Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

FOOTNOTES:

[2] See Tagantseff, Russian Criminal Law.

CHAPTER II
REALISM OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

The moment a writer nowadays mentions the word “realism” he risks the danger of being told that he is a disciple of a particular school, and that he is bent on propagating a peculiar and exclusive theory of art. If, however, Russian literature is to be discussed at all, the word “realism” cannot be avoided. So it will be as well to explain immediately and clearly what I mean when I assert that the main feature of both Russian prose and Russian verse is its closeness to nature, its love of reality, which for want of a better word one can only call realism. When the word “realism” is employed with regard to literature, it gives rise to two quite separate misunderstandings: this is unavoidable, because the word has been used to denote special schools and theories of art which have made a great deal of noise both in France and England and elsewhere.

The first misunderstanding arises from the use of the word by a certain French school of novelists who aimed at writing scientific novels in which the reader should be given slices of raw life; and these novelists strove by an accumulation of detail to produce the effect of absolute reality. The best known writers of this French school did not succeed in doing this, although they achieved striking results of a different character. For instance, Emile Zola was entirely successful when he wrote prose epics on subjects such as life in a mine, life in a huge shop, or life during a great war; that is to say, he was poetically successful when he painted with a broad brush and set great crowds in motion. He produced matchless panoramas, but the effect of them at their best was a poetic, romantic effect. When he tried to be realistic, and scientifically realistic, when he endeavoured to say everything by piling detail on detail, he merely succeeded in being tedious and disgusting. And so far from telling the whole truth, he produced an effect of distorted exaggeration such as one receives from certain kinds of magnifying and distorting mirrors.

The second misunderstanding with regard to the word “realism” is this. Certain people think that if you say an author strives to attain an effect of truth and reality in his writings, you must necessarily mean that he is without either the wish or the power to select, and that his work is therefore chaotic. Not long ago, in a book of short sketches, I included a very short and inadequate paper on certain aspects of the Russian stage; and in mentioning Tchekov, the Russian dramatist, I made the following statement: “The Russian stage simply aims at one thing: to depict everyday life, not exclusively the brutality of everyday life, nor the tremendous catastrophes befalling human beings, nor to devise intricate problems and far-fetched cases of conscience in which human beings might possibly be entangled. It simply aims at presenting glimpses of human beings as they really are, and by means of such glimpses it opens out avenues and vistas into their lives.” I added further that I considered such plays would be successful in any country.

A reviewer, commenting on this in an interesting article, said that these remarks revealed the depth of my error with regard to realism. “As if the making of such plays,” wrote the reviewer, “were not the perpetual aim of dramatists! But a dramatist would be putting chaos and not real life on the stage if he presented imitations of unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments. The idea which binds the drama together, an idea derived by reason from experience of life at large, is the most real and lifelike part in it, if the drama is a good one.”

Now I am as well aware as this reviewer, or as any one else, that it is the perpetual aim of dramatists to make such plays. But it is an aim which they often fail to achieve. For instance, we have had, during the last thirty years in England and France, many successful and striking plays in which the behaviour of the characters although effective from a theatrical point of view, is totally unlike the behaviour of men and women in real life. Again, when I wrote of the Russian stage, I never for a moment suggested that the Russian dramatist did, or that any dramatist should, present imitations of unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments. As my sketch was a short one, I was not able to go into the question in full detail, but I should have thought that if one said that a play was true to life, and at the same time theatrically and dramatically successful, that is to say, interesting to a large audience, an ordinary reader would have taken for granted (as many of my readers did take for granted) that in the work of such dramatists there must necessarily have been selection.

Later on in this book I shall deal at some length with the plays of Anton Tchekov, and in discussing that writer, I hope to make it clear that his work, so far from presenting imitations of unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments, are imitations of selected but real people, doing selected but probable things at selected but interesting moments. But the difference between Tchekov and most English and French dramatists (save those of the quite modern school) is, that the moments which Tchekov selects appear at first sight to be trivial. His genius consists in the power of revealing the dramatic significance of the seemingly trivial. It stands to reason, as I shall try to point out later on, that the more realistic your play, the more it is true to life; the less obvious action there is in it, the greater must be the skill of the dramatist; the surer his art, the more certain his power of construction, the nicer his power of selection.

Mr. Max Beerbohm once pointed this out by an apt illustration. “The dramatist,” he said, “who deals in heroes, villains, buffoons, queer people who are either doing or suffering either tremendous or funny things, has a very valuable advantage over the playwright who deals merely in humdrum you and me. The dramatist has his material as a springboard. The adramatist must leap as best he can on the hard high road, the adramatist must be very much an athlete.”

That is just it: many of the modern (and ancient) Russian playwriters are adramatists. But they are extremely athletic; and so far from their work being chaotic, they sometimes give evidence, as in the case of Tchekov, of a supreme mastery over the construction and architectonics of drama, as well as of an unerring instinct for what will be telling behind footlights, although at first sight their choice does not seem to be obviously dramatic.

Therefore, everything I have said so far can be summed up in two statements: Firstly, that Russian literature, because it deals with realism, has nothing in common with the work of certain French “Naturalists,” by whose work the word “realism” has achieved so wide a notoriety; secondly, Russian literature, although it is realistic, is not necessarily chaotic, and contains many supreme achievements in the art of selection. But I wish to discuss the peculiar quality of Russian realism, because it appears to me that it is this quality which differentiates Russian literature from the literature of other countries.

I have not dealt in this book with Russian poets, firstly, because the number of readers who are familiar with Russian poetry in its original tongue is limited; and, secondly, because it appears to me impossible to discuss Russian poetry, if one is forced to deal in translations, since no translation, however good, can give the reader an idea either of the music, the atmosphere, or the charm of the original. But it is in Russian poetry that the quality of Russian realism is perhaps most clearly made manifest. Any reader familiar with German literature will, I think, agree that if one compares French or English poetry with German poetry, and French and English Romanticism with German Romanticism, one is conscious, when one approaches the work of the Germans, of entering into a more sober and more quiet dominion; one leaves behind one the exuberance of England: “the purple patches” of a Shakespeare, the glowing richness of a Keats, the soaring rainbow fancies of a Shelley, the wizard horizons of a Coleridge. One also leaves behind one the splendid sword-play and gleaming decision of the French: the clarions of Corneille, the harps and flutes of Racine, the great many-piped organ of Victor Hugo, the stormy pageants of Musset, the gorgeous lyricism of Flaubert, the jewelled dreams of Gautier, and all the colour and the pomp of the Parnassians. One leaves all these things behind, and one steps into a world of quiet skies, rustling leaves, peaceful meadows, and calm woods, where the birds twitter cheerfully and are answered by the plaintive notes of pipe or reed, or interrupted by the homely melody, sometimes cheerful and sometimes sad, of the wandering fiddler.

In this country, it is true, we have visions and vistas of distant hills and great brooding waters, of starlit nights and magical twilights; in this country, it is also true that we hear the echoes of magic horns, the footfall of the fairies, the tinkling hammers of the sedulous Kobolds, and the champing and the neighing of the steeds of Chivalry. But there is nothing wildly fantastic, nor portentously exuberant, nor gorgeously dazzling; nothing tempestuous, unbridled, or extreme. When the Germans have wished to express such things, they have done so in their music; they certainly have not done so in their poetry. What they have done in their poetry, and what they have done better than any one else, is to express in the simplest of all words the simplest of all thoughts and feelings. They have spoken of first love, of spring and the flowers, the smiles and tears of children, the dreams of youth and the musings of old age—with a simplicity, a homeliness no writers of any other country have ever excelled. And when they deal with the supernatural, with ghosts, fairies, legends, deeds of prowess or phantom lovers, there is a quaint homeliness about the recital of such things, as though they were being told by the fireside in a cottage, or being sung on the village green to the accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy. To many Germans the phantasy of a Shelley or of a Victor Hugo is essentially alien and unpalatable. They feel as though they were listening to men who are talking too loud and too wildly, and they merely wish to get away or to stop their ears. Again, poets like Keats or Gautier often produce on them the impression that they are listening to sensuous and meaningless echoes.

Now Russian poetry is a step farther on in this same direction. The reader who enters the kingdom of Russian poetry, after having visited those of France and England, experiences what he feels in entering the German region, but still more so. The region of Russian poetry is still more earthy. Even the mysticism of certain German Romantic writers is alien to it. The German poetic country is quiet and sober, it is true; but in its German forests you hear, as I have said, the noise of those hoofs which are bearing riders to the unknown country. Also you have in German literature, allegory and pantheistic dreams which are foreign to the Russian poetic temperament, and therefore unreflected in Russian poetry.

The Russian poetical temperament, and, consequently, Russian poetry, does not only closely cling to the solid earth, but it is based on and saturated with sound common sense, with a curious matter-of-fact quality. And this common sense with which the greatest Russian poet, Pushkin, is so thoroughly impregnated, is as foreign to German Schwärmerei as it is to French rhetoric, or the imaginative exuberance of England. In Russian poetry of the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of the enthusiasm kindled in certain Russian poets by the romantic scenery of the Caucasus, there is very little feeling for nature. Nature, in the poetry of Pushkin, is more or less conventional: almost the only flower mentioned is the rose, almost the only bird the nightingale. And although certain Russian poets adopted the paraphernalia and the machinery of Romanticism (largely owing to the influence of Byron), their true nature, their fundamental sense, keeps on breaking out. Moreover, there is an element in Russian Romanticism of passive obedience, of submission to authority, which arises partly from the passive quality in all Russians, and partly from the atmosphere of the age and the political régime of the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus it is that no Russian Romantic poet would have ever tried to reach the dim pinnacles of Shelley’s speculative cities, and no Russian Romantic poet would have uttered a wild cry of revolt such as Musset’s “Rolla.” But what the Russian poets did do, and what they did in a manner which gives them an unique place in the history of the world’s literature, was to extract poetry from the daily life they saw round them, and to express it in forms of incomparable beauty. Russian poetry, like the Russian nature, is plastic. Plasticity, adaptability, comprehensiveness, are the great qualities of Pushkin. His verse is “simple, sensuous and impassioned”; there is nothing indistinct about it, no vague outline and no blurred detail; it is perfectly balanced, and it is this sense of balance and proportion blent with a rooted common sense, which reminds the reader when he reads Pushkin of Greek art, and gives one the impression that the poet is a classic, however much he may have employed the stock-in-trade of Romanticism.

Meredith says somewhere that the poetry of mortals is their daily prose. It is precisely this kind of poetry, the poetry arising from the incidents of everyday life, which the Russian poets have been successful in transmuting into verse. There is a quality of matter-of-factness in Russian poetry which is unique; the same quality exists in Russian folklore and fairy tales; even Russian ghosts, and certainly the Russian devil, have an element of matter-of-factness about them; and the most Romantic of all Russian poets, Lermontov, has certain qualities which remind one more of Thackeray than of Byron or Shelley, who undoubtedly influenced him.

I will quote as an example of this one of his most famous poems. It is called “The Testament,” and it is the utterance of a man who has been mortally wounded in battle.

“I want to be alone with you,[3]
A moment quite alone.
The minutes left to me are few,
They say I’ll soon be gone.
And you’ll be going home on leave,
Then tell ... but why? I do believe
There’s not a soul, who’ll greatly care
To hear about me over there.
And yet if some one asks you, well,
Let us suppose they do—
A bullet hit me here, you’ll tell,—
The chest,—and it went through.
And say I died and for the Tsar,
And say what fools the doctors are;—
And that I shook you by the hand,
And thought about my native land.
My father and my mother, there!
They may be dead by now;
To tell the truth, I wouldn’t care
To grieve them anyhow.
If one of them is living, say
I’m bad at writing home, and they
Have sent us to the front, you see,—
And that they needn’t wait for me.
They’ve got a neighbour, as you know,
And you remember I
And she.... How very long ago
It is we said good-bye!
She won’t ask after me, nor care,
But tell her ev’rything, don’t spare
Her empty heart; and let her cry;—
To her it doesn’t signify.”

The words of this poem are the words of familiar conversation; they are exactly what the soldier would say in such circumstances. There is not a single literary or poetical expression used. And yet the effect in the original is one of poignant poetical feeling and consummate poetic art. I know of no other language where the thing is possible; because if you translate the Russian by the true literary equivalents, you would have to say: “I would like a word alone with you, old fellow,” or “old chap,”[4] or something of that kind; and I know of no English poet who has ever been able to deal successfully (in poetry) with the speech of everyday life without the help of slang or dialect. What is needed for this are the Russian temperament and the Russian language.

I will give another instance of what I mean. There is a Russian poet called Krilov, who wrote fables such as those of La Fontaine, based for the greater part on those of Æsop. He wrote a version of what is perhaps La Fontaine’s masterpiece, “Les Deux Pigeons,” which begins thus:

“Two pigeons, like two brothers, lived together.
They shared their all in fair and wintry weather.
Where the one was the other would be near,
And every joy they shared and every tear.
They noticed not Time’s flight. Sadness they knew;
But weary of each other never grew.”

This last line, translated literally, runs: “They were sometimes sad, they were never bored.” It is one of the most poetical in the whole range of Russian literature; and yet how absolutely untranslatable!—not only into English, but into any other language. How can one convey the word “boring” so that it shall be poetical, in English or in French? In Russian one can, simply from the fact that the word which means boring, “skouchno,” is just as fit for poetic use as the word “groustno,” which means sad. And this proves that it is easier for Russians to make poetry out of the language of everyday than it is for Englishmen.

The matter-of-fact quality of the Russian poetical temperament—its dislike of exaggeration and extravagance—is likewise clearly visible in the manner in which Russian poets write of nature. I have already said that the poets of the early part of the nineteenth century reveal (compared with their European contemporaries) only a mild sentiment for the humbler aspects of nature; but let us take a poet of a later epoch, Alexis Tolstoy, who wrote in the fifties, and who may not unfairly be called a Russian Tennyson. In the work of Tolstoy the love of nature reveals itself on almost every page. His work brings before our eyes the landscape of the South of Russia, and expresses the charm and the quality of that country in the same way as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” evokes for us the sight of England. Yet if one compares the two, the work of the Russian poet is nearer to the earth, familiar and simple in a fashion which is beyond the reach of other languages. Here, for instance, is a rough translation of one of Alexis Tolstoy’s poems:

“Through the slush and the ruts of the road,
By the side of the dam of the stream;
Where the wet fishing nets are spread,
The carriage jogs on, and I muse.
I muse and I look at the road,
At the damp and the dull grey sky,
At the shelving bank of the lake,
And the far-off smoke of the villages.
By the dam, with a cheerless face,
Is walking a tattered old Jew.
From the lake, with a splashing of foam,
The waters rush through the weir.
A little boy plays on a pipe,
He has made it out of a reed.
The startled wild-ducks have flown,
And call as they sweep from the lake.
Near the old crumbling mill
Labourers sit on the grass.
An old worn horse in a cart,
Is lazily dragging some sacks.
And I know it all, oh! so well,
Although I have never been here;
The roof of that house over there,
And that boy, and the wood, and the weir,
And the mournful voice of the mill,
And the crumbling barn in the field—
I have been here and seen it before,
And forgotten it all long ago.
This very same horse plodded on,
It was dragging the very same sacks;
And under the mouldering mill
Labourers sat on the grass.
And the Jew, with his beard, walked by,
And the weir made just such a noise.
All this has happened before,
Only, I cannot tell when.”

I have said that Russian fairy tales and folk stories are full of the same spirit of matter-of-factness. And so essential do I consider this factor to be, so indispensable do I consider the comprehension of it by the would-be student of Russian literature, that I will quote a short folk-story at length, which reveals this quality in its essence. The reader will only have to compare the following tale in his mind with a French, English, or German fairy tale to see what I mean.