Louis S. Friedland

“ His mind pictured to itself all bonds rent asunder, all things holy cut down, such a thirst for blood and destruction, such disbelief, and such deep cynicism, that he was terrified, and in his great eagerness to stem the tide of vengeance, he wished to throw broadcast into life texts from the Scriptures and bits of Slavophile formulas, like a priest sprinkling holy water over a sinning multitude. In the dread consciousness of all this evil, Dostoyevsky called upon man to draw within himself, to develop spiritual power, and attain inner mastery. ”

“ What underlying motifs are we to expect of a literature so conditioned? First of all, we shall find a severe, often rigorous attitude toward the social problems of life. There is little "Art of Art's sake." This formula of a day comes into its own only in the most recent works, for in Russia the divorce of art from life can come about only as a temporary escape from the grimness of reality. In a literature fundamentally social, like that of Russia, man is viewed as a human being,—a being responsible to his own conscience for all his actions ”

“ To answer this urgent demand, a literature needs to be closely linked to life and reality. In the literature of Russia this union is close and indissoluble. We cannot attain a true understanding of the one, without knowing something of the other, of the realities, political and racial, that moulded it. Instinctively, Russian writers know that the meaning of life is involved in life itself; and he who would comprehend their treatment of life's problems, must not separate the literature from the milieu in which it lives and has its being. ”

“ Of course, all the modern literary currents are found in the stream of present-day Russian literature: futurism, and symbolism, and acmeism. The writers who express these influences have no fixed body of doctrine, but their viewpoint is the reverse of the one so long accepted without question in Russia. They insist that art is concerned first and foremost with beauty, not with morality; they claim that its true function is its appeal to the imagination. It is no longer to be, say the modernists, a conveyor of moral ideas. ”

“ The "simplifiers" negatived progress and culture. The Westernizers, rallying to the defense, proclaimed that wisdom and knowledge are the same as power and freedom. They viewed life as an unceasing struggle, as a great adventure on which man is embarked. And the goal, whatever it be, cannot be attained unless man overcomes the forces of Nature, and subjects them to human ends. Whereas the logical outcome of Simplification is the complete merging and loss of personality in the indeterminate mass, the inevitable result of the other view is the bold assertion of individuality. ”

“ Everything is thought of in terms of the whole people. And in the new heroism of self-sacrifice, individuality is surrendered and lost in mass-consciousness. One need hardly be reminded of how this philosophy drives Tolstoy to give up family and friends and to seek the extinction of his individuality in the communal life of the peasant-sects.
In the whole of our rapid survey of the chief aspects of nineteenth century Russian literature, we have sought to determine the underlying ideas, to set forth the basic principles as found in social, political, ethical, and even religious theories. ”

“ On the more recent phases of Russian literature, a few words will have to suffice here. The great problems that undelie the literature of present-day Russia are those of Freedom and Necessity. Man strives for liberty, for the liberation of all his individual powers. He feels in himself an upward striving that may yet lead him to higher things and a greater perfection. Many of the thinkers and writers of the time swear allegiance to the doctrine of economic determinism, and are visibly influenced by Marxian socialism, on the one hand, and by Nietzschean individualism on the other. ”

“ These two felt only imperfectly the great social forces that determined the course of later Russian literature, but already they give expression to some consciousness of Russian unity. They are, above all, romanticists, both depicting, at least in their earlier works, characters of the Byronic type,—brooding, disenchanted men, who have compressed all their life in a decade of years. Having failed to find happiness in life, they seek it vainly in solitude. These romantic heroes, in their aristocratic aloofness, are foreign to the social spirit of Russian literature. ”

“ To Dostoyevsky, the tremendous menace of individuality was apparent, and it seemed to him such an abyss of accumulated vengeance and insatiable wrath, that, like Savva in Andreyev's play, it seemed to be ready to wreck everything, to turn its hand against all creation. ”

“ Tolstoy carries still further Dostoyevsky's ideas, "Look within thy soul." His book, Confession, is the Everlasting Nay of Russian literature. In it he sounds the depths of despair, and the thought of death as a release, comes to him. But later, the road to salvation offers itself: "Back to the People," and the great Moralist calls upon us to abandon culture, which is a lie and a deception, and to renounce violence, and all other things that breed corruption. ”

“ Just as the Simplifiers annihilated knowledge and culture by refusing to give them a place in their conception of the full life, so the Early Nihilists did away with everything that, to them, was not real. And what is their test of reality? The real, said men like Hertzen, is whatever frees the individual and, in the end, humanity, from the bonds with which they are tied. ”

“ For they know that a goal exists, and that they must go on in their great spiritual search over the endless plain of Life. Things seen, are real to them, but those unseen have the true reality which they seek, and which they know exists. ”

“ So that the cardinal doctrine of the Nihilists of the time may be summed up in the words: "It is freedom that liberates, for fredom is creative power. It is only in order to be able to create that we learn. The creative power is the panacea for our suffering, the relief for our burden." Hence, they felt the great necessity of liberating the individual. Freedom and power for the individual—this expresses the new reliance of the Nihilists. ”

“ A Russian critic has described the psychology of his people as an "agricultural" one, that of "the man who walks behind the plow." The exclusive social structure for the first half of the century was that of the landowner and the peasant,—on the one hand, a great, leisurely, patriarchal class,—on the other, the serfs, the masses, "the mysterious strangers in literature toward whom all were striving and whom none understood." Many Russians who sought to isolate what was distinctively Russian in the social system, found in the agrarian community the real unit of the social structure. ”

“ But Dostoyevsky saw and portrayed the other side,—the new force of individuality that was stirring in the intellectual life of his country. It is in Dostoyevsky's ideas on individuality that Nietzsche found much of his inspiration. Human personality interested Dostoyevsky deeply, and it troubled him when it arose in protest, hurling down everything traditional and hereditary, denying the past, and sweeping away the faith based upon it. Dostoyevsky watched this uprising and assertion of the power of individuality, and he was drawn to it, and terrified by it at the same time. ”

“ Attempts were made to create a body of religious doctrine, to single out the essential values in human life and declare all others subordinate to them. And the intellectuals of the day did not have to go far afield for the discovery of the absolute values in life. They found them already expressed in the writings of the "thirties" and "forties": the happiness of the people, a morality of heroism and self-denial, the ideal of the "beautiful" life, in the sense of general peace, fraternity, and equality. ”

“ Russian literature, the ideas involved in this tendency toward simplification will at once suggest themselves. They form the chief "problems" of Goncharov, Turgeniev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,—of all the masters of Russia's golden age. In time, the trend toward simplification takes concrete form in a desire to become unified with the people. But always it presupposes a return to Nature, a vindication of the ethics of equality and fraternity. ”

“ They wish to discover man as he actually is, in his true essence, not as he appears to be, shorn of power and true "selfness" by as yet unconquered forces, and hemmed in by laws and social structures that only partly reveal him.
Here, then, we are dealing with a literature that exists for social service,—with man, and not society, as the object to be served. So that Russian literature is social in a peculiar sense. It has been said that the Russian looks to literature for solutions to "the accursed problems of life." ”

“ The trust in the people had proved a dream and a failure, and the intellectuals took refuge in empty speculating on Buddhism and its Nirvana-ideas. The great writer of this age, and the one who best reflects the somber mood of the time, is Chekhov. His works form, as a Russian critic puts it, "one big poem,—the poem of rainy weather." To Chekhov it seemed vain to try to solve the riddle of life. He is an "inconclusive," who presents with wondrous artistic reverence and finesse, the bare facts of life. ”

“ The spirit of Super-Reason led a wandering life, and when it lived with a people, that people was a living one. Chaldea, Babylon, China, India,—each had, at some time of the world's history, been the dwelling-place of Reason pure and unadulterated,—and thus it had gone on, from East to West, leaving behind it a trail of national corpses. It had never reached the Slavic race, but had attained its highest wisdom in Germany. ”

“ The simplification of life, the decrease of "vital" demands, strips the arts and culture of the West of all efficacy and worth. To these men, whose longing was for the inner, spiritual freedom of man, Western progress, with all it connoted, was an abomination. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the Westernizers, the rationalists, strongly arrayed against them. ”

“ It is perhaps the last of these views that the "moderns" accentuate, in the spirit that is so well expressed in the words of Gorky: "The life of man may be consumed in one deed, but that deed must be beautiful, splendid, free!" ”

“ The Simplifiers deny progress, and art, and culture, and affirm the inner spiritual life. The Rationalists affirm the whole of life—past, present, and future—for they believe in progress, growth, development. But they also deny the past and present in rejecting authority and tradition. These things were as nothing to them, and, as Hertzen, their spokesman, says, "Nothingness should not be made everything." It is this negation of the Westernizers that has earned for some of them the name of the Early Nihilists. ”

“ It was felt that Russia was destined to be the great hope of the world largely because it was running a different historical course from that of other nations. And the differentiating factor was the "rural" community. The cry was for Russia to purge its social system of the conditions that prevented a return to the communal mode of life. By far the saddest of these conditions was serfdom. ”

“ As it happened, the Slavophiles, though they strove to be purely Russian, followed the Westernizers in basing their views upon Hegel. They adapted, for home consumption, perhaps the central idea of the philosopher's views on history. It was the doctrine of a super-race and a super-nation, a glorification of nationalism, and it apealed strongly to the defenders of the Slavic idea. Hegel taught a new metamorphosis in man's conception of the divinity: the Supreme Reason. ”

“ With the development of the industrial system, there came the realization that there were, as a Russian critic puts is, "larger communities than the commune."
The literature of this decade is marked by the spirit of realism. The idealized peasant of Turgeniev gives way to the real peasant of a literature whose aim is purely objective. Then, too, the writers are no longer drawn exclusively from the gentry. The new literature is the product of men of different ranks (raznochintzy) , and among them are many who spring from the people: Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov. ”

“ With the beginning of the "fifties," a new force enters into Russian literature. The old conditions of life were falling to pieces under the strong attack of industrial and commercial changes. Chernishevsky had said about his country, "We are a backward people, and in this lies our hope. We must bless our fate that we have not lived the same life as Europe. ”

“ To begin with, the popularity of Mill's Essay on the Emancipation of Women led to the formulation of the so-called "free-love" ideas of the Nihilists: married life should continue only as long as love does,—otherwise, marriage is a bondage. It is, however, the new attitude to history that is of special interest to-day, for the Nihilistic conception of history is gaining unconscious adherents in our own universities. ”

“ The "simplifiers,"—whose aims were wholly moral and whose methods were purely pacific—felt that their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? ”

“ But they are conscious, too, of the fact that they will never attain to the secret unless they can fathom the nature of man in his inmost self. For to them man is the enigma that must be solved,—man as he really is, not what he romantically pretends to be, or, in the spirit of renunciation, says he is. ”

“ Chernyshevsky sums up the new attitude to history when he says, "Each new generation starts its life anew." In present-day philosophic speculation, this same conception is gaining ground, largely because of a natural reaction against the mechanical and uninspired interpretations of Darwinian evolution. ”

“ They hated all movements that were not animated by ideals of love. Therefore, they were completely out of sympathy with those who viewed society as a war of classes, and who placed their hope in a violent struggle for the rights of man. ”