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Lectures on Russian Literature Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy By: Ivan Panin (1855-1942) |
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IVAN PANIN.
LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE:
PUSHKIN, GOGOL, TURGENEF,
TOLSTOY.
NEW YORK & LONDON:
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS,
The Knickerbocker Press.
1889.
Copyright, 1889, By Ivan Panin.
TO MIRIAM
PREFACE.
The translations given in this volume, with the exception of the
storm scene from Tolstoy in the First Lecture, are my own. The reader will please bear in mind that these Lectures, printed here
exactly as delivered, were written with a view to addressing the ear as
well as the eye, otherwise the book would have been entirely different
from what it now is. When delivering the Sixth Lecture, I read extracts from Tolstoy's "My
Religion" and "What to Do," illustrating every position of his I there
commend; but for reasons it is needless to state, I omit them in the
book. I can only hope that the reader will all the more readily go to
the books themselves. I. P. Grafton, Mass.,
1 July, 1889.
CONTENTS.
LECTURE PAGE I. Introductory 1 II. Pushkin 44 III. Gogol 76 IV. Turgenef 115 V. Tolstoy the Artist 154 VI. Tolstoy the Preacher 190
LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY.
1. I have chosen the four writers mentioned on the programme not so
much because they are the four greatest names of Russian literature as
because they best represent the point of view from which these lectures
are to be delivered. For what Nature is to God, that is Literature unto
the Soul. God ever strives to reveal himself in Nature through its
manifold changes and developing forms. And the human soul ever strives
to reveal itself in literature through its manifold changes and
developing forms. But while to see the goal of the never resting
creativeness of God is not yet given unto man, it is given unto mortal
eyes to behold the promised land from Pisgah, toward which the soul
ever strives, and which, let us hope, it ever is approaching. For the
soul ever strives onward and upward, and whether the struggle be called
progress of species, looking for the ideal, or union with God, the
thing is the same. It is of this journey of the soul heavenward that
literature is the record, and the various chases of literary development
in every nation are only so many mile posts on the road. 2. In its childhood the human soul only exists; it can hardly yet be
said to live; but soon it becomes conscious of its existence, and the
first cry it utters is that of joy. Youth is ever cheerful, and in its
cheer it sings. Youth sings to the stars in the sky, to the pale moon
and to the red moon, to the maiden's cheeks and to the maiden's fan;
youth sings to the flower, to the bee, to the bird, and even to the
mouse. And what is true of the individual is equally true of the race.
The earliest voices in the literature of any nation are those of song.
In Greece Homer, like his favorite cicada, chirps right gladly, and in
England Chaucer and Shakespeare are first of all bards. In France and
Germany it is even difficult to find the separate prominent singers, for
there the whole nation, whatever hath articulate voice in it, takes to
singing with its troubadours and minnesingers... Continue reading book >>
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