Ivan Turgénief was born at Orel on the 28th of October, 1818. This
date, given by Turgénief himself in a letter to the Russian journalist
Suvarin, corresponds to the 9th of November in our calendar.
His father, Sergéi Nikolayevitch, and his mother, Várvara Petrovna,
died early.[25] He was brought up by his grandmother, a Russian lady
of the old school, haughty by nature and of despotic disposition. The
portrait of this “severe and choleric” _baruina_ is found sketched in
vigorous outlines in the little story “Punin and Baburin.” This story,
says Turgénief in the letter which I have just mentioned, “contains
much biography.”
Turgénief’s grandmother lived in the country, on an estate a short
distance from the city of Orel. Here the child became passionately
fond of nature. From the age of twelve he entered into intimate
relationship with trees and flowers; and he felt, when in contact with
them, impressions whose vividness remains after more than forty years
in the deeply stirred remembrances of the mature man.
“The garden belonging to my grandmother’s property was a large park of
ancient date. On one side it sloped towards a pond of running water,
wherein lived not only gudgeon and tench, but also _salvelines_,
the famous _salvelines_, those little eels which are found scarcely
anywhere nowadays. At the head of this pond grew a dense rose-bed;
higher up, on both sides of the ravine, stretched a thicket of vigorous
bushes,--hazel, elder, honeysuckle, black-thorn, in the lower part
encroached upon by tall grass and lovage. Amid the clumps of trees,
but only here and there, appeared very small bits of emerald-green
lawn of fine and silken grass, prettily mottled with the dainty pink,
yellow, lilac caps of those mushrooms called _russules_; and there the
golden balls of the great celandine hung in luminous patches. There
in springtime were heard the songs of nightingales, the whistling of
blackbirds, and the cuckoos’ call. It was always cool there, even
during the warmest days of summer; and I loved to bury myself in those
depths where I had my favorite hiding-places, mysterious, known to
myself alone--or at least so I imagined.”
Prepared by this beneficent influence of colors, perfumes, and the
sounds of rustic life, the child’s moral education was directed,
without anybody’s knowledge, and influenced for all time, by the
presence of two outlandish servants, flitting members of the high-born
lady’s household. One of them was a “philanthropic and philosophical
plebeian,” destined to die in Siberia; the other, a sort of innocent
enthusiast, a great reader of Russian epics then out of fashion. The
former sowed in the young Turgénief’s soul the seeds of a liberalism
which will bear fruit in the most manly resolves; the latter kindled in
the lad’s lively imagination a poetic flame whose heat and glory will
shine out in a score of masterpieces.
Towards the age of thirteen, the young Ivan was removed from these
influences. He was given two tutors, one French and the other German.
Having obtained his diploma as candidate in philology, he went to
Berlin to finish, or rather begin anew, his studies in the humanities;
and he brought them to a close by plunging into the current of
the Hegelian philosophy. He came back to Russia converted to that
“occidentalism” which we shall define later when we study Turgéniefs
political theories.
He made his _début_ as a writer in 1843, with a little poem,
“Parasha.”[26] The critic Biélinsky gave it such praise that it covered
the author with confusion. Towards the end of his life, Turgénief
criticised his poetry with a severity that was absolutely sincere. Even
at this period, he set as little value on his verses as though he
had already shown his ability in a prose masterpiece. The masterpiece
appeared three years later, in 1846. The first story in “The Annals
of a Sportsman,”[27] “Khor and Kalinuitch,” was published in the
_Sovremennik_ (“Contemporary”); and at a single stroke Turgénief’s fame
reached a height which will never be surpassed by any of his great
works.[28]
[Most of] the other stories in Turgénief’s first collection were
written abroad. The author came back to Russia in 1851, but only to
leave it again two years later. He will still have a domicile there,
and above all he will come back regularly to keep up his relations,
and touch foot to earth; but it may be said that after 1863 he made
only flying visits to his country. The Russians have heaped reproaches
on Turgénief for this abandonment of his native soil. It has always
been easily explained. There was, at least primarily, a sort of state
reason. In 1852, owing to an article on Gogol’s death, Turgénief
got into difficulty with the imperial censorship, which ended in a
month of close imprisonment, and in the writer being interned at his
estate. After two years of solitude and work, Turgénief felt the need
of “gaining freedom, the knowledge of himself.” He acquired these
conditions, outside of which it was impossible for him to write and to
struggle, at the price of life in a foreign country.[29]
But behold what was not known, and what was revealed only by the
posthumous publication of Turgénief’s letters. This Russian who made
his home abroad, who dwelt twenty years in France, and died in the very
heart of Paris, was overwhelmed during his forced or voluntary exile
with the blackest melancholy of homesickness, and during the last part
of his life suffered even the sharpest torment.
He did not succeed in acclimating himself, either at Baden Baden, in
spite of the charm of the situation where his poet’s glance first
rested; or at Paris, where he was to be enchained by the bonds of love
which he himself called “imperishable, indissoluble.” It may be asked,
in regard to this well-known friendship, whether Turgénief, exiled from
Russia by his desire for liberty, succeeded in avoiding all the forms
of dependence. It is a problem which I leave to the most inquisitive to
settle. I confine myself to pointing out in Turgénief the expressions
which now and again betray his weariness of exile, his restlessness as
of a Northern bird, a captive swan or eider, languishing, mourning with
regret for its cold natal seas. “I am condemned to a Bohemian life,
and I must make up my mind never to build me a nest.” “In a foreign
atmosphere,” he writes once more, “I decompose like a frozen fish in
time of thaw.... I shall certainly come back to Russia in the spring.”
During the winter of 1856 Turgénief made this promise to return; and
he repeats it many times, as though to assure himself further excuses
for keeping it. From that time he knows all the disappointments of a
wandering life; and to express the idea of not feeling at home where
one is, he uses a word of rare power: “Say what you will, but in a
foreign country a man is _dislocated_: you are needful to no one,
and no one is needful to you.” Far from growing feeble, this painful
impression will increase as time goes on; the flame of regret, instead
of going out or dying down, will get fresh vigor, and break forth in
new developments.
First it is the family instinct, which wakens and which speaks very
eloquently at that ambiguous hour when youth begins to withdraw, and
when, like the foliage in autumn, one feels a premonitory shiver,
harbinger of the wintry winds. “Anenkof married,” says Turgénief
smiling, “is handsomer than ever.” “Get thee a wife,” he writes
seriously to another of his friends: “it is the one thing needful.”
Then there is also the acute feeling of the impoverishment of the
creative faculty, the very disturbing realization or apprehension of a
sort of literary _anema_ due to the deprivation of the desired climate
with its inspiring horizons, with its atmosphere filled with vivifying
breezes and suggestive sounds. “I will admit, if you please, that the
talent with which I was endowed by nature has not grown smaller; but
I have nothing on which to set it to work. The voice is rested: there
is naught to sing, so it is better to be silent. And I have nothing to
sing, because I live away from Russia.” “Living abroad,” he says in
another place, “the fountain from which my inspiration sprang has dried
up.”
Finally, more than all, it is the lofty sadness and the noble remorse
at not being on hand, at not mingling more intimately in the troublous,
dangerous drama which is enacting on Russian soil. “In fact,” Turgénief
writes his friend the great author, Lyof Tolstoï, “Russia is now
passing through serious and gloomy times; but it is for that very
reason that at this moment one feels the gnawing of conscience at
living like a foreigner.”
And so this existence which seemed to be ruled by a certain
indifference, a sort of elegant and fortunate dilettanteism, was early
crossed, and to the very end disturbed, by fits of melancholy and
splenetic depression, the secret of whose existence few people, I am
inclined to think, ever discovered. Who seeing Turgénief unaffectedly
smiling, in a humor not exactly sportive, but sweet, even, and
obliging, would have suspected that after an interview with his
Parisian friends, for whom he saved all the flower of his wit, he would
shut himself up to confide his heart-secret to pages destined to fall
only under the softened and by no means mocking eyes of his old Russian
comrades?
One can easily imagine the sympathy roused in a Polonsky, for example,
by passages such as this: “The chill of old age every day penetrates
farther into my soul: it takes entire possession of it. The absolute
indifference which I find in me makes me tremble for myself. I can now
repeat with Hamlet,--
“‘How stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems me that life!’[30]
Perhaps this mood will pass; or, if it lasts, perhaps I shall succeed
in _lignifying_, and in that case, it is all the same.”
Another day he tears out from his private journal this page, the
disappearance of which is to be deeply regretted: “Again I am at my
table, and in my soul it is gloomier than the gloomiest night. Thus,
like a moment, passes the day, empty, aimless, colorless. A space to
give a passing glance, and, lo! it is bedtime again. No right to life,
no desire to live. Nothing to do, nothing to expect, nothing to hope
for.... Thou speakest of halos of glory, and of enchanting tones. O my
friend! we are the fragments of a vase broken long ago.”
When once the straits of old age were crossed, Turgénief enjoyed a few
years of relative calm, of less bitter resignation. It was the time of
his intimacy with George Sand and Flaubert. They both died. Illness
falls upon Turgénief himself, and nails him pitilessly to the land of
exile.
From the day when the way of return is cut off, the “occidental”
is seized once more with the agony of homesickness for the mother
country. His eyes and his heart are fastened immovably on the corner of
Russia whither all the memories of childhood and youth draw him. Unable
to see his village of Spaskoe, he sends his best friends to it, and
establishes them there. He begs them to give him endless details about
the peasants, about the women, the school, the chapel, the hospital.
He worries about the garden, and urges Mrs. Polonskaïa to look upon
its most humble products with “the eyes of the master.” He feels more
keenly than ever the value of what he has lost. In addition to his ever
renewed and lively regrets comes the feeling of bitterness and mourning
which is born of the irreparable. His country calls him, and draws
him with such force, that he has the sensation of a great “tearing
asunder.” That is the expression to which it is necessary to hold fast.
It is calculated to surprise even those who had the good fortune often
to meet Ivan Sergéyevitch; but what regret it ought to cause those who,
deceived by the way in which Turgénief persisted in living far away
from the Russian land, cruelly upbraided him for having forgotten his
country!
Turgénief was so far from forgetting Russia, that he went back almost
every year; and he wrote almost all his works there. The critics
scarcely had any suspicion of such a thing. They attacked Turgénief’s
later novels, bringing up against them his residence abroad. “How
could he know Russia any more? He no longer lives there.” Turgénief
was indignant at this objection, which “that old woman called the
public” persisted in hurling at him. He answered this argument once for
all, in terms which must be quoted: “The objection can only be made
to what I have published since 1863. Until that time,--that is, until
my forty-fifth year,--I lived in Russia, scarcely going out of the
country, except the years from 1848 to 1850. During just those years
I wrote ‘The Annals of a Sportsman.’ On the other hand, ‘Rudin,’ ‘The
Nest of Gentlemen,’ ‘On the Eve,’ and ‘Fathers and Sons’ were written
in Russia. But that makes no difference to the old woman. Her mind is
already made up.”
To be a little more precise, “Rudin” was published in 1855. “A Nest
of Gentlemen”[31] appeared in 1859 [1858?], and the year 1862 was
distinguished by the appearance of “Fathers and Sons.” Better than any
one, Turgénief understood the necessity of writing nothing without his
models before him; and he went to seek for them where they were to be
found. Turgénief’s correspondence shows these scruples in a score of
places, and especially in regard to “Fathers and Sons.” Having once
conceived the plan of the work, the novelist has no rest until he finds
himself in Russia. There only can he imagine, create, or, to speak more
accurately, reproduce what he sees in real life. His pen, which refused
to move as long as he was abroad, runs and flies over the paper. The
sight of familiar landscapes refreshes the parched brain: inspiration
flows.
Between the romance of “Fathers and Sons,” and that of “Smoke,” which
was published in 1867, during the period when the Russian writer was an
habitual resident of Baden Baden,[32] appeared quite a large number of
shorter stories and tales of less pretension, but not of less value.
There is more than one masterpiece of sentiment or imagination in
“Apparitions,” in “Strange Stories,” “Spring Waters,” “Living Relics.”
Not all these collections preceded “Smoke,” but they came shortly
before or shortly after it.
Between “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil,” Turgénief’s last great novel, passes
a period of nearly ten years. The cause of this long silence was the
alienation which had arisen between the writer and his public. Russian
readers had already begun to show their dissatisfaction with “Fathers
and Sons,” and the causes of this displeasure deserve to be closely
examined. We shall return to them in the course of this study. The
spitefulness of the critics was let loose against the very satirical
romance “Smoke;” other works, such as “The King Lear of the Steppe,”
did not even have the success of causing scandal, and were “damned with
faint praise.” “That,” said Turgénief, “for an author who is growing
old, is worse than a _fiasco_. It is the best proof that it is time to
stop, and I am going to stop.”
In such a resolution, there were other motives besides pique.
Turgénief felt weary, and, as it were, short of inspiration or of
subjects. In the intervals between the recuperative journeys which we
have mentioned, he was obliged to nourish himself on his own substance.
He knew that to suspend them, or even to postpone them too long, was at
the risk of losing his strength and wasting away even to consumption.
“I am compelled, like a bear in winter, to suck my paw; and thus it is
that nothing comes forth.”
The weariness disappeared, the pique wore away, and gradually this firm
resolution to enjoy rest and absolute silence was shaken. Turgénief
finally even found excellent reason for resuming the pen. It was
necessary, not to blot out, but to complete, the effect of “Fathers
and Sons” by writing another romance, which this time should clear up
misunderstandings, and put the author in the position and in the rank
that he felt he ought to hold. This romance, “Virgin Soil,”[33] did
not appear till 1876; but almost two years beforehand Turgénief was
talking of it, thinking about it, and working at it. It can be seen in
his correspondence, that the work is in some degree taking shape; and
under each abstract formula one can already detect the outlines of a
character who will be the realization of it.
It is easily understood how Turgénief, who expected so much from this
last work, who thought that he had put into it the best of his talent,
and reached the culmination of his creative faculty, was disappointed
and discouraged to receive once more only reproaches and blame. “This
time,” he says, “it is my last original work. Such is my decision,
and it is irrevocable.... I may possibly busy myself still with
translations. I am contemplating ‘Don Quixote’ and Montaigne.” In vain
opinion calms down, changes base, turns to praise and admiration: he
remains firm in his design of staying in retreat, and of “joining the
veterans.” Indeed, for a few months at least, he seems to drop this
implement of the writer, “which he has used for thirty years.”
He travels abroad, in England; and quickly finds himself too well
known, too much entertained, too much exhibited. This excess of glory
is incompatible with his modesty.
Was it the delight in his visit to Russia in the spring of 1878, was it
the joy of renewing long-interrupted relations of intimacy with Count
Lyof Tolstoï? At all events, Turgénief again finds literary work to his
taste. At first, it is true, he is seen occupying himself only with the
work of others. He wishes to do for Tolstoï the same service in France,
as for Flaubert in Russia, by popularizing their works in translation.
Or he publishes Pushkin’s correspondence, and supervises a superb
edition of the complete works of his favorite poet.
He writes Bougival his “Song of Triumphant Love,” which he regretfully
allows to be printed, and which is this time hailed as a marvel. He
makes a selection of his “Poems in Prose.” He puts some personal
reminiscences in the form of short stories; among others, “The Hopeless
Man.” He already passes beyond the horizon of life,--which is ending
for him amid the most cruel sufferings,--by writing that half-real
vision entitled “The Morrow of Death.”
Turgénief, by these short works, endeavored to get himself into the
mood of writing another great work. He was already beginning to speak
of it to his friends; he explained the subject; he had, perhaps,
blocked out his plan; and since we know his habits of work, and his
method, we are safe in adding that he had conceived the principal
types, that he had seen the majority of the characters pass and halt
before his eyes. In this romance, Turgénief intended to compare the
Russian with the French _grévistes_ or anarchists. We see it is the
subject which Zola had the ambition to take up in “Germinal;” and, in
spite of the popularity of the work, I may be allowed to believe that
this subject still remains to be treated.
The idea of this great romance must have been suggested to Turgénief’s
mind, as a consequence of his almost triumphal journey in Russia,
on the occasion of the Pushkin festival. A few years had sufficed
absolutely to change the feelings of the younger generation in Russia.
The popularity which the author of “The Annals of a Sportsman” so
suddenly won was restored to him after a pretty long period of
alienation, and at last beatified the author of “Virgin Soil.” The
enthusiastic reception of the Moscow students filled his soul with
the emotion of unexpected joy, and the ovation which he received had
for him all the value of an improbable result. A Russian who was very
near to Turgénief told me that, on this occasion, he found only a few
hesitating and broken words to reply to the speeches of the orators,
the leaders of this young generation; but he had the moistened eyes and
the smile of a happy man.
Full of gratitude for this eleventh-hour homage, he would have been
glad to express his thankfulness in his own manner; and doubtless
the new work would have translated it. His illness put a stop to his
project. On the 8th of April, 1882, Turgénief writes to Mrs. Polonskaïa
to inform her of the physician’s diagnosis in regard to what they
call his _angina pectoris_, or his gouty neuralgia of the heart. The
term was not accurate. It is known that Turgénief died of cancer of
the spinal marrow. Whatever the trouble was, the torment of it became
atrocious, and the suffering which the invalid underwent lasted
more than a year. He bore this slow agony with great sweetness. His
complaints were rare, and they were for the most part hidden under a
veil of irony which robbed them of every shade of bitterness.
Pinched by pain as by a vise, he still found the time and the power to
address comforting raillery to those who were sadder than himself. “For
your consolation,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I wish to quote one
of Goethe’s remarks, made just before his death. It would seem as if he
at least had to satiety all of the happiness that life can give. Think
what a pitch of glory he reached, loved by women, and hated by fools;
think that he had been translated even into Chinese; that all Europe
was setting out in pilgrimage to salute him; that Napoleon himself said
of him, ‘There is a man!’ think that our Russian critics, the Uvarofs
and others, burned incense under his nose: and yet, at the age of
eighty-two, he declared that during his long life he had not been happy
a quarter of an hour all told. Then for you and me it is the will of
God, isn’t it? Suppose the perfect health which Goethe always enjoyed
is lacking to us, still he was bored.... But what is to be done about
it?”
On the 3d of July, 1883, Turgénief with feeble hand, and at the cost
of cruel pangs, wrote in pencil the following unsigned letter to his
friend the great novelist Lyof Tolstoï: “It is long since I have
written you, for I have been and I am literally on my death-bed. It is
impossible for me to recover: it is not within the limits of thought.
I write you simply to tell you that I am happy to have been your
contemporary, and to express to you my last and most sincere request:
my friend, return to literary work! This talent of yours came to you
from the source whence come all our gifts. Ah! how happy I should be if
my prayer were to have the effect upon you so deeply desired! As for
me, I am a dead man. The doctors do not even know what name to give
my ailment. Gouty neuralgia of the stomach; no walking, no eating, no
sleeping. Bah! it is tiresome to repeat all this. My friend, great
writer of the Russian land, hear my supplication. Let me know if you
receive this slip of paper, and allow me once more to press you
closely in my embrace,--you, your wife, and all your family. I cannot
write you more, I am weary.”
Turgénief died a month later, on Monday, Sept. 3, 1883.
Turgéniefs features are so well known that it seems unnecessary to
sketch them in his biography. One of his characters, the gigantic
Karlof, thus defined the men of his race: “We are all born with
light hair, brilliant eyes, and pale faces; for we have sprung up
under the snow.” Turgénief himself had a good share of these race
characteristics. But in France the majority of people knew the good
giant only after he was well along in life, and when he already had the
aspect of one of those venerable kings of whom the poet speaks:--
... _Nosco crines incanaque menta._
Turgénief was of a very honest, very obliging, and very affable
nature.[34] Those who met him saw him to the best advantage at moments
when he allowed himself to talk with a charming frankness. He talked
deliciously, with abundance of feeling and a fluency of expression,
which went with him even when he spoke in French. He enchanted those
who listened to him in his moments of enthusiasm: always lively and
original, his conversation then became passionate and brilliant, even
lyrical. Listening to this stream of ideas and words hurrying in eager
floods, not noisily, from the lips of this old man of heroic mould and
structure, one involuntarily thought of some Homeric bard. There was
also “the harmony of the cicadas” and “all the sweetness of honey” in
the voice of the Nestor of the steppes.