Essays on Russian Novelists | Page 9

the
national poet, wrote in a letter to a friend, "Je vous parlerai la langue de
l'Europe, elle m'est plus familiere." Imagine Tennyson writing a letter
in French, with the explanation that French came easier to him!
It follows, as a consequence, that the chief reading of Russian society
people is French novels; that French customs, morals, and manners (as
portrayed in French fiction) have had an enormous effect on the
educated classes in Russia. If we may believe half the testimony we
hear,--I am not sure that we can,--Russian aristocratic society is to-day
the most corrupt in the world. There is an immense contrast between
Parisians and Russians, and the literature that would not damage the
morals of the former is deadly to the latter. The spirit of mockery in the
Parisian throws off the germs of their theatre and their fiction. I have
seen in a Parisian theatre men, their wives, and their families laughing
unrestrainedly at a piece, that if exhibited before an American audience
would simply disgust some, and make others morbidly attentive. This
kind of literature, comic or tragic, disseminated as it everywhere is
among impulsive and passionate Russian readers, has been anything
but morally healthful. One might as rationally go about and poison
wells. And the Russian youth are sophisticated to a degree that seems
to us almost startling. In 1903, a newspaper in Russia sent out
thousands of blanks to high school boys and girls all over the country,
to discover what books constituted their favourite reading. Among
native authors, Tolstoi was first, closely followed by Gorki; among
foreign writers, Guy de Maupassant was the most popular! The
constant reading of Maupassant by boys and girls of fifteen and sixteen
years, already emancipated from the domination of religious ideas, can
hardly be morally hygienic. And to-day, in many families all over the
Western world, Hygiene has taken the place of God.
Russian novelists have given us again and again pictures of typical
society women who are thoroughly corrupt. We find them in historical

and in contemporary fiction. They are in "War and Peace," in "Anna
Karenina," in "Dead Souls," in "A House of Gentlefolk," and in the
books of to-day. And it is worth remembering that when Tolstoi was a
young man, his aunt advised him to have an intrigue with a married
woman, for the added polish and ease it would give to his manners, just
as an American mother sends her boy to dancing-school.
Finally, in reading the works of Tolstoi, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Gorki,
Chekhov, Andreev, and others, what is the general impression
produced on the mind of a foreigner? It is one of intense gloom. Of all
the dark books in fiction, no works sound such depths of suffering and
despair as are fathomed by the Russians. Many English readers used to
say that the novels of George Eliot were "profoundly sad,"--it became
almost a hackneyed phrase. Her stories are rollicking comedies
compared with the awful shadow cast by the literature of the Slavs.
Suffering is the heritage of the Russian race; their history is steeped in
blood and tears, their present condition seems intolerably painful, and
the future is an impenetrable cloud. In the life of the peasants there is of
course fun and laughter, as there is in every human life; but at the root
there is suffering, not the loud protest of the Anglo-Saxon labourer,
whose very loudness is a witness to his vitality--but passive, fatalistic,
apathetic misery. Life has been often defined, but never in a more
depressing fashion than by the peasant in Gorki's novel, who asks
quietly:--
"What does the word Life mean to us? A feast? No. Work? No. A battle?
Oh, no!! For us Life is something merely tiresome, dull,--a kind of
heavy burden. In carrying it we sigh with weariness and complain of its
weight. Do we really love Life! The Love of Life! The very words
sound strange to our ears! We love only our dreams of the future--and
this love is Platonic, with no hope of fruition."
Suffering is the corner-stone of Russian life, as it is of Russian fiction.
That is one reason why the Russians produce here and there such
splendid characters, and such mighty books. The Russian capacity for
suffering is the real text of the great works of Dostoevski, and the
reason why his name is so beloved in Russia--he understood the hearts
of his countrymen. Of all the courtesans who have illustrated the
Christian religion on the stage and in fiction, the greatest is
Dostoevski's Sonia. Her amazing sincerity and deep simplicity make us

ashamed of any tribute of tears we may have given to the familiar
sentimental type. She does not know what the word "sentiment" means;
but the awful sacrifice of her daily life