I. THE PART OF THE NOBILITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT
OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

In the persons of the two foremost living representatives of Russian literature - Count Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky - we see two elements which have influenced its progress: the landed nobility and the proletary. The first, indeed, has already advanced to the extreme limit (at least outwardly) of that tendency which characterizes the latter period of the aristocratic domination in Russian literature and which may be expressed in the motto "Back to the soil," while in Gorky, the upstart, the man from nowhere, the proletary looms in the foreground.

If one recalls the Dantesque scenes of "In a Night Lodginghouse" (What a clumsy translation, by the way! The original "At the Bottom" might have been more fitly translated as "Dregs" and thus conveyed the desired idea), one is not prepared to realize the fact that the literature of Russia is a nursling of blue-blooded aristocracy. Pushkin had behind him six hundred years of titled ancestry; Plestscheeff was a descendant of the saintly Metropolitan Alexis; Tolstoy's title dates back two hundred years; Lermontoff, Turgeneff, Hertzen, Granoffsky, Saltykoff, Ogareff - all are scions of old nobility; Koltsoff, Belinsky, Polevoy, are all noblemen.

A noted Russian critic remarks that for forty years, from 1820 to 1860, not only every writer, but every hero of Russian fiction was a nobleman, and the peculiar psychology of the Russian

nobleman and serf-owner was not only reflected but also fully expressed in Russian literature.

While the Russian nobility as such was stubbornly opposed to progress in any shape or form, the foremost Russian fighters for liberty on the battlefield whereon the pen is the weapon, were men like Tolstoy, brought up in an atmosphere where the peculiar type of the Russian lord and as characteristic a type of the Russian serf combined together in a strange union and affected every expression of public and private activity. "We are slaves," writes Hertzen, "because our fathers had sold their human dignity for inhuman privileges, and we are enjoying them. We are slaves because we are masters. We are servants because we are serf-owners and serf-owners without belief in our right to be such. We are serfs because we keep in a state of serfdom our brothers, our equals by birth, by blood, by language." The serfs and serf-owners created the literature of Russia.

What was the character of that Russian nobility? Outwardly it only faintly resembled the feudal system of Western Europe. In the privacy of its estates it led a life of shameful and vulgar idleness, of dissolute license, and it exhibited a simply incredible cruelty to serfs. A sense of duty, a struggle for rights, a knightly romanticism and the adventures of chivalry — in short, all that went to beautify Western feudalism remained foreign to Russian nobility. In the seventeenth century the titled landowner in Russia was either a tamed prince or a favored ennobled commoner, but in either case devoted to his supreme lord and busily exploiting his serfs. Russian nobility was not the child of conquests, but developed on the basis of a systematic and progressive enslavement of peasantry.

While the history of the West progressed from one madness to another, and from crusades to humanism, science and discoveries, Russia knew few madnesses and few intellectual epidemics. Even the growth of dissent failed to awaken the Russian. The dogmatism of the "Raskol" was an effective narcotic. The Russian nobleman lived the life of a miniature tsar on his estate, and it took centuries of time, the mighty onrush of Western influence, the persistent recurrence of agrarian revolts, to lead the

best of the noble class to this question: "What right have we after all to own human beings?"

The life of the Muscovite nobility was appalling in its viciousness, hypocrisy and lack of ideals. The noble literati of Russia received a meagre historical heritage, indeed. The nobility of Russia was wakened into intellectual life as much by the Napoleonic cannon and the Western ideas as by its own internal process of dissolution. This presentiment of its own decay fashioned the wisdom and the beauty of the "manorial" period of Russian literature.

To resume, it was the peculiar condition of life in which the Russian nobility moved that gave to Russian literature its peculiar bent, and it appears as an independent factor during a process of decomposition. It was a plant which flourished on a grave. Lacking the inheritance of inspiring traditions, in its vicious indolence it owed its artistic presentation of heroism and melancholy to the ferment of prescience of death. Before its final passing as a potent factor in Russian literature it takes up an alliance with Slavophilism and the "back to the soil" movement, the last attempt to galvanize its own corpse into a semblance of life. In this late period the Russian literary nobles humbly exclaim: "Ave Cæsar, morituri te salutamus."

As it was dying of its own viciousness, of new deeds and ideas, its best representatives, Hertzen, Ogareff and Turgeneff, met dissolution half way, hailing death as a deliverer, beyond which they felt a new life opening up for Russia. The literature of the Russian nobility was a testament, a confession, a funeral sermon, but it is pervaded by such earnestness and sincerity and sadness that it will forever remain one of the most beautiful pages in the world's history. It was, moreover, a heroic page, says Andreyevitch, for it had to overcome its history, its habits, the elemental blind love of its own environment, its ancestral gallery, the memories of its childhood.

Slavophilism was an important current in Russian literature. It had its poets, S. Aksakoff, S. Chomiakoff, Ostroffsky; its historians, its publicists, its philosophers. The central idea. of Slavophilism was that the future belonged to the Slav. Its dream was a revival of the Byzantine Empire. It was exceed

ingly complex. Hertzen connects it with the historic and stubborn native opposition to foreign innovations, dating from Peter the Great. The Slavophiles were the heirs of the rebels hanged, quartered, shot down by Peter the Great, of the Dolgorukoff party in the days of Peter II, of Lomonossoff, of Empress Elizabeth, whose ascension was expected to be accompanied by an order to "massacre the foreigners." In a somewhat contradictory fashion the Slavophiles dreamt of tolerance, of liberty, of "Zemsky Sobors," of the abolition of serfdom on one hand and of a return to pre-Peter customs on the other. "Down with St. Petersburg and up with Moscow," was their cry. Rather absurdly they claimed that the West was rotting and the young Russian giant was called upon to battle with the Western culture.

"Russia," writes Aksakoff, "is a quite peculiar land, entirely unlike any European State. . . . All European States are the results of conquest. . . . . Their beginning is enmity. The Russian State was the result of a voluntary recognition of authority. The Europeans mistake rebellion and license for liberty."

Equally dissimilar are the religious paths which orthodox Russia and the West with its "Popery" have travelled, and the Slavophile considered the comparison highly flattering to the Russian, ecclesiastically.

Slavophilism went the natural path of a movement which attempts to convince its adherents that they are the sole keepers of all truths. Even Dostoyeffsky's genius failed to save it from a sudden and decrepit senility. Upholders of the patriarchal customs, with a horror of personal freedom and liberty, the Slavophiles went down before the inexorable progress of culture and economic conditions.

We find the next act in the drama of Russian nobility under the sign of Nihilism and Western influence. Gogol's mighty hand angrily forced the Russian nobleman's face into the filth wherein the landowners lived. His works created an immense impression upon the decaying caste of serf-owners. Turgeneff's wonderful pen pictured those noble parks and old mansions slowly going to wreck and ruin. He truly "wrought while passing through the graveyard of his heart." Turgeneff was above all a poet, an artist, a dreamer. The heroes of his tender brush

are men capable only of beautiful impulses, like Rudin, who passes away under the strain of the Marseillaise, or given to a still and contemplative melancholy like Lavretsky, like Turgeneff himself. They are "superfluous" men, wearied with a struggle between honor and conscience, easily losing their spiritual balance. Turgeneff himself passionately loves life, but painfully realizes its fleeting, its spectral side. He loves liberty, but realizes man's dependence on forces beyond him. He loves the good and the true, but has no faith in the triumph of that which is good and true.

The dissolution of the nobility's influence was progressing slowly but surely. But side by side with the agricultural there was growing up an urban, a metropolitan Russia. Side by side with the nobleman-idealist there was beginning to raise his head the commoner - realist and socialist as he was. The nobleman loved side by side with negation, the commoner hates what he denies. A stepson of life, the commonor holds against it all he has suffered. He is a vindictive iconoclast. He fights for his own self. Russian literature henceforth knows the nobleman in the rôle of a penitent. The central figure of Russian literature becomes now the "muzhik," the peasant, and next in importance is the indigent dweller of the city's slums. What Gogol did for the country, Dostoyeffsky did for the city as a novelist and Nekrassoff as a poet, and "the city" in Russia, until some years back, meant St. Petersburg, or perhaps also Moscow.

A remarkable feature of this final stage of the career of the Russian nobility in literature was its passion to reward the "people" for the wrongs and the sins of the upper classes. The "back to the soil" movement, with its fanatical "simplification" of habit, speech and mode of life; the devotion of thousands of refined men and women who buried themselves in the povertystricken villages and lived among the peasants, teaching the "muzhik's" children and holding lectures for the benefit of the peasants these were characteristics of Russian literature in the seventies.

Tolstoy is the connecting link between the literature of the spiritually bankrupted nobility and the later stage of Russian