XVI
RUSSIAN LITERATURE
By J. A. JoFFE, Lecturer in Russian
In the Pantheon of Literature the writers of Russia have been accorded, within the last thirty years, a niche by the side of the supreme heaven-dwellers of that temple. The phenomenon is all the more remarkable when one remembers that it is practically within this brief period, about a generation and a half, roughly speaking, that the outside nations have made the acquaintance of Russian Literature.
The hold it laid upon the non-Russian reading public was instantaneous, firm, and persistent. Foreign observers of literary phenomena were amazed at its sudden sweep and force. One of its greatest admirers (Ferdinand Brunetière) records that for a time matters threatened to reach a point when the well-known yellow-covered volume in the hands of a Frenchman could be almost safely assumed to be the work of one of the chief Russian novelists,—such was the vogue of the conquering barbarians.
Are these Russians "barbarians or are they saints"?—those were exactly the words used by French critics in attempting to fathom the causes of the sudden tide of interest in Russian Literature in France. The critics were seized with the impression that Russian authors did not merely write novels, but celebrated mass as it were, with the "why and wherefore" ever present in all they wrote. There was a strange fascination in the "new gospel" these writers were preaching. In their works new horizons and a new world were being opened to the astonished gaze of their Western European readers.
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