CHAPTER V

THE EPOCH OF REFORM

For seven years after the death of Belinsky in 1848, all literary development ceased. This period was the darkest hour before the dawn of the second great renascence of Russian literature. Criticism was practically non-existent; the Slavophiles were forbidden to write; the Westernizers were exiled. An increased severity of censorship, an extreme suspicion and drastic measures on the part of the Government were brought about by the fears which the Paris revolution of 1848 had caused. The Westernizers felt the effects of this as much as the Slavophiles; a group of young literary men, schoolmasters and officers, the Petrashevtsy, called after their leader, a Foreign Office official PETRASHEVSKY, met together on Fridays and debated on abstract subjects; they discussed the emancipation of the serfs, read Fourier and Lamennais, and considered the establishment of a secret press: the scheme of a popular propaganda was thought of, but nothing had got beyond talk--and the whole thing was in reality only talk--when the society was discovered by the police and its members were punished with the utmost severity. Twenty-one of them were condemned to death, among whom was Dostoyevsky, who, being on the army list, was accused of treason. They were reprieved on the scaffold; some sent into penal servitude in Siberia, and some into the army. This marked one of the darkest hours in the history of Russian literature. And from this date until 1855, complete stagnation reigned. In 1855 the Emperor Nicholas died during the Crimean War; and with the accession of his son Alexander II, a new era dawned on Russian literature, the Era of the Great Reforms. The Crimean War and the reforms which followed it--the emancipation of the serfs, the creation of a new judicial system, and the foundation of local self-government--stabbed the Russian soul into life, relieved it of its gag, produced a great outburst of literature which enlarged and enriched the literature of the world, and gave to the world three of its greatest novelists: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky.

IVAN TURGENEV (1816-83), whose name is of Tartar origin, came of an old family which had frequently distinguished itself in the annals of Russian literature by a fearless outspokenness. He began his literary career by writing verse (1843); but, like Maupassant, he soon understood that verse was not his true vehicle, and in 1847 gave up writing verse altogether; in that year he published in _The Contemporary_ his first sketch of peasant life, _Khor and Kalinych_, which afterwards formed part of his _Sportsman's Sketches_, twenty-four of which he collected and published in 1852. The Government rendered Turgenev the same service as it had done to Pushkin, in exiling him to his own country estate for two years. When, after the two years, this forced exile came to an end, he went into another kind of exile of his own accord; he lived at first at Baden, and then in Paris, and only reappeared in Russia from time to time; this accounts for the fact that, although Turgenev belongs chronologically to the epoch of the great reforms, the Russia which he paints was really more like the Russia before that epoch; and when he tried to paint the Russia that was contemporary to him his work gave rise to much controversy.

His _Rudin_ was published in 1856, _The Nest of Gentlefolk_ in 1859, _On the Eve_ in 1860, _Fathers and Sons_ in 1862, _Smoke_ in 1867. Turgenev did for Russian literature what Byron did for English literature; he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe. And in Europe his work reaped a glorious harvest of praise. Flaubert was astounded by him, George Sand looked up to him as to a Master, Taine spoke of his work as being the finest artistic production since Sophocles. In Turgenev's work, Europe not only discovered Turgenev, but it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the naturalness of the Russian character; and this came as a revelation. For the first time, Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin was the first to paint; for the first time Europe came into contact with the Russian soul; and it was the sharpness of this revelation which accounts for the fact of Turgenev having received in the West an even greater meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled to.

In Russia, Turgenev attained almost instant popularity. His _Sportsman's Sketches_ made him known, and his _Nest of Gentlefolk_ made him not only famous but universally popular. In 1862 the publication of his masterpiece _Fathers and Sons_ dealt his reputation a blow. The revolutionary elements in Russia regarded his hero, Bazarov, as a calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary elements in Russia looked upon _Fathers and Sons_ as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. This, perhaps, could only happen in Russia to this extent; and for the same reason as that which made Russian criticism didactic. The conflicting elements of Russian society were so terribly in earnest in fighting their cause, that any one whom they did not regard as definitely for them was at once considered an enemy, and an impartial delineation of any character concerned in the political struggle was bound to displease both parties. If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must either be a hero or a scoundrel, if either the revolutionaries or the reactionaries were to be pleased. If in England the militant suffragists suddenly had a huge mass of educated opinion behind them and a still larger mass of educated public opinion against them, and some one were to draw in a novel an impartial picture of a suffragette, the same thing would happen. On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes are concerned, it has happened in the case of Mr. Wells. But, if Turgenev's popularity suffered a shock in Russia from which it with difficulty recovered, in Western Europe it went on increasing. Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that was eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hall-mark of good taste.

In Russia, Turgenev's work recovered from the unpopularity caused by his _Fathers and Sons_ when Nihilism became a thing of the past, and revolution took an entirely different shape; but, with the growing up of new generations, his popularity suffered in a different way and for different reasons. A new element came into Russian literature with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and later with Gorky, and Turgenev's work began to seem thin and artificial beside the creations of these stronger writers; but in Russia, where Turgenev's work has the advantage of being read in the original, it had an asset which ensured it a permanent and safe harbour, above and beyond the fluctuations of literary taste, the strife of political parties, and the conflict of social ideals; and that was its art, its poetry, its style, which ensured it a lasting and imperishable niche among the great classics of Russian literature. And there it stands now. Turgenev's work in Russia is no longer disputed or a subject of dispute. It is taken for granted; and, whatever the younger generation will read and admire, they will always read and admire Turgenev first. His work is a necessary part of the intellectual baggage of any educated man and, especially, of the educated adolescent.

The position of Tennyson in England offers in a sense a parallel to that of Turgenev in Russia. Tennyson, like Turgenev, enjoyed during his lifetime not only the popularity of the masses, but the appreciation of all that was most eclectic in the country. Then a reaction set in. Now I believe the young generation think nothing of Tennyson at all. And yet nothing is so sure as his permanent place in English literature; and that permanent place is secured to him by his incomparable diction. So it is with Turgenev. One cannot expect the younger generation to be wildly excited about Turgenev's ideas, characters, and problems. They belong to an epoch which is dead. At the same time, one cannot help thinking that the most advanced of the symbolist writers would not have been sorry had he happened by chance to write _Bezhin Meadow_ and the _Poems in Prose_. Just so one cannot help thinking that the most modern of our poets, had he by accident written _The Revenge_ or _Tears, Idle Tears_, would not have thrown them in the fire!

There is, indeed, something in common between Tennyson and Turgenev. They both have something mid-Victorian in them. They are both idyllic, and both of them landscape-lovers and lords of language. They neither of them had any very striking message to preach; they both of them seem to halt, except on rare occasions, on the threshold of passion; they both of them have a rare stamp of nobility; and in both of them there is an element of banality. They both seem to a certain extent to be shut off from the world by the trees of old parks, where cultivated people are enjoying the air and the flowers and the shade, and where between the tall trees you get glimpses of silvery landscapes and limpid waters, and soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of course, there is more than this in Turgenev, but this is the main impression.

Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he describes beautifully from the outside, making you feel its existence, but not convincing you that he felt it himself; but on the other hand what an artist he is! How beautifully his pictures are painted; and how rich he is in poetic feeling!

Turgenev is above all things a poet. He carried on the work of Pushkin, and he did for Russian prose what Pushkin did for Russian poetry; he created imperishable models of style. His language has the same limpidity and absence of any blur that we find in Pushkin's work. His women have the same crystal radiance, transparent simplicity, and unaffected strength; his pictures of peasant life, and his country episodes have the same truth to nature; as an artist he had a severe sense of proportion, a perfect purity of outline, and an absolute harmony between the thought and the expression. Now that modern Europe and England have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is possible that a reaction will set in to the detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a certain extent this reaction has set in in Western Europe, as M. Haumant, one of Turgenev's ablest critics and biographers, pointed out not long ago. And, as the majority of Englishmen have not the advantage of reading him in the original, they will be unchecked in this reaction, if it comes about, by their appreciation of what is perhaps most durable in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev adequately, it would require an English poet gifted with a sense of form and of words as rare as that of Turgenev himself. However this may be, there is no doubt about the importance of Turgenev in the history of Russian literature, whatever the future generations in Russia or in Europe may think of his work. He was a great novelist besides being a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed his early _Sportsman's Sketches_ in freshness of inspiration and the perfection of artistic execution.

His _Bezhin Meadow_, where the children tell each other bogey stories in the evening, is a gem with which no other European literature has anything to compare. _The Singers_, _Death_, and many others are likewise incomparable. _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, to which Turgenev owed his great popularity, is quite perfect of its kind, with its gallery of portraits going back to the eighteenth century and to the period of Alexander I; its lovable, human hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a fit descendant of Pushkin's Tatiana, radiant as a star. All Turgenev's characters are alive; but, with the exception of his women and the hero of _Fathers and Sons_, they are alive in bookland rather than in real life.

George Meredith's characters, for instance, are alive, but they belong to a land or rather a planet of his own making, and we should never recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the street, but we do meet women sometimes who remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia Jane. The same is true with regard to Turgenev, although it is not another planet he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch to which his books exclusively belong, and which some critics say never existed at all. That is of no consequence. It exists for us in his work.

But perhaps what gave rise to accusations of unreality and caricature against Turgenev's characters, apart from the intenser reality of Tolstoy's creations, by comparison with which Turgenev's suffered, was that Turgenev, while professing to describe the present, and while believing that he was describing the present, was in reality painting an epoch that was already dead. _Rudin_, _Smoke_, and _On the Eve_ have suffered more from the passage of time. _Rudin_ is a pathetic picture of the type that Turgenev was so fond of depicting, the _génie sans portefeuille_, a latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his heart with words, and with his eloquence persuade others to believe in him, and succeed even in persuading himself to believe in himself, until the moment for action comes, when he breaks down. The subjects of _Smoke_ and _Spring Waters_ are almost identical; but, whereas _Spring Waters_ is one of the most poetical of Turgenev's achievements, _Smoke_ seems to-day the most banal, and almost to deserve Tolstoy's criticism: "In _Smoke_ there is hardly any love of anything, and very little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." _On the Eve_, which tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of the liberation of his country, suffers from being written at a time when real Russians were hard at work at that very task; and it was on this account that the novel found little favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside the reality.

It was followed by Turgenev's masterpiece, for which time can only heighten one's admiration. _Fathers and Sons_ is as beautifully constructed as a drama of Sophocles; the events move inevitably to a tragic close. There is not a touch of banality from beginning to end, and not an unnecessary word; the portraits of the old father and mother, the young Kirsanov, and all the minor characters are perfect; and amidst the trivial crowd, Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the strongest--the only strong character--that Turgenev created, the first Nihilist--for if Turgenev was not the first to invent the word, he was the first to apply it in this sense.

Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer type that recurs again and again in Russian history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the meek humble type of Ivan Durak. Lermontov's Pechorin was in some respects an anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many Russian rebels. He is the man who denies, to whom art is a silly toy, who detests abstractions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; he believes in nothing; he bows to nothing; he can break, but he cannot bend; he does break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, he retains his invincible pride, and

"not cowardly he puts off his helmet,"

and he dies "valiantly vanquished."

In the pages which describe his death Turgenev reaches the high-water mark of his art, his moving quality, his power, his reserve. For manly pathos they rank among the greatest scenes in literature, stronger than the death of Colonel Newcome and the best of Thackeray. Among English novelists it is, perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such strong, piercing chords, nobler than anything in Daudet or Maupassant, more reserved than anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the great poets, of the tragic pathos of Goethe and Dante. The character of Bazarov, as has been said, created a sensation and endless controversy. The revolutionaries thought him a caricature and a libel, the reactionaries a scandalous glorification of the Devil; and impartial men such as Dostoyevsky, who knew the revolutionaries at first hand, thought the type unreal. It is possible that Bazarov was not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in any case as a figure in fiction, whatever the fact may be, he lives and will continue to live.

In _Virgin Soil_, Turgenev attempted to paint the underground revolutionary movement; here, in the opinion of all Russian judges, he failed. The revolutionaries considered their portraits here more unreal than that of Bazarov; the Conservatives were grossly caricatured; the hero Nezhdanov was a type of a past world, another Rudin, and not in the least like--so those who knew them tell us--the revolutionaries of the day. Solomin, the energetic character in the book, was considered as unreal as Nezhdanov. The wife of the reactionary Sipyagin is a _pastiche_ of the female characters of that type in his other books; cleverly drawn, but a completely conventional book character. The redeeming feature in the book is Mariana, the heroine, one of Turgenev's finest ideal women; and it is full, of course, of gems of descriptive writing. The book was a complete failure, and after this Turgenev went back to writing short stories. The result was a great disappointment to Turgenev, who had thought that, by writing a novel dealing with actual life, he would please and reconcile all parties. To this later epoch belong his matchless _Poems in Prose_, one of the latest melodies he sounded, a melody played on one string of the lyre, but whose sweetness contained the essence of all his music.

Turgenev's work has a historic as well as an artistic value. He painted the Russian gentry, and the type of gentry that was disappearing, as no one else has done. His landscape painting has been dwelt on; one ought, perhaps, to add that, beautiful as it is, it still belongs to the region of conventional landscape painting; his landscape is the orthodox Russian landscape, and is that of the age of Pushkin, in which no bird except a nightingale is mentioned, no flower except a rose. This convention was not really broken in prose until the advent of Gorky.

Reviewing Turgenev's work as a whole, any one who goes back to his books after a time, and after a course of more modern and rougher, stormier literature, will, I think, be surprised at its excellence and perhaps be inclined to heave a deep sigh of relief. Some of it will appear conventional; he will notice a faint atmosphere of rose-water; he will feel, if he has been reading the moderns, as a traveller feels who, after an exciting but painful journey, through dangerous ways and unpleasant surroundings, suddenly enters a cool garden, where fountains sob between dark cypresses, and swans float majestically on artificial lakes. There is an aroma of syringa in the air; the pleasaunce is artistically laid out, and full of fragrant flowers. But he will not despise that garden for its elegance and its tranquil seclusion, for its trees cast large shadows; the nightingale sings in its thickets, the moon silvers the calm statues, and the sound of music on the waters goes to the heart. Turgenev reminds one of a certain kind of music, beautiful in form, not too passionate and yet full of emotion, Schumann's music, for instance; if Pushkin is the Mozart of Russian literature, Turgenev is the Schumann; not amongst the very greatest, but still a poet, full of inspired lyrical feeling; and a great, a classic artist, the prose Virgil of Russian literature.

What Turgenev did for the country gentry, GONCHAROV (1812-91) did for the St. Petersburg gentry. The greater part of his work deals with the forties. Goncharov, a noble (_dvoryanin_) by education, and according to his own account by descent, though according to another account he was of merchant extraction, entered the Government service, and then went round the world in a frigate, a journey which he described in letters. Of his three novels, _The Everyday Story_, _Oblomov_, and _The Landslip_, _Oblomov_ is the most famous: in it he created a type which became immortal; and Oblomov has passed into the Russian language just as Tartuffe has passed into the French language, or Pecksniff into the English language. A chapter of the book appeared in 1849, and the whole novel in 1859.

Oblomov is the incarnation of what in Russia is called _Halatnost_, which means the propensity to live in dressing-gown and slippers. It is told of Krylov, who was an Oblomov of real life, and who spent most of his time lying on a sofa, that one day somebody pointed out to him that the nail on which a picture was hanging just over the sofa on which he was lying, was loose, and that the picture would probably fall on his head. "No," said Krylov, not getting up, "the picture will fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle." The apathy of Oblomov, although to the outward eye it resembles this mere physical inertness, is subtly different. Krylov's apathy was the laziness of a man whose brain brought forth concrete fruits; and who feels neither the inclination nor the need of any other exercise, either physical or intellectual. Oblomov's apathy is that of a brain seething with the burning desires of a _vie intime_, which all comes to nothing owing to a kind of spiritual paralysis, "une infirmité morale." It is true he finds it difficult to put on his socks, still more to get up, when he is awake, impossible to change his rooms although the ceiling is falling to bits, and impossible not to lie on the sofa most of the day; but the reason of this obstinate inertia is not mere physical disinclination, it is the result of a mixture of seething and simmering aspirations, indefinite disillusions and apprehensions, that elude the grasp of the will. Oblomov is really the victim of a dream, of an aspiration, of an ideal as bright and mobile as a will-o'-the-wisp, as elusive as thistledown, which refuses to materialize.

The tragedy of the book lies in the effort he makes to rise from his slough of apathy, or rather the effort his friends encourage him to make. Oblomov's heart is made of pure gold; his soul is of transparent crystal; there is not a base flaw in the paste of his composition; yet his will is sapped, not by words, words, words, but by the inability to formulate the shadows of his inner life. His friend is an energetic German-Russian. He introduces Oblomov to a charming girl, and together they conspire to drag him from his apathy. The girl, Olga, at first succeeds; she falls in love with him, and he with her; he wants to marry her, but he cannot take the necessary step of arranging his affairs in a manner which would make that marriage possible; and gradually he falls back into a new stage of apathy worse than the first; she realizes the hopelessness of the situation, and they agree to separate. She marries the energetic friend, and Oblomov sinks into the comforts of a purely negative life of complete inaction and seclusion, watched over by a devoted housekeeper, whom he ultimately marries.

The extraordinary subtlety of the psychology of this study lies, as well as in other things, in the way in which we feel that Olga is not really happy with her excellent husband; he is the man whom she respects; but Oblomov is the man whom she loves, till the end; and she would give worlds to respect him too if he would only give her the chance. Oblomov often defends his stagnation, while realizing only too well what a misfortune it is; and we sometimes feel that he is not altogether wrong. The chapter that tells of his dream in which his past life and childhood arise before him in a haze of serene laziness is one of the masterpieces of Russian prose. The book is terribly real, and almost intolerably sad.

Goncharov's third and last novel deals with the life of a landed proprietor on the Volga, and its main idea is the contrast between the old generation before the reforms and the new generation of Alexander II's day--a paler _Fathers and Sons_.

To go back to criticism, the name of BAKUNIN, the apostle of destruction and the incarnation of Russian Nihilism, belongs to history; that of GRIGORIEV must be mentioned as founding a school of thought which preached the union of arts with the national soil; he exercised a strong influence over Dostoyevsky. KATKOV, whose influence was at one time immense, originally belonged to the circle of Herzen and Bakunin; he became a professor of philosophy, but was driven from his chair in the reaction of '48, and, being banished from erudition, he took up a journalistic career and became the Editor of the _Moscow News_. He was a Slavophile, and when the rising in Poland broke out, he headed the great wave of nationalist feeling which passed over the country at that time; he doubled the number of his subscribers, and dealt a death-blow to Herzen's _Bell_. After 1866, he headed reactionary journalism and became a Nationalist of the narrowest kind; but he was of a higher calibre than the Nationalists of later days. Slavophile critics of another kind were STRAKHOV and DANILEVSKY, like Dostoyevsky, disciples of Grigoriev, who preached the last word of Slavophilism and were opposed to all foreign innovations.

On the Radical side the leaders were CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and PISAREV. Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart Mill, and published a treatise on the æsthetic relations of art and reality, served a sentence of seven years' hard labour and of twenty years' exile. His criticism--socialist propaganda, and an attack on all metaphysics--does not belong to literature, but his novel _Shto dielat_--"What is to be done?"--had an immense influence on his generation. It deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died when he was twenty-four, belonged to the same realistic school. His main theory was that Russian literature is dominated by Oblomov; that Chatsky, Pechorin, and Rudin are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov followed Chernyshevsky in his realistic philosophy, in his rejection of metaphysics, in his theory that beauty is to be sought in life only, and that the sole duty of art is to help to illustrate life. Pisarev recognized that Turgenev's Bazarov was a picture of himself, and he was pleased with the portrait. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov died young.

VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as well as poet, moral philosopher, and theologian, is one of the most interesting figures in Russian literature. What is most remarkable about him, and what makes him stand out, a radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his absolute independence. He belonged to no camp; he was a slave to no party cry; utterly unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the truth for the sake of truth, and to proclaim it. In an age of positivism, he was a believing Christian, and the dream of his life was a union of the Eastern and Western Churches. He deals with this idea in a book which he wrote in French and published in Paris: _L'Église Russe et l'Église Universelle_. He admired the older Slavophiles, but he severely attacked the Nationalists, such as Katkov. His range of subjects was great, and his style was brilliant; like many great thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and in his criticism of the _Intelligentsia_ anticipated some tendencies, which have become visible since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one at times of Mr. A. J. Balfour, and even of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose "orthodoxy" he would have much sympathy; and he deals with questions such as Woman's Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present day. He never became a Catholic, holding that the Eastern Church _qua_ Church had never been cut off from the West, and that only one definite schism had been condemned; but he believed in the necessity of a universal Church. He was the first intellectual Russian to point out to a generation which took atheism as a matter of course that they were possibly inferior instead of superior to religion. He believed in Russia; he had nothing against the Slavophile theory that Russia had a divine mission; only he wished to see that mission divinely performed. He believed in the East of Christ, and not in that of Xerxes. He died in 1900, before he had finished his _Magnum Opus_, a work on moral philosophy written on a religious basis. He preached self-effacement; pity towards one's fellow men; and reverence towards the supernatural. His whole work is a defence of moral principles, written with the soul of a poet, the knowledge of a scholar, and the brilliance of a dialectician. It is only lately that his books have gained the appreciation which they deserve; they are certainly more in harmony with the present generation than with that of the sixties and the seventies. His _Three Conversations_ has been translated into English. Vladimir Soloviev stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, and his prematurity; he was _intempestivus_.

To the same epoch belong four other important writers, each occupying a place apart from the current stream of literary or political influences: one because he was a satirist, one because he wrote for the stage, and the two others because one impartially, and the other bitterly, dared to criticize the Radicals.

MICHAEL SALTYKOV (1826-89), who wrote under the name of Shchedrin, holds a unique place in Russian literature, not only because he is a writer of genius, but because he is one of the world's great satirists. Unlike Russian satirists before him, Krylov, Gogol, and Griboyedov, good-humoured irony or sharp rapier thrusts of wit do not suffice him; he has in himself the _saeva indignatio_, and he expresses it with all the concentrated spite that he can muster, which is all the more deadly from being used with perfect control. His work is bulky, and fills eleven thick volumes; some of it is quite out of date and at the present day almost unintelligible; but all that deals with the fundamental essentials of the Russian character, and not with the passing episodes of the day, has the freshness of immortality. At the outset of his career, he was banished to Vyatka, where he remained from 1848-56, an exile, which gave him a rich store of priceless material. His experiences appeared in his _Sketches of Provincial Life_ in 1886-7.

He describes the good old times and the officials of the good old times, with diabolic malice and with an unequalled eye for the ironical, the comic, the topsy-turvy, and the true; and while he is as observant as Gogol, he is as bitter as Swift. He puts his characters on the stage and makes them relate their experiences; thus we hear how the collector of the dues manages to combine the maximum amount of robbery with the minimum amount of inconvenience. In his pictures of prison life, the prisoners tell their own stories, sometimes with unaffected frankness, sometimes with startling cynicism, and sometimes the story is obscured by a whole heap of lies. The prisoners are of different classes; one is an ex-official who states that he was a statistician who got into trouble over his figures; wishing to levy dues on a peasant's property, he had demanded the number, not of their bee-hives, but of their bees, and wrote in his list: "The peasant Sidorov possesses two horses, three cows, nine sheep, one calf, and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven bees." Unfortunately he was betrayed by the police inspector.

Saltykov's satire deals entirely with the middle class, the high officials, the average official, and the minor public servants; and his best-known work, and one that has not aged any more than Swift has aged, is his _History of a City according to the original documents_.

In this he tells of the city of _Glupov_, _Fool-City_, where the people were such fools that they were not content until they found some one to rule them who was stupider than they were themselves. The various phases Russia had gone through are touched off; the mania for regulations, the formalism, the official red-tape, the persecution of independent thought, and the oppression of original thinkers and writers; the ultimate ideal is that introduced by the last ruler of Glupov (the history lasts from 1731 to 1826), of turning the country into barracks and reducing every one and everything to one level--in which the régime of the period of Nicholas I is satirized; until in the final picture, as fine in its way as Pope's close of the _Dunciad_, the stream rises, and refusing to be stopped by the dam, carries everything away. The style parodies that of the ancient chroniclers; and its chief intent lies not in the satirizing of any particular events or person, but in the shafts of light, sometimes bitter, and sometimes inexpressibly droll, it throws on the Russian system of administration and on the Russian character.

In his _Pompaduri_, Saltykov dissects and vivisects the higher official,--the big-wig,--and in his sketches from the "Domain of Moderation and Accuracy," he writes, in little, the epic of the minor public servant--the man who is never heard of, who is included in the term of "the rest," but who, nevertheless, is a cogwheel in the machinery, without which the big-wigs cannot act or execute. No more supreme piece of art than this piece of satire exists. The typical minor official is drawn in all the variations of his miserable and pitiable species, and in all the phases of his ignoble and sometimes tragical career, with a pen dipped in scorn and stinging malice, not unblent with a grave pity, which always exists in the work of the greatest satirists--"Peace to all such, but there was one ..." for instance--and wielded with terrible certainty of touch. This epic of the _Molchalins_ of life--the typical officials who cease to be men--was the story of a great part of the Russian population; and in its essence, a great deal of it remains true to-day, while all of it remains artistically enjoyable.

Saltykov continued to write during the whole of his long life. His field of satire ranges from the days before serfdom to the epoch of the reforms, extends to the days of the Russo-Turkish War, and passes the frontier into the West. It is impossible here even to name all his works; but there is one, written in the decline of his life, which has a solid historical as well as a rich and varied artistic interest. This is his _Poshenkhonskaya Starina_; it is practically the history of his childhood, his upbringing, and the state of affairs which existed at that time, the life lived by his parents and their neighbours, the landed proprietors and their serfs. With amazing impartiality, without exaggeration, and yet with evidences of deep feeling and passionate indignation, all the more striking from being both rare and expressed with reserve, he paints on a large and crowded canvas the life of the masters and their serfs. A long gallery of men and women is opened to one; tragedy, comedy, farce, all are here--in fact, life--life as it was then in a remote corner of the country. Here Saltykov's spite and malice give way to higher strokes of tragic irony and pity; and the work has dignity as well as power In the bulk of Saltykov's early work there is much dross, much venom, and much ephemeral tinsel that has faded; the stuff of this book is stern and enduring; its subject-matter would not lose a particle of interest in translation. The Russians have been ungrateful towards Saltykov, and have been inclined to neglect his work, the lasting element of which is one of the most original, precious, and remarkable possessions of Russian literature.

The complement of Saltykov is LESKOV (or, as he originally called himself, _Stebnitsky_). The character of his work, its reception by the reading public on the one hand, and by the professional critics on the other, is one of the most striking object-lessons in the history of Russian literature and Russian literary criticism. Leskov has been long ago recognized by educated Russia as a writer of the first rank; what is best in his work, which is bulky and unequal, has the unmistakable hall-mark of the classics; he is with Gogol and Saltykov, and the novelists of the first rank. Educated Russia is fully aware of this. Nobody disputes Leskov his place, nor denies him his supreme artistic talent, his humour, his vividness, his colour, his satire, the depth of his feeling, the richness of his invention. In spite of this, there is no Russian writer who has so acutely suffered from the didactic and partisan quality of Russian criticism.

His literary career began in 1860. Like Saltykov, he paints the period of transition that followed the epoch of the great Reforms. In spite of this, as late as 1902, no critical biography, no serious work of criticism, had been devoted to his books. All Russia had read him, but literary criticism had ignored him. It is as if English literary criticism had ignored Dickens until 1900.

The reason of this neglect is not far to seek. Saltykov was an independent thinker; he belonged to no literary or political camp; he criticized the partisans of both camps with equal courage; and the partisans could not and did not forgive him. Like Saltykov, Leskov saw what was going on in Russia; with penetrating insight and observation he realized the evils of the old order; like Saltykov, he was filled with indignation, and perhaps to a greater degree than Saltykov, he was filled with pity. But, whereas Saltykov's work was purely destructive--an onslaught of brooms in the Augean stables--Leskov begins where Saltykov ends. Like Saltykov and like Gogol before him, the old order inspires him with laughter, sometimes with bitter laughter, at the absurdities of the old régime and its results; but he does not confine himself to destructive irony and sapping satire. With PISEMSKY, another writer of first-class talent, of the same epoch, Leskov was the first Russian novelist--Griboyedov had already anticipated such criticism in _Gore ot Uma_, in his delineation of Chatsky,--to have the courage to criticize the reformers, the men of the new epoch; and his criticism was not only negative but creative; he realized that everything must be "reformed altogether." He then asked himself whether the new men, who were engaged in the task of reform, were equal to their task. He came to the conclusion not only that they were inadequate, but that they were setting about the business the wrong way, and he had the courage to say so. He was the first Russian novelist to say he disbelieved in Liberals, although he believed in Liberalism; and this was a sentiment which no Liberal in Russia could admit then, and one which they can scarcely admit now.

His criticism of the Liberals was creative, and not negative, in this: that, instead of confining himself to pointing out their weakness and the mistaken course they were taking, he did his best to point out the right path. Dostoyevsky was likewise subjected to the same ostracism. Turgenev suffered from it; but the genius of Dostoyevsky and the art of Turgenev overstepped the limits of all barriers and frontiers. Europe acclaimed them. Leskov's criticism being more local, the ostracism, although powerless to prevent the popularity of his work in Russia, succeeded for a time in keeping him from the notice of Western Europe. This barrier is now being broken down. One of Leskov's masterpieces, _The Sealed Angel_, was lately translated into English; but he is one of the most difficult authors to translate because he is one of the most native.

A far bitterer and more pessimistic note is heard in the work of Pisemsky. He attacks the new democracy mercilessly, and not from any predilection towards the old. His most important work, _The Troubled Sea_ (1862), was a terrific onslaught on Radical Russia; and Pisemsky paid the same price for his pessimistic analysis as Leskov did for his impartiality, namely social ostracism.

The work of OSTROVSKY (1823-86) belongs to the history of the Stage, to which he brought slices of real life from the middle class; the townsmen, the minor public servants, merchants great and small, and rogues, a _milieu_ which he had observed in his youth, his father having been an attorney to a Moscow merchant. Ostrovsky may be called the founder of modern Russian realistic comedy and drama. In spite of the epoch at which his plays were written (the fifties and the sixties), there is not a trace of _Scribisme_, no tricks, no effective exits or curtains; he thus anticipated the form of the quite modern drama by about seventy years. His plays hold the stage now in Russia, and form part of the stock repertories every season. They give, moreover, just the same lifelike impression whether read or seen acted; and they are as interesting from a literary as they are from a historical or dramatic point of view, interesting because they are intensely national, and as Russian as beer is English.

This brief summary of the epoch would be still more incomplete than it is without the mention of yet another novelist, GRIGOROVICH. Although on a lower level of art and creative power than Pisemsky and Leskov, he was the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant literature. He anticipated Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_, and for the first time made Russian readers cry with sympathy over the annals of the peasant. Like Turgenev, he was a great landscape painter. In his "Fishermen" he paints the peasant and the artisan's life, and in his "Country Roads" he gives a picture of the good old times--replete with rich humour, and in sharp contrast to Saltykov's sunless and trenchant etching of the same period. Humour, the pathos of the poor, landscape--these are his chief qualities.