May 10, 191 7 
LAND & WATER 
17 
Life and Letters 
By J. C. Squire 
MANY English people tlimk of Russian literature 
as something very gloomy. In their minds all 
Russian writers arc telescoped together into a 
mass witli unpronounceable names, and their 
works seem a single vast torturc-chamber-cum-charnel-house 
in which brutal police oflicers called Serge apply the knout 
to the shoulders of fainting, but still indomitable heroines 
called Marya Alexandrovna ; tramps, covered in filthy 
rags, sleep in piles and occasionally rouse themselves to ask 
" What's the use of anything ? " or " If I had three kopecks 
I should get some vodka " ; precocious children commit 
suicide ; and revolutionary students of both sexes writhe in 
love-affairs the agony of which is only interrupted by an 
occasional revolver-shot at a magistrate. There is no cloubt 
whatever that- there is some foundation for the belief that 
Russian literature is largely preoccupied with pain, vice and 
mi.sery. Dostoevsky and Tolstoi are harrowing and many 
of their successors are morbidly horrible. Hut two qualifica- 
tions must be made. One is that literature is bound to re- 
flect not merely the native genius of a people, but also its 
conditions at particular periods. Russia in the nineteenth 
century was a country which had outgrown its institutions 
and in which the war between the new spirit and the old 
forms was waged tenaciously, bitterly, ferociously on both 
sides. The extremes of depression and exaltation were 
the inevitable product of such . an era— pcspecially with a 
people so mercurial and passionate as the Russians. The 
direct effect of political conditions was very strongly attested 
after the failure of the rebellion of 1905 ; all hope seerried to be 
extinguished, and even books which were scarcely concerned 
with politics at all were infested with the prevalent hopeless- 
ness and shot with blood, and impotent violence, and the 
perverse dreams of thwarted desire. But granted a similar 
struggle, a similar clash and transition, and a similar 
physicial background, the jolliest people on earth might 
ha\'e become gloomy. The second point to be noted is 
that Russian products, even as things are, have not been 
so uniformly cheerless as the ordinary English reader seems 
to suppose. 
***** 
Why it is I don't know, but for the ten or fifteen years 
preceeding the war all sorts of depressed and depraved 
modern Russians were translated whilst men of infinitely 
greater reputation and much more sympathetic outlook 
were neglected. Some of the most illustrious of Russian 
classics are still unknown here or only now in process 
of becoming known ; and amongst them are several which are 
scarcely scarred at all by the marks of Russia's sufferings. 
The greatest of them perhaps are the books of Serge Aksakoff 
(died 1859), of which the first translation is now appearing. 
It was before the war that Mr. Maurice Baring wrote of 
Aksakofi's Family History : " There is no book in Russia 
which, for its entrancing interest, as well as for its historical 
value, so richly deserves translation into English ; only such 
a translation should be made by a stylist — that is, by a man 
who knows how to speak and write his mother tongue per- 
spicuously and simply." Yet, for some undiscoverable reason, 
we have had to wait sixty years for a translation of this master- 
piece. It has now been published by Mr. Edward Arnold 
under the title of A Russian Gmtleman (7s. 6d. net.) The 
English version is by Mr. J. D. Duff, who fully satisfies Mr. 
Baring's requirements and gives one the feeling that Aksakoff 
wrote in one's own tongue. 
***** 
The book is a book of memoirs ; and, unlike most books 
of the kind, it ends with the author's birth. Aksakoff, long 
after his grand parents and parents were dead, sat down, 
with family letters and traditions as his materials, to recreate 
the life they had led. The family estates were in>the govern- 
ment of Orenburg, between the Urals and the Volga ; and the 
narrative never goes beyond the district. The first section 
sketches the character of Stephen Mikhailovitch, the 
novehst's patriarchal grandfather ; the next digresses into the 
history of a cousin of the family who married a scoundrel ; 
the next tells how Alexyei Stepanitch, Aksakoff 's father, 
got married ; the next shows the young couple on a visit 
to the old people in the country and paying calls on the 
relations round ; and the last shows them living in the" little 
town of Ufa and ends with the doctor walking out of thbir 
house after the novelist's birth and remarking : " Well 
he's a lucky child! How glad they all are to have him! '' 
It sounds ver\' slight ; and indeed ihere is no more " plot " 
than there usually is in human lives. I'ut these simj'le incidents 
have been quite enough for Aksakoff lo illustrate the 
characters ol a dozen ))eople so completely that we should 
know them if we met thtni. The book is fascinating as a 
description of unfamiliar life in a remote place — the serfs 
were unfreed ; the patriarch lived like Abraham with his 
people, his flocks and his herds about the house, and was 
absolutely a law to himself ; and it is continually interesting 
to .see modernism encroaching, occidental books and furniture 
invading an almost .'\siatic place. But the chief interest is 
always the characters. Aksakolf's parents are drawn with 
a symj)athetic detachment that leaves Father and S(m in the 
shade; it is evident at once that the son loved his father 
and luofher and that he docs not jialliate a single one of their 
faults. But tiiese and the neighbours, jjleasant and un- 
pleasant, the house-servants, the crew of malicious aunts, 
and the fat ancl flat-faced grandmother an^ really only a 
setting for the fine figure of the old grandfather, who dominates 
the whole settlement with his eyes and, when these fail him, 
with his black-thorn stick.. It is not easy to make one re;Uly 
fond of a grim old autocrat who, in his maniac rages, drags 
his wife and daughter round the house by the hair ; one has 
always been biassed against this kind of remonstrance. 
But Aksakotf does it ; he is always just to his subject ; and in 
the end half persuades one that that is the sort (jf grandfather 
to have. 
***** 
And throughout the book we feel tlie author's profound 
love for the fife and'the country he is writing about. Here 
and there he speaks of the landscape in his own person and 
with marked emotion. There is a passage in \Vhich he laments 
the invasion of the wilderness by human swarms who fell 
the forests and pollute the rivers so that the fish die ; a strange 
thing — an l'2nglishman must feel — to come from a Russian 
of sixty years ago writing of the desolate steppes of south- 
eastern Russia. We still think of that countr}', and 
with some reason, as one of nature's most inviolate 
retreats ; but all change is in the direction of " development " 
and to a Russian of tliis age Aksakoff's owti days must seem 
good old days when forests still stood and streams still ran 
clear and the Tartar tribes were still untamed. On another 
page all the author's affection for the land pours quietly but 
strongly out at the mere memory of its mosciuitoes : 
The winged mosquitoes swarmed round the bed, drove their 
long probosces into the fine fabric which protected him, 
and kept up their monotonous serenade all through the night. 
It sounds absurd, but I cannot conceal the fact that I like the 
shrill high note and even the bite of the mosquito ; for it 
reminds me of sleeple.ss nights in high summer on the banks 
of the Boogoorooslan, where the bushes grew thick and 
green and all round the nightingales called ; and I remember 
the beating heart ol youth, and that vague feeling, half- 
pleasure and half pairi, for which I would now give up all 
that remains of the sinking fire of life. 
But usually he is. superficially, more impersonal. He 
does not sentimentali.se over the landscape ; he does not abuse 
it as a picturesque background. He merely "states" it; 
its details, briefly named, come in when they are relevant to 
the narrative ; the little towns with their gossipings and 
festivals, the seemingly endless prairies clothed with long 
grass, the rye-fields over which blue and purple waves were 
driven by the breeze ; the streams flowing slowly between 
rparshy banks ; the deep quiet pools full of leaping fish ; 
the grinding water mills, the scattered manors, the new white 
Churches, tiie golden sunsets, the wide sky full f)f larks. The 
effect of it all is to leave one aching for aluit in the province 
of Ufa, Government of Orenburg, with a fishing-rod, a samovar, 
9^4 a few devoted servants. There are weaklings who are 
always stumped by Russian books because the characters in 
tllem have so many alternative names. They can never ' 
remember whether Tasha, Sasha, Parasha, etc., are really 
one person or not ; which of them, if any, is elsewhere called 
Ajma and which Sofya ; so they lose heart. To the.se 
A Russian Gentleman will present all the familiar problems : 
except for these, no person interested in good literature can 
afford to ' neglect this book, which is a consunmiate picture 
of life, exquisitely- written and finely translalcd. 
