At first sight nothing could be more attractive than the great Russian family, nothing more useful than the rural communes; and nowadays, when we are applying the laws and technicism of physiology to the study of society, this primordial association would seem the cell from which the true organism of the State may be born; the family is a sort of lesser municipality, the municipality is a larger family, and the whole Russian people is an immense agglomeration, a great ant-hill whose head is the emperor. In the popular songs we see the Oriental idea of the nation expressed as the family, when the peasant calls the Czar father. But this primitive machinery can never prevail against the notion of individualism entertained among civilized peoples. Our way of understanding property, which the admirers of the Russian commune consider fundamentally vicious, is the only way compatible with the independence and dignity of work and the development of industries and arts. The Russian mir may prevent the growth of the proletariat, but it is by putting mankind in bonds. It may be said that agrarian communism only differs from servitude in that the latter provides one master and the former many; and that though the laboring man theoretically considers himself a member of a co-operative agricultural society, he is in reality a slave, subject to collective responsibilities and obligations, by virtue of which he is tied to the soil the same as the vassals of our feudal epochs. Perhaps the new social conditions which are the fruit of the emancipation of the serfs, which struck at and violated the great associated family, will at last undermine the mir, unless the mir learns some way to adapt itself to any political mutations. What is most important to the study of the historical development and the social ideas as shown in modern Russian literature, is to understand how by means of the great family and the agrarian municipality, communism and socialism run in the veins of the people of Russia, so that Leroy-Beaulieu could say with good reason, that if they are to be preserved from the pernicious effects of the Occidental proletariat it must be by inoculation, as vaccination exempts from small-pox.
The socialist leaven may be fairly said to lie in the most important class in the Russian State,—important not alone by reason of numerical superiority, but because it is the depositary of the liveliest national energies and the custodian of the future: I mean the peasants. There are some who think that this mitjik, this little man or black man, tiller of still blacker soil, holds the future destinies of Europe in his hands; and that when this great new Horde becomes conscious some day of its strength and homogeneity, it will rise, and in its concentrated might fall upon some portion of the globe, and there will be no defence or resistance possible. In the rest of Europe it is the cities, the urban element, which regulates the march of political events. Certainly Spain is not ignorant of this fact, since she has a vivid remembrance of civil wars in which the rustic element, representing tradition, was vanquished. In Russia, the cities have no proportionate influence, and that which demands the special attention of the governor or the revolutionist is the existence, needs, and thoughts of the innumerable peasant communities, who are the foundation and material of an empire justly termed rural. From this is derived a sort of cult, an apotheosis which is among the most curious to be found in Russian modern literature. Of the peasant, wrapped in badly cured sheepskins, and smelling like a beast; the humble and submissive peasant, yesterday laden with the chains of servitude; the dirty, cabbage-eating peasant, drunk with wodka, who beats his wife and trembles with fright at ghosts, at the Devil, and at thunder,—of this peasant, the charity of his friends and the poetic imagination of Russian writers has made a demi-god, an ideal. So great is the power of genius, that without detriment to the claims of truth, picturing him with accurate and even brutal realism (which we shall find native to the Russian novel), Russian authors have distilled from this peasant a poetic essence which we inhale involuntarily until we, aristocratic by instinct, disdainful of the rustic, given to ridicule the garlic-smelling herd, yield to its power. And not content with seeing in this peasant a brother, a neighbor, whom, according to the word of Christ, we ought to love and succor, Russian literature discovers in him a certain indefinable sublimity, a mysterious illumination which other social classes have not. Not merely because of the introduction of the picturesque element in the description of popular customs has it been said that Russian contemporary literature smells of the peasant, but far rather because it raises the peasant to the heights of human moral grandeur, marks in him every virtue, and presupposes him possessed of powers which he never puts forth. From Turguenief, fine poet as he is, to Chtchédrine, the biting satirist, all paint the peasant with loving touch, always find a ready excuse for his defects, and lend him rare qualities, without ever failing to show faithfully his true physiognomy. Corruption, effeminacy, and vice characterize the upper classes, particularly the employees of government, or any persons charged with public trusts; and to make these the more odious, they are attributed with a detestable hypocrisy made more hateful by apparent kindliness and culture.
There is a humorous little novel by Chtchédrine (an author who merits especial mention) entitled "The Generals[1] and the Mujik," which represents two generals of the most ostentatious sort, transported to a desert island, unable either to get food or to get away, until they meet with a mujik, who performs all sorts of services for them, even to making broth in the hollow of his hand, and then, after making a raft, conveys them safely to St. Petersburg; whereupon these knavish generals, after recovering back pay, send to their deliverer a glass of whiskey and a sum amounting to about three cents. But this bitter allegory is a mild one compared with the mystical apotheosis of the mujik as conceived by Tolstoï. In one of his works, "War and Peace," the hero, after seeking vainly by every imaginable means to understand all human wisdom and divine revelation, finds at last the sum of it in a common soldier, imperturbable and dull of soul, and poor in spirit, a prisoner of the French, who endures with calm resignation ill treatment and death without once entertaining the idea of taking the life of his foreign captors. This poor fellow, who, owing to his rude, uncouth mode of life, suffers persecution by other importunate lesser enemies which I forbear to name, is the one to teach Pierre Besukof the alpha and omega of all philosophy, wherein he is wise by intuition, and, in virtue of his condition as the peasant, fatalistic and docile.
I have had the good fortune to see with my own eyes this idol of Russian literature, and to satisfy a part of my curiosity concerning some features of Holy Russia. Twenty or thirty peasants from Smolensk who had been bitten by a rabid wolf were sent to Paris to be treated by M. Pasteur. In company with some Russian friends I went to a small hotel, mounted to the fourth floor, and entered a narrow sleeping apartment. The air being breathed by ten or twelve human beings was scarcely endurable, and the fumes of carbolic acid failed to purify it; but while my companions were talking with their compatriots, and a Russian young-lady medical student dressed their wounds, I studied to my heart's content these men from a distant land. I frankly confess that they made a profound impression upon me which I can only describe by saying that they seemed to me like Biblical personages. It gave me a certain pleasure to see in them the marks of an ancient people, rude and rough in outward appearance, but with something majestic and monumental about them, and yet with a suggestion of latent juvenility, the grave and religious air of dreamer or seer, different from really Oriental peoples. Their features, as well as their limbs (which bearing the marks of the wild beast's teeth they held out to be washed and dressed with tranquil resignation), were large and mighty like a tree. One old man took my attention particularly, because he presented a type of the patriarchs of old, and might have served the painter as a model for Abraham or Job,—a wide skull bald at the top, fringed about with yellowish white hair like a halo; a long beard streaked with white also; well-cut features, frontal development very prominent, his eyes half hidden beneath bushy eyebrows. The arm which he uncovered was like an old tree-trunk, rough and knotty, the thick sinuous network of veins reminding one of the roots; his enormous hands, wrinkled and horny, bespoke a life of toil, of incessant activity, of daily strife with the energies of Mother Nature. I heard with delight, though without understanding a word, their guttural speech, musical and harmonious withal, and I needed not to heat my imagination overmuch to see in those poor peasants the realization of the great novelists' descriptions, and an expression of patience and sadness which raised them above vulgarity and coarseness. The sadness may have been the result of their unhappy situation; nevertheless it seemed sweet and poetic.
The attraction which the people exercises upon refined and cultivated minds is not surprising. Who has not sometimes experienced with terrible keenness what may be called the æsthetic effect of collectivity? A regiment forming, the crew of a ship about to weigh anchor, a procession, an angry mob,—these have something about them that is epic and sublime; so any peasant, if we see in him an epitome of race or class, with his historic consequence and his unconscious majesty, may and ought to interest us. The payo of Avila who passes me indifferently in the street; the beggar in Burgos who asks an alms with courteous dignity, wrapped in his tattered clothes as though they were garments of costly cloth; the Gallician lad who guides his yoke of oxen and creaking cart,—these not only stir in my soul a sentiment of patriotism, but they have for me an æsthetic charm which I never feel in the presence of a dress-coat and a stiff hat. Perhaps this effect depends rather on the spectator, and it may be our fancy that produces it; for, as regards the Russian peasant, those who know him well say that he is by nature practical and positive, and not at all inclined to the romantic and sentimental. The Sclav race is a rich poetic wellspring, but it depends upon what one means by poetry. For example, in love matters, the Russian peasant is docile and prosaic to the last degree. The hardy rustic is supposed to need two indispensable accessories for his work,—a woman and a horse; the latter is procured for him by the head or old man of the house, the former by the old woman; the wedding is nothing more than the matriculation of the farmer; the pair is incorporated with the great family, the agricultural commune, and that is the end of the idyl. Amorous and gallant conduct among peasants would be little fitting, given the low estimation in which women are held. Although the Russian peasant considers the woman independent, subject neither to father nor husband, invested with equal rights with men; and although the widow or the unmarried woman who is head of the house takes part in the deliberations of the mir and may even exercise in it the powers of a mayor (and in order to preserve this independence many peasant-women remain unmarried), this consideration is purely a social one, and individually the woman has no rights whatever. A song of the people says that seven women together have not so much as one soul, rather none at all, for their soul is smoke. The theory of marriage relations is that the husband ought to love his wife as he does his own soul, to measure and treasure her as he does his sheepskin coat: the rod sanctions the contract. In some provinces of Finnish or Tartar origin the bride is still bought and sold like a head of cattle; it is sometimes the custom still to steal her, or to feign a rape, symbolizing indeed the idea of woman as a slave and the booty of war. So rigorous is the matrimonial yoke, that parricides are numerous, and the jury, allowing attenuating circumstances, generally pardons them.
Tikomirov, who, though a radical, is a wise and sensible man, says, that far from considering the masses of the people as models worthy of imitation, he finds them steeped in absolute ignorance, the victims of every abuse and of administrative immorality; deprived for many centuries of intercourse with civilized nations, they have not outgrown the infantile period, they are superstitious, idolatrous, and pagan, as shown by their legends and popular songs. They believe blindly in witchcraft, to the extent that to discredit a political party with them one has only to insinuate that it is given to the use of sorcery and the black arts. The peasant has also an unconquerable propensity to stealing, lying, servility, and drunkenness. Wherefore, then, is he judged superior to the other classes of society?
In spite of the puerile humility to which the Russian peasant is predisposed by long years of subjection, he yet obeys a democratic impulse toward equality, which servitude has not obliterated; the Russian does not understand the English peasant's respect for the gentleman, nor the French reverence for the chevalier well-dressed and decorated. When the government of Poland ordered certain Cossack executions of the nobility, these children of the steppes asked one another, "Brother, has the shadow of my body increased?" Taught to govern himself, thanks to the municipal regimen, the Russian peasant manifests in a high degree the sentiment of human equality, an idea both Christian and democratic, rather more deeply rooted in those countries governed by absolute monarchy and municipal liberty, than in those of parliamentary institutions. The Spaniard says, "None lower than the King;" the Russian says the same with respect to the Czar. Primitive and credulous, a philosopher in his way, the dweller on the Russian steppes wields a dynamic force displayed in history by collectivities, be the moral value of the individual what it may. In nations like Russia, in which the upper classes are educated abroad, and are, like water, reflectors and nothing more, the originality, the poetry, the epic element, is always with the masses of the people, which comes out strong and beautiful in supreme moments, a faithful custodian of the national life, as for example when the butcher Minine saved his country from the yoke of Sweden, or when, before the French invasion of 1812, they organized bands of guerillas, or set fire to Moscow.
Hence in Russia, as in France prior to the Revolution, many thinkers endeavor to revive the antiquated theory of the Genevan philosopher, and proclaim the superiority of the natural man, by contact with whom society, infected with Occidental senility, must be regenerated. Discouraged by the incompatibility between the imported European progress and the national tradition, unable to still the political strife of a country where pessimist solutions are most natural and weighty, their patriotism now uplifts, now shatters their hopes, even in the case of those who disclaim and condemn individual patriotism, such as Count Tolstoï; and then ensues the apotheosis of the past, the veneration of national heroes and of the people. "The people is great," says Turguenief in his novel "Smoke;" "we are mere ragamuffins." And so the people, which still bears traces of the marks of servitude, has been converted into a mysterious divinity, the inspiration of enthusiastic canticles.
[1] Voguié explains this title of "General" to be both in the civil and military order with the qualification of "Excellency." Without living in Russia one can hardly understand the prestige attached to this title, or the facilities it gives everywhere for everything. To attain this dignity is the supreme ambition of all the servants of the State. The common salutation by way of pleasantry among friends is this line from the comedy of Griboiëdof, which has become a proverb: "I wish you health and the tchin of a General."—TR.