In the study of literature, as in other fields of learning, there exists something that may be termed “the inertia of science”. Its essence lies in the employment of premises and formulae considered indisputable by those engaged in research. This, of course, is natural: the purpose of the history of science is to establish a certain number of general principles accepted thereafter as universal. Circumstances arise, however, which call for a revision of some of these generally accepted principles.

These circumstances may arise as a result of something taking place within this branch of learning, or in connection with a change in a wider sphere to which the given science belongs. It appears to uS that in view of such a change certain premises customarily regarded as indisputable by historians ©f literature require to be, if not completely revised, at any rate extended, and that this applies to some aspects of the study of Shakespeare.

For example, now that the immense sources of material on the history of the Eastern peoples have been used in the study of the general historical process, we can view differently and more comprehensively the trend of world history in general, and such aspects of it as, let us say, the Renaissance. Another important circumstance is that this particular epoch, with which Shakespeare’s name is inseparably associated, is now being given a new interpretation by historians, especially that aspect of it which identifies the Renaissance with humanism. This necessitates a revision of the current conceptions of the Middle Ages. These, then, are a few of the trends that should be followed, in my opinion, in striving to “overcome inertia” in the study of Shakespeare.

The book on Shakespeare, by M. and D. Urnovs ¹ {Shakespeare. His Hero and His Time), was prepared with a view to publishing it in 1964, the quater-centenary of his birth.

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item from a historical quest.onna.re WhatiJfXn fhe English epoch? The Urnovs oharac ®^ris® _{b peare} then, was the last and most’emUient^epresentaUve^of^FTenaissance culture in England.

^a™’n°^{f C}°^UrSe’ ^{Eagland herself}- ^{Its ri}se in these countries was not simultaneous, as the authors are well aware: in some it came earlier m others later It emerged first of all in Italy in the 14th century!

i g and was the last country in which it appeared. Therefore the fourth stage of the answer is: English literature, or, to be exact the English drama of the late 16th and early 17th centuries marks the culminating point in the development of European Renaissance literature. Since the peak of English drama is Shakespeare’s work his name concludes the literary history of the European, or more precisely, the West European, Renaissance.

This must be dealt with at more length. That a West European literature, a regional literature, existed during the European Re-naissimce, is beyond doubt. Regional literature is a tangible historical S: ,^{0n varyin}g geographical scales, with changing frontiers,

^{E rmg de}g^re^es °f inner unity, different proportions of component parts, regional literatures are a feature of many epochs in the history ol world literature. In some cases the character of this literature is

n!I¹S₁^eX?^^ed’. ^aa’ rl°J ^mstance’ the Alexandrian literature of the Hellenistic period. The important thing is to discern the historic

, / ^^poa ^^{ch a} regional literature came into existence and persisted. At different historical periods this soil varied. For example during the period before the formation of nations, a regional litera ture emerged upon one particular basis; when nations had formed it arose on another basis. If we study from this standpoint the regional literature that emerged in the West European countries during the Renaissance, it should be noted that this literature arose during the slow, uneven but persistent transformation of the various peoples of Western Europe into nations. The Renaissance is an intermediate period between the Middle Ages as the last stage in the history of peoples, and modern times as the first stage in the history of nations.

It is ol importance to take this circumstance into consideration 1 we want to understand by what social stratum the unity of Renaissance culture in West European countries was upheld, the founda-

T °™^ch11 rested was the intellectual stratum, and this was indisputably international within, of course, the scope of its time t he point has long since been stressed by all historians of the Re, ^dlfet^ance- ^rhe fact that the active element in the Renaissance was the intellectual does not mean that the culture of that lime wus solely confined to a narrow milieu. The Urnovs do not use the word intellectuals in their book, they speak of the humanists, but to historians writing of the Renaissance these are synonymou^ As the authors point out, “humanism as an integral system of concepts was accessible to a narrow circle. The humanists were few, but the humanistic philosophy, freed from medieval dogma, became the heritage of an entire epoch.”

At the same time, it must be taken into account that the Renaissance epoch was not stationary, it was a process. In the course of time its characteristic phenomena altered, lost some features and acquired others. The exponents of the Renaissance were themselves affected by this process: as the concept of nations developed, the foundation weakened upon which the “internationality” of the humanists rested. Shakespeare stood not upon the threshold, but within the gates, so to speak, of the nations’ epoch in Western Europe; at that time “internationality” was built on a foundation differing from that of Petrarch’s day. This, too, is an indication that during the second half of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, English literature, particularly English drama and, consequently, Shakespeare, were not only a late, but the last stage in the great regional literature of the Renaissance in Western Europe.

It is not a question of Western Europe alone. The idea expressed by the Renaissance, as is well known, was humanism. In their book on Shakespeare, the Urnovs speak of humanism as a new trend in the spiritual life of not only Western but also Central Europe. And this is perfectly justified. Renaissance phenomena in art, literature and science were to be observed in those centuries among the peoples of Central Europe. It should he added, among those of Eastern Europe as well. In our day, this is an indisputable fact for scholars engaged in Renaissance research, as may be seen in that admirable book, The Italian Renaissance and Slavonic Literatures of the 15th-16th Centuries, by I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov. Shakespeare marks the culminating point in Renaissance literature in Europe as a whole.

Another point one would like to make here is that there is a tendency—a result of inertia—to refer to the Renaissance exclusively on the loftiest of levels. It would be hard to find any published work on the subject in which bombastic remarks upon the prodigious upheaval experienced by mankind are not included.

This, however, always applies to the West European Renaissance. We know, of course, that upheavals which prove of revolutionary significance for all mankind, may take place in a group of countries, or even in one alone. Such, for example, was the English industrial revolution. Can the West European, or even the European Renaissance in general, be placed under the heading ol such upheavals—localised in their emergence, but universal in their

It would be more correct to say that the Renaissance m itseli constituted a momentous progressive turning-point in the historic path of mankind; not because, having received its impetus m one country, it then affected every other, but because it occurred at a definite phase of their history among other civilised nations. In each case it was observed to appear independently. What has been called the Renaissance in the history of European peoples was a universal, and not a local, phenomenon.

Renaissance took place in Italy. What was the position of Italy at that time in relation to other peoples of Western Europe? It was an ancient land, an active agent of history, the land that could boast, in that part of Europe, the longest and most uninterrupted history, that possessed her antiquity, and her Middle Ages of many centuries. In the 14th century it was the country that possessed the richest cultural heritage in Western and Central Europe.

This heritage embraced all that antiquity had given to Europeans, that is to say, the culture of ancient Greece and ancient Rome; all that had belonged to the Middle Ages, within the boundaries of the Roman Empire of the Christian era. Moreover, as the result of the movement of her own history Italy was then the one European country ahead of all the rest in the general European historical process.

Rut was she the only country to possess a history and a culture such as these? After all, Ryzantium could also look back upon a history of parallel length and unbroken continuity, which included a highly developed antiquity, and its own widely developed Middle Ages. Byzantium was for the peoples of Eastern Europe what Italy was for the Western and Central European peoples.

And what of the countries beyond Europe? The peoples of Iran, India and China could boast an equally long history. Their civilisation was on just as high a level, and in some fields far richer. Now, at a certain crucial moment in the history of these ancient civilised peoples, phenomena appeared which closely resembled those known in Europe by the term “Renaissance”. They found particularly vivid expression in the luxuriant and original flowering of literature, art, social thought and science. In Italy this began in the 14th century; in Iran and contiguous regions of North-West India and Central Asia, in the 11th century; in China, at a still earlier date, in the 8th century. The Renaissance may be sensed as a parallel process, in its essentials, in many countries, if we read with close attention the verses of poets such as Petrarch, Ronsard, Ruda-ki, Saadi, Hafiz, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Po Chii-i. We know these poets well, but individually; had we become acquainted with them side by side in a single series of volumes entitled A Treasury of Poetry of the World Renaissance, their creations would have shone out with a new and dazzling brilliance. This would have proved a far more convincing argument than many historical works in favour of considering the Renaissance as a universal phenomenon.

However, this is not the place for detailed research on the Renaissance as a world-wide phenomenon. We shall only stress the point that it was a movement. History presents it as a tidal wave surging over the vast continent of Eurasia, or, more correctly, of Afro-Eura-sia, since North Africa had from ancient times constituted one historical whole with the Mediterranean countries of Europe and ¹ Asia. Beginning in the 8th century on the eastern frontiers of the Eurasian continent—the shores of the Pacific, the movement ended

It is understood, of course, that throughout those nine centuries of the world Renaissance, history could not remain stationary. The actual disparity of time in the appearance of the Renaissance in different countries is evidence of the movement of history. In the case of some Eastern countries, their historical development brought about their Renaissance earlier than in Italy. And there is nothing surprising in this: in those remote days, the great and ancient peoples of the Orient were more advanced than those of the West. From the 16th century onward, Europe began to overtake Asia, and the further, the more decisive became the advance. _

Another circumstance which should not be forgotten is that since the Renaissance was a movement, and that movement, a historical one, its destiny was subject to the general course of history. That is why the phenomena of the Renaissance did not have a permanent form. Even in the same country they gradually underwent alteration in both content and appearance. They were all the more varied m the changing history of different countries; in each country, at every historic juncture, they remained fundamentally individual. The development of the Renaissance as a whole presented, then, a picture of an especial character: its phenomena in one country might gradually weaken and eventually disappear, while simultaneously, in another country they might be flourishing. Rut still, if we take the Renaissance movement as a whole, from its historical emergence to its historical end, it is permissible to speak of the actual world-wide Renaissance epoch as lasting from the 8th to the Kith centuries.

It should be pointed out that the movement we know by this name arose, as a rule, in the more ancient countries, rich in history, and subsequently spread to other, historically younger, countries. This was the case in the Far East, where the Chinese Renaissance called into existence similar phenomena in Korea and Japan; it was also the case in the Middle East, where the Indo-Iranian-West-ern Asian Renaissance evoked similar phenomena among the Transcaucasian peoples; and so it was in Europe, where the Italian Renaissance overspread the countries of Western, Central and Eastern Europe, even penetrating to the Transcaucasian countries—for example, Armenia. In Armenia, the national culture revealed an unusual intermingling of the elements of the Oriental Renaissance with those of the Occidental Renaissance. This necessitates drawing a distinction between the autochthonic, or indigenous, Renaissance, and that introduced or reflected from some other source. The Renaissance in China, in the Indo-Iranian-Western Asian group of countries and in Italy, where it arose out of the development of their own histories, was purely and completely autochthonic. In other countries it was reflected. .

sance phenomena does not render them any the less expressive of the epoch, Ihe history of Renaissance drama may be taken as evidence of this. In Europe, the highest level attained in Renaissance drama was not that of the Italian drama produced in the home of the European Renaissance, but the drama appearing in England, one of the countries to which the movement born in Italy had spread.

Similar instances may be observed in the general history of this world-wide movement. Renaissance drama emerged in China in the 13th and 14th centuries, the period of what was known as the Yuan drama. Rut the finest achievement in this field, and in this part of the world, was the Japanese drama of the 17th and 18th centuries, which appeared in a country where Renaissance phenomena were not autochthonic.

Two names stand out in the history of Renaissance drama on two opposite sides of the world, the names of William Shakespeare and Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Two great names: but as regards the breadth and nature of the problems treated, the power of artistic expressiveness and depth in subject-matter of universal human interest, William Shakespeare undoubtedly takes precedence.

Are we not, then, justified in saying that Shakespeare was the genius not only of English, of West European, of European drama in general, but of the world’s Renaissance drama? And is not this addition only a fraction of those new things about Shakespeare that can be contributed by us, by our research scholars, in the year 1964?

It is of the utmost importance for the Urnovs that the work of the great dramatist dates from the close of the Renaissance epoch. For this reason, it is essential to understand the nature of Renaissance drama in general and all that happened to it during the final stage of its historical existence.

Historians of the theatre often say that Renaissance drama lies midway between the open-air mystery or miracle play form of dramatic art and the literary-theatre production. One may agree with the general idea of this. Theatricals in the Middle Ages were performances for the masses, and therefore required no special settings; the town square, the grounds of an abbey, an open space in front of a castle, or the large porch of a church or cathedral, could serve as a stage. The piece enacted was either a mystery or miracle play, or some simple farcical sketch. Theatre art of this type is found in various forms everywhere: in the East and in the West, in Asia and in Europe. They might be wordless: such were the pantomimes, dance or circus scenes, and processions. Wherever speech was used, it svas generally accorded an auxiliary role, as a medium in the enacting of a tale, already familiar to most of the audience.

But with the opening of the Renaissance epoch this situation underwent a gradual change. If drama is to be understood as a theatrical production in which the elementary plot has become a fully worked-out subject, calculated to suit specifically theatrical methods of treatment, and if the spoken parts are accorded their full significance, then it must be admitted that drama—in the form existing during the feudal stage of man’s development-appeared precisely at the time of the Renaissance. The whole history of the theatre convinces us of this. Such, for example, was the Yuan drama of the 13th and 14th centuries in China, the first Renaissance drama to emerge. Such, too, was the No drama of the 14th and 15th centuries in Japan. _TT , . ,

But this was not yet a literary theatre. Ihe Urnovs book contains a very interesting chapter entitled “A Partiality lor Music , in which the authors point to the importance that music was accorded in Shakespeare’s plays. This does not refer to stage directions such as “flourish”, “trumpets sound”, “hautboys play”, etc. “Music, the authors say, “is included in Shakespeare’s dramatic conception and in the subject of his plays; it introduces nuances into their noetic atmosphere, and is employed by him in the solution ol his ideological and aesthetic problems.” These words go to the heart ol

music in the plays does not enter into rivalry with the speech ol the characters, but supplements it and at times expresses something words leave unsaid, either because the poet hesitates to go so tar, or because he senses that words lack the necessary power and therefore relies on the spontaneity of musical expression.” It seems to me that if it were necessary to point to something m dramaturgy that would proclaim it at once as belonging to the Renaissance, no better indication could be found than music. The authors’ remarks regarding the place of music in Shakespeare’s drama might be applied without modification to the music in the Yuan and No dramas.

This is easily understood. Renaissance drama was still theatre, and music enters into the element of theatre. Not in an illustrative capacity, as an accompaniment to the text, but as an element of dramaturgy itself. The authors of the book on Shakespeare expressed this idea as follows: “In the Renaissance theatre music was the organising groundwork of the entire course of the show; it governed not only the actors’ speech, but also their movements and their

This, however, refers to Renaissance dramaturgy when the epoch was at its height. Towards its close things were changing. Many instances are given by the Urnovs of the mention and discussion o music in Shakespeare’s plays, and this is no longer Renaissance. When music is discussed in a play, it means that music has become something external, A necessary element of life is not talked of: it is lived. Neither in the Yuan nor the No drama do the characters

philosophise about music: they simply live in it. The talk of music in Shakespeare’s plays is clear evidence that the end of the purely Renaissance dramaturgy had arrived.

This was precisely what had happened. Drama had grown more and more into a production encroaching on the literary field, “dramatic literature”, as it was later called. Increasing importance was given to the text of the play. True, the era of the literary theatre had not yet begun in the Renaissance; it was to be launched in modern times—with the theatre of the Baroque and the Enlightenment periods. But the approach to the drama as a literary work—“dramatic” though it might be in its nature, made itself felt everywhere as the Renaissance progressed: in Chinese drama of the 15th and 16th centuries, in 16th-century Spanish plays, in 17th-century Japanese plays. Striking examples of this trend towards a literary theatre are afforded by English drama in the second half of the 16th and the opening of the 17th centuries, and they include the plays of Shakespeare. They do indeed belong to the close of the Renaissance and mark the beginning of a new stage in dramaturgy.

This should not be regarded as a mere historical detail. The years when Shakespeare was alive, writing his plays—that is, the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of modern times—determined not only the general character and form but also the historical place of his plays. It also determined their content, and it is this content that leads us to discuss Shakespeare anew in our own day.

At the end of their book, the Urnovs mention past Shakespearean anniversaries, two of which—those of 1939 and of 1964—“were separated by events of truly Shakespearean tragical quality”.

A profound thought, and one which, it seems, will be understood by everyone. And, in analysing Shakespeare’s plays, the authors suggest a great deal. It is with more than a purely theatrical interest that we now see a play such as Richard III or Macbeth, in which the characters shed human blood and defy all law.

Shakespeare’s time was a tragic time, and it is this tragic quality that was expressed in his plays with such superb mastery. It is this that evokes a response in us in our day. It seems to me that the book by the Urnovs is, in itself, a response of this kind. The voice of the research scholar, specialising in English literature, in Shakespeare, is heard in it, and at the same time one senses the emotions oi the man of our day who lives by all that belongs to our epoch.

m 1964 about Shakespeare and his contemporaries is the idea of crisis, crisis inherent in the time itself in which these people lived.

This is understandable. Shakespeare’s lifetime fell between the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. On the socio-economic plane, this covered the concluding phase of the feudal era and the

initial stage of the capitalist era. The Netherlands Revolution, the first bourgeois revolution in history, was a thing of the past, but was still not so very distant from Shakespeare. Ahead lay the English Revolution, in which many historians discern the outset of the capitalist era. On the cultural-historical plane, it covered the decline of the Renaissance and the dawn of the Enlightenment period.

Yet Shakespeare’s time possessed its own particular content in England. It was not only the decline of the Renaissance, is was the Renaissance itself; at all events, as the authors maintain, it was the most decisive stage of the Renaissance for England: “Whereas the Renaissance in Europe had extended over centuries and had taken the form of a many-stage process—as, for example, in Italy, here in England it had hastened its advance in everything—state, society and intellects and in its decisiveness, intensity and brevity showed a close resemblance to a revolutionary upheaval.” One might add that brevity, even haste, and at the same time decisiveness and intensity, are features inherent in revolutionary upheavals when they take place in countries that find themselves left behind by others, and make a sudden impetuous leap forward. Consequently, as the authors point out, the most decisive stage in the great progressive upheaval in English history took place within one man’s life time, and a short one at that; hardly had England recovered from the period of feudal anarchy than “the time was out of joint”. To recover from anarchy evidently entailed a transition to the Renaissance; “the time was out of joint” means that the crisis of the Renaissance had already arrived.

But what was this Renaissance itself? A period when art, literature and science flourished as never before? This is an obvious understatement. The opening of the capitalist era? This is simply inaccurate, especially in the light of world history.

The Renaissance did not mark the opening of the bourgeois-capitalist era; yet this new and, in comparison with the preceding, far higher stage of the historical process could not have begun without the preparations carried out during the Renaissance. Avery definite change on the plane of ideas and culture was necessary before the Middle Ages could be done away with and the modern age inaugurated. We are in the habit of calling this the turn towards humanism. The terms “Renaissance” and “humanism” have become almost synonymous in this respect.

But in this identification of the Renaissance with humanism there lies, it seems to me, a grave error. Although this epoch, undoubtedly, is associated with the movement that may be called humanistic, it does not mean that humanism was unknown until the Renaissance. It is important, I consider, that the authors of this hook on Shakespeare overcame the inertia of their branch of study. Humanism existed in the ancient world, and in the Middle Ages; moreover, it was widespread in all European and Asian countries whose

history had known its own antiquity and its own Middle Ages. Humanism was the manifestation of humanitas—humaneness, a principle underlying all human conduct; but it was subject to alteration in scale and specific features. For this reason, the humanism of the Renaissance may be referred to solely as a certain historically defined aspect of this eternal principle.

By what traits is this historical aspect distinguished? The authors offer the customary answer to this question. They discern the essence of Renaissance humanism in “the emergence of the personality, freed from the thousand-year shackles of medieval dogmas”, in “the appearance of a man possessing a consciousness and a pattern of behaviour of an entirely new type”. What were those “religious dogmas”? “... The dogma of the duality and wickedness of human nature, the helplessness of man confronted by higher powers, the frailty of earthly existence,” the writers reply. In what, then, did this new type of consciousness” consist? In daring creativeness, in free, real, active thought on a broad theoretical and practical scale, intended to supplant the old constraint, rigorism and sterile scholasticism. What was “the new pattern of behaviour”? “The daily practice of self-affirmation, spiritual staunchness, and an inexhaustible affirmation of life, as a basic means of overcoming every form of tragic wretchedness.”

This is all true—precisely this, and not the invectives commonly used by Renaissance historians in speaking of the “infamous” Middle Ages. As a rule, this period is designated only as “gloomy”; though it lasted for centuries, it was allegedly filled with nothing more than the morti fication of the flesh. The extreme accusation levelled at the Middle Ages was the reiteration of the “sinister” formula: “Philosophy is the servant of theology.” That is why I find it important that the Urnovs overcame in their book the “inertia of science”, which owed its origin to prejudice or simply to inadequate knowledge of facts.

We need not go deeply here into the question of whether medieval times were indeed an unrelieved inferno which mankind endured for a thousand years until rescued by the Renaissance. This view would mean, first and foremost, an underestimation of man, his powers and his labours. Let us confine ourselves to recalling that those same “gloomy Middle Ages” witnessed the formation of allembracing systems such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, which, though philosophical in essence, were presented — as was natural at the time—under the heading of religions.

Other things that should be recalled are Gothic architecture, the architecture and sculpture of Buddhist temples, Moorish palaces and gardens. One should ponder on the brilliant poetry of the troubadours and minnesingers, the epic and romance of chivalry, the merry popular farces with their sparkling humour, the stirring public shows, such as mystery and miracle plays, and many other things present in various forms and on various levels in the culture

of West and East. The Middle Ages remain as one of the great est. epochs in the history of mankind. Does the fact that it was, in many respects, also a grim and difficult time for people, necessarily mean that the Renaissance led them into paradise? “This inspired age was not cloudless,” the Urnovs write in their book, “it was a time of unremitting strife. Its keynote was austerity rather than smiling happiness. All that had been disturbed in the revolutionary process and found no place for itself, rose to block the path of new thought and activity. It was marked by religious clashes, wars, enmity between social strata, castes, groups and persons, and by political con

During the Renaissance epoch the things to be fought against became clear to people; they realised whose power they had to rid themselves of, what form of enslavement they had to^ cast off: it was “the thousand-year shackles of medieval dogmas”. Let us reject the word “thousand-year”. Is it conceivable that the transition from the slave-owning society to the feudal system could be unrelieved misery from the very outset, and that it was not a necessary and, for that time, a progressive move in history? It seems, then, that the fault lies not with the medieval period, but with the fact that at a definite moment in its history dogmas appeared in its philosophy.

Religious and philosophic teachings of any kind, unless they move with the times, unless they continue to develop and are supplemented by new elements, are threatened by two dangers: first, dogmatism, that is, the transformation of free creative thought into dogma, and secondly, scepsis, that is, doubts of the value of a given doctrine in general. Scepsis may lead to something bad, to nihilism both intellectual and moral, or to something good—the fruitful reassessment of values. Dogmatism puts an end to all movement, and consequently, to the possibility of progress. By the end of the Middle Ages the prevailing religious-philosophical systems had indeed become the unyielding ramparts of dogma. Thus, the further development of these systems, and not only of these, but of society, culture and the individual, was blocked.

This is what occurred at least in the case of three systems: Confucianism, Christianity and Islam. In China, this found expression in Confucian “orthodoxy”, its dogmas were laid down in the famous code drawn up by K’ung Ying-ta in the 7th century and known as Wu-ching cheng-i (“The Five Books in their Correct Interpretation”). “Orthodoxy” made its appearance in Islam, too. Christian religious-philosophical thought was also transformed into a system of dogmas, a particularly striking expression of which is found in the doctrinal work of Thomas Aquinas.

Free-thinking people rebelled against this dogmatism, and the revolt followed two paths: scepsis and free thought. The struggle, if it was to succeed, required a reliable new basis. This was created by the Renaissance. The finest minds of this period were in opposi

lion to dogma both in religion and in philosophy, but their struggle was not conducted against religion as such, or against any special philosophy. The means resorted to in the struggle differed. In some cases they took the form of conversion to other trends of thought, other teachings, in particular, the mystical. In China, they took the form of Taoism, in opposition to Confucian dogma; in Buddhism, they expressed themselves in sects; in Islamic countries, in Sufism; in Christian countries, in what were known as heresies. Another form was to turn to reason, free creative thought. This stirring of the minds of men engendered what was known in the Renaissance times as humanism.

1 he Urnovs, in my opinion, offer a correct answer to the question, in what did the true essence of this Renaissance humanism consist? Everyone who had the boldness to consider himself “his own ma-kei shared in the spirit of the new time: “Man recognised his own worth, trusted to his own powers, put himself in the place of god.”

This last sentence does not necessarily mean that men of the Renaissance age had reached the stage where they fiercely denied god, became militant atheists or indulged in anti-religious excesses. Some of them were, no doubt, sceptics and free-thinkers, who believed in nothing. They might even have been princes of the church. All these things are well known. But they gave their formal support to religion, and the majority of humanists were sincerely religious. This was the case in Islamic and Christian countries. In China, the Renaissance was divorced from religion; as far as its theory was concerned, the change took place in the sphere of philosophical thought, but at the same time, the phrase “the individual has elevated him-seli to the level of god is equally applicable to Chinese humanism: it is sufficient to recall the idea expressed by Lu Hsien-shan (11391191) that it is not man who makes commentaries on the canonical books, but the books that make commentaries on him. It is as if someone in a Western country had said in the Middle Ages: I do not comment upon the Scriptures, they comment upon me.

The Middle Ages created their own humanism, with a definite principle of thought and conduct. Following the decline and fall of the slave-owning world that had seemed so great, society, its life and outlook had all to be built up anew. This called for inexhaustible strength and energy, and also the belief that this reconstruction was not only necessary but feasible.

Where were these powers and this faith to be sought? Only within one’s self, no other source being available. The rebuilding of the world, it seemed, would require powers that could make a man virtually omnipotent. This secret consciousness of the latent omnipotence of man found expression in conceptions which, for the thinkers of that historical phase, were the clearest and most comprehensible: in religion, in the conception of the deity as the embodiment of omnipotence. Interpreting his own powers in this way, a man acquired the intellectual and moral force needed for creative histor

ical work. It was this interpretation that constituted the essence of medieval humanism. It is also applicable to the Arab Middle Ages with their Islam, and the medieval China of Taoism and Buddhism.

While the reconstruction of society was being accomplished in the main, and the feudal world was following its course, this humanism which, at the outset, as the Urnovs observe, was characterised “by enthusiasm and passion rather than by a system of thinking”, gradually developed and assumed another shape. Formulae of strict exactitude made their appearance. At first, this was highly necessary and useful. It rendered the efforts 'or the further development of society more purposeful and assured. But the formulae could not keep pace with swiftly moving life; new ones were required, yet people still clung to the old, striving to follow these under changed conditions. Since the force of the old formulae—once actual — had now waned, the zealots of the old aimed at giving them an absolute and abstract shape, and thus the formerly living formulae became dogmas. Hence, the emergence of dogmatism, the chief stumbling block to man as he strove to advance along his historical path.

As a rule, when one source of strength fails, another appears-Once more, man found the source of strength within himself, but only by “elevating himself to god’s place”, and recognising that forces he had considered as inherent in the godhead, were perfectly human. Thus, a new foundation was created for humanistic, or human, activity, and upon this basis arose that splendid resurgence of culture which justifies in a certain measure the name of Renaissance.

Then, the unexpected happened: “...No matter what personal problems might be confronting Hamlet, no matter what his torments—his own character, his peculiar turn of mind are discernible everywhere, and through these the spiritual state of Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries, representatives of the young generation: it was a state of deep-seated perturbation,” we read in this book on Shakespeare. This perturbation was the outcome of the crisis in humanism, or to be exact, in the ideal of humanism: “Hamlet, his character, his emotional experiences and fate, give us an idea of how grave, and, for many adherents of humanism, how fatal, was the crisis of the humanistic ideal.”

Is it possible that the change once observed in medieval humanism was now taking place in Renaissance humanism? Could this, too, have become mere dogma? To a certain extent, it was so. The authors remind us that the humanists had been termed proud since they looked down upon others; they did so because they believed themselves to be the exponents of irrefutable truths. But, by Shakespeare ’s time.theseprinciplescould no longer be regarded as irrefutable truths. What the Urnovs said of Othello applies to these humanists: “He continued to think dogmatically, and went to the limit of unreasoning

pedantry in circumstances that called for broad views, sober flexibility, manly tact and restraint, and far-sighted trust.” Fine, apt words. But all the same, the most significant point in the crisis of Renaissance humanism, as the Urnovs correctly observed, was the collapse of the humanistic ideal. In the writers’ words, we may explain it as follows: the free and harmoniously developed individual, as a norm of life, proved to be a beautiful but Utopian idea of the humanists and sustained a collapse; “the cruel age of self-affirmation of absolutistbourgeois society emerged”.

In terms of time it was so. The outlines of the collapse of Renaissance humanism had been discernible while the outlines of the bourgeois-capitalist system took shape. It is clear that this collapse must have been deeply felt in Shakespeare’s England; at that time— and at no considerable historical distance—the outlines became visible of the bourgeois revolution that was to be of greater signi fi-cance for the European nations than the bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands. Hamlet’s frame of mind—the mind of a young man of that generation—“conveys the shattered spirit of the time”.

In what, then, was this perturbation of the time expressed? It would be reasonable enough to accept, as the underlying cause of the collapse of the humanistic ideal, the transition that had begun from one social system to another. “The Middle Ages (that is to say, feudalism.—N. K.) came into conflict in the people’s minds with the modern age (that is, the beginning of capitalism.—iV. K.) and it was plainly seen how complex, motley and contradictory this process proved to be,” the authors say in their book. Yet it would be more correct to say, I think that the transition constituted no more than the basis upon which the crisis of humanism arose.

The Urnovs quote in one place a profound observation made by N. I. Storozhenko, in his time one of our finest specialists in English literature: “...It is not the bloody events, nor the horrors, but the spirit shattered by passion, that becomes the main subject of tragedy.” Exactly—the shattered spirit.

What produced this state of the spirit, the “disillusionment” in Renaissance values, the sceptical reaction to Renaissance transports of enthusiasm? The answer lay in the very nature of Renaissance humanism.

This has been aptly noted by the Urnovs. In connection with their characterisation of John Lyly, one of Shakespeare’s forerunners, they pointed out: “... The Renaissance emancipation of man was fraught with crisis.” Why? Because the humanistic principle— “man is the measure of all things”—had come into use as a personal, practical motto: “All is permissible.” For, though the remnants

of Renaissance humanistic conceptions apparently still held their ground, “the norms of the inner self, the discipline of mind and feelings, no longer meant breadth and freedom, but licentiousness”.

Macbeth, as the authors point out, is “in the thrall of his own passion for vainglory; he hastens to rid his mind of moral princi-

pies and rules of conduct, dismissing them as trivial prejudices. His own turbulent energy, unbridled initiative, leads him to spur on his will-power. He strains towards his purpose, stifling the insistent doubts that trouble him, disregarding risk, overcoming obstacles, stopping at nothing.” This, then, is the heart of the matter. The path followed by Renaissance humanism led to crisis, both intellectual and moral.

The fact that the authors have led their reader to this conclusion is of great importance. At each stage in its historical path, humanism required a definite discipline of mind and feeling, a discipline both intellectual and moral. Medieval humanism had created this discipline: it was based upon religious conceptions of the world and man’s duty in it. Renaissance humanism set to work to create its own discipline, building it upon anthropological views; the intellectual side of this discipline was sought along the lines of rationalism. (It should be pointed out here that the traits of rationalism are inherent in the Renaissance, no matter where it appeared. For example, these features were clearly marked in what was known as neo-Confucianism, the philosophy of the Chinese Renaissance.) Although during the Renaissance epoch in Europe these features had not yet assumed the form of a definite system, their presence was felt everywhere—in natural science, history, and even in literature. But moral discipline was still drawn from religion, and this, by the way, reveals the transitional nature of that particular phase of history. Not until the opening of the Enlightenment era, the true age of rationalism, was a new intellectual discipline, merging with moral discipline, founded upon a strictly anthropological basis.

It was precisely because rationalism, the corner-stone of the new philosophy, was insufficiently developed in Renaissance conditions that the collapse of the moral discipline of humanism was inevitable. The Renaissance emancipation of man was indeed in itself fraught with crisis. The principle “man is the measure of all things”, that is, anthropological humanism, was indeed reduced to the motto, “all is permissible”. How strikingly this was demonstrated in the history of the Renaissance! How sharply defined it was in Shakespeare’s chronicle plays and tragedies! The balance between intellectual and moral discipline was struck—in reciprocal interdependence—only during the age of Enlightenment, which established rationalist philosophy. This, too, was only for a limited time: the firm foundations of rationalist intellectual and moral discipline were laid by Descartes, but when they were developed by Kant they led to the blind alley of antinomies, that is, to another collapse of the humanistic ideal. The search for a new humanistic ideal followed other paths.

The crisis of Renaissance humanism as an ethical category conditioned the state of profound shock or disturbance which the Ur-novs observe in Hamlet’s mind, and through him, in Shakespeare’s; through these instances they envisage the state of mind prevailing

among the young generation of the period that extended from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 17th century—the last phase of Renaissance history in general.

The intellectual crisis in which Renaissance humanism ended was reflected with amazing power in Shakespeare’s plays. This was the crisis that created the “unsettled fancy”, the “boiling brains”. But the dramatist himself pointed the way out of the crisis; it was the re-establishment in man of the lost harmony.

The most satisfying expression of harmony, its symbol as used by Shakespeare, was music, the Urnovs consider. The harmony represented by music resolves all difficulties:

The quotation is taken from The Tempest, the most wonderful of Shakespeare’s plays. I will permit myself to quote a passage from the Urnovs’ book which seems to me extremely important for their whole conception:

“The magician Prospero, the central character, in calling for ‘some heavenly music’, conveys the poet’s attitude. The desire for a musical resonance in life might appear celestial, while the monologue about the ‘so potent art’ relieved by music, might seem to mean the wizardry of the alchemist. But, actually, clothed in these metaphorical words are enlightenment and poetic insight. It is possible that the awareness of life, the rhythmic pulsation felt continually, are at the source of Prospero’s extraordinary power. Experience, understanding of human character and a thorough knowledge of the people’s life, sustain this power. Harkening to the rhythm, drawing inspiration from reason and will, Shakespeare’s last hero, Prospero, responds to his daughter’s joyous exclamation: ‘How beauteous mankind is!’ Prospero, and with him Shakespeare, taking leave of the theatre, once again look for a new hope in man.”

In what man? In the man of the past—that is to say, of the Middle Ages? But the authors of the book have clearly shown that Shakespeare could find nothing there. They make apt mention of Malory who, writing a hundred years before Shakespeare and full of the highest admiration for the Knights of the Round Table, yet indicated the collapse of those knightly adventurers. Was this hope, then, centred in the man of the future, of the approaching bourgeois age? No. The authors clear up that point by reminding us of Lang-land. Did the vision of that still far-distant age move Piers the Plowman, the simple peasant, to such enthusiasm? Quite the contrary.

It would be not only trivial but simply depressing to refer in this connection to the man of another, a post-bourgeois epoch. The Urnovs have refrained from this, of course, and very justly pointed out that no “theoretical programme or orderly system of practical instruc-

tion” should be sought in the dramatist’s dream of an ideal society and a new man. It is not a question of a type of man belonging to anv definite historical epoch, but of man in general or to be exact, of humanistic faith in man. And it should be made clear that this faith “ man is not characteristic of Renaissance humanism alone, bu, of th”h"m».u_Sm of an, epoch. Otherwise, .t would not be lmman-

had a sense of distant prospects, or that he was, to a greater ^deS^r® > f tii« time'¹” the authors ask. Their answer is that while

Shakespeare “suffered tragically from the shock of disorder and chaos, it was only his brilliant prospectiveness of thinking that kep

^PeCWhSrgofng^efo°ver¹t'heir manuscripts the Urnovs substituted the word “redeemed” for the word “justified”, which was formerly used in this sentence. Horror and bloodshed can nover be ]ustified by My mi. hp pither forgiven or redeemed, forgiveness may

JonT, by ot lo hi°_t^She right to forgive, redemption meet come from mankind. The horror and bloodshed that abounded 1 English history, in Shakespeare’s view, could be redeemed by the nrosuect he envisaged — still far distant, perhaps—of the untiring a-bour, of mankind directed towards eradicating horror and bloodshed from the life of the English and of all the nations on earth, eradicat g them omthe basis of a new, more profound and comprehensive huma-

^niSWhat was the basis underlying Shakespeare’s optimistic belief in man? The authors reply: “A single word ... stands out and immed ately claims attention, inasmuch as it draws after it the associations with Hamlet. The word is .‘conscience .

even at the worst of times. I cannot but recall that at the end ot the Chinese Renaissance epoch a word was

force, a word possessing a meaning identical with conscience uang hsin The last representative of Renaissance philosophical thoug in China, Wang Yang-ming (1472-1526), spoke of conscience as a great source in human nature, directing all man s conduct.

It seems to me that in Shakespeare there is something that can be understood as the highest manifestation of the humanistic conscience. But, before coming to this, we should recall the words of John Donne, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, about those tragic twenty years. The quotation from his An Anatomie of the World is given by the Urnovs in their book:

When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

Let us turn back to Shakespeare. Who is the leading character in The Tempest? Prospero, the man who had evoked that same tempest. But it was also he who opened the path to peace and happiness. Wherein lies his power? He is a magician who discovered the great and truly awful mystery of nature, and mastered it. But, having used this almost supernatural power and realising what it really is, he rejects it. Was it not conscience, as the amazing source of the human principle in man, as the highest of all ethical categories, that made him act in this way?

The Urnovs have written a book on Shakespeare, the concrete, historical Shakespeare. But, we read, the “artistic thought pregnant with life and finding its own image, acquires something in the nature of an independent life”. The posthumous life of Shakespeare of which they spoke at the beginning of their book is the life, now become self-dependent, of his tragedies.

One aspect of this life was experienced by us with particular keenness during a quarter-century of our history, which, fortunately, belongs to the past. It was filled with truly Shakespearean tragedy, as the Urnovs have pointed out. Hence, it is not necessary to explain why the book by M. and D. Urnovs should be regarded not merely as a jubilee book to mark a famous poet’s quater-centenary, but as a warm response to Shakespeare’s works from onr contemporaries in this country—-a country with a great prospectiveness of thinking, a firm humanistic faith in man, a country where life should be directed not only by reason and will, but conscience as the image and expression of the highest ethical principle in man.

It has long been an acknowledged principle in our country that a history of literature should embrace all the known literary material, not only of the West but also of the East, The Universal History of Literature, which appeared here at the end of the last century and was participated in by many scholars and edited by A Korsli and A. Kirpichnikov, included articles on the history ol literature of European peoples, and of many peoples of the East.

It is a great pity that this experiment was not repeated and carried further; even at the present day when life itself has imperatively broadened our outlook, we still have no up-to-date history of world literature conforming to odr far wider knowledge of available material and to our greatly altered conception of the development

The theory of literature, too, calls for revision. Both Western writings, studied in many respects from new standpoints, and Eastern, which are becoming better known to us, may bring much that is new into the understanding of the essence of literature as a social phenomenon possessing its own specific nature; also into the appraisal of the means of literary expression and the understanding of the progressive development of literature—both in connection with the inner laws of this development and in connection with the history

This article comprises some observations on the literary history of certain Oriental peoples. It seems to us that these might have a certain importance for literary studies in general.

During the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century an extraordinarily intensive development of realistic literature was to be observed in Japan. It is understood, of course, that other trends existed simultaneously, but the predominant trend was undoubtedly realism. It was launched m the

1880 s by Hasegawa Futabatei, and its last important exponent, who continued its creative development, was Natsume Soseki. This writer’s principal works appeared at the close of the first decade and the first part of the second decade of the 20th century.

When we use the term “realistic” in regard to Japanese literature of the period mentioned, our conception of realism is that which was bestowed upon it by the history of 19th-century European literature — the history of French, English, Russian and other European literatures. Japanese literature of that trend adjoins, in its fundamental traits, the parallel trend in European literature, thus forming a part of the world’s classic realistic literature. The literatures of some other Eastern countries, Turkey for instance, also come within the scope of this trend.

The close and vital contacts existing between the literatures of different countries will be obvious from even a superficial acquaintance with the world literature of that period. The close mutual contacts between the literatures of European countries at that time are common knowledge. Students of Eastern literature are aware that, beginning from the second half of the 19th century, a great deal of European literature became widely read in Eastern countries, at least in certain social circles. For example, European literature, especially English, became familiar to a large stratum of Western-educated Indian society. The same may be said of the Western-educated stratum in Turkey, where French literature was well known at the end of the 19th century. ¹ Beginning from the 1880’s an ever increasing tide of Russian, French, English, German and Scandinavian literature flowed into Japan.²

The same tendency, in varying degrees of intensity and on a varying scale, was to be observed among other Eastern peoples. That ties between the literatures of the world existed during the period of classic realism is an incontrovertible fact.

Involuntarily, this gives rise to conjecture on the particular role played by these contacts, and leads to the conclusion that the appearance of the same type of literature in different Western and Eastern countries was conditioned to some extent by these literary ties.

Other instances may be found in history, where the literatures of different nations proved to be of the same type, with close contact existing between them. No one would dispute the mutual interconnection and interdependence of the literatures of Western Asia, North-West India and the Caucasus from the 10th to the 13th centuries; despite local differences, these literatures were of one type. The Shah Namah and The Knight in the Panther's Skin undoubtedly belong to the same type; they were produced in a definite cultural region, which was characterised by close interrelations. It was in the same region that poets such as Rudaki, Nizami, Saadi and Omar Khayyam ³ emerged, who wrote lyrics similar in theme and stylistic colouring.

The connections between Japanese and Chinese literatures from the 17th century to the beginning of the 19lh century are obvious.⁴In both countries literary genres such as the fantastic novella, the heroic adventure novel, the story of real life, which were widespread at the time, closely resembled each other. This is particularly the case with the Japanese fantastic novellas in the well-known collection Otogi-boko (1666), and the Chinese tales from a popular collection Chien-teng hsin-hua, which dates from the late 14th century. Both the Japanese and the Chinese collections are in themselves merely examples of a great mass of literary works of the same type in both countries. The stories of everyday life in the collection known as Kokin kidan hanabusa zoshi, dating from about 1749 and regarded as the starting-point of a certain line in Japanese 18th-century literature; the Chinese fantastic stories in the ch'uan-ch'i genre; the hun-ts'u, or “funny stories”—all these represent in themselves an entire branch of literature and belong to the same type. The adventure novels of Bakin (1767-1848) merely reproduce the adventure stories of Chinese narratives, typical examples of which are the Yu-hsien wai-shih and Shui-hu-chuan. Many similar examples might be given here from the history of world literature in the Middle Ages and modern times.

On the other hand, instances that seem to contradict the foregoing may also be found: identical types of literature sometimes arose among different peoples, who were not in contact with each other.

For example, the Japanese knightly epics of the 13th to the 15th centuries were far removed from the heroic epics of the peoples of Western Turkistan, Iran and the Caucasus, but bore a resemblance to the West European medieval romances of chivalry though it is practically impossible to establish any connections between Japan and Western Europe in those centuries. Yuan Chi, a Chinese poet of the 3rd century, one of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest”, wrote a verse cycle on wine, an original expression of a mood of bitter grief, in its trend and general idea closely akin to the 12th-century wine-songs of Omar Khayyam—at any rate, to those widely-known verses attributed to the famous Iranian poet. No data exists in support of the conjecture that the Chinese poet’s verses, written almost a thousand years before Omar Khayyam, could have influenced the Iranian. Sometimes, in Japanese poetry of early medieval times, we find verses containing lovers’ reproaches addressed to the dawn that heralds the inexorable hour of parting, and we are involuntarily reminded of the same reproaches voiced in medieval Provencal albas; it would be futile to suppose that any contact existed at that time between two countries so distant from each other. Many examples might be quoted of identical or very similar literary phenomena occurring among diverse peoples, where contact between their literatures has been totally absent.

The conclusion to be drawn amounts to this: although literary contacts between different peoples might play a definite part in the

rise and development of identical or similar literary phenomena, these may also arise in the absence of such contacts. The necessary and decisive condition for their appearance is the attaining of one and the same stage of social-historical and culturaPdevelopment by different] peoples, and the similarity of forms in which this development takes place. The conditions prevailing in the social life and culture of diverse peoples at an early stage of feudalism often resemble each other in essentials and even in form, so that it is not surprising if striking resemblances occur frequently in their literatures. What was known in German medieval poetry as the “hofische Lyrik”, can be found in the poetry of other West European peoples of that time. The court lyric is typical of early medieval poetry in Iran and Western Turkistan. The same type of lyric constitutes the main trend of poetry in the early phases of the Japanese Middle Ages. While the rise and development of the court lyric in Western Europe was accompanied by contacts between the various peoples of the region, there could be very little contact at that time between Western Europe and Iran, and still less between Western Europe and Japan at the other side of the world.

The resemblance existing between Arabic verse in Spain, in the period extending from the 10th to the 12th centuries, and the poetry of the troubadours in France is well known; but, though the Arabs of Spain and the French were fairly near neighbours in those days, literary and cultural contacts were extremely slight. It appears, then, that geographical proximity by no means determined or ensured the existence of literary contacts between different peoples at certain periods of their history. The epics of chivalry in diverse forms—the epopee, poem and romance—are to be found in the literature of West European peoples, of the Arabs, Iranians, Georgians and Japanese. Although in some instances connecting links existed between the national literatures enumerated, in other instances there were none, and nevertheless, similar literary phenomena arose. From this it follows that the fundamental condition for the rise of such a resemblance was the existence of chivalry among these nations, the appearance of a certain type of knight, leading a characteristic way of life, having a specific psychology and outlook. This particular type existed neither in feudal China nor in feudal Russia, consequently, these countries had no knightly epic of this kind. The reason for its absence is to be sought in the peculiar nature of the historical forms in which feudalism developed in China and Russia.

Literary contacts, then, do not determine the rise of homogeneous literatures, but accompany them; the latter is not necessarily the rule, for contacts will appear only when certain general-historical conditions obtain. And it is by no means necessary that these contacts should be established and developed solely where a homogeneous literature has emerged in two nations; there may be contacts where literatures are dissimilar. The fact that widely differing lit-

erary works from West European countries have penetrated to our country, and vice versa, does not mean that trends of a similar nature to those represented by Proust or J oyce exist here; or that in England, for example, where Soviet literature is well known, a literature approaching socialist realism has come into existence.

Literary contacts are a historical category. While the peoples of the world were, to a considerable extent, isolated from each other, literary contacts were formed—under the above-mentioned historical conditions—between countries that were geographically and culturally near neighbours and had reached the same stage in their historical development; their connections were then on a regional scale. When international relations developed on a wide scale to include all the civilised nations, literary contacts also acquired a world-wide character and became a form of international communication. This was the form they assumed in the second half of the 19th century. But this does not exclude, of course, a narrower circle of regional links. For example, in the second half of the 19th century and in the 20th century, European literature became well known to the peoples of the Arab countries, while at the same time the literary contacts between those Arab countries, that is, contacts on a regional scale, retained their importance. At the present time, the links between the literatures of diverse peoples of India still retain their significance, while simultaneously India has entered the orbit of world literary contacts.

Literary contacts are a concrete historical category: they vary in their scale, their part in the literary process as a whole, and their importance in the history of the literature of certain peoples at different periods of history, under differing historical conditions. Consequently, the study of these contacts forms one of the tasks of research in literature.

In the general sense of the term, literary contacts mean the penetration of one literature into the world of another. This may assume diverse forms.

Since the second half of the 19th century literary contacts have acquired a world-wide scale and have become an established fact in the literature of each people, and at the same time an established fact in world literature. During this period the East has been brought within the sphere of these contacts. The process by which European literatures penetrated into the literary world of the Eastern peoples reveals also the forms taken by this penetration.

European literature often penetrated the Eastern in the original—that is to say, in the language in which it was written. It was this form that exercised the greatest influence during the initial period when the Orient entered the general orbit of literary contacts— when Eastern countries began to produce their own realistic lit era-

ture. It is characteristic that in this case penetration was accomplished through the works of some particular writer or writers.

Typical of many Oriental literatures of the time was the author familiar with European writing, usually with one of the Western literatures. For example, Hasegawa Futabatei (1864-1909), mentioned above as the founder of the realistic school in Japan, was la-miliar with Russian literature of the classic realistic school. At the outset of his work as a creative writer, he knew Turgenev and Goncharov, passing later to Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and many other Russian authors. It is safe to assert that he owed his formation as a writer to his knowledge of Russian realistic literature, which he studied in Russian, not in translation. He mastered the tongue and even lectured on the Russian language and literature.

Tsubouchi Slioyo (1859-1929) was a prominent writer and critic, an expert on English literature. As the author of the treatise On the Essence of Literature (published in 1885), his position, like Futabatei’s, was at the fountain-head of the realistic school of literature in Japan. Mori Ogai (1862-1922),who knew German literature well, was the third important writer of the initial period of realistic literature in Japan.

Halid Ziya (1866-1945), one of the most outstanding realistic writers of Turkey, was educated at a college where all instruction was given in French, and he knew modern French literature. ⁵ The new literary trend was introduced into Persia by the dramatist Mirza Malkom (Malkom-khan; 1833-1909) and the novelist and satirist Zain al-Abidin (1837-1900). The first-named knew French literature well in the original, and the second knew Russian.⁶

It is typical of most eminent authors in Eastern countries (not only at the beginning of the new realistic literature, but also later on) that they were acquainted with European literature in the original and often knew several languages. Since it was these writers who created their own literature and directed its course of development, their knowledge of foreign literatures in the original was of the utmost importance: European literature had become accessible to them in its own linguistic idiom and, hence, fullness of expression, capable of maximally influencing the reader. But this meant, at the same time, that the books the writer had read impressed themselves upon his consciousness in a wholly original way, and, moreover, selectively, according to his individuality. Transmitted thus into his own creative work, they passed through the prism of his creative individuality and the various stratifications formed by the traditions of his country’s literature. ...

A direct acquaintance with an alien literature in the original is one of the forms by which one literature may penetrate to the world of another. Another form, which was also fully represented during the period of world realistic literature, was translation.

The penetration of one people’s literature into the literary world of another in the form of translation is a phenomenon of a totally

different order from the penetration of works in the original. Of necessity, translation gives a very definite, new linguistic guise to the translated work, and under this guise it begins its existence for foreign readers. When a literary work reaches the foreign reader in the original it has no new, strictly drawn linguistic shape; this has to be created by each reader according to his own taste and, therefore, exists for him alone. Naturally, the extent of influence of this second form of literary penetration is entirely different. At the time when realistic literature became world-wide, this sphere of influence assumed vast proportions. Every book that possessed any significance or was simply found attractive by mass readers spread all over the world, only altering its language guise to suit each country. This means that a literary work begins to have a life independent of its primary language form. It becomes many-faceted in linguistic expression. In the process of translation it loses something, and gains somet hing. For one thing, it loses its unique quality the inimitable individuality ensured by its native language, on the other hand, its multilingual existence brings out the common features that give it a meaning for everyone. In French, Madame Bovary is a part of French literature; in Russian it has become a part of the Russian literary world; in Japanese it belongs to the Japanese literary world; and in its multilingual form it is a part ot the world’s literature.

A definite conception now exists of what a translation should be. It would not be correct to think that our present understanding ot translation existed in all preceding centuries and that the translations were always distinguished only as bad or good, or that some were “closer to the original” and others less so. Instances may be quoted when translators were guided by special considerations, wine 1 were not the result of their own opinions, but oi the requirements

found their way to the Oriental literary world m the original, the people who introduced realistic literature into all the Eastern countries employed this method to bring the literature ot one or another European country into their own. The principal means ot introducing realism were their own writings. But, as a rule, these writ

The above-mentioned Futabatei not only studied lurgenev s works in Russian, but translated them at the same time. Ihe first attempts in this field were the translations ol The Rendezvous, a story from A Sportsman's Sketches, and a story Three Encounters. This happened in 1888, the early dawn of realistic literature in Ja pan, the years when progressive writers were still on y groping their way towards the creation of a literature of this kind. Futabatei was a pioneer in this field. In 1887 he published the first part of h.s

novel The Passing Cloud ( Ukigumo); in 1888, the second part. It is clear from this novel how much the author owed to his study of the works of Turgenev and Goncharov.

“One evening, as I unfolded my newspaper, I saw that on the way from Colombo to Singapore, Hasegawa Futabatei had died of consumption, on the steamer by which he was returning home from Russia. It had happened ten days ago.

“In my time, I, who had been fond on reading Bakin and literary rubbish such as Setchubai’s Plum Blossom in Snow, had been genuinely moved by Futabatei’s Passing Cloud. It seemed as though for the first time in my life I had been taken into an anatomical theatre where a man’s body was being dissected. Fearfully, I watched the movement of the pen, keen as a scalpel. Later, when I read in the Kokumin-no tomo magazine his translation of The Rendezvous, and in the Miyano-no hana magazine, Three Encounters, I was full of admiration: was it possible that there could be such a beautiful world? I read these tales over and over again and still it was not enough for me. I copied them out for myself....”⁷

This was written in 1909 by Tokutomi Roka, a younger contemporary of Futabatei’s. He had already made a name for himself as a writer, and his talent developed along the lines of critical realism. As a matter of fact, the quotation given shows that he regarded Futabatei’s novel as possessing features of critical realism.

The strong impression produced by Futabatei’s translations was shared throughout Japan by the young reading public of that time, a period when it would have been hard to find a Japanese writer who had not expressed similar views.

The reader probably remembers that The Rendezvous is in two parts: the first, the description of the birch grove, the second, the conversation carried on by the gentleman’s valet with a peasant girl, and overheard by the author. Looked at closely, the first part of Futabatei’s translation evidences particular care. It is really a fine and penetrating translation, showing that the author expended great pains upon it.

Subsequently, excerpts from this particular part came to be included in the Japanese anthologies as models of the finest language. Fragments from the description of the grove, in Futabatei’s translation, were inserted in the Diary of the Musashi Plain ⁸ by Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908), who was one of the prominent writers of Japan’s realistic school at its peak period; the Musashi Plain he describes is a picturesque plain in the vicinity of Tokyo. Thus the Russian birch grove was transplanted to Japanese soil.

But in reality it was not the birch grove that was transplanted. Now, years later, we can understand the things taking place in the Japanese literature of that time: it was not the Russian birch grove that was transplanted, but the mode of its description. Japanese writers of that time could not draw the birch grove as Turgenev had drawn the picture through the medium of his native tongue.

This does not mean that the Japanese writers’ art was primitive; they had more than a thousand years of many-sided literary experience to look back upon, a literature of great variety and richness. Then, wherein lay the crux of the matter?

Let us picture to ourselves a grove drawn by a Japanese artist in ink or colour. It would be a landscape in the linear perspective typical of Oriental art. This is one way of seeing the external world. Now let us visualise a similar grove painted by a European artist. Here the landscape would be presented in aerial perspective and chiaroscuro—a totally different way of seeing the external world. Then, it follows that Japanese writers describing a landscape in their native tongue were accustomed to visualising it as two-dimensional, in linear perspective, and selected for this purpose their own familiar approach in language. But in Turgenev’s landscape they became aware of the depth of space, of vistas, of chiaroscuro; this explains why Futabatei had to work so painstakingly to find the correct language media capable of transmitting a perception as yet unfamiliar to readers of his generation. This he achieved, and that is why his translation “opened the eyes” of his contemporaries. As Tokutomi Roka expressed it, a new and beautiful world was opened to them.

Now that Japanese literature was launched upon the path of realism, aerial perspective and light-and-shade had become necessary. It entailed a deeper penetration into reality than had been required by linear perspective, and, above all, a different viewpoint: it was this that constituted the elements of realism for the Japanese writers of the time.

In that case, what was the principal thing in Futabatei’s translation of The Rendezvous? Not the scene enacted between the valet and the peasant girl. When all was said and done, the presentation of such emotional stories was not beyond the powers of the Japanese writers, even if it had been done with less insight. That is why the second part of the translation is more ordinary. The first part held a new significance for the realistic trend, for the writers of that time and for that generation in general. And that was why it had been translated with so much care. ⁹

This example has been given in some detail as an illustration of an important principle that the translator should keep in view when attempting a task of a special kind: the task of assimilating, with the aid of translation, a new creative method, the task of working out language treatments characteristic of this method. Therefore, in the execution of a translation something else emerges: no special care is taken of things that do not help to solve the problem, while those that do serve to solve the problem are treated with the utmost care. In this case, translation becomes one of the ways by which an author obtains creative re-equipment; for the reader, it becomes a means of transforming his perception of actuality. It is understandable, therefore, that during the early stages, when literature of a

new trend or method is establishing itself, a translator’s work assumes a place of considerable importance, and writers devote a great deal of attention to translation. The history of the establishment of realistic literature in Eastern countries affords ample evidence of this. Translations of this particular period cannot be viewed from the same standpoint as translations of a period when the homogeneity of two literatures, the one that exerts the influence and the one that feels it, had already been established. It seems to me that the study of translations from this viewpoint could aid considerably in assessing the character and the essence of the contacts between one literature and another.

It need not be supposed that only two forms exist by which one people’s literature can penetrate into the literary world of another— penetration by the original and by translation. The history of the world’s literary contacts can show us other forms.

One of these is the reproduction in creative work by a writer of one nationality, of the content and motives of a work by a writer of a different nationality. This form will be found to be particularly widespread in the literature of the peoples of Western Turkistan, Iran and the Near East.

Nameless story-tellers have created the tale of Leila and Majnun in its original form. An Azerbaijanian, Nizami (1141-1203), transformed this romance of the Romeo and Juliet of the East into a poem that is one of the world’s literary gems. The Uzbek Navoi (14411505) retold the story in his own tongue. The poem had a double existence in two languages—Persian and Uzbek. It was no mere translation that emerged; a comparison of the texts by Nizami and Navoi reveals that the latter poet introduced much of his own into the poem.¹⁰ At the same time, according to our ideas today, this is not an original work: too much in Navoi’s poem comes direct from Nizami.

Can this be called plagiarism? Nothing could be further from the truth: in plagiarism mention of the original is carefully avoided. But Navoi refers openly to Nizami’s Leila and Majnun, expresses his veneration for the Azerbaijanian poet and makes no secret of the fact that he is reproducing Nizami’s poem. Could this be regarded as a new treatment of the same theme? Hardly, because new treatments are usually accomplished independently of the earlier ones, and frequently as a result of dissatisfaction with them. But in this case Navoi makes no adverse criticisms on Nizami’s treatment of the theme; on the contrary, he expresses his unbounded admiration for the poem. Consequently, we must reject the customary evaluation in considering these reconstructions. It seems to me that the main point lies in the following: the reproducing of another writer’s work written in a foreign language was, in those times, creative

work and, furthermore, a free creative act. In the eyes of the people of the day, the new language form in which the old work was presented endowed it with something different, and so it entered upon a new and different life. The creator of this new life was a poet whose genius, in its power and character, was often equal to that of the man who had created the poem in its primary language form.

According to the concepts of that day, if the new language shape given to a literary work endowed it with new life and was regarded as a creative piece of work, then it was only natural that the Introduction of changes into the original was the new author’s right. For this reason, Navoi’s poems were neither translations nor imitations of Nizami’s work. At the same time, Navoi’s poem showed that the works of the Azerbaijanian Nizami had penetrated to the literature of another people, a plain proof of literary contacts.

Examples of a similar nature may be found in plenty in the history of the medieval literature of Western Asia, the Arab world and even the Caucasus. One may go so far as to say that this form of penetration was widespread. Certain gradations existed, of course, from genuinely creative reconstruction down to flagrant imitation.

And so, another form of the penetration of one people s literature to the world of another is discovered in the study of the history of literary contacts. This form is national adaptation.

The Otogi-boko, mentioned earlier, was a Japanese collection of “extraordinary adventures”, which first saw the light in 1666. Its close kinship with the stories in the Chien-teng hsin-hua, the Chinese collection, has already been commented upon. This connection is evidenced in the fact that the great majority of the Japanese tales reproduce the Chinese, but in a form adapted to the Japanese reader.

What does adaptation mean in this case? First of all, Chinese material became Japanese, the scene of action was transferred to Japan, the characters were now Japanese. Furthermore, features of Chinese life that would be alien or unfamiliar to the Japanese are rejected, and instead of these, elements acceptable to the concepts and tastes of the Japanese readers of the time are introduced. These alterations come under the heading, we consider, of national adaptation.

This is far from being a unique instance. It recurs in several branches of Japanese literature of the period extending from the 17tli century to the early 19th century. Practically the whole genre of adventure stories (kaidanmono) is founded upon this adaptation of Chinese literary material. Then again, a great deal in the extensive field of novellas of everyday life is bound up with the corresponding field in Chinese literature. For instance, many of the novellas in the Kokin kidan hanabusa zoshi collection (1744-1747) are adaptations of corresponding stories in the famous Chinese collection Chin-ku ch'i-kuan (dating from the first half of the 17th century) and from other Chinese collections.

Here again, it should be taken into consideration that the borrowing of material was in no way disguised; on the contrary, the

fact that the source was indicated ensured greater popularity. Even the title of the source book was often repeated for this purpose. Take, for example, the historical adventure novel Shui-hu-chuan, extremely popular in China; the most widely-known version of this novel dates from the first half of the 17th century. In 1773, a novel called Honcho Suikoden, or The Japanese Shui-hu-chuan, appeared in Japan. The plot of the story had been transferred to that country and the Chinese personages replaced by Japanese. The plot was drawn from Japanese history.

This is still another kind of borrowing. There is no question here of the simple adaptation of a foreign literary work. The Japanese Shui-hu-chuan suggests a desire to introduce on Japanese soil a literary genre new at that time, the romantic adventure narrative, ox-in other words, the Japanese version of the world-wide genre of the “robber romance”. The initial step was the building-up of this romance on the model of an existing one, which had become a classic in that part of the world. The Shui-hu-chuan was the Chinese version of the “robber romance” type of a novel; this, then, was not a case of reproduction of a foreign book, but of a genre, following a definite model.

It may be asked: if the Japanese writers of the time knew this Chinese novel so well, if they admired it so much, why did they not make a straight translation of it? We are unable to give a sufficiently convincing answer to this question. We can only say that the Chinese novel is available in translation in Japan, but the translation was made in our time. The whole point is that translation as a form of transmitting a literary work from one language milieu to another is a historical phenomenon; it is characteristic of certain historical epochs, but not necessarily of others; and in some epochs it is nonexistent. If we consider the immensity of the historical epoch during which one people’s literature penetrated to another’s by means other than translation, it will seem that the epoch of translations is not so long.

In conclusion, let us examine one more form of literary penetration. In ancient India, the home of Buddhism, legends existed about the life of its founder, Buddha. On the basis of these a peculiar species of narrative arose—the hagiography. This became known in a great variety of languages: Indian, Persian-Pahlavi, Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Armenian, Latin, Greek, almost all the West European and Slavonic languages, as well as in Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian.

It would not be correct to call these versions translations: they vary too distinctly from each other. Neither would reproduction, in the sense that we encountered it in Navoi’s poems, be a suitable term. The most correct conclusion is that here we have a unique literary work in diverse forms and variations, existing in many countries of the world. The same, on a grander scale, may be said of another ancient Indian work, the Panchatantra.

These are the different forms which literary contacts assume at different historical epochs and which are characteristic of these epochs. Possibly, some of the forms discussed ought to have been differentiated, and in these, narrower forms examined separately; possibly still more forms could be discovered. But the conclusion seems clear enough: the problem of literary contacts is one of importance in the history of world literature, and should be considered from a strictly historical standpoint, in all its concretely historical significance.

¹ See. JI. O. AjitKaeBa, Teopnecmeo Xajiuda 3uu 1956, bungahu (.Nippon bungaku-o chusin-to shite), Tokyo, 1953,

^19-87 See’ Indoyt°'in: Tokutomi Rona-shu (the series “Gendai Nippon bungaku zenshu”, 2nd year of Showa Kaijosha publ., vol. 12, p. 552). ,

10 on the poems of Navoi and Nizami see E. 9. BepienbC Haeou u Hum _MU — c.6. «Annmep HaBon», MocKBa-JIeHimrpafl, 1946, CTp. 68-91.

“Realism” is a term widely used in the history and theory of literature. It is alluded to,at times in the somewhat toned-down form— “elements of realism”, in connection with many works, almost throughout the whole of the literature of the past. We might go further and say that if we take historical surveys of literature (particularly the degree theses written within the past ten or fifteen years) it would he practically impossible to find one that does not speak of realism, whether the given thesis treats of the literature of a European or an Asian people, whether it is on 19th-century literature, or that of medieval Europe and Asia, or even the literature of antiquity. The general impression left upon the reader is that realism is a kind of absolute category — it may be supra-historical, it may he omni-historical, but at all events existing in history “in general” (independent of concrete history) and developing by definite stages, each of which possesses its own socio-economic and cultural content. Since it is hardly possible to accept such a category outside an idealistic interpretation, it appears highly necessary to investigate the reason for this extensive use of the term “realism” and, remaining on concrete historical grounds, clarify the meaning or meanings attributed to this term.

A glance aj; history suffices to determine when the term “realism” was first used in respect to that literature in the sphere of which the name in general made its appearance and which people desired to characterise by that name. This was French literature in the second and third, quarters of the 19th century. The representatives of its most forceful trend were Balzac and Flaubert. In this instance there can be no doubt that the use of the term is fully justified. Here we have a concrete historical fact that must be accepted,

and it is the starting-point in any study of the meaning of the realism concept in literature.

The question of its meaning, and its acceptance as a term, arises only in cases where we discover that it has been applied to other literatures. This was the case with 19th-century English literature with Russian of the same time, and also with the literatures oi other European peoples.

In all these instances, too, the question is easily decided. Ine use of the term was justified: it was motivated by the feasilnlitj oi considering all of these literatures as realistic, in the same meaning

Realistic literature in 19th-century France arose and developed in the conditions created by the prevailing capitalist system, this means that it was characteristic of precisely these social relations, both from the viewpoint of their general social content and from that of the specific circumstances which distinguished the epoch of capitalism from the preceding epoch of feudalism. The social situation typical of society in the capitalist epoch was determined by the struggle of two main classes of this society-the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Therefore, all phenomena appearing in the culture ot capitalist society emerge and develop in the circumstances and under the influence of the dialectics of that struggle. Such, then is the literature of the capitalist epoch. But the level, the content, the theoretical principles are determined by concrete historical circumstances These circumstances are known: they occurred in the mid-19th century in France. It was the time of the impetuous development and prosperity of the capitalist system, and simultaneously the time which witnessed the steady strengthening and increasing activity of the proletariat, the inevitable concomitant of the bourgeoisie and, in the ultimate result, its grave-digger. This meant that at the very moment of capitalism’s establishment, the social contradictions inherent in the system were laid bare. It was precisely this that acted as the impetus towards the extremely high development of realistic literature. In its turn, this development owed much to criticism, which acquired significance in the creative method ot

It would be a mistake to oversimplify this criticism as exposure , “the laying bare of sores”, etc.; this element was present, and considerably strong at times. But the opposite also was present—the affirmation of all that was progressive in the system, which constituted a higher level of social development than feudalism, there fore criticism in French realism of the 19th century should be viewed as a method of revealing reality in all the complexity and contradictoriness of the forces at work in it. If we do not depart from the vantage-point of concrete history and always consider French realism in the ambience of its time, it is quite possible to transfer the characteristics of “realism” to the literature of other peoples, provided the socio-economic and general-cultural conditions under which

these literatures developed at a given historical moment correspond to the conditions then obtaining in France. It is justifiable to apply the term to the trend in 19th-century English literature which is represented, for example, by the works of Dickens and Thackeray. It is justifiable to apply the term “realistic”—in the same strictly historical sense—to 19th-century Russian literature, to the trend represented by the works of Goncharov and Turgenev.

The tangible features of the epoch in each country—France, England and Russia—differed in many respects: the level of bourgeois-capitalist development was not the same in each country, but on the whole, viewed along the broad lines of the historical process and the general tendencies of socio-economic development, it was one and the same important epoch in the history of Europe. Unequal though the development of capitalism undoubtedly was, all the European countries at that time were drawn into the common course of this development, forming a general capitalist system in Europe. In the 19th century, therefore, particularly about the middle of it, the literatures of all Western peoples could be called realistic, in the exact “French” meaning of the word, with, of course, the necessary national corrections. The use of the term in the given instance is fully justified historically.

But if we are to adhere to the historical meaning of the term “realism”, its application to the literatures of Eastern peoples is possible only when we find in their history socio-economic conditions parallel in their principal traits and tendencies to those of the West, that is, the establishment and development of capitalism as the prevailing system.

As is well known, corresponding conditions existed in Japan alone. It was the sole Oriental country to emerge from the fateful clash with the expanding West without becoming a colony of some European power, without losing sovereignty, as India and Indonesia had lost it. Japan had not been reduced to the state of a semi-colony of some Western country, as, for a considerable time, the states of Indo-China had been, where only the semblance of independence had been maintained. Neither had Japan become a dependency, as Turkey and Persia and, to a certain extent, China, had become temporarily; politically and formally independent, they -were caught in the web of financial and diplomatic control. Japan was the sole country in the Orient which, after the revolution of 1868, launched out upon independent capitalist development and attained so high a level in this that she was enabled, at the beginning of the 19th century, to join the far from friendly “family” of imperialist powers; politically, after the First World War, she acquired the footing of an almost equal partner. It follows that in Japan alone that stage of contemporary history had been developed which, in its social and economic content (as regards the main features and tendencies), corresponded to the parallel stage of bourgeois-capitalist development in England, France and Russia. In the Japan of the

second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century then we find a literature that corresponds in its general traits to the realistic literature of Western countries. It shows, of course, national characteristics, and is represented by the work of Tokuto-mi Roka, Shimazaki Toson and Natsume Sosela, to take leading ex-

^Intfie case of other Eastern countries the question is more complex. Their position as colonies, semi-colonies or dependencies retarded the disintegration of feudalism and affected the development of capitalist relations in them insofar as to make it a slower, more limited and deformed process. The development of the bourgeoisie in these countries showed features corresponding to the above. It was not fortuitous that a peculiar phenomenon known as the “comprador bourgeoisie” should arise in the Orient; here two bourgeois groups, the “comprador” and the “national”, proved to he m opposition to each other. The opposition arose out of a certain diversity of interests. This diversity concerned the attitude to the economic political and cultural development of the given country; the respective roles of these bourgeois groups in this development were also diverse. Nevertheless, retarded, limited and deformed as it might be in those countries, the development of capitalist relationships and the formation of a bourgeois-capitalist system took its course. The 19th century saw the establishment of capitalism as a worldwide and, moreover, ruling social and economic system. Different countries occupied different places in the system, the level of capitalist development and the paths this development pursued also differed widely, hut still, in one capacity or another, all these countries ultimately entered into the world capitalist system.

Consequently, it was natural that realistic literature, typical ot the epoch, should appear, in one form or another, both m Japan and in other old and civilised Eastern countries, notwithstanding their colonial, semi-colonial or dependent status. It is sufficient to reca 1 the writers of the Servetifiiniin group in Turkey, the works of A.al-kom-khan and Zain al-Abidin in Persia. . . , . .

The special features of their internal historical development, in conjunction with their position in the world capitalist system left their individual imprint upon the realistic literatures of each of these Eastern countries and determined their trend General economic and political backwardness and the immaturity of the bourgeoisie tended to slow down momentum in the development ot ideas to lower the artistic level in the realistic literature of colonial semi-colonial and dependent Eastern countries, and also to detract from its social role. Since the more highly-educated strata oi the national bourgeoisie had a predilection for some foreign bourgeois country, more progressive at the time than the rest (often the coun ry where they had received their education), this resulted man interruption in the consecutiveness of development in national literature.

stage in the general process of development of French literature from the decay of feudalism to the establishment of capitalism as the prevailing system. A romantic literature which had preceded and, for a fairly long time, run parallel to realistic literature was necessary for the existence of the last-named, since, on the one hand, realistic literature had taken shape in the struggle with romantic literature and, on the other hand, was destined to continue, and creatively develop, some of the achievements of this school. Realistic literature could never have become what it was without the preceding stage of a fully-developed romantic literature.

In the countries of the East, literature at this stage of their history showed signs of hastening its progress. No sooner was it well launched—in the natural sequence—upon the path of romanticism than, before it had thoroughly assimilated this trend, it hurried on towards realism. The outcome of this was a peculiar feature, recurring, to a lesser or greater degree, in almost all Eastern literatures: many works which undoubtedly aimed at realism contained elements o r omanticism (usually in an extremely sentimental and often very ofbvious form). It seemed as though this realistic literature sought to supplement within itself the insufficient development of the preliminary and necessary stage. For some time realistic literature seemed to continue romanticism, but in doing so, strove to overcome it.

Another peculiarity of realistic literatures of the East arose from the impact of general circumstances in the world around them. As a rule, these countries’ approach to realistic literature occurred somewhat later than in progressive Western countries. Even in Japan, where independent capitalist development begun in the 1870’s had progressed at a tremendous rate, realistic literature of a type familiar in Europe during the second and third quarters of the 19th century began to take shape only towards the close of that century, a period when naturalism was widespread in the major Western countries. A certain flavour of naturalism, as a consequence, was sensed in Japanese realistic literature from the outset. It could not be otherwise, considering that Japanese realistic writers read not only the works of Goncharov and Turgenev, but also those of Zola and Maupassant. By the second decade of the 20th century, realistic literature in Japan had attained the peak of its development. It existed in a most complex ambience, wherein the elements stemming from naturalism were subtly intertwined with those inspired by the ideas and moods of the European fin de si'ecle. Now, these had already given rise in the West to a literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a literature extremely varied and contradictory in form, treatment and creative principles. Consequently, echoes of Dostoyevsky and Rolland, or again of Chekhov and Ibsen, and of Anatole France and Oscar Wilde, were heard in Japanese realistic literature of the peak period. It meant that this literature had scarcely attained maturity when it diverged from the classic path and culminated in a

hotchpotch of elements of later analytical naturalism, garnished with touches of aestheticised modernism.

Another feature characteristic of Eastern literatures should be pointed out. Hitherto we have been speaking of the stream of literature as a whole. In each of the literatures mentioned, however, certain writers stand out who were not in the current of the stream of realistic literature in the advanced European countries, but kept pace with it and thus approached, to a certain extent, the general level. One of these was Futabatei, the author of Ukigumo (The Passing Cloud), which appeared in the middle of the 1880’s. In its theme, concept and creative treatment this novel possessed affinities with Goncharov’s A Common Story and The Precipice, and with Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. As regards the theoretical position, Futabatei owed something to the influence of Belinsky. At a later period, it is also possible to find Japanese writers on the level of the world literature of their OAvn time.

The reason for this was that since Eastern countries had been in contact with the more advanced European countries, a stratum of Westernised intellectuals had formed. The intellectuals, who knew European languages well, were familiar with the science, literature and social life of these countries. They were not very numerous, their development was far ahead of the general cultural development of the bourgeoisie to which they belonged. Consequently, these intellectuals played the role of forerunners or founders of some literary trend, while the trend itself only assumed its finished shape and acquired a corresponding social significance later. Futabatei’s personality and the part he played were, in this respect, very revealing. He had made a special study of the Russian language and literature; he was the first Japanese translator of Turgenev and Gogol, and he had an excellent knowledge of the works of Belinsky, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky. This, we must bear in mind, took place in the 188.0’s, at a time when there were, perhaps, only a very few Japanese who had even heard of Turgenev and Gogol, and, it is safe to say, none who knew anything of Belinsky. The result was that Futabatei’s novel was not accepted by the public: it did not fit into the general current of Japanese literature of the time. Nevertheless, his novel was a landmark on the way to realistic literature. Later, when this literature had acquired a definite form and growm stronger, Futabatei’s novel was remembered. Today, he is the acknowdedged forerunner of classical Japanese realistic literature of those times.

In spite of these special features of their development, all the realistic literatures of the Eastern countries may he and should be considered in the context of the world’s realistic literature, in the strictly historical sense specified above.

The evolution of the term “realism” is in itself characteristic. French in origin, based upon a Latin root, it has come into common use not only among European peoples, but among all the civilised nations of the world. In some languages it retains its original form, in others it exists in translation.

True, it has acquired the status of a term only since the second half ot the 19th century. At the outset those literary phenomena which were known in France as realism were known to other nations hy different names: for example, the term “naturalism” was employed by the Scandinavians and “naturalist school”, by the Russians of the mid-19th century. In the course of time, local terms were rejected in favour of “realism”, which was first in European use, and later came into world-wide use.

It appears, then, that the employment of the word “realism” to denote a definite historical epoch in the development of world literature is historically justifiable. This epoch covers the second and third quarters of the 19th century, if we agree on some central chronological framework, always bearing in mind that, on the world scale, certain national literatures extend beyond the range of these boundaries. In some instances, for example, in France, realistic literature covered the period from the end of the first quarter of the 19th century to the very end of the century; in other instances, such as Japan, realistic literature, of which the beginnings as a whole can be traced to the last quarter of the 19th century, extended naturally over two decades of the 20th century. It should also be borne in mind that in the history of realistic literature, as well as in that of any other trend in literature, the central stage is always the most sharply defined, while the beginning and the closing stages are diffuse. This is due to the fact that in its initial stage this literature not only stemmed from that which history destined it to replace, but in addition retained many of the traits of this still-existent literature. At the end of its course it often proves hard to trace a sharp demarcation line between the literature of realism and that of naturalism.

Another thing that should be taken into account is that during its historical existence realistic literature passed through several phases of its inner development, The realism of Flaubert is not the realism of Balzac. The difference does not rest only on the diversity of their creative individualities, no matter how immeasurably great the significance of the writer’s individuality might be; much depends upon the changes in the social atmosphere and also upon the internal laws of development in literature of a certain type. Consequently, we meet many very different approaches in the world’s realistic literature. It is the sum total of the works of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ber-thold Auerbach, Spielhagen, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Boleslaw Prus, Perez Galdos, Tokutomi, Tayama, Shimazaki, Natsume, Halid Ziya,

Malkom-khan, Zain al-Abidin, and many other writers. But despite all differences, the historical, social and artistic essence of this literature remains well defined in the more important works and the principal tendencies of its development.

In a concrete-historical approach to the phenomena of the literary process, have we the right to move heyond the boundaries indicated, and apply the term “realism” elsewhere? Have we the right to transfer the term that defined the main stream of a literature which arose and developed in conditions when capitalism became the prevailing, world-wide social and economic system, to a literature belonging to other epochs and arising in other historical conditions?

The answer to this question must be in the negative, nor can it be otherwise if we observe the concrete-historical approach. Still, a fact is a fact, and neither more nor less. The term “realism” is applied to 18th-century literature in France, Germany, England, and also to that of the West European Renaissance. It is met with in discussions of The Knight in the Panther's Skin, The Tale of Genji (Gen-ji-monogatari) and even Homer. It would be easier to say where it is not applied than to enumerate all the works that appeared among different nationalities at different periods and were designated by this term.

Nevertheless, since the standards applied to literatures of the time when capitalism flourished may not be used in assessing literatures of the feudal and slave-owning societies, it must be admitted that if the term “realism” is used to characterise these last-named literatures, something must have happened to the term itself. This is not difficult to determine: it lost its concrete historical content.

What were the constituent elements of the “realism” concept when it began to be applied to literature? The most convenient method of discovering this is to proceed from the juxtaposition of French mid-19th century realism with French romanticism that preceded it and for a while existed parallel to it. The formation of realism as a creative method stemmed in many ways from the negation of the creative method of romanticism. Realism rejected, in its creative reflection of reality, the approach based on ideas, on abstractions— the approach characteristic of romanticism; instead of this, realism required that the writer should turn to reality itself. In the depiction of nature, realism rejected the principle of fusion with nature, absorption in its mystery and beauty. The realist writer desired to be an attentive observer of nature and to disclose its mystery and its beauty. The romantic writer aimed at expressing himself in his work; the realist writer wanted to be objective. At a later stage of realism Flaubert expressed this idea in a yery extreme form: he declared that the artist should be so unobtrusive as to convince readers of later generations that he never existed at all in this world. When the romantic author attempted a contemporary theme, he sought for the hidden and unusual in life and, with the aid of these, expressed his

ideas and liis inner world. The realist author did the exact opposite: he selected the most typical from life around him and on this basis strove to create generalised types. For example, Madame Bovary was conceived as the type of woman from a bourgeois family in provincial France of the mid-19th century.

The above is meant to show the principal traits of realism as a definite historical category in literature. Could all these traits be applicable to the literature of any other epoch? We are familiar with the general state of culture in Europe of that time, we know how closely lealism in literature was connected with science, and above all with the state and trend of natural science. In short, the historical features of realism w^rere clearly marked, inimitable in their combination. What rendered it permissible, then, to apply the designation “realism” to literary works written in other historical epochs, when the combination of such traits did not, nor could, exist?

The first thought that occurs to us in this instance is that we must presuppose the existence of realism as a concept in some field other than literature, and, moreover, in a connotation that would permit of its being widely employed.

The word “realism” actually existed in a different field at that time. Schelling used it in philosophy to define reality cognoscible through the media of art. But Schelling’s realism was contained within the framew'ork of his teaching of identity: he considered that the reality of being could be known to its fullest extent through art precisely because knowledge and being were identical from the aspect of their oneness in some absolute principle of the highest order. If such a concept of realism could become the basis for the extension of the term “realism” to any corresponding phenomenon in art, at any period in history, then it could oidv be on the metaphysical plane. But the plain and simple fact that the term was employed in the assessment of literary works of past epochs shows that in these cases the understanding of “realism” is very far from metaphysics.

The term “realism” existed also, as is well known, in medieval philosophy, wdiere it w^Tas used to distinguish the trend of philosophical thought directly opposite to the doctrine of “nominalism”. It is clear that this “realism” could have nothing in common with the concept of realism as understood in mid-19tli-century French literature. Therefore, it could only have been some alteration in the content of “realism” that led to its application to literary phenomena of all preceding epochs.

Actually, the application of the term discloses the nature ol the change that has taken place. Since the concept of realism began to be applied to the literature of all historical epochs, this means that the concept ceased to be historically conditioned and became a general term for all time.

It is not difficult to see what determined this change: in the complex of characteristic features of wdiich the concrete historical concept of realism consists, there is one that has the right to genera

significance. This is “reality”. It was this trait that was singled out from the general complex and acquired independent being. Since this reality accompanies man at every stage of his historical existence, and human life is part of reality, then the trait “reality”, as one of general significance, became a criterion for the assessment of a literary work of any epoch.

The transformation of the concept “realism” in its complex historical content into a synonym of the concept “principle of reality” had a dual consequence: on the one hand, it made it possible to trace in the literary process, in the isolated phenomena of which this process consisted, the general; but, on the other hand, it led to ignoring the fact that the general is always manifested in the particular, and the particular is always concrete. “Reality” is something general, but it is manifested in the particular, and the particular in social life, in social phenomena, is invariably not only concrete but also historical. To people of one level of cognition, with one set of problems in this cognition, one specific attitude to the world, “reality” means one thing; to people of another level, with other problems of cognition and another attitude to the world, “reality” means something different. At the present time the phenomenon of the magnetic field is part of reality to us, but it did not constitute a part of reality for people of the not very distant past.

In the Genji-monogatari, a Japanese novel of the end of the 10th century, historically truthful pictures are given of the people of the time, their life and customs. The story tells us of a woman who was attacked by the spirit of her rival during her slumber. For the people of those days this experience appeared perfectly consistent with reality: a “spirit” that was able to cast off its mortal shell and undertake certain actions was for 10th-century Japanese a part of reality. The author himself bears witness to this, for he declares in one place that “the tales (monogatari) describe all that has happened in the world”. Therefore, if such “spirit” happenings had not been described by the author, he would not have been true to reality as it existed for him and the people of his day. Moreover, it should be remembered that phenomena such as these w^rere not regarded then as belonging to the mystical plane; on the contrary, a “spirit” of this type was considered as much a creature of matter as a man of flesh and blood. At a certain period in the European Middle Ages, the creatures participating in the orgies at Brocken were held to be matter or substance. The love potion in the romance of Tristan and Iseult had nothing of the mystical about it, but was simply a product of the pharmacology of the period, not only for the heroes of this romance but also for Gottfried von Strassburg, not to mention authors who wrote on the same subject before his time.

Is it possible, therefore, to apply the term “realism” to a literary work on the grounds that it “reflects reality”, without considering precisely what form of reality is meant and to what end this reality is reflected? If this is not to be considered, then, in place of

concrete historical reality we will deal with some abstract reality, or the particular reality that exists only for the scholar investigating it. Herein lies the danger of applying the term “realism” in a sense completely detached from historical concreteness*

Even if historical concreteness is taken into account in employing the term “realism” when speaking of a literary work or trend of past epochs, this can only be done in a limited sense. We can speak of “realism”, even with the above reservations, only when we come upon a work which stems from reality (as it appeared at a given time).

The history of 19th-century French realism affords us one of the more reliable criteria for the definition of conditions permitting us to speak of “realism”, meaning works that take their bearings from reality. French ’’realism” is not solely a sum of literary works; it is a method acknowledged by the writer, his reader and his epoch. The term realism rose in association with the French literature of the mid-19th century. Without this literature it would not have appeared; but its rise attests the fact that writers, critics and thinkers of that epoch understood that they were concerned with something original, and having decided the question of wherein this originality lay, named it “realism”.

That is why every literature that takes its bearings from reality, if it is something big, something of serious social significance, is accompanied by the understanding of this approach on the part of the writers and the reading public of its time. This understanding may be manifested in a variety of ways: in the writer’s opinions, the reader’s judgement, the literary critic’s views, the formulae of the corresponding poetics of that period. The history of literature in Japan affords excellent material for this study.

One of the peculiar traits of the history of Japanese literature is the consistent use of a term applied to characterise some new trend that arose at a certain period. For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, when a multitude of diverse trends existed, a work that belonged to a particular trend was given a definite name: a comical novel (kokkeibon), a sentimental novel (ninjobon), a historical play (jidaimono), a play of everyday life (sewamono), and so on. Publishers were very particular about printing these terms on the book cover, so that the customer would know beforehand the nature of the book he was buying. Then, suddenly, among all these familiar and correctly labelled books, new ones appeared on the bookstalls of the time, and these were labelled ukiyo-zoshi; zoshi in this compound word denoted a book in a narrative genre of any type (a novel, a play, a cycle of short stories), something integral in concept, but carried out in various scenes. The word ukiyo in this title meant “world”, “life”. Therefore, the term in its entirety meant “a novel (story) from life”.

The concept of “world” and “life” possessed a content of a definite kind: “world” signified the reality of the surroundings in which people lived; “life” meant human existence, the life of society. Consequently, these books might be written to present a picture of reality.

Does this, then, mean “realism”? The term is usually applied to this genre. But it suffices to compare this Japanese realism of the last quarter of the 17th and first half of the 18th century—the period when its development was at its height—with mid-19th-century French realism, to see how strikingly different these “realisms” were, how unjustifiable it would be to apply a term defining the works of Balzac to the works of Saikaku, the principal representative of this Japanese trend.

In 19th-century France the concept of “realism” assumed its shape as the antithesis of the former principles upon which romantic literature rested. The concept of Japanese 17th-century literature of ukiyo (“world”, “life”) owed its origin to the antithesis of one world outlook to another. The word ukiyo arose in Buddhism and was used by Buddhists to define reality, but solely as the “world of futility”, “earthly vanities”, a concept founded on the negation of the genuineness of the reality surrounding people, the ordinary life of man. The higher verity lay in absolute reality, wherein the ordinary reality, being, was dialectically merged with “oblivion”—nirvana. .

The trend represented by Saikaku used this same term to specify the life of “this world” and not of the “other world”. Earthly life for this author was the real life; his was not a world of earthly vanities but of human activity. This literature did not exhort people to reject the world, hut to live an intensive life in it; and this attitude to life determined the creative method of Saikaku and other writers of his school.

How different this method is from that of French realists of the 19th century! The French writers’ aim was to be objective, but the Japanese evidently thought neither of being objective nor subjective. The French sought to probe reality, the Japanese simply presented it without having any special purpose in this. The French endeavoured to reveal reality in the typical, but the Japanese showed no inclination for the typical. The French writer above all desired things to be true to objective reality, but the Japanese writer could create images he had never observed in life.

For example, Saikaku recurred in a series of works to the sensualist, a character with an unbridled desire for sensual pleasures. Numbers of people of this type passed before Saikaku’s eyes, so that its familiarity (the society he wrote about was noted for people of this type) must have impelled him to picture it with the aid of hyperbole. But it would be erroneous to imagine that exaggeration was the specific creative method on which Saikaku’s work was built up. True, he resorted to this treatment when he considered it suit-

able, but in other cases he was extremely “objective”, and drew bis characters as he saw them in life. A good example of this “objective” approach is found in the characters of the women of a merchant ’s family in a cycle of stories Five Women (Gonin onna). But here again, though he is objective, it is by no means a treatment specially employed. The same may be said of the author’s role in the hook: he may disappear or reappear again in a maxim or a lyrical digression. In short, the specific quality of Saikaku’s “realism", if we are to apply the term to his work, will not be revealed by comparing certain treatments of his to'certain treatments of the 19th-century French realists. They are not comparable; they lie on different planes in these two kinds of “realism”.

Japanese realism (ukiyo-zoshi) of the second half of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century is connected, like the whole of Japanese fiction of the time, with the establishment of the bourgeoisie. For Japan it was the epoch of absolutism, when the feudal class was beginning to lose ground, but was not yet so enfeebled as to release the reins of pow⁷er; on the other hand, the bourgeois class was not yet strong enough to force the feudal class to yield power. And the merchant, though he still had to bow to the feudal lord, knew perfectly well that the aristocrat would come to ask him for a loan. The feudal aristocrat still possessed the right to behead the merchant if he considered that the bourgeois had in some way shown disrespect, but the merchant did not fear for his head as he knew that the baron’s estate, and consequently his welfare, was in his hands.

Conscious as they were of their strength, the bourgeoisie were eager for life. At the outset, the cultural narrowmess of this class, limited as it had been for centuries by the monopoly of culture held by the feudal class, permitted it very little scope. Rich merchants, factory owners and guild masters aimed first of all at things within their reach; these were confined to what could be purchased. Money they certainly possessed. So they were eager to enjoy life, above all sensual life. The ukiyo-zoshi school of literature reflected this desire for enjoyment; consequently, those sides of life that constituted reality for the bourgeoisie of the day were presented in literature. It unfolded the life stories of merchants and entrepreneurs, it gave examples of enterprise, enrichment, prosperity and ruin. Saikaku wrote a series of novellas on this side of life, under the general title The Treasury (Eitaigura). It was an account of the life and morals of merchant families, domestic dramas, many of which dealt with a wife’s liaison with her husband’s shop-assistants. The Five Women cycle is all about family life. Finally, there are the pleasures of life: drinking in the gay quarters that sprang up at that time in the towns, a life of unbridled sensuality. The Sensualist of Our Time (Koshoku ichidai otoko) pictures this kind of life.

Thus, the literature of that period might be called “the literature of life” or, more correctly, “the literature of the affirmation of life”, within those bounds and from those aspects that were accessible to

the bourgeoisie during the period of primary accumulation of capital. Life could be affirmed by true and “objective” depiction, and also by the exaggeration of some phenomenon, with a view to throwing it into high relief and stressing its significance. The author’s attitude to life may be manifested both by his total absence from the pages of his work, and also in his loudly-voiced assertiveness. In the works of Saikaku and other representatives of the ukiyo-zoshi school, such features did not determine the essentials of their creative method. _t

The literature of the absolutist epoch in Japan, which extends from the 17tli century to the end of the first half of the 19th century, is by no means confined to the trend represented by Saikaku. The “literature of reality” includes the sentimental novel (ninjobon), the comical novel (kokkeibon), the stories of actual occurrences (jitsurokumono) and many other kinds of literary work. It is not limited to narrative prose, but includes a great quantity of dramatic works, foremost among them the plays of everyday life by Saikaku’s famous contemporary Chikamatsu Monzaemon—the most outstanding dramatist in feudal Japan. Books like The Sensualist of Our Time are reminiscent of a notable Chinese novel of the 16th century (the epoch of the beginning of Chinese absolutism), entitled The Branch of Plum Blossom in the Golden Pitcher. This contains a description of the life led by a rich merchant, his sensual pleasures; it manifests a tendency to show up the false morals of a feudal aristocratic family by contrasting it with the merchant’s frankly sensual life. Such books are also reminiscent of Les amours du chevalier de Faublas or Casanova’s Memoirs. Saikaku’s other writings and certain trends in the “literature of real life” recall impressions of Le Sage, Fielding, Smollett, Defoe (Moll Flanders), even Richardson—a great number of prose writers during the epoch of absolutism in Europe. When one reads the “everyday-life plays” (sewa-mono) and the historical plays (fidaimono) of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, one involuntarily recalls not only the remarkable Chinese drama of the 16th to the 18th centuries, but also the “petty-bourgeois” drama of Lessing and his followers in Europe, and the historical tragedies of Schiller and Goethe. Is it not possible that these mark yet another general line in world literature? It is undoubtedly the literature of reality; if we take it as a whole on a world scale, does it not show clearly expressed features that prevent us from placing it under the heading of realism beside 19th-century literature (notwithstanding all the reservations surrounding this term)?

Another section in the history of Japanese literature was the drama during the epoch of its formation—the 14th to the 15th centuries—when this, too, was developing along the lines of “reality”. But here the term “reality” did not strike the eye in the book titles, as in the case of narrative literature of the late 17th and early 18th centuries: it was evident in the theory.

plays, acted in them, produced them, was the manager and leader of the troupe and trained the actors. Since the drama, that is to say, the textual libretto of the performance, constituted only one of the elements in the theatrical production, and this production was built up on music, the dramatist had to compose the music as well. The rendering of the libretto consisted of arias that were sung, melodic recitative and stage declamation. The acting consisted of stylised movements, pantomime and dances. The player had to sing and dance. Consequently, we visualise Seami as a personality as many-faceted and synthesised as the art itself of the No theatre, as these performances were called. He was the author of the text, the music, the pantomimic and choreographic parts; he was the dramatic actor, singer and dancer, the teacher of actors and the organiser of the theatre. It should be added that this was a theatre of masks, since the leading characters wore masks; apart from the actors, there was a chorus. Music was not only vocal, but also instrumental, performed by an orchestra, accompanying now the singer and dancer, now the chorus, and also playing as an independent element of the show. Only men could he actors.

Seami set out clearly the principles of his art. The two most important were termed monomane and yugen.

The word monomane may be translated as “imitation of things”. The word mono (“things”) may include any object existing or regarded as existing in the world. For Seami it was the No theatre world, and the concept of an “object” was confined to the world of living beings.

Who were these beings? Men, spirits, gods. Seami was even more explicit: under the heading of men came the nobility, the knightly warriors, squires, servants, Buddhist monks, Shinto priests, novices, peasants, traders, fishermen, wood-cutters, salters, charcoal burners; women included noblewomen, wives and mistresses of the knights, women of the people, dancers and singers; spirits were the souls of the dead, the spirits of plants and mountains; gods included the deities of the Shintoist pantheon, Buddhist deities and saints. It should be added that in Seami’splays all characters were on an equal footing, no special “transcendental” plane was set apart for spirits and gods. To Seami these things represented “reality”. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that this was a time when Japanese feudalism was at its height—between the 14th and 15th centuries.

What exactly was the “imitation of things”, that is, the reproduction of reality in the No theatre both through the play as such, and through its performance? Seami explained this as follows:

“It is difficult to describe what the imitation of each object means. The main point is to concentrate on each object in every way. Above all, to be able to imitate each object fully, in every way. It must be borne in mind, however, that in some cases deep colours are required; in others, light and delicate colours.”

“The imitation of things does not consist in achieving a simple resemblance. He who acquires a genuine facility for imitation, penetrates to the very essence of the thing, and therefore he is not aware of imitating anything.”

What, then, is the “essence” of a thing, to which the artist should penetrate while he is reproducing it in his art? Seami’s definition of this is the word yugen, the closest translation of which would be secret . This point he clarifies as follows: “the secret exists in everything: it is the beautiful. Imitation of things alters in accordance with the nature of things, but in each there is beauty.”

. ^{What does} Seami mean by beauty, and what is the true meaning of the word yugen? He illustrates it by an example—the personification of an aristocrat on the stage. The actor must be able to reproduce the exquisite manners, gentle and delicate speech, the elegant simplicity of the clothes worn by this character; in music, beauty of melody should convey all that the image stands for; grace and fluency in movement should convey it in the dance.

Here, then, is a fresh instance where the principle of looking to reality as a source is proclaimed in art; this, to use a customary term, is realism. But does this realism of the 14th and 15th centuries, when it was called the “reproduction of reality”, possess anything in common with the realism of the “literature of life” of the latter part of the 17tli and the first half of the 18th century? Do both of these possess anything in common with the realism of Japanese literature during the late 19th and early 20th centuries? All these “realisms” aimed at reproduction of reality, only in each case it was a different reality, and so the attitude to it and the purpose of its reproduction varied. In Saikaku s reality no spirits or deities exist, nor are they present as elements of reality, in the realistic literature on the threshold of the 20th century. Saikaku sought no “inner beauty” in presenting the people of his day; he certainly did not set himself the task of reproducing the “inner beauty” of his “sensualist”. Neither did Shimazaki meditate on this secret “inner beauty” when, at the opening of the 20th century, he drew the character of a pariah concealing his origin, in his novel The Broken Vow.

Here the picture is more subtle. Outwardly, the content of all the plays is integrated in the Buddhist tenet regarding the frailty of all that is earthly. But when it is considered that the theatricals were later transferred to the palaces of the feudal nobility and became a customary feature of holiday celebrations, and not a source of mournful resignation, it is easy to understand that the Buddhist motive was inserted to “ennoble” a performance which, since the No theatre stemmed from plays for the populace, had been hitherto

regarded as definitely “low.” Tlie aristocracy resigned itself to listening to these discourses on the transitoriness of earthly things, but least of all were they interested in them. They were attracted hy the characters and plots* which were perfectly mundane and familiar. Inasmuch as these characters of the feudal world and the events typical of that world were shown in all their beauty, the art of the No theatre appeared to sing the praises of the feudal world. This approach to reality determined Seami’s creative method.

Parallels to the No theatre and its plays may be found in the history of the world’s theatrical art and dramatic literature. The closest resemblance to the Japanese theatre and its plays both from the standpoint of art and the level of artistic development— is seen in the Chinese theatre during the Yuan dynasty (the second half of the 13th and the first half of the 14th centuries), in what are known as the Yuan plays (Yuan ch'ii). Historically, the No theatre might be placed beside the mystery plays of medieval Europe, except for the circumstance that the latter fell far below' the Chinese and Japanese productions in scope and artistic standards.

Another instance from the history of literature may be given, when the essence of the literary wmrk and its public appraisal also show that its purpose was to reflect reality. This is the Chinese literature of the 8th to the 12th centuries. This was a time, a particular phase in the history of literature, art and philosophy in China, associated wdth a movement knowm as “the return to antiquity . Ihe moving force of this phase was revealed by Han ^u (768-824), a poet and thinker, who was also a publicist.

The antiquity to which return was advocated, Han Yii defined with great exactitude as the period from the 12th century B. C. to the 3rd century A. D. From the standpoint of China s general historical development this covered the entire period preceding the establishment of feudalism as the prevailing social-economic system, that is, the period of the slave-owning system. “Antiquity" for the 8th-century Chinese, when feudalism had reached its peak in China. w⁷as identical with the “antiquity” known to medieval Europe.

For the thinkers, publicist writers and poets of the 8th century the main thing in this antiquity was literature. It attracted them because they visualised in it the embodiment of an idea they considered of the highest importance. This idea was humanism.

There are ample grounds for applying this European term, in its exact historical sense, to Han Yu’s outlook, and also to that of his followers, his outstanding contemporaries and his disciples in succeeding centuries. In both medieval Europe and China, humanism signifiied that man was brought into the foreground.

The long history of his country, w'hicli for him signi lied the history of mankind, is reviewed by Han Yu in one of his treatises -On the Way (Yuan Tao). Man, he considers, has built up civilisation and culture and has been its creator from the moment w'hen he emerged from his cave dwelling and started to build himself a house,

prepare food to appease his hunger, and clothing to protect him from the cold- from the moment when he founded a family, a society, a state ’regulated by definite civilised standards. According to Han Yii all these things had been created by man for himself, no deitv had created them'for man. Han Yii considered that men of the greatest intellect were the best representatives of mankind, and he called these “perfect”. The “Perfect Ones” led others, and thus, under their guidance, civilisation had been created.

This concept of the historical process, free as it was of any trace of religious awareness, constituted a challenge not only to religion, represented in the China of that day by Buddhism and Taoism, but also to Buddhist and Taoist philosophy. The Taoist philosophy propagated by Lao-tzu was rejected by Han Yii because it negated culture and advocated the return to the “natural state , to passmtji. Buddhist philosophy was rejected by Han Yii because it regarded being as merely a lower stage in human evolution; because Buddhist philosophy claimed that the ultimate purpose of this evolution was “oblivion”, nirvana.

In the above-mentioned treatise, Han Tu quotes from a book dating from antiquity and almost forgotten by his time. It was called The Great Learning and was to be found in the Li-chi, an ancient code of standards for social life and ritual instructions, lhe central portion in this work reads as follows:

“In ancient times he who desired to render bright for the entire Universe the bright attributes of his nature had first of all to learn how to rule the state. He who desired to rule the state had first to learn to rule his household. He who desired to rule his household had first to learn to perfect himself. He who desired to perfect himself had first to learn to make his own heart right. He who desired to make his own heart right had first to bring his thoughts into accordance with truth. He who desired to bring his thoughts into accordance with truth had first to learn how to acquire knowledge, the acquirement of knowledge consists in the study of things.

Here, then, is the beginning of all human activity— the study of things”. We have just encountered the concept of “things^ m the work of the 15th-century Japanese dramatist Seami; to him things were people, spirits and gods. For the Chinese of the 8th to the 12 th centuries they were things of a material nature, man himself, society and the state*. These constituted reality for Han Yii and other ideologists of Chinese humanism, and for them man’s activity began with the knowledge of these. Then, is this “realism” again? All its standard features seem to be present. We may add for the sake ot analogy: when humanism flourished in Europe the literature ot that

A closer scrutiny of the literature of Chinese humanism is necessary in order to discern what it consists of. In the first place, it_consists of poetry. The names of its foremost representatives are Li Bo, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Po Chu-i, SuTung-po. The names alone ot these

T^{C SU}?^{cient t0 indic}^e the level of poetry. Prose .mould he placed alongside poetry, but prose of a special kind- treati

epistles^S0Cetc ^"S®^{1 and} J^Jnsopbical subjects, descriptive prose, epistles etc Nowadays, we would call these publicist articles and rhetorical prose in various genres. Very few of these writings wouid come under the heading of fine literature; but the Chinese considered all the above-mentioned kinds of prose as fine literature and, moreover, accorded them the highest place. Han Yu Liu Tsunoyuan, Ouyang Hsiu, Su Tung-po, the most eminent writers of such proseq were.included m the list of “Eight Great Writers of the Vans ¹¹ N^vt^g’^Dynn^StleS ’ ^{3S they W6re} named by a later tradition. ^&Yuan Chen °^^erH^comes, narrative prose-the novella, created by luan Chen, Po Hsmg-chien and many other writers

,, .^Wlthf*^h constituents, Chinese humanist literature requires that in the assessment of its art method we should consider all of th,s literature. From tlrie whole we should then seleot Crst of all

inapplicable here True, it was a literature that turned consciously and with conviction to reality, to the most human reality but free of any intention to merely show or reflect it. In everything he wrote the writer strove to speak of man and society. But' how? By any means: through the medium of an inspired love poem for a beloved ^W7^ho 7^as, ^dead- ^ Po Chu-i did in his Song of Unending Com plaint- through expressing thoughts on his country’s destiny and her grievous trials, as Tu Fu did in his poignant lyrics; by means of discussions about “love for all”, regulated by a sense of duty

g someone s fate, or some unusual experience that befell someone such as the writers of novellas did; or by means of a farewell address to a friend departing to take up an office, a reminder fW _i^governme?^{t offlCiaI was no more than} the people’s servant

vant TheT⁶ °f ^{y t}j^ie+.^wages P^aid by the people to their hired servant. I he true foundation of these writers’ creative method was humanism. This allowed them a free hand: they could use any method o. treatment including the fantastic. This last, by the way was very evident in the novellas, but it was employed to presentTn

Hfe n^lkl7n^mai^nner r ^aecessary ^asP^ect the theme of man of social that L ^{f h}i 7' LV^S P^e™^{issible to s}Peak of Chinese literature of 1” I m ^{6 8 h} i° ?^e centuries—as the “literature of reality , but to apply the term “realism” to it, wmuld lead it seems

hv ^^e’t? ^{theaubstltutl}<?^{n of the true} concept of its creative method ^{by anot}her that mistakenly regarded certain particular and derivative features of the method as basic principles.

^?1Untari1^ °^{ne iS reminded} that the literature of European humanism was also very complex in its composition. It included the works of Boccaccio Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus and Ulrich von Hutten. Moreover, it is impossible to draw a sharp demar-

cation line between fine literature and all other varieties of literature. The closest links between literature and philosophy, history, and science, are characteristic of the humanistic period in both China and Europe. History and philosophy flourished in China from the 8th to the 12th centuries; it is sufficient to name the historians Ou-yang Hsiu and Ssu-ma Kuang, the philosophers Han Yu, Chou Tun-i, Ch’eng Hao, Ch’eng I and Chu Hsi. As in Europe, most of these were writers on social subjects, poets, and also representatives of the above-mentioned genre of prose without a special plot.

This recalls another remarkable historical epoch: the history of Western Asia and North-West India from the 9th to the 15th centuries. It was a brilliant epoch that glittered with the names of scholars, historians and philosophers: al-Farabi, al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, the poets Rudaki, Firdausi, Omar Khayyam, Nasir Khusrau, Saadi, Hafiz and Jami.

If we consider that in this region of the world, the same humanism flourished at that period, do we not distinguish still another universal epoch in literature—the world literature of humanism? An epoch beginning from the 8th to the 12th centuries in China, continuing through the 9th to the 13th centuries in Western Asia and the adjoining part of India, and culminating in the period covering the 14th to the 16th centuries in Europe.

The foregoing is intended to show the necessity for the utmost caution in applying the term “realism” to literature previous to the 19tli century, even with modifications and reservations such as “primitive”, “elemental”, and so forth. Literature that consciously takes its bearings from reality has emerged at many stages in man’s historical development, and therefore the term “literature of reality” may be used, to some measure, as a general term for these cases. The term “realism” should be kept for only one of these cases—the 19th-century trend in world literature which has been described in this article. But in employing a general term, great care should be exercised to avoid narrowing down the conception of literature to poetry, narrative prose and drama. In some epochs, literature moreover, what may be called fine literature—was made up of very different elements. _

Another danger to be avoided is this: it should be borne in mind that literature wdiich consciously takes its bearings from reality is only a single line in the history of world literature. Many other lines existed; there have been epochs when it was on these lines that the highest achievements of genius were manifested, when it was these lines that guided mankind on the path forward. If we were to ascribe this role in the past to “realistic literature” alone, it would mean that we had diverged as far from concrete history as in the indiscriminate application of the term “realism”.

• if,^tlie.^Iast twenty or thirty years there have appeared works in different countries which, under various titles, set forth the history of world literature. These works differ greatly in the volume of matenal used, in the way it is arranged and the form in which it is offered, to say nothing of the interpretation given to the process

wi t ?^s.^hls^^0ncal development in general and in particular. Work of this kind is conducted in this country as well.

^{he v}®^ry steadiness of the desire to generalise and elucidate the piocess of the development of world literature proves, in m_V opinion, that it is prompted by the course of the development of literary studies. Our knowledge of the literatures of different nations peopling the world has increased considerably in the past fifty years The well-known literatures of European nations apart, we now have a sufficiently good knowledge of the literatures of Asia and Africa

of different European countries. It may even be said that we have as good a knowledge of the history of literature of many Oriental peoples as we have of Occidental literatures. The desire to somehow generalise this enormous material was therefore perfectly natural the traditions of the old and merited cultural-historical school provided a convenient soil for such generalising. The result was the publication of compendiums which gave the history of different literatures within the framework of the general history of mankind’s culture these compendiums or reviews, if they are sufficiently comprehensive are extremely valuable, if only for the wealth of material thev contain. ^J

But matters did not stop there. The summing up of the material clearly indicated the existence of many-sided and different links between many individual literatures. The existence of such links was put down to the influence one literature had exercised upon another, and on this basis, as everyone knows, numerous works were written disclosing cases of such influence. A whole school of comparative literature was born, a leading place in which was assumed from the start by the French litterature comparee.² Influence as such— that is, the active role which some element in the literature of one country plays in another country’s literature—is an indisputable fact, observable in the histories of many literatures. Therefore, works disclosing instances of such influence are not simply well justified but are really essential.

The existence of links, however, was also interpreted as a factor indicative of a certain community in the history of two or more literatures belonging, as a rule, to neighbouring nations. The idea of zonal literatures was conceived: for example, the literatures of West European peoples, of Slav peoples, and so on.

It is an indisputable fact, frequently known in history, that close links do exist between the literatures of some nations. The discovery of zonal literatures, in a correct, concretely historical understanding of such a phenomenon, is a great achievement of literary scholars. The French comparative school showed the community of literatures within one zone—the zone into which come the literatures of West European nations and America—and also*within a definite historical period, from the 17th to the 19th century in the main, and going back no further than the Renaissance.³ It is not sufficient, of course, but even so literary science is greatly indebted to the French comparativists. In any case, the idea of zonal literatures undoubtedly affected, and very fruitfully so, some of tbe histories of world literatures that have appeared in print.

And still matters did not stop there. The idea of zonal literatures naturally gave birth to the idea of the community of literatures on a world scale. In the light of this idea the term “world literature” acquired a special meaning—an integral phenomenon, rather than an aggregate of separate phenomena closely linked together though they may be. On this basis, a special branch of the comparativist school came into being, developed mainly in the United States.

This is a new and unquestionably important aspect, of course, and it is essential for a better comprehension of the historico-lite-rary process. But only if interpreted correctly. The concept “world literature” in American litterature comparee was actually formed by spreading the concept “zonal literature” to embrace all literatures as such; in other words, the principle of links, which makes the corner-stone of the conception of zonal literatures, remains.

There is a certain historical justice in this, of course: the American comparativists speak of 19th-century literature, and mainly of contemporary literature; actually the community of all literatures has been established since at least the middle of the 19th century. But if we are to work only on the presence of links and the community created by them, we shall of necessity have to restrict ourselves to the study of the history of world literature belonging to modern

times in other words, to particularise the concept “world literature” as applicable to only a single, definite historical period.

res l7u^e ?^1Iedu^tl!f P^r°j^ect dealing with the history of literatu-makes ft If .^laun<*^ed. ^here- ^aN^tory of World Literature, which different ^bn^10Ut ? Tv ^{understand the} term “world literature”

.• T° ^d° ^thl®* T must first outline some particular questions, par-^tl.^c“^^ar ,^ia relation to the general: questions concerning the essence

Every time we begin a review of the history of world literature we first of all come up against an old and elementary question-the composition of literature. ¹

The fact that the composition of literature differed at different historical periods is perfectly obvious. For instance, we find Pla-

SW y TT / * ^{anCi6nt Greek} literature, but Nietzsche’s Thus T f Zarathustrh is not included in new German literature. Livy’s J^StAZ^y- ^{and S}su-ma Ch’ien’s History are included in the literature of ancient Rome and ancient China respectively, while Ferrero’s

WorSiTT^eSS Tv ^L!^ef^ine °J ^J!^orne and Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-rship are not listed in the Italian and English literatures of the

time although they are undeniably brilliant from the point of view of literary merits especially. Aurelius Augustinus’ Confessions is course, a literary monument of later antiquity in the Graeco-Roman world (it is even called the first autobiographical novel) hut len Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions is sometimes mentioned

SainT Tf ^n0t,^jn ]^{he llist0I}-y of French literature of his time; a^ain, Leo Tolstoy s My Confession is never examined in the usual histories of Russian literature but is merely mentioned as one of his works when a general study of Tolstoy’s writings is made. From this we see that works, very similar in theme and character, of un-demab¹⁶ literary merit, were included in the composition of earlier liteiature and left out in later times.

The reverse happens sometimes too. Books of the novel type such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, which ,^PT^{ared m} China in the Middle Ages, were for a long time regarded by Chinese literary scholars as something that was “not quite literature m the accepted sense, while a publicist article or a^hi-losophica] treatise was, on the contrary, considered to be literature of the highest order. And only later, around the 17th century these novels^ began to be recognised as literary works. Consequently, the recognised composition of literature is also dependent on the notions of what a literary work should be, and these notions are always istorical, l. e., they are shaped by the position of literature in a giV-

en historical epoch: its place in the country’s cultural life and the part it plays in that life. These notions are also shaped by the given society’s attitude to the themes raised in a literary work, its material, form, genre and mission.

All this is well known, but today with our greater knowledge of the material and our better understanding of it we can clearly see that the historical composition of literature is one of the most important considerations. And what we have to fear more than anything else are hackneyed notions of the course of literature’s development: of its original non-differentiated composition and the subsequent process of differentiation; of the gradual formation of a specific phenomenon, known as belles-lettres, and so on. The danger of operating with these notions only is that the integrity and completeness of the literary systems of each large historical epoch in their inimitable originality, their qualitative value for their times and their society, might disappear if such an approach is taken. And this is precisely why we should go back to the question of the historical composition of literature once more.

The question of notions about literature as an element of its history has a direct bearing on this. We simply cannot ignore this element: our very material insistently reminds us that the history of literature is at the same time the history of notions about literature. Various theories of poetry, for instance, are well known—treatises on the art of writing poetry, its forms and styles, its essence and tasks. The whole history of Indian, Japanese, Chinese and Arab poetry is littered with these treatises. The most outstanding among these are theories which were conceived at some especially important moments, such as we find in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, for example. The poetry of the meistersinger was coming to an end. And the famous master Hans Sachs himself grew old. In his place came Walther von Stolzing who sang an entirely different song. Beckmesser was highly displeased because Walther sang not as “he was supposed to”, that is, not according to the Tabulatur, and the Tabulatur was law. But Sachs understood that the time had come for precisely this kind of song. And as it turned out, at the Nuremberg guild masters’ and apprentices’ song competition, this song proved victorious, whereas the Tabulatur, like any other Tabulatur that begins to imagine itself the only truth in the world, was doomed to retirement and, even worse, to becoming a caricature of itself, as was the case with Beckmesser—its high priest.

Du Bellay’s poetry resounded like Walther’s song in one of those critical moments in the history of Western poetry, and together with his poetry came his famous manifesto Defense et illustration de la langue franqaise. It offered French poetry, which was already emerging from the Middle Ages, new notions of poetic art. In a very

similar moment in the history of Japanese poetry, Basho gave voice to another “Walther’s song” at the turn of the 17th century, and also expressed his thoughts on the meaning and tasks of the new poetry which was coming to replace the poetry of haikai—the creation of guild masters and merchants. A similar fusion of the new in literature with new notions about literature can be discovered in almost every field of literary endeavour both in the \\ est and in the East.

Thus, the history of literature is made up of two intertwining factors: literature itself, i. e., the aggregate of literary works, and thoughts on literature, i. e., notions about its meaning, its tasks and its types. This gives rise to the following questions: how do these two factors interact, how important is this interaction and how is it influenced by the life of society itself? The interaction as such, however, is an indisputable and universal fact.

If we take the historical character of the composition of literature into account and admit that every large epoch has its own literature as a thing of integrity that is socially and aesthetically important for its time, then the question of historical systems .of literature will naturally arise. We see clearly enough how amazingly stable are the uniformities or the similarities in the literatures of different peoples at one and the same historical time. It should hardly he dismissed as a mere coincidence that a literary-historical genre such as a “pragmatic history” existed in ancient Greek and ancient Chinese literatures at the same time, as well as the genre of “historical biography”. In Greece and in China these were Polybius s History and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s History and Biographies. The latter, even though not entitled “comparative , are anyway, just as they are in Plutarch, based on comparison of persons and destinies that would seem to be different and are yet somehow alike. In medieval Europe we find mysteries and miracle plays, on the one hand, and farces and Fastnachtspielen, on the other.’ Medieval Japan also had its mysteries, yokyoku, and its farces, kyogen. Considering that compositions of this type, clothed in their own genre and form, are encountered elsewhere in the East, also in the Middle Ages, one cannot help thinking that there must be some logic to the simultaneous emergence and development of two opposed types of dramaturgy, and that they must belong to the same system. The same can be said of court lyrics and court epics: whatever their form, they belong to the system of literature of their historical time. It can hardly be accidental that in medieval literature the exquisitely gallant poem of the Aucassin and Nicolette type existed side by side°with the most devil-may-care schwank. Is it so very accidental that the appearance of the “accusatory” novel and the lachrymose melodrama coincided, which is characteristic of literature in the last stages of feudal society both in France and China? It is

hardly probable that the literary forms of romanticism and realism— the way they are presented in fiction and connected manifestos, pamphlets and polemic articles—are not interdependent, and that this interdependence is not a very important feature of the system of literature existing in capitalist society at its time of flower. It is precisely these forms that we inevitably find both in the 19th-century literatures of France, England and Russia, and in the literatures of Japan and Turkey in the 20tli century—a historically similar time. These coincidences cannot be explained away by literary influences alone. An influence can speed up or slow down a process and guide it in one or another direction, but it cannot engender a process, especially one that is of cardinal importance to the entire literature of a given people. The question of historical systems of literature is there without waiting to be raised, and it is imperative to answer it one way or another.

Apparently, the basic types of literary systems will correspond to such large epochs in history as antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times. These epochs, needless to say, are attended by definite social-economic systems—the slave system, the feudal and the capitalist—but only at the very basis. All systems are always in movement: the end of one long stage blends with the beginning of the next, and the beginning of the next stems from the final stage of the last. Therefore the “pure” form of a social-historical system is evidently created by the middle period of its history when the development of all the elements of this system is as harmonious as

The fact that it is so, is very clearly seen in the history of the slave-owning society. In what period of its existence did Hellenic civilisation create the greatest that it gave the world, that which came to be a classical heritage for all the peoples of Europe? In the middle period of its history: in the epoch of poleis, or city-states. That was the time of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Phidias and others. In what period of its history did ancient China create the culture that became a classical heritage for all the peoples of Eastern Asia? In its middle period, in the epoch of lieh-kuo, or kingdoms. That was the time of Confucius, Lao-tzu, Chuan-tzu, Lieh-tzu, Hsiun-tzu, Ivuan-tzu and others.

The heyday of medieval civilisation also occurred in its middle period, taking the form typical for that civilisation; only, to my mind, the most characteristic form should be sought not in the history of the old, but of the younger nations, which came striding into feudalism, bypassing the slave system stage and unburdened by the enormous weight of an antique heritage, which they simply did not possess. In Italy, for instance, the transition to feudalism was a complicated process, overburdened with all kinds of elements

stemming from the past, and a great past at that. The same can be said of other nations which went through the slavery system stage with its many-sided developments.

We know no more than five such nations in history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Iranians, the Indians and the Chinese. Together with the Hebrews they created that which comprises the world’s “classical” heritage. Therefore, in outlining the system of medieval literature we should base ourselves on the literature of the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, the Japanese and the Arabs, rather than on the literature of medieval Italians or Chinese. “Classical” medieval poetry began with the Provencal troubadours, the German minnesingers and the Arab and Japanese bards. The same applies to the knightly epics: it was the historically younger nations w^rho created them. Suffice it to recall the Chanson de Roland and The Lay of Igor's Host, the Song of the Cid and Heike Monogatari.

The question of what literary systems were typical of the large historical epochs is of paramount importance for the elucidation of the general course of mankind’s literary development. But to understand the transition of literature from one large epoch to the next, we must examine the literatures of the transitional periods, the literatures at either extreme, so to say, which concluded one social-historical formation and led to the next one.

In the history of the Western world these transitional periods stand out with singular clarity. The first is the transition from ancient society to the medieval, the Hellenistic period as it is usually called; the second is the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times, called the Renaissance; and the third is the transition from modern times to the contemporary period. It has no generally accepted name as yet, but it began with the Paris Commune and the Internationale. .

The tremendous significance of these transitional epochs in the history of literature is obvious if only from the fact that each one of them was heralded and launched with a literary work of genius. The first was ushered in by De Civitate Dei; the second, by I he Divine Comedy, and the third, by The Communist Manifesto.

The existence of these extremely important transitional epochs in the history of Western literature immediately poses another question: was it a purely European phenomenon? A local phenomenon, historically speaking?

The history of Western peoples is one of the most imporant chapters in world history. In order to appreciate the great help it rendered science to gain a better understanding of the historical process as a whole, it is sufficient to recall that such categories as slaveowning system, feudalism, capitalism, discovered in the history of European nations, came to be universal categories. It is a perfectly

logical inference that there had to be transitional epochs of equai importance in the history of those peoples who, like the Greeks and the Italians, had their antiquity with as great and many-sided a culture. These nations were the Iranians, the Indians and the Chinese. Like the Greeks and the Italians they, too, made the transition to feudalism. And they naturally had their transitional epoch.

The epoch of transition from antiquity to medieval times was no longer the slave-owning system in its classical form, nor was it yet the feudal system in its classical form. The change was indicated, however, and it influenced the minds of men. The Hellenistic period started and developed in the history of the old civilised peoples in the East-Mediterranean countries on all three sides: Europe, Africa and Asia. The revolution of minds which took place here led to the collapse of the old pagan world outook and the adoption of the new Christian ideology. The words “pagan” and “Christian are, of course, no more than very general designations; the phenomena themselves,' covered by these designations, were extremely complicated, varied,,and at times contradictory — all of them, however, joining in the struggle against the old world with equal determination. The new came into the world of the Roman Empire from outside, as it were, from the East: from Judea, Syria and Egypt- the Roman East, as historians call it. As a matter of fact, it was there, in this Roman East, that the revolution of minds began and developed, but it also spread to the Graeco-Latin part of the “Roman world” where the old established world outlook was undergoing a crisis of

With the Chinese and the Iranians the transition from antiquity to medieval times was also accompanied by a revolution of minds. This revolution was fed primarily by inner sources, by trends that were alien to ideological orthodoxy and were called Taoism in China and Manichaeism in Iran. There was also an extraneous factor: a system of ideology coming from outside. In China it was Buddhism, and in Iran, Islam. And it was under the influence of these two forces that minds were reorientated in that first great transitional epoch in these parts of the world.

In Europe, the second transitional epoch—from medieval to modern times—first unfolded in Italy. This, too, was a revolution of minds, and again it drew its inspiration from two sources. The first was that which in the circles of orthodox ideology was called heresies; the second was that which stemmed from Graeco-Roman antiquity, the Italians’own antiquity. Naturally, something came from outside as well: partly from the newly emergent Arab world nearby, and partly from the world of medieval Jewry, but the chief factors of the revolution of minds were certainly the two sources—one from the present and the other from the past.

As events developed, however, the second factor gained priority over the first, at least in the eyes of those active in this second transitional epoch. They attributed such an enormous importance to

antiquity in the remodelling of their own times that they even called their movement the “Renaissance”. Needless to say, there was no restoration of antiquity and there could not have been. Actually, a new philosophy was created, a new sociology and jurisprudence, a new literature and a new natural science; but antiquity was naturally called upon to assist in its own way.

We see exactly the same thing happening in the 9th-12th centuries in the vast Indo-Iranian and Western Turkistan world. There, too, a revolution of minds was going on, which brought about the florescence of philosophical thought, literature, the humanities and the natural sciences. And, again, as in Italy, this movement was fed by two sources: its own times—various anti-orthodox trends in Islam, and its antiquity. The participants in this movement called it the “modernisation”, which shows how great a significance they ascribed to it.

In the 8th-13th centuries a similar movement became clearly outlined in China. It led to the creation of a new philosophy, a new historical school, a new literature. It also drew nourishment from two sources: from its present—various intellectual trends that challenged the official ideology, and from its past, i. e., antiquity. The fact that the movement was called a “return to antiquity” (fu-ku) shows how significant its representatives thought the second source.

Thus, students of the history of world literature are confronted by the question: how to evaluate these facts historically? Attribute them to the accidental or to some law of development? A law of the general course of historical development, which had manifested itself, in features peculiar to itself, in the history of at least three great and leading (in the cultural sense) peoples? This question cannot be avoided. Without solving it, there can simply be no understanding of that golden age of poetry which we link with such names as Li Po, Tu Fu, Po Chii-i, Rudaki, Saadi, Hafiz, Petrarch, Ron-sard and du Bellay.

I do not mention the third transitional epoch here, our epoch, but I think that a careful study of the first two in a world-historical aspect will help us the better to understand the contemporary epoch as well, and, consequently, the processes which have been going on in world literature since the end of the last century.

All these facts, once we succeed in probing them to the full, will enable us to see clearly the movement in the literatures of single nations. At the same time these very facts will let us see the movement in literature on a world scale. And for the history of world literature—that is, of course, if a mere summary of the histories of separate literatures is not substituted for it—the question of this general movement is, perhaps, the cardinal one.

To clarify, here are two examples. Accepting the thesis that “Renaissance” literature, let us call it that, originated with the old peoples—China, Iran and Italy—we shall see that corresponding Renaissance ideas were subsequently conceived by the young peoples as well: in the zone of China, it was the Koreans; in the zone of Iran, the peoples of North-West India and the Turkic peoples of Western Turkistan; in the zone of Italy, the peoples of Western, Central and even Eastern Europe. Thus, it has to be admitted that Renaissance features were already becoming facts of world culture. But at the same time it transpired that their centre of gravity had shifted in a number of cases: the most brilliant attainments of the Renaissance in some spheres of culture were found not in the birthplace of the Renaissance in the given cultural zone but elsewhere. For example, Renaissance dramaturgy in the West attained its peak not in Italy hut in England, with Shakespeare’s art; and in the East it was not in China but in Japan, with the work of Chikamatsu Monzaemon.

It follows, therefore, that in every case Renaissance began, developed and ended in its birthplace before anywhere else. Taking Europe as an example, this is demonstrated by Italy, which fell behind the younger countries—the Netherlands, England, France— in both its social-economic and cultural development. The history of world literature has to examine this process.

But apart from the movement in each separate zone there is also the general world movement. If we analyse the Renaissance chronology for each zone, we shall discover that this proces : first appeared in China in the 8tli century, then in Central Asia, Iran and NorthWest India in the 9th century, and, finally, in Italy in the 13tli century. It was ended in the 17th century on the fringe lands of the Old World: in England, of the Western countries, and in Japan, of the Eastern.

Let us take another example. The literature of modern times— the literature of capitalist society—was most vividly developed not in the old countries but in the young: not in Italy, but in England and France; not in China, but in Japan. Later, this process spread to the other countries as well. This establishes the chronological order in which the world system of literature of modern times was formed from the 17th to the late 19th centuries. This world process moved reversely to the first, Renaissance process: from the West to the East this time.The crest of this wave rose highest not in the country where the process began, but elsewhere. In the West it was attained in Russia with the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, and in the East it was in Japan with the writings of Shimazaki Toson and Natsume Soseki; the levels, both artistic and social, were entirely different, of course.

A third example can be added to these two. The beginning of the latest, in other words present-day, epoch in literature appeared most clearly in the works of Gorky and Mayakovsky in the W est, and in

the works of the Japanese writers Kobayasi Takizi and Ishikawa Takuboku in the East. The artistic levels were very different, but they were alike in the social message they brought the respective countries.

The essence of what is perhaps the most important question in the history of world literature now takes shape: the question of movement. What is it essentially? What are those impulses that start the movement, guide and stimulate it—where do they come from and when, where and how do they start?

Is there such a thing as “world literature” not in the limited sense in which the term is applied to the literature of the modern world, but as a specific phenomenon that existed in all times?To my mind, this question can be answered in the following manner.

As said above, the composition of literature changed historically: it was determined by the actual state of literature at a given time and the current notion of what a literary work should be. This fact was observed in the history of all separate literatures, and in its main features it is common to all of them.

We further observe how gradually, in the process of historical changes, that which people have called “literature” took more and more definite shape and received the right to independent existence. By “literature” we mean that special category of society’s creative activity which differs from philosophy, science and the fine arts and is yet linked to them since it uses all their means: concepts, symbols, images, metre, rhythm and euphony. This process is invariably observed in the history of all separate literatures and is, therefore, general in character.

In every large historical epoch literary manifestations, in whatever stage of formation literature itself may have been, always crystallised into a whole which acquired the importance of a system whose , separate parts were linked together by various relationships. The existence of such systems is observed in the history of all literatures; what is particularly important, the characteristic features of these systems, and even their composition, are roughly similar in the history of all separate literatures—in epochs that have a social-historical similarity, of course.

The history of literature is made by the movement of these systems—the forming, developing, and eventual dying of one system and the appearance in its place of another system with the same cycle. This process with all its peculiarities is also repeated in the history of all separate literatures.

The succession of literary systems, however, does not mean that whatever has been replaced is lost forever. It is rather a process of replenishing the existing aesthetic values with new ones. The con-

cept “heritage” is perfectly real, it means that many works of past epochs live on in later epochs, enriching, what is more, the minds of subsequent generations with the aesthetic values embodied in them. This connecting line, drawn through the ages, and the unbroken succession form a solid substratum for the whole literary-historical process. It is this aesthetic accumulation that makes the substance of the progress created by means of literature.

The succeeding literary systems are linked together in another respect as well: in the origin of literary types and genres. Each type and genre of literature in a given historical system is somehow connected with its predecessor in the previous system. Even though the types and genres originating in a new system may be entirely new, a study of them will reveal their dependence on the old. Naturally, dependence does not necessarily mean that the old types and genres are continued or developed; in can mean a complete renunciation of them. This, too, is observable always and everywhere.

Relations between literatures may vary, as borne out by the history of all literatures. Therefore the communities of literatures we have mentioned before by no means have to last forever. Let us recall, for instance, the history of literatures of the peoples of Western Turkistani in the Middle Ages these literatures belonged to the community of literature which embraced Western Turkistan, Iran and North-West India; in our time they belong to the literary community of Soviet peoples. The existence of zonal literatures for each historical time is a fact recorded in history. Historical changes in number, composition and zonal boundaries, however, are one of the elements of the world historical process.

The character of literature, wherever it may appear, reflects the social nature of its makers. This nature changes; tribes come into being, then they unite, and finally nations are formed. And so there is literature typical of the epoch of tribes, the period between tribes and nations, and the age of nations. National literature in the exact social-historical sense of the term is a special category that originated only in modern times and is the unquestionably predominant one at present. The historical changes of literature’s social substratum, which determines its character, forms, boundaries and lifespan, are common to the histories of all large, long-existing literatures.

And so, in the history of separate literatures known to us there are features peculiar to all of them; in its development we identify the same processes which acquire the significance of definite laws. The fact that a number of these developing phenomena have common laws proves that by nature they are one. This is why the history of separate literatures itself confirms that for all their individual distinctions they are one and the same phenomenon: literature.

Separate literatures, however, join together to form a whole not only on the basis of their, so to speak, substantial unity. They are also linked by the general movement of history. History, as everyone

knows, unfolds unevenly: in the common stream of social-economic development some nations take the lead and others fall behind. This unevenness is one of the motive forces of the historical process. In every large epoch, the stride forward is made in some one part of the world and under its influence a corresponding movement begins in some other parts. This was observed in social-economic history, and this was observed in literary history as well. In this manner a general history of the world’s literature is created.

The existence of histories of separate nations does not preclude the existence of a history of mankind as a phenomenon sui generis.

In the same way the existence of separate literatures does not preclude the existence of a world literature. Each separate literature is a fully independent phenomenon, but so is world literature, except that it is of a higher order.

I have only one question left which I should like to touch upon. It is a question which confronted Soviet literary science when we undertook the compilation of a History of World Literature. Was it worth while doing all this work? If so, why? What for? To find out how the process of inception and development of literature went with different peoples? For that too, certainly. Or in order to see this process on a world scale? Yes, that too. These are the scientific aims of our work.

But we have other, social aims as well. The history of world literature may help to bring into the sphere of the people’s awareness much that deserves to be appreciated. Translators and literary scholars in the Soviet Union have already done a tremendous deal in this respect. The widest circles of readers are now familiar with Medea, Romeo and Juliet, Farkhad andShirin, Petrarch, LiPo,Basho, Omar Khayyam and very much else. But let a young man of our day know not just Beatrice or Laura, but also Yang Kui-fei and Salome. Lethimheartheheroicin//eiA*eMonogataris.n&not just in the Chanson de Roland. It is all necessary, it will all come in useful; we want not Montaigne alone but the Ecclesiastes too. However, one of the vital tasks of the History of World Literature is not so much the introduction of our society to new literary facts as the dissemination of a proper understanding of their aesthetic value.

Another social aim of our work is to show that the history of world literature is a product of mankind’s joint endeavour. We are well familiar with large cultural zones. The peoples of Eastern Asia and India have long been interrelated. Buddhism—and it is far from being simply a religion or simply a philosophy, hut is both literature and art in all its spheres—this Buddhism united the countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Asia into one cultural group. In another direction, Indian civilisation came into con-

tact with the world of Western Turkistan, Middle East and even Greece, both in the times of the Hellenes and Byzantium Byzantine civilisation spread to South-Eastern and Eastern Europe and itself belonged to the sphere of all-European civilisation. Boman culture, another component of this all-European civilisation, embraced Central and Western Europe. The East-Mediterranean world with its multitribal and multilingual population—European, Asian and African—made one huge cultural zone already in the Hellenistic period. Arabic culture with Islam in a variety of interpretations spread over the vast territory from Spain to Indonesia.

One of the aims of the History of World Literature is to disclose these numerous links through literature and, more important still, to help people to understand these links correctly: to understand that different peoples, for all their, feuds, always associated with one another in the field of culture and could not have managed without this association.

To my mind, our History of World Literature must also help to strengthen the notion of the true criterion of historical social progress.

There have been and still are different notions of what should be regarded as progress in the cultural life of mankind. There is quite a widespread opinion that progress should be gauged only by the level of material and technical progress attained in a given country. But even that one span of history Avhich was witnessed by the presently living generation demonstrated with striking vividness how a very high level of material and technical progress, perhaps the highest at that time, in one European country proved to be compatible with perhaps the lowest level of moral depravity civilised mankind of that time could sink to. It is understandable enough that this fact, taken in all its depth and seriousness, led many to historical scepticism and some to an even more bitter state—to historical pessimism. But even this is not the worst: after all, both scepticism and pessimism are anyw^Tay responses of the human intellect which could not ignore and remain indifferent to what had happened. What is much more frightening is the spread of cynicism, insensibility and indifference to everything except material benefits, and a refusal to give any thought to the future roads along which mankind should go.

It is imperative at the present time especially to argue with scepticism and pessimism, on the one hand, and fight cynicism and spiritual inertia, on the other. And in the first place, the truth of a simple principle must be reinstated: only that which is compatible with humaneness and is justified by it, is historically progressive. —

I think that literature is one of the most powerful means with which to convince people of the imperative validity of this principle.

There are different forms of thinking. One form is valid for the field which we call science; another, for thatwhich we call philosophy; the third, for what we entitle art. The material on which our mind is wmrking calls into existence many specific branches of sci-

ence, philosophy and art, but in man’s social consciousness they appear as an integral whole. This whole, moulded in concepts, images and symbols, is embodied in language—that “direct reality of thought”, and through language, elevated to the plane of art, in literature. This makes literature a synthesis of the elements of philosophy, science and the arts. And it is precisely this synthesis that social consciousness is presented with.

If this is so, is not then literature the most direct and powerful means of restoring in social consciousness the notion of humanism as the highest criterion of social and cultural progress?

In socialist society, which is called upon to raise the ethical level of social consciousness in the first place,' we naturally do not have to worry about restoring the meaning of the humanist concept of social and cultural progress: this concept lies in the very basis of our system. Still, a reminder is necessary just the same since the enormous material and technical progress made today, accompanied as it is by a magnificent flight of theoretical thought in this field and an insufficiently developed theoretical thought in the sphere of spiritual values, misleads many into an overestimation of the significance of the former and an underestimation of the importance of the latter. That is why the task of literature which we are discussing concerns in some measure our society as well.

If literature as such can most effectively implant in social consciousness the humanist concept of social and cultural progress, then what other branch of knowledge if not the history of literature can best show that the criterion of humaneness has faithfully served civilised mankind in all the periods of its history? And this is precisely why our work takes on a special meaning: it is not simply a routine undertaking, extremely important though it may be, but a great social cause.

And now for the last point, which concerns our own needs. What can we derive from the history of world literature, Ave people of the third great transitional epoch, to whom the transitional epochs of the past seem especially close? What can we derive from them?

I have named three great works which called for the creation of a new and different future—neAV for each historical period, that is, De Civitate Dei, The Divine Comedy and The Communist Manifesto. Oh, how hard Aurelius Augustinus Avas on his age! How mercilessly he castigated its vices! And what did Dante do? He subjected the past and his own times to the most ruthless judgement: some he sent down to hell with a specialised punishment for each, others he put in purgatory, and some he thought deserving of paradise. Does it need reminding how the authors of The Communist Manifesto came down on the evils of their times and their society?

But then how fervently Aurelius Augustinus believed in his ideal, which he called ^uCity of God”, thinking of it in categories

of the social consciousness of liis time! How passionately Dante believed that it was possible to build up a society that would answer his ideal! And how great was the conviction of the authors of The Communist Manifesto that a new social system was both necessary and attainable! All three works are not only books of great wrath but of great faith too, of great belief in the highest ethical nature of that to which they called men.

And, finally, these three works are also books of great love. Love of man, of mankind. For it was man the authors vere thinking of, worrying about, fighting for; it was for man they wanted to create the new and the best they could imagine. Without this great love their wrath and their faith would have been barren. This too, I think, the history of world literature could show. And it is hardly the smallest of our needs.

1 [ shall only mention the major works: E. Laaths, Geschichte der IV eltlitera-lur. Eine Gesamtdarstellung, Miinchen, 1953; G. True, Histoire illustree des litteratures, Paris, 1952; E. Tunk, Illustrierle Weltliteraturgeschichte. In drei Banden, Zurich, 1954-1955; G. Prampolini, Storia universale della lette-ratura Torino, 1959; H. W. Eppelsheimer, Handbuch der Weltliteratur, Bd. 1-2, Frankf./M., 1950; R. Lavalette, Literaturgeschichte der Welt, Zurich, 1948.

³ See P. Tiegbem, Histoire litteraire de VEurope et de l Amerique de la Renaissance a nos jours, Paris, 1946. -

⁴ See W. P. Friedrich, Outline of Comparative Literature from Dante Alighieri to Eugene O'Neill, Chapel Hill, 1954.

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