Ryeshétnikoff

RYESHÉTNIKOFF (1841–1870) went still further in the same direction, and, with Pomyalóvskiy, he may be considered as the founder of the ultra-realistic school of Russian folk-novelists. He was born in the Uráls and was the son of a poor church cantor who became a postman. The family was in extreme poverty. An uncle took him to the town of Perm, and there he was beaten and thrashed all through his childhood. When he was ten years old they sent him to a miserable clerical school, where he was treated even worse than at his uncle’s. He ran away, but was caught, and they flogged the poor child so awfully that he had to lie in a hospital for two months. As soon as he was taken back to school he ran away a second time, joining a band of tramping beggars. He suffered terribly during his peregrinations with them, and was caught once more, and again flogged in the most barbarous way. His uncle also was a postman, and Ryeshétnikoff, having nothing to read, used to steal newspapers from the Post Office, and after reading them, he destroyed them. This was, however, discovered, the boy having destroyed some important Imperial manifesto addressed to the local authorities. He was brought before a Court and condemned to be sent to a monastery for a few months (there were no reformatories then). The monks were kind to him, but they led a most dissolute life, drinking excessively, overeating, and stealing away from the monastery at night, and they taught the boy to drink. In spite of all this, after his release from the monastery Ryeshétnikoff passed brilliantly the examinations in the district school, and was received as a clerk in the Civil Service, at a salary of six shillings, and later on, half-a-guinea per month. This meant, of course, the most wretched poverty, because the young man took no bribes, as all clerks in those times were accustomed to do. The arrival of a “revisor” at Perm saved him. This gentleman employed Ryeshétnikoff as a copyist, and, having come to like him, gave him the means to move to St. Petersburg, where he found him a position as clerk in the Ministry of Finance at almost double his former salary. Ryeshétnikoff had begun to write already, at Perm, and he continued to do so at St. Petersburg, sending contributions to some of the lesser newspapers, until he made the acquaintance of Nekrásoff. Then he published his novel, Podlípovtsy, in The Contemporary (Ceux de Podlipnaïa, in a French translation).

Ryeshétnikoff’s position in literature is quite unique. “The sound truth of Ryeshétnikoff” — in these words Turguéneff characterised his writings. It is truth, indeed, nothing but truth, without any attempt at decoration or lyric effects — a sort of diary in which the men with whom the author lived in the mining works of the Urals, in his Permian village, or in the slums of St. Petersburg, are described. “Podlípovtsy” means the inhabitants of a small village Podlípnaya, lost somewhere in the mountains of the Uráls. They are Permians, not yet quite Russified, and are still in the stage which so many populations of the Russian Empire are living through nowadays — namely the early agricultural. Few of them have for more than two months a year pure rye-bread to eat: the remaining ten months they are compelled to add the bark of trees to their flour in order to have “bread” at all. They have not the slightest idea of what Russia is, or of the State, and very seldom do they see a priest. They hardly know how to cultivate the land. They do not know how to make a stove, and periodical starvation during the months from January to July has taken the very soul and heart out of them. They stand on a lower level than real savages.

One of their best men, Pilá, knows how to count up to five, but the others are unable to do so. Pilá’s conceptions of space and time are of the most primitive description, and yet this Pilá is a born leader of his semi-savage village people, and is continually making something for them. He tells them when it is time to plough; he tries to find a sale for their small domestic industries; he knows how to go to the next town, and when there is anything to be done there, he does it. His relations with his family, which consists of an only daughter, Apróska, are at a stage belonging to prehistorical anthropology, and yet he and his friend Sysói love that girl Apróska so deeply, that after her death they are ready to kill themselves. They abandon their village to lead the hard life of boatmen on the river, dragging the heavy boats up the current. But these semi-savages are deeply human, and one feels that they are so, not merely because the author wants it, but in reality; and one cannot read the story of their lives and the sufferings which they endure, with the resignation of a patient beast, without being moved at times even more deeply than by a good novel from our own life.

Another novel of Ryeshétnikoff, The Glúmoffs, is perhaps one of the most depressing novels in this branch of literature. There is nothing striking in it — no misfortunes, no calamities, no dramatic effects; but the whole life of the ironworkers of the Uráls, who are described in this novel, is so gloomy, there is so little possibility of possible escape from this gloominess, that sheer despair seizes you, as you gradually realise the immobility of the life which this novel represents. In Among Men Ryeshétnikoff tells the story of his own terrible childhood. As to his larger two-volume novel Where is it Better? — it is an interminable string of misfortunes which befell a woman of the poorer classes, who came to St. Petersburg in search of work. We have here (as well as in another long novel, One’s Own Bread) the same shapelessness and the same absence of strongly depicted characters as in The Glúmoffs, and we receive the same gloomy impression.

The literary defects of all Ryeshétnikoff’s work are only too evident. Yet in spite of them, he may claim to be considered as the initiator of a new style of novel, which has its artistic value, notwithstanding its want of form and the ultra-realism of both its conception and structure. Ryeshétnikoff certainly could not inspire a school of imitators; but he has given hints to those who came after him as to what must be done to create the true folk-novel, and what must be avoided. There is not the slightest trace of romanticism in his work; no heroes; nothing but that great, indifferent, hardly individualised crowd, among which there are no striking colours, no giants; all is small; all interests are limited to a microscopically narrow neighbourhood. In fact, they all centre round the all-dominating question, Where to get food and shelter, even at the price of unbearable toil. Every person described has, of course, his individuality; but all these individualities are merged into one single desire: that of finding a living which shall not be sheer misery — shall not consist of days of well — being alternating with days of starvation. How lessen the hardships of work which is beyond a man’s forces? how find a place in the world where work shall not be done amid such degrading conditions? these questions make the unanimity of purpose among all these men and women.

There are, I have just said, no heroes in Ryeshétnikoff’s novels: that means, no “heroes” in our usual literary sense; but you see before you real Titans — real heroes in the primitive sense of the word — heroes of endurance — such as the species must produce when, a shapeless crowd, it bitterly struggles against frost and hunger. The way in which these heroes support the most incredible physical privations as they tramp from one part of Russia to another, or have to face the most cruel deceptions in their search for work — the way they struggle for existence — is already striking enough; but the way in which they die, is perhaps even more striking. Many readers remember, of course, Tolstóy’s Three Deaths: the lady dying from consumption, and cursing her illness, the peasant who in his last hours thinks of his boots, and directs to whom they shall be given, so that they may go to the toiler most in need of them; and the third — the death of the birch tree. For Ryeshétnikoff’s heroes, who live all their lives without being sure of bread for the morrow, death is not a catastrophe: it simply means less and less force to get one’s food, less and less energy to chew one’s dry piece of bread, less and less bread, less oil in the lamp — and the lamp is blown out.

Another most terrible thing in Ryeshétnikoff’s novels is his picture of how the habit of drunkenness takes possession of men, You see it coming — see how it must come, organically, necessarily, fatally — how it takes possession of the man, and how it holds him till his death. This Shakespearian fatalism applied to drink — whose workings are only too well known to those who know popular life — is perhaps the most terrible feature of Ryeshétnikoffs novels. Especially is it apparent in The G1úmoffs, where you see how the teacher in a mining town, because he refuses to join the administration in exploitation of children, is deprived of all means of living and although he marries in the long run a splendid woman, sinks at last into the clutches of the demon of habitual drunkenness. Only the women do not drink, and that saves the race from utter destruction; in fact, nearly every one of Ryeshétnikoff’s women is a heroine of persevering labour, of struggle for the necessities of life, as the female is in the whole animal world; and such the women are in real popular life in Russia.

If it is very difficult to avoid romantic sentimentalism, when the author who describes the monotony of the everyday life of a middle-class crowd intends to make the reader sympathise nevertheless with this crowd, the difficulties are still greater when he descends a step lower in the social scale and deals with peasants, or, still worse, with those who belong to the lowest strata of city life. The most realistic writers have fallen into sentimentalism and romanticism when they attempted to do this. Even Zola in his last novel, Work, falls into the trap. But that is precisely what Ryeshétnikoff never did. His writings are a violent protest against aesthetics, and even against all sorts of conventional art. He was a true child of the epoch characterised by Turguéneff in Bazároff. “I do not care for the form of my writings: truth will speak for itself,” he seems to say to his readers. He would have felt ashamed if, even unconsciously, he had resorted anywhere to dramatic effects in order to touch his readers — just as the public speaker who entirely relies upon the beauty of the thought he develops would feel ashamed if some merely oratorical expression escaped his lips.

For myself, I think that a great creative genius was required in order to pick, as Ryeshétnikoff did, out of the everyday, monotonous life of the crowd, those trifling expressions, those exclamations, those movements expressive of some feelings or some idea without which his novels would have been quite unreadable. It has been remarked by one of our critics that when you begin to read a novel of Ryeshétnikoff you seem to have plunged into a chaos. You have the description of a commonplace landscape, which, in fact, is no “landscape” at all; then the future hero or heroine of the novel appears, and he or she is a person whom you may see in every crowd — with no claims to rise above this crowd, with hardly anything even to distinguish him or her from the crowd. This hero speaks, eats, drinks, works, swears, as everyone else in the crowd does. He is not a chosen creature — he is not a demoniacal character — a Richard Ill. in a fustian jacket; nor is she a Cordelia or even a Dickens’ “Nell.” Ryeshétnikoff’s men and women are exactly like thousands of men and women around them; but gradually, owing to those very scraps of thought, to an exclamation, to a word dropped here and there, or even to a slight movement that is mentioned — you begin to feel interested in them. After thirty pages you feel that you are already decidedly in sympathy with them and you are so captured that you read pages and pages of these chaotic details with the sole purpose of solving the question which begins passionately to interest you: Will Peter or Anna find to-day the piece of bread which they long to have? Will Mary get the work which might procure her a pinch of tea for her sick and half-crazy mother? Will the woman Praskóvia freeze during that bitterly cold night when she is lost in the streets of St. Petersburg or will she be taken at last to a hospital where she may have a warm blanket and cup of tea? Will the postman abstain from the “fire-water,” and will he get a situation, or not?

Surely, to obtain this result with such unconventional means reveals a very great talent; it means, to possess that power of moving one’s readers — of making them love and hate — which makes the very essence of literary talent; and this is why those shapeless, and much too long, and much too dreary novels of Ryeshétnikoff make a landmark in Russian literature, and are the precursors not only of a Gókiy, but, most surely, of a greater talent still.