MODERN NOVELISTS 
 
 OF RUSSIA
 
 OF 
 
 RUSSIA 
 
 BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF SIX LECTURES 
 DELIVERED AT THE TAYLOR INSTITUTION, OXFORD 
 
 CHARLES EDWARD TURNER 
 
 ENGLISH LECTOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. PETERSBURG 
 
 LONDON 
 
 TRUBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL 
 
 1890
 
 LONDON : 
 
 PRINTED BY THE HANSARD PUBLISHING UNION, LIMITED, 
 GREAT QUEEN STREET, W.C.
 
 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA, 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 
 
 THE Russian novel did not easily, or till within a 
 comparatively recent period, obtain its right of 
 citizenship in the world of letters. The purists 
 of the eighteenth century were ill-disposed to 
 allow the claim of the novelist to rank with the 
 dramatist or poet; whilst the Church sharply 
 denounced romances as injurious and prejudicial 
 to public morality. "From the reading of novels," 
 writes Sumarokoff, the great literary authority of 
 those days, and the founder of the modern 
 Russian theatre, "we can get little good and 
 risk getting much harm. We have no right to 
 call it an amusement, it is rather a hurtful waste 
 of time." An anonymous pamphleteer of the 
 same period, whose fierceness of style perhaps 
 justifies us in supposing him to have been an 
 ecclesiastic, condemns romances as being " the 
 B
 
 2 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 deadliest of all the weapons employed by the 
 devil against the soul of man." If we turn to the 
 novels themselves, we find them to be irredeem- 
 ably dull, and their extremely limited number, 
 seldom more than two or three a year being pub- 
 lished in the whole of Russia, would betoken an 
 indifference on the part of the public that makes 
 it difficult to understand how they ever could have 
 provoked such bitter hostility. When not direct 
 translations from the French, they were closely 
 modelled on Fenelon or Scarron, and accordingly 
 were either sermons in the form of fiction, as 
 edifying as they were tedious, or else portrayals 
 of a life that had nothing in common with the 
 habits and traditions of the Russian people. 
 
 As the earlier stages of Russian civilisation are 
 marked by the bitter struggle of two opposing 
 parties for pre-eminence, the one desirous to im- 
 press a new and foreign-exported social code upon 
 the people, the other zealous to preserve, as far as 
 possible, untouched the national life and traditions 
 of the past ; so, in the history of Russian literature 
 we observe, from its very commencement, two like 
 conflicting elements. In spite of his heavy, mono- 
 tonous, unformed style, Kantemier, the first in 
 point of date of Russian poets, has given us in his 
 nine satires a faithful picture of the manners and
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 3 
 
 belief of his times, and it is in their nationality 
 that their true, it may be their only, value resides. 
 Even when imitating the satires of Horace, Juvenal, 
 or Boileau, he never fails to accommodate these 
 imitations to the necessities of Russian life. The 
 vices he exposes are not the vices of a past or 
 foreign civilisation, but those which stained the 
 society of his own age and country. He chiefly 
 attacks those of his countrymen who, unable to 
 comprehend the full significance and bearing of 
 the reforms inaugurated by Peter, and still further 
 carried out by Catherine, idly imagined that they 
 were aiding the cause of progress by aping foreign 
 customs, copying the fashions of Western Europe, 
 and heartily despising everything Russian. Un- 
 fortunately, his rude diction and still ruder versi- 
 fication did not allow Kantemier to become a 
 model for the writers who followed him, and the 
 place of literary lawgiver was reserved for his 
 more illustrious contemporary, Lomonosoff, who 
 exchanged the dull syllabic metre hitherto ex- 
 clusively employed for a richer and more varied 
 form of verse, and who gave a new life to the 
 Russian language by freeing it from archaic bar- 
 barisms and endowing it with a constructive polish 
 and grace it had never known before. Seeing that 
 his predecessors taught him nothing except what 
 
 B 2
 
 4 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 he had better avoid, and unable to find in them 
 any sure foundation whereon to build, it is only 
 natural that Lomonosoff should have gone to 
 foreign sources for his inspiration. Consequently, 
 his poems are little more than transcripts of French 
 or German thought and expression, are marked by 
 a complete absence of originality, abound with 
 stereotyped pseudo - classical figures of speech, 
 which, from constant repetition, had lost whatever 
 meaning they once possessed, and are thoroughly 
 non- Russian in spirit and tone. 
 
 The persistency with which these classical affec- 
 tations maintained their hold in Russian literature 
 is best to be seen in the works of those writers 
 who, following the example set by Kantemier, 
 tried to bring poetry and the novel into close and 
 direct union with the cares and hopes of the 
 actual world around them. We may select, by 
 way of example, Karamsin's once famous, now 
 almost forgotten, romance, " Poor Louisa." It is 
 evidently modelled on Richardson's "Pamela," 
 for which Karamsin always expressed the warmest 
 admiration, declaring its author to be "the most 
 artistic painter of man's moral nature." But though 
 it pretends to be a story of humble life, the writer 
 carefully adheres to the literary traditions of his 
 age. The poor peasant girl is made to talk and act
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHARQFF. 5 
 
 like a fine heroine, her conversation is couched in a 
 style as far as possible removed from the language 
 of ordinary people, and she perpetually indulges 
 in high-flown gushing tirades which would scarcely 
 be tolerated in the most sentimental of melo- 
 dramas. Old modes of speech, that had long been 
 banished from daily conversation, and were reserved 
 solely for official documents, and bookish forms 
 of words, supposed to have a solemnity which 
 would be wanting to them if presented in their 
 ordinary shape, are put into the mouths of pea- 
 sants, who, in real life, would never think of 
 employing them. But we must not blame the 
 novelist for thus idealising his characters. In so 
 doing he but satisfied the tastes of his epoch. 
 Nor should we forget that exactly those portions 
 of the tale which offend us as being unnatural and 
 lachrymose, won from contemporary critics the 
 warmest praise and loudest applause. It was a 
 bold venture to select for his subject the fate of a 
 common peasant family, but at least its members 
 had to be washed, combed, and well dressed be- 
 fore they could be judged worthy to excite the 
 interest and gain the sympathy of polite and 
 cultured readers. 
 
 What I have just said of Karamsin applies 
 equally to his immediate successors, who, whilst
 
 6 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 aiming to reflect in their romances the life of the 
 age in which they wrote, and, whilst acknow- 
 ledging that the poet should be the interpreter, 
 not only of the loftier manifestations of humanity, 
 but also of the daily worries, trivialities, and solemn 
 nothings of man's existence, none the less con- 
 sidered it necessary to give an idyllic tone to their 
 works. Their peasant characters are far too area 
 dian to be true portraitures, whilst their nobles are 
 nothing more than copies of the heroes of French 
 romance, bearing Russian names and swaggering 
 about in Russian costumes. Their highly-coloured 
 pictures of Russian country life remind us of 
 Manieloff, in Gogol's " Dead Souls," who, we are 
 told, " was by nature excessively sugary," indulged 
 in pleasant dreams as to what he meant to do for 
 his serfs, and spent whole days in drawing elaborate 
 plans of pretty ivy-covered cottages, which he in- 
 tended to build for them. But, in the meantime, 
 their condition remained unaltered and unimproved, 
 nor was it possible to find in the whole district pea- 
 sants worse lodged, or sunk in deeper wretchedness 
 or misery, than those who lived on the estates of 
 the good and tender-hearted Manieloff. In the 
 same way, these sentimental writers, with their 
 fancy pictures of happy serfs and beneficent mas- 
 ters, only contributed to the indefinite postpone-
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 7 
 
 ment of any amelioration in the life of the bond- 
 man, tranquillised the public conscience, blinded 
 men to the sin of trafficking in human flesh, and 
 exalted serfdom into a patriarchal institution, 
 necessary to the due organisation and well-being 
 of the state. By his stern exposure of the un- 
 natural barbarities that accompanied the reign of 
 serfage, Gogol once and for ever freed Russian 
 literature from all this Manielovistic cant. 
 
 It is impossible to overestimate the influence 
 exercised by Gogol on Russian literature. He 
 introduced into it a new and all-powerful ele- 
 ment, that of realism. In his humour, in his 
 irony, in his language, in his ideas, in his pathos, 
 in his occasional outbursts of lyrical eloquence, 
 Gogol is thoroughly Russian. His characters 
 betray their nationality, not by wearing a saraphan, 
 but in their every word, in their way of looking at 
 things, and in their every act and gesture. There 
 is no reason why Karamsin's " Poor Louisa " 
 should not have been written by a Frenchman or 
 by a German, but we cannot by any freak of the 
 fancy imagine Gogol's tales or comedies to have 
 been composed by any other than a Russian poet. 
 The narrow stifling circle that had hitherto formed 
 the source of the novelist's inspiration was ex- 
 changed for a wider and healthier sphere; the
 
 8 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 legendary exploits of historical heroes no longer 
 constituted the favourite theme of romancists ; 
 and the serf-owner was stripped of the stage robes 
 in which poets had been pleased to drape him. 
 For the first time, in the pages of Gogol, the life 
 of the suffering poor, photographed from actual 
 observation, was revealed with a power of truthful- 
 ness that effectually aroused his countrymen from 
 the lethargic complacency with which they had so 
 long ignored the evils necessarily attached to a 
 system that entrusted a privileged class with 
 unlimited and irresponsible authority over all in 
 their employ. With such fidelity to human nature 
 are his different personages delineated, that we 
 instinctively recognise them as old acquaintances 
 whom we have come across more than once, to 
 whom we could without difficulty give their true 
 names, and whose foibles, when recalled to our 
 memories, we immediately associate with a certain 
 Ivan or Masha. It is their kinship to ourselves, 
 the knowledge that they are no fantastic creations, 
 but real living beings, that enlists our interests in 
 the humblest and meanest among them, and 
 makes us sympathise with them in their little joys 
 and struggling toil. There is no single phase of 
 Russian life that Gogol has not seized on and 
 depicted ; nor do I know of any writer, unless it
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 9 
 
 be our English Dickens, in whose works we shall 
 find so many portraits that have become to all of 
 us familiar and household names. 
 
 The radical reform effected by Gogol in Russian 
 literature was no less enduring than it was bene- 
 ficial. We cannot mention a single later writer 
 who has not followed in his steps, and in his own 
 way and after his peculiar genius carried on the 
 work he began. For we must not forget that, at 
 the time when Gogol wrote, the peasant class was 
 separated by a rigid and impassable line of demar- 
 cation from the so-called higher orders of society, 
 and novelists, who introduced into their works 
 sketches of serf-life, naturally wrote under the 
 influence of this idea. With marvellous power 
 Gogol reproduces in its every minutest detail the 
 outward form of peasant life, and exposes the 
 misery and degradation to which the serf was 
 subjected ; but at the same time he makes us feel, 
 and would seem himself to consider, the peasant 
 to be something beneath and different to ourselves. 
 It were foolish to blame Gogol for not doing more. 
 The first step in progress was made when the eyes 
 of the Russian people were opened to a recogni- 
 tion of the ill that had for generations been fester- 
 ing unnoticed and uncared for in their very midst. 
 It remained for the writers who immediately
 
 10 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 followed him to inspire them with the sure con- 
 viction that the free development of the latent 
 forces of the nation was, then, only possible when 
 serfdom had been completely and finally abolished. 
 In proof that Gogol and his successors each did 
 their work well, I may mention that, when the 
 author of " Dead Souls " read to Poushkin the 
 opening chapters of his work, the poet was so 
 struck with the miseries of the Russian peasantry, 
 for the first time revealed in all their naked hide- 
 ousness, that he cried out : " God ! how wretched 
 life in Russia is." Of a more practical nature 
 was the impression produced by his perusal of 
 Tourgenieff's " Stories from a Sportsman's Note- 
 book " on the late emperor, Alexander II., who 
 once confessed to the novelist that, " aftei having 
 read it, he never for a minute doubted the 
 necessity of securing, as quickly as possible, the 
 full emancipation of the serfs." 
 
 In one and the same year, 1847, within less 
 than six years after the appearance of the first 
 part of Gogol's " Dead Souls," and within twelve 
 months after Dostoevsky had written his " Poor 
 People," Hertzen gave to the world, under the 
 pseudonym of Iskander, his best romance, "Who 
 is to Blame?" Goncharoff published his first 
 novel, " A Common Story," Grigorovitch wrote his
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. II 
 
 touching tale, " The Village," and Tourgenieff 
 contributed to the pages of " The Contemporary " 
 the opening chapters of his " Stories from a Sports- 
 man's Notebook." The mere enumeration of 
 these works carries back the mind to the bright 
 epoch when the hopes of Russia began to beat 
 high, the "golden days," as Stchedrin proudly 
 calls them, when a spirit of enthusiasm, mixed, it 
 is true, with much that strikes us as ludicrous and 
 bombastic, was spread abroad, and when her best 
 men were nerved with the belief that the old order 
 of things would ere long be transformed and 
 brought into harmony with the wants and require- 
 ments of a progressive age. The realisation of 
 these hopes could, of course, be only ensured by 
 making the work of reform a common work, the 
 necessity of which should be acknowledged by all, 
 and in which all should take their part. For this 
 purpose, it was not sufficient to evoke pity for the 
 serf as mere serf, but the as yet unlearned lesson 
 had to be taught that the moujik is a man, that 
 beneath his rough sheepskin there beats a human 
 heart, and that in spite of the filth, poverty, and 
 ignorance to which the greed and apathy of his 
 owners had condemned him, he is still endowed 
 with the higher and kindlier instincts of our nature 
 that require only to be cultured. And besides
 
 12 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 this, the nation at large must be compelled to 
 recognise the empty worthlessness of the idle 
 selfish lives led by those, on whose behalf and 
 for whose profit the enslavement of the serf had 
 so long and so harshly been maintained, These 
 are the two lessons taught by the writers I have 
 just mentioned ; and for this reason, apart from 
 any attraction their novels may possess as works 
 of art and stories of human passion and suffering, 
 they have a higher worth in their historical bear- 
 ing, as interpreting to us the first steps made in 
 the social and political regeneration of modern 
 Russia. 
 
 We have only to compare the impression pro- 
 duced on us by Gogol's story, "The Cloak," 
 and that left on our minds by Dostoevsky's 
 " Poor People," to understand the significance 
 and extent of the change that had come over the 
 tone and tendency of Russian thought in the short 
 interval separating the publication of these two 
 tales. We pity Akakia Akakievitch, the poor shy 
 copying-clerk, who, convinced of the impossibility 
 of patching any more his one overcoat, nerves 
 himself to form an extravagant resolution, the 
 execution of which must involve the patient labour 
 of more than one long year. He determines to 
 purchase a new thickly-wadded cloak, and accord-
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 13 
 
 ingly begins to practise the strictest economy, his 
 whole income amounting to exactly one sovereign 
 a month. His thrifty habits have in the end their 
 full reward. The cloak is bought : but he is not 
 allowed long to enjoy the realisation of the one 
 idea of his life. On awaking the next morning 
 from a glorious dream, in which he saw nothing 
 but Akakias, in every form and posture, and all 
 clothed in the newest and brightest of cloaks, he 
 discovered that his cloak had been stolen during 
 the night. But the story excites only our pity, nor 
 is there one of its readers who would wish to be 
 Akakia Akakievitch. The barrenness of a life 
 like his repels us, and this feeling is intensified by 
 the one act of energy that interrupts the monotony 
 of his existence ; for in nothing does the debasing 
 insignificance of his aims and ideas stand forth 
 more prominently than in this exceptional, but 
 paltry, activity. Very different is our feeling to- 
 wards Dayvouschkin, the hero of Dostoevsky's 
 tale. The complete absence of self-seeking in his 
 love for Barbara, the delicacy with which he tries 
 to represent to her every act of kindly help he 
 renders as a mere whim on his part involving no 
 sacrifice, his ill-concealed fear lest she should 
 obtain the slightest taint or suffer the most trifling 
 inconvenience from those with whom, owing to her
 
 14 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 poverty, she is obliged to live and associate : these 
 and twenty other traits of character he uncon- 
 sciously reveals in his letters to her, win for him 
 our envying sympathy, and compel the most 
 cultured and fastidious among us to confess that, 
 with all our culture and refinement, there is some- 
 thing in Dayvouschkin's unaffected way of think- 
 ing and acting to which we have not attained, and 
 that the dark damp hole in which he lodged was 
 warmed and lighted up by the illuminating pre- 
 sence of the divine. Akakia Akakievitch denied 
 himself much, but it was to procure his own ease 
 and comfort ; Dayvouschkin denied himself every- 
 thing, but it was for others : and in this resides the 
 whole difference between the two. 
 
 How necessary it was men should be taught 
 that through generations of suffering and privation 
 the poor despised serfs have maintained unshaken 
 that faith in God and that obedience to the law of 
 love, which the so-called intelligent class of Russia 
 has all but lost, or at the best despise as supersti- 
 tious and old-fashioned, we may judge from the 
 godless indifference with which their owners 
 habitually neglected and violated the commonest 
 and most ordinary rights of human brotherhood. 
 Thus, in " The Village," Grigorovitch relates how, 
 to amuse his young wife, who had never seen a
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 15 
 
 peasant-wedding, the noble hero gets up a marriage 
 for her entertainment, and orders a young orphan 
 girl on his estate to marry the peasant, whose 
 name first comes into his head. After the con- 
 clusion of the ceremony, the newly-joined pair 
 come to pay their respects to their master and 
 mistress. To the great astonishment of the lady, 
 the bride looks sad, and her face bears signs of 
 recent weeping. But she is easily quieted, when 
 her lord assures her that with the common people 
 it is a traditional custom for brides to weep during 
 the first week after their marriage. The same 
 cynical disregard for the happiness and interests of 
 others, the same insolent neglect of all moral 
 obligations in the pursuit of one's own selfish 
 ease, and the same crass ignorance of the rights 
 common to rich and poor alike, characterise 
 Madame Zvierkoff in Tourgenieff's tale, " Her- 
 molaus and the Miller's Wife." She complains 
 bitterly of what she terms " the black and mon- 
 strous ingratitude " of poor Irene, who actually 
 has the presumption to ask her employer's leave to 
 marry the man to whom she has long been 
 engaged, though " she knows that her mistress has 
 not another chambermaid to take her place, and 
 that it is a rule of the house not to have married 
 servants." And when the weeping girl throws
 
 1 6 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 herself at the feet of her ladyship, and tearfully 
 prays for the sanction without which no peasant 
 could marry, she at once raises her up, and blandly 
 assures her that " we should never demean our- 
 selves so far as to forget what is due to human 
 dignity." 
 
 It is the universal recognition of this " human 
 dignity," about which Madame Zvierkoff prates so 
 glibly, that forms the fundamental principle of the 
 social creed of the novelists of this period. This 
 idea, I need scarcely say, is expressed most 
 directly in the novels of Dostoevsky and Count 
 Tolstoi. They have, to use Dostoevsky's favourite 
 expression, " brought us to the people," made 
 their life and faith our example and rule, and 
 taught us how it is in the people that we must 
 seek the real strength and power of a nation. But 
 though Goncharoff, in his three novels, " A Com- 
 mon Story," " Oblomoff," and " The Precipice," 
 introduces us into another world, and rarely selects 
 his personages from the peasant class, the lesson 
 these stories teach by implication, rather than 
 directly, is the same. 
 
 Alexander Adoueflf, the hero of the first of Gon- 
 charofFs novels, is a type of the cultured Russian 
 in the old sleepy days, when every day, yesterday, 
 to-day, and to-morrow, the bureaucratic machine of
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. I 7 
 
 government worked orderly, regularly, without rest, 
 and the wheels of the machine moved round and 
 round, without a single break or pause, grinding 
 all down to one uniform level, and ruthlessly 
 crushing everything that stood in the way of its 
 dull, monotonous march. The spoilt son of a 
 fond mother, he soon learned the easy lesson of 
 regarding all round him as creatures sent into the 
 world for the express object of rendering his life 
 easy and comfortable, beings, whose excuse for 
 existing at all, is to anticipate his every whim, and 
 to humour his every caprice. " You are the only 
 master here," are the words with which his mother 
 liked to console him, whenever he complained of 
 any faint show of opposition ; whilst the nurse was 
 ever croning into his ears sweet prophesies that he 
 would go through the world in robes of gold, and 
 should never know sorrow. What wonder if he 
 accepted the adulation showered on him as the 
 just acknowledgment of his high worth and 
 exceptional talents ? He, accordingly, had no 
 sooner finished his University studies than he re- 
 solved to go up to St. Petersburg, where his uncle, 
 Peter Ivanovitch, occupied a high government 
 post, and through whose protection Alexander 
 hoped to see his rare merits quickly appreciated 
 and rewarded. He felt that a glorious future 
 c
 
 1 8 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 awaited him, and that he had a special call to 
 accomplish some great work in the world. Like 
 all dreamers of his time, the very indefiniteness of 
 the work, the achievement of which was to bring 
 him. immortal fame, invested it in his eyes with a 
 peculiar charm. He, of course, might have stayed 
 on his estate, made his own home happier, and 
 spread that happiness over the little circle within 
 which his power and influence, for good or evil, 
 could be felt. But Adoueff soared above such 
 narrowing limits. His activity needed a wider 
 sphere, and nothing less than humanity, the whole 
 human race, could satisfy his all-embracing 
 schemes of philanthropy and reform. There is no 
 occasion to follow his career step by step ; it could 
 only end in disappointment and failure. Expe- 
 rience taught him the primary law of life, " Do the 
 duty which lies nearest thee," drove him back from 
 the unreal kingdoms in which he had sought im- 
 possible conquests, and made him acknowledge 
 that the one place wherein he could be of use to 
 himself or others, was that same tiny home- world 
 he had, in his ignorance, despised, as being too 
 hampered and confined. 
 
 It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for one unac- 
 quainted with Russian life as it was in the days of 
 an Adoueff, to appreciate the art and skill with
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 19 
 
 which the novelist has drawn the portrait of his hero. 
 The character is apt to strike one as exaggerated 
 and overdrawn. His ignorance of the world he 
 goes forth so confidently to conquer must appear 
 unnatural, if we do not recollect the pernicious 
 training to which he had been exposed. And what 
 is still more difficult for us to understand, is the 
 comparatively undisturbed placidity with which, 
 when he has learned, so far as he ever could learn, 
 what the world really is, he accepts his defeat in 
 the battle of life. But, unfortunately, there is in 
 reality nothing strange or exceptional in his fate. 
 All who have studied modern Russia must have 
 been struck with the fact that, not only the 
 Adoueffs, men radically weak in will and character, 
 but, with few exceptions, her most prominent men, 
 either die early or bring their career of activity to 
 a premature end. The explanation is to be found 
 in the conditions of Russian life, which are alto- 
 gether unfavourable to the full and free develop- 
 ment of the intellectual force and energy of the 
 nation. It requires no ordinary physical, and a 
 still rarer mental vigour to keep true to the creed 
 of one's youth, when the slighfest display of indi- 
 vidualism is visited as a crime, and is looked upon 
 as being out of gear with the elaborate machinery 
 of a bureaucratic administration. We thus find 
 c 2
 
 20 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the majority of Russians, after a short and fitful 
 Sturm und Drang period, and whilst still in the 
 prime of life, rejecting what they call the Utopias of 
 youth ; and in this term is too often included every 
 high moral standard and every high practical aim. 
 They learn after a little experience that it is safer 
 and wiser to mind their own affairs, to restrict 
 their activity to making their own fortune, and 
 believe themselves, and are esteemed by others, 
 to be very useful, respectable members of society, 
 if only they refrain from writing or talking about 
 politics, of all occupations the least profitable in 
 Russia. If of a cynical temperament, they will 
 henceforth scoff at, and hold up to ridicule the ideas 
 to which they so loudly and so enthusiastically 
 asserted their adherence in earlier days. If en- 
 dowed with a kindlier and more genial nature, 
 they will pardon and excuse the extravagances of 
 youthful opinion, but at the same time will preach 
 the necessity of these vagaries being quickly 
 replaced by a more practical, that is, a more 
 selfish and narrower view of things. It was so 
 with Adoueff. At the beginning of his career, it 
 may be, he was inspired with generous sentiments, 
 indulged in the widest-reaching schemes, and 
 looked eagerly forward to the day when he should 
 be able to carry out his lofty principles. But he
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 21 
 
 remained true to his creed only till he entered the 
 world, and then, in presence of the deadening 
 exigencies of official life, abandoned his dreams, 
 and ended with burning what he had once adored, 
 and adoring what he had once burned. Not with- 
 out reason, the novelist has given to his work the 
 meaning title, " A Common Story." 
 
 In his critical study, published in 1874, under 
 the title of " Better Late than Never," long after 
 the hot controversies provoked by his second and 
 greatest novel, " Oblomoff," had come to an end, 
 Goncharoff declares that his three romances are a 
 faithful reproduction of the experiences of his own 
 life, the description of what he had seen with his 
 own eyes. " I have never been able to. write of 
 anything that has not grown up and ripened within 
 me, that I have not myself seen, observed, and 
 experienced. I have, or rather had, my own field, 
 my own soil, just as I have my own country ; my 
 own natal air, friends, and enemies ; my own little 
 corner, wherein I have observed, felt, and thought ; 
 and I have written only what I have lived through, 
 what I have thought, felt, and loved, what I have 
 seen close to me, and what I have known, in a 
 word, I have described my own life, and what 
 grew into it, and made itself a part of that life." 
 
 These words admirably illustrate the bent of
 
 22 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 GoncharoflPs genius. He depicts life as it exhibited 
 itself around him, such as he found it, and presents 
 it in the forms it had in the course of ages as- 
 sumed, forms that had long existed, but which, 
 in part, already belonged to the past, or were in 
 the process of dying out. He sees all that is 
 around him, and, endowed to a far higher degree 
 than any of his contemporaries with the power of 
 generalisation, he has, in the person of Oblomoff, 
 created a type of the old Russian character, which, 
 for breadth of conception and accuracy in minute 
 filling-up, has no equal in the literature of his 
 country. But, unlike Dostoevsky and Count 
 Tolstoi, he does not possess the prophetic instinct 
 of looking ahead, and his descriptions of the 
 actual lack the suggestiveness that gives a charm, 
 and at the same time a peculiar value, to their 
 pictures of the present. 
 
 As I have already remarked, only those who 
 have themselves been brought into contact with it 
 can form an idea of the dull, monotonous existence 
 which the old-fashioned Russian country gentry 
 had from time immemorial been accustomed to 
 lead, and which they continued to pursue up to 
 the momentous year of the emancipation of the 
 serfs. How can an Englishman be brought to 
 believe that there is no exaggerated distortion of
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 23 
 
 the truth in Goncharoff's description of the daily 
 home-life of the Oblomoffs, who, like the rest of 
 their class, slept away their existence, took no part 
 in the interests of the outer world, and were dead 
 to all the higher aims and nobler instincts of 
 humanity ! From an early hour in the morning 
 the noise of knives, as the cook and his underlings 
 in the kitchen chopped up the meat and the greens 
 for the soup, could be heard as far as the village ; 
 whilst from time to time the shrill whining tone of 
 the housekeeper's voice rose above the din, as she 
 gave her different orders and instructions. In the 
 meantime, the master of the house was busily 
 engaged in sitting at the window of his room, 
 watching with untired energy all that went on in 
 the courtyard. " Hey, Ignasha, you blockhead, 
 what are you carrying there ? " he shouts to a serf 
 who then happened to pass by. " I am taking the 
 knives to be sharpened," was the answer ; and the 
 servant shuffles on, without once looking at his 
 master, lest he should be suspected of loitering on 
 the way. " Well, well, that is right, and see that 
 they are well sharpened, do you hear ? " A few 
 minutes later, and an old woman hobbles by. 
 "Eh, you, where are you going to, my good 
 woman ? " " To the dairy, to get some milk for 
 the lunch, your honour." " Well, well," the squire
 
 24 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 replies, " only see that none of the milk is spilt and 
 wasted." "And you, Zacharka," he cries out 
 directly after, " where are you sneaking off to, you 
 lazy vagabond ? I'll give you something to run 
 for ; that is the third time you have gone across 
 the yard, and each time came back as empty- 
 handed as you went. Get into the house, will 
 you, and mind your work." And Zacharka obe- 
 diently returns to his work, which consists in 
 dozing at his post in the ante-room till his young 
 master may happen to want him. The latter, 
 when he is not in bed, spends his time in lounging 
 on his wide soft sofa, to lie at full length on which 
 is not, with him, a mere relaxation or enjoyment, 
 but is his normal position. And close by its side 
 are placed his slippers, so capacious and easy- 
 fitting, that when he lets fall his feet from off the 
 sofa on to the ground, they drop of themselves 
 into them, without any trouble or effort on his 
 part. Nor is the mistress of the house less busily 
 engaged than the rest of the family. A large part 
 of the morning is occupied in anxious consultation 
 with one of the female serfs as to a jacket that is 
 being made for the eldest son, and she herself 
 measures it out with a piece of chalk, and sees it 
 cut then and there, lest the girl should steal a strip 
 of the cloth. Later on in the day she will, with
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 25 
 
 her husband, take a leisurely stroll through the 
 garden, and see what vegetables are fit to be 
 gathered, and what fruit is sufficiently ripe to be 
 plucked. And then it is full time to prepare for 
 the great event of the day. Each member of the 
 family is consulted as to what he would like for 
 dinner, and each has his favourite dish or sauce to 
 recommend, whilst fresh orders are being continu- 
 ally given as to how the cook is to flavour the soup, 
 or with what particular sauce he is to serve up the 
 meat and fowls. After dinner, all enjoy a long 
 siesta, and for two or three hours the utmost quiet 
 prevails in the house as well as in the kitchen and 
 courtyard; and then a hearty substantial tea is 
 served, which disposed of, the family retire to rest, 
 and as they lay themselves down to sleep, they do 
 not fail to thank God that he has allowed them to 
 pass another day in undisturbed peace and tran- 
 quillity. Once indeed this tranquillity was strangely 
 broken by the arrival of a letter, an unheard-of and 
 unprecedented event in the history of the Oblo- 
 moffs. The envelope was curiously examined, 
 and turned over and over by every member of the 
 household in the vain endeavour to guess, by the 
 hand-writing, from whom the letter could have 
 come ; and then, instead of being opened, was 
 placed on the mantelpiece for perusal on the
 
 26 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 morrow, as it might contain bad news, and no one 
 could summon courage to unseal it, till every pos- 
 sible conjecture had been made as to what it might 
 be about. The next day, and for several weeks, 
 the letter formed the sole theme of conversation ; 
 and only after numerous consultations was it 
 finally decided to pluck up heart, risk any danger, 
 and see what it really contained. It turned out 
 to be from an aunt, residing some hundred versts 
 distant, who prayed them to send her a particular 
 receipt for currant preserves. Of course, it was 
 decided that the required receipt should be copied 
 and forwarded. But each day something happened 
 to cause them to postpone writing till the morrow, 
 "and," adds the novelist, "though it is now more 
 than two years since the letter was received, I am 
 not sure that it has yet been answered." 
 
 The stolid apathy and fixed inactivity of an 
 Oblomoff will cease to provoke any feeling of sur- 
 prise on our part if we take into account the 
 social position he and his class occupied, and the 
 education he received. He was a barine a 
 Russian word, which though always translated into 
 English by the term gentleman, has no equivalent 
 in our language a kind of irresponsible roi faine- 
 ant on his estate, and had at his beck and call, as 
 the novelist reminds us, " not one Zacharka, but
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 27 
 
 fifteen hundred Zacharkas," whose duty it was to 
 save their master every bother and care, and to 
 spare him the necessity of doing anything for him- 
 self that involved the slightest thought or the 
 least bodily movement. The conditions of his 
 life rendered any rational development of his intel- 
 lectual or moral nature an impossibility. From 
 his infancy habituated to depend physically and 
 morally on the service and labour of others, he 
 naturally regarded work of any kind as a burden, 
 the necessary accompaniment of poverty and 
 serfdom, and could not imagine that a barine 
 would ever condescend to anything so low and 
 vulgar ; of course, he went to school, where he sat 
 quietly in class, listened to what the masters 
 taught, simply because he could not help doing 
 so, but took no interest in what he heard, and 
 looked on all study as a punishment inflicted 
 on men for the sin of their first parents. Nor did 
 he gain any good from his university career, his 
 head crammed with a mass of undigested know- 
 ledge, utterly unconscious of the necessity of 
 making that knowledge the rule and guide of 
 life. And if Oblomoff went through the routine 
 of school and college studies, he did so simply in 
 order that he might enter the Government service, 
 secure a rank, and what constitutes the supreme
 
 28 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 ambition of every true Russian obtain the right 
 to wear a civil or military uniform ; for we must 
 not forget that the universities and the higher 
 schools of Russia are not, as in Western Europe, 
 the products of slow spontaneous growth. In 
 the beginning they were the artificial creations of 
 Government, and for a long time continued to 
 bear the distinctive character of establishments 
 founded for the sole purpose of supplying the 
 civil service with well-trained officials, providing 
 the public schools with teachers, and finding 
 instructed engineers and officers for the army and 
 navy. 
 
 But though Oblomoff instinctively hated work, 
 which, we are expressly told, he included together 
 with illness and poverty among the accidental evils 
 of life, he was not altogether devoid of the ambition 
 to do something for the general good and welfare of 
 men. For several years he worked untiringly at a 
 new original plan, conceived in accordance with the 
 spirit of modern ideas for the better organisation 
 of his estate and the improvement of his peasants. 
 Every morning, directly he had slipped off his bed, 
 he would hurriedly drink his tea, and then at once 
 lie down on the sofa, his head propped up with a 
 cushion, and would think and think over his 
 scheme, till his head ached with the undue strain
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 29 
 
 of excessive work, and, murmuring to himself, 
 "Enough for to-day," he would fall asleep, 
 exhausted and worn out. Neither the love of 
 Olga, with her self-sacrificing eagerness to stir 
 Oblomoff from his apathy, nor the example of his 
 friend Stoltz, with his keen practical energy, could 
 overcome the moral fear that in reality forms the 
 fundamental trait in the character of Oblomoff. 
 As he lay stretched out on his sofa he could form 
 schemes and indulge in vague ideas of making his 
 life useful to others ; but the instant it came to 
 putting his plans into execution, he involuntarily 
 shrank from binding himself to any obligation, and 
 dreaded the possibility of becoming involved in dis- 
 putes, difficulties, and strife. The stern realities of 
 life frightened him ; the devotion of an Olga lost 
 all its charms directly be perceived that it required 
 from him something else than a languid abandon- 
 ment to sentiment ; the enterprising boldness of a 
 Stoltz shocked his shrinking sensitiveness. He 
 could not bring himself to act till he had con- 
 sidered and foreseen every possible issue of the 
 event, and thus a cowardly fear of failure unnerved 
 and paralysed his will. 
 
 A strained feeling of patriotism has led Pea- 
 sareff and other critics to condemn Goncharoff for 
 portraying in the person of Stoltz, a German, the
 
 30 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 man of action, the complete antithesis of Oblo- 
 moff. In like manner Tourgenieff was sharply 
 attacked, because in his novel " On the Eve," 
 published in the same year as Goncharoff's 
 "Oblomoff," he has put Insaroff, the Bulgarian, in 
 opposition to the Russian Bersenieff. Such com- 
 plaints are essentially puerile ; and we might just 
 as well blame the physician who determines the. 
 illness from which his patient is suffering, as be 
 angry with Tourgenieff and Goncharoff for expos- 
 ing that terrible malady, Oblomoffism, which so 
 long spread its curse over the cultured classes of 
 Russia. And as we read these stories of an epoch 
 so near to us in time, so far removed from us in 
 every other respect, we notice two characteristics 
 common to all these Russian Oblomoffs. They 
 are but talkers, and nothing more; in their dis- 
 satisfaction at lacking the energy to accomplish all 
 they wish, they sullenly refrain from doing the 
 little that lies within their power ; they let slip out 
 of their hands any favourable chance that may 
 occur; and it is by men of foreign origin and 
 education that the practical organisation of the 
 reforms they so eloquently advocate in words 
 is carried out. Bersenieff may plead in 
 glowing speech the cause of progress; but it is 
 Insaroff who proves in deed to be the true patriot,
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 3! 
 
 and who in energy of character and singleness of 
 aim stands out in such marked contrast to these 
 empty talkers and parrot chatterers of social 
 philosophy and political economy. Nay, they are 
 equally unable to manage their own private affairs. 
 Oblomoff may denounce, as he lolls on his sofa, 
 the dishonesty of Matveieff, who presents against 
 him a forged bill of exchange; but it is the 
 German Stoltz who forces the rogue to give it up 
 and secures his well-merited punishment. We 
 further observe that, however loudly they may 
 preach and with whatever assurance they may lay 
 down the law, they never succeed in blinding the 
 quicker, sharper judgment of women, and their 
 hollow pretences are seen through and detected 
 by those whose good opinion and love they desire 
 to gain. The kindlier qualities of an Oblomoff 
 may for awhile awaken Olga's sympathy, and 
 inspire her with the hope to stir him from his 
 aimless inertness, but his ignoble love of ease 
 prevents the hold which at one moment she 
 obtained over him being permanent or complete. 
 In the same way, it was impossible that Ellen could 
 find any real satisfaction in the empty theorisings 
 of the priggish orators by whom she was sur- 
 rounded, and she only found her true province in 
 life when she made herself a co-worker in the
 
 32 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 cause Insaroff had at heart, since, to use her own 
 words, " he not only talks, but acts, and will act." 
 Of Goncharoff's three novels, " The Precipice " 
 is the longest, and it must be confessed the 
 weakest. Its cardinal fault, the want of historical 
 unity, must be attributed to the long period, no 
 less than twenty years, over which its composition 
 extended. The pictures it gives of the past are 
 drawn with that sureness of hand which never 
 fails the author of " Oblomoff " when describing 
 Russian life such as it was in the days of his 
 youth and early manhood. Unfortunately, he has 
 introduced characters that belong to a later period, 
 and thus two different epochs are confusedly 
 mingled. The work, we are told, is designed to 
 represent the "awakening dawn," when Russia 
 first awoke from her long sleep, and to depict 
 the struggle between the old and the new. But 
 the task is ill suited to the genius of Goncharoff, 
 who does not possess that quick perception which 
 enabled Tourgenieff to seize on and note every 
 varying phase in the reform movement that agi- 
 tated his country between the years 1860 and 
 1870. There is, accordingly, a want of complete- 
 ness in the portrait of Mark Volochoff, who is 
 intended to represent the new generation; the 
 worse traits in his nature are dwelt upon with
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 33 
 
 unnecessary emphasis, and there are glaring in- 
 consistencies in the character as drawn by the 
 novelist which it is impossible to reconcile. 
 
 We are told very little of the education or early 
 training which had made Volochoff what he was 
 when first introduced to us, already in his thirtieth 
 year. We only know that he had been a student 
 at the University of Moscow, which, however, he 
 left without taking a degree ; that he served for a 
 short time in the army, but soon got mixed up in 
 some political affair, and was sent to live under 
 police surveillance in a small remote provincial 
 town. Here he quickly became the theme of 
 gossiping wonder. His strange, uncouth manner 
 and untidy dress, his offensive indifference to the 
 requirements of the world, his outspoken con- 
 tempt for the ordinary rules of morality, his 
 ostentatious neglect of all religious observances, 
 and his unconcealed hostility to any teaching that 
 bore the taint of orthodoxy, rendered him an 
 object of mingled curiosity and terror. The good 
 people of Manielovka, where he took up his 
 forced residence, listened to him in bewilderment 
 as he set forth the " new faith " it was his mission 
 to preach, and declared that henceforth the aim of 
 every true and honest man should be to " clean 
 the brain " of the rubbish that, accumulating for
 
 34 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 centuries, had in the end effectually clogged the 
 healthy working of the human mind. But brain- 
 cleaning, though it may be an attractive, is cer- 
 tainly a dangerous operation, and requires a far 
 more delicate touch than the rough hand of a 
 Volochoff possessed. He led more than one of 
 those who allowed themselves to be attracted by 
 the daring novelty of his creed to the giddy pre- 
 cipice into which they threw what they fondly 
 believed were only childish prejudices, but the 
 loss of which involved the abandonment of all 
 faith in God and all belief in life. 
 
 It is evident that Goncharoff wished to make 
 the character of Volochoff unpleasing and anti- 
 pathetic. His rude speech and unpolished man- 
 ners are calculated to repel. But I need scarcely 
 remark, these qualities are gratuitously assigned, 
 since a man may be the rankest materialist, and 
 yet be exemplary in his toilet and punctiliously 
 scrupulous in his observance of the drawing-room 
 code. We may acknowledge that Volochoffs 
 ideas on religion, honour, duty, and marriage 
 were a strange and contradictory medley of 
 opinions he had gained from an ill-digested study 
 of books he had read, but not understood; and 
 most of us, I presume, will reject his wild theory 
 of " free love," though his peculiar doctrine, it
 
 IVAN ALEXANDROVITCH GONCHAROFF. 35 
 
 would appear, has of late obtained acceptance in 
 sober England. But when we have admitted all 
 this, the errors of the man and his perverted views 
 of life lend only an increased weight to the sen- 
 tence of condemnation we must pass on that old 
 sleepy Russia, of which Goncharoff is the kindly 
 annalist. He is its creation, and the appearance 
 of a Volochoff both marks the awakening of the 
 country to the first glimmering consciousness of 
 its responsibilities and duties, and is at the same 
 time the just penalty it had to pay for its long 
 slumberous indifference to the spiritual instincts 
 of our nature. 
 
 D 2
 
 36 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 
 
 No Russian writer, unless it be Count Tolstoi, 
 ever enjoyed so undisputed and so widespread a 
 popularity as that which fell to the lot of 
 Tourgenieff. Each of his more important works 
 has for its theme some burning question of the 
 day, and consequently the publication of a new 
 tale by Tourgenieff was always regarded as an 
 event in the world of Russian letters, exciting no 
 less keen an interest among those who shared the 
 opinions he advocated than among those who were 
 most opposed to his views. He was, moreover, 
 the first who made Western Europe acquainted 
 with the life of Russia and with the literature that 
 life produced. His long residence in France 
 brought him into communion with the best repre- 
 sentatives of French thought ; the Russian mind 
 and genius attracted first the curiosity and then 
 the sympathy of men like Merimee; and his novels 
 were translated and had already obtained a place 
 in European literature when even the names of
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 37 
 
 his great contemporaries were unknown beyond 
 the limits of their country. Many misconceptions 
 and prejudices as to the character, belief, and 
 aims of the Russian people, once common to us 
 all, but now cherished only by the ignorant or as- 
 sumed from a desire to secure the triumph of a 
 party creed, have been cleared up and removed 
 mainly through the closer and sounder knowledge 
 of Russia we have gained from the study of his 
 works. But, whilst freely acknowledging the high 
 service he rendered in this respect, we must not, 
 like many of his foreign critics, ignore the fact that, 
 though to the last his love for Russia was warm 
 and eager, with each year of his sojourn abroad, 
 his trust in the Russian people grew weaker, till 
 he would seem to have lost all belief that they 
 possessed the patient power, or anything beyond 
 the vague will, to work out their own destinies. 
 
 The novels of Tourgenieff form a sequel to those 
 of Goncharoff. They treat of two successive 
 periods through which newly -awakened Russia had 
 to pass. In "Roudine," " A Nobleman's Retreat," 
 and "On the Eve," he has painted the age of 
 spouting theorisers, when the old order of things 
 had died out, but the new order had not yet taken 
 root, an age of unrest that has been happily 
 baptised as the "castle-building epoch." In
 
 38 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 "Fathers and Children," "Smoke," and "Virgin 
 Soil," is sketched the age of action, a period of 
 practical patriotism that witnessed the temporary 
 triumph of Slavophil ideas and the accomplishment 
 of a series of wide reforms, which, but for the 
 criminal folly of a small and unscrupulous party 
 of noisy agitators, must have resulted in the final 
 deliverance of the country from the hereditary 
 shackles that had hitherto impeded her free and 
 natural development. Taken together, these six 
 novels present a general picture, or as Tourgenieff 
 himself has expressed it, a " concentrated reflec- 
 tion" of the most critical moments in the social 
 history of contemporary Russia. The period of 
 which they treat is so near to us that, perhaps, we 
 have little reason to be surprised if they have been 
 made the subject of hot and bitter controversy, 
 or if, with few exceptions, his Russian critics, 
 while admitting their artistic excellences, have 
 distorted their real teaching in obedience to the 
 exigencies of party spirit. Fortunately for us, we, 
 as foreigners, have no reason to yield to any such 
 temptation, and can, with strictest impartiality, 
 criticise them from the point of view which their 
 writer assures us he consistently maintained through- 
 out the whole of his literary career. " The author 
 of ' Roudine,' written in 1855," we read in his
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 39 
 
 introduction to the collected edition of his works, 
 "and the author of 'Virgin Soil,' written in 1876, 
 is one and the same man. In the whole course of 
 these years, I have endeavoured, as far as my 
 power and knowledge permitted me, conscien- 
 tiously and truthfully to represent and to incarnate 
 what Shakspere has called the body and pressure 
 of the age, and to catch and to reflect the quickly- 
 changing features of the cultured class of Russian 
 society, which has mainly formed the theme of my 
 observation and study." These words admirably 
 explain the source of TourgenierFs popularity, and 
 at the same time mark the limit of his genius. 
 Then, even more than now, the reading pubjic of 
 Russia was composed of the class Tourgenieff 
 himself belonged to. No wonder, then, if they 
 gave their love to one who, alone of all the writers 
 of his age, remained faithful to the literary tra- 
 ditions in which they had been bred, who repro- 
 duced in prose the choice artistic language of a 
 Poushkin, and who, in style, thought, and tone, was 
 a full and sympathetic representative and inter- 
 preter of the culture which constituted the basis 
 and foundation of their life. It may seem that 
 the outward form adopted by a writer is of 
 secondary importance, but I think that Tourgenieff' s 
 relation to the people, and particularly to their
 
 40 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 religious faith, may be best explained by his 
 tenacious adherence to the literary style of the 
 past. The absence of all affectation in their life 
 and speech, their simple uninquiring faith in God, 
 their patient endurance of wrong, their cheerful 
 submission to poverty, suffering, or illness, and, 
 above all, the tranquil, uncomplaining spirit in 
 which they meet death, these and like traits in the 
 character of the Russian people are brought out 
 by Tourgenieff with supreme realistic force. But 
 it is impossible not to remark that much of this 
 simplicity strikes the novelist as strange and in- 
 harmonious with that culture he had learned to 
 worship ; and it may be safely said that he never 
 more than partially realised those hidden forces 
 in the Russian people, which are entirely remote 
 from and unintelligible to Western European 
 civilisation, but are closely connected with their 
 religious creed, and, when allowed their full play, 
 will enable them to work out their future inde- 
 pendently of foreign influences. It is very different 
 with writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoi, who find 
 in their religious belief a tie that binds them to 
 the people closely in soul and mind, and gives 
 strength to their conviction that the aspirations 
 common to them and the people alike will, in 
 spite of all temporary hindrances and disappoint-
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 41 
 
 ments, be eventually realised. For this reason 
 Tourgenieff has never been a power in Russian 
 literature. His novels are eagerly read, their high 
 moral tone and perfect finished style are recognised 
 and admired, but, whilst tracing its newest depar- 
 tures and fresh currents, he has never guided or 
 controlled the tendencies of Russian life and 
 thought. Wedded to his Western European 
 theories, he could find no sure holding-point in 
 national self-development, and would seem to have 
 thought that Russian progress consists in a more 
 or less successful imitation of a civilisation that 
 has nothing in common with Russian traditions 
 and can never contribute to the natural and healthy 
 growth of the Russian people. 
 
 After what I have already said in my last lecture 
 respecting the novels of Goncharoff, it will scarcely 
 be necessary to dwell at any length on Tourgenieff's 
 " Roudine." He already belongs to the past. 
 Useful in his generation, he appears to us of a later 
 day to be a mere phrasemaker, a " minikin Ham- 
 let," as Tourgenieff calls him. The eloquent zeal 
 with which the young orator pleads for the reform 
 of abuses has lost the charm that once made him 
 the hero of drawing-rooms, and won for him the 
 easy admiration of sentimental women, who hung 
 upon his every word and took his fervid declama-
 
 42 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 tion for genuine coin. At the same time, he is 
 better than Oblomoff, and his impulsive advocacy 
 of right and justice compares favourably with 
 Oblomoff's sofa musings on the unredressed 
 wrongs and evils of life. But, after all, the one 
 only dreams and the other only talks. His real 
 worthlessness comes out most strongly if we con- 
 trast Roudine with the landed gentry of his neigh- 
 bourhood, such as Pegasoff, on whom he looked 
 down as beings of an inferior order. We shall 
 then see that a very imperfect activity may be less 
 hurtful than Roudine's barren eloquence. We 
 know, that Pegasoff was guilty of taking bribes, did 
 not scruple to toady his superiors, and professed 
 a worldly disbelief in honesty and disinterestedness. 
 But his peasants were not so neglected as those 
 on Roudine's estate, of whose existence, except 
 through the monthly reports of his German 
 steward, their master was completely ignorant. 
 For, like all men of his class, Roudine considered 
 himself to be far above the common tribe ; and 
 as Dobrolouboff, the great Russian critic, has well 
 expressed it, " in the days of Roudine, men who 
 believed themselves to be superior to the sphere 
 in which they were fated to move, grew so fast and 
 multiplied with such rapidity, that, if the change 
 that came over the national life had not happily
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGEN1EFF. 43 
 
 put a stop to their growth, there would soon have 
 been no sphere left for them to be superior to." 
 Only once does he escape from his habitual sin 
 of believing mere words to have a healing power, 
 and this one instance of activity affords a striking 
 proof of the absence of solidity of character, with- 
 out which the best of our deeds are but irrational 
 impulse. He takes part in the Parisian Revolution 
 of 1848, and dies of a wound received whilst 
 defending one of the barricades. As if his own 
 country had no need of the services of her children, 
 and as if there was no cause save the stranger's on 
 which to exercise his energies ! 
 
 Roudine's fatal mistake consisted in that, whilst 
 he interested the mind and stirred the ideas of 
 men, he forgot that, if he would achieve any 
 practical 'good, it was necessary to touch the heart 
 and appeal to the feelings. It was impossible that 
 men who had nothing better than fine-spun 
 theories to offer, who were always preparing them- 
 selves and getting ready, but never put their hand 
 boldly to work, could long be accepted as author- 
 ities and guides. Oblomoff had to give way to 
 Roudine, and Roudine, in his turn, is replaced by 
 Lavretsky, the hero of Tourgenieff's next novel, 
 " A Nobleman's Retreat." Unlike Roudine, 
 Lavretsky is not of unmixed noble descent, his
 
 44 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 father having married a serf-girl, and he more than 
 once boasts that " pure plebeian blood flows in 
 his veins." It is this plebeian descent that inspires 
 him with a belief in the youth and strength of his 
 country, encourages his hope in the continuous 
 development of national life, and causes him to 
 distrust the abstract reasoning and ideal concep- 
 tions of a perfect state of society in which Roudine 
 liked to indulge. It is true that his marriage with 
 the heartless and frivolous Barbara, so soon followed 
 by the discovery of his wife's unfaithfulness, induced 
 him for a while to renounce all work, and, in the 
 solitude and quiet of his country home, to seek 
 forgetfulness of the past. But that which would 
 have lulled Roudine into sluggish resignation, 
 aroused Lavretsky to a consciousness of the 
 humiliation involved in any such passive surrender 
 to fate, and in all around him, in every mood of 
 nature, he found a fresh stir to activity. It was 
 thus that, on the first day of his arrival in the 
 dull country village where he had resolved to bury 
 himself from the world, the tranquil languor of the 
 scenery seemed to typify only too faithfully the 
 dead calm and purposeless stagnation of the days 
 that awaited him. " There was not a breath of 
 air or the least noise to break the calm. The 
 wind had not strength enough to stir the foliage of
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 45 
 
 the trees ; the swallows, as they swept the ground 
 with their wings, silently chased one another, and 
 the heart felt oppressed with the silent persistence 
 of their flight. The sun sank softly in the clear 
 blue sky ; the clouds floated slowly in the golden 
 ether, alone seeming to have an aim, and to know 
 whither they were bound. Elsewhere, and at this 
 very moment, the sea of life was tossing with its 
 foaming and tumultuous waves ; but here it was 
 calm and motionless as a piece of stagnant water." 
 And whilst he thus gazed at the clouds, which 
 " knew whither they were bound," he resolved to 
 make himself an aim and to find a purpose for his 
 life. As we might expect, the end is not easily 
 attained, but, though its achievement is marred by 
 occasional failures, he finally conquers, and listen- 
 ing to the counsel of the pure and noble-minded 
 Liza, finds strength sufficient to forego the rich 
 store of happiness his love for her promised to 
 secure him, and, in obedience to her prayer, con- 
 sents to pardon the wife who has done him so cruel 
 a wrong. Nor, after his forgiveness of Barbara, does 
 he repeat the error he had committed when, smart- 
 ing under the treachery of his wife, life seemed to 
 have lost every purpose and every charm ; but, 
 instead of weakly hugging his grief to his heart, he 
 puts aside self, and seeks consolation for his own
 
 46 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 woes in ameliorating the ills of others, and in im- 
 proving the lot of his peasants. The fate of the 
 two heroes, Roudine and Lavretsky, is equally 
 tragic. But, whilst the death of the one, with its 
 flaunting theatrical surroundings, excites within us 
 a mingled feeling of regret arid discontented con- 
 tempt for the man who thus wilfully threw away 
 his life, as we follow Lavretsky in his new career 
 of activity, and see how he preserved to the last 
 his belief in good and firmness of will, though we 
 pity him in his disappointed search after happiness, 
 we can never despise him. 
 
 The title of TourgenierFs novel, " On the Eve," 
 sufficiently characterises the stage in Russian 
 development immediately succeeding the Ob- 
 lomoff, Roudine, and Lavretsky periods. The 
 action of the story is laid in 1853, and none of 
 the epochs sketched by Tourgenieff in his preced- 
 ing novels afforded such rich and varied materials 
 as those days of ardent hope and expectation. 
 Russia has produced many striking and original 
 individualities, but in her history we find few great 
 epochs, and not one that can be compared with 
 this era of eager palpitating life, revelling in the 
 consciousness of youthful strength, and longing to 
 put forth its hitherto unexercised powers. The 
 keynote to the whole work, and which is sustained
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 47 
 
 throughout from the first to the last page, is given 
 in one of the earlier scenes, where Schoubine says 
 to his friend Bersenieff, " But go, pray go ; I was 
 only talking so, and do not wish to keep you : be off 
 into the garden as quickly as you like : you will find 
 Ellen there : apparently she is waiting for you, in 
 any case she is waiting for somebody; do you under- 
 stand the meaning of those words, she is waiting? " 
 Like Ellen, Russia was unquiet, dissatisfied, on 
 the eve of breaking with a sluggish, unproductive 
 past, awaiting the advent of men who should be 
 able to satisfy her newly-awakened aspirations. 
 But where could such men be found ? Certainly 
 not among the Loupoyarofifs, the empty, frivolous 
 expounders of the political creed of young Russia, 
 or even in a Bersenieff or a Schoubine. Bersenieff 
 is filled with an unselfish devotion to all that is 
 good, and indulges in the dream of a happier 
 future for his country. But his heroism is of a 
 passive nature ; he is able to endure much, to 
 make great sacrifices, and to behave nobly when 
 an occasion presents itself. The occasion, how- 
 ever, must come unsought. He cannot determine 
 a line of action, or play an independent part when 
 called upon to act. Schoubine puts to himself, 
 and to others, the question, "Whether the time 
 will ever come when we shall have real men
 
 48 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 amongst us ? " and, having posed the question, 
 languidly falls back into his wonted caustic in- 
 difference. Of all the characters introduced into 
 the novel, Insaroff is the only one who does not 
 talk, but acts ; and he is not a Russian, but a 
 Bulgarian. He is strong exactly in those points 
 where these Russian theorists are weak. A 
 Bulgarian by birth, he is filled with a passionate 
 love for his country, a love strengthened by the 
 desire to avenge the brutal murder of his mother 
 by a Turkish aga, and the not less brutal execution 
 of his father for having slain the assassin ; and he 
 lives with but one object, to secure its freedom 
 from the foul tyranny of the Turks. He never 
 thinks of separating his personal happiness from 
 the happiness of his country. Such an idea, how- 
 ever natural to the educated and philosophical 
 Bersenieff, never occurs to the simple-minded 
 Bulgarian, and in promoting the one, he believes 
 he is best promoting the other. 
 
 " You love your country dearly? " is the question 
 Ellen asks him in one of their earlier interviews. 
 
 "What else is there worth loving?" he hotly 
 replies. "What else is there which never changes, 
 of which you never doubt, in which, next to God, 
 you never cease to believe ? And when she, your 
 country, has need of you . . . well, well, the veriest
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 49 
 
 boor, the lowest beggar in Bulgaria, not one whit 
 less than I myself, awaits one and the same thing : 
 we have all but one and the same end in view." 
 
 In these words we see the whole difference be- 
 tween the two men. Insaroff is no cold philosopher, 
 dreamingly wondering whether he shall ever be 
 called on to play a part in the struggle for national 
 freedom, and, if so, what part it will be. That 
 events must decide ; enough for him that he be 
 allowed to enlist, in the van or in the rear, in the 
 coming battle against wrong and injustice. Ber- 
 senieff, too, is capable of this, but he would be glad 
 were the sacrifice never demanded of him, and 
 looks fonvard with shrinking and aversion to the 
 possibility of being engaged in the strife. In her 
 journal, Ellen, with the keenness of a woman's 
 judgment, notes this inferiority in Bersenieff's 
 character: " He is, perhaps, more learned and wiser; 
 this may be ; but he is so little when compared with 
 him. Whenever he speaks of his fatherland, his 
 form becomes fuller, his face wears a strange 
 beauty, and his voice obtains a manlier tone- 
 Then, in truth, there is not a man in the whole 
 world to whom he need yield." 
 
 And this contrast between the Bulgarian patriot 
 and the 'Russian political spouters, is brought out 
 with a force that is almost stern in its pointedness. 
 E
 
 50 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 in the scene where the dying Insaroff, the man of 
 action, is visited by Loupoyaroff, the frothy de- 
 claimer: "Insaroff was tired out with this un- 
 expected visit, and lay down on the sofa. ' And 
 that,' he muttered bitterly, as he looked up at 
 Ellen, ' is our rising generation, our young Russia ! 
 They give themselves grand airs, and talk wonder- 
 fully well, but it is all talk, and there it ends.' " 
 
 We can, then, easily understand why, after 
 Tnsaroff's death, Ellen feels that she has no coun- 
 try but his, and determines to remain faithful to 
 the cause to which he had devoted his life. " Re- 
 turn to Russia?" she writes. "Why? What is 
 there to do in Russia ? " 
 
 And the very last sentence in the book forms a 
 sad, but just, commentary on Ellen's despairing 
 query. Urban Ivanovitch, her great-uncle, has 
 received a letter from Schoubine, in which his 
 correspondent repeats his favourite question as to 
 whether there is any just ground to hope that real 
 men will ever rise up amongst us. "And as he 
 read these lines, Urban Ivanovitch played with 
 his fingers, and with a puzzled glance looked out 
 of the window of his room." 
 
 And soon, even whilst puzzled Urbans were still 
 playing with their fingers, idly renouncing as im- 
 possible the task of solving the destinies of the
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 51 
 
 Russian people, these "real men" appeared, or those 
 who gave themselves out as such, men who 
 claimed to know in what the malady of their 
 country consisted, and who at once set to work, 
 without caring to pose as propagandists of any 
 particular creed, new or old. What that work was, 
 and how they sought to carry it out, forms the 
 theme of Tourgenieff's greatest and most famous 
 novel, "Fathers and Children." Its publication 
 provoked much bitter controversy, the echoes of 
 which have even yet scarcely died away, and its 
 author, so long the idol of Russian youth, was 
 roundly accused of having calumniously carica- 
 tured the rising generation. Whether there was 
 any real ground for this ill-feeling, the source of 
 which, I believe, is to be found in the suspicious 
 and distrustful attitude the novelist assumes in 
 reference to the more prominent phases of con- 
 temporary Russian life, we shall be best able to 
 judge after we have made ourselves acquainted 
 with the subject and leading personages of the 
 story. 
 
 Its characters naturally fall into two groups, and 
 nearly the whole book is made up of scenes in 
 which the representatives of the old and new school 
 are brought into collision. To the former belong 
 Nicholas Petrovitch Kirsanoff and his brother, 
 E 2
 
 52 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Paul Petrovitch ; to the latter Arcadie, the son of 
 Nicholas, and his friend, Bazaroff, the son of an 
 old army surgeon It is worthy of remark that, as 
 in his "Stories from a Sportsman's Note-book," 
 Tourgenieffdid not fill in his picture of country life, 
 such as it was in the olden days, with portraits of serf- 
 owners exceptionally coarse or cruel, but rather 
 selected the better types of their class, so now, he 
 does not fail to attribute to the two "fathers," 
 among the qualities inherited from their social 
 position, many traits of a pleasing and even praise- 
 worthy kind. But in both cases the conclusion 
 we are forced to draw is one and the same. We 
 feel that these men have outlived their age; 
 neither in sympathies, feelings, nor ideas, do they 
 belong to the present, and, in their unwilling con- 
 cessions to the spirit of progress, tacitly acknowledge 
 that they have no interest or part in the work of 
 the new generation. Nothing is allowed to disturb 
 the monotony of their lives ; and if, under some 
 strong external pressure, they are momentarily 
 roused from their inactive lethargy, the result of 
 their spasmodic activity is barren and unproductive. 
 " Every one knows me to be a liberal and a 
 lover of progress," complacently urges Paul 
 Petrovitch. "And why am I so? Because I 
 honour the aristocracy. Where there is no feeling
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 53 
 
 of self-respect, and this feeling is most highly 
 developed among the aristocracy, there can be no 
 durable foundation for le Men public" 
 
 Perfectly satisfied that he has well proved the 
 sincerity of his sympathy with his age by the 
 utterance of this profound truth, and by con- 
 descendingly dubbing himself a liberal, the good 
 Paul, as he lounges in his easy-chair, contentedly 
 passes the years of his life, which indeed go by 
 pleasantly enough, since, as the novelist maliciously 
 observes, "nowhere does time fly so quickly as in 
 Russia." And if occasionally he gets angry with 
 the new-fangled exigencies made on him and his 
 class, we can easily understand, and almost excuse, 
 his petulant regret for the old days when he and 
 his compeers were allowed to sleep through their 
 lives in a slumber of unbroken content. 
 
 In stern contrast with these form-worshippers 
 and word-idolaters stands out the commanding 
 figure of Bazaroff, the self-reliant and self-con- 
 centred realist. There is a strength and power 
 in Bazaroff which none can resist ; however pre- 
 judiced we may be against the creed he professes, 
 and however repelled we may be by his habitual 
 roughness of conduct and speech, we are invo- 
 luntarily attracted towards him, and though there 
 is, apparently, nothing striking or brilliant about
 
 54 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 him, he none the less towers above all the other 
 characters of the novel, and forms its one central 
 point of interest. At the same time, of all the 
 persons introduced into the romance, he is the 
 most Russian. His speech is characterised by a 
 simplicity, pointedness, and mocking humour that 
 at once betray his true Russian nature and train- 
 ing. Better than any of them he knows how to 
 speak to the peasant, and it is in him, rather than 
 in any of the others, that the moujik is most ready 
 to recognise a fellow-countryman. And the in- 
 terest which he excites in us is unsought and 
 extorted in spite of ourselves ; for, whilst he con- 
 cerns himself but little, or not at all, with the 
 thoughts and pursuits of others, all are strangely 
 occupied with what he thinks or does. 
 
 We are told but little .of Bazaroff's previous life, 
 and this silence on the part of the novelist as to 
 the experiences and mental process by which he 
 became a negationist, has been attributed by some 
 of his critics to the spirit of antipathy which, as 
 they allege, colours the whole portrait. It is 
 against this accusation that Tourgenieff somewhat 
 warmly defends himself in his " Literary and Per- 
 sonal Reminiscences," published seven years later. 
 " Probably my readers will be astonished, if I tell 
 them that all the time I was writing the novel I
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 55 
 
 felt a kind of involuntary attraction to Bazaroff, 
 and that, with the exception of his views on art, 
 I share nearly all his opinions." It seems to me, 
 then, that the reason why Tourgenieff has not 
 introduced any details concerning Bazaroff's earlier 
 life and education is that his object was, not to 
 give the whole career of the man, with those 
 changes in character and modifications in opinion 
 which we all experience, but rather to sketch one 
 single stage, and that the most important and the 
 most interesting, in his mental and spiritual deve- 
 lopment. Nor does the portrait, through being 
 painted on a narrower canvas, lose in fulness. On 
 the contrary, the entire man appears before us, 
 drawn with a completeness that renders each little 
 trait known and familiar. 
 
 Like all Russians who claim to be the intel- 
 lectual leaders of their generation, Bazaroff is a 
 theorist. The peculiar conditions of Russian 
 society and its government render it impossible 
 that they should take any active part in the life 
 surrounding them. To do this, they would have 
 to cast away that which is most precious to them, 
 independence of thought, and, losing all self- 
 activity, sink into obedient and well-drilled workers 
 of the bureaucratic machine. But, unlike most 
 of them, Bazaroff is possessed with an ardent,
 
 56 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 unconquerable desire to work ; his theory is based 
 on this demand, and his nature is such that he 
 cannot help seizing on any chance opportunity 
 that may be afforded him of putting it, however 
 imperfectly, into practice. For he is thoroughly 
 in earnest, and it is to this earnestness we should 
 attribute those peculiar traits in his character 
 which, on a first acquaintance, are calculated to 
 shock and repel. His ideas, and the way he 
 insists upon them, as if no one but a fool 
 could think of disputing them, are marked by a 
 sharp narrowness, a contemptuous hostility to 
 received opinions, and a rough indifference to the 
 prejudices of others, that is apt to make him 
 imperious and overbearing. But he is by no 
 means a dry pedant, with whom logic has taken 
 the place of feeling, and who, having solved a 
 question abstractedly and without reference to 
 those it closely concerns, thinks he has done all 
 that is necessary, and finds full satisfaction and 
 contentment in the solution arrived at. Hence 
 he is easily excited, can ill brook contradiction, 
 and, in spite of his consciousness that truth 
 should be advocated calmly and judiciously, will 
 frequently, for the sake of surprising and crushing 
 an antagonist, indulge in violent tirades, and give 
 utterance to the most extravagant paradoxes. It
 
 IVAN SERGEI VITCH TOURGENIEFF. 57 
 
 is in this spirit that he denounces Poushkin and 
 his poetry as "all nonsense," declares "a good 
 chemist to be twenty times more useful than the 
 greatest of poets," and, on one occasion, breaks 
 out into a vehement protest against the doctrine 
 of self-sacrifice for the good of others. "I re- 
 collect," he says, "you told me this morning, as 
 we were passing Philip's white pretty cottage, that 
 Russia would only then be what she should be, 
 when the last moujik had such a home, and that 
 each one of us should help to bring about such 
 a state of things. Now, I tell you, I hate this 
 last moujik of yours, this Philip, or what not, for 
 whom I am to work and sweat till I wear my skin 
 away, and who will never thank me for what I do ; 
 and, indeed, why should he? And so, he will 
 live in his pretty white cottage, and I, well, I 
 shall die, perish, and rot into nothing ; the fate 
 common to us all." 
 
 Though little prone to parade his plebeian 
 descent, Bazaroff never conceals it, and even 
 regards his humble birth with a pride equal to 
 that which the haughtiest noble takes in his aris- 
 tocratic origin. " My grandfather ploughed his 
 own land," he tells Paul Petrovitch. And pre- 
 cisely because Bazaroff was not a baritch^ the 
 son of a noble, he enjoyed the trust and con-
 
 58 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 fidence of the peasantry, and was enabled to 
 practise in his dealings with them a frankness that 
 would have been taken in ill part from one of 
 gentle birth. Paul Petrovitch could not under- 
 stand that it, is possible for a man to be at one 
 with the people and still have contempt for the 
 degrading superstitions that in the course of ages 
 have overcrusted their simple creed. " No, no," 
 he petulantly exclaims, " I will not believe that 
 you gentlemen really know the Russian people, 
 that you are the representatives of their wants, 
 their longings. The Russian people are not such 
 as you imagine. They honour tradition, they are 
 patriarchal, they cannot live without faith." 
 
 " I will not dispute that," interrupted Bazaroff ; 
 " I am even ready to grant that on this point you 
 are right." 
 
 " And if I am right ? " 
 
 "Still that proves nothing." 
 
 " How, proves nothing ? " stammered the asto- 
 nished Paul Petrovitch ; " then you go against the 
 people ? " 
 
 " And what if we do ? The peasant believes 
 that, when it thunders, the prophet Elijah is riding 
 through the sky in his chariot. Am I to agree 
 with him ? Besides, if he is a Russian, am I not 
 one also ? "
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 59 
 
 " No, you are not a Russian, after all that you 
 have said ! I cannot acknowledge you to be a 
 Russian." 
 
 "My grandfather ploughed his own land," 
 answered Bazaroff, haughtily. " Ask any of your 
 peasants, in which of us two he sees a fellow- 
 countryman. Why, you do not know even how 
 to speak to him." 
 
 " And you speak to him, and at the same time 
 despise him ! " 
 
 " Why not, if he deserves contempt ? " 
 
 Bazaroff is the uncompromising foe of all shams 
 and of everything bearing the taint of pretence. 
 He never affects to be different to, or better than, 
 what he really is. He may be unintelligible to 
 men like Paul Petrovitch, the rule of whose lives 
 is based on decorous prudery ; but the genuine- 
 ness of his speech is readily recognised by those 
 who, from their position, have never been cor- 
 rupted by the false shows of society. "He 
 belongs to us and is one of ourselves," exclaims 
 an old serf. 
 
 This enmity to display not only colours the 
 practical life of Bazaroff, but is equally evident in 
 his relations to nature, poetry, and art. Nothing 
 is valuable in his eyes unless it brings some 
 tangible and calculable good. He acknowledges
 
 60 THK MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 only that which he can touch with his hands, see 
 with his eyes, taste with his tongue ; in a word, 
 what is cognisable to one or other of the senses. 
 The rest of our feelings he attributes to the action 
 of our nervous system, to be repressed and con- 
 quered rather than cultivated or encouraged. It 
 is, therefore, impossible for him to find pleasure 
 in mere views of nature, in the harmony of 
 music, in the colouring of the painter, in the 
 rhyme of the poet, or in the charm of woman's 
 beauty. For him there is no ideal beyond the 
 real ; aspirations towards something purer than 
 earth of itself can afford are to him romantic and 
 sentimental ; he never looks beyond the human, 
 or busies himself with those dreams of the spiritual, 
 wherein so many find their best consolation. " The 
 one important thing is that two and two make four," 
 he declares; "all the rest is vain and empty." 
 Here we have Bazaroff's prosaic view of the world 
 and of human life. "Nature," he continues, "is 
 not a temple, but a workshop, in which man is 
 the workman." This forms the practical side of 
 his creed. Worship of nature is an idle super- 
 stition ; poetical delineations of nature are con- 
 demned as sentimental ; the circle of his studies 
 is limited to the real and positive, discarding all 
 that lies beyond the province of experience and
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 6 1 
 
 proof. Hence, also, the realism which charac- 
 terises his political opinions and speculations. 
 To none of those fine-sounding phrases which 
 Paul Petrovitch was pleased to parade before him 
 could he attach any solid, tangible signification. 
 " Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles," he 
 exclaims, " what a host of foreign and useless 
 words ! A Russian has no need of them, and 
 should not accept them as a gift." And in speak- 
 ing thus, Bazaroff is only protesting, perhaps too 
 angrily, against that monkey imitation of Western 
 Europe which so long impeded all national deve- 
 lopment in Russia, and could achieve nothing 
 better than the reproduction of foreign manners 
 and institutions on a soil unsuited to their growth. 
 Although, as I have said, Tourgenieff is 
 pointedly silent as to the youth and education of 
 Bazaroff, we can have no doubt as to some of the 
 controlling influences that caused him to put him- 
 self in antagonism to the conventional opinions 
 of his age. "At the present time," he explains, 
 " the most useful thing is denial, and so we 
 deny." He saw around him a noisy crowd of 
 preachers of liberalism, flaunting the borrowed 
 robes of French freethinkers, but in whose voice 
 the ring of insincerity, and in whose step the strut 
 and gait of men playing a part could easily be
 
 62 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 detected. The barrenness of their utterances was 
 emphasised by the ready glibness with which they 
 aired theories they neither cared nor tried to put 
 into practice. What wonder, then, if he turned 
 from these pretentious theorists in contempt, and, 
 in his hatred of mere words, set to "clearing 
 the ground " of antiquated prejudices and worn- 
 out creeds ? The task of construction might be 
 left to others, but the first and most pressing need 
 was to find the solid rock on which to raise a 
 surer building than that which was already 
 toppling about their ears. We must not be sur- 
 prised if he was over-passionate or somewhat 
 indiscriminate in his work of destruction. Has 
 not Swift, in his " Tale of a Tub," told us that 
 " zeal is never so highly obliged as when you set 
 it a-tearing." Besides, the system of serfdom had 
 struck too deeply into the social life of Russia to 
 permit of men destroying it without at the same 
 time uprooting some of the most cherished in- 
 stitutions of the past. He consequently called 
 himself, and is called by others, a Nihilist. The 
 name has, unfortunately, acquired a terrible and 
 evil meaning since Tourgenieff 's novel was written. 
 But we should be doing a manifest injustice to 
 Bazaroff, were we to suppose that the policy he 
 advocated had anything in common with the
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 63 
 
 follies and extravagances of his professed fol- 
 lowers, who have usurped the title to themselves, 
 and, by rendering it a synonym for assassin, have 
 made it an offence to every honest man. Bazaroff 
 is a Nihilist in the sense of one " who bows before 
 no authority, accepts of no principle improved, 
 and looks at everything from a critical point of 
 view." He is thus the representative of his age, 
 and, however we may be displeased or irritated, 
 we must be content to make the best of him. 
 "For if," as M. Peasareff has well said, "Baza- 
 roffism be a malady, it is the malady of our days, 
 so widely spread that, in spite of all our pal- 
 liatives or amputations, we must learn to endure 
 it as well as we can. We may call it a good or an 
 evil, as we like ; but stay its progress we cannot, 
 for it pervades the very air we breathe," 
 
 What, then, is it that, in spite of the coldness 
 of his creed, and the harsh rejection he preaches 
 of the tenderer instincts of human nature, draws 
 us to Bazaroff, and causes us, I will not say to 
 tolerate and respect, but to sympathise with and 
 love him ? The man is terribly sincere in all that 
 he professes, but none the less he is, like most of 
 us. better than his creed. He struggles against 
 what he believes to be childish weaknesses, and 
 scorns as a treachery to his higher nature every
 
 64 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 exhibition of love or care for others ; and the 
 severity of the struggle against what he regards to 
 be a surrender of principle, only serves to proclaim 
 the strength and loftiness of his character. Of 
 this we have a striking illustration in his affection 
 for his aged parents. He inveighs against what 
 he calls " pampering the old people," and spends 
 as little of his time as possible at home, seizing 
 any pretext to stay with one or another of his 
 friends, since only thus can he pursue his studies 
 without perpetual interruption. " At home it is 
 impossible to do anything," he explains to 
 Arcadie ; " here at least you can shut yourself up 
 and work. My father, it is true, tells me his room 
 is at my service, but never likes me to be out of 
 his sight. And I am ashamed to close the door 
 on the old man. And it is the same with mother. 
 I hear her groaning and sighing in the next room, 
 and then I have to leave off and go to her, and . . . 
 how refuse her ? " There is a kindliness of feel- 
 ing in these words that belies the cold sternness 
 of his scientific rules of life. And the half shame 
 with which he thus yields to the influence of our 
 common nature is altogether abandoned when, 
 brought face to face with death, he first feels the 
 real power of that love he had sought to deny. 
 He reminds his weeping father and mother that
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 65 
 
 now is the moment to prove the faith which they 
 have all their lives professed ; and, when they 
 hesitatingly beseech him to avail himself of the 
 last consolations of religion, he consents, if, by so 
 doing, "he can only please them." 
 
 From BazarofFs point of view, any such sur- 
 render to the natural promptings of his heart was 
 a proof of moral weakness ; but, had he not been 
 blinded by a belief in his freedom from what he 
 looked upon as failing in others, these moments of 
 supposed weakness might have discovered to him 
 the cardinal error of the creed he had adopted. 
 Man is not sufficient in himself, and cannot with 
 impunity ignore the eternal principles of life. 
 Art, poetry, love, the permanent elements of the 
 temporary, may be denied in words ; but they 
 irrevocably revenge themselves on those who deny 
 them, and make their power to be felt. We re- 
 cognise the grandeur of Bazaroff's aims, but, 
 though he is head and shoulders above all who 
 surround him, whilst we admit their inferiority, we 
 are conscious that in them there is something 
 higher than Bazaroff, something to which mere 
 negation could never bring him. This something 
 is the life that animates them, and the human 
 elements of their feelings raise them above him. 
 To try and find a political tendency in the novel
 
 66 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 is to misconceive its real meaning. The passage 
 from the old to the new, this is but the scaffolding, 
 as it were, of the romance. It has a deeper inner 
 lesson, and teaches the necessity of recognising 
 the one eternal law that runs through the ever 
 varying order of the world, as generation succeeds 
 to generation, exhibiting itself in different forms, 
 but in essence ever the same. I ought rather to 
 have said this lesson is suggested by the novelist. 
 For, as M. Strachoff has pointed out in his 
 "Critical Essays on Tourgenieff and Tolstoi," if 
 Bazaroff disdainfully turns away from nature, 
 Tourgenieff refrains from reproaching him, but 
 silently sketches some picture of nature in which 
 are unfolded all her charms and beauties that 
 speak to the soul of man. Bazaroff despises 
 friendship, and again he does not blame him, but 
 gives some fresh instance of trusting unselfish 
 devotion on the part of Arcadie to the very man 
 that ridicules all show of affection. It is the 
 same with his denial of the parental tie and his 
 alienation from the life around him. No judg- 
 ment is pronounced upon him, but the novelist 
 brings us into the home of the old Bazaroffs, with 
 all their tender love and care for the son of whom 
 they are so proud. 
 
 We cannot but regret that Tourgenieff in his
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 67 
 
 later stories, "Smoke" and "Virgin Soil," did not 
 preserve the same calmness of tone towards what 
 he believed to be the errors and extravagances of 
 the new generation. Unfortunately, he would 
 seem to have felt too deeply the injustice of many 
 of the criticisms made on his " Fathers and 
 Children," and the two novels bear unpleasing 
 traces of his irritation. In both there is much to 
 anger and annoy. The attack on the hopes and 
 aims of young Russia is partial and passionate ; 
 the types introduced to represent its ideas are 
 over-coloured to such an extent that they frequently 
 sink into caricatures; and it may be questioned 
 whether Bazaroff himself could be more negative 
 or more destructive than Potooguin, the novelist's 
 mouthpiece. Nor do his violent diatribes possess 
 one half the force that resided in those silent con- 
 demnations which Tourgenieff passed on the new 
 tendencies of Russian life and thought, when he 
 put in opposition to Bazaroff's wholesale denial 
 of nature, poetry, and art, their unrecognised 
 power over the soul of the man who vainly rebelled 
 against them. Much of the bitterness that 
 characterises his attack on the new departure in 
 Russian life contemporary with the appearance of 
 his novel must be attributed to his long residence 
 abroad, during which he had become saturated 
 
 F 2
 
 68 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 with ideas that rendered it impossible for him to 
 form a fair estimate of the equally rapid and 
 startling changes effected in. the political and social 
 position of his country. In his eyes Russian 
 social life has no solid foundation, and is so under- 
 mined with evils inherited from a system of 
 privileged corruption, that it can afford no scope 
 for healthy development and growth. " The wind 
 has changed and chopped round to another quarter" 
 complains Lietvinoff, the hero of the tale entitled 
 " Smoke," " but, just as before, Russian life remains 
 the same unsettled, feverish, profitless game of 
 chance. Smoke, smoke ! " he repeated many times ; 
 and forthwith everything seemed to. him to be 
 nothing but smoke, his own life, Russian life, 
 everything human, especially everything Russian ! 
 He called to mind all that had passed under his 
 eyes during the last few years, not without thunder 
 and great tumult. "Smoke! " he muttered, "smoke !" 
 He called to mind the disorderly discussions, the 
 noise in Goubareff's rooms, the disputes of other 
 people, high and low, progressive and retrograde, 
 old and young. " Smoke ! " he repeated, " smoke and 
 vapour ! " He remembered the famous picnic, the 
 remarks and speeches of great statesmen, and even 
 everything that Potooguin had extolled ; and it was 
 all smoke, and nothing more !
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 69 
 
 In reply to this fierce diatribe, we may remark 
 that, if in truth the new life of Russia be nothing 
 but smoke, there is no great reason why it should 
 make the novelist so angry ; since, like all smoke, 
 it will be blown away by the first strong breeze, 
 and leave the ground clear for fresh workers 
 But Tourgenieff was right in declaring that " the 
 wind had changed." Russians have ceased to 
 be what they term Westerners, that is, admiring 
 imitators of Western Europe, and have become 
 Slavophils, that is, have found in their own country 
 and in their own people a higher object of worship 
 and devotion. They no longer believe that their 
 chief aim should be "to saunter Europe round, and 
 gather every vice in every ground," but have 
 accepted the healthier doctrine that each people 
 should work out their civilisation in harmony with 
 the traditions of their past. And if there be 
 confusion and chaos in their first efforts to find a 
 sure and solid basis whereon to build, and if in 
 their political programme there be much that is 
 extravagant and, it may be, absurd, this by no 
 means proves that their hopes and belief are 
 nothing more than empty, vaporous smoke. 
 Confusion must reign for awhile till life has re- 
 covered from the shock given to it. The waters 
 may be troubled, but the healing power of liberty
 
 70 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 will in due time be felt, and the storm of conflict 
 give place to the reign of stable order and peace. 
 In spite of all hindrances, and though their work 
 has been sadly thwarted and retarded by the 
 criminal excesses of men who have not scrupled 
 to cloak their selfish ends under the sacred name 
 of patriotism, none can doubt the final victory and 
 triumph of their cause. Least of all, should we 
 English, so proud of our historical traditions, and 
 the sworn foes of all that threatens or contravenes 
 them, mock at those, who, like ourselves, are 
 inspired with a faith in national life and progress, 
 which no sarcasms of a LietvinofT can destroy, or 
 even impair. 
 
 In his latest work, " Short Poems in Prose," 
 Tourgenieff has given us a fable, which, though of 
 course originally written with a quite different 
 intention, may, I think, be applied to the Slavophils, 
 and be made the expression of the fearless spirit 
 in which they labour, and are ready to labour, in 
 carrying out their work to a successful end. 
 " What a trifle will sometimes give new life to a 
 man ! I was one day walking along a road, lost in 
 thought. Suddenly I raised my head. Before 
 me lay the long straight road that ran between two 
 rows of high poplar trees. And across it, across 
 this same road, about ten steps off, in the bright
 
 IVAN SERGEIVITCH TOURGENIEFF. 71 
 
 summer sunshine, a long train of sparrows was 
 hopping, quickly, boldly, without fear. One in 
 particular attracted my attention by its pompous 
 strut, as it stretched out its beak, and chirped 
 defiantly, as though it feared neither man nor 
 devil. It had all the airs and importance of a 
 conquering general on his march. And, in the 
 meantime, high up in the sky, wheeled a huge 
 vulture, that very likely would, ere long, pounce 
 down and gulp up my swaggering hero. I 
 curiously watched the scene with no little amuse- 
 ment, shook myself together, and got rid of my 
 gloomy thoughts. In a moment, I felt arise 
 within me, a boldness, a daring, a desire to live. 
 And now, I thought, let my vulture, if it chooses, 
 wheel its threatening flight over me. Never mind, 
 we will have a fight for it yet ! "
 
 72 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 
 PART I. 
 
 THERE are few pages in the history of modern 
 literature more heroically touching than those 
 devoted to the story of the life of the great 
 Russian novelist, Theodore Michaelovitch Dos- 
 toevsky. The son of a poor staff-surgeon, he 
 was born in one of the Moscow hospitals, where 
 his father served, on October 30, 1821. Together 
 with his two brothers, Michael and Andre, he was 
 brought up with strict but loving care, and till 
 his fifteenth or sixteenth year was educated at 
 home. The father himself undertook the Russian 
 and Latin lessons, whilst masters from the diffe- 
 rent public schools were engaged to teach the 
 boys French, German, history, arithmetic, and 
 religion. The evenings were generally spent in 
 reading aloud some novel or poem, the father and 
 mother taking part ; and it is interesting to note 
 that Scott, Cooper, and De Foe, with Poushkin 
 and Foukovsky, were special favourites. Like
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 73 
 
 most future writers, Dostoevsky from an early age 
 was fond of trying his hand at original composi- 
 tions, and would frequently dramatise any story 
 that had caught his fancy. The summer months 
 were always spent on the small family estate in 
 the government of Toula, and, during his stays 
 in the country, the boy liked to associate and chat 
 with the peasants, many of whom he has intro- 
 duced into his different tales and novels. In 
 1837, a few months after the death of the mother, 
 he was sent up to St. Petersburg and placed in the 
 Engineers' School, where he remained till 1841, 
 when, his father having died in the meantime, he 
 entered the military service with the rank of sub- 
 lieutenant. He was, however, little suited to such 
 a career, being equally averse to the routine of 
 military duties and the gay noisy life led by the 
 majority of his fellow-officers; and three years 
 later he finally quitted the army, and determined 
 . to devote himself exclusively to the literary pro- 
 fession. 
 
 It was in 1846 that he began writing his first 
 novel, " Poor People." Its publication was at- 
 tended with all those difficulties a poor unknown 
 writer has usually to contend with. " When I 
 finished it," Dostoevsky tells us, " I did not know 
 what to do with it, or to whom to send it.'' The
 
 74 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 only literary acquaintance he had in the world was 
 Grigorovitch, who, like his friend, was then begin- 
 ning his career, and in great trouble to find an 
 editor, who would undertake to print his story, 
 " The Village." He promised to show the manu- 
 script to Nekrasoff, the poet, then collecting 
 materials for an annual, which he proposed to 
 publish in January of the following year. Nekra- 
 soff consulted with Belinsky as to the merits of 
 the tale, and M. Annenkoff, in his interesting 
 "Memoirs," has described the impression its 
 perusal produced on the great critic. " One day 
 I went to visit Belinsky, just before dinner, and as 
 I crossed the court-yard of his house saw him 
 sitting by the window of his study with a bulky 
 manuscript in his hand, and was not a little sur- 
 prised at the excited way in which he beckoned to 
 me and began crying out, "Make haste and come 
 here, I have a rare piece of news for you ! " And 
 scarcely had I entered the room before he ex 
 claimed, holding out the manuscript to me : "For 
 two whole days I have been unable to tear myself 
 away from it. It is a novel by a new writer, 
 who or what he is I do not know ; but he has 
 revealed to me traits and characters in Russian 
 life which none of us have had the wit to dis- 
 cover. You understand, this is the first attempt
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 75 
 
 that has ever been made by a Russian to write a 
 socialistic novel ; and, as is nearly always the case 
 with a true genius, the author all the while evi- 
 dently has had no idea of what he really was 
 doing." 
 
 No one who has read the tale will care to dis- 
 pute the justice of Belinsky's verdict ; and yet, 
 how simple is the story it relates ; how natural 
 and unbookish its language; how commonplace 
 and trivial its incidents ; how socially insignificant 
 its characters. It introduces us to that numerous 
 class of " trodden-down toilers," as the novelist 
 names them, who think they are rich and lucky if 
 they can hire a whole room for themselves and 
 family, and are oftener obliged to put up with 
 what the Russians call " a clean corner," that is, 
 a small portion of a room, partitioned off with a 
 high screen. In such a corner lived Dayvousch- 
 kin, a poor tchinovnik, whose pne difficulty in life 
 was, with his scanty earnings, to keep his brass- 
 buttoned uniform and boots in sufficiently decent 
 order so as not to attract the attention of " his 
 excellency," the chief of the department in which 
 he served. But poor as he was, and though not 
 seldom it necessitated his denying himself a 
 dinner for a day or so, he was never so poor but 
 he could buy for Barbara, his cousin, who lodged
 
 76 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 in a bare ill-furnished room on the opposite side 
 of the court-yard of the house in which he lived, 
 stuff to make curtains for her window, some little 
 cheap ornament for her dress, or a few pots of her 
 favourite flowers wherewith to make her room 
 more homelike. And if at times a feeling of 
 envious discontent at the wealth of others came 
 over him, it was rather for her sake than his own 
 that he lamented his poverty, though even then 
 he would quickly chase away such thoughts as 
 impious murmurings against God's will. " Each 
 of us," he writes in a letter to her, " has his lot in 
 life ordained by One who knows better than we 
 can what is good for us. One man is destined to 
 be a general and to wear epaulettes ; another to 
 be a titular counsellor ; some are born to com- 
 mand, others to obey." And this spirit of sub- 
 mission, however strange and unreasonable it may 
 appear to some of us, was based on a deep reli- 
 gious sentiment that formed the guiding principle 
 of his every act. In his simple creed, a good 
 deed loses all worth the instant it is performed 
 with the anticipation or hope of reward ; and so 
 thoroughly does he carry out his rule of self- 
 .effacement, that he forbears expressing to Barbara, 
 or acknowledging to himself, the nature of the 
 love he feels for her lest his kindly care for
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 77 
 
 her comfort and welfare should ever appear to be 
 tainted with self-seeking. 
 
 The novelist, it need scarcely be said, does not 
 pretend that all poor tchinovniks are like Day- 
 vouschkin, and we may admit that he is a rare 
 exception without in any way diminishing the 
 force of the lesson which the story is evidently 
 designed to teach. The possibility of his exist- 
 ence shows us that, even in natures the most 
 crushed and humiliated, the presence of the 
 heavenly, common to us all, may be found. 
 However dull and joyless their life may be, the 
 human heart still beats in it and sympathisingly 
 responds to the joys and griefs of others. 
 
 And if this be true of Dayvouschkin, it is 
 equally true of men like old Petrovsky, the father 
 of the poor student who dies of consumption. 
 There is nothing heroic in the cheated husband of 
 a worthless woman, and we smile at his blind 
 affection for his son, reminding us of the love a 
 dog has to his master ; but in spite of his drunken- 
 ness and queer follies, the story of his life 
 touches and moves us. Indeed, it would not be 
 easy to name any scene in Russian fiction in 
 which humour and pathos are so powerfully com- 
 bined as in the description of the burial of the 
 student.
 
 78 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 "Anna Fedorovna, the landlady, undertook all 
 arrangements concerning the funeral. A very 
 plain, ready-made coffin was bought, and a carter's 
 truck was hired. To cover any expenses she 
 might have to incur, she at once took possession 
 of the books and few chattels belonging to the 
 deceased. The old man disputed and fought 
 with her about the books, carried off as many as 
 he could, stuffing his pockets full with them, 
 cramming two or three into his hat, and would 
 not part with them for an instant, but took them 
 with him, even into the church. All those three 
 days he was, as it were, dazed and out of his 
 mind, and with restless, anxious disquietude was 
 each moment altering and arraying the solitary 
 wreath on the coffin, or lighting, extinguishing, 
 and changing the wax tapers that were burning 
 before it. It was plain that he could not fix his 
 mind on anything, or bring his thoughts into 
 order. Neither mother nor Anna Fedorovna went 
 to the church ; mother was too ill to stir out, and 
 Anna Fedorovna, after she was ready and dressed, 
 got into a hot quarrel with the old man, and shut 
 herself up in the room. So he and I were the 
 only people there. During the whole of the ser. 
 vice I was possessed with a strange, mysterious 
 dread, and my soul was filled with a terrible pre-
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 79 
 
 sentiment of some impending sorrow. At last 
 the coffin was screwed down, hoisted on to the 
 truck, and we set off. I accompanied it as far as 
 the corner of the street. The carter started at a 
 good smart pace. The old man ran behind, sob- 
 bing and weeping aloud, his quivering voice keep- 
 ing time with his quick, uneven steps. The wind 
 caught his hat, and it fell off, but he did not stay 
 to pick it up. His bare head was soon drenched 
 with the rain, and the drizzling sleet dashed against 
 his shrivelled face ; but he did not seem to feel 
 the sharp weather, and trotted on, running from 
 one side to the other of the truck. The flaps of 
 his old torn coat fluttered in the breeze, and stood 
 out like wings behind him. Books were sticking 
 out of each of his pockets, whilst in his hands he 
 held tightly a huge old volume. The people, as 
 they passed by, took off their hats and crossed 
 themselves ; some stopped a minute to stare with 
 astonishment at the poor old man. More than 
 once a volume fell out of his pockets into the 
 mud, and some one in the street would cry out to 
 him, and he would hurriedly pick it up, try to rub 
 it dry with the wet dirty cuffs of his coat, and then 
 run on quickly to catch up the cart. At the farther 
 end of the street a beggar-woman joined the old 
 man, and together with him followed the coffin ;
 
 8o THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and then they turned round the corner, and were 
 lost to sight, and I made my way back home." 
 
 In one of his novels, "The Injured and In- 
 sulted," Dostoevsky has described his experiences 
 during the first years of his literary career. " You 
 are a mere writing machine," Natasha exclaims to 
 the hero ; " there is nothing spontaneous in your 
 work ; you are expected to turn out so much 
 material within an allotted time ; you force your 
 thoughts, and thus both body and mind are in- 
 jured-. Look at C , he will take two years to 
 
 write a tale, and N is occupied ten years on 
 
 one novel, and for that reason their work is free 
 from blemishes, the result of carelessness and 
 haste." " They can afford to do it," he answers 
 with bitterness ; " they are in no anxiety about to- 
 morrow's bread ; whilst I, well, I am a literary 
 hack," His extremely straitened circumstances 
 compelled Dostoevsky to write for money rather 
 than for fame, and he was only too glad to abandon 
 his idea of composing a regular, well-thought-out 
 romance, and to accept the offer made him by 
 Kraevsky, and became a constant contributor to 
 the " Annals of the Country," in which he pub- 
 lished from month to month a number of short 
 and hurriedly-written tales and sketches. Many 
 a time he received money in advance for a story
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 8 1 
 
 he had not even begun, and then had to write day 
 and night, constantly haunted by the dread lest 
 he should fail to have it ready by the promised 
 date. The strain was too great for a constitution 
 never very robust, and the excessive labours of 
 these years, coupled with all the worry and annoy- 
 ances inseparable from a hand-to-mouth life, first 
 brought on those epileptic fits from which he 
 henceforth suffered till the day of his death. 
 
 Several of the tales he wrote at this period 
 acquire an additional interest from the connexion 
 they have with his own sorrows, privations, and 
 disappointments. Thus the fate of the hero of 
 " A Faint Heart " ceases to strike us as exagge- 
 ratedly sentimental when we remember that the 
 novelist, with his irritable nervous temperament, 
 himself endured and went through sufferings 
 scarcely less torturing than those which brought 
 poor Schoumkoff to end his days in a lunatic 
 asylum. Madly in love with his young bride, he 
 spends whole days in her society, and quite forgets 
 he has to make a fair copy of certain voluminous 
 official papers, which must be given in by the end 
 of the year. When at last he sets to work, it is 
 too late ; there is no possibility of finishing in 
 time ; and he is terrified at the idea that his 
 failure may involve his being drafted into the 
 G
 
 82 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 army as a common soldier, the usual punishment 
 in those cruel days for offences of the most trifling 
 kind. Evening after evening he writes and writes in 
 the vain hope of getting through his task, till one 
 night his friend, who shares the same room with him, 
 to his horror remarks that Schoumkoff is scribbling 
 away with a dry pen, turning over one page after 
 another with feverish impatience, and throwing 
 aside, as if they were finished, sheets of paper on 
 which not a word had in reality been written. 
 And, as he watched the poor crazed tchinovink, 
 strange thoughts, we are told, came into his mind. 
 For the first time he understood what the agony 
 and fear were that possessed and shattered his 
 friend's soul and reason. " His lips trembled, 
 his eyes gleamed with a strange light, his whole 
 face grew pale, and a new sight, as it were, was 
 granted him, revealing to him in that minute 
 something he had never known or grasped 
 before." 
 
 What, then, is the lesson, new to many of us, 
 which, together with his friend and biographer, 
 we may learn, as we read the story of Schoumkoff's 
 life, and listen to the madman's piteous cry : " In 
 what is she to blame, and why must she suffer for 
 my fault ? " The earlier years of Dostoevsky's 
 literary career were dogged with poverty and phy-
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 83 
 
 sical sufferings that robbed his life of all joy and 
 made his days a burden and a curse. Those with 
 whom he mixed were, for the most part, like him- 
 self, men who, from the contrast between their 
 social and intellectual position, could not but be 
 struck with the inequalities of life and the crying 
 injustices that reigned around them, men whose 
 souls were filled with a bitterness and discontent, 
 it may be morbid, but felt all the more strongly 
 because they dared not express it openly. " There 
 are," he writes in his story entitled "Sleepless 
 Nights," " a number of queer, strange corners in 
 St. Petersburg, places into which the sun that warms 
 and cheers its other inhabitants seldom or never 
 penetrates, but which are dimly lighted by a dif- 
 ferent sun, a sun we might suppose to have been 
 especially created for these spots, into which it 
 shines with a dull, peculiar light. In these corners 
 men and women live a life quite different to that 
 which surges around us, a life we might expect 
 to find in some remote, far-off planet, but not in 
 our days and in our immediate neighbourhood. 
 For this life is a medley of the fantastic and the 
 ideal, and at the same time so piteously prosaic 
 and common, not to say so impossibly mean and 
 base." It is this life that Dostoevsky knew and 
 has described. Nor was he able, like some of his 
 G 2
 
 84 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 contemporaries, to content himself with finding an 
 artistic pleasure in sketching its distinguishing 
 feature, but what he saw he felt and brooded 
 over. 
 
 A strong impulse was given to the feeling of 
 discontent, which at that time, owing to the stern 
 rule of a Nicholas, generally obtained among the 
 cultured and student classes of Russia by the re- 
 volutionary movement then agitating France and 
 the whole of Western Europe. The works of St. 
 Simon, Fourier, and Leroux, despite censorial 
 prohibitions, were read with avidity, and secret 
 societies founded for the purpose of propagating 
 their ideas and carrying them into active practice. 
 At the head of one of these societies was a certain 
 Petraschevsky, an old pupil of the Alexander 
 Lyceum, and with whom Dostoevsky was slightly 
 acquainted. He attended some of its meetings, 
 and took part in more than one of its weekly dis- 
 cussions. If we may judge from the official reports, 
 these debates mainly turned on abstract questions, 
 and to an Englishman, accustomed from his youth 
 to freedom of speech, must seem to have been 
 singularly harmless and inoffensive. It is true that 
 at times, as we might expect, the young disputants 
 would wax warm and give utterance to the most 
 violent and revolutionary ideas. Thus, on one
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 85 
 
 occasion Dostoevsky, in the course of a speech, 
 defended the thesis that the Russian people would 
 never follow in the steps of the French revolu- 
 tionists, and proceeded to quote the well-known 
 lines by Poushkin : 
 
 " Shall I live, dear friends, to see the people unoppressed, 
 And slavery, by the will of our Tsar, disappear from the 
 
 land ; 
 
 And will the dawn of fair liberty break at length, 
 And spread over our native land its healing rays of 
 
 light ? " 
 
 His remarks were interrupted by one of the mem- 
 bers, who declared that it was folly to expect that 
 the emancipation of the peasants could be obtained 
 by legal means, to which Dostoevsky rejoined that 
 he for one honestly believed that the great reform 
 should be effected peacefully and lawfully. But 
 when further pressed with the question : " Well, 
 suppose they cannot be freed without a revolution, 
 what then ? " he passionately cried out : " What 
 then ? why, let us have a revolution ! " Such 
 utterances, however, do not fairly interpret his real 
 opinions. Then, as throughout his life, he was 
 strongly opposed to the introduction into Russia 
 of political schemes of reform based on ideas 
 radically at variance with the traditions of Russian 
 life ; and in the Russian commune, workmen's 
 associations, and co-operative societies discovered
 
 86 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 a more lasting and normal foundation for future 
 reforms than he could find in the wild, unpractical 
 dreams of French theorists. Nor did he once 
 allow the free opinions adopted by the majority of 
 his associates to shake his belief in the religious 
 creed of the Russian people. " It was easier for 
 me, perhaps, than for any of the others," he tells 
 us in his " Diary of a Writer," " to keep true to 
 the religion of the people, to learn their faith and 
 thoughts, to be one in spirit with their life. I was 
 brought up in a family at once thoroughly Russian 
 and thoroughly religious. From our first child- 
 hood we were made familiar with the Gospel, and 
 before my tenth year I knew all the principal 
 episodes in the history of Russia, as related by 
 Karamsin, whose work father used to read to us 
 of an evening." 
 
 As always happens, the longer these secret 
 societies existed the theories they advocated grew 
 in extravagance, and the more violent became the 
 policy they proposed to adopt. A noisy dinner 
 in memory of Fourier, at which Petraschevsky 
 wound up his speech by declaring that it was time 
 to put into execution the death-sentence they had 
 pronounced on the Government and on society, 
 was followed a few days later by the arrest of 
 thirty-four of its members, Dostoevsky among the
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 87 
 
 number ; though, it should be remarked, he was 
 not present at the banquet. After a short preli- 
 minary examination, held at the Department of the 
 Secret Police, they were lodged in the fortress, 
 where they lay for no less than eight months before 
 they were brought to trial. From the letters and 
 memoirs of Speschnieff, Debout, Duroff,and others, 
 which have been published within the last few 
 years, we learn that during their long confinement 
 they were treated by the authorities with a con- 
 sideration and kindness not always extended to 
 political prisoners. They were allowed to commu- 
 nicate with their friends ; books and writing mate- 
 rials were placed at their disposal ; and it was 
 whilst in prison that Dostoevsky wrote his story, 
 "A Little Hero." A special commission, under 
 the presidency of General Perovsky, was appointed 
 to investigate the affair ; and, if we may credit the 
 testimony of Yastrgzemscky, one of the accused 
 and formerly an inspector in the Technologial 
 Institute, the result of their deliberations was a 
 verdict of not proven ; but, by imperial orders, the 
 case was referred to a higher court for final decision. 
 On the 22nd of December, 1849, tne sentence of 
 the court, condemning all the accused to death, 
 was formally communicated to the prisoners, and 
 early the same morning they were conveyed
 
 88 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 in prison vans to Simonovsky Place, and there 
 made to stand in three lines on a large scaffold. 
 The terrible sentence was read aloud by one of 
 the court-auditors, and, during the reading, Dos- 
 toevsky turned to Duroff, who stood next to him, 
 and whispered: " It cannot be that they will shoot 
 us ! " Duroff made no reply, but pointed to a 
 large cart, drawn up close to the scaffold, and on 
 which were strapped a number of plain wooden 
 coffins, partially covered with mat-packing. A 
 priest then stepped forward, bearing a cross, and 
 invited them to confess ; but, though all bent 
 down and reverently kissed the cross, only one of 
 them, Schaposchnikoff, left the ranks in re- 
 sponse to the priest's call. The condemned had 
 now lost all hope that the sentence would not be 
 carried out, and silently prepared themselves to 
 meet their fate with what calmness they could. 
 But one of them, Kaschkin, a young Govern- 
 ment clerk, who had not yet completed his nine- 
 teenth year, was struck with the strange fact that, 
 though he had confessed, Schaposchnikoff was not 
 allowed to receive the Sacrament. He happened 
 to be placed at the extreme corner of the platform, 
 and, availing himself of his position, leaned down 
 to where Galachoff, the Policemaster, was standing, 
 and hurriedly asked him in French : " Is it possible
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 89 
 
 that the priest can hear our confession, and at the 
 same time refuse us the Sacrament ? " " Mais 
 vous serez tous pardonne's," the General whispered 
 in reply. In the meantime, the hideous formalities 
 of the law were duly gone through. " We stood on 
 the scaffold," Dostoevsky relates in the " Diary of a 
 Writer," " and listened to the sentence read out to 
 us without the slightest feeling of repentance or 
 regret. Of course, I have no right to speak for 
 the rest, but I believe I am justified in saying that, 
 if not all, the greater number of us would, even in 
 that awful moment, have felt it a disgrace to have 
 recanted any one of our opinions. During those 
 last ten minutes of life, as we stood face to face 
 with death, some of us, as I know on the surest 
 evidence, instinctively searched into our souls, and, 
 it may be, in that short interval of time had taken 
 account of the few years of our young lives, and 
 repented those acts of wrong and ill from which 
 no man is wholly free. But with reference to the 
 special act for which we were condemned and 
 must so soon suffer, the thoughts and convictions 
 of our mind : this seemed to us not only to demand 
 no repentance, but rather to be something that 
 purified and raised the soul, to die for which might 
 justly win pardon for our many faults and short- 
 comings." At the command of the superior officer,
 
 90 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 three of them, Petraschevsky, Mombell, and 
 Grigorieff, were led out and bound to separate 
 posts, and in front of each, at the distance of a 
 few feet a small company of soldiers was drawn 
 up. The soldiers had been ordered to make 
 ready, and the guns were levelled, when the chief 
 officer waved a handkerchief, and the prisoners, 
 were informed that, by the will of the Emperor, 
 the extreme penalty of the law would be remitted. 
 But when, in his turn, Grigorieff was unlashed 
 from his post, he burst into a flood of passionate 
 tears, uttered a wild, incoherent cry, and was 
 carried from the square a raving madman. 
 
 Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to penal 
 servitude in Siberia for four years, with, at the 
 expiration of that period, enforced military service 
 in the ranks for the rest of his life. On Christmas 
 Eve of the same year, his brother was informed 
 that, together with Duroff, he would late that night 
 commence the first stage of his long and tedious 
 journey to Omsk. With some little difficulty he 
 obtained permission to see him once more before 
 his departure, and, in company with a mutual 
 friend, M. Mieloukoff, arrived at the Fortress 
 punctually at the hour that had been appointed 
 them. " We were shown into a large room," writes 
 the friend, "in the lower story of the Command-
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 91 
 
 ant's house. The evening was already far advanced, 
 and the room was dimly lighted by a single lamp. 
 We had to wait a considerable time, and twice we 
 heard the chimes of the Fortress church ring the 
 quarters. At length the door opened, the thud 
 of a gun's butt-end sounded sharply on the stone 
 floor, and Dostoevsky and Duroff, closely followed 
 by an officer, stood before us. We silently ex- 
 changed a warm shake of the hands. Notwith- 
 standing their eight months' confinement, we could 
 detect but little change in their looks ; the one 
 still preserved his serious, thoughtful expression, 
 whilst the face of the other was lighted up with its 
 wonted childish smile. They were both dressed 
 in the convict's long travelling cloak, in short fur 
 overcoats, and in high, felt boots. The officer on 
 duty courteously drew his chair as far away from 
 us as he could, and left us to converse freely with 
 one another. Dostoevsky began by telling his 
 brother how glad he was that he had escaped their 
 fate, and then put a number of questions concerning 
 the health and well-being of his family and children. 
 But what most struck me in this farewell interview 
 between the two brothers was, that the one who 
 was to remain behind in Petersburg seemed to feel 
 the parting the more acutely. Tears filled his eyes 
 each time he spoke, and his lips trembled with
 
 92 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the emotion he tried in vain to suppress, whilst 
 Dostoevsky remained outwardly calm, and was 
 mainly eager to tranquillise him. ' And even in 
 the galleys I shall find, not wild beasts, but men, 
 and, it may be, men better and worthier than I 
 am. We shall see one another again, I hope. 
 Hope ! nay, I am sure we shall. And you will 
 write to me, yes ! And when I have got a little 
 settled send me some books : I will let you have 
 a list ; for I shall be allowed to have books there.' 
 In saying this he probably only wished to cheer 
 the brother a little. ' And when I leave the gal- 
 leys, you know, I will begin to write again. These 
 months I have learned a great deal ; out there I 
 shall learn still more what life really is, and I shall 
 have something to write about.' The interview 
 lasted a little more than half an hour, and, before we 
 could realise how quickly the time had passed, the 
 officer reminded us that, according to the rules, 
 we could not remain any longer. For the last time 
 we kissed each other, and then with a long, silent 
 grasp of the hand they tore themselves away, and 
 we were alone. Having been told that they would 
 set off in less than an hour, we waited under the 
 outer gate of the Fortress. It was a cold, bright 
 night. The chimes had just struck nine when two 
 sledges drove up, and the prisoners, guarded by
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 93 
 
 two gendarmes, took their places. ' Farewell ! ' we 
 cried out to them. ' To our next meeting ! ' was 
 the reply, as they drove quickly off." 
 
 From the few letters written to his brother during 
 his long exile we can form some idea of what the 
 sufferings were he was called on to endure, and 
 the spirit in which he supported them. It was 
 only after he had quitted the galleys that he was 
 allowed to hold any communication with the outer 
 world. "Already ten months have passed," he 
 writes in a letter dated November 6, 1854, " since I 
 left the mines and began my new life. All those 
 four years I was like a man buried alive, nailed 
 down in his coffin. How awful they were no 
 human pen can describe. They were one unbroken 
 round of inexpressible, endless woe, and each hour, 
 each minute weighed and crushed my soul like some 
 heavy paving-stone. For four whole years I never 
 breathed or moved, never made the shortest step 
 without feeling that I was at the galleys. But why 
 try to explain ? If I were to fill up a hundred 
 sheets of paper you would still have no idea of 
 what my life really was. To understand that you 
 must have seen with your own eyes, or rather 
 have experienced it yourself." And, when he had 
 served his time as convict, the indignities to which 
 he was subjected, particularly during the five years
 
 94 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 he was quartered as a common soldier at Semipa- 
 latinsk, were, if possible, harder to endure than all 
 he had gone through at the galleys. " God send 
 you peace and happiness," he writes in 1856, 
 " and may you never know the horrors that fall to 
 the lot of some among us : I speak from expe- 
 rience. Everything is against me, and I am in 
 despair. It is not easy to suffer what I have suf- 
 fered. I cannot tell all ; I am alone, and must 
 remain alone, in my helpless agony." Cut off from 
 all he cared for, debarred every pursuit that could 
 interest, condemned to the most humiliating 
 drudgeries, his health shattered and ruined by 
 daily deprivations, moneyless, homeless, and 
 friendless, what wonder if there were moments 
 when he lost all hope and prayed for death? 
 After long waiting and repeated disappointments 
 he obtained permission to resume his literary 
 career. In 1858 he was raised, chiefly through the 
 intercession of his old schoolfellow, General 
 Todleben, to the rank of under-officer ; and in the 
 following year, on the accession of Alexander II., 
 was at length recalled from exile. Whilst an officer 
 he married Madame Isaieff, a widow lady, who, how- 
 ever, died two years after his return to Petersburg. 
 When we have read the story of Dostoevsky's 
 life in Siberia, so far as he has thought fit to relate
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKV. 95 
 
 it, and seen how, in spite of long and cruel suffer- 
 ing, he returned with an unbroken and loyal faith 
 in the religious and political institutions of his 
 country, we can easily understand the love, I 
 had almost said idolatry, in which his name is 
 held by every Russian. A weaker man would have 
 come back embittered and eager to make war 
 on society. M. Aksakoff has told us that once 
 Uostoevsky, together with Mackenzie Wallace and 
 others, was spending the evening with him, when 
 the conversation turned on the character of the 
 Emperor Nicholas, of whom the novelist spoke in 
 terms of the highest praise. After his departure, 
 the Englishman came up to Aksakoff, and asked, 
 
 " Did you tell me that was Dostoevsky ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " The author of ' Memorials of the House of 
 Death ' ? " 
 
 "The same." 
 
 " But it cannot be he who was exiled to the 
 mines ? " 
 
 " No other ; and pray why not ? " 
 
 " Why, how could he eulogise the very man who 
 sent him to the galleys ? " 
 
 " You, as a foreigner," replied Aksakoff, " may 
 find it difficult to understand, but to us it is intel- 
 ligible, and is thoroughly Russian."
 
 g6 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 I may remark that Count Tolstoi, who better 
 than any other knows the true character of the 
 Russian people, has brought out this national trait 
 in the scene in his story, " By what Rule Men 
 should Live," where the stranger says to Simon, 
 the shoemaker : " No one has done me wrong : it 
 is God who punishes." And the simple peasant, 
 unversed in the disputes of creeds, is satisfied, 
 and, without a demur, acknowledges : " Of course ; 
 we know all comes from God." It was in this 
 spirit that Dostoevsky bore and endured, found 
 good in what seemed to be evil, and learned the 
 true uses of adversity. " No, it was just," he on 
 one occasion remonstrated to a friend who had 
 been denouncing his exile as wrongful and un- 
 righteous ; " the Russian people would have con- 
 demned us. That I only learned there in the 
 galleys. And, besides, who knows but that, in 
 thus punishing me, it was God's purpose to teach 
 me the one thing needful, without which man 
 cannot live, and which can be found alone among 
 the people, criminals, thieves, murderers, drunk- 
 ards though they be, and that, in my turn, I 
 should teach it to others, so that they, not all, 
 only a few, should become a little better, accept 
 the truth, however partially, and finally be led to 
 escape the abyss into which they are falling."
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 97 
 
 But whilst, like Tolstoi, it is to the people that 
 Dostoevsky makes his final appeal, there is, in 
 the enunciation of the truth he would have us learn 
 from them, a tone of vague mysticism that, to a 
 large extent, deprives his teaching of that practical 
 bearing without which the loftiest and purest creed 
 will be barren and profitless. He believed that it 
 is reserved for the Russian people to form a social 
 state, the binding principle of which shall be no 
 external contract or forced obligation, but love 
 to one's neighbour ; in other words, to realise the 
 high ideal of the Gospel, and replace the arbitrary 
 formal ties that now unite society by the higher 
 spiritual bond of charity and love. No one will 
 dispute that, theoretically, it is the ideal after 
 which, whether orthodox Russians or not, we 
 ought all to strive. Hitherto, at least, Russian 
 progress has not been guided by any such lofty 
 law, and we may reasonably doubt whether it ever 
 will be the recognised and leading principle of 
 national development in Russia or elsewhere. 
 It is a good thing to aspire, but our aspirations, to 
 be of any practical worth, should be accompanied 
 with the modest consciousness that they are but 
 pious wishes, the full completion of which can 
 never be attained, unless, indeed, the conditions 
 of human nature become radically changed, and 
 H
 
 98 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 men be no longer actuated by selfish and utili- 
 tarian motives. Nor can we forget that Alexis 
 and Zozime, the two types of this ideal, are not 
 brought into close contact with the strife and 
 battle of actual life, and, though Dostoevsky in- 
 tended to represent them in this relation, in the 
 concluding portion of his last unfinished novel, 
 " The Karamazoff Family," we may, without fear 
 of erring, presume that their portraits would have 
 been sketched with far less similitude to reality 
 than the imperfect and erring heroes he has else- 
 where drawn for us from his own personal observa- 
 tion and experience. 
 
 But if we regard these idealised portraits as 
 potential, rather than actual types, we need not, 
 therefore, be blind to the thoroughly human point 
 of view from which Dostoevsky ordinarily sketches 
 his characters. In all his novels, beginning with 
 " Poor People," and ending with " The Kara- 
 mazoff Family," the fundamental motive of his 
 characterisation is the capacity common to all his 
 personages, however low, fallen, and degraded they 
 may be, to experience in a moment of ecstatic 
 enthusiasm, called forth by some rare and excep- 
 tional circumstance in their lives, an irresistible 
 excitement to an act of the highest self-devotion 
 and self-denial. It is in these moments that the
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 99 
 
 spark of human feeling, seemingly stifled in them 
 by the noxious poison of worldliness they have so 
 long breathed, bursts forth with strength sufficient 
 to enable them to overcome and rise above those 
 lower instincts of their nature to which they are 
 habitually enslaved. In this they are like the 
 heroes of TourgeniefFs novels, but here the 
 resemblance ends. For whilst these, when the 
 moment of enthusiasm has passed, sink into despair 
 and fall back into the state of pessimistic unbelief 
 from which they were for an instant stirred, 
 Dostoevsky's heroes zealously guard the remem- 
 brance of .the victory gained as their brightest and 
 most precious possession, the memory of which 
 brightens up and gladdens their darkest and 
 gloomiest days. And as we read the story of 
 their lives we are made to share this feeling. The 
 manifestations of spiritual strength in these out- 
 casts of our race inspire us with a belief in the 
 possibility of a higher and more perfect happiness 
 for mankind, and encourage us in the desire to 
 work with and for those who, now crushed by 
 poverty, ignorance, and neglect, have still within 
 them the seed of life that requires but warmth and 
 kindly culture to bring forth the richest and 
 ripest of fruit. It is in this faith that Dostoevsky 
 lived and wrote, and in all his works he A Speaks 
 H 2
 
 100 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the word of love and trust to the suffering 
 and oppressed classes of his countrymen. None, 
 save those who have finally and entirely lost all 
 hope and belief, can for an instant doubt that the 
 call will be heard and responded to. 
 
 In the second year after his return from Siberia, 
 Dostoevsky published his novel, "The Injured 
 and Insulted." Its faults of construction are 
 numerous and glaring ; the plot, in itself improb- 
 able, is inconsistently worked out ; the blind, 
 unreasoning love of Natasha for the empty-headed 
 chatterer, Alexis, is irritatingly unnatural ; the 
 character of the wicked prince is drawn too 
 melodramatically ; and the personages habitually 
 talk in a language appropriate to the author, but 
 altogether out of harmony with their temperament 
 and position. And yet, in spite of all these short- 
 comings, we read the novel with interest and 
 avidity. " I know," writes Dostoevsky, in a letter 
 to his brother, " what I wished to produce, but a 
 rough, wild piece of work is all I have succeeded 
 in turning out, though there are some fifty pages 
 or so of which I am proud." Among the fifty 
 pages to which he refers with such pride must be 
 included those dedicated to the story of little 
 Nellie. From her childhood she had been the 
 witness and victim of wrong and injustice. In the
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. IOI 
 
 long hours she passed by the bedside of her dying 
 mother, cast off and abandoned to poverty by the 
 man for whom she had gladly made the dearest 
 sacrifices, refused pardon and forgiveness by the 
 husband she had betrayed, Nellie, whilst yet a 
 child, was made to feel the unpitying selfishness 
 of the world, and the indiscriminating sternness of 
 its moral law. She has thus learned to distrust, 
 and will not remain under obligation even to the 
 man who rescues her from the hands of a 
 Boubnova, and thus saves her from a life of shame 
 and dishonour. But she never loses her faith in 
 mankind, though she looks with suspicion and 
 doubt on individuals. "There is no shame in 
 begging," she declares, when Ivan Petrovitch finds 
 her in the streets soliciting alms that she may 
 have wherewith to buy necessaries for her mother ; 
 " I do not beg of any one man, I beg of all, and 
 all are not one man : it were a shame to ask 
 charity of one, but there is no disgrace in asking 
 alms of all." Little by little he wins her con- 
 fidence, and, with the impulsiveness of a simple, 
 unspoiled nature, she devotes herself to him heart 
 and soul, and cannot bear that he should give a 
 thought or care to others. She is jealous of 
 Natasha, in whose fate he is so warmly interested, 
 and, rather than share what she believes to be a
 
 IO2 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 divided affection, is ready to return to the life 
 from which he had taken her. But when she 
 learns the story of Natasha's mad love for Alexis, 
 and how her father had cursed her and banished 
 her from his presence, her heart goes out towards 
 her, and she gladly aids him in bringing about a 
 reconciliation between father and daughter. She 
 tells him of her mother; how she too had been 
 driven from home, with a father's curse still ring- 
 ing in her ears, and how, when at last he came 
 with the tardy message of peace, he found her 
 dead, deaf to all human pity or blame, already in 
 the presence of One who judges with larger, 
 other eyes than ours. The old man is touched, 
 and ere it is too late forgives his erring child. 
 The whole life of Nellie is thus a protest against 
 human justice. When, soon after, she herself is 
 dying, she calls Ivan Petrovitch to her bedside, 
 and bids him : " Go to him, and tell him I died 
 without forgiving him. Tell him I have this very 
 morning been reading my Bible, but I do not 
 forgive him, because when mother was dying, and 
 could hardly speak, her last words were, ' I curse 
 him.' And so now I, her daughter, curse him, not 
 for any harm he has done me, but for the sin he 
 did her." After her death, a little bag that hung 
 from her neck is opened, and found to contain a
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 103 
 
 letter written by her mother to the prince who had 
 betrayed her, in which she tells him that in heaven 
 she will pray for him, and learn to forgive, if only 
 he will care for and be kind to little Nellie, her 
 child and his daughter. That letter had never 
 been given to the prince, nor did she once try to 
 bring him to account. Human law, had she ap- 
 pealed to its protection, would doubtless have 
 compelled him to fulfil the dying woman's prayer, 
 but in the eyes of Nellie no earthly court could 
 redeem the offence and insult. She, therefore, 
 sought no redress, and it was to a higher tribunal 
 that she carried her complaint. 
 
 No analysis can possibly give an adequate idea 
 of the charm the novelist has thrown over this 
 episode in his romance. Of equal merit are the 
 scenes in which the life of Natasha's family, the 
 Ichmeneffs, is described. Readers who, like 
 Partridge at the :play, admire loud speaking and 
 noisy rant, will, of course, find them dull and 
 insipid ; but all who have an ear for the true and 
 simple, must acknowledge -their exceptional worth. 
 The hero, Ivan Petrovitch, who had lived with 
 them in their more prosperous days, one evening 
 brings to them the manuscript of his first 
 novel; and the old man, Nicholas Sergeivitch, 
 together with his wife s Anna Andreevna, and
 
 104 TH E MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Natasha, form the young author's first public 
 audience : 
 
 ' I read to them my romance in one sitting. 
 We began directly after tea, and the reading con- 
 tinued till two o'clock in the early morning. At 
 first, the old man was evidently put out. He 
 had expected something immeasurably grander, 
 something that, in all probability, he would not 
 have understood, but, all the same, something 
 undoubtedly magnificent and lofty. And, instead 
 of that, a poor lot of ordinary people, and the 
 most common events, exactly such as they them- 
 selves had experienced a thousand times. If the 
 hero had only been a great man, an interesting 
 character, an historical celebrity, like Roslavlieff, 
 or Youric Miloslavsky ! But to make a hero of a 
 little, miserable, stupid tchinovnik, the buttons on 
 whose uniform were greasy and torn, and all 
 described in language neither better nor worse 
 than we ourselves employ, that could not be 
 right. The old woman looked inquisitively at her 
 husband, and seemed to feel that she had been 
 cheated, and was accordingly offended. 
 
 " ' Is it worth while to print and read such 
 rubbish ? ' she appeared to be saying to herself. 
 ' And to think he will get paid for it ! ' 
 
 " Natasha was all attention, listened greedily,
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 105 
 
 did not once take her eyes off me, as she watched 
 each movement of my lips, whilst hers moved in 
 response, as though she were mentally repeating 
 each word. And what do you think ? Before 
 I had half finished, tears filled the eyes of all 
 my listeners. Anna Andreevna wept outright, and 
 I understood, from her naive explanations, how, 
 with all her heart, she only wished that she 
 could help my poor hero in his struggles and 
 misfortunes. 
 
 " ' It is not from the first step,' Nicholas 
 Sergeivitch said, ' that the end of a long journey 
 is to be seen. And so it is with us. At first, 
 we think, a mere story-teller ; then, the heart is 
 touched ; little by little all that is happening gets 
 intelligible and interesting; and, at last, we are 
 made to comprehend and feel that the veriest 
 outcast, the last and lowest of men, is one with 
 ourselves and a brother ! ' 
 
 " Natash listened and wept, as, under the 
 table, she silently but warmly pressed my hand. 
 The reading was finished. She rose hurriedly, 
 her cheeks all on fire, and her eyes overflowing 
 with tears. Suddenly she seized my hand, kissed 
 it, and rushed from the room. Her father and 
 mother exchanged looks of puzzled bewilderment. 
 
 " ' Ah well, she was always of an excitable
 
 io6 
 
 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 temper,' the old man muttered ; ' but there is no 
 harm in that. It is a good feeling. Yes, she is 
 a brave, noble girl.' 
 
 " ' Well,' exclaimed his wife, ' of course Alex- 
 ander of Macedonia is a hero ; but that is no 
 reason for beginning to break the chairs and 
 furniture.' "
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 107 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 
 PART II. 
 
 FEW who have travelled in the north-eastern 
 districts of Russia can fail to have met from time 
 to time bands of people in grey jackets and 
 cloaks, with closely-shaven heads, and heavy irons 
 .clamped round their ankles, wearied and way- 
 worn, as they drag themselves along the rough, 
 uneven road. They are prisoners, or, as the 
 Russians like to call them, " unfortunates," on 
 their way to the Siberian galleys. The passer-by will 
 stop a few minutes, cross himself, distribute his 
 charity among them, and then hurry on. In his 
 eyes they are but a crowd of criminals, murderers, 
 and thieves. We have all read of their sufferings 
 in prison, and of the still harder fate of those 
 who have to work in the mines. But till 
 Dostoevsky wrote his "Memorials of the House 
 of Death," our only sources of information as to 
 the life of these Siberian convicts were either 
 dry, incomplete official records, or the narrative of
 
 108 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 some traveller who could only tell the very little he 
 was allowed by the authorities to see and inspect. 
 He first introduced us to this new world, a country 
 of woe and suffering, so intense and so crushing 
 that few who have once crossed its borders have 
 had strength to survive the miseries they there 
 endured. The perusal of his book produces on us 
 an impression not less profound and harrowing 
 than Dante's pictures of Hell; only these are no fan- 
 tastic regions, the creation of a poet's imagination, 
 but real and actual. There is not a single crime 
 that does not find its representative here, and, 
 huddled together in one common barrack, the 
 born criminal, the murderer by profession, the 
 innocent dupe, the half-mad fanatic, the honest 
 political enthusiast, are one and all subjected to 
 the same stern punishment, and have to suffer the 
 same death in life. For four years Dostoevsky 
 lived with these men, the air filled day and night 
 with brutal oaths, coarse jokes, rude quarrels, and 
 drunken orgies. We may wonder how, brought 
 up as he had been, he could have supported such 
 an existence ; but, as he reminds us with one of 
 those touches of truthful humour we so often find 
 in his writings, " there is nothing to which a man 
 cannot get accustomed." Besides, in the very 
 worst of them, in the murderer Gazine (who had
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 1 09 
 
 enticed a young child into a by-road, and there 
 hacked him up slowly into pieces, as he watched 
 with fiendish delight the convulsive twitchings of 
 his helpless victim), no less than in the venerable 
 Old Believer, who had committed no offence save 
 that of remaining true to his faith and creed ; or in 
 the simple, pure-souled Alexis, who passed his 
 leisure time in reading the Bible, and would hush 
 all grumbling discontent at their fate with the 
 assurance that Isaiah was a great prophet : in each 
 of them he discovered those traits of human 
 nature which might seem to have been effaced by 
 the all-destroying power of some outburst of wild 
 passion, but which still lay dormant in the heart of 
 the lowest criminal. "It often happens in the 
 galleys," he writes, " that you have known a man 
 for years, and have come to regard him as an 
 animal rather than a human creature, when 
 suddenly, and in a chance minute, the true soul of 
 the man unexpectedly reveals itself, and you find 
 in him feeling, heart, consciousness of his own 
 vices, and sympathy with the sorrows of others, so 
 that you can only gaze with wonder, and are 
 unable for a while to believe the testimony of your 
 own eyes and ears." 
 
 Whilst reading Dostoevsky's work, we must not 
 forget that, since it was written, many changes
 
 110 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 have been made in the criminal law of Russia, 
 and in the administration of her prisons. The 
 peasant is no longer a serf, to be whipped or 
 exiled to Siberia at the will of his owner ; military 
 discipline has lost much of its former harshness ; 
 magisterial courts, with trial by jury, have been 
 established; and, as a natural result of these 
 reforms, the number of offences for which trans- 
 portation to the mines is the legal penalty has 
 been considerably diminished. But in spite of 
 these concessions to the requirements of a 
 humaner age, the book points out certain evils 
 that are still unreformed, and which strangely 
 clash with the most elementary ideas of right and 
 justice. No distinction, beyond the term of exile 
 to which they are sentenced, is made either in 
 the kind of labour on which the convicts are 
 employed, or in the rigorous nature of the im- 
 prisonment to which they are exposed. The con- 
 sequence is that hardened criminals, and those 
 who have been led into crime through mere 
 thoughtlessness and chance temptation, or are 
 guilty of what in happier times would be regarded 
 as no offence at all, are not only lodged together, 
 but are punished with equal severity. Our moral 
 sense revolts at the idea that political offenders 
 like Dostoevsky or Duroff should be forced to
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. Ill 
 
 herd with the most depraved of murderers, nor can 
 we by any jugglery be persuaded to regard their 
 venial faults as deserving the punishment meted 
 out to the ruffianly excesses of a Gazine. As we 
 read of the unmerited ignominies they, and many 
 like them, were called on to suffer, and think of 
 the waste of strength involved in their forced ex- 
 clusion from those spheres of activity wherein 
 they might have worked and laboured for the 
 good of their country, we can only ask, as the 
 author does in the concluding lines of his 
 "Memorials," "Who is to blame, and who is 
 really in fault, that all this power has been thus 
 blindly, wilfully, and irreparably thrown away ? " 
 
 Dostoevsky's " Crime and Punishment," pub- 
 lished in 1866, is almost as direct an outcome of 
 his Siberian experiences as the " Memorials of the 
 House of Death." Characters like Rascolnikoff 
 are, fortunately for us, abnormal and exceptional ; 
 but, among the criminals with whom his lot was 
 cast, Dostoevsky more than once came across men 
 who, naturally kind, generous, and unselfish, had, 
 under the influence of a radically-false theory of 
 life, over which they allowed themselves to brood, 
 been led to commit some foul and brutal crime. 
 A poor student, eager in his search after know- 
 ledge, he is hampered and impeded at every step,
 
 112 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and made to feel more sharply than he might 
 have done, had he been engaged in work 
 demanding only physical labour and energy, the 
 inequalities of life, believes the world to be sadly 
 out of joint, and is convinced that our existing 
 social order is based on wrong and injustice. But 
 it is not his own deprivations or the hardships he 
 has himself to endure, so much as pity for and 
 sympathy with the poverty and sufferings of 
 others, that make him the sworn foe of wealth and 
 rank. Poor though he was, he still contrived, with 
 the scanty wages he earned by giving lessons, to 
 support for six months a sick fellow-student, and, 
 when his friend died, expended his last to secure 
 for him a fit and decent burial. And his attach- 
 ment to the daughter of his landlady is chiefly 
 motived by a feeling of commiseration for her 
 hard and cheerless lot. "I do not know," he 
 confesses after her death, "what it was that 
 attached me to her, unless it were that she always 
 was ill and ailing. Had she been lame or hump- 
 backed, in all probability I should have loved her 
 still more." Some of us may find it difficult to 
 understand Rascolnikoffs tenderness of heart, 
 and be disposed to ridicule it as maudlin and 
 sentimental. But if we remember that he lived 
 surrounded by abject want and starving poverty,
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 113 
 
 of which most of us have only read and heard, 
 we may, perhaps, be able to comprehend how 
 his heart bled within him as each day and every 
 hour he witnessed misery he had. no power to 
 mitigate or relieve. What must have been the 
 impression produced on such a nature by his visit 
 to the cold-hearted, grasping usuress, with whom 
 he pawns for a rouble and a half the last of his 
 possessions, the watch his dying father had given 
 him ! Need we wonder, if, whilst she was beating 
 him down, and then discounted the heavy interest 
 from the trifling loan she finally agreed to advance, 
 the idea came into his head that he would be 
 doing a righteous deed were he to murder the 
 greedy hag, rob her of her ill-gained wealth, and 
 with it help those who, through no fault of their 
 own, had not the means to feed themselves and 
 their hungry children. 
 
 It is whilst he is in this dangerous state of mind 
 that Rascolnikoff meets the drunken Marmeladoff 
 at a common tavern. None who have once read 
 the novel can ever forget the scene that follows. 
 With a half-comic, half-tragic solemnity of style 
 and diction, interrupted with bitter self-reproaches, 
 Marmeladoff relates the hideous story of his home- 
 life, and tells of the poor consumptive wife, the 
 hungry starving children, and the terrible price at
 
 114 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 which Sophie, the eldest daughter, obtains money 
 to buy them food : 
 
 " I was lying on the bed . . . well, if you will 
 have it, in a heavy drunken doze . . . when 
 suddenly I heard Sophie's voice . . . she is 
 always very gentle, and her voice is soft and low, 
 she has light flaxen hair, and a pale thin face. 
 So I listened, and caught the words : ' How, 
 Catherine Ivanovna, is it possible you can wish 
 me to go and sell myself like that ? Why, Daria 
 Fedorovna, since she has become a fallen woman, 
 has got known to the police, and they have been 
 three times to the landlady, making inquiries 
 about her.' 'And who are you,' answered my 
 wife, 'that you must needs take such wonderful 
 care of yourself; I did not know you were so 
 precious ! ' But you must not blame her, do not 
 blame her, sir ! When she spoke thus, she was 
 not in her right mind ; she was agitated, ill, and 
 maddened with the tears of the children, who 
 were crying out for something to eat ; she did not 
 mean what she said, but spoke in anger, merely 
 to vent her spite on Sophie. For Catherine 
 Ivanovna is like that, and often, when the children 
 are troublesome and will clamour for bread, she 
 will begin to punish and beat them. And then I 
 saw Sophie get up from her seat ; it was about
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 115 
 
 six in the evening, and she drew a kerchief over 
 her head, and put on her little jacket, and left the 
 house, and it was not till nine o'clock that she re- 
 turned. She came into the room, went straight 
 up to Catherine Ivanovna, and silently threw on 
 the table before her thirty silver rouble pieces. 
 She did not say a single word, or even look at any 
 one of us, but took down from a hook the large 
 woollen shawl, which was their common property, 
 pulled it close over her head and face, and threw 
 herself on to her bed, with her face turned to the 
 wall, her shoulders and whole body trembling 
 with the sobs she tried to suppress. . . . And 
 I continued to lie there as before, still drunk. 
 . . . And some few minutes later, my good 
 sir, I saw Catherine Ivanovna, also without 
 uttering a word, go up to Sophie's bed, fall on her 
 knees, and begin to kiss her feet ; and there she 
 remained kneeling, and for a long time refused to 
 get up, and then at last they both fell asleep, 
 locked in one another's arms, whilst I ... I still 
 lay there drunk and dazed." 
 
 As Roscolnikoff listens to his story, and hears 
 how for five days he has been away from home, 
 spending in drink his last month's salary, as well 
 as the money he had stolen from his daughter's 
 drawer, he learns, for the first time, that far worse 
 
 I 2
 
 1 1 6 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 than the physical deprivations which poverty 
 brings with it is the moral degradation of its 
 victims, too often the destruction and effacement 
 of all that is pure and noble in their nature. The 
 old social problem, the unequal distribution of 
 wealth, that ever since men began to think has 
 unhinged and perverted weak minds, presents 
 itself with renewed force, and to him there is but 
 one solution. With the riches that are now 
 hoarded in the money chests of the old usuress 
 and cheats like her how many a Sophie might be 
 saved from shame and ruin, how many a life's 
 burden eased and removed ! And, as so often 
 happens in the real world, two chance circum- 
 stances, calculated to confirm him in his idea, 
 occur at the very moment when his mind un- 
 consciously invites persuasion, and is most dis- 
 posed to yield to any passing temptation. He 
 receives a letter from home, informing him that his 
 sister, Dounya, has accepted a brilliant offer, and 
 is engaged to a certain Loujine, "whom, of 
 course," as the mother takes care to add, "the 
 girl does not love, but whb is extremely rich and 
 apparently a good and honourable man." It is 
 not, then, only Sophie that barters herself away; 
 and the sole difference is that she does it from 
 abject want, and for the sake of obtaining the
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 1 17 
 
 bare necessities of life, whilst these other women 
 sell themselves that they may enjoy unnecessary 
 luxuries and comforts. A few days later, he is 
 sitting in the same tavern where he had encoun- 
 tered Marmeladoff, and accidentally overhears 
 a conversation between a student and a young 
 officer. They are talking of the usuress, and the 
 student relates how she has been heard to express 
 her intention of bequeathing her money to a mo- 
 nastery, probably hoping, by this deed of charity, 
 to purchase a good place in the next world. And 
 he proceeds to argue that, if she were put out of 
 the way, her riches might be the means of rescuing 
 dozens of poor families from want and starvation. 
 It is true that, when the officer laughingly asks 
 him, " Will you, then, undertake to murder the 
 hag ? " he immediately answers, " Certainly not ; 
 it is not my business." These words, however, 
 chiming in, as they do, with the theory over which 
 he has so long been brooding, produce a strong 
 and lasting impression on Rascolnikoffs mind. It 
 may be, the student has nothing to do with 
 punishing the ill-doer ; but suppose it is he, Ras- 
 colnikoff, who has been called to the work and 
 chosen by fate to be the avenger of wrong. From 
 that moment there is no more doubt or hesitation ; 
 he feels that he is no longer free to judge or to
 
 Il8 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 will ; and he returns home like a man condemned 
 to death. The time is past for debating whether 
 the end he has in view be righteous or not ; his 
 whole mind is now concentred on arranging the 
 plan of its execution, and overcoming any 
 obstacles that may stand in his way. When he 
 hears a neighbouring church clock strike seven, 
 the hour at which he knows the usuress will be 
 alone in her lodging, he is only afraid that he may 
 be too late. When he sees that it is impossible to 
 steal the hatchet, with which he is to commit his 
 crime, from the landlady's kitchen without being 
 discovered, he only feels a dull brutal anger at 
 what, for the first moment, seems to be an insur- 
 mountable difficulty. When he succeeds in 
 getting a hatchet from the dvorniKs room and, 
 undetected, conceals it under his overcoat, he only 
 experiences a feeling of relief at the thought that 
 he is fully equipped for the work he has under- 
 taken. So possessed is he with the one idea that 
 he and no other is destined to fulfil the decree of 
 fate, that he loses all power to provide against 
 those little oversights which must, if neglected, 
 lead to his conviction. But this mental exalta- 
 tion only carries him through the crime, and then 
 abandons him. When he has killed the woman, 
 he does not make that use of the stolen money
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 119 
 
 which he had reasoned himself into accepting as 
 a full justification of his act. An inferior novelist, 
 I think, would have represented him as at once 
 lavishly expending it in deeds of charity, and 
 thereby winning an easy opportunity for self-praise. 
 But though Rascolnikoff has a chance of so doing 
 when Marmeladoff is run over by a carriage and 
 killed, it is out of the little monthly sum his 
 mother sends him that he relieves the most 
 pressing necessities of the family, nor does he 
 touch or even count the money he has carried off 
 with him from the room of the usuress, but hurries 
 to dig a hole somewhere in the earth and bury it 
 out of sight. 
 
 Punishment follows quickly on his crime. 
 Little by little his eyes are opened, and he is 
 forced to acknowledge how false were his pre- 
 tensions to play the part he had assumed, and 
 that, not love for the suffering and poor, but self- 
 conceit, and a vain desire to show himself in will 
 and courage superior to other men, was the real 
 motive that had actuated him. "It was not," he 
 says, "from any wish to help poor mother, that 
 I killed her; all that is nonsense. It was not 
 that I might get the means and power of doing 
 good, but it was something quite different that 
 urged me on. I wished to know, once and for
 
 120 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 all, whether I have that within me, or not, to 
 transgress the ordinary limits and raise myself 
 above the common run of men." This melo- 
 dramatic trait, the longing to play a grand part, 
 is not lightly thrown off, and accompanies Rascol- 
 nikoff in his first essays at repentance. He re- 
 solves to confess his crime to Sophie, to be guided 
 by her counsel, for she too has sinned, and will 
 not turn from him with aversion. He therefore 
 seeks her out, and, throwing himself at her feet, 
 exclaims : " It is not before thee I bow myself, 
 but to suffering humanity I pay my homage." 
 These words are evidently designed to produce a 
 powerful effect, but Sophie, with that instinctive 
 avoidance of anything like theatrical show, which 
 is a characteristic trait in Russian women of her 
 class, merely asks : " What have you done, what 
 is it you have done against yourself ? " She has 
 read but little, has never, like him, written a uni- 
 versity dissertation on the nature of crime, but 
 none the less she, without difficulty, understands 
 that he has sinned against himself far more than 
 against others. But though she condemns, the 
 sentence she pronounces is seasoned with mercy. 
 She takes him by the hand, draws him to herself, 
 throws her arms round his neck, and, looking 
 kindly into his eyes, exclaims : " There is not in
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 121 
 
 the whole world a being to be pitied more than 
 you ! " All this is quite different to what he had 
 expected : he had looked for something more im- 
 posing, more dramatic; he cannot comprehend 
 the feeling by which she is prompted. " What a 
 strange creature you are, Sophie ! " he cries out ; 
 " you embrace and kiss me at the very moment I 
 am speaking to you of that; you do not know 
 what you are doing." She makes no direct an- 
 swer, but, going to her little table, takes up her 
 Bible, and begins to read to him the story of 
 Lazarus of Bethany, of all the Gospel narratives 
 the one that speaks most home to the- heart of the 
 common Russian folk. He listens, and for the 
 first time the spiritual meaning of the stupendous 
 miracle is borne upon him, and he feels what the 
 crime he has committed really is. " It is not the 
 old woman I have murdered, but I have killed 
 myself ! " In these words is summed up the 
 whole lesson of the novel. For three days, like 
 Lazarus, he has lain in the grave, cramped and 
 bound, till the moment of awakening arrives, 
 and, hearing the divine call, "Come forth!" he 
 casts off the chains and fetters with which he is 
 shackled, stands on his feet, and is once more able 
 to walk in spiritual freedom. 
 
 The simpler but stronger nature triumphs over
 
 122 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Rascolnikoff's deadened and perverted soul. He 
 gives himself up to justice, is tried, and exiled to 
 Siberia for life, whither Sophie follows him. " Ma- 
 toushka, Sophie Simonovna, you are our little 
 mother, always kind and gentle, for you have 
 suffered yourself," are the words with which her 
 hourly services of love and sympathy are acknow- 
 ledged by the rude, rough convicts, so easily 
 moulded, as Dostoevsky has taught us, by those 
 who approach them as creatures differing from 
 ourselves only in the hardness of their fate, so 
 stubborn and obdurate in the hands of those who 
 think they can reform men with the knout and the 
 Siberian mines. 
 
 It is not without reason that the novelist has 
 put into opposition to the weak, erring Rascolnikoff 
 the strong, healthy character of his friend and 
 fellow-student, Razoumiechen. " For nearly two 
 hundred years," he says on one occasion, "we 
 have been unlearning the lesson of work. You 
 are all, to a man, chatterers and fine talkers ; you 
 breed melancholy, and sit brooding on it as a hen 
 does on her egg. And your grumbling philosophy 
 is stolen from foreign authors ; nor do you once 
 show the least sign of self-made or self-independent 
 life." It is an old complaint that we find in nearly 
 every Russian writer, and, unfortunately, the com-
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOV1TCH DOSTOEVSKY. 123 
 
 plaint is as true as it is old. But we must not 
 blame too unreservedly the Rascolnikoffs, if their 
 creed of life be too often soulless, unprofitable, and 
 unproductive. The sophisms which they get from 
 books corrupt and turn their natures awry, simply 
 because the conditions of their life have rendered 
 them peculiarly susceptible to such influences and 
 cut them off from all corrective impressions. It 
 is exclusively from books they get their instruc- 
 tion. The lessons of public life they are not 
 allowed to learn. Practical experience, which 
 would soon clear their brains of fantastic theories, 
 is denied them ; and, consequently, Rascolnikoffs 
 are less rare phenomena in Russia than elsewhere. 
 In " Crime and Punishment " we have the 
 diagnosis of a diseased mind, and in his novel 
 entitled " Evil Spirits " Dostoevsky has given 
 us an analysis of a diseased age, and traced 
 the source and origin of Nihilism, the peculiar 
 malady of our epoch. The least pleasing in 
 subject and treatment of all his novels, it is 
 the one in which he most strikingly exhibits 
 his rare power of analysing sickly characters 
 and compelling the reader to watch and follow 
 with interest each detail of the operation. 
 The evil spirits of which it treats are, as its 
 hero explains to us, the sores, miasmas, and
 
 124 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 impurities that for generations have fastened on 
 and corrupted Russian life. There is something 
 so bizarre in the ideas, conduct, and speech of its 
 leading characters, that we should be tempted to 
 accuse the author of indulging in caricature, did 
 we not know that the story is founded on fact, and 
 is nothing more than a record of Netchaieff's mad 
 attempt to revolutionise Russia. They live in a 
 world of their own, speak a peculiar jargon, and 
 seem to think that, if only they set at defiance 
 every elementary idea of religion and morality, 
 they have made good their claim to be accepted 
 as liberal and enlightened reformers. But we 
 should err, did we suppose that all who took part 
 in the movement were cheats or ignorant en- 
 thusiasts. "It was my object in writing 'Evil 
 Spirits,' " we read in Dostoevsky's " Diary of a 
 Writer," "to explain how men like Netchaieff 
 could in our age and generation obtain adepts 
 and followers. Is it possible to suppose that all 
 his proselytes, or even the majority of them, were 
 unread ignoramuses ? I do not believe all were 
 such ; I myself am an old Netchaievist, and have 
 stood on the scaffold under sentence of death ; 
 and I assure you that many of my fellow-sufferers 
 were men of high education and culture." 
 
 If Nihilism so easily took root in Russia, it could
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 125 
 
 only be because it found there a convenient soil 
 for its growth. The secret but persistent oppo- 
 sition of the landed nobility to the emancipation 
 of their serfs, the chicaneries to which they re- 
 sorted in order to minimise as far as possible the 
 benefits conferred on the peasantry by the mea- 
 sure of 1861, naturally produced a general feeling 
 of disappointment and discontent at the com- 
 paratively small results obtained; and it was on 
 this feeling of dissatisfied discontent that Nihilist 
 agitators worked with such sinister success. More 
 especially they traded on the enthusiasm of the 
 inexperienced, and many a young student, like 
 poor Erkel in the novel, was inveigled into com- 
 mitting atrocious and heartless crimes in the 
 honest and firm belief that he was thereby aiding 
 in and hastening the inauguration of a new era of 
 equal happiness. Slaves to this idea, everything 
 else seemed to these Erkels to be accidental and 
 unimportant, and constituting, as it did in their 
 eyes, the one reality, there was no crime they 
 were not ready to perpetrate, no life they were 
 not willing to sacrifice, in order to secure its 
 realisation and triumph. Dostoevsky fully acknow- 
 ledges the pure and unselfish motives by which 
 men like Erkel were actuated ; but none the less 
 sternly exposes their powerlessness to do more
 
 126 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 than promote a temporary political terror. For, 
 whatever acceptance their teaching may find 
 among those who have been brought up in the 
 ideas of Western European revolutionists, it is 
 radically opposed to the religious and political 
 belief of the Russian people. The Russian 
 peasant, when smarting most cruelly under wrong, 
 never loses his faith in the Tsar, and is convinced 
 that he has only to make his grievances known to 
 him to have them at once redressed. With him 
 loyalty is not so much a feeling as a religion, and 
 no practical reform, however good it may be in 
 itself, can possibly be effected, unless it be based 
 on a recognition of the supreme authority of the 
 Tsar. The necessity of preserving that authority 
 intact is persistently inculcated by Dostoevsky 
 and others, who speak with the authority of men 
 that have lived with the people, and are intimately 
 acquainted with their belief. " We are the faithful 
 servants of the Tsar," he writes in one place, 
 " because we are his children, and his people are 
 not ashamed to call themselves his servants." 
 
 Although Dostoevsky, to the last, continued 
 writing romances, like most of his Russian con- 
 temporaries, before the end of his career he 
 became more a publicist than a novelist. What 
 he was content to suggest in his earlier com-
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 127 
 
 positions, in his latest work, "The Karamazoff 
 Family," which he did not live to complete, he 
 preaches and sets forth in every possible form and 
 from every possible point of view. Its characters 
 fall into two sharply divided groups, the sheep and 
 the goats : the former consisting of monks, nuns, 
 and priests ; the latter, of those who live in the 
 world. They do not talk, but sermonise and 
 deliver elaborate discourses of a mystical style on 
 those social and religious questions in which 
 Dostoevsky himself always took a peculiar interest. 
 The author evidently regarded the plot and con- 
 struction of his story to be a thing of secondary 
 importance, and adopted the form of a fiction 
 simply because many will read a novel who would 
 turn away with aversion from a tractate or long 
 didactic essay. 
 
 By reason of the mystic, exalted style which 
 characterises the greater portion of the novel, it is 
 not altogether easy to seize on or to state in plain, 
 succinct language the fundamental idea, to expound 
 and develop which was presumably the author's 
 main object in writing it. The Karamazoff family 
 consists of Theodore Pavlovitch, his three boys, 
 Demetrius, Ivan, and Alexis, and his illegitimate 
 son, Smerdiakoff. They differ widely in dispo- 
 sition and temperament, but are all possessed, to
 
 128 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 a high degree, with that wild unrest and impetuous 
 impatience which gives an attractive, but, at the 
 same time, dangerous tendency to the policy of 
 typical modern Russian reformers. Desirous of 
 making up for lost time, these theorists advocated 
 and preached the necessity of adopting at once, 
 and in all their entirety, the most advanced ideas 
 of European civilisation, and seemed to imagine 
 that a constitution after the fashion of England or 
 France could be ordered and transported from 
 abroad with as little trouble as a hamper of 
 English stout or a fresh Parisian suit. Under the 
 influence of the revolutionary movement of 1848, 
 a few rash attempts were made to put these 
 theories into practice. These, of course, were 
 easily and quickly put down by the Government. 
 But the measures of repression resorted to were so 
 exceptionally stern and sharp that they overshot 
 their mark, and the re-establishment of order was 
 more apparent than real. Any expression of dis- 
 satisfaction, in however mild a form, was rendered 
 impossible ; but the spirit of discontent, so far 
 from being crushed, was driven underground, 
 where it acquired a secret force and extent that 
 only declared itself when the first concessions were 
 made to the party of progress. Great as were the 
 changes introduced into the social and political
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 1 29 
 
 life of the country during the earlier years of 
 Alexander the Second's reign, and these changes 
 were carried out with a rapidity that at times 
 bordered closely on rashness, because all was not 
 done at once, it seemed to the more ardent minds 
 of young Russia that, in reality, nothing had been 
 accomplished. To educate a people in the hard 
 and slowly-learned lesson of self-rule and in- 
 dependence, to train them in those habits which 
 alone can assure the right use of liberty, it was 
 thought sufficient to open a few schools and to 
 write eloquent panegyrics on the blessings of con- 
 stitutional government. Instead of building on 
 the strong foundations already laid in the past 
 traditions of the Russian people, hot-brained 
 enthusiasts set themselves to the more attractive 
 task of uprooting and destroying the basis on 
 which alone they could have raised a sure and 
 lasting edifice. We all know the result of the mad 
 crimes to which they had recourse in order to 
 finish their work the more speedily. 
 
 Ivan Karamazoff, half positivist half pessimist, 
 belongs to this class of dangerous enthusiasts. In 
 one part of the romance he relates to his brother, 
 Alexis, the scheme of his prose-poem, " The Grand 
 Inquisitor," in which he designed to set forth in 
 the person of the hero his own views on man and 
 
 K
 
 130 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the world. The poem is in the form of a dialogue 
 between the inquisitor and Christ, who is supposed 
 to have come again on to the earth and to have 
 been arrested as a teacher of false and heretical 
 doctrines. The inquisitor reproaches Christ for 
 having come again into the world, and fears that 
 He will hinder him and his in their work of bring- 
 ing men to faith and obedience. . He prays Him 
 not to repeat the mistake He made during His first 
 advent, when He gave men liberty to interpret the 
 Scriptures, each in his own way, to believe or not 
 to believe ; whereas He should have contented 
 Himself with turning stones into bread, and thus 
 satisfied once and for ever the animal instincts and 
 requirements of man. He might thus have gained 
 the whole world to His cause, if, instead of preach- 
 ing love and freedom, He had boldly proclaimed 
 His kingly authority, made good His claim by a 
 series of stupendous miracles, and struck terror 
 into the hearts of men. 
 
 In all this Ivan Karamazoff is but echoing, with 
 a blunt frankness we are scarcely accustomed to, 
 the theory that lies at the bases of Nihilistic 
 socialism, and which has been turned to their own 
 selfish ends by more than one of our modern 
 saviours of society. The doctrine is manifestly the 
 outcome and product of a complete disbelief in
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 13! 
 
 the possibility of human happiness, and involves 
 the denial of all progress towards perfection. The 
 only happiness that lies within our grasp, if we are 
 to believe these Karamazoffs, is of a negative kind, 
 and consists in freedom from physical suffering 
 and bodily want. " Man is naturally weak and 
 vile," Ivan's inquisitor declares, " you promise him 
 heavenly bread, that is, love and freedom ; but I 
 repeat 'again, can that, in the eyes of a weak, 
 corrupt, selfish race, compare for a moment with 
 earthly bread ? And if thousands, or tens of thou- 
 sands, are tempted to follow you for the sake of 
 this heavenly bread, what is to become of the 
 millions, or tens of millions, who have not the 
 strength to prefer the heavenly to the more satis- 
 fying bread of this earth ? " And if Ivan is in- 
 terested in the fate of these millions, it is but 
 abstractedly. The sufferings of humanity, but 
 never of the individual, arouse his sympathy. " I 
 never could understand," he cynically declares, 
 " how a man can be expected to love his neigh- 
 bour ; it is exactly my neighbour I am unable to 
 love." To relieve the actual misery around him is 
 too humble and vulgar a task, and the sphere of 
 home-life is far too narrow for a reformer who be- 
 lieves it is his mission to set right the universe. 
 He feels that there is something wrong in existing 
 
 . K 2
 
 IJ2 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 social relations, and, with his impulsive, lawless 
 nature, feeling usurps the place of reason and 
 judgment. If he is to have happiness, it must be 
 here, in this world, or he will none of it ; nor does 
 he believe that any deprivation, however trifling, 
 can be redeemed by the promise of bliss in some 
 distant future world. "Your future heaven," he 
 exclaims, with a savage plainness of speech that 
 has the true Karamazoff ring in it, "has already 
 cost me pretty dear. My pockets will not allow 
 me to pay such a high price. And, therefore, I 
 shall lose no more time, but at once return my 
 ticket of admission. I cannot accept your God, 
 Alexis ; all I can do is to give back politely my 
 entrance-ticket." 
 
 With Alexis, on the contrary, this hope in the 
 future, this belief in the higher goal of life, made 
 him hold to the ticket which Ivan, in his childish 
 petulance, was ready to throw away as a cheat 
 that can only take in the ignorant and unwary. 
 The remembrance, the more powerful, perhaps, 
 from its very vagueness, of his mother, who died 
 in his early childhood, and still more the example 
 and wise counsel of the aged monk, Zozime, had 
 kept Alexis pure in the midst of the hideous vice 
 that flaunted itself in the home of the Karama- 
 zoffs. To preserve that purity as far as possible
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 133 
 
 untainted, he withdraws from the world, enters 
 the monastery, and puts himself under the 
 spiritual direction of the good Zozime. But he is 
 also attracted to Zozime, and in this he exhibits 
 the distinguishing trait common to the Karama- 
 zoffs, by his fame and by the authority he enjoys 
 among the people. And, if he accepts the monk's 
 teaching, and makes his own the fundamental 
 principle of that teaching, love to one's neighbour 
 and charity in our judgment of men, it is mainly 
 because it is Zozime, and not another, whom he 
 will have to serve. He believed as fervently as 
 his brother Ivan in the necessity of the strong 
 man if individuals or societies are to be saved, 
 and would have scorned to be the follower of any 
 prophet who did not exercise power. Like the 
 Grand Inquisitor, he was eager for signs and 
 wonders, and when Zozime died, felt a discon- 
 tented impatience at the ways of Providence, 
 because miracles were not wrought at his tomb, 
 and the vouch of supernatural testimony was not 
 given to his mission. 
 
 Many of Dostoevsky's readers have found it 
 difficult to understand the sympathetic partiality 
 with which the person of Zozime is drawn, and to 
 his foreign critics in particular the character of 
 the monk and the novelist's enthusiastic eulogy of
 
 134 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 monastic life have proved a serious stumbling- 
 block and a stone of offence. " The monastery," 
 he declares, " has been from days immemorial and 
 in all times Russia's salvation." We all know 
 Milton's opinion of " cloistered virtue," and most 
 of us, I presume, are disposed to prefer the bold 
 wrestler who, " not without dust and heat," strives 
 to win the prize, to the cautious seeker of salva- 
 tion that screens himself in monastic retirement 
 from the wounds and perils of combat. But they 
 err who would lay down a fast and fixed law for 
 all men, and the story of the old monk's life, as 
 related by Alexis, his loving disciple, may well 
 serve to teach us that the ways of God are many 
 and diverse. 
 
 Originally destined to serve in the army, he 
 was educated in a military college, and from an 
 early age accepted as his guide and rule the false 
 ideas of truth and honour which are always incul- 
 cated in these establishments. " When we left 
 with the rank of officers," he confesses, " we were 
 ready to wipe out with our blood any insult to the 
 honour of our regiment, though not one of us had 
 the least idea wherein true honour consists." For 
 a while he found satisfaction in the pleasures of 
 the world, and, under the idea of avenging his 
 honour, on one occasion challenged the husband
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 135 
 
 of a young girl for no other reason than that he 
 imagined his claims to her affection to be superior 
 to those of his rival. This duel formed the 
 turning-point in his life. For the first time, his 
 conscience speaks with a voice that no juggling 
 sophistry can hush, the true nature of the crime 
 he is about to commit under the specious name 
 of honour confronts him, and, after his opponent 
 has shot, he not only fires in the air, but implores 
 pardon for the wrong of which he himself had 
 been guilty, and for the sin into which he had 
 led his antagonist by tempting him to seek the 
 life of a fellow-creature. As we might expect, his 
 true motives are misunderstood, and his act forms 
 the theme of many a sharp epigram and idle 
 witticism ; but his simple answer, " Yesterday I 
 was a fool, but to-day I have become wiser," and 
 his declaration that he has resolved to enter a 
 monastery, disarm his mockers, and they them- 
 selves acknowledge, " It is not for us to judge a 
 man of God." 
 
 But if Zozime himself withdrew from the world, 
 and believed the work and teaching of the monas- 
 tery to be the surest means of salvation for the 
 Russian people, he in no wise advocated a life of 
 religious idleness, or regarded monastic seclusion 
 as a good thing for all. As understood by him,
 
 136 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the monastery was something quite different to 
 what it has become in a later age. He aimed by 
 his teaching and example to revive, as far as 
 possible, the spirit that inspired it when, as he 
 reminds us with truth, " from our midst went 
 forth the real workers for the people " ; when the 
 rule of monastic life was, " he that laboureth not, 
 neither shall he eat " ; when the humblest monk 
 was not afraid to rebuke the sin of the powerful ; 
 and when the people rightly looked on the monas- 
 tery as their succourer in trouble, their home in 
 poverty, their encourager in good, and their shield 
 from spiritual and worldly danger. He did not 
 consider the real work of the monastery to be 
 restricted to its four walls. The faithful monk 
 must labour in the world as well as pray in his 
 cell. In this spirit he commands Alexis, after his 
 death, to leave the monastery : " Thou shalt go 
 forth from these walls, and thou shalt live in the 
 world as a monk." 
 
 The more we study the actual condition of the 
 Russian people, and the better acquainted we 
 make ourselves with their real wants and desires, 
 the more convinced we must be of the soundness 
 of the views which Dostoevsky all his life advo- 
 cated with such force and persistency. However 
 strange his defence of monastic institutions, that
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 137 
 
 have elsewhere outlived their day, may appear to 
 us, we cannot forget that it is made by one who 
 knew his country well, was thoroughly versed in 
 its past and present history, and had closely 
 identified himself with its best and highest aspira- 
 tions. There is a homely proverb that tells us, 
 " What is one people's poison is another people's 
 food," and I think many of his critics would have 
 done well if they had borne it in mind, instead of 
 indulging in wholesale condemnation of the great 
 novelist as a mystic and a dreamer. We may 
 admit the mystical tendency of much that he has 
 written, without taking away aught from his autho- 
 rity. The culture of the so-called intelligent class 
 in Russia is too void of stability, too ready in its 
 acceptance of any theory that is at all attractive, 
 either from its novelty or its plausibility, to afford 
 a solid basis of national weal and happiness. All 
 that is sure and firm in the structure of Russian 
 civilisation is to be found in the life of the people, 
 the unartificial product of ages, and whose roots 
 have sunk deep into a soil naturally favourable to 
 its growth. In spite of the changes that life has 
 undergone, and the inconsiderate attempts that 
 have from time to time been made to give it a 
 new shape, all that is good and sound in it always 
 has been and still is intimately bound up with the
 
 138 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 monastery. It is the monastery, and the monas- 
 tery alone, that till now wages the people's war 
 against violence. In the days of serfdom it was 
 the peasant's one place of flight and refuge ; in 
 the later days of his comparative freedom it is his 
 one safeguard against lawless encroachment on 
 his rights. 
 
 It may be that Dostoevsky has somewhat 
 idealised monastic life, though he is by no means 
 blind to the shortcomings with which it is too 
 often disfigured, and has placed, side by side with 
 Zozime and Alexis, the monk Therapont, who, 
 himself the slave of low superstition, would bind 
 others with the like heavy chains of ignorance 
 and fear. But there is a buoyancy of faith in his 
 grasp and conception of life which gives us 
 courage to try and find order in disorder, robs 
 evil and misery of their power to crush men with 
 despair, enables us to confront with boldness the 
 " doubtful doom of humankind," and endows us 
 with sight to discern the spirituality of a universe 
 that would otherwise be voiceless and meaning- 
 less. His is the gospel of hope, the creed of 
 progress, that not only lends us encouragement to 
 advance, but points out the way we should go, 
 and puts into our hand the staff of religious faith 
 by which we may support and guide our steps.
 
 THEODORE MICHAELOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY. 139 
 
 It is based on the two great principles of obedience 
 and love, as represented by loyalty to the Tsar 
 and fidelity to the Church, the two principles 
 which, I believe, every unprejudiced observer of 
 Russia will agree with me must underlie any 
 scheme of reform that is to prove lasting and 
 profitable. It may be summed up in the stirring 
 words of Nekrasoff, of all modern poets the one 
 most in accord with the spirit that leavens the life 
 of the Russian people : 
 
 " We can no more live as we have lived, cheated by false 
 
 learning, 
 
 With dull weariness at soul and chilling cold at heart, 
 Without the glow of youth, the faith that alone gives life, 
 Without the sharp pains and the still sharper joys of love, 
 Without the tears of pity, and the cheerful laugh of 
 
 sympathy, 
 
 In the joyless pleasures and idleness of easy wealth. 
 No, friends, no ! We can no more live as we have lived. 
 The dark night of unbelief can never bring us rest or ease ; 
 Men are sick of false promises and jangling calumny; 
 Our dulled eyes yearn for the sun's illuming ray, 
 And our tired spirits hunger for the Divine ! "
 
 140 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 
 
 IT is now more than ten years since Count 
 Tolstoi, having already made good his claim to 
 rank highest among the first novelists of Europe, 
 formally announced his abandonment of the work 
 of artist, and the necessity which he felt of hence- 
 forth devoting himself to the study of the real 
 meaning and true purpose of life. We all know to 
 what harsh criticisms and ridicule he has been 
 exposed for thus renouncing his calling as artist 
 and busying himself with questions that lie beyond 
 the province of practical life, and whose solution, 
 supposing them to be soluble, can bring no im- 
 mediate profit. 
 
 But Count Tolstoi's critics apparently forget 
 that the novelist, who would be something more 
 than a writer of sensational stories, is, from the 
 nature of his art, bound to analyse the motives, to 
 sound the souls of the characters he creates, and 
 to discover the harmonising principle that under- 
 lies their most contradictory and impulsive acts.
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 14! 
 
 It was impossible, therefore, that, in the course of 
 his work, he should not be fronted with those 
 questions that from time to time flit across the 
 mind and arrest the attention of the most vacant 
 and careless amongst us. He could not help 
 asking himself, what is the law and aim of that 
 life, whose varying phases he has sketched in the 
 conduct and career of the different heroes of his 
 romances. Nor was he able to find escape from 
 these thoughts, as most of us do, in the daily 
 occupations of ordinary life, which have little or 
 nothing in common with the spiritual problem of 
 human existence ; but, as I have already sug- 
 gested, each return to his special work served only 
 to fix his mind more intently on a subject that 
 forms the very essence of his art. Any explana- 
 tion we can offer will, of course, prove unsatisfac- 
 tory to those who think the artist has no business 
 to meddle with philosophy, but the fact remains 
 the same. " I found it impossible," he tells us, " to 
 continue living as I had been without a thought 
 of the future ; for I felt too sharply and too 
 clearly that each of the many comforts I enjoyed 
 was purchased at the price of suffering and de- 
 privation to millions of my fellow-creatures." And 
 if this discontent and these doubts as to whether 
 the cravings of his higher nature could find their
 
 142 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 full satisfaction in the kind of life he was accus- 
 tomed to lead did not bring him to open and 
 declared revolt against the social creed of the 
 world till a comparatively late period in his career, 
 they had for a long time, and it may be uncon- 
 sciously, been working in his soul, and their origin 
 is to be found in the surrounding circumstances 
 of his youth and early manhood. Naturally dis- 
 posed to serious thought, there could be no bond 
 of sympathy between him and the light-minded 
 worldly circle in which he was brought up. Any 
 idea of moral obligation rising from our mutual 
 relations one to another, or any conception of the 
 duties the rich are under towards the poor, were 
 foreign to the code of those with whom he was 
 called on to mix, and a formal observance of the 
 rites of the Church, coupled with a punctilious 
 obedience to the rules of worldly propriety, had, 
 with them, usurped the place of religion. " With 
 all my soul," he writes, " I wished to be good, but 
 I was young, had all the passions of youth, and I 
 was alone, utterly alone, in my search after the 
 good. Each time I ventured to speak of what 
 constituted my heart's one desire, the wish to be- 
 come morally good, I encountered contemptuous 
 looks and mocking rejoinders." 
 
 When once this question, What is the meaning
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 143 
 
 of life, whence does it come, whither does it tend ? 
 has taken hold of the mind, it cannot be stifled or 
 put aside, but must be answered or bring us to 
 despair. So long as the puzzle of life, with all its 
 potential happiness and little achievement, its 
 fitful aspirations and frequent debasement, its 
 mysterious suggestions and halting response, pre- 
 sented itself to his mind with no greater force 
 or persistency than it does to the man who is con- 
 tent to live without thinking why he lives, Count 
 Tolstoi, as he himself confesses, could find pleasure 
 and even satisfaction in his poetical creations, and 
 could look on the world through the mirror of art. 
 But in proportion as each day he became more 
 and more convinced that his life was purposeless, 
 art in itself gradually lost its power to afford him 
 either enjoyment or profit. It was impossible for 
 him to go on giving to the world, as though it 
 were the whole message he had to deliver, what he 
 had already proved and found to be imperfect and 
 incomplete. 
 
 We have, then, no reason to reproach Count 
 Tolstoi, because, when the truth was forced upon 
 him that the life, which he, in common with 
 thousands of others, was leading, involves the 
 betrayal and degradation of our higher nature, he 
 set himself to the task of discovering a higher rule
 
 144 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 that should reveal the end and purpose of our life, 
 supply the motive force that can alone give har- 
 monious persistency to our acts, and, by discover- 
 ing to us what is man's real work in the world, 
 convert despair into hope, and unbelief into faith. 
 But we are told that the philosophy he preaches is 
 merely the crude theorising of an inexperienced 
 thinker, who imagines that he has discovered 
 America, but who has simply reproduced ideas of 
 mediaeval devotees, which, if carried into practice, 
 would destroy all social order, and, from their 
 fantastic Utopian character, are unworthy of serious 
 criticism. Of course, Count Tolstoi, whether 
 writing a novel or propounding a scheme of moral 
 philosophy, remains true to his artistic nature and 
 instincts. He will give a concrete rather than an 
 abstract shape to his speculations, and will appeal 
 to the heart rather than to the mind ; nor have we 
 any right to demand from him the formal and 
 passionless reasoning of a specialist. But, because 
 here and there we may detect a flaw in the treat- 
 ment and exposition of his moral creed, the real 
 worth of his work is not thereby touched, or the 
 authority it possesses as a whole impaired. He is 
 no professed teacher, whose chief anxiety is that 
 the faultless symmetry of the scheme in favour 
 with the particular school he belongs to should be
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 145 
 
 preserved; but he speaks as one who knows he 
 has a gospel to preach, and the unselfish earnest- 
 ness that inspires his every word compels the most 
 careless and indifferent to listen to his message. 
 We may dispute this or that point in his teaching, 
 but we cannot withhold our admiration and our 
 love from one who has dared to brave the scorn 
 of the world by acting up to the creed he asks us 
 to accept, and renouncing those superfluities with 
 which his rank and position had rendered him 
 familiar, has made himself one with his peasants, 
 and, like them, earns his bread by the sweat of 
 his brow and the labour of his hands. 
 
 Like a true artist, he deduced his principles, not 
 from any preconceived self-evolved theory, but 
 from the facts of life. In them, if anywhere, must 
 be found the answer to his doubts and question- 
 ings. From his own circle it need scarcely be 
 said he could learn nothing, since, as he has told 
 us, " in our world a man may live for years and 
 have no idea that he is living among Christians, 
 though all the while he may without reproach pro- 
 fess himself to be a Christian and a member of 
 the orthodox Church." He then tried to find 
 the truth he was seeking in intercourse with the 
 literary leaders and representatives of his country, 
 but could not accept their proposed solutions of
 
 146 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 his difficulties, because their practical inefficiency 
 was forced upon him by the fact that the lives of 
 those who advanced them were in contradiction to 
 their teaching. " These people were repugnant to 
 me," he complains, " and I perceived that their 
 teaching was a lie." The thoroughness of the 
 man, to which we may attribute the extraordinary 
 influence he exercises over the mind and life of 
 young Russia, is strikingly exhibited in this re- 
 jection of doctrines that are not, or cannot be, 
 applied to the daily conduct of men. He does 
 not believe that any moral or religious creed, 
 unless it be fully and literally carried out by those 
 who profess it, can possibly effect any good on 
 their own lives or on the world at large. 
 
 Disappointed in his attempt to find in these two 
 spheres of life any solid foundation for hope or 
 belief, he came to doubt the possibility of tracing 
 in the mixed condition of things the hand of a 
 Supreme Ruler, to see nothing but inexplicable 
 chaos and confusion in the process of the world, to 
 look upon man as the toy and plaything of an 
 unknowable and irresponsible Power, and more 
 than once he was tempted to solve the riddle of 
 existence by some sudden act of violence. " A 
 man can only consent to live," he writes in refer- 
 ence to these days of scepticism and despair, " so
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 147 
 
 long as he is drank with the desire of life, but 
 when he comes to himself is forced to confess that 
 it is all a cheat. The horror of my position con- 
 sisted in the knowledge that all I had done in the 
 past, all that I might do in the present, must be 
 foolishness, useless to myself, and profitless to 
 others." None of us can hope to escape these 
 accesses of despair, but it is only a weak nature 
 that can find satisfaction in negation, or acquiesce 
 in the futility of seeking a rational explanation 
 of life. Accordingly, Count Tolstoi studied the 
 theories of the principal thinkers of Europe, and 
 sought an answer to his doubts in science or in 
 speculative philosophy. The doctrines of individual 
 development and of human progress appeared 
 to him to give no final or adequate solution. So 
 long as growth continues, the hope of unravelling 
 the mystery of life may seem to be attainable, and 
 our work in the world may have a meaning. But 
 ere long the individual returns to the dust whence 
 he originally sprang, leaving nothing behind him, 
 and in the same way human states, societies, and 
 generations are fated to decay and death. The 
 crude dogmas of materialism and the vague assur- 
 ances of happiness to be found in human progress 
 equally failed to remove the difficulties he had to 
 meet. The one condemn us to the abandonment 
 L 2
 
 148 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 of all hope, since with our corporeal dissolution 
 will also come the end to all our doubts and 
 questions. The other hold out a vague promise 
 of their being cleared up somewhere and at some 
 future period, whereas life in the actual present is 
 a cruel mockery, unless the answer be given here 
 and now, and the meaning of life be made known 
 to us, whilst we still have the will to comprehend 
 its demands and the power to accomplish its 
 work. 
 
 Science not only furnished no answer, but 
 frankly avowed that none can be given, and that 
 man must rest contented in his ignorance. This, 
 however, Count Tolstoi could not do, and pur- 
 suing his inquiries, found partly in the critical 
 philosophy of Kant and partly in the psycho- 
 logical speculations of English thinkers, the 
 groundwork of a rational and consistent theory of 
 life. We have already seen how he felt that the 
 theory of individual development can explain life 
 only so long as growth continues. This caused 
 him to doubt the independence of reason from 
 organic processes, and consequently its com- 
 petency to decide questions concerning the end 
 and meaning of life. Reason, the product of life, 
 cannot embrace or explain life, its producer, and 
 of which it is an element and instrument. It can
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 149 
 
 only explain the manifestations of life so far as 
 they are limited by time and space. So long as 
 we confine ourselves to this restricted sphere, we 
 may appeal to reason, and the single answer it can 
 give is that life has no meaning. But the concep- 
 tion of the finite and the limited necessitates the 
 conception of the infinite and the unlimited. And 
 without this conception, not only is morality 
 impossible, as Kant teaches us, but without it 
 there can be no conscious rational life. It is the 
 foundation of life, life itself. Now, if the infinite 
 is undemonstrable by reason, and if at the same 
 time the idea of the infinite can alone give a 
 meaning to life, it follows that we must seek the 
 answer in that which is wider in its sphere of 
 action, namely, in life. 
 
 It will, of course, be understood that the solu- 
 tion to the problem, though to be sought in life, 
 is not to be learned in the life of every man or of 
 every class. We must look for it among those 
 whose actual practical life is based, it may be 
 consciously or it may be without knowledge, on 
 the necessary recognition of, and belief in, the 
 infinite. Nor need we be surprised or discouraged 
 if we find in these lives much ignorance and 
 superstition. It is the province of reason to 
 sweep away the rubbish that encrusts the pure
 
 150 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 seed we are in search of, the knowledge of the 
 end and meaning of life, the knowledge that 
 transforms life from a burden and evil into the 
 greatest blessing- and joy to man, the knowledge 
 that destroys within us the fear of death, and 
 gives us strength to support suffering, deprivation, 
 and disappointment. 
 
 In a famous passage, that has been quoted so 
 often that I need not cite it at length, Count 
 Tolstoi has related by what gradual steps, when 
 once convinced that the true solution to his 
 perplexities lay in life itself, he came to discover 
 which class of men, the cultured, the learned, or 
 the poor, lead the life that can alone satisfy the 
 complex requirements of our nature. He soon 
 perceived, though at first somewhat confusedly, 
 that the truth had been hidden from him, not 
 because he had reasoned falsely, but because his 
 life had been passed under conditions of luxury, 
 indolence, and pleasure, that rendered it impos- 
 sible for it to have any real worth or signification. 
 It was the same, in some cases still more flagrantly 
 so, with the lives led by those of his own class and 
 social position. And then it was that he began to 
 examine the life of the people, and, though he 
 found it to be tainted with more of what he 
 bluntly calls rubbish than the life of those above
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 151 
 
 them, there was this great difference between the 
 two : with the latter faith is an accidental quality, 
 an accessory that confers on their life an outward 
 propriety; whilst with the people it constitutes 
 the essence of their lives. Their life is the inter- 
 pretation of their faith. "In opposition to us, 
 who the wiser we become the less we understand 
 the meaning of life, and think to see some evil 
 mockery in the fate that condemns us to live, to 
 suffer, and to die, these people live, suffer even to 
 death, and die in peaceful resignation, not seldom 
 with an eager joy." As we read these lines, we 
 think of how, in " War and Peace," Pierre, during 
 his captivity, is brought into close relationship 
 with the peasant Karataeff, and learns from him 
 fully and finally the lesson of life ; how, in " Anna 
 Karenina," it is Theodore the peasant who brings 
 Levine to comprehend the way in which men 
 should live, and the real work they have to 
 accomplish in the world; and how, in "The 
 Death of Ivan Ilyitch," the peasant Gerasime 
 inspires the dying man with faith to find light and 
 bliss even in that death he had once awaited with 
 such dread and horror. 
 
 The motive and nature of this appeal to the 
 people, as the final authority, has been much 
 misunderstood. I presume there is no occasion
 
 152 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 to notice the adverse carpings of his Russian 
 critics, whose opinions are for the most part 
 influenced by strong party bias. But the criti- 
 cisms of a writer like M. Vogue" are, I need 
 scarcely say, of a quite different order. In his 
 most interesting studies on " Les dcrivains russes 
 contemporains," he represents Count Tolstoi as 
 "being earlier than any other of his fellow- 
 countrymen, and in a more marked degree than 
 any of them, at once the type and interpreter of 
 that phase of Russian thought which has received 
 the ugly name of Nihilism." Now, it may be 
 safely stated that, in the ordinary and proper 
 acceptation of the term, Count Tolstoi never was, 
 and never could be, a Nihilist. A real Nihilist is 
 a revolutionary Socialist, a man who denies, but 
 who has no misgivings as to the necessity of 
 denying, knows exactly what he is to do, and 
 finds satisfaction and peace in his denial. He is, 
 as Dostoevsky neatly expressed it, "a straight- 
 lined thinker," and never, even for a moment, 
 swerves from his track of hard unsympathising 
 unbelief. With Count Tolstoi it was the exact 
 contrary. He could not make denial the ultimate 
 stage of thought; he was from first to last haunted 
 with a keen consciousness of the necessity of 
 believing; his soul hungered for the truth, and,
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 153 
 
 though for a while the search seemed to him to be 
 vain and fruitless, he never completely lost the 
 hope of attaining it ; and the final call to faith in 
 God was the only possible outcome of these 
 earlier stages of doubt and despair. It is an 
 equally grave mistake on the part of M. Vogue, 
 when he somewhat petulantly rejects the religious 
 creed of Count Tolstoi because there is nothing 
 original in it, declares it to be a melange of fables 
 of the middle ages that have from time to time 
 been resuscitated among the Waldenses, the 
 Lollards, and the Anabaptists, and affirms that 
 the only fruit his teaching can bear is the 
 complete renunciation of our intellectual nature, 
 a dull resigned quietism, a fanatically ascetic 
 indifference to the dignity and pleasures of life. 
 We may readily admit its lack of originality, and 
 many will be inclined to regard this as rather a 
 recommendatory quality than a fault. We must 
 not forget that Count Tolstoi has emphatically 
 told us that what he believes in and what he 
 would teach us is " Christ's Christianity," that is, 
 Christianity, not as it has been cunningly toned 
 down in order to bring it into accord with the 
 lives and interests of worldly professors, but in 
 all its bald and naked simplicity as Christ him- 
 self originally taught it. Count Tolstoi, to the
 
 154 TH E MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 annoyance of many of his readers and critics, has 
 an irritating and uncomfortable way of supposing 
 that Christ understood what He meant to say, and 
 he accordingly interprets His precepts in their plain 
 literal sense. To him, as to Alexis Karamazoff, 
 the idea that he could go on living his former life 
 seemed strange and impossible. It had been 
 commanded him to "give all that thou hast, and 
 follow me ; " and Alexis said to himself, it will not 
 be enough if, instead of giving "all," I merely give 
 two roubles, or if, instead of "following me," I 
 content myself with attending a certain number of 
 church services. Nor do I suppose that, even if 
 the peculiar doctrines, of which Count Tolstoi has 
 made himself the most consistent exponent in our 
 days, can be traced no farther back than to the 
 Middle Ages, they must therefore necessarily be 
 idle and baseless fables. We cannot be justified 
 in condemning and rejecting them simply because 
 they found acceptance and credence in the so- 
 called Dark Ages. The only question we need 
 busy or concern ourselves with is, Are they true, 
 and do they form an essential constituent of the 
 faith we profess to hold as the guide and rule of 
 life ? And whatever error there may be in them, 
 they are at least free from the taint of asceticism. 
 As we have already seen, in Count Tolstoi's creed,
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 155 
 
 belief in the infinite is a necessity of life, without 
 which life is an impossibility and unthinkable. 
 Our individual earthly life is, therefore, perfect only 
 so far as it is brought into harmony with the law 
 of the infinite, and to fulfil that law constitutes 
 our highest bliss and greatest happiness. We 
 cannot, then, despise or neglect this life ; asceti- 
 cism is no longer a virtue, but a revolt against 
 nature, and the true pleasures of life, instead of 
 being shunned as hurtful and seductive, are to be 
 cultivated and enjoyed. But what most displeases 
 M. Vogue, is that Pierre Bezouchoff, the well-bred, 
 accomplished aristocrat, should find a teacher in 
 the rude Karataeff, and learn from a simple 
 peasant the lesson of life. " This Karataeff," he 
 writes, "endures all the sufferings of his harsh 
 captivity with the quiet and humble resignation of 
 a beast of burden ; addresses to him a few simple 
 words, chiefly composed of popular proverbs that 
 have little defined meaning and are inspired by a 
 tone of abnegation, brotherhood, and a peculiar 
 fanaticism ; one evening, when he has grown so 
 weak that he can march no farther, he is shot 
 down by a soldier of the convoy and left to die 
 beneath a snow-covered fir-tree, and he accepts 
 his fate in the same equable, uncomplaining spirit 
 as he would have met any other accident of life,
 
 156 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 like some sick dog, or, to speak more justly, like 
 some dumb brute." What, however, strikes the 
 cultured critic as so strange and unreal, will 
 appear to Count Tolstoi, and those best acquainted 
 with the high qualities of the peasant class in 
 Russia, to be very simple and quite natural. No 
 doubt, when sketching to us the character of 
 Karataeff, the novelist was thinking of the un- 
 lettered Soutaieff, one of those unguided but 
 honest gropers after truth who, dissatisfied with 
 the cold dogmatism of the official Church, and 
 tired of being held in leading-strings, dare to read 
 and think for themselves, and from whom, we 
 know, Count Tolstoi more than once sought 
 counsel and advice. The power which Soutaieff 
 obtained over those to whom he spoke, with that 
 simplicity which so offends the critic because it is 
 couched in the proverb language of the people, is 
 proved by the rapidity with which his creed has 
 spread throughout the villages of southern Russia. 
 Among his earliest converts was a younger brother, 
 who, sharing his opinions on the iniquity of war, 
 refused to serve in the army. For this offence 
 he was, of course, arrested and marched off, in 
 company with a number of recruits less scrupu- 
 lous than himself, to be tried before a court- 
 martial, But, before they reached their destination,
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 157 
 
 he had already converted many to his creed. To. 
 prevent his doing further mischief he was quickly 
 judged and sentenced to hard labour for life in 
 the mines of Siberia. And in his exile, without a 
 murmur at the harshness of his lot, he continued 
 his good work, and more than one convict has 
 had reason to bless the day when he was first 
 brought into contact with the peasant evangelist 
 of Tver. Karataeff is one of these. To some of 
 us he may be a puzzle and enigma, but we do 
 wrong to affect contempt for men who, through 
 long ages of oppression and neglect, have pre- 
 served a simpleness of mind that enables them to 
 endure all in the full assurance that it is God's 
 will, and that in due time he will bring all to a 
 foreordained end, the overthrow of evil and the 
 triumph of good. "Do not fret," he says to 
 Pierre on the first day of his imprisonment, " we 
 suffer for an hour, but we live for ever." In these 
 words we have summed up the whole faith of the 
 Russian peasant. 
 
 It is by this process, this appeal to the people, 
 that Count Tolstoi arrives at the formulation of a 
 series of moral laws that lie at the basis of all 
 his teaching and flow necessarily from his theory 
 of life. They are six in number, and are as 
 follows : Do not war. Do not judge. Do not
 
 158 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 commit fornication. Do not swear. Do not give 
 way to anger. Do not 6ppose with force the 
 evildoer. 
 
 With the exception of the first and sixth pre- 
 cepts, this moral code does not call for any special 
 remark. And, in reference to the first, I must 
 not dwell at any length on Count Tolstoi's sharp 
 denunciation of all war as a folly and a crime, lest 
 I should give a political colouring to lectures 
 which are designed to be of an exclusively literary 
 character. I would only observe that his righteous 
 protests against the hideous cruelties and wrongs 
 committed in the name of patriotism and honour 
 serve to bring out the fearless honesty of the man, 
 living, as he does, in a country where the military 
 element is dominant and rules with such crushing 
 power. His views are in thorough accordance 
 with those which the great orator, whose loss 
 England has so lately had occasion to deplore, 
 was wont to advocate, and rather than abandon 
 which he willingly sacrificed place and popularity. 
 And as with John Bright, so with Count Tolstoi ; 
 what chiefly moves his anger and indignation is 
 that the Church and her priests should bless and 
 sanction what it is their duty to curse and 
 denounce. "Make war," he exclaims, "but not 
 in the name of Christ, the Herald of Peace, but in
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 159 
 
 the name of the devil, who alone is the god of 
 war." Men of the world, I know, regard the 
 belief that wars will cease and be replaced by some 
 humaner and more rational mode of settling 
 international quarrels as a harmless but idle 
 fancy ; but it seems to me that we are justified 
 in holding fast to the hope that the law of 
 violence and brute force will ere long yield to a 
 gentle and juster law. No salutary reform has 
 ever been effected in the lives of men or nations, 
 which, when first proposed, was not hotly ridiculed 
 by .wise and practical men as foolish and im- 
 possible of realisation. He who, some seventy 
 years ago, had declared that, in this country at 
 least, duelling would soon cease to be considered 
 a sensible way of avenging an insult, would 
 certainly have been stigmatised as a madman and 
 a dreamer. 
 
 But of the six rules of life laid down for us by 
 Count Tolstoi, it is the sixth, forbidding us to 
 oppose by force the evildoer, that has most pro- 
 voked angry criticism and contemptuous laughter. 
 Nor is it difficult, if we so choose, to turn it into 
 ridicule. And to prove its absurdity, some of his 
 critics, who failed to see how intimately bound 
 up the law is with the fundamental principles of 
 morality, have been pleased to imagine extreme
 
 l6o THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 cases, as, for example, the defence against lawless 
 violence of one's own life, or the life of one near 
 and dear to us. Count Tolstoi, by way of reply, 
 in one of his shorter stories has condemned the 
 hero for shooting a burglar and thereby saving 
 his mother's life. It may, I think, with reason be 
 doubted whether it is wise to introduce ticklish 
 moral problems of this kind into a tale designed 
 for popular reading, but, if we are to discuss the 
 question, the only conclusion at which we can 
 arrive is that Count Tolstoi is morally right. A 
 moral law admits of no exception. Each of the 
 Ten Commandments is an absolute, unconditional 
 prohibition. The instant the moralist admits that 
 his law may sometimes be disregarded, the law 
 ceases to exist. We are then driven to search for 
 a principle higher than that on which the law is 
 based, and by whose guidance we may be able to 
 decide in what cases and under what circum- 
 stances disobedience to it is permitted. We must 
 not forget, moreover, that an act may be necessary, 
 and so far justifiable, without being consequently 
 moral. But it is exclusively the moral aspect of 
 the question which Count Tolstoi has in view 
 when he affirms the slayer of the burglar to have 
 committed a crime, or when he declares that to 
 oppose the evil-doer by means of violence is a sin.
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. l6l 
 
 It is not by trying to apply it to exceptional 
 cases that we shall discover the significance and 
 worth of this prohibitory law. We may acknow- 
 ledge that neither in their private nor in their 
 public relations to one another do men make it 
 their universal rule and guide. In this respect it 
 does but share the fate of all moral laws. At the 
 same time, experience teaches us that with each 
 generation its adoption as a principle that should 
 regulate our conduct becomes more general. Of 
 this we have proofs in the changes that have been 
 gradually effected in our system of education, in 
 our treatment of criminals, and in our bearing 
 towards those whose faith differs from our own. 
 We no longer convert with the sword, but by argu- 
 ment; we do not any more punish merely to 
 revenge the wrong done to society ; we induce 
 our children to take an intelligent interest in their 
 studies instead of making them look on the school- 
 room as a place of torture. Reason reigns where 
 once force and violence tyrannised, and in our 
 age more than ever, to quote the words of Auguste 
 Comte, " Les idees gouvernent et bouleversent le 
 monde." 
 
 The views of Count Tolstoi on science and art, 
 which have aroused the hostility of professed 
 specialists to the same extent as his religious 
 M
 
 1 62 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 opinions have shocked those who plume them- 
 selves on their orthodoxy, are by no means so 
 sweeping and revolutionary as they are frequently 
 represented to be. They are the logical conse- 
 quence of his theological and social creed. Even 
 if we had never read a line of his elaborate essay 
 on national education, we should instinctively be 
 inclined to suspect that the accusation so freely 
 brought against him by some of his critics, that he 
 is opposed to the study and spread of science, 
 must be founded on a gross misconception. There 
 is a manifest contradiction of ideas, amounting to 
 absurdity, in the notion that Count Tolstoi, him- 
 self one of the most highly cultured and widely 
 read men of his country, should at the same time 
 be the apologist for ignorance, the sworn foe of 
 knowledge. It is not against science that he 
 directs his attack, but against the false application 
 of science. "The sphere of general human 
 knowledge," he writes, " is all but boundless, and, 
 before a man sets to study a thing, he must assure 
 himself that the subject he has chosen is im- 
 portant for him, and of more importance than all 
 the subjects of knowledge with which he is 
 surrounded, and he must determine why he has 
 selected this in preference to the others." In 
 these words he protests against acquiring know-
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 163 
 
 ledge for mere knowledge sake, and exalts the use 
 of knowledge above knowledge in itself. "The 
 thinker and the artist," he continues, " should not 
 sit quietly on some Olympian height, but they 
 must suffer together with their fellow creatures, if 
 they would find for themselves or others escape 
 from or consolation in suffering. Science and art 
 will only then be of use to the people when, living 
 among the people and like the people, the thinker 
 and artist, claiming neither rights nor privileges, 
 shall make them sharers in their learning and 
 art." 
 
 Nor are these words mere commonplace as they 
 may, perhaps, seem to be to the English reader. 
 To understand them fully we must bear in mind 
 the actual condition and wants of the Russian 
 people. Even in the cities and larger towns, till 
 within a very recent period, and only since Count 
 Tolstoi and the few who belong to what is called 
 the Tolstoi school began to write, little or nothing 
 has been done to make the masses acquainted 
 with the wonders of modern science, or to apply 
 its discoveries to the bettering and improvement 
 of their lot. The homes of the poor are unhealthy 
 and ill-drained ; amusements of a rational kind do 
 not exist for them ; workmen's clubs are still a 
 thing unknown ; the theatres are virtually closed
 
 164 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 to all save the middle and upper classes ; and the 
 public-house is the only place of recreation and 
 enjoyment open to the moujik. 
 
 And if it be true, as we so often hear, that the 
 people are unfitted through their ignorance and 
 hereditary tastes to take pleasure in anything 
 but vulgar and noisy shows, and that Ivan's 
 highest idea of enjoyment is to get dead drunk, 
 this only proves the incompleteness and in- 
 efficiency of the system of national education 
 actually in force. As Count Tolstoi has pointed 
 out in the essay I have already alluded to, all are 
 agreed that the people ought to be taught; but the 
 real question we have to decide is, what we should 
 teach them. This involves the further question, 
 who is to determine what the people shall be 
 taught ? In practice we know how this second 
 question is answered. Bureaucratic administrators 
 are too fond of regarding the people as a kind of 
 tabula rasa, and accordingly draw up an elaborate 
 programme of studies, which they proceed to apply 
 indiscriminately to all schools for the children of 
 peasants, in the belief that their scheme will not 
 only bear good fruit, but will be gratefully and 
 eagerly adopted. But, in reality, the people have 
 already their religion, their language, and even 
 their favourite literature, and any scheme that is
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 165 
 
 to prove useful or acceptable must be founded on 
 their culture and be in harmony with their religious 
 ideas. We have not to create ; we have only to 
 encourage and aid the growth and development of 
 what already exists. It is in consequence of the 
 neglect of these elementary principles that so little 
 success has hitherto attended the well-meant, but 
 ill-organised, attempts that have been made to 
 raise the existing low level of popular education in 
 Russia. The people have no need to be told what 
 they want, and if we wish the education of the 
 people to become a reality and not simply a formal 
 paper-scheme, if we wish to overcome their 
 stubborn indifference to learning and instruction, 
 which is the result of a suspicious fear that, by 
 forcing on them a system of our own, we are 
 pursuing some selfish end rather than seeking their 
 good, we must let them conduct their schools 
 after their own ideas, with as little interference 
 as possible on our part, and in accordance with 
 the traditions and necessities of the peasant 
 class. 
 
 Owing to the peculiar conditions of Russian life, 
 the instruction given to women and the social 
 position they occupy have in that country more 
 than elsewhere a close connexion with, and an 
 immediate bearing on, the education and well-
 
 l66 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 being of the peasantry. It is, therefore, the 
 more strange that Count Tolstoi persistently 
 ignores the fact that the welfare of the peasantry 
 is bound up with the recognition of the natural 
 rights of women, and has ranked himself among 
 the advocates of the complete subordination of the 
 woman to man. Saint Paul himself is not more 
 emphatic in restricting her to the narrowest sphere 
 of action, and he would seem to think that the 
 province of a woman's duty is confined to waiting 
 on her husband, bearing children, and minding 
 the kitchen. In support of an opinion which, I 
 need scarcely say, is contradictory to past ex- 
 perience and discordant with the future, Count 
 Tolstoi appeals to the Bible, and quotes the curse 
 pronounced on the human race after the fall, by 
 which man is condemned to eat his bread in the 
 sweat of his brow, and woman to bring forth 
 children in sorrow. But Count Tolstoi forgets 
 that, though it be impossible for us to free our- 
 selves entirely from the primal curse, that is, in 
 other words, the law of nature, it is within our 
 power to mitigate its force, and that by failing to 
 do so we declare ourselves to be passive fatalists 
 and idly forego the exercise of the will with which 
 nature has endowed us. By the adoption of his 
 theory, which is fundamentally at variance with
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 167 
 
 his religious creed, we bring the women of Russia 
 back to the old days, when, to cite the words of 
 Belinsky, " men, in conditions and classes of 
 Russian society, occupied the first rank, but we 
 cannot say that women occupied the second or 
 even an inferior rank, since, to tell the truth, they 
 in reality occupied no rank at all." Of the 
 humiliations and degradation to which, in those 
 evil days, women were subjected, Ostrovsky has 
 given a terrible but unexaggerated picture in his 
 different dramas. Besides, whoever else may 
 claim with consistency to plead for the denial to 
 his countrywomen of the simplest and most 
 elementary right, the right to be educated, Count 
 Tolstoi has completely put himself out of court. 
 If, in the case of the peasantry, he argues that the 
 education of their children, since they themselves 
 are directly interested in it, should be left to their 
 own discretion and management, instead of being 
 arbitrarily directed by a body of official tchinov- 
 niks, the same argument applies with equal force 
 to women. We may be quite sure, if Russian 
 women demand higher instruction than has hither- 
 to been given them, and crowd the few institutions 
 where it can be had, it is because they feel the 
 urgent necessity of it, and are the best judges of 
 what they want. Nor is there any reasonable fear
 
 1 68 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 of their being unsexed by having free play granted 
 to their natural faculties. 
 
 The position taken up by Count Tolstoi on this 
 question is the more to be regretted when we 
 recollect the extraordinary difficulties with which 
 the promoters of Medical Courses and Higher 
 Classes for the instruction of women have had to 
 contend. The sneers he indulges in at the 
 expense of women, who, as he alleges, shirk the 
 duties of wives and mothers that they may occupy 
 themselves with nerve phenomena and differentials, 
 must not blind us to the good which these institu- 
 tions have already during the short time of their 
 existence effected. The number of scholars 
 attending the Higher Classes at St. Petersburg in 
 1885, the year from which the admission of new 
 pupils has been forbidden, amounted to about 
 1,100, and of these 85 per cent, finished the full 
 course, extending over four years, and passed the 
 final examination. The Medical Courses in St. 
 Petersburg alone turn out yearly from forty to 
 fifty competent and well-qualified practitioners. 
 In proof of the sympathy with which these courses 
 are regarded by the Russian public, I may mention 
 that when, six years ago, it was proposed to close 
 them on the plea that the Government had not 
 sufficient means to support them, subscriptions
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 169 
 
 amounting to more than five times the sum 
 required were without any difficulty raised, a 
 merchant at Moscow giving not less than 100,000 
 roubles, and seven lady donors of the same city 
 contributing 50,000 roubles each. 
 
 It is in the remoter provinces of Russia that the 
 majority of these women, on quitting the classes, 
 have proved what influence their studies have had 
 on their character and conception of life. It 
 should also be remembered at what a cost in a 
 large number of cases these studies were pursued. 
 Many came from enormous distances to Moscow 
 or St. Petersburg, the only cities where the classes 
 exist, some even making the long journey on foot; 
 and in order to find the necessary fees devoted 
 the few free evening hours they had to work as 
 teachers, copyists, or translators. Nor was there 
 any brilliant future awaiting them, to tempt them 
 to make such sacrifices or to endure these priva- 
 tions. Prompted by the single unselfish desire to 
 come to the help of the ignorant and necessitous, 
 they voluntarily accompanied the troops in the 
 late war with Turkey and served as sisters of 
 mercy on the field and in the hospitals ; accepted 
 ill-paid places as doctors in what the Russians 
 aptly call the " deaf and dumb " districts of the 
 empire, where the want of experienced practi-
 
 1 70 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 tioners is most severely felt, and where the sick, 
 for lack of attendance, are left to die like flies ; or 
 occupied themselves as school teachers in villages, 
 where, but for them, the peasantry must have 
 remained uninstructed and uncared for. And if 
 the tone of home life, as most undoubtedly is the 
 case, in those classes of society whence Ostrovsky 
 liked to take his characters, has lost not a little of 
 the savageness and indelicacy that characterised it 
 up to a period within the memory of us all, the 
 change in the relation between man and wife, 
 parents and children, is largely due to the healthy 
 influence exercised on their circle by women who 
 have received a broader culture and wider 
 knowledge than could be obtained in the old days, 
 when the rude patriarchal system of family life 
 prevailed. 
 
 We have now gone through the main points of 
 Count Tolstoi's religious and social creed. Many 
 may not be disposed to accept it in its every 
 detail, or exactly in the shape in which it has been 
 presented to us ; but there are few, I think, who 
 will care to dispute its stimulating influence or its 
 coherency with the best ideas and spirit of our 
 age. He would stir us from the cowardly fear of 
 being true to ourselves, and wean us from the 
 passive adoption of certain rules of life, by which
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEV1TCH TOLSTOI. I?! 
 
 we are content to regulate our conduct without 
 once inquiring whether they are good or bad, 
 simply because they are acknowledged by the 
 generality of men, and their non-observance might 
 expose us to the suspicion of being unpractical 
 and eccentric. To this spiritual lethargy he traces 
 the emptiness of the life we lead, the insincerity 
 of our beliefs, the want of a common active tie 
 that shall bind man to man and make the interests 
 of each the interests of all. He believes, and 
 would have us believe, in man's capacity to realise 
 the ideal of human nature. That ideal is with 
 Count Tolstoi no idle phrase, but lies within our 
 grasp, and he himself, before holding it up as the 
 end to which we should aim, has proved and 
 tested its worth. The obligation under which 
 each of us lies to take an active share in the 
 common battle of life and in the common struggle 
 with nature; simplicity and truthfulness in our 
 speech and acts ; an intelligent consistency and 
 moderation in the satisfaction of our wants and 
 desires; a free, unrestrained, brotherly bond of 
 sympathy and interest between individuals and 
 between the different classes of society, this 
 sums up the formula of his ideal. 
 
 I have said that Count Tolstoi's teaching is in 
 accord with the tendencies and ideas of the age in
 
 172 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 which we live. It is the product of the nineteenth 
 century. Its fundamental principle is the equality 
 of all in presence of the one universal law : labour 
 and eat. This principle is the outcome and 
 higher application of the democratic spirit that 
 underlies every branch and phase of our modern 
 life. But whilst the democratic idea of our days is 
 social and utilitarian, that of Count Tolstoi's creed 
 is individual and ethical. Instead of regarding 
 work as a necessary condition of social happiness 
 and general progress, he teaches us that only by 
 work and by physical labour can man attain the 
 full development of his nature, and secure his own 
 personal happiness. The union between the 
 happiness of mankind as a whole and the happi- 
 ness of man as an individual is thus established, 
 and the attainment of the one guarantees the 
 attainment of the other. 
 
 In attempting to lay before you a brief summary 
 of Count Tolstoi's moral and social philosophy, I 
 have been obliged to repeat much of what I said 
 in a course of lectures I had the privilege of 
 delivering last year at the Royal Institution. 
 Now, as then, I can only conclude by expressing 
 a hope that, however imperfectly I may have 
 acquitted myself of the task, I have not altogether 
 failed to inspire you with something of that grate-
 
 COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH TOLSTOI. 173 
 
 ful love I feel for a writer from whom I have 
 learned so much, and to whom I must ever re- 
 main indebted for having dispelled more than one 
 disquieting doubt, and made the end and meaning 
 of our human lives clear, rational, intelligible. In 
 one of his essays, the late Matthew Arnold assured 
 us that before long the English would all be 
 studying Russian that they might read Tolstoi. 
 Should any of those whom I am addressing be 
 tempted to do so from what they have heard to- 
 day, I am convinced they will have no reason to 
 regret the labour or trouble they may have to 
 encounter in mastering the difficulties of the 
 Russian language.
 
 174 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 VSEVOLOD GARSCHINE AND VLADIMIR KOROLENKO. 
 
 THE writers of whom I have had occasion to 
 speak in the preceding lectures, have all acquired 
 a European celebrity, but the names of M. 
 Garschine and M". Korolenko are, I imagine, 
 scarcely known beyond the limits of their own 
 country. In one of his letters, Tourgenieff speaks 
 of Garschine in the following terms: "Of all our 
 young writers, he is the one that gives most promise 
 of a brilliant future. He has all the qualities of 
 real genius ; an artistic temperament, a keen and 
 clear observation of human nature and individual 
 character, an accurate sense of proportion, sim- 
 plicity, and beauty of style, and, as a result of all 
 this, a rare and striking originality." In judging 
 how far the promises of Tourgenieff discerned in 
 the young writer, just then beginning his literary 
 career, were fulfilled, we must, of course, bear in 
 mind the haunting fear of a recurrence of the most 
 terrible of all maladies that embittered his whole 
 life, and the early age at which he died. Admira.-
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 175 
 
 tion at what he achieved, rather than disappoint- 
 ment that he did not accomplish more, will then 
 be the feeling with which we close our study of 
 the two small volumes containing all that he ever 
 wrote. 
 
 Vsevolod Michaelovitch Garschine was born, ' 
 February 2, 1855, on the estate of his grandmother, 
 in the government of Ekaterinoslaff. The details 
 that have been made public concerning his earlier 
 years are few and scanty. His childhood, from 
 causes into which it is not necessary to enter, was 
 an extremely unhappy one, and the lasting im- 
 pressions left on his mind by the rough treatment 
 he was exposed to will explain certain peculiarities 
 in his character and views of life. In his ninth 
 year he was sent up to St. Petersburg, and placed 
 at one of the public schools. As a youth he was 
 shy and reserved, exhibited little liking for the 
 ordinary games and amusements of boyhood, was 
 passionately fond of reading, and, as one who 
 knew him well has told us, " lived in a world of 
 his own." It was whilst at school he exhibited the 
 first signs of abnormal nervous excitability, which, 
 before long, developed into pronounced mental 
 derangement, and rendered it necessary to place 
 him under the care of Dr. Frei, the director of a 
 private asylum. Towards the end of 1873, his
 
 176 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 health was sufficiently re-established to justify his 
 removal, and, having passed the final gymnasium 
 examination, he entered the Mining Corps. There 
 would seem to have been no particular reason for 
 his choosing this establishment, since he had 
 already resolved to adopt the literary calling, and 
 during his stay there busied himself but little with 
 the specially technical subjects included in the 
 programme of studies. One of his fellow students, 
 M. Maliescheff, relates how Garschine was the 
 originator and founder of the so-called " Friday 
 Evenings," at which literary papers were read and 
 discussed, and questions relating to art and life 
 were debated, at times with all the warmth and 
 passion natural to youthful disputants. It was at 
 one of these meetings that he read his story, " Four 
 Days," which, however, was not published till 1878, 
 and with which, though he had previously written 
 for a St. Petersburg paper a short series of criticisms 
 on art, his career as a novelist really commences. 
 
 But those were troublous days. To a man of 
 Garschine's eager sensitiveness it was impossible to 
 remain a passive spectator of the cruelties then 
 being enacted in Bulgaria, and no sooner were the 
 first Russian troops called to arms to avenge the 
 sufferings of their Slav brethren, than he threw up 
 his mining studies and enlisted as a volunteer.
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 177 
 
 " Many thanks," he writes in a letter to a friend, 
 " for your scientific news, but, to tell you the 
 truth, Teploff's electrophore and the coalition of 
 chemical and physical atoms interest me far less 
 than the terrible fact that the Turks have massa- 
 cred thirty thousand defenceless old men, women, 
 and children. A plague on all your learned 
 societies, if with all their grand scientific theories 
 they are unable to render the accomplishment of 
 such horrors an impossibility. If you only knew 
 how my heart boils within me ! If I am not ill 
 again this summer it will be a miracle ! " His 
 example was followed by more than one of his 
 fellow-students, and together with them he set 
 out, May i, 1877, to join the active army at 
 Kiescheneff. 
 
 What he saw and experienced during that 
 eventful campaign, in which, it may be remarked, 
 he behaved with more than creditable bravery, 
 forms the subject of his first two stories, "Four 
 Days " and " Memoirs of a Private Soldier." The 
 daily horrors he witnessed, the sight of wounded 
 men dying in slow agony, the cries and fear oi 
 flying villagers leaving their homes behind them a 
 prey to flames, fertile fields transformed into 
 savage wastes, the foul crimes committed by 
 a rude soldiery drunk with victory, all this
 
 178 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 produced on him an enduring sense of the sin of 
 war, and led him in his different tales to plead 
 the cause of peace with a simple earnestness that 
 speaks the strength and sincerity of his convic- 
 tions. In a letter to M. Maliescheff he writes : 
 " Some of the corpses we saw were truly horrible : 
 one Turk, instead of being buried, had been en- 
 veloped in straw and burned by the Cossacks, 
 and there lay a black charred mass of something 
 that bore in its outlines a faint resemblance to a 
 human body. In many places the clefts were 
 spotted with bits of red flesh. Here, a dissevered 
 skull in which the white pearly teeth stood out 
 clearly on a black ground ; there, a heap of bones 
 let loose from the shattered broken joints." In 
 an engagement near Ayaslar he was severely 
 wounded and was sent home. The two or three 
 years he now spent partly at Kharkoff and partly 
 at St. Petersburg were, perhaps, the happiest of his 
 life. He quickly established his claim to rank 
 high among the contemporary novelists of Russia ; 
 he made acquaintance, which, in many cases, 
 ripened into close intimacy, with the leading 
 artists and writers of his country ; and those 
 brought into communication with him remarked 
 that he now began to acquire an evenness and 
 cheerfulness of temperament that seemed to indi-
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 179 
 
 cate a complete and permanent recovery of health. 
 But these hopes were destined soon to be frus- 
 trated. Before long his malady returned, and 
 once more his friends were obliged to place him 
 under restraint. The accesses of folly alternated 
 with short intervals of undisturbed intelligence, 
 and these snatches of fitful consciousness were 
 even fuller of torture and agony than the periods 
 of raving passionate frenzy. For with them came 
 back the clear and distinct recollection of all the 
 wild words he had uttered and all the senseless 
 acts he had committed in his madness. And 
 when, after two years' confinement, he was allowed 
 to quit the asylum, he wrote his story, " The Red 
 Flower," in which he has recorded all that he 
 thought, felt, and fancied during those long 
 months of mental derangement. " I still live, 
 at least, I suppose, it is the only expression I can 
 use," he writes in a letter to M. Maliescheff; 
 " though, to speak more truly, I no longer live. 
 My bodily organs still act and perform their 
 ordinary functions ; I eat, I sleep, I get up, and 
 then I eat and sleep again. As to thinking, I 
 scarcely think at all, and, it must be confessed, it 
 is better not to think, for any train of thought into 
 which I am led is torturing and revolting. There 
 are those who imagine that a man with a diseased 
 
 N 2
 
 l8o THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 brain does not know what he is doing ; but my 
 own experience has taught me it is not so. At 
 any rate, what we call conscience torments me for 
 all I did in madness as sharply as it ever could 
 have tortured me had I never been mad." 
 
 I do not envy the man who can read the story 
 of the last seven years of Garschine's life and 
 remain untouched. A deep melancholy, which 
 could be cast off only at rare intervals to return 
 with increased force, fell upon him and poisoned 
 his every pleasure and employment. " A heavy 
 stone," to quote the words of an unfinished tale 
 that has never been published, " lay upon his 
 heart ; the heart could not bear its weight, but 
 broke." In 1883 he married, but a true wife's 
 devotion and loving care had no power to rouse 
 him from his despair, or dispel the constant rack- 
 ing pain with which his aching head throbbed and 
 beat. For hours he would sit, silent and motion- 
 less, and, in reply to any offer of help, would raise 
 his hand to his head, as if imploring relief of some 
 ill he was unable to define or explain. He gra- 
 dually lost all -hope, all faith. He began to hear 
 mysterious sounds and voices, and would hurriedly 
 run from room to room to escape the pursuing 
 phantoms of a sick brain. And then came the 
 end. Early one March morning, in 1888, he
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. l8l 
 
 crept unobserved from his room, rushed to the 
 landing of the staircase leading down into the hall, 
 and, throwing himself over the balustrade, was 
 found lying on the stone floor, with one of his 
 legs broken and his face terribly disfigured. He 
 was immediately removed to the neighbouring 
 hospital in a state of semi-consciousness. As he 
 was being placed in the carriage that was to con- 
 vey him there, he pressed his hand to his heart, 
 and said : " Why trouble about the leg ? the 
 pain is here " ; and when his friends carried him 
 into the room assigned him and laid him gently 
 on the bed, he looked round with a smile, and 
 muttered, " Thank God ! " as if glad to have 
 reached the last station in his short, sad life- 
 journey. With these words, his head sank back 
 on the pillow, he feebly raised his hand and tried 
 to make the sign of the Cross on his breast, gave a 
 faint sigh, and all was over. The " heavy stone," 
 of which he so often complained, had been taken 
 away, and ceased to weigh upon his heart. 
 
 In choosing the form of fiction as the vehicle 
 for expressing his ideas and revealing the working 
 of his mind, not only in its normal condition, but 
 still oftener in its uncontrolled aberrations, Gars- 
 chine has afforded a direct proof of his rare sensi- 
 tivenesss to the impressions of life. He did not
 
 1 82 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 possess the patience or self-command necessary to 
 set forth any of the manifestations of life circum- 
 stantially and in detail. He felt too strongly to 
 attempt this, and was eager to free himself as 
 quickly as possible from the all-absorbing impres- 
 sion produced upon him by the incident or train 
 of thought he happened to be describing. The 
 need of relief from this torturing sensibility to 
 the facts of life was all the stronger, because he 
 never could separate the individual fact from the 
 general order of life, and, in the singular event, he 
 invariably recognised the revelation of the uni- 
 versal law. For this reason, in each of his tales, 
 however short, he collects, compares, and examines 
 the whole sum of phenomena connected with or 
 flowing from the fact of life that first and originally 
 engaged his thoughts. 
 
 Of this we have a striking example in the 
 earliest of his stories, " Four Days." Nothing 
 can be more ordinary, more commonplace, than 
 the incident that forms the subject of the whole 
 tale. The hero in a skirmish kills a Turk, and 
 is himself severely wounded, and left to lie four 
 whole days on the field, close to the corpse of the 
 man he had slain. But, by tracing and analysing 
 in their minutest details the trains of thought that 
 succeed each other in the fevered brain of the
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 183 
 
 wounded man, the novelist, after his wont, makes 
 the accidental fact serve as a background to the 
 wider moral question that underlies it. The fate 
 of Ivanoff, which, after all, has been the fate of a 
 hundred Ivanoffs in every military campaign, thus 
 receives its true significance, which, from its com- 
 monness, we are likely to overlook, and it reveals, 
 in -all their nakedness, the false pretences and 
 hypocrisies of our conventional morality. " Be- 
 fore me lies the man I slew. And why did I kill 
 him ? He lies there, dead, all stained and dirtied 
 with blood. Why did a cruel fate drive him 
 hither ? Who is he ? Perchance he, too, like 
 myself, has an aged mother. Long will she sit in 
 the evenings by the door of her rude mud-hut, 
 peering into the distant North, awaiting the return 
 of her darling son, her help and bread-winner. 
 And I ? It will be the same with me. Willingly 
 would I change places with him. He is happy : 
 he hears nothing, feels no pain from wounds, no 
 death-agony, no thirst. The bayonet-thrust went 
 home straight to his heart. Through his uniform I 
 see a huge black gash, and all around it clotted blood . 
 And that is my work ! " And then the thoughts 
 of the abandoned soldier are fixed for a while on 
 his own sufferings and the hopeless horror of his 
 position, but soon they get back to their former
 
 184 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 current, and once more he is confronted with a 
 sense of .the criminal folly he had been guilty of in 
 spite of the grand pretentious part he had aped to 
 play. " All my thoughts are of him, and I can 
 think of nothing else. Is it possible that I aban- 
 doned all that was dear and near to me, marched 
 sore-foot for thousands of miles, endured cold, 
 hunger, burning heat, and am now lying here in 
 hideous torment, only that this wretched creature 
 might cease to live ? And, pray, what service 
 have I rendered to military glory, or to the sacred 
 cause, beyond this murder ? Murder ! And who, 
 then, is the murderer? Why, I myself. When I took 
 it into my head to serve in the army as a volunteer, 
 neither my mother nor Masha tried to dissuade me, 
 though they often wept at my decision. Blinded 
 with my fantastic idea, I could not see their tears, 
 I did not understand, now I understand too well, 
 what a wrong I was doing to those who should 
 have been dearer to me than all the world. But 
 what good can these thoughts bring me now ? 
 We never can redeem the past. And yet I might 
 have known this from the strange coldness with 
 which most of my acquaintances received the 
 news of my intentions. Poor fellow, he was 
 always a little queer, you know, else he would 
 never go and meddle with affairs that do not
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 185 
 
 concern him ! How could they talk like that, in 
 flat contradiction to their own ideas of heroism, 
 love for one's country, and other like high virtues ? 
 For, of course, in their eyes I could not be other 
 than the representative of these glorious qualities. 
 And, nevertheless, I was a little daft, you know. 
 And so I arrive at Kiescheneff. I don my knap- 
 s'ack and all the other military accessories. And 
 I march with thousands, of whom very few are, 
 like myself, serving of their own good will. They 
 would gladly have remained in their homes, if 
 they had only been allowed. But they trudge on, 
 just as we, volunteers, trudge on ; they march and 
 march thousands of miles, and fight, as well as we 
 do, and even better. They do their duty without 
 a murmur, though there is scarcely one among 
 them all who would not throw it all up and re- 
 turn home, if only they had their own free 
 way." 
 
 There is very little to cheer, nothing to amuse, in 
 the tales of M. Garschine. They are all coloured 
 with a melancholy, the reflex of his own sad life. 
 Thus we cannot help noting that all his stories, 
 not only his narratives of war, in which there 
 would be nothing surprising, end sadly. At times 
 he introduces us into spheres of unmitigated 
 misery and sin, circles of life that we think right
 
 1 86 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and proper to ignore, and in speaking of which it 
 certainly requires the greatest delicacy on the 
 part of a writer to prevent his pictures of the real 
 world becoming hurtful and revolting to the moral 
 sense. Take, for example, the second of his tales, 
 " A Catastrophe." The subject is not a pleasing 
 one ; it is nothing less than the confessions of a 
 fallen woman. And yet, from beginning to end 
 there is not a false note struck. The story is un- 
 canny, but not unclean. It is one of those few 
 stories that make us think. We read and are 
 made to doubt whether there must not be some- 
 thing wrong in a civilisation that calls itself Chris- 
 tian, and still has no power to extirpate some at 
 least of those glaring vices that grow up and 
 flourish in its very midst. What a picture of 
 despair, hopeless, brutish submission to her so- 
 called fate, is presented in the savage, defiant 
 apology Nadejida Nicholaevna makes for keeping 
 to and not caring, even were a chance offered her, 
 to change her life of vice and degradation. "How 
 dull and stupid all this thinking is ! Of course, it 
 is all the same, seeing I cannot change my life. 
 And why cannot I change it ? Simply because I 
 do not wish. I have taken to this business, and 
 I know the road I have to go. I remember once 
 seeing a caricature in "Strekoza," a comic journal
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 187 
 
 which a friend of mine often brought me, espe- 
 cially when there was anything in it unusually 
 droll, the portrait of a pretty little girl playing 
 with a doll, and around her two groups of figures 
 representing the two futures open before her. The 
 first group was composed of a little school-girl, a 
 modest young maiden, the mother of a family, 
 and, lastly, an old woman, but so venerable- 
 looking ! In the second group, you saw, first, a girl 
 coming out of a shop with a basket on her arm, 
 then there was, myself, and again, myself, and 
 once more, myself. The first I was, just what 
 I am now; the second, I, a poor ragged street- 
 sweeper ; and the third, I, a repulsive, hideous old 
 hag. But I shall never come to that ! Two or 
 three years more, if I can only support the life, 
 and then, to the cemetery. There can be no 
 other end ; but I am not frightened. . . . And 
 why should I think of my future, when I already 
 know too well what it will be ? Why think of my 
 past, when there is nothing in that past to make 
 me regret that I cannot exchange my actual life 
 for it ? That is true. ... I must stay at my post 
 and die. But better not to try and think ! I only 
 know that I am drunk, and that I have no clear 
 idea of anything. My head is distracted with 
 strange, confused thoughts, and I mix up in my
 
 1 88 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 mind the dirty saloon where I shall dance to-night 
 and the cell in the lock-up, to get a comfortable 
 night's shelter in which you must be drunk. - My 
 temples throb, my ears tingle, my head is racked 
 with pain, and I feel as if I were being carried 
 down some rushing stream, I know not whither. 
 I try to stop myself, to hold on by anything, by a 
 mere straw ; but, alas ! there is not even a straw 
 by whose help I can keep myself from floating 
 down." 
 
 As we might expect from its theme, " The Red 
 Flower " is, of all these tales, the one that leaves 
 the strongest and the weirdest impression on the 
 mind of the reader. It is distinct from and 
 unlike anything else in Russian literature. For it 
 is not, as Gogol's masterpiece, "The Diary of a 
 Madman," a fictitious record of the wild ravings 
 in which the practised student of human nature 
 imagines a madman to indulge, but in it we have 
 the carefully gathered up reminiscences of the 
 strange convulsions of a diseased mind, presented 
 to us, in a form free from all affectations of style, 
 by the very man who had thought the thoughts 
 and felt the feelings he describes. 
 
 The novelist sharply distinguishes two periods 
 in his illness. The first is characterised by the 
 absence of any settled order in his delirious
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. .189 
 
 fancies, and one wild impulse of mad raving is 
 followed by another without there being any 
 apparent connexion between the trains of ideas. 
 In the second period there is a fixed series of 
 ideas, with which the acts of the madman are 
 closely connected, they being the motors of his 
 activity. On the first day after his admission into 
 the asylum, he had noticed in the little garden, on 
 to which the windows of his room looked, two 
 poppies of a rare kind, and whose bright colour 
 particularly attracted his attention. Each day his 
 confused ideas became more and more concen- 
 trated on these poppies, till at length he conceived 
 the bizarre idea that their flowers contained in 
 themselves the root and essence of all evil, and 
 that, could he but destroy them, he would thereby 
 secure the full and final triumph of good over ill. 
 Henceforth the thoughts of the sick man were 
 exclusively directed to the attainment of this end. 
 The accuracy with which he notes each phase 
 in his malady is, as we are reminded by Dr. 
 Siekkorsky, who speaks with the authority of one 
 well practised in the treatment of mental diseases, 
 best seen in the description he gives of the 
 coexistence of two consciousnesses, the normal 
 and the pathological. They exist together, but 
 the former is powerless to gain, or even to
 
 190 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 struggle for, supremacy. " He knew," writes the 
 novelist, " that he was in a mad asylum ; he also 
 knew that he was ill. Sometimes, as on the first 
 night, he awoke from sleep in the midst of the 
 quiet that succeeded the day's noise, feeling a 
 strange ache in all his limbs and a dull heaviness 
 in his brain, but all the while fully conscious. It 
 may have been owing to the absence in the silence 
 of the night and early dawn of all that could excite 
 or impress him, or it may have been owing to the 
 feeble action of the brain on his first awakening, 
 that in such minutes he completely understood 
 his position, and felt, as it were, in perfect health. 
 But then day came on, and, together with the 
 light and stir of life in the asylum, his mind was 
 again a prey to chance impressions, his sickly 
 brain could not cope with them, and once more 
 he lost all control over his reason. The ideas he 
 entertained formed a strange medley of the rational 
 and irrational. He understood that all around 
 him were ill, but, at the same time, saw in each of 
 them some disguised character whom he had 
 known before, or of whom he had read and heard. 
 The asylum, he thought, was filled with men of 
 all times and countries, the living and the dead. 
 Among them were famous and strong men of the 
 world, and not a few of the soldiers who had been
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 19 1 
 
 killed in the last war, but had risen from their 
 graves. He imagined he was in a kind of magic 
 circle that included the entire strength of the 
 world, and in proud rapture he counted himself to 
 be the centre of that circle. He and they, his 
 companions in the asylum, were all there for the 
 purpose of fulfilling a task, that vaguely presented 
 itself to his mind as a gigantic work, directed to- 
 wards the destruction of evil on the earth. He 
 did not know how that task would be effected, 
 but felt within him strength sufficient to accom- 
 plish it." Or, what can be more true than the 
 picture he draws of the short intervals he enjoyed 
 of undisturbed reason, quickly followed by relapses 
 into stark madness. "He awoke in the night. 
 All was quiet ; from the neighbouring large room 
 could be heard the heavy breathing of the 
 slumbering patients. Somewhere, in the distance, 
 a madman, who had been lodged for the night 
 in a dark chamber, was talking to himself in a 
 strained monotonous tone; and above, in one of 
 the rooms in the women's division, a hoarse-voiced 
 contralto was singing a wild uproarious song. The 
 sick man listened to these sounds. He felt a 
 strange weakness and languor in all his limbs, and 
 his neck ached violently. Where am I? What 
 has happened to me ! were the questions that
 
 IQ2 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 flitted through his mind. And suddenly, with 
 unusual clearness, all that had happened in the 
 last month came back to him, and he knew he 
 was ill, and he knew what his illness was. He 
 recalled all the foolish thoughts, words, and acts, 
 and, at the remembrance, his whole body shook 
 and was convulsed. But all that is over now, 
 thank God ! Of course, it is all over! he murmured, 
 and again fell asleep. And when he awoke, for 
 some minutes he possessed his full reason and was 
 seemingly quite well, only to get up from his bed 
 as mad as he had been before." 
 
 There are two points admirably brought out in 
 this unique and strangely interesting study of a 
 diseased mind. In the moments when reason 
 returns to the hero, he invariably feels a dull 
 bodily weakness come over him, but the instant 
 he experiences the first slight excitement of mad- 
 ness, this weakness disappears and is replaced by 
 an extravagant energy, and an uncontrollable 
 activity, that causes him to march about his room 
 with hurried, uneven steps, talking and gesticu- 
 lating all the while, and frequently stumbling 
 against whatever may be in his way, and from the 
 shock receiving heavy blows that do not seem to 
 hurt or pain, and to which he pays no attention. 
 Further, there is in his maddest wanderings
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 193 
 
 and fancies an association of ideas as marked as 
 any sequence of thought in a healthy brain. " He 
 did not sleep all that night. He had plucked the 
 flower, because in that act he recognised the work 
 of his life, the task allotted to him by fate. The very 
 first time he happened to glance through the win- 
 dow of his room, its red leaflets had attracted his 
 attention, and now he felt that he had been faithful 
 to his call, and had done the work to accomplish 
 which life had been granted him. In its bright 
 red colour was concentrated all the evil of the 
 world. Of course, he knew that opium was 
 produced from the poppy, and it may be this 
 knowledge took a fantastic shape and suggested to 
 him the queer fancy that ere long completely 
 possessed his mind. In his eyes, the flower realised 
 in itself all existing evil ; it had drunk in all the 
 innocent blood that had ever been poured forth, 
 and that is why it was so red, all the tears that 
 had ever been shed by the victims of human rage 
 and spleen. It was the personification of the 
 proud, cruel Ahriman, the enemy to God, who 
 had assumed this humble and seemingly innocent 
 form. It was his call to pluck and destroy it. 
 But that was not all. It must not be allowed, 
 while fading away, to diffuse its poisoned breath 
 abroad. For this reason he hid it in his bosom 
 o
 
 194 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 He hoped that by the morning the flower would 
 have lost all its strength. Its poison would 
 penetrate into his breast, his very soul, and there 
 be conquered or conquer ; and if it conquered, he 
 must perish and die, but he would then die like 
 a brave fighter, the first true champion of man- 
 kind, since no one before him had dared to try 
 and crush at one blow all the evil of this world." 
 There are other details in the story that deserve 
 to be noticed, but I must content myself with 
 selecting one. In the final scene, the only part 
 of the tale that is fictitious and invented, the 
 crazed hero is found dead on his couch : " and on 
 his face lay the seal of unruffled peace and repose, 
 and his worn features bore an expression of proud 
 happiness and contentment." The artistic beauty 
 of the scene must be evident to all, but it is also 
 characterised by a scientific truthfulness that we 
 do not always find in works of fiction. As the 
 best pathologists have remarked, the higher 
 qualities of a man are not destroyed, though they 
 may from time to time be weakened and trans- 
 formed by mental maladies ; and thus the noble un- 
 selfishness of the hero of our story, and his capacity 
 to devote himself to what he believes to be the 
 cause of humanity, remain to the last fresh and 
 vivid, and give him strength to die peacefully and 
 gladly.
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 195 
 
 Simplicity, which, I need scarcely say, by no 
 means implies banality of style or poverty of in- 
 vention, has been, from the days of Poushkin, the 
 crowning characteristic of Russian poetry and 
 fiction. Unfortunately, not a few later writers, 
 tempted by the prevailing taste for realistic sen- 
 sationalism, have adopted the tone and manner- 
 isms of a foreign school of novelists. It is for 
 this reason we are justified in placing such a high 
 value on the works of those who have not fallen in 
 with a passing fashion, but have persistently 
 remained faithful to the better traditions of 
 Russian literature. Of all our contemporary 
 novelists, M. Garschine and M. Korolenko have 
 the most closely followed in the steps of the great 
 Russian writers, and their works are the produc- 
 tions of true poets who have no need to resort to 
 the petty artifices of an affected and pretentious 
 style in order to win the interest of their readers. 
 There is a rare beauty in M. Korolenko's de- 
 scription of forest scenery that reminds us of 
 Tourgenieff, and it is impossible not to be struck 
 with the reserved power and delicacy of touch 
 with which these pictures are filled up. The life, 
 the sounds, the colours of the forest, are well 
 known to him ; he is familiar with the varying 
 phases of its growth ; the murmuring leaves of the 
 o 2
 
 196 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 oak, the elm, the fir, and the beech, have for him 
 their distinct and peculiar melody ; and the stir 
 and the movement of each tree are reproduced 
 without effort. " In the forest there was always a 
 murmur, regular, continuous, like the faint echo of 
 a distant peal of bells ; soft and indistinct, like a 
 song without words, or like the confused recollec- 
 tion of bygone days. The murmur never ceased 
 by day or night, for it was an old dense forest of 
 pines that had never been touched by woodman's 
 saw or axe. Lofty pines, a hundred years old, 
 with their red, sturdy trunks, stood in close array, 
 waving, in response to each breath of wind, their 
 high-tufted tops. Below, all was quiet ; the air was 
 filled with an odour of tar; through the thick 
 layer of pine-cones, with which the ground was 
 strewn, pushed gay ferns, in all the luxury of their 
 rich fringes, and standing motionless, their leaves 
 unstirred by the breeze. In damp nooks green 
 grasses rose up on their high stalks ; and the white 
 clover bent its heavy head, overcome, as it were, 
 with dreamy lassitude. And above flowed the 
 murmur of the forest, the mingling sighs of the 
 old pine-wood." 
 
 The title-page of M. Korolenko's " Blind 
 Musician" informs us that it is " a psychological 
 study." The same may be said of all his tales.
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 1 97 
 
 The inner life of man is his favourite theme. He 
 penetrates to the soul of man ; seeks out the 
 moving principle of acts which seem to be the 
 mere impulses of an ill-regulated nature ; and is 
 thus able to present, in one harmonious whole, the 
 complex workings of the human machine. His 
 personages are, therefore, by reason of the 
 varied, at times contradictory, elements of which 
 they are composed, living creatures, and not, as 
 with so many novelists, personifications of a pre- 
 conceived idea. Take, for example, Vasielie, the 
 hero of " The Sakhalientzie." He is naturally 
 endowed with a restless, unsubdued energy : the 
 monotony of home soon becomes insupportable, 
 notwithstanding the ease and comfort with which 
 his youth is surrounded ; and the mild Siberian 
 steppes tempt him to commence a wandering 
 vagabond life. He tells the story of his escape 
 from the island of Sakhalin, and the listeners are 
 stirred with an unrest similar to that which had 
 led Vasielie himself to throw up all and risk the 
 dangers and shame of a law-breaking career. This, 
 however, is but the impression produced at first, 
 and, in spite of the cool, daring tone he assumes, 
 we before long come to know him better than, 
 perhaps, he would care to have us know him. His 
 passionate love of adventure, the indifference to
 
 198 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 human suffering and contempt for moral right, 
 which were the fruits of his inordinate desire to 
 live freely, had only touched the surface of the 
 man's nature, and his better instincts, which he 
 had schooled himself to crush, love for his country 
 and home, and a yearning for the life he professed 
 to despise, have, in reality, preserved their full 
 force. " ' Are you content with your life ? ' I asked, 
 glancing up at the vagrant. He smiled, but his 
 face wore a puzzled look. 'Life?' he said, and 
 then paused, as he threw a fresh log of wood on 
 to the fire. The flames lighted up his features, 
 but his bright eyes had lost their wonted brilliancy. 
 ' Eh, sir, if I were to relate to you . . . Then I 
 saw nothing good in life, nor do I see any good 
 now. Till I was eighteen I knew what is good 
 in life, and I lived well and happily so long as I 
 obeyed and listened to my parents. And when I 
 refused to do so any longer life was over for me. 
 From that day I reckon I ceased to live. It is 
 so, and it is no use pretending it is not.' And, as 
 he spoke, his face became darkened, and his 
 lower lip trembled nervously, like a young child's, 
 as if in this moment he had returned to the age 
 when he ' listened to his parents,' as if once more 
 he was a child, but the child was now ready to 
 weep over the life he had wilfully cast away."
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 199 
 
 As we might expect, the subject of his story, 
 "The Blind Musician," affords M. Korolenko 
 abundant material for the exercise of his peculiar 
 talent. The mental history of the boy, surrounded 
 from his birth by an ever-during dark, the persis- 
 tent struggle of his fancy to break down the bar 
 that shut to him the book of nature ; the feverish 
 development of a keen quickness of hearing, as if to 
 recompense him for the deprivation of sight; all this 
 is described with rare picturesqueness and poetic 
 truthfulness. "The bov figured to himself depth in the 
 form of the soft murmur of the stream as it flowed 
 at the foot of the precipice, or of the frightened 
 splash of pebbles thrown from its top. Distance 
 sounded in his ears like the confused notes of a 
 dying song. At times, in the sultry noonday, when 
 over the whole of nature there reigns a quiet so 
 profound that we can only divine the uninterrupted 
 noiseless course of life, the face of the blind boy 
 would light up with a strange expression. It 
 seemed as if, under the influence of the silence 
 that prevailed around, there rose up from the 
 depth of his soul sounds audible only to himself, 
 and to which he was listening with rapt attention. 
 It was easy to believe that at such moments a 
 vague, but productive, train of thought was 
 awakening in his soul, like to the imperfectly
 
 200 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 caught melody of an unknown song." Naturally 
 of a lively and active disposition, as the months 
 went by, blindness set its mark upon its character, 
 and whilst still a child he lost much of r his gaiety, 
 and liked to sit for hours in the corner of his room, 
 with the quiet, hushed air of one who is listening ; 
 and if by chance any one entered, an expression of 
 annoyance would come over his face, as though 
 the noise of the opening door had broken the 
 charm of the world of sound wherein he lived, and 
 with which he loved to commune. The outer 
 world was known to him only through sound, and 
 as he grew up, with each year he found fresh and 
 wider means of receiving those impressions which 
 others obtain by sight. 
 
 There is a fascinating originality in M. Koro- 
 lenko's tale, entitled, " A Dream of After-Death." 
 Its hero, Macarius, lived at Chalgan, an obscure 
 Siberian village, in the far-off marshes of Yakut ; 
 " where he worked hard, lived poorly, and endured 
 hunger and cold." But dull and irksome as his 
 life was, Macarius, like other men, had his visions 
 of a happier possible future, and particularly when 
 he was drunk would indulge in vague dreams of 
 throwing up his home and setting forth in search 
 of the blessed country that lay beyond the moun- 
 tains, and of which he had often heard the elders
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 2O1 
 
 of the Yakut village tell such wonderful stories. 
 " What kind of mountains they were, or where 
 they were to be found, he did not exactly know ; 
 all he knew was, that there were such mountains, 
 and that they were far, far, away ; so far, that no 
 police-sergeant could ever get at him. There he 
 would not have to plough, or sow, or fell trees, or 
 bring in timber, or grind corn with a hand mill- 
 stone. There he would have nothing to do, except 
 to pray and earn his salvation. And, of course, 
 he would no longer have to pay Government taxes." 
 On the day when we first make his acquaintance, 
 poor Macarius is perfectly sober, and as is always 
 the case with him under such circumstances, in a 
 sad and melancholy mood. " It was Christmas 
 Eve, and Macarius knew that to-morrow was a 
 great holiday. For that reason he wished to 
 celebrate the day like a good Christian, and to lay 
 in some drink ; but unfortunately he had no means 
 to buy any. He had long ago disposed of all his 
 corn, and was already in debt to every shopkeeper 
 and Tartar of the place. What kind of life was 
 that, when even on the great winter feast a man 
 could not have his bottle of brandy ? " With some 
 difficulty he, however, succeeds in disposing of 
 five loads of wood, which he promises to supply 
 on a fixed date, and receives a rouble in advance,
 
 202 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 with which, of course, he at once hurries off to the 
 nearest Tartar inn. On his way home he surprises a 
 certain Alexis, poaching on his grounds, and in his 
 pursuit of the marauder gets lost in the forest, and 
 after long and vain efforts to find the path, sinks 
 down to die in the snow. " How he died, and in 
 what death consisted, he did not exactly remark. 
 He knew that something ought to go out of him, 
 and waited for it to do so. But nothing went out 
 of him. Still he was conscious that he had died, 
 and lay quiet, without moving. He lay for a long 
 time, indeed, so long that at last he got tired of 
 it. It was quite dark when Macarius felt some 
 one give him a gentle kick. He turned his head 
 and opened his shut eyes. The bare boughs of the 
 larch trees were spread peacefully over him ; the 
 shaggy fir-trees waved gently their snow-covered 
 branches ; the flakes of snow hovered softly in the 
 clear fresh air ; and the bright pure stars peered 
 down from the blue sky into the dense forest, and 
 whispered to one another : ' See, a poor man has 
 died.' It was the old priest, Ivan, who stood over 
 the body of Macarius, pushing it gently with his 
 foot. His long cassock was covered with snow, 
 and snow had fallen on his fur cap, his shoulders, 
 and his long beard. But what was most strange 
 of all, this same priest, Ivan, had died four years
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 203 
 
 ago." The priest tells Macarius that he must get 
 up and go with him to the great Lord Toyon ; and 
 though poor Macarius thinks " it is a shame that 
 even after death a man cannot be left in peace," 
 there is nothing to be done, and he grumblingly 
 obeys. It was a long and difficult journey they 
 made together, nor was the poor peasant at all 
 pleased with the conditions under which he had 
 to tramp on, as he followed his guide along the 
 seemingly endless straight road that led them 
 towards the east. " ' Have we much farther to 
 go ? ' asked Macarius. ' A long way yet,' shortly 
 answered the priest. ' And where can we get 
 something to eat ? ' anxiously demanded Macarius. 
 ' You forget,' answered the priest, turning round, 
 ' you are dead, and do not want anything to eat or 
 to drink.' Macarius was not very pleased with 
 this reply. Of course, it was no good grumbling 
 if there really was nothing to eat, but then they 
 should have let him lie still and quiet after death. 
 But to have to walk, and to walk for miles too, 
 without anything to eat, struck him as being 
 quite contrary to the natural order of things. 
 And again he began to grumble. ' Do not grum- 
 ble ! ' said the priest. ' All right,' he muttered 
 in a surly tone, but continued to growl to 
 himself at his hard fate. Who ever heard of
 
 204 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 making a man walk and walk, and all the while 
 refuse to give him a bit of something to eat ? 
 And so, they continue to march on and on 
 for a number of days, till at l.ast they find 
 themselves before a large beautiful hut, and 
 with the words, ' Let us enter, we have arrived at 
 the end of our journey,' the good priest leads him 
 in. Some servants of the great Toyon make 
 inquiries of the priest as to who it is he has 
 brought with him, and then conduct them to the 
 middle of the hut, where stood a pair of huge 
 scales, and bid them wait till Toyon appears. 
 Macarius asked the priest what the scales were 
 wanted for, and why they were so large. ' You 
 see,' replied the priest, a little confused, ' the 
 scales are required to weigh the good and evil each 
 one of us has done during his lifetime. With 
 most the good and evil are pretty equally 
 balanced ; but the Chalganians are such sinners 
 that Toyon ordered special scales to be made for 
 them, and the bowl in which their sins are weighed 
 is enormously large.' Macarius felt rather un- 
 comfortable on hearing this, and began to be 
 frightened. He remarked that one of the bowls 
 was of pure gold and very diminutive in size ; the 
 other was of wood and of huge proportions. 
 Under the latter a deep black hole suddenly
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 205 
 
 opened in the ground. Macarius went up and 
 examined the scales, to see if there was nothing 
 wrong about them. But they were strictly accurate 
 and stood perfectly balanced. For this very reason 
 he did not quite understand their construction, 
 the more so as all his life he had had to do with 
 scales that invariably enabled him to sell and 
 buy with advantage and profit to himself. And 
 whilst he is thus wondering the aged Toyon enters. 
 Macarius is asked who he was, his name and age, 
 whence he came, and what he had done in his 
 lifetime. In his reply to these searching questions 
 the peasant who, strange to say, remembers each 
 stroke of his axe, each tree he had felled, each 
 furrow he had made, and each field he had 
 ploughed, takes care to add a few thousand trees 
 and fathoms of wood, in the hope of exciting the 
 aged Toyon's sympathy and pity. But, to his 
 fright, Toyon sends the priest to fetch a large 
 book, in which is entered every detail of the 
 whole life of Macarius, and orders him to read 
 out all his sins that from day to day had been re- 
 corded . against him. And whilst he read the 
 white-winged servants put into the golden scale 
 the timber and trees he had cut down, and all the 
 field-work he had done. And the sum total 
 amounted to so much that the golden scale rose
 
 206 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 up high beyond the reach of man ; and the young 
 angels flew to the top beam and with ropes pulled 
 it down. The life of the poor Chalganian had 
 been hard and toilsome ! After this, priest Ivan 
 began to read out the cheats of which he had 
 been guilty, and it appeared they were twenty-one 
 thousand nine hundred and thirty-three in number; 
 and next he read how many bottles of brandy he 
 had drunk, and they were four hundred in all ; 
 and the priest read on, and poor Macarius saw the 
 wooden scale drag down the golden one, and each 
 moment it sank lower into the hole dug beneath 
 it j and still the priest went on reading, and still 
 the scale continued to fall." Sentence is pro- 
 nounced, and Macarius is condemned to serve as 
 beast of burden to the police-sergeant and the 
 church-manciple of Chaligan, who are well known 
 to carry the heaviest of loads and to drive their 
 horses at fullest speed. At the same time he is 
 asked if he can allege any just cause why the 
 sentence should not be carried into execution. 
 And then the strangest of things happens. 
 Macarius, who had never been able to put to- 
 gether ten words consecutively, suddenly feels 
 within him the gift of speech, and pleads for 
 justice with a power and persuasiveness the most 
 practised of orators might have envied.
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLENKO. 207 
 
 " He began by saying that he did not wish to 
 serve as horse to the church-manciple. And if 
 he did not wish, it was not because he feared hard 
 work, but because the sentence was an unjust one. 
 And since it was an unjust one, he would never 
 submit to it. Let them do what they liked with 
 him, he would never budge a step ! Let them give 
 him to the devil, to be tormented for all eternity, 
 he would never carry the police-sergeant, because 
 it was unjust ! And do not let them suppose that 
 he was too proud to take the place of a horse ! 
 The manciple drives his horse far and sharply, 
 but he at least finds him good oats ; and he had 
 been driven and hunted about all his life, and no 
 one had ever fed him with oats or with anything 
 
 else Yes, they had driven and hunted him 
 
 all his life ! The village mayor and his officials, 
 the police-sergeants and their underlings had 
 hunted him to force taxes out of him ; the priests, 
 with their church dues, had hunted him ; poverty 
 and hunger had hunted him ; cold and heat had 
 hunted him ; rain and drought had hunted him ; 
 the frozen ground and evil forest had hunted him. 
 The beasts of the field are driven on, and they 
 hang down their heads to the ground, and know 
 not whither they are driven ! And so it had been 
 with him. Did he, then, know what it was the
 
 208 THE MODERN NOVELISTS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 priest read in church, or why he took his fees and 
 dues ? Did he, then, know why, or whither, they 
 carried off his eldest son, when they made him a 
 soldier, or where he died, and where his bleached 
 bones are lying ? . . . They say he added on 
 three thousand trees. And suppose he did. If 
 he cut down only sixteen thousand, is that so 
 little? Besides, two thousand of these trees he 
 cut down when his first wife was ill. And his 
 heart was heavy, and he longed to sit by the old 
 woman, but want and poverty drove him to the 
 woods. And there, in the forest, he wept, and 
 the tears froze on his eyelids, and sorrow and cold 
 pierced to his very heart. But for all that he set 
 to work, and cut down the trees. And then his 
 old wife died, and he must bury her, but he had 
 no money. He got some work in the woods, so 
 that he might earn money enough to pay for the 
 old woman's lodging in the next world. The 
 wood-merchant saw he was hard up, and gave him 
 ten copecks apiece. And the old woman was all 
 the while lying cold and alone in the unwarmed 
 hut, and he went into the forest to cut down the 
 trees, and to weep. . . . They say that all his 
 whole life is written down in that book. Will 
 they try and find in it when he once received 
 from any of his fellow-creatures a kindly word,
 
 V. GARSCHINE AND V. KOROLKNKO. 2OQ 
 
 an affectionate caress, or a good service ? Where 
 are his children, or what joy have they been to 
 him ? If they died, it was hard and bitter to 
 him. If they lived and grew up, they went away, 
 and left him to fight alone with want and hunger. 
 And he had suffered alone with his second old 
 woman, and had seen how little by little his 
 strength forsook him, and evil, homeless, old age 
 came upon him. They stood alone, like two 
 orphaned fir-trees in the wide forest, scathed 
 and beaten on every side by the cruel storm - 
 wind." 
 
 The words of Macarius are not without effect. 
 The aged Toyon is touched, and bids him " have 
 patience, poor soul, thou art no longer on earth : 
 here will be found justice, even for thee ! " And 
 as he spoke, the scales began to tremble, and 
 the wooden bowl began to rise ever higher and 
 higher. 
 
 THE END.
 
 V