 | Lazarus |  |
Foreword
Lazarus and The Gentleman from San Francisco, while fairly typical of Slavic literature, nevertheless contain few of the elements popularly associated with the work of contemporary Russian writers. They have no sex interest, no photographic descriptions of sordid conditions and no lugubrious philosophizing. These stories are not cheerful, yet their sadness is uplifting rather than depressing. They both contain what the Greek called katharsis in their tragedies, — that cleansing atmosphere which purges us of every baser feeling as we read them.
In Lazarus Andreyev has come as near as it is humanly possible to achieving the impossible. He has made concretely vivid an abstraction; he has arrested for an instant the ceaseless, unmeasurable flood of eternity; he has enclosed in a small frame the boundless void of the infinite. That which no human faculty can understand Andreyev has made almost intelligible. For a terrible moment he unveils the the secrets of the grave, and together with Augustus and the others who have come under the spell of Lazarus' eyes, we see how the most enduring of human monuments crumble into chaos even at the instant when they are being built, how nations upon nations tower like the shadows of silent ghosts, rising out of nothingness and sinking instantaneously into nothingness again, "for Time was no more, and the beginning of all things came near their end: the building was still being built, and the builders were still hammering away, and its ruins were already seen and the void in its place; the man was still being born, but already funeral candles were burning at his head, and now they were extinguished and there was the void in place of the man and of the funeral candles. And wrapped by void and darkness the man in despair trembled in the face of the Horror of the Infinite."
In The Gentleman from San Francisco — Ivan Bunin demonstrates the poverty of wealth and the impotence of power. This story has been called the best work of fiction produced in Russia during the last decade.
The petty seriousness of the life of the modern Babylon, the deference paid by all people to bald heads and patent leather shoes and well-filled pockets, and the utter disregard for human feelings, are pictured with the pen of one who pities rather than scorns the frailties of the earth. The author stands aside, letting the world rush by like a hurdy gurdy, each gentleman from San Francisco or Boston or Berlin or Hong Kong sitting on his hobby horse, while the head waiter Luigi clownishly mocks their antics and nudges Death in the ribs.
The Gentleman from San Francisco shows the wide gulf that yawns between our estimate of our own worth and our actual worth. "I need the whole wide world for my amusement!" cries the man of wealth. "Yes, and here it is," answered Death, handing him a coffin. And as a further humiliation, those who were most anxious to serve this man of wealth in life are the first to shove the coffin into the ground.
The two stories in this book will arouse thought. They will be severely criticized by those who hate thought and as an excuse for their superficial shallowness condemn all Russian literature, for Russian literature is nothing if not thought-provoking. I do hope, however, that nobody will be found quite so devoid of a sense of humor as an admirable college dean and a sweet old lady the former of whom wrote to me that Chekhov's Nine Humorous Tales was immoral, and the latter of whom insisted that Lazarus was ungodly, inasmuch as Christ would never have raised a man from the dead for the purpose of teaching us so sad a lesson about the grave.
| Lazarus | |