II.

Was Turgénief only an artist, only a dilettante?

We must give up this false definition which his enemies wished to

become current, and which his friends even have been too willing

to let go with contravention. Superficial critics deny in him all

capacity, all enlightenment, on the questions of social order: they

have gone so far as to say that in these respects he has neither

teachings nor opinion. Certain fanatics, young or old, the Písarefs,

the Dostoyevskys, have taken it upon them to advance this pretext for

denying him the right to write and to print his works, and to be read

as they are and more than they are.

It is true to say that Turgénief never laid down, or even sketched

out, a programme; that he never made public speeches, that he did not

peddle interviews, that he did not lucubrate leading articles for the

editorial pages of journals. What am I saying? Perhaps he did not

even reply to a sensational toast during his active life! Many persons

obtain and grant the title of political man only by this test. In their

judgment, Turgénief was not one.

As for believing that Turgénief had in political matters no definite

opinions, or keen sympathies, or profound views, or well-digested

purposes, it takes a pretty strong dose of passion or of _naïveté_ to

accept and to promulgate this mistake. Those who have read his works

carefully suspected it; those who were in his intimate circle had no

question about it: but no scepticism in this regard could withstand the

revelations of his correspondence.

We know what popularity the Slavophile party gained from the moment of

its birth. The declamations of the Pogodins and the Aksákofs against

“occidental rot,” their dithyrambs in honor of the virtues of the

Slavic race, their childish programmes pretending to put the Russian

people on the right track, and to free it from the old vestment

of foreign ideas and habits which Peter the Great had swaddled it

with,--all this specious rhetoric, flattering at once the national

vanity, ignorance, and indolence, found in Turgénief from his early

youth a decided enemy. His conviction as an occidental, which was the

foundation of all his other convictions, could not be shaken either by

the constant effort of years or by the sudden shock of the most varied

events.

But what was the characteristic of this occidentalism? Did it go so

far as to dislike the special features of the Russian people, and

desire to extirpate the individuality of the race, as one would demand

the excision of a tumor or the extirpation of a wart? Turgénief was

too proud of being a Russian, not to have a legitimate share in the

development of these peculiarities of the national type; but, according

to his own words, it was repugnant to him “to feel any vanity in this

sort of exclusiveness, in whatever sphere it was manifested, pure art

or politics.” In his eyes, Slavophilism was an artificial entity, a

sort of hollow edifice, constructed on foreign models and in imitation

of the German genius.

He could not reconcile himself to the idea of artificially isolating

Russia from the rest of Europe, and of shutting her up in a sort of

quarantine, where, in order to be free from foreign influences, the

result would be that the natal air would not preserve its purity, but

would grow vitiated and rarefied. And with still greater reason, he

regarded as puerile the thought of giving new life to the European

organism by the infusion of the Slavic element. This ambition of

grafting the Russian shoot on the aged wood of other races tore from

him protestations of very expressive irony. “I cannot accustom myself

to this view of Aksákof’s, that it is necessary for Europe, if she

would be saved, to accept our orthodox religion.” Every policy that

adopted this narrow principle seemed to him worthy of reprobation,

at least in its principle. “In freeing the Bulgarians we ought to be

guided to this step, not because they are Christians, but because the

Turks are massacring and robbing them.” “All that is human is dear to

me,” he says again: “Slavophilism is as foreign to me as every other

orthodoxy.”

In bringing these habits of moderation to his judgments of the acts

of the government, and of the men who helped, who extolled, who

blamed, who clogged its action, Turgénief might have expected to cause

dissatisfaction, and to rouse for the most part only murmurs. Early

in point of fact, and even to the end of his career, Turgénief is the

object of violent attacks from the opposite party. At the very moment

when the younger generation of Russians felt that they were travestied

by him in “Fathers and Sons,” and when Tchernuishevsky, the author of

the famous romance “What is to be Done?”[35] turns to his own profit

the misunderstandings caused by the appearance of the hero Bazarof;

Turgénief, for having created this same Bazarof, for having refused to

exaggerate or blacken his character, makes for himself irreconcilable

enemies in the reactionary party. He quarrels with Katkof, the

officious journalist, the confidant of the heir-apparent, the inspirer

of that retrograde policy which has prevailed in Russia of late years.

“When I left ‘The Russian Messenger’ (_Russki Vyestnik_), Katkof sent

me word that I did not know what it was to have him for an enemy. He

is trying, therefore, to show me. Let him do his best. My soul is not

in his power.”

No consideration of interest, no low ambition for popularity, could

have decided Turgénief to deviate from this line of conduct. We

remember the quite barren movement of agitation started a few years ago

by those young people who called themselves, somewhat naïvely, “the

new men.” A lady who was one of their sympathizers sends Turgénief a

bundle of documents: it is the confession of one of the representatives

of this progressive generation. Turgénief finds in this jumble of

prose and verse only two characteristics,--an intoxicated, delirious

self-conceit, and boundless incapacity and ignorance. It is vain to

make allowance for time of life, and to attribute a part of their

faults to the extreme youth of these individuals puffed up with a

mighty sense of their small importance. Under it all there lies “only

feebleness of thought, absence of all knowledge, a scantiness of talent

verging on poverty.” He does not put his unfavorable judgment under any

sort of subterfuge or oratorical disguise: his frankness costs him a

storm of bitter criticisms.

Yet Turgénief is the very same man who will receive in Paris other

young people, with still more trenchant opinions, still more angular

forms; and “in their presence,” he says eloquently, “I, old man that I

am, I open my heart, because I feel in them the ‘real presence,’ and

force, and talent, and mind.” These virtues attracted him and disarmed

him, no matter in what class of people or in what group of thinkers he

found them. Thus he is seen giving the patronage of his name, and the

cover of his authority, to the first work on the newspaper _Le Temps_

of a young Russian, treated by the home government as a dangerous

character. To punish Turgénief for this audacious deed, the minister

causes him to be insulted, slandered by a paid scribbler. “Verily,

among us,” writes Turgénief, “many shameful things are exposed to God’s

air, like this vile article of the rascally....”

Now, a few days later, on the occasion of the attempted assassination

of 1879, behold how the man whom “The Moscow Gazette” (edited by

Katkof) affected to confound with the scatter-brains of Nihilism,

expressed himself: “The last ignominious news has greatly troubled me.

I foresee that certain people will use this senseless outrage to the

disadvantage of the party which justly, in the interest of its liberal

ideas, places the Tsar’s life above every thing; for salutary reforms

are to be expected from him alone. In Russia, how can a reform be

imagined which does not come from above?... I am deeply troubled and

grieved. Here for two days I have not slept at the idea of it. I think

about it, and think about it; but I cannot come to any conclusion.”

Whatever were his apprehensions, he could not foresee with what fury

of re-action the Emperor would strive to stem the Liberal current, by

which, when he first mounted the throne, he had allowed himself to be

carried onward. Turgénief suffered from this aberration of power more

than can be told. He foresaw new acts of despair, which would give

a color of reason to measures of repression constantly growing more

crushing. He attributed this infatuated policy to the influence of

Pobyedonostsef, the _Ober-Prokuror_ of the Holy Synod; and above all

to the counsels of Katkof, that former Liberal, that exile converted to

the most brutal absolutism. He writes: “Who can tell what is going on

at home, _Katkovio regnante_?”

With what passion Turgénief uttered one day before two callers, one

of whom was a Frenchman, this expression, which I find also in his

correspondence! With what pathetic eloquence he mourned for the days of

yore, the days of the old oppression! “We had then a bare wall before

us,” he writes, “but we knew where it was necessary to make the breach.

To-day the door is ajar, but to enter through this narrow opening is

more difficult than to undermine and cast down the wall.”

I find, among some notes taken down after an afternoon call upon Ivan

Turgénief during the winter of 1882, a rather expressive _résumé_ of

his conversation, which I beg permission to quote in its entirety. “At

that time we felt sustained by an auxiliary which allows one to defy,

and which finally softens, all the severities of power,--Opinion. We

had on our side the two stimuli which lead to victory,--the feeling

of duty, the presentiment of success. Who would have believed that the

day would come when we should look back with regret upon this period of

terror, but of hope; of oppression, but of activity! Indeed, were not

the youth of that time happy and enviable compared to those of to-day?

What sincere mind can help feeling the deepest pity for that handful

of Russians, educated, or greedy for education, whom the misfortune

of the times has driven to the most frightful extremes? You might say

that every thinker is caught between the anvil of an ignorant populace

and the hammer of a blinded power. The Russian people are afraid

even of those who, scorning every danger, are laboring to gain them

their rights; they are absolutely ignorant, and are afraid of every

innovation. They have the anxious look, and the quick flashes of anger,

of a wild beast. We have just seen them rush upon the Jews with a sort

of frenzy. If the people were not kept like a bear fastened to a chain,

they would treat the revolutionists with the same fairness and the same

gentleness.

“As to the throne, the end of advance in the path of absolutism has

just about been reached. It is now the formidable ideal of tyranny.

During the preceding reign it took the initiative of reform. Alexander

II. was carried away by the current of liberal ideas. He ordered

measures to be taken; above all, he allowed projects to be elaborated.

He wished, for example, to give the district assemblies power enough to

struggle against the abuses of the _tchinovniks_, and to put a stop to

corruption. But one day he was panic-struck. Karakózof’s pistol-shot

drove back into the shade that phantom of liberty, the appearance of

which all Russia had hailed with acclamation. From that moment, and

even to the end of his life, the Emperor devoted himself to the undoing

of all that he had done. If he could have cancelled with one stroke the

glorious _ukaz_ which had proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he

would have been only too glad to disgrace himself.

“What can be said of his successor, that doting sovereign, that victim

nailed to the throne? He shuts himself between four walls, and, what

is worse, between four narrow, limited minds, the responsible editors

of the policy of an anonymous tsar, the former Liberal and exile,

Katkof. It is a war upon ideas, a crusade of ignorance. Russia is

having its Inquisition, it has its Torquemada. What other name is to

be given to that minister of creeds, or, to speak more exactly, that

procuror-general of the Synod, Pobyedonostsef?

“The Tsar sees in Pobyedonostsef the most virtuous and the most saintly

man in all the empire. He has for him all the tenderness of Orgon; and

you might say that he likes to think, like that pig-headed dupe,--

“‘He teaches me for naught to feel affection,

My soul from every friendship he estranges.’

“Just as the Tsar loves and venerates Pobyedonostsef, so he shows

Katkof _naïve_ admiration and respectful deference. In the one he

sees science inborn; in the other, religion personified. But the more

dangerous of these two fanatics is Katkof, the former Liberal, the

companion of Herzen’s misfortunes, the ex-professor of philosophy at

Moscow. He scorns to hold the reins of power; he likes better to give

the word to those who carry the order for him and by him alone. The

ministers are his valets; he has even his under-slaves; it would not be

interesting to mention all their names. He is the disgraceful Richelieu

behind the throne, who terrorizes Russia.”

Notwithstanding the very gloomy aspect of the present, Turgénief had

unshaken faith in the future. “We must not expect that the future will

be all roses. No matter, things will come out all right.” And what were

the means, according to Turgénief’s idea, of realizing this? Give up

illusions and fidgeting. Don’t imagine that you are going to find a

panacea, a remedy for the great evils; and that, to cure the Russian

colossus of all his tribulations, it will be sufficient to practise a

sort of incantation “analogous to the spells used by old women to calm

the toothache suddenly, miraculously.” According to Turgénief, the

miraculous means alone changes: “sometimes it is a man, sometimes the

natural sciences, sometimes a war;” but what is unchangeable is faith

in the miracle. That is the superstition which first of all must be

extirpated.

Likewise the idea of obtaining without delay “large, beautiful, and

glorious” results, the idea of wishing “to move mountains,” must be

renounced. It is necessary to know how to pay attention to little

objects, to limit one’s self to a very narrow circle of action, not

to step out of it; and there without glory, almost without result,

work incessantly. The only activity that is fruitful was defined by

Turgénief, in quoting the two verses of Schiller’s old man: “Unwearied

activity is that which adds one grain of sand to another.” “What!” said

he, “you begin by telling me that your constructive work is ended,

that the school has just been begun; and, a little farther on, you

speak of the despair which takes hold of you! I beg of you, for pity’s

sake: your enterprise has already had some small result. It is not

unfruitful. What more do you want? Let every one do as much in his own

sphere, and there will be a grand, a splendid result.”

And Turgénief was one of the first to put his doctrine into practice.

Just as in his youth he signed the charter for the emancipation of his

serfs, with the same pen which wrote the indictment of serfage in “The

Annals of a Sportsman;” so in the time of his old age, notwithstanding

his absence, tortured as he was by the horrors of disease, he preached

humbleness of aim and constancy of effort, but he preached it by his

example. All his cares were directed to the improvement of the material

and moral condition of his former serfs. He granted them a fifth of

the sum settled upon for the redemption. At his own expense he built

a school; he founded a hospital in his village of Selo Spaskoe; he

succeeded in diminishing drunkenness, and in spreading a taste for

reading in a region where, at the time of his boyhood, an educated,

self-taught _muzhik_ was a genuine rarity.

His correspondence shows that he was greatly concerned about his estate

in the government of Orel: but it was not the revenue of his lands

that troubled him; it was the happiness, the moral welfare, of his

little people of Spaskoe. Behold the evolution which he wanted to see

accomplished from one end to the other of his country, and which, so

far as in him lay, he called forth, he prepared.

Any other policy seemed to him useless, dangerous, almost criminal. He

hoped that the new reign was going to inaugurate a whole tradition

of efforts in favor of the development of the rural classes. That was

why he manifested his sympathy with the new Tsar, on the accession

of Alexander III.: he applied to him the title, the “Emperor of the

_muzhiks_,” and, if this was not a name of praise, it was found at

least to contain a counsel.

“All that one can say,” wrote Turgénief again on the subject of the

Tsar, “is that he is Russian, and nothing but Russian.... Seeing him

anywhere, one would know his country.” I do not know whether these

words went to the Tsar’s heart; but are they not honorable to him

who penned them? What Slavophile would have imagined any thing more

eloquent in their simplicity? In giving this emperor, “in whose veins

runs scarce a drop of Russian blood,” his naturalization papers,

Turgénief surely thought that he had reached the borders of eulogy.