Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

No better indictment has ever been made against those to whom self-denial and renunciation are merely a luxurious attitude of the mind.

Chekhov's sympathy with Imagination and his hatred for commonplace folk who stupidly try to repress its manifestations are shown again and again in his tales. He loves especially the imagination of children; and he shows them as infinitely wiser than their practical parents. In the short sketch An Event the children are wild with delight over the advent of three kittens, and cannot understand their father's disgust for the little beasts, and his cruel indifference to their welfare. The cat is their mother, that they know; but who is the father? The kittens must have a father, so the children drag out the wooden rocking-horse, and place him beside his wife and offspring.

In the story At Home the father's bewilderment at the creative imagination and the curious caprices of his little boy's mind is tenderly and beautifully described. The father knows he is not bringing him up wisely, but is utterly at a loss how to go at the problem, having none of the intuitive sympathy of a woman. The boy is busy with his pencil, and represents sounds by shapes, letters by colours. For example, "the sound of an orchestra he drew as a round, smoky spot; whistling as a spiral thread." In making letters, he always painted L yellow, M red, and A black. He draws a picture of a house with a soldier standing in front of it. The father rebukes him for bad perspective, and tells him that the soldier in his picture is taller than the house. But the boy replies, "If you drew the soldier smaller, you wouldn't be able to see his eyes."

One of Chekhov's favourite pastimes was gardening. This, perhaps, accounts for his location of the scene in his comedy The Cherry Garden, where a business-like man, who had once been a serf, just like the dramatist's own father, has prospered sufficiently to buy the orchard from the improvident and highly educated owners; and for all the details about fruit-gardening given in the powerful story The Black Monk. This story infallibly reminds one of Gogol. A man has repeatedly a vision of a black monk, who visits him through the air, with whom he carries on long conversations, and who inspires him with great thoughts and ideals. His wife and friends of course think he is crazy, and instead of allowing him to continue his intercourse with the familiar spirit, they persuade him he is ill, and make him take medicine. The result is wholesale tragedy. His life is ruined, his wife is separated from him; at last he dies. The idea seems to be that he should not have been disobedient unto the heavenly vision. Imagination and inspiration are necessary to life; they are what separate man from the beasts that perish. The monk asks him, "How do you know that the men of genius whom all the world trusts have not also seen visions?"

Chekhov is eternally at war with the practical, with the narrow-minded, with the commonplace. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Professor Brückner has well said that Chekhov was by profession a physician, but an artist by the grace of God. He was indeed an exquisite artist, and if his place in Russian literature is not large, it seems permanent. He does not rank among the greatest. He lacks the tremendous force of Tolstoi, the flawless perfection of Turgenev, and the mighty world-embracing sympathy of Great-heart Dostoevski. But he is a faithful interpreter of Russian life, and although his art was objective, one cannot help feeling the essential goodness of the man behind his work, and loving him for it.

VIII

ARTSYBASHEV

NOT the greatest, but the most sensational, novel published in Russia during the last five years is Sanin, by Artsybashev. It is not sensational in the incidents, though two men commit suicide, and two girls are ruined; it is sensational in its ideas. To make a sensation in contemporary Russian literature is an achievement, where pathology is now rampant. But Artsybashev accomplished it, and his novel made a tremendous noise, the echoes of which quickly were heard all over curious and eclectic Germany, and have even stirred Paris. Since the failure of the Revolution, there has been a marked revolt in Russia against three great ideas that have at different times dominated Russian literature: the quiet pessimism of Turgenev, the Christian non-resistance religion of Tolstoi, and the familiar Russian type of will-less philosophy. Even before the Revolution Gorki had expressed the spirit of revolt; but his position, extreme as it appears to an Anglo-Saxon, has been left far behind by Artsybashev, who, with the genuine Russian love of the reductio ad absurdum, has reached the farthest limits of moral anarchy in the creation of his hero Sanin.

In an admirable article in the Westminster Gazette, for 14 May 1910, by the accomplished scholar and critic, Mr. R. C. Long, called The Literature of Self-assertion, we obtain a strong smell of the hell-broth now boiling in Russian literature. "In the Spring of 1909, an exhibition was held in the Russian ministry of the Interior of specimen copies of all books and brochures issued in 1908, to the number of 70,841,000. How many different books were exhibited the writer does not know, but he lately came upon an essay by the critic Ismailoff, in which it was said that there were on exhibition a thousand different sensational novels, classed as 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes literature,' with such expressive titles as 'The Hanged,' 'The Chokers,' 'The Corpse Disinterred,' and 'The Expropriators.' Ismailoff comments on this as sign and portent. Russia always had her literature of adventure, and Russian novels of manners and of psychology became known to Westerners merely because they were the best, and by no means because they were the only books that appeared. The popular taste was formerly met with naïve and outrageous 'lubotchniya' -books. The new craze for 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes' stories is something quite different. It foreshadows a complete change in the psychosis of the Russian reader, the decay of the literature of passivity, and the rise of a new literature of action and physical revolt. The literature of passivity reached its height with the (sic) Chekhov. The best representative of the transition from Chekhov to the new literature of self-assertion is Maxim Gorki's friend, Leonid Andreev. . . .