Various

“ The last six years of Pushkin’s life established his claim to greatness not only as a poet and a dramatist, but also as a master of Russian prose. We may not term him a novelist, but as a writer of prose tales he set a new mark in the literature of his land. When we recall that it was in the first years of that significant decade, 1830-1840, that Poe, Balzac, and Mérimée perfected and brought to its modern form the short-story, we shall realize what a great forward step was being made in Russia at the very same time when Pushkin produced his “Prose Tales.” ”

“ Pushkin is one of those writers who are big enough to have founded and dominated an era, not solely because of his own preëminent genius, but for the deeper reason that he represented in himself the culmination of a series of national steps, each as definite as it was important.
For all the centuries of her life up to the nineteenth, Russia had lived a separate existence from that of her great neighbors. In seeking a cause for this condition, we must remember that the imperial bigness of Russia, and her remote location, are not the only factors entering into her segregate character. ”

“ I believe you; you are a good man and an honest man; I conjure you by all that is holy upon earth—to tell me the truth! If you only knew how important it is that I should know!... Doctor, for God’s sake, tell me, am I in danger?’ ‘What am I to tell you, Alexandra Andreyevna, I beg of you?’ ‘I entreat you, for God’s sake!’ ‘I can’t conceal it from you, Alexandra Andreyevna, you are really in danger, but the Lord is merciful.’... ”

“ This would not be so significant a statement were modern Russian literature—by which I mean all such literature which really counts—more than a century old; but this ancient, remote, and self-sufficient people really lived for so long a time apart from the great highways of Continental thought that they were not nationally conscious of those titanic upheaving and levelling passions whose fitful and at times appalling force shook France, England, and even Poland to the very heart and forced their thinkers to express the spirit of the revolutionary era in undying prose. ”

“ The yoke worn for so many ages by the masses, the bitterness of a life devoted to service for the “big man,” the hopelessness born of petty and major oppressions, result for the Russian, as for all barbaric peoples—for Russia is still largely barbaric—in a resigned suffering which has not yet begun to be mitigated by the great increase of revolutionary ideas among the people. ”

“ That was a vitally formative thought-period for Europe, the years between 1835 and 1842, and during such of them as Turgenev spent in the German capital he became impregnated with free thought in all its phases, and never thereafter could he breathe without oppression the air of his restricted Russia. Thus the propaganda of emancipation which the great novelist subtly spread by means of his fiction, without ever becoming a physically present leader, was first of all inspired by his life at home and fanned to enthusiasm by contact with intrepid thinkers in Germany. ”

“ The forest fragrance grows stronger; there is a scent of warmth and damp earth; the fluttering breeze dies away at your side. The birds go to sleep—not all at once—but after their kinds; first the finches are hushed, a few minutes later the warblers, and after them the yellow buntings. In the forest it grows darker and darker. The trees melt together into great masses of blackness; in the dark-blue sky the first stars come timidly out. All the birds are asleep. ”

“ Add to this the influence of Byron’s poetry, now stirring Europe, and we have the external forces which drove Russia to look at her own self with honest eyes—forces which at length found their literary climax in Pushkin’s giving to his native land a literature which was of the Russians, for the Russians, and by a Russian—a literature born of the Russian spirit, breathing her ideals, speaking her marvellously expressive tongue in new combinations of beauty, and set against a background of her soil and her cities. ”

“ A being disappeared, who was protected by none, dear to none, interesting to none, and who did not even attract to himself the attention of the student who does not let an opportunity slip by to put a pin through a common fly and to examine it under the microscope—a being who endured humbly the ridicule of his brother officials and went to his grave without having experienced a single notable event, but for whom nevertheless, at the very close of his life, came a radiating guest in the shape of a cloak, which cheered for an instant his sorry existence ”

“ Petersburg became altogether extinct, and the entire official multitude had already dined to satiety, each as he could, according to his means and whim; when all had rested after the departmental grating of pens, running about for one’s own affairs and those urgent ones of strangers—indeed, all the work which tireless man had willingly created for himself, even far beyond any actual need; when officials hasten to devote the rest of the evening to pleasure—the more alert going to the theatre; those on the street employing their time looking at the bonnets ”

“ Petersburg was suddenly startled by rumors that on the Kalinkin Bridge and in its vicinity there had begun to appear nightly a corpse, in the shape of an official, seeking a stolen cloak, and that, under the pretense that it was the stolen cloak, he dragged off, regardless of rank or calling, every one’s cloak from his shoulders, whether it was cat-skin, beaver, raccoon, fox, or bear—in short, every variety of fur and skin which man had thought of for his covering. One of the department officials saw the dead with his own eyes, and immediately recognized in him Akaki Akakievich ”

“ Brutalities, gaucheries, physicalities, were to him expressions of the man in whose inner life the novelist was more deeply interested than in the outer. Thus his realism is neither so physical as Zola’s nor so materialistic in philosophy as Maupassant’s. Turgenev’s pessimism is social, and not primarily moral; hence character is always the big element in his novels and shorter fictional pieces.
As with Tolstoi, so with Turgenev, plot is a negligible quantity. Yet in a way that quite defies any explanation but one, the final impression is fairly unified, and certainly tremendously effective. ”

“ Those who have only a shivering admiration for the terrors of Russian fiction in general will find in Tolstoi’s short-stories much that is sweet and gentle; yet, being the most Russian of all Russian fiction-writers, he could but cry aloud with the pity of his people. ”

“ Strange contradiction of human life when this idealizer of family love, this apostle of gentleness, this generous soul who could withhold nothing from the needy, make over his estate to his family years before he died, refuse to receive royalties from his books, beg the public to forget his masterpieces of fiction and read only his tractates, labor in the fields and eat peasant bread—when this [Pg 164] great soul could love-starve the aged helpmeet who had been his strength for three-score years! ”

“ Not once in his life did he direct his attention upon what was happening daily in the street—quite unlike his colleague, the young official, whose glance was sufficiently far-reaching and keen to observe when any one’s trouser-straps became undone on the opposite sidewalk, which always called forth upon his face a smile of gratification. ”

“ Masha wrapped a shawl around her, put on a long, warm mantle, took into her hands her treasure-casket, and walked down the back-stairs. The maid followed her with two bundles. They entered the garden. The storm did not subside; the wind blew in their faces, as if it sought to stop the young culprit. With the greatest difficulty, they reached the end of the garden. On the road a sledge awaited them. The chilled horses would not stand still, and Vladimir’s coachman was restlessly walking in front of them, trying to quiet them. ”

“ The great autocratic rulers of Russia, and her leading nobles, at last began to feel the allurement of the French, and Peter the Great even travelled abroad, coming home imbued with new ideas for a progressive nation. When a giant people, long [Pg 15] content to be sufficient unto itself, awakens to see that other ideals of life, other habits of thought, other standards of conduct, have brought other great nations to a brilliancy of position which its own solitary bigness has not enabled it to attain, the first feeling is one of contempt for “those others,” as the French would say. ”

“ The vagueness of a mind is never asserted; it is shown indubitably. The inept man, the supernumerary of society, the man who is engrossed in self, the despairing peasant bound to the wheel, the reflective but weak-willed dreamer—speech, physical habits, and physical traits reveal them all as relentlessly as a scalpel uncovers diseased tissue. This is the wonder of Turgenev’s fictional power. ”

“ The short-story of today in Russia is strong—terribly strong, for the most part, for it is not charming, certainly. But as an augury of what the Russian people will yet become it has a thousand-fold more promise than may be found in the perfumed politeness of an anæmic fiction such as floods the magazines of England and America. ”

“ Therefore, he accepts—and Lensky falls. Onyegin then goes off on his travels. Olga soon consoles herself with a handsome officer, and after their marriage goes with him to his regiment. Tatyana, however, who is of a reserved, intense character, pines, refuses all offers of marriage, and, by the advice of friends, is finally taken to Moscow for the winter. There, as a wall-flower at her first ball, she captivates a prince from St. Petersburg—a distinguished and socially important general. She follows her parents’ wishes and marries him. ”

“ Maria Gavrilovna herself gave away her secret while in delirium. Her words, however, were so incoherent that her mother, who never left her bedside, could only gather that her daughter was passionately in love with Vladimir Nikolaevich, and that this love was apparently the cause of her illness. She held counsel with her husband, and with some of the neighbors, and in the end they unanimously decided that there was no getting around fate, that poverty was no crime, that the man was the thing—not wealth, and so on. ”

“ Afterwards, wasting no time, he dressed himself, placed the cloak across his shoulders, and went into the street.
Just where the inviting official lived, we unfortunately cannot say; our memory is beginning to fail us, and the St. Petersburg streets and houses have so badly massed and mixed themselves in our head that it is most difficult to establish any kind of order out of all the chaos. However that may be, at least it is certain that the official lived in the better part of the city, from which may be guessed that it was anywhere but near Akaki Akakievich’s neighborhood. ”

“ No one takes care of her; kind people sometimes replenish her jar with fresh water. She requires nothing else. The only sign of life, if life it can be called, is in her eyes and her faint respiration. But this hideous wreck of a body contains an [Pg 136] immortal soul, purified by suffering, utterly resigned, lifted above itself, this simple peasant nature, into the realms of perfect self-renunciation. ”