NEKRÁSOFF
With Nekrásoff we come to a poet whose work has been the subject of a lively controversy in Russian Literature. He was born in 1821—his father being a poor army officer who married a Polish lady for love. This lady must have been most remarkable, because in his poems Nekrásoff continually refers to his mother in accents of love and respect, such as perhaps have no parallel in any other poet. His mother, however, died very early, and their large family, which consisted of thirteen brothers and sisters, must have been in great straits. No sooner had Nicholas Nekrásoff, the future poet, attained his sixteenth year, than he left the provincial town where the family were staying and went to St. Petersburg, to enter the University, where he joined the philological department. Most Russian students live very poorly—mostly by lessons, or entering as tutors in families where they are paid very little, but have at least lodgings and food. But Nekrásoff experienced simply black misery: “For full three years,” he said at a later period, “I felt continually hungry every day.” “It often happened that I entered one of the great restaurants where people may go to read newspapers, even without ordering anything to eat, and while I read my paper I would draw the bread plate towards myself and eat the bread, and that was my only food.” At last he fell ill, and during his convalescence the old soldier from whom he rented a tiny room, and to whom he had already run into debt, one cold November night refused to admit his lodger to his room. Nekrásoff would have had to spend the night out of doors, but a passing beggar took pity on him and took him to some slums on the outskirts of the town, to a “doss-house,” where the young poet found also the possibility of earning fifteen farthings for some petition that he wrote for one of the inmates. Such was the youth of Nekrásoff; but during it he had the opportunity of making acquaintance with the poorest and lowest classes of St. Petersburg, and the love towards them which he acquired during these peregrinations he retained all his life. Later on, by means of relentless work, and by editing all sorts of almanacks, he improved his material conditions. He became a regular contributor to the chief review of the time, for which Turguéneff, Dostoyévskiy, Hérzen, and all our best writers wrote, and in 1846 he even became the owner of this review, The Contemporary, which for the next fifteen years played so important a part in Russian literature. In The Contemporary he came, in the sixties, into close contact and friendship with two remarkable men, Tchernyshévskiy and Dobrolúboff, and about this time he wrote his best verses. In 1875 he fell seriously ill, and the next two years his life was simply agony. He died in December, 1877, and thousands of people, especially the University students, followed his body to the grave.
Here, over his grave, began the passionate discussion which has never ended, about the merits of Nekrásoff as a poet. While speaking over his grave, Dostoyévskiy put Nekrásoff by the side of Púshkin and Lérmontoff (“higher still than Púshkin and Lérmontoff,” exclaimed some young enthusiast in the crowd), and the question, “Is Nekrásoff a great poet, like Púshkin and Lérmontoff?” has been discussed ever since.
Nekrásoff’s poetry played such an important part in my own development, during my youth, that I did not dare trust my own high appreciation of it; and therefore to verify and support my impressions and appreciations I have compared them with those of the Russian critics, Arsénieff, Skabitchévskiy, and Venguéroff (the author of a great biographical dictionary of Russian authors).
When we enter the period of adolescence, from sixteen years to twenty, we need to find words to express the aspirations and the higher ideas which begin to wake up in our minds. It is not enough to have these aspirations: we want words to express them. Some will find these words in those of the prayers which they hear in the church; others—and I belonged to their number—will not be satisfied with this expression of their feelings: it will strike them as too vague, and they will look for something else to express in more concrete terms their growing sympathies with mankind and the philosophical questions about the life of the universe which pre-occupy them. They will look for poetry. For me, Goethe on the one side, by his philosophical poetry, and Nekrásoff on the other, by the concrete images in which he expressed his love of the peasant masses, supplied the words which the heart wanted for the expression of its poetical feelings. But this is only a personal remark. The question is, whether Nekrásoff can really be put by the side of Púshkin and Lérmontoff as a great poet.
Some people repudiate such a comparison. He was not a poet, they say, because he always wrote with a purpose. However, this reasoning, which is often defended by the pure æsthetics, is evidently incorrect. Shelley also had a purpose, which did not prevent him from being a great poet; Browning has a purpose in a number of his poems, and this did not prevent him from being a great poet. Every great poet has a purpose in most of his poems, and the question is only whether he has found a beautiful form for expressing this purpose, or not. The poet who shall succeed in combining a really beautiful form, i. e., impressive images and sonorous verses, with a grand purpose, will be the greatest poet.
Now, one certainly feels, on reading Nekrásoff, that he had difficulty in writing his verses. There is nothing in his poetry similar to the easiness with which Púshkin used the forms of versification for expressing his thoughts, nor is there any approach to the musical harmony of Lérmontoff’s verse or A. K. Tolstóy’s. Even in his best poems there are lines which are not agreeable to the ear on account of their wooden and clumsy form; but you feel that these unhappy verses could be improved by the change of a few words, without the beauty of the images in which the feelings are expressed being altered by that. One certainly feels that Nekrásoff was not master enough of his words and his rhymes; but there is not one single poetical image which does not suit the whole idea of the poem, or which strikes the reader as a dissonance, or is not beautiful; while in some of his verses Nekrásoff has certainly succeeded in combining a very high degree of poetical inspiration with great beauty of form. It must not be forgotten that the Yambs of Barbier, and the Châtiments of Victor Hugo also leave, here and there, much to be desired as regards form.
Nekrásoff was a most unequal writer, but one of the above-named critics has pointed out that even amidst his most unpoetical “poem”—the one in which he describes in very poor verses the printing office of a newspaper—the moment that he touches upon the sufferings of the workingman there come in twelve lines which for the beauty of poetical images and musicalness, connected with their inner force, have few equals in the whole of Russian literature.
When we estimate a poet, there is something general in his poetry which we either love or pass by indifferently, and to reduce literary criticism exclusively to the analysis of the beauty of the poet’s verses or to the correspondence between “idea and form” is surely to immensely reduce its value. Everyone will recognise that Tennyson possessed a wonderful beauty of form, and yet he cannot be considered as superior to Shelley, for the simple reason that the general tenor of the latter’s ideas was so much superior to the general tenor of Tennyson’s. It is on the general contents of his poetry that Nekrásoff’s superiority rests.
We have had in Russia several poets who also wrote upon social subjects or the duties of a citizen—I need only mention Pleschéeff and Mináyeff—and they attained sometimes, from the versifier’s point of view, a higher beauty of form than Nekrásoff. But in whatever Nekrásoff wrote there is an inner force which you do not find in either of these poets, and this force suggests to him images which are rightly considered as pearls of Russian poetry.
Nekrásoff called his Muse, “A Muse of Vengeance and of Sadness,” and this Muse, indeed, never entered into compromise with injustice. Nekrásoff is a pessimist, but his pessimism, as Venguéroff remarks, has an original character. Although his poetry contains so many depressing pictures representing the misery of the Russian masses, nevertheless the fundamental impression which it leaves upon the reader is an elevating feeling. The poet does not bow his head before the sad reality: he enters into a struggle with it, and he is sure of victory. The reading of Nekrásoff wakes up that discontent which bears in itself the seeds of recovery.
The mass of the Russian people, the peasants and their sufferings, are the main themes of our poet’s verses. His love to the people passes as a red thread through all his works; he remained true to it all his life. In his younger years that love saved him from squandering his talent in the sort of life which so many of his contemporaries have led; later on it inspired him in his struggle against serfdom; and when serfdom was abolished he did not consider his work terminated, as so many of his friends did: he became the poet of the dark masses oppressed by the economical and political yoke; and towards the end of his life he did not say: “Well, I have done what I could,” but till his last breath his verses were a complaint about not having been enough of a fighter. He wrote: “Struggle stood in the way of my becoming a poet, and songs prevented me from becoming a fighter,” and again: “Only he who is serviceable to the aims of his time, and gives all his life to the struggle for his brother men—only he will live longer than his life.”
Sometimes he sounds a note of despair; however, such a note is not frequent in Nekrásoff. His Russian peasant is not a man who only sheds tears. He is serene, sometimes humourous, and sometimes an extremely gay worker. Very seldom does Nekrásoff idealise the peasant: for the most part he takes him just as he is, from life itself; and the poet’s faith in the forces of that Russian peasant is deep and vigorous. “A little more freedom to breathe—he says—and Russia will shew that she has men, and that she has a future.” This is an idea which frequently recurs in his poetry.
The best poem of Nekrásoff is Red-nosed Frost. It is the apotheosis of the Russian peasant woman. The poem has nothing sentimental in it. It is written, on the contrary, in a sort of elevated epic style, and the second part, where Frost personified passes on his way through the wood, and where the peasant woman is slowly freezing to death, while bright pictures of past happiness pass through her brain—all this is admirable, even from the point of view of the most æsthetic critics, because it is written in good verses and in a succession of beautiful images and pictures.
The Peasant Children is a charming village idyll. The “Muse of Vengeance and Sadness”—one of our critics remarks—becomes wonderfully mild and gentle as soon as she begins to speak of women and children. In fact, none of the Russian poets has ever done so much for the apotheosis of women, and especially of the mother-woman, as this supposedly severe poet of Vengeance and Sadness. As soon as Nekrásoff begins to speak of a mother he grows powerful; and the strophes he devoted to his own mother—a woman lost in a squire’s house, amidst men thinking only of hunting, drinking, and exercising their powers as slave owners in their full brutality—these strophes are real pearls in the poetry of all nations.
His poem devoted to the exiles in Siberia and to the Russian women—that is, to the wives of the Decembrists—in exile, is excellent and contains really beautiful passages, but it is inferior to either his poems dealing with the peasants or to his pretty poem, Sasha, in which he describes, contemporaneously with Turguéneff, the very same types as Rúdin and Natásha.
It is quite true that Nekrásoff’s verses often bear traces of a painful struggle with rhyme, and that there are lines in his poems which are decidedly inferior; but he is certainly one of our most popular poets amidst the masses of the people. Part of his poetry has already become the inheritance of all the Russian nation. He is immensely read—not only by the educated classes, but by the poorest peasants as well. In fact, as has been remarked by one of our critics, to understand Púshkin a certain more or less artificial literary development is required; while to understand Nekrásoff it is sufficient for the peasant simply to know reading; and it is difficult to imagine, without having seen it, the delight with which Russian children in the poorest village schools are now reading Nekrásoff and learning full pages from his verses by heart.