CHAPTER LXXXI
CABBAGE SOUP
We have been following the fortunes of a pioneer people breaking into the field of world culture. Let us now travel part way round the earth in either direction, and watch another pioneer people doing the same thing.
The differences between America and Russia are many and striking, and before we enter upon a study of Russian literature we must understand Russian life. Voltaire tells us that virtue and vice are products like vinegar, and we shall find this applies also to the Russian soul with its mysticism and melancholy. When the sun almost disappears for six months at a time, and icy blizzards rage, human beings have a tendency to stay by the fire and develop their inner natures; also they develop congested livers, and brood upon the futility of life.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Don’t forget that it often gets cold in New England.”
“Yes, and there is both mysticism and melancholy in New England art. But the difference is that the people of New England escaped from the cradle of despotism in Asia many centuries earlier than the Russians. So the brooding of the New England colonist took the form of calling a town meeting to plan for the building of a new road in the spring. But the Russian could not do things for himself; he had to get the permission of officials. If he tried to act for himself, they would strip him and beat him with knouts until he swooned. So the Russian’s brooding turned to despair, and he got drunk, and got into a fight and killed his neighbor, and then tried to make up his mind whether God would forgive him, or damn him to hell fire forever; he fretted over this problem until he went insane or wrote a novel--”
“Or both,” says Mrs. Ogi.
The dominant fact in Russian art of the nineteenth century was despotism. Here was a vast empire of a hundred million people, energetic and aspiring; and the ruling class dreamed that they could introduce modern material civilization, while keeping out the modern mind and soul. Young Russians travelled, and learned to think as the rest of Europe thought; then they came home, to find that the slightest attempt to teach or to organize was met by imprisonment, torture, exile, hard labor, or the scaffold. Wave after wave of rebellion swept Russia, to be met by wave after wave of repression. Intellectual activity which New England honored was in Russia a secret and criminal conspiracy; the youth of the country was broken in a torture chamber; and so we have the misery and distortion and impotence which we regard as characteristic Slavic qualities.
The Russian was supposed to be incapable of action, incapable of keeping an appointment on time, incapable of doing anything but drinking a hundred cups of tea and shedding tears over the fate of man. But now comes the revolution, and in a flash we discover that all that was buncombe. The Russians begin to act precisely like other men; they cease to get drunk, they learn to keep appointments, they discover a sudden admiration for those qualities we call Yankee--hustle and efficiency, the adjusting of one’s desires to what can be immediately accomplished. The Russian peasant, supposed to be a grown-up and bearded cherub, lifting his eyes in adoration to his Little Father in the Winter Palace and his Big Father in Heaven, is discovered to have precisely the same desires as every other farmer in the world--that is to say, more land, and fewer tax-collectors.
Russian literature is a great literature, because it voices the hopes and resolves of a great people groping their way to freedom and understanding. It is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a literature of revolt. It is full of ideas, because it has to take the place of the prohibited subjects, science, politics, economics, and social psychology. It is desperately serious, because it is produced by people who are suffering. Some twenty years ago I remember meeting in New York the adopted son of Maxim Gorki, who was earning his living as a printer by day and studying our civilization by night. I recall his remark: “Americans do not know what the intellectual life means.” The young man had in mind a country where you adopted ideas with the knowledge that they might cost you your liberty, and even your life. Under such circumstances you think hard before you come to a decision. A lot of Americans have had an opportunity to test their ideas that way during the past ten years, and so they are now taking the intellectual life seriously, and producing literature in many ways resembling the Russian.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Sherwood Anderson says it is because he was raised on cabbage soup.”
“People will read that,” says Ogi, “and think it a flash of humor; very few will consider seriously the effect of a starvation diet upon the soul of a sensitive boy. Neither will they stop to think about three boys sleeping in one bed as a source of abnormal sexual imaginings, which constitute one of the original elements in Sherwood Anderson’s books. To me this seems a law: that wherever you have widespread and long-continued poverty, maintained by policemen’s clubs, there you will have a literature, extremely painful to its creators, but delightful to high-brow critics, who will hail it as ‘strong,’ and up to the standard of the great Russian masters.”
##