Rostopchin did not suspect the profound truth of his capricious saying.
This truth burst forth in all its strength about 1870, the time of the great reforms undertaken by Alexander II, when the interests of the people were, for the first time, the order of the day. It was at this period that a great deal of studying was being done with great enthusiasm and that a general infatuation for folklore and for a "union with the masses" was being shown. The desire to become "simplified," that is to say to have all people live the same kind of life, the appearance of a type, celebrated under the sarcastic name of "noble penitent" (meaning the titled man who is ashamed of his privileged position as if it were a humiliating and infamous thing), the politico-socialistic ideology of the first Slavophiles, still half conservative, but wholly democratic; all these things were the results of the manifestations which astonished Rostopchin and made the more intelligent class of Russians fraternize more with the masses. In our day, this tendency has been eloquently illustrated by the greatest Russian artist and thinker, Tolstoy, who was the very incarnation of the ideas named above, and who always appears to us as a highly cultured peasant. The hero of "Resurrection" sums up in a few words this sympathy for the people: "This is it, the big world, the true world!" he says, on seeing the crowd of peasants and workingmen packed into a third-class compartment.
In the last half of the 19th century, Russian literature took a further step in the way of democracy. It passed from the hands of the nobility into the hands of the middle class, as the conditions under which it existed brought it closer to the people and made it therefore more accessible to their aspirations. It is no longer the great humanitarians of the privileged class who paint the miserable conditions among which people vegetate; it is the people themselves who are beginning to speak of their miseries and of their hopes for a better life. The result is a deep penetration of the popular mind, in conjunction with an acute, and sometimes sickly, nervousness, which is shown in the works of the great Uspensky, and, more recently still, in Tchekoff, Andreyev, and many others.
None of these writers belong to the aristocracy, and two of them – Tchekoff and Gorky – have come up from the masses: the former was the son of a serf, and the latter the son of a workingman. Let me add that, among the women of letters, the one who is most distinguished by her talent in describing scenes from popular life – Mme. Dmitrieva – is the daughter of a peasant woman.
Thus, as we have shown, the Russian writers alone, under the cover of imaginative works which became expressive symbols, could undertake a truly efficacious struggle against tyranny and arbitrariness. They found themselves in that way placed in a peculiar social position with corresponding duties. Men expected from them, naturally, a new gospel and also a plan of conduct necessary in order to escape from the circle of oppression. The best of the Russian writers have undertaken a difficult and perilous task; they have become the guides, and, so to speak, the "masters" of life. This tendency constitutes a new trait in Russian literature, one of its most characteristic; not that other literatures have neglected it, but no other literature in the world has proclaimed this mission with such a degree of energy and with such a spirit of sacrifice. Never, in any other country, have novelists or poets felt with such intensity the burden on their souls. At this point Gogol, first of all, became the victim of this state of things.
The enthusiasm stirred up by his works and by the immense hopes that he had evoked suddenly elevated him to such a height in the minds of his contemporaries that he felt real anguish. Artist he was, and now he forced himself to become a moralist; he rushed into philosophical speculations which led him on to a nebulous mysticism, from which his talent suffered severely. When he realized what had happened, despair seized him, his ideas troubled him, and he died in terrible intellectual distress.
We see also the great admirer of Gogol – Dostoyevsky – under different pretexts making known in almost all his novels and especially in his magazine articles, "Recollections of an Author," his opinions on the reforms about to be realized. He studies the problems of civilization which concern humanity in general, and particularly insists upon the mission of the Russian people, who are destined, he believes, to end all the conflicts of the world by virtue of a system based upon Christian love and pity.
Turgenev, himself, although above all an artist, does not remain aloof from this educational work. In his "Annals of a Sportsman," he attacks bondage. And when it was abolished, and when in the very heart of Russian society, among the younger generation, the revolutionists appeared, Turgenev attempted to paint these "new men." Thus in his novel, "Fathers and Sons," he sketches in bold strokes the character of the nihilist Bazarov. This celebrated type cannot, however, be considered a true representative of the mentality of the "new men," for it gave only a few aspects of their character, which, besides, did not have Turgenev's sympathy.
They are valued in an entirely different way by Chernyshevsky in his novel, "What Is To Be Done?" where the author, one of the most powerful representatives of the great movement toward freedom from 1860 to 1870, carefully studied the bases of the new morals and the means to be used in struggling against the prejudices of the old society. Finally let us mention Tolstoy, whose entire literary activity was a constant search for truth, till the day when his mind found an answer to his doubts in the religion of love and harmony which he preached from then on.
The earnestness which sees an apostle in a writer has not ceased to grow and has almost blinded the public.
For example, Gorky needed only to write some stories in which he places before us beings belonging to the most miserable classes of society, to be suddenly, and perhaps against his own will, elevated to the rôle of prophet of a new gospel, of annunciator from whom they were waiting for the Word, although one could also find the Word in the anti-socialistic circles which he depicts. Another contemporaneous author, Tchekoff, once wrote a story about the precarious position of the workingman in the city; he showed how this man, after he had become old and had gone back to his native village, suffered even more misery than before instead of getting the rest he had hoped for. Immediately an ardent controversy took place between the two factions of the youth of that time, the Populists and the Marxists. The former, defending the rural population, accused the author of having exaggerated and of having only superficially considered the question, while the others triumphed, confident in the activity of the people of the city.
The literary critic, however, in carefully studying the works of these authors, tried to get at the real meaning, – the idea between the lines. Gorky's philosophy has often been discussed; a great many men of letters have tried to unravel what there was of pessimism, of indifference or of mystic idealism in the soul of Tchekoff. This everlasting habit, not to say this mania, of analyzing the mind or soul of an author in order to get at his conception, his personal doctrine of life, often leads to partial and erroneous conclusions, especially when, as in most cases, the critic has only a very vague idea of the main current of thought which formed the genesis of the work.
The hopes and emotions which are aroused by every original expression in literature, show more than ever what hopes are based upon its rôle, the mission which has devolved on it to serve life, by formulating the facts of the ideal to be realized.
But what is this ideal? What are these ideal aspirations? Of what elements are they made up? What is the state of mind of the great majority of Russian "intellectuals" in the midst of the enmity which compromises and menaces them?
Thanks to the window pierced by Peter the Great in the thick Muscovite wall, the Russian "intellectuals" have begun to have a general idea of European civilization. They have admired the beauty of this culture, and the greatness of European political and social institutions, guarantees of the dignity of human beings; they have endured mental suffering because they have found that in Russia such independence would be impossible, and, consequently, they have had a feeling of extreme bitterness, which has forced them either to deny or calumniate the moral