Read Ebook: Russian literature by Kropotkin Petr Alekseevich Kniaz

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1175 lines and 127183 words, and 24 pages

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.

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

These were, then, the elements out of which Russian literature had to be evolved in the nineteenth century. The slow work of the last five hundred years had already prepared that admirable, pliable, and rich instrument--the literary language in which P?shkin would soon be enabled to write his melodious verses and Turgu?neff his no less melodious prose. From the autobiography of the Non-conformist martyr, Avvak?m, one could already guess the value of the spoken language of the Russian people for literary purposes.

THE "DECEMBRISTS"

FOOTNOTES:

The Russian name of the first capital of Russia is Moskv?. However, "Moscow," like "Warsaw," etc., is of so general a use that it would be affectation to use the Russian name.

In the years 1730-1738 he was ambassador at London.

In 1775-1782 she spent a few years at Edinburgh for the education of her son.

PART II

P?shkin--L?rmontoff

P?SHKIN AND L?RMONTOFF

P?SHKIN

P?shkin is not quite a stranger to English readers. In a valuable collection of review articles dealing with Russian writers which Professor Coolidge, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, put at my disposal, I found that in 1832, and later on in 1845, P?shkin was spoken of as a writer more or less familiar in England, and translations of some of his lyrics were given in the reviews. Later on P?shkin was rather neglected in Russia itself, and the more so abroad, and up to the present time there is no English translation, worthy of the great poet, of any of his works. In France, on the contrary--owing to Turgu?neff and Prosper M?rim?e, who saw in P?shkin one of the great poets of mankind--as well as in Germany, all the chief works of the Russian poet are known to literary men in good translations, of which some are admirable. To the great reading public the Russian poet is, however, nowhere well known outside his own mother country.

It is extremely interesting to compare P?shkin with Schiller, in their lyrics. Leaving aside the greatness and the variety of subjects touched upon by Schiller, and comparing only those pieces of poetry in which both poets speak of themselves, one feels at once that Schiller's personality is infinitely superior, in depth of thought and philosophical comprehension of life, to that of the bright, somewhat spoiled and rather superficial child that P?shkin was. But, at the same time, the individuality of P?shkin is more deeply impressed upon his writings than that of Schiller upon his. P?shkin was full of vital intensity, and his own self is reflected in everything he wrote; a human heart, full of fire, is throbbing intensely in all his verses. This heart is far less sympathetic than that of Schiller, but it is more intimately revealed to the reader. In his best lyrics Schiller did not find either a better expression of feeling, or a greater variety of expression, than P?shkin did. In that respect the Russian poet decidedly stands by the side of Goethe.

P?shkin's grandmother and his old nurse were the future poet's best friends in his childhood. From them he got his perfect mastership of the Russian language; and from his nurse, with whom he used to spend, later on, the long winter nights at his country house, when he was ordered by the State police to reside on his country estate, he borrowed that admirable knowledge of Russian folk-lore and Russian ways of expression which rendered his poetry and prose so wonderfully Russian. To these two women we thus owe the creation of the modern, easy, pliable Russian language which P?shkin introduced into our literature.

In 1824, when he had rendered himself quite impossible at Odessa , he was ordered to return to Central Russia and to reside at his small estate, Mikha?lovskoye, in the province of Pskov, where he wrote his best things. On December 14, 1825, when the insurrection broke out at St. Petersburg, P?shkin was at Mikha?lovskoye; otherwise, like so many of his Decembrist friends, he would most certainly have ended his life in Siberia. He succeeded in burning all his papers before they could be seized by the secret police.

Thunders came upon P?shkin from the classical camp when this poem made its appearance. We have only to think of the Daphnes and the Chloes with which poetry used to be embellished at that time, and the sacerdotal attitude which the poet took towards his readers, to understand how the classical school was offended at the appearance of a poet who expressed his thoughts in beautiful images, without resorting to any of these embellishments, who spoke the language which everyone speaks, and related adventures fit for the nursery. With one cut of his sword P?shkin had freed literature from the ties which were keeping it enslaved.

This simplicity of expression characterised P?shkin in everything he afterwards wrote. He did not depart from it, even when he wrote about so-called elevated subjects, nor in the passionate or philosophical monologues of his latest dramas. It is what makes P?shkin so difficult to translate into English; because, in the English literature of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth is the only poet who has written with the same simplicity. But, while Wordsworth applied this simplicity mainly to the description of the lovely and quiet English landscape, P?shkin spoke with the same simplicity of human life, and his verses continued to flow, as easy as prose and as free from artificial expressions, even when he described the most violent human passions. In his contempt of everything exaggerated and theatrical, and in his determination to have nothing to do with "the lurid tragic actor who wields a cardboard sword," he was thoroughly Russian: and at the same time he powerfully contributed towards establishing, in both the written literature and on the stage, that taste for simplicity and honest expression of feeling of which so many examples will be given in the course of this book.

The main force of P?shkin was in his lyric poetry, and the chief note of his lyrics was love. The terrible contradictions between the ideal and the real, from which deeper minds, like those of Goethe, or Byron, or Heine, have suffered, were strange to him. P?shkin was of a more superficial nature. It must also be said that a West-European poet has an inheritance which the Russian has not. Every country of Western Europe has passed through periods of great national struggle, during which the great questions of human development were at stake. Great political conflicts have produced deep passions and resulted in tragical situations; but in Russia the great struggles and the religious movements which took place in the seventeenth century, and under Pugatch?ff in the eighteenth, were uprisings of peasants, in which the educated classes took no part. The intellectual horizon of a Russian poet is thus necessarily limited. There is, however, something in human nature which always lives and appeals to every mind. This is love, and P?shkin, in his lyric poetry, represented love under so many aspects, in such beautiful forms, and with such a variety of shades, as one finds in no other poet. Besides, he often gave to love an expression so refined, so high, that his higher comprehension of love left as deep a stamp upon subsequent Russian literature as Goethe's refined types of women left in the world's literature. After P?shkin had written, it was impossible for Russian poets to speak of love in a lower sense than he did.

But, with his light character, P?shkin could not fathom, and still less share, the depth of hatred and contempt towards post-revolutionary Europe which consumed Byron's heart. P?shkin's "Byronism" was superficial; and, while he was ready to defy "respectable" society, he knew neither the longings for freedom nor the hatred of hypocrisy which inspired Byron.

P?shkin's real force was in his having created in a few years the Russian literary language, and having freed literature from the theatrical, pompous style which was formerly considered necessary in whatever was printed in black and white. He was great in his stupendous powers of poetical creation: in his capacity of taking the commonest things of everyday life, or the commonest feelings of the most ordinary person, and of so relating them that the reader lived them through; and, on the other side, constructing out of the scantiest materials, and calling to life, a whole historical epoch--a power of creation which, of those coming after him, only Tolst?y has to the same extent. P?shkin's power was next in his profound realism--that realism, understood in its best sense, which he was the first to introduce in Russia, and which, we shall see, became afterwards characteristic of the whole of Russian literature. And it is in the broadly humanitarian feelings with which his best writings are permeated, in his bright love of life, and his respect for women. As to beauty of form, his verses are so "easy" that one knows them by heart after having read them twice or thrice. Now that they have penetrated into the villages, they are the delight of millions of peasant children, after having been the delight of such refined and philosophical poets as Turgu?neff.

"Ony?ghin, I was younger then, and better looking, I suppose; and I loved you" ... but the love of a country girl offered nothing new to Ony?ghin. He paid no attention to her.... "Why then does he follow her now at every step? Why such display of his attention? Is it because she is now rich and belongs to the high society, and is well received at Court?

And she continues:

She supplicates Ony?ghin to leave her. "I love you," she says:

How many thousands of young Russian women have later on repeated these same verses, and said to themselves: "I would gladly give up all these rags and all this masquerade of luxurious life for a small shelf of books, for life in the country, amidst the peasants, and for the grave of my old nurse in our village." How many have done it! And we shall see how this same type of Russian girl was developed still further in the novels of Turgu?neff--and in Russian life. Was not P?shkin a great poet to have foreseen and predicted it?

L?RMONTOFF

It is said that when Turgu?neff and his great friend, Kav?lin, came together--Kav?lin was a very sympathetic philosopher and a writer upon law--a favourite theme of their discussions was: "P?shkin or L?rmontoff?" Turgu?neff, as is known, considered P?shkin one of the greatest poets, and especially one of the greatest artists, among men; while Kav?lin must have insisted upon the fact that in his best productions L?rmontoff was but slightly inferior to P?shkin as an artist, that his verses were real music, while at the same time the inspiration of his poetry was of a much higher standard than that of P?shkin. When it is added that eight years was the entire limit of L?rmontoff's literary career--he was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-six--the powers and the potentialities of this poet will be seen at once.

L?rmontoff had Scotch blood in his veins. At least, the founder of the family was a Scotchman, George Learmonth, who, with sixty Scotchmen and Irishmen, entered the service of Poland first, and afterwards, in 1613, of Russia. The inner biography of the poet remains still but imperfectly known. It is certain that his childhood and boyhood were anything but happy. His mother was a lover of poetry--perhaps a poet herself; but he lost her when he was only three years old--she was only twenty-one. His aristocratic grandmother on the maternal side took him from his father--a poor army officer, whom the child worshipped--and educated him, preventing all intercourse between the father and the son. The boy was very gifted, and at the age of fourteen had already begun to write verses and poems--first in French, , and soon in Russian. Schiller and Shakespeare and, from the age of sixteen, Byron and Shelley were his favourites. At the age of sixteen L?rmontoff entered the Moscow University, from which he was, however, excluded next year for some offence against a very uninteresting professor. He then entered a military school at St. Petersburg, to become at the age of eighteen an officer of the hussars.

A young man of twenty-two, L?rmontoff suddenly became widely known for a piece of poetry which he wrote on the occasion of P?shkin's death . A great poet, as well as a lover of liberty and a foe of oppression, was revealed at once in this passionate production of the young writer, of which the concluding verses were especially powerful. "But you," he wrote, "who stand, a haughty crowd, around the throne, You hang men of genius, of liberty, and fame! You have now the law to cover you, And justice must close her lips before you! But there is a judgment of God,--you, dissolute crowd! There is a severe judge who waits for you. You will not buy him by the sound of your gold.... And, with all your black blood, You will not wash away the stain of the poet's pure blood!" In a few days all St. Petersburg, and very soon all Russia, knew these verses by heart; they circulated in thousands of manuscript copies.

For this passionate cry of his heart, L?rmontoff was exiled at once. Only the intervention of his powerful friends prevented him from being marched straight to Siberia. He was transferred from the regiment of guards to which he belonged to an army regiment in the Caucasus. L?rmontoff was already acquainted with the Caucasus: he had been taken there as a child of ten, and he had brought back from this sojourn an ineffaceable impression. Now the grandeur of the great mountain range impressed him still more forcibly. The Caucasus is one of the most beautiful regions on earth. It is a chain of mountains much greater than the Alps, surrounded by endless forests, gardens, and steppes, situated in a southern climate, in a dry region where the transparency of the air enhances immensely the natural beauty of the mountains. The snow-clad giants are seen from the Steppes scores of miles away, and the immensity of the chain produces an impression which is equalled nowhere in Europe. Moreover, a half-tropical vegetation clothes the mountain slopes, where the villages nestle, with their semi-military aspect and their turrets, basking in all the gorgeous sunshine of the East, or concealed in the dark shadows of the narrow gorges, and populated by a race of people among the most beautiful of Europe. Finally, at the time L?rmontoff was there the mountaineers were fighting against the Russian invaders with unabated courage and daring for each valley of their native mountains.

All these natural beauties of the Caucasus have been reflected in L?rmontoff's poetry, in such a way that in no other literature are there descriptions of nature so beautiful, or so impressive and correct. Bodenstedt, his German translator and personal friend, who knew the Caucasus well, was quite right in observing that they are worth volumes of geographical descriptions. The reading of many volumes about the Caucasus does not add any concrete features to those which are impressed upon the mind by reading the poems of L?rmontoff. Turgu?neff quotes somewhere Shakespeare's description of the sea as seen from the cliffs of Dover , as a masterpiece of objective poetry dealing with nature. I must confess, however, that the concentration of attention upon small details in this description does not appeal to my mind. It gives no impression of the immensity of the sea as seen from the Dover cliffs, nor of the wonderful richness of colour displayed by the waters on a sunny day. No such reproach could ever be made against L?rmontoff's poetry of nature. Bodenstedt truly says that L?rmontoff has managed to satisfy at the same time both the naturalist and the lover of art. Whether he describes the gigantic chain, where the eye loses itself--here in snow clouds, there in the unfathomable depths of narrow gorges; or whether he mentions some detail: a mountain stream, or the endless woods, or the smiling valleys of Georgia covered with flowers, or the strings of light clouds floating in the dry breezes of Northern Caucasia,--he always remains so true to nature that his picture rises before the eye in life-colours, and yet it is imbued with a poetical atmosphere which makes one feel the freshness of these mountains, the balm of their forests and meadows, the purity of the air. And all this is written in verses wonderfully musical. L?rmontoff's verses, though not so "easy" as P?shkin's, are very often even more musical. They sound like a beautiful melody. The Russian language is always rather melodious, but in the verses of L?rmontoff it becomes almost as melodious as Italian.

L?rmontoff deeply loved Russia, but not the official Russia: not the crushing military power of a fatherland, which is so dear to the so-called patriots, and he wrote:

"I thought: How miserable is man! What does he want? The sky is pure, and under it there's room for all; but without reason and necessity, his heart is full of hatred.--Why?"

He died in his twenty-seventh year. Exiled for a second time to the Caucasus , he was staying at Pyatig?rsk, frequenting the shallow society which usually comes together in such watering places. His jokes and sarcasms addressed to an officer, Mart?noff, who used to drape himself in a Byronian mantle the better to capture the hearts of young girls, led to a duel. L?rmontoff, as he had already done in his first duel, shot sideways purposely; but Mart?noff slowly and purposely took his aim so as even to call forth the protests of the seconds--and killed L?rmontoff on the spot.

P?SHKIN AND L?RMONTOFF AS PROSE-WRITERS

Petch?rin is an extremely clever, bold, enterprising man who regards his surroundings with cold contempt. He is undoubtedly a superior man, superior to P?shkin's Ony?ghin; but he is, above all, an egotist who finds no better application for his superior capacities than all sorts of mad adventures, always connected with love-making. He falls in love with a Circassian girl whom he sees at a native festival. The girl is also taken by the beauty and the gloomy aspect of the Russian. To marry her is evidently out of question, because her Mussulman relatives would never give her to a Russian. Then, Petch?rin daringly kidnaps her, with the aid of her brother, and the girl is brought to the Russian fort, where Petch?rin is an officer. For several weeks she only cries and never speaks a word to the Russian, but by and bye she feels love for him. That is the beginning of the tragedy. Petch?rin soon has enough of the Circassian beauty; he deserts her more and more for hunting adventures, and during one of them she is kidnapped by a Circassian who loves her, and who, on seeing that he cannot escape with her, kills her with his dagger. For Petch?rin this solution is almost welcome.

OTHER POETS AND NOVELISTS OF THE SAME EPOCH KRYL?FF

The fable-writer KRYL?FF is perhaps the Russian writer who is best known abroad. English readers know him through the excellent work and translations of so great a connoisseur of Russian literature and language as Ralston was, and little can be added to what Ralston has said of this eminently original writer.

He stands on the boundary between two centuries, and reflects both the end of the one and the beginning of the other. Up to 1807 he wrote comedies which, even more than the other comedies of the time, were mere imitations from the French. It was only in 1807-1809 that he found his true vocation and began writing fables, in which domain he attained the first rank, not only in Russia, but among the fable-writers in all modern literatures. Many of his fables--at any rate, the best known ones--are translations from Lafontaine; and yet they are entirely original productions. Lafontaine's animals are academically educated French gentlemen; even the peasants in his fables come from Versailles. There is nothing of the sort in Kryl?ff. Every animal in his fables is a character--wonderfully true to life. Nay, even the cadence of his verses changes and takes a special aspect each time a new animal is introduced--that heavy simpleton, the Bear, or the fine and cunning Fox, or the versatile Monkey. Kryl?ff knew every one of them intimately; he knew each of their movements, and above all he had noticed and enjoyed long since in his own self the humorous side of every one of the dwellers of the forests or the companions of Man, before he undertook to put them in his fables. This is why Kryl?ff may be taken as the greatest fable-writer not only of Russia--where he had a not to be neglected rival in DM?TREFF --but also of all nations of modern times. True, there is no depth, no profound and cutting irony, in Kryl?ff's fables. Nothing but a good-natured, easy-going irony, which made the very essence of his heavy frame, his lazy habits, and his quiet contemplation. But, is this not the true domain of fable, which must not be confounded with satire?

THE MINOR POETS

Several minor poets, contemporary of P?shkin and L?rmontoff, and some of them their personal friends, must be mentioned in this place. The influence of P?shkin was so great that he could not but call to life a school of writers who should try to follow in his steps. None of them reached such a height as to claim to be considered a world poet; but each of them has made his contribution in one way or another to the development of Russian poetry, each one has had his humanising and elevating influence.

D?LWIG was a great personal friend of P?shkin, whose comrade he was at the Lyceum. He represented in Russian literature the tendency towards reviving ancient Greek forms of poetry, but happily enough he tried at the same time to write in the style of the Russian popular songs, and the lyrics which he wrote in this manner especially contributed to make of him a favourite poet of his own time. Some of his romances have remained popular till now.

BARAT?NSKIY was another poet of the same group of friends. Under the influence of the wild nature of Finland, where he spent several years in exile, he became a romantic poet, full of the love of nature, and also of melancholy, and deeply interested in philosophical questions, to which he could find no reply. He thus lacked a definite conception of life, but what he wrote was clothed in a beautiful form, and in very expressive, elegant verses.

YAZ?KOFF belongs to the same circle. He was intimate with P?shkin, who much admired his verses. It must be said, however, that the poetry of Yaz?koff had chiefly an historical influence in the sense of perfecting the forms of poetical expression. Unfortunately, he had to struggle against almost continual illness, and he died just when he had reached the full development of his talent.

VENEV?TINOFF died at a still younger age; but there is no exaggeration in saying that he promised to become a great poet, endowed with the same depth of philosophical conception as was Goethe, and capable of attaining the same beauty of form. The few verses he wrote during the last year of his life revealed the suddenly attained maturity of a great poetical talent, and may be compared with the verses of the greatest poets.

A similar fate befell the Little Russian poet SHEVCH?NKO , who, for some of his poetry, was sent in 1847 to a battalion as a common soldier. His epical poems from the life of the free Cossacks in olden times, heart rending poems from the life of the serfs, and lyrics, all written in Little Russian and thoroughly popular in both form and content, belong to the fine specimens of poetry of all nations.

FOOTNOTES:

The great composer Gl?nka has made of this fairy tale a most beautiful opera , in which Russian, Finnish, Turkish, and Oriental music are intermingled in order to characterise the different heroes.

For all translations, not otherwise mentioned, it is myself who is responsible.

G?gol

G?GOL

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet