these beliefs were powerless to relieve the dislocations and suffering of peasant life.
The basic cause of the madness and near madness of the populist age was the unresolved (and largely unacknowledged) conflict that existed within the intelligentsia between its relentless determination to see things as they really are and its passionate desire to have them better. It was the old conflict between harsh facts and high ideals-lifted, however, to a new level of intensity by the conviction that facts and ideals were but two aspects of one Truth. The populists followed Mikhailovsky in contending that both objective and subjective truth were contained in the Russian word pravda and that both must be realized by those 'servants of truth,' the Russian intelligentsia. The optimistic Comtian belief that there was no contradiction between the truths of science and those of morality was particularly hard to sustain in Russia, where analysis tended to lead to revulsion and ideals to utopianism.
The agony of populist art resulted essentially from its unique sense of tension between things as they are and as they should be. The tension between the limpid realism of Tolstoy's novels and the muddled moralism of his religious tracts is a classic illustration. But this conflict is illustrated even more dramatically in the brief career of Vsevolod Garshin, one of the greatest short-story writers of modern Russia.
Garshin was born in the first year of Alexander's reign, and he had an early brush with the 'new men of the sixties' when his mother eloped with a revolutionary, taking the four-year-old Garshin with her. He read Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? at the age of eight and developed a life-long interest in the natural sciences while at the gymnasium. With his first short story, 'Four Days,' in 1877, he proved himself a master of clipped realism. It is a compelling, semi-autobiographical account of a Russian volunteer lying wounded for four days on the battlefield, driven almost to madness not so much by his own suffering as by his inability to explain why he killed a poor Egyptian peasant fighting for the Turks.
When a Pole made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of a Tsarist minister in February, 1880, Garshin suddenly became possessed with the
idea that he must save the life of the young would-be assassin. Garshin wrote and visited the minister, but all to no avail, as the Pole was led through the streets, humiliated, and publicly hanged, in an obvious effort to discourage further terrorism. Garshin had never been a terrorist, but this action and the general reaction that set in in the 1880's demonstrated to him the illusion of the populist belief that there could ever be an alternative to the horror and cruelty of the real world. Uspensky had already reached that conclusion in his mammoth study of the Russian countryside, The Power of the Earth, which proved the prelude to insanity. Garshin, just before he too went insane, suggested in the manner of Dostoevsky's Idiot that perhaps insanity was the form that sainthood must now assume in the world. His masterpiece of 1883, 'The Red Flower,' tells of a man committed to an insane asylum because of his neurotic preoccupation with ridding the world of evil. Removed from the real world, he clearly does go mad-imagining that all the evil in the world is concentrated in one red flower in the courtyard. Plucking the red flower becomes in a sense the dying gesture of the modern Don Quixote, for whom there is no longer any place in the real world. He is found dead in the garden.
When they placed him on the stretcher, they tried to loosen his hand and take out the red flower. But the hand stiffened, and he took his trophy down into the grave.1
The dark thought that those within asylums are more complete human beings than those who commit them became a recurrent theme of Russian literature-from Chekhov's uncharacteristically terrifying tale Ward No. 6 to the cri de coeur of the 1960's by the dissident writer whom Soviet authorities had sent to a mental institution: Ward 7 by Valery Tarsis.
By the narrow standards of physiological realism painting was bound to be the most successful art medium, and the painters of the populist era felt generally less deeply perplexed than writers or composers. Yet the history of painting and, even more, of its impact during this period illustrates the same movement from realism to moral agony and madness that was characteristic of much populist art. The story is told succinctly in one of Garshin's short stories, 'The Artists,' in which an innocuous painter of idealized landscapes is contrasted with another artist, Riabinin, who seeks to render realistically the expressions of suffering on the face of workmen and finally abandons painting to become a village schoolmaster.2
The real-life counterpart of Garshin's hero was the new school of painters known as the 'wanderers' (peredvizhniki). They were a kind of artistic by-product of the iconoclastic revolution. Rebelling in 1862 at the proposed subject for the painting competition in the St. Petersburg academy,
'The Entrance of Odin into Valhalla,' they resolved to paint henceforth only live Russian subjects and to use a remorselessly realistic style. They accepted ostracism from the academies with populist eagerness and proved true 'wanderers' in their search both for subject matter and places of exhibition.
The leader of this new school of painting was Ilya Repin, whose famous canvas of 1870-3, 'Haulers on the Volga,' may be regarded as the icon of populism. It presented a realistic portrayal of popular suffering in such a way as to arouse in the sensitive viewer's mind the hint of a better alternative. For behind the dark and beaten-down figures of the haulers there looms the distant, brightly colored boat itself; and, in the middle of the picture, a good- looking young boy has lifted up his head and is staring off out of the picture. To the young students who saw this picture, its meaning was clear: the boy was raising his head up in a first, subconscious act of defiance and was looking inarticulately to them, the student generation of Russia, to come and lead the suffering people to deliverance.
Recognizing the popularity of the new realistic style, the government enlisted the talents of one of Russia's best painters, Vasily Vereshchagin, to serve as official artistic chronicler of the Russo-Turkish War. But some of Vereshchagin's paintings were awesomely realistic in portraying the horrors of war and inspired emotions other than the intended one of patriotic exultation. His three-part study, 'All Quiet on the Shipka,' which showed a soldier gradually freezing to death, inspired Garshin to write a poem, 'The Exhibition of Vereshchagin,' contrasting the horror of the scene in the painting with the blase, well-dressed viewers walking past it.3
Another creative genius of the populist era, Modest Musorgsky, also tried to describe people at an art exhibition with a total realism that described the viewers as well as the paintings in his 'Pictures at an Exhibition.' Like Garshin's poem, Musorgsky's tone poem was part of a strange artistic quest for both realism and redemption which led to brilliant and original results.
Musorgsky was the most distinguished member of a group of musical iconoclasts known as the 'mighty handful' (moguchaia kuchka), or 'The Five,' whose rebellion from established musical conventions almost exactly parallels that of the 'wanderers' in art. This group sought to lead Russian music on a special path that would avoid sterile imitation of the West and also sought to 'wander' in search of new forms of musical construction. The organizer of the group and founder of the Free Music School, which became the populist rival to the conservatory, was Mily Balakirev, a native of Nizhny Novgorod, who gathered about him a group of talented musicians influenced by the new materialism and realism of the sixties: a
chemist, Borodin; a military engineer, Cui; a naval officer, Rimsky-Korsa-kov; and Musorgsky, a young military officer who had been devouring the works of Darwin and living in a typical student commune of the sixties. The mighty handful sought a new popular style of music; and Musorgsky went far toward creating one.
Musorgsky was the consummate 'man of the sixties' in his passion for realism and novelty, his rejection of
