Naúmoff was born at Tobólsk (in 1838) and, settling in Western Siberia after he had received a university education at St. Petersburg, he wrote a series of short novels and sketches in which he described life in West Siberian villages and mining towns. These stories were widely read, owing to their expressive, truly popular language, the energy with which they were imbued, and the striking pictures they contained of the advantage taken of the poverty of the mass by the richer peasants, known in Russia as “mir-eaters” (miroyéd).
Zasódimskiy (born 1843) belongs to the same period. Like many of his contemporaries, he spent years of his youth in exile, but he remains still the same “populist” that he was in his youth, imbued with the same love of the people and the same faith in the peasants. His Chronicle of the Village Smúrino (1874) and Mysteries of the Steppes (1882) are especially interesting, because Zasódimskiy made in these novels attempts at representing types of intellectual and protesting peasants, true to life, but usually neglected by our folk-novelists. Some of them are rebels who revolt against the conditions of village-life, chiefly in their own, personal interest, while others are peaceful religious propagandists, and still others are men who have developed under the influence of educated propagandists.
Another writer who excelled in the representation of the type of “mir-eaters” in the villages of European Russia is Sáloff (1843-1902).
Petropávlovskiy (1857-1892), who wrote under the pseudonym of Karónin, was, on the other hand, a real poet of village-life and of the cultivation of the fields. He was born in southeastern Russia, in the province of Samára, but was early exiled to the government of Tobólsk, in Siberia, where he was kept many years, and from which he was released only to die soon after from consumption. He gave in his novels and stories several very dramatic types of village “ne’er-do-well’s,” but the novel which is most typical of his talent is My World. In it he tells how an “intellectual,” “rent in twain” and nearly losing his reason in consequence of this dualism, finds inner peace and reconciliation with life when he settles in a village and works in the same almost superhuman way that the peasants do, when hay has to be mown and the crops to be carried in. Thus living the life they live, he is loved by them, and finds a healthy and intelligent girl to love him. This is, of course, to some extent an idyll of village life; but so slight is the idealisation, as we know from the experience of those “intellectuals” who went to the villages as equals coming among equals, that the idyll reads almost as a reality.
Several more folk-novelists ought to be mentioned. Such are L. Melshin (born 1860), the pseudonym of an exile “P. Ya.,” who is also a poet, and who, having been kept for twelve years at hard labour in Siberia as a political convict, has published two volumes of hard-labour sketches, In the World of the Outcasts (a work to put by the side of Dostoyévskiy’s Dead House); S. Elpátievskiy (born 1854), also an exile, who has given good sketches of Siberian tramps; Nefédoff (1847-1902), an ethnographer who has made valuable scientific researches and at the same time has published excellent sketches of factory and village life, and whose writings are thoroughly imbued with a deep faith in the store of energy and plastic creative power of the masses of the country people; and several others. Every one of these writers deserves, however, more than a short notice, because each has contributed something, either to the comprehension of this or that class of the people, or to the working out of those forms of “idealistic realism” which are best suited for dealing with types taken from the toiling masses, and which has lately made the literary success of Maxím Górkiy.
MAXÍM GÓRKIY
Few writers have established their reputation so rapidly as Maxím Górkiy. His first sketches (1892-95) were published in an obscure provincial paper of the Caucasus, and were totally unknown to the literary world, but when a short tale of his appeared in a widely-read review, edited by Korolénko, it at once attracted general attention. The beauty of its form, its artistic finish, and the new note of strength and courage which rang through it, brought the young writer immediately into prominence. It became known that “Maxím Górkiy” was the pseudonym of a quiet young man, A. Pyéshkoff, who was born in 1868 in Níjniy Nóvgorod, a large town on the Vólga; that his father was a merchant or an artisan, his mother a remarkable peasant woman, who died soon after the birth of her son, and that the boy, orphaned when only nine, was brought up in a family of his father’s relatives. The childhood of “Górkiy” must have been anything but happy, for one day he ran away and entered into service on a Vólga river steamer. This took place when he was only twelve. Later on he worked as a baker, became a street porter, sold apples in a street, till at last he obtained the position of clerk at a lawyer’s. In 1891 he lived and wandered on foot with the tramps in South Russia, and during these wanderings he wrote a number of short stories, of which the first was published in 1892, in a newspaper of Northern Caucasia. The stories proved to be remarkably fine, and when a collection of all that he had hitherto written was published in 1900, in four small volumes, the whole of a large edition was sold in a very short time, and the name of Górkiy took its place—to speak of living novelists only—by the side of those of Korolénko and Tchéhoff, immediately after the name of Leo Tolstóy. In Western Europe and America his reputation was made with the same rapidity as soon as a couple of his sketches were translated into French and German, and re-translated into English.
It is sufficient to read a few of Górkiy’s short stories, for instance, Málva, or Tchelkásh, or The Ex-Men, or Twenty-Six Men and One Girl, to realise at once the causes of his rapidly won popularity. The men and women he describes are not heroes: they are the most ordinary tramps or slum-dwellers; and what he writes are not novels in the proper sense of the word, but merely sketches of life. And yet, in the literature of all nations, including the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and Bret Harte, there are few things in which such a fine analysis of complicated and struggling human feelings is given, such interesting, original, and new characters are so well depicted, and human psychology is so admirably interwoven with a background of nature—a calm sea, menacing waves, or endless, sunburnt prairies. In the first-named story you really see the promontory that juts out into “the laughing waters,” that promontory upon which the fisherman has pitched his hut; and you understand why Málva, the woman who loves him and comes to see him every Sunday, loves that spot as much as she does the fisherman himself. And then at every page you are struck by the quite unexpected variety of fine touches with which the love of that strange and complicated nature, Málva, is depicted, or by the unforeseen aspects under which both the ex-peasant fisherman and his peasant-son appear in the short space of a few days. The variety of strokes, refined and brutal, tender and terribly harsh, with which Górkiy pictures human feelings is such that in comparison with his heroes the heroes and heroines of our best novelists seem so simple—so simplified—just like a flower in European decorative art in comparison with a real flower.
Górkiy is a great artist; he is a poet; but he is also a child of all that long series of folk-novelists whom Russia has had for the last half century, and he has utilised their experience: he has found at last that happy combination of realism with idealism for which the Russian folk-novelists have been striving for so many years. Ryeshétnikoff and his school had tried to write novels of an ultra-realistic character without any trace of idealisation. They restrained themselves whenever they felt inclined to generalise, to create, to idealise. They tried to write mere diaries, in which events, great and small, important and insignificant, were related with an equal exactitude, without even changing the tone of the narrative. We have seen that in this way, by dint of their talent, they were able to obtain the most poignant effects; but like the historian who vainly tries to be “impartial,” yet always remains a party man, they had not avoided the idealisation which they so much dreaded. They could not avoid it. A work of art is always personal; do what he may, the author’s sympathies will necessarily appear in his creation, and he will always idealise those who answer to them. Grigórovitch and Márko Vovtchók had idealised the all-pardoning patience and the all-enduring submissiveness of the Russian peasant; and Ryeshétnikoff had quite unconsciously, and maybe against his will, idealised the almost supernatural powers of endurance which he had seen in the Uráls and in the slums of St. Petersburg. Both had idealised something: the ultra-realist as well as the romantic. Górkiy must have understood the significance of this; at all events he does not object in the least to a certain idealisation. In his adherence to truth he is as much of a realist as Ryeshétnikoff; but he idealises in the same sense as Turguéneff did when he pictured Rúdin, Helen, or Bazároff. He even says that we must idealise, and he chooses for idealisation the type he admired most among those tramps whom he knew—the rebel. This made his success; it appeared to be exactly what the readers of all nations were unconsciously calling for as a relief from the dull mediocrity and absence of strong individuality all about them.