LITERATURE***


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RUSSIA

ITS PEOPLE AND ITS LITERATURE

BY

EMILIA PARDO BAZAN

Translated from the Spanish

By FANNY HALE GARDINER

CHICAGO

A.C. McCLURG & CO.

1901




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.


Emilia Pardo Bazan, the author of the following critical survey of
Russian literature, is a Spanish woman of well-known literary
attainments as well as wealth and position. Her life has been spent in
association with men of mark, both during frequent sojourns at Madrid
and at home in Galicia, "the Switzerland of Spain," from which province
her father was a deputy to Cortes.

Books and libraries were almost her only pleasures in childhood, as she
was allowed few companions, and she says she could never apply herself
to music. By the time she was fourteen she had read widely in history,
sciences, poetry, and fiction, excepting the works of the French
romanticists, Dumas, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, which were forbidden
fruit and were finally obtained and enjoyed as such. At sixteen she
married and went to live in Madrid, where, amid the gayeties of the
capital, her love for literature suffered a long eclipse.

Her father was obliged, for political reasons, to leave the country
after the abdication of Amadeus, and she accompanied him in a long and
to her profitable period of wandering, during which she learned French,
English, and Italian, in order to read the literatures of those tongues.
She also plunged deep into German philosophy, at first out of curiosity,
because it was then in vogue; but she confesses a debt of gratitude to
it nevertheless.

While she was thus absorbed in foreign tongues and literatures, she
remained almost entirely ignorant of the new movement in her own land,
led by Valera, Galdos, and Alarcon. The prostration which characterized
the reign of Isabella II. had been followed by a rejuvenation born of
the Revolution of 1868. When this new literature was at last brought to
her notice, she read it with delighted surprise, and was immediately
struck by something resembling the spirit of Cervantes, Hurtado, and
other Spanish writers of old renown. Inspired by the possibility of this
heredity, she resolved to try novel-writing herself,--a thought which
had never occurred to her when her idea of the novel had been bounded by
the romantic limitations of Victor Hugo and his suite. But if the novel
might consist of descriptions of places and customs familiar to us, and
studies of the people we see about us, then she would dare attempt it.
As yet, however, no one talked of realism or naturalism in Spain; the
tendency of Spanish writers was rather toward a restoration of elegant
Castilian, and her own first novel followed this line, although
evidently inspired by the breath of realism as far as she was then aware
of it. The methods and objects of the French realists became fully
manifest to her shortly afterward; for, being in poor health, she went
to Vichy, where in hours of enforced leisure she read for the first time
Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Daudet. The result led her to see the
importance of their aims and the force of their art, to which she added
the idea that each country should cultivate its own tradition while
following the modern methods. These convictions she embodied first in a
prologue to her second novel, "A Wedding Journey," and then in a series
of articles published in the "Epoca" at Madrid, and afterward in Paris;
these she avers were the first echoes in Spain of the French realist
movement.

All of her novels have been influenced by the school of art to which she
has devoted her attention and criticism, and her study of which has well
qualified her for the essays contained in this volume. This work on
Russian literature was published in 1887, but prior to its appearance
in print the Senora de Bazan was invited to read selections from it
before the Ateneo de Madrid,--an honor never before extended to a woman,
I believe.

Few Spanish women are accustomed to speaking in public, and she thus
describes her own first attempt in 1885, when, during the festivities
attending the opening of the first railway between Madrid and Coruna,
the capital of