The Subman
Lifeand Literature in Russia are interdependent forces to such a degree that in approaching a phenomenon, whether in book-form or in reality, we can hardly discern the line of demarcation between cause and effect. If it is true that a number of Russian writers have mirrored actual life in their works, it is more significantly true that many powerful authors have influenced life and have moulded it in accordance with their views and ideas. And it is to be noticed that the less artistic the writers have been, the more obvious has been their tendency to preach and sermonize, the stronger their influence upon the young minds; more than Gogol and Dostoyevsky have such second-rate writers as Chernyshevsky and Stepnyak succeeded in shaping the creeds of their readers. We must remember that literature in Russia, although gagged by bigoted censorship, has been the only medium for expressing and moulding public opinion throughout the past century, and to a great extent this holds true to our very day. Revolutionism, terrorism, socialism, have been propagated through the mouths of novel heroes and heroines for the ardent emulation of the seeking susceptible youth.
The furor produced in Russia by the appearance of Artzibashev’sSaninsome eight years ago has had no parallel even in that country, where a new word in belles-lettres has always taken on the significance of a national event. The importance of this novel is partly due to chronological circumstances—the fact that it came as a luring will o’ the wisp in the post-revolutionary gloom of Russian life. The young generation was on the vergeof despondency; the collapse of the Revolution brought to nought the long struggle, the thousands of sacrificed lives, the high aspirations; the Constitution, which had been the ideal of generations, the religion of all pure-minded Russia, had degenerated into a mocking buffonade, the subservient Duma. At such a time Artzibashev steps forward offering the disillusioned youth a new type—the strong, sane Sanin, who derides the altruistic strivings of his compatriots and advocates simple animalistic life, sans principles, sans standards, with the sole aim of satisfying one’s impulses. So strong and timely was the appeal that it immediately created a large following; clubs and societies were formed for the promulgation of the new religion, Sanin’s ideas were hotly discussed from the lecture platform and in the press—in short, such a formidable movement burst forth that the government, which has usually welcomed any sign of deviation from revolutionary thought, became alarmed and withdrew the book from circulation.
But the importance ofSaninhas been far more than local. In Germany it was translated and even dramatized, and has created a literature. Even France, oversatiated with pornography, was for a moment stirred at the appearance of the sensational novel, until a new scandal captured the limelight. Finally, with the customary Anglo-Saxon retardation, we have the book in English.[2]The universality of Artzibashev’s appeal is thus evident, and the question arises: What is the underlying force that makes the book arouse interest, admiration, and indignation in various tongues and countries? To my mind, this is the answer: The author, a typical representative of our age, has performed a purely subjective, introspective study—hence he has voiced the ideas of his contemporaries, hence he is so readily understood and appreciated by the children of our civilization.
Francis Hackett, who, when he writes on books, has no equal in this country, has remarked with his usual insight: “It is plain that for himself Artzibashev has made not a man, but a hero, a god.” To this true statement I wish to add that when we humans erect a god, we endow him with those qualities and virtues which we ourselves lack, which to us are but unattainable desiderata. Artzibashev glorifies Sanin because he himself is Sanin’s antipode, the whining, impotent Yourii, whom he paints with obvious disgust. This is no sheer presumption; I have followed the author’scareer since his early short stories written in a Tolstoyan, idealistic vein, where he revealed a restless, self-questioning, self-analyzing spirit of the sort that he caricaturizes in Yourii: “Perpetual sighing and groaning, or incessant questionings such as ‘I sneezed just now. Was that the right thing to do? Will it not cause harm to some one? Have I, in sneezing, fulfilled my destiny?’” But the idealist-Artzibashev-Yourii lived not in the clouds, but in the midst of the St. Petersburg Bohème, with the decadent crowd of the restaurant “Vienna”—a life of questionable virtuousness and of dubious hygiene. He conceived the idea ofSaninwhen he had become almost a physical wreck, forced to spend his time, when not in “Vienna,” in a resort in Crimea. Incapable of enjoying carnal life any longer, yet morbidly craving to empty the cup of sensuous pleasures to the dregs, he creates for himself a fetish, an ideal male, stripped of all human weaknesses, doubtings, and questionings, free of all principles but the principle of professing no principles, living to the full the life of a healthy animal.
In order to accentuate the superiority of his god, Sanin, the author surrounds him with sentimental weaklings, vegetating in a small provincial town, engaged in petty philosophizing and whimpering, bored with one another and with the general ennui of their life, aimlessly pining, striving purposelessly. In such a setting the figure of Sanin naturally looms up as the least boring individual. But try to transfer the hero from this stage of marionettes into real Russian, or, for that matter, into any life full of struggle and love and passion, and what a platitudinous, uninteresting figure he will make! In what he says is nothing strikingly new; his discourses on Christianity or on morality could have been borrowed from any modern rank-and-file radical. As to what he does—well, it is zoology. A witty critic has endeavored to pin to him the label of Superman; what an insult for our hero, who after a feast of vodka, cucumbers, and cheap cigarettes, “undressed and got into bed, where he tried to readThus spake Zarathustrawhich he found among Lida’s books” (an interesting detail about the intellectual status of the provincials who read Ibsen, Hamsun, Nietzsche). “But the first few pages were enough to irritate him. Such inflated imagery left him unmoved. He spat, flung the volume aside, and soon fell fast asleep.”
Artzibashev is obviously an erotomaniac. His men and women think of one another only in sexual terms, dream of possessing and being possessed. Broad shoulders, strong muscles, intense virility; ample bosoms, swaying hips, supple bodies—these are thene plus ultraattractions of his heroes and heroines. Even nature appears to his characters through a pathological prism; under the influence of moonlight or sunshine they dream of nude bodies, white limbs, yielding mates.
I repeat my statement:Sanin, or rather Artzibashev, is typical of his age—the age of the oversatiated enervated urbanite, the age of civilizationoverdeveloped at the expense of culture. You see them in the big cities (perhaps to a lesser degree in this young country), on the streets, among society, among professionals—those over-ripe men and women whose senses have become dull, who are driven by ennui and imbecility to seek the piquant, the bestial, the “healthy.” But the true healthy men and women do not talk health, sex, muscles, virility, for as long as our natural faculties are sound we are hardly aware of them. The healthy, those who are pulsating with life, strive to surpass themselves, strive towards the Superman; it is the pathological, the incapacitated, the withered, who impotently yearn for a retrogradation towards the Subman-Sanin.
[2]Sanine, by Michael Artzibashef.[B. W. Huebsch, New York.]
There is hardly any danger of the book being persecuted by Anthony Comstock, for whatever pernicious influence it might have had has been splendidly neutralized through the wretched translation which evidently was rendered from the French version, in its turn a poor translation from the German; this explains—does it justify—the cosmopolitan transliteration of the proper names and the numerous nonsensical errors. The publisher threatens to present the public with Artzibashev’sMillionaire; let us hope that this time the author will be spared the atrocious mutilation by the hands of the humoristic Percy Pinkerton.