Another essentially Russian trait is the quite unaffected
conception that the lowly are on a plane of equality with the so-called upper
classes. When the Englishman Dickens wrote with his profound pity and
understanding of the poor, there was yet a bit; of remoteness, perhaps, even, a
bit of caricature, in his treatment of them. He showed their sufferings to the
rest of the world with a “Behold how the other half lives!” The Russian writes
of the poor, as it were, from within, as one of them, with no eye to theatrical
effect upon the well-to-do. There is no insistence upon peculiar virtues or
vices. The poor are portrayed just as they are, as human beings like the rest
of us. A democratic spirit is reflected, breathing a broad humanity, a true
universality, an unstudied generosity that proceed not from the intellectual
conviction that to understand all is to forgive all, but from an instinctive
feeling that no man has the right to set himself up as a judge over another,
that one can only observe and record.
In 1834 two short stories appeared, The Queen of Spades,
by Pushkin, and The Cloak, by Gogol. The first was a finishing-off
of the old, outgoing style of romanticism, the other was the beginning of the
new, the characteristically Russian style. We read Pushkin’s Queen of
Spades, the first story in the volume, and the likelihood is we shall enjoy
it greatly. “But why is it Russian?” we ask. The answer is, “It is not
Russian.” It might have been printed in an American magazine over the name of
John Brown. But, now, take the very next story in the volume, The Cloak.
“Ah,” you exclaim, “a genuine Russian story, Surely. You cannot palm it off on
me over the name of Jones or Smith.” Why? Because The Cloak for
the first time strikes that truly Russian note of deep sympathy with the
disinherited. It is not yet wholly free from artificiality, and so is not yet
typical of the purely realistic fiction that reached its perfected development
in Turgenev and Tolstoy.
Though Pushkin heads the list of those writers who made the
literature of their country world-famous, he was still a romanticist, in the
universal literary fashion of his day. However, he already gave strong
indication of the peculiarly Russian genius for naturalness or realism, and was
a true Russian in his simplicity of style. In no sense an innovator, but taking
the cue for his poetry from Byron and for his prose from the romanticism
current at that period, he was not in advance of his age. He had a
revolutionary streak in his nature, as his Ode to Liberty and
other bits of verse and his intimacy with the Decembrist rebels show. But his
youthful fire soon died down, and he found it possible to accommodate himself
to the life of a Russian high functionary and courtier under the severe despot
Nicholas I, though, to be sure, he always hated that life. For all his flirting
with revolutionarism, he never displayed great originality or depth of thought.
He was simply an extraordinarily gifted author, a perfect versifier, a wondrous
lyrist, and a delicious raconteur, endowed with a grace, ease and power of
expression that delighted even the exacting artistic sense of Turgenev. To him
aptly applies the dictum of Socrates: “Not by wisdom do the poets write poetry,
but by a sort of genius and inspiration.” I do not mean to convey that as a
thinker Pushkin is to be despised. Nevertheless, it is true that he would
occupy a lower position in literature did his reputation depend upon his
contributions to thought and not upon his value as an artist.
“We are all descended from Gogol’s Cloak,” said a
Russian writer. And Dostoyevsky’s novel, Poor People, which
appeared ten years later, is, in a way, merely an extension of Gogol’s shorter
tale. In Dostoyevsky, indeed, the passion for the common people and the
all-embracing, all-penetrating pity for suffering humanity reach their climax.
He was a profound psychologist and delved deeply into the human soul,
especially in its abnormal and diseased aspects. Between scenes of
heart-rending, abject poverty, injustice, and wrong, and the torments of mental
pathology, he managed almost to exhaust the whole range of human woe. And he
analysed this misery with an intensity of feeling and a painstaking regard for
the most harrowing details that are quite upsetting to normally constituted
nerves. Yet all the horrors must be forgiven him because of the motive
inspiring them—an overpowering love and the desire to induce an equal love in
others. It is not horror for horror’s sake, not a literary tour de
force, as in Poe, but horror for a high purpose, for purification through
suffering, which was one of the articles of Dostoyevsky’s faith.
Following as a corollary from the love and pity for mankind that
make a leading element in Russian literature, is a passionate search for the
means of improving the lot of humanity, a fervent attachment to social ideas
and ideals. A Russian author is more ardently devoted to a cause than an
American short-story writer to a plot. This, in turn, is but a reflection of
the spirit of the Russian people, especially of the intellectuals. The Russians
take literature perhaps more seriously than any other nation. To them books are
not a mere diversion. They demand that fiction and poetry be a true mirror of
life and be of service to life. A Russian author, to achieve the highest
recognition, must be a thinker also. He need not necessarily be a finished
artist. Everything is subordinated to two main requirements—humanitarian ideals
and fidelity to life. This is the secret of the marvellous simplicity of
Russian-literary art. Before the supreme function of literature, the Russian
writer stands awed and humbled. He knows he cannot cover up poverty of thought,
poverty of spirit and lack of sincerity by rhetorical tricks or verbal
cleverness. And if he possesses the two essential requirements, the simplest
language will suffice.
These qualities are exemplified at their best by Turgenev and
Tolstoy. They both had a strong social consciousness; they both grappled with
the problems of human welfare; they were both artists in the larger sense, that
is, in their truthful representation of life. Turgenev was an artist also in
the narrower sense—in a keen appreciation Of form. Thoroughly Occidental in his
tastes, he sought the regeneration of Russia in radical progress along the
lines of European democracy. Tolstoy, on the other hand, sought the salvation
of mankind in a return to the primitive life and primitive Christian religion.
The very first work of importance by Turgenev, A
Sportsman’s Sketches, dealt with the question of serfdom, and it wielded
tremendous influence in bringing about its abolition. Almost every succeeding
book of his, from Rudin through Fathers and Sons to Virgin
Soil, presented vivid pictures of contemporary Russian society, with its
problems, the clash of ideas between the old and the new generations, and the
struggles, the aspirations and the thoughts that engrossed the advanced youth
of Russia; so that his collected works form a remarkable literary record of the
successive movements of Russian society in a period of preparation, fraught
with epochal significance, which culminated in the overthrow of Czarism and the
inauguration of a new and true democracy, marking the beginning, perhaps, of a
radical transformation the world over.
“The greatest writer of Russia.” That is Turgenev’s estimate of
Tolstoy. “A second Shakespeare!” was Flaubert’s enthusiastic outburst. The Frenchman’s
comparison is not wholly illuminating. The one point of resemblance between the
two authors is simply in the tremendous magnitude of their genius. Each is a
Colossus. Each creates a whole world of characters, from kings and princes and
ladies to servants and maids and peasants. But how vastly divergent the angle
of approach! Anna Karenina may have all the subtle womanly charm of an Olivia
or a Portia, but how different her trials. Shakespeare could not have treated
Anna’s problems at all. Anna could not have appeared in his pages except as a
sinning Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet. Shakespeare had all the prejudices of
his age. He accepted the world as it is with its absurd moralities, its
conventions and institutions and social classes. A gravedigger is naturally
inferior to a lord, and if he is to be presented at all, he must come on as a
clown. The people are always a mob, the rabble. Tolstoy, is the revolutionist,
the iconoclast. He has the completest independence of mind. He utterly refuses
to accept established opinions just because they are established. He probes
into the right and wrong of things. His is a broad, generous universal
democracy, his is a comprehensive sympathy, his an absolute incapacity to
evaluate human beings according to station, rank or profession, or any standard
but that of spiritual worth. In all this he was a complete contrast to
Shakespeare. Each of the two men was like a creature of a higher world,
possessed of supernatural endowments. Their omniscience of all things human,
their insight into the hiddenmost springs of men’s actions appear miraculous.
But Shakespeare makes the impression of detachment from his works. The works do
not reveal the man; while in Tolstoy the greatness of the man blends with the
greatness of the genius. Tolstoy was no mere oracle uttering profundities he
wot not of. As the social, religious and moral tracts that he wrote in the
latter period of his life are instinct with a literary beauty of which he never
could divest himself, and which gave an artistic value even to his sermons, so
his earlier novels show a profound concern for the welfare of society, a broad,
humanitarian spirit, a bigness of soul that included prince and pauper alike.
Is this extravagant praise? Then let me echo William Dean Howells:
“I know very well that I do not speak of Tolstoy’s books in measured terms; I
cannot.”
The Russian writers so far considered have made valuable
contributions to the short story; but, with the exception of Pushkin, whose
reputation rests chiefly upon his poetry, their best work, generally, was in
the field of the long novel. It was the novel that gave Russian literature its
pre-eminence. It could not have been otherwise, since Russia is young as a
literary nation, and did not come of age until the period at which the novel
was almost the only form of literature that counted. If, therefore, Russia was
to gain distinction in the world of letters, it could be only through the
novel. Of the measure of her success there is perhaps no better testimony than
the words of Matthew Arnold, a critic certainly not given to overstatement.
“The Russian novel,” he wrote in 1887, “has now the vogue, and deserves to have
it... The Russian novelist is master of a spell to which the secret of human
nature—both what is external and internal, gesture and manner no less than
thought and feeling—willingly make themselves known... In that form of
imaginative literature, which in our day is the most popular and the most
possible, the Russians at the present moment seem to me to hold the field.”
With the strict censorship imposed on Russian writers, many of
them who might perhaps have contented themselves with expressing their opinions
in essays, were driven to conceal their meaning under the guise of satire or
allegory; which gave rise to a peculiar genre of literature, a sort of
editorial or essay done into fiction, in which the satirist Saltykov, a
contemporary of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who wrote under the pseudonym of
Shchedrin, achieved the greatest success and popularity.
It was not however, until the concluding quarter of the last
century that writers like Korolenko and Garshin arose, who devoted themselves
chiefly to the cultivation of the short story. With Anton Chekhov the short
story assumed a position of importance alongside the larger works of the great
Russian masters. Gorky and Andreyev made the short story do the same service
for the active revolutionary period in the last decade of the nineteenth
century down to its temporary defeat in 1906 that Turgenev rendered in his
series of larger novels for the period of preparation. But very different was
the voice of Gorky, the man sprung from the people, the embodiment of all the
accumulated wrath and indignation of centuries of social wrong and oppression,
from the gentlemanly tones of the cultured artist Turgenev. Like a mighty
hammer his blows fell upon the decaying fabric of the old society. His was no
longer a feeble, despairing protest. With the strength and confidence of
victory he made onslaught upon onslaught on the old institutions until they
shook and almost tumbled. And when reaction celebrated its short-lived triumph
and gloom settled again upon his country and most of his co-fighters withdrew
from the battle in despair, some returning to the old-time Russian mood of
hopelessness, passivity and apathy, and some even backsliding into wild orgies
of literary debauchery, Gorky never wavered, never lost his faith and hope,
never for a moment was untrue to his principles. Now, with the revolution
victorious, he has come into his right, one of the most respected, beloved and
picturesque figures in the Russian democracy.
Kuprin, the most facile and talented short-story writer next to
Chekhov, has, on the whole, kept well to the best literary traditions of
Russia, though he has frequently wandered off to extravagant sex themes, for
which he seems to display as great a fondness as Artzybashev. Semyonov is a
unique character in Russian literature, a peasant who had scarcely mastered the
most elementary mechanics of writing when he penned his first story. But that
story pleased Tolstoy, who befriended and encouraged him. His tales deal
altogether with peasant life in country and city, and have a lifelikeness, an
artlessness, a simplicity striking even in a Russian author.
There is a small group of writers detached from the main current
of Russian literature who worship at the shrine of beauty and mysticism. Of
these Sologub has attained the highest reputation.
Rich as Russia has become in the short story, Anton Chekhov still
stands out as the supreme master, one of the greatest short-story writers of
the world. He was born in Taganarok, in the Ukraine, in 1860, the son of a
peasant serf who succeeded in buying his freedom. Anton Chekhov studied
medicine, but devoted himself largely to writing, in which, he acknowledged,
his scientific training was of great service. Though he lived only forty-four
years, dying of tuberculosis in 1904, his collected works consist of sixteen
fair-sized volumes of short stories, and several dramas besides. A few volumes
of his works have already appeared in English translation.
Critics, among them Tolstoy, have often compared Chekhov to
Maupassant. I find it hard to discover the resemblance. Maupassant holds a
supreme position as a short-story writer; so does Chekhov. But there, it seems
to me, the likeness ends.
The chill wind that blows from the atmosphere created by the
Frenchman’s objective artistry is by the Russian commingled with the warm
breath of a great human sympathy. Maupassant never tells where his sympathies
lie, and you don’t know; you only guess. Chekhov does not tell you where his
sympathies lie, either, but you know all the same; you don’t have to guess. And
yet Chekhov is as objective as Maupassant. In the chronicling of facts, conditions,
and situations, in the reproduction of characters, he is scrupulously true,
hard, and inexorable. But without obtruding his personality, he somehow manages
to let you know that he is always present, always at hand. If you laugh, he is
there to laugh with you; if you cry, he is there to shed a tear with you; if
you are horrified, he is horrified, too. It is a subtle art by which he
contrives to make one feel the nearness of himself for all his objectiveness,
so subtle that it defies analysis. And yet it constitutes one of the great
charms of his tales.
Chekhov’s works show an astounding resourcefulness and
versatility. There is no monotony, no repetition. Neither in incident nor in
character are any two stories alike. The range of Chekhov’s knowledge of men
and things seems to be unlimited, and he is extravagant in the use of it. Some
great idea which many a writer would consider sufficient to expand into a whole
novel he disposes of in a story of a few pages. Take, for example, Vanka,
apparently but a mere episode in the childhood of a nine-year-old boy; while it
is really the tragedy of a whole life in its tempting glimpses into a past
environment and ominous forebodings of the future—all contracted into the space
of four or five pages. Chekhov is lavish with his inventiveness. Apparently, it
cost him no effort to invent.
I have used the word inventiveness for lack of a better name. It
expresses but lamely the peculiar faculty that distinguishes Chekhov. Chekhov
does not really invent. He reveals. He reveals things that no author before him
has revealed. It is as though he possessed a special organ which enabled him to
see, hear and feel things of which we other mortals did not even dream the
existence. Yet when he lays them bare we know that they are not fictitious, not
invented, but as real as the ordinary familiar facts of life. This faculty of
his playing on all conceivable objects, all conceivable emotions, no matter how
microscopic, endows them with life and a soul. By virtue of this power The
Steppe, an uneventful record of peasants travelling day after day through
flat, monotonous fields, becomes instinct with dramatic interest, and its 125
pages seem all too short. And by virtue of the same attribute we follow with
breathless suspense the minute description of the declining days of a great
scientist, who feels his physical and mental faculties gradually ebbing
away. A Tiresome Story, Chekhov calls it; and so it would be
without the vitality conjured into it by the magic touch of this strange
genius.
Divination is perhaps a better term than invention. Chekhov
divines the most secret impulses of the soul, scents out what is buried in the
subconscious, and brings it up to the surface. Most writers are specialists.
They know certain strata of society, and when they venture beyond, their step
becomes uncertain. Chekhov’s material is only delimited by humanity. He is
equally at home everywhere. The peasant, the labourer, the merchant, the
priest, the professional man, the scholar, the military officer, and the
government functionary, Gentile or Jew, man, woman, or child—Chekhov is
intimate with all of them. His characters are sharply defined individuals, not
types. In almost all his stories, however short, the men and women and children
who play a part in them come out as clear, distinct personalities. Ariadne is
as vivid a character as Lilly, the heroine of Sudermann’s Song of Songs;
yet Ariadne is but a single story in a volume of stories. Who
that has read The Darling can ever forget her—the woman who
had no separate existence of her own, but thought the thoughts, felt the
feelings, and spoke the words of the men she loved? And when there was no man
to love any more, she was utterly crushed until she found a child to take care
of and to love; and then she sank her personality in the boy as she had sunk it
before in her husbands and lover, became a mere reflection of him, and was
happy again.
In the compilation of this volume I have been guided by the desire
to give the largest possible representation to the prominent authors of the
Russian short story, and to present specimens characteristic of each. At the
same time the element of interest has been kept in mind; and in a few
instances, as in the case of Korolenko, the selection of the story was made
with a view to its intrinsic merit and striking qualities rather than as
typifying the writer’s art. It was, of course, impossible in the space of one
book to exhaust all that is best. But to my knowledge, the present volume is
the most comprehensive anthology of the Russian short story in the English
language, and gives a fair notion of the achievement in that field. All who
enjoy good reading, I have no reason to doubt, will get pleasure from it, and
if, in addition, it will prove of assistance to American students of Russian
literature, I shall feel that the task has been doubly worth the while.
