Chapter VI: Book III: Rise of the Russian Novel (1)

I.

The Beginnings of Russian Literature.

From this state of anguish, of unrest, of uncertainty, has been brought forth, like amber from the salt sea, a most interesting literature. Into this relatively peaceful domain we are about to penetrate. But before speaking of the novel itself I must mention as briefly as possible the sources and vicissitudes of Russian letters up to the time when they assumed a national and at the same time a social and political character.

I will avoid tiresome details, and the repetition of Russian names which are formidable and harsh to our senses, besides being confusing and at first sight all very much alike, and much given to terminating in _of_,--a syllable which on Russian lips is nevertheless very euphonious and sweet. I will also avoid the mention of books of secondary importance; for as this is not a course of Russian literature, it would be pedantry to refer to more than those I have read from cover to cover. I will mention in passing only a few authors of lesser genius than the four whom Melchior de Voguié very correctly estimates as the perfect national types; namely, Gogol, Turguenief, Dostoiëwsky, and Tolstoï, and I will give only a succinct review of the primitive period, the classicism and romanticism, the satire and comedy antecedent to Gogol, this much being necessary in order to bring out the transformation due to the prodigious genius of this founder of realism, and consummated in the contemporary novel.

Literature, considered not as rhetorical feats or as the art of speaking and writing well, but as a manifestation of national life or of the peculiar inclinations of a people, exists from the time when the spirit of the people is spontaneously revealed in legends, traditions, proverbs, and songs. The fertility of Russian popular literature is well known to students of folk-lore. Critics have demonstrated to us that between the primitive oral, mythical, and poetical literature of Russia and the present novel (which is profoundly philosophical in character, and inspired by that austere muse, the Real) there is as close a relationship as between the gray-haired grandfather who has all his life followed the plough, and his offspring who holds a chair in a university. Russian literature was born beside the Danube, in the fatherland of the Sclavonic people. The various tribes dispersed themselves over the Black Sea, and the Russian Sclavs, following the course of the Dnieper, began to elaborate their heroic mythology with feats of gods and demi-gods against the forces of Nature, and monsters and other fantastic beings. A warlike mode of life and a semi-savage imagination are reflected in their legends and songs. All this period is covered by the _bilinas_, a word which is explained by Russian etymology to mean _songs of the past_. These epics tell of the exploits of ancient warriors who personify the blind and chaotic forces of Nature and the elements. _Esviatogor_, for example, represents a mountain; _Volk_ may mean a wolf, a bull, or an ant; there is a godlike tiller of the soil who stands for Russian agriculture, and who is the popular and indigenous hero, in opposition to the fighting and adventurous hero _Volga_, who stands for the ruling classes. Perhaps these _bilinas_ and the Finnish Kalevala are the only primitive epics in which the laborer plays a first part and puts the fighting hero into the shade. In these national poems of a people descended from the Scythians, who in the days of Herodotus were proud of calling themselves _farmers_ or _laborers_, the two most attractive figures are the heroes of the plough, Mikula and Ilia; it is as though the singers of long ago started the worship of the peasant, which is the dogma of the present novel, or as though the apotheosis of agriculture were an idea rooted in the deepest soil of the national thought of Russia.

Next after this primitive cycle comes the age of chivalry, known under the name of Kief cycle, which has its focus in the Prince Vladimir called the Red Sun; but even in this Round Table epic we find the heroic _mujik_, the giant Cossack, Ilias de Moron. The splendor of the hero-mythical epoch faded after the advent of Christianity, and the heroes of Kief and Novgorod fell into oblivion; one _bilina_ tells now "the paladins of Holy Russia disappeared; a great new force that was not of this world came upon them," and the paladins, unable to conquer it, and seeing that it multiplied and became only more powerful with every stroke, were afraid, and ran and hid themselves in the caverns, which closed upon them forever. Since that day there are no more paladins in Holy Russia.

In every _bilina_, and also in songs which celebrate the seed-time, the pagan feast of the summer solstice, and the spring-time, we notice the two characteristics of Russian thought,--a lively imagination and a dreamy sadness, which is most evident in the love-songs. On coming in contact with Christianity the pagan tale became a legend, and the clergy, brought from Byzantium by Valdimir the Baptizer, gave the people the Gospel in the Sclavonic tongue, translated by two Greek brothers, Cyril and Methodius, and the day of liturgical and sacred literature was at hand. The apostles of Christianity arranged the alphabet of thirty-eight letters, which represent all the sounds in the Sclav language, and founded also the grammar and rhetoric. As in every other part of Christendom, these early preachers were the first to enlighten the people, bringing ideas of culture entirely new to the barbarous Sclavonic tribes; and the poor monk, bent over his parchment, writing with a sharp-pointed reed, was the first educator of the nation. In the eleventh century the first Russian literary efforts began to take shape, being, like all early-written literature, of essentially clerical origin and character,--such as epistles, sermons, and moral exhortations. The chief writers of that time were the monk Nestor, the metropolitan Nicephorous, and Cyril the Golden-Mouthed, who imitated the florid Byzantine eloquence. At the side of ecclesiastical literature history was born; the lives of the saints prepared the ground for the chroniclers, and Nestor's Chronicle, the first book on Russian history, was written. The early essays in profane history, which took the form of fables and trenchant sayings disclosing a vein of satire, still smack of the ecclesiastical flavor, although they contain the instincts of a laic and civil literature.

The people had their epic, the clergy accumulated their treasures, but the warriors and knights, who with the sovereign formed a separate society, must have their heroic cycle also; and bards and singers were found to give it to them in fragmentary pieces, among which the most celebrated is the "Song of the Host of Igor," which relates the victories of a prince over the savage tribes of the steppes. The poem is a mixture of pagan and Christian wonders, which is only natural, since in the twelfth century (the era of its composition) Christianity, while triumphant in fact, had not yet succeeded in driving out the old Sclavonic deities.

In the eighth century the Tartar invasion interrupted the course of civil literature. Russia then had no time for the remembrance of anything but her disasters, and the Church became again the only depository of the civilization brought from Byzantium, and of the intellectual riches of the nation; for the Khans, who destroyed everything else, regarded the churches and images with superstitious respect. The little then written expresses the grief of Russia over her catastrophe, but in sermon form, presenting it as a punishment from Heaven, and a portent of the end of the world; it was the universal panic of the Middle Ages arrived in Russia three centuries late. Until the fourteenth century there was no revival of historical narrations in sufficient numbers to show the preponderance of the epic spirit in the Russian people. In the fifteenth century, for the first time, oral literature really penetrated into the domain of the written; but the inevitable and tiresome mediæval stories of Alexander the Great and the Siege of Troy, the Thousand and One Nights, and others, entering by way of Servia and Bulgaria, appear among the literature of the southern Sclavs; and tales of chivalry from Byzantium are also rearranged and copied,--an element of imitation and artificiality which never took deep root in Russia, however. Aside from some few tales, the only germs of vitality are to be found in the apocryphal religious narratives, which were an early expression of the spirit of mysticism and exegesis, natural to Muscovite thought; and in the songs, also religious, chanted by pilgrims on their way to visit the shrines, and by the people also, but probably the work of the monks. These are still sung by beggars on the streets, and the people listen with delight.

In the sixteenth century there were Maximus the Greek (the Savonarola of Russia), the priest Silvester, author of "Domostrof," a book which was held to contain the model of ancient Russian society, and lastly the Czar, Ivan the Terrible himself, who wrote many notable epistles, models of irony. The songs of the people still flourished, and they were provided with subject-matter by the awful figure and actions of the emperor, who was beloved by the people, because, like Pedro the Cruel of Castile, he dared to bridle the nobles. The popular poet describes him as giving to a potter the insignia and dignity of a Boyar. This tyrant, the most ferocious that humanity ever endured, busied himself with establishing the art of printing in Russia, with the help of Maximus the Greek, who was a great friend of Aldus the Venetian, the famous printer. According to the Metropolitan Macarius, God himself from his high throne put this thought into the heart of the Czar. On the 1st of May, 1564, the first book printed in Russia, "The Acts of the Apostles," made its appearance.

The Russian theatre grew out of the symbolic ceremonies of the church and the representations given by the Polish Jesuits in the colleges; and through Poland, in the seventeenth century, by means of translations or imitations, came also that kind of literary recreations known in France and Italy during the fourteenth century under the name of novels and facetias. But these did not intercept the natural course of the national spirit, nor drown the popular voice,--the _duma_, or meditation, the religious canticle, the satire, and especially the incessant reiteration of the _bilinas_, which were now devoted to relating the heroic conquests of the Cossacks. The impulse communicated to Russian thought by Peter the Great at last obliterated the chasm between popular and written literature. Peter established in Russia a school of translators; whatever he thought useful and beneficial he had correctly translated, and then he established the academy. He set up the first regular press and founded the first periodical paper. Not having much confidence in ecclesiastical literature, he commanded that the monks should be deprived of pen, ink, and paper; and on the other hand he revived the theatre, which was apparently dead, and under the influence of his reforms there arose the first Russian writer who can properly be called such,--Lomonosof, the personification of academical classicism, who wrote because he thought it his business, in a well-ordered State, to write incessantly, to polish and perfect the taste, the speech, and even the characters of his fellow-countrymen; he was always a rhetorician, a censor, a corrector, and we seem to see him always armed with scissors and rule, pruning and shaping the myrtles in the garden of literature. The Czar pensioned this ornamental poet, after the fashion of French monarchs, and he in turn bequeathed to his country, of course, a heroic poem entitled "Petriada." His best service to the national literature was in the line of philology; he found a language unrefined and hampered by old Sclavonic forms, and he refined it, softened it, made it more flexible, and ready to yield sweeter melody to those who played upon it thereafter.

Semiramis, in her turn, was not less eager to forward the cause of letters; she had also her palace poet, Derjavine, the Pindar of her court; and not being satisfied with this, her imperial hands grasped the foils and fought out long arguments in the periodicals, to which she contributed for a long time. Woman, just at that time emerging from Oriental seclusion, as during the Renaissance in Europe, manifested an extraordinary desire to learn and to exercise her mind. Catherine became a journalist, a satirist, and a dramatic author; and a lady of her court, the Princess Daschkof, directed the Academy of Sciences, and presided over the Russian Academy founded by Catherine for the improvement and purification of the language, while three letters in the new dictionary are the exclusive work of this learned princess.

Catherine effectively protected her literary men, being convinced that letters are a means of helping the advancement of a barbarous people, in fact the highways of communication; and under her influence a literary Pleiad appeared, among whom were Von-Vizine, the first original Russian dramatist; Derjavine, the official bard and oracle; and Kerakof, the pseudo-classic author of the "Rusiada." Court taste prevailed, and Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot ruled as intellectual masters of a people totally opposed to the French in their inmost thoughts.

The thing most grateful to the Russian poet in Catherine's time was to be called the Horace or the Pindar of his country; the nobles hid their Muscovite ruggedness under a coat of Voltairian varnish, and even the seminaries resounded with denunciations of _fanaticism_ and _horrid superstition_. Other nations have been known to go thus masked unawares. But new currents were undermining the possessions of the Encyclopedists. During the last years of Catherine's reign the theosophical doctrines from Sweden and Germany infiltrated Russia; mysticism brought free-masonry, which finally mounted the throne with Alexander I., the tender friend of the sentimental Valeria; and even had Madame Krudener never appeared to shape in her visions the protest of the Russian soul against the dryness and frivolity of the French philosophers, the fresh lyric quality of Rousseau, Florian, and Bernardin Saint-Pierre would still have flowed in upon the people of the North by means of that eminent man and historian, Karamzine.

Before achieving the title of the Titus Livius of Russia, Karamzine, being a keen intellectual observer of what was going on abroad, founded, by means of a novel, the _emotional school_, declaring that the aim of art is "to pour out floods of grateful impressions upon the realms of the sentimental." This sounds like mere jargon, but such was their mode of speech at the time; and that their spirits demanded just such food is proved by the general use of it, and by the tears that rained upon the said novel, in which the Russian _mujik_ appears in the disguise of a shepherd of Arcadia. These innocent absurdities, which were the delight of our own grandmothers, prepared the way for Romanticism, and the appearance of Lermontof and Puchkine.

II.

Russian Romanticism.--the Lyric Poets.

The period of lyric poetry represented by these two excellent poets, Lermontof and Puchkine, was considered the most glorious in Russian literature, and there are yet many who esteem it as such in spite of the contemporary novel. Undoubtedly rhyme can do wonders with this rich tongue in which words are full of color, melody, and shape, as well as ideas. A fine critic has said that Russian poetry is untranslatable, and that one must feel the beauty of certain stanzas of Lermontof and Puchkine sensually, to realize why they are beyond even the most celebrated verses in the world.

At the beginning of the century classicism was in its decline; Russia was leaving her youth behind her, and after 1812 she became totally changed. The Napoleonic wars caused the alliance with Germany, and secret societies of German origin flourished under the favor of the versatile Alexander I. Weary of the artificial literature imposed by the iron will of Peter the Great, and stirred by a great desire for independence, like all the other nations awakened by Napoleon, Russia held her breath and listened to the birdlike song of the harbingers of a new era, to the great romantic poets who, almost simultaneously and with marvellous accord, burst forth in England, Italy, France, Spain, and Russia. The air was full of melody like the sudden twang of harp-strings in the darkness of the night; and perhaps the autocratic severity of Nicholas I. by forcing attention from public affairs and concentrating it upon literature, was a help rather than a hindrance to this revelation and development.

Alexander Puchkine, the demi-god of Russian verse, carried African as well as Sclavonic blood in his veins, being the grandson of an Abyssinian named Abraham Hannibal, a sort of Othello upon whom Peter the Great bestowed the rank of general and married him to a lady of the court. During the poet's childhood an old servant beguiled him with legends, fables, and popular tales, and the seed fell upon good ground. He left home at the age of fourteen, having quarrelled with all his family and become an out-and-out Voltairian; his professor at the Lyceum--of whom no more needs be said than that he was a brother of Marat--had instilled into his youthful mind the superficial atheism then the fashion; his other tutors declared that this impetuous and fanciful child was throwing away body and soul; yet, when the occasion came, Puchkine remembered all that his old nurse had told him, and found himself with an exquisite æsthetic instinct, in touch with the popular feeling.

When Nicholas I., in December, 1825, mounted the throne vacated by the death of Alexander I. and the renunciation of the Grand-Duke Constantine, Puchkine, then scarcely more than twenty-six years of age, found himself in exile for the second time. His first appearance in public life coincided with the reactionary mood of Alexander I. and the favoritism of the retrogressive minister, Count Arakschef; and the young men from the Lyceum, who had been steeping their souls in liberalism, found themselves defrauded of their expectations of active life, discussions closed, meetings prohibited, and Russia again in a trance of Asiatic immobility. The young nobility began to entertain themselves with conspiracy; and those who had no talent for that, spent their time in drinking and dissipation. Puchkine was as much inclined toward the one as the other. His passionate temperament led him into all sorts of adventures; his eager imagination and his literary tastes incited him to political essays, though under pain of censure. Living amid a whirl of amusement, and coveting an introduction to aristocratic circles, he launched his celebrated poem of "Russia and Ludmilla," which placed him at once at the head of the poets of his day, who had formed themselves into a society called "Arzamas," which was to Russian Romanticism what the Cénacle was to the French,--a centre of attack and defence against classicism; but at length their literary discussions overstepped the forbidden territory of politics, and certain ideas were broached which ended in the conspiracy of December. If Puchkine was not himself a conspirator, he was at least acquainted with the movement; his ode to liberty alarmed the police, and the Czar said to the director of the Lyceum, "Your former pupil is inundating Russia with revolutionary verses, and every boy knows them by heart." That same afternoon the Czar signed the order for Puchkine's banishment,--a great good-fortune for the poet; for had he not been banished he might have been implicated in the conspiracy about to burst forth, and sent to Siberia or to the quicksilver mines. He was expelled from Odessa, which was his first place of confinement, because his Byronic bravado had a pernicious influence upon the young men of the place, and he was sent home to his father, with whom he could come to no understanding whatever. While there he heard of the death of Alexander and the events of December. Upon knowing that his friends were all compromised and under arrest, he started for St. Petersburg, but having met a priest and seen a hare cross his path, he considered these ill omens, and, yielding to superstition, he turned back. Soon afterward he wrote to the new Czar begging reprieve of banishment, which was granted. The Iron Czar sent for him to come to the palace, and held with him a conversation or dialogue which has become famous in the annals of the historians:

"If you had found yourself in St. Petersburg on the 25th of December, where would you have been?" asked Nicholas.

"Among the rebels," answered the poet.

Far from being angry, the sovereign was pleased with his reply, and he embraced Puchkine, saying: "Your banishment is at an end; and do not let fear of the censors spoil your poetry, Alexander, son of Sergius, for I myself will be your censor."

This is not the only instance of this inflexible autocrat's warm-heartedness. More than once his imperial hand stayed the sentence of the censors and gave the wing to genius. Nicholas was not afraid of art, and was, besides, an intelligent amateur of literature. We shall see how he protected even the satire of Gogol. And so, with a royal suavity which softens the most selfish character, Nicholas gained to his side the first poet of Russia, and forever alienated him from the cause for which his friends suffered in gloomy fortresses and in exile, or perished on the scaffold. Puchkine had no other choice than to accept the situation or forfeit his freedom,--to make peace with the emperor or to go and vegetate in some village and bury his talent alive. He chose his vocation as poet, accepted the imperial favor, and returned to St. Petersburg, where he found a remnant of the Arzamas, but now languid and without creative fire. Being restored to his place in high society, he tasted the delights of living in a sphere with which his refined and aristocratic nature was in harmony. He was a poet; he enjoyed the privileges and immunities of a demi-god, the just tribute paid to the productive genius of beauty. And yet at times the pride and independence hushed within his soul stirred again, and he thought with horror upon the hypocrisy of his position as imperial oracle. But he found himself at the height of his glory, doing his best work, seldom annoyed by the censorial scissors, thanks to the Czar; and so, flattered by the throne, the court, and the public, he led to the altar his "brown-skinned virgin," his beautiful Natalia, with whom he was so deeply in love. Having satisfied every earthly desire, he must needs, like Polycrates, throw his ring into the sea.

All his happiness came to a sudden end, and not only his happiness, but his life, went to pay his debt to that high society which had received him with smiles and fair promises. Puchkine's end is as dramatic as any novel. A certain French Legitimist who had been well received by the nobility at St. Petersburg took advantage of the chivalrous customs then in vogue there, to pay court to the poet's beautiful wife, electing her as the lady of his thoughts without disguise. Society protected this little skirmish, and assisted the gallant to meet his lady at every entertainment and in every _salon_; and as Puchkine, though quite unsuspicious, showed plainly that he did not enjoy the game, they amused themselves with exciting and annoying him, ridiculing him, and making him the butt of epigrams and anonymous verses. The marriage of "Dante"--as the adorer of his wife was called--with his wife's sister, far from calming his nerves, only irritated him the more, and he believed it to be a stratagem on the lover's part, a means of approaching the nearer to his desires. Becoming desperate, he sought and obtained a challenge to a duel, and fell mortally wounded by a ball from his adversary. Two days later he died, having just received a letter from the emperor, saying:--

"Dear Alexander, Son of Sergius,--If it is the will of
Providence that we should never meet again in this world, I
counsel you to die like a Christian. Give yourself no
anxiety for your wife and children; I will care for them."

Russia cried out with indignation at the news of his death, accusing polite society in round terms of having taken the part of the professional libertine against the husband,--of the French adventurer against their illustrious compatriot; and Lermontof voiced the national anger in some celebrated lines to this effect:--

"Thy last days were poisoned by the vicious ridicule of low
detractors; thou hast died thirsting for vengeance, moaning
bitterly to see thy most beautiful hopes vanished; none
understood the deep emotion of thy last words, and the last
sigh of thy dying lips was lost."

But I agree with those who, in spite of this fine elegy, do not regret the premature end of the romantic poet. His life, exuberant, brilliant, fecund, passionate, like that of Byron, could have no more appropriate termination than a pistol-shot. He died before the end of romanticism--his tragic history lent him a halo which lifts his figure above the mists of time. I have seen Victor Hugo and our own Zorilla in their old age, and I was not guilty of wishing them anything but long life and prosperity; but, æsthetically speaking, it seemed to me that both of them had lived forty years too long, and that Alfred de Musset, Espronceda, and Byron were well off in their glorious tombs.

Puchkine belongs undeniably to the great general currents of European literature; only now and then does he manifest the peculiar genius of his country which was so strongly marked in Gogol. But it would be unjust to consider him a mere imitator of foreign romanticists, and some even claim that he always had one foot upon the soil of classicism, taking the phrase in the Helenic sense, as particularly shown in his "Eugene Oneguine," and that, were he to live again, his talents would undergo a transformation and shine forth in the modern novel and the national theatre. Besides being a lyric poet of first rank, Puchkine must also be considered a superb prose writer, having learned from Voltaire a harmony of arrangement, a discreet selection of details, and a concise, clear, and rapid phrasing. His novel, "The Captain's Daughter," is extremely pretty and interesting, at times amusing, or again very touching, and in my opinion preferable in its simplicity to the interminable narratives of Walter Scott. But Puchkine has one remarkable peculiarity, which is, that while he had a keen sympathy with the popular poetry, and was fully sensible of the revelation of it by Gogol, which he applauded with all his heart, yet the author of "Boris Godonof" was so caught in the meshes of romanticism that he never could employ his faculties in poetry of a national character. Puchkine's works have no ethnical value at all. His melancholy is not the despairing sadness of the Russian, but the romantic _morbidezza_ expressed often in much the same words by Byron, Espronceda, and de Musset. The phenomenon is common, and easily explained. It lies in the fact that romanticism was always and everywhere prejudicial to the manifestation of nationality, and made itself a nation apart, composed of half-a-dozen persons from every European country. Realism, with its principles--whether tacitly or explicitly accepted--of human verities, heredity, atavism, race and place influences, etc., became a necessity in order that writers might follow their natural instincts and speak in their own mother tongue.

Within the restricted circle of poets who hovered around Puchkine, one deserves especial mention, namely, Lermontof. He is the second lyric poet of Russia, and perhaps embodies the spirit of romanticism even more than Puchkine; he is the real Russian Byron. His life is singularly like that of Puchkine, he having also been banished to the Caucasus, and for the very reason of having written the elegy upon Puchkine's death; like him he was also killed in a duel, but still earlier in life, and before he had reached the plenitude of his powers.

Lermontof became the singer of the Caucasian region. At that time it was really a great favor to send a poet to the mountains, for there he came in contact with things that reclaimed and lifted his fancy,--air, sun, liberty, a wooded and majestic landscape, picturesque and charming peasant-maidens, wild flowers full of new and virginal perfume like the Haydees and Fior d'Alizas sung of by our Western poets. There they forgot the deceits of civilization and the weariness of mind that comes of too much reading; there the brain was refreshed, the nerves calmed, and the moral fibre strengthened. Puchkine, Lermontof, and Tolstoï, each in his own way, have lauded the regenerative virtue of the snow-covered mountains. But Lermontof in particular was full of it, lived in it, and died in it, after his fatal wound at the age of twenty-six, when public opinion had just singled him out as Puchkine's successor. He had drunk deeply of Byron's fountain, and even resembled Byron in his discontent, restlessness, and violent passions, which more than Byron's were tinged with a stripe of malice and pride, so that his enemies used to say that to describe Lucifer he needed only to look at himself in the glass. There is an unbridled freedom, a mocking irony, and at times a deep melancholy at the bottom of his poetic genius; it is inferior to Puchkine's in harmony and completeness, but exceeds it in an almost painful and thrilling intensity; there was more gall in his soul, and therefore more of what has been called subjectivity, even amounting to a fierce egoism. Lermontof is the high-water mark of romanticism, and after his death it necessarily began to ebb; it had exhausted curses, fevers, complaints, and spleens, and now the world of literature was ready for another form of art, wider and more human, and that form was realism.

I am sorry to have to deal in _isms_, but the fault is not mine; we are handling ideas, and language offers no other way. The transition came by means of satire, which is exceptionally fertile in Russia. A genius of wonderful promise arose in Griboiëdof, a keen observer and moralist, who deserves to be mentioned after Puchkine, if only for one comedy which is considered the gem of the Russian stage, and is entitled (freely rendered) "Too Clever by Half." The hero is a misanthropic patriot who sighs for the good old times and abuses the mania for foreign education and imitation. This shows the first impulse of the nation to know and to assert itself in literature as in everything else. Being prohibited by the censor, the play circulated privately in manuscript; every line became a proverb, and the people found their very soul reflected in it. Five years later, when Puchkine was returning from the Caucasus, he met with a company of Georgians who were drawing a dead body in a cart: it was the body of Griboiëdof, who had been assassinated in an insurrection.

Between the decline of the romantic period and the appearance of new forms inspired by a love of the truth, there hovered in other parts of Europe undefined and colorless shapes, sterile efforts and shallow aspirations which never amounted to anything. But not so in Russia. Romanticism vanished quickly, for it was an aristocratic and artificial condition, without root and without fruit conducive to the well-being of a nation which had as yet scarcely entered on life, and which felt itself strong and eager for stimulus and aim, eager to be heard and understood; realism grew up quickly, for the very youth of the nation demanded it. Russia, which until then had trod with docile steps upon the heels of Europe, was at last to take the lead by creating the realistic novel.

She had not to do violence to her own nature to accomplish this. The Russian, little inclined to metaphysics, unless it be the fatalist philosophy of the Hindus, more quick at poetic conceptions than at rational speculations, carries realism in his veins along with scientific positivism; and if any kind of literature be spontaneous in Russia it is the epic, as shown now in fragmentary songs and again in the novels. Before ever they were popular in their own country, Balzac and Zola were admired and understood in Russia.

The two great geniuses of lyric poetry, Puchkine and Lermontof, confirm this theory. Though both perished before the descriptive and observing faculties of their countrymen were matured, they had both instinctively turned to the novel, and perhaps the possible direction of their genius was thus shadowed forth as by accident. Puchkine seems to me endowed with qualities which would have made him a delightful novel-writer. His heroes are clearly and firmly drawn and very attractive; he has a certain healthy joyousness of tone which is quite classic, and a brightness and freedom of coloring that I like; in the short historic narrative he has left us we never see the slightest trace of the lyric poet. As to Lermontof, is it not marvellous that a man who died at the age of twenty-six years should have produced anything like a novel? But he left a sort of autobiography, which is extremely interesting, entitled "A Contemporary Hero," which hero, Petchorine by name, is really the type of the romantic period, exacting, egotistical, at war with himself and everybody else, insatiable for love, yet scorning life, a type that we meet under different forms in many lands; now swallowing poison like De Musset's Rolla, now refusing happiness like Adolfo, now consumed with remorse like Réné, now cocking his pistol like Werther, and always in a bad humor, and to tell the truth always intolerable. "My hero," writes Lermontof, "is the portrait of a generation, not of an individual." And he makes that hero say, "I have a wounded soul, a fancy unappeased, a heart that nothing can ease. Everything becomes less and less to me. I have accustomed myself to suffering and joy alike, and I have neither feelings nor impressions; everything wearies me." But there are many fine pages in the narratives of Lermontof besides these poetical declamations. Perhaps the novel might also have offered him a brilliant future.

The sad fate of the writers during the reign of Nicholas I. is remarkable, when we consider how favorable it was to art in other respects. Alexander Herzen calculated that within thirty years the three most illustrious Russian poets were assassinated or killed in a duel, three lesser ones died in exile, two became insane, two died of want, and one by the hand of the executioner. Alas! and among these dark shadows we discern one especially sad; it is that of Nicholas Gogol, a soul crushed by its own greatness, a victim to the noblest infirmity and the most generous mania that can come upon a man, a martyr to love of country.

III.

Russian Realism: Gogol, its Founder.

Gogol was born in 1809; he was of Cossack blood, and first saw the light of this world amid the steppes which he was afterward to describe so vividly. His grandfather, holding the child upon his knee, amused him with stories of Russian heroes and their mighty deeds, not so very long past either, for only two generations lay between Gogol and the Cossack warriors celebrated in the _bilinas_. Sometimes a wandering minstrel sang these for him, accompanying himself on the _bandura_. In this school was his imagination taught. We may imagine the effect upon ourselves of hearing the Romance of the Cid under such circumstances. When Gogol went to St. Petersburg with the intention of joining the ranks of Russian youth there, though ostensibly to seek employment, he carried a light purse and a glowing fancy. He found that the great city was a desert more arid than the steppes, and even after obtaining an office under the government he endured poverty and loneliness such as no one can describe so well as himself. His position offered him one advantage which was the opportunity of studying the bureaucratic world, and of drawing forth from amid the dust of official papers the material for some of his own best pages. On the expiration of his term of office he was for a while blown about like a dry leaf. He tried the stage but his voice failed him; he tried teaching but found he had no vocation for it. Nor had he any aptitude for scholarship. In the Gymnasium of Niejine his rank among the pupils was only medium; German, mathematics, Latin, and Greek were little in his line; he was an illiterate genius. But in his inmost soul dwelt the conviction that his destiny held great things in store for him. In his struggle with poverty, the remembrance of the hours he had passed at school reading Puchkine and other romantic poets began to urge him to try his fortune at literature. One day he knocked with trembling hand at Puchkine's door; the great poet was still asleep, having spent the night in gambling and dissipation, but on waking, he received the young novice with a cordial welcome, and with his encouragement Gogol published his first work, called "Evenings at the Farm." It met with amazing success; for the first time the public found an author who could give them a true picture of Russian life. Puchkine had hit the mark in advising him to study national scenes and popular customs; and who knows whether perhaps his conscience did not reproach him with shutting his own eyes to his country and the realities she offered him, and stopping his ears against the voice of tradition and the charms of Nature?

Gogol's "Evenings at the Farm" is the echo of his own childhood; in these pages the Russia of the people lives and breathes in landscapes, peasants, rustic customs, dialogues, legends, and superstitions. It is a bright and simple work, not yet marked with the pessimism which later on darkened the author's soul; it has a strong smell of the soil; it is full of dialect and colloquial diminutive and affectionate terms, with now and then a truly poetical passage. Is it not strange that the intellect of a nation sometimes wanders aimlessly through foreign lands seeking from without what lies handier at home, and borrowing from strangers that of which it has a super-abundance already? And how sweet is the surprise one feels at finding so beautiful the things which were hidden from our understanding by their very familiarity!

"The Tales of Mirgorod," which followed the "Evenings at the Farm," contain one of the gems of Gogol's writings, the story of "Taras Boulba." Gogol has the quality of the epic poet, though he is generally noted only for his merits as a novelist; but judging from his greatest works, "Taras Boulba" and "Dead Souls," I consider his epic power to be of the first class, and in truth I hold him to be, rather more than a modern novelist, a master poet who has substituted for the lyric poetry brought into favor by romanticism the epic form, which is much more suited to the Russian spirit. He is the first who has caught the inspiration of the _bilinas_, the hero-songs, the Sclavonic poetry created by the people. The novel, it is true, is one manifestation of epic poetry, and in a certain way every novelist is a rhapsodist who recites his canto of the poem of modern times; but there are some descriptive, narrative fictions, which, imbued with a greater amount of the poetic element united to a certain large comprehensive character, more nearly resemble the ancient idea of the epopee; and of this class I may mention "Don Quixote," and perhaps "Faust," as examples. By this I do not mean to place Gogol on the same plane as Goethe and Cervantes; yet I associate them in my mind, and I see in Gogol's books the transition from the lyric to the epic which is to result in the true novel that begins with Turguenief.

All the world is agreed that "Taras Boulba" is a true prose poem, modelled in the Homeric style, the hero of which is a people that long preserved a primitive character and customs. Gogol declared that he merely allowed himself to reproduce the tales of his grandfather, who thus becomes the witness and actor in this Cossack Iliad.

One charming trait in Gogol is his love for the past and his fidelity to tradition; they have as strong an attraction for him certainly as the seductions of the future, and both are the outcome of the two sublime sentiments which divide every heart,--retrospection and anticipation. Gogol, who is so skilful in sketching idyllic scenes of the tranquil life of country proprietors, clergy, and peasants, is no less skilful in his descriptions of the adventurous existence of the Cossack; sometimes he is so faithful to the simple grandeur of his grandfather's style, that though the action in "Taras Boulba" takes place in recent times, it seems a tale of primeval days.

The story of this novel--I had almost said this poem--unfolds among the Cossacks of the Don and the Dnieper, who were at that time a well-preserved type of the ancient warlike Scythians that worshipped the blood-stained sword. Old Taras Boulba is a wild animal, but a very interesting wild animal; a rude and majestic warrior-like figure cast in Homeric mould. There is, I confess, just a trace of the leaven of romanticism in Taras. Not all in vain had Gogol hidden Puchkine's works under his pillow in school-days; but the whole general tone recalls inevitably the grand naturalism of Homer, to which is added an Oriental coloring, vivid and tragical. Taras Boulba is an Ataman of the Cossacks, who has two young sons, his pride and his hope, studying at the University of Kief. On a declaration of war between the savage Cossack republic and Poland, the old hawk calls his two nestlings and commands them to exchange the book for the sword. One of the sons, bewitched by the charms of a Polish maiden, deserts from the Cossack camp and fights in the ranks of the enemy; he at length falls into the power of his enraged father, who puts him to death in punishment for his treason. After dreadful battles and sieges, starvation and suffering, Taras dies, and with him the glory and the liberty of the Cossacks. Such is the argument of this simple story, which begins in a manner not unlike the Tale of the Cid. The two sons of Taras arrive at their father's house, and the father begins to ridicule their student garb.

"'Do not mock at us, father,' says the elder.

"'Listen to the gentleman! And why should I not mock at
you, I should like to know?'

"'Because, even though you are my father, I swear by the
living God, I will smite you.'

"'Hi! hi! What? Your father?' cries Taras, receding a step
or two.

"'Yes, my own father; for I will take offence from nobody
at all.'

"'How shall we fight then,--with fists?' exclaims the
father in high glee.

"'However you like.'

"'With fists, then,' answers Taras, squaring off at him.
'Let us see what sort of fellow you are, and what sort of
fists you have.'"

And so father and son, instead of embracing after a long absence, begin to pommel one another with naked fists, in the ribs, back, and chest, each advancing and receding in turn.

"'Why, he fights well,' exclaims Taras, stopping to take
breath. 'He is a hero,' he adds, readjusting his clothes. 'I
had better not have put him to the proof. But he will be a
great Cossack! Good! my son, embrace me now.'"

This is like the delight of Diego Lainez in the Spanish Romanceros, when he says, "Your anger appeases my own, and your indignation gives me pleasure."

Could Gogol have been acquainted with the Tale of the Cid and the other Spanish Romanceros? I do not think it too audacious to believe it possible, when we know that this author was a delighted reader of "Don Quixote," and really drew inspiration from it for his greatest work. But let us return to "Taras Boulba." Another admirable passage is on the parting of the mother and sons. The poor wife of Taras is the typical woman of the warlike tribes, a gentle and miserable creature amid a fierce horde of men who are for the most part celibates,--a creature once caressed roughly for a few moments by her harsh husband, and then abandoned, and whose love instincts have concentrated themselves upon the fruits of his early fugitive affection. She sees again her beloved sons who are to spend but one night at home,--for at break of day the father leads them forth to battle, where perhaps at the first shock some Tartar may cut off their heads and hang them by the hair at his saddle-girths. She watches them while they sleep, kept awake herself by hope and fear.

"'Perhaps,' she says to herself, 'when Boulba awakes he will
put off his departure one or two days; perhaps he was drunk,
and did not think how soon he was taking them away from
me.'"

But at dawn her maternal hopes vanish; the old Cossack makes ready to set off.

"When the mother saw her sons leap to horse, she rushed
toward the younger, whose face showed some trace of
tenderness; she grasped the stirrup and the saddle-girth,
and would not let go, and her eyes were wide with agony and
despair. Two strong Cossacks seized her with firm but
respectful hands, and bore her away to the house. But
scarcely had they released her upon the threshold, when she
sprang out again quicker than a mountain-goat, which was the
more remarkable in a woman of her age; with superhuman
effort she held back the horse, gave her son a wild,
convulsive embrace, and again was carried away. The young
Cossacks rode off in silence, choking their tears for fear
of their father; and the father, too, had a queer feeling
about his heart, though he took care that it should not be
noticed."

In another place I have translated his magnificent description of the steppe, and I should like to quote the admirable paragraphs on starvation, on the killing of Ostap Boulba, and the death of Taras. As an example of the extreme simplicity with which Gogol manages his most dramatic passages and yet obtains an intense and powerful effect, I will give the scene in which Taras takes the life of his son by his own hand,--a scene which Prosper Mérimée imitated in his celebrated sketch of "Mateo Falcone."

Andry comes out of the city, which was attacked by the Cossacks.

"At the head of the squadron galloped a horseman, handsomer
and haughtier than the others. His black hair floated from
beneath his bronze helmet; around his arm was bound a
beautifully embroidered scarf. Taras was stupefied on
recognizing in him his son Andry. But the latter, inflamed
with the ardor of combat, eager to merit the prize which
adorned his arm, threw himself forward like a young hound,
the handsomest, the fleetest, the strongest of the pack....
Old Taras stood a moment, watching Andry as he cut his way
by blows to the right and the left, laying the Cossacks
about him. At last his patience was exhausted.

"'Do you strike at your own people, you devil's whelp?' he
cried.

"Andry, galloping hard away, suddenly felt a strong hand
pulling at his bridle-rein. He turned his head and saw
Taras before him. He grew pale, like a child caught idling
by his master. His ardor cooled as though it had never
blazed; he saw only his terrible father, motionless and
calm before him.

"'What are you doing?' exclaimed Taras, looking at the
young man sharply. Andry could not reply, and his eyes
remained fixed upon the ground.

"'How now, my son? Have your Polish friends been of much
use to you?' Andry was dumb as before.

"'You commit felony, you barter your religion, you sell
your own people.... But wait, wait.... Get down.' Like an
obedient child Andry alighted from his horse, and, more
dead than alive, stood before his father.

"'Stand still. Do not move. I gave you life, I will take
your life away,' said Taras then; and going back a step he
took the musket from his shoulder. Andry was white as wax.
He seemed to move his lips and to murmur a name. But it
was not his country's name, nor his mother's, nor his
brother's; it was the name of the beautiful Polish maiden.
Taras fired. As the wheat-stalk bends after the stroke of
the sickle, Andry bent his head and fell upon the grass
without uttering a word. The man who had slain his son
stood a long time contemplating the body, beautiful even in
death. The young face, so lately glowing with strength and
winsome beauty, was still wonderfully comely, and his
eyebrows, black and velvety, shaded his pale features.

"'What was lacking to make him a true Cossack?' said
Boulba. 'He was tall, his eyebrows were black, he had a
brave mien, and his fists were strong and ready to fight.
And he has perished, perished without glory, like a
cowardly dog.'"

In the opinion of Guizot there is perhaps no true epic poem in the modern age besides "Taras Boulba," in spite of some defects in it and the temptation to compare it with Homer to its disadvantage. But Gogol's glory is not derived solely from his epopee of the Cossacks. His especial merit, or at least his greatest service to the literature of his country, lies in his having been what neither Lermontof nor Puchkine could be; namely, the centre at which romanticism and realism join hands, the medium of a smooth and easy transition from lyric poetry, more or less imported from abroad, and the national novel; the founder of the _natural school_, which was the advance sentinel of modern art.

This tendency is first exhibited in a little sketch inserted in the same volume with Taras Boulba, and entitled "The Small Proprietors of Former Times," also translated as "Old-fashioned Farmers," or "Old-time Proprietors,"--a story of the commonplace, full of keen observations and wrought out in the methods of the great contemporary novelists. About the year 1835, at the height of the romantic period, Gogol gave up his official employment forever, exclaiming, "I am going to be a free Cossack again; I will belong to nobody but myself." He then published a little volume of _Arabesques_,--a collection of disconnected articles, criticisms, and sketches, chiefly interesting because by him. His short stories of this period are the stirrings of his awakening realism; and among them the one most worthy of notice is "The Cloak," which is filled with a strain of sympathy and pity for the poor, the ignorant, the plain, and the dull people,--social zeros, so different from the proud and aristocratic ideal of romanticism, and who owe their title of citizenship in Russian literature to Gogol. The hero of the story is an awkward, half-imbecile little office-clerk, who knows nothing but how to copy, copy, copy; a martyr to bitter cold and poverty, and whose dearest dream is to possess a new cloak, for which he saves and hoards sordidly and untiringly. The very day on which he at last fulfils his desire, some thieves make off with his precious cloak. The police, to whom he carries his complaint, laugh in his face, and the poor fellow falls a victim to the deepest melancholy, and dies of a broken heart shortly after.

"And," says Gogol, "St. Petersburg went on its way without
Acacio, son of Acacio, just exactly as though it had never
dreamed of his existence. This creature that nobody cared
for, nobody loved, nobody took any interest in,--not even
the naturalist who sticks a pin through a common fly and
studies it attentively under a microscope,--this poor
creature disappeared, vanished, went to the other world
without anything in particular ever having happened to him
in this.... But at least once before he died he had welcomed
that bright guest, Fortune, whom we all hope to see; to his
eyes she appeared under the form of a cloak. And then
misfortune fell upon him as suddenly and as darkly as it
ever falls upon the great ones of the earth."