Every movement among the educated classes in favour of the poorer classes begins by an idealisation of the latter. It being necessary to clear away, first of all, a number of prejudices which exist among the rich as regards the poor, some idealisation is unavoidable. Therefore, the earlier folk-novelist takes only the most striking types—those whom the wealthier people can better understand and sympathise with; and he lightly passes over the less sympathetic features of the life of the poor. This was done in the forties in France and England, and in Russia by Grigoróvitch, Márko Vovtchók, and several others. Then came Ryeshétnikoff with his artistic Nihilism: with his negation of all the usual tricks of art, and his objectivism; his blunt refusal to create “types” and his preference for the quite ordinary man; his manner of transmitting to you his love of his people, merely through the suppressed intensity of his own emotion. Later on, new problems arose for Russian literature. The readers were now quite ready to sympathise with the individual peasant or factory worker; but they wanted to know something more: namely, what were the very foundations, the ideals, the springs of village life? what were they worth in the further development of the nation? what, and in what form, could the immense agricultural population of Russia contribute to the further development of the country and the civilised world altogether? All such questions could not be answered by the statistician alone; they required the genius of the artist, who must decipher the reply out of the thousands of small indications and facts, and our folk-novelists understood this new demand of the reader. A rich collection of individual peasant types having already been given, it was now the life of the village—the mir, with its advantages and drawbacks, and its promises for the future—that the readers were anxious to find in the folk-novel. These were the questions which the new generation of folk-novelists undertook to discuss.
In this venture they were certainly right. It must not be forgotten that in the last analysis every economical and social question is a question of psychology of both the individual and the social aggregation. It cannot be solved by arithmetic alone. Therefore, in social science, as in human psychology, the poet often sees his way better than the physiologist. At any rate, he too has his voice in the matter.
When Uspénskiy began writing his first sketches of village life—it was in the early seventies—Young Russia was in the grip of the great movement “towards the people,” and it must be owned that in this movement, as in every other, there was some idealisation. Those who did not know village-life at all cherished exaggerated, idyllic illusions about the village-community. In all probability Uspénskiy, who was born in a large industrial town, Túla, in the family of a small functionary and hardly knew country life at all, shared these illusions to some extent, very probably in their most extreme aspect; and still preserving them he went to a province of southeastern Russia, Samára, which had lately become the prey of modern commercialism, and where, owing to a number of peculiar circumstances, the abolition of serfdom had been accomplished under conditions specially ruinous to the peasants and to village-life altogether. Here he must have suffered intensely from seeing his youthful dreams vanishing; and, as artists often do, he hastened to generalise; but he had not the education of the thorough ethnographer, which might have prevented him from making too hasty ethnological generalisations from his limited materials, and he began to write a series of scenes from village-life, imbued with a deep pessimism. It was only much later on, while staying in a village of Northern Russia, in the province of Nóvgorod, that he came to understand the influences which the culture of the land and life in an agricultural village may exercise upon the tiller of the soil; then only had he some glimpses of what are the social and moral forces of land cultivation and communal life, and of what free labour on a free soil might be. These observations inspired Uspénskiy with perhaps the best thing he wrote, The Power of the Soil (1882). It will remain, at any rate, his most important contribution in this domain—the artist appearing here in all the force of his talent and in his true function of explaining the inner springs of a certain mood of life.
ZLATOVRÁTSKIY AND OTHER FOLK-NOVELISTS
One of the great questions of the day for Russia is, whether we shall abolish the communal ownership of the land, as it has been abolished in Western Europe, and introduce instead of it individual peasant proprietorship; or whether we shall endeavour to retain the village community, and do our best to develop it further in the direction of coöperative associations, both agricultural and industrial. A great struggle goes on accordingly among the educated classes of Russia upon this question, and in his first Samára sketches, entitled From a Village Diary, Uspénskiy paid a great deal of attention to this subject. He tried to prove that the village community, such as it is, results in a formidable oppression of the individual, in a hampering of individual initiative, in all sorts of oppression of the poorer peasants by the richer ones, and, consequently, in general poverty. He omitted, however, all the arguments which these same poorer peasants, if they should be questioned, would bring forward in favour of the present communal ownership of the land; and he attributed to this institution what is the result of other general causes, as may be seen from the fact that exactly the same poverty, the same inertia, and the same oppression of the individual, are found in an even greater degree in Little Russia, where the village community has ceased to exist long since. Uspénskiy thus expressed—at least in those sketches which dealt with the villages of Samára—the views which prevail among the middle classes of Western Europe, and are current in Russia among the growing village bourgeoisie.
This attitude called forth a series of replies from another folk-novelist of an equally great talent, Zlatovrátskiy (born 1845), who answered each sketch of Uspénskiy’s by a novel in which he took the extreme opposite view. He had known peasant life in Middle Russia from his childhood; and the less illusions he had about it, the better was he able, when he began a serious study of the peasants, to see the good features of their lives, and to understand those types of them who take to heart the interests of the village as a whole—types that I also well knew in my youth in the same provinces.
Zlatovrátskiy was accused, of course, of idealising the peasants; but the reality is, that Uspénskiy and Zlatovrátskiy complement each other. Just as they complement each other geographically—the latter speaking for the truly agricultural region of Middle Russia, while Uspénskiy spoke for the periphery of this region—so also they complement each other psychologically. Uspénskiy was right in showing the drawbacks of the village community institution—deprived of its vitality by an omnipotent bureaucracy; and Zlatovrátskiy was quite right, too, in showing what sort of men are nevertheless bred by the village-communal institutions and by attachment to the land, and what services they could render to the rural masses under different conditions of liberty and independence.
Zlatovrátskiy’s novels are thus an important ethnographical contribution, and they have at the same time an artistic value. His Everyday Life in the Village, and perhaps even more his Peasant Jurymen (since 1864, the peasant heads of households have acted in turn as jurors in the law courts), are full of the most charming scenes of village-life; while his Foundations represents a serious attempt at grasping in a work of art the fundamental conceptions of Russian rural life. In this last work we also find types of men, who personify the revolt of the peasant against both external oppression and the submissiveness of the mass to that oppression—men, who, under favourable conditions might become the initiators of movements of a deep purport. That types have not been invented will be agreed by everyone who knows Russian village-life from the inside.
The writers who have been named in the preceding pages are far from representing the whole school of folk-novelists. Not only has every Russian novelist of the past, from Turguéneff down, been inspired in some of his work by folk life, but some of the best productions of the most prominent contemporary writers, such as Korolénko, Tchéhoff, Oertel and many others (see next chapter), belong to the same category. There are besides quite a number of novelists distinctively of this class, who would be spoken of at some length in any course of Russian literature, but whom, unfortunately, I am compelled to mention in but a few lines.