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Title: Turgenev - A Study
Author: Garnett, Edward
Language: English
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TURGENEV
[Illustration: _Ivan Turgenev_ _from a photograph kindly lent by Mr.
Edward Garnett_]
TURGENEV
A STUDY
BY
EDWARD GARNETT
WITH A FOREWORD BY JOSEPH CONRAD
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
COPYRIGHT 1917
FOREWORD
Dear Edward--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.
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.
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 _Smoke_ "to all time."
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 _A Sportsman's
Sketches_--those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 _all_ 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.
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,
J. C.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
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.
E. G.
_March 1917._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
page
Turgenev's Critics and his Detractors 1
CHAPTER II
Youth, Family and Early Work 25
CHAPTER III
"A Sportsman's Sketches" 35
CHAPTER IV
"Rudin" 55
CHAPTER V
"A House of Gentlefolk" 73
CHAPTER VI
"On the Eve" 91
CHAPTER VII
"Fathers and Children" 107
CHAPTER VIII
"Smoke" 127
CHAPTER IX
"Virgin Soil" 137
CHAPTER X
The Tales 161
CHAPTER XI
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 185
I
TURGENEV'S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS
CHAPTER I
TURGENEV'S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS
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."
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.
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."
"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 _Sportsman's Sketches_. In this book nearly the
whole of his talent finds expression.
* * * * *
"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.
"... 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.... (_Virgin Soil_) 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.
"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."--_Landmarks in Russian Literature_, pp.
99-110.
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.
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 _conventional_?
Why damn all the great creations in _books_, 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 _sui
generis, and are irreplaceable creations_. 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 _Anna Karenin_. 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 _very quintessence of truth_"! We are more humble in our
claims for Nezhdanov and Marianna and Mashurina in _Virgin Soil_; 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 _The Possessed_ 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 _On the Eve_, 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 _The Cossacks_, Levin in _Anna Karenin_, and Pierre
in _War and Peace_, 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 _Fathers and Children_ and _The Poems in Prose_
should have been relatively weak and narrow! and that the understanding
which created _A House of Gentlefolk_ and _A Sportsman's Sketches_
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.
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 _vieux jeu_. When Dostoevsky is sentimental, as in
_The Insulted and Injured_, 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
_The Diary of a Superfluous Man_, _A Correspondence_, _Faust_, 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.
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.[1] 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.
[1] _Tourguénief, la vie et l'œuvre._ Par Émile Haumant. Paris, 1906.
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?[2] We cite a specimen from _A Tour in the Forest_,
showing the penetrating freshness and warmth of his description:
"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."--_A Tour in the Forest_,
pp. 105-107.
[2] "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...."--_A History of
Russian Literature_, by K. Waliszewski, p. 290.
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 _A Sportsman's Sketches_ are inspired
by profound sensitiveness and close fidelity. "Vague backgrounds and
diaphanous figures!" This is the accusation of townsmen.
Another and more insidious line of critical detraction has been
followed by M. Haumant in _Ivan Tourguénief, la vie et l'œuvre_, 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 _The Brigadier_ Turgenev has
constructed "a Russian Werther"! while a passage in _Phantoms_, it
appears, is inspired by a passage in De Quincey's _Confessions of
an Opium-Eater_. A page is devoted to the discussion of the latter
conjecture,[3] but nothing at all is said as to the unique spiritual
beauty and the haunting atmosphere of these tales. And _A Lear of
the Steppes_, 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 _confrères_,
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."
[3] Haumant, p. 174.
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 _élite_ 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:
"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. _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._"
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 _Smoke_ (1867) Turgenev was accused of being _out of
date_, 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 _The Torrents of Spring_ or _A Lear of the
Steppes_, 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, _quality_ 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.
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.
II
YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK
CHAPTER II
YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK
"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 _Three Portraits_, 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,[4] early aroused in him a detestation of the
system of serfdom. The touching story of _Mumu_, 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
_affaires de cœur_ embittered her days.[5] 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."[6]
[4] See "La mère d'Ivan Turguenieff," in _Tourguénieff Inconnu_, par
Michel Delines.
[5] See the story _First Love_, where Turgenev describes his parents'
relations.
[6] Brückner's _A Literary History of Russia_, p. 338.
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."
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.[7] Much ingenuity has been
exercised, especially by French critics,[8] 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, _The Duellist_ (1846), we find a complete break
with the traditions of the romantic school, traditions which are indeed
here turned inside out.[9] Here it is evident that a new master is in
the field, "a painter of realities" as Byelinsky soon declared.[10] The
story is of much significance, as exemplifying Turgenev's clear-eyed,
deep apprehension of character, and his creative penetration through
_beauty of feeling_. 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
_by the absence of any tender or chivalrous emotion for women_. 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.
[7] "Parasha" was warmly praised by Byelinsky in 1843, in an article in
_Annals of the Fatherland_. Of the six Plays, which were revived from
time to time, _The Bachelor_ (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.
[8] Haumant, Delines, Waliszewski, etc.
[9] 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 _social atmosphere_ 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.
[10] Byelinsky, in his criticism on _Hor and Kalinitch_, says: "His
talent is not suited to true lyrics. He can only paint from real
life what he has seen or _studied_. 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."
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 _natural inclination for everything beautiful_" 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.[11] 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, _A Sportsman's Sketches_ (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.
[11] For example, Turgenev warmly commended Dostoevsky's works to
foreign critics, after the latter had perpetrated the spiteful libel on
him in _The Possessed_.
III
"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"
CHAPTER III
"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"--"NATURE AND MAN"--THE SECRET OF TURGENEV'S ART
At this date, 1847, Russia, long prostrate beneath the drill sergeants
of that "paternal" autocrat Nicholas I.,[12] 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 _The Village_ (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 _A Sportsman's Sketches_. 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 _Dead Souls_ (1842), that Turgenev made
his appeal with his first sketch "Hor and Kalinitch" in the magazine
_The Contemporary_. 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, _A Sportsman's
Sketches_, 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.
[12] "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.e._ of the
seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, was allowed to be taught in any
form whatsoever."--E. M. DE VOGÜÉ.
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 _A Sportsman's Sketches_ 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 _Odyssey_--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.
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 _in just
relation to their surroundings, to their fellows and to nature_.
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, _eau de cologne_, 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.
_The parts in just relation to the whole scheme of existence_, 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 _the model village_ 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 _comme il
faut_, 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
_Sportsman's Sketches_ expose typical cases of a landlord's tyranny and
the anachronism of this mediaeval survival--serfdom.
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:
"'And do you know her lover, Petrushka?'
"'Piotr Vassilyevitch? Of course I know him.'
"'Where is he now?'
"'He was sent for a soldier.'
"We were silent for a while.
"'She doesn't seem very well?' I asked Yermolai at last.
"'I should think not! To-morrow, I say, we shall have good sport. A
little sleep now would do us no harm.'
"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!"
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 _parti-pris_ 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.
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 _in tempo_. 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:
"'Come, that's enough; don't be timid. For shame! ... why go back?...
Sing the best you can, by God's gift.'
"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....
"'Yasha,' said the Wild Master, laying his hand on his shoulder, and
he could say no more.
"We stood, as it were, petrified. The booth-keeper softly rose and
went up to Yakov.
"'You ... yours ... you've won,' he articulated at last with an
effort, and rushed out of the room."
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:
"... 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.
"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.
"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:
"'Wha-a-t?'
"The boy's voice shouted back at once with gleeful exasperation:
"'Come here, devil! woo-od imp!'
"'What fo-or?' replied the other, after a long interval.
"'Because dad wants to thrash you!' the first voice shouted back
hurriedly.
"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."
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! _The parts in just relation to the
whole scheme of human existence._ Man, earth and heaven--it is the
secret of the perfection of the great poets.
IV
"RUDIN"
CHAPTER IV
"RUDIN"
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 _A Sportsman's Sketches_; 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 _A Sportsman's Sketches_ 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.[13]
[13] "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.
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 _A Sportsman's Sketches_
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 _Dead Souls_ 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,[14] 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."
[14] In an access of self-reproach he once declared to a friend that
his character was comprised in one word--"poltroon."
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 _Rudin_ (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.
* * * * *
Though sixty years have passed since the appearance of _Rudin_, 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
_intelligentsia_ 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 _Brand_.
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.
Of Turgenev's six novels, _Rudin_ is the most perfect in form, by the
harmony of its parts and absolute grace of modelling.[15] 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 _protégé_ 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.
[15] For a discussion of Turgenev's debt to George Sand's novel,
_Horace_, see M. Halperine-Kaminsky's _Tourguéneff and his French
Circle_, p. 301.
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.
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, _unasked_. "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!"
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.
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:
"'And what advice can I give you, Natalya Alexyevna?'
"'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?'
"'My plans.... Your mother will certainly turn me out of the house.'
"'Perhaps.... She told me yesterday that I must break off all
acquaintance with you.... But you do not answer my question?'
"'What question?'
"'What do you think we must do now?'
"'What we must do?' replied Rudin; 'of course submit.'
"'Submit,' repeated Natalya slowly, and her lips turned white.
"'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!'
"All at once Natalya hid her face in her hands and began to weep.
Rudin went up to her.
"'Natalya Alexyevna! Dear Natalya!' he said with warmth, 'do not cry,
for God's sake do not torture me, be comforted.'
"Natalya raised her head.
"'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....'
"Her voice broke down.
"'But, Natalya Alexyevna,' began Rudin in confusion, 'remember--I do
not disown my words--only----'
"'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.'
"'I swear to you, Natalya Alexyevna--I assure you,' maintained Rudin.
"But she did not listen to him."
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.
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:
"'... He took pity on me, perhaps; anyway, he took me by the arm and
led me away to his lodging.'
"'Was that Rudin?' asked Alexandra Pavlovna.
"'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.'
"'What was there so exceptional in this Pokorsky?' asked Alexandra
Pavlovna.
"'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.'"
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.
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.
V
"A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK"
CHAPTER V
"A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK"
In 1859, three years after _Rudin_, appeared _A House of Gentlefolk_,
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[16] being balanced against the
voluptuous, worldly coquette, Varvara Pavlovna. The story which
chronicles how the latter, _la belle Madame de Lavretsky_, 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.
[16] Liza, "the best impersonation possible of the average, thoroughly
good and honest Russian girl of the times."--Kropotkin.
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:
"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."
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 _couche sociale_, 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 _justesse_
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----:
"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!
"He caught his breath.... He leaned against the wall.
"'_Théodore_, do not repulse me!' she said in French, and her voice
cut to his heart like a knife.
"He looked at her senselessly, and yet he noticed involuntarily at
once that she had grown both whiter and fatter.
"'_Théodore!_' she went on, from time to time lifting her eyes and
discreetly wringing her marvellously beautiful fingers with their
rosy, polished nails. '_Théodore_, 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....
_Puis, j'ai été si malade_.... 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 ... _paraître devant vous, mon juge_; 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....
"... '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----'
"'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.
"'Ada, _vois, c'est ton père_,' said Varvara Pavlovna, pushing the
curls back from her eyes and kissing her vigorously, '_prie-le avec
moi_.'
"'_C'est ça, papa?_' stammered the little girl lisping.
"'_Oui, mon enfant, n'est-ce pas que tu l'aimes?_'
"But this was more than Lavretsky could stand.
"'In what melodrama is there a scene exactly like this?' he muttered
and went out of the room.
"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.
"'_Eh bien, madame?_' queried her maid, a French woman whom she had
brought from Paris, as she unlaced her corset.
"'_Eh bien, Justine_,' 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.'
"'_A la guerre comme à la guerre_,' replied Justine, as she put out
the candle."
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.
In depicting the contest between Varvara Pavlovna's worldliness
and Liza's spirituality, how comes it that Turgenev's _parti pris_
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, _the greater is our reaction towards spiritual
beauty_. Therefore Turgenev, with his unerring instinct, intersperses
Liza's sad love story with scenes of the brilliant worldly comedy
played between that _comme-il-faut_ pair, Panshin, the brilliant young
official from Petersburg, Liza's suitor, and Varvara Pavlovna.
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, _chic morceau_. 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:
"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, _c'est même très chic_,
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, _un charmant
garçon_. 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 _Kammer-Yunker_, 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."
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 _arriviste_,
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.
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:
"... 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.
"'What's the matter?' he asked.
"'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.'
"'I beg your pardon, Lisaveta Mihalovna, the words slipped out
unawares.'
"'You have hurt his feelings and mine too. Now he will not trust even
me.'
"'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.'
"'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?'
"Panshin was taken aback.
"'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.'
"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."
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.
The sequel our readers have divined, if they do not already know
_A House of Gentlefolk_. 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."
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:
"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."
VI
"ON THE EVE"
CHAPTER VI
"ON THE EVE"
_On the Eve_, not finished and published till 1859, but projected in
1855, and then laid aside for _Rudin_ and _A House of Gentlefolk_,
holds depths of meaning which at first sight lie veiled under the
simple harmonious surface. To the English reader _On the Eve_ 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.
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.
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 _On the
Eve_ 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 _un père de
famille_, 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'.
Turning to the figure of the Bulgarian hero, it is interesting to find
from the _Souvenirs sur Tourguénev_ (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.
* * * * *
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 _On the Eve_, 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?[17]
[17] Written in 1895.
"'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?"'
"Uvar Ivanovitch flourished his fingers, and fixed his enigmatical
stare into the far distance."
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 _Emma_, 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 _On the Eve_, 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.
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;[18] but _On the Eve_, 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[19] 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 _On the Eve_, 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 _On the Eve_ 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.
[18] Passages written in 1895.
[19] Passages written in 1895.
* * * * *
Twenty-two years ago the above appreciation of _On the Eve_ 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 _entente_.
VII
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"
CHAPTER VII
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"
I
While _On the Eve_ signalizes the end of the Crimea epoch and the
break-up of the crushing, overwhelming régime of Nicholas, _Fathers
and Children_ 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.
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 _Fathers and Children_, written at Baden in
1869:
"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 _Fathers
and Children_ 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
_Fathers and Children_. 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...."
_Fathers and Children_ was published in the spring of 1862 in Katkoff's
paper, _The Russian Messenger_, 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:
"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."
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, "_simply did not know how to
work otherwise_," 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 _caricature_ 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:
"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."
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.
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."
And Dostoevsky was of the opposite camp--a Slavophil.
II
What, then, is Bazarov?
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[20] he says:
"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."
[20] _Souvenirs sur Tourguéneff_, 1887.
And in a letter addressed to the Russian students at Heidelberg he
reiterates:
"_Flatter comme un caniche_, 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, _méchant_ 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, '_Vous êtes foutu_, 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.'"
What, then, is Bazarov?
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,
_he is the bare mind of Science first applied to Politics_. 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 _the sceptical conscience of modern Science_. His watchword is
_Reality_, 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.
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 _romantic_ 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.
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 _to stand alone_, 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.
III
As a piece of art _Fathers and Children_ 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 _Fathers and Children_, 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 _On the Eve_ Turgenev cast his
figures against a poetic background by creating an atmosphere of War
and Patriotism. But in _Fathers and Children_ 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.
Let us end here with a repetition of a simple passage that, echoing
through the last pages of _Fathers and Children_, 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.
VIII
"SMOKE"
CHAPTER VIII
"SMOKE"
_Smoke_ 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. _Smoke_, as an historical
study, though it yields in importance to _Fathers and Children_ and
_Virgin Soil_, is of great significance to Russians. It might with
truth have been named _Transition_, for the generation it paints was
then midway between the early philosophical Nihilism of the 'sixties
and the active political Nihilism of the 'seventies.
Markedly transitional, however, as was the Russian mind of the days
of _Smoke_, 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. _Smoke_ 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 _ennui_,
the Slav nature that analyses everything with force and brilliancy,
and ends, so often, by doing nothing. _Smoke_ 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. _Smoke_ 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 _Smoke_; for this reason alone it would stand unique among
novels.
The attention that _Smoke_ 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, _Virgin Soil_, bears
splendid witness that it was Young Russia that was one-eyed.
Let the plain truth here be set down. _Smoke_ 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 _laissez-faire_ 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.
But though the bitterness of political life flavours _Smoke_, 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 _A House of Gentlefolk_, is a
first cousin to Litvinov, an older and a sadder man.
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.
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.
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.
As a triumphant example of consummate technical skill, _Smoke_ 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. _Smoke_ 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 _Smoke_ 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.
IX
"VIRGIN SOIL"
CHAPTER IX
"VIRGIN SOIL"
The last words of _Virgin Soil_--
"A long while Paklin remained standing before this closed door.
"'Anonymous Russia!' he said at last"--
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 _Virgin Soil_ 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 _Virgin
Soil_ remains the best analysis made of the national elements that
were mingled in its loosely-knit secret organizations. _Virgin Soil_
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.
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 _Virgin Soil_, 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 _Cymbeline_,
where the action, so easygoing is it, is almost too natural and
effortless to be called _art_. In reality this large carelessness is
a sign that the stage of the artist's maturity has been reached, and
a little passed. _Virgin Soil_, 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. _Virgin Soil_ 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,[21] that had feared
his power in life. And this fatuous act of the autocracy is the best
commentary on the truth of _Virgin Soil_.
[21] For an account of the suppression and prohibition of Tolstoy's
lecture on Turgenev, in Moscow, after the latter's death, see Maude's
_Life of Tolstoy_, vol. ii, p. 185.
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 _mésalliance_, 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.
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 _character_.
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.[22]
[22] Passage written in 1896.
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 _Virgin Soil_, 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 _men_.
Marianna, Marianna herself, must seek the prison! Turgenev foresaw
this, and _Virgin Soil_ tells of her preparation for the ordeal, of the
why and the wherefore she went on her path.
And if anything remains obscure in _Virgin Soil_, the English reader
must remember that Turgenev was writing under special difficulties.
There must always be a little vagueness in one's speech, when
_Silence_ 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 _Silence_ that Tolstoy was
forbidden to speak when Turgenev had been carried to his tomb. It was
for Marianna's transgression against this _Silence_ that Turgenev has
glorified her in _Virgin Soil_.
* * * * *
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.
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.
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 _status quo_, 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,
_to awaken the public mind_. 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.
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.
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 _Virgin Soil_. Liberty must spring from the soil whence Marianna
springs.
In the words of that great poem of Whitman:
"The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent
advance and retreat,
The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,
The prison, scaffold, garotte, hand-cuffs, iron necklace,
and lead balls do their work,
The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,
The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick
in distant lands,
The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked
with their own blood.
The young men droop their eyelashes towards the ground
when they meet.
But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place,
nor the infidel entered into full possession,
When Liberty goes out of the place it is not the first to
go, nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last."
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!
* * * * *
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 _Times_ Petrograd correspondent:
"A DELAYED DEVELOPMENT
"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.
"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....
"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, _mirabile dictu!_
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.
"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."--_The Times_, February 8, 1917.
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.
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" (_Rudin_)
to the disastrous obscurantism of the heavy, stupid-minded Alexander
III., and his reactionary ministers. From _Virgin Soil_, 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.
The result signally vindicates Turgenev's political prescience and his
_rôle_ 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.
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.[23]
As _an artist_, while he stood aside from direct political action,
his attitude to the revolutionaries appeared necessarily ambiguous.
Pavlovsky, however, has well characterized it:
"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 _an artist_. 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
_Poems in Prose_, 'The Workman and the Man with White Hands,' and
'The Threshold!'"
[23] 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.
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 _Temps_ of Turgenev's preface to _En Cellule_, a
tale by one of these protégés, Pavlovsky, and Turgenev in a letter to
the _Malva_ thereupon defined his political faith:
"PARIS, _December 30, 1879_.
"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.
"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."
Turgenev's political creed may be read without the slightest ambiguity
between the lines of _A Sportsman's Sketches_ 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.[24]
[24] 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."--_Memoirs of a
Revolutionist_, vol. ii. p. 222.
X
THE TALES
CHAPTER X
THE TALES
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 _The Torrents of Spring_, are of considerable
length, but their comparatively simple structure places them definitely
in the class of the _conte_. 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 _The Brigadier_ and _A Lear of the
Steppes_, 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 _a poetic realist_.
In our first chapter we glanced at _The Duellist_, and in the same year
(1846) appeared _The Jew_, a close study, based on a family anecdote,
of Semitic double-dealing and family feeling: also _Three Portraits_,
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 _Pyetushkov_ (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.
Although _Pyetushkov_ shows us, by a certain open _naïveté_ 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 _Pyetushkov_ 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 _Andrei Kolosov_ (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 _The Diary of a Superfluous Man_ (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 _modelling_ his subject is called for. The
last-named story belongs to a group with which we must place _Faust_
(1853), _Yakov Pasinkov_ (1855), _A Correspondence_ (1855) and even the
tender and charming _Acia_ (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.
In _The Country Inn_ (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 _Mumu_
(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 _The Backwater_, with its
fresh, charming picture of youth's _insouciance_ 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
_The Seagull_, 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 _A Tour of the Forest_ (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.)
The rich colour and perfume of Turgenev's delineation of romantic
passion are disclosed when we turn to _First Love_ (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 _Phantoms_ (1863), which we discuss with
_Prose Poems_ (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.
In his treatment of the supernatural Turgenev, however, sometimes
missed his mark. _The Dog_ (1866) is of a coarser and indeed of an
ordinary texture. With the latter story may be classed _The Dream_
(1876), curiously Byronic in imagery and atmosphere, and artistically
not convincing. Far more sincere, psychologically, is _Clara Militch_
(1882), a penetrating study of a passionate temperament, a story based
on a tragedy of Parisian life. In our opinion _The Song of Triumphant
Love_, 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 _genre_.
To return to the tales of the 'sixties. _Lieutenant Yergunov's Story_,
though its strange atmosphere is cunningly painted, is not of the
highest quality, comparing unfavourably with _The Brigadier_ (1867),
the story of the ruined nobleman, Vassily Guskov, with its tender,
sub-ironical studies of odd characters, Narkiz and Cucumber. _The
Brigadier_ 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 _The Brigadier_ 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.
A complete contrast to _The Brigadier_ is the sombre and savagely
tragic piece of realism, _An Unhappy Girl_ (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.
_A Strange Story_ (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 _be_ unworthy, this
desire implies that the Slav character is apt to be lacking in _will_,
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.
Brilliant also is _Knock-Knock-Knock_ (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 _Punin and Baburin_ (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 _The Watch_ (1875), a
story for boys, nothing here need be said, except that it is inferior
to the delightful _The Quail_, a _souvenir d'enfance_ written at the
Countess Tolstoy's request for an audience of children. In considering
_A Lear of the Steppes_ (1870), _The Torrents of Spring_ (1871) and
_A Living Relic_ (1874), we shall sum up here our brief survey of
Turgenev's achievement in the field of the _conte_.
In _The Torrents of Spring_ 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. _Torrents_ 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.
Not less perfect as art though far slighter in scope is the exquisite
_A Living Relic_ (1874), one of the last of _A Sportsman's Sketches_.
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:
"... I was walking away....
"'Master, master! Piotr Petrovitch!' I heard a voice, faint, slow,
and hoarse, like the whispering of marsh rushes.
"I stopped.
"'Piotr Petrovitch! Come in, please!' the voice repeated. It came
from the corner where were the trestles I had noticed.
"I drew near, and was struck dumb with amazement. Before me lay a
living human being; but what sort of creature was it?
"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.
"'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?'
"'Lukerya!' I cried. 'Is it you? Can it be?'
"'Yes, it's I, master--I, Lukerya.'
"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!"
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."
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.
Infinitely tender in the depth of understanding is this gem of
art, and _A Living Relic's_ 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
_spiritual perspective_ 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.
To those critics, Russian and English, who naïvely slur over the
aesthetic qualities of a masterpiece, such as _A Lear of the Steppes_
(1870), or fail to recognize all that aesthetic perfection implies,
we address these concluding remarks. _A Lear of the Steppes_ 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.
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.
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.
This sense of inevitability and of the mystery of life which Turgenev
gives us in _A Lear of the Steppes_ is the highest demand we can make
from art. If we contrast with it two examples of Turgenev's more
"romantic" manner, _Acia_, though it gives us a sense of mystery, is
not inevitable: the end is _faked_ to suit the artist's purpose, and
thus, as in other ways, it is far inferior to _Lear_. _Faust_ has
consummate charm in its strange atmosphere of the supernatural mingling
with things earthly, but it is not, as is _A Lear of the Steppes_, 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
_naturalness_: Tolstoy's _The Death of Ivan Ilytch_, 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 _natural_. 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.
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 _Lear_ 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.
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 _A House of Gentlefolk_, 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 _Lear_ 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."
XI
NOTE ON TURGENEV'S LIFE
CHAPTER XI
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.
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 _Lettres à Madame Viardot_, 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 _The Bell_: his relations and quarrel with Tolstoy,
and his enthusiastic appreciation of the latter's genius are recorded
in Biriukoff's _Life of Tolstoy_, and in Halperine-Kaminsky's
_Correspondence_. 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 _Ivan Tourguénief_, Paris, 1906; for
an account of Turgenev's youth, his relations with the Nihilists, his
later life in Paris, etc., to Michel Delines' _Tourguénief Inconnu_,
and also to the much-abused but valuable volume, _Souvenirs sur
Tourguéneff_, by Isaac Pavlovsky.
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:
"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.
"No more cultivated, penetrating spirit, no more loyal, generous
heart than his ever existed."
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 _Enough_ (1864), a fragment inspired by the seas of acrimonious
misunderstanding raised by _Fathers and Children_, 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."
"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...."
With this passage of weary disillusionment and disgust of life we may
compare one in _Phantoms_, 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 _The Torrents of Spring_:
"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."
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 _Hamlet
and Don Quixote_ (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?"
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.[25] The guiding law of his being
was shown not only in his unmeasured desire to exalt the works of his
rivals,[26] 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.[27] 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.
[25] "On arriving at his rooms, Tourguéneff took from his writing-table
a roll of paper. I give what he said word for word.
"'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 _real_ 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.'
"Two days afterwards there appeared in the _Temps_, 'Les Souvenirs de
Sebastopol,' by Leòn Tolstoi."--_Tourguéneff and his French Circle_, p.
188.
[26] "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."--_Tourguéneff and his French Circle_, by E.
Halpérine-Kaminsky, p. 186.
[27] 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."
The _Poems in Prose_ (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 _Poems in Prose_ are unique in Russian
literature, one may say unsurpassed for exquisite felicity of language,
and for haunting, rhythmical beauty. Turgenev's characteristic, _the
perfect fusion of idea and emotion_, 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 _Prose Poems_ from a version which, however
careful, must inevitably fall short of the original:
"NECESSITAS-VIS-LIBERTAS
"A BAS-RELIEF
"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.
"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.
"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.
"_Necessitas-vis-Libertas!_
"Who will, may translate."
* * * * *
"THE SPARROW
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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!
"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.
"My Trésor stood still, drew back.... Clearly he, too, recognized
this force.
"I hastened to call off the disconcerted dog, and went away, full of
reverence.
"Yes; do not laugh. I felt reverence for that tiny, heroic bird, for
its impulse of love.
"Love, I thought, is stronger than death, or the fear of death. Only
by it, by love, life holds together and advances."
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 _Poems in Prose_.
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 _Poems in Prose_ 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.
"THE ROSE
"The last days of August.... Autumn was already at hand.
"The sun was setting. A sudden downpour of rain, without thunder or
lightning, had just passed rapidly over our wide plain.
"The garden in front of the house glowed and steamed, all filled with
the fire of the sunset and the deluge of rain.
"She was sitting at a table in the drawing-room, and with persistent
dreaminess, gazing through the half-open door into the garden.
"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.
"All at once she got up, went quickly out into the garden, and
disappeared.
"An hour passed ... a second; she had not returned.
"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.
"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.
"I stooped down. It was a fresh, new-blown rose. Two hours before I
had seen this very rose on her bosom.
"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.
"And now at last she came back, and with light footsteps, crossing
the whole room, sat down at the table.
"Her face was both paler and more vivid; her downcast eyes, that
looked somehow smaller, strayed rapidly in happy confusion from side
to side.
"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.
"'What are you crying for?' I asked.
"'Why, see this rose. Look what has happened to it.'
"Then I thought fit to utter a profound remark.
"'Your tears will wash away the mud,' I pronounced with a significant
expression.
"'Tears do not wash, they burn,' she answered. And turning to the
hearth she flung the rose into the dying flame.
"'Fire burns even better than tears,' she cried with spirit; and her
lovely eyes, still bright with tears, laughed boldly and happily.
"I saw that she, too, had been through the fire."
A few of the _Poems in Prose_, 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 _Phantoms_, where a series of prose
poems is enshrined in the setting of a story.
"'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!'
"I turned my head in the direction in which her trembling hand was
pointing and discerned something ... horrible indeed.
"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."
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 _Poems in Prose_, 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.[28] Pavlovsky tells us:
"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.
"'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.'
"On another occasion he said to me:
"'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.'
"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.
"In speaking of the condition of Viardot, who was also dying,
Turgenev said to me:
"'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.'
"And he added, after a moment's silence, in a whisper, strangely
passionate:
"'Yes, death is the lie!' ...
"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."
[28] _Ossip Lourié_, p. 63.
In his last days Turgenev addressed to Tolstoy the famous letter in
which he adjured him to return to literature,[29] 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:
"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."[30]
[29] "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,
_névralgie stomacale goutteuse_. 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, _The Life of Tolstoy_, vol. ii. p. 182.
[30] For this and other details, see Haumant, p. 110.
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.
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![31] Renan, in France, pronounced the valedictory
oration, and the passage we extract stands as Turgenev's noble epitaph:
"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."
[31] On Turgenev's death, Lavrov, the Russian refugee, stated that
Turgenev had contributed 500 francs annually to the expenses of the
revolutionary Zurich paper _En Avant_. The Russian Government hastened
to manifest its displeasure accordingly.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
Transcriber's Notes
Inconsistent punctuation corrected.
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