Essays on Russian Novelists Part 10

Chekhov is durch und durch echt russisch: no one but a Russian would ever have conceived such characters, or reported such conversations.

We often wonder that physical exercise and bodily recreation are so conspicuously absent from Russian books. But we should remember that a Russian conversation is one of the most violent forms of physical exercise, as it is among the French and Italians. Although Chekhov belongs to our day, and represents contemporary Russia, he stands in the middle of the highway of Russian fiction, and in his method of art harks back to the great masters. He perhaps resembles Turgenev more than any other of his predecessors, but he is only a faint echo. He is like Turgenev in the delicacy and in the aloofness of his art. He has at times that combination of the absolutely real with the absolutely fantastic that is so characteristic of Gogol: one of his best stories, "The Black Monk," might have been written by the author of "The Cloak"

and "The Portrait." He is like Dostoevski in his uncompromising depiction of utter degradation; but he has little of Dostoevski's glowing sympathy and heartpower. He resembles Tolstoi least of all.

The two chief features of Tolstoi's work--self-revelation and moral teaching--must have been abhorrent to Chekhov, for his stories tell us almost nothing about himself and his own opinions, and they teach nothing. His art is impersonal, and he is content with mere diagnosis.

His only point of contact with Tolstoi is his grim fidelity to detail, the peculiar Russian realism common to every Russian novelist. Tolstoi said that Chekhov resembled Guy de Maupa.s.sant. This is entirely wide of the mark. He resembles Guy de Maupa.s.sant merely in the fact that, like the Frenchman, he wrote short stories.

Among recent writers Chekhov is at the farthest remove from his friend Gorki, and most akin to Andreev. It is probable that Andreev learned something from him. Unlike Turgenev, both Chekhov and Andreev study mental disease. Their best characters are abnormal; they have some fatal taint in the mind which turns this goodly frame, the earth, into a sterile promontory; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, into a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Neither Chekhov nor Andreev have attempted to lift that black pall of despair that hangs over Russian fiction.

Just as the austere, intellectual beauty of Greek drama forms striking evidence of the extraordinarily high average of culture in Athenian life, so the success of an author like Chekhov is abundant proof of the immense number of readers of truly cultivated taste that are scattered over Holy Russia. For Chekhov's stories are exclusively intellectual and subtle. They appeal only to the mind, not to the pa.s.sions nor to any love of sensation. In many of them he deliberately avoids climaxes and all varieties of artificial effect. He would be simply incomprehensible to the millions of Americans who delight in musical comedy and in pseudo-historical romance. He wrote only for the elect, for those who have behind them years of culture and habits of consecutive thought. That such a man should have a vogue in Russia such as a cheap romancer enjoys in America, is in itself a significant and painful fact.

Chekhov's position in the main line of Russian literature and his likeness to Turgenev are both evident when we study his a.n.a.lysis of the Russian temperament. His verdict is exactly the same as that given by Turgenev and Sienkiewicz--slave improductivite. A majority of his chief characters are Rudins. They suffer from internal injuries, caused by a diseased will. In his story called "On the Way" the hero remarks, "Nature has set in every Russian an enquiring mind, a tendency to speculation, and extraordinary capacity for belief; but all these are broken into dust against our improvidence, indolence, and fantastic triviality."*

*The citations from Chekhov are from the translations by Long.

The novelist who wrote that sentence was a physician as well as a man of letters. It is a professional diagnosis of the national sickness of mind, which produces sickness of heart.

It is absurd to join in the chorus that calls Turgenev old-fashioned, when we find his words accurately, if faintly, echoed by a Russian who died in 1904! Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and wishes have always been the legitimate fathers of thoughts. My friend and colleague, Mr. Mandell, the translator of "The Cherry Garden,"* says that the play indicates that the useless people are dying away, "and thus making room for the regenerated young generation which is full of hope and strength to make a fruitful cherry garden of Russia for the Russian people . . . the prospects of realisation are now bright. But how soon will this become a practical reality? Let us hope in the near future!" Yes, let us hope, as Russians hoped in 1870 and in 1900.

Kropotkin says that Chekhov gave an "impressive parting word" to the old generation, and that we are now on the eve of the "new types which already are budding in life." Gorki has violently protested against the irresolute Slav, and Artsybashev has given us in Jurii the Russian as he is (1903) and in Sanin the Russian as he ought to be. But a disease obstinately remains a disease until it is cured, and it cannot be cured by hope or by protest.

*Published at Yale University by the "Yale Courant."

Chekhov was a physician and an invalid; he saw sickness without and sickness within. Small wonder that his stories deal with the unhealthy and the doomed. For just as Artsybashev's tuberculosis has made him create the modern Tamburlaine as a mental enjoyment of physical activity, so the less turbulent nature of Chekhov has made him reproduce in his creatures of the imagination his own sufferings and fears. I think he was afraid of mental as well as physical decay, for he has studied insanity with the same a.s.siduity as that displayed by Andreev in his nerve-wrecking story "A Dilemma."

In "Ward No. 6," which no one should read late at night, Chekhov has given us a picture of an insane asylum, which, if the conditions there depicted are true to life, would indicate that some parts of Russia have not advanced one step since Gogol wrote "Revizor." The patients are beaten and hammered into insensibility by a brutal keeper; they live amidst intolerable filth. The attending physician is a typical Russian, who sees clearly the horror and abomination of the place, but has not sufficient will-power to make a change. He is fascinated by one of the patients, with whom he talks for hours. His fondness for this man leads his friends to believe that he is insane, and they begin to treat him with that humouring condescension and pity which would be sufficient in itself to drive a man out of his mind. He is finally invited by his younger colleague to visit the asylum to examine a strange case; when he reaches the building, he himself is shoved into Ward No. 6, and realises that the doors are shut upon him forever. He is obliged to occupy a bed in the same filthy den where he has so often visited the other patients, and his night-gown has a slimy smell of dried fish. In about twenty-four hours he dies, but in those hours he goes through a h.e.l.l of physical and mental torment.

The fear of death, which to an intensely intellectual people like the Russians, is an obsession of terror, and shadows all their literature, --it appears all through Tolstoi's diary and novels,--is a.n.a.lysed in many forms by Chekhov. In "Ward No. 6" Chekhov pays his respects to Tolstoi's creed of self-denial, through the lips of the doctor's favourite madman. "A creed which teaches indifference to wealth, indifference to the conveniences of life, and contempt for suffering is quite incomprehensible to the great majority who never knew either wealth or the conveniences of life, and to whom contempt for suffering would mean contempt for their own lives, which are made up of feelings of hunger, cold, loss, insult, and a Hamlet-like terror of death. All life lies in these feelings, and life may be hated or wearied of, but never despised. Yes, I repeat it, the teachings of the Stoics can never have a future; from the beginning of time, life has consisted in sensibility to pain and response to irritation."

No better indictment has ever been made against those to whom self-denial and renunciation are merely a luxurious att.i.tude of the mind.

Chekhov's sympathy with Imagination and his hatred for commonplace folk who stupidly try to repress its manifestations are shown again and again in his tales. He loves especially the imagination of children; and he shows them as infinitely wiser than their practical parents. In the short sketch "An Event" the children are wild with delight over the advent of three kittens, and cannot understand their father's disgust for the little beasts, and his cruel indifference to their welfare. The cat is their mother, that they know; but who is the father? The kittens must have a father, so the children drag out the wooden rocking-horse, and place him beside his wife and offspring.

In the story "At Home" the father's bewilderment at the creative imagination and the curious caprices of his little boy's mind is tenderly and beautifully described. The father knows he is not bringing him up wisely, but is utterly at a loss how to go at the problem, having none of the intuitive sympathy of a woman. The boy is busy with his pencil, and represents sounds by shapes, letters by colours. For example, "the sound of an orchestra he drew as a round, smoky spot; whistling as a spiral thread." In making letters, he always painted L yellow, M red, and A black. He draws a picture of a house with a soldier standing in front of it. The father rebukes him for bad perspective, and tells him that the soldier in his picture is taller than the house. But the boy replies, "If you drew the soldier smaller, you wouldn't be able to see his eyes."

One of Chekhov's favourite pastimes was gardening. This, perhaps, accounts for his location of the scene in his comedy "The Cherry Garden," where a business-like man, who had once been a serf, just like the dramatist's own father, has prospered sufficiently to buy the orchard from the improvident and highly educated owners; and for all the details about fruit-gardening given in the powerful story "The Black Monk." This story infallibly reminds one of Gogol. A man has repeatedly a vision of a black monk, who visits him through the air, with whom he carries on long conversations, and who inspires him with great thoughts and ideals. His wife and friends of course think he is crazy, and instead of allowing him to continue his intercourse with the familiar spirit, they persuade him he is ill, and make him take medicine. The result is wholesale tragedy. His life is ruined, his wife is separated from him; at last he dies. The idea seems to be that he should not have been disobedient unto the heavenly vision.

Imagination and inspiration are necessary to life; they are what separate man from the beasts that perish. The monk asks him, "How do you know that the men of genius whom all the world trusts have not also seen visions?"

Chekhov is eternally at war with the practical, with the narrow-minded, with the commonplace. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Professor Bruckner has well said that Chekhov was by profession a physician, but an artist by the grace of G.o.d. He was indeed an exquisite artist, and if his place in Russian literature is not large, it seems permanent. He does not rank among the greatest. He lacks the tremendous force of Tolstoi, the flawless perfection of Turgenev, and the mighty world-embracing sympathy of Great-heart Dostoevski. But he is a faithful interpreter of Russian life, and although his art was objective, one cannot help feeling the essential goodness of the man behind his work, and loving him for it.

VIII

ARTSYBASHEV

Not the greatest, but the most sensational, novel published in Russia during the last five years is "Sanin," by Artsybashev. It is not sensational in the incidents, though two men commit suicide, and two girls are ruined; it is sensational in its ideas. To make a sensation in contemporary Russian literature is an achievement, where pathology is now rampant. But Artsybashev accomplished it, and his novel made a tremendous noise, the echoes of which quickly were heard all over curious and eclectic Germany, and have even stirred Paris. Since the failure of the Revolution, there has been a marked revolt in Russia against three great ideas that have at different times dominated Russian literature: the quiet pessimism of Turgenev, the Christian non-resistance religion of Tolstoi, and the familiar Russian type of will-less philosophy. Even before the Revolution Gorki had expressed the spirit of revolt; but his position, extreme as it appears to an Anglo-Saxon, has been left far behind by Artsybashev, who, with the genuine Russian love of the reductio ad absurdum, has reached the farthest limits of moral anarchy in the creation of his hero Sanin.

In an admirable article in the "Westminster Gazette," for 14 May 1910, by the accomplished scholar and critic, Mr. R. C. Long, called "The Literature of Self-a.s.sertion," we obtain a strong smell of the h.e.l.l-broth now boiling in Russian literature. "In the Spring of 1909, an exhibition was held in the Russian ministry of the Interior of specimen copies of all books and brochures issued in 1908, to the number of 70,841,000. How many different books were exhibited the writer does not know, but he lately came upon an essay by the critic Ismailoff, in which it was said that there were on exhibition a thousand different sensational novels, cla.s.sed as 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes literature,' with such expressive t.i.tles as 'The Hanged,' 'The Chokers,' 'The Corpse Disinterred,' and 'The Expropriators.' Ismailoff comments on this as sign and portent. Russia always had her literature of adventure, and Russian novels of manners and of psychology became known to Westerners merely because they were the best, and by no means because they were the only books that appeared. The popular taste was formerly met with naive and outrageous 'lubotchniya'-books. The new craze for 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes' stories is something quite different. It foreshadows a complete change in the psychosis of the Russian reader, the decay of the literature of pa.s.sivity, and the rise of a new literature of action and physical revolt. The literature of pa.s.sivity reached its height with the (sic) Chekhov. The best representative of the transition from Chekhov to the new literature of self-a.s.sertion is Maxim Gorki's friend, Leonid Andreev. . . .

"These have got clear away from the humble, ineffectual individual, 'crushed by life.' Full of learned philosophies from Max Stirner and Nietzsche, they preach, in Stirner's words, 'the absolute independence of the individual, master of himself, and of all things.' 'The death of "Everyday-ism,"' the 'resurrection of myth,' 'orgiasm,' 'Mystical Anarchism,' and 'universalist individualism' are some of the shibboleths of these new writers, who are mostly very young, very clever, and profoundly convinced that they are even cleverer than they are.

"Anarchism, posing as self-a.s.sertion, is the note in most recent Russian literature, as, indeed, it is in Russian life."

The most powerful among this school of writers, and the only one who can perhaps be called a man of genius, is Michael Artsybashev. He came honestly by his hot, impulsive temperament, being, like Gogol, a man of the South. He was born in 1878. He says of himself: "I am Tartar in name and in origin, but not a pure-blooded one. In my veins runs Russian, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. I am glad to name as one of my ancestors the famous Pole, Kosciusko, who was my maternal great-grandfather. My father, a retired officer, was a landed proprietor with very little income. I was only three years old when my mother died. As a legacy, she bequeathed to me tuberculosis. . . . I am now living in the Crimea and trying to get well, but with little faith in my recovery."

"Sanin" appeared at the psychological moment, late in the year 1907.

The Revolution was a failure, and it being impossible to fight the government or to obtain political liberty, people in Russia of all cla.s.ses were ready for a revolt against moral law, the religion of self-denial, and all the conventions established by society, education, and the church. At this moment of general desperation and smouldering rage, appeared a work written with great power and great art, deifying the natural instincts of man, incarnating the spirit of liberty in a hero who despises all so-called morality as absurd tyranny. It was a bold attempt to marshal the animal instincts of humanity, terrifically strong as they are even in the best citizens, against every moral and prudential restraint. The effect of the book will probably not last very long,--already it has been called an ephemeral sensation,--but it was immediate and tremendous. It was especially powerful among university students and high school boys and girls--the "Sanin-morals" of undergraduates were alluded to in a speech in the Duma.

But although the book was published at the psychological moment, it was written with no reference to any post-revolution spirit. For Artsybashev composed his novel in 1903, when he was twenty-four years old. He tried in vain to induce publishers to print it, and fortunately for him, was obliged to wait until 1907, when the time happened to be exactly ripe.

The novel has been allowed to circulate in Russia, because it shows absolutely no sympathy with the Revolution or with the spirit of political liberty. Men who waste their time in the discussion of political rights or in the endeavour to obtain them are ridiculed by Sanin. The summum bonum is personal, individual happiness, the complete gratification of desire. Thus, those who are working for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the Russian people, for relief from the bureaucracy, and for more political independence, not only have no sympathy with the book--they hate it, because it treats their efforts with contempt. Some of them have gone so far as to express the belief that the author is in a conspiracy with the government to bring ridicule on their cause, and to defeat their ever living hopes of better days. However this may be, Sanin is not in the least a politically revolutionary book, and critics of that school see no real talent or literary power in its pages.

But, sinister and d.a.m.nable as its tendency is, the novel is written with extraordinary skill, and Artsybashev is a man to be reckoned with. The style has that simplicity and directness so characteristic of Russian realism, and the characters are by no means sign-posts of various opinions; they are living and breathing human beings. I am sorry that such a book as Sanin has ever been written; but it cannot be black-balled from the republic of letters.

It is possible that it is a florescence not merely of the author's genius, but of his sickness. The glorification of Sanin's bodily strength, of Karsavina's female voluptuousness, and the loud call to physical joy which rings through the work may be an emanation of tuberculosis as well as that of healthy mental conviction. Shut out from active happiness, Artsybashev may have taken this method of vicarious delight.

The bitterness of his own enforced resignation of active happiness and the terror inspired by his own disease are incarnated in a decidedly interesting character, Semionov, who, although still able to walk about when we first see him, is dying of consumption. He has none of the hopefulness and cheerfulness so often symptomatic of that malady; he is peevish, irritable, and at times enraged by contact with his healthy friends. After a frightful attack of coughing, he says: "I often think that soon I shall be lying in complete darkness. You understand, with my nose fallen in and my limbs decayed. And above me, where you are on the earth, everything will go on, exactly as it does now, while I still am permitted to see it. You will be living then, you will look at this very moon, you will breathe, you will pa.s.s over my grave; perhaps you will stop there a moment and despatch some necessity. And I shall lie and become rotten."

His death at the hospital in the night, with his friends looking on, is powerfully and minutely described. The fat, stupid priest goes through the last ceremonies, and is dully amazed at the contempt he receives from Sanin.

Sanin's beautiful sister Lyda is ruined by a worthless but entirely conventional officer. Her remorse on finding that she is with child is perfectly natural, but is ridiculed by her brother, who saves her from suicide. He is not in the least ashamed of her conduct, and tells her she has no reason for loss of pride; indeed, he does not think of blaming the officer. He is ready to commit incest with his sister, whose physical charm appeals to him; but she is not sufficiently emanc.i.p.ated for that, so he advises her to get married with a friend who loves her, before the child is born. This is finally satisfactorily arranged. Later, Sanin, not because he disapproves of the libertine officer's affair with his sister, but because he regards the officer as a blockhead, treats him with scant courtesy; and the officer, hidebound by convention, sees no way out but a challenge to a duel. The scene when the two brother officers bring the formal challenge to Sanin is the only scene in the novel marked by. genuine humour, and is also the only scene where we are in complete sympathy with the hero. One of the delegates has all the stiff courtesy and ridiculous formality which he regards as entirely consistent with his errand; the other is a big, blundering fellow, who has previously announced himself as a disciple of Tolstoi. To Sanin's philosophy of life, duelling is as absurd as religion, morality, or any other stupid conventionality; and his cold, ruthless logic makes short work of the polite phrases of the two amba.s.sadors. Both are amazed at his positive refusal to fight, and hardly know which way to turn; the disciple of Tolstoi splutters with rage because Sanin shows up his inconsistency with his creed; both try to treat him like an outcast, but make very little progress. Sanin informs them that he will not fight a duel, because he does not wish to take the officer's life, and because he does not care to risk his own; but that if the officer attempts any physical attack upon him in the street, he will thrash him on the spot. Enraged and bewildered by Sanin's unconventional method of dealing with the difficulty, the discomfited emissaries withdraw.

Later, the challenger meets Sanin in the street, and goaded to frenzy by his calm and contemptuous stare, strikes him with a whip; he immediately receives in the face a terrible blow from his adversary's fist, delivered with all his colossal strength. A friend carries him to his lodgings, and there he commits suicide. From the conventional point of view, this was the only course left to him.

In direct contrast to most Russian novels, the man here is endowed with limitless power of will, and the women characterised by weakness.

The four women in the story, Sanin's sister Lyda, the pretty school-teacher Karsavina, Jurii's sister, engaged to a young scientist, who during the engagement cordially invites her brother to accompany him to a house of ill-fame, and the mother of Sanin, are all thoroughly conventional, and are meant to be. They are living under what Sanin regards as the tyranny of social convention. He treats his mother's shocked amazement with brutal scorn; he ridicules Lyda's shame at being enceinte; he seduces Karsavina, at the very time when she is in love with Jurii, and reasons with cold patience against her subsequent remorse. It is clear that Artsybashev believes that for some time to come women will not accept the gospel of uncompromising egoism.

The most interesting character in the book, apart from the hero, is Jurii, who might easily have been a protagonist in one of Turgenev's tragedies. He is the typical Russian, the highly educated young man with a diseased will. He is characterised by that indecision which has been the bane of so many Russians. All through the book he seeks in vain for some philosophy of life, some guiding principle. He has abandoned faith in religion, his former enthusiasm for political freedom has cooled, but he simply cannot live without some leading Idea. He is an acute sufferer from that mental sickness diagnosed by nearly all writers of Russia. He envies and at the same time despises Sanin for his cheerful energy. Finally, unable to escape from the perplexities of his own thinking, he commits suicide. His friends stand about his grave at the funeral, and one of them foolishly asks Sanin to make some appropriate remarks. Sanin, who always says exactly what he thinks, and abhors all forms of hypocrisy, delivers the following funeral oration--heartily endorsed by the reader--in one sentence: "The world has now one blockhead the less." The horror-stricken consternation of his friends fills Sanin with such scorn that he leaves the town, and we last see him in an open field in the country, giving a glad shout of recognition to the dawn.

The motto that Artsybashev has placed at the beginning of the novel is taken from Ecclesiastes vii. 29: "G.o.d hath made man upright: but they have sought out many inventions." This same text was used by Kipling as the t.i.tle of one of his books, but used naturally in a quite different way. The Devil has here cited Scripture for his purpose. The hero of the novel is an absolutely sincere, frank, and courageous Advocatus Diabou. He is invariably calm and collected; he never loses his temper in an argument; he questions the most fundamental beliefs and principles with remorseless logic. Two of his friends are arguing about Christianity; "at least," says one, "you will not deny that its influence has been good." "I don't deny that," says the other. Then Sanin remarks quietly, "But I deny it!" and he adds, with a calmness provoking to the two disputants, "Christianity has played an abominable role in history, and the name of Jesus Christ will for some time yet oppress humanity like a curse."

Sanin insists that it is not necessary to have any theory of life, or to be guided by any principle; that G.o.d may exist or He may not; He does not at any rate bother about us. The real rational life of man should be exactly like a bird. He should be controlled wholly by the desire of the moment. The bird wishes to alight on a branch, and so he alights; then he wishes to fly, so he flies. That is rational, declares Sanin; that is the way men and women should live, without principles, without plans, and without regrets. Drunkenness and adultery are nothing to be ashamed of, nor in any sense to be called degrading. Nothing that gives pleasure can ever be degrading. The love of strong drink and the l.u.s.t for woman are not sins; in fact, there is no such thing as sin. These pa.s.sions are manly and natural, and what is natural cannot be wrong. There is in Sanin's doctrine something of Nietzsche and more of Rousseau.

Sanin himself is not at all a contemptible character. He is not argumentative except when dragged into an argument; he does not attempt to convert others to his views. He has the inner light which we more often a.s.sociate with Christian faith. In the midst of his troubled and self-tortured comrades, Sanin stands like a pillar, calm, unshakable. He has found absolute peace, absolute harmony with life.

He thinks, talks, and acts exactly as he chooses, without any regard whatever to the convenience or happiness of any one else. There is something refreshing about this perfectly healthy, clear-eyed, quiet, composed, resolute man--whose way of life is utterly unaffected by public opinion, who simply does not care a straw for anything or anybody but himself. Thus he recognises his natural foe in Christianity, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in His Russian interpreter, Leo Tolstoi. For if Christianity teaches anything, it teaches that man must live contrary to his natural instincts. The endeavour of all so-called "new religions" is rootless, because it is an attempt to adapt Christianity to modern human convenience. Much better is Sanin's way: he sees clearly that no adaptation is possible, and logically fights Christianity as the implacable enemy of the natural man.

There are many indications that one of the great battle-grounds of Christianity in the near future is to be the modern novel. For many years there have been plenty of attacks on the supernatural side of Christianity, and on Christianity as a religion; nearly all its opponents, however, have treated its ethics, its practical teachings, with respect. The novel "Sanin" is perhaps the boldest, but it is only one of many attacks that are now being made on Christianity as a system of morals; as was the case with the Greeks and Romans, scepticism in morals follows hard on scepticism in religion. Those who believe in Christianity ought to rejoice in this open and fair fight; they ought to welcome it as a complete unmasking of the foe. If the life according to "Sanin" is really practicable, if it is a good subst.i.tute for the life according to the Christian Gospel, it is desirable that it should be clearly set forth, and its working capacity demonstrated. For the real test of Christianity, and the only one given by its Founder, is its practical value as a way of life. It can never be successfully attacked by historical research or by destructive criticism--all such attacks leave it precisely as they found it. Those who are determined to destroy Christianity, and among its relentless foes have always been numbered men of great courage and great ability, must prove that its promises of peace and rest to those who really follow it are false, and that its influence on society and on the individual is bad.

IX