Modern Russian Literature

...MODERN RUSSIAN LITERATURE By CATHERINE RADZIWILL R USSIAN literature, which twenty-five years ago took a leading part in the intellectual life of the entire world, has now utterly changed...

...Gogol amused both masses and intelligentsia...

...Startling as the assertion may seem to be to some, there can be no question as to this fact: that Roman instincts of order and justice, upon which we pride our- selves as Englishmen, were first fostered by the apostle of our race, the Roman monk imbued with the principles of Saint Benedict's legislation...

...Herzen, one of the leaders of the now defunct Cadet party...

...They have talent, great talent in some instances, but talent like everything else requires certain conditions of well-being to give its real value, and to ensure its development...

...Over his head the curse of Bolshevism also has passed, and left him perhaps a wiser, and certainly a sadder man...

...The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn litany was in a sense a return of the Roman legionaries who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric...

...Petersburg, Kro- potkin never lost his serenity, and wrote some of his most eloquent pages...

...His Roman sense taught him that the work of building up a Chris- tian people had to proceed pari passu with the spread of civilization...

...Therefore an enormous amount of biog- raphical sketches have been offered to the public, some worthless, others which will one day rank among his- torical works...

...When this has been properly sorted it will help him considerably in coming to an exact opinion about the events which now are too close to be judged impartially and accurately...

...In his dark cell in the gloomy fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in St...

...Not one among them can find in himself the strength to speak about hope to a nation that has unfortunately forgotten what hope is...

...The only field in which modern Russian literature has made great progress is that of history and biog- raphy...

...They still can write, but their productions refer only to the past...

...On the one hand we find writers who have migrated in consequence of the Revolution, and gradually lost touch with their country, judging it according to its former standards, unable to realize that it is no longer the country which they had known in their youth, loved during their manhood...

...Augus-tine, a Roman at the heart's core, set himself to con- verting the people of Kent according to the manner in which old Rome conquered the world...

...Russians are born story-tellers...

...Above June I2, I929 THE COMMONWEAL ISt everything else it requires peace, intellectual peace, which does not mean lack of material cares...

...But hOWl How can any talent come to the surface when existence becomes a perpetual fight, not against misery or destitution, but against sudden but always imminent annihilation...

...Betimes in the morning Brother Odo read grammar to the boys...

...To the keen spirit of observation displayed in analyzing the things which they saw, they added much of that divine pity for the poor, the helpless and even the criminal, which has always been one of the distinctive features of the Russian character...

...In his The Land of the Children there are scenes so unfor- gettable that one wakes up at night trembling from the terrifying impression which they have produced, scenes absolutely Shakespearean in their tragic, slow, but at the same time violent development...

...Present Russian literature can be divided into two classes...

...But it was one of those spontaneous combustions brought about by the force of tremendous facts, not by an explosion of unre-pressed talent...

...The desire to tell others one's varied experi- ences is inherent in human nature...

...They knew that, although they might individually perish, Russia would survive, and this knowledge helped them to preach to others this great humanitarian creed of love of one's neighbor and faith in one's God...

...But Dostoievsky, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgeniev all had faith, this faith which the demon Bolshevism has destroyed in so many human souls...

...Good literature does not thrive upon scenes of horror, which explains why in the most talented Russian books nowadays there are splendid pages, but not one really splendid volume...

...They taught daily...

...in the mines of Nertchinsk the Decembrists kept their faith in the future, and did not despair...

...He is undoubtedly the greatest figure in Russian modern literature...

...Among the latter are very distinguished men, like-Krasnov already referred to, Ivan Bunine, Merejkov- ski, Prince Volkonski and others...

...ancient and modern, they know how to keep the atten- tion of their audience...

...There can be no real literary movement in a country and among people who have seen only one side of the picture, who have looked only upon one of the pages of the book unfolded before their eyes, and who have not even done that thoroughly...

...And yet this book of Orenburgsky's is the only one which ends upon a note of hope among all those of modern Rus- sian writers that I have read...

...few with time to read, by diverting them from their gloomy thoughts...

...Maxim Gorky stands the only exception among all these mediocrities that might under other circumstances have developed into talents...

...Their books were always humanly true, which explains the great influence so many of them have exercised over the people who read them...

...It drifts from right to left, and from left to right, ac-cording to the impressions which events have--not engraved, but simply photographed, on the Russian mind, and to a certain extent on the Russian concep- tion of right and wrong...

...How can it develop itself and rise to the heights upon which it ought to stand in a country where there is no society, where life is not normal, where there is nothing remaining but political passions, hatred, cruelty and despair...

...There is no genius among modern Russian authors, only gigantic talent at times, combined with a colossal disdain for those conventions which up to now have been considered indispensable in the framing of a book...

...Merejkovski's superb story of the revolutionary movement which culminated in the mutiny of December I4, I825, contains pages which Shakespeare himself might have written, so tragic are they in their quiet grandeur...

...Within the four walls of Schlfisselburg, Vera Fiegner retained her vitality...

...It is this lack of belief in a coming daylight which is the great weakness of modern Russian literature...

...It was not the masterful description of the character of Raskolnikov, in Dostoievsky's Crime and Punish-ment, which made him so unforgettable, but the fact that everyone who closed the volume in which his story was related felt that there might be circum-stances capable of making others do as he had done, sin as he had sinned, kill as he had killed...

...When a country's existence is normal, its talented men, even if they find themselves oppressed (as was so often the case in the Russia of the czars) still can work, write and observe...

...On the one hand we find writers allowed to express themselves in their native land, who are trying to forget any mental agony they may have undergone in the past, and appealing to the chaotic minds of the...

...But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal of the first...

...He is a real writer, one who condenses his personal impressions from a literary point of view, and who in addition understands the science of effect produced at the right time, and under the right circumstances...

...It is nothing short of a miracle that there still exist Russian authors worth reading, amid the chaos into which Russia has fallen...

...It produced an immense impression, principally because all the Rus- sians who read it, and all the foreigners who had been in Russia in those days, found recorded in it things which they had seen and known themselves...

...Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the missionaries fronted the king...

...Nothing of this kind exists in the writings of the post-war Russian writers...

...Such was the beginning of many a university: a good result from the first attempts of Sublaco and Monte Cassino...

...At one o'clock Brother Wil- liam read a lecture on Tully's Rhetoric and Quintilian Flores...

...It requires something more, it needs the divine spark of genius to assure it immortality...

...Petersburg society, and of the disorganization brought about by the great war, with the subsequent collapse of the entire country under the weight of Bolshevism...

...They have seen but one side of the general picture of the Russia of today, and have not realized that there is another angle from which it can be gazed upon...

...Without his work, the Anglo-Saxon race would have passed from the knowledge of future generations more completely than people who set up inscribed stones and graven images in the tropical forests of Yucatan...

...Literature is after all a study of society as well as of life...

...What made Russian writers so fascinating in the past was their power of analyzing human sensations and the fluctuations of human mentality...

...This is a most interesting collection consisting for the most part of personal reminiscences and anecdotes of known and unknown people, and well deserves to be trans-lated into foreign languages...

...His first book, From Double-Headed Eagle to Red Flag, was an extraordinary production--a most accu- rate picture of pre-war St...

...whence he sent to his manor of Cotenham, near Cam- bridge, four of his French fellow-students and monks-- one of them to be professor of sacred learning, the rest teachers in philosophy...

...By the second year the number of the hearers was so great from the town and country that not the biggest house and barn that was, says Wood, "nor any church whatever sufficed to hold them...

...The Russian 6migr6s, on the other hand, are publishing an immense work called The Archives of the Russian Revolution, under the superintendence of Mr...

...When these ex-periences have been as tragic as those which Russians have had to undergo, their story cannot fail to be interesting...

...There was displayed in it an immense gift for assimilating scenes of horror, but is this kind of talent real...

...It haunts them to the exclusion of everything else...

...Cardinal Newman thus relates the origin of Cambridge: Jeoffred, or Goisfred, had studied at Orl6ans...

...They all move in a real world, not in a universe created by their own imagination, and this is what constituted the power of Russian pre-war literature...

...They build upon it as if it were going to be eternal...

...His prose remained to the last the strong and powerful thing it had always been...

...They accordingly divided off into several schools and began an arrangement of classes, some of which are enumerated...

...It is impossible for human beings to go through an unbroken period of moral and physical suffering without becoming callous and even cruel in their appreciations of this eternal gamble with life to which they have been subjected...

...These cloistral schools gradually developed into the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge...

...Its closing words are those of an old ballad of the thirteenth century which the czarinas confined within the walls of the Moscow Kremlin used to sing: In Holy Russia, the cocks are crowing, Daylight will soon come in Holy Russia...

...Also the monastic school founded by Saint Benedict at Monte Cassino was the model after which the first English schools (and French as well) were organ- ized...

...They forget that it will pass one day as everything else passes...

...But others, like Ivan Bunine, Madame BreshkoBreshkovskaia, Madame Lapo-Danilevskaya, Ivan Nagivin, who now rank as foremost Russian narrators and novelists, all make the same mistakes, and astonish us with the same lack of moderation, the same inability to see things from another point of view than that of the havoc and destruction caused by the folly of Bolshevism...

...But in his works also can be found here and there this note of unmitigated horror which is the leit-motif of every modern Russian book, be it novel or essay...

...From the old peasant who during the long winter evenings relates to his children and grandchildren episodes of the time when he was young, to the famous authors...

...They had studied man as a whole, tried to get to the bottom of his struggles, even attempted to discover in him the sources out of which he had gathered the energy to sin and the strength to repent...

...In a certain sense it was a literary event, a chronicle of a great nation's decay and fall...

...It is not at all surprising if there are none who can judge sanely, write the truth instead of some truths, describe what everybody has witnessed, instead of what they alone have looked upon...

...This is a Bolshevik publication...

...This, however, is not entirely his fault, because most modern Russian authors, especially those who live abroad, share it with him...

...Leonid Andreyev alone knew how to rise above the influence of the painful conditions of existence amid which he died at last...

...And the literature of a people cannot be judged on the strength of a few pages...

...It is easier to curse one's neighbor when one is still smart- ing under the wrongs one has suffered at his hands, than coolly to strike terror in the hearts of mankind by an expos6 of things which one knows are true, presented without rancor and with an unimpassioned impartiality...

...In the case of the heroes of Turgenlev's novels, there is not one whose deeds or thoughts are not understandable, even by those whose mentality is absolutely different from theirs...

...The war and the sinister trag- edy of Bolshevism have produced an enormous amount of material which undoubtedly will be quoted at great_ x52 THE COMMONWEAL June x2, I929 length by the future historian...

...On the other, we have to do with, expatriated Russians who only remember a Russi~ that drove them away from her, and condemned them, to perpetual wanderings on the face of the earth...

...They have retained their talent, but they do not know how to use it because of the hard necessity in which most of them find themselves to market it, and to write what most appeals to the small public which reads their books...

...Unfortu-nately, existence today compels us to keep our eyes riveted on the future, which explains why these writers fail to strike any appealing note in the hearts of their readers...

...For this reason the earlier works of some of the most popular (note I have not said some of the best) anti-Bolshevik Russian writers, are a great deal more clever and better written than the later ones...

...In the same order of things, historical novels also have increased in number and importance, and any amount of public and private archives have been published in Russia itself as well as abroad...

...Cardinal Gasquet lays emphasis on the Roman character of Augustine's mission in England...

...Other writers, such as Dostoievsky, opened the eyes of the blind and aroused dormant consciences...

...and when they wept over the sins of their native land, they did it with the hope of resur-rection always before their eyes, with the conviction that Russia, their Mother Russia could not die...

...Today it is different, and Russian writers watch no longer beside a death-bed, they kneel before a grave...

...As a contrast to them we find the correspondence of Nicholas II with his wife, that terrible monument to a man's weakness and a woman's folly, which even if read alone would explain the wherefore and the success of the Revolution...

...Tolstoy influenced the intelligentsia, at least until he had turned into the preacher he had never been meant to be...

...At Cambridge, they hired a common barn and opened it as a school of the high sciences...

...It was the revolt of one who had suffered against those who had made him suffer...

...thence he came to Lincolnshire and became abbot of Croyland...

...Take for instance the books of General Krasnov...

...It is this lack of impartiality which constitutes one of the weakest sides of modern Russian literature...

...Prince Volkonsky also has written the story of his life, and among other things has given us the best sketches ever published of the personalities of Nicholas II and his ill-fated consort...

...This is a dangerous error from the liter-ary point of view...

...They simply cannot refrain from introducing Bolshevism in their books...

...Cardinal Gasquet wanted to remem- ber them in the fourteenth centenary of the mother abbey: then he died...

...Turgeniev moved the masses...

...I have kept Serge Gussiev-Orenburgsky for the end of this rapid sketch...

...How can a man write when he is ever listening for the sound of the feet of other men coming to drag him to prison or to some dark cellar where he will be summarily put to death ? How can he expect to give his best to a world in which he occupies the position of an outcast...

...Master Gislebert, upon every Sunday, preached the Word of God to the People...

...But Maxim Gorky is the exception which confirms the rule, and even his later works lack the strength which characterized his earlier ones...

...But his attempts at writing a novel have not been happy, perhaps be- cause he chose to compose historical fiction founded on a great deal of imagination combined with some reminiscences of a past of which it is doubtful whether he had ever realized the importance...

...I5o THE COMMONWEAL June 12, I929 The author of The Making of England has seen something of this when he says that the spot which witnessed the landing of Romans became better known as the landing place of Augustine...