A CONTINENTAL VIEW OF RUSSIA.* IN this unpretending volume of
some four hundred pages, written with an intensity and a concentration that have kept it wholly free from the superfluous matter and trivial personal -details that load most books of the kind, Dr. Brandes, well known in German and Scandinavian countries as one of the ablest critics and publicists of the day, has drawn a portrait of the Russian State that in depth of insight, range of know- ledge, and vividness of presentation, surpasses every contribu- tion we are acquainted with to our knowledge of the vast
• Impressions of Husain. By Dr. Georg Brandes. Translated from the Danish by S. C Eastman. London: Walter Scott.
Empire which in England is still so little known, and, with insular heedlessness, too often slighted or neglected.
A vast Empire, in truth, Russia is, to lie under the unlegalised sway of a single man. Dr. Brandes quotes Humboldt's com- parison as an impressive illustration of its immensity. The great German said that the surface of the full moon turned towards us was fifty thousand square miles leas in extent than the Empire which occupies a sixth of the earth's surface. The dominions of the Czar stretch from Germany to Japan, from the Arctic Ocean to the frontiers of Persia, Afghanistan, and China. Dr. Brandes estimates the population of both Russias at ninety-seven millions of souls, but in 1888 over one hundred and ten millions of "souls "—the proper Russian expression (dushi)—acknowledged the Czar's rule ; and the vast total in- creases yearly at a prodigious and ever-increasing rate. Never- theless, in most of its natural accidents Russia is big but not imposing. Russia Proper has no mountains, scarcely even hills ; its rivers are long, bat shallow and slow ; the extensive forests consist of small trees ; and, excepting a few bears, wolves—of which 175,000 are said to roam over the steppes of European Russia—are the largest quadrupeds it produces. The climate alone presents striking phenomena. There is hardly any spring or autumn, the summer is intolerably hot, and the winter—which lasts into May, even in Moscow—is insufferably cold. The Russian people resemble their land and climate., They are monotonously alike, from one end of the Empire to the other ; their very speech has but a single dialect, and that by no means a marked one. But their temperament is such that they are always either at one extreme or the other of the gamut of passion ; or they are, in a true and not metaphorical sense, mirtvy dushi, dead souls,—alive, but sunk in immobility and indifference. The latter is their normal condition—witness Goncha,r6f's celebrated novel, Obl6ozoff—but a slight event will throw them into a frenzy of love or hate. Hence they have little originality, and are fit subjects for the despotisms they endure in turn, though occasionally dangerous under some particular form of tyranny. The assassins of Paul crouched like hounds under Nicholas.
Nevertheless, the Russians have many of the intrinsic qualities of a great people. Their language, with its exquisite mechanism, and delicacy and felicity of expression, could only have been evolved by a highly endowed race. Some centuries ago, they enjoyed a freedom which they were not then in a condition to profit by ; but since the days of Peter the Great, they have been subjected to a cold and rigid despotism, as cruel morally at the present day as it was physically and morally during the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries. They possess, and have too often had to show, the kind of dogged courage upon which we pride ourselves ; their morality is careless, rather than perverted in the sense of the Latin races ; they are modern, practical, and realistic ; and the better-educated classes are specially distinguished, to use Dr. Brandes's language, by a "broad and proud frankness" that has about it a singular charm. Thus they are admirable hosts and most agreeable acquaintances. There are, in addition, scores of able men of science and fertile writers in Russia. But, as a rule, they lack both invention and imagination, or at least the higher forms of the latter supreme quality, and have produced but few men of genius, though talent, often of a very high order, is common enough in the dominions of the Czar. It is, indeed, this abundance of talent which maintains the absurdly anachronous system of govern- ment, which never lacks able administrators in any branch of the public service.
The essential trait of contemporary Russia is its modernness of feeling. The old clothes of the Greek religion and Peterine Government are worn, and under the Pan-Slavic enthusiasm of the day, or rather yesterday, even affected ; but at heart the Russian of any culture despises the whole business, and equally despises most of the conventionalities which Western Europe has inherited from the past. He would like, so far as he has any active feeling about the matter, to start afresh, making a tabula rasa of existing conditions, on which to draw a new scheme of life, based usually upon some German model. Repre- sentative institutions he seldom admires : his ideal is an honest administration of some philosophical system, which would look extremely pretty upon paper, and might last a week. At this point, a word may be said upon the non-official Russian Press, to the consideration of which Dr. Brandes devotes a most instructive chapter. The best of the St. Petersburg papers is the Novosti, "sober, serious, earnest patriotic," pub-
lished by a Jew, with which the often-quoted Nome Vronya (" New Time") is constantly at war. The latter, says Dr. Brandes, is known to be "without faith or law." Of the Moscow journals, the Russkaya Vyedonwsei (" Russian Gazette") has the highest reputation, and thirty thousand subscribers. A more celebrated one was the Moskovskaya Vyedomosti while under Katkof's editorship. Katkof was an unscrupulous politician, but a clever writer. He started as an advanced Liberal, but became an uncompromising supporter of the most thorough despotism, a system which he recom- mended as a necessary means to Pan-Slavism. The Grazhdanin (" Citizen ") is a badly written Moscow Gazette, but is never- theless often quoted by English correspondents in Russia. Of the several monthly periodicals, the best are the Vyestnik Evropi (" Messenger of Europe "), and Goltzef's review, Russkaya lily el (" Russian Thought "). Both are conducted on the plan of the Revue de Deux Mondes, and are extremely well written. The Myst is decidedly the abler and more liberal of the two. There is also a Jewish organ, Vascha- which might be translated "Excelsior "—which is well edited. On all Russian literature, periodical or other, the hand of the Censor lies heavy. Even in such a book as Gonchard's History of Slavic Literature, it is felt throughout ; and in passing judgment upon the works of Russian authors, it must be remembered that we have before us only what the censorate passes, and that the dread of the Censor clogs and embarrasses the pen of every Russian writer.
In the profoundly interesting study of Russian literature which forms the latter half of the present volume, the miserable results of the Russian autocrato-bureaucratic system are vividly set forth. The earliest of modern Russian writers— those most unhappy of the many victims of Russian tyranny —was perhaps also the greatest, Lomonosof, son of an Archangel fisherman, born in 1711. In the catholicity of his powers, he was a sort of Lionardo da Vinci. He was a his- torian and philologist, writing the first Russian Grammar; a mathematician, chemist, and physicist, explaining electricity before Franklin ; an astronomer, discovering the atmosphere of Venus ; and a poet. His immediate successors were Derz- havin, a lyric poet, one of whose effusions is said by Dr. Brandes to have been translated into Japanese ; and Von Wizin, the Russian Moliere. Then came Zhukofski (1783- 1852), a greater man than either of the last-named writers, but whose fame was eclipsed by that of Pushkin, whose virile but graceful poetry is still the delight of well-educated Russians. Lermontof (of the Scotch family of Learmont), born in 1814, was a military officer, whose odes Dr. Brandes prefers to those of Pushkin, but to our mind they lack the force and fire of the latter poet. Like Pushkin, Lermontof lost his life miserably in a stupid duel. Gogol (1809-1852) was and is the first of Russian humorists. His play Revisor (" The Inspector ") is unsurpassed in modern dramatic literature for the amusing humour and brilliant wit which relieve its keen satire. In some respects, his extraordinary story Myerivy Dushi, or Dead Souls, is a more powerful production even than the play; but one must be thoroughly acquainted with Russian life to appreciate the central point of the tale,—" the idea," as Dr. Brandes briefly puts it, "of the audacious speculator, of buying up dead serfs, who were still nominally counted as living, carrying them to a worthless tract of land, and then mortgaging them to a bank." Of the great-souled Herzen, whose Memoirs give a more lifelike picture of the Russian people than any book we are acquainted with ; of the Tartar Turgenief, the most charming of melancholy novelists ; of Dostoyevski and Tolstoi,—the brief but sufficient and most admirable studies will well repay perusal. We could do no justice to these fine portraitures within the limits of a review.
Now, under, and as a direct consequence of, the political system, which is still in as full vigour as it was a hundred years ago in Russia, of all these men, and of hundreds of others, indeed of all or nearly all the finest intellects that Russia has pro- duced since the days of Peter, the spirit has been crushed, the life made wretched, the faith in humanity not seldom extin- guished. Lomonosof, the pioneer of the higher Western civilisa- tion in his country, died its bitterest enemy ; Derzhavin became an ultra-reactionary ; Zhukofski and Gogol ended as insane mystics, hating the freedom they had once loved so well ; Pushkin and Lermontof were both exiled ; Herzen was sent to the Siberian frontier, and was obliged to live all the latter years of his life in exile ; Dostoyevski, on his return frcfm years of banishment in Siberia, was almost a madman; and Turgenief found his own country too uncomfortable to reside in it. It is true that if you have no aspirations, and are content to be a man of science only, or a dilettante in art, literature, or philosophy, or satisfied with the mere sensuous delights of the world, or with the charms of society, you may live as little disturbed in Russia as elsewhere. Nay, you may enjoy an even freer life there, for Russians care little for conven- tionalities, are troubled by no Puritanic restraints, and indulge in a license of manners only in part redeemed by comparative freedom from physical excesses. But not thus can a nation attain to a high manhood : the luxury, mental or other, and social freedom of the few form no compensation for the misery and ignorance of the many ; still less, perhaps, for the abasement and destruction of the finest intellects of the race.
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