Text: Abraham Yarmolinsky, “The Russian View of American Literature,” The Bookman (New York, NY), vol. XLIV, no. 1, September 1916, pp. 44-48

[page 44:]

THE RUSSIAN VIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

BY ABRAHAM YARMOLINSKY

I. POE

THE gift for inner communion with the genius of other nations seems to be one of the minor characteristics of the Slav. The ages of cultural apprenticeship, which have fallen to his lot, have only quickened and developed this capacity. Whatever are the virtues and failings of the Russian intellectual, provincialism is not among them. Ever since the “intelligentzia” came into being, it kept its eyes turned abroad, and it was in the West that its sun, contrary to all precedent, rose in the radiance of light and beauty. One is not surprised, therefore, to find that the New World literature is not unknown in Russia, de- spite the fact that the bear, to use a figure recently popularised by Shaw, was never on close terms with the North American eagle, and has, until recently, entertained distinctly unfavourable, but otherwise vague ideas concerning matters American, in general.

The first name a Russian is most likely to mention when the conversation turns to American literature, is that of “mad Edgar.” It is Poe that has come to be popularly identified in Russia with the American literary genius in its highest achievements. ‘That this should have happened will be considered by many an apt illustration of Maurus's famous aphorism about books and their destinies. At any rate, more than any other land, France included, Russia may claim to be Poe's country by, so to speak, posthumous adoption. ‘The Slav has taken him to heart with all his unearthliness and morbidity, his fantastic rationalism and superexcited æstheticism, with all his dreams and nightmares. Poe's popularity in Russia is hard [column 2:] to overrate. He is known not only as a teller of strange, unforgettable tales and of what a Russian critic calls “philosophical fables, which hypnotise both our senses and our mind,” — but also as a poet who has discovered new islands of beauty. Russian literature possesses a truly remarkable translation of Poe's complete poetical works, which closely follows the metre of the original. This is perhaps the most adequate transposition of Poe's poetry yet produced in any language, since Stephan Mallarme's celebrated prose version of “The Raven” and other pieces utterly fails to render the lilt and the manifold sonorities of Poe's verse.

Casual translations from Poe began to appear in leading Russian periodicals as early as the late thirties. In 1861 the magazine The Russian Word printed an intelligent critical study of Poe. Here, the art of the American poet is described as “fantastic realism,” and his personality likened to an aerolite, the messenger of another world. But it is only toward the end of the century that Poe attained the height of his popularity in the Slav country and was completely naturalised there. The tide of Neo- romanticism which swept over Europe and reached Russia in the nineties bore on its crest Poe among other dead and living masters. The destinies of books are as strange as those of men. ‘The author of the Raven suddenly found himself in the Pantheon, — or, as some would say, in the Pandemonium — of modernity, “an early forerunner of a far too slow spring,” invoked by the neo-romanticist in one breath with Baudelaire, Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, and others. Poe's influence on modern Russian [page 45:] literature is well established. There is in its cauldron an element coming directly from Poe; it is especially noticeable in writers like Sologub and Andreyev, to mention two names not entirely unfamiliar to the American ear.

This new enthusiasm in Russia for the works of Poe found its spokesman in the person of Constantine Balmont, who is the foremost living Russian poet. He has done for the whole body of Poe's writings in Russia what Baudelaire did for his prose in France. Balmont's admirable translation of Poe's complete works, begun in 1906, puts a finishing stroke to the process of Poe's Russification. Baudelaire prayed to his beloved Edgar as his intercessor before God; Jules Lemaitre placed him in the company of Plato and Shakespeare. The Russian translator has an admiration for the American poet which is hardly inferior. In an essay on Walt Whitman, entitled “Polarity,” he has this to say about Poe:

How could I breathe, and thousands of people with me, if there were not Poe's Raven, with its unforgettable burden of “Nevermore”? And if by night Annabel Lee and Morella and Ligeia did not lean over me and kiss me a fantastic kiss? And how could the evening and morning bells chime if there were no “Bells” of the mad Edgar? And was I not among the masks of the Red Death? And have I not fled in frenzied terror from the falling house of Usher?

Edgar Poe is the North Pole and all the southern lands which one passes on one's way to the North Pole. Edgar Poe is the sweetest sound of the lute and the most passionate sob of the violin. He is sensation exalted to the state of crystal serenity, an enchanted gorgeous hall ending with a magical mirror. . . . Edgar Poe is the furnace of self-knowledge. He is our elder brother, the beloved Solitary One, and we sorely grieve that we are not able to sail up the river of years and join him, all of us, a faithful band, now so numerous, him, our king, who at that time was deserted, in the dreadful moment of his great struggle. Peace, peace be with him, our fair angel of sorrow. He lives among us, in our most delicate sensations, in the mad out- cries of our sorrow, in the sonorous rhythms of our songs, in rhymes final and initial, in the beautiful gestures of the young girl who thinks of him. . . .

II. WHITMAN

It is this enthusiast of Poe who has introduced to the Russian public another American poet, of a later generation. In 1905, in Moscow, under the music of ceaseless rifle fire exchanged by the insurgents and the army, Constantine Balmont was ending his translation of Leaves of Grass, begun in 1903, on the Baltic sea-shore, in the enchanted hours, as he says, of late northern mornings and evenings. Walt Whitman is but a newcomer in Russia, but he has already attracted a great deal of attention and his popularity is undoubtedly on the increase: the Russian reader may rightly claim that moral and intellectual thirstiness which, as it has been recently asserted, is necessary truly to enjoy the water-brooks of Whitman's poetry.

The Russian view of Walt Whitman and his gospel is quite suggestive, without being by any means fixed or crystallised. “Cosmical enthusiasm” is the term by which a Russian critic endeavours to describe the religion of the author of Leaves of Grass. Others dwell on Whitman's social pathos and his serene universalism; others again emphasise Whitman's enmity to analysis and criticism, and contrast his way of joyously and naively “accepting” the world as it is, with the Russian mentality, ever drifting toward heart-wrung negation, ever engaged in fruitless efforts to solve the eternal equation and to justify the iniquity of existence; but to all of them the Leaves of Grass are a work, on which dwells the glimmer of great beauty and which is heavy with the seeds of the future, perhaps more than any other book of poems hitherto written. The most interesting Russian utterance about Whitman belongs to Balmont: like Poe, the poet of the Leaves [page 46:] of Grass is one of his rather numerous literary loves. After stating, that with- out Poe and Whitman the nineteenth century could not have realised itself, and that “they are as inevitable in the life of our soul as the first love, the first sorrow, a moon-lit night and a sunny morning,” he centres his attention on Poe, and then goes on to Whitman:

If Edgar Poe is the movement of my soul from the Southern smiles northward, from flowers and kisses to the ice crystal — Walt Whitman is the opposite movement. From doubts and sorrow he arrives at the positive principle. Through him my soul, gradually freeing itself from the fanaticism of the heart, from my ardent adherence to individual events and the sensations of individual life, enters the cosmical Ocean and, joining all the instruments into a thundering organ, sings ecstatically “Hosannah.”

Walt Whitman is the South Pole. . . Here we find much that is unexplored and unexpected. On the South Pole there are surely warm inland seas, unsailed and un- charted, islands rich with flowers and fruits, resembling and yet not resembling ours. Through the triumphant symbolisation of everything that for a moment arises from the flowing stream of life, through the falling of all rivers into the cosmical Ocean. Whitman repeatedly comes near the cosmical assertion of the Ego — the Being Asserted, that ever spends itself without losing a single drop. He is the poet of the Present and of the Future. He is a portion, and a considerable portion, too, of that future which is coming to us rapidly, which is becoming the present. He is — idealised, clarified Democracy, the triumphant procession of Planet. Humanity in its conquest of the There is little sweetness in Whitman. His is the salty breath of the sea. He is the legendary King of the Sea, reeling, sinking ships in his wild merriment, hirsute, uncouth, monstrous, absurd, superb.

III. LONGFELLOW

Longfellow is the third — and last American poet, known to fame in Rus- sia and accessible — at least partly — to [column 2:] the Russian reader uninitiated into the

English tongue. None of the other members of the group of New England poets has hitherto won the Slav ear. Despite the fact that some of Longfellow's lyrics had been rendered in 1894 into Russian, he is known exclusively as the author of The Song of Hiawatha. It is Ivan Bunin, a prominent master of modern Russian prose and a poet of classical purity, that has added his countrymen to the wide circle of Longfellow's readers. Bunin's transposition of the American epic is a work of rare merits, a production standing out in the mass of what Mallarmé dubbed as singerte rimée. The translator has succeeded in pouring the old wine of Longfellow's poetry into new bottles, without spilling a drop; the freshness of the original and the fragrance of its simple imagery are not only retained but actually enhanced in the new linguistic medium. Small wonder that this book of noble and humanitarian poetry, although an adopted child, is as dear to Russian literature as the offspring of its own flesh.

IV. IRVING, COOPER, AND HAWTHORNE

American prose is, naturally, more fully represented in Russia than the New World poetry. A Russian catalogue of bibliographical rarities mentions a Collection of Sundry Works of Benjamin Franklin, translated from the French and published in Moscow in 1803. ‘To the same category of book curiosities belong also Russian versions of Washington Irving's books, of which there have been translated only Columbus's biography (Petrograd, 1837) and the History of Mahomet and his Successors (Moscow, 1857). Curiously enough, Irving had the rare privilege of being honoured by a leading Russian magazine with an obituary article about a quarter of a century before his death. In 1835 The Readers’ Library printed a paper on Irving's life and literary activity. It deplores his death, “shortly announced by English journals,” declares [page 47:] him the only great author hitherto produced by the New World, and traces this sterility of genius in relation to fine arts to the greediness of the North Americans, — “a passion which dries up in them the sources of inspiration, melt- ing in its alchemical crucible the world, both material and spiritual, in order to transform it into cash.”

This article mentions also the name of Fenimore Cooper, as the only rival

of Irving. “The former's novels were to become the fashion of the day in the early forties. Especially popular was the Pathfinder. In reviewing this novel, the great critic of the time, Vissarion Byelinsky, the “fierce Vissarion,” ever white-hot with enthusiasm for

somebody or something, called it “a Shakespearean drama in the form of a novel.” Before long, however, Cooper's books found their proper place in the category of juveniles and have stayed there, in the congenial company of Mayne Reid's novels, Bret Harte's stories, and the incomparable Uncle Tom's Cabin, to make the joy of that age which in Russia, as elsewhere, reads most and knows best how to read. The Russian version of Beecher Stowe's novel appeared in 1857. It was a very opportune hour indeed. “The movement

for political and Social emancipation, which resulted in the great reforms of the sixties, had at that time gained con- siderable impetus, and it is natural that the great abolitionistic novel was met with deep enthusiasm. ‘Time has not impaired the fame of the novel, although it has changed the circle of its readers. There are, at least, five different Russian versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin; We and Our Neighbours, Old Town Folks, and some other novels have also been done into Russian. In fact, these writers, especially Mayne Reid, are more extensively read and enthusiastically admired than in their home-country.

Hawthorne has been rather slow in gaining ground in Russia. Only of late years has he attracted some attention, and now his complete works are being [column 2:] published by a Petrograd firm. A small following has also been secured by the transcendentalists, after the main bulk of Emerson's and Thoreau's essays had in recent years been made accessible to the Russian reader. A few philosophical treatises, done into Russian, mainly the works of William James, have added to the prestige of American thought in the eyes of the Russians.

V. MARK TWAIN

However plausible may appear the discovery of John Palmer that laughter is the real frontier between races, it is nevertheless true that Mark Twain's broad laughter seems to respect no boundaries. An indication of his popularity in Russia is the fact that his books have been translated not only into the main national tongue but also — at least, some of them — into the musical language of Ukraine, generally known as the Little Russian dialect. The volume of The Prince and the Pauper was the first to appear, and it has to this very day remained the standard juvenile, more popular with the Russian children than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or his Huckleberry Finn. His purely humourous stories are current in Russian not only in the form of respectable middle-sized volumes, but also in the shape of cheap yellow-covered “brochures,” with which the Universal Library Company floods the country. A Russian biographer of Mark Twain quotes the following “interview” with the American humourist by a Russian correspondent, which took place apparently in Vienna and which was printed in Moscow papers in 1897:

The newspaper man accosted Mark Twain on the sidewalk and proceeded to introduce himself.

“An interview?” interrupted Twain gently, “well, at your service, sir.”

The Russian did not expect such a meekness and lost his courage. Twain smiled and said in German:

“Young man, you are an inexperienced interviewer. While you were losing time [page 48:] in getting confused, an American would jot down a hundred lines, and a hundred

and one of them would tell all sorts of cock-and-bull stories.”

The correspondent remarked that the Russian press is far from such perfection. Mark

[‘wain went on:

“Your press, too, is getting Americanised, just as that of Paris and London. Upon the whole, your culture is young. . . It is only by your Russian youth and inexperience that I can explain why you translate my books in great number without paying me a penny.”

The interviewer retorted that there exists no literary convention in Russia, and that, in general, the publishers are very much handicapped on all sides.

“So it seems,” concluded Twain, “that they publish my works ad maiorem Tweni gloriam? And your authors write not for money, but for glory? This, too, will change in course of time.”

VI. CONTEMPORARY WRITERS

Of contemporary American writers very few are known in Russia. The fame of “the Maupassant of the New World,” O. Henry, has already reached the shores of Neva and Volga, but his stories are still inaccessible to the Russians. More fortunate is the late Richard Harding Davis and Upton Sinclair, whose The Jungle was widely read a few years ago. But there is one living American fiction-writer, whose vogue in Russia is truly extraordinary. It is Jack London, christened “the American Gorky.” His books are being published by at least three publishing houses at once, and all of Russia reads Jack London, as a few years ago all of Russia read Knut Hamsun, the Scandinavian [column 2:] novelist who likes to call himself a Russian writer. It is the pathos of struggle and the gospel of action that appeal to the will-less, muscle-bound Russian intellectual in London's fiction, and make them blind to the defects of his genre féroce. Leonid Andreyev declares with an air of conviction that as you read these novels you feel how your muscles grow stronger; Alexander Kuprin likens the American novelist to Kipling; the philosopher Lopatin calls him the apostle of energy. Other writers, on the contrary, violently denounce his false romanticism and deplore the intrusion into Russian literature of this “travelling salesman in a derby, who deals in oceans, storms, Lucifers and prairies.” Others again take London as a text of their sermon on the necessity for the Russian educated class to throw off the cocoon of passivity, — all the while emphasising that America is a land of two dimensions, that is, of immense length and immense breadth, but of no depth and that Jack London is a worthy representative of the country, where man is spiritually a chimpanzee and materially a demiurge.

It is clear that the Russians have to unlearn a great many things and to learn even more about America, in general, and American letters, in particular. The present war, tightening as it does the bonds between the Slav and the Anglo-Saxon, will undoubtedly hasten in Russia the growth of a deeper understanding of America's soul and bring about a fuller appreciation of the finer values of the New World culture. In fact, observers of Russian life for the last year have already noticed a rise of sympathetic interest in matters pertaining to the United States. A quelque chose malheur est bon.