Front matter (continued 4)

Many hundreds of amateur players have struggled through the music of the Kreuzer Sonata, trying vainly to see in it what Tolstoi declared it means. Of course the significance attached to it by Tolstoi existed only in his vivid imagination, Beethoven being the healthiest of all great composers. If the novelist had really wished to describe sensual music, he would have made a much more felicitous choice of Tristan und Isolde.

Although his own married life was until the last years happy as man could wish, Tolstoi introduced into the Kreuzer Sonata passages from his own existence. When Posdnichev is engaged, he gives his fiancée his memoirs, containing a truthful account of his various liaisons. She is in utter despair, and for a time thinks of breaking off the engagement. All this was literally true of the author himself. When a boy, the hero was led to a house of ill-fame by a friend of his brother, "a very gay student, one of those who are called good fellows." This reminds us of a precisely similar attempt described by Tolstoi in Youth. Furthermore, Posdnichev's self-righteousness in the fact that although he had been dissipated, he determined to be faithful to his wife, was literally and psychologically true in Tolstoi's own life.

The Kreuzer Sonata shows no diminution of Tolstoi's realistic power: the opening scenes on the train, the analysis of the hero's mind during the early years of his married life, and especially the murder, all betray the familiar power of simplicity and fidelity to detail. The passage of the blade through the corset and then into something soft has that sensual realism so characteristic of all Tolstoi's descriptions of bodily sensations. The book is a work of art, and contains many reflections and bitter accusations against society that are founded on the truth.

The moral significance of the story is perfectly clear--that men who are constantly immoral before marriage need not expect happiness in married life. It is a great pity that Tolstoi did not let the powerful little novel speak for itself, and that he allowed himself to be goaded into an explanatory and defensive commentary by the thousands of enquiring letters from foolish readers. Much of the commentary contains sound advice, but it leads off into that reductio ad absurdum so characteristic of Russian thought.

Many of the tracts and parables that Tolstoi wrote are true works of art, with a Biblical directness and simplicity of style. Their effect outside of Russia is caused fully as much by their literary style as by their teaching. I remember an undergraduate, who, reading Where Love is there God is Also, said that he was tremendously excited when the old shoemaker lost his spectacles, and had no peace of mind till he found them again. This is unconscious testimony to Tolstoi's power of making trivial events seem real.

The long novel, Resurrection, is, as Mr. Maude, the English translator, shows, not merely a story, but a general summary of all the final conclusions about life reached by its author. The English volume actually has an Index to Social Questions, Types, etc., giving the pages where the author's views on all such topics are expressed in the book. Apart from the great transformation wrought in the character of the hero, which is the motive of the work, there are countless passages which show the genius of the author, still burning brightly in his old age. The difference between the Easter kiss and the kiss of lust is one of the most powerful instances of analysis, and may be taken as a symbol of the whole work. And the depiction of the sportsman's feelings when he brings down a wounded bird, half shame and half rage, will startle and impress every man who has carried a gun.

Resurrection teaches directly what Tolstoi always taught--what he taught less directly, but with even greater art, in Anna Karenina.

In reading this work of his old age, we cannot help thinking of what Carlyle said of the octogenarian Goethe: "See how in that great mind, beaming in mildest mellow splendour, beaming, if also trembling, like a great sun on the verge of the horizon, near now to its long farewell, all these things were illuminated and illustrated."

VI

GORKI

GORKI went up like the sky-rocket, and seems to have had the traditional descent. From 1900 to 1906 everybody was talking about him; since 1906 one scarcely hears mention of his name. He was ridiculously overpraised, but he ought not to be forgotten. As an artist, he will not bear a moment's comparison with Andreev; but some of his short stories and his play, The Night Asylum, have the genuine Russian note of reality, and a rude strength much too great for its owner's control. He has never written a successful long novel, and his plays have no coherence; but, after all, the man has the real thing--vitality.

Just at the moment when Chekhov appeared to stand at the head of young Russian writers, Gorki appeared, and his fame swept from one end of the world to the other. In Russia, his public was second in numbers only to Tolstoi's; Kuprin and Andreev both dedicated books to him; in Germany, France, England, and America, he became literally a household word. It is probable that there were a thousand foreigners who knew his name, to one who had heard of Chekhov. Compared with Chekhov, he had more matter and less art.

His true name, which comparatively few have ever heard, is Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. "This name," said M. de Vogue, "will remain forever buried in the parish register." He chose to write under the name Gorki, which means "bitter," a happy appellation for this modern Ishmaelite. He was born in 1869, at Nizhni Novgorod, in a dyer's shop. He lost both father and mother when he was a child, but his real mother was the river Volga, on whose banks he was born, and on whose broad breast he has found the only repose he understands. The little boy was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but ran away, as he did from a subsequent employer. By a curious irony of fate, this atheist learned to read out of a prayer-book, and this iconoclast was for a time engaged in the manufacture of ikons, holy images. As the aristocrat Turgenev learned Russian from a house servant, Gorki obtained his love for literature from a cook. This happened on a steamer on the great river, where Gorki was employed as an assistant in the galley. The cook was a rough giant, who spent all his spare moments reading, having an old trunk full of books. It was a miscellaneous assortment, containing Lives of Saints, stories by Dumas père, and fortunately some works by Gogol. This literature gave him a thirst for learning, and when he was sixteen he went to Kazan, a town on the Volga, where Tolstoi had studied at the University. He had the notion that literature and learning were there distributed free to the famished, like bread in times of famine. He was quickly undeceived; and instead of receiving intellectual food, he was forced to work in a baker's shop, for a miserable pittance. These were the darkest days of his life, and in one of his most powerful stories he has reflected the wretched daily and nightly toil in a bakery.

Then he went on the road, and became a tramp, doing all kinds of odd jobs, from peddling to hard manual labour on wharves and railways. At the age of nineteen, weary of life, he shot himself, but recovered. Then he followed the Volga to the Black Sea, unconsciously collecting the material that in a very few years he was to give to the world. In 1892, when twenty-three years old, he succeeded in getting some of his sketches printed in newspapers. The next year he had the good fortune to meet at Nizhni Novgorod the famous Russian author Korolenko. Korolenko was greatly impressed by the young vagabond, believed in his powers, and gave timely and valuable help. With the older man's influence, Gorki succeeded in obtaining the entrée to the St. Petersburg magazines; and while the Russian critics were at a loss how to regard the new genius, the public went wild. He visited the capital in 1899, and there was intense curiosity to see and to hear him. A great hall was engaged, and when he mounted the platform to read, the young people in the audience went into a frenzy.

Gorki has been repeatedly imprisoned for his revolutionary ideas and efforts; in 1906, at the very apex of his fame, he came to the United States to collect funds for the cause. The whole country was eager to receive and to give, and his advent in New York was a notable occasion. He insisted that he came, not as an anarchist, but as a socialist, that his mission in the world was not to destroy, but to fulfil. At first, he was full of enthusiasm about America and New York, and American writers; he was tremendously impressed by the sky-scrapers, by the intense activity of the people, and by the Hudson River, which, as he regarded from his hotel windows, reminded him of the Volga. He said America would be the first nation to give mankind a true government, and that its citizens were the incarnation of progress. He declared that Mark Twain was even more popular in Russia than in America, that it was "a part of the national Russian education" to read him, and that he himself had read every translation of his books.

Incidentally he spoke of his favourite world- authors. Shakespeare he put first of all, saying he was "staggering," an opinion quite different from that of Tolstoi. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the philosophers he liked the best. Byron and Heine he read in preference to most other poets, for there is an invincible strain of lyric romanticism in this Russian tramp, as there was in his master Gogol. Flaubert, Goethe, and Dumas père he read with delight.

A literary dinner was arranged in honour of the distinguished guest, and inasmuch as all present were ignorant of the next day's catastrophe, the account given of this love-feast in the New York Sun is worth quoting. "Mark Twain and Gorki recognised each other before they were introduced, but neither being able to understand the language of the other, they simply grasped hands and held on more than a minute. . . . Gorki said he had read Mark Twain's stories when he was a boy, and that he had gotten much delight from them. Mark declared that he also had been a reader and admirer of Gorki. The smile of Gorki was broader and not so dry as the smile of Mark, but both smiles were distinctly those of fellow-humorists who understood each other. Gorki made a little speech which was translated by a Russian who knew English. Gorki said he was glad to meet Mark Twain, 'world famous and in Russia the best known of American writers, a man of tremendous force and convictions, who, when he hit, hit hard. I have come to America to get acquainted with the American people and ask their aid for my suffering countrymen who are fighting for liberty. The despotism must be overthrown now, and what is needed is money, money, money!' Mark said he was glad to meet Gorki, adding, 'If we can help to create the Russian republic, let us start in right away and do it. The fighting may have to be postponed awhile, but meanwhile we can keep our hearts on the matter and we can assist the Russians in being free.'"

A committee was formed to raise funds, and then came the explosion, striking evidence of the enormous difference between the American and the Continental point of view in morals. With characteristic Russian impracticability, Gorki had come to America with a woman whom he introduced as his wife; but it appeared that his legal wife was in Russia, and that his attractive and accomplished companion was somebody else. This fact, which honestly seemed to Gorki an incident of no importance, took on a prodigious shape. This single mistake cost the Russian revolutionary cause an enormous sum of money, and may have altered history. Gorki was expelled from his hotel, and refused admittance to others; unkindest cut of all, Mark Twain, whose absence of religious belief had made Gorki believe him to be altogether emancipated from prejudices, positively refused to have anything more to do with him. As Gorki had said, "When Mark Twain hit, he hit hard." Turn whither he would, every door was slammed in his face. I do not think he has ever recovered from the blank amazement caused by the American change of front. His golden opportunity was gone, and he departed for Italy, shaking the dust of America off his feet, and roundly cursing the nation that he had just declared to be the incarnation of progress. The affair unquestionably has its ludicrous side, but it was a terrible blow to the revolutionists. Many of them believed that the trap was sprung by the government party.

Gorki's full-length novels are far from successful works of art. They have all the incoherence and slipshod workmanship of Dostoevski, without the latter's glow of brotherly love. His first real novel, Foma Gordeev, an epic of the Volga, has many beautiful descriptive passages, really lyric and idyllic in tone, mingled with an incredible amount of drivel. The character who plays the title-role is a typical Russian windbag, irresolute and incapable, like so many Russian heroes; but whether drunk or sober, he is destitute of charm. He is both dreary and dirty. The opening chapters are written with great spirit, and the reader is full of happy expectation. One goes farther and fares worse. After the first hundred pages, the book is a prolonged anti-climax, desperately dull. Altogether the best passage in the story is the description of the river in spring, impressive not merely for its beauty and accuracy of language, but because the Volga is interpreted as a symbol of the spirit of the Russian people, with vast but unawakened possibilities.

"Between them, in a magnificent sweep, flowed the broad-breasted Volga; triumphantly, without haste, flow her waters, conscious of their unconquerable power; the hill-shore was reflected in them like a dark shadow, but on the left side she was adorned with gold and emerald velvet by the sandy borders of the reefs, and the broad meadows. Now here, now there, on the hills, and in the meadows, appeared villages, the sun sparkled in the window-panes of the cottages, and upon the roofs of yellow straw; the crosses of the churches gleamed through the foliage of the trees, the gray wings of the mills rotated lazily through the air, the smoke from the chimneys of a factory curled skyward in thick black wreaths. . . . On all sides was the gleaming water, on all sides were space and freedom, cheerfully green meadows, and graciously clear blue sky; in the quiet motion of the water, restrained power could be felt; in the heaven above it shone the beautiful sun, the air was saturated with the fragrance of evergreen trees, and the fresh scent of foliage. The shores advanced in greeting, soothing the eye and the soul with their beauty, and new pictures were constantly unfolded upon them.

"On everything round about rested the stamp of a certain sluggishness: everything--nature and people--lived awkwardly, lazily; but in this laziness there was a certain peculiar grace, and it would seem that behind the laziness was concealed a huge force, an unconquerable force, as yet unconscious of itself, not having, as yet, created for itself clear desires and aims. And the absence of consciousness in this half-somnolent existence cast upon its whole beautiful expanse a shade of melancholy. Submissive patience, the silent expectation of something new and more active was audible even in the call of the cuckoo, as it flew with the wind from the shore, over the river."*

* Isabel Hapgood's translation. The novel Varenka Olessova is a tedious book of no importance. The hero is, of course, the eternal Russian type, a man of good education and no backbone: he lacks resolution, energy, will-power, and will never accomplish anything. He has not even force enough to continue his studies. Contrasted with him is the girl Varenka, a simple child of nature, who prefers silly romances to Russian novels, and whose virgin naïveté is a constant puzzle to the conceited ass who does not know whether he is in love with her or not. Indeed, he asks himself if he is capable of love for any one. The only interesting pages in this stupid story are concerned with a discussion on reading, between Varenka and the young man, where her denunciation of Russian fiction is, of course, meant to proclaim its true superiority. In response to the question whether she reads Russian authors, the girl answers with conviction: "Oh, yes! But I don't like them! They are so tiresome, so tiresome! They always write about what I know already myself, and know just as well as they do. They can't create anything interesting; with them almost everything is true. . . . Now with the French, their heroes are real heroes, they talk and act unlike men in actual life. They are always brave, amorous, vivacious, while our heroes are simple little men, without any warm feelings, without any beauty, pitiable, just like ordinary men in real life. . . In Russian books, one cannot understand at all why the men continue to live. What's the use of writing books if the author has nothing remarkable to say?"

The long novel Mother is a good picture of life among the working-people in a Russian factory, that is, life as seen through Gorki's eyes; all cheerfulness and laughter are, of course, absent, and we have presented a dull monotone of misery. The factory itself is the villain of the story, and resembles some grotesque wild beast, that daily devours the blood, bone, and marrow of the throng of victims that enter its black jaws. The men, women, and children are represented as utterly brutalised by toil; in their rare moments of leisure, they fight and beat each other unmercifully, and even the little children get dead drunk. Socialist and revolutionary propaganda are secretly circulated among these stupefied folk, and much of the narrative is taken up with the difficulties of accomplishing this distribution; for the whole book itself is nothing but a revolutionary tract. The characters, including the pitiful Mother herself, are not vividly drawn, they are not alive, and one forgets them speedily; as for plot, there is none, and the book closes with the brutal murder of the old woman. It is a tedious, inartistic novel, with none of the relief that would exist in actual life. Turgenev's poorest novel, Virgin Soil, which also gives us a picture of a factory, is immensely superior from every point of view.

But if Mother is a dull book, The Spy is impossible. It is full of meaningless and unutterably dreary jargon; its characters are sodden with alcohol and bestial lusts. One abominable woman's fat body spreads out on an arm-chair "like sour dough." And indeed, this novel bears about the same relation to a finished work of art that sour dough bears to a good loaf of bread. The characters are poorly conceived, and the story is totally without movement. Not only is it very badly written, it lacks even good material. The wretched boy, whose idiotic states of mind are described one after the other, and whose eventual suicide is clear from the start, is a disgusting whelp, without any human interest. One longs for his death with murderous intensity, and when, on the last page, he throws himself under the train, the reader experiences a calm and sweet relief.

Much of Gorki's work is like Swift's poetry, powerful not because of its cerebration or spiritual force, but powerful only from the physical point of view, from its capacity to disgust. It appeals to the nose and the stomach rather than to the mind and the heart. From the medicinal standpoint, it may have a certain value. Swift sent a lady one of his poems, and immediately after reading it, she was taken violently sick. Not every poet has sufficient force to produce so sudden an effect.

One man, invariably before reading the works of a famous French author, put on his overshoes.

A distinguished American novelist has said that in Gorki "seems the body without the soul of Russian fiction, and sodden with despair. The soul of Russian fiction is the great thing." This is, indeed, the main difference between his work and that of the giant Dostoevski. In the latter's darkest scenes the spiritual flame is never extinct.

Gorki lacks either the patient industry or else the knowledge necessary to make a good novel. He is seen at his best in short stories, for his power comes in flashes. In Twenty-six Men and a Girl, the hideous tale that gave him his reputation in America, one is conscious of the streak of genius that he undoubtedly possesses. The helpless, impotent rage felt by the wretched men as they witness the debauching of a girl's body and the damnation of her soul, is clearly echoed in the reader's mind. Gorki's notes are always the most thrilling when played below the range of the conventional instrument of style. This is not low life, it is sub-life.

He is, after all, a student of sensational effect; and the short story is peculiarly adapted to his natural talent. He cannot develop characters, he cannot manage a large group, or handle a progressive series of events. But in a lurid picture of the pit, in a flash-light photograph of an underground den, in a sudden vision of a heap of garbage with unspeakable creatures crawling over it, he is impressive.

I shall never forget the performance of The Night Asylum, Nachtasyl, which I saw acted in Munich by one of the best stock companies in the world, a combination of players from the Neues and Kleines theaters in Berlin. In reading this utterly formless and incoherent drama, I had been only slightly affected; but when it was presented on the stage by actors who intelligently incarnated every single character, the thing took on a terrible intensity. The persons are all, except old Luka, who talks like a man in one of Tolstoi's recent parables, dehumanised. The woman dying of consumption before our eyes, the Baron in an advanced stage of paresis who continually rolls imaginary cigarettes between his weak fingers, and the alcoholic actor who has lost his memory are impossible to forget. I can hear that actor now, as with stupid fascination he continually repeats the diagnosis a physician once made of his case: "Mein Organismus ist durch und durch mit Alcool vergiftet!"

Gorki, in spite of his zeal for the revolutionary cause, has no remedy for the disease he calls Life. He is eaten up with rage at the world in general, and tries to make us all share his disgust with it. But he teaches us nothing; he has little to say that we can transmute into anything valuable. This is perhaps the reason why the world has temporarily, at any rate, lost interest in him. He was a new sensation, he shocked us, and gave us strange thrills, after the manner of new and unexpected sensations. Gorki came up on the literary horizon like an evil storm, darkening the sky, casting an awful shadow across the world's mirth and laughter, and making us shudder in the cold and gloom..

Gorki completely satisfied that strange but almost universal desire of well-fed and comfortable people to go slumming. In his books men and women in fortunate circumstances had their curiosity satisfied--all the world went slumming, with no discomfort, no expense, and no fear of contagion. With no trouble at all, no personal inconvenience, we learned the worst of all possible worsts on this puzzling and interesting planet.

But we soon had enough of it, and our experienced and professional guide failed to perceive the fact. He showed us more of the same thing, and then some more. Such sights and sounds--authentic visions and echoes of hell--merely repeated, began to lose their uncanny fascination. The man who excited us became a bore. For the worst thing about Gorki is his dull monotony, and vice is even more monotonous than virtue, perhaps because it is more common. Open the pages of almost any of his tales, it is always the same thing, the same criminals, the same horrors, the same broken ejaculations and brutish rage. Gorki has shown no capacity for development, no power of variety and complexity. His passion for mere effect has reacted unfavourably on himself.*

* His play Die Letzten was put on at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 6 September 1910. The press despatch says, "The father is a police inspector, drunkard, gambler, briber, bribe-taker, adulterer, and robber."

Is it possible that success robbed him of something? He became a popular author in conventional environment, surrounded by books and modem luxuries, living in the pleasant climate of Italy, with no anxiety about his meals and bed. Is it possible that wealth, comfort, independence, and leisure have extinguished his original force? Has he lost something of the picturesque attitude of Gorki the penniless tramp? He is happily still a young man, and perhaps he may yet achieve the masterpiece that ten years ago we so confidently expected from his hands.

He is certainly not a great teacher, but he has the power to ask awkward questions so characteristic of Andreev, Artsybashev, and indeed of all Russian novelists. We cannot answer him with a shrug of the shoulders or a sceptical smile. He shakes the foundations of our fancied security by boldly questioning what we had come to regard as axioms. As the late M. de Vogüé remarked, when little children sit on our knee and pelt us with questions that go to the roots of our philosophy, we get rid of the bother of it by telling the children to go away and play; but when a Tolstoi puts such questions, we cannot get rid of him so easily. Russian novelists are a thorn in the side of complacent optimism.

And yet surely, if life is not so good, as it conceivably might be, it is not so darkly bitter as the Bitter One would have us believe. In a short article that he wrote about one of the playgrounds of America, he betrayed his own incurable jaundice. In the New York Independent for 8 August 1907, Gorki published a brilliant impressionistic sketch of Coney Island, and called it Boredom. Gorki at Coney Island is like Dante at a country fair. Thomas Carlyle was invited out to a social dinner-party once upon a time, and when he came home he wrote savagely in his diary of the flippant, light-hearted conversation among the men and women about the festive board, saying, "to me through those thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sat glaring." What a charming guest he must have been on that particular occasion!

Gorki speaks poetically in his article of the "fantastic city all of fire" that one sees at night. But as he mingles with the throng, disgust fills his lonely heart.

"The public looks at them silently. It breathes in the moist air, and feeds its soul with dismal ennui, which extinguishes thought as a wet, dirty cloth extinguishes the fire of a smouldering coal."

Describing the sensations of the crowd before the tiger's cage, he says:--

"The man runs about the cage, shoots his pistol and cracks his whip, and shouts like a madman. His shouts are intended to hide his painful dread of the animals. The crowd regards the capers of the man, and waits in suspense for the fatal attack. They wait; unconsciously the primitive instinct is awakened in them. They crave fight, they want to feel the delicious shiver produced by the sight of two bodies intertwining, the splutter of blood and pieces of torn, steaming human flesh flying through the cage and falling on the floor. They want to hear the roar, the cries, the shrieks of agony. . . . Then the crowd breaks into dark pieces, and disperses over the slimy marsh of boredom.

". . . You long to see a drunken man with a jovial face, who would push and sing and bawl, happy because he is drunk, and sincerely wishing all good people the same. . .

"In the glittering gossamer of its fantastic buildings, tens of thousands of grey people, like patches on the ragged clothes of a beggar, creep along with weary faces and colourless eyes. . . .

"But the precaution has been taken to blind the people, and they drink in the vile poison with silent rapture. The poison contaminates their souls. Boredom whirls about in an idle dance, expiring in the agony of its inanition.

"One thing alone is good in the garish city: you can drink in hatred to your soul's content, hatred sufficient to last throughout life, hatred of the power of stupidity!"

This sketch is valuable not merely because of the impression of a distinguished foreign writer of one of the sights of America, but because it raises in our minds an obstinate doubt of his capacity to tell the truth about life in general. Suppose a person who had never seen Coney Island should read Gorki's vivid description of it, would he really know anything about Coney Island? Of course not. The crowds at Coney Island are as different from Gorki's description of them as anything could well be. Now then, we who know the dregs of Russian life only through Gorki's pictures, can we be certain that his representations are accurate? Are they reliable history of fact, or are they the revelations of a heart that knoweth its own bitterness?

VII

CHEKHOV

ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, like Pushkin, Lermontov, Bielinski, and Garshin, died young, and although he wrote a goodly number of plays and stories which gave him a high reputation in Russia, he did not live to enjoy international fame. This is partly owing to the nature of his work, but more perhaps to the total eclipse of other contemporary writers by Gorki. There are signs now that his delicate and unpretentious art will outlast the sensational flare of the other's reputation. Gorki himself has generously tried to help in the perpetuation of Chekhov's name, by publishing a volume of personal reminiscences of his dead friend.

Like Gogol and Artsybashev, Chekhov was a man of the South, being born at Taganrog, a seaport on a gulf of the Black Sea, near the mouth of the river Don. The date of his birth is the 17 January 1860. His father was a clever serf, who, by good business foresight, bought his freedom early in life. Although the father never had much education himself, he gave his four children every possible advantage. Anton studied in the Greek school, in his native city, and then entered the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Moscow. "I don't well remember why I chose the medical faculty," he remarked later, "but I never regretted that choice." He took his degree, but entered upon no regular practice. For a year he worked in a hospital in a small town near Moscow, and in 1892 he freely offered his medical services during an epidemic of cholera. His professional experiences were of immense service to him in analysing the characters of various patients whom he treated, and his scientific training he always believed helped him greatly in the writing of his stories and plays, which are all psychological studies.

He knew that he had not very long to live, for before he had really begun his literary career signs of tuberculosis had plainly become manifest. He died in Germany, the 2 July 1904, and his funeral at Moscow was a national event.

Chekhov was a fine conversationalist, and fond of society; despite the terrible gloom of his stories, he had distinct gifts as a wit, and was a great favourite at dinner-parties and social gatherings. He joked freely on his death-bed. He was warm-hearted and generous, and gave money gladly to poor students and overworked school-teachers. His innate modesty and lack of self-assertion made him very slow at personal advertisement, and his dislike of Tolstoi's views prevented at first an acquaintance with the old sage. Later, however, Tolstoi, being deeply interested in him, sought him out, and the two writers became friends. At this time many Russians believed that Chekhov was the legitimate heir to Tolstoi's fame.

In 1879, while still in the University of Moscow, Chekhov began to write short stories, of a more or less humorous nature, which were published in reviews. His first book appeared in 1887. Some critics sounded a note of warning, which he heeded. They said "it was too bad that such a talented young man should spend all his time making people laugh." This indirect advice, coupled with maturity of years and incipient disease, changed the writer's point of view, and his best known work is typically Russian in its tragic intensity.

In Russia he enjoyed an enormous vogue. Kropotkin says that his works ran through ten to fourteen editions, and that his publications, appearing as a supplement to a weekly magazine, had a circulation of two hundred thousand copies in one year. Toward the end of his life his stories captivated Germany, and one of the Berlin journalists cried out, as the Germans have so often of Oscar Wilde, "Chekhov und kein Ende!"

Chekhov, like Gorki and Andreev, was a dramatist as well as a novelist, though his plays are only beginning to be known outside of his native land. They resemble the dramatic work of Gorki, Andreev, and for that matter of practically all Russian playwrights, in being formless and having no true movement; but they contain some of his best Russian portraits, and some of his most subtle interpretations of Russian national life. Russian drama does not compare for an instant with Russian fiction: I have never read a single well-constructed Russian play except Revizor. Most of them are dull to a foreign reader, and leave him cold and weary. Mr. Baring, in his book Landmarks in Russian Literature, has an excellent chapter on the plays of Chekhov, which partially explains the difficulties an outsider has in studying Russian drama. But this chapter, like the other parts of his book, is marred by exaggeration. He says, "Chekhov's plays are as interesting to read as the work of any first-rate novelist." And a few sentences farther in the same paragraph, he adds, "Chekhov's plays are a thousand times more interesting to see on the stage than they are to read." Any one who believes Mr. Baring's statement, and starts to read Chekhov's dramas with the faith that they are as interesting as Anna Karenina, will be sadly disappointed. And if on the stage they are a thousand times more interesting to see than Anna Karenina is to read, they must indeed be thrilling. It is, however, perfectly true that a foreigner cannot judge the real value of Russian plays by reading them. We ought to hear them performed by a Russian company. That wonderful actress, Madame Komisarzhevskaya, who was lately followed to her grave by an immense concourse of weeping Russians, gave a performance of The Cherry Garden which stirred the whole nation. Madame Nazimova has said that Chekhov is her favourite writer, but that his plays could not possibly succeed in America, unless every part, even the minor ones, could be interpreted by a brilliant actor.

Chekhov is durch und durch echt russisch: no one but a Russian would ever have conceived such characters, or reported such conversations. We often wonder that physical exercise and bodily recreation are so conspicuously absent from Russian books. But we should remember that a Russian conversation is one of the most violent forms of physical exercise, as it is among the French and Italians. Although Chekhov belongs to our day, and represents contemporary Russia, he stands in the middle of the highway of Russian fiction, and in his method of art harks back to the great masters. He perhaps resembles Turgenev more than any other of his predecessors, but he is only a faint echo. He is like Turgenev in the delicacy and in the aloofness of his art. He has at times that combination of the absolutely real with the absolutely fantastic that is so characteristic of Gogol: one of his best stories, The Black Monk, might have been written by the author of The Cloak and The Portrait. He is like Dostoevski in his uncompromising depiction of utter degradation; but he has little of Dostoevski's glowing sympathy and heartpower. He resembles Tolstoi least of all. The two chief features of Tolstoi's work--self-revelation and moral teaching--must have been abhorrent to Chekhov, for his stories tell us almost nothing about himself and his own opinions, and they teach nothing. His art is impersonal, and he is content with mere diagnosis. His only point of contact with Tolstoi is his grim fidelity to detail, the peculiar Russian realism common to every Russian novelist. Tolstoi said that Chekhov resembled Guy de Maupassant. This is entirely wide of the mark. He resembles Guy de Maupassant merely in the fact that, like the Frenchman, he wrote short stories.

Among recent writers Chekhov is at the farthest remove from his friend Gorki, and most akin to Andreev. It is probable that Andreev learned something from him. Unlike Turgenev, both Chekhov and Andreev study mental disease. Their best characters are abnormal; they have some fatal taint in the mind which turns this goodly frame, the earth, into a sterile promontory; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, into a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Neither Chekhov nor Andreev have attempted to lift that black pall of despair that hangs over Russian fiction.

Just as the austere, intellectual beauty of Greek drama forms striking evidence of the extraordinarily high average of culture in Athenian life, so the success of an author like Chekhov is abundant proof of the immense number of readers of truly cultivated taste that are scattered over Holy Russia. For Chekhov's stories are exclusively intellectual and subtle. They appeal only to the mind, not to the passions nor to any love of sensation. In many of them he deliberately avoids climaxes and all varieties of artificial effect. He would be simply incomprehensible to the millions of Americans who delight in musical comedy and in pseudo-historical romance. He wrote only for the elect, for those who have behind them years of culture and habits of consecutive thought. That such a man should have a vogue in Russia such as a cheap romancer enjoys in America, is in itself a significant and painful fact.

Chekhov's position in the main line of Russian literature and his likeness to Turgenev are both evident when we study his analysis of the Russian temperament. His verdict is exactly the same as that given by Turgenev and Sienkiewicz--slave improductivité. A majority of his chief characters are Rudins. They suffer from internal injuries, caused by a diseased will. In his story called On the Way the hero remarks, "Nature has set in every Russian an enquiring mind, a tendency to speculation, and extraordinary capacity for belief; but all these are broken into dust against our improvidence, indolence, and fantastic triviality."*

* The citations from Chekhov are from the translations by Long.

The novelist who wrote that sentence was a physician as well as a man of letters. It is a professional diagnosis of the national sickness of mind, which produces sickness of heart.

It is absurd to join in the chorus that calls Turgenev old-fashioned, when we find his words accurately, if faintly, echoed by a Russian who died in 1904! Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and wishes have always been the legitimate fathers of thoughts. My friend and colleague, Mr. Mandell, the translator of The Cherry Garden,* says that the play indicates that the useless people are dying away, "and thus making room for the regenerated young generation which is full of hope and strength to make a fruitful cherry garden of Russia for the Russian people . . . the prospects of realisation are now bright. But how soon will this become a practical reality? Let us hope in the near future!" Yes, let us hope, as Russians hoped in 1870 and in 1900. Kropotkin says that Chekhov gave an "impressive parting word" to the old generation, and that we are now on the eve of the "new types which already are budding in life." Gorki has violently protested against the irresolute Slav, and Artsybashev has given us in Jurii the Russian as he is (1903) and in Sanin the Russian as he ought to be. But a disease obstinately remains a disease until it is cured, and it cannot be cured by hope or by protest.

* Published at Yale University by the Yale Courant.

Chekhov was a physician and an invalid; he saw sickness without and sickness within. Small wonder that his stories deal with the unhealthy and the doomed. For just as Artsybashev's tuberculosis has made him create the modern Tamburlaine as a mental enjoyment of physical activity, so the less turbulent nature of Chekhov has made him reproduce in his creatures of the imagination his own sufferings and fears. I think he was afraid of mental as well as physical decay, for he has studied insanity with the same assiduity as that displayed by Andreev in his nerve-wrecking story A Dilemma.

In Ward No. 6, which no one should read late at night, Chekhov has given us a picture of an insane asylum, which, if the conditions there depicted are true to life, would indicate that some parts of Russia have not advanced one step since Gogol wrote Revizor. The patients are beaten and hammered into insensibility by a brutal keeper; they live amidst intolerable filth. The attending physician is a typical Russian, who sees clearly the horror and abomination of the place, but has not sufficient will-power to make a change. He is fascinated by one of the patients, with whom he talks for hours. His fondness for this man leads his friends to believe that he is insane, and they begin to treat him with that humouring condescension and pity which would be sufficient in itself to drive a man out of his mind. He is finally invited by his younger colleague to visit the asylum to examine a strange case; when he reaches the building, he himself is shoved into Ward No. 6, and realises that the doors are shut upon him forever. He is obliged to occupy a bed in the same filthy den where he has so often visited the other patients, and his night-gown has a slimy smell of dried fish. In about twenty-four hours he dies, but in those hours he goes through a hell of physical and mental torment.

The fear of death, which to an intensely intellectual people like the Russians, is an obsession of terror, and shadows all their literature, --it appears all through Tolstoi's diary and novels, --is analysed in many forms by Chekhov. In Ward No. 6 Chekhov pays his respects to Tolstoi's creed of self-denial, through the lips of the doctor's favourite madman. "A creed which teaches indifference to wealth, indifference to the conveniences of life, and contempt for suffering is quite incomprehensible to the great majority who never knew either wealth or the conveniences of life, and to whom contempt for suffering would mean contempt for their own lives, which are made up of feelings of hunger, cold, loss, insult, and a Hamlet-like terror of death. All life lies in these feelings, and life may be hated or wearied of, but never despised. Yes, I repeat it, the teachings of the Stoics can never have a future; from the beginning of time, life has consisted in sensibility to pain and response to irritation."

No better indictment has ever been made against those to whom self-denial and renunciation are merely a luxurious attitude of the mind.

Chekhov's sympathy with Imagination and his hatred for commonplace folk who stupidly try to repress its manifestations are shown again and again in his tales. He loves especially the imagination of children; and he shows them as infinitely wiser than their practical parents. In the short sketch An Event the children are wild with delight over the advent of three kittens, and cannot understand their father's disgust for the little beasts, and his cruel indifference to their welfare. The cat is their mother, that they know; but who is the father? The kittens must have a father, so the children drag out the wooden rocking-horse, and place him beside his wife and offspring.

In the story At Home the father's bewilderment at the creative imagination and the curious caprices of his little boy's mind is tenderly and beautifully described. The father knows he is not bringing him up wisely, but is utterly at a loss how to go at the problem, having none of the intuitive sympathy of a woman. The boy is busy with his pencil, and represents sounds by shapes, letters by colours. For example, "the sound of an orchestra he drew as a round, smoky spot; whistling as a spiral thread." In making letters, he always painted L yellow, M red, and A black. He draws a picture of a house with a soldier standing in front of it. The father rebukes him for bad perspective, and tells him that the soldier in his picture is taller than the house. But the boy replies, "If you drew the soldier smaller, you wouldn't be able to see his eyes."

One of Chekhov's favourite pastimes was gardening. This, perhaps, accounts for his location of the scene in his comedy The Cherry Garden, where a business-like man, who had once been a serf, just like the dramatist's own father, has prospered sufficiently to buy the orchard from the improvident and highly educated owners; and for all the details about fruit-gardening given in the powerful story The Black Monk. This story infallibly reminds one of Gogol. A man has repeatedly a vision of a black monk, who visits him through the air, with whom he carries on long conversations, and who inspires him with great thoughts and ideals. His wife and friends of course think he is crazy, and instead of allowing him to continue his intercourse with the familiar spirit, they persuade him he is ill, and make him take medicine. The result is wholesale tragedy. His life is ruined, his wife is separated from him; at last he dies. The idea seems to be that he should not have been disobedient unto the heavenly vision. Imagination and inspiration are necessary to life; they are what separate man from the beasts that perish. The monk asks him, "How do you know that the men of genius whom all the world trusts have not also seen visions?"

Chekhov is eternally at war with the practical, with the narrow-minded, with the commonplace. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Professor Brückner has well said that Chekhov was by profession a physician, but an artist by the grace of God. He was indeed an exquisite artist, and if his place in Russian literature is not large, it seems permanent. He does not rank among the greatest. He lacks the tremendous force of Tolstoi, the flawless perfection of Turgenev, and the mighty world-embracing sympathy of Great-heart Dostoevski. But he is a faithful interpreter of Russian life, and although his art was objective, one cannot help feeling the essential goodness of the man behind his work, and loving him for it.

VIII

ARTSYBASHEV

NOT the greatest, but the most sensational, novel published in Russia during the last five years is Sanin, by Artsybashev. It is not sensational in the incidents, though two men commit suicide, and two girls are ruined; it is sensational in its ideas. To make a sensation in contemporary Russian literature is an achievement, where pathology is now rampant. But Artsybashev accomplished it, and his novel made a tremendous noise, the echoes of which quickly were heard all over curious and eclectic Germany, and have even stirred Paris. Since the failure of the Revolution, there has been a marked revolt in Russia against three great ideas that have at different times dominated Russian literature: the quiet pessimism of Turgenev, the Christian non-resistance religion of Tolstoi, and the familiar Russian type of will-less philosophy. Even before the Revolution Gorki had expressed the spirit of revolt; but his position, extreme as it appears to an Anglo-Saxon, has been left far behind by Artsybashev, who, with the genuine Russian love of the reductio ad absurdum, has reached the farthest limits of moral anarchy in the creation of his hero Sanin.

In an admirable article in the Westminster Gazette, for 14 May 1910, by the accomplished scholar and critic, Mr. R. C. Long, called The Literature of Self-assertion, we obtain a strong smell of the hell-broth now boiling in Russian literature. "In the Spring of 1909, an exhibition was held in the Russian ministry of the Interior of specimen copies of all books and brochures issued in 1908, to the number of 70,841,000. How many different books were exhibited the writer does not know, but he lately came upon an essay by the critic Ismailoff, in which it was said that there were on exhibition a thousand different sensational novels, classed as 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes literature,' with such expressive titles as 'The Hanged,' 'The Chokers,' 'The Corpse Disinterred,' and 'The Expropriators.' Ismailoff comments on this as sign and portent. Russia always had her literature of adventure, and Russian novels of manners and of psychology became known to Westerners merely because they were the best, and by no means because they were the only books that appeared. The popular taste was formerly met with naïve and outrageous 'lubotchniya' -books. The new craze for 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes' stories is something quite different. It foreshadows a complete change in the psychosis of the Russian reader, the decay of the literature of passivity, and the rise of a new literature of action and physical revolt. The literature of passivity reached its height with the (sic) Chekhov. The best representative of the transition from Chekhov to the new literature of self-assertion is Maxim Gorki's friend, Leonid Andreev. . . .

"These have got clear away from the humble, ineffectual individual, 'crushed by life.' Full of learned philosophies from Max Stirner and Nietzsche, they preach, in Stirner's words, 'the absolute independence of the individual, master of himself, and of all things.' 'The death of "Everyday-ism,"' the 'resurrection of myth,' 'orgiasm,' 'Mystical Anarchism,' and 'universalist individualism' are some of the shibboleths of these new writers, who are mostly very young, very clever, and profoundly convinced that they are even cleverer than they are.

"Anarchism, posing as self-assertion, is the note in most recent Russian literature, as, indeed, it is in Russian life."

The most powerful among this school of writers, and the only one who can perhaps be called a man of genius, is Michael Artsybashev. He came honestly by his hot, impulsive temperament, being, like Gogol, a man of the South. He was born in 1878. He says of himself: "I am Tartar in name and in origin, but not a pure-blooded one. In my veins runs Russian, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. I am glad to name as one of my ancestors the famous Pole, Kosciusko, who was my maternal great-grandfather. My father, a retired officer, was a landed proprietor with very little income. I was only three years old when my mother died. As a legacy, she bequeathed to me tuberculosis. . . . I am now living in the Crimea and trying to get well, but with little faith in my recovery."

Sanin appeared at the psychological moment, late in the year 1907. The Revolution was a failure, and it being impossible to fight the government or to obtain political liberty, people in Russia of all classes were ready for a revolt against moral law, the religion of self-denial, and all the conventions established by society, education, and the church. At this moment of general desperation and smouldering rage, appeared a work written with great power and great art, deifying the natural instincts of man, incarnating the spirit of liberty in a hero who despises all so-called morality as absurd tyranny. It was a bold attempt to marshal the animal instincts of humanity, terrifically strong as they are even in the best citizens, against every moral and prudential restraint. The effect of the book will probably not last very long, --already it has been called an ephemeral sensation, --but it was immediate and tremendous. It was especially powerful among university students and high school boys and girls--the "Sanin-morals" of undergraduates were alluded to in a speech in the Duma.

But although the book was published at the psychological moment, it was written with no reference to any post-revolution spirit. For Artsybashev composed his novel in 1903, when he was twenty-four years old. He tried in vain to induce publishers to print it, and fortunately for him, was obliged to wait until 1907, when the time happened to be exactly ripe.

The novel has been allowed to circulate in Russia, because it shows absolutely no sympathy with the Revolution or with the spirit of political liberty. Men who waste their time in the discussion of political rights or in the endeavour to obtain them are ridiculed by Sanin. The summum bonum is personal, individual happiness, the complete gratification of desire. Thus, those who are working for the enfranchisement of the Russian people, for relief from the bureaucracy, and for more political independence, not only have no sympathy with the book--they hate it, because it treats their efforts with contempt. Some of them have gone so far as to express the belief that the author is in a conspiracy with the government to bring ridicule on their cause, and to defeat their ever living hopes of better days. However this may be, Sanin is not in the least a politically revolutionary book, and critics of that school see no real talent or literary power in its pages.

But, sinister and damnable as its tendency is, the novel is written with extraordinary skill, and Artsybashev is a man to be reckoned with. The style has that simplicity and directness so characteristic of Russian realism, and the characters are by no means sign-posts of various opinions; they are living and breathing human beings. I am sorry that such a book as Sanin has ever been written; but it cannot be black-balled from the republic of letters.

It is possible that it is a florescence not merely of the author's genius, but of his sickness. The glorification of Sanin's bodily strength, of Karsavina's female voluptuousness, and the loud call to physical joy which rings through the work may be an emanation of tuberculosis as well as that of healthy mental conviction. Shut out from active happiness, Artsybashev may have taken this method of vicarious delight.

The bitterness of his own enforced resignation of active happiness and the terror inspired by his own disease are incarnated in a decidedly interesting character, Semionov, who, although still able to walk about when we first see him, is dying of consumption. He has none of the hopefulness and cheerfulness so often symptomatic of that malady; he is peevish, irritable, and at times enraged by contact with his healthy friends. After a frightful attack of coughing, he says: "I often think that soon I shall be lying in complete darkness. You understand, with my nose fallen in and my limbs decayed. And above me, where you are on the earth, everything will go on, exactly as it does now, while I still am permitted to see it. You will be living then, you will look at this very moon, you will breathe, you will pass over my grave; perhaps you will stop there a moment and despatch some necessity. And I shall lie and become rotten."

His death at the hospital in the night, with his friends looking on, is powerfully and minutely described. The fat, stupid priest goes through the last ceremonies, and is dully amazed at the contempt he receives from Sanin.

Sanin's beautiful sister Lyda is ruined by a worthless but entirely conventional officer. Her remorse on finding that she is with child is perfectly natural, but is ridiculed by her brother, who saves her from suicide. He is not in the least ashamed of her conduct, and tells her she has no reason for loss of pride; indeed, he does not think of blaming the officer. He is ready to commit incest with his sister, whose physical charm appeals to him; but she is not sufficiently emancipated for that, so he advises her to get married with a friend who loves her, before the child is born. This is finally satisfactorily arranged. Later, Sanin, not because he disapproves of the libertine officer's affair with his sister, but because he regards the officer as a blockhead, treats him with scant courtesy; and the officer, hidebound by convention, sees no way out but a challenge to a duel. The scene when the two brother officers bring the formal challenge to Sanin is the only scene in the novel marked by. genuine humour, and is also the only scene where we are in complete sympathy with the hero. One of the delegates has all the stiff courtesy and ridiculous formality which he regards as entirely consistent with his errand; the other is a big, blundering fellow, who has previously announced himself as a disciple of Tolstoi. To Sanin's philosophy of life, duelling is as absurd as religion, morality, or any other stupid conventionality; and his cold, ruthless logic makes short work of the polite phrases of the two ambassadors. Both are amazed at his positive refusal to fight, and hardly know which way to turn; the disciple of Tolstoi splutters with rage because Sanin shows up his inconsistency with his creed; both try to treat him like an outcast, but make very little progress. Sanin informs them that he will not fight a duel, because he does not wish to take the officer's life, and because he does not care to risk his own; but that if the officer attempts any physical attack upon him in the street, he will thrash him on the spot. Enraged and bewildered by Sanin's unconventional method of dealing with the difficulty, the discomfited emissaries withdraw. Later, the challenger meets Sanin in the street, and goaded to frenzy by his calm and contemptuous stare, strikes him with a whip; he immediately receives in the face a terrible blow from his adversary's fist, delivered with all his colossal strength. A friend carries him to his lodgings, and there he commits suicide. From the conventional point of view, this was the only course left to him.

In direct contrast to most Russian novels, the man here is endowed with limitless power of will, and the women characterised by weakness. The four women in the story, Sanin's sister Lyda, the pretty school-teacher Karsavina, Jurii's sister, engaged to a young scientist, who during the engagement cordially invites her brother to accompany him to a house of ill-fame, and the mother of Sanin, are all thoroughly conventional, and are meant to be. They are living under what Sanin regards as the tyranny of social convention. He treats his mother's shocked amazement with brutal scorn; he ridicules Lyda's shame at being enceinte; he seduces Karsavina, at the very time when she is in love with Jurii, and reasons with cold patience against her subsequent remorse. It is clear that Artsybashev believes that for some time to come women will not accept the gospel of uncompromising egoism.

The most interesting character in the book, apart from the hero, is Jurii, who might easily have been a protagonist in one of Turgenev's tragedies. He is the typical Russian, the highly educated young man with a diseased will. He is characterised by that indecision which has been the bane of so many Russians. All through the book he seeks in vain for some philosophy of life, some guiding principle. He has abandoned faith in religion, his former enthusiasm for political freedom has cooled, but he simply cannot live without some leading Idea. He is an acute sufferer from that mental sickness diagnosed by nearly all writers of Russia. He envies and at the same time despises Sanin for his cheerful energy. Finally, unable to escape from the perplexities of his own thinking, he commits suicide. His friends stand about his grave at the funeral, and one of them foolishly asks Sanin to make some appropriate remarks. Sanin, who always says exactly what he thinks, and abhors all forms of hypocrisy, delivers the following funeral oration--heartily endorsed by the reader--in one sentence: "The world has now one blockhead the less." The horror-stricken consternation of his friends fills Sanin with such scorn that he leaves the town, and we last see him in an open field in the country, giving a glad shout of recognition to the dawn.

The motto that Artsybashev has placed at the beginning of the novel is taken from Ecclesiastes vii. 29: "God hath made man upright: but they have sought out many inventions." This same text was used by Kipling as the title of one of his books, but used naturally in a quite different way. The Devil has here cited Scripture for his purpose. The hero of the novel is an absolutely sincere, frank, and courageous Advocatus Diabou. He is invariably calm and collected; he never loses his temper in an argument; he questions the most fundamental beliefs and principles with remorseless logic. Two of his friends are arguing about Christianity; "at least," says one, "you will not deny that its influence has been good." "I don't deny that," says the other. Then Sanin remarks quietly, "But I deny it!" and he adds, with a calmness provoking to the two disputants, "Christianity has played an abominable role in history, and the name of Jesus Christ will for some time yet oppress humanity like a curse."

Sanin insists that it is not necessary to have any theory of life, or to be guided by any principle; that God may exist or He may not; He does not at any rate bother about us. The real rational life of man should be exactly like a bird. He should be controlled wholly by the desire of the moment. The bird wishes to alight on a branch, and so he alights; then he wishes to fly, so he flies. That is rational, declares Sanin; that is the way men and women should live, without principles, without plans, and without regrets. Drunkenness and adultery are nothing to be ashamed of, nor in any sense to be called degrading. Nothing that gives pleasure can ever be degrading. The love of strong drink and the lust for woman are not sins; in fact, there is no such thing as sin. These passions are manly and natural, and what is natural cannot be wrong. There is in Sanin's doctrine something of Nietzsche and more of Rousseau.

Sanin himself is not at all a contemptible character. He is not argumentative except when dragged into an argument; he does not attempt to convert others to his views. He has the inner light which we more often associate with Christian faith. In the midst of his troubled and self-tortured comrades, Sanin stands like a pillar, calm, unshakable. He has found absolute peace, absolute harmony with life. He thinks, talks, and acts exactly as he chooses, without any regard whatever to the convenience or happiness of any one else. There is something refreshing about this perfectly healthy, clear-eyed, quiet, composed, resolute man--whose way of life is utterly unaffected by public opinion, who simply does not care a straw for anything or anybody but himself. Thus he recognises his natural foe in Christianity, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in His Russian interpreter, Leo Tolstoi. For if Christianity teaches anything, it teaches that man must live contrary to his natural instincts. The endeavour of all so-called "new religions" is rootless, because it is an attempt to adapt Christianity to modern human convenience. Much better is Sanin's way: he sees clearly that no adaptation is possible, and logically fights Christianity as the implacable enemy of the natural man.

There are many indications that one of the great battle-grounds of Christianity in the near future is to be the modern novel. For many years there have been plenty of attacks on the supernatural side of Christianity, and on Christianity as a religion; nearly all its opponents, however, have treated its ethics, its practical teachings, with respect. The novel Sanin is perhaps the boldest, but it is only one of many attacks that are now being made on Christianity as a system of morals; as was the case with the Greeks and Romans, scepticism in morals follows hard on scepticism in religion. Those who believe in Christianity ought to rejoice in this open and fair fight; they ought to welcome it as a complete unmasking of the foe. If the life according to Sanin is really practicable, if it is a good substitute for the life according to the Christian Gospel, it is desirable that it should be clearly set forth, and its working capacity demonstrated. For the real test of Christianity, and the only one given by its Founder, is its practical value as a way of life. It can never be successfully attacked by historical research or by destructive criticism--all such attacks leave it precisely as they found it. Those who are determined to destroy Christianity, and among its relentless foes have always been numbered men of great courage and great ability, must prove that its promises of peace and rest to those who really follow it are false, and that its influence on society and on the individual is bad.

IX

ANDREEV

LEONID ANDREEV is at this moment regarded by many Russians as the foremost literary artist among the younger school of writers. He was born at Orel, the birthplace of Turgenev, in 1871, and is thus only two years younger than Gorki. He began life as a lawyer at Moscow, but according to his own statement, he had only one case, and lost that. He very soon abandoned law for literature, as so many writers have done, and his rise has been exceedingly rapid. He was appointed police-court reporter on the Moscow Courier, where he went through the daily drudgery without attracting any attention. But when he published in this newspaper a short story, Gorki sent a telegram to the office, demanding to know the real name of the writer who signed himself Leonid Andreev. He was informed that the signature was no pseudonym. This notice from Gorki gave the young man immediate prominence. Not long after, he published another story in the Russian periodical Life; into the editor's rooms dashed the famous critic Merezhkovski, who enquired whether it was Chekhov or Gorki that had selected this assumed name.

Andreev himself says that he has learned much from Tolstoi, the great Tolstoi of the sixties and seventies, also from Nietzsche, whom he reads with enthusiasm, and whose most characteristic book, Also Sprach Zarathustra, he translated into Russian. He has read Poe with profit, but he testifies that his greatest teacher in composition is the Bible. In a letter to a young admirer, he wrote: "I thank you for your kind dedication. . . . I note that in one place you write about the Bible. Yes, that is the best teacher of all--the Bible."*

* Most of the biographical information in this paragraph I have taken from an interesting article in The Independent for 29 July 1909, by Ivan Lavretski.

Andreev has the gift of admiration, and loves to render homage where homage is due, having dedicated his first book to Gorki, and his story of ÊThe Seven Who Were Hanged to Tolstoi. His style, while marked by the typical yet always startling Russian simplicity, is nevertheless entirely his own, and all his tales and plays are stamped by powerful individuality. He is fast becoming an international celebrity. His terrible picture of war, The Red Laugh, has been translated into German, French, and English, two of his dramas, Anathema and To the Stars, have been published in America, and other of his short stories are known everywhere in Germany.

The higher the scale in human intelligence, the more horrible and the more ridiculous does war appear. That men engaged in peaceful and intellectual pursuits should leave their families, their congenial work, their pleasant associations, and go out to torture and murder men of similar tastes and activities, and become themselves transformed into hideous wild beasts, has a combination of horror and absurdity that peculiarly impresses a people so highly sensitive, so thoroughly intellectual, and so kind-hearted as the Russians. All Russian war-literature, and there is much of it, points back to Tolstoi's Sevastopol, where the great novelist stripped warfare of all its sentiment and patriotic glitter, and revealed its dull, sordid misery as well as its hellish tragedies. What Tolstoi did for the Crimean War, Garshin did for the war with Turkey in the seventies. I have not seen it mentioned, but I suspect that Andreev owes much to the reading of this brilliant author. Garshin was an unquestionable genius; if he had lived, I think he might have become the real successor to Tolstoi, a title that has been bestowed upon Chekhov, Gorki, and Andreev, and has not yet been earned by any man. But like nearly all Russian authors, he suffered from intense melancholia, and in 1888 committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. His short story Four Days on the Field of Slaughter first brought him into public notice. One cannot read Andreev's Red Laugh to-day without thinking of it.

"On the edge of the wood there was visible something red, floating here and there. Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at me in silence with great, terrified eyes. Out of his mouth poured a stream of blood. Yes, I remember it very well." This is the red laugh of Andreev, though until the appearance of his book it lacked the appropriate name. Garshin describes how a Russian soldier stabs a Fellah to death with his bayonet, and then, too badly injured to move, lies for four days and nights, in shivering cold and fearful heat, beside the putrefying corpse of his dead antagonist. "I did that. I had no wish to do it. I wished no one evil, as I left home for the war. The thought that I should kill a man did not enter my head. I thought only of my own danger. And I went to him and did this. Well, and what happened? O fool, O idiot! This unfortunate Egyptian is still less guilty. Before they packed them on a steamer like herrings in a box, and brought them to Constantinople, he had never heard of Russia, or of Bulgaria. They told him to go and he went."

In the Diary of Private lvanov, Garshin gave more pictures of the hideous suffering of war, with a wonderful portrait of the commander of the company, who is so harshly tyrannical that his men hate him, and resolve to slay him in the battle. But he survives both open and secret foes, and at the end of the conflict they find him lying prostrate, his whole body shaken with sobs, and saying brokenly, "Fifty-two! Fifty-two!" Fifty-two of his company had been killed, and despite his cruelty to them, he had loved them all like children.

Garshin wrote other tales, among them a poetically beautiful story of a tree, Attalea Princeps, that reminds one somewhat of Björnson. But his chief significance is as a truthful witness to the meaningless maiming and murder of war, and his attitude is precisely similar to that of Andreev, and both follow Tolstoi.

Andreev's Red Laugh ought to be read in America as a contrast to our numerous war stories, where war is pictured as a delightful and exciting tournament. This book has not a single touch of patriotic sentiment, not a suggestion of "Hurrah for our side!" The soldiers are on the field because they were sent there, and the uninjured are too utterly tired, too tormented with lack of sleep, too hungry and thirsty to let out a single whoop. The first sight of the Red Laugh reminds us of the picturesque story of Napoleon's soldier that Browning has immortalised in the Incident of the French Camp. Tolstoi mentions the same event in Sevastopol, and his version of it would have pleased Owen Wister's Virginian more than Browning's. In Andreev there is no graceful gesture, no French pose, no "smiling joy"; but there is the nerve-shattering red laugh. The officer who tells the story in the first half of the book narrates how a young volunteer came up to him and saluted. The appearance of his face was so tensely white that the officer enquires, "Are you afraid?" Suddenly a stream of blood bursts from the young man's body, and his deadly pale face turns into something unspeakable, a toothless laugh--the red laugh.

In this gruesome tale of the realities of war, Andreev has given shocking physical details of torn and bleeding bodies, but true to the theme that animates all his books, he has concentrated the main interest on the Mind. Soldiers suffer in the flesh, but infinitely more in the mind. War points chiefly not to the grave, nor to the hospital, but to the madhouse. All forms of insanity are bred by the horror and fatigue of the marches and battles: many shoot themselves, many become raging maniacs, many become gibbering idiots. Every man who has studied warfare knows that the least of all perils is the bullet of the enemy, for only a small proportion are released by that. The innumerable and subtle forms of disease, bred by exposure and privation, constitute the real danger. Andreev is the first to show that the most common and awful form of disease among Russian soldiers is the disease of the brain. The camp becomes a vast madhouse, with the peculiar feature that the madmen are at large. The hero of the story loses both his legs, and apparently completely recovered in health otherwise, returns home to his family, and gazes wistfully at his bicycle. A sudden desire animates him to write out the story of the Japanese war; in the process he becomes insane and dies. His brother then attempts to complete the narrative from the scattered, confused notes, but to his horror, whenever he approaches the desk, the phantom of the dead man is ever there, busily writing: he can hear the pen squeak on the paper.

No more terrible protest against war has ever been written than Andreev's Red Laugh. It shows not merely the inexpressible horror of the battlefield and the dull, weary wretchedness of the men on the march, but it follows out the farthest ramifications flowing from the central cause: the constant tragedies in the families, the letters received after the telegraph has announced the death of the writer, the insane wretches who return to the homes they left in normal health, the whole accumulation of woe.

The first two words of the book are Madness and Horror! and they might serve as a text for Andreev's complete works. There seems to be some taint in his mind which forces him to dwell forever on the abnormal and diseased. He is not exactly decadent, but he is decidedly pathological. Professor Brückner has said of Andreev's stories, "I do not recall a single one which would not get fearfully on a man's nerves." He has deepened the universal gloom of Russian fiction, not by descending into the slums with Gorki, but by depicting life as seen through the strange light of a decaying mind. He has often been compared, especially among the Germans, with Edgar Allan Poe. But he is really not in the least like Poe. Poe's horrors are nearly all unreal fantasies, that vaguely haunt our minds like the shadow of a dream. Andreev is a realist, like his predecessors and contemporaries. His style is always concrete and definite, always filled with the sense of fact. There is almost something scientific in his collection of incurables.

The most cheerful thing he has written is perhaps The Seven Who Were Hanged. This is horrible enough to bring out a cold sweat; but it is redeemed, as the work of Dostoevski is, by a vast pity and sympathy for the condemned wretches. This is the book he dedicated to Tolstoi, in recognition of the constant efforts of the old writer to have capital punishment abolished. No sentimental sympathy with murderers is shown here; he carries no flowers to the cells where each of the seven in solitude awaits his fate. Nor are the murderers in the least degree depicted as heroes--they are all different men and women, but none of them resembles the Hero-Murderer of romance.

The motive underlying this story is shown plainly by the author in an interesting letter which he wrote to the American translator, and which is published at the beginning of the book. "The misfortune of us all is that we know so little, even nothing, about one another--neither about the soul, nor the life, the sufferings, the habits, the inclinations, the aspirations, of one another. Literature, which I have the honour to serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself is that of wiping out boundaries and distances." That is, the aim of Andreev, like that of all prominent Russian novelists, is to study the secret of secrets, the human heart. And like all specialists in humanity, like Browning, for example, he feels the impossibility of success.

"About what's under lock and key, Man's soul!"

Farther on in his letter, we read: "My task was to point out the horror and the iniquity of capital punishment under any circumstances. The horror of capital punishment is great when it falls to the lot of courageous and honest people whose only guilt is their excess of love and the sense of righteousness--in such instances, conscience revolts. But the rope is still more horrible when it forms the noose around the necks of weak and ignorant people. And however strange it may appear, I look with a lesser grief and suffering upon the execution of the revolutionists, such as Werner and Musya, than upon the strangling of ignorant murderers, miserable in mind and heart, like Yanson and Tsiganok." Spoken like Dostoevski!

These seven are an extraordinary group, ranging from calm, courageous, enlightened individuals to creatures of such dull stupidity that one wonders if they ever once were men. Each spends the intervening days in his cell in a different manner. One goes through daily exercises of physical culture. One receives a visit from his father and mother, another from his old mother alone. There is not a false touch in the sentiment in these painful scenes. The midnight journey to the place of execution is vividly portrayed, and the different sensations of each of the seven are strikingly indicated. At the last, Musya, who is a typical Russian heroine in her splendid resolution and boundless tenderness, becomes the soul of the whole party, and tries to help them all by her gentle conduct and her words of love. The whole spirit of this book is profoundly Christian. One feels as if he were taken back in history, and were present at the execution of a group of early Christian martyrs. There are thousands of women in Russia like Musya, and they are now, as they were in the days of Turgenev, the one hope of the country.

In Merezhkovski's interesting work Tolstoi as Man and Artist, the author says: "We are accustomed to think that the more abstract thought is, the more cold and dispassionate it is. It is not so; or at least it is not so with us. From the heroes of Dostoevski we may see how abstract thought may be passionate, how metaphysical theories and deductions are rooted, not only in cold reason, but in the heart, emotions, and will. There are thoughts which pour oil on the fire of the passions and inflame man's flesh and blood more powerfully than the most unrestrained license. There is a logic of the passions, but there are also passions in logic. And these are essentially our new passions, peculiar to us and alien to the men of former civilisations. . . . They feel deeply because they think deeply; they suffer endlessly because they are endlessly deliberate; they dare to will because they have dared to think. And the farther, apparently, it is from life--the more abstract, the more fiery is their thought, the deeper it enters into their lives. O strange young Russia!"

Merezhkovski is talking of the heroes of Dostoevski; but his remark is applicable to the work of nearly all Russian novelists, and especially to Chekhov and Andreev. It is a profound criticism that, if once grasped by the foreign reader, will enable him to understand much in Russian fiction that otherwise would be a sealed book. Every one must have noticed how Russians are hag-ridden by an idea; but no one except Merezhkovski has observed the passion of abstract thought. In some characters, such as those Dostoevski has given us, it leads to deeds of wild absurdity; in Andreev, it usually leads to madness.

One of Andreev's books is indeed a whole commentary on the remark of Merezhkovski quoted above. The English title of the translation is A Dilemma, but as the translator has explained, the name of the story in the original is Thought (Mysl). The chief character is a physician, Kerzhentsev, who reminds one constantly of Dostoevski's Raskolnikov, but whose states of mind are even more subtly analysed. No one should read this story unless his nerves are firm, for the outcome of the tale is such as to make almost any reader for a time doubt his own sanity. It is a curious study of the border-line between reason and madness. The physician, who rejoices in his splendid health, bodily vigour, and absolute equilibrium of mind, quietly determines to murder his best friend--to murder him openly and violently, and to go about it in such a way that he himself will escape punishment. He means to commit the murder to punish the man's wife because she had rejected him and married his friend, whom she loves with all the strength of her powerful nature. His problem, therefore, is threefold: he must murder the man, the man's wife must know that he is the murderer, and he must escape punishment. He therefore begins by feigning madness, and acting so well that his madness comes upon him only at long intervals; at a dinner-party he has a violent fit; but he waits a whole month before having another attack. Everything is beautifully planned; he smashes a plate with his fist, but no one observes that he has taken care previously to cover the plate with his napkin, so that his hand will not be cut. His friends are all too sorry for him to have any suspicion of a sinister intention; and his friend Alexis is fatuously secure. Not so the wife; she has an instinctive fear of the coming murder. One evening, when all three are together, the doctor picks up a heavy iron paper-weight, and Alexis says that with such an instrument a murderer might break a man's head. This is interesting. "It was precisely the head, and precisely with that thing that I had planned to crush it, and now that same head was telling how it would all end." Therefore he leads Alexis into a dispute by insisting that the paper-weight is too light. Alexis becomes angry, and actually makes the doctor take the object in his hand, and they rehearse his own murder. They are stopped by the wife, who, terror-stricken, says that she never likes such jokes. Both men burst into hearty laughter.

A short time after, the doctor crushes the skull of Alexis in the presence of his wife. In the midst of the horror and confusion of the household, the murderer slips out, goes home, and is resting calmly, thinking with intense delight of the splendid success of the plan, and of the extraordinary skill he had shown in its conception and execution; when, just as he was dropping off to sleep in delicious drowsiness, there "languidly" entered into his head this thought: it speaks to his mind in the third person, as though somebody else had actually said it: It is very possible that Dr. Kerzhentsev is really insane. He thought that he simulated, but he is really insane--insane at this very instant.

After this poison has entered his soul, his condition can be easily imagined. A terrible debate begins in his own mind, for he is fighting against himself for his own reason. Every argument that he can think of to persuade himself of his sanity he marshals; but there are plenty of arguments on the other side. The story is an excellent example of what Merezhkovski must mean by the passion of thought.

Another illustration of Andreev's uncanny power is seen in the short story Silence. A father does not understand his daughter's silence, and treats her nervous suffering with harsh practicality. She commits suicide; the mother is stricken with paralysis; silence reigns in the house. Silence. The father beseeches his wife to speak to him; there is no speculation in her wide-open eyes. He cries aloud to his dead daughter. Silence. Nothing but silence, and the steady approach of madness.

Andreev is an unflinching realist, with all the Russian power of the concrete phrase. He would never say, in describing a battle, that the Russians "suffered a severe loss." He would turn a magnifying glass on each man. But, although he is a realist and above all a psychologist, he is also a poet. In the sketch Silence there is the very spirit of poetry. The most recent bit of writing by him that I have seen is called a Fantasy*--Life is so Beautiful to the Resurrected. This is a meditation in a graveyard, written in the manner of one of Turgenev's Poems in Prose, though lacking something of that master's exquisite beauty of style. It is, however, not sentimentally conventional, but original. The poetic quality in Andreev animates all his dramas, particularly To the Stars.

* Translated in Current Literature, New York, for September 1910.

X

KUPRIN'S PICTURE OF GARRISON LIFE

As Tolstoi, Garshin, and Andreev have shown the horrors of war, so Kuprin* has shown the utter degradation and sordid misery of garrison life. If Russian army posts in time of peace bear even a remote resemblance to the picture given in Kuprin's powerful novel In Honour's Name,** one would think that the soldiers there entombed would heartily rejoice at the outbreak of war--would indeed welcome any catastrophe, provided it released them from such an Inferno. It is interesting to compare stories of American garrisons, or such clever novels as Mrs. Diver's trilogy of British army posts in India, with the awful revelations made by Kuprin. Among these Russian officers and soldiers there is not one gleam of patriotism to glorify the drudgery; there is positively no ideal, even dim-descried. The officers are a collection of hideously selfish, brutal, drunken, licentious beasts; their mental horizon is almost inconceivably narrow, far narrower than that of mediæval monks in a monastery. The soldiers are in worse plight than prisoners, being absolutely at the mercy of the alcoholic caprices of their superiors. A favourite device of the officer is to jam the trumpet against the trumpeter's mouth, when he is trying to obey orders by sounding the call; then they laugh at him derisively as he spits out blood and broken teeth. The common soldiers are beaten and hammered unmercifully in the daily drill, so that they are all bewildered, being in such a state of terror that it is impossible for them to perform correctly even the simplest manoeuvres. The only officer in this story who treats his men with any consideration is a libertine, who seduces the peasants' daughters in the neighbourhood, and sends them back to their parents with cash payments for their services.

* Kuprin was born in 1870, and was for a time an officer in the Russian army.

** Translated by W. F. Harvey: the French translation is called Une Petite Garnison Russe; the German, Das Duell, after the original title.

If Kuprin's story be true, one does not need to look far for the utter failure of the Russian troops in the Japanese war; the soldiers are here represented as densely ignorant, drilling in abject terror of their officers' fists and boots, and knowing nothing whatever of true formations in attack or defence. As for the officers, they are much worse than the soldiers: their mess is nothing but an indescribably foul alcoholic den, where sodden drunkenness and filthy talk are the steady routine. They are all gamblers and debauchees; as soon as a sum of money can be raised among them, they visit the brothel. The explanation of the beastly habits of these representatives of the Tsar is given in the novel in this wise: "Yes, they are all alike, even the best and most tender-hearted among them. At home they are splendid fathers of families and excellent husbands; but as soon as they approach the barracks they become low-minded, cowardly, and idiotic barbarians. You ask me why this is, and I answer: Because nobody can find a grain of sense in what is called military service. You know how all children like to play at war. Well, the human race has had its childhood--a time of incessant and bloody war; but war was not then one of the scourges of mankind, but a continued, savage, exultant national feast to which daring bands of youths marched forth, meeting victory or death with joy and pleasure. . . . Mankind, however, grew in age and wisdom; people got weary of the former rowdy, bloody games, and became more serious, thoughtful, and cautious. The old Vikings of song and saga were designated and treated as pirates. The soldier no longer regarded war as a bloody but enjoyable occupation, and had often to be dragged to the enemy with a noose round his neck. The former terrifying, ruthless, adored atamens* have been changed into cowardly, cautious tschinovnih,** who get along painfully enough on never adequate pay. Their courage is of a new and quite moist kind, for it is invariably derived from the glass. Military discipline still exists, but it is based on threats and dread, and undermined by a dull, mutual hatred. . . . And all this abomination is carefully hidden under a close veil of tinsel and finery, and foolish, empty ceremonies, in all ages the charlatan's conditio sine quâ non. Is not this comparison of mine between the priesthood and the military caste interesting and logical? Here the riassa and the censer; there the gold-laced uniform and the clank of arms. Here bigotry, hypocritical humility, sighs and sugary, sanctimonious, unmeaning phrases; there the same odious grimaces, although its method and means are of another kind--swaggering manners, bold and scornful looks--'God help the man who dares to insult me!'--padded shoulders, cock-a-hoop defiance. Both the former and the latter class live like parasites on society, and are profoundly conscious of that fact, but fear--especially for their bellies' sake--to publish it. And both remind one of certain little blood-sucking animals which eat their way most obstinately into the surface of a foreign body in proportion as it is slippery and steep."

* Officers.

** Officials.

Apart from the terrible indictment of army life and military organisation that Kuprin has given, the novel In Honour's Name is an interesting story with living characters. There is not a single good woman in the book: the officers' wives are licentious, unprincipled, and eaten up with social ambition. The chief female character is a subtle, clever, heartless, diabolical person, who plays on her lover's devotion in the most sinister manner, and eventually brings him to the grave by a device that startles the reader by its cold-blooded, calculating cruelty. Surely no novelists outside of Russia have drawn such evil women. The hero, Romashov, is once more the typical Russian whom we have met in every Russian novelist, a talker, a dreamer, with high ideals, harmlessly sympathetic, and without one grain of resolution or will-power. He spends all his time in aspirations, sighs, and tears--and never by any chance accomplishes anything. The author's mouthpiece in the story is the drunkard Nasanski, who prophesies of the good time of the brotherhood of man far in the future. This is to be brought about, not by the teachings of Tolstoi, which he ridicules, but by self-assertion. This self-assertion points the way to Artsybashev's Sanin, although in Kuprin it does not take on the form of absolute selfishness. One of Nasanski's alcoholic speeches seems to contain the doctrine of the whole book: "Yes, a new, glorious, and wonderful time is at hand. I venture to say this, for I myself have lived a good deal in the world, read, seen, experienced, and suffered much. When I was a schoolboy, the old crows and jackdaws croaked into our ears: 'Love your neighbour as yourself, and know that gentleness, obedience, and the fear of God are man's fairest adornments.' Then came certain strong, honest, fanatical men who said: 'Come and join us, and we'll throw ourselves into the abyss so that the coming race shall live in light and freedom.' But I never understood a word of this. Who do you suppose is going to show me, in a convincing way, in what manner I am linked to this 'neighbour' of mine--damn him! who, you know, may be a miserable slave, a Hottentot, a leper, or an idiot? . . . Can any reasonable being tell me why I should crush my head so that the generation in the year 3200 may attain a higher standard of happiness? . . . Love of humanity is burnt out and has vanished from the heart of man. In its stead shall come a new creed, a new view of life that shall last to the world's end; and this view of life consists in the individual's love for himself, for his own powerful intelligence, and the infinite riches of his feelings and perceptions. . . Ah, a time will come when the fixed belief in one's own Ego will cast its blessed beams over mankind as did once the fiery tongues of the Holy Ghost over the Apostles' heads. Then there shall be no longer slaves and masters; no maimed or cripples; no malice, no vices, no pity, no hate. Men shall be gods. How shall I dare to deceive, insult, or ill-treat another man, in whom I see and feel my fellow, who, like myself, is a god? Then, and then only, shall life be rich and beautiful.... Our daily life shall be a pleasurable toil, an enfranchised science, a wonderful music, an everlasting merrymaking. Love, free and sovereign, shall become the world's religion."