Essays on Russian Novelists

Essays on Russian Novelists

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Title: Essays on Russian Novelists
Author: William Lyon Phelps
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ESSAYS ON RUSSIAN NOVELISTS
By William Lyon Phelps

I
RUSSIAN NATIONAL CHARACTER AS SHOWN IN RUSSIAN
FICTION

The Japanese war pricked one of the biggest bubbles in history, and left
Russia in a profoundly humiliating situation. Her navy was practically
destroyed, her armies soundly beaten, her offensive power temporarily
reduced to zero, her treasury exhausted, her pride laid in the dust. If the
greatness of a nation consisted in the number and size of its battleships,
in the capacity of its fighting men, or in its financial prosperity, Russia
would be an object of pity. But in America it is wholesome to
remember that the real greatness of a nation consists in none of these
things, but rather in its intellectual splendour, in the number and
importance of the ideas it gives to the world, in its contributions to
literature and art, and to all things that count in humanity's intellectual
advance. When we Americans swell with pride over our industrial
prosperity, we might profitably reflect for a moment on the
comparative value of America's and Russia's contributions to literature
and music.
At the start, we notice a rather curious fact, which sharply differentiates
Russian literature from the literature of England, France, Spain, Italy,
and even from that of Germany. Russia is old; her literature is new.
Russian history goes back to the ninth century; Russian literature, so far
as it interests the world, begins in the nineteenth. Russian literature and
American literature are twins. But there is this strong contrast, caused

partly by the difference in the age of the two nations. In the early years
of the nineteenth century, American literature sounds like a child
learning to talk, and then aping its elders; Russian literature is the voice
of a giant, waking from a long sleep, and becoming articulate. It is as
though the world had watched this giant's deep slumber for a long time,
wondering what he would say when he awakened. And what he has
said has been well worth the thousand years of waiting.
To an educated native Slav, or to a professor of the Russian language,
twenty or thirty Russian authors would no doubt seem important; but
the general foreign reading public is quite properly mainly interested in
only five standard writers, although contemporary novelists like Gorki,
Artsybashev, Andreev, and others are at this moment deservedly
attracting wide attention. The great five, whose place in the world's
literature seems absolutely secure, are Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev,
Dostoevski, and Tolstoi. The man who killed Pushkin in a duel
survived till 1895, and Tolstoi died in 1910. These figures show in how
short a time Russian literature has had its origin, development, and full
fruition.
Pushkin, who was born in 1799 and died in 1838, is the founder of
Russian literature, and it is difficult to overestimate his influence. He is
the first, and still the most generally beloved, of all their national poets.
The wild enthusiasm that greeted his verse has never passed away, and
he has generally been regarded in Russia as one of the great poets of
the world. Yet Matthew Arnold announced in his Olympian manner,
"The Russians have not yet had a great poet."* It is always difficult
fully to appreciate poetry in a foreign language, especially when the
language is so strange as Russian. It is certain that no modern European
tongue has been able fairly to represent the beauty of Pushkin's verse,
to make foreigners feel him as