Lermontov. During the last generation of the 19th century most
of the Titans of her literature departed, and cannot be said to have
left successors of equal merit. Dostoievskiy, Pisemskiy, Turgeniev,
Goncharov, Ostrovskiy and Saltikov followed each other to the grave
in rapid succession. Leo Tolstoy alone remained, a veritable
patriarch, whose views on life gave him a world-interest beyond
even the contributions of his great prose fiction. In 1895 Apukhtin,
author of many graceful lyrics, died; in 1897 Apollon Maikov, and
soon afterwards Polonskiy. These men were well known throughout
Russia. A new school of poets has sprung up, consisting for the
most part of the so-called decadents and symbolists. Among them
may be mentioned A. Korinfskiy; Ivan Bunin, who has published
an excellent translation of Longfellow's Hiawatha; and Constantine
Balmont. The last of these has given to the public several volumes
of lyrics, many of which exhibit a graceful imagination. He has
been a successful translator of Shelley, and of Edgar Allan Poe,
Ibsen and Calderon. We must also mention V. Briusov and
K. Sluchevskiy, Mme. Gippius-Merezhkovskaya and Mme. Myrrha
Lokhvitskaya. Excellent historical novels have been written by
Merezhkovskiy (Merejkovsky (q.v.)). The drama is not in a
flourishing condition. Very little of merit has been produced
since the great trilogy (1866–69) of Alexis Tolstoy dealing with
the reign of Ivan the Terrible—full of picturesque horrors for the
dramatist—and the bourgeois comedies of Ostrovskiy.
If we turn to history, in which the Russians have always shown considerable talent, we can cite some really good work. We cannot here find room to discuss the memoirs and other documents which appear in the Russian Antiquary (Russkaya Starina), the Historical Messenger (Istoricheskiy Viestnik) and other journals, the name of which is legion. In 1897 Professor Bestuzhev-Riumin, of the university of St Petersburg, died. He had held his chair of history since 1865. His valuable History of Russia must now remain a torso only, the first volume and the first half of the second having alone appeared. Soloviev and Kostomarov are dead. The famous school of Russian historians is thus almost extinct. But some excellent writers in this department have come to the front. Professor Miliukov has started his Sketches of the History of Russian Culture (Ocherki po istorii russkoi kulturi), which has been much read. Professor Bilbasov wrote a History of Catherine II. and N. Shilder a Life of Alexander I. D. Evarnitskiy has added a third volume to his interesting work on the Zaporozhian Cossacks. The Russians have always enjoyed a considerable reputation as memoir-writers, and the Recollections of Mme. Smirnov, which first appeared in the Northern Messenger (Sieverny Viestnik), proved very interesting. Pushkin appears here before us in the most minute details of his everyday life. The centenary of his birth (1899) was signalized by the publication of many interesting monographs on his strange career. The details furnished by his nephew, L. Pavlistchev, were especially noteworthy. The second volume appeared of the classical History of the Russian Church, by E. Golubinskiy. A valuable contribution to early Russian history was furnished by the Legal Antiquities (Yuridicheskia Drevnosti) of V. Serguievich, by which quite a new light has been thrown upon the Russian sobor. The well known savant, Maxime Kovalevskiy, published the second volume of his Economic Development of Europe to the Rise of Capitalism. N. Rozhkov wrote an important work entitled Village Economy in Muscovy in the Sixteenth Century. This book analyses the conditions under which economic production was developed in Old Russia. S. Platonov published a History of the Insurrections in Russia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. He holds entirely new views on the oprichina, the famous bodyguard of Ivan the Terrible. Professor B. Kliuchevskiy, of the university of Moscow, published in 1883 a valuable book on the Russian Duma, as the privy council of the emperors was called, and in 1899 he issued his Aids to Lectures on Russian History. Russian writers have not often devoted themselves to the political and social conditions of other countries, but an exception must be made in the case of the books by Professor Vinogradov, formerly of Moscow, notably his Investigations into the Social History of England in the Middle Ages (1887). The learned author, who was called to Oxford as Corpus professor of jurisprudence, also prepared an edition of this work for the English public. In fiction no new writers appeared of equal calibre to Gogol, Turgeniev, Dostoievskiy and Tolstoy. But A. Chekhov showed considerable power in his short stories. Some of the tales of Gorki (q.v.), Ertel and Yasinskiy are also of great merit. The brilliant Garshin died insane in 1888.
A few words must be said on the literature of the Russian dialects, the Little and White Russian. The Little Russian is rich in skazki (tales) and songs. Peculiar to them is the duma a narrative poem which corresponds in many particulars with the Russian bylina. Since the commencement of the 19th century, the Little Russian dumy have been repeatedly The Little Russian dialect, or Malo-Russian. edited, as by Maksimovich Metlinskiy and others, and an elaborate edition was undertaken by Dragomanov and Antonovich. Just as the byliny of the Great Russians, so also these dumy of the Little Russians admit of classification, and they have been divided by their latest editors as follows: (1) the songs of the druzhina, treating of the early princes and their followers; (2) the Cossack period (Kozachestvo), in which the Cossacks are found in continual warfare with the Polish pans and the attempts of the Jesuits to introduce the Roman Catholic religion; (3) the period of the Haidamaks, who formed the nucleus of the national party, and prolonged the struggle.
The foundation of the Little Russian literature (written, as opposed to the oral) was laid by Ivan Kotliarevskiy (1769–1838), whose travesty of part of the Aeneid enjoys great popularity among some of his countrymen. Others, however, object to it as tending to bring the language or dialect into ridicule. A truly national poet appeared in Taras Shevchenko, born at the village of Kirilovka, in the government of Kiev, in the condition of a serf. The strange adventures of his early life he has told us in his autobiography. He did not get his freedom till some time after he had reached manhood, when he was purchased from his master by the generous efforts of the poet Zhukovskiy and others. Besides poetry, he occupied himself with painting, with considerable success. He unfortunately became obnoxious to the government, and was punished with exile to Siberia from 1847 to 1857. He did not long survive his return, dying in 1861, aged forty-six. No one has described with greater vigour than Shevchenko the old days of the Ukraine. In his youth he listened to the village traditions handed down by the priests, and he has faithfully reproduced them. In the powerful poem entitled Haidamak we have a graphic picture of the horrors enacted by Gonta and his followers at Uman. The funeral of the poet was a vast public procession; a great cairn, surmounted with a cross, was raised over his remains, where he lies buried near Kaniov on the banks of the Dnieper. His grave has been styled the “Mecca of the South Russian Revolutionists.” A complete edition of his works, with interesting biographical notices—one contributed by the novelist Turgeniev—appeared at Prague in 1876. Besides the national songs, excellent collections of the South Russian folk-tales have appeared, edited by Dragomanov, Rudchenko, and others. Many of these are still recited by the tchumaki, or wandering pedlars. A valuable work is the Zapiski o Yuzhnoy Rossii (“Papers on Southern Russia”), published at St Petersburg in 1857 by Panteleimon Kulish. After he got into trouble (with Kostomarov and Shevchenko) for his political views, the late works of this author show him to have undergone a complete change. Other writers using the Little Russian language are Marko-Vovchok (that is, Madame Eugenia Markovich) and Yuri Fedkovich, who employs a dialect of Bukovina. Fedkovich, like Shevchenko, sprang from a peasant family, and served as a soldier in the Austrian army against the French during the Italian campaign. Naturally we find his poems filled with descriptions of life in the camp. Like the Croat Preradović, he began writing poetry in the German language, till he was turned into more natural paths by some patriotic friends. A collection of songs of Bukovina was published at Kiev in 1875 by Lonachevskiy. Eugene Zelechovskiy compiled a valuable Dictionary of Little Russian. There is a good grammar by Osadtsa, a pupil of Miklosich.
In the White Russian dialect are to be found only a few songs, with the exception of portions of the Scriptures and some legal documents. A valuable dictionary has been published by Nosovich, but this is one of the most neglected of the Russian dialects. Collections of White Russian songs have White Russian dialect. been published by Shein and others.
Bibliography.—A. Pypin, History of Russ. Lit. (in Russian); A. Bruckner, Geschichte der russ. Lit. (Leipzig, 1905; Eng. trans. ed. E. H. Minns, London, 1909); A. Skabichevskiy, History of the Latest Russ. Lit., 1848–1892 (in Russian, St Petersburg, 1897); Gallery of Russian Writers (in Russian, Moscow, 1901); Russian Poets, compiled by A. Salnikov (in Russian, St Petersburg, 1901); L. Wiener, Anthology of Russ. Lit. (New York, 1902); Rosa Newmarch, Poetry and Progress in Russia (London, 1907). (W. R. M.)
RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR, 1904–5. The seizure by Russia of the Chinese fortress of Port Arthur, which she had a few years previously, in concert with other powers, compelled Japan to relinquish, was from the Russian point of view the logical outcome of her eastward expansion and her need for an ice-free harbour on the Pacific. The extension of the Trans-Siberian railway through Manchuria to Port Arthur and a large measure of influence in Manchuria followed equally naturally. But the whole course of this expansion had been watched with suspicion by Japan, from the time of the Saghalien incident of 1875, when the island power, then barely emerging from the feudal age, had to cede her half of the island to Russia, to the Shimonoseki treaty of 1895, when the powers compelled her to forego the profits of her victory over China. The subsequent occupation of Port Arthur and other Chinese harbours by European powers, and the evident intention of consolidating Russian influence in Manchuria, were again and again the subject of Japanese representations at St Petersburg, and these representations became more vigorous when, in 1903, Russia seemed to be about to extend her Manchurian policy into Korea. No less than ten draft treaties
