The Early Folk-Novelists: Grigoróvitch

One of the earliest folk-novelists was GRIGORÓVITCH (1822–1899), a man of great talent, who sometimes is placed by the side of Tolstóy, Turguéneff, Gontcharóff and Ostróvskiy. His literary career was very interesting. He was born of a Russian father and a French mother, and at the age of ten hardly knew Russian at all. His education was entirely foreign — chiefly French — and he never really lived the village life amidst which Turguéneff or Tolstóy grew up. Moreover, he never gave himself exclusively to literature: he was a painter as well as a novelist, and at the same time a fine connoisseur of art, and for the last thirty years of his life he wrote almost nothing, but gave all his time to the Russian Society of Painters. And yet this half-Russian was one of those who rendered the same service to Russia before the abolition of serfdom that Harriet Beecher Stowe rendered to the United States by her description of the sufferings of the negro slaves.

Grigoróvitch was educated in the same military school of engineers as was Dostoyévskiy, and after having finished his education there, he took a tiny room from the warder of the Academy of Arts, with the intention of giving himself entirely to art. However, in the studios he made the acquaintance of the Little Russian poet Shevtchénko, and next of Nekrásoff and Valerián Máykoff (a critic of great power, who died very young), and through them he found his vocation in literature.

In the early forties he was known only by a charming sketch, The Organ Grinders, in which he spoke with great warmth of feeling of the miserable life of this class of the St. Petersburg population. Russian society, in those years, felt the impression of the Socialist revival of France, and its best representatives were growing impatient with serfdom and absolutism. Fourier and Pierre Leroux were favourite writers in advanced intellectual circles, and Grigoróvitch was carried on by the growing current. He left St. Petersburg, went to stay for a year or two in the country, and in 1846 he published his first novel dealing with country life, The Village. He depicted in it, without any exaggeration, the dark sides of village life and the horrors of serfdom, and he did it so vividly that Byelínskiy, the critic, at once recognised in him a new writer of great power, and greeted him as such. His next novel, Antón the Unfortunate, also drawn from village life, was a tremendous success, and its influence was almost equal to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. No educated man or woman of his generation or of ours could have read the book without weeping over the misfortunes of Antón, and finding better feelings growing in his heart towards the serfs. Several novels of the same character followed in the next eight years (1847 to 1855) — The Fishermen, The Immigrants, The Tiller, The Tramp, The Country Roads — and then Grigoróvitch came to a stop. In 1865 he took part with some of our best writers — Gontcharóff, Ostróvskiy, Maxímoff (the ethnographer), and several others — in a literary expedition organised by the Grand Duke Constantine for the exploration of Russia and voyages round the world on board ships of the Navy. Grigoróvitch made a very interesting sea-voyage; but his sketches of travel — The Ship Retvizan — cannot be compared with Gontcharóff’s Frigate Pallas. On returning from the expedition he abandoned literature to devote himself entirely to art, and he subsequently brought out only a couple of novels and his Reminiscences. He died in 1899.

Grigoróvitch thus published all his chief novels between the years 1846 and 1855. Opinion about his work is divided. Some of our critics speak of it very highly, but others — and they are the greater number — say that his peasants are not quite real. Turguéneff made also the observation that his descriptions are too cold: the heart is not felt in them. This last remark may be true, although the average reader who did not know Grigoróvitch personally hardly would have made it: at any rate, at the time of the appearance of Antón, The Fishermen, etc., the great public judged the author of these works differently. As to his peasants, I will permit myself to make one suggestion. Undoubtedly they are slightly idealised; but it must also be said that the Russian peasantry does not present a compact, uniform mass. Several races have settled upon the territory of European Russia, and different portions of the population have followed different lines of development. The peasant from South Russia is quite different from the Northerner, and the Western peasants differ in every respect from the Eastern ones. Grigoróvitch described chiefly those living directly south of Moscow, in the provinces of Túla and Kalúga, and they are exactly that mild and slightly poetical, downtrodden and yet inoffensive, good-hearted race of peasants that Grigoróvitch described in is novels — a sort of combination of the Lithuanian and the Little-Russian poetical mind, with the Great-Russian communal spirit. Ethnographers themselves see in the populations of this part of Russia a special ethnographical division.

Of course, Turguéneff’s peasants (Túla and Oryól) are more real, his types are more definite, and every one of the modern folk-novelists, even of the less talented, has gone much further than Grigoróvitch did into the depths of peasant character and life. But such as they were, the novels of Grigoróvitch exercised a profound influence on a whole generation. They made us love the peasants and feel how heavy was the indebtedness towards them which weighed upon us — the educated part of society. They powerfully contributed towards creating a general feeling in favour of the serfs, without which the abolition of serfdom would have certainly been delayed for many years to come, and assuredly would not have been so sweeping as it was. And at a later epoch his work undoubtedly contributed to the creation of that movement “towards the people” (v naród) which took place in the seventies. As to the literary influence of Grigoróvitch, it was such that it may be questioned whether Turguéneff would ever have been bold enough to write as he did about the peasants, in his Sportsman’s Note Book, or Nekrásoff to compose his passionate verses about the people, if they had not had a forerunner in him.