But in order to get an understanding of modern Russian literature we turn backward in our swift survey. When Peter the Great, that much magnified and more maligned potentate, ascended the throne, he found Russia the home of bigotry, prejudice, and barbarism. But before his unceremonious blows the doors swung reluctantly open, and from the west a steady concourse of European ideas, often accompanied in person by their thinkers, moved through the gates and penetrated every upper circle. Naturally, literature was the first of the arts to throb with this infusion of outside blood, and naturally, also, its first expressions were in that form of flattery which is alleged to be most sincere.
But when national consciousness is awakened, national pride soon begins to utter lusty sounds, and its theme is certain to be as national as its form of expression. So, with the dawn of the nineteenth century—Lomonosoff, Kantemier, Sumarakov, the Empress Catherine, Von Viezin, Derzhavin, Karamsin, and Zhukovski having in the previous century done fine service in poetry, history, and the drama—there opened a new era: the period of artistic Russian fiction. The barbaric richness and fearless crudity of the old poetry were exchanged for sophisticated prose.
Kriloff deserves special mention here, even though to Gogol and Pushkin must go the trail-blazers’ honor. His fables and tales were distinctly in advance of previous similar work, but the real fictive creators were yet to come. Kriloff was at once the last of the old and the first of the new prose-writers.
It is a curious coincidence that the youngest two literatures of the world, American and Russian, should each have contributed so materially to the development of the short-story. During the eighteenth century American literature was compassing a slow growth; but in Russia literature was virtually sleeping. Later, both come to effective expression at about the same time. While Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Harte, Stockton, James, and O. Henry were telling wonderful stories in our land, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Korolenko, Garshin, Chekhov, Andreev, and Gorki were doing the like in Russia. The balance dips toward America for literary art, but for sheer strength it unmistakably drops on the side of the Slav. Thus throughout the nineteenth century and till now the short-story has been a form to be reckoned with in any adequate estimate of Russian writers, just as in the two other literatures whose recent development follows similar lines—American and French.
When the modern short-story was born in its technical perfection in America, France, and Russia almost simultaneously, the French Revolution had worn out most of its evil effects and the New Spirit was beneficently at work in every enlightened land. The superior value of human beings, the benumbing effects of slavery, the priceless qualities of real liberty, and the absolute necessity for an enlightenment which should be something more than education, became ideals worth fighting and dying for.
It is important to note here that great short-stories from that day to this have developed themes vital to the people for whom and by whom they were written.
But we must look deeper than the spirit of an era if we are to account for a national tone in any given literature, and in the characteristic Russian temperament we shall in this case find the inspiring cause.