The dawn came quicker probably than he expected. Tchekoff’s last play was performed in 1904, and he himself died soon after, while the war was still going on. Then came the bursting of the dam, and with the swift and tumultuous events of the political movement, with the granting of the freedom of the Press and the inflooding of Russia with a light which it had never before known, came a new literary renascence. It is too soon as yet to discern and to gauge what is the literary value of the thick and turbulent mass of production which has been poured out in Russia during the last two years. But one thing is certain, namely, that there is nothing stagnant in the new phenomena. The writers of the younger generation are still often pessimistic in the extreme; they dip their pencils in the “hues of earthquake and eclipse,” but it is the gloom of the earthquake and not the monotonous greyness of a sunless atmosphere. They shriek, they vociferate and they anathematise, but they do not say: “There is nothing to be done. Let us sit down and play Vindt.” It is true that this revolutionary outburst was succeeded by weariness and apathy. It is true that reaction was again in its turn as triumphant as it was in France during the reign of Louis XVIII., that the Liberal movement suffered a great blow owing to the fact that a considerable part of the population, namely, the landed proprietors and all people of means, who were until 1905 nearly all of them staunch supporters of the Opposition, frightened by the spectres of expropriation, revolution, and anarchy and ruin, veered to the Right. It is true that some people think that it will need another war, a famine, an epidemic of cholera, and several other disasters of the kind to set the movement going again. But in spite of this we shall never get back to the old stagnation, because of the flood of light which has been let into the country, and which cannot now ever be driven out again.

The literature, for instance, cannot go back to the time when there was no political life, because there is a political life now. The Reactionaries may have the best of it; the Liberals may discredit themselves and they may fail again and again; but all this constitutes a thing called political life, and which is reflected directly in the daily Press and indirectly in the literature of the day. Therefore, so far, whatever may be the discouragement felt by political reformers, there is as yet no trace of a note of apathy in the literature of the day. The curious thing is that nearly all the literature which is now appearing—with the exception of a small æsthetic school which has plunged into mysticism, decadentism, and many other isms—has for its subject-matter political events and political events only. Prisons, police, Pogroms, meetings, elections, parties, assassinations, bombs, revolutionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, fanatics—these are the main elements of the new literature. Another interesting point is that with all this stock-in-trade of sensationalism the literature is not sensational. If one compares it with English or German books on the same subject one thinks one is reading about a different country. This is owing to the simple fact that the Russians understand the people about whom they are writing. They know that humanity is not divided into two clearly defined categories—Liberals who are all saints and Conservatives who are all monsters. They know that because a man is a policeman he does not necessarily cease to be a human being, or that because a man is a revolutionary he does not necessarily become a superman, endowed with the resistance of Prometheus, the energy of Cromwell, the kindness of St. John. These writers distinguish. Andreev, for instance, writes a touching story of the Governor of a town, who in a moment of riot gives the order for firing on the crowd. He then relates how this man knows he will be killed, how every one else knows it, and how slowly, deliberately, and helplessly he slides into his doom. Kouprin, one of the most talented writers of the younger generation, tells a story which he says is a true one, of how after one of the Jewish “Pogroms,” when a committee was sitting to organise relief for those who had suffered, a deputation of thieves arrives and addresses the President. The thieves are burning with indignation because they have been accused of having taken part in the “Pogrom.” They are wounded in their most sensitive spot: their amour propre. They cannot get over the fact that people such as they—thieves by profession, who take pride in their art, whether it consist in pocketpicking, or housebreaking—should be confused with the inglorious herd of hooligans; and what is to them the unkindest cut of all is that people should have thought them capable of siding with the police, since they say that the “Pogroms” are the work of the police, and that the police is but the instrument in the hands of what Prince Ourousov once called the “dark forces” which stand behind the Government, and who make it so difficult for people to govern Russia.

Again, the same author tells a story of a revolutionary student who betrays his companions because, when he is interviewed by the police inspector he loses his nerve. He is not otherwise a coward; but he is afraid of people. The police inspector, he says, was as civil as a dentist to his comrades, but him he hectored and bullied, feeling instinctively that he would give way, and he did. He shoots himself: he is not afraid of doing that. In a letter he writes before killing himself he explains that he is not in the least afraid of death or of danger; but that in the presence of people he loses his head, and he attributes the fact to his having been soaked in the atmosphere of the stagnant generation of his parents, from whose influence he never escaped. These writers afford us an infinite number of sidelights on the subtleties, the contradictions, the curious contrasts which the political events bring to light—in fact on human nature, which is the same everywhere, but which under the stress and pressure of untoward violence is sharply revealed to us as though by lightning. Then, of course, the very existence of conflicting parties, ideals, opinions and aims gives the writer endless “copy” and an unbounded field of dramatic material.

The Dreyfus case divided France into two camps and split up families. Much more powerful, then, must be the political question in Russia, where it is not merely abstract but concrete; not merely platonic, but full of living passion, where any day a Conservative statesman may learn that his son or his daughter has blown up one of his colleagues, or a revolutionary girl may ascertain that her betrothed has denounced her comrades to the police. In this domain vistas are opened on to endless “conflicts of wills,” the most rewarding stuff for drama.

All this does not make for stagnation, and it is impossible to sum up the characteristics of modern Russian literature better than in the following words, which Kouprin puts into the mouth of the student (in a story to which I alluded above) who shot himself. He is talking of the schoolboy of the present generation, and what he says of the schoolboy applies equally well to the new generation, its literature, and all that belongs to it.

“I am convinced that the schoolboy of the sixth form to-day in the presence of all the Kings of Europe, in any throne room you please, would fiercely and clearly—and even somewhat rudely—declare the claims of his party. He is, it is true, almost absurd, this premature schoolboy; but there is in him a sacred respect for his own joyful, proud, and free ego, for that very thing which the spiritual poverty and the cowardly morals of our parents extirpated in us, who belong to the former generation.”