Book Discussion
Toparaphrase the biblical adage: Samson is upon ye, Philistines! That quaint giant, Russian literature, is storming the Anglo-Saxon world; and no longer in apothecary doses, in solitary books, but in avalanches. A practical dreamer, Alfred A. Knopf, is determined to deluge this country with the best and nearly best that has been written in Russia, and he is doing it on a big scale, in torrents and showers. Such a dizzying list of publications: Gogol, Goncharov, Lermontov, Gorky, Andreyev, Garshin, Kropotkin; and he is going to give us Sologub, Kuzmin, Ropshin! And he has given usPrzybyszewski’sHomo Sapiens, the book about which I have been drumming the ears of my American friends for years, the book that has stirred me more than any other work of art,—I mean it literally. Mr. Knopf has introduced another novel feature on the book-market: he selects translators from among those who know three things—Russian, English, and how to write,—so that the reader will be spared the torture of wading through a badly-done translation from the French version of a German translation from the Russian (examples? RecallSanine!).
A literature is like a people; if you want to know it, you must learn not only its Cromwells and Napoleons, but also its Asquiths and Vivianis; not only its Shakespeares and Goethes, but its Wellses and Sudermanns as well. Turgenyev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, do not exhaust Russian literatureof the nineteenth century, though they are the greatest novelists of their epoch. There are many interesting sides of Russian life which are not reflected on the canvasses of the great Trio, but have been painted by perhaps minor artists, whom we cannot afford to miss if we intend to gain a clear vista of that peculiar life and its peculiar literature.
Hence Goncharov and hisPrecipice. In Russia he is ranked next to Turgenyev. Without the latter’s delicate lyricism Goncharov presents the objective artist, if this is possible, in depicting the life of the gentry, the class that has been either ignored or caricatured by the writers with aTendenz. InPrecipicewe face Rayski, Vyera, the grandmother, the passing types of the romantic nobility, whose passions and tragedies are as stirring and as human as those of the more democratic elements of society.
Garshin is another writer heretofore unknown to the English world. HisSignal and other Storiesare achingly Russian. Garshin is a product of the Eighties, the epoch of “petty deeds,” when the heavy boot of Alexander III. drove into the underground all that was idealistic in his country. The soil-lessIntelligentziahad the alternative of turning retrogrades or going insane. Garshin’s lot was with the latter category. His few stories ache with the black melancholy which finally hurled him down a flight of stone steps,—his last flight. His war impressions are gripping with the resigned Russian sadness; they are all-human, universal; butAttalea Princeps, the symbolical tale of an exotic plant chafing in a hot-house—who but a compatriot of mad Garshin will fathom its profound tragicness!
The republication of Kropotkin’sIdeals and Realities in Russian Literaturewill be of service to the critical student of Russian literature. I say critical, for although the book is rich in material the personal views of the author and his valuations of the writers are considerably obsolete and tainted with the liberalistic tendency of “problem”-friends.
Below are more reviews of Mr. Knopf’s publications. The most important one is Przybyszewski’sHomo Sapiens. It deserves a special article. See the next issue!
Taras Bulba, by Nicolai Gogol. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
They burned him at the stake, bound to a great tree in iron chains. The flames lapped at his feet, glowing into his old face that was scarred and leathered with battle, brightening the silver of his fierce mustache....
Out of the reddened shadows that fell over him like a mantle his lips could be seen curling in a smile, contemptuous and arrogant, and he turned his eyes toward the Dnyeper where the boats of his brothers were pulling away under a rain of lead.
“Farewell, comrades,” he shouted to them; “remember me, and come hither again next spring to make merry!”
And then he turned to the Lyakhs against whom he had waged war and who knew him as the raven of the steppe.
The fire had risen above the faggots and the great tree was burning. Out of the flames came the voice of the hero....
“A Tzar shall arise from the Russian soil and there shall not be a Power in the world which shall not submit to him.”
Thus died Taras Bulba, kazak.
In this day when a man’s skin is his most greedily guarded possession and the lisping of pale, pretty words his greatest glory, Taras Bulba comes charging into America, a figure in need. On his black horse he comes, his scalp lock flying in the wind, his sword waving in great circles above his head, his body leaning over the shining neck of his steed and his voice ringing with the battle whoop of the kazak.
He is the eternal warrior, the plundering hero, the lusty knight of battle, a devil of a man with boiling blood in his veins and the savage joy of life in his heart.
Taras and his two sons, Andrii and Ostap, go thundering up and down the Russian steppe with the savage avalanche of the Zaporozhe. They fight and carouse and their deeds are mighty—mightier than the deeds of which Homer sang and the performances which Walter Scott sketched. Beside Taras Ivanhoe pales into tin puppet, Ulysses into a lady’s man.
What a book!
If you know Gogol through hisDead Souls, the “humorous” classic of Russia, you will read in amazement hisTaras Bulba. It is Rabelais with a sword. Through its pages ring the shouts of battle and Gargantuan manhood—Homo Monstrosus....
Once or twice the pale face of a woman peeps out of them and Gogol kicks it back into place with his kazak boot.
“Do you want fire, Ostap? Do you want mad blood in your heart? Come ride with me over the steppe to the tents of the Zaporozhe....”
When I closed the book with its red shouts still ringing in my ears—with old Taras still burning against the great tree and the magic steppe stretching before me—I thought of the baby-ribbon bards and the querulous quibblers of American letters—and smiled....
Come on, Bulba, there is still blood in America that has not dried, there are still hearts that have not been transformed into pink doilies.
Welcome! You can’t shout too loud for me, you can’t swagger too much. The soul of you that left your burning body laughed and roared its way into heaven....
Chelkash, and Other Stories, by Maxim Gorky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Maxim Gorky is the poorest and most uneven of the Russian writers. He is—or was—a pioneer. He came wailing from lonely roads where the vagrom man sleeps beneath the stars and wonders what there is to life. And his dull, bitter plaints with ferocity as their leit motif soon sounded over the world. When the majority of Russian genius was struggling to “go to the people” Gorky had the advantage of coming from the people.
Alfred Knopf’s collection of Gorky tales under the title ofChelkashis Gorky at his best and worst. I find in it some of his best tales abominably written, studded with crass “gems” of philosophy, broken up with unnecessary moralizings. For instance, hisTwenty-Six of Us and One Other. In this Gorky writes of his immortal bakeshop. As a youth Gorky spent his days in a bakeshop. Time and again he has painted it, in other stories better than in this one. But in this instance the bakeshop is only a background; usually it is the main theme. Tanya, a little girl, stops every morning to say “Hello” to the twenty-six bakers. They give her little cakes. She is the only “ray of sweetness” in their lives. They look upon her as a daughter, a shrine. And Tanya it is who alone awakens in them for a few moments each day something approaching fineness. Along comes a terrible dandy, a ladies’ man. He seduces every lady he sets his cap for; it is his boast. The bakers like him: he is a “gentleman” and very democratic. But one day when he is boasting the head baker grows excited and mentions “Tanya.” The dandy boasts he will seduce her. An argument follows. After a month the dandy succeeds. The bakers witness the girl’s “undoing.” When she comes out of the dandy’s room, smiling, happy, they gather around her, spit at her, revile and abuse her. No names they can think of are bad enough. They fall into a frenzy of vituperation. But they do not strike her. Realizing dully that a “god” has died, they go back to work.
Chelkash, the first tale in the book, is Gorky on his “home ground”—the vagrom man, the pirate, the road thief. He paints him with a careful brush and a sureness of his subject. InThe Steppehe does the same.A Rolling Stone, andChums, the last the best story in the volume, are also variations of the vagrom man theme—the underdog. But it is in stories likeOne Autumn Night,Comrades,The Green Kitten, andHer Loverthat Gorky reveals his greatest genius and his greatest weakness. He can feel them, imagine them, see them, but for some reason he cannot write them.One Autumn Nightmight have been one of the world’s strongest classics.
All the tales in the volume are the work of the “first” Gorky—the bitter one, the melodramatic, outraged Gorky. They are on a whole not as good as the collection of stories written during that same period and translated in a volume calledOrloff and His Wife. Gorky still lives and he has learned how to write. His later tales, composed in Italy by the “second”Gorky, the consumptive, contemplative, clear-seeing Gorky, are mature, almost mellow. But they are no longer distinctive. Anyone could have written them, anyone with a bit of genius and a great deal of time on his hands. But theChelkashtales and the tales inOrloff and His Wife—these no one but Gorky has written, and although they are inferior in workmanship to the products of Chekhov and Andreyev the American reader will find them perhaps more interesting.
The Little Angel, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Russian Silhouettes, by Anton Chekhov. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The Breaking Point, by Michael Artzibashef. New York: B. W. Huebsch.
“Charming fellows, those Russians,” said my friend. “When it comes to delineating the processes, mental and physical, of rape, suicide, incest, arson, butchery, and disease, they are without peers....” I therefore take this occasion to hurl two newly translated Russian books at my friend, hoping they land on his thick head.
The first book which I hurl at my friend is Andreyev’sThe Little Angel. It is a collection of short stories. There are fifteen stories in the new volume brought out by Mr. Alfred Knopf, and all of them are little masterpieces. There is one story about a dog,Snapper. Only Anatole France has equaled it. There is another story,The Marseillaise. It is a perfect story. It is Kipling at his very best plus a flavor, a note, a something serious and deep that the Russians alone know how to command, that Kipling never reached. There is one story,In the Basement. I hope my friend chokes on this story. It would serve him right.
ButThe Little Angelstands out from the fifteen. It is about a little boy, a bitter, lonely-hearted fellow whose mother drinks and beats him, whose father is dying of consumption, and who in turn snarls and bullies his playmates and weeps at night because his heart is so empty and heavy. In this story Andreyev attains a poignant delicacy of touch and a grim beauty which even his one-time contemporary Chekhov never surpassed.
The Little Angelis the most beautiful short story I ever have read.
Chekhov has also been translated again. A collection of fragments, vibrating episodes, moods, and exquisite children stories calledRussian Silhouetteshas been issued by Scribners’.
A better artist than Andreyev, keener, more reserved, more subtle, Chekhov to my notion nevertheless lacks the vibrancy which the author ofThe Seven Who Were Hangedflings into his tales. Andreyev wields the pen of Dostoevsky with a little thinner ink. Chekhov is Turgenev fragmentized. He has left behind him a series of little canvases so finely done, so skilfully passionate ... well, I hurl him at my friend without further ado....
... It is that consumptive rogue of an Artzibashef who has caused most of the trouble. The devil take him and his erotic suicides. His latest translated book brought out by Huebsch is a tasteless joke. It is calledThe Breaking Point. In it all the characters but one commit suicide, all the women are “ruined.” Whenever two or more of its genial personae come together they forthwith fall into an argument concerning the futility of life, the idiocy of existence and so on and so on. And the trouble is that Artzibashef can write, beautifully, keenly, and sometimes gloriously. InSanine, for instance, inThe Millionaire, there are passages better than Andreyev, better than Chekhov, better than any writer has written. But the books are distorted, full of puerile moralizings, breathing a diseased lust and a sentimentalized violence—andThe Breaking Pointis the worst of them to date. Artzibashef’s work stands in the same relation to the Russian realism that Paul De Kock’s work stands to the French sensual finesse.