INTRODUCTION.
Of all manifestations of literary genius humour is the rarest, and I am not sure that it is not the highest. Laughter is immortal. The sentimental novels over which our grandfathers and grandmothers shed floods of tears—the “Corinnas,” the “Clarissas,” and the “New Heloises”—have become for us soporifics of an almost irresistible strength. But the world still laughs, and will laugh for ever, over the masterpiece of Cervantes and the burlesques of Voltaire. Who nowadays can read from beginning to end Francesco Petrarca, and who can put down Giovanni Boccaccio when once begun?
Then again, whilst the demand for refreshing, invigorating laughter has been in all times the greatest, the number of authors who have come forward to dispense it is surprisingly small, even in the richest literatures. The Italians, for example, have had only one master of immortal laughter—the above-mentioned Boccaccio. The great Manzoni possessed the deep intrinsic qualities of a humorist but had not the pungency. In the long list of Italian authors of our century there is only one humorist of first magnitude—Carlo Porta, whowrote not in literary Italian but in the Milanese dialect.
Of all races the stern, sad English are by far the richest in the beautiful gift of genuine humour. The melancholy Slavonians come, I think, next to the English. Melancholy does not exclude humour. On the contrary, the richest pearls of humour are gathered at the bottom of the sea of sadness. The greatest humorists have never been men of cheerful mood, and this seems to be as true of nations as of men.
From the time when Russia first possessed a literature worthy of the name, we have always had eminent humorists, some of them, like Gogol and Shchedrìn, belonging to those makers of divine laughter who so rarely appear among the nations.
But although justly popular in their own country, the Russian humorists are hardly known abroad. This is certainly due not to want of opportunity of knowing them. Gogol’s masterpieces, “Dead Souls” and “The Inspector,” were translated years ago into English. But he is not half so well known in this country as any of the three great Russian novelists. Humour is so eminently national, it is so closely bound to the soil where it is born, that it can rarely be transplanted to other climes and skies. It certainly loses more in translation than ordinary fiction, and it requires a peculiar gift on the part of the translator that its distinctive characteristics should not be lost altogether. However, translators have had the courage to try their skill upon Gogol, who is not only the greatest but the most comprehensible of Russian humorists.With him the comical effect results neither from the peculiar manner of description nor from the contrasts presented, but from his unique gift of bringing to the surface the comical traits of men’s characters. His is the deepest and the most artistic form of humour, which on this account becomes sometimes international. Gogol’s heroes—some of them at least—are as comprehensible to the English as Charles Dickens’s Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby are comprehensible to the Russians.
The present volume contains two beautiful examples of Gogol’s art, which has not been yet translated into English—“A Madman’s Diary” and “Marriage.”
The “Diary” is a fanciful sketch, presenting perhaps the most typical sample of “Humour,” as distinguished from other forms of the comical, which can be found in any literature. It is an intensely pathetic, and at the same time irresistibly droll, bit of autobiography of a poor wretch of an official whose life has been one of insufferable humiliation, and whose mind, upset by a fatal passion for a fashionable girl, seeks refuge in the dream of greatness ending in total madness. “Laughter through tears,” that was Gogol’s own definition of the character of his muse, and in no other work has he shown so palpably what he meant by that expression as in “A Madman’s Diary.”
“Marriage,” although bearing the author’s heading, “an utterly incredible story,” and viewed by him as a mere joke, is recognised by all Russia as one of Gogol’s truest and finest works. It contains two of the best conceived and most delicately drawn characters of our great character-maker, that of the hero,the old bachelor Podkolyòssin, an amusing type of irresolution and pusillanimity, and of his friend Kochkaryòv, the meddlesome busybody, who, just after he has abused the professional matchmaker Fèkla for having married him to a fool, becomes fired with an irresistible longing to confer upon his bosom friend Podkolyòssin the blessing of an alliance with another fool of exactly the same type. As a comedy of customs “Marriage” reproduces a patriarchal life so remote from the modern English that some explanations are necessary. Among the uneducated part of the Russian middle-class, as well as among the peasantry, marriages are arranged by the parents. The young people being considered too ignorant to be consulted upon a matter of such importance. In the villages, among the peasantry, where everybody is known by everybody else, no special intermediaries are needed to arrange these matches. But it is different with the middle-class living in large cities. Here a class of professional matchmakers and go-betweens exists. Naturally enough, it lends itself very much to ridicule, and two samples of it appear in the present volume—one in Gogol, the other in Ostròvsky’s comedy.
Gogol, who was born in 1810 and died in 1852, is the oldest of our great prose writers. To him we can trace the origin of the Russian realistic novel as well as drama. Ostròvsky, who is his successor in the dramatic art, is our contemporary. He was born in 1824, and died four years ago. To him the Russians owe their theatre: he left us thirty-seven dramas and comedies, varying in merit and popularity, but all keeping their place upon the stage.
“Incompatibility of Temper”—one of the two of his comedies that are given in the present volume—is a sample of that pure and deep humour which we admire in Gogol. Serafìma, the heroine, with her extraordinary stupidity, sentimentality, apparent whimsicalness, and practical pigheadedness, is as living and striking a creation of Russian humour as the best of Gogol’s types. But in the next comedy the sunny, sympathetic humour changes into the harsh laughter of the satirist.
The “Domestic Picture,” the second of Ostròvsky’s dramas, is anything but a picture of Russian domestic life. It is a bitter and merciless satire, exposing the commercial dishonesty, the result of ignorance, which prevailed in the bulk of our middle-class two generations ago, and the shocking immorality nestling secretly in those families where despotism has destroyed all natural ties of affection and uprooted all sense of honour.
With Shchedrìn (Saltykòv) we are in presence of the greatest satirist the Slavonic race has produced. He is a man of our time, Russia having lost him only a few years ago. For about fifty years he was the moral leader of liberal Russia, having devoted his life to the awakening of the national conscience by all the ways and methods which his incomparable genius could suggest. He was the political chronicler of his time, reproducing in rough caricatures, which made the whole of reading Russia roar with laughter, the principal events which took place in the country. At the same time, in his more elaborate works, as the “Story of the Golovlevs,” and others, he equals Dostoyèvsky in the power of creating weird, gloomy,strikingly original figures, as well as in the subtle delineation of the whole man from the inner side.
When the boldness of some idea or the virulence of some attack rendered it impossible for Shchedrìn (on account of the censorship) to speak plainly, he resorted to what he himself used to call the “slave’s language,” employing the Oriental form of the fable, the allegory, the fairy tale.
The best of Shchedrìn’s works are not translated into English, and probably will never be. His unrivalled wit and humour are untranslatable, because they depend chiefly upon the marvellous skill in using the Russian language. This is not inferiority, but difference in the quality of the talent. Rudyard Kipling’s military stories, to quote an English example, are certainly very fine samples of genuine humour. But what would remain of them if stripped of their racy idiom? And how many second and third-rate authors are just as good (or as bad) in any decent translation?
Our great satirist stands at the head of those authors who must be read in their own tongue. The translator has shown much discernment in choosing as samples of Shchedrìn’s art three minor works of his, in which the language is of lesser importance. One is a burlesque, “The Recollections of Onésime Chenapan,” which is an amusing caricature of the Russian “administrators.” The other two are fables—“The Self-Sacrificing Rabbit,” in which the satirist boldly ridicules nothing less thanthe feeling of loyalty under a régime which consists of brutal violence erected into a system, and “The Eagle as Mecænas,” a skit on the Tzar himself.
The gloomy author ofCrime and Punishmentonce relieved his mind with a queer, semi-fantastic little story, “The Crocodile,” which amuses by its incongruities and contrasts. It has not been before translated, so far as I know, into any foreign language, and the English admirers of Dostoyèvsky will be the first to read it.
But the object of the translator was not merely to make a collection of the best humoristic works of the best Russian authors. She wanted to give samples of all kinds of Russian humour, and her list includes the two Uspènskys, Glyeb and Nikolai, V. Slyeptzòv, and even some sketches by Gorbounòv. There is hardly a name worth mentioning that could be added to these. As to translation, it is as good as it possibly could be. Only a person with the translator’s exceptional knowledge of the Russian language could have overcome the difficulties inherent in a work of such a kind. Yet, with all that, I doubt whether the English will make a fair estimate of the above-mentioned authors, though among them there is one—Glyeb Uspènsky—who enjoys an enormous and well-merited popularity among the very exacting and discriminating Russian public.
What has been said about the untranslatableness of Shchedrìn appliesà fortiorito the minor humorists. Their charm depends in a still greater degree upon the language. The unique flexibility, richness, and freedom of the Russian idiom allows those few who have got the mastery over it to obtain with it truly wonderful effects. Some authors do this at the expense of more substantial qualities. With our younger humorists the language runs riot.They are like those injudicious painters who, having a great command over the colouring, neglect to give the necessary correctness and fulness to thelines, which alone know of no decay and are preserved through time and space. The translation is like the plain black and white reproduction of a picture. Only the substantial, unperishable part of the work is preserved, the rest being lost almost entirely. And in regard to the examples taken here from our minor humorists,—if English readers enjoy the humour of “A Trifling Defect in the Mechanism,” or “The Porridge,” it will be as high a compliment to the translator as to the authors.
A trifle of my own—“The Story of a Kopeck”—has been kindly included by the translator in the present collection. It is quite a youthful production, and will not, I am afraid, be of much credit to Russian humour. But in view of the catholicity of the translator’s choice, which includes even Gorbounòv, I thought it might stand where it is.
Whatever be the reader’s opinion of the merit of separate stories, the translator, as well as the publishers, deserve the thanks of the lover of Russian literature for bringing out this collection.
The smile is the most characteristic trait of a human face. We do not really know what a face is like before we have seen it smiling. Now with a nation its humour is what a smile is with an individual.
S. STEPNIAK.
S. STEPNIAK.
S. STEPNIAK.
S. STEPNIAK.