An Inspired Publisher
To paraphrase the biblical adage: Samson is upon ye, Philistines! That quaint giant, Russian literature, is storming the Anglo-Saxon world; and no longer in apothecary doses, in solitary books, but in avalanches. A practical dreamer, Alfred A. Knopf, is determined to deluge this country with the best and nearly best that has been written in Russia, and he is doing it on a big scale, in torrents and showers. Such a dizzying list of publications: Gogol, Goncharov, Lermontov, Gorky, Andreyev, Garshin, Kropotkin; and he is going to give us Sologub, Kuzmin, Ropshin! And he has given us Przybyszewski’s Homo Sapiens, the book about which I have been drumming the ears of my American friends for years, the book that has stirred me more than any other work of art,—I mean it literally. Mr. Knopf has introduced another novel feature on the book-market: he selects translators from among those who know three things—Russian, English, and how to write,—so that the reader will be spared the torture of wading through a badly-done translation from the French version of a German translation from the Russian (examples? Recall Sanine!).
A literature is like a people; if you want to know it, you must learn not only its Cromwells and Napoleons, but also its Asquiths and Vivianis; not only its Shakespeares and Goethes, but its Wellses and Sudermanns as well. Turgenyev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, do not exhaust Russian literature of the nineteenth century, though they are the greatest novelists of their epoch. There are many interesting sides of Russian life which are not reflected on the canvasses of the great Trio, but have been painted by perhaps minor artists, whom we cannot afford to miss if we intend to gain a clear vista of that peculiar life and its peculiar literature.
Hence Goncharov and his Precipice. In Russia he is ranked next to Turgenyev. Without the latter’s delicate lyricism Goncharov presents the objective artist, if this is possible, in depicting the life of the gentry, the class that has been either ignored or caricatured by the writers with a Tendenz. In Precipice we face Rayski, Vyera, the grandmother, the passing types of the romantic nobility, whose passions and tragedies are as stirring and as human as those of the more democratic elements of society.
Garshin is another writer heretofore unknown to the English world. His Signal and other Stories are achingly Russian. Garshin is a product of the Eighties, the epoch of “petty deeds,” when the heavy boot of Alexander III. drove into the underground all that was idealistic in his country. The soil-less Intelligentzia had the alternative of turning retrogrades or going insane. Garshin’s lot was with the latter category. His few stories ache with the black melancholy which finally hurled him down a flight of stone steps,—his last flight. His war impressions are gripping with the resigned Russian sadness; they are all-human, universal; but Attalea Princeps, the symbolical tale of an exotic plant chafing in a hot-house—who but a compatriot of mad Garshin will fathom its profound tragicness!
The republication of Kropotkin’s Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature will be of service to the critical student of Russian literature. I say critical, for although the book is rich in material the personal views of the author and his valuations of the writers are considerably obsolete and tainted with the liberalistic tendency of “problem”-friends.
Below are more reviews of Mr. Knopf’s publications. The most important one is Przybyszewski’s Homo Sapiens. It deserves a special article. See the next issue!