Russian literature

BY P. KROPOTKIN
NEW YORK McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. MCMV
Copyright, 1905, by McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. Published, April, 1905
This book originated in a series of eight lectures on Russian Literature during the Nineteenth Century which I delivered in March, 1901, at the Lowell Institute, in Boston.
In accepting the invitation to deliver this course, I fully realised the difficulties which stood in my way. It is by no means an easy task to speak or to write about the literature of a country, when this literature is hardly known to the audience or to the readers. Only three or four Russian writers have been properly and at all completely translated into English; so that very often I had to speak about a poem or a novel, when it could have been readily characterised by simply reading a passage or two from it.
However, if the difficulties were great, the subject was well worth an effort. Russian literature is a rich mine of original poetic thought. It has a freshness and youthfulness which is not found to the same extent in older literatures. It has, moreover, a sincerity and simplicity of expression which render it all the more attractive to the mind that has grown sick of literary artificiality. And it has this distinctive feature, that it brings within the domain of Art—the poem, the novel, the drama—nearly all those questions, social and political, which in Western Europe and America, at least in our present generation, are discussed chiefly in the political writings of the day, but seldom in literature.
In no other country does literature occupy so influential a position as it does in Russia. Nowhere else does it exercise so profound and so direct an influence upon the intellectual development of the younger generation. There are novels of Turguéneff, and even of the less-known writers, which have been real stepping stones in the development of Russian youth within the last fifty years.
The reason why literature exercises such an influence in Russia is self-evident. There is no open political life, and with the exception of a few years at the time of the abolition of serfdom, the Russian people have never been called upon to take an active part in the framing of their country’s institutions.