Pushkin and His Successors

By the side of the poputchiki, the "proletarian" novelists at first cut a rather inferior figure. The work of Yuri Libedinsky (b. 1898; The Week, Eng. trans. 1923), of Theodore Gladkov (b. 1883; Cement, 1926) and of D. Furmanov (d. 1926) is hardly literature, but it is interesting as reflecting the optimistic energy of the men who won the civil war and shouldered the work of reconstruction after it. The younger proletarian generation has produced writers of real talent. Artem Vesely (b. 1898) carried the "dynamic" novel to its highest perfection (My Native Land, 1926), infusing into it a vitality and cheerfulness entirely alien to its poputchiki initiators. A. Fadeyev and Sergey Semenov, on the other hand, are more interested in individual and ethical man. Fadeyev's The Defeat (1927) and Semenov's Natalia Tarpova (1927) are works of great merit and still greater promise.

The drama, in spite of the continued vitality of the theatre, has produced little of importance. The realistic tradition has been abandoned. The plays of Nicolas Evreinov (b. 1879), a leading theatrical producer, have many points in common with Piran dello's. The Futurists at one time attempted to create a high standard, boldly Aristophanesque propaganda play; but the only successful venture was Mayakovsky's A Mystery-Bouffe (1918). The dominant type of drama is a kind of conventional puppet play with characters stripped of all reality and humanity. Such are the crude and mediocre plays of Lunacharsky (Eng. trans. Three Plays, 1923). Only the plays of the regretted Leo Lunts (1901-24) are on a much higher level. They are simplified tragedies of pure action, full of a genuine heroical spirit.

Historians.

Modern Russian historiography begins with V. N. Tatishchev (1686-175o) ; his history of Russia is a laborious but uncritical compilation from the chronicles. Gerhard Friedrich Milller (1705-83), a German member of the Petersburg academy and a pioneer in many fields, was the first to open up the jungle of official acts and records. A critical spirit was first introduced by another German, August Ludwig v. Schloezer, and by the amateur historian I. N. Boltin (1735-92). Karamzin's (q.v.) History of the Russian State (12 vol., 1818-26) summed up the work of the 18th century, to which it essentially belongs : it is moralizing and rhetorical, and devoid of all "sense of period." Its conception of autocracy as the only constructive and benefi cent force in the Russian past made it the bible of official and conservative Russia. But before Karamzin was dead new ideas were abroad ; and acquaintance with Niebuhr and Hegel demanded a new approach to Russian history. Nicolas Polevoy (see P. 754) in his History of the Russian People (183o-33) attempted to supply the demand, but being no more than a journalist, failed. Michael Pagodin (1800-75), who did much to advance a critical and detailed knowledge of Russia's past, was prevented from achieving a synthesis by the provincial conservatism of his out look. The younger Slavophils were more imaginative, and being

convinced that the chief hero of history was the People and not the State, concentrated their attention on the history of the masses. Their best historian was I. D. Belyaev (1810-73). The same predilection for social history and for the masses marks the work of the Radical historians, N. I. Kostomarov (1817-85) the most "literary" and widely read historian of the time and A. P. Shchapov (183o-76), who tried to apply to Russian history the methods of Buckle. The moderate and Liberal Westernizers, on the contrary, devoted themselves to the history of the State, which appeared to them as the only civilizing force, and of its legislation. The most industrious of them, S. M. Soloviev (182o 79), compiled what is the most complete detailed history of Russia (29 vol., 1851-79). It is little more than a transcript of the sources, interspersed with a few historical discussions, reflect ing the ideas of Hegel. Russian historiography was freed from philosophy and party bias by K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin (1829– 97) and V. 0. Klyuchevsky (1841-1911). Klyuchevsky, espe cially, introduced a more intimate study of the sources, resulting in a more general reconstruction of the past ; and his monographs on the pre-Muscovite and Muscovite period have become classics. His Course of Russian History (4 vol., 1904) has charmed many readers by its literary form, but is handicapped by the absence of a sincerely considered point of view. Bestuzhev-Ryumin became the master of a whole school of historians, among whom S. Th. Platonov (1860-1932) was the most eminent. The Time of Troubles (1899) is a masterpiece of knowledge and presenta tion. Apart from the main schools stand V. I. Sergeyevich (1838 1909), whose Antiquities of Russian Law is a brilliant work of criticism, written in a concise and trenchant style; and E. E. Golubinsky (1834-1912), whose History of the Russian Church presents a strange mixture of great critical acumen and quaint stolidity. The old Westernizing tendency survives in the work of P N. Milyukov (b. 1859; Studies in the History of Russian Civilization), whose leading idea is to prove the poverty and inferiority of old Russian civilization. N. P. Pavlov-Silvansky (1869-1908) was a Westernizer of a different type, who tried to prove the essential similarity of the historical process in Russia and the West. The rise of Marxism has led to the rise of a school of Marxist historians, who aim at reducing Russian history to universally applicable methods of dialectic materialism. Their patriarch, M. N. Pokrovsky (1868-1932), was a historian of great gifts whose treatment of historical problems did much to renovate our ideas of the Russian past.