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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Turgenev A Study, by Edward Garnett
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56809 ***</div>
<p class="center p160">TURGENEV</p>
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<img src="images/i_004.jpg" width="563" height="800" alt="" />
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<div class="chapter">
<h1><span class="p160">TURGENEV</span><br />
<small>A STUDY</small></h1>
</div>
<p class="center p8">BY<br /><br />
<span class="p160">EDWARD GARNETT</span></p>
<p class="center p6">WITH A FOREWORD BY JOSEPH CONRAD</p>
<p class="center p8">LONDON: 48 PALL MALL<br />
<span class="p160">W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.</span><br />
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center">COPYRIGHT 1917</p>
</div>
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<div class="chapter">
<h2>FOREWORD</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">Dear Edward</span>—I am glad to hear that you are
about to publish a study of Turgenev, that fortunate
artist who has found so much in life for us and no
doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice.
Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your
study may help the consummation. For his luck
persists after his death. What greater luck an
artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in
the English-speaking world a translator who has
missed none of the most delicate, most simple
beauties of his work, and a critic who has known
how to analyse and point out its high qualities with
perfect sympathy and insight.</p>
<p>After twenty odd years of friendship (and my
first literary friendship too) I may well permit
myself to make that statement, while thinking of
your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time
to time in the volumes of Turgenev’s complete
edition, the last of which came into the light of
public indifference in the ninety-ninth year of the
nineteenth century.</p>
<p>With that year one may say, with some justice, that
the age of Turgenev had come to an end too; only
work so simple and human, so independent of the
transitory formulas and theories of art belongs as
you point out in the Preface to <i>Smoke</i> “to all time.”</p>
<p>Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirty
years. Since it came to an end the social and
political events in Russia have moved at an accelerated
pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral
and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in
the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity
of a great national writer. The first stirrings, the
first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost
in every page of the novels, of the short stories
and of <i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i>—those marvellous
landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.</p>
<p>Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters
do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for
ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety
of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev’s art, which
has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness,
is for “all time” it is hard to say. Since, as
you say yourself, he brings all his problems and
characters to the test of love we may hope that it
will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love
are replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected
Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women
would not have changed much; and the women
of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so
reverently and so passionately—they, at least, are
certainly for all time.</p>
<p>Women are, one may say, the foundation of his
art. They are Russian of course. Never was a
writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national.
But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia is
but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of
humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great
light and the free air of the world. Had he invented
them all and also every stick and stone, brook and
hill and field in which they move, his personages
would have been just as true and as poignant in
their perplexed lives. They are his own and also
universal. Any one can accept them with no more
question than one accepts the Italians of Shakespeare.</p>
<p>In the larger non-Russian view, what should
make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the
English-speaking world, is his essential humanity.
All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed
and oppressors are human beings, not strange
beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking
themselves about in the stuffy darkness of mystical
contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live,
fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in
the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day
to day the ever-receding future.</p>
<p>I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a
sense. But one ends by having some doubts. To
be so great without the slightest parade and so fine
without any tricks of “cleverness” must be fatal
to any man’s influence with his contemporaries.</p>
<p>Frankly, I don’t want to appear as qualified to
judge of things Russian. It wouldn’t be true. I
know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few
general truths, such as, for instance, that no man,
whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the
purity of his motives and the peace of his conscience—no
man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks
during the greater part of his existence. From
what one knows of his history it appears clearly
that in Russia almost any stick was good enough
to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he
died the characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy
hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb
it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists
went on for a time flinging after his shade
those jeers and curses from which that impartial
lover of <i>all</i> his countrymen had suffered so much
in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every
page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal
absence of callousness in the man.</p>
<p>And now he suffers a little from other things.
In truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted
Dostoevski but the serene Turgenev who is under
a curse. For only think! Every gift has been
heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity and the
deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the
quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and
unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception
of the visible world and an unerring instinct
for the significant, for the essential in the life of men
and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart,
the largest sympathy—and all that in perfect
measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects
of any writer. For you know very well, my dear
Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth
of the world’s-fair, and killed yourself in protesting
that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn’t
get one per cent of the crowd struggling next door
for a sight of the Double-headed Nightingale or of
some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse
collar.—Yours,</p>
<p class="right">J. C.<br /></p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2>INTRODUCTORY NOTE</h2>
</div>
<p>For permission to use certain Prefaces, which I
wrote originally for my wife’s Translations of the
Novels and Tales of Ivan Turgenev, and for the use
of a few quotations from her versions I have to
thank Mr. William Heinemann, the publisher of the
Collected Edition.</p>
<p class="right">E. G.<br /></p>
<p><span class="ml1"><i>March 1917.</i></span><br /></p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
</div>
<table summary="CONTENTS" class="toc">
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER I</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"></td>
<td class="tdr"><span class="smcap">page</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Turgenev’s Critics and his Detractors</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">1</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER II</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Youth, Family and Early Work</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">25</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER III</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“<span class="smcap">A Sportsman’s Sketches</span>”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">35</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER IV</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“<span class="smcap">Rudin</span>”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">55</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER V</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“<span class="smcap">A House of Gentlefolk</span>”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">73</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER VI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“<span class="smcap">On the Eve</span>”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">91</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER VII</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“<span class="smcap">Fathers and Children</span>”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">107</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER VIII</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“<span class="smcap">Smoke</span>”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">127</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER IX</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“<span class="smcap">Virgin Soil</span>”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">137</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER X</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Tales</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">161</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc">CHAPTER XI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Note on Turgenev’s Life—His Character and
Philosophy—“Enough”—“Hamlet and
Don Quixote”—The “Poems in Prose”—Turgenev’s
Last Illness and Death—His Epitaph</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">185</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">I<br />TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND<br />HIS DETRACTORS</p></div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS</p>
<p>A writer, Mr. Robert Lynd, has said: “It is the
custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at
the expense of all other Russian writers. It is
as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion
to authors, and could not endure to see any
respect paid to the images of the rivals of the gods
of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid
prone as Dagon, and another year, Turgenev. And
no doubt the day will come when Dostoevsky will
fall from his huge eminence.”</p>
<p>One had hoped that the disease, long endemic in
Russia, of disparaging Turgenev, would not have
spread to England, but some enthusiastic explorers
of things Russian came back home with a mild
virus and communicated the spores of the misunderstanding.
That misunderstanding, dating at
least fifty years back, was part of the polemics of
the rival Russian political parties. The Englishman
who finds it strange that Turgenev’s pictures of
contemporary Russian life should have excited such
angry heat and raised such clouds of acrimonious
smoke may imagine the fate of a great writer in
Ireland to-day who should go on his way serenely,
holding the balance level between the Unionists, the
Nationalists, the Sinn Féin, the people of Dublin,
and the people of Belfast. The more impartial were
his pictures as art, the louder would rise the hubbub
that his types were “exceptional,” that his insight
was “limited,” that he did not understand either the
politicians or the gentry or the peasants, that he
had not fathomed all that was in each “movement,”
that he was palming off on us heroes who had “no
real existence.” And, in the sense that Turgenev’s
serene and beautiful art excludes thousands of
aspects that filled the newspapers and the minds of
his contemporaries, his detractors have reason.</p>
<p>Various Russian critics, however, whom Mr.
Maurice Baring, and a French biographer, M.
Haumant, have echoed, have gone further, and in
their critical ingenuity have mildly damned the
Russian master’s creations. It seems to these
gentlemen that there is a great deal of water in
Turgenev’s wine. Mr. Baring tells us that Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky “reached the absolute truth of the
life which was round them,” and that “people are
beginning to ask themselves whether Turgenev’s
pictures are true (!), whether the Russians that he
describes ever existed, and whether the praise
which was bestowed upon him by his astonished
contemporaries all over Europe was not a gross
exaggeration.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Turgenev painted people of the same epoch, the
same generation; he dealt with the same material;
he dealt with it as an artist and as a poet, as a great
artist and a great poet. But his vision was weak and
narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding
was cold and shallow compared with that of
Dostoevsky. His characters beside those of Tolstoy
seem caricatures, and beside those of Dostoevsky they
are conventional.... When all is said, Turgenev
was a great poet. What time has not taken away from
him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty
of his language and the poetry in his work.... Turgenev
never wrote anything better than the book which
brought him fame, the <i>Sportsman’s Sketches</i>. In this
book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>“No one can deny that the characters of Turgenev
live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true
to life is another question. The difference between
the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev is this: that Turgenev’s
characters are as living as any characters are
in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to
bookland and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s
characters belong to life. The fault which Russian
critics find with Turgenev’s characters is that they are
exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in
them, and that they are permeated by the faults of the
author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and,
above all, his self-consciousness.</p>
<p>“... Than Bazarov there is no character in the
whole of his work which is more alive ... (but he is)
a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living
though he be.... Dostoevsky’s Nihilists, however
outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not
only truer, but the very quintessence of truth....
(<i>Virgin Soil</i>) Here in the opinion of all Russian judges,
and of most latter-day judges who have knowledge of
the subject, he failed. In describing the official class,
although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he
makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries
whom he sets before us as types, however good they may
be as fiction, are not the real thing.</p>
<p>“The lapse of years has only emphasized the elements
of banality—and conventionality—which are to be found
in Turgenev’s work. He is a masterly landscape
painter; but even here he is not without convention.
His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes,
and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to
face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth;
he never gives us any elemental pictures of nature,
such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he
rings the changes on delicate arrangements of wood,
cloud, mist, and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous
figures, after the manner of Corot.”—<i>Landmarks
in Russian Literature</i>, pp. 99-110.</p></blockquote>
<p>It is obvious from the above criticisms of Mr.
Baring and the Russian critics whom he represents
that what is the matter with Turgenev in their eyes
is his “vision,” his “temperament.” They admire
his language, his beautiful style: they pay lip
service to him as “a poet.” They even admit that
he was “a great artist,” but they do not suspect that
his intellectual pre-eminence is disguised from them
by his very aesthetic qualities, balance, contrast,
grouping, perspective, harmony of form and perfect
modelling, qualities in which Turgenev not only far
surpasses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but any nineteenth-century
European. Further, it is evident
that these critics, having themselves never seen or
felt in nature’s life those shades of “truth” which
Turgenev’s poetical vision reveals to us, imagine
that such have no “real” existence! Otherwise
these critics would have laid stress on these special
shades and tones and not passed them by with a
perfunctory nod. One may go further and assert
that it is precisely this same “poetic vision” which
irritates Turgenev’s detractors; they resent it,
because it conflicts with the more prosaic, everyday
point of view. They mean by “truth” something
both more photographic and commonplace, something
more striking or more ordinary in the “lighting,”
something observed with less beautiful shades
of feeling, less exquisitely stamped and recorded in
classical contours.</p>
<p>Let us examine some of these charges. “Turgenev’s
characters are as living as any in books, but
they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland,
and are thus conventional.” But why <i>conventional</i>?
Why damn all the great creations in <i>books</i>, from
Don Quixote downwards, as bookish? Are
Turgenev’s women characters, say Maria Nikolaevna,
Zinaïda, Varvara Pavlovna, Irene, Elena, Anna
Martinovna, creations which are more highly individualized
than are Tolstoy’s women, conventional?
No more than are Shakespeare’s women, Lady
Macbeth, Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Desdemona,
Portia. Mr. Baring cannot mean this absurdity.
But he repeats the charge “Bazarov is a ‘book-character,’
extraordinarily vivid and living though
he be,” evidently thinking that because Bazarov is a
figure synthesizing social tendencies and a mental
attitude peculiar to his time, he is inferior as a creation
to, say, Tolstoy’s Vronsky. On the contrary,
that is why Bazarov is both psychologically and
humanly a much more interesting figure, and one
higher in the creative scale than Vronsky. Nature
denied Tolstoy the power of constructing a Rudin or a
Bazarov. It is because these types are personifications
incarnate of tendencies, traits, and a special
mode of thought and action of a particular period,
and yet are brimming with individual life, that they
are <i>sui generis, and are irreplaceable creations</i>. This is
Turgenev’s glory. We have only to compare Rudin
or Bazarov with such heroes as Lermontov’s Petchorin
or Herzen’s Beltoff to recognize that while
these latter have all the force of autobiography,
they are not shown us in the round. Mr. Baring
has been seduced, one imagines, by our generation’s
preference for the “photographic likeness” in art,
which nevertheless, at critical moments, often leaves
us in the air: for example, the scene of Vronsky’s
attempted suicide in <i>Anna Karenin</i>. Turgenev
could never have been guilty of this piece of banal,
doubtful psychology. And the latter-day school of
Russian critics, when they ask with Mr. Baring,
“Did men ever meet the double of a Bazarov or a
Rudin in flesh and in blood? if not, then these
characters are bookishly exaggerated or have an
element of caricature in them,” may be asked in
reply, “Did you ever meet Dostoevsky’s Alyosha
or Prince Myshkin walking and talking in life?”
Again, are not three-fourths of Dostoevsky’s people
permeated by “the faults of the author’s own
character”? Do they not behave extravagantly or
fantastically in a manner all their own? Is there not
a strong element of caricature in them? Of course
there is, and Mr. Baring and his Russian critics
delight in it, and for that very reason exalt Dostoevsky
above Turgenev. They exalt the exaggerated
Satanic element in Dostoevsky’s work, even while
they declare “Dostoevsky’s Nihilists are not only
truer than Turgenev’s, but the <i>very quintessence of
truth</i>”! We are more humble in our claims for
Nezhdanov and Marianna and Mashurina in <i>Virgin
Soil</i>; we do not assert that they are “the very
quintessence of truth”; but we know that these
creations are not “caricatures” in the sense that
Stepan Trofimovitch and Karmazinov in <i>The
Possessed</i> are caricatures. We know, on the contrary,
that Turgenev’s Nihilists, in Kropotkin’s words, are
real representatives of “the very earliest phases of
the movement.... Turgenev had, with his wonderful
intuition, caught some of the most striking
features of the movement, viz. the early promoters’
‘Hamletism,’ and their misconception of the
peasantry.” How curious it is that Stepniak and
Kropotkin, who themselves lived with and knew
intimately these early Nihilists, bear witness to the
truth of Turgenev’s portraiture, while MM. Baring
and Brückner and Haumant, these critics of our own
generation, tell us “Turgenev’s Nihilists are not the
real thing”! While admitting that Turgenev had
his comparative failures, such as Insarov in <i>On the
Eve</i>, one observes that Turgenev’s detractors demand
from his social pictures what they demand from no
other of his contemporaries, “the whole objective
truth and nothing but the truth.” And this curious
demand, fundamentally at the root of the widespread
misunderstanding about Turgenev’s work, has been
spread and caught up and re-echoed by the great
tribe of partisan critics, political propagandists,
Slavophils, reactionaries, progressives, for two
generations. Necessarily Turgenev, this consummate
artist whose contemporary pictures synthesize
many aspects of the social and political movements
of his time, colours and tones his work with his own
personality, as do all the other great creators. Just
as the hero, Olenin in <i>The Cossacks</i>, Levin in <i>Anna
Karenin</i>, and Pierre in <i>War and Peace</i>, are projections
of Tolstoy’s individuality, so Lavretski,
Litvinov, Sanin, and other characters, are projections
of Turgenev’s personality. It is the same
with Fielding, with Balzac and Maupassant, with
Dostoevsky and Gontcharov, whose characters also
“are compacted of the result of their observation,
with all their own inner feelings, their loves and
hates, their anger and disdain.” But only in
Turgenev’s case, it appears, it is a sin that the
creations should contain a certain amount of
“subjective reality.” It must therefore be the case
that it is precisely Turgenev’s “temperament”
which is at fault in the eyes of critics who assert that
“his vision was weak and narrow compared with
that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and
shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky.” How
curious that the vision which created <i>Fathers and
Children</i> and <i>The Poems in Prose</i> should have been
relatively weak and narrow! and that the understanding
which created <i>A House of Gentlefolk</i> and
<i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i> should have been cold and
shallow! And yet in the same breath we are
instructed that Turgenev “dealt with his generation
as a great poet and a great artist.” A great poet
with a relatively weak and narrow vision, a great
artist with a relatively cold and shallow understanding!
This is an enigma to us, but not to Turgenev’s
detractors.</p>
<p>No! One must fall back on other explanations
of Turgenev’s comparative unpopularity. The first
is that beauty of form, a master’s sense of composition,
an exquisite feeling for balance are less and
less prized in modern opinion. Our age has turned
its back on the masters possessed of these classic
qualities. Modern life flows along congested roads,
and modern art responds in bewilderment to an
embarrassment of forces. Corot’s example in painting
is no longer extolled save by the true connoisseur.
The grace of beauty is more or less out of fashion.
The wider becomes the circle of modern readers and
the more the audience enfolds the great bourgeois
class, the less are form, clarity and beauty prized.
The second explanation is that the inspiration of
Love, and the range of exquisite feelings of Love, so
manifest in Turgenev’s vision, are slightly <i>vieux jeu</i>.
When Dostoevsky is sentimental, as in <i>The Insulted
and Injured</i>, he turns one’s stomach. It is impossible
to read him, so false, exaggerated and
unreal are his characters’ emotions. But when
Turgenev is sentimental, as he is in passages in
<i>The Diary of a Superfluous Man</i>, <i>A Correspondence</i>,
<i>Faust</i>, one finds oneself to be in the atmosphere of a
faded drawing-room of the “’forties.” This perishable
element undoubtedly exists in some of Turgenev’s
short stories: it was the heritage he received from
the Romantic movement of his fathers, and occasionally,
here and there, streaks of this romanticism
appear and are detrimental to the firm and delicate
objectivity of his creations. But, apart from the
question of these streaks of sentimentalism, it is
obvious that Turgenev in his attitude towards love
and women is nearer to Shakespeare than is, say,
Tchehov. Liza and Elena are almost as far removed
from the range of our modern creators as are Imogen
and Desdemona. It is not that we do not believe
firmly in their existence, but that the changed social
atmosphere of our times does not so sharply develop
and outline woman’s spiritual characteristics: such
heroines are now free to act in many directions denied
to Turgenev’s heroines. A girl might say, to-day,
of Elena, “Grandmother was like that! so father
says, and grandfather saw her like that! Isn’t it
interesting?” And this change in our social
atmosphere, undoubtedly, is a bar to Turgenev’s
popularity in the eyes of the younger generation.</p>
<p>Again, despite the change of fashion in schools of
landscape painters, it is amusing to hear that
Turgenev—“this masterly landscape painter”—is
charged with “never getting face to face with
nature, after the manner of Wordsworth—and
Gorky”! But Mr. Baring is echoing his French
authority, M. Haumant, who in turn is modestly
echoing, it would seem, MM. Mihaïlovsky and
Strahov.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> These eminent authorities on nature are
agreed in comparing Turgenev with Corot, “whose
subjects and methods scarcely alter.” Vogüé, who
knew the province of Orel, Turgenev’s country,
however, does not agree. He says pointedly, “One
has to live in the country described by Turgenev
to admire how on every page he corroborates our
personal impressions, how he brings back to our
soul every emotion experienced, and to our senses
every subtle odour breathed in that country.”
This seems explicit.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Tourguénief, la vie et l’œuvre.</i> Par Émile Haumant.
Paris, 1906.</p></div>
<p>Never getting face to face with nature! Could
a more baseless charge have been made, one falsified
by the innermost spirit of Turgenev’s work, and by
countless passages in his writings, of the most
intimate observation?<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> We cite a specimen from
<i>A Tour in the Forest</i>, showing the penetrating freshness
and warmth of his description:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I fed my horses, and I too was ferried over. After
struggling for a couple of miles through the boggy
prairie, I got at last on to a narrow raised wooden causeway
to a clearing in the forest. The cart jolted unevenly
over the round beams of the causeway; I got out and
went along on foot. The horses moved in step, snorting
and shaking their heads from the gnats and flies. The
forest took us into its bosom. On the outskirts, nearer
to the prairie, grew birches, aspens, limes, maples, and
oaks. Then they met us more rarely. The dense
firwood moved down on us in an unbroken wall. Further
on were the red, bare trunks of pines, and then again
a stretch of mixed copse, overgrown with underwood of
hazelnut, mountain ash, and bramble, and stout, vigorous
weeds. The sun’s light threw a brilliant light on the
tree-tops, and, filtering through the branches, here and
there reached the ground in pale streaks and patches.
Birds I scarcely heard—they do not like great forests.
Only from time to time there came the doleful and
thrice-repeated call of a hoopoe, and the angry screech
of a nut-hatch or a jay; a silent, always a solitary bird
kept fluttering across the clearing, with a flash of golden
azure from its lovely feathers. At times the trees grew
further apart, ahead of us the light broke in, the cart
came out on a cleared, sandy, open space. Thin rye
was growing over it in rows, noiselessly nodding its pale
ears. On one side there was a dark, dilapidated little
chapel with a slanting cross over a well. An unseen
brook was bubbling peacefully with changing, ringing
sounds, as though it were flowing into an empty bottle.
And then suddenly the road was cut in half by a birch-tree
recently fallen, and the forest stood around, so old,
lofty and slumbering, that the air seemed pent in.
In places the clearing lay under water. On both sides
stretched a forest bog, all green and dark, all covered
with reeds and tiny alders. Ducks flew up in pairs,
and it was strange to see those water-birds darting
rapidly about among the pines. ‘Ga, ga, ga, ga,’ their
drawn-out call kept rising unexpectedly. Then a
shepherd drove a flock through the underwood; a
brown cow with short, pointed horns broke noisily
through the bushes, and stood stock-still at the edge of
the clearing, her big dark eyes fixed on the dog running
before me. A slight breeze brought the delicate pungent
smell of burnt wood. A white smoke in the distance
crept in eddying rings over the pale, blue forest air,
showing that a peasant was charcoal-burning for a glass-factory
or for a foundry. The further we went on,
the darker and stiller it became all round us. In the
pine-forest it is always still; there is only, high overhead,
a sort of prolonged murmur and subdued roar in the
tree tops.... One goes on and on, and this eternal
murmur of the forest never ceases, and the heart gradually
begins to sink, and a man longs to come out quickly
into the open, into the daylight; he longs to draw a full
breath again, and is oppressed by the pungent damp
and decay.”—<i>A Tour in the Forest</i>, pp. 105-107.</p></blockquote>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> “Their predecessors had lived more or less with Nature,
but had always looked upon her as something foreign to
themselves, with an existence separated from theirs. In
Tourguéniev’s case this external intercourse becomes a fusion,
a mutual pervasion. He feels and recognizes portions of his
own being in the wind that shakes the trees, in the light that
beams on surrounding objects....”—<i>A History of Russian
Literature</i>, by K. Waliszewski, p. 290.</p></div>
<p>Anybody who has lived amid forests and woods
must agree that in the passage above Turgenev has
seized with unerring exactitude the character, the
breath itself of a great woodland, and similarly all
his descriptions of nature in <i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i>
are inspired by profound sensitiveness and close
fidelity. “Vague backgrounds and diaphanous
figures!” This is the accusation of townsmen.</p>
<p>Another and more insidious line of critical detraction
has been followed by M. Haumant in <i>Ivan
Tourguénief, la vie et l’œuvre</i>, a volume, painstaking
and well documented, assuredly of great
interest to the student. Intent on his efforts to
track down to their source “the origins of Turgenev’s
thoughts,” the French critic has forgotten to applaud
the aesthetic appeal, and the very perfection of
these creations! It is as though a critic of Keats,
in trying to discover “the sources” of “Hyperion”
or “An Ode to a Grecian Urn,” had neglected to
appraise the imperishable essence of these masterpieces.
Thus M. Haumant, searching profoundly
for “echoes” in Turgenev’s “inner voices,” gravely
informs us that in <i>The Brigadier</i> Turgenev has
constructed “a Russian Werther”! while a passage
in <i>Phantoms</i>, it appears, is inspired by a passage in
De Quincey’s <i>Confessions of an Opium-Eater</i>. A page
is devoted to the discussion of the latter conjecture,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
but nothing at all is said as to the unique spiritual
beauty and the haunting atmosphere of these tales.
And <i>A Lear of the Steppes</i>, that masterpiece, incomparable
in its force of genius, is dismissed in
half a line! The effect of such “comments,” both on
those who know and those who do not know their
Turgenev, is equally unfortunate. For it really
looks, but of course one may be wrong, as though
the French critic, like his latter-day Russian <i>confrères</i>,
did not recognize a masterpiece when he sees
one. Has not, indeed, a Russian literary teacher,
A. D. Alfyorov, publicly declared that “Turgenev’s
work is, of course, only of historical importance.”</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Haumant, p. 174.</p></div>
<p>But enough! Indeed one may well be asked,
Is it necessary to defend so great a classic as Turgenev
against modern criticisms of this character?
Perhaps it is not a mere waste of time, for certain
reasons. Turgenev’s supremacy, as artist, accepted
by the <i>élite</i> in France, Renan, Taine, Flaubert,
Maupassant, etc., and by the best European critics,
such as Brandes, was impaired in Russian eyes by
his growing unpopularity after 1867. Brückner says
justly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“To the intelligent Russian, without a free press,
without liberty of assembly, without the right to free
expression of opinion, literature became the last refuge
of his freedom of thought, the only means of propagating
higher ideas. He expected and demanded of his country’s
literature not merely aesthetic recreation; he placed
it at the service of everything noble and good, of his
aspiration, of the enlightenment and emancipation of
the spirit. <i>Hence the striking partiality, nay, unfairness,
displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works
of their own literature when they did not answer to the
claims or the expectations of their party or their day. A
purely aesthetic handling of the subject would not gain it
full acceptance.</i>”</p></blockquote>
<p>Indeed, to read the contemporary Russian onslaughts
directed against Turgenev’s successive
masterpieces is to imagine one must be dreaming.
Nearly every popular critic of the periodical press,
righteous or self-righteous, is seen, tape-measure in
hand, arbitrarily finding fault with Turgenev’s
subject, conception and treatment, disdaining or
ignoring its aesthetic force, beauty and harmonious
perfection. It is a crowd of critical gnats dancing
airily round the great master and eagerly driving
their little stings into his flesh. Even before the
publication of <i>Smoke</i> (1867) Turgenev was accused
of being <i>out of date</i>, and his frequent spells of residence
abroad, at Baden, Paris, etc. (though he returned
to Russia nearly every year), and his “life devotion”
to a foreigner, Madame Viardot, helped to consolidate
the story that he no longer knew the Russia of the
day. And indeed there is truth in the dictum that
Turgenev was pre-eminently a chronicler of the
Pre-Reform days, or as he himself said, “a writer
of the transition period.” But the bulk of his
works, even those into which no tendency could be
read, such as <i>The Torrents of Spring</i> or <i>A Lear of the
Steppes</i>, was never properly appreciated as aesthetic
creations, so deeply imbued was the intelligent
Russian with the “war-like” criticism of Drobrolubov,
Tchernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mihaïlovsky, etc.,
critics who, in Brückner’s words, “relegated aesthetics
to ladies’ society, and turned its critical
report into a sort of pulpit for moral and social
preaching.” A strong reaction in Turgenev’s favour
was manifested at the Pushkin statue celebration
in Moscow, 1879, and at his funeral obsequies in
Petersburg, 1883, when two hundred and eighty-five
deputations met at his grave. But, later,
MM. Mihaïlovsky and Strahov, and latterly MM.
Haumant, Brückner and Baring, have declared that
“the general admiration” for Turgenev’s genius
has greatly weakened, and that Turgenev’s star has
paled before the stars of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
This undercutting style of criticism—“They
shadow you with Homer, knock you flat with
Shakespeare,” as Meredith puts it—seems a little
clumsy when one reflects that not merely in vision
and temperament, but in aesthetic quality, Turgenev
is irreplaceable. The spiritual kingdoms of Turgenev,
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are separated as
widely as are the kingdoms of Wordsworth, Byron
and Shelley. It is true that for our triumphant
bourgeoisies, who, bewildered, grapple with the
rich profusion of facts, problems and aspects of our
congested civilization, <i>quality</i> in art is little understood
or prized. And Turgenev, by his art’s harmonious
union of form and subject, of grace and
strength, of thought and emotion, in fact belongs,
as Renan said, to the school of Greek perfection.</p>
<p>Since Turgenev is pre-eminently an intellectual
force, as well as an artist with a consummate sense
of beauty, it is difficult for a critic to hold the
balance equitably between the social significance of
Turgenev’s pictures of life and the beauty of his
vision. Far too little attention has been paid to
him as artist. This is no doubt not merely due to
the fact that while the majority of critics either
naïvely ignore or take for granted his supreme
quality, the more perfect is a work of art the more
impossible is it to do it critical justice. The great
artists, as Botticelli, who are peculiarly mannered,
it is far easier to criticize and comment on than is a
great artist, as Praxiteles, whose harmony of form
conceals subtleties of technique unique in spiritual
handling. The discussion of technical beauties,
however, is not only a thankless business but tends
to defeat its own object. It is better to seek to
appreciate the spirit of a master, and to dwell on his
human value rather than on his aesthetic originality.
The present writer need scarcely add that he is
dissatisfied with his inadequate discussion of Turgenev’s
masterpieces, but fragmentary as it is, he
believes his is almost the only detailed attempt yet
made in the English language.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">II<br />YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK</p>
<p>“All my life is in my works,” said Turgenev, and
his biographers’ account of his education and youth
reveals how it was that from the age of twenty-three
Turgenev was to become both an interpreter of the
Russian mind to Europe and an interpreter of
Western culture to his countrymen. His father,
Sergey Ivanovitch, a handsome, polished officer of
impoverished but ancient family, married an heiress,
Varvara Petrovna Lutovinov, and their eldest son,
Ivan Sergeyevitch, was born, October 28, 1818,
at Orel, in central Russia. The natural loathing of
the soft, poetic and impulsive boy for tyrannical
harshness was accentuated by his parents’, especially
by his mother’s, severity, unmerited whippings
and punishments being his portion in the “noble
and opulent country-house” at Spasskoe, where
foreign tutors and governesses succeeded one another
quickly. That Turgenev had before his eyes from
his childhood in his capricious and despotic mother
a distressing object-lesson of a typical Russian vice,
viz. unbridled love of power, could only deepen his
instinct for siding with weak and gentle natures.
Turgenev’s psychological penetration into hard,
coarse and heartless characters, so antithetic to
his own, seems surprising till we learn that the
unscrupulous and cruel “Lutchinov,” the hero of
<i>Three Portraits</i>, was drawn from a maternal ancestor.
From the Lutovinov family, cruel, despotic and
grasping, Turgenev no doubt inherited a mental
strand which enabled him to fathom the workings
of hardness and cruelty in others. The injustice
and humiliations he and his brothers, along with a
large household of dependents, suffered at Madame
Turgenev’s hands,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> early aroused in him a detestation
of the system of serfdom. The touching story
of <i>Mumu</i>, in which the deaf and dumb house-porter’s
sweetheart is forced to marry another man, while he
himself is ordered to drown his pet dog by his
mistress’s caprice, is a true domestic chronicle.
Though Madame Turgenev dearly loved her son
Ivan Sergeyevitch, whose sweet and tender nature
influenced her for good, her insatiable desire to
domineer over others, and her violent outbursts of
rage kept the household trembling before her whims.
“Nobody had a right to sustain in her presence any
ideas which contradicted her own,” while her jealousy
of her handsome husband’s <i>affaires de cœur</i> embittered
her days.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> She herself had been the victim
of her own upbringing, and remembered with
loathing her step-father’s lust and cruelty. Turgenev
therefore was early inoculated with an aversion
for tyrannizing in any shape or form, as well as
for the prevalent forms of oppression, official or
social, under Nicholas I., and as his biographers
tell us, the Turgenevs were a stock noted for
“a hatred of slavery and for noble and humane
temperaments.”<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> See “La mère d’Ivan Turguenieff,” in <i>Tourguénieff Inconnu</i>,
par Michel Delines.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> See the story <i>First Love</i>, where Turgenev describes his
parents’ relations.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Brückner’s <i>A Literary History of Russia</i>, p. 338.</p></div>
<p>A second potent influence that turned the youthful
Turgenev’s face definitely towards the West was
his lengthy tour in Europe, 1838-41. His early
education at Moscow University had been completed
at the University of St. Petersburg, where his family
had removed after his father’s death in 1835, and
where as a shy youth he saw the two great authors,
Gogol and Pushkin, whose literary example was to
have a profound influence on his own work. German
philosophy, especially Hegel’s, was at this epoch
fashionable in Russia, and Turgenev, after setting
out on his tour with his mother’s blessing, attended
by a valet, arrived in Berlin, where he drank deep of
Goethe’s, Schiller’s and Heine’s works, and where
his ardent discussions with his circle of students on
life, art, politics and metaphysics crystallized his
aspirations for European culture. A tour on the
Rhine, in Switzerland and in Italy effectually
widened his outlook, and he returned to Spasskoe
in 1841, bringing with him his narrative poem
“Parasha.”</p>
<p>Undoubtedly conflicting influences, such as Byron,
Pushkin and Lermontov, are visible in Turgenev’s
youthful, romantic poems, “Parasha,” and various
others (1837-47), which we shall not discuss here, or
his half-dozen plays (1845-52), which last, however
excellent, did not give his genius sufficient scope.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>
Much ingenuity has been exercised, especially by
French critics,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> in ascribing Turgenev’s literary debts
to authors as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Victor
Hugo, Balzac, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Auerbach,
Dal, Grigorovitch, Dickens, etc. But it would
be a waste of time to analyse Turgenev’s work for
traces of contemporary authors, though George
Sand’s stories of French peasant life had undoubtedly
deeply influenced him. With Pushkin as classical
model for clarity of style, and with Gogol as his
model for direct painting from everyday life,
Turgenev belongs to “the natural school” of the
’forties, the school of the realists championed by the
critic Byelinsky, then all-powerful with the rising
men. It is true that a vein of romanticism crops
up here and there in various of Turgenev’s tales,
and that a definite strain of lyrical sentimentalism
in occasional passages may be credited to German
influence. But in almost his first story, <i>The Duellist</i>
(1846), we find a complete break with the traditions
of the romantic school, traditions which are indeed
here turned inside out.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Here it is evident that a
new master is in the field, “a painter of realities”
as Byelinsky soon declared.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> The story is of much
significance, as exemplifying Turgenev’s clear-eyed,
deep apprehension of character, and his creative
penetration through <i>beauty of feeling</i>. It is to be
noted how the coarse bullying insolence of the
officer, Lutchkov (who out of envious spleen kills in
a duel his friend, the refined and generous Kister),
is betrayed <i>by the absence of any tender or chivalrous
emotion for women</i>. Filled with his own male self-complacency,
and contemptuous of women, Lutchkov
comes to his interview with the fresh, innocent
girl Masha, whom he alarms by his coarse swagger.
To cover his brutal egoistic feeling he roughly kisses
the shrinking girl, but she shudders and darts away.
“What are you afraid of? Come, stop that....
That’s all nonsense,” he says hoarsely, as he approaches
her, terribly confused, with a disagreeable
smile on his twisted lips, while patches of red came
out on his face.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> “Parasha” was warmly praised by Byelinsky in 1843, in an
article in <i>Annals of the Fatherland</i>. Of the six Plays, which were
revived from time to time, <i>The Bachelor</i> (1849) is perhaps the
strongest. In later years Turgenev disclaimed any interest in
his dramas, and declared that towards his poems he felt an
antipathy almost physical.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Haumant, Delines, Waliszewski, etc.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> M. Haumant has been at great pains to show that Turgenev
in his early prose and verse “commenced by appropriating the
form and the subjects of the romantics of the ’twenties and the
’thirties, that his ‘half revolt’ against the romantic convention
became accentuated later, and that we find in the plays and
poems a ‘degradation of the romantic heroes’ of Pushkin and
Lermontov” (Haumant, pp. 113-122). Although there is not a
little truth in his thesis, M. Haumant has forgotten to add that
the <i>social atmosphere</i> of the preceding generation, as well as of
its literature, music and art, was “romantic,” and that the youth
of the period, as well as the heroes of Goethe and Stendhal, did
act, think and feel in a “romantic” manner.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Byelinsky, in his criticism on <i>Hor and Kalinitch</i>, says:
“His talent is not suited to true lyrics. He can only paint from
real life what he has seen or <i>studied</i>. He can create, but only
with the materials given by nature. It is not a copy of the
real; nature has not given the author innate ideas, but he has
to find them; the author transforms the real, following his
artistic ideal, and so his picture becomes more living. He knows
how to render faithfully a character or a fact he has observed....
Nature has given Turgenev this capacity of observing, of understanding,
and of appreciating faithfully and quickly each fact,
of divining its cause and consequences, and, when facts are
lacking, of supplying the factors by just divination.”</p></div>
<p>Could anything describe better the brutal spirit
of the man who, out of spiteful envy, to revenge his
slighted self-love, kills his own friend, Kister, in a
duel? Turgenev’s description of Kister must be
remarked, for the latter in his “good nature,
modesty, warm-heartedness and <i>natural inclination
for everything beautiful</i>” is the twin-soul of his
creator. Turgenev’s lifelong readiness to lose
sight of himself in appreciation of others, even of
the men who abused his good offices and repaid him
with ingratitude, was notorious.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> One may assert
that Turgenev’s character was thus early expressed
in four dominant traits, viz. a generous tenderness
of heart, an enthusiasm for the good, sensitiveness
to beauty of form and feeling, an infinite capacity
for the passion of love. These qualities are manifest
in his first work of importance, <i>A Sportsman’s
Sketches</i> (1847-51), an epoch-making book which
profoundly affected Russian society and had no
small influence in hastening the Emancipation of
the Serfs in 1861-63.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> For example, Turgenev warmly commended Dostoevsky’s
works to foreign critics, after the latter had perpetrated the
spiteful libel on him in <i>The Possessed</i>.</p></div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">III<br />“A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES”</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">“A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES”—“NATURE<br />AND MAN”—THE SECRET OF TURGENEV’S ART</p>
<p>At this date, 1847, Russia, long prostrate beneath
the drill sergeants of that “paternal” autocrat
Nicholas I.,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> with the lynx-eyed police rule, servile
press and general atmosphere of bureaucratic
subservience stupefying the country, was slowly
awakening to the new ideas of reform. Grigorovitch’s
novel <i>The Village</i> (1846), which painted the
wretched life of the serfs, marked the changing
current of social ideas, but to Turgenev was to fall
the honour of hastening “the Emancipation.” There
is perhaps a little exaggeration in this eloquent
passage of M. de Vogüé: “Russia saw its own
image with alarm in the mirror of serfdom held
towards it. A shiver passed through the land: in
a day Turgenev became famous, and his cause was
half won.... I have said that serfdom stood
condemned in everybody’s heart, even in the
Emperor Nicholas’s.” But we are assured by
Turgenev himself that Alexander II.’s resolution
to abolish serfdom was due in no small part to
<i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i>. The old generation in fact
was soon to pass away with Nicholas’s rule. As
the sketch “The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov”
demonstrates, to this old race of landowners, frankly
despotic in their manners, was succeeding a milder
class—one which “did not like the old methods,”
but was ineffective and self-distrustful. And it was
to this younger Russia in silent protest against the
“official nationalism” prescribed by the ministers
of Nicholas, and against the stagnation of provincial
life which Gogol had satirized so unsparingly in
<i>Dead Souls</i> (1842), that Turgenev made his appeal
with his first sketch “Hor and Kalinitch” in the
magazine <i>The Contemporary</i>. Turgenev’s reputation
was made, and Byelinsky, who declared that
Turgenev was “not a creator but a painter of
realities,” immediately predicted his future greatness.
The other, <i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i>, as they
appeared, one by one, were eagerly seized on by the
public, who felt that this new talent was revealing
deep-welling springs of individuality in the Russian
nature, hitherto unrecorded.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> “The teaching of philosophy was proscribed in all the
schools, and in all the universities of the Empire; admission to
which had now been reduced in numbers. The classics were
similarly ostracised. Historical publications were put under a
censor’s control, which was tantamount to a prohibition. No
history of modern times, <i>i.e.</i> of the seventeenth or eighteenth
centuries, was allowed to be taught in any form whatsoever.”—<span class="smcap">E.
M. de Vogüé.</span></p></div>
<p>Though Russian society was profoundly moved
by Turgenev’s picture of serfdom, it was in truth
the triumph of the pure artist, of the writer who
saw man’s fugitive life in relation to the vast,
universal drama of nature, that made <i>A Sportsman’s
Sketches</i> acceptable to all. One may compare the
book’s atmosphere to some woodland’s tender
morning air quivering with light, which transmits
the ringing voices of men in all their meaning
inflections. The voices rise, in joy or strife or
passion, then die away in silence, and we hear the
gentle stir and murmur of the leaves as the wind
passes, while afar swells the roar of the deep forest.
Turgenev’s spiritual vision resembles this silvery
light and air which register equally the most exquisite
vibration of human aspiration and the
dissonance of men’s folly and misery. The sweet
and tender depths of the author’s spirit served, so
to say, as a sensitive mirror which reflected impassively
the struggle between the forces of worldly
craft and the appeal of all humble, neglected and
suffering creatures. “The Tryst” is an example of
the artist’s exquisite responsiveness both to the
fleeting moods of nature and the conflicts of human
feeling. Thus the sufferings of the young peasant
girl, poor Akoulina, at the hands of her conceited
lover, the pampered valet, Viktor, are so blended
with the woodland scene and our last view of “the
empty cart rattling over the bare hillside, the low
sinking sun in the pale clear sky, the gusty wind
scudding over the stubble fields, the bright but chill
smile of fading nature,” that one can scarcely
dissociate the girl’s distress from the landscape.
An illusion! but one that great literature—for
example, the <i>Odyssey</i>—fosters. When we look over
the face of a wide-stretching landscape each tiny
hamlet and its dwellers appear to the eye as a little
point of human activity, and each environment,
again, as the outcome of an endless chain of forces,
seen and unseen in nature. Man, earth and heaven—it
is the trinity always suggested in the work of
the great poets.</p>
<p>But the vast background of nature need not be
always before the eyes of an audience. In “The
Hamlet of the Shtchigri District,” for instance, where—through
the railings of an embittered man against
the petty boredom of provincial life, together with
a characteristically Russian confession of his own
sloth and mediocrity—we breathe the heated air
of a big landowner’s house, the window on nature is,
so to say, shut down. So in “Lebedyan” the bustle
and humours of a horse-fair in the streets of a small
country town, and in “The Country House” the
sordid manoeuvres of the stewards and clerks of the
lazy landed proprietor, Madame Losnyakov, against
their victims, the peasants on the estate, exclude
the fresh atmosphere of forest and steppe. But
even so we are conscious that the sky and earth
encompass these people’s meetings in market-place
and inns, in posting-stations, peasants’ huts and
landowners’ domains, and always a faint undertone
murmurs to us that each generation is like a wave
passing in the immensity of sea. Sometimes, as in
“The District Doctor,” a tragedy within four walls is
shut in by a feeling of sudden night and the isolation
of the wintry fields. Sometimes, as in “Biryuk,” the
outbreak of a despairing peasant is reflected in the
fleeting storm-clouds and lashing rain of a storm
in the forest. But the people’s figures are always
seen <i>in just relation to their surroundings, to their
fellows and to nature</i>.</p>
<p>By the relations of a man with his neighbours
and their ideas, a man’s character is focussed for
us and his place in his environment determined.
Thus in “Raspberry Spring” the old steward Tuman’s
complacent panegyrics on the lavish ways of his
former master, a grand seigneur of Catherine’s time,
are a meaning accompaniment to the misery of
Vlass the harassed serf. Vlass has just returned
from his sad errand to Moscow (his son has died
there penniless), where he has had his master’s door
shut in his face, and he has been ordered to return and
pay the bailiff his arrears of rent. Whether under
the ancient régime of Catherine, or of Nicholas I.,
Vlass is the “poor man” of Scripture whose face
is ground by the rich. All the irony of poor Vlass’s
existence steals upon us while we hear the old
steward’s voice descanting on the dead count’s
sumptuous banquets, on his cooks and fiddlers and
the low-born mistresses who brought him to ruin;
while the humble peasant sits still and hears, too,
of the “embroidered coats, wigs, canes, perfumes,
<i>eau de cologne</i>, snuff-boxes, of the huge pictures
ordered from Paris!” It is the cruelty, passive
or active, innate in the web of human existence
that murmurs here in the bass.</p>
<p><i>The parts in just relation to the whole scheme of
existence</i>, that is the secret of Turgenev’s supremacy,
and what a piercing instinct for the relative values
of men’s motives and actions is revealed by his calm,
clear scrutiny! Observe in “The Agent” how the
old serf Antip’s weeping protest against his family’s
ruin at the hands of the tyrannous agent Sofron
is made in <i>the model village</i> Shiplova, with its tidy
farm-buildings and new windmill and threshing-floors,
its rich stacks and hemp-fields “all in excellent
order.” It is Sofron, the man of “first rate administrative
power,” so honey-tongued before the
gentry, who farms four hundred acres of his own,
and trades in horses and stock and corn and hemp,
it is this petty despot in his prosperity who “is
harrying the peasants out of their lives.” “He is
sharp, awfully sharp, and rich, too, the beast!”
says the Ryabovo peasant. Behind the tyrannous
bailiff Sofron is the owner of Shiplova, the polished
Mr. Pyenotchkin, a retired officer of the Guards,
who has mixed in the highest society. Mr. Pyenotchkin
is a man <i>comme il faut</i>, but when he finds
that his luckless footman has forgotten to warm the
wine, he simply raises his eyebrows and orders his
major-domo to “make the necessary arrangements”—to
have Fyodor flogged! Here is progress on
Western lines comfortably cheek by jowl with
serfdom! Of course the sting, here, for the Russian
conscience lay precisely in this juxtaposition of old
and new, and in the knowledge that the most
progressive landowner could exercise his legal right
to sell his peasants, send a man away as a conscript,
and separate him from his family. But it is well
to note that only three or four of the <i>Sportsman’s
Sketches</i> expose typical cases of a landlord’s tyranny
and the anachronism of this mediaeval survival—serfdom.</p>
<p>One of these cases is “Yermolai and the Miller’s
Wife,” a sketch which for the calm breadth of vision
in its exposure of serfdom is flawless. In “Yermolai”
note how Turgenev by a series of discreet intermittent
touches brings his people on the scene, and
how the tranquil description of the winding river,
the Ista, with its stony banks and cold clear streams
and rugged precipitous banks, prepares us for the
story of poor Arina’s sorrows and of the self-complacent
master’s tyranny. Because Madame Zvyerkoff
makes it a rule never to keep married lady’s
maids, poor Arina is disgraced, her lover sent away
as a soldier, and she herself is married to the miller,
who has offered a price for her. This distressing
episode, though the central theme, is introduced
subtly by a side wind after we have accompanied
the narrator and the tall gaunt huntsman, Yermolai,
to the Ista’s banks, where the two sportsmen are
benighted and seek sleep in the outhouse of a mill.
The bull-necked, fat-bellied miller sends out his
wife with a message to them, and this woman with
her refined, mournful eyes is none other than the
unfortunate Arina, with whom Yermolai is on old,
familiar terms. The sportsman-narrator, who has
been dozing in the hay, wakes and soon gathers
from the snatches of talk between the pair the
details of Arina’s listless melancholy days after her
child’s death. Her bitter situation is flashed upon
us in Yermolai’s suggestion that she shall pay a
visit to him in his hut when his own wife is
away from home! She changes the subject and
soon walks away, and Yermolai’s peasant callousness
is indicated in his yawning answer to his
master’s questions. Then this story of a woman’s
sorrow is brought to a close by one of those
exquisite nature touches which brings us back again
to the infinite life of the encompassing earth and
sky:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“‘And do you know her lover, Petrushka?’</p>
<p>“‘Piotr Vassilyevitch? Of course I know him.’</p>
<p>“‘Where is he now?’</p>
<p>“‘He was sent for a soldier.’</p>
<p>“We were silent for a while.</p>
<p>“‘She doesn’t seem very well?’ I asked Yermolai
at last.</p>
<p>“‘I should think not! To-morrow, I say, we shall
have good sport. A little sleep now would do us no
harm.’</p>
<p>“A flock of wild ducks swept whizzing over our heads,
and we heard them drop down into the river not far
from us. It was quite dark, and it began to be cold;
in the thicket sounded the melodious notes of a nightingale.
We buried ourselves in the hay and fell asleep!”</p></blockquote>
<p>By the descriptions of the landscape in “Yermolai
and the Miller’s Wife” Turgenev subtly introduces
the sense into our minds of nature’s vastness, of
her infinity, of which the spectacle of man’s social
injustice and distress becomes indissolubly part.
Here there is nothing of the reformer’s <i>parti-pris</i>
in the picture. Turgenev’s fluid, sympathetic perceptions
blend into a flow of creative mood, in
which the relations of men to their surroundings,
and the significance of their actions, their feelings,
their fate are seen as parts of the universal, dominating
scheme of things. And this flow of mood in
Turgenev is his creative secret: as when music
flows from a distance to the listener over the darkening
fields immediately the rough coarse earth, with
all its grinding, petty monotony melts into harmony,
and life is seen in its mysterious immensity, not
merely in its puzzling discrepancy of gaps, and
contradictions and confusions. Turgenev’s work,
at its best, gives us the sense of looking beyond the
heads of the moving human figures, out to the
infinite horizon.</p>
<p>Although in Turgenev’s pellucid art each touch
seems simple, the whole effect is highly complex,
depending upon an infinite variety of shades of
tone. Let us finish by examining his complex
method in “The Singers.” In the first twenty lines
the author etches the cheerless aspect of “the
unlucky hamlet of Kolotovka, which lies on the slope
of a barren hill ... yet all the surrounding inhabitants
know the road to Kolotovka well; they
go there often and are always glad to go.” It is
not merely the tavern “The Welcome Resort,” but
the tavern-keeper Nikolai Ivanitch that attracts
them, for his shrewd alertness and geniality are an
influence far and wide in the neighbourhood.
Turgenev now introduces his main theme by a
variation <i>in tempo</i>. He describes how the narrator
on a blazing hot July day is slowly dragging his
feet up the Kolotovka ravine towards the Inn, when
he overhears one man calling to another to come
and hear a singing competition between Yashka the
Turk and the booth-keeper from Zhizdry. The
narrator’s curiosity is stirred, and he follows the
villagers into the bar-room, where he finds the
assembled company, who are urging the two singers
to begin. The men toss and the lot falls on the
booth-keeper. Having riveted our attention, Turgenev
now increases his hold on us by sketching the
life and character of three village characters, “the
Gabbler,” “the Blinkard” and “the Wild Master.”
We examine the village audience till the booth-keeper
at last steps forward and sings. For a time
the booth-keeper does not evoke the enthusiasm
of the critical villagers, but at last they are conquered
by his bold flourishes and daring trills, and
they shout their applause. The booth-keeper’s song
is the triumph of technique and of training, and
he carries away his hearers, while “the Gabbler”
bawls: “You’ve won, brother, you’ve won!” But
“the Wild Master” silences “the Gabbler” with an
oath and calls on Yashka to begin. And now follows
an entrancing description of the power of genius
to sway the heart:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“‘Come, that’s enough; don’t be timid. For shame!
... why go back?... Sing the best you can, by
God’s gift.’</p>
<p>“And the Wild Master looked down expectant.
Yakov was silent for a minute; he glanced round, and
covered his face with his hand. All had their eyes simply
fastened upon him, especially the booth-keeper, on
whose face a faint, involuntary uneasiness could be seen
through his habitual expression of self-confidence and
the triumph of his success. He leant back against the
wall, and again put both hands under him, but did not
swing his legs as before. When at last Yakov uncovered
his face it was pale as a dead man’s; his eyes gleamed
faintly under their drooping lashes. He gave a deep
sigh, and began to sing.... The first sound of his
voice was faint and unequal, and seemed not to come
from his chest, but to be wafted from somewhere afar
off, as though it had floated by chance into the room.
A strange effect was produced on all of us by this trembling,
resonant note; we glanced at one another, and
Nikolai Ivanitch’s wife seemed to draw herself up. This
first note was followed by another, bolder and prolonged,
but still obviously quivering, like a harp-string when
suddenly struck by a stray finger it throbs in a last,
swiftly-dying tremble; the second was followed by a
third, and, gradually gaining fire and breadth, the strains
swelled into a pathetic melody. ‘Not one little path
ran into the field,’ he sang, and sweet and mournful it
was in our ears. I have seldom, I must confess, heard
a voice like it; it was slightly hoarse, and not perfectly
true; there was even something morbid about it at first;
but it had genuine depth of passion, and youth and
sweetness, and a sort of fascinating careless, pathetic
melancholy. A spirit of truth and fire, a Russian spirit,
was sounding and breathing in that voice, and it seemed
to go straight to your heart, to go straight to all that
was Russian in it. The song swelled and flowed. Yakov
was clearly carried away by enthusiasm; he was not
timid now; he surrendered himself wholly to the
rapture of his art; his voice no longer trembled; it
quivered; but with a scarce perceptible inward quiver
of passion, which pierces like an arrow to the very soul
of the listeners, and he steadily gained strength and
firmness and breadth. I remember I once saw at sunset
on a flat sandy shore, when the tide was low and the
sea’s roar came weighty and menacing from the distance,
a great white sea-gull; it sat motionless, its silky
bosom facing the crimson glow of the setting sun, and
only now and then opening wide its great wings to greet
the well-known sea, to greet the sinking lurid sun: I
recalled it, as I heard Yakov. He sang, utterly forgetful
of his rival and all of us; he seemed supported, as a bold
swimmer by the waves, by our silent, passionate
sympathy. He sang, and in every sound of his voice
one seemed to feel something dear and akin to us, something
of breadth and space, as though the familiar steppes
were unfolding before our eyes and stretching away into
endless distance. I felt the tears gathering in my bosom
and rising to my eyes; suddenly I was struck by dull,
smothered sobs.... I looked round—the innkeeper’s
wife was weeping, her bosom pressed close to the window.
Yakov threw a quick glance at her, and he sang more
sweetly, more melodiously than ever; Nikolai Ivanitch
looked down; the Blinkard turned away; the Gabbler,
quite touched, stood, his gaping mouth stupidly open;
the humble peasant was sobbing softly in the corner and
shaking his head with a plaintive murmur; and on the
iron visage of the Wild Master, from under his overhanging
brows there slowly rolled a heavy tear; the
booth-keeper raised his clenched fists to his brow, and
did not stir.... I don’t know how the general emotion
would have ended if Yakov had not suddenly come to
a full stop on a high, exceptionally shrill note, as though
his voice had broken. No one called out or even stirred;
every one seemed to be waiting to see whether he was
not going to sing more; but he opened his eyes as
though wondering at our silence, looked round at all
of us with a face of enquiry, and saw that the victory
was his....</p>
<p>“‘Yasha,’ said the Wild Master, laying his hand on
his shoulder, and he could say no more.</p>
<p>“We stood, as it were, petrified. The booth-keeper
softly rose and went up to Yakov.</p>
<p>“‘You ... yours ... you’ve won,’ he articulated
at last with an effort, and rushed out of the room.”</p></blockquote>
<p>An artist less consummate than Turgenev would
have ended here. But the sequel immeasurably
heightens the whole effect by plunging us into the
mournful, ever-running springs of human tragedy—the
eclipse of man’s spiritual instincts by the
emergence of his underlying animalism. Observe
there is not a trace of ethical feeling in the mournful
close. It is simply the way of life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“... When I waked up, everything was in darkness;
the hay scattered around smelt strong, and was slightly
damp; through the slender rafters of the half-open
roof pale stars were faintly twinkling. I went out.
The glow of sunset had long died away, and its last
trace showed in a faint light on the horizon; but above
the freshness of the night there was still a feeling of heat
in the atmosphere, lately baked through by the sun,
and the breast still craved for a draught of cool air.
There was no wind nor were there any clouds; the sky
all round was clear and transparently dark, softly
glimmering with innumerable, but scarcely visible stars.
There were lights twinkling about the village; from
the flaring tavern close by rose a confused, discordant
din, amid which I fancied I recognized the voice of
Yakov. Violent laughter came from there in an outburst
at times. I went up to the little window and
pressed my face against the pane. I saw a cheerless,
though varied and animated scene; all were drunk—all
from Yakov upwards. With breast bared, he sat
on a bench, and singing in a thick voice a street song
to a dance tune, he lazily fingered and strummed on the
strings of a guitar. His moist hair hung in tufts over his
fearfully pale face. In the middle of the room, the
Gabbler, completely ‘screwed,’ and without his coat,
was hopping about in a dance before the peasant in the
grey smock; the peasant, on his side, was with difficulty
stamping and scraping with his feet, and grinning
meaninglessly over his dishevelled beard; he waved
one hand from time to time, as much as to say, ‘Here
goes!’ Nothing could be more ludicrous than his
face; however much he twitched up his eyebrows, his
heavy lids would hardly rise, but seemed lying upon
his scarcely-visible, dim, and mawkish eyes. He was
in that amiable frame of mind of a perfectly intoxicated
man, when every passer-by, directly he looks him in
the face, is sure to say, ‘Bless you, brother, bless you!’
The Blinkard, as red as a lobster, and his nostrils dilated
wide, was laughing malignantly in a corner; only
Nikolai Ivanitch, as befits a good tavern-keeper, preserved
his composure unchanged. The room was
thronged with many new faces, but the Wild Master
I did not see in it.</p>
<p>“I turned away with rapid steps and began descending
the hill on which Kolotovka lies. At the foot of
this hill stretches a wide plain; plunged in the misty
waves of the evening haze, it seemed more immense,
and was, as it were, merged in the darkening sky. I
marched with long strides along the road by the ravine,
when all at once, from somewhere far away in the plain,
came a boy’s clear voice: ‘Antropka! Antropka-a-a...!’
He shouted in obstinate and tearful desperation,
with long, long drawing out of the last syllable.</p>
<p>“He was silent for a few instants, and started shouting
again. His voice rang out clear in the still, lightly
slumbering air. Thirty times at least he had called the
name, Antropka. When suddenly, from the farthest
end of the plain, as though from another world, there
floated a scarcely audible reply:</p>
<p>“‘Wha-a-t?’</p>
<p>“The boy’s voice shouted back at once with gleeful
exasperation:</p>
<p>“‘Come here, devil! woo-od imp!’</p>
<p>“‘What fo-or?’ replied the other, after a long
interval.</p>
<p>“‘Because dad wants to thrash you!’ the first voice
shouted back hurriedly.</p>
<p>“The second voice did not call back again, and the
boy fell to shouting ‘Antropka’ once more. His cries,
fainter and less and less frequent, still floated up to my
ears, when it had grown completely dark, and I had
turned the corner of the wood that skirts my village
and lies over three miles from Kolotovka ...
‘Antropka-a-a!’ was still audible in the air, filled with
the shadows of the night.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In the above passage the feeling of the shadowy
earth, the mist, the great plain and the floating
cries rarefies the village atmosphere of human
commonness. By such a representation of the
people’s figures, seen in just relation to their surroundings,
to their fellows, and to nature, Turgenev’s
art secures for his picture poetic harmony, and
renders these finer cadences in the turmoil of life
which ears less sensitive than his fail to hear! <i>The
parts in just relation to the whole scheme of human
existence.</i> Man, earth and heaven—it is the secret
of the perfection of the great poets.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">IV<br />“RUDIN”</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">“RUDIN”</p>
<p>The biographers tell us that Turgenev left Russia
again in 1847, for the sake of being near Pauline
Garcia, the famous singer (afterwards Madame
Viardot), whom he adored all his life; that he left
her in Berlin, visited Salzbrunn with the critic
Byelinsky, who was dying of consumption, and
then proceeded to Paris, Brussels, Lyons and
Courtavenel. In Paris he works incessantly, producing
plays and short stories and most of the
series of <i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i>; makes friends
with Hertzen and George Sand; studies the French
classics and avows his democratic sympathies,
without any illusions as to the good-for-nothingness
of “the Reds.” In the autumn of 1858 he returns
to Russia, recalled by news of the grave illness of
his mother, who, however, refused to be reconciled
with her two sons, whom she tried to disinherit on
her deathbed. Turgenev was henceforward a rich
man. In 1852 <i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i> appeared
in book form, and in April of the same year, for
writing a sympathetic article on Gogol’s death,
Turgenev was ordered a month’s detention in a
police-station and then confined to his estate at
Spasskoe.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> “I am confined in a police-station by the Emperor’s orders
for having printed a short article on Gogol in a Moscow journal.
This was only a pretext, the article itself being perfectly insignificant.
They have looked at me askance for a long time,
and they have laid hold of this pretext at the first opportunity.
I do not complain of the Emperor; the matter has been so
deceitfully represented to him that he couldn’t have acted
otherwise. They have wished to put a stop on all that is being
said on Gogol’s death, and they have not been sorry, at the same
time, to place an embargo on my literary activity.”—Letter to
M. and Mme. Viardot, May 13, 1852.</p></div>
<p>Turgenev notes that his imperious desire to
escape to Europe indicated “Possibly something
lacking in my character or force of will.” But he
declares, “I should never have written <i>A Sportsman’s
Sketches</i> had I remained in Russia.... It
was impossible for me to remain and breathe the
same air that gave life to everything I abhorred.”
The persecution of his literary forerunners and
contemporaries by the Autocracy was continuous.
Pushkin’s humiliation and subjection to official
authority; Lermontov’s exile to the Caucasus;
Tchaadaev declared insane by bureaucratic order
and confined to a mad-house; Gogol’s recantation
of <i>Dead Souls</i> and relapse into feeble mysticism;
Hertzen’s expatriation; Dostoevsky’s and Petrashevsky’s
exile to the mines of Siberia; Saltykov’s
banishment, etc., the list of the intellectual and
creative minds gagged or stifled under Nicholas I.
is endless. And Turgenev’s mild and generous
spirit was designed neither for political partisanship
nor for active revolt. He has indeed been accused
of timidity,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> and cowardice by uncompromising
Radicals and Revolutionaries. But his life-work
is the answer to these ill-considered allegations.
Spiritual enfranchisement was impossible in “the
swamp of Petersburg with its Winter Palace, eight
Ministries, three Polices, the most Holy Synod, and
all the exalted family with their German relatives,”
as Hertzen wittily put it later; and by faring abroad
and by inhaling deep draughts of free European
air Turgenev was enabled, in his own phrase, “to
strike the enemy from a distance.”</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> In an access of self-reproach he once declared to a friend
that his character was comprised in one word—“poltroon.”</p></div>
<p>His exile for a year and a half to his own estate
was, however, by no means a bad thing for his own
self-development. Years afterwards he wrote: “All
was for the best.... My being under arrest and
in the country proved to my undeniable advantage;
it brought me close to those sides of Russian life
which, in the ordinary course of things, would
probably have escaped my observation.” He consoled
himself with shooting, with music, with
reading, with literary composition, and it is to this
enforced detention in Russia that, no doubt, we
owe the masterpiece <i>Rudin</i> (1855), which he rewrote
many times, declaring to Aksakov that none of his
other stories had ever given him so much trouble.
In fact this novel, in grace, ease and strength, has
the quality of finished statuary.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>Though sixty years have passed since the appearance
of <i>Rudin</i>, no dust has gathered on the novel, so
original is the leading figure. The portrait of the
hero who typifies the failure of the Russian <i>intelligentsia</i>
of the ‘’forties’ to do more than talk, is as
arresting as the day on which it was painted. In
him Turgenev creates a fresh variety of idealist, the
orator sapped by the love of his own words. Rudin
is Russian in the combination of his soft, wavering
will, his lofty enthusiasm for ideas, and his rather
naïve sincerity: in other respects, he might be a
western European. Behind him we feel generations
of easygoing manorial gentlefolk regarding in
surprise this curious descendant, whose clever brain
is aglow with a passion for “eternal truth” and for
the “general principles” of German philosophy.
One is haunted by a sense of Rudin’s cousinship to
other famous idealists in life and literature; he
shows affinities both to a contemporary, Coleridge,
and to a famous successor, Ibsen’s <i>Brand</i>.</p>
<p>English idealism in general is both a covering
for mundane interests, and a spiritual compromise
with those same interests. An English Rudin
would have gone into the Church, and as a Canon
or Bishop would have attained celebrity by his
gift of lofty and magnetic eloquence. But a Russian
Rudin does not succeed in buttering his bread; it
is both his unworldliness and lack of will that bring
his powers to nought. Rudin can and does indeed,
deceive himself; but the strands of hypocrisy in
his nature are too fragmentary to bring him worldly
success.</p>
<p>Of Turgenev’s six novels, <i>Rudin</i> is the most
perfect in form, by the harmony of its parts and
absolute grace of modelling.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> Everywhere the
master’s chisel has fined away his material to attain
the most delicately firm contours. The grouping
of the character is a lesson in harmonious arrangement.
Note by what simple, natural steps one
passes from the outer circle of the neighbours of
the wealthy patroness of art and letters, Darya
Mihailovna, to the inner circle of her household.
The cold, suave egoism of the lady of the manor is
admirably set off by the sketches of her dependents,
the simple young tutor, Bassistoff, her young
Jewish <i>protégé</i> Pandalevsky, and the cynic Pigasov.
The household is expecting the arrival of a guest,
a Baron Muffel, but in his place arrives his acquaintance,
Dmitri Rudin, slightly shabby, but of pre-possessing
address.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> For a discussion of Turgenev’s debt to George Sand’s novel,
<i>Horace</i>, see M. Halperine-Kaminsky’s <i>Tourguéneff and his
French Circle</i>, p. 301.</p></div>
<p>A master of eloquent language, Rudin conquers
his hearers by his fine bearing and brilliant talk.
But notice that the effect he instantaneously produces
holds in germ all the after development of
the story. Volintsev fears in him a rival for
Natalya’s love; Pandalevsky is on his guard
against the clever stranger who may dispossess him
in the favour of the mistress of the house; Natalya
falls in love with the newcomer who has fired her
girlish imagination; while her mother, Darya
Mihailovna, is planning to keep Rudin, this coming
lion, in her house to adorn her salon. The structure
of the story, beautifully planned, is a lesson in the
directness and ease of artistic development. Everything
flows, simply and inevitably, from the actions
of the group of characters, quickened and watchful
after Rudin’s arrival.</p>
<p>As an example of Turgenev’s skill in drawing a
man with a dozen touches, and of exposing the
mainspring of his nature by a few of his words and
actions, consider the Jewish-looking youth, Pandalevsky;
with the slight, exact strokes of his
chisel Turgenev here graves a perfect intaglio.
Pandalevsky, in the opening pages, meeting the
charming Alexandra Pavlovna on her walk, offers
her his arm, <i>unasked</i>. “She took it.” After some
flowery remarks, Pandalevsky, presuming further,
says, “Allow me to offer you this lovely wild
flower.” Alexandra Pavlovna did not refuse it,
but “after a few steps, let it drop on the path.”
The sensitive woman is repelled by the young Jew’s
familiarity and his thickness of skin, and indeed
Pandalevsky has scarcely turned his back on her,
when he transfers his interest to a peasant girl
working in the field, and so coarse is his talk that
she stops her ears and mutters, “Go away, sir;
upon my word!”</p>
<p>Again, note how the characters all reveal themselves
by their unconscious behaviour. On the
night of Rudin’s unexpected arrival, while Bassistoff
sits up, pouring out his soul in an eloquent letter
to a friend, and Natalya cannot sleep for thinking
of Rudin’s glowing eloquence, “Pandalevsky went
to bed, and as he took off his daintily embroidered
braces, he said aloud, ‘A very smart fellow,’ and
suddenly, looking harshly at his page, ordered him
out of the room.” By this little revelation of his
mean spirit the young Jew prepares us for his
furtive suspicion of Rudin, and for his playing the
spy subsequently. By a word, a gesture, a look,
psychologically exact, Turgenev secures thus in a
sentence effects which it takes his rivals a paragraph
or a page to make clear to us. Thus his scenes
always appeal by their aesthetic ease and grace.</p>
<p>Remark again how swift, precise and final is
Turgenev’s exploration of Rudin’s character. Tired
of wandering, Rudin, as Darya Mihailovna’s guest,
is glad to have found a congenial circle, perhaps
indeed a home, but while every one seems to listen
eagerly to him, and he lays down the law to the
household, a cold undercurrent of criticism is
already felt threatening his position. One of the
neighbours, Lezhnyov, had been at college with
Rudin in youth, and from his talk about their past
relations one learns why Rudin, despite his genius,
has not succeeded in life. He is a theorist and he
has never really understood human nature. So
much so is this indeed that Rudin does not realize
in time that Natalya, this girl “of an ardent, true
and passionate nature,” has fallen in love with him,
and exalts him as her spiritual teacher. And when
Rudin’s eyes are opened this fatal flaw in his character
is seen. He lives only for his ideas and for
his audience; his great, his sole power lies in the
magic of his stimulating, flowing oratory. He is a
master of words, but he cannot act. Lezhnyov is
right in declaring that Rudin in his relations with
others, even in his love affairs, “only needs a fresh
opportunity of speechifying and giving vent to his
fine talk, and that’s what he can’t live without.”
Rudin, carried away by the discovery of Natalya’s
love, pretends and simulates love for her, but his
“passion” is shown to be hollow when the young
girl comes to warn him that Pandalevsky, spying
on them, has betrayed their secret meetings to her
mother, who is angry and jealous that Rudin should
be paying court to her daughter. Rudin is in
consternation at the news. He has been so intent
on his eloquent feelings that he has not faced the
practical difficulties. And he has made no plans
to face the future. But let us quote the scene:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“‘And what advice can I give you, Natalya
Alexyevna?’</p>
<p>“‘What advice? You are a man; I am used to
trusting to you. I shall trust you to the end. Tell me,
what are your plans?’</p>
<p>“‘My plans.... Your mother will certainly turn
me out of the house.’</p>
<p>“‘Perhaps.... She told me yesterday that I must
break off all acquaintance with you.... But you do
not answer my question?’</p>
<p>“‘What question?’</p>
<p>“‘What do you think we must do now?’</p>
<p>“‘What we must do?’ replied Rudin; ‘of course
submit.’</p>
<p>“‘Submit,’ repeated Natalya slowly, and her lips
turned white.</p>
<p>“‘Submit to destiny,’ continued Rudin. ‘What is
to be done?... I know very well how bitter it is,
how painful, how unendurable. But consider yourself,
Natalya Alexyevna; I am poor. It is true I could
work; but even if I were a rich man, could you bear
a violent separation from your family, your mother’s
anger?... No, Natalya Alexyevna; it is useless even
to think of it. It is clear it was not fated for us to live
together, and the happiness of which I dreamed is not
for me!’</p>
<p>“All at once Natalya hid her face in her hands and
began to weep. Rudin went up to her.</p>
<p>“‘Natalya Alexyevna! Dear Natalya!’ he said with
warmth, ‘do not cry, for God’s sake do not torture me,
be comforted.’</p>
<p>“Natalya raised her head.</p>
<p>“‘You tell me to be comforted!’ she began, and her
eyes blazed through her tears; ‘I am not weeping for
what you suppose—I am not sad for that; I am sad
because I have been deceived in you.... What! I
come to you for counsel, and at such a moment!—and
your first word is submit! submit! So this is how
you translate your talk of independence, of sacrifice
which....’</p>
<p>“Her voice broke down.</p>
<p>“‘But, Natalya Alexyevna,’ began Rudin in confusion,
‘remember—I do not disown my words—only——’</p>
<p>“‘You asked me,’ she continued with new force,
‘what I answered my mother, when she declared she
would sooner agree to my death than my marriage to
you; I answered that I would sooner die than marry
any other man.... And you say, “Submit!” It
must be that she is right; you must, through having
nothing to do, through being bored, have been playing
with me.’</p>
<p>“‘I swear to you, Natalya Alexyevna—I assure
you,’ maintained Rudin.</p>
<p>“But she did not listen to him.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Natalya’s passionate answer: “I told my
mother that I would die sooner than marry any
other man.... And you say ‘submit’!” passes
through Rudin’s self-esteem like a knife. He
protests vainly again and again his love. But he
has exposed his ambiguous emptiness too fully.
And now he must leave Darya Mihailovna’s household,
discredited in his own, in Natalya’s and in
everybody’s eyes.</p>
<p>Remark in the passage quoted above how the
conflicting currents of the girl’s passionate warmth
and the man’s ambiguous reasoning—like hot and
cold springs mingling—flow in a form beautiful by
its grace of line. The scene is graven as lightly,
yet as durably as an antique Greek gem. One must
emphasize this union of soft warmth and grace in
Turgenev’s work, for it is one of his special characteristics.
While the beauty of his feeling declares
itself by its purity of tone, all the mental shades of
a scene or a conversation are unfolded with flowing,
flexible grace. Even a piece of mental analysis, a
synthesis of the internal life of character, and of
pure thought, are stamped with the spontaneous
gestures of life. And calm and mellow tenderness
seems to emanate, as a secret essence, from his
pictures. We cite a little passage, famous in
Russian literature, where Turgenev sketches a
portrait of Byelinsky, under the pseudonym of
Pokorsky, Rudin’s friend:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“‘... He took pity on me, perhaps; anyway, he
took me by the arm and led me away to his lodging.’</p>
<p>“‘Was that Rudin?’ asked Alexandra Pavlovna.</p>
<p>“‘No, it was not Rudin ... it was a man ... he
is dead now ... he was an extraordinary man. His
name was Pokorsky. To describe him in a few words
is beyond my powers, but directly one begins to speak
of him, one does not want to speak of any one else. He
had a noble, pure heart, and an intelligence such as I
have never met since. Pokorsky lived in a little, low-pitched
room, in an attic of an old wooden house. He
was very poor, and supported himself somehow by
giving lessons. Sometimes he had not even a cup of
tea to offer to his friends, and his only sofa was so shaky
that it was like being on board ship. But in spite of
these discomforts a great many people used to go and
see him. Every one loved him; he drew all hearts to
him. You would not believe what sweetness and
happiness there was in sitting in his poor little room!
It was in his room I met Rudin. He had already parted
from his prince before then.’</p>
<p>“‘What was there so exceptional in this Pokorsky?’
asked Alexandra Pavlovna.</p>
<p>“‘How can I tell you? Poetry and truth—that
was what drew us all to him. For all his clear, broad
intellect he was as sweet and simple as a child....
Pokorsky and Rudin were very unlike. There was
more flash and brilliance about Rudin, more fluency,
and perhaps more enthusiasm. He appeared far more
gifted than Pokorsky, and yet all the while he was a
poor creature by comparison. Rudin was excellent at
developing any idea, he was capital in argument, but
his ideas did not come from his own brain; he borrowed
them from others, especially from Pokorsky: Pokorsky
was quiet and soft—even weak in appearance—and he
was fond of women to distraction, and fond of dissipation,
and he would never take an insult from any one.
Rudin seemed full of fire and courage and life, but at
heart he was cold and almost a coward, until his vanity
was touched, then he would not stop at anything....
And really when I recall our gatherings, upon my word
there was much that was fine, even touching in them....
Ah, that was a glorious time, and I can’t bear to believe
that it was altogether wasted! And it was not wasted—not
even for those whose lives were sordid afterwards.
How often have I chanced to come across such old
college friends! You would think the man had sunk
altogether to the brute, but one had only to utter
Pokorsky’s name before him and every trace of noble
feeling in him was stirred at once; it was like uncorking
a forgotten phial of fragrance in some dark and dirty
room.’”</p></blockquote>
<p>How perfect is the form of the novel! Rudin’s
sudden appearance at Darya Mihailovna’s house,
from the void, his brief, brilliant scintillation, his
disappearance beyond the horizon like a falling
star, while the little circle he has quitted returns
to its quiet settled round, and is knitted closer, by
and by, in two marriages. In the final chapters
Turgenev gives a wonderful feeling of the stormy
horizon of life in his glimpses of Rudin’s restless
wanderings, of his pathetic series of failures, of his
useless death in a hopeless cause on a Paris barricade.
It is now the genius of Turgenev’s heart that speaks,
the head in absolute unison with the heart. For
Turgenev’s creative judgment, infinitely just, infinitely
tender, is a court of appeal from all hard,
worldly arraignments. All that has been shown
us of Rudin’s Utopianism, of the “something
lacking” in his character and outlook is true. But
it is not the whole truth. In Lezhnyov’s final
words, “Rudin has faith, Rudin has honesty. He
has enthusiasm, the most precious quality in our
times. We have all become insufferably reasonable
and indifferent and slothful.” That is the point.
The Rudins, the idealists of the “’forties,” were the
yeast in the dough of Russian fatalism and the
nation’s stagnation. For one idealist there were a
thousand lethargic, acquiescent minds, clinging to
the rock of personal interest, staking nothing, but
all subservient to the forces of official despotism or
worldly power. In Rudin burned clear the light of
humane, generous ideals, of the fire of the love of
truth. Most of the intellectual seed he scattered
fell by the wayside or was swallowed up in the
morass of Russia’s social distress and mass impotence.
But, in Lezhnyov’s words: “I say again,
that is not Rudin’s fault, and it is his fate—a cruel
and unhappy fate—for which we cannot blame him.”
And when we survey the figures of that gloomy
reign of Nicholas, when “a merciless Imperialism
repressed the least sign of intellectuality,” it was
the Rudins who breathed on and passed on that
living seed of fire to the younger generation.</p>
<p>It is to be remarked that not a line, not a detail
in the social picture seems to have faded. The
picture by its truth and art is timeless in its plastic
grace, like a Tanagra group, or a Velasquez portrait.
Nothing, indeed, can be added or taken away from
the masterpiece.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">V<br />“A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK”</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">“A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK”</p>
<p>In 1859, three years after <i>Rudin</i>, appeared <i>A House
of Gentlefolk</i>, in popular estimation the most perfect
of Turgenev’s works. This verdict, repeated by
many critics, was gained no less by the pathos of
Lavretsky’s love story than by the faultless character
drawing, the gentle, earnest, religious Liza<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>
being balanced against the voluptuous, worldly
coquette, Varvara Pavlovna. The story which
chronicles how the latter, <i>la belle Madame de
Lavretsky</i>, twists her honest, candid husband round
her finger, how at length Lavretsky discovers her
infidelities, and returns to Russia where he meets
and falls in love with Liza, and how, on the false
news of his wife’s death, they confess their mutual
passion—when their dream is shattered by the
dramatic reappearance of Varvara Pavlovna—is
characteristic of Turgenev’s underlying sad philosophy.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> Liza, “the best impersonation possible of the average,
thoroughly good and honest Russian girl of the times.”—<span class="smcap">Kropotkin.</span></p></div>
<p>Both Turgenev’s temperamental melancholy and
irony are seconded by, indeed are enrooted in, his
calm, piercing perception of the ineffectual struggle
of virtue in the vortex of worldly power. All the
great literature of all the ages warns us that the
world is mainly swayed by force and craft, twin
children of human necessity and appetite. Virtue,
beautiful in its disinterested impulse, as the love of
truth, has always to reckon with the all-powerful
law of life, self-interest, on which the whole fabric
of society is reared. Goodness is but a frail defence
against the designs of force and egoistic craft. We
see magnanimity falling before unscrupulousness;
while the stupidity of the mass of men is twisted
adroitly by the worldly to their own advantage.
While Turgenev’s philosophy reinforces the experience
of the ages, his pictures of life are distinguished
by the subtle spiritual light which plays upon the
egoistic basis. In his vision “the rack of this
tough world” triumphs, but his peculiarly subtle
appeal to our sense of spiritual beauty registers the
common earthiness of the triumph of force and evil.
That triumph is everywhere; it is a fundamental
law of nature that worldly craft and appetite shall
prevail, whelming the finer forces, but Turgenev’s
sadness and irony, by their beauty of feeling,
strengthen those spiritual valuations which challenge
the elemental law. His aesthetic method is so to
place in juxtaposition the fine shades of human
worldliness that we enjoy the spectacle of the varied
strands composing a family or social pattern. In
the sketch of Lavretsky’s ancestors, for two generations,
the pattern is intricate, surprisingly varied,
giving us the richest sense of all the heterogeneous
elements that combine in a family stock. In the
portraits of Varvara Pavlovna’s father and mother
we recognize the lines of heredity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Varvara Pavlovna’s father, Pavel Petrovitch
Korobyin, a retired major-general, had spent his whole
time on duty in Petersburg. He had had the reputation
in his youth of a good dancer and driller. Through
poverty he had served as adjutant to two or three
generals of no distinction, and had married the daughter
of one of them with a dowry of twenty-five thousand
roubles. He mastered all the science of military discipline
and manoeuvres to the minutest niceties, he
went on in harness, till at last, after twenty-five years’
service, he received the rank of a general and the command
of a regiment. Then he might have relaxed his
efforts and quietly secured his pecuniary position.
Indeed this was what he reckoned upon doing, but he
managed things a little incautiously. He devised a
new method of speculating with public funds—the
method seemed an excellent one in itself—but he
neglected to bribe in the right place and was consequently
informed against, and a more than unpleasant,
a disgraceful scandal followed ... he was advised to
retire from active duty.... His bald head, with its
tufts of dyed hair, and the soiled ribbon of the order of
St. Anne, which he wore over a cravat of the colour of
a raven’s wing, began to be familiar to all the pale and
listless young men who hang morosely about the card-tables
while dancing is going on. Pavel Petrovitch
knew how to gain a footing in society; he spoke little,
but from long habit, condescendingly—though of course
not when he was talking to persons of a higher rank than
his own.... Of the general’s wife there is scarcely
anything to be said. Kalliopa Karlovna, who was of
German extraction, considered herself a woman of great
sensibility. She was always in a state of nervous
agitation, seemed as though she were ill-nourished, and
wore a tight velvet dress, a cap, and tarnished hollow
bracelets.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In this incisive little cameo Turgenev has told
us everything about Varvara Pavlovna’s upbringing.
It is typical of Turgenev’s method, of indicating
with sparse, magic touches the <i>couche sociale</i>, so that
we see working in the individual the forces that
form him as a social type. Varvara Pavlovna, in
her arts, is the worldly woman incarnate, sensual
in her cold, polished being, in her luxurious elegance,
in her inherently vulgar ambition. But Turgenev’s
instinctive <i>justesse</i> is shown in the attractiveness
of Varvara Pavlovna’s bodily beauty. Remark
that the more Turgenev unmasks her coldness and
falsity the more he renders tribute to her bodily
charm, to the subtle intelligence in her dark, oval,
lovely face, with its splendid eyes, which gazed
softly and attentively from under her fine brows.
She is a worldly syren, lovely and desirable in her
sensual fascination. But she is not too discriminating
in the choice of her male adorers. His remembrance
of all her deceptions stings Lavretsky when
in her manœuvres to be reinstated in society she
descends upon him suddenly at O——:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The first thing that struck him as he went into the
entrance hall was a scent of patchouli, always distasteful
to him; there were some high travelling-trunks standing
there. The face of his groom, who ran out to meet him,
seemed strange to him. Not stopping to analyse his
impressions, he crossed the threshold of the drawing-room....
On his entrance there rose from the sofa a
lady in a black silk dress with flounces, who, raising a
cambric handkerchief to her pale face, made a few paces
forward, bent her carefully dressed, perfumed head,
and fell at his feet.... Then, only, he recognised her:
this lady was his wife!</p>
<p>“He caught his breath.... He leaned against the
wall.</p>
<p>“‘<i>Théodore</i>, do not repulse me!’ she said in French,
and her voice cut to his heart like a knife.</p>
<p>“He looked at her senselessly, and yet he noticed
involuntarily at once that she had grown both whiter
and fatter.</p>
<p>“‘<i>Théodore!</i>’ she went on, from time to time lifting
her eyes and discreetly wringing her marvellously
beautiful fingers with their rosy, polished nails.
‘<i>Théodore</i>, I have wronged you, deeply wronged you;
I will say more, I have sinned; but hear me; I am
tortured by remorse, I have grown hateful to myself,
I could endure my position no longer; how many times
have I thought of turning to you, but I feared your
anger; I resolved to break every tie with the past....
<i>Puis, j’ai été si malade</i>.... I have been so ill,’ she
added, and passed her hand over her brow and cheek.
‘I took advantage of the widely-spread rumour of my
death, I gave up everything; without resting day or
night I hastened hither; I hesitated long to appear
before you, my judge ... <i>paraître devant vous, mon
juge</i>; but I resolved at last, remembering your constant
goodness, to come to you; I found your address at
Moscow. Believe me,’ she went on, slowly getting up
from the floor and sitting on the very edge of an armchair.
‘I have often thought of death, and I should
have found courage to take my life ... ah! life is a
burden unbearable for me now!... but the thought
of my daughter, my little Ada, stopped me. She is
here, she is asleep in the next room, the poor child!
She is tired—you shall see her; she at least has done
you no wrong, and I am so unhappy, so unhappy!’
cried Madame Lavretsky, and she melted into tears....</p>
<p>“... ‘I have no commands to give you,’ replied
Lavretsky in the same colourless voice; ‘you know,
all is over between us ... and now more than ever;
you can live where you like; and if your allowance is
too little——’</p>
<p>“‘Ah, don’t say such dreadful things,’ Varvara
Pavlovna interrupted him, ‘spare me, if only ... if
only for the sake of this angel.’ And as she uttered
these words, Varvara Pavlovna ran impulsively into the
next room, and returned at once with a small and very
elegantly dressed little girl in her arms. Thick flaxen
curls fell over her pretty rosy little face, and on to her
large sleepy black eyes; she smiled, and blinked her
eyes at the light and laid a chubby little hand on her
mother’s neck.</p>
<p>“‘Ada, <i>vois, c’est ton père</i>,’ said Varvara Pavlovna,
pushing the curls back from her eyes and kissing her
vigorously, ‘<i>prie-le avec moi</i>.’</p>
<p>“‘<i>C’est ça, papa?</i>’ stammered the little girl lisping.</p>
<p>“‘<i>Oui, mon enfant, n’est-ce pas que tu l’aimes?</i>’</p>
<p>“But this was more than Lavretsky could stand.</p>
<p>“‘In what melodrama is there a scene exactly like
this?’ he muttered and went out of the room.</p>
<p>“Varvara Pavlovna stood still for some time in the
same place, slightly shrugged her shoulders, carried the
little girl off into the next room, undressed her and put
her to bed. Then she took up a book and sat down
near the lamp, and after staying up for an hour she went
to bed herself.</p>
<p>“‘<i>Eh bien, madame?</i>’ queried her maid, a French
woman whom she had brought from Paris, as she unlaced
her corset.</p>
<p>“‘<i>Eh bien, Justine</i>,’ she replied, ‘he is a good deal
older, but I fancy he is just the same good-natured
fellow. Give me my gloves for the night, and get out
my grey, high-necked dress for to-morrow, and don’t
forget the mutton cutlets for Ada.... I daresay it will
be difficult to get them here; but we must try.’</p>
<p>“‘<i>A la guerre comme à la guerre</i>,’ replied Justine, as
she put out the candle.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The reader should contrast with the above
satiric passage, the summer evening scene in the
garden at Vassilyevskoe (chap. xxvi.), where Marya
Dmitrievna’s party sit by the pond fishing. The
soft tranquillity of the hour, the charm of this pure
young girl, Liza, with “her soft, glowing cheeks and
somewhat severe profile” as “she looked at the
water, half frowning, to keep the sun out of her
eyes, half smiling,” the tender evening atmosphere,
all are faintly stirred, like the rippling surface of
a stream, by a puff of wind, by Liza’s words upon
her religious thoughts on death. In this delicate,
glancing conversation, Turgenev while mirroring,
as in a glass, the growing intimacy of feeling between
Liza and Lavretsky, discloses almost imperceptibly
the sunken rock on which his happiness is to strike
and suffer shipwreck—Liza’s profound instinct of
self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. Her sweet seriousness,
her slowness of brain, her very lack of words,
all appear to Lavretsky enchanting. This scene
in the garden, in its tender breathing tranquillity,
holds suspended beneath the gentle, flowing stream
of the lovers’ happiness, the faint, ambiguous
menace of the days to come.</p>
<p>In depicting the contest between Varvara
Pavlovna’s worldliness and Liza’s spirituality, how
comes it that Turgenev’s <i>parti pris</i> for Liza has not
impaired the aesthetic balance? It is because he
shows us how Lavretsky’s mistake in marrying
this syren has tied his hands. The forces of worldly
convention when reinforced by Liza’s religious
conviction that Varvara Pavlovna, odious as she is,
is still Lavretsky’s wife, are bound to triumph.
Accordingly the more the all-pervasive, all-conquering
force of worldliness is done justice to, and the
more its brilliant, polished appearances are displayed
in all their deceptive colours, <i>the greater is our
reaction towards spiritual beauty</i>. Therefore Turgenev,
with his unerring instinct, intersperses Liza’s
sad love story with scenes of the brilliant worldly
comedy played between that <i>comme-il-faut</i> pair,
Panshin, the brilliant young official from Petersburg,
Liza’s suitor, and Varvara Pavlovna.</p>
<p>Turgenev sees through the pretences of his
worldly types at a glance. All the inflexions of
their engaging manners reflect as in a clear mirror
the evasive shades of their worldly motives. He
has a peculiar gift of so contrasting their tones of
insincerity that the artificial pattern of their intercourse
gleams and glistens in its polished falsity.
As a social comedy of the purest water, how delightful
are the scenes where the foolish Marya Dmitrievna,
the old counsellor Gedeonovsky, and
Panshin with his diplomatic reserve, are fascinated
by the seductive modesty of Varvara Pavlovna
(chap. xxxix.). How natural in the interplay of
ironic light and shade is the picture of Varvara
Pavlovna’s conquest of her provincial audience.
Note, moreover, how in art and literature and
music, what always thrills these ladies and gentlemen
is the polished, insipid, <i>chic morceau</i>. Their talk,
their manner, their aspiration are all of the surface,
facile, smooth polished, like their scented, white
hands, and one listens to their correctly modulated
voices exchanging compliments and social banalities,
suavely, in the reception room, while beneath this
correct surface is self, self and worldly advantage.
That is the one reality. The world of beautiful
feeling, of disinterested, generous impulse, is on
quite another plane; it is as strange and alien to
their minds as the peasant’s rough, harsh world of
labour. Examine the exact relation Panshin bears
to the world in which he is so successfully playing
his part:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Panshin’s father, a retired cavalry officer and a
notorious gambler, was a man with insinuating eyes, a
battered countenance, and a nervous twitch about the
mouth. He spent his whole life hanging about the
aristocratic world; frequented the English clubs of
both capitals, and had the reputation of a smart, not
very trustworthy, but jolly good-natured fellow. In
spite of his smartness, he was almost always on the brink
of ruin, and the property he left his son was small and
heavily encumbered. To make up for that, however,
he did exert himself, after his own fashion, over his son’s
education. Vladimir Nikolaitch spoke French very
well, English well, and German badly; that is the
proper thing: fashionable people would be ashamed to
speak German well; but to utter an occasional—generally
a humorous—phrase in German is quite
correct, <i>c’est même très chic</i>, as the Parisians of Petersburg
express themselves. By the time he was fifteen, Vladimir
knew how to enter any drawing-room without embarrassment,
how to move about in it gracefully and to leave it
at the appropriate moment. Panshin’s father gained
many connections for his son. He never lost an opportunity,
while shuffling the cards between two rubbers,
or playing a successful trump, of dropping a hint about
his Volodka to any personage of importance who was
a devotee of cards. And Vladimir, too, during his
residence at the University, which he left without a very
brilliant degree, formed an acquaintance with several
young men of quality, and gained an entry into the best
houses. He was received cordially everywhere: he was
very good-looking, easy in his manners, amusing, always
in good health, and ready for everything; respectful,
when he ought to be; insolent, when he dared to be;
excellent company, <i>un charmant garçon</i>. The promised
land lay before him. Panshin quickly learnt the secret
of getting on in the world; he knew how to yield with
genuine respect to its decrees; he knew how to take up
trifles with half ironical seriousness, and to appear to
regard everything serious as trifling; he was a capital
dancer; and dressed in the English style. In a short
time he gained the reputation of being one of the
smartest and most attractive young men in Petersburg.
Panshin was indeed very smart, not less so than his
father; but he was also very talented. He did everything
well; he sang charmingly, sketched with spirit,
wrote verses, and was a very fair actor. He was only
twenty-eight, and he was already a <i>Kammer-Yunker</i>, and
he had a very good position. Panshin had complete
confidence in himself, in his own intelligence, and his
own penetration; he made his way with light-hearted
assurance, everything went smoothly with him. He
was used to being liked by everyone, old and young, and
imagined he understood people, especially women: he
certainly understood their ordinary weaknesses. As a
man of artistic leanings, he was conscious of a capacity
for passion, for being carried away, even for enthusiasm,
and, consequently, he permitted himself various irregularities;
he was dissipated, associated with persons not
belonging to good society, and, in general, conducted
himself in a free and easy manner; but at heart he was
cold and false, and at the moment of the most boisterous
revelry his sharp brown eye was always alert, taking
everything in. This bold, independent young man
could never forget himself and be completely carried
away. To his credit it must be said, that he never
boasted of his conquests.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The passage we have cited illustrates Turgenev’s
method of so placing in perspective the fine shades
of worldliness that their social significance is seen
contrasted with the force of spiritual beauty beyond,
out of their ken. Panshin cannot but rise in the
world, for his polished astuteness is weakened by
no feeling of mental integrity, his coldness is impaired
by no sympathy with merit which is unsuccessful.
In official life as in society Panshin is
the type of the <i>arriviste</i>, and his “Western” liberal
sympathies, one knows, are part of the flowing
tide; otherwise Panshin would not be expressing
them. In ten years later the official tide will be
flowing the other way, and Panshin, more dignified
and stouter, with the Vladimir Cross on his frock-coated
breast, will be emphasizing the necessity for
severer measures of Governmental reaction. The
Panshins are legion.</p>
<p>To reveal Panshin’s essence in his actions Turgenev
employs but a single stroke—Panshin’s
spitefulness to the old music-master, Lemm, a
musician of genius, but solitary, poor and despised
because “he did not know how to set about things
in the right way, to gain favour in the right place,
and to make a push at the right moment.” Lemm
has composed for his pupil, Liza, a religious cantata.
Panshin has seen the score, inscribed “For you
alone,” and for the pleasure of mortifying the old
man who has called him a dilettante, he twits Lemm
about the composition, thereby betraying the young
girl’s confidence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“... Liza’s eyes were fixed directly on Panshin,
and expressed displeasure. There was no smile on her
lips, her whole face looked stern and even mournful.</p>
<p>“‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.</p>
<p>“‘Why did you not keep your word?’ she said.
‘I showed you Christopher Fedoritch’s cantata on the
express condition that you said nothing about it to
him.’</p>
<p>“‘I beg your pardon, Lisaveta Mihalovna, the words
slipped out unawares.’</p>
<p>“‘You have hurt his feelings and mine too. Now
he will not trust even me.’</p>
<p>“‘How could I help it, Lisaveta Mihalovna? Ever
since I was a little boy I could never see a German
without wanting to tease him.’</p>
<p>“‘How can you say that, Vladimir Nikolaitch?
This German is poor, lonely, and broken-down—have
you no pity for him? Can you wish to tease him?’</p>
<p>“Panshin was taken aback.</p>
<p>“‘You are right, Lisaveta Mihalovna,’ he declared.
‘It’s my everlasting thoughtlessness that’s to blame.
No, don’t contradict me; I know myself. So much
harm has come to me from my want of thought. It’s
owing to that failing that I am thought to be an egoist.’</p>
<p>“Panshin paused. With whatever subject he began
a conversation, he generally ended by talking of himself,
and the subject was changed by him so easily, so smoothly
and genially, that it seemed unconscious.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Thus delicately Turgenev indicates the impassable
spiritual gulf between Panshin and the
pure, serious Liza. It is an illustration of Turgenev’s
genius in disclosing life as a constantly
growing, changing phenomenon. His artistic synthesis
reproduces all the hesitating inflexions in
Liza’s feeling, and soon the interest that, as an inexperienced
girl, she takes in Panshin’s attentions
will fade before the mounting wave of Lavretsky’s
love.</p>
<p>The sequel our readers have divined, if they do
not already know <i>A House of Gentlefolk</i>. We have
seen above how Varvara Pavlovna’s return from
the void, blights Lavretsky’s future; and now
through the closing chapters, xliii. to xlv., of the
worldly comedy of her social rehabilitation, sounds
the low, piercing note of Liza’s renunciation. For
her the convent, for Lavretsky henceforward his
unavailing memories. It is the idealistic girl, who
at the Church’s behest, immolates herself and the
man she loves on the altar of her religion. And
Varvara Pavlovna is left softly smiling at Lavretsky’s
inner misery; and “the day after his departure,
Panshin appeared at Lavricky, the lofty apartments
of the house, and even the garden re-echoed with
the sound of music, singing and lively French talk—and
Panshin, when he took leave of Varvara Pavlovna,
warmly pressing her lovely hands, promised
to come back very soon—and he kept his word.”</p>
<p>It is life, and to those who rebel against the
innocent bearing the sorrow of renunciation, Turgenev
addresses the beautiful Epilogue in which we
see Lavretsky, years later, revisiting the house of
Marya Dmitrievna now dead and gone, and sitting
alone in the room where he had so often looked at
Liza, he hears the happy laughter of the young,
careless people, the young generation, ringing in the
sunlit garden:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Lavretsky quietly rose and quietly went away;
no one noticed him, no one detained him; the joyous
cries sounded more loudly in the garden behind the
thick green wall of high lime trees. He took his seat in
the carriage and bade the coachman drive home and
not hurry the horses.... They say, Lavretsky visited
that convent where Liza had hidden herself—that he
saw her. Crossing over from choir to choir, she walked
close past him, moving with the even, hurried, but meek
walk of a nun; and she did not glance at him; only the
eyelashes on the side towards him quivered a little, only
she bent her emaciated face lower, and the fingers of her
clasped hands, entwined with her rosary, were pressed
still closer to one another. What were they both
thinking? What were they feeling? Who can know?
Who can say? There are such moments in life, there
are such feelings.... One can but point to them—and
pass by.”</p></blockquote>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">VI<br />“ON THE EVE”</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">“ON THE EVE”</p>
<p><i>On the Eve</i>, not finished and published till 1859,
but projected in 1855, and then laid aside for <i>Rudin</i>
and <i>A House of Gentlefolk</i>, holds depths of meaning
which at first sight lie veiled under the simple
harmonious surface. To the English reader <i>On the
Eve</i> is a charming picture of a quiet Russian household,
with a delicate analysis of a young girl’s soul.
For Russians, however, on the background is cast
the wavering shadow of Russia’s national aspirations.</p>
<p>Elena, the heroine, as Turgenev tells us, was “a
new type in Russian life,” when his idea of her first
began to trouble his imagination; but “I could
not find the hero to whom she, with her vague but
strong aspirations for liberty, could give herself.”
In comparing her with Natalya and Liza the reader
will remark that he is allowed to come into even
closer spiritual contact with her than with them.
When Elena stands before us we know the innermost
secrets of her character. Her strength of will, her
serious, courageous, proud soul, her capacity for
passion, all the play of her idealistic nature troubled
by the contradictions, aspirations, and unhappiness
that the dawn of love brings to her, all this is
conveyed to us by a simple and consummate art.
The diary (chap. xvi.) that Elena keeps is in itself
a masterly revelation of a young girl’s heart; it
has never been equalled by any other novelist.</p>
<p>How exquisitely Turgenev reveals his characters
may be seen by an examination of the parts Shubin
the artist, and Bersenyev the student, play towards
Elena. Both young men are in love with her, and
the description of their after relations as friends,
and the feelings of Elena towards them, and her
own self-communings are interwoven with unfaltering
skill. All the most complex and baffling
shades of the mental life, in the hands of Turgenev
are used with deftness and certainty to bring to
light the complexity of motives and instincts which
is always lying hidden beneath the surface, beneath
the commonplace of daily life. In the difficult art
of literary perspective, in the effective grouping of
contrasts in character and the criss-cross of the
influence of the different individuals, lies one of the
secrets of Turgenev’s supremacy. As an example
the reader may note how he is made to judge Elena
through six pairs of eyes—Stahov’s contempt for
his daughter, her mother’s affectionate bewilderment,
Shubin’s petulant criticism, Bersenyev’s
half-hearted enthralment, Insarov’s recognition, and
Zoya’s indifference, being the facets for converging
light on Elena’s sincerity and depth of soul. Again
one may note Turgenev’s method for rehabilitating
Shubin in our eyes; Shubin is simply made to
criticise Stahov; the thing is done in a few seemingly
careless lines, but these lines lay bare Shubin’s
strength and weakness, the fluidity of his nature.
The reader who does not see the art which underlies
almost every line of <i>On the Eve</i> is merely paying the
highest tribute to that art; as often the clear
waters of a pool conceal its surprising depth. Taking
Shubin’s character as an example of creative skill,
we cannot call to mind any instance in the range
of European fiction where the typical artist mind,
on its lighter sides, has been analysed with such
delicacy and truth as here by Turgenev. The
irresponsibility, alertness, the whimsicality and
mobility of Shubin combine to charm and irritate
the reader in the exact proportion that such a
character affects him in actual life; there is not
the least touch of exaggeration, and all the values
are kept to a marvel. Looking at the minor characters,
perhaps one may say that the father of Elena
will be the most suggestive, and not the least
familiar character, to English households. His
essentially masculine meanness, his self-complacency,
his unconscious indifference to the opinion of others,
his absurdity as <i>un père de famille</i>, are balanced by
the foolish affection and jealousy which his wife,
Anna Vassilyevna, cannot help feeling towards him.
The perfect balance and duality of Turgenev’s
outlook are here shown by the equal cleverness with
which he seizes on and quietly derides the typical
masculine and typical feminine attitude in such a
married life as the Stahovs’.</p>
<p>Turning to the figure of the Bulgarian hero, it is
interesting to find from the <i>Souvenirs sur Tourguénev</i>
(published in 1887) that Turgenev’s only distinct
failure of importance in character drawing, Insarov,
was not taken from life, but was the legacy of a
friend, Karateieff, who implored Turgenev to work
out an unfinished conception. Insarov is a figure
of wood. He is so cleverly constructed, and the
central idea behind him so strong, that his wooden
joints move naturally, and the spectator has only
the instinct, not the certainty, of being cheated.
The idea he incarnates, that of a man whose soul
is aflame with patriotism, is finely suggested, but
an idea, even a great one, does not make an individuality.
And, in fact, Insarov is not a man, he
is an automaton. To compare Shubin’s utterances
with his is to perceive that there is no spontaneity,
no inevitability in Insarov. He is a patriotic clock
wound up to go for the occasion, and in truth he
is very useful. Only on his deathbed, when the
unexpected happens, and the machinery runs down,
do we feel moved. Then he appears more striking
dead than alive—a rather damning testimony to
the power Turgenev credits him with. This artistic
failure of Turgenev’s is, as he no doubt recognized,
curiously lessened by the fact that young girls of
Elena’s lofty idealistic type are particularly impressed
by certain stiff types of men of action and
great will-power, whose capacity for moving straight
towards a goal by no means implies corresponding
brain-power. The insight of a Shubin and the
moral worth of a Bersenyev are not so valuable to
the Elenas of this world, whose ardent desire to be
made good use of, and to seek some great end, is
best developed by strength of aim in the men they
love.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>And now to see what the novel before us meant
to the contemporary Russian mind, we must turn
to the infinitely suggestive background. Turgenev’s
genius was of the same force in politics as in art;
it was that of seeing aright. He saw his country
as it was, with clearer eyes than any man before or
since. As a critic of his generation little escaped
Turgenev’s eye, as a politician he foretold nearly
all that actually came to pass in his life, and as
a consummate artist, led first and foremost by his
love for his art, his novels are undying historical
pictures. It is not that there is anything allegorical
in his novels—allegory is at the farthest pole from
his method; it is that whenever he created an
important figure in fiction that figure is necessarily
a revelation of the secrets of the fatherland, the
soil, the race. Turgenev, in short, was a psychologist
not merely of men, but of nations; and so
the chief figure of <i>On the Eve</i>, Elena, foreshadows
and stands for the rise of Young Russia in the
’sixties. Elena is Young Russia, and to whom does
she turn in her prayer for strength? Not to
Bersenyev, the philosopher, the dreamer; not to
Shubin, the man carried outside himself by every
passing distraction; but to the strong man, Insarov.
And here the irony of Insarov being made a foreigner,
a Bulgarian, is significant of Turgenev’s distrust of
his country’s weakness. The hidden meaning of the
novel is a cry to the coming men to unite their
strength against the foe without and the foe within
the gates; it is not only an appeal to them to
hasten the death of the old régime of Nicholas I.,
but an appeal to them to conquer their sluggishness,
their weakness and their apathy. It is a cry for
Men. Turgenev sought in vain in life for a type
of man to satisfy Russia, and ended by taking no
living model for his hero, but the hearsay Insarov,
a foreigner. Russia has not yet produced men of
this type. But the artist does not despair of the
future. Here we come upon one of the most striking
figures of Turgenev—that of Uvar Ivanovitch.
He symbolizes the ever-predominant type of Russian,
the sleepy, the slothful Slav of yesterday. He is
the Slav whose inherent force Europe is as ignorant
of as he is himself. Though he speaks only twenty
sentences in the book he is a creation of Tolstoian
force. His very words are dark and of practically
no significance. There lies the irony of the social
picture. On the eve of what? one asks. Time has
given contradictory answers to the men of all
parties. The Elenas of to-day need not turn their
eyes abroad to find their counterpart in spirit; so
far at least the pessimists are refuted; but the note
of death that Turgenev strikes in his marvellous
chapter on Venice has still for Young Russia an
ominous echo—so many generations have arisen
eager, only to be flung aside helpless, that one asks,
what of the generation that fronts Autocracy
to-day?<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Written in 1895.</p></div>
<blockquote>
<p>“‘Do you remember I asked you, “Will there ever
be men among us?” and you answered, “There will be.”
O primæval force! And now from here in “my poetic
distance” I will ask you again, “What do you say, Uvar
Ivanovitch, will there be?”’</p>
<p>“Uvar Ivanovitch flourished his fingers, and fixed
his enigmatical stare into the far distance.”</p></blockquote>
<p>This creation of a universal national type, out
of the flesh and blood of a fat, taciturn country
gentleman, brings us to see that Turgenev was not
merely an artist, but that he was a poet using
fiction as his medium. To this end it is instructive
to compare Jane Austen, perhaps the greatest
English exponent of the domestic novel, with the
Russian master, and to note that, while her picture
of manners is as indestructible as his, she is
absolutely wanting in his poetic insight. How
petty and parochial appears her outlook in <i>Emma</i>,
compared with Turgenev’s wide and unflinching gaze.
She painted most admirably the English types she
knew, and how well she knew them! but she failed
to correlate them with the national life; and yet,
while her men and women were acting and thinking,
Trafalgar and Waterloo were being fought and
won. But each of Turgenev’s novels in some
subtle way suggests that the people he introduces
are playing their little part in a great national
drama everywhere round us, invisible, yet audible
through the clamour of voices near us. And so <i>On
the Eve</i>, the work of a poet, has certain deep notes,
which break through the harmonious tenor of the
whole, and strangely and swiftly transfigure the
quiet story, troubling us with a dawning consciousness
of the march of mighty events. Suddenly a
strange sense steals upon the reader that he is
living in a perilous atmosphere, filling his heart
with foreboding, and enveloping at length the
characters themselves, all unconsciously awaiting
disaster in the sunny woods and gardens of Kuntsevo.
But not till the last chapters are reached does the
English reader perceive that in recreating for him
the mental atmosphere of a single educated Russian
household, Turgenev has been casting before his
eyes the faint shadow of the national drama which
was indeed played, though left unfinished, on the
Balkan battlefields of 1876-77. Briefly, Turgenev,
in sketching the dawn of love in a young girl’s soul,
has managed faintly, but unmistakably, to make
spring and flourish in our minds the ineradicable,
though hidden, idea at the back of Slav thought—the
unification of the Slav races.</p>
<p>How doubly welcome that art should be which
can lead us, the foreigner, thus straight to the heart
of the national secrets of a great people, secrets
which our own critics and diplomatists have so
often misrepresented. Each of Turgenev’s novels
may be said to contain a light-bringing rejoinder
to the old-fashioned criticism of the Muscovite,
current up to the rise of the great Russian novel,
and still, unfortunately, lingering among us;<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> but
<i>On the Eve</i>, of all the novels, contains, perhaps, the
most instructive political lesson England can learn.
Europe has always had, and most assuredly England
has been very rich in those alarm-monger critics,
watchdogs for ever baying at Slav cupidity,
treachery, intrigue, and so on and so on. It is
useful to have these well-meaning animals on the
political premises, giving noisy tongue whenever
the Slav stretches out his long arm and opens his
drowsy eyes, but how rare it is to find a man who
can teach us to interpret a nation’s aspirations, to
gauge its inner force, its aim, its inevitability.
Turgenev gives us such clues. In the respectful,
if slightly forced, silence that has been imposed by
certain recent political events<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> on the tribe of
faithful watchdogs, it may be permitted to one to
say, that whatever England’s interest may be in
relation to Russia’s development, it is better for us
to understand the force of Russian aims before we
measure our strength against it. And a novel,
such as <i>On the Eve</i>, though now it is nearly forty
years old, and to the short-sighted out of date,
reveals in a flash the attitude of the Slav towards
his political destiny. His aspirations may have
to slumber through policy or necessity; they may
be distorted or misrepresented, or led astray by
official action, but we confess for us <i>On the Eve</i>
suggests the existence of a mighty lake, whose
waters, dammed back for a while, are rising slowly,
but are still some way from the brim. How long
will it take to the overflow? Nobody knows; but
when the long winter of Russia’s dark internal
policy shall be broken up, will the snows, melting
on the mountains, stream south-west, inundating
the valley of the Danube? Or, as the national
poet, Pushkin, has sung, will there be a pouring of
many Slavonian rivulets into the Russian sea, a
powerful attraction of the Slav races towards a
common centre to create an era of peace and development
within, whereby Russia may rise free and
rejoicing to face her great destinies? Hard and
bitter is the shaping of nations. Uvar Ivanovitch
still fixes his enigmatical stare into the far distance.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> Passages written in 1895.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> Passages written in 1895.</p></div>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>Twenty-two years ago the above appreciation
of <i>On the Eve</i> was written by the present writer, who,
on re-reading it, finds it necessary to alter only two
or three sentences. The sentence “The respectful,
if slightly forced, silence that has been imposed by
recent political events on the tribe of faithful watchdogs”
is an allusion to the first attempt made by
our diplomatists and our Court, on the accession
of Nicholas II., to reverse the traditional policy of
England’s hostility to Russia. The sequel, despite
the surprising ups and downs of the political barometer,
was determined by Germany’s naval policy
and the Anglo-French <i>entente</i>.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">VII<br />“FATHERS AND CHILDREN”</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">“FATHERS AND CHILDREN”</p>
<p class="center p2">I</p>
<p>While <i>On the Eve</i> signalizes the end of the Crimea
epoch and the break-up of the crushing, overwhelming
régime of Nicholas, <i>Fathers and Children</i>
is a forecast of the new Liberal movement which
arose in the Russia of the ’sixties, and an analysis
of the formidable type appearing on the political
horizon—the Nihilist.</p>
<p>Turgenev was the first man to detect the existence
of this new type, the Nihilist. His own
account of his discovery gives us such an interesting
glimpse of his method in creative work
that we transcribe a passage from his paper on
<i>Fathers and Children</i>, written at Baden in 1869:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It was in the month of August 1860, when I was
taking sea baths at Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight, that the
first idea of <i>Fathers and Children</i> came into my head;
that novel, thanks to which the favourable opinion of
the younger generation about me, has come to an end.
Many times I have heard and read in critical journals
that I have only been elaborating an idea of my own....
For my part, I ought to confess that I never attempted
to create a type without having, not an idea, but a
living person, in whom the various elements were
harmonised together, to work from. I have always
needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly.
This was the case with <i>Fathers and Children</i>. At the
foundation of the principal figure Bazarov was the
personality of a young provincial doctor. He died not
long before 1860. In that remarkable man was incarnated
to my ideas the just rising element, which,
still chaotic, afterwards received the title of Nihilism.
The impression produced by this individual was very
strong. At first I could not clearly define him to
myself. But I strained my eyes and ears, watching
everything surrounding me, anxious to trust simply in
my own sensations. What confounded me was that I
had met not a single idea or hint of what seemed appearing
to me on all sides. And the doubt involuntarily
suggested itself....”</p></blockquote>
<p><i>Fathers and Children</i> was published in the spring
of 1862 in Katkoff’s paper, <i>The Russian Messenger</i>,
the organ of the Younger Generation, and the
stormy controversy that the novel immediately
provoked was so bitter, deep and lasting that the
episode forms one of the most interesting chapters
in literary history. Rarely has so great an artist
so thoroughly drawn public attention to a scrutiny
of new ideas rising in its midst; rarely has so great
an artist come into such violent collision with his
own party thereby; never, perhaps, has there been
so striking an illustration of the incapacity of the
public, swayed by party passion, to understand
a pure work of art. The effect of the publication
was widespread excitement in both political camps.
Everybody was, at the time, on the alert to see
what would be the next move on the political board.
The recent Emancipation of the Serfs was looked
upon by Young Russia as only the prelude to many
democratic measures, while the Reactionists professed
to see in that measure the ruin of the country
and the beginning of the end. The fast-increasing
antipathy between the Old Order and the New, like
a fire, required only a puff of wind to set it ablaze.
And Bazarov’s character and aims came as a godsend
to the Reactionists, who hailed in it the portrait
of the insidious revolutionary ideas current
in Young Russia; and they hastened to crowd round
Turgenev, ironically congratulating the former champion
of Liberalism on his penetration and honesty
in unmasking the Nihilist. But we will quote
Turgenev’s own words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I will not enlarge on the effect produced by this
novel. I will only say that everywhere the word
Nihilist was caught up by a thousand tongues, and that
on the day of the conflagration of the Apraksinsky shops,
when I arrived in St. Petersburg, the first exclamation
with which I was greeted was, ‘Just see what your
Nihilists are doing!’ ... I experienced a coldness
approaching to indignation from people near and
sympathetic to me. I received congratulations, almost
caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies.
This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did
not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out
honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only
without prejudice, but positively with sympathy....
While some attack me for outraging the Younger
Generation, and promise me, with a laugh of contempt,
to burn my photograph, others, on the contrary, with
indignation, reproach me for my servile cringing to the
Younger Generation.... ‘You are grovelling at the
feet of Bazarov. You pretend to find fault with him,
and you are licking the dust at his feet,’ says one correspondent.
Another critic represented M. Katkoff and
me as two conspirators, ‘plotting in the solitude of our
chamber our traps and slanders against the forces of
Young Russia.’ An effective picture!... My critics
called my work a pamphlet, and referred to my wounded
and irritated vanity.... A shadow has fallen on my
name. I don’t deceive myself. I know that shadow
will remain.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Politics is a game where the mistakes and admissions
of your adversary are your good character
in public opinion—a definition which goes far to
account for the easy predominance of the political
sharper,—and so Turgenev, the great artist, he who,
in creating Bazarov for an ungrateful public, to use
his own words, “<i>simply did not know how to work
otherwise</i>,” found to his cost. The Younger Generation,
irritated by the public capital made out of
Bazarov and his Nihilism by “the Fathers,” flew into
the other extreme, and refused to see in Bazarov
anything other than a <i>caricature</i> of itself. It
denied Bazarov was of its number, or represented
its views in any way; and to this day surviving
Nihilists will demonstrate warmly that the creation
of his sombre figure is “a mistake from beginning
to end.” The reason for this wholesale rejection
of Bazarov is easy to account for; and Turgenev,
whose clear-sightedness about his works was unaffected
either by vanity, diffidence or the ignorant
onslaughts of the whole tribe of minor critics, penetrates
at once to the heart of the matter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The whole ground of the misunderstanding lay in
the fact that the type of Bazarov had not time to pass
through the usual phases. At the very moment of his
appearance the author attacked him. It was a new
method as well as a new type I introduced—that of
Realizing instead of Idealizing.... The reader is easily
thrown into perplexity when the author does not show
clear sympathy or antipathy to his own child. The
reader readily gets angry.... After all, books exist
to entertain.”</p></blockquote>
<p>An excellent piece of analysis and a quiet piece
of irony this! The character of Bazarov was in
fact such an epitome of the depths of a great
movement that the mass of commonplace educated
minds, the future tools of the movement, looked
on it with alarm, dislike and dread. The average
man will only recognize his own qualities in his
fellows, and endow a man with his own littlenesses.
So Bazarov’s depth excited the superficiality of the
eternally omnipresent average mind. The Idealists
in the Younger Generation were mortally grieved to
see that Bazarov was not wholly inspired by their
dreams; he went deeper, and the average man
received a shock of surprise that hurt his vanity.
So the hue and cry was raised around Turgenev,
and raised only too well. Bazarov is the most
dominating of Turgenev’s creations, yet it brought
upon him secret distrust and calumny, undermined
his influence with those he was with at heart, and
went far to damage his position as the leading
novelist of his day. The lesson is significant. No
generation ever understands itself; its members
welcome eagerly their portraits drawn by their
friends, and the caricatures drawn by their adversaries;
but to the new type no mercy is shown,
and everybody hastens to misunderstand, to abuse,
to destroy.</p>
<p>So widely indeed was Bazarov misunderstood
that Turgenev once asserted, “At this very moment
there are only two people who have understood my
intentions—Dostoevsky and Botkin.”</p>
<p>And Dostoevsky was of the opposite camp—a
Slavophil.</p>
<p class="center p2">II</p>
<p>What, then, is Bazarov?</p>
<p>Time after time Turgenev took the opportunity,
now in an article, now in a private or a public letter,
to repel the attacks made upon his favourite character.
Thus in a letter to a Russian lady<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> he says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“What, you too say that in drawing Bazarov I
wished to make a caricature of the young generation.
You repeat this—pardon my plain speaking—idiotic
reproach. Bazarov, my favourite child, on whose
account I quarrelled with Katkoff; Bazarov, on whom
I lavished all the colours at my disposal; Bazarov, this
man of intellect, this hero, a caricature! But I see it
is useless for me to protest.”</p></blockquote>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Souvenirs sur Tourguéneff</i>, 1887.</p></div>
<p>And in a letter addressed to the Russian students
at Heidelberg he reiterates:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<i>Flatter comme un caniche</i>, I did not wish; although
in this way I could no doubt have all the young men at
once on my side; but I was unwilling to buy popularity
by concessions of this kind. It is better to lose the
campaign (and I believe I have lost it) than win by this
subterfuge. I dreamed of a sombre, savage and great
figure, only half emerged from barbarism, strong,
<i>méchant</i> and honest, and nevertheless doomed to perish
because it is always in advance of the future. I dreamed
of a strange parallel to Pugatchev. And my young
contemporaries shake their heads and tell me, ‘<i>Vous
êtes foutu</i>, old fellow. You have insulted us. Your
Arkady is far better. It’s a pity you haven’t worked
him out a little more.’ There is nothing left for me
but, in the words of the gipsy song, ‘to take off my hat
with a very low bow.’”</p></blockquote>
<p>What, then, is Bazarov?</p>
<p>Various writers have agreed in seeing in him only
“criticism, pitiless, barren, and overwhelming
analysis, and the spirit of absolute negation,” but
this is an error. Representing the creed which has
produced the militant type of Revolutionist in every
capital of Europe, <i>he is the bare mind of Science first
applied to Politics</i>. His own immediate origin is
German Science interpreted by that spirit of logical
intensity, Russian fanaticism, or devotion to the
Idea, which is perhaps the distinguishing genius of
the Slav. But he represents the roots of the modern
Revolutionary movements in thought as well as in
politics, rather than the branches springing from
those roots. Inasmuch as the early work of the
pure scientific spirit, knowing itself to be fettered
by the superstitions, the confusions, the sentimentalities
of the Past, was necessarily destructive,
Bazarov’s primary duty was to Destroy. In his
essence, however, he stands for <i>the sceptical conscience
of modern Science</i>. His watchword is <i>Reality</i>, and
not Negation, as everybody in pious horror hastened
to assert Turgenev, whose first and last advice
to young writers was, “You need truth, remorseless
truth, as regards your own sensations,” was indeed
moved to declare, “Except Bazarov’s views on
Art, I share almost all his convictions.” The crude
materialism of the ’sixties was not the basis of the
scientific spirit, it was merely its passing expression;
and the early Nihilists who denounced Art, the
Family and Social Institutions were simply freeing
themselves from traditions preparatory to a struggle
that was inevitable. Again, though Bazarov is a
Democrat, perhaps his kinship with the people is
best proved by the contempt he feels for them.
He stands forward essentially as an Individual,
with the “isms” that can aid him, mere tools in his
hand; Socialist, Communist or Individualist, in his
necessary phases he fought this century against the
tyranny of centralized Governments, and next
century he will be fighting against the stupid tyranny
of the Mass. Looking at Bazarov however, as a
type that has played its part and vanished with its
generation, as a man he is a new departure in history.
His appearance marks the dividing-line between
two religions, that of the Past—Faith, and that growing
religion of to-day—Science. His is the duty of
breaking away from all things that men call Sacred,
and his savage egoism is essential to that duty.
He is subject to neither Custom nor Law. He is his
own law, and is occupied simply with the fact he is
studying. He has thrown aside the ties of love and
duty that cripple the advance of the strongest men.
He typifies Mind grappling with Nature, seeking
out her inexorable laws, Mind in pure devotion to
the What Is, in startling contrast to the minds that
follow their self-created kingdoms of What Appears
and of What Ought to Be. He is therefore a foe
to the poetry and art that help to increase Nature’s
glamour over man by alluring him to yield to her;
for Bazarov’s great aim is to see Nature at work
behind the countless veils of illusions and ideals, and
all the special functions of belief which she develops
in the minds of the masses to get them unquestioning
to do her bidding. Finally, Bazarov, in whom
the comfortable compromising English mind sees
only a man of bad form, bad taste, bad manners
and overwhelming conceit, finally, Bazarov stands
for Humanity awakened from century-old superstitions
and the long dragging oppressive dream of
tradition. Naked he stands under a deaf, indifferent
sky, but he feels and knows that he has the
strong brown earth beneath his feet.</p>
<p>This type, though it has developed into a network
of special branches to-day, it is not difficult for us
to trace as it has appeared and disappeared in the
stormy periods of the last thirty years. Probably
the genius and energy of the type was chiefly devoted
to positive Science, and not to Politics; but it is
sufficient to glance at the Revolutionary History, in
theory and action, of the Continent to see that every
movement was inspired by the ideas of the Bazarovs,
though led by a variety of leaders. Just as the
popular movements for Liberty fifty years earlier
found sentimental and <i>romantic</i> expression in
Byronism, so the popular movements of our time
have been realistic in idea, and have looked to
Science for their justification. Proudhon, Bakunin,
Karl Marx, the Internationals, the Russian Terrorists,
the Communists, all have a certain relation to
Bazarov, but his nearest kinsmen in these and other
movements we believe have worked, and have
remained, obscure. It was a stroke of genius on
Turgenev’s part to make Bazarov die on the threshold
unrecognized. He is Aggression, destroyed in
his destroying. And there are many reasons in life
for the Bazarovs remaining obscure. For one thing,
their few disciples, the Arkadys, do not understand
them; for another, the whole swarm of little
interested persons who make up a movement are
more or less engaged in personal interests, and they
rarely take for a leader a man who works for his
own set of truths, scornful of all cliques, penalties
and rewards. Necessarily, too, the Bazarovs work
alone, and are given the most dangerous tasks to
accomplish unaided. Further, they are men whose
brutal and breaking force attracts ten men where it
repels a thousand. The average man is too afraid
of Bazarov to come into contact with him. Again,
the Bazarovs, as Iconoclasts, are always unpopular
in their own circles. Yesterday in political life they
were suppressed or exiled, and even in Science they
were the men who were supplanted before their real
claim was recognized, and to-day, when order reigns
for a time, the academic circles and the popular
critics will demonstrate that Bazarov’s existence
was a mistake, and the crowd could have got on
much better without him.</p>
<p>The Crowd, the ungrateful Crowd! though for it
Bazarov has wrested much from effete or corrupt
hands, and has fought and weakened despotic and
bureaucratic power, what has its opinion or memory
to do with his brave heroic figure? Yes, heroic,
as Turgenev, in indignation with Bazarov’s shallow
accusers, was betrayed into defining his own creation,
Bazarov, whose very atmosphere is difficulty and
danger, who cannot move without hostility carrying
as he does destruction to the old worn-out truths,
contemptuous of censure, still more contemptuous
of praise, he goes his way against wind and tide.
Brave man, given up to his cause, whatever it be,
it is his joy <i>to stand alone</i>, watching the crowd as it
races wherever reward is and danger is not. It is
Bazarov’s life to despise honours, success, opinion,
and to let nothing, not love itself, come between
him and his inevitable course, and, when death
comes, to turn his face to the wall, while in the
street below he can hear the voices of men cheering
the popular hero who has last arrived. The Crowd!
Bazarov is the antithesis of the cowardice of the
Crowd. That is the secret why we love him.</p>
<p class="center p2">III</p>
<p>As a piece of art <i>Fathers and Children</i> is the most
powerful of all Turgenev’s works. The figure of
Bazarov is not only the political centre of the book,
against which the other characters show up in their
respective significance, but a figure in which the
eternal tragedy of man’s impotence and insignificance
is realized in scenes of a most ironical human
drama. How admirably this figure dominates
everything and everybody. Everything falls away
before this man’s biting sincerity. In turn the
figureheads of Culture and Birth, Nicolai and Pavel
representing the Past; Arkady the sentimentalist
representing the Present; the father and mother
representing the ties of family that hinder a man’s
life-work; Madame Odintsov embodying the fascination
of a beautiful woman—all fall into their respective
places. But the particular power of <i>Fathers
and Children</i>, of epic force almost, arises from the
way in which Turgenev makes us feel the individual
human tragedy of Bazarov in relation to the perpetual
tragedy everywhere in indifferent Nature.
In <i>On the Eve</i> Turgenev cast his figures against a
poetic background by creating an atmosphere of
War and Patriotism. But in <i>Fathers and Children</i>
this poetic background is Nature herself, Nature
who sows, with the same fling of her hand, life and
death springing each from each, in the same rhythmical
cast of fate. And with Nature for the background,
there comes the wonderful sense conveyed
to the reader throughout the novel, of the generations
with their fresh vigorous blood passing away
quickly, a sense of the coming generations, whose
works, too, will be hurried away into the background,
a sense of the silence of Earth, while her
children disappear into the shadows, and are whelmed
in turn by the inexorable night. While everything
in the novel is expressed in the realistic terms of
daily commonplace life, the characters appear now
close to us as companions, and now they seem like
distant figures walking under an immense sky; and
the effect of Turgenev’s simply and subtly drawn
landscapes is to give us a glimpse of men and women
in their actual relation to their mother earth and the
sky over their heads. This effect is rarely conveyed
in the modern Western novel, which deals
so much with purely indoor life; but the Russian
novelist gained artistic force for his tragedies by
the vague sense ever present with him of the enormous
distances of the vast steppes, bearing on their bosom
the peasants’ lives, which serve as a sombre background
to the life of the isolated individual figures
with which he is dealing. Turgenev has availed
himself of this hidden note of tragedy, and with the
greatest art he has made Bazarov, with all his ambition
opening out before him, and his triumph
awaited, the eternal type of man’s conquering
egoism conquered by the pin-prick of death.
Bazarov, who looks neither to the right hand nor to
the left, who delays no longer in his life-work of
throwing off the mind-forged manacles; Bazarov,
who trusts not to Nature, but would track the
course of her most obscure laws; Bazarov, in his
keen pursuit of knowledge, is laid low by the weapon
he has selected to wield. His own tool, the dissecting
knife, brings death to him, and his body is
stretched beside the peasant who had gone before.
Of the death scene, the great culmination of this
great novel, it is impossible to speak without
emotion. The voice of the reader, whosoever he be,
must break when he comes to those passages of
infinite pathos where the father, Vassily Ivanovitch,
is seen peeping from behind the door at his dying
son, where he cries, “Still living, my Yevgeny is still
living, and now he will be saved. Wife, wife!”
And where, when death has come, he cries, “I
said I should rebel. I rebel, I rebel!” What art,
what genius, we can only repeat, our spirit humbled
to the dust by the exquisite solemnity of that
undying simple scene of the old parents at the grave,
the scene where Turgenev epitomizes in one stroke
the infinite aspiration, the eternal insignificance of
the life of man.</p>
<p>Let us end here with a repetition of a simple
passage that, echoing through the last pages of
<i>Fathers and Children</i>, must find an echo in the
hearts of Turgenev’s readers: “‘To the memory
of Bazarov,’ Katya whispered in her husband’s ear,
... but Arkady did not venture to propose the toast
aloud.” We, at all events, can drink the toast to-day
as a poor tribute in recompense for those days when
Turgenev in life proposed it, and his comrades looked
on him with distrust, with coldness and with anger.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">VIII<br />“SMOKE”</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">“SMOKE”</p>
<p><i>Smoke</i> was first published in 1867, several years
after Turgenev had fixed his home in Baden, with
his friends the Viardots. Baden at this date was a
favourite resort for all circles of Russian society,
and Turgenev was able to study at his leisure his
countrymen as they appeared to foreign critical
eyes. The novel is therefore the most cosmopolitan
of all Turgenev’s works. On a veiled background
of the great world of European society, little groups
of representative Russians, members of the aristocratic
and the Young Russia parties, are etched with
an incisive, unfaltering hand. <i>Smoke</i>, as an historical
study, though it yields in importance to
<i>Fathers and Children</i> and <i>Virgin Soil</i>, is of great
significance to Russians. It might with truth
have been named <i>Transition</i>, for the generation it
paints was then midway between the early philosophical
Nihilism of the ’sixties and the active
political Nihilism of the ’seventies.</p>
<p>Markedly transitional, however, as was the
Russian mind of the days of <i>Smoke</i>, Turgenev, with
the faculty that distinguishes the great artist from
the artist of the second rank, the faculty of seeking
out and stamping the essential under confused and
fleeting forms, has once and for ever laid bare the
fundamental weakness of the Slav nature, its weakness
of will. <i>Smoke</i> is an attack, a deserved attack,
not merely on the Young Russia party, but on all
the Parties; not on the old ideas or the new ideas, but
on the proneness of the Slav nature to fall a prey
to a consuming weakness, a moral stagnation, a
feverish <i>ennui</i>, the Slav nature that analyses everything
with force and brilliancy, and ends, so often,
by doing nothing. <i>Smoke</i> is the attack, bitter yet
sympathetic, of a man who, with growing despair,
has watched the weakness of his countrymen, while
he loves his country all the more for the bitterness
their sins have brought upon it. <i>Smoke</i> is the
scourging of a babbling generation, by a man who,
grown sick to death of the chatter of reformers and
reactionists, is visiting the sins of the fathers on the
children, with a contempt out of patience for the
hereditary vice in the Slav blood. And this time
the author cannot be accused of partisanship by
any blunderer. “A plague o’ both your houses”
is his message equally to the Bureaucrats and the
Revolutionists. And so skilfully does he wield the
thong that every lash falls on the back of both
parties. An exquisite piece of political satire is
<i>Smoke</i>; for this reason alone it would stand unique
among novels.</p>
<p>The attention that <i>Smoke</i> aroused was immediate
and great; but the hue-and-cry that assailed it
was even greater. The publication of the book
marks the final rupture between Turgenev and the
party of Young Russia. The younger generation
never quite forgave him for drawing Gubaryov and
Bambaev, Voroshilov and Madame Suhantchikov—types,
indeed, in which all revolutionary or
unorthodox parties are painfully rich. Or, perhaps,
Turgenev was forgiven for it when he was in his
grave, a spot where forgiveness flowers to a late
perfection. And yet the fault was not Turgenev’s.
No, his last novel, <i>Virgin Soil</i>, bears splendid
witness that it was Young Russia that was one-eyed.</p>
<p>Let the plain truth here be set down. <i>Smoke</i>
is not a complete picture of the Young Russia of the
day; it was not yet time for that picture; and
that being so, Turgenev did the next best thing in
attacking the windbags, the charlatans and their
crowd of shallow, chattering followers, as well as the
empty formulas of the <i>laissez-faire</i> party. It was
inevitable that the attack should bring on him the
anger of all young enthusiasts working for “the
Cause”; it was inevitable that “the Cause” of reform
in Russia should be mixed up with the Gubaryovs,
just as reforms in France a generation ago were
mixed up with Boulanger; and that Turgenev’s
waning popularity for the last twenty years of his
life should be directly caused by his honesty and
clear-sightedness in regard to Russian Liberalism,
was inevitable also. To be crucified by those you
have benefited is the cross of honour of all great,
single-hearted men.</p>
<p>But though the bitterness of political life flavours
<i>Smoke</i>, although its points of departure and arrival
are wrapped in the atmosphere of Russia’s dark
and insoluble problems, nevertheless the two central
figures of the book, Litvinov and Irina, are not
political figures. Luckily for them, in Gubaryov’s
words, they belong “to the undeveloped.” Litvinov
himself may be dismissed in a sentence. He is
Turgenev’s favourite type of man, a character much
akin to his own nature, gentle, deep and sympathetic.
Turgenev often drew such a character;
Lavretsky, for example, in <i>A House of Gentlefolk</i>, is
a first cousin to Litvinov, an older and a sadder
man.</p>
<p>But Irina—Irina is unique; for Turgenev has in
her perfected her type till she reaches a destroying
witchery of fascination and subtlety. Irina will
stand for ever in the long gallery of great creations,
smiling with that enigmatical smile which took
from Litvinov in a glance half his life, and his love
for Tatyana. The special triumph of her creation
is that she combines that exact balance between good
and evil which makes good women seem insipid
beside her and bad women unnatural. And, by
nature irresistible, she is made doubly so to the
imagination by the situation which she re-creates
between Litvinov and herself. She ardently desires
to become nobler, to possess all that the ideal of
love means for the heart of woman; but she has
only the power given to her of enervating the man she
loves. Can she become a Tatyana to him? No, to
no man. She is born to corrupt, yet never to be
corrupted. She rises mistress of herself after the
first measure of fatal delight. And, never giving
her whole heart absolutely to her lover, she, nevertheless,
remains ever to be desired.</p>
<p>Further, her wit, her scorn, her beauty preserve
her from all the influences of evil she does not deliberately
employ. Such a woman is as old and as
rare a type as Helen of Troy. It is most often
found among the mistresses of great princes, and it
was from a mistress of Alexander II. that Turgenev
modelled Irina.</p>
<p>Of the minor characters, Tatyana is an astonishing
instance of Turgenev’s skill in drawing a complete
character with half a dozen strokes of the
pen. The reader seems to have known her intimately
all his life—her family life, her girlhood,
her goodness and individual ways to the smallest
detail; yet she only speaks on two or three occasions.
Potugin is but a weary shadow of Litvinov,
but it is difficult to say how much this is a telling
refinement of art. The shadow of this prematurely
exhausted man is cast beforehand by Irina across
Litvinov’s future. For Turgenev to have drawn
Potugin as an ordinary individual would have
vulgarized the novel and robbed it of its skilful
proportions, for Potugin is one of those shadowy
figures which supply the chiaroscuro to a brilliant
etching.</p>
<p>As a triumphant example of consummate
technical skill, <i>Smoke</i> will repay the most exact
scrutiny. There are a lightness and a grace about
the novel that conceal its actual strength. The
political argument glides with such ease in and out
of the love story, that the hostile critic is absolutely
baffled; and while the most intricate steps are
executed in the face of a crowd of angry enemies,
the performer lands smiling and in safety. The art
by which Irina’s disastrous fascination results in
falsity, and Litvinov’s desperate striving after
sincerity ends in rehabilitation—the art by which
these two threads are spun, till their meaning
colours the faint political message of the book, is so
delicate that, like the silken webs which gleam only
for the first fresh hours in the forest, it leaves no
trace, but becomes a dream in the memory. And
yet this book, which has the freshness of windy rain
and the whirling of autumn leaves, is the story of
disintegrating weakness, of the passion that saps and
paralyses, that renders life despicable, as Turgenev
himself says. <i>Smoke</i> is the finest example in
literature of a subjective psychological study of
passion rendered clearly and objectively in terms of
art. Its character—we will not say its superiority—lies
in the extraordinary clearness with which the
most obscure mental phenomena are analysed in
relation to the ordinary values of daily life. At the
precise point of psychological analysis where Tolstoy
wanders and does not convince the reader, and at
the precise point where Dostoevsky’s analysis seems
exaggerated and obscure, like a figure looming
through the mist, Turgenev throws a ray of light
from the outer to the inner world of man, and the
two worlds are revealed in the natural depths of
their connection. It is in fact difficult to find among
the great modern artists men whose natural balance
of intellect can be said to equalize their special
genius. The Greeks alone present to the world
a spectacle of a triumphant harmony in the critical
and creative mind of man, and this is their great
pre-eminence. But <i>Smoke</i> presents the curious
feature of a novel (Slav in virtue of its modern
psychological genius) which is classical in its treatment
and expression throughout; the balance of
Turgenev’s intellect reigns ever supreme over the
natural morbidity of his subject.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">IX<br />“VIRGIN SOIL”</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">“VIRGIN SOIL”</p>
<p>The last words of <i>Virgin Soil</i>—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“A long while Paklin remained standing before this
closed door.</p>
<p>“‘Anonymous Russia!’ he said at last”—</p></blockquote>
<p>lay bare the inner meaning of the book. Anonymous
Russia! It was Anonymous Russia, as Turgenev
saw, that had at last arisen to menace the doors
which shut out Russia from political liberty. And
it is of the spontaneous formation of the Nihilist
party, and of the hurried and uncertain steps it
took preparatory to the serious Terrorist struggle,
that <i>Virgin Soil</i> treats with equal skill and force.
The educated young Russian of the ’seventies had
begun to live an underground life; Turgenev
studied this phenomenon, and, difficult though
this study was, so well did he foresee the future of
Young Russia that <i>Virgin Soil</i> remains the best
analysis made of the national elements that were
mingled in its loosely-knit secret organizations.
<i>Virgin Soil</i> gives us the historical justification of
the Nihilist movement, and the prophecy of its
surface failure; it traces out the deep roots of the
necessity of such a movement; it shows forth the
ironical and inevitable weakness of this party of
self-sacrifice. This effect is obtained in this novel
by a series of significant suggestions underlying the
words and actions of the characters.</p>
<p>These suggestions are delicate and fleeting like
the quiet swirl of water round the sunken rocks in a
stream. And so delicately is the Nihilist rising
shadowed forth, that a foreign reader can enjoy the
novel simply for its human, and not for its political,
interest. Delicate, however, as is the technique of
<i>Virgin Soil</i>, there is a large, free carelessness in the
spirit of its art which reminds one much of the few
last plays of Shakespeare, notably of <i>Cymbeline</i>,
where the action, so easygoing is it, is almost too
natural and effortless to be called <i>art</i>. In reality
this large carelessness is a sign that the stage of the
artist’s maturity has been reached, and a little
passed. <i>Virgin Soil</i>, one must admit, is artistically
the least perfect of the six great novels. The
opening is too leisurely, and not till the second
volume is reached do we feel that Turgenev is exerting
his full power over us. The characterization
is less subtle in detail. While Markelov’s figure
is somewhat enigmatic, Paklin, though extremely
life-like, too obviously serves the purpose of a go-between.
But if people declare that Kallomyetsev
is a type caricatured, we protest that the portrait
of Sipyagin, this statesman of “the most liberal
opinions,” is priceless. The scene between Sipyagin
and Paklin in chapter xxxiv., especially the
portion in the carriage, is psychologically a gem of
the first water. <i>Virgin Soil</i> was the last of Turgenev’s
great novels, and appropriately ends his
career as novelist; it was his last word to the young;
it was one of the causes of his final disgrace with
the Government; it was his link with most of
Russia’s great writers: they were exiled in life:
Turgenev was exiled after death. After his funeral
at Petersburg, September 1883, attended by
285 deputations, public comments on his labours
were discreetly veiled and discreetly suppressed by
the Government,<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> that had feared his power in
life. And this fatuous act of the autocracy is the
best commentary on the truth of <i>Virgin Soil</i>.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> For an account of the suppression and prohibition of
Tolstoy’s lecture on Turgenev, in Moscow, after the latter’s
death, see Maude’s <i>Life of Tolstoy</i>, vol. ii, p. 185.</p></div>
<p>To examine the characters of the novel is to see
how representative they were of Russian political
life. Nezhdanov, the poet and half-aristocrat, is
one of the most important. Turgenev makes him
the child of a <i>mésalliance</i>, and he is, in fact, the
bastard child of Power allied to modern Sentimentality.
Born with the brain of an aristocrat, he
represents the uneasy educated conscience of the
aristocrats, the conscience which is ever seeking to
propitiate, and be responsible for, “the people,” but
is ever driven back by its inability to make itself
understood by the masses, which have been crystallized
by hard facts, for hundreds of years, into
a great caste of their own. Nezhdanov understands
instinctively how impossible, how fatal, is
the task of “going to the people”: his sympathy
is with them, but not of them. Banished, by his
attitude, from his own caste, he seeks refuge in
poetry and art; but there is not enough of reality,
not enough of the national life, in his art for him
to feel himself more than a dilettante. He feels
he must identify himself with the real movements
around him, or perish. He fails in his impossible
task of winning over “the people,” and perishes.
The Nezhdanovs still exist in Europe: they are
the sign of a dislocation of the national life and of
the artificial conditions of the society in which they
appear; and the Russian Nezhdanov of the ’seventies
was a type very much in evidence in the Nihilist
party, and by making his hero perish Turgenev
wished to show that hope for the future lay with
far different men—with the Mariannas, the moral
enthusiasts, and with the Solomins, the practical
leaders who must come from “the people” itself.</p>
<p>In drawing Nezhdanov, Turgenev was on his
own ground: the type was very sympathetic to
him, for he too felt all his life with despair that the
gulf that separated “the people” from those who
would lead them, was too great to be successfully
crossed; and his own inner life was a turning away
from the politicians, who traduced him and watched
him with suspicion, to art as a refuge from reality.
But in drawing Solomin, the leader coming from
the people, Turgenev did not achieve perfect artistic
success. The truth is, this type was then a scarce
one, and to-day it is not prominent. It is this type
of man that Russia needs more than any other, the
man of firmness and <i>character</i>. Solomin is admirably
drawn in the amusing scene of his visit to the
Sipyagins (chaps. xxiii.-xxv.); also in his relations
with Nezhdanov and Marianna, as their host at the
factory; but there is a slight veil drawn over his
inner life, and he is never sounded to the depths.
Does he present enough of the rich contradictions
and human variations of a living man? True,
Solomin typifies the splendid sturdiness of the
Russian people, the caution and craftiness of the
peasant-born and the intellectual honesty of his
race; but perhaps these qualities need a more
individual soul behind them to combine them into
a perfect creation. And in fact the Russian Solomins
have not yet left the factories: they are the foremen
who do not speak up enough for “the people”
in the national life.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> Passage written in 1896.</p></div>
<p>Marianna, however, the young girl, the Nihilist
enthusiast, is the success of the book. The splendid
qualities shown by the Nihilist women in the
Terrorist campaign, a few years later than the
publication of <i>Virgin Soil</i>, are a striking testimony
to Turgenev’s genius in psychology. The women
of Young Russia were waiting to be used, and used
the women were. Marianna is the incarnation of
that Russian fight for progress, which, though half-hidden
and obscure to foreign eyes, has thrilled the
nerves of Europe. This pure girl with passionate,
courageous soul is, in fact, the Liberty of Russia.
Without experience or help, with eyes bandaged by
her destiny, she calmly goes forward on the far
journey whence there is no return. By necessity
she must go on: she lives by faith. In her figure
is personified the flower of the Russian youth, those
who cast off from their generation the stigma of
inaction—that heart-eating inaction which is the
vice of the Russian temperament, as her great
writers tell us—those who cast fear to the Sipyagins,
and the Kallomyetsevs, to the bureaucrats their
enemies, and went forth on that campaign, sublime
in its recklessness, fruitful in its consequences to
their country and fatal in its consequences to themselves.
Marianna personifies the spirit of self-sacrifice
which led her comrades forth against
autocracy. The path was closed; behind them
was only dishonour and cowardice; onward, then,
for honour, for liberty, for all that makes life worth
living to the courageous in heart. But the closed
doors, the doors on which they knocked, were the
doors of the fortress: the fortress closed upon them,
upon their brothers and sisters: their leaders were
sentenced, deported, exiled: fresh leaders sprang
up, each circle had its leaders, whose average life,
as free men, was reckoned, not by years but by
months. The lives of Marianna and her generation
were spent in prison or in exile. But by the
very recklessness of their protest against autocracy,
by their very simplicity in “going to the people,”
by their self-immolation for their principles Europe
knew that there was no liberty in Russia save in its
prisons, and that the bloody reprisals that followed
were those of Marianna’s brothers, who saw her
helpless in the hands of a great gendarmerie—a
gendarmerie that had long shamelessly abused the
power it held, that had silenced brutally all who
had protested, all, all the independent spirits, all
their great writers, all their <i>men</i>. Marianna,
Marianna herself, must seek the prison! Turgenev
foresaw this, and <i>Virgin Soil</i> tells of her preparation
for the ordeal, of the why and the wherefore she
went on her path.</p>
<p>And if anything remains obscure in <i>Virgin Soil</i>,
the English reader must remember that Turgenev
was writing under special difficulties. There must
always be a little vagueness in one’s speech, when
<i>Silence</i> is written in an official writing above the
doors. Anonymous Russia! Anonymous Russia
had arisen to mine the doors: the doors must be
shattered by secret hands that Europe might for
once gaze through. It was for Turgenev’s breaking
of this <i>Silence</i> that Tolstoy was forbidden to
speak when Turgenev had been carried to his tomb.
It was for Marianna’s transgression against this
<i>Silence</i> that Turgenev has glorified her in <i>Virgin
Soil</i>.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>What was the Nihilist party of the ’seventies?
It began, as we have said, with the Socialistic
movement of “going to the people.” This movement,
again, was the natural outlet for the many
liberal ideas which, germinating in “advanced”
heads, had been gathering in intensity with each
generation. With the liberation of the serfs
Alexander II.’s liberal policy had abruptly ended.
To understand Russian politics is to know that though
there are many cliques there are only two great
parties, the one orthodox, the other unorthodox—the
party of Governmental Action, and the party
of Liberal Ideas. There are no safe politics in
Russia outside the official world. If you can win
over the officials to your plans in various local work,
well and good; if not, your efforts are labelled
“subversive”; and it is thus that, sooner or later,
every disciple of liberal ideas finds himself placed
in direct opposition to the Government. Though
there are many liberal-minded men among the
officials, still, in Solomin’s words, “the official is
always an outsider,” and therefore it is that the
unofficial thinking part of Russia—the writers, the
professors, the students, the press, and the more
intelligent of the professional world—form an unorganized
but permanent opposition. To this party
gravitate naturally the discontented spirits from all
classes—nobles, military men, those who have been
hardly dealt with, and those who have an axe of
their own to grind—the Markelovs, and the Paklins.
Accordingly, the autocracy, by the solid, impermeable
front it has presented for twenty-five years
to reform and to the education of the peasants, may
be said to hold the varying opposition together.
The action of the Government, too, in forbidding
the public to comment on such matters as the
late strike of factory hands in Petersburg, where
also the masters were “forbidden” to yield to the
men’s demands, constantly creates a hostile public.
And it was in this manner that the Nihilist party
of the ’seventies was formed.</p>
<p>It was natural enough for the last generation
of Young Russia “to go to the people,” for it is in
the matter of the education of the peasants that
Russia’s hope of social and political reform lies.
Besides, this plan of action meant for Young Russia
the taking of the path of least resistance. The
other paths had been closed by reactionary decrees.
But to go actually among the peasantry and work
for them and learn from them had never been
attempted, and by a natural impulse the Young
Russia theorists threw themselves into this Utopian
campaign. The movement, of course, was fore-doomed.
Not only did the Government enact
harsh penalties against the Socialists, but the
peasants themselves were too ignorant, too far off
in their life, to understand what Young Russia
meant. And the exiling and imprisonment of the
leading propagandists, when it came, could not
fail to bring the Nihilists into a direct war with
autocracy itself.</p>
<p>The whole quarrel between the autocracy and
the liberal opposition, a quarrel which the Nihilists
of the late ’seventies brought to a head, is a question
of liberty. Is Russia to be more Orientalized or
more Europeanized? If you believe in liberty of
speech and of the conscience, in a free press and the
education of the peasants, if you would reform the
peculation and corruption of the official world, if
you wish to circulate European literature without
hindrance, if you detest the persecution of the Jews
and the Stundists,—then you must be silent or be
prepared at any moment for bureaucratic warnings,
deprivations, detentions and possible exile. If you
are a Conservative you will acquiesce in every
possible action of the bureaucracy, as “necessary.”
It is simply a struggle between a very strongly
organized bureaucracy, armed with the modern
weapons of centralized power, and the public
opinion of a large body of educated subjects with
advanced views. Though enormous power is in
the hands of the Government, and the gross credulity
and ignorance of the peasants and the self-interest
of the officials all work to preserve the <i>status quo</i>,
nevertheless there is in the Russian mind, side by
side with its natural Slavophilism, a great susceptibility
to European example, and therefore the work
of the Nihilists of yesterday and the Liberals of
to-day was, and is, <i>to awaken the public mind</i>. It
does not matter very much how this work is performed,
so long as it is performed. The Russian
mind is naturally quick and sensitive; it moves
quickly to conclusions when once it is started, as
we see in the quickness with which Russia was semi-Europeanized
by Peter the Great, and how easily
the Emancipation of the Serfs was effected owing
to the weakness of the autocracy at the close of the
Crimean War. There is reaction now in Russia,
but this may be broken up by the pressure of a series
of fresh economic difficulties superimposed upon
the old.</p>
<p>It can only, therefore, be claimed for the Nihilists
of the ‘seventies that they represented an advanced
section of the community, and not the nation itself,
in their struggle with the bureaucracy. They must
be regarded as enthusiasts who awoke public opinion
when it had begun to slumber. They vindicated
the manliness of the nation, which had always gone
in fear of the official world: it was now the bureaucracy
that was afraid! The Nihilists became
martyrs for their creed of progress; they drew
the attention of Europe to the strange spectacle
that Russia presents in its well-equipped bureaucracy
of caste slowly paralysing the old democratic
institutions of the peasantry. A strong Governmental
system is absolutely necessary for the holding
together of the enormous Russian Empire; but the
fact that the work of freeing and educating the
peasants had (with only the rarest exceptions),
been always violently or secretly opposed by the
high officials, suggests that the bureaucracy is like
a parasite which strangles, though appearing to
protect, the tree itself. And the attitude of the
official world to its sun and centre, the autocracy, is
something like that of threatening soldiers surrounding
the throne of a latter-day Caesarism.</p>
<p>Whether or no the Nihilists’ belief in revolution
in Russia was justified by their measure of success,
their rising was but a long-threatened revolt of
idealism and of the Russian conscience against
Russian cowardice; it was the fermentation of
modern ideas in the breast of a society iron-bound
by officialism; it was the generous aspiration of
the Russian soul against sloth and apathy and
greed. The Nihilists failed, inasmuch as the battle
of Liberty is yet to be won: they succeeded, inasmuch
as their revolt was a tremendous object-lesson
to Europe of the internal evils of their country.
And the objection that they borrowed their ideas
of revolution from the Commune and were not a
genuine product of Russia, Turgenev has answered
once for all in <i>Virgin Soil</i>. Liberty must spring
from the soil whence Marianna springs.</p>
<p>In the words of that great poem of Whitman:</p>
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse1">“The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat,<br /></div>
<div class="verse">The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,<br /></div>
<div class="verse">The prison, scaffold, garotte, hand-cuffs, iron necklace, and lead balls do their work,<br /></div>
<div class="verse">The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,<br /></div>
<div class="verse">The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands,<br /></div>
<div class="verse">The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with their own blood.<br /></div>
<div class="verse">The young men droop their eyelashes towards the ground when they meet.<br /></div>
<div class="verse">But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the infidel entered into full possession,<br /></div>
<div class="verse">When Liberty goes out of the place it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,<br /></div>
<div class="verse">It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.”<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
<p>There is no going back for the Mariannas of
Russia. They must go forward, and to-day they
are going forward. Honour to them and theirs,
to them who, if forbidden by authority to work in
the light, are ready again to work in the dark.
Honour to that great party with whom their
country’s liberties have remained—Anonymous
Russia!</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>Much water has flowed under the bridge since
the preface above was written one-and-twenty
years ago, but the author has only deemed it necessary
to correct a few lines of his criticism and to
modify his statement concerning Turgenev’s funeral.
Since 1896, we have seen the spectacle of the Russo-Japanese
war, the General Strike, the creation of
the Duma, the abortive Revolution of 1905, the
excesses of Terrorists, Agent-Provocateurs, “Black
Hundreds” and Military Court-Martials, Governmental
illegalities, the rapid evolution, economic
and political, of a new Russia till 1914; and finally
the spectacle of the Great European War, the rally
of all parties, under the Prussian invasion, to the
patriotic programme of the Progressive Bloc, the
falling away of even the old-fashioned Bureaucrats
from “the dark forces of the Empire,” and the
general situation, in the words of the <i>Times</i>
Petrograd correspondent:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<span class="smcap">A Delayed Development</span></p>
<p>“We know that had the Constitution signed by
Alexander II. been introduced, Russia might have been
spared much suffering. The assassination of the Tsar
brought about a delay of 25 precious years. Pobiedonostzeff
persuaded Alexander III. that Russia enjoyed
a special dispensation of Providence; that the laws of
history in other lands did not apply to her. Thus the
greatest of reforms, introduced in the ’sixties, the
abolition of slavery and the institution of the Zemstvos
granting the people a voice in the affairs of their country,
became stultified. It is true that serfdom could not be
reintroduced, that Zemstvos could not be abolished, but
what happened was bad enough. The education of the
masses was neglected and the local assemblies were
placed under tutelage.</p>
<p>“Not till 1905 did Russia obtain relief from the reaction
that followed upon the tragedy of 1881. But
Pobiedonostzeff had numerous adherents among his
contemporaries in the older bureaucracy, many of whom
survive to this day. The governing class in Russia
forms a caste which directs a huge and highly intricate
mechanism of a centralized administration ruling nearly
200,000,000 of people. These statesmen could not
suddenly be eliminated or instilled with new ideas alien
to all their habits or traditions. In the Senate or
Supreme Court of Justice, which promulgates all laws
and sees to their enforcement, and in the Upper House,
which is half composed of members appointed from the
ranks of these elder statesmen, the old leaven was still
unhappily strong.... To these causes and agencies
we owe the reaction that has characterized Russian
internal politics within recent years....</p>
<p>“Slowly but surely the ranks of the old reactionary
party have been declining. By an infallible process of
attrition they were bound to disappear sooner or later,
leaving the field clear for the New Russia. The Great
War came before the elimination was consummated.
It has hastened the process by convincing everybody,
including the bureaucracy, of the utter failure of the old
system to cope with great national problems. At the
present time no section of the population, and, therefore,
no genuine political party, exists in Russia that
has a word to say in support of the Pobiedonostzeff
theory. The Nobles’ Congress was the last stronghold
to surrender. It did so in the most emphatic manner
by endorsing, <i>mirabile dictu!</i> the resolutions of both
Houses of Parliament demanding the formation of a
strong, united Ministry enjoying the confidence of the
people. Between the Army and the nation there is not,
and there cannot be, any difference of opinion on this
subject.</p>
<p>“Within something like ten years the Russian people
have become a new people. What Pobiedonostzeff
succeeded in doing 25 years ago cannot, obviously, be
attempted now. Russia has finally, irrevocably, turned
her back upon the old ideas. She has spoken her mind
fully, unanimously.”—<i>The Times</i>, February 8, 1917.</p></blockquote>
<p>As the writer is retouching his last chapter
comes the news of the Russian Revolution, an event
of no less import to Europe than was the French
Revolution, and one no less fraught with incalculable
consequences.</p>
<p>This event carries back one’s thought to the
revolutionary attempt of the Decembrists, 1825,
and to the successive movements for political reform
in Turgenev’s own day, from the men of the “’forties”
(<i>Rudin</i>) to the disastrous obscurantism of the heavy,
stupid-minded Alexander III., and his reactionary
ministers. From <i>Virgin Soil</i>, 1877, one follows in
thought the succeeding forty years in which tract
after tract of stubborn political virgin soil has been
slowly broken up and sown with progressive seed.
The changing economic conditions, aggravated by
the Great European War, and the weak obstinacy
of Nicholas II. have, at last, bankrupted the
Autocracy.</p>
<p>The result signally vindicates Turgenev’s political
prescience and his <i>rôle</i> as the interpreter of Western
culture and Western liberalism to his countrymen.
For until the great barrier of petrified Bureaucratic
Nationalism was broken down, true democratic
Nationalism could not flow in free channels. Slavophilism,
with its leading idea of the deliverance of
Europe by the Autocracy, by Orthodoxy and the
communal love of the meek Russian peasant, must
be replaced by a new movement, spiritual in its
essence, and give much-needed fresh conceptions to
our materialized Western civilization. Every reader
of Russian literature, from Gogol to our day, cannot
fail to recognize that the Russian mind is superior
to the English in its emotional breadth and flexibility,
its eager responsiveness to new ideas, its
spontaneous warmth of nature. With all their
faults the Russian people are more permeated
with humane love and living tenderness, in their
social practice, than those of other nations. Let
us trust that the Russian earth, no longer clouded
by a dark, overcast sky, will be flooded with
the fertilizing sunlight of this new, democratic
Nationalism.</p>
<p>Turgenev stood, in the ’seventies, between the
camps of the extremists, the old nobility who worked
to prevent, hinder or suppress every reform, and the
shallow, hot-headed theorists, who wished to force
the pace, but whose talk ended in “smoke.” Consequently
he was frequently accused of cowardice by
the revolutionaries on the one hand, and by the
Conservatives of complicity with the revolutionaries,
on the other.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> As <i>an artist</i>, while he stood
aside from direct political action, his attitude to
the revolutionaries appeared necessarily ambiguous.
Pavlovsky, however, has well characterized it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We see therefore that Turgenev was too variable
to be in any sense a man of politics. He was never a
Nihilist nor a Revolutionary, and those episodes we have
cited are advanced only to show he considered the
revolutionaries as <i>an artist</i>. As such they excited his
imagination and carried him away like a child.
Immediately after reflection he became sceptical and—this
was his ordinary mental disposition—never believing
in solid results of these agitators, though he retained
always great sympathy for the Youth, whom he esteemed
beyond all for their constant spirit of self-sacrifice.
Both these mental tendencies are clearly to be seen in
two of his <i>Poems in Prose</i>, ‘The Workman and the Man
with White Hands,’ and ‘The Threshold!’”</p></blockquote>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> See the letter to Madame Viardot, of January 19, 1864, in
which Turgenev describes how he was summoned before a
Tribunal of the Senate to answer charges of plotting with the
revolutionaries, which he did without any trouble.</p></div>
<p>In Paris, in his last years, Turgenev was in active
touch with the colony of young Russians, and assisted
with his purse and his advice a number of protégés.
A ridiculous hubbub arose in the Russian press on
the publication in the <i>Temps</i> of Turgenev’s preface
to <i>En Cellule</i>, a tale by one of these protégés,
Pavlovsky, and Turgenev in a letter to the <i>Malva</i>
thereupon defined his political faith:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
“<span class="smcap">Paris</span>, <i>December 30, 1879</i>.<br />
</p>
<p>“Without vanity or circumlocution, and merely
stating facts I have the right to say that my convictions
put on record in the press and in other sources, have not
changed an iota in the last forty years. I have never
hidden them from any one. To the young I have always
been and have remained a moderate, a liberal of the
old-fashioned stamp, a man who looks for reforms from
above, and is opposed to the revolution.</p>
<p>“If young Russia appreciated me it was in that light,
and if the ovations offered were dear to me, it was
precisely because I did not go to seek the young generation,
but it who came to me.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Turgenev’s political creed may be read without
the slightest ambiguity between the lines of <i>A
Sportsman’s Sketches</i> and his great novels. It is a
creed of the necessity of the people’s mental and
spiritual enlightenment, of the amelioration of bad
social conditions and of the establishment of constitutional
government, in the place of despotism.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> Kropotkin tells us: “I saw Turgenev for the last time in
the autumn of 1881. He was very ill, and worried by the thought
that it was his duty to write to Alexander III. who had just come
to the throne, and hesitated as to the policy he should follow—asking
him to give Russia a constitution, and proving to him
by solid arguments the necessity of that step. With evident
grief he said to me, ‘I feel that I must do it, but I feel I shall
not be able to do it.’ In fact, he was already suffering awful
pains occasioned by a cancer in the spinal cord, and had the
greatest difficulty in sitting up and talking for a few moments.
He did not write then, and a few weeks later it would have been
useless, Alexander III. had announced in a manifesto his resolution
to remain the absolute ruler of Russia.”—<i>Memoirs of a
Revolutionist</i>, vol. ii. p. 222.</p></div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">X<br />THE TALES</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="center mb1">THE TALES</p>
<p>In addition to his six great novels Turgenev published,
between 1846 and his death in 1883, about
forty tales which reflect as intimately social atmospheres
of the ’thirties, ’forties and ’fifties as do
Tchehov’s stories atmospheres of the ’eighties and
’nineties. Several of these tales, as <i>The Torrents of
Spring</i>, are of considerable length, but their comparatively
simple structure places them definitely
in the class of the <i>conte</i>. While their form is generally
free and straightforward, the narrative, put often
in the mouth of a character who by his comments
and asides exchanges at will his active rôle for that
of a spectator, is capable of the most subtle modulations.
An examination of the chronological order
of the tales shows how very delicately Turgenev’s
art is poised between realism and romanticism. In
his finest examples, such as <i>The Brigadier</i> and <i>A
Lear of the Steppes</i>, the two elements fuse perfectly,
like the meeting of wave and wind in sea foam.
“Nature placed Turgenev between poetry and
prose,” says Henry James; and if one hazards a
definition we should prefer to term Turgenev <i>a
poetic realist</i>.</p>
<p>In our first chapter we glanced at <i>The Duellist</i>,
and in the same year (1846) appeared <i>The Jew</i>, a
close study, based on a family anecdote, of Semitic
double-dealing and family feeling: also <i>Three
Portraits</i>, a more or less faithful ancestral chronicle.
This latter tale, though the hero is of the proud,
bad, “Satanic” order of the romantic school, is
firmly objective, as is also <i>Pyetushkov</i> (1847), whose
lively, instinctive realism is so bold and intimate
as to contradict the compliment that the French
have paid themselves—that Turgenev ever had
need to dress his art by the aid of French mirrors.</p>
<p>Although <i>Pyetushkov</i> shows us, by a certain open
<i>naïveté</i> of style, that a youthful hand is at work, it
is the hand of a young master carrying out Gogol’s
satiric realism with finer point, to find a perfect
equilibrium free from bias or caricature. The
essential strength of the realistic method is developed
in <i>Pyetushkov</i> to its just limits, and note it is the
Russian realism carrying the warmth of life into the
written page, which warmth the French so often
lose in clarifying their impressions and crystallizing
them in art. Observe how the reader is transported
bodily into Pyetushkov’s stuffy room, how the Major
fairly boils out of the two pages he lives in, and how
Onisim and Vassilissa and the aunt walk and chatter
around the stupid Pyetushkov, and laugh at him
behind his back in a manner that exhales the vulgar
warmth of these people’s lower-class world. One
sees that the latter holds few secrets for Turgenev.
Three years earlier had appeared <i>Andrei Kolosov</i>
(1844), a sincere diagnosis of youth’s sentimental
expectations, raptures and remorse, in presence of
the other sex, in this case a girl who is eager for a
suitor. The sketch is characteristically Russian in
its analytic honesty, but Turgenev’s charm is here
lessened by his over-literal exactitude. And passing
to <i>The Diary of a Superfluous Man</i> (1850), we must
remark that this famous study of a type of a petty
provincial Hamlet reveals a streak of suffused
sentimentalism in Turgenev’s nature, one which
comes to the surface the more subjective is the
handling of his theme, and the less his great technical
skill in <i>modelling</i> his subject is called for. The last-named
story belongs to a group with which we must
place <i>Faust</i> (1853), <i>Yakov Pasinkov</i> (1855), <i>A
Correspondence</i> (1855) and even the tender and
charming <i>Acia</i> (1857), all of which stories, though
rich in emotional shades and in beautiful descriptions,
are lacking in fine chiselling. The melancholy
yearning of the heroes and heroines through failure
or misunderstanding, though no doubt true to life,
seems to-day too imbued with emotional hues of the
Byronic romanticism of the period, and in this small
group of stories Turgenev’s art is seen definitely
dated, even old-fashioned.</p>
<p>In <i>The Country Inn</i> (1852), we are back on the
firm ground of an objective study of village types,
with clear, precise outlines, a detailed drawing from
nature, strong yet subtle; as is also <i>Mumu</i> (1852),
one based on a household episode that passed before
Turgenev’s youthful eyes, in which the deaf-mute
Gerassim, a house serf, is defrauded first of the girl
he loves, and then of his little dog, Mumu, whom he
is forced to drown, stifling his pent-up affection,
at the caprice of his tyrannical old mistress. The
story is a classic example of Turgenev’s tender
insight and beauty of feeling. As delicate, but more
varied in execution is <i>The Backwater</i>, with its fresh,
charming picture of youth’s <i>insouciance</i> and readiness
to take a wrong turning, a story which in its
atmospheric freshness and emotional colouring may
be compared with Tchehov’s studies of youth in <i>The
Seagull</i>, a play in which the neurotic spiritual
descendants of Marie and Nadejda, Veretieff and
Steltchinsky, appear and pass into the shadows.
This note of the fleetingness of youth and happiness
reappears in <i>A Tour of the Forest</i> (1857), where
Turgenev’s acute sense of man’s ephemeral life in
face of the eternity of nature finds full expression.
The description, here, of the vast, gloomy, murmuring
pine forest, with its cold, dim solitudes, is
finely contrasted with the passing outlook of the
peasants, Yegor, Kondrat, and the wild Efrem.
(See p. 16.)</p>
<p>The rich colour and perfume of Turgenev’s delineation
of romantic passion are disclosed when we
turn to <i>First Love</i> (1860), which details the fervent
adoration of Woldemar, a boy of sixteen, for the
fascinating Zinaïda, an exquisite creation, who, by
her mutability and caressing, mocking caprice keeps
her bevy of eager suitors in suspense till at length
she yields herself in her passion to Woldemar’s
father. This study of the intoxication of adolescent
love is, again, based on an episode of Turgenev’s
youth, in which he and his father played the identical
rôles of Woldemar and his father. Here we tremble
on the magic borderline between prose and poetry,
and the fragrance of blossoming love instincts is felt
pervading all the fluctuating impulses of grief,
tenderness, pity and regret which combine in the
tragic close. The profoundly haunting apostrophe
to youth is indeed a pure lyric. Passing to <i>Phantoms</i>
(1863), which we discuss with <i>Prose Poems</i>
(see p. 200), the truth of Turgenev’s confession that
spiritually and sensuously he was saturated with the
love of woman and ever inspired by it, is confirmed.
In his description of Alice, the winged phantom-woman,
who gradually casts her spell over the
sick hero, luring him to fly with her night after night
over the vast expanse of earth, Turgenev has in a
mysterious manner, all his own, concentrated the
very essence of woman’s possessive love. Alice’s
hungry yearning for self-completion, her pleading
arts, her sad submissiveness, her rapture in her
hesitating lover’s embrace, are artistically a sublimation
of all the impressions and instincts by which
woman fascinates, and fulfils her purpose of creation.
The projection of this shadowy woman’s love-hunger
on the mighty screen of the night earth, and
the merging of her power in men’s restless energies,
felt and divined through the sweeping tides of
nature’s incalculable forces, is an inspiration which,
in its lesser fashion, invites comparison with Shakespeare’s
creative vision of nature and the supernatural.</p>
<p>In his treatment of the supernatural Turgenev,
however, sometimes missed his mark. <i>The Dog</i>
(1866) is of a coarser and indeed of an ordinary
texture. With the latter story may be classed <i>The
Dream</i> (1876), curiously Byronic in imagery and
atmosphere, and artistically not convincing. Far
more sincere, psychologically, is <i>Clara Militch</i> (1882),
a penetrating study of a passionate temperament,
a story based on a tragedy of Parisian life. In our
opinion <i>The Song of Triumphant Love</i>, though
exquisite in its jewelled mediaeval details, has been
overrated by the French, and Turgenev’s genius is
here seen contorted and cramped by the <i>genre</i>.</p>
<p>To return to the tales of the ’sixties. <i>Lieutenant
Yergunov’s Story</i>, though its strange atmosphere is
cunningly painted, is not of the highest quality,
comparing unfavourably with <i>The Brigadier</i> (1867),
the story of the ruined nobleman, Vassily Guskov,
with its tender, sub-ironical studies of odd characters,
Narkiz and Cucumber. <i>The Brigadier</i> has
a peculiarly fascinating poignancy, and must be
prized as one of the rarest of Turgenev’s high
achievements, even as the connoisseur prizes the
original beauty of a fine Meryon etching. The tale
is a microcosm of Turgenev’s own nature; his love
of Nature, his sympathy with all humble, ragged,
eccentric, despised human creatures, his unfaltering,
keen gaze into character, his perfect eye for
relative values in life, all mingle in <i>The Brigadier</i> to
create for us a sense of the vicissitudes of life, of how
a generation of human seed springs and flourishes
awhile on earth and soon withers away under the
menacing gaze of the advancing years.</p>
<p>A complete contrast to <i>The Brigadier</i> is the sombre
and savagely tragic piece of realism, <i>An Unhappy
Girl</i> (1868). As a study of a coarse and rapacious
nature the portrait of Mr. Ratsch, the Germanized
Czech, is a revelation of the depths of human
swinishness. Coarse malignancy is here “the power
of darkness” which closes, as with a vice, round
the figure of the proud, helpless, exquisite girl,
Susanna. There is, alas, no exaggeration in this
unrelenting, painful story. The scene of Susanna’s
playing of the Beethoven sonata (chapter xiii.)
demonstrates how there can be no truce between
a vile animal nature and pure and beautiful instincts,
and a faint suggestion symbolic of the
national “dark forces” at work in Russian history
deepens the impression. The worldly power of
greed, lust and envy, ravaging, whether in war or
peace, which seize on the defenceless and innocent,
as their prey, here triumphs over Susanna, the
victim of Mr. Ratsch’s violence. The last chapter,
the banquet scene, satirizes “the dark forest” of
the heart when greed and baseness find their allies
in the inertness, sloth or indifference of the ordinary
man.</p>
<p><i>A Strange Story</i> (1869) has special psychological
interest for the English mind in that it gives clues
to some fundamental distinctions between the
Russian and the Western soul. Sophie’s words,
“You spoke of the will—that’s what must be
broken,” seems strange to English thought. To be
lowly, to be suffering, despised, to <i>be</i> unworthy,
this desire implies that the Slav character is apt to
be lacking in <i>will</i>, that it finds it easier to resign
itself than to make the effort to be triumphant or
powerful. The Russian people’s attitude, historically,
may, indeed, be compared to a bowl which
catches and sustains what life brings it; and the
Western people’s to a bowl inverted to ward off
what fate drops from the impassive skies. The
mental attitude of the Russian peasant indeed
implies that in blood he is nearer akin to the Asiatics
than the Russian ethnologists wish to allow. Certainly
in the inner life, intellectually, morally and
emotionally, the Russian is a half-way house between
the Western and Eastern races, just as geographically
he spreads over the two continents.</p>
<p>Brilliant also is <i>Knock-Knock-Knock</i> (1870), a
psychological study, of “a man fated,” a Byronic
type of hero, dear to the heart of the writers of the
romantic period. Sub-Lieutenant Teglev, the melancholy,
self-centred hero, whose prepossession of a
tragic end nothing can shake, so that he ends by
throwing himself into the arms of death, this portrait
is most cunningly fortified by the wonderfully life-like
atmosphere of the river fog in which the suicide
is consummated. Turgenev’s range of mood is
disclosed in <i>Punin and Baburin</i> (1874), a leisurely
reminiscence of his mother’s household; but the
delicious blending of irony and kindness in the treatment
of both Punin and Baburin atones for the
lengthy conclusion. Of <i>The Watch</i> (1875), a story for
boys, nothing here need be said, except that it is
inferior to the delightful <i>The Quail</i>, a <i>souvenir
d’enfance</i> written at the Countess Tolstoy’s request
for an audience of children. In considering <i>A Lear
of the Steppes</i> (1870), <i>The Torrents of Spring</i> (1871)
and <i>A Living Relic</i> (1874), we shall sum up here our
brief survey of Turgenev’s achievement in the field
of the <i>conte</i>.</p>
<p>In <i>The Torrents of Spring</i> the charm, the grace,
the power of Turgenev’s vision are seen bathing his
subject, revealing all its delicate lineaments in a
light as fresh and tender as that of a day of April
sunlight in Italy. <i>Torrents</i> of Spring, not Spring
Floods, be it remarked, is the true significance of
the Russian, telling of a moment of the year when
all the forces of Nature are leaping forth impetuously,
the mounting sap, the hill streams, the mating
birds, the blood in the veins of youth. The opening
perhaps is a little over-leisurely, this description of
the Italian confectioner’s family, and its fortunes
in Frankfort, but how delightful is the contrast in
racial spirit between the pedantic German shop-manager,
Herr Klüber and Pantaleone, and the
lovely Gemma. But the long opening prelude
serves as a foil to heighten the significant story of
the seduction of the youthful Sanin by Maria
Nikolaevna, that clear-eyed “huntress of men”;
one of the most triumphant feminine portraits in
the whole range of fiction. The spectator feels that
this woman in her ruthless charm is the incarnation
of a cruel principle in Nature, while we watch her
preparing to strike her talons into her fascinated,
struggling prey. Her spirit’s essence, in all its
hard, merciless joy of conquest, is disclosed by
Turgenev in his rapid, yet exhaustive glances at
her disdainful treatment of her many lovers, and of
her cynical log of a husband. The extraordinarily
clear light in the narrative, that of spring mountain
air, waxes stronger towards the climax, and the
artistic effort of the whole is that of some exquisite
Greek cameo, with figures of centaurs and fleeing
nymphs and youthful shepherds; though the postscript
indeed is an excrescence which detracts from
the main impression of pure, classic outlines.</p>
<p>Not less perfect as art though far slighter in scope
is the exquisite <i>A Living Relic</i> (1874), one of the last
of <i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i>. Along with the narrator
we pass, in a step, from the clear sunlight and
freshness of early morning, “when the larks’ songs
seemed steeped in dew,” into the “little wattled
shanty with its burden of a woman’s suffering,” poor
Lukerya’s, who lies, summer after summer, resigned
to her living death:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“... I was walking away....</p>
<p>“‘Master, master! Piotr Petrovitch!’ I heard a
voice, faint, slow, and hoarse, like the whispering of
marsh rushes.</p>
<p>“I stopped.</p>
<p>“‘Piotr Petrovitch! Come in, please!’ the voice
repeated. It came from the corner where were the
trestles I had noticed.</p>
<p>“I drew near, and was struck dumb with amazement.
Before me lay a living human being; but what sort of
creature was it?</p>
<p>“A head utterly withered, of a uniform coppery hue—like
some very ancient and holy picture, yellow with
age; a sharp nose like a keen-edged knife; the lips
could barely be seen—only the teeth flashed white and
the eyes; and from under the kerchief sometimes wisps
of yellow hair struggled on to the forehead. At the
chin, where the quilt was folded, two tiny hands of the
same coppery hue were moving, the fingers slowly
twitching like little sticks. I looked more intently;
the face far from being ugly was positively beautiful,
but strange and dreadful; and the face seemed more
dreadful to me that on it—on its metallic cheeks—I saw
struggling ... struggling and unable to form itself—a
smile.</p>
<p>“‘You don’t recognize me, master?’ whispered the
voice again; it seemed to be breathed from the almost
unmoving lips! ‘And, indeed, how should you? I’m
Lukerya.... Do you remember, who used to lead the
dance at your mother’s, at Spasskoe?... Do you
remember, I used to be leader of the choir, too?’</p>
<p>“‘Lukerya!’ I cried. ‘Is it you? Can it be?’</p>
<p>“‘Yes, it’s I, master—I, Lukerya.’</p>
<p>“I did not know what to say, and gazed in stupefaction
at the dark motionless face with the clear, deathlike
eyes fastened upon me. Was it possible? This mummy
Lukerya—the greatest beauty in all our household—that
tall, plump, pink-and-white, singing, laughing,
dancing creature! Lukerya, our smart Lukerya, whom
all our lads were courting, for whom I heaved some
secret sighs—I a boy of sixteen!”</p></blockquote>
<p>Lukerya tells her story. How one night she could
not sleep, and, thinking of her lover, rose to listen
to a nightingale in the garden; how half-dreaming
she fell from the top stairs—and now she lives on,
a little shrivelled mummy. Something is broken
inside her body, and the doctors all shake their heads
over her case. Her lover, Polyakov, has married
another girl, a good sweet woman. “He couldn’t
stay a bachelor all his life, and they have children.”</p>
<p>And Lukerya? All is not blackness in her
wasted life. She is grateful for people’s kindness
to her.... She can hear everything, see everything
that comes near her shed—the nesting swallows,
the bees, the doves cooing on the roof. Lying alone
in the long hours she can smell every scent from the
garden, the flowering buckwheat, the lime tree.
The priest, the peasant girls, sometimes a pilgrim
woman, come and talk to her, and a little girl, a
pretty, fair little thing, waits on her. She has her
religion, her strange dreams, and sometimes, in her
poor, struggling little voice that wavers like a
thread of smoke, she tries to sing, as of old. But
she is waiting for merciful death—which now is
nigh her.</p>
<p>Infinitely tender in the depth of understanding
is this gem of art, and <i>A Living Relic’s</i> perfection is
determined by Turgenev’s scrutiny of the warp and
woof of life, in which the impassive forces of Nature,
indifferent alike to human pain or human happiness,
pursue their implacable way, weaving unwittingly
the mesh of joy, anguish, resignation, in the breast
of all sentient creation. It is in the <i>spiritual perspective</i>
of the picture, in the vision that sees the
whole in the part, and the part in the whole, that
Turgenev so far surpasses all his European rivals.</p>
<p>To those critics, Russian and English, who naïvely
slur over the aesthetic qualities of a masterpiece,
such as <i>A Lear of the Steppes</i> (1870), or fail to recognize
all that aesthetic perfection implies, we address
these concluding remarks. <i>A Lear of the Steppes</i>
is great in art, because it is a living organic whole,
springing from the deep roots of life itself; and the
innumerable works of art that are fabricated and
pasted together from an ingenious plan—works
that do not grow from the inevitability of things—appear
at once insignificant or false in comparison.</p>
<p>In examining the art, the artist will note
Turgenev’s method of introducing his story. Harlov,
the Lear of the story, is brought forward with such
force on the threshold that all eyes resting on his
figure cannot but follow his after-movements. And
absolute conviction gained, all the artist’s artful
after-devices and subtle presentations and side-lights
on the story are not apparent under the
straightforward ease and the seeming carelessness
with which the narrator describes his boyish
memories. Then the inmates of Harlov’s household,
his two daughters, and a crowd of minor
characters, are brought before us as persons in the
tragedy, and we see that all these people are living
each from the innate laws of his being, apparently
independently of the author’s scheme. This conviction,
that the author has no prearranged plan,
convinces us that in the story we are living a piece
of life: here we are verily plunging into life itself.</p>
<p>And the story goes on flowing easily and naturally
till the people of the neighbourhood, the peasants,
the woods and fields around, are known by us as
intimately as is any neighbourhood in life. Suddenly
a break—the tragedy is upon us. Suddenly
the terrific forces that underlie human life, even the
meanest of human lives, burst on us astonished and
breathless, precisely as a tragedy comes up to the
surface and bursts on us in real life: everybody
runs about dazed, annoyed, futile; we watch other
people sustaining their own individuality inadequately
in the face of the monstrous new events
which go their fatal way logically, events which
leave the people huddled and useless and gasping.
And destruction having burst out of life, life slowly
returns to its old grooves—with a difference to us,
the difference in the relation of people one to another
that a death or a tragedy always leaves to the
survivors. Marvellous in its truth is Turgenev’s
analysis of the situation after Harlov’s death,
marvellous is the simple description of the neighbourhood’s
attitude to the Harlov family, and
marvellous is the lifting of the scene on the afterlife
of Harlov’s daughters. In the pages (pages 140,
141, 146, 147) on these women, Turgenev flashes
into the reader’s mind an extraordinary sense of the
inevitability of these women’s natures, of their
innate growth fashioning their after-lives as logically
as a beech puts out beech-leaves and an oak oak-leaves.
Through Turgenev’s single glimpse at their
fortunes one knows the whole intervening fifteen
years; he has carried us into a new world; yet it
is the old world; one needs to know no more. It
is life arbitrary but inevitable, life so clarified by
art that it is absolutely interpreted; but life with
all the sense of mystery that nature breathes around
it in its ceaseless growth.</p>
<p>This sense of inevitability and of the mystery of
life which Turgenev gives us in <i>A Lear of the Steppes</i>
is the highest demand we can make from art. If
we contrast with it two examples of Turgenev’s
more “romantic” manner, <i>Acia</i>, though it gives us
a sense of mystery, is not inevitable: the end is
<i>faked</i> to suit the artist’s purpose, and thus, as in
other ways, it is far inferior to <i>Lear</i>. <i>Faust</i> has
consummate charm in its strange atmosphere of the
supernatural mingling with things earthly, but it is
not, as is <i>A Lear of the Steppes</i>, life seen from the
surface to the revealed depths; it is a revelation of
the strange forces in life, presented beautifully;
but it is rather an idea, a problem to be worked out
by certain characters, than a piece of life inevitable
and growing. When an artist creates in us the
sense of inevitability, then his work is at its highest,
and is obeying Nature’s law of growth, unfolding
from out itself as inevitably as a tree or a flower or
a human being unfolds from out itself. Turgenev
at his highest never quits Nature, yet he always
uses the surface, and what is apparent, to disclose
her most secret principles, her deepest potentialities,
her inmost laws of being, and whatever he presents
he presents clearly and simply. This combination
of powers marks only the few supreme artists. Even
great masters often fail in perfect <i>naturalness</i>:
Tolstoy’s <i>The Death of Ivan Ilytch</i>, for instance, one
of the most powerful stories ever written, has too
little of what is typical of the whole of life, too much
that is strained towards the general purpose of the
story, to be perfectly <i>natural</i>. Turgenev’s special
feat in fiction is that his characters reveal themselves
by the most ordinary details of their everyday life;
and while these details are always giving us the
whole life of the people, and their inner life as well,
the novel’s significance is being built up simply out
of these details, built up by the same process, in fact,
as Nature creates for us a single strong impression
out of a multitude of little details.</p>
<p>Again, Turgenev’s power as a poet comes in,
whenever he draws a commonplace figure, to make
it bring with it a sense of the mystery of its existence.
In <i>Lear</i> the steward Kvitsinsky plays a subsidiary
part; he has apparently no significance in the story,
and very little is told about him. But who does
not perceive that Turgenev looks at and presents the
figure of this man in a manner totally different from
the way any clever novelist of the second rank
would look at and use him? Kvitsinsky, in
Turgenev’s hands, is an individual with all the
individual’s mystery in his glance, his coming and
going, his way of taking things; but he is a part of
the household’s breath, of its very existence; he
breathes the atmosphere naturally and creates an
atmosphere of his own.</p>
<p>It is, then, in his marvellous sense of the growth
of life that Turgenev is superior to most of his rivals.
Not only did he observe life minutely and comprehensively,
but he reproduced it as a constantly
growing phenomenon, growing naturally, not accidentally
or arbitrarily. For example, in <i>A House
of Gentlefolk</i>, take Lavretsky’s and Liza’s changes
of mood when they are falling in love with one
another; it is Nature herself in them changing very
delicately and insensibly; we feel that the whole
picture is alive, not an effect cut out from life, and
cut off from it at the same time, like a bunch of cut
flowers, an effect which many clever novelists often
give us. And in <i>Lear</i> we feel that the life in Harlov’s
village is still going on, growing yonder, still growing
with all its mysterious sameness and changes, when,
in Turgenev’s last words, “The story-teller ceased,
and we talked a little longer, and then parted, each
to his home.”</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center nobreak larger">XI<br />NOTE ON TURGENEV’S LIFE</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /></h2>
</div>
<p class="hangingindent mb1">Note on Turgenev’s Life—His Character and Philosophy—<i>Enough</i>
—<i>Hamlet and Don Quixote</i>—The <i>Poems in
Prose</i>—Turgenev’s last Illness and Death—His Epitaph.</p>
<p>If we have said nothing hitherto about the twenty
years of Turgenev’s life (1855-1877), in which the
six great novels were composed, it is because his
cosmopolitan activities, social, political, intellectual,
were too many to be chronicled in the compass of a
short Study. They may be here indicated in a few
lines. Lengthy stays in France, and visits to
Germany, Italy, England, were alternated with
residence every year at Spasskoe. His attachment
to Madame Viardot and her family (which may be
studied in <i>Lettres à Madame Viardot</i>, Paris, 1907, a
series unfortunately not published in its entirety)
led to his joining their household at Courtavenel and
Paris, and later (1864) to settling with them at
Baden. His residence in France brought him into
contact with nearly all the celebrated French men
of letters, Mérimeé, Taine, Renan, Victor Hugo,
Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, etc., and later with the
chiefs of the young naturalistic school, as Zola,
Daudet, Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev’s political
outlook and Liberal creed are best represented in his
Correspondence with Hertzen, to whom he communicated
Russian news for <i>The Bell</i>: his relations
and quarrel with Tolstoy, and his enthusiastic
appreciation of the latter’s genius are recorded
in Biriukoff’s <i>Life of Tolstoy</i>, and in Halperine-Kaminsky’s
<i>Correspondence</i>. For his relations with
Russian contemporary men of letters, Fet, Grigorovitch,
Nekrassov, Dostoevsky, Annenkov, Aksakov,
etc., there exists a mass of documents, letters and
reminiscences in the Russian. For a general sketch
of Turgenev’s life the English reader can turn to
E. Haumant’s <i>Ivan Tourguénief</i>, Paris, 1906; for an
account of Turgenev’s youth, his relations with the
Nihilists, his later life in Paris, etc., to Michel Delines’
<i>Tourguénief Inconnu</i>, and also to the much-abused
but valuable volume, <i>Souvenirs sur Tourguéneff</i>, by
Isaac Pavlovsky.</p>
<p>All these sources reveal Turgenev in much the
same light, a man of boundless cosmopolitan interests,
of a broad, sane, fertile mind, of the most generous
and tender heart. Some of his contemporaries
touch on certain weaknesses, his vacillating will,
his fits of hypochondria, his romantic affectation in
youth, etc., but everybody bears witness (as does
his Correspondence) to his lovableness, and the
extraordinary altruism and sweetness of his nature.
Thus Maupassant, a keen judge of character, records:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“He was one of the most remarkable writers of this
century, and at the same time the most honest, straightforward,
universally sincere and affectionate man one
could possibly meet. He was simplicity itself, kind and
honest to excess, more good-natured than any one in the
world, affectionate as men rarely are, and loyal to his
friends whether living or dead.</p>
<p>“No more cultivated, penetrating spirit, no more
loyal, generous heart than his ever existed.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Such a man’s philosophy can in no sense be
termed “pessimistic,” since the wells of his spirit
are constantly fed by springs of understanding, love
and charity. The whole body of Turgenev’s work
appeals to our faith in the ever-springing, renovating
power of man’s love of the good and the beautiful,
and to his spiritual struggle with evil. But, faced by
the threatening mass of wrong, of human stupidity
and greed, of men’s pettiness and blindness, Turgenev’s
beauty of feeling often recoils in a wave of
melancholy and of sombre mournfulness. Thus in
<i>Enough</i> (1864), a fragment inspired by the seas
of acrimonious misunderstanding raised by <i>Fathers
and Children</i>, Turgenev has concentrated in a prose
poem of lyrical beauty, an access of profound
dejection. Here we see laid bare the roots of
Turgenev’s philosophic melancholy,—man’s insignificance
in face of “the deaf, blind, dumb force of
nature ... which triumphs not even in her conquests
but goes onward, onward devouring all things....
She creates destroying, and she cares not whether
she creates or she destroys.... How can we stand
against those coarse and mighty waves, endlessly,
unceasingly, moving upward? How have faith in
the value and dignity of the fleeting images, that in
the dark, on the edge of the abyss, we shape out
of dust for an instant?” After recording many
exquisite memories of nature and of love, Turgenev,
then, compares human activities to those of gnats
on the forest edge on a frosty day when the sun
gleams for a moment: “At once the gnats swarm
up on all sides; they sport in the warm rays, bustle,
flutter up and down, circle round one another....
The sun is hidden—the gnats fall in a feeble shower,
and there is the end of their momentary life. And
men are ever the same.” “What is terrible is that
there is nothing terrible, that the very essence of
life is petty, uninteresting and degradingly inane.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“But are there no great conceptions, no great words
of consolation: patriotism, right, freedom, humanity,
art? Yes, those words there are and many men live
by them and for them. And yet it seems to me that if
Shakespeare could be born again he would have no
cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear. His searching
glance would discover nothing new in human life: still
the same motley picture—in reality so little complex—would
unroll beside him in its terrifying sameness. The
same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of
blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the
same senseless sufferings in the name ... why in the
name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered
at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in
which the many-headed beast, the multitude, is caught
so easily, the same workings of power, the same traditions
of slavishness, the same innateness of falsehood—in
a word, the same busy squirrel’s turning in the old,
unchanged wheel....”</p></blockquote>
<p>With this passage of weary disillusionment and
disgust of life we may compare one in <i>Phantoms</i>,
written a year earlier: “These human flies, a
thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings
glued together with filth, the pitiful traces of their
tiny, monotonous bustle, of their comic struggle
with the unchanging and inevitable, how revolting
it all suddenly was to me”; and one, no less
significant, in the opening pages of <i>The Torrents
of Spring</i>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the
vulgar falsity of all things human.... Everywhere
the same everlasting pouring of water into a sieve, the
everlasting beating of the air, everywhere the same self-deception—half
in good faith, half conscious—any toy
to amuse the child, so long as it keeps him from crying.
And then all of a sudden old age drops down like snow
on the head, and with it the ever-growing, ever-growing
and devouring dread of death ... and the plunge into
the abyss.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But to show these waves of pessimistic exhaustion
in right relation to the whole volume of Turgenev’s
work, one must contrast them with many hundreds
of passages where the struggle of love, faith and
courage, where the impulse of pity and beauty of
conduct rank supreme in all human endeavour.
And in his illuminating essay on <i>Hamlet and Don
Quixote</i> (1860), Turgenev holds the balance level
between humanity’s blind faith in the power of the
good (Don Quixote), and the disillusionment of its
knowledge (Hamlet). Here Turgenev shows us
that sincerity and force of conviction in the justice
or goodness of a cause (however wrong-headed or
absurd the idealist’s judgment may be) is the prime
basis for the pursuit of virtue, and that true enthusiasm
for goodness and beauty exacts self-sacrifice,
disregard of one’s own interest, and forgetfulness
of the “I.” Hamlet by his sceptical intelligence
becomes so conscious of his own weakness, of the
worthlessness of the crowd, of the self-regarding
motives of men, that he is unable to love them.
Hence his irony, his melancholy, his despair in the
triumph of the good, for which he, too, struggles,
while paralysed by his thoughts which sap his will
and condemn him to inactivity. “The Hamlets,”
says Turgenev, “find nothing, discover nothing, and
leave no trace in their passage through the world
but the memory of their personality: they have no
spiritual legacy to bequeath. They do not love:
they do not believe. How, then, should they
find?”</p>
<p>Love and faith in the good and beautiful—based
on forgetfulness of self—must therefore be set against
and balance the rule of the intelligence, and this is
precisely the effect Turgenev’s work makes on us
and the effect which his personality made on his
acquaintances. “This man was all good,” says
Vogüé. “I think one would have to search the
literary world for a long time before finding a writer
capable of such modesty and such effacement,” says
Halpérine-Kaminsky. “I am always thinking
about Turgenev. I love him terribly,” says Tolstoy
naïvely, after his lifelong hostility to Turgenev’s
genius had been removed by the latter’s death.
And all Turgenev’s acquaintances agreed that no
one was so devoid of egoism, so generous in his
enthusiasm for the works of other men as he.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> The
guiding law of his being was shown not only in his
unmeasured desire to exalt the works of his rivals,<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a>
but to find excellent, absorbing qualities in the works
of obscure, unsuccessful writers. This trait often
appeared, to his own circle, to be proof of mere
uncritical misplaced enthusiasm, but in fact
Turgenev was a most severe and impartial critic.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a>
There is in even the humblest work of art, that is
not false, a nucleus of individual feeling, experience,
insight which cannot be replaced. And Turgenev,
always searching for the good, instantly detected
any individual excellence and emphasized its value,
without dwelling on a work’s mediocre elements.
The world, and the generality of men, do exactly
the reverse; they take pleasure in pointing out and
publishing defects and weaknesses and in ignoring
the points of strength.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> “On arriving at his rooms, Tourguéneff took from his
writing-table a roll of paper. I give what he said word for word.
</p>
<p>
“‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Here is “copy” for your paper of an
absolutely first-rate kind. This means that I am not its author.
The master—for he is a <i>real</i> master—is almost unknown in
France, but I assure you, on my soul and conscience, that I do
not consider myself worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes.’
</p>
<p>
“Two days afterwards there appeared in the <i>Temps</i>, ‘Les
Souvenirs de Sebastopol,’ by Leòn Tolstoi.”—<i>Tourguéneff and his
French Circle</i>, p. 188.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> “From the letters to Zola ... we shall see with what
devotion, sparing neither time nor trouble, Tourguéneff endeavoured
to make his friend’s books known in Russia. What
he did for Zola, he had already done for Gustave Flaubert;
afterwards came Goncourt’s turn and that of Guy de Maupassant.
Never did he take such minute pains to safeguard his own
interests, as those he took in the service of his friends.”—<i>Tourguéneff
and his French Circle</i>, by E. Halpérine-Kaminsky, p. 186.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> Flaubert writing to George Sand says, “What an auditor
and what a critic is Turgenev! He has dazzled me by the profundity
of his judgments. Ah! if all those who dabble in
literary criticism could have heard him, what a lesson! Nothing
escapes him. At the end of a piece of a hundred lines he remembers
a feeble epithet.”</p></div>
<p>The <i>Poems in Prose</i> (1878-1882), this exquisite
collection of short, detached descriptions, scenes,
memories, and dreams, yields a complete synthesis
in brief of the leading elements in Turgenev’s own
temperament and philosophy. The <i>Poems in Prose</i>
are unique in Russian literature, one may say
unsurpassed for exquisite felicity of language, and
for haunting, rhythmical beauty. Turgenev’s characteristic,
<i>the perfect fusion of idea and emotion</i>, takes
shape here in æsthetic contours which challenge the
antique. As with all poetry of a high order, the
creative emotion cannot be separated from the
imperishable form in which it is cast, and ten lines
of the original convey what a lengthy commentary
would fail to communicate. We therefore quote a
translation of three of the <i>Prose Poems</i> from a
version which, however careful, must inevitably
fall short of the original:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="center xlarge p2">“NECESSITAS-VIS-LIBERTAS</p>
<p class="center">“A BAS-RELIEF</p>
<p>“A tall bony old woman, with iron face and dull
fixed look, moves along with long strides, and, with an
arm dry as a stick, pushes before her another woman.</p>
<p>“This woman—of huge stature, powerful, thickset,
with the muscles of a Hercules, with a tiny head set on
a bull neck, and blind—in her turn pushes before her a
small, thin girl.</p>
<p>“This girl alone has eyes that see; she resists, turns
round, lifts fair, delicate hands; her face full of life,
shows impatience and daring.... She wants not to
obey, she wants not to go, where they are driving her ...
but, still, she has to yield and go.</p>
<p class="center">“<i>Necessitas-vis-Libertas!</i></p>
<p>“Who will, may translate.”</p>
<p class="center xlarge p2">“THE SPARROW</p>
<p>“I was returning from hunting, and walking along
an avenue of the garden, my dog running in front of me.
Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along
as though tracking game.</p>
<p>“I looked along the avenue and saw a young sparrow,
with yellow about its beak and down on its head. It
had fallen out of the nest (the wind was violently shaking
the birch-trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move,
helplessly fluffing its half-grown wings.</p>
<p>“My dog was slowly approaching it, when, suddenly
darting down from a tree close by, an old dark-throated
sparrow fell like a stone right before its nose, and all
ruffled up, terrified, with despairing and pitiful cheeps,
it flung itself twice toward the open jaws of shining
teeth.</p>
<p>“It sprang to save; it cast itself before its nestling ...
but all its tiny body was shaking with terror; its note
was harsh and strange. Swooning with fear it offered
itself up!</p>
<p>“What a huge monster must the dog have seemed
to it! And yet it could not stay on its high branch out
of danger.... A force stronger than its will flung it
down.</p>
<p>“My Trésor stood still, drew back.... Clearly he,
too, recognized this force.</p>
<p>“I hastened to call off the disconcerted dog, and
went away, full of reverence.</p>
<p>“Yes; do not laugh. I felt reverence for that tiny,
heroic bird, for its impulse of love.</p>
<p>“Love, I thought, is stronger than death, or the fear
of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and
advances.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The content, the quiet, the plenty of the Russian
earth, “The Country”; the insignificance of man,
“A Conversation”; there is no escape from death,
“The Old Woman”; the tie between man and the
animals, “The Dog”; death reconciles old enemies,
“The Last Meeting”; Nature’s indifference to man,
“Nature”; the beauty of untroubled, innocent
youth, “How Fair and Fresh were the Roses”; the
genius of poesy, “A Visit”; the joy of giving
and taking, “Alms”; the rich misjudge the poor,
“Cabbage Soup”; we always pray for miracles,
“Prayer”; Christ is in all men, “Christ”; the
immortal hour of genius, “Stay”; love and hunger,
“The Two Brothers”; such are a few of the
subjects of the <i>Poems in Prose</i>. The permanent
appeal of these exquisite little pieces lies in their
soft, deep humanity and emotional freshness, while
æsthetically they are marked by the broad warm
touch in which Turgenev indicates the infinite lights
and tones of living nature. Turgenev’s supremacy
in style rests, indeed, precisely here, in this faculty
of concentrating in a few broad sweeping touches,
a wealth of tones which, producing an individual
effect, makes a universal appeal to feeling. It is
mysterious, this faculty of so massing and concentrating
your effect that one detailed touch does the
work of half a dozen. Turgenev alone among his
contemporaries had mastered this secret of Greek
art. It is the emotional breadth, imparted in ease,
sureness, and flexibility of stroke, that distinguishes
the <i>Poems in Prose</i> from all other examples of the
genre. Fresh as the rain, soft as the petal of a
flower, warm as the touch of love is “The Rose,”
so simple, yet so complete in its message.</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="center xlarge p2">“THE ROSE</p>
<p>“The last days of August.... Autumn was already
at hand.</p>
<p>“The sun was setting. A sudden downpour of rain,
without thunder or lightning, had just passed rapidly
over our wide plain.</p>
<p>“The garden in front of the house glowed and steamed,
all filled with the fire of the sunset and the deluge of
rain.</p>
<p>“She was sitting at a table in the drawing-room, and
with persistent dreaminess, gazing through the half-open
door into the garden.</p>
<p>“I knew what was passing at that moment in her
soul; I knew that, after a brief but agonising struggle,
she was at that instant giving herself up to a feeling she
could no longer master.</p>
<p>“All at once she got up, went quickly out into the
garden, and disappeared.</p>
<p>“An hour passed ... a second; she had not
returned.</p>
<p>“Then I got up, and, going out of the house, I
turned along the walk by which—of that I had no doubt—she
had gone.</p>
<p>“All was darkness about me; the night had already
fallen. But on the damp sand of the path a roundish
object could be discerned—bright red even through the
mist.</p>
<p>“I stooped down. It was a fresh, new-blown rose.
Two hours before I had seen this very rose on her bosom.</p>
<p>“I carefully picked up the flower that had fallen in
the mud, and, going back to the drawing-room, laid it
on the table before her chair.</p>
<p>“And now at last she came back, and with light footsteps,
crossing the whole room, sat down at the table.</p>
<p>“Her face was both paler and more vivid; her
downcast eyes, that looked somehow smaller, strayed
rapidly in happy confusion from side to side.</p>
<p>“She saw the rose, snatched it up, glanced at its
crushed, muddy petals, glanced at me, and her eyes,
brought suddenly to a standstill, were bright with tears.</p>
<p>“‘What are you crying for?’ I asked.</p>
<p>“‘Why, see this rose. Look what has happened
to it.’</p>
<p>“Then I thought fit to utter a profound remark.</p>
<p>“‘Your tears will wash away the mud,’ I pronounced
with a significant expression.</p>
<p>“‘Tears do not wash, they burn,’ she answered.
And turning to the hearth she flung the rose into the
dying flame.</p>
<p>“‘Fire burns even better than tears,’ she cried with
spirit; and her lovely eyes, still bright with tears,
laughed boldly and happily.</p>
<p>“I saw that she, too, had been through the fire.”</p></blockquote>
<p>A few of the <i>Poems in Prose</i>, profoundly
ironical, as “The Fool,” “A Contented Man,”
“The Egoist,” “A Rule of Life,” “Two
Strangers,” “The Workmen and the Man with the
White Hands,” show the indignation of a large
generous heart with human baseness, pettiness,
stupidity, and envy. A minority of the poems are
instinct with Turgenev’s morbid apprehension of
death’s stealthy approach, and the final, unescapable
blotting out of life and love by his clutch.
Turgenev’s dread of the malignant forces of decay
and dissolution had found powerful expression nearly
twenty years earlier in <i>Phantoms</i>, where a series of
prose poems is enshrined in the setting of a story.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“‘Do not utter her name, not her name,’ Alice
faltered hurriedly. ‘We must escape, or there will be an
end to everything and for ever.... Look over there!’</p>
<p>“I turned my head in the direction in which her
trembling hand was pointing and discerned something
... horrible indeed.</p>
<p>“This something was the more horrible since it had
no definite shape. Something bulky, dark, yellowish-black,
spotted like a lizard’s belly, not a storm-cloud,
and not smoke, was crawling with a snakelike motion
over the earth. A wide rhythmic undulating movement
from above downwards, and from below upwards, an
undulation recalling the malignant sweep of the wings
of a vulture seeking its prey; at times an indescribably
revolting grovelling on the earth, as of a spider stooping
over its captured fly.... Who are you, what are you,
menacing mass? Under its influence I saw it, I felt
it—all sank into nothingness, all was dumb.... A
putrefying, pestilential chill came from it. At this chill
breath the heart turned sick and the eyes grew dim, and
the hair stood up on the head. It was a power moving;
that power which there is no resisting, to which all is
subject, which, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all,
knows all, and like a bird of prey, picks out its victims,
stifles them and stabs them with its frozen sting.”</p></blockquote>
<p>This passage, by the intensity of horror it evokes,
shows how deeply entwined in the roots of Turgenev’s
joy in life was his loathing of death; and the same
note is struck with cumulative force in “The End of
the World” and “The Insect,” where the chill atmosphere
of frozen terror and suffocating dread is
enforced by the gloomy imagery. There can be no
doubt that Turgenev’s premonitory obsession of death
in his last years was one of the manifestations of the
malignant disease of which he died—cancer of the
spinal marrow—which cast the darkening shadow
of melancholy over his vital energies and intensified
his sensation of spiritual isolation. In the struggle
between his healthy instincts and the weariness and
dejection diffused by this creeping, malignant cancer,
his latter days may be likened to those of an autumnal
landscape at evening, with the valleys shivering in
the shadows of approaching night, while the higher
ground remains still flushed with warm light. But
the <i>Poems in Prose</i>, his last work, declare how comparatively
little the morbid processes at work
within his frame had impaired his serene intelligence,
his wide unflinching vision, his deep generous
heart, and passion to help others. This, although
he had already written, “I have grown old, all
seems tarnished around me and within me. The
light which rays from the heart, showing life in its
colour, in relief, in movement, this light is nearly
extinguished within me: it flickers under the crust
of cinders which grows thicker and thicker.” But
his cruel malady in the last two years, when Turgenev
endured “all that one can endure without dying,”
did not embitter his character.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> Pavlovsky tells us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“After terrible sufferings, during which the sick man
could neither sit nor remain standing nor lying down,
his condition improved. He could work and read free
from pain, except when he moved about. That gave
him hope that with many precautions, he would live a
few years longer. But very soon a fresh access arrived,
followed with fresh prostration of spirit.</p>
<p>“‘When my sufferings are unendurable,’ said
Turgenev, ‘I follow Schopenhauer’s advice. I analyse
my sensations and my agony departs for a period. For
example, if my sufferings are terrible I can easily tell
myself of what kind they are. First there is a stinging
pain which, in itself, is not insupportable. To this is
added a burning feeling, and next a shooting pang;
then a difficulty in breathing. Separately each one is
endurable and when I analyse them thus, it is easy for
me to endure them. One must always do this in life,
if you analyse your sufferings you will not suffer so
much.’</p>
<p>“On another occasion he said to me:</p>
<p>“‘I do not regret dying. I have had all the pleasures
I could wish for. I have done much work. I have had
success. I have loved people; and they have, also,
loved me. I have reached old age. I have been as
happy as one can be. Many have not had that. It is
bad to die before the time comes, but for me it is time.’</p>
<p>“One need not say that these words were those of a
sick man wishing to console himself. Turgenev knew
well that he could still create, and he did not wish
to die.</p>
<p>“In speaking of the condition of Viardot, who was
also dying, Turgenev said to me:</p>
<p>“‘A bad thing this death! One couldn’t complain
if she killed one at a stroke; then it would be over;
but she glides behind you like a robber, takes from man
all his soul, his intelligence, his love of the beautiful;
she attacks the essence of the human being. The
envelope alone remains.’</p>
<p>“And he added, after a moment’s silence, in a
whisper, strangely passionate:</p>
<p>“‘Yes, death is the lie!’ ...</p>
<p>“A thing strange and most characteristic was that
during his last illness Turgenev never ceased to occupy
himself with the affairs of others.... Moreover, he
did not wait to be solicited to render people services.”</p></blockquote>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <i>Ossip Lourié</i>, p. 63.</p></div>
<p>In his last days Turgenev addressed to Tolstoy
the famous letter in which he adjured him to return
to literature,<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> and bequeathed to others as his creed
and example his farewell words, “Live and love
others as I have always loved them.” After
renewed cruel sufferings he sank into a delirium,
and died at Bougival on September 3, 1883.
Madame Viardot describes his end, thus:</p>
<p>“He had lost consciousness since two days.
He no longer suffered, his life slowly ebbed away,
and after two convulsions, he breathed his last.
He looked as beautiful again as ever. On the first
day after death, there was still a deep wrinkle,
caused by the convulsions, between his eyebrows;
the second day his habitual expression of goodness
reappeared. One would have expected to see him
smile.”<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> “Kind and dear Leo Nikoláyevitch,—I have long not written
to you, because, to tell the truth, I have been, and am, on my
deathbed. I cannot recover: that is out of the question, I am
writing to you specially to say how glad I am to be your contemporary,
and to express my last and sincere request. My
friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you whence
comes all the rest. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think
my request would have an effect on you!... I am played
out—the doctors do not even know what to call my malady,
<i>névralgie stomacale goutteuse</i>. I can neither walk, nor eat, nor
sleep. It is wearisome even to repeat it all! My friend—great
writer of our Russian land—listen to my request!...
I can write no more I am tired. (Unsigned), Bougival, 27 or
28 June 1883.”—Translated by A. Maude, <i>The Life of Tolstoy</i>,
vol. ii. p. 182.</p></div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> For this and other details, see Haumant, p. 110.</p></div>
<p>The autopsy made by the French doctors revealed
that the weight of Turgenev’s brain, 2012
grammes, surpassed by a third the normal weight,
and, though Turgenev’s high stature partly accounted
for this, the doctors were astonished by its volume,
which much exceeded Cuvier’s, hitherto the largest
brain known.</p>
<p>Turgenev was buried, according to his wish, in
the Volkov cemetery at Petersburg, by the side
of his friend, the critic Byelinsky. A crowd of
100,000 people accompanied the funeral procession,
including 285 deputations from all parts of
Russia. The Russian Government declined to
take part in it!<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> Renan, in France, pronounced
the valedictory oration, and the passage we extract
stands as Turgenev’s noble epitaph:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Au-dessus de la race, en effect, il y a l’humanité,
ou, si l’on veut, la raison. Tourguéneff fut d’une race
par sa manière de sentir et de peindre; il appartenait à
l’humanité tout entière par une haute philosophie,
envisageant d’un œil ferme les conditions de l’existence
humaine et cherchant sans parti pris à savoir la réalité.
Cette philosophie aboutissait chez lui à la douceur, à la
joie de vivre, à la pitié pour les créatures, pour les
victimes surtout. Cette pauvre humanité souvent
aveugle assurément, mais si souvent aussi trahie par ses
chefs, il l’aimait ardemment. Il applaudissait à son
effort spontané vers le bien et le vrai. Il ne gourmandait
pas ses illusions; il ne lui en voulait pas de se
plaindre. La politique de fer qui raille ceux qui souffrent
n’était pas la sienne. Aucune déception ne l’arrêtait.
Comme l’univers, il eut recommencé mille fois l’œuvre
manquée; il savait que la justice peut attendre; on
finira toujours par y revenir. Il avait vraiment les
paroles de la vie éternelle, les paroles de paix, de justice,
d’amour et de liberté.”</p></blockquote>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> On Turgenev’s death, Lavrov, the Russian refugee, stated
that Turgenev had contributed 500 francs annually to the
expenses of the revolutionary Zurich paper <i>En Avant</i>. The
Russian Government hastened to manifest its displeasure
accordingly.</p></div>
<p class="center p4">THE END</p>
<p class="center p6"><i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. & R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="transnote space3">
<p class="larger"><b>Transcriber’s Notes</b></p>
<p>Inconsistent punctuation corrected.</p>
</div>
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56809 ***</div>
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