University of Virginia Library

THE YOUNGER RUSSIAN WRITERS.

RUSSIAN critics never cease lamenting the dearth of good literature. Turgeneff, Dostoyevsky, Pisemsky, Goncharoff, and Pomialovsky are dead; Tolstoy, the only survivor of the great constellation of the sixties and seventies, is a very old man and has "sworn off;" while the younger generation of novelists has so far failed to produce a single work of lasting value. The productions of the masters were inspired by the noble enthusiasms of their time: they were the æsthetic offspring of the abolitionist movement and of the renaissance which followed the emancipation of the serfs. "Does the poverty of our literature of to-day denote a lack of ideals?" ask the critics.

This literary famine, however, is limited to the novel; for the list of short story-tellers in Russia is considerable in length, and includes several men of uncommon power, some of whom deserve a place in the foremost ranks of modern authors. Of these younger Russian writers Vladimir Korolenko is perhaps, the only one with whom English-speaking readers are more or less familiar; Chekhoff, Potapenko, Gorki, and Veresayeff being almost unknown in Anglo-Saxon countries.

All these are realists. Indeed, no other species of fiction would be considered literature in Russia, where the story of adventure and plot is looked upon as the æsthetic diet of children, and where "decadent" influences have never been able to obtain even a temporary footing. Lifelikeness clothed in the simplest forms of expression, and artistic sincerity reflecting the self-criticisms and the melancholy moods of the Russian people — which the critics have taught the public to exact from its story-writers since Pushkin — are still the sine qua non of literature.

The testimonial was signed by some of the leading Russian writers of to-day; and the note which rings through it is the keynote of the Russian short story as well as of the Russian drama.

The list of living authors, omitting the name of Count Tolstoy, is headed by Vladimir Galaktionovitch Korolenko and Anton Pavlovitch Chekhoff; and the relative standing of these two men, better than anything else, perhaps, illustrates the general literary situation of their country. Korolenko is popular for his views on the social question; Chekhoff, in spite of his having none.

The peculiar conditions under which Russian literature has grown up have brought about a close intimacy between the political ideals of the cultured classes, on the one hand, and their fiction, on the other. Silenced by the censor, the reformer is forced to call upon the novel to convey his message. This is the characteristic feature of Russian letters. It involves a point of view which countries otherwise circumstanced may find it difficult to appreciate, and that accounts for the unusual seriousness with which the educated Russian takes his fiction.

No nation has a theory of art so clearly defined, nor one so firmly imbedded in the traditions of the intelligent classes, as is the theory which forms the underlying principle of Russian criticism; and one of the essential points of this theory is, that a work of art must also be a work of education. "Art for art's sake" is out of the question in a country where the poem must take the place of the editorial, and where the story-teller, who does not make his fiction a criticism of life, is looked upon as something like a public officer who betrays his trust.

A literary creed such as this would seem to be fatal to art, and the fiction based upon it doomed to degenerate into that species of sermon-novel which is a bad sermon and a worse novel. Yet, so far as Russia is concerned, the curse has turned out to be a blessing. Sermonizing is just what the censor will not allow; so the novelist must try to make his pictures talk, to let life expose its own wounds. For, like those well-bred ladies of whom Thackeray tells us that they did not mind looking at the trousers of hundreds of men, though they would have been shocked to hear the word uttered, the censor, as a rule, does not prevent a subject of the Czar from painting a spade, but he will not let him call it by its name.

To make a story such a vehicle of expression two things are necessary. It must be a faithful transcript of life, and it must be a work of

art; that is, not a dead "protocol" of events, nor yet a series of re-touched photographs, but a picture vivified by the breath of genius and carrying the illusion of pulsating reality. A "purpose novel," where the sails of the narrative are trimmed to suit the wind which blows in the direction of the author's preconceived moral, is in Russia in far worse odor than it is here. Indeed, this sort of fiction usually defeats its own "purpose;" for it is prevented, by its artificiality, and made-to-order effect, from directing attention to the phase of life in question, so that, instead of exclaiming, "How true!" the reader exclaims, "Oh, it's only a story!"

This is the sum and substance of the literary doctrine which holds sway over the great Northern Empire. Like Molière's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," who was agreeably surprised to discover that what he had spoken all his life was prose, Russia had been writing realism long before she was acquainted with the term. While in France, for example, this school of fiction made its appearance in the natural course of literary evolution, in Russia it was forced upon the enlightened classes by the political conditions of their country.

In the above sense Turgeneff was a propagandist. His every novel was written with a purpose; and yet they are anything but "novels with a purpose," as the term is used in American and English criticism. Turgeneff's works are the artistic incarnation of social ideas; so are Pisemsky's, Tolstoy's, Dostoyevsky's, Ostrovsky's; and so are the stories and sketches of Vladimir Korolenko.

Korolenko is of an affectionate, self-sacrificing nature. He thinks the present order of things in his country unjust, and his heart goes out to every victim of it. He has suffered for the sympathies which form the groundwork of his art; and the public and the critics love him as much for his sacrifices as for his talent. In short, Korolenko is a radical; and the "facts of life which strike him" most keenly, and which he portrays in his works, are such as, according to the critics, contain his advanced views. Not so Chekhoff, who is neither a radical nor a conservative, but a man without convictions, who writes for no

other "purpose" than the pleasure which he takes in his work. As a result, the applause which his genius received in the early days of his career was half-hearted and accompanied by howls of disapproval.

He made his bow to the public in the latter part of the eighties as a writer of short sketches for newspapers; and he had not been known a year, before it became evident that a great, new star had appeared on the literary horizon of Russia. But then he was a man without social ideas; so the critics took a tone with him which made it appear as if they begrudged him his powers and challenged his title to them. That he has overcome all the obstacles in his way to fame, and has been universally recognized as the greatest master of the Russian short story and the most powerful living writer in his country after Tolstoy, is one of the proofs of the magnitude of his genius.

Speaking of Chekhoff's earlier sketches, Skabichevsky, in his "History of Recent Russian Literature," remarks that they

Since 1892, when the above passage was written, Chekhoff has taken himself more seriously. His "Ward No. 6," where a country physician — a lonely thinker and passionate reader, misunderstood by his neighbors — is locked up as a madman by his rival physician; "The Black Friar," which portrays the picturesque hallucinations of an overworked professor and his misery upon recovering from his blissful megalomania; "The Butterfly," which is the quiet tragedy of a good-natured man of science married to an unsuccessful painter, who, unable to appreciate her husband's gifts and the importance of his work, is abandoned to the recklessness of Bohemian life till she violates her plighted troth; "The Kiss," which a shy bachelor received in a dark room from a charming woman, who mistook him for her lover, and the tragic-comic effect it had upon his psychology; "The Peasants," where the grim truth of village life in Russia is laid bare — these and many other short stories and sketches are irresistible works of art, strong, deep, true, and beautiful. But they, too, are devoid of "underlying ideas;" and so, while the critics have come to agree that the appearance of a new story by Chekhoff is an important event in the

literary history of Russia, they still frown upon him as a kind of political heathen.

Nicolai Constantinovitch Michailovsky, the leading critical authority of the present generation, who is one of the irreconcilable literary enemies of the younger master, points to the following passage in "A Dull Story," by Chekhoff, as true of the author himself.

"Chekhoff has talent and the power of observation," declares Michailovsky, "but he lacks 'that which is called unifying idea or the God in the living man.' This is the key to the riddle why we all, who respect his gifts, are firmly convinced that he will never develop them to the full extent of their potential vigor."

The hero of "A Dull Story" and his author are representatives of a type which is quite common in Russia and Poland. Turgeneff has portrayed several varieties of this Hamlet of our times in his stories; and Sienkewitcz has made him the subject of his best psychological novel, "Without Dogma." As to Chekhoff, his "Dull Story" is not the only production in which his leading character is a man without a dogma. Several of his other tales have this type for their central figures. The rest treat of other types; each story "living by itself," and all of them reflecting the state of mind which is characteristic of their time.

Another critic who finds fault with Chekhoff's social views observes apropos his "Peasants:"

Verisimilitude, then, is a first consideration; and no amount of cleverness and fine writing can atone for the lack of it. To win the attention of the educated Russian, it is absolutely necessary that the author should have the gift of making things seem real. Chekhoff possesses this gift in a marvellous degree. One of the striking features of his stories is their absolute naturalness. Korolenko, Potapenko,

Gorki, and a score of lesser lights are endowed with a sense of character and can draw a lifelike picture; but Chekhoff, of all Russian writers of the younger generation, seems to tell a true story. It is impossible to read half a dozen sentences in any of his tales without beginning to feel that all was only spirited gossip about people with whom author and reader are personally acquainted. Chekhoff seems to be too keenly interested in these people, and too anxious to tell you about them, to indulge in a prettily turned phrase, a jest, or a piece of rhetoric. Indeed, his works teem with irresistible humor; his style is a model of grace; a few simple words sketch off the character so that it lives and moves before the reader; and, above all, almost every sentence exposes to view some interesting nook of the human soul. But all these results are achieved in a most casual way. The author enjoys his gossip too intensely to be aware of his own cleverness.

The stories mentioned, except "The Peasants," have been selected, because they belong to those of Chekhoff's productions in which something happens, so that the "point" or the simple little plot can be presented in a nutshell. The typical Chekhoff story, however, the one which shows his genius at its best, is so absolutely storyless that there is not enough even to fill a nutshell. From five to ten thousand words are bestowed upon the most trivial bit of every-day life. But then it is life itself, not a mere réchauffé of it; and the plain, hum-drum people and things, to whom nothing out of the ordinary happens, turn out to be thrillingly interesting.

The great point of Chekhoff's genius is his wonderful artistic memory for the caprices and fleeting trifles of reality — for the wanton dissimilarities as well as for the similarities of life. Almost everything the author says sets the reader wondering how it ever occurred to him to mention such a thing at all. It seems to have so little in common with what writers, good or bad, usually put in their descriptions or dialogues. It is one of those evanescent flinders of life which one can neither remember nor invent, and which are as fresh and unexpected, in every instance, as they are characteristic of the period and place to which they relate. His stories are full of these little surprises, and the illusion is entrancingly complete. Tolstoy is the only writer who possesses this quality in a higher degree for psychical analysis; but even he yields first place to Chekhoff in the description of external phenomena.

It is ordinary, commonplace conditions, too, which have furnished Korolenko, the humane prose-poet of Russian literature of to-day,

with some of his most fascinating creations; but, like Gorki, he sometimes departs from this realism sans phrases to write a species of fairy tales or fables. These, however, can hardly be called romance in the sense in which the term is applied to the novels of Crockett, Weyman, or Anthony Hope; for while the English romancer will make it his business to put ordinary mortals through experiences that are anything but ordinary, the fantasies referred to deal with actualities under the guise of the supernatural, in common mortals masked as fairies, devils, or angels. Korolenko's "Judgment Day," which is a satire upon the government's discriminative policy regarding the Jews, is, perhaps, the best example of this class of realistic poetry. The devil of the story is a pretty human sort of devil, just as Makar's "Dream" of his experiences after death is quite a wakeful vision of throbbing earthly life.

Korolenko's natural bent seems to be in the direction of the mysterious and the weird. He is indisputably the greatest master of Russian composition since Turgeneff and Goncharoff. His style is rich in color and exquisitely finished; but instead of the soft, enravishing splendor of Turgeneff's diction, it has a lethargic, uncanny glow which pleases but does not move. Were he an Englishman his art would, perhaps, have developed some of the qualities of Stevenson and Du Maurier. As it is, he often seeks for the quaint and the bizarre in real life; now penetrating the depths of a "Rustling Forest" for a story of old serfdom days; now descending into the subterranean refuge of beggars to study the feelings of a boy "In Bad Company;" now ascending to the bell-tower of a village church where a superannuated, life-long "Bell-ringer" gasps his last amid the reverberations of his own chimes.

Korolenko is best known to English readers as the author of "The Blind Musician," which it is customary to call his masterpiece. This is scarcely fair to the gifted writer; for, with all its high merits, this story is not altogether free from a certain premeditated effect which is absent from his other works, notably, "In Bad Company." This tale treats of life among the drink-crazed outcasts of a southern town, and of the touching friendship between the young son of the local judge and the sickly little daughter of one of the social waifs. Abandoned to his gnawing grief over the loss of his wife, the judge neglects his motherless boy; letting him roam around the streets, make excursions to the vaults of the abandoned castle, and visit the church where the tramps of the town find shelter. The lonely little nobleman thirsts for the caressing hand of a parent; and in his yearnings he finds consolation

in his secret devotion to the beggar girl. The story is thoroughly convincing, and offers a striking example of a disagreeable subject made beautiful through artistic truth inspired by human sympathy. The several outcasts in the story are among the strongest creations in modern literature.

Korolenko's later stories have all appeared in "Russkoye Bogatstvo" (Russian Riches), of which he and Michailovsky, the critic, are the editors. His contributions are rather far between. So are Chekhoff's. The most prolific of the noted writers of short stories is Ignati Nicolaïevitch Potapenko. This, however, has anything but an enviable effect upon his literary status. He has written several tales which should entitle him to a place in the front rank. "The Private Secretary of His Excellency" is an inimitable portrait of a man who wears out his nerves and dies of heart-failure; overworking himself for the glory of his worthless time-server of an employer; "Practical Common Sense" may not be a model of construction, but it is full of human interest and irresistible humor. Besides these two, Potapenko has written a dozen or so of other stories and sketches which have in them the elements of enduring literature; but all these are lost in scores of "potboilers" quite unworthy of his talent.

All his stories, without exception, are, however, extremely readable; and running through them all there is a chord of human sympathy and of an undimmed optimism, coupled with that spirit of criticism which is a necessary element of success in Russian fiction. Sometimes the humanitarian idea is given expression in a species of semi-idealized images, whose flesh and blood are of a questionable quality, as is the case in his "General's Daughter" and "Active Service;" at other times it betrays him into false notes like those which jar upon the reader of his story of newspaper life in Odessa; but in his happier moods he is free from all these faults. At his best he is very good indeed. Unfortunately, however, he is too often at his worst.

The clerical and the Bohemian world are his specialty; but he has a close acquaintance with almost every walk of life, particularly in the southern provinces; and the ten or twelve volumes of short stories he has published cover the widest range of type and circumstance. He has neither the tender-hearted poetry of Korolenko nor the divine clairvoyance of Chekhoff; but he knows the world thoroughly, and has a lively sense of its comedies and tragedies. One of the secrets of his wide popularity is his inexhaustible stock of most interesting themes. As the reader lays down a new story by Potapenko, he thinks it curious

that the subject should so long have been overlooked by literature. It seems just the thing to make a story of, and, at the same time, it is such a familiar phase of our every-day experience, that one cannot help wondering how it escaped the notice of all other writers.

As to Gorki and Veresayeff, they "arrived" so recently that their position has not yet been clearly defined. Both are endowed with the power of description, and both have sense of character; but while Veresayeff has attracted attention as a promising disciple of Turgeneff, Gorki has sprung into sudden prominence through his most original and extremely vigorous sketches of life among social waifs. His "unifying idea" strongly suggests Nietzsche.

Piotr Dmitrievitch Boborykin, who trains his literary camera upon the latest tendencies and fads of his country, and Dmitri Nikanorovitch Mamin, who hunts for "local color" among the tribes of the Ural Mountains and Western Siberia, are novelists. Both have the art of projecting their figures, and both are widely read — particularly Boborykin, who belongs to an older generation. But neither of them is capable of arousing enthusiasm in a country where the word novelist is associated in the public mind with the names of Tolstoy, Turgeneff, Dostoyevsky, and Goncharoff.

Of the young women who contribute stories to the leading magazines, Viera Mikoulich has attracted considerable notice. Other young writers, also, have done good work; and, like those mentioned above, they draw their themes from the actualities of their own environment.

The peculiar history of Russian literature, from Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontoff down to our time, and the "characteristic sadness" and introspective, "self-lashing" propensities of the educated classes have developed a passionate interest in the artistic study of character and human motive. The five or six magazines published in the two capitals, and the influential newspapers of the Empire, give much space to this kind of literature. Not contented with the home product, they also print a translation of anything to be found in the way of realistic fiction in foreign countries; provided the realism is art, and the analysis is not a long-drawn-out discussion, but a "picture of the soul."

But then the Russian magazines will also give space to stories of foreign authors who are not realists. Generally speaking, they are far more tolerant with writers of the "decaying West" than they are with their own. They limit themselves, however, to the best representatives

of literature in each country; so that, upon the whole, the fiction printed in the Russian magazines is of an unusually high order. This would not be the case, perhaps, if the magazine-reading public in Russia were as large as it is in countries where education is much more evenly distributed than it is in the dominions of the Czar. But the Russian monthlies cater to a small, intellectual minority — the circulation of the "Messenger of Europe," the best-established magazine in St. Petersburg, is, according to its own figures, from 7,000 to 8,000 — and the average of tastes they have to deal with is exceedingly high.

The publications in question are all of the "Revue des Deux Mondes" type; each combining the elements of a review, such as THE FORUM, and a literary magazine. In Russia they are, broadly speaking, the substitutes for political parties. Not that the matter published is limited by any definite programme or necessarily colored by partisan bias — for, indeed, topics covering the widest range of thought are given fair and exhaustive treatment, and the fiction, though often saddled with a purpose, is in the majority of instances good literature — but the writers grouped about a magazine are, for the most part, banded together by the ties of political persuasion; and their belief, more or less directly advocated in special articles, crops out in the trend of the literary discussions as well as in the stories and the poetry.