Maurice Baring

“ With Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, we come not only to the two great pillars of modern Russian literature which tower above all others like two colossal statues in the desert, but to two of the greatest figures in the literature of the world. Russia has not given the world a universal poet, a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, or a Molière; for Pushkin, consummate artist and inspired poet as he was, lacks that peculiar greatness which conquers all demarcations of frontier and difference of language, and produces work which becomes a part of the universal inheritance of all nations ”

“ She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman; that is to say, of all that is best in Russia; and it is a type taken straight from life, and not from fairy-land—a type that exists as much to-day as it did in the days of Pushkin. She is the first of that long gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky have given us, and which are the most precious jewels of Russian literature, because they reflect the crowning glory of Russian life. Tatiana falls in love with Onegin at first sight. ”

“ In all the annals of poetry, there is no more curious figure than Lermontov. He was like a plant that above all others needed a sympathetic soil, a favourable atmosphere, and careful attention. As it was, he came in the full tide of the régime of Nicholas I, a régime of patriarchal supervision, government interference, rigorous censorship, and iron discipline,—a grey epoch absolutely devoid of all ideal aspirations. Considerable light is thrown on the contradictory and original character of the poet by his novel, A Hero of Our Days, the first psychological novel that appeared in Russia. ”

“ In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; but there is a great deal that is flat and sullen. But if one reviews the great amount of work he produced in his short life, one is struck, not by its variety, as in the case of Pushkin,—it is, on the contrary, limited and monotonous in subject,—but by his authentic lyrical inspiration, by the strength, the intensity, the concentration of his genius, the richness of his imagination, the wealth of his palette, his gorgeous colouring and the high level of his strong square musical verse. ”

“ In his work you find none of the piteous cries, no beauty of soaring and bleeding wings as in Shelley, nor the sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no tempest of defiant challenge, no lightnings of divine derision, as in Byron; his is neither the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that “brave soldier in the war of the liberation of humanity,” nor the agonized passion of a suffering Catullus. He never descended into Hell. Every great man is either an artist or a fighter; and often poets of genius, Byron and Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently fighters than they are artists. ”

“ Apart from its philosophy and ideas, Dead Souls had a great influence on Russian literature as a work of art. Just as Pushkin set Russian poetry free from the high-flown and the conventional, so did Gogol set Russian fiction free from the dominion of the grand style. He carried Pushkin’s work—the work which Pushkin had accomplished in verse and adumbrated in prose—much further; and by depicting ordinary life, and by writing a novel without any love interest, with a Chichikov for a hero, he created Russian realism. ”

“ Without fear of controversy or contradiction one can now say that Dostoyevsky’s place in Russian literature is at the top, equal and in the opinion of some superior to that of Tolstoy in greatness. He is also one of the greatest writers the world has ever produced, not because, like Tolstoy, he saw life steadily and saw it whole, and painted it with the supreme and easy art of a Velasquez; nor because, like Turgenev, he wove exquisite pictures into musical words. Dostoyevsky was not an artist; his work is shapeless ”

“ Looking back over the record of Russian literature, the first thing which must strike us, if we think of the literature of other countries, is its comparatively short life. There is in Russian literature no Middle Ages, no Villon, no Dante, no Chaucer, no Renaissance, no Grand Siècle. Literature begins in the nineteenth century. The second thing which will perhaps strike us is that, in spite of its being the youngest of all the literatures, it seems to be spiritually the oldest. ”

“ Now when Dostoyevsky is one of the shibboleths of our intelligentsia, one can boldly say, without fear of being misunderstood, that, as a creator and a force in literature, Dostoyevsky is in another plane than that of Turgenev, and as far greater than him as Leonardo da Vinci is greater than Vandyke, or as Wagner is greater than Gounod, while some Russians consider him even infinitely greater than Tolstoy. ”

“ When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov’s romantic work, and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the West—from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda—we find that in Lermontov’s work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled with his lyrical, imaginative, and [Pg 117] descriptive powers, a bed-rock of matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the “intense inane” of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim twilight of Coleridge. ”

“ He was neither a rebel nor a reformer; neither a liberal nor a conservative; he was a democrat in his love for the whole of the Russian people; he was a patriot in his love of his country. He resembled Goethe [Pg 93] rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or Byron; although, in his love of his country and in every other respect, his fiery temperament both in itself and in its expression was far removed from Goethe’s Olympian calm. He was like Goethe in his attitude towards society, and the attitude of the social and official world towards him resembles the attitude of Weimar towards Goethe. ”

“ On the other hand, the utmost confusion reigned as to what constituted romanticism. To each single writer it meant a different thing: “Enfonçez Racine,” and the unities, in one case; or ghosts, ballads, legends, local colour in another; or the defiance of morality and society in another. Zhukovsky, in introducing German romanticism into Russia, paved the way for its death, and for the death of all exotic fashions and models; for he paved the way for Pushkin to render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating models of his own and by founding a national literature. ”

“ There are no six lines more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly poetical in the whole of Russian literature.
Krylov’s fables, like La Fontaine’s, deal with animals, birds, fishes and men; the Russian peasant plays a large part in them; often they are satirical; nearly always they are [Pg 38] bubbling with humour. A writer of fables is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is sometimes to convey pregnant sense, keen mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human foibles, or to express wisdom in the form of wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. ”

“ Take, for instance, a masterpiece such as Flaubert’s Salammbô; it may and very likely does take away your breath by the splendour of its language, its colour, and its art, but you never feel that, even in a dream, you had taken part in the life which is painted there. The only bit of unreality in War and Peace is the figure of Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately unfair. Another impression which Tolstoy gives us in War and Peace is that man is in reality always the same, and that changes of manners are not more important than changes in fashions of clothes. ”

“ Russian character, because although between them they sum up all that is greatest, deepest, and all that is weakest in the Russian soul, there is perhaps one element of the Russian character, which, although they understood it well enough, their genius forbade them to possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the Great, Dostoyevsky’s Mwyshkin—the idiot, the pure fool who is wiser than the wise—and the hero of Gogol’s Revisor, Hlestyakov the liar and wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these elements, reconstitute any Russian who has ever lived. ”

“ Gogol is an author who will always be loved even as much as he is admired, and his stories are a boon to the young; to many a Russian boy and girl the golden gates of romance have been opened by Gogol, the destroyer of Russian romanticism, the inaugurator of Russian realism.
Side by side with fiction, another element grew up in this age of prose, namely criticism. Karamzin in the twenties had been the first to introduce literary criticism, and critical appreciations of Pushkin’s work appeared from time to time in the European Messenger. ”

“ For years, Russian criticism was either neglectful of his work or unjust towards it; for his serene music and harmonious design left the generations which came after him, who were tossed on a tempest of social problems and political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin’s memorial at Moscow, the homage which he paid to the dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of [Pg 100] the whole of Russia. His work is beyond the reach of critics, whether favourable or unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of his countrymen, and chiefly upon the lips of the young. ”

“ Only active love can bring out faith. Love men, and do not be afraid of their sins; love man in his sin; love all the creatures of God, and pray God to make you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and as the birds.” This was Father Zosima’s advice to Alyosha. And that is the gist of Dostoyevsky’s message to mankind. “Life,” Father Zosima also says to Alyosha, “will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it.” Here we have the whole secret of Dostoyevsky’s greatness. He blessed life, and he caused others to bless it. ”

“ His diction is the inseparable skin of the thought. You seem to hear him thinking. He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated spontaneity. His soul was sincere, noble, and open; he was frivolous, a child of the world and of his century; but if he was worldly, he was human; he was a citizen as well as a child of the world; and it is that which makes him the greatest of Russian poets.
[Pg 98] His career was unromantic; he was rooted to the earth; an aristocrat by birth, an official by profession, a lover of society by taste. ”

“ The story is as vivid and as interesting as that of any novel, as that of the novels of Russian writers of genius, and it has the additional value of being true. And yet we never feel that Aksakov has a thought of compiling a historical document for the sake of its historical interest. He is making history unawares, just as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose without knowing it; and, [Pg 157] whether he was aware of it or not, he wrote perfect prose. No more perfect piece of prose writing exists. The style flows on like a limpid river; there is nothing superfluous, and not a hesitating touch. ”

“ Nobody then would have dreamed it possible to write a play or a novel without a love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed to Russia that there was such a thing as Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one better, revealed the fascination, the secret and incomprehensible power that lay in the flat monotony of the Russian country, and the inexhaustible source of humour, absurdity, [Pg 139] irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the everyday life of the ordinary people. ”

“ Turgenev reminds one of a certain kind of music, beautiful in form, not too passionate and yet full of emotion, Schumann’s music, for instance; if Pushkin is the Mozart of Russian literature, Turgenev is the Schumann; not amongst the very greatest, but still a poet, full of inspired lyrical feeling; and a great, a classic artist, the prose Virgil of Russian literature. ”

“ I do not mean by this that Pushkin is as great a poet as Shakespeare or Milton, but I do mean that he is the most national and the most important of all Russian writers. There is no translation of Saltykov, the greatest of Russian satirists; there is no complete translation of Leskov, one of her greatest novelists, while Russian criticism and philosophy, as well as almost the whole of Russian poetry, is completely beyond the ken of England. The knowledge of what Russian civilisation, with its glorious fruit of literature, consists in, is still a sealed book so far as England is concerned. ”

“ He sees what is mean and common clearer than any one, but he does not infer from it that life, or mankind, or the world is common or mean. He infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no lower morally than he would put Napoleon, Harpagon, or Don Juan—all of them victims of a ruling passion, and all of them great by reason of it—for Chichikov is also great in rascality, just as Harpagon was great in avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. And this large charity blent with biting irony is again peculiarly Russian.
Dead Souls is a deeper book than any of Gogol’s early work. ”

“ If a thing is as good as possible in itself, what is the use of saying that it is less good or better than something else, which is as good as possible in itself also. Nevertheless, placed beside any of the great confessions of love in poetry—Francesca’s story in the Inferno, Romeo and Juliet’s leavetaking, Phèdre’s declaration, Don Juan Tenorio’s letter—the beauty of Tatiana’s confession would not be diminished by the juxtaposition. ”

“ All Russian poets have this gift of reality of conception and simplicity of treatment in a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none has it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. The difference between Pushkin’s style and Lermontov’s is that, when you read Pushkin, [Pg 123] you think: “How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world did he do it?” You admire the “magic hand of chance.” In reading Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness. ”

“ I emerged from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. ”

“ Philosophy took the place of politics, and liberalism was diverted into the channel of romanticism; but out of this romantic movement came the springtide of Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the soul of the Russian people found adequate expression. And the very fact that politics [Pg 45] were excluded from the movement proved, in one sense, a boon to literature: for it gave Russian men of genius the chance to be writers, artists and poets, and prevented them from exhausting their whole energy in being inefficient politicians or unsuccessful revolutionaries. ”