Slime and the Breath of Life
The Russian Novel, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M. de Vogüe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]
Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910, did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy, however—“probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen since Goethe”—the book closes.
The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin—a romanticism which disappeared in 1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction—a leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian, adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of expression.
In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the breath of life, it is barren.
Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal allegiance—the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to say that some of her writing, for instance “the meeting between Dinah and Lisbeth,” is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have been written by the hand that gave us Ruth.
This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of renunciation in Tolstoy.
And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians “disentangled themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels”—because of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.
The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves—namely, read comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us; whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in terms.
Llewellyn Jones.