Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/341

Rh of material beauty is childishness, the infantile age of Art"; "Art is a medium of communion with mankind, not its aim."

Thus whether in the jeremiads of Radishcheff against serfdom or in Fonvizin's and Griboyedoff's satires on the stupid mania for imitating foreign manners, or Gogol's scourging of official corruption from lowest to highest, or Turgenieff's pleading for the serfs, or the whole folk-novel movement in behalf of the starving emancipated peasants, or Tolstoy's glorification of the common people (and in his actual teachings), or Dostoyefski's plea for the humble, the downtrodden, and the criminals, or Gorki's appeals for the outcast and the tramp, Russian Literature has been faithful to its mission: to direct the minds of its readers for the betterment of Russian society as a whole by bettering the lot of those who most urgently need it, to tell the unvarnished truth in describing Russian life.

Owing to the extraordinary conditions of Russian political and social life, with its argus-eyed censors and dreadful system of espionage, Literature has by force of circumstances become the only means, the exclusive arena for struggle against the evils of Russian political, economic, and social life. Even the establishment of a free school is strongly objected to by the government and imphes untold difficulties. Tolstoy's pedagogic labors in Yasnaya Polyana had been made the subject of an especial investigation with a view to finding traces of revolutionary activity. Through certain circumstances, however, Tolstoy went unmolested and was even commended where thousands of others were visited with exile or imprisonment.

In this its special mission. Literature in the narrower sense of belles-lettres was powerfully supported by all the advanced Russian literary critics who took their cue from the great authors of Russia. Thus the interdependence between Literature and life, and the function of Literature as a disseminator of