Notwithstanding all the qualities of their work, Grigoróvitch and Márko Vovtchók failed to realise that the very fact of taking the life of the poorer classes as the subject of novels, ought to imply the working out of a special literary manner. The usual literary technique evolved for the novel which deals with the leisured classes—with its mannerism, its “heroes,” poetised now, as the knights used to be poetised in the tales of chivalry—is certainly not the most appropriate for novels treating the life of American squatters or Russian peasants. New methods and a different style had to be worked out; but this was done step by step only, and it would be extremely interesting to show this gradual evolution, from Grigoróvitch to the ultra-realism of Ryeshétnikoff, and finally to the perfection of form attained by the realist-idealist Górkiy in his shorter sketches. Only a few intermediate steps can, however, be indicated in these pages.
I. T. Kókoreff (1826-1853), who died very young, after having written a few tales from the life of the petty artisans in towns, had not freed himself from the sentimentalism of a benevolent outsider; but he knew this life from the inside: he was born and brought up in great poverty among these very people; consequently, the artisans in his novels are real beings, described, as Dobrolúboff said, “with warmth and yet with tender restraint, as if they were his nearest kin.” However, “No shriek of despair, no mighty wrath, no mordant irony came out of this tender, patiently suffering heart.” There is even a note of reconciliation with the social inequalities.
A considerable step in advance was made by the folk-novel in A. Th. Písemskiy (1820-1881), and A. A. Potyékhinn (born 1829), although neither of them was exclusively a folk-novelist. Písemskiy was a contemporary of Turguéneff, and at a certain time of his career it seemed as if he were going to take a place by the side of Turguéneff, Tolstóy and Gontcharóff. He undoubtedly possessed a great talent. There was power and real life in whatever he wrote, and his novel, A Thousand Souls, appearing on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs (1858), produced a deep impression. It was fully appreciated in Germany as well, where it was translated the next year. But Písemskiy was not a man of principle, and this novel was his last serious and really good production. When the great Radical and Nihilist movement took place (1858-1864), and it became necessary to take a definite position amidst the sharp conflict of opinions, Písemskiy, who was deeply pessimistic in his judgment of men and ideas, and considered “opinions” as a mere cover for narrow egotism of the lowest sensual sort, took a hostile position towards this movement, and wrote such novels as The Unruly Sea, which were mere libels upon the young generation. This was, of course, the death of his by no means ordinary talent.
Písemskiy wrote also, during the early part of his literary career, a few tales from the life of the peasants (The Carpenters’ Artel, The St. Petersburg Man, etc.), and a drama, from village life, A Bitter Fate, all of which have a real literary value. He displayed in them a knowledge of peasant life and a mastery of the spoken, popular Russian language, together with a perfectly realistic perception of peasant character. There was no trace of the idealisation which is so strongly felt in the later productions of Grigoróvitch, written under the influence of George Sand. The steady, common-sense peasant characters that Písemskiy pictured are taken from a real, sound observation of life, and rival the best peasant characters of Turguéneff. As to the drama of Písemskiy (he was, by the way, a very good actor), it loses nothing from comparison with the best dramas of Ostróvskiy, and is more tragic than any of them, while in powerful realism it is by no means inferior to Tolstóy’s Power of Darkness, with which it has much in common, and which it perhaps surpasses in its stage qualities.
The chief work of Potyékhin was his comedies, mentioned in the preceding chapter. All of them are from the life of the educated classes, but he wrote also a few less known dramas from the peasant life, and twice—in his early career in the fifties, and later on in the seventies—he turned to the writing of short stories and novels from popular life.
These stories and novels are most characteristic of the evolution of the folk-novel during those years. In his earlier tales Potyékhin was entirely under the spell of the then prevailing manner of idealising the peasants; but in his second period, after having lived through the years of realism in the sixties, and taken part in the above-mentioned ethnographic expedition, he changed his manner. He entirely got rid of benevolent idealisation, and represented the peasants as they were. In the creation of individual characters he was undoubtedly successful, but the life of the village—the mir—without which Russian village-life cannot be represented, and which so well appears in the works of the later folk-novelists, is yet missing. Altogether one feels that Potyékhin knew well the outer symptoms of the life of the Russian peasants, including their way of talking, but that he had not yet grasped the real soul of the peasant. This came only later on.
ETHNOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH
Serfdom was abolished in 1861, and the time for mere lamentation over its evils was gone. Proof that the peasants were human beings, accessible to all human feelings, was no longer needed. New and far deeper problems concerning the life and ideals of the Russian people rose before every thinking Russian. Here was a mass of nearly fifty million people, whose manners of life, whose creed, ways of thinking, and ideals were totally different from those of the educated classes, and who at the same time were as unknown to the would-be leaders of progress as if these millions spoke a quite different language and belonged to a quite different race.
Our best men felt that all the future development of Russia would be hampered by that ignorance, if it continued—and literature did its best to answer the great questions which besieged the thinking man at every step of his social and political activity.
The years 1858-1878 were years of the ethnographical exploration of Russia on such a scale that nowhere in Europe or America do we find anything similar. The monuments of old folklore and poetry; the common law of different parts and nationalities of the Empire; the religious beliefs and the forms of worship, and still more the social aspirations characteristic of the many sections of dissenters; the extremely interesting habits and customs which prevail in the different provinces; the economical conditions of the peasants; their domestic trades; the immense communal fisheries n southeastern Russia; the thousands of forms taken by the popular coöperative organisations (the Artels); the “inner colonisation” of Russia, which can only be compared with that of the United States; the evolution of ideas of landed property, and so on—all these became the subjects of extensive research.