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p Russian classical literature was formed mainly in the I9th century, in other words under the tsars. What ideas fed it, and whence did it draw its remarkable strength and humanism?

p No one would dispute the tremendous contribution of Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky to world culture. Wherein does their greatness lie? The answer to this question must be sought in the particularities of Russian history.

p It is, of course, wrong to think that any one nation, endowed with elite biological qualities, is capable of producing geniuses from its midst, while other nations of “inferior” blood (the nazis in Germany pointed to the Jews in particular, and the reactionaries in the U.S.A. to the Negroes) are incapable of higher spiritual activity. No one would deny that different national characters do exist. Only the difference between them is not biological; it is conditioned by their history, geography and climate, and, especially, by social struggle and the development of the productive forces.

p For centuries Russian history seemed to hold out a sort of challenge to every Russian and to the nation as a whole. Russian history always mobilised the population of the vast Russian land and demanded the utmost effort from the people. Chaadayev, a friend of Pushkin and Herzen, once wrote that Russia, unlike the vale of Kashmir, was constantly hardening and not softening man.

p If I dwell on this question for a while, it is because I believe it to be of help in understanding the Soviet period.

p What gave the Russians strength on the one hand, and caused Russia’s economic backwardness on the other?

p In his book History of Russia (1863-1864), the famous Russian historian S. M. Solovyov gave a general outline of the course of ancient Russian history, and in the chapter entitled “Russia Before the Age of Great Reforms" spoke as follows of the difference between Western and Eastern Europe:

p “Looking at the map of Europe we are amazed first of all by the dissimilarity of its two uneven halves—the western and the eastern. Geographically and climatically, Europe has the advantage over other parts of the world, and these beneficial conditions are given 14 as the reason for the brilliant development of the European nations and their domination of other peoples. When speaking of these beneficial conditions, however, one must have only Western Europe in mind, for Eastern Europe has not been endowed with them. Nature has been a loving mother to Western Europe, and a mean stepmother to the nations fated to live in Eastern Europe. Thus we observe European civilisation gradually spreading from the West to the East as decreed by Nature, since it was in the West that the most favourable conditions for its early successes were created, growing less and less favourable as one moved East. In this connection, it is interesting to note the limits of the invasion of the wild Asiatic hordes in Europe, the point where it was stopped. . . . How many centuries separated Attila’s defeat at Chalons and Catherine the Great’s conquest of the Crimea which was finally to put an end to Asiatic domination on European soil! Think of the advantage, measured in centuries, which history gave Western Europe over Eastern Europe!”

p I have quoted this long paragraph from a mid-19th-century Russian historian in order to show that Russia had long been aware of the need to catch up with the capitalist states in science and culture—a task which the Soviet Union is successfully tackling today. These words of Solovyov are also repeated, without mention of his name, in Pierre Pate’s book Phenomene sovietique. The author points out how the inequality of Western and Eastern Europe’s potential was fully appreciated by Russian statesmen several centuries ago. After the overthrow of the Tatar yoke, which lasted for more than two centuries and was the main reason why Russia fell behind Western Europe in her development, two of Russia’s tsars made Herculean efforts to give Russian history a great thrust forward. The first was Ivan the Terrible who united the Russian state and extended its boundaries, and the second was Peter the Great who, to use the words of Lenin, attempted to put an end to Russian barbarity by barbarous means. But it took another two centuries, the book goes on to say, for historical conditions to ripen to the point at which Lenin, backed by Russia’s progressive working class, tackled anew the problem of overcoming Russia’s backwardness by introducing a socialist system of planning and socialist principles of labour organisation.

p There are two points I want to make quite clear here. The first is that both Sergei Solovyov in his view of Russia’s historical development and those historians and publicists in the West who (like Pierre Pate) a hundred years later, turn to the same view again, completely overlook the main factor—the development of production and the class struggle. In this respect the same laws of development apply to East and West. But the “East is East, and West is West" 15 idea is the favourite argument of bourgeois historians, and it is on this aphorism that Hans Kohn, author of Basic History of Modern Russia. Political, Cultural and Social Trends, bases his “scientific” reasoning. Actually, neither the climatic and geographical contrasts nor even the tragedy of being dominated by the Tatars for more than two centuries, set Russia outside the general laws governing the world’s cultural development. These laws, which were discovered and elaborated by Karl Marx, apply to all nations and historical formations without exception.

p The second point concerns national and historical traditions and their role in shaping national character. This is also frequently misinterpreted in the West (by the same Hans Kohn, for one), and we find the following line of reasoning. Say what you will, but you Russians, even in your new shell, are exactly like you were a hundred years ago. No revolution can break the hold of the past. In saying this they sometimes refer to Marx’s famous work The Eighteenth Brurnaire of Louis Bonaparte in which he says: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."  [15•1  But Marx was referring to bourgeois revolutions. Of the proletarian revolution he said that in order to arrive at its own content it “must let the dead bury their dead".  [15•2  This content is the building of a new society where there will be no exploitation of man by man and where production forces will develop to the full.

p It is rather amusing to find Western apologists of capitalism and critics of Soviet Russia’s new, socialist system going so far as to call in the ghost of Guizot and say: “You may fly to the stars in your spaceships, but you’ll never shake off your Oblomov. Our Western civilisation is anyway ahead of yours. As Kipling has said: ‘East is East, and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet.’ "

p Francois Guizot in his History of the English Revolution (1854- 1856) was trying to prove that revolution, no matter how bold and powerful, is incapable of destroying old national traditions. Thus Guizot, who was the first bourgeois historian to advance and develop the idea of class struggle (actually borrowed by him from SaintSimon), ascribed the greatest importance to the role of national and historical traditions.

p These traditions, certainly are important in shaping a people’s character and its literature. But in the West people often make the mistake, when discussing Russia and the character of the Russian people, of overestimating the importance of those old national 16 traditions which grew up under tsarism, and of carrying forward the past into the present. What was true in Guizot’s time, and the age of the bourgeois revolutions, no longer applies in the conditions of the proletarian socialist revolution. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 did not simply sweep away the vestiges of feudal relations, thereby finishing what the February bourgeois revolution had not accomplished: it actually went much further.

p In solving the problem of Russia’s backwardness and of “catching up with the West and overtaking it”, the Soviet people have left their past far behind them. In the process of building socialism, Russian people are determinedly shedding those negative traits in their character produced by their country’s historical backwardness.

p I always remember what Ivan Pavlov said about the Russian character in one of his scientific works, Reflexes of Aim (1916).

p “Whenever I am depressed by such negative traits of the Russian character as laziness, lack of initiative, and an indifferent or perhaps even a careless attitude to every kind of work, I always tell myself: nOj these are not our native traits, it’s just dross, a cursed legacy of serfdom. It turned the serf-owner into a drone, relieving him of the need to exercise such normal human desires as a striving to provide himself and his dear ones with their daily bread, or to win himself a place in life, and leaving his reflex of aim with nothing to do on life’s main lines. It turned the serf into an utterly passivecreature with nothing to look forward to, since his most natural desires were always thwarted by the insurmountable obstacle presented by the absolute power of his master or mistress’s will and pleasure. My thoughts run further. A ruined appetite and undernourishment can be cured by careful nursing and special hygiene. The same can and must be done for the reflex of aim which has been downtrodden by history on the Russian soil. If each one of us will cherish this reflex in himself as a most precious part of his being, if parents and teachers of all ranks will set themselves the task of fostering and developing this reflex in their charges, and if our public organisations will provide generous opportunities for exercising this reflex, then we shall become what we must and can become, judging from many episodes in our history and from some of our bursts of creative strength.”

p We Russians, and all the other peoples of the U.S.S.R., have now become what we must and can become. By carrying out the Great October Socialist Revolution and by adopting Lenin’s aim of collectively building communism, our people have opened, as it were, a vast historical school for the cultivation of a taste for aim in every person, a school for re-education. Look at the main characters in Soviet literature-Furmanov’s Chapaycv, Fadeyev’s Levinson, Ostrovsky’s Korchagin, Fedin’s Izvekov, Polevoi’s Mcresycv, and 17 Tvardovsky’s Vassily Tyorkin—personal and social aims merge into one for all these men whose characters were shaped by the reflex of aim.

p In his novel Mother (1907), Gorky showed how a “taste” for a revolutionary aim ennobled people. Looking back over the last fifty years in the history and the development of literature both of Western Europe and the U.S.S.R., one is forced to reject the idea that the way to freedom lies through anarchy, through “throwing off the fetters" of civilisation. The way to freedom and “natural man" lies through the cultivation of noble, humane aims and the setting up of a society—a communist society—where people will not feel stifled by exploitation and where their creative powers will unfold to the full. Such is the logic of history.

p The fact that tsarist Russia, both technically and economically, was about a hundred years behind Germany, France, Britain and the U.S.A. was a challenge to Lenin’s Russia. Hence the urgent appeal of the slogan “to catch up and surpass”, which was reflected both in the speed of socialist construction and also in the country’s cultural life. As for the reasons for Russia’s backwardness they were best explained by Lenin in 1913, in his article “How Can Per Capita Consumption in Russia Be Increased”. He asked: “Why is the development of capitalism and culture proceeding at a snail’s pace? Why are we falling farther and farther behind? Why does this increasing backwardness make exceptional speed and ’strikes’ necessary?" His answer was: “Our industrial satraps are afraid to answer this question, which is quite clear to any politically conscious worker, because they are satraps. They are not the representatives of capital that is free and strong, like that of America; they are a handful of monopolists protected by state aid and by thousands of intrigues and deals with the very Black-Hundred landowners whose medieval land tenure (about 70 million dessiatines of the best land) and oppression condemn five-sixths of the population to poverty, and the entire country to stagnation and decay."  [17•1 

p Such then were the historical conditions which, compounded of acute class struggle, geographical and climatic factors, and contrasts in the whole pattern of Russian life, had influenced the shaping of the Russian national character. How were they reflected in classical literature?

p Like a lake that mirrors the sky, the Russian spirit mirrors the endlessness of the rolling Russian plains, and the severe climate. The very conditions of their existence conspired to produce in the Russians a strong sense of duty towards their fellow men and an elementary human decency. In their life of hard toil which required 18 unspectacular, everyday heroism, they were constantly reminded of the importance of a helping hand. Forever warding off the attacks of their bellicose neighbours, they lived patiently tilling the soil and building their log houses which in winter were buried so deep in snow that often only the plume of smoke trailing from the chimney identified them as human habitations.

p Bismarck was fond of repeating that “the Russian takes a long time to harness his horse, but he drives quickly”. And this applies both to Russian history and to the Russian character.

p How then was this “everyday heroism" of the Russians, their inherent humaneness and their sober appraisal of their harsh existence with its sharp turns from cruelty to kindness and back, portrayed in literature? In the first place these features were reflected in the profound realism of Russian literature, in its honest, unvarnished depiction of life.

p Georg Brandes, who visited Russia at the end of the last century and wrote numerous articles about it, observed that “intellectually the Russians often amaze foreigners by that realism, that sense of reality which made them a great nation and proved so victorious in their life’s struggle”. I think this is one of the most accurate remarks about Russia and Russian literature made by a foreign observer. A keen interest in life’s truth was always a basic feature of Russian literature. This was why even trends like decadence which led literature away from social interests acquired a rather different character in Russia from that they had in the West. Awareness of social contradictions and the imminence of a revolutionary crisis was always pronounced in Russian literature, even in the work of the symbolists. This insistence with which life forced its way into literature, giving it no chance to indulge in purely aesthetic problems and interests, was also a feature of literature in the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, where the national liberation movement left its imprint on such fashionable pre-revolutionary trends as decadence and modernism, imported from France and Russia. This is why the Armenian and Georgian symbolists (for example, Vaan Teryan and Galaktion Tabidze) little resembled their West European counterparts and why, after the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus, they entered the mainstream of the country’s multinational literary world with its new themes and moods easily and naturally enough.

p Thus realism, a strong sense of reality, was always the main feature of classical Russian literature. It was this realistic approach to the portrayal of Russian life and people which gave Russian literature its particular position and influence in world culture. The Russian 19th-century classics—the poetry of Pushkin, the novels of Turgenev, Herzen, Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky, the stories of Chekhov, 19 and later the writings of Gorky—won recognition and popularity in many countries of the world. Hundreds of works in different languages have been devoted to the influence of the Russian novel on the development of the European and American novel.

p Russian literature began to play this important role around the turn of the century when translations became widespread in Europe. Gradually 19th-century Russian literature came to be used as a sort of yardstick of the literary merits of books everywhere.

p In the West, Russian literature is far from always acclaimed for its realism. What critics and readers tend to look for mainly in it (especially in Dostoyevsky) is an explanation of the now legendary “enigmatic Russian soul".

p For many people in the West “the Russian soul" has come to mean a penchant for mysticism, violent action, anarchism and melancholy songs. According to some philosophers, like Jules Leger, a professor at the Sorbonne who wrote a book on this subject before the war, the “Russian soul" is something dark, with the most unexpected things lurking in its depths. It is a tangle of contradictions, and its natural elements is vast Russian spaces, log houses, snowdrifts, bears and vodka. This myth, which attributes to the Russians all sorts of barbaric habits and irrational behaviour, is centuries old. Foreigners who visited Muscovy in the ijth-iyth centuries (mainly Germans like Olearius, Herberstein, and others who came later, like de Custine in the i9th century), tried to present Russia to the Western rulers as a backward country which was just waiting to be colonised. And although the mysterious “Russian soul" had actually very little to do with the real Russian national character, and although Russia’s history and way of life gave no reason to place it in a class of its own as a barbarous and exotic land radically differing from countries in the West, the legend nevertheless struck firm root and was invariably to be found in the various philosophical and historical Baedekers published in Europe. It was a convenient myth because it obviated the need to study facts and added exotic glamour to the whole subject.

p This myth has been played up greatly by the enemies of the new Soviet system as a useful “confirmation” of the irrelevance of the Russian experience for Europe. Besides, this allegation of the exclusiveness and psychological barbarity of the Russians fitted into racialist theories splendidly. No wonder nazi “philosophers” (like Rosenberg, for instance) seized upon the myth of the “enigmatic Russian soul" to prove the necessity of exterminating a few dozen million of the said souls.

p A large number of Western propagandists of anti-communism are at present engaged in elaborating this colonialist myth about Russia and the traits of “the Russian soul" which, they allege, is 20 barbarous and inclined to totalitarianism. Among these scholars, Professor Hans Kohn, whom we have already had occasion to mention, surely occupies the place of honour. Professor Kohn is the author of over a dozen books in which he investigates “the national spirit" of different peoples.  [20•1  In 1960, he was elected president of the International Society for History of Ideas, founded in the U.S.A. In his books about Russia and the Russians (one of them called The Mind of Modern Russia which gives excerpts from Chaadayev to Berdyaev and from Tyutchev to Lenin, and the other entitled Basic History of Modern Russia} Professor Kohn advances the thesis that there is not much difference between tsarist and Soviet Russia. Both are barbarous and totalitarian. There was hope, he says, that the Russians would join the liberal and humane West. There was a glimmer of this hope in the reign of Nicholas II, when the bourgeois-landowner party, the Constitutional Democrats, entered the scene. But everything collapsed in 1917. Lenin came to power, and once again he faced Russia round to the East, tearing up by the root the tender shoots of liberty and western civilisation.

p I do not propose to make a detailed analysis of Hans Kohn’s mythopoetic activity. It is based on garbled quotations, an arbitrary interpretation of facts and, of course, a complete disregard for the class approach. The unscientific nature of his method could be easily and convincingly proved. The aim of a bourgeois ideologist is clear from the whole pattern of his reasoning, which is that of a typical Western propagandist of anti-communism.

p This aim is to discredit Russia and the Russians for taking the road to communism. The idea of presenting Lenin as a successor to Nicholas II! Yet this is what Professor Kohn tries to do. Both, he says, opposed “the freedom of the individual" and were for “a totalitarian state"!

p I have quoted this example for its curiosity value rather than anything else, as an instance of the lengths to which anti-communist propaganda in the West can go in its blind frenzy.

p Naturally, nations differ from one another in certain traits of character, formed in the course of their history. Lenin wrote of this too. We speak, for instance of the revolutionary spirit of the Russians, of the business acumen of the Americans, of the Englishmen’s reserve, of the methodical and punctilious Germans, the clearheaded Frenchmen, the industrious Chinese, and so on. But these qualities do not come from biological differences between races. 21 They are historically formed traits and are subject to evolution. The character of a nation must be examined only in development. It is not a static or immutable thing. Especially in the case of the Russian nation, which has undergone such great revolutionary changes in the last fifty years.

p Literature reflects the life and character of a people; it does not simply reflect the writer’s individual psychology but actually interprets history and shows the peculiarities of a people’s development.

p The greatness of Russian literature must be attributed not only to the fact that it happened to be a sphere in which the Russian genius manifested itself so splendidly. Russian literature does indeed illustrate the giftedness of the Russian people: but it also owes its greatness to the eventful life and history it reflects.

p Tolstoi is a great writer not only because he is Tolstoi, but also because his genius sprang from and was nourished by a great people. When Lenin called him the “mirror of the Russian revolution”, he had in mind Tolstoi’s ability to absorb and truthfully reflect the peasant life in its entirety, with all its contradictions and its protest against oppression and injustice, and to impart to it a universal meaning and significance.

p Russia’s history happened to run such an unusual course that it was always providing an object lesson for the rest of the world. The struggle of the Russian people against serfdom and tsarism, against exploitation by those who owned the land and the factories, their struggle to defend their country against Tatars, Mongols, Germans and other invaders—all this fed literature with lofty ideas and epic images, and accounted for its dream of freedom and determination to stand up in defence of human rights.

Russian literature derives its main qualities from the deep involvement of the 19th-century classics in the life and interests of the different strata of the country’s population. These qualities are: first, its closeness to the people (as regards both form and content); next, its earnest yet romantic patriotism; and, last but not least, its constant defence of human rights, its profound humanism. It is this last and most pronounced quality of Russian literature which is responsible for its social and ethical spirit, its tendency to preach, and its invariably critical attitude to life in old Russia. Such are the traditions of the Russian literary heritage.