The great ethnographical expedition organised by the Grand Duke Constantine, in which a number of our best writers took part, was only the forerunner of many expeditions, great and small, which were organised by the numerous Russian scientific societies for the detailed study of Russia’s ethnography, folklore, and economics. There were men like Yakúshkin (1820-1872), who devoted all his life to wandering on foot from village to village, dressed like the poorest peasant, and without any sort of thought of to-morrow; drying his wet peasant cloth on his shoulders after a day’s march under the rain, living with the peasants in their poor huts, and collecting folk-songs or ethnographic material of the highest value.
A special type of the Russian “intellectuals” developed in the so-called “Song-Collectors,” and “Zemstvo Statisticians,” a group of people, old and young, who during the last twenty-five years have as volunteers and at a ridiculously small price, devoted their lives to house-to-house inquiry in behalf of the County Councils. (A. Oertel has admirably described these “Statisticians” in one of his novels.)
Suffice it to say that, according to A. N. Pýpin, the author of an exhaustive History of Russian Ethnography (4 vols.), not less than 4000 large works and bulky review articles were published during the twenty years, 1858-1878, half of them dealing with the economical conditions of the peasants, and the other half with ethnography in its wider sense; and research still continues on the same scale. The best of all this movement has been that it has not ended in dead material in official publications. Some of the reports, like Maxímoff’s A Year in the North, Siberia and Hard Labour, and Tramping Russia, Afanásieff (Legends), Zheleznóff’s Ural Cossacks, Mélnikoff’s (Petchérsky), In the Woods and On the Mountains, or Mordóvtseff’s many sketches, were so well written that they were as widely read as the best novels; while the dry statistical reports were summed up in lively review articles (in Russia the reviews are much more bulky, and the articles much longer than in England), which were widely read and discussed all over the country. Besides, admirable researches dealing with special classes of people, regions, and institutions were made by men like Prugávin, Zasódimskiy, Pyzhóff (History of the Public Houses, which is in fact a popular history of Russia).
Russian educated society, which formerly hardly knew the peasants otherwise than from the balcony of their country houses, was thus brought in a few years into a close intercourse with all divisions of the toiling masses; and it is easy to understand the influence which this intercourse exercised, not only upon the development of political ideas, but also upon the whole character of Russian literature.
The idealised novel of the past was now outgrown. The representation of “the dear peasants” as a background for opposing their idyllic virtues to the defects of the educated classes was possible no more. The taking of the people as a mere material for burlesque tales, as Nicholas Uspénskiy and V. A. Slyeptsóff tried to do, enjoyed but a momentary success. A new, eminently realistic school of folk-novelists was wanted. And the result was the appearance of quite a number of writers who broke new ground and, by cultivating a very high conception concerning the duties of art in the representation of the poorer, uneducated classes, opened, I am inclined to think, a new page in the evolution of the novel for the literature of all nations.
POMYALÓVSKIY
The clergy in Russia—that is, the priests, the deacons, the cantors, the bell-ringers—represent a separate class which stands between “the classes” and “the masses”—much nearer to the latter than to the former. This is especially true as regards the clergy in the villages, and it was still more so some fifty years ago. Receiving no salary, the village priest, with his deacon and cantors, lived chiefly by the cultivation of the land that was attached to the village church; and in my youth, in our Central Russia neighbourhood, during the hot summer months when they were hay-making or taking in the crops, the priest would always hurry through the mass in order to return to their field-work. The priest’s house was in those years a log-house, only a little better built than the houses of the peasants, alongside which it stood sometimes thatched, instead of being simply covered with straw, that is, held in position by means of straw ropes. His dress differed from that of the peasants more by its cut than by the materials it was made of, and between the church services and the fulfilment of his parish duties the priest might always be seen in the fields, following the plough or working in the meadows with the scythe.
All the children of the clergy receive free education in special clerical schools, and later on, some of them, in seminaries; and it was by the description of the abominable educational methods which prevailed in these schools in the forties and fifties that Pomyalóvskiy (1835-1863) acquired his notoriety. He was the son of a poor deacon in a village near St. Petersburg, and had himself passed through one of these schools and a seminary. Both the lower and the higher schools were then in the hands of quite uneducated priests—chiefly monks—and the most absurd learning by rote of the most abstract theology was the rule. The general moral tone of the schools was extremely low, drinking went on to excess, and flogging for every lesson not recited by heart, sometimes two or three times a day, with all sorts of refinements of cruelty—was the chief instrument of education. Pomyalóvskiy passionately loved his younger brother and wanted at all hazards to save him from such an experience as his own; so he began to write for a pedagogical review, on the education given in the clerical schools, in order to get the means to educate his brother in a gymnasium. A most powerful novel, evidently taken from real life in these schools, followed, and numbers of priests, who had themselves been the victims of a like “education,” wrote to the papers to confirm what Pomyalóvskiy had said. Truth, without any decoration, naked truth, with an absolute negation of art for art’s sake, were the distinctive features of Pomyalóvskiy, who went so far in this direction as even to part with the so-called heroes. The men whom he described were not sharply outlined types, but, if I may be permitted to express myself in this way, the “neutral-tint” types of real life: those indefinite, not too good and not too bad characters of whom mankind is mostly composed, and whose inertia is everywhere the great obstacle to progress.
Besides his sketches from the life of the clerical schools, Pomyalóvskiy wrote also two novels from the life of the poorer middle classes: Philistine Happiness, and Mólotoff—which is autobiographic to a great extent—and an unfinished larger novel, Brother and Sister. He displayed in these works the same broad humanitarian spirit as Dostoyévskiy had for noticing humane redeeming features in the most degraded men and women, but with the sound realistic tendency which made the distinctive feature of the young literary school of which he was one of the founders. And he depicted also, in an extraordinarily powerful and tragic manner, the hero from the poorer classes—who is imbued with hatred towards the upper classes and toward all forms of social life which exist for their advantage—and yet has not the faith in his own possibilities, which knowledge gives, and which a real force always has. Therefore this hero ends, either in a philistine family idyll, or, this failing, in a propaganda of reckless cruelty and of contempt towards all mankind, as the only possible foundation for personal happiness.
These novels were full of promise, and Pomyalóvskiy was looked upon as the future leader of a new school of literature; but he died, even before he had reached the age of thirty.