A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections Part 20

They roamed for a long time about the island without any success whatever, but at last the penetrating smell of bread-crust and sour sheepskin put them on the track. Under a tree, flat on his back, with his fists under his head, lay a huge peasant fast asleep, and shirking work in the most impudent manner. There were no bounds to the wrath of the Generals.

"Asleep, lazybones!" and they flung themselves upon him; "and you don't move so much as an ear, when here are two Generals who have been dying of hunger these two days! March off, this moment, to work!"

The man rose; he saw that the Generals were stern. He would have liked to give them the slip, but they had become fairly rigid when they grasped him.

And he began to work under their supervision.

First of all he climbed a tree and picked half a score of the ripest apples for the Generals, and took one, a sour one, for himself. Then he dug in the earth and got some potatoes; then he took two pieces of wood, rubbed them together, and produced fire. Then he made a snare from his own hair and caught a hazel-hen. Last of all, he arranged the fire, and cooked such a quant.i.ty of different provisions that the idea even occurred to the Generals, "would it not be well to give the lazy fellow a little morsel?"

The Generals watched the peasant's efforts, and their hearts played merrily. They had already forgotten that they had nearly died of hunger on the preceding day, and they thought, "What a good thing it is to be a general--then you never go to destruction anywhere."

"Are you satisfied, Generals?" asked the big, lazy peasant.

"We are satisfied, my dear friend, we perceive your zeal,"

replied the Generals.

"Will you not permit me to rest now?"

"Rest, my good friend, only first make us a rope."

The peasant immediately collected wild hemp, soaked it in water, beat it, worked it--and by evening the rope was done.

With this rope the Generals bound the peasant to a tree so that he should not run away, and then they lay down to sleep.

One day pa.s.sed, then another; the big, coa.r.s.e peasant became so skilful that he even began to cook soup in the hollow of his hand. Our Generals became jovial, light-hearted, fat, and white. They began to say to each other that, here they were living with everything ready to hand while their pensions were acc.u.mulating and acc.u.mulating in Petersburg.

"What do you think, your Excellency, was there really a tower of Babel, or is that merely a fable?" one General would say to the other, as they ate their breakfast.

"I think, your Excellency, that it really was built; because, otherwise, how can we explain the fact that many different languages exist in the world?"

"Then the flood must have occurred also?"

"The flood did happen, otherwise, how could the existence of antediluvian animals be explained? The more so as it is announced in the 'Moscow News'...."

"Shall we not read the 'Moscow News'?"

Then they would hunt up that copy, seat themselves in the shade, and read it through from end to end; what people had been eating in Moscow, eating in Tula, eating in Penza, eating in Ryazan--and it had no effect on them; it did not turn their stomachs.

In the long run, the Generals got bored. They began to refer more and more frequently to the cooks whom they had left behind them in Petersburg, and they even wept, on the sly.

"What is going on now in Pettifoggers Street, your Excellency?"

one General asked the other.

"Don't allude to it, your Excellency! My whole heart is sore!"

replied the other General.

"It is pleasant here, very pleasant--there are no words to describe it; but still, it is awkward for us to be all alone, isn't it? And I regret my uniform also."

"Of course you do! Especially as it is of the fourth cla.s.s,[40]

so that it makes you dizzy to gaze at the embroidery alone!"

Then they began to urge the peasant: Take them, take them to Pettifoggers Street! And behold! The peasant, it appeared, even knew all about Pettifoggers Street; had been there; his mouth had watered at it, but he had not had a taste of it!

"And we are Generals from Pettifoggers Street, you know!" cried the Generals joyfully.

"And I, also, if you had only observed; a man hangs outside a house, in a box, from a rope, and washes the wall with color, or walks on the roof like a fly. I am that man," replied the peasant.

And the peasant began to cut capers, as though to amuse his Generals, because they had been kind to him, an idle sluggard, and had not scorned his peasant toil. And he built a ship--not a ship exactly, but a boat--so that they could sail across the ocean-sea, up to Pettifoggers Street.

"But look to it, you rascal, that you don't drown us!" said the Generals, when they saw the craft pitching on the waves.

"Be easy, Generals, this is not my first experience," replied the peasant, and began to make preparations for departure.

The peasant collected soft swansdown, and lined the bottom of the boat with it; having done this, he placed the Generals on the bottom, made the sign of the cross over them, and set sail.

The pen cannot describe, neither can the tongue relate, what terror the Generals suffered during their journey, from storms and divers winds. But the peasant kept on rowing and rowing, and fed the Generals on herrings.

At last, behold Mother Neva, and the splendid Katherine Ca.n.a.l, and great Pettifoggers Street! The cook-maids clasped their hands in amazement at the sight of their Generals, so fat, white, and merry! The Generals drank their coffee, ate rolls made with milk, eggs, and b.u.t.ter, and put on their uniforms.

Then they went to the treasury, and the pen cannot describe, neither can the tongue relate, how much money they received there.

But they did not forget the peasant; they sent him a winegla.s.s of vodka and a silver five-kopek piece.[41] "Make merry, big, coa.r.s.e peasant!"

While Turgeneff represented the "western" and liberal element (with a tinge of the "red") in the school of the '40's, and Gontcharoff stood for the bourgeois and opportunist ideals of the St. Petersburg bureaucrats, Count Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy penetrated more profoundly into the depths of the spirit of the times than any other writer of the period in the matter of a.n.a.lysis and skepticism which characterized that school, and carried them to the extremes of pitiless logic and radicalness, approaching more closely than any other to democratic and national ideals. But notwithstanding all his genius, Count Tolstoy was not able to free himself to any great extent from his epoch, his environment, his contemporaries. His special talents merely caused him to find it impossible to reconcile himself to the state of affairs existing around him; and so, instead of progressing, he turned back and sought peace of mind and a firm doctrine in the distant past of primitive Christianity. Sincere as he undoubtedly is in his propaganda of self-simplification and self-perfection--one might almost call it "self-annihilation"--his new att.i.tude has wrought great and most regrettable havoc with his later literary work, with some few exceptions.

And yet, in pursuing this course, he did not strike out an entirely new path for himself; his youth was pa.s.sed in an epoch when the ideal of personal perfection and self-surrender stood in the foreground, and const.i.tuted the very essence of Russian progress.

Count L. N. Tolstoy was born on August 28, O. S., 1828 (September 9th, N. S.), in the village of Yasnaya Polyana, in the government of Tula.

His mother, born Princess Volkonsky (Marya Nikolaevna), died before he was two years old, and his father's sister, Countess A. T. Osten-Saken, and a distant relative, Madame T. A. Ergolsky, took charge of him. When he was nine years old the family removed to Moscow, and his father died soon afterwards. Lyeff Nikolaevitch, his brother Dmitry, and his sister Marya then returned to the country estate, while his elder brother Nikolai remained in Moscow with Countess Osten-Saken and studied at the University of Moscow. Three years later, the Countess Osten-Saken died, and another aunt on the father's side, Madame P. I. Yushkoff, who resided in Kazan, became their guardian. Lyeff Nikolaevitch went there to live, and in 1843 he entered the University of Kazan in the philological course, but remained in it only one year, because the professor of history (who had quarreled with Tolstoy's relatives) gave him impossibly bad marks, in addition to which he received bad marks from the professor of German, although he was better acquainted with that language than any other member of his course. He was compelled to change to the law course, where he remained for two years. In 1848 he took the examination for "candidate" in the University of St.

Petersburg. "I knew literally nothing," he says of himself, "and I literally began to prepare myself for the examination only one week in advance." He obtained his degree of candidate, or bachelor of arts, and returned to Yasnaya Polyana, where he lived until 1851, when he entered the Forty-fourth Battery of the Twentieth Brigade of Artillery as "yunker" or supernumerary officer, with no official rank, but eligible to receive a commission as ensign, and thence advance in the service.

This battery was stationed on the Terek River, in the Caucasus, and there Tolstoy remained with it until the Crimean War broke out. Thus during the first twenty-six years of his life he spent less than five years in towns, the rest in the country; and this no doubt laid the foundation for his deep love for country life, which has had so profound an effect upon his writings and his views of existence in general.

The dawning of his talent came during the four years he spent in the Caucasus, and he wrote "Childhood," "The Incursion," "Boyhood," "The Morning of a Landed Proprietor," and "The Cossacks." During the Turkish campaign he was ordered to the staff of Prince M. D. Gortchakoff, on the Danube, and in 1855 received the command of a mountain battery, and took part in the fight at Tchernaya, and the siege of Sevastopol. The literary fruits of this experience were "Sevastopol," in December, May, and August, three sketches.

It is convenient to finish his statistical history at this point with the statement that in 1862 he married, having firmly resolved, two years previously, that he never would do so, and clinched the bargain with himself by selling the big manor-house at Yasnaya Polyana for transportation and re-erection elsewhere. Between that date and 1888 he had a family of fifteen[42] children, of whom seven are still alive.

In his very first efforts in literature we detect certain characteristics which continue to distinguish him throughout his career, and some of which, on attaining their legitimate and logical development seem, to the ordinary reader, to be of extremely recent origin. In "Childhood" and "Boyhood" ("Youth," the third section, was written late in the '50's) we meet the same keen a.n.a.lysis which is a leading feature in his later works, and in them is applied with such effect to women and to the tender pa.s.sion, neither of which elements enters into his early works in any appreciable degree. He displays the most astounding genius in detecting and understanding the most secret and trivial movements of the human soul. In this respect his methods are those of a miniature painter. Another point must be borne in mind in studying Tolstoy's characters, that, unlike Turgeneff, who is almost exclusively objective, Tolstoy is in the highest degree subjective, and has presented a study of his own life and soul in almost every one of his works, in varying degrees, and combined with widely varying elements. In the same way he has made use of the spiritual and mental state of his relatives. For example, who can fail to recognize a self-portrait from the life in Levin ("Anna Karenin"), and in Prince Andrei Bolkonsky ("War and Peace")? And the feminine characters in these great novels are either simple or composite portraits of his nearest relations, while many of the incidents in both novels are taken straight from their experience or his own, or the two combined.

It is useless to catalogue his many works with their dates in this place. Unquestionably the finest of them (despite the author's present erroneous view, that they const.i.tute a sin and a reproach to him) are his magnificent "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenin." Curiously enough, neither met with prompt or enthusiastic welcome in Russia when they first made their appearance.[43] The public had grown used to the very different methods of the other celebrated romance-writers of the '40's, with whom we have already dealt. Gontcharoff had accustomed them to the delineation of character by broad, sweeping strokes; Dostoevsky to lancet-like thrusts, penetrating the very soul; Turgeneff to tender touches, which produced soft, melting outlines. It was long before they could reconcile themselves to Tolstoy's original mode of painting a vast series of miniature portraits on an immense canvas. But the effect of this procedure was at last recognized to be the very acme of throbbing, breathing life itself. Moreover, it became apparent that Tolstoy's theory of life was, that great generals, statesmen, and as a whole, all active persons who seem or try to control events, do nothing of the kind. Somewhere above, in the unknown, there is a power which guides affairs at its own will, and (here is the special point) deliberately thwarts all the efforts of the active people. According to his philosophy, the self-contained, thoroughly egotistical natures, who are wedded solely to the cult of success, generally pa.s.s through this earthly life without any notable disasters; they attend strictly to their own selfish ends, and do not attempt to sway the destinies of others from motives of humanity, patriotism, or anything else in the lofty, self-sacrificing line. On the contrary, the fate of the people who are endowed with tender instincts, who have not allowed self-love to smother their humanity, who are guilty only of striving to attain some lofty, unselfish object in life, are thwarted and repressed, balked and confounded at every turn. This is particularly interesting in view of his latter-day exhortations to men, on the duty of toiling for others, sacrificing everything for others. Nevertheless, it must stand as a monument to the fidelity of his powers of a.n.a.lysis of life in general, and of the individual characters in whose lot he demonstrates his theory.

This contrast between the two conflicting principles, a haughty individualism and peaceable submission to a higher power, of which the concrete representative is the ma.s.s of the population, is set forth with especial clearness in "War and Peace," where the two princ.i.p.al heroes, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukoff, represent individualism.

In "Anna Karenin," in the person of his favorite hero, Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy first enunciates the doctrine of moral regeneration acquired by means of physical labor, and his later philosophical doctrines are the direct development of the views there set forth. He had represented a hero of much earlier days, Prince Nekhliudoff, in "The Morning of a Landed Proprietor," as convinced that he should make himself of use to his peasants; and he had set forth the result of those efforts in terms which tally wonderfully well with his direct personal comments in "My Confession," of a date long posterior to "Anna Karenin." "Have my peasants become any the richer?" he writes; "have they been educated or developed morally? Not in the slightest degree. They are no better off, and my heart grows more heavy with every pa.s.sing day. If I could but perceive any success in my undertaking; if I could descry any grat.i.tude--but no; I see false routine, vice, distrust, helplessness! I am wasting the best years of my life in vain."

But Nekhliudoff--Tolstoy was not alone in devoting himself to his peasants; before he withdrew to the country he had led a gay life in St.

Petersburg, after resigning from the army, and in writing his fine peasant story, "Polikushka," setting up peasant-schools on his estate, and the like, he was merely paying his tribute to the spirit of the time (which reached him even in his seclusion), and imitating the innumerable village schools and Sunday schools in the capitals (for secular instruction of the laboring cla.s.ses who were too busy for education during the week) in which the aristocratic and educated cla.s.ses in general took a lively interest.[44] But the leisure afforded by country life enabled him to compose his masterpieces. "War and Peace," which was begun in 1864, was published serially in "The Russian Messenger,"

beginning in 1865, and in book form in 1869, and "Anna Karenin," which was published serially in the same journal, in 1875-1876. His style is not to be compared to that of Turgeneff, with its exquisite harmony, art, and sense of proportion. Tolstoy writes carelessly, frequently repeats himself, not infrequently expresses himself ambiguously or obscurely. But the supreme effect is produced, nevertheless.

At last came the diametrical change of views, apparently, which led to this supreme artist's discarding his art, and devoting himself to religious and philosophical writings for which neither nature nor his training had fitted him. He himself dates this change from the middle of the '70's, and it must be noted that precisely at this period that strong movement called "going to the people," i. e., devoting one's self to the welfare of the peasants, became epidemic in Russian society.

Again, as fifteen or twenty years previously, Count Tolstoy was merely swept onward by the popular current. But his first pamphlet on his new propaganda is ten years later than the date he a.s.signs to the change.

Thereafter for many years he devoted his chief efforts to this new cla.s.s of work, "Life," "What Is to Be Done?" "My Confession," and so forth, being the more bulky outcome. Some of the stories, written for the people during this interval, are delightful, both in tone and artistic qualities. Others are surcharged with "morals," which in many cases either directly conflict with the moral of other stories in the same volume, or even with the secondary moral of the same story. Even his last work--"in my former style," as he described it--"Resurrection," has special doctrines and aims too emphatically insisted upon to permit of the reader deriving from it the pure literary pleasure afforded by his masterpieces. In short, with all due respect to the entire sincerity of this magnificent writer, it must be said that those who would enjoy and appreciate him rightly, should ignore his philosophico-religious treatises, which are contradictory and confusing to the last degree. As an ill.u.s.tration, let me cite the case of the famine in Russia of 1891-92. Great sums of money[45] were sent to Count Tolstoy, chiefly from America, and were expended by him in the most practicable and irreproachable manner--so any one would have supposed--for the relief of the starving peasants. Count Tolstoy and his a.s.sistants lived the life of the peasants, and underwent severe hardships; the Count even fell ill, and his wife was obliged to go to him and nurse him. It would seem that his conscience had no cause for reproach, and that the situation was an ideal one for him. But before that famine was well over, or the funds expended, he wrote a letter to a London newspaper, in which he declared that helping people by means of money was all wrong--positively a sin. He felt that collecting and distributing money was not the best thing of which he was capable, and called it "making a pipe of one's self," personal service with brains, heart, and muscles being the only right service for G.o.d or man. This service he certainly rendered, and without the money he could not have rendered it.