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1915 



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»v1 

Short Histories of the Literatures 

of the World 

Edited by Edmund Gosse 



LITERATURES OF THE WORLD 

Edited by EDMUND GOSSE 

Librarian to the House of Lords, London. 



CHINESE LITERATURE. By Herbert A. Giles, M.A., 
LL.D. (Aberd.), Professor of Chinese in the Univer- 
sity of Cambridge. 

SANSKRIT LITERATURE. By A. A. Macdonell, M.A., 
Budcn Professor of Sanskrit, University of Oxford. 

RUSSIAN LITERATURE. By K. Waliszewski. 

JAPANESE LITERATURE. By W. G. Aston, C.M.G., 
M.A., late Acting Secretary at the British Legation 

SPANISH LITERATURE. By J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Gil- 

mour Professor uf Spanish Language and Literature, 

University of Liverpool. 
ITALIAN LITERATURE. By Richard Garnett, C.B., 

LL.D., Late Keeper of Printed Books in the British 

Museum. 
ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE. By Gilbert Murray, 

M.A., Professor of Greek in the University of Glas- 
gow. , 
FRENCH LITER^rtTURE. By Edward Dowden, LL.D., 

Professor of English Literature at the University of 

Dublin. 
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE. By the Editor. 
AMERICAN LITERATURE. By William P. Trent, 

LL.D., Professor of English Literature, Columbia 

LTniversity. 
ARABIC LITERATURE. By Clement Huart, Secretary- 
Interpreter for Oriental Languages to the French 

Government. 
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE. By Frederick Reidl, 

Professor of Hungarian Literature in the University 

of Budapest. 
GERMAN LITERATURE. By Calvin Thomas, LL.D., 

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature, 

Columbia LTniversity. 
LATIN LITERATURE. By Marcus Dimsdale, Professor, 

University of Cambridge. 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW ;YORK. \^j 

~75 ~ ^ *"" 



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WOULD NOT PERMIT SEWING, IT WAS 
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ADHESIVE ESPECIALLY APPLIED TO 
ASSURE HARD WEAR AND USE, 

THIS NEW TYPE OF ADHESIVE IS 
GUARANTEED BY 
HERTZBERG-NEW METHOD, INC. 



A HISTORY OF 

RUSSIAN LITERATURE 



BY 



K. WALISZEWSKI 

AUTHOR OF THE ROMANCE OF AN EMPRESS, 
PETER THE GREAT, ETC. 




NEW YORK AND LONDON 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1915 



Authorized Edition 



V] 



W14XE 



PREFACE 

In the year 1834 the great Bielinski, 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 
^S . . . 

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 PREPACK 

merit 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 Onieguine, 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 accomplishment 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. WALISZEWSKI. 

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 WEST — 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 TOURGUENIEV . . . 227 
IX. THE CONTROVERSIALISTS — HERZEN AND CHTCHE- 

DRINE 299 

X. THE PREACHERS — DOSTOlEVSKI AND TOLSTO? . . 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 Stoff),\hey 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. 

Betweenthe Novgorod merchants and theirsixteenth- 
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 nor 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. The perpetual 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 Grasco-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, she 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 Dostoi- 
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. Voina stands for war; 



6 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

vo'ine for the warrior. But should the warrior be 
called to defend his country, threatened by an in- 
vader, he becomes Khrabryi, Zachtchichtchaionchtchyi I 
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 
Khrantzouz (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 of 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 
8 



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 



IO 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 century) 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 Nibelnngen- 
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 Kiriei6vski, 
Sakharov, Rybnikov, and Hilferding, and revealed to 



POPULAR POETRY II 

the Western world by the translations and studies of 
Ralston, Bistrom, Damberg, Iagic, 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 gzverziou of Lower Brittany, the 
Chants des Panvres 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 Pulicane of the Reali 
di Fra?icia, 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 staryna = " 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 huge 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, Solovie'i Boudimirovitch, the son of a shopkeeper. 
Both of these fraternise with Dobrynia, who belongs 
to a princely family. .ia 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 role 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, Solovie'i (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 Kiev ; 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 India to the Thor-Wotan of the Germans, and 
the Peroune of the Russians, rise before our eyes. But 



16 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

dissimilarities crop up forthwith. When, at long last, 
Ilia consents to deliver KieV, 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 
Chansons 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 Table, 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 Table, 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. 



1 8 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

Barren of ideals as of ideas, they represent, in the popu- 
lar conception, the lower grade of heroism, the elemen- 
tary forces of Nature, of the earth, of the wind, of the 
heavy fist. 

Tourgueniev has placed this terrible declaration in 
the mouth of Potioughine, the grumbler in Smoke: 
" What is known as our 'epic literature' is the only one 
in Europe or Asia which does not afford a single 
example of a typical pair of lovers. The hero of Holy 
Russia always begins his relations with the being to 
whose destiny fate has linked his own. by mercilessly ill- 
treating her. . . . Look into our legends. Love never 
appears in them but as the result of a charm or spell. 
It is absorbed with the liquor that brings forgetfulness ; 
its effect is compared with soil that is dried up, or 
frozen." 

Yet numerous female figures flit across these legends. 
They possess but little charm. They are triumphant, 
often, with an air of superiority which raises them above 
the masculine element ; but this they owe neither to 
their attraction nor to the love they inspire. Ilia of 
Moiirom is overthrown by a giant Pole'nitsa (Polenitsas 
is the generic title of these viragos), who prowls over 
the steppe, shouldering a club weighing several thou- 
sand pounds, defying the bohatyry (heroes) — and who 
turns out to be his own daughter. Vassilissa, the 
daughter of Mikoula, combines strength with cunning 
to rescue her husband, Stavre Godounovitch ; but the 
legend is dumb as to her beauty and that of her fellow- 
women. And this neglect suffices to distinguish the 
Polenitsas from the Amazons, as well as from the Val- 
kyries. Men light with them, they are frequently over- 
come by them, but they never pay court to them. 



RUSSIAN WOMEN 19 

The woman of modern Russia does not share this 
pe 'uliarity 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 Terem. 
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 
the 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 



20 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

temper, who makes the town ring with the tumult of his 
freaks and bloodthirsty rages. Just as he is about to 
destroy his fellow-citizens, his father intervenes. Where- 
upon Vaska shuts him up in a cellar. Vaska's whole 
life is one tissue of follies and crimes. To expiate these, 
he goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and dies, on his 
return, by attempting a dangerous leap and striking 
against a rock — the image of the fate his pride has 
courted. 

Popular Songs. 

The first singers of bylines are believed to have been 
professional bards, attached to the court of the Varegian 
princes. Their tradition seems to have been carried on 
by the skoromokhy of the Muscovite epoch, against whom 
the pious and scrupulous Tsar Alexis waged merciless 
war. For a long period they were the great entertain- 
ment of the noble houses. Their present descendants 
are only to be found in the huts and taverns of the 
province of Olonetz. 

In hut and tavern, from one end of Russia to the 
other, simple melodies are still sung, recalling or accom- 
panying the recital, in a confused traditional medley, of 
the common events of the popular life and of Christian 
and P^.gan festivals. Christmas Koliada, Roussalnaia, 
in honour of the Slavonic nymphs {roussalki), harvest 
songs (dojinki\ betrothal songs {svadiebnyie piesni), and 
funeral songs {pokhoronnyie). 

Incantations {zagovory) against drought and fire hold 
a considerable place in this national poetry, and so do 
riddles {zagadki) and proverbs (posslovitsy), which en- 
shrine the popular wisdom as drawn from all its nume- 
rous 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- 
si rained 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 justice 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 Boi'ane, 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-Sievierski, charged by Sviatoslav, 
Prince of Kiev, to drive back the Polovtsy. Up to 
the time of the Tartar invasion, the Polovtsy were the 
greatest enemies of Russia. Igor begins with 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 
Lavrentii, 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, Iaroslavna, 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 Danube. 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 Kiev (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 1185, 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 ".'.'ithers, 
the trees bend under the weight of the mourning that 
overshadows Russian soil. Iarpslovna 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 Servian 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 Troiane, — whom some critics 
believe to be the Tsar-Troi'an 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 
Igorievie. 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 
Bielinski, 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 fidovstvouiouchtchyle (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 prioi 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 Piitchersky-Monastyr^ Monastery 
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. Theodosius. He died about 
1 1 00. These few lines contain all that we know of his 
biography. The works presumed to be his are The Life 
of Boris aitdof Glcb, the Life of Theodosius, and the Russian 
Chronicle {Poviest vremiennykh 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 Khli'ebnikov, 
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 believes 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. A midst 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" 

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 ino. 
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 earlier 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 
principalities {oudiely), 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 Kiev and Novgorod. After the Tartar 
invasion, we find signs of it in the North-East, at Vladimir, 
Rostov, Mourom, Iaroslavl, 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- 
chinia, posslanid). The Metropolitan Fotii' (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 Timeofieiev, 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 Domostro'i 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 
Domostro'i 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' was 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 Bieloziersk. 
This was a place of exile for disgraced Eoyards 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, 
Cheremetiev 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 their 
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 Kiev, 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 
4 



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 Moscow. 

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 Michai'lovitch, 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 
AlexieieVitch, 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 Meletii Smotrytski 
was printed at Moscow. This was followed, early in the 



KOTOCHIKHINE 41 

eighteenth century, by those of Fiodor Polikarpov (1721) 
and Fiodor 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 Tdieti-Minei 
(" Ecclesiastical Years "), a very popular work of encyclo- 
paedic hagiography, by Danilo Touptala (St. Demetrius 
of Rostov). It seems, in this book, as though Orthodox 
and ascetic Russia, standing on the threshold of a new 
epoch, were casting back a glance fraught with terror 
and regret. Yet 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-Russian soil and Polish culture. The foreign and 
Western element also made itself evident in two literary 
productions of very dissimilar natures. Russia under 
Alexis Mikhailovitchy by Kotochikhine, and The Russian 
Empire in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century, by 
Jouri'i Krijanitch. 

Kotochikhine and Krijanitch. 

Kotochikhine, an employe in the Foreign Office 
{Possolskoi Prikaze), 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 Herzen, Chtchedrine, 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 Domostroi, 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 
Kiev, 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 
Fioravanti, the Italian architect, Western art once more 
took up 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 cosmopolitan 
" 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 — Nebuc/md?iezzar 
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 Schelmen-Romane, 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 Dostoi'evski 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, 

47 



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 
English. 

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 not 
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 



5 o 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 51 

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 rilled 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 Kiev 
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 Kiev 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. 



U. OF !LL LIS. 



52 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

He taught theology at Kiev, 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 published 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 Monarchel ("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 Synod 
in 1721, and in 1724 he was made Archbishop of Nov- 



PROKOPOVITCH 53 

gorod. 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, Buddaeus 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 library 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. 
Galitsine, Tatichtchev, Kantemir, and the foreign mem- 
bers of the Academy, one of whom, Baier, dedicated his 
Museum Sinicutn 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 brandy. 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 55 

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 meciun 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-slumber 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 



56 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 I 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 Dielatiel (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- 



58 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 Rousska'ia 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 Conversatio?i with 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 59 

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 Domostroi. 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 
service, 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. I 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 
Kiev in 1702 and at Moscow in 1705, teems with such 
allusions. 



60 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

Had Prokopovitch any knowledge of Shakespeare ? 
Possibly, through Philipps' TJicatrum Poetarum (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 
Kant£mir, 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 61 

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 sarapJiane, 
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 Kantemir 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, Kant6mir 
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 

65 



66 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

unlucky TelemacJiida, 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- 
Graeco-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 new 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 



trediakovski 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 Trediakovski 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 Poetique, Te'lemaque, and some of ^Esop's fables into 
verse, and did Horace's De Arte Poeiica and Tallemant's 
Voyage a I lie d' Amour 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 TelemacJiida 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 (oudarinie) 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 ! 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 69 

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 



yo RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

have seen how they would have shut the door in Tr6- 
diakovski's face. It was not until 1741 that the native 
clement 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 ; Kotielnikov, 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 literary, 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 w r orld, the 
gropings after the road that led towards the future — all 
these things are personified in the advent and career of 
this astounding monjik. 

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 Vassilievitch 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 



12 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 1731, 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 Glinther, 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 Trediakovski, 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 Trediakovski, 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 Dusseldorf, 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 " Maecenas " 



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 
Trediakovski 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 Tredia- 
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 



76 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 Onicguine } 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 77 

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, 
like 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 Miiller, 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 ! 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. 



80 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 vigor- 
ously, and, as it absorbed and assimilated the juices of the 



SOUMAROKOV 81 

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, Trediakovski, 
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 aggravated 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 Kantemir 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 Minerva, 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 Russia" I iteriture." A man who had trodden 



PRINCESS DOLGOROUKAlA 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 — 
Miiller, 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 
Chakhofskoi (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 approach 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 Cheremetiev, 
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 brilliantly. 
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 wedding-day dawned, all these joys had been 
swept away. The Tsar's death, the favourite's disgrace, 
the persecution that 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 ! 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 II. 

Even in certain manuals published in foreign countries, 
the reign of the Northern Semiramis is described as the 
11 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 have 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 Skobieie'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 



90 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! One man, 
fLBadichtchev, 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 DieYjavine 
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" (Vssiakaia Vssyatchina), 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 Niebylitsy) published 
in The Interlocutor {Sobicssie'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-Constantine, 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 History, and in a refutation 



CATHERINE 93 

of the Abbe 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 righting 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 (Troutcgne). 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 Chamane, 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 

the 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 Lanskoi'. 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. Ielaguine, 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, Tchebichev, 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 

grew calmer in the process. But idleness fell upon his 
pen. He climbed the professional ladder, became sec- 
retary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, N. S. Panine, 
in 1769, grew rich, and travelled abroad. He sojourned 
at Leipzig, at Lyons, at Montpellier, and finally at Paris, 
whence he wrote Panine a series of letters which have 
attracted much attention, but which do not constitute 
a masterpiece. It was not till 1782, after an eclipse 
lasting sixteen years, that he reappeared on the literary 
horizon, with the Set of Questions which so upset Cathe- 
rine's temper, followed by another comedy, The Minor, 
which at once carried him to the very front. A year 
after he was abroad again ; the death of Panine, the 
displeasure of the Empress, and other worries, together 
with his own dissipated life, had ruined his health. At 
forty he was a mere wreck. Paralysis laid its hand on 
him ; then, in 1786, he planned a fresh attempt at inde- 
pendent journalism, was checked by a formal veto from 
the censorship, and died at last in 1792, in the midst 
of a second crisis of moral prostration and religious 
fanaticism, resembling that which was to mark the last 
days of Gogol. 

Von Visine's talent is essentially satirical. Even when 
he was a student at the Moscow University, his witty 
sayings won him constant successes, and his Brigadier 
may be taken as a prelude to Gogol's manner, though 
with much less art, and a complete absence of the ideal. 
The sense of his satire strikes us as being purely negative. 
The author has intended to demonstrate the fatal effect 
of French habits and education, but he overwhelms 
his characters, whether representing the ancient or the 
modern society, whether affected by this education or not, 
with an equal share of ridicule for their moral baseness. 



ioo 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 t chine, 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 Fenelon's book on education, and dreams 
of a very different kind of husband ; her uncle, Staro- 



VON VISINE 101 

doume, who has perused the Instructions to the Legis- 
lative Commission, and absorbed all the principles therein 
contained ; and, finally, Pravdine, the good tchinovifc, the 
representative of "enlightened despotism," who inter- 
venes at the close of the play, like a Deus ex machina, 
to clear up the plot and put everything in its place. 
Unluckily, while in The Brigadier we were left to choose 
between two equally repulsive realities, our choice in 
The Minor must be made, to all appearances, between 
reality and fiction. Mme. Prostakova and her son are crea- 
tures of flesh and blood, frequently to be met with in the 
society of that day. But a consultation of the memoirs 
of the period suffices to convince us of the unlikeli- 
hood of the existence of such a character as Sofia — not 
to mention the young lady's insufferable pedantry — or 
Pravdine, a model functionary, who finds himself sorely 
puzzled to reconcile his ideas with his tastes, and his 
attachment to the good old times with his enthusiasm 
for the Reform. This will also be noticed in the case 
of Gogol's heroes. 

As regards workmanship, the play gives proof of a 
more thorough study of the Western models, and hence 
it somewhat resembles a harlequin's cloak. The geo- 
graphical examination, during which Mitrofanouchka 
reveals his stupidity, is copied from Voltaire's Jeannot et 
Collin. 

The ideas expressed by Starodoume belong in great 
measure to the Nationalist doctrines of that period, and 
have much in common with those of the modern Slavo- 
phil theory. The view taken of the Western world is 
correspondingly narrow and imperfect. Von Visine him- 
self only regarded the philosophical current of his time, 
which both attracted and alarmed him, as a corrupting 



102 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 Dostoi'evski 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 Moenrs du Siec/e, 
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. 



L0UK1NE 103 

The success of The Minor was stupendous. After the 
first performance, Patiomkine called out to the author, 
" Die now, at once ! — or never write again ! " Such tri- 
umphs were not to be repeated on the Russian stage for 
many a day. 

In the hands of Jakov Borissovitch Kniajnine (1747- 
1791), the author of a Dido copied from Metastasio and 
Lefranc de Perpignan, and of some pseudo-classic works, 
such as Rosslav and Vadim, the Russian drama fell 
back into the rut in which Soumarokov had run. And 
indeed Kniajnine was Soumarokov's son-in-law. Vadim 
attained the undeserved honour of attracting Catherine's 
displeasure. The play celebrated the exploits of a mili- 
tary leader who fought with Rurik for the independence 
of Novgorod. Kniajnine's comedies are mere adapta- 
tions of French pieces. 

In Chicanery, by Vassili Iakovlevitch Kapnist (1757- 
1824), a piece which shared the ill-luck of Vadim, and 
could not be presented to the public till after Catherine's 
death, there are some pleasing features. But it is 
not so much a play as a pamphlet in dialogue, contain- 
ing a bold and violent attack against the judicial circles 
of the day. Paul I., who liked violence of any kind, 
authorised its performance, and considered it " did a 
public service." But though the play entertained the 
public vastly, and though a considerable number of its 
lines, which lashed the members of the national magis- 
tracy severely, have become proverbs, history does not 
tell us that a bribe the less has passed into the Russian 
magistrates' hands since its sensational appearance. 

Far more interesting, from the artistic point of view, 
is the contemporary attempt of Vladimir Ignati£- 
vitch Loukine (1757-1824) to acclimatise " middle-class 



104 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 formulae, 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 

Yet this essentially national and popular element did 
contrive, even in Catherine's lifetime, and with some 
slight help from her, to make its appearance on the stage 
under another form, exceedingly fashionable at that 
period — the comic opera. Thus labelled, the satirical 
spirit of the race, and that love of parody which in all 
Russians, as in Peter the Great himself, is but another 
form of the critical spirit, gave birth to a succession of 
works closely allied with the type produced in later days 
by Offenbach. We see the same grotesque and facetious 
travesty of the ancients, the same light and cynical opinion 
of mankind, the same kindly and sympathetic glance, 
cast, in spite of all, on the lower strata of the populace. 
The whole effect is confused. Lessons to proprietors on 
their duties to their serfs are mingled with the defence 
of serfdom itself. But this chaos of feeling and ideas 
obtains in all the literature of the day. Ablessimov 
(1724-1784) was for many years the favourite writer in 
this line. Dierjavine himself tried his hand at it, but 
there was nothing of the playwright about the author of 
Felitsa. 

The glory of Dierjavine, like that of Lomonossov, 
met with varying fortunes. To-day the latter is held the 
greatest of the Russian poets of the eighteenth century, 
and full justice is not done to Lomonossov unless we 
also class him among men of science. Until the advent 
of Pouchkine, that great demolisher of reputations, Dier- 
javine's importance was steadily on the increase. The 
words "great poet" were pronounced regardless of 
chronology and comparison, and he was even called 
" a god." Pouchkine fell upon the idol, and Bielinski's 
assault was still more violent. The "god" was torn 
from 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 Dierjavine (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 
Pougatchovchtchina, 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 



DlfiRJAVINE 107 

Plenire, a fair Portuguese whose happy husband he 
became. In 1778 he contributed to the St. Petersburg 
Messenger, inserting in its columns two rhymed pane- 
gyrics of Peter the Great, an epistle to Chouvalov, and 
the famous Ode to Sovereigns, which was later to earn 
him the reputation of a Jacobin. His literary reputa- 
tion was not established until the publication, in 1782, of 
Felitsa — a poem founded on a tale by Catherine II., in 
which a good fairy of that name, who represents Happi- 
ness, rewards a virtuous young prince. This good fairy 
could be none other than Catherine herself. Dierjavine 
hinted the fact, and was rewarded with a gold snuff-box 
containing five hundred ducats. Soon afterwards, how- 
ever, Felitsa invited the poet to retire from the adminis- 
trative career, wherein he did not show sufficient docility. 
" Let him write verses ! " He wrote them for Zoubov 
and for Patiomkine, the rival favourites, and by this 
shady device contrived to gain forgiveness, and even to 
enter the sovereign's intimate circle as her private sec- 
retary. But one day, as he was working with her, the 
second secretary, Popov, was called in. 

" Remain here ; this gentleman is too free with his 
hands." 

Zoubov and Patiomkine sufficed Catherine at the 
moment. Yet she forgave him, but fancied such an act 
of clemency deserved another laudatory poem. None 
came. On close acquaintance, Felitsa ceased to inspire 
the poet. They parted, and Dierjavine, banished to the 
Senate, climbed the slippery slope no more, until the days 
of Paul and Alexander I. He had grown wise. The 
man who had been called a Jacobin, the apologist of the 
humanitarian ideas attributed to " Felitsa," President of 
the College of Commerce in 1800, Minister of Justice in 



ro8 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 

need not have prevented Dierjavine from becoming a 
great poet. But he was, above all things, a man of 
his own time. His work is like a mirror, wherein we 
see every aspect and every phase of Catherine's reign 
reflected. This being so, it gives us an equal proportion 
of patches of light and pools of darkness, much spirit, 
a certain dignity, no personal feeling for beauty, and 
no moral sense whatever. Dierjavine only saw beauty 
through other men's eyes, and frequently lost sight of 
goodness altogether. Now and then his voice rings with 
an accent of dignity, but he always produces the sen- 
sation that we are listening to a well-conned lesson. 
Oftener yet his muse seems to have wandered into evil 
resorts, where degradation of character is swiftly followed 
by debauch of talent. 

Until he wrote Felitsa, he remained the pupil of 
Trediakovski and the imitator of Lomonossov. But 
this last author towered far above the stature of his imi- 
tator's talent. Dierjavine had the sense to acknowledge 
it, and, advised by some of his friends, he condescended 
to Anacreon, taking Horace and Ossian on his way. He 
knew neither Latin, Greek, nor English. His friends, 
Lvov, Kapnist, and Dmitriev, more educated, though 
less gifted, than himself, set themselves to overcome 
this difficulty. Their assistance even extended to very 
copious corrections, which may still be traced on the 
poet's manuscripts. 

Felitsa, like most of his poems, is a mixture of satire 
and ode. Catherine is extolled, contemporary habits are 
criticised. The general tone betrays the humourist. 
The goddess of Happiness descends from heaven and 
becomes a Tartar princess, whose virtues are sung by a 
murza. This murza, who reappears in another poem 



no RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

{The Vision of the Mursa, 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 Mirza, 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 life, 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, 



DIERJAV1NE in 

of a collection of Bylines by Klioutcharev inspired him 
to the composition of a Dobrynia, in the fourth act of 
which he introduced a chorus of young Russian girls. 
At the same time, to the great scandal of the " Society 
of friends of the Russian Tongue," the veteran poet, like 
Joukovski, went so far as to compose ballads on popular 
subjects. But his heart was with the classics, and he 
did not withstand the temptation to clap a mask, bor- 
rowed from Corneille, upon his Dobrynia, and so dis- 
figure the character completely. But indeed, as I have 
already said, he had no scenic talent. 

Still, when Pouchkine denies him, generally and 
absolutely, every artistic gift, he goes too far. The ex- 
grenadier's language gives him a splendid opening. 
" Dierjavine," he writes, "knew nothing either of the 
grammar or the spirit of the Russian tongue (in this he 
was inferior to Lomonossov); he had no idea of style nor 
harmony, nor even of the rules of versification. . . . 
Reading his work, you would think you were read- 
ing a bad translation of an uncouth original. Truly his 
mind worked in Tartar, and never had time to learn to 
write Russian " (Letters to Baron Delwig). 

I feel a natural shyness about contradicting such an 
authority. Yet the " Tartar's " language strikes me, in 
places, at all events, as being very expressive, plastic, and 
powerful, if not exceedingly correct. His verse, though 
less full than Lomonossov's, has more simplicity, more 
freedom, much greater flexibility, and, in the use of the new 
metres, which broke the old classic uniformity, a fertility 
of resource by which Pouchkine himself appears to me 
to have profited. I believe that the man himself, the 
tchinovnik, the courtier, has compromised the poet's cause 
in the 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 (Iermiel 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 ALneid, 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 
MatviEiEvitch KhEraskov (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 

which the best writers of the time contributed. In 
1775 he became a Freemason and supported the propa- 
ganda of Novikov and his German master, Schwartz, 
obtaining a professorial chair for the first, and farming 
the printing of the University to the second. His epic 
poems have a strong flavour of mysticism. In the 
Rossiad there is a struggle between good and evil ; 
in Vladimir, a struggle between Pagan instincts and 
Christian faith, with, here and there, a victory won by 
the better element, thanks to the intervention of occult 
forces, less connected with the Gospel than with the 
Kabala, which put forward in the most unevangelical 
fashion, and on the esoteric principle of the opposing of 
evil by evil, the struggle of lie against lie, working out 
the final triumph of truth and virtue. 

Those who have the curiosity to look will find the 
same ideas and tendencies in numerous novels by Khera- 
skov, imitated from Fenelon and Marmontel. They are 
also to be observed, in a generalised and popularised 
form, in the strange application by other contemporary 
Russian writers of their studies of the sensualist novels 
imported from France. It must not be forgotten that 
in Russia Gogol was destined to be taken for an imitator 
of Paul de Kock ! These Russian adapters accept these 
novels as satires, and superadd a moral intention. Thus 
we see Tchoulkov and Ismailov making astonishingly 
realistic attempts to Russify the popular type of Faublas. 

Richardson's novels also found many Russian readers, 
and some few imitators, at this period. Among these 
last was Fiodor Emine, author of the Adventures of 
Miramond, which some have taken to be an autobio- 
graphy. Miramond is a sort of Telemachus, travelling 
under the care of a mentor, a near relation, it would 



ii4 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 DoncJienka (" 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 
Mai'kov (1728-1778), who, writing in the same heroi- 
comic style, has descended to indecent parody, was 
also a member of this circle. His Ielssei (or "Angry 
Bacchus ") is a mere piece of filthiness. 

La Fontaine had a better pupil in the person of 
Ivan Ivanovitch Khemnitzer (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 

This foreigner — he came of a German family, probably 
belonging to Chemnitz, in Silesia, who wrote German 
verses in his youth, and developed into a mere dilettante 
in Russian literature in his riper age (he was Consul- 
General at Smyrna when he died) — shared his French 
master's peculiarities, his almost childish nature, his 
shrewd intelligence, and his simple good-heartedness. 

Simpler, less of an artist than La Fontaine, less senti- 
mental than Gellert, he is almost the only Russian fable- 
writer who possesses a touch of originality. 

Foreign literature was at that time rolling into 
Russia like the flood after a storm, in foam-flecked 
waves, which stirred the mud upon the soil beneath, 
and hollowed out great pits upon its surface. From 
the year 1768 onwards, Catherine allotted 5000 roubles 
yearly from her privy purse, for translations from foreign 
languages. She put a hand to the work herself, in a 
translation of Marmontel's Belisaire, and Von Visine, 
Kniajnine, and Kheraskov shared the labour. A per- 
manent committee of translators sat at the Academy 
of Sciences. Various societies were formed for the 
same purpose. Rekhmaninov, a land-owner in the 
Government of Tambov, translated and published the 
works of Voltaire. The director of the College of Kazan, 
Verevkine, undertook the whole of Diderot's Encyclo- 
pedia. Russian extracts from French authors, The 
Spirit of Voltaire, of Rousseau, of Helvetius, had a large 
circulation. This propaganda had no political effect, 
and its humanitarian value strikes us, at this distance 
of time, as utterly insignificant. The very noblemen who 
crowded to pay their court at Ferney, and pressed their 
own hospitality on Rousseau, protested against the 
enfranchisement of the serfs, prematurely proposed by 



n6 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 NikolaiEvitch 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 Sentimental 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. Petersbiirg 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 

fanaticism, and scorn of prejudice. His philanthropy 
comes from Rousseau and Raynal ; his cynicism from 
Diderot. If to these we add, and reconcile as best 
we may, his professions of orthodoxy, joined to tirades 
against the priests and their never-ending impositions on 
human credulity, and his apologies for autocratic power 
followed by revolutionary outpourings, we obtain a com- 
plete idea of the book. 

Radichtchev goes farther than Voltaire and Rousseau. 
He would grant the freed serfs the ownership of the soil 
they till, but he leaves the carrying out of this reform to 
the Samodierjavie, and, except in the matter of date, he 
proves himself a true prophet. He shows a great deal of 
sympathy for the lower classes, declaring his conviction 
that their morality is higher than that of their superiors ; 
but this does not prevent him from expressing astonish- 
ment when a peasant woman is faithful to her word. Such 
a case, he avers, is rare in that class. He is full of contra- 
dictions, and the object to be attained never seems to 
be clear before his mind. But had he really any object 
at all ? He cannot have believed that Catherine would 
permit the circulation of his treatise in the year 1790. 
The days of her dalliance with philosophy were long gone 
by. She might have suppressed the book without touch- 
ing the writer, who was, as he afterwards proved him- 
self, harmless enough. But the widow of Peter III., a 
very woman at times, in spite of her fondness for being 
called Catherine the Great, crushed this fly with a sledge- 
hammer. Radichtchev spent ten years in Siberia, where 
he employed his time, after permission to write had been 
restored to him, in composing another work, filled with 
quotations from Locke, Newton, and Rousseau, entitled 
On Man, on Death, and Immortality, and which might 



n8 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 

of the extreme Nationalist party. His absolute and 
vehement denial of the existence of any loan borrowed 
from a foreign source led him, by way of the clear sheet 
he insisted on, to utter vacancy. He took alarm, and 
retired for refuge into religious mysticism, without caring 
this time to inquire whether the edifice which sheltered 
him had been built by foreign hands or not. At the 
same time he realised that before Russia could possess 
any original culture, the national soil must be stirred to 
its very depths. Under the influence of this idea, the 
theorist in Novikov made way for the man of action, 
the publisher bowed before the educator, and thus began 
the finest period of a career which, if it had lasted longer, 
might have advanced the progress of a work which 
is still in its preliminary stage, by a good half-century. 
But Novikov was stopped half-way. I will endeavour 
to sum up his history ; it was full of incident, and much 
of it is still obscure. 

I have already described the early disagreement 
between the editor of the Drone and Catherine II. 
Novikov, a man of noble birth, like Radichtchev, had 
previously served in the army, and had acted as Secretary 
to the Commission of Legislation. In 1769, journalism 
began to attract, and soon entirely absorbed him. The 
Russian periodical press of Elizabeth's time, although 
modelled on that of England, France, and Germany, 
preserved an officially academic character, which con- 
fined it exclusively to literary and scientific subjects. 
Catherine cast it headlong into the social and political 
vortex. The first blows exchanged between these inex- 
perienced warriors missed their aim. With arms bor- 
rowed from Addison and Steele, they fought against 
windmills — 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 Zamoskvorietchie (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 

another truce, for which Novikov himself was respon- 
sible. He was passing through the mental convulsion 
to which I have already adverted. In the last numbers 
of The Purse (Kochilek) he had reached practical Nihilism. 
Happily Schwartz stood close beside him, ready to hold 
out the hand which saved him at the very edge of the 
abyss. 

The introduction of Freemasonry into Russia dates 
from the time of Elizabeth, but the first Grand Lodge 
was not opened in St. Petersburg until 1772. It was 
connected with the Scottish Masons, and the rites fol- 
lowed the Scottish form, the simplest and purest of all. 
Schwartz introduced Continental forms, which, though 
stained with illuminism and charlatanism, were better 
suited, by their mystic tendency, to the bent of the Rus- 
sian nation. Novikov had been affiliated to the English 
brotherhood since 1772, and its influence had already 
directed him into that path of fruitful activity which has 
rendered him the most meritorious toiler of an epoch 
the relative value of the workers in which has not yet 
been fairly apportioned. He had made some attempts 
to popularise knowledge, had published an Historical 
Lexicon of Russian Writers, a Russian Hydrography, and, 
under the title of An Ancient Russian Library, a col- 
lection of historical documents. Schwartz, whose ac- 
quaintance he made in 1779, after his removal from St. 
Petersburg to Moscow, was the very guide needed to 
draw out his best efforts and full powers in this direc- 
tion. The spark which fires all grand enthusiasms was 
kindled in the Russian's breast by the enthusiastic Ger- 
man dreamer. 

Of a sudden, Novikov began to found schools, print- 
ing-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, unti 
the day when she fancied she perceived a mysteriou 
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 

assumed in Russia a frankly reactionary character, the 
fervent pietism of its members driving it in exactly 
the opposite direction to the philosophic and humani- 
tarian current which was to bring about the Revolu- 
tion. Catherine, who was quite at her ease, and sure 
of her way amidst the shabby windings of ministerial 
chanceries, was utterly incapable of steering a course 
amidst the far more complex mazes of the moral 
phenomena that shook the very soul of her century. 
The moment came at last, when agitation of every 
kind grew hateful to her. Orders were given that no- 
body should budge. And in January 1792 Novikov was 
arrested at his country-house at Avdotino, whither he 
had gone to rest, and conducted, between two hussars, 
to the fortress of Schliisselburg. His philanthropic in- 
stitutions, his printing-works, his bookshops, were all 
forcibly driven out. Paul I. at the beginning of a reign 
which was to increase the population of the Russian 
dungeons, was moved to open the noble martyr's prison 
doors. Legend goes so far as to assert that he im- 
plored his pardon on bended knee. Extravagant the 
story sounds, and it can hardly be true, for of all he 
had lost, the only thing Novikov recovered, besides his 
liberty, was leave to end his life in idleness at Avdotino. 

He had no forerunners, and no direct heirs, in his 
own country. A fraction of his inspiration, minus his 
high morality, descended to that friend of Catherine's 
better days, Princess Dachkov, who was another of 
her victims, and on whom, nevertheless, devolved the 
honour — a strange one — of leading the scientific move- 
ment of her time. 

The movement to which I refer was restricted in 
scope 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 -sufficing. 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 

ing, and held the post for twelve years, combining 
with its duties those of the editorship of the Inter- 
locutor, and, at a later date, those of the Presidency 
of the " Russian Academy," which was, in a sense, an 
offshoot of the journal in question. The Interlocutor 
caused fresh disagreements between the Princess and 
her sovereign, and the publication of Vadime, in 1795, 
completed the quarrel. The Tsarina's quondam friend 
retired to the country in disgrace, and there wrote her 
Memoirs, the French manuscript of which was pre- 
served by Miss Wilmot (later Mrs. Bradford), a dame de 
compagnie, whom she had brought back with her from 
Herzen. She published an English version of the work 
in 1740. 

The author of these Memoirs is remembered as hav- 
ing possessed a disagreeable temper, but a soul open to 
all noble feelings. She did all that lay in her power to 
encourage a school of history, of which, at this period, 
Chtcherbatov and Boltine were the most eminent ex- 
ponents. I have not mentioned her beauty, because I 
have nothing agreeable to say on that subject. 

The school to which I have just referred was more 
controversial than scientific in its essence. Its chief 
function was to support the author of The Antidote, by 
defending the defamed past of the nation against all the 
Abbe Chappes of the West. Prince Michael Mikhai'- 
lovitch Chtcherbatov (1733-1790) was, as his History of 
Russia from the Most Ancient Times, and more especially 
his more popular essay On the Corruption of Russian 
Manners (which did not see the light until 1858), will 
prove, the theorist of the group. And his theories led 
him much farther than the author of The Antidote de- 
sired — 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, 
Golikov, 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 Ielaguine 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 

the period of the great Tsar's reign, and give us an in- 
structive picture of a moral corruption which might 
well invalidate the idea that any good was likely to result 
from the labours of Peter and Catherine. The recol- 
lections of Princess Dachkov and of DieYjavine present 
particular interest in this connection, but their state- 
ments must be accepted with caution. The memory of 
Catherine's former friend may have been confused by 
anger, and that of Dierjavine by the weariness of old 
age. 

Taking it all in all, this " Golden Age," except in the 
department of history, can only be marked in the annals 
of learning by leanings, presumptions, and pretensions, 
none 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 

128 



THE TRANSITION PERIOD 129 

of a gloomy abyss in which the national existence was 
engulfed, and suffered agonising trial. 

The conflict between the liberal and the reactionary 
principle also assumed quite a different complexion in 
Russia. Instead of working from the bottom upwards, 
as was the case elsewhere, the emancipating current 
flowed from the upper strata of society to the lower. 
We have seen Catherine at the head of the philosophic 
propaganda. Alexander I. was to follow her in the 
part, during the earlier portion of his reign, and the 
opposition he then met with came from the literary 
circles of the country. In Russia, until towards the 
middle of the present century, literature was the spe- 
cial field of a small class, imbued, by its aristocratic 
origin, with a strongly conservative spirit. And finally, 
both the point of departure and the general direction 
of the nationalist current in Russia were totally dif- 
ferent from those taken by the same movement in other 
countries. This current was evident even under Cathe- 
rine's rule, when the political integrity of the empire 
was not threatened in any way. It corresponded, not 
with the need to defend the house against intruders, but 
with the desire to possess a house at all. Of the three 
literary leaders who, at the moment now under observa- 
tion, were preparing the way for Pouchkine — Karamzine, 
Joukovski, and Batiouchkov — the first two belonged, for 
political purposes, to the camp of reaction, while the 
third belonged to no camp at all. In literature, the first 
was a pupil of the sentimental school, the second was an 
eclectic, the third a classic of a special type. All three 
really belong to a period of transition, which was to lead 
up to the evolution of the approaching future. 

The intellectual life of Russia is so closely interwoven 



i 3 o 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 detat 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 ni 



j 



Alexander I. was almost the only person who did not 
realise the new, positive, concrete element imported 
by it into the national life. He dallied with his dream. 
Up to about 1 82 1 he played with liberalism, much as 
Catherine had played with Voltairianism. Until 181 1 
he defended Speranski and his reforms against the mili- 
tary party, which represented the conservative element, 
and was supported by the whole, or very nearly the 
whole, of the best intelligence of the country. Speranski 
was always an isolated figure, and when the passage of the 
Niemen and the conflagration of Moscow had proved the 
triumphant military party in the right, all sides were soon 
fused in one outbreak of warlike enthusiasm. Conser- 
vatives, liberals, nationalists, mystics, all rubbed shoulders 
in the ranks of the army that marched on Paris. At 
Paris Alexander I. held on his way, and publicly an- 
nounced, in- Mine, de Stael's drawing-room, the approach- 
ing abolition of serfdom. At the Congress of Aix, in 
1818, he was still full of his dreams, and openly expressed 
his idea that Governments should place themselves at 
the head of the liberal movement. That very year he 
caused Novossiltsov to draw up a plan of liberal insti- 
tutions for Russia. At the same time he favoured the 
diffusion of knowledge and the creation of popular 
schools on the Lancaster model'. The English agents 
of the Bible Society, which had established itself in 
Russia, had given him the first idea of these institutions, 
in 1813. 

From this epoch we may date the predominance of 
English influence in the literature of the country. It 
was exercised, in the first instance, in a manner more 
practical than literary. Nicholas Tourgueniev and 
Admiral 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 Gbttingenists, 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 Spdranski'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 

fore, still and always, dreams. Not one of them, indeed, 
had been put into actual practice. It was not until 
1 82 1 that the military party succeeded in convincing 
the sovereign that Ryleiev and his friends would soon 
cease to confine themselves to chanting the dawn of a 
new era in inferior poetry. Then Catherine's grandson 
took fright, loosed Araktcheiev, like a watch-dog, on 
the harmless band of singers, and himself sought refuge 
in the arms of Mme. de Kriidener. 

In this shelter death overtook him, and a fresh 
catastrophe was the result. Ryleiev and his friends con- 
vinced themselves that the moment for putting their 
dreams into action had arrived. Hence the unhappy 
incidents of December 25, 1825, — a childish attempt at a 
coup d'etat, put down with a savage hand, a gallows or 
two, a long procession of exiles along the Siberian roads, 
and the accession of Nicholas I. 

One of those who blamed the attempt and applauded 
its repression was Nicholas Mikhailovitch Karamzine 
(1766-1826). Born of a noble Tartar family (Karamurza), 
he entered the halls of literature in 1785, by the gate 
of Freemasonry, the cloudy and sentimental aspect of 
which was to attract his feeble and undecided character. 
He was the friend of Novikov, and assisted him with 
his popular publications. Already his taste for English 
literature was increasing. Among the members of the 
Droujeskoie Obclitchestvo (Society of Friends of the 
Russian Tongue) he was nicknamed Ramsay. In 1789, 
he visited foreign countries, the bearer, it has been 
thought, of a Freemasonic mission and subsidies. He 
travelled through Germany and Switzerland, sojourned 
in France and England, and wrote some Letters from a 
Russian 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 

and greatness, thirst for immortal glory, melancholy, 
tenderness. And all this is discovered in the daily life 
of the old Boyards, — the author deliberately overlook- 
ing the existence of the Terem, within whose narrow 
prison walls Natalia would not have found it easy to 
experience the sudden thunderclap of emotion which 
causes her to fall in love with Alexis. Historically 
speaking, all the characters and habits of life depicted in 
the first of these two novels are absolutely false, and the 
modest, dreamy Lisa, whose story is revealed to us in the 
second— the humble flower-girl courted by the great 
nobleman, who desires to cast himself and her into the 
arms of Nature, is not a vision very likely to appear on 
the banks of the Moskva. Yet Lisa has drawn tears 
from many eyes, and for many a year the lake near the 
Monastery of St. Simon, where her dream found its 
ending, was a place of pilgrimage. 

Apart from the matter of truthfulness, to which, 
doubtless, the novelist hardly gave a thought, other good 
qualities, already evident in the Letters from a Traveller, 
justify, in a measure, his great success. These are a very 
lively and delicate feeling for Nature, a great charm in 
his descriptions of landscape, and, above all, a simpli- 
city, vigour, warmth, and luminosity of style, such as no 
Russian pen had up to that date produced. On this 
account alone, the appearance of these novels was a 
real event. Karamzine, like the true virtuoso he was, 
enriched the language of Lomonossov with a bevy of 
foreign expressions and phrases for which he discovered 
equivalents in the popular tongue and in the literary 
documents of past times. This attempt of his was not 
allowed to pass without vehement opposition, apparently 
led by Alexander Siemionovitch Chichkov (1754-1841). 
10 



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 militant 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 Aonides (1796-1799), 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 was to find a more complete and definite development. 
In the European 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 Ca>sar 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 published 
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 



3 7 



prevented him from leaning too pronouncedly in the 
nationalist direction. "We must be men, not Slavs, 
before all else," he was heard to assert. I believe, 
indeed, that his sincerity on this point was not untouched 
by that spirit of opposition which has always been a 
characteristic and generic trait in the most autocratically 
governed of all the civilised nations. As liberalism had 
reached the highest spheres of the government, the 
opposition must necessarily change its tone. And of a 
sudden, Karamzine came to regard Russia, past and 
present, as a world apart, which was not only severed 
from the European West by the special conditions of 
its historical existence, but which ought so to remain. 
And, aided by his power of fancy as a novelist, and his 
knowledge and feeling as a scholar, he set himself to trans- 
port that poetic and ideal view of the reality which had 
made the fortune of his artistic work, into the history 
and politics of his country. People talked to him of 
the abolition of serfdom. But was the condition of the 
serfs really so wretched ? When the barbarity of the 
ancient customs which had forged their chain was 
blamed, he grew indignant. Safe in his triple armour 
of heroic optimism, soaring patriotism, and romantic 
hallucination, he took his way athwart the gloomy 
horrors of past centuries, to confound their detractors 
by calling up the national ideal in all the glory of an 
apotheosis. 

Journalism had long been a weariness to him, but he 
had married without possessing any private fortune, and 
depended for most of his income on this source. He 
succeeded in obtaining the post of historiographer to 
the crown, with a salary of 2000 roubles, retired to 
Ostafievo, 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 Speranski'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, which 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 Genera/ History of Russia, and a firm resolution to 



KARAMZINE 139 

ignore the all-powerful favourite of the period. But 
Araktcheiev was not the man to permit this. The Em- 
peror refused Karamzine an audience, and the grant of 
60,000 roubles necessary for the printing of his book 
appeared to depend on a preliminary visit to the favou- 
rite. Karamzine demurred at first. " We will sell our 
lands," he wrote to his wife. But he thought the matter 
over, and ended by doing more than submit. Another 
letter, written just after his visit to Araktcheiev, de- 
clares his conviction that he had found in him "an 
intelligent and high-principled man." He received his 
60,000 roubles, and the ribbon of St. Anne into the 
bargain. And his recantation does not appear to have 
been indispensable, for in a little over three weeks the 
edition of the first three volumes of his History, number- 
ing three thousand copies, was all bought up. 

The historian's character resembles that of the man. 
An enormous amount of analytical labour, a very notice- 
able art in the employment of the material collected, and 
an excellent moral intention. These are the qualities we 
must place to the credit of his work. We find quite twice 
as many defects. His view of the past is invariably 
influenced by his present sensations ; he is absolutely 
resolved on a sentimental idealisation — the optimism of 
Leibnitz as parodied by Thomson (Karamzine had trans- 
lated The Seasons) ; and he is almost utterly oblivious of 
the internal development and the moral and intellectual 
life of the masses. From this last point of view, Karam- 
zine is inferior to Tatichtchev. Yet his work, with its 
classic architecture, and pompous rhetoric, holds a con- 
siderable place in the literature of his country. For 
many years it served as a model. It influenced Pouch- 
kine, and even Ostrovski. Four more volumes appeared 



140 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 with 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, Yermak — 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 tchinovnik, employed first 
in the Senate, and afterwards as assistant to the Minister 
of Crown Lands. Then comes a change of residence, 



OZIEROV 141 

a meeting with Karamzine at Moscow, and the Muses 
reconquer their adorer. He translates La Fontaine's 
fables. This is the pearl of his literary performances, 
and a considerable factor in the artistic improvement of 
the language. At this point a fresh whimsical adventure 
occurs to complicate the translator's life. He, Karam- 
zine's pupil, finds himself suddenly adopted by Chichkov's 
circle as the champion of the classic tradition and the 
school of Dierjavine, against Karamzine and the new 
school, which he at that moment appears to represent ! 
His absolute lack of individuality favoured this usurpa- 
tion of his person. The worst of it is, that to it he owed 
a great portion of his renown, and even of his success in 
the administrative career. In 1807, he became curator of 
the University of Moscow, and in 181 1, he was appointed 
Minister of Justice. He had then ceased to write, and 
he never was to take up the pen again. 

Ladislas Alexandrovitch Ozierov (1769- 1816) 
began by writing French verses, and afterwards produced 
Russian odes, epistles, and fables. These continued till 
1798, when his first tragedy, Iaropolk and Oleg — a mere 
plagiarism of French models in the style of Soumarokov 
and Kniajnine — was performed. The cold reception 
given it by the audience was calculated to warn the author 
that he was behind his times. He fell back on Richard- 
son and Ducis for his CEdipus at Athens, and next, in 
1805, on Macpherson for his unlucky Fingal, and at 
last attained success, in 1807, with his Dmitri Donskot. 
This is certainly the worst of all his tragedies, but it 
swarms with allusions to contemporary events. Every 
one recognised Alexander I. in the character of Dmitri, 
who successfully repulses the Tartar onslaught, and 
Napoleon I. in that of Mamai. When 1812 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 chatelaine, 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 Andreievitch 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 

tastic, his intense mysticism, which betokened an exces- 
sive development of feeling at the expense of reason, 
closed his eyes to these horizons of contemporary 
thought. 

Practically, he simply carried on the work of Karam- 
zine, whose political ideas and didactic and moralising 
tendency he shared. Thus it came about that in 1830 
he found himself left out of the current on which the 
younger generation of literary men was floating. He 
misjudged Gogol, and only met the author of Dead 
Souls after the period of his intellectual bankruptcy, 
on the common ground of a pietism not far removed 
from madness. The only quality of the Romantic poet 
which he possessed was his subjectivity, but this was his 
to a remarkable degree, and in such a manner as to 
make him the first Russian writer who gave ideal ex- 
pression to the subjective life of the human heart. 
In his eyes, poetry and real life were one — the external 
world and the intellectual world mingled in one match- 
less sensation of beauty and harmony. 

The very birth of Joukovski was a page of romance. 
A country land-owner, Bounine, of the obsolete type of 
the ancient Russian Boyard, owned a Turkish slave 
named Salkha. A child was born, and adopted by a 
family friend, Andrew Grigorovitch Joukovski. The 
boy was afterwards entrusted to the care of his natural 
father's sister, Mme. Iouchkov, who resided at Toula. 
She lived in a literary and artistic circle, in which 
concerts and plays were frequently organised. Before 
young Joukovski had thoroughly mastered the principles 
of Russian grammar, he had become a dramatic author, 
having written two plays, Camilla, or Rome Delivered, and 
Paul and Virginia, both of which were duly performed. 



144 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

In 1797 Mine. Iouchkov 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 
Mine. Iouchkov, 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 Totnb. 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 

at the Borodino, but after the battle he wrote his first 
great poem, The Bard in the Russian Camp, which opened 
the gates of glory to him. 

It was only an imitation, and a somewhat clumsy 
one, of Gray's Bard, with a strange medley of romantic 
sentiment and classic imagery — lyres that rang warlike 
chords and warriors dressed in armour. But the public 
did not look too closely at such trifles, and its enthusiasm 
was increased, after the taking of Paris in 1814, by the 
appearance of an Epistle of five hundred lines addressed 
to the victorious Tsar. The Empress, surrounded by her 
family and intimate circle, desired to hear it, and the 
reader, A. I. Tourgueniev, could hardly get to the end 
of his task. His voice was drowned in sobs and plaudits ; 
he was sobbing himself ; and throughout the country 
the cry went up that another great poet had risen in 
the footsteps of Lomonossov, and there would be fresh 
master-pieces for all men to admire. 

But the country waited long. Tourgueniev even 
went so far as to chide Lomonossov's poetic heir. 
"You have Milton's imagination and Petrarch's ten- 
derness — and you write us ballads ! " At that moment 
Joukovski was forced to play the great man rather 
against his will. In spite of himself, he was pushed to 
the head of the Karamzine party, then in full warfare 
with Chichkov's Bie'ssieda, and became the pillar of the 
rival society of the Arzamas. He drew up its reports 
in burlesque hexameters, which seem to indicate that, 
in his case, melancholy was much more a matter of 
fashion than of temperament. But the great work 
which was obstinately demanded of him came not. 
Settled at court, first as reader to the Empress, and 
later 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 a?id Diamaianti. In 
1 84 1, 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 {Shah Mamet), 
Rustem and Zoi'av — 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 chtchas, 
sometimes struck him as barbarous. 



BATIOUCHKOV 147 

He wrote 110 master-piece, but by interpreting and 
disseminating those of English and German literature, 
he largely contributed to the literary education of his 
country. And Alexander II. was not his only pupil. 
Pouchkine, after having risen in revolt against the blank 
verse adopted by this master, adopted it, in later years, 
as his favourite method of expression, and Batiouchkov 
owed more than mere instruction to the great poet, 
who never made his mark, but who was something 
better than a genius — a kind, and generous, and helpful 
friend. 

Although CONSTANTINE NICOLAI&VITCH BATIOUCHKOV 
(1787-1855) moved in the same orbit as Joukovski and 
Karamzine, he belongs to a separate category. As a prose 
writer he follows Karamzine, but as a poet, and even as 
a translator of anthological or erotic works, he goes his 
own way. He stands alone. He has none of Joukovski's 
sentimental idealism. He is a classic, but of the pure 
Greek type, in love with Nature as she is, conscious of 
her real beauty, treading the ground firmly, and enjoy- 
ing life, even to its bitterness, like some intoxicating 
beverage. In his person, as in that of Krylov, soon 
after, the national poetry at last reaches the stratum of 
fruitful soil in which it was to take root and blossom 
forth. Batiouchkov only skims along the surface of 
this soil, but though his life was long, how short was 
his career ! His was the first in that series of unhappy 
fates of which Joukovski's haunting thoughts of tombs 
and weeping shades would seem to have been the 
presage. He has himself compared his condition to 
that of the most unhappy of modern poets, and his 
lines 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 
;i 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 

for three-and-thirty years the poet's miserable existence 
dragged on. 

Though still farther removed than Batiouchkov from 
the literary group from which the genius of Pouchkine was 
to spring, Ivan Andr£ievitch Krylov (1768-1844) was 
nevertheless the undoubted product of the same sap, the 
same intellectual germination in the national soil, and 
is directly connected, in his best work, with the popular 
mind, of which Frol Skobtiev was an expression. Born of 
a poor family at Moscow — his father was a subaltern 
officer, and his mother, we are told, supported the whole 
family by reading the prayers for the dead in the houses 
of the rich merchants of the city — he belonged, by his 
origin, to the people. Yet, considering his surroundings, 
he was singularly precocious. His Kofeinitsa (fortune- 
teller by coffee-grounds), a comic opera which some 
critics think superior in originality to his later produc- 
tions, was written before he was fourteen. This work, 
which did not at present attain the honour of publication, 
but was exchanged with a bookseller for a bundle of 
French books, including Racine, Moliere, and Boileau, 
was to be the parent, some five years later, of a Philomena 
and a Cleopatra, both of them sad failures. The author, 
whose works were now printed, and more or less read, 
moved in the circle of Kniajnine and revolved in the 
orbit of Novikov, borrowed from foreign authors with 
the first, and decried them with the second. The two 
comedies signed with his name in 1793 and 1794, The 
Rogues and The Author, are nothing more than adapta- 
tions. 

In 1797 we find him in the country, in the house of 
Prince S. F. Galitsine, where he occupied an indefinite 
position, half salaried tutor, half family friend. Four 



j 50 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 

something like a bite. The Frenchman's fables are quite 
impersonal ; the Russian's teem with transparent allu- 
sions to contemporary individuals and things. Krylov 
shows us a "quartette of musicians" — a monkey, a goat, 
a donkey, and a bear — who only succeed in making a 
deafening discord. Nobody hesitates to identify the party 
with the " Society of Friends of the Russian Tongue," 
with its four coteries and its habitual quarrels. Then 
he gives us Demiane and his well-known soup, with 
which he plies his guests till they are sick, and every 
one recognises the most verbose poet of the day. 

La Fontaine's archness is thus turned into asperity, 
and in this, again, Krylov gives proof of a powerful 
originality, more Russian than humane, and essentially 
realistic. Even in his imitations he remains true to the 
national spirit, to its simple, practical, commonplace con- 
ception of the world. With his very scanty education 
and very narrow intellectual horizon, he not only knows 
the life of the mass of the people down to its most secret 
corners, with all its habits, ideas, and prejudices, but all 
these habits, ideas, and prejudices are his own. His 
original fables are, as it were, a counterpart of the pro- 
verbs and legends of his country. His language, plastic 
and vigorous, with a touch of coarseness, is absolutely 
that of the people, without the smallest infusion of book 
lore. 

This original quality of Krylov's was so striking, 
that when the question of his monument was mooted, 
it proved stronger than the classical tradition, in a 
country where even the effigy of Souvorov, that most 
original of men, was set up for the admiration of pos- 
terity, in a public square, disguised as the god Mars! 
Nobody dared to dress up Krylov as Apollo! Care- 
11 



152 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 ^Esop, Phaedrus, 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 ^Esop'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 Araktcheiev 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 th£ 
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 

huts over which the tide of invasion swept, on current 
political events, and on the figure of the great Napoleon. 
Of this series, The Waggon and The Wolf and the Dog- 
Kennel are the most characteristic specimens. 

I am forced to confine myself to these few remarks. 
Krylov's works have been translated into twenty-one 
languages — all the Indo-European and several Eastern 
tongues. There are seventy-two French translations, 
thirty-two German, and only twelve English. He was 
introduced to English readers by W. R. S. Ralston, but 
the most complete English version is that of Mr. Harri- 
son (1884). The first national poet of Russia was also the 
first whose genius conquered the world at large. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE NATIONAL EVOLUTION— POUCHKINE 

The first verses of Alexander Serguieievitch 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 

*54 



POUCHKINE 155 

every voice, external and internal ; and out of its bosom 
had sprung a new mental personality, with its own 
special method of being, thought, and feeling — Russia, 
already embodied in the genius of Krylov, and soon to 
be seen in Pouchkine, Gogol, and Tourgueniev. 

Did Pouchkine really represent this personality ? 
There have been prolonged doubts on the subject, even 
in Russia. With the exception of Gogol, the poet's con- 
temporaries and his natural judges, like the first literary 
critics in Russia, Nadiejdine and Polevoi', have not 
looked on him as much more than imitator, a Westerner. 
To a German, Varnhagen von Ense, belongs the honour 
of having declared his conviction of the falsehood of 
this verdict, and it has been reversed, by degrees, in 
the opinion of the country. Russia, as I write, is pre- 
paring to celebrate the poet's centenary, amidst a general 
concourse of enthusiastic homage, which has never been 
exceeded in the history of the glories of any nation ; 
Nevertheless, a French writer has recently reopened the 
case, and has ventured to come to a definite conclusion, 
which, in his own words, " should sever the poet from 
his own nationality, and restore him to humanity at 
large." 

M. de Vogue will permit me to say that I fail to per- 
ceive the interest of such a restitution. I incline, in 
fact, to the opinion that the more personal, original, and 
national the creator of ideas and images is, the more 
likely is he to interest the human community in general, 
whatever may be the country to which he belongs. And 
it appears to me that to deny the possession of these 
qualities to Pouchkine, is simply to degrade him to 
the rank of such writers as Soumarokov. He deserves 
better 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 Onieguine, 
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. I 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, " I 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 157 

expected, wrote French verses and borrowed from the 
Henriadc. At fifteen, at the College of Tsarskoi'e-Sielo, 
an institution devoted to the education of the youth of 
the aristocracy, he was still rhyming in French : — 

Vrai demon par Pesptiglerie, 
Vrai singe par sa mine, 
Beau coup et trop dtiourderie, 
Mafoif voild.Pouch.kine! 

There were still French masters in this college, among 
them one De Boudry, who, under this name, concealed 
a very compromising kinship ; he was own brother 
to Marat, and his views coincided with his family rela- 
tionship. 

But in 1 8 14 the European Messenger published imita- 
tions in Russian verse of Ossian and Parny, the initials at 
the foot of which scarcely concealed the identity of one 
of the most insubordinate pupils in the College. There 
was much more writing than studying done in that 
establishment. Even periodical sheets were edited by its 
members. Among a group of young men who subse- 
quently made their mark either in politics or literature 
— A. M. Gortchakov, the future Chancellor, and A. A. 
Delwig, the future poet, both belonged to it — Pouchkine 
distinguished himself by his indefatigable diligence as a 
publicist, and his excessive idleness as a student. Karam- 
zine and Joukovski thought highly of his verses, but his 
teachers opined that he " had not much of a future be- 
fore him." In his own family circle this latter opinion 
necessarily prevailed. When " M. de Boudry's" pupil 
left college in 1817, he was at once received into the 
Arzamas, and so plunged into the thick of the political 
and literary fray. Ryleiev belonged to the coterie, and 



158 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 clique was chiefly 
connected with literature. In 1818 he read his com- 
rades the opening verses of Rousslane and Lioudviila, 
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 Chenier, 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 

it appeared a thunderbolt had fallen on the young 
author's head. Numerous other manuscript verses of 
his were in general circulation, among them an Ode to the 
Dagger, suggested by the execution of Karl Sand, who 
had murdered Kotzebue, epigrams on Araktch&ev, and a 
Gabriclid, imitated from Parny's War of the Gods, which, 
for profane and licentious obscenity, far surpassed its 
model, but which departed from it, more especially, in 
its total freedom from any ulterior philosophic intention. 
Poetry of this description, simply and coarsely ribald, 
is, alas ! of very frequent occurrence in Pouchkine's 
work, though it does not appear in any of the " complete 
editions." In these the erotic poems are either omitted, 
or so much expurgated, by dint of pruning and arbi- 
trary correction, that the original sense is completely 
altered. Thus in the four-line stanza addressed to 
Princess Ouroussov, the line — 

" / have never believed in the Trinity " 

is turned into — 

" / have never believed in the Three Graces " ! 

Some special collections of the poet's erotic verse 
have been printed abroad with his name on the cover ; 
and however his biographers may have endeavoured to 
disguise the fact, it is certain that his disgrace in 1820 
was largely connected with the Gabrielid. Parny's imi- 
tator narrowly escaped Siberia. By Karamzine's good 
offices, his punishment was commuted to banishment to 
the Southern Provinces, and the adventure, in the result, 
set an aureole of glory on the exile's brow. Pouchkine's 
Russian contemporaries, like Voltaire's in France, were 
disposed to confuse liberty with license. But the young 



160 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 Eugene Onicguine, 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 Kicheniev 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 Bielkine (1830), one of his 



POUCHKINE 161 

most popular works, and would thus seem to be 
autobiographic. The details of his last and fatal meet- 
ing with Dantes-Heckeren prove that he was quite 
capable of it. His physical courage was foolhardy and 
indomitable. He is also reported to have lived for some 
time with a tribe of gipsies. And in all this I see more 
extravagance and wildness — Abyssinian or Muscovite — 
than romantic fancy. Byron was never either a gambler 
or a bully. He would never have bitten a woman's 
shoulder in a crowded theatre, in a fit of frantic jealousy, 
nor punted at a gambling-table with his own verses at the 
rate of five roubles for an alexandrine ! His Russian 
rival was always, for the reasons I have stated, to 
spend his vital energy in feats of this description, and 
reappear after them, worn out and exhausted, just when 
the noblest causes appealed to him for help. 

The Prisoner of the Caucasus is a Childe Harold with 
more human nature about him, who allows himself to 
hold tender converse with a fair Circassian. The dra- 
matic struggle between the harem system and a man's 
love for a single woman forms the subject of The Foun- 
tain of Baktchissarai, and it is also the subject of the 
Giaour. Aleko, the hero of the Gipsies, who flies from 
the lying conventionalities of society, is Byron himself, 
but a disfigured Byron, capable of introducing all the 
weaknesses and prejudices of the world from which he 
has banished himself, into the gipsy camp. In this fact 
Pouchkine's apologists have endeavoured to discover a 
repudiation of the Byronian ethics, and the poet's con- 
version to nationalism. He never gave it a thought ! 
Writing to Joukovski in 1825, he says, "You ask what 
is my object in The Gipsies? My object is poetry." 
He 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 Rodoslovnaid), in 
which he proudly claims the title of bourgeois, 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 

Byron and from Southern climes; and this coincidence 
is doubtless not merely accidental. The influence of 
surroundings always affected this impressionable nature 
strongly. When about to leave Odessa, he bade farewell 
to the sea, and to " the poet of the sea, powerful, deep, 
gloomy, unconquerable, even as the sea itself," in lines 
which are among the finest he ever wrote ; and thus he 
revealed the mysterious link which, in his poetic thought, 
bound the man and the element together. Fresh dis- 
grace awaited him. At St. Petersburg he had outdone 
Parny ; at Odessa an English traveller introduced him 
to Shelley, and soon he went farther than the author 
of Prometheus Unbound. He felt strong leanings to "ab- 
solute atheism," and was so imprudent as to state the 
fact in a correspondence which, naturally, was inter- 
cepted. He was treated as a hardened offender, and 
sent in disgrace to the care of his father, who lived in a 
lonely village in the Government of Pskov. 

This banishment was infinitely more severe. MikhaT- 
lovskoie was very different from Odessa, and the elder 
Pouchkine took his responsibility as jailer quite seriously. 
The poet's letters were opened. He was obliged to give 
up seeing his friends. At last Joukovski interfered, and 
to such purpose that the son was at all events left alone 
in the village, his father taking his departure, and leaving 
the local police to watch the behaviour of his perverted 
child, with whom he refused to hold any intercourse 
whatever. Friends began to make their appearance, 
and the poet was able to mingle some entertainment 
with his literary labours, which still continued. His 
liaison with Mme. Kern dates from this period. At the 
same time he was passing The Gipsies through the 
press, beginning his Boris Godounov and carrying on 



164 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

his Eugene Onieguine. 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 165 

and in which men who know how to dream can see 
so much. 

Pouchkine's poem is full of digressions, a constant 
commentary on the story, apparently very Byronic, but 
in reality very different, both in substance and in form. 
Form and substance are affected, in the case of both 
poets, by the fact that one belonged to a country where 
men speak much and unconstrainedly, and the other to 
a country where expression is rare and reserved. The 
dwellers on the steppe are, as a rule, a silent race. 
Occasionally some special circumstance may unseal their 
lips ; then comes something like a torrent which has 
broken its banks. They grow talkative and prolix to 
excess. But they are doomed to continue within the 
narrow and commonplace intellectual horizon that hems 
them in, with all the paltry ideas and interests it involves. 

There was no Hellespont for Pouchkine to cross at 
Mikhai'lovskoi'e\ The only water he met with on his 
walks was a narrow rivulet, which he could cross dry 
footed. We see the consequence in a strong touch of 
the commonplace in parts of his work. To European 
readers the interest of his poem centres in the character 
of Onieguine. Now this "Muscovite dressed up as Childe 
Harold" — as Tatiana is fain to call him, wondering 
whether she has not to deal with "a parody" — this 
disenchanted man of pleasure, is neither Childe Harold 
nor Manfred, neither Obermann nor Charles Moor ; he 
is Eugene Onieguine, a character so thoroughly and 
specifically Russian that no equivalent to it can be found 
in the literature of any other country. In Russian litera- 
ture, on the contrary, it constantly appears. It appears 
under the name of Tchatski in the work of Griboiedov, as 
Pietchorine in Lermontov's, as Oblomov in Gontcharov's, 



1 66 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

unci Peter Bezouchov 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 LicJinyiie 
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 ! Look in thine own face. Already it is full of 
wrinkles ! " 

Dostoi'evski, 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 

events, has modelled it in the true clay, drawn from the 
very heart of the national life and history. 

I cannot share Dostoevski's opinion of Tatiana. Her 
figure is charming. Is it really and essentially typical, 
and Russian ? In its mingling of resolution with grace 
and tenderness, it may be, although the famous letter 
in which she reveals her love is borrowed from the 
Nouvelle Hcloise. In several places Pouchkine has simply 
translated from Rousseau. In her profound devotion to 
duty, again, I will admit it. This trait in Tatiana's char- 
acter is the legacy of distant ancestors. The obligatory 
and universal military service which for centuries called 
every man of the free classes away from his own fire- 
side, had, as its inevitable consequence, the development 
of certain qualities within the home, and the exaltation 
of certain virtues in the women of the country. But 
in Dostoevski's view, Tatiana's great originality lies in 
the final feature, that of her heroic adherence to her 
conjugal fidelity ; and I fear this presumption may call 
a smile to my reader's countenance. 

Pouchkine, after he had composed the first few cantos 
of Eugene Onuguine, wrote thus to one of his friends, 
" I have begun a poem in the style of Don Juan." A 
year later he writes, " I see nothing in common between 
Eugene Onieguine and Don Juan!" These changes 
of view are common among poets. But Pouchkine was 
right — the second time ! In vain do we seek, in the 
Russian poet's work, for the religious, social, and political 
philosophy which is the basis of all the English poet wrote. 
We do not find a symptom of Byron's vehement protest 
against the cankers of modern civilisation, poverty, war, 
despotism, the desperate struggles of ambition and appe- 
tite. The picture of the soldier robbing the poor peasant 
12 



1 68 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

of what remained in his porringer never haunted the 
brain of the recluse of Mikai'lovskole. In him Byron's 
excessive individualism, 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 Bielinski affirms, the poem is "an 
encyclopaedia 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 Mikhailovskoi'd, 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 

again. He tore himself finally away from the gipsies, 
"sons of the desert and of liberty," and sought shelter 
in the theory of Art for art's sake. 

This was to lead him to Goethe, and from Goethe to 
Shakespeare. No more verses like those of Solitude, 
written at Mikhailovskoi'e, were to brand the name 
of " serfdom " with disgrace. No more appeals for 
intellectual union with Sand or Radichtchev. The rup- 
ture with the past was utter and complete. Sometimes 
it was to cause the poet pain, as when the "enlightened 
despotism," of which he had become an adherent, laid 
its iron fingers on his own brow. " The devil," he was 
to write, " has caused me to be born, in this country, 
with talent and a heart." But in vain was the turmoil of 
thought and aspiration and revolt, in which he had once 
shared, to call upon him to return. He never descended 
from his Olympus. 

Silence, mad nation, slave of need and toil ! 
Thine insolent mitrmiirings are hateful to me / 

To the study of Shakespeare, into which he now threw 
himself with avidity, he added that of Karamzine. In 
the solitude of Mikhailovskoi'e the poet laboured to supply 
the inadequacy of his "cursed education." An old nurse, 
Arina Rodionovna, guided him, meanwhile, through the 
wonderful mazes of the national legends. This resulted 
in the conception of Boris Godounov. In the figure of 
this throned parvenu Pouchkine has endeavoured to 
merge the features of Shakespeare's Richard III., Mac- 
beth, and Henry IV. Certain scenes in the play — the 
election scene, and that in which Boris gives his parting 
counsels to his son — are directly taken from the English 
playwright. Taken as a whole, it is only a chapter out 



170 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 MeYimee, 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 which it is difficult to express. Behold 
her ! 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 ca?i offer her the faintest hope of a throne 
which 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 
Eugene 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 



P0UCHK1NE 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 Onicguine. 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 72 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

arrived at Mikha'i'lovskoi'e, 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 Mikha'i'lov- 
skoi'e. 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 
if 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 Sa/tane, are master-pieces. The little 
dramatic fancies entitled The Stingy Knight, Mozart and 
Sa/ieri, and The Stone Landlord, also belong to this pro- 
ductive period. Their value seems to me to have been 
overrated. 

But once more, alas ! 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 Chris tabel. But the plan was 
never put into execution, and we are not tempted to 
regret it. 

The author of Eugene Onicguinc was visibly approach- 
ing mental exhaustion. In his new surroundings, his 
inspiration was failing him, and his mental horizon nar- 
rowing. In 1 83 1, 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 i;5 

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, like 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 triumphant 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 1800 
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 art's 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. 



POUCHK1NE 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 The 
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 ;i 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 T/ie 
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 (j'eud, masculine rhyme ; 
km'ga, 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 (1 798-1 831) 
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 
precocious 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 181 

had an irresistible attraction for him. He had the de- 
light of spending the winter of 1843-44 in 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 The Steam-Boat, one 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 Baratinski 
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 SerguiEievitch Griboiedov(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 
ChakhofskoT, 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 ot 
oumd) 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 Onicguine 
found a rival, and Pouchkine seems to have felt 
some annoyan ,e ; 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 



GRIBOIEDOV 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 liberty, served as Paskievitch's attache 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 Dzvellers 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. " / go to 
seek some spot in the universe where I may find a corner 
which will shelter a feeling and wounded soul. My coach ! 
my 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 



GRIBOIEDOV 185 

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 upon 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, Odoi'evski, 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 sooieties 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 



GRIBOIEDOV 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, tov/ards 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, Grietch (1787-1867), and Boul- 
garine (1 789-1 859), and on the Reader s Library by a 
literary clown, Senkovski (1800-1858), who signed his 
articles with such pseudonyms as " Baron Brambaiis " 
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, 

189 



190 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 with 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 Alexieievitch 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 
formulae. 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) is, 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 Grietch 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 



1 92 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 Iakovlevitch 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 
Dolgoroukai'a, 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 182 1 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 Tchadaiev'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 Madman's 
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, Bielinski, 
and the Slavophils of the future, Khomiakov, Kirieievski, 
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 almost 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 Boris 
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 Modem 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 
Grigori£vitch 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 middling talent. According to the memory 
of him preserved by his contemporaries, Stankievitch'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 reappear in 
Moscow until 1838. During this interval, a little revo- 
lution had taken place in the coterie of which Stankie- 
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, 
Bielinski 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 doctrine of 
" Hindoo quietism," and the 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. Bielinski, 
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 dealings 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- 
toievsky 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, Bielinski 



BIELINSKI 201 

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 consequent 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 oj 
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 talk 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. Kirieievski, C. Akssakov, and 
especially A. Grigoriev, endeavoured to reconcile art 
and the national element ; and the doctrine of the critical 
publicists, which Dostoi'evski 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 Nihilism. 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 
( 1 836-1 860) 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- 



206 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

geratcd 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 Oblomov, 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 eye 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 not 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 Kirieievski 
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 revolutionised 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 Bielinski, 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' Nicolaie- 
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 public 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 



210 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 Vassilievitch Kirieievski (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, 



KIRIEIEVSKI: KHOMIAKOV 211 

Peter Kirieievski (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 
{Rousskaia Biessicda), 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 Vassilievitch 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 Kirieievski. Alexis Stefanovitch 
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 Yermak 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- 



212 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 Words 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). I. 
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 I. 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 realised 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. KaveUine, one of 
the contributors to The Contemporary, was to take definite 
shape under the pen of C. Akssakov. 

According to Samarine (died 1876), Russian organisa- 
tion has always been essentially based on the communal 
system (obchtchina), 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 numerous 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 Sergui£i£- 
vitch Akssakov (1817-1860). This man was an idealist 
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 



214 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 Lonpouvitski 
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 Serguieievitch 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 1 861 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 Serguieievitch 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, ?l 
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 u National 
idea." 

The Kiri^idvskis 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, the Revue 
15 



216 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 Dostoi'evski, 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 Veneline (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 



218 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, Zabieline, S. M. Soloviov (1820-1879), and 
N. I. .Kostomakov (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. I. 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 185 1, 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 March 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), ne 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 Koudciar (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 Razine, 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 Archaeographical 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. Kirieievski'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 Iasnaia 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 
Tourgueniev is said to have dubbed, in 1862, with the 
name of Nihilism — the origin of which, however, dates 
from 1855 — did 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 225 

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 cast 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 
Tourgueniev. Reason and truth have suffered even 
more, when the writer who thus disguised them bore 
the name of TolstoL 



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 blase' beings. "What passion !" 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 Enghie Onic'guinc. 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 Nationalist 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 Kirieievski 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. Tourgueniev remarked upon his eyes, " which 
never laughed, even when he laughed himself ! " 

The parents of Michael Iourievitch 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 Iourievitch 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 Peterhof 'and 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, " 1 love, thee, man, not less, but Nature 
more ! " 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 confrere. 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 

standpoint, a taste for the brilliant imagery, the sonorous 

language, and the humour and pathos of the English 

16 



332 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

poet, did him the service of snatching him from the 
habits and surroundings of a mere cavalry officer, and 
revealing 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 mm 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 Lermonto\ 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, ana more directly by De Vigny's 
Eloa ; but in the hands ot the Russian poet the cha: 
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 a S a tana represents the forsa vindice della razione of 
our own day. This sensual demon approaches much 
more nearly to the type created by De Vigny. "fat 
fonde mon empire de fiamme — dans les desirs du caur 



234 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

■ — dans les rh>es de lame — dans les dfcirs 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 Demon } 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 Kiribi&evitch, 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 I 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 Onieguine 
and Lenski, without exhausting his whole personality 
in either character — so Pietchorine, 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'nn Enfant du Steele (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 Pict- 
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 Onieguine 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 2nd sentimental, and at the same 
time .i 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 Schille 1 ; and Walter Scott ; a Don 
Juan rilled 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. Pietchorine may 
possibly be a Manfred. When, after reading Moore's 
Life of Byron, Lermontov exclaimed — 

We have the same soul, the same torments; 
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 Lermontoy 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 Nathan 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 Leidenschaften. 
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 
(prassot) 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 Vassilievitch 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, bu' to make 
him fall in love. The heroine of this fin' v!yl 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 Porfirevitch Serebrianski, a young poet, 
whose melancholy song, " Swift as the waves flow the 
days of our life," had its hour of popularity. Then came 
Stankievitch, 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 a 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 kep> 
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 my 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 
nr>t 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 (Doumy), 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 moajiks, 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 ihvariably 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. Onieguine, 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, ascribed 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 Seminarists 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 N6krassov. In my judgment it 
betokens more fierce enthusiasm than poetic feeling, and 
the author's best works, his Humour, his Nocturne, his 
Soliloquy, his Winters 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. Polevoi', Prince V. Odoi'evski, 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 I. 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 NortJiern 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 
hi.m 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'e*- 
Sielo. 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, The Brothers Tvierdislavitchy •, the 
subject and form of which was borrowed from the 
German almanacs of that period, a tragedy, The Rodders, 
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 use later, 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 
vhich to burn them, every one, and was suddenly seized 
with 1 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 1831. 
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 — and this time Pouchkine, in his delight, fell 
on the author's neck. Perhaps the truth had reveled 
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 Alirgorod 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. 



250 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 tb~ 



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- 
fire 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 Vii, 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, Akaki'i 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 Dostoi'evski 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 The 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 ; 
Dostoi'evski 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 



254 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 Akaki'i 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 255 

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 Kantemir, 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 
of feeling the phenomena he described, another feature, 
to which I have already alluded — and which, as it be- 



256 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 Examiner 
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 ; Sobakievitch, 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 '. ,vhat 
a dreary place our Russia is ! " cried Pouchkine when 
he hac 1 read the book. The picture it presents is extra- 
ordinarily 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 Cafe 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 t~ 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 Vogue" 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 Dostoevski's work," he certainly falls into 
an historical error. The trait, as to Gogol, is derived 
from Dickens. In Dostoi'evski'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 
Tius constantly exaggerate every feature. A society 
made up of nothing but such people as Manilov, 
Nozdriov, and Sbakievitch, could not exist. The author 
needed the assistance of Bielinski and Herzen, before 
he .ealiscd 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 



260 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 ! was 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. The 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 
Vrote 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 political, social, and religious 
regime which had produced his Sobakievitch 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 ingenuous 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 



202 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 Happing on his forehead, and his 
large 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 public 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&ev 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, an< ^ * s 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 Bielinski, 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, Oblonwv, 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 barchtckina, amongst the rural land- 
owners, previous to the abolition of serfdom. The long 
Russian winters naturally predispose the monjik 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 thought, 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 Onieguine, 
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 
farniente. 

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 Gontcharov only published a few sketches, and 
an excellent analysis of The Misfortune of being too Clever. 

As a painter of aristocratic or bourgeois society, 
Dmitki Vassili£vitch 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 Smicdov, made Grigorovitch's reputa- 
tion as a Russian Beecher-Stowe. In The Fishers (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 2; i 

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 an 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 NicolaiEvitch 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 Zamoskvorictchie, 
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 (Svoi 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 Jiii 
own place {Nie v svoi sani nie sadis), played in 1853, 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 BieUinski, 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 Karc'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 Domostrol 
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!" 

And so Catherine seeks in another man's arms the 
caress, the loving words, the tender clasp for which her 
sou l_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 
a 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 re- 
cognise Cicconi's Pecorelle smarrite ; in A Cafe, Goldoni's 
Bottega 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 pamiechtchiki (rural 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 would vanish, if they showed some little energy. 
But 01 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 dfoioue- 
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, prosford). They taught 
Ostrovski precious lessons. 

Tourgueniev also enriched the national stage with 
several pieces which cannot be reckoned among his 
master-pieces. Pissemski, in his Bitter Fate (Gorkai'a 
soudbina) y 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 Tourgueniev. 

TOURGUENIEV. 

Ivan Serguieievitch Tourgueniev (18 18-1883) was born 
of a family of country nobles in the government of Orel. 



tourgu£niev 579 

Among his ancestors he reckoned that Peter Tourgue- 
niev who was executed on the lobnoie miisto 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 
Serguieievitch showed his professor of literature, P. A. 
Pletniev, a fantastic drama in verse, Stem'o, 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 Tourgutmiev 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- 
ments, and published, over the initials T. L., a Paracha 
in rhyme, of which Bielinski spoke in terms of praise. 
This resulted in a friendship, followed by some slight 
coldness. Bielinski, 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 



280 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

chance, the difficulty in which Panaiev, the editor of 
The Contemporary y 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 Serguieievitch, 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 Tourgu6niev 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 



TOURGUENIEV 281, 

recognised, was revealed to Russia by Tourgueniev, 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 Iermolai, 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), 
Tourgueniev, 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 volition, 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 very like the 
deceptive phrase-maker whom Goutzkov has reproached 
himself with idealising in Dankmars Wildungen, with a 
touch, too, of Spielmann's problematical figures. 

A House of Gentlefolk occupies a place of its own in 
Tourgueniev'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 Tourgueniev 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 all 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, 
Tourgueniev, 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 Nadiejdine 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 likeness 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 
Tourgueniev 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 Ego. 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 
Tourgueniev. 

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, Tourgueniev — 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 



TOURGUENIEV 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 Niejdanov, Rudin's own 
brother in no/onte, as Gambetta would have phrased 
it — seems to have more reality and life. This was because 
Tourgueniev had sketched him from Nature. Niejdanov 
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 of 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 been somewhat coldly received in Russia. Yet 
sometimes they give us back the Tourgueniev 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 289 

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, Moutuou, 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- 
gueniev, 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 Tourgueniev'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 



TOURGUENIEV 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. 

Tourgueniev'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 Tolstoi', 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 t