Best Russian Short Stories | Page 3

a whole
world of characters, from kings and princes and ladies to servants and
maids and peasants. But how vastly divergent the angle of approach!
Anna Karenina may have all the subtle womanly charm of an Olivia or
a Portia, but how different her trials. Shakespeare could not have
treated Anna's problems at all. Anna could not have appeared in his
pages except as a sinning Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet. Shakespeare
had all the prejudices of his age. He accepted the world as it is with its
absurd moralities, its conventions and institutions and social classes. A
gravedigger is naturally inferior to a lord, and if he is to be presented at

all, he must come on as a clown. The people are always a mob, the
rabble. Tolstoy, is the revolutionist, the iconoclast. He has the
completest independence of mind. He utterly refuses to accept
established opinions just because they are established. He probes into
the right and wrong of things. His is a broad, generous universal
democracy, his is a comprehensive sympathy, his an absolute
incapacity to evaluate human beings according to station, rank or
profession, or any standard but that of spiritual worth. In all this he was
a complete contrast to Shakespeare. Each of the two men was like a
creature of a higher world, possessed of supernatural endowments.
Their omniscience of all things human, their insight into the
hiddenmost springs of men's actions appear miraculous. But
Shakespeare makes the impression of detachment from his works. The
works do not reveal the man; while in Tolstoy the greatness of the man
blends with the greatness of the genius. Tolstoy was no mere oracle
uttering profundities he wot not of. As the social, religious and moral
tracts that he wrote in the latter period of his life are instinct with a
literary beauty of which he never could divest himself, and which gave
an artistic value even to his sermons, so his earlier novels show a
profound concern for the welfare of society, a broad, humanitarian
spirit, a bigness of soul that included prince and pauper alike.
Is this extravagant praise? Then let me echo William Dean Howells: "I
know very well that I do not speak of Tolstoy's books in measured
terms; I cannot."
The Russian writers so far considered have made valuable contributions
to the short story; but, with the exception of Pushkin, whose reputation
rests chiefly upon his poetry, their best work, generally, was in the field
of the long novel. It was the novel that gave Russian literature its
pre-eminence. It could not have been otherwise, since Russia is young
as a literary nation, and did not come of age until the period at which
the novel was almost the only form of literature that counted. If,
therefore, Russia was to gain distinction in the world of letters, it could
be only through the novel. Of the measure of her success there is
perhaps no better testimony than the words of Matthew Arnold, a critic
certainly not given to overstatement. "The Russian novel," he wrote in

1887, "has now the vogue, and deserves to have it... The Russian
novelist is master of a spell to which the secret of human nature--both
what is external and internal, gesture and manner no less than thought
and feeling--willingly make themselves known... In that form of
imaginative literature, which in our day is the most popular and the
most possible, the Russians at the present moment seem to me to hold
the field."
With the strict censorship imposed on Russian writers, many of them
who might perhaps have contented themselves with expressing their
opinions in essays, were driven to conceal their meaning under the
guise of satire or allegory; which gave rise to a peculiar genre of
literature, a sort of editorial or essay done into fiction, in which the
satirist Saltykov, a contemporary of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who
wrote under the pseudonym of Shchedrin, achieved the greatest success
and popularity.
It was not however, until the concluding quarter of the last century that
writers like Korolenko and Garshin arose, who devoted themselves
chiefly to the cultivation of the short story. With Anton Chekhov the
short story assumed a position of importance alongside the larger works
of the great Russian masters. Gorky and Andreyev made the short story
do the same service for the active revolutionary period in the last
decade of the nineteenth century down to its temporary defeat in 1906
that Turgenev rendered in his series of larger novels for the period of
preparation. But very different was the voice of Gorky, the man sprung
from the people, the embodiment of all the accumulated wrath and
indignation of centuries of social wrong and oppression, from the
gentlemanly tones of the cultured artist Turgenev. Like a mighty