Produced by Robert Tonsing and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
TURGENEV
[Illustration: _Ivan Turgenev_ _from a photograph kindly lent by Mr.
Edward Garnett_]
TURGENEV
A STUDY
BY
EDWARD GARNETT
WITH A FOREWORD BY JOSEPH CONRAD
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
COPYRIGHT 1917
FOREWORD
Dear Edward--I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study
of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for
us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice.
Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your study may help the
consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What greater
luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in the
English-speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most
delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known
how to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy
and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship
too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking
of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the
volumes of Turgenev's complete edition, the last of which came into
the light of public indifference in the ninety-ninth year of the
nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev
had come to an end too; only work so simple and human, so independent
of the transitory formulas and theories of art belongs as you point out
in the Preface to _Smoke_ "to all time."
Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came
to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at
an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and
intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his
work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. The first
stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in
every page of the novels, of the short stories and of _A Sportsman's
Sketches_--those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the
truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible
in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev's art, which has
captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for "all time" it
is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems
and characters to the test of love we may hope that it will endure
at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact
simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women
would not have changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood
them so tenderly, so reverently and so passionately--they, at least,
are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of
course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national.
But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia is but a canvas on which
the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in
the great light and the free air of the world. Had he invented them
all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which
they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant
in their perplexed lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one
can accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of
Shakespeare.
In the larger non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic
and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his essential humanity.
All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors
are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned
souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy darkness of mystical
contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit
to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game
of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by
having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and
so fine without any tricks of "cleverness" must be fatal to any man's
influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don't want to appear as qualified to judge of things
Russian. It wouldn't be true. I know nothing of them. But I am aware
of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever
may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and
the peace of his conscience--no man, I say, likes to be beaten with
sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows
of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was
good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the
characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his
mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive
Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers
and curses from which that impartial lover of _all_ his countrymen
had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive.
Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of
callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not
the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoevski but the serene Turgenev who
is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his
cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest
vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and
unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the
visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the
essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest
heart, the largest sympathy--and all that in perfect measure. There's
enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer. For you know very
well, my dear Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of
the world's-fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was
as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one per cent of the crowd
struggling next door for a sight of the Double-headed Nightingale or of
some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse collar.--Yours,
J. C.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
For permission to use certain Prefaces, which I wrote originally for
my wife's Translations of the Novels and Tales of Ivan Turgenev, and
for the use of a few quotations from her versions I have to thank Mr.
William Heinemann, the publisher of the Collected Edition.
E. G.
_March 1917._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
page
Turgenev's Critics and his Detractors 1
CHAPTER II
Youth, Family and Early Work 25
CHAPTER III
"A Sportsman's Sketches" 35
CHAPTER IV
"Rudin" 55
CHAPTER V
"A House of Gentlefolk" 73
CHAPTER VI
"On the Eve" 91
CHAPTER VII
"Fathers and Children" 107
CHAPTER VIII
"Smoke" 127
CHAPTER IX
"Virgin Soil" 137
CHAPTER X
The Tales 161
CHAPTER XI
Note on Turgenev's Life--His Character and
Philosophy--"Enough"--"Hamlet and
Don Quixote"--The "Poems in Prose"--Turgenev's
Last Illness and Death--His
Epitaph 185
I
TURGENEV'S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS
CHAPTER I
TURGENEV'S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS
A writer, Mr. Robert Lynd, has said: "It is the custom when praising a
Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It
is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors,
and could not endure to see any respect paid to the images of the
rivals of the gods of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone
as Dagon, and another year, Turgenev. And no doubt the day will come
when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence."
One had hoped that the disease, long endemic in Russia, of disparaging
Turgenev, would not have spread to England, but some enthusiastic
explorers of things Russian came back home with a mild virus and
communicated the spores of the misunderstanding. That misunderstanding,
dating at least fifty years back, was part of the polemics of the rival
Russian political parties. The Englishman who finds it strange that
Turgenev's pictures of contemporary Russian life should have excited
such angry heat and raised such clouds of acrimonious smoke may imagine
the fate of a great writer in Ireland to-day who should go on his
way serenely, holding the balance level between the Unionists, the
Nationalists, the Sinn Féin, the people of Dublin, and the people of
Belfast. The more impartial were his pictures as art, the louder would
rise the hubbub that his types were "exceptional," that his insight
was "limited," that he did not understand either the politicians or
the gentry or the peasants, that he had not fathomed all that was in
each "movement," that he was palming off on us heroes who had "no real
existence." And, in the sense that Turgenev's serene and beautiful art
excludes thousands of aspects that filled the newspapers and the minds
of his contemporaries, his detractors have reason.
Various Russian critics, however, whom Mr. Maurice Baring, and a French
biographer, M. Haumant, have echoed, have gone further, and in their
critical ingenuity have mildly damned the Russian master's creations.
It seems to these gentlemen that there is a great deal of water in
Turgenev's wine. Mr. Baring tells us that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
"reached the absolute truth of the life which was round them," and that
"people are beginning to ask themselves whether Turgenev's pictures
are true (!), whether the Russians that he describes ever existed,
and whether the praise which was bestowed upon him by his astonished
contemporaries all over Europe was not a gross exaggeration."
"Turgenev painted people of the same epoch, the same generation; he
dealt with the same material; he dealt with it as an artist and as
a poet, as a great artist and a great poet. But his vision was weak
and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was
cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky. His characters
beside those of Tolstoy seem caricatures, and beside those of
Dostoevsky they are conventional.... When all is said, Turgenev was
a great poet. What time has not taken away from him, and what time
can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry in
his work.... Turgenev never wrote anything better than the book which
brought him fame, the _Sportsman's Sketches_. In this book nearly the
whole of his talent finds expression.
* * * * *
"No one can deny that the characters of Turgenev live; they are
intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question.
The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev is this: that
Turgenev's characters are as living as any characters are in books,
but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland and are thus
conventional; whereas Tolstoy's characters belong to life. The fault
which Russian critics find with Turgenev's characters is that they
are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them, and
that they are permeated by the faults of the author's own character,
namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self-consciousness.
"... Than Bazarov there is no character in the whole of his work
which is more alive ... (but he is) a book-character, extraordinarily
vivid and living though he be.... Dostoevsky's Nihilists, however
outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer,
but the very quintessence of truth.... (_Virgin Soil_) Here in the
opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter-day judges who
have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official
class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he
makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets
before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the
real thing.
"The lapse of years has only emphasized the elements of banality--and
conventionality--which are to be found in Turgenev's work. He is
a masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without
convention. His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes,
and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to face with
nature, after the manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any
elemental pictures of nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a
phrase; but he rings the changes on delicate arrangements of wood,
cloud, mist, and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures,
after the manner of Corot."--_Landmarks in Russian Literature_, pp.
99-110.
It is obvious from the above criticisms of Mr. Baring and the Russian
critics whom he represents that what is the matter with Turgenev
in their eyes is his "vision," his "temperament." They admire his
language, his beautiful style: they pay lip service to him as "a
poet." They even admit that he was "a great artist," but they do
not suspect that his intellectual pre-eminence is disguised from
them by his very aesthetic qualities, balance, contrast, grouping,
perspective, harmony of form and perfect modelling, qualities in
which Turgenev not only far surpasses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but any
nineteenth-century European. Further, it is evident that these critics,
having themselves never seen or felt in nature's life those shades of
"truth" which Turgenev's poetical vision reveals to us, imagine that
such have no "real" existence! Otherwise these critics would have laid
stress on these special shades and tones and not passed them by with
a perfunctory nod. One may go further and assert that it is precisely
this same "poetic vision" which irritates Turgenev's detractors;
they resent it, because it conflicts with the more prosaic, everyday
point of view. They mean by "truth" something both more photographic
and commonplace, something more striking or more ordinary in the
"lighting," something observed with less beautiful shades of feeling,
less exquisitely stamped and recorded in classical contours.
Let us examine some of these charges. "Turgenev's characters are
as living as any in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking,
to bookland, and are thus conventional." But why _conventional_?
Why damn all the great creations in _books_, from Don Quixote
downwards, as bookish? Are Turgenev's women characters, say Maria
Nikolaevna, Zinaïda, Varvara Pavlovna, Irene, Elena, Anna Martinovna,
creations which are more highly individualized than are Tolstoy's
women, conventional? No more than are Shakespeare's women, Lady
Macbeth, Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Desdemona, Portia. Mr. Baring
cannot mean this absurdity. But he repeats the charge "Bazarov is a
'book-character,' extraordinarily vivid and living though he be,"
evidently thinking that because Bazarov is a figure synthesizing social
tendencies and a mental attitude peculiar to his time, he is inferior
as a creation to, say, Tolstoy's Vronsky. On the contrary, that is why
Bazarov is both psychologically and humanly a much more interesting
figure, and one higher in the creative scale than Vronsky. Nature
denied Tolstoy the power of constructing a Rudin or a Bazarov. It is
because these types are personifications incarnate of tendencies,
traits, and a special mode of thought and action of a particular
period, and yet are brimming with individual life, that they are _sui
generis, and are irreplaceable creations_. This is Turgenev's glory. We
have only to compare Rudin or Bazarov with such heroes as Lermontov's
Petchorin or Herzen's Beltoff to recognize that while these latter
have all the force of autobiography, they are not shown us in the
round. Mr. Baring has been seduced, one imagines, by our generation's
preference for the "photographic likeness" in art, which nevertheless,
at critical moments, often leaves us in the air: for example, the
scene of Vronsky's attempted suicide in _Anna Karenin_. Turgenev could
never have been guilty of this piece of banal, doubtful psychology.
And the latter-day school of Russian critics, when they ask with Mr.
Baring, "Did men ever meet the double of a Bazarov or a Rudin in flesh
and in blood? if not, then these characters are bookishly exaggerated
or have an element of caricature in them," may be asked in reply,
"Did you ever meet Dostoevsky's Alyosha or Prince Myshkin walking
and talking in life?" Again, are not three-fourths of Dostoevsky's
people permeated by "the faults of the author's own character"? Do
they not behave extravagantly or fantastically in a manner all their
own? Is there not a strong element of caricature in them? Of course
there is, and Mr. Baring and his Russian critics delight in it, and
for that very reason exalt Dostoevsky above Turgenev. They exalt the
exaggerated Satanic element in Dostoevsky's work, even while they
declare "Dostoevsky's Nihilists are not only truer than Turgenev's,
but the _very quintessence of truth_"! We are more humble in our
claims for Nezhdanov and Marianna and Mashurina in _Virgin Soil_; we
do not assert that they are "the very quintessence of truth"; but we
know that these creations are not "caricatures" in the sense that
Stepan Trofimovitch and Karmazinov in _The Possessed_ are caricatures.
We know, on the contrary, that Turgenev's Nihilists, in Kropotkin's
words, are real representatives of "the very earliest phases of the
movement.... Turgenev had, with his wonderful intuition, caught some of
the most striking features of the movement, viz. the early promoters'
'Hamletism,' and their misconception of the peasantry." How curious
it is that Stepniak and Kropotkin, who themselves lived with and
knew intimately these early Nihilists, bear witness to the truth of
Turgenev's portraiture, while MM. Baring and Brückner and Haumant,
these critics of our own generation, tell us "Turgenev's Nihilists are
not the real thing"! While admitting that Turgenev had his comparative
failures, such as Insarov in _On the Eve_, one observes that Turgenev's
detractors demand from his social pictures what they demand from no
other of his contemporaries, "the whole objective truth and nothing
but the truth." And this curious demand, fundamentally at the root of
the widespread misunderstanding about Turgenev's work, has been spread
and caught up and re-echoed by the great tribe of partisan critics,
political propagandists, Slavophils, reactionaries, progressives,
for two generations. Necessarily Turgenev, this consummate artist
whose contemporary pictures synthesize many aspects of the social
and political movements of his time, colours and tones his work with
his own personality, as do all the other great creators. Just as the
hero, Olenin in _The Cossacks_, Levin in _Anna Karenin_, and Pierre
in _War and Peace_, are projections of Tolstoy's individuality, so
Lavretski, Litvinov, Sanin, and other characters, are projections of
Turgenev's personality. It is the same with Fielding, with Balzac and
Maupassant, with Dostoevsky and Gontcharov, whose characters also "are
compacted of the result of their observation, with all their own inner
feelings, their loves and hates, their anger and disdain." But only
in Turgenev's case, it appears, it is a sin that the creations should
contain a certain amount of "subjective reality." It must therefore
be the case that it is precisely Turgenev's "temperament" which is at
fault in the eyes of critics who assert that "his vision was weak and
narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold
and shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky." How curious that the
vision which created _Fathers and Children_ and _The Poems in Prose_
should have been relatively weak and narrow! and that the understanding
which created _A House of Gentlefolk_ and _A Sportsman's Sketches_
should have been cold and shallow! And yet in the same breath we are
instructed that Turgenev "dealt with his generation as a great poet and
a great artist." A great poet with a relatively weak and narrow vision,
a great artist with a relatively cold and shallow understanding! This
is an enigma to us, but not to Turgenev's detractors.
No! One must fall back on other explanations of Turgenev's comparative
unpopularity. The first is that beauty of form, a master's sense of
composition, an exquisite feeling for balance are less and less prized
in modern opinion. Our age has turned its back on the masters possessed
of these classic qualities. Modern life flows along congested roads,
and modern art responds in bewilderment to an embarrassment of forces.
Corot's example in painting is no longer extolled save by the true
connoisseur. The grace of beauty is more or less out of fashion. The
wider becomes the circle of modern readers and the more the audience
enfolds the great bourgeois class, the less are form, clarity and
beauty prized. The second explanation is that the inspiration of Love,
and the range of exquisite feelings of Love, so manifest in Turgenev's
vision, are slightly _vieux jeu_. When Dostoevsky is sentimental, as in
_The Insulted and Injured_, he turns one's stomach. It is impossible
to read him, so false, exaggerated and unreal are his characters'
emotions. But when Turgenev is sentimental, as he is in passages in
_The Diary of a Superfluous Man_, _A Correspondence_, _Faust_, one
finds oneself to be in the atmosphere of a faded drawing-room of the
"'forties." This perishable element undoubtedly exists in some of
Turgenev's short stories: it was the heritage he received from the
Romantic movement of his fathers, and occasionally, here and there,
streaks of this romanticism appear and are detrimental to the firm and
delicate objectivity of his creations. But, apart from the question
of these streaks of sentimentalism, it is obvious that Turgenev in
his attitude towards love and women is nearer to Shakespeare than is,
say, Tchehov. Liza and Elena are almost as far removed from the range
of our modern creators as are Imogen and Desdemona. It is not that we
do not believe firmly in their existence, but that the changed social
atmosphere of our times does not so sharply develop and outline woman's
spiritual characteristics: such heroines are now free to act in many
directions denied to Turgenev's heroines. A girl might say, to-day, of
Elena, "Grandmother was like that! so father says, and grandfather saw
her like that! Isn't it interesting?" And this change in our social
atmosphere, undoubtedly, is a bar to Turgenev's popularity in the eyes
of the younger generation.
Again, despite the change of fashion in schools of landscape painters,
it is amusing to hear that Turgenev--"this masterly landscape
painter"--is charged with "never getting face to face with nature,
after the manner of Wordsworth--and Gorky"! But Mr. Baring is echoing
his French authority, M. Haumant, who in turn is modestly echoing, it
would seem, MM. Mihaïlovsky and Strahov.[1] These eminent authorities
on nature are agreed in comparing Turgenev with Corot, "whose subjects
and methods scarcely alter." Vogüé, who knew the province of Orel,
Turgenev's country, however, does not agree. He says pointedly, "One
has to live in the country described by Turgenev to admire how on every
page he corroborates our personal impressions, how he brings back to
our soul every emotion experienced, and to our senses every subtle
odour breathed in that country." This seems explicit.
[1] _Tourguénief, la vie et l'œuvre._ Par Émile Haumant. Paris, 1906.
Never getting face to face with nature! Could a more baseless charge
have been made, one falsified by the innermost spirit of Turgenev's
work, and by countless passages in his writings, of the most intimate
observation?[2] We cite a specimen from _A Tour in the Forest_,
showing the penetrating freshness and warmth of his description:
"I fed my horses, and I too was ferried over. After struggling for
a couple of miles through the boggy prairie, I got at last on to a
narrow raised wooden causeway to a clearing in the forest. The cart
jolted unevenly over the round beams of the causeway; I got out and
went along on foot. The horses moved in step, snorting and shaking
their heads from the gnats and flies. The forest took us into its
bosom. On the outskirts, nearer to the prairie, grew birches, aspens,
limes, maples, and oaks. Then they met us more rarely. The dense
firwood moved down on us in an unbroken wall. Further on were the
red, bare trunks of pines, and then again a stretch of mixed copse,
overgrown with underwood of hazelnut, mountain ash, and bramble, and
stout, vigorous weeds. The sun's light threw a brilliant light on
the tree-tops, and, filtering through the branches, here and there
reached the ground in pale streaks and patches. Birds I scarcely
heard--they do not like great forests. Only from time to time there
came the doleful and thrice-repeated call of a hoopoe, and the angry
screech of a nut-hatch or a jay; a silent, always a solitary bird
kept fluttering across the clearing, with a flash of golden azure
from its lovely feathers. At times the trees grew further apart,
ahead of us the light broke in, the cart came out on a cleared,
sandy, open space. Thin rye was growing over it in rows, noiselessly
nodding its pale ears. On one side there was a dark, dilapidated
little chapel with a slanting cross over a well. An unseen brook
was bubbling peacefully with changing, ringing sounds, as though it
were flowing into an empty bottle. And then suddenly the road was
cut in half by a birch-tree recently fallen, and the forest stood
around, so old, lofty and slumbering, that the air seemed pent in.
In places the clearing lay under water. On both sides stretched
a forest bog, all green and dark, all covered with reeds and tiny
alders. Ducks flew up in pairs, and it was strange to see those
water-birds darting rapidly about among the pines. 'Ga, ga, ga, ga,'
their drawn-out call kept rising unexpectedly. Then a shepherd drove
a flock through the underwood; a brown cow with short, pointed horns
broke noisily through the bushes, and stood stock-still at the edge
of the clearing, her big dark eyes fixed on the dog running before
me. A slight breeze brought the delicate pungent smell of burnt wood.
A white smoke in the distance crept in eddying rings over the pale,
blue forest air, showing that a peasant was charcoal-burning for a
glass-factory or for a foundry. The further we went on, the darker
and stiller it became all round us. In the pine-forest it is always
still; there is only, high overhead, a sort of prolonged murmur
and subdued roar in the tree tops.... One goes on and on, and this
eternal murmur of the forest never ceases, and the heart gradually
begins to sink, and a man longs to come out quickly into the open,
into the daylight; he longs to draw a full breath again, and is
oppressed by the pungent damp and decay."--_A Tour in the Forest_,
pp. 105-107.
[2] "Their predecessors had lived more or less with Nature, but had
always looked upon her as something foreign to themselves, with an
existence separated from theirs. In Tourguéniev's case this external
intercourse becomes a fusion, a mutual pervasion. He feels and
recognizes portions of his own being in the wind that shakes the trees,
in the light that beams on surrounding objects...."--_A History of
Russian Literature_, by K. Waliszewski, p. 290.
Anybody who has lived amid forests and woods must agree that in
the passage above Turgenev has seized with unerring exactitude the
character, the breath itself of a great woodland, and similarly all
his descriptions of nature in _A Sportsman's Sketches_ are inspired
by profound sensitiveness and close fidelity. "Vague backgrounds and
diaphanous figures!" This is the accusation of townsmen.
Another and more insidious line of critical detraction has been
followed by M. Haumant in _Ivan Tourguénief, la vie et l'œuvre_, a
volume, painstaking and well documented, assuredly of great interest
to the student. Intent on his efforts to track down to their source
"the origins of Turgenev's thoughts," the French critic has forgotten
to applaud the aesthetic appeal, and the very perfection of these
creations! It is as though a critic of Keats, in trying to discover
"the sources" of "Hyperion" or "An Ode to a Grecian Urn," had neglected
to appraise the imperishable essence of these masterpieces. Thus
M. Haumant, searching profoundly for "echoes" in Turgenev's "inner
voices," gravely informs us that in _The Brigadier_ Turgenev has
constructed "a Russian Werther"! while a passage in _Phantoms_, it
appears, is inspired by a passage in De Quincey's _Confessions of
an Opium-Eater_. A page is devoted to the discussion of the latter
conjecture,[3] but nothing at all is said as to the unique spiritual
beauty and the haunting atmosphere of these tales. And _A Lear of
the Steppes_, that masterpiece, incomparable in its force of genius,
is dismissed in half a line! The effect of such "comments," both on
those who know and those who do not know their Turgenev, is equally
unfortunate. For it really looks, but of course one may be wrong, as
though the French critic, like his latter-day Russian _confrères_,
did not recognize a masterpiece when he sees one. Has not, indeed,
a Russian literary teacher, A. D. Alfyorov, publicly declared that
"Turgenev's work is, of course, only of historical importance."
[3] Haumant, p. 174.
But enough! Indeed one may well be asked, Is it necessary to defend
so great a classic as Turgenev against modern criticisms of this
character? Perhaps it is not a mere waste of time, for certain reasons.
Turgenev's supremacy, as artist, accepted by the _élite_ in France,
Renan, Taine, Flaubert, Maupassant, etc., and by the best European
critics, such as Brandes, was impaired in Russian eyes by his growing
unpopularity after 1867. Brückner says justly:
"To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without liberty of
assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion, literature
became the last refuge of his freedom of thought, the only means of
propagating higher ideas. He expected and demanded of his country's
literature not merely aesthetic recreation; he placed it at the
service of everything noble and good, of his aspiration, of the
enlightenment and emancipation of the spirit. _Hence the striking
partiality, nay, unfairness, displayed by the Russians towards the
most perfect works of their own literature when they did not answer
to the claims or the expectations of their party or their day. A
purely aesthetic handling of the subject would not gain it full
acceptance._"
Indeed, to read the contemporary Russian onslaughts directed against
Turgenev's successive masterpieces is to imagine one must be dreaming.
Nearly every popular critic of the periodical press, righteous or
self-righteous, is seen, tape-measure in hand, arbitrarily finding
fault with Turgenev's subject, conception and treatment, disdaining or
ignoring its aesthetic force, beauty and harmonious perfection. It is
a crowd of critical gnats dancing airily round the great master and
eagerly driving their little stings into his flesh. Even before the
publication of _Smoke_ (1867) Turgenev was accused of being _out of
date_, and his frequent spells of residence abroad, at Baden, Paris,
etc. (though he returned to Russia nearly every year), and his "life
devotion" to a foreigner, Madame Viardot, helped to consolidate the
story that he no longer knew the Russia of the day. And indeed there
is truth in the dictum that Turgenev was pre-eminently a chronicler of
the Pre-Reform days, or as he himself said, "a writer of the transition
period." But the bulk of his works, even those into which no tendency
could be read, such as _The Torrents of Spring_ or _A Lear of the
Steppes_, was never properly appreciated as aesthetic creations, so
deeply imbued was the intelligent Russian with the "war-like" criticism
of Drobrolubov, Tchernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mihaïlovsky, etc., critics
who, in Brückner's words, "relegated aesthetics to ladies' society, and
turned its critical report into a sort of pulpit for moral and social
preaching." A strong reaction in Turgenev's favour was manifested at
the Pushkin statue celebration in Moscow, 1879, and at his funeral
obsequies in Petersburg, 1883, when two hundred and eighty-five
deputations met at his grave. But, later, MM. Mihaïlovsky and Strahov,
and latterly MM. Haumant, Brückner and Baring, have declared that
"the general admiration" for Turgenev's genius has greatly weakened,
and that Turgenev's star has paled before the stars of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky. This undercutting style of criticism--"They shadow you with
Homer, knock you flat with Shakespeare," as Meredith puts it--seems
a little clumsy when one reflects that not merely in vision and
temperament, but in aesthetic quality, Turgenev is irreplaceable. The
spiritual kingdoms of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are separated
as widely as are the kingdoms of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. It is
true that for our triumphant bourgeoisies, who, bewildered, grapple
with the rich profusion of facts, problems and aspects of our congested
civilization, _quality_ in art is little understood or prized. And
Turgenev, by his art's harmonious union of form and subject, of grace
and strength, of thought and emotion, in fact belongs, as Renan said,
to the school of Greek perfection.
Since Turgenev is pre-eminently an intellectual force, as well as
an artist with a consummate sense of beauty, it is difficult for a
critic to hold the balance equitably between the social significance
of Turgenev's pictures of life and the beauty of his vision. Far too
little attention has been paid to him as artist. This is no doubt
not merely due to the fact that while the majority of critics either
naïvely ignore or take for granted his supreme quality, the more
perfect is a work of art the more impossible is it to do it critical
justice. The great artists, as Botticelli, who are peculiarly mannered,
it is far easier to criticize and comment on than is a great artist,
as Praxiteles, whose harmony of form conceals subtleties of technique
unique in spiritual handling. The discussion of technical beauties,
however, is not only a thankless business but tends to defeat its own
object. It is better to seek to appreciate the spirit of a master, and
to dwell on his human value rather than on his aesthetic originality.
The present writer need scarcely add that he is dissatisfied with his
inadequate discussion of Turgenev's masterpieces, but fragmentary as it
is, he believes his is almost the only detailed attempt yet made in the
English language.
II
YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK