A Writer's Notebook (47 page)

The patriotism of the Russians is a singular thing; there is a great deal of conceit in it; they feel themselves different from other people and flatter themselves on their difference; they speak with self-satisfaction of the ignorance of their peasants; they vaunt their mysteriousness and complexity; they repeat
that with one face they look to the west and with the other to the east; they are proud of their faults—like a boorish man who tells you he is as God made him—and will admit with complacency that they are besotted and ignorant, incoherent of purpose and vacillating in action; but in that complex feeling which is the patriotism one knows in other countries, they seem deficient. I have tried to analyse what this particular emotion in myself consists of. To me the very shape of England on the map is significant, and it brings to my mind pell-mell a hundred impressions, the white cliffs of Dover and the tawny sea, the pleasant winding roads of Kent and the Sussex downs, St. Paul's and the Pool of London; scraps of poetry, the noble ode of Collins and Matthew Arnold's
Scholar Gipsy
and Keats'
Nightingale
, stray lines of Shakespeare's and the pages out of English history, Drake with his ships, and Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth; Tom Jones and Dr. Johnson; and all my friends and the posters at Victoria Station; then some vague feeling of majesty and power and continuity; and then, heaven knows why, the thought of a barque in full sail going down the Channel—
Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding
—while the setting sun hangs redly on the edge of the horizon. These feelings and a hundred others make up an emotion which makes sacrifice easy, it is an emotion compact of pride and longing and love, but it is humble rather than conceited, and it does not preclude a sense of humour. Perhaps Russia is too large for sentiments so intimate, its past too barren of chivalry and high romance, its character too indefinite, its literature too poor, for the imagination to embrace the country, its history and culture, in a single emotion. Russians will tell you that the peasant loves his village. His outlook goes no further. And when you read histories of Russia you are amazed to find how little the feeling of nationality has meant to one age after another. It is a startling incident when a wave of patriotism has arisen to drive out an invader. The general attitude has been one of indifference to his presence on the part of those not actually afflicted by it. It is not by
chance that Holy Russia bore so long and so submissively the yoke of the Tartar. Now it causes no indignation that the Central Powers may seize portions of Russian soil: the possibility is dismissed with a shrug and the words: “Russia is large enough anyway.”

But my work throws me in close contact with the Czechs, and here I see a patriotism that fills me with amazement. It is a passion so single and so devouring that it leaves room for no others. I feel that awe rather than admiration is due to these men who have sacrificed everything for the cause, and not in twos and threes, fanatics among an apathetic herd, but in tens of thousands; they have given everything they had, their peace, their home, their fortune, their lives, to gain independence for their country. They are organised like a department store, disciplined like a Prussian regiment. Most of the patriots I have come across—among my own countrymen, alas! too often—have been eager to serve their country, but determined it should not be without profit to themselves (who will ever tell of the hunting for jobs, the intrigues, the exertion of influence, the personal jealousies, that have distracted the nation when its very existence was in peril?), but the Czechs are completely disinterested. They think as little of payment as does a mother of reward for the care of her child. With alacrity they accept drudgery when others are given the opportunity of adventure, mean offices when others are awarded posts of responsibility. Like all men of political mind, they have parties and programmes, but they submit them all to the common good. Is it not a marvellous thing that in the great Czech organisation which has been formed in Russia, all, from the rich banker to the artisan, have given a tenth part of their income to the cause throughout the war? Even the prisoners of war—and heaven knows how precious to these were their few poor kopecks—found they could spare enough to amount to some thousands of roubles.

The nineties appealed only to the mind, and that is a running stream that purifies what passes through it, but the literature of today appeals to the heart, and that is a well that grows foul. They wore their heart on their sleeve, a fantastic orchid in Solomon's window, but our contemporaries carry it about in a slop basin. It may have been absurd to burn with a hard gem-like flame, but it is tedious to be bread-sauce.

I read
Anna Karenina
when I was a boy in a blue-bound translation published by Walter Scott, long before I began to write myself, but my recollection of it was vague, and when I read it again many years afterwards, interested then from a professional standpoint in the art of fiction, it seemed to me powerful and strange, but a little hard and dry. Then I read
Fathers and Sons
, in French; I was too ignorant of Russian things to appreciate its value; the strange names, the originality of the characters, opened a window on romance, but it was a novel like another, related to the French fiction of its day, and for me at all events, it had no great significance. Later still, when I found myself definitely interested in Russia, I read other books by Turgenev; but they left me cold. Their idealism was too sentimental for my taste, and unable in a translation to see the beauty of manner and style which Russians value, I found them ineffectual. It was not till I came to Dostoievsky (I read
Crime and Punishment
in a German version) that I received a bewildering and arresting emotion. Here was something that really had significance for me and I read greedily one after the other the great novels of Russia's greatest writer. Finally I read Chekov and Gorki. Gorki left me indifferent. His subject matter was curious and remote, but his talent seemed mediocre: he was readable enough when he set down unaffectedly the lives of the lowest orders of the population, but my interest in the slums of Petrograd was soon exhausted; and when he began to reflect or philosophise I found him
trivial. His talent sprang from his origins. He wrote of the proletariat as a proletarian, not as do most authors who have dealt with the subject, as a bourgeois. In Chekov on the other hand I discovered a spirit vastly to my liking. Here was a writer of real character, not a wild force like Dostoievsky, who amazes, inspires, terrifies and perplexes; but one with whom you could get on terms of intimacy. I felt that from him as from no other could be learned the secret of Russia. His range was great and his knowledge of life direct. He has been compared with Guy de Maupassant, but one would presume only by persons who have read neither. Guy de Maupassant is a clever story-teller, effective at his best—by which, of course, every writer has the right to be judged—but without much real relation to life. His better known stories interest you while you read them, but they are artificial so that they do not bear thinking of. The people are figures of the stage, and their tragedy exists only because they behave like puppets rather than like human beings. The outlook upon life which is their background is dull and vulgar. Guy de Maupassant had the soul of a well-fed bagman; his tears and his laughter smack of the commercial room in a provincial hotel. He is the son of Monsieur Homais. But with Chekov you do not seem to be reading stories at all. There is no obvious cleverness in them and you might think that anyone could write them, but for the fact that nobody does. The author has had an emotion and he is able so to put it into words that you receive it in your turn. You become his collaborator. You cannot use of Chekov's stories the hackneyed expression of the slice of life, for a slice is a piece cut off and that is exactly the impression you do not get when you read them; it is a scene seen through the fingers which you know continues this way and that though you only see a part of it.

In the above I was grossly unfair to Maupassant. “La Maison Tellier” is enough to prove it
.

Russian writers have been so much the fashion that sober-minded people have greatly exaggerated the merit of certain writers merely because they write in Russian, so that Kuprin, for instance, Korolenko and Sologub have received an attention which they hardly deserve. Sologub seems worthless to me, but his combination of sensuality and mysticism is evidently one that was bound to attract readers of a certain class. On the other hand I can't look on Artzibachev with the contempt some affect.
Sanine
, to my mind, is a book of some value; it has the merit, rare in Russian fiction, of sunshine. The characters do not pass their lives in the freezing drizzle which we are accustomed to: the sky is blue and the pleasant breezes of summer rustle through the birches.

What must surprise anyone who enters upon the study of Russian literature is its extraordinary poverty. The most enthusiastic critics claim no more than an historical interest for the works written before the nineteenth century, and Russian literature begins with Pushkin; then you have Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky; then Chekov; and that is all. Students mention a number of names, but they do not attach any importance to them, and the stranger has only to read works here and there of other writers to realise that he will lose little by ignoring them. I have tried to imagine what English literature would be if it began with Byron and Shelley (it would scarcely be unfair to put Tom Moore in Shelley's place) and Walter Scott; proceeded with Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot; and finished with George Meredith. The first effect would be to give a far greater importance to these writers.

Because the Russians have so small a literature they know it with great thoroughness. Everyone who reads at all has read everything and read it so often that it is as familiar to him as to us the authorised version of the Bible. And because literature in Russia consists for the most part of novels, fiction has
a much higher place in the opinion of the cultivated man than in other countries.