Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/241

Rh words will have to suffice here. The great problems that undelieunderlie [sic] the literature of present-day Russia are those of Freedom and Necessity. Man strives for liberty, for the liberation of all his individual powers. He feels in himself an upward striving that may yet lead him to higher things and a greater perfection. Many of the thinkers and writers of the time swear allegiance to the doctrine of economic determinism, and are visibly influenced by Marxian socialism, on the one hand, and by Nietzschean individualism on the other. It is perhaps the last of these views that the "moderns" accentuate, in the spirit that is so well expressed in the words of Gorky: "The life of man may be consumed in one deed, but that deed must be beautiful, splendid, free!"

Of course, all the modern literary currents are found in the stream of present-day Russian literature: futurism, and symbolism, and acmeism. The writers who express these influences have no fixed body of doctrine, but their viewpoint is the reverse of the one so long accepted without question in Russia. They insist that art is concerned first and foremost with beauty, not with morality; they claim that its true function is its appeal to the imagination. It is no longer to be, say the modernists, a conveyor of moral ideas.

In these articles our purpose has not been an appreciation of Russian literature, or a discussion of its aesthetic merits. We have attempted a brief survey of the underlying and subtly moulding ideas of the literature. Its spirit would have to be expressed in another way. Perhaps Dostoyevsky did this for us when he used as the motto of his Brothers Karamazov, the words: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."