Levítoff

Another folk-novelist of the same generation was LEVÍTOFF (1835 or 1842–1877). He described chiefly those portions of southern Middle Russia which are in the border-land between the wooded parts of the country and the treeless prairies. His life was extremely sad. He was born in the family of a poor country priest in a village of the province of Tambóf, and was educated in a clerical school of the type described by Pomyalóvskiy. When he was only sixteen he went on foot to Moscow, in order to enter the university, and then moved to St. Petersburg. There he was soon involved in some “students’ affair,” and was exiled, in 1858, to Shenkúrsk, in the far north, and next removed to Vólogda. Here he lived in complete isolation from everything intellectual, and in awful poverty verging on starvation. Not until three years later was he allowed to return to Moscow, and, being absolutely penniless, he made all the journey from Vólogda to Moscow on foot, earning occasionally a few shillings by clerical work done for the cantonal Board of some village. These years of exile left a deep trace upon all his subsequent life, which he passed in extreme poverty, never finding a place where he could settle, and drowning in drink the sufferings of a loving, restless soul.

During his early childhood he was deeply impressed by the charm and quiet of village life in the prairies, and he wrote later on: “This quietness of village life passes before me, or rather flies, as something really living, as a well defined image. Yes, I distinctly see above our daily life in the village, somebody gliding — a little above the cross of our church, together with the light clouds — somebody light and soft of outline, having the mild and modest face of our prairie girls.”... Thus, after many years spent amidst the untold sufferings of my present existence, do I represent to myself the genius of country life.”

The charm of the boundless prairies of South Russia — the Steppes — is so admirably rendered by Levítoff that no Russian author has surpassed him in the poetical description of their nature, excepting Koltsóff in his poetry. Levítoff was a pure flower of the Steppes, full of the most poetical love of his birthplace, and he certainly must have suffered deeply when he was thrown amidst the intellectual proletarians in the great, cold, and egotistic capital of the Nevá. Whenever he stayed at St. Petersburg or at Moscow he always lived in the poorest quarters, somewhere on the outskirts of the town: they reminded him of his native village; and when he thus settled amongst the lowest strata of the population, he did so, as he wrote himself, “to run away from the moral contradictions, the artificiality of life, the would-be humanitarianism, and the cut and dried imaginary superiority of the educated classes.” He could not live, for even a couple of months in succession, in relative well-being: he began to feel the gnawings of conscience, and it ended in his leaving behind his extremely poor belongings and going somewhere — anywhere where he would be poorer still, amidst other poor who live from hand to mouth.

I do not even know if I am right in describing Levítoff’s works as novels. They are more like shapeless, lyrical-epical improvisations in prose. Only in these improvisations we have not the usual hackneyed presentment of the writer’s compassion for other people’s sufferings. It is an epical description of what the author has lived through in his close contact with all classes of people of the poorest sort, and its lyric element is the sorrow that he himself knew — not in imagination — as he lived that same life; the sorrow of want, of family troubles, of hopes unsatisfied, of isolation, of all sorts, of oppression, and of all sorts of human weakness. The pages which he has given to the feelings of the drunken man and to the ways in which this disease — drunkenness — takes possession of men, are something really terrible. Of course, he died young — from an inflammation of the lungs caught one day in January, as he went in an old summer coat to get ten shillings from some petty editor at the other end of Moscow.

The best known work of Levítoff is a volume of Sketches from the Steppes; but he has also written scenes from the life of the towns, under the title of Moscow Dens and Slums, Street Sketches, etc., and a volume to which some of his friends must have given the title of Sorrows of the Villages, the High Roads, and the Towns. In the second of these works we find a simply terrifying collection of tramps and outcasts of the large cities — of men sunk to the lowest level of city slum-life, represented without the slightest attempt at idealising them — and yet deeply human, Sketches from the Steppes remains his best work. It is a collection of poems, written in prose, full of the most admirable descriptions of prairie nature and of tiny details from the life of the peasants, with all their petty troubles, their habits, customs, and superstitions. Plenty of personal reminiscences are scattered through these sketches, and one often finds in them a scene of children playing in the meadows of the prairies and living in accordance with the life of nature, in which every little trait is pictured with a warm, tender love; and almost every. where one feels the unseen tears of sorrow, shed by the author.

Amongst the several sketches of the life and work of Levítoff there is one — written with deep feeling and containing charming idyllic features from his childhood as well as a terrible account of his later years — by A. Skabitchévskiy, in his History of Modern Russian Literature.