A VIEW OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
619
Mirsky, who wrote magnificently about works of genius like the Lay of
Igor's Host, or Avvakum's autobiography, or the Bylinas, and polished
off the rest with conspicuous lack of interest. But then comes the great
awakening which began in the late eighteenth century, one of the most
astonishing developments in the history of European civilization.
It
began in effect with Derzhavin, reached a height not attained before or
since in the poetry and prose of Pushkin, and continued to put forth
both fruit and flower for a century-a prodigious outpouring of genius
scarcely equalled since the Greeks. Throughout, the characteristic
which strikes the historian of culture most is the degree to which art
remains united with life, and the artist remains an undivided personality
not conscious of his art as a peculiar and separate activity, insulated from
his activity as an individual or as a member of society, to be judgt!d
therefore by special criteria, living in a world governed by rules dif–
ferent from those of daily existence. Consequently the central artistic
issue of the nineteenth century-the degree to which the artist has a
right to be, or in some metaphysical sense is "free" from the laws which
govern society-the cause which led to those famous battles in which
Stendhal, and Baudelaire, Flaubert and Ruskin, and to a certain
degree Ibsen and Wilde became involved, the issue which raised at any
rate the possibility of an ivory tower in which the artist was free to
act as he pleased, liberated from the laws of even a private morality,
even of commandments imposed upon him by his own self-generated
ideals-that celebrated problem has relatively little relevance to the
Russian scene. There was of course, a battle fought out in Russia too,
a far more violent battle whose consequences have affected the lives of
ordinary men and women today more deeply than the critical battles of
the West; but it revolved not so much round the relation, or absence of
relation, between art and life but the more fundamental problem of
the nature of truth it elf. The major preoccupation, almost the ob–
session of Russian writers, is the nature of truth in a very wide
sense. The upholders of the "social" theory of art whether they were
aesthetically sensitive liberal humanists like Belinsky and Herzen, or
fanatical utilitarian materialists like Dobrolyubov and Pissarev, be–
lieved that truth in art and life alike consisted in the discovery, and
clearest and most uncompromising formulation of those intractable
facts upon which everything else in human experience was held to de–
pend; the business of art-as of all expression-was to tell the truth;
and this implied the painful but unavoidable obligation to conform
to a reality not made by, but given to the artist; and entailed a capacity
for distinguishing in this unalterable "given," between the central and
