Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is the key-note of much Russian literature; but it was the clash of events; the march of ideas which precipitated young Russia into the expression of revolt, pessimism, and its usual concomitant, materialism. There were bloodshed, battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears, tangible, not invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled the minds of the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new fermentation.
Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales of mean, colourless lives, Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic Andreiev, the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin, Ivanov, Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch (I select a few of the romancers)—not to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and Ivanov—are the men who are fighting under various banners but always for complete freedom.
Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young man named Michael Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring of trumpets, has taken the centre of the stage and still holds it. He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy, though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. Of Gogol's overwhelming humour he has not a trace; instead, a corroding irony which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky, despite his "bitter" nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared with Artzibashef. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only swears by Max Stirner, but some of his characters are Stirnerism incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the middle-class and proletarian.
To André Villard, his friend and one of his translators, the new Russian novelist told something of his life, a life colourless, dreary, bare of dramatic events. Born in a small town in southern Russia (1878), Michael Artzibashef is of Tatar, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. His great-grandfather on the maternal side was the Polish patriot Kosciusko. His father, a retired officer, was a small landowner. In the lad there developed the seeds of tuberculosis. His youth was a wretched one. At school he was unhappy because of its horrors—he has written of them in his first story, Pasha Tumanow—and he drifted from one thing to another till he wrote for a literary weekly in the provinces founded by a certain Miroliuboff, to whom he ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors at the time were Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreiev, Kuprin, and other young men who, like Artzibashef, have since "arrived."
His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It brought him recognition. This was in 1904. But the year before he had finished Sanine, his masterpiece, though it did not see publication till 1908. This was three years after the revolution of 1905, so that those critics were astray who spoke of the book as a naturally pessimistic reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism was born in the bones of the author and he needed no external stimulus to provoke such a realistic study as Sanine. Whether he is happier, healthier, whether he has married and raised a family, we know not. Personal as his stories are said to be, their art renders them objective.
The world over Sanine has been translated. It is a significant book, and incorporates the aspirations of many young men and women in the Russian Empire. It was not printed at first because of the censorship, and in Germany it had to battle for its life.
It is not only written from the standpoint of a professed immoralist, but the Russian censor declared it pernicious because of its "defamation of youth," its suicidal doctrine, its depressing atmosphere. The sex element, too, has aroused indignant protests from the clergy, from the press, from society itself.
In reply to his critics Artzibashef has denied libelling the younger generation. "Sanine," he says, "is the apology for individualism: the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong representative of the new Russia." And then he adds his own protest against the imitators of Sanine, who "flooded the literary world with pornographic writings." Now, whatever else it may be, Sanine is not pornographic, though I shall not pretend to say that its influence has been harmless. We should not forget Werther and the trail of sentimental suicides that followed its publication. But Sanine is fashioned of sterner stuff than Goethe's romance, and if it be "dangerous," then all the better.
Test all things, and remember that living itself is a dangerous affair. Never has the world needed precepts of daring, courage, individualism more than in this age of cowardly self-seeking, and the sleek promises of altruism and its soulless well-being. Sanine is a call to arms for individualists. And recall the Russian saying: Self-conceit is the salt of life.