A SKETCH OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

I.—THE OLDEST PERIOD

Of the many Slavic nations and tribes that at one time occupied the east of Europe from the Elbe and the headwaters of the Danube to Siberia, and from the Ionic Sea to the Baltic and White Seas, some have entirely disappeared in the ruthless struggle with a superior German civilisation; others, like the Bulgarians and Servians, have paled into insignificance under the lethargic influence of the Crescent, to be fanned to life again within the memory of the present generation by a breath of national consciousness, which is the result of the Romantic Movement in European literature; others again like the Bohemians and Poles, rent asunder by fraternal discord and anarchy, have forfeited their national existence and are engaged in an unequal battle to regain it. Of all the Slavs, Russia alone has steadily gathered in the lands of the feudal lords, to shine at last as a power of the first magnitude among the sisterhood of states, and to scintillate hope to its racial brothers as the “Northern Star.”

The unity of the Russian land was ever present to the minds of the writers in the earliest days of the appanages. The bard of the Word of Ígor’s Armament and Daniel the Palmer made appeals to the whole country and prayed for all the princes in the twelfth century, and for upwards of four centuries Moscow has been the centre towards which the outlying districts have been gravitating. Yet, in spite of so continuous and well-defined a political tendency, Russia is the last of the Slavic nations to have evolved a literature worthy of the name. Bohemia had a brilliant literature of the Western stamp as early as the thirteenth century; Bulgaria had made a splendid start three centuries before, under the impulse of the newly introduced religion; the Servian city of Ragusa, receiving its intellectual leaven from its Italian vicinage, invested Petrarch and Dante with Servian citizenship in the fifteenth century, and, shortly after, gloried in an epic of a Gundulić, and in a whole galaxy of writers; Poland borrowed its theology from Bohemia, took an active part in the medieval Latin literature, and boasted a golden age for its native language in the sixteenth century. Russia produced an accessible literature only in the second half of the eighteenth century, became known to Western Europe not earlier than the second quarter of the next, and had not gained universal recognition until within the last twenty-five years.

In the case of the Western and Southern Slavs, a community of interests, whether religious or social, has led to an intellectual intercourse with their neighbours, from whom they have received their models for imitation or adaptation. Without a favourable geographical position, or some common bond with the external world, no nation can have a healthy development, especially in the incipient stage of its political existence. Blatant Slavophiles of fifty years ago heaped reproach on the reforms of Peter the Great, on the ground that they were fashioned upon Western ideals, and that he had retarded the evolution of Russia according to its inherent Slavic idea. There still survive men of that persuasion, though a comparative study of Russian literature long ago demonstrated that every step in advance has been made by conscious or unconscious borrowings from abroad. If there was a Russian literature previous to the introduction of Christianity, it certainly stood in some kind of relation to the literatures of the neighbours. The few extant treaties with the Greeks for that period show unmistakable Byzantine influences, and the Russian Code of Yarosláv, with its purely Norse laws, dates from a time when the Varyágs had not yet disappeared in the mass of the Slavic majority.

With the introduction of Christianity, Russia, instead of entering into closer communion with the rest of the world, was separated from it even more securely than before, and soon after, an intellectual stagnation began that lasted very nearly to the end of the seventeenth century. Various causes combined to produce this singular effect. Chief of these was its geographical position. Living in the vast eastern plain of Europe, which in itself would have been productive of a larger life, the Russian tribes had civilised neighbours on one side only. On the north they were separated from the Swedes by rude Finnish tribes; on the south, they had for centuries to contend against all the nomads, Pechenyégs, Cumanians, Khazars, who slowly proceeded from Asia to central Europe to become lost in the nations to the south of the Carpathians and in the Balkan peninsula; in the east the Finns of the north met the Tartars of the south, and behind them lay unprofitable Asia. On the north-west, it is true, was the civilised Teutonic Order, but the inveterate hatred between these Germans and the Slavs prevented any intercommunication from that quarter. There was left Poland, through which Russia might issue into Europe; but savage Lithuania was wedged in between the two, so as to reduce still more the line of contact with the West. When Lithuania became civilised, and a part of Poland, the latter had grown suspicious of the youthful Ilyá of Múrom who “had sat thirty years upon the oven,” and enunciated a political maxim that either Russia would have to become Polish, or else Poland Russian. Knowing that there was no other exit for Russia, Poland permitted no light to reach it from the West. When England began to communicate with Russia in the sixteenth century, King Sigismund made an earnest appeal to Queen Elizabeth to stop sending skilled mechanics, lest the Colossus should awaken and become a danger to Europe.

These external causes of Russia’s aloofness were still more intensified by a systematic determination of Russia to keep out the Catholic contamination that would come from intercourse with Europe. This was a direct outgrowth of its adoption of Christianity from Byzantium, instead of Rome. Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, were themselves Bulgarians from Macedonia. When they first carried the new religion to Moravia and later to Bulgaria, they, no doubt, preached and wrote in the dialect with which they were most familiar. This innovation of preaching the gospel in another than one of the three sacred languages was a necessary departure, in order to win over the troublesome Slavs to the north of Byzantium. Though at the end of the ninth century the various dialects were already sufficiently dissimilar to constitute separate languages, yet they were not so distant from each other as to be a hindrance to a free intercommunication. When, a century later, Christianity was introduced into Russia from Constantinople, Bulgarian priests and bookmen were the natural intermediaries, and the Bulgarian language at once became the literary medium, to the exclusion of the native tongue. Soon after, the Eastern Church separated from Rome, and the Greek-Catholic clergy inculcated upon their neophytes an undying hatred of the Latins, as the Romanists were called. In Moscow, the slightest deviation from the orthodox faith was sufficient cause for suspecting a Romanist heresy, and anathemas against Roman-Catholics were frequent, but at Kíev, where the contact with Poland was inevitable, the disputes with the Latins form a prominent part of ecclesiastical literature. To guard the country against any possible contagion, the punishment of Russians who crossed the border, in order to visit foreign parts, was so severe, that few ever ventured out of the country. The seclusion of Russia was complete.

Even under these difficulties, literature and the arts might have flourished, if Constantinople had been able to give to the new converts even its degraded Byzantine culture, or if there had not been other powerful causes that militated against a development from within. In the west of Europe the Latin language of the Church did not interfere with an early national literature. Latin was the language of the learned, whether clerical or lay, and mediated an intellectual intercourse between the most distant members of the universal faith. At the same time, the native dialects had received an impulse before the introduction of Christianity, often under the influence of Rome, and they were left to shift for themselves and to find their votaries. The case was quite different in Russia. The Bulgarian language, which was brought in with the gospel, at once usurped on the native Russian to the great disadvantage of the latter. Being closely related to the spoken Russian, Bulgarian was easily acquired by the clergy, but it was not close enough to become the literary language of the people. On the one hand, this new gospel language could at best connect Russia with Byzantium by way of Bulgaria; on the other, Russian was looked down upon as a rude dialect and was discouraged, together with every symptom of the popular creation which was looked upon as intimately connected with ancient paganism.

This Bulgarian language was not long preserved in its purity. Detached from its native home, it was immediately transformed in pronunciation, so as to conform to the spoken Russian; thus, for example, it at once lost its nasals, which were not familiar to the Russian ear. In the course of time, words and constructions of the people’s language found their way into the Church-Slavic, as the Bulgarian was then more properly called. Naturally, many words, referring to abstract ideas and the Church, passed from the Bulgarian into the spoken tongue. Thus, the two dialects, one the arbitrary literary language, the other, the language of every-day life, approached each other more and more. At the present time, the Russian of literature contains a large proportion of these Church-Slavic words; the language of the Bible and the liturgy is the Church-Slavic of the sixteenth century, which differs so much from the original Bulgarian that, though a Russian reads with comparative ease this Church-Slavic, he has to study Bulgarian as a German would study Old German. This Church-Slavic of the Russian redaction has also been, and still is, in part, the ecclesiastical language of the other Greek-Catholic countries of the Slavs.

Some time passed before Russia could furnish its own clergy. All the leading places in the Church were at first filled with Bulgarians and Greeks who were steeped in Byzantine religious lore. The Church at Constantinople stood in direct opposition to the classical traditions of Greece. These were not separated from the old heathenism, and to the luxury and voluptuousness of medieval Greece, which was ascribed to classical influences, the Church opposed asceticism and self-abnegation. Monasticism was preached as the ideal of the religious life, and arts and sciences had no place in the scheme of the Church. Theology and rhetoric were the only sciences which the hermit practised in his cell, in the moments that were free from prayer and self-castigation. And it is only the Church’s sciences that ancient Russia inherited from Byzantium. The civil intercourse between the two countries was very slight, and the few Russian ecclesiastics who visited Mount Athos and the Holy Land brought back with them at best a few legends and apocryphal writings. The Byzantine influence at home showed itself in a verbal adherence to the Bible and the Church Fathers, and an occasional attempt at pulpit oratory in the bombastic diction of contemporary Greece.

Not a science penetrated into ancient Russia. Historically the rest of the world did not exist for it, and geographically it was only of interest in so far as it came into contact with Russia: Russia knew more of Tartars and Cumanians than of Germany or France. Arithmetic, not to speak of mathematics, and physics, medicine and engineering, were unknown before the sixteenth century, and then only when a few foreigners practised these arts in the capital and at the Court. The only literature that reached Russia was the legendary lore of the South and West, through Bulgaria and Poland, generally at a time when it had long been forgotten elsewhere: thus, the Lucidarius and Physiologus were accepted as genuine bits of zoölogical and botanical science, long after sober knowledge had taken possession of the universities of the world. The literature of Russia before Peter the Great is by no means meagre or uninteresting, but it lacks an important element of historical continuity; in fact, it is devoid of every trace of chronology. What was written in the twelfth century might with equal propriety be the product of the sixteenth, and vice versa, and the productions of the earliest time were copied out as late as the seventeenth century, and relished as if they had just been written. Where a certain literary document has come down to us in a later copy, it is not possible to date it back, unless it contains some accidental indication of antiquity. In short, there was no progress in Russia for a period of six or seven centuries, from the tenth century to the seventeenth.

In this achronism of literary history, there may, however, be discerned two periods that are separated from each other by the first invasion of the Tartars. Previous to that momentous event, Kíev formed the chief intellectual and political centre of the Russian principalities. Here the Norse traditions, which had been brought by the Varyág warriors, had not entirely faded away in the century following the introduction of Christianity, and the Court maintained certain relations with the rest of the world, as in the case of Yarosláv, who was related, by the marriage of his children, to the Courts of Norway, France, Germany and Hungary. On the other hand, Vladímir’s heroes were celebrated abroad, and Ilyá of Múrom is not unknown to German tradition and the Northern saga. Not only its favourable geographical position, but its climate as well, inspired the inhabitants of Kíev with a greater alacrity, even as the Little-Russians of to-day have developed less sombre characteristics than the Great-Russians of the sterner north. It is sufficient to compare the laconic instructions of Luká Zhidyáta in the commercial Nóvgorod with the flowery style of Serapión’s sermon, or the dry narrative of the northern chronicles with the elaborate adornment of the stories in the chronicles of Néstor and Sylvester, to become aware of the fundamental difference between the two sections of Russia. The twelfth century, rich in many aspects of literature, including that beautiful prose poem of popular origin, the Word of Ígor’s Armament, gave ample promise of better things to come. Similarly, the bylínas of the Vladímir cycle, the best and most numerous of all that are preserved, point to an old poetic tradition that proceeded from Kíev.

The fact that these bylínas have been lately discovered in the extreme north-east, in the Government of Olónetsk, while not a trace of them has been found in their original home, has divided the scholars of Russia into two camps. Some assert that all the Russians of Kíev belonged to the Great-Russian division, and that the Tartar invasion destroyed most of them, and caused the rest to migrate to the north, whither they carried their poetry. The Little-Russians that now occupy the south of Russia are supposed by these scholars to have come from Galicia to repeople the abandoned places. The Little-Russians themselves claim, with pardonable pride, to be the direct descendants of the race that gave Russia its Néstor and the bard of the Word of Ígor’s Armament. There are weighty arguments on both sides, and both the Great-Russians, with whom we are at present concerned, and the Little-Russians, or Ruthenians, who have developed a literature in their own dialect, claim that old literature as their own.

The terrible affliction of the Mongol invasion marks, on the one hand, the beginning of the concentration of Russia around Moscow, and, on the other, accentuates more strongly the barren activities of the Russian mind for the next few centuries. Historians have been wont to dwell on the Tartar domination as the chief cause of Russian stagnation, but the calmer judgment of unbiassed science must reject that verdict. It is true, the Tartars carried ruin to all the Russian land, but after every successful raid, they withdrew to their distant camps, ruling the conquered land merely by exacting tribute and homage from its princes. The Tartars in no way interfered with the intellectual and religious life of the people; on the contrary, they mingled freely with the subject nation, and intermarriages were common. It has already been pointed out that the germ of unprogressiveness was older than the invasion, that the Byzantine religious culture was the real cause of it. That Moscow was even less progressive than Kíev is only natural. All its energies were bent on political aggrandisement, on throwing off the hated Tartar yoke, and it was farther removed from Europe than the more fortunate southern metropolis. All these conditions were unfavourable to the practice of the gentler arts.

The religious lore of ancient Russia was derived from the gospel, which was hardly ever accessible in continuous form, but only as an aprakos, i. e., as a manual in which it was arranged according to the weekly readings. This was supplemented by two peculiar versions of the Old Testament, the palæas, in which passages of the Bible were intermingled with much apocryphal matter, and which originally had served as controversial literature against the Jews, and to prove the coming of Christ; there was no translation of the whole Old Testament, and as late as the eighteenth century a priest referred to the palæa as to Holy Writ. Prayers to saints, lives and legends of saints, with moral instructions, complete the list of the religious equipment that Russia received from Byzantium. One of the oldest Russian manuscripts, the Collection of Svyatosláv, made for Svyatosláv of Chernígov in 1073, is a copy of a similar production, translated from the Greek for Simeón of Bulgaria. It is an encyclopedia of ecclesiastic and moral themes, culled from the Church Fathers, among whom John Chrysostom is most prominent. Later, there were many similar collections, known under the names of The Golden Beam, Emerald, Golden Chain, and so forth.

By the aid of this literature and such Greek models as were accessible to the priests, were produced the sermons that have come down to us in a large number, and a few of which, like those of Cyril of Túrov and Serapión, do not lack literary polish, and are not inferior to Western pulpit oratory of the same period. Whenever the preachers turned to praise the princes, as in the case of Ilarión who eulogised Vladímir, they had in mind only their orthodox Christianity, for religion was the all-absorbing question. Similarly, when Vladímir Monomákh wrote his Instruction to his children, he composed it according to the model given in Svyatosláv’s Collection. Sermons and Instructions, from the introduction of Christianity to the middle of the eighteenth century, form one of the most important ingredients of Collections, and served as models for Spiritual Testaments even in the eighteenth century. Sylvester’s Domostróy belongs to the same type, though what in Vladímir was the enthusiasm and earnestness of the new faith, has in this later document become a series of external observances. Formalism and adherence to the dead letter characterise the whole period of Russian unprogressiveness, and remained the characteristic of the Church at a much later time, in spite of the enlightened labours of a Feofán or Platón; and it was the same formalism that caused the schism of the raskólniks, who saw in Nikón’s orthographical corrections of the corrupt Bible text an assault upon the orthodox religion.

Only a small proportion of the literature of ancient Russia was produced outside the ranks of the clergy. There were few literate persons who were not priests or monks; for there hardly existed any schools during this whole period, and even princes could not sign their names. The influence of the lettered priest was paramount, and if he was at all equal to the task of composing readable sermons, these were eagerly sought for by all who could read them. When, in the sixteenth, and still more in the seventeenth century, rays of light began to penetrate into Moscow, the chief and most dangerous task of instruction fell to the share of those preachers who had come in contact with Polish learning at Kíev; in the days of Peter the Great, Feofán Prokopóvich was an important factor in the civilisation of Russia, and in the beginning of the nineteenth century the sermons of Platón still form an integral part of literature.

To the student of comparative literature the semi-religious lore, which finds its expression in the apocrypha, is of vastly greater interest. The poetical creative activity of the people, combining with the knowledge of religious lore, has ever been active in producing spurious legendary accounts of matters biblical. The book of Enoch and the Talmud disseminated such legends in regard to the Old Testament long before the birth of Christianity. The Russian apocryphal literature is rich in legendary accounts of the creation of the world, the confession of Eve, the lives of Adam, Melchisedec, Abraham, Lot, Moses, Balaam, the twelve patriarchs, David, and particularly Solomon. Much more extensive is the store of legends from the New Testament. The birth of the Holy Virgin is dilated upon in the gospel of Jacob, the childhood of Christ is told in the gospel of Thomas, while a fuller story of Pilate’s judgment of Christ and of Christ’s descent into Hell is given in the old gospel of Nicodemus. Lazarus, Judas, and the twelve apostles have all their group of legends, but the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the Judgment-day were the most popular. The list is far from being exhausted, and only a small part of the material has been scientifically investigated and located. Most of these stories travelled by the customary road over Bulgaria from Byzantium. As they have also reached the west of Europe, the investigator of their Western forms has to look into Byzantine sources; but as many of the legends have been preserved in the Slavic form, and when they have disappeared from the Greek, or as fuller redactions are to be met with in the North, he cannot well afford to overlook the Slavic sources. The index librorum prohibitorum of Russia, fashioned after the Greek, includes all such apocrypha as were current at the time of the composition of the first index. The clergy were continually preaching against them, yet their efforts were useless, especially since they themselves were at the same time drawing extensively on the apocryphal accounts of the palæas, lives of saints, etc.

There is this vast difference in the literature of this kind as it was current in Russia and in the West. Elsewhere the legends were early seized upon by the fancy of the poets, were clothed in the conventional garb of verse, remodelled, combined, beautified, until they became the stock in trade of literature, while the memory of the unadorned story had entirely faded from the popular consciousness. Dante’s Divine Comedy is an illustration of how transformed the legends had become at a very early date. In Russia nothing of the kind has taken place. With the usual achronism of its literature, legends of the eleventh and eighteenth centuries live side by side, or mingle in the same version, and they have undergone no other change than corruption of misunderstood passages, transposition of motives, modernisation of language. The religious songs that a mendicant may be heard singing at the present time in front of a church are nothing but these old legends, almost in their primitive form.

Nearly allied to the apocryphal stories are the profane legends that form the subject-matter of so much of European medieval literature. The stories of Alexander the Great, the Trojan War, Digenis Akritas, Barlaam and Josaphat, Calilah-wa-Dimnah, are as common in Russian literature as in that of France or Germany. Byzantium is the immediate source of most of these legends both for the East and the West, but there are also many motives in the Russian stories that were derived from the West through Servia and Bulgaria. It is not yet quite clear how these stories came to travel in a direction opposite to the customary route of popular tales; no doubt the crusades did much to bring about an interchange of the oral literature of the nations. In the West, these stories have furnished the most beautiful subjects for medieval poetry, but as before, the Russian stories have not found their way into polite literature. They have either remained unchanged in their original form, or, being of a more popular character than the religious legends, have adapted themselves to the style of folktales, as which they have been preserved.

It is not unlikely that many of these tales were brought back from Palestine, the common camping-ground of the Christian nations during the crusades. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land began soon after the introduction of Christianity into Russia, and in the twelfth century we have the first account of such a journey, from the pen of the abbot Daniel. None of the later accounts of Palestine and Constantinople compare in interest with the simple narrative of Daniel the Palmer, after whose Pilgrimage they are fashioned and whose very words they often incorporated in their Travels. The purpose of all these was to serve as incitements to religious contemplation. There is but one account of a journey to the west of Europe. It was undertaken by the metropolitan Isidor who, in 1437, attended the Council of Florence. A few years later Afanási Nikítin described his journey to India, which was one of the earliest undertaken by Westerners in the same century; but while Vasco de Gama and Columbus were revolutionising the knowledge of geography, and were making the discovery of a route to India the object of mercantile development, Nikítin’s report, important though it was, had absolutely no effect upon dormant Russia.

As there existed no external geography, so there was no external history. But fortunately for Russia, a long series of chronicles have saved historical events from oblivion. The earliest chronicle, that of Néstor, was the model for all that followed. Excepting the history of Kúrbski, who had come into contact with Western science through the Polish, and Krizhánich, who was not a Russian, there was no progress made in the chronological arrangement of historical facts from Néstor to Tatíshchev, while in style and dramatic diction there is a decided retrogression. The promise held out by the historian of the twelfth century was not made good for six hundred years. Néstor and Sylvester, the continuator, were of the clerical profession, and naturally the religious element, richly decked out with legend, folktale and reports of eye-witnesses, is the prevailing tone throughout the whole production. The Bible and the Byzantines, Hamartolos and John Malalas, serve as models for the fluent style of this production, but the vivid, dramatic narrative bears witness to considerable talent in the author. At first only the cities of Kíev, Nóvgorod and Súzdal, and Volhynia seem to have possessed such chronicles; but those that are preserved show traces of being composed of shorter accounts of other individual places. In the following centuries, most of the larger cities and monasteries kept chronological records of important events, and with the centralisation of Russia about Moscow there also appeared a species of Court chroniclers whose dry narration is often coloured in favour of the tsarate.

All this mass of literature is essentially ecclesiastic, and hardly any other could raise its head against the constant anathemas of the Church. No prohibition of the priests was strong enough to obliterate the craving for a popular literature, for no school, no science, was opposed to the superstition of the people, which therefore had full sway. The best the Church was able to do for the masses was to foster a “double faith,” in which Christianity and paganism lived side by side. We shall see later how this state of affairs has been favourable to the preservation of an oral tradition up to the present time. Yet, but for the Word of Ígor’s Armament, and its imitation, the Zadónshchina, no one could have suspected that the elements of a natural, unecclesiastic literature were present in ancient Russia.

This Word of Ígor’s Armament is unique. It was composed at a time when Russia was already well Christianised, yet the references to Christianity are only sporadic, whereas the ancient pagan divinities and popular conceptions come in for a goodly share of attention. There are some who are inclined to see in this production a forgery, such as Hanka concocted for Bohemian literature, or Macpherson for Celtic, for the absence of any later works of the kind seems to be inexplicable. But this absence need not surprise us, for no such work could have been written at a later time outside the Church, which alone was in possession of a modicum of learning. It must be assumed that the bard of the Word represents the last of a bygone civilisation that had its firm footing in the people, but stood in a literary relation to the singers of the Norsemen; for there is much in the Word that reminds one of the Northern sagas. The tradition of the bard came to an end with this last production, but his manner, corrupted and twisted by a wrongly understood Christianity, lived on in the folksong of the people; hence the remarkable resemblance between the two.

But for the inertia of the Russian Church and people, it would not have been necessary to wait until a Peter the Great violently shook the country into activity, for long before his time glimpses of European civilisation reached Moscow. In the fifteenth century, we have found metropolitan Isidor travelling to the Council of Florence, to cast his vote in favour of a union of the Churches under Rome. In the same century foreigners began to arrive in Moscow to practise medicine or architecture, or to serve in the Russian army; in the time of Iván the Terrible there was already a considerable foreign colony in Moscow, and its influences upon individual Russians were not rare. Iván the Terrible himself made several attempts to get skilled mechanics from the West, but his efforts were generally frustrated by Poland and the Germans of the Baltic provinces.

The most important points of contact with the West were in the Church itself, through Kíev and Western Russia. These outlying parts of Russia had early come into relation with Poland, and their unyielding orthodoxy had been mellowed by the prevailing scholasticism of the Polish theology. In the academy of Kíev, Greek and Latin grammar, theology and rhetoric were taught, while these sciences—especially grammar, even though it were Slavic grammar—were looked upon at Moscow as certain expressions of heresy. The correction of the corrupt church books, which in itself was advocated by priests who had imbibed the Kíev culture, made the presence of learned men—that is, of such as knew grammar enough to discover orthographical mistakes—an absolute necessity. In the reign of Alexis Mikháylovich, Kíev monks were called out for the purpose of establishing a school, and only in 1649 was the first of the kind opened. This innovation divided the churchmen into two camps,—those who advocated the Greek grammar, and those who advocated the Latin,—that is, those who would hear of nothing that distantly might remind them of the Latins, and those who were for a Western culture, even though it was to be only the scholastic learning already abandoned in the rest of Europe. The battle between the two was fought to the death. Those who were in favour of the Latin were generally worsted, and some of the most promising of them were imprisoned and even capitally punished; but men like Medvyédev, and later Simeón Pólotski, laid the foundation for an advancement, however gradual, which culminated in the reforms of Peter the Great.

Where a few individuals gained some semblance of Western culture, they could not write freely at home, and had to develop their activities abroad. Kúrbski, who for a long time stands alone as an historian, wrote his History in Poland, and it remained without any influence whatsoever at home; its very existence was not known before our own times. The same thing happened with Kotoshíkhin, whose description of Russia was known to the learned of Sweden, but the original of which was unknown until its accidental discovery by a Russian scholar of the nineteenth century. So, while the ferment of reform began much earlier than the eighteenth century, it would have been indefinitely delayed, causing many a bloody battle, if the Gordian knot had not been cut by Peter the Great in favour of the West.

II.—THE FOLKLORE

In the Russian terminology, the people includes all the elements of society that are not covered by the term intelligence. This latter is a comprehensive designation of all the classes that have some education and can give intelligent opinions on social, political and cultural themes. The vast majority of the nation are the people in the narrower sense, and it is essentially the characteristic of the democratic nineteenth century to regard the intellectual life of this people as worthy of consideration. This is true of the world at large, but, in Russia, preoccupation with the people, down to the lowest strata of society, has become a dominating note in literature. Whatever other causes may have been active in creating this strong sentiment,—and they will be discussed in a later chapter,—the strongest impulse to such a people—worship was received from the unexpected and undreamt-of wealth of that popular literature which has been unearthed by the diligent labours of a few investigators.

In the eighteenth century, the term people had a wider significance. All those who did not belong to polite society, that is, all those who were not dignitaries or functionaries of a higher order, were the people, and at first the literati were included in that general appellation. Literature was entirely in the service of the higher classes, whom it was intended to amuse and eulogise; there was no other audience, and writers had to direct their attention to filling the demand, as hirelings of princes, and as pamperers of the pseudo-classic taste and Voltairism which held sway in refined society. Though frequently originating from the people, these writers dissevered all connection with it, for they had no longer any interests in common. With a few occasional exceptions, the people had no place in literature, and the inflated style that prevailed in prose and poetry was so far removed from the language of the people that the written literature could exert little influence upon the popular mind, and if there existed anything of a traditional nature among the lower classes, it was little, if at all, contaminated by literary influences. Whatever it had received from bygone ages was transmitted to the nineteenth century and collected just in time, before its certain disintegration.

This disregard for the enormous majority of the people was an inheritance of ancient Russia, before the reforms of Peter the Great. We have already seen with what unintelligent severity the Church persecuted every creation of a popular nature. As the nation consisted of the Church and the people, so, also, everything that was not directly of a Christian tendency was un-Christian and therefore tabooed. True Christianity could never take possession of the people that was not intelligent enough to discern what was religion and what not, and the result was that “double faith” in which, in spite of the persistent endeavours of the clergy, the old heathenism showed through the varnish of the new faith. The anathemas of the Church against “pagan rites,” which included the singing of harmless songs, continue down to the eighteenth century.

In the general unprogressiveness of the whole country, the agricultural classes, that constituted the bulk of the people, have remained unchanged for centuries. Russia was as much a country of raw products in the eighteenth century as in the twelfth, and barter and tribute in kind were common until a very late time. The life of the peasant has always moved in the same primitive conditions. Nothing whatsoever has been added to his physical and intellectual existence since the introduction of Christianity, and the latter itself did not much affect his spiritual life. He has remained essentially the same through the ages. The love of singing and story-telling that characterises him to-day has, no doubt, been his characteristic for centuries, and as the memory of the untutored man is much better than that of the lettered, he has been able to transmit orally to our own day the stock of his ancient songs and tales. The folklore of Russia, more than that of any Western nation, bridges over the chasm between the most distant antiquity and the present. It is an inheritance of the past, the more precious because it has been transmitted by an unsophisticated class, whereas in the West the people has come to a great extent under the influence of the literary caste.

When the folklore of Russia first became accessible to scholars, the adherents of the mythological theory of the origin of popular tales and songs, which had been enunciated by Grimm, set out at once to expound the epic songs and fairy tales as purely mythical symbols of a pre-Christian era. It was assumed that the songs and stories had come down to us in an almost unchanged text from the most remote antiquity, and that they were the representatives of a distinctly Russian conception. In the meantime, Benfey and his followers have pointed out that the fairy tales of Europe are traceable to their Indian home, whence they have wandered to the most remote regions, crossing and recrossing each other, and mingling in a variety of ways. Even the casual song that bears every appearance of native origin is frequently identical with similar songs in distant quarters; so, for example, Professor Child has brought together a vast number of similar motives from the whole world in his monumental work on the English and Scotch Ballads. Under the stress of these discoveries, the greater part of the mythological ballast had to be thrown overboard, and Russian folklore was brought into direct relations with the rest of the world.

It has been a rude disappointment to those who believed in an autochthonous development of the bylínas, to discover that they are often variations of similar accounts in foreign literatures; that, for example, the story of Sadkó the Merchant has been found to be identical with a French story; similarly, the ceremonial songs are not all of native growth. The study of comparative literature is of recent development, at least so far as Russian sources are concerned, and only a small part of the material has been properly located; but this much can even now be asserted,—that the folklore of Russia is much more intimately connected with that of Europe and Asia than is the written literature of the old period. Much of the apocryphal matter came through the South Slavic countries; many stories and songs must have wandered by way of Poland to White-Russia, and hence farther into the interior. Anciently there could have been an interchange of motives between Germany and Russia in the cities of Nóvgorod and Pskov, which stood in commercial relations with the towns of the Hansa, while earlier the Northern saga may have left some traces during the domination of the Norse. But one of the investigators, Stásov, and after him Potánin, have stoutly maintained that most of the stories of the Russian epic cycle came with the Tartars directly from Asia.

If we admit all possible borrowings from the West and the East, Russian folklore is still of unique interest to the student of literature on account of the evident traces of great antiquity which it has preserved. The same cause that kept the written literature of Russia at a low level and destroyed all appreciable chronology has been active in the traditional literature, and has saved it from violent transformations. It cannot be asserted that any one song has come down to us in its original shape. The change of the spoken language naturally affected the stories and songs, and many a word that has become obsolete has been superseded, or preserved in an unrecognisable form. Contemporary facts of history have been introduced in the place of older ones, as when the heroes of the cycle of Vladímir are made to fight the Tartars. Motives have become mingled by superposition of related stories, or by accretion of foreign material. But never has the people wilfully transformed, corrupted, added or taken away. Though individuals continually produced new songs and stories, yet they moved in narrowly prescribed traditional limits, and the moment these passed to the people and became its common possession, they suffered only the accidental changes just spoken of. The task of separating later and adventitious elements from the bulk of this literature has only begun, and when that is accomplished, the past of Russia will be reproduced much more clearly than that of other countries of Europe, because an achronous period separates the last two centuries from the tenth.

Only one epic, the Word of Ígor’s Armament, has survived from antiquity. That others existed, the bard assures us when he tells of princes, for a period of a whole century, whom Boyán, an older singer, had celebrated. This precious relic is not only interesting for its intrinsic poetical merit, permitting us to guess the possibilities of the Russian untutored mind before the introduction of the repressive Byzantinism, but it serves as a guide in redating much of the oral literature of the present day. In the bylínas, the ceremonial songs, the fairy tales, we continually come upon passages that are constructed in the same manner as in the Word, and the popular poetry of to-day and the writings of the whole old period contain many identical phrases and illustrations.

The epic songs, or bylínas, have been discovered in out-of-the-way places in the swampy region of the Government of Olónetsk. It has puzzled all the investigators to explain why the memory of Vladímir and his heroes should have lived so long in these distant regions when every recollection of them has entirely disappeared in Kíev, the scene of all their deeds. Throughout these epic songs there is evidence of their southern origin, yet nothing whatsoever is known of them in the south of Russia. Various explanations have been attempted, but the most wide-spread is that the Great-Russians of the south had been exterminated by the Tartars, and that the few who survived had taken refuge in the north, while the present inhabitants of the south have come from the south-east and represent a different tribe. There seems, however, to be a more plausible explanation. Considering that the Word of Ígor’s Armament has not survived except in writing, and that there are no old epics living in the mouths of the people, except in inaccessible regions, it is natural to assume that no longer poem, nor a cycle of poems, which demanded a great amount of mental exertion and a special class of singers, could outlive the persecution of the Church, and that only where the people were separated from the rest of the world by impassable swamps and forests, and where, therefore, the influence of the Church was of necessity weakest, was it possible for the class of traditional bards to maintain itself.

There is ample evidence that these epics were based on historical events, and that they belong to the same category as the historical songs, of which a number have been recorded from the seventeenth century and later. The oldest are those that Richard James had written down in 1619; they were composed by some popular bard immediately after the incidents which they relate. Later historical songs deal with Peter the Great, while the song collections contain many others that range in time from Iván the Terrible to the nineteenth century. The manner of all these is identical, and strongly reminds us of the epic songs. From this it may be inferred that the bylínas were separate songs, composed by contemporary bards, and that their present condition is merely due to that series of corruptions to which all orally transmitted literature is subject.

In the Word, Germans, Venetians, Greeks and Moravians are made to sing the glory of Svyatosláv. This is certainly not a mere adornment of speech, but rests on the actual fact of a lively intercommunication between the East and the West before the introduction of Christianity and in the first century following it. Thus, the chief hero of the Vladímir cycle, Ilyá of Múrom, was known to German song and the Northern saga, where he is often mentioned. It has also been found that many of the heroes are real personages whose names are recorded in chronicles. Yet, though Vladímir is made the centre of the Kíev cycle, his heroes seem to range over two or three centuries; from this we may conclude that poetical activity continued for a long time, and that it is only a later tradition that has grouped all the interesting events around the famous Vladímir. Originally, there must have been a number of cities of prominence around which separate epics centred, but in time they were transferred to the three great cities, Kíev, Nóvgorod and Moscow, where the national life had its fullest development.

In the ceremonial songs, antiquity is even better preserved than in the epics, and quite naturally. The epics arose on special occasions, were adapted to transitory historical incidents, and only the most favourable conditions of seclusion could save them from entire oblivion. Not so the ceremonial songs. These belonged to a heathen religion, contained a mythological element, and were part and parcel of the people’s belief and customs. The chief labour of the Church consisted in battling against the survivals from heathenism; but all it accomplished was to ensure an existence for the Christian tenets by the side of the traditional customs. The pagan festivities were merged in the corresponding holidays of the Church, but the old games, rites and songs went on as before. In time, the meaning of all the customs connected with the seasons, marriage, death, was forgotten, but the simple ditties were easily remembered, though frequently transferred to other occasions. Had there existed in the Russian Middle Ages any incitement to the introduction of new songs, the old ones would have been abandoned long ago; but city life was weakly represented in the country, most of the towns hardly differing from agricultural settlements, and the city song, which always plays havoc with the country tunes, had little chance to spread. City life is of quite recent growth in Russia, and industrialism, which is only now developing under our very eyes, draws many forces away from the plough; when these return to the village, they bring with them the refrains of the modern opera, and degraded street ballads. The same lowering of the popular poetry has been caused in the nineteenth century by the soldiers who have come in contact with the city. The result of this is the complete disappearance of popular song from some districts, and its gradual dying out in others. Should this tendency continue with any regularity, a new kind of folksong will result, but in the meanwhile there is produced an uninteresting chaos.

The freer form of the prose story and the fairy tale, which are bound by neither verse nor tune, makes them more subject to change than the ceremonial song. Whatever their original meaning may have been, they have been preserved as mere stories to amuse. Though they frequently deal with mythical beings who had some special meaning, they have all an equal value, and one tale is as good as another; consequently they easily combined with each other, and new elements were continually added to them. The prose story is, therefore, less local and even less national: it travels far and wide, and may turn up in any corner of the globe. The Russian peasant is a good story-teller, witty and dramatic; hence he has added much local colouring to all the flotsam of fairyland, and the folktales of Russia have a distinct flavour of their own, and are relished even more than the popular tales of the West. The absence of a book influence on these stories shows itself in simplicity of narration and lack of moral; the latter is particularly the case in the animal tales, which, contrary to the usual stories of the kind, contain no explicit instruction.

In the nineteenth century, the popular element enters more and more into the literary productions, but a proper beginning has hardly been made in utilising the extremely rich store of Russian folklore. When the Romantic spirit held sway over the West, Russia had not yet collected its songs and popular stories, and a Zhukóvski had to imitate Western models, in order to make Romanticism accessible. Púshkin divined more correctly the value of the native stories, and made excellent use of the tales of his nurse. Otherwise, only sporadic use has been made of the folktale in literature. One of the best literary rifacimentos is the collection of all the stories told about the Fox, which Mozharóvski has brought together in one long, connected series.

III.—THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Court at Moscow had come into contact with foreign ideas ever since the days of Iván the Terrible. The “German Suburb,” as the foreign colony was called, was itself a piece of the West, transplanted into the semi-barbarous capital, and foreigners of necessity occupied various posts in the Government. Germans, Greeks, and especially Englishmen were employed as ambassadors and foreign agents, and in the seventeenth century it was not rare to find Westerners as teachers of Russian youths. At the same time, clergymen from Kíev carried ever more and more the Polish scholasticism and rhetoric to the most orthodox city, and with it came the weak reflection of Western culture. Alexis Mikháylovich became fascinated by the theatre, and a German troupe and even English comedians played before the Tsar; among these early plays was a crude rifacimento of Marlowe’s Tamerlane. Sophia went one step further, and had a Russian translation of Molière’s Médecin malgré lui performed in her apartments. Even poetry of an European type had made its appearance before Kantemír, though only in the mediocre syllabic versification of a Karión Istómin and a Simeón Pólotski. Yet the progress was very slow, and the historian of Peter’s time, Tatíshchev, had figured out that at the rate at which it was proceeding, it would take Russia seven generations, or more than two hundred years, to be equal in civilisation to the rest of Europe.

Then Peter appeared. He found around him weak tendencies to reform, but hardly any men to help him carry them out, and no institutions of any kind on which to engraft the new knowledge he had brought with him from Holland and Germany. There was no native scientific literature whatsoever; there were no terms in which to express the truths which he and his disciples had learned; there was no established language even for educated people. Peter united in his person the extreme of practical sense with the idealism of youth; while bent on introducing mechanical sciences for the advancement of his country, he at the same time carried on a correspondence with the philosopher Leibniz, and favoured the introduction of every branch of literature. With an indomitable will he wanted to merge savage Russia into the liberal West, and he frequently used savage means to attain his end.

Peter’s idea of conviviality consisted in getting drunk in a room filled with tobacco smoke, as he had known it in the taverns of Holland, and the whole aspect of literature of his period is that of a crude democracy, such as he advocated in his own circle. In whatever he or his followers wrote there is a tone of rough simplicity, practical liberalism, and the ardour of manful youth. Everything that could be useful to the State and nation received his equal attention. He familiarised his people with the German and Dutch jurists, who were translated under his care, and with text-books on the most necessary sciences and arts; he corresponded with German, French and English scholars on the subject of establishing universities and academies; he invited actors from Slavic Austria to play in his theatre; and superintended the translation of Ovid, of encyclopedias, and of romances. In this burning activity there could be no such a thing as a literary school; everything was welcome, provided it advanced his cherished reforms.

There was no time to waste on the mere externals of language. The authors of the day had to grope their way as best they could. Some interlarded their style with hybrid words from all the tongues of Europe; others wavered between a purely Slavic and a more or less Russianised language, and Peter the Great, though he was fond of a display of Dutch words, could use a very idiomatic style. While Stefán Yavórski and Feofán Prokopóvich charmed their congregations with elegant sermons in which Byzantine rhetoric and Western eloquence had the fullest sway, Tatíshchev laboured to find the proper expressions for the historical truths which he had well learned in the West, and the peasant Pososhkóv dimly guessed the economic problems that presented themselves to the country, vainly trying to clothe them in an intelligible language.

Peter did not live to see the fruition of his endeavours in literature. The time was too short to produce any good writers, and though belles-lettres were encouraged, the whole attention of the best minds was absorbed in the acquisition of the most-needed information. Knowledge was the watchword of Peter’s time, and the desire for knowledge was so great that even later Lomonósov and Tredyakóvski thought no hardships too great, to gain the coveted instruction. It is characteristic of the times, that these two poets in the new style walked to Moscow to enter school, one from the extreme north, the other from the extreme south. A mighty task fell to the lot of the generation that had been born in the days of the great Tsar. They had to transfer the whole European culture to Russian soil and to discover a means of expressing it. Kantemír, whose education was of an European type, chose the ready model of French verse in which to write his satires, wrestling to say in Russian what he thought out in French. Tredyakóvski discovered the proper versification for his native tongue, but his diligence and good sense did not make up for his barren poetical talent. Sumarókov, single-handed, created the drama, while Lomonósov fostered the ode, settled grammar and created Russian science.

The intermediate period between the death of Peter the Great and the accession of Catherine II. was not one that would in itself have encouraged people to take to literature, which was looked down upon as the handmaid of the mighty, if the writers had not inherited an insatiable love of knowledge. The rough and sincere manner of the Tsar had given way to a flimsy imitation of the Court at Versailles. With the introduction of Western civilisation, the Empresses Anna and Elizabeth took over only the mere external appearance, the love of pleasure, a luxury that was incompatible with their rude surroundings. Literary men had no public to write for, except the degraded courtiers who might flatter themselves that they were the Mæcenases of that literature for which, in their hearts, they cared very little. Odes by which one might gain a favour, solemn addresses written to order, tragedies to be furnished by such and such a date, epigrams of a flippant turn,—these were the verses that the courtiers wanted, and they were furnished in sufficient quantity. Though Lomonósov was more intimately acquainted with Günther than with Boileau, yet he, like his contemporaries, found himself compelled to favour the introduction of the French pseudo-classic style, which was the only one that high society knew anything about. From chaos and no literature at all, Russia was of necessity forced to cultivate the unnatural imitation of what was supposed to be classic antiquity, before it knew anything about that antiquity, and before it had tried itself in simpler fields. The literature of that period was consequently unreal, stilted, distant.

This pseudo-classicism continued to flourish to the end of the century, though a new spirit had taken possession of men’s minds in the reign of Catherine. This Empress had educated herself in the school of the great philosophers who, in the second half of the eighteenth century, were the dominating spirits in European literature. She corresponded with Voltaire, had not only studied Montesquieu, but embodied his Esprit des Lois in her famous instruction for a new code of laws, invited d’Alembert to be her son’s tutor,—in short, she was in sympathy with the humanitarian movements of the encyclopedists. She planned reforms on a magnificent scale,—though but few of them were executed, as her theories were only academic and had little reference to existing conditions. Though she planned, with the help of Diderot, a complicated educational system, yet there were no more schools at the end of her reign than at the beginning, and the freedom of the press was curtailed much more in the second half of her rule than in the first. So long as there were no disturbing elements at home, and things went to her liking, she was pleased to favour the liberalism which had spread over Europe, and had found its advocates at other Courts. Her idealism was of a purely intellectual character, and her humanitarian views as she had expressed them in her Instruction were good and harmless so long as they remained on paper. The moment she was disturbed in her philanthropy by the rebellion of Pugachév at home, and when, later, she was still more startled by the events of the French Revolution, which it became the fashion to ascribe to the philosophy of Voltaire, she recanted her liberalism, and tried to crush all intellectual progress that had grown strong in the earlier part of her reign. The best authors were ruthlessly persecuted: Radíshchev was banished to Siberia for his advocating the very theories which she had propounded in her Instruction; Nóvikov’s philanthropic activity was sufficient cause for his imprisonment, and it was fortunate for Knyazhnín that he was dead when his Vadím of Nóvgorod made its appearance.

Yet, Russian literature owes much to Catherine, who, at least in the first part of her enlightened absolutism, encouraged a healthy development of Letters, often through her own example. Her own writings familiarised her people with the best thought of Europe, and as before her Racine and Boileau, so now Voltaire, Beccaria, Montesquieu, were upon the lips of all. Literature had begun in imitations of foreign models, and hardly a trace of anything original is to be found in the eighteenth century; but even a superficial Voltairism was preferable to the more distant pseudo-classicism of the preceding reigns, for, though most of its humanitarianism was spurious and its culture skin-deep, it led a few more gifted individuals to a clearer perception of actualities, to a fuller interest in that which was immediate and around them, and, in the end, to true culture.

The most promising influence on Russian literature was the one which Addison and the English satirical journals began to exert on Catherine and on nearly all the writers of the day. The Spectator, the Guardian, and the Tatler had found a host of imitators in continental Europe, and satirical journals sprang up in astonishing abundance. It is not likely that Catherine became acquainted with the English originals. Her knowledge came rather through German and French translations; and the many passages from these English journals that found their way into Russia after the fifties were likewise generally derived at second hand. In any case, Addison and the satirical journals took deep root in Russian soil, and a long series of similar productions, from 1769 to 1774, had a very salutary effect on the drama and on those writings in which contemporary manners are held up to the scorn and ridicule of the people. Catherine herself, the founder of the first of these journals, had only the intention of practising this kind of literature for purposes of good-natured banter, and she was rather shocked when she discovered that her example had given Nóvikov and his adherents a weapon for attacking all the negative sides of contemporary civilisation. Without having wished it, Catherine gave into the hands of the disaffected a means of concentrating themselves around a name, a standard,—and public opinion became a factor in literature.

Patronage of the mighty was as much a goal towards which authors aimed in the days of Catherine as in the previous half-century, and the Empress regarded it as her privilege and duty to draw literary talent to the Court, by giving them government positions and lavish gifts. Derzhávin, Fon-Vízin, Bogdanóvich, Kostróv, Petróv, all were attracted to her as the central luminary. Felítsa was the keynote of what Derzhávin purported to be a new departure in the writing of odes, but it was in reality an old laudatory theme with an application of fashionable liberalism, and Felítsa remained the watchword of a generation of poets that gyrated around the throne. At the same time, Catherine made a seeming appeal to public opinion by her comedies and satires. If Nóvikov took her in earnest, and responded to her invitation by making a stand against her lukewarm satire by a systematic arraignment of vice in every form, he soon found it necessary in his next literary venture, the Painter, to appease her suspicion and anger by a fulsome praise of the Empress. Underneath this outward dependence upon the Court’s opinion, literary coteries were, however, beginning to come into existence, and the dramas of the day received their impulse from their writings, and in their turn were beginning to look to others than the Court for their approval.

These coteries were concentrated around the Masonic lodges, where, under the pledge of secrecy, an exchange of ideas could take place, and which, consequently, Catherine hated more and more. This Freemasonry was in itself under English influence, whence were taken the ceremonial and the organisation. It is said that Freemasonry first made its appearance in Russia under Peter the Great; later it came also under German influence, had its wide-spread connections in Europe, and, under the guise of mysterious practices, discussed the means of spreading popular education, doing unstinted charity, and ensuring freedom of thought. In the uncertain and superficial state of culture which then prevailed in Russia, much that these men did was unreal and irrelevant: they lost themselves in the mystical speculations of the Martinists and the Rosicrucians, and wasted their time in an unprofitable symbolism. But it is sufficient to read the biography of a Nóvikov to perceive that their efforts for the advancement of science and useful knowledge were more real than those of the cultivated and more materialistic Catherine. If Catherine had made the press free, she also persecuted those who had availed themselves of the privilege against her pleasure; if her mouth spoke fine sentiments, her heart was closed against their realisation. But Nóvikov, in the silence of his mysticism, made Russia’s past accessible to the scholar, founded the book trade, and took a practical interest in the common people by giving them useful books to read. This Nóvikov, and the unfortunate Radíshchev, whose book is even now prohibited in Russia, and Shcherbátov, who preferred the rough old times to the flighty manners of the day,—that is, the writers who were at outs with existing conditions,—were the carriers of a new spirit which, though not characteristically Russian, was akin to it in that it devoted itself with ardour to the treatment of burning questions from a native standpoint. Two of these writers, Shcherbátov and Nóvikov, were Slavophiles in the best sense of the word.

We shall now make the balance-sheet of the eighteenth-century literature in the separate departments, and see what residuum it bequeathed to the nineteenth century.

In the scholastic style of the Middle Ages it became a settled practice to dedicate books to powerful persons, and to address them with eulogies on all solemn occasions. Polish influence had made this kind of poetry popular at Kíev, and Simeón Pólotski introduced it in Moscow in time to sing the glory of the new-born Peter. Lomonósov’s activity began with an ode, and Tredyakóvski, Sumarókov, Petróv and a host of minor poets, if that name can be applied to writers of soulless rhymed adulation, proceeded in the beaten track of “ecstatic” poetry, until Dmítriev gave it the death-blow by his What Others Say. The only positive value lay in the odes of Lomonósov in which he described phenomena of nature, and those of Derzhávin, who, following his example, made similar use of them as, for example, in his Ode to the Deity. His Felítsa, which marked the disintegration of the “ecstatic ode,” left its effect in the lighter epistolary poetry of his contemporaries, like Kostróv, and may even be traced in the playful productions of the next generation.

The epic is akin to the ode, in that it is a kind of rapturous eulogy on some momentous event in history. In the mad intoxication with foreign pseudo-classic ideals there could be no place for a proper understanding of native history; hence the flatulent epics of Kheráskov, admired though they were, could be of no lasting merit. The other epics dealt with foreign subjects. Tredyakóvski’s Telemachiad could only amuse as a piece of poetical ineptitude, and a pleasure-loving public of the times of Catherine II. was more inclined to go into raptures over Apuleius’s Golden Ass which, having passed through a French transformation, appeared as a species of mock-heroic in Bogdanóvich’s Psyche. Púshkin still took delight in it, and his earlier productions of this kind have something of Bogdanóvich’s manner. Máykov’s Eliséy, which is really superior to the Psyche, was not so well received because he introduced too freely the popular element, for which at that time there could be no appreciation.

Lyrics (in the narrower sense of poems expressing the individual emotion of the writer) can have a place only where the conditions are favourable to the formation of individual feelings, where well-defined conceptions of nature and man are common to a certain class of society or to the whole nation. Nothing of the kind could exist in Russia throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century, when everything was only external veneer, and no lyrics made their appearance until the last quarter, when, under the influence of a thorough acquaintance with Horace and the French lyricists, some fine verses were produced by Bogdanóvich, Kapníst, Derzhávin, Dmítriev, Neledínski-Melétski. Most of these poems only appeared in the nineteenth century, and all belong to that intermediate stage of literature which was represented by Karamzín and Dmítriev and which, in spirit, no longer continues the tradition of the days of Catherine.

Krylóv’s fables are justly celebrated as among the best literature that Russia evolved in the last century; but they are only the culmination of a series of fables, most of them adaptations from La Fontaine and Gellert, in which nearly all the poets tried their skill. By 1700, there had been current in Russia three translations of Esop’s Fables, and Pólotski had imitated a number of such as he knew. Here again we see the utter inability of the writers of the eighteenth century to make use of a popular motive. Nothing is more common in the oral literature of the people than fables, especially animal fables, yet they had to borrow their themes from abroad. Sumarókov’s fables make, with rare exceptions, unprofitable reading; Máykov struck a few times a proper note, and Khémnitser alone, though he followed Gellert closely, is still read with pleasure on account of the simplicity of his tales. Dmítriev, as before, belongs to another period.

Modern Russian poetry practically begins with the satires of Kantemír, and satires, with their adjunct, comedy, have remained down to our day the most prominent part of belles-lettres; only, whereas their usual purpose is to provoke laughter, in Russia tears are their more appropriate due. Under the systematic, though arbitrary and capricious, persecution of the censorship, writers have evolved the art of telling a bitter truth by means of satire which by its outward appearance generally escapes the scrutinising attention of the usually dull censor, but the esoteric meaning of which is quite comprehensible to the whole class of readers. In the days of Peter the Great, with his violent reforms, direct command was more effective than a satire which but few could unravel, and Kantemír’s Satires, in spite of their literary value, are mere exotics. Catherine thought this species of essays a good medium for a gentle reproof, but Nóvikov more correctly divined their office, and much later Gógol and Shchedrín brought them to great perfection along the path indicated by him.

The same causes which prevented the formation of a Russian epic and of lyric poetry throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century militated against the evolution of a native tragedy. Theatrical performances had been given ever since the days of Alexis, but these were mainly Mysteries and Moralities that had long been forgotten in the West, or crude plays and harlequinades by German, Italian and English travelling comedians. Thus, a taste had been formed for the drama when Sumarókov was ordered to organise the first Russian theatre, though there did not exist the elements for a native stage. Sumarókov furnished pseudo-classic tragedies as readily as he manufactured any other kind of poetry, and his conceit of being the Russian Racine indicates whence he took his models. Neither Knyazhnín’s nor Ózerov’s borrowing of incidents from Russian history could make their tragedies real: they were accessible only to those who were steeped in French culture. Not so comedy. Comedy stands in direct relation to satire, and it has taken firm root in Russian soil. Catherine herself wrote a number of dramatised satires, and Fon-Vízin’s Brigadier made its appearance just as satire began to occupy an important place in the public eye. Fon-Vízin, Griboyédov and Gógol are only the greatest of the long series of dramatists, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used comedy as a weapon for attacking the corruption of officials, superficiality in education and the brutality of the serf-owners. Here was an opportunity to introduce a native element, which becomes for the first time prominent in Ablesímov’s comic opera.

Though Western novels reached Russia in indifferent translations long before the end of Catherine’s reign, yet there was no proper soil for them until Radíshchev came under the influence of the English writers, especially of Sterne, and Karamzín, on the verge of the century, introduced sentimentalism into literature. Throughout the whole eighteenth century, little earnestness was shown in literary pursuits. Prose suffered more than poetry, for prose demands a more assiduous and constant attention than verse. It was left for the nineteenth century to settle the prose diction appropriate to the Russian language. In this neglect of cultivating an elegant prose style is to be found the main reason for a very extensive literature of memoirs which were not originally meant for publication, but were intended as mere records for the use of posterity. The restriction of free speech was another powerful factor in encouraging this species of historical revelation. In these memoirs, the student of manners and history and literature will find much better material for a correct appreciation of the eighteenth century than in the exotic literature of the upper classes. The emptiness of the superficial French culture, which was prevalent in Russia, became apparent only to those who, like Tatíshchev, Shcherbátov, and Nóvikov, busied themselves with the study of native history. The progress which history made from Tatíshchev to Karamzín is the most prominent feature in the evolution of the native literature. By the historians was laid the real foundation for a native science and interest in the people. It was quite natural for these men to turn away from the disheartening corruption of manners which was introduced from abroad, and to find inspiration in their own past. They, consequently, were the first Slavophiles, though as yet in the gentler sense of the word. They did not preach a turning away from European culture, as did their later spiritual descendants, but a more organic welding of the new life with the Russian reality.