0000000 RUSSIAN LITERATURE. PERIOD II.-THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. MITATION of French models was the basis of Russian literature until the excesses of the opening of the French Revolution startled the Czarina Catherine II.* Then she prohibited the publication of French books in her dominions. But even aside from politics, the French artificial style had begun to pall on the Russians. Von Visin in his comedy, "The Brigadier," had derided those whose only reading was French romances; and Kropotof, in his "Funeral Oration of Balabas, My Dog," congratulated that animal on never having read Voltaire! With the Napoleonic invasion the national spirit burst forth in the most bitter and violent odes and writings of a "patriot war." In tragedy, Ozerof wrote " Dmitri Donskoi," recalling the struggles of Russia against the Tartars. Krioukovski wrote the tragedy of "Pojarski," the hero of 1612. The poet Zhukovski sang the exploits of the Russians against Napoleon and stirred all anti-Napoleonic Europe with his "Bard in the Camp of the Russian Warriors." Even the childlike Kriloff satirized the French fashions of the Russian court in "The School for Young Ladies" and "The Milliner's Shop." The great literary event of the reign (1801-25) of Alexander I. was, however, the "History of Russia" by Nikolai Mikhailovitch Karamsin. Before Karamsin there was no inspiring picture of Russia's past. Nestor had brought his crude annals *For Early Russian Literature, see Volume III., pp. 386-400. down to Alexis Mikhailovitch, father of Peter the Great. Patistcheff, his successor, was rough in style. Faithful pictures of the old barbaric Russia had been given in the "Russkaia Pravda" (code) of Yaroslaff-the Russia of Ivan the Terrible, after the lifting of the Mongolian yoke (1238–1462); in Monk Sylvester's "Domostroi" (Household Instruction), before the Mongols; and in Vladimir Monomakh's "Pouchenie" (Instruction), a quaint picture of the daily life of an ancient Slavonic prince. But these bald records of barbarism were not attractive. It needed the pen of Karamsin to cast a halo about the old Slav warriors. He admired Ivan the Terrible. After the fashion of Scott he put a romantic gloss over the real coarseness. He stirred the imagination and the patriotism of his countrymen. Kollar sounded the slogan of Panslavism. Pushkin became the laureate of Nicholas and Russia's greatest poet; Gogol mirrored in his Cossack tales the life of Little Russia; and Ivan Turgenieff revealed the misery and despair of the serf, and caught the rising mutterings of Nihilism. Ivan Kriloff, the Russian Lafontaine, supplied his countrymen with distinctively national fables abounding in vigorous pictures of Russian life. Pushkin was succeeded by Mikhail Yurevitch Iermontoff, known as the poet of the Caucasus, and by Nicholas Nekrasoff. Lermontoff's first noteworthy ode was an appeal to Russia to avenge the killing of Pushkin in a duel, lest she receive no more poets. His lyrics are wild and varied and beautiful as the scenery of the Caucasus and Georgia. Nekrasoff's realistic poems present the melancholy feature of Russian life. It would not be right to forget Taras Shevchenko, the national poet of Little Russia, whose grave near Kanioff on the Dnieper has been marked with a cairn and cross and has become a patriotic shrine for all the Ukraine. Shevchenko, born a serf, but bought and set free by the poet Zhukovski, not only sang the old days of the Ukraine, but became the voice of the Haidamaks in their national struggle against the Tsar. Gogol probably had Shevchenko in mind in naming his great Cossack hero Taras Bulba, for Taras is just such a hero as Little Russia's poet loved to celebrate in song. Shevchenko died in 1861. |