Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_); small caps are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS; words in bold are represented as in =bold=, and superscript text is represented with the sign ^{text}.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain.

* * * * *

[Illustration: =Nikolai V. Gogol=]

SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES

VOLUME III--RUSSIAN

DONE INTO ENGLISH BY JOHN COURNOS

INTRODUCTIONS BY

J. BERG ESENWEIN _Editor of Lippincott’s Magazine_

THE HOME CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL Springfield, Massachusetts 1913

Copyright 1912 and 1913--J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY Copyright 1913--THE HOME CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL

CONTENTS - VOLUME III

PAGE

General Introduction: The Russian Short-Story 5

Pushkin and the New Era 13 Story: The Snow-Storm 31

Gogol, the First Russian Realist 53 Story: The Cloak 69

Turgenev the Emancipator 125 Story: The District Doctor 139

Tolstoi, Artist and Preacher 157 Story: A Long Exile 175

THE RUSSIAN SHORT-STORY

In introducing the volumes of this series which deal with the work of French fictionists I commented upon the real distinction existing between the French short-story and the short-story in French, asserting that the former is a precise term because the greater number of worthy short-stories in French really exhibit the typical French spirit and are therefore French.

The Russian short-story is even more pronouncedly national in theme, in tone, and in treatment than is its French contemporary; indeed, Muscovite literature is the most markedly national of any in Europe. This would not be so significant a statement were modern Russian literature--by which I mean all such literature which really counts--more than a century old; but this ancient, remote, and self-sufficient people really lived for so long a time apart from the great highways of Continental thought that they were not nationally conscious of those titanic upheaving and levelling passions whose fitful and at times appalling force shook France, England, and even Poland to the very heart and forced their thinkers to express the spirit of the revolutionary era in undying prose.

Instead, Russian writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries occupied their pens with imitations of foreign--chiefly French--literature, or wrote minute local descriptions which were important not so much for what they were as for what they pointed to--a new national consciousness.

* * * * *

But in order to get an understanding of modern Russian literature we turn backward in our swift survey. When Peter the Great, that much magnified and more maligned potentate, ascended the throne, he found Russia the home of bigotry, prejudice, and barbarism. But before his unceremonious blows the doors swung reluctantly open, and from the west a steady concourse of European ideas, often accompanied in person by their thinkers, moved through the gates and penetrated every upper circle. Naturally, literature was the first of the arts to throb with this infusion of outside blood, and naturally, also, its first expressions were in that form of flattery which is alleged to be most sincere.

But when national consciousness is awakened, national pride soon begins to utter lusty sounds, and its theme is certain to be as national as its form of expression. So, with the dawn of the nineteenth century--Lomonosoff, Kantemier, Sumarakov, the Empress Catherine, Von Viezin, Derzhavin, Karamsin, and Zhukovski having in the previous century done fine service in poetry, history, and the drama--there opened a new era: the period of artistic Russian fiction. The barbaric richness and fearless crudity of the old poetry were exchanged for sophisticated prose.

Kriloff deserves special mention here, even though to Gogol and Pushkin must go the trail-blazers’ honor. His fables and tales were distinctly in advance of previous similar work, but the real fictive creators were yet to come. Kriloff was at once the last of the old and the first of the new prose-writers.

* * * * *

It is a curious coincidence that the youngest two literatures of the world, American and Russian, should each have contributed so materially to the development of the short-story. During the eighteenth century American literature was compassing a slow growth; but in Russia literature was virtually sleeping. Later, both come to effective expression at about the same time. While Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Harte, Stockton, James, and O. Henry were telling wonderful stories in our land, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Korolenko, Garshin, Chekhov, Andreev, and Gorki were doing the like in Russia. The balance dips toward America for literary art, but for sheer strength it unmistakably drops on the side of the Slav. Thus throughout the nineteenth century and till now the short-story has been a form to be reckoned with in any adequate estimate of Russian writers, just as in the two other literatures whose recent development follows similar lines--American and French.

When the modern short-story was born in its technical perfection in America, France, and Russia almost simultaneously, the French Revolution had worn out most of its evil effects and the New Spirit was beneficently at work in every enlightened land. The superior value of human beings, the benumbing effects of slavery, the priceless qualities of real liberty, and the absolute necessity for an enlightenment which should be something more than education, became ideals worth fighting and dying for.

It is important to note here that great short-stories from that day to this have developed themes vital to the people for whom and by whom they were written.

* * * * *

But we must look deeper than the spirit of an _era_ if we are to account for a national tone in any given literature, and in the characteristic Russian temperament we shall in this case find the inspiring cause.

The word _Slav_ has given to the world our word _slave_. In the pathetic and expressive phrase of Waliszewski, “The Slav race, the latest comer into the world of civilization, has always been at school, always under some rod or sway. Whether it be the Oriental and material conquests of the thirteenth century, or the Western and moral one of the eighteenth, it merely undergoes a change of masters.” Yet in the face of all this the Russian people has persistently maintained, and even accentuated, its personality. To me, this personality is marked by six great characteristics: _hugeness_, _passion_, _simplicity_, _religiousness_, _suffering_, and _fatalism_. Herzen said that “sadness, skepticism, irony, are the three strings of Russian literature--the skepticism is not typical; the other qualities are.”

In looking for the typical and distinctive elements of national character in Russian literature we must remember that they are more to be observed in the tone of the author considered than in the characters he portrays, and this for a perfectly obvious reason: Russia is a land of extremes, not alone of condition but of advancement. One class outrivals the Parisian in refinement of desires, while no people in Europe can surpass the remoter peasant in his stolidity; the greatest wealth is just across the way from the most tax-oppressed poverty; high-minded patriotism sits on the same park-bench with a Red maniac; skepticism and religious credulity run to astounding contra extremes.

Of course, the Russian composite character is modified by the antipodal nature of its society, but its literature is enriched by a vast variety of types, and when, as in the stories of Tolstoi, these types appear in dramatic juxtaposition; the effect is unique.

It would be interesting to trace here each of these six nationally characteristic traits, but all are either dwelt upon in the succeeding introductory studies or are clearly illustrated in the accompanying stories; it may therefore be enough to point out in brief how naturally each takes its place in the sum total of Russian temperament.

The physical vastness of this self-sufficient land, with its sweep of continent-wide, continent-long domain, must at once suggest the bigness of its spirit. Even its people grow big and Norse-like in frame, while the centuries of indifference to the outlanders’ views and ideals culminate readily in direct, fearless self-expression.

Passion, too, finds a similar origin, encouraged by Tartar fire, Cossack physicality, and the composite life bred of oriental contact.

Simplicity is often in our day written down as the sign of ignorance, or at least of inexperience of the great world; but in the Russian character it has mainly a nobler origin. What need for hesitation, finesse, caution in word and attitude, when one is certain of being the chosen of Heaven? Not even the Jew is more firmly convinced and poised than the Muscovite.

The essential religiousness--the mystical religiousness--of the Slav is as old as his history. In fact, his Aryan origin, so often boasted of, points to the Hindu origin of his religious attitude of mind. True, many of his matter-of-fact appeals to divine things are habitual rather than reverential and often have too close association with base dealing to be convincing; still the peasant particularly is colored in all his life by his church and her tenets.

The Russian countenance is typically sad, almost despairing. The yoke worn for so many ages by the masses, the bitterness of a life devoted to service for the “big man,” the hopelessness born of petty and major oppressions, result for the Russian, as for all barbaric peoples--for Russia is still largely barbaric--in a resigned suffering which has not yet begun to be mitigated by the great increase of revolutionary ideas among the people. Indeed, protest against the ruling order has thus far yielded only greater present sadness, how hopeful soever the future may be.

And lastly we have that most terrible, most pathetic, most depressing temper--fatalism. And yet this is not the precise word, for no single English word expresses the pessimism, the apathy, the expectation of nothing, the anticlimax of ambition in which a whole race begins as a Napoleon and--peters out.

All this may sound unlovely. And doubtless it is, for loveliness is not the tone of Nihilism, nor is beauty the consort of despair. Yet the towering ambition that ends in puny deeds shows even now signs of a more effective result, and larger liberties, the outgrowth of contact with the world without, must sooner or later bring to life a more ardent and hope-cherishing Russia.

* * * * *

The short-story of today in Russia is strong--terribly strong, for the most part, for it is not charming, certainly. But as an augury of what the Russian people will yet become it has a thousand-fold more promise than may be found in the perfumed politeness of an anæmic fiction such as floods the magazines of England and America. Notwithstanding all her gloom, Russia’s strength is her bow of promise.

PUSHKIN AND THE NEW ERA

Alexander Sergyevitch Pushkin was born in Moscow, June 7, 1799, at a time when Russia was aswirl with various currents. Therefore, to gain some clear vision of the distinguished service which he rendered the literature of his native land, we must at least glance at the great intellectual and political tides--they were largely coincident--which swept Russia, first away from her own self-sufficient life, then toward France, next in the direction of Germany, and finally out into a national thought-channel of her own.

Pushkin is one of those writers who are big enough to have founded and dominated an era, not solely because of his own preëminent genius, but for the deeper reason that he represented in himself the culmination of a series of national steps, each as definite as it was important.

For all the centuries of her life up to the nineteenth, Russia had lived a separate existence from that of her great neighbors. In seeking a cause for this condition, we must remember that the imperial bigness of Russia, and her remote location, are not the only factors entering into her segregate character. The _great_ factor is that Russia is much more largely Asiatic in spirit than it is European. The typical Slav of today is, temperamentally, though not in a precise sense racially, a mixture of Tartar fierceness, old Slavonic stolidity, and Hindu _Nirvana_, which, being translated into Russian, is essentially Nihilism. Yet, today as for many centuries, the Slavic race is as truly homogeneous as any can be.

During this long era of Russia’s ultra-exclusiveness, the polished periods of Montaigne and the brilliant dramas of Corneille, Racine, and Molière were delighting France, and Spenser, Milton, and Dryden were doing rare things for English literature. At the same time, nationally unconscious of all this, Russia was singing its epical and ballad folk-songs, with only now and then a note of premeditated art sounding forth. Here indeed was a true poetry _of_ the people--which, as Dr. Gummere has pointed out, is a very different thing from that pseudo-folk-poetry which is merely _about_ the people. Still, it required influences from without to bring Russian literature to artistic national expression.

The great autocratic rulers of Russia, and her leading nobles, at last began to feel the allurement of the French, and Peter the Great even travelled abroad, coming home imbued with new ideas for a progressive nation. When a giant people, long content to be sufficient unto itself, awakens to see that other ideals of life, other habits of thought, other standards of conduct, have brought other great nations to a brilliancy of position which its own solitary bigness has not enabled it to attain, the first feeling is one of contempt for “those others,” as the French would say. Later comes a naïve passion to imitate. And finally, enter a whole train of foreign influences, good and bad.

So it was with Russia after the powerful, rough, and somewhat benevolently autocratic reign of Catherine II, at whose court Pushkin’s father was a complacent noble. The French tongue, which even Pushkin himself called “the language of Europe,” already prevailed at the Russian court, and the literature of the country consisted chiefly of imitations of the pseudo-classical French school, adaptations, or even translations, from other languages, and here and there a struggling voice which lifted itself with difficulty above the imitative clack. All three of these types Catherine herself fostered--intermittently, though still with some success.

But the alarming revolutionary ideas bruited from France, and the Napoleonic campaign against Russia, caused a powerful revulsion of feeling toward Germany and away from France. In Germany, however, Young Russia met the same humanistic tendencies and passion for free thought with which France had been gradually impregnating the empire of the Slavs. Add to this the influence of Byron’s poetry, now stirring Europe, and we have the external forces which drove Russia to look at her own self with honest eyes--forces which at length found their literary climax in Pushkin’s giving to his native land a literature which was of the Russians, for the Russians, and by a Russian--a literature born of the Russian spirit, breathing her ideals, speaking her marvellously expressive tongue in new combinations of beauty, and set against a background of her soil and her cities.

A further remarkable influence was operating to prepare both Russia and Pushkin for the work of new creation: in the hands of Zhukovski and others who immediately preceded our author, the Russian language began suddenly to assume a flexibility and richness which, as I have intimated, were destined to be still more greatly enlarged by the gifts of Pushkin.

The author-to-be wasted no time beginning his career. Even at the age of ten, while an unstudious but omnivorously reading school-boy, he made deft imitations of French verse and the French drama, while at twelve he knew four or five languages and was reading Rousseau, Voltaire, and Molière with avidity. At this age the lad became a pupil in the College Tsarskoïé-Siélo, in 1811, the year of its founding by Alexander I. But while he absorbed enough to cause his wild genius to flourish, he was incorrigible, and always in hot-water--except among his comrades, by whom his dash, impudence, and wit made him to be both admired and feared.

When Pushkin was only fifteen, the _European Messenger_ published anonymously a series of clever but obscene Russian verses in the style of Ossian and Parny. The name of the author soon leaked out, however, and when the following year the boy read on a public speech-day a suitable poem entitled “Recollections of Tsarskoïé-Siélo,” he was hailed as a gifted poet. The poetic form was miraculous--the thought, just about what a precocious lad could produce.

In 1817 Pushkin was graduated, and entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At once he was lionized by literary society, and became the leader of a brilliant but rakish clique--the story of their escapades would read like a tenderloin police-docket. At length, in 1820, the year when “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” his first great poem, was published, he committed some folly too outrageous to be condoned--probably an especially licentious expression in verse--and was banished to South Russia, where, wandering among the Caucasus ranges which color all his later work, and living near the romantic Black Sea, he remained for several years; until, in 1824, his banishment was commuted to confinement to his father’s estates. In a literary way this date marks the beginning of his new era, for he now began to bring into final form the master-poem, “Eugene Onyegin,” on which he had been working for several years--of which more presently.

Some--why, I cannot conceive--have attributed Pushkin’s ungovernable disposition to the mixed blood that flowed in his veins, as was the case with the elder Dumas. Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather was that Abram Hannibal, “Peter the Great’s Arab favorite,” who was really an Abyssinian slave. The African youth was educated in France by his royal master and godfather, later admitted to his friendship, and eventually married to a Russian lady. Their son became a great Russian general. The poet himself bore unmistakable marks of his ancestry in his short curly hair and thick, sensuous lips, though his eyes were blue, his skin fair, and his hair light in hue.

During these earlier years of his short life, Pushkin was profoundly influenced by Byron, and even was willing to be called “the Russian Byron.” Indeed, his license-loving and liberty-adoring nature was quite like that of his English model. This influence is seen not only in his poetic methods, but in his teachings and in his themes. The poem “Poltava,” published in 1829, takes Mazeppa for its hero, and his poetic masterpiece, “Eugene Onyegin,” published in 1828, is really Don-Juanesque. Nor is it difficult to trace other evidences of this frankly admiring spirit.

Singularly enough, “Eugene Onyegin” (which Tschaikovsky has made the subject of an opera) is at once in the style of Byron (somewhat resembling his “Beppo”), while in theme, locale, and handling it throws off the trammels of Byronism, and indeed all foreignism, and becomes the first really great work of modern Russian literature. Whatever the original debt Pushkin owed to the author of “Don Juan,” in this and later work he strikes out with all the self-confidence and attainment of an original genius. So tender, so pathetic, yet so humorous, so full of human understanding, so informed with the spirit of contemporary Russian society, is this remarkable work, that its author achieved immortality in its writing. Thus did the years of exile on the paternal manor bear notable fruit.

Because this creation sets so lasting an initial mark, by establishing Russian literature upon a basis of art, it seems worth while to recite its argument here in full.

Eugene Onyegin is a “Byronic young society man,” who is recalled to the country from his city dissipations by his father’s death. Here he lives, for a long time avoiding all contact with his less cultivated neighbors. A young poet, Vladimir Lensky, the son of one of these manorial families, returns from abroad, and a congenial friendship springs up between the young men. Lensky, who is betrothed to Olga Larin, persuades Onyegin to call upon her family with him. Tatyana, Olga’s elder sister, at once falls in love with Onyegin, and writes him a letter of frank avowal--one of the most famous passages of the drama. But Onyegin gently turns her aside by assuming the rôle of a fatherly adviser, and the incident remains unknown to all except themselves and Tatyana’s old nurse. Soon afterwards, Lensky induces Onyegin to go to the Larins’ on the occasion of Tatyana’s name-day festival. For the sake of preventing gossip in a district given over to small talk, Onyegin yields and goes. At table, by the innocent scheming of her family, he is placed opposite to Tatyana, and finds the situation so embarrassing that he determines to revenge himself on the innocent Lensky by flirting with Olga, who is shortly to become Lensky’s wife. During the evening, Olga, pretty but weak-natured, accepts Onyegin’s attentions with such interest that Lensky challenges him. Heart-sick at the results of his momentary unjust anger, Onyegin would gladly apologize, were it not that Lensky has chosen as his representative an old fire-eater and tattler who would misrepresent his motives and perhaps compromise Tatyana. Therefore, he accepts--and Lensky falls. Onyegin then goes off on his travels. Olga soon consoles herself with a handsome officer, and after their marriage goes with him to his regiment. Tatyana, however, who is of a reserved, intense character, pines, refuses all offers of marriage, and, by the advice of friends, is finally taken to Moscow for the winter. There, as a wall-flower at her first ball, she captivates a prince from St. Petersburg--a distinguished and socially important general. She follows her parents’ wishes and marries him. When Onyegin returns to the capital a few years later, he finds, to his great astonishment, “that the little country girl whom he has patronized, rejected, almost scorned, is one of the great ladies of the court and society.” He falls madly in love with her, in his turn, but she gives him not the slightest sign of friendship. Driven to despair by this coldness, he writes her three letters, but she does not reply. Then, entering her boudoir unexpectedly, through the carelessness of her servants, he finds her in tears, reading his letter. He again avows his love. She is obliged to confess that she loves him still, but finally makes him understand that she will be true to her kind and high-minded husband. Thus the drama ends.

After the production of his masterpiece, followed a notable poetic tragedy, “Boris Godunov,” in which may be discerned the author’s admiration for the methods of Shakespeare, to whom he turned, yet not slavishly, after freeing himself from the overshadowing Byron.

It is inevitable that we should speculate upon the splendid work which might have come from the pen of this greatest of Russian poets had he not fallen in his prime. The story is sad and sordid enough. In 1831, having been restored to imperial favor, he had married the beautiful Natalya Nikolaevna Gontcharoff, and they plunged into society, loaded with recognition by the court.

He had been married but five years when society began to gossip about “the lovely Madame Pushkin” and Baron George Hekkeren-Dantes, the natural son of the Dutch minister to Russia. Pushkin attached no blame to his wife for the indiscretions of the infatuated young chevalier of the Guards, but challenged him nevertheless. Dantes averted a meeting by marrying Pushkin’s sister. Still the gossip persisted, and eventually, being refused access to the Pushkin home, Dantes made his persecutions so patent, and was so seconded by the elder Hekkeren, that the poet challenged the father. The son intervened, adopted the quarrel, and in a duel at St. Petersburg Pushkin was killed, January 29, 1837, being only thirty-eight years old.