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Russia: Its People and Its Literature

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Title: Russia: Its People and Its Literature

Author: condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán


        
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Language: English

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RUSSIA

ITS PEOPLE AND ITS LITERATURE

BY

EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN

Translated from the Spanish

By FANNY HALE GARDINER

CHICAGO

A.C. McCLURG & CO.

1901




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.


Emilia Pardo Bazán, the author of the following critical survey of
Russian literature, is a Spanish woman of well-known literary
attainments as well as wealth and position. Her life has been spent in
association with men of mark, both during frequent sojourns at Madrid
and at home in Galicia, "the Switzerland of Spain," from which province
her father was a deputy to Cortes.

Books and libraries were almost her only pleasures in childhood, as she
was allowed few companions, and she says she could never apply herself
to music. By the time she was fourteen she had read widely in history,
sciences, poetry, and fiction, excepting the works of the French
romanticists, Dumas, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, which were forbidden
fruit and were finally obtained and enjoyed as such. At sixteen she
married and went to live in Madrid, where, amid the gayeties of the
capital, her love for literature suffered a long eclipse.

Her father was obliged, for political reasons, to leave the country
after the abdication of Amadeus, and she accompanied him in a long and
to her profitable period of wandering, during which she learned French,
English, and Italian, in order to read the literatures of those tongues.
She also plunged deep into German philosophy, at first out of curiosity,
because it was then in vogue; but she confesses a debt of gratitude to
it nevertheless.

While she was thus absorbed in foreign tongues and literatures, she
remained almost entirely ignorant of the new movement in her own land,
led by Valera, Galdos, and Alarcon. The prostration which characterized
the reign of Isabella II. had been followed by a rejuvenation born of
the Revolution of 1868. When this new literature was at last brought to
her notice, she read it with delighted surprise, and was immediately
struck by something resembling the spirit of Cervantes, Hurtado, and
other Spanish writers of old renown. Inspired by the possibility of this
heredity, she resolved to try novel-writing herself,--a thought which
had never occurred to her when her idea of the novel had been bounded by
the romantic limitations of Victor Hugo and his suite. But if the novel
might consist of descriptions of places and customs familiar to us, and
studies of the people we see about us, then she would dare attempt it.
As yet, however, no one talked of realism or naturalism in Spain; the
tendency of Spanish writers was rather toward a restoration of elegant
Castilian, and her own first novel followed this line, although
evidently inspired by the breath of realism as far as she was then aware
of it. The methods and objects of the French realists became fully
manifest to her shortly afterward; for, being in poor health, she went
to Vichy, where in hours of enforced leisure she read for the first time
Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Daudet. The result led her to see the
importance of their aims and the force of their art, to which she added
the idea that each country should cultivate its own tradition while
following the modern methods. These convictions she embodied first in a
prologue to her second novel, "A Wedding Journey," and then in a series
of articles published in the "Epoca" at Madrid, and afterward in Paris;
these she avers were the first echoes in Spain of the French realist
movement.

All of her novels have been influenced by the school of art to which she
has devoted her attention and criticism, and her study of which has well
qualified her for the essays contained in this volume. This work on
Russian literature was published in 1887, but prior to its appearance
in print the Señora de Bazán was invited to read selections from it
before the Ateneo de Madrid,--an honor never before extended to a woman,
I believe.

Few Spanish women are accustomed to speaking in public, and she thus
describes her own first attempt in 1885, when, during the festivities
attending the opening of the first railway between Madrid and Coruña,
the capital of her native province, she was asked to address a large
audience invited to honor the memory of a local poet:--

     "Fearful of attempting so unusual a performance, as well as
     doubtful of the ability to make my voice heard in a large
     theatre, I took advantage of the presence of my friend
     Emilio Castelar to read to him my discourse and confide to
     him my fears. On the eve of the performance, Castelar,
     ensconced in an arm-chair in my library, puzzled his brains
     over the questions whether I should read standing or
     sitting, whether I should hold my papers in my hand or no,
     and having an artist's eye to the scenic effect, I think he
     would have liked to suggest that I pose before the mirror!
     But I was less troubled about my attitude than by the
     knowledge that Castelar was to speak also, and before me,
     which would hardly predispose my audience in my favor....
     The theatre was crowded to suffocation, but I found that
     this rather animated than terrified me. I rose to read (for
     it was finally decided that I should stand), and I cannot
     tell how thin and hard and unsympathetic my voice sounded in
     the silence. My throat choked with emotion; but I was
     scarcely through the first paragraph when I heard at my
     right hand the voice of Castelar, low and earnest, saying
     over and over again, 'Very good, very good! That is the
     tone! So, so! 'I breathed more freely, speaking became
     easier to me; and my audience, far from becoming impatient,
     gave me an attention and applause doubly grateful to one
     whose only hope had been to avoid a fiasco. Castelar greeted
     me at the close with a warm hand-grasp and beaming eyes,
     saying, 'We ought to be well satisfied, Emilia; we have
     achieved a notable and brilliant success; let us be happy,
     then!'"

Probably the Señora de Bazán learned her lesson well, and had no need of
the friendly admonitions of Castelar when she came to address the
distinguished audience at the Ateneo, for she is said to have "looked
very much at ease," and to have been very well received, but a good deal
criticised afterward, being the first Spanish woman who ever dared to
read in the Ateneo.

Turning from the authoress to the work, I will only add that I hope the
American reader may find it to be what it seemed to me as I read it in
Spanish,--an epitome of a vast and elaborate subject, and a guide to a
clear path through this maze which without a guide can hardly be clear
to any but a profound student of belles-lettres; for classicism,
romanticism, and realism are technical terms, and the purpose of the
modern novel is only just beginning to be understood by even fairly
intelligent readers. In the belief that the interest awakened by Russian
literature is not ephemeral, and that this great, young, and original
people has come upon the world's stage with a work to perform before the
world's eye, I have translated this careful, critical, synthetical study
of the Russian people and literature for the benefit of my intelligent
countrymen.

F.H.G.

Chicago, March, 1890.




CONTENTS.


Book I.

THE EVOLUTION OF RUSSIA.

   I. Scope and Purpose of the Present Essay
  II. The Russian Country
 III. The Russian Race
  IV. Russian History
   V. The Russian Autocracy
  VI. The Agrarian Communes
 VII. Social Classes in Russia
VIII. Russian Serfdom


Book II.

RUSSIAN NIHILISM AND ITS LITERATURE.

   I. The Word "Nihilism"
  II. Origin of the Intellectual Revolution
 III. Woman and the Family
  IV. Going to the People
   V. Herzen and the Nihilist Novel
  VI. The Reign of Terror
 VII. The Police and the Censor


Book III.

RISE OF THE RUSSIAN NOVEL.

   I. The Beginnings of Russian Literature
  II. Russian Romanticism.--The Lyric Poets
 III. Russian Realism: Gogol, its Founder


Book IV.

MODERN RUSSIAN REALISM.

   I. Turguenief, Poet and Artist
  II. Gontcharof and Oblomovism
 III. Dostoiëwsky, Psychologist and Visionary
  IV. Tolstoï, Nihilist and Mystic
   V. French Realism and Russian Realism




Book I.


THE EVOLUTION OF RUSSIA.




I.

Scope And Purpose of the Present Essay.


The idea of writing something about Russia, the Russian novel, and
Russian social conditions (all of which bear an intimate relationship to
one another), occurred to me during a sojourn in Paris, where I was
struck with the popularity and success achieved by the Russian authors,
and especially the novelists. I remember that it was in the month of
March, 1885, that the Russian novel "Crime and Punishment," by
Dostoiëwsky, fell into my hands and left on my mind a deep impression.
Circumstances prevented my following up at that time my idea of literary
work on the subject; but the next winter I had nothing more important to
do than to make my projected excursion into this new realm.

My interest was quickened by all the reports I read of those who had
done the same. They all declared that one branch of Russian literature,
that which flourishes to-day in every part of Europe, namely, the novel,
has no rival in any other nation, and that the so much discussed
tendency to the pre-eminence of truth in art, variously called realism,
naturalism, etc., has existed in the Russian novel ever since the
Romantic period, a full quarter of a century earlier than in France. I
saw also that the more refined and select portion of the Parisian
public, that part which boasts an educated and exacting taste, bought
and devoured the works of Turguenief, Tolstoï, and Dostoiëwsky with as
much eagerness as those of Zola, Goncourt, and Daudet; and it was
useless to ascribe this universal eagerness merely to a conspiracy
intended to produce jealousy and humiliation among the masters and
leaders of naturalism or realism in France, even though I may be aware
that such a conspiracy tacitly exists, as well as a certain amount of
involuntary jealousy, which, in fact, even the most illustrious artist
is prone to display.

I do not ignore the objections that might be urged against going to
foreign lands in search of novelties, and I should decline to face them
if Russian literature were but one of the many caprices of the exhausted
Parisian imagination. I know very well that the French capital is a city
of novelties, hungry for extravagances which may entertain for a moment
and appease its yawning weariness, and that to this necessity for
diversion the _decadent_ school (which has lately had such a revival,
and claims the aberrations of the Spanish Gongora as its master), though
aided by some talent and some technical skill, owes the favor it enjoys.
Some years ago I attended a concert in Paris, where I heard an orchestra
of Bohemians, or Zingaras, itinerant musicians from Hungary. I was
asked my opinion of them at the close, and I frankly confessed that the
orchestra sounded to me very like a jangling of mule-bells or a
caterwauling; they were only a little more tolerable than a street band
of my own country (Spain), and only because these were gypsies were
their scrapings to be endured at all. Literary oddities are puffed and
made much of by certain Parisian critics very much as the Bohemian
musicians were, as, for example, the Japanese novel "The Loyal Ronins,"
and certain romantic sketches of North American origin.

It is but just, nevertheless, to acknowledge that in France the mania
for the exotic has a laudable aim and obeys an instinct of equity. To
know everything, to call nothing outlandish, to accord the highest right
of human citizenship, the right of creating their own art and of
sacrificing according to their own rites and customs on the altar sacred
to Beauty, not only to the great nations, but to the decayed and obscure
ones,--this surely is a generous act on the part of a people endowed
with directive energies; the more so as, in order to do this, the French
have to overcome a certain petulant vanity which naturally leads them to
consider themselves not merely the first but the only people.

But confining myself now to Russia, I do not deny that to my curiosity
there were added certain doubts as to the value of her literary
treasures. During my investigations, however, I have discovered that,
apart from the intrinsic merit of her famous authors, her literature
must attract our attention because of its intimate connections with
social, political, and historical problems which are occupying the mind
of Europe to-day, and are outcomes of the great revolutionary movement,
unless it would be more correct to say that they inspired and directed
that movement.

I take this opportunity to confess frankly that I lack one almost
indispensable qualification for my task,--the knowledge of the Russian
language. It would have been easy for me, during my residence in Paris,
to acquire a smattering of it perhaps, enough to conceal my ignorance
and to enable me to read some selections in poetry and prose; but not so
easy thus to learn thoroughly a language which for intricacy, splendid
coloring, and marvellous flexibility and harmony can only be compared,
in the opinion of philologists, to the ancient Greek. Of what use then a
mere smattering, which would be insufficient to give to my studies a
positive character and an indisputable authority? Two years would not
have been too long to devote to such an accomplishment, and in that
length of time new ideas, different lines of thought, and unexpected
obstacles might perhaps arise; the opportunity would be gone and my plan
would have lost interest.

Still, I mentioned my scruples on this head to certain competent
persons, and they agreed that ignorance of the Russian language, though
an ignorance scarcely uncommon, would be an insuperable difficulty if I
proposed to write a didactic treatise upon Russian letters, instead of
a rapid review or a mere sketch in the form of a modest essay or two.
They added that the best Russian books were translated into French or
German, and that in these languages, and also in English and Italian,
had been published several able and clever works relative to Muscovite
literature and institutions, solid enough foundations upon which to
build my efforts.

It may be said, and with good reason, that if I could not learn the
language I might at least have made a trip to Russia, and like Madame de
Staël when she revealed to her countrymen the culture of a foreign land,
see the places and people with my own eyes. But Russia is not just
around the corner, and the women of my country, though not cowardly, are
not accustomed to travel so intrepidly as for example the women of Great
Britain. I have often envied the good fortune of that clever Scotchman,
Mackenzie Wallace, who has explored the whole empire of Russia, ridden
in sleighs over her frozen rivers, chatted with peasants and _popes_,
slept beneath the tents of the nomadic tribes, and shared their offered
refreshment of fermented mare's-milk, the only delicacy their
patriarchal hospitality afforded. But I acknowledge my deficiencies, and
can only hope that some one better qualified than I may take up and
carry on this imperfect and tentative attempt.

I have tried to supply from other sources those things which I lacked.
Not only have I read everything written upon Russia in every language
with which I am acquainted, but I have associated myself with Russian
writers and artists, and noted the opinions of well-informed persons
(who often, however, be it said in parenthesis, only served to confuse
me by their differences and opposition). A good part of the books (a
list of which I give at the end) were hardly of use to me, and I read
them merely from motives of literary honesty. To save continual
references I prefer to speak at once and now of those which I used
principally: Mackenzie Wallace's work entitled "Russia" abounds in
practical insight and appreciation; Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu's "The Empire
of the Czars" is a profound, exact, and finished study, so acknowledged
even by the Russians themselves in their most just and calm judgments;
Tikomirov's "Russia, Political and Social" is clear and comprehensible,
though rather radical and passionate, as might be expected of the work
of an exile; Melchior de Voguié's "The Russian Novel" is a critical
study of incomparable delicacy, though I do not always acquiesce in his
conclusions. From these four books, to which I would add the remarkable
"History of Russia" by Rambaud, I have drawn copious draughts; and
giving them this mention, I may dispense with further reference to
them.




II.

The Russian Country.


If we consider the present state of European nations, we shall observe a
decided decline of the political fever which excited them from about the
end of the last century to the middle of the present one. A certain
calm, almost a stagnation with some, has followed upon the conquest of
rights more craved than appreciated. The idea of socialistic reforms is
agitated darkly and threateningly among the masses, openly declaring
itself from time to time in strikes and riots; but on the other hand,
the middle classes almost everywhere are anxious for a long respite in
which to enjoy the new social conditions created by themselves and for
themselves. The middle classes represent the largest amount of
intellectual force; they have withdrawn voluntarily (through egoism,
prudence, or indifference) from active political fields, and renounced
further efforts in the line of experiment; the arts and letters, which
are in the main the work of well-to-do people, cry out against this
withdrawal, and, losing all social affinities, become likewise isolated.

France possesses at this moment that form of government for which she
yearned so long and so convulsively; yet she has not found in it the
sort of well-being she most desired,--that industrial and economical
prosperity, that coveted satisfaction and compensation which should
restore to the Cock of Brenus his glittering spurs and scarlet crest.
She is at peace, but doubtful of herself, always fearful of having to
behold again the vandalism of the Commune and the catastrophes of the
Prussian invasion. Italy, united and restored, has not regained her
place as a European power, nor, in rising again from her glorious ashes,
can she reanimate the dust of the heroes, the great captains and the
sublime artists, that lie beneath her monuments. And it is not only the
Latin nations that stand in more or less anxious expectation of the
future. If France has established her much desired republic, and Italy
has accomplished her union, England also has tasted all the fruits of
the parliamentary system, has imparted her vigor to magnificent
colonies, has succeeded in impressing her political doctrines and her
positive ideas of life upon the whole continent; while Germany has
obtained the military supremacy and the amalgamation of the fatherland
once dismembered by feudalism, as well as the fulfilment of the old
Teutonic dream of Cæsarian power and an imperial throne,--a dream
cherished since the Middle Ages. For the Saxon races the hour of change
has sounded too; in a certain way they have fulfilled their destinies,
they have accomplished their historic work, and I think I see them like
actors on the stage declaiming the closing words of their rôles.

One plain symptom of what I have described seems to me to be the
draining off of their creative forces in the domain of art. What
proportion does the artistic energy of England and Germany bear to
their political strength? None at all. No names nowadays cross the
Channel to be put up beside--I will not say those of Shakspeare and
Byron, but even those of Walter Scott and Dickens; there is no one to
wear the mantle of the illustrious author of "Adam Bede," who was the
incarnation of the moral sense and temperate realism of her country, and
at the same time an eloquent witness to the extent and limit allowed by
these two tendencies, both of puritanic origin, to the laws of æsthetics
and poetry. On the other side of the Rhine the tree of Romance is dry,
though its roots are buried in the mysterious sub-soil of legend, and
beneath its branches pass and repass the heroes of the ballads of Bürger
and Goethe, and within its foliage are crystallized the brilliant
dialectics of Hegel. To put it plainly, Germany to-day produces nothing
within herself, particularly if we compare this to-day with the not
distant yesterday.

But I would be less general, and set forth my idea in a clearer manner.
It is not my purpose to sacrifice on the altar of my theme the genius of
all Europe. I recognize willingly that there are in every nation writers
worthy of distinction and praise, and not only in nations of the first
rank but in some also of second and third, as witness those of Portugal,
Belgium, Sweden, modern Greece, Denmark, and even Roumania, which can
boast a queenly authoress, extremely talented and sympathetic. I merely
say--and to the intelligent reader I need give but few reasons why--that
it is easy to distinguish the period in which a people, without being
actually sterile, and even displaying relatively a certain fecundity
which may deceive the superficial observer, yet ceases to produce
anything virile and genuine, or to possess vital and creative powers.

To this general rule I consider France an exception, for she is really
the only nation which, since the close of the Romantic period, has seen
any spontaneous literary production great enough to traverse and
influence all Europe,--a phenomenon which cannot be explained by the
mere fact of the general use of the French tongue and customs. It will
be understood that I refer to the rise and success of Realism, and that
I speak of it in a large sense, not limiting my thoughts to the master
minds, but considering it in its entirety, from its origin to its newest
ramifications, from its antecedent encyclopedists to its latest echoes,
the pessimists, _decadents_, and other fanatics. Looking at what are
called French naturalists or realists in a group, as a unity which
obliterates details, I cannot deny to France the glory of presenting to
the world in the second half of this century a literary development,
which, even if it carries within itself the germs of senility and
decrepitude (namely, the very materialism which is its philosophic
basis, its very extremes and exaggerations, and its erudite, and
reflective character, a quality which however unapparent is nevertheless
perfectly demonstrable), yet it shows also the vigor of a renaissance in
its valiant affirmation of artistic truth, its zeal in maintaining this,
in the faith with which it seeks this truth, and in the effectiveness
of its occasional revelations thereof. When party feeling has somewhat
subsided, French realism will receive due thanks for the impulse it has
communicated to other peoples; not a lamentable impulse either, for
nations endowed with robust national traditions always know how to give
form and shape to whatever comes to them from without, and those only
will accept a completed art who lack the true conditions of nationality,
even though they figure as States on the map.

There are two great peoples in the world which are not in the same
situation as the Latin and Saxon nations of Europe,--two peoples which
have not yet placed their stones in the world's historic edifice. They
are the great transatlantic republic and the colossal Sclavonic
empire,--the United States and Russia.

What artistic future awaits the young North American nation? That land
of material civilization, free, happy, with wise and practical
institutions, with splendid natural resources, with flourishing commerce
and industries, that people so young yet so vigorous, has acquired
everything except the acclimatization in her vast and fertile territory
of the flower of beauty in the arts and letters. Her literature, in
which such names as Edgar Poe shine with a world-wide lustre, is yet a
prolongation of the English literature, and no more. What would that
country not give to see within herself the glorious promise of that
spirit which produced a Murillo, a Cervantes, a Goethe, or a Meyerbeer,
while she covers with gold the canvases of the mediocre painters of
Europe!

But that art and literature of a national character may be spontaneous,
a people must pass through two epochs,--one in which, by the process of
time, the myths and heroes of earlier days assume a representative
character, and the early creeds and aspirations, still undefined by
reflection, take shape in popular poetry and legend; the other in which,
after a period of learning, the people arises and shakes off the outer
crust of artificiality, and begins to build conscientiously its own art
upon the basis of its never-forgotten traditions. The United States was
born full-grown. It never passed through the cloudland of myth; it is
utterly lacking in that sort of popular poetry which to-day we call
folk-lore.

But when a nation carries within itself this powerful and prolific seed,
sooner or later this will sprout. A people may be silent for long years,
for ages, but at the first rays of its dawning future it will sing like
the sphinx of Egypt. Russia is a complete proof of this truth. Perhaps
no other nation ever saw its æsthetic development unfold so
unpromisingly, so cramped and so stunted. The stiff and unyielding
garments of French classicism have compressed the spirit of its national
literature almost to suffocation; German Romanticism, since the
beginning of this century, has lorded it triumphantly there more than in
any other land. But in spite of so many obstacles, the genius of Russia
has made a way for itself, and to-day offers us a sight which other
nations can only parallel in their past history; namely, the sudden
revelation of a national literature.

I do not mean to prophesy for others an irremediable sterility or
decadence; I merely confine myself to noting one fact: Russia is at this
moment the only young nation in Europe,--the last to arrive at the
banquet. The rest live upon their past; this one sets out now
impetuously to conquer the future. Over Russia are passing at present
the hours of dawn, the golden days, the times that after a while will be
called classic; some even of the men whom generations to come will call
their glorious ancestors are living now. I insist upon this view in
order to explain the curiosity which this empire of the North has
aroused in Europe, and also to explain why so much thoughtful and
serious study and attention is given to Russia by all foreigners; while
every book or article on such a country as Spain, for instance, is full
of so many careless and superficial errors. That elegant and subtle
author, Voguié, in writing of Léon Tolstoï, says that this Russian
novelist is so great that he seems to belong to the dead,--meaning to
express in this wise the idea that the magnitude of Tolstoï's genius
annuls the laws of temporal criticism by which we are accustomed to see
the glory of our contemporaries less or more than the reality. I would
apply Voguié's phrase to the Russian national literature as a whole.
Though I see it arise before my very eyes, yet I view it amid the halo
of prestige enjoyed only by things that have been.

There is indeed no parallel to it anywhere. The modern phenomenon of the
resurrection of local literatures, and the reappearance of forgotten or
amalgamated races, bears no analogy to this Russian movement; for apart
from the fact that the former represents a protest by race individualism
against dominant nationalities, and the latter, on the contrary, bears
the seal of strong unity of sentiment (which distinguishes Russia), it
must be borne in mind that local literatures are reactionary in
themselves,--restorers of traditions more or less forgotten and lost
sight of,--while Russian literature is an innovation, which accepts the
past, not as its ideal, but as its root.

I have heard Émile Zola say, with his usual ingenuousness, that between
his own spirit and that of the Russian novel there was something like a
haze. This gray vapor may be the effect of the northern mist which is so
asphyxiating to Latin brains, or it may be owing to the eccentricity
which sometimes produces a work entirely independent of accepted social
notions and historical factors. In order to dissipate this haze, this
mist, I must devote a part of this essay to a study of the race, the
natural conditions, the history, the institutions, the social and
political state of Russia, especially to that revolutionary
effervescence known as Nihilism. Without such a preliminary study I
could scarcely give any idea of this literary phenomenon.

Let us, then, cross the Russian frontier and enter her colossal expanse,
without being too much abashed by its size, which, says Humboldt, is
greater than that of the disk of the full moon. Really, when we cast our
eyes upon the map, fancy refuses to believe or to conceive that so large
an extent of territory can form but one nation and obey but one man. We
are amazed by its geographical bigness, and a sentiment of respect
involuntarily enters the mind, together with the instinctive conviction
that God has not modelled the body of this Titan without having in view
for it some admirable historical destiny to be achieved by the fine
diplomacy of Providence. Truly it is God's handiwork, as is proved by
its solid unity,--geographical as well as ethnographical,--and its
duration as an independent empire. Russia is no artificial
conglomeration, nor a federation of States,--each with distinct internal
life and traditions,--the result of conquest or of the necessity of
resistance to a common enemy; for while the strife against the nomadic
Asiatics may have contributed to solidify her union, it was Nature that
predisposed her to a community of aspirations and political existence.
There are islands like Sicily, peninsulas like Spain, whose territory,
though so small, is far more easily subdivided than Russia, which is
intersected by no mountain chains, and which is everywhere connected by
rivers,--water-ways of communication. The vast surface of Russia is like
a piece of cloth which unfolds everywhere alike, seamless and level. The
northern regions, which produce lumber, cannot exist without the
southern regions, which produce cereals; the two halves of Russia are
complementary; there is nowhere any conception of the provincialisms
which honeycomb the Spanish peninsula; and in spite of the imposing
magnitude of the nation, which at first glance would seem necessarily
divided into different if not inimical provinces, especially those most
distant, the cohesion is so strong that all Russia considers herself,
not so much a state as a family, subject to the law of a father; and
Father they call, with tender familiarity, the Autocrat of all the
Russias. Even to-day the name of the famous Mazeppa, who tried to
separate Ukrania from Russia, is a term of insult in the Ukranian
dialect, and his name is cursed in their temples. To this sublime
sentiment Russia owes that national independence which the other
Sclavonic peoples have lost.




III.

The Russian Race.


It is no hindrance to Muscovite unity that within it there are two
completely opposing elements, namely, the Germanic and the Semitic. The
influence of the Germans is about as irritating to the Russians as was
that of the Flemings to the Spaniards under Charles V. They are petted
and protected by the government, especially in the Baltic provinces, all
the while that the Russians accuse them of having introduced two
abominations,--bureaucracy and despotism. But even more aggravating to
the Russian is the Jewish usurer, who since the Middle Ages has fastened
himself like a leach upon producer and consumer, and who, if he does not
borrow or lend, begs; and if he does not beg, carries on some
suspicious business. A nation within a nation, the Jews are sometimes
made the victims of popular hatred; the usually gentle Russians
sometimes rise in sudden wrath, and the newspapers report to us dreadful
accounts of an assault and murder of Hebrews.

Russian national unity is not founded, however, upon community of race;
on the contrary, nowhere on the globe are the races and tribes more
numerous than those that have spread over that illimitable territory
like the waves of the sea; and as the high tide washes away the marks of
every previous wave, and levels the sandy surface, these divers races
have gone on stratifying, each forgetful of its distinct origin. Those
who study Russian ethnography call it a chaos, and declare that at least
twenty layers of human alluvium exist in European Russia alone, without
counting the emigrations of prehistoric peoples whose names are lost in
oblivion. And yet from these varied races and origins--Scythians,
Sarmatians, Kelts, Germans, Goths, Tartars, and Mongols--has proceeded a
most homogeneous people, a most solid coalescence, little given to
treasuring up ancient rights and lost causes. Geographical oneness has
superseded ethnographical variety, and created a moral unity stronger
than all other.

When so many races spread themselves over one country, it becomes
necessary and inevitable that one shall exercise sovereignty. In Russia
this directive and dominant race was the Sclav, not because of numerical
superiority, but from a higher character more adaptable to European
civilization, and perhaps by virtue of its capability for expansion.
Compare the ethnographical maps of Russia in the ninth and nineteenth
centuries. In the ninth the Sclavs occupy a spot which is scarcely a
fifth part of European Russia; in the nineteenth the spot has spread
like oil, covering two thirds of the Russian map. And as the Sclavonic
inundation advances, the inferior races recede toward the frozen pole or
the deserts of Asia. When the monk Nestor wrote the first account of
Russia, the Sclavs lived hedged in by Lithuanians, Turks, and Finns;
to-day they number above sixty million souls.

Thus it is once more demonstrated that to the Aryan race, naturally and
without violence, is reserved the pre-eminence in modern civilization. A
thousand years ago northern Russia was peopled by Finnish tribes; in
still more recent times the Asiatic fisherman cast his nets where now
stands the capital of Peter the Great; and yet without any war of
extermination, without any emigration of masses, without persecutions,
or the deprivation of legal privileges, the aboriginal Finns have
subsided, have been absorbed,--have become Russianized, in a word.

This is not surprising, perhaps, to us who believe in the absolute
superiority of the Indo-European race, noble, high-minded, capable of
the loftiest and profoundest conceptions possible to the human
intellect. I may say that the Russian ethnographical evolution may be
compared with that of my own country, if we may trust recent and
well-authenticated theories. The most remote peoples of Russia were,
like those of Spain, of Turanian origin, with flattish faces, and high
cheek-bones, speaking a soft-flowing language; and to this day, as in
Spain also, one may see in some of the physiognomies clear traces of the
old blood in spite of the predominance of the invading Aryan. In Spain,
perhaps, the aboriginal Turanian bequeathed no proofs of intellectual
keenness to posterity, and the famous Basque songs and legends of Lelo
and Altobizkar may turn out to be merely clever modern tricks of
imitation; but in Russia the Finnish element, whose influence is yet
felt, shows great creative powers. One of the richest popular
literatures known to the researches of folk-lore is the epic cycle of
Finland called the Kalevala, which compares with the Sanscrit poems of
old.

A Castilian writer of note, absent at present from his country, in
writing to me privately his opinions on Russia, said that the
civilization which we behold has been created, so far as concerns its
good points, exclusively by the Mediterranean race dwelling around that
sea of inspiration which stretches from the Pillars of Hercules to Tyre
and Sidon; that sea which brought forth prophets, incarnate gods, great
captains and navigators, arch-philosophers, and the geniuses of mankind.
Recently the most celebrated of our orators has stirred up in Paris some
Greco-Latin manifestations whose political opportuneness is not to the
point just here, but whose ethnographical significance, seeking to
divide Europe into northern barbarians and civilized Latin folk,--just
as happened at the fall of the Roman Empire,--is of no benefit to me.
Who would listen without protest nowadays to the famous saying that the
North has given us only iron and barbarism, or read tranquilly Grenville
Murray's exclamation in an access of Britannic patriotism, "Russia will
fall into a thousand pieces, the common fate of barbarous States!" The
intelligence of the hearers would be offended, for they would recall the
part played in universal civilization by Germans and Saxons,--Germany,
Holland, England; but confining myself to the subject in hand, I cannot
credit those who taunt the Sclav with being a barbarian, when he is as
much an Aryan, a descendant of Japhet, as the Latin, descended as much
as he from the sacred sources beside which lay the cradle of humanity,
and where it first received the revelation of the light. Knowing their
origin, are we to judge the Sclav as the Greeks, the contemporaries of
Herodotus, did the Scythian and the Sarmatian, relegating him forever to
the cold eternal night of Cimmerian regions?

It is nothing remarkable that, in the varied fortunes of this great
Indo-European family of races, if the Kelt came early to the front, the
Sclav came correspondingly late. Who can explain the causes of this
diversity of destiny between the two branches that most resemble each
other on this great tree?

In the study of Russian writings I was ofttimes surprised at the
resemblances in the character, customs, and modes of thought of the
Russian _mujik_ to those of the peasants of Gallicia (northern Spain),
my native province. Then I read in various authors that the Sclav is
more like the Kelt than like his other ancestors, which observation
applied equally well to my own people. Perhaps the Kelt brought to Spain
and France the first seeds of civilization; but the superiority of the
Greek and the Latin obliterated the traces of that primitive culture
which has left us no written monuments. More fortunate is the Sclav, the
last to put his hand to the great work, for he is sure of leaving the
marks of his footprints upon the sands of time.

It is undeniable that he has come late upon the world's stage, and after
the ages of inspiration and of brilliant historic action have passed. It
sometimes seems now as though the brain of the world had lost its
freshness and plastic quality, as though every possible phase of
civilization had been seen in Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, and in the scientific and political development of our own
day. But the backwardness of the Russian has been caused by no
congenital inferiority of race; his quickness and aptitude are apparent,
and sufficient to prove it is the rich treasure of popular poetry to be
found among the peoples of Sclav blood,--Servians, Russians, and Poles.
Such testimony is irrefutable, and is to groups of peoples what
articulate speech is to the individual in the zoological scale. What the
Romanceros are to the Spaniard, the Bilinas are to the Russian,--an
immense collection of songs in which the people have immortalized the
memory of persons and events indelibly engraved on their imagination; a
copious spring, a living fountain, whither the future bards of Russia
must return to drink of originality. What the poem of the Cid represents
to Spain, and the Song of Roland to France, is symbolized for the
Russian by the Song of the Tribe of Igor, the work of some anonymous
Homer,--a pantheistic epic impregnated with the abounding and almost
overwhelming sense of realism which seems to preponderate in the
literary genius of Russia.

History--and I use this word in the broadest sense known to us
to-day--thrusts some nations to the fore, as the Latins, for example;
others, like the Sclavs, she holds back, restraining their instinctive
efforts to make themselves heard. We are accustomed to say that Russia
is an Asiatic country, and that the Russian is a Tartar with a thin coat
of European polish. The Mongolian element must certainly be taken into
account in a study of Muscovite ethnography, in spite of the supremacy
of the Byzantine and Tartar influence, and in order to understand
Russia. In the interior of European Russia the ugly _Kalmuk_ is still to
be seen, and who can say how many drops of Asiatic blood run in the
veins of some of the most illustrious Russian families? Yet within this
question of purity of race lies a scientific and social _quid_ easily
demonstrable according to recent startling biological theories, and only
the thoughtless will censure the old Spaniards for their efforts to
prove their blood free of any taint of Moor or Jew. Russia, with her
double nature of European and Asiatic, seems like a princess in a
fairy-tale turned to stone by a malignant sorcerer's art, but restored
to her natural and living form by the magic word of some valiant knight.
Her face, her hands, and her beautiful figure are already warm and
life-like, but her feet are still immovable as stone, though the damsel
struggles for the fulness of reanimation; even so Imperial Russia
strives to become entirely European, to free herself from Asiatic
inertia to-day.

Apart from the undeniable Asiatic influence, we must consider the
extreme and cruel climate as among the causes of her backwardness. The
young civilization flourishes under soft skies, beside blue seas whose
soft waves lave the limbs of the new-born goddess. Where Nature
ill-treats man he needs twice the time and labor to develop his vocation
and tendencies. To us of a more temperate zone, the description of the
rigorous and overpowering climate of Russia is as full of terrors as
Dante's Inferno. The formation of the land only adds to the trying
conditions of the atmosphere. Russia consists of a series of plains and
table-lands without mountains, without seas or lakes worthy of the
name,--for those that wash her coasts are considered scarcely navigable.
The only fragments of a mountain system are known by the generic and
expressive term _ural_, meaning a girdle; and in truth they serve only
to engirdle the whole territory. To an inhabitant of the interior the
sight of a mountainous country is entirely novel and surprising. Almost
all the Russian poets and novelists exiled to the Caucasus have found an
unexpected fountain of inspiration in the panorama which the mountains
afforded to their view. The hero of Tolstoï's novel "The Cossacks," on
arriving at the Caucasus for the first time, and finding himself face to
face with a mountain, stands mute and amazed at its sublime beauty.

"What is that?" he asked the driver of his cart.

"The mountain," is the indifferent reply.

"What a beautiful thing!" exclaims the traveller, filled with
enthusiasm. "Nobody at home can imagine anything like it!" And he loses
himself in the contemplation of the snow-covered crests rising abruptly
above the surface of the steppes.

The oceans that lie upon the boundaries of Russia send no refreshing
breezes over her vast continental expanse, for the White Sea, the
Arctic, the Baltic, and sometimes the Caspian, are often ice-bound,
while the waves of the Sea of Asof are turbid with the slime of marshes.
Neither does Russia enjoy the mild influence of the Gulf Stream, whose
last beneficent waves subside on the shores of Scandinavia. The winds
from the Arctic region sweep over the whole surface unhindered all the
winter long, while in the short summer the fiery breath of the central
Asian deserts, rolling over the treeless steppes, bring an intolerable
heat and a desolating drought. Beyond Astrakan the mercury freezes in
winter and bursts in the summer sun. Under the rigid folds of her winter
shroud Russia sleeps the sleep of death long months at a time, and upon
her lifeless body slowly and pauselessly fall the "white feathers" of
which Herodotus speaks; the earth becomes marble, the air a knife. A
snow-covered country is a beautiful sight when viewed through a
stereopticon, or from the comfortable depths of a fur-lined,
swift-gliding sleigh; but snow is a terrible adversary to human
activity. If its effects are not as dissipating as excessive heat, it
none the less pinches the soul and paralyzes the body. In extreme
climates man has a hard time of it, and Nature proves the saying of
Goethe: "It envelops and governs us; we are incapable of combating it,
and likewise incapable of eluding its tyrannical power." Formidable in
its winter sleep, Nature appears even more despotic perhaps in its
violent resurrection, when it breaks its icy bars and passes at once
from lethargy to an almost fierce and frenzied life. In the spring-time
Russia is an eruption, a surprise; the days lengthen with magic
rapidity; the plants leaf out, and the fruits ripen as though by
enchantment; night comes hardly at all, but instead a dusky twilight
falls over the land; vegetation runs wild, as though with impatience,
knowing that its season of happiness will be short. The great writer,
Nicolaï Gogol, depicts the spring-time on the Russian steppes in the
following words:

     "No plough ever furrowed the boundless undulations of this
     wild vegetation. Only the unbridled herds have ever opened a
     path through this impenetrable wilderness. The face of earth
     is like a sea of golden verdure, broken into a thousand
     shades. Among the thin, dry branches of the taller shrubs
     climb the cornflowers,--blue, purple, and red; the broom
     lifts its pyramid of yellow flowers; tufts of white clover
     dot the dark earth, and beneath their poor shade glides the
     agile partridge with outstretched neck. The chattering of
     birds fills the air; the sparrow-hawk hangs motionless
     overhead, or beats the air with the tips of his wings, or
     swoops upon his prey with searching eyes. At a distance one
     hears the sharp cry of a flock of wild duck, hovering like a
     dark cloud over some lake lost or unseen in the immensity of
     the plain. The prairie-gull rises with a rhythmic movement,
     bathing his shining plumage in the blue air; now he is a
     mere speck in the distance, once more he glistens white and
     brilliant in the rays of the sun, and then disappears. When
     evening begins to fall, the steppes become quite still;
     their whole breadth burns under the last ardent beams; it
     darkens quickly, and the long shadows cover the ground like
     a dark pall of dull and equal green. Then the vapors
     thicken; each flower, each herb, exhales its aroma, and all
     the plain is steeped in perfume. The crickets chirp
     vigorously.... At night the stars look down upon the
     sleeping Cossack, who, if he opens his eyes, will see the
     steppes illuminated with sparks of light,--the fireflies.
     Sometimes the dark depths of the sky are lighted up by fires
     among the dry reeds that line the banks of the little
     streams and lakes, and long lines of swans, flying northward
     and disclosed to view by this weird light, seem like bands
     of red crossing the sky."

Do we not seem to see in this description the growth of this impetuous,
ardent, spasmodic life, goaded on to quick maturity by the knowledge of
its own brevity?

Without entirely accepting Montesquieu's theory as to climate, it is
safe to allow that it contains a large share of truth. It is indubitable
that the influence of climate is to put conditions to man's artistic
development by forcing him to keep his gaze fixed upon the phenomena of
Nature and the alternation and contrast of seasons, and helps to develop
in him a fine pictorial sense of landscape, as in the case of the
Russian writers. In our temperate zone we may live in relative
independence of the outside world, and almost insensible to the
transition from summer to winter. We do not have to battle with the
atmosphere; we breathe it, we float in it. Perhaps for this reason good
word-painters of landscape are few in our (Spanish) literature, and our
descriptive poets content themselves with stale and regular phrases
about the aurora and the sunset. But laying aside this parallel, which
perhaps errs in being over-subtle, I will say that I agree with those
who ascribe to the Russian climate a marked influence in the evolution
of Russian character, institutions, and history.

Enveloped in snow and beaten by the north wind, the Sclav wages an
interminable battle; he builds him a light sleigh by whose aid he
subjects the frozen rivers to his service; he strips the animals of
their soft skins for his own covering; to accustom his body to the
violent transitions and changes of temperature, he steams himself in hot
vapors, showers himself with cold water, and then lashes himself with a
whip of cords, and if he feels a treacherous languor in his blood he
rubs and rolls his body in the snow, seeking health and stimulus from
his very enemy. But strong as is his power of reaction and moral
energy, put this man, overwrought and wearied, beside a genial fire, in
the silence of the tightly closed _isba_, or hut, within his reach a jug
of _kvass_ or _wodka_ (a terrible _fire-water_ more burning than any
other), and, obeying the urgency of the long and cruel cold, he drinks
himself into a drunken sleep, his senses become blunted, and his brain
is overcome with drowsiness. Do not exact of him the persevering
activity of the German, nor talk to him of the public life which is
adapted to the Latin mind. Who can imagine a forum, an oracle, a
tribune, in Russia? Study the effect of an inclement sky upon a Southern
mind in the Elegies of Ovid banished to the Pontus; his reiterated
laments inspire a profound pity, like the piping of a sick bird cowering
in the harsh wind. The poet's greatest dread is that his bones may lie
under the earth of Sarmatia; he, the Latin voluptuary, son of a race
that desires for its dead that the earth may lie lightly on them,
shrinks in anticipation of the cold beyond the tomb, when he thinks that
his remains may one day be covered by that icy soil.

The Sclav is the victim of his climate, which relaxes his fibres and
clouds his spirit. The Sclav, say those who know him well, lacks
tenacity, firmness; he is flexible and variable in his impressions; as
easily enthusiastic as indifferent; fluctuating between opposite
conclusions; quick to assimilate foreign ideas; as quick to rid himself
of them; inclined to dreamy indolence and silent reveries; given to
extremes of exaltation and abasement; in fact, much resembling the
climate to which he has to adapt himself. It needs not be said that
this description, and any other which pretends to sum up the
characteristics of the whole people, must have numerous exceptions, not
only in individual cases but in whole groups within the Russian
nationality: the Southerner will be more lively and vivacious; the
Muscovite (those properly answering to that name) more dignified and
stable; the Finlander, serious and industrious, like the Swiss, to whose
position his own is somewhat analogous. There is in every nation a
psychical as well as physical type to which the rank and file more or
less correspond, and it is only upon a close scrutiny that one notices
differences. The influence of the Tropics upon the human race has never
been denied; we are forced to admit the influence of the Pole also,
which, while beneficial in those lands not too close upon it,
invigorating both bodies and souls and producing those chaste and robust
barbarians who were the regenerators of the effete Empire, yet too
close, it destroys, it annihilates. Who can doubt the effect of the snow
upon the Russian character when it is stated upon the authority of
positive data and statistics that the vice of drunkenness increases in
direct proportion to the degrees of latitude? There is a fine Russian
novel, "Oblomof" (of which I shall speak again later), which is more
instructive than a long dissertation. The apathy, the distinctively
Russian enervation of the hero, puts the languor of the most indolent
Creole quite in the shade, with the difference that in the case of the
Sclav brain and imagination are at work, and his body, if well wrapped,
is able to enjoy the air of a not unendurable temperature.

Not only the rigors of climate but the aspect of the outside world has a
marked influence on character. Ovid in exile lamented having to live
where the fields produced neither fruits nor sweet grapes; he might have
added, had he lived in Russia, where the fields are all alike, where the
eye encounters no variety to attract and please it. Castile is flat and
monotonous like Russia, but there the sky compensates for the nakedness
of the earth, and one cannot be sad beneath that canopy of turquoise
blue. In Russia the dark firmament seems a leaden vault instead of a
silken canopy, and oppresses the breast. The only things to diversify
the immense expanse of earth are the great rivers and the broad belts or
zones of the land, which may be divided into the northern, covered with
forests; the _black lands_, which have been the granary of the empire
from time immemorial; the arable steppes, so beautifully described by
Gogol, like the American prairies, the land of the wild horses of the
Russian heroic age; and lastly, the sandy steppes, sterile deserts only
inhabited by the nomadic shepherds and their flocks. Throughout this
vast body four large arteries convey the life-giving waters: the Dnieper
which brought to Russia the culture of old Byzantium; the Neva, beside
which sits the capital of its modern civilization; the Don, legendary
and romantic; and the Volga, the great _Mother Volga_, the marvellous
river, whose waters produce the most delicious fish in the world.
Without the advantage of these rivers, whose abundance of waters is
almost comparable to an ocean, the plains of Russia would be
uninhabitable. Land, land everywhere, an ocean of land, a uniformity of
soil, no rocks, no hills, so that stone is almost unknown in Russia. St.
Petersburg was the first city not built entirely of wood, and it is an
axiom, that Russian houses, as a rule, burn once in seven years. This
dulness and desolation of Nature's aspect must of course influence brain
and imagination, and consequently must be reflected in the literature,
where melancholy predominates even in satire, and whence is derived a
tendency to pessimism and a sort of religious devotion tinged with
misery and sadness. Indolence, fatalism, inconstancy,--these are the
defects of Russian character; resignation, patience, kindness,
tolerance, humility, its better qualities. Its passive resignation may
be readily transformed into heroism; and Count Léon Tolstoï, in his
military narrative of the "Siege of Sevastopol," and his novel "War and
Peace," studies and portrays in a wonderful way these traits of the
national soul.




IV.

Russian History.


History has been for Russia as inclement and hostile as Nature. A
cursory glance will suffice to show this, and it is foreign to my
purpose to devote more than slight attention to it.

The Greeks, the civilizers of the world, brought their culture to
Colchis and became acquainted with the very southernmost parts of Russia
known as Sarmatia and Scythia. Herodotus has left us minute descriptions
of the inhabitants of the Cimmerian plains, their ways, customs,
religions, and superstitions, distinguishing between the industrious
Scythians who produce and sell grain, and the nomadic Scythians, the
Cossacks, who, depending on their pastures, neither sow nor work. The
Sarmatian region was invaded and subjugated by the northern Sclavs, who
in turn were conquered by the Goths, these by the Huns, and finally,
upon the same field, Huns, Alans, and Bulgarians fought one another for
the mastery. In this first confused period there is no historical
outline of the Russia that was to be. Her real history begins in a, to
us, strange event, whose authenticity historical criticism may question,
but which is the basis of all tradition concerning the origin of Russian
institutions; I mean the famous message sent by the Sclavs to those
Norman or Scandinavian princes, those daring adventurers, the Vikings
supposedly (but it matters not), saying to this effect, more or less:
"Our land is broad and fertile, but there is neither law nor justice
within it; come and possess it and govern it."

Upon the foundation provided by this strange proceeding many very
original theories and philosophical conclusions have been built
concerning Russian history; and the partisans of autocracy and the
ancient order of things consider it a sure evidence that Russia was
destined by Heaven to acknowledge an absolute power of foreign
derivation, and to bow voluntarily to its saving yoke. Whether the
triumphal rulers were Normans or Scandinavians or the original Sclavs,
it is certain that with their appearance on the scene as the element of
military strength and of disciplined organization, the history of Russia
begins: the date of this foreign admixture (which would be for us a day
of mourning and shame) Russia to-day celebrates as a glorious
millennium. Heroic Russia came into being with the Varangian or Viking
chieftains, and it is that age which provides the subject of the
_bilinas_; it was the ninth century after Christ, at the very moment
when the epic and romantic life of Spain awoke and followed in the train
of the Cid.

With the establishment of order and good government among the Sclavs,
Rurik founded the nation, as certainly as he founded later the legendary
city of Novgorod, and his brother and successor, Olaf, that of Kief,
mother of all the Russian cities. It fell to Rurik's race also to give
the signal for that secular resistance which even to-day Russia
maintains toward her perpetual enemy, Constantinople; the Russian fleets
descended the Dnieper to the Byzantine seas to perish again and again
under the Greek fire. Russia received also from this same Byzantium,
against which her arms are ever turned, the Christian religion, which
was delivered to Olga by Constantine Porfirogenitus. Who shall say what
a change there might have been over the face of the earth if the
Oriental Sclavs had received their religion from Rome, like the Poles?

Olga was the Saint Clotilde of Russia; in Vladimir we see her
Clodovicus. He was a sensuous and sanguinary barbarian, though at times
troubled with religious anxieties, who at the beginning of his reign
upheld paganism and revived the worship of idols, at whose feet he
sacrificed the Christians. But his darkened conscience was tortured
nevertheless by aspirations toward a higher moral light, and he opened a
discussion on the subject of the best religion known to mankind. He
dismissed Mahometanism because it forbade the use of the red wine which
rejoiceth the heart of man; Judaism because its adherents were wanderers
over the face of the earth; Catholicism because it was not sufficiently
splendid and imposing. His childish and primitive mind was taken with
the Asiatic splendors of the church of Constantinople, and being already
espoused to the sister of the Byzantine emperor, he returned to his own
country bringing its priests with him, cast his old idols into the
river, and compelled his astonished vassals to plunge into the same
waters and receive baptism perforce, while the divinity he venerated but
yesterday was beaten, smeared with blood, and buried ignominiously.
Happy the people upon whom the gospel has not been forced by a cruel
tyrant, at the point of the sword and under threats of torture, but to
whom it has been preached by a humble apostle, the brother of
innumerable martyrs and saintly confessors! In the twelfth century, when
Christianity inspired us to reconquer our country, Russia, more than
half pagan, wept for her idols, and seemed to see them rising from the
depths of the river demanding adoration. From this corrupt Byzantine
source Russia derived her second civilization, counting as the first
that proceeding from the colonization and commerce of the Greeks, as
related by Herodotus. The dream of Yaroslaus, the Russian Charlemagne,
was to make his capital, Kief, a rival and imitator of Byzantium. From
Byzantium came the arts, customs, and ideas; and it seemed the fate of
the Sclav race to get the pattern for its intellectual life from abroad.

Some Russian thinkers deem it advantageous for their country to have
received its Christianity from Byzantium, and consider it an element of
greater independence that the national Church never arrogated to itself
the supremacy and dominion over the State. Let such advantages be judged
by the rule of autocracy and the nullity of the Greek Church. The
Catholic nations, being educated in a more spiritual and exalted idea of
liberty, have never allowed that the monarch could be lord of the human
conscience, and have never known that monstrous confusion of attributes
which makes the sovereign absolute dictator of souls. The Crusade, that
fecund movement which was the work of Rome, never spread over Russia;
and when the Sclavs fell under the Tartar yoke, the rest of Europe left
her to her fate. Russia's choice of this branch of the Christian
religion was fatal to her dominion over other kindred Sclavs; for it
embittered her rivalry with the Poles, and raised an insurmountable
barrier between Russia and European civilization which was inseparably
intertwined with the Catholic faith even in such phenomena as the
Renaissance, which seems at first glance laic and pagan.

Nevertheless, so much of Christianity as fell to Russia through the
accepted channel sufficed to open to her the doors of the civilized
world, and to rouse her from the torpid sleep of the Oriental. It gave
her the rational and proper form of family life as indicated by
monogamy, whose early adoption is one of the highest and most
distinguishing marks of the Aryan race; and instead of the savage
chieftain surrounded by his fierce vassals always ready for rebellion
and bloodshedding, it gave the idea of a monarch who lives as God's
vicar upon the earth, the living incarnation of law and order,--an idea
which, in times of anarchy and confusion, served to constitute the State
and establish it upon a firm basis. Lastly, Russia owes to Christianity
her ecclesiastical literature, the fount and origin of literary culture
throughout Europe.

In the thirteenth century--that bright and luminous age, the time of
Saint Thomas, of Saint Francis of Assisi, of Dante, of Saint
Ferdinand--Russia was suddenly invaded by the Mongols, and, like locusts
in a corn-field, those hideous and demoniacal foes fell upon her and
made all Christendom tremble, so that the French historian Joinville
records it as a sign of the coming of Antichrist. "For our sins the
unknown nations covered our land," say the Russian chroniclers. Genghis
Khan, after subduing all Asia, drew around him an immense number of
tribes, and fell upon Russia with irresistible force, sowing the land
with skulls as the flower of the field sows it with seeds, and
compelling the once free and wealthy native Boyars to bring grist to the
mill and serve their conquerors as slaves. The Russian towns and princes
performed miracles of heroism, but in vain. The Tartar hordes, let loose
upon those vast plains where their horses found abundant pasture, rolled
over the land like an inundation. In a more varied country, more densely
populated and with better communication, the Tartars would have been
beaten back, as they were from Moravia. Again Nature's hand was upon the
destinies of Russia; the topographical conditions laid her under the
power of the Golden Horde.

This great misfortune not only isolated Russia from the Occident and
left her under Asiatic sway, but it also subjugated her to the growing
autocracy of the Muscovite princes who were becoming formidable
oppressors of their subjects, and they in turn were victims,
tributaries, and vassals of the great Khans. So the invasion came to
exercise a decisive influence upon the institutions of the future
empire, pernicious in consequence of the abnormal development allowed to
monarchical authority, and beneficent inasmuch as it aided forcibly in
the formation of the nationality. At the time of the Mongol irruption
Russia was composed of various independent principalities governed by
the descendants of Rurik; the necessity of opposing the invader
demonstrated the necessity also of uniting all under one sceptre.

Continually chafing at the bit, dissimulating and temporizing with the
enemy by means of clever diplomatic envoys, the princes slowly cemented
their power and prepared the land for a homogeneous state, until one day
the chivalrous Donskoï, the victor at the battle of the Don, opened the
era of reconquest, exclaiming in the exuberance of his first triumph
over the Tartars, "Their day is past, and God is with us!" But Russia's
evil star awoke one of the greatest captains named in history,
Tamerlane, who ruined the work begun by Donskoï, and toward the end of
the fourteenth century once more laid the Muscovite people under
subjection.

At the meeting of the Council of Florence, when the Greek Emperor John
Paleologos agreed to the reunion of the two churches, the prince of
Moscow, Basil the Blind, showed himself blind of soul as well as of eye,
in obstinately opposing such a union, thus cutting off Russia again from
the Occident. When the Turks took Constantinople and consummated the
fall of the Byzantine empire, Moscow became the capital of the Greek
world, the last bulwark of the schismatic church, the asylum of the
remains of a depraved and perishing organism, of the senile decadence of
the last of the Cæsars.




V.

The Russian Autocracy.


Such was the sad situation in Russia at the opening of the period of
European Renaissance, out of which grew the modern age which was to
provide the remedy for her ills through her own tyrants. For without
intending a paradox, I will say that tyranny is the liberator of Russia.
Twice these tyrants who have forced life into her, who have impelled her
toward the future, have been called _The Terrible_,--Ivan III., the
uniter of the provinces, he whose very look made the women faint, and
Ivan IV., the first to use the title of Czar. Both these despots cross
the stage of history like spectres called up by a nightmare: the former
morose, dissimulating, and hypocritical, like Louis XI. of France, whom
he resembles; the latter demented, fanatical, epileptic, and
hot-tempered, clutching his iron pike in hand, with which he transfixed
Russia as one may transfix a fluttering insect with a pin. But these
tyrants, gifted and guided by a saving instinct, created the nation.
Ivan III. instituted the succession to the throne, thus suppressing the
hurtful practice of partition among brothers, and it was he who finally
broke the yoke of the Mongols. Ivan IV. did more yet; he achieved the
actual separation of Europe from Asia, put down the anarchy of the
nobles, and taught them submission to law; and not content with this,
he put himself at the head of the scanty literature of his time, and
while he widened the domains of Russia, he protected within her borders
the establishment of the press, until then persecuted as sacrilegious.
It is difficult to think what would have become of the Russian nation
without her great tyrants. Therefore it is that the memory of Ivan IV.
still lives in the popular imagination, and the Terrible Czar, like
Pedro the Cruel of Spain, is neither forgotten nor abhorred.

The consolidation of the autocratic idea is easily understood in the
light of these historic figures. No wonder that the people accepted it,
from a spirit of self-preservation, since it was despotism that
sustained them, that formed them, so to speak. It is folly to consider
the institutions of a nation as though they were extraneous to it, fruit
of an individual will or of a single event; society obeys laws as exact
as those which regulate the courses of the stars, and the historian must
recognize and fix them.

The autocracy and the unity of Russia were consolidated together by the
genius of Ivan III., who made their emblem the double-headed eagle, and
by Ivan IV., who sacrificed to them a sea of blood. The municipal
autonomies and the petty independent princes frowned, but Russia became
a true nation; at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the brilliant
age of the monarchical principle, no European sovereign could boast of
being so thoroughly obeyed as the sovereign prince of Moscow.

The radical concept of omnipotent power, not tempered as in the West by
the humanity of Catholicism, at once rushed headlong to oppression and
slavery. The ambitious regent Boris Godonof was not long in attaching
the serfs to the soil, and upon the heels of this unscrupulous act
followed the dark and bloody days of the false Demetrii, in which the
serf, irritated by the burden of his chains, welcomed, in every
adventurer, in every impostor, a Messiah come to redeem him. Then the
Poles, the eternal enemies of Russia, seized the Kremlin, the Swedes
threatened to overcome her, and the nation seemed ready to perish had it
not been for the heroism of a butcher and a prince; a suggestive example
of the saving strength which at supreme moments rises up in every
nation.

But one more providential tyrant was needed, the greatest of all, the
most extraordinary man of Russia's history, of the house of Romanoff,
successor to the extinct dynasty of the Terrible Ivans. "Terrible" might
also be applied to the name of the imperial carpenter whose character
and destiny are not unlike those of Ivan IV. Both were precocious in
intellect, both were self-educated, and both cooled their hot youth in
the hard school of abandonment. Out of it came Peter the Great,
determined at all costs to remodel his gigantic empire.

Herodotus relates how the young Anacarsis, on returning from foreign
lands wherein he had learned new arts and sciences, came to Scythia his
native country, and wished to celebrate there a great feast, after the
manner of the Greeks, in honor of the mother of the gods; hearing of
which the king Sarillius impaled him with a lance. He tells also how
another king who wearied of the Scythian mode of living, and craved the
customs of the Greeks, among whom he had been educated, endeavored to
introduce the Bacchanalian dances, himself taking part in them. The
Scythians refused to conform to these novel ideas, and finally cut off
the king's head; for, adds the historian, "The Scythians detest nothing
so much as foreign customs." The tale of Herodotus was in danger of
being repeated at the beginning of the reign of Peter Romanoff. With him
began the battle, not yet ended, between old Russia, which calls itself
Holy, and new Russia, cut after the Western pattern. While Peter
travelled and studied the industry and progress of Europe with the idea
of bringing them to his Byzantine empire, the rebels at home conspired
to dethrone this daring innovator who threatened to use fire and sword,
whips and scourges, the very implements of barbarism, against barbarism
itself.

It is a notable fact in Russian history that none of her mighty
sovereigns was possessed of moral conditions in harmony with the vigor
of their intelligence and will force. Russia has had great emperors but
not good emperors. The halo that wreathes the head of Berenguela of
Castile and Isabel the Catholic, Saint Ferdinand, or Saint Louis,--men
and women in whom the ideal of justice seemed to become incarnate,--is
lacking to Vladimir the Baptizer, to Ivan IV., to Peter the Great.
Among Occidental peoples the monarchy owed its prestige and sacred
authority to good and just kings, vicars of God on earth, who were
impressed with a sense of being called to play a noble part in the drama
of history, conscious of grave responsibilities, and sure of having to
render an account of their stewardship to a Supreme Power. The Czars
present quite a different aspect: they seem to have understood
civilization rather by its externals than by its intrinsic doctrines,
which demand first of all our inward perfecting, our gradual elevation
above the level of the beast, and the continuous affirmation of our
dignity. Therefore they used material force as their instrument, and
spared no means to crown their efforts.

But with all it is impossible to withhold a tribute of admiration to
Peter the Great. That fierce despot, gross and vicious, was not only a
reformer but a hero. Pultowa, which beheld the fall of the power of
Sweden, justified the reforms and the military organization instituted
by the young emperor, and made Russia a European power,--a power
respected, influential, and great. Whatever may be said against war,
whatever sentimental comparisons may be made between the founder and the
conqueror, it must still be admitted that the monarch who leads his
people to victory will lead them _ipse facto_ to new destinies, to a
more glorious and intense historic life.

If Peter the Great had vacillated one degree, if he had squandered time
and opportunity in studying prudent ways and means for planting his
reforms, if his hand had trembled in laying the rod across the backs of
his nobles, or had spared the lash upon the flesh of his own son,
perhaps he would never have achieved the transformation of his Oriental
empire into a European State, a transformation which embraced
everything,--the navy, the army, public instruction, social relations,
commerce, customs, and even the beards of his subjects, the much
respected traditional long beards, mercilessly shaven by order of the
autocrat. In his zeal for illimitable authority, and that his decrees
might meet with no obstacles either in heaven or earth, this Czar
conceived the bright idea of assuming the spiritual power, and having
suppressed the Patriarchy and created the Synod, he held in his hands
the conscience of his people, could count its every pulsation, and wind
it up like a well-regulated clock. What considerations, human or divine,
will check a man who, like Abraham, sacrifices his first-born to an
idea, and makes himself the executioner of his own son?

The race sign was not obliterated from the Russian culture produced by
immoral and short-sighted reformers. A woman of low extraction and
obscure history, elevated to the imperial purple, was the one to
continue the work of Peter the Great; his daughter's favorite became the
protector of public instruction and the founder of the University of
Moscow; a frivolous and dissolute Czarina, Elisabeth Petrowna, modified
the customs, encouraged intellectual pleasures and dramatic
representations, and put Russia in contact with the Latin mind as
developed in France; another empress, a parricide, a usurper and
libertine, who deserves the perhaps pedantic name of the Semiramis of
the North given her by Voltaire, hid her delinquencies under the
splendor of her intellect, the refined delicacy of her artistic tastes,
her gifts as a writer, and her magnificence as a sovereign.

It was the profound and violent shock administered by the hard hand of
Peter the Great that impelled Russia along the road to French culture,
and with equal violence she retraced her steps at the invasion of the
armies of Napoleon. The nobility and the patriots of Russia cursed
France in French,--the language which had been taught them as the medium
of progress; and the nation became conscious of its own individuality in
the hour of trial, in the sudden awakening of its independent instincts.
But in proportion as the nationality arose in its might, the low murmur
of a growing revolution made itself heard. This impulse did not burst
first from the hearts of the people, ground down by the patriarchal
despotism of Old Russia, but from the brain of the educated classes,
especially the nobility. The first sign of the strife, predestined from
the close of the war with the French, was the political repression of
the last years of the reign of Alexander I., and the famous republican
conspiracy of December against Nicholas,--an aristocratic outbreak
contrived by men in whose veins ran the blood of princes. Of these
events I shall speak more fully when I come to the subject of Nihilism;
I merely mention it here in this general glimpse of Russian history.

Menaced by Asia, Russia had willingly submitted to an absolute power,
because, as we have seen, she lacked the elements that had concurred in
the formation of modern Europe. Classic civilization never entered her
veins; she had no other light than that which shone from Byzantium, nor
any other model than that offered by the later empire; she had no place
in the great Catholic fraternity which had its law and its focus in
Rome, and the Mongolian invasion accomplished her complete isolation.
Spain also suffered an invasion of a foreign race, but she pulled
herself together and sustained herself on a war-footing for seven
centuries. Russia could not do this, but bent her neck to the yoke of
the conqueror. Our national character would have chafed indeed to see
the kings of Asturias and Castile, instead of perpetually challenging
the Moors, become their humble vassals, as the Muscovite princes were to
the Khans. With us the struggle for re-conquest, far from exhausting us,
redoubled our thirst for independence,--a thirst born farther back than
that time, in spite of Leroy-Beaulieu's statement, although it was
indeed confirmed and augmented during the progress of that
Hispano-Saracenic Iliad. The Russians being obliged to lay down their
arms, to suffer and to wait, assumed, instead of our ungovernable
vehemence, a patient resignation. But they none the less considered
themselves a nation, and entertained a hope of vindicating their rights,
which they accomplished finally in the overthrow of the Tartars, and in
later days in rising against the French with an impetuosity and
spontaneity almost as savage as Spain had shown in her memorable days.
Moreover, Russia lacked the elements of historic activity necessary to
enable her to play an early part in the work of modern civilization. She
had no feudalism, no nobility (as we understand the term), no chivalry,
no Gothic architecture, no troubadours, no knights. She lacked the
intellectual impetus of mediæval courts, the sturdy exercise of
scholastic disputations, the elucidations of the problems of the human
race, which were propounded by the thirteenth century. She lacked the
religious orders, that network which enclosed the wide edifice of
Catholicism; and the military, uniting in mystic sympathy the ascetic
and chivalric sentiments. She lacked the councils of the laws of modern
rights; and that her lack might be in nothing lacking, she lacked even
the brilliant heresies of the West, the subtle rationalists and
pantheists, the Abelards and Amalrics, whose followers were brilliant
ignoramuses or rank bigots roused by a question of ritual. Lastly, she
lacked the sunny smile of Pallas Athene and the Graces, the Renaissance,
which brightened the face of Europe at the close of the Middle Ages.

And as the civilization brought at last to Russia was the product of
nations possessed of all that Russia lacked, and as finally, it was
imposed upon her by force, and without those gradual transitions and
insensible modifications as necessary to a people as to an individual,
she could not accept it in the frank and cordial manner indispensable to
its beneficent action. A nation which receives a culture ready made, and
not elaborated by itself, condemns itself to intellectual sterility; at
most it can only hope to imitate well. And so it happened with Russia.
Her development does not present the continuous bent, the gentle
undulations of European history in which yesterday creates to-day, and
to-day prepares for to-morrow, without an irregular or awkward halt, or
ever a trace broken. In the social order of Russia primitive
institutions coexist with products of our spick and span new sociology,
and we see the deep waters of the past mixed with the froth of the
Utopia that points out the route of the unknown future. This confusion
or inharmoniousness engenders Russian dualism, the cause of her
political and moral disturbances. Russia contains an ancient people,
to-day an anachronism, and a society in embryo struggling to burst its
bounds.

But above all it is evident there is a people eager to speak, to come
forth, to have a weight in the world, because its long-deferred time has
come; a race which, from an insignificant tribe mewed in around the
sources of the Dnieper, has spread out into an immense nation, whose
territory reaches from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the
borders of Turkey, Persia, and China; a nation which has triumphed over
Sweden, Poland, the Turks, the Mongols, and the French; a nation by
nature expansive, colonizing, mighty in extent, most interesting in the
qualities of the genius it is developing day by day, and which is more
astonishing than its material greatness, because it is the privilege of
intellect to eclipse force. Half a dozen brains and spirits who are now
spelling out their race for us, arrest and captivate all who contemplate
this great empire. Out of the poverty of traditions and institutions
which Russian history bewails, two characteristic ones appear as bases
of national life: the autocracy, and the agrarian commune,--absolute
imperial power and popular democracy.

The geography of Russia, which predisposes her both to unity and to
invasion, which obliges her to concentrate herself, and to seek in a
vigorous autocratic principle the consciousness of independent being as
a people, created the formidable dominion of the Muscovite Czars, which
has no equal in the world. Like all primordial Russian ideas, the plan
of this Cæsarian sovereignty proceeded from Byzantium, and was founded
by Greek refugee priests, who surrounded it with the aureole of divinity
indispensable to the establishment of advantageous superstitions so
fecund in historical results. Since the twelfth century the autocracy
has been a fixed fact, and has gone on assuming all the prerogatives,
absorbing all the power, and symbolizing in the person of one man this
colossal nation. The sovereign princes, discerning clearly the object
and end of these aims, have spared no means to attain to it. They began
by checking the proud Boyars in their train, reducing them from
companions and equals to subjects; later on they devoted themselves to
the suppression of all institutions of democratic character.

For the sake of those who judge of a race by the political forms it
uses, it should be observed that Russia has not only preserved latent in
her the spirit of democracy, but that she possessed in the Middle Ages
republican institutions more liberal and radical than any in the rest of
Europe. The Italian republics, which at bottom were really oligarchies,
cannot compare with the municipal and communist republics of Viatka,
Pskof, and especially the great city of Novgorod, which called itself
with pride Lord Novgorod the Great. The supreme power there resided in
an assembly of the citizens; the prince was content to be an
administrator or president elected by free suffrage, and above all an
ever-ready captain in time of war; on taking his office he swore
solemnly to respect the laws, customs, and privileges of the republic;
if he committed a perjury, the assembly convened in the public square at
the clang of an ancient bell, and the prince, having been declared a
traitor, was stripped, expelled, and _cast into the mud_, according to
the forcible popular expression. This industrious republic reached the
acme of its prosperity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after
which the rising principality of Moscow, now sure of its future, came
and took down the bells of Novgorod the Great, and so silenced their
voices of bronze and the voice of Russian liberties, though not without
a bloody battle, as witnesseth the whirlpool--which is still pointed out
to the curious traveller--under the bridge of the ancient republican
city, whose inhabitants were drowned there by Ivan the Terrible. Upon
their dead bodies he founded the unity of the empire. Nor are the free
towns the only tradition of autonomy which disturbed the growing
autocratic power. The Cossacks for a long time formed an independent and
warlike aristocracy, proud and indomitable; and to subdue and
incorporate these bellicose tribes with the rest of the nation it was
necessary to employ both skill and force.

We may say without vanity that although the Spaniards exalted
monarchical loyalty into a cult, they never depreciated human dignity.
Amongst us the king is he who makes right (_face derecho_), and if he
makes it not, we consider him a tyrant, a usurper of the royal
prerogative; in acknowledging him lord of life and property, we protest
(by the mouth of Calderon's honest rustic) against the idea that he can
arrogate to himself also the dominion over conscience and soul; and the
smallest subject in Spain would not endure at the king's hand the blows
administered by Peter the Great for the correction of his nobles,
themselves descendants of Rurik. In Russia, where the inequalities and
extremes of climate seem to have been communicated to its institutions,
there was nothing between the independent republics and the autocracy.
In Spain, the slightest territorial disaffection, the fruit of partial
conquests or insignificant victories, was an excuse for some upstart
princeling, our instinctive tendencies being always monarchical and
anything like absolute authority and Cæsarism, so odious that we never
allowed it even in our most excellent kings; a dream of imperial power
would almost have cost them the throne. In Russia, absolutism is in the
air,--one sole master, one lord omnipotent, the image of God himself.

Read the Muscovite code. The Czar is named therein _the autocrat whose
power is unlimited_. See the catechism which is taught in the schools of
Poland; it says that the subject owes to the Czar, not love or loyalty,
but adoration. Hear the Russian hymn; amid its harmonies the same idea
resounds. In all the common forms of salutation to the Czar we shall
find something that excites in us a feeling of rebellion, something that
represents us as unworthy to stand before him as one mortal before
another. Paul I. said to a distinguished foreigner, "You must know that
in Russia there is no person more important than the person to whom I
speak and while I speak." A Czar who directs by means of _ukases_ not
only the dress but even the words of the language which his subjects
must use, and changes the track of a railroad by a stroke of his pen,
frightens one even more than when he signs a sentence of proscription;
for he reaches the high-water mark of authority when he interferes in
these simple and unimportant matters, and demonstrates what one may call
the micrography of despotism. If anything can excuse or even commend to
our eyes this obedience carried to an absurdity, it is its paternal
character. There are no offences between fathers and sons, and the Czar
never can insult a subject. The serf calls him _thou_ and _Father_, and
on seeing him pass he takes off his cap though the snow falls, crossing
his hands over his breast with religious veneration. For him the Czar
possesses every virtue, and is moved only by the highest purposes; he
thinks him impeccable, sacred, almost immortal. If we abide by the
judgment of those who see a symbol of the Russian character in the call
of Rurik and the voluntary placing of the power in his hands, the
autocracy will not seem a secular abuse or a violent tyranny, but rather
an organic product of a soil and a race; and it will inspire the respect
drawn forth by any spontaneous and genuine production.

There exists in Russia a small school of thinkers on public affairs,
important by reason of the weight they have had and still have upon
public opinion. They are called Sclavophiles,--people enamoured of their
ancient land, who affirm that the essence of Russian nationality is to
be found in the customs and institutions of the laboring classes who are
not contaminated by the artificial civilization imported from the
corrupt West; who make a point of appearing on occasions in the national
dress,--the red silk blouse and velvet jacket, the long beard and the
clumsy boots. According to them, the only independent forces on which
Russia can count are the people and the Czar,--the immense herd of
peasants, and, at the top, the autocrat. And in fact the Russian empire,
in spite of official hierarchies, is a rural state in which the
sentiment of democratic equality predominates so entirely that the
people, not content with having but yesterday taken the Czar's part
against the rich and mighty Boyars, sustains him to-day against the
revolution, loves him, and cannot conceive of intermediaries between him
and his subjects, between lord and vassal, or, to put it still more
truly, between father and son. And having once reduced the nobles, with
the consent of the people, to the condition of inoffensive hangers-on of
the court, many thinkers believe that the Czar need only lean upon the
rude hand of the peasant to quell whatever political disaffection may
arise. So illimitable is the imperial power, that it becomes impotent
against itself if it would reduce itself by relegating any of its
influence to a class, such as, for instance, the aristocracy. If
turbulent magnates or sullen conspirators manage to get rid of the
person of the Czar, the principle still remains inviolate.




VI.

The Agrarian Communes.


At the right hand of the imperial power stands the second Russian
national institution, the municipal commune known as the _mir_, which is
arresting the attention of European statesmen and sociologists, since
they have learned of its existence (thanks to the work of Baron
Haxsthausen on the internal life of Russia). Who is not astonished at
finding realized in the land of the despots a large number of the
communist theories which are the terror of the middle classes in
liberal countries, and various problems, of the kind we call formidable,
there practically solved? And why should not a nation often called
barbarous swell with pride at finding itself, suddenly and without noise
or effort, safely beyond what in others threatens the extremity of
social revolution? Therefore it happens that since the discovery of the
_mir_, the Russians have one argument more, and not a weak one, against
the corrupt civilization of the Occident. The European nations, they
say, are running wildly toward anarchy, and in some, as England, the
concentration of property in a few hands creates a proletariat a
thousand times more unhappy than the Russian serf ever was, a hungry
horde hostile to the State and to the wealthy classes. Russia evades
this danger by means of the _mir_. In the Russian village the land
belongs to the municipality, amongst whose members it is distributed
periodically; each able-bodied individual receives what he needs, and is
spared hunger and disgrace.

Foreigners have not been slow to examine into the advantages of such an
arrangement. Mackenzie Wallace has pronounced it to be truly
constitutional, as the phrase is understood in his country; not meaning
a sterile and delusive law, written upon much paper and enwrapped in
formulas, but a traditional concept which came forth at the bidding of
real and positive necessities. What an eloquent lesson for those who
think they have improved upon the plan of the ages! History, scouting
our thirst for progress, offers us again in the _mir_ the picture of the
serpent biting his own tail. This institution, so much lauded by the
astonished traveller and the meditative philosopher, is really a
sociological fossil, remains of prehistoric times, preserved in Russia
by reason of the suspension or slow development of the history of the
race. Students of law have told me that in the ancient forms of
Castilian realty, those of Santander, for example, there have been
discovered traces of conditions analogous to the Russian _mir_. And when
I have seen the peasants of my own province assembled in the
church-porch after Mass, I have imagined I could see the remains of this
Saturnian and patriarchal type of communist partition. Common possession
of the land is a primitive idea as remote as the prehistoric ages; it
belongs to the paleontology of social science, and in those countries
where civilization early flourished, gave way before individual interest
and the modern idea of property. "Happy age and blessed times were
those," exclaimed Don Quixote, looking at a handful of acorns, "which
the ancients called golden, and not because gold which in our iron age
has such a value set on it, not because gold could be got without any
trouble, but because those who lived in it were ignorant of those two
words, _mine_ and _thine_! In that blessed age everything was in common;
nobody needed to take any more trouble for his necessities than to
stretch forth his hand and take from the great oak-trees the sweet and
savory fruit so liberally offered!" Gone long ago for us is the time
deplored by the ingenious knight, but it has reappeared there in the
North, where, according to our information, it is still recent; for it
is thought that the _mir_ was established about the sixteenth century.

The character of the _mir_ is entirely democratic; the oldest peasant
represents the executive power in the municipal assembly, but the
authority resides in the assembly itself, which consists of all the
heads of families, and convenes Sundays in the open air, in the public
square or the church-porch. The assembly wields a sacred power which no
one disputes. Next to the Czar the Russian peasant loves his _mir_,
among whose members the land is in common, as also the lake, the mills,
the canals, the flocks, the granary, the forest. It is all re-divided
from time to time, in order to avoid exclusive appropriation. Half the
cultivable land in the empire is subject to this system, and no
capitalist or land-owner can disturb it by acquiring even an inch of
municipal territory; the laborer is born invested with the right of
possession as certainly as we are all entitled to a grave. In spite of a
feeling of distrust and antipathy against communism, and of my own
ignorance in these matters which precludes my judgment of them, I must
confess to a certain agreement with the ardent apologists of the Russian
agrarian municipality. Tikomirov says that in Russia individual and
collective property-rights still quarrel, but that the latter has the
upper hand; this seems strange, since the modern tendency is decidedly
toward individualism, and it is hard to conceive of a return to
patriarchal forms; but there is no reason to doubt the vitality of the
_mir_ and its generation and growth in the heart of the fatherland, and
this is certainly worthy of note, especially in a country like Russia,
so much given to the imitation of foreign models. Mere existence and
permanence is no _raison d'être_ for any institution, for many exist
which are pernicious and abominable; but when an institution is found to
be in harmony with the spirit of the people, it must have a true merit
and value. It is said that the tendency to aggregate, either in agrarian
municipalities or in trades guilds and corporations, is born in the
blood and bred in the bone of the Sclavs, and that they carry out these
associations wherever they go, by instinct, as the bee makes its cells
always the same; and it is certainly true that as an ethnic force the
communistic principle claims a right to develop itself in Russia. It is
certain that the _mir_ fosters in the poor Russian village habits of
autonomous administration and municipal liberty, and that in the shadow
of this humble and primitive institution men have found a common home
within the fatherland, no matter how scattered over its vast plains.
"The heavens are very high, and the Czar is far off," says the Russian
peasant sadly, when he is the victim of any injustice; his only refuge
is the _mir_, which is always close at hand. The _mir_ acts also as a
counterbalance to a centralized administration, which is an inevitable
consequence of the conformation of Russian territory; and it creates an
advantageous solidarity among the farmers, who are equal owners of the
same heritages and subject to the same taxes.

Since 1861 the rural governments, released from all seignorial
obligations, elect their officers from among themselves, and the smaller
municipal groups, still preserving each its own autonomy, meet together
in one larger municipal body called _volost_, which corresponds to the
better-known term _canton_. No institution could be more democratic:
here the laboring man discusses his affairs _en famille_, without
interference from other social classes; the _mir_ boasts of it, as also
of the fact that it has never in its corporate existence known head or
chief, even when its members were all serfs. In fine, the _mir_ holds
its sessions without any presiding officer; rooted in the communist and
equal-rights idea, it acknowledges no law of superiority; it votes by
unanimous acclamation; the minority yields always to the general
opinion, to oppose which would be thought base obstinacy. "Only God
shall judge the _mir_" says the proverb; the word _mir_, say the
etymological students and admirers of the institution, means, "world,"
"universe," "complete and perfect microcosm," which is sufficient unto
itself and is governed by its own powers.

To what does the _mir_ owe its vitality? To the fact that it did not
originate in the mind of the Utopian or the ideologist, but was produced
naturally by derivation from the family, from which type the whole
Russian state organization springs. It should be understood, however,
that the peasant family in Russia differs from our conception of the
institution, recalling as it does, like all purely Russian institutions,
the most ancient or prehistoric forms. The family, or to express it in
the language of the best writers on the subject, _the great Russian
family_, is an association of members submitted to the absolute
authority of the eldest, generally the grandfather,--a fact personally
interesting to me because of the surprising resemblance it discloses
between Russia and the province of Gallicia, where I perceive traces of
this family power in the _petrucios_, or elders. In this association
everything is in common, and each individual works for all the others.
To the head of the house is given a name which may be translated as
administrator, major-domo, or director of works, but conveys no idea of
relationship. The laws of inheritance and succession are understood in
the same spirit, and very differently from our custom. When a house or
an estate is to be settled, the degree of relationship among the heirs
is not considered; the whole property is divided equally between the
male adults, including natural or adopted sons if they have served in
the family the same as legitimate sons, while the married daughter is
considered as belonging to the family of her husband, and she and the
son who has separated himself from the parent house are excluded from
the succession, or rather from the final liquidation or settlement
between the associates. Although there is a law of inheritance written
in the Russian Code, it is a dead letter to a people opposed to the idea
of individual property.

Intimately connected with this communist manner of interpreting the
rights of inheritance and succession are certain facts in Russian
history. For a long time the sovereign authority was divided among the
sons of the ruler; and as the Russian nobility rebelled against the
establishment of differences founded upon priority in birth, entail and
primogeniture took root with difficulty, in spite of the efforts made by
the emperors to import Occidental forms of law. Their idea of succession
is so characteristic that, like the Goths, they sometimes prefer the
collateral to the immediate branch, and the brother instead of the son
will mount the steps of the throne. It is important to note these
radical differences, because a race which follows an original method in
the matter of its laws has a great advantage in setting out upon genuine
literary creations.

But while the family, understood as a group or an association, offers
many advantages from the agrarian point of view, its disadvantages are
serious and considerable because it annuls individual liberty. It
facilitates agricultural labors, it puts a certain portion of land at
the service of each adult member, as well as tools, implements, fuel,
and cattle; helps each to a maintenance; precludes hunger; avoids legal
exactions (for the associated family cannot be taxed, just as the _mir_
cannot be deprived of its lands); but on the other hand it puts the
individual, or rather the true family, the human pair, under an
intolerable domestic tyranny. According to traditional usage, the
authority of the head of the family was omnipotent: he ordered his
house, as says an old proverb, like a Khan of the Crimea; his gray hairs
were sacred, and he wielded the power of a tribal chieftain rather than
of a head of a house. In our part of the world marriage emancipates; in
Russia, it was the first link in a galling chain. The oppression lay
heaviest upon the woman: popular songs recount the sorrows of the
daughters-in-law subjected to the maltreatment of mothers-in-law and
sisters-in-law, or the victims of the vicious appetites of the chief,
who in a literally Biblical spirit thought himself lord of all that
dwelt beneath his roof. Truly those institutions which sometimes elicit
our admiration for their patriarchal simplicity hide untold iniquities,
and develop a tendency to the abuse of power which seems inherent in the
human species.

At first sight nothing could be more attractive than the great Russian
family, nothing more useful than the rural communes; and nowadays, when
we are applying the laws and technicism of physiology to the study of
society, this primordial association would seem the cell from which the
true organism of the State may be born; the family is a sort of lesser
municipality, the municipality is a larger family, and the whole Russian
people is an immense agglomeration, a great ant-hill whose head is the
emperor. In the popular songs we see the Oriental idea of the nation
expressed as the family, when the peasant calls the Czar _father_. But
this primitive machinery can never prevail against the notion of
individualism entertained among civilized peoples. Our way of
understanding property, which the admirers of the Russian commune
consider fundamentally vicious, is the only way compatible with the
independence and dignity of work and the development of industries and
arts. The Russian _mir_ may prevent the growth of the proletariat, but
it is by putting mankind in bonds. It may be said that agrarian
communism only differs from servitude in that the latter provides one
master and the former many; and that though the laboring man
theoretically considers himself a member of a co-operative agricultural
society, he is in reality a slave, subject to collective
responsibilities and obligations, by virtue of which he is tied to the
soil the same as the vassals of our feudal epochs. Perhaps the new
social conditions which are the fruit of the emancipation of the serfs,
which struck at and violated the great associated family, will at last
undermine the _mir_, unless the _mir_ learns some way to adapt itself to
any political mutations. What is most important to the study of the
historical development and the social ideas as shown in modern Russian
literature, is to understand how by means of the great family and the
agrarian municipality, communism and socialism run in the veins of the
people of Russia, so that Leroy-Beaulieu could say with good reason,
that if they are to be preserved from the pernicious effects of the
Occidental proletariat it must be by inoculation, as vaccination exempts
from small-pox.

The socialist leaven may be fairly said to lie in the most important
class in the Russian State,--important not alone by reason of numerical
superiority, but because it is the depositary of the liveliest national
energies and the custodian of the future: I mean the peasants. There
are some who think that this _mitjik_, this _little man_ or _black man_,
tiller of still blacker soil, holds the future destinies of Europe in
his hands; and that when this great new Horde becomes conscious some day
of its strength and homogeneity, it will rise, and in its concentrated
might fall upon some portion of the globe, and there will be no defence
or resistance possible. In the rest of Europe it is the cities, the
urban element, which regulates the march of political events. Certainly
Spain is not ignorant of this fact, since she has a vivid remembrance of
civil wars in which the rustic element, representing tradition, was
vanquished. In Russia, the cities have no proportionate influence, and
that which demands the special attention of the governor or the
revolutionist is the existence, needs, and thoughts of the innumerable
peasant communities, who are the foundation and material of an empire
justly termed rural. From this is derived a sort of cult, an apotheosis
which is among the most curious to be found in Russian modern
literature. Of the peasant, wrapped in badly cured sheepskins, and
smelling like a beast; the humble and submissive peasant, yesterday
laden with the chains of servitude; the dirty, cabbage-eating peasant,
drunk with _wodka_, who beats his wife and trembles with fright at
ghosts, at the Devil, and at thunder,--of this peasant, the charity of
his friends and the poetic imagination of Russian writers has made a
demi-god, an ideal. So great is the power of genius, that without
detriment to the claims of truth, picturing him with accurate and even
brutal realism (which we shall find native to the Russian novel),
Russian authors have distilled from this peasant a poetic essence which
we inhale involuntarily until we, aristocratic by instinct, disdainful
of the rustic, given to ridicule the garlic-smelling herd, yield to its
power. And not content with seeing in this peasant a brother, a
neighbor, whom, according to the word of Christ, we ought to love and
succor, Russian literature discovers in him a certain indefinable
sublimity, a mysterious illumination which other social classes have
not. Not merely because of the introduction of the picturesque element
in the description of popular customs has it been said that Russian
contemporary literature smells of the peasant, but far rather because it
raises the peasant to the heights of human moral grandeur, marks in him
every virtue, and presupposes him possessed of powers which he never
puts forth. From Turguenief, fine poet as he is, to Chtchédrine, the
biting satirist, all paint the peasant with loving touch, always find a
ready excuse for his defects, and lend him rare qualities, without ever
failing to show faithfully his true physiognomy. Corruption, effeminacy,
and vice characterize the upper classes, particularly the employees of
government, or any persons charged with public trusts; and to make these
the more odious, they are attributed with a detestable hypocrisy made
more hateful by apparent kindliness and culture.

There is a humorous little novel by Chtchédrine (an author who merits
especial mention) entitled "The Generals[1] and the _Mujik_," which
represents two generals of the most ostentatious sort, transported to a
desert island, unable either to get food or to get away, until they meet
with a _mujik_, who performs all sorts of services for them, even to
_making broth in the hollow of his hand_, and then, after making a raft,
conveys them safely to St. Petersburg; whereupon these knavish generals,
after recovering back pay, send to their deliverer a glass of whiskey
and a sum amounting to about three cents. But this bitter allegory is a
mild one compared with the mystical apotheosis of the _mujik_ as
conceived by Tolstoï. In one of his works, "War and Peace," the hero,
after seeking vainly by every imaginable means to understand all human
wisdom and divine revelation, finds at last the sum of it in a common
soldier, imperturbable and dull of soul, and poor in spirit, a prisoner
of the French, who endures with calm resignation ill treatment and death
without once entertaining the idea of taking the life of his foreign
captors. This poor fellow, who, owing to his rude, uncouth mode of life,
suffers persecution by other importunate lesser enemies which I forbear
to name, is the one to teach Pierre Besukof the alpha and omega of all
philosophy, wherein he is wise by intuition, and, in virtue of his
condition as the peasant, fatalistic and docile.

I have had the good fortune to see with my own eyes this idol of Russian
literature, and to satisfy a part of my curiosity concerning some
features of Holy Russia. Twenty or thirty peasants from Smolensk who had
been bitten by a rabid wolf were sent to Paris to be treated by M.
Pasteur. In company with some Russian friends I went to a small hotel,
mounted to the fourth floor, and entered a narrow sleeping apartment.
The air being breathed by ten or twelve human beings was scarcely
endurable, and the fumes of carbolic acid failed to purify it; but while
my companions were talking with their compatriots, and a Russian
young-lady medical student dressed their wounds, I studied to my heart's
content these men from a distant land. I frankly confess that they made
a profound impression upon me which I can only describe by saying that
they seemed to me like Biblical personages. It gave me a certain
pleasure to see in them the marks of an ancient people, rude and rough
in outward appearance, but with something majestic and monumental about
them, and yet with a suggestion of latent juvenility, the grave and
religious air of dreamer or seer, different from really Oriental
peoples. Their features, as well as their limbs (which bearing the marks
of the wild beast's teeth they held out to be washed and dressed with
tranquil resignation), were large and mighty like a tree. One old man
took my attention particularly, because he presented a type of the
patriarchs of old, and might have served the painter as a model for
Abraham or Job,--a wide skull bald at the top, fringed about with
yellowish white hair like a halo; a long beard streaked with white also;
well-cut features, frontal development very prominent, his eyes half
hidden beneath bushy eyebrows. The arm which he uncovered was like an
old tree-trunk, rough and knotty, the thick sinuous network of veins
reminding one of the roots; his enormous hands, wrinkled and horny,
bespoke a life of toil, of incessant activity, of daily strife with the
energies of Mother Nature. I heard with delight, though without
understanding a word, their guttural speech, musical and harmonious
withal, and I needed not to heat my imagination overmuch to see in those
poor peasants the realization of the great novelists' descriptions, and
an expression of patience and sadness which raised them above vulgarity
and coarseness. The sadness may have been the result of their unhappy
situation; nevertheless it seemed sweet and poetic.

The attraction which _the people_ exercises upon refined and cultivated
minds is not surprising. Who has not sometimes experienced with terrible
keenness what may be called the æsthetic effect of collectivity? A
regiment forming, the crew of a ship about to weigh anchor, a
procession, an angry mob,--these have something about them that is epic
and sublime; so any peasant, if we see in him an epitome of race or
class, with his historic consequence and his unconscious majesty, may
and ought to interest us. The _payo_ of Avila who passes me
indifferently in the street; the beggar in Burgos who asks an alms with
courteous dignity, wrapped in his tattered clothes as though they were
garments of costly cloth; the Gallician lad who guides his yoke of oxen
and creaking cart,--these not only stir in my soul a sentiment of
patriotism, but they have for me an æsthetic charm which I never feel in
the presence of a dress-coat and a stiff hat. Perhaps this effect
depends rather on the spectator, and it may be our fancy that produces
it; for, as regards the Russian peasant, those who know him well say
that he is by nature practical and positive, and not at all inclined to
the romantic and sentimental. The Sclav race is a rich poetic
wellspring, but it depends upon what one means by poetry. For example,
in love matters, the Russian peasant is docile and prosaic to the last
degree. The hardy rustic is supposed to need two indispensable
accessories for his work,--a woman and a horse; the latter is procured
for him by the head or _old man_ of the house, the former by the _old
woman_; the wedding is nothing more than the matriculation of the
farmer; the pair is incorporated with the great family, the agricultural
commune, and that is the end of the idyl. Amorous and gallant conduct
among peasants would be little fitting, given the low estimation in
which women are held. Although the Russian peasant considers the woman
independent, subject neither to father nor husband, invested with equal
rights with men; and although the widow or the unmarried woman who is
head of the house takes part in the deliberations of the _mir_ and may
even exercise in it the powers of a mayor (and in order to preserve this
independence many peasant-women remain unmarried), this consideration is
purely a social one, and individually the woman has no rights whatever.
A song of the people says that seven women together have not so much as
one soul, rather none at all, for their soul is smoke. The theory of
marriage relations is that the husband ought to love his wife as he does
his own soul, to measure and treasure her as he does his sheepskin coat:
the rod sanctions the contract. In some provinces of Finnish or Tartar
origin the bride is still bought and sold like a head of cattle; it is
sometimes the custom still to steal her, or to feign a rape, symbolizing
indeed the idea of woman as a slave and the booty of war. So rigorous is
the matrimonial yoke, that parricides are numerous, and the jury,
allowing attenuating circumstances, generally pardons them.

Tikomirov, who, though a radical, is a wise and sensible man, says, that
far from considering the masses of the people as models worthy of
imitation, he finds them steeped in absolute ignorance, the victims of
every abuse and of administrative immorality; deprived for many
centuries of intercourse with civilized nations, they have not outgrown
the infantile period, they are superstitious, idolatrous, and pagan, as
shown by their legends and popular songs. They believe blindly in
witchcraft, to the extent that to discredit a political party with them
one has only to insinuate that it is given to the use of sorcery and the
black arts. The peasant has also an unconquerable propensity to
stealing, lying, servility, and drunkenness. Wherefore, then, is he
judged superior to the other classes of society?

In spite of the puerile humility to which the Russian peasant is
predisposed by long years of subjection, he yet obeys a democratic
impulse toward equality, which servitude has not obliterated; the
Russian does not understand the English peasant's respect for the
_gentleman_, nor the French reverence for the _chevalier_ well-dressed
and decorated. When the government of Poland ordered certain Cossack
executions of the nobility, these children of the steppes asked one
another, "Brother, has the shadow of my body increased?" Taught to
govern himself, thanks to the municipal regimen, the Russian peasant
manifests in a high degree the sentiment of human equality, an idea both
Christian and democratic, rather more deeply rooted in those countries
governed by absolute monarchy and municipal liberty, than in those of
parliamentary institutions. The Spaniard says, "None lower than the
King;" the Russian says the same with respect to the Czar. Primitive and
credulous, a philosopher in his way, the dweller on the Russian steppes
wields a dynamic force displayed in history by collectivities, be the
moral value of the individual what it may. In nations like Russia, in
which the upper classes are educated abroad, and are, like water,
reflectors and nothing more, the originality, the poetry, the epic
element, is always with the masses of the people, which comes out strong
and beautiful in supreme moments, a faithful custodian of the national
life, as for example when the butcher Minine saved his country from the
yoke of Sweden, or when, before the French invasion of 1812, they
organized bands of guerillas, or set fire to Moscow.

Hence in Russia, as in France prior to the Revolution, many thinkers
endeavor to revive the antiquated theory of the Genevan philosopher, and
proclaim the superiority of the natural man, by contact with whom
society, infected with Occidental senility, must be regenerated.
Discouraged by the incompatibility between the imported European
progress and the national tradition, unable to still the political
strife of a country where pessimist solutions are most natural and
weighty, their patriotism now uplifts, now shatters their hopes, even in
the case of those who disclaim and condemn individual patriotism, such
as Count Tolstoï; and then ensues the apotheosis of the past, the
veneration of national heroes and of the people. "The people is great,"
says Turguenief in his novel "Smoke;" "we are mere ragamuffins." And so
_the people_, which still bears traces of the marks of servitude, has
been converted into a mysterious divinity, the inspiration of
enthusiastic canticles.


[1] Voguié explains this title of "General" to be both in the civil and
military order with the qualification of "Excellency." Without living in
Russia one can hardly understand the prestige attached to this title, or
the facilities it gives everywhere for everything. To attain this
dignity is the supreme ambition of all the servants of the State. The
common salutation by way of pleasantry among friends is this line from
the comedy of Griboiëdof, which has become a proverb: "I wish you health
and the tchin of a General."--TR.




VII.

Social Classes in Russia.


Properly speaking, there are no social classes in Russia, a phenomenon
which explains to some extent the political life and internal
constitution; there is no co-ordinate proportion between the rural and
the urban element, and at first sight one sees in this vast empire only
the innumerable mass of peasants, just as on the map one sees only a
wide and monotonous plain. Although it is true that a rural and
commercial aristocracy did arise and flourish in old Moscow in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the era of invasions, yet the passions
of the wars that followed gave it the death-blow. The middle classes in
the rich and independent republics lost their wealth and influence, and
the people, being unable of themselves to reorganize the State,
sustained the princes, who soon became autocrats, ready at the first
chance to subdue the nobles and unite the disintegrated and war-worn
nation. With the sub-division into independent principalities and the
institution of democratic municipalities the importance of the cities
decreased, and the privileged classes were at an end. The middle class
is the least important. In the same districts where formerly it was most
powerful it has been dissolved by the continuous infusion of the
peasant element, owing to the curious custom of emigration, which is
spontaneous with this nomadic and colonizing people. Many farmers,
although enrolled in the rural villages, spend a large part of the year
in the city, filling some office, and forming a hybrid class between the
rural and artisan classes, thus sterilizing the natural instincts of the
laboring proletariat by the enervation of city life. The emperors were
not blind to the disproportion between the civic and rural elements, and
have endeavored to remedy it. The industrial and commercial population
fled from the cities to escape the taxes; therefore they promulgated
laws prohibiting emigration and the renunciation of civic rights, under
severe penalties. Yet with all these the cities have taken but a second
place in Russian history. Western annals are full of sieges, defences,
and mutinies of cities; in Russia we hear only of the insurrection of
wandering tribes or hordes of peasants. Russian cities exist and live
only at the mandate or protection of the emperor. Every one knows what
extraordinary means were taken by Peter the Great to build St.
Petersburg upon the swamps along the Neva; in twenty-three years that
remarkable woman called the Semiramis of the North founded no less than
two hundred and sixteen cities, determined to create a mesocratic
element, to the lack of which she attributed the ignorance and misery of
her empire. Whenever we see any rapid advancement in Russia we may be
sure it is the work of autocracy, a beneficence of despotism (that word
so shocking to our ears). It was despotism which created the modern
capital opposite the old Byzantine, legendary, retrogressive town,--the
new so different from the old, so full of the revolutionary spirit, its
streets undermined by conspirators, its pavements red with the blood of
a murdered Czar. These cities, colleges, schools, universities,
theatres, founded by imperial and autocratic hands, were the cradle of
the political unrest that rebels against their power; were there no
cities, there would be no revolutions in Russia. Although they do not
harbor crowds of famishing authors like those of London and Paris, who
lie in wait for the day of sack and ruin, yet they are full of a strange
element composed of people of divers extraction and condition, and of
small intellect, but who call themselves emphatically _the intelligence
of Russia_.

I have felt compelled to render justice to the good will of the
autocrats; and to be equally just I must say that whatever has advanced
culture in Russia has proceeded from the nobility, and this without
detriment to the fact that the larger energies lie with the masses of
the people. The enlightenment and thirst for progress manifested by the
nobility is everywhere apparent in Russian history. They are descended
from the retinues of the early Muscovite Czars, to whom were given
wealth and lands on condition of military service, and they are
therefore in their origin unlike any other European nobility; they have
known nothing of feudalism, nor the Germanic symbolism of blazons, arms,
titles, and privileges, pride of race and notions of caste: these have
had no influence over them. The Boyars, who are the remnants of the
ancient territorial aristocracy, on losing their sovereign rights,
rallied round the Czar in the quality of court councillors, and received
gold and treasure in abundance, but never the social importance of the
Spanish grandee or the French baron. Hence the Russian aristocracy was
an instrument of power, but without class interests, replenished
continually by the infusion of elements from other social classes, for
no barrier prevented the peasant from becoming a merchant and the
merchant from becoming a noble, if the fates were kind. There are
legally two classes of aristocracy in Russia,--the transmissible, or
hereditary, and the personal, which is not hereditary. If the latter
surprise us for a moment, it soon strikes us with favor, since we all
acknowledge to an occasional or frequent protest against the idea of
hereditary nobility, as when we lament that men of glorious renown are
represented by unworthy or insignificant descendants. In Russia, Krilof,
the Æsop of Moscow, as he is called, put this protest into words in the
fable of the peasant who was leading a flock of geese to the city to
sell. The geese complained of the unkindness with which they were
treated, adding that they were entitled to respect as being the
descendants of the famous birds that saved the Capitol, and to whom Rome
had dedicated a feast. "And what great thing have _you_ done?" asked the
peasant. "We? Oh, nothing." "Then to the oven!" he replied.

The only title of purely national origin in Russia is that of
prince;[1] all others are of recent importation from Europe; in the
family of the prince, as in that of the humblest _mujik_, the sons are
equals in rights and honors, and the fortune of the father, as well as
his title, descends equally to all. Feudalism, the basis of nobility as
a class, never existed in Russia: according to Sclavophiles, because
Russia never suffered conquest in those ancient times; according to
positivist historians, by reason of geographical structure which did not
favor seignorial castles and bounded domains, or any other of those
appurtenances of feudalism dear to romance and poetry, and really
necessary to its existence,--the moated wall, the mole overhanging some
rocky precipice washed by an angry torrent, and below at its foot, like
a hen-roost beneath a vulture's nest, the clustered huts of the vassals.
But we have seen that the Russian nobility acknowledges no law of
superiority; like the people, they hold the idea of divisible and common
property. Hence this aristocracy, less haughty than that of Europe,
ruled by imperial power, subject until the time of Peter III. to
insulting punishment by whip or rod, and which, at the caprice of the
Czar, might at any time be degraded to the quality of buffoons for any
neglect of a code of honor imposed by the traditions of their
race,--never drew apart from the life of the nation, and, on the
contrary, was always foremost in intellectual matters. Russian
literature proves this, for it is the work of the Russian nobility
mainly, and the ardent sympathy for the people displayed in it is
another confirmation. Tolstoï, a noble, feels an irrepressible
tenderness, a physical attraction toward the peasant; Turguenief, a
noble and a rich man, in his early years consecrated himself by a sort
of vow to the abolition of servitude.

The same lack of class prejudices has made the Russian nobility a quick
soil for the repeated ingrafting of foreign culture according to the
fancy of the emperors. Catherine II. found little difficulty in
modelling her court after that of Versailles; but the same aristocracy
that powdered and perfumed itself at her behest adopted more important
reforms to a degree that caused Count Rostopchine to exclaim, "I can
understand the French citizen's lending a hand in the revolution to
acquire his rights, but I cannot understand the Russian's doing the same
to lose his." They are so accustomed to holding the first place in
intellectual matters, that no privilege seems comparable to that of
standing in the vanguard of advanced thought. They had been urged to
frequent the lyceums and debating societies, to take up serious studies
and scientific education by the word of rulers who were enlightened, and
friends to progress (as were many of them), when all at once sciences
and studies, books and the press, began to be suspected, the censorship
was established, and the conspiracy of December was the signal for the
rupture between authority and the liberal thought of the country. But
the nobles who had tasted of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil
did not resign themselves easily to the limited horizon offered by the
School of Pages or the antechamber of the palace; their hand was upon
the helm, and rather than let it go they generously immolated their
material interests and social importance. The aristocracy is everywhere
else the support of the throne, but in Russia it is a destroying
element; and while the people remains attached to the autocrat, the
nobles learn in the very schools founded by the emperors to pass
judgment upon the supreme authority and to criticise the sovereign.
Nicholas I. did not fail to realize that these establishments of
learning were focuses of revolutionary ardor, and he systematically
reduced the number of students and put limits to scientific education.

It follows that the most reactionary class, or the most unstable class
in Russia, the class painted in darkest colors by the novelists and used
as a target for their shafts by the satirists, is not the noble but the
bureaucratic, the office-holders, the members of the _tchin_ (an
institution Asiatic in form, comparable perhaps to a Chinese
mandarinate). Peter the Great, in his zeal to set everything in order,
drew up the famous categories wherein the Russian official microcosm is
divided into a double series of fourteen grades each, from
ecclesiastical dignitaries to the military. This Asiatic sort of
machinery (though conceived by the great imitator of the West) became
generally abhorred, and excited a national antipathy, less perhaps for
its hollow formalism than on account of the proverbial immorality of the
officers catalogued in it. Mercenariness, pride, routine, and indolence
are the capital sins of the Russian office-holder, and the first has so
strong a hold upon him that the people say, "To make yourself understood
by him you must talk of rubles;" adding that in Russia everybody robs
but Christ, who cannot because his hands are nailed down. Corruption is
general; it mounts upward like a turbid wave from the humblest clerk to
the archduke, generalissimo, or admiral. It is a tremendous ulcer, that
can only be cured by a cautery of literary satire, the avenging muse of
Gogol, and the dictatorial initiative of the Czars. In a country
governed by parliamentary institutions it would be still more difficult
to apply a remedy.

The contrast is notable between the odium inspired by the bureaucracy
and the sympathy that greets the municipal institutions,--not only those
of a patriarchal character such as the _mir_, but those too of a more
modern origin. Among the latter may be mentioned the _zemstvo_, or
territorial assembly, analogous to our provincial deputations, but of
more liberal stripe, and entirely decentralized. In this all classes are
represented, and not, as in the _mir_, the peasants merely. The form of
this local parliament is extremely democratic; the cities, the peasants,
and the property-holders elect separate representatives, and the
assembly devotes itself to the consideration of plain but interesting
practical questions of hygiene, salubrity, safety, and public
instruction. This offers another opportunity to the nobility, for this
body engages itself particularly with the well-being and progress of the
poorer classes, in providing physicians for the villages in place of the
ignorant herb-doctors, in having the _mujiks_ taught to read, and in
guarding their poor wooden houses from fire.

While the Russian nobility has never slept, the Russian clergy, on the
contrary, has been permanently wrapped in lethargy. The rôle accorded to
the Greek Church is dull and depressing, a petrified image, fixed and
archaic as the _icons_, or sacred pictures, which still copy the
coloring and design of the Byzantine epoch. Ever since it was rent by
schism from the parent trunk of Catholicism, life has died in its roots
and the sap has frozen in its veins. Since Peter the Great abolished the
Patriarchy, the ecclesiastical authority resides in a Synod composed of
prelates elected by the government. According to the ecclesiastical
statutes, the emperor is Head of the church, supreme spiritual chief;
and though there has been promulgated no dogma of his infallibility, it
amounts to the same in effect, for he may bind and loose at will. At the
Czar's command the church anathematizes, as when for example to-day the
_popes_ are ordered to preach against the growing desire for partition
of land, against socialism, and against the political enemies of the
government; the priest is given a model sermon after which he must
pattern his own; and such is his humiliation that sometimes he is
obliged by order of the Synod to send information, obtained through his
office as confessor, to the police, thus revealing the secrets of
confiding souls. What a loss of self-respect must follow such a
proceeding! Is it a marvel that some independent schismatics called
_raskolniks_, revivalists and followers of ancient rites and truths,
should thrive upon the decadence of the official clergy, who are
subjected to such insulting servitude and must give to Cæsar what
belongs to God?

In view of these facts it is in vain to boast of spiritual independence
and say that the Greek church knows no head but Christ. The government
makes use of the clergy as of one arm more, which, however, is now
almost powerless through corruption. The Oriental church has no
conception of the noble devotion which has honored Catholicism in the
lives of Saint Thomas of Canterbury and Cardinal Cisneros.

The Russian clergy is divided into _black_ and _white_, or regular and
secular; the former, powerful and rich, rule in ecclesiastical
administration; the latter vegetate in the small villages, ill paid and
needy, using their wits to live at the expense of their parishioners,
and to wheedle them out of a dozen eggs or a handful of meal. Is it
strange that the parishioner respects them but little? Is it strange
that the _pope_ lives in gross pride or scandalous immorality, and that
we read of his stealing money from under the pillow of a dying man, of
one who baptized a dog, of another who was ducked in a frozen pond by
his _barino_, or landlord, for the amusement of his guests? It is true
that a few occasional facts prove nothing against a class, and that
malice will produce from any source hurtful anecdotes and more or less
profane details touching sacred things; but to my mind, that which tells
most strongly against the Russian clergy is its inanity, its early
intellectual death, which shut it out completely from scientific
reflection, controversy, and apology, and therefore from all
philosophy,--realms in which the Catholic clergy has excelled. Like a
stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians,
thinkers, or _savants_. There are none to elaborate, define, and ramify
her dogmas; the human mind in her sounds no depths of mystery. If there
are no conflicts between religion and science in Russia, it is because
the Muscovite church weighs not a shadow with the free-thinkers.

Certainly the adherents and members of the earlier church bear away the
palm for culture and spiritual independence. At the close of the
seventeenth century, after the struggles with Sweden and Poland, the
schismatic church aroused the national conscience, and satisfied, to a
certain extent, the moral needs of a race naturally religious by
temperament It began to discuss liturgical minutiæ, and persecuted
delinquents so fiercely that it infused all dissenters with a spirit of
protest against an authority which was disposed to treat them like
bandits or wild beasts. Such persecution demonstrates the fact that not
only ecclesiastical but secular power is irritated by heterodoxy. In
Russia, whose slumbering church is unmoved even by a thunder-bolt, an
instinct of orderliness led the less devout of the emperors against the
schismatics. To-day there are from twelve to fifteen millions of
schismatics and sects; and many among them are given to the coarsest
superstitions, practise obscene and cruel rites, worship the Devil, and
mutilate themselves in their insane fervors. Probably Russia is the only
country in the civilized world to-day where superstition, quietism, and
mysticism, without law or limit, grow like poisonous trees; and in my
work on Saint Francis of Assisi I have remarked how the communist
heresies of the Middle Ages have survived there in the North. Some
authors affirm that the clergy shut their eyes and open their hands to
receive hush-money for their tolerance of heterodoxy. But let us not be
too ready always to believe the worst. Only lately there fell into my
hands an article written by that much respected author, Melchior de
Voguié, who assures us that he has observed signs of regeneration in
many Russian parishes.

From this review of social classes in Russia it may be deduced that the
peasant masses are the repository of national energies, while the
nobility has until now displayed the most apparent activity. The proof
of this is to be found in the consideration of a memorable historical
event,--the greatest perhaps that the present century has known,--the
emancipation of the serfs.


[1] "The term translated 'prince' perhaps needs some explanation. A
Russian prince may be a bootblack or a ferryman. The word _kniaz_
denotes a descendant of any of the hundreds of petty rulers, who before
the time of the unification of Russia held the land. They all claim
descent from the semi-mythical Rurik; and as every son of a _kniaz_
bears the title, it may be easily imagined how numerous they are. The
term 'prince,' therefore, is really a too high-sounding title to
represent it."--Nathan Haskell Dole.




VIII.

Russian Serfdom.


Russia boasts of never having known that black stain upon ancient
civilizations, slavery; but the pretension, notwithstanding many
allegations thereto in her own chronicles, is refuted by Herodotus, who
speaks of the inhuman treatment inflicted by the Scythians on their
slaves, even putting out their eyes that they might better perform
certain tasks; and the same historian refers to the treachery of the
slaves to their masters in raping the women while they were at war with
the Medes, and to the insurrection of these slaves which was put down by
the Scythians by means of the whip alone,--the whip being in truth a
characteristic weapon of a country accustomed to servitude. Herodotus
does say in another place that "among the Scythians the king's servants
are free youths well-born, for it is not the custom in Scythia to buy
slaves;" from which it may be inferred that the slaves were prisoners of
war. Howbeit, Russian authors insist that in their country serfs were
never slaves, and serfdom was rather an abuse of the power of the
nobility and the government than an historic natural result.

To my mind this is not so; and I must say that I think servitude had an
actual beginning, and that there was a cause for it. The Muscovite
empire was but sparsely populated, and the population was by
temperament adventurous, nomadic, restless, and expansive. We have
observed that the limitless plains of Russia offer no climatic
antagonisms, for the reason that there are no climatic boundaries; but
it was not merely the love of native province that was lacking in the
Russian, but the attachment to the paternal roof and to the home
village. It is said that the origin of this sentiment is embedded in
rock; where dwellings are built of wood and burn every seven years on an
average, there is no such thing as the paternal roof, there is no such
thing as home. With his hatchet in his belt the Russian peasant will
build another house wherever a new horizon allures him. But if the
scanty rural population scatters itself over the steppes, it will be
lost in it as the sand drinks in the rain, and the earth will remain
unploughed and waste; there will be nothing to tax, and nobody to do
military service. Therefore, about the end of the sixteenth century,
when all the rest of Europe was beginning to feel the stirrings of
political liberty and the breath of the Renaissance, the Regent, Boris
Godonof, riveted the chains of slavery upon the wrists of many millions
of human beings in Russia. It is very true that Russian servitude does
not mean the subjection of man to man, but to the soil; for the decree
of Godonof converted the peasant into a slave merely by abrogating the
traditional right of the "black man" to change his living-place on Saint
George's day. The peasant perceived no other change in his condition
than that of finding himself fastened, chained, bound to the soil. The
Russian word which we translate "serf" means "consolidated,"
"adherent."

It is easy to see the historical transition from the free state to that
of servitude. The military and political organization of the Russian
State in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries hedged in the peasant's
liberty of action, and his situation began to resemble that of the Roman
_colonus_, or husbandman, who was neither "bond nor free." When the
nation was constituted upon firmer bases, it seemed indispensable to fix
every man's limitation, to range the population in classes, and to lay
upon them obligations consistent with the needs of the empire. These
bonds were imposed just as the other peoples of Europe were breaking
away from theirs.

Servitude, or serfdom, did not succeed throughout the empire, however.
Siberia and the independent Cossacks of the South rejected it; only
passive consent could sanction a condition that was not the fruit of
conquest nor had as an excuse the right of the strongest. Even in the
rest of Russia the peasant never was entirely submissive, never
willingly bent his neck to the yoke, and the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries witnessed bitter and sanguinary uprisings of the serfs, who
were prompt to follow the first impostor who pronounced words of
promise; and, strange to say, what was most galling was his entail upon
the land rather than the deprivation of his own liberty. He imagined
that the lord of the whole earth was the Czar, that by his favor it was
temporarily in possession of the nobles, but that in truth and justice
it belonged to him who tilled it. Pugatchef, the pretender to the title
of Peter III., in order to rally to his standard an innumerable host of
peasants, called himself the rural emperor, and declared that no sooner
should he gain the throne of his ancestors than he would shower treasure
upon the nobles and restore the land to the tillers of it.

Those who forged the fetters of serfdom had little faith in the
stability of it, however. And although the abuses arising out of it were
screened and tacitly consented to,--and never more so than during the
reign of the humane philosopher, friend, and correspondent of Voltaire,
the Empress Catherine II.,--yet law and custom forever refused to
sanction them. Russian serfdom assumed rather a patriarchal character,
and this softened its harshness. It was considered iniquitous to
alienate the serfs, and it was only lawful in case of parting with the
land whereon those serfs labored; in this way was preserved the thin
line of demarcation between agrarian servitude and slavery.

There were, however, serfs in worse condition, true helots, namely, the
domestic servants, who were at the mercy of the master's caprice, like
the fowls in his poultry-yard. Each proprietor maintained a numerous
household below stairs, useless and idle as a rule, whose children he
brought up and had instructed in certain ways in order to hire them out
or sell them by and by. The players in the theatres were generally
recruited from this class, and until Alexander I. prohibited such
shameless traffic, it was not uncommon to see announced in the papers
the sale of a coachman beside that of a Holstein cow. But like every
other institution which violates and offends human conscience, Russian
serfdom could not exist forever, in spite of some political and social
advantages to the empire.

Certain Russian writers affirm that the assassination of masters and
proprietors was of frequent occurrence in the days of serfdom, and that
even now the peasant is disposed to quarrels and acts of violence
against the nobles. Yet, on the whole, I gather from my reading on the
subject that the relations in general between the serf and the master
were, on the one side, humble, reverent, and filial; on the other, kind,
gentle, and protecting. The important question for the peasant is that
of the practical ownership of the land. It is not his freedom but his
agrarian rights that have been restored to him; and this must be borne
in mind in order to understand why the recent emancipation has not
succeeded in pacifying the public mind and bringing about a new and
happy Russia.

Given the same problem to the peasant and the man of mind, it will be
safe to say that they will solve it in very different ways, if not in
ways diametrically opposed. The peasant will be guided by the positive
and concrete aspect of the matter; the man of mind by the speculative
and ideal. The peasant calculates the influence of atmospheric phenomena
upon his crops, while the other observes the beauty of the sunset or
the tranquillity of the night. In social questions the peasant demands
immediate utility, no matter how small it may be, while the other
demands the application of principles and the triumph of ideas. Under
the care of a master the Russian serf enjoyed a certain material
welfare, and if he fell to the lot of a good master--and Russian masters
have the reputation of being in general excellent--his situation was not
only tolerable but advantageous. On the other hand, the intelligent
could not put up with the monstrous and iniquitous fact of human liberty
being submitted to the arbitrary rule of a master who could apply the
lash at will, sell men like cattle, and dispose as he would of bodies
and souls. Where this exists, since Christ came into the world, either
there is no knowledge, or the ignominy must be stamped out.

We all know that celebrated story of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the famous
Abolitionist novel by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. There were also
novelists in Russia who set themselves to plead for the emancipation of
the serfs. But there is a difference between them and the North American
authoress, in that the Russians, in order to achieve their object, had
no need to exaggerate the reality, to paint sensitive slaves and
children that die of pity, but, with an artistic instinct, they appealed
to æsthetic truth to obtain human justice. "Dead Souls," by Gogol, or
one of the poetical and earnest _brochures_ of Turguenief, awakens a
more stirring and permanent indignation than the sentimental allegory
of Mrs. Stowe; and neither Gogol nor Turguenief misrepresented the serf
or defamed the master, but rather they present to us both as they were
in life, scorning recourse to bad taste for the sake of capturing tender
hearts. The noblest sentiments of the soul, divine compassion, equity,
righteous vengeance, the generous pity that moves to sacrifice, rise to
the inspired voice of great writers; we see the abuse, we feel it, it
hurts us, it oppresses us, and by a spontaneous impulse we desire the
good and abhor the evil. This enviable privilege has been granted to the
Russian novelists; had they no greater glory, this would suffice to save
them from oblivion.

The Abolitionist propaganda subtly and surely spread through the
intelligent classes, created an opinion, communicated itself naturally
to the press in as far as the censor permitted, and little by little the
murmur grew in volume, like that raised against the administrative
corruption after the Crimean War. And it is but just to add that the
Czars were never behind in this national movement. Had it not been for
their omnipotent initiative, who knows if even now slavery would not
stain the face of Europe? There is reason to believe it when one sees
the obstacles that hinder other reforms in Russia in which the autocrat
takes no part. Doubtless the mind of the emperor was influenced by the
words of Alexander II., in 1856, to the Muscovite nobles: "It is better
to abolish serfdom by decrees from above than to wait for it to be
destroyed by an impulse from below." A purely human motive; yet in every
generous act there may be a little egotistical leaven. Let us not judge
the unfortunate Emancipator too severely.

The Crimean War and its grave internal consequences aided to undermine
the infamous institution of serfdom, at the same time that it disclosed
the hidden cancer of the administration, the misgovernment and ruin of
the nation. With the ill success of the campaign, Russia clearly saw the
need for self-examination and reorganization. Among the many and
pressing questions presented to her, the most urgent was that of the
serfs, and the impossibility of re-forming a prosperous State, modern
and healthy, while this taint existed within her. Alexander II., whose
variability and weakness are no bar to his claim of the honored title of
the Liberator, exhorted the aristocracy to consummate this great work,
and (a self-abnegation worthy of all praise, and which only a blind
political passion can deny them) the nobles coincided and co-operated
with him with perfect good faith, and even with the electrical
enthusiasm characteristic of the Sclavic race. One cannot cease to extol
this noble act, which, taken as a whole, is sublime, although, being the
work of large numbers, it may be overloaded with details and incidents
in which the interest flags. It may be easy to preach a reform whose
aims do not hurt our pride, shatter our fortunes, alter our way of
living, or conflict with the ideas inculcated upon us in childhood by
our parents; but to do this to one's own detriment deserves especial
recognition. The nobility on this occasion only put into practice
certain theories which had stirred in their hearts of old. The first
great Russian poet, Prince Kantemire, wrote in 1738, in his satires,
that Adam did not beget nobles, nor did Noah save in the ark any but his
equals,--humble husbandmen, famous only for their virtues. To my mind
the best praise to the Russian nobility is for having offered less
hindrance to the emancipation of the serfs than the North American
democracy to the liberation of the slaves; and I solicit especial
applause for this self-sacrificing, redeeming aristocracy.

The fruits of the emancipation were not what desire promised. The
peasants, from their positivist point of view, set little value on
liberty itself, and scarcely understood it. "We are yours," they were
accustomed to say to their masters; "but the soil is ours." When it
became known that they must go on paying even for the goods of the
community, they rebelled; they declared that emancipation was a farce, a
lie, and that true emancipation ought to abolish rent and distribute the
land in equal parts. Did not the proclamation of the Czar read that they
were free? Well, freedom, in their language, meant emancipation from
labor, and the possession of the land. One _mir_ even sent a deputation
to the governor, announcing that as he had been a good master he would
still be allowed the use and profit of his house and farm. The peasant
believed himself free from all obligation, and even refused to work
until the government forced him to do so; and the result was that the
lash and the rod were never so frequently laid across Russian shoulders
as in the first three years of emancipation and liberty.

What cared they--"the little black men"--for the dignity of the freeman
or the rights of citizenship? That which laid strongest hold of their
primitive imagination was the desire to possess the whole land,--the old
dream of what they called the _black partition_, the national Utopia.
One Russian revolutionary journal adopted the name of "Land and
Liberty," a magic motto to a peasant country, giving the former the
first place, or at least making the two synonymous. The Russian
people ask no political rights, but rather the land which is watered
by the sweat of their brow; and if some day the anarchists--the
agitators who go from village to village propagating their sanguinary
doctrines--succeed in awakening and stirring this Colossus to action, it
will be by touching this tender spot and alluring by the promise of this
traditional dream. The old serf lives in hopes of a Messiah, be he
emperor or conspirator, who shall deliver the earth into his hands; and
at times the vehemence of this insatiable desire brings forth popular
prophets, who announce that the millennium is at hand, and that by the
will of Heaven the land is to be divided among the cultivators thereof.
From his great love to the autocrat the peasant believes that _he_ also
desires this distribution, but being hampered by his counsellors and
menaced by his courtiers, he cannot authorize it yet. "For," says the
peasant, "the land never belonged to the lords, but first to the
sovereign and then to the _mir_." The idea of individual proprietorship
is so repugnant to this people that they say that even death is
beautiful shared in common.

All the schismatic sects in Russia preach community of possessions. Some
among them live better than the orthodox Greeks; some are voluntarily
consecrated to absolute poverty, such as characterized the early orders
of mendicants, and literally give their cloak to him who asks; but both
the more temperate and the fanatics agree in the faith of the general
and indisputable right of man to possess the land he cultivates.

With society as with the individual, after great effort comes
prostration, after a sudden change, inevitable uneasiness. So with
Russian emancipation. Although in some localities the condition of the
peasants was ameliorated, in others their misery and retrogression
seemed only to increase, and led them to pine for the old bonds. The
abuse, arbitrariness, and cruelty which are cited, and which shock the
nerves of Westerners, caused no alarm to the Russian peasant, who was
well used to baring his back in payment for any delinquency. The worst
extent to which the master allowed his anger to spend itself was an
unlimited number of stripes; and this very punishment, which to-day no
master would inflict, and which the law expressly forbids, is still
frequently imposed by the peasant tribunals of the _volost_ or
_canton_; their confidence in its efficacy is well grounded, and it is
well authorized by custom and experience. What the peasant fears and
hates most is not the rod or the whip, but the rent-collector, the
tax-gatherer, the burden of the taxes themselves, and hunger.

What must be the æsthetic and political determination of this race,
which prefers the possession of the soil to the liberty of the
individual? In literature, toward a plain and candid realism; in form of
government, a communist absolutism. The abstract constitutional idea,
which, in spite of its Anglo-Saxon origin, meets perfectly the ideal
entertained by Latin minds, has no charm for the Sclav. Yet at the same
time the Russian combines, with his practical and concrete notions of
life and his preponderating sense of realism, a dreamy and childlike
imagination, which acts upon him like a dangerous dose of opium.

In the next essay I propose to show how there has grown up within this
patient and submissive rural people, and has finally burst forth, that
most terrible of revolutionary volcanoes, nihilism.




Book II.

RUSSIAN NIHILISM AND ITS LITERATURE.




I.

The Word "Nihilism."


I have scarcely realized until now the difficulties in the way of the
subject I am treating. To talk of nihilism is an audacious undertaking,
and in spite of all my endeavors to hold the balance true, and to
consider calmly the social phenomena and the literature into which it
has infiltrated, I shall perhaps not be able to avoid a note of
partiality or emotion. To some I shall seem too indulgent with the
Russian revolutionaries, and they may say of me, as of M.
Leroy-Beaulieu, that my opinions are imbibed from official sources and
my words taken from the mouth of reactionaries.

The first stumbling-block is the word "nihilism." In Tikomirov's work on
Russia seven or eight pages are devoted to the severe condemnation of
the use of the expressions "nihilism" and "nihilist," Nevertheless, at
the risk of offending my friend the author, I must make use of them,
since, as he himself allows, they are employed universally, and all the
world understands what is meant by them in an approximate and relative
way. I do not reject the term proposed by Tikomirov, who would call
nihilism "the militant intelligence;" but this is much too long and
obscure, and before accepting it, it behooves one to understand what is
meant by _Russian intelligence_. The nihilists call themselves by a
variety of names,--democrats, socialists, propagandists, _new men_, or
sometimes by the title of some organ of their clandestine press. This
war of names seems puerile, and I prefer to face the fury of Tikomirov
against those who not only use the objectionable term but dedicate a
chapter to what it represents, and study nihilism as a doctrine or
tendency distinct among all that have arisen until now. I cannot agree
to the idea that nihilism is merely a Russian intellectual movement, nor
do I think that all Europe is mistaken in judging that the nihilist
explosions are characteristic of the great Sclav empire. On the
contrary, I believe that if Russia were to-morrow blotted from the map,
and her history and every trace of her national individuality
obliterated, only a few pages of her romances and a few fragments of her
revolutionary literature being left to us, a philosopher or a critic
could reconstruct, without other data, the spirit of the race in all its
integrity and completeness.

Now, to begin, how did this much-discussed word originate? It was a
novelist who first baptized the party who called themselves at that time
_new men_. It was Ivan Turguenief, who by the mouth of one of the
characters in his celebrated novel, "Fathers and Sons," gave the young
generation the name of nihilists. But it was not of his coinage;
Royer-Collard first stamped it; Victor Hugo had already said that the
negation of the infinite led directly to nihilism, and Joseph Lemaistre
had spoken of the nihilism, more or less sincere, of the contemporary
generations; but it was reserved for the author of "Virgin Soil" to
bring to light and make famous this word, which after making a great
stir in his own country attracted the attention of the whole world.

The reign of Nicholas I. was an epoch of hard oppression. When he
ascended the throne, the conspiracy of the Decembrists broke out, and
this sudden revelation of the revolutionary spirit steeled the already
inflexible soul of the Czar. Nicholas, although fond of letters and an
assiduous reader of Homer, was disposed to throttle his enemies, and
would not have hesitated to pluck out the brains of Russia; he was very
near suppressing all the universities and schools, and inaugurating a
voluntary retrocession to Asiatic barbarism. He did mutilate and reduce
the instruction, he suppressed the chair of European political laws, and
after the events of 1848 in France he seriously considered the idea of
closing his frontiers with a cordon of troops to beat back foreign
liberalism like the cholera or the plague. Those who have had a near
view of this Iron Czar have described him to me as tall, straight,
stiff, always in uniform, a slave to his duties as sovereign, the
living personification of the autocrat, and called, not without reason,
the Quixote of absolutism. At the close of a life devoted to the
fanatical inculcation of his convictions, this inflexible emperor, who
believed himself to be guided by the Divine hand, saw only the
dilapidation and ruin of his country, which then started up dismayed and
raised a cry of reprobation, a chorus of malediction against the emperor
and the order of things established by him. Satire cried out in strident
and indignant tones, and spit in the face of the Czar with terrible
anathemas. "Oh, Emperor," it said to him, "Russia confided the supreme
power to you; you were as a god upon the earth. What have you done?
Blinded by ignorance and selfishness, you longed for power and forgot
Russia; you spent your life in reviewing troops, in changing uniforms,
in signing decrees. You created the vile race of press-censors, so that
you might sleep in peace, that you might ignore the needs of the people,
and turn a deaf ear to their cries; and the truth you buried deep, and
rolled a great stone over the door of the sepulchre, and put a guard
over it, so that you might think in your proud heart that it would never
rise again. But the light of the third day is breaking, and truth will
come forth from among the dead." And so the great autocrat heard the
crash of the walls that he had built with callous hands and cemented
with the blood and tears of two millions of human beings whom he had
exiled to Siberia. Perhaps the inflexible principles, the mainspring of
his hard soul, gave way then; but it was indeed too late to give the
lie to his whole life, and according to well-authenticated reports he
sought a sure and speedy death by wilful exposure to the rigors of the
terrible climate. "I cannot go back," were the dying words of this
upright and consistent man, who, notwithstanding his hardness, was yet
not a tyrant.

However, it was under his sceptre, under his systematic suppression,
that, by confession of the great revolutionary statesman Herzen, Russian
thought developed as never before; that the emancipation of the
intelligence, which this very statesman calls a tragic event, was
accomplished, and a national literature was brought to light and began
to flourish. When Alexander II. succeeded to the throne, when the bonds
of despotism were loosened and the blockade with which Nicholas vainly
tried to isolate his empire was raised, the field was ready for the
intellectual and political strife.

Russia is prone to violent extremes in everything. No social changes are
brought about in her with the slow gradations which make transitions
easy and avoid shocks and collisions. In the rest of Europe modern
scientific progress was due to numerous coincident causes, such as the
Renaissance, the art of printing, the discovery of America; but in
Russia the will of the autocrat was the motor, and the country was
forced and surprised into it. And when this drowsy land one day shakes
off its lethargy and takes note of the latent political effervescence
within itself, it will be with the same fiery earnestness, the same
exaggeration, the same logical directness, straight to the end, even
though that end culminate in absurdity.

Before explaining how nihilism is the outcome of intelligence, we must
understand what is meant by intelligence in Russia. It means a class
composed of all those, of whatever profession or estate, who have at
heart the advancement of intellectual life, and contribute in every way
toward it. It may be said, indeed, that such a class is to be found in
every country; but there is this difference,--in other countries the
class is not a unit; there are factions, or a large number of its
members shun political and social discussion in order to enjoy the
serene atmosphere of the world of art, while in Russia _the
intelligence_ means a common cause, a homogeneous spirit, subversive and
revolutionary withal. To write a history of modern literature,
particularly of the novel, in Russia, is equivalent to writing the
history of the revolution.

The subversive, dissolvent character of this intelligence--working now
tacitly, now openly, and with a candor surprising in a country subjected
to such suspicious censorship--explains why the czars, once the
protectors of the arts, have become since the middle of this century so
out of humor with authors, books, and the press. We have heard of one
emperor--the cleverest of them all--who in the interest of his reforms
had his own son whipped to death. Russian art, also son of the czars,
figuratively speaking, received scarcely better treatment when it
signified a desire to stand on its own feet.

Long and painful is the list of persecutions directed against the
growth of Thought, in prose and verse, and above all against illustrious
men. But we must make a distinction, so as not to be unjust. Herzen,
exiled and deprived of all his possessions, and the famous martyr
Tchernichewsky, confined twenty and odd years in a Siberian prison or
fortress, do not arouse our astonishment, for they suffered the common
fate of the political agitator; but it seems a pity that such artists as
Dostoiëwsky and Turguenief should suffer any such infliction at all. All
Russian literature is charged with a revolutionary spirit; but there is
the same difference between those authors whose aim is political and
those who merely speak of Russia's wounds when occasion offers, that
there is between those who are licentious and those who are simply open
and candid. And by this I do not mean to compare the nihilist writers
with licentious ones, nor to convey any stigma by my words. I merely say
that when literature deliberately attacks established society, the
instinct of self-preservation obliges the latter to defend itself even
to persecuting its adversary.




II.

Origin of the Intellectual Revolution.


Whence came the revolutionary element in Russia? From the Occident, from
France, from the negative, materialist, sensualist philosophy of the
Encyclopædia imported into Russia by Catherine II. and later from
Germany, from Kantism and Hegelianism, imbibed by Russian youth at the
German universities, and which they diffused throughout their own
country with characteristic Sclav impetuosity. By "Pure Reason" and
transcendental idealism, Herzen and Bakunine, the first apostles of
nihilism, were inspired. But the ideas brought from Europe to Russia
soon allied themselves with an indigenous or possibly an Oriental
element; namely, a sort of quietist fatalism, which leads to the darkest
and most despairing pessimism. On the whole, nihilism is rather a
philosophical conception of the sum of life than a purely democratic and
revolutionary movement. Since the beginning of this century Europe has
seen mobs and revolutions, dynasties wrecked and governments overturned;
but these were political disturbances, and not the result of mind
diseased or anguish of soul.

Nihilism had no political color about it at the beginning. During the
decade between 1860 and 1870 the youth of Russia was seized with a sort
of fever for negation, a fierce antipathy toward everything that
was,--authorities, institutions, customary ideas, and old-fashioned
dogmas. In Turguenief's novel, "Fathers and Sons," we meet with Bazarof,
a froward, ill-mannered, intolerable fellow, who represents this type.
After 1871 the echo of the Paris Commune and emissaries of the
Internationals crossed the frontier, and the nihilists began to bestir
themselves, to meet together clandestinely, and to send out propaganda.
Seven years later they organized an era of terror, assassination, and
explosions. Thus three phases have followed upon one another,--thought,
word, and deed,--along that road which is never so long as it looks, the
road that leads from the word to the act, from Utopia to crime.

And yet nihilism never became a political party as we understand the
term. It has no defined creed or official programme. The fulness of its
despair embraces all negatives and all acute revolutionary forms.
Anarchists, federalists, cantonalists, covenanters, terrorists, all who
are unanimous in a desire to sweep away the present order, are grouped
under the ensign of _nihil_.

The frenzy which thus moves a whole people to tear their hair and rend
their garments has at bottom an element of passionate melancholy born of
just and noble aspirations crushed by fatal circumstances. We have seen
what Nature and history have made of Russia,--a nation civilized by
violence, whose natural and harmonious development was checked, and
which was isolated from Europe as soon as the ruling powers perceived
the dangers likely to ensue from communication therewith. The impulse of
youth toward the unknown and the new, toward vague dreams and
abstractions, was thus exasperated; and from out the seminaries,
universities, and schools, from the ranks of the nobility and from the
bosom of the literature, there arose a host composed of women hungering
for the ideal, and young students, poor in pocket and position, who gave
themselves up to a Bohemian sort of life well calculated to set at
nought society and the world in general. A Russian friend once told me
that seeing a _mujik_ looking very dejected and melancholy he asked what
was the matter, and received answer, "Sir, we are a sick people." His
reply defines the whole race; and of all the explanations of nihilism,
that which describes it as a pathological condition of the nation is
perhaps the most accurate.

One must be prudent, however, in calling an intellectual phenomenon
based upon historical reasons a sickness or dementia; and above all one
must not confound the mental exaltation of the enthusiast with the
vagaries of the unsound mind. We do not allow ourselves to call him a
fool who does not think as we do, nor even him who leaves the beaten
common track for dizzy heights above our ken. No reformer or other great
man, however, has escaped the insinuation of foolishness, not even Saint
Francis of Assisi, who openly professed idiocy. But we have a kind of
sympathy for madness of a speculative character,--the sort of lunacy
which makes mankind dream sometimes that material good does not entirely
satisfy, that makes it yearn anxiously for something that it may never
obtain on this earth.

To begin with, is nihilism pure negation? No. Pure negation conceives
nothing further, and whatever it denies it affirms at the same time.
Nihilism, or to use their own term, Russian _intelligence_, contains the
germs of social renovation; and before referring to its political
history I will explain some of its strange and curious doctrines.




III.

Woman and the Family.


Among the most important of the nihilist doctrines is that which refers
to the condition of woman and the constitution of the family; and the
attempt radically to modify things so guarded and so sacred presupposes
an extraordinary power in the moving principle. The state of woman in
Russia has been far more bitter and humiliating than in the rest of
Europe; she wore her face covered with the Oriental veil until an
empress dared to cast it aside,--to the great horror of the court; among
the peasants she was a beast of burden; among the nobles an odalisque;
in the most enlightened classes of society the whip hung at the head of
the bed as a symbol of the husband's authority. The law did not keep her
perpetually a minor, as with us, but allowed her to administer her
property freely; yet the invisible and unwritten bonds of custom made
this freedom illusory. The new ideas have changed all this, however, and
to-day the Russian woman is more nearly equal to the man in condition,
more free, intelligent, and respected than elsewhere in Europe. Even the
peasants, accustomed to bestow a daily allowance of the lash upon their
women, are beginning to treat them with more gentleness and regard, for
they realize, tardily though certainly, the worth of the ideas of
justice deduced from the Gospels, which once planted can never be rooted
out. Their conquests are final. A few years hence the conjugal relation
in Russia will be based on ideas of equality, fraternity, and mutual
respect. I have never gone about preaching emancipation or demanding
rights, but I am nevertheless quite capable of appreciating everything
that savors of equity.

The great Russian romantic poet, Lermontof, lamented the moral
inferiority of the women of his country. "Man," said this Russian Byron,
"should not be satisfied with the submission of his slave or the
devotion of his dog; he needs the love of a human being who will repay
insight for insight, soul for soul." This noble aspiration, derived from
the profound Platonic allegory of the two soul-halves that seek each
other and thereby find completion, the Russian intelligence desired to
realize, and as a step toward it procured participation for woman in
intellectual and political life; she, on her part, proved her worth by
bringing to nihilism a passionate devotion, absolute faith, and
initiative energy. When the early Christians rehabilitated the pagan
woman, somewhat the same thing happened, and a tender gratitude toward
the gentle Nazarene led virgins and matrons to vie with strong men in
the heroism displayed in the amphitheatre.

But in our times the systematic efforts toward female emancipation have
a tendency to stumble into absurdities. To show to what an extent
conjugal equality has been carried in certain Russian families of
humble position, I was told that the wife cooks one day and the husband
the next! At the beginning of the reign of Alexander II. the longing for
feminine independence was expressed in the wearing of short hair, blue
spectacles, and extraordinary dress; in smoking, in scorn of neatness,
and the assumption of viragoish and disgusting manners. The serious side
of the movement led them on the other hand to study, to throw themselves
into every career open to them, to show a brave front in the hospitals
of typhus and the plague, to win honors in the clinics, and to practise
medicine in the small villages with noble self-abnegation, seriousness,
and sagacity.

It is worthy of note, in examining Russian revolutionary tendencies,
that political rights are a secondary consideration, and that they go
down to the root of the matter, and seek first to reclaim natural
rights. In countries that are under parliamentary regimen, half of the
human race is judicially and civilly the servant of the other half;
while in the classic land of absolutism all parts are equal before the
law, especially among the reformatory class, the nobility.

There is one fact in this connection which, though rather dubious on the
face of it, is yet so original and typical that it ought not to be
omitted. Owing to these modifications in the social condition of women,
and also to political circumstances, we are told that one frequently
hears in Russia--among the _intelligent_ class particularly--of a sort
of free unions, having no other bond than the mutual willingness of the
contracting parties, and marked by singular characteristics. Some of
these unions may be compared to the espousals of Saint Cecilia and her
husband, Saint Valerian, or to the nuptials of the legendary hero
separated by a naked sword from the bride. The Russians call this a
fictitious marriage. It sometimes happens that a young girl, bold,
determined, and full of a longing for life,--in the social sense of the
word,--leaves the paternal roof and takes up her abode under that of
another man. Having obtained the liberty and individuality enjoyed by
the married woman, the protector and the _protégée_ maintain a fraternal
friendship mutually and willingly agreed to. In Turguenief's novel,
"Virgin Soil," a young lady runs away from her uncle's house with the
tutor, a young nihilist poet, with whom she believes herself to be
deeply in love; but she finds out that what she really loved and craved
was liberty, and the chance to practise her politico-social principles;
and as these two runaways live in chastity, the heroine finally, and
without any conscientious scruples, marries another poet, also a
nihilist, but more practical and intelligent, who has really succeeded
in interesting her heart.

Is such a voluntary restriction the result of a hyperæsthesia of the
fancy, natural to an age of persecution, in which those who fight for
and defend an idea are ready at any moment to go to the gallows for its
sake? Is it mere woman's pride demanding for her sex liberty and
franchises which she scorns to make use of? Is it a manifestation of an
idealist sentiment which is always present in revolutionary outbursts?
Is it a consequence of the theory which Schopenhauer preached, but did
not practise? Is it Malthusian pessimism which would refuse to provide
any more subjects for despotism? Is it a result of the natural coldness
of the Scythian? There seems to be no doubt, according to the statement
of trustworthy authors, that there are nihilist virgins living
promiscuously with students, helping them like sisters, united by this
strange understanding. Solovief, who made a criminal attempt on the life
of Alexander II., was thus _married_, as was shown at his trial.

Among the young generation of nihilists this sort of union was really an
affiliation in devotion to their party. The bride's dower went into the
party treasury, her body was consecrated to the worship of the unknown
God; and being but slightly bound to his or her nominal spouse, each one
went his or her way, sometimes to distant provinces, to propagate and
disseminate the good news.

Tikomirov (from whose interesting book I have taken most of my
information concerning the constitution of the Russian revolutionary
family) seems to think that French authors have not done full justice to
the austerity and purity of nihilist customs, and he depicts a charming
scene in the home of intelligence, whose members are united and
affectionate, where moral and intellectual equality produce solid
friendship, precluding tyranny on the one hand and treason on the other;
adding that in Russia everybody is convinced of the superiority of this
sort of family, and only foreigners think that nihilism undermines the
foundations of conjugal union. Is this really true? In any case it seems
possible that such a beautiful ideal might be attained to in our Latin
societies, given the elevated conception of the Catholic marriage, which
makes it a sacrament, were there only a little more equity, toward which
it is evident, however, that laws and customs are ever tending.

In speaking of nihilist marriages, it is well to add that in general the
Russian revolutionary movement has a pronounced flavor of mysticism,
although at first sight it seems an explosion of free-thinking and
blasphemy. It is true that nihilist youth laughs at the supernatural,
and has been steeped in the crudities of German materialism and in the
pliant philosophies of the clinic and the laboratory; but at the same
time, whether because of the religious character of the race, or because
of a certain exaltation which may be the fruit of a period of stress,
the nihilist young people are mystics in their own way, and talk about
the martyrs to the cause with an inspired voice and with the unction of
a devotee invoking the saints. In proof of this I will give here a
nihilist madrigal dedicated to the young heroine in a political trial,
Lydia Figuier, who had studied medicine in Zurich and Paris.

     "Deep is the impression, O maiden, left by thy enchanting
     beauty; but more powerful than the charm of thy face is the
     purity of thy soul. Full of pity is the image of the
     Saviour, and his divine features are full of compassion; but
     in the unfathomable depths of thine eyes there is still more
     love and suffering."

The extremes of this rare sort of fanaticism are still better shown in a
famous novel of Tchernichewsky, the hero of which outdoes the Hindu
fakirs and Christian anchorites in point of macerations, penances, and
austerities. He is offered several kinds of fruit, but he will taste
only the apple, which is what the people eat; he fasts in grief and
anguish, and one day, in order to accustom himself to bear any sort of
trial, he lays himself down upon a cloth thickly studded with nails an
inch long, points upward, and there he remains until his blood saturates
the ground. Not content with mortifying the flesh in this way, he
disposes of all his worldly goods among the poor, and vows never to
touch a drop of wine or the lips of woman. This is only the hero of a
story-book; yes, but this story endeavors to present a type, an ideal
pattern, to which the _new men_, or nihilists, try to conform
themselves.

It must be understood that when I say mysticism, I use the word in a
generic and not in a theological sense. It seems contradictory to say
that an atheist can do and feel like the most fervent believer; but a
man may pass a whole lifetime in parrying logic, and yet sometimes what
his reason refuses his imagination accepts. There is something in
nihilism that recalls the transcendental contradictions of the Hindu
philosophies and religions, especially Buddhism; and in Russian brains
there is a fermentation of heterodox illumination which is manifested
among the common people by sects of tremblers, jumpers, and others, and
among the more learned classes by revolutionary mysticism, amorphism,
anarchy, and a gloomy and rebellious pessimism. The prophets of the
ignorant sects among the people preach many of the revolutionary dogmas,
teaching disobedience to all authority, community of goods, social
liquidation and free love, yet without political intention; and better
educated nihilists, even reactionary minds like Dostoiëwsky, feel the
pulse of mystic enthusiasm which runs in the blood. The people are so
predisposed to color the language of the political devotee that they
were quite satisfied with the answer given by the propagandist Rogatchef
to the peasants who asked what he sought among them. He replied, "The
true faith."

To the honor of humanity be it said that the most profound emotions it
has experienced have been produced by its own thirst for the ideal, and
caused by the need of belief, and of feeling in one form or another a
religious excitement. It is this element which conquers our sympathy for
nihilism; this shows us a young and enthusiastic people given to visions
and sublime ardors. To put it more explicitly, I am not passing judgment
upon the only revolutionaries just now extant in the world. I have very
little liking for political upheavals; but, to the egotistical
indifference that afflicts some nations, I believe that I prefer the
passionate extremes of nihilism. In politics as in art we want the
living.

It will be seen therefore that the people were not irrelevant in
confounding nihilism with a religions sect. As far as our rationalist
age will admit, the nihilist dissenter resembles the great heretics of
the Middle Ages; he has traces of the Millenarian, of Sakya Muni, and of
the German pantheists; and he has the blind faith, the hazy transports,
the dogmatical and absolute affirmation of the persecuted religious
sects, and of esoteric and subterranean beliefs. He adores a divinity
without feelings, deaf and primitive, and this adoration is the
corner-stone of the nihilist temple. The _mujik_ sublimated by Russian
literature is the god of nihilism.




IV.

Going to the People.


Here is a passage from Tikomirov's book to illustrate this aspect of
Russian revolution:--

     "Where is there any sociological theory that can explain the
     crusade taken up in 1873 by thousands of young men and women
     determined to _go to the people_? The word crusade is
     appropriate. Our youths left the bosom of their families;
     our maidens abandoned the worldly pleasures of life. Nobody
     thought of his own welfare; the great cause absorbed all
     attention, and the nervous tension was such that many were
     able to endure, without injury to health, unusual and
     dreadful privations. They gave up their past life and all
     their property, and if any vacillated in offering his
     fortune to the cause, he was looked upon with pity and
     contempt. Some renounced official positions and gave all
     their means, even to thousands of rubles; others, like
     Prince Krapotkine, from being _savants_, diplomats and
     opulent, became humble artisans. The prince took to painting
     doors and windows. Rich heiresses sought occupation as
     factory operatives, even some who had reigned as belles in
     aristocratic salons. It was as though, exiled from other
     classes of society, they found, in turning to the people,
     their souls' true country."

Do not these words almost seem to describe the beginnings of
Christianity in Rome?

The idol takes no notice of his fanatical adorers, nor perhaps does he
understand them any better than the peasant-woman of Toboso understood
the amorous suit with which Don Quixote wooed her malformed and
dishevelled person. The Russian peasant cannot make anything of theories
and apotheoses evolved from an intellectual condition amounting to
rapturous frenzy. "Oh that I might die," exclaims a devout nihilist,
"and that my blood like a drop of hot lead could burn and arouse the
people!" This thirst for martyrdom is common, but above all is the
anxiety to be amalgamated with the people, to know them, and if possible
to infuse them with the enthusiasm they feel themselves.

It requires more courage to do what Russians call _going to the people_,
than to bear exile or the gallows. In our society, which boasts of its
democracy, the very equalization of classes has strengthened the
individual instinct of difference, and especially the aristocrats of
mind, the writers and thinkers, have become terribly nervous, finicky,
and inimical to the plebeian smell, to the extent that even novels which
describe the common people with sincerity and truth displease the public
taste. Yet the nihilists, a select company from the point of view of
intellectual culture, go, like apostles, in search of the poor in
spirit, the ignorant and the humble. The sons of families belonging to
the highest classes, alumni of universities, leave fine clothes and
books, dress like peasants, and mix with factory hands, so as to know
them and to teach them; young ladies of fine education return from a
foreign tour and accept with the utmost contentment situations as cooks
in manufacturers' houses, so as to be able to study the labor question
in their workshops. We find very curious instances of this in
Turguenief's novel "Virgin Soil." The heroine, Mariana, a nihilist, in
order to learn how the people live, and to _simplify herself_ (this is a
sacramental term), helps a poor peasant-woman in her domestic duties.
Here we have the way of the world reversed: the educated learns of the
ignorant, and in all that the peasant-woman does or says the young lady
finds a crumb of grace and wisdom. "We do not wish to teach the people,"
she explains, "we wish to serve them." "To serve them?" replies the
woman, with hard practicality. "Well, the best way to serve them is to
teach them." Equally fruitless are the efforts of Mariana's _fictitious
husband_, or _husband by free grace_, as the peasant-woman calls
him,--the poet and dreamer Nedjanof, who thinks himself a nihilist, but
in the bottom of his soul has the aristocratic instincts of the artist.
Here is the passage where he presents himself to Mariana dressed in
workman's clothes:--

     "Mariana uttered an exclamation of surprise. At first she
     did not know him. He wore an old caftan of yellowish drill,
     short-waisted, and buttoned with small buttons; his hair was
     combed in the Russian style, with the part in the middle; a
     blue kerchief was tied around his neck; he held in his hand
     an old cap with a torn visor, and his feet were shod with
     undressed calfskin."

Mariana's first act on seeing him in this guise is to tell him that he
is indeed ugly, after which disagreeable piece of information, and a
shudder of repugnance at the smell of his greasy cap and dirty sleeves,
they provide themselves with pamphlets and socialist proclamations and
start out on their Odyssey among the people, hoping to meet with
ineffable sufferings. He would be no less glad than she of a heroic
sacrifice, but he is not content with a grotesque farce; and the girl is
indignant when Solomine, her professor in nihilism, tells her that her
duty actually compels her to wash the children of the poor, to teach
them the alphabet, and to give medicine to the sick. "That is for
Sisters of Charity," she exclaims, inadvertently recognizing a truth;
the Catholic faith contains all ways of loving one's neighbor, and none
can ever be invented that it has not foreseen. But the human type of the
novel is Nedjanof, although the nihilists have sought to deny it. There
is one very sad and real scene in which he returns drunk from one of
his propagandist excursions, because the peasants whom he was
haranguing compelled him to drink as much as they. The poor fellow
drinks and drinks, but he might as well have thrown himself upon a file
of bayonets. He comes home befuddled with _wodka_, or perhaps more so
with the disgust and nausea which the brutish and mal-odorous people
produced in him. He had never fully believed in the work to which he had
consecrated himself: now it is no longer scepticism, it is invincible
disgust that takes hold upon his soul, urging him to despair and
suicide. The lament of his lost revolutionary faith is contained in the
little poem entitled "Dreaming," which I give literally, as follows:--

     "It was long since I had seen my birthplace, but I found it
     not at all changed. The deathlike sleep, intellectual
     inertia, roofless houses, ruined walls, mire and stench,
     scarcity and misery, the insolent looks of the oppressed
     peasants,--all the same! Only in sleeping, we have
     outstripped Europe, Asia, and the whole world. Never did my
     dear compatriots sleep a sleep so terrible!

      "Everything sleeps: wherever I turn, in the fields, in the
      cities, in carnages, in sleighs, day and night, sitting or
      walking; the merchant and the functionary, and the watchman
      in the tower, all sleep in the cold or in the heat! The
      accused snores and the judge dozes; the peasants sleep the
      sleep of death; asleep they sow and reap and grind the
      corn; father, mother, and children sleep! The oppressed and
      the oppressor sleep equally well!

      "Only the gin-shop is awake, with eyes ever open! And
      hugging to her breast a jug of fire-water, her face to the
      pole, her feet to the Caucasus, thus sleeps and dreams on
      forever our Mother, Holy Russia!"

To all nihilist intents and purposes, particularly to those of a
political character, the masses are apparently asleep. Many eloquent
anecdotes refer to their indifference. A young lady propagandist, who
served as cook on a farm, confesses that the peasants spitefully accused
her of taking bread from the poor. In order to get them to take their
pamphlets and leaflets, the nihilists present them as religious tracts,
adorning the covers with texts of Scripture and pious mottoes and signs.
Only by making good use of the antiquated idea of distribution (of
goods) have they any chance of success; it is of no use to talk of
autonomous federations, or to attack the emperor, who has the people on
his side.

The active nihilists are always young people, and this is reason enough
why they are not completely discouraged by the sterility of their
efforts. Old age abhors fruitless endeavors, and better appreciating the
value of life, will not waste it in tiresome experiments. And this
contrast between the ages, like that between the seasons, is nowhere so
sharp as in Russia; nowhere else is the difference of opinions and
feelings between two generations so marked. Some one has called nihilism
a disease of childhood, like measles or diphtheria; perhaps this is not
altogether erroneous, not only as regards individuals but also as
regards society, for vehemence and furious radicalism are the fruit of
historical inexperience, of the political youth of a nation. The
precursor of nihilism, Herzen, said, with his brilliant imagery and
vigor of expression, that the Russia of the future lay with a few
insignificant and obscure young folks who could easily hide between the
earth and the soles of the autocrat's boots; and the poet Mikailof, who
was sentenced to hard labor in 1861, and subsequently died under the
lash, exclaimed to the students, "Even in the darkness of the dungeon I
shall preserve sacredly in my heart of hearts the incomparable faith
that I have ingrafted upon the new generation."

It is sad to see youth decrepit and weary from birth, without enthusiasm
or ambition for anything. It is more natural that the sap should
overflow, that a longing for strife and sacrifice, even though foolish
and vain, should arise in its heart. This truth cannot be too often
repeated: to be enthusiastic, to be full of life, is not ridiculous; but
our pusillanimous doctrine of disapproval is ridiculous indeed,
especially in life's early years,--as ridiculous as baldness at twenty,
or wrinkles and palsy at thirty. Besides, we must recognize something
more than youthful ardor in nihilism, and that is, sympathetic
disinterestedness. The path of nihilism does not lead to brilliant
position or destiny: it may lead to Siberia or to the gibbet.




V.

Herzen and the Nihilist Novel.


But it is time to mention some of the precursors of nihilism. First of
all there is Alexander Herzen, a brilliant, paradoxical writer, a great
visionary, a keen satirist, the poet of denial, a romanticist and
idealist to his own sorrow, and, in the bottom of his soul, sceptical
and melancholy. Herzen was born in Moscow in the year of the Fire, and
his mind began to mature about the time the December conspirators forced
Nicholas I. into trembling retirement. He was wont to say that he had
seen the most imposing personification of imperial power, had grown up
under the shadow of the secret police and panted in its clutches.
Charmed by the philosophical doctrines of Hegel and Feuerbach, which
were then superseding the French, he became a socialist and a
revolutionary. Just at the time when to have a constitution was the
ideal and the dream of the Latin peoples, who were willing to tear
themselves to pieces to obtain it, this Sclav was writing that a
constitution was a miserable contract between a master and his slaves!
Herzen was but a little more than twenty years old when he was sent to
Siberia. On his return from exile he found at home a mental
effervescence, a Germanic and idealist current in the wake of the
eminent critic Bielinsky, Sclavophiles singing hymns in praise of
national life and repudiating European civilization which was in turn
defended by the so-called Occidentals; and lastly he found a set of
literary, innovators who formed the famous _natural school_, at the head
of which was the great Gogol. Herzen fell into this whirl of ideas, and
his æsthetic doctrines and advanced Hegelianism had great influence, and
after some more serious works he published his celebrated novel, "Who is
to Blame?"--a masterly effort, which gained him immense renown in
Russia. It was masterly more by reason of the popularity it achieved
than by its literary merit, for Herzen is, after all, not to be counted
among the chief novel-writers of Russia. Herzen was born to point the
way to a social Utopia rather than the road to pure Beauty. He invented
new phases of civilization, societies transformed by the touch of a
magic wand. The star of Proudhon was at this time in the ascendant, and
Herzen, attracted by its brilliancy, left his country never to return;
but he did not on this account cease to exercise a great influence upon
her destinies, so great, indeed, that some profess to think that had
Herzen never lived, nihilism would have perished in the bud.

Herzen hailed with delight the French revolution of 1848. He expected to
behold a social liquidation, but he saw instead only a conservative
republic,--a change of form. Then he cried out in savage despair, and
his words have become the true nihilist war-cry: "Let the old world
perish! Let chaos and destruction come upon it! Hail, Death! Welcome to
the Future!"

To sweep away the past with one stroke became his perennial aspiration.
He drew a vivid picture of a secret tribunal which every _new man_
carries within himself, to judge, condemn, and guillotine the past; he
described how a man, fearful of following up his logical conclusions,
after citing before this tribunal the Church, the State, the family, the
good, and the evil, might make an effort to save a rag of the worn-out
yesterday, unable to see that the lightest weight would prove a
hindrance to his passage from the old world to the new. "There is a
remarkable likeness between logic and terror," he said. "It is not for
us to pluck the fruits of the past, but to destroy them, to persecute
them, to judge them, to unmask them, and to immolate them upon the
altars of the future. Terror sentenced human beings; it concerns us to
judge institutions, demolish creeds, put no faith in old things,
unsettle every interest, break every bond, without mercy, without
leniency, without pity."

This was his programme: Not to civilize or to progress, but to
obliterate, to demolish; to replace what he called the senile barbarity
of the world with a juvenile barbarity; "to go to the very limits of
absurdity,"--these are his own words. They contain the sum of nihilism;
they include the pessimist despair, and the foolish proscription of art,
beauty, and culture, which to an artistic mind is the greatest crime
that can be laid at the door of any political or philosophical doctrine.
A tendency that aspires to overthrow the altar sacred to the Muses and
the Graces can never prevail.

Herzen went to London, established a press for the dissemination of
political writings in Russia, and organized a secret society for Russian
refugees, among whom he counted Bakunine; and having refused to return
to his country, he founded a singular paper called "The Bell"
(_Kolokol_), of which thousands of copies, though strictly prohibited by
the censor, crossed the frontier. They were distributed and read on
every hand, and a copy was regularly placed, by invisible hands, in the
chamber of the emperor, who devoured it no less eagerly than his
faithful subjects. From the pages of this illegal publication the
sovereign learned of secret intrigues in his palace, of plots among his
high officials, and scandalous stories reported by the socialist refugee
with incredible accuracy. By 

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