TURGENEF.

1. In the history of Russian letters, Ivan Turgenef is the most complex

figure. Nay, with the exception of Shakespeare he is perhaps the most

complex figure in all literature. He is universal, he is provincial; he

is pathetic, he is sneering; he is tender, he is merciless; he is

sentimental, he is frigid. He can be as compact as Tacitus, and as

prolix as Thackeray. He can be as sentimental as Werther, and as

heartless as Napoleon. He can cry with the bird, grow with the grass,

and hum with the bee; he can float with the spirits, and dream with the

fevered. He is everywhere at home: in the novel, in the story, in the

sketch, in the diary, in the epistle. Whatever form of composition he

touches, let once his genius be mature, and it turns to gold under his

hands. On reading through his ten volumes you leave him with the feeling

that you have just emerged from the virgin forests of South America;

your head is full of monkeys frolicking about, with an occasional

cocoanut shot at you, your head is full of the birds with their

variegated plumage, of the fragrance of the flowers, of the dusk about

you, and of the primeval stillness of the forest. And the collective

impression of the writer, the man, left upon you is that of some

invisible but consummate artist who had been passing before you all

manner of photographs made lurid by the glare of the stereopticon:

photograph now of sunset cloud, now of lover's scene in the lane, now of

a dyspeptic, long-haired, wrinkled old man. The writer Turgenef has thus

been for years an enigma. Katkof, the pillar of Russian autocracy,

claims him as his, and the revolutionists claim him as theirs; the

realists point to him as one of the apostles of their new gospel, and

the idealists point to him as the apostle of theirs. Now he defies

public opinion by befriending an obnoxious exile, now he shrinks before

it by disclaiming almost his acquaintance. Between the contending

parties, poor Turgenef shared the fate of the child of the women who did

_not_ come to King Solomon for advice in their dispute about its mother.

The poor child was pulled by each until disfigured for life. So Turgenef

between the different parties, each claiming him as its own, remained

homeless, almost friendless, to the end of his days, belonging to none;

and though surrounded by all manner of society and companionship which

fame, wealth, and position could give, he was yet at bottom solitary,

for he went through the world a man who was misunderstood.

2. His position in letters is therefore anomalous. Russians blame him,

but read him; and Americans praise him, and read him not. Englishmen

quote him, Frenchmen write essays on him, and Germans write books about

him; but all agree in wondering at him, all agree in not comprehending

him. And yet Turgenef's life and the purpose of his books is plain

enough to him that comes to view him with eyes as yet uncovered by

partisan glasses. Turgenef the realist, Turgenef the idealist, is

enigmatic enough; but once understood that Turgenef was the literary

warrior against what was to him a mortal enemy, and his whole life and

all his important works at once become explicable, consistent.

3. For man is something more than the mere sum of his abilities. Behind

all the forces of the man, whether of body or of mind, there stands the

soul, which uses them for purposes of its own, be they for better or for

worse. And of these there is always one which in time becomes the

absorbent of all its life, the essence of all its being; and such

purpose is soon found in the life of every man who lives, and not merely

exists; such purpose is soon found in the mightiest as well as in the

frailest, in the loftiest as well as in the lowest. And till such

purpose is understood, the life of the man is to beholders what the

flower is to the eye when looked at through a microscope,--an expanse of

mere tissue, rough, formless, confusing; but such purpose once

understood, the soul is transformed to the beholder as if made of

glass, transparent, uniform, simple.

4. Such purpose runs like a woof through the whole being of Turgenef. He

is a hunter, he is a clubman, he is a philanthropist, he is an artist;

but he is first of all a warrior, because he is first of all a lover of

his country, and a hater of what oppresses it. He does indeed much else

besides fighting for the emancipation of the land of his birth; but he

does it in the same spirit in which sensible folk go to dinners not for

the sake of eating, to receptions not for the sake of being received,

and wear kid gloves in summer not for the sake of keeping the hands

warm; these things, meaningless in themselves, are only incidentals in

the life of the spirit, which alone can be said to have any meaning.

5. Turgenef, then, is the fighter. This accounts for what is otherwise a

strange phenomenon in Turgenef's art. In his "Memoirs of a Sportsman,"

in which he first aimed his blows consciously against serfdom, his muse

busies itself not with life normal, but with life abnormal; not with

every-day characters, but with such as are seen rarely; not with

frequented places, but with unfrequented places. The "Memoirs of a

Sportsman" is a collection of sketches which form a sort of variety

museum of all manner of bizarre and even grotesque figures. Critics

naturally marvelled at this; and as in the days of old, men explained

the effects of morphine by saying that it contained the soporific

principle, and the action of the pump by nature's abhorring a vacuum, so

critics explained this fact, so strange in the healthy, clear-eyed,

measure-loving Turgenef, by saying that he had a natural fondness for

the fantastic and the strange. In truth, however, the choice of his

subjects was part of his very art as a warrior. He wished to strike, to

rouse; and here the extraordinary is ever more effective than the

ordinary. It was the same design which made the otherwise generous,

tender Wendell Phillips adopt a personal mode of warfare in his struggle

against slavery with a bitterness almost Mephistophelian. And the same

purpose made Turgenef, against the dictates of his muse, choose strange

characters for his sketches. Both Phillips and Turgenef here sacrificed

their feelings to their cause: the one sacrificed to his purpose even

his love for his fellow-men; the other, even his love for his art.

6. One other strange fact in the art of Turgenef is explained by this

fighting essence of his being. There is no growth, development, visible

in Turgenef. He lived to what is for Russian men of letters an advanced

age: he died when over sixty years old; yet, beginning with his first

great work of art, "Rudin," and ending with his last great work of art,

"Virgin Soil," through all his masterpieces, he remains the same. His

six great novels, "Rudin," "A Nest of Noblemen," "On the Eve," "Fathers

and Sons," "Smoke," and "Virgin Soil," form indeed an ascending scale,

but not as works of art; as such, they are all on the same highest

plane. And it would be difficult to find any canon of art according to

which one could be placed above the other. Only when viewed as different

modes of warfare, do they represent the different stages of his soul's

life; but this only in so far as they reflect at the same time the

state of the enemy's forces, against whom he found it necessary to

re-equip himself from time to time. As an artist, then, Turgenef is not

progressive; when his art comes to him, it comes like Minerva from

Jupiter's head,--fully made, fully armed; and had it even come

undeveloped, it would have had, in his case, to remain thus. For growth,

development, needs time, needs leisure, needs reflection, needs rest;

and of all this, on the field of battle, there is none to be had. Onward

or backward, conquer or perish, but stand still on the field of battle

thou must not. And while it was not given to Turgenef to conquer,

neither was it given to the enemy to conquer him. Turgenef, therefore,

as he lived a fighter, so he died a fighter.

7. Turgenef, then, had a life-long enemy; this enemy was Russian

autocracy.

8. Born in 1818, in the same year with the autocrat of Russia, who

afterwards dreaded him as his _bête noir_, he already in his childhood

had the opportunity to learn the weight of the iron hand of Nicolas.

Scarcely was he seven years old when the news came to his father's

household that the family name so dear to them, and hitherto a synonym

of honor both in and out of Russia, had been disgraced; that Nicolai

Turgenef, one of the most faithful servants of the country under

Alexander I., the younger of the two celebrated brothers, and a near

relative of Ivan, had been sentenced to Siberian hard labor for

life,--sentenced under circumstances which could not but shock the sense

of justice not only of the trustful boy, but also of those whom maturer

age had accustomed to the methods of the government. Nicolai Turgenef

was condemned as one of the Decembrists, and the days of the youth of

Ivan were the days when the Decembrists were looked up to as the first

martyrs of Russian liberty. Pushkin, the friend of the leaders of the

insurrection, and the singer of the "Ode to Liberty," was then

worshipped by the youth of Russia as poet was worshipped never before;

to be related to the Decembrists was therefore a privilege, and to

oppose autocracy in thought at least thus became a kind of family

pride. Moreover, contrary to most Russian aristocrats, Sergei Turgenef

conducted the early education of his gifted son himself; and the son of

the conscientious father, when taken out into the world, could not but

feel the discord between the peaceful life, rigid conduct, and high

ideals of his home on the one hand, and the gloomy struggle for

existence, lax morals of the officials, and the low standards of the

world about him on the other. When Turgenef therefore was introduced

into society, he was already saturated with revolutionary ideas, and it

was not long before he found the atmosphere of his native land stifling;

and already, at the age of nineteen, he had to face the question whether

to stay and endure, or--to flee. The boy of nineteen cannot endure; go

then from Russia he must, but go--whither? Fortunately, just beyond the

western border there lay a country which had already proved the promised

land of others equally defiant with Turgenef. Germany already harbored

Stankevitch, Granofsky, Katkof, and Bakunin. The youth of Russia of

those days had metaphorically cried to the Germans what a thousand

years before them the Slavs had cried literally to the Varangians: "Our

land is wide, and overflowing with abundance; but of order in it there

is none. Come ye, therefore; and rule over us, and restore order among

us!" Germany thus became the land of milk and honey for the Russians

hungry in spirit. Whatever had any ambition looked to a visit to Germany

with the same longing with which a Mohammedan looks to the shrines of

Mecca.

9. Berlin was the first halting-station of the pilgrims; Böck was

lecturing there on Greek literature, Zumpt on Roman antiquities, and

Werder was expounding the philosophy of the man who boasted or

complained of being understood by only one man, and that one

misunderstood him. To these masters in the education of hair-splitting

flocked almost all who became celebrated afterwards in Russia's public

life, and even the government was sending students to Berlin at public

expense. To these masters Turgenef also went, hearing Greek literature

and Roman antiquities by day, and committing to memory the elements of

Greek and Latin grammar by night. For in the Russian university, where

Turgenef had hitherto spent two years, the professors were appointed not

because of their knowledge of Latin and Greek, but because of their

knowledge of military tactics.

10. When after two years Turgenef returned to his native land, he

brought back with him, indeed, a high knowledge of Latin grammar, but a

total ignorance of the highest aims of life. He brought back with him a

religious scepticism, and a metaphysical pessimism, which colored

henceforth his whole life, and therefore his artistic works. For those

were the days when men yet believed that the great problems of the soul

in its relation to the gods and to men could be solved not so much by

living and by doing, as by disputing and by talking; those were the days

when the philosopher's stone, turning all things into gold, was sought

not in a rule for the conduct of life, such as "Love thy neighbor," or

"Do unto others," but rather in the barren, egg-dancing,

acrobatically-balanced formula, "What is, is right." Those were the

days when Hegel was supreme in philosophy because of his obscurity, as

Browning is now supreme in poetry because of his; the shrivelled,

evaporated, dead grain of wheat was prized all the more because it had

been searched out with painful toil from the heap of chaff. "By their

fruits ye shall know them." The fruit of the deep study of Browning is

an intimate knowledge of the use of English particles; and the fruit of

the devoted study of Hegel was an intimate knowledge of metaphysical

verbiage: being, substance, essence, and absolute. But of life-giving

nourishment there was none to be had. The barrenness of all this,

Turgenef indeed soon did perceive, but when the disenchantment came, his

blood was already poisoned; his very being was eaten into by doubt, and

almost to the very end of his days Turgenef remained a fatalistic

sceptic, a godless pessimist; not till his old age did he espy the

promised land. It was only when he witnessed with his own eyes the

boundless self-sacrifice of the revolutionists, when the old man was

moved by the heroism of the young Sophie Bardine even to the kissing of

the very sheet upon which the girl's burning words to her judges were

printed,--then, indeed, he regained his faith. He now hoped for his

country, and stood even ready to become the head of the revolutionary

movement in Russia; but for his artistic career all this came too late.

In fact, his faith in God he never regained, though his hope for man did

come back at last in his old age with the glow of his younger days.

11. This fundamental philosophic scepticism which had poisoned

Turgenef's mind throughout the best years of his life accounts for a

striking change which in time took place in the method of his art.

Hitherto his art had been photographic of individuals. His "Memoirs of a

Sportsman" is a gallery, not of ideals, not of types, but of actual

men,--a gallery put on exhibition for the same end for which the rogues'

gallery is exposed at the police headquarters. It is a means towards the

welfare of the country. But after that book, when the scepticism had

become part of his being, his method changes. For he now becomes

convinced that the misrule of Russia is not so much due to the

government as to the people themselves; that existence is in itself

evil; that salvation, therefore, if it can come at all, must come not

from without, but from within; that reform, therefore, was needed not so

much for the institution, as for the men themselves. And to him men are

diseased. He no longer therefore paints individual men, but henceforth

he paints types; just as the physician first studies the disease not as

affecting this patient or that, but as likely to affect all men, every

man.

12. For much of this scepticism before life and irreverence before God

Turgenef had to thank the paternal government of his fatherland. There

are indeed those to whom sorrow comes like a messenger from the skies

above, and lifts them heavenward on its wings. Turgenef alas! was not

one of these. His was one of those souls whom sorrow deprives not only

of the joys of the present, but also of the hopes of the future; and the

government saw to it that of sorrows poor Turgenef have enough.

Homelessness is an affliction to all sons of Adam, but to none is the

sorrow of exile so intense as to the Russian. And to exile Turgenef was

soon driven. Hid under glowing pictures of nature and fascinating

figures of men, the real meaning of the "Memoirs of a Sportsman," while

they appeared in detached sketches, eluded readily enough the Argus-eyed

censor. But when these sketches were gathered into a living book, then

whatever had eye could behold, and whatever had ear could hear, their

heavenly message. The book therefore creates a sensation, the censor is

astir, hurried consultation takes place, his Majesty himself is roused;

but all this too late; the living book can no longer be strangled. The

government saw that the monster was hydra-headed, and resolved to let it

alone rather than by cutting one of its heads to rouse twenty in its

stead. The book then was spared, but the writer was henceforth doomed;

and the occasion for the final blow is soon enough at hand. The great

Gogol had at last departed. The enthusiastic Turgenef writes a letter

about the dead master, and calls him a great man. "In my land only he

is great with whom I speak, and only while I am speaking with him," had

said Paul the father; and Nicolas proved a worthy son. "In Russia there

shall be no great men," saith the Tsar; and Turgenef is arrested.

High-stationed dame indeed intercedes for the gifted culprit. "But

remember, madame," she is told, "he called Gogol a great man." "Ah,"

high-stationed protectress replies, "I knew not that he committed _that_

crime!" Which crime, accordingly, Turgenef expiates with one month's

imprisonment in the dungeon, and two years' banishment to his estates.

Only when the heir to the throne himself appeased his enraged sire was

Turgenef allowed to go in peace. Once master over himself again,

Turgenef hesitated no longer. He loved, indeed, his country much, but he

loved freedom more; and like a bird fresh from the cage away flew

Turgenef beyond the sea. The migrating bird returns, indeed, in the

spring; but for Turgenef there was no longer any spring on Russian soil,

and once abroad, he became an exile for life.

13. I have said that the heroes of his six great novels are not

photographs, but types. I venture to say that neither Turgenef himself

nor any other Russian ever knew _a_ Bazarof, _a_ Paul Kirsanof, _a_

Rudin, _a_ Nezhdanof. But as in the generic image of Francis Galton the

traits of all the individuals are found whose faces entered into the

production of the image, so in the traits of Turgenef's types every one

can recognize some one of _his_ acquaintance. And such is the life which

the master breathes into his creations, that they become not only

possible to the reader, but they actually gain flesh and blood in his

very presence.

14. And of these types, Turgenef, in harmony with the advance of his own

warfare, has furnished a progressive series. Accordingly the earliest

depicted under the impression of profound despair is the type of the

superfluous man,--the man, who not only _does_ nothing, but _can_ do

nothing, struggle he never so hard. And the superfluous man not only

_is_ impotent, but he _knows_ his impotence, so that he is dead in soul

as well as in body. This brief sketch of a living corpse, written as

early as 1850, forms thus the prologue, as it were, to all his future

tragedies. From this depth of nothingness Turgenef, however, soon rises

to at least the semblance of strength; and while Rudin is at bottom as

impotent as Tchulkaturin, he at least pretends to strength. Rudin, then,

is the hero of phrases, the boaster; he promises marvels, he charms, he

captivates; but it all ends in words, and Rudin perishes as needlessly

as he lived needlessly. In "Fathers and Sons," however, Bazarof is no

longer a talker; he already rises to indignation and rebellion; he

_lives out_ his spirit, and stubbornly resists society, religion,

institutions. From Bazarof Turgenef ascends still higher to Nezhdanof in

"Virgin Soil," whose aggressive attitude is already unmistakable.

Nezhdanof no longer indulges in tirades against government, but he

glumly organizes the revolutionary forces for actual battle. Lastly,

Turgenef arrives at the highest type of the warrior, at Sophia

Perofskya; and this his last type he paints in brief epilogue, just as

his first type he had painted in brief prologue. What this his last

type meant to Turgenef is best seen from the short prose-poem itself.