Russia: Its People and Its Literature

by condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán

The race sign was not obliterated from the Russian culture produced by immoral and short-sighted reformers. A woman of low extraction and obscure history, elevated to the imperial purple, was the one to continue the work of Peter the Great; his daughter's favorite became the protector of public instruction and the founder of the University of Moscow; a frivolous and dissolute Czarina, Elisabeth Petrowna, modified the customs, encouraged intellectual pleasures and dramatic representations, and put Russia in contact with the Latin mind as developed in France; another empress, a parricide, a usurper and libertine, who deserves the perhaps pedantic name of the Semiramis of the North given her by Voltaire, hid her delinquencies under the splendor of her intellect, the refined delicacy of her artistic tastes, her gifts as a writer, and her magnificence as a sovereign.

It was the profound and violent shock administered by the hard hand of Peter the Great that impelled Russia along the road to French culture, and with equal violence she retraced her steps at the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. The nobility and the patriots of Russia cursed France in French,—the language which had been taught them as the medium of progress; and the nation became conscious of its own individuality in the hour of trial, in the sudden awakening of its independent instincts. But in proportion as the nationality arose in its might, the low murmur of a growing revolution made itself heard. This impulse did not burst first from the hearts of the people, ground down by the patriarchal despotism of Old Russia, but from the brain of the educated classes, especially the nobility. The first sign of the strife, predestined from the close of the war with the French, was the political repression of the last years of the reign of Alexander I., and the famous republican conspiracy of December against Nicholas,—an aristocratic outbreak contrived by men in whose veins ran the blood of princes. Of these events I shall speak more fully when I come to the subject of Nihilism; I merely mention it here in this general glimpse of Russian history.

Menaced by Asia, Russia had willingly submitted to an absolute power, because, as we have seen, she lacked the elements that had concurred in the formation of modern Europe. Classic civilization never entered her veins; she had no other light than that which shone from Byzantium, nor any other model than that offered by the later empire; she had no place in the great Catholic fraternity which had its law and its focus in Rome, and the Mongolian invasion accomplished her complete isolation. Spain also suffered an invasion of a foreign race, but she pulled herself together and sustained herself on a war-footing for seven centuries. Russia could not do this, but bent her neck to the yoke of the conqueror. Our national character would have chafed indeed to see the kings of Asturias and Castile, instead of perpetually challenging the Moors, become their humble vassals, as the Muscovite princes were to the Khans. With us the struggle for re-conquest, far from exhausting us, redoubled our thirst for independence,—a thirst born farther back than that time, in spite of Leroy-Beaulieu's statement, although it was indeed confirmed and augmented during the progress of that Hispano-Saracenic Iliad. The Russians being obliged to lay down their arms, to suffer and to wait, assumed, instead of our ungovernable vehemence, a patient resignation. But they none the less considered themselves a nation, and entertained a hope of vindicating their rights, which they accomplished finally in the overthrow of the Tartars, and in later days in rising against the French with an impetuosity and spontaneity almost as savage as Spain had shown in her memorable days. Moreover, Russia lacked the elements of historic activity necessary to enable her to play an early part in the work of modern civilization. She had no feudalism, no nobility (as we understand the term), no chivalry, no Gothic architecture, no troubadours, no knights. She lacked the intellectual impetus of mediæval courts, the sturdy exercise of scholastic disputations, the elucidations of the problems of the human race, which were propounded by the thirteenth century. She lacked the religious orders, that network which enclosed the wide edifice of Catholicism; and the military, uniting in mystic sympathy the ascetic and chivalric sentiments. She lacked the councils of the laws of modern rights; and that her lack might be in nothing lacking, she lacked even the brilliant heresies of the West, the subtle rationalists and pantheists, the Abelards and Amalrics, whose followers were brilliant ignoramuses or rank bigots roused by a question of ritual. Lastly, she lacked the sunny smile of Pallas Athene and the Graces, the Renaissance, which brightened the face of Europe at the close of the Middle Ages.

And as the civilization brought at last to Russia was the product of nations possessed of all that Russia lacked, and as finally, it was imposed upon her by force, and without those gradual transitions and insensible modifications as necessary to a people as to an individual, she could not accept it in the frank and cordial manner indispensable to its beneficent action. A nation which receives a culture ready made, and not elaborated by itself, condemns itself to intellectual sterility; at most it can only hope to imitate well. And so it happened with Russia. Her development does not present the continuous bent, the gentle undulations of European history in which yesterday creates to-day, and to-day prepares for to-morrow, without an irregular or awkward halt, or ever a trace broken. In the social order of Russia primitive institutions coexist with products of our spick and span new sociology, and we see the deep waters of the past mixed with the froth of the Utopia that points out the route of the unknown future. This confusion or inharmoniousness engenders Russian dualism, the cause of her political and moral disturbances. Russia contains an ancient people, to-day an anachronism, and a society in embryo struggling to burst its bounds.

But above all it is evident there is a people eager to speak, to come forth, to have a weight in the world, because its long-deferred time has come; a race which, from an insignificant tribe mewed in around the sources of the Dnieper, has spread out into an immense nation, whose territory reaches from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the borders of Turkey, Persia, and China; a nation which has triumphed over Sweden, Poland, the Turks, the Mongols, and the French; a nation by nature expansive, colonizing, mighty in extent, most interesting in the qualities of the genius it is developing day by day, and which is more astonishing than its material greatness, because it is the privilege of intellect to eclipse force. Half a dozen brains and spirits who are now spelling out their race for us, arrest and captivate all who contemplate this great empire. Out of the poverty of traditions and institutions which Russian history bewails, two characteristic ones appear as bases of national life: the autocracy, and the agrarian commune,—absolute imperial power and popular democracy.

The geography of Russia, which predisposes her both to unity and to invasion, which obliges her to concentrate herself, and to seek in a vigorous autocratic principle the consciousness of independent being as a people, created the formidable dominion of the Muscovite Czars, which has no equal in the world. Like all primordial Russian ideas, the plan of this Cæsarian sovereignty proceeded from Byzantium, and was founded by Greek refugee priests, who surrounded it with the aureole of divinity indispensable to the establishment of advantageous superstitions so fecund in historical results. Since the twelfth century the autocracy has been a fixed fact, and has gone on assuming all the prerogatives, absorbing all the power, and symbolizing in the person of one man this colossal nation. The sovereign princes, discerning clearly the object and end of these aims, have spared no means to attain to it. They began by checking the proud Boyars in their train, reducing them from companions and equals to subjects; later on they devoted themselves to the suppression of all institutions of democratic character.

For the sake of those who judge of a race by the political forms it uses, it should be observed that Russia has not only preserved latent in her the spirit of democracy, but that she possessed in the Middle Ages republican institutions more liberal and radical than any in the rest of Europe. The Italian republics, which at bottom were really oligarchies, cannot compare with the municipal and communist republics of Viatka, Pskof, and especially the great city of Novgorod, which called itself with pride Lord Novgorod the Great. The supreme power there resided in an assembly of the citizens; the prince was content to be an administrator or president elected by free suffrage, and above all an ever-ready captain in time of war; on taking his office he swore solemnly to respect the laws, customs, and privileges of the republic; if he committed a perjury, the assembly convened in the public square at the clang of an ancient bell, and the prince, having been declared a traitor, was stripped, expelled, and cast into the mud, according to the forcible popular expression. This industrious republic reached the acme of its prosperity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after which the rising principality of Moscow, now sure of its future, came and took down the bells of Novgorod the Great, and so silenced their voices of bronze and the voice of Russian liberties, though not without a bloody battle, as witnesseth the whirlpool—which is still pointed out to the curious traveller—under the bridge of the ancient republican city, whose inhabitants were drowned there by Ivan the Terrible. Upon their dead bodies he founded the unity of the empire. Nor are the free towns the only tradition of autonomy which disturbed the growing autocratic power. The Cossacks for a long time formed an independent and warlike aristocracy, proud and indomitable; and to subdue and incorporate these bellicose tribes with the rest of the nation it was necessary to employ both skill and force.

We may say without vanity that although the Spaniards exalted monarchical loyalty into a cult, they never depreciated human dignity. Amongst us the king is he who makes right (face derecho), and if he makes it not, we consider him a tyrant, a usurper of the royal prerogative; in acknowledging him lord of life and property, we protest (by the mouth of Calderon's honest rustic) against the idea that he can arrogate to himself also the dominion over conscience and soul; and the smallest subject in Spain would not endure at the king's hand the blows administered by Peter the Great for the correction of his nobles, themselves descendants of Rurik. In Russia, where the inequalities and extremes of climate seem to have been communicated to its institutions, there was nothing between the independent republics and the autocracy. In Spain, the slightest territorial disaffection, the fruit of partial conquests or insignificant victories, was an excuse for some upstart princeling, our instinctive tendencies being always monarchical and anything like absolute authority and Cæsarism, so odious that we never allowed it even in our most excellent kings; a dream of imperial power would almost have cost them the throne. In Russia, absolutism is in the air,—one sole master, one lord omnipotent, the image of God himself.

Read the Muscovite code. The Czar is named therein the autocrat whose power is unlimited. See the catechism which is taught in the schools of Poland; it says that the subject owes to the Czar, not love or loyalty, but adoration. Hear the Russian hymn; amid its harmonies the same idea resounds. In all the common forms of salutation to the Czar we shall find something that excites in us a feeling of rebellion, something that represents us as unworthy to stand before him as one mortal before another. Paul I. said to a distinguished foreigner, "You must know that in Russia there is no person more important than the person to whom I speak and while I speak." A Czar who directs by means of ukases not only the dress but even the words of the language which his subjects must use, and changes the track of a railroad by a stroke of his pen, frightens one even more than when he signs a sentence of proscription; for he reaches the high-water mark of authority when he interferes in these simple and unimportant matters, and demonstrates what one may call the micrography of despotism. If anything can excuse or even commend to our eyes this obedience carried to an absurdity, it is its paternal character. There are no offences between fathers and sons, and the Czar never can insult a subject. The serf calls him thou and Father, and on seeing him pass he takes off his cap though the snow falls, crossing his hands over his breast with religious veneration. For him the Czar possesses every virtue, and is moved only by the highest purposes; he thinks him impeccable, sacred, almost immortal. If we abide by the judgment of those who see a symbol of the Russian character in the call of Rurik and the voluntary placing of the power in his hands, the autocracy will not seem a secular abuse or a violent tyranny, but rather an organic product of a soil and a race; and it will inspire the respect drawn forth by any spontaneous and genuine production.

There exists in Russia a small school of thinkers on public affairs, important by reason of the weight they have had and still have upon public opinion. They are called Sclavophiles,—people enamoured of their ancient land, who affirm that the essence of Russian nationality is to be found in the customs and institutions of the laboring classes who are not contaminated by the artificial civilization imported from the corrupt West; who make a point of appearing on occasions in the national dress,—the red silk blouse and velvet jacket, the long beard and the clumsy boots. According to them, the only independent forces on which Russia can count are the people and the Czar,—the immense herd of peasants, and, at the top, the autocrat. And in fact the Russian empire, in spite of official hierarchies, is a rural state in which the sentiment of democratic equality predominates so entirely that the people, not content with having but yesterday taken the Czar's part against the rich and mighty Boyars, sustains him to-day against the revolution, loves him, and cannot conceive of intermediaries between him and his subjects, between lord and vassal, or, to put it still more truly, between father and son. And having once reduced the nobles, with the consent of the people, to the condition of inoffensive hangers-on of the court, many thinkers believe that the Czar need only lean upon the rude hand of the peasant to quell whatever political disaffection may arise. So illimitable is the imperial power, that it becomes impotent against itself if it would reduce itself by relegating any of its influence to a class, such as, for instance, the aristocracy. If turbulent magnates or sullen conspirators manage to get rid of the person of the Czar, the principle still remains inviolate.