitement, interspersed with the noblest 
 inspirations. He loathed war, and yet insisted on bear- 
 ing his part in the campaign of 1876, so that he might 
 share the fate of the unfortunate creatures sent out to 
 suffer and to die. This was his manner of " going out 
 amongst the people." He received a bullet wound at 
 the battle of Aiaslar, and related his experiences in The 
 Four Days, a work which has been flatteringly compared 
 
420 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 with the Memories of Sevastopol. A few months later, an 
 attempt was made on the life of Loris Melikov, and the 
 gallows threatened one of the poet's friends. During 
 the night before the execution, Garchine made desperate 
 efforts to prevent it ; he failed, and soon after it became 
 necessary to place him in a lunatic asylum. He re- 
 covered, and married a young lady, who practised as a 
 doctor, and employed all her skill to prevent a recurrence 
 of his attack. But before long the readers of his Red 
 Flower were forced to the conclusion that the young 
 author was still haunted by memories of the time spent 
 in the madhouse. The story describes a demented 
 person, half-conscious of his condition, who wears him- 
 self out in superhuman efforts to gain possession of a 
 red poppy — reddened, as he imagines, by the blood of 
 all the martyrdoms of the human race. If the flower 
 were only destroyed, he thinks, humanity would be 
 saved. A few years later, Garchine threw himself over 
 the staircase, and was killed. 
 
 Some of his works, expatiating on the uselessness 
 and monstrous cruelty of war, are directly inspired by 
 Tolstoi. To his master he owes his very elevated doc- 
 trine and his exceedingly delicate aesthetic sense. His 
 Four Days, a terrifying picture of a wounded Russian 
 left tete-a-tete with the rotting corpse of a dead Turk, is 
 as full of detail as a picture by Verechtchaguine, and he 
 is believed to have been influenced by that master of 
 pictorial realism. You will not find a single disgusting 
 detail. Like Tolstoi, the author of The Red Flower 
 delights in allegory ; for assuredly, the execution of the 
 bears condemned to death by the police, and executed 
 by their masters, the wandering gipsies, described in the 
 tale named after those harmless Plantigrades, is allegorical 
 
GARCHINE 421 
 
 in intention. We find anothei" instance in the story of 
 the Attalea Princeps, an exotic plant which pines to 
 break the hothouse in which it is shut up. At the very 
 nnoment when its end is attained and its proud crest 
 shatters the glass dome which protects it from the frost, 
 the winter sky chills it from above, and, at its base, it 
 feels the sharp teeth of the saw, which, by the head- 
 gardener's command, rids the conservatory of its too 
 ambitious presence. The ideas thus symbolised are 
 somewhat obscure. 
 
 In The Coward ( Trouss), Garchine goes even further 
 than Tolstoi in the direction taken by the Doukho- 
 bortsy. He depicts a soldier who protests furiously 
 against the necessity of being killed, or trying to kill 
 his fellow-creatures, but who does his duty none the 
 less, and dies, rifle in hand, in very simple and heroic 
 fashion. The Russian talent for dying worthily was one 
 of Garchine's favourite ideas from his youth up. His 
 very wide humanity, his hatred for everything that 
 causes suffering, his sympathy for life's failures, whether 
 innocent or guilty, follows him into his novels on social 
 questions. But his talent is marred by his excessive, 
 though thoroughly honest, pessimism. The victors, the 
 fortunate individuals whom he brings before us, are all, 
 without exception, very shabby characters. Such are 
 Di^dov, in The Artists, and the engineer who has grown 
 rich in The Meeting. Riabinine, Diedov's less fortunate 
 friend, curses his art, and turns his back upon it, after 
 seeing, during a visit to a factory, a workman crouched in 
 a boiler, and pressing his chest against the rivets while 
 his foreman strikes them with his hammer. Garchine's 
 most attractive type (probably autobiographic in its 
 nature) is that of a man who is doomed to suffering, and 
 
422 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 who looks at life with a feeling of painful impotence ; a 
 man with no belief in happiness, no power of being 
 happy, inspired by a deep love for the human race, and 
 an equal and almost feminine horror of life's struggle. 
 When he is forced to struggle, even to save the 
 woman he loves froni misery — as in the novel entitled 
 Nadiejda Nikolaievna — he is incapable of anything but 
 suffering without a murmur, until a pistol shot ends 
 it all. 
 
 Garchine is no declaimer, he gives us no showy tirades 
 or phrases. His humanitarian ideas connect him with 
 the intellectual current of the sixties, and his preference 
 for heroes who always stand out above the common herd, 
 men either of high intelligence or a strong character, 
 distinguishes him from Tolstoi, and draws him closer to 
 Tourgudniev and the traditions of the romantic school. 
 This feature, as well as his care for artistic completeness 
 and his preference for short stories, in which that is 
 more easily attained, he also shares with his imitator 
 Vladimir Korou^nko. 
 
 This writer, who was born in i860, has hitherto pub- 
 lished only one really considerable story. It numbers 
 150 pages, and is entitled The Blind Musician. This, 
 with his The Forest Whispers, and lom-Kipour, forms 
 part of a cycle of compositions, the scene of which is laid 
 in South-Western Russia, whereas his Tales of a Siberian 
 Tourist call up the snow-covered landscapes of the north, 
 and the exiles and convicts there to be found. Koro- 
 lidnko himself made involuntary acquaintance with exile, 
 brought about by the most trifling of political peccadilloes. 
 In all these stories the moral teaching is identical, and 
 strongly resembles that we have already noticed in the 
 case of Garchine — sympathy felt with the weak and the 
 
KOROLI^NKO 423 
 
 hardly used, and no clear distinction drawn between 
 the innocent and the guilty. 
 
 The novelist's reputation dates from the publication 
 of his Dream of Macaire, 1885 — a fanciful story, which 
 winds up with the judgment of a drunkard peasant by a 
 heavenly tribunal. Whether the heaven be that of the 
 Gospel or that of Siberian legend is not made abundantly 
 clear. The Russian pviblic thirsts for poetry ; it eagerly 
 quaffed the cup offered it by Koroli^nko, without looking 
 too closely at the bottom. That which lies at the bottom 
 of the cup does not, in this author's case, possess a 
 perfect lucidity. His figures are like Murillo's beggars. 
 But he possesses the art of escaping triviality by never 
 lingering over external detail longer than is absolutely 
 necessary to the realisation of his types. Dostoievski's 
 influence is clearly visible in the Tales of a Siberian 
 Tourist. To it we owe some very doubtful portraits of 
 good ruffians. But this is a mere passing error. The 
 tales entitled The Old Ringer and An Easter Night, which 
 belong to the same group, betray nothing of this kind. 
 The exquisite language, the transparently brilliant colour- 
 ing, and the picturesque imagery of these stories recall 
 Tourgudniev's Poems in Prose, and no greater praise can 
 be ascribed to any author. The soldier of the guard, 
 who, in spite of himself, becomes the murderer of the 
 escaped convict, whom he brings down by a shot from 
 his rifle, just as the distant bells ring out the Easter ves- 
 pers, attracts our sympathy even more strongly than his 
 victim. Korolienko reached a height, here, which he was 
 unfortunately not destined to maintain. The men of his 
 generation soon lose their breath ; it may be because 
 they find so little air that they can breathe. In lom- 
 Kipour (the Jewish Day of Expiation), which relates how 
 
 23 
 
424 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 a Little-Russian miller, good Christian though he .is, 
 narrowly escapes being carried away by the devil, in the 
 place of the Jewish tavern-keeper lankiel, because, like 
 him, he has tried to make money out of the poof peasants 
 ■ — a very true and deep idea is embodied in a most 
 delightful description of local manners and customs. 
 But all the other pieces in the same collection are pale 
 in colour and empty in conception. The Blind Musician, 
 who attempts to reproduce the sensations of sight by 
 means of sounds, is an attempt, and a fresh failure, to 
 work out a psychological subject, which had attracted 
 inany writers before Koroli^nko's time. 
 
 The Russian novelist has hoped to replace the lack 
 of substance in his writings by lyrical fire ; but his 
 enthusiasm is cold and without emotion. 
 
 In On the Road and Two Points of View, Tolstoi's 
 influence, following on that of Dostoievski, impels the 
 author in his search for some moral principle as the 
 basis of our common ' existence. The traveller who 
 has lately escaped from a Siberian prison, and is strain- 
 ing every nerve to escape innumerable dangers and 
 regain his home, stops suddenly short. A doubt has 
 overwhelmed him. Why should he fly ? Why go there 
 rather than elsewhere ? and Korolienko is soon deep in 
 the analysis of the wavering spirit of the men of his 
 generation. A young man sees one of his friends killed 
 in a railway accident ; so struck is he by this event that 
 he arrives at last, through a series of questions, at a 
 completely mechanical conception of existence. What 
 is the use of thought or love ? and he forsakes a young 
 girl, whose affections he has won, until the unhappy 
 creature's sufferings reveal the true meaning of life to 
 his case-hardened soul. 
 
NOVELISTS 425 
 
 All this, finished as it is as far as the form goes, is 
 very incomplete in conception, and for some years past 
 Koroli6nko seems to have taken a fancy to a still more slip- 
 shod method of work. He has published notes collected 
 in the Government of Nijni-Novgorod, in the course of 
 one of those famines which from time to time afflict the 
 provinces of the great empire ; and after a journey to 
 England, he made known his impressions of a stormy 
 sitting in Parliament. But all this may not unfairly be 
 called mere reporter's work. 
 
 The favour of the Russian public is now bestowed 
 on another group of novelists, far removed from Tolstoi 
 and his views of morality and art. The lovers of aesthetic 
 delights, and the eager reformers of the forties and the 
 sixties, have given place to a new generation of readers, 
 whose chief desire is to be amused or startled, and who 
 are not over particular as to the quality of the work which 
 gives them the desired sensation. Messrs Boborikine and 
 Potapienko are amongst those who best understand how 
 to satisfy this need. The first named (born 1836) is a bold 
 follower after prevailing fashions. For a considerable 
 period he has published a novel every year, and he has 
 never failed to touch on the topic of the moment. In 
 the last I have read, that published in 1897, and entitled 
 In Another Manner, I find references to the latest fashion- 
 able philosophic formula, Economic Materialism. Except 
 for the difference in talent, the author's method is that 
 of Tourgueniev in Fathers and Children. But the spirit 
 of the work is very dissimilar. It is affected by the in- 
 differentist theories of The Week. In The Turning, which 
 dates from 1894, my readers will find a very curious 
 panorama of the variations of philosophy and literature 
 since the year 1840. M. Boborikine makes no selection 
 
426 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 of his own, and does not suggest that his readers should 
 make any. 
 
 M. Potapidnko, whose celebrity only dates from 1891, 
 is a great discoverer of dramatic situations. Generally 
 speaking, he leaves them where he finds them. The 
 failure of certain of his novels doubtless arises from this 
 last peculiarity ; for the author has naturalness, feeling, 
 freshness of impression, and a delicate observation. 
 Occasionally he shows a philosophic intention. In Sins 
 (1896) he even strikes me, in his somewhat coarse expo- 
 sure of the hypocritical virtue of a father, before the art- 
 less eyes of his children, as following up the furrow 
 traced by the toiler of lasnaia Poliana. Like their rivals of 
 the other group, these observers of life through a reversed 
 opera-glass prefer very small frames for their pictures. 
 If they do chance to choose a larger setting, they only 
 succeed in bringing together a succession of tiny facts 
 and exiguous impressions, which remind one of those 
 strings of dried mushrooms that grace the shop front 
 of every Russian provision merchant. The star of this 
 school is M. TCHfiKHOV. 
 
 I am tempted to describe this young writer as having 
 hitherto proved himself a first-rate artist in an inferior style. 
 And further, he has been living, since 1885, on a promise 
 which threatens to become a disappointment. Has he 
 given us his last word ? I cannot tell. The personal 
 impression he left on me about a year ago, after all too 
 short an interview, was that of a man of a very thought- 
 ful and retiring nature. His first attempts, published in 
 one of the least important of the St. Petersburg news- 
 papers, revealed a most successful search after simplicity, 
 a natural gift for fitting his form to his subject, a regret- 
 table taste for coarse humour, and a dangerous tendency 
 
TCKEKHOV 427 
 
 to the drawing of arabesques upon an invisible back- 
 ground. In a collection of tales published, at a later 
 period, in book form, the young writer's range of vision 
 appears raised and widened. He touches on psycho- 
 logical conflicts {The Sorceress and Agatha) and even 
 on social problems {The Enemies and The Nightmare), 
 — elements in the drama of existence which he had 
 hitherto seemed to ignore. These matters are glanced 
 at, rather than squarely faced, in The Twilight, — 
 such is the title of the collection. The half-tints, 
 the vague hints, the hasty abridgments, of which 
 the author makes use, were accepted, at that time, 
 as an ingenious artifice, deliberately employed. But 
 on this point Tch^khov's admirers were soon unde- 
 ceived. In The Steppe he undertook a canvas on a 
 larger scale, and it was noticed, with astonishment, 
 that his method remained unchanged. He still gave 
 sketches ; passing impressions hastily noted down ; 
 scenes strung one after the other, without any apparent 
 bond of continuity ; vague outlines ; and not one vigor- 
 ous touch or clear-cut figure. No ! not even that of 
 Egorouchka, the principal character of the book, — a 
 nine-year-old boy, whom his father takes to school 
 across the Steppe, and who describes the landscapes 
 seen during his journey. The method of describing the 
 scene — quite that of Tourgu6niev, a deliberate confu- 
 sion of the child's ideas and sentiments with his feel- 
 ings of nature and with his inner sensations — creates a 
 still stronger impression of artificiality as seen in Tchdk- 
 hov's work. Egorouchka hears a song, and cannot see 
 the singer. At once he imagines this plaintive voice to 
 be that of the grass, already half burnt up by the sum- 
 mer heat. The grass sings and weeps ; it tells some 
 
428 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 other invisible being that it has not deserved the fate 
 which has overtaken it, that the cruel sun does wrong to 
 devour it, so young as it still is, so fair as it might yet 
 grow, so passionately as it clings to life ! The effect of 
 this lyric effort might possibly be considerable, but for 
 the presence of Egorouchka, whom nobody can suppose 
 capable of so much imagination. A moment's reflection 
 detects the poet's artifice, and thus his endeavour is in 
 vain. The story ends when the child reaches the town 
 where he is to enter school. The panorama of the great 
 Steppe, which thus fills the whole picture — with its 
 huge plains, its picturesque encampments, its dirty 
 taverns, and their heterogeneous crowd of travellers, 
 rough drovers, filthy Jews, and elegant fine ladies — bears 
 witness to a care for detail carried even into trifling 
 minutiae. How is it that the truth of this laborious 
 realism carries no conviction to my mind ? It may be 
 the Polish countess who has stirred my suspicion, 
 Polish countesses receive, as a rule, but scurvy treat- 
 ment at the hands of Russian novelists. And it is no 
 part of my duty to defend them here. But I can 
 assure M. Tchekhov that not one has ever addressed 
 any man, whether her lover or another, by his first 
 two names, according to the essentially Russian cus- 
 tom. The touch in itself is of no importance. But it 
 is the importance ascribed in Tchekhov's work, and in 
 that of the new school, to such touches, nine out of ten 
 of which are utterly incorrect, which causes me distress. 
 The author of The Steppe would have done far better if 
 he had clearly indicated the general idea of his com- 
 position. Did he aim at the symbolisation of the 
 general aspect of life, and the apparent absence of 
 connection between the phenomena which go to 
 
TCHEKHOV 429 
 
 make it up ? I have no idea. Perhaps he has none, 
 either. 
 
 In the author's other stories, A Melancholy Tale, A 
 Stranger's Story, and Room No. 6, I do, on the contrary, 
 perceive an effort to seize the meaning of these pheno- 
 mena, and throw them into striking and typical form. 
 In the last-named work, Tchdkhov even seems to take up 
 arms in an unexpected revulsion of feeling against that 
 indifferentism which constitutes the badge and the essen- 
 tial dogma of his school, and the affinity of which with 
 Tolstoi's theory of non-resistance, nobody can fail to 
 recognise. The hero of this tale is a hospital doctor, 
 who treats his patients by scepticism. Room No. 6 is 
 set apart for persons mentally affected. It is a filthy 
 hole, where nobody gets enough to eat, except the bugs. 
 This does not prevent the sceptical medico from assuring 
 his patients that they are just as well off there as any- 
 where else, seeing it is a matter of perfect indifference 
 whether they dwell in the open air, or are shut up in a 
 cell, and whether their food is good or bad, not to mention 
 the thumps administered by Nikita, their keeper. A day 
 comes at last, when, the doctor having been himself 
 ordered to undergo his former patients' so-called cure, 
 Nikita bestows the same treatment upon him, and he 
 dies of it. 
 
 The Melancholy Tale has been the most successful of 
 all these works (1889). My readers must imagine two per- 
 sons of absolutely different character and condition, the 
 man a savant, the woman an actress, whom chance has 
 thrown together, who are soon still more closely bound 
 by their common sense of the vanity of life, and whose 
 communion leads them, on parallel lines, one to loathe 
 his science, and the other to loathe her art. Such part- 
 
430 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 nerships do not, fortunately, form part* of Western habits. 
 And their result, as presented to us by Tch^khov, is not 
 conclusive. For Katia has no talent, and her protector 
 strikes us as being a thorough simpleton. In the course 
 of the book, the author makes an attack upon modern 
 Russian literature. The savant reads nothing in his 
 leisure time but French novels. They do not altogether 
 satisfy him, but they are less tiresome than those pub- 
 lished in Russia, and at all events they contain the essen- 
 tial element of all artistic creation — that sentiment of 
 individual liberty, of which not a trace remains in the 
 Russian writers of the last ten or fifteen years. But 
 might not this learned man indulge in a more serious 
 kind of reading ? He does, but not in Russian. Russian 
 books of the serious order are written in Hebrew, as far 
 as he is concerned. 
 
 I have no intention of making myself responsible 
 for this sally, but it may assist my readers in verifying 
 the judgments I offer for their acceptance. 
 
 Tchekhov's capital fault is the absence of any natural 
 and organic connection between the characters he de- 
 picts, and between the action and the denouement of 
 his stories. This drawback is evident even in A 
 Stranger s Story, which — and this is a fresh surprise — 
 almost carries us back to the literary school of 1840. 
 This Stranger, who has mysterious reasons, the secret 
 of which we shall never know, for his enmity against 
 an exalted personage, takes service as valet with the 
 great man's son, in order that he may kill the father. 
 Instead of perpetrating murder, he commits abduction. 
 His enemy has a mistress, whom he is just about to 
 forsake. The Stranger, touched with pity, carries her 
 across the frontier. But she has no love for him. He 
 
TCHfiKHOV 431 
 
 is stung with remorse, and knows not which way to turn. 
 Here we have another " superfluous man " ; but who is 
 he ? 
 
 Tch^khov's latest works, My Life and The Gabled 
 House, prove him to be less and less capable of supplying 
 clear answers to the questions he is so fond of multiplying. 
 It is now quite evident, indeed, that he has missed his path. 
 Sometimes we find him following Tolstoi's latest move- 
 ment, sometimes on the track of the French symbolists 
 and decadents, and then suddenly, in The Peasants, he 
 executes a step backward in the direction of Gogol and 
 Tourgudniev. A waiter in a Moscow restaurant falls 
 ill, travels home to his old village, finds there is no place 
 for him there now, and dies in his despair. The coarse- 
 ness and savagery of rural habits are here set forth 
 with extraordinary power. But the picture is thoroughly 
 repulsive. There is no artistic feeling in it. That feel- 
 ing existed, unconsciously, in Gogol's case, and more 
 consciously in that of Tourgu^niev, in the impression 
 they both give us that their moujiks possess hearta and 
 souls, worthy of another and a better fate. Tch^khov's 
 peasants are heavy brutes, without purity of moral sense, 
 nor any thought of the hereafter. 
 
 Tch6khov has also written for the stage. He has pub- 
 lished a drama, Ivanov (1889), a comedy. The Seagull, 
 and several other pieces. These efforts of his have not 
 been crowned with success. The two indispensable 
 factors in any work intended for the stage, action, and 
 the psychological development of character, are just 
 those the total absence of which detracts from the value 
 of his best stories. Clearness is indispensable in dramatic 
 writing, and Tch^khov cannot cast off his twilight manner. 
 Does he conceive his Ivanov to represent the young 
 
432 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 generation, which sets to work furiously at twenty, and 
 seems worn out by its exertions before it reaches the age 
 of thirty ? We may conclude that this is so. But where 
 is the effort ? Ivanov marries a rich Jewess for the sake 
 of her fortune, and consoles himself for the inevitable 
 disappointments she causes him, by seducing a Christian 
 girl. This twofold performance leaves him so over- 
 whelmed with debt, grey hairs, and hypochondria, 
 that he shoots himself with a pistol, just as he is about 
 to lead a second bride to the altar. The real meaning of 
 this conclusion quite escapes me. That of The Seagull 
 is similar in nature, which appears somewhat odd, as 
 applied to a comedy. Everywhere, even in the young 
 author's tales and stories, we behold the same strange 
 assemblage of neurotics, lunatics, and semi-lunatics : well- 
 born girls, rich and pretty, who suddenly, no one knows 
 why, lose their heads, cast themselves into the arms of a 
 man they have never seen but once, and whom they will 
 certainly leave on the morrow, even if they do happen 
 to marry him ; young men of twenty who loathe life 
 already ; old men of sixty who have just found out that 
 existence has no meaning. The society thus brought 
 before us is really like a nightmare. All its members are 
 bent on one thing only, the solution of the problem of 
 life. Girls, young men, old men, all study it persistently. 
 What is its meaning ? They struggle desperately to find 
 an answer, and suffer and die because none is forth- 
 coming. I fear, indeed, that the mind of the world, as 
 modern civilisation has made it, is largely occupied, even 
 in Russia, with other subjects, and that when Tchdkhov 
 takes it to be absorbed by this particular anxiety, he is 
 a prey, like Tolstoi', to a mere fanciful illusion. 
 
 Like all his young followers, the author of The 
 
SCIENCE 433 
 
 Father, and of several others of those equally short 
 stories in which he seems to excel, soon loses his depth 
 when he attempts larger subjects. Perhaps the respon- 
 sibility for this should be ascribed, in a certain measure, 
 to that pneumatic machine the rarefying action of which 
 M. Pabiddonostsov daily increases. 
 
 The effect of this process of suffocation is very evi- 
 dent in those sketches of provincial life, Ursa Major and 
 After the Deluge, in which Madame Khvostchinskaia (born 
 1825) has won distinction, under the nom de plume of M. 
 Krestovski. This name must not be confused with that 
 of its rightful owner, Vsidvolod Krestovski (born 1820), 
 an imitator of Eugene Sue's picturesque descriptions of 
 the habits of the city populace. 
 
 My readers will divine how much greater must be 
 the moral depression of scientific progress arising out 
 of the same causes. Activity in scientific matters is 
 confined to the domain of geography, ethnography, 
 and history. The expeditions organised by the Im- 
 perial Geographical Society, and the publications of 
 its Ethnographical Department, and the statistical and 
 geographical studies pursued under the auspices of 
 the General Staff and of the Minister of the Interior, 
 have, during the last thirty years, imparted a con- 
 siderable forward impulse to this branch of science. 
 It is curious that this collective work, in which the 
 names of Bouniakovski, Zablotski-Diessiatovski, Bezobra- 
 zov, Buschen, Hagemaister, Halmersen, Bloch, Niebol- 
 chine, Thorner, Janson, and Tchoubinski are associated, 
 has not brought any special individual effort into pro- 
 minence. This is perhaps in agreement with the demo- 
 cratic spirit of the country, expressed in the proverb, 
 "A body of men is one great man." The same fact is 
 
434 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 certainly reproduced in the domain of historical investi- 
 gation, in which "The Society for the Study of History 
 and Antiquity," "The Archaeological Society," "The 
 Imperial Historical Society," and the periodical publica- 
 tions of the Russian Archive, edited by Bartenievj of 
 Russian Antiquities, edited by Si^mievski ; of The Ar- 
 chives of Prince Vorontsov, The A rchives of Prince Koura- 
 kine, Ancient and Modern Russia, and The Antiquities of 
 Kiev, have done wonderful work, collected an enormous 
 amount of information, and piled quantities of the best 
 material ready to the worker's hand. But the workers, 
 whose personal labour can alone utilise the said material, 
 have not as yet appeared. 
 
 It is true that the present order of things would seem 
 to preclude their appearance. The correspondence of the 
 Empress Catherine has been published, even to its most 
 private and least edifying details ; but the first two volumes 
 of the History, in which M. Bilbassov proposed to re- 
 produce — and in the discreetest manner possible — the 
 general features of the reign of the great Empress, were 
 promptly suppressed ; and the ten remaining volumes 
 of this important work are still in the manuscript. M. 
 Klioutchevski's lectures are only known, beyond the circle 
 of his audience at the Moscow University, by means 
 of a few lithographed copies. General Schilder has 
 undertaken a great history of Alexander I. Amongst the 
 documents therein quoted we find the condemnation 
 of the autocratic principle expressed by the august 
 disciple of La Harpe, and the exact list of the guests 
 who assembled round the table of Paul I. the night 
 before his death. But we shall not discover the smallest 
 reference to the causes and incidents of that gloomy 
 catastrophe, though the author, who commands the 
 
HISTORIANS 43 5 
 
 School of Military Engineering, and occupies the very 
 palace in which the occurrence took place, must possess 
 special information on the subject. In the person of 
 Milioukov, the younger generation has given us a man 
 who is more specially gifted for this sort of study than 
 almost any other I have ever met.^ I have just heard 
 that he has been forbidden to teach even at Sophia. 
 Kovalevski has been forced to produce his fine work 
 in four volumes, on the origins of contemporary democ- 
 racy, on French soil, and a fresh edition, in the French 
 language, is now passing through the press. 
 
 Such of the national historians as have not found 
 means to carry out their work, or publish their writings, 
 abroad, fall back on subjects which, though exceedingly 
 interesting, are less fitted to advance the study of the 
 nation's past. M. Manouilov published, in 1894, a book 
 on the Agrarian System in Ireland, founded on documents 
 in the British Museum, and on his own local obser- 
 vation. In the following year, M. Kamienski gave us 
 Six Years of Tory Government in England, iSSy to i8gj. 
 Quite lately I met, in Paris, a young Professor from the 
 University of Kiev, who had come to France to study 
 the organisation of the old provincial parliaments. The 
 remarkable Essay on the Representative System of the Pro- 
 vincial States of Ancient Russia, published by M. Kliout- 
 chevski, strikes me as having been affected by the author's 
 desire to avoid incurring the displeasure of the Censure. 
 
 In the field of literary history, the first place is held 
 by a veteran of "the sixties," and comrade-in-arms of 
 Tchernichevski, Alexander Nicolaievitch Pypine (born 
 1833). He was obliged to leave his professorial chair 
 in the St. Petersburg University in the year 1862, as 
 a result of the students' revolts to which I have re- 
 
436 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 ferred, and which are recurring at the present time. 
 His writings are exceedingly voluminous. His great 
 History of the Slav Literatures, in which he was assisted 
 by M. Vladimir Spassowicz, was preceded or followed 
 by a series of original works, and published docu- 
 ments, dealing with popular poetry and the older 
 writers, the period of Alexander I., the literary prog- 
 ress of the years between 1820 and 1850, the life of 
 Bielinski, and, more recently, with Panslavism, and with 
 the latest results of the study of Russian Ethnography. 
 For the purposes of this book, I have consulted three 
 volumes of a History of Russian Literature, which bear 
 witness to the author's deep knowledge and finely-de- 
 veloped critical faculty. His literary reviews in The 
 European Messenger carry authoritative weight. 
 
 Amongst his followers I must mention N. S. Tikhon- 
 ravov (1832-1893), who published, between 1859 and 
 1 86 1, five volumes of a work which has won many 
 admirers, entitled. Chronicle of Russian Literature and 
 Antiquities. This was followed by a swarm of detached 
 studies, principally on the subject of the literary history 
 of the eighteenth century. M. Tikhonravov was also the 
 author of a critic's edition of Gogol, in seven volumes, 
 which appeared in 1889. 
 
 I see no figure worthy to rank, as regards knowledge, 
 broad-mindedness, and independence, with that of Pypine, 
 save Nicholas Constantinovich Mikhailovski. A younger 
 man — he was born in 1843 — he does not belong to the 
 latest generation, though he unfortunately shows traces of 
 certain of its tendencies. He excels it in brilliance, wit, 
 and artistic power, but his talent, like that of Garchine, 
 is dimmed, in my opinion, by his deliberate pessimism. 
 He never spares any one, seldom praises anything, and 
 
PHILOSOPHERS 437 
 
 carries his use of sarcasm into abuse. He has been 
 called the Chtchedrine of criticism. He did, in fact, 
 collaborate with the mighty publicist in the pages of 
 Annals of the Fatherland, and seems to have annexed 
 some peculiarities of his style, — with its wealth of incident 
 and antitheses, its love of the comic and grotesque, and 
 its swift changes from the humorous to the pathetic. A 
 considerable number of Mikailovski's works are devoted 
 to the English philosophers, Darwin and Mill, with a 
 glance at Herbert Spencer. 
 
 The philosophers of his own country have so far 
 given Mikailovski less occupation. The great national 
 school of philosophy, the dream of the intellectual heirs 
 of Khomiakov, remains a dream. Schopenhauer, whose 
 jubilee was brilliantly celebrated at Moscow in 1888, did 
 not endow his Russian disciples with that strong sense of 
 discipline which their elders had imbibed from Hegel and 
 Schelling. De Roberty may indeed, as his biographer, 
 M. G. de Greef, asserts, be one of the most original 
 thinkers of our day, but if it be true, as M. de Greef 
 also avers, that " he is neither Mongol nor Russian, 
 neither German, nor French, nor Belgian, though the 
 blood of all these nations flows in his veins," it is equally 
 true that his works have long since ceased to belong to 
 Russia. Born in 1843, he contributed, from 1869 to 1873, 
 to the St. Petersburg Academic Gazette, and supported 
 liberal views. He was removed from the editorial staff 
 of the paper by the personal order of the Tsar, who 
 replaced the opposition writers by others devoted to the 
 Imperial exchequer, if not to the Imperial cause. A short 
 time later, his second and last work in the Russian lan- 
 guage, on the History of Philosophy, was seized. The author 
 had previously published a volume of Studies on Political 
 
438 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Economy, containing a critical and theoretical explana- 
 tion of H. C. Carey's Principles of Social Science and Karl 
 Marx's Capital. Since he has lived in Paris, De Roberty 
 has only written in French. In his Notes Sociologiques, 
 published (1876-1878) in the Revue de Philosophie Positive, 
 and since collected into a book, and in a series of other 
 volumes, which make their appearance almost annually 
 — more especially in his Essai sur les lois g^nerales du 
 developpement de la Philosophie— \i& has expounded the 
 fundamental idea of his doctrine, according to which 
 philosophy is a concrete fact, neither purely biological 
 nor purely sociological, the constituent elements whereof 
 must be studied through both of these sciences. The 
 psychological object, that is to say, man himself, who feels, 
 and thinks, and wills, is nothing but a product of bio- 
 logical and sociological conditions. Psychology, there- 
 fore, should be regarded as an appendage to, and a 
 prolongation of, sociology. According to this hypo- 
 thesis, for which the author coins the adjective "bio- 
 social," and which M. Izoulet has appropriated in his 
 Modern City, society " creates the psychic individual." 
 But what M. Izoulet considers a revolution, M. de 
 Roberty believes to be no more than a fresh scien- 
 tific classification. Personally I fail to discover what 
 either of them can find to change in the older defi- 
 nition given by Lewes in The Physical Basis of Mind 
 (i860), where he affirms that the specially human faculties 
 of intelligence and consciousness niust necessarily be 
 the product of the co-operation of social and biological 
 factors. This idea strikes me as occurring even in the 
 teaching of a much older philosopher, of the name of 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
 
 Since De Roberty's voluntary departure into exile, 
 
SOLOVIOV 439 
 
 Vladimir Soloviov appears to me the only Russian who 
 professes an independent and comparatively original form 
 of philosophy. Born in 1853, the son of the famous 
 historian, and brought up in the Ecclesiastical Academy 
 at Moscow, he is connected by hereditary origin with 
 the Orthodox Church and the Slavophil party. Since 
 1888, he has broken with both, and has risen in revolt 
 against the exclusively national theory put forward by 
 Danilevski in his Russia and Europe (3rd edition, 1888). 
 He still beheves, like Dostoievski, in the universality of 
 the historic mission the performance of which devolves 
 upon his country, but thinks that to attain its realisation, 
 through the universal organisation of human life on the 
 lines of truth, his country should carry out Tchadaiev's 
 theory, sacrifice itself, and consent to the union of the 
 Greco-Byzantine and the Roman Churches. In Solo- 
 viov's eyes, the Eastern and the Western worlds repre- 
 sent the two highest phases of the development of the 
 human organism ; Monism, in the first, fusing together 
 the three vital principles, feeling, thought, and will ; 
 Atomism, in the second, following on the other, decom- 
 posing these three elements of life into science and art, 
 and stirring them up to conflict. The recomposition 
 and rearrangement of these elements into a third and 
 last phase of historic evolution, calls for the interven- 
 tion of a superior conciliating principle. And this must 
 needs be the destiny of the Slavonic, and, more parti- 
 cularly, of the Russian race, the only one free from all 
 exclusiveness, and capable of rising above those narrow 
 interests in which the energies of other nations are 
 absorbed. 
 
 The strong opposition with which Ihe philosopher's 
 views have been received in his own country, would seem 
 29 
 
440 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 to weaken the basis on which he claims to build this 
 fanciful palace of our human future. His whilom fellow- 
 believers of the Slavophil party have shown no aptitude, 
 so far, for the exemplification of the " conciliating prin- 
 ciple." The total absence of the exclusive spirit, and the 
 abdication of every individual interest, have not as yet 
 been evident and characteristic features of their moral 
 character. And the would-be reorganiser of the human 
 race has met with his least unfriendly reception in Paris, 
 where his two great works, Russia and the Universal 
 Church, and The History and Future of Theocracy, have 
 both been published. 
 
 All these things are only a fair dream. And the reality 
 is sad enough. Even close around lasnaia Poliana, the 
 wild brambles have almost overgrown the furrow along 
 which the great toiler still drives his plough. The seed 
 he had hoped to have seen sprouting about him is carried 
 far afield towards the setting sun, to a less barren soil. 
 . . . But, yet again I say it, the space in which we per- 
 form our little task is but a tiny spot on the measureless 
 face of what shall be. And the last sentence of this book 
 of mine shall not ring with a note of despair. From 
 Pouchkine's time down to Tolstoi's, Russia lived out 
 certain years of literary activity and glory, which may 
 be reckoned to her as centuries. Some fresh phase of 
 her appointed destiny, so full of suffering and of 
 splendour, will some day bring the spirit of those brief 
 years back to her again. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 I. GENERAL WORKS 
 
 Outside the Russian frontiers, the most comprehensive and important 
 work has been written in German, Geschichte der russischen Literatur, 
 •von ihren Anfangen bis auf die neueste Zeit, by A. von Reinholdt 
 (Leipzig, 1886, I vol. 8vo). 
 
 The most complete study in French, up to the present, is that of 
 C. Courrifere, Histoire de la Litt^rature Contemporaine en Russie 
 (Paris, 1875, I v'- i2mo). The works of M. Ernest Dupuy, Les 
 Grands jnattres de la LittSrature Russe au XIX"'"^ Slide (Paris, 
 1885, I vol. i2mo), and of M. E. M. de Vogue, Le Roinan Russe 
 (Paris, 1897, I vol. i8mo, 4th edit.), deal almost exclusively with 
 novel-writers. M. de Vogue's book, however, contains some general 
 views of great value. Under the title of La Litterature Russe (Paris, 
 1892, I vol. i3mo), M. L. Leger has published a collection of extracts, 
 with short commentaries. 
 
 England is behindhand. Yet Prince Volkonski's studies have 
 recently appeared in London, under the title Pictures of Russian Life 
 and History. There is a German edition of this work, and a French 
 one is just passing through the press. Some additional information 
 will be found in an older work by Graham, The Progress of Art, 
 Science, and Literature in Russia {^ond^on, 1865, i vol. 8vo), and in 
 those of Morfill, Russia (London, 1881, i vol. i2mo), and Slavonic 
 Literature {^oxiAo'd, 1883, I vol. i2mo). 
 
 The following works bear indirectly on the study of Russian litera- 
 ture : in French, La Russie, a collective work, by MM. A. Leroy- 
 Beaulieu, A. Rambaud, E. M. de Vogue, and A. Vandal, and older 
 works by Tardif de Mello and Gallet de Culture ; in German, the 
 works of Brandfes, Eckard, Houneger, Minzlofif, Julian Schmidt, 
 Weddigen, and Zabel. Those of Brandos {Menschen und Werke, 
 Frankfurt, 1885) and of Schmidt {Bilder aus dem geistigen Leben 
 unserer Zeit, Leipzig, 1875) are particularly admirable. 
 
442 • BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 In Russia, of course, the field is much wider. It was opened by 
 Karamzine, who published a Pantheon of Russian writers, which goes 
 back to Nestor and the legendary figure of Boiane. The first real 
 attempt at literary history was Grietch's Opyt Istorii rousskoi litiera- 
 tonri (1822). This was followed, in 1839, by a book written by 
 Maximovitch, in which he is accused of having dwelt on that which 
 had never had any existence ; in 1846, by the teachings and publica- 
 tions of Chevirev, among which we may mention a History of Russian 
 Literature, translated into Italian by Rubini (Florence, 1862) ; between 
 1851 and i860 we have Bousslaiev's Essays on Comparative Historical 
 Criticis7n ; and these are followed by the works of Orestes Miller 
 (i860), Galakhov (i860), Tikhonravov (1878), Porfiriev (the posthumous 
 edition of his works, 1891, is carried down to Pouchkine), Karaoulov 
 (1865-1870), Polevoi (1883, a popular work, modelled upon Kurtz, and 
 the best of its kind), Petrov (translated into French by A. Romald. 
 Paris and St. Petersburg, 1872, &c.) ; Pypine's History of Russian 
 Literature (now in course of publication, three volumes have already 
 appeared) is the last and the best book of the series. M. Vladi- 
 mirov published in 1898, at Ki^v, an Introduction to the History 
 of Russian Literature ( VviMienid v istoriou rousskoi Utiiratouri), 
 which is well worth consultation. 
 
 II. MONOGRAPHS. 
 Various Subjects. 
 
 English. — The annual contributions of Krapotkine, Milioukov, 
 Bogdanovitch, and Balmont, to the AthencEum (1887- 1898). 
 
 French. — Russes et Slaves, by L. Leger (Paris, 1893, i vol. i2mo) ; 
 Les Poites Russes, by St. Albin (Paris, 1893, i vol. i2mo) ; this 
 anthology is worth consulting. 
 
 German. — Wolfsohn's Die Schonivissenschaftliche Litteraiur der 
 Russen (Leipzig, 1893, i vol. 8vo). 
 
 Russian. — Anidnkov's Recollections and Critical Sketches ( Vospo- 
 minania i Krititchhkiie otcherki), St. Petersburg, 1877-1881, 3 vols. 
 8vo ; Arsdniev's Critical Studies of Russian Literature {Krititche'skiie 
 itioudi po rousskoi liti^ratouri/), St. Petersburg, 1888, 2 vols. Svo ; 
 Kirpitchnikov's Sketches of the History of the Ne-w Russian Litera- 
 ture ( Otcherki po istorii novoi rousskoi litiSratoiiri'), St. Petersburg, 
 1896, I vol. 8vo ; Skabitchevski's History of Recent Russian Litera- 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 443 
 
 iure (Jstoria noviHchei rousskoi litie'ratouri), St. Petersburg, 1897, 
 I vol. 8vo, and the works of Eour^nine, Cheine, Golovine, Gerbel, 
 Ikonnikov, Klioutchevski, Maikov, Mikhailovski, Morozov, Nieous- 
 troiev, Piatkovski, Protopopov, Pypine, Soukhomlinov, Strakhov, 
 Tchernichevski, Vi^trinski, Vengerov, Vidsidlovski, Vodovozov, &c. &c. 
 
 Ancient Literature and Popular Poetry. 
 
 English. — Gaster, llchester Lectures on Greco-Slavonic Literature 
 (London, 1887, i vol. 8vo) ; Naake, Slavonic Fairy-Tales (London, 
 1874, I vol. 8vo) ; and Ralston's Studies of Russian Folklore, which 
 are well known and greatly valued, and deserve their reputation. 
 
 French. — A. Ram baud, La Russie itpique (Paris, 1876, i vol. 
 8vo), a most important work, the best on the subject by any foreign 
 writer ; and studies by Brunetifere, Hins, &c. 
 
 German. — Hilferding, Der Gouv. Olonez, unci seine Volksrhap- 
 soden {Russische Revue, 1872) ; Wollner, Untersuchungen iiber die 
 Volksepik der Grossrussen (Leipzig, 1879, i vol. 8vo) ; and studies by 
 Bistrom, Damberg, Goldschmidt, Jagie, Leskien, Vi^sidlovski, &c. 
 
 Russian. — Bousslaiev, Historical Studies of Poptclar Literature 
 {Istoritcheskiid otcherki rousskoi narodnoi slovie'snosti), St. Petersburg, 
 1861, I vol. 8vo ; Danilov, Ancient Russian Poetry {Drevnyia rousskiia 
 stikhotvor^nid), St. Petersburg, various editions, with notes and re- 
 marks, the latest published in 1897 ; Jdanov, The Epic Poetry of the 
 Bylines {Rousskii bylevoi epos), St. Petersburg, 1885, I vol. 8vo ; 
 Kiridievski, Collection of Popular Verse {Pi^sni Sobrannyia), Moscow, 
 1 868-1 874, 10 vols. 8vo ; Rybnikow, Collection of National Songs 
 (Moscow, 1861-1867, 4 vols. 8vo) ; and the writings and publica- 
 tions of Cheine, Dahl, Efimenko, Erlenvein, Khalanski, Hilferding, 
 Khoudiakov, lachtchourjinski, Kolmatchevski, Lobody, Mailcov, 
 Maksimovitch, Miller, Petrov, Sn^guirev, Stassov, Stepovitch, &c. 
 
 Period of Peter the Great. 
 
 German. — Bruckner, Iv, Possochkov, Ideen und Zustdnde in Russ- 
 land, zur Zeit Peters des Crossen (Leipzig, 1878, i vol. 8vo). 
 
 Russian. — Piekarski, Science and Literature in Russia under Peter 
 the Great {Naouka i litieratoura v Rossii pri Pietrie V), St. Peters- 
 burg, 1862, 2 vols. 8vo. A consultation of this work is indispensable 
 to the student. 
 
444 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Period of Lomonossov. 
 
 Russian. — Biliarski, Materials for a Biography of Lomonossov (St. 
 Petersburg, 1865, i vol. 8vo). 
 
 Period of Catherine II. 
 
 Russian. — Niezidlenov, Novikov and the Literary Tendencies oftKe 
 Period of Catheriiie If. {Novikov i liti^ratournyia napravlenia v. 
 Ekatierinskoiou epokhou), St. Petersburg, 1889, i vol. 8vo — a very 
 interesting work ; and the writings and publications of Afanassiev, 
 Grot, Piekarski, Soukhomlinov, Viaziemski, &c. 
 
 Period of Joukovski and Karamzine. 
 
 English. — Ralston, The great Fabulist Krilof and his Fables 
 (London, 1868, i vol. 8vo). 
 
 French. — Fleury, Krylov et ses Fables (Paris, 1869, i vol. i2mo). 
 
 German. — Seidlitz, W. A. Joukoffsky, ein russisc/tes Dichtersleben 
 (Mittau, 1S70, I vol. 8vo). 
 
 Russian. — Groi, Sketches of the Life and PoeticalWorks of Joukovski 
 {Otcherki jisni i poezii, &-=<:.), St. Petersburg, 1883, published by the 
 Second Section of the Academy of Sciences, vol. xxxii. ; Pogodine, 
 N. M. Karamzine, as shown in his Works and Correspondence, S-'c. 
 (Moscow, 1866, I vol. 8vo) ; and the works of Arkhangelski, Pletniev, 
 Pypine, Sertchevski (on Griboiedov, &c.). 
 
 Period of Pouchkine. 
 
 English. — Turner, Studies in Russian Literature (London, 1882, 
 I vol. 8vo). Translations of various selected portions of Pouchkine's 
 works, with notes and commentaries, have been published by Buchan 
 Telfer (1875), Lewis (1849), Turner (1899), Wilson (1887), and "A 
 Russian Lady" (Princess Bariatinski), 1882. Pouchkine's prose 
 works have been translated by Mrs. Sutherland Edwards and Mr. T. 
 Keane. 
 
 French. — Prosper M^rimde, Portraits historiques et littSraires 
 (Paris, 1874, I vol. l2mo). There are numerous translations, both 
 French and German, of Pouchkine's works. The best are those of 
 Tourgueniev and Viardot. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 445 
 
 German. — Varnhagen von Ense, Werke von A. Pouchkine 
 {Jahrbilcher fiir wissenschaftliche Kritik, October 1838) ; Konig, 
 Bilder aus der Russischen ZMera/ur {Leipzig, 1838, I vol. Svo). 
 
 Russian. — The most complete biography of Pouchkine is that in 
 the first volume of Anienkov's edition of his works (St. Petersburg, 
 1854-1857, 7 vols. Svo). The first supplements to the incomplete 
 texts of the Russian editions appeared in Herzen's Polar Star. Since 
 that time Gerbel has published a whole volume of supplementary- 
 matter. A bibliography of works specially concerning the great poet 
 has been issued by Miejov (St. Petersburg, 1886, i vol. Svo). The 
 studies of Korch (very important from the technical standpoint), 
 Niezidldnov, Spasovitch, and V. N. (Nikolski), should also be con- 
 sulted. 
 
 Period Posterior to the Time of Gogol. 
 
 English. — Gosse, Studies of Gontcharov and Tolstoi, prefixed to 
 the English translations of some of their works (London, 1891 and 
 1894) ; Ralston, The Modern Russian Drama, Ostrovskys Plays 
 {Edinburgh Review, July 1868). Henry James, Study of Tour- 
 gu^niev, in Partial Portraits, 1888. The majority of the works of 
 Tourgueniev, Tolstoi, and Dostoievski have been translated into 
 English, French, and German. Much remains to be done in this 
 particular for the other novelists and poets of this period. 
 
 French. — P. Bourget, Nouveaux essais de Psychologie Contem- 
 poraine), Paris, 1885, I vol. l2mo — (Study of Tourgudniev) ; Bobory- 
 kine, Tourguiniev, Notes d^un Compatriote {Revue Indipendante, 
 December 1884), and various other studies by Delaveau, Durand- 
 Greville, Hennequin, E. M. de Vogue, &c. 
 
 German. — Bodenstedt, M. Lermontoff' s poetischer Nachlass (^er\\n, 
 1852, I vol. Svo) ; Loewenfeld, Leo N. Tolstoi, sein Leben, seine 
 Werke . . . (Berlin, 1892, l vol. Svo) ; Zabel, T. Tourgueniev, eine 
 literarische Studie{\uevpzig, 1884); and the works of Althaus, Brandos, 
 Eckardt, Ernst, Glogau, Seuron, Thorsch, Zabel, &c. 
 
 Russian. — Anienkov, Recollections and Correspondence, 1835-1885 
 (St. Petersburg, 1892, i vol. Svo); Barssoukov, Life and Works of 
 Pogodine (Moscow, 1880) — in course of publication — a collection of 
 documents of the deepest interest to the student of this period, and 
 that preceding it ; Miller, Russian Writers Subsequent to Gogol 
 {Rousskii^ pisatieli posli^ Gogola), St. Petersburg, 1888-1890, 3 vols. 
 Svo ; Pypine, Bielinski, His Life and Correspondence (St. Petersburg, 
 
446 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 1876, 2 vols. 8vo) ; Tchernichevski, Sketches nf Literary History in 
 the Time of Gogol (Otcherki Gogolevskavo p&ioda . . .)> St. Peters- 
 burg, 1891, I vol. 8vo ; and the studies of Akssakov (on Tioutchev), 
 Andrdievski, Boulkhakov (on Tolstoi), Bourenine (on Tourgueniev), 
 Gromeko (on Tolstoi), Koulich (on Gogol), Koloubovski (supplemen- 
 tary to Herveg-Heinze's History of Modern Philosophy (St. Peters- 
 burg, i8go), Livov (on Katkov), Serguienko (on Tolstoi), Smirnov (on 
 Herzen), SoIoviov(on Dostoievski), andZielinski(on Tolstoi). The best 
 edition of Gogol, with notes and commentaries, is that of Tikhonravov 
 (St. Petersburg, 1889). The complete edition of Ostrovski's works 
 (St. Petersburg, 1889, 10 vols. 8vo) includes a biography of the 
 playwright, by A. Nos. That of Dostoievski's works (St. Petersburg, 
 1883, 14 vols. 8vo) contains some Recollections of the novelist, by 
 N. Strakhov. The complete edition of Chtchedrine's works, published 
 by Pypine and Arsdniev (St. Petersburg, l88g, 3 vols. 8vo), is pre- 
 faced by a life of the writer, by C. Arsdniev. The Russian editions of 
 Tolstoi and Tourgueniev may be counted up in dozens. 
 
INDEX 
 
 AblAssimov, 105 
 
 Afanassiev, 218 
 
 Akhcharoumov, 203 
 
 Akssakov, I., 102, 195-197, 210, 
 
 214. 413 
 Akssakov, C, 102, 195, 197, 203, 
 
 213 
 Akssakov, S., 251, 330, 331 
 Alexander I., 128-132 
 Alov, pseudonym of Gogol, 248 
 
 Bacmeister, 97 
 
 Bakounine, 224, 285, 306 
 
 Baier, 54 
 
 Baratinski, 180-181 
 
 Batiouchkov, 129, 147, 176 
 
 Barsov, 67 
 
 Bart^niev, 434 
 
 Bernoulli, 124 
 
 Bestoujev, 190, 246 
 
 Bezobrazov, 433 
 
 Bezsonov, 42 
 
 Bielinski, 105, 195, 197-203, 300 
 
 Bilbassov, 434 
 
 Bilfinger, 85 
 
 Bloch, 433 
 
 Eoborikine, 294, 295, 425 
 
 Bogdanovitch, 10, 114 
 
 Boltine, 126 
 
 Bondarev, 391 
 
 Borovikovski, 329 
 
 Boulgarine, 1S9 
 
 Bouniakovski, 433 
 
 Bourenine, 417 
 Bousslaiev, 218 
 Bova, Legend of, 11 
 Buschen, 433 
 
 Catherine II., 46, 79, 87, 88- 
 
 99 
 Chakhofskoi, Prince, 85, 182 
 Chevirev, 196 
 Chevtchenko, 220 
 Chichkov, 108, 135 
 Chouvalov, 70, 74, 82, 107, no 
 Chtchedrine (Saltykov), 41, 79, 253, 
 
 299, 309-319, 399 
 Chtcherbatov, Prince, 125, 126 
 Chtchoukine, 405 
 
 Dachkov, Princess, 96, 123-127, 
 
 308 
 Dahl, 246 
 
 Danilevski, 297, 439 
 Danilov (Kircha), 10, 85 
 Danilov, 10 
 Delwig, 157, 179-180 
 Dierjavine, 105, 106-112 
 Dievnltski, 124 
 Dmitriev, 84, 109, 140 
 Dmiirievski, 84 
 Dobrolioubov, 6, 176, 205, 274 
 Dolgoroukai'a, Princess, 85-87 
 Domostro'i, the, 36, 54, 59 
 Dostoievski, F., 4, 46, 102, 166, 
 
 200, 309, 330-360 
 
448 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Dragomanov, 309 
 Droujinine, 203 
 
 Edelsohn, 203 
 Emine, 113 
 
 Fadi^iev, 308 
 
 Feodorov, 36 
 
 Fiodorov, 329 
 
 Foeth, 415 
 
 Fotii (the Metropolitan), 35 
 
 Frol SkobiHev, The Adventures of, 
 
 45.89 
 Frug, 417 
 
 Gagarine, 308 
 
 Galakhov, 208 
 
 Garchine, 421 
 
 Gmeline, 74 
 
 Gnieditch, 68 
 
 Gogol, 21, 46, 99, 113, 143, 197, 
 
 200, 246-265 
 Golikov, 126 
 
 Gontcharov, 165, 200, 265-270, 309 
 Granovski, 209, 348 
 Griboiedov, 182-188 
 Grietch, 189 
 Grigoriev, 178, 203 
 Grigorovitch, 200, 270, 298 
 
 Hagemeister, 433 
 
 Halmersen, 433 
 
 Herzen, 41, 195, 200, 222, 283, 299, 
 
 301-309, 405 
 Hilarion (the Metropolitan), 31 
 Hilferding, 10 
 
 Iahontov, 329 
 
 lelaguine, 126, 308 
 
 Igor, The Band of, 10, 13, 25, 29 
 
 IliadeMourom, The Legend of , 10 
 
 Ismailov, 113 
 
 Istimragd, 31 
 
 Ivan the Terrible, 37 
 
 Janson, 433 
 Javorski, 51-54 
 Jemtchoujnikov, 410 
 Joachim, 32 
 
 Joukovski, 108, 129, 142-146, 161, 
 324 
 
 Kalatchov, 218 
 
 Kamienski, 435 
 
 Kantemir, 54, 60, 141 
 
 Kapnist, 21, 103, 109 
 
 Karamzine, 104, 108, 126, 129, 133- 
 
 140, 170, 210, 435 
 Katch^novski, 190 
 Katkov, 221, 224-226, 2S6 
 Kaveline, 213, 218, 308 
 Khalanski, 11 
 Khemnitzer, 114 
 Kheraskov, 68, H2, 115 
 Khliebnikov, 32 
 Khomiakov, 195, 210, 211, 308 
 Khvochtchinskaia, Mme., 309, 
 
 433 
 Kircha Danilov. See Danilov 
 Kirieievski, I., 202, 210, 215 
 Kirieievski, P., 10, 23, 195, 211, 
 
 221 
 Klioutcharev, in 
 Klioutchevski, 434 
 Klioutchnikov, 198 
 Kniajnine, 103, 115 
 Kochelev, 308 
 Koltsov, 200, 244, 298, 416 
 Koni, 359 
 Korch, 179 
 Korolienko, 422, 425 
 Kostomarov, 218, 221, 296 
 Kostrov, 112 
 Kotielnikov, 70 
 Kotochikhine, 41 
 Koulich, 220 
 Koukolnik, 190, 246, 296 
 Kourbski, Prince, 38, 39 
 Kourotchkine, 410 
 
INDEX 
 
 449 
 
 Kovalevski, 405, 406, 435 
 
 Kozitski, 70, 82, gz 
 
 Krachennikov, 70 
 
 Krapotkine, Prince, 309 
 
 Krassov, 198 
 
 Krestovski, V. , 433 
 
 Krestovski, pseudonym of Mme. 
 
 Khvochtchinskaia, 310 
 Krijanitch, 41 
 Krylov, 21, 136, 147, 149-163, 179 
 
 Lajetchnikov, 246, 296 
 
 Lapoukhine, 122 
 
 Lavrov, 308 
 
 L^ontiev, 226 
 
 Lermontov, 227-239 
 
 Li^skov, 399 
 
 Lomonossov, 67, 69, 71 > 7S> 7^, 7^, 
 
 81, 105 
 Leukine, 103 
 Lvov, 109 
 
 Magnitski, 72 
 
 Mai'kov, V. I., 114 
 
 Maikov, A., 413-415 
 
 Maksimov, 41 
 
 Manouilov, 435 
 
 Margarit, 34 
 
 Marlinski, pseudonym of Bestoujev, 
 
 190 
 Matvi^iev, 263 
 Maximus tlie Greek, 35 
 Mechtcherski, Prince, 352 
 Melcliine, 341 
 M^rechkovski, 409 
 Miedviediev, 46 
 Mi^lnikov, 298 
 Mi^tchnikov, 406 
 Mikhailov, pseudonym of Scheller, 
 
 309 
 
 Mikhailovski, 404 
 Milioukov, 404-405, 435 
 Minski, 417 
 Mordvinov, 131 
 
 Morochkine, 217 
 Moussine-Pouchkine, 25, 126 
 Muller, 85, 124 
 
 Nachtchokine, 85 
 
 Nadiejdine, 155, 195, 284 
 
 Nadsohn, 417 
 
 Nekrassov, 200, 201, 245, 323-329, 
 
 410 
 Nepanov, pseudonym of Chtch^drine, 
 
 309 
 
 Nestor, 27, 32 
 Nicone (the Patriarch), 40 
 Nicone, Chronicles of, 34 
 Niebolchine, 433 
 
 Niedooumko, pseudonym of Nadiej- 
 dine, 195 
 Nikifor, 196 
 Nikitine, 244 
 Nossov, 84 
 
 Novikov, 10, 90, 91, 94, 1 18-123 
 Novitski, 395 
 
 Odoievski, 245 
 
 Ogariov, 245 
 
 Omoulevski, pseudonym of Fiodorov, 
 
 329 
 Onieguine, 406 
 Ostrovski, 244, 271-277 
 Oustrialov, 217 
 Ozieretskovski, 124 
 Ozierov, 141-142 
 
 Pabiedonostsov, 433 
 
 PalHa, 31 
 
 Pallas, 97 
 
 Panaiev, 201 
 
 Pavlov, 246 
 
 Paul I., 103, 130 
 
 Perepielski, pseudonym of Nekrassov, 
 
 325 
 Peter the Great, 47 
 Pi^tcherski, pseudonym of Mi^lnikov, 
 
 298 
 
450 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pietrachevski, 301, 336 
 
 Pietrov, 112 
 
 Pirogov, 206 
 
 Pissarev, 203, 207 
 
 Pissemski, 41, 277, 319-323 
 
 Pletniev, 260 
 
 Pogodine, 218, 219, 246 
 
 Poletika, 82 
 
 Polevoi, 155, 190, 246 
 
 Polikarpov, 41 
 
 Polonski, 416 
 
 Pclotski, 44, 46, 72 
 
 Pomialovski, 309 
 
 Popov, 10, 67, 70 
 
 Possochkov, 54, 59 
 
 Potapienko, 425-426 
 
 Pouchkine, 21, 28, 67, 75, 77, 80, 
 
 105,108, III, 118, 147, 154-179, 
 
 195, 200, 228, 249, 258, 410 
 Prokopovitch, 51, 60 
 Protassov, 116, 124 
 Proutkov (Kouzma), pseudonym of 
 
 A. Tolstoi and of Jemtchoujnikov, 
 
 410 
 Pypine, 208, 404, 408, 435 
 
 Radichtchev, 91, 116 
 
 Razoumovski, 70 
 
 Rekhmaninov, 115 
 
 Roberty, De, 405 
 
 Rostoptchine, Countess Eudoxia, 245 
 
 Rostoptchine, Countess Lydia, 406 
 
 Rovinski, 221 
 
 Rybnikov, 10 
 
 Ryleiev, 132, 133, 157, 185 
 
 Rtychtchev, 40 
 
 Sakharov, 13 
 Saltykov. See Chtchedrine 
 Samarine, 210, 212, 308 
 Sav^liev-Rostislavitch, 217 
 Scheller, 309 
 Schilder, General, 434 
 Schlozer, 85 
 
 Schwartz, 113, 114, 121 
 
 Senkovski, 189 
 
 Serebrianski, 240 
 
 Serguienko, 364 
 
 Siemievski, 434 
 
 Silvestre, the Pope, 36, 274 
 
 Skabitchevski, 404 
 
 Skalkovski, 406 
 
 Slieptsov, 309 
 
 Smirnova, Mme., 281 
 
 Smotrytski, 40, 72 
 
 Sokolov, 124 
 
 Soloviov, S., 218, 296 
 
 Soloviov, N. , 203 
 
 Soloviov, v., 40S 
 
 Sophi'iskii Vrdviiennik, Annals of 
 
 Sophia, 34 
 Soumarokov, 69, 75, 78-85, 88, 103, 
 
 114 
 Soutaiev, 395 
 Spasowicz, 403 
 Speranski, 131, 132 
 Sreznievski, 11 
 Staehlin, 76 
 
 Stankievitch, 197, 202, 240, 299 
 Stebnitski, pseudonym of Li&kov, 
 
 400 
 Strakhov, 124 
 Sviatoslav, 30 
 
 Tatichtchev, 32, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62 
 Tchadaiev, 156, 191-196, 405 
 Tchekhov, 254, 403, 426-432 
 Tchernichevski, 203 
 Tchij, 358 
 Tchoubinski, 433 
 Tchoulkov, 113 
 Thorner, 433 
 Tikhonravov, 208 
 Timofi^iev, 36 
 Tioutchev, 41 1-4 1 3 
 Tolstoi, A., 297 
 
 Tolstoi, L., 5, 122, 197, 249, 273, 
 309, 333. 343> 300-399, 420 
 
INDEX 
 
 451 
 
 Touptala, Danilo, St. Dmitri of Ros- 
 tov, 41 
 
 Tourgueniev, I., 18, 46, 155, 200, 
 243. 277. 278-297, 309, 322, 340, 
 370 
 
 Tourgueniev, N., 131 
 
 Trebotarev, 124 
 
 Trediakovski, 66, 72, 73, 82, 104 
 
 Tretiakov, 124 
 
 Valouiev, 210, 212 
 Vasska, son of Boussldi, Legend of, 
 
 V^n^Iine, 217 
 Venianiinov, 124 
 Verevkine, 115 
 Vi^trinski, 308 
 Volkov, 79, 84 
 
 Volynski, 404 
 
 Von-Visine, 87, 96, 98-102, 115, 
 
 242 
 Vorontsov, 408 
 Vosskressenskaia, Chronicle called, 
 
 34 
 Vyroubov, 406 
 
 Weltmann, 246 
 
 Zabieline, 218 
 Zagoskine, 246, 296 
 Zablotski-Diessiatovski, 433 
 Zassoulitch, Vera, 309 
 Zlatooust, 31 
 Zotov, 296 
 Zouiev, 124 
 Zybeline, 124, 218 
 
 THE END 
 
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