The Land of Riddles (Russia of To-day)

by Hugo Ganz

But more interesting to me than the play was the audience. And the audience, composed entirely of the educated middle class, knew quite as well how to judge what was success and what failure in the performance as any of the better audiences of a Vienna or a Berlin theatre. And the foyer, very appealingly decorated by the simplest artistic means with scenes from the history of the Russian drama and with many portraits of writers and actors, was visited and enjoyed by the audience in the intermission. If I had not continually heard about me the sounds of a strange speech, and had not seen here and there a Russian student uniform, it never would have occurred to me that I was in the very heart of Russia, so far as culture was concerned.

It was the same, too, in the families with which I spent my evenings. If anything, only the heartiness with which one is received is gratefully at variance with our habits of careful reserve towards strangers. But these hearty and hospitable people who at once lead us to the samovar are by no means backwoodsmen, but are most intimately in touch with all the advantages of the world, and they have uncommonly keen powers of observation. The visiting European who might think himself in a position to act among them would quickly become aware that the Russian writers, who astonish us by their deep psychological insight, have not picked up their art by the wayside. It is hidden in the most charming little formalities, which in Moscow, in particular, simply charmed me. Nowhere the slightest cant, nowhere the slightest false display, nowhere the forced enthusiasm for culture which makes certain circles of our great cities so repulsive to us. Naturalness is the pervading note in Moscow social life. But literary and art interests are a matter of course in a society which is scarcely paralleled by the English in its demand for reviews. To-day, of course, every other interest is forced to the wall by politics. I have been present at gatherings in the best circles of people of culture at which even the young had scarcely any interest save in political questions. Even little declamations with which the individual guests distinguished themselves were spiced with political allusions, and were enjoyed by young and old just because of this spice.

Yet Moscowism has, in a sense, a bad reputation. It is held to be the embodiment of the Russian reaction against every attempt of a civilizing nature which emanates from St. Petersburg. Of the lesser citizens, or the old-fashioned merchants at times, this may even to-day be true. The nobility in the Moscow government, however, the university, and the members of the few professions such as medicine and the law, are much less circumspect and free-minded in their political criticism than their contemporaries in St. Petersburg, for instance. Such an opposition organ as the Russkiya Vyedomosti does not exist in St. Petersburg. There is also, to be sure, a sharp contrast between the intelligence of Moscow and that of official St. Petersburg; but this contrast is anything but one between reaction and progress. It is worth while to examine it more closely.

The present Russian régime has preserved only the despotism of the enlightened despotism of Peter; the enlightenment has vanished. The wisdom of the government consists solely in the obstruction of popular education. The means to this end is the police, with their relentless crusade against any intelligence of a trend not quite orthodox in its attitude towards the state and the ruling spirit of the old régime in the corruption of all the elements of the higher strata of society. Demoralization is encouraged, so to say, by official circles. Just as among the peasants a man caught reading his Bible is held in suspicion, so in St. Petersburg a young man makes himself subject to the displeasure of the authorities if he does not take his part in the "diversions of youth." A lordly contempt for humanity is accordingly the prerequisite for every career in that Northern Paris. The pursuit of fortune has never a conscience, least of all where it appears in military form. There esprit de corps and dignity of position displace to a degree of absolute hostility all morality. Elegantly and fashionably clothed, one is always ready to wager one's life, or rather to throw it into the balance, for the most valueless stake. One is irreligious and anti-moral on principle, but of the strictest outward orthodoxy and monarchical to the very marrow.

It is to this anti-moral (anti-democratic) superficial superciliousness[13] that Moscow forms a contrast in each and every particular. Here one is benevolent, democratic, hearty, and intentionally modest in appearance. Here, too, there appears to be less struggling. The kupetz (small merchant) is rich as can be, but he lingers in his little store with narrow entrances, and never has a thought of laying aside his caftan, the ancestral overcoat, or his high boots, into which are stuffed the ends of his trousers. But it is not exactly this merchant whom I should like to cite as an example of my point, for it is just he who has brought upon Moscow the reputation for being hostile to progress. But there is probably some connection between the resistance which the nobility of Moscow offers to St. Petersburg customs and the obstinate self-sufficiency of the merchant with his old-fashioned views. Just as this kupetz does not allow himself to be dazzled by the elegant-looking clerk of the St. Petersburg merchant, but clings to his ancestral ways, so the Moscow nobleman is not dazzled by the elegance of the dressy St. Petersburg officer of the guards. People dress elegantly in Moscow, too—yes, even in the Parisian style. But the contemptible inhumanity of the struggling official of St. Petersburg does not appeal to the Moscowite as civilizational progress, but as a metropolitan degeneracy to be despised. And so among the bright people of Moscow patriarchal heartiness is preserved. It was not a matter of pure chance that Leo Tolstoï spent so many winters in Moscow society. In St. Petersburg he would not have stayed.

The most beautiful creation of this conscious devotion to Moscow is the donation of a simple merchant, the possession of which any city of the world might envy—the Tretyakov Gallery, the largest and most valuable private collection that exists anywhere. A knowledge of it is absolutely indispensable to the historian of modern Russian painting. The Alexander Museum of St. Petersburg has isolated magnificent pieces of Ryepin, Aiwasowsky, and the most beautiful sculptures of Antokolski; but it cannot be compared with the two thousand pieces of the Tretyakov Gallery. The founder gave, besides this invaluable collection, a building for it, and a fund, from the interest of which, even after his death, the collection might be augmented. Admission, of course, is free to all; even fees for coat checks may not be collected of its visitors.

In this gallery one realizes for the first time that Russian painting is about at par with Russian literature, that it also has its Tolstoïs, Turgenyevs, and Dostoyevskys. Above all, there is Ilya Ryepin with a whole collection of portraits and large genre pictures. I have tried to sketch some of those works of art elsewhere in a special article devoted to this greatest of Russian artists, and will not repeat myself here. Let me only mention the portraits of Leo Tolstoï, copies of which can now be found in the West. The poet is here depicted once behind the plough and again barefoot in his garden, his hands in his belt, his head thoughtfully sunk upon his breast. It is the best picture of Tolstoï that exists. Once, while I was walking up and down in conversation with the poet in his room at Yasnaya Polyana, I had to bite my tongue in order to suppress the remark, "Now you look as if you had been cut from the canvas of Ryepin." Ryepin may be compared as a portrait-painter with the very foremost artists of all times. The strength of his characters is simply unequalled.

But the Russians appear to me particularly great in the field of realistic genre and of landscape painting, just as in their literature, which never leaves the firm ground of observation; and just for that reason it is perfectly unique in the catching of every little event, of every feeling and atmosphere peculiar to the landscape. Among the painters of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who already have worked under Ryepin's influence, there is no longer any insidiousness of coloring. Everything is seen clearly and strongly reproduced. No Düsseldorferie and no anecdote painting. Of course, they did not shun a subject useful in itself, and they by no means avoid a slight political tendency. But they are no less artists because they disdain to beg of the fanatics of "art for art's sake" the right to the name of artists by an exclusion of all but purely neutral subjects. On the contrary, in the naïveté in which they show themselves in their art as human beings of their time, they let it be known that the problem "art for art's sake" is for them without any meaning, since with them it is an axiom that they desire to influence only through the medium of their art; and yet they judge every work of art first of all in accordance with its artistic qualities. Only they do not allow themselves by an apparently neutral, but in reality a reactionary, doctrine to be hindered from the expression of their sympathy for everything liberal, free, and human.