Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

The first thing that strikes the English reader when he dips into translations of Russian literature, is the unrelieved gloom, the unmitigated pessimism of the characters and the circumstances described. Everything is grey, everybody is depressed; the atmosphere is one of hopeless melancholy. On the other hand, the first thing that strikes the English traveller when he arrives in Russia for the first time, is the cheerfulness of the Russian people. Nowhere have I seen this better described than in an article, written by Mr. Charles Hands, which appeared in the summer of 1905 in The Daily Mail. Mr. Hands summed up his idea of the Russian people, which he had gathered after living with them for two years, both in peace and in war, in a short article. His final impression was the same as that which he received on the day he arrived in Russia for the first time. That was in winter; it was snowing; the cold was intense. The streets of St. Petersburg were full of people, and in spite of the driving snow, the bitter wind, and the cruel cold, everybody was smiling, everybody was making the best of it. Nowhere did you hear people grumbling, or come across a face stamped with a grievance.

I myself experienced an impression of the same kind, one evening in July 1906. I was strolling about the streets of St. Petersburg. It was the Sunday of the dissolution of the Duma; the dissolution had been announced that very morning. The streets were crowded with people, mostly poor people. I was walking with an Englishman who had spent some years in Russia, and he said to me: “It is all very well to talk of the calamities of this country. Have you ever in your life seen a more cheerful Sunday crowd?” I certainly had not.

The Russian character has an element of happy consent and submission to the inevitable; of adapting itself to any circumstance, however disagreeable, which I have never come across in any other country. The Russians have a faculty of making the best of things which I have never seen developed in so high a degree. I remember once in Manchuria during the war, some soldiers, who were under the command of a sergeant, preparing early one morning, just before the battle of Ta-Shi-Chiao, to make some tea. Suddenly a man in command said there would not be time to have tea. The men simply said, “To-day no tea will be drunk,” with a smile; it did not occur to any one to complain, and they put away the kettle, which was just on the boil, and drove away in a cart. I witnessed this kind of incident over and over again. I remember one night at a place called Lonely Tree Hill. I was with a battery. We had just arrived, and there were no quarters. We generally lived in Chinese houses, but on this occasion there were none to be found. We encamped on the side of a hill. There was no shelter, no food, and no fire, and presently it began to rain. The Cossacks, of whom the battery was composed, made a kind of shelter out of what straw and millet they could find, and settled themselves down as comfortably and as cheerfully as if they had been in barracks. They accomplished the difficult task of making themselves comfortable out of nothing, and of making me comfortable also.

Besides this power of making the best of things, the Russians have a keen sense of humour. The clowns in their circuses are inimitable. A type you frequently meet in Russia is the man who tells stories and anecdotes which are distinguished by simplicity and by a knack of just seizing on the ludicrous side of some trivial episode or conversation. Their humour is not unlike English humour in kind, and this explains the wide popularity of our humorous writers in Russia, beginning with Dickens, including such essentially English writers as W. W. Jacobs and the author of The Diary of a Nobody, and ending with Jerome K. Jerome, whose complete works can be obtained at any Russian railway station.[5]

All these elements are fully represented in Russian literature; but the kind of Russian literature which is saturated with these qualities either does not reach us at all, or reaches us in scarce and inadequate translations.

The greatest humorist of Russian literature, the Russian Dickens, is Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol. Translations of some of his stories and of his longest work, Dead Souls, were published in 1887 by Mr. Vizetelly. These translations are now out of print, and the work of Gogol may be said to be totally unknown in England. In France some of his stories have been translated by no less a writer than Prosper Mérimée.

Gogol was a Little Russian, a Cossack by birth; he belonged to the Ukraine, that is to say, the frontier country, the district which lies between the north and the extreme south. It is a country of immense plains, rich harvests, and smiling farms; of vines, laughter, and song. He was born in 1809 near Poltava, in the heart of the Cossack country. He was brought up by his grandfather, who had been the regimental chronicler of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who live in the region beyond the falls of the Dnieper. His childhood was nursed in the warlike traditions of that race, and fed with the tales of a heroic epoch, the wars against Poland and the deeds of the dwellers of the Steppes. Later he was sent to school, and in 1829, when he was twenty years old, he went to St. Petersburg, where after many disillusions and difficulties he obtained a place in a Government office. The time that he spent in this office gave him the material for one of his best stories. He soon tired of office work, and tried to go on the stage, but no manager would engage him. He became a tutor, but was not a particularly successful one. At last some friends obtained for him the professorship of History at the University, but he failed in this profession also, and so he finally turned to literature. By the publication of his first efforts in the St. Petersburg press, he made some friends, and through these he obtained an introduction to Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, who was at that time in the fullness of his fame.

Pushkin was a character devoid of envy and jealousy, overflowing with generosity, and prodigal of praise. Gogol subsequently became his favourite writer, and it was Pushkin who urged Gogol to write about Russian history and popular Russian scenes. Gogol followed his advice and wrote the Evenings in a Farmhouse on the Dikanka. These stories are supposed to be told by an old beekeeper; and in them Gogol puts all the memories of his childhood, the romantic traditions, the fairy tales, the legends, the charming scenery, and the cheerful life of the Little Russian country.

In these stories he revealed the twofold nature of his talent: a fantasy, a love of the supernatural, and a power of making us feel it, which reminds one of Edgar Allan Poe, of Hoffmann, and of Robert Louis Stevenson; and side by side with this fantastic element, the keenest power of observation, which is mixed with an infectious sense of humour and a rich and delightful drollery. Together with these gifts, Gogol possessed a third quality, which is a blend of his fantasy and his realism, namely, the power of depicting landscape and places, with their colour and their atmosphere, in warm and vivid language. It is this latter gift with which I shall deal first. Here, for instance, is a description of the river Dnieper:

“Wonderful is the Dnieper when in calm weather, smooth and wilful, it drives its full waters through the woods and the hills; it does not whisper, it does not boom. One gazes and gazes without being able to tell whether its majestic spaces are moving or not: one wonders whether the river is not a sheet of glass, when like a road of crystal azure, measureless in its breadth and unending in its length, it rushes and swirls across the green world. It is then that the sun loves to look down from the sky and to plunge his rays into the cool limpid waters; and the woods which grow on the banks are sharply reflected in the river.