for mankind exists only in distinct nations. Men of genius are the spokesmen of the nations. The author is a prophet; he creates out of his thoughts and feelings; in sorrow doth he bring forth his children. The truly great author invariably speaks a "new word." Puškin was such a genius and prophet of the Russian people. Puškin had had personal experience of the contrasts between Russian and Europeanism, but had transcended these contrasts, and, being a great genius, had created a new and perfectly independent type, a genuinely Russian type which must be counterposed to the European.[1] Grigor'ev considers that full and accurate expression of the Russian folk-spirit is given in the figure of Bělkin and similar characters in Puškin's works—Dubrovskii, for instance, and the captain's daughter. The Russian soul first secured complete expression through Puškin. Pečorin, on the other hand, the central figure of Lermontov's book The Hero of our own Time, was an unrussian, an antirussian type, such as Europe, or rather European romanticism, had forced upon the Russians. The Russian type was the peaceful, good-natured, unassuming man, with his simple healthy mind and sound sentiments. Pečorin, the brilliant, passionate hero, seemed to Grigor'ev an embodiment of the predatory type. But among Lermontov's figures Grigor'ev finds that of Maksim Maksimyč congenial. Puškin's Tatjana, he considered, incorporated at once the positive feminine type and the positive Russian ideal.
It will thus be seen that Grigor'ev does not look upon art as the mirror of life, but as an instrument for the guidance of life, presenting positive ideals in the types it creates. In conformity with this view Grigor'ev assigns a constructive and positive task to literary criticism. Criticism must be "organic," the word being used in much the same sense as that in which Homjakov spoke of the church as an organism, being used as it was employed by Saint-Simon and above all by Carlyle. We trace here, too, an idea of Carlyle, a writer who exercised much influence on Grigor'ev, and even on the Russian's literary style. Grigor'ev elaborates Carlyle's distinction
- ↑ Grigor'ev describes the creative process more or less in the following way. The great writer becomes acquainted with the figures depicted by foreign poets, but he does not take these over to make them his own, for they serve merely to arouse kindred images in his mind. The Byronic types became part of Puškin's mental experience, but these were not the types he gave to the world as his own; he fought with them, and his own Russian types were the issue of the struggle.
