The Peasant Children is a charming village idyll. The “Muse of Vengeance and Sadness”—one of our critics remarks—becomes wonderfully mild and gentle as soon as she begins to speak of women and children. In fact, none of the Russian poets has ever done so much for the apotheosis of women, and especially of the mother-woman, as this supposedly severe poet of Vengeance and Sadness. As soon as Nekrásoff begins to speak of a mother he grows powerful; and the strophes he devoted to his own mother—a woman lost in a squire’s house, amidst men thinking only of hunting, drinking, and exercising their powers as slave owners in their full brutality—these strophes are real pearls in the poetry of all nations.
His poem devoted to the exiles in Siberia and to the Russian women—that is, to the wives of the Decembrists—in exile, is excellent and contains really beautiful passages, but it is inferior to either his poems dealing with the peasants or to his pretty poem, Sasha, in which he describes, contemporaneously with Turguéneff, the very same types as Rúdin and Natásha.
It is quite true that Nekrásoff’s verses often bear traces of a painful struggle with rhyme, and that there are lines in his poems which are decidedly inferior; but he is certainly one of our most popular poets amidst the masses of the people. Part of his poetry has already become the inheritance of all the Russian nation. He is immensely read—not only by the educated classes, but by the poorest peasants as well. In fact, as has been remarked by one of our critics, to understand Púshkin a certain more or less artificial literary development is required; while to understand Nekrásoff it is sufficient for the peasant simply to know reading; and it is difficult to imagine, without having seen it, the delight with which Russian children in the poorest village schools are now reading Nekrásoff and learning full pages from his verses by heart.
OTHER PROSE WRITERS OF THE SAME EPOCH
Having analysed the work of those writers who may be considered as the true founders of modern Russian literature, I ought now to review a number of prose-writers and poets of less renown, belonging to the same epoch. However, following the plan of this book, only a few words will be said, and only some of the most remarkable among them will be mentioned.
A writer of great power, quite unknown in Western Europe, who occupies a quite unique position in Russian literature, is Serghéi Timoféevitch Aksákovv (1791-1859), the father of the two Slavophile writers, Konstantín and Iván Aksákoff. He is in reality a contemporary of Púshkin and Lérmontoff, but during the first part of his career he displayed no originality whatever, and lingered in the fields of pseudo-classicism. It was only after Gógol had written—that is, after 1846—that he struck a quite new vein, and attained the full development of his by no means ordinary talent. In the years 1847-1855 he published his Memoirs of Angling, Memoirs of a Hunter with his Fowling Piece in the Government of Orenbúrg, and Stories and Remembrances of a Sportsman; and these three works would have been sufficient to conquer for him the reputation of a first-rate writer. The Orenbúrg region, in the Southern Uráls, was very thinly inhabited at that time, and its nature and physiognomy are so well described in these books that Aksákoff’s work reminds one of the Natural History of Selbourne. It has the same accuracy; but Aksákoff is moreover a poet and a first-rate poetical landscape painter. Besides, he so admirably knew the life of the animals, and he so well understood them, that in this respect his rivals could only be Krylóff on the one hand, and Brehm the elder and Audubon among the naturalists.
The influence of Gógol induced S. T. Aksákoff to entirely abandon the domain of pseudo-classical fiction. In 1846 he began to describe real life, and the result was a large work, A Family Chronicle and Remembrances (1856), soon followed by The Early Years of Bagróff-the-Grandchild (1858), which put him in the first ranks among the writers of his century. Slavophile enthusiasts described him even as a Shakespeare, nay, as a Homer; but all exaggeration apart, S. T. Aksákoff has really succeeded not only in reproducing a whole epoch in his Memoirs, but also in creating real types of men of that time, which have served as models for all our subsequent writers. If the leading idea of these Memoirs had not been so much in favour of the “good old times” of serfdom, they would have been even much more widely read than they are now. The appearance of A Family Chronicle—in 1856—was an event, and the marking of an epoch in Russian literature.
V. Dal (1801-1872) cannot be omitted even from this short sketch. He was born in Southeastern Russia, of a Danish father and a Franco-German mother, and received his education at the Dorpat university. He was a naturalist and a doctor by profession, but his favourite study was ethnography, and he became a remarkable ethnographer, as well as one of the best connoisseurs of the Russian spoken language and its provincial dialects. His sketches from the life of the people, signed Kozak Luganskiy (about a hundred of them are embodied in a volume, Pictures from Russian Life, 1861), were very widely read in the forties and the fifties, and were highly praised by Turguéneff and Byelínskiy. Although they are mere sketches and leaflets from a diary, without real poetical creation, they are delightful reading. As to the ethnographical work of Dal it was colossal. During his continual peregrinations over Russia, in his capacity of a military doctor attached to his regiment, he made most wonderful collections of words, expressions, riddles, proverbs, and so on, and embodied them in two large works. His main work is An Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, in four quarto volumes (first edition in 1861-68, second in 1880-1882). This is really a monumental work and contains the first and very successful attempt at a lexicology of the Russian language, which, notwithstanding some occasional mistakes, is of the greatest value for the understanding and the etymology of the Russian tongue as it is spoken in different provinces. It contains at the same time a precious and extremely rich collection of linguistic material for future research, part of which would have been lost by now if Dal had not collected it, fifty years ago, before the advent of railways. Another great work of Dal, only second to the one just mentioned, is a collection of proverbs, entitled The Proverbs of the Russian People (second edition in 1879).
A writer who occupies a prominent place in the evolution of the Russian novel, but has not yet been sufficiently appreciated, is Ivan Panáeff (1812-1862), who was a great friend of all the literary circle of the Sovreménnik (Contemporary). Of this review he was co-editor with Nekrásoff, and he wrote for it a mass of literary notes and feuilletons upon all sorts of subjects, extremely interesting for characterising those times. In his novels Panáeff, like Turguéneff, took his types chiefly from the educated classes, both at St. Petersburg and in the provinces. His collection of “Swaggerers” (hlyschí), both from the highest classes in the capitals, and from provincials, is not inferior to Thackeray’s collection of “snobs.” In fact, the “swaggerer,” as Panáeff understood him, is even a much broader and much more complicated type of man than the snob, and cannot easily be described in a few words. The greatest service rendered by Panáeff was, however, the creation in his novels of a series of such exquisite types of Russian women that they were truly described by some critics as “the spiritual mothers of the heroines of Turguéneff.”