A letter which I have just received from the poor prisoner gives the following thoughts:
“Your book has changed much in my conception of life. I was too Martha. These last two years of captivity have been a pilgrimage for me though I have stayed in one place. Still I console myself by thinking that if I am suffering others also are, when I should, on the contrary, remember that what happens to me happens to no one else.
“I have just been told that my translations may not be sent out of Germany, but I hear that one book will soon appear in Russia. It will be good for Russians to read it now.
“You are right saying that we shall be mad with joy at our relief. I cannot yet feel myself free spiritually in prison, and for me the body’s freedom is still the greatest thing on earth, but I think of the day of deliverance as something so remote and so beautiful that I compare it with our resurrection from death.”
VIII
RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN 1916
I read, as ever, a great number of contemporary Russian books, spent many hours in bookshops, and it may not be out of place to give my impression of the literature of the hour.
Undoubtedly the great emotional impulse of the opening of the war in Russia has passed. This is reflected very clearly in current literature. The flood of printed lectures, war-pamphlets, and poems has ceased. Volumes of war stories are no longer printed, and indeed the war as a literary topic has become of minor interest. In the clearance it is now possible to observe the great desolation which the war has wrought. There is a strange silence in Russia. What was before the war has passed; what shall be after has not begun to be. There is as yet no promise of the future anywhere.
Not that books have not been published in 1916. They have been published thickly, despite the absence of genius, the scarcity of paper, and the supposed dearth of readers. Fonvisin gets into her eighteenth thousand with “Innocent and Yet to Blame,” and “The Keys of Happiness” goes into the sixth sequel. “The End of the War,” a novel by Lef Zhdanof, runs through several editions. “Russian Master,” an enthralling yellow-back of 470 pages by Lappo-Danilevsky, is reprinted many times. The translation of the novels of W. J. Locke flood over every bookseller’s counter and railway station book-stall. New books are certainly as plentiful as ever. But they are mostly interim volumes whose object is to pass the time away till the clamour of the war be over.
Gorky, who appears more and more as an editor and essayist, has issued a volume of translated Armenian literature, but he is putting forth no creative artistic work, and perhaps finds little time for it. As a reward, however, politically-minded Radical Russia certainly looks to him for light and leading. Andreef goes on writing, but seems to have fallen into minor importance. Viacheslaf Ivanof has just written an excellent book of essays on Dostoevsky, Solovyof, Tolstoy, etc., which ought to be translated into English together with his former book “From Star to Star.” Artsibashef continues to write salacious stories for the Russian middle-class, and seems to reflect their life and mind. Igor Severanin is quiescent, but his latest volume of poems, printed on bad paper, is dedicated to his “Thirteenth,” by which he apparently means his thirteenth “lady friend.” A curious volume lately confiscated by the police is “Father Leontius and his Lady Admirers,” an account of Rasputin, written in the form of a fictitious narrative by a serious student of sectarianism and religious phenomena—Prugavin. The society ladies circle round Leontius and cry out “Alleluia!” “Sabaoth!” “Three in One and One in Three!” which seems very shocking and novel to Russians, though it only reminds the English reader of the Agapemonites at Clapton and similar phenomena. Greater than the problem of the psychology of Leontius seems to be the problem of the psychology of the refined and normal women who can hail him as God. Lef Zhdanof’s popular novel on the war is very friendly to the German people and gives them a new chance after a political revolution. Balmont, the popular poet, has written an essay in one volume entitled “Poetry as Magic,” and parts are highly reminiscent of Stevenson’s “Art of Writing.” He analyses the functions of the letters of the alphabet: L is a caress; o is space triumphant; u is the music of noise, the cry of terror; m is man shutting his lips, it is all the dumb can say in their anguish, etc.
Walter Pater is being translated, and seems to be appreciated by cultured Russians, though it is a pity that only fragments and not the whole of his masterpiece “Marius the Epicurean” are appearing in the collection of his works. There is certainly a great demand for English books, and our literature remains in vogue. And books about England have been appearing, the latest being Nabokof’s account of his visit with the journalists. It is somewhat inadequate as an account of England, but then it pretends to reflect only the impressions of this officially guided tour. Nabokof seems to have been greatly impressed by Sir Edward Grey as a new type of diplomatist, a man whose strength lies in the fact that he is always a gentleman and tells the simple truth. Chukovsky’s book, “The Silent Ones have Spoken,” on the British Tommy is popular. Incidentally it may be remarked that Chukovsky, who made such an impression in England, is a journalistic critic of a penetrative quality. His “From Chekhof to our Days,” though containing some things impossible to print in English, is yet a very clever book. A new correspondent of some ability is now representing the Russkoe Slovo in England and giving a more representative account of our life than the old school of academic Radicals who usually represent Russian newspapers abroad.