R. L.

“ There is no hero or heroine, no interaction of characters, no genuine love interest, not even a moral or social problem. The numberless characters are marched on to the stage merely for the purpose of having their moral diseases examined, and of being thereupon dismissed with contempt. The middle-aged advocate, Basoff, at whose datcha the play opens, is merely stupid, rude, and intemperate, an embodiment of that queer mixture of culture and barbarism which is characteristic of Russia. ”

“ In initiative, zeal, resistance, no one expects anything from them. But how is it, all ask, that the rich, cultivated, personally fearless classes which have lately united in hatred for the autocracy have effected so little—a little which has never transgressed the limits of passive resistance and pious, condemnatory resolutions? How is it that they have come down to a despairing acquiescence in murder as the only instrument of salvation—to a reliance on a small knot of reckless men who possess what they possess not, brain to plot and nerve to execute? ”

“ So far, Russia has never had an educated class united by blood with the mass of the nation. This blood alliance would inspire us with a burning desire to widen, reconstruct, enlighten the life of those who, related to us, now slave, sunken in darkness and filth. ”

“ Before the diagnosis of Datchniki is accepted, the obvious question will therefore be asked: To what extent is Maxim Gorky, the romancer, a serious critic of affairs; how far is he qualified to judge a class from which he is alien by birth and sympathies? Many Russians, and I believe many foreigners, would reply that Gorky has none of the necessary qualifications at all. They regard him as an intruder among the intelligents, as lacking the training for the part of social critic, as temperamentally incapable of judging any serious problem outside the domain of imaginative art. ”

“ In other words, for Russia’s intelligent class to be saved from the impending decrepitude, and equipped for leadership of a resurgent nation, the barbarian lower orders must be summoned from the depths, to merge their blood, their vigour, their healthy social instincts, their laboriousness, and faith with the exhausted intelligents now on top. For lack of this, we have the decadence of Russian intellect, its failure in the present revolt, and the demoralisation now displayed in its reliance upon the anarchical elements to blow a path to freedom.
It is a serious thing to indict a whole class. ”

“ Indeed, Gorky seemed to have little hope for the redemption of Russia by any mild and benevolent system of rule. “I have seen too much,” he said, “and lived through too much to think that love between men as brothers can be relied upon as a basis for a reformed society. But each man must respect humanity.” All, therefore, he demanded from the Russian or any other Government was that it should respect human personality, and that it should not shackle the progressive instincts natural in all men. The Autocracy at present existed by disrespect for the individual, he said ”

“ The South is forever our home.
All is now well again, &c.
The grottoes, the rivers, the hills, and the plains,
Will abound with mirth and great glee;
And the love of our Country forever is dear,
Where the heart of her people are free.
All is now well again, &c.
This work was published before January 1, 1929 and is anonymous or pseudonymous due to unknown authorship. It is in the public domain in the United States as well as countries and areas where the copyright terms of anonymous or pseudonymous works are 95 years or less since publication. ”

“ It is apparently so natural for the “intelligent” man to make love to his friend’s wife that, when Varvara Mikhailovna desires to reject the advances of the philosopher Riumin, she prefers to answer that she “is in doubt before life” rather than urge the practical objection (which both he and she ignore) that she has a husband in the next room. Riumin’s love-suit is based upon the strange plea that “life frightens me by the persistency of its demands.” ”

“ The motives which ordinarily inspire great actions and great sins are beyond the comprehension of this outworn, passionless, decadent society. Feebleness of will and spiritual cowardice envelop all; and paralyse action to such an extent that when Riumin, driven to despair by the failure of his suit and by “the persistency of life’s demands,” attempts to shoot himself, he fails abjectly, and is carried wounded home, with the confession, “I live without success, and have not the capacity to die.” ”

“ The Maxim Gorky whom I left a week ago among the evergreen woods of Bilderlinghof, on the Baltic coast, is a tall, straight, deep-chested, large-boned man, who towered like a giant over the squat Germans and stunted Lettish peasants who are now struggling for racial dominion on the Livonian coast. In features, he is as far removed from the refined, weak-faced intelligents as from the submissive, apathetic muzhik. The forehead is broad, furrowed deeply when he talks, and surmounted by a mop of dark hair ”

“ There is a real bond between Peshkoff the man and Gorky the writer in the love of Nature, in the innate, incommunicable instinct for all that is free, open, and joyous, in the contempt for the restraints of conventional religion and morals, in the adoration of strength, of mastery over self, of bravery in face of the world. ”

“ Only the irresponsible “intelligents” desire the overthrowal of Autocracy coute que coute, and these only because they fail to realise that the first price paid will be the trampling of their own class under the feet of demagogues and butchers. They do not see that they are justifying Rostopchin’s bitter gibe that “Usually cobblers want revolution so as to emerge gentlemen; in our country, gentlemen want revolution that they may emerge as cobblers.” ”

“ In order to leave no doubt that in Datchniki he was girding at a whole class, Gorky overcrowded his canvas, preferring to spoil his play rather than have his homily incomprehensive. Thus, among the twenty-six dramatis personæ are an advocate, a doctor, an engineer, a literary man, a student, a retired business man, an emancipated woman—representatives in fact of the professions which are the backbone—as far as it has any backbone—of the urban anti-Governmental party. The two hundred pages in which these “intelligents” expose their inadequacy are in no sense a play. ”

“ It is hard for me to live. It seems to me that I have come to a strange land, to strange people, whose life I cannot understand!... I cannot understand this life of our cultivated class. It is impermanent, unstable, made hastily for the occasion as are toys at fairs.... ”

“ A negative discontent holds every mind; and search is vain, either in the literature or in the common mental currency of the people, for any great, fructifying idea. In Russia, as elsewhere, revolutions must be made by ideas. But beyond the vague desire to attain the personal liberty and licence existing under the institutions of Western Europe, ideas Russia has none.
The social languor thus diagnosed affects only the educated classes, or so-called “intelligents,” a class which must not be confounded with the “intellectuals” of other countries. ”

“ The anarchical, anti-social Gorky is similarly mythopoeic, and, it seems, similarly credited. “Gorky’s idea of society,” wrote a Russian newspaper critic not long ago, “is so corrupted by individualist, anti-human instincts that he would dissolve society into its original units. All those triumphs which are the outcome of the social instinct and of united labour, all culture, all art, would be swept away. ”

“ Possibly the crucial test will come sooner than is expected, for the collapse at Mukden may supply the impetus to revolution hitherto lacking. Peace and an angry Army back from Manchuria are the next perils to be faced by the Tsardom. But should military loyalty stand the final strain of admitted defeat, my prediction is that we shall be faced by a sort of Shaho stale-mate, in which the helplessness of society to move the Tsardom, and of the Tsardom to repress manifestations of discontent, will balance one another for a time. ”

“ Gorky’s earlier play, Miestchanye, had painted the manners and sentiment of the petits bourgeois of Russian towns. The purpose of Datchniki was to expose the manners and sentiments of the “intelligent” class; and this purpose it accomplished with a brutality and frankness which made the more sensitive half of the “intelligents” dance with wrath.
Datchniki (which a respectable St. Petersburg News Agency mistranslates The Suburbians) are known only to Russia. They are a product of climate. Nobody lives in the Russian capital (or in any other large city) in summer. ”

“ Though Russia is united against the Autocracy, it is not united in favour of Revolution. The longer-headed intelligents do not want revolution. Gorky himself expressed to me his forebodings on that score. ”

“ You feel at once that this is a self-possessed, masterful man, a man in whom character is even more remarkable than intellect, who, even had he been born without that instinct for the natural and the dramatic, and that verbal deftness which have raised him among his countrymen to unexampled fame, would not the less surely have broken the bonds of birth and penury. ”

“ Again and again throughout the play, Gorky cries aloud that “intelligent” society is feeble, passionless, rotten. Outside the ranks of his own bossiaki and freebooters there is nothing in all Russia heroic even in wickedness. A mean-spirited desire for cheap comfort and a dread of responsibility and conflict inspire all actions. When Kaleria, after the manner of datchniki, reads aloud her trivial, sentimental verses, Varvara’s brother, Vlas, proceeds to parody them into the following characterisation of Russian society ”

“ To answer these questions, though obliquely, I propose this month to deal in some detail with the recent writings and speech of the one Russian who, as an intruder in the intelligent class, regards it objectively; who, being outside all cliques and parties, is not afraid to tell the truth. ”

“ Can anyone, unfamiliar with the social pathology of the Tsar’s Empire, credit that this is a faithful translation of the first page of the third Act?
Yulia Phillipovna. This picnic is tiresome.
Kaleria. Like our life!
Varvara Mikhailovna. It’s gay enough for the men.
Yulia Phillipovna. They’ve drunk a lot, and I expect are now telling improper stories.... I have also drunk a lot... but it does not make me gay; on the contrary... when I drink a glass of strong wine, I feel more serious... life seems worse... I feel I must do something mad. ”

“ Varvara Mikhailovna, his wife, is the central figure round which Basoff and the other characters aimlessly revolve. She is the daughter of a laundress, and being, like Gorky himself, an intruder into “intelligent” society, is able to discern its vices. ”

“ It has killed that instinct for mastery and greed for success which, even in crises in which self-sacrifice are necessary, are the precedent conditions of leadership, with the characteristic result that the nearest approach to a popular hero among the malcontents—Father Gapon—is by origin an Italian or Jew. There are no men of the first rank, and as I pointed out last month, there is no great religious or intellectual movement to inspire the people in their fight against despotism. ”

“ The deed is outside the domain of moral casuistry. It issued from certain conditions, and while those conditions continue, the issue will be repeated.”
The mass of society, not being responsible, as are newspapers and party leaders, hailed the murder with unconcealed joy. An elderly, highly-respectable, and humane lady in no way connected with Terrorism, to whom I happened first to communicate the details, had no word of comment save “A very neat job!” (Otchen lofko!) . Everyone rejoiced that the effect would be far-reaching. ”

“ But while the wealthy upper classes forsake their stucco palaces for remote country estates, the professional men, authors, actors, artists, and well-to-do traders migrate to tiny wooden summer houses in the forests around St. ”