An admirer has said of him that "confession has become his second nature"; rather it was a psychological necessity. The voice that cried from the comfortable wilderness of Yasnaya Polyana furnished unique "copy" for newspapers. Alas! the pity of it all. The moral dyspepsia that overtook Carlyle in middle life was the result of a lean, spoiled, half-starved youth; the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth overflowing with the "joy of life." Ibsen, like Carlyle, battled in his early days with poverty; but his message—if you will have a definite message (Oh, these literal, unimaginative folk of the Gradgrind sort, who would wring from the dumb mysterious beauty of nature definite meanings—as if sheer existence itself is not its own glorious vindication!)—may be a hopeful one. The individual is all in all; he is the evangel of the future; his belief is buoyant and Northern; whereas Tolstoy's sour outlook, his constant girding at the vanities of life (after he had, Solomon-like, tasted of them to the full) is Eastern; his is the Oriental fatalism, the hopeless doctrine of determinism. He discovers a new sin every day. Better one hour of Nietzsche's dancing madness than a cycle of Tolstoy's pessimistic renunciations. And all his ethical propaganda does not shake in the least our conviction of the truth and grandeur of Tolstoy's art.
Of the disciples the son of Tolstoy, Count Ilya, tells us in no uncertain accents:
My father had good reason for saying that the "Tolstoyites" were to him the most incomprehensible sect and the furthest removed from his way of thinking that he had ever come across. "I shall soon be dead," he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most important of all, they will forget."
IV
THE YOUNGER CHOIR
Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoïevsky, Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics. As long as Russian, sonorous and beautiful tongue, is spoken, they will never die. And their successors? What is the actual condition of Russian literature at the present time? It is the bare truth to say that a period of stagnation set in during the decade after Turgenieff's death. Emigration carried with it the best brains of the land. We need not dwell upon the publicists, nor yet stir the muddy stream of agitation. It has been the misfortune of Russian literary men to be involved in dangerous political schisms and revolutionary movements; their misfortune, and perhaps their good luck. For dramatic material they have never been at a loss, though their art has suffered, and depth of feeling has been gained at a sad waste of other qualities. That grand old humourist Gogol has had no successors. Humour in Russia is a suspected thing. Even if there were a second Gogol he would never be allowed to put on the boards a second Revizor. We do not mean to assert that humour has died out altogether in literature, but it is not the special gift of those who write nowadays. Since Gogol or coeval with him, only men of secondary importance have been humourists: Uspenski, Ostrovski, Saltykov (Chtchédrine), or the author of the novel Oblomov, Gontcharov by name.
Maikov, Nadsohn, Polonski, Garchin, Korolenko, Tchekov were all men of talent; the last in particular, preceptor and friend to Gorky in his days of want, was a novelist of high artistic if morbid powers. He is dead. It is when we turn to the living that we realise what a flatland is Russian literature now. A writer and critic, Madame Z. Hippius, attempted in the Paris Mercure de France to give an idea of the situation. She admitted the inadequacy of her sketch. The troubled political map of Russia has not been conducive to ripe artistic production. As she says, even the writers who refused to meddle with politics are marked men; politics in the shape of the secret police comes to them. Madame Hippius makes the assertion that literature in Russian has never existed in the sense of a literary milieu, as an organic art possessing traditions and continuity; for her, Tolstoy, Dostoïevsky, and Turgenieff are but isolated men of genius. A glance back at the times and writings of such critics as Bielinski, Dobroliubov, and Nekrasov—a remarkable poet—disproves this statement. Without a Gogol the later novelists would be rather in the air. He first fashioned the bricks and mortar of native fiction. Read Kropotkin, Osip-Luri, E. Semenov, Walizewski, Melchior de Vogüé, and Leo Wiener if you doubt the wealth and variety of this literature.
Among living prose writers two names are encountered: Maxim Gorky and Léonide Andreiev. Of the neurotic Gorky there is naught to be said that is encouraging. He was physically ill when in America and as an artist in plain decadence. He had shot his bolt in his tales about his beloved vagabonds. He had not the long-breathed patience or artistic skill for a novel. His novels, disfigured by tirades and dry attempts at philosophical excursions, are all failures. When his tramps begin to spout Nietzsche on their steppes the artificial note is too apparent. His plays are loose episodes without dramatic action or climax, sometimes moving, as in the case of Nachtasyl, and discordant in The Children of the Sun. Gorky had a natural talent; in his stories a submerged generation became eloquent. And he became a doctrinaire. Nietzsche finished the ruin that Marx had begun; his art, chiefly derived from Dostoïevsky and Tchekov, succumbed to a sentimental socialism.
Andreiev is still strong, though enveloped in "mystic anarchism." He is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His play, Les Ténèbres, reveals the influences of Dostoïevsky and Tolstoy. It is a shocking arraignment of self-satisfied materialism. A young revolutionary is the protagonist. The woman in the case belongs to the same profession as Dostoïevsky's Sonia. Not encouraging, this. Yet high hopes are centred upon Andreiev. For the rest there is Vladimir Soloviev, who is a poet-metaphysician with a following. He has mystic proclivities. Scratch a Russian writer and you come upon a mystic. He is against clericalism and believes in an "anti-clerical church"! There is a little circle at Moscow, where a Muscovite review, La Balance (founded 1903), is the centre of the young men. V. Brusoff, a poet, is the editor. Balmont and Sologub write for its pages, as do Rosanow and Merejkowski. In 1898 there was a review started called Mir Iskousstva. Its director was Serge Diaghilev, and it endured until 1904. Sologub is one of the most promising poets. Block, Remisov, Ivanov are also poets of much ability. There are romancers such as Zensky, Kuzmin, Ivanov, Ropshin, Chapygin, Serafimovitch, Zaitzeff, Volnoff; some of these wrote on risky themes. But when the works of these new writers are closely scrutinised their lack of originality and poverty of invention are noticeable.