Among the historical characters belonging to Turgénief’s family
were Piotr, who exposed the character of the False Dmitri, and who
in consequence was executed on the Lobno Place in Moscow; and Yakof
Turgénief, the well-known jester of Peter the Great, who, in the
year 1700, had to shear off the _boyars’_ beards. Still more worthy
of mention among those who bore the name of Turgénief was his cousin
Nikolaï Ivanovitch, who was implicated in the celebrated Dekabrist
conspiracy of 1825, and was exiled by Nicholas. He wrote a large work
entitled “Russia and the Russians.” He was a passionate advocate of the
emancipation of the serfs.
Ivan Turgénief’s father served in a regiment of cuirassiers stationed
at Orel, and there he married Várvara Petrovna Lutovinova. His father
resigned with the rank of colonel, and died in 1835. Ivan’s mother
lived till she reached the age of seventy. In 1820 the whole Turgénief
family went abroad and visited Switzerland. At Berne the little
four-year-old Ivan Sergéyevitch narrowly escaped falling a prey to
the bears. His father caught him by the leg just as he was pitching
headlong into the pit. When the family returned to Russia, they lived
in the Government of Orlof; and Ivan Sergéyevitch had tutors of every
nationality except his own. His first acquaintance with Russian
literature came from a serf named Kheraskof, belonging to his mother.
The first Russian book that he ever read was the “Rossiada.” In 1828
the family moved to Moscow, and six years later Ivan Sergéyevitch
entered the University of Moscow; but the year following he left for
Petersburg, where he graduated as _kandidat_ in philology. His first
attempts at writing were made before he graduated; and his teacher,
Pletnef, was able to discover in him signs of future greatness.
Turgénief says, in his “Reminiscences,” “At the beginning of 1827,
while I was a student in the third course of the University of St.
Petersburg, I handed the professor of literature, P. A. Pletnef, one
of the first ‘fruits of my muse,’ as they used to say in those days.
It was a fantastic drama, in iambic pentameters, entitled ‘Stenio.’
In one of the following lectures, Pletnef, without mentioning any
names, analyzed, with his usual kindness, this absolutely stupid piece
of work, in which, with childish incapability, was shown a slavish
imitation of Byron’s ‘Manfred.’ After leaving the university building,
and finding me on the street, he called me to him, and caressed me
like a father, remarking at the same time that there was something
[_tchto-to_] in me. These two words gave me sufficient assurance to
take to him some more of my poetical productions. He picked out two of
them, and a year later published them in ‘The Sovremennik,’ which he
inherited from Pushkin. I don’t remember the title of one; but “The Old
Oak” was the subject of the other, and it began thus:--
“‘The forests’ mighty tsar with curly head,
The ancient oak, bent o’er the water’s sleeping smoothness.’”
In 1838 Turgénief went to Berlin. On his way the ship took fire,
and he narrowly escaped with his life. He afterwards embodied the
recollection in his story, or sketch, “A Fire at Sea.” “I was then
nineteen years old,” he says, in his “Reminiscences,” “and I had been
dreaming about this trip. I was convinced that it was possible to
acquire in Russia only elementary knowledge, but that the source of
real knowledge was abroad. Among the number of the professors in the
St. Petersburg University at that time, there was not one who could
have shaken that conviction in me. Moreover, they themselves felt the
same way. Even the ministry itself, including its chief, Count Uvarof,
was convinced of this same thing; and the latter used to send at his
own expense young men to the universities of Germany. I was at Berlin
(at two different times) for about two years. I studied philosophy,
the ancient languages, history, and with special eagerness I devoted
myself to Hegel under the guidance of Professor Werder. As proof of
the insufficiency of the knowledge to be gained at our own colleges,
I am going to quote this fact: I studied Latin antiquity with Zumpt,
the history of Greek literature with Beck; but at my own home I was
compelled to learn by heart Latin and Greek grammar, of which I had a
very slim acquaintance, and I was not one of the worst candidates.”
In his “Reminiscences” he throws further light on the causes which
induced him to live abroad. He says that there was nothing to keep
him in Russia. Every thing around him was calculated to fill him with
indignation, contempt, and scorn. “I could not hesitate long. It was
necessary either to submit to humiliation, and calmly make up my mind
to follow the general rut over the beaten road, or boldly to push away
‘every thing and all,’ even at the risk of losing much that was dear
and near to my heart. And so I did. I threw myself head first into the
‘German sea,’ which should purify and regenerate me; and, when at last
I emerged from its billows, I became a _Zapadnik_,--a Western man, and
such I remained for all my life.”
In 1841 Turgénief returned to Russia, going directly to Moscow, where
his mother was living. Here he became acquainted with the Slavophiles
Aksákof, Khomiakof, and the Kiriyevskys, who at this time were
just beginning to promulgate their ideas. But Turgénief found them
hopelessly in the “general rut.”
He tells in his “Reminiscences” how he first thought of “Fathers and
Sons.” “I was taking baths at Ventnor, a little town on the Isle of
Wight, in August, 1860, when the first thought of ‘Fathers and Sons’
entered my mind,--that narrative which checked, as it seems to me,
forever the kindly disposition of the Russian younger generation.
More than once I read in journals, and heard that ‘I was off the
track,’ or was ‘bringing in new ideas.’ Some praised me; others, on
the contrary, blamed me. On my part, I must confess that I never
attempted to ‘create a figure.’ I always had for my starting-point,
not an idea, but a living person, to whom I would gradually add and
join suitable elements. The same thing happened in ‘Fathers and
Sons.’ As the foundation of the main figure, Bazarof, the person of a
young provincial doctor, who surprised me very much at the time, was
chosen. He died just before 1860. This remarkable man appeared to me
to contain all the elements of what has since received the name of
Nihilism, but which at that time was just beginning to rise, and had
not yet been formulated. The impression made upon me by this person was
very strong, and at the same time not very clear. At first I could not
account for him very well; and I used my utmost endeavors to hear and
see every thing about me, with a view of vivifying the truthfulness of
my own impressions. This fact confused me. In no book of our literature
could I find a single hint of what seemed to me to be everywhere.
Reluctantly the doubt arose in me whether I was not hunting for a
shadow.”
What he found at last was Bazarof, in which type he predicted the
spirit of a new epoch, and showed “the new man” at the very moment of
his appearance. No one understood it, and hence arose the storm which
assailed the author.
“I experienced impressions,” says Turgénief, “of different kinds, but
all equally disagreeable to me. I noticed coolness, even going so far
as indignation, in many who had been near and dear to me. I received
almost fulsome congratulations from people who belonged to the camp of
my enemies. This confused me: ... it grieved me. But my conscience did
not reproach me. I knew well that I had been true to the type which I
had described.”
M. le Vicomte E. Melchior de Vogüé, in a capital study of Turgénief’s
life and works, thus speaks of the reason for the novelist’s popularity
and influence in Russia: “We read books as the passer-by glances at a
painting in a shop-window, for an instant, from the corner of the eye,
as he goes to his business. If you knew how differently they read their
poets there [in Russia]! What for us is only a feast for enjoyment is
for them the daily bread of the soul. It is the golden age of lofty
literature, which all very youthful peoples in Asia, in Greece, in the
Middle Ages have seen flourishing. The writer is the guide for his
race, the master of a multitude of commingling thoughts; still in a
measure the creator of his language, poet in the ancient and complete
meaning of the word _vates_, poet, prophet. Simple-hearted and serious
readers, new-comers into the world of ideas, eager for direction, full
of illusions about the power of human genius, ask their intellectual
guide for a doctrine, for a reason for life, for a perfect revelation
of the ideal. In Russia the few members of the aristocratic _élite_
long ago reached, and perhaps went beyond, our dilettanteism; but the
lower classes are beginning to read: they read passionately, with
faith and hope, as we read ‘Robinson’ at twelve.... For the Moscow
merchant, the son of the village priest, the small country proprietor,
to whom a few volumes of Pushkin, of Gogol, of Nekrásof represent the
encyclopædia of the human mind, this novel [“Virgin Soil,” or “Fathers
and Sons,” or “A Nest of Noblemen”] is one of the books of the national
Bible: it assumes the importance and the epic significance which the
story of Esther had for the people of Judæa, the story of Ulysses for
the people of Athens, the romance of ‘The Rose’ or of ‘Renart’ for our
ancestors.
“Three years ago, in dedicating the statue of Pushkin at Moscow,
Turgénief quoted a characteristic remark made by a peasant standing
near the monument. In reply to a comrade who asked the name of this
gentleman in bronze, the _muzhik_ said, ‘He was a schoolmaster.’ The
orator appropriated the remark, and developed it, saying rightly that
the peasant in his ignorance had hit upon the true name of the hero
of the celebration. The first Russian poet had been the schoolmaster
of his countrymen, he had given new life to their language and their
thought. The day, not far distant, doubtless, when Turgénief’s statue
will be erected at Moscow, the _muzhik_ will be able to repeat his
saying: he also was a schoolmaster.
“His generation listened to him more willingly than to any other.
It would be a mistake to seek solely in what we call talent for the
reasons of this popular adoption. How many among his primitive and
passionate readers troubled themselves about the question of talent,
of devices of form, delicacies of thought? In literature, as in
politics, a people follow instinctively the men whom they feel belong
to themselves, made of their flesh and their genius, marked by their
virtues and their failings. Ivan Sergeyévitch personified the master
qualities of the Russian people,--their simple-hearted goodness,
simplicity, and resignation. He was, as it is said popularly, _une âme
du bon Dieu_: that mighty brain was ruled by a child’s heart. Never did
I approach him without better comprehending the magnificent meaning
of the gospel saying about the “simple in spirit,” and how this state
of soul can be allied to the artist’s exquisite gifts and knowledge.
Devotion, generosity of heart and of hand, brotherly kindness--all
were as natural to him as an organic function. In our cautious,
complicated society, where every one is armed for the rough struggle of
life, he seemed like a person from another sphere, from some pastoral
and fraternal tribe of the Ural;--some grand, self-forgetful child,
following his thoughts under the sky, as a shepherd follows his flocks
in the steppe.
“Physically, likewise, this tall, calm old man, with his somewhat
coarse features, his _sculpturesque_ head, and his thoughtful gaze,
brought to mind certain Russian peasants,--the elder who sits at
the head of the table in patriarchal families,--but ennobled and
transfigured by the labor of thought, like those peasants of old who
became monks, were worshipped as saints, and are seen represented on
the _ikonostas_ with the aureole and the majesty of prayer. The first
time that I met this good giant, the symbolical statue of his country,
I had great difficulty in making my impression clear: it seemed to me
that I saw and heard a _muzhik_ upon whom had descended the fire of
genius, who had been raised to the pinnacles of mind without losing any
of his native candor. He would assuredly not have been offended by the
comparison, he who so loved his people.”
M. de Vogüé goes on to speak of Turgénief’s work. “The public,” he
says, referring to the “Annals of a Sportsman,” “did not at first
perceive their hidden significance: the watchful censor was deceived.
All that was seen in them was a literary manifestation of the first
order, a new note in Russia. Doubtless Gogol’s influence was apparent
in the young writer’s style, in his comprehension of nature: the
‘Evenings at the Farm’ set the model for the class. It was always the
grand and melancholy symphony of the Russian land; but this time the
interpretation by the artist was quite different. No longer were seen
Gogol’s sharp humor, the frankly popular character of his paintings,
his warm outbursts of enthusiasm suddenly checked by touches of irony:
in Turgénief, no jests or enthusiasm; a soberer note, a more subdued
emotion; landscapes and men are seen in the pale twilight, through an
idealizing mistiness, yet clearly outlined and focussed, as it were,
under the eyes of the ever watchful observer.
“The language, also, is richer, more flexible, more graceful; no
Russian writer had ever carried it to such a degree of expression.
It is not the clear and limpid prose of Pushkin, who had read much
of Voltaire, and did not forget it. Turgénief’s periods run slow and
voluptuous, like the surface of the mighty Russian rivers, without
haste, harmonious, amid the reeds, bearing water-lilies, floating
nests, wandering perfumes, showing luminous vistas, and long mirages of
sky and land, and suddenly reappearing in shady depths. His discourse
stops to gather up any thing,--the humming of a bee, the call of a
night-bird, a passing, caressing, dying breeze. The most elusive
accords of the grand register of nature it translates with the infinite
resources of the Russian keys, flexible epithets, words welded together
with poetic fancy, popular joinings of sound to sense.
“I dwell on that which makes the power of this book: it is only a song
of the earth, and a murmur of a few poor souls directly heard by us.
The writer takes us to the heart of his native land; he leaves us face
to face with this country; he disappears, it seems: yet, if not he,
who then has drawn from things, and condensed on their surface, that
mysterious poetry which they hide within them, but which so few can
see, and which we clearly see here? The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ have
charmed many French readers; yet how much they lose in color across
the double veil of the translation and the common ignorance of the
country!...
“When these fragments were brought together into a volume, the public,
till then uncertain, saw the significance of the work. Some one had
appeared with courage to develop the meaning concealed in Gogol’s
sinister jest about “Dead Souls.” What other name can be given to
that gallery of portraits gathered by the sportsman,--small country
proprietors, selfish and hard; sneaking overseers, idle and rapacious
functionaries; beneath this cruel society, wretched helots, fallen, as
it were, from the state of humanity, touching by force of misery and
submission? The process--however well disguised it be, there is always
a process--was invariably the same. The author causes a ludicrous
being to pass again and again in his lantern, showing all its phases,
laughable and pitiable, in turn, without wants, without resources,
condemned to crepuscular life. By the side of the serf appeared
the master, a half-civilized marionette, a good devil, after all,
unconscious of the harm he was doing, led astray by the fatality of his
environment. This painting, which would otherwise be ugly, repulsive,
the writer clothed with grace and charm, in some sort contrary to his
desire by the inborn virtue of his poetry. Why were all the mainsprings
of life broken in all the heroes of the book? Whence came this malaria
over the Russian land? What was the name of this pest? The reader was
left the trouble of answering.
“It is not very exact to say that Turgénief _attacked_ serfage. Russian
writers, in consequence of the conditions under which they work, as
well as by the peculiar turn of their genius, never attack openly; they
neither argue nor declaim: they paint without drawing conclusions,
and they appeal to pity rather than wrath. Twenty years later, when
Dostoyevsky will publish his “Recollections of a Dead House” (_Zapiski
Mertvava Doma_), his terrible memoirs of ten years in Siberia, he will
proceed in the same way, without a word of mutiny, without a drop of
gall, seeming to find what he describes as quite natural, only a trifle
sad. It is the national trait in all things.... The public understands
by a hint.
“It understood this time. The Russia of serfage looked at itself with
horror in the mirror which was held before its eyes: a long shudder
shook the country; between night and morning the author was famous, and
his cause was half gained. The censorship was the last to comprehend,
but finally it also comprehended. Possibly its sensitiveness will
be wondered at: I have said that serfage was condemned even in
the Emperor Nicholas’s heart. You must know that the wishes of the
censorship do not always coincide with the emperor’s wishes; at
least, it is backward, it is sometimes a reign behindhand. It gave
up launching its thunder against the book, but it kept its eye on
the author. Gogol being dead in the interim, Turgénief dedicated a
warmly eulogistic article to the dead author. This article would seem
inoffensive enough, as it appears in Turgénief’s complete works,[59]
and we should have difficulty in discovering the crime if the criminal
had not revealed the secret in a very gay note: ‘_Apropos_ of that
article, I remember that one day at Petersburg, a lady of very high
rank criticised the punishment inflicted upon me, judging it to have
been undeserved, or at least too severe. As she was warmly speaking
in my defence, some one said to her, “Is it possible that you don’t
know that in this article he called Gogol _a great man_?”--“It is
impossible.”--“I assure you that it is so.”--“Ah! in that case, I have
nothing more to say. I am sorry, but I see that they had to be severe
upon him.”’
“This impertinent epithet, given to a simple writer, cost Turgénief a
month of arrest; then he was advised to go and meditate in his domain.
I imagine that he found that society was very ill arranged, so unfair
are we to the power that wills our best good. It must be confessed,
however, that this power sometimes serves our interest better than
we ourselves, and _lettres de cachet_ are generally in accordance
with the views of Providence. Thirty years earlier an order of exile
saved Pushkin by tearing the poet from the dissipations of Petersburg,
where he was wasting his genius, and by sending him to the sun of the
East, where his genius was to ripen. If Turgénief had remained at the
capital, the warmth of youth and compromising friendships, perchance,
might have brought him into some barren political quarrel: sent into
the solitude of the woods, he lived there laborious years, studying the
humble provincial life of Russia, and gathering materials for his first
great novels.”
An anonymous writer, who knew Turgénief intimately, contributed,
shortly after his death, to “The London Daily News,” an article, some
of the details of which are worthy of preservation: “Turgénief hated
luxury. The more he advanced in life, the more he prized simplicity
in all things. His bedroom at Les Fresnes[60] had an almost austere
aspect. The bed and toilet-stand were in iron; and the desk, drawers,
and a large bookcase, in mahogany, of a plain design. Some photographs
and engraved likenesses of literary and other friends broke the
monotony of the wall. Portrait-cartes, many of which had autographs of
those whom they represented, were stuck into the frame of the chimney
glass.
“Turgénief was the youngest of three very distinguished brothers. Were
the eldest of the trio now living, he would be almost a centenarian. He
remembered Buonaparte, Bernardin, St. Pierre, Talleyrand, Sir Walter
Scott,--of whom he was for some weeks a guest at Abbotsford,--Miss
Edgeworth when she was in the zenith of her fame; visited Mme. de
Staël at Coppet, and fell in with Byron as he was making a tour on
the Rhine. The eldest Turgénief was a many-sided man. Though not a
professional author, he had great literary qualities. His political
insight and sagacity were no less remarkable, and he had a wider
experience of human nature than perhaps any other European of his
time. Though he belonged to a family which stood well with the Court
and high in the administration, he enjoyed close intercourse with his
‘unmasked countrymen.’ He thus designated the serfs, who had learned to
be patient and resigned, but were unable to dissimulate. Nevertheless,
he was accomplished in every polite art, and, if he had chosen, might
have risen to the highest diplomatic position. His education was French
on Russian soil. Voltaire and Diderot were his early schoolmasters.
When he grew up, he made wide incursions into English literature, and
came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein which
most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work. She
took the world as she found it, and selected from it the material
that she thought would be interesting to write about in a clear and
natural style. It was Ivan Turgénief himself who told me this, and he
modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth
in setting out on his literary career. He had not the advantage of
knowing English;[61] but, as a youth, he used to hear his brother
translate to visitors, at his country house in the Uralian, passages
from ‘Irish Tales and Sketches,’ which he thought superior to her
three-volume novels. Turgénief also said to me, ‘It is possible, nay,
probable, if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of
the County Longford, and the squires and squireens, that it would not
have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about
the classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing
out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their
extreme simplicity, and to the distinction with which she treated the
simple ones of the earth.’
“Turgéniefs stature was far above the average. He was admirably
proportioned, and, when young, could walk as far in a day as a tough
horse would amble, and that without any oppressive sense of fatigue.
The big bones supported tremendous muscles, which at no time of his
life were clogged with adipose tissue. When I knew him, his thick,
long hair and flowing beard were white as snow; but as the complexion
was fresh, the eye bright, the carriage upright, the voice resonant,
I never thought of him as an old man. This giant wrote a neat and
almost delicate hand. I have before me a book of his with an autograph
inscription which he sent me last winter.... This autograph, though
almost ladylike in its delicacy, is very free and unconventional.
Turgénief felt what was beautiful in minute and lowly things. He
was one of those who are happy in admiring flowers in the valley of
humiliation. In some respects he was a big child. Nobody was more easy
to amuse. He used to say that Providence was so kind in throwing in
his way the kind of persons who exactly suited him. Liking fine arts
and music, and disliking fashion and worldly frivolity, he deemed it
a piece of rare good luck to fall in with Louis Viardot and his gifted
wife (_née_ Garcia), and to be allowed to enter their family circle....
“Turgénief’s conversation was analogous to his handwriting. It was
light, delicate, of a free and quite original style, and abounded in
picturesque traits. Nothing was forced or far-fetched. His ideas came
in the bright, easy flow of a quick-running and well-fed streamlet. It
was all the same to him whether he was brought forward or unnoticed
in society, for he was neither shy nor vain. He rarely, in talking,
broached a subject; but there was no subject on which he could not
talk with ease. The politician, philosopher, artist, poet, novelist,
intelligent or simple, woman or child, found him good company. Whatever
interested mankind appeared to concern him, and to be a thing to study.
At the Universal Exhibition of 1878 I found Turgénief in the United
States Agricultural Department studying horse-shoes and horse-shoe
nails with as much zest as he afterwards showed in comparing the works
of the English, Russian, and German schools of pictorial art. The
person who explained to him the peculiar merits of the horse-shoe nails
was a character; and his peculiarities, which were racy of the soil of
Texas, acted as a stimulant on the Russian novelist.”
“Theoretically, there was no depth of human degradation with which the
Russian novelist was not acquainted; but it was said that personally
no vice ever touched him. ‘_Gros innocent_’ was a term which M.
Viardot often applied to him in their intimate conversation. The
giant was ‘_naïf_.’ He preserved until old age the impressionable
eyes of childhood, and a freshness of nature which to those who did
not know him must seem incompatible with his extensive knowledge of
human nature, which he studied as a student at Moscow and Berlin, as a
functionary at St. Petersburg and in other parts of Russia, and as an
exile in Paris. Although an old bachelor, he was free from crotchets
and angles. He was glad to oblige, often obliged, sometimes was
heartily thanked; and, when he met with ingratitude, he did not think
about it. Flaubert was the French novelist whom he best liked as a man
and a writer. But he was of opinion that he travelled too far south
when he went to Carthage[62] to look for a heroine. His eyes were not
used to the glaring landscape of North Africa. They discerned better
the cool tints of the Normandy landscape. Plots, he thought, spoiled
novels, which were _peintures de mœurs_; and he was glad to see that
the taste for them was dying out. Dickens, in his opinion, was at his
best in the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ because he had not to be thinking about
a plot, instead of letting his pen run on according to the humor of
the moment. The plot was necessary for a drama, but in the way of a
novelist, who should, above every thing else, keep truth in view....
“Turgénief was of opinion that a splendidly picturesque country was
a bad soil for literary or artistic production. Strong emotions or
sensations tended to dethrone the faculty of exact observation upon
which we are dependent for æsthetic enjoyment in flat districts. We
console ourselves for the prose of a landscape in looking with an
almost microscopic eye at the plants and insects, and come to see
a world replete with beauty and animation in a tangle of gorse,
brambles, and humble field-flowers. In expressing to me this theory, he
asked, ‘Did you ever see a mountaineer who was sensible to the beauty
and song of a small bird? He watches the flight of game and birds
of prey. But, for my part, I have found him indifferent to the lark
and swallow. My first acquaintance with the skylark was precisely in
looking about for compensation for the ugliness of a flat near Berlin.
I shall never forget the broadening out of the æsthetic faculty on this
occasion. The little creature rose almost from under my feet, and went
up singing her joyful song, which I heard long after she was invisible.
I then remarked the beauty of the sky and of many other things which I
should not otherwise have noticed.’”
* * * * *
A few sentences from the “noble discourse” spoken by M. Renan at
Turgénief’s tomb, on Oct. 1, 1883, will fittingly bring this note to a
close.
“Turgénief was an eminent writer. He was, above all, a great man. I
shall speak to you only of his soul as it always appeared to me in the
pleasant retreat which an illustrious friendship had provided for him
among us.
“Turgénief received, by that mysterious decree which makes human
avocations, the noblest gift of all: he was born essentially
impersonal. His consciousness was not that of an individual more or
less finely endowed by nature: he was in some sort the consciousness of
a people. Before his birth he had lived thousands of years; infinite
series of visions were concentrated in the depths of his heart. No man
has been to such a degree the incarnation of an entire race. A world
lived in him, spoke by his lips; generations of ancestors lost in the
sleep of ages, without voices, through him came to life and to speech.
“The silent genius of collective masses is the source of all great
things. But the masses have no voice. They can only feel and stammer.
They need an interpreter, a prophet, to speak for them. Who shall be
this prophet? Who shall tell their sufferings, denied by those who are
interested in not seeing them, their secret aspirations which upset the
sanctimonious optimism of the contented? The great man, gentlemen,
when he is at once a man of genius and a man of heart. That is why the
great man is least free of all men. He does not do, he does not say,
what he wishes. A God speaks in him; ten centuries of suffering and
of hope possess him and rule him. Sometimes it happens to him, as to
the seer in the ancient stories of the Bible, that, when called upon
to curse, he blesses; according to the spirit which moves, his tongue
refuses to obey.
“It is to the honor of the great Slav race, whose appearance in the
world’s foreground is the most unexpected phenomenon of our century,
that it was first expressed by a master so accomplished. Never were the
mysteries of an obscure and still contradictory consciousness revealed
with such marvellous insight. It was because Turgénief at once felt,
and perceived that he felt: he was the people, and he was of the elect.
He was as sensitive as a woman and as impassive as a surgeon, as free
from illusions as a philosopher and as tender as a child. Happy the
race, which, at its beginning a life of reflection, can be represented
by such images, simple-hearted as well as learned, at once real and
mystical.
“When the future shall have brought to their real proportions the
surprises kept in reserve for us by this wonderful Slav genius, with
its ardent faith, its depth of intuition, its individual idea of life
and death, its martyr spirit, its thirst for the ideal, Turgénief’s
paintings will be priceless documents, something, as it were, like the
portrait of a man of genius, if it were possible to be had, taken in
his infancy. The perilous solemnity of his duty as interpreter of one
of the great families of humanity, Turgénief clearly saw. He felt that
he had souls in his charge; and, as he was a man of honor, he weighed
each of his words. He trembled for what he said, and what he did not
say.
“His mission was thus wholly that of the peacemaker. He was like the
God of the Book of Job, who ‘makes peace upon the heights.’ What
everywhere else caused discord became with him a principle of harmony.
In his great bosom, contradictions united. Cursing and hatred were
disarmed by the magic enchantments of his art.
“That is why he is the common glory of schools, between which so many
disagreements exist. This great race, divided because it is great,
finds in him its unity. Hostile brethren separated by different ways of
interpreting the ideal, come all of you to his tomb. All of you have
the right to love him; for he belonged to all of you, he held you all
in his heart. Admirable privilege of genius! The repellent sides of
things do not exist for him. In him all finds reconciliation. Parties
most opposed unite to praise him and admire. In the region whither he
carries us, words which stir irritation in the vulgar lose their sting.
Genius accomplishes in a day what it takes centuries to do. It creates
an atmosphere of higher peace when those who were foes find that in
reality they have been co-laborers; it opens the era of the grand
amnesty when those who have been battling in the arena of progress
sleep side by side and hand in hand.
“Above the race, in fact, stands humanity; or, if you prefer, reason.
Turgénief was of a race by his manner of feeling and painting. He
belonged to all humanity by his lofty philosophy, facing with calm
eyes the conditions of human existence, and seeking without prejudice
to know the reality. This philosophy brought him sweetness, joy in
life, pity for creatures, for victims above all. Ardently he loved this
poor humanity, often blind, in sooth, but so often betrayed by its
leaders. He applauded its spontaneous effort towards well being and
truth. He did not reprove its illusions; he was not angry because it
complained. The iron policy which mocked at those who suffer was not
for him. No disappointment arrested him. Like the universe, he would
have begun a thousand times the ruined work: he knew that justice can
wait; the end will always be success. He had truly the words of eternal
life, the words of peace, of justice, of love, and of liberty.”