Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/102

84 that of an agricultural communism. For the first time voices arise from the city. In his stories, Nevsky Prospect, and The Portrait, Gogol writes about the poverty-stricken chinovniks (petty officials) in the town. Nekrasov, the poet, sings the woes of the city proletarian, and his songs are a bitter protest against misfortunes, and evils without end. Dostoyevsky depicts the poor in the city; his grief is the knowledge of what man has made of man, and, with the wonderful detachment of an alienist, he seeks to know how men are able to bear it all, what it is that consoles them. And thus it was that suffering and misery entered into artistic consciousness.

The thinking men of the "fifties" felt that it was possible to find a release for man from all the sorrow that they saw everywhere about them. They dreamt of Utopian Socialism. They read with a great eagerness the works of Fourier, and Robert Owen, and Saint-Simon. Man, they felt, must find his own way to freedom from the nightmare of a horrible actuality. But it was not until the next decade that a complete philosophy of freedom was developed. This was the work of the Nihilists of the "sixties."

  Not for every plashing wavelet Watches keen the helmsman's eye; He awaits the last huge roller, When the ninth wave surges high.

But until that last strong roller Swells with deep, decisive roar, We must meet the strife and effort Of the waves that go before.

Even though we scarce perceive them, Sinking vanquished to their grave, Wait, O brethren, wait with courage For the ninth, the conqu'ring wave!