An Outline of Russian Literature Part 8

school were influenced by Sh.e.l.ley, Verlaine, and the French symbolists; but there is nothing which is decadent in the ordinary sense of the word in their verse. Their influence may not be lasting, but they are factors in Russian literature, and some of them, SOLOGUB, BRUSOV, BALMONT, and IVANOV, have produced work which any school would be glad to claim. This is also true of ALEXANDER BLOCH, one of the most original as well as one of the most exquisite of living Russian poets.

CONCLUSION

With the death of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, the great epoch of Russian literature came to an end. A period of literary as well as of political stagnation began, which lasted until the Russo-j.a.panese War.

This was followed by the revolutionary movement, which, in its turn, produced a literary as well as a political chaos, the effect of which and of the manifold reactions it brought about are still being felt.

It was only natural, if one considers the extent and the quality of the productions of the preceding epoch, that the soil of literary Russia should require a rest.

As it is, one can count the writers of prominence which the epoch of stagnation produced on one's fingers--CHEKHOV, GARSHIN, KOROLENKO, and at the end of the period MAXIME GORKY, and apart from them, in a by-path of his own, MEREZHKOVSKY. Of these Chekhov and Gorky tower above the others. Chekhov enlarged the range of Russian literature by painting the middle-cla.s.s and the _Intelligentsia_, and brought back to Russian literature the note of humour; and Gorky broke altogether fresh ground by painting the vagabond, the artisan, the tramp, the thief, the flotsam and jetsam of the big town and the highway, and by painting in a new manner.

Gorky's work came like that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling to England, as a revelation. Not only did his subject matter open the doors on dominions undreamed of, but his att.i.tude towards life and that of his heroes towards life seemed to be different from that of all Russian novelists before his advent; and yet the difference between him and his forerunners is not so great as it appears at first sight. It is true that his rough and rebellious heroes, instead of playing the Hamlet, or of finding the solution of life in charity and humility or submission, are partisans of the survival of the fittest with a vengeance, the survival of the strongest fist and the sharpest knife; yet are these new heroes really so different from the uncompromising type that we have already seen sharing one half of the Russian stage, right through the story of Russian literature, from Bazarov back to Peter the Great, and on whose existence was founded the remark that Peter the Great was one of the ingredients in the Russian character?

Put Bazarov on the road, or Lermontov, or even Peter the Great, and you get Gorky's barefooted hero.

Where Gorky created something absolutely new was in the surroundings and in the manner of life which he described, and in the way he described them; this is especially true of his treatment of nature: for the first time in Russian prose literature, we get away from the "orthodox" landscape of convention, and we are face to face with the elements. We feel as if a new breath of air had entered into literature; we feel as people accustomed to the manner in which the poets treated nature in England in the eighteenth century must have felt when Wordsworth, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley and Coleridge began to write.

Chekhov worked on older lines. He descends directly from Turgenev, although his field is a different one. He, more than any other writer and better than any other writer, painted the epoch of stagnation, when Russia, as a Russian once said, was playing itself to death at _vindt_ (an older form of _Bridge_). The tone of his work is grey, and indeed resembles, as Tolstoy said, that of a photographer, by its objective realism as well as by its absence of high tones; yet if Chekhov is a photographer, he is at the same time a supreme artist, an artist in black and white, and his pessimism is counteracted by two other factors, his sense of humour and his humanity; were it not so, the impression of sadness one would derive from the sum of misery which his crowded stage of merchants, students, squires, innkeepers, waiters, schoolmasters, magistrates, popes, officials, make up between them, would be intolerable. Some of Chekhov's most interesting work was written for the stage, on which he also brought Scenes of Country Life, which is the sub-t.i.tle of the play _Uncle Vanya_. There are the same grey tints, the same weary, amiable, and slack people, bankrupt of ideals and poor in hope, whom we meet in the stories; and here, too, behind the sordid triviality and futility, we hear the "still sad music of humanity." But in order that the tints of Chekhov's delicate living and breathing photographs can be effective on the stage, very special acting is necessary, in order to convey the quality of atmosphere which is his special gift. Fortunately he met with exactly the right technique and the appropriate treatment at the Art Theatre at Moscow.

Chekhov died in 1904, soon after the Russo-j.a.panese War had begun.

Apart from the main stream and tradition of Russian fiction and Russian prose, Merezhkovsky occupies a unique place, a place which lies between criticism and imaginative historical fiction, not unlike, in some respects--but very different in others--that which is occupied by Walter Pater in English fiction. His best known work, at least his best known work in Europe, is a prose trilogy, "The Death of the G.o.ds"

(a study of Julian the apostate), "The Resurrection of the G.o.ds" (the story of Leonardo da Vinci), and "The Antichrist" (the story of Peter the Great and his son Alexis), which has been translated into nearly every European language. This trilogy is an essay in imaginative historical reconst.i.tution; it testifies to a real and deep culture, and it is lit at times by flashes of imaginative inspiration which make the scenes of the past live; it is alive with suggestive thought; but it is not throughout convincing, there is a touch of Bulwer Lytton as well as a touch of Goethe and Pater in it. Merezhkovsky is perhaps more successful in his purely critical work, his books on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol, which are infinitely stimulating, suggestive, and original, than in his historical fiction, although, needless to say, his criticism appeals to a far narrower public. He is in any case one of the most brilliant and interesting of Russian modern writers, and perhaps the best known outside Russia.

During the war, a writer of fiction made his name by a remarkable book, namely KUPRIN, who in his novel, _The Duel_, gave a vivid and masterly picture of the life of an officer in the line. Kuprin has since kept the promise of his early work. At the same time, LEONID ANDREEV came forward with short stories, plays, a description of war (_The Red Laugh_), moralities, not uninfluenced by Maeterlinck, and a limpid and beautiful style in which pessimism seemed to be speaking its last word.

In 1905 the revolutionary movement broke out, with its great hopes, its disillusions, its period of anarchy on the one hand and repression on the other; out of the chaos of events came a chaos of writing rather than literature, and in its turn this produced, in literature as well as in life, a reaction, or rather a series of reactions, towards symbolism, aestheticism, mysticism on the one hand, and towards materialism--not of theory but of practice--on the other.

But since these various reactions are now going on, and are vitally affecting the present day, the revolutionary movement of 1905 seems the right point to take leave of Russian literature. In 1905 a new era began, and what that era will ultimately produce, it is too soon even to hazard a guess.

Looking back over the record of Russian literature, the first thing which must strike us, if we think of the literature of other countries, is its comparatively short life. There is in Russian literature no Middle Ages, no Villon, no Dante, no Chaucer, no Renaissance, no _Grand Siecle_. Literature begins in the nineteenth century. The second thing which will perhaps strike us is that, in spite of its being the youngest of all the literatures, it seems to be spiritually the oldest. In some respects it seems to have become over-ripe before it reached maturity. But herein, perhaps, lies the secret of its greatness, and this may be the value of its contribution to the soul of mankind. It is--

"Old in grief and very wise in tears":

and its chief gift to mankind is an expression, made with a naturalness and sincerity that are matchless, and a love of reality which is unique,--for all Russian literature, whether in prose or verse, is rooted in reality--of that grief and that wisdom; the grief and wisdom which come from a great heart; a heart that is large enough to embrace the world and to drown all the sorrows therein with the immensity of its sympathy, its fraternity, its pity, its charity, and its love.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

1113. _The Chronicle of Nestor._

1692. First play produced in Russia, Gregory.

Simeon Polotsky's _The Prodigal Son_ acted.

1703. The first Russian newspaper, _The Russian News_, appears.

1725. Death of Peter the Great.

Foundation of the Academy of Science.

1744. Death of Kantemir.

1750. Death of Tatishchev.

1755. University of Moscow founded.

1762. Accession of Catherine the Great.

1765. Death of Lomonosov.

1790. Radishchev's _Journey Through Russia_ published.

1796. Death of Catherine the Great.

1800. First edition of _The Story of the Raid of Prince Igor_ published.

1802. Zhukovsky translates Gray's _Elegy_.

Death of Radishchev.

1806. Krylov's first fables published.

1816. Death of Derzhavin.

_History of the Russian State_, by Karamzin, published.

1819. University of St. Petersburg founded.

1820. Pushkin's _Ruslan and Ludmila_ published.

1823. Griboyedov's _Misfortune of Being Clever_ circulated.

First Canto of _Eugene Onegin_ published.

1825. The Decembrist Attempt.

1826. Rileev hanged.

Death of Karamzin.

1827. Pushkin's _Gypsies_ published.

1829. Death of Griboyedov.

Pushkin's _Poltava_ published.

1831. Pushkin's _Boris G.o.dunov_ published.

Complete version of _Eugene Onegin_ published.

1832. Gogol's _Evening on the Farm near the Dikanka_ published.

1834. Gogol's _Mirgorod_ published.