by Riazanovsky
Science and Scholarship
The Academy of Sciences, the universities, and other institutions of higher learning developed, or rather continued to develop, science and scholarship in Russia. In fact, in the period from the emancipation of the serfs until the revolutions of 1917, Russians made significant contributions in almost every area of knowledge. In mathematics, while no one quite rivaled Lobachevsky, a considerable number of outstanding Russian mathematicians made their appearance, including Pafnutii Chebyshev in St.
Petersburg and a remarkable woman, Sophia Kovalevskaia, who taught at the University of Stockholm. Chemistry in Russia achieved new heights in the works of many talented scholars, the most celebrated of them being the great Dmitrii Mendeleev, who lived from 1834 to 1907 and whose periodic table of elements, formulated in 1869, both organized the known elements into a system and made an accurate forecast of later discoveries. Leading Russian physicists included the specialist in magnetism and electricity, Alexander Stoletov, and the brilliant student of the properties of light, Peter Lebedev, as well as such notable pioneer inventors as Paul Iablochkov, who worked before Edison in developing electric light, and Alexander Popov, who invented the radio around 1895, shortly before Marconi. Russian inventors, even more than Russian scholars in general, frequently received less than their due recognition in the world both because of the prevalent ignorance abroad of the Russian language and Russia and because of the backwardness of Russian technology, which usually failed to utilize their inventions.
Advances in the biological sciences rivaled those in the physical. Alexander Kovalevsky produced classic works in zoology and embryology, while his younger brother, Vladimir, the husband of the mathematician, made important contributions to paleontology - and, incidentally, was much appreciated by Darwin. The famous embryologist and bacteriologist Elijah Mechnikov, who did most of his work in the Pasteur Institute in Paris, concentrated on such problems as the function of the white corpuscles, immunity, and the process of aging. Medicine developed well in Russia during the last decades of the empire, both in terms of quality and, after the zemstvo reform, in terms of accessibility to the masses. Following the lead of an outstanding anatomist, surgeon, teacher, and public figure, Nicholas Pirogov, who died in 1881, and others, Russian doctors exhibited a remarkable civic spirit and devotion to their work and their patients.
Russian contributions to physiology were especially striking and important, and they overlapped into psychology. Ivan Sechenov, who taught in several universities for about half a century and died in 1905, did remarkable research on gases in blood, nerve centers, and reflexes and on other related matters. Ivan Pavlov, who lived from 1849 to 1936 and whose epoch-making experiments began in the 1880's, established through his studies of dogs' reactions to food the existence and nature of conditioned reflexes, and, further developing his approach, contributed enormously to both theory and experimental work in physiology and to behavioral psychology.
The social sciences and the humanities also prospered. Russian scholars engaged fruitfully in everything from law to oriental studies and from economics to folklore. In particular, Russian historiography flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century.
Building on the work of Serge Soloviev and other pioneers, Basil Kliuchevsky, Serge Platonov, Matthew Liubavsky, Paul Miliukov, and their colleagues in effect established Russian history as a rich and many-sided field of learning. Their works have not been surpassed. Other Russians made notable contributions to the histories of other countries and ages, as did the medievalist Paul Vinogradov and the specialist in classical antiquity Michael Rostovtzeff. While Russian historiography profited greatly from the sociological emphasis characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century, the "silver age" stimulated the history of art, which could claim in Russia such magnificent specialists as Nikodim Kondakov, Alexander Benois, and Igor Grabar, and it led to a revival of philosophy, esthetics, and literary criticism.
Literature
After the "great reforms" as before them, literature continued to be the chief glory of Russian culture, and it also became a major source of Russian influence on the West, and indeed on the world. That happened in spite of the fact that the intellectual climate in Russia changed and became unpropitious for creative expression. Instead of admiring art, poetry, and genius, as had been common in the first half of the nineteenth century, the influential critics of the generation of the sixties and of the following decades emphasized utility and demanded from the authors a clear and simple social message. Logically developed, civic literature led to Chemyshevsky's novel, What Is To Be Done?, a worthless literary effort, whatever its intellectual and social significance. With better luck, it produced Nicholas Ne-krasov's civic poetry, which showed inspiration and an effective use of language, for Nekrasov was a real poet, although he wrote unevenly and too much. Fortunately for Russian literature, the greatest writers rejected critical advice and proceeded to write in their own manner. That was especially true of the three giants of the age, Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy.
Ivan Turgenev lived from 1818 to 1883 and became famous around 1850 with the gradual appearance of his Sportsman's Sketches. He responded to the trends of the time and depicted with remarkable sensitivity the intellectual life of Russia, but he failed eventually to satisfy the Left. Six novels, the first of which appeared in 1855 and the last in 1877, described the evolution of Russian educated society and Russia itself as Turgenev, a gentleman of culture, had witnessed it. These novels are, in order of publication, Rudin, A Gentry Nest, On the Eve, the celebrated Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Virgin Soil. Turgenev depicted Russia from the time of the iron regime of Nicholas I, through the "great reforms," to the return of reaction in the late '60's and the '70's. He concerned himself especially with
the idealists of the '40's and the later liberals, nihilists, and populists. Indeed, it was Turgenev's hero, Bazarov, who gave currency to the concept nihilist and to the term itself. Although he was a consistent Westernizer and liberal, who was appreciative of the efforts of young radicals to change Russia, Turgenev advocated gradualism, not revolution; in particular he recommended patient work to develop the Russian economy and education. And he refused to be one-sided or dogmatic. In fact, critics debate to this day whether Rudin and Bazarov are essentially sympathetic or unsympathetic characters. Besides, Turgenev's novels were by no means simply romans a these. The reader remembers not only the author's ideological protagonists, but also his remarkable, strong heroines, the background, the dialogue, and, perhaps above all, the consummate artistry. As writer, Turgenev resembled closely his friend Flaubert, not at all Chernyshevsky. In addition to the famous sequence of novels, Turgenev wrote some plays and a considerable number of stories - he has been described as a better story writer than novelist.
Fedor - that is, Theodore - Dostoevsky, who lived from 1821 to 1881, also became well known before the "great reforms." He was already the author of a novel, Poor Folk, which was acclaimed by Belinsky when it was published in 1845, and of other writings, when he became involved, as already mentioned, with the Petrashevtsy and was sentenced to death, the sentence being commuted to Siberian exile only at the place of execution. Next the writer spent four years at hard labor and two more as a soldier in Siberia before returning to European Russia in 1856, following a general amnesty proclaimed by the new emperor. Dostoevsky recorded his Siberian experience in a remarkable book, Notes from the House of the Dead, which came out in 1861. Upon his return to literary life, the onetime member of the Petrashevtsy became an aggressive and prolific Right-wing journalist, contributing to a certain Slavophile revival, Pan-Slavism, and even outright chauvinism. His targets included the Jews, the Poles, the Germans, Catholicism, socialism, and the entire West. While Dostoevsky's journalism added to the sound and fury of the period, his immortal fame rests on his late novels, four of which belong among the greatest ever written. These were Crime and Punishment, Th
e Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1866, 1868, 1870-72, and 1879-80 respectively. In fact, Dostoevsky seemed to go from strength to strength and was apparently at the height of his creative powers in working on a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov when he died.
Dostoevsky has often been represented as the most Russian of writers and evaluated in terms of Russian messiahship and the mysteries of the Russian soul - an approach to which he himself richly contributed. Yet, a closer study of the great novelist's so-called special Russian traits demonstrates that they are either of secondary importance at best or even entirely
imaginary. To the contrary, Dostoevsky could be called the most international or, better, the most human of writers because of his enormous concern with and penetration into the nature of man. The strange Russian author was a master of depth psychology before depth psychology became known. Moreover, he viewed human nature in the dynamic terms of explosive conflict between freedom and necessity, urge and limitations, faith and despair, good and evil. Of Dostoevsky's several priceless gifts the greatest was to fuse into one his protagonists and the ideas - or rather states of man's soul and entire being - that they expressed, as no other writer has ever done. Therefore, where others are prolix, tedious, didactic, or confusing in mixing different levels of discourse, Dostoevsky is gripping, in places almost unbearably so. As another Russian author, Gleb Uspensky, reportedly once remarked, into a small hole in the wall, where the generality of human beings could put perhaps a pair of shoes, Dostoevsky could put the entire world. One of the greatest anti-rationalists of the second half of the nineteenth century, together with Nietzsche and Kirkegaard, Dostoevsky became with them an acknowledged prophet for the twentieth, inspiring existential philosophy, theological revivals, and scholarly attempts to understand the catastrophes of our time - as well as, of course, modern psychological fiction.
It has been said that, if Dostoevsky was not the world's greatest novelist, then Tolstoy certainly was, and that the choice between the two depends on whether the reader prefers depth or breadth. These are quite defensible views, provided one remembers the range of Dostoevsky, and especially his very numerous secondary and tertiary characters who speak their own language and add their own comment to the tragedy of man, and provided one realizes that Tolstoy too cuts very deep.
Count Leo Tolstoy lived a long, full, and famous life. Bora in 1828 and brought up in a manner characteristic of his aristocratic milieu - magnificently described in Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth - he received a cosmopolitan, if dilettante, education; engaged in gay social life; served in the army, first in the Caucasus and later in the siege of Sevastopol; and became a happy husband, the father of a large family, and a progressive landowner much concerned with the welfare of his peasants. In addition to these ordinary activities, however, Tolstoy also developed into one of the greatest writers in world literature and later into an angry teacher of mankind, who condemned civilization, including his own part in it, and called for the abandonment of violence and for a simple, moral life. In fact, he died in 1910 at the age of eighty-two as he fled from his family and estate in yet another attempt to sever his ties with all evil and falsehood and to find truth. It is indeed difficult to determine whether Tolstoy acquired more fame and influence in his own country and all over the world as a writer or as a teacher of nonresistance and unmasker of modern civilization, and
whether Anna Karenina or A Confession - an account of the crisis that split his life in two - carries the greater impact. In Russia at least, Tolstoy's position as the voice of criticism that the government dared not silence, as moral conscience, appeared at times even more extraordinary and precious than his literary creations.
But, whatever can be said against Tolstoy as thinker - and much has been justly said about his extraordinary naivete, his stubborn and at the same time poorly thought-out rationalism, and his absolute insistence on such items as vegetarianism and painless death as parts of his program of salvation - Tolstoy as writer needs no apologies. While a prolific author, the creator of many superb stories and some powerful plays, Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, is remembered best for his novels, especially War and Peace, published in 1869, and Anna Karenina, published in 1876. In these novels, as in much else written by Tolstoy, there exists a boundless vitality, a driving, overpowering sense of life and people. And life finds expression on a sweeping scale. War and Peace contains sixty heroes and some two hundred distinct characters, not to mention the unforgettable battle and mob scenes and the general background. The war of 1812 is depicted at almost every level: from Alexander I and Napoleon, through commanders and officers, to simple soldiers, and among civilians from court circles to the common people. Anna Karenina, while more restricted in scope, has been praised no less for its construction and its supreme art.
The Russian novel, which in the second half of the nineteenth century won a worldwide reputation because of the writings of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, had other outstanding practitioners as well. Ivan Gon-charov, who lived from 1812 to 1891, produced at least one great novel, Oblomov, published two years before the emancipation of the serfs and representing in a sense a farewell, spoken with mixed feelings, to the departing patriarchal Russia, and a welcome, again with mixed feelings, to the painfully evolving new order. Oblomov himself snored his way to fame as one of the most unforgettable as well as most "superfluous" heroes of Russian literature. Other noteworthy novelists of the period included Nicholas Leskov who developed a highly individual language and style and wrote about the provincial clergy and similar topics associated with the Church and the people, and Gleb Uspensky, a populist and a pessimist, deeply concerned with peasant life as well as with the intelligentsia. An able satirist, Michael Saltykov, who wrote under the pseudonym of N. Shchedrin, fitted well into that critical and realistic age and acquired great popularity. A highly talented dramatist, Alexander Ostrovsky, wrote indefatigably from about 1850 until his death in 1886, creating much of the basic repertoire of the Russian theater and contributing especially to the depiction of merchants, minor officials, and the lower middle class in general.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth new
writers came to the fore to continue the great tradition of Russian prose. One was Vladimir Korolenko, a populist, optimist, and author of charming stories; another was Anton Chekhov; and a third was the restless Alexis Peshkov, better known as Maxim Gorky, who created his own world of tramps and outcasts and went on to become the dean of Soviet writers. Chekhov, who lived from 1860 until 1904, left a lasting imprint on Russian and world literature. A brilliant playwright, he had the good fortune to be writing just as the Moscow Art Theater was rising to its heights. He is even more important as one of the founders and a master craftsman of the modem short story, the literary genre that he usually chose to make his simple, gentle, restrained, and yet wonderfully effective comments on the world.
Poetry fared less well than prose between the "great reforms" and the turn of the century. The very great lyricist Fedor Tiutchev, perhaps the world's outstanding poet of late love and of nature in its romantic, pantheistic, and chaotic aspects, died in 1873, an isolated figure. In the decades following the emancipation neither the small group of poets who championed "art for art's sake," such as the gifted Athanasius Fet-Shenshin, nor the dominant practitioners of "civic poetry," led by Nekrasov, left much of lasting value. The poetic muse had to wait for more propitious circumstances.
These circumstances emerged around 1900 with the dawning of the "silver age." Foreshadowed by certain literary critics and poets in the 1890's, the new period has often been dated from the appearance in 1898 of a seminal periodical, The World of Art, put out by Serge Diaghilev and Alexander Benois. What followed was a cultural explosion. Almost overnight there sprung up in Russia a rich variety of literary and artistic creeds, circles, and movements. As Mirsky and other specialists have noted, these different and sometimes hostile groups had little or nothing in com
mon, except their denial of "civic art" and their high standards of culture and craftsmanship. While much of the creative work of the "silver age" tended toward pretentiousness, obscurity, or artificiality, its best products were very good indeed. And even when short of the best, the works of the "silver age" indicated a new refinement, richness, and maturity in Russian culture.
In literature, the new trends resulted in a great revival of poetry and literary criticism, although some remarkable prose was also produced, for example, by Boris Bugaev, known as Andrei Bely. Among the poets, the symbolist Alexander Blok, who lived from 1880 to 1921 and wrote verses of stunning magic and melody to the mysterious Unknown Lady and on other topics, has been justly considered the greatest of the age and one of the greatest in all Russian literature. But Russia suddenly acquired many brilliant poets; other symbolists, for example, Innokentii Annensky, Bely, Valery Briusov, and Constantine Balmont; "acmeists," such as Nicholas