Some persons may express surprise that it is of her novelists that I demand the secret of Russia.
It is because poetry and romance, the modes of expression most natural to this people, are alone compatible with the exigencies of a press-censure which was formerly most severe, and is even now very suspicious. There is no medium for ideas save through the supple meshes of fiction; so that the fiction which shields yet conveys these ideas assumes the importance of a doctrinal treatise.
Of these two leading forms of literature, the first, poetry, absorbed the early part of the present century; the other, the novel, has superseded poetry, and monopolized the attention of the whole nation for the last forty years.
With the great name of Pushkin at the head of the list, the Russians consider the romantic period as the crowning point of their intellectual glory. I once agreed with them, but have had two motives for changing my opinion.
In the first place, it would be quite useless to discuss works which we could not quote from; for the Russian poets have never been and never will be translated. The life and beauty of a lyric poem is in its arrangement of words and its rhythm; this beauty cannot be transferred into a foreign form. I once read a very admirable and exact Russian translation of Alfred de Musset’s “Nights”; it produced the same sensation as when we look upon a beautiful corpse; the soul had fled, like the divine essence which was the life of those charming verses.
The task is yet more difficult when you attempt to transfer an idea from the most poetical language in Europe into one which possesses the least of that quality. Certain verses of Pushkin and Lermontof are the finest I know in any language. But in the fragment of French prose they are transferred into, you glean but a commonplace thought. Many have tried, and many more will continue to try to translate them, but the result is not worth the effort. Besides, it does not seem to me that this romantic poetry expresses what is most typical of the Russian spirit. By giving poetry the first rank in their literature, their critics are influenced by the prestige of the past and the enthusiasm of youth; for the passage of time adds lustre to what is past, to the detriment of the present.
A foreigner can perhaps judge more truly in this case; for distance equalizes all remote objects on the same plane. I believe that the great novelists of the past forty years will be of more service to Russia than her poets. For the first time she is in advance of Western Europe through her writers, who have expressed æsthetic forms of thought which are peculiarly her own. This is why I choose these romances as illustrative of the national character. Ten years’ study of these works has suggested to me many thoughts relative to the character of this people, and the part it is destined to fill in the domain of intellect. As the novelist undertakes to bring up every problem of the national life, it will not be a matter of surprise if I make use of works of fiction in touching upon grave subjects and in the weaving together of some abstract thoughts.
We shall see the Russians plead the cause of realism with new arguments, and better ones, in my opinion, than those of their rivals in the West.
This work is an important one, and is the foundation of all the contests of ideas in the civilized world; revealing, moreover, the most characteristic conceptions of our contemporaries.
In all primitive literature, the classical hero was the only one considered worthy of attention, representing in action all ideas on religions, monarchical, social, and moral subjects, existing from time immemorial. In exaggerating the qualities of his hero, either for good or evil, the classic poet took for his model what he deemed should or should not be expected of him, rather than what such a character would be in reality.