are completely at one whenever Princess Dashkov is spoken of. Miss
Katharine’s sarcastic pen loses all its venom when writing of the
princess. We have put her description of her at the beginning of this
account. In it she has shown least appreciation of the tender, womanly
side, for which love was a necessity. This side of her nature was far
better understood by Miss Mary, and yet she abandoned her.
In 1807 Miss Katharine went away. Mary meant to leave a little later. She
was detained by a terrible blow which fell upon Princess Dashkov.
Though the latter loved her son devotedly, she had never quite forgiven
his marriage, and would never receive his wife; she was in correspondence
with her son, however, but did not see him. In spite of all entreaties,
and in particular those of Miss Wilmot, whose influence was so immense,
the mother’s wounded heart, which they had not known how to soften
immediately after the marriage, could not do violence to itself and be
fully reconciled. In 1807, immediately after Princess Dashkov had arrived
in Moscow, her son was taken ill, and a few days later he died.
This was a terrible blow for her, it shortened her life; repentance too
late laid all its irrevocable burden of regret upon her. She sent for her
daughter-in-law. And these women, who had done each other so much harm,
who had never met and had openly and senselessly hated each other, fell
sobbing in each other’s arms, and were reconciled for ever beside the
coffin of the man whom they had so much loved.
Life was shattered for the princess. One consolation was left her—that
was her child, her friend, her ‘Irish daughter,’ and _she_ was preparing
to leave her.
Why she went away I do not understand. It is hard to restrain a feeling
of vexation, seeing how unnecessarily Miss Wilmot abandoned Princess
Dashkov for the sake of her Irish relatives, who played an extremely
limited part in her life, and with whom she must have been very dreary.
Princess Dashkov, frightened of her isolation, wanted to go with her
to Ireland, there to end her existence, ‘which has no heirs and must
die out.’ Miss Wilmot persuaded her not to go and promised to come back
to her. The old woman felt it bitterly. Miss Mary, to spare her, set
off secretly, but, detained in Petersburg by the departure of the ship
and the incredibly stupid police measures taken against the English on
account of the war which had then been declared, she made up her mind to
go back for some months to Moscow; the figure of the old lady with tears
in her eyes rent her heart; she wrote to her of her intention.
Princess Dashkov’s joy and gratitude knew no bounds, and how did she
celebrate the news? She sent to the prison for five men who were there
for debt to be released, and charged them to celebrate a thanksgiving
service for her.
But the bitterness of separation was only deferred; the obstinate
Miss Mary would have her way, and went after all. Princess Dashkov,
heartbroken at parting from her friend, had gone to bed. At night Miss
Wilmot stole quietly once more into her room. The princess, who had been
weeping the whole day, had fallen asleep: ‘The expression of her face was
serene as a child’s. I softly kissed her and went away.’ They never saw
each other again.
The last days of our princess were passed in complete emptiness, through
which those dreary ‘shades’ flitted from time to time, covered with
stars and powder, and growing still more decrepit. Her thoughts were
concentrated on the young girl with a sorrow and dreamy tenderness which
makes the heartache; one has a distinct feeling that this grief must go
uncomforted.
‘What am I to say to you, my beloved child, not to grieve you?’ she
writes on the 25th of October 1809. ‘I am sad, very sad, tears are
flowing from my eyes, and I cannot get used to our separation. I have
built a few bridges. I have planted a few hundred trees, I am told
successfully; all that distracts me for a minute, but my sadness comes
back again.’
On the 29th of October she writes: ‘And how changed everything is in
Troitskoye since you left! The theatre is shut up, there has not been a
single performance, the pianos are mute, and even the maids do not sing.
But why am I telling you this? you are surrounded by your kinsfolk, you
are happy, contented....’
She writes her a few more lines on the 6th of November, and ends her
letter with the English words: ‘God bless you!’ Did Mary know that that
blessing came from a dying hand? Less than two months later, on the 9th
of January 1810, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna was no more.
Five years before her death, on the 22nd of October 1806, she concluded
her Memoirs with these words: ‘With an honest heart and pure intentions I
have had to endure many calamities; I should have been crushed under them
if my conscience had not been clear ... now I look forward without fear
and uneasiness to my approaching dissolution.’
What a woman! What a rich and vigorous life!
BAZAROV
Letter 1
Instead of a letter, dear friend, I am sending you a dissertation, and an
unfinished one too. After our conversation I read over again Pisarev’s
article on Bazarov, which I had quite forgotten, and I am very glad I
did—that is, not that I had forgotten it, but that I read it again. The
article confirms my point of view. In its one-sidedness it is more true
and more worth consideration than its opponents have supposed. Whether
Pisarev has correctly grasped the character of Bazarov as Turgenev meant
it, does not concern me. What does matter is that he has recognised
himself and his comrades in Bazarov, and has added to the portrait what
was lacking in the book. The less Pisarev has adhered to the narrow
framework in which the exasperated ‘Father’ has tried to confine the
obstinate ‘Son,’ the more freely has he been able to treat him as the
expression of his ideal.
‘But what interest can Mr. Pisarev’s ideal have for us? Pisarev is
a smart critic, he has written a great deal, he has written about
everything, sometimes about subjects of which he had knowledge, but all
that does not give his ideal any claim on the attention of the public.’
The point is that it is not his own individual ideal, but the ideal which
both before and since the appearance of Turgenev’s Bazarov has haunted
the younger generation, has been embodied not only in various heroes
in novels and stories, but in living persons who have tried to take
Bazarovism as the basis of their words and actions. What Pisarev says I
have seen and heard myself a dozen times; in the simplicity of his heart,
he has let out the cherished thought of a whole circle and, focussing the
scattered rays on one centre, has shed a light on the typical Bazarov.
To Turgenev, Bazarov is more than alien; to Pisarev, more than a comrade;
to study the type, of course, one must take the view which sees in
Bazarov the desideratum.
Pisarev’s opponents were frightened by his lack of caution; while
denouncing Turgenev’s Bazarov as a caricature, they repudiated even more
violently his transfigured double; they were displeased at Pisarev’s
having put his foot in it, but it does not follow from this that he was
wrong in his interpretation.
Pisarev knows the heart of his Bazarov through and through; he makes
a confession for his hero. ‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘at the bottom of his
heart Bazarov does accept a great deal of what he denies in words, and,
perhaps, it is just what is accepted and concealed that saves him from
moral degradation and from moral insignificance.’
We regard this indiscreet utterance, which looks so deeply into another
soul, as very important.
Further on, Pisarev describes his hero’s character thus: ‘Bazarov is
extremely proud, but his pride is not noticeable’ (clearly this is not
Turgenev’s Bazarov) ‘just because it is so great. Nothing would satisfy
Bazarov but an _eternity of ever-widening activity and ever-increasing
enjoyment_.’[76]
Bazarov acts everywhere and in everything only as he wishes, or as he
thinks advantageous and convenient; he is guided only by his personal
desire or personal calculation. He acknowledges no Mentor above him,
without himself nor within himself. Before him is no lofty aim, in his
mind is no lofty thought, and with all that his powers are immense. If
Bazarovism is a malady, it is a malady of our age, and will have to run
its course in spite of any amputations or palliatives.
Bazarov looks down on people, and rarely gives himself the trouble,
indeed, to conceal his half-contemptuous and half-patronising attitude
to those who hate and to those who obey him. He loves no one. He thinks
it quite unnecessary to put any constraint on himself whatever. There
are two sides to his cynicism, an internal and an external, the cynicism
of thought and feeling and the cynicism of manner and expression. The
essence of his inner cynicism lies in an ironical attitude to feeling of
every sort, to dreaminess, to poetical enthusiasm. The harsh expression
of this irony, the causeless and aimless roughness of manner, are part of
his external cynicism. Bazarov is not merely an empiricist; he is also
an unkempt Bursch. Among the admirers of Bazarov there will doubtless be
some who will be delighted with his rude manners, the vestiges left by
his rough student life, and will imitate those manners, which are in any
case a defect and not a virtue.[77] Such people are most often evolved
in the grey environment of hard work: stern work coarsens the hands,
coarsens the manners, coarsens the feelings; the man is toughened, casts
off youthful dreaminess, and gets rid of tearful sentimentality; there
is no possibility of dreaming at work; the hard-working man looks upon
idealism as a folly peculiar to the idleness and soft self-indulgence of
the well-to-do, he reckons moral sufferings as imaginary, moral impulses
and heroic deeds as far-fetched and absurd. He feels a repulsion for
high-flown talk.’
Then Pisarev draws the genealogical tree of Bazarov: the Onyegins and
Petchorins begat the Rudins and the Beltovs,[78] the Rudins and the
Beltovs begat Bazarov. (Whether the Decembrists are omitted intentionally
or unintentionally I do not know.) The bored and disillusioned are
succeeded by men who strive to act, life rejects them both as worthless
and incomplete. ‘It is sometimes their lot to suffer, but they never
succeed in getting anything done. Society is deaf and inexorable to them.
They are incapable of adapting themselves to its conditions, not one
of them ever rises so high as head clerk of a government office. Some
are consoled by becoming professors and working for future generations.
Their negative usefulness is incontestable. They increase the numbers of
men incapable of practical activity, in consequence of which practical
activity itself, or more precisely the forms in which it usually finds
expression now, slowly but steadily sink lower in public esteem.’
‘It seemed (after the Crimean War) that Rudinism was over, that the
period of fruitless ideals and yearnings was succeeded by a period of
seething and useful activity. But the illusion has faded. The Rudins have
not become practical workers, and a new generation has come forward from
behind them and taken up a reproachful and ironical attitude towards its
predecessors. “What are you whining about, what are you seeking, what
are you asking from life? You want happiness, I suppose? I daresay you
do! Happiness has to be fought for. If you are strong, take it. If you
are weak, hold your tongue; we feel sick enough without your whining!”
A gloomy, concentrated energy is expressed in this unfriendly attitude
of the younger generation to their Mentors. In their conceptions of good
and evil the young generation and the best men of the preceding one
are alike, the sympathies and antipathies of both are the same; they
desire the same thing, but the men of the past generation were in an
everlasting fuss and ferment. The men of to-day are not in a fuss, they
are not trying to find anything, they will not give in to any compromise,
and they hope for nothing. They are as helpless as the Rudins, but they
recognise their helplessness. “I cannot act now,” each of these new men
thinks, “and I am not going to try. I despise everything that surrounds
me, and I am not going to conceal my contempt. I shall enter on the
battle with evil when I feel myself strong.” Having no possibility
of acting, men begin to reflect and investigate. Superstitions and
authorities are torn to shreds, and the philosophy of life is completely
cleared of all sorts of fantastic conceptions. It is nothing to them
whether the public is following in their footsteps. They are full of
themselves, of their own inner life. In short, the Petchorins had will
without understanding, the Rudins understanding without will, the
Bazarovs both understanding and will. Thought and action are blended in
one firm whole.’
As you see, there is everything here (if there is no mistake), both
character-drawing and classification. All is brief and clear, the sum is
added up, the bill is presented, and perfectly correctly from the point
of view from which the author has attacked the question.
But we do not accept this bill, and we protest from our premature coffins
which have not yet arrived, though bespoken. We are not Charles V., and
have no desire to be buried alive.
How strange has been the fate of _Fathers and Children_! That Turgenev
created Bazarov with no idea of patting him on the head is clear; that
he meant to do something for the ‘Fathers’ is clear too. But when he
came to deal with such pitiful and worthless ‘Fathers’ as the Kirsanovs,
Turgenev was carried away by Bazarov in spite of his harshness, and
instead of thrashing the son he chastised the fathers.
And so it has come to pass that some of the younger generation have
recognised themselves in Bazarov. But we entirely fail to recognise
ourselves in the Kirsanovs, just as we did not recognise ourselves in
the Manilovs nor the Sobakevitches, although Manilovs and Sobakevitches
existed all over the place in the days of our youth, and are existing now.
Whole herds of moral freaks live at the same date in different layers
of society and in its different currents; undoubtedly they represent
more or less general types, but they do not represent the most striking
and characteristic side of their generation, the side which most fully
expresses its force. Pisarev’s Bazarov is, in a one-sided sense, to a
certain extent the extreme type of what Turgenev called the ‘Sons’; while
the Kirsanovs are the most commonplace and ordinary representatives of
the ‘Fathers.’
Turgenev was more of an artist in his novel than is thought, and that is
why he turned out of his course, and to my thinking he did well in so
doing—he meant to go one way, and he went another and a better one.
He might just as well have sent his Bazarov to London. That insignificant
creature, Pisemsky, did not shrink from travelling expenses for his
sorely tried freaks. We could perhaps have shown Bazarov on the banks of
the Thames that, without rising to the post of head clerk of an office,
one might do quite as much good as any head of a department; that society
is not always deaf and inexorable when the protest finds a response; that
action does sometimes succeed; that the Rudins and the Beltovs sometimes
have will and perseverance; and that, seeing the impossibility of
carrying on the work to which they are urged by their inner impulse, they
have forsaken many things, gone abroad, and without ‘fuss and ferment’
have established a Russian printing-press, and are carrying on a Russian
propaganda. The influence of the London press from 1856 to the end of
1863 is not merely a practical fact, but an historical fact. It cannot be
effaced, it has to be accepted. In London Bazarov would have seen that it
was only from a distance that we seemed to be waving our arms in despair,
and that in reality we were keeping our hands hard at work. Perhaps his
wrath would have been changed to lovingkindness, and he would have given
up treating us with ‘reproach and irony.’
I frankly confess this throwing of stones at one’s predecessors is very
distasteful to me. I repeat what I have said already: ‘I should like to
save the younger generation from historical ingratitude, and even from
historical error. It is high time that the fathers gave up devouring
their children like Saturn, but it is time the children ceased to follow
the example of those savages who slaughter their old people. Surely it
is not right that only in natural science the phases and degrees of
development, the variations and the deviations, even the _avortements_,
should be studied, accepted, considered _sine ira et studio_, while as
soon as one approaches history the physiological method is abandoned,
and the methods of the Criminal Court and the House of Correction are
adopted.’
The Onyegins and Petchorins have passed away.
The Rudins and the Beltovs are passing.
The Bazarovs will pass ... and very quickly, as a matter of fact. It is a
too artificial, bookish, overstrained type to persist for long.
A type has already tried to thrust himself forward to replace him, one
rotten in the spring of his days, the type of the orthodox student,
the conservative patriot trained at Government expense, in whom
everything loathsome in Imperial Russia was incarnate, though even he
felt embarrassed after serenading the Iversky Madonna, and singing a
thanksgiving service to Katkov.
All the types that arise pass, and all, in virtue of the law of the
conservation of energy which we have learnt to recognise in the physical
world, persist and will spring up in different forms in the future
progress of Russia and in her future organisation.
And so would it not be more interesting, instead of pitting Bazarov
against Rudin, to analyse what are the salient points connecting them,
and what are the reasons of their appearing and their transformation?
Why have precisely these forms of development been called forth by our
life, and why have they passed one into the other in this way? Their
dissimilarity is obvious, but in some respects they are alike. Typical
characters readily pounce on distinctions, exaggerate the angles and
prominent features for the sake of emphasising them, paint the barriers
in vivid colours, and tear apart the bonds. The shades are lost and unity
is left far away, hidden in mist, like the plain that joins the foot
of the mountains, whose tops, far apart from each other, are brightly
lighted up. Moreover, we load on the shoulders of these types more than
they can carry, and ascribe to them in life a significance they have
not had, or have only in a limited sense. To take Onyegin as the finest
type of the intellectual life of the period between 1820 and 1830, as
the integral of all the tendencies and activities of the class then
awakening, would be quite a mistake, although he does represent one of
the aspects of the life of that time.
The type of that period, one of the most splendid types of modern
history, was the Decembrist and not Onyegin. He could not be touched by
Russian literature for all these forty years, but he is not the less for
that.
How is it the younger generation have not the clearness of vision, the
imagination, or the heart to grasp the grandeur and the virtue of those
brillant young men who emerged from the ranks of the Guards, those
spoilt darlings of wealth and high rank who left their drawing-rooms and
their piles of gold to demand the rights of man, to protest, to make
a statement for which—and they knew it—the hangman’s rope and penal
servitude awaited them? It is a melancholy and puzzling question.
To resent the fact that these men appeared in the one class in which
there was some degree of culture, of leisure, and of security, is
senseless. If these ‘princes, boyars, voyevods,’ these secretaries of
state and colonels, had not been awakened by moral hunger, but had waited
to be aroused by bodily hunger, there would have been no whining and
restless Rudins, nor Bazarovs, priding themselves on their combination
of will and knowledge: in their place there would have been a regimental
doctor who would have done the soldiers to death, robbing them of
their rations and medicines, and have sold the death certificate to a
Kirsanov’s bailiff when he had flogged a peasant to death, or there
would have been a court clerk taking bribes, for ever drunk, fleecing
the peasants of their quarter-roubles, and handing overcoat and goloshes
to his Excellency, a Kirsanov and Governor of the province; and what is
more, serfdom would not have received its death-blow, nor would there
have been any of that underground activity under the heavy heel of
authority, gnawing away the imperial ermine and the quilted dressing-gown
of the landowners. It was fortunate that, side by side with men who found
their gentlemanly pastimes in the kennels and the serfs’ quarters, in
outraging and flogging at home and in cringing servility in Petersburg,
there were some whose ‘pastime’ it was to tear the rod out of their
hands and fight for freedom, not for licence but freedom for mind, for
human life. Whether this pastime of theirs was their serious work, their
passion, they showed on the gallows and in prison ... they showed it,
too, when they came back after thirty years spent in Siberia.
If the type of the Decembrist has been reflected at all in literature, it
is—faintly but with kindred features—in Tchatsky.[79]
His exasperated, bitter feeling, his youthful indignation, betray a
healthy impulse to action; he feels what it is he is displeased with, he
beats his head against the stone wall of social conventions and tries
whether the prison bars are strong. Tchatsky was on the straight road for
penal servitude, and if he survived the 14th of December he certainly
did not turn into a passively suffering or proudly contemptuous person.
He would have been more likely to rush into some indignant extreme, like
Tchaadayev, to become a Catholic, a Slav-hater or a Slavophil, but he
would not in any case have abandoned his propaganda, which he did not
abandon either in the drawing-room of Famussov or in his entrance-hall,
and he would not have comforted himself with the thought that ‘his hour
had not yet come.’ He had that restless energy which cannot endure to be
out of harmony with what surrounds it, and must either crush it or be
crushed. This is the ferment which makes stagnation in history impossible
and clears away the scum on its flowing but dilatory wave.
If Tchatsky had survived the generation that followed the 14th of
December in fear and trembling, and grown up crushed by terror,
humiliated and suppressed, he would have stretched across it a warm hand
of greeting to us. With us Tchatsky would have come back to his natural
surroundings. These _rimes croisées_ across the generations are not
uncommon even in zoology. And it is my profound conviction that we should
meet Bazarov’s children with sympathy and they us ‘without bitterness and
sarcasm.’ Tchatsky could not have lived with his hands folded, neither
in capricious peevishness nor in haughty self-admiration; he was not old
enough to find pleasure in grumbling sulkiness, nor young enough to enjoy
the conceit and self-sufficiency of adolescence. The whole character of
the man lies in this restless ferment, this leaven of energy. But it is
just that aspect that displeases Bazarov, it is that that incenses his
proud stoicism. ‘Keep quiet in your corner if you have not the strength
to do anything; it is sickening enough as it is without your whining,’ he
says; ‘if you are beaten, well, stay beaten.... You have enough to eat;
as for your weeping, that’s just an idle diversion’ ... and so on.
Pisarev was bound to speak in that way for Bazarov; the part he played
required it.
It is hard not to play a part so long as it is liked. Take off Bazarov’s
uniform, make him forget the jargon he uses, let him be free to utter one
word simply, without posing (he so hates affectation!), let him for one
minute forget his bristling duty, his artificially frigid language, his
rôle of castigator, and within an hour we should understand each other in
all the rest.