Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

And yet surely, if life is not so good, as it conceivably might be, it is not so darkly bitter as the Bitter One would have us believe. In a short article that he wrote about one of the playgrounds of America, he betrayed his own incurable jaundice. In the New York Independent for 8 August 1907, Gorki published a brilliant impressionistic sketch of Coney Island, and called it Boredom. Gorki at Coney Island is like Dante at a country fair. Thomas Carlyle was invited out to a social dinner-party once upon a time, and when he came home he wrote savagely in his diary of the flippant, light-hearted conversation among the men and women about the festive board, saying, "to me through those thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sat glaring." What a charming guest he must have been on that particular occasion!

Gorki speaks poetically in his article of the "fantastic city all of fire" that one sees at night. But as he mingles with the throng, disgust fills his lonely heart.

"The public looks at them silently. It breathes in the moist air, and feeds its soul with dismal ennui, which extinguishes thought as a wet, dirty cloth extinguishes the fire of a smouldering coal."

Describing the sensations of the crowd before the tiger's cage, he says:--

"The man runs about the cage, shoots his pistol and cracks his whip, and shouts like a madman. His shouts are intended to hide his painful dread of the animals. The crowd regards the capers of the man, and waits in suspense for the fatal attack. They wait; unconsciously the primitive instinct is awakened in them. They crave fight, they want to feel the delicious shiver produced by the sight of two bodies intertwining, the splutter of blood and pieces of torn, steaming human flesh flying through the cage and falling on the floor. They want to hear the roar, the cries, the shrieks of agony. . . . Then the crowd breaks into dark pieces, and disperses over the slimy marsh of boredom.

". . . You long to see a drunken man with a jovial face, who would push and sing and bawl, happy because he is drunk, and sincerely wishing all good people the same. . .

"In the glittering gossamer of its fantastic buildings, tens of thousands of grey people, like patches on the ragged clothes of a beggar, creep along with weary faces and colourless eyes. . . .

"But the precaution has been taken to blind the people, and they drink in the vile poison with silent rapture. The poison contaminates their souls. Boredom whirls about in an idle dance, expiring in the agony of its inanition.

"One thing alone is good in the garish city: you can drink in hatred to your soul's content, hatred sufficient to last throughout life, hatred of the power of stupidity!"

This sketch is valuable not merely because of the impression of a distinguished foreign writer of one of the sights of America, but because it raises in our minds an obstinate doubt of his capacity to tell the truth about life in general. Suppose a person who had never seen Coney Island should read Gorki's vivid description of it, would he really know anything about Coney Island? Of course not. The crowds at Coney Island are as different from Gorki's description of them as anything could well be. Now then, we who know the dregs of Russian life only through Gorki's pictures, can we be certain that his representations are accurate? Are they reliable history of fact, or are they the revelations of a heart that knoweth its own bitterness?