All this may sound unlovely. And doubtless it is, for loveliness is not the tone of Nihilism, nor is beauty the consort of despair. Yet the towering ambition that ends in puny deeds shows even now signs of a more effective result, and larger liberties, the outgrowth of contact with the world without, must sooner or later bring to life a more ardent and hope-cherishing Russia.
The short-story of today in Russia is strong—terribly strong, for the most part, for it is not charming, certainly. But as an augury of what the Russian people will yet become it has a thousand-fold more promise than may be found in the perfumed politeness of an anæmic fiction such as floods the magazines of England and America. Notwithstanding all her gloom, Russia’s strength is her bow of promise.
PUSHKIN AND THE NEW ERA
Alexander Sergyevitch Pushkin was born in Moscow, June 7, 1799, at a time when Russia was aswirl with various currents. Therefore, to gain some clear vision of the distinguished service which he rendered the literature of his native land, we must at least glance at the great intellectual and political tides—they were largely coincident—which swept Russia, first away from her own self-sufficient life, then toward France, next in the direction of Germany, and finally out into a national thought-channel of her own.
Pushkin is one of those writers who are big enough to have founded and dominated an era, not solely because of his own preëminent genius, but for the deeper reason that he represented in himself the culmination of a series of national steps, each as definite as it was important.
For all the centuries of her life up to the nineteenth, Russia had lived a separate existence from that of her great neighbors. In seeking a cause for this condition, we must remember that the imperial bigness of Russia, and her remote location, are not the only factors entering into her segregate character. The great factor is that Russia is much more largely Asiatic in spirit than it is European. The typical Slav of today is, temperamentally, though not in a precise sense racially, a mixture of Tartar fierceness, old Slavonic stolidity, and Hindu Nirvana, which, being translated into Russian, is essentially Nihilism. Yet, today as for many centuries, the Slavic race is as truly homogeneous as any can be.
During this long era of Russia’s ultra-exclusiveness, the polished periods of Montaigne and the brilliant dramas of Corneille, Racine, and Molière were delighting France, and Spenser, Milton, and Dryden were doing rare things for English literature. At the same time, nationally unconscious of all this, Russia was singing its epical and ballad folk-songs, with only now and then a note of premeditated art sounding forth. Here indeed was a true poetry of the people—which, as Dr. Gummere has pointed out, is a very different thing from that pseudo-folk-poetry which is merely about the people. Still, it required influences from without to bring Russian literature to artistic national expression.
The great autocratic rulers of Russia, and her leading nobles, at last began to feel the allurement of the French, and Peter the Great even travelled abroad, coming home imbued with new ideas for a progressive nation. When a giant people, long content to be sufficient unto itself, awakens to see that other ideals of life, other habits of thought, other standards of conduct, have brought other great nations to a brilliancy of position which its own solitary bigness has not enabled it to attain, the first feeling is one of contempt for “those others,” as the French would say. Later comes a naïve passion to imitate. And finally, enter a whole train of foreign influences, good and bad.
So it was with Russia after the powerful, rough, and somewhat benevolently autocratic reign of Catherine II, at whose court Pushkin’s father was a complacent noble. The French tongue, which even Pushkin himself called “the language of Europe,” already prevailed at the Russian court, and the literature of the country consisted chiefly of imitations of the pseudo-classical French school, adaptations, or even translations, from other languages, and here and there a struggling voice which lifted itself with difficulty above the imitative clack. All three of these types Catherine herself fostered—intermittently, though still with some success.