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Like Dostoïevsky, Moussorgsky is ur-Russian, not a polished production of Western culture, as are Turgenieff, Tschaikovsky, Tolstoy, or Rubinstein. He is not a romantic, this Russian bear; the entire modern school is at one in their rejection of romantic moods and attitudes. Now, music is pre-eminently a romantic art.
And some men there were, Moussorgsky and Borodin, who were quick enough of imagination to become the instruments of their folk and respond to its need. And so, when we would hear Russian speech, we go to them as we go to Dostoievsky and to Tolstoy. It is in "Boris" and "Prince Igor" as richly as it is in any work. But the men of the other school did not hear the appeal.
As she says, even the writers who refused to meddle with politics are marked men; politics in the shape of the secret police comes to them. Madame Hippius makes the assertion that literature in Russian has never existed in the sense of a literary milieu, as an organic art possessing traditions and continuity; for her, Tolstoy, Dostoïevsky, and Turgenieff are but isolated men of genius.
France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia? "We," Tourgenieff once said, "we have given the samovar." But that poet's own works, the symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed all this. Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest efforts of mediaeval Europe.
But the new note is the influence of Max Stirner. Michael Artzibaschev calmly grafts the disparate ideas of Dostoïevsky and Max Stirner in his Sanine, and the result is a hero who is at once a superman and a scoundrel or are the two fairly synonymous? This clear-eyed, broad-shouldered Sanine passes through the little town where he was born, leaving behind him a trail of mishaps and misfortunes.
There are many other contacts with Dostoïevsky intense Slavophilism, adoration of Russia; its very soil is sacred; carelessness as to the externals of their art a Chinese asymmetry is present in their architectonic; they both excel in portraying humour, broad, vulgar, uproarious, outrageous, reckless humour; and also in exposing the profundities of the Russian soul, especially the soul racked by evil and morbid thoughts.
I always think of Dostoïevsky as a man in shabby clothes mounting at twilight an obscure staircase in some St. Petersburg hovel, the moon shining dimly through the dirty window-panes, and cobwebs and gloom abounding.
No writers of fiction, save the very greatest, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoïevsky, or Turgenieff, have so exposed the soul of man under the stress of sorrow, passion, anger, or as swimming, a midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea they are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue.
It is an attitude of mind which a critic or a cynic might be justified in assuming, for it is the attitude of one who desires rather to observe the world than to shoulder any of its burdens; but it is a posture of exceeding danger to anyone who lacks tenderness or sympathy, whatever his purpose or office may be, for it tends to breed the most dangerous of all intellectual vices, that spirit of self-satisfaction which Dostoievsky declares to be the infallible mark of an inferior mind.
Nietzsche finished the ruin that Marx had begun; his art, chiefly derived from Dostoïevsky and Tchekov, succumbed to a sentimental socialism. Andreiev is still strong, though enveloped in "mystic anarchism." He is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His play, Les Ténèbres, reveals the influences of Dostoïevsky and Tolstoy.
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