Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

The principal fact which has struck me with regard to the Russian character, is a characteristic which was once summed up by Professor Milioukov thus: “A Russian,” he said, “lacks the cement of hypocrisy.” This cement, which plays so important a part in English public and private life, is totally lacking in the Russian character. The Russian character is plastic; the Russian can understand everything. You can mould him any way you please. He is like wet clay, yielding and malleable; he is passive; he bows his head and gives in before the decrees of Fate and of Providence. At the same time, it would be a mistake to say that this is altogether a sign of weakness. There is a kind of toughness in the Russian character, an irreducible obstinacy which makes for strength; otherwise the Russian Empire would not exist. But where the want of the cement of hypocrisy is most noticeable, is in the personal relations of Russians towards their fellow-creatures. They do not in the least mind openly confessing things of which people in other countries are ashamed; they do not mind admitting to dishonesty, immorality, or cowardice, if they happen to feel that they are saturated with these defects; and they feel that their fellow-creatures will not think the worse of them on this account, because they know that their fellow-creatures will understand. The astounding indulgence of the Russians arises out of this infinite capacity for understanding.

Another point: This absence of hypocrisy causes them to have an impatience of cant and of convention. They will constantly say: “Why not?” They will not recognise the necessity of drawing the line somewhere, they will not accept as something binding the conventional morality and the artificial rules of conduct which knit together our society with a bond of steel. They may admit the expediency of social laws, but they will never prate of the laws of any society being divine; they will merely admit that they are convenient. Therefore, if we go to the root of this matter, it comes to this: that the Russians are more broadly and widely human than the people of other European or Eastern countries, and, being more human, their capacity of understanding is greater, for their extraordinary quickness of apprehension comes from the heart rather than from the head. They are the most humane and the most naturally kind of all the peoples of Europe, or, to put it differently and perhaps more accurately, I should say that there is more humanity and more kindness in Russia than in any other European country. This may startle the reader; he may think of the lurid accounts in the newspapers of massacres, brutal treatment of prisoners, and various things of this kind, and be inclined to doubt my statement. As long as the world exists there will always be a certain amount of cruelty in the conduct of human beings. My point is this: that there is less in Russia than in other countries, but the trouble up to the last two years has been that all excesses of any kind on the part of officials were unchecked and uncontrolled. Therefore, if any man who had any authority over any other man happened to be brutal, his brutality had a far wider scope and far richer opportunities than that of a corresponding overseer in another country.

During the last three years Russia has been undergoing a violent evolutionary process of change, what in other countries has been called a revolution; but compared with similar phases in other countries, and taking into consideration the size of the Russian Empire, and the various nationalities which it contains, I maintain that the proportion of excesses has been comparatively less. There are other factors in the question which should also be borne in mind; firstly, that politically Russia is about a century behind other European countries, and the second is that Russians accept the fact that a man who does wrong deserves punishment, with a kind of Oriental fatality, although the pity which is inherent in them causes them to have a horror of capital punishment.

Now, let us take the first question, and just imagine for a moment what the treatment of the poor would be in England were there no such thing as a habeas corpus. Imagine what the position of the police would be, if it held a position of arbitrary dominion; if nobody were responsible; if any policeman could do what he chose, with no further responsibility than that towards his superior officers. I do not hesitate to say that were such a state of things to exist in England, the position of the poor would be intolerable. Now, the position of the poor in Russia is not intolerable; it is bad, owing to the evils inseparable from poverty, drink, and the want of control enjoyed by public servants. But it is not intolerable. Were it intolerable, the whole of the Russian poor, who number ninety millions, would have long ago risen to a man. They have not done so because their position is not intolerable; and the reason of this is, that the evils to which I have alluded are to a certain extent mitigated by the good-nature and kindness inherent in the Russian temperament, instead of being aggravated by an innate brutality and cruelty such as we meet with in Latin and other races.

Again, closely connected with any political system which is backward, you will always find in any country a certain brutality in the matter of punishments. Perhaps the cause of this—which is the reason why torture was employed in the Middle Ages, and why it is employed in China at the present day—is that only a small percentage of the criminal classes are ever arrested; therefore when a criminal is caught, his treatment is often unduly severe. If you read, for instance, the sentences of corporal punishment, etc., which were passed in England in the eighteenth century by county judges, or of the punishments which were the rule in the Duke of Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War, they will make your hair stand on end by their incredible brutality; and England in the eighteenth century was politically more advanced than Russia is at the present day.

With regard to the second point, the attitude of Russians towards the question of punishments displays a curious blend of opinion. While they are more indulgent than any other people when certain vices and defects are concerned, they are ruthless in enforcing and accepting the necessity of punishment in the case of certain other criminal offences. For instance, they are completely indulgent with regard to any moral delinquencies, but unswervingly stern in certain other matters; and although they would often be inclined to let off a criminal, saying: “Why should he be punished?” at the same time if he is punished, and severely punished, they will accept the matter as a part of the inevitable system that governs the world. On the other hand, they are indulgent and tolerant where moral delinquencies which affect the man himself and not the community are concerned; that is to say, they will not mind how often or how violently a man gets drunk, because the matter affects only himself; but they will bitterly resent a man stealing horses, because thereby the whole community is affected.

This attitude of mind is reflected in the Russian Code of Laws. The Russian Penal Code, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu points out in his classic book on Russia, is the most lenient in Europe. But the trouble is, as the Liberal members of the Duma are constantly repeating, not that the laws in Russia are bad, but that they are overridden by the arbitrary conduct of individual officials. However, I do not wish in this article to dwell on the causes of political discontent in Russia, or on the evils of the bureaucratic régime. My object is simply to point out certain characteristics of the Russian race, and one of these characteristics is the leniency of the punishment laid down by law for offences which in other countries are dealt with drastically and severely; murder, for instance. Capital punishment was abolished in Russia as long ago as 1753 by the Empress Elizabeth; corporal punishment subsisted only among the peasants, administered by themselves (and not by a magistrate) according to their own local administration, until it was abolished by the present Emperor in 1904. So that until the revolutionary movement began, cases of capital punishment, which only occurred in virtue of martial law, were rare, and from 1866 to 1903 only 114 men suffered the penalty of death throughout the whole of the Russian Empire, including the outlying districts such as Caucasus, Transbaikalia, and Turkestan;[2] and even at the present moment, when the country is still practically governed by martial law, which was established in order to cope with the revolutionary movement, you can in Russia kill a man and only receive a few years’ imprisonment. It is the contrast of the lenient treatment meted out to non-political prisoners with the severity exercised towards political offenders which strikes the Russian politician to-day, and it is of this contradiction that he so bitterly complains. The fact, nevertheless, remains—in spite of the cases, however numerous, which arose out of the extraordinary situation created by the revolutionary movement, that the sentence of death, meted out by the judicial court, is in itself abhorrent to the Russian character.

I will now give a few minor instances illustrating the indulgent attitude of the Russian character towards certain moral delinquencies. In a regiment which I came across in Manchuria during the war there were two men; one was conscientious, brave to the verge of heroism, self-sacrificing, punctilious in the performance of his duty, and exacting in the demands he made on others as to the fulfilment of theirs, untiringly energetic, competent in every way, but severe and uncompromising. There was another man who was incurably lax in the performance of his duty, not scrupulously honest where the Government money was concerned, incompetent, but as kind as a human being can be. I once heard a Russian doctor who was attached to this regiment discussing and comparing the characters of the two men, and, after weighing the pros and cons, he concluded that as a man the latter was superior. Dishonesty in dealings with the public money seemed to him an absolutely trifling fault. The unswerving performance of duty, and all the great military qualities which he noted in the former, did not seem to him to count in the balance against the great kindness of heart possessed by the latter; and most of the officers agreed with him. It never seemed to occur to these men that any one set of qualities, such as efficiency, conscientiousness, or honesty, were more indispensable, or in any way superior to any other set of qualities. They just noticed the absence of them in others, or, as often happened, in themselves, and thought they were amply compensated for by the presence of other qualities, such as good-nature or amiability. And one notices in Russian literature that authors such as Dostoievsky are not content with showing us the redeeming points of a merely bad character, that is to say, of a man fundamentally good, but who indulges in vice or in crime; but they will take pleasure in showing you the redeeming points of a character which at first sight appears to be radically mean and utterly despicable. The aim of these authors seems to be to insist that, just as nobody is indispensable, so nobody is superfluous. There is no such thing as a superfluous man; and any man, however worthless, miserable, despicable and mean he may seem to be, has just as much right to be understood as any one else; and they show that, when he is understood, he is not, taking him as a whole, any worse than his fellow-creatures.

Another characteristic which strikes one in Russian literature, and still more in Russian life, especially if one has mingled in the lower classes, is the very deeply rooted sense of pity which the Russians possess. An Englishman who is lame, and whom I met in Russia, told me that he had experienced there a treatment such as he had never met before in any other country. The people, and especially the poor, noticed his lameness, and, guessing what would be difficult for him to do, came to his aid and helped him.

In the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg you rarely see beggars beg in vain; and I have observed, travelling third class in trains and in steamers, that when the poor came to beg bread for food from the poor, they were never sent empty away. During the war I always found the soldiers ready to give me food, however little they had for themselves, in circumstances when they would have been quite justified in sending me about my business as a pestilential nuisance and camp-follower. It is impossible for a man to starve in Russia. He is perfectly certain to find some one who will give him food for the asking. In Siberia the peasants in the villages put bread on their window-sills, in case any fugitive prisoners should be passing by. This fundamental goodness of heart is the most important fact in the Russian nature; it, and the expression of it in their literature, is the greatest contribution which they have made to the history of the world. It is probably the cause of all their weakness. For the defects indispensable to such qualities are slackness, and the impossibility of conceiving self-discipline to be a necessity, or of recognising the conventional rules and prejudices which make for solidity, and which are, as Professor Milioukov said, as cement is to a building.