The Russian Review/Volume 1/March 1916/Aspects of Russian Literature II
Aspects of Russian Literature.
By Louis S. Friedland.
II.
The literature of the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century was determined by a rare mingling of diverse forces. To begin with the social factors, we find that the structure of Russian society was based on one of those marked class-divisions which, in one form or another, have existed in all countries and in all ages. In this instance, it was the division between the land-owners and the serfs, the "people." The economic and environmental conditions that determine the literature are those of a land-owning class, on the one hand, and a land-working class on the other.
As we have seen, a desire for reconstruction was already beginning to manifest itself. Abolition of serfdom became the first concrete doctrine of the writings of this period. But the very men who were preaching this duty were themselves of the master-class. This fact gives us the keynote of the literature of this period. It is the record of a people who are conscious that their day is over, that for them, social dissolution is at hand, that a new era is dawning. It is the swan-song of the master-class. The gentry had had their day, and now the clear-seeing spirits among them were bidding a graceful and melancholy farewell to a moribund social order. There was nothing in the past of this landed gentry to furnish the seeds of renewed life,—no legacy of ideas of noblesse oblige, of honor, of growth and development. They had been, and were soon to be no more. And, in keeping with this premonition of social death, the literature of the time is, in a sense, an orchid growth. It is melancholy and dispirited. For the writers, the glory of life has departed, and the spirit of their works is one of sad heroism. They write beautifully, earnestly, sincerely, but their mood is that of hopelessness and gentle resignation.
These men needed a great belief to arouse the spirit, and a great inspiration to invigorate the mind and heart. For a
time, some of them found a vitalizing cause in the hopes and aspirations of the new nationalism,—the Slavophile movement. We have already considered the national aspect of Slavophilism,—an assertion of racial and spiritual unity. As such, it led inevitably to the strong desire for a return to what was considered the peculiarly Russian social system: that of an idealized communism. In this way began the great struggle against serfdom and certain other conditions of "rural" life, and the masses found their way into literary consciousness. They became a necessary element of literature and thought, and fervent idealists preached the doctrine of "Pity" toward an enslaved people.
There is one other far-reaching effect of the Slavophile movement. The desire for a return to the communal mode of Russian life led to a close scrutiny of the existing order of things. In the name of Slavophilism, men challenged the non-Russian in the social structure, and, together with the populist appeal of "Back to the people," there was heard the cry "Back to the soil and the simple life." The demand was for the urgent necessity of fewer demands,—for simplification of life, for a great unloading of the burden of Western culture and non-Russian customs, for an escape from the complexities of civilization which were threatening the development of the truly Russian spirit.
To the reader of "modern" Russian literature, the ideas involved in this tendency toward simplification will at once suggest themselves. They form the chief "problems" of Goncharov, Turgeniev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,—of all the masters of Russia's golden age. In time, the trend toward simplification takes concrete form in a desire to become unified with the people. But always it presupposes a return to Nature, a vindication of the ethics of equality and fraternity. Its model is the original Christian brotherhood; its program is the writings of the Apostles; its hope is the purified agrarian community, and its guiding principle is love among men. One is tempted to add,—its apostle is Tolstoy.
We must remember, however, that all this is the constructive side, the affirmation, of the "simplifiers." They had aversions, as well, and strong antagonisms. They hated all movements that were not animated by ideals of love. Therefore, they were completely out of sympathy with those who viewed society as a war of classes, and who placed their hope in a violent struggle for the rights of man. The "simplifiers,"—whose aims were wholly moral and whose methods were purely pacific—felt that their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? The simplification of life, the decrease of "vital" demands, strips the arts and culture of the West of all efficacy and worth. To these men, whose longing was for the inner, spiritual freedom of man, Western progress, with all it connoted, was an abomination. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the Westernizers, the rationalists, strongly arrayed against them. The "simplifiers" negatived progress and culture. The Westernizers, rallying to the defense, proclaimed that wisdom and knowledge are the same as power and freedom. They viewed life as an unceasing struggle, as a great adventure on which man is embarked. And the goal, whatever it be, cannot be attained unless man overcomes the forces of Nature, and subjects them to human ends. Whereas the logical outcome of Simplification is the complete merging and loss of personality in the indeterminate mass, the inevitable result of the other view is the bold assertion of individuality. The former promises the millenium through the power of "Abnegation," the latter demands a different world by virtue of "Struggle"; the first begins with love, and ends with Surrender, the second begins with Strife, and ends with—Humanity.
Which of these two views of life is nihilistic,—a negation? Both. The Simplifiers deny progress, and art, and culture, and affirm the inner spiritual life. The Rationalists affirm the whole of life—past, present, and future—for they believe in progress, growth, development. But they also deny the past and present in rejecting authority and tradition. These things were as nothing to them, and, as Hertzen, their spokesman, says, "Nothingness should not be made everything." It is this negation of the Westernizers that has earned for some of them the name of the Early Nihilists. Just as the Simplifiers annihilated knowledge and culture by refusing to give them a place in their conception of the full life, so the Early Nihilists did away with everything that, to them, was not real. And what is their test of reality? The real, said men like Hertzen, is whatever frees the individual and, in the end, humanity, from the bonds with which they are tied. This means that everything is "suspected," judged, tested from the standpoint of "reality." So that the attitude of the Early Nihilists is one of skepticism; they accept nothing on its socially stamped valuation. They are rationalists, and skeptics par excellence. But it is well to note that the theoretical Nihilism we are considering, does not mean universal negation. As a matter of fact, its upholders had started with an affirmation, —the Western idea of individuality—and also with a firm belief in change and growth.
Perhaps our exposition of these two opposing views of life makes it appear that they are completely irreconcilable. In reality, this is not so. Disagreement implies some common basis. Trends of thought have a disconcerting way of merging, in their final analysis and effects, with philosophic theories that seem to be at the opposite pole. And intellectual, as well as other forces, defy all our attempts to coop them up within convenient dates and periods. It is not surprising, then, that the ideas current in the "thirties" and "forties" have passed down through the generations "even unto our own day." Of course, they have undergone change and development, and apparent transformation. Nor is it strange that Westernizers and Slavophiles were in virtual agreement on many matters, or that a writer like Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, reflects the contrasting influences of tendencies theoretically opposed to one another. These men attempt to solve the problems raised by the theorists of both camps. But it is Turgeniev who saw the birth of these ideas and their gradual development. From one point of view, his works are a study, by an acute observer, of the contending forces in the intellectual life of his countrymen. He belongs, first of all, to the early period when the abolition of serfdom was the burning issue of the day. And he lived through the next three decades, the chief ideas of which we shall now attempt to summarize.
With the beginning of the "fifties," a new force enters into Russian literature. The old conditions of life were falling to pieces under the strong attack of industrial and commercial changes. Chernishevsky had said about his country, "We are a backward people, and in this lies our hope. We must bless our fate that we have not lived the same life as Europe. Her present condition must be a lesson to us. We don't want her proletariat, and we don't want her aristocracy." But the rejection was in vain. With the development of the industrial system, there came the realization that there were, as a Russian critic puts is, "larger communities than the commune."
The literature of this decade is marked by the spirit of realism. The idealized peasant of Turgeniev gives way to the real peasant of a literature whose aim is purely objective. Then, too, the writers are no longer drawn exclusively from the gentry. The new literature is the product of men of different ranks (raznochintzy), and among them are many who spring from the people: Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov. The milieu is no longer that of an agricultural communism. For the first time voices arise from the city. In his stories, Nevsky Prospect, and The Portrait, Gogol writes about the poverty-stricken chinovniks (petty officials) in the town. Nekrasov, the poet, sings the woes of the city proletarian, and his songs are a bitter protest against misfortunes, and evils without end. Dostoyevsky depicts the poor in the city; his grief is the knowledge of what man has made of man, and, with the wonderful detachment of an alienist, he seeks to know how men are able to bear it all, what it is that consoles them. And thus it was that suffering and misery entered into artistic consciousness.
The thinking men of the "fifties" felt that it was possible to find a release for man from all the sorrow that they saw everywhere about them. They dreamt of Utopian Socialism. They read with a great eagerness the works of Fourier, and Robert Owen, and Saint-Simon. Man, they felt, must find his own way to freedom from the nightmare of a horrible actuality. But it was not until the next decade that a complete philosophy of freedom was developed. This was the work of the Nihilists of the "sixties."