A very large part Eastern Europe is occupied by the Russian
people. East to the Urals and south to the Caucasus the country is almost
wholly a plain: marshland to the far north; then wooded stretches; then a great
agricultural plain; and, last of all, the steppes of the south. Russia’s rivers
are numerous, and include the Volga, the longest in Europe. Its cities,
particularly Kiev and Novgorod, Moscow and Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg),
are famous in Russian literature. The reader of the poems and tales of Russia
soon receive an indelible impression of the characteristic landscape as it
appears in winter and in summer, and of the villages, the old country estates,
and the manners and customs of the people. He comes to know intimately the life
of Moscow and Leningrad; he gets glimpses of the Cossacks on the plains and in
their mountain fastnesses; most of all, he meets at every turn the Russian
peasant, that inscrutable and interesting figure, forming by far the largest
element among the people of Russia.
Primarily a Slav, the Russian is a descendant of that branch
of the Aryan or Indo-European, race which occupied Eastern Europe at a very
early period. He faces both east and west and he has been influenced strongly
by both Orient and Occident. He seems to have pretty well-defined qualities. As
a rule he is pacific, human, sincere, keen and quick-witted, fond of argument
and discussion. He is by nature religious, with a strain of superstition. He is
patient and stoical under suffering, but bursts of energy and audacity are
characteristic. He has sympathy for his fellows and for dumb animals, and he
lives close to nature and to the facts of life. Absolute frankness and reality
seem to be the rule with him. On the other hand, he is apt to be
self-indulgent, unoriginal, indolent, and indecisive. He lacks initiative and
independence. A settled gloom and tragic seriousness permeate the novels of
Russian writers. Among the major novelists only one, Gogol, may be considered a
humourist, and his humor is of a grim and searching nature.
The genius of the Russian race has expressed itself chiefly
in the novel. The first of the great line of Russian novelists was Nicolai
Gogol (1809-1859), a man who constantly mingled comedy with tragedy. The reader
carries away with him the impression of his versatility. Gogol excelled in four
fields of literary art. He produced in The Cloak a little masterpiece, the
progenitor of a host of other Russian short stories; in The Inspector-General (Rerizor)
he wrote a finished comedy, one of the very few plays of his nation that are
known internationally; in Taras Bulba he offered, a prose romance or historical
novel of almost epic power and strength; and in Dead Souls he gave to Russia
its first great realistic novel.
By the tradition, and doubtless by justice, the great
outstanding figures in Russian literature are Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoevsky
and Anton Chekhov. Any country might well be proud of writers of this order.
Dostoevsky, despite physical and other handicaps and a slovenliness of style
and method, had genius and an almost unparalleled sense of power and at his
highest level is an extraordinary writer and thinker. Tolstoy possessed a
university that placed him among the great European writers of his century or
any century. Henry James said, “The perusal of Tolstoy – a wonderful mass of
life – is an immerse event, a kind of splendid accident, for each of us."
Anton Chekhov has left a number of stories and plays. He was
a physician whose brief career was marked by kindly deeds. Many of his admirers
in Europe and America considered him the foremost of Russian short-story
writers. He had a wonderful descriptive power and the skill to compress much
into a few lines. Chekhov reflects the prevailing gloom of his time, but
imagination, humor, the love of nature, and the love of children are depicted
in his writings.
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