French Realism and Russian Realism.
The Russian naturalistic school seems to have reached its culmination in Tolstoï. Concerning Russian naturalism I would say a few words more before leaving the subject. The opinions expressed are impartial, though long confirmed in my own mind.
In recapitulating half a century of Russian literature, we see that this natural school followed close upon an imitation of foreign style and an effervescence of romanticism; it was founded by Gogol, and defended by Bielinsky, the estimable critic who did for Russia what Lessing did for Germany. The natural school professed the principle of adhering with strict fidelity to the reality, and of copying life exactly in all its humblest and most trivial details. And this new school, born before romanticism was well worn-out, grew and prospered quickly, producing a harvest of novelists even more fertile than the poets of the antecedent school. The date of its appearance was the period denominated the forties,—the decade between 1840 and 1850.
The general European political agitation, not being able to manifest itself in Russia by means of insurrections, tumults, and proclamations, took an intellectual form; and young Russia, returning from German universities intoxicated with metaphysics, saturated with liberalism and philanthropy, was eager to pour out its soul, and give vent to its plethora of ideas. A country without lecture-halls, free-press, or political liberty of any sort, had to recur to art as the only refuge. And making use of the sort of subterfuge that love employs when it hides itself under the veil of friendship, the political radical called himself in Russia a sort of left-handed Hegelian, to invent a phrase.
Thus Russian letters, in assuming a national character, showed a strong social and political bias, which contains the clew to its qualities and defects, and especially to its originality. The academic idea of literature as a gentle solace and noble recreation has been for the last half-century less applicable in Russia than anywhere else in the world; never has literature in Russia become a profession as in France, where the writer is prone to become more or less the skilful artisan, quick to observe the variations of public taste, what sort of condiment most tickles its palate, and straightway takes advantage of it,—an artisan satisfied, with honorable exceptions, to sell his wares, and to snap his fingers at the world, at humanity, at France, and even at Paris, exclusive of that strip of asphalt which runs from the Madeleine to the Porte St. Martin. Russian literature stands for more than this; persuaded of the importance of its task, and that it is charged with a great social work and the conduct of the progress of its country,—Holy Russia, which is itself called to regenerate the world,—neither glory nor gold will satisfy it; its object is to enlighten and to teach the generations. It is but a short step from this to an admonitory and directive literature; and the noblest Russian geniuses have stumbled over this propensity at the end of their literary career. Gogol finished by publishing edificatory epistles, believing them more advantageous than "Dead Souls;" an analogous condition has to-day befallen Tolstoï.
In spite of the severity of Nicholas I., literature enjoyed a relative ease and freedom under his sceptre, either because the Autocrat had a fondness for it, or was not afraid of it. Under the shelter afforded by literature, political Utopias, nihilistic germs, subversive philosophies, and dreams of social regeneration were fostered. The novel—more directly, actively, and efficaciously than the most careful treatises or occasional articles—propagated the seeds of revolution, and being filled with sociological ideas, was devoted to the study of the poor and humble classes, and was marked by realism and sincerity of design; while the flood of indignation consequent upon repressive and violent measures broke forth into copious satire.
In this development of a literature aspiring to transform society, the love of beauty for beauty's sake plays a secondary part, though it is the proper end and aim of all forms of art. Therefore that which receives least attention in the Russian novel is perfection of form,—plot and method best revealing the æsthetic conception. It abounds in superb pages, admirable passages, prodigies of observation, and truth; but, except in the case of Turguenief, the composition is always defective, and there is a sort of incoherence, of palpable and fearful obscurity, amid which we seem to discover gigantic shapes, vaguer but grander than those we are accustomed to see about us.
During a period of twenty or thirty years the novel and the critic were everything to Russia; the national intelligence lived in them, and within their precincts it elaborated a free world after its own heart. Like a maiden perpetually shut away from the outside world, dreaming of some romantic lover whom she has never known or seen, consoling herself with novels, and fancying that all the fine adventures in them have happened to herself, Russia has written into the national novel her own visionary nature, her thirst for political adventures, and her eagerness for transcendental reforms. One most important reform may be said to be directly the work of the novel, namely, the emancipation of the serfs.
When the more clement Alexander II. succeeded the austere Nicholas I., and the restraints laid upon the political press were loosened so that it could spread its wings, the novel suffered in consequence. The hope of great events to come, the approaching liberation of the serfs, the formation of a sort of liberal cabinet, the efflorescence of new illusions that bud under every new régime, concurred to infuse the literature with civic and social tendencies. Beautiful and bright and poetical is art for art's sake, and as Puchkine understood it; but at the hour of doubt and strife we ask even art for positive service and practical solutions. Who stops to see whether the life-preservers thrown to drowning men struggling with death are of elegant workmanship?
In speaking of nihilism I have mentioned the most important one of the directive Russian novels, called "What to Do?" by the martyr Tchernichewsky,—a work of no great literary merit, but which was the gospel of young Russia. In his wake followed a host of novelists of this tendency, but inferior, obscure, and without even the inventive power of their leader in dressing up their ideas as symbolic personages, like his ascetic socialist Rakmetof, who laid himself down upon a board stuck through with nail-points. In their turn came the reactionaries, or rather the conservatives, and in novels as absurd as those of their predecessors they clothed the nihilists in purple and gold; it finally resulted that everybody was as ready to produce a novel as to write a serious article, or to handle a gun at a barricade. If any one of the neophytes of the school of directive novels possessed genius, it was swallowed up in the froth of political passion.