In his Letter to Gógol concerning the latter’s Correspondence with Friends (see Ch. III.) he gave quite a programme of urgent social and political reforms; but his days were numbered. His review of the literature for the year 1847, which was especially beautiful and deep, was his last work. Death spared him from seeing the dark cloud of reaction in which Russia was wrapped from 1848 to 1855.
Valerián Máykoff (1823-1847), who promised to become a critic of great power on the same lines as Byelínskiy, died unfortunately too young, and it was Tchernyshévskiy, soon followed by Dobrolúboff, who continued and further developed the work of Byelínskiy and his predecessors.
The leading idea of Tchernyshévskiy was that art cannot be its own aim; that life is superior to art; and that the aim of art is to explain life, to comment upon it, and to express an opinion about it. He developed these ideas in a thoughtful and stimulating work, The Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality, in which he demolished the current theories of æsthetics, and gave a realistic definition of the Beautiful. The sensation—he wrote—which the Beautiful awakens in us is a feeling of bright happiness, similar to that which is awakened by the presence of a beloved being. It must therefore contain something dear to us, and that dear something is life. “To say that that which we name ‘Beauty’ is life; that that being is beautiful in which we see life—life as it ought to be according to our conception—and that object is beautiful which speaks to us of life—this definition, we should think, satisfactorily explains all cases which awaken in us the feeling of the beautiful.” The conclusion to be drawn from such a definition was that the beautiful in art, far from being superior to the beautiful in life, can only represent that conception of the beautiful which the artist has borrowed from life. As to the aim of art it is much the same as that of science, although its means of action are different. The true aim of art is to remind us of what is interesting in human life, and to teach us how men live and how they ought to live. This last part of Tchernyshévskiy teachings was especially developed by Dobrolúboff.
Dobrolúboff (1836-1861) was born in Nízhniy Nóvgorod, where his father was a parish priest, and he received his education first in a clerical school, and after that in a seminarium. In 1853 he went to St. Petersburg and entered the Pedagogical Institute. His mother and father died the next year, and he had then to maintain all his brothers and sisters. Lessons, for which he was paid ridiculously low prices, and translations, almost equally badly paid—all that in addition to his student’s duties—meant working terribly hard, and this broke down his health at an early age. In 1855 he made the acquaintance of Tchernyshévskiy and, having finished in 1857 his studies at the Institute, he took in hand the critical department of The Contemporary, and again worked passionately. Four years later, in November, 1861, he died, at the age of twenty-five, having literally killed himself by overwork, leaving four volumes of critical essays, each of which is a serious original work. Such essays as The Kingdom of Darkness, A Ray of Light, What is Oblómoffdom? When comes the Real Day? had especially a profound effect on the development of the youth of those times.
Not that Dobrolúboff had a very definite criterion of literary criticism, or that he had a very distinct programme as to what was to be done. But he was one of the purest and the most solid representatives of that type of new men—the realist-idealist, whom Turguéneff saw coming by the end of the fifties. Therefore, in whatever he wrote one felt the thoroughly moral and thoroughly reliable, slightly ascetic “rigourist” who judged all facts of life from the standard of—“What good will they bring to the toiling masses?” or, “How will they favour the creation of men whose eyes are directed that way?” His attitude towards professional æsthetics was most contemptuous, but he felt deeply himself and enjoyed the great works of art. He did not condemn Púshkin for his levity, or Gógol for his absence of ideals. He did not advise anyone to write novels or poems with a set purpose: he knew the results would be poor. He admitted that the great geniuses were right in creating unconsciously, because he understood that the real artist creates only when he has been struck by this or that aspect of reality. He asked only from a work of art, whether it truly and correctly reproduced life, or not? If not, he passed it by; but if it did truly represent life, then he wrote essays about this life; and his articles were essays on moral, political or economical matters—the work of art yielding only the facts for such a discussion. This explains the influence Dobrolúboff exercised upon his contemporaries. Such essays written by such a personality were precisely what was wanted in the turmoil of those years for preparing better men for the coming struggles. They were a school of political and moral education.
PÍSAREFF (1841-1868), the critic who succeeded, so to speak, Dobrolúboff, was a quite different man. He was born in a rich family of landlords and had received an education during which he had never known what it meant to want anything; but he soon realised the drawbacks of such a life, and when he was at the St. Petersburg university he abandoned the rich house of his uncle and settled with a poor student comrade, or lived in an apartment with a number of other students—writing amidst their noisy discussions or songs. Like Dobrolúboff, he worked excessively hard, and astonished everyone by his varied knowledge and the facility with which he acquired it. In 1862, when reaction was beginning to reappear, he permitted a comrade to print in a secret printing office an article of his—the criticism of some reactionary political pamphlet—which article had not received the authorisation of the censorship. The secret printing office was seized, and Písareff was locked for four years in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. There he wrote all that made him widely known in Russia. When he came out of prison his health was already broken, and in the summer of 1868 he was drowned while bathing in one of the Baltic sea-side resorts.
Upon the Russian youth of his own time, and consequently on whatever share, as men and women later on, they brought to the general progress of the country, Písareff exercised an influence which was as great as that of Byelínskiy, Tchernyshévskiy, and Dobrolúboff. Here again it is impossible to determine the character and the cause of this influence by merely referring to Písareff’s canons in art criticism. His leading ideas on this subject can be explained in a few words; his ideal was “the thoughtful realist”—the type which Turguéneff had just represented in Bazároff, and which Písareff further developed in his critical essays. He shared Bazároff’s low opinion of art, but, as a concession, demanded that Russian art should, at least, reach the heights which art had reached with Goethe, Heine and Börne in elevating mankind—or else that those who are always talking of art, but can produce nothing approaching it, should rather give their forces to something more within their reach. This is why he devoted most elaborate articles to depreciating the futile poetry of Púshkin. In ethics he was entirely at one with the “Nihilist” Bazároff, who bowed before no authority but that of his own reason. And he thought (like Bazároff in a conversation with Pável Petróvitch) that the main point, at that given moment, was to develop the thorough, scientifically-educated realist, who would break with all the traditions and mistakes of the olden time, and would work, looking upon human life with the sound common-sense of a realist. He even did something himself to spread the sound natural science knowledge that had suddenly developed in those years, and wrote a most remarkable exposition of Darwinism in a series of articles entitled Progress in the World of Plants and Animals.
But—to quote the perfectly correct estimate of Skabitchévskiy—“all this does not, however, determine Písareff’s position in Russian literature. In all this he only embodied a certain moment of the development of Russian youth, with all its exaggerations.” The real cause of Písareff’s influence was elsewhere, and may be best explained by the following example. There appeared a novel in which the author had told how a girl, good-hearted, honest, but quite uneducated, quite commonplace as to her conceptions of happiness and life, and full of the current society-prejudices, fell in love, and was brought to all sorts of misfortunes. This girl—Písareff at once understood—was not invented. Thousands upon thousands of like girls exist, and their lives have the same run. They are—he said—“Muslin Girls.” Their conception of the universe does not go much beyond their muslin dresses. And he reasoned, how with their “muslin education” and their “muslin-girl conceptions,” they must unavoidably come to grief. And by this article, which every girl in every educated family in Russia read, and reads still, he induced thousands upon thousands of Russian girls to say to themselves: “No, never will I be like that poor muslin girl. I will conquer knowledge; I will think; and I will make for myself a better future.” Each of his articles had a similar effect. It gave to the young mind the first shock. It opened the young man’s and the young woman’s eyes to those thousands of details of life which habit makes us cease to perceive, but the sum of which makes precisely that stifling atmosphere under which the heroines of “Krestóvskiy-pseudonym” used to wither. From that life, which could promise only deception, dulness and vegetative existence, he called the youth of both sexes to a life full of the light of knowledge, a life of work, of broad views and sympathies, which was now opened for the “thoughtful realist.”
The time has not yet come to fully appreciate the work of Mihailóvskiy (1842-1904), who in the seventies became the leading critic, and remained so till his death. Moreover, his proper position could not be understood without my entering into many details concerning the character of the intellectual movement in Russia for the last thirty years, and this movement has been extremely complex. Suffice it to say that with Mihailóvskiy literary criticism took a philosophical turn. Within this period Spencer’s philosophy had produced a deep sensation in Russia, and Mihailóvskiy submitted it to a severe analysis from the anthropological standpoint, showing its weak points and working out his own Theory of Progress, which will certainly be spoken of with respect in Western Europe when it becomes known outside Russia. His very remarkable articles on Individualism, on Heroes and the Crowd, on Happiness, have the same philosophical value; while even from the few quotations from his Left and Right Hand of Count Tolstóy, which were given in a preceding chapter, it is easy to see which way his sympathies go.