The great masters of Russian literature in the nineteenth century

It may be said, that the emancipation of literature in Russia dates back scarcely fifty years. All the Russian writers, whether of poetry or prose, with the exception possibly of one or two satirists, were little more than imitators. Some of the most valued authors during the first half of this century, Zhukovsky for example, owed all their fame to translations. Pushkin himself, who, on the recommendation of Merimée, has for some time been admired in France, did not venture far from the Byronic manner. He died, to be sure, just at the moment when he had found his path. He suspected the profit that could be made from national sources; he had a presentiment that a truly Russian literature was about to burst into bloom; he aided in its production. His greatest originality lies in his having predicted, preached, perhaps prepared or inspired Gogol.

NIKOLAÏ GOGOL.

I.

Nikolaï Gogol[1] was born in 1810, in a village of the government of Poltava. His father, a small proprietor with some education, obtained for him a scholarship in the college of Niézhin. Fortunately the young Gogol was able to hold his own in rebellion against the direction of his instructors, and neither the dead nor the living languages brought him any gain. He thus failed of becoming a commonplace man of letters, and consequently had less trouble in the end with discovering his original genius.

In his father’s house, on the other hand, he received a priceless education, such as Pushkin, in spite of all his efforts, vainly attempted to obtain. He was imbued with the poetry of the people. His childhood was entertained by the marvellous legends of the Malo-Russians. Gogol’s grandfather was one of those Zaparog Cossacks whose heroic exploits the author of “Taras Bulba” was destined to celebrate. He excelled in the art of story-telling, and his narrations had a tinge of mystery about them that brought the cold chills. “When he was speaking I would not move from my place all day long, but would listen, ... and the things were so strange that I always shivered, and my hair stood on end. Sometimes I was so frightened by them, that at night every thing seemed like God knows what monsters.” This fund of mainly fantastic and diabolical legends afterwards furnished the grandson of the Ukraïne village story-teller, with the material for his first original work.[2]

Gogol’s first attempts were not original: he began too early. Scarcely out of the gymnasium, he began to write in rhyme; in the morning trying all the styles in vogue, at evening making parodies upon them. He established a manuscript journal “The Star” (Zvyezd). The student intoxicated by reading Pushkin still remained in the trammels of uninspired verse, in the formulas of romanticism. Some characteristics already began to reveal the precocious observer, the brilliant satirist. Thus his prose articles, clandestinely introduced, had a tremendous success never equalled in his ripest years, even by his comedy of “The Revizor.”

After his studies were ended, Gogol was obliged to conquer the favor of a public less complacent than the rhetoricians and philosophers of Niézhin. He obtained (1830) an exceedingly modest office in the Ministry of Appanages (Udyélui). But in the bureau, where, like Popritshchin in the “Recollections of a Lunatic” his service was limited to sharpening dozens of pens for the director, he worked out a comedy on the pattern of Scribe’s, and spun a cottony idyl in the German style. The comedy was hissed by the public, and the idyl was so unkindly received by the critics that Gogol had this attempt withdrawn from the market.[3]

Gogol almost simultaneously shook off the double yoke of bureaucratic slavery and literary imitation. Instead of following, like so many others, in the track of French, English, or German writers, he determined to be himself. He went back over the course of his early years to find in this way in all their freshness the impressions of his childhood; he returned to his first, his real masters, and began once more to get material around the Malo-Russian hearth. He appealed to his mother for recollections; he besought the aid of his friends; he put them like so many bloodhounds on the track of half-forgotten legends, half-vanished traditions; he collected documents of every sort and kind: and when he was sufficiently permeated with savagery to think and speak, if need were, like a Cossack of the last century, he created a work at once modern and archaic, learned and enthusiastic, mystic and refined,--Russian, in a word,--and published it under the title “Evenings at the Farm” (Vetchera na Khutoryé bliz Dikanki).

This series of fantastic tales, published in the reviews under the pseudonyme of Rudui Panko (Sandy the little nobleman), produced a singular effect. The Russian reader was surprised and charmed in the same way as a French traveller, who, after having visited all the countries and admired all the floras of the world, should discover the banks of the Seine, and declare that he was willing to exchange the splendors of the savannas for a tuft of turf and a bunch of violets. No one was more struck with the value of these tales than Pushkin. He recommended their author to Pletnef, minister of public instruction; and Gogol was appointed professor. The servitude was still more onerous than that of the bureaucracy. The young writer had too much originality to bend under it very long: a second time he escaped, and took his departure for the Ukraïna.

The Zaparog Cossack’s grandson used to say that there was material for an Iliad in the exploits of his ancestors. He buried himself in the study of the annals of Little Russia; he collected the traditions; more than all, he picked up the national songs of the Ukraïna,--those kinds of heroic cantilenas composed by the players of the bandura. A modern diaskenastes, he constructed a body out of all these poetic remains, joined them together by means of a romantic plot, and renewed the astonishment caused by the appearance of “Evenings at the Farm,” by publishing “Taras Bulba.” The minister was convinced that a man who could thus revivify history could not fail to be skilled in teaching it: he therefore offered Gogol the chair of mediæval history in the University of Petersburg. The romancer gave only one lecture, his opening lecture. This day he dazzled his audience. The remainder of his course was for both students and professor only a long-continued bore, which ended finally in his losing the place.

Gogol dreamed of a different success. In 1835 he published his comedy, “The _Revizor_” (The Inspector General). It was applauded, and, what was of more value, it was desperately attacked. The author gained as many admirers and enemies as “Tartuffe” cost Molière. At Petersburg, as at Paris, the masterpiece was produced on the stage, and kept before the public, only by a fortunate caprice on the part of the sovereign.

Gogol’s health, which had long been failing, caused him about this period to leave Russia. He lived many years in Italy. There he completed his great romance, “Dead Souls” (Mertvuia Dushi). The work appeared in complete form in 1841.[4] The author had reached a state of nervous irritation and hypochondria, which was more and more manifested in his correspondence, published in part towards 1846. The last years of Gogol’s life were only a long torture. A sort of mystic madness took possession of his brain, exhausted or over-excited by production: death put an end to his nervous disease (1852).

II.

Dreaminess and banter are the two natural tendencies, the two favorite pleasures, of the Russian mind. They are also the two elements of Gogol’s talent. At the beginning of his career as a writer, and during the sprightly years of his youth, it is dreaminess which prevails: the narrator penetrates with enthusiasm into the untrodden paths of the Malo-Russian legends. On the track of witches, of Rusalkas, he finds the unpublished poetry of the forests, the ponds, the wide stretches, and the sky of the steppes. These lovely days pass. With age, this restless spirit grows gloomy and melancholy. The observer’s eyes turn from the pacifying spectacle of nature, and attempt only to notice the vexing absurdities of humanity.

The satirical spirit in Gogol is first expressed in verse. He is poetical only in prose; but his prose is equal to the most beautiful verse. In truth, poetry is not rhyme, or metre, or even rhythm: it is the power of touching, of recording its impressions in vivid and genuine images. To feel emotion suitable for poetic expression, there is no need of picturing lofty heroes, or of spreading marvellous landscapes before the eyes. Properly speaking, a Malo-Russian peasant is like a hero in Corneille; and the imagination of an author, and therefore of his reader, can just as well be stirred by the view of a bit of the flat and naked steppe, as by the sight of the Bay of Naples or a sunset on the ruins of the Coliseum.

Gogol understood this, and, what is far better, made it understood. Instead of preparing his imitation of Werther and his copy of Childe Harold in the fashion of so many others, he had the courage to go to Nature for his models. And in this Russian nature, the wild grace and strange flavor of which he was, so to speak, the first to feel, that which attracts him more than all else is its unostentatious aspect. His field of observation is the village. His heroes are unimportant people, half-barbarous peasants, true Cossack lads, hard drinkers, with circumscribed intellectual training, with superstitious imaginations; in a word, very simple souls, whose artless passions are shown without any veil, but whose very ingenuousness is a deliriously restful contrast to our romantic or theatrical characters, so artificial in their labored mechanism, so insipid and perfunctory in the refinements of their conventionality.

Gogol places his characters in their natural surroundings. It is the hamlet bordering on the steppe, monotonous and infinite, deserted and mysterious. All this country appeals to the writer’s imagination, as well as to that of those Malo-Russians, whose history, past and present, he will describe for us in turn. Each shrub inshrines a memory; each winding valley veils a legend. In yonder stretch of water, beset with rushes and starred with nenuphars, the sceptic traveller in his indifference sees only a sort of marsh. The peasant who is here a poet, and the poet who remembers that he was once a peasant, know well who the Rusalka is who has been hiding there these many years. From its surface, on nights when the moon lights up the silvery mist, the queen of the drowned comes forth with her train of virgins, to find and drag into the depths of the water her stepmother, the witch whose evil deeds drove her to suicide.

But to move those whom she has brought forth, this land of the Ukraïna has no need of being wrapped in mystery. Gogol has only to pronounce the name of the Dniépr to arouse a sort of passionate woe, whose expression, unhappily almost untranslatable, equals in beauty the accents of the noblest poetry.