Like other writers, in his youth Lennox Robinson was chiefly impressed with the difficulties that beset men and women, but in maturity he is more than ever conscious of the humor that leavens human suffering; with time has come completer understanding of the stuff a dramatist's dreams are made of.

NORREYS JEPHSON O'CONOR.

Boston, Massachusetts.

EVENING

Above the grey, the parched horizon line,

The deep sky rends its breast,

And from the gaping west

Pours the swift crimson blood of day.

Great Pelican! fold down your evening wings

To staunch that flood and rest.

With dark-plumed midnight hide

Your heart's red tide;

Cover your wound-and mine.

Harvard, Massachusetts.

G. O. WARREN.

DOSTOYEVSKY AND MODERN RUSSIAN

LITERATURE

Only rarely does an author appear in any literature of such transcendent importance that all later work, whether by friends or foes, whether of the same or opposing schools, must take account of him and in one form or another must follow and imitate him. Such a giant is Dostoyevsky, and he, far more than either of the two other great Russian writers of the nineteenth century, has left his mark on the works of his successors.

Turgenev, with his masterly descriptions of the nests of nobles and their large estates, is now an author of the past. Long before the Revolution the country life which he describes had withered away and the spirit of those days had fled. Even his intellectual revolutionists no longer hold the centre of the stage. The stern fact of the Revolution soon swept away the Rudins and the other delightful chatterers, true prototypes of large numbers of Russian intellectuals, as Chaykovsky sadly remarked in his speech at the centennial of the birth of Turgenev at Archangel in 1918.

Tolstoy, with his moral belief that force lies at the root of all evil in the world, may be praised by the twentieth century, but the age has not followed him. His anarchism has succeeded in undermining governments everywhere, but his doctrine of love has not exerted a corresponding influence on the great mass of humanity. The problem of life is too complex to admit of so simple a solution. As a result, he is praised rather than imitated, and later literature has not followed him and his philosophy as widely in Russia as perhaps in other countries.

At first it would seem that the influence of Dostoyevsky would be even less. Fate, with bitter irony, has jested at his formless novels, in which he repeats and repeats his conviction that Russia will never rise against the Tsar, that socialism. will never gain a foothold in Russia, and that the Russian peasant will be forever devoted to the Orthodox Church and the Russian government. Then came 1917. The last of the Rom

anovs died an unknown death in prison, and an era of persecutian for the Church commenced. And yet the works of Dostoyevsky live. Why? It is not for their historical accuracy. Dostoyevsky did not bother about that. It is not for their exquisite form. There is hardly one of his works which can satisfy the most elementary canons of art, and the poor epileptic had no time or energy to revise his work with the care and industry of a Tolstoy. It is not for their tender delineation of the humble. It is only the least known works of our author which deal with the honest poor. Creatures, warped and misshapen morally and physically, are the subjects of his greater novels, and these, it would seem, could attract little more than a morbid interest.

Yet Dostoyevsky is read and read widely. He is read for his psychological analyses of the abnormal; he is read for the evident sympathy which he has with these poor beings; and, above all, he is read for the kinship which he shows with later authors. The entire Neo-romantic School of Russia is to a surprising degree built upon the foundations laid by Dostoyevsky, even when he thought that a far different superstructure was to be erected upon them. It may be of interest, then, to consider some few of the points in which the writings of Dostoyevsky anticipate or have influenced the work of the more modern Russian authors, even those who have been working since 1917.

First of all we must mention the interest in the abnormal. The indictment literature of the middle of the century-novels written with the purpose of helping in the liberation of Russiadoes not deal with the abnormal. The older literature took as its hero the superfluous man, the man without purpose or will in life, some Pechorin or Evgeny Onyegin, or, in a more striking example, Oblomov, the hero of Goncharov's great novel, and the the classic example of the type. Another type is the repentant nobleman, voluntarily giving up his privileges to help his oppressed brethren. Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Children, and Nekhlyudov in Tolstoy's Resurrection, are of this class. It is hardly possible to find among them such a hero as Dostoyevsky presents, but since his day, there is hardly an author, certainly among the symbolists, as Bryusov, Sologub, and Andreyev, who does not feel himself drawn to a study of the insane, the sick, or the

afflicted in body, mind and soul. Eleazer or Judas Iscariot of Andreyev can find their comrades in Shatov in The Possessed or Smerdyakov or Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov.

Then, again, during the nineteenth century Russian literature was essentially rural. Turgenev and Tolstoy loved the country. The noble lived on his estates and spent the social seasons in the capitals, but he rarely learned to know or love the people of the city. Life for Turgenev passes on the estate or abroad in some gay watering-place. To Tolstoy the city was the negation of Christianity, a blot on the world, a subject for sociological studies rather than for literature. Dostoyevsky, however, was born and brought up in the city; he knew the hopes and fears, the ambitions and the failures of its people, and he described what he knew. Raskolnikov, the Karamazovs, Myshkin, all live in the city. There is hardly one of Dostoyevsky's great works that is not laid in the city, save the Memoirs of a Dead House, the account of the Siberian prisons, compared to which even a city is a luxury. Where, as in The Possessed, part of the scene is laid in the country, there the final catastrophe is caused by the strike of the factory workers and every act is viewed from its connection with the life of the provincial capital.

During the last half century the centre of Russian literature has abruptly shifted. The nests of nobles have disappeared. Bunin, in The Village, has given us the country as he sees it,-a fearful, empty place. The peasants are dull and brutish. For Muyzhel they are mere clods, suffering and dying like beasts in their dens, with nothing to brighten or cheer their painful existence. Gone is the joy of labor, so well set forth in the folkpoems of Koltsov. Gone are happiness, honor, everything but a miserable gnawing of discontent. It is the city worker, the townsman, that holds the key to the future, as Veresayev and his fellow-realists point out. The symbolists also under the leadership of Bryusov have turned in the same direction. In his poems the whirr of the airplane, the hum of the motor, and the cramping life of the city are fully reflected. Yet in The Answer he declares boldly that the same passions and the same torments inflame the human heart as in the days of Dido and that we are still the slaves of the same unsparing Aphrodite.

This change has taken place in life as in literature, since the present régime in Russia is founded chiefly on the cities, with a constant struggle against the peasantry and the agricultural classes.

This development has been accompanied by an increasing callousness in literature. Stephen Graham' says of Bryusov that he is a hard, polished, and even merciless personality, and has little in common with the compassionate spirits of Russia. He is not alone. Artsybashev in Sanin proposes a mode of life which is purely egotistic and thoroughly scornful of sympathy. His doctrine is entirely selfish. We should hardly err in ascribing this same sentiment to the bosyak of Gorky, the bare-footed ruffian, who figures in many of his stories. Surely this cannot touch the influence of Dostoyevsky, the most Christian soul in centuries, as many of his admirers have asserted.

Nevertheless, Dostoyevsky is less different than we might be led to think. Callousness is interwoven with a vein of cruelty in many of his characters. as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He will give his last ruble to insure a proper funeral for Marmeladov, the drunken and worthless official, but he is a murderer, and he works out the doctrine of the superman (this in 1866). He divides all men into two classes—those who are under the law and those who are above the law. The latter are justly exempted from the petty restrictions and the moral regulations which exist for lesser personalities. A Napoleon on his way to a splendid goal can and must sacrifice whatever crosses his path and thwarts his sovereign will. If this be true, why should a man worry if his duty to humanity urges him to kill a money-lender, a bloodsucker, a louse, as Raskolnikov proudly explains? Needless to say, the poor student is not a superman. He acknowledges his failure, begs pardon of Mother Earth, and gives himself up to the authorities; but the principle is enunciated. The evil is done and we can understand why Nietzsche declared that from Dostoyevsky alone could he learn psychology. If Raskolnikov argues himself into this belief, Ivan Karamazov uses his theories of duty and rights to rouse Smer

1 The Republic of the Southern Cross, p. v.