GLEB USPÉNSKIY
Gleb Uspénskiy (1840-1902) widely differs from all the preceding writers. He represents a school in himself, and I know of no writer in any literature with whom he might be compared. Properly speaking, he is not a novelist; but his work is not ethnography or demography either, because it contains, besides descriptions belonging to the domain of folk-psychology, all the elements of a novel. His first productions were novels with a leaning towards ethnography. Thus, Ruin is a novel in which Uspénskiy admirably described how all the life of a small provincial town, which had flourished under the habits and manners of serfdom, went to ruin after the abolition of that institution: but his later productions, entirely given to village life, and representing the full maturity of his talent, had more the character of ethnographic sketches, written by a gifted novelist, than of novels proper. They began like novels. Different persons appear before you in the usual way, and gradually you grow interested in their doings and their life. Moreover, they are not offered you haphazard, as they would be in the diary of an ethnographer; they have been chosen by the author because he considers them typical of those aspects of village life which he intends to deal with. However, the author is not satisfied with merely acquainting the reader with these types: he soon begins to discuss them and to talk about their position in village life and the influence they must exercise upon the future of the village; and, being already interested in the people, you read the discussions with interest. Then some admirable scene, which would not be out of place in a novel of Tolstóy or Turguéneff, is introduced; but after a few pages of such artistic creation Uspénskiy becomes again an ethnographer discussing the future of the village-community. He was too much of a political writer to always think in images and to be a pure novelist, but he was also too passionately impressed by the individual facts which came under his observation to calmly discuss them, as the merely political writer would do. In spite of all this, notwithstanding this mixture of political literature with art, because of his artistic gifts, you read Uspénskiy just as you read a good novelist.
Every movement among the educated classes in favour of the poorer classes begins by an idealisation of the latter. It being necessary to clear away, first of all, a number of prejudices which exist among the rich as regards the poor, some idealisation is unavoidable. Therefore, the earlier folk-novelist takes only the most striking types—those whom the wealthier people can better understand and sympathise with; and he lightly passes over the less sympathetic features of the life of the poor. This was done in the forties in France and England, and in Russia by Grigoróvitch, Márko Vovtchók, and several others. Then came Ryeshétnikoff with his artistic Nihilism: with his negation of all the usual tricks of art, and his objectivism; his blunt refusal to create “types” and his preference for the quite ordinary man; his manner of transmitting to you his love of his people, merely through the suppressed intensity of his own emotion. Later on, new problems arose for Russian literature. The readers were now quite ready to sympathise with the individual peasant or factory worker; but they wanted to know something more: namely, what were the very foundations, the ideals, the springs of village life? what were they worth in the further development of the nation? what, and in what form, could the immense agricultural population of Russia contribute to the further development of the country and the civilised world altogether? All such questions could not be answered by the statistician alone; they required the genius of the artist, who must decipher the reply out of the thousands of small indications and facts, and our folk-novelists understood this new demand of the reader. A rich collection of individual peasant types having already been given, it was now the life of the village—the mir, with its advantages and drawbacks, and its promises for the future—that the readers were anxious to find in the folk-novel. These were the questions which the new generation of folk-novelists undertook to discuss.
In this venture they were certainly right. It must not be forgotten that in the last analysis every economical and social question is a question of psychology of both the individual and the social aggregation. It cannot be solved by arithmetic alone. Therefore, in social science, as in human psychology, the poet often sees his way better than the physiologist. At any rate, he too has his voice in the matter.
When Uspénskiy began writing his first sketches of village life—it was in the early seventies—Young Russia was in the grip of the great movement “towards the people,” and it must be owned that in this movement, as in every other, there was some idealisation. Those who did not know village-life at all cherished exaggerated, idyllic illusions about the village-community. In all probability Uspénskiy, who was born in a large industrial town, Túla, in the family of a small functionary and hardly knew country life at all, shared these illusions to some extent, very probably in their most extreme aspect; and still preserving them he went to a province of southeastern Russia, Samára, which had lately become the prey of modern commercialism, and where, owing to a number of peculiar circumstances, the abolition of serfdom had been accomplished under conditions specially ruinous to the peasants and to village-life altogether. Here he must have suffered intensely from seeing his youthful dreams vanishing; and, as artists often do, he hastened to generalise; but he had not the education of the thorough ethnographer, which might have prevented him from making too hasty ethnological generalisations from his limited materials, and he began to write a series of scenes from village-life, imbued with a deep pessimism. It was only much later on, while staying in a village of Northern Russia, in the province of Nóvgorod, that he came to understand the influences which the culture of the land and life in an agricultural village may exercise upon the tiller of the soil; then only had he some glimpses of what are the social and moral forces of land cultivation and communal life, and of what free labour on a free soil might be. These observations inspired Uspénskiy with perhaps the best thing he wrote, The Power of the Soil (1882). It will remain, at any rate, his most important contribution in this domain—the artist appearing here in all the force of his talent and in his true function of explaining the inner springs of a certain mood of life.