V.

The astonishment felt by Vronsky at hearing Karénin’s words, we also have some right to feel in reading Tolstoï’s work entitled “My Religion.” This work is a socialistic and communistic interpretation of the gospel. The censorship has put an end to the publication and sale of it; but it cannot prevent the manuscript from passing from hand to hand; and, when it shall have succeeded in destroying it, it will be forever unable to suppress the state of mind of which this work is only a manifestation, and which will possibly be before long the state of mind of a whole people.

It is possible now, if it ever was, by looking towards Russia, to find in the spectacle of the moral phenomena there going on an answer to the question, “How are dogmas born?”

It was remarked long ago that all the great convulsions of a nation are followed by an increased tendency towards mysticism: this is manifested in Russia more than elsewhere. For example, after the invasion in 1812, a sort of sectarian eruption followed the patriotic fever. The _muzhik_ had bravely burned his harvest, and had taken arms to drive out the foreigner. He had done a man’s work, and had been given to understand, that, as soon as the enemy were out of the way, the grateful country would recognize him as a son and give him his freedom. The French, burned out by fire, cut down by frost,[55] retire, sowing the path of their journey back with corpses. But the hour of liberty does not yet strike. The affairs of Europe must be put in order before taking hold of the _muzhik’s_. After the treaties have been signed, after the armies have gone home, the rights of the _muzhik_ remain neglected, and his complaints are stifled. His despair is seen in emigrations, in deeds of violence, in his affiliation with existing sects, in the formation of a new social and religious dogma. At that moment we see arise for the first time the _bogomól_, or praying men.

In the last quarter of the century, Russia has experienced a storm more tremendous than that of the invasion of 1812: it might be said that the face of the country was transformed by the upheaval in the condition of the people.

The single reign of Alexander II. saw such facts accomplished as the abolition of serfdom; the redivision of the land; above all, the increase in the taxes, which has touched the people in a very different way from all the reforms. The dominating influence of wealth has grown more and more; a great net-work of railroads has extended over the country; the maxim of _laissez faire_ and _laissez passer_ has made its way into the Russian village. None of these changes has fully succeeded, or, in better words, none has succeeded as yet. In periods of transition, it is the feature of inconvenience that, above all, attracts attention, and more often than not causes the advantageous to be overlooked. Now, here, the ill has often surpassed the good. Thus in the regulation of landed property, the insufficiency of the lots of land granted the _muzhik_, and the lack of proportion between the revenue and the tax imposed, have quickly brought the small cultivator back into dependence upon the great proprietor, and serfage has re-appeared in disguise.

As to the administrative reforms, the _zemstvo_, the tribunal, the school, all this has scarcely made any impression upon the people except as bringing an increase in the tax, expressed by the immemorial formula _so much per soul_. The taxes coming in much less than the increase in the rates, extreme measures have to be taken to obtain the payment of them. The _muzhik_ has only one way of escaping prosecution, and that is to give himself over, body and soul, to the usurer. In short space of time the misery is universal. A single man gets rich at the expense of all the others: it is the _kulak_ (the fist), the monopolist.

Bread is lacking in many places. In its place they eat, not cake, but preparations of straw, bark, or grass, all that which is called by the expressive term _cheat-hunger_.[56] It is plain to see that the _muzhiks_, reduced to these extremities, lose their interest in a society which treats them a little less kindly than if they were common cattle. All that they know of public affairs is that it is necessary to pay the tax. The most palpable advantage which they get from the time spent in discussing the common interests is the bumper of _vodka_ with which discussions are kept alive: thus they forget themselves for a few hours.

Then, in hatred of the present, minds turn back to the past, and, above all, yearn eagerly for the future. The peasant’s _naïve_ imagination is consoled by his dreams; the ardor of his desires is spent in Utopias. The idea of _free lands_ haunts these enthusiastic minds. The story is secretly whispered about of the promises made by the Shah of Persia to emigrants who will come and settle in his dominions: his subjects shall pay no taxes and have no superiors. Solid masses of people set out suddenly, and depart for “the country of the white waters.” There it is that the popular ideal is to be realized. Many outlaw themselves without leaving their residences, and refuse to answer any of their obligations towards the commune or the _mir_. Others take refuge in the neighboring forest, go and settle in the desert, in the steppe. A considerable number go on pilgrimages to the holy places. Finally, there are those who go to swell the class of true Nihilists; that is to say, people who make their lives even a bold negation of all that is accepted, affirmed, around them,--the class of wanderers, or that of occults.

The attitude of these refractory men and women strikes the people, and is not slow to inspire them with a respect which is thus explained. The Russian people’s heads are stuffed with legends. One of the widest spread is that of the centenarian who lives in the desert, taking no other food than a consecrated wafer once a week; and, though he has not the slightest notion of the alphabet, yet he reads the Holy Book, the book with the leaves of gold, where is found the answer to every question, the rule for all conduct. We see now how reality and legend can come to be confounded. In the lonely hut where this hermit dwells apart, fitted as he is ordinarily by his intelligence and his will for the exceptional part which he is going to perform, he allows himself endlessly to reflect on all sorts of subjects. He ruminates at his leisure, in the solitude, over all the difficulties of the life from which he has torn himself away. He gropes after his definition of things good and of things evil; he slowly builds up his solemn casuistry.

The peasants one after another take the road to his hermitage. They are sure of bringing away good advice about disputed cases. Their cases include every subject,--family affairs, commune affairs, church affairs. Every thing is discussed, exposed to the cenobite’s criticism, to his interpretation. It is a matter of course that religious questions fill a large part in this programme, worked up by the anxieties of the throng, and the prophetic explanations of the hermit. But the programme also takes up economic or social questions. It prepares for the coming of a new law. This law is the outcome of a duty, and this duty is summed up in the formula, “To live according to justice;” or, in other words, “according to the will of God.”

The schisms formed, as we have just seen, are those of unimportant people. They have nothing in common with those which the irksomeness of living develops, in similar lines, in Russia, among the upper classes of the nation. Quite contrary to the sects born in the aristocracy, the schisms among the common people take their rise in the need of existence. They serve the instinct which impels the creature to seek not only life, but the best form of life. That is why they act so powerfully on the masses; that is why they cross time and space, making proselytes, apostles, martyrs.

The surprising thing is that the rich and aristocratic Count Tolstoï should become the apostle of such a religion. Like the sectaries of the rustic class, he builds a complete religious, political, and social system upon a new interpretation of the Gospels.

His religion, properly speaking, takes as its foundation the maxim of the Evangelist, “Resist not the one that is evil.” And it is not in an allegorical sense, it is by the letter, that these words of Jesus must be understood. The law laid down by Jesus’ disciples is precisely the opposite of that of the disciples of this world, which is the _law of conflict_. This doctrine of Jesus, which is sure to give peace to the world, is contained wholly in five commandments:--

1. Be at peace with everybody. Do not allow yourself to consider any one as low or stupid.

2. Do not violate the rights of wedlock. Do not commit adultery.

3. The oath impels men to sin. Know that it is wrong, and bind not yourselves by any promise.

4. Human vengeance or justice is an evil. Do not, under any pretext, practise it. Bear with insults, and render not evil for evil.

5. Know that all men are brothers, the sons of one father. Do not break the peace with any on account of difference of nationality.

By putting this doctrine into practice, man can realize a happiness in life, and there is no happiness in life except in this path. There is no immortality. The conception of the resurrection of the dead, according to Tolstoï, is the greatest piece of barbarism.

The political doctrine derived from this religious doctrine admits of no tribunals or armies or national frontiers.

The social doctrine to which we must be led by this religious and political dogma is the suppression of property, and the proclamation of communism. Man is not put into the world that others should work for him, but that he himself should work for others. He alone who works shall have daily bread.

The most dangerous enemy of society is the Church, because it supports with all its power the errors which it has read into its interpretation of Jesus’ doctrine. In place of this false light of Church dogma, which misleads believers and lets them “go into the pit,” must be substituted the light of conscience; one’s whole conduct must be irradiated by it, by submitting each of his acts to the approbation of the judge which we feel within us, “in our inner tribunal.”

To succeed in leading the life which conscience may approve, what is, above all, necessary? “Do not lead a life which makes it so difficult to refrain from wrath, from not committing adultery, from not taking oaths, from not defending yourself by violence, from not carrying on war: lead a life which would make all that difficult to do.” Do not crush at pleasure the very conditions of earthly happiness; do not break the bond which unites man to nature: that is to say, lead lives so as to enjoy “the sky, the sun, the pure air, the earth covered with vegetation and peopled with animals;” become a rustic instead of being the busy, weary, sickly urban. Return to the natural law of labor,--of labor freely chosen and accomplished with pleasure, of physical labor, the source of appetite and sleep. Have a family, but have the joys of it as well as the cares: that is, keep your children near you; do not intrust their education to strangers; do not imprison them; do not drive them “into physical, moral, and intellectual corruption.” Have free and affectionate intercourse with all men, whatever their rank, their nationality. “The peasant and wife are free to enter into brotherly relations with eighty millions of working-men, from Arkhangel to Astrakhan, without waiting for ceremony or introduction. A clerk and his wife find hundreds of people who are their equals; but the clerks of higher station do not recognize them as their equals, and they in their turn exclude their inferiors. A wealthy man of society and his wife have only a few score families of equal distinction, all the others are unknown to them. The cabinet minister and the millionaire have only a dozen people as rich and as important as they are. For emperors and kings, the circle is still narrower. Is it not like a prison, where each prisoner in his cell has relations only with one or two jailers?” Finally, live in a community, in hygienic conditions, with moral habits, which bring you the nearest possible to that ideal which is the very foundation of happiness, health as long as you live, death without disease, when existence has reached its limit.

The higher one rises in the social scale, the farther one departs from this ideal. The picture, which Tolstoï paints of the physical pains and tortures of the wealthy and of the aristocratic, of those whom he calls “the martyrs of the religion of the world,” is remarkably vigorous. Rousseau’s declamation against the pretended benefits of civilization here finds a powerful interpreter.

Does that mean that Tolstoï declaims? No one is more in earnest. It is not only in words that he declares war on the organization of society recognized and defended by the government of his country. He puts the doctrine into practice; he is ready to suffer all things to affirm the cause of Jesus. His refusal to take an oath, which is one of the articles of his creed, has already brought upon him a condemnation from one of those tribunals which he himself condemns in the name of the maxim of the Gospels, “Judge not.” It is not credible that the old hero of the wars of the Caucasus and Crimea compels his son to refuse military service, as was done once by the son of Sutaïef, the _raskolnik_ of Tver. He would have liked to strip himself of his property, in order to conform to the socialistic dogma forbidding inheritance and property. He was hindered only by the fear of trampling upon the liberty and the conscience of others. But amid the luxury of his family Count Tolstoï lives the life of a poor man. He has dropped his pen as a novelist.[57] Clad like a _muzhik_, he wields the scythe or drives the plough; between seedtime and harvest, he preaches his evangel.

I do not wish either to spread or to confute his teaching: for me it is sufficient to have given the reader an idea of it. Let him not show the characteristic behavior of a French reader; let him not hasten to see in Count Tolstoï’s latest attitude a sign of aberration. This attitude in his country is shared by a multitude of men. The single religious sect of _Shalaputui_ (Extravagants), preaching and practising a communistic gospel like Tolstoï, has, within a score of years, won over all the common people, all the rustic class, of the south and south-west of Russia. Judicious observers, well-informed economists, foresee the complete and immediate spread of the doctrine in the lower classes throughout the empire.[58] The day when the work of propagation shall be finished, the _raskolniks_ of a special socialistic dogma will be counted: their number will suffice to show their power. That day, if they take it into their heads to act, will only have--using the popular expression--“to blow” on the old order of things, to see it vanish away.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] _Zapiski Markera._

[48] Count Tolstoï himself apparently narrowly escaped a similar fate. His brother-in-law induced him to give up gambling; but, after he went to Teheran, he fell into his old habits, and incurred such debts that he was unable to pay them. He tells how full of despair he was at the thought of a certain note falling due when he had nothing wherewith to meet it. He began to pray; and, as though in answer to his prayer, he received a playfully sarcastic letter from his brother, enclosing the dreaded note which a brother officer had generously refused to press or even collect. Yashvin’s passion for the gaming-table, in Anna Karénina, is also a reminiscence of this wild-oats period in Count Tolstoï’s life. All true fiction must be fact.--N. H. D.

[49] Aleksander Sergeyévitch Griboyédof was born in January, 1795, and died in 1829. He studied law at first, but at the age of seventeen entered the army, and afterwards the college of foreign affairs, the service of which took him to Persia and Georgia, where a part of his great comedy, The Misfortune of having Brains (Gore ot Uma), was written.--N. H. D.

[50] Cadet, or ensign.

[51] M. Dupuy, in his condensation of the story, loses the perspective. Olénin taps lightly on the window. “He ran to the door, and actually heard Marianka’s deep sigh and her steps. He took hold of the latch, and shook it softly. Bare, cautious feet, scarcely making the boards creak, drew near the door. The latch was lifted: the door was pushed ajar. There was a breath of gourds and marjoram, and suddenly Marianka’s full form appeared on the threshold.” But the prospective interview is broken by the appearance of Lukashka’s friend Nazarka, who has to be bought off. The next day Olénin writes a letter, which, being more like a diary, he does not send, “because no one would understand what he meant to say.” In this letter occurs the passage which M. Dupuy quotes.--N. H. D.

[52] She takes a dose of arsenic, but prompt means save her life.--N. H. D.

[53] M. Dupuy adds, that he borrows “the inelegant but expressive translation of this scene” from the _Journal de Saint Pétersbourg_. In the present case, as in nearly all other quotations in the book, the originals have been used, which will account for greater or less variations from the literal version of the French text.--N. H. D.

[54] _Vasha prevoskhodítelstvo_; literally, Your Excellency.

[55] The Russians, after the retreat of the French, conferred the epaulets on Jack Frost: it was said that General _Morozof_ won the victory for them.--N. H. D.

[56] The word _podspórye_ might be rendered by the much less expressive periphrasis “the _succedanea_ of bread.”--_Author’s note._

[57] At last accounts, the reports about Count Tolstoï’s vagaries were found to be idle exaggerations: he is living on his estate, like a reasonable man, studying Greek and Hebrew, and writing short stories.--N. H. D.

[58] In 1882 a Russian writer, Mr. Abramof, published, in The Annals of the Country, a very curious study of the _Shalaputui_. Turgénief was greatly struck by it. He said in regard to it: “There is the peasant getting up steam; before long he will make a general up-turning.”--_Author’s Note._

APPENDIX.

As M. Dupuy does not pretend to give any thing more than a hasty _résumé_ of biographical facts, the reader may like to have for reference a more definite and fuller account of the lives of the three great authors whose literary work has been analyzed. The main authority which I have consulted has been P. Polevoï’s “History of Russian Literature, in Sketches and Biographies” [_Istoriya Russkoï Literaturui f Otcherkakh i Biografyakh_, fourth edition, published in 1883.] Some of his dates differ slightly from those commonly accepted. How far a man’s judgment is to be accepted who writes with the fear of the censor in his eyes, is a question; but there are a few quotations in Polevoï which are surprising in their liberality. The work is a valuable compound of literary fact and criticism, and it is illustrated with capital woodcuts.

Nikolaï Vasilyévitch Gogol-Yanovsky was born on the 31st of March, 1809 (N.S.), in the little town of Sorotchintsui, in the Government of Poltava. His father, Vasíli Afanasyévitch Gogol, was the son of a regimental clerk: at the time when the Zaparog Cossacks were still in existence, this position was considered highly respectable. Only two generations separated Gogol from the time of the Cossack wars; and his grandfather, the regimental clerk, used to relate to his family a great many stories of that time. Gogol was surrounded from his earliest childhood by a life that was hardly freed from its mediæval, warlike, half-wild character. It was full of fresh recollections of the olden times, of legends and war-songs; it was a life in which religious fervor was intermingled with a swarm of popular prejudices. Gogol’s grandfather was a lively representative of the just vanishing past, and not in vain does Gogol speak about him often in his _Vetchera na Khutoryé_ (Evenings at the Farm). Gogol was indebted to his grandfather for at least half of his Malo-Russian tales. “My grandfather,” he says, in his sketch in his _Vetcher Nakanunya Ivána Kupála_ (“The Eve of Ivan Kupalo’s Day”). “My grandfather (may he prosper in heaven! may he eat in the other world little wheaten rolls, with poppy seeds and honey!) was able to tell stories in a wonderful way. When he told stories, I would sit the whole day without moving from my place, and never cease to listen.... It was not so much the marvellous tales of the olden time, about the invasions of the Zaporozhtsui (Cossacks) and the Poles, about the brave deeds of the old heroes (Polkova, Poltor-Kozhukh, and Sagaidatchnui), that interested us, as the legends about some olden deed, which used to make the shudders run down my back, and my hair stand on end. Sometimes my fear would be so great from them, that every thing would appear to me like God knows what monsters.”

While his grandfather was a representative of the vanishing past, his father, Vasíli Afanasyévitch, appeared as the representative of modern times. He was a well-read man and full of experience, was fond of literature, subscribed to magazines, and at the same time was endowed with a gift of relating stories, and of enhancing them with Malo-Russian humor. His farm, Vasilyevka, was the centre of society for the district. Among the varied festivals in this farm, Gogol’s father used often to get up private theatricals. At these spectacles they used to give Kotlyarevsky’s just published comedy _Natalka Poltavka_ (“The Girl from Poltava”), and _Moskal Tcharivnik_ (“The Charming Muscovite”). Thus Gogol was early attracted to the stage.

Gogol’s father wrote, in imitation of Kotlyarevsky, several comedies which were played at Vasilyevka. Gogol was taught to read at home by a hired seminarist. Afterwards he was taken, with his younger brother Ivan, to Poltava, where he was taught by one of the teachers of the gymnasium. While the children were at home on their vacation, Ivan died; and Gogol was not sent back to Poltava, but remained for some time at home. Meantime, the governor of Thernígof, the _prokuror_ (attorney-general) Bazhánof, informed Gogol’s father about the opening at Niézhin, of a gymnasium for higher learning, founded by Prince Bezborodko, and advised him to place his son in the boarding-school connected with the gymnasium. This was done in May, 1821. Gogol entered as a paying pupil, and at the end of a year he received the government scholarship. It cannot be said that Gogol was much indebted to this gymnasium of the higher education, or that he gained there any solid knowledge of any kind whatsoever, even in the very elementary branches. He studied his lessons very superficially; but as he had a good memory he got a smattering of the lectures, and, by studying hard just before the examinations, he was promoted in due time. He especially disliked mathematics, and he had a very slight inclination even for the study of languages. After graduation he could not read a French book without a dictionary. Against German and English he had a curious spite. He used to say, in jest, that he did not believe that Schiller or Goethe knew German; “surely they must have written in some other language.”

The slight progress made by Gogol in the modern languages was more than rivalled by his backwardness in the classic tongues. “He studied with me three years,” says Kulzhinsky, Gogol’s Latin teacher at the Niézhin gymnasium, in his “Reminiscences,” “and he could not learn any thing except the translation of the first sentence of the “Chrestomathie” by means of Koshansky’s grammar, ‘Universus mundus plerumque distribuitur in duas partes, cœlum et terram’ (for which he was nicknamed _universus mundus_). During the lectures, Gogol used to hide some book or other under his desk, paying heed neither to _cœlum_ nor _terram_. I must confess that neither under me nor under my colleagues did he learn any thing. The school taught him only some logical formality and directness of understanding and thought; and, more than that, he learned nothing with us.”

Not even the Russian language was accurately learned by Gogol in the gymnasium of the higher sciences, according to the testimony of his biographer. “His school letters,” says he, “can be distinguished by the absence of all rules of orthography. To make them plainer, I used to arrange the punctuation-marks as it was necessary; I used to change the capital letters, of which he was very extravagant; and I often corrected his blunders in the endings of adjectives.”

The only thing that Gogol acquired in the gymnasium was the art of drawing, and his letters to his relatives prove that he took great pleasure in spending much time in this art.

As he was towards the bottom of his class in his studies, he was at the same time greatly distinguished by his love of mischief; and he was a great favourite with every one. His comrades were especially drawn to him by his inexhaustible humor. Even in childhood could be seen in him his spontaneous wit; and at the same time, no one could copy or imitate a character as well as the little Gogol.

He was an indefatigable reader. He especially liked Pushkin and Zhukovsky. His parents subscribed to the _Vyestnik Yevropui_ (“Messenger of Europe”), and the reading of this and the almanacs aroused in him a desire to write. At first this came in the form of parodies. While he was at Niézhin, a certain scholar showed some signs of poetical passion; and Gogol collected this fellow’s verses, and put them in the form of an almanac, which he called _Parnassky Navoz_ (“Manure from Parnassus”). These parodies suggested to him to publish a serious written journal, and his enterprise cost him great trouble. He had to write articles on all subjects, and then copy them, and, what was more important, to make a volume out of them. He spent whole nights trying to decide upon his titlepage, on which was ornamented the name of his journal “The Star” (_Zvyezdá_). It was all done stealthily, without the knowledge of his friends. Early in the month, the journal made its first appearance. In “The Star” were published Gogol’s story, “The Tverdislavitch Brothers,” which was an imitation of contemporary fiction, and some of his poems. In Gogol’s lofty style, which he now affected, he also wrote a tragedy, “The Murderers” (_Razboiniki_) and a ballad, “Two Little Fish” (_Dvé Ruíbki_), touching on the death of his brother. He also wrote at this time “Hans Küchel-Garten,” a rhymed idyl, which tells how an ideal young man leaves his sweetheart through his thirst for grandeur, but, after vain wandering, returns again to his home, and shares with his love happiness under a straw thatch. Gogol’s comic talent, however, in spite of his belief in a lofty style, began to find means of expression. Thus, among other things, he wrote a satire on the inhabitants of the town of Niézhin, under the title “Something about Niézhin; or, no Law for Fools,” in which he depicts the typical people of the town. It was divided into five parts,--“The Dedication of the Church in the Greek Cemetery,” “The Election to the Greek Magistracy,” “Swallowing-all Fair,” “The Dinner to the _Predvodítel_ of the Nobility,” and “The Coming and Going of the Students.”

On returning once to the gymnasium after his vacation, Gogol wrote a comedy in Malo-Russian, which was played in his father’s theatre; and thus he made his _début_ as a director and actor.

Blackboards served as scenes, and the insufficiency of costumes was made up by imagination. Then the schoolboys clubbed together, and got scenery and costumes, copying what Gogol had seen in his father’s theatre, the only one that he had ever attended. The direction of the gymnasium, wishing to encourage the study of French, introduced pieces in that tongue; and the repertory of the little school theatre soon was composed of comedies by Molière, Florian, Von Vizin, Kotzebue, Kniaznin, and Malo-Russian authors. The townspeople heard about the theatre, and it soon became very popular; and a few years ago people were still living in Niézhin who could remember how successfully Gogol took the _rôle_ of old women.

Towards the end of his course, Gogol and his comrades subscribed quite a sum of money, and bought a library, which contained the works of Delvig, Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and other distinguished contemporaries, and subscribed to several journals. Gogol was made librarian. He was so indefatigable that he made every person who took a book finish it, and so careful of their cleanliness that he used to wrap up the fingers of his readers in paper.

Gogol graduated in 1828, with the rank of the fourteenth _tchin_. Even at this time he was very religious, as can be seen in his correspondence with his relatives. “After the death of his father, in 1825, he writes to his mother, ‘Don’t be worried, my dearest _mámenka_. I have borne this shock with the strength of a Christian. It is true, at first I was overwhelmed with this terrible tidings. However, I did not let anybody see that I was so sorrowful; but, in my own room, I was given over mightily to unreasonable despair. I even wanted to take my life. But God kept me from it. And towards evening, I noticed only sorrow, but not a passionate sorrow; and it gradually turned into an uneasy, hardly noticeable melancholy, mingled with a feeling of gratitude to Almighty God. I bless thee, holy faith! In thee only I find a source of consolation and compensation for my bitter grief.’”

At the same time he was a fiery enthusiast; he imagined himself a great benefactor of his fatherland. For this reason he felt inclined to a governmental situation. He wrote his mother in 1828 that he was not understood: some, he said, took him to be a genius; others, to be a stupid. He tried to be one of the romanticists; and, like all of those budding geniuses, he thought that he had a great deal to put up with from people. In the same letter he writes his mother how much ungratefulness, coldness, vexation, he had been obliged to bear without complaint and without grumbling. He writes one of his friends that the people of Niézhin, not excepting “our dear instructors,” have heaped upon our genius the pressing heaps of their earthiness, and crushed us. Two features of Gogol’s life at this time are interesting as showing his development,--a tendency to asceticism, which led him to a stern self-restraint, turning all the pleasures and interests of his life to a spiritual and intellectual sphere. “My plan of my life,” he writes to his mother in 1829, “is wonderfully stern and exact. Every _kopek_ has its place. I refuse myself even very extreme necessities, with a view of being able to keep myself in the position which I am now, so that I can satisfy my desire of seeing and feeling the beautiful (_prekrásnoe_). With this view I lay up all my annual allowance, except what is absolutely necessary.”

In 1829 Gogol first went to Petersburg, where, in spite of his vivid dreams of success and glory, he found the hard realities of life, and met with discouraging failures. He wrote his mother: “Everywhere I met with disappointments; and, what is strangest of all, I met them when I least expected them. Men entirely incapable, without any letters of introduction whatever, easily succeeded where I, even with the aid of my patrons, failed.” He also fell in love with a girl of high rank; and in his letter to his mother he speaks about it, but does not mention her name: “For God’s sake, don’t ask her name. She is very, very high.... No, it is not love: I, at least, never heard of such a love. Under the impulse of madness and horrible torments of the soul, I was thirsty to intoxicate myself only with the sight of her, only the sight of her I looked for. To look upon her once more was my only desire, which grew stronger with an unspeakable, gnawing anguish. I looked upon myself with horror, and I saw all my horrible situation. Every thing in the world was strange to me, life and death were equally intolerable, and my soul could not account for its impulses.”

His mental state arising from all these disappointments became so serious that he went abroad with money that his mother sent him to pay a mortgage on their estate, and told his mother to take his portion of the estate in exchange for it. He went to Lübeck by sea, staid there a month, took a few baths, and returned to Petersburg without seeing any thing more of Europe. At all events, he returned, sobered, refreshed, and strengthened, in September, 1829. In April, 1830, Gogol found a very insignificant place in the ministry of Appanages. The whole outcome of this year of servitude was the knowledge of tying up papers, and a vivid memory of various types of _Tchinovniks_ which he used to advantage in his works later on.

In 1829 he wrote his poem “Italy,” and sent it anonymously to the publisher of _Suin Otetchestva_ (Son of the Fatherland.) Soon afterwards he published “Hans Küchel-Garten,” which had been written while he was in the gymnasium. It was signed _Alof_, and brought a review full of unmerciful ridicule. This review cut Gogol so keenly that he immediately withdrew the story from circulation. Buying up all the copies that he could get hold of, he hired a room in a hotel, and made a grand holocaust of them. The last tendencies of his immature, imitative romanticism went up with the incense of the fire and smoke. He soon saw that a new spirit was invading Russian literature: historical novels were becoming fashionable. So Gogol writes to all his friends and relatives in Malo-Russia to send him every possible scrap about the history of that region, about the habits, manners, customs, legends, games, songs, of the Cossacks. “It is very, very necessary for me,” he would add. He was working over his “Evenings on the Farm near Dikanka.” In February, 1830, there appeared anonymously in the _Otetchestvennuie Zapiski_ one of Gogol’s tales, entitled “Bassavriuk; or, Ivan Kupala’s Eve.” In 1831, in “Northern Flowers,” appeared a chapter of his historical novel “Hetman,” signed with four zeros. In the first number of the “Literary Gazette” he published a sketch from his Malo-Russian story, _Strashnui Kaban_ (The Terrible Boar). He also wrote serious articles and translations.

In March, 1831, he was made teacher of Russian in the Patriotic Institute. Here, instead of teaching Russian, he taught history, geography, and international history; and when he was called to account for his vagaries, and was asked when he was going to teach the Russian language, he smiled, and said, “What do you want it for, gentlemen? The main thing in Russian is to know the difference between _yé_ and _yat_ [two similarly sounding, but differently written, letters], and that I perceive you know already, as is seen by your copy-books. No one can teach you to write smoothly and gracefully. This power is granted by nature, but not by instruction.”

Indeed, Gogol himself, to his dying day, was not able to spell correctly. He cared more for the spirit than the form. The publication of “Evenings on the Farm,” especially the second series, which are marked by the purest humor, without a shade of melancholy, immediately placed him in the front rank of the authors of his day; and this was the happiest epoch of his life. Soon afterwards he began to feel a re-action. In 1833 he wrote to Pogódin: “Let my stories be doomed to oblivion till something really solid, great, artistic, shall come out of me. But I stand idle, motionless. I don’t want to do any thing trivial, and I can’t think of any thing great.” He then betook himself to historical investigation, and determined to write the history of Malo-Russia and of the Middle Ages. He laid out the work on a colossal scale. He wrote to Maksímof, “I am writing the history of the Middle Ages, and I think it will fill eight volumes, if not nine.” He never finished these histories, but his study of Malo-Russia led him to the composition of his great epos “Taras Bulba.”

There happened to be a vacancy in the university of St. Vladímer in Kief. Some one suggested Gogol, and he was invited to apply. He came, he saw, and he conquered the man in whose hands the appointment lay, by his wonderful flow of brilliant conversation; but he brought no documents. He was requested to come again, with his documents and application. Again he appeared, and again he dazzled by his wit; but when he was asked for his documents he pulled from his inside pocket his certificate of graduation from the gymnasium, which gave him the right to a _tchin_ of the fourteenth class, and an application for the chair of Ordinary Professor. He was told that it was impossible, with such credentials, for him to be given any thing more than the chair of adjunct. Gogol was obstinate, and absolutely refused to take that position. Shortly after, he was appointed professor at Petersburg, where he gave the one lecture which was so beautiful. “We awaited the next lecture with impatience,” says Ivanitsky, who was a pupil at that time; “Gogol came in very late, and began with the phrase: ‘Asia was a volcano belching forth people.’ Then he spoke a few words about the emigration of nations; but it was so dull, lifeless, and desultory that it was tedious to listen to him, and we could not believe that it was the same Gogol who had spoken so beautifully the week before. Finally he mentioned a few books where we could read up the subject, and bowed and left. The whole lecture lasted twenty minutes. The following lectures were of the same stamp; so that we became entirely cool to him, and the classes became smaller and smaller. But once,--it was October,--while walking up and down the hall of assembly, and waiting for him, suddenly Pushkin and Zhukovsky came in. They knew, of course, through the Swiss, that Gogol had not yet come; and so they only asked us in which room he would read. We showed them the auditorium. Pushkin and Zhukovsky looked in, but did not enter. They waited in the hall of assembly. In quarter of an hour the lecturer came; and we, following the three poets, entered the auditorium and sat down. Gogol took his chair, and suddenly, without any warning, began to read the history of the Arabians. The lecture was brilliant, exactly in the manner of the first. Word for word it was published in the ‘Arabesques.’ It was evident that he knew beforehand the intention of the poets to come to his lecture, and therefore he prepared himself to treat them like poets. After the lecture Pushkin said something to Gogol, but the only word I heard was ‘fascinating’ (_uvlekátelno_). The rest of his lectures were very dry and tedious. Not one historical personage caused any lively and enthusiastic discussion.... He looked upon the dead nations of the past with dreary eyes, as it were; and it was doubtless true that it was tedious to him, and he saw that it was tedious to his hearers. He used to come and speak half an hour from his platform, and then leave for a whole week and sometimes for two. Then he would come again and repeat the same proceeding. Thus went the time till May.”

He gave up his thoughts of the nine-volume history of the Middle Ages; and of this year of disappointment there remained only a few articles in the “Arabesques,” and the sketches of a tragedy entitled “Alfred,” which show that he had not a trace of talent for tragedy. In 1835 he resigned, and devoted himself entirely to literature.

About this time he began to develop a great passion for the supernatural, which is best illustrated in his sketch “Vii.” It is an interesting fact that the poet Pushkin, whose influence over Gogol was considerable, suggested to him the subject of “Dead Souls.” He also told him the story which he afterwards worked up into the “Revizor.” Pushkin himself at one time intended to use both of these subjects. Gogol attended the first production of the “Revizor” on the stage, and was greatly disgusted. He trained the actors, however, giving them the meaning of every inflection, and showing what gesticulation was needed. “All are against me,” he wrote to M. S. Shchepkin in 1836, “all the decent _tchinovniks_ are shouting that I hold nothing sacred, since I dared to speak so about people who are in the service. The police are against me, merchants are against me, literary men are against me: they berate me, yet they go to see the play. At the fourth act it is impossible to get tickets. Had it not been for the mighty protection of the emperor, my play would never have been put on the stage; and people even now are doing their best to have it suppressed. Now I see what it means to be a comic writer. The least spark of truth, and all are against you,--not one man, but all classes. I imagine what it would have been if I had taken something from Petersburg life, with which I am even more acquainted than provincial life. It is very unpleasant for a man to see people against him whom he loves with brotherly affection.”

Gogol wrote another comedy, entitled “The Leaving of the Theatre after the Production of a New Comedy.” It was founded on the various criticisms of his “Revizor,” but it was not very successful. In 1836 Gogol went abroad. He lived most of the time in Rome, though he wandered all over Europe, and occasionally returned for short visits, renewing his acquaintance with his old friends. Like Turgénief, while he was in Russia he was disgusted with the state of affairs, but when he left there his soul began to turn with intense yearning for his native land. In 1837 Gogol wrote “Dead Souls.” He said in his “Confessions of an Author,” “I began to write ‘Dead Souls’ without laying out any circumstantial plan, without deciding what the hero should be. I simply thought that the bold project, with the fulfilment of which Tchitchikof was occupied, would of itself lead me to various persons and characters, that the natural impulse in me to laugh would create many scenes which I intended to mingle with pathetic ones. But I was stopped with questions at every step, why and wherefore? What must express such and such a character? What must express such and such a phenomenon? Now I had to ask: What must be done when such questions arise? Drive them off? I tried, but the stern question confronted me. As I felt no special love for this character or that, I could not feel any love for the work to bring it out. On the contrary, I felt something like contempt: every thing seemed strained, forced; and even that which made me laugh became pitiable.”

Charles Edward Turner, English lector in the University of St. Petersburg, says in his “Studies in Russian Literature:” “In the year 1840 Gogol came to Russia for a short period, in order to superintend the publication of the first volume of the “Dead Souls”, and then returned to Italy. With the appearance of this volume we may date the close of his literary career; for though in 1846, at which period he again settled in Russia, he published his “Correspondence with my Friends,” the work can only be regarded as the production of a disordered and enfeebled intellect.... Describing his final illness and death in 1852, he says, “One of his last acts was to burn the manuscript of the concluding portion of ‘The Dead Souls,’ and to write a few sad lines in which he prays that all his works may be forgotten as the products of a pitiable vanity, composed at a time when he was still ignorant of the true interests and duties of man.” At the end of his article on Gogol he says, “What ultimately became of Tchitchikof, we do not know; for, as has been already stated, the concluding portion of his adventures was destroyed by Gogol in a fit of religious enthusiasm.” A certain Dr. Zahartchenko of Kief thought fit to publish, in 1857, a continuation of Gogol’s inimitable work. The stolid complacency which alone could encourage an obscure and talent-less novelist to undertake such a task is in itself a sufficient standard of the success he could achieve; and his book must be regarded with the same mingled feeling of astonishment and pity an Englishman would experience on having put before him a continuation of Thackeray’s “Denis Duval” or Dickens’s “Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

In 1848 Gogol made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and returned to Russia by way of Odessa. The last years of his life were passed in Moscow in an ever-deepening state of fanatical mysticism. His death, in March, 1852, was probably due to his insane attempt to keep the strict fast. His last days were troubled by strange hallucinations. His life-long disorder was an acute derangement of the nerves caused by self-abuse.

As an example of Gogol’s early style, the opening scene of “Taras Bulba,” which has been mentioned by M. Dupuy, may be read with interest:--

“‘Ah! turn around, little son. How funny you look! What kind of a parson’s garment have you got on? Is that the way you go in your academy?’ With such words the old Bulba met his two sons, who had been studying in the theological school in Kief, and who just came home to their father.

“His sons have only just dismounted from their horses. They were a couple of hearty fellows, who looked from under their brows like just graduated seminarists. Their strong, healthy faces were covered with the first downy hair, as yet untouched by a razor. They were very much confused at such a reception by their father, and stood motionless, with their eyes fixed on the ground.

“‘Hold on, hold on, children!’ he continued, turning them around and around. ‘What a long _svitkas_ you’ve got on! Those are fine _svitkas_. _Nu, nu, nu_, such _svitkas_ as these were never yet seen! Well, now, both of you try to run; I’ll see if you don’t trip up.’

“‘Don’t you make fun of us, don’t you make fun of us, father!’ at last said the eldest of them.

“‘_Fu_, what a dandy you are! Why not laugh?’

“‘Simply because [_Da tak_]; I suppose, you are my father; yet, if you keep on making sport of us, by Heaven, I’ll give to you!’

“‘_Akh!_ a fine kind of a son you are. What’s that you say to your father?’ said Taras Bulba, falling back a little in surprise.

“‘Yes, though you are my father. I don’t regard anybody, or have any respect for anybody, who insults me.’

“‘How do you want to fight with me,--with fists?’

“‘It makes no difference to me.’

“‘_Nu!_ let us fight with fists,’ said Bulba, rolling up his sleeves.

“And the father and son, instead of saluting each other after their long separation, began to beat each other angrily.

“‘The old man must be crazy,’ said the pale, thin, and kindly mother, who was standing on the threshold, and who has not yet had a chance to embrace her beloved children. ‘By Heaven, he is crazy! Here the children have come home. For more than a year he has not seen them, and now he is doing, God knows what! To fight with fists!’

“‘Yes, he fights gloriously,’ said Bulba, stopping. [_Éï Bogu!_] ‘Capital!... So, so!’ he continued, adjusting himself a little. ‘There won’t be any need of trying. He will make a good Kazak.--_Nu_, how are you, little son? Give us a kiss.’ And the father and son began to kiss each other.

“‘Excellent, little son; pound everybody just as you have thrashed me; don’t give in to anybody. Yet you have on a funny rig. What kind of a rope is that hanging down?--And, you dog, what are you there for with your hands by your sides?’ said he, addressing the younger one. ‘Why don’t you thrash me, you son of a dog?’

“‘Now he is talking nonsense again,’ cried the mother, at the same time throwing her arms around the younger one. ‘And what nonsense gets into his head! How can a child beat his own father? As though that was all he had to tend to now. He is a little child; he has travelled such a long way, he must be tired’ (this child was more than twenty years old, and exactly a _Sazhen_, almost seven feet high). ‘He must need to rest now, and have something to eat; and yet he compels him to fight!’

“‘_Ey!_ you are a little dandy [_mazuntchik_] I see,’ said Bulba. ‘Don’t listen, little son, to your mother: she is a _baba_ [woman], she doesn’t know any thing. What kind of petting do you want? Your petting is the clear field and a good horse; that is your petting. And do you see this sabre? That is your mother. All they are stuffing your heads with is nonsense: the academy and all those little books--primers and philosophies--are the Devil knows what. I spit at it all. I am going to send you away next week to the Zaporozhe. That is the school for you. It is there only where you will learn reason.’

“‘Won’t they stay at home with us but one week?’ asked the thin old mother pitifully, with tears in her eyes. ‘Poor fellows, they won’t have time to enjoy themselves. They won’t get any good out of their own home, and I sha’n’t look at them half enough.’

“That’ll do, that’ll do, old woman! A Kazak’s got something better to do than spend his time with women [_babas_]. Hurry up, and put on the table every thing you’ve got,--poppy-seed cake [_pampuskek_], gingerbread, and such like; _puddings_ we can get along without. But fetch us a whole ram for dinner, and then whiskey; and let’s have more whiskey than any thing else: not the kind with different kinds of stuff in it,--raisins, and other such things,--but straight whiskey, the unadulterated, such as’ll hiss like the devil!’

“Bulba took his sons into the small room. Every thing in the room was arranged according to the taste of that time; and that time was about the sixteenth century, when the idea of the union had just begun to be discussed. Every thing was clean and whitewashed. The whole wall was adorned with sabres and guns. The windows in the room were small, with round panes of ground glass, such as can be found at the present time only in old churches. On the shelves, which occupied the corners of the room, and which were made triangular in shape, were standing earthen pitchers, blue and green bottles, silver cups, gilded wine-glasses, of Venetian, Turkish, and Circassian workmanship, which had found their way into Bulba’s room in different ways,--third and fourth hand, a very ordinary thing in those bold days. The linden benches around the whole room, the huge table in the middle of it, the stove occupying half of the room, like a fat Russian merchant’s wife, and adorned with tiles with designs of cockerels,--all these things were very familiar to our two young fellows, who used to walk home almost every year to spend their vacation; they used to walk because they had no horses, and because it was not customary to allow scholars to go on horseback. They had only the long forelocks which every Kazak who carries weapons felt that he had a right to pull. Bulba, just as they were about to leave school, sent them from his stud a pair of good horses.

“‘Well [_nu_], little sons, before all let us have some whiskey. God bless you! to your health, my little sons; yours, Ostap, and yours, Andriï! May God grant you be always successful in battle, that you may beat the Busurmans (Mahometans), beat the Turks, beat the Tatars, and when the Poles begin to do any thing against our religion, beat the Poles too! _Nu!_ hold up your glass. Is the whiskey good? And what is whiskey in Latin? That’s it [_to-to_] little son. The _Latuintsui_ [Latins] were fools; they did not know there was such a thing as whiskey in existence. What was the name of that fellow who wrote Latin verses? I don’t know much of reading and writing, and therefore I do not remember. Wasn’t it Horatsii?’

“‘That’s a fine father,’ said the older son, Ostap, to himself. ‘The dog knows every thing, but he makes believe that he doesn’t.’

“‘I don’t believe the _arkhimandrit_ allowed you even to smell whiskey,’ continued Bulba. ‘Well, now, little sons, tell the truth: did they lash you with cherry and maple sticks over the back, and everywhere else? Or maybe, being as you are so mighty smart, they used straps on you! I reckon that; besides Saturdays, they used to thrash you on Wednesdays and Thursdays too.’

“‘Father, there’s no need of bringing up all that,’ said Ostap, in his usual phlegmatic voice. ‘What’s past is gone.’

“‘Now we shall pay everybody off,’ said Andriï, ‘with sabres and bayonets. Just let the Tatars come in our way!’

“‘That is good, little son. By Heavens, that’s good! If that’s the case, I shall go along with you. By Heavens, I’ll go! What the devil is the good of staying here! What! must I look after the grain and swine-herds, or to fool with my wife? I stay at home for her sake? I am a Kazak. I do not want it! Well, even supposing there is no war, I am going with you to the Zaporozhe. We’ll have a good time. By Heavens, I’m going!” And the old Bulba, little by little, grew excited, and finally became entirely fierce. He got up from the table, and, trying to look dignified, stamped his foot upon the ground. ‘To-morrow we’ll go! Why put it off? What in the devil should we sit here for? What good does this hut do us? What do we want all these things for? What’s the good of these pots?’ And, while saying this, Bulba began to smash and throw about the pots and the bottles.

“The poor old wife, who was long wonted to such tricks of her husband, looked on sorrowfully as she sat on the bench. She did not dare to say a word; but after hearing this resolution, so terrible to her, she could not refrain from tears. She looked up at her children, from whom such a quick separation threatened her; and no one could describe the whole speechless force of her sorrow, which seemed to quiver in her eyes and in the tremblingly compressed lips.

“Bulba was terribly stubborn. He was one of those characters which could spring up only in the rough sixteenth century, and especially in the half-nomadic Eastern Europe, when ideas were both right and wrong as to the possession of lands which were a disputed and undecided property. At that time, the Ukraïna was in this state. The everlasting necessity of defending the border against three different nations,--all this added a sort of free and broad character to the actions of its sons, and it trained in them a stubborn spirit. This stubbornness of spirit was imprinted with full strength in Taras Bulba. When Batori raised regiments in Malo-Russia, and roused in them that warlike spirit which at first marked only the inhabitants of the Rapids, Taras was one of the first colonels; but at the first opportunity he quarrelled with all the others, because the booty obtained from the Tatars by the united forces of the Polish and Cossack armies was not equally divided between them, and because the Polish army received a greater share. He, in the presence of all, resigned his rank, and said, ‘When you colonels don’t know your own rights, then let the Devil lead you by the nose. And I am going to recruit my own regiment; and whoever will attempt to take away what belongs to me, I shall know how to wipe off his lips.’ And, in fact, in a short time he collected from his father’s estate quite a good number of men, made up of both farm-laborers and warriors, who gave themselves up entirely to his wish. He was generally a great hand for taking part in invasions and raids; he heard with his nose, as it were, where and in what place an uprising was taking place. Like snow upon the head, he would appear on his horse. ‘_Nu_, children, what is it? How is it? Who is to be beaten? What is the reason?’ was what he generally asked, and then took a hand in the affair. First of all, he would sternly analyze the circumstances, and he would take a hand only in cases when he saw that those who seized the weapons had really a right to do so; and this right, according to his opinion, was only in the following cases. If the nation in the neighborhood had been carrying off cattle, or cutting off a portion of land; or if the commissioners had been putting on heavy taxes, or had not respected their elders, and had spoken in their presence with their hats on; or if they had left the Christian religion,--in such cases it was inevitably necessary to take up the sabre; but against the Busurmans, Tatars, and Turks, he considered it just to use the weapon any time, in the name of God, Christianity, and Kazatchestvo (Cossackdom). The position of Malo-Russia at that time, having no system whatever, and being in perfect uncertainty, brought into existence many entirely separate partisans. Bulba led a very simple life; and it would have been impossible to distinguish him from any ordinary Kazak in the service, if his face had not preserved a certain expression of command, and even grandeur, particularly when he used to make up his mind to defend something.

“Bulba comforted himself beforehand with the thought of how he should appear now with his two sons, and say, ‘Just look what nice fellows I have brought to you.’ He thought about how he should take them to the Zaporozhe, to that school of war of the Ukraïna of that day, how he should introduce them to his comrades, and superintend their advance in the science of war and making raids, which he considered at that time one of the first qualities of a knight. At first he intended to send them off alone, because he deemed it necessary to give himself up to the enlistment of a new regiment which demanded his presence; but at the sight of his sons, who were well built and hearty, all his warrior-spirit suddenly awoke in him, and he made up his mind to go along with them on the following day, though the necessity of this was only his stubborn will.

“Without losing a minute, he began to give orders to his _esaul_, whom he called Tovkatch, because he was really like some kind of a cold-blooded machine: during battle he would pass indifferently along the enemy’s ranks, sweeping them down with his sabre as though he was mixing dough, like a boxer clearing his way. The orders were to the effect that he should stay on the farm till orders came for him to set out to the war. After this, he went around the village, giving orders to some of his people to accompany him, to water the horses, to feed them with wheat, and to saddle his own horse, which he used to call Tchort, or the Devil. ‘_Nu_, children, now we must go to sleep, and to-morrow we shall do what God may instruct us to do. Don’t give us any bedding! We don’t need any bedding: we shall sleep in the _dvor_!’

“The night had just embraced the heaven; but Bulba always retired early. He made himself comfortable on the carpet, covered himself up with a sheep-skin _tulup_, because the night air was rather fresh, and because Bulba was fond of covering himself warmly when at home. He was soon snoring, and his example was followed by the whole court. Every thing that was lying in its various corners was snoring and singing. Before anybody else the watchman fell asleep, because he drank more than anybody else, in honor of the arrival of the young lords.

“The poor mother only was not sleeping. She leaned towards the heads of her dear sons, who were lying side by side; with a comb she straightened their young, carelessly disordered locks, and moistened them with her tears. She gazed at them with her whole soul, with all her feelings; she _metamorphosed herself into one gaze_, and she could not satisfy herself in looking at them. She had nursed them with her own breast; she had brought them up, caressed them,--and now only for one moment does she see them before her. ‘My sons, my precious sons! what will become of you? what fate awaits you there? If only for one week more, I might look upon you both,’ said she; and her tears stood in the wrinkles, which had changed her once beautiful face. And indeed she was pitiful, like any other woman of that bold age. She saw her husband two or three days a year, and then for several years there would be no tidings of him. And if she did see him, when they lived together, what kind of a life was hers? She suffered insults, even blows. Only out of mercy at times she felt his caresses. She was like a strange creature in this assemblage of wifeless knights, upon whom the dissolute Zaparog life threw its stern shadow. The joyless days of her youth flashed before her, and her cheeks were covered with premature wrinkles. All her love, all her feelings, all that is tender and passionate in a woman, all turned with her into one motherly feeling. She, with heat, with passion, with tears, like the gull of the steppe [_step-tchaïka_], looked upon her children. Her sons, her dear sons, are taken away from her: they are taken away, never to be seen again. Who knows? Maybe at the first battle the _Tatarin_ will chop off their heads, and she would not even know where their bodies lie: the ravening birds may pick them up; and for every little piece of their flesh, for every drop of blood, she would have given up her all! As she wept, she looked straight into their eyes, which all compelling sleep began to close, and she thought to herself, ‘Maybe Bulba, after having a good sleep, will postpone the journey for a couple of days. Maybe he decided to go so soon because he drank too much.’ The moon from the height of the heaven was already shining over the whole _dvor_, filled with sleeping people, with the thick mass of willows and tall steppe grass, in which the fence around the yard was drowned. She was still sitting at the heads of her dear sons, without for a moment taking off her eyes from them, and not thinking of sleep.

“The horses, anticipating the dawn of day, lay down on the grass, and ceased eating. The upper leaves of the willows began to rustle, and little by little the rustling stream descended down over them to the very bottom. She sat till the very morning: she was not at all tired, and she inwardly wished that the night might last as long as possible. From the steppe was heard the loud neighing of a young colt.

“Ruddy stripes brightly gleamed in the heaven. Bulba suddenly awoke and jumped up. He remembered very well every thing that he had ordered the day before. ‘_Nu_, fellows, you’ve slept long enough: it is time. Water the horses. And where is the old woman? [Thus he generally called his wife]. Be lively, old woman, have something for us to eat, because there is a long journey before us.’

“The poor old woman, who was deprived of her last hope, gloomily dragged herself to the hut. While with tears in her eyes she was preparing every thing for breakfast, Bulba gave his orders, busied himself in the stable, and he himself selected for his sons his best adornments. The seminarists were suddenly transformed: instead of their old soiled boots, they wore red leather ones with silver rings on the heels; pantaloons as wide as the Black Sea, with a thousand folds and pleats, were fastened tight around the waist with a golden belt; to the belt were attached long straps, with tassels and other little ornaments for the pipe. The _kazakin_ (a little Russian garment), of gay color, of cloth as bright as fire, was tightened with an embroidered belt. Silver-mounted Turkish pistols were stuck behind the belt; the sabre clattered under their feet. Their faces, which were a little burned by the sun, it seemed, became handsomer and whiter; their young black mustaches brought out now in somewhat more striking contrast their whiteness and the healthy, robust color of youth. They looked well under their sheepskin hats with golden tips.

“The poor mother! As soon as she looked up at them, she could not utter a word, and the tears were checked in her eyes.

“‘_Nu_, little sons, every thing is ready! There is no need of wasting time,’ cried Bulba at last. ‘Now, according to the Christian style, all of us must sit down before setting out.’

“All of them sat down, not excepting even the serfs, who were standing respectfully at the door. ‘Now, mother, bless your children,’ said Bulba. ‘Pray to God that they may fight with courage, that they may always keep the honor of knights, that they may always stand up for the Christian faith; else rather may they sink, so that their spirits perish from the world.--Go over, children, to your mother. A mother’s prayer saves in fire and water.’ The mother, weak as a mother, embraced them, took out two small holy images, put them on their necks, all the time weeping bitterly. ‘May the Mother of God--preserve you.--Don’t forget, little sons, your mother.--Send me some little word about you.’ Further she could not speak.

“‘_Nu_, let us start, children,’ said Bulba.

“At the steps their horses were standing. Bulba mounted his _devil_, who wickedly began to back on feeling a weight of twenty _puds_ (nearly eight hundred pounds), for Bulba was exceedingly heavy and fat.

“When the mother saw that her sons were already on the horses, she hurried after the younger one, whose face expressed more of tenderness. She caught the stirrup, clung to his saddle, and, with desperation in all her features, would not let it out of her hands. Two strong Kazaks took her gently and carried her into the hut. But as soon as they left her, she, with all the rapidity of a wild goat, though it was not in accordance with her age, ran out of the gate, and with an incomprehensible strength stopped the horse, and threw her arms around one of them in a sort of a mad and senseless excitement.

“They took her away again.

“The young Kazaks rode on gloomily, but kept their tears, fearing their father, who, however, on his part, was also somewhat melancholy, though he tried not to show it. It was a gray day; the green fields gleamed brightly, the birds were singing somehow in discord. After going some distance, they looked back. Their farm seemed as though it was swallowed up by the earth; only two chimneys of their humble house stood on the earth; only the tops of the trees, on the branches of which they used to climb like squirrels. Only the distant prairie remained before them, that prairie which reminded them of the whole history of their life, since the days when they used to ride over its dewy grass. And now there is only the sweep over the well, with a _telyega_ wheel attached to its top, standing out by itself against the sky; already the level over which they have passed looks, in a distance, like a mountain, and it has covered every thing. Farewell, childhood, and games, and all, and all, farewell.”

TURGÉNIEF.

Among the historical characters belonging to Turgénief’s family were Piotr, who exposed the character of the False Dmitri, and who in consequence was executed on the Lobno Place in Moscow; and Yakof Turgénief, the well-known jester of Peter the Great, who, in the year 1700, had to shear off the _boyars’_ beards. Still more worthy of mention among those who bore the name of Turgénief was his cousin Nikolaï Ivanovitch, who was implicated in the celebrated Dekabrist conspiracy of 1825, and was exiled by Nicholas. He wrote a large work entitled “Russia and the Russians.” He was a passionate advocate of the emancipation of the serfs.

Ivan Turgénief’s father served in a regiment of cuirassiers stationed at Orel, and there he married Várvara Petrovna Lutovinova. His father resigned with the rank of colonel, and died in 1835. Ivan’s mother lived till she reached the age of seventy. In 1820 the whole Turgénief family went abroad and visited Switzerland. At Berne the little four-year-old Ivan Sergéyevitch narrowly escaped falling a prey to the bears. His father caught him by the leg just as he was pitching headlong into the pit. When the family returned to Russia, they lived in the Government of Orlof; and Ivan Sergéyevitch had tutors of every nationality except his own. His first acquaintance with Russian literature came from a serf named Kheraskof, belonging to his mother. The first Russian book that he ever read was the “Rossiada.” In 1828 the family moved to Moscow, and six years later Ivan Sergéyevitch entered the University of Moscow; but the year following he left for Petersburg, where he graduated as _kandidat_ in philology. His first attempts at writing were made before he graduated; and his teacher, Pletnef, was able to discover in him signs of future greatness. Turgénief says, in his “Reminiscences,” “At the beginning of 1827, while I was a student in the third course of the University of St. Petersburg, I handed the professor of literature, P. A. Pletnef, one of the first ‘fruits of my muse,’ as they used to say in those days. It was a fantastic drama, in iambic pentameters, entitled ‘Stenio.’ In one of the following lectures, Pletnef, without mentioning any names, analyzed, with his usual kindness, this absolutely stupid piece of work, in which, with childish incapability, was shown a slavish imitation of Byron’s ‘Manfred.’ After leaving the university building, and finding me on the street, he called me to him, and caressed me like a father, remarking at the same time that there was something [_tchto-to_] in me. These two words gave me sufficient assurance to take to him some more of my poetical productions. He picked out two of them, and a year later published them in ‘The Sovremennik,’ which he inherited from Pushkin. I don’t remember the title of one; but “The Old Oak” was the subject of the other, and it began thus:--

“‘The forests’ mighty tsar with curly head, The ancient oak, bent o’er the water’s sleeping smoothness.’”

In 1838 Turgénief went to Berlin. On his way the ship took fire, and he narrowly escaped with his life. He afterwards embodied the recollection in his story, or sketch, “A Fire at Sea.” “I was then nineteen years old,” he says, in his “Reminiscences,” “and I had been dreaming about this trip. I was convinced that it was possible to acquire in Russia only elementary knowledge, but that the source of real knowledge was abroad. Among the number of the professors in the St. Petersburg University at that time, there was not one who could have shaken that conviction in me. Moreover, they themselves felt the same way. Even the ministry itself, including its chief, Count Uvarof, was convinced of this same thing; and the latter used to send at his own expense young men to the universities of Germany. I was at Berlin (at two different times) for about two years. I studied philosophy, the ancient languages, history, and with special eagerness I devoted myself to Hegel under the guidance of Professor Werder. As proof of the insufficiency of the knowledge to be gained at our own colleges, I am going to quote this fact: I studied Latin antiquity with Zumpt, the history of Greek literature with Beck; but at my own home I was compelled to learn by heart Latin and Greek grammar, of which I had a very slim acquaintance, and I was not one of the worst candidates.”

In his “Reminiscences” he throws further light on the causes which induced him to live abroad. He says that there was nothing to keep him in Russia. Every thing around him was calculated to fill him with indignation, contempt, and scorn. “I could not hesitate long. It was necessary either to submit to humiliation, and calmly make up my mind to follow the general rut over the beaten road, or boldly to push away ‘every thing and all,’ even at the risk of losing much that was dear and near to my heart. And so I did. I threw myself head first into the ‘German sea,’ which should purify and regenerate me; and, when at last I emerged from its billows, I became a _Zapadnik_,--a Western man, and such I remained for all my life.”

In 1841 Turgénief returned to Russia, going directly to Moscow, where his mother was living. Here he became acquainted with the Slavophiles Aksákof, Khomiakof, and the Kiriyevskys, who at this time were just beginning to promulgate their ideas. But Turgénief found them hopelessly in the “general rut.”

He tells in his “Reminiscences” how he first thought of “Fathers and Sons.” “I was taking baths at Ventnor, a little town on the Isle of Wight, in August, 1860, when the first thought of ‘Fathers and Sons’ entered my mind,--that narrative which checked, as it seems to me, forever the kindly disposition of the Russian younger generation. More than once I read in journals, and heard that ‘I was off the track,’ or was ‘bringing in new ideas.’ Some praised me; others, on the contrary, blamed me. On my part, I must confess that I never attempted to ‘create a figure.’ I always had for my starting-point, not an idea, but a living person, to whom I would gradually add and join suitable elements. The same thing happened in ‘Fathers and Sons.’ As the foundation of the main figure, Bazarof, the person of a young provincial doctor, who surprised me very much at the time, was chosen. He died just before 1860. This remarkable man appeared to me to contain all the elements of what has since received the name of Nihilism, but which at that time was just beginning to rise, and had not yet been formulated. The impression made upon me by this person was very strong, and at the same time not very clear. At first I could not account for him very well; and I used my utmost endeavors to hear and see every thing about me, with a view of vivifying the truthfulness of my own impressions. This fact confused me. In no book of our literature could I find a single hint of what seemed to me to be everywhere. Reluctantly the doubt arose in me whether I was not hunting for a shadow.”

What he found at last was Bazarof, in which type he predicted the spirit of a new epoch, and showed “the new man” at the very moment of his appearance. No one understood it, and hence arose the storm which assailed the author.

“I experienced impressions,” says Turgénief, “of different kinds, but all equally disagreeable to me. I noticed coolness, even going so far as indignation, in many who had been near and dear to me. I received almost fulsome congratulations from people who belonged to the camp of my enemies. This confused me: ... it grieved me. But my conscience did not reproach me. I knew well that I had been true to the type which I had described.”

M. le Vicomte E. Melchior de Vogüé, in a capital study of Turgénief’s life and works, thus speaks of the reason for the novelist’s popularity and influence in Russia: “We read books as the passer-by glances at a painting in a shop-window, for an instant, from the corner of the eye, as he goes to his business. If you knew how differently they read their poets there [in Russia]! What for us is only a feast for enjoyment is for them the daily bread of the soul. It is the golden age of lofty literature, which all very youthful peoples in Asia, in Greece, in the Middle Ages have seen flourishing. The writer is the guide for his race, the master of a multitude of commingling thoughts; still in a measure the creator of his language, poet in the ancient and complete meaning of the word _vates_, poet, prophet. Simple-hearted and serious readers, new-comers into the world of ideas, eager for direction, full of illusions about the power of human genius, ask their intellectual guide for a doctrine, for a reason for life, for a perfect revelation of the ideal. In Russia the few members of the aristocratic _élite_ long ago reached, and perhaps went beyond, our dilettanteism; but the lower classes are beginning to read: they read passionately, with faith and hope, as we read ‘Robinson’ at twelve.... For the Moscow merchant, the son of the village priest, the small country proprietor, to whom a few volumes of Pushkin, of Gogol, of Nekrásof represent the encyclopædia of the human mind, this novel [“Virgin Soil,” or “Fathers and Sons,” or “A Nest of Noblemen”] is one of the books of the national Bible: it assumes the importance and the epic significance which the story of Esther had for the people of Judæa, the story of Ulysses for the people of Athens, the romance of ‘The Rose’ or of ‘Renart’ for our ancestors.

“Three years ago, in dedicating the statue of Pushkin at Moscow, Turgénief quoted a characteristic remark made by a peasant standing near the monument. In reply to a comrade who asked the name of this gentleman in bronze, the _muzhik_ said, ‘He was a schoolmaster.’ The orator appropriated the remark, and developed it, saying rightly that the peasant in his ignorance had hit upon the true name of the hero of the celebration. The first Russian poet had been the schoolmaster of his countrymen, he had given new life to their language and their thought. The day, not far distant, doubtless, when Turgénief’s statue will be erected at Moscow, the _muzhik_ will be able to repeat his saying: he also was a schoolmaster.

“His generation listened to him more willingly than to any other. It would be a mistake to seek solely in what we call talent for the reasons of this popular adoption. How many among his primitive and passionate readers troubled themselves about the question of talent, of devices of form, delicacies of thought? In literature, as in politics, a people follow instinctively the men whom they feel belong to themselves, made of their flesh and their genius, marked by their virtues and their failings. Ivan Sergeyévitch personified the master qualities of the Russian people,--their simple-hearted goodness, simplicity, and resignation. He was, as it is said popularly, _une âme du bon Dieu_: that mighty brain was ruled by a child’s heart. Never did I approach him without better comprehending the magnificent meaning of the gospel saying about the “simple in spirit,” and how this state of soul can be allied to the artist’s exquisite gifts and knowledge. Devotion, generosity of heart and of hand, brotherly kindness--all were as natural to him as an organic function. In our cautious, complicated society, where every one is armed for the rough struggle of life, he seemed like a person from another sphere, from some pastoral and fraternal tribe of the Ural;--some grand, self-forgetful child, following his thoughts under the sky, as a shepherd follows his flocks in the steppe.

“Physically, likewise, this tall, calm old man, with his somewhat coarse features, his _sculpturesque_ head, and his thoughtful gaze, brought to mind certain Russian peasants,--the elder who sits at the head of the table in patriarchal families,--but ennobled and transfigured by the labor of thought, like those peasants of old who became monks, were worshipped as saints, and are seen represented on the _ikonostas_ with the aureole and the majesty of prayer. The first time that I met this good giant, the symbolical statue of his country, I had great difficulty in making my impression clear: it seemed to me that I saw and heard a _muzhik_ upon whom had descended the fire of genius, who had been raised to the pinnacles of mind without losing any of his native candor. He would assuredly not have been offended by the comparison, he who so loved his people.”

M. de Vogüé goes on to speak of Turgénief’s work. “The public,” he says, referring to the “Annals of a Sportsman,” “did not at first perceive their hidden significance: the watchful censor was deceived. All that was seen in them was a literary manifestation of the first order, a new note in Russia. Doubtless Gogol’s influence was apparent in the young writer’s style, in his comprehension of nature: the ‘Evenings at the Farm’ set the model for the class. It was always the grand and melancholy symphony of the Russian land; but this time the interpretation by the artist was quite different. No longer were seen Gogol’s sharp humor, the frankly popular character of his paintings, his warm outbursts of enthusiasm suddenly checked by touches of irony: in Turgénief, no jests or enthusiasm; a soberer note, a more subdued emotion; landscapes and men are seen in the pale twilight, through an idealizing mistiness, yet clearly outlined and focussed, as it were, under the eyes of the ever watchful observer.

“The language, also, is richer, more flexible, more graceful; no Russian writer had ever carried it to such a degree of expression. It is not the clear and limpid prose of Pushkin, who had read much of Voltaire, and did not forget it. Turgénief’s periods run slow and voluptuous, like the surface of the mighty Russian rivers, without haste, harmonious, amid the reeds, bearing water-lilies, floating nests, wandering perfumes, showing luminous vistas, and long mirages of sky and land, and suddenly reappearing in shady depths. His discourse stops to gather up any thing,--the humming of a bee, the call of a night-bird, a passing, caressing, dying breeze. The most elusive accords of the grand register of nature it translates with the infinite resources of the Russian keys, flexible epithets, words welded together with poetic fancy, popular joinings of sound to sense.

“I dwell on that which makes the power of this book: it is only a song of the earth, and a murmur of a few poor souls directly heard by us. The writer takes us to the heart of his native land; he leaves us face to face with this country; he disappears, it seems: yet, if not he, who then has drawn from things, and condensed on their surface, that mysterious poetry which they hide within them, but which so few can see, and which we clearly see here? The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ have charmed many French readers; yet how much they lose in color across the double veil of the translation and the common ignorance of the country!...

“When these fragments were brought together into a volume, the public, till then uncertain, saw the significance of the work. Some one had appeared with courage to develop the meaning concealed in Gogol’s sinister jest about “Dead Souls.” What other name can be given to that gallery of portraits gathered by the sportsman,--small country proprietors, selfish and hard; sneaking overseers, idle and rapacious functionaries; beneath this cruel society, wretched helots, fallen, as it were, from the state of humanity, touching by force of misery and submission? The process--however well disguised it be, there is always a process--was invariably the same. The author causes a ludicrous being to pass again and again in his lantern, showing all its phases, laughable and pitiable, in turn, without wants, without resources, condemned to crepuscular life. By the side of the serf appeared the master, a half-civilized marionette, a good devil, after all, unconscious of the harm he was doing, led astray by the fatality of his environment. This painting, which would otherwise be ugly, repulsive, the writer clothed with grace and charm, in some sort contrary to his desire by the inborn virtue of his poetry. Why were all the mainsprings of life broken in all the heroes of the book? Whence came this malaria over the Russian land? What was the name of this pest? The reader was left the trouble of answering.

“It is not very exact to say that Turgénief _attacked_ serfage. Russian writers, in consequence of the conditions under which they work, as well as by the peculiar turn of their genius, never attack openly; they neither argue nor declaim: they paint without drawing conclusions, and they appeal to pity rather than wrath. Twenty years later, when Dostoyevsky will publish his “Recollections of a Dead House” (_Zapiski Mertvava Doma_), his terrible memoirs of ten years in Siberia, he will proceed in the same way, without a word of mutiny, without a drop of gall, seeming to find what he describes as quite natural, only a trifle sad. It is the national trait in all things.... The public understands by a hint.

“It understood this time. The Russia of serfage looked at itself with horror in the mirror which was held before its eyes: a long shudder shook the country; between night and morning the author was famous, and his cause was half gained. The censorship was the last to comprehend, but finally it also comprehended. Possibly its sensitiveness will be wondered at: I have said that serfage was condemned even in the Emperor Nicholas’s heart. You must know that the wishes of the censorship do not always coincide with the emperor’s wishes; at least, it is backward, it is sometimes a reign behindhand. It gave up launching its thunder against the book, but it kept its eye on the author. Gogol being dead in the interim, Turgénief dedicated a warmly eulogistic article to the dead author. This article would seem inoffensive enough, as it appears in Turgénief’s complete works,[59] and we should have difficulty in discovering the crime if the criminal had not revealed the secret in a very gay note: ‘_Apropos_ of that article, I remember that one day at Petersburg, a lady of very high rank criticised the punishment inflicted upon me, judging it to have been undeserved, or at least too severe. As she was warmly speaking in my defence, some one said to her, “Is it possible that you don’t know that in this article he called Gogol _a great man_?”--“It is impossible.”--“I assure you that it is so.”--“Ah! in that case, I have nothing more to say. I am sorry, but I see that they had to be severe upon him.”’

“This impertinent epithet, given to a simple writer, cost Turgénief a month of arrest; then he was advised to go and meditate in his domain. I imagine that he found that society was very ill arranged, so unfair are we to the power that wills our best good. It must be confessed, however, that this power sometimes serves our interest better than we ourselves, and _lettres de cachet_ are generally in accordance with the views of Providence. Thirty years earlier an order of exile saved Pushkin by tearing the poet from the dissipations of Petersburg, where he was wasting his genius, and by sending him to the sun of the East, where his genius was to ripen. If Turgénief had remained at the capital, the warmth of youth and compromising friendships, perchance, might have brought him into some barren political quarrel: sent into the solitude of the woods, he lived there laborious years, studying the humble provincial life of Russia, and gathering materials for his first great novels.”

An anonymous writer, who knew Turgénief intimately, contributed, shortly after his death, to “The London Daily News,” an article, some of the details of which are worthy of preservation: “Turgénief hated luxury. The more he advanced in life, the more he prized simplicity in all things. His bedroom at Les Fresnes[60] had an almost austere aspect. The bed and toilet-stand were in iron; and the desk, drawers, and a large bookcase, in mahogany, of a plain design. Some photographs and engraved likenesses of literary and other friends broke the monotony of the wall. Portrait-cartes, many of which had autographs of those whom they represented, were stuck into the frame of the chimney glass.

“Turgénief was the youngest of three very distinguished brothers. Were the eldest of the trio now living, he would be almost a centenarian. He remembered Buonaparte, Bernardin, St. Pierre, Talleyrand, Sir Walter Scott,--of whom he was for some weeks a guest at Abbotsford,--Miss Edgeworth when she was in the zenith of her fame; visited Mme. de Staël at Coppet, and fell in with Byron as he was making a tour on the Rhine. The eldest Turgénief was a many-sided man. Though not a professional author, he had great literary qualities. His political insight and sagacity were no less remarkable, and he had a wider experience of human nature than perhaps any other European of his time. Though he belonged to a family which stood well with the Court and high in the administration, he enjoyed close intercourse with his ‘unmasked countrymen.’ He thus designated the serfs, who had learned to be patient and resigned, but were unable to dissimulate. Nevertheless, he was accomplished in every polite art, and, if he had chosen, might have risen to the highest diplomatic position. His education was French on Russian soil. Voltaire and Diderot were his early schoolmasters. When he grew up, he made wide incursions into English literature, and came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work. She took the world as she found it, and selected from it the material that she thought would be interesting to write about in a clear and natural style. It was Ivan Turgénief himself who told me this, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. He had not the advantage of knowing English;[61] but, as a youth, he used to hear his brother translate to visitors, at his country house in the Uralian, passages from ‘Irish Tales and Sketches,’ which he thought superior to her three-volume novels. Turgénief also said to me, ‘It is possible, nay, probable, if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of the County Longford, and the squires and squireens, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity, and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones of the earth.’

“Turgéniefs stature was far above the average. He was admirably proportioned, and, when young, could walk as far in a day as a tough horse would amble, and that without any oppressive sense of fatigue. The big bones supported tremendous muscles, which at no time of his life were clogged with adipose tissue. When I knew him, his thick, long hair and flowing beard were white as snow; but as the complexion was fresh, the eye bright, the carriage upright, the voice resonant, I never thought of him as an old man. This giant wrote a neat and almost delicate hand. I have before me a book of his with an autograph inscription which he sent me last winter.... This autograph, though almost ladylike in its delicacy, is very free and unconventional. Turgénief felt what was beautiful in minute and lowly things. He was one of those who are happy in admiring flowers in the valley of humiliation. In some respects he was a big child. Nobody was more easy to amuse. He used to say that Providence was so kind in throwing in his way the kind of persons who exactly suited him. Liking fine arts and music, and disliking fashion and worldly frivolity, he deemed it a piece of rare good luck to fall in with Louis Viardot and his gifted wife (_née_ Garcia), and to be allowed to enter their family circle....

“Turgénief’s conversation was analogous to his handwriting. It was light, delicate, of a free and quite original style, and abounded in picturesque traits. Nothing was forced or far-fetched. His ideas came in the bright, easy flow of a quick-running and well-fed streamlet. It was all the same to him whether he was brought forward or unnoticed in society, for he was neither shy nor vain. He rarely, in talking, broached a subject; but there was no subject on which he could not talk with ease. The politician, philosopher, artist, poet, novelist, intelligent or simple, woman or child, found him good company. Whatever interested mankind appeared to concern him, and to be a thing to study. At the Universal Exhibition of 1878 I found Turgénief in the United States Agricultural Department studying horse-shoes and horse-shoe nails with as much zest as he afterwards showed in comparing the works of the English, Russian, and German schools of pictorial art. The person who explained to him the peculiar merits of the horse-shoe nails was a character; and his peculiarities, which were racy of the soil of Texas, acted as a stimulant on the Russian novelist.”

“Theoretically, there was no depth of human degradation with which the Russian novelist was not acquainted; but it was said that personally no vice ever touched him. ‘_Gros innocent_’ was a term which M. Viardot often applied to him in their intimate conversation. The giant was ‘_naïf_.’ He preserved until old age the impressionable eyes of childhood, and a freshness of nature which to those who did not know him must seem incompatible with his extensive knowledge of human nature, which he studied as a student at Moscow and Berlin, as a functionary at St. Petersburg and in other parts of Russia, and as an exile in Paris. Although an old bachelor, he was free from crotchets and angles. He was glad to oblige, often obliged, sometimes was heartily thanked; and, when he met with ingratitude, he did not think about it. Flaubert was the French novelist whom he best liked as a man and a writer. But he was of opinion that he travelled too far south when he went to Carthage[62] to look for a heroine. His eyes were not used to the glaring landscape of North Africa. They discerned better the cool tints of the Normandy landscape. Plots, he thought, spoiled novels, which were _peintures de mœurs_; and he was glad to see that the taste for them was dying out. Dickens, in his opinion, was at his best in the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ because he had not to be thinking about a plot, instead of letting his pen run on according to the humor of the moment. The plot was necessary for a drama, but in the way of a novelist, who should, above every thing else, keep truth in view....

“Turgénief was of opinion that a splendidly picturesque country was a bad soil for literary or artistic production. Strong emotions or sensations tended to dethrone the faculty of exact observation upon which we are dependent for æsthetic enjoyment in flat districts. We console ourselves for the prose of a landscape in looking with an almost microscopic eye at the plants and insects, and come to see a world replete with beauty and animation in a tangle of gorse, brambles, and humble field-flowers. In expressing to me this theory, he asked, ‘Did you ever see a mountaineer who was sensible to the beauty and song of a small bird? He watches the flight of game and birds of prey. But, for my part, I have found him indifferent to the lark and swallow. My first acquaintance with the skylark was precisely in looking about for compensation for the ugliness of a flat near Berlin. I shall never forget the broadening out of the æsthetic faculty on this occasion. The little creature rose almost from under my feet, and went up singing her joyful song, which I heard long after she was invisible. I then remarked the beauty of the sky and of many other things which I should not otherwise have noticed.’”

* * * * *

A few sentences from the “noble discourse” spoken by M. Renan at Turgénief’s tomb, on Oct. 1, 1883, will fittingly bring this note to a close.

“Turgénief was an eminent writer. He was, above all, a great man. I shall speak to you only of his soul as it always appeared to me in the pleasant retreat which an illustrious friendship had provided for him among us.

“Turgénief received, by that mysterious decree which makes human avocations, the noblest gift of all: he was born essentially impersonal. His consciousness was not that of an individual more or less finely endowed by nature: he was in some sort the consciousness of a people. Before his birth he had lived thousands of years; infinite series of visions were concentrated in the depths of his heart. No man has been to such a degree the incarnation of an entire race. A world lived in him, spoke by his lips; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of ages, without voices, through him came to life and to speech.

“The silent genius of collective masses is the source of all great things. But the masses have no voice. They can only feel and stammer. They need an interpreter, a prophet, to speak for them. Who shall be this prophet? Who shall tell their sufferings, denied by those who are interested in not seeing them, their secret aspirations which upset the sanctimonious optimism of the contented? The great man, gentlemen, when he is at once a man of genius and a man of heart. That is why the great man is least free of all men. He does not do, he does not say, what he wishes. A God speaks in him; ten centuries of suffering and of hope possess him and rule him. Sometimes it happens to him, as to the seer in the ancient stories of the Bible, that, when called upon to curse, he blesses; according to the spirit which moves, his tongue refuses to obey.

“It is to the honor of the great Slav race, whose appearance in the world’s foreground is the most unexpected phenomenon of our century, that it was first expressed by a master so accomplished. Never were the mysteries of an obscure and still contradictory consciousness revealed with such marvellous insight. It was because Turgénief at once felt, and perceived that he felt: he was the people, and he was of the elect. He was as sensitive as a woman and as impassive as a surgeon, as free from illusions as a philosopher and as tender as a child. Happy the race, which, at its beginning a life of reflection, can be represented by such images, simple-hearted as well as learned, at once real and mystical.

“When the future shall have brought to their real proportions the surprises kept in reserve for us by this wonderful Slav genius, with its ardent faith, its depth of intuition, its individual idea of life and death, its martyr spirit, its thirst for the ideal, Turgénief’s paintings will be priceless documents, something, as it were, like the portrait of a man of genius, if it were possible to be had, taken in his infancy. The perilous solemnity of his duty as interpreter of one of the great families of humanity, Turgénief clearly saw. He felt that he had souls in his charge; and, as he was a man of honor, he weighed each of his words. He trembled for what he said, and what he did not say.

“His mission was thus wholly that of the peacemaker. He was like the God of the Book of Job, who ‘makes peace upon the heights.’ What everywhere else caused discord became with him a principle of harmony. In his great bosom, contradictions united. Cursing and hatred were disarmed by the magic enchantments of his art.

“That is why he is the common glory of schools, between which so many disagreements exist. This great race, divided because it is great, finds in him its unity. Hostile brethren separated by different ways of interpreting the ideal, come all of you to his tomb. All of you have the right to love him; for he belonged to all of you, he held you all in his heart. Admirable privilege of genius! The repellent sides of things do not exist for him. In him all finds reconciliation. Parties most opposed unite to praise him and admire. In the region whither he carries us, words which stir irritation in the vulgar lose their sting. Genius accomplishes in a day what it takes centuries to do. It creates an atmosphere of higher peace when those who were foes find that in reality they have been co-laborers; it opens the era of the grand amnesty when those who have been battling in the arena of progress sleep side by side and hand in hand.

“Above the race, in fact, stands humanity; or, if you prefer, reason. Turgénief was of a race by his manner of feeling and painting. He belonged to all humanity by his lofty philosophy, facing with calm eyes the conditions of human existence, and seeking without prejudice to know the reality. This philosophy brought him sweetness, joy in life, pity for creatures, for victims above all. Ardently he loved this poor humanity, often blind, in sooth, but so often betrayed by its leaders. He applauded its spontaneous effort towards well being and truth. He did not reprove its illusions; he was not angry because it complained. The iron policy which mocked at those who suffer was not for him. No disappointment arrested him. Like the universe, he would have begun a thousand times the ruined work: he knew that justice can wait; the end will always be success. He had truly the words of eternal life, the words of peace, of justice, of love, and of liberty.”

COUNT LYOF N. TOLSTOÏ.

Count Tolstoï traces his ancestry back to Count Piotr Andreyévitch Tolstoï, a friend and companion of Peter the Great. In all probability the unnamed _atavus_ who lurks in the patronymic _Andreyévitch_ was merely distinguished by his size,--Andrew the Stout. Many Russian family names, just as is the case with our own English appellations, are derived from characteristics or resemblances. The great Speransky was a hopeful foundling; Soloviéf recalls our nightingales; Pobyedonovtsof means “of the victorious;” the name of Katkof may refer to the proverbial rolling stone; Gogol is a species of duck called the golden eye; the report of cannon may be heard in Pushkin’s name; the ancestor of Griboyédof was probably an eater of mushrooms.

Tolstoï’s father was a retired lieutenant-colonel, who died in 1839. His mother, the Princess Marya Nikolayevna Volkonskaïa, died when Count Lyof was only two years old, and he was brought up by a distant relative, Mme. Yergolskaïa. At Yasnaïa Polyana his education was desultory. In 1840 the five children were taken in charge by a relative of their mother, Pelagia Ilinishna Yushkovaïa, who lived at Kazan. It was thus that Lyof Tolstoï happened to enter the university of that city in 1843. After a few years of study, he suddenly determined to leave the university without graduation. The _rektor_ and the professors argued with him, but in vain; and he went back to his ancestral estate, where he lived till 1851, very rarely visiting the capital. A visit from his beloved brother Nikolaï, who was an officer in the army of the Caucasus, inspired him to see “cities of men and manners, climates, councils,” though least of all the cities of men. Especially strong was his desire to be with his brother in the _Kavkaz_, where Russia’s greatest poets had won their proudest laurels. The impressions made on him by the splendid scenery of the ‘white mountains,’ and by the rough, half-savage life, were so strong that in 1851 he entered the service, like Olénin, as a _yunker_, or ensign-bearer in the Fourth Battery of the Twentieth Artillery, the same in which his brother was an officer.

Here in the Caucasus Count Tolstoï first began to write fiction. He planned to weave his recollections of family life and old traditions into a great novel. Fragments of this work were written and afterwards published in the “Sovremennik.” “Infancy” (_Dyetstvo_) came out in 1852. “Adolescence” (_Otrotchestvo_) was also written then, and several of his brilliant sketches of wild life,--“The Invasion,” “The Felling of the Forest,” and, as has been said, “The Cossacks.” “The Cossacks” is translated into English by Mr. Eugene Schuyler. A very little polishing would make it a brilliant piece of literary work: in its present form it is crude and rough.

Count Tolstoï lived two years in the Caucasus, taking part in various guerilla expeditions, and enduring in common with the soldiers all the hardships of frontier warfare. Here on the spot he made his powerful and life-like studies of the Russian soldier, which are seen in his “War Sketches” (_Voyennuié Razskazui_). At the breaking out of the Crimean War, Count Tolstoï was transferred to the army of the Danube, and served on Prince M. D. Gortchakof’s staff. At Sevastópol, whither he went after the Russian army was driven from the principalities, he was attached to the artillery. His literary work had attracted attention in high quarters, and orders were sent to the front to see that he was not exposed to danger. In May, 1855, he was appointed division commander: he took part in the battle of the Tchernaïa, was in the celebrated storming of Sevastópol, and after the battle was sent as special courier to Petersburg. At the end of the campaign Count Tolstoï retired, and the next winter he spent at Moscow and Petersburg. This was a period of great literary activity. Besides his stories, “Sevastópol in December,” and “Sevastópol in May,” there appeared in the magazines “Youth” (_Yunost_), “Sevastópol in August,” “Two Hussars” (_Dva Gusári_), and “Three Deaths” (_Tri Smerti_).

After the liberation of the serfs, Count Tolstoï, like many conscientious Russian proprietors, felt it his duty to live on his estate. He was profoundly interested in agronomic questions, and in the application to the Slavic commune of Occidental methods, which he studied abroad for himself. He was still more interested in popular education; and a school journal, called “Yasnaïa Polyana,” which he established, discussed all pedagogical questions. He also published a series of primers, readers, spellers, in paper covers and large type. It was about this time that a Russian journalist met Count Tolstoï; and his account of the interview is interesting, as showing the novelist’s views a quarter of a century ago. He says,--

“In 1862 I became acquainted with him in Moscow. I saw before me a tall, wide-shouldered, thin-waisted man, about thirty-five years old, with a mustache, but without a beard, with a serious, even gloomy expression of face, which, however, was softened by a gleam of kindliness whenever he laughed. Our conversation turned on the occurrences which at that time were exciting Russian life. Count Tolstoï immediately showed that he lived outside of this life, that the interests of the class which regards itself as cultured were foreign to him. He seemed to be opposed to progress, which, in his opinion, was only advantageous for the smaller portion of society, having plenty of time to spend, and which was absolutely injurious for the majority, for the people; and for them it was just as disadvantageous as it was profitable for the minority.... Those present argued angrily with him: he himself sometimes was drawn away, sometimes he spoke ironically. I listened more than I spoke. At the time when all were infatuated with progress, such original boldness of thought was remarkable; and I felt an involuntary sympathy for this Rousseau, who began to contrast the products of nature with the products of civilization,--forests, wild creatures, rivers, physical development, purity of morals, and other such things. It seemed that this man was living the life of the peasantry, sharing their views, that he was devoted to the welfare of the people with all the strength of his soul, though he understood the people in different way from others. The proof was his school,--those _maltchiks_, of whom he spoke with evident love, praising their talents, their powers of comprehension, their artistic sense, their moral virginity, which was so far from being the case with children of other nationalities.”

The latter years of Count Tolstoï’s life, since the publication of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karénina,” are somewhat wrapped in mystery. Various wild stories, founded on the evident bias of “My Confession” and “My Religion,” have assumed almost the proportions of myth. It may be that at the present day, that we of the calm, rational, sceptical, Western world are granted the privilege of seeing the actual evolution of a myth, as a boy may see a chrysalis unfold.

The Russian race, standing with its Janus face towards the sunset and the more mystical sunrise, a link, as it were, between Occidental fact and Oriental fancy, might well allow us the spectacle. “My Religion” declares that titles, emoluments, dignities, and all such things, are vain. Next we hear that Count Tolstoï is only a _muzhik_. No man has a right to wealth. We hear that the opulent aristocrat has stripped himself to give to the poor. All must earn their bread by the sweat of the brow. The young sons of the count are next heard of as crossing-sweepers. The truth probably is, that Count Tolstoï has in reality changed little from the Olénin of “The Cossacks,” praying for occasion of self-sacrifice, for chance of renunciation, changed little from the threefold manifestation of himself in “War and Peace,” working for the same end, or from the twofold and simpler manifestation of himself, morally in Levin, socially in Vronsky, of “Anna Karénina.” The little picture of him given by the Russian journalist casts a flood of light on the man; and therefore it was but a fulfilment of prophecy to read that Count Tolstoï, instead of beggaring his children, instead of deserting the pen of the writer for the awl of the cobbler, was brave and cheerful and healthy in body and mind, superintending his schools, cultivating his ancestral _desyatins_, and writing stories when the mood was on him.

This brief sketch of Count Tolstoï’s life may fitly come to a conclusion with an acute bit of criticism from a Russian writer. It is very possible that his marriage to Sofia Andreyevna Beers, the daughter of a Muscovite professor, which took place in 1862, may have cast a back gleam, and inspired the thought of creating the gracious forms that move through Count Tolstoï’s later novels. At all events, this is what the critic said when “War and Peace” appeared, at the end of 1860, “It is remarkable, that in all Tolstoï’s works, until the appearance of “_Voïna i Mir_,” there is not a single female figure brought out in strong relief; but here were seen a whole _pleiad_, wonderfully clear, psychologically true, and beautifully described. The richness and variety in the figures of the men, the splendid description of the battles, a perfect mass of marvellously described scenery, in which persons of all classes appear, beginning with emperors, and ending with _muzhiks_ and _babas_, make this work one of the greatest ornaments of our literature.”

NOTE TO P. 145.--TCHERNUISHEVSKY.

It is commonly reported in Russia, that Tchernuishevsky wrote yet another novel besides _Tchto Dyélat_, entitled _Prolog Prologof_ (a Prologue of Prologues), which may possibly be still in existence in manuscript.

NOTE TO P. 202.--DOSTOYEVSKY.

Feódor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoyevsky’s father was a doctor. The boy, who was one of a large family, grew up pale and thin. He had a nervous and impressionable nature, with some tendency to hallucination. He was very fond of the woods. He tells in his recollections of his childhood, that his “special delight was the forest, with its mushrooms and wild cherries, with its beetles and birds, its porcupines and squirrels, with its delicious damp of the flying leaves.” He had all the books that he desired. By the time that he was twelve, he had read all of Sir Walter Scott’s and Cooper’s novels, besides some Russian authors, including Karamzin’s great history. At fifteen, Dostoyevsky was sent to Petersburg, where he entered the main engineering school. Notwithstanding his passion for literature, which was shared by many of his school-mates, he distinguished himself in mathematics, and graduated number three in a class of thirty. About this time he was deprived of both father and mother.

“While he was living in Petersburg,” says Mr. S. S. Skidelsky, “he visited all the slums and haunts of poverty, for the sake of collecting materials for his future literary work.” Dostoyevsky tells in his recollections, quoted by Polevoï, that in the winter of 1845 he began his first story, “Poor People” (_Byédnuié Liudi_). “When I finished the tale, I did not know what to do with it, or where to place it. I had no literary acquaintances, except possibly Grigoróvitch, who at that time had written nothing except ‘Petersburg Organ-grinders,’ in a magazine.... He came to me one day in May, and said, ‘Show me the manuscript: Nekrásof is going to publish a magazine next year, and I want to show it to him.’ I took it over to Nekrásof. We shook hands; I became confused at the thought that I had come with my writing, and I quickly beat a retreat without saying another word. I had very little hope of success; for I stood in awe of the party of ‘the Country Annals,’ as the literary men of that day were called. I read Byélinsky’s criticisms eagerly, but he seemed to me too severe and cruel; and ‘he will make sport of my “Poor People,”’ I used to think at times, but only at times. ‘I wrote it with passion, almost with tears. Is it really possible that all these minutes spent with pen in hand over this story, that all this is falsehood, mirage, untrue feeling?’ But I had these thoughts only now and then, and immediately the doubts returned again.

“On the evening of the very day that I handed him the manuscript, I went a long way to see one of my former classmates. We talked all night about ‘Dead Souls,’ and we read it again,--I don’t know how many times it made. At that time it was fashionable, when two or three young men met, to say, ‘Hadn’t we better read some Gogol, gentlemen?’ and then to sit down and read late into the night.... I returned home at four o’clock, in the white Petersburg night, bright as day. It was a beautiful warm time; and when I reached my room I could not go to sleep, but opened the window, and sat down by it. Suddenly the bell rang: it surprised me greatly; and in an instant Grigoróvitch and Nekrásof were hugging me in a glory of enthusiasm, and both of them were almost in tears. The evening before they had returned home early, took up my manuscript, and began to read it for a trial: ‘By ten pages we shall be able to judge.’ But after they had finished ten pages they decided to read ten more. And afterwards, without budging, they sat the whole night through till early morning, taking turns in reading aloud when one got tired. ‘He read about the death of the student,’ said Grigoróvitch, after we were alone; ‘and suddenly I noticed, that, when he reached the place where the father runs after his son’s coffin, Nekrásof’s voice broke once, and a second time, and all at once it failed entirely. He pounded with his fist on the manuscript: “_Akh_, what a man!” That was said about you; and so we spent the whole night.’

“When they finished the manuscript, they exclaimed, simultaneously, ‘Let us go and find him right away. Suppose he is asleep, this is more important than sleep.’... They staid half an hour. For half an hour we talked about, God knows what, understanding each other by half words, by exclamations, so eager were we. We talked about poetry, about prose, about the ‘situation of affairs,’ and of course about Gogol, quoting from the ‘Revizor’ and ‘Dead Souls,’ but chiefly about Byélinsky.... Nekrásof took the manuscript to Byélinsky that very day. ‘A new Gogol has appeared,’ shouted Nekrásof, entering with ‘Poor People.’ ‘Gogols with you spring up like mushrooms,’ remarked Byélinsky severely; but he took the manuscript. When Nekrásof returned that same evening, Byélinsky met him in perfect enthusiasm. ‘Bring him, bring him as soon as you can!’”

On the next day an interview took place between Dostoyevsky and the great Russian critic. Dostoyevsky thus describes it: “He began to speak with me ardently, with flashing eyes. ‘Do you understand yourself what you have written?’ he shouted at me several times, in his own peculiar way. ‘Only by your own unassisted genius as an artist, could you have written this. But have you realized all the terrible truth which you have presented before us? It is impossible that you, at the age of twenty, could understand it.... You have touched the very essence of the matter, you have reached the most vital inwardness. We journalists and critics only argue; we try to explain it with words: but you are an artist, and with a single stroke put the very truth into shape so that it is tangible, so that the simplest reader can understand instantly. Here lies the secret of the artistic, the truth of art. Here is the service that the artist performs for truth. The truth is revealed and imparted to you; it is your gift as an artist. Value your talent, and be true to it, and you will be a great writer.’

“I went from him in a state of rapture. I stopped at the corner of his house, looked up at the sky, at the bright sun, on the passing people, and all; and with my whole body I felt that a glorious moment had come into my life,--a most important crisis; that a new life had begun, such as I had never anticipated in my most passionate dreams (and at that time I was a great dreamer). ‘Is it really true that I am so great?’ I asked myself, full of shame, full of timid glory.--Oh, do not laugh!--Never again did I have an idea that I was great. But at that time was it possible to bear it calmly? Oh! I will be worthy of this praise.”

His name from this time began to stand with Turgénief’s, Byélinsky’s, Iskander’s (Herzen’s), and others, in the pages of the Russian magazines. This period, which began so auspiciously, was clouded by a catastrophy which greatly affected his whole life. In 1849 he was arrested and imprisoned on the charge of being engaged in a secret political society. His older brother, a married man, the father of three children, was also arrested on the same charge. Dostoyevsky knew that his brother’s family was almost penniless, that his brother had taken no active part in the Petrashevsky Society, and had only borrowed books from the general library. The brother, however, was soon released by the interposition of the Emperor Nicholas. While he was in prison, Feódor Mikhaïlovitch wrote his beautiful story, “The Little Hero.” He was condemned to death; but the sentence, without his knowledge, was commuted to transportation to the mines. He wrote his brother on the 3d of January, 1850: “To-day we were taken to the Semyónovsky Place. Here the sentence of death was read to us, we were given the cross to kiss, the sabres were broken over our heads, and our death-toilet was prepared,--white shirts. Then three of our number were placed at the ‘disgraceful post,’ ready for execution. I was the sixth. Three were summoned at a time: consequently my turn came next, and I had only a second to live. I remembered thee, my brother, and all of thy household; at the last moment thou alone wert in my mind; here, only, I learned how I loved thee, my dear brother!... At last the drums sounded a retreat. Those who were fastened to the ‘disgraceful post’ were taken down, and it was announced that his Imperial Majesty had granted us our lives.”

“Dostoyevsky, as a thoroughly religious and highly moral man,” says Polevoï, “endured all the deprivations of his life in the mines with remarkable firmness and undisturbed equanimity. His faith was strengthened, not by the Bible alone, which was the only book allowed him in prison, but by his love for ‘Poor People,’ to whom he had sworn to be true till he died.”

After he spent a number of years in the mines, he entered the military service, and was quickly promoted to be an officer. He says, “I remember that soon after leaving the Siberian prison, in 1854, I began to read all the literature written during the five years since my imprisonment. The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ had just begun to be published; and Turgénief’s first stories I read at one draught. The sun of the steppe shone upon me, spring began, and with it an entirely new life, an end to prison,--freedom!”

His passion for literature, so long restrained, broke out with energy and strength; and even before he quitted military service and returned to Petersburg, he wrote a few little trifles. In Petersburg he took

## part in the journal, “The Times” (_Vremya_), edited by his brother

Mikhaïl Mikhaïlovitch. In 1860 appeared the first collection of his works, and shortly after appeared his great novel, “The Degraded and Insulted” (_Unizhónnuie i Oskorblonnuie_). At this time Turgénief, Gontcharóf (author of “Oblómof”), Grigoróvitch, and Count Lyof Tolstoï were in the full bloom of production, and Dostoyevsky’s book was not warmly received. But the most antagonistic critics were silenced when “The Recollections of a Dead House” appeared. It immediately gave him the reputation as one of the greatest lights of Russian literature.

In 1863 Dostoyevsky’s wife died; and in the following year he lost his beloved brother, whose journal, “The Times,” passed into his hands. But he was entirely unused to business, and was placed in a very embarrassing situation, which was intensified by a strange public impression that it was the novelist who was dead. Consequently its circulation was greatly reduced, and Feódor Mikhaïlovitch had to give it up. As a distraction for all these tribulations, Dostoyevsky devoted himself to literary work, and wrote his great story, “Crime and Punishment,” which established his reputation as a psychological analyst. In 1867 he married again, and lived abroad for four years. He also, looking from the “beautiful distance” upon the pitiful side of Russian social life, wrote his two stories, “Idiot” and “Devils.” After he came back he wanted to analyze the abnormal relationship between the rising generation and the older writers; and he founded a new journal, and wrote a novel entitled “Podrostok” (The Adult). The journal was given up at the end of 1877; but Dostoyevsky, who had new novels in view, promised ultimately to continue the journal at some future time. He died on the 9th of February, 1881; and on the day of his funeral the first number of the long-looked-for journal, which he did not live to see, was issued. All Petersburg escorted the beloved remains to the tomb; tens of thousands of people were counted in the procession. Dostoyevsky’s faith in humanity is summed up in his own words: “I never could understand the reason why one-tenth part of our people should be cultured, and the other nine-tenths must serve as the material support of the minority and themselves remain in ignorance. I do not want to think or to live with any other belief than that our ninety millions of people (and those who shall be born after us) will all be some day cultured, humanized, and happy. I know and I firmly believe that universal enlightenment will harm none of us. I also believe that the kingdom of thought and light is possible of being realized in our Russia, even sooner than elsewhere maybe, because with us, even now, no one defends the idea of one part of the population being enlisted against the other, as is found everywhere in the civilized countries of Europe.’

NOTE TO P. 203.

The _Banya_ (from “The Recollections of a Dead-House”).

“In the whole city, there were only two public baths. The first, which was kept by a Hebrew, was numbered, with an entrance-fee of fifty _kopeks_ for each number, and was designed for high-toned people. The other _banya_ was pre-eminently common, old, filthy, small; and to this _banya_ our prisoners were going. It was cold and sunny. The men were already rejoicing because they were going to get out of prison, and have a glimpse of the city. Jests, laughter, did not cease during the walk. A whole squad of soldiers escorted us with loaded guns, to the wonder of the whole city. At the _banya_ they immediately divided us into two detachments. The second had to wait in the cold ante-room while the first detachment soaped themselves, and this was necessary on account of the smallness of the _banya_; but, notwithstanding this fact, the _banya_ was so small, that it was hard to imagine how our half could find accommodation in it. But Petrof did not leave me: he himself, without my asking him, hurried to help me, and even offered to wash me. Bakliushin, as well as Petrof, offered me his services. He was a prisoner from a special cell, and was known among us as the pioneer, and him I remembered as the gayest and liveliest of the _arestants_, as indeed he was. We had already become somewhat well acquainted. Petrof helped me undress myself, because, as I was not used to it, it took me long; and the dressing-room was cold, almost as cold as the street. By the way, it is very hard for a prisoner to undress if he has not had some practice. In the first place, it is necessary to know how to unfasten quickly the shin-protectors.[63] These shin-protectors are made of leather, about seven inches long; and they are fastened to the underclothes directly under the iron anklet which encircles the leg. A pair of shin-protectors are worth not less than sixty kopeks; but, nevertheless, every prisoner gets himself a pair, at his own expense of course, because without them it is impossible to walk. The iron ring does not encircle the leg tightly, and it is easy to thrust a finger between the ring and the leg. Thus the iron strikes the leg, chafes it; and a prisoner without shin-protectors would in a single day have bad wounds. But to take off the shin-protectors is not the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to learn to get off the clothes when one wears the rings (_kandalui_). This is the whole trick: Suppose you are taking off the drawers from the left leg, it is necessary first to let the garment slip through between the leg and the ring. Afterwards you have to put it on again the same way. The same process must be gone through with when you put on clean clothes. For a newcomer it is even hard to guess how it is accomplished. The first one who ever taught us how to do it was the prisoner Kóryenef in Tobolsk, who had once been atamán of a gang of cut-throats, and had been fastened to a chain five years. But the prisoners get used to it, and do it without any difficulty. I gave several kopeks to Petrof to get soap and scrubbers. To be sure, the authorities furnished the prisoners with soap. Every one would get a little piece about the size of a two-kopek coin, and as thick as the slice of cheese served at evening lunch by middle-class people. Soap was sold here in the dressing-room, together with _sbiten_ [a kind of mead], twists, and hot water. Every prisoner would get, according to the agreement made with the proprietor of the _banya_, a single pail of hot water. Whoever wanted to wash himself cleaner could get for a _grosh_, or half kopek, an extra pail, which was handed into the _banya_ itself through a window made for that purpose from the dressing-room. After helping me to undress, Petrof led me by the hand, observing that it was very hard for me to walk in the rings. “Pull them up a little higher over the calf,” he added, supporting me as though he were my uncle (_dyadka_). “Be a little careful here, there is a door-sill.” I even felt a little ashamed. I wanted to assure Petrof that I could get along by myself, but he would not have believed me. He treated me just like a young and incapable child, whom everybody was obliged to help. Petrof was far from being a servant, by no means was he a servant. Had I insulted him, he would have understood how to behave to me. I did not offer him any money for his services, and he did not ask for any. What, then, prompted him to take such care of me?

“When we opened the door of the _banya_, I thought that we were going into Gehenna. Imagine a room about twelve feet long, and as wide, stuffed with probably a hundred men at once, and, at the very least, surely eighty, because the prisoners were divided into two detachments, and the whole number of us who went to the _banya_ were two hundred men; the steam blinding our eyes, the sweat, the filth, such a crowd that there was no room to get a leg in. I was alarmed, and wanted to go back, but Petrof immediately encouraged me. Somehow, with the greatest difficulty, we squeezed ourselves through to the benches, over the heads of those who were sitting on the floor, asking them to bend down so that we could pass. But all the places on the benches were occupied. Petrof told me that it was necessary to buy a place, and immediately entered into transactions with a prisoner who had taken a place near the window. For a kopek the prisoner surrendered his place, immediately took the money from Petrof, who had it tight in his fist, having foreseen that it would be necessary to bring it with him into the _banya_. The man threw himself under the bench, directly under my place, where it was dark, filthy, and where the slimy dampness was almost half a finger in thickness. But the places under the benches were also taken; even there, the crowd clustered. On the whole floor, there was not a free place as large as the palm of the hand where the prisoners would not be sitting doubled up, washing themselves in their pails. Others stood upright among these, and, holding their pails in their hands, washed themselves as best they could. The dirty water ran down directly on the shaven heads of those who sat beneath them. On the platform, and on all the steps leading to it, were men washing themselves, bent down and doubled up. But precious little washing they got. Plebeians wash themselves very little with hot water and soap: they only steam themselves tremendously, and then pour cold water over them, and that’s their whole bath. Fifty brooms or so on the platform were rising and falling in concert: they all broomed themselves into a state of intoxication. Every instant steam was let in. It was not merely heat, it was hell let loose. It was all one uproar and hullaballoo (_gogotalo_), with the rattling of a hundred chains dragging over the floor.... Some, trying to pass, entangled themselves with the chains of others, and they themselves bumped against the heads of those sitting below, and they tumbled over, and scolded, and dragged into the quarrel those whom they hit. The filth was streaming on every side. All were in an excited, and as it were intoxicated, state of mind. Shrieks and cries were heard. At the dressing-room window, where the water was handed through, there was a tumult, a pushing, even fighting. The hot water ordered was spilt on the heads of those sitting on the floor, before it reached its destination. Now and then, at the window or in the half-opened door, a soldier with mustachioed face would show himself, with gun in hand, ready to quell any disorder. The shaven heads and red, parboiled bodies of the prisoners seemed uglier than ever. On their parboiled shoulders clearly appeared, oftentimes, the welts caused by the strokes and lashes which they may have received in days gone by; so that now all these backs seem to be freshly wounded. Horrid welts! A chill went through my skin at seeing them. “Give us more steam;” and the steam would spread in a thick hot cloud over the whole _banya_. From under the cloud of steam gleamed scarred backs, shaven heads, disfigured arms and legs. And as a fit climax Isaï Fomitch (the Jew) would roar with all his throat, from the top of the platform. He steams himself into insanity, but it seems as if no heat could satisfy him. For a _kopek_ he hires a washer (_parilshchik_); but at last it gets too warm for him, and he throws down the broom, and runs to pour cold water on him. Isaï Fomitch does not give up hope, but hires a second, a third: he makes up his mind, on such occasions, not to grudge any expense, and he has as many as half a dozen washers. “You are tough, Isaï Fomitch, you are a fine fellow,” shout the prisoners from below. And Isaï Fomitch himself feels that at this moment he stands above them all, and could thrust them all under his belt; he is in a glory; and with a sharp, crazy voice he shouts out his aria _lya-lya-lya-lya_, drowning all other voices.[64] The thought entered my mind, that, if we were ever to be all in hell, then it would look very much like this place. I could not refrain from imparting this thought to Petrof: he only looked around, but said nothing.”

FOOTNOTES:

[59] Ten volumes, published by Salaïef, in Moscow: his poetry, in one volume of two hundred and thirty pages, bears no publisher’s imprint, simply the title, Stikhotvoreniya I. S. Turgénieva, S. Peterburg, 1885.

[60] The summer home of his friends the Viardots, at Bougival.

[61] Mr. Henry James, in his Atlantic Monthly article upon Turgénief, says: “He had read a great deal of English, and knew the language remarkably well,--too well I used often to think; for he liked to speak it with those to whom it was native, and, successful as the effort always was, it deprived him of the facility and raciness with which he expressed himself in French.”

[62] Referring to Salammbo.

[63] _Podkandalniki._

[64] At the beginning of the chapter Isaï Fomitch assures Dostoyevsky, “under oath, that this song and the same motive was sung by the six hundred thousand Hebrews, from small to great, when they crossed the Red Sea; and that every Hebrew has to sing this song at the moment of glory and victory over his enemies.”

INDEX.

Aksákof, 142, 144.

Alexander II., Emperor, 148, 151, 152, 326.

Alexander III., Emperor, 151, 152, 156.

“Anna Karénina,” 206, 218, 230, 232; analysis, 297-323; quoted, 304-305, 306-307, 309-322; meaning, 322.

“Annals of a Sportsman,” 121, 129, 158, 190, 394.

Aristophanes, 70.

Arria, 188.

Balzac, 105.

“Banya (bath), The,” 203; quoted, 433-440.

Bázarof, 145, 173, 174, 186, 388.

Biélinsky, 120, 121 _note_, 424, 426.

“Bulba.” _See_ “Taras Bulba.”

Censorship, The Russian, 122 _note_, 217, 398.

“Childhood and Youth,” 205, 217.

“Confession.” _See_ “My Confession.”

Corneille, 13.

“Cossacks, The” (“Kazaki”), 216, 229, 231; analysis, 239-267.

“Commentary on the Gospels,” Tolstoï’s, 234.

Daudet, Alphonse, 199 _note_.

“Dead Souls,” 11, 28, 61, 159, 360, 396, 426; analysis, 86-115.

Devil, The, in Gogol, 30.

Dissenters, 181, 330, 337.

Divorce, according to Tolstoï, 271, 299, 302.

“Dmitri Rudin,” 167, 168.

Dniépr, 15-18, 36.

“Don Quixote,” 133, 158, 170.

Dostoyevsky, 141, 202 _note_, 203, 204 _note_; biography, 423-432; faith, 432.

Edgeworth, Maria, 401, 402, 403.

“Evenings at the Farm,” 9, 10, 28, 29, 60.

“Fathers and Sons,” 130, 173, 388; quoted, 193-198.

Fénelon, 70.

Flaubert, 127, 134, 207, 209, 406.

French novelists, 190, 191.

German education, 172, 386.

Goethe, 343; quoted by Turgénief, 137.

Gogol, biography, 5-11, 339-362; professorship, 9, 10, 353, 355-358; works enumerated, 29, 30, 346, 353; humor, 80, 346; as a poet, 6, 13, 47, 114, 191; as a scholar, 343, 344, 354; as a painter of women, 186; influence on Turgénief, 394.

Gontcharóf, 430.

Griboyédof, 238 _note_, 414.

Grigoróvitch, 425, 430.

Hamlet, 126, 158, 170, 179.

Hegel, 120, 168, 172, 386.

Herzen, 428.

Hugo, Victor, 209, 210.

Iskander. _See_ Herzen.

Ivanitsky on Gogol, quoted, 356.

James, Henry, quoted, 403 _note_.

Karakózof, 151.

Katkof, 145, 148, 149, 152, 174, 414.

“Kazaki.” _See_ “The Cossacks.”

Khor and Kalinuitch, 121, 159.

Kulzhinsky on Gogol, quoted, 343.

La Bruyère, 70.

La Rochefoucauld, 220.

Lermontof, 202 and _note_.

“May Night, The,” quoted, 21, 32.

Marvellous, The, in Gogol, 30-34.

Merimée, 4, 48, 192.

Molière, 11, 68, 70, 80.

Muzhik. _See_ Russian Peasantry.

Murillo, comparison with Gogol, 31.

“My Confession” (Tolstoï), 219-228.

“My Religion” (Tolstoï), 228, 322, 420; quoted, 278, 296; analysis, 324-338.

Napoleon, Tolstoï’s judgment of, 285.

Nekrásof, 181, 202 _note_, 210 _note_, 391, 426.

“Nest of Noblemen,” 169.

Nicholas, Emperor, 84, 113, 399, 426, 429.

Niézhin, 5, 7, 342.

Nihilism, 148, 173, 176, 179, 180, 329, 389.

Occidentalism, Turgénief’s, 120, 142, 387.

“Old-time Proprietors,” 51-58; quoted, 24.

“Parasha,” 120.

Pathetic, The, in Turgénief, 199.

Písemsky, 167 _note_.

Pletnef, 9, 385.

Pobyedonovtsof, 152, 414.

Poetry, Nature of, 13.

Pogodin, 142.

Polevoï, 339; quoted, 424, 429.

Polonsky, 126, 136.

Pushkin, 4, 6, 7, 9, 73, 112, 134, 202, 210, 238, 345, 385, 400, 414; on Griboyédof’s death, 238; judgment of Gogol, 58; as inspiration to Gogol, 345; festival, 135, 391.

Raskolniks. _See_ Dissenters.

Realism, French and Russian, 25, 189, 193, 199, 286.

“Recollections of a Scorer” (Tolstoï), quoted, 235-237.

“Recollections” (Reminiscences), Turgénief’s, quoted, 120 _note_, 122 _note_, 384, 388.

Renan, funeral discourse on Turgénief, 408.

Resurrection, The, according to Tolstoï, 278.

Revizor, The, 7, 10, 61, 358, 426; analysis, 63-83.

Rousseau, 70.

Rudin. _See_ Dmitri Rudin.

Russian ideal, 182; language, 98, 110, 192, 395, 414; mind, 12; nature, 14, 18, 23, 114; nobility, 159, 164; peasantry, 150, 159, 181, 325.

Sand, George, 127, 211.

Sasuluitch, Viéra, 171.

Satirical, The, in Gogol, 7, 12, 60, 347.

Shchedrin. _See_ Soltuikof.

Schiller, 212, 343; quoted by Turgénief, 154.

Schopenhauer, 172, 228.

Schuyler, Eugene, translation of “The Cossacks,” 416.

Serfage, 166, 326, 397.

Shakspeare, 69, 126, 225.

Skidelsky, quoted, 424.

Slavophilism, 143, 144, 206.

“Smoke,” 175.

Soltuikof, 204, 211.

Swinburne, Turgénief’s opinion of, 210.

“Taras Bulba,” 6, 10, 18, 29, 355; analysis, 36-49; Turgénief’s judgment on, 50; quoted, 19, 23, 363-382.

Tchernuishevsky, 145, 201, 210 _note_, 423.

“Terrible Vengeance, A,” quoted, 15-18.

Tolstoï, Count Lyof N., biography, 215, 222-230, 236 _note_, 414-422; works enumerated, 216, 416, 417; talent, 218; mental and moral transformation, 222-230, 278; literary life, 224, 231; marriage, 224, 421; mysticism, 234; character revealed in “The Cossacks,” 256-258; in “War and Peace,” 267, 275, 293, 295; in “Anna Karénina,” 295, 421; his ideal of strength, 248; ideal of life, 227, 275, 299; as a historian, 283; as a non-combatant, 293, 299; as a prophet, 219, 329; as a communist, 335; his creed, 332; appearance in 1862, 418; criticised by Turgénief, 205.

Turgénief, Ivan, biography, 117-140, 383-408; works enumerated, 129-139; method of work, 130, 135, 183, 407; progress, 157; talent, 182, 409; character, 139, 141; generosity, 139 _note_, 155, 205; conversation, 140, 149, 405; as a political prophet, 153, 157; as a dramatist, 189; as a poet, 191, 385, 399 _note_; as a critic on his epoch, 146, 150, 200; judgment on Alexander III., 152, 156; on Hugo, 209, 210; on George Sand, 212; Flaubert, 209; Zola, 208; Swinburne, 210; Dickens, 407; Dostoyevsky, 203; Nekrásof, 201, 202; Gogol, 50; Soltuikof, 204; Tchernuishevsky, 201; Tolstoï, 205, 231, 284; letters to Tolstoï, 127, 138; letter to Mr. King, 183; homesickness and love of Russia, 123, 127; personal appearance, 139, 393, 404; disease, 136.

Turgénief, Nikolaï, 383.

Turner, C. E., on Gogol, quoted, 361.

Ukraïna, 10, 15, 23, 32.

Viardot, 401, 406.

“Vii,” quoted, 30, 358.

“Virgin Soil” (_Nov_), 131, 132, 176, 179, 187.

Vogüé, Count E. Melchior, on Turgénief, quoted, 390-400.

“War and Peace,” 206, 218, 230, 232, 233; analysis, 267-294.

Woman in Gogol, 109, 187; in Turgénief, 186, 187; in Tolstoï, 247, 288, 422.

Zhukovsky, 4, 345.

Zola, 135, 208, 211, 286.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation and accentuation errors have been silently corrected.

Spelling of proper names has been standardized in most cases.

Page 228: “to anihilate” changed to “to annihilate”

Page 233: “sem-military” changed to “semi-military”

Page 335: “the millionnaire” changed to “the millionaire”

Page 337: “immedate spread” changed to “immediate spread”

Page 359: “lived the most” changed to “lived most”