618
PARTISAN REVIEW
play of ideas which sprang from a wide if undisciplined knowledge of
all the great European civilizations, assimilated without residue into the
loose but rich texture of his own mental life, and expressed with that
astonishing mixture of elegance, high spirits, and directness of vision
which is the specific property of the best Russian liberal intelligentsia;
of this unique society he was perhaps the most accomplished representa–
tive among the emigres of the twentieth century. He was not a systematic
critic, and there are large and capricious omissions in his work; but his
confidence in his own literary insight was unbounded and, armed with
it, he succeeded in rescuing various authors from undeserved oblivion,
and in introducing figures hitherto little known outside Russia in a
manner which arrested the attention of Western readers to their great
and abiding profit.
There is an obvious sense in which Mr. Slonim's book is a comple–
ment and useful antidote to Mirsky's glittering but uneven masterpiece.
A balanced presentation of so immense and various a scene presupposes
a certain degree of academic detachment, and Mirsky's warmest ad–
mirers would not wish to maintain that he took care not to obtrude his
own spectacular personality over his subject; there is a virtue in being
sober, and just, a transparent medium through which the subject itself is
allowed to have its full impact on the reader: and Mr. Slonim is a
paragon of such heroic self effacement; yet the subject deserves some–
thing greater. Russian literature, apart from the individual achieve–
ment of men of genius, possesses properties which need special illumina–
tion if the Western reader is to understand its significance as an aspect–
perhaps the most revealing, certainly the most arresting-of the develop–
ment of Russian society as a whole since the beginning of its contact with
the West. Indeed it was a commonplace among the Russian critics of
the last century that no literature in the world was so inextricably bound
up with the social, political and moral views prevalent in its time as
their own. Russian writers, whether or not they believed in the utilitarian
value of literature-its "social function"-saw themselves as conscious
champions of a point of view, of a particular attitude toward life and
society to the validity of which their art was first and foremost a testi–
mony.
Mr. Slonim is well aware of this: he deals faithfully with the
early and medieval periods of Russian literature, and gives an adequate
account of the sowing of foreign seeds, which though not devoid of
moments of originality, is on the whole interesting mainly because of
the astonishingly rich harvest which followed: upon all this Mr. Slonim,
being more thorough and conscientious, is a more dependable guide than
