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+Project Gutenberg's An Outline of Russian Literature, by Maurice Baring
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Outline of Russian Literature
+
+Author: Maurice Baring
+
+Release Date: June 27, 2010 [EBook #33005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OUTLINE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Sam W. and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
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+
+
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+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+A single Greek word appears in this book. It has been transliterated
+and is marked with plus symbols, like +this+.
+
+
+
+
+             HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
+               OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+                   AN OUTLINE
+              OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
+
+           By the Hon. MAURICE BARING
+
+
+                     LONDON
+               WILLIAMS & NORGATE
+
+           HENRY HOLT & CO., NEW YORK
+         CANADA: RYERSON PRESS, TORONTO
+         INDIA: R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.
+
+
+
+
+                      HOME
+                   UNIVERSITY
+                     LIBRARY
+
+                       OF
+
+                MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+                   _Editors:_
+
+       HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A., LL.D.
+
+   Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.
+
+      Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D.
+
+         Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+          (Columbia University, U.S.A.)
+
+                    NEW YORK
+             HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                  AN OUTLINE OF
+                    RUSSIAN
+                   LITERATURE
+
+                   BY THE HON.
+                 MAURICE BARING
+
+         AUTHOR OF "WITH THE RUSSIANS IN
+      MANCHURIA," "A YEAR IN RUSSIA," "THE
+              RUSSIAN PEOPLE," ETC.
+
+                     LONDON
+              WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+             _First printed 1914/15_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The chief difficulty which Englishmen have experienced in writing
+about Russia has, up till quite lately, been the prevailing ignorance
+of the English public with regard to all that concerns Russian
+affairs. A singularly intelligent Russian, who is connected with the
+Art Theatre at Moscow, said to me that he feared the new interest
+taken by English intellectuals with regard to Russian literature and
+Russian art. He was delighted, of course, that they should be
+interested in Russian affairs, but he feared their interest was in
+danger of being crystallized in a false shape and directed into
+erroneous channels.
+
+This ignorance will always remain until English people go to Russia
+and learn to know the Russian people at first hand. It is not enough
+to be acquainted with a certain number of Russian writers; I say a
+certain number advisedly, because, although it is true that such
+writers as Tolstoy and Turgenev have long been naturalized in England,
+it is equally true that some of the greatest and most typical of
+Russian authors have not yet been translated.
+
+There is in England no complete translation of Pushkin. This is much
+the same as though there were in Russia no complete translation of
+Shakespeare or Milton. I do not mean by this that Pushkin is as great
+a poet as Shakespeare or Milton, but I do mean that he is the most
+national and the most important of all Russian writers. There is no
+translation of Saltykov, the greatest of Russian satirists; there is
+no complete translation of Leskov, one of her greatest novelists,
+while Russian criticism and philosophy, as well as almost the whole of
+Russian poetry, is completely beyond the ken of England. The knowledge
+of what Russian civilisation, with its glorious fruit of literature,
+consists in, is still a sealed book so far as England is concerned.
+
+                                                       M. B.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAP.                                                   PAGE
+
+      I THE ORIGINS                                        9
+
+     II THE NEW AGE--PUSHKIN                              30
+
+    III LERMONTOV                                        101
+
+     IV THE AGE OF PROSE                                 126
+
+      V THE EPOCH OF REFORM                              159
+
+     VI TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY                          196
+
+    VII THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY                         226
+
+        CONCLUSION                                       243
+
+        CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE                              251
+
+        INDEX                                            254
+
+
+
+
+    _The following volumes of kindred interest have already been
+                     published in the Library:_
+
+      27. English Literature: Mediaeval. By W. P. Ker.
+
+      43. English Literature: Modern. G. H. Mair.
+
+      35. Landmarks of French Literature. G. L. Strachey.
+
+      65. The Literature of Germany. Prof. J. G. Robertson, Ph.D.
+
+
+
+
+AN OUTLINE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE ORIGINS
+
+
+For the purposes of the average Russian, and still more for the
+purposes of the foreigner, Russian literature begins with the
+nineteenth century, that is to say with the reign of Alexander I. It
+was then that the literary fruits on which Russia has since fed were
+born. The seeds were sown, of course, centuries earlier; but the
+history of Russian literature up to the nineteenth century is not a
+history of literature, it is the history of Russia. It may well be
+objected that it is difficult to separate Russian literature from
+Russian history; that for the understanding of Russian literature an
+understanding of Russian history is indispensable. This is probably
+true; but, in a sketch of this dimension, it would be quite
+impossible to give even an adequate outline of all the vicissitudes in
+the life of the Russian people which have helped and hindered,
+blighted and fostered the growth of the Russian tree of letters. All
+that one can do is to mention some of the chief landmarks amongst the
+events which directly affected the growth of Russian literature until
+the dawn of that epoch when its fruits became palpable to Russia and
+to the world.
+
+The first of these facts is the existence of a Slav race on the banks
+of the Dnieper in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the growth of
+cities and trade centres such as Kiev, Smolensk, and Novgorod, which
+seem already to have been considerable settlements when the earliest
+Russian records were written. Of these, from the point of view of
+literature, Kiev was the most important. Kiev on the Dnieper was the
+mother of Russian culture; Moscow and St. Petersburg became afterwards
+the heirs of Kiev.
+
+Another factor of vital historical importance which had an indirect
+effect on the history of Russian literature was the coming of the
+Norsemen into Russia at the beginning of the ninth century. They came
+as armed merchants from Scandinavia; they founded and organized
+principalities; they took Novgorod and Kiev. The Scandinavian Viking
+became the Russian _Kniaz_, and the Varanger principality of Kiev
+became the kernel of the Russian State. In the course of time, the
+Norsemen became merged in the Slavs, but left traces of their origin
+in the Sagas, the _Byliny_, which spread from Kiev all over Russia,
+and still survive in some distant governments. Hence the Norse names
+Oleg (Helgi), Olga (Helga), Igor (Ingvar). The word Russian, _Rus_,
+the origin and etymology of which are shrouded in obscurity, was first
+applied to the men-at-arms who formed the higher class of society in
+the early Varanger states.
+
+The next determining factor in the early history of Russian literature
+is the Church. Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, married the sister of the
+Emperor of Byzantium and was baptized; henceforward Christianity began
+to spread (987-8), but the momentous fact is that it was the
+Christianity of the East. The pearl of the Gospels, says Soloviev, was
+covered over with the dust of Byzantium, and Russia was committed to
+the Greek tradition, the Greek rivalry with the West and was
+consequently excluded from the civilization of the West and the great
+intellectual community of which Rome was the centre. This fact is of
+far-reaching and momentous importance. No less important was the
+introduction of the Slavonic liturgy, which was invented by two Greek
+brothers from Saloniki, in the ninth century, who tried to force their
+Macedonian dialect on all the Slavs, and succeeded in the case of
+Bulgaria and Servia. A century or so later it reached the Russian
+Slavs. Through Bulgaria, the Russians acquired a ready-made literature
+and a written language in a dialect which was partly Bulgarian and
+partly Macedonian, or rather Macedonian with Bulgarian modifications.
+The possession of a written language acted as a lever as far as
+culture was concerned. In the eleventh century, Kiev was one of the
+most enlightened cities in Europe.
+
+The rulers of Kiev were at this time related to the Kings of France,
+Hungary, Norway, and even England. The Russian MSS. of the eleventh
+century equal the best MSS. of Western Europe of the same period. The
+city of Kiev was a home of wealth, learning, and art. Byzantine
+artists went to Kiev, and Kiev sent Russian painters to the West.
+There seemed at this time to be no barrier between East and West.
+Nothing could be more promising than such a beginning; but the course
+of Russian history was not destined to run smooth. In the middle of
+the eleventh century, the foundations of a durable barrier between
+Russia and Western Europe were laid. This was brought about by the
+schism of the Eastern and Western Churches. The schism arose out of
+the immemorial rivalry between the Greeks and the Latins, a rivalry
+which ever since then has continued to exist between Rome and
+Byzantium. The Slavs, whom the matter did not concern, and who were
+naturally tolerant, were the victims of a racial hatred and a rivalry
+wholly alien to them. It may seem unnecessary to dwell upon what some
+may regard as an ancient and trivial ecclesiastical dispute. But, in
+its effects and in its results, this "Querelle de Moine," as Leo X
+said when he heard of Luther's action, was as momentous for the East
+as the Reformation was for the West. Sir Charles Eliot says the schism
+of the Churches ranks in importance with the foundation of
+Constantinople and the Coronation of Charlemagne as one of the turning
+points in the relations of West and East. He says that for the East it
+was of doleful import, since it prevented the two great divisions from
+combining against the common enemy, the Turk. It was of still more
+doleful import for Russia, for the schism erected a barrier, which
+soon became formidable, between it and the civilizing influences of
+Western Europe.
+
+But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the existence of this
+growing barrier was not yet perceptible. The eleventh and twelfth
+centuries in Russia were an age of Sagas and "Byliny," already clearly
+stamped with the democratic character and ideal that is at the root of
+all Russian literature, and which offer so sharp a contrast to Greek
+and Western ideals. In the Russian Sagas, the most popular hero is the
+peasant's son, who is despised and rejected, but at the critical
+moment displays superhuman strength and saves his country from the
+enemy; and in return for his services is allowed to drink his fill for
+three years in a tavern.
+
+But by far the most interesting remains of the literature of Kiev
+which have reached posterity are the _Chronicle of Kiev_, often called
+the _Chronicle of Nestor_, finished at the beginning of the twelfth
+century, and the _Story of the Raid of Prince Igor_. The _Chronicle of
+Kiev_, written in a cloister, rich in that epic detail and democratic
+quality that characterize the Sagas, is the basis of all later
+chronicles dealing with the early history of Russia. _The Story of the
+Raid of Prince Igor_, which also belongs to the twelfth century, a
+prose epic, is not only one of the most remarkable memorials of the
+ancient written language of Russia; but by virtue of its originality,
+its historical truth, its vividness, it holds a unique place in the
+literary history of Europe, and offers an interesting contrast to the
+_Chanson de Roland_.
+
+_The Story of the Raid of Igor_ tells of an expedition made in the
+year 1185 against the Polovtsy, a tribe of nomads, by Igor the son of
+Sviatoslav, Prince of Novgorod, together with other Princes. The story
+tells how the Princes set out and raid the enemy's country; how,
+successful at first, they are attacked by overwhelming numbers and
+defeated; how Igor is taken prisoner; and how in the end he escapes
+and returns home. The story is written in rhythmical prose, with
+passages where the rhythm has a more strongly accentuated quality as
+of unrhymed verse. All the incidents recorded in the epic agree in
+every respect with the narrative of the same events which is to be
+found in the _Chronicle of Kiev_. It is only the manner of presenting
+them which is different. What gives the epic a unique interest is that
+the author must indubitably have belonged to the militia of
+Sviatoslav, Grand Duke of Kiev; and, if he was not an eye-witness of
+the events he describes with such wealth of detail, his knowledge was
+at any rate first-hand and intimate.
+
+But the epic is as remarkable for the quality of its style as it is
+for the historical interest of its subject-matter. It plunges, after a
+short introduction, _in medias res_, and the narrative is concentrated
+on the dramatic moments which give rise to the expression of lyrical
+feeling, pathos and description--such as the battle, the defeat, the
+ominous dream of the Grand Duke, and the lament of the wife of Igor on
+the walls of Putivl--
+
+        "I will fly"--she says--
+    "Like the cuckoo down the Don;
+    I will wet my beaver sleeve
+    In the river Kayala;
+    I will wash the bleeding wounds of the Prince,
+    The wounds of his strong body."
+
+        *   *   *   *   *
+
+        "O Wind, little wind,
+    Why, Sir,
+    Why do you blow so fiercely?
+    Why, on your light wings
+    Do you blow the arrows of the robbers against my husband's warriors?
+    Is it not enough for you to blow high beneath the clouds,
+    To rock the ships on the blue sea?
+    Why, Sir, have you scattered my joy on the grassy plain?"
+
+Throughout the poem, Nature plays an active part in the events. When
+Igor is defeated, the grasses bend with pity and the trees are bowed
+to the earth with grief. When Igor escapes, he talks with the river
+Don as he fords it, and when the bandits follow him, the woodpeckers
+tell them the way with their tapping. The poem, which contains much
+lamentation over the quarrels of the Princes and the injury ensuing
+from them to the Russian people, ends in the major key. Igor is
+restored to his native soil, he goes to Kiev to give thanks in the
+Church, and the people acclaim the old Princes and then the young
+Princes with song.
+
+A transcript of the poem, made probably at the end of the fourteenth
+century, was first discovered in 1795 by Count Musin-Pushkin, and
+first published in 1800, when it made the same kind of impression as
+the publication of the _Songs of Ossian_. It was not, however, open to
+Dr. Johnson's objection--"Show me the originals"--for the fourteenth
+century transcript of the original then existed and was inspected and
+considered unmistakably genuine by Karamzin and others, but was
+unfortunately burnt in the fire of Moscow.[1] The poem has been
+translated into English, French and German, and has given rise to a
+whole literature of commentaries.
+
+Up to the twelfth century, Russian life was concentrated in the
+splendid and prosperous centre of Kiev; but in the thirteenth century
+came a crushing blow which was destined to set back the clock of
+Russian culture for three hundred years, namely, the Tartar invasion.
+Kiev was destroyed in 1240. After this, the South was abandoned;
+Lithuania and Poland became entirely separated from the East; the
+Eastern principalities centred round Moscow; the Metropolitan of Kiev
+transferred his see to Moscow in 1328; and by the fourteenth century
+Moscow had taken the place of Kiev, and had become the kernel of
+Russian life and culture. Russia under the dominion of the Tartar yoke
+was intellectually stagnant. The Church alone retained its
+independence, and when Constantinople fell, Moscow declared itself to
+be the third and last Rome: but the independence of the Church,
+although it kept national feeling alive under the Tartar yoke, made
+for stagnation rather than progress, and the barrier between Russia
+and the culture of the West was now solid and visible.
+
+From the fourteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth
+century, Russian literature, instead of being a panorama of various
+and equally splendid periods of production, such as the Elizabethan
+epoch, the Jacobean epoch, and the Georgian epoch, or, as in France,
+the Renaissance, the _Grand Siecle_, and the philosophic era of the
+eighteenth century, has nothing to show at all to the outward world;
+for during all this time the soil from which it was to grow was merely
+being prepared, and gradually, with difficulty and delay, gaining
+access to such influences as would make any growth possible. All that
+is important, as far as literature is concerned, in this period, are
+those events and factors which had the effect of making breaches in
+the wall which shut Russia off from the rest of Europe; in letting in
+that light which was necessary for any literary plants to grow, and in
+removing those obstacles which prevented Russia from enjoying her
+rightful heritage among the rest of her sister European nations: a
+heritage which she had well employed in earlier days, and which she
+had lost for a time owing to the barbarian invasion.
+
+The first event which made a breach in the wall was the marriage of
+Ivan III, Tsar of Moscow, to Sophia Palaeologa, the niece of the last
+of the Byzantine Emperors. She brought with her Italian architects and
+other foreigners, and the work of Peter the Great, of opening a window
+in Russia on to Europe, was begun.
+
+The first printing press was established in Moscow during the reign of
+Ivan the Terrible, and the first book was printed in 1564. But
+literature was still under the direct control of the Church, and the
+Church looked upon all innovations and all foreign learning with the
+deepest mistrust. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Peter
+the Great had a strange forerunner in the shape of that enigmatic
+historical personage, the false Demetrius, who claimed to be the
+murdered son of Ivan the Terrible, and who, in spite of his western
+ideas, Polish manners, and Latin culture, succeeded in occupying the
+throne of Moscow for a year. His ideal was one of progress; but he
+came too soon, and paid for his prematurity with his life.
+
+But it was from Kiev and Poland that the fruitful winds of
+enlightenment were next to blow. Kiev, re-risen from its ruins and
+recovered from its long slumber, became a centre of learning, and
+possessed a college whose curriculum was modelled on the Jesuit
+schools; and although Moscow looked upon Kiev with mistrust, an
+imperative demand for schools arose in Moscow. In the meantime a
+religious question had arisen fraught with consequences for Russia:
+namely that of the revision of the Liturgical books, into the text of
+which, after continuous copying and recopying, errors had crept. The
+demand for revision met with great opposition, and ended ultimately in
+producing a great schism in the Russian Church, which has never been
+healed. But, with the exception of the Little Russians, there was no
+one at Moscow capable of preparing texts for printing or of conducting
+schools. The demand for schools and the decision to revise the texts
+were simultaneous. The revision was carried out between 1653-7, and a
+migration of Kiev scholars to Moscow came about at the same time. In
+1665 Latin was taught in Moscow by SIMEON POLOTSKY, who was the first
+Russian verse-maker. It is impossible to call him a poet; he wrote
+what was called syllabic verse: the number of syllables taking the
+place of rhythm. As a pioneer of culture, he deserves fame; but in the
+interest of literature, it was a misfortune that his tradition was
+followed until the middle of the eighteenth century.
+
+In the latter half of the seventeenth century, another influence
+besides that of Kiev and Poland made itself felt. A fresh breach in
+the wall came from another quarter. The German suburb in Moscow in the
+seventeenth century, called the _Sloboda_, became a centre of European
+culture. Here dwelt the foreign officers and soldiers, capitalists and
+artisans, who brought with them the technical skill and the culture of
+Western Europe. It was here that the Russian stage was born. The
+Protestant pastor of the _Sloboda_, Gregory, was commanded to write a
+comedy by the Tsar Alexis, in 1672, on the occasion of the birth of
+the Tsarevitch. A theatre was built in the village of Preobrazhenskoe
+(Transfiguration), and a play on the subject of Esther and Ahasuerus
+was produced there. It was here also in 1674 that the ballet was
+introduced. A regular company was formed; several plays translated
+from the German were produced, and the first original play written in
+Russia was _The Prodigal Son_, by Simeon Polotsky.
+
+Thus, at the end of the seventeenth century, Russia was ready for any
+one who should be able to give a decisive blow to the now crumbling
+wall between herself and the West. For, by the end of the seventeenth
+century, Russia, after having been centralized in Moscow by Ivan III,
+and enlarged by Ivan IV, had thrown off the Tartar yoke. She had
+passed through a period of intestine strife, trouble, anarchy, and
+pretenders, not unlike the Wars of the Roses; she had fought Poland
+throughout the whole of the seventeenth century, from her darkest hour
+of anarchy, when the Poles occupied Moscow. It was then that Russia
+had arisen, expelled the invaders, reasserted her nationality and her
+independence, and finally emerged out of all these vicissitudes, the
+great Slavonic state; while Poland, Russia's superior in culture and
+civilization, had sunk into the position of a dependency.
+
+The man whom the epoch needed was forthcoming. His name was Peter. He
+carried on the work which had been begun, but in quite an original
+manner, and gave it a different character. He not only made a breach
+in the wall, but he forced on his stubborn and conservative subjects
+the habits and customs of the West. He revolutionized the government
+and the Church, and turned the whole country upside down with his
+explosive genius. He abolished the Russian Patriarchate, and crushed
+the power of the Church once and for all, by making it entirely depend
+on the State, as it still does. He simplified the Russian script and
+the written language; he caused to be made innumerable translations of
+foreign works on history, geography, and jurisprudence. He founded the
+first Russian newspaper. But Peter the Great did not try to draw
+Russia into an alien path; he urged his country with whip, kick, and
+spur to regain its due place, which it had lost by lagging behind, on
+the path it was naturally following. Peter the Great's reforms, his
+manifold and superhuman activity, produced no immediate fruits in
+literature. How could it? To blame him for this would be like blaming
+a gardener for not producing new roses at a time when he was relaying
+the garden. He was completely successful in opening a window on to
+Europe, through which Western influence could stream into Russia. This
+was not slow in coming about; and the foreign influence from the end
+of the reign of Peter the Great onwards divided directly into two
+different currents: the French and the German. The chief
+representatives of the German influence in the eighteenth century were
+TATISHCHEV, the founder of Russian history, and MICHAEL LOMONOSOV.
+
+Michael Lomonosov (1714-1765), a man with an incredibly wide
+intellectual range, was a mathematician, a chemist, an astronomer, a
+political economist, a historian, an electrician, a geologist, a
+grammarian and a poet. The son of a peasant, after an education
+acquired painfully in the greatest privation, he studied at Marburg
+and Freiburg. He was the Peter the Great of the Russian language; he
+scratched off the crust of foreign barbarisms, and still more by his
+example than his precepts--which were pedantic--he displayed it in its
+native purity, and left it as an instrument ready tuned for a great
+player. He fought for knowledge, and did all he could to further the
+founding of the University of Moscow, which was done in 1755 by the
+Empress Elizabeth. This last event is one of the most important
+landmarks in the history of Russian culture.
+
+The foremost representative of French influence was PRINCE KANTEMIR
+(1708-44), who wrote the first Russian literary verse--satires--in the
+pseudo-classic French manner, modelled on Boileau. But by far the most
+abundant source of French ideas in Russia during the eighteenth
+century was Catherine II, the German Princess. During Catherine's
+reign, French influence was predominant in Russia. The Empress was the
+friend of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot. Diderot came to St.
+Petersburg, and the Russian military schools were flooded with French
+teachers. Voltaire and Rousseau were the fashion, and cultured society
+was platonically enamoured of the _Rights of Man_. Catherine herself,
+besides being a great ruler and diplomatist, was a large-minded
+philosopher, an elegant and witty writer. But the French Revolution
+had a damping effect on all liberal enthusiasm, for the one thing an
+autocrat, however enlightened, finds difficulty in understanding, is a
+revolution.
+
+This change of point of view proved disastrous for the writer of what
+is the most thoughtful book of the age: namely RADISHCHEV, an official
+who wrote a book in twenty-five chapters called _A Journey from St.
+Petersburg to Moscow_. Radishchev gave a simple and true account of
+the effects of serfdom, a series of pictures drawn without
+exaggeration, showing the appalling evils of the system, and appealing
+to the conscience of the slave-owners; the book contained also a
+condemnation of the Censorship. It appeared in 1790, with the
+permission of the police. It was too late for the times; for in 1790
+the events in France were making all the rulers of Europe pensive.
+Radishchev was accused of being a rebel, and was condemned to death.
+The sentence was commuted to one of banishment to Eastern Siberia. He
+was pardoned by the Emperor Paul, and reinstated by the Emperor
+Alexander; but he ultimately committed suicide on being threatened in
+jest with exile once more. Until 1905 it was very difficult to get a
+copy of this book. Thus Radishchev stands out as the martyr of Russian
+literature; the first writer to suffer for expressing opinions at the
+wrong moment: opinions which had they been stated in this case twenty
+years sooner would have coincided with those published by the Empress
+herself.
+
+Catherine's reign, which left behind it many splendid results, and
+had the effect of bestowing European culture on Russia, produced
+hardly a single poet or prose-writer whose work can be read with
+pleasure to-day, although a great importance was attached to the
+writing of verse. There were poets in profusion, especially writers of
+Odes, the best known of whom was DERZHAVIN (1743-1816), a brilliant
+master of the pseudo-classical, in whose work, in spite of its
+antiquated convention, elements of real poetical beauty are to be
+found, which entitle him to be called the first Russian poet. But so
+far no national literature had been produced. French was the language
+of the cultured classes. Literature had become an artificial
+plaything, to be played with according to French rules; but the
+Russian language was waiting there, a language which possessed, as
+Lomonosov said, "the vivacity of French, the strength of German, the
+softness of Italian, the richness and powerful conciseness of Greek
+and Latin"--waiting for some one who should have the desire and the
+power to use it.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] Another copy of it was found in 1864 amongst the papers of
+Catherine I. Pushkin left a remarkable analysis of the epic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE NEW AGE--PUSHKIN
+
+
+The value of Russian literature, its peculiar and unique message to the
+world, would not be sensibly diminished, had everything it produced
+from the twelfth to the beginning of the nineteenth century perished,
+with the exception of _The Raid of Prince Igor_. With the beginning of
+the nineteenth century, and the accession of Alexander I, the New Age
+began, and the real dawn of Russian literature broke. It was soon to be
+followed by a glorious sunrise. The literature which sprang up now and
+later, was profoundly affected by public events; and public events
+during this epoch were intimately linked with the events which were
+happening in Western Europe. It was the epoch of the Napoleonic wars,
+and Russia played a vital part in that drama. Public opinion, after
+enthusiasm had been roused by the deeds of Suvorov, was exasperated
+and humiliated by Napoleon's subsequent victories over Russian arms.
+But when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, a wave of patriotism swept
+over the country, and the struggle resulted in an increased sense of
+unity and nationality. Russia emerged stronger and more solid from the
+struggle. As far as foreign affairs were concerned, the Emperor
+Alexander I--on whom everything depended--played his national part
+well, and he fitly embodied the patriotic movement of the day. At the
+beginning of his reign he raised great hopes of internal reform which
+were never fulfilled. He was a dreamer of dreams born out of his due
+time; a pupil of La Harpe, the Swiss Jacobin, who instilled into him
+aspirations towards liberty, truth and humanity, which throughout
+remained his ideals, but which were too vague to lead to anything
+practical or definite. His reign was thus a series of more or less
+undefined and fitful struggles to put the crooked straight. He desired
+to give Russia a constitution, but the attempts he made to do so proved
+fruitless; and towards the end of his life he is said to have been
+considerably influenced by Metternich. It is at any rate a fact that
+during these years reaction once more triumphed.
+
+Nevertheless windows had been opened which could not be shut, and the
+light which had streamed in produced some remarkable fruits.
+
+When Alexander I came to the throne, the immediate effect of his
+accession was the ungagging of literature, and the first writer of
+importance to take advantage of this new state of things was KARAMZIN
+(1726-1826). In 1802 he started a new review called the _Messenger of
+Europe_. This was not his _debut_. In the reign of Catherine, Karamzin
+had been brought to Moscow from the provinces, and initiated into
+German and English literature. In 1789-90 he travelled abroad and
+visited Switzerland, London and Paris. On his return, he published his
+impressions in the shape of "Letters of a Russian Traveller" in the
+_Moscow Journal_, which he founded himself. His ideals were
+republican; he was an enthusiastic admirer of England and the Swiss,
+and the reforms of Peter the Great. But his importance in Russian
+literature lies in his being the first Russian to write unstudied,
+simple and natural prose, Russian as spoken. He published two
+sentimental stories in his _Journal_, but the reign of Catherine II
+which now came to an end (1796) was followed by a period of
+unmitigated censorship, which lasted throughout the reign of the
+Emperor Paul, until Alexander I came to the throne. The new review
+which Karamzin then started differed radically from all preceding
+Russian reviews in that it dealt with politics and made _belles
+lettres_ and criticism a permanent feature. As soon as Karamzin had
+put this review on a firm basis, he devoted himself to historical
+research, and the fruit of his work in this field was his _History of
+the Russian Dominion_, in twelve volumes; eight published in 1816, the
+rest in 1821-1826. The Russian language was, as has been said, like an
+instrument waiting for a great player to play on it, and to make use
+of all its possibilities. Karamzin accomplished this, in the domain of
+prose. He spoke to the Russian heart by speaking Russian, pure and
+unmarred by stilted and alien conventionalisms.
+
+The publication of Karamzin's history was epoch-making. In the first
+place, the success of the work was overwhelming. It was the first
+time in Russian history that a prose work had enjoyed so immense a
+success. Not only were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian language
+revealed to the Russians in the style, but the subject-matter came as
+a surprise. Karamzin, as Pushkin put it, revealed Russia to the
+Russians, just as Columbus discovered America. He made the dry bones
+of history live, he wrote a great and glowing prose epic. His
+influence on his contemporaries was enormous. His work received at
+once the consecration of a classic, and it inspired Pushkin with his
+most important if not his finest achievement in dramatic verse (_Boris
+Godunov_).
+
+The first Russian poet of national importance belongs likewise to this
+epoch, namely KRYLOV (1769[2]-1844), although he had written a great
+deal for the stage in the preceding reigns, and continued to write for
+a long time after the death of Alexander I. Krylov is also a Russian
+classic, of quite a different kind. The son of an officer of the line,
+he started by being a clerk in the provincial magistrature. Many of
+his plays were produced with success, though none of them had any
+durable qualities. But it was not until 1805 that he found his
+vocation which was to write fables. The first of these were published
+in 1806 in the _Moscow Journal_; from that time onward he went on
+writing fables until he died in 1844.
+
+His early fables were translations from La Fontaine. They imitate La
+Fontaine's free versification and they are written in iambics of
+varying length. They were at once successful, and he continued to
+translate fables from the French, or to adapt from AEsop or other
+sources. But as time went on, he began to invent fables of his own;
+and out of the two hundred fables which he left at his death, forty
+only are inspired by La Fontaine and seven suggested by AEsop: the
+remainder are original. Krylov's translations of La Fontaine are not
+so much translations as re-creations. He takes the same subject, and
+although often following the original in every single incident, he
+thinks out each _motif_ for himself and re-creates it, so that his
+translations have the same personal stamp and the same originality as
+his own inventions.
+
+This is true even when the original is a masterpiece of the highest
+order, such as La Fontaine's _Deux Pigeons_. You would think the
+opening lines--
+
+    "Deux pigeons s'amoient d'amour tendre,
+    L'un d'eux s'ennuyant au logis
+    Fut assez fou pour entreprendre
+    Un voyage en lointain pays"--
+
+were untranslatable; that nothing could be subtracted from them, and
+that still less could anything be added; one ray the more, one shade
+the less, you would think, would certainly impair their nameless
+grace. But what does Krylov do? He re-creates the situation, expanding
+La Fontaine's first line into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps
+on it the impress of his personality and his nationality. Here is a
+literal translation of the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously
+trying a third English version.)
+
+    "Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother.
+    Neither would eat nor drink without the other;
+    Where you see one, the other's surely near,
+    And every joy they halved and every tear;
+    They never noticed how the time flew by,
+    They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh."
+
+This gives the sense of Krylov's poem word for word, except for what
+is the most important touch of all in the last line. The trouble is
+that Krylov has written six lines which are as untranslatable as La
+Fontaine's four; and he has made them as profoundly Russian as La
+Fontaine's are French. Nothing could be more Russian than the last
+line, which it is impossible to translate; because it should run--
+
+    "They were sometimes sad, but they never felt _ennui_"--
+
+literally, "it was never _boring_ to them." The difficulty is that the
+word for _boring_ in Russian, _skuchno_, which occurs with the utmost
+felicity in contradistinction to _sad_, _grustno_, cannot be rendered
+in English in its poetical simplicity. There are no six lines more
+tender, musical, wistful, and subtly poetical in the whole of Russian
+literature.
+
+Krylov's fables, like La Fontaine's, deal with animals, birds, fishes
+and men; the Russian peasant plays a large part in them; often they
+are satirical; nearly always they are bubbling with humour. A writer
+of fables is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is sometimes to
+convey pregnant sense, keen mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled
+manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human foibles, or to express
+wisdom in the form of wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. But
+Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in remaining a poet. It has been
+said that his images are conventional and outworn--that is to say, he
+uses the machinery of Zephyrs, Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,--and that
+his conceptions are antiquated. But what splendid use he makes of this
+machinery! When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is a Zephyr blowing,
+for instance, as when the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze.
+Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse he conveys a picture, and
+more than a picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and the Mole, in the
+first lines of which he makes you see and hear the eagle and his mate
+sweeping to the dreaming wood, and swooping down on to the oak-tree.
+Or again, in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, he gives in a
+few words the sense of height and space, as if you were looking down
+from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over the mountains of the
+Caucasus, sees the end of the earth, the rivers meandering in the
+plains, the woods, the meadows in all their spring glory, and the
+angry Caspian Sea, darkling like the wing of a raven in the distance.
+But his greatest triumph, in this respect, is the fable of the Ass and
+the Nightingale, in which the verse echoes the very trills of the
+nightingale, and renders the stillness and the delighted awe of the
+listeners,--the lovers and the shepherd. Again a convention, if you
+like, but what a felicitous convention!
+
+The fables are discursive like La Fontaine's, and not brief like
+AEsop's; but like La Fontaine, Krylov has the gift of summing up a
+situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect by the sudden evocation
+of a whole picture in a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable
+of the Peasants and the River: the peasants go to complain to the
+river of the conduct of the streams which are continually overflowing
+and destroying their goods, but when they reach the river, they see
+half their goods floating on it. "They looked at each other, and
+shaking their heads," says Krylov, "went home." The two words "went
+home" in Russian (_poshli domoi_) express their hopelessness more
+than pages of rhetoric. This is just one of those terse effects such
+as La Fontaine delights in.
+
+Krylov in his youth lived much among the poor, and his language is
+peculiarly native, racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the
+language of the people and of the peasants, and it abounds in humorous
+turns. He is, moreover, always dramatic, and his fables are for this
+reason most effective when read aloud or recited. He is dramatic not
+only in that part of the fable which is narrative, but in the
+prologue, epilogue, or moral--the author's commentary; he adapts
+himself to the tone of every separate fable, and becomes himself one
+of the _dramatis personae_. Sometimes his fables deal with political
+events--the French Revolution, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the
+Congress of Vienna; the education of Alexander I by La Harpe, in the
+well-known fable of the Lion who sends his son to be educated by the
+Eagle, of whom he consequently learns how to make nests. Sometimes
+they deal with internal evils and abuses: the administration of
+justice, in fables such as that of the peasant who brings a case
+against the sheep and is found guilty by the fox; the censorship is
+aimed at in the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing in the cat's
+claws; the futility of bureaucratic regulations in the fable of the
+sheep who are devoured by their superfluous watchdogs, or in that of
+the sheep who are told solemnly and pompously to drag any offending
+wolf before the nearest magistrate; or, again, in that of the high
+dignitary who is admitted immediately into paradise because on earth
+he left his work to be done by his secretaries--for being obviously a
+fool, had he done his work himself, the result would have been
+disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they deal merely with human
+follies and affairs, and the idiosyncrasies of men.
+
+Krylov's fables have that special quality which only permanent
+classics possess of appealing to different generations, to people of
+every age, kind and class, for different reasons; so that children can
+read them simply for the story, and grown-up people for their
+philosophy; their style pleases the unlettered by its simplicity, and
+is the envy and despair of the artist in its supreme art. Pushkin
+calls him "le plus national et le plus populaire de nos poetes" (this
+was true in Pushkin's day), and said his fables were read by men of
+letters, merchants, men of the world, servants and children. His work
+bears the stamp of ageless modernity just as _The Pilgrim's Progress_
+or Cicero's letters seem modern. It also has the peculiarly Russian
+quality of unexaggerated realism. He sees life as it is, and writes
+down what he sees. It is true that although his style is finished and
+polished, he only at times reaches the high-water mark of what can be
+done with the Russian language: his style, always idiomatic, pregnant
+and natural, is sometimes heavy, and even clumsy; but then he never
+sets out to be anything more than a fabulist. In this he is supremely
+successful, and since at the same time he gives us snatches of
+exquisite poetry, the greater the praise to him. But, when all is said
+and done, Krylov has the talisman which defies criticism, baffles
+analysis, and defeats time: namely, charm. His fables achieved an
+instantaneous popularity, which has never diminished until to-day.
+
+Internal political events proved the next factor in Russian
+literature; a factor out of which the so-called romantic movement was
+to grow.
+
+During the Napoleonic wars a great many Russian officers had lived
+abroad. They came back to Russia after the Congress of Vienna in 1815,
+teeming with new ideas and new ideals. They took life seriously, and
+were called by Pushkin the Puritans of the North. Their aim was
+culture and the public welfare. They were not revolutionaries; on the
+contrary, they were anxious to co-operate with the Government. They
+formed for their purpose a society, in imitation of the German
+_Tugendbund_, called _The Society of Welfare_: its aims were
+philanthropic, educational, and economic. It consisted chiefly of
+officers of the Guard, and its headquarters were at St. Petersburg.
+All this was known and approved of by the Emperor. But when the
+Government became reactionary, this peaceful progressive movement
+changed its character. The Society of Welfare was closed in 1821, and
+its place was taken by two new societies, which, instead of being
+political, were social and revolutionary. The success of the
+revolutionary movements in Spain and in Italy encouraged these
+societies to follow their example.
+
+The death of Alexander I in 1825 forced them to immediate action. The
+shape it took was the "Decembrist" rising. Constantine, the Emperor's
+brother, renounced his claim to the throne, and was succeeded by his
+brother Nicholas. December 14 (O.S.) was fixed for the day on which
+the Emperor should receive the oath of allegiance of his troops. An
+organized insurrection took place, which was confined to certain
+regiments. The Emperor was supported by the majority of the Guards
+regiments, and the people showed no signs of supporting the rising,
+which was at once suppressed.
+
+One hundred and twenty-five of the conspirators were condemned. Five
+of them were hanged, and among them the poet RYLEEV (1795-1826). But
+although the political results of the movement were nil, the effect of
+the movement on literature was far-reaching. Philosophy took the place
+of politics, and liberalism was diverted into the channel of
+romanticism; but out of this romantic movement came the springtide of
+Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the soul of the Russian
+people found adequate expression. And the very fact that politics
+were excluded from the movement proved, in one sense, a boon to
+literature: for it gave Russian men of genius the chance to be
+writers, artists and poets, and prevented them from exhausting their
+whole energy in being inefficient politicians or unsuccessful
+revolutionaries. I will dwell on the drawbacks, on the dark side of
+the medal, presently.
+
+As far as the actual Decembrist movement is concerned, its concrete
+and direct legacy to literature consists in the work of Ryleev, and
+its indirect legacy in the most famous comedy of the Russian stage,
+_Gore ot Uma_, "The Misfortune of being Clever," by GRIBOYEDOV
+(1795-1829).
+
+Ryleev's life was cut short before his poetical powers had come to
+maturity. It is idle to speculate what he might have achieved had he
+lived longer. The work which he left is notable for its pessimism, but
+still suffers from the old rhetorical conventions of the eighteenth
+century and the imitation of French models; moreover he looked on
+literature as a matter of secondary importance. "I am not a poet," he
+said, "I am a citizen." In spite of this, every now and then there are
+flashes of intense poetical inspiration in his work; and he struck
+one or two powerful chords--for instance, in his stanzas on the vision
+of enslaved Russia, which have a tense strength and fire that remind
+one of Emily Bronte. He was a poet as well as a citizen, but even had
+he lived to a prosperous old age and achieved artistic perfection in
+his work, he could never have won a brighter aureole than that which
+his death gained him. The poems of his last days in prison breathe a
+spirit of religious humility, and he died forgiving and praying for
+his enemies. His name shines in Russian history and Russian
+literature, as that of a martyr to a high ideal.
+
+Griboyedov, the author of _Gore ot Uma_, a writer of a very different
+order, although not a Decembrist himself, is a product of that period.
+His comedy still remains the unsurpassed masterpiece of Russian
+comedy, and can be compared with Beaumarchais' _Figaro_ and Sheridan's
+_School for Scandal_.
+
+Griboyedov was a Foreign Office official, and he was murdered when
+Minister Plenipotentiary at Teheran, on January 30, 1829. He conceived
+the plot of his play in 1816, and read aloud some scenes in St.
+Petersburg in 1823-24. They caused a sensation in literary circles,
+and the play began to circulate rapidly in MSS. Two fragments of the
+drama were published in one of the almanacs, which then took the place
+of literary reviews. But beyond this, Griboyedov could neither get his
+play printed nor acted. Thousands of copies circulated in MSS., but
+the play was not produced on the stage until 1831, and then much
+mutilated; and it was not printed until 1833.
+
+_Gore ot Uma_ is written in verse, in iambics of varying length, like
+Krylov's fables. The unities are preserved. The action takes place in
+one day and in the same house--that of Famusov, an elderly gentleman
+of the Moscow upper class holding a Government appointment. He is a
+widower and has one daughter, Sophia, whose sensibility is greater
+than her sense; and the play opens on a scene where the father
+discovers her talking to his secretary, Molchalin, and says he will
+stand no nonsense. Presently, the friend of Sophia's childhood,
+Chatsky, arrives after a three years' absence abroad; Chatsky is a
+young man of independent ideas whose misfortune it is to be clever. He
+notices that Sophia receives him coldly, and later on he perceives
+that she is in love with Molchalin,--a wonderfully drawn type, the
+perfect climber, time-server and place-seeker, and the incarnation of
+convention,--who does not care a rap for Sophia. Chatsky declaims to
+Famusov his contempt for modern Moscow, for the slavish worship by
+society of all that is foreign, for its idolatry of fashion and
+official rank, its hollowness and its convention. Famusov, the
+incarnation of respectable conventionality, does not understand one
+word of what he is saying.
+
+At an evening party given at Famusov's house, Chatsky is determined to
+find out whom Sophia loves. He decides it is Molchalin, and lets fall
+a few biting sarcasms about him to Sophia; and Sophia, to pay him back
+for his sarcasm, lets it be understood by one of the guests that he is
+mad. The half-spoken hint spreads like lightning; and the spreading of
+the news is depicted in a series of inimitable scenes. Chatsky enters
+while the subject is being discussed, and delivers a long tirade on
+the folly of Moscow society, which only confirms the suspicions of the
+guests; and he finds when he gets to the end of his speech that he is
+speaking to an empty room.
+
+In the fourth act we see the guests leaving the house after the
+party. Chatsky is waiting for his carriage. Sophia appears on the
+staircase and calls Molchalin. Chatsky, hearing her voice, hides
+behind a pillar. Liza, Sophia's maid, comes to fetch Molchalin, and
+knocks at his door. Molchalin comes out, and not knowing that Sophia
+or Chatsky are within hearing, makes love to Liza and tells her that
+he only loves Sophia out of duty. Then Sophia appears, having heard
+everything. Molchalin falls on his knees to her: she is quite
+inexorable. Chatsky comes forward and begins to speak his mind--when
+all is interrupted by the arrival of Famusov, who speaks his. Chatsky
+shakes the dust of the house and of Moscow off his feet, and Sophia is
+left without Chatsky and without Molchalin.
+
+The _Gore ot Uma_ is a masterpiece of satire rather than a masterpiece
+of dramatic comedy. That is to say that, as a satire of the Moscow
+society of the day and of the society of yesterday, and of to-morrow,
+it is immortal, and forms a complete work: but as a comedy it does
+not. Almost every scene separately is perfect in itself, but
+dramatically it does not group itself round one central idea or one
+mainspring of action. Judged from the point of view of dramatic
+propriety, the behaviour of the hero is wildly improbable throughout;
+there is no reason for the spectator to think he should be in love
+with Sophia; if he is, there is no reason for him to behave as he
+does; if a man behaved like that, declaiming at an evening party long
+speeches on the decay of the times, the most frivolous of societies
+would be justified in thinking him mad.
+
+Pushkin hit on the weak point of the play as a play when he wrote: "In
+_The Misfortune of being Clever_ the question arises, Who is clever?
+and the answer is Griboyedov. Chatsky is an honourable young man who
+has lived for a long time with a clever man (that is to say with
+Griboyedov), and learnt his clever sarcasms; but to whom does he say
+them? To Famusov, to the old ladies at the party. This is
+unforgivable, because the first sign of a clever man is to know at
+once whom he is dealing with."
+
+But what makes the work a masterpiece is the naturalness of the
+characters, the dialogue, the comedy of the scenes which represent
+Moscow society. It is extraordinary that on so small a scale, in four
+short acts, Griboyedov should have succeeded in giving so complete a
+picture of Moscow society, and should have given the dialogue, in
+spite of its being in verse, the stamp of conversational familiarity.
+The portraits are all full-length portraits, and when the play is
+produced now, the rendering of each part raises as much discussion in
+Russia as a revival of one of Sheridan's comedies in England.
+
+As for the style, nearly three-quarters of the play has passed into
+the Russian language. It is forcible, concise, bitingly sarcastic, it
+is as neat and dry as W. S. Gilbert, as elegant as La Fontaine, as
+clear as an icicle, and as clean as the thrust of a sword. But perhaps
+the crowning merit of this immortal satire is its originality. It is a
+product of Russian life and Russian genius, and as yet it is without a
+rival.
+
+Outside the current of politics and political aspirations, there
+appeared during this same epoch a poet who exercised a considerable
+influence over Russian literature, and who devoted himself exclusively
+to poetry. This was BASIL ZHUKOVSKY (1783-1852). He opened the door
+of Russian literature on the fields of German and English poetry. The
+first poem he published in 1802 was a translation of Gray's _Elegy_;
+this, and an imitation of Buerger's _Leonore_, which affected all Slav
+literatures, brought him fame. Later, he translated Schiller's _Maid
+of Orleans_, his ballads, some of the lyrics of Uhland, Goethe,
+Hebbel, and a great quantity of other foreign poems. His translations
+were faithful, but in spite of this he gave them the stamp of his own
+dreamy personality. He was made tutor to the Tsarevitch
+Alexander--afterwards Alexander II,--and for a time his production
+ceased; but when this task was finished, he braced himself in his old
+age to translate _The Odyssey_, and this translation appeared in
+1848-50. In this work he obeyed the first great law of translation,
+"Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one." He produced a
+beautiful work; but he also did what all other translators of Homer
+have done; he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky, and with it
+something sentimental, elegiac, and didactic.
+
+Zhukovsky's greatest service to Russian literature consisted in his
+exploding the superstition that the literature of France was the only
+literature that counted, and introducing literary Russia to the poets
+of England and Germany rather than of France. But apart from this, he
+is the first and best translator in European literature, for what
+Krylov did with some of La Fontaine's fables, he did for all the
+literature he touched--he re-created it in Russian, and made it his
+own. In his translation of Gray's _Elegy_, for instance, he not only
+translates the poet's meaning into musical verse, but he conveys the
+intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape, and the poignant accent
+which makes that poem the natural language of grief. It is
+characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years after he translated the
+poem, he visited Stoke Poges, re-read Gray's _Elegy_ there, and made
+another translation, which is still more faithful than the first.
+
+The Russian language was by this time purified from all outward
+excrescences, released from the bondage of convention and the
+pseudo-classical, open to all outside influences, and only waiting,
+like a ready-tuned instrument, on which Krylov and Zhukovsky had
+already sounded sweet notes and deep tones, and which Karamzin had
+proved to be a magnificent vehicle for musical and perspicuous prose,
+for a poet of genius to come and sound it from its lowest note to the
+top of its compass, for there was indeed much music and excellent
+voice to be plucked from it. At the appointed hour the man came. It
+was PUSHKIN. He arrived at a time when a battle of words was raging
+between the so-called classical and romantic schools. The
+pseudo-classical, with all its mythological machinery and conventional
+apparatus, was totally alien to Russia, and a direct and slavish
+imitation of the French. On the other hand, the utmost confusion
+reigned as to what constituted romanticism. To each single writer it
+meant a different thing: "Enfoncez Racine," and the unities, in one
+case; or ghosts, ballads, legends, local colour in another; or the
+defiance of morality and society in another. Zhukovsky, in introducing
+German romanticism into Russia, paved the way for its death, and for
+the death of all exotic fashions and models; for he paved the way for
+Pushkin to render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating models of his
+own and by founding a national literature.
+
+Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, at Moscow. He was of ancient
+lineage, and inherited African negro blood on his mother's side, his
+mother's grandmother being the daughter of Peter the Great's negro,
+Hannibal. Until he was nine years old, he did not show signs of any
+unusual precocity; but from then onwards he was seized with a passion
+for reading which lasted all his life. He read Plutarch's _Lives_, the
+_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ in a translation. He then devoured all the
+French books he found in his father's library. Pushkin was gifted with
+a photographic memory, which retained what he read immediately and
+permanently. His first efforts at writing were in French,--comedies,
+which he performed himself to an audience of his sisters. He went to
+school in 1812 at the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St.
+Petersburg. His school career was not brilliant, and his leaving
+certificate qualifies his achievements as mediocre, even in Russian.
+But during the six years he spent at the Lyceum, he continued to read
+voraciously. His favourite poet at this time was Voltaire. He began to
+write verse, first in French and then in Russian; some of it was
+printed in 1814 and 1815 in reviews, and in 1815 he declaimed his
+_Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_ in public at the Lyceum examination,
+in the presence of Derzhavin the poet.
+
+The poems which he wrote at school afterwards formed part of his
+collected works. In these poems, consisting for the greater part of
+anacreontics and epistles, although they are immature, and imitative,
+partly of contemporary authors such as Derzhavin and Zhukovsky, and
+partly of the French anacreontic school of poets, such as Voltaire,
+Gresset and Parny, the sound of a new voice was unmistakable. Indeed,
+not only his contemporaries, but the foremost representatives of the
+Russian literature of that day, Derzhavin, Karamzin and Zhukovsky,
+made no mistake about it. They greeted the first notes of this new
+lyre with enthusiasm. Zhukovsky used to visit the boy poet at school
+and read out his verse to him. Derzhavin was enthusiastic over the
+recitation of his _Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_. Thus fame came to
+Pushkin as easily as the gift of writing verse. He had lisped in
+numbers, and as soon as he began to speak in them, his contemporaries
+immediately recognized and hailed the new voice. He did not wake up
+and find himself famous like Byron, but he walked into the Hall of
+Fame as naturally as a young heir steps into his lawful inheritance.
+If we compare Pushkin's school-boy poetry with Byron's _Hours of
+Idleness_, it is easy to understand how this came about. In the _Hours
+of Idleness_ there is, perhaps, only one poem which would hold out
+hopes of serious promise; and the most discerning critics would have
+been justified in being careful before venturing to stake any great
+hopes on so slender a hint. But in Pushkin's early verse, although the
+subject-matter is borrowed, and the style is still irregular and
+careless, it is none the less obvious that it flows from the pen of
+the author without effort or strain; and besides this, certain coins
+of genuine poetry ring out, bearing the image and superscription of a
+new mint, the mint of Pushkin.
+
+When the first of his poems to attract the attention of a larger
+audience, _Ruslan and Ludmila_, was published, in 1820, it was greeted
+with enthusiasm by the public; but it had already won the suffrages of
+that circle which counted most, that is to say, the leading men of
+letters of the day, who had heard it read out in MSS. For as soon as
+Pushkin left school and stepped into the world, he was received into
+the literary circle of the day on equal terms. After he had read aloud
+the first cantos of _Ruslan and Ludmila_ at Zhukovsky's literary
+evenings, Zhukovsky gave him his portrait with this inscription: "To
+the pupil, from his defeated master"; and BATYUSHKOV, a poet who,
+after having been influenced, like Pushkin, by Voltaire and Parny, had
+gone back to the classics, Horace and Tibullus, and had introduced the
+classic anacreontic school of poetry into Russia, was astonished to
+find a young man of the world outplaying him without any trouble on
+the same lyre, and exclaimed, "Oh! how well the rascal has started
+writing!"
+
+The publication of _Ruslan and Ludmila_ sealed Pushkin's reputation
+definitely, as far as the general public was concerned, although some
+of the professional critics treated the poem with severity. The
+subject of the poem was a Russian fairy-tale, and the critics blamed
+the poet for having recourse to what they called Russian folk-lore,
+which they considered to be unworthy of the poetic muse. One review
+complained that Pushkin's choice of subject was like introducing a
+bearded unkempt peasant into a drawing-room, while others blamed him
+for dealing with national stuff in a flippant spirit. But the curious
+thing is that, while the critics blamed him for his choice of subject,
+and his friends and the public defended him for it, quoting all sorts
+of precedents, the poem has absolutely nothing in common, either in
+its spirit, style or characterization, with native Russian folk-lore
+and fairy-tales. Much later on in his career, Pushkin was to show what
+he could do with Russian folk-lore. But _Ruslan and Ludmila_, which,
+as far as its form is concerned, has a certain superficial resemblance
+to Ariosto, is in reality the result of the French influence, under
+which Pushkin had been ever since his cradle, and which in this poem
+blazes into the sky like a rocket, and bursts into a shower of sparks,
+never to return again.
+
+There is no passion in the poem and no irony, but it is young, fresh,
+full of sensuous, not to say sensual images, interruptions,
+digressions, and flippant epigrams. Pushkin wondered afterwards that
+nobody noticed the coldness of the poem; the truth was that the eyes
+of the public were dazzled by the fresh sensuous images, and their
+ears were taken captive by the new voice: for the importance of the
+poem lies in this--that the new voice which the literary pundits had
+already recognized in the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo was now speaking to
+the whole world, and all Russia became aware that a young man was
+among them "with mouth of gold and morning in his eyes." _Ruslan and
+Ludmila_ has just the same sensuous richness, fresh music and
+fundamental coldness as Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. After finishing
+the poem, Pushkin added a magnificent and moving Epilogue, written
+from the Caucasus in the year of its publication (1820); and when the
+second edition was published in 1828, he added a Prologue in his
+finest manner which tells of Russian fairy-land.
+
+After leaving school in 1817, until 1820, Pushkin plunged into the gay
+life of St. Petersburg. He wanted to be a Hussar, but his father could
+not afford it. In default he became a Foreign Office official; but he
+did not take this profession seriously. He consorted with the
+political youth and young Liberals of the day; he scattered stinging
+epigrams and satirical epistles broadcast. He sympathized with the
+Decembrists, but took no part in their conspiracy. He would probably
+have ended by doing so; but, luckily for Russian literature, he was
+transferred in 1820 from the Foreign Office to the Chancery of General
+Inzov in the South of Russia; and from 1820 to 1826 he lived first at
+Kishinev, then at Odessa, and finally in his own home at Pskov. This
+enforced banishment was of the greatest possible service to the poet;
+it took him away from the whirl and distractions of St. Petersburg; it
+prevented him from being compromised in the drama of the Decembrists;
+it ripened and matured his poetical genius; it provided him, since it
+was now that he visited the Caucasus and the Crimea for the first
+time, with new subject-matter.
+
+During this period he learnt Italian and English, and came under the
+influence of Andre Chenier and Byron. Andre Chenier's influence is
+strongly felt in a series of lyrics in imitation of the classics; but
+these lyrics were altogether different from the anacreontics of his
+boyhood. Byron's influence is first manifested in a long poem _The
+Prisoner of the Caucasus_. It is Byronic in the temperament of the
+hero, who talks in the strain of the earlier Childe Harold; he is
+young, but feels old; tired of life, he seeks for consolation in the
+loneliness of nature in the Caucasus. He is taken prisoner by mountain
+tribesmen, and set free by a girl who drowns herself on account of her
+unrequited love. Pushkin said later that the poem was immature, but
+that there were verses in it that came from his heart. There is one
+element in the poem which is by no means immature, and that is the
+picture of the Caucasus, which is executed with much reality and
+simplicity. Pushkin annexed the Caucasus to Russian poetry. The Crimea
+inspired him with another tale, also Byronic in some respects, _The
+Fountain of Baghchi-Sarai_, which tells of a Tartar Khan and his
+Christian slave, who is murdered out of jealousy by a former
+favourite, herself drowned by the orders of the Khan. Here again the
+descriptions are amazing, and Pushkin draws out a new stop of rich and
+voluptuous music.
+
+In speaking of the influence of Byron over Pushkin it is necessary to
+discriminate. Byron helped Pushkin to discover himself; Byron
+revealed to him his own powers, showed him the way out of the French
+garden where he had been dwelling, and acted as a guide to fresh woods
+and pastures new. But what Pushkin took from the new provinces to
+which the example of Byron led him was entirely different from what
+Byron sought there. Again, the methods and workmanship of the two
+poets were radically different. Pushkin is never imitative of Byron;
+but Byron opened his eyes to a new world, and indeed did for him what
+Chapman's _Homer_ did for Keats. It frequently happens that when a
+poet is deeply struck by the work of another poet he feels a desire to
+write something himself, but something different. Thus Pushkin's
+mental intercourse with Byron had the effect of bracing the talent of
+the Russian poet and spurring him on to the conquest of new worlds.
+
+Pushkin's six years' banishment to his own country had the effect of
+revealing to him the reality and seriousness of his vocation as a
+poet, and the range and strength of his gifts. It was during this
+period that besides the works already mentioned he wrote some of his
+finest lyrics, _The Conversation between the Bookseller and the
+Poet_--perhaps the most perfect of his shorter poems--it contains four
+lines to have written which Turgenev said he would have burnt the
+whole of his works--a larger poem called _The Gypsies_; his dramatic
+chronicle _Boris Godunov_, and the beginning of his masterpiece
+_Onegin_; several ballads, including _The Sage Oleg_, and an
+unfinished romance, the _Robber Brothers_.
+
+Not only is the richness of his output during this period remarkable,
+but the variety and the high level of art maintained in all the
+different styles which he attempted and mastered. _The Gypsies_
+(1827), which was received with greater favour by the public than any
+of his poems, either earlier or later, is the story of a disappointed
+man, Aleko, who leaves the world and takes refuge with gypsies. A
+tragically ironical situation is the result. The anarchic nature of
+the Byronic misanthrope brings tragedy into the peaceful life of the
+people, who are lawless because they need no laws. Aleko loves and
+marries the gypsy Zemfira, but after a time she tires of him, and
+loves a young gypsy. Aleko surprises them and kills them both. Then
+Zemfira's father banishes him from the gypsies' camp. He, too, had
+been deceived. When his wife Mariula had been untrue and had left him,
+he had attempted no vengeance, but had brought up her daughter.
+
+"Leave us, proud man," he says to Aleko. "We are a wild people; we
+have no laws, we torture not, neither do we punish; we have no use for
+blood or groans; we will not live with a man of blood. Thou wast not
+made for the wild life. For thyself alone thou claimest licence; we
+are shy and good-natured; thou art evil-minded and presumptuous.
+Farewell, and peace be with thee!"
+
+The charm of the poem lies in the descriptions of the gypsy camp and
+the gypsy life, the snatches of gypsy song, and the characterization
+of the gypsies, especially of the women. It is not surprising the poem
+was popular; it breathes a spell, and the reading of it conjures up
+before one the wandering life, the camp-fire, the soft speech and the
+song; and makes one long to go off with "the raggle-taggle gypsies O!"
+
+Byron's influence soon gave way to that of Shakespeare, who opened a
+still larger field of vision to the Russian poet. In 1825 he writes:
+"Quel homme que ce Shakespeare! Je n'en reviens pas. Comme Byron le
+tragique est mesquin devant lui! Ce Byron qui n'a jamais concu qu'un
+seul caractere et c'est le sien ... ce Byron donc a partage entre ses
+personages tel et tel trait de son caractere: son orgeuil a l'un, sa
+haine a l'autre, sa melancolie au troisieme, etc., et c'est ainsi d'un
+caractere plein, sombre et energique, il a fait plusieurs caracteres
+insignifiants; ce n'est pas la de la tragedie. On a encore une manie.
+Quand on a concu un caractere, tout ce qu'on lui fait dire, meme les
+choses les plus etranges, en porte essentiellement l'empreinte, comme
+les pedants et les marins dans les vieux romans de Fielding. Voyez le
+haineux de Byron ... et la-dessus lisez Shakespeare. Il ne craint
+jamais de compromettre son personage, il le fait parler avec tout
+l'abandon de la vie, car il est sur en temps et lieu, de lui faire
+trouver le langage de son caractere. Vous me demanderez: votre
+tragedie est-elle une tragedie de caractere ou de costume? J'ai choisi
+le genre le plus aise, mais j'ai tache de les unir tous deux. J'ecris
+et je pense. La plupart des scenes ne demandent que du raisonnement;
+quand j'arrive a une scene qui demande de l'inspiration, j'attends ou
+je passe dessus."
+
+I quote this letter because it throws light, firstly, on Pushkin's
+matured opinion of Byron, and, secondly, on his methods of work; for,
+like Leonardo da Vinci, he formed the habit, which he here describes,
+of leaving unwritten passages where inspiration was needed, until he
+felt the moment of _bien etre_ when inspiration came; and this not
+only in writing his tragedy, but henceforward in everything that he
+wrote, as his note-books testify.
+
+The subject-matter of _Boris Godunov_ was based on Karamzin's history:
+it deals with the dramatic episode of the Russian Perkin Warbeck, the
+false Demetrius who pretended to be the murdered son of Ivan the
+Terrible. The play is constructed on the model of Shakespeare's
+chronicle plays, but in a still more disjointed fashion, without a
+definite beginning or end: when Mussorgsky made an opera out of it,
+the action was concentrated into definite acts; for, as it stands, it
+is not a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had not the power of
+conceiving and executing a drama which should move round one idea to
+an inevitable close. He had not the gift of dramatic architectonics,
+and still less that of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the scenes,
+whether they be tragic and poetical, or scenes of common life, are as
+vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive, and they
+speak a language which is at the same time ancient, living, and
+convincing.
+
+In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of stage architectonics and
+stage carpentry, it is not merely meant that he lacked the gift of
+arranging acts that would suit the stage, or that of imagining stage
+effects. His whole play is not conceived as a drama; a subject from
+which a drama might be written is taken, but the drama is left
+unwritten. We see Boris Godunov on the throne, which he has unlawfully
+usurped; we know he feels remorse; he tells us so in monologues; we
+see his soul stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of fire, and we
+watch the wheel revolve; and that is all the moral and spiritual
+action that the part contains; he is static and not dynamic, he never
+has to make up his mind; his will never has to encounter the shock of
+another will during the whole play. Neither does the chronicle centre
+round the Pretender. It is true that we see the idea of impersonating
+the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind; and it is also true that in one
+scene with his Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically moving in a
+dramatic situation. She loves him because she thinks he is the son of
+an anointed King. He loves her too much to deceive her, and tells her
+the truth. She then says she will have nothing of him; and then he
+rises from defeat and shame to the height of the situation, becomes
+great, and, not unlike Browning's Sludge, says: "Although I am an
+impostor, I am born to be a King all the same; I am one of Nature's
+Kings; and I defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell every one
+what I have told you. Nobody will believe you." And Marina is
+conquered once more by his conduct and bearing.
+
+This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict of two wills and two
+souls. But there the matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken, and we
+are shown a series of different patterns, in which the heroine plays
+no part at all, and in which the hero only makes a momentary
+appearance. The fact is there is neither hero nor heroine in the play.
+It is not a play, but a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame
+Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never attempted. As a chronicle,
+a series of detached scenes, it is supremely successful. There are
+certain scenes which attain to sublimity: for instance, that in the
+cell of the monastery, where the monk is finishing his chronicle; and
+the monologue in which Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying speech
+to his son. The verse in these scenes is sealed with the mark of that
+God-gifted ease and high seriousness, which belong only to the
+inspired great. They are Shakespearean, not because they imitate
+Shakespeare, but because they attain to heights of imaginative truth
+to which Shakespeare rises more often than any other poet; and the
+language in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitableness, an
+absence of all conscious effort and of all visible art and artifice, a
+closeness of utterance combined with a width of suggestion which
+belong only to the greatest artists, to the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to
+Dante.
+
+_Boris Godunov_ was not published until January 1, 1831, and passed,
+with one exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. Like so many
+great works, it came before its time; and it was not until years
+afterwards that the merits of this masterpiece were understood and
+appreciated.
+
+In 1826 Pushkin's banishment to the country came to an end; in that
+year he was allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St. Petersburg. In
+1826 his poems appeared in one volume, and the second canto of
+_Onegin_ (the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827 _The Gypsies_, and
+the third canto of _Onegin_; in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth
+cantos of _Onegin_; in 1829 _Graf Nulin_, an admirably told _Conte_
+such as Maupassant might have written, of a deceived husband and a
+wife who, finding herself in the situation of Lucretia, gives the
+would-be Tarquin a box on the ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in
+being unfaithful with some one else--the _Cottage of Kolomna_ is
+another story in the same vein--and in the same year _Poltava_.
+
+This poem was written in one month, in St. Petersburg. The subject is
+Mazepa, with whom the daughter of his hereditary enemy, Kochubey, whom
+he afterwards tortures and kills, falls in love. But it is in reality
+the epic of Peter the Great.[3] When the poem was published, it
+disconcerted the critics and the public. It revealed an entirely new
+phase of Pushkin's style, and it should have widened the popular
+conception of the poet's powers and versatility. But at the time the
+public only knew Pushkin through his lyrics and his early tales;
+_Boris Godunov_ had not yet been published; moreover, the public of
+that day expected to find in a poem passion and the delineation of the
+heart's adventures. This stern objective fragment of an epic, falling
+into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses and cupids,
+like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan and executed by a god, met with
+little appreciation. The poet's verse which, so far as the public
+knew it, had hitherto seemed like a shining and luscious fruit, was
+exchanged for a concentrated weighty tramp of ringing rhyme, _martele_
+like steel. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a
+style as concise as that of Pope and as concentrated as that of
+Browning's dramatic lyrics. The poem is a fit monument to Peter the
+Great, and the great monarch's impetuous genius and passion for
+thorough craftsmanship seem to have entered into it.
+
+In 1829 Pushkin made a second journey to the Caucasus, the result of
+which was a harvest of lyrics. On his return to St. Petersburg he
+sketched the plan of another epic poem, _Galub_, dealing with the
+Caucasus, but this remained a fragment.
+
+In 1831 he finished the eighth and last canto of _Onegin_. Originally
+there were nine cantos, but when the work was published one of the
+cantos dealing with Onegin's travels was left out as being irrelevant.
+Pushkin had worked at this poem since 1823. It was Byron's _Beppo_
+which gave him the idea of writing a poem on modern life; but here
+again, he made of the idea something quite different from any of
+Byron's work. _Onegin_ is a novel. Eugene Onegin is the name of the
+hero. It is, moreover, the first Russian novel; and as a novel it has
+never been surpassed. It is as real as Tolstoy, as finished in
+workmanship and construction as Turgenev. It is a realistic novel; not
+realistic in the sense that Zola's work was mis-called realistic, but
+realistic in the sense that Miss Austen is realistic. The hero is the
+average man about St. Petersburg; his father, a worthy public servant,
+lives honourably on debts and gives three balls a year. Onegin is
+brought up, not too strictly, by "Monsieur l'Abbe"; he goes out in the
+world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in French, and able to dance
+the Mazurka.
+
+Onegin can touch on every subject, can hold his tongue when the
+conversation becomes too serious, and make epigrams. He knows enough
+Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk about Juvenal, and put "Vale!"
+at the end of his letters, and he can remember two lines of the
+_AEneid_. He is severe on Homer and Theocritus, but has read Adam
+Smith. The only art in which he is proficient is the _ars amandi_ as
+taught by Ovid. He is a patron of the ballet; he goes to balls; he
+eats beef-steaks and _pate de foie gras_. In spite of all
+this--perhaps because of it--he suffers from spleen, like Childe
+Harold, the author says. His father dies, leaving a lot of debts
+behind him, but a dying uncle summons him to the country; and when he
+gets there he finds his uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the
+estate. In the country, he is just as much bored as he was in St.
+Petersburg. A new neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a young
+man fresh from Germany, an enthusiast and a poet, and full of Kant,
+Schiller, and the German writers. Lensky introduces Onegin to the
+neighbouring family, by name Larin, consisting of a widow and two
+daughters. Lensky is in love with the younger daughter, Olga, who is
+simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face, as Onegin says, like the
+foolish moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less pretty; shy and
+dreamy, she conceals under her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut
+character and a strong will.
+
+Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen's heroines; as alive as
+Fielding's Sophia Western, and as charming as any of George Meredith's
+women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. Turgenev, with
+all his magic, and Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours of
+life, never created a truer, more radiant, and more typically Russian
+woman. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman; that
+is to say, of all that is best in Russia; and it is a type taken
+straight from life, and not from fairy-land--a type that exists as
+much to-day as it did in the days of Pushkin. She is the first of that
+long gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky
+have given us, and which are the most precious jewels of Russian
+literature, because they reflect the crowning glory of Russian life.
+Tatiana falls in love with Onegin at first sight. She writes to him
+and confesses her love, and in all the love poetry of the world there
+is nothing more touching and more simple than this confession. It is
+perfect. If Pushkin had written this and this alone, his place among
+poets would be unique and different from that of all other poets.
+
+Possibly some people may think that there are finer achievements in
+the love poetry of the world; but nothing is so futile and so
+impertinent as giving marks to the great poets, as if they were
+passing an examination. If a thing is as good as possible in itself,
+what is the use of saying that it is less good or better than
+something else, which is as good as possible in itself also.
+Nevertheless, placed beside any of the great confessions of love in
+poetry--Francesca's story in the _Inferno_, Romeo and Juliet's
+leavetaking, Phedre's declaration, Don Juan Tenorio's letter--the
+beauty of Tatiana's confession would not be diminished by the
+juxtaposition. Of the rest of Pushkin's work at its best and highest,
+of the finest passages of _Boris Godunov_, for instance, you can say:
+This is magnificent, but there are dramatic passages in other works of
+other poets on the same lines and as fine; but in Tatiana's letter
+Pushkin has created something unique, which has no parallel, because
+only a Russian could have written it, and of Russians, only he. It is
+a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a
+blackbird's song.
+
+Onegin tells Tatiana he is not worthy of her, that he is not made for
+love and marriage; that he would cease to love her at once; that he
+feels for her like a brother, or perhaps a little more tenderly. It
+then falls out that Onegin, by flirting with Olga at a ball, makes
+Lensky jealous. They fight a duel, and Lensky is killed. Onegin is
+obliged to leave the neighbourhood, and spends years in travel.
+Tatiana remains true to her first love; but she is taken by her
+relatives to Moscow, and consents at last under their pressure to
+marry a rich man of great position. In St. Petersburg, Onegin meets
+her again. Tatiana has become a great lady, but all her old charm is
+there. Onegin now falls violently in love with her; but she, although
+she frankly confesses that she still loves him, tells him that it is
+too late; she has married another, and she means to remain true to
+him. And there the story ends.
+
+_Onegin_ is, perhaps, Pushkin's most characteristic work; it is
+undoubtedly the best known and the most popular; like _Hamlet_, it is
+all quotations. Pushkin in his _Onegin_ succeeded in doing what
+Shelley urged Byron to do--to create something new and in accordance
+with the spirit of the age, which should at the same time be
+beautiful. He did more than this. He succeeded in creating for Russia
+a poem that was purely national, and in giving his country a classic,
+a model both in construction, matter, form, and inspiration for
+future generations. Perhaps the greatest quality of this poem is its
+vividness. Pushkin himself speaks, in taking leave, of having seen the
+unfettered march of his novel in a magic prism. This is just the
+impression that the poem gives; the scenes are as clear as the shapes
+in a crystal; nothing is blurred; there are no hesitating notes,
+nothing _a peu pres_; every stroke comes off; the nail is hit on the
+head every time, only so easily that you do not notice the strokes,
+and all labour escapes notice. Apart from this the poem is amusing; it
+arrests the attention as a story, and it delights the intelligence
+with its wit, its digressions, and its brilliance. It is as witty as
+Don Juan and as consummately expressed as Pope; and when the occasion
+demands it, the style passes in easy transition to serious or tender
+tones. _Onegin_ has been compared to Byron's _Don Juan_. There is this
+likeness, that both poems deal with contemporary life, and in both
+poems the poets pass from grave to gay, from severe to lively, and
+often interrupt the narrative to apostrophize the reader. But there
+the likeness ends. On the other hand, there is a vast difference.
+_Onegin_ contains no adventures. It is a story of everyday life.
+Moreover, it is an organic whole: so well constructed that it fits
+into a stage libretto--Tchaikovsky made an opera out of it--without
+difficulty. There is another difference--a difference which applies to
+Pushkin and Byron in general. There is no unevenness in Pushkin; his
+work, as far as craft is concerned, is always on the same high level.
+You can admire the whole, or cut off any single passage and it will
+still remain admirable; whereas Byron must be taken as a whole or not
+at all--the reason being that Pushkin was an impeccable artist in form
+and expression, and that Byron was not.
+
+In the winter of 1832 Pushkin sought a new field, the field of
+historical research; and by the beginning of 1833 he had not only
+collected all the materials for a history of Pugachev, the Cossack who
+headed a rising in the reign of Catherine II; but his literary
+activity was so great that he had also written the rough sketch of a
+long story in prose dealing with the same subject, _The Captain's
+Daughter_, another prose story of considerable length, _Dubrovsky_,
+and portions of a drama, _Rusalka_, The Water Nymph, which was never
+finished. Besides _Boris Godunov_ and the _Rusalka_, Pushkin wrote a
+certain number of dramatic scenes, or short dramas in one or more
+scenes. Of these, one, _The Feast in the Time of Plague_, is taken
+from the English of John Wilson (_The City of the Plague_), with
+original additions. In _Mozart and Salieri_ we see the contrast
+between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does
+what it can. The story is based on the unfounded anecdote that Mozart
+was poisoned by Salieri out of envy. This dramatic and beautifully
+written episode has been set to music as it stands by Rimsky-Korsakov.
+
+_The Covetous Knight_, which bears the superscription, "From the
+tragi-comedy of Chenstone"--an unknown English original--tells of the
+conflict between a Harpagon and his son: the delineation of the
+miser's imaginative passion for his treasures is, both in conception
+and execution, in Pushkin's finest manner. This scene has been
+recently set to music by Rakhmaninov. _The Guest of Stone_, the story
+of Don Juan and the _statua gentilissima del gran Commendatore_, makes
+Don Juan life. A scene from _Faust_ between Faust and Mephistopheles
+is original and not of great interest; _Angelo_ is the story of
+_Measure for Measure_ told as a narrative with two scenes in dialogue.
+_Rusalka_, The Water Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the sham
+province of national legend, and it is tantalizing that this poetic
+fragment remained a fragment.
+
+Pushkin's prose is in some respects as remarkable as his verse. Here,
+too, he proved a pioneer. _Dubrovsky_ is the story of a young officer
+whose father is ousted, like Naboth, from his small estate by his
+neighbour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, becomes a highway
+robber so as to revenge himself, and introduces himself into the
+family of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes his revenge
+because he falls in love with his enemy's daughter. In this extremely
+vivid story he anticipates Gogol in his lifelike pictures of country
+life. _The Captain's Daughter_ is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev
+has nothing stagey or melodramatic about him, nothing of Harrison
+Ainsworth. Of his shorter stories, such as _The Blizzard_, _The Pistol
+Shot_, _The Lady-Peasant_, the most entertaining, and certainly the
+most popular, is _The Queen of Spades_, which was so admirably
+translated by Merimee, and formed the subject of one of Tchaikovsky's
+most successful operas. As an artistic work _The Egyptian Nights_,
+written in 1828, is the most interesting, and ranks among Pushkin's
+masterpieces. It tells of an Italian _improvisatore_ who, at a party
+in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on Cleopatra and her lovers. The
+story is written to lead up to this poem, which gives a gorgeous
+picture of the pagan world, and is another example of Pushkin's
+miraculous power of assimilation. Pushkin's prose has the same
+limpidity and ease as his verse; the characters have the same vitality
+and reality as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, and had he
+lived longer he might have become a great novelist. As it is, he
+furnished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made in 1832) with the subject
+of two of his masterpieces--_Dead Souls_ and _The Revisor_.
+
+The province of Russian folk-lore and legend from which Pushkin took
+the idea of _Rusalka_ was to furnish him with a great deal of rich
+material. It was in 1831 that in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he
+wrote his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian popular style,
+_The Tale of Tsar Saltan_. Up till now he had written only a few
+ballads in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a brilliant success
+as a _pastiche_; but it was a _pastiche_ and not quite the real thing,
+as cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of epigram here and there,
+which indeed makes it delightful reading. He followed it by another in
+the comic vein, _The Tale of the Pope and his Man Balda_, and by two
+more _Maerchen_, _The Dead Tsaritsa_ and _The Golden Cock_; but it was
+not until two years later that he wrote his masterpiece in this vein,
+_The Story of the Fisherman and the Fish_. It is the same story as
+Grimm's tale of the Fisherman's wife who wished to be King, Emperor,
+and then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting ambition. The tale
+is written in unrhymed rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines;
+all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such as might have been
+handed down by oral tradition in some obscure village out of the
+remotest past; it has the real _Volkston_; the good-nature and
+simplicity and unobtrusive humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects
+of all these stories were told to Pushkin by his nurse, Anna
+Rodionovna, who also furnished him with the subject of his ballad,
+_The Bridegroom_. In Pushkin's note-books there are seven fairy-tales
+taken down hurriedly from the words of his nurse; and most likely all
+that he wrote dealing with the life of the people came from the same
+source. Pushkin called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, and said that
+he was indebted to her for counteracting the effects of his first
+French education.
+
+In 1833 he finished a poem called _The Brazen Horseman_, the story of
+a man who loses his beloved in the great floods in St. Petersburg in
+1834, and going mad, imagines that he is pursued by Falconet's
+equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains a magnificent
+description of St. Petersburg. During the last years of his life, he
+was engaged in collecting materials for a history of Peter the Great.
+His power of production had never run dry from the moment he left
+school, although his actual work was interrupted from time to time by
+distractions and the society of his friends.
+
+All the important larger works of Pushkin have now been mentioned; but
+during the whole course of his career he was always pouring out a
+stream of lyrics and occasional pieces, many of which are among the
+most beautiful things he wrote. His variety and the width of his range
+are astonishing. Some of them have a grace and perfection such as we
+find in the Greek anthology; others--"Recollections," for instance, in
+which in the sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pass before
+him the blotted scroll of his past deeds, which he is powerless with
+all the tears in the world to wash out--have the intensity of
+Shakespeare's sonnets. This poem, for instance, has the same depth of
+feeling as "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry," or "The
+expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Or he will write an elegy as
+tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture of a sledge in a
+snow-storm, and give you the plunge of the bewildered horses, the
+whirling demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the quiet spaces of
+snow, in intoxicating rhythms which E. A. Poe would have envied; or
+again he will write a description of the Caucasus in eleven short
+lines, close in expression and vast in suggestion, such as "The
+Monastery on Kazbek"; or he will bring before you the smell of the
+autumn morning, and the hoofs ringing out on the half-frozen earth; or
+he will write a patriotic poem, such as _To the Slanderers of
+Russia_, fraught with patriotic indignation without being offensive;
+in this poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of Russia: "Will not,"
+he says, "from Perm to the Caucasus, from Finland's chill rocks to the
+flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to the unshaken walls of
+China, glistening with its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise?"
+Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance and as humble in
+spirit as one of the old Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as
+Musset and as playful as Heine: he will translate you the spirit of
+Horace and the spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure the
+restraint of Andre Chenier, and the impetuous gallop of Byron.
+
+Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin's poems is the poem which
+expresses his view of life in the elegy--
+
+    "As bitter as stale aftermath of wine
+    Is the remembrance of delirious days;
+    But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs
+    The past more sorely, as my days decline.
+    My path is dark. The future lies in wait,
+    A gathering ocean of anxiety,
+    But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create,
+    That is my prayer; to live and not to die!
+    I know that ecstasy shall still lie there
+    In sorrow and adversity and care.
+    Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine,
+    Be moved to tears by musings that are mine;
+    And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh
+    Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."
+
+But the greatest of his short poems is probably "The Prophet." This is
+a tremendous poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin only attained
+once. It is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression; the
+syllables ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a silver clarion.
+It is, as it were, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.
+Nothing finer as sound could ever be compounded with Russian vowels
+and consonants; nothing could be more perfectly planned, or present,
+in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the imagination. Even a
+rough prose translation will give some idea of the imaginative
+splendour of the poem--
+
+"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark
+wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the
+crossing of the ways: And he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were
+as soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my
+prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them
+with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the
+flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that
+are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in
+the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he
+tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and
+that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled
+with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips,
+the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a
+sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast
+he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and
+the voice of God called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take
+heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and go forth over the sea and
+over the land and set light with My word to the hearts of the
+people.'"
+
+In 1837 came the catastrophe which brought about Pushkin's death. It
+was caused by the clash of evil tongues engaged in frivolous gossip,
+and Pushkin's own susceptible and violent temperament. A guardsman,
+Heckeren-Dantes, had been flirting with his wife. Pushkin received an
+anonymous letter, and being wrongly convinced that Heckeren-Dantes was
+the author of it, wrote him a violent letter which made a duel
+inevitable. A duel was fought on the 27th of February, 1837, and
+Pushkin was mortally wounded. Such was his frenzy of rage that, after
+lying wounded and unconscious in the snow, on regaining consciousness,
+he insisted on going on with the duel, and fired another shot, giving
+a great cry of joy when he saw that he had wounded his adversary. It
+was only a slight wound in the hand. It was not until he reached home
+that his anger passed away. He died on the 29th of February, after
+forty-five hours of excruciating suffering, heroically borne; he
+forgave his enemies; he wished no one to avenge him; he received the
+last sacraments; and he expressed feelings of loyalty and gratitude
+to his sovereign. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old.
+
+Pushkin's career falls naturally into two divisions: his life until he
+was thirty, and his life after he was thirty. Pushkin began his career
+with liberal aspirations, and he disappointed some in the loyalty to
+the throne, the Church, the autocracy, and the established order of
+things which he manifested later; in turning to religion; in remaining
+in the Government service; in writing patriotic poems; in holding the
+position of Gentleman of the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in fact,
+what is called a reactionary. But it would be a mistake to imagine
+that Pushkin was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause of liberty for
+a handful of silver and a riband to stick in his coat. The liberal
+aspirations of Pushkin's youth were the very air that the whole of the
+aristocratic youth of that day breathed. Pushkin could not escape
+being influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel then, than he was a
+reactionary afterwards, when again the very air which the whole of
+educated society breathed was conservative and nationalistic. It may
+be a pity that it was so; but so it was. There was no liberal
+atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and the radical effervescence
+of the Decembrists was destroyed by the Decembrists' premature action.
+It is no good making a revolution if you have nothing to make it with.
+The Decembrists were in the same position as the educated elite of one
+regiment at Versailles would have been, had it attempted to destroy
+the French monarchy in the days of Louis XIV. The Decembrists by their
+premature action put the clock of Russian political progress back for
+years. The result was that men of impulse, aspiration, talent and
+originality had in the reign of Nicholas to seek an outlet for their
+feelings elsewhere than in politics, because politics then were simply
+non-existent.
+
+But apart from this, even if the opportunities had been there, it may
+be doubted whether Pushkin would have taken them. He was not born with
+a passion to reform the world. He was neither a rebel nor a reformer;
+neither a liberal nor a conservative; he was a democrat in his love
+for the whole of the Russian people; he was a patriot in his love of
+his country. He resembled Goethe rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or
+Byron; although, in his love of his country and in every other
+respect, his fiery temperament both in itself and in its expression
+was far removed from Goethe's Olympian calm. He was like Goethe in his
+attitude towards society, and the attitude of the social and official
+world towards him resembles the attitude of Weimar towards Goethe.
+
+During the first part of his career he gave himself up to pleasure,
+passion, and self-indulgence; after he was thirty he turned his mind
+to more serious things. It would not be exact to say he _became_
+deeply religious, because he was religious by nature, and he soon
+discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism; but in spite of this he was
+a victim of _amour-propre_; and he wavered between contempt of the
+society around him and a petty resentment against it which took the
+shape of scathing and sometimes cruel epigrams. It was this dangerous
+_amour-propre_, the fact of his being not only passion's slave, but
+petty passion's slave, which made him a victim of frivolous gossip and
+led to the final catastrophe.
+
+"In Pushkin," says Soloviev, the philosopher, "according to his own
+testimony there were two different and separate beings: the inspired
+priest of Apollo, and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children
+of the world." It was the first Pushkin--the inspired priest--who
+predominated in the latter part of his life; but who was unable to
+expel altogether the second Pushkin, the frivolous _Weltkind_, who was
+prone to be exasperated by the society in which he lived, and when
+exasperated was dangerous. There is one fact, however, which accounts
+for much. The more serious Pushkin's turn of thought grew, the more
+objective, purer, and stronger his work became, the less it was
+appreciated; for the public which delighted in the comparatively
+inferior work of his youth was not yet ready for his more mature work.
+What pleased the public were the dazzling colours, the sensuous and
+sometimes libidinous images of his early poems; the romantic
+atmosphere; especially anything that was artificial in them. They had
+not yet eyes to appreciate the noble lines, nor ears to appreciate the
+simpler and more majestic harmonies of his later work. Thus it was
+that they passed _Boris Godunov_ by, and were disappointed in the
+later cantos of _Onegin_. This was, of course, discouraging.
+Nevertheless, it is laughable to rank Pushkin amongst the
+misunderstood, among the Shelleys, the Millets, of Literature and Art;
+or to talk of his sad fate. To talk of him as one of the victims of
+literature is merely to depreciate him.
+
+He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus, which gave him inspiration:
+to his own country home, which gave him leisure. He was censored. Yes:
+but the Emperor undertook to do the work himself. Had he lived in
+England, society--as was proved in the case of Byron--would have been
+a far severer censor of his morals and the extravagance of his youth,
+than the Russian Government. Besides which, he won instantaneous fame,
+and in the society in which he moved he was surrounded by a band not
+only of devoted but distinguished admirers, amongst whom were some of
+the highest names in Russian literature--Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol.
+
+Pushkin is Russia's national poet, the Peter the Great of poetry, who
+out of foreign material created something new, national and Russian,
+and left imperishable models for future generations. The chief
+characteristic of his genius is its universality. There appeared to be
+nothing he could not understand nor assimilate. And it is just this
+all-embracing humanity--Dostoyevsky calls him +pananthropos+--this
+capacity for understanding everything and everybody, which makes him so
+profoundly Russian. He is a poet of everyday life: a realistic poet,
+and above all things a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as an
+epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief and produce a noble
+fragment, he cannot set crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians
+the beauty of their landscape and the poetry of their people; and they,
+with ears full of pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and romantic
+stage properties, did not understand what he was doing: but they
+understood later. For a time he fought against the stream, and all in
+vain; and then he gave himself up to the great current, which took him
+all too soon to the open sea.
+
+He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional;
+and all his life he was still learning to become more and more
+intimate with the savour and smell of the people's language. Like
+Peter the Great, he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and his
+whole energies in craftsmanship. He was a great artist; his style is
+perspicuous, plastic, and pure; there is never a blurred outline,
+never a smear, never a halting phrase or a hesitating note. His
+concrete images are, as it were, transparent, like Donne's description
+of the woman whose
+
+          "... pure and eloquent blood
+    Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought,
+    That you might almost think her body thought."
+
+His diction is the inseparable skin of the thought. You seem to hear
+him thinking. He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated
+spontaneity. His soul was sincere, noble, and open; he was frivolous,
+a child of the world and of his century; but if he was worldly, he was
+human; he was a citizen as well as a child of the world; and it is
+that which makes him the greatest of Russian poets.
+
+His career was unromantic; he was rooted to the earth; an aristocrat
+by birth, an official by profession, a lover of society by taste. At
+the same time, he sought and served beauty, strenuously and
+faithfully; he was perhaps too faithful a servant of Apollo; too
+exclusive a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find none of the
+piteous cries, no beauty of soaring and bleeding wings as in Shelley,
+nor the sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no tempest of defiant
+challenge, no lightnings of divine derision, as in Byron; his is
+neither the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that "brave soldier in the
+war of the liberation of humanity," nor the agonized passion of a
+suffering Catullus. He never descended into Hell. Every great man is
+either an artist or a fighter; and often poets of genius, Byron and
+Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently fighters than they are
+artists. Pushkin was an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what
+makes even his love-poems cold in comparison with those of other
+poets. Although he was the first to make notable what was called the
+romantic movement; and although at the beginning of his career he
+handled romantic subjects in a more or less romantic way, he was
+fundamentally a classicist--a classicist as much in the common-sense
+and realism and solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the
+perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form. And he soon cast aside
+even the vehicles and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively followed
+reality. "He strove with none, for none was worth his strife." And
+when his artistic ideals were misunderstood and depreciated, he
+retired into himself and wrote to please himself only; but in the
+inner court of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired he created
+imperishable things; for he loved nature, he loved art, he loved his
+country, and he expressed that love in matchless song.
+
+For years, Russian criticism was either neglectful of his work or
+unjust towards it; for his serene music and harmonious design left the
+generations which came after him, who were tossed on a tempest of
+social problems and political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when
+Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin's memorial at Moscow, the homage which he
+paid to the dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of the whole of
+Russia. His work is beyond the reach of critics, whether favourable or
+unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of his countrymen, and
+chiefly upon the lips of the young.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Not 1763, as generally stated in his biographies.
+
+[3] The poem was originally called _Mazepa_: Pushkin changed the title
+so as not to clash with Byron. It is interesting to see what Pushkin
+says of Byron's poem. In his notes there is the following passage--
+
+"Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire's history of Charles XII. He was
+struck solely by the picture of a man bound to a wild horse and borne
+over the steppes. A poetical picture of course; but see what he did
+with it. What a living creation! What a broad brush! But do not expect
+to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual gloomy Byronic hero.
+Byron was not thinking of him. He presented a series of pictures, one
+more striking than the other. Had his pen come across the story of the
+seduced daughter and the father's execution, it is improbable that
+anyone else would have dared to touch the subject."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LERMONTOV
+
+
+The romantic movement in Russia was, as far as Pushkin was concerned,
+not really a romantic movement at all. Still less was it so in the
+case of the Pleiade which followed him. And yet, for want of a better
+word, one is obliged to call it the _romantic_ movement, as it was a
+new movement, a renascence that arose out of the ashes of the
+pseudo-classical eighteenth century convention. Pushkin was followed
+by a Pleiade.
+
+The claim of his friend and fellow-student, BARON DELVIG, to fame,
+rests rather on his friendship with Pushkin (to whom he played the
+part of an admirable critic) than on his own verse. He died in 1831.
+YAZYKOV, PRINCE BARIATINSKY, VENEVITINOV, and POLEZHAEV, can all be
+included in the Pleiade; all these are lyrical poets of the second
+order, and none of them--except Polezhaev, whose real promise of
+talent was shattered by circumstances (he died of drink and
+consumption after a career of tragic vicissitudes)--has more than an
+historical interest.
+
+Pushkin's successor to the throne of Russian letters was Lermontov: no
+unworthy heir. The name Lermontov is said to be the same as the Scotch
+Learmonth. The story of his short life is a simple one. He was born at
+Moscow in 1814. He visited the Caucasus when he was twelve. He was
+taught English by a tutor. He went to school at Moscow, and afterwards
+to the University. He left in 1832 owing to the disputes he had with
+the professors. At the age of eighteen, he entered the Guards' Cadet
+School at St. Petersburg; and two years later he became an officer in
+the regiment of the Hussars. In 1837 he was transferred to Georgia,
+owing to the scandal caused by the outspoken violence of his verse;
+but he was transferred to Novgorod in 1838, and was allowed to return
+to St. Petersburg in the same year. In 1840 he was again transferred
+to the Caucasus for fighting a duel with the son of the French
+Ambassador; towards the end of the year, he was once more allowed to
+return to St. Petersburg. In 1841 he went back for a third time to
+the Caucasus, where he forced a duel on one of his friends over a
+perfectly trivial incident, and was killed, on the 15th of July of the
+same year.
+
+In all the annals of poetry, there is no more curious figure than
+Lermontov. He was like a plant that above all others needed a
+sympathetic soil, a favourable atmosphere, and careful attention. As
+it was, he came in the full tide of the regime of Nicholas I, a regime
+of patriarchal supervision, government interference, rigorous
+censorship, and iron discipline,--a grey epoch absolutely devoid of
+all ideal aspirations. Considerable light is thrown on the
+contradictory and original character of the poet by his novel, _A Hero
+of Our Days_, the first psychological novel that appeared in Russia.
+The hero, Pechorin, is undoubtedly a portrait of the poet, although he
+himself said, and perhaps thought, that he was merely creating a type.
+
+The hero of the story, who is an officer in the Caucasus, analyses his
+own character, and lays bare his weaknesses, follies, and faults, with
+the utmost frankness. "I am incapable of friendship," he says. "Of two
+friends, one is always the slave of the other, although often neither
+of them will admit it; I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a
+tiring business." Or he writes: "I have an innate passion for
+contradiction.... The presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and
+intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a
+passionate dreamer." Speaking of enemies, he says: "I love enemies,
+but not after the Christian fashion." And on another occasion: "Why do
+they all hate me? Why? Have I offended any one? No. Do I belong to
+that category of people whose mere presence creates antipathy?" Again:
+"I despise myself sometimes, is not that the reason that I despise
+others? I have become incapable of noble impulses. I am afraid of
+appearing ridiculous to myself."
+
+On the eve of fighting a duel Pechorin writes as follows--
+
+"If I die it will not be a great loss to the world, and as for me, I
+am sufficiently tired of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, who
+does not go home to bed because the carriage is not there, but as soon
+as the carriage is there, Good-bye!"
+
+"I review my past and I ask myself, Why have I lived? Why was I born?
+and I think there was a reason, and I think I was called to high
+things, for I feel in my soul the presence of vast powers; but I did
+not divine my high calling; I gave myself up to the allurement of
+shallow and ignoble passions; I emerged from their furnace as hard and
+as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble
+aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I
+played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of
+the executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often
+without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought
+happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed
+myself for those whom I loved. I loved for my own sake, for my own
+pleasure.... And if I die I shall not leave behind me one soul who
+understood me. Some think I am better, others that I am worse than I
+am. Some will say he was a good fellow; others he was a blackguard."
+
+It will be seen from these passages, all of which apply to Lermontov
+himself, even if they were not so intended, that he must have been a
+trying companion, friend, or acquaintance. He had, indeed, except for
+a few intimate friends, an impossible temperament; he was proud,
+overbearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savage
+_amour-propre_; and he took a childish delight in annoying; he
+cultivated "le plaisir aristocratique de deplaire"; he was envious of
+what was least enviable in his contemporaries. He could not bear not
+to make himself felt, and if he felt that he was unsuccessful in
+accomplishing this by pleasant means, he resorted to unpleasant means.
+And yet, at the same time, he was warm-hearted, thirsting for love and
+kindness, and capable of giving himself up to love--if he chose.
+
+During his period of training at the Cadet School, he led a wild life;
+and when he became an officer, he hankered after social and not after
+literary success. He did not achieve it immediately; at first he was
+not noticed, and when he was noticed he was not liked. His looks were
+unprepossessing, and one of his legs was shorter than the other. His
+physical strength was enormous--he could bend a ramrod with his
+fingers. Noticed he was determined to be; and, as he himself says in
+one of his letters, observing that every one in society had some sort
+of pedestal--wealth, lineage, position, or patronage--he saw that if
+he, not pre-eminently possessing any of these,--though he was, as a
+matter of fact, of a good Moscow family,--could succeed in engaging
+the attention of one person, others would soon follow suit. This he
+set about to do by compromising a girl and then abandoning her: and he
+acquired the reputation of a Don Juan. Later, when he came back from
+the Caucasus, he was treated as a lion. All this does not throw a
+pleasant light on his character, more especially as he criticized in
+scathing tones the society in which he was anxious to play a part, and
+in which he subsequently enjoyed playing a part. But perhaps both
+attitudes of mind were sincere. He probably sincerely enjoyed society,
+and hankered after success in it; and equally sincerely despised
+society and himself for hankering after it.
+
+As he grew older, his pride and the exasperating provocativeness of
+his conduct increased to such an extent that he seemed positively
+seeking for serious trouble, and for some one whose patience he could
+overtax, and on whom he could fasten a quarrel. And this was not slow
+to happen.
+
+At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with
+himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to
+life, resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet,
+and so recoiled upon himself. The epoch, the atmosphere and the
+society were the worst possible for his peculiar nature; and the only
+fruitful result of the friction between himself and the society and
+the established order of his time, was that he was sent to the
+Caucasus, which proved to be a source of inspiration for him, as it
+had been for Pushkin. One is inclined to say, "If only he had lived
+later or longer"; yet it may be doubted whether, had he been born in a
+more favourable epoch, either earlier in the milder regime of
+Alexander I, or later, in the enthusiastic epoch of the reforms, he
+would have been a happier man and produced finer work.
+
+The curious thing is that his work does not reveal an overwhelming
+pessimism like Leopardi's, an accent of revolt like Musset's, or of
+combat like Byron's; but rather it testifies to a fundamental
+indifference to life, a concentrated pride. If it be true that you can
+roughly divide the Russian temperament into two types--the type of
+the pure fool, such as Dostoyevsky's _Idiot_, and a type of
+unconquerable pride, such as Lucifer--then Lermontov is certainly a
+fine example of the second type. You feel that he will never submit or
+yield; but then he died young; and the Russian poets often changed,
+and not infrequently adopted a compromise which was the same thing as
+submission.
+
+Lermontov was, like Pushkin, essentially a lyric poet, still more
+subjective, and profoundly self-centred. His attempts at the drama
+(imitations of Schiller and an attempt at the manner of Griboyedov)
+were failures. But, unlike Pushkin, he was a true romantic; and his
+work proves to us how essentially different a thing Russian
+romanticism is from French, German or English romanticism. He began
+with astonishing precocity to write verse when he was twelve. His
+earliest efforts were in French. He then began to imitate Pushkin.
+While at the Cadet School he wrote a series of cleverly written, more
+or less indecent, and more or less Byronic--the Byron of
+_Beppo_--tales in verse, describing his love adventures, and episodes
+of garrison life. What brought him fame was his "Ode on the Death of
+Pushkin," which, although unjustified by the actual facts--he
+represents Pushkin as the victim of a bloodthirsty society--strikes
+strong and bitter chords. Here, without any doubt, are "thoughts that
+breathe and words that burn"--
+
+    "And you, the proud and shameless progeny
+    Of fathers famous for their infamy,
+    You, who with servile heel have trampled down
+    The fragments of great names laid low by chance,
+    You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne,
+    Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory,
+    You hide behind the shelter of the law,
+    Before you, right and justice must be dumb!
+    But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize;
+    There is an awful court of law that waits.
+    You cannot reach it with the sound of gold;
+    It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds;
+    And vainly you shall call the lying witness;
+    That shall not help you any more;
+    And not with all the filth of all your gore
+    Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."
+
+He struck this strong chord more than once, especially in his
+indictment of his own generation, called "A Thought"; and in a poem
+written on the transfer of Napoleon's ashes to Paris, in which he
+pours scorn on the French for deserting Napoleon when he lived and
+then acclaiming his ashes.
+
+But it is not in poems such as these that Lermontov's most
+characteristic qualities are to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to
+his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, and still less to
+foreign models. It is true that, as a school-boy, he wrote verses full
+of Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these were merely echoes of
+his reading. The gloom of spirit which he expressed later on was a
+permanent and innate feature of his own temperament. Later, the
+reading of Shelley spurred on his imagination to emulation, but not to
+imitation. He sought his own path from the beginning, and he remained
+in it with obdurate persistence. He remained obstinately himself,
+indifferent as a rule to outside events, currents of thought and
+feeling. And he clung to the themes which he chose in his youth. His
+mind to him a kingdom was, and he peopled it with images and fancies
+of his own devising. The path which he chose was a narrow one. It was
+a romantic path. He chose for the subject of the poem by which he is
+perhaps most widely known, _The Demon_, the love of a demon for a
+woman. The subject is as romantic as any chosen by Thomas Moore; but
+there is nothing now that appears rococo in Lermontov's work. The
+colours are as fresh to-day as when they were first laid on. The
+heroine is a Circassian woman, and the action of the poem is in the
+Caucasus.
+
+The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that denies of Goethe, nor
+Byron's Lucifer, looking the Almighty in His face and telling him that
+His evil is not good; nor does he cherish--
+
+    "the study of revenge, immortal hate,"
+
+of Milton's Satan; but he is the lost angel of a ruined paradise, who
+is too proud to accept oblivion even were it offered to him. He dreams
+of finding in Tamara the joys of the paradise he has foregone. "I am
+he," he says to her, "whom no one loves, whom every human being
+curses." He declares that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, that he
+desires to be reconciled with Heaven, to love, to pray, to believe in
+good. And he pours out to her one of the most passionate love
+declarations ever written, in couplet after couplet of words that glow
+like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp, Tamara yields to
+him, and forfeits her life; but her soul is borne to Heaven by the
+Angel of Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, and the Demon is
+left as before alone in a loveless, lampless universe. The poem is
+interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, which are as glowing
+and splendid as the impassioned utterance of the Demon. They put
+Pushkin's descriptions in the shade. Lermontov's landscape-painting
+compared with Pushkin's is like a picture of Turner compared with a
+Constable or a Bonnington.
+
+Lermontov followed up his first draft of _The Demon_ (originally
+planned in 1829, but not finished in its final form until 1841) with
+other romantic tales, the scene of which for the most part is laid in
+the Caucasus: such as _Izmail Bey_, _Hadji-Abrek_, _Orsha the
+Boyar_--the last not a Caucasian tale. These were nearly all of them
+sketches in which he tried the colours of his palette. But with
+_Mtsyri_, _the Novice_, in which he used some of the materials of the
+former tales, he produced a finished picture.
+
+_Mtsyri_ is the story of a Circassian orphan who is educated in a
+convent. The child grows up home-sick at heart, and one day his
+longing for freedom becomes ungovernable, and he escapes and roams
+about in the mountains. He loses his way in the forest and is brought
+back to the monastery after three days, dying from starvation,
+exertion, and exhaustion. Before he dies he pours out his confession,
+which takes up the greater part of the poem. He confesses how in the
+monastery he felt his own country and his own people forever calling,
+and how he felt he must seek his own people. He describes his
+wanderings: how he scrambles down the mountain-side and hears the song
+of a Georgian woman, and sees her as she walks down a narrow path with
+a pitcher on her head and draws water from the stream. At nightfall he
+sees the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a falling star; but
+he dares not seek it. He loses his way in the forest, he encounters
+and kills a panther. In the morning, he finds a way out of the woods
+when the daylight comes; he lies in the grass exhausted under the
+blinding noon, of which Lermontov gives a gorgeous and detailed
+description--
+
+    "And on God's world there lay the deep
+    And heavy spell of utter sleep,
+    Although the landrail called, and I
+    Could hear the trill of the dragonfly
+    Or else the lisping of the stream ...
+    Only a snake, with a yellow gleam
+    Like golden lettering inlaid
+    From hilt to tip upon a blade,
+    Was rustling, for the grass was dry,
+    And in the loose sand cautiously
+    It slid, and then began to spring
+    And roll itself into a ring,
+    Then, as though struck by sudden fear,
+    Made haste to dart and disappear."
+
+Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and delirium overtake him, and
+he fancies that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, where
+speckled fishes are playing in the crystal waters. One of them nestles
+close to him and sings to him with a silver voice a lullaby,
+unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and alluring like the call of the
+Erl King's daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches the high-water
+mark of his descriptive powers. Its pages glow with the splendour of
+the Caucasus.
+
+To his two masterpieces, _The Demon_ and _Mtsyri_, he was to add a
+third: _The Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprichnik
+(bodyguardsman), and the Merchant Kalashnikov_. The Oprichnik insults
+the Merchant's wife, and the Merchant challenges him to fight with his
+fists, kills him, and is executed for it. This poem is written as a
+folk-story, in the style of the _Byliny_, and it in no way resembles a
+_pastiche_. It equals, if it does not surpass, Pushkin's _Boris
+Godunov_ as a realistic vision of the past; and as an epic tale, for
+simplicity, absolute appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to
+nature and terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian literature to
+compare with it. Besides these larger poems, Lermontov wrote a
+quantity of short lyrics, many of which, such as "The Sail," "The
+Angel," "The Prayer," every Russian child knows by heart.
+
+When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov's romantic work,
+and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the
+West--from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda--we find
+that in Lermontov's work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled
+with his lyrical, imaginative, and descriptive powers, a bed-rock of
+matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in
+reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the "intense
+inane" of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim
+twilight of Coleridge. Romantic he is, but one note of Heine takes us
+into a different world: for instance, Heine's quite ordinary
+adventures in the Harz Mountains convey a spell and glamour that takes
+us over a borderland that Lermontov never crossed.
+
+Nothing could be more splendid than Lermontov's descriptions; but they
+are, compared with those of Western poets, concrete, as sharp as views
+in a camera obscura. He never ate the roots of "relish sweet, the
+honey wild and manna dew" of the "Belle Dame Sans Merci"; he wrote of
+places where Kubla Khan might have wandered, of "ancestral voices
+prophesying war," but one has only to quote that line to see that
+Lermontov's poetic world, compared with Coleridge's, is solid fact
+beside intangible dream.
+
+Compared even with Musset and Victor Hugo, how much nearer the earth
+Lermontov is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealt with just the
+same themes; but in Lermontov, the most splendid painter of mountains
+imaginable, you never hear
+
+    "Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne,"
+
+and you know that it will never drive the Russian poet to frenzy. On
+the other hand, you never get Victor Hugo's extravagance and
+absurdities. Or take Musset; Musset dealt with romantic themes _si
+quis alius_; but when he deals with a subject like Don Juan, which of
+all subjects belonged to the age of Pushkin and Lermontov, he writes
+lines like these--
+
+    "Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin d'autrui;
+    Et ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son ame,
+    Comme un luth eolien, aux levres de la nuit."
+
+Here again we are confronted with a different kind of imagination. Or
+take a bit of sheer description--
+
+    "Pale comme l'amour, et de pleurs arrosee,
+    La nuit aux pieds d'argent descend dans la rosee."
+
+You never find the Russian poet impersonating nature like this, and
+creating from objects such as the "yellow bees in the ivy bloom" forms
+more real than living man. The objects themselves suffice. Lermontov
+sang of disappointed love over and over again, but never did he create
+a single image such as--
+
+    "Elle aurait aime, si l'orgueil
+    Pareil a la lampe inutile
+    Qu'on allume pres d'un cercueil,
+    N'eut veille sur son coeur sterile."
+
+In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; but Byron was far less
+romantic and far less imaginative than Lermontov, although he invented
+Byronism, and shattered the crumbling walls of the eighteenth century
+that surrounded the city of romance, and dallied with romantic themes
+in his youth. All his best work, the finest passages of _Childe
+Harold_, and the whole of _Don Juan_, were slices of his own life and
+observation, _choses vues_; he never created a single character that
+was not a reflection of himself; and he never entered into the city
+whose walls he had stormed, and where he had planted his flag.
+
+This does not mean that Lermontov is inferior to the Western romantic
+poets. It simply means that the Russian poet is--and one might add
+the Russian poets are--different. And, indeed, it is this very
+difference,--what he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his
+composition,--that constitutes his unique excellence. So far from its
+being a vice, he made it into his especial virtue. Lermontov
+sometimes, in presenting a situation and writing a poem on a fact,
+presents that situation and that fact without exaggeration, emphasis,
+adornment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any kind, in the language of
+everyday life, and at the same time he achieves poetry. This was
+Wordsworth's ideal, and he fulfilled it.
+
+A case in point is his long poem on the Oprichnik, which has been
+mentioned; and some of the most striking examples of this unadorned
+and realistic writing are to be found in his lyrics. In the
+"Testament," for example, where a wounded officer gives his last
+instructions to his friend who is going home on leave--
+
+    "I want to be alone with you,
+      A moment quite alone.
+    The minutes left to me are few,
+      They say I'll soon be gone.
+    And you'll be going home on leave,
+    Then say ... but why? I do believe
+    There's not a soul, who'll greatly care
+    To hear about me over there.
+
+    And yet if some one asks you there,
+      Let us suppose they do--
+    Tell them a bullet hit me here,
+      The chest,--and it went through.
+    And say I died and for the Tsar,
+    And say what fools the doctors are;--
+    And that I shook you by the hand,
+    And thought about my native land.
+
+    My father and my mother, too!
+      They may be dead by now;
+    To tell the truth, it wouldn't do
+      To grieve them anyhow.
+    If one of them is living, say
+    I'm bad at writing home, and they
+    Have sent us to the front, you see,--
+    And that they needn't wait for me.
+
+    We had a neighbour, as you know,
+      And you remember I
+    And she ... How very long ago
+      It is we said good-bye!
+    She won't ask after me, nor care,
+    But tell her ev'rything, don't spare
+    Her empty heart; and let her cry;--
+    To her it doesn't signify."
+
+The language is the language of ordinary everyday conversation. Every
+word the officer says might have been said by him in ordinary life,
+and there is not a note that jars; the speech is the living speech of
+conversation without being slang: and the result is a poignant piece
+of poetry. Another perhaps still more beautiful and touching example
+is the cradle-song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, in which
+again every word has the native savour and homeliness of a Cossack
+woman's speech, and every feeling expressed is one that she would have
+felt. A third example is "Borodino," an account of the famous battle
+told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. Lermontov's fishes
+never talk like big whales.
+
+All Russian poets have this gift of reality of conception and
+simplicity of treatment in a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none
+has it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. The difference between
+Pushkin's style and Lermontov's is that, when you read Pushkin, you
+think: "How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world
+did he do it?" You admire the "magic hand of chance." In reading
+Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style
+at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes
+notice in its absolute appropriateness. Thus, what Matthew Arnold said
+about Byron and Wordsworth is true about Lermontov--there are moments
+when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.
+
+In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; but there is a great deal that
+is flat and sullen. But if one reviews the great amount of work he
+produced in his short life, one is struck, not by its variety, as in
+the case of Pushkin,--it is, on the contrary, limited and monotonous
+in subject,--but by his authentic lyrical inspiration, by the
+strength, the intensity, the concentration of his genius, the richness
+of his imagination, the wealth of his palette, his gorgeous colouring
+and the high level of his strong square musical verse. And perhaps
+more than by anything else, one is struck by the blend in his nature
+and his work which has just been discussed, of romantic imagination
+and stern reality, of soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as
+though we had before us the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings
+of a Shelley. Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you take him, one
+of the most astonishing figures, and certainly the greatest purely
+lyrical _Erscheinung_ in Russian literature.
+
+With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the springtide of national song
+that began in the reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for the only
+poet he left behind him did not survive him long. This was his
+contemporary KOLTSOV (1809-42), the greatest of Russian folk-poets.
+The son of a cattle-dealer, after a fitful and short-lived primary
+education at the district school of Voronezh, he adopted his father's
+trade, and by a sheer accident a cultivated young man of Moscow came
+across him and his verses, and raised funds for their publication.
+
+Koltsov's verse paints peasant life as it is, without any
+sentimentality or rhetoric; it is described from the inside, and not
+from the outside. This is the great difference between Koltsov and
+other popular poets who came later. Moreover, he caught and
+reproduced the true _Volkston_ in his lyrics, so that they are
+indistinguishable in accent from real folk-poetry. Koltsov sings of
+the woods, and the rustling rye, of harvest time and sowing; the song
+of the love-sick girl reaping; the lonely grave; the vague dreams and
+desires of the peasant's heart. His pictures have the dignity and
+truth of Jean Francois Millet, and his "lyrical cry" is as authentic
+as that of Burns. His more literary poems are like Burns' English
+poems compared with his work in the Scots. But he died the year after
+Lermontov, of consumption, and with his death the curtain was rung
+down on the first act of Russian literature. When it was next rung up,
+it was on the age of prose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE AGE OF PROSE
+
+
+When the curtain again rose on Russian literature it was on an era of
+prose; and the leading protagonist of that era, both by his works of
+fiction and his dramatic work, was NICHOLAS GOGOL [1809-52]. It is
+true that in the thirties Russia began to produce home-made novels. In
+Pushkin's story _The Queen of Spades_, when somebody asks the old
+Countess if she wishes to read a Russian novel, she says "A Russian
+novel? Are there any?" This stage had been passed; but the novels and
+the plays that were produced at this time until the advent of Gogol
+have been--deservedly for the greater part--forgotten. And, just as
+Lermontov was the successor of Pushkin in the domain of poetry, so in
+the domain of satire Gogol was the successor of Griboyedov; and in
+creating a national work he was the heir of Pushkin.
+
+Gogol was a Little Russian. He was born in 1809 near Poltava, in the
+Cossack country, and was brought up by his grandfather, a Cossack; but
+he left the Ukraine and settled in 1829 in St. Petersburg, where he
+obtained a place in a Government office. After an unsuccessful attempt
+to go on the stage, and a brief career as tutor, he was given a
+professorship of History; but he failed here also, and finally turned
+to literature. The publication of his first efforts gained him the
+acquaintance of the literary men of the day, and he became the friend
+of Pushkin, who proved a valuable friend, adviser, and critic, and
+urged him to write on the life of the people. He lived in St.
+Petersburg from 1829 to 1836; and it was perhaps home-sickness which
+inspired him to write his Little Russian sketches--_Evenings on a Farm
+on the Dikanka_,--which appeared in 1832, followed by _Mirgorod_, a
+second series, in 1834.
+
+Gogol's temperament was romantic. He had a great deal of the dreamer
+in him, a touch of the eerie, a delight in the supernatural, an impish
+fancy that reminds one sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of R. L.
+Stevenson, as well as a deep religious vein which was later on to
+dominate and oust all his other qualities. But, just as we find in the
+Russian poets a curious mixture of romanticism and realism, of
+imagination and common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with his
+imaginative gifts, which were great, there is a realism based on
+minute observation. In addition to this, and tempering his penetrating
+observation, he had a rich streak of humour, a many-sided humour,
+ranging from laughter holding both its sides, to a delicate and half
+melancholy chuckle, and in his later work to biting irony.
+
+In the very first story of his first book, "The Fair of Sorochinetz,"
+we are plunged into an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way that
+no other Russian book has ever yet savoured of the soil. We are
+plunged into the South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is
+standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at the fair; and the fair,
+with its noise, its smell and its colour, rises before us as vividly
+as Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupassant, or Scotland from the
+pages of Stevenson. And just as Andrew Lang once said that probably
+only a Scotsman, and a Lowland Scotsman, could know how true to life
+the characters in _Kidnapped_ were, so it is probable that only a
+Russian, and indeed a Little Russian, appreciates to the full how true
+to life are the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the tales of
+Gogol. And then we at once get that hint of the supernatural which
+runs like a scarlet thread through all these stories; the rumour that
+the _Red Jacket_ has been observed in the fair; and the _Red Jacket_,
+so the gossips say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned out of
+Hell as a punishment for some misdemeanour--probably a good
+intention--established himself in a neighbouring barn, and from
+home-sickness took to drink, and drank away all his substance; so that
+he was obliged to pawn his red jacket for a year to a Jew, who sold it
+before the year was out, whereupon the buyer, recognizing its unholy
+origin, cut it up into bits and threw it away, after which the Devil
+appeared in the shape of a pig every year at the fair to find the
+pieces. It is on this Red Jacket that the story turns.
+
+In this first volume, the supernatural plays a predominant part
+throughout; the stories tell of water-nymphs, the Devil, who steals
+the moon, witches, magicians, and men who traffic with the Evil One
+and lose their souls. In the second series, _Mirgorod_, realism comes
+to the fore in the stories of "The Old-Fashioned Landowners" and "The
+Quarrel of the Two Ivans." These two stories contain between them the
+sum and epitome of the whole of one side of Gogol's genius, the
+realistic side. In the one story, "The Old-Fashioned Landowners," we
+get the gentle good humour which tells the charming tale of a South
+Russian Philemon and Baucis, their hospitality and kindliness, and the
+loneliness of Philemon when Baucis is taken away, told with the art of
+La Fontaine, and with many touches that remind one of Dickens. The
+other story, "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans," who are bosom friends and
+quarrel over nothing, and are, after years, on the verge of making it
+up when the mere mention of the word "goose" which caused the quarrel
+sets alight to it once more and irrevocably, is in Gogol's richest
+farcical vein, with just a touch of melancholy.
+
+And in the same volume, two _nouvelles_, _Tarass Bulba_ and _Viy_, sum
+up between them the whole of the other side of Gogol's genius. _Tarass
+Bulba_, a short historical novel, with its incomparably vivid picture
+of Cossack life, is Gogol's masterpiece in the epic vein. It is as
+strong and as direct as a Border ballad. _Viy_, which tells of a
+witch, is the most creepy and imaginative of his supernatural stories.
+
+Later, he published two more collections of stories: _Arabesques_
+(1834) and _Tales_ (1836). In these, poetry, witches, water-nymphs,
+magicians, devils, and epic adventure are all left behind. The element
+of the fantastic still subsists, as in the "Portrait," and of the
+grotesque, as in the story of the major who loses his nose, which
+becomes a separate personality, and wanders about the town. But his
+blend of realism and humour comes out strongly in the story of "The
+Carriage," and his blend of realism and pathos still more strongly in
+the story of "The Overcoat," the story of a minor public servant who
+is always shivering and whose dream it is to have a warm overcoat.
+After years of privation he saves enough money to buy one, and on the
+first day he wears it, it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his
+ghost haunts the streets. This story is the only begetter of the large
+army of pathetic figures of failure that crowd the pages of Russian
+literature.
+
+While Gogol had been writing and publishing these tales, he had also
+been steadily writing for the stage; but here the great difficulty and
+obstacle was the Censorship, which was almost as severe as it was in
+England at the end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a curious
+paradox, the play, which you would have expected the Censorship to
+forbid before all other plays, _The Revisor_, or _Inspector-General_,
+was performed. This was owing to the direct intervention of the
+Emperor. _The Revisor_ is the second comic masterpiece of the Russian
+stage. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an
+obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government
+Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. A
+traveller from St. Petersburg--a fine natural liar--is taken for the
+Inspector, plays up to the part, and gets away just before the arrival
+of the real Inspector, which is the end of the play. The play is a
+satire on the Russian bureaucracy. Almost every single character in it
+is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and irrelevant hero, with his
+magnificent talent for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The play
+at once became a classic, and retains all its vitality and comic force
+to-day. There is no play which draws a larger audience on holidays in
+St. Petersburg and Moscow.
+
+After the production of _The Revisor_, Gogol left Russia for ever and
+settled in Rome. He had in his mind a work of great importance on
+which he had already been working for some time. This was his _Dead
+Souls_, his most ambitious work, and his masterpiece. It was Pushkin
+who gave him the idea of the book. The hero of the book, Chichikov,
+conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs,
+called "souls." A revision took place every ten years, and the
+landlord had to pay for poll-tax on the "souls" who had died during
+that period. Nobody looked at the lists between the periods of
+revision. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the
+landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to be rid of the
+fictitious property and the real tax, to register his purchases, and
+then to mortgage at a bank at St. Petersburg or Moscow, the "souls,"
+which he represented as being in some place in the Crimea, and thus
+make money enough to buy "souls" of his own. The book tells of the
+adventures of Chichikov as he travels over Russia in search of dead
+"souls," and is, like Mr. Pickwick's adventures, an Odyssey,
+introducing us to every kind and manner of man and woman. The book was
+to be divided in three parts. The first part appeared in 1842. Gogol
+went on working at the second and third parts until 1852, when he
+died. He twice threw the second part of the work into the fire when it
+was finished; so that all we possess is the first part, and the second
+part printed from an incomplete manuscript. The second part was
+certainly finished when he destroyed it, and it is probable that the
+third part was sketched. He had intended in the second part to work
+out the moral regeneration of Chichikov, and to give to the world his
+complete message. Persecuted by a dream he was unable to realize and
+an ambition which he was not able to fulfil, Gogol was driven inwards,
+and his natural religious feeling grew more intense and made him into
+an ascetic and a recluse. This break in the middle of his career is
+characteristic of Russia. Tolstoy, of course, furnishes the most
+typical example of the same thing. But it is a common Russian
+characteristic for men midway in a successful career to turn aside
+from it altogether, and seek consolation in the things which are not
+of this world.
+
+Gogol's _Dead Souls_ made a deep impression upon educated Russia. It
+pleased the enthusiasts for Western Europe by its reality, its
+artistic conception and execution, and by its social ideas; and it
+pleased the Slavophile Conservatives by its truth to life, and by its
+smell of Russia. When the first chapter was read aloud to Pushkin, he
+said, when Gogol had finished: "God, what a sad country Russia is!"
+And it is certainly true, that amusing as the book is, inexpressibly
+comic as so many of the scenes are, Gogol does not flatter his country
+or his countrymen; and when Russians read it at the time it appeared,
+many must have been tempted to murmur "_doux pays!_"--as they would,
+indeed, now, were a writer with the genius of a Gogol to appear and
+describe the adventures of a modern Chichikov; for, though
+circumstances may be entirely different, although there are no more
+"souls" to be bought or sold, Chichikov is still alive--and as Gogol
+said, there was probably not one of his readers who after an honest
+self-examination, would not wonder if he had not something of
+Chichikov in him, and who if he were to meet an acquaintance at that
+moment, would not nudge his companion and say: "There goes Chichikov."
+"And who and what is Chichikov?" The answer is: "A scoundrel." But
+such an entertaining scoundrel, so abject, so shameless, so utterly
+devoid of self-respect, such a magnificent liar, so plausible an
+impostor, so ingenious a cheat, that he rises from scoundrelism almost
+to greatness.
+
+There is, indeed, something of the greatness of Falstaff in this
+trafficker of dead "souls." His baseness is almost sublime. He in any
+case merits a place in the gallery of humanity's typical and human
+rascals, where Falstaff, Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign.
+He has the great saving merit of being human; nor can he be accused of
+hypocrisy. His coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every "decent
+man," is worthy of the creator of Sam Weller. But what distinguishes
+Gogol in his _Dead Souls_ from the great satirists of other nations,
+and his satire from the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift, for instance, is
+that, after laying bare to the bones the rascality of his hero, he
+turns round on his audience and tells them that there is no cause for
+indignation; Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling passion--gain;
+perhaps, indeed, in the chill existence of a Chichikov, there may be
+something which will one day cause us to humble ourselves on our knees
+and in the dust before the Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with
+indulgence; his sleepless observation is tempered by fundamental
+charity. He sees what is mean and common clearer than any one, but he
+does not infer from it that life, or mankind, or the world is common
+or mean. He infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no lower morally
+than he would put Napoleon, Harpagon, or Don Juan--all of them victims
+of a ruling passion, and all of them great by reason of it--for
+Chichikov is also great in rascality, just as Harpagon was great in
+avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. And this large charity
+blent with biting irony is again peculiarly Russian.
+
+_Dead Souls_ is a deeper book than any of Gogol's early work. It is
+deep in the same way as _Don Quixote_ is deep; and like _Don Quixote_
+it makes boys laugh, young men think, and old men weep. Apart from
+its philosophy and ideas, _Dead Souls_ had a great influence on
+Russian literature as a work of art. Just as Pushkin set Russian
+poetry free from the high-flown and the conventional, so did Gogol set
+Russian fiction free from the dominion of the grand style. He carried
+Pushkin's work--the work which Pushkin had accomplished in verse and
+adumbrated in prose--much further; and by depicting ordinary life, and
+by writing a novel without any love interest, with a Chichikov for a
+hero, he created Russian realism. He described what he saw without
+flattery and without exaggeration, but with the masterly touch, the
+instinctive economy, the sense of selection of a great artist.
+
+This, at the time it was done, was a revolution. Nobody then would
+have dreamed it possible to write a play or a novel without a
+love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed to Russia that there was
+such a thing as Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one better,
+revealed the fascination, the secret and incomprehensible power that
+lay in the flat monotony of the Russian country, and the inexhaustible
+source of humour, absurdity, irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the
+everyday life of the ordinary people. So that, however much his
+contemporaries might differ as to the merits or demerits, the harm or
+the beneficence, of his work, he left his nation with permanent and
+classic models of prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin had
+bequeathed to them permanent models of verse.
+
+Gogol wrote no more fiction after _Dead Souls_. In 1847 _Passages from
+a Correspondence with a Friend_ was published, which created a
+sensation, because in the book Gogol preached submission to the
+Government, both spiritual and temporal. The Western enthusiasts and
+the Liberals in general were highly disgusted. One can understand
+their disgust; it is less easy to understand their surprise; for Gogol
+had never pretended to be a Liberal. He showed up the evils of
+Bureaucracy and the follies and weaknesses of Bureaucrats, because
+they were there, just as he showed up the stinginess of misers and the
+obstinacy of old women. But it is quite as easy for a Conservative to
+do this as it is for a Liberal, and quite as easy for an orthodox
+believer as for an atheist. But Gogol's contemporaries had not
+realized the tempest that had been raging for a long time in Gogol's
+soul, and which he kept to himself. He had always been religious, and
+now he became exclusively religious; he made a pilgrimage to the Holy
+Land; he spent his substance in charity, especially to poor students;
+and he lived in asceticism until he died, at the age of forty-three.
+What a waste, one is tempted to say--and how often one is tempted to
+say this in the annals of Russian literature--and yet, one wonders!
+
+What we possess of the second part of _Dead Souls_ is in Gogol's best
+vein, and of course one cannot help bitterly regretting that the rest
+was destroyed or possibly never written; but one wonders whether, had
+he not had within him the intensity of feeling which led him
+ultimately to renounce art, he would have been the artist that he was;
+whether he would have been capable of creating so many-coloured a
+world of characters, and whether the soil out of which those works
+grew was not in reality the kind of soil out of which religious
+renunciation was at last bound to flower. However that may be, Gogol
+left behind him a rich inheritance. He is one of the great humorists
+of European literature, and whoever gives England a really fine
+translation of his work, will do his country a service. Merimee places
+Gogol among the best _English_ humorists. His humour and his pathos
+were closely allied; but there is no acidity in his irony. His work
+may sometimes sadden you, but (as in the case of Krylov's two pigeons)
+it will never bore you, and it will never leave you with a feeling of
+stale disgust or a taste as of sharp alum, for his work is based on
+charity, and it has in its form and accent the precious gift of charm.
+Gogol is an author who will always be loved even as much as he is
+admired, and his stories are a boon to the young; to many a Russian
+boy and girl the golden gates of romance have been opened by Gogol,
+the destroyer of Russian romanticism, the inaugurator of Russian
+realism.
+
+Side by side with fiction, another element grew up in this age of
+prose, namely criticism. Karamzin in the twenties had been the first
+to introduce literary criticism, and critical appreciations of
+Pushkin's work appeared from time to time in the _European Messenger_.
+PRINCE VYAZEMSKY, whose literary activity lasted from 1808-78, was a
+critic as well as a poet and a satirist, a fine example of the type of
+great Russian nobles so frequent in Russian books, who were not only
+saturated with culture but enriched literature with their work, and
+carried on the tradition of cool, clear wit, clean expression, and
+winged phrase that we find in Griboyedov. POLEVOY, a self-educated man
+of humble extraction, was the first professional journalist, and
+created the tradition of violent and fiery polemics, which has lasted
+till this day in Russian journalism. But the real founder of Russian
+aesthetic, literary, and journalistic criticism was BELINSKY
+(1811-1847).
+
+Like Polevoy, he was of humble extraction and almost entirely
+self-educated. He lived in want and poverty and ill-health. His life
+was a long battle against every kind of difficulty and obstacle; his
+literary production was more than hampered by the Censorship, but his
+influence was far-reaching and deep. He created Russian criticism, and
+after passing through several phases--a German phase of Hegelian
+philosophy, Gallophobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Goethe and for
+objective art, a French phase of enthusiasm for art as practised in
+France, ended finally in a didactic phase of which the watchword was
+that Life was more important than Art.
+
+The first blossoms of the new generation of writers, Goncharov,
+Dostoyevsky, Herzen, and others, grew up under his encouragement. He
+expounded Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Griboyedov, Zhukovsky and the
+writers of the past. His judgments have remained authoritative; but
+some of his final judgments, which were unshaken for generations, such
+as for instance his estimates of Pushkin and Lermontov, were much
+biassed and coloured by his didacticism. He burnt what he had adored
+in the case of Gogol, who, like Pushkin, became for him too much of an
+artist, and not enough of a social reformer. Whatever phase Belinsky
+went through, he was passionate, impulsive, and violent, incapable of
+being objective, or of doing justice to an opponent, or of seeing two
+sides to a question. He was a polemical and fanatical knight errant,
+the prophet and propagandist of Western influence, the bitter enemy of
+the Slavophiles.
+
+The didactic stamp which he gave to Russian aesthetic and literary
+criticism has remained on it ever since, and differentiates it from
+the literary and aesthetic criticism of the rest of Europe, not only
+from that school of criticism which wrote and writes exclusively under
+the banner of "Art for Art's Sake," but from those Western critics who
+championed the importance of moral ideas in literature, just as
+ardently as he did himself, and who deprecated the theory of Art for
+Art's sake just as strongly. Thus it is that, from the beginning of
+Russian criticism down to the present day, a truly objective criticism
+scarcely exists in Russian literature. AEsthetic criticism becomes a
+political weapon. "Are you in my camp?" if so, you are a good writer.
+"Are you in my opponent's camp?" then your god-gifted genius is mere
+dross.
+
+The reason of this has been luminously stated by Professor Brueckner:
+"To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without the liberty
+of assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion,
+literature became the last refuge of freedom of thought, the only
+means of propagating higher ideas. He expected of his country's
+literature not merely aesthetic recreation; he placed it at the service
+of his aspirations.... Hence the striking partiality, nay unfairness,
+displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own
+literature, when they did not respond to the aims or expectations of
+their party or their day." And speaking of the criticism that was
+produced after 1855, he says: "This criticism is often, in spite of
+all its giftedness, its ardour and fire, only a mockery of all
+criticism. The work only serves as an example on which to hang the
+critics' own views.... This is no reproach; we simply state the fact,
+and fully recognize the necessity and usefulness of the method. With a
+backward society, ... this criticism was a means which was sanctified
+by the end, the spreading of free opinions.... Unhappily, Russian
+literary criticism has remained till to-day almost solely
+journalistic, _i. e._ didactic and partisan. See how even now it
+treats the most interesting, exceptional, and mighty of all Russians,
+Dostoyevsky, merely because he does not fit into the Radical mould!
+How unjust it has been towards others! How it has extolled to the
+clouds the representatives of its own camp!" I quote Professor
+Brueckner, lest I should be myself suspected of being partial in this
+question. The question, perhaps, may admit of further expansion. It
+is not that the Russian critics were merely convinced it was
+all-important that art should have ideas at the roots of it, and had
+no patience with a merely shallow aestheticism. They went further; the
+ideas had to be of one kind. A definite political tendency had to be
+discerned; and if the critic disagreed with that political tendency,
+then no amount of qualities--not artistic excellence, form, skill,
+style, not even genius, inspiration, depth, feeling, philosophy--were
+recognized.
+
+Herein lies the great difference between Russian and Western critics,
+between Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky; between Matthew Arnold and his
+Russian contemporaries. Matthew Arnold defined the highest poetry as
+being a criticism of life; but that would not have prevented him from
+doing justice either to a poet so polemical as Byron, or to a poet so
+completely unpolitical, so sheerly aesthetic as Keats; to Lord
+Beaconsfield as a novelist, to Mr. Morley or Lord Acton as historians,
+because their "tendency" or their "politics" were different from his
+own. The most biassed of English or French critics is broad-minded
+compared to a Russian critic. Had Keats been a Russian poet, Belinsky
+would have swept him away with contempt; Wordsworth would have been
+condemned as reactionary; and Swinburne's politics alone would have
+been taken into consideration. At the present day, almost ten years
+after Professor Brueckner wrote his _History of Russian Literature_, now
+that the press is more or less free, save for occasional pin-pricks,
+now that literary output is in any case unfettered, and the stage freer
+than it is in England, the same criticism still applies. Russian
+literary criticism is still journalistic. There are and there always
+have been brilliant exceptions, of course, two of the most notable of
+which are VOLYNSKY and MEREZHKOVSKY; but as a rule the political camp
+to which the writer belongs is the all-important question; and I know
+cases of Russian politicians who have been known to refuse to write,
+even in foreign reviews, because they disapproved of the "tendency" of
+those reviews, the tendency being non-existent--as is generally the
+case with English reviews,--and the review harbouring opinions of every
+shade and tendency. You would think that narrow-mindedness could no
+further go than to refuse to let your work appear in an impartial
+organ, lest in that same organ an opinion opposed to your own might
+appear also. But the cause of this is the same now as it used to be,
+namely that, in spite of there being a greater measure of freedom in
+Russia, political liberty does not yet exist. Liberty of assembly does
+not exist; liberty of conscience only partially exists; the press is
+annoyed and hampered by restrictions; and the great majority of Russian
+writers are still engaged in fighting for these things, and therefore
+still ready to sacrifice fairness for the greater end,--the achievement
+of political freedom.
+
+Thus criticism in Russia became a question of camps, and the question
+arises, what were these camps? From the dawn of the age of pure
+literature, Russia was divided into two great camps: The Slavophiles
+and the Propagandists of Western Ideas.
+
+The trend towards the West began with the influence of Joseph Le
+Maistre and the St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 1836, CHAADAEV, an
+ex-guardsman who had served in the Russian campaign in France and
+travelled a great deal in Western Europe, and who shared Joseph Le
+Maistre's theory that Russia had suffered by her isolation from the
+West and through the influence of the former Byzantine Empire,
+published the first of his _Lettres sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire_
+in the _Telescope_ of Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. He
+glorified the tradition and continuity of the Catholic world. He said
+that Russia existed, as it were, outside of time, without the
+tradition either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that the
+universal culture of the human race had not touched it. "The
+atmosphere of the West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, order; we
+have given nothing to the world and taken nothing from it; ... we have
+not contributed anything to the progress of humanity, and we have
+disfigured everything we have taken from that progress. Hostile
+circumstances have alienated us from the general trend in which the
+social idea of Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise our
+faith, and begin our education over again on another basis." The
+expression of these incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the exile
+of the editor of the _Telescope_, the dismissal of the Censor, and in
+the official declaration of Chaadaev's insanity, who was put under
+medical supervision for a year.
+
+Chaadaev made disciples who went further than he did, PRINCESS
+VOLKONSKY, the authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox Church, and
+PRINCE GAGARIN, who both became Catholics. This was one branch of
+Westernism. Another branch, to which Belinsky belonged, had no
+Catholic leanings, but sought for salvation in socialism and atheism.
+The most important figure in this branch is ALEXANDER HERZEN
+(1812-1870). His real name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy
+nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalize his marriage in
+Russia, so his children took their mother's name.
+
+Herzen's career belongs rather to the history of Russia than to the
+history of Russian literature; were it not that, besides being one of
+the greatest and most influential personalities of his time, he was a
+great memoir-writer. He began, after a mathematical training at the
+University, with fiction, of which the best example is a novel _Who is
+to Blame?_ which paints the _genie sans portefeuille_ of the period
+that Turgenev was so fond of depicting. Herzen was exiled on account
+of his oral propaganda, first to Perm, and then to Vyatka. In 1847, he
+left Russia for ever, and lived abroad for the rest of his life, at
+first in Paris, and afterwards in London, where he edited a newspaper
+called _The Bell_.
+
+Herzen was a Socialist. Western Europe he considered to be played out.
+He looked upon Socialism as a new religion and a new form of
+Christianity, which would be to the new world what Christianity had
+been to the old. The Russian peasants would play the part of the
+Invasion of the Barbarians; and the functions of the State would be
+taken over by the Russian Communes on a basis of voluntary and mutual
+agreement--the principle of the Commune, of sharing all possessions in
+common, being so near the fundamental principle of Christianity.
+
+"A thinking Russian," he wrote, "is the most independent being in the
+world. What can stop him? Consideration for the past? But what is the
+starting-point of modern Russian history if it be not a total negation
+of nationalism and tradition?... What do we care, disinherited minors
+that we are, for the duties you have inherited? Can your worn-out
+morality satisfy us? Your morality which is neither Christian nor
+human, which is used only in copybooks and for the ritual of the
+law?" Again: "We are free because we begin with our own liberation; we
+are independent; we have nothing to lose or to honour. A Russian will
+never be a protestant, or follow the _juste milieu_ ... our
+civilization is external, our corrupt morals quite crude."
+
+The great point Herzen was always making was that Russia had escaped
+the baleful tradition of Western Europe, and the hereditary infection
+of Western corruption. Thus, in his disenchantment with Western
+society and his enthusiasm for the communal ownership of land, he was
+at one with the Slavophiles; where he differed from them was in
+accepting certain Western ideas, and in thinking that a new order of
+things, a new heaven and earth, could be created by a social
+revolution, which should be carried out by the Slavs. His
+influence--he was one of the precursors of Nihilism, for the seed he
+sowed, falling on the peculiar soil where it fell, produced the
+whirlwind as a harvest--belongs to history. What belongs to literature
+are his memoirs, _My Past and my Thoughts_ (_Byloe i Dumy_), which
+were written between 1852 and 1855. These memoirs of everyday life
+and encounters with all sorts and conditions of extraordinary men are
+in their subject-matter as exciting as a novel, and, in their style,
+on a level with the masterpieces of Russian prose, through their
+subtle psychology, interest, wit, and artistic form.
+
+Herzen lived to see his ideas bearing fruit in the one way which of
+all others he would have sought to avoid, namely in "militancy" and
+terrorism. When in 1866, an attempt was made by Karakozov to
+assassinate Alexander II, and Herzen wrote an article repudiating all
+political assassinations as barbarous, the revolutionary parties
+solemnly denounced him and his newspaper. _The Bell_, which had
+already lost its popularity owing to Herzen's pro-Polish sympathies in
+1863, ceased to have any circulation. Thus he lived to see his vast
+hopes shattered, the seed he had sown bearing a fruit he distrusted,
+his dreams of regeneration burst like a bubble, his ideals exploited
+by unscrupulous criminals. He died in 1870, leaving a name which is as
+great in Russian literature as it is remarkable in Russian history.
+
+Turning now to the _Slavophiles_, their idea was that Russia was
+already in possession of the best possible institutions,--orthodoxy,
+autocracy, and communal ownership, and that the West had everything to
+learn from Russia. They pointed to the evils arising from the feudal
+and aristocratic state, the system of primogeniture in the West, the
+higher legal status of women in Russia, and the superiority of a
+communal system, which leads naturally to a Consultative National
+Assembly with unanimous decisions, over the parliaments and party
+systems of the West.
+
+The leader of the Slavophiles was HOMYAKOV, a man of great culture; a
+dialectician, a poet, and an impassioned defender of orthodoxy. The
+best of his lyrics, which are inspired by a profound love of his
+country and belief in it, have great depth of feeling. Besides
+Homyakov, there were other poets, such as TYUTCHEV and IVAN AKSAKOV.
+Just as the camp of Reform produced in Herzen a supreme writer of
+memoirs, that of the Slavophiles also produced a unique memoir writer
+in the SERGE AKSAKOV, the father of the poet (1791-1859), who
+published his _Family Chronicle_ in 1856, and who describes the life
+of the end of the eighteenth century, and the age of Alexander. This
+book, one of the most valuable historical documents in Russian, and a
+priceless collection of biographical portraits, is also a gem of
+Russian prose, exact in its observation, picturesque and perfectly
+balanced in its diction.
+
+Aksakov remembered with unclouded distinctness exactly what he had
+seen in his childhood, which he spent in the district of Orenburg. He
+paints the portraits of his grandfather and his great-aunt. We see
+every detail of the life of a backwoodsman of the days of Catherine
+II. We see the noble of those days, simple and rustic in his habits as
+a peasant, almost entirely unlettered, and yet a gentleman through and
+through, unswerving in maintaining the standard of morals and
+traditions which he considers due to his ancient lineage. We see every
+hour of the day of his life in the country; we hear all the details of
+the family life, the marriage of his son, the domestic troubles of his
+sister.
+
+What strikes one most, perhaps, besides the contrast between the
+primitive simplicity of the habits and manners of the life described,
+and the astoundingly gentlemanlike feelings of the man who leads this
+quiet and rustic life in remote and backward conditions, is that there
+is not a hint or suspicion of anything antiquated in the sentiments
+and opinions we see at play. The story of Aksakov's grandfather might
+be that of any country gentleman in any country, at any epoch, making
+allowances for a certain difference in manners and customs and
+conditions which were peculiar to the epoch in question, the existence
+of serfdom, for instance--although here, too, the feeling with regard
+to manners described is startlingly like the ideal of good manners of
+any epoch, although the _moeurs_ are sometimes different. The story
+is as vivid and as interesting as that of any novel, as that of the
+novels of Russian writers of genius, and it has the additional value
+of being true. And yet we never feel that Aksakov has a thought of
+compiling a historical document for the sake of its historical
+interest. He is making history unawares, just as Monsieur Jourdain
+talked prose without knowing it; and, whether he was aware of it or
+not, he wrote perfect prose. No more perfect piece of prose writing
+exists. The style flows on like a limpid river; there is nothing
+superfluous, and not a hesitating touch. It is impossible to put down
+the narrative after once beginning it, and I have heard of children
+who read it like a fairy-tale. One has the sensation, in reading it,
+of being told a story by some enchanting nurse, who, when the usual
+question, "Is it true?" is put to her, could truthfully answer, "Yes,
+it is true." The pictures of nature, the portraits of the people, all
+the good and all the bad of the good and the bad old times pass before
+one with epic simplicity and the magic of a fairy-tale. One is
+spellbound by the charm, the dignity, the good-nature, the gentle,
+easy accent of the speaker, in whom one feels convinced not only that
+there was nothing common nor mean, but to whom nothing was common or
+mean, who was a gentleman by character as well as by lineage, one of
+God's as well as one of Russia's nobility.
+
+There is no book in Russian which, for its entrancing interest as well
+as for its historical value, so richly deserves translation into
+English; only such a translation should be made by a stylist--that is,
+by a man who knows how to speak and write his mother tongue
+perspicuously and simply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE EPOCH OF REFORM
+
+
+For seven years after the death of Belinsky in 1848, all literary
+development ceased. This period was the darkest hour before the dawn
+of the second great renascence of Russian literature. Criticism was
+practically non-existent; the Slavophiles were forbidden to write; the
+Westernizers were exiled. An increased severity of censorship, an
+extreme suspicion and drastic measures on the part of the Government
+were brought about by the fears which the Paris revolution of 1848 had
+caused. The Westernizers felt the effects of this as much as the
+Slavophiles; a group of young literary men, schoolmasters and
+officers, the Petrashevtsy, called after their leader, a Foreign
+Office official PETRASHEVSKY, met together on Fridays and debated on
+abstract subjects; they discussed the emancipation of the serfs, read
+Fourier and Lamennais, and considered the establishment of a secret
+press: the scheme of a popular propaganda was thought of, but nothing
+had got beyond talk--and the whole thing was in reality only
+talk--when the society was discovered by the police and its members
+were punished with the utmost severity. Twenty-one of them were
+condemned to death, among whom was Dostoyevsky, who, being on the army
+list, was accused of treason. They were reprieved on the scaffold;
+some sent into penal servitude in Siberia, and some into the army.
+This marked one of the darkest hours in the history of Russian
+literature. And from this date until 1855, complete stagnation
+reigned. In 1855 the Emperor Nicholas died during the Crimean War; and
+with the accession of his son Alexander II, a new era dawned on
+Russian literature, the Era of the Great Reforms. The Crimean War and
+the reforms which followed it--the emancipation of the serfs, the
+creation of a new judicial system, and the foundation of local
+self-government--stabbed the Russian soul into life, relieved it of
+its gag, produced a great outburst of literature which enlarged and
+enriched the literature of the world, and gave to the world three of
+its greatest novelists: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky.
+
+IVAN TURGENEV (1816-83), whose name is of Tartar origin, came of an
+old family which had frequently distinguished itself in the annals of
+Russian literature by a fearless outspokenness. He began his literary
+career by writing verse (1843); but, like Maupassant, he soon
+understood that verse was not his true vehicle, and in 1847 gave up
+writing verse altogether; in that year he published in _The
+Contemporary_ his first sketch of peasant life, _Khor and Kalinych_,
+which afterwards formed part of his _Sportsman's Sketches_,
+twenty-four of which he collected and published in 1852. The
+Government rendered Turgenev the same service as it had done to
+Pushkin, in exiling him to his own country estate for two years. When,
+after the two years, this forced exile came to an end, he went into
+another kind of exile of his own accord; he lived at first at Baden,
+and then in Paris, and only reappeared in Russia from time to time;
+this accounts for the fact that, although Turgenev belongs
+chronologically to the epoch of the great reforms, the Russia which he
+paints was really more like the Russia before that epoch; and when he
+tried to paint the Russia that was contemporary to him his work gave
+rise to much controversy.
+
+His _Rudin_ was published in 1856, _The Nest of Gentlefolk_ in 1859,
+_On the Eve_ in 1860, _Fathers and Sons_ in 1862, _Smoke_ in 1867.
+Turgenev did for Russian literature what Byron did for English
+literature; he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout all
+Europe. And in Europe his work reaped a glorious harvest of praise.
+Flaubert was astounded by him, George Sand looked up to him as to a
+Master, Taine spoke of his work as being the finest artistic
+production since Sophocles. In Turgenev's work, Europe not only
+discovered Turgenev, but it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the
+naturalness of the Russian character; and this came as a revelation.
+For the first time, Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin
+was the first to paint; for the first time Europe came into contact
+with the Russian soul; and it was the sharpness of this revelation
+which accounts for the fact of Turgenev having received in the West an
+even greater meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled to.
+
+In Russia, Turgenev attained almost instant popularity. His
+_Sportsman's Sketches_ made him known, and his _Nest of Gentlefolk_
+made him not only famous but universally popular. In 1862 the
+publication of his masterpiece _Fathers and Sons_ dealt his reputation
+a blow. The revolutionary elements in Russia regarded his hero,
+Bazarov, as a calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary elements in
+Russia looked upon _Fathers and Sons_ as a glorification of Nihilism.
+Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. This, perhaps,
+could only happen in Russia to this extent; and for the same reason as
+that which made Russian criticism didactic. The conflicting elements
+of Russian society were so terribly in earnest in fighting their
+cause, that any one whom they did not regard as definitely for them
+was at once considered an enemy, and an impartial delineation of any
+character concerned in the political struggle was bound to displease
+both parties. If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must either be a hero
+or a scoundrel, if either the revolutionaries or the reactionaries
+were to be pleased. If in England the militant suffragists suddenly
+had a huge mass of educated opinion behind them and a still larger
+mass of educated public opinion against them, and some one were to
+draw in a novel an impartial picture of a suffragette, the same thing
+would happen. On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes are
+concerned, it has happened in the case of Mr. Wells. But, if
+Turgenev's popularity suffered a shock in Russia from which it with
+difficulty recovered, in Western Europe it went on increasing.
+Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that was
+eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hall-mark of good taste.
+
+In Russia, Turgenev's work recovered from the unpopularity caused by
+his _Fathers and Sons_ when Nihilism became a thing of the past, and
+revolution took an entirely different shape; but, with the growing up
+of new generations, his popularity suffered in a different way and for
+different reasons. A new element came into Russian literature with
+Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and later with Gorky, and Turgenev's work began
+to seem thin and artificial beside the creations of these stronger
+writers; but in Russia, where Turgenev's work has the advantage of
+being read in the original, it had an asset which ensured it a
+permanent and safe harbour, above and beyond the fluctuations of
+literary taste, the strife of political parties, and the conflict of
+social ideals; and that was its art, its poetry, its style, which
+ensured it a lasting and imperishable niche among the great classics
+of Russian literature. And there it stands now. Turgenev's work in
+Russia is no longer disputed or a subject of dispute. It is taken for
+granted; and, whatever the younger generation will read and admire,
+they will always read and admire Turgenev first. His work is a
+necessary part of the intellectual baggage of any educated man and,
+especially, of the educated adolescent.
+
+The position of Tennyson in England offers in a sense a parallel to
+that of Turgenev in Russia. Tennyson, like Turgenev, enjoyed during
+his lifetime not only the popularity of the masses, but the
+appreciation of all that was most eclectic in the country. Then a
+reaction set in. Now I believe the young generation think nothing of
+Tennyson at all. And yet nothing is so sure as his permanent place in
+English literature; and that permanent place is secured to him by his
+incomparable diction. So it is with Turgenev. One cannot expect the
+younger generation to be wildly excited about Turgenev's ideas,
+characters, and problems. They belong to an epoch which is dead. At
+the same time, one cannot help thinking that the most advanced of the
+symbolist writers would not have been sorry had he happened by chance
+to write _Bezhin Meadow_ and the _Poems in Prose_. Just so one cannot
+help thinking that the most modern of our poets, had he by accident
+written _The Revenge_ or _Tears, Idle Tears_, would not have thrown
+them in the fire!
+
+There is, indeed, something in common between Tennyson and Turgenev.
+They both have something mid-Victorian in them. They are both idyllic,
+and both of them landscape-lovers and lords of language. They neither
+of them had any very striking message to preach; they both of them
+seem to halt, except on rare occasions, on the threshold of passion;
+they both of them have a rare stamp of nobility; and in both of them
+there is an element of banality. They both seem to a certain extent to
+be shut off from the world by the trees of old parks, where cultivated
+people are enjoying the air and the flowers and the shade, and where
+between the tall trees you get glimpses of silvery landscapes and
+limpid waters, and soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of course,
+there is more than this in Turgenev, but this is the main impression.
+
+Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he describes beautifully
+from the outside, making you feel its existence, but not convincing
+you that he felt it himself; but on the other hand what an artist he
+is! How beautifully his pictures are painted; and how rich he is in
+poetic feeling!
+
+Turgenev is above all things a poet. He carried on the work of
+Pushkin, and he did for Russian prose what Pushkin did for Russian
+poetry; he created imperishable models of style. His language has the
+same limpidity and absence of any blur that we find in Pushkin's work.
+His women have the same crystal radiance, transparent simplicity, and
+unaffected strength; his pictures of peasant life, and his country
+episodes have the same truth to nature; as an artist he had a severe
+sense of proportion, a perfect purity of outline, and an absolute
+harmony between the thought and the expression. Now that modern Europe
+and England have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is possible
+that a reaction will set in to the detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a
+certain extent this reaction has set in in Western Europe, as M.
+Haumant, one of Turgenev's ablest critics and biographers, pointed out
+not long ago. And, as the majority of Englishmen have not the
+advantage of reading him in the original, they will be unchecked in
+this reaction, if it comes about, by their appreciation of what is
+perhaps most durable in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev
+adequately, it would require an English poet gifted with a sense of
+form and of words as rare as that of Turgenev himself. However this
+may be, there is no doubt about the importance of Turgenev in the
+history of Russian literature, whatever the future generations in
+Russia or in Europe may think of his work. He was a great novelist
+besides being a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed his early
+_Sportsman's Sketches_ in freshness of inspiration and the perfection
+of artistic execution.
+
+His _Bezhin Meadow_, where the children tell each other bogey stories
+in the evening, is a gem with which no other European literature has
+anything to compare. _The Singers_, _Death_, and many others are
+likewise incomparable. _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, to which Turgenev
+owed his great popularity, is quite perfect of its kind, with its
+gallery of portraits going back to the eighteenth century and to the
+period of Alexander I; its lovable, human hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a
+fit descendant of Pushkin's Tatiana, radiant as a star. All Turgenev's
+characters are alive; but, with the exception of his women and the
+hero of _Fathers and Sons_, they are alive in bookland rather than in
+real life.
+
+George Meredith's characters, for instance, are alive, but they belong
+to a land or rather a planet of his own making, and we should never
+recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the street, but we do meet women
+sometimes who remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia Jane. The
+same is true with regard to Turgenev, although it is not another
+planet he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch to which his
+books exclusively belong, and which some critics say never existed at
+all. That is of no consequence. It exists for us in his work.
+
+But perhaps what gave rise to accusations of unreality and caricature
+against Turgenev's characters, apart from the intenser reality of
+Tolstoy's creations, by comparison with which Turgenev's suffered, was
+that Turgenev, while professing to describe the present, and while
+believing that he was describing the present, was in reality painting
+an epoch that was already dead. _Rudin_, _Smoke_, and _On the Eve_
+have suffered more from the passage of time. _Rudin_ is a pathetic
+picture of the type that Turgenev was so fond of depicting, the _genie
+sans portefeuille_, a latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his heart
+with words, and with his eloquence persuade others to believe in him,
+and succeed even in persuading himself to believe in himself, until
+the moment for action comes, when he breaks down. The subjects of
+_Smoke_ and _Spring Waters_ are almost identical; but, whereas _Spring
+Waters_ is one of the most poetical of Turgenev's achievements,
+_Smoke_ seems to-day the most banal, and almost to deserve Tolstoy's
+criticism: "In _Smoke_ there is hardly any love of anything, and very
+little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and
+therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." _On the Eve_, which
+tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of the liberation of his country,
+suffers from being written at a time when real Russians were hard at
+work at that very task; and it was on this account that the novel
+found little favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside the
+reality.
+
+It was followed by Turgenev's masterpiece, for which time can only
+heighten one's admiration. _Fathers and Sons_ is as beautifully
+constructed as a drama of Sophocles; the events move inevitably to a
+tragic close. There is not a touch of banality from beginning to end,
+and not an unnecessary word; the portraits of the old father and
+mother, the young Kirsanov, and all the minor characters are perfect;
+and amidst the trivial crowd, Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the
+strongest--the only strong character--that Turgenev created, the first
+Nihilist--for if Turgenev was not the first to invent the word, he was
+the first to apply it in this sense.
+
+Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer type that recurs again and
+again in Russian history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the meek
+humble type of Ivan Durak. Lermontov's Pechorin was in some respects
+an anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many Russian rebels. He is
+the man who denies, to whom art is a silly toy, who detests
+abstractions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; he believes in
+nothing; he bows to nothing; he can break, but he cannot bend; he does
+break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, he retains his
+invincible pride, and
+
+    "not cowardly he puts off his helmet,"
+
+and he dies "valiantly vanquished."
+
+In the pages which describe his death Turgenev reaches the high-water
+mark of his art, his moving quality, his power, his reserve. For manly
+pathos they rank among the greatest scenes in literature, stronger
+than the death of Colonel Newcome and the best of Thackeray. Among
+English novelists it is, perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such
+strong, piercing chords, nobler than anything in Daudet or Maupassant,
+more reserved than anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the great
+poets, of the tragic pathos of Goethe and Dante. The character of
+Bazarov, as has been said, created a sensation and endless
+controversy. The revolutionaries thought him a caricature and a libel,
+the reactionaries a scandalous glorification of the Devil; and
+impartial men such as Dostoyevsky, who knew the revolutionaries at
+first hand, thought the type unreal. It is possible that Bazarov was
+not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in any case as a figure in
+fiction, whatever the fact may be, he lives and will continue to live.
+
+In _Virgin Soil_, Turgenev attempted to paint the underground
+revolutionary movement; here, in the opinion of all Russian judges, he
+failed. The revolutionaries considered their portraits here more
+unreal than that of Bazarov; the Conservatives were grossly
+caricatured; the hero Nezhdanov was a type of a past world, another
+Rudin, and not in the least like--so those who knew them tell us--the
+revolutionaries of the day. Solomin, the energetic character in the
+book, was considered as unreal as Nezhdanov. The wife of the
+reactionary Sipyagin is a _pastiche_ of the female characters of that
+type in his other books; cleverly drawn, but a completely conventional
+book character. The redeeming feature in the book is Mariana, the
+heroine, one of Turgenev's finest ideal women; and it is full, of
+course, of gems of descriptive writing. The book was a complete
+failure, and after this Turgenev went back to writing short stories.
+The result was a great disappointment to Turgenev, who had thought
+that, by writing a novel dealing with actual life, he would please and
+reconcile all parties. To this later epoch belong his matchless _Poems
+in Prose_, one of the latest melodies he sounded, a melody played on
+one string of the lyre, but whose sweetness contained the essence of
+all his music.
+
+Turgenev's work has a historic as well as an artistic value. He
+painted the Russian gentry, and the type of gentry that was
+disappearing, as no one else has done. His landscape painting has been
+dwelt on; one ought, perhaps, to add that, beautiful as it is, it
+still belongs to the region of conventional landscape painting; his
+landscape is the orthodox Russian landscape, and is that of the age of
+Pushkin, in which no bird except a nightingale is mentioned, no flower
+except a rose. This convention was not really broken in prose until
+the advent of Gorky.
+
+Reviewing Turgenev's work as a whole, any one who goes back to his
+books after a time, and after a course of more modern and rougher,
+stormier literature, will, I think, be surprised at its excellence
+and perhaps be inclined to heave a deep sigh of relief. Some of it
+will appear conventional; he will notice a faint atmosphere of
+rose-water; he will feel, if he has been reading the moderns, as a
+traveller feels who, after an exciting but painful journey, through
+dangerous ways and unpleasant surroundings, suddenly enters a cool
+garden, where fountains sob between dark cypresses, and swans float
+majestically on artificial lakes. There is an aroma of syringa in the
+air; the pleasaunce is artistically laid out, and full of fragrant
+flowers. But he will not despise that garden for its elegance and its
+tranquil seclusion, for its trees cast large shadows; the nightingale
+sings in its thickets, the moon silvers the calm statues, and the
+sound of music on the waters goes to the heart. Turgenev reminds one
+of a certain kind of music, beautiful in form, not too passionate and
+yet full of emotion, Schumann's music, for instance; if Pushkin is the
+Mozart of Russian literature, Turgenev is the Schumann; not amongst
+the very greatest, but still a poet, full of inspired lyrical feeling;
+and a great, a classic artist, the prose Virgil of Russian literature.
+
+What Turgenev did for the country gentry, GONCHAROV (1812-91) did for
+the St. Petersburg gentry. The greater part of his work deals with the
+forties. Goncharov, a noble (_dvoryanin_) by education, and according
+to his own account by descent, though according to another account he
+was of merchant extraction, entered the Government service, and then
+went round the world in a frigate, a journey which he described in
+letters. Of his three novels, _The Everyday Story_, _Oblomov_, and
+_The Landslip_, _Oblomov_ is the most famous: in it he created a type
+which became immortal; and Oblomov has passed into the Russian
+language just as Tartuffe has passed into the French language, or
+Pecksniff into the English language. A chapter of the book appeared in
+1849, and the whole novel in 1859.
+
+Oblomov is the incarnation of what in Russia is called _Halatnost_,
+which means the propensity to live in dressing-gown and slippers. It
+is told of Krylov, who was an Oblomov of real life, and who spent most
+of his time lying on a sofa, that one day somebody pointed out to him
+that the nail on which a picture was hanging just over the sofa on
+which he was lying, was loose, and that the picture would probably
+fall on his head. "No," said Krylov, not getting up, "the picture will
+fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle." The apathy of Oblomov,
+although to the outward eye it resembles this mere physical inertness,
+is subtly different. Krylov's apathy was the laziness of a man whose
+brain brought forth concrete fruits; and who feels neither the
+inclination nor the need of any other exercise, either physical or
+intellectual. Oblomov's apathy is that of a brain seething with the
+burning desires of a _vie intime_, which all comes to nothing owing to
+a kind of spiritual paralysis, "une infirmite morale." It is true he
+finds it difficult to put on his socks, still more to get up, when he
+is awake, impossible to change his rooms although the ceiling is
+falling to bits, and impossible not to lie on the sofa most of the
+day; but the reason of this obstinate inertia is not mere physical
+disinclination, it is the result of a mixture of seething and
+simmering aspirations, indefinite disillusions and apprehensions, that
+elude the grasp of the will. Oblomov is really the victim of a dream,
+of an aspiration, of an ideal as bright and mobile as a
+will-o'-the-wisp, as elusive as thistledown, which refuses to
+materialize.
+
+The tragedy of the book lies in the effort he makes to rise from his
+slough of apathy, or rather the effort his friends encourage him to
+make. Oblomov's heart is made of pure gold; his soul is of transparent
+crystal; there is not a base flaw in the paste of his composition; yet
+his will is sapped, not by words, words, words, but by the inability
+to formulate the shadows of his inner life. His friend is an energetic
+German-Russian. He introduces Oblomov to a charming girl, and together
+they conspire to drag him from his apathy. The girl, Olga, at first
+succeeds; she falls in love with him, and he with her; he wants to
+marry her, but he cannot take the necessary step of arranging his
+affairs in a manner which would make that marriage possible; and
+gradually he falls back into a new stage of apathy worse than the
+first; she realizes the hopelessness of the situation, and they agree
+to separate. She marries the energetic friend, and Oblomov sinks into
+the comforts of a purely negative life of complete inaction and
+seclusion, watched over by a devoted housekeeper, whom he ultimately
+marries.
+
+The extraordinary subtlety of the psychology of this study lies, as
+well as in other things, in the way in which we feel that Olga is not
+really happy with her excellent husband; he is the man whom she
+respects; but Oblomov is the man whom she loves, till the end; and she
+would give worlds to respect him too if he would only give her the
+chance. Oblomov often defends his stagnation, while realizing only too
+well what a misfortune it is; and we sometimes feel that he is not
+altogether wrong. The chapter that tells of his dream in which his
+past life and childhood arise before him in a haze of serene laziness
+is one of the masterpieces of Russian prose. The book is terribly
+real, and almost intolerably sad.
+
+Goncharov's third and last novel deals with the life of a landed
+proprietor on the Volga, and its main idea is the contrast between the
+old generation before the reforms and the new generation of Alexander
+II's day--a paler _Fathers and Sons_.
+
+To go back to criticism, the name of BAKUNIN, the apostle of
+destruction and the incarnation of Russian Nihilism, belongs to
+history; that of GRIGORIEV must be mentioned as founding a school of
+thought which preached the union of arts with the national soil; he
+exercised a strong influence over Dostoyevsky. KATKOV, whose influence
+was at one time immense, originally belonged to the circle of Herzen
+and Bakunin; he became a professor of philosophy, but was driven from
+his chair in the reaction of '48, and, being banished from erudition,
+he took up a journalistic career and became the Editor of the _Moscow
+News_. He was a Slavophile, and when the rising in Poland broke out,
+he headed the great wave of nationalist feeling which passed over the
+country at that time; he doubled the number of his subscribers, and
+dealt a death-blow to Herzen's _Bell_. After 1866, he headed
+reactionary journalism and became a Nationalist of the narrowest kind;
+but he was of a higher calibre than the Nationalists of later days.
+Slavophile critics of another kind were STRAKHOV and DANILEVSKY, like
+Dostoyevsky, disciples of Grigoriev, who preached the last word of
+Slavophilism and were opposed to all foreign innovations.
+
+On the Radical side the leaders were CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and
+PISAREV. Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart Mill, and
+published a treatise on the aesthetic relations of art and reality,
+served a sentence of seven years' hard labour and of twenty years'
+exile. His criticism--socialist propaganda, and an attack on all
+metaphysics--does not belong to literature, but his novel _Shto
+dielat_--"What is to be done?"--had an immense influence on his
+generation. It deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died when he was
+twenty-four, belonged to the same realistic school. His main theory
+was that Russian literature is dominated by Oblomov; that Chatsky,
+Pechorin, and Rudin are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
+followed Chernyshevsky in his realistic philosophy, in his rejection
+of metaphysics, in his theory that beauty is to be sought in life
+only, and that the sole duty of art is to help to illustrate life.
+Pisarev recognized that Turgenev's Bazarov was a picture of himself,
+and he was pleased with the portrait. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
+died young.
+
+VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as well as poet, moral
+philosopher, and theologian, is one of the most interesting figures in
+Russian literature. What is most remarkable about him, and what makes
+him stand out, a radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his
+absolute independence. He belonged to no camp; he was a slave to no
+party cry; utterly unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the truth
+for the sake of truth, and to proclaim it. In an age of positivism, he
+was a believing Christian, and the dream of his life was a union of
+the Eastern and Western Churches. He deals with this idea in a book
+which he wrote in French and published in Paris: _L'Eglise Russe et
+l'Eglise Universelle_. He admired the older Slavophiles, but he
+severely attacked the Nationalists, such as Katkov. His range of
+subjects was great, and his style was brilliant; like many great
+thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and in his criticism of the
+_Intelligentsia_ anticipated some tendencies, which have become
+visible since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one at times of Mr.
+A. J. Balfour, and even of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose
+"orthodoxy" he would have much sympathy; and he deals with questions
+such as Woman's Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present day.
+He never became a Catholic, holding that the Eastern Church _qua_
+Church had never been cut off from the West, and that only one
+definite schism had been condemned; but he believed in the necessity
+of a universal Church. He was the first intellectual Russian to point
+out to a generation which took atheism as a matter of course that they
+were possibly inferior instead of superior to religion. He believed in
+Russia; he had nothing against the Slavophile theory that Russia had a
+divine mission; only he wished to see that mission divinely performed.
+He believed in the East of Christ, and not in that of Xerxes. He died
+in 1900, before he had finished his _Magnum Opus_, a work on moral
+philosophy written on a religious basis. He preached self-effacement;
+pity towards one's fellow men; and reverence towards the supernatural.
+His whole work is a defence of moral principles, written with the soul
+of a poet, the knowledge of a scholar, and the brilliance of a
+dialectician. It is only lately that his books have gained the
+appreciation which they deserve; they are certainly more in harmony
+with the present generation than with that of the sixties and the
+seventies. His _Three Conversations_ has been translated into English.
+Vladimir Soloviev stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the
+crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, and his prematurity; he
+was _intempestivus_.
+
+To the same epoch belong four other important writers, each occupying
+a place apart from the current stream of literary or political
+influences: one because he was a satirist, one because he wrote for
+the stage, and the two others because one impartially, and the other
+bitterly, dared to criticize the Radicals.
+
+MICHAEL SALTYKOV (1826-89), who wrote under the name of Shchedrin,
+holds a unique place in Russian literature, not only because he is a
+writer of genius, but because he is one of the world's great
+satirists. Unlike Russian satirists before him, Krylov, Gogol, and
+Griboyedov, good-humoured irony or sharp rapier thrusts of wit do not
+suffice him; he has in himself the _saeva indignatio_, and he
+expresses it with all the concentrated spite that he can muster, which
+is all the more deadly from being used with perfect control. His work
+is bulky, and fills eleven thick volumes; some of it is quite out of
+date and at the present day almost unintelligible; but all that deals
+with the fundamental essentials of the Russian character, and not with
+the passing episodes of the day, has the freshness of immortality. At
+the outset of his career, he was banished to Vyatka, where he remained
+from 1848-56, an exile, which gave him a rich store of priceless
+material. His experiences appeared in his _Sketches of Provincial
+Life_ in 1886-7.
+
+He describes the good old times and the officials of the good old
+times, with diabolic malice and with an unequalled eye for the
+ironical, the comic, the topsy-turvy, and the true; and while he is as
+observant as Gogol, he is as bitter as Swift. He puts his characters
+on the stage and makes them relate their experiences; thus we hear how
+the collector of the dues manages to combine the maximum amount of
+robbery with the minimum amount of inconvenience. In his pictures of
+prison life, the prisoners tell their own stories, sometimes with
+unaffected frankness, sometimes with startling cynicism, and sometimes
+the story is obscured by a whole heap of lies. The prisoners are of
+different classes; one is an ex-official who states that he was a
+statistician who got into trouble over his figures; wishing to levy
+dues on a peasant's property, he had demanded the number, not of
+their bee-hives, but of their bees, and wrote in his list: "The
+peasant Sidorov possesses two horses, three cows, nine sheep, one
+calf, and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven bees."
+Unfortunately he was betrayed by the police inspector.
+
+Saltykov's satire deals entirely with the middle class, the high
+officials, the average official, and the minor public servants; and
+his best-known work, and one that has not aged any more than Swift has
+aged, is his _History of a City according to the original documents_.
+
+In this he tells of the city of _Glupov_, _Fool-City_, where the
+people were such fools that they were not content until they found
+some one to rule them who was stupider than they were themselves. The
+various phases Russia had gone through are touched off; the mania for
+regulations, the formalism, the official red-tape, the persecution of
+independent thought, and the oppression of original thinkers and
+writers; the ultimate ideal is that introduced by the last ruler of
+Glupov (the history lasts from 1731 to 1826), of turning the country
+into barracks and reducing every one and everything to one level--in
+which the regime of the period of Nicholas I is satirized; until in
+the final picture, as fine in its way as Pope's close of the
+_Dunciad_, the stream rises, and refusing to be stopped by the dam,
+carries everything away. The style parodies that of the ancient
+chroniclers; and its chief intent lies not in the satirizing of any
+particular events or person, but in the shafts of light, sometimes
+bitter, and sometimes inexpressibly droll, it throws on the Russian
+system of administration and on the Russian character.
+
+In his _Pompaduri_, Saltykov dissects and vivisects the higher
+official,--the big-wig,--and in his sketches from the "Domain of
+Moderation and Accuracy," he writes, in little, the epic of the minor
+public servant--the man who is never heard of, who is included in the
+term of "the rest," but who, nevertheless, is a cogwheel in the
+machinery, without which the big-wigs cannot act or execute. No more
+supreme piece of art than this piece of satire exists. The typical
+minor official is drawn in all the variations of his miserable and
+pitiable species, and in all the phases of his ignoble and sometimes
+tragical career, with a pen dipped in scorn and stinging malice, not
+unblent with a grave pity, which always exists in the work of the
+greatest satirists--"Peace to all such, but there was one ..." for
+instance--and wielded with terrible certainty of touch. This epic of
+the _Molchalins_ of life--the typical officials who cease to be
+men--was the story of a great part of the Russian population; and in
+its essence, a great deal of it remains true to-day, while all of it
+remains artistically enjoyable.
+
+Saltykov continued to write during the whole of his long life. His
+field of satire ranges from the days before serfdom to the epoch of
+the reforms, extends to the days of the Russo-Turkish War, and passes
+the frontier into the West. It is impossible here even to name all his
+works; but there is one, written in the decline of his life, which has
+a solid historical as well as a rich and varied artistic interest.
+This is his _Poshenkhonskaya Starina_; it is practically the history
+of his childhood, his upbringing, and the state of affairs which
+existed at that time, the life lived by his parents and their
+neighbours, the landed proprietors and their serfs. With amazing
+impartiality, without exaggeration, and yet with evidences of deep
+feeling and passionate indignation, all the more striking from being
+both rare and expressed with reserve, he paints on a large and crowded
+canvas the life of the masters and their serfs. A long gallery of men
+and women is opened to one; tragedy, comedy, farce, all are here--in
+fact, life--life as it was then in a remote corner of the country.
+Here Saltykov's spite and malice give way to higher strokes of tragic
+irony and pity; and the work has dignity as well as power In the bulk
+of Saltykov's early work there is much dross, much venom, and much
+ephemeral tinsel that has faded; the stuff of this book is stern and
+enduring; its subject-matter would not lose a particle of interest in
+translation. The Russians have been ungrateful towards Saltykov, and
+have been inclined to neglect his work, the lasting element of which
+is one of the most original, precious, and remarkable possessions of
+Russian literature.
+
+The complement of Saltykov is LESKOV (or, as he originally called
+himself, _Stebnitsky_). The character of his work, its reception by
+the reading public on the one hand, and by the professional critics on
+the other, is one of the most striking object-lessons in the history
+of Russian literature and Russian literary criticism. Leskov has been
+long ago recognized by educated Russia as a writer of the first rank;
+what is best in his work, which is bulky and unequal, has the
+unmistakable hall-mark of the classics; he is with Gogol and Saltykov,
+and the novelists of the first rank. Educated Russia is fully aware of
+this. Nobody disputes Leskov his place, nor denies him his supreme
+artistic talent, his humour, his vividness, his colour, his satire,
+the depth of his feeling, the richness of his invention. In spite of
+this, there is no Russian writer who has so acutely suffered from the
+didactic and partisan quality of Russian criticism.
+
+His literary career began in 1860. Like Saltykov, he paints the period
+of transition that followed the epoch of the great Reforms. In spite
+of this, as late as 1902, no critical biography, no serious work of
+criticism, had been devoted to his books. All Russia had read him, but
+literary criticism had ignored him. It is as if English literary
+criticism had ignored Dickens until 1900.
+
+The reason of this neglect is not far to seek. Saltykov was an
+independent thinker; he belonged to no literary or political camp; he
+criticized the partisans of both camps with equal courage; and the
+partisans could not and did not forgive him. Like Saltykov, Leskov saw
+what was going on in Russia; with penetrating insight and observation
+he realized the evils of the old order; like Saltykov, he was filled
+with indignation, and perhaps to a greater degree than Saltykov, he
+was filled with pity. But, whereas Saltykov's work was purely
+destructive--an onslaught of brooms in the Augean stables--Leskov
+begins where Saltykov ends. Like Saltykov and like Gogol before him,
+the old order inspires him with laughter, sometimes with bitter
+laughter, at the absurdities of the old regime and its results; but he
+does not confine himself to destructive irony and sapping satire. With
+PISEMSKY, another writer of first-class talent, of the same epoch,
+Leskov was the first Russian novelist--Griboyedov had already
+anticipated such criticism in _Gore ot Uma_, in his delineation of
+Chatsky,--to have the courage to criticize the reformers, the men of
+the new epoch; and his criticism was not only negative but creative;
+he realized that everything must be "reformed altogether." He then
+asked himself whether the new men, who were engaged in the task of
+reform, were equal to their task. He came to the conclusion not only
+that they were inadequate, but that they were setting about the
+business the wrong way, and he had the courage to say so. He was the
+first Russian novelist to say he disbelieved in Liberals, although he
+believed in Liberalism; and this was a sentiment which no Liberal in
+Russia could admit then, and one which they can scarcely admit now.
+
+His criticism of the Liberals was creative, and not negative, in this:
+that, instead of confining himself to pointing out their weakness and
+the mistaken course they were taking, he did his best to point out the
+right path. Dostoyevsky was likewise subjected to the same ostracism.
+Turgenev suffered from it; but the genius of Dostoyevsky and the art
+of Turgenev overstepped the limits of all barriers and frontiers.
+Europe acclaimed them. Leskov's criticism being more local, the
+ostracism, although powerless to prevent the popularity of his work in
+Russia, succeeded for a time in keeping him from the notice of
+Western Europe. This barrier is now being broken down. One of Leskov's
+masterpieces, _The Sealed Angel_, was lately translated into English;
+but he is one of the most difficult authors to translate because he is
+one of the most native.
+
+A far bitterer and more pessimistic note is heard in the work of
+Pisemsky. He attacks the new democracy mercilessly, and not from any
+predilection towards the old. His most important work, _The Troubled
+Sea_ (1862), was a terrific onslaught on Radical Russia; and Pisemsky
+paid the same price for his pessimistic analysis as Leskov did for his
+impartiality, namely social ostracism.
+
+The work of OSTROVSKY (1823-86) belongs to the history of the Stage,
+to which he brought slices of real life from the middle class; the
+townsmen, the minor public servants, merchants great and small, and
+rogues, a _milieu_ which he had observed in his youth, his father
+having been an attorney to a Moscow merchant. Ostrovsky may be called
+the founder of modern Russian realistic comedy and drama. In spite of
+the epoch at which his plays were written (the fifties and the
+sixties), there is not a trace of _Scribisme_, no tricks, no effective
+exits or curtains; he thus anticipated the form of the quite modern
+drama by about seventy years. His plays hold the stage now in Russia,
+and form part of the stock repertories every season. They give,
+moreover, just the same lifelike impression whether read or seen
+acted; and they are as interesting from a literary as they are from a
+historical or dramatic point of view, interesting because they are
+intensely national, and as Russian as beer is English.
+
+This brief summary of the epoch would be still more incomplete than it
+is without the mention of yet another novelist, GRIGOROVICH. Although
+on a lower level of art and creative power than Pisemsky and Leskov,
+he was the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant literature. He
+anticipated Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_, and for the first time
+made Russian readers cry with sympathy over the annals of the peasant.
+Like Turgenev, he was a great landscape painter. In his "Fishermen" he
+paints the peasant and the artisan's life, and in his "Country Roads"
+he gives a picture of the good old times--replete with rich humour,
+and in sharp contrast to Saltykov's sunless and trenchant etching of
+the same period. Humour, the pathos of the poor, landscape--these are
+his chief qualities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY
+
+
+With TOLSTOY and DOSTOYEVSKY, we come not only to the two great
+pillars of modern Russian literature which tower above all others like
+two colossal statues in the desert, but to two of the greatest figures
+in the literature of the world. Russia has not given the world a
+universal poet, a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, or a Moliere; for
+Pushkin, consummate artist and inspired poet as he was, lacks that
+peculiar greatness which conquers all demarcations of frontier and
+difference of language, and produces work which becomes a part of the
+universal inheritance of all nations; but Russia has given us two
+prose-writers whose work has done this very thing. And between them
+they sum up in themselves the whole of the Russian soul, and almost
+the whole of the Russian character; I say almost the whole of the
+Russian _character_, because although between them they sum up all
+that is greatest, deepest, and all that is weakest in the Russian
+_soul_, there is perhaps one element of the Russian _character_,
+which, although they understood it well enough, their genius forbade
+them to possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the Great,
+Dostoyevsky's Mwyshkin--the idiot, the pure fool who is wiser than the
+wise--and the hero of Gogol's _Revisor_, Hlestyakov the liar and
+wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these elements, reconstitute any
+Russian who has ever lived. That is to say, you will find that every
+single Russian is compounded either of one or more of these elements.
+
+For instance, mix Peter the Great with a sufficient dose of
+Hlestyakov, and you get Boris Godunov and Bakunin; leave the Peter the
+Great element unmixed, and you get Bazarov, and many of Gorky's
+heroes; mix it slightly with Hlestyakov, and you get Lermontov; let
+the Hlestyakov element predominate, and you get Griboyedov's
+Molchalin; let the Mwyshkin element predominate, with a dose of
+Hlestyakov, and you get Father Gapon; let it predominate without the
+dose of Hlestyakov, and you get Oblomov; mix it with a dose of Peter
+the Great, you get Herzen, Chatsky; and so on. Mix all the elements
+equally, and you get Onegin, the average man. I do not mean that there
+are necessarily all these elements in every Russian, but that you will
+meet with no Russian in whom there is not to be found either one or
+more than one of them.
+
+Now, in Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element dominates, with a dose of
+Mwyshkin, and a vast but unsuccessful aspiration towards the complete
+characteristics of Mwyshkin; while in Dostoyevsky the Mwyshkin
+predominates, blent with a fiery streak of Peter the Great; but in
+neither of them is there a touch of Hlestyakov. In Russia, it
+constantly happens that a man in any class, be he a soldier, sailor,
+tinker, tailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, or thief, will
+suddenly leave his profession and avocation and set out on the search
+for God and for truth. These men are called _Bogoiskateli_, Seekers
+after God. The one fact that the whole world knows about Tolstoy is
+that, in the midst of his great and glorious artistic career, he
+suddenly abjured literature and art, denounced worldly possessions,
+and said that truth was to be found in working like a peasant, and
+thus created a sect of Tolstoyists. The world then blamed him for
+inconsistency because he went on writing, and lived as before, with
+his family and in his own home. But in reality there was no
+inconsistency, because there was in reality no break. Tolstoy had been
+a _Bogoiskatel_, a seeker after truth and God all his life; it was
+only the manner of his search which had changed; but the quest itself
+remained unchanged; he was unable, owing to family ties, to push his
+premises to their logical conclusion until just before his death; but
+push them to their logical conclusion he did at the last, and he died,
+as we know, on the road to a monastery.
+
+Tolstoy's manner of search was extraordinary, extraordinary because he
+was provided for it with the eyes of an eagle which enabled him to see
+through everything; and, as he took nothing for granted from the day
+he began his career until the day he died, he was always subjecting
+people, objects, ideas, to the searchlight of his vision, and testing
+them to see whether they were true or not; moreover, he was gifted
+with the power of describing what he saw during this long journey
+through the world of fact and the world of ideas, whether it were the
+general or the particular, the mass or the detail, the vision, the
+panorama, the crowd, the portrait or the miniature, with the strong
+simplicity of a Homer, and the colour and reality of a Velasquez. This
+made him one of the world's greatest writers, and the world's greatest
+artist in narrative fiction. Another peculiarity of his search was
+that he pursued it with eagle eyes, but with blinkers.
+
+In 1877 Dostoyevsky wrote: "In spite of his colossal artistic talent,
+Tolstoy is one of those Russian minds which only see that which is
+right before their eyes, and thus press towards that point. They have
+not the power of turning their necks to the right or to the left to
+see what lies on one side; to do this, they would have to turn with
+their whole bodies. If they do turn, they will quite probably maintain
+the exact opposite of what they have been hitherto professing; for
+they are rigidly honest." It is this search carried on by eyes of
+unsurpassed penetration between blinkers, by a man who every now and
+then did turn his whole body, which accounts for the many apparent
+changes and contradictions of Tolstoy's career.
+
+Another source of contradiction was that by temperament the Lucifer
+element predominated in him, and the ideal he was for ever seeking was
+the humility of Mwyshkin, the pure fool, an ideal which he could not
+reach, because he could not sufficiently humble himself. Thus when
+death overtook him he was engaged on his last and his greatest voyage
+of discovery; and there is something solemn and great about his having
+met with death at a small railway station.
+
+Tolstoy's works are a long record of this search, and of the memories
+and experiences which he gathered on the way. There is not a detail,
+not a phase of feeling, not a shade or mood in his spiritual life that
+he has not told us of in his works. In his _Childhood, Boyhood and
+Youth_, he re-creates his own childhood, boyhood and youth, not always
+exactly as it happened in reality; there is _Dichtung_ as well as
+_Wahrheit_; but the _Dichtung_ is as true as the _Wahrheit_, because
+his aim was to recreate the impressions he had received from his early
+surroundings. Moreover, the searchlight of his eyes even then fell
+mercilessly upon everything that was unreal, sham and conventional.
+
+As soon as he had finished with his youth, he turned to the life of a
+grown-up man in _The Morning of a Landowner_, and told how he tried to
+live a landowner's life, and how nothing but dissatisfaction came of
+it. He escapes to the Caucasus, and seeks regeneration, and the result
+of the search here is a masterpiece, _The Cossacks_. He goes back to
+the world, and takes part in the Crimean war; he describes what he saw
+in a battery; his eagle eye lays bare the _splendeurs et miseres_ of
+war more truthfully perhaps than a writer on war has ever done, but
+less sympathetically than Alfred de Vigny--the difference being that
+Alfred de Vigny is innately modest, and that Tolstoy, as he wrote
+himself, at the beginning of the war, "had no modesty."
+
+After the Crimean war, he plunges again into the world and travels
+abroad; and on his return to Russia, he settles down at Yasnaya
+Polyana and marries. The hero of his novel _Domestic Happiness_
+appears to have found his heart's desire in marriage and country life.
+It was then that he wrote _War and Peace_, which he began to publish
+in 1865. He always had the idea of writing a story on the Decembrist
+movement, and _War and Peace_ was perhaps the preface to that
+unwritten work, for it ends when that movement was beginning. In _War
+and Peace_, he gave the world a modern prose epic, which did not
+suffer from the drawback that spoils most historical novels, namely,
+that of being obviously false, because it was founded on his own
+recollection of his parents' memories. He gives us what we feel to be
+the very truth; for the first time in an historical novel, instead of
+saying "this is very likely true," or "what a wonderful work of
+artistic reconstruction," we feel that we were ourselves there; that
+we knew those people; that they are a part of our very own past. He
+paints a whole generation of people; and in Pierre Bezukhov, the new
+landmarks of his own search are described. Among many other episodes,
+there is nowhere in literature such a true and charming picture of
+family life as that of the Rostovs, and nowhere a more vital and
+charming personality than Natasha; a creation as living as Pushkin's
+Tatiana, and alive with a reality even more convincing than Turgenev's
+pictures of women, since she is alive with a different kind of life;
+the difference being that while you have read in Turgenev's books
+about noble and exquisite women, you are not sure whether you have
+not known Natasha yourself and in your own life; you are not sure she
+does not belong to the borderland of your own past in which dreams and
+reality are mingled. _War and Peace_ eclipses all other historical
+novels; it has all Stendhal's reality, and all Zola's power of dealing
+with crowds and masses. Take, for instance, a masterpiece such as
+Flaubert's _Salammbo_; it may and very likely does take away your
+breath by the splendour of its language, its colour, and its art, but
+you never feel that, even in a dream, you had taken part in the life
+which is painted there. The only bit of unreality in _War and Peace_
+is the figure of Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately unfair.
+Another impression which Tolstoy gives us in _War and Peace_ is that
+man is in reality always the same, and that changes of manners are not
+more important than changes in fashions of clothes. That is why it is
+not extravagant to mention _Salammbo_ in this connection. One feels
+that, if Tolstoy had written a novel about ancient Rome, we should
+have known a score of patricians, senators, scribblers, clients,
+parasites, matrons, courtesans, better even than we know Cicero from
+his letters; we should not only feel that we _know_ Cicero, but that
+we had actually known him. This very task--namely, that of
+reconstituting a page out of Pagan history--was later to be attempted
+by Merezhkovsky; but brilliant as his work is, he only at times and by
+flashes attains to Tolstoy's power of convincing.
+
+_Anna Karenina_ appeared in 1875-76. And here Tolstoy, with the touch
+of a Velasquez and upon a huge canvas, paints the contemporary life of
+the upper classes in St. Petersburg and in the country. Levin, the
+hero, is himself. Here, again, the truth to nature and the reality is
+so intense and vivid that a reader unacquainted with Russia will in
+reading the book probably not think of Russia at all, but will imagine
+the story has taken place in his own country, whatever that may be. He
+shows you everything from the inside, as well as from the outside. You
+feel, in the picture of the races, what Anna is feeling in looking on,
+and what Vronsky is feeling in riding. And with what reality, what
+incomparable skill the gradual dawn of Anna's love for Vronsky is
+described; how painfully real is her pompous and excellent husband;
+and how every incident in her love affair, her visit to her child, her
+appearance at the opera, when, after having left her husband, she
+defies the world, her gradual growing irritability, down to the final
+catastrophe, bears on it the stamp of something which must have
+happened just in that very way and no other.
+
+But, as far as Tolstoy's own development is concerned, Levin is the
+most interesting figure in the book. This character is another
+landmark in Tolstoy's search after truth; he is constantly putting
+accepted ideas to the test; he is haunted by the fear of sudden death,
+not the physical fear of death in itself, but the fear that in the
+face of death the whole of life may be meaningless; a peasant opens a
+new door for him and furnishes him with a solution to the problem--to
+live for one's soul: life no longer seems meaningless.
+
+Thus Levin marks the stage in Tolstoy's evolution of his abandoning
+materialism and of seeking for the truth in the Church. But the Church
+does not satisfy him. He rejects its dogmas and its ritual; he turns
+to the Gospel, but far from accepting it, he revises it. He comes to
+the conclusion that Christianity as it has been taught is mere
+madness, and that the Church is a superfluous anachronism. Thus
+another change comes about, which is generally regarded as _the_
+change cutting Tolstoy's life in half; in reality it is only a fresh
+right-about-turn of a man who is searching for truth in blinkers. In
+his _Confession_, he says: "I grew to hate myself; and now all has
+become clear." He came to believe that property was the source of all
+evil; he desired literally to give up all he had. This he was not able
+to do. It was not that he shrank from the sacrifice at the last; but
+that circumstances and family ties were too strong for him. But his
+final flight from home in the last days of his life shows that the
+desire had never left him.
+
+Art was also subjected to his new standards and found wanting, both in
+his own work and in that of others. Shakespeare and Beethoven were
+summarily disposed of; his own masterpieces he pronounced to be
+worthless. This more than anything shows the pride of the man. He
+could admire no one, not even himself. He scorned the gifts which were
+given him, and the greatest gifts of the greatest men. But this
+landmark of Tolstoy's evolution, his turning his back on the Church,
+and on his work, is a landmark in Russian history as well as in
+Russian art. For far less than this Russian thinkers and writers of
+high position had been imprisoned and exiled. Nobody dared to touch
+Tolstoy. He fearlessly attacked all constituted authority, both
+spiritual and temporal, in an epoch of reaction, and such was his
+prestige that official Russia raised no finger. His authority was too
+great, and this is perhaps the first great victory of the liberty of
+individual thought over official tyranny in Russia. There had been
+martyrs in plenty before, but no conquerors.
+
+After _Anna Karenina_, Tolstoy, who gave up literature for a time, but
+for a time only, nevertheless continued to write; at first he only
+wrote stories for children and theological and polemical pamphlets;
+but in 1886 he published the terribly powerful peasant drama: _The
+Powers of Darkness_. Later came the _Kreutzer Sonata_, the _Death of
+Ivan Ilitch_, and _Resurrection_. Here the hero Nehludov is a lifeless
+phantom of Tolstoy himself; the episodes and details have the reality
+of his early work, so has Maslova, the heroine; but in the squalor
+and misery of the prisons he shows no precious balms of humanity and
+love, as Dostoyevsky did; and the book has neither the sweep and epic
+swing of _War and Peace_, nor the satisfying completeness of _Anna
+Karenina_. Since his death, some posthumous works have been published,
+among them a novel, and a play: _The Living Corpse_. He died, as he
+had lived, still searching, and perhaps at the end he found the object
+of his quest.
+
+Tolstoy, even more than Pushkin, was rooted to the soil; all that is
+not of the soil--anything mystic or supernatural--was totally alien to
+him. He was the oak which could not bend; and being, as he was, the
+king of realistic fiction, an unsurpassed painter of pictures,
+portraits, men and things, a penetrating analyst of the human heart, a
+genius cast in a colossal mould, his work, both by its substance and
+its artistic power, exercised an influence beyond his own country,
+affected all European nations, and gives him a place among the great
+creators of the world. Tolstoy was not a rebel but a heretic, a
+heretic not only to religion and the Church, but in philosophy,
+opinions, art, and even in food; but what the world will remember of
+him are not his heretical theories but his faithful practice, which is
+orthodox in its obedience to the highest canons, orthodox as Homer and
+Shakespeare are orthodox, and like theirs, one of the greatest earthly
+examples of the normal and the sane.
+
+To say that DOSTOYEVSKY is the antithesis to Tolstoy, and the second
+great pillar of Russian prose literature, will surprise nobody now.
+Had one been writing ten years ago, the expression of such an opinion
+would have met with an incredulous smile amongst the majority of
+English readers of Russian literature, for Dostoyevsky was practically
+unknown save for his _Crime and Punishment_, and to have compared him
+with Turgenev would have seemed sacrilegious. Now when Dostoyevsky is
+one of the shibboleths of our _intelligentsia_, one can boldly say,
+without fear of being misunderstood, that, as a creator and a force in
+literature, Dostoyevsky is in another plane than that of Turgenev, and
+as far greater than him as Leonardo da Vinci is greater than Vandyke,
+or as Wagner is greater than Gounod, while some Russians consider him
+even infinitely greater than Tolstoy. Let us say he is his equal and
+complement. He is in any case, in almost every respect, his
+antithesis. Tolstoy was the incarnation of health, and is above all
+things and pre-eminently the painter of the sane and the earthly.
+Dostoyevsky was an epileptic, the painter of the abnormal, of
+criminals, madmen, degenerates, mystics. Tolstoy led an even,
+uneventful life, spending the greater part of it in his own country
+house, in the midst of a large family. Dostoyevsky was condemned to
+death, served a sentence of four years' hard labour in a convict
+settlement in Siberia, and besides this spent six years in exile; when
+he returned and started a newspaper, it was prohibited by the
+Censorship; a second newspaper which he started came to grief; he
+underwent financial ruin; his first wife, his brother, and his best
+friend died; he was driven abroad by debt, harassed by the authorities
+on the one hand, and attacked by the liberals on the other; abused and
+misunderstood, almost starving and never well, working under
+overwhelming difficulties, always pressed for time, and ill requited
+for his toil. That was Dostoyevsky's life.
+
+Tolstoy was a heretic; at first a materialist, and then a seeker after
+a religion of his own; Dostoyevsky was a practising believer, a
+vehement apostle of orthodoxy, and died fortified by the Sacraments of
+the Church. Tolstoy with his broad unreligious opinions was
+narrow-minded. Dostoyevsky with his definite religious opinions was
+the most broad-minded man who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the
+supernatural, and was alien to all mysticism. Dostoyevsky seems to get
+nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, than any other
+writer. In Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element of the Russian
+character predominated; in Dostoyevsky that of Mwyshkin, the pure
+fool. Tolstoy could never submit and humble himself. Submission and
+humility and resignation are the keynotes and mainsprings of
+Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy despised art, and paid no homage to any of the
+great names of literature; and this was not only after the so-called
+change. As early as 1862, he said that Pushkin and Beethoven could not
+please because of their absolute beauty. Dostoyevsky was catholic and
+cosmopolitan, and admired the literature of foreign countries--Racine
+as well as Shakespeare, Corneille as well as Schiller. The essence of
+Tolstoy is a magnificent intolerance. The essence of Dostoyevsky is
+sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamed of giving up all he had to the
+poor, and of living like a peasant; Dostoyevsky had to share the hard
+labour of the lowest class of criminals. Tolstoy theorized on the
+distribution of food; but Dostoyevsky was fed like a beggar. Tolstoy
+wrote in affluence and at leisure, and re-wrote his books; Dostoyevsky
+worked like a literary hack for his daily bread, ever pressed for time
+and ever in crying need of money.
+
+These contrasts are not made in disparagement of Tolstoy, but merely
+to point out the difference between the two men and between their
+circumstances. Tolstoy wrote about himself from the beginning of his
+career to the end; nearly all his work is autobiographical, and he
+almost always depicts himself in all his books. We know nothing of
+Dostoyevsky from his books. He was an altruist, and he loved others
+better than himself.
+
+Dostoyevsky's first book, _Poor Folk_, published in 1846, is a
+descendant of Gogol's story _The Cloak_, and bears the influence, to a
+slight extent, of Gogol. In this, the story of a minor public servant
+battling against want, and finding a ray of light in corresponding
+with a girl also in poor circumstances, but who ultimately marries a
+rich middle-aged man, we already get all Dostoyevsky's peculiar
+sweetness; what Stevenson called his "lovely goodness," his almost
+intolerable pathos, his love of the disinherited and of the failures
+of life. His next book, _Letters from a Dead House_, has a far more
+universal interest. It is the record of his prison experiences, which
+is of priceless value, not only on account of its radiant moral
+beauty, its perpetual discovery of the soul of goodness in things
+evil, its human fraternity, its complete absence of egotism and pose,
+and its thrilling human interest, but also on account of the light it
+throws on the Russian character, the Russian poor, and the Russian
+peasant.
+
+In 1866 came _Crime and Punishment_, which brought Dostoyevsky fame.
+This book, Dostoyevsky's _Macbeth_, is so well known in the French and
+English translations that it hardly needs any comment. Dostoyevsky
+never wrote anything more tremendous than the portrayal of the anguish
+that seethes in the soul of Raskolnikov, after he has killed the old
+woman, "mechanically forced," as Professor Brueckner says, "into
+performing the act, as if he had gone too near machinery in motion,
+had been caught by a bit of his clothing and cut to pieces." And not
+only is one held spellbound by every shifting hope, fear, and doubt,
+and each new pang that Raskolnikov experiences, but the souls of all
+the subsidiary characters in the book are revealed to us just as
+clearly: the Marmeladov family, the honest Razumikhin, the police
+inspector, and the atmosphere of the submerged tenth in St.
+Petersburg--the steaming smell of the city in the summer. There is an
+episode when Raskolnikov kneels before Sonia, the prostitute, and says
+to her: "It is not before you I am kneeling, but before all the
+suffering of mankind." That is what Dostoyevsky does himself in this
+and in all his books; but in none of them is the suffering of all
+mankind conjured up before us in more living colours, and in none of
+them is his act of homage in kneeling before it more impressive.
+
+This book was written before the words "psychological novel" had been
+invented; but how all the psychological novels which were written
+years later by Bourget and others pale before this record written in
+blood and tears! _Crime and Punishment_ was followed by _The Idiot_
+(1868). The idiot is Mwyshkin, who has been alluded to already, the
+wise fool, an epileptic, in whom irony and arrogance and egoism have
+been annihilated; and whose very simplicity causes him to pass
+unscathed through a den of evil, a world of liars, scoundrels, and
+thieves, none of whom can escape the influence of his radiant
+personality. He is the same with every one he meets, and with his
+unsuspicious sincerity he combines the intuition of utter goodness, so
+that he can see through people and read their minds. In this
+character, Dostoyevsky has put all his sweetness; it is not a portrait
+of himself, but it is a portrait of what he would have liked to be,
+and reflects all that is best in him. In contrast to Mwyshkin,
+Rogozhin, the merchant, is the incarnation of undisciplined passion,
+who ends by killing the thing he loves, Nastasia, also a creature of
+unbridled impulses,--because he feels that he can never really and
+fully possess her. The catastrophe, the description of the night after
+Rogozhin has killed Nastasia, is like nothing else in literature;
+lifelike in detail and immense, in the way in which it makes you
+listen at the keyhole of the soul, immense with the immensity of a
+great revelation. The minor characters in the book are also all of
+them remarkable; one of them, the General's wife, Madame Epanchin, has
+an indescribable and playful charm.
+
+_The Idiot_ was followed by _The Possessed_, or _Devils_, printed in
+1871-72, called thus after the Devils in the Gospel of St. Luke, that
+left the possessed man and went into the swine; the Devils in the book
+are the hangers-on of Nihilism between 1862 and 1869. The book
+anticipated the future, and in it Dostoyevsky created characters who
+were identically the same, and committed identically the same crimes,
+as men who actually lived many years later in 1871, and later still.
+The whole book turns on the exploitation by an unscrupulous,
+ingenious, and iron-willed knave of the various weaknesses of a crowd
+of idealist dupes and disciples. One of them is a decadent, one of
+them is one of those idealists "whom any strong idea strikes all of a
+sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes for ever"; one of them is a
+maniac whose single idea is the production of the Superman which he
+thinks will come, when it will be immaterial to a man whether he lives
+or dies, and when he will be prepared to kill himself not out of fear
+but in order to kill fear. That man will be God. Not the God-man, but
+the Man-God. The plan of the unscrupulous leader, Peter Verkhovensky,
+who was founded on Nechaev, a Nihilist of real life, is to create
+disorder, and amid the disorder to seize the authority; he imagines a
+central committee of which he pretends to be the representative,
+organizes a small local committee, and persuades his dupes that a
+network of similar small committees exist all over Russia; his aim
+being to create them gradually, by persuading people in every plot of
+fresh ground that they exist everywhere else.
+
+Thus the idea of the book was to show that the strength of Nihilism
+lay, not in high dogmas and theories held by a large and
+well-organized society, but in the strength of the will of one or two
+men reacting on the weaker herd and exploiting the strength, the
+weakness, and the one-sidedness of its ideals, a herd which was
+necessarily weak owing to that very one-sidedness. In order to bind
+his disciples with a permanent bond, Verkhovensky exploits the _idee
+fixe_ of suicide and the superman, which is held by one of his dupes,
+to induce him to commit a crime before he kills himself, and thus make
+away with another member of the committee who is represented as being
+a spy. Once this is done, the whole committee will be jointly
+responsible, and bound to him by the ties of blood and fear. But
+Verkhovensky is not the hero of the book. The hero is Stavrogin, whom
+Verkhovensky regards as his trump card, because of the strength of his
+character, which leads him to commit the most outrageous
+extravagances, and at the same time to remain as cold as ice; but
+Verkhovensky's whole design is shattered on Stavrogin's character, all
+the murders already mentioned are committed, the whole scheme comes to
+nothing, the conspirators are discovered, and Peter escapes abroad.
+
+When _Devils_ appeared in 1871, it was looked upon as a gross
+exaggeration, but real life in subsequent years was to produce
+characters and events of the same kind, which were more startling than
+Dostoyevsky's fiction. The book is the least well-constructed of
+Dostoyevsky's; the narrative is disconnected, and the events,
+incidents, and characters so crowded together, that the general effect
+is confused; on the other hand, it contains isolated scenes which
+Dostoyevsky never surpassed; and in its strength and in its
+limitations it is perhaps his most characteristic work.
+
+From 1873-80 Dostoyevsky went back to journalism, and wrote his _Diary
+of a Writer_, in which he commented on current events. In 1880, he
+united all conflicting and hostile parties and shades of public
+opinion, by the speech he made at the unveiling of Pushkin's memorial,
+in one common bond of enthusiasm. At the end of the seventies, he
+returned to a work already begun, _The Brothers Karamazov_, which,
+although it remains the longest of his books, was never finished. It
+is the story of three brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha; their
+father is a cynical sensualist. The eldest brother is an
+undisciplined, passionate character, who expiates his passions by
+suffering; the second brother is a materialist, the tragedy of whose
+inner life forms a greater part of the book; the third brother,
+Alyosha, is a lover of humanity, and a believer in God and man. He
+seeks a monastery, but his spiritual father sends him out into the
+world, to live and to suffer. He is to go through the furnace of the
+world and experience many trials; for the microbe of lust that is in
+his family is dormant in him also. The book was called the _History of
+a Great Sinner_, and the sinner was to be Alyosha. But Dostoyevsky
+died before this part of the subject is even approached.
+
+He died in January 1881; the crowds of men and women of all sorts and
+conditions of life that attended his funeral, and the extent and the
+sincerity of the grief manifested, gave it an almost mythical
+greatness. The people gave him a funeral such as few kings or heroes
+have ever had. Without fear of controversy or contradiction one can
+now say that Dostoyevsky's place in Russian literature is at the top,
+equal and in the opinion of some superior to that of Tolstoy in
+greatness. He is also one of the greatest writers the world has ever
+produced, not because, like Tolstoy, he saw life steadily and saw it
+whole, and painted it with the supreme and easy art of a Velasquez;
+nor because, like Turgenev, he wove exquisite pictures into musical
+words. Dostoyevsky was not an artist; his work is shapeless; his books
+are like quarries where granite and dross, gold and ore are mingled.
+He paid no attention to style, and yet so strong and vital is his
+spoken word that when the Moscow Art Theatre put some scenes in _The
+Brothers Karamazov_ and _Devils_ on the stage, they found they could
+not alter one single syllable; and sometimes his words have a power
+beyond that of words, a power that only music has. There are pages
+where Dostoyevsky expresses the anguish of the soul in the same manner
+as Wagner expressed the delirium of dying Tristram. I should indeed
+put the matter the other way round, and say that in the last act of
+Tristram, Wagner is as great as Dostoyevsky. But Dostoyevsky is great
+because of the divine message he gives, not didactically, not by
+sermons, but by the goodness that emanates, like a precious balm, from
+the characters he creates; because more than any other books in the
+world his books reflect not only the teaching and the charity, but the
+accent and the divine aura of love that is in the Gospels.
+
+"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom,
+conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that
+addresses your spirit, just as if both had passed through the grave,
+and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we are!" These words, spoken by
+Charlotte Bronte's _Jane Eyre_, express what Dostoyevsky's books do.
+His spirit addresses our spirit. "Be no man's judge; humble love is a
+terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can
+bring out faith. Love men, and do not be afraid of their sins; love
+man in his sin; love all the creatures of God, and pray God to make
+you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and as the birds." This was
+Father Zosima's advice to Alyosha. And that is the gist of
+Dostoyevsky's message to mankind. "Life," Father Zosima also says to
+Alyosha, "will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on
+account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless
+it." Here we have the whole secret of Dostoyevsky's greatness. He
+blessed life, and he caused others to bless it.
+
+It is objected that his characters are abnormal; that he deals with
+the diseased, with epileptics, neurasthenics, criminals, sensualists,
+madmen; but it is just this very fact which gives so much strength and
+value to the blessing he gave to life; it is owing to this fact that
+he causes others to bless life; because he was cast in the nethermost
+circle of life's inferno; he was thrown together with the refuse of
+humanity, with the worst of men and with the most unfortunate; he saw
+the human soul on the rack, and he saw the vilest diseases that
+afflict the human soul; he faced the evil without fear or blinkers;
+and there, in the inferno, in the dust and ashes, he recognized the
+print of divine footsteps and the fragrance of goodness; he cried from
+the abyss: "Hosanna to the Lord, for He is just!" and he blessed life.
+It is true that his characters are taken almost entirely from the
+_Despised and Rejected_, as one of his books was called, and often
+from the ranks of the abnormal; but when a great writer wishes to
+reveal the greatest adventures and the deepest experiences which the
+soul of man can undergo, it is in vain for him to take the normal
+type; it has no adventures. The adventures of the soul of Fortinbras
+would be of no help to mankind; but the adventures of Hamlet are of
+help to mankind, and the adventures of Don Quixote; and neither Don
+Quixote nor Hamlet are normal types.
+
+Dostoyevsky wrote the tragedy of life and of the soul, and to do this
+he chose circumstances as terrific as those which unhinged the reason
+of King Lear, shook that of Hamlet, and made Oedipus blind himself.
+His books resemble Greek tragedies by the magnitude of the spiritual
+adventures they set forth; they are unlike Greek Tragedies in the
+Christian charity and the faith and the hope which goes out of them;
+they inspire the reader with courage, never with despair, although
+Dostoyevsky, face to face with the last extremities of evil, never
+seeks to hide it or to shun it, but merely to search for the soul of
+goodness in it. He did not search in vain, and just as, when he was on
+his way to Siberia, a conversation he had with a fellow-prisoner
+inspired that fellow-prisoner with the feeling that he could go on
+living and even face penal servitude, so do Dostoyevsky's books come
+to mankind as a message of hope from a radiant country. That is what
+constitutes his peculiar greatness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY
+
+
+The fifties, the sixties, and the seventies were, all over Europe, the
+epoch of Parnassian poetry. In England, Tennyson was pouring out his
+"fervent and faultless melodies," Matthew Arnold was playing his
+plaintive harp, and the Pre-Raphaelites were weaving their tapestried
+dreams; in France, Gautier was carving his cameos, Banville's
+Harlequins and Columbines were dancing on a Watteau-like stage in the
+silver twilight of Corot, Baudelaire was at work on his sombre bronze,
+Sully-Prudhomme twanged his ivory lyre, and Leconte de Lisle was
+issuing his golden coinage. It was, in poetry, the epoch of art for
+art's sake.
+
+Russian poetry did not escape the universal tendency; but in Russia
+everything was conspiring to put poetry, and especially that kind of
+poetry, in the shade. In the first place, events of great magnitude
+were happening--the wide reforms, the emancipation of the serfs, the
+growth of Nihilism, which was the product of the disillusion at the
+result of the reforms: in the second place, criticism under the
+influence of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and Dobrolyubov was entirely
+realistic and positivist, preaching not art for life's sake only, but
+the absolute futility of poetry; and, in the third place, work of the
+supremest kind was being done in narrative fiction; in the fourth
+place, no prophet-poet was forthcoming whose genius was great enough
+to voice national aspirations. All this tended to put poetry in the
+shade, especially as such poets as did exist were, with one notable
+exception, Parnassians, whose talent dwelt aloof from the turbid
+stream of life, and who sought to express the adventures of their
+souls, which were emotional and artistic, either in dreamy music or in
+exquisite shapes and colours. This neglect of verse lasted right up
+until the end of the seventies. When, however, in the eighties, the
+wave of political crisis reached its climax and, after the
+assassination of Alexander II, rolled back into a sea of stagnant
+reaction, the poets, who had been hitherto neglected, and quietly
+singing all the while, were discovered once more, and the shares in
+poetry continued to rise as time went on; thus the poets of the
+sixties reaped their due meed of appreciation.
+
+A proof of how widespread and deep this neglect was is that TYUTCHEV,
+whose work attracted no attention whatever until 1854, and met with no
+wide appreciation until a great deal later, was four years younger
+than Pushkin, and a man of thirty when Goethe died. He went on living
+until 1873, and can be called the first of the Parnassians.
+Politically, he was a Slavophile, and sang the "resignation" and
+"long-suffering" of the Russian people, which he preferred to the
+stiff-neckedness of the West. But the value of his work lies less in
+his Slavophile aspirations than in its depth of thought and lyrical
+feeling, in the contrast between the gloomy forebodings of his
+imagination and the sunlike images he gives of nature. His verse is
+like a spring day, dark with ominous thunderclouds, out of which a
+rainbow and a shaft of sunlight fall on a dewy orchard and light it
+with a silvery smile. His verse is, on the one hand, full of
+foreboding and terror at the fate of man and the shadow of
+nothingness, and, on the other hand, it twitters like a bird over the
+freshness and sunshine of spring. He sings the spring again and again,
+and no Russian poet has ever sung the glory, the mystery, the wonder,
+and the terror of night as he has done; his whole work is compounded
+of glowing pictures of nature and a world of longing and of
+unutterable dreams.
+
+The dreamy dominion of the Parnassian age, on whose threshold Tyutchev
+stood, was to be disturbed by the notes of a harsher and stronger
+music.
+
+NEKRASOV (1821-77), Russia's "sternest painter," and certainly one of
+her best, drew his inspiration direct from life, and sang the
+sufferings, the joys, and the life of the people. He is a Russian
+Crabbe; nature and man are his subjects, but nature as the friend and
+foe of man, as a factor, the most important factor in man's life, and
+not as an ideal storehouse from which a Shelley can draw forms more
+real than living man, nurslings of immortality, or a Wordsworth reap
+harvests of the inward eye. He called his muse the "Muse of Vengeance
+and of Grief." He is an uncompromising realist, like Crabbe, and
+idealizes nothing in his pictures of the peasant's life. Like Crabbe,
+he has a deep note of pathos, and a keen but not so minute an eye for
+landscape.
+
+On the other hand, he at times attains to imaginative sublimity in his
+descriptions, as, for instance, in his poem called _The Red-nosed
+Frost_, where King Frost approaches a peasant widow who is at work in
+the winter forest, and freezes her to death. As Daria is gradually
+freezing to death, the frost comes to her like a warrior; and his
+semblance and attributes are drawn in a series of splendid stanzas. He
+sings to her of his riches that no profusion can decrease, and of his
+kingdom of silver and diamonds and pearls: then, as she freezes, she
+dreams of a hot summer's day, and of the rye harvest and of the
+familiar songs--
+
+    "Away with the song she is soaring,
+      She surrenders herself to its stream,
+    In the world there is no such sweet singing
+      As that which we hear in a dream."
+
+His longest and most ambitious work was a kind of popular epic, _Who
+is Happy in Russia?_ written in short lines which have the popular
+ring and accent. Some peasants start on a pilgrimage to find out who
+is happy in Russia. They fly on a magic carpet, and interview
+representatives of the different classes of society, the pope, the
+landowner, the peasant woman, each new interview producing a whole
+series of stories, sometimes idyllic and sometimes tragic, and all
+showing their genius as intimate pictures of various phases of Russian
+life. Here, again, the analogy with Crabbe suggests itself, for
+Nekrasov's tales, taking into consideration the difference between the
+two countries, have a marked affinity, both in their subject matter,
+their variety, their stern realism, their pathos, their bitterness,
+and their observation of nature, with Crabbe's stories in verse.
+
+Two of Nekrasov's long poems tell the story in the form of
+reminiscence,--and here again the naturalness and appropriateness of
+the diction is perfect,--of the Russian women, Princess Volkonsky and
+Princess Trubetzkoy, who followed their husbands, condemned to penal
+servitude for taking part in the Decembrist rising, to Siberia. Here,
+again, Nekrasov strikes a note of deep and poignant pathos, all the
+more poignant from the absolute simplicity with which the tales are
+told. Nekrasov towers among the Parnassians of the time and has only
+one rival, whom we shall describe presently.
+
+The Parnassians are represented by three poets, MAIKOV (1821-97), FET
+(1820-98), and POLONSKY (1820-98), all three of whom began to write
+about the same time, in 1840; none of these three poets was didactic,
+and all three remained aloof from political or social questions.
+
+Maikov is attracted by classical themes, by Italy and also by old
+ballads, but his strength lies in his plastic form, his colour, and
+his pictures of Russian landscape; he writes, for instance, an
+exquisite reminiscence of a day's fishing when he was a boy.
+
+The quality of Fet's muse, in contrast to Maikov's concrete
+plasticity, is illusiveness; his lyrics express intangible dreams and
+impressions; delicate tints and shadows tremble and flit across his
+verse, which is soft as the orient of a pearl; and his fancy is as
+delicate as a thread of gossamer: he lives in the borderland between
+words and music, and catches the vague echoes of that limbo.
+
+    "The world in shadow slipped away
+      And, like a silent dream took flight,
+    Like Adam, I in Eden lay
+      Alone, and face to face with night."
+
+He sings about the southern night amidst the hay; or again about the
+dawn--
+
+    "A whisper, a breath, a shiver,
+      The trills of the nightingale,
+    A silver light and a quiver
+      And a sunlit trail.
+    The glimmer of night and the shadows of night
+      In an endless race,
+    Enchanted changes, flight after flight,
+      On the loved one's face.
+    The blood of the roses tingling
+      In the clouds, and a gleam in the grey,
+    And tears and kisses commingling--
+      The Dawn, the Dawn, the Day!"
+
+Polonsky's verse, in contrast to Fet's gentle epicurean temperament,
+his delicate half-tones and illusive whispers, is made of sterner
+stuff; and, in contrast to Maikov's sculptural lines, it is
+pre-eminently musical, and reflects a fine and charming personality.
+His area of subjects is wide; he can write a child's poem as
+transparent and simple as Hans Andersen--as in his conversation
+between the sun and the moon--or call up the "glory that was Greece,"
+as in the poem when his "Aspasia" listens to the crowds acclaiming
+Pericles, and waits in rapturous suspense for his return--an evocation
+that Browning would have envied for its life and Swinburne for its
+sound.
+
+But neither Maikov, Fet, nor Polonsky, exquisite as much of their
+writing is, produced anything of the calibre of Nekrasov, even in
+their own province; that is to say, they were none of them as great in
+the artistic field as he was in his didactic field. Compared with him,
+they are minor poets. There is one poet of this epoch who does rival
+Nekrasov in another field, and that is COUNT ALEXIS TOLSTOY (1817-75),
+who was also a Parnassian and remained aloof from didactic literature;
+yet, under the pseudonym of Kuzma Prutkov, he wrote a satire, a
+collection of platitudes, that are household words in Russia; also a
+short history of Russia in consummately neat and witty satirical
+verse. As well as his satires, he wrote an historical novel, _Prince
+Serebryany_, and more important still, a trilogy of plays, dealing
+with the most dramatic epoch of Russian history, that of Ivan the
+Terrible. The trilogy, written in verse, consists of the "Death of
+Ivan the Terrible," "The Tsar Feodor Ivanovitch" and "Tsar Boris."
+They are all of them acting plays, form part of the current classical
+repertory, and are effective, impressive and arresting when played on
+the stage.
+
+But it is as a poet and as a lyrical poet that Alexis Tolstoy is most
+widely known. Versatile with a versatility that recalls Pushkin, he
+writes epical ballads on Russian, Northern, and even Scottish themes,
+and dramatic poems on Don Juan, St. John Damascene, and Mary
+Magdalene; and, besides these, a whole series of personal lyrics,
+which are full of charm, tenderness, music and colour, harmonious in
+form and transparent. No Russian poet since Pushkin has written such
+tender love lyrics, and nobody has sung the Russian spring, the
+Russian summer, and the Russian autumn with such tender lyricism. His
+poem on the early spring, when the fern is still tightly curled, the
+shepherd's note still but half heard in the morning, and the birch
+trees just green, is one of the most tender, fresh, and perfect
+expressions of first love, morning, spring, dew, and dawn in the
+world's literature. His songs have inspired Tchaikovsky and other
+composers. The strongest and highest chord he struck is in his St.
+John Damascene; this contains a magnificent dirge for the dead which
+can bear comparison even with the _Dies Irae_ for majesty, solemn
+pathos, and plangent rhythm.
+
+His pictures of landscapes have a peculiar charm. The following is an
+attempt at a translation--
+
+    "Through the slush and the ruts of the highway,
+      By the side of the dam of the stream,
+    Where the fisherman's nets are drying,
+      The carriage jogs on, and I dream.
+
+    I dream, and I look at the highway,
+      At the sky that is sullen and grey,
+    At the lake with its shelving reaches,
+      And the curling smoke far away.
+
+    By the dam, with a cheerless visage
+      Walks a Jew, who is ragged and sere.
+    With a thunder of foam and of splashing,
+      The waters race over the weir.
+
+    A boy over there is whistling
+      On a hemlock flute of his make;
+    And the wild ducks get up in a panic
+      And call as they sweep from the lake.
+
+    And near the old mill some workmen
+      Are sitting upon the green ground,
+    With a wagon of sacks, a cart horse
+      Plods past with a lazy sound.
+
+    It all seems to me so familiar,
+      Although I have never been here,
+    The roof of that house out yonder,
+      And the boy, and the wood, and the weir.
+
+    And the voice of the grumbling mill-wheel,
+      And that rickety barn, I know,
+    I have been here and seen this already,
+      And forgotten it all long ago.
+
+    The very same horse here was dragging
+      Those sacks with the very same sound,
+    And those very same workmen were sitting
+      By the rickety mill on the ground.
+
+    And that Jew, with his beard, walked past me,
+      And those waters raced through the weir;
+    Yes, all this has happened already,
+      But I cannot tell when or where."
+
+The people also produced a poet during this epoch and gave Koltsov a
+successor, in the person of NIKITIN; his themes are taken straight
+from life, and he became known through his patriotic songs written
+during the Crimean War; but he is most successful in his descriptions
+of nature, of sunset on the fields, and dawn, and the swallow's nest
+in the grumbling mill. Two other poets, whose work became well known
+later, but passed absolutely unnoticed in the sixties, were
+SLUCHEVSKY, a philosophical poet, whose verse, excellent in
+description, suffers from clumsiness in form, and APUKHTIN, whose
+collected poems and ballads, although he began to write in 1859, were
+not published until 1886. Apukhtin is a Parnassian. The bulk of his
+work, though perfect in form, is uninteresting; but he wrote one or
+two lyrics which have a place in any Russian Golden Treasury, and his
+poems are largely read now.
+
+In the eighties, a reaction against the anti-poetical tendency set in,
+and poets began to spring up like mushrooms. Of these, the most
+popular and the most remarkable is NADSON (1862-87); he died when he
+was twenty-four, of consumption. Since then his verse has gone through
+twenty-one editions, and 110,000 copies have been sold; ten editions
+were published in his own lifetime. And there are innumerable musical
+settings by various composers to his lyrics. His verse inaugurates a
+new epoch in Russian poetry, the distinguishing features of which are
+a great attention to form and _technique_, a Parnassian love of colour
+and shape, and a deep melancholy.
+
+Nadson sings the melancholy of youth, the dreams and disillusions of
+adolescence, and the hopelessness of the stagnant atmosphere of
+reaction to which he belonged. This last fact accounted in some
+measure for his extraordinary popularity. But it was by no means its
+sole cause; his verse is not only exquisite but magically musical, to
+an extent which makes the verse of other poets seem a stuff of coarser
+clay, and his pictures of nature, of spring, of night, and especially
+of night in the Riviera (with a note of passionate home-sickness),
+have the aromatic, intoxicating sweetness of syringa. Verse such as
+this, sensitive, ultra-delicate, morbid, nervous, and pessimistic, is
+bound to have the defects of its qualities, in a marked degree; one is
+soon inclined to have enough of its sultry, oppressive atmosphere, its
+delicate perfume, its unrelieved gloom and its music, which is nearly
+always not only in a minor key but in the same key. Nobody was more
+keenly aware of this than Nadson himself, and one of his most
+beautiful poems begins thus--
+
+    "Dear friend, I know, I know, I only know too well
+    That my verse is barren of all strength, and pale, and delicate,
+    And often just because of its debility I suffer
+    And often weep in secret in the silence of the night."
+
+And in another poem he writes his apology. He has never used verse as
+a toy to chase tedium; the blessed gift of the singer has often been
+to him an unbearable cross, and he has often vowed to keep silent;
+but, if the wind blows, the AEolian harp must needs respond, and
+streams of the hills cannot help rushing to the valley if the sun
+melts the snow on the mountain tops. This apologia more than all
+criticism defines his gift. His temperament is an AEolian harp, which,
+whether it will or no, is sensitive to the breeze; its strings are
+few, and tuned to one key; nevertheless some of the strains it has
+sobbed have the stamp of permanence as well as that of ethereal magic.
+
+The poets that come after Nadson belong to the present day; there are
+many, and they increase in number every year. The so-called "decadent"
+school were influenced by Shelley, Verlaine, and the French
+symbolists; but there is nothing which is decadent in the ordinary
+sense of the word in their verse. Their influence may not be lasting,
+but they are factors in Russian literature, and some of them, SOLOGUB,
+BRUSOV, BALMONT, and IVANOV, have produced work which any school would
+be glad to claim. This is also true of ALEXANDER BLOCH, one of the
+most original as well as one of the most exquisite of living Russian
+poets.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+With the death of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, the great epoch of Russian
+literature came to an end. A period of literary as well as of
+political stagnation began, which lasted until the Russo-Japanese War.
+This was followed by the revolutionary movement, which, in its turn,
+produced a literary as well as a political chaos, the effect of which
+and of the manifold reactions it brought about are still being felt.
+It was only natural, if one considers the extent and the quality of
+the productions of the preceding epoch, that the soil of literary
+Russia should require a rest.
+
+As it is, one can count the writers of prominence which the epoch of
+stagnation produced on one's fingers--CHEKHOV, GARSHIN, KOROLENKO, and
+at the end of the period MAXIME GORKY, and apart from them, in a
+by-path of his own, MEREZHKOVSKY. Of these Chekhov and Gorky tower
+above the others. Chekhov enlarged the range of Russian literature by
+painting the middle-class and the _Intelligentsia_, and brought back
+to Russian literature the note of humour; and Gorky broke altogether
+fresh ground by painting the vagabond, the artisan, the tramp, the
+thief, the flotsam and jetsam of the big town and the highway, and by
+painting in a new manner.
+
+Gorky's work came like that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling to England, as a
+revelation. Not only did his subject matter open the doors on
+dominions undreamed of, but his attitude towards life and that of his
+heroes towards life seemed to be different from that of all Russian
+novelists before his advent; and yet the difference between him and
+his forerunners is not so great as it appears at first sight. It is
+true that his rough and rebellious heroes, instead of playing the
+Hamlet, or of finding the solution of life in charity and humility or
+submission, are partisans of the survival of the fittest with a
+vengeance, the survival of the strongest fist and the sharpest knife;
+yet are these new heroes really so different from the uncompromising
+type that we have already seen sharing one half of the Russian stage,
+right through the story of Russian literature, from Bazarov back to
+Peter the Great, and on whose existence was founded the remark that
+Peter the Great was one of the ingredients in the Russian character?
+Put Bazarov on the road, or Lermontov, or even Peter the Great, and
+you get Gorky's barefooted hero.
+
+Where Gorky created something absolutely new was in the surroundings
+and in the manner of life which he described, and in the way he
+described them; this is especially true of his treatment of nature:
+for the first time in Russian prose literature, we get away from the
+"orthodox" landscape of convention, and we are face to face with the
+elements. We feel as if a new breath of air had entered into
+literature; we feel as people accustomed to the manner in which the
+poets treated nature in England in the eighteenth century must have
+felt when Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge began to write.
+
+Chekhov worked on older lines. He descends directly from Turgenev,
+although his field is a different one. He, more than any other writer
+and better than any other writer, painted the epoch of stagnation,
+when Russia, as a Russian once said, was playing itself to death at
+_vindt_ (an older form of _Bridge_). The tone of his work is grey, and
+indeed resembles, as Tolstoy said, that of a photographer, by its
+objective realism as well as by its absence of high tones; yet if
+Chekhov is a photographer, he is at the same time a supreme artist, an
+artist in black and white, and his pessimism is counteracted by two
+other factors, his sense of humour and his humanity; were it not so,
+the impression of sadness one would derive from the sum of misery
+which his crowded stage of merchants, students, squires, innkeepers,
+waiters, schoolmasters, magistrates, popes, officials, make up between
+them, would be intolerable. Some of Chekhov's most interesting work
+was written for the stage, on which he also brought Scenes of Country
+Life, which is the sub-title of the play _Uncle Vanya_. There are the
+same grey tints, the same weary, amiable, and slack people, bankrupt
+of ideals and poor in hope, whom we meet in the stories; and here,
+too, behind the sordid triviality and futility, we hear the "still sad
+music of humanity." But in order that the tints of Chekhov's delicate
+living and breathing photographs can be effective on the stage, very
+special acting is necessary, in order to convey the quality of
+atmosphere which is his special gift. Fortunately he met with exactly
+the right technique and the appropriate treatment at the Art Theatre
+at Moscow.
+
+Chekhov died in 1904, soon after the Russo-Japanese War had begun.
+Apart from the main stream and tradition of Russian fiction and
+Russian prose, Merezhkovsky occupies a unique place, a place which
+lies between criticism and imaginative historical fiction, not unlike,
+in some respects--but very different in others--that which is occupied
+by Walter Pater in English fiction. His best known work, at least his
+best known work in Europe, is a prose trilogy, "The Death of the Gods"
+(a study of Julian the apostate), "The Resurrection of the Gods" (the
+story of Leonardo da Vinci), and "The Antichrist" (the story of Peter
+the Great and his son Alexis), which has been translated into nearly
+every European language. This trilogy is an essay in imaginative
+historical reconstitution; it testifies to a real and deep culture,
+and it is lit at times by flashes of imaginative inspiration which
+make the scenes of the past live; it is alive with suggestive thought;
+but it is not throughout convincing, there is a touch of Bulwer
+Lytton as well as a touch of Goethe and Pater in it. Merezhkovsky is
+perhaps more successful in his purely critical work, his books on
+Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol, which are infinitely stimulating,
+suggestive, and original, than in his historical fiction, although,
+needless to say, his criticism appeals to a far narrower public. He is
+in any case one of the most brilliant and interesting of Russian
+modern writers, and perhaps the best known outside Russia.
+
+During the war, a writer of fiction made his name by a remarkable
+book, namely KUPRIN, who in his novel, _The Duel_, gave a vivid and
+masterly picture of the life of an officer in the line. Kuprin has
+since kept the promise of his early work. At the same time, LEONID
+ANDREEV came forward with short stories, plays, a description of war
+(_The Red Laugh_), moralities, not uninfluenced by Maeterlinck, and a
+limpid and beautiful style in which pessimism seemed to be speaking
+its last word.
+
+In 1905 the revolutionary movement broke out, with its great hopes,
+its disillusions, its period of anarchy on the one hand and
+repression on the other; out of the chaos of events came a chaos of
+writing rather than literature, and in its turn this produced, in
+literature as well as in life, a reaction, or rather a series of
+reactions, towards symbolism, aestheticism, mysticism on the one hand,
+and towards materialism--not of theory but of practice--on the other.
+But since these various reactions are now going on, and are vitally
+affecting the present day, the revolutionary movement of 1905 seems
+the right point to take leave of Russian literature. In 1905 a new era
+began, and what that era will ultimately produce, it is too soon even
+to hazard a guess.
+
+Looking back over the record of Russian literature, the first thing
+which must strike us, if we think of the literature of other
+countries, is its comparatively short life. There is in Russian
+literature no Middle Ages, no Villon, no Dante, no Chaucer, no
+Renaissance, no _Grand Siecle_. Literature begins in the nineteenth
+century. The second thing which will perhaps strike us is that, in
+spite of its being the youngest of all the literatures, it seems to be
+spiritually the oldest. In some respects it seems to have become
+over-ripe before it reached maturity. But herein, perhaps, lies the
+secret of its greatness, and this may be the value of its contribution
+to the soul of mankind. It is--
+
+    "Old in grief and very wise in tears":
+
+and its chief gift to mankind is an expression, made with a
+naturalness and sincerity that are matchless, and a love of reality
+which is unique,--for all Russian literature, whether in prose or
+verse, is rooted in reality--of that grief and that wisdom; the grief
+and wisdom which come from a great heart; a heart that is large enough
+to embrace the world and to drown all the sorrows therein with the
+immensity of its sympathy, its fraternity, its pity, its charity, and
+its love.
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
+
+
+       1113. _The Chronicle of Nestor._
+
+       1692. First play produced in Russia, Gregory.
+             Simeon Polotsky's _The Prodigal Son_ acted.
+
+       1703. The first Russian newspaper, _The Russian News_, appears.
+
+       1725. Death of Peter the Great.
+             Foundation of the Academy of Science.
+
+       1744. Death of Kantemir.
+
+       1750. Death of Tatishchev.
+
+       1755. University of Moscow founded.
+
+       1762. Accession of Catherine the Great.
+
+       1765. Death of Lomonosov.
+
+       1790. Radishchev's _Journey Through Russia_ published.
+
+       1796. Death of Catherine the Great.
+
+       1800. First edition of _The Story of the Raid of Prince Igor_
+               published.
+
+       1802. Zhukovsky translates Gray's _Elegy_.
+             Death of Radishchev.
+
+       1806. Krylov's first fables published.
+
+       1816. Death of Derzhavin.
+             _History of the Russian State_, by Karamzin, published.
+
+       1819. University of St. Petersburg founded.
+
+       1820. Pushkin's _Ruslan and Ludmila_ published.
+
+       1823. Griboyedov's _Misfortune of Being Clever_ circulated.
+             First Canto of _Eugene Onegin_ published.
+
+       1825. The Decembrist Attempt.
+
+       1826. Rileev hanged.
+             Death of Karamzin.
+
+       1827. Pushkin's _Gypsies_ published.
+
+       1829. Death of Griboyedov.
+             Pushkin's _Poltava_ published.
+
+       1831. Pushkin's _Boris Godunov_ published.
+             Complete version of _Eugene Onegin_ published.
+
+       1832. Gogol's _Evening on the Farm near the Dikanka_ published.
+
+       1834. Gogol's _Mirgorod_ published.
+
+       1835. Gogol's _Revisor_ produced on the stage.
+
+       1836. Chaadaev's letters published.
+
+       1837. Death of Pushkin.
+
+       1841. Death of Lermontov.
+
+       1842. Death of Koltsov.
+             Gogol's _Dead Souls_ published.
+
+       1844. Death of Krylov.
+
+       1847. Gogol's correspondence published.
+             Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_ published.
+             Death of Belinsky.
+
+       1849. Dostoyevsky imprisoned.
+
+     1856-7. Saltykov's _Government Sketches_ appear.
+
+       1859. Ostrovsky's _Storm_ produced.
+             Goncharov's _Oblomov_ published.
+
+       1860. Turgenev's _Fathers and Sons_ published.
+
+       1861. Emancipation of the Serfs.
+
+       1862. Pisemsky's _Troubled Sea_ published.
+
+       1863. Chernyshevsky's _What is to be Done?_ published.
+
+       1865. Leskov's _No Way Out_ published.
+
+  1865-1872. Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ appeared.
+
+       1866. Dostoyevsky's _Crime and Punishment_ published.
+
+       1868. Dostoyevsky's _Idiot_ published.
+
+       1875. Death of Count Alexis Tolstoy.
+
+     1875-6. Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina_ published.
+
+       1877. Death of Nekrasov.
+
+       1881. Death of Dostoyevsky.
+
+       1883. Death of Turgenev.
+
+       1886. Death of Ostrovsky.
+
+       1887. Death of Nadson.
+
+       1889. Death of Saltykov.
+
+       1900. Death of Soloviev.
+             Production of Chekhov's _Chaika_ (Seagull).
+
+       1904. Production of Chekhov's _Cherry Orchard_.
+             Death of Chekhov.
+
+       1910. Death of Tolstoy.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+    Acton, Lord, 146
+
+    Ainsworth, Harrison, 82
+
+    Aksakov, Ivan, 154
+
+    ----, Serge, 154 f.
+
+    Alexander I, 9, 30 f., 44, 124, 169
+
+    ---- II, 52, 153, 160, 179, 227
+
+    Alexis, Tsar, 23
+
+    Andreev, Leonid, 248
+
+    _Anna Karenina_, Tolstoy's, 205 f.
+
+    Apukhtin, 238
+
+    Arnold, Matthew, 123, 146, 226
+
+    Atheism and Socialism, 150 f.
+
+
+    Bakunin, 179, 180
+
+    Balfour, Mr. A. J., 182
+
+    Balmont, 242
+
+    Bariatinsky, Prince, 101
+
+    Batyushkov, 58
+
+    Baudelaire, 226
+
+    Beaconsfield, Lord, 146
+
+    Belinsky, 142, 150
+
+    _Bell, The_, Herzen edits, 151, 153, 180
+
+    Bloch, Alexander, 242
+
+    _Bogoiskateli_, 198, 199
+
+    Bronte, Charlotte, 222
+
+    ----, Emily, 46
+
+    Brueckner, Prof., 144, 145, 147, 214
+
+    Brusov, 242
+
+    Bulgaria, 12
+
+    Bulgaria, liberation of, 170, 171
+
+    Buerger's _Leonore_ translated into Russian, 52
+
+    Burns, Robert, 125
+
+    Byron, 61 f., 66, 67, 71, 72 (footnotes), 73, 98, 119, 123, 146
+
+    Byzantium, Emperor of, 11
+
+
+    Catherine I, 18 (footnote)
+
+    ---- II, 27, 32, 33, 80, 155
+
+    Chaadaev, 148
+
+    Chekhov, 243, 244 f.
+
+    Chernyshevsky, 180, 181, 227
+
+    Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 182
+
+    Christianity of the East, 11
+
+    _Chronicle of Kiev_, the, 15 f.
+
+    _Chronicle of Nestor_, the, 15 f.
+
+    Church, the, influence on Russian literature, 11, 21
+
+    Constantine, 44
+
+    Corot, 226
+
+    Crabbe, Nekrasov and, 229 f.
+
+    Crimean War, the, 160, 202, 238
+
+
+    Danilevsky, 180
+
+    Daudet, 172
+
+    "Decembrist" rising, the, 44, 45, 61, 92
+
+    Delvig, Baron, 101
+
+    Demetrius, 21, 67
+
+    Derzhavin, 29, 56
+
+    Diderot, 27
+
+    Dobrolyubov, 180, 181, 227
+
+    Donne, John, 97
+
+    Dostoyevsky, 96, 99, 109, 143, 145, 160, 161, 164, 167, 173, 180,
+        192, 196 f., 200, 210 f., 220 f.
+
+
+    Eastern and Western Churches, schism of, 13, 22, 182, 183
+
+    Eliot, Sir Charles, 13
+
+    Elizabeth, Empress, 26
+
+    Emancipation of the serfs, the, 160, 227
+
+
+    Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great, 85
+
+    Fet, 232 f.
+
+    Flaubert, 162, 204
+
+    French influence in Russia, 26
+
+    French Revolution, the, 27, 40, 159
+
+
+    Gagarin, Prince, 150
+
+    Garshin, 243
+
+    Gautier, 226
+
+    German influence in Russia, 26
+
+    Goethe, death of, 228
+
+    ----, Pushkin's resemblance to, 92 f.
+
+    Gogol, Nicholas, 126 f., 190
+
+    Goncharov, 143, 176 f.
+
+    Gorky, Maxime, 164, 243, 244 f.
+
+    Gray's _Elegy_, Russian translations of, 52, 53
+
+    Gregory, Protestant pastor of the Sloboda, 23
+
+    Griboyedov, 45 f., 126, 191
+
+    Grigoriev, 179, 180
+
+    Grigorovich, 194, 195
+
+    Grimm's Fairy Tales, 84
+
+
+    Haumant, M., 168
+
+    Heckeren-Dantes' duel with Pushkin, 90
+
+    Heine, 98
+
+    Herzen, Alexander, 143, 150 f., 180
+
+    Hoffmann, 127
+
+    Homyakov, 154
+
+    Hugo, Victor, 117, 118, 172
+
+
+    Ivan III, 20, 21, 24
+
+    ---- IV ("The Terrible"), 24, 67, 235
+
+    Ivanov, 242
+
+
+    _Jane Eyre_ cited, 222
+
+
+    Kantemir, Prince, 27
+
+    Karakozov, 153
+
+    Karamzin, 18, 32 f., 141
+
+    Katkov, 180, 182
+
+    Keats, 146
+
+    _Kidnapped_ (Stevenson's), 129
+
+    Kiev, destruction of, 19;
+      rebuilding of, 21
+
+    ----, the mother of Russian culture, 10 f.
+
+    Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, 244
+
+    Koltsov, 124 f.
+
+    Korolenko, 243
+
+    Krylov, 34 f., 176 f.
+
+    Kuprin, 248
+
+
+    La Fontaine, 35 f.
+
+    Lang, Andrew, 128
+
+    Latin language taught in Moscow, 22
+
+    Le Maistre, Joseph, 148, 149
+
+    Leo X, 13
+
+    Lermontov, 102 f., 126
+
+    Leskov, vi, 189 f.
+
+    Lisle, Leconte de, 226
+
+    Literary criticism, 141
+
+    Liturgical books, revision of, 22
+
+    Lomonosov, Michael, 26, 29
+
+    Luther, 13
+
+    Lytton, Bulwer, 248
+
+
+    Maikov, 232
+
+    Maupassant, 128, 172
+
+    Meredith, George, 169, 172
+
+    Merezhkovsky, 147, 205, 243, 247 f.
+
+    Merimee, 83, 141
+
+    Mill, John Stuart, 181
+
+    Mickiewicz, the Pole, 87
+
+    Montesquieu, 27
+
+    Morley, John, 146
+
+    Moscow, 10, 19, 21
+
+    Moscow Art Theatre, the, v, 221, 222, 247
+
+    ----, European culture in, 23
+
+    _Moscow Journal_ founded by Karamzin, 32
+
+    Moscow, Pushkin's memorial at, 99, 220
+
+    ----, schools in, 22
+
+    ----, the fire of, 18
+
+    ----, University of, 26
+
+    Mozart of Russian literature, the, 175
+
+    Musin-Pushkin, Count. _See_ Pushkin.
+
+    Musset, 118, 119
+
+    Mussorgsky, 67
+
+
+    Nadson, 239 f.
+
+    Napoleon, 30 f., 40, 111, 204
+
+    Nechaev, 218
+
+    Nekrasov, 229 f., 234
+
+    Nicholas, 44
+
+    Nicholas, Emperor, 160
+
+    Nicholas I, 103
+
+    Nihilism, 152, 163, 171, 173, 179, 217, 218, 227
+
+    Nikitin, 238
+
+    Norsemen in Russia, 10
+
+
+    _Odyssey_, the, Russian translation of, 52
+
+    Ostrovsky, 193 f.
+
+
+    Palaeologa, Sophia, 21
+
+    Paris revolution of 1848, the, 159
+
+    Parnassian poetry, the epoch of, 226 f.
+
+    Pater, Walter, 247, 248
+
+    Paul, Emperor, 33
+
+    Peter the Great, 21, 24 f., 71, 85, 97
+
+    ---- ---- of Poetry, the, 95
+
+    Petrashevsky and his followers, 159, 160
+
+    Pisarev, 180, 181, 227
+
+    Pisemsky, 191, 193
+
+    Poe, E. A., 86
+
+    Poland, 21, 24
+
+    Poland, the rising in, 180
+
+    Poles occupy Moscow, 24
+
+    Polevoy, 142
+
+    Polezhaev, 101
+
+    Polonsky, 232, 233 f.
+
+    Polotsky, Simeon, 22 f.
+
+    Preobrazhenskoe and its theatre, 23
+
+    Pre-Raphaelites, the, 226
+
+    Printing press, the first, 21
+
+    Propagandists of Western Ideas the, 148 f.
+
+    Prutkov, Kuzma. _See_ Tolstoy, Count Alexis.
+
+    Pugachev and the Cossack rising, 80
+
+    Pushkin vi, 18, 34, 41, 43, 50, 54 f., 109, 110, 123, 126, 132,
+        135, 138, 143, 162, 167, 220
+
+
+    Radishchev, 27 f.
+
+    Rakhmaninov, 81
+
+    Rimsky-Korsakov, 81
+
+    Rodionovna, Anna, 84, 85
+
+    Rome, Gogol settles in, 133
+
+    Rousseau, 27
+
+    Russia and political liberty, 148
+
+    ----, Norsemen in, 10, 11
+
+    ----, Tartar invasion of, 19, 24
+
+    ----, the revolutionary movement of 1905, 243, 248, 249
+
+    Russian literature, beginnings of, 9 f.
+
+    ---- ----, dawn of, 30 f.
+
+    ---- ----, second renascence of, 159
+
+    ---- ----, the age of prose, 126 f.
+
+    ---- ----, the second age of poetry, 226 f.
+
+    ---- newspaper, the first, 25
+
+    ---- Nihilism. _See_ Nihilism.
+
+    ---- trade centres, 10
+
+    Russia's national poet, 95
+
+    Russo-Japanese War, the, 243
+
+    Ryleev, 44
+
+
+    Sainte-Beuve, 146
+
+    St. Petersburg, 10
+
+    ---- Jesuits, the, 148
+
+    ----, the great floods of 1834, 85
+
+    Saltykov, Michael, vi, 184 f., 190 f.
+
+    Sand, George, 162
+
+    Schiller's _Maid of Orleans_, Russian translation of, 52
+
+    Schumann of Russian literature, the, 175
+
+    Seekers after God, 198
+
+    Serfs, emancipation of the, 160, 227
+
+    Shakespeare, Pushkin on, 65, 66
+
+    Shchedrin. _See_ Saltykov.
+
+    Siberia, Dostoyevsky at, 160, 213, 225
+
+    ----, Radishchev at, 28
+
+    Slav race, the, 10 f.
+
+    Slavonic liturgy, introduction of, 12
+
+    Slavophiles, the, 143, 148, 152, 154, 159, 180, 228
+
+    Sluchevsky, 238
+
+    Socialism and Atheism, 150 f.
+
+    Society of Welfare, the, 43
+
+    Sologub, 242
+
+    Soloviev, Vladimir, 11, 93, 181 f.
+
+    Stebnitsky. _See_ Leskov.
+
+    Stendhal, 204
+
+    Stevenson, R. L., 127, 128, 129, 214
+
+    Strakhov, 180
+
+    Suffragettes, 163, 164
+
+    Sully-Prudhomme, 226
+
+    Suvorov, 30
+
+    Sviatoslav, 15, 16
+
+
+    Taine, 162
+
+    Tartar invasion of Russia, the, 19;
+      the Tartar yoke thrown off, 24
+
+    Tatishchev, 26
+
+    Tchaikovsky, 80, 236
+
+    Tennyson, Lord, 165, 166, 226
+
+    Thackeray, 172
+
+    Tolstoy, Count Alexis, 234 f.
+
+    ----, Count Leo, 134, 161, 164, 170, 196 f., 211, 246
+
+    Turgenev, Ivan, 64, 161 f., 192
+
+    Tyutchev, 154, 228
+
+
+    Universal church, Soloviev's views on, 182-183
+
+    University of Moscow, the, 26, 251
+
+
+    Venevitinov, 101
+
+    Vienna, Congress of, 40, 43
+
+    Vigny, Alfred de, 202
+
+    Vinci, Leonardo da, 67
+
+    Virgil of Russian prose, the, 175
+
+    Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, 11
+
+    Volkonsky, Princess, 150
+
+    Voltaire, 27
+
+    Volynsky, 147
+
+    Vyatka, Saltykov banished to, 185
+
+    Vyazemsky, Prince, 141
+
+
+    _War and Peace_, publication of, 202 f.
+
+    Wells, Mr., 164
+
+    Wilson, John, 81
+
+    Woman's Suffrage, 182. _Cf._ Suffragettes.
+
+    Wordsworth, 120, 123
+
+
+    Yakovlev. _Cf._ Herzen, Alexander.
+
+    Yazykov, 101
+
+
+    Zhukovsky, Basil, 51 f., 83
+
+    Zola, 74, 204
+
+
+_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._
+
+
+
+
+                       The
+                 Home University
+           Library of Modern Knowledge
+
+         _A Comprehensive Series of New
+          and Specially Written Books_
+
+                    EDITORS:
+
+   Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.
+          HERBERT FISHER, LL.D., F.B.A.
+      Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D.
+         Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+   1/- net          256 Pages          2/6 net
+  in cloth                           in leather
+
+
+_History and Geography_
+
+3. _THE FRENCH REVOLUTION_
+
+By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A. (With Maps.) "It is coloured with all the
+militancy of the author's temperament."--_Daily News._
+
+4. _A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE_
+
+By G. H. PERRIS. The Rt. Hon. JAMES BRYCE writes: "I have read it with
+much interest and pleasure, admiring the skill with which you have
+managed to compress so many facts and views into so small a volume."
+
+8. _POLAR EXPLORATION_
+
+By Dr W. S. BRUCE, F.R.S.E., Leader of the "Scotia" Expedition. (With
+Maps.) "A very freshly written and interesting narrative."--_The
+Times._
+
+12. _THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA_
+
+By Sir H. H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., F.Z.S. (With Maps.) "The Home
+University Library is much enriched by this excellent work."--_Daily
+Mail._
+
+13. _MEDIAEVAL EUROPE_
+
+By H. W. C. DAVIS, M.A. (With Maps.) "One more illustration of the
+fact that it takes a complete master of the subject to write briefly
+upon it."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+14. _THE PAPACY & MODERN TIMES (1303-1870)_
+
+By WILLIAM BARRY, D.D. "Dr Barry has a wide range of knowledge and an
+artist's power of selection."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+23. _HISTORY OF OUR TIME (1885-1911)_
+
+By G. P. GOOCH, M.A. "Mr Gooch contrives to breathe vitality into his
+story, and to give us the flesh as well as the bones of recent
+happenings."--_Observer._
+
+25. _THE CIVILISATION OF CHINA_
+
+By H. A. GILES, LL.D., Professor of Chinese at Cambridge. "In all the
+mass of facts, Professor Giles never becomes dull. He is always ready
+with a ghost story or a street adventure for the reader's
+recreation."--_Spectator._
+
+29. _THE DAWN OF HISTORY_
+
+By J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S.A., Wykeham Professor of Ancient History,
+Oxford. "There is not a page in it that is not suggestive."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+33. _THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND_
+
+_A Study in Political Evolution_
+
+By Prof. A. F. POLLARD, M.A. With a Chronological Table. "It takes
+its place at once among the authoritative works on English
+history."--_Observer._
+
+34. _CANADA_
+
+By A. G. BRADLEY. "The volume makes an immediate appeal to the man who
+wants to know something vivid and true about Canada."--_Canadian
+Gazette._
+
+37. _PEOPLES & PROBLEMS OF INDIA_
+
+By Sir T. W. HOLDERNESS, K.C.S.I., Permanent Under-Secretary of State
+of the India Office. "Just the book which newspaper readers require
+to-day, and a marvel of comprehensiveness."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+42. _ROME_
+
+By W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A. "A masterly sketch of Roman character and of
+what it did for the world."--_The Spectator._
+
+48. _THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR_
+
+By F. L. PAXSON, Professor of American History, Wisconsin University
+(With Maps.) "A stirring study."--_The Guardian._
+
+51. _WARFARE IN BRITAIN_
+
+By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A. "Rich in suggestion for the historical
+student."--_Edinburgh Evening News._
+
+55. _MASTER MARINERS_
+
+By J. R. SPEARS. "A continuous story of shipping progress and
+adventure.... It reads like a romance."--_Glasgow Herald._
+
+61. _NAPOLEON_
+
+By HERBERT FISHER, LL.D., F.B.A., Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield
+University. (With Maps.) The story of the great Bonaparte's youth, his
+career, and his downfall, with some sayings of Napoleon, a genealogy,
+and a bibliography.
+
+66. _THE NAVY AND SEA POWER_
+
+By DAVID HANNAY. The author traces the growth of naval power from
+early times, and discusses its principles and effects upon the history
+of the Western world.
+
+71. _GERMANY OF TO-DAY_
+
+By CHARLES TOWER. "It would be difficult to name any better
+summary."--_Daily News._
+
+82. _PREHISTORIC BRITAIN_
+
+By ROBERT MUNRO, M.A., M.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E. (Illustrated.)
+
+91. _THE ALPS_
+
+By ARNOLD LUNN, M.A. (Illustrated.)
+
+92. _CENTRAL & SOUTH AMERICA_
+
+By PROFESSOR W. R. SHEPHERD. (Maps.)
+
+97. _THE ANCIENT EAST_
+
+By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A. (Maps.)
+
+98. _THE WARS between ENGLAND and AMERICA_
+
+By Prof. T. C. SMITH.
+
+100. _HISTORY OF SCOTLAND_
+
+By Prof. R. S. RAIT.
+
+
+_Literature and Art_
+
+2. _SHAKESPEARE_
+
+By JOHN MASEFIELD. "We have had more learned books on Shakespeare in
+the last few years, but not one so wise."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+27. _ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN_
+
+By G. H. MAIR, M.A. "Altogether a fresh and individual
+book."--_Observer._
+
+35. _LANDMARKS IN FRENCH LITERATURE_
+
+By G. L. STRACHEY. "It is difficult to imagine how a better account of
+French Literature could be given in 250 small pages."--_The Times._
+
+39. _ARCHITECTURE_
+
+By Prof. W. R. LETHABY. (Over forty Illustrations.) "Delightfully
+bright reading."--_Christian World._
+
+43. _ENGLISH LITERATURE: MEDIAEVAL_
+
+By Prof. W. P. KER, M.A. "Prof. Ker's knowledge and taste are
+unimpeachable, and his style is effective, simple, yet never
+dry."--_The Athenaeum._
+
+45. _THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE_
+
+By L. PEARSALL SMITH, M.A. "A wholly fascinating study of the
+different streams that make the great river of the English
+speech."--_Daily News._
+
+52. _GREAT WRITERS OF AMERICA_
+
+By Prof. J. ERSKINE and Prof. W. P. TRENT. "An admirable summary, from
+Franklin to Mark Twain, enlivened by a dry humour."--_Athenaeum._
+
+63. _PAINTERS AND PAINTING_
+
+By Sir FREDERICK WEDMORE. (With 16 half-tone illustrations.) From the
+Primitives to the Impressionists.
+
+64. _DR JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE_
+
+By JOHN BAILEY, M.A. "A most delightful essay."--_Christian World._
+
+65. _THE LITERATURE OF GERMANY_
+
+By Professor J. G. ROBERTSON, M.A., Ph.D. "Under the author's skilful
+treatment the subject shows life and continuity."--_Athenaeum._
+
+70. _THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE_
+
+By G. K. CHESTERTON. "No one will put it down without a sense of
+having taken a tonic or received a series of electric shocks."--_The
+Times._
+
+73. _THE WRITING OF ENGLISH_
+
+By W. T. BREWSTER, A.M., Professor of English in Columbia University.
+"Sensible, and not over-rigidly conventional."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+75. _ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL_
+
+By JANE E. HARRISON, LL.D., D.Litt. "Charming in style and learned in
+manner."--_Daily News._
+
+76. _EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE_
+
+By GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A., Regius Professor of Greek
+at Oxford. "A beautiful piece of work.... Just in the fulness of time,
+and exactly in the right place.... Euripides has come into his
+own."--_The Nation._
+
+87. _CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES_
+
+By GRACE E. HADOW.
+
+89. _WILLIAM MORRIS: HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE_
+
+By A. CLUTTON BROCK.
+
+93. _THE RENAISSANCE_
+
+By EDITH SICHEL.
+
+95. _ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE_
+
+By J. M. ROBERTSON, M.P.
+
+99. _AN OUTLINE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE_
+
+By Hon. MAURICE BARING.
+
+
+_Science_
+
+7. _MODERN GEOGRAPHY_
+
+By Dr MARION NEWBIGIN. (Illustrated.) "Geography, again: what a dull,
+tedious study that was wont to be!... But Miss Marion Newbigin invests
+its dry bones with the flesh and blood of romantic interest."--_Daily
+Telegraph._
+
+9. _THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS_
+
+By Dr D. H. SCOTT, M.A., F.R.S., late Hon. Keeper of the Jodrell
+Laboratory, Kew. (Fully illustrated.) "Dr Scott's candid and
+familiar style makes the difficult subject both fascinating and
+easy."--_Gardeners' Chronicle._
+
+17. _HEALTH AND DISEASE_
+
+By W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D., Local Government Board, Edinburgh.
+
+18. _INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS_
+
+By A. N. WHITEHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S. (With Diagrams.) "Mr Whitehead has
+discharged with conspicuous success the task he is so exceptionally
+qualified to undertake. For he is one of our great authorities upon
+the foundations of the science."--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+19. _THE ANIMAL WORLD_
+
+By Professor F. W. GAMBLE, F.R.S. With Introduction by Sir Oliver
+Lodge. (Many Illustrations.) "A fascinating and suggestive
+survey."--_Morning Post._
+
+20. _EVOLUTION_
+
+By Professor J. ARTHUR THOMSON and Professor PATRICK GEDDES. "A
+many-coloured and romantic panorama, opening up, like no other book we
+know, a rational vision of world-development."--_Belfast News-Letter._
+
+22. _CRIME AND INSANITY_
+
+By Dr C. A. MERCIER. "Furnishes much valuable information from one
+occupying the highest position among medico-legal psychologists."--_Asylum
+News._
+
+28. _PSYCHICAL RESEARCH_
+
+By Sir W. F. BARRETT, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of
+Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "What he has to say on thought-reading,
+hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism, divinings, and so
+on, will be read with avidity."--_Dundee Courier._
+
+31. _ASTRONOMY_
+
+By A. R. HINKS, M.A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory.
+"Original in thought, eclectic in substance, and critical in
+treatment.... No better little book is available."--_School World._
+
+32. _INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE_
+
+By J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History,
+Aberdeen University. "Professor Thomson's delightful literary style is
+well known; and here he discourses freshly and easily on the methods
+of science and its relations with philosophy, art, religion, and
+practical life."--_Aberdeen Journal._
+
+36. _CLIMATE AND WEATHER_
+
+By Prof. H. N. DICKSON, D.Sc.Oxon., M.A., F.R.S.E., President of the
+Royal Meteorological Society. (With Diagrams.) "The author has
+succeeded in presenting in a very lucid and agreeable manner the
+causes of the movements of the atmosphere and of the more stable
+winds."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+41. _ANTHROPOLOGY_
+
+By R. R. MARETT, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford
+University. "An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a child
+could understand it, so fascinating and human that it beats fiction
+'to a frazzle.'"--_Morning Leader._
+
+44. _THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY_
+
+By Prof. J. G. MCKENDRICK, M.D. "Upon every page of it is stamped the
+impress of a creative imagination."--_Glasgow Herald._
+
+46. _MATTER AND ENERGY_
+
+By F. SODDY, M.A., F.R.S. "Prof. Soddy has successfully accomplished
+the very difficult task of making physics of absorbing interest on
+popular lines."--_Nature._
+
+49. _PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR_
+
+By Prof. W. MCDOUGALL, F.R.S., M.B. "A happy example of the
+non-technical handling of an unwieldy science, suggesting rather than
+dogmatising. It should whet appetites for deeper study."--_Christian
+World._
+
+53. _THE MAKING OF THE EARTH_
+
+By Prof. J. W. GREGORY, F.R.S. (With 38 Maps and Figures.) "A
+fascinating little volume.... Among the many good things contained in
+the series this takes a high place."--_The Athenaeum._
+
+57. _THE HUMAN BODY_
+
+By A. KEITH, M.D., LL.D., Conservator of Museum and Hunterian
+Professor, Royal College of Surgeons. (Illustrated.) "It literally
+makes the 'dry bones' to live. It will certainly take a high place
+among the classics of popular science."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+58. _ELECTRICITY_
+
+By GISBERT KAPP, D.Eng., Professor of Electrical Engineering in the
+University of Birmingham. (Illustrated.) "It will be appreciated
+greatly by learners and by the great number of amateurs who are
+interested in what is one of the most fascinating of scientific
+studies."--_Glasgow Herald._
+
+62. _THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE_
+
+By Dr BENJAMIN MOORE, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, University College,
+Liverpool. "Stimulating, learned, lucid."--_Liverpool Courier._
+
+67. _CHEMISTRY_
+
+By RAPHAEL MELDOLA, F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry in Finsbury
+Technical College, London. Presents clearly, without the detail
+demanded by the expert, the way in which chemical science has
+developed, and the stage it has reached.
+
+72. _PLANT LIFE_
+
+By Prof. J. B. FARMER, D.Sc., F.R.S. (Illustrated.) "Professor Farmer
+has contrived to convey all the most vital facts of plant physiology,
+and also to present a good many of the chief problems which confront
+investigators to-day in the realms of morphology and of
+heredity."--_Morning Post._
+
+78. _THE OCEAN_
+
+A General Account of the Science of the Sea. By Sir JOHN MURRAY,
+K.C.B. F.R.S. (Colour plates and other illustrations.)
+
+79. _NERVES_
+
+By Prof. D. FRASER HARRIS, M.D., D.Sc. (Illustrated.) A description,
+in non-technical language, of the nervous system, its intricate
+mechanism and the strange phenomena of energy and fatigue, with some
+practical reflections.
+
+86. _SEX_
+
+By Prof. PATRICK GEDDES and Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, LL.D. (Illus.)
+
+88. _THE GROWTH OF EUROPE_
+
+By Prof. GRENVILLE COLE, (Illus.)
+
+
+_Philosophy and Religion_
+
+15. _MOHAMMEDANISM_
+
+By Prof. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.Litt. "This generous shilling's
+worth of wisdom.... A delicate, humorous, and most responsible
+tractate by an illuminative professor."--_Daily Mail._
+
+40. _THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY_
+
+By the Hon. BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S. "A book that the 'man in the
+street' will recognise at once to be a boon.... Consistently lucid and
+non-technical throughout."--_Christian World._
+
+47. _BUDDHISM_
+
+By Mrs RHYS DAVIDS, M.A. "The author presents very attractively as
+well as very learnedly the philosophy of Buddhism."--_Daily News._
+
+50. _NONCONFORMITY: Its ORIGIN and PROGRESS_
+
+By Principal W. B. SELBIE, M.A. "The historical part is brilliant in
+its insight, clarity, and proportion."--_Christian World._
+
+54. _ETHICS_
+
+By G. E. MOORE, M.A., Lecturer in Moral Science in Cambridge
+University. "A very lucid though closely reasoned outline of the logic
+of good conduct."--_Christian World._
+
+56. _THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT_
+
+By Prof. B. W. BACON, LL.D., D.D. "Professor Bacon has boldly, and
+wisely, taken his own line, and has produced, as a result, an
+extraordinarily vivid, stimulating, and lucid book."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+60. _MISSIONS: THEIR RISE and DEVELOPMENT_
+
+By Mrs CREIGHTON. "Very interestingly done.... Its style is simple,
+direct, unhackneyed, and should find appreciation where a more
+fervently pious style of writing repels."--_Methodist Recorder._
+
+68. _COMPARATIVE RELIGION_
+
+By Prof. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, D.Litt., Principal of Manchester
+College, Oxford. "Puts into the reader's hand a wealth of learning and
+independent thought."--_Christian World._
+
+74. _A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT_
+
+By J. B. BURY, Litt.D., LL.D., Regius Professor of Modern History at
+Cambridge. "A little masterpiece, which every thinking man will
+enjoy."--_The Observer._
+
+84. _LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT_
+
+By Prof. GEORGE MOORE, D.D., LL.D., of Harvard. A detailed examination
+of the books of the Old Testament in the light of the most recent
+research.
+
+90. _THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND_
+
+By Canon E. W. WATSON, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at
+Oxford.
+
+94. _RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS_
+
+By Canon R. H. CHARLES, D.D., D.Litt.
+
+
+_Social Science_
+
+1. _PARLIAMENT_
+
+Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir COURTENAY P. ILBERT,
+G.C.B., K.C.S.I., Clerk of the House of Commons. "The best book on the
+history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's
+'Constitution.'"--_Yorkshire Post._
+
+5. _THE STOCK EXCHANGE_
+
+By F. W. HIRST, Editor of "The Economist." "To an unfinancial mind
+must be a revelation.... The book is as clear, vigorous, and sane as
+Bagehot's 'Lombard Street,' than which there is no higher
+compliment."--_Morning Leader._
+
+6. _IRISH NATIONALITY_
+
+By Mrs J. R. GREEN. "As glowing as it is learned. No book could be
+more timely."--_Daily News._
+
+10. _THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT_
+
+By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P. "Admirably adapted for the purpose of
+exposition."--_The Times._
+
+11. _CONSERVATISM_
+
+By LORD HUGH CECIL, M.A., M.P. "One of those great little books which
+seldom appear more than once in a generation."--_Morning Post._
+
+16. _THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH_
+
+By J. A. HOBSON, M.A. "Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among
+living economists.... Original, reasonable, and illuminating."--_The
+Nation._
+
+21. _LIBERALISM_
+
+By L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A., Professor of Sociology in the University of
+London. "A book of rare quality.... We have nothing but praise for the
+rapid and masterly summaries of the arguments from first principles
+which form a large part of this book."--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+24. _THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY_
+
+By D. H. MACGREGOR, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in the
+University of Leeds. "A volume so dispassionate in terms may be read with
+profit by all interested in the present state of unrest."--_Aberdeen
+Journal._
+
+26. _AGRICULTURE_
+
+By Prof. W. SOMERVILLE, F.L.S. "It makes the results of laboratory work
+at the University accessible to the practical farmer."--_Athenaeum._
+
+30. _ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW_
+
+By W. M. GELDART, M.A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law at
+Oxford. "Contains a very clear account of the elementary principles
+underlying the rules of English Law."--_Scots Law Times._
+
+38. _THE SCHOOL: An Introduction to the Study of Education._
+
+By J. J. FINDLAY, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in Manchester
+University. "An amazingly comprehensive volume.... It is a remarkable
+performance, distinguished in its crisp, striking phraseology as well
+as its inclusiveness of subject-matter."--_Morning Post._
+
+59. _ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY_
+
+By S. J. CHAPMAN, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in Manchester
+University. "Its importance is not to be measured by its price.
+Probably the best recent critical exposition of the analytical method
+in economic science."--_Glasgow Herald._
+
+69. _THE NEWSPAPER_
+
+By G. BINNEY DIBBLEE, M.A. (Illustrated.) The best account extant of
+the organisation of the newspaper press, at home and abroad.
+
+77. _SHELLEY, GODWIN, AND THEIR CIRCLE_
+
+By H. N. BRAILSFORD, M.A. "Mr Brailsford sketches vividly the
+influence of the French Revolution on Shelley's and Godwin's England;
+and the charm and strength of his style make his book an authentic
+contribution to literature."--_The Bookman._
+
+80. _CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT-SHARING_
+
+By ANEURIN WILLIAMS, M.A. "A judicious but enthusiastic history, with much
+interesting speculation on the future of Co-partnership."--_Christian
+World._
+
+81. _PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE_
+
+By E. N. BENNETT, M.A. Discusses the leading aspects of the British
+land problem, including housing, small holdings, rural credit, and the
+minimum wage.
+
+83. _COMMON-SENSE IN LAW_
+
+By Prof. P. VINOGRADOFF, D.C.L.
+
+85. _UNEMPLOYMENT_
+
+By Prof. A. C. PIGOU, M.A.
+
+96. _POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: FROM BACON TO HALIFAX_
+
+By G. P. GOOCH, M.A.
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_ANCIENT EGYPT._ By F. LL. GRIFFITH, M.A.
+
+_A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE._ By HERBERT FISHER, LL.D.
+
+_THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE._ By NORMAN H. BAYNES.
+
+_THE REFORMATION._ By President LINDSAY, LL.D.
+
+_A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA._ By Prof. MILYOUKOV.
+
+_MODERN TURKEY._ By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A.
+
+_FRANCE OF TO-DAY._ By ALBERT THOMAS.
+
+_HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SPAIN._ By J. FITZMAURICE-KELLY, F.B.A.,
+    Litt.D.
+
+_LATIN LITERATURE._ By Prof. J. S. PHILLIMORE.
+
+_ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE._ By ROGER E. FRY.
+
+_LITERARY TASTE._ By THOMAS SECCOMBE.
+
+_SCANDINAVIAN HISTORY & LITERATURE._ By T. C. SNOW.
+
+_THE MINERAL WORLD._ By Sir T. H. HOLLAND, K.C.I.E., D.Sc.
+
+_A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY._ By CLEMENT WEBB, M.A.
+
+_POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bentham to J. S. Mill._ By Prof.
+    W. L. DAVIDSON.
+
+_POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Herbert Spencer to To-day._ By
+    ERNEST BARKER, M.A.
+
+_THE CRIMINAL AND THE COMMUNITY._ By Viscount ST. CYRES.
+
+_THE CIVIL SERVICE._ By GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A.
+
+_THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT._ By JANE ADDAMS and R. A. WOODS.
+
+_GREAT INVENTIONS._ By Prof. J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S.A.
+
+_TOWN PLANNING._ By RAYMOND UNWIN.
+
+
+          London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+     _And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls._
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+Minor punctuation errors and printer errors (omitted or transposed
+letters) have been repaired. Hyphenation has been made consistent.
+
+The following amendments have also been made:
+
+    Page 22--mas amended to was--"... but in the interest of
+    literature, it was a misfortune ..."
+
+    Page 192--be amended to he--"... disbelieved in
+    Liberals, although he believed in Liberalism; ..."
+
+    Page 222--Broente's amended to Bronte's--"These words,
+    spoken by Charlotte Bronte's _Jane Eyre_, ..."
+
+    Page 251--Simon amended to Simeon--"1692. ... Simeon
+    Polotsky's _The Prodigal Son_ acted."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's An Outline of Russian Literature, by Maurice Baring
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OUTLINE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 33005.txt or 33005.zip *****
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