At least in the mid-forties the ordinary Russian reader knew, if only incompletely, that George Sand was one of the brightest, most consistent, and most upright representatives of the group of Western ‘new people’ of the time, who, with their arrival on the scene, began to refute directly those ‘positive’ achievements which marked the end of the bloody French (or rather, European) revolution of the preceding century. With the end of the revolution (after Napoleon I) there were fresh attempts to express new aspirations and new ideals.
The most advanced minds understood all too well that this had only been despotism in a new form and that all that had happened was ‘ôte toi de là que je m’y mette’; that the new conquerors of the world, the bourgeoisie, turned out to be perhaps even worse than the previous despots, the nobility; that Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité proved to be only a ringing slogan and nothing more. Moreover, certain doctrines appeared which transformed such ringing slogans into utterly impossible ones.
The conquerors now pronounced or recalled these three sacramental words in a tone of mockery; even science, through its brilliant representatives (economists) came with what seemed to be its new word to support this mocking attitude and to condemn the utopian significance of these three words for which so much blood had been shed. So it was that alongside the triumphant conquerors there began to appear despondent and mournful faces that frightened the victors.
At this very same time a truly new word was pronounced and hope was reborn: people appeared who proclaimed directly that it had been vain and wrong to stop the advancement of the cause; that nothing had been achieved by the change of political conquerors; that the cause must be taken up again; that the renewal of humanity must be radical and social. Oh, of course, along with these solemn exclamations there came a host of views that were most pernicious and distorted, but the most important thing was that hope began to shine forth once more and faith again began to be regenerated.
The history of this movement is well known; it continues even now and, it seems, has no intention of coming to a halt. I have no intention whatever of speaking either for or against it here, but I wanted only to define George Sand’s real place within that movement. We must look for her place at the very beginning of the movement. People who met her in Europe then said that she was propounding a new status for women and foreseeing the ‘rights of the free wife’ (this is what Senkovsky said about her). But that was not quite correct, because she was by no means preaching only about women and never invented any notion of a ‘free wife.’ George Sand belonged to the whole movement and was not merely sermonizing on women’s rights.
It is true that as a woman she naturally preferred portraying heroines to heroes; and of course women all over the world should put on mourning in her memory, because one of the most elevated and beautiful of their representatives has died. She was, besides, a woman of almost unprecedented intelligence and talent – a name that has gone down in history, a name that is destined not to be forgotten and not to disappear from European humanity.
As far as her heroines are concerned, I repeat that from my very first reading at the age of sixteen I was amazed by the strangeness of the contradiction between what was written and said about her and what I myself could see in fact. In actual fact, many, or at least some, of her heroines represented a type of such sublime moral purity as could not be imagined without a most thorough moral scrutiny within the poet’s own soul; without the acceptance of one’s full responsibility; without an understanding and a recognition of the most sublime beauty and mercy, patience, and justice.
It is true that along with mercy, patience, and the recognition of one’s obligations there was also an extraordinary pride in this scrutiny and in protest, but this pride was precious because it stemmed from that higher truth without which humanity could never maintain its high moral ideals. This pride is not a feeling of hostility quand même, based on the fact that I am supposedly better than you and you are worse than I; it is only a sense of the most chaste impossibility of compromise with falsity and vice, although, I repeat, this feeling excludes neither universal forgiveness nor mercy. Moreover, along with the pride came an enormous responsibility, voluntarily assumed.
These heroines of hers sought to make sacrifices and do noble deeds. Several of the girls in her early works particularly appealed to me; these were the ones depicted, for example, in what were called at the time her Venetian tales (including L’Uscoque and Aldini). These were of the type that culminated in her novel Jeanne, a brilliant work which presents a serene and, perhaps, a final solution to the historical question of Joan of Arc.
In a contemporary peasant girl she suddenly resurrects before us the image of the historical Joan of Arc and graphically makes a case for the actual possibility of this majestic and marvellous historical phenomenon, a task quite characteristic of George Sand, for no one but she among contemporary poets, perhaps, bore within her soul such a pure ideal of an innocent girl, an ideal that derives its power from its innocence. In several works in succession we find all these girl characters engaged in the same task and exemplifying the same theme (however, not only girls: this same theme is repeated later in her magnificent novel La Marquise, also one of her early works). We see depicted the upright, honest, but inexperienced character of a young female having that proud chastity, a girl who is unafraid and who cannot be stained by contact with vice, even if she were suddenly to find herself in some den of iniquity.
The need for some magnanimous sacrifice (which supposedly she alone must make) strikes the heart of the young girl, and, without pausing to think or to spare herself, she selflessly, self-sacrificingly, and fearlessly takes a most perilous and fateful step. The things she sees and encounters subsequently do not trouble or frighten her in the least; to the contrary, courage at once rises up in her young heart, which only now becomes fully aware of its power – the power of innocence, honesty, purity. Courage doubles her energy and shows new paths and new horizons to a mind that had not fully known itself but was vigorous and fresh and not yet stained by life’s compromises. In addition to this, there was the irreproachable and charming form of her poem-novels.
At that time George Sand was particularly fond of ending her poems happily, with the triumph of innocence, sincerity, and young, fearless simplicity. Are these images that could trouble society and arouse doubts and fears?
To the contrary, the strictest fathers and mothers began permitting their families to read George Sand and could only wonder, ‘Why is everyone saying these things about her?’ But then voices of warning began to be heard: ‘In this very pride of a woman’s quest, in this irreconcilability of chastity with vice, in this refusal to make any concessions to vice, in this fearlessness with which innocence rises up to struggle and to look straight into the eyes of the offender – in all this there is a poison, the future poison of women’s protest, of women’s emancipation.’ And what of it? Perhaps they were right about the poison; a poison really was being brewed, but what it sought to destroy, what had to perish from that poison and what was to be saved – these were the questions, and they were not answered for a long time.
Now these questions have long been resolved (or so it seems). It should be noted, by the way, that by the middle of the forties the fame of George Sand and the faith in the force of her genius stood so high that we, her contemporaries, all expected something incomparably greater from her in the future, some unprecedented new word, even something final and decisive. These hopes were not realized: it turned out that at that same time, that is, by the end of the forties, she had already said everything that she was destined to say, and now the final word about her can be said over her fresh grave.
George Sand was not a thinker, but she had the gift of most clearly intuiting (if I may be permitted such a fancy word) a happier future awaiting humanity. All her life she believed strongly and magnanimously in the realization of those ideals precisely because she had the capacity to raise up the ideal in her own soul. The preservation of this faith to the end is usually the lot of all elevated souls, all true lovers of humanity.
George Sand died a déiste, firmly believing in God and her own immortal life, but it is not enough to say only that of her: beyond that she was, perhaps, the most Christian of all her contemporaries, the French writers, although
