Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/240

 the thought of death as a release, comes to him. But later, the road to salvation offers itself: "Back to the People," and the great Moralist calls upon us to abandon culture, which is a lie and a deception, and to renounce violence, and all other things that breed corruption. But his greatest renunciation came when he abandoned art, or wished to reduce it to the position of handmaid to ethics and morality, and place it at the service of the masses. Here was a social conscience that bade fair to slay in its youth the growing consciousness of individuality.

The last of the "seventies" saw the end of the golden age of Russian literature. The decline, if such it may be called, came with the political reaction that followed the assassination of Alexander II., a little more than a month after the death of Dostoyevsky. Many an intellectual of the time saw the significance for literature of this event, and one of them, Katkov, a noted publicist, expressed the situation allegorically when he said: "Gentlemen, rise, the government is coming back." And indeed, in the years immediately following, such was the severity of the government, that attention was turned from literature to purely political and social questions. Of course, the new teaching and example of Tolstoy may have helped to bring on the decline. "Anna Karenina," issued in 1876-77, was the last for many years, of his artistic works. His new views on art, which were practically tantamount to a negation of the artistic consciousness, helped to discourage the renewal of literary labors. And so, what with the exhaustion that comes after several decades of intense literary effort, and the increasing absorption of the nation's energies in the political struggle, the outlook for literature at the beginning of the "eighties" seemed bleak indeed. The period of the "eighties" is one of gray, unrelieved hopelessness. The time seemed like a great fallow field, strewn with dead hopes. The trust in the people had proved a dream and a failure, and the intellectuals took refuge in empty speculating on Buddhism and its Nirvana-ideas. The great writer of this age, and the one who best reflects the somber mood of the time, is Chekhov. His works form, as a Russian critic puts it, "one big poem,—the poem of rainy weather." To Chekhov it seemed vain to try to solve the riddle of life. He is an "inconclusive," who presents with wondrous artistic reverence and finesse, the bare facts of life. And if you wish to draw conclusions, you must do so for yourself.

On the more recent phases of Russian literature, a few