SOME CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS
It does not enter into the plan of this book to analyse contemporary Russian writers. Another volume would be required to do them justice, not only on account of the literary importance of some of them, and the interest of the various directions in Art which they represent, but especially because in order to properly explain the character of the present literature, and the different currents in Russian Art, it would be necessary to enter into many details concerning the unsettled conditions under which the country has been living during the last thirty years. Moreover, most of the contemporary writers have not yet said their last word, and we can expect from them works of even greater value than any they have hitherto produced. I am compelled, therefore, to limit myself to brief remarks concerning the most prominent living novelists of the present day.
Oertel (born 1855) has unfortunately abandoned literature during the last few years, just at a time when his last novel, Smyéna (Changing Guards), had given proofs of a further development of his sympathetic talent. He was born in the borderland of the Russian Steppes, and was brought up on one of the large estates of this region. Later on he went to the university of St. Petersburg and, as a matter of fact, was compelled to leave it after some “students’ disorders,” and was interned in the town of Tver. He soon returned, however, to his native Steppe region, which he cherishes with the same love as Nikítin and Koltsóff.
Oertel began his literary career by short sketches which are now collected in two volumes under the name of Notebook of a Prairie-Man, and whose manner suggests Turguéneff’s Sportsman’s Notebook. The nature of the prairies is admirably described in these little stories, with great warmth and poetry, and the types of peasants who appear in the stories are perfectly true to nature, without any attempts at idealisation, although one feels that the author is no great admirer of the “intellectuals” and fully appreciates the general ethics of rural life. Some of these sketches, especially those which deal with the growing bourgeoisie du village, are highly artistic. Two Couples (1887), in which the parallel stories of two young couples in love—one of educated people and the other of peasants—are given, is a story evidently written under the influence of the ideas of Tolstóy, and bearing traces of a preconceived idea, which spoils in places the artistic value of the novel. There are nevertheless admirable scenes, testifying to very fine powers of observation.
However, the real force of Oertel is not in discussing psychological problems. His true domain is the description of whole regions, with all the variety of types of men which one finds amidst the mixed populations of South Russia, and this force appears at its best in The Gardénins, their Retainers, their Followers, and their Enemies, and in Changing Guards. Russian critics have, of course, very seriously and very minutely discussed the young heroes, Efrem and Nicholas, who appear in The Gardénins, and they have made a rigorous inquiry into the ways of thinking of these young men. But this is of a quite secondary importance, and one almost regrets that the author, paying a tribute to his times, has given the two young men more attention than they deserve, being only two more individuals in the great picture of country life which he has drawn for us. The fact is, that just as we have in Gógol’s tales quite a world opening before us—a Little Russian village, or provincial life—so also here we see, as the very title of the novel suggests, the whole life of a large estate at the times of serfdom, with its mass of retainers, followers and foes, all grouped round the horse-breeding establishment which makes the fame of the estate and the pride of all connected with it. It is the life of that crowd of people, the life at the horse-fairs and the races, not the discussions or the loves of a couple of young men, which makes the main interest of the picture; and that life is really reproduced in as masterly a manner as it is in a good Dutch picture representing some village fair. No writer in Russia since Serghéi Aksákoff and Gógol has so well succeeded in painting a whole corner of Russia with its scores of figures, all living and all placed in those positions of relative importance which they occupy in real life.
The same power is felt in Changing Guards. The subject of this novel is very interesting. It shows how the old noble families disintegrate, like their estates, and how another class of men—merchants and unscrupulous adventurers—get possession of these estates, while a new class made up of the younger merchants and clerks, who are beginning to be inspired with some ideas of freedom and higher culture, constitutes already the germ of a new stratum of the educated classes. In this novel, too, some critics fastened their attention chiefly on the undoubtedly interesting types of the aristocratic girl, the Non-conformist peasant whom she begins to love, the practical Radical young merchant—all painted quite true to life; but they overlooked what makes the real importance of the novel. Here again we have quite a region of South Russia (as typical as the Far West is in the United States), throbbing with life and full of living men and women, as it was some twenty years after the liberation of the serfs, when a new life, not devoid of some American features, was beginning to appear. The contrast between this young life and the decaying mansion is very well reproduced, too. In the romances of the young people—the whole bearing the stamp of the most sympathetic individuality of the author.
Korolénko was born (in 1853) in a small town of Western Russia, and there he received his first education. In 1872 he was at the Agricultural Academy of Moscow, but was compelled to leave after having taken part in some students’ movement. Later on he was arrested as a “political,” and exiled, first to a small town of the Uráls, and then to Western Siberia, and from there, after his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., he was transported to a Yakút encampment several hundred miles beyond Yakútsk. There he spent several years, and when he returned to Russia in 1886, not being allowed to stay in University towns, he settled at Nízhniy Nóvgorod.
Life in the far north, in the deserts of Yakútsk, in a small encampment buried for half the year in the snow, produced upon Korolénko an extremely deep impression, and the little stories which he wrote about Siberian subjects (The Dream of Makár, The Man from Sakhalín, etc.), were so beautiful that he was unanimously recognised as a true heir to Turguéneff. There is in the little stories of Korolénko a force, a sense of proportion, a mastery in depicting the characters, and an artistic finish, which not only distinguish him from most of his young contemporaries, but reveal in him a true artist. What the Forest Says, in which he related a dramatic episode from serfdom times in Lithuania, only further confirmed the high reputation which Korolénko had already won. It is not an imitation of Turguéneff, and yet it at once recalled, by its comprehension of the life of the forest, the great novelist’s beautiful sketch, The Woodlands (Polyesie). In Bad Society is evidently taken from the author’s childhood, and this idyll among tramps and thieves who concealed themselves in the ruins of some tower is of such beauty, especially in the scenes with children, that everyone found in it a truly “Turguéneff charm.” But then Korolénko came to a halt. His Blind Musician was read in all languages, and admired—again for its charm; but it was felt that the over-refined psychology of this novel is hardly correct; and no greater production worthy of the extremely sympathetic and rich talent of Korolénko has appeared since, while his attempts at producing a larger and more elaborate romance were not crowned with success.
This is somewhat striking, but the same would have to be said of all the contemporaries of Korolénko, among whom there are men and women of great talent. To analyse the causes of this fact, especially with reference to so great an artist as Korolénko, would certainly be a tempting task. But this would require speaking at some length of the change which took place in the Russian novel during the last twenty years or so, in connection with the political life of the country. A few hints will perhaps explain what is meant. In the seventies quite a special sort of novel had been created by a number of young novelists—mostly contributors of the review, Rússkoye Slóvo. The “thoughtful realist”—such as he was understood by Písareff—was their hero, and however imperfect the technique of these novels might have been in some cases, their leading idea was most honest, and the influence they exercised upon Russian youth was in the right direction. This was the time when Russian women were making their first steps towards higher education, and trying to conquer some sort of economical and intellectual independence. To attain this, they had to sustain a bitter struggle against their elders. “Madame Kabanóva” and “Dikóy” (see Ch. VI.) were alive then in a thousand guises, in all classes of society, and our women had to struggle hard against their parents and relatives, who did not understand their children; against “Society” as a whole, which hated the “emancipated woman”; and against the Government, which only too well foresaw the dangers that a new generation of educated women would represent for an autocratic bureaucracy. It was of the first necessity, then, that at least in the men of the same generation the young fighters for women’s rights should find helpers, and not that sort of men about whom Turguéneff’s heroine in Correspondence wrote (see Ch. IV.). In this direction—especially after the splendid beginning that was made by two women writers, Sophie Smirnóva (The Little Fire, The Salt of the Earth) and Olga Shapír—our men-novelists have done good service, both in maintaining the energy of women in their hard struggle and in inspiring men with respect towards that struggle and those who fought in it.
Later on a new element became prominent in the Russian novel. It was the “populist” element—love to the masses of toilers, work among them in order to introduce, be it the slightest spark of light and hope, into their sad existence. Again the novel contributed immensely to maintain that movement and to inspire men and women in that sort of work, an instance of which has been given on a preceding page, in speaking of The Great Bear. The workers in both these fields were numerous, and I can only name in passing Mordóvtseff (in Signs of the Times), Scheller, who wrote under the name of A. Mikháiloff, Stanukóvitch, Novodvórskiy, Barantsévitch, Matchtétt, Mámin, and the poet, Nádson, who all, either directly or indirectly, worked through the novel and poetry in the same direction.
However, the struggle for liberty which was begun about 1857, after having reached its culminating point in 1881, came to a temporary end, and for the next ten years a complete prostration spread amidst the Russian “intellectuals.” Faith in the old ideals and the old inspiring watchwords—even faith in men—was passing away, and new tendencies began to make their way in Art—partly under the influence of this phase of the Russian movement, and partly also under the influence of Western Europe. A sense of fatigue became evident. Faith in knowledge was shaken. Social ideals were relegated to the background. “Rigourism” was condemned, and “popularism” began to be represented as ludicrous, or, when it reappeared, it was in some religious form, as Tolstóyism. Instead of the former enthusiasm for “mankind,” the “rights of the individual” were proclaimed, which “rights” did not mean equal rights for all, but the rights of the few over all the others.
In these unsettled conditions of social ideas our younger novelists—always anxious to reflect in their art the questions of the day—have had to develop; and this confusion necessarily stands in the way of their producing anything as definite and as complete as did their predecessors of the previous generation. There have been no such complete individualities in society; and a true artist is incapable of inventing what does not exist.
Dmitriy Merezhkóvskiy (born 1866) may be taken to illustrate the difficulties which a writer, even when endowed with a by no means ordinary talent, found in reaching his full development under the social and political conditions which prevailed in Russia during the period just mentioned. Leaving aside his poetry—although it is also very characteristic—and taking only his novels and critical articles, we see how, after having started with a certain sympathy, or at least with a certain respect, for those Russian writers of the previous generation who wrote under the inspiration of higher social ideals, Merezhkóvskiy gradually began to suspect these ideals, and finally ended by treating them with contempt. He found that they were of no avail, and he began to speak more and more of “the sovereign rights of the individual,” but not in the sense in which they were understood by Godwin and other eighteenth century philosophers, nor in the sense which Písareff attributed to them when he spoke of the “thoughtful realist”; Merezkhóvskiy took them in the sense—desperately vague, and narrow when not vague—attributed to them by Nietzsche. At the same time he began to speak more and more of “Beauty” and “the worship of the Beautiful,” but again not in the sense which idealists attributed to such words, but in the limited, erotic sense in which “Beauty” was understood by the “Æsthetics” of the leisured class in the forties.
The main work which Merezhkóvskiy undertook offered great interest. He began a trilogy of novels in which he intended to represent the struggle of the antique pagan world against Christianity: on the one hand, the Hellenic love and poetic comprehension of nature, and its worship of sound, exuberant life; and on the other, the life-depressing influences of Judaic Christianity, with its condemnation of the study of nature, of poetry, art, pleasure, and sound, healthy life altogether. The first novel of the trilogy was Julian the Apostate, and the second, Leonardo da Vinci (both have been translated into English). They were the result of a careful study of the antique Greek world and the Renaissance, and notwithstanding some defects (absence of real feeling, even in the glorification of the worship of Beauty, and a certain abuse of archæological details), both contained really beautiful and impressive scenes; while the fundamental idea—the necessity of a synthesis between the poetry of nature of the antique world and the higher humanising ideals of Christianity—was forcibly impressed upon the reader.
Unfortunately, Merezhkóvskiy’s admiration of antique “Naturism” did not last. He had not yet written the third novel of his trilogy when modern “Symbolism” began to penetrate into his works, with the result that notwithstanding all his abilities the young author seems now to be drifting straight towards a hopeless mysticism, like that into which Gógol fell towards the end of his life.
It may seem strange to the West Europeans, and especially to English readers, to hear of such a rapid succession of different moods of thought in Russian society, sufficiently deep to exercise such an influence upon the novels as has just been mentioned. And yet so it is, in consequence of the historical phase which Russia is living through. There is even a very gifted novelist, Boborýkin (born 1836), who has made it his peculiar work to describe in novels the prevailing moods of Russian educated society in their rapid succession for the last thirty years. The technique of his novels is always excellent (he is also the author of a good critical work, just published, on the influences of Western romance upon the Russian novel). His observations are always correct; his personal point of view is that of an honest advanced progressive; and his novels can always be taken as true and good pictures of the tendencies which prevailed at a given moment amongst the Russian “intellectuals.” For the history of thought in Russia they are simply invaluable; and they must have helped many a young reader to find his or her way amidst the various facts of life; but the variety of currents which have been chronicled by Boborýkin would appear simply puzzling to a Western reader.
Boborýkin has been reproached by some critics with not having sufficiently distinguished between what was important in the facts of life which he described and what was irrelevant or only ephemeral, but this is hardly correct. The main defect of his work lies perhaps elsewhere; namely, in that the individuality of the author is hardly felt in it at all. He seems to record the kaleidoscope of life without living with his heroes, and without suffering or rejoicing with them. He has noticed and perfectly well observed those persons whom he describes; his judgment of them is that of an intelligent, experienced man; but none of them has impressed him enough to become part of himself. Therefore they do not strike the reader with any sufficient depth of impression.
One of our contemporary authors, also endowed with great talent, who is publishing a simply stupefying quantity of novels, is Potápenko. He was born in 1856, in South Russia, and after having studied music, he began writing in 1881, and although his later novels bear traces of too hasty work, he still remains a favourite writer. Amidst the dark colours which prevail now amongst the Russian novelists, Potápenko is a happy exception. Some of his novels are full of highly comic scenes, and compel the reader to laugh heartily with the author. But even when there are no such scenes, and the facts are, on the contrary, sad, or even tragical, the effect of the novel is not depressing—perhaps because the author never departs from his own point of view of a satisfied optimist. In this respect Potápenko is absolutely the opposite of most of his contemporaries, and especially of Tchéhoff.