Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/29

Rh thee." Even the supreme artist among them, Turgeniev, knew of a condition, a foe to his people's happiness, that he had to fight. "In my thoughts this enemy had a definite shape and bore a definite name: the enemy was serfdom."

This abolitionist idea was like a ferment that worked through the length and breadth of the literature. The antagonism to serfdom was only an expression of the all-embracing idea of struggling for the liberation of the individual. It must be noted, however, that literature was not really the first expression of this desire for individuality. We find it earlier in the free communities established as a reaction against the rigorous officialdom.

The first phase of nineteenth century literature may be summed up as the period of Romanticism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, and for some decades after, literature was produced by members of the nobility. Such were the great poets, Pushkin and Lermontov. These two felt only imperfectly the great social forces that determined the course of later Russian literature, but already they give expression to some consciousness of Russian unity. They are, above all, romanticists, both depicting, at least in their earlier works, characters of the Byronic type,—brooding, disenchanted men, who have compressed all their life in a decade of years. Having failed to find happiness in life, they seek it vainly in solitude. These romantic heroes, in their aristocratic aloofness, are foreign to the social spirit of Russian literature.

The later heroes of Pushkin and Lermontov are endowed with a trait that has been considered distinctively Russian: over-development of the sensibilities and the mental powers at the expense of the will. To realize their ideas was impossible, to give themselves to some practical task was hopeless, in view of the political situation. Not being able to have what they wished, they talked their ideals to death. This mixture of cul- ture and of deficient will-power was characteristic of the Russian "intellectual", so that we find many variants of the will-less intellectual in the literature of the nineteenth century. Later, the two novelists, Gontcharov and Turgeniev, attempted to find the hero whose soul would be a balanced harmony between intellect and will; but the Russian society of that day did not enable them to find the necessary prototypes.

In the literature of the second period, the 30's and 40's, authorship was still limited to the nobility. But now, new ideas enter, and Russian literature becomes a great purposeful force.