‘Soviet Russia’, the New York-based, semi-official voice of the Soviets before U.S. recognition, hosted a series to introduce readers to the great historic Russian writers with essays written by prominent revolutionaries. Here Rosa Luxemburg looks at the life and work of Vladimir Korolenko, written in 1918 while she was in Breslau prison.

‘Life of Korolenko’ (1918) by Rosa Luxemburg from Soviet Russia (New York). Vol. 6 No. 3. February 15, 1922.

Born at Zhitomir, July 15/27, 1853—Died at Poltava, December 25, 1921.

KOROLENKO is an out and out poetic nature. About his cradle hover dense mists of superstition, not the corrupt superstition of modern metropolitan decadence, such as is expressed in the great capitals in the forms of spiritualism, fortunetelling, and faith-healing, but the naive superstition of folk legend, which is as pure and redolent of the soil as the unbridled winds of the Ukrainian steppes and the millions of wild berries, poppies, and cornflowers which flourish there in the tall grass. In the awesome atmosphere of the servant’s hall and nursery, in Korolenko’s paternal home, you distinctly feel that his cradle stood in close proximity to the magic land of Gogol, with its earth-spirits, its witches, and its pagan Christmas spell.

At the age of seventeen, having lost his father, and being entirely dependent on his own efforts, he goes to Petersburg to plunge into the whirl of university life and political ferment. After three years of study at the Technical University, he enters the Agricultural Academy of Moscow. But two years later his plans for a career are frustrated, as in the case of many others of his generation, by “higher forces”. Korolenko is arrested for participation in and advocacy of a student demonstration, is dismissed from the Academy and banished to the Province of Vologda in the Northern part of European Russia, and later permitted to domicile himself under police surveillance at Kronstadt.

Some years later he returns to Petersburg to plan for a new career, and learns the trade of a shoemaker, in order to be able, as was his ideal, to come closer to the working layers of the population, and simultaneously to make his own training as versatile as possible. But in 1879 he is again arrested and banished to a region lying further to the Northeast than his original place of banishment, namely, to the Province of Vyatka, where he is assigned to a remote little village.

Korolenko adapts himself cheerfully to this situation. He makes every effort to fit in with the new conditions of banishment and diligently pursues his new trade, partly with the object of making his livelihood thereby. But he was not to have peace for long. Suddenly he was transferred to Western Siberia without any visible reason, thence again to Perm, and from Perm to the extreme Far East of Siberia.

But here again he was not to cease his wanderings. In 1881, after the attempt on the life of Alexander II, the new Tsar Alexander III mounted the throne. Korolenko, who meanwhile had become a railway employee, took the oath of allegiance together with the remainder of the railway force. But this was not considered to be sufficient in his case. He was asked to swear allegiance also as a private individual, as “а political exile”. Korolenko—together with all the other exiles— declined this suggestion and was rewarded by banishment to the icy waste of the Yakutsk region.

For four years Korolenko, because of his refusal to take the oath, was obliged to live in a wretched settlement of half-savage nomads on the shores of the Aldan, a tributary of the Lena, in the midst of the primitive Siberian forests, in winter temperatures of 40 to 45 degrees below zero. But all the tribulations, the loneliness, the gloomy scene of the Taiga, the wretched surroundings, the remoteness from the civilized world, could not make any impression on Korolenko’s mental elasticity and sunny disposition. He participates eagerly iп the wretched existence of the Yakuts, tills his farm, mows hay and milks cows, devoting his winters to the turning out of shoes and icons. Korolenko later describes this period of being “buried alive”, which is the term George Kennan uses of the life of the exiles in Yakutsk, when he writes, without complaint, without bitterness, even with humor, his impressions and sketches, in the most delicate poetic manner. His poetic talent, however, was meanwhile maturing and he was gathering a rich harvest of impressions of nature and human psychology.

In 1885, having finally returned from a banishment which had lasted, with short interruptions, for almost ten years, Korolenko published a short story which at once ranked him with the masters of Russian literature: Makar’s Dream. In the leaden atmosphere of the ’80s this first ripe fruit pf his young talent had the effect of the first song of the lark on a grey day in February. In rapid succession now followed further sketches and stories: The Journal of a Siberian Tourist, The Rustling Forest, In Pursuit of the Sacred Image, In the Night, Yom Kipur, the Foaming River. All are characterized by the same fundamental quality of Korolenko’s creations: magic depictions of landscapes and moods, brisk and amiable naturalness, and a warm interest for the “debased and disinherited”.

But this strong social note in Korolenko’s writings has nothing about it that is didactic, controversial, apostolic, as is the case in Tolstoy. It is simply a portion of his love of life, of his gentle nature, his sunny temperament. With all the breadth and generosity of his views, with all him distaste for chauvinism, Korolenko is nevertheless a Russian poet through and through, perhaps the most national of the great prose writers of Russian literature. He not only loves his country, he is positively in love with Russia as a young lover, in love with its natural scenes, with the intimate charms of every region of the gigantic empire, with every sleepy little river, and every quiet forestcircled valley, in love with the plain people, its types, its naive religiosity, its native humor, and its brooding introspection.

Korolenko and Gorky represent not only two different poetic individualities, but also two generations of Russian literature and of the ideology of liberty. For Korolenko the peasant is still the central point of interest; for Gorky, the enthusiastic devotee of German scientific socialism, it is the city proletarian and his shadow, the slum proletarian. While in Korolenko the landscape is the natural frame of the story, in Gorky’s works it is the workshop, the cellar den, the underground lodging house.

The fundamentally different course of their lives affords a key to the personality of the two artists. Korolenko, who grew up in comfortably bourgeois surroundings, had in early childhood a normal appreciation of the immutability, the stability of the world and the objects in it, such as is peculiar of all children of happiness. Gorky, whose roots are partly in the petty bourgeoisie and partly in the slum proletariat, nursed the entire Russian proletariat as a class, which out of the coarse and crude barbarism of Tsarism, through the hard school of struggle, worked its way up in the astonishingly short time of two decades to the position of being able to function as an historical force. This is certainly an incomprehensible phenomenon for all those cultural philistines who consider a proper illumination of the streets, a punctual railway service and clean collars to be the sum total of civilization, not to mention the diligent operation of the Parliamentary treadmills.

The pervading magic of Korolenko’s poetry constitutes at the same time its limitation. Когоlenko is entirely rooted in the present, in the moment of the experience, in the sensual impression. His stories are as a cluster of freshly plucked wild flowers; time will not be favorable to their merry colors, their precious fragrance. The Russia that Korolenko pictures no longer exists, it is the Russia of yesterday. The delicate, poetic, dreamy mood that hovers over his country and its peoples, is a thing of the past. In fact, it ceased a decade or two ago in the tragic or stormny mood of Gorky and his group, the shrill storm-petrels of the revolution. Even in Korolenko himself his mood was obliged to yield to that of battle. In him as in Tolstoy, the social champion, the great citizen, came out victorious in the end over the poet and dreamer. When Tolstoy, in the ’80s, began to preach through little popular stories,— Turgenyev, in an imploring letter addressed to the sage of Yasnaya Polyana, begged him in the name of the fatherland to return to the fields of pure art. Korolenko’s friends also mourned his fragrant poetry when he plunged with consuming zeal into journalism. But the spirit of Russian Literature, the high sense of social responsibility, turned out to be stronger in this God-favored poet even than his love for nature, his wanderlust, his poetic creation. Swept away by the wave of the approaching revolutionary flood, his poetry dies down toward the end of the ’90s and his blade thenceforth flashes only as the harbinger of liberty, as a spiritual center for the oppositional tendencies of the Russian intelligentsia.

Soviet Russia began in the summer of 1919, published by the Bureau of Information of Soviet Russia and replaced The Weekly Bulletin of the Bureau of Information of Soviet Russia. In lieu of an Embassy the Russian Soviet Government Bureau was the official voice of the Soviets in the US. Soviet Russia was published as the official organ of the RSGB until February 1922 when Soviet Russia became to the official organ of The Friends of Soviet Russia, becoming Soviet Russia Pictorial in 1923. There is no better US-published source for information on the Soviet state at this time, and includes official statements, articles by prominent Bolsheviks, data on the Soviet economy, weekly reports on the wars for survival the Soviets were engaged in, as well as efforts to in the US to lift the blockade and begin trade with the emerging Soviet Union.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/srp/v6-7-soviet-russia%20Jan-Dec%201922.pdf