Russian literature is a great literature, because it voices the hopes and resolves of a great people groping their way to freedom and understanding. It is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a literature of revolt. It is full of ideas, because it has to take the place of the prohibited subjects, science, politics, economics, and social psychology. It is desperately serious, because it is produced by people who are suffering. Some twenty years ago I remember meeting in New York the adopted son of Maxim Gorki, who was earning his living as a printer by day and studying our civilization by night. I recall his remark: “Americans do not know what the intellectual life means.” The young man had in mind a country where you adopted ideas with the knowledge that they might cost you your liberty, and even your life. Under such circumstances you think hard before you come to a decision. A lot of Americans have had an opportunity to test their ideas that way during the past ten years, and so they are now taking the intellectual life seriously, and producing literature in many ways resembling the Russian.

Says Mrs. Ogi: “Sherwood Anderson says it is because he was raised on cabbage soup.”

“People will read that,” says Ogi, “and think it a flash of humor; very few will consider seriously the effect of a starvation diet upon the soul of a sensitive boy. Neither will they stop to think about three boys sleeping in one bed as a source of abnormal sexual imaginings, which constitute one of the original elements in Sherwood Anderson’s books. To me this seems a law: that wherever you have widespread and long-continued poverty, maintained by policemen’s clubs, there you will have a literature, extremely painful to its creators, but delightful to high-brow critics, who will hail it as ‘strong,’ and up to the standard of the great Russian masters.”

CHAPTER LXXXII
DEAD SOULS

The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who live fast and die young. He was born of an aristocratic family, and when he was twenty he was, like most poets, a hopeful idealist, and wrote an ode to liberty, and was condemned to exile. He lived a wild life among the gypsies, and wasted himself, and finally his family persuaded the tsar to give him another chance. He was brought back to court and made a small functionary, among illiterate, dull, supposed-to-be-great people who had no understanding of his talents. He married a beautiful noble lady, who betrayed him continuously and broke his heart.

Pushkin now wrote folk tales, and a great quantity of love poems in the Byronic manner. His idealism was dead; he was a court man, and went so far as to glorify the rape of Poland. He wrote a long narrative poem, “Eugene Onegin,” which tells about the tragic love troubles of an aristocratic youth, together with all the details of his life, how he got up in the morning, how he sipped his chocolate, how he read his invitations to tea-parties and balls. You might not think there would be great literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something important to say to their people.

Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is supposed to be warm-hearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized “propaganda,” for the simple reason, that this would have cost him his liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of dealing with the real problems of your country and time.

Gogol wrote a play called “The Inspector-General,” which tells how a government representative is expected to visit a small provincial town, and all the functionaries are in a state of terror for fear their various stealings will be exposed. It is understood that the inspector-general will come in disguise, and so they mistake a youthful traveler for this functionary, and insist on doing him honor, to his great bewilderment. Finally the postmaster of the town, following his custom of secretly reading the mail, opens a letter from the young man to a friend, telling about his adventures and ridiculing the town functionaries. The postmaster reads this aloud in the hearing of the functionaries, to their great dismay.

Somebody read this play to the tsar, and he was so delighted that he ordered it produced. You remember King Louis of France, the “grand monarch,” taking delight in Moliere’s ridicule of his courtiers. The monarch can afford to laugh, or at least thinks he can; it is only the functionaries who realize the destructive power of laughter.

Then Gogol wrote a long novel, “Dead Souls.” He introduces us to a young man who might be a graduate of any one of a thousand schools and colleges and universities of “salesmanship” in the United States. So brilliant are this young man’s talents: