russe cette stérilité relative; elle a droit de se reposer, après les riches moissons qui ont constitué à ce grand empire un trésor durable, qui lui ont assuré, dans le domaine intellectuel et moral, une place proportionnée à celle qu'il occupe sur le globe terrestre. Nicomte E. M. Je Vogüg DE L'ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE, 28 avril 1899. RUSSIAN LITERATURE: ITS GREAT PERIOD AND ITS GREAT NOVELISTS 1840-1880 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF THE VICOMTE MELCHIOR DE VOGÜÉ, OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY THE fact that Russian genius has won for itself a great position in European literature is one of the most notable phenomena in the history of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Until very lately, Russian literature had been content to accept, with docility, the theories and the literary formula of the older European civilisation; but at last it became conscious of its own power, extended its influence beyond the national frontiers, and now it repays its debt to Europe, enriching us by the gift of new ideas and new forms of expression. In its own country it has attained independence; abroad it is recognised as one of the artistic forces of the day; yesterday a vassal, it is to-day one of the Great Powers; and, like more than one state among the nations, it has risen to power by the force of fiction. In the eighteenth century the intellectual progress of Russia was almost exclusively confined to the Court of the Empress Catherine; the French spirit, with Voltaire as its king, was all powerful in Russian society, which was, indeed, no more than a French colony, an intellectual hothouse in which frail cuttings from the French art and poetry were being acclimatised. The French classic school ruled the men who were creating the literary dialect of the Russian tongue-Lomonosoff, Von - Vizine, and Derjavine. But the coronation of Alexander I. inaugurated the new age, and marked the beginning of the new ideas which were to make modern Russia independent of foreign influences. The historian Karamsine aroused the national spirit, for this gentleman of the old school was the true founder of the political, philosophical, and literary schools which were afterwards to be called Slavophile, Moscovite, and Panslavist. The influence of the Romantic party did much to free Russian poetry from French influences. Joukovsky first gave it an impetus toward the German spirit of Schiller and Goethe, and then the influence of Byron was imported by Pouchkine, Lermontoff, and their rivals. The Russians do not like to hear Pouchkine's originality questioned, and I myself have the most sincere admiration for this marvellous virtuoso; I believe that he created the poetic style which he used, that he gave a Russian colour to the ideas and the emotions he expressed. Yet the Byronic spirit lies at the base of his conceptions; the author of Childe Harold stirred Pouchkine's imagination to life, directed its tendencies and its emotional tone. The passionate soul of the Russian poet seems to have been cast in the same mould as that of his English prototype, and the resemblance is all the greater because we perceive that the one, like the other, had wandered in search of adventure; that both had heard the mysterious murmur of the East. The fiery Lermontoff resembles Byron even more closely; his magnificent pictures of the Caucasus, his cries of passion-the most piercing ever uttered-would never have existed if Byron had not shown us all how a bard of the Romantic School should love, should suffer; how he should find in nature his joy and his despair. In order to find an individual altogether Russian, a characteristic figure which owes nothing to western influences, we must come to Nicholas Gogol, the first of the great novelists, the one who inspired all his successors. Born in 1809, in Little Russia, Gogol began life as one of the modest and unfortunate minor officials whose lives he was afterwards to portray with so cutting, and yet so just, a pen. A son of the Cossacks, the adventurous spirit of his race rebelled against the dulness of his lot; he resigned his post, and devoted himself to writing. He began with a sort of prose poem, Tarass Boulba, in which he celebrated the free life and the splendid feats of his Cossack ancestors. This work, overflowing with lyric power, illuminated by a sense of historic truth, is permeated by a comprehension of the Russian spirit, which no one else had depicted with so much intensity. Its author seems literally intoxicated by the infinite horizons of the steppes over whose expanse his imagination roves. It has been said, with truth, that Tarass Boulba is the only true epic written by a modern poet. Yet the youthful Gogol soon abandoned this channel of expression. There was in him the spirit of Dickens; he was a realist and a satirist, as earnest as the English novelist, and even more bitter. I compare the two, because there is an intimate kinship of thought and of emotion between them, and yet the dates of their works show that Gogol could not have read Dickens, whose works had not yet been translated. It was by the approbation of the critic Bielinsky that the author of Tarass Boulba was encouraged to study contemporary life, and to observe the conditions of the poor. As early as 1840 Bielinsky proclaimed the death of the Romantic School, the necessity for a return to realism, and arrived at the belief that the elements of a new art should be found in the life of the masses. This great agitator exercised a preponderant influence upon the generation whom Russians describe as "the men of the forties." Gogol, who felt this influence more keenly than did any of his contemporaries, carried out the programme of Bielinsky, who saw clearly what ought to be done, although he had not the creative force to do it himself. Gogol brought upon his stage the world of minor officials among whom it had been his misfortune to live; depicting their lives in a series of novels, of which Le Manteau is the best type. "We have all come from beneath Gogol's Manteau," said one of the great writers of the following generation. The obscure and unfortunate hero of this story, Akaky Akakiévitch, is the father of an innumerable line of clerks, copyists, and messengers; all formed in his likeness. It was, however, in his comedy, Le Revisor, that Gogol gave fullest vent to his eager satire; holding up to public mockery the vices of the administration, the dishonesty that corrupted the whole empire. These fragmentary works were preliminaries to the execution of Les Ames Mortes, the masterpiece which will preserve immortal the name of Gogol. I have no hesitation in placing this work next to Don Quixote, if not, indeed, in the same rank. In these two humorous epopees, one finds Russia and Spain complete and vivid; there is the same combination of irony and of concealed tenderness toward the persons satirised; the same sweeping comprehension of national life and spirit. Gogol's novel has not yet found, and cannot find for many years to come, the favour in foreign eyes which has been accorded to Cervantes, for the episodes of the Ames Mortes are so characteristically local that they cannot be appreciated in Western Europe until we are as familiar with the life of the Russian people as with the life of the Spanish. But each character, each detail of popular life observed by Gogol has become proverbial in the country where Tchitchikoff plied his remarkable trade, buying dead serfs, posing as the wealthy owner of these phantasmal creatures, and borrowing money upon the security of their ghostly muster-roll. The whole of Russian middle-class and lower-class life, in all its misery, its deformity, its grotesqueness-its kindliness, too, and its patience is shown in the picture of provincial life which Gogol's canvas presented. Keen as was the artist's insight, there was in his heart a great fund of compassion for the models he painted; and the swift flow of his humour is broken by frequent outbursts of genuine poetic feeling. All his characters are full of life; and although they are so gnarled and squalid that at first the picture excites our laughter, it soon makes us ponder the social conditions of Russia. "The Russian," said Gogol in one of his letters, " is appalled when he perceives how utterly insignificant he is." And he adds: "Those who have tried to dissect my literary faculties have failed to perceive the one essential trait of my temperament. No one but Pouchkine understood me. It was he who always declared that it was my peculiar power to display the |