What then of Russian ideas? Of the Russian idea?
When you first step into a Russian novel you come across symptomatic ideas, and when you go into Russia you find them again in the life of the people. Probably the most obviously characteristic thing is the love towards the suffering, pity. Russia is a remarkably tender and comforting nation. She is greatly concerned with her neighbour, and her heart is touched by his destiny. As Rozanof writes:
Is there one page in the whole of Russian literature where a mock is made of a girl who has been betrayed, of a child, of a mother, of poverty? Even the thief is an honest thief. (Dostoieffsky’s Honest Thief.) Russian literature is one continuous hymn to the injured and insulted. And as of such people there must always be a multitude in vain and gigantically-working Europe, it is possible to imagine the shout of joy which breaks forth when they are shown a country, a whole nation, where no one ever dare offend the orphan, the destitute, in the moral sense never dares to look insultingly upon the person left forlorn by circumstance, by destiny, by the break up of life. Of such people there are only too many. And what can the “kings” of Victor Hugo say to them, or in general, the manifestly artificial subjects of Western writers? Russian stories can give consolation. For besides being taken from the habitual common everyday life they have a tenderness. The Western man can say: “There is a country where I should not have been despised; there is a country where I should not have been so coarsely insulted, where every man would have taken my part and interceded for me, where they would have taken me by the hand and raised me upon my feet again. I am cursed, but only in my own country, not on the whole planet.”
That is the effect of Russian literature. Its significance is not a matter of the reviews of Western critics, not a matter of the noisy fame which has overtaken it; it lies not in its material triumph, but in a direct and absolutely unhampered affinity to the soul of the simple and universal reader. To some the Russian song is always pleasing.... No,—bigger, better. There are souls to whom the Russian song is the one thing necessary in life, to whom it is dearer than anything else in life—as to the hurt one, his mother; as to the sick child, again his mother, perhaps neither a beautiful nor a virtuous one. Virtue—it is of course somewhat strange to ask virtue from Russians.... “The Troika.”... But one thing there always is in Russia—sympathy, responsiveness. Perhaps it sprang up in Russia, and became exaggerated there just because so many people were crushed by various “troikas.” However that may be, to be sung to sleep with Russia’s cradle song many wish....
There is love towards the suffering one. It is part of a love towards the destiny of the individual. There is a remarkable absence of conventional standards. You are not looked at askance because you seem poor. The tramps and pilgrims on the road are never made ashamed of themselves. A contrast to America, where the tramp is an object of mirth, where he is regarded almost as an enemy of society. The Russian takes the tramp in. He has real hospitality, and not only hospitality of hearth and home, the giving of food and a night’s shelter, but also a more vital hospitality, that of mind and heart. He wants to know all about you. He asks you the human questions. He asks about father and mother and brothers and sisters, about your home and your calling and your goal. In return he tells you the intimate things of his life.
This is not only a matter of the road. How often the most utter stranger, met in a railway carriage or a post-station or at an inn, will after a remark about the weather or the crops begin to tell you the whole story of his life. He assumes the hospitality of your heart; a sure sign that in general people’s hearts are hospitable, that in general there is a love towards destiny.
As a wanderer and a seeker I have myself experienced the ordinary material hospitality of hearth and home, and also this of the heart, having often been poor, strange-looking, and enigmatical enough. Russians have not looked askance; they have been brotherly. They have accepted a stranger naturally and simply as they would one near to themselves. More than that, knowing that I had a special quest, there have always been those who came forward and helped me in the spiritual things. Mysterious beings have, as it were, anticipated my coming, and have stepped out and recognised and said: “Read this; go to that one and talk to him; see this Russian picture.” They love to preserve the mystery too. I have known people who had the aspect of having dreamed of my coming.
The first day I was in Vladikavkaz, an old tatterdemalion standing by the bridge over the Terek came forward to embrace me and welcome me in the name of God. I had never met him before; I knew no one in the town. When I left Vladikavkaz last, to make my long and possibly dangerous Central Asian tramp, the most mysterious of my friends brought me a beautiful little copy of Nesterof’s “Martha and Mary” to keep me from harm. And one night, months later, in a remote Moslem town on the fringe of the desert, I had a strange experience of adventure and terror when, as it seems to me, I was literally saved by looking at the picture. The giving of it was love towards destiny, hospitality of the heart.
It might be thought, however, that the Russian love stopped short with the honest, the religious, the seeking—that as long as a man could give a decent explanation of himself and his mode of life the Russian was on his side. But that would be to miss the real saliency of this love. The Russian loves the dishonest, the criminal, the despicable, the unpleasantly strange, the man who can give no explanation of himself, as much as she loves the other, even a little more than she loves the other; she has a “weakness” for the prodigal. Half her novels are expressive of love towards “criminals.”
In English novels the plot is so adjusted that the author has scope to make a thorough out-and-out condemnation of the villain. He has a few pages where he lays himself out to show how inexcusable the villain’s conduct was, what an abject scoundrel, what a disgraceful creature he is. The condition on which you may describe sin is that you condemn the sinner. In life also, as well as in literature, we are condemnatory; we love to pass judgment on others. How different in Russian literature! You find no condemnatory spirit there. The author’s whole passion is to defend and explain the criminal, to evoke the tender sympathy of the reader. He makes you feel how strange, how pathetic, is man’s destiny, how sordid his life compared with his spirit. Over the portal of Russian life and literature you might find the motto, “Neither do I condemn thee.” Russia feels that however mean, however ugly and strange a man’s life may seem, it is nevertheless a part of his great pilgrimage. He has got to go through it, he is learning something thereby, fulfilling something sacred thereby. This is exemplified very remarkably in Russia’s legal system where, for instance, there is no capital punishment except under martial law. A man commits a murder, but he is not therefore condemned and hanged and turned over to God; he gets merely a dozen years in Siberia, and he goes on with his life.