great literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something important to say to their people.

Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is supposed to be warmhearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized "propaganda," for the simple reason that this would have cost him his liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of dealing with the real problems of your country and time.

Gogol wrote a play called "The Inspector-General," which tells how a government representative is expected to visit a small provincial town, and all the functionaries are in a state of terror for fear their various stealings will be exposed. It is understood that the inspector-general will come in disguise, and so they mistake a youthful traveler for this functionary, and insist on doing him honor, to his great bewilderment. Finally the postmaster of the town, following his custom of secretly reading the mail, opens a letter from the young man to a friend, telling about his adventures and ridiculing the town functionaries. The postmaster reads this aloud in the hearing of the functionaries, to their great dismay.

Somebody read this play to the tsar, and he was so delighted that he ordered it produced. You remember King Louis of France, the "grand monarch," taking delight in Moliere's ridicule of his courtiers. The monarch can afford to laugh, or at least thinks he can; it is only the functionaries who realize the destructive power of laughter.

Then Gogol wrote a long novel, "Dead Souls." He introduces us to a young man who might be a graduate

of any one of a thousand schools and colleges and universities of "salesmanship" in the United States. So brilliant are this young man's talents:

Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also Tchitchikov would make remarks to the point. If the conversation related to some investigation which was being made by the government, he would show that he also knew something about the tricks of the civil service functionaries. When the talk was about billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, he knew all about brandy.

This expert in the psychology of salesmanship had a truly Yankee idea to make his fortune. At that time the Russian peasants were sold with the land, and the landlord had to pay taxes on all his serfs. A reckoning was made at certain periods, and if any serfs died in between the periods of reckoning, the landlord had to pay taxes just the same. Now, said the salesman to himself, any landlord will be glad to sell me these "dead souls"; and when I have bought a great number of them, I will get hold of a piece of land, and move all these "dead souls" to that land, and some bank will lend me a great sum of money, not knowing they are dead.

To travel over Russia and interview landlords on such an errand is in itself high comedy. Gogol takes us to one estate after another, and lets us see the misery of the serfs, and the incompetence and futility of the landlords; the ones who are kind-hearted and sentimental don't know what to do, and cause just as much misery as the brutal ones. Such a situation requires no comment from the novelist; merely to know about it is to condemn it. So it happened that Gogol's story became a revolutionary document, and was copied out by hand and passed about among the young rebels. The government intervened, preventing a second edition of the book; and poor Gogol, a little later in his life, turned into some kind of religious maniac, and repented of what he had written, and burned great quantities of his manuscripts, including the latter part of this novel. That gives us a glimpse of the "Russian soul," and makes us realize what a distance these people had to travel from Oriental barbarism to modern individualism.

CHAPTER LXXXIII

THE RUSSIAN HAMLET

The modern world was there, and it kept calling to the youth of Russia. There came a skillful novelist, whose task it was to interpret his country to the outside world, and at the same time to interpret the outside world to Russia. He came of a family of wealthy landowners, and received the best education available; but he ventured at the funeral of Gogol to praise the work of this great master-which so incensed the government that he was sentenced to exile upon his own estate. Three years later he succeeded in getting permission to go abroad, and lived the rest of his life in Germany and France, where he was free to write as he pleased.

The first work of Ivan Turgenev was called "A Sportsman's Sketches"; pictures of the peasant types he met while on shooting trips. It was a safe, aristocratic occupation, that of killing birds for pleasure, and surely no government could object to a gentleman's describing the peasants who went along to carry his guns and his lunch. The government did not object; and so the reading public in Russia had brought vividly before it the fact that human beings, of their own blood and their own faith, were serfs at the mercy of landlords, to be sold like other chattels. So the tsar was forced to free the serfs.

Turgenev settled in Paris; a great, handsome giant, a wealthy bachelor, amiable and simple, a charming literary lion. His friends were Gautier, Flaubert, and other novelists, from whom he learned the perfections of artistry, the pictorial charm, the "enamels and cameos" ideal. He had no need to learn from them the bitter and corroding despair, because that was his Russian heritage.

He wrote seven novels, all short and simple; the theme of each being the stock theme of leisure-class fiction, a man and a woman at the crisis of their love. His girls are very much alike; direct and honest, they flame up, and are ready to act upon their feelings, to go anywhere with the man they love. But the man does not know where to go or what to do. The hero of the first novel, Rudin, is a kind of modern Hamlet, who became pro

verbial as the type of Russian intellectual. He is incapable of anything but talk, and tells the girl that they must submit to her family, which opposes the marriage.

In the other novels the heroes do not always submit. There is, for example, Bazarov, the Nihilist; he is a fighter, and ready for action—but Turgenev tells us what he thinks of man's dream of accomplishment, when Bazarov scratches his finger and dies of blood poisoning. Another hero is a Bulgarian, and there is a chance for action in Bulgaria; but unfortunately this man's lungs are weak, and he dies in the arms of the brave girl who eloped with him.

You see, it is hard for Turgenev to portray anyone who believes, because he is an artist in the leisure-class tradition of fatalism and urbane incredulity. Life is a malady; it is a malady in cruel and barbarous Russia, and no less so in free but cynical and licentious Paris. Turgenev, living safely abroad, describes heroes who also live abroad; he has not the moral courage to face Russia and the Russian problem, even in his thoughts. His people are the exiles and intellectuals, the travelers and parasites, amusing themselves in the capitals of Europe. He loathes this loafing class, and satirizes it without mercy; but also he cannot help seeing the weaknesses of the revolutionists—and the revolutionists were of course indignant at that, because they were fighting for human freedom, and thought that a man of culture and enlightment ought to help them.

So there was furious controversy over each of Turgenev's novels, and it hurt the feelings of the great, good-natured giant, and he did a lot of explaining, some of it contradictory. The truth is that he did not know quite what he believed; he was not a thinker, but merely an artist in the narrow sense of the word, one who sees what exists and portrays it with cunning skill. This makes him, of course, a darling of the leisure-class critics, art for art sakers and dilettanti. The French translations of his novels had an enormous vogue, likewise the English translations, and men like Henry James thought him a god. But out of Russia there now comes a new voice; the revolutionary proletariat is making Russia over, and the young students report themselves bored with Turgenev; he whines and moans and gets them nowhere.

You see, the Russians can now act, like other people; and so the Russian Hamlet is laid on the shelf.

CHAPTER LXXXIV

THE DEAD-HOUSE

A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had never been able to read one of his novels through. Van Eeden replied that Dostoievski was the world's greatest novelist; and that is high praise, because van Eeden is a great novelist himself. Now, under the strain of the war, my old friend has turned into a Catholic mystic; and so I understand his passion for the dark Russian, another of those over-burdened spirits who despair of the human intellect, and seek refuge in that most powerful autosuggestion known as God.

Feodor Dostoievski was born in a hospital, his father being a poor surgeon with a big family. As a child he knew cold and hunger, and was living in a garret when he wrote his first novel, "Poor People," at the age of twenty-four. It is a picture of two suffering, will-less creatures; and so genuine, so completely "lived," that it made an instant impression.

Its author was drawn into literary circles—which in those days meant also revolutionary circles. In his feeble way he took up the ideas of Fourier; he attended some radical gatherings, and went so far as to identify himself with a printing press. The group were arrested, and Dostoievski lay in a dungeon for many months, and finally with twenty companions was brought out upon a public square before a scaffold and prepared for death. At the last moment there came a reprieve from the tsar, but meantime one of the victims had gone insane. The shock to Dostoievski's mind was such that he comes back to the incident again and again in his books.

He was sent to Siberia at hard labor; herded with common felons, beaten and tormented-in short, receiving exactly the same treatment now meted out to social idealists by the states of California and Washington, and recently by the United States government at Leavenworth.

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