I was sitting next to M. Lakiardopulo, the secretary of the theatre. “You know how he has been slating us,” whispered he to me. “There was a time when on such an occasion Gorky would have stood up in his seat and addressed the house, saying, ‘Why do you come to see such a thing? It is no good; it is reactionary, and only helps to put back the progress of Russia.’ But he is afraid to do it now. He is not sure of the Russia to which he has returned.”
Around Gorky and the spirit of Dostoieffsky rage for the time being all the questions of the hour in Russia—Apollo versus Dionysus, Progress and Westernism versus Life understood as a religious orgy; Materialism versus Mysticism. How weak is the power of the West may be seen in the guise of its champion—Gorky with his foot in his grave, Gorky, whose wonderful literary gift Italy and Greece have withered.
But Gorky, frustrate as he seems, has effectually raised the question and set Russia thinking and differentiating.
I have a strange, strange feeling about Moscow (says he), a mournful feeling.... Were the Moscow streets and the Moscow people like this before, or do I only remark it now because I have seen what it is like in the West? There, in Italy, amidst the brilliance and magnificence of Nature, in the magnificent chaos of cities buzzing with automobiles, humming with factories, you feel at least that Man is not losing himself; you feel he is the master, the centre. His voice is full-sounding, it is ever in one’s ears, the voice of one who is master of earth and master of his life. But in Moscow! On the streets I feel the people are all voiceless. The pavements are populous, lively, noisy; there are people of all kinds going to and fro, but the actual human voice of mankind seems to be utterly silent. The people are all gloomy, melancholy, above all, angry. The women have widows’ faces.... Is it possible it was like this when I was here before?
Gorky, despite his experience in what may be called the absolute West—America[[3]]—has come back enchanted with the West. The idea accepted in the revolutionary days that the West was good, the West was Russia’s bright destiny providentially lighted before her for her to follow, has died out almost unremarked. Gorky alone, all these eight years, has nursed it, and he has been writing stories and dramas which fall flatter and flatter on the ears of Russia. The Theatre of Art alone has refused in turn each of his last eight plays! No wonder the faces seem to him preoccupied.
He cannot understand why the Theatre of Art, in its working out of a new life for the theatre in general, should take The Brothers Karamazof and Besi (The Possessed). Were there not new writers who would breathe the new ideals and new hopes of Russia into the work of the stage? Dostoieffsky was a genius, but in Gorky’s opinion an evil genius—the evil genius—the evil genius of Russia which Russia must overcome, an abscess on the Russian body. Dostoieffsky was profoundly national, yes, but he expressed the Asiatic side of the Russian. “If Russians give themselves up to Dostoieffsky they will become like China,” said he. “In each of us sits a Dostoieffsky—we have to overcome him.”
Well, the great fact of this month is that Gorky’s protest has had the fullest publicity, and has been discussed at many hundred public meetings and in numberless newspaper articles, and yet the great mass of the people have supported the Theatre of Art and Dostoieffsky—even although the performance of The Possessed is but a poor experiment.
The difference between Eastern and Western literature may be aptly contrasted. I read last summer in the letter of an American to an English publisher something of this kind:—
Mr. So-and-So’s novel may be a success with you, but we shan’t be able to do much with it over here as it ends on a note of failure; the reader must be quite sure that the hero and heroine, whatever troubles they may have at the beginning, are going to win through in the end. Anything that ends on a curse or a suicide or hysteria is almost sure to fall commercially dead over here.
Now the Russian considers failure and despair and cursing and suicide as a glory, and success to be a reproach—the likely destiny of Jews or earth-swallowers. America and the West prize the whole, the sound, the substantial banking account, the ideal marriage, domestic bliss, correct collars and ties, creases where they should be on the right sort of attire, that glamour of materialism which Mr. Bennett so satisfactorily renders in his descriptions of hotel apartments and the clothes of the soulless. But Russia, even Gorky in his best days, prizes the barefooted tramp, the consumptive and disease-stricken, the imbecile, the improvident, the man who has no sense of the value of money, the poverty-stricken student of Chekhof’s Cherry Garden who can refuse money, saying, “Offer me two hundred thousand, I wouldn’t take it. I am a free man. And none of all that you value so highly is any use to me. I can do without it on the way to higher truth.”