INTRODUCTION.
It affords me great pleasure to link my name with that of Vladimir Korolenko by writing a few words in the form of an introduction to the translation of that gifted young author’s “Blind Musician,” which is now to appear for the first time in English.
I knew Korolenko by reputation and by his work long before I made his personal acquaintance. While engaged in making an investigation of the exile system in Siberia, I met many of his banished friends and comrades; and my attention was first called by them to the series of graphic sketches of Siberian life and experience that he was then publishing in “Russian Thought,” “The Northern Messenger,” the “Annals of the Fatherland,” and other Russian periodicals. I read them carefully, and formed from them at once a high opinion of the author’s character and talent.
Upon my return from Siberia in the summer of 1886, I stopped for a few days in the old Tartar town of Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga (where Mr. Korolenko was then living), for the express purpose of calling upon a writer whose life and whose work had so deeply interested me. I need not describe the impression that he made upon me further than to say, that a feeling of warm personal regard and esteem for the man was soon added to the admiration that I already had for him as a literary artist. Mr. Korolenko seems to me to represent the most liberal, the most progressive, and the most sincerely patriotic type of young Russian manhood. The influence that he has exerted, personally and by his writings, has always been on the side of liberty, humanity, and justice; and there could hardly be a more significant commentary upon the existing form of government in Russia than the fact that this talented author, before he was thirty-five years of age, had been four times banished from his home to remote parts of the empire, without even the form of a judicial trial, and had twice been sent as a political exile to Siberia. If he had been an active revolutionist like Lopatin, or even a writer upon prohibited social and political subjects like Chernishèfski, his banishment to Siberia would have been more comprehensible; but he was neither one nor the other. He was removed to the province of Vòlogda, and afterward to the province of Viatka, merely because the police regarded him as a “neblagonadëzhni” (politically untrustworthy person), and then he was exiled to Siberia as a result of a stupid police blunder. When, after years of hardship and privation, he finally returned to his home, he was called upon to take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., and to swear that he would betray every one of his friends or acquaintances whom he knew to be engaged in revolutionary or anti-Government work. No conscientious and self-respecting man could take such an oath, and Mr. Korolenko, of course, declined to do it. He was thereupon exiled by administrative process to the East-Siberian province of Yakutsk, where in a wretched Yakut “ooloos” he lived for three years, and where he made some of the character studies, such as “The Vagrant” and “Makàr’s Dream,” that first attracted to him the attention of the Russian reading public.
Mr. Korolenko has not thus far published anything like a long and carefully worked out novel of Russian life; but the fault is not his own. He wrote such a novel under the title “Pròkhor and the Students” in 1886 or 1887, and the first chapters of it were printed in the well-known magazine “Russian Thought” in 1888. As soon however as the plot began to develop and the nature and tendency of the story became apparent, the censor interposed with his veto; and the publishers of the magazine were compelled to announce to its readers that “on account of circumstances beyond their control” the remainder of the novel could not be printed.
Mr. Korolenko’s short stories, sketches, and studies of character show so much talent, originality, and artistic skill that if he were untrammelled, and could work out his ideas and conceptions in his own way, there would be every reason to predict for him a useful and brilliant literary career. Unfortunately, however, all Russian authors are forced to work within the bounds set for them by an arbitrary and often stupid censorship; and the most promising career may be utterly ruined by the caprice of an ignorant official, or by a sentence of exile for life or for a long term of years to the sub-arctic province of Yakutsk. I can recall the names of a dozen young Russian authors, journalists, or poets, among them Korolenko, Màchtet, Lessèvitch, Volkhòfski, Petropàvlovski, Chudnòfski, Klemens, Ivanchìn-Pìsaref, and Staniukòvitch, who are in Siberia now, or have spent there some of the best years of their young manhood.
One can only wonder at and admire the courage, the energy, and the persistence of men like Korolenko, who, although gagged by the censor, imprisoned, and banished to the remotest parts of Siberia, work on with heroic patience, and finally make their names known and respected, not only in their native country but throughout the civilized world.
GEORGE KENNAN.
I. THE BLIND INFANT. THE FAMILY.
I.
The Blind Infant. The Family.
At the hour of midnight, in a wealthy family living in the southwestern part of Russia, a child was born. As the first faint, pitiful cry of the baby echoed through the room, the young mother, who had been lying with closed eyes, unconscious to all appearances, stirred uneasily in the bed. She murmured a word or two in a low whispering tone, while her pallid face, with its sweet and almost childlike features, was disfigured by an expression of impatience,—like that of a spoiled child, who resents the unwonted suffering as something new to her experience. The nurse bent low to catch the inarticulate sounds that fell from her whispering lips.
“Why, why does he—?” murmured the invalid in the same impatient whisper.
The nurse did not understand the question. Again the child cried out, and again the same shadow of sharp pain darkened the face of the mother, while large tears rolled down from her closed eyes.
“Why, why,” she repeated in a whisper.
At last the meaning of her question seemed to occur to the nurse, who answered quite calmly,—
“Oh, you mean why does the child cry? Babies always do. You must not agitate yourself.”
But the mother was not to be pacified. She started every time the little one cried, and kept repeating in tones of angry impatience, “Why—why—so dreadfully?”
To the nurse there seemed nothing unusual in the cries of the infant; and supposing the mother to be either unconscious or simply delirious, she left her, and busied herself with the child.
The young mother said no more, but from time to time an anguish too deep for expression brought the tears to her eyes. They forced their way through the thick black eye-lashes, and slowly rolled down her pale marble-like cheeks. Perchance her mother’s heart was torn by a presentiment of some dark, abiding misery hanging like a heavy cloud over the infant’s crib, and destined to accompany him through life even unto the grave. These signs of emotion, on the other hand, were very likely nothing more than the wanderings of delirium. But however this may have been, the child was indeed born blind.