Russian literature

POLITICAL LITERATURE

To speak of political literature in a country which has no political liberty, and where nothing can be printed without having been approved by a rigorous censorship, sounds almost like irony. And yet, notwithstanding all the efforts of the Government to prevent the discussion of political matters in the Press, or even in private circles, that discussion goes on, under all possible aspects and under all imaginable pretexts. As a result it would be no exaggeration to say that in the necessarily narrow circle of educated Russian “intellectuals” there is as much knowledge, all round, of matters political as there is in the educated circles of any other European country, and that a certain knowledge of the political life of other nations is wide-spread among the reading portion of Russians.

It is well known that everything that is printed in Russia, even up to the present time, is submitted to censorship, either before it goes to print, or afterwards. To found a review or a paper the editor must offer satisfactory guarantees of not being “too advanced” in his political opinions, otherwise he will not be authorised by the Ministry of the Interior to start the paper or the review and to act in the capacity of its editor. In certain cases a paper or a review, published in one of the two capitals but never in the provinces, may be allowed to appear without passing through the censor’s hands before going to print; but a copy of it must be sent to the censor as soon as the printing begins, and every number may be stopped and prevented from being put into circulation before it has left the printing office, to say nothing of subsequent prosecution. The same condition of things exists for books. Even after the paper or the book has been authorised by the censor it may be subject to a prosecution. The law of 1864 was very definite in stating the conditions under which such prosecution could take place; namely, it had to be made before a regular court, within one month after publication; but this law was never respected by the Government. Books were seized and destroyed—reduced to pulp—without the affair ever being brought before a Court, and I know editors who have been plainly warned that if they insisted upon this being done, they would simply be exiled, by order of the administration, to some remote province. This is not all, moreover. A paper or a review may receive a first, a second, and a third warning, and after the third warning it is suspended, by virtue of that warning. Besides, the Ministry of the Interior may at any time prohibit the sale of the paper in the streets and the shops, or deprive the paper of the right of inserting advertisements.

The arsenal of punishments is thus pretty large; but there is still something else. It is the system of ministerial circulars. Suppose a strike takes place, or some scandalous bribery has been discovered in some branch of the administration. Immediately all papers and reviews receive a circular from the Ministry of the Interior prohibiting them to speak of that strike, or that scandal. Even less important matters will be tabooed in this way. Thus a few years ago an anti-Semitic comedy was put on the stage at St. Petersburg. It was imbued with the worst spirit of national hatred towards the Jews, and the actress who was given the main part in it refused to play. She preferred to break her agreement with the manager rather than to play in that comedy. Another actress was engaged. This became known to the public, and at the first representation a formidable demonstration was made against the actors who had accepted parts in the play, and also against the author. Some eighty arrests—chiefly of students and other young people and of litterateurs—were made from among the audience, and for two days the St. Petersburg papers were full of discussions of the incident; but then came the ministerial circular prohibiting any further reference to the subject, and on the third day there was not a word said about the matter in all the Press of Russia.

Socialism, the social question altogether, and the labour movement are continually tabooed by ministerial circulars—to say nothing of Society and Court scandals, or of the thefts which may be discovered from time to time in the higher administration. At the end of the reign of Alexander II. the theories of Darwin, Spencer, and Buckle were tabooed in the same way, and their works were prevented from being kept by the circulating libraries.

This is what censorship means nowadays. As to what was formerly, a very amusing book could be made of the antics of the different censors, simply by utilising Skabitchévskiy’s History of Censorship. Suffice it to say that when Púshkin, speaking of a lady, wrote: “Your divine features,” or mentioned “her celestial beauty,” the censorship would cross out these verses and write, in red ink on the MS., that such expressions were offensive to divinity and could not be allowed. Verses were mutilated without any regard to the rules of versification; and very often the censor introduced, in a novel, scenes of his own.

Under such conditions political thought had continually to find new channels for its expression. Quite a special language was developed therefore in the reviews and papers for the treatment of forbidden subjects and for expressing ideas which censorship would have found objectionable; and this way of writing was resorted to even in works of art. A few words dropped by a Rúdin, or by a Bazároff in a novel by Turguéneff, conveyed quite a world of ideas. However, other channels besides mere allusion were necessary, and therefore political thought found its expression in various other ways: first of all, in literary and philosophical circles which impressed their stamp on the entire literature of a given epoch; then, in art-criticism, in satire, and in literature published abroad, either in Switzerland or in England.

THE “CIRCLES”—WESTERNERS AND SLAVOPHILES

It was especially in the forties and fifties of the nineteenth century that “the circles” played an important part in the intellectual development of Russia. No sort of expression of political thought in print was possible at that time. The two or three semi-official newspapers which were allowed to appear were absolutely worthless; the novel, the drama, the poem, had to deal with the most superficial matters only, and the heaviest books of science and philosophy were as liable to be prohibited as the lighter sort of literature. Private intercourse was the only possible means of exchanging ideas, and therefore all the best men of the time joined some “circle,” in which more or less advanced ideas were expressed in friendly conversation. There are even men like Stankévitch (1817-1840) who are mentioned in every course of Russian literature, although they have never written anything, simply for the moral influence they exercised within their circle. (Turguéneff’s Yákov Pásynkoff was inspired by such a personality.)

It is quite evident that under such conditions there was no room for the development of political parties properly speaking. However, from the middle of the nineteenth century two main currents of philosophical and social thought, which took the name of “Western” and “Slavophile,” were always apparent. The Westerners were, broadly speaking, for Western civilisation. Russia—they maintained—is no exception in the great family of European nations. She will necessarily pass through the same phases of development that Western Europe has passed through, and consequently her next step will be the abolition of serfdom and, after that, the evolution of the same constitutional institutions as have been evolved in Western Europe. The Slavophiles, on the other side, maintained that Russia has a mission of her own. She has not known foreign conquest like that of the Normans; she has retained still the structure of the old clan period, and therefore she must follow her own quite original lines of development, in accordance with what the Slavophiles described as the three fundamental principles of Russian life: the Greek Orthodox Church, the absolute power of the Tsar, and the principles of the patriarchal family.

These were, of course, very wide programmes, which admitted of many shades of opinion and gradations. Thus, for the great bulk of the Westerners, Western liberalism of the Whig or the Guizot type was the highest ideal that Russia had to strive for. They maintained moreover that everything which has happened in Western Europe in the course of her evolution—such as the depopulation of the villages, the horrors of freshly developing capitalism (revealed in England by the Parliamentary Commissions of the forties), the powers of bureaucracy which had developed in France, and so on, must necessarily be repeated in Russia as well: they were unavoidable laws of evolution. This was the opinion of the rank-and-file “Westerner.”

The more intelligent and the better educated representatives of this same party—Byelínskiy, Hérzen, Turguéneff, Tchernyshévskiy, who were all under the influence of advanced European thought, held quite different views. In their opinion the hardships suffered by workingmen and agricultural labourers in Western Europe from the unbridled power won in the parliaments, by both the landlords and the middle classes, and the limitations of political liberties introduced in the continental States of Europe by their bureaucratic centralisation, were by no means “historical necessities.” Russia—they maintained—need not necessarily repeat these mistakes; she must on the contrary, profit by the experience of her elder sisters, and if Russia succeeds in attaining the era of industrialism without having lost her communal land-ownership, or the autonomy of certain parts of the Empire, or the self-government of the mir in her villages, this will be an immense advantage. It would be therefore the greatest political mistake to go on destroying her village community, to let the land concentrate in the hands of a landed aristocracy, and to let the political life of so immense and varied a territory be concentrated in the hands of a central governing body, in accordance with the Prussian, or the Napoleonic ideals of political centralisation—especially now that the powers of Capitalism are so great.

Similar gradations of opinion prevailed among the Slavophiles. Their best representatives—the two brothers Aksákoff, the two brothers Kiréevskiy, Homyakóff, etc., were much in advance of the great bulk of the party. The average Slavophile was simply a fanatic of absolute rule and the Orthodox Church, to which feelings he usually added a sort of sentimental attachment to the “old good times,” by which he understood all sorts of things: patriarchal habits of the times of serfdom, manners of country life, folk songs, traditions, and folk-dress. At a time when the real history of Russia had hardly begun to be deciphered they did not even suspect that the federalist principle had prevailed in Russia down to the Mongol invasion; that the authority of the Moscow Tsars was of a relatively late creation (15th, 16th and 17th centuries); and that autocracy was not at all an inheritance of old Russia, but was chiefly the work of that same Peter I. whom they execrated for having violently introduced Western habits of life. Few of them realised also that the religion of the great mass of the Russian people was not the religion which is professed by the official “Orthodox” Church, but a thousand varieties of “Dissent.” They thus imagined that they represented the ideals of the Russian people, while in reality they represented the ideals of the Russian State, and the Moscow Church, which are of a mixed Byzantine, Latin, and Mongolian origin. With the aid of the fogs of German metaphysics—especially of Hegel—which were in great vogue at that time, and with that love of abstract terminology which prevailed in the first half of the nineteenth century, discussion upon such themes could evidently last for years without coming to a definite conclusion.

However, with all that, it must be owned that, through their best representatives, the Slavophiles powerfully contributed towards the creation of a school of history and law which put historical studies in Russia on a true foundation, by making a sharp distinction between the history and the law of the Russian State and the history and the law of the Russian people. Kostomároff (1818-1885), Zabyélin (born 1820) and Byeláeff (1810-1873), were the first to write the real history of the Russian people, and of these three, the two last were Slavophiles; while the former—an Ukraïnian nationalist—had also borrowed from the Slavophiles their scientific ideas. They brought into evidence the federalistic character of early Russian history. They destroyed the legend, propagated by Karamzín, of an uninterrupted transmission of royal power, that was supposed to have taken place for a thousand years, from the times of the Norman Rúrik till to-day. They brought into evidence the violent means by which the princes of Moscow crushed the independent city-republics of the pre-Mongolian period, and gradually, with the aid of the Mongol Khans, became the Tsars of Russia; and they told (especially Byeláeff, in his History of the Peasants in Russia) the gruesome tale of the growth of serfdom from the seventeenth century, under the Moscow Tsars. Besides, it is mainly to the Slavophiles that we owe the recognition of the fact that two different codes exist in Russia—the Code of the Empire, which is the code of the educated classes, and the Common Law, which is (like the Norman law in Jersey) widely different from the former, and very often preferable, in its conceptions of land-ownership, inheritance, etc., and is the law which prevails among the peasants, its details varying in different provinces. The recognition of this fact has already had far-reaching consequences in the whole life of Russia and her colonies.

In the absence of political life the philosophical and literary struggles between the Slavophiles and the Westerners absorbed the minds of the best men of the literary circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow in the years 1840-1860. The question whether or not each nationality is the bearer of some pre-determined mission in history, and whether Russia has some such special mission, was eagerly discussed in the circles to which, in the forties, belonged Bakúnin, the critic Byelínskiy, Hérzen, Turguéneff, the Aksákoffs and the Kiréevskiys, Kavélin, Bótkin, and, in fact, all the best men of the time. But when later on serfdom was being abolished (in 1857-63) the very realities of the moment established upon certain important questions the most remarkable agreement between Slavophiles and Westerners, the most advanced socialistic Westerners, like Tchernyshévskiy, joining hands with the advanced Slavophiles in their desire to maintain the really fundamental institutions of the Russian peasants: the village community, the common law, and the federalistic principles; while the more advanced Slavophiles made substantial concessions as regards the “Western” ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was to these years (1861) that Turguéneff alluded when he said that in A Nobleman’s Retreat, in the discussion between Lavrétskiy and Pánshin, he—“an inveterate Westerner”—had given the superiority in argument to the defender of Slavophile ideas because of the deference to them then in real life.

At present the struggle between the Westerners and the Slavophiles has come to an end. The last representative of the Slavophile school, the much-regretted philosopher, V. Solovióff (1853-1900), was too well versed in history and philosophy, and had too broad a mind to go to the extremes of the old Slavophiles. As to the present representatives of this school, having none of the inspiration which characterised its founders, they have sunk to the level of mere Imperialistic dreamers and warlike Nationalists, or of Orthodox Ultramontanes, whose intellectual influence is nil. At the present moment the main struggle goes on between the defenders of autocracy and those of freedom; the defenders of capital and those of labour; the defenders of centralisation and bureaucracy, and those of the republican federalistic principle, municipal independence, and the independence of the village community.

POLITICAL LITERATURE ABROAD

One great drawback in Russia has been that no portion of the Slavonian countries has ever obtained political freedom, as did Switzerland or Belgium, so as to offer to Russian political refugees an asylum where they would not feel quite separated from their mother country. Russians, when they have fled from Russia, have had therefore to go to Switzerland or to England, where they have remained, until quite lately, absolute strangers. Even France, with which they had more points of contact, was only occasionally open to them; while the two countries nearest to Russia—Germany and Austria—not being themselves free, remained closed to all political refugees. In consequence, till quite lately political and religious emigration from Russia has been insignificant, and only for a few years in the nineteenth century has political literature published abroad ever exercised a real influence in Russia. This was during the times of Hérzen and his paper The Bell.

Hérzen (1812-1870) was born in a rich family at Moscow—his mother, however, being a German—and he was educated in the old-nobility quarter of the “Old Equerries.” A French emigrant, a German tutor, a Russian teacher who was a great lover of freedom, and the rich library of his father, composed of French and German eighteenth century philosophers—these were his education. The reading of the French encyclopædists left a deep trace in his mind, so that even later on, when he paid, like all his young friends, a tribute to the study of German metaphysics, he never abandoned the concrete ways of thought and the naturalistic turn of mind which he had borrowed from the French eighteenth century philosophers.

He entered the Moscow university in its physical and mathematical department. The French Revolution of 1830 had just produced a deep impression on thinking minds all over Europe; and a circle of young men, which included Hérzen, his intimate friend, the poet Ogaryóff, Pássek, the future explorer of folklore, and several others, came to spend whole nights in reading and discussing political and social matters, especially Saint-Simonism. Under the impression of what they knew about the Decembrists, Hérzen and Ogaryóff, when they were mere boys, had already taken “the Hannibal oath” of avenging the memory of these forerunners of liberty. The result of these youthful gatherings was that at one of them some song was sung in which there was disrespectful allusion to Nicholas I. This reached the ears of the State police. Night searchings were made at the lodgings of the young men, and all were arrested. Some were sent to Siberia, and the others would have been marched as soldiers to a battalion, like Polezháeff and Shevtchénko, had it not been for the interference of certain persons in high places. Hérzen was sent to a small town in the Uráls, Vyátka, and remained full six years In exile.

When he was allowed to return to Moscow, in 1840, he found the literary circles entirely under the influence of German philosophy, losing themselves in metaphysical abstractions. “The absolute” of Hegel, his triad-scheme of human progress, and his assertion to the effect that “all that exists is reasonable” were eagerly discussed. This last had brought the Hegelians to maintain that even the despotism of Nicholas I. was “reasonable,” and even the great critic Byelínskiy had been smitten with that recognition of the “historical necessity” of absolutism. Hérzen too had, of course, to study Hegel; but this study brought him, as well as his friend Mikhail Bakúnin (1824-1876), to quite different conclusions. They both acquired a great influence in the circles, and directed their studies toward the history of the struggles for liberty in Western Europe, and to a careful knowledge of the French Socialists, especially Fourier and Pierre Leroux. They then constituted the left wing of “the Westerners,” to which Turguéneff, Kavélin and so many of our writers belonged; while the Slavophiles constituted the right wing which has already been mentioned on a preceding page.

In 1842 Hérzen was exiled once more—this time to Nóvgorod, and only with great difficulties could he obtain permission to go abroad. He left Russia in 1847, never more to return. Bakúnin and Ogaryóff were already abroad, and after a journey to Italy, which was then making heroic efforts to free itself from the Austrian yoke, he soon joined his friends in Paris, which was then on the eve of the Revolution of 1848.

He lived through the youthful enthusiasm of the movement which embraced all Europe in the spring of 1848, and he also lived through all the subsequent disappointments and the massacre of the Paris proletarians during the terrible days of June. The quarter where he and Turguéneff stayed at that time was surrounded by a chain of police-agents who knew them both personally, and they could only rage in their rooms as they heard the volleys of rifle-shots, announcing that the vanquished workingmen who had been taken prisoners were being shot in batches by the triumphing bourgeoisie. Both have left most striking descriptions of those days—Hérzen’s June Days being one of the best pieces of Russian literature.

Deep despair took hold of Hérzen when all the hopes raised by the revolution had so rapidly come to nought and a fearful reaction had spread all over Europe, re-establishing Austrian rule over Italy and Hungary, paving the way for Napoleon III. at Paris, and sweeping away everywhere the very traces of a wide-spread Socialistic movement. Hérzen then felt a deep despair as regards Western civilisation altogether, and expressed it in most moving pages, in his book From the other Shore. It is a cry of despair—the cry of a prophetic politician in the voice of a great poet.

Later on Hérzen founded, at Paris, with Proudhon, a paper, L’Ami du Peuple, of which almost every number was confiscated by the police of Napoleon the Third. The paper could not live, and Hérzen himself was soon expelled from France. He was naturalised in Switzerland, and finally, after the tragic loss of his mother and his son in a shipwreck, he definitely settled at London in 1857. Here the first leaf of a free Russian Press was printed that same year, and very soon Hérzen became one of the strongest influences in Russia. He started first a review, the name of which, The Polar Star, was a remembrance of the almanack published under this name by Ryléeff (see Ch. I.); and in this review he published, besides political articles and most valuable material concerning the recent history of Russia, his admirable memoirs—Past Facts and Thoughts.

Apart from the historical value of these memoirs—Hérzen knew all the historical personages of his time—they certainly are one of the best pieces of poetical literature in any language. The descriptions of men and events which they contain, beginning with Russia in the forties and ending with the years of exile, reveal at every step an extraordinary, philosophical intelligence; a profoundly sarcastic mind, combined with a great deal of good-natured humour; a deep hatred of oppressors and a deep personal love for the simple-hearted heroes of human emancipation. At the same time these memoirs contain such fine, poetical scenes from the author’s personal life, as his love of Nathalie—later his wife—or such deeply impressive chapters as Oceano Nox, where he tells about the loss of his son and mother. One chapter of these memoirs remains still unpublished, and from what Turguéneff told me about it, it must be of the highest beauty. “No one has ever written like him,” Turguéneff said: “it is all written in tears and blood.”

A paper, The Bell, soon followed the Polar Star, and it was through this paper that the influence of Hérzen became a real power in Russia. It appears now, from the lately published correspondence between Turguéneff and Hérzen, that the great novelist took a very lively part in The Bell. It was he who supplied his friend Hérzen with the most interesting material and gave him hints as to what attitude he should take upon this or that subject.

These were, of course, the years when Russia was on the eve of the abolition of serfdom and of a thorough reform of most of the antiquated institutions of Nicholas I., and when everyone took interest in public affairs. Numbers of memoirs upon the questions of the day were addressed to the Tsar by private persons, or simply circulated in private, in MS.; and Turguéneff would get hold of them, and they would be discussed in The Bell. At the same time The Bell was revealing such facts of mal-administration as it was impossible to bring to public knowledge in Russia itself, while the leading articles were written by Hérzen with a force, an inner warmth, and a beauty of form which are seldom found in political literature. I know of no West European writer with whom I should be able to compare Hérzen. The Bell was smuggled into Russia in large quantities and could be found everywhere. Even Alexander II. and the Empress Marie were among its regular readers.

Two years after serfdom had been abolished, and while all sorts of urgently needed reforms were still under discussion—that is, in 1863—began, as is known, the uprising of Poland; and this uprising, crushed in blood and on the gallows, brought the liberation movement in Russia to a complete end. Reaction got the upper hand; and the popularity of Hérzen, who had supported the Poles, was necessarily gone. The Bell was read no more in Russia, and the efforts of Hérzen to continue it in French brought no results. A new generation came then to the front—the generation of Bazároff and of “the populists,” whom Hérzen did not understand from the outset, although they were his own intellectual sons and daughters, dressed now in a new, more democratic and realistic garb. He died in isolation in Switzerland, in 1870.

The works of Hérzen, even now, are not allowed to be circulated in Russia, and they are not sufficiently known to the younger generation. It is certain, however, that when the time comes for them to be read again Russians will discover in Hérzen a very profound thinker, whose sympathies were entirely with the working classes, who understood the forms of human development in all their complexity, and who wrote in a style of unequalled beauty—the best proof that his ideas had been thought out in detail and under a variety of aspects.

Before he had emigrated and founded a free press at London, Hérzen had written in Russian reviews under the name of Iskander, treating various subjects, such as Western politics, socialism, the philosophy of natural sciences, art, and so on. He also wrote a novel, Whose Fault is it? which is often spoken of in the history of the development of intellectual types in Russia. The hero of this novel, Béltoff, is a direct descendant from Lérmontoff’s Petchórin, and occupies an intermediate position between him and the heroes of Turguéneff.

The work of the poet Ogaryóff (1813-1877) was not very large, and his intimate friend, Hérzen, who was a great master in personal characteristics, could say of him that his chief life-work was the working out of such an ideal personality as he was himself. His private life was most unhappy, but his influence upon his friends was very great. He was a thorough lover of freedom, who, before he left Russia, set free his ten thousand serfs, surrendering all the land to them, and who, throughout all his life abroad remained true to the ideals of equality and freedom which he had cherished in his youth. Personally, he was the gentlest imaginable of men, and a note of resignation, in the sense of Schiller’s, sounds throughout his poetry, amongst which fierce poems of revolt and of masculine energy are few.

As to Mikhail Bakúnin (1824-1876), the other great friend of Hérzen, his work belongs chiefly to the International Working Men’s Association, and hardly can find a place in a sketch of Russian literature; but his personal influence on some of the prominent writers of Russia was very great. Suffice it to say that Byelínskiy distinctly acknowledged in his letters that Bakúnin was his “intellectual father,” and that it was in fact he who infused the Moscow circle, of which I have just spoken, and the St. Petersburg literary circles with socialistic ideas. He was the typical revolutionist, whom nobody could approach without being inspired by a revolutionary fire. Besides, if advanced thought in Russia has always remained true to the cause of the different nationalities—Polish, Finnish, Little Russian, Caucasian—oppressed by Russian tsardom, or by Austria, it owes this to a very great extent to Ogaryóff and Bakúnin. In the international labour movement Bakúnin became the soul of the left wing of the great Working Men’s Association, and he was the founder of modern Anarchism, or anti-State Socialism, of which he laid down the foundations upon his wide historical and philosophical knowledge.

Finally I must mention among the Russian political writers abroad, Peter Lavróff (1823-1901). He was a mathematician and a philosopher who represented, under the name of “anthropologism,” a reconciliation of modern natural science materialism with Kantianism. He was a colonel of artillery, a professor of mathematics, and a member of the St. Petersburg newly-formed municipal government, when he was arrested and exiled to a small town in the Uráls. One of the young Socialist circles kidnapped him from there and shipped him off to London, where he began to publish in the year 1874 the Socialist review Forward. Lavróff was an extremely learned encyclopædist who made his reputation by his Mechanical Theory of the Universe and by the first chapters of a very exhaustive history of mathematical sciences. His later work, History of Modern Thought, of which unfortunately only the four or five introductory volumes have been published, would certainly have been an important contribution to evolutionist philosophy, if it had been completed. In the socialist movement he belonged to the social-democratic wing, but was too widely learned and too much of a philosopher to join the German social-democrats in their ideals of a centralised communistic State, or in their narrow interpretation of history. However, the work of Lavróff which gave him the greatest notoriety and best expressed his own personality was a small work, Historical Letters, which he published in Russia under the pseudonym of Mírtoff and which can now be read in a French translation. This little work appeared at the right moment—just when our youth, in the years 1870-73, were endeavouring to find a new programme of action amongst the people. Lavróff stands out in it as a preacher of activity amongst the people, speaking to the educated youth of their indebtedness to the people, and of their duty to repay the debt which they had contracted towards the poorer classes during the years they had passed in the universities—all this, developed with a profusion of historical hints, of philosophical deductions, and of practical advice. These letters had a deep influence upon our youth. The ideas which Lavróff preached in 1870 he confirmed by all his subsequent life. He lived to the age of 82, and passed all his life in strict conformity with his ideal, occupying at Paris two small rooms, limiting his daily expenses for food to a ridiculously small amount, earning his living by his pen, and giving all his time to the spreading of the ideas which were so dear to him.

Nicholas Turguéneff (1789-1871) was a remarkable political writer, who belonged to two different epochs. In 1818 he published in Russia a Theory of Taxation—a book, quite striking for its time and country, as it contained the development of the liberal economical ideas of Adam Smith; and he was already beginning to work for the abolition of serfdom. He made a practical attempt by partly freeing his own serfs, and wrote on this subject several memoirs for the use of Emperor Alexander I. He also worked for constitutional rule, and soon became one of the most influential members of the secret society of the Decembrists; but he was abroad in December, 1825, and therefore escaped being executed with his friends. After that time N. Turguéneff remained in exile, chiefly at Paris, and in 1857, when an amnesty was granted to the Decembrists, and he was allowed to return to Russia, he did so for a few weeks only.

He took, however, a lively part in the emancipation of the serfs, which he had preached since 1818 and which he had discussed also in his large work, La Russie et les Russes, published in Paris in 1847. Now he devoted to this subject several papers in The Bell and several pamphlets. He continued at the same time to advocate the convocation of a General Representative Assembly, the development of provincial self-government, and other urgent reforms. He died at Paris in 1871, after having had the happiness which had come to few Decembrists—that of taking, towards the end of his days, a practical part in the realisation of one of the dreams of his youth, for which so many of our noblest men had given their lives.

I pass over in silence several other writers, like Prince Dolgorúkiy, and especially a number of Polish writers, who emigrated from Russia for the sake of free speech.

I omit also quite a number of socialistic and constitutional papers and reviews which have been published in Switzerland or in England during the last twenty years, and will only mention, and that only in a few words, my friend Stepniak (1852-1897). His writings were chiefly in English, but now that they are translated into Russian they will certainly win for him an honourable place in the history of Russian literature. His two novels, The Career of a Nihilist (Andréi Kozhuhóff in Russian) and The Stundist Pável Rudénko, as also his earlier sketches, Underground Russia, revealed his remarkable literary talent, but a stupid railway accident put an end to his young life, so rich in vigour and thought and so full of promises. It must also be mentioned that the greatest Russian writer of our own time, Leo Tolstóy, cannot have many of his works printed in Russia, and that therefore his friend, V. Tchertkoff, has started in England a regular publishing office, both for editing Tolstóy’s works and for bringing to light the religious movements which are going on now in Russia, and the prosecutions directed against them by the Government.

TCHERNYSHÉVSKIY AND “THE CONTEMPORARY”

The most prominent among political writers in Russia itself has undoubtedly been Tchernyshévskiy (1828-1889), whose name is indissolubly connected with that of the review, Sovreménnik (The Contemporary). The influence which this review exercised on public opinion in the years of the abolition of serfdom (1857-62) was equal to that of Hérzen’s Bell, and this influence was mainly due to Tchernyshévskiy, and partly to the critic Dobrolúboff.

Tchernyshévskiy was born in Southeastern Russia, at Sarátoff—his father being a well educated and respected priest of the cathedral—and his early education he received, first at home, and next in the Sarátoff seminary. He left the seminary, however, in 1844, and two years later entered the philological department of the St. Petersburg University.

The quantity of work which Tchernyshévskiy performed during his life, and the immensity of knowledge which he acquired in various branches, was simply stupendous. He began his literary career by works on philology and literary criticism; and he wrote in this last branch three remarkable works, The Æsthetical Relations between Art and Reality, Sketches of the Gógol period, and Lessing and his Time, in which he developed a whole theory of æsthetics and literary criticism. His main work, however, was accomplished during the four years, 1858-62, when he wrote in The Contemporary, exclusively on political and economical matters. These were the years of the abolition of serfdom, and opinion, both in the public at large and in the Government spheres, was quite unsettled even as to the leading principles which should be followed in accomplishing it. The two main questions were: should the liberated serfs receive the land which they were cultivating for themselves while they were serfs, and if so—on what conditions? And next—should the village community institutions be maintained and the land held, as of old, in common—the village community becoming in this case the basis for the future self-government institutions? All the best men of Russia were in favour of an answer in the affirmative to both these questions, and even in the higher spheres opinion went the same way; but all the reactionists and “esclavagist” serf-owners of the old school bitterly opposed this view. They wrote memoirs upon memoirs and addressed them to the Emperor and the Emancipation Committees, and it was necessary, of course, to analyse their arguments and to produce weighty historical and economical proofs against them. In this struggle Tchernyshévskiy, who was, of course, as was Hérzen’s Bell, with the advanced party, supported it with all the powers of his great intelligence, his wide erudition, and his formidable capacity for work; and if this party carried the day and finally converted Alexander II. and the official leaders of the Emancipation Committees to its views, it was certainly to a great extent owing to the energy of Tchernyshévskiy and his friends.

It must also be said that in this struggle The Contemporary and The Bell found a strong support in two advanced political writers from the Slavophile camp: Kósheleff (1806-1883) and Yúriy Samarin (1819-1876). The former had advocated, since 1847—both in writing and in practise—the liberation of the serfs “with the land,” the maintenance of the village community, and peasant self-government, and now Kósheleff and Samarin, both influential landlords, energetically supported these ideas in the Emancipation Committees, while Tchernyshévskiy fought for them in The Contemporary and in his Letters without an Address (written apparently to Alexander II. and published only later on in Switzerland).

No less a service did Tchernyshévskiy render to Russian Society by educating it in economical matters and in the history of modern times. In this respect he acted with a wonderful pedagogical talent. He translated Mill’s Political Economy, and wrote Notes to it, in a socialistic sense; moreover, in a series of articles, like Capital and Labour, Economical Activity and the State, he did his best to spread sound economic ideas. In the domain of history he did the same, both in a series of translations and in a number of original articles upon the struggle of parties in modern France.

In 1863 Tchernyshévskiy was arrested, and while he was kept in the fortress he wrote a remarkable novel, What is to be Done? From the artistic point of view this novel leaves much to be desired; but for the Russian youth of the times it was a revelation, and it became a programme. Questions of marriage, and separation after marriage in case such a separation becomes necessary, agitated Russian society in those years. To ignore such questions was absolutely impossible. And Tchernyshévskiy discussed them in his novel, in describing the relations between his heroine, Vyéra Pávlovna, her husband Lopukhóff and the young doctor with whom she fell in love after her marriage—indicating the only solutions which perfect honesty and straightforward common sense could approve in such a case. At the same time he preached—in veiled words, which were, however, perfectly well understood—Fourierism, and depicted in a most attractive form the communistic associations of producers. He also showed in his novel what true “Nihilists” were, and in what they differed from Turguéneff’s Bazároff. No novel of Turguéneff and no writings of Tolstóy or any other writer have ever had such a wide and deep influence upon Russian Society as this novel had. It became the watchword of Young Russia, and the influence of the ideas it propagated has never ceased to be apparent since.

In 1864 Tchernyshévskiy was exiled to hard labour in Siberia, for the political and socialist propaganda which he had been making; and for fear that he might escape from Transbaikália he was soon transported to a very secluded spot in the far North of Eastern Siberia—Vilúisk—where he was kept till 1883. Then only was he allowed to return to Russia and to settle at Astrakhán. His health, however, was already quite broken. Nevertheless, he undertook the translation of the Universal History of Weber, to which he wrote long addenda, and he had translated twelve volumes of it when death overtook him in 1889. Storms of polemics have raged over his grave, although his name, even yet, cannot be pronounced, nor his ideas discussed, in the Russian Press. No other man has been so much hated by his political adversaries as Tchernyshévskiy. But even these are bound to recognise now the great services he rendered to Russia during the emancipation of the serfs, and his immense educational influence.

THE SATIRE: SALTYKÓFF

With all the restrictions imposed upon political literature in Russia, the satire necessarily became one of the favourite means of expressing political thought. It would take too much time to give even a short sketch of the earlier Russian satirists, as in order to do that one would have to go back as far as the eighteenth century. Of Gógol’s satire I have already spoken; consequently I shall limit my remarks under this head to only one representative of modern satire, Saltykóff, who is better known under his nom-de-plume of Schedrin (1826-1889).

The influence of Saltykóff in Russia was very great, not only with the advanced section of Russian thought, but among the general readers as well. He was perhaps one of Russia’s most popular writers. Here I must make, however, a personal remark. One may try as much as possible to keep to an objective standpoint in the appreciation of different writers, but a subjective element will necessarily interfere, and I personally must say that although I admire the great talent of Saltykóff, I never could become as enthusiastic over his writings as the very great majority of my friends did. Not that I dislike satire: on the contrary; but I like it much more definite than it is in Saltykóff. I fully recognise that his remarks were sometimes extremely deep, and always correct, and that in many cases he foresaw coming events long before the common reader could guess their approach; I fully admit that the satirical characterisations he gave of different classes of Russian society belong to the domain of good art, and that his types are really typical—and yet, with all this, I find that these excellent characterisations and these acute remarks are too much lost amidst a deluge of insignificant talk, which was certainly meant to conceal their point from the censorship, but which mitigates the sharpness of the satire and tends chiefly to deaden its effect. Consequently, I prefer, in my appreciation of Saltykóff to follow our best critics, and especially K. K. Arsénieff, to whom we owe two volumes of excellent Critical Studies.

Saltykóff began his literary career very early and, like most of our best writers, he knew something of exile. In 1848 he wrote a novel, A Complicated Affair, in which some socialistic tendencies were expressed in the shape of a dream of a certain poor functionary. It so happened that the novel appeared in print just a few weeks after the February revolution of 1848 had broken out, and when the Russian Government was especially on the alert. Saltykóff was thereupon exiled to Vyátka, a miserable provincial town in East Russia, and was ordered to enter the civil service. The exile lasted seven years, during which he became thoroughly acquainted with the world of functionaries grouped around the Governor of the Province. Then in 1857 better times came for Russian literature, and Saltykóff, who was allowed to return to the capitals, utilised his knowledge of provincial life in writing a series of Provincial Sketches.

The impression produced by these Sketches was simply tremendous. All Russia talked of them. Saltykóff’s talent appeared in them in its full force, and with them was opened quite a new era in Russian literature. A great number of imitators began in their turn to dissect the Russian administration and the failure of its functionaries. Of course, something of the sort had already been done by Gógol, but Gógol, who wrote twenty years before, was compelled to confine himself to generalities, while Saltykóff was enabled to name things by their names and to describe provincial society as it was—denouncing the venal nature of the functionaries, the rottenness of the whole administration, the absence of comprehension of what was vital in the life of the country, and so on.

When Saltykóff was permitted to return to St. Petersburg, after his exile, he did not abandon the service of the State, which he had been compelled to enter at Vyátka. With but a short interruption he remained a functionary till the year 1868, and twice during that time he was Vice-Governor, and even Governor of a province. It was only then that he definitely left the service, to act, with Nekrásoff, as co-editor of a monthly review, Otéchestvennyia Zapíski, which became after The Contemporary had been suppressed, the representative of advanced democratic thought in Russia, and retained this position till 1884, when it was suppressed in its turn. By that time the health of Saltykóff was broken down, and after a very painful illness, during which he nevertheless continued to write, he died in 1889.

The Provincial Sketches determined once for all the character of Saltykóff’s work. His talent only deepened as he advanced in life, and his satires went more and more profoundly into the analysis of modern civilised life, of the many causes which stand in the way of progress, and of the infinity of forms which the struggle of reaction against progress is taking nowadays. In his Innocent Tales he touched upon some of the most tragic aspects of serfdom. Then, in his representation of the modern knights of industrialism and plutocracy, with their appetites for money-making and enjoyments of the lower sort, their heartlessness, and their hopeless meanness, Saltykóff attained the heights of descriptive art; but he excelled perhaps even more in the representation of that “average man” who has no great passions, but for the mere sake of not being disturbed in the process of enjoyment of his philistine well-being will not recoil before any crime against the best men of his time, and, if need be, will lend a ready hand to the worst enemies of progress. In flagellating that “average man,” who, owing to his unmitigated cowardice, has attained such a luxurious development in Russia, Saltykóff produced his greatest creations. But when he came to touch those who are the real geniuses of reaction—those who keep “the average man” in fear, and inspire reaction, if need be, with audacity and ferocity—then Saltykóff’s satire either recoiled before its task, or the attack was veiled in so many funny and petty expressions and words that all its venom was gone.

When reaction had obtained the upper hand, in 1863, and the carrying out of the reforms of 1861 and of those still to be undertaken fell into the hands of the very opponents of these reforms, and the former serf-owners were doing all they could in order to recall serfdom once again to life, or, at least, so to bind the peasant by over-taxation and high rents as to practically enslave him once more, Saltykóff brought out a striking series of satires which admirably represented this new class of men. The History of a City, which is a comic history of Russia, full of allusions to contemporary currents of thought. The Diary of a Provincial in St. Petersburg, Letters from the Provinces, and The Pompadours belong to this series; while in Those Gentlemen of Tashkent he represented all that crowd which hastened now to make fortunes by railway building, advocacy in reformed tribunals, and annexation of new territories. In these sketches, as well as in those which he devoted to the description of the sad and sometimes psychologically unsound products of the times of serfdom (The Gentlemen Golovlóffs, Poshekhónsk Antiquity), he created types, some of which, like Judushka, have been described as almost Shakespearian.

Finally, in the early eighties, when the terrible struggle of the terrorists against autocracy was over, and with the advent of Alexander III. reaction was triumphant, the satires of Schedrin became a cry of despair. At times the satirist becomes great in his sad irony, and his Letters to my Aunt will live, not only as an historical but also as a deeply human document.

It is also worthy of note that Saltykóff had a real talent for writing tales. Some of them, especially those which dealt with children under serfdom, were of great beauty.

LITERARY CRITICISM

The main channel through which political thought found its expression in Russia during the last fifty years was literary criticism, which consequently has reached with us a development and an importance that it has in no other country. The real soul of a Russian monthly review is its art-critic. His article is a much greater event than the novel of a favourite writer which may appear in the same number. The critic of a leading review is the intellectual leader of the younger generation; and it so happened that throughout the last half-century we have had in Russia a succession of art-critics who have exercised upon the intellectual aspects of their own times a far greater, and especially a far more wide-spread influence than any novelist or any writer in any other domain. It is so generally true that the intellectual aspect of a given epoch can be best characterised by naming the art-critic of the time who exercised the main influence. It was Byelínskiy in the thirties or forties, Tchernyshévskiy and Dobrolúboff in the fifties and the early sixties, and Písareff in the later sixties and seventies, who were respectively the rulers of thoughts in their generation of educated youth. It was only later on, when real political agitation began—taking at once two or three different directions, even in the advanced camp—that Mihailóvskiy, the leading critic from the eighties until the present time, stood not for the whole movement but more or less for one of its directions.

This means, of course, that literary criticism has in Russia certain special aspects. It is not limited to a criticism of works of art from the purely literary or æsthetic point of view. Whether a Rúdin or a Katerína are types of real, living beings, and whether the novel or the drama is well built, well developed, and well written—these are, of course, the first questions considered. But they are soon answered; and there are infinitely more important questions, which are raised in the thoughtful mind by every work of really good art: the questions concerning the position of a Rúdin or a Katerína in society; the part, bad or good, which they play in it; the ideas which inspire them, and the value of these ideas; and then—the actions of the heroes, and the causes of these actions, both individual and social. In a good work of art the actions of the heroes are evidently what they would have been under similar conditions in reality; otherwise it would not be good art. They can be discussed as facts of life.

But these actions and their causes and consequences open the widest horizons to a thoughtful critic, for an appreciation of both the ideals and the prejudices of society, for the analysis of passions, for a discussion of the types of men and women which prevail at a given moment. In fact, a good work of art gives material for discussing nearly the whole of the mutual relations in a society of a given type. The author, if he is a thoughtful poet, has himself either consciously or often unconsciously considered all that. It is his life-experience which he gives in his work. Why, then, should not the critic bring before the reader all those thoughts which must have passed through the author’s brain, or have affected him unconsciously when he produced these scenes, or pictured that corner of human life?

This is what Russian literary critics have been doing for the last fifty years; and as the field of fiction and poetry is unlimited, there is not one of the great social and human problems which they must not thus have discussed in their critical reviews. This is also why the works of the four critics just named are as eagerly read and re-read now at this moment as they were twenty or fifty years ago: they have lost nothing of their freshness and interest. If art is a school of life—the more so are such works.

It is extremely interesting to note that art-criticism in Russia took from the very outset (in the twenties) and quite independently of all imitation of Western Europe, the character of philosophical æsthetics. The revolt against pseudo-classicism had only just begun under the banner of romanticism, and the appearance of Púshkin’s Ruslán and Ludmíla had just given the first practical argument in favour of the romantic rebels, when the poet Venevítinoff (see Ch. II.), soon followed by Nadézhdin (1804-1856) and Polevóy (1796-1846)—the real founder of serious journalism in Russia—laid the foundations of new art-criticism. Literary criticism, they maintained, must analyse, not only the æsthetic value of a work of art, but, above all, its leading idea—its “philosophical,”—its social meaning.

Venevítinoff, whose own poetry bore such a high intellectual stamp, boldly attacked the absence of higher ideas among the Russian romantics, and wrote that “the true poets of all nations have always been philosophers who reached the highest summits of culture.” A poet who is satisfied with his own self, and does not pursue aims of general improvement, is of no use to his contemporaries.[24]

Nadézhdin followed on the same lines, and boldly attacked Púshkin for his absence of higher inspiration and for producing a poetry of which the only motives were “wine and women.” He reproached our romantics with an absence of ethnographical and historic truth in their work, and the meanness of the subjects they chose in their poetry. As to Polevóy, he was so great an admirer of the poetry of Byron and Victor Hugo that he could not pardon Púshkin and Gógol the absence of higher ideas in their work. Having nothing in it that might raise men to higher ideas and actions, their work could stand no comparison whatever with the immortal creations of Shakespeare, Hugo, and Goethe. This absence of higher leading ideas in the work of Púshkin and Gógol so much impressed the last two critics that they did not even notice the immense service which these founders of Russian literature were rendering to us by introducing that sound naturalism and realism which have become since a distinctive feature of Russian art, and the need of which both Nadézhdin and Polevóy were the first to recognise. It was Byelínskiy who had to take up their work, to complete it, and to show what was the technique of really good art, and what its contents ought to be.

To say that Byelínskiy (1810-1848) was a very gifted art-critic would thus mean nothing. He was in reality, at a very significant moment of human evolution, a teacher and an educator of Russian society, not only in art—its value, its purport, its comprehension—but also in politics, in social questions, and in humanitarian aspirations.

He was the son of an obscure army-surgeon, and spent his childhood in a remote province of Russia. Well prepared by his father, who knew the value of knowledge, he entered the university of St. Petersburg, but was excluded from it in 1832 for a tragedy which he wrote, in the style of Schiller’s Robbers, and which was an energetic protest against serfdom. Already he had joined the circle of Hérzen, Ogaryóff, Stankévitch, etc., and in 1834 he began his literary career by a critical review of literature which at once attracted notice. From that time till his death he wrote critical articles and bibliographical notes for some of the leading reviews, and he worked so extremely hard that at the age of thirty-eight he died from consumption. He did not die too soon. The revolution had broken out in Western Europe, and when Byelínskiy was on his deathbed an agent of the State-police would call from time to time to ascertain whether he was still alive. The order was given to arrest him, if he should recover, and his fate certainly would have been the fortress and at the best—exile.

When Byelínskiy first began to write he was entirely under the influence of the idealistic German philosophy. He was inclined to maintain that Art is something too great and too pure to have anything to do with the questions of the day. It was a reproduction of “the general idea of the life of nature.” Its problems were those of the Universe—not of poor men and their petty events. It was from this idealistic point of view of Beauty and Truth that he exposed the main principles of Art, and explained the process of artistic creation. In a series of articles on Púshkin he wrote, in fact, a history of Russian literature down to Púshkin, from that point of view.

Holding such abstract views, Byelínskiy even came, during his stay at Moscow, to consider, with Hegel, that “all that which exists is reasonable,” and to preach “reconciliation” with the despotism of Nicholas I. However, under the influence of Hérzen and Bakúnin he soon shook off the fogs of German metaphysics, and, removing to St. Petersburg, opened a new page of his activity.

Under the impression produced upon him by the realism of Gógol, whose best works were just appearing, he came to understand that true poetry is real: that it must be a poetry of life and of reality. And under the influence of the political movement which was going on in France he arrived at advanced political ideas. He was a great master of style, and whatever he wrote was so full of energy, and at the same time bore so truly the stamp of his most sympathetic personality, that it always produced a deep impression upon his readers. And now all his aspirations towards what is grand and high, and all his boundless love of truth, which he formerly had given in the service of personal self-improvement and ideal Art, were given to the service of man within the poor conditions of Russian reality. He pitilessly analysed that reality, and wherever he saw in the literary works which passed under his eyes, or only felt, insincerity, haughtiness, absence of general interest, attachment to old-age despotism, or slavery in any form—including the slavery of woman—he fought these evils with all his energy and passion. He thus became a political writer in the best sense of the word at the same time that he was an art-critic; he became a teacher of the highest humanitarian principles.

In his Letter to Gógol concerning the latter’s Correspondence with Friends (see Ch. III.) he gave quite a programme of urgent social and political reforms; but his days were numbered. His review of the literature for the year 1847, which was especially beautiful and deep, was his last work. Death spared him from seeing the dark cloud of reaction in which Russia was wrapped from 1848 to 1855.

Valerián Máykoff (1823-1847), who promised to become a critic of great power on the same lines as Byelínskiy, died unfortunately too young, and it was Tchernyshévskiy, soon followed by Dobrolúboff, who continued and further developed the work of Byelínskiy and his predecessors.

The leading idea of Tchernyshévskiy was that art cannot be its own aim; that life is superior to art; and that the aim of art is to explain life, to comment upon it, and to express an opinion about it. He developed these ideas in a thoughtful and stimulating work, The Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality, in which he demolished the current theories of æsthetics, and gave a realistic definition of the Beautiful. The sensation—he wrote—which the Beautiful awakens in us is a feeling of bright happiness, similar to that which is awakened by the presence of a beloved being. It must therefore contain something dear to us, and that dear something is life. “To say that that which we name ‘Beauty’ is life; that that being is beautiful in which we see life—life as it ought to be according to our conception—and that object is beautiful which speaks to us of life—this definition, we should think, satisfactorily explains all cases which awaken in us the feeling of the beautiful.” The conclusion to be drawn from such a definition was that the beautiful in art, far from being superior to the beautiful in life, can only represent that conception of the beautiful which the artist has borrowed from life. As to the aim of art it is much the same as that of science, although its means of action are different. The true aim of art is to remind us of what is interesting in human life, and to teach us how men live and how they ought to live. This last part of Tchernyshévskiy teachings was especially developed by Dobrolúboff.

Dobrolúboff (1836-1861) was born in Nízhniy Nóvgorod, where his father was a parish priest, and he received his education first in a clerical school, and after that in a seminarium. In 1853 he went to St. Petersburg and entered the Pedagogical Institute. His mother and father died the next year, and he had then to maintain all his brothers and sisters. Lessons, for which he was paid ridiculously low prices, and translations, almost equally badly paid—all that in addition to his student’s duties—meant working terribly hard, and this broke down his health at an early age. In 1855 he made the acquaintance of Tchernyshévskiy and, having finished in 1857 his studies at the Institute, he took in hand the critical department of The Contemporary, and again worked passionately. Four years later, in November, 1861, he died, at the age of twenty-five, having literally killed himself by overwork, leaving four volumes of critical essays, each of which is a serious original work. Such essays as The Kingdom of Darkness, A Ray of Light, What is Oblómoffdom? When comes the Real Day? had especially a profound effect on the development of the youth of those times.

Not that Dobrolúboff had a very definite criterion of literary criticism, or that he had a very distinct programme as to what was to be done. But he was one of the purest and the most solid representatives of that type of new men—the realist-idealist, whom Turguéneff saw coming by the end of the fifties. Therefore, in whatever he wrote one felt the thoroughly moral and thoroughly reliable, slightly ascetic “rigourist” who judged all facts of life from the standard of—“What good will they bring to the toiling masses?” or, “How will they favour the creation of men whose eyes are directed that way?” His attitude towards professional æsthetics was most contemptuous, but he felt deeply himself and enjoyed the great works of art. He did not condemn Púshkin for his levity, or Gógol for his absence of ideals. He did not advise anyone to write novels or poems with a set purpose: he knew the results would be poor. He admitted that the great geniuses were right in creating unconsciously, because he understood that the real artist creates only when he has been struck by this or that aspect of reality. He asked only from a work of art, whether it truly and correctly reproduced life, or not? If not, he passed it by; but if it did truly represent life, then he wrote essays about this life; and his articles were essays on moral, political or economical matters—the work of art yielding only the facts for such a discussion. This explains the influence Dobrolúboff exercised upon his contemporaries. Such essays written by such a personality were precisely what was wanted in the turmoil of those years for preparing better men for the coming struggles. They were a school of political and moral education.

PÍSAREFF (1841-1868), the critic who succeeded, so to speak, Dobrolúboff, was a quite different man. He was born in a rich family of landlords and had received an education during which he had never known what it meant to want anything; but he soon realised the drawbacks of such a life, and when he was at the St. Petersburg university he abandoned the rich house of his uncle and settled with a poor student comrade, or lived in an apartment with a number of other students—writing amidst their noisy discussions or songs. Like Dobrolúboff, he worked excessively hard, and astonished everyone by his varied knowledge and the facility with which he acquired it. In 1862, when reaction was beginning to reappear, he permitted a comrade to print in a secret printing office an article of his—the criticism of some reactionary political pamphlet—which article had not received the authorisation of the censorship. The secret printing office was seized, and Písareff was locked for four years in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. There he wrote all that made him widely known in Russia. When he came out of prison his health was already broken, and in the summer of 1868 he was drowned while bathing in one of the Baltic sea-side resorts.

Upon the Russian youth of his own time, and consequently on whatever share, as men and women later on, they brought to the general progress of the country, Písareff exercised an influence which was as great as that of Byelínskiy, Tchernyshévskiy, and Dobrolúboff. Here again it is impossible to determine the character and the cause of this influence by merely referring to Písareff’s canons in art criticism. His leading ideas on this subject can be explained in a few words; his ideal was “the thoughtful realist”—the type which Turguéneff had just represented in Bazároff, and which Písareff further developed in his critical essays. He shared Bazároff’s low opinion of art, but, as a concession, demanded that Russian art should, at least, reach the heights which art had reached with Goethe, Heine and Börne in elevating mankind—or else that those who are always talking of art, but can produce nothing approaching it, should rather give their forces to something more within their reach. This is why he devoted most elaborate articles to depreciating the futile poetry of Púshkin. In ethics he was entirely at one with the “Nihilist” Bazároff, who bowed before no authority but that of his own reason. And he thought (like Bazároff in a conversation with Pável Petróvitch) that the main point, at that given moment, was to develop the thorough, scientifically-educated realist, who would break with all the traditions and mistakes of the olden time, and would work, looking upon human life with the sound common-sense of a realist. He even did something himself to spread the sound natural science knowledge that had suddenly developed in those years, and wrote a most remarkable exposition of Darwinism in a series of articles entitled Progress in the World of Plants and Animals.

But—to quote the perfectly correct estimate of Skabitchévskiy—“all this does not, however, determine Písareff’s position in Russian literature. In all this he only embodied a certain moment of the development of Russian youth, with all its exaggerations.” The real cause of Písareff’s influence was elsewhere, and may be best explained by the following example. There appeared a novel in which the author had told how a girl, good-hearted, honest, but quite uneducated, quite commonplace as to her conceptions of happiness and life, and full of the current society-prejudices, fell in love, and was brought to all sorts of misfortunes. This girl—Písareff at once understood—was not invented. Thousands upon thousands of like girls exist, and their lives have the same run. They are—he said—“Muslin Girls.” Their conception of the universe does not go much beyond their muslin dresses. And he reasoned, how with their “muslin education” and their “muslin-girl conceptions,” they must unavoidably come to grief. And by this article, which every girl in every educated family in Russia read, and reads still, he induced thousands upon thousands of Russian girls to say to themselves: “No, never will I be like that poor muslin girl. I will conquer knowledge; I will think; and I will make for myself a better future.” Each of his articles had a similar effect. It gave to the young mind the first shock. It opened the young man’s and the young woman’s eyes to those thousands of details of life which habit makes us cease to perceive, but the sum of which makes precisely that stifling atmosphere under which the heroines of “Krestóvskiy-pseudonym” used to wither. From that life, which could promise only deception, dulness and vegetative existence, he called the youth of both sexes to a life full of the light of knowledge, a life of work, of broad views and sympathies, which was now opened for the “thoughtful realist.”

The time has not yet come to fully appreciate the work of Mihailóvskiy (1842-1904), who in the seventies became the leading critic, and remained so till his death. Moreover, his proper position could not be understood without my entering into many details concerning the character of the intellectual movement in Russia for the last thirty years, and this movement has been extremely complex. Suffice it to say that with Mihailóvskiy literary criticism took a philosophical turn. Within this period Spencer’s philosophy had produced a deep sensation in Russia, and Mihailóvskiy submitted it to a severe analysis from the anthropological standpoint, showing its weak points and working out his own Theory of Progress, which will certainly be spoken of with respect in Western Europe when it becomes known outside Russia. His very remarkable articles on Individualism, on Heroes and the Crowd, on Happiness, have the same philosophical value; while even from the few quotations from his Left and Right Hand of Count Tolstóy, which were given in a preceding chapter, it is easy to see which way his sympathies go.

Of the other critics of the same tendencies I shall only name Skabitchévskiy (born 1838), the author of a very well written history of modern Russian literature, already mentioned in these pages; K. Arsénieff (born 1837), whose Critical Studies (1888) are the more interesting as they deal at some length with some of the less known poets and the younger contemporary writers; and P. Polevóy (1839-1903), the author of many historical novels and of a popular and quite valuable History of the Russian Literature; but I am compelled to pass over in silence the valuable critical work done by Druzhínin (1824-1864) after the death of Byelínskiy, as also A. Grigórieff (1822-1864), a brilliant and original critic from the Slavophile camp. They both took the “æsthetical” point of view and combated the utilitarian views upon Art, but had no great success.