A Survey of Russian Literature, with SelectionsHapgood, Isabel Florence
History
A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections
Hapgood, Isabel Florence
Russian literature -- History and criticism
After 1846 Byelinsky was connected with the journal, "The Contemporary,"
published by the poet Nekrasoff, and I. I. Panaeff, to which the best
writers of the day contributed. Here, during the brief period when his
health permitted him to work, he expressed even bolder and more
practical ideas, and became the advocate of the "natural school," of
which he regarded Gogol as the founder, wherein poetry was treated as
an integral part of every-day life. Turgeneff has declared, that
Byelinsky indisputably possessed all the chief qualities of a great
critic, and that no one before him, or better than he, ever expressed a
correct judgment and an authoritative verdict, and that he was,
emphatically, "the right man in the right place."
One author who deserves to be better known outside of Russia produced
the really original and indescribably fascinating works on which his
fame rests during the last ten or twelve years of his long life, late in
the '40's and '50's, although he was much older than the authors we have
recently studied, and began to write much earlier than many of them. His
early writing, however, was in the classical style, and does not count
in comparison with his original descriptions of nature, and of the life
of the (comparatively) distant past. Sergyei Timofeevitch Aksakoff
(1791-1859), the descendant of a very ancient noble family, was born in
far-away eastern Russia, in Ufa, and was very well educated by his
mother, at schools, and at Kazan University. His talents first revealed
themselves in 1847, in his "Notes on Angling," and his "Diary of a
Sportsman with a Gun," in the Orenburg Government (1852). Most famous of
all, and most delightful, are the companion volumes, "A Family Chronicle
and Souvenirs" (1856) and "The Childhood's Years of Bagroff's Grandson"
(1858). In these Russian descriptive language made a great stride in
advance, even after Pushkin and Gogol; and as a limner of landscape, he
has no equal in Russian literature. The most noteworthy point about his
work is that there is not a trace of creative fancy or invention; he
describes reality, takes everything straight from life, and describes
it with amazing faithfulness and artistic harmony. He was the first
Russian writer to look on Russian life from a positive instead of from a
negative point of view.[19]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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