THE GOLDEN AGE: PUSHKIN.—The true Russian nineteenth century and its golden age must be dated from Pushkin. He wrote from his earliest youth. He was an epic poet, novelist, and historian. His principal poems were Ruslan and Liudmila, Eugene Onegin, Poltava; his most remarkable historical essay was The Revolt of Pugachev. He possessed a fertile and vigorous imagination, which he developed by continual and enthusiastic study of Byron. He did not live long enough either for his own fame or for the welfare of Russian literature, being killed in a duel at the age of thirty-eight. Mérimée translated much by Pushkin. The French lyric stage has mounted one of his most delicate inspirations, La Rousalka (the water nymph). He was quite conscious of his own genius and, freely imitating the Exegi monumentum of Horace, as will be seen, he wrote: "I have raised to myself a monument which no human hand has constructed.... I shall not entirely perish ... the sound of my name shall permeate through vast Russia.... For long I shall be dear to my race because my lyre has uttered good sentiments, because, in a brutal age, I have vaunted liberty and preached love for the down-trodden. Oh, my Muse, heed the commands of God, fear not offence, claim no crown; receive with equal indifference eulogy and calumny, but never dispute with fools."
LERMONTOV.—Lermontov was not inferior to his friend Pushkin, whom he closely resembled. Like him he drew inspiration from the romantic poets of the West. He loved the East, and his short, glorious suggestions came to him from the Caucasus. Among his finest poetic works may be cited The Novice Ismael Bey, The Demon, The Song of the Tzar Ivan. He wrote a novel, perhaps autobiographical, entitled A Hero of Our Own Time, the hero of which is painted in highly Byronic colours.
GOGOL.—Russian taste was already veering to the epic novel or epopee in prose, of which Gogol was the most illustrious representative until Tolstoy. He was highly gifted. In him the feeling for Nature was acutely active, and recalling his descriptions of the plains of the Crimea, its rivers and steppes, he must be regarded as the Rousseau and Chateaubriand of Russia. Further, he was a close student of village habits, and a painter in astonishing hues. He eminently possessed the sense of epic grandeur, and added a sarcastic vein of delightful irony. His Taras Bulba, King of the Dwarfs, History of a Fool, and Dead Souls, have the force of arresting realism, his Revisor (inspector of finances) is a caustic comedy which has been a classic not only in Russia but in France, where it was introduced in translation by Mérimée.
TURGENEV.—Turgenev, less epical than Gogol, was also studious of local habits and dexterous in describing them. He began with exquisite Huntsman's Tales impregnated with truth and precision, as well as intimate and picturesque details; then he extended his scope and wrote novels, but never at great length, and therefore suited to the exigencies or habits of Western Europe (such as Smoke). He had selected Paris as his abode, and he mixed with the greatest thinkers of the day: Taine, Flaubert, Edmond About. In the eyes of his fellow-countrymen he became ultimately too Western and too Parisian. His was a delicate, sensitive soul, prone to melancholy and perpetually dreaming. He had a cult of form in which he went so far as to make it a sort of scruple and superstition.
TOLSTOY.—Tolstoy, so recently dead, was a great epic poet in prose, a very powerful and affecting novelist, and in some measure an apostle. He began with Boyhood Adolescence and Youth, in itself very curious and particularly valuable because of the idea it conveys of the life of the lords of the Russian soil, and for its explanation of the formation of the soul and genius of Tolstoy; then came The Cossacks, full of magnificent descriptions of the Caucasus and of interesting scenes of military and rural life; subsequently that masterpiece of Tolstoy's, War and Peace, narratives dealing with the war of Napoleon with Russia and of the subsequent period of peaceful and healthy rural life. It is impossible to adequately admire the power of narration and descriptive force, the fertility of incidents, characterisations, and dramatic moments, the art or rather the gift of portraiture, and finally, the grandeur and moral elevation, in fact, all the qualities, not one of which he appeared to lack, of which Tolstoy gave proof and which he displayed in this immense history of the Russian soul at the commencement of the nineteenth century; for it is thus that it is meet to qualify this noble creation. The only analogy is with Les Misérables of Victor Hugo, and it must be admitted that despite its incomparable merits, the French work is the more unequal. Anna Karenina is only a novel in the vein of French novels, but very profound and remarkable for its analysis of character and also impassioned and affecting, besides having considerable moral range. The Kreutzer Sonata is a romance rather than a novel, but cruelly beautiful because it exposes with singular clairvoyance the misery of a soul impotent for happiness. Resurrection shows that mournful and impassioned pity felt by Tolstoy for the humble and the "fallen," to use the phrase of Pushkin; it realises a lofty dramatic beauty. Tolstoy, in a thousand pamphlets or brief works, preached to his own people and to mankind the strict morality of Christ, charity, renunciation, peace at all price, without taking into account the necessities of social life; and he denounced, as had Jean Jacques Rousseau, the culpability of art and literature, being resigned to recognising his own works as condemnable. His was the soul of an exalted poet and a lofty poetical mind; from a poet must not be demanded practical common sense or that feeling for reality which is demanded, often unavailingly, from a statesman.
DOSTOEVSKY.—Dostoevsky, with a tragic genius as great as that of Tolstoy, may be said to have been more restricted because he exclusively delineated the unhappy, the miserable, and those defeated in life. He knew them personally because, after being arrested in 1849 at the age of fifty for the crime of belonging to a secret society, he spent years in the convict prisons of Siberia. Those miseries he describes in the most exact terms and with heart-rending eloquence in Buried Alive: Ten Years in Siberia, and in the remarkable novel entitled Crime and Punishment. He has lent invaluable aid in the propagation of two sentiments which have created some stir in the West and which, assuredly, we desire to foster: namely, "the religion of human suffering" and the cult of "expiation."
CHAPTER XXI. — POLISH LITERATURE
At an Early Date Western Influence sufficiently Potent. Sixteenth Century Brilliant; Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries highly Cultured; Nineteenth Century Notably Original.