Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

A distinguished American novelist has said that in Gorki "seems the body without the soul of Russian fiction, and sodden with despair. The soul of Russian fiction is the great thing." This is, indeed, the main difference between his work and that of the giant Dostoevski. In the latter's darkest scenes the spiritual flame is never extinct.

Gorki lacks either the patient industry or else the knowledge necessary to make a good novel. He is seen at his best in short stories, for his power comes in flashes. In Twenty-six Men and a Girl, the hideous tale that gave him his reputation in America, one is conscious of the streak of genius that he undoubtedly possesses. The helpless, impotent rage felt by the wretched men as they witness the debauching of a girl's body and the damnation of her soul, is clearly echoed in the reader's mind. Gorki's notes are always the most thrilling when played below the range of the conventional instrument of style. This is not low life, it is sub-life.

He is, after all, a student of sensational effect; and the short story is peculiarly adapted to his natural talent. He cannot develop characters, he cannot manage a large group, or handle a progressive series of events. But in a lurid picture of the pit, in a flash-light photograph of an underground den, in a sudden vision of a heap of garbage with unspeakable creatures crawling over it, he is impressive.

I shall never forget the performance of The Night Asylum, Nachtasyl, which I saw acted in Munich by one of the best stock companies in the world, a combination of players from the Neues and Kleines theaters in Berlin. In reading this utterly formless and incoherent drama, I had been only slightly affected; but when it was presented on the stage by actors who intelligently incarnated every single character, the thing took on a terrible intensity. The persons are all, except old Luka, who talks like a man in one of Tolstoi's recent parables, dehumanised. The woman dying of consumption before our eyes, the Baron in an advanced stage of paresis who continually rolls imaginary cigarettes between his weak fingers, and the alcoholic actor who has lost his memory are impossible to forget. I can hear that actor now, as with stupid fascination he continually repeats the diagnosis a physician once made of his case: "Mein Organismus ist durch und durch mit Alcool vergiftet!"

Gorki, in spite of his zeal for the revolutionary cause, has no remedy for the disease he calls Life. He is eaten up with rage at the world in general, and tries to make us all share his disgust with it. But he teaches us nothing; he has little to say that we can transmute into anything valuable. This is perhaps the reason why the world has temporarily, at any rate, lost interest in him. He was a new sensation, he shocked us, and gave us strange thrills, after the manner of new and unexpected sensations. Gorki came up on the literary horizon like an evil storm, darkening the sky, casting an awful shadow across the world's mirth and laughter, and making us shudder in the cold and gloom..

Gorki completely satisfied that strange but almost universal desire of well-fed and comfortable people to go slumming. In his books men and women in fortunate circumstances had their curiosity satisfied--all the world went slumming, with no discomfort, no expense, and no fear of contagion. With no trouble at all, no personal inconvenience, we learned the worst of all possible worsts on this puzzling and interesting planet.

But we soon had enough of it, and our experienced and professional guide failed to perceive the fact. He showed us more of the same thing, and then some more. Such sights and sounds--authentic visions and echoes of hell--merely repeated, began to lose their uncanny fascination. The man who excited us became a bore. For the worst thing about Gorki is his dull monotony, and vice is even more monotonous than virtue, perhaps because it is more common. Open the pages of almost any of his tales, it is always the same thing, the same criminals, the same horrors, the same broken ejaculations and brutish rage. Gorki has shown no capacity for development, no power of variety and complexity. His passion for mere effect has reacted unfavourably on himself.*

* His play Die Letzten was put on at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 6 September 1910. The press despatch says, "The father is a police inspector, drunkard, gambler, briber, bribe-taker, adulterer, and robber."

Is it possible that success robbed him of something? He became a popular author in conventional environment, surrounded by books and modem luxuries, living in the pleasant climate of Italy, with no anxiety about his meals and bed. Is it possible that wealth, comfort, independence, and leisure have extinguished his original force? Has he lost something of the picturesque attitude of Gorki the penniless tramp? He is happily still a young man, and perhaps he may yet achieve the masterpiece that ten years ago we so confidently expected from his hands.

He is certainly not a great teacher, but he has the power to ask awkward questions so characteristic of Andreev, Artsybashev, and indeed of all Russian novelists. We cannot answer him with a shrug of the shoulders or a sceptical smile. He shakes the foundations of our fancied security by boldly questioning what we had come to regard as axioms. As the late M. de Vogüé remarked, when little children sit on our knee and pelt us with questions that go to the roots of our philosophy, we get rid of the bother of it by telling the children to go away and play; but when a Tolstoi puts such questions, we cannot get rid of him so easily. Russian novelists are a thorn in the side of complacent optimism.