Chapter XX: Act V: SCENE 1. TWILIGHT. KULÍGIN (sitting on a bench), KABANÓV (5)

One of us had been a soldier of a railroad battalion, later, as he professed, a roadmaster with one of the Polish railways; he was a red-haired, muscular man, with cold, grey eyes; he could speak German, and possessed a very detailed knowledge of prison life.

People of our class don’t like to talk much about their past, generally having more or less good reasons for not mentioning it; consequently we all believed each other, at least outwardly, for inwardly we hardly believed ourselves.

When our second companion, a small, wizened man with thin lips, that were all the time skeptically compressed, said of himself that he had been a student at the Moscow University,--the soldier and I accepted this assertion as a fact. In reality, it was absolutely the same to us whether he had ever been a student, a detective, or one of the “orleans,”--the only important point was that at the time of our acquaintanceship he was our equal: he was starving, he enjoyed in towns the especial attention of the police, and in the country the suspicious attitude of the peasants; he hated both with the hatred of a powerless, persecuted, and hungry animal, and dreamt of a universal revenge upon everybody and everything,--in short, by his position amidst the kings of Nature and the potentates of life, and by his inclinations, he was a bird of our feather.

Misfortune is the best cement to unite even the most contradictory natures, and we were all convinced of our right to regard ourselves as unfortunates.

I was the third. Out of modesty, which has been my characteristic ever since my nails were grown, I will not say a word about my worth, and, not wishing to appear naïve to you, I will keep silent about my faults. However, to furnish you material for my characterisation, I will say that I always regarded myself better than others, and that I still successfully maintain this opinion.

So we left Perekóp and moved on, depending for that day upon the shepherds, whom one may always ask for a piece of bread and who never refuse it to pedestrians.

I walked by the side of the soldier, the “student” marched behind us. Over his shoulders hung something that somewhat reminded of a frock-coat; on his sharp-pointed, angular and clean-shaven head rested the remnant of a broad-brimmed hat; grey trowsers with many-coloured patches fitted tightly to his thin legs, and to the soles of his feet he had fastened parts of a bootleg, which he had picked up on his way; he held them in place by means of ropes which he had wound out of the lining of his costume, and this affair he called sandals; he marched silently, raising a great deal of dust and blinking with his small greenish eyes. The soldier was dressed in a red fustian shirt which, to use his words, he had by his own hand obtained at Khérson; over his shirt there was a warm cotton jacket, and his head was adorned by a soldier’s cap of indefinite colour, which was poised, according to the military rule, “with a bend of the upper circle over the right brow”; about his legs flapped broad Ukrainian carter’s pantaloons. He was barefooted.

I was similarly dressed, and also barefooted.

We marched on, and all about us extended the steppe with a heroic sweep and, being covered with the blue, burning cupola of a cloudless summer sky, lay before us like an enormous black dish. The grey, dusty road cut a broad swath across it, and burned our feet. Here and there we saw bristly stretches of harvested grainfields that bore a striking resemblance to the long-neglected cheeks of the soldier.

The soldier walked and sang with a hoarse voice:

“And we sing and praise Thy holy Sunday----”

During his military service he had been something like a sexton in the battalion church, and he knew an endless number of hymns and chants, which knowledge he misused every time our conversation did not flow exactly right.

Ahead of us, on the horizon, rose some forms of soft contours and gentle shades, from lilac to light pink.

“That ’s evidently the Crimean range,” said the student dryly.

“Mountains?” exclaimed the soldier. “It ’s mighty early, my friend, you see them. Those are clouds, just clouds. You see what they look like? Just like cranberry sauce with milk.”

I remarked that it would be exceedingly agreeable if the clouds really consisted of cranberry sauce. This at once roused our hunger,--the great question of the day.

“The devil!” cursed the soldier, and spit out. “If only a single living soul came our way! Not a person---- We ’ll have to lick our own paws, like bears in winter.”

“I said we ought to keep near inhabited places,” remarked the “student,” moralising.

“You said!” said the soldier angrily. “That ’s why you are a learned man, just to be a-talking. Where do you expect to find inhabited places here? The devil knows where they are!”

The “student” grew silent and compressed his lips. The sun was going down, and the clouds in the horizon displayed a variety of intangible colours. The air smelled of land and salt.

This dry and appetising odour only increased our hunger.

There was a gnawing sensation in our stomachs. It was a strange and disagreeable sensation: it felt as though the sap were flowing out of all the muscles of the body, as though it evaporated, and the muscles lost their vital flexibility. A sensation of stinging dryness filled the cavity of the mouth and the throat; the head was dizzy, and dark spots arose and flitted before the eyes. At times they assumed the form of steaming pieces of meat, of big slices of bread; reminiscence furnished these “visions of the past, silent visions” with their appropriate aromas, and then it felt as though a knife were turning around in the stomach.

We kept on marching, communicating to each other the description of our sensations and being on a sharp lookout on both sides,--hoping to discover somewhere a flock of sheep, or to hear the sharp creaking of a Tartar’s cart taking fruit to an Armenian market.

But the steppe was deserted and speechless.

On the previous day we had eaten between us four pounds of rye bread and some five melons, after having marched about forty versts,--there was a discrepancy between assets and liabilities,--and, having fallen asleep on the market place of Perekóp, we awoke from hunger.

The “student” had justly advised us not to lie down to sleep, but to go to work in the night,--it is not considered proper in decent society to speak aloud of the plans for trespassing on private property, and so I shall keep silent. I only want to be truthful, and not vulgar, as regards my own interests. I know that people are getting more and more kind-hearted in these our highly cultured days and that when they take their neighbour by the throat with the evident purpose of choking him, they try to do so with the utmost politeness and with the observance of all the proprieties, suited to the case. The experience of my own throat compels me to notice this progress of manners, and I affirm with a pleasant feeling of conviction that everything in this world is being developed and perfected. This remarkable progress is, in particular, sufficiently proved by the annual increase in prisons, saloons, and “houses of toleration.”

So, swallowing our hungry spittle and attempting by a friendly conversation to suppress the pain in our stomachs, we marched across the deserted and speechless steppe, marched in the blood-red rays of the declining sun, full of a dim hope of something. In front of us, the sun was going down, gently descending into the soft clouds, which were lavishly painted by its rays, and behind us and at our sides a bluish mist, rising from the steppe towards heaven, narrowed down the inhospitable horizon around us.

“Friends, collect material for a fire,” said the soldier, as he lifted a stick by the wayside. “We will have to sleep out on the steppe, and there is dew falling. Pick up dung chips and all kinds of dry stalks!”

We scattered on both sides of the road and began to collect dry weeds and everything else that would burn. Every time I had to bend down, a powerful desire to fall down upon the ground took possession of my body, a desire to lie immovably and eat the rich, black earth, to eat a great deal of it, to exhaustion, and then to fall asleep, even if it were to fall asleep for ever, as long as there would be something to eat, and I could chew and feel the thick, warm mass slowly passing from the mouth over the dried-up œsophagus into the hungry and compressed stomach that was burning with the desire of sucking something in.

“If we could only find some roots,” sighed the soldier. “There are some edible roots.”

But there were no roots whatsoever in the black, ploughed-up earth. The southern night came upon us rapidly, and the last sunbeam had not yet gone out, when the stars began to glisten in the dark-blue vault, and the dark shadows grew thicker around us, narrowing down the endless extent of the steppe that held us.

“Friends,” said the “student” half-aloud, “there is a man lying to the left of us.”

“A man?” doubted the soldier. “Why should he be lying there?”

“Go and ask him. No doubt, he has some bread, or he would not be camping out in the steppe,” explained the “student.” The soldier looked aside, where the man was lying, and, spitting out assertively, he said:

“Let us go to him!”

Only the “student’s” sharp green eyes could have discovered that the dark mass that rose some three hundred and fifty feet to the left of the road was a man. We started in that direction, swiftly striding over clods of earth, and we felt the pang of hunger getting more acute in the germinating hope of finding something to eat. We were near the place, but the man did not move.

“Maybe that is not a man,” gloomily said the soldier, giving expression to our common thought.

But our doubt was immediately dispersed, for the mass on the ground moved, raised itself, and we saw that it was a real, live man who was standing on his knees and stretching out his hands towards us.

He spoke to us with a dull and trembling voice:

“Not a step nearer, or I ’ll shoot!”

A dry, short click was heard in the murky air.

We stopped as commanded and kept silent for a few seconds, being dazed by such an inhospitable reception.

“What a r-rascal!” muttered the soldier deliberately.

“Yes,” thoughtfully said the “student.” “He wanders about with a revolver; evidently, the fish is full of spawn.”

“Oh there!” called out the soldier, having made up his mind for something.

The man did not change his position and kept silent.

“Oh there! We will not touch you. Give us only some bread, if you have any! For Christ’s sake, give us some, friend! Damn you, anathema!”

The last words the soldier spoke under his breath.

The man kept silent.

“Do you hear?” again spoke the soldier, with a tremor of anger and despair. “Give us some bread, I say! We will not come near you. Throw some to us!”

“All right!” said the man abruptly.

He might have said to us: “My dear brethren!” and if he had poured all his holiest and purest sentiments into these three Christian words, they would not have roused us so and would not have made us so human as this dull and short:

“All right!”

“Don’t fear us, good man!” said the soldier softly and with a sweet smile upon his face, though the man could not see his smile, for he was separated from us by at least twenty paces.

“We ’re peaceable people, and are walking from Russia into the Kubán country; we have spent our pennies on the way, and have eaten up our provisions, and have n’t had a bite for two days.”

“Catch it,” said the good man, flourishing something in the air. A black piece flashed by and fell not far from us on the ploughed field. The “student” threw himself upon it.

“Catch again! Once more! That ’s all I have!”

When the “student” collected this original gift, it appeared that we had about four pounds of stale wheat bread. It was all rolled in dirt and very stale. The first did not detain our attention, the second pleased us very much. Stale bread is more nourishing than fresh bread, because there is less moisture in it.

“Here, and here, and here!” the soldier doled out the shares with concentrated attention. “Hold on, the pieces are n’t equal! We ’ll have to pinch off a piece of yours, learned man, or he will have too little.”

The “student” submitted without grumbling to the diminution of his piece of bread by some five ounces; I took it and put it in my mouth.

I began to chew it, to chew it slowly, barely repressing the cramp-like motion of my jaws that were ready to crush stones. It gave me an acute pleasure to feel the palpitating cramps of my alimentary canal, and to satisfy it slowly and by small drops. Swallow after swallow, warm and inexpressibly, incomprehensibly appetising, penetrated into the burning stomach and seemed immediately to be transformed into blood and brain. Joy, such a strange, quiet, and vivifying joy, warmed my heart in the measure as my stomach filled up, and my general condition was not unlike a half-sleeping. I forgot those accursed days of my chronic hunger; I forgot my companions, being all merged in the enjoyment by the sensations through which I then passed.

But when I threw from my palm the last crumbs into my mouth, I felt that I was deathly hungry.

“That accursed one has some bacon or some meat left,” grumbled the soldier, sitting against me on the ground and rubbing his belly with his hands.

“No doubt, for the bread smelled of meat. Yes, and he may have some bread left, too,” said the “student” and softly added:

“If it were not for the revolver----”

“Who is he anyway?”

“Evidently, one of our kind.”

“A dog!” declared the soldier.

We were sitting closely together and kept looking askance at the place where our benefactor was sitting with his revolver. Not a sound, nor a sign of life proceeded from him.

Night was gathering around us her dark powers. There was a dead silence in the steppe, and we could hear each other’s breathing. Now and then the melancholy whistling of a gopher reached our ears. The stars--living flowers of heaven--gleamed above us. We wanted to eat.

I say it proudly,--I was not worse nor better than my casual companions in that somewhat strange night. I proposed to them that we should get up and make for that man. We would not touch him, but we would eat up anything he might have. He would shoot,--let him! He could hit but one of us three, if he hit us at all; and even if he did, a bullet from a revolver would hardly kill.

“Let us go!” said the soldier, jumping to his feet.

The “student” was slower in rising.

We started, we almost ran. The “student” kept towards one side, and behind us.

“Partner!” cried the soldier to him reproachfully.

We were met with a dull grumbling and a sharp sound of a clicking hammer. There was a flash of fire, and the dry sound of a shot was heard.

“Missed!” joyfully exclaimed the soldier, reaching the man with one bound. “Well, devil, I ’ll give it to you now!”

The “student” made a rush for his wallet.

The devil fell from his knees upon his back and, stretching out his hands, began to snore.

“What the deuce!” wondered the soldier, who had already raised his foot to give the man a kick. “Is it possible he has filled himself up with lead? Oh, there, get up! Say, did you kill yourself, eh?”

“There is some bread, and some cakes, and bread--lots of it, friends!” was heard the jubilant voice of the “student.”

“Well, the deuce take you, go to! Let us eat, friends!” cried the soldier. I took the revolver out of the hands of the man, who had stopped snoring and lay motionless. One barrel had a cartridge in it.

We ate again, and we ate in silence. The man lay silent, without moving a limb. We paid no attention to him.

“Is it really so, my friends, that you did it all for the bread only?” suddenly was heard a hoarse and quivering voice.

We all shuddered. The “student” even started up and, bending to the ground, began to cough.

The soldier finished chewing and began cursing.

“You, soul of a dog, may you burst like a dry plank! What did you want us to do? Take off your hide? What good would it do us? You stupid snout, damned soul! I declare! Carrying arms, and shooting at people! You anathema!”

He kept on cursing and eating, which latter fact much diminished the expressiveness and strength of his curses.

“Just wait, when we are through eating, we ’ll square up with you,” ominously threatened the “student.”

Then were heard, in the quiet of the night, howling sobs that frightened us.

“Friends, how could I know? I fired because I was afraid. I am on my way from New Afón to the Government of Orél. O Lord! The fever is undoing me since the sun went down! It was the fever that made me leave Afón---- I was doing some carpentering there---- I am a carpenter---- I have at home a wife and two daughters--have n’t seen them these three years---- Friends! Eat everything----”

“We will, you need n’t ask us!” said the “student.”

“My Lord! If I had known that you were good, peaceable people, do you suppose I would have fired at you? You see, my friends, it ’s the steppe, and night--am I to be blamed, eh?”

As he said that, he wept, or to speak more correctly, emitted a quivering, timorous howl.

“Hear him whine!” contemptuously said the soldier.

“He must have money about him,” declared the “student.”

The soldier blinked, looked at him, and smiled.

“You are a good guesser. Say: let us make a fire, and go to sleep!”

“And he?” inquired the “student.”

“The deuce take him! What do you want us to do--roast him?”

“We ought to!” the “student” shook his sharp-pointed head.

We went for the material which we had been gathering and which we had thrown away where the carpenter had stopped us with his threatening call; we brought it back, and soon we were sitting around a fire. It glowed softly in the windless night and illuminated a small space which we were occupying. We were feeling sleepy, though we could have supped again.

“Friends!” cried out the carpenter. He was lying some three paces from us, and at times it appeared to me that he was muttering something.

“Well?” said the soldier.

“May I move up to you, to the fire? My death is upon me, my bones are aching. Lord! I don’t think I ’ll reach home.”

“Crawl up,” decided the “student.”

The carpenter slowly crawled along the ground towards the fire, as if fearing to lose an arm or leg. He was a tall and dreadfully dried up man: everything hung dreadfully loose about him, and his large dim eyes reflected the pain that was consuming him. His wry face was bony and had even in the light of the fire a kind of a yellowish earthy, deathly color. He was all in a tremble and provoked a contemptuous pity. He stretched out to the fire his long, lean hands, and rubbed his bony fingers, but their joints bent lazily and slowly. In short, he was a horrible sight.

“How is it you are in such a fix, and afoot? Are you so stingy?” gloomily asked the soldier.

“They advised me not to go by sea, but to walk through the Crimea, on account of the air. But I can’t walk, I am dying, brothers! I ’ll die alone in the steppe--the birds will peck at me, and nobody will know me---- My wife and daughters will be waiting---- I have written to them--but the rains of the steppe will be bleaching my bones. My Lord, my Lord!”

He whined with the melancholy whine of a wounded wolf.

“The devil,” cried out the soldier as he rose to his feet. “Don’t howl so! Why don’t you give us people any rest? Are you dying? All right, die, but keep quiet. Who wants you? Shut up!”

“Kick him in the pate!” proposed the “student.”

“Let us lie down to sleep,” said I. “And you, if you want to be by the fire, don’t howl at least.”

“Did you hear?” sternly said the soldier. “Well, make a note of it. Do you think we are going to pity you and look after you, for hurling bread at us, and firing on us? You mean devil! Others----pah----”

The soldier grew silent and stretched himself out on the ground.

The “student” had lain down before. I lay down myself. The frightened carpenter was all bent into a ball and moved to the fire, and looked at it fixedly. I lay to the right of him and I could hear his teeth chatter. The “student” was to the left of him and, it seemed, fell at once asleep, having rolled up into a ball. The soldier put his hands under his head and lay, face upwards, and looked at the sky.

“What a night! Lots of stars--warmth----” he turned to me after a time.

“What a sky! It ’s a coverlet, not a sky. I do love this life of a tramp, my friend. You suffer cold and hunger, but it ’s a mighty free life. There is no superior over you--you are master of your life. You may chew off your head, and nobody will say a word to you. It ’s fine. I have starved enough these days, and have had enough cause for anger, but now I am lying and looking at the sky. The stars are twinkling to me, as if to say: ‘Never mind, Lakútin, wander about over the earth and submit to nobody.’ Yes---- And my heart feels light---- Oh, there, what do they call you? Oh, there, carpenter! Don’t be angry with me, and have no fear! As to our having eaten up your bread, that ’s nothing. You had some bread, and we had none, so we ate up yours---- But you are a savage, you fire off guns. Don’t you know that bullets may harm people? It made me dreadfully mad, and if you had not fallen down, I would have thrashed you, my friend, for your impudence. But as for the bread, you will reach Perekóp to-morrow, and so you will buy some--I know you have money---- How long is it since you caught the ague?”

The bass of the soldier and the quivering voice of the sick carpenter resounded for quite a while in my ears. Dark, almost black night descended more and more upon the earth, and the fresh, aromatic air flowed into my breast.

From the fire came an even light and vivifying warmth. The eyes became gluey, and before them was borne, through the drowsiness, something soothing and purifying.

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“Get up! Lively there! Let us go!”

I opened my eyes with a feeling of terror and swiftly jumped to my feet, being helped by the soldier, who jerked me up from the ground.

“Lively there! Move on!”

His face was stern and agitated. I looked around me. The sun was rising, and its rose-coloured beam lay upon the immovable and blue face of the carpenter. His mouth was open, his eyes stood far out of their sockets and stared with a glassy glance, expressive of terror. His dress was all torn over his chest, and he lay in an unnaturally contorted position. The “student” was gone.

“Well, what are you tarrying for? I told you to go!” said the soldier persuasively, pulling me all the time by my arm.

“Is he dead?” asked I, shuddering from the morning freshness.

“Of course. You would die, too, if they choked you,” explained the soldier.

“What, did the ‘student’?” cried I.

“Well, who else? Maybe, you? Or I? Yes. There you have a learned man---- He got away with the man, and left his companions in a nice fix. If I had known that yesterday, I would have killed that ‘student.’ I would have killed him with one stroke. I would have banged his temple with my fist, and there would have been a villain less in the world. Do you understand what he did? Now we are compelled to walk in such a way that not a soul shall see us in the steppe. Do you understand? Because they will find the carpenter to-day, and they will discover that he had been choked to death and robbed. And they will be on the lookout for fellows of our kind: Where do you come from, and where did you pass your night? Yes, and they will catch us---- Though we have n’t a thing of his--yes, I have his revolver in my bosom. It ’s a nice fix we are in!”

“Throw it away,” I advised the soldier.

“Throw it away,” said he, thoughtfully. “It ’s worth something. And then, maybe they will not catch us. No, I won’t throw it away. Who knows that the carpenter had a gun? I won’t throw it away. It ’s worth three roubles. There is a bullet in it. I tell you, I would like to send it a-flying into the ear of our dear companion! I wonder how much money that dog got away with! Anathema!”

“Poor daughters of the carpenter,” said I.

“The daughters? What daughters? Oh, his. Well, they ’ll grow up, and they won’t marry us, so there is no use talking about them. Come, friend, let us be off. Where shall we go?”

“I don’t know---- Anywhere.”

“I don’t know either, and I know that it makes no difference. Come, let us to the right, there must be the sea.”

We went to the right.

I turned back. Far away from us rose a dark mound in the steppe, and the sun shone over it.

“Are you trying to see if he has arisen from the dead? Don’t be afraid, he won’t be up after us. The learned fellow is evidently a man of experience, he has done his job thoroughly. Well, he ’s a fine partner! He has put us in a nice hole! Friend! People are getting worse from year to year, they are getting worse!” said the soldier mournfully.

The deserted and speechless steppe, bathed by the bright morning sun and mingling in the horizon with the sky, was unfolded around us in such a bright, gentle, and abundant light that every black and unrighteous deed seemed impossible amidst the great extent of this free plain that was covered by the blue cupola of the sky.

“I feel like having something to eat, friend!” said my companion, as he rolled himself a cigarette out of coarse tobacco.

“What shall we eat to-day, and where and how?”

It was a problem!

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Having told me this, the storyteller, who was my neighbour in the hospital, ended his narrative.

“That ’s all. The soldier and I got to be good friends, and we walked together to the Kára territory. He was a good and very experienced fellow, a typical barefoot tramp. I respected him. We walked together to Asia Minor, and then I lost track of him.”

“Do you ever think of the carpenter?” asked I.

“As you see, or, as you heard.”

“Well, and--?”

He laughed.

“What am I to feel? It was not my fault what happened to him, not any more than it is your fault what has happened to me. Nobody is to be blamed for anything, because we are all alike--beasts.”

Dmítri Sergyéevich Merezhkóvski. (1865-.)

Merezhkóvski was born in 1865 and graduated from the university in
1886. He began early to write poetry, but met with no success. A novel
in verse, _Vyéra_, which he wrote in 1890, however, produced a
favourable impression. Since then Merezhkóvski has devoted himself
more especially to prose. He is opposed to the prevailing democratism
in literature, and preaches a return to the ideal of Púshkin. He has
evolved an unusually fine style for Russian literature, but his
conceptions are rather fantastic, and not always coherent. His chief
interest lies in the illustration of the struggle of two worlds, the
pagan and the Christian. This idea runs through all his critical
essays, in which he deplores the democratic spirit in literature since
Gógol, and through his trilogy of novels, of which the first deals
with Julian the Apostate, the second with Leonardo da Vinci, and the
third is to treat of Peter the Great.

In English translation have appeared: _The Death of the Gods_, _The
Resurrection of the Gods_, and _Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, the
Forerunner_, translated by H. French, London, 1902, the latter also
New York, 1902; _Julian the Apostate_, Philadelphia, 1902; _Tolstoi as
Man and Artist, with Essay on Dostoïevski_, New York, 1902.

FROM AN ESSAY ON “PÚSHKIN”

Not by sudden outbursts and by jerks, but premise after premise, step by step, unavoidably and with dialectic precision, by evolving the one sphere of Púshkin’s harmony, by sacrificing and killing the other, has Russian literature at last reached that one-sidedness of Lev Tolstóy, so suicidal for every artistic development.

Gógol, the nearest of Púshkin’s disciples, was the first to understand and express the meaning of Púshkin for Russia, as no one after him has been able to do. In his best creations, in the _Revizór_ and in the _Dead Souls_, Gógol carried out the plans with which his teacher had inspired him. It is difficult to find a case of closer adaptation in the history of any literature. Gógol drew directly from Púshkin, that deep and pure source of Russian harmony. Well? Did the disciple execute the injunction of his teacher? Gógol was the first who unconsciously and involuntarily betrayed Púshkin; he was the first who became a victim of the great disorganisation, which was later more and more to take possession of Russian poetry; he was the first to experience the attacks of the all-devouring, sickly mysticism, which was to undermine also the creative powers of others than himself.

It is a tragic fact in Russian literature that in departing with every step more and more from Púshkin, that in destroying the most precious creation of his spirit,--the co-ordination and equipoise of two worlds,--it at the same time has regarded itself as the true guardian of Púshkin’s legacies. Great men have no more dangerous enemies than their nearest disciples,--those who recline upon their breast, for no one can, loving and adoring, with such innocent cunning distort the real image of their teacher.

Turgénev and Goncharóv made conscientious attempts to overcome the incipient discord within them, the ill-omened dissonance of Lérmontov and Gógol, to return to Púshkin’s objective calm and equipoise. If not with their hearts, they understood with their minds the heroic deed of Peter the Great, remaining strangers to the Slavophile pride of Dostoévski, and they consciously, like Púshkin, bowed before the majesty of Western culture. Turgénev appears in a certain measure as the legal heir of Púshkin’s harmony, both on account of the perfect clearness of the artistic architecture and the gentle grace of language.

But all that resemblance, all that harmony, is superficial and deceptive. Neither Turgénev nor Goncharóv succeeded in the attempt to conquer the approaching disorganisation, to return to Púshkin. A feeling of great fatigue and satiety with all cultural forms, Schopenhauer’s Buddhistic nirvana, Flaubert’s artistic nihilism, were much nearer to Turgénev’s heart than Púshkin’s heroic wisdom. In Turgénev’s exceedingly soft, feminine, and pliable language there is no longer Púshkin’s manliness, his sturdy strength and simplicity. In Turgénev’s bewitching melody you continually hear a penetrating, plaintive tone, like the sound of a cracked bell,--a sign of a deepening spiritual discord,--the terror of life, the terror of death, which Lev Tolstóy will later carry to appalling limits.

Turgénev has created an endless gallery of what in his opinion are real Russian heroes, that is, heroes of weakness, cripples, unsuccessful men. He has surrounded his _Living Relics_ with an aureole of the same Galilean poetry which surrounds the images of Tatyána, Tazít, the old gipsy. He has reached the highest degree of his accessible inspiration, by pointing out the superiority of weakness over strength, of the little man over the great, and the humble over the proud, of Don Quixote’s simple-minded insanity over Hamlet’s evil wisdom. The only strong Russian in Turgénev is the nihilist Bazárov. Of course, the author of _Fathers and Sons_ was enough of an objective artist to treat his hero without anger or bias, but he nevertheless was afraid of him and could not forgive him his strength. The poet seemed to say, as he pointed to Bazárov, without noticing that he was not at all a hero, but just such an abortion, just such an unsuccessful man, as the rest of his superfluous people, who created nothing and who was doomed to ruin: “You wanted to see a strong Russian,--here is a strong man! See for yourselves what narrowness and limitation of will-power, which is directed to destruction! What coarseness and awkwardness before the tender mystery of love! What insignificance before the majesty of death! That is what your heroes, your Russian strong men are like! Oh, do you not a hundred times prefer my weak, superfluous, little, gentle heroes of Russian wretchedness, indolence, and carelessness, my magnanimous unsuccessful men and Don Quixotes?”

If a foreigner were to believe Gógol, Turgénev, and Goncharóv, the Russian nation must represent itself to him as unique in history, as denying the very essence of heroic will. If the depth of the Russian spirit were exhausted by _only_ Christian meekness, _only_ self-sacrifice, _only_ the poetry of the pariahs, the humbled, and the offended,--whence, then, comes that “Divine storm,” that blissful and terrifying grandeur, that superabundance of success, will, and merriment, that are felt in Peter and in Púshkin? How could arise these two demoniac phenomena of infinite beauty and infinite love in the country of Buddhistic nihilism and wretchedness, in the country of _Dead Souls_ and _Living Relics_ in the Siloam pool of the maimed and the halt? Or are Peter and Púshkin not our own, not Russians?

Goncharóv has gone even farther on this dangerous path The critics saw in _Oblómov_ a satire, a moral. But Goncharóv’s novel is more venomous and more terrible than any satire. For the poet himself there is in that all-embracing artistic synthesis of Russian helplessness and Russian “do-nothingness,” neither praise, nor blame, but there is only a full justice, the representation of Russian reality in all its terror and in all its beauty. In his best moments Oblómov, a bookish dreamer who with the childlike serenity and azure chastity of his infinitely deep and simple heart is unfit for too coarse a human existence, is surrounded with the same aureole of quiet poetry, as the _Living Relics_ of Turgénev. Goncharóv would, perhaps, have liked to be unjust to Oblómov, but he could not, because he loved him; he, no doubt, intended to be just to Stolz, but he could not, because he secretly hated him. The German hero (he did not try to represent a Russian hero, so unnatural did such a phenomenon seem to him) came out dead, cold, and formless. Art reveals the secret feeling which the poet dares not express: is not the resignation from stern life, the primitive simplicity, the wise inactivity of the gentle hero of Russian indolence a thousand times more noble than the prosaic bustle of the hero of German precision? From Mahomet, Napoleon, Byron, the Bronze Rider, to a puny, hoarding, bourgeois German, and to a gawky seminarist, a provincial tempting demon, Mark Volokhóv,--what a sad metamorphosis, what a fall of the Pushkin demigod!

But that is not yet the lowest step. Gógol, Turgénev, and Goncharóv appear as writers full of objective equipoise, health, and harmony in comparison with Dostoévski and Lev Tolstóy. The emaciated and half-dead Russian heroes, the Russian strong men, Bazárov and Mark Volokhóv, come once more to life in the person of Raskólnikov, Iván Karamázov, in the monstrous visions of the _Devils_, in order to undergo the last degrading punishment, the most refined, hellish torture,--in the terrible hands of that demon of wretchedness and torment, the great inquisitor Dostoévski.

How much stronger and more truthful he was than Turgénev and Goncharóv! Dostoévski did not hide his dissonance, his discord, did not deceive himself, nor the reader, did not make vain attempts to re-establish the disturbed equilibrium,--the harmony of Púshkin’s form. And yet he valued and understood this harmony with more penetration than Turgénev and Goncharóv,--he loved Púshkin, as the most inaccessible, the most opposite to his nature, just as the mortally ill man values health,--he loved him, but no longer strove after that harmony.

The author of _Brothers Karamázov_ has maimed and violated the artistic form of the epos, has with unheard-of audacity transformed it into a terrible instrument of psychological torture. It is hard to believe that the language that still possesses such vernal freshness and chaste serenity in Púshkin has been so transformed as to serve for the representation of the horrible nightmares and gloomy, fiery visions of Dostoévski.

Dostoévski was more consistent than Turgénev and Goncharóv in even another respect: he did not hide his immeasurable Slavophile pride,--he did not ogle the civilisation of the West. Hellenic beauty was to him Sodom, and Roman force the kingdom of the Antichrist. What could meek, youthful, God-harbouring Russia learn from the haughty, decrepit, Godless West? The Russian nation is not to strive after the ideal of the West, that is, after universal paganism, but the West is to strive after the ideal of the Russian nation, that is, after universal Christianity.

Nevertheless, as an artist he is nearer to Púshkin than Turgénev and Goncharóv. He is the only one of the Russian authors who consciously reproduces the struggle of two worlds. It is even possible that his dualism is deeper than Púshkin’s. Yet it is withal, to its very depths, a discord, a struggle, a torment. Dostoévski’s great soul is like a battle-field, agitated, bloody, full of gnashing of teeth and sobbing of the wounded, a field on which two irreconcilable foes have met. Who will be the victor? No one, never. It is a hopeless, unending struggle. On whose side is the poet? We only know on whose side he wants to be. But in those very moments when you most trust his Christian humility, his wretchedness, and his chastity,--there suddenly happens something unusual and evil somewhere in the dark, dangerous corner of the author’s psychological labyrinth where he slowly, like a spider, entices and entangles the inexperienced reader, so that you look, and hardly know whether it is he or not, and whether it really is, or you only imagine it to be, a terrible were-wolf, a double, or a wolf in a sheepskin. And the great inquisitor whispers with scarcely audible, insane laughter, which sends a chill through your body, and through the meekness of the martyr flickers the unlimited conceit of the devil, through the wretchedness and chastity of the pious sufferer the lustful cruelty of the devil.

To such monstrous insanity, to such epileptic fits of demonism has been changed the beneficent dualism of Púshkin, the harmony of two worlds, the divine music of the spheres that unite their voices to glorify the One. Such is the vengeance of the vilified pagan gods.

It would seem the limit was reached, and that one could go no farther. But Lev Tolstóy has proved that one may go farther on the same road,--into the abyss, into self-torment, into the terror of dualism, into the Titanic disorganisation.

Dostoévski to his last breath suffered, thought, struggled, and died, without finding what he sought most in life,--spiritual peace. Lev Tolstóy no longer seeks or struggles, or, at least, he wishes to assure himself and others that he has nothing to struggle for, nothing to seek. This calm, this silence and petrifaction of a whole subdued world, which once was free and beautiful, but from the present standpoint of its creator is to its very depths pagan and criminal, a world which majestically evolved itself before us in _Ánna Karénin_ and _War and Peace_,--that tranquillity of _The Kingdom of God_ produces a more disquieting, a more oppressive impression than the sanguinary struggle, contrition, sobs, and eternal agony of Dostoévski. Of course, Lev Tolstóy did not suddenly, and not without painful efforts, reach the final tranquillity, the final victory over the pagan world. But even in _War and Peace_ and _Ánna Karénin_ we are present at a very strange phenomenon: two elements there meet, without running together, like two streams of one river. Where paganism is, all is life and passion, luxury and ardour of physical sensations. Outside of good and evil,--as if good and evil had never existed,--the poet expresses with infinite truthfulness, with a childish and divine inability of being ashamed, of hiding the nakedness of his heart, a thirsty, unsatisfiable love for everything mortal and transitory,--a love for this great billowing ocean of matter, for everything which from the Christian standpoint ought to appear as vain and sinful,--for powerful physical health, for country, glory, woman, and children.

Here is the whole gamut of physical pleasures, and they are told with fearless openness, such as has never been in any other literature: the sensation of muscular strength, the charm of field labour in the fresh air, the gentleness of a child’s sleep, the intoxication with the first games, with the mirth of youthful banquets, with the tranquil manliness in sanguinary battles, with the speechlessness of eternal Nature, with the bracing cold of Russian snows, with the aromatic warmth of the deep summer grass.

Here is the whole gamut of physical pain, told with the same inexorable candour, which sometimes rises to cynical coarseness and shamelessness,--all the terrors of pain, beginning with the inhuman cries of a beloved woman, dying in the agony of childbirth, up to the terrible, crushing sound, when the spine of the horse racing in the hippodrome is broken. What a terror, what an intoxication of unlimited sensuality!

How could he himself, how could others believe in the icy, reflective Christianity, and how did they not recognise in him a great, hidden pagan? This paganism is proclaimed in all the best productions of Tolstóy by all the voices of the human flesh, which is fresh and joyous in the baby in its mother’s embrace, covered with the sweat of the agony and half rotten on the terrible bed of Iván Ilích, blooming and lusty in Ánna Karénin, and racked and bloody under the knives of the surgeons on the operating tables of the military hospitals. Flesh everywhere, the pagan soul of flesh, the one of the two struggling souls of which Goethe sings:

“Die eine hält in derber Liebeslust
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen.”

But in these very productions there come also to the surface insipid and offensive parts that are connected by no inner tie with the artistic woof of the production, as if written by a different man. Such are the murderous sophistry of Pierre Bezúkhov, and the childishly clumsy and unnatural Christian regenerations of Konstantín Levín. In these dead pages the mighty carnal life, which had just been welling up in a stream, suddenly becomes stark and frozen. The very language which had reached Púshkin’s simplicity and clearness, the greatest in Russian literature, abruptly changes: as though a gloomy ascetic took vengeance upon him for his recent candour, his un-Christian luxury and audacity, with which but a moment ago had been described the torments and pleasures of sinful flesh. The ascetic unsparingly violates the language, breaks, maims, stretches out, and forces into the Procrustean bed towering, intricate syllogisms. “Two souls,” that were united in Púshkin, that struggled in Gógol, Goncharóv, Turgénev, and Dostoévski, for ever abandon each other in Tolstóy, so that the one does not see, nor hear, nor answer the other.

We are at present past our suffering, we have become accustomed to all monstrosity and dissonance, or else we certainly should have felt the barbarity and unseemliness of the artist who, in killing himself and blasphemously treading on God’s gift within himself, publicly recants the best of his productions as a crime: “What is it you admire in _Ánna Karénin_?” says he to the people: “do you not know it is a debauch, a pagan nastiness of my soul?” The weakness of the great artist lies in his unconsciousness, because he is a pagan not of the bright, heroic type, but of the dark, elementary, barbarous type, the son of ancient Chaos, _a blind Titan_. The small meek one came and placed a cunning trap for the great one,--the terror of death, the terror of pain,--and the blind Titan was caught; the meek one enmeshed him with the finest nets of moral sophisms and Galilean wretchedness, and he overcame and vanquished him. A few more agonising convulsions, desperate struggles and outbursts,--and everything was for ever silenced and dead,--there began the tranquillity of _The Kingdom of God_. Only rarely, amidst monkish hymns and prayers, among icy, Puritanic discourses about the use of tobacco, about the brotherhood of the nations, about corporal punishment and chastity, are heard in the depth of depths a subterranean din and hollow thunderclaps: it is the voice of the blind Titan, of indomitable Chaos,--of the pagan love of physical life and pleasures, of the pagan terror of physical pain and death.

Lev Tolstóy is the antipode, the complete opposite and negation of Púshkin in Russian literature. And, as often happens, opposites deceive the superficial observers by their external resemblances. Both in Púshkin and in our Lev Tolstóy there is oneness, equilibrium, peace. But Púshkin’s oneness is based on the harmonious union of two worlds; the oneness of Tolstóy is based on the complete disunion, disruption, and violence, committed against one of the two equally great, equally divine elements. Púshkin’s calm and tranquillity witness to a fulness of life; Lev Tolstóy’s calm and tranquillity witness to a petrified immobility, to a deadening of the whole world. In Púshkin the thinker and artist are welded into one being; in Lev Tolstóy the thinker despises the artist, and the artist does not care for the thinker. Púshkin’s chastity presupposes passion subject to the feeling of divine moderation; Lev Tolstóy’s chastity flows from a desperate ascetic negation of love for a woman. Púshkin’s hope, like Peter the Great’s, was Russia’s participation in the universal life of the spirit, in universal civilisation; but for that participation neither Púshkin nor Peter denied the native element, the peculiarities of the Russian spirit. Lev Tolstóy, an anarchist without violence, preaches the amalgamation of the warring nations into a universal brotherhood; but for that brotherhood he renounces love of country,--that jealous tenderness that filled the hearts of Púshkin and Peter; and with unsparing haughtiness despises those peculiar, for him too impassioned, pagan features of the separate nations, which he would like to weld like the living colours of the rainbow into one white, dead colour--into a cosmopolitan abstraction.

It is significant that the greatest of Tolstóy’s productions discrowns that last incarnation of the heroic spirit in history, which for good reasons had an irresistible charm for all those who in the democracy of the nineteenth century had preserved a spark of the Promethean fire,--Byron, Goethe, Púshkin, and even Lérmontov and Heine. Napoleon, the Delphic god of strength, anger, and glory, “that wondrous man, the messenger of Providence, the fateful executor of the nameless order, that vanished king, vanished like a dream, like the shadow of the dawn,” is transformed in Tolstóy not even into the nihilist Raskólnikov, not even into one of the monstrous devils of Dostoévski, who are still surrounded with the aureole of terror, but into a puny, low-born parvenu, a self-satisfied and prosaic bourgeois, perfumed with eau-de-Cologne, with fat calves, a pusillanimous and coarse-souled French shopkeeper, into a comic general Bonaparte of the Moscow chap-books. That is where the last step into the abyss has been reached, when it is not possible to go any farther, for here the spirit of the mob, the spirit of triumphant vulgarity blasphemes the Divine Spirit, the sanctity of fate, the beneficent and awful appearance of the hero. The most insinuating and modern of all the devils, the devil of equality, the devil of the small and numberless, whose name is _Legion_, has possessed the last great artist, the blind Titan, in order to proclaim with his thunderous voice to the whole world: “Behold, here is your hero, your god,--_he is as small as we, as vulgar as we!_”

Everybody has understood Tolstóy, everybody has accepted that watchword of the mob! Not Púshkin, but Tolstóy is the representative of Russian literature before the masses of the universe. Tolstóy, the victor over Napoleon, is himself a Napoleon of the numberless democratic army of the small, the miserable, the lamenting, and the crushed. They dispute with Tolstóy, they hate and fear him: this is a sign that his fame is alive and growing. Púshkin’s fame is becoming ever more academic and distant, ever more unintelligible to the crowd. Who disputes with Púshkin, who in Europe knows of Púshkin more than his name? We learn him by heart on our school-benches, and his verses appear to us as cold and unnecessary for active Russian life as the choirs of the Greek tragedies or the formulas of higher mathematics. The most inaccessible and mysterious of all the books is called the book of the vulgar, the “Vulgate.” Púshkin has become the Vulgate of Russian literature. Everybody is ready to honour him with dead lips, with dead laurels,--who honours him with his soul and spirit? The crowd purchases in the acknowledgment of the great the right of ignoring them, and avenges its too noble enemies by a memorial plate in the academic Pantheon, and by oblivion in fame. Who would believe that this god of the teachers of Russian literature is not only more alive, more modern, but, from the standpoint of bourgeois vulgarity, even more dangerous, more audacious than Lev Tolstóy? Who would believe that the irreproachably aristocratic Púshkin, the singer of the Bronze Rider, the nursling of his old nurse Arína, is nearer to the heart of the Russian people, than the herald of universal brotherhood, the merciless Puritan in the sheepskin coat of the Russian peasant?

To what extent the heroic side of Púshkin’s poetry is not understood and despised, is evident from the fact that two of the greatest of Púshkin’s admirers, Gógol and Dostoévski, as if by common agreement, do not attach the slightest importance to it. However strange it may be, if we leave out of consideration the text-books and the dead academic recognition, Púshkin, the only bard of the only hero in the country of Lev Tolstóy and of Dostoévski, in the country of Russian nihilism and Russian democracy, is a forgotten bard of a forgotten hero.

INDEX.

Abrék, its definition, 105

Aksákov, S. T., biographical sketch and extract, 216 _seq._; _and see_
19, 236

Alexander I., and his period, 5; his liberalism, 12, 16; _and see_ 240

Alexander II. and his period, 4, 5

Alexis Mikháylovich, 40, 239

American Constitution and Alexander I., 12

American War and Karamzín, 32

Analysis, in literature, 20; in Dostoévski, 21

_Ánna Karénin_, 5, 391 _seq._; and see _L. N. Tolstóy_

Arína Rodiónovna, Púshkin’s nurse, 122, 493

Art for art’s sake, in literature, 16, 20; criticised by Písarev, 386
_seq._

Baratýnski, E. A., Púshkin’s influence on, 17; biographical sketch and
extracts, 149 _seq._

Bátyushkov, K. N., estimate of, 13 _seq._; biographical sketch and
extracts, 73 _seq._; _and see_ 16, 81

Beecher-Stowe, Russian, 297

Belles-lettres, peculiar course of, in Russia, 6 _seq._

Bestúzhev, A. A., biographical sketch and extract, 102 _seq._; _and
see_ 4

Boborýkin, 5

_Borís Godunóv_, by Púshkin, 143 _seq._; _and see_ 16

Bowring, Sir John, not the first translator from the Russian, v

Boyán, 70

Bronze Rider, The, Peter the Great so called, 123, 493

Byelínski, V. G., and the Natural School, 4, 19; and Koltsóv, 176;
biographical sketch and extract, 205 _seq._; _and see_ 5, 6, 9, 186,
389, 492

Bylínas, by A. K. Tolstóy, 246

Byron, his influence, on Russian literature, 8, 10, 16, 17; on
Púshkin, 16; on Kozlóv, 68; on Lérmontov, 155

Byzantine period, 18

Catherine II., 12, 239

Censorship, and literature, 6; after 1848, 20; _and see_ 303

Chékhov, A. P., biographical sketch and extract, 459 _seq._; _and see_
5

Chernyshévski, 5, 389

Church-Slavic, and Shishkóv, 12; and Karamzín, 28

_Cloak, The_, prototype of later novels, 19

Comedy, Griboyédov’s, 17; and see _Griboyédov_, _Gógol_

Cosmopolitanism of the newer Russian literature, 23

_Crime and Punishment_, 5; and see _Dostoévski_

Crimean War and literature, 5

Criminals, portrayed in literature, 21; and see _Dostoévski_