Tales of the Untold

The English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporary Russian Literature. In the great age of the Russian Realistic Novel, which begins with Turgeniev and finishes with Chekhov, the English reader is tolerably at home. But what came after the death of Chekhov is still unknown or, what is worse, misrepresented. Second and third- rate writers, like Merezhkovsky, Andreyev, and Artsybashev, have found their way into England and are still supposed to be the best Russian twentieth century fiction can offer.

The names of really significant writers, like Remizov and Andrey Bely, have not even been heard of. This state of affairs makes it necessary, in introducing a contemporary Russian writer to the English public, to give at least a few indications of his place in the general picture of modern Russian Literature.

The date of Chekhov's death (1904) may be taken to mark the end of a long and glorious period of literary achievement. It is conveniently near the dividing line of two centuries, and it coincides rather exactly with the moment when Russian Literature definitely ceased to be dominated by Realism and the Novel. In the two or three years that followed the death of Chekhov Russian Literature underwent a complete and drastic transformation. The principal feature of the new literature became the decisive preponderance of Poetry over Prose and of Manner over Matter-a state of things exactly opposite to that which prevailed during what we may conveniently call the Victorian age. Poetry in contemporary Russian Literature is not only of greater intrinsic merit than prose, but almost all the prose there is has to such an extent been permeated with the methods and standards of poetry that in the more extreme cases it is almost impossible to tell whether what is printed as prose is really prose or verse.

Contemporary Russian Poetry is a vigorous organic growth. It is a self-contained movement developing along logically consistent lines. It has produced much that is of the very first order. The poetry of Theodore Sologub, of Innocent Annensky, [Footnote: The reader will notice the quotations from Annensky in the first story of this volume.] of Vyacheslav Ivanov, and of Alexander Blok, is to our best understanding of that perennial quality that will last. They have been followed by younger poets, more debatable and more debated, many of them intensely and daringly original, but all of them firmly planted in the living tradition of yesterday. They learn from their elders and teach their juniors-the true touchstone of an organic and vigorous movement. What is perhaps still more significant-the level of minor poetry is extraordinarily high, and every verse-producer is, in varying degrees, a conscious and efficient craftsman.

The case with prose is very different. The old nineteenth century realistic tradition is dead. It died, practically, very soon after Chekhov. It has produced a certain amount of good, even excellent, work within these last twenty years, but this work is disconnected, sterile of influence, and more or less belated; at the best it has the doubtful privilege of at once becoming classical and above the age. Such for instance was the case of Bunin's solitary masterpiece The Gentleman from San Francisco, and of that wonderful series of Gorky's autobiographical books, the fourth of which appeared but a few months ago. These, however, can hardly be included in the domain of Fiction, any more than his deservedly famous Reminiscences of Tolstoy. But Gorky, and that excellent though minor writer, Kuprin, are the only belated representatives of the fine nineteenth century tradition. For even Bunin is a poet and a stylist rather than a story teller: his most characteristic "stories" are works of pure atmosphere, as diffuse and as skeletonless as a picture by Claude Monet.

The Symbolists of the early twentieth century (all the great poets of the generation were Symbolists) tried also to create a prose of their own. They tried many directions but they did not succeed in creating a style or founding a tradition. The masterpiece of this Symbolist prose is Theodore Sologub's great novel The Little Demon[Footnote: English translation.] (by the way a very inadequate rendering of the Russian title). It is a great novel, probably the most perfect Russian novel since the death of Dostoyevsky. It breaks away very decidedly from Realism and all the traditions of the nineteenth century. It is symbolic, synthetic, and poetical. But it is so intensely personal and its achievements are so intimately conditioned by the author's idiosyncrasies that it was quite plainly impossible to imitate it, or even to learn from it. This is still more the case with the later works of Sologub, like the charming but baffling and disconcerting romance of Queen Ortruda.

The other Symbolists produced nothing of the same calibre, and they failed to attract the public. The bestsellers of the period after 1905 were, naturally enough, hybrid writers like Andreyev. The cheap effect of his cadenced prose, his dreary and monotonous rhetoric, his sensational way of treating "essential problems" were just what the intelligentsia wanted at the time; it is also just what nobody is likely to want again. Another writer of "problem stories" was Artsybashev. His notorious Sanin (1907) is very typical of a certain phase of Russian life. It has acquired a somewhat unaccountable popularity among the budding English intelligentsia. From the literary point of view its value is nil. Artsybashev and Andreyev were very second-rate writers; they had no knowledge of their art and their taste was deplorably bad and crude, but at least they were in a way, sincere, and gave expression to the genuine vacuum and desolation of their hearts. But around them sprung up a literature which sold as well and better than they did, but was openly meretricious and, fortunately, ephemeral. If it has done nothing else the great Revolution of 1917 has at least done one good thing in making a clean sweep of all this interrevolutionary (1905- 1917) fiction.

All this literature appealed to certain sides of the "intellectual" heart, but it could not slake the thirst for fiction. It was rather natural that the reading public turned to foreign novelists in preference to the native ones. It may be confidently said that three- quarters of what the ordinary Russian novel-reader read in the years preceding the Revolution were translated novels. The book-market was swamped with translations, Polish, German, Scandinavian, English, French and Spanish. Knut Hamsun, H. G. Wells, and Jack London were certainly more popular than any living Russian novelist, except perhaps the Russian Miss Dell, Mme. Verbitsky. In writers like Jack London and H. G. Wells the reader found what he missed in the Russian novelists-a good story thrillingly told. For no reader, be he ever so Russian, will indefinitely put up with a diet of "problems" and imitation poetry.

While all these things were going on on the surface of things and sharing between themselves the whole of the book-market, a secret undercurrent was burrowing out its bed, scarcely noticed at first but which turned out to be the main prolongation of the Russian novel. The principal characteristic of this undercurrent was the revival of realism and of that untranslatable Russian thing "byt," [Footnote: "Byt" is the life of a definite community at a definite time in its individual, as opposed to universally human, features.] but a revival under new forms and in a new spirit. The pioneers of this movement were Andrey Bely and Remizov. There was little in common between the two men, except that both were possessed with a startlingly original genius, and both directed it towards the utilization of Russian "byt" for new artistic ends.

Andrey Bely was, and is, a poet rather than a novelist. His prose from the very beginning exhibits in its extreme form the Symbolist tendency towards wiping away the difference between poetry and prose: in his later novels his prose becomes distinctly metrical, it is prose after all only because it cannot be devided into lines; it can be devided into feet very easily. But, though such prose is essentially a hybrid and illegitimate form, Bely has achieved with it things that have probably never been achieved with the aid of anything like his instruments. The first of the series of his big novels appeared in 1909: it is the Silver Dove, a story of Russian mystical sectarians and of an intellectual who gets entangled in their meshes. At its appearance it sold only five hundred copies. His next novel Petersburg (1913) had not a much greater success. The third of the series is Kotik Letaev (1917). The three novels form a series unique in its way. Those who can get over the initial difficulties and accustom themselves to the very peculiar proceedings of the author will not fail to be irresistibly fascinated by his strange genius. The first novel, the Silver Dove, is in my opinion the most powerful of the three. It combines a daring realism, which is akin to Gogol both in its exaggerations and in its broad humour, with a wonderful power of suggestion and of "atmosphere." One of its most memorable passages is the vast and elemental picture of the Wind driving over the Russian plain; a passage familiarised to satiety by numerous more or less clever imitations. Petersburg is a "political" novel. It is intended to symbolise the Nihilism, the geometrical irreality of Petersburg and Petersburg bureaucracy. The cold spirit of system of the Revolutionary Terrorists is presented as the natural and legitimate outcome of bureaucratic formalism.

A cunningly produced atmosphere of weird irreality pervades the whole book. It is in many ways a descendant of Dostoyevsky-and has in its turn again produced a numerous family of imitations, including Pilniak's most characteristic tales of the Revolution. Kotik Letaev, the last and up to the present the least imitated of Bely's novels, is the story of a child in his very first years. In it the "poetical" methods of the author reach their full development; but at the same time he achieves miracles of vividness and illusion in the realism of his dialogue and the minute, but by no means dry, analysis of the movements of his hero's subconscious Ego. In spite of the enormous difference of style, methods, and aims Bely approaches in many ways the effects and the achievements of Proust.

Remizov is very different. He is steeped in Russian popular and legendary lore. His roots are deep down in the Russian soil. He is the greatest living master of racy and idiomatic Russian. He has also written prose that elbows poetry, and that was looked upon with surprise and bewilderment until people realised that it was poetry. But his importance in the history of the Russian Novel is of another kind. It is firstly in his deliberate effort to "deliteralize" Russian prose, to give it the accent, the intonation, and the syntax of the spoken language. He has fully achieved his ends; he has created a prose which is entirely devoid of all bookishness and even on the printed page gives the illusion of being heard, not seen.

Few have been able to follow him in this path; for in the present state of linguistic chaos and decomposition few writers have the necessary knowledge of Russian, the taste and the sense of measure, to write anything like his pure and flexible Russian. In the hands of others it degenerates into slang, or into some personal jargon closely related to Double Dutch.