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<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2> <h2>ARTZIBASHEF</h2> <h3>I</h3> Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: "Whereas, it is far away from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and the tears of men are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual...." This is a plea for his own spiritualised art, in which sensations are attenuated, and emotions within emotions, the shadow of the primal emotions, are spun into crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to follow the example of the Belgian dreamer, and since the advent of the new century there has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic violence, that must be disconcerting to Maeterlinck. It is particularly the case with Russian poetry, drama, and fiction. That vast land of promise and disillusionment is become a trying-out place for the theories and speculations of western Europe; no other nation responds so sensitively to the vibrations of the Time-Spirit, no other literature reflects with such clearness the fluctuations of contemporary [Pg 34] thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most emotional among living peoples. Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is the key-note of much Russian literature; but it was the clash of events; the march of ideas which precipitated young Russia into the expression of revolt, pessimism, and its usual concomitant, materialism. There were bloodshed, battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears, tangible, not invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled the minds of the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new fermentation. Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales of mean, colourless lives, Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic Andreiev, the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin, Ivanov, Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch (I select a few of the romancers)—not to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and Ivanov—are the men who are fighting under various banners but always for complete freedom. Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young man named Michael Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring of trumpets, has taken the centre of the stage and still holds it. He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy, though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. [Pg 35] Of Gogol's overwhelming humour he has not a trace; instead, a corroding irony which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky, despite his "bitter" nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared with Artzibashef. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only swears by Max Stirner, but some of his characters are Stirnerism incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the middle-class and proletarian. To André Villard, his friend and one of his translators, the new Russian novelist told something of his life, a life colourless, dreary, bare of dramatic events. Born in a small town in southern Russia (1878), Michael Artzibashef is of Tatar, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. His great-grandfather on the maternal side was the Polish patriot Kosciusko. His father, a retired officer, was a small landowner. In the lad there developed the seeds of tuberculosis. His youth was a wretched one. At school he was unhappy because of its horrors—he has written of them in his first story, Pasha Tumanow—and he drifted from one thing to another till he wrote for a literary weekly in the provinces founded by a certain Miroliuboff, to whom he ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors at the time were Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreiev, Kuprin, and other young men who, like Artzibashef, have since "arrived." His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It brought him recognition. This was in 1904. [Pg 36] But the year before he had finished Sanine, his masterpiece, though it did not see publication till 1908. This was three years after the revolution of 1905, so that those critics were astray who spoke of the book as a naturally pessimistic reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism was born in the bones of the author and he needed no external stimulus to provoke such a realistic study as Sanine. Whether he is happier, healthier, whether he has married and raised a family, we know not. Personal as his stories are said to be, their art renders them objective. The world over Sanine has been translated. It is a significant book, and incorporates the aspirations of many young men and women in the Russian Empire. It was not printed at first because of the censorship, and in Germany it had to battle for its life. It is not only written from the standpoint of a professed immoralist, but the Russian censor declared it pernicious because of its "defamation of youth," its suicidal doctrine, its depressing atmosphere. The sex element, too, has aroused indignant protests from the clergy, from the press, from society itself. In reply to his critics Artzibashef has denied libelling the younger generation. "Sanine," he says, "is the apology for individualism: the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong representative [Pg 37] of the new Russia." And then he adds his own protest against the imitators of Sanine, who "flooded the literary world with pornographic writings." Now, whatever else it may be, Sanine is not pornographic, though I shall not pretend to say that its influence has been harmless. We should not forget Werther and the trail of sentimental suicides that followed its publication. But Sanine is fashioned of sterner stuff than Goethe's romance, and if it be "dangerous," then all the better. Test all things, and remember that living itself is a dangerous affair. Never has the world needed precepts of daring, courage, individualism more than in this age of cowardly self-seeking, and the sleek promises of altruism and its soulless well-being. Sanine is a call to arms for individualists. And recall the Russian saying: Self-conceit is the salt of life. <h3>II</h3> That Artzibashef denies the influence of Nietzsche while admitting his indebtedness to Nietzsche's forerunner, Max Stirner, need not particularly concern us. There are evidences scattered throughout the pages of Sanine that prove a close study of Nietzsche and his idealistic superman. Artist as is Artzibashef, he has densely spun into the fabric of his work the ideas that control his characters, and whether these ideas are called moral or immoral does [Pg 38] not matter. The chief thing is whether they are propulsive forces in the destiny of his puppets. That he paints directly from life is evident: he tells us that in him is the débris of a painter compelled by poverty to relinquish his ambitions because he had not money enough to buy paper, pencil, colour. Such a realistic brush has seldom been wielded as the brush of Artzibashef. I may make one exception, that of J.-K. Huysmans. The Frenchman is the greater artist, the greater master of his material, and, as Havelock Ellis puts it, the master of "the intensest vision of the modern world"; but Huysmans lacks the all-embracing sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of suffering mankind that distinguishes the young Russian novelist, a love that is blended with an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both men prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the vilest aspects of life. The general ideas of Artzibashef are few and profound. The leading motive of his symphony is as old as Ecclesiastes: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be." It is not original, this theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity; but it has been orchestrated anew by Artzibashef, who, like his fellow countrymen, Tschaikovsky and Moussorgsky, contrives to reveal to us, if no hidden angles of the truth, at least its illusion in terms of terror, anguish, and deadly nausea produced by mere existence. [Pg 39] With such poisoned roots Artzibashef's tree of life must soon be blasted. His intellectual indifferentism to all that constitutes the solace and bravery of our daily experience is almost pathological. The aura of sadism hovers about some of his men. After reading Artzibashef you wonder that the question, "Is life worth living?" will ever be answered in the affirmative among these humans, who, as old Homer says, hasten hellward from their birth. The corollary to this leading motive is the absolute futility of action. A paralysis of the will overtakes his characters, the penalty of their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev, in an essay on Hamlet, who declared that the Russian character is composed of Hamlet-like traits. Man is the only animal that cannot live in the present; a Norwegian philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, has said that he lives forward, thinks backward; he aspires to the future. An idealist, even when close to the gorilla, is doomed to disillusionment. He discounts to-morrow. Russian youth has not always the courage of its chimera, though it fraternises with the phantasmagoria of its soul. Its Golden Street soon becomes choked with fog. The political and social conditions of the country must stifle individualism, else why should Artzibashef write with such savage intensity? His pen is the pendulum that has swung away from the sentimental brotherhood of man as exemplified [Pg 40] in Dostoievsky, and from the religious mania of Tolstoy to the opposite extreme, individual anarchy. Where there is repression there is rebellion. Max Stirner represents the individualism which found its vent in the Prussia of 1848; Nietzsche the reaction from the Prussia of 1870; Artzibashef forestalled the result of the 1905 insurrection in Russia. His prophetic soul needed no proof; he knew that his people, the students and intellectuals, would be crushed. The desire of the clod for the cloud was extinguished. Happiness is an eternal hoax. Only children believe in life. The last call of the devil's dinner-bell has sounded. In the scenery of the sky there is only mirage. The moonlit air is a ruse of that wily old serpent, nature, to arouse romance in the breast of youth and urge a repetition of the life processes. We graze Schopenhauer, overhear Leopardi, but the Preacher has the mightiest voice. Naturally, the novelist says none of these things outright. The phrases are mine, but he points the moral in a way that is all his own. What, then, is the remedy for the ills of this life? Is its misery <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: immediable" id="tnote3">irremediable</ins>? Why must mankind go on living if the burden is so great? Even with wealth comes ennui or disease, and no matter how brilliant we may live, we must all die alone. Pascal said this better. In several of his death-bed scenes the dying men of Artzibashef curse their parents, mock at religion, [Pg 41] and—here is a novel nuance—abuse their intellectual leaders. Semenow the student, who appears in several of the stories, abuses Marx and Nietzsche. Of what use are these thinkers to a man about to depart from the world? It is the revolt of stark humanity from the illusions of brotherly love, from the chiefest illusion—self. Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God's will be done, not the roseate dream of a future life, only—why must I die? though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life. But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather than annihilation! In the portrayal of these damned creatures Artzibashef is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky. He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy (also to Goethe, Hugo, Dostoievsky, and much to Tchekov), but his characters are usually failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the great moralist and expounder of "non-resistance." He simply explodes the torpedo of truth under the ark of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan Lande—now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire—where we see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the love of his fellows. [Pg 42] It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus can you save your soul. Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter, and heartily. However, naught avails, you must die, and die like a dog, a star, or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who, in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. (A ferocious advocate of pessimism and a disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer, by name Mainlander, preached world destruction through race suicide.) But all these pessimists seem well fed and happy when compared to the nihilists of Artzibashef. He portrays every stage of disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is worth the trouble of a despairing gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist or royalist—your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of silence—a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love a brief sensation. Death a certainty. For such nihilism we must go to the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence, some fanatic fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity. [Pg 43] <h3>III</h3> But if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead, there is the world of the five senses, and a glorious world it may prove if you have only the health, courage, and contempt for the Chinese wall with which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws, except to be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the blue sky, brother, and the air on the heath, brother! Drop the impedimenta and lead a free, roving life. How the world would wag without work no one tells us. Not didactic, the novelist disdains to draw a moral. There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in Sanine, who is a handsome young chap, a giant, and a "blond barbarian." It is the story of the return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sanine is surprised to note her development. He admires her—too much so for our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the moral and mental make-up of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a type, but I don't believe in types; there are only humans. His motto might be: What's the difference? He is passive, not with the fatalism of Oblomov, Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of Frederic [Pg 44] Moreau; he displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes him seem an idler on the scene. When the time arrives for action he is no skulker. His sister has been ruined by a frivolous officer in garrison, and she attempts suicide. Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words. Ruined! Very well, marry and forget! However, he drives the officer to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches his head, and the silly soldier with his silly code of honour blows out his brains. A passive rôle is Sanine's in the composition of this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us as to its polyphonic complexity. He remains in the background while about him play the little destinies of little souls. Yet he is always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind whether Sanine is a great man or a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both. A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artzibashef. I first read him (1911) in French, the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly because of the language. In the German translation he is not so appealing; again perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translating [Pg 45] into Russian the Three Tales of his friend Flaubert. Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech the genius of Artzibashef shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss the caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-toned Russian language: The English versions are excellent, though, naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the monastery, there to end his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's, whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his genius. The very air of America makes for optimism; our land of milk and honey may never produce such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef, unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the courageous manner—and artistic, too—with which the Russian pursues the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a psychologist as well as a painter, [Pg 46] the exquisite recoil of the cerebral cells upon themselves which we call consciousness. Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being, in the least sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a flowing brush and a fine sense of character values. But he will never bend the bow of Balzac. Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful portrait. In the book there are several persons: the disgraced student Yourii, who is self-complacent to the point of morbidity; his lovely sister, and her betrothed. The officers are excellently delineated and differentiated, while the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the teacher, are extremely attractive. Karsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless Hebrew who desires light on the mystery of life could not be bettered by Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is partially indebted to Dostoievsky for certain traits of Ivan Lande—who is evidently patterned from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Wherever Sanine passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make love to pretty girls. But as he goes he snuffs out ideals like candles. As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must not be supposed that the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay episodes, sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party, and pastorals done in a way which [Pg 47] would have extorted the admiration of Turgenev. Thomas Hardy has done no better in his peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement—related with blasting irony—and drinking festivals which are masterly in their sense of reality; add to these pages of nature descriptions, landscapes, pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises, revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You fairly smell the frosty air of his Winter days. Little cause for astonishment that Sanine at its appearance provoked as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did Fathers and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov the anarchist, but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the new order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch who lazily mutters: "Let the world wag; I don't care so that it minds its own business and lets me alone." With few exceptions most latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with Artzibashef's rich, red-blooded genius. I have devoted so much attention to Sanine that little space is left for the other books, though they are all significant. Revolutionary Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sanine, the portrait of the metal-worker Schevyrjoy, who is a revolutionist in the literal sense. His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression. [Pg 48] The end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef does not paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yesteryear, nor yet the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment). Few outcasts of this sort are to be found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly etched, as, for example, the ladies in The Millionaire. This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sanine, is Tolstoyian in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tumanow is autobiographical, and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar schools where suicides among the scholars are anything but infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic conclusions. The two girl students end badly, one a suicide, the other a prisoner of the police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling. The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province town. You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It is a time for tears; though I cannot quite [Pg 49] believe in this doctor, who, while not a Jew, so sympathises with them that he lets die the Chief of Police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar intensity, called Nina in the English translation, fills us with wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions or their causes. Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary Tales is The Blood Stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again we are confronted by the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right, ever was, ever will be. Again the victims of lying propagandists and the cruel law lie "on stretchers, with white eyes staring upward. In these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and despair." Always despair, in life or death, is the portion of these poor. [This was written in 1915, before the New Russia was born. Since the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served in the field and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, War, has been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest story, The Woman Standing in the Midst, has not yet appeared here.] Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plan in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor details in his novel Breaking Point. The canvas is large and crowded, the [Pg 50] motivation subtly managed. As is the case with his novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the steppes, where the inhabitants would certainly commit suicide if the place were half as dreary as depicted. Some of them do so, and you are reminded of that curious, nervous disease, indigenous to Siberia, named by psychiatrists "myriachit," or the epidemic of imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumow, preaches the greyness and folly of living, and this "Naumowism" sets by the ears three or four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin or its equivalent. Naumow recalls a character in The Possessed, also the sinister hero of The Synagogue of Satan by the dramatic Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central point the "chorus" of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch, and has a birdlike way of piping about matters philosophical. There are oceans of talk throughout the novels, talks about death. Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all till you meet them and discover what normal people they are. (It should not be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight deformation of facts.) The student watches the comedy and tragedy of the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect on the uselessness of suffering from self-privation so that some proletarian family may eat [Pg 51] roast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually he succumbs to the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a nail in the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful to the last—they, Dickens-like, are shown from the start. There is a nihilistic doctor—the most viable character of all about whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy—a particularly fascinating actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by a young painter (a Sanine type, i. e., Max Stirnerism in action), while the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin in Dostoievsky's The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder, drunkenness, and boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called Suicide Symphony. Browning is reversed. Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world! Yet it compels reflection and rereading. Why? Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable, and granting the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject, it is lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the Seven Sorrows. However, in it, as in Sanine, there is many an oasis of consolation where sanity [Pg 52] and cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But I am loath to believe that young Russia, Holy Russia, as the mystagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that most count; above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray as prayed Des Esseintes in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: "Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith." <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 53] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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