Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/342

328 the tenets of the advanced minds in Russia, soon became the Russian literary critics' profession of faith. A literary production was judged not from a purely literary point of view, but according as it furthered or retarded social progress, as it served to help the attainment of the social and ethical ideals of society. A work would be condemned unhesitatingly if it lost connection with life by tearing itself away into the regions of Art for Art's sake.

Here one might say that the Russian's well-known idealism apparently runs counter to his uncompromising realism in Literature. But this contradiction is only surface deep; the Russian sees everything with the eyes of a thoroughgoing realist, but back of it all is a higher purpose, the realism becomes handmaid of a high ideal: to advance social progress, to better the lot of the unfortunate.

Naturally, in the clash and turmoil of several generations of opposing views, many a writer or critic has gone to the absurd limits of his pet theories, the more so when we bear in mind that the Russian nature tends to run to extremes.

Thus, on the one hand, Pisareff (1840-1868), a critic who swayed the minds of Russian youth during the Sixties, proclaimed the ancillary office of Literature by pushing his utilitarian theories to the point of declaring that all the works of a second-rate poet are not worth a pair of boots, the labor of a plodding cobbler. And years before Ibsen had disowned verse for the purposes of drama, the great satirist Shchedrin, himself guilty of riding Pegasus in his younger days, declared, in a moment of exasperation, that those who wrote verse seemed to him lunatics trying to walk along a string stretched on the floor, and half sitting down at each step.

On the other hand, a whole group of poets, under the reactionary pressure of Nicholas I's reign preached "Art for Art's sake," and their most characteristic representative, Fet, who hymned abstract beauty untiringly for over half a century, was the most hard-handed among the many Russian