FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[2]Not 1763, as generally stated in his biographies.[3]The poem was originally calledMazepa: Pushkin changed the title so as not to clash with Byron. It is interesting to see what Pushkin says of Byron’s poem. In his notes there is the following passage—“Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire’s history of Charles XII. He was struck solely by the picture of a man bound to a wild horse and borne over the steppes. A poetical picture of course; but see what he did with it. What a living creation! What a broad brush! But do not expect to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual gloomy Byronic hero. Byron was not thinking of him. He presented a series of pictures, one more striking than the other. Had his pen come across the story of the seduced daughter and the father’s execution, it is improbable that anyone else would have dared to touch the subject.”

[2]Not 1763, as generally stated in his biographies.

[3]The poem was originally calledMazepa: Pushkin changed the title so as not to clash with Byron. It is interesting to see what Pushkin says of Byron’s poem. In his notes there is the following passage—“Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire’s history of Charles XII. He was struck solely by the picture of a man bound to a wild horse and borne over the steppes. A poetical picture of course; but see what he did with it. What a living creation! What a broad brush! But do not expect to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual gloomy Byronic hero. Byron was not thinking of him. He presented a series of pictures, one more striking than the other. Had his pen come across the story of the seduced daughter and the father’s execution, it is improbable that anyone else would have dared to touch the subject.”

“Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire’s history of Charles XII. He was struck solely by the picture of a man bound to a wild horse and borne over the steppes. A poetical picture of course; but see what he did with it. What a living creation! What a broad brush! But do not expect to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual gloomy Byronic hero. Byron was not thinking of him. He presented a series of pictures, one more striking than the other. Had his pen come across the story of the seduced daughter and the father’s execution, it is improbable that anyone else would have dared to touch the subject.”

The romantic movement in Russia was, as far as Pushkin was concerned, not really a romantic movement at all. Still less was it so in the case of the Pléiade which followed him. And yet, for want of a better word, one is obliged to call it theromanticmovement, as it was a new movement, a renascence that arose out of the ashes of the pseudo-classical eighteenth century convention. Pushkin was followed by a Pléiade.

The claim of his friend and fellow-student,Baron Delvig, to fame, rests rather on his friendship with Pushkin (to whom he played the part of an admirable critic) than on his own verse. He died in 1831.Yazykov,Prince Bariatinsky,Venevitinov, andPolezhaev, can all be included in the Pléiade; all these are lyrical poets of the second order, and none of them—except Polezhaev, whosereal promise of talent was shattered by circumstances (he died of drink and consumption after a career of tragic vicissitudes)—has more than an historical interest.

Pushkin’s successor to the throne of Russian letters was Lermontov: no unworthy heir. The name Lermontov is said to be the same as the Scotch Learmonth. The story of his short life is a simple one. He was born at Moscow in 1814. He visited the Caucasus when he was twelve. He was taught English by a tutor. He went to school at Moscow, and afterwards to the University. He left in 1832 owing to the disputes he had with the professors. At the age of eighteen, he entered the Guards’ Cadet School at St. Petersburg; and two years later he became an officer in the regiment of the Hussars. In 1837 he was transferred to Georgia, owing to the scandal caused by the outspoken violence of his verse; but he was transferred to Novgorod in 1838, and was allowed to return to St. Petersburg in the same year. In 1840 he was again transferred to the Caucasus for fighting a duel with the son of the French Ambassador; towards the end of the year, he was once more allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In 1841he went back for a third time to the Caucasus, where he forced a duel on one of his friends over a perfectly trivial incident, and was killed, on the 15th of July of the same year.

In all the annals of poetry, there is no more curious figure than Lermontov. He was like a plant that above all others needed a sympathetic soil, a favourable atmosphere, and careful attention. As it was, he came in the full tide of the régime of Nicholas I, a régime of patriarchal supervision, government interference, rigorous censorship, and iron discipline,—a grey epoch absolutely devoid of all ideal aspirations. Considerable light is thrown on the contradictory and original character of the poet by his novel,A Hero of Our Days, the first psychological novel that appeared in Russia. The hero, Pechorin, is undoubtedly a portrait of the poet, although he himself said, and perhaps thought, that he was merely creating a type.

The hero of the story, who is an officer in the Caucasus, analyses his own character, and lays bare his weaknesses, follies, and faults, with the utmost frankness. “I am incapable of friendship,” he says. “Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other,although often neither of them will admit it; I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a tiring business.” Or he writes: “I have an innate passion for contradiction.... The presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a passionate dreamer.” Speaking of enemies, he says: “I love enemies, but not after the Christian fashion.” And on another occasion: “Why do they all hate me? Why? Have I offended any one? No. Do I belong to that category of people whose mere presence creates antipathy?” Again: “I despise myself sometimes, is not that the reason that I despise others? I have become incapable of noble impulses. I am afraid of appearing ridiculous to myself.”

On the eve of fighting a duel Pechorin writes as follows—

“If I die it will not be a great loss to the world, and as for me, I am sufficiently tired of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, who does not go home to bed because the carriage is not there, but as soon as the carriage is there, Good-bye!”

“I review my past and I ask myself, Whyhave I lived? Why was I born? and I think there was a reason, and I think I was called to high things, for I feel in my soul the presence of vast powers; but I did not divine my high calling; I gave myself up to the allurement of shallow and ignoble passions; I emerged from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. I loved for my own sake, for my own pleasure.... And if I die I shall not leave behind me one soul who understood me. Some think I am better, others that I am worse than I am. Some will say he was a good fellow; others he was a blackguard.”

It will be seen from these passages, all of which apply to Lermontov himself, even if they were not so intended, that he must have been a trying companion, friend, or acquaintance. He had, indeed, except for a fewintimate friends, an impossible temperament; he was proud, overbearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savageamour-propre; and he took a childish delight in annoying; he cultivated “le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire”; he was envious of what was least enviable in his contemporaries. He could not bear not to make himself felt, and if he felt that he was unsuccessful in accomplishing this by pleasant means, he resorted to unpleasant means. And yet, at the same time, he was warm-hearted, thirsting for love and kindness, and capable of giving himself up to love—if he chose.

During his period of training at the Cadet School, he led a wild life; and when he became an officer, he hankered after social and not after literary success. He did not achieve it immediately; at first he was not noticed, and when he was noticed he was not liked. His looks were unprepossessing, and one of his legs was shorter than the other. His physical strength was enormous—he could bend a ramrod with his fingers. Noticed he was determined to be; and, as he himself says in one of his letters, observing that every one in society had some sort of pedestal—wealth,lineage, position, or patronage—he saw that if he, not pre-eminently possessing any of these,—though he was, as a matter of fact, of a good Moscow family,—could succeed in engaging the attention of one person, others would soon follow suit. This he set about to do by compromising a girl and then abandoning her: and he acquired the reputation of a Don Juan. Later, when he came back from the Caucasus, he was treated as a lion. All this does not throw a pleasant light on his character, more especially as he criticized in scathing tones the society in which he was anxious to play a part, and in which he subsequently enjoyed playing a part. But perhaps both attitudes of mind were sincere. He probably sincerely enjoyed society, and hankered after success in it; and equally sincerely despised society and himself for hankering after it.

As he grew older, his pride and the exasperating provocativeness of his conduct increased to such an extent that he seemed positively seeking for serious trouble, and for some one whose patience he could overtax, and on whom he could fasten a quarrel. And this was not slow to happen.

At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to life, resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet, and so recoiled upon himself. The epoch, the atmosphere and the society were the worst possible for his peculiar nature; and the only fruitful result of the friction between himself and the society and the established order of his time, was that he was sent to the Caucasus, which proved to be a source of inspiration for him, as it had been for Pushkin. One is inclined to say, “If only he had lived later or longer”; yet it may be doubted whether, had he been born in a more favourable epoch, either earlier in the milder régime of Alexander I, or later, in the enthusiastic epoch of the reforms, he would have been a happier man and produced finer work.

The curious thing is that his work does not reveal an overwhelming pessimism like Leopardi’s, an accent of revolt like Musset’s, or of combat like Byron’s; but rather it testifies to a fundamental indifference to life, a concentrated pride. If it be true that you can roughly divide the Russian temperament intotwo types—the type of the pure fool, such as Dostoyevsky’sIdiot, and a type of unconquerable pride, such as Lucifer—then Lermontov is certainly a fine example of the second type. You feel that he will never submit or yield; but then he died young; and the Russian poets often changed, and not infrequently adopted a compromise which was the same thing as submission.

Lermontov was, like Pushkin, essentially a lyric poet, still more subjective, and profoundly self-centred. His attempts at the drama (imitations of Schiller and an attempt at the manner of Griboyedov) were failures. But, unlike Pushkin, he was a true romantic; and his work proves to us how essentially different a thing Russian romanticism is from French, German or English romanticism. He began with astonishing precocity to write verse when he was twelve. His earliest efforts were in French. He then began to imitate Pushkin. While at the Cadet School he wrote a series of cleverly written, more or less indecent, and more or less Byronic—the Byron ofBeppo—tales in verse, describing his love adventures, and episodes of garrison life. What brought him fame was his “Odeon the Death of Pushkin,” which, although unjustified by the actual facts—he represents Pushkin as the victim of a bloodthirsty society—strikes strong and bitter chords. Here, without any doubt, are “thoughts that breathe and words that burn”—

“And you, the proud and shameless progenyOf fathers famous for their infamy,You, who with servile heel have trampled downThe fragments of great names laid low by chance,You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne,Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory,You hide behind the shelter of the law,Before you, right and justice must be dumb!But, parasites of vice, there’s God’s assize;There is an awful court of law that waits.You cannot reach it with the sound of gold;It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds;And vainly you shall call the lying witness;That shall not help you any more;And not with all the filth of all your goreShall you wash out the poet’s righteous blood.”

He struck this strong chord more than once, especially in his indictment of his own generation, called “A Thought”; and in a poem written on the transfer of Napoleon’s ashes to Paris, in which he pours scorn on the French for deserting Napoleon when he lived and then acclaiming his ashes.

But it is not in poems such as these that Lermontov’s most characteristic qualities are to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, and still less to foreign models. It is true that, as a school-boy, he wrote verses full of Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these were merely echoes of his reading. The gloom of spirit which he expressed later on was a permanent and innate feature of his own temperament. Later, the reading of Shelley spurred on his imagination to emulation, but not to imitation. He sought his own path from the beginning, and he remained in it with obdurate persistence. He remained obstinately himself, indifferent as a rule to outside events, currents of thought and feeling. And he clung to the themes which he chose in his youth. His mind to him a kingdom was, and he peopled it with imagesand fancies of his own devising. The path which he chose was a narrow one. It was a romantic path. He chose for the subject of the poem by which he is perhaps most widely known,The Demon, the love of a demon for a woman. The subject is as romantic as any chosen by Thomas Moore; but there is nothing now that appears rococo in Lermontov’s work. The colours are as fresh to-day as when they were first laid on. The heroine is a Circassian woman, and the action of the poem is in the Caucasus.

The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that denies of Goethe, nor Byron’s Lucifer, looking the Almighty in His face and telling him that His evil is not good; nor does he cherish—

“the study of revenge, immortal hate,”

of Milton’s Satan; but he is the lost angel of a ruined paradise, who is too proud to accept oblivion even were it offered to him. He dreams of finding in Tamara the joys of the paradise he has foregone. “I am he,” he says to her, “whom no one loves, whom every human being curses.” He declares that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, that he desires to be reconciled with Heaven, to love, to pray, to believe in good. And hepours out to her one of the most passionate love declarations ever written, in couplet after couplet of words that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp, Tamara yields to him, and forfeits her life; but her soul is borne to Heaven by the Angel of Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, and the Demon is left as before alone in a loveless, lampless universe. The poem is interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, which are as glowing and splendid as the impassioned utterance of the Demon. They put Pushkin’s descriptions in the shade. Lermontov’s landscape-painting compared with Pushkin’s is like a picture of Turner compared with a Constable or a Bonnington.

Lermontov followed up his first draft ofThe Demon(originally planned in 1829, but not finished in its final form until 1841) with other romantic tales, the scene of which for the most part is laid in the Caucasus: such asIzmail Bey,Hadji-Abrek,Orsha the Boyar—the last not a Caucasian tale. These were nearly all of them sketches in which he tried the colours of his palette. But withMtsyri,the Novice, in which he used some of the materials of the former tales, he produced a finished picture.

Mtsyriis the story of a Circassian orphan who is educated in a convent. The child grows up home-sick at heart, and one day his longing for freedom becomes ungovernable, and he escapes and roams about in the mountains. He loses his way in the forest and is brought back to the monastery after three days, dying from starvation, exertion, and exhaustion. Before he dies he pours out his confession, which takes up the greater part of the poem. He confesses how in the monastery he felt his own country and his own people forever calling, and how he felt he must seek his own people. He describes his wanderings: how he scrambles down the mountain-side and hears the song of a Georgian woman, and sees her as she walks down a narrow path with a pitcher on her head and draws water from the stream. At nightfall he sees the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a falling star; but he dares not seek it. He loses his way in the forest, he encounters and kills a panther. In the morning, he finds a way out of the woods when the daylight comes; he lies in the grass exhausted under the blinding noon, of which Lermontov gives a gorgeous and detailed description—

“And on God’s world there lay the deepAnd heavy spell of utter sleep,Although the landrail called, and ICould hear the trill of the dragonflyOr else the lisping of the stream ...Only a snake, with a yellow gleamLike golden lettering inlaidFrom hilt to tip upon a blade,Was rustling, for the grass was dry,And in the loose sand cautiouslyIt slid, and then began to springAnd roll itself into a ring,Then, as though struck by sudden fear,Made haste to dart and disappear.”

Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and delirium overtake him, and he fancies that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, where speckled fishes are playing in the crystal waters. One of them nestles close to him and sings to him with a silver voice a lullaby, unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and alluring like the call of the Erl King’s daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches the high-water mark of his descriptive powers. Its pages glow with the splendour of the Caucasus.

To his two masterpieces,The DemonandMtsyri, he was to add a third:The Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprichnik (bodyguardsman), and the Merchant Kalashnikov. The Oprichnik insults the Merchant’s wife, and the Merchant challenges him to fight with his fists, kills him, and is executed for it. This poem is written as a folk-story, in the style of theByliny, and it in no way resembles apastiche. It equals, if it does not surpass, Pushkin’sBoris Godunovas a realistic vision of the past; and as an epic tale, for simplicity, absolute appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian literature to compare with it. Besides these larger poems, Lermontov wrote a quantity of short lyrics, many of which, such as “The Sail,” “The Angel,” “The Prayer,” every Russian child knows by heart.

When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov’s romantic work, and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the West—from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda—we find that in Lermontov’s work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled with his lyrical, imaginative, anddescriptive powers, a bed-rock of matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the “intense inane” of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim twilight of Coleridge. Romantic he is, but one note of Heine takes us into a different world: for instance, Heine’s quite ordinary adventures in the Harz Mountains convey a spell and glamour that takes us over a borderland that Lermontov never crossed.

Nothing could be more splendid than Lermontov’s descriptions; but they are, compared with those of Western poets, concrete, as sharp as views in a camera obscura. He never ate the roots of “relish sweet, the honey wild and manna dew” of the “Belle Dame Sans Merci”; he wrote of places where Kubla Khan might have wandered, of “ancestral voices prophesying war,” but one has only to quote that line to see that Lermontov’s poetic world, compared with Coleridge’s, is solid fact beside intangible dream.

Compared even with Musset and Victor Hugo, how much nearer the earth Lermontov is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealtwith just the same themes; but in Lermontov, the most splendid painter of mountains imaginable, you never hear

“Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne,”

and you know that it will never drive the Russian poet to frenzy. On the other hand, you never get Victor Hugo’s extravagance and absurdities. Or take Musset; Musset dealt with romantic themessi quis alius; but when he deals with a subject like Don Juan, which of all subjects belonged to the age of Pushkin and Lermontov, he writes lines like these—

“Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin d’autrui;Et ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son âme,Comme un luth éolien, aux lèvres de la nuit.”

Here again we are confronted with a different kind of imagination. Or take a bit of sheer description—

“Pâle comme l’amour, et de pleurs arrosée,La nuit aux pieds d’argent descend dans la rosée.”

You never find the Russian poet impersonatingnature like this, and creating from objects such as the “yellow bees in the ivy bloom” forms more real than living man. The objects themselves suffice. Lermontov sang of disappointed love over and over again, but never did he create a single image such as—

“Elle aurait aimé, si l’orgueilPareil à la lampe inutileQu’on allume près d’un cercueil,N’eut veillé sur son coeur stérile.”

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 passages ofChilde Harold, and the whole ofDon 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. Itsimply 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 constitutes 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 believeThere’s not a soul, who’ll greatly careTo 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 doTo grieve them anyhow.If one of them is living, sayI’m bad at writing home, and theyHave 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 IAnd she ... How very long agoIt is we said good-bye!She won’t ask after me, nor care,But tell her ev’rything, don’t spareHer empty heart; and let her cry;—To her it doesn’t signify.”

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 doTo grieve them anyhow.If one of them is living, sayI’m bad at writing home, and theyHave 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 IAnd she ... How very long agoIt is we said good-bye!She won’t ask after me, nor care,But tell her ev’rything, don’t spareHer 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 Shelley. Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you take him, one of the most astonishing figures, and certainly the greatest purely lyricalErscheinungin 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 contemporaryKoltsov(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 reproducedthe trueVolkstonin 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 François 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.

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, wasNicholas Gogol[1809-52]. It is true that in the thirties Russia began to produce home-made novels. In Pushkin’s storyThe 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 passed; 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 professorship 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 byMirgorod, 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 religiousvein 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 Maupassant, 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 thecharacters inKidnappedwere, 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 theRed Jackethas been observed in the fair; and theRed Jacket, so the gossips say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned out of Hell 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 pawn 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 whotraffic with the Evil One and lose their souls. In the second series,Mirgorod, realism comes to the fore in the stories of “The Old-Fashioned 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-Fashioned 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 Dickens. 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, twonouvelles,Tarass BulbaandViy, sum up between them the whole of the other side of Gogol’s genius.Tarass Bulba, a short historical novel, withits 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) andTales(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 shivering 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 patheticfigures of failure that crowd the pages of Russian literature.

While Gogol had been writing and publishing these tales, he had also been steadily writing for the stage; but here the great difficulty and obstacle was the Censorship, 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 Censorship to forbid before all other plays,The Revisor, orInspector-General, was performed. This was owing to the direct intervention of the Emperor.The Revisoris 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 talentfor easy lying, is a masterly creation. The play at once became a classic, 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 ofThe 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 hisDead 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. Nobody 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 fictitious 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 makemoney 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 manuscript. 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 isa 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’sDead Soulsmade 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: “God, 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 circumstances 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 notone 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 hisDead Soulsfrom the great satirists of other nations, and his satire from thesaeva indignatioof Swift, for instance, is that, afterlaying 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 passion—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 passion, 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 Soulsis a deeper book than any of Gogol’s early work. It is deep in the same way asDon Quixoteis deep; and likeDon Quixoteit makes boys laugh, young menthink, and old men weep. Apart from its philosophy and ideas,Dead Soulshad 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. Nobody 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 classic models of prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin had bequeathed to them permanent models of verse.

Gogol wrote no more fiction afterDead Souls. In 1847Passages from a Correspondence with a Friendwas 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 ofDead Soulsis 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. Heis 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. Mérimée places Gogol among the bestEnglishhumorists. 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 theEuropean Messenger.Prince Vyazemsky, whose literary activitylasted from 1808-78, was a critic as well as a poet and a satirist, a fine example of the type of great Russian nobles 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 æsthetic, literary, and journalistic criticism wasBelinsky(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 Censorship, but his influence was far-reaching and deep. He created Russian criticism, and after passing through several phases—a German phase of Hegelian philosophy, Gallophobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Goethe and for objective art, a Frenchphase 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 biassed 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 passionate, 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 æsthetic and literary criticism has remainedon it ever since, and differentiates it from the literary and æsthetic 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. Æsthetic 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 god-gifted genius is mere dross.

The reason of this has been luminously stated by Professor Brückner: “To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without the liberty of assembly, 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 æsthetic recreation; he placed it at the service of his aspirations.... Hence the strikingpartiality, 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 Brückner, 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 æstheticism. 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 æsthetic 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 biassed of English or French critics is broad-minded compared to a Russian critic. HadKeats 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 Brückner wrote hisHistory of Russian Literature, now that the press is more or less free, save for occasional pin-pricks, 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 areVolynskyandMerezhkovsky; 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 workappear 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 assembly 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 hadsuffered by her isolation from the West and through the influence of the former Byzantine Empire, published the first of hisLettres sur la Philosophie de l’Histoirein theTelescopeof Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. 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 circumstances 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 theTelescope, 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 authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox Church, andPrince 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 isAlexander Herzen(1812-1870). His real name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalize his marriage in Russia, so his children took their mother’s name.

Herzen’s career belongs rather to the history of Russia than to the history of Russian literature; were it not that, besides being one of the greatest and most influential personalities of his time, he was a great memoir-writer. He began, after a mathematical training at the University, with fiction, of which the best example is a novelWho is to Blame?which paints thegénie sans portefeuilleof the period that Turgenev was so fond of depicting. Herzen was exiled on account of his oral propaganda, first to Perm, and then to Vyatka. In 1847, he left Russia for ever, and livedabroad for the rest of his life, at first in Paris, and afterwards in London, where he edited a newspaper calledThe Bell.

Herzen was a Socialist. Western Europe he considered to be played out. He looked upon Socialism as a new religion and a new form of Christianity, which would be to the new world what Christianity had been to the old. The Russian peasants would play the part of the Invasion of the Barbarians; and the functions of the State would be taken over by the Russian Communes on a basis of voluntary and mutual agreement—the principle of the Commune, of sharing all possessions in common, being so near the fundamental principle of Christianity.

“A thinking Russian,” he wrote, “is the most independent being in the world. What can stop him? Consideration for the past? But what is the starting-point of modern Russian history if it be not a total negation of nationalism and tradition?... What do we care, disinherited minors that we are, for the duties you have inherited? Can your worn-out morality satisfy us? Your morality which is neither Christian nor human, which is used only in copybooks and for the ritualof the law?” Again: “We are free because we begin with our own liberation; we are independent; we have nothing to lose or to honour. A Russian will never be a protestant, or follow thejuste milieu... our civilization is external, our corrupt morals quite crude.”

The great point Herzen was always making was that Russia had escaped the baleful tradition of Western Europe, and the hereditary infection of Western corruption. Thus, in his disenchantment with Western society and his enthusiasm for the communal ownership of land, he was at one with the Slavophiles; where he differed from them was in accepting certain Western ideas, and in thinking that a new order of things, a new heaven and earth, could be created by a social revolution, which should be carried out by the Slavs. His influence—he was one of the precursors of Nihilism, for the seed he sowed, falling on the peculiar soil where it fell, produced the whirlwind as a harvest—belongs to history. What belongs to literature are his memoirs,My Past and my Thoughts(Byloe i Dumy), which were written between 1852 and 1855.These memoirs of everyday life and encounters with all sorts and conditions of extraordinary men are in their subject-matter as exciting as a novel, and, in their style, on a level with the masterpieces of Russian prose, through their subtle psychology, interest, wit, and artistic form.

Herzen lived to see his ideas bearing fruit in the one way which of all others he would have sought to avoid, namely in “militancy” and terrorism. When in 1866, an attempt was made by Karakozov to assassinate Alexander II, and Herzen wrote an article repudiating all political assassinations as barbarous, the revolutionary parties solemnly denounced him and his newspaper.The Bell, which had already lost its popularity owing to Herzen’s pro-Polish sympathies in 1863, ceased to have any circulation. Thus he lived to see his vast hopes shattered, the seed he had sown bearing a fruit he distrusted, his dreams of regeneration burst like a bubble, his ideals exploited by unscrupulous criminals. He died in 1870, leaving a name which is as great in Russian literature as it is remarkable in Russian history.

Turning now to theSlavophiles, their idea was that Russia was already in possession of the best possible institutions,—orthodoxy, autocracy, and communal ownership, and that the West had everything to learn from Russia. They pointed to the evils arising from the feudal and aristocratic state, the system of primogeniture in the West, the higher legal status of women in Russia, and the superiority of a communal system, which leads naturally to a Consultative National Assembly with unanimous decisions, over the parliaments and party systems of the West.

The leader of the Slavophiles wasHomyakov, a man of great culture; a dialectician, a poet, and an impassioned defender of orthodoxy. The best of his lyrics, which are inspired by a profound love of his country and belief in it, have great depth of feeling. Besides Homyakov, there were other poets, such asTyutchevandIvan Aksakov. Just as the camp of Reform produced in Herzen a supreme writer of memoirs, that of the Slavophiles also produced a unique memoir writer in theSerge Aksakov, the father ofthe poet (1791-1859), who published hisFamily Chroniclein 1856, and who describes the life of the end of the eighteenth century, and the age of Alexander. This book, one of the most valuable historical documents in Russian, and a priceless collection of biographical portraits, is also a gem of Russian prose, exact in its observation, picturesque and perfectly balanced in its diction.

Aksakov remembered with unclouded distinctness exactly what he had seen in his childhood, which he spent in the district of Orenburg. He paints the portraits of his grandfather and his great-aunt. We see every detail of the life of a backwoodsman of the days of Catherine II. We see the noble of those days, simple and rustic in his habits as a peasant, almost entirely unlettered, and yet a gentleman through and through, unswerving in maintaining the standard of morals and traditions which he considers due to his ancient lineage. We see every hour of the day of his life in the country; we hear all the details of the family life, the marriage of his son, the domestic troubles of his sister.

What strikes one most, perhaps, besidesthe contrast between the primitive simplicity of the habits and manners of the life described, and the astoundingly gentlemanlike feelings of the man who leads this quiet and rustic life in remote and backward conditions, is that there is not a hint or suspicion of anything antiquated in the sentiments and opinions we see at play. The story of Aksakov’s grandfather might be that of any country gentleman in any country, at any epoch, making allowances for a certain difference in manners and customs and conditions which were peculiar to the epoch in question, the existence of serfdom, for instance—although here, too, the feeling with regard to manners described is startlingly like the ideal of good manners of any epoch, although themœursare sometimes different. The story is as vivid and as interesting as that of any novel, as that of the novels of Russian writers of genius, and it has the additional value of being true. And yet we never feel that Aksakov has a thought of compiling a historical document for the sake of its historical interest. He is making history unawares, just as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose without knowing it; and,whether he was aware of it or not, he wrote perfect prose. No more perfect piece of prose writing exists. The style flows on like a limpid river; there is nothing superfluous, and not a hesitating touch. It is impossible to put down the narrative after once beginning it, and I have heard of children who read it like a fairy-tale. One has the sensation, in reading it, of being told a story by some enchanting nurse, who, when the usual question, “Is it true?” is put to her, could truthfully answer, “Yes, it is true.” The pictures of nature, the portraits of the people, all the good and all the bad of the good and the bad old times pass before one with epic simplicity and the magic of a fairy-tale. One is spellbound by the charm, the dignity, the good-nature, the gentle, easy accent of the speaker, in whom one feels convinced not only that there was nothing common nor mean, but to whom nothing was common or mean, who was a gentleman by character as well as by lineage, one of God’s as well as one of Russia’s nobility.

There is no book in Russian which, for its entrancing interest as well as for its historicalvalue, so richly deserves translation into English; only such a translation should be made by a stylist—that is, by a man who knows how to speak and write his mother tongue perspicuously and simply.

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