THE RUSSIAN HAMLET
The modern world was there, and it kept calling to the youth of Russia.
There came a skillful novelist, whose task it was to interpret his
country to the outside world, and at the same time to interpret the
outside world to Russia. He came of a family of wealthy landowners, and
received the best education available; but he ventured at the funeral of
Gogol to praise the work of this great master--which so incensed the
government that he was sentenced to exile upon his own estate. Three
years later he succeeded in getting permission to go abroad, and lived
the rest of his life in Germany and France, where he was free to write
as he pleased.
The first work of Ivan Turgenev was called “A Sportsman’s Sketches”;
pictures of the peasant types he met while on shooting trips. It was a
safe, aristocratic occupation, that of killing birds for pleasure, and
surely no government could object to a gentleman’s describing the
peasants who went along to carry his guns and his lunch. The government
did not object; and so the reading public in Russia had brought vividly
before it the fact that human beings, of their own blood and their own
faith, were serfs at the mercy of landlords, to be sold like other
chattels. So the tsar was forced to free the serfs.
Turgenev settled in Paris; a great, handsome giant, a wealthy bachelor,
amiable and simple, a charming literary lion. His friends were Gautier,
Flaubert, and other novelists, from whom he learned the perfections of
artistry, the pictorial charm, the “enamels and cameos” ideal. He had no
need to learn from them the bitter and corroding despair, because that
was his Russian heritage.
He wrote seven novels, all short and simple; the theme of each being the
stock theme of leisure-class fiction, a man and a woman at the crisis of
their love. His girls are very much alike; direct and honest, they flame
up, and are ready to act upon their feelings, to go anywhere with the
man they love. But the man does not know where to go or what to do. The
hero of the first novel, Rudin, is a kind of modern Hamlet, who became
proverbial as the type of Russian intellectual. He is incapable of
anything but talk, and tells the girl that they must submit to her
family, which opposes the marriage.
In the other novels the heroes do not always submit. There is, for
example, Bazarov, the Nihilist; he is a fighter, and ready for
action--but Turgenev tells us what he thinks of man’s dream of
accomplishment, when Bazarov scratches his finger and dies of blood
poisoning. Another hero is a Bulgarian, and there is a chance for action
in Bulgaria; but unfortunately this man’s lungs are weak, and he dies in
the arms of the brave girl who eloped with him.
You see, it is hard for Turgenev to portray anyone who believes, because
he is an artist in the leisure-class tradition of fatalism and urbane
incredulity. Life is a malady; it is a malady in cruel and barbarous
Russia, and no less so in free but cynical and licentious Paris.
Turgenev, living safely abroad, describes heroes who also live abroad;
he has not the moral courage to face Russia and the Russian problem,
even in his thoughts. His people are the exiles and intellectuals, the
travelers and parasites, amusing themselves in the capitals of Europe.
He loathes this loafing class, and satirizes it without mercy; but also
he cannot help seeing the weaknesses of the revolutionists--and the
revolutionists were of course indignant at that, because they were
fighting for human freedom, and thought that a man of culture and
enlightenment ought to help them.
So there was furious controversy over each of Turgenev’s novels, and it
hurt the feelings of the great, good-natured giant, and he did a lot of
explaining, some of it contradictory. The truth is that he did not know
quite what he believed; he was not a thinker, but merely an artist in
the narrow sense of the word, one who sees what exists and portrays it
with cunning skill. This makes him, of course, a darling of the
leisure-class critics, art for art sakers and dilettanti. The French
translations of his novels had an enormous vogue, likewise the English
translations, and men like Henry James thought him a god. But out of
Russia there now comes a new voice; the revolutionary proletariat is
making Russia over, and the young students report themselves bored with
Turgenev; he whines and moans and gets them nowhere. You see, the
Russians can now act, like other people; and so the Russian Hamlet is
laid on the shelf.