Their Position in Russian Literature

An important division of Russian novelists, almost totally unknown in Western Europe, and yet representing perhaps the most typical portion of Russian literature, “Folk-Novelists.” It is under this name that we know them chiefly in Russia, and under this name the critic Skabitchévskiy has analysed them — first, in a book bearing this title, and then in his excellent History of Modern Russian Literature (4th ed. 1900). By “Folk-Novelists” we mean, of course, not those who write for the people, but those who write about the people: the peasants, the miners, the factory workers, the lowest strata of population in towns, the tramps. Bret Harte in his sketches of the mining camps, Zola in L’Assommoir and Germinal, Mr. Gissing in Liza of Lambeth, Mr. Whiting in No. 5 John Street, belong to this category; but what is exceptional and accidental in Western Europe is organic in Russia.

Quite a number of talented writers have devoted themselves during the last fifty years, some of them entirely, to the description of this or that division of the Russian people. Every class of the toiling masses, which in other literatures would have appeared in novels as the background for events going on amidst educated people (as in Hardy’s Woodlanders), has had in the Russian novel its own painter. All great questions concerning popular life which are debated in political and social books and reviews have been treated in the novel as well. The evils of serfdom and, later on, the struggle between the tiller of the soil and growing commercialism; the effects of factories upon village life, the great coöperative fisheries, peasant life in certain monasteries, and life in the depths of the Siberian forests, slum life and tramp life — all these have been depicted by the folk-novelists, and their novels have been as eagerly read as the works of the greatest authors. And while such questions as, for instance, the future of the village-community, or of the peasants’ Common Law Courts, are debated in the daily papers, in the scientific reviews and the journals of statistical research, they are also dealt with by means of artistic images and types taken from life in the folk-novel.

Moreover, the folk-novelists, taken as a whole, represent a great school of realism in art, and in true realism they have surpassed all those writers who have been mentioned in the preceding chapters. Of course, Russian “realism,” as the reader of this book is already well aware, is something quite different from what was represented as “naturalism” and “realism” in France by Zola. As already remarked, Zola, notwithstanding his propaganda of realism, always remained an inveterate romantic in the conception of his leading characters, both of the “saint” and of the “villain” type; and no doubt because of this — perhaps feeling it himself — he gave, as a compensation, such an exaggerated importance to speculations about physiological heredity and, to the accumulation of pretty descriptive details, many of which, especially amongst his repulsive types, might have been omitted without depriving the characters of any really significant feature. In Russia the “realism” of Zola has always been considered too superficial, too outward, and while our folk-novelists also have often indulged in an unnecessary profusion of detail — sometimes decidedly ethnographical — they have aimed nevertheless at that inner realism which appears in the construction of such characters as are really representative of life taken as a whole. Their aim has been to represent life without distortion — whether that distortion consists in introducing petty details, which may be true, but are accidental, or in endowing heroes with virtues or vices which are indeed met with here and there, but ought not to be generalised. Several novelists, as will be seen presently, have objected even to the usual ways of describing types and relating the individual dramas of a few typical heroes. They have made the extremely bold attempt of describing life itself, in its succession of petty actions, moving on amidst its grey and dull surroundings, introducing only that dramatic element which results from the endless succession of petty and depressing details and wonted circumstances; and it must be owned that they have not been quite unsuccessful in striking out this new line of art — perhaps the most tragical of all. Others, again, have introduced a new type of artistic representation of life, which occupies an intermediate position between the novel, properly so-called, and a demographic description of a given population. Thus, Gleb Uspénskiy knew how to intermingle artistic descriptions of typical village-people with discussions belonging to the domain of folk-psychology in so interesting a manner that the reader willingly pardons him these digressions; while others like Maxímoff succeeded in making out of their ethnographical descriptions real works of art, without in the least diminishing their scientific value.