Short-story masterpieces - Vol. IV - Russian

Various Authors

Short-story masterpieces - Vol. IV - Russian

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066431891

Table of Contents

DOSTOEVSKI, APOSTLE TO THE LOWLY

THE TREE AND THE WEDDING

KOROLENKO THE EXILE

THE OLD BELL-RINGER

GARSHIN THE MELANCHOLIAC

FOUR DAYS

CHEKHOV, RECORDER OF LOST ILLUSIONS

IN EXILE

ANDREEV, APOSTLE OF THE TERRIBLE

SILENCE

I

II

III

IV

GORKI THE BITTER

COMRADES

I

II

DOSTOEVSKI, APOSTLE TO THE LOWLY

Table of Contents

It is really a hopeless task to view within small compass so prolific and so intense a novelist as Féodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski. Indeed, I long questioned the fitness of including him in this series of brief studies, for his little fictions are few; but Russian literature knows no more vigorous novelist than this inartistic though colossal figure, and any compendious treatment of Russian writers would seem inadequate which did not include the author of Crime and Punishment. Apart from a few little stories, Dostoevski’s short fictional creations are chiefly episodes in his long and mostly rambling novels—powerful and compact little digressions often almost unrelated to the main thread of the story, but worthy of existence separately as pieces of impressionism.

No finer tribute could be paid to a man than to recognize him as the apostle of humble folk—unless it were to add that this apostolate was free from the taint of demagoguery and solely the vocation of a tender spirit. Fifty years ago, in the Russia of the sixties, Dostoevski came to the full enduement of his ministry for man. What Jean François Millet saw in the French peasant, that the great Russian novelist felt in the muzhik—the pathos of those who suffer under burdens, the heart-break of hopeless toil, the unexpected beauty gleaming in the midst of ugliness, honey hidden in the carcass of the lion.

No man ever lived a selfless life of service but his reward followed him—though often enough too late to cheer the rigors of his way. So too Dostoevski came to his own at last, but not till after a life of suffering, banishment, disease, disappointment, poverty, and debt; and he died just when his voice was heard most impressively, leaving his master-novel unfinished, and its author wept by forty thousand mourners who followed his bier as delegates, so to call them, of the uncounted millions whose cries he had voiced.

We are all agreed that the function of literature is to portray life, but when we have said that, we have not begun at the beginning. What motive must be back of the portrayal? Or must there be no motive at all save that of picturing life faithfully? Here is where opinions divide, as well as upon that other question: Is all life proper subject-matter for literary portrayal?

Russian literature especially furnishes ground for such questionings, and the work of Dostoevski in particular; but to me it illustrates the view which seems to be the true one. The literary portrayal of life must have a motive beyond that of mere faithful delineation, for it is inevitable that the artist must foresee this truth: the effect which the contemplation of certain aspects of life had upon him will be the effect upon the reader after having read his transcription. So the desire to reproduce an effect—impressionism, they call it in art—is in itself a powerful motive, changing according to the greatness or littleness of the effect to be produced.

Thus we have the whole range of possible motives for the portrayal of life in literature—entertainment, teaching, arousement, propagandum, what-not. This variation of motive naturally leads us to the question: Who should read? Certainly not every one should read everything; hence many books not bad in themselves become bad influences when placed in wrong hands. It is worth while remembering this in forming our judgments.

The second question—Is all life proper subject-matter for literary portrayal?—lies close beside the former. If we could assume that certain literary delineations would be held as material sacred to the pathologist of soul, of mind, of body, of society, we could unhesitatingly say Yes to this question. But when we consider that the inevitable destiny of great writing is its free distribution in periodical or book form, we are certain that not all books are for all readers.

In discussing the work of Gorki in this series this question is touched upon. Here we face it also—Dostoevski is too true, too terrible, at times too revolting, for every one to read. Let no one read him who dreads to look upon scenes sad, terrible, funereal; who fears to enter hospitals, prisons, charnel houses, and the place of knout and execution. The message of this precursor of Bourget was not one of lyric sweetness, he never dwelt in ecstasy upon the beauties of forest and stream—man, not nature, was his theme. With a wildly passionate understanding—perhaps a diseased and certainly an abnormal understanding—he showed the furies of crime, the viciousness of those whom society has thrust out, the dull brutality of the under dog, the aborted egoism of those who haunt every dark way—but in all he found goodness, for his eye was full of pity, always full of pity. To him crime was a misfortune more than a mark of sheer evil. A dangerous view? Yes—and a gentle one.

No man can persistently look upon his fellow men without awakening his own real self. Now, see how this doctrine of expression works itself out when we give due value to the personal equation. Here is a man who was born October 30, 1821, in a charity hospital in Warsaw, as the second of seven children. His father, a poor army surgeon, was of excellent birth, though his family lived in but two rooms. Féodor went to boarding-school when thirteen, was graduated with honors from the Military School of Engineering in St. Petersburg, received a good appointment, but soon resigned to give himself to literature.

His first novel, Poor People (1846), won him the name of the new Gogol, but in 1849 he was unjustly arrested for inciting to insurrection, condemned to be shot, and reprieved after standing on the executioner’s platform for twenty minutes in freezing weather while almost naked. Four terrible years in a Siberian prison nearly completed the ruin which a sickly constitution, shattered nerves, and epileptic attacks had begun. Brückner puts it thus dramatically: ...for no single moment, or at most when he collapsed under his load of bricks, did he feel himself a man. Yet, quite in the wonderful way that life often takes, this very prison era made the man and the novelist.

When at length he was released from prison, he served three years in the Siberian army, and finally was permitted to return home—to a period of struggle with his little magazine, its silly suppression by the censor, the ruin of his family, the death of his dear ones, the exhausting fight to bear the load of debt, the flight from the debtors’ prison into foreign countries, the ill-rewarded toil which forever harassed him, in short, to a cycle of suffering which might well have worn out the strongest. No wonder that he had the sensation of being flayed alive—that every breath of air held pains in store for him.

Now suppose that such a maddening plenitude of experience should clamor for expression, why should not the unfortunate epileptic indite with his pen the diseased, the abnormal, the despairing, sensations which piled upon him with terrific weight year after year? He saw all with sympathy, why should not his soul-cries rouse the world to pity for what he saw?

There is an immeasurable area lying between that morbid mind which loves to depict the purlieus of life and that brave heart which reaches down deep into the filthy and the sickening for the sake of dragging somewhat of value up to the light. Dostoevski conceived that Russia could never energize her arm for saving service without a wide knowledge of what existed in every place of nameless horror. As a great natural pathologist, he understood the vagaries of the diseased and the defective; in Siberia he perforce mingled with the lowest criminals—the results he embodied in a score of novels, four or five of them great novels, for those to read who dare look in the face the life of the shadowy alleys, for those to avoid who prefer the light and airy high-paths.

What is more, no pleasant bucolic pipe can rouse like a bugle-blast. Those who play the notes of beauty will exalt or pacify the soul, but those who would rouse the whole being must choose sturdy instruments and various. To shift the similitude, Russia needed no soothing unguents, her festering sores called for the heroic knife—first exact diagnosis, then the knife. And Dostoevski showed always the truth—the sordid, noisome, revolting, pitiful truth—and, as this serene prophet saw that she would, Russia herself is more and more bravely using the knife. Yet beauty and sweetness and upper air are in his stories, too, especially if one sees beneath the surface.

Russia’s greatest novelists are really three: Turgenev, the cosmopolitan, was an æsthete, an artist, a polished littérateur; Tolstoi, the mystic, was a brooding reformer, too self-centered to realize his humanitarian ideals, but a majestic figure in literature as in life; Dostoevski, the profoundly religious psychologist, was an unbalanced, fiery apostle, winging among the highest, stalking amidst the lowest, seeing visions not given to common men.

Dostoevski’s novels are great not by reason of their art, but from their artlessness, which is to say their explosive sincerity, like the incoherent violence of one who feels things too powerful for orderly utterance. In this they reflect his life only in that they reproduce what the seismograph of his spirit recorded. Outwardly, he was quiet, detached, even morose, his epileptic seizures doubtless sending him into the companionship of his own life; but his soul shook with the volcanic terrors which he perforce beheld, from his cradle in the charity hospital, through the turbulent years of Siberia, Russia, and the continent, down to the day of his too early taking-off at the age of fifty-nine.

Not all of his novels are worth general reading, even were they all available in English. He was too much preoccupied with his struggle with debt, his physical sufferings, his inner life, his passion of pity, his profound analyses of the characters about him, his tender religious faith, to allow him to study the graces of expression. In consequence, diffuseness and lack of compact, progressive plot—for he had no dramatic skill—characterize his work, and when he does rise to heights of beautiful utterance, which is not seldom, it is the outbursting of sheer feeling, the power of his theme, not the premeditated caperings of the self-conscious stylist. The man and his vehement message are far bigger than his technique.

Seven of his works must here be dismissed in as many paragraphs as they deserve chapters.

Poor Folk, strongly influenced by Gogol’s The Cloak, was written when Dostoevski was twenty-five. Though told in the handicapping form of letters, it made an immediate impression. Simplicity, human understanding, and compression—and the last was not one of his usual virtues—mark this spiritual history of two lives. It is an effective book, though not a great.

The years of Siberian torment yielded fruit in that remarkable example of criminal psychology, Memories of a House of the Dead, 1861-62. Not Dickens, and certainly not Oscar Wilde, approached this dispassionate record of a tremendously passionate and passion-inspiring theme, the inside of a terrible prison, which stirred Europe just when Hugo was issuing Les Miserables. His calm account of their unblushing knavery is entirely free from either vindictive malice or superior contempt. He loved them because they were buried alive, he loved them because of their wretchedness, with a love as far removed from condescension as it was from secret admiration of their bold wickedness. These words of Professor Phelps are singularly illuminating.

Crime and Punishment, the best known to English readers of the author’s works, is by many