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PREFACE v

Their position in Russian literature--The early folk-novelists--Grig?rovitch--M?rko Vovtch?k--Danil?vskiy--Intermediate period: K?koreff; P?semskiy; Potyekhin--Ethnographical researches--The realistic school: Pomyal?vskiy--Ryeshetnikoff--Lev?toff--Gleb Uspenskiy--Zlatovr?tskiy and other folk-novelists: Na?moff--Zas?dimskiy--S?loff--Nef?doff--Modern realism: Maxim Gorkiy.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 319

INDEX 321

PART I

Introduction: The Russian Language

Like all other languages, the Russian has adopted many foreign words: Scandinavian, Turkish, Mongolian, and, lately, Greek and Latin. But notwithstanding the assimilation of many nations and stems of the Ural-Altayan or Turanian stock which has been accomplished in the course of ages by the Russian nation, her language has remained remarkably pure. It is striking indeed to see how the translation of the Bible which was made in the ninth century into the language currently spoken by the Moravians and the South Slavonians remains comprehensible, down to the present time, to the average Russian. Grammatical forms and the construction of sentences are indeed quite different now. But the roots, as well as a very considerable number of words, remain the same as those which were used in current talk a thousand years ago.

I wish that I could give here an idea of the beauty of the structure of the Russian language, such as it was spoken early in the eleventh century in North Russia, a sample of which has been preserved in the sermon of a N?vgorod bishop . The short sentences of this sermon, calculated to be understood by a newly christened flock, are really beautiful; while the bishop's conceptions of Christianity, utterly devoid of Byzantine gnosticism, are most characteristic of the manner in which Christianity was and is still understood by the masses of the Russian folk.

EARLY FOLK-LITERATURE: FOLK-LORE--SONGS--SAGAS

The early folk-literature of Russia, part of which is still preserved in the memories of the people alone, is wonderfully rich and full of the deepest interest. No nation of Western Europe possesses such an astonishing wealth of traditions, tales, and lyric folk-songs--some of them of the greatest beauty--and such a rich cycle of archaic epic songs, as Russia does. Of course, all European nations have had, once upon a time, an equally rich folk-literature; but the great bulk of it was lost before scientific explorers had understood its value or begun to collect it. In Russia, this treasure was preserved in remote villages untouched by civilisation, especially in the region round Lake On?ga; and when the folk-lorists began to collect it, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they found in Northern Russia and in Little Russia old bards still going about the villages with their primitive string instruments, and reciting poems of a very ancient origin.

Besides, a variety of very old songs are sung still by the village folk themselves. Every annual holiday--Christmas, Easter, Midsummer Day--has its own cycle of songs, which have been preserved, with their melodies, even from pagan times. At each marriage, which is accompanied by a very complicated ceremonial, and at each burial, similarly old songs are sung by the peasant women. Many of them have, of course, deteriorated in the course of ages; of many others mere fragments have survived; but, mindful of the popular saying that "never a word must be cast out of a song," the women in many localities continue to sing the most antique songs in full, even though the meaning of many of the words has already been lost.

The gradual evolution and migration of myths, which are successively fastened upon new and local persons as they reach new countries, may perhaps aid to explain these contradictions. That there are mythological features in the heroes of the Russian epics may be taken as certain; only, the mythology they belong to is not Slavonian but Aryan altogether. Out of these mythological representations of the forces of Nature, human heroes were gradually evolved in the East.

"LAY OF IGOR'S RAID"

The description of the battle, in which all Nature takes part--the eagles and the wolves, and the foxes who bark after the red shields of the Russians--is admirable. Igor's band is defeated. "From sunrise to sunset, and from sunset to sunrise, the steel arrows flew, the swords clashed on the helmets, the lances were broken in a far-away land--the land of the P?lovtsi." "The black earth under the hoofs of the horses was strewn with bones, and out of this sowing affliction will rise in the land of the Russians."

Then comes one of the best bits of early Russian poetry--the lamentations of Yarosl?vna, Igor's wife, who waits for his return in the town of Put?vl:

"The voice of Yarosl?vna resounds as the complaint of a cuckoo; it resounds at the rise of the sunlight.

"I will fly as a cuckoo down the river. I will wet my beaver sleeves in the K?yala; I will wash with them the wounds of my prince--the deep wounds of my hero.

"Yarosl?vna laments on the walls of Put?vl.

"Oh, Wind, terrible Wind! Why dost thou, my master, blow so strong? Why didst thou carry on thy light wings the arrows of the Khan against the warriors of my hero? Is it not enough for thee to blow there, high up in the clouds? Not enough to rock the ships on the blue sea? Why didst thou lay down my beloved upon the grass of the Steppes?

"Yarosl?vna laments upon the walls of Put?vl.

"Oh, glorious Dni?per, thou hast pierced thy way through the rocky hills to the land of P?lovtsi. Thou hast carried the boats of Svyatosl?v as they went to fight the Khan Koby?k. Bring, oh, my master, my husband back to me, and I will send no more tears through thy tide towards the sea.

"Yarosl?vna laments upon the walls of Put?vl.

"Brilliant Sun, thrice brilliant Sun! Thou givest heat to all, thou shinest for all. Why shouldest thou send thy burning rays upon my husband's warriors? Why didst thou, in the waterless steppe, dry up their bows in their hands? Why shouldest thou, making them suffer from thirst, cause their arrows to weigh so heavy upon their shoulders?"

Surely this poem was not the only one that was composed and sung in those times. The introduction itself speaks of bards, and especially of one, Bay?n, whose recitations and songs are compared to the wind that blows in the tops of the trees. Many such Bay?ns surely went about and sang similar "Sayings" during the festivals of the princes and their warriors. Unfortunately, only this one has reached us. The Russian Church, especially in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, pitilessly proscribed the singing of all the epic songs which circulated among the people: it considered them "pagan," and inflicted the heaviest penalties upon the bards and those who sang old songs in their rings. Consequently, only small fragments of this early folk-lore have reached us.

And yet even these few relics of the past have exercised a powerful influence upon Russian literature, ever since it has taken the liberty of treating other subjects than purely religious ones. If Russian versification took the rhythmical form, as against the syllabic, it was because this form was imposed upon the Russian poets by the folk-song. Besides, down to quite recent times, folk-songs constituted such an important item in Russian country life, in the homes alike of the landlord and the peasant, that they could not but deeply influence the Russian poets; and the first great poet of Russia, P?shkin, began his career by re-telling in verse his old nurse's tales to which he used to listen during the long winter nights. It is also owing to our almost incredible wealth of most musical popular songs that we have had in Russia, since so early a date as 1835, an opera , based upon popular tradition, of which the purely Russian melodies at once catch the ear of the least musically-educated Russian. This is also why the operas of Dargom?zhsky and the younger composers are now successfully sung in the villages to peasant audiences and with local peasant choirs.

The folk-lore and the folk-song have thus rendered to Russia an immense service. They have maintained a certain unity of the spoken language all over Russia, as also a unity between the literary language and the language spoken by the masses; between the music of Gl?nka, Tchayk?vsky, R?msky K?rsakoff, Borod?n, etc., and the music of the peasant choir--thus rendering both the poet and the composer accessible to the peasant.

THE ANNALS

And finally, whilst speaking of the early Russian literature, a few words, at least, must be said of the Annals.

Such, then, were the treasuries of literature which Russia possessed at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE

The Mongol invasion, which took place in 1223, destroyed all this young civilisation, and threw Russia into quite new channels. The main cities of South and Middle Russia were laid waste. K?eff, which had been a populous city and a centre of learning, was reduced to the state of a straggling settlement, and disappeared from history for the next two centuries. Whole populations of large towns were either taken prisoners by the Mongols, or exterminated, if they had offered resistance to the invaders. As if to add to the misfortunes of Russia, the Turks soon followed the Mongols, invading the Balkan peninsula, and by the end of the fifteenth century the two countries from which and through which learning used to come to Russia, namely Servia and Bulgaria, fell under the rule of the Osmanlis. All the life of Russia underwent a deep transformation.

Before the invasion the land was covered with independent republics, similar to the mediaeval city-republics of Western Europe. Now, a military State, powerfully supported by the Church, began to be slowly built up at Moscow, which conquered, with the aid of the Mongol Khans, the independent principalities that surrounded it. The main effort of the statesmen and the most active men of the Church was now directed towards the building up of a powerful kingdom which should be capable of throwing off the Mongol yoke. State ideals were substituted for those of local autonomy and federation. The Church, in its effort to constitute a Christian nationality, free from all intellectual and moral contact with the abhorred pagan Mongols, became a stern centralised power which pitilessly persecuted everything that was a reminder of a pagan past. It worked hard, at the same time, to establish upon Byzantine ideals the unlimited authority of the Moscow princes. Serfdom was introduced in order to increase the military power of the State. All Independent local life was destroyed. The idea of Moscow becoming a centre for Church and State was powerfully supported by the Church, which preached that Moscow was the heir to Constantinople--"a third Rome," where the only true Christianity was now to develop. And at a later epoch, when the Mongol yoke had been thrown off, the work of consolidating the Moscow monarchy was continued by the Tsars and the Church, and the struggle was against the intrusion of Western influences, in order to prevent the "Latin" Church from extending its authority over Russia.

Learning was gradually concentrated in the monasteries, every one of which was a fortress built against the invaders; and it was limited, of course, to Christian literature. It became entirely scholastic. Knowledge of nature was "unholy," something of a witchcraft. Asceticism was preached as the highest virtue, and became the dominant feature of written literature. Legends about the saints were widely read and repeated verbally, and they found no balance in such learning as had been developed In Western Europe in the mediaeval universities. The desire for a knowledge of nature was severely condemned by the Church, as a token of self-conceit. All poetry was a sin. The annals lost their animated character and became dry enumerations of the successes of the rising State, or merely related unimportant details concerning the local bishops and superiors of monasteries.

During the twelfth century there had been, in the northern republics of N?vgorod and Pksov, a strong current of opinion leading, on the one side, to Protestant rationalism, and on the other side to the development of Christianity on the lines of the early Christian brotherhoods. The apocryphal Gospels, the books of the Old Testament, and various books in which true Christianity was discussed, were eagerly copied and had a wide circulation. Now, the head of the Church in Central Russia violently antagonised all such tendencies towards reformed Christianity. A strict adherence to the very letter of the teachings of the Byzantine Church was exacted from the flock. Every kind of interpretation of the Gospels became heresy. All intellectual life in the domain of religion, as well as every criticism of the dignitaries of the Moscow Church, was treated as dangerous, and those who had ventured this way had to flee from Moscow, seeking refuge in the remote monasteries of the far North. As to the great movement of the Renaissance, which gave a new life to Western Europe, it did not reach Russia: the Church considered it a return to paganism, and cruelly exterminated its forerunners who came within her reach, burning them at the stake, or putting them to death on the racks of her torture-chambers.

I will not dwell upon this period, which covers nearly five centuries, because it offers very little interest for the student of Russian literature; I will only mention the two or three works which must not be passed by in silence.

One of them is the letters exchanged between the Tsar John the Terrible , and one of his chief vassals, Prince K?rbskiy, who had left Moscow for Lithuania. From beyond the Lithuanian border he addressed to his cruel, half-lunatic ex-master long letters of reproach, which John answered, developing in his epistles the theory of the divine origin of the Tsar's authority. This correspondence is most characteristic of the political ideas that were current then, and of the learning of the period.

After the death of John the Terrible , Russia passed, as is known, through years of great disturbance. The pretender Demetrius, who proclaimed himself a son of John, came from Poland and took possession of the throne at Moscow. The Poles invaded Russia, and were the masters of Moscow, Smol?nsk, and all the western towns; and when Demetrius was overthrown, a few months after his coronation, a general revolt of the peasants broke out, while all Central Russia was invaded by Cossack bands, and several new pretenders made their appearance. These "Disturbed Years" must have left traces in popular songs, but all such songs entirely disappeared in Russia during the dark period of serfdom which followed, and we know of them only through an Englishman, RICHARD JAMES, who was in Russia in 1619, and who wrote down some of the songs relating to this period. The same must be said of the folk-literature, which must have come into existence during the later portion of the seventeenth century. The definite introduction of serfdom under the first Romanoff ; the wide-spread revolts of the peasants which followed--culminating in the terrific uprising of Step?n R?zin, who has become since then a favourite hero with the oppressed peasants; and finally the stern and cruel persecution of the Non-conformists and their migrations eastward into the depths of the Ur?ls--all these events must have found their expression in folk-songs; but the State and the Church so cruelly hunted down everything that bore trace of a spirit of rebellion that no works of popular creation from that period have reached us. Only a few writings of a polemic character and the remarkable autobiography of an exiled priest have been preserved by the Non-conformists.

SPLIT IN THE CHURCH--MEMOIRS OF AVVAK?M

The first Russian Bible was printed in Poland in 1580. A few years later a printing office was established at Moscow, and the Russian Church authorities had now to decide which of the written texts then in circulation should be taken for the printing of the Holy Books. The handwritten copies which were in use at that time were full of errors, and it was evidently necessary to revise them by comparing them with the Greek texts before committing any of them to print. This revision was undertaken at Moscow, with the aid of learned men brought over partly from Greece and partly from the Greco-Latin Academy of Kieff; but for many different reasons this revision became the source of a widely spread discontent, and in the middle of the seventeenth century a formidable split took place in the Church. It hardly need be said that this split was not a mere matter of theology, nor of Greek readings. The seventeenth century was a century when the Moscow Church had attained a formidable power in the State. The head of it, the Patriarch N?kon, was, moreover, a very ambitious man, who intended to play in the East the part which the Pope played in the West, and to that end he tried to impress the people by his grandeur and luxury--which meant, of course, heavy impositions upon the serfs of the Church and the lower clergy. He was hated by both, and was soon accused by the people of drifting into "Latinism"; so that the split between the people and the clergy--especially the higher clergy--took the character of a wide-spread separation of the people from the Greek Church.

"When I came to Yenis?isk," Avvak?m wrote, "another order came from Moscow to send me to Da?ria, 2,000 miles from Moscow, and to place me under the orders of P?shkoff. He had with him sixty men, and in punishment of my sins he proved to be a terrible man. Continually he burnt, and tortured, and flogged his men, and I had often spoken to him, remonstrating that what he did was not good, and now I fell myself into his hands. When we went along the Angar? river he ordered me, 'Get out of your boat, you are a heretic, that is why the boats don't get along. Go you on foot, across the mountains.' It was hard to do. Mountains high, forests impenetrable, stony cliffs rising like walls--and we had to cross them, going about with wild beasts and birds; and I wrote him a little letter which began thus: 'Man, be afraid of God. Even the heavenly forces and all animals and men are afraid of Him. Thou alone carest nought about Him.' Much more was written in this letter, and I sent it to him. Presently I saw fifty men coming to me, and they took me before him. He had his sword in his hand and shook with fury. He asked me: 'Art thou a priest, or a priest degraded?' I answered, 'I am Avvak?m, a priest, what dost thou want from me?' And he began to beat me on the head and he threw me on the ground, and continued to beat me while I was lying on the ground, and then ordered them to give me seventy-two lashes with the knout, and I replied: 'Jesus Christ, son of God, help me!' and he was only the more angered that I did not ask for mercy. Then they brought me to a small fort, and put me in a dungeon, giving me some straw, and all the winter I was kept in that tower, without fire. And the winter there is terribly cold; but God supported me, even though I had no furs. I lay there as a dog on the straw. One day they would feed me, another not. Rats were swarming all around. I used to kill them with my cap--the poor fools would not even give me a stick."

Later on Avvak?m was taken to the Am?r, and when he and his wife had to march, in the winter, over the ice of the great river, she would often fall down from sheer exhaustion. "Then I came," Avvak?m writes, "to lift her up, and she exclaimed in despair: 'How long, priest, how long will these sufferings continue?' And I replied to her: 'Until death even'; and then she would get up saying: 'Well, then, priest; let us march on.'" No sufferings could vanquish this great man. From the Am?r he was recalled to Moscow, and once more made the whole journey on foot. There he was accused of resistance to Church and State, and was burned at the stake in 1681.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

One of them was KOTOSH?KHIN , an historian. He ran away from Moscow to Sweden, and wrote there, fifty years before Peter became Tsar, a history of Russia, in which he strenuously criticised the condition of ignorance prevailing at Moscow, and advocated wide reforms. His manuscript was unknown till the nineteenth century, when it was discovered at Upsala. Another writer, imbued with the same ideas, was a South Slavonian, KRYZH?NITCH, who was called to Moscow in 1659, in order to revise the Holy Books, and wrote a most remarkable work, in which he also preached the necessity of thorough reforms. He was exiled two years later to Siberia, where he died.

There was also a historian, TAT?SCHEFF , who wrote a history of Russia, and began a large work on the geography of the Empire--a hard-working man who studied a great deal in many sciences, as well as in Church matters, was superintendent of mines in the Ur?ls, and wrote a number of political works as well as history. He was the first to appreciate the value of the annals, which he collected and systematised, thus preparing materials for future historians, but he left no lasting trace in Russian literature. In fact, only one man of that period deserves more than a passing mention. It was LOMON?SOFF . He was born in a village on the White Sea, near Arch?ngel, in a fisherman's family. He also ran away from his parents, came on foot to Moscow, and entered a school in a monastery, living there in indescribable poverty. Later on he went to K?eff, also on foot, and there he very nearly became a priest. It so happened, however, that at that time the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences applied to the Moscow Theological Academy for twelve good students who might be sent to study abroad. Lomon?soff was chosen as one of them. He went to Germany, where he studied natural sciences under the best natural philosophers of the time, especially under Christian Wolff,--always in terrible poverty, almost on the verge of starvation. In 1741 he came back to Russia, and was nominated a member of the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg.

"Lomon?soff was himself a university," was P?shkin's remark, and this remark was quite correct: so varied were the directions in which he worked. Not only was he a distinguished natural philosopher, chemist, physical geographer, and mineralogist: he laid also the foundations of the grammar of the Russian language, which he understood as part of a general grammar of all languages, considered in their natural evolution. He also worked out the different forms of Russian versification, and he created quite a new literary language, of which he could say that it was equally appropriate for rendering "the powerful oratory of Cicero, the brilliant earnestness of Virgil and the pleasant talk of Ovid, as well as the subtlest imaginary conceptions of philosophy, or discussing the various properties of matter and the changes which are always going on in the structure of the universe and in human affairs." This he proved by his poetry, by his scientific writings, and by his "Discourses," in which he combined Huxley's readiness to defend science against blind faith with Humboldt's poetical conception of Nature.

His odes were, it is true, written in the pompous style which was dear to the pseudo-classicism then reigning, and he retained Old Slavonian expressions "for dealing with elevated subjects", but in his scientific and other writings he used the commonly spoken language with great effect and force. Owing to the very variety of sciences which he had to acclimatise in Russia, he could not give much time to original research; but when he took up the defence of the ideas of Copernicus, Newton, or Huyghens against the opposition which they met with on theological grounds, a true philosopher of natural science, in the modern sense of the term, was revealed in him. In his early boyhood he used to accompany his father--a sturdy northern fisherman--on his fishing expeditions, and there he got his love of Nature and a fine comprehension of natural phenomena, which made of his Memoir on Arctic Exploration a work that has not lost its value even now. It is well worthy of note that in this last work he had stated the mechanical theory of heat in such definite expressions that he undoubtedly anticipated by a full century this great discovery of our own time--a fact which has been entirely overlooked, even in Russia.

A contemporary of Lomon?soff, SUMAR?KOFF who was described in those years as a "Russian Racine," must also be mentioned in this place. He belonged to the higher nobility, and had received an entirely French education. His dramas, of which he wrote a great number, were entirely imitated from the French pseudo-classical school; but he contributed very much, as will be seen from a subsequent chapter, to the development of the Russian theatre. Sumar?koff wrote also lyrical verses, elegies, and satires--all of no great importance; but the remarkably good style of his letters, free of the Slavonic archaisms, which were habitual at that time, deserves to be mentioned.

The poetry of Derzh?vin certainly does not answer our modern requirements. He was the poet laureate of Catherine, and sang in pompous odes the virtues of the ruler and the victories of her generals and favourites. Russia was then taking a firm hold on the shores of the Black Sea, and beginning to play a serious part in European affairs; and occasions for the inflation of Derzh?vin's patriotic feelings were not wanting. However, he had some of the marks of the true poet; he was open to the feeling of the poetry of Nature, and capable of expressing it in verses that were positively good . Nay, these really poetical verses, which are found side by side with unnatural, heavy lines stuffed with obsolete pompous words, are so evidently better than the latter, that they certainly were an admirable object-lesson for all subsequent Russian poets. They must have contributed to induce our poets to abandon mannerism. P?shkin, who in his youth admired Derzh?vin, must have felt at once the disadvantages of a pompous style, illustrated by his predecessor, and with his wonderful command of his mother-tongue he was necessarily brought to abandon the artificial language which formerly was considered "poetical,"--he began to write as we speak.

THE FREEMASONS: FIRST MANIFESTATION OF POLITICAL THOUGHT.

The looseness of habits which characterised Russian high society in the eighteenth century, the absence of ideals, the servility of the nobles, and the horrors of serfdom, necessarily produced a reaction amongst the better minds, and this reaction took the shape, partly of a widely spread Masonic movement, and partly of Christian mysticism, which originated in the mystical teachings that had at that time widely spread in Germany. The freemasons and their Society of Friends undertook a serious effort for spreading moral education among the masses, and they found in N?VIKOFF a true apostle of renovation. He began his literary career very early, in one of those satirical reviews of which Catherine herself took the initiative at the beginning of her reign, and already in his amiable controversy with "the grandmother" he showed that he would not remain satisfied with the superficial satire in which the empress delighted, but that, contrary to her wishes, he would go to the root of the evils of the time: namely, serfdom and its brutalising effects upon society at large. N?vikoff was not only a well-educated man: he combined the deep moral convictions of an idealist with the capacities of an organiser and a business man; and although his review was soon stopped by "the grandmother," he started in Moscow a most successful printing and book-selling business, for editing and spreading books of an ethical character. His immense printing office, combined with a hospital for the workers and a chemist's shop, from which medicine was given free to all the poor of Moscow, was soon in business relations with booksellers all over Russia; while his influence upon educated society was growing rapidly, and working in an excellent direction. In 1787, during a famine, he organised relief for the starving peasants--quite a fortune having been put for this purpose at his disposal by one of his pupils. Of course, both the Church and the Government looked with suspicion upon the spreading of Christianity, as it was understood by the freemason Friends; and although the metropolitan of Moscow testified that N?vikoff was "the best Christian he ever knew," N?vikoff was accused of political conspiracy.

He insisted especially upon the horrors of serfdom, as also upon the bad organisation of the administration, the venality of the law-courts, and so on, confirming his general condemnations by concrete facts taken from real life. Catherine, who already before the beginning of the revolution in France, and especially since the events of 1789, had come to regard with horror the liberal ideas of her youth, ordered the book to be confiscated and destroyed at once. She described the author as a revolutionist, "worse than Pugatch?ff"; he ventured to "speak with approbation of Franklin" and was infected with French ideas! Consequently, she wrote herself a sharp criticism of the book, upon which its prosecution had to be based. Rad?scheff was arrested, confined to the fortress, later on transported to the remotest portions of Eastern Siberia, on the Olenek. He was released only in 1801. Next year, seeing that even the advent of Alexander the First did not mean the coming of a new reformatory spirit, he put an end to his life by suicide. As to his book, it still remains forbidden in Russia. A new edition of it, which was made in 1872, was confiscated and destroyed, and in 1888 the permission was given to a publisher to issue the work in editions of a hundred copies only, which were to be distributed among a few men of science and certain high functionaries.

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