An Outline of Russian Literature Part 7

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 surpa.s.sed; 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, pa.s.sionate character, who expiates his pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d 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 l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.sed through the grave, and we stood at G.o.d'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 G.o.d, and pray G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances as terrific as those which unhinged the reason of King Lear, shook that of Hamlet, and made dipus 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 const.i.tutes his peculiar greatness.

CHAPTER VII

THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY

The fifties, the sixties, and the seventies were, all over Europe, the epoch of Parna.s.sian 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 tw.a.n.ged 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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, Parna.s.sians, 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 Parna.s.sians.

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 Parna.s.sian 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.n.a.logy 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 Parna.s.sians of the time and has only one rival, whom we shall describe presently.

The Parna.s.sians 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 cla.s.sical 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 Parna.s.sian and remained aloof from didactic literature; yet, under the pseudonym of Kuzma Prutkov, he wrote a satire, a collection of plat.i.tudes, 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 cla.s.sical 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 Parna.s.sian. 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 Parna.s.sian 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 coa.r.s.er clay, and his pictures of nature, of spring, of night, and especially of night in the Riviera (with a note of pa.s.sionate 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. n.o.body 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"