Part 34 (1/2)

In _War and Peace_ Tolstoy meant to give us what is commonly known as an historical novel: on laying it down we feel, not that we have lived in an age long past side by side with Napoleon, or fought at Borodino, but that these characters have been transplanted to our own age, and that he is depicting men and women whom we already know very well. The poverty of his historical colouring is amazing: where he depicts reality, the ”natural” man, his language is distinguished by unequalled simplicity, strength and accuracy, but directly he gets on to the subject of abstract psychology he is lost; his very language seems to become helpless. When he leaves the pa.s.sions of the heart for the pa.s.sions of the mind he becomes obscure, ungrammatical and false. Compare Irteniev, the hero of _Childhood and Youth_, with Nekhlindov in _Resurrection_.

The former is distinct, unforgettable, alive ... the latter a lifeless abstraction, a dreary megaphone. He cannot create human souls with anything like the success he achieves with human bodies.

We see this best of all in the case of Natasha, in _War and Peace_. She seems at the end of the book to have lost her soul in her body, and become a mere prolific she-animal, living solely for her children and husband. She has become divinely fleshly. ”'We may run risks ourselves, but not for our children,'” she remarks to Pierre when he wishes to give away his property, echoing what Tolstoy's own wife said to him on a similar occasion.

Austerlitz, Borodino, the burning of Moscow, Napoleon--all pa.s.s forgotten as if written on sand, but Natasha remains, Natasha, the eternal mother, triumphantly waving ”swaddling clothes, with a yellow stain instead of a green,” the divine animal. The swallowing up of the human individual in the universal is Tolstoy's unvarying theme. Natures swallows up Uncle Yeroshka (”I die and--the gra.s.s grows”), child-bearing absorbs Natasha, sinful, destroying love swallows up Anna Karenina. She is all compact of love. Her words are poor: Tolstoy is always poor in dialogue. His excellence lies, as may have been guessed, in descriptions. One might almost say that his characters only speak because the mechanical conformation of their mouths admits of it.

What do we know, for instance, of Anna? What does she think about Children, People, Duty, Nature, Art, Life, Death and G.o.d? We don't know.

But, on the other hand, we do know exactly how her slender fingers taper at the end, what a round, polished neck she has, how her curls flutter on her neck and temples; every expression of her face, every movement of her body we do know.

He probes the human till he reaches the animal, and so, as in the case of Vronsky's mare, Frou-frou, he probes the animal till he reaches the human. He brings the likeness of G.o.d to the image of the beast.

There are in Tolstoy's books no heroes, no characters, no personalities ... and hence there is no tragedy, no catastrophe, no redeeming horror, no redeeming laughter. The princ.i.p.als are all clever, honourable, good, simple, nave or kindly, yet we never feel at home with them. There is always present that feeling with us that he lacks spiritual liberty, as Turgenev said. It is due entirely to his too great sense of the body, too little sense of the spirit.

X

TCHEHOV (1860-1904)

Tchehov is to Russian literature what de Maupa.s.sant is to French, but he has none of the ribaldry of the great Frenchman. His stories deal with the middle cla.s.ses, minor officials and the professional cla.s.ses.

Tolstoy looked upon him as a mere photographer, much in the same way that many Englishmen regard Galsworthy because of his amazing sense of detachment. But Tchehov has one quality not commonly found among photographers, and that is humour. Many of his stories are pathetic, but they are always lit up by a vein of gay drollery which adds to their subtlety and heightens the effect. It must always be remembered that he wrote at a period when Russia was in a peculiar state of stagnation. His work represents the reaction of flatness after a period of literary activity. Hence we are always coming up against words like ”ennui,”

”greyness,” and so on. Half the people seemed to have run to seed playing vint.

Turgenev painted the generation before, a generation that strove hard to evolve something out of life; Tchehov portrays a generation which had sunk back into torpor: the disease of Oblmovism had a firm grip of them.

He was born in South Russia, the son of a serf: luckily he was given a good education, finis.h.i.+ng at the University of Moscow, where he studied medicine. During the cholera epidemics of 1892 he volunteered to stand at the head of a medical district, and became acquainted with diverse characters, all of whom stood him in good stead when he took to writing, which he did very early in life. He attracted attention from the first in his volume of short humorous sketches: as his life went on he undertook more and more complicated problems and increased year by year in artistry.

His great success lies in presenting the failures of human life, especially the failure of the educated man in the face of the all-pervading meanness of everyday life.

I will treat first of his dramas.

The Russians, it must be premised, go to the theatre to see what they would see off the stage: they are incurably realistic. They do not take a delight, as we do, in huge catastrophes: they like to see the trivial incidents of ordinary life reproduced with life-like accuracy on the stage.

He wrote in all eleven plays, five of which are serious: the remaining farces need not detain us. He discovered that life can be made interesting and dramatic with indulging in heroics. He is always human, and makes us feel moods and sensations over again which we have often felt before. He seems, in other words, to make his plays out of nothing, without having recourse to action or any extraordinary phenomena.

We are not introduced to men and women stripped of the masks which they wear in ordinary life: his characters behave exactly as they would off the stage, and betray themselves as people do by a phrase, a gesture, the humming of a tune and the smell of a flower.

In The _Seagull_ we are introduced to the family of Sorin, whose sister is a famous actress called Arkadina. Preparations have been made for some private theatricals written by Arkadina's son, Constantin. The chief part is to be played by Ina, the young daughter of a neighbour who is in love with Constantin, who is full of ideals about reforming the stage. A well-known writer, Trigorin, a man of about forty, is staying with Sorin at the time.

The play is acted: Arkadina labels it decadent; Constantin gets annoyed.

Ina after the performance is introduced to Trigorin. The daughter of an agent who has witnessed the performance (her name is Masha) confesses to a doctor visitor that she is in love with Constantin, and the curtain falls on Act I.

The second Act takes place in the same house. Constantin brings in a dead seagull, and lays it at Ina's feet as a symbol which she fails to understand.

Trigorin in the course of a conversation with her tells her what it feels like to be a famous author.

”'What is there so wonderful about it? Like a monomaniac, who is always thinking day and night of the moon, I am pursued by the one thought which I cannot get rid of, I must write, I must write, I must. I have scarcely finished a story when I must write a second, then a third, then a fourth. I write uninterruptedly, I cannot do otherwise. What is there so wonderful and splendid in this, I ask you? It is a cruel life. I get excited with you and all the time I am remembering that an unfinished story is waiting for me. I see a cloud which is like a piano, and I at once think that I must remember to say somewhere in the story that there is a cloud like a piano.

”'When I write it is pleasant, and it is nice to correct proofs: but as soon as the thing is published I cannot bear it, and I already see that it is not at all what I meant, that it is a mistake, that I should not have written it at all, and I am vexed and horribly depressed. The public reads it, and says: ”Yes, pretty, full of talent, very nice, but how different from Tolstoy!” or ”Yes, a fine thing, but how far behind _Fathers and Sons_: Turgenev is better.” And so, until I die, it will always be ”pretty and full of talent,” never anything more: and when I die my friends as they pa.s.s my grave will say: ”Here lies Trigorin; he was a good writer, but he did not write so well as Turgenev.”'”