An Outline of Russian Literature Part 4

In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; but Byron was far less romantic and far less imaginative than Lermontov, although he invented Byronism, and shattered the crumbling walls of the eighteenth century that surrounded the city of romance, and dallied with romantic themes in his youth. All his best work, the finest pa.s.sages of _Childe Harold_, and the whole of _Don Juan_, were slices of his own life and observation, _choses vues_; he never created a single character that was not a reflection of himself; and he never entered into the city whose walls he had stormed, and where he had planted his flag.

This does not mean that Lermontov is inferior to the Western romantic poets. It simply means that the Russian poet is--and one might add the Russian poets are--different. And, indeed, it is this very difference,--what he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his composition,--that const.i.tutes his unique excellence. So far from its being a vice, he made it into his especial virtue. Lermontov sometimes, in presenting a situation and writing a poem on a fact, presents that situation and that fact without exaggeration, emphasis, adornment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any kind, in the language of everyday life, and at the same time he achieves poetry. This was Wordsworth's ideal, and he fulfilled it.

A case in point is his long poem on the Oprichnik, which has been mentioned; and some of the most striking examples of this unadorned and realistic writing are to be found in his lyrics. In the "Testament," for example, where a wounded officer gives his last instructions to his friend who is going home on leave--

"I want to be alone with you, A moment quite alone.

The minutes left to me are few, They say I'll soon be gone.

And you'll be going home on leave, Then say ... but why? I do believe There's not a soul, who'll greatly care To hear about me over there.

And yet if some one asks you there, Let us suppose they do-- Tell them a bullet hit me here, The chest,--and it went through.

And say I died and for the Tsar, And say what fools the doctors are;-- And that I shook you by the hand, And thought about my native land.

My father and my mother, too!

They may be dead by now; To tell the truth, it wouldn't do To grieve them anyhow.

If one of them is living, say I'm bad at writing home, and they Have sent us to the front, you see,-- And that they needn't wait for me.

We had a neighbour, as you know, And you remember I And she ... How very long ago It is we said good-bye!

She won't ask after me, nor care, But tell her ev'rything, don't spare Her empty heart; and let her cry;-- To her it doesn't signify."

The language is the language of ordinary everyday conversation. Every word the officer says might have been said by him in ordinary life, and there is not a note that jars; the speech is the living speech of conversation without being slang: and the result is a poignant piece of poetry. Another perhaps still more beautiful and touching example is the cradle-song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, in which again every word has the native savour and homeliness of a Cossack woman's speech, and every feeling expressed is one that she would have felt. A third example is "Borodino," an account of the famous battle told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. Lermontov's fishes never talk like big whales.

All Russian poets have this gift of reality of conception and simplicity of treatment in a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none has it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. The difference between Pushkin's style and Lermontov's is that, when you read Pushkin, you think: "How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world did he do it?" You admire the "magic hand of chance." In reading Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness. Thus, what Matthew Arnold said about Byron and Wordsworth is true about Lermontov--there are moments when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.

In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; but there is a great deal that is flat and sullen. But if one reviews the great amount of work he produced in his short life, one is struck, not by its variety, as in the case of Pushkin,--it is, on the contrary, limited and monotonous in subject,--but by his authentic lyrical inspiration, by the strength, the intensity, the concentration of his genius, the richness of his imagination, the wealth of his palette, his gorgeous colouring and the high level of his strong square musical verse. And perhaps more than by anything else, one is struck by the blend in his nature and his work which has just been discussed, of romantic imagination and stern reality, of soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as though we had before us the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings of a Sh.e.l.ley. Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you take him, one of the most astonis.h.i.+ng figures, and certainly the greatest purely lyrical _Erscheinung_ in Russian literature.

With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the springtide of national song that began in the reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for the only poet he left behind him did not survive him long. This was his contemporary KOLTSOV (1809-42), the greatest of Russian folk-poets.

The son of a cattle-dealer, after a fitful and short-lived primary education at the district school of Voronezh, he adopted his father's trade, and by a sheer accident a cultivated young man of Moscow came across him and his verses, and raised funds for their publication.

Koltsov's verse paints peasant life as it is, without any sentimentality or rhetoric; it is described from the inside, and not from the outside. This is the great difference between Koltsov and other popular poets who came later. Moreover, he caught and reproduced the true _Volkston_ in his lyrics, so that they are indistinguishable in accent from real folk-poetry. Koltsov sings of the woods, and the rustling rye, of harvest time and sowing; the song of the love-sick girl reaping; the lonely grave; the vague dreams and desires of the peasant's heart. His pictures have the dignity and truth of Jean Francois Millet, and his "lyrical cry" is as authentic as that of Burns. His more literary poems are like Burns' English poems compared with his work in the Scots. But he died the year after Lermontov, of consumption, and with his death the curtain was rung down on the first act of Russian literature. When it was next rung up, it was on the age of prose.

CHAPTER IV

THE AGE OF PROSE

When the curtain again rose on Russian literature it was on an era of prose; and the leading protagonist of that era, both by his works of fiction and his dramatic work, was NICHOLAS GOGOL [1809-52]. It is true that in the thirties Russia began to produce home-made novels. In Pushkin's story _The Queen of Spades_, when somebody asks the old Countess if she wishes to read a Russian novel, she says "A Russian novel? Are there any?" This stage had been pa.s.sed; but the novels and the plays that were produced at this time until the advent of Gogol have been--deservedly for the greater part--forgotten. And, just as Lermontov was the successor of Pushkin in the domain of poetry, so in the domain of satire Gogol was the successor of Griboyedov; and in creating a national work he was the heir of Pushkin.

Gogol was a Little Russian. He was born in 1809 near Poltava, in the Cossack country, and was brought up by his grandfather, a Cossack; but he left the Ukraine and settled in 1829 in St. Petersburg, where he obtained a place in a Government office. After an unsuccessful attempt to go on the stage, and a brief career as tutor, he was given a professors.h.i.+p of History; but he failed here also, and finally turned to literature. The publication of his first efforts gained him the acquaintance of the literary men of the day, and he became the friend of Pushkin, who proved a valuable friend, adviser, and critic, and urged him to write on the life of the people. He lived in St.

Petersburg from 1829 to 1836; and it was perhaps home-sickness which inspired him to write his Little Russian sketches--_Evenings on a Farm on the Dikanka_,--which appeared in 1832, followed by _Mirgorod_, a second series, in 1834.

Gogol's temperament was romantic. He had a great deal of the dreamer in him, a touch of the eerie, a delight in the supernatural, an impish fancy that reminds one sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of R. L.

Stevenson, as well as a deep religious vein which was later on to dominate and oust all his other qualities. But, just as we find in the Russian poets a curious mixture of romanticism and realism, of imagination and common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with his imaginative gifts, which were great, there is a realism based on minute observation. In addition to this, and tempering his penetrating observation, he had a rich streak of humour, a many-sided humour, ranging from laughter holding both its sides, to a delicate and half melancholy chuckle, and in his later work to biting irony.

In the very first story of his first book, "The Fair of Sorochinetz,"

we are plunged into an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way that no other Russian book has ever yet savoured of the soil. We are plunged into the South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at the fair; and the fair, with its noise, its smell and its colour, rises before us as vividly as Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupa.s.sant, or Scotland from the pages of Stevenson. And just as Andrew Lang once said that probably only a Scotsman, and a Lowland Scotsman, could know how true to life the characters in _Kidnapped_ were, so it is probable that only a Russian, and indeed a Little Russian, appreciates to the full how true to life are the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the tales of Gogol. And then we at once get that hint of the supernatural which runs like a scarlet thread through all these stories; the rumour that the _Red Jacket_ has been observed in the fair; and the _Red Jacket_, so the gossips say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned out of h.e.l.l as a punishment for some misdemeanour--probably a good intention--established himself in a neighbouring barn, and from home-sickness took to drink, and drank away all his substance; so that he was obliged to p.a.w.n his red jacket for a year to a Jew, who sold it before the year was out, whereupon the buyer, recognizing its unholy origin, cut it up into bits and threw it away, after which the Devil appeared in the shape of a pig every year at the fair to find the pieces. It is on this Red Jacket that the story turns.

In this first volume, the supernatural plays a predominant part throughout; the stories tell of water-nymphs, the Devil, who steals the moon, witches, magicians, and men who traffic with the Evil One and lose their souls. In the second series, _Mirgorod_, realism comes to the fore in the stories of "The Old-Fas.h.i.+oned Landowners" and "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans." These two stories contain between them the sum and epitome of the whole of one side of Gogol's genius, the realistic side. In the one story, "The Old-Fas.h.i.+oned Landowners," we get the gentle good humour which tells the charming tale of a South Russian Philemon and Baucis, their hospitality and kindliness, and the loneliness of Philemon when Baucis is taken away, told with the art of La Fontaine, and with many touches that remind one of d.i.c.kens. The other story, "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans," who are bosom friends and quarrel over nothing, and are, after years, on the verge of making it up when the mere mention of the word "goose" which caused the quarrel sets alight to it once more and irrevocably, is in Gogol's richest farcical vein, with just a touch of melancholy.

And in the same volume, two _nouvelles_, _Tara.s.s Bulba_ and _Viy_, sum up between them the whole of the other side of Gogol's genius. _Tara.s.s Bulba_, a short historical novel, with its incomparably vivid picture of Cossack life, is Gogol's masterpiece in the epic vein. It is as strong and as direct as a Border ballad. _Viy_, which tells of a witch, is the most creepy and imaginative of his supernatural stories.

Later, he published two more collections of stories: _Arabesques_ (1834) and _Tales_ (1836). In these, poetry, witches, water-nymphs, magicians, devils, and epic adventure are all left behind. The element of the fantastic still subsists, as in the "Portrait," and of the grotesque, as in the story of the major who loses his nose, which becomes a separate personality, and wanders about the town. But his blend of realism and humour comes out strongly in the story of "The Carriage," and his blend of realism and pathos still more strongly in the story of "The Overcoat," the story of a minor public servant who is always s.h.i.+vering and whose dream it is to have a warm overcoat.

After years of privation he saves enough money to buy one, and on the first day he wears it, it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his ghost haunts the streets. This story is the only begetter of the large army of pathetic figures of failure that crowd the pages of Russian literature.

While Gogol had been writing and publis.h.i.+ng these tales, he had also been steadily writing for the stage; but here the great difficulty and obstacle was the Censors.h.i.+p, which was almost as severe as it was in England at the end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a curious paradox, the play, which you would have expected the Censors.h.i.+p to forbid before all other plays, _The Revisor_, or _Inspector-General_, was performed. This was owing to the direct intervention of the Emperor. _The Revisor_ is the second comic masterpiece of the Russian stage. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. A traveller from St. Petersburg--a fine natural liar--is taken for the Inspector, plays up to the part, and gets away just before the arrival of the real Inspector, which is the end of the play. The play is a satire on the Russian bureaucracy. Almost every single character in it is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and irrelevant hero, with his magnificent talent for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The play at once became a cla.s.sic, and retains all its vitality and comic force to-day. There is no play which draws a larger audience on holidays in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

After the production of _The Revisor_, Gogol left Russia for ever and settled in Rome. He had in his mind a work of great importance on which he had already been working for some time. This was his _Dead Souls_, his most ambitious work, and his masterpiece. It was Pushkin who gave him the idea of the book. The hero of the book, Chichikov, conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs, called "souls." A revision took place every ten years, and the landlord had to pay for poll-tax on the "souls" who had died during that period. n.o.body looked at the lists between the periods of revision. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to be rid of the fict.i.tious property and the real tax, to register his purchases, and then to mortgage at a bank at St. Petersburg or Moscow, the "souls,"

which he represented as being in some place in the Crimea, and thus make money enough to buy "souls" of his own. The book tells of the adventures of Chichikov as he travels over Russia in search of dead "souls," and is, like Mr. Pickwick's adventures, an Odyssey, introducing us to every kind and manner of man and woman. The book was to be divided in three parts. The first part appeared in 1842. Gogol went on working at the second and third parts until 1852, when he died. He twice threw the second part of the work into the fire when it was finished; so that all we possess is the first part, and the second part printed from an incomplete ma.n.u.script. The second part was certainly finished when he destroyed it, and it is probable that the third part was sketched. He had intended in the second part to work out the moral regeneration of Chichikov, and to give to the world his complete message. Persecuted by a dream he was unable to realize and an ambition which he was not able to fulfil, Gogol was driven inwards, and his natural religious feeling grew more intense and made him into an ascetic and a recluse. This break in the middle of his career is characteristic of Russia. Tolstoy, of course, furnishes the most typical example of the same thing. But it is a common Russian characteristic for men midway in a successful career to turn aside from it altogether, and seek consolation in the things which are not of this world.

Gogol's _Dead Souls_ made a deep impression upon educated Russia. It pleased the enthusiasts for Western Europe by its reality, its artistic conception and execution, and by its social ideas; and it pleased the Slavophile Conservatives by its truth to life, and by its smell of Russia. When the first chapter was read aloud to Pushkin, he said, when Gogol had finished: "G.o.d, what a sad country Russia is!"

And it is certainly true, that amusing as the book is, inexpressibly comic as so many of the scenes are, Gogol does not flatter his country or his countrymen; and when Russians read it at the time it appeared, many must have been tempted to murmur "_doux pays!_"--as they would, indeed, now, were a writer with the genius of a Gogol to appear and describe the adventures of a modern Chichikov; for, though circ.u.mstances may be entirely different, although there are no more "souls" to be bought or sold, Chichikov is still alive--and as Gogol said, there was probably not one of his readers who after an honest self-examination, would not wonder if he had not something of Chichikov in him, and who if he were to meet an acquaintance at that moment, would not nudge his companion and say: "There goes Chichikov."

"And who and what is Chichikov?" The answer is: "A scoundrel." But such an entertaining scoundrel, so abject, so shameless, so utterly devoid of self-respect, such a magnificent liar, so plausible an impostor, so ingenious a cheat, that he rises from scoundrelism almost to greatness.

There is, indeed, something of the greatness of Falstaff in this trafficker of dead "souls." His baseness is almost sublime. He in any case merits a place in the gallery of humanity's typical and human rascals, where Falstaff, Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign.

He has the great saving merit of being human; nor can he be accused of hypocrisy. His coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every "decent man," is worthy of the creator of Sam Weller. But what distinguishes Gogol in his _Dead Souls_ from the great satirists of other nations, and his satire from the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift, for instance, is that, after laying bare to the bones the rascality of his hero, he turns round on his audience and tells them that there is no cause for indignation; Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling pa.s.sion--gain; perhaps, indeed, in the chill existence of a Chichikov, there may be something which will one day cause us to humble ourselves on our knees and in the dust before the Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with indulgence; his sleepless observation is tempered by fundamental charity. He sees what is mean and common clearer than any one, but he does not infer from it that life, or mankind, or the world is common or mean. He infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no lower morally than he would put Napoleon, Harpagon, or Don Juan--all of them victims of a ruling pa.s.sion, and all of them great by reason of it--for Chichikov is also great in rascality, just as Harpagon was great in avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. And this large charity blent with biting irony is again peculiarly Russian.

_Dead Souls_ is a deeper book than any of Gogol's early work. It is deep in the same way as _Don Quixote_ is deep; and like _Don Quixote_ it makes boys laugh, young men think, and old men weep. Apart from its philosophy and ideas, _Dead Souls_ had a great influence on Russian literature as a work of art. Just as Pushkin set Russian poetry free from the high-flown and the conventional, so did Gogol set Russian fiction free from the dominion of the grand style. He carried Pushkin's work--the work which Pushkin had accomplished in verse and adumbrated in prose--much further; and by depicting ordinary life, and by writing a novel without any love interest, with a Chichikov for a hero, he created Russian realism. He described what he saw without flattery and without exaggeration, but with the masterly touch, the instinctive economy, the sense of selection of a great artist.

This, at the time it was done, was a revolution. n.o.body then would have dreamed it possible to write a play or a novel without a love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed to Russia that there was such a thing as Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one better, revealed the fascination, the secret and incomprehensible power that lay in the flat monotony of the Russian country, and the inexhaustible source of humour, absurdity, irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the everyday life of the ordinary people. So that, however much his contemporaries might differ as to the merits or demerits, the harm or the beneficence, of his work, he left his nation with permanent and cla.s.sic models of prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin had bequeathed to them permanent models of verse.

Gogol wrote no more fiction after _Dead Souls_. In 1847 _Pa.s.sages from a Correspondence with a Friend_ was published, which created a sensation, because in the book Gogol preached submission to the Government, both spiritual and temporal. The Western enthusiasts and the Liberals in general were highly disgusted. One can understand their disgust; it is less easy to understand their surprise; for Gogol had never pretended to be a Liberal. He showed up the evils of Bureaucracy and the follies and weaknesses of Bureaucrats, because they were there, just as he showed up the stinginess of misers and the obstinacy of old women. But it is quite as easy for a Conservative to do this as it is for a Liberal, and quite as easy for an orthodox believer as for an atheist. But Gogol's contemporaries had not realized the tempest that had been raging for a long time in Gogol's soul, and which he kept to himself. He had always been religious, and now he became exclusively religious; he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; he spent his substance in charity, especially to poor students; and he lived in asceticism until he died, at the age of forty-three.

What a waste, one is tempted to say--and how often one is tempted to say this in the annals of Russian literature--and yet, one wonders!

What we possess of the second part of _Dead Souls_ is in Gogol's best vein, and of course one cannot help bitterly regretting that the rest was destroyed or possibly never written; but one wonders whether, had he not had within him the intensity of feeling which led him ultimately to renounce art, he would have been the artist that he was; whether he would have been capable of creating so many-coloured a world of characters, and whether the soil out of which those works grew was not in reality the kind of soil out of which religious renunciation was at last bound to flower. However that may be, Gogol left behind him a rich inheritance. He is one of the great humorists of European literature, and whoever gives England a really fine translation of his work, will do his country a service. Merimee places Gogol among the best _English_ humorists. His humour and his pathos were closely allied; but there is no acidity in his irony. His work may sometimes sadden you, but (as in the case of Krylov's two pigeons) it will never bore you, and it will never leave you with a feeling of stale disgust or a taste as of sharp alum, for his work is based on charity, and it has in its form and accent the precious gift of charm.

Gogol is an author who will always be loved even as much as he is admired, and his stories are a boon to the young; to many a Russian boy and girl the golden gates of romance have been opened by Gogol, the destroyer of Russian romanticism, the inaugurator of Russian realism.

Side by side with fiction, another element grew up in this age of prose, namely criticism. Karamzin in the twenties had been the first to introduce literary criticism, and critical appreciations of Pushkin's work appeared from time to time in the _European Messenger_.

PRINCE VYAZEMSKY, whose literary activity lasted from 1808-78, was a critic as well as a poet and a satirist, a fine example of the type of great Russian n.o.bles so frequent in Russian books, who were not only saturated with culture but enriched literature with their work, and carried on the tradition of cool, clear wit, clean expression, and winged phrase that we find in Griboyedov. POLEVOY, a self-educated man of humble extraction, was the first professional journalist, and created the tradition of violent and fiery polemics, which has lasted till this day in Russian journalism. But the real founder of Russian aesthetic, literary, and journalistic criticism was BELINSKY (1811-1847).

Like Polevoy, he was of humble extraction and almost entirely self-educated. He lived in want and poverty and ill-health. His life was a long battle against every kind of difficulty and obstacle; his literary production was more than hampered by the Censors.h.i.+p, but his influence was far-reaching and deep. He created Russian criticism, and after pa.s.sing through several phases--a German phase of Hegelian philosophy, Gallophobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Goethe and for objective art, a French phase of enthusiasm for art as practised in France, ended finally in a didactic phase of which the watchword was that Life was more important than Art.

The first blossoms of the new generation of writers, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Herzen, and others, grew up under his encouragement. He expounded Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Griboyedov, Zhukovsky and the writers of the past. His judgments have remained authoritative; but some of his final judgments, which were unshaken for generations, such as for instance his estimates of Pushkin and Lermontov, were much bia.s.sed and coloured by his didacticism. He burnt what he had adored in the case of Gogol, who, like Pushkin, became for him too much of an artist, and not enough of a social reformer. Whatever phase Belinsky went through, he was pa.s.sionate, impulsive, and violent, incapable of being objective, or of doing justice to an opponent, or of seeing two sides to a question. He was a polemical and fanatical knight errant, the prophet and propagandist of Western influence, the bitter enemy of the Slavophiles.

The didactic stamp which he gave to Russian aesthetic and literary criticism has remained on it ever since, and differentiates it from the literary and aesthetic criticism of the rest of Europe, not only from that school of criticism which wrote and writes exclusively under the banner of "Art for Art's Sake," but from those Western critics who championed the importance of moral ideas in literature, just as ardently as he did himself, and who deprecated the theory of Art for Art's sake just as strongly. Thus it is that, from the beginning of Russian criticism down to the present day, a truly objective criticism scarcely exists in Russian literature. aesthetic criticism becomes a political weapon. "Are you in my camp?" if so, you are a good writer.

"Are you in my opponent's camp?" then your G.o.d-gifted genius is mere dross.

The reason of this has been luminously stated by Professor Bruckner: "To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without the liberty of a.s.sembly, without the right to free expression of opinion, literature became the last refuge of freedom of thought, the only means of propagating higher ideas. He expected of his country's literature not merely aesthetic recreation; he placed it at the service of his aspirations.... Hence the striking partiality, nay unfairness, displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own literature, when they did not respond to the aims or expectations of their party or their day." And speaking of the criticism that was produced after 1855, he says: "This criticism is often, in spite of all its giftedness, its ardour and fire, only a mockery of all criticism. The work only serves as an example on which to hang the critics' own views.... This is no reproach; we simply state the fact, and fully recognize the necessity and usefulness of the method. With a backward society, ... this criticism was a means which was sanctified by the end, the spreading of free opinions.... Unhappily, Russian literary criticism has remained till to-day almost solely journalistic, _i. e._ didactic and partisan. See how even now it treats the most interesting, exceptional, and mighty of all Russians, Dostoyevsky, merely because he does not fit into the Radical mould!

How unjust it has been towards others! How it has extolled to the clouds the representatives of its own camp!" I quote Professor Bruckner, lest I should be myself suspected of being partial in this question. The question, perhaps, may admit of further expansion. It is not that the Russian critics were merely convinced it was all-important that art should have ideas at the roots of it, and had no patience with a merely shallow aestheticism. They went further; the ideas had to be of one kind. A definite political tendency had to be discerned; and if the critic disagreed with that political tendency, then no amount of qualities--not artistic excellence, form, skill, style, not even genius, inspiration, depth, feeling, philosophy--were recognized.

Herein lies the great difference between Russian and Western critics, between Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky; between Matthew Arnold and his Russian contemporaries. Matthew Arnold defined the highest poetry as being a criticism of life; but that would not have prevented him from doing justice either to a poet so polemical as Byron, or to a poet so completely unpolitical, so sheerly aesthetic as Keats; to Lord Beaconsfield as a novelist, to Mr. Morley or Lord Acton as historians, because their "tendency" or their "politics" were different from his own. The most bia.s.sed of English or French critics is broad-minded compared to a Russian critic. Had Keats been a Russian poet, Belinsky would have swept him away with contempt; Wordsworth would have been condemned as reactionary; and Swinburne's politics alone would have been taken into consideration. At the present day, almost ten years after Professor Bruckner wrote his _History of Russian Literature_, now that the press is more or less free, save for occasional pin-p.r.i.c.ks, now that literary output is in any case unfettered, and the stage freer than it is in England, the same criticism still applies. Russian literary criticism is still journalistic. There are and there always have been brilliant exceptions, of course, two of the most notable of which are VOLYNSKY and MEREZHKOVSKY; but as a rule the political camp to which the writer belongs is the all-important question; and I know cases of Russian politicians who have been known to refuse to write, even in foreign reviews, because they disapproved of the "tendency" of those reviews, the tendency being non-existent--as is generally the case with English reviews,--and the review harbouring opinions of every shade and tendency. You would think that narrow-mindedness could no further go than to refuse to let your work appear in an impartial organ, lest in that same organ an opinion opposed to your own might appear also. But the cause of this is the same now as it used to be, namely that, in spite of there being a greater measure of freedom in Russia, political liberty does not yet exist. Liberty of a.s.sembly does not exist; liberty of conscience only partially exists; the press is annoyed and hampered by restrictions; and the great majority of Russian writers are still engaged in fighting for these things, and therefore still ready to sacrifice fairness for the greater end,--the achievement of political freedom.

Thus criticism in Russia became a question of camps, and the question arises, what were these camps? From the dawn of the age of pure literature, Russia was divided into two great camps: The Slavophiles and the Propagandists of Western Ideas.

The trend towards the West began with the influence of Joseph Le Maistre and the St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 1836, CHAADAEV, an ex-guardsman who had served in the Russian campaign in France and travelled a great deal in Western Europe, and who shared Joseph Le Maistre's theory that Russia had suffered by her isolation from the West and through the influence of the former Byzantine Empire, published the first of his _Lettres sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire_ in the _Telescope_ of Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-sh.e.l.l. He glorified the tradition and continuity of the Catholic world. He said that Russia existed, as it were, outside of time, without the tradition either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that the universal culture of the human race had not touched it. "The atmosphere of the West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, order; we have given nothing to the world and taken nothing from it; ... we have not contributed anything to the progress of humanity, and we have disfigured everything we have taken from that progress. Hostile circ.u.mstances have alienated us from the general trend in which the social idea of Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise our faith, and begin our education over again on another basis." The expression of these incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the exile of the editor of the _Telescope_, the dismissal of the Censor, and in the official declaration of Chaadaev's insanity, who was put under medical supervision for a year.

Chaadaev made disciples who went further than he did, PRINCESS VOLKONSKY, the auth.o.r.ess of a notable book on the Orthodox Church, and PRINCE GAGARIN, who both became Catholics. This was one branch of Westernism. Another branch, to which Belinsky belonged, had no Catholic leanings, but sought for salvation in socialism and atheism.

The most important figure in this branch is ALEXANDER HERZEN (1812-1870). His real name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy n.o.bleman, married in Germany, but did not legalize his marriage in Russia, so his children took their mother's name.