Russian literature

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

THE PRECIPICE

The last and longest novel of Goncharóff, The Precipice, has not the unity of conception and workmanship which characterise Oblómoff. It contains wonderful pages, worthy of a writer of genius; but, all said, it is a failure. It took Goncharóff full ten years to write it, and having begun to depict in it types of one generation, he remodelled later on these types into types from the next generation—at a time when the sons differed totally from their fathers: he has told this himself in a very interesting critical sketch of his own work. As a result there is no wholeness, so to speak, in the main personages of the novel. The woman upon whom he has bestowed all his admiration, Vyéra, and whom he tries to represent as most sympathetic, is certainly interesting, but not sympathetic at all. One would say that Goncharóff’s mind was haunted by two women of two totally different types when he pictured his Vyéra—the one whom he tried—and failed—to picture in Sophie Byelovódova, and the other—the coming woman of the sixties, of whom he saw some features, and whom he admired, without fully understanding her. Vyéra’s cruelty towards her grandmother, and towards Ráisky, the hero, render her most unsympathetic, although you feel that the author quite adores her. As to the Nihilist, Vólokhoff, he is simply a caricature—taken perhaps from real life,—even seemingly from among the author’s personal acquaintances,—but obviously drawn with the desire of ventilating personal feelings of dislike. One feels a personal drama concealed behind the pages of the novel. Goncharóff’s first sketch of Vólokhoff was, as he wrote himself, some sort of Bohemian Radical of the forties who had retained in full the Don Juanesque features of the “Byronists” of the preceding generation. Gradually, however, Goncharóff, who had not yet finished his novel by the end of the fifties, transformed the figure into a Nihilist of the sixties—a revolutionist—and the result is that one has the sensation of the double origin of Vólokhoff, as one feels the double origin of Vyéra.

The only figure of the novel really true to life is the grandmother of Vyéra. This is an admirably painted figure of the simple, commonsense, independent woman of old Russia, while Martha, the sister of Vyéra, is an excellent picture of the commonplace girl, full of life, respectful of old traditions—to be one day the honest and reliable mother of a family. These two figures are the work of a great artist; but all the other figures are made-up, and consequently are failures; and yet there is much exaggeration in the tragical way in which Vyéra’s fall is taken by her grandmother. As to the background of the novel—the estate on a precipice leading to the Vólga—it is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Russian literature.

DOSTOYÉVSKIY

Few authors have been so well received, from their very first appearance in literature, as Dostoyévskiy was. In 1845 he arrived in St. Petersburg, a quite unknown young man who only two years before had finished his education in a school of military engineers, and after having spent two years in the engineering service had then abandoned it with the intention of devoting himself to literature. He was only twenty-four when he wrote his first novel, Poor People, which his school-comrade, Grigoróvitch, gave to the poet Nekrásoff, offering it for a literary almanack. Dostoyévskiy had inwardly doubted whether the novel would even be read by the editor. He was living then in a poor, miserable room, and was fast asleep when at four o’clock in the morning Nekrásoff and Grigoróvitch knocked at his door. They threw themselves on Dostoyévskiy’s neck, congratulating him with tears in their eyes. Nekrásoff and his friend had begun to read the novel late in the evening; they could not stop reading till they came to the end, and they were both so deeply impressed by it that they could not help going on this nocturnal expedition, to see the author and tell him what they felt. A few days later Dostoyévskiy was introduced to the great critic of the time, Byelínskiy, and from him he received the same warm reception. As to the reading public, the novel produced quite a sensation. The same must be said about all subsequent novels of Dostoyévskiy. They had an immense sale all over Russia.

The life of Dostoyévskiy was extremely sad. In the year 1849, four years after he had won his first success with Poor People, he became mixed up in the affairs of some Fourierists (members of the circles of Petrashévskiy), who used to meet together to read the works of Fourier, commenting on them, and talking about the necessity of a Socialistic movement in Russia. At one of these gatherings Dostoyévskiy read, and copied later on, a certain letter from Byelínskiy to Gógol, in which the great critic spoke in rather sharp language about the Russian Church and the State; he also took part in a meeting at which the starting of a secret printing office was discussed. He was arrested, tried (of course with closed doors), and, with several others, was condemned to death. In December, 1849, he was taken to a public square, placed on the scaffold, under a gibbet, to listen there to a profusedly-worded death-sentence, and only at the last moment came a messenger from Nicholas I., bringing a pardon. Three days later he was transported to Siberia and locked up in a hard-labour prison at Omsk. There he remained for four years, when owing to some influence at St. Petersburg he was liberated, only to be made a soldier. During his detention in the hard-labour prison he was submitted, for some minor offence, to the terrible punishment of the cat-o’-nine-tails, and from that time dates his disease—epilepsy—which he never quite got rid of during all his life. The coronation amnesty of Alexander II. did not improve Dostoyévskiy’s fate. Not until 1859—four years after the advent of Alexander II. to the throne—was the great writer pardoned and allowed to return to Russia. He died in 1883.

Dostoyévskiy was a rapid writer, and even before his arrest he had published ten novels, of which The Double was already a forerunner of his later psycho-pathological novels, and Nétochka Nezvánova showed a rapidly maturing literary talent of the highest quality. On his return from Siberia he began publishing a series of novels which produced a deep impression on the reading public. He opened the series by a great novel, The Downtrodden and Offended, which was soon followed by Memoirs from a Dead-House, in which he described his hard-labour experience. Then came an extremely sensational novel, Crime and Punishment, which lately was widely read all over Europe and America. The Brothers Karamázoff, which is considered his most elaborate work, is even more sensational, while The Youth, The Idiot, The Devils are a series of shorter novels devoted to the same psycho-pathological problems.

If Dostoyévskiy’s work had been judged from the purely æsthetic point of view, the verdict of critics concerning its literary value would have been anything but flattering. Dostoyévskiy wrote with such rapidity and he so little cared about the working out of his novels, that, as Dobrolúboff has shown, the literary form is in many places almost below criticism. His heroes speak in a slipshod way, continually repeating themselves, and whatever hero appears in the novel (especially is this so in The Downtrodden), you feel it is the author who speaks. Besides, to these serious defects one must add the extremely romantic and obsolete forms of the plots of his novels, the disorder of their construction, and the unnatural succession of their events—to say nothing of the atmosphere of the lunatic asylum with which the later ones are permeated. And yet, with all this, the works of Dostoyévskiy are penetrated with such a deep feeling of reality, and by the side of the most unreal characters one finds characters so well known to every one of us, and so real, that all these defects are redeemed. Even when you think that Dostoyévskiy’s record of the conversations of his heroes is not correct, you feel that the men whom he describes—at least some of them—were exactly such as he wanted to describe them.

The Memoirs from a Dead-House is the only production of Dostoyévskiy which can be recognised as truly artistic: its leading idea is beautiful, and the form is worked out in conformity with the idea; but in his later productions the author is so much oppressed by his ideas, all very vague, and grows so nervously excited over them that he cannot find the proper form. The favourite themes of Dostoyévskiy are the men who have been brought so low by the circumstances of their lives, that they have not even a conception of there being a possibility of rising above these conditions. You feel moreover that Dostoyévskiy finds a real pleasure in describing the sufferings, moral and physical, of the down-trodden—that he revels in representing that misery of mind, that absolute hopelessness of redress, and that completely broken-down condition of human nature which is characteristic of neuro-pathological cases. By the side of such sufferers you find a few others who are so deeply human that all your sympathies go with them; but the favourite heroes of Dostoyévskiy are the man and the woman who consider themselves as not having either the force to compel respect, or even the right of being treated as human beings. They once have made some timid attempt at defending their personalities, but they have succumbed, and never will try it again. They will sink deeper and deeper in their wretchedness, and die, either from consumption or from exposure, or they will become the victims of some mental affection—a sort of half-lucid lunacy, during which man occasionally rises to the highest conceptions of human philosophy—while some will conceive an embitterment which will bring them to commit some crime, followed by repentance the very next instant after it has been done.

In Downtrodden and Offended we see a young man madly in love with a girl from a moderately poor family. This girl falls in love with a very aristocratic prince—a man without principles, but charming in his childish egotism—extremely attractive by his sincerity, and with a full capacity for quite unconsciously committing the worst crimes towards those with whom life brings him into contact. The psychology of both the girl and the young aristocrat is very good, but where Dostoyévskiy appears at his best is in representing how the other young man, rejected by the girl, devotes the whole of his existence to being the humble servant of that girl, and against his own will becomes instrumental in throwing her into the hands of the young aristocrat. All this is quite possible, all this exists in life, and it is all told by Dostoyévskiy so as to make one feel the deepest commiseration with the poor and the down-trodden; but even in this novel the pleasure which the author finds in representing the unfathomable submission and servitude of his heroes, and the pleasure they find in the very sufferings and the ill-treatment that has been inflicted upon them—is repulsive to a sound mind.