No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Saltykov and the Russian Squire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2017
Extract
Just as the allied fleets of England and France were bombing the façade of the empire of Nicholas I at Sebastopol and smashing the military power of the “gendarme de l'Europe” so that the weakness of Nicholas's Russia appeared to European eyes, the great Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin opened his literary career on a large scale. In 1856, he began to publish his Provincial Sketches.
At that critical moment the whole of Russia had been awakened and was rising to a new life. The bankruptcy of the regime of Nicholas I was universally apparent, and the necessity of broad, deep, consistent, and systematic reforms was accepted even by bureaucrats and conservative officials. The despair provoked by the ineptitude and the corruption of Russian civilian and military authority which had led Russia to the Crimean catastrophe gave place to an enthusiastic wish and will to liquidate the evil past and to create, as quickly as possible, a new future, a “new order” based on wisdom and justice. Never perhaps had Bakunin's aphorism, “Die Lust amzerstören ist auch eine schaffendeLust,” a better application than at that moment.
- Type
- Review Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1941
References
1 Saltykov and the Russian Squire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940). Pp. XII+176.
2 Op. cit., p. 92.
3 Particularly his novel Difficult Time (Trudnoe Vremya) where he attacks the liberal nobles. Comp. a very interesting book of K. Chukovski, Ljudi i knigi šestidesjatych godov (Leningrad, 1934).
4 Dr. Strelsky supposes that it was “a distant relationship which obtained for him a place in the memoir of Aksakov” (p. 140). But this is not an argument for the thesis of “idealization.” On the contrary, it is proof of the sincerity and truthfulness of Aksakov's picture. He very easily could have eliminated Kurolesov.
5 Dr. Strelsky mentions Bunin in a quotation from Elsberg. I do not agree with the opinion of Dr. Strelsky on Gogol: “once having read Dead Souls, one never forgets the lineaments, the gestures, of a Plyushkin, a Korobochka, a Chichikov. They remain forever in our memories, alive and colorful, grotesque, yet warmly humanized,” pp. 138–139. There is in my opinion, no “warm humanity” in Dead Souls. The souls of Gogol's living heroes are more dead than his “dead souls.” After the works of Vengerov, Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, Bryusov, Eichenbaum, and even Gippius, it is rather difficult to agree with the thesis of Gogol's “realistic humanitarianism.”
6 Even Elsberg says that Saltykov's “expression is abstract, as it is impossible to identify it with a unique, sensual fact.” Comp. Ya. E. Elsberg, Mirovozzrenie i tvorčestvo Ščedrina (Moscow-Leningrad: Mead. Nauk S.S.S.R., 1936), p. 190. His “expression” is abstract, because it is essentially general and at the same time hyperbolical.
7 Madaule, Jacques, Le christianisme de Dostoievsky (Paris, Blond et Gay, 1939), pp. 24–25 Google Scholar. This very interesting book failed to receive general attention because of the war.
8 Cf. the three immense volumes of Literaturnoe Nasledstvo (11–14), where there are even studies on the Bolsheviks and Saltykov. See also a useful small publication, M. E. Saltykov-Sledrin—k pjatidesjatilelju so dnja smerti. (Leningrad: Sovetski Pisatel, 1939), with a good chronological canvas established by V. Evgenyev-Maksimov and a serious study, “Tvorčeski put Saltykova-Ščedrina,” by V. V. Gippius.
8 Comp. Eichenwald, Y., “Silucty Russkich Pisatelei,” Kniga i Slovo, VII (Berlin, 1923), pp. 224–225 Google Scholar.
10 Ya. E. Elsberg, op. cit.