“This gift comes to you from whence come all our gifts. Return to your literary labors, great author of our beloved Russia!”
I shall not pretend to draw any definite or elaborate conclusions from these initiatory explorations into Russian literature. To make them complete, we should study the less prominent writers, who have a right to bear their testimony as to the actual condition of the nation. If, moreover, the writer of this book has succeeded in presenting his own ideas clearly, the reader should draw his own conclusions from the perusal of it; if the author has failed, any added defence of his ideas would be superfluous, and have little interest or value for the reader.
We have witnessed the at first artificial growth of this literature, for a long time subjected to foreign influence; a weak and servile type of literature, giving us no enlightenment whatever as to the actual interior condition of its own country, which it voluntarily ignored. Again, when turning to its natal soil to seek its objects of study it has become vigorous. Realism is the proper and perfect instrument which it has employed, applied with equal success to material and spiritual life. Although this realism may occasionally lack method and taste, and is at the same time both diffuse and subtile, it is invariably natural and sincere, ennobled by moral sentiments, aspirations toward the Divine, and sympathy for humanity. Not one of these novelists aims merely at literary fame, but all are governed by a love of truth as well as of justice,—a combination of great importance, and well worth our serious reflection, betraying and explaining to us, moreover, the philosophical conceptions of this race.
The Russians seek religious truth because they find the formulas of their doctrines insufficient for them, and the negative arguments which satisfy us would be entirely opposed to all their instincts. Their religious doubts govern, cause, and characterize all their social and political questions and difficulties. The Slav race, under the guise of its apparent orthodoxy, has not yet found its true path, but seeks it still in every grade of society. The formula they are looking forward to must comprise and answer to their double ideal of truth and justice. Moreover, the people still feel the influence of the old Aryan spirit; the cultivated classes also feel that of the teachings of the contemporaneous sciences; hence the resurrection of Buddhism which we now witness in Russia; for I cannot otherwise qualify these tendencies. We see in them the condition of the ancient Hindus vacillating between an extremely high morality and Nihilism, or a metaphysical Pantheism.
The spirit of Buddhism in its great efforts toward the extension of evangelical charity has penetrated the Russian character, which naturally has such intense sympathy for human nature, for the humblest creatures, for the forsaken and unfortunate. This spirit decries reason and elevates the brute, and inspires the deepest compassion in the heart. Moreover, this simple love of the neighbor and infinite tenderness for the suffering gives a peculiarly pathetic quality to their literary works. The initiators of this movement, after having written for the benefit of their peers and the cultivated classes, are strongly drawn toward the people. Gogol with his bitter irony devoted himself to the study of suffering humanity. Turgenef pictured it from his own artistic standpoint rather than from that of an apostle. Tolstoï, his sceptical investigations being over, has become the most determined of the apostles of the unfortunate.
But beyond these mental tortures, beneath the extreme Nihilism of a Tolstoï and the intellectual morbidness of a Dostoyevski, we feel that there is a rich fund of vitality, a fountain of truth and justice, which will surely triumph in the future.
FOOTNOTES:
[L] By Alfred de Vigny, author of “Cinque-Mars.”