Lectures on Russian Literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy

2. And what is true of his more sustained works, is equally true of his lesser works. They all bear the mark of having come from the surface, and not from the depths. His “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” his “Fountain of Bachtshisarai,” his “Gypsies,” are moreover weighted down with the additional load of having been written directly under the influence of Byron. And as health is sufficient unto itself and it is only disease which is contagious, Byron, who was sick at heart himself, could only impart disease and not health. Byron moreover had besides his gift of song the element of moral indignation against corrupt surroundings. Pushkin had not even this redeeming feature.

3. Pushkin therefore is not a poet, but only a singer; for he is not a maker, a creator. There is not a single idea any of his works can be said to stand for. His is merely a skill. No idea circulates in his blood giving him no rest until embodied in artistic form. His is merely a skill struggling for utterance because there is more of it than he can hold. Pushkin has thus nothing to give you to carry away. All he gives is pleasure, and the pleasure he gives is not that got by the hungry from a draught of nourishing milk, but that got by the satiated from a draught of intoxicating wine. He is the exponent of beauty solely, without reference to an ultimate end. Gogol uses his sense of beauty and creative impulse to protest against corruption, to give vent to his moral indignation; Turgenef uses his sense of beauty as a weapon with which to fight his mortal enemy, mankind's deadly foe; and Tolstoy uses his sense of beauty to preach the ever-needed gospel of love. But Pushkin uses his sense of beauty merely to give it expression. He sings indeed like a siren, but he sings without purpose. Hence, though he is the greatest versifier of Russia, – not poet, observe! – he is among the least of its writers.

4. Towards the end of his early extinguished life he showed, indeed, signs of better things. In his “Captain's Daughter” he depicts a heroic simplicity, the sight of which is truly refreshing, and here Pushkin becomes truly noble. As a thing of purity, as a thing of calmness, as a thing of beauty, in short, the “Captain's Daughter” stands unsurpassed either in Russia or out of Russia. Only Goldsmith's “Vicar of Wakefield,” Gogol's “Taras Bulba,” and the Swiss clergyman's “Broom Merchant,” can be worthily placed by its side. But this nobility is of the lowly, humble kind, to be indeed thankful for as all nobility must be, whether it be that of the honest farmer who tills the soil in silence, or that of the gentle Longfellow who cultivates his modest muse in equal quietness. But there is the nobility of the nightingale and the nobility of the eagle; there is the nobility of the lamb and the nobility of the lion; and beside the titanesqueness of Gogol, and Turgenef, and Tolstoy, the nobility of Pushkin, though high enough on its own plane, is relatively low.

5. Mere singer then that Pushkin is, he is accordingly at his best only in his lyrics. But the essence of a lyric is music, and the essence of music is harmony, and the essence of harmony is form; hence in beauty of form Pushkin is unsurpassed, and among singers he is peerless. His soul is a veritable Æolian harp. No sooner does the wind begin to blow than his soul is filled with music. His grace is only equalled by that of Heine, his ease by that of Goethe, and his melody by that of Tennyson. I have already said that Pushkin is not an eagle soaring in the heavens, but he is a nightingale perched singing on the tree. But this very perfection of form makes his lyrics well-nigh untranslatable, and their highest beauty can only be felt by those who can read them in the original.

6. In endeavoring therefore to present Pushkin to you, I shall present to you not the nine tenths of his works which were written only by his hands, – his dramas, his tales, his romances, whether in prose or verse, – but the one tithe of his works which was writ from his heart. For Pushkin was essentially a lyric singer, and whatever comes from this side of his being is truly original; all else, engrafted upon him as it is from without, either from ambition or from imitation, cannot be called his writing, that which he alone and none others had to deliver himself of. What message Pushkin had to deliver at all to his fellow-men is therefore found in his lyrics.

7. Before proceeding, however, to look at this singer Pushkin, it is necessary to establish a standard by which his attainment is to be judged. And that we may ascertain how closely Pushkin approaches the highest, I venture to read to you the following poem, as the highest flight which the human soul is capable of taking heavenward on the wings of song.

HYMN TO FORCEBY WM. R. THAYERI am eternal!I throb through the ages;I am the MasterOf each of Life's stages.I quicken the bloodOf the mate-craving lover;The age-frozen heartWith daisies I cover.Down through the etherI hurl constellations;Up from their earth-bedI wake the carnations.I laugh in the flameAs I kindle and fan it;I crawl in the worm;I leap in the planet.Forth from its cradleI pilot the river;In lightning and earthquakeI flash and I quiver.My breath is the wind;My bosom the ocean;My form's undefined;My essence is motion.The braggarts of scienceWould weigh and divide me;Their wisdom evading,I vanish and hide me.My glances are raysFrom stars emanating;My voice through the spheresIs sound, undulating.I am the monarchUniting all matter:The atoms I gather;The atoms I scatter.I pulse with the tides —Now hither, now thither;I grant the tree sap;I bid the bud wither.I always am present,Yet nothing can bind me;Like thought evanescent,They lose me who find me.

8. I consider a poem of this kind (and I regret that there are very few such in any language) to stand at the very summit of poetic aspiration. For not only is it perfect in form, and is thus a thing of beauty made by the hands of man, but its subject is of the very highest, since it is a hymn, a praise of God, even though the name of the Most High be not there. For what is heaven? Heaven is a state where the fellowship of man with man is such as to leave no room for want to the one while there is abundance to the other. Heaven is a state where the wants of the individual are so cared for that he needs the help of none. But if there be no longer any need of toiling, neither for neighbor nor for self, what is there left for the soul to do but to praise God and glorify creation? A hymn like the above, then, is the outflow of a spirit which hath a heavenly peace. And this is precisely the occupation with which the imagination endows the angels; the highest flight of the soul is therefore that in which it is so divested of the interests of the earth as to be filled only with reverence and worship. And this hymn to Force seems to me to have come from a spirit which, at the time of its writing at least, attained such freedom from the earthly.

9. Such a poem being then at one end of the scale, the highest because it gratifies the soul's highest need, on the opposite end, on the lowest, is found that which gratifies the soul's lowest need, its need for novelty, its curiosity. And this is done by purely narrative writing, of which the following is a good example: —

THE BLACK SHAWLI gaze demented on the black shawl,And my cold soul is torn by grief.When young I was and full of trustI passionately loved a young Greek girl.The charming maid, she fondled me,But soon I lived the black day to see.Once as were gathered my jolly guests,A detested Jew knocked at my door.Thou art feasting, he whispered, with friends,But betrayed thou art by thy Greek maid.Moneys I gave him and curses,And called my servant, the faithful.We went; I flew on the wings of my steed,And tender mercy was silent in me.Her threshold no sooner I espied,Dark grew my eyes, and my strength departed.The distant chamber I enter alone —An Armenian embraces my faithless maid.Darkness around me: flashed the dagger;To interrupt his kiss the wretch had no time.And long I trampled the headless corpse, —And silent and pale at the maid I stared.I remember her prayers, her flowing blood,But perished the girl, and with her my love.The shawl I took from the head now dead,And wiped in silence the bleeding steel.When came the darkness of eve, my serfThrew their bodies into the billows of the Danube.Since then I kiss no charming eyes,Since then I know no cheerful days.I gaze demented on the black shawl,And my cold soul is torn by grief.

10. The purpose of the author here was only to tell a story; and as success is to be measured by the ability of a writer to adapt his means to his ends, it must be acknowledged that Pushkin is here eminently successful. For the story is here well told; well told because simply told; the narrative moves, uninterrupted by excursions into side-fields. In its class therefore this poem must stand high, but it is of the lowest class.

11. For well told though this story be, it is after all only a story, with no higher purpose than merely to gratify curiosity, than merely to amuse. Its art has no higher purpose than to copy faithfully the event, than to be a faithful photograph; and moreover it is the story not of an emotion, but of a passion, and an ignoble passion at that; the passion is jealousy, – in itself an ugly thing, and the fruit of this ugly thing is a still uglier thing, – a murder. The subject therefore is not a thing of beauty, and methinks that the sole business of art is first of all to deal with things of beauty. Mediocrity, meanness, ugliness, are fit subjects for art only when they can be made to serve a higher purpose, just as the sole reason for tasting wormwood is the improvement of health. But this higher purpose is here wanting. Hence I place such a poem on the lowest plane of art.

THE OUTCASTOn a rainy autumn eveningInto desert places went a maid;And the secret fruit of unhappy loveIn her trembling hands she held.All was still: the woods and the hillsAsleep in the darkness of the night;And her searching glancesIn terror about she cast.And on this babe, the innocent,Her glance she paused with a sigh:“Asleep thou art, my child, my grief,Thou knowest not my sadness.Thine eyes will ope, and though with longing,To my breast shalt no more cling.No kiss for thee to-morrowFrom thine unhappy mother.Beckon in vain for her thou wilt,My everlasting shame, my guilt!Me forget thou shalt for aye,But thee forget shall not I;Shelter thou shalt receive from strangers;Who'll say: Thou art none of ours!Thou wilt ask: Where are my parents?But for thee no kin is found.Hapless one! with heart filled with sorrow,Lonely amid thy mates,Thy spirit sullen to the endThou shalt behold the fondling mothers.A lonely wanderer everywhere,Cursing thy fate at all times,Thou the bitter reproach shalt hear …Forgive me, oh, forgive me then!Asleep! let me then, O hapless one,To my bosom press thee once for all;A law unjust and terribleThee and me to sorrow dooms.While the years have not yet chasedThe guiltless joy of thy days,Sleep, my darling; let no bitter griefsMar thy childhood's quiet life!”But lo, behind the woods, near by,The moon brings a hut to light.Forlorn, pale, tremblingTo the doors she came nigh;She stooped, and gently laid downThe babe on the strange threshold.In terror away she turned her eyesAnd disappeared in the darkness of the night.

12. This also is a narrative poem; but it tells something more than a story. A new element is here added. For it not only gratifies our curiosity about the mother and the babe, but it also moves us. And it moves not our low passion, but it stirs our high emotion. Not our anger is here roused, as against the owner of the black shawl, but our pity is stirred for the innocent babe; and even the mother, though guilty enough, stirs our hearts. Here, too, as in the “Black Shawl,” the art of the narrator is perfect. The few touches of description are given only in so far as they vivify the scene and furnish a fit background for the mother and child. But the theme is already of a higher order, and in rank I therefore place the “Outcast” one plane above the “Black Shawl.”

13. The two poems I have just read you are essentially ballads; they deal indeed with emotion, but only incidentally. Their chief purpose is the telling of the story. I shall now read you some specimens of a higher order of poetry, – of that which reflects the pure emotion which the soul feels when beholding beauty in Nature. I consider such poetry as on a higher plane, because this emotion is at bottom a reverence before the powers of Nature, hence a worship of God. It is at bottom a confession of the soul of its humility before its Creator. It is the constant presence of this emotion which gives permanent value to the otherwise tame and commonplace writings of Wordsworth. Wordsworth seldom climbs the height he attains in those nine lines, the first of which are: —

“My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky.”

But here Pushkin is always on the heights. And the first I will read you shall be one in which the mere sense of Nature's beauty finds vent in expression without any conscious ethical purpose. It is an address to the last cloud.

THE CLOUDO last cloud of the scattered storm,Alone thou sailest along the azure clear;Alone thou bringest the darkness of shadow;Alone thou marrest the joy of the day.Thou but recently hadst encircled the sky,When sternly the lightning was winding about thee.Thou gavest forth mysterious thunder,Thou hast watered with rain the parched earth.Enough; hie thyself. Thy time hath passed.The earth is refreshed, and the storm hath fled,And the breeze, fondling the leaves of the trees,Forth chases thee from the quieted heavens.

14. Observe, here the poet has no ultimate end but that of giving expression to the overflowing sense of beauty which comes over the soul as he beholds the last remnant of a thunder-storm floating off into airy nothingness. But it is a beauty which ever since the days of Noah and his rainbow has filled the human soul with marvelling and fearing adoration. Beautiful, then, in a most noble sense this poem indeed is. Still, I cannot but consider the following few lines to the Birdlet, belonging as the poem does to the same class with “The Cloud,” as still superior.

THE BIRDLETGod's birdlet knowsNor care nor toil;Nor weaves it painfullyAn everlasting nest;Through the long night on the twig it slumbers;When rises the red sun,To the voice of God listens birdie,And it starts and it sings.When spring, nature's beauty,And the burning summer have passed,And the fog and the rainBy the late fall are brought,Men are wearied, men are grieved;But birdie flies into distant lands,Into warm climes, beyond the blue sea, —Flies away until the spring.

15. For a poem of this class this is a veritable gem; for not only is its theme a thing of beauty, but it is a thing of tender beauty. Who is there among my hearers that can contemplate this birdlet, this wee child of God, as the poet hath contemplated it, and not feel a gentleness, a tenderness, a meltedness creep into every nook and corner of his being? But the lyric beauty of the form, and the tender emotion roused in our hearts by this poem, form by no means its greatest merit. To me the well-nigh inexpressible beauty of these lines lies in the spirit which shineth from them, – the spirit of unreserved trust in the fatherhood of God. “When fog and rain by the late fall are brought, men are wearied, men are grieved, but birdie – ” My friends, the poet has written here a commentary on the heavenly words of Christ, which may well be read with immeasurable profit by our wiseacres of supply-and-demand economy, and the consequence-fearing Associated or Dissociated Charity. For if I mistake not, it was Christ that uttered the strangely unheeded words, “Be not anxious for the morrow… Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feedeth them.” Fine words these, to be read reverently from the pulpit on Sunday, but to be laughed at in the counting-room and in the charity-office on Monday. But the singer was stirred by this trustfulness of birdie, all the more beautiful because unconscious, and accordingly celebrates it in lines of well-nigh unapproachable tenderness and grace!

16. There is, however, one realm of creation yet grander and nobler than that visible to the eye of the body. Higher than the visible stands the invisible; and when the soul turns from the contemplation of the outward universe to the contemplation of the inward universe, to the contemplation of affection and aspiration, its flight must of necessity be higher. Hence the high rank of those strains of song which the soul gives forth when stirred by affection, by love to the children of God, whether they be addressed by Wordsworth to a butterfly, by Burns to a mouse, or by Byron to a friend. You have in English eight brief lines which for this kind of song are a model from their simplicity, tenderness, and depth.

LINES IN AN ALBUMAs over the cold, sepulchral stoneSome name arrests the passer-by,Thus when thou viewest this page aloneMay mine attract thy pensive eye.And when these lines by thee are readPerchance in some succeeding year,Reflect on me as on the dead,And think my heart is buried here!

17. It is this song of love for one's kind which makes Burns, Heine, and Goethe pre-eminently the singers of the human heart when it finds itself linked to one other heart. And it is this strain which gives everlasting life to the following breath of Pushkin's muse:

TO A FLOWERA floweret, withered, odorless,In a book forgot I find;And already strange reflectionCometh into my mind.Bloomed where? When? In what spring?And how long ago? And plucked by whom?Was it by a strange hand, was it by a dear hand?And wherefore left thus here?Was it in memory of a tender meeting?Was it in memory of a fated parting?Was it in memory of a lonely walkIn the peaceful fields, or in the shady woods?Lives he still? lives she still?And where is their nook this very day?Or are they too withered,Like unto this unknown floweret?

18. But from the love of the individual the growing soul comes in time to the love of the race; or rather, we only love an individual because he is to us the incorporation of some ideal. And let the virtue for which we love him once be gone, he may indeed keep our good will, but our love for him is clean gone out. This is because the soul in its ever-upward, heavenward flight alights with its love upon individuals solely in the hope of finding here its ideal, its heaven realized. But it is not given unto one person to fill the whole of a heaven-searching soul. Only the ideal, God alone, can wholly fill it. Hence the next strain to that of love for the individual is this longing for the ideal, a longing for what is so vague to most of us, a longing to which therefore not wholly inappropriately the name has been given of a longing for the Infinite.

19. And of this longing, Heine has given in eight lines immeasurably pathetic expression:

“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsamIm Norden auf kahler Höh'.Ihn schläfert; mit weisser DeckeUmhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.Er träumt von einer Palme,Die, fern im Morgenland,Einsam und schweigend trauertAuf brennender Felsenwand.”

Heine has taken the evergreen pine in the cold clime, as the emblem of this longing, and a most noble emblem it is. But I cannot help feeling that in choosing a fallen angel, as Pushkin has on the same subject, he was enabled to give it a zenith-like loftiness and a nadir-like depth not to be found in Heine.

THE ANGELAt the gates of Eden a tender AngelWith drooping head was shining;A demon gloomy and rebelliousOver the abyss of hell was flying.The spirit of Denial, the spirit of Doubt,The spirit of purity espied;And unwittingly the warmth of tendernessHe for the first time learned to know.Adieu, he spake. Thee I saw;Not in vain hast thou shone before me.Not all in the world have I hated,Not all in the world have I scorned.

20. Hitherto we have followed Pushkin only through his unconscious song; only through that song of which his soul was so full as to find an outlet, as it were, without any deliberate effort on his part. But not even unto the bard is it given to remain in this childlike health. For Nature ever works in circles. Starting from health, the soul indeed in the end arrives at health, but only through the road of disease. And a good portion of the conscious period in the life of the soul is taken up by doubt, by despair, by disease. Hence when the singer begins to reflect, to philosophize, his song is no longer that of health. This is the reason why Byron and Shelley have borne so little fruit. Their wail is the cry not of a mood, but of their whole being; it is not the cry of health temporarily deranged, but the cry of disease. With the healthy Burns, on the other hand, his poem, “Man was made to Mourn,” reflects only a stage which all growing souls must pass. So Pushkin, too, in his growth, at last arrives at a period when he writes the following lines, not the less beautiful for being the offspring of disease, as all lamentation must needs be: —

“Whether I roam along the noisy streets,Whether I enter the peopled temple,Or whether I sit by thoughtless youth,My thoughts haunt me everywhere.“I say, swiftly go the years by:However great our number now,Must all descend the eternal vaults, —Already struck has some one's hour.“And if I gaze upon the lonely oak,I think: The patriarch of the woodsWill survive my passing ageAs he survived my father's age.“And if a tender babe I fondle,Already I mutter, Fare thee well!I yield my place to thee;For me 'tis time to decay, to bloom for thee.“Thus every day, every year,With death I join my thoughtOf coming death the day,Seeking among them to divine“Where will Fortune send me death, —In battle, in my wanderings, or on the waves?Or shall the neighboring valleyReceive my chilled dust?“But though the unfeeling bodyCan equally moulder everywhere,I, still, my birthland nigh,Would have my body lie.“Let near the entrance to my graveCheerful youth be engaged in play,And let indifferent creationShine there with beauty eternally.”

21. Once passed through its mumps and measles, the soul of the poet now becomes conscious of its heavenly gift, and begins to have a conscious purpose. The poet becomes moralized, and the song becomes ethical. This is the beginning of the final stage, which the soul, if its growth continue healthy, must reach; and Pushkin, when singing, does retain his health. Accordingly in his address to the Steed, the purpose is already clearly visible.

THE HORSEWhy dost thou neigh, O spirited steed;Why thy neck so low,Why thy mane unshaken,Why thy bit not gnawed?Do I then not fondle thee;Thy grain to eat art thou not free;Is not thy harness ornamented,Is not thy rein of silk,Is not thy shoe of silver,Thy stirrup not of gold?The steed, in sorrow, answer gives:Hence am I still,Because the distant tramp I hear,The trumpet's blow, and the arrow's whiz;And hence I neigh, since in the fieldNo longer shall I feed,Nor in beauty live, and fondling,Nor shine with the harness bright.For soon the stern enemyMy harness whole shall take,And the shoes of silverFrom my light feet shall tear.Hence it is that grieves my spirit;That in place of my chaprakWith thy skin shall cover heMy perspiring sides.

22. It is thus that the singer lifts up his voice against the terrors of war. It is thus that he protests against the struggle between brother and brother; and the effect of the protest is all the more potent that it is put into the mouth, not as Nekrassof puts it, of the singer, but into that of a dumb, unreasoning beast.

23. We have now reached the last stage of the development of Pushkin's singing soul. For once conscious of a moral purpose, he cannot remain long on the plane of mere protest; this is mere negation. What is to him the truth must likewise be sung, and he utters the note of affirmation; this in his greatest poem, —

THE PROPHETTormented by the thirst for the Spirit,I was dragging myself in a sombre desert,And a six-winged seraph appearedUnto me on the parting of the roads;With fingers as light as a dreamHe touched mine eyes;And mine eyes opened wise,Like unto the eyes of a frightened eagle.He touched mine ears,And they filled with din and ringing.And I heard the trembling of the heavens,And the flight of the angels’ wings,And the creeping of the polyps in the sea,And the growth of the vine in the valley.And he took hold of my lips,And out he tore my sinful tongue,With its empty and false speech.And the fang of the wise serpentBetween my terrified lips he placedWith bloody hand.And ope he cut my breast with a sword,And out he took my trembling heart,And a coal blazing with flameHe shoved into the open breast.Like a corpse I lay in the desert;And the voice of the Lord called unto me:“Arise! O prophet and guide, and listen, —Be thou filled with my will,And going over land and sea,Burn with the Word the hearts of men!”

24. This is the highest flight of Pushkin. He knew that the poet comes to deliver the message. But what the message was, was not given unto him to utter. For God only speaks through those that speak for him, and Pushkin's was not yet a God-filled soul. Hence the last height left him yet to climb, the height from which the “Hymn of Force” is sung, Pushkin did not climb. Pushkin's song, in short, was so far only an utterance of a gift, it had not become as yet a part of his life. And the highest is only attainable not when our lives are guided by our gifts, but when our gifts are guided by our lives. How this thus falling short of a natively richly endowed soul became possible, can be told only from a study of his life. To Pushkin his poetic ideal bore the same relation to his practical life that the Sunday religion of the business-man bears to his Monday life. To the ordinary business man, Christ's words are a seeing guide to be followed in church, but a blind enough guide, not to be followed on the street. Hence Pushkin's life is barren as a source of inspiration towards what life ought to be; but it is richly fruitful as a terrifying warning against what life ought not to be.