YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK
"All my life is in my works," said Turgenev, and his biographers'
account of his education and youth reveals how it was that from the
age of twenty-three Turgenev was to become both an interpreter of
the Russian mind to Europe and an interpreter of Western culture to
his countrymen. His father, Sergey Ivanovitch, a handsome, polished
officer of impoverished but ancient family, married an heiress, Varvara
Petrovna Lutovinov, and their eldest son, Ivan Sergeyevitch, was born,
October 28, 1818, at Orel, in central Russia. The natural loathing
of the soft, poetic and impulsive boy for tyrannical harshness was
accentuated by his parents', especially by his mother's, severity,
unmerited whippings and punishments being his portion in the "noble
and opulent country-house" at Spasskoe, where foreign tutors and
governesses succeeded one another quickly. That Turgenev had before
his eyes from his childhood in his capricious and despotic mother a
distressing object-lesson of a typical Russian vice, viz. unbridled
love of power, could only deepen his instinct for siding with weak and
gentle natures. Turgenev's psychological penetration into hard, coarse
and heartless characters, so antithetic to his own, seems surprising
till we learn that the unscrupulous and cruel "Lutchinov," the hero
of _Three Portraits_, was drawn from a maternal ancestor. From the
Lutovinov family, cruel, despotic and grasping, Turgenev no doubt
inherited a mental strand which enabled him to fathom the workings of
hardness and cruelty in others. The injustice and humiliations he and
his brothers, along with a large household of dependents, suffered at
Madame Turgenev's hands,[4] early aroused in him a detestation of the
system of serfdom. The touching story of _Mumu_, in which the deaf and
dumb house-porter's sweetheart is forced to marry another man, while
he himself is ordered to drown his pet dog by his mistress's caprice,
is a true domestic chronicle. Though Madame Turgenev dearly loved
her son Ivan Sergeyevitch, whose sweet and tender nature influenced
her for good, her insatiable desire to domineer over others, and her
violent outbursts of rage kept the household trembling before her
whims. "Nobody had a right to sustain in her presence any ideas which
contradicted her own," while her jealousy of her handsome husband's
_affaires de cœur_ embittered her days.[5] She herself had been
the victim of her own upbringing, and remembered with loathing her
step-father's lust and cruelty. Turgenev therefore was early inoculated
with an aversion for tyrannizing in any shape or form, as well as for
the prevalent forms of oppression, official or social, under Nicholas
I., and as his biographers tell us, the Turgenevs were a stock noted
for "a hatred of slavery and for noble and humane temperaments."[6]
[4] See "La mère d'Ivan Turguenieff," in _Tourguénieff Inconnu_, par
Michel Delines.
[5] See the story _First Love_, where Turgenev describes his parents'
relations.
[6] Brückner's _A Literary History of Russia_, p. 338.
A second potent influence that turned the youthful Turgenev's face
definitely towards the West was his lengthy tour in Europe, 1838-41.
His early education at Moscow University had been completed at the
University of St. Petersburg, where his family had removed after his
father's death in 1835, and where as a shy youth he saw the two
great authors, Gogol and Pushkin, whose literary example was to have
a profound influence on his own work. German philosophy, especially
Hegel's, was at this epoch fashionable in Russia, and Turgenev, after
setting out on his tour with his mother's blessing, attended by a
valet, arrived in Berlin, where he drank deep of Goethe's, Schiller's
and Heine's works, and where his ardent discussions with his circle
of students on life, art, politics and metaphysics crystallized his
aspirations for European culture. A tour on the Rhine, in Switzerland
and in Italy effectually widened his outlook, and he returned to
Spasskoe in 1841, bringing with him his narrative poem "Parasha."
Undoubtedly conflicting influences, such as Byron, Pushkin and
Lermontov, are visible in Turgenev's youthful, romantic poems,
"Parasha," and various others (1837-47), which we shall not discuss
here, or his half-dozen plays (1845-52), which last, however excellent,
did not give his genius sufficient scope.[7] Much ingenuity has been
exercised, especially by French critics,[8] in ascribing Turgenev's
literary debts to authors as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Victor Hugo,
Balzac, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Auerbach, Dal, Grigorovitch, Dickens,
etc. But it would be a waste of time to analyse Turgenev's work for
traces of contemporary authors, though George Sand's stories of French
peasant life had undoubtedly deeply influenced him. With Pushkin as
classical model for clarity of style, and with Gogol as his model for
direct painting from everyday life, Turgenev belongs to "the natural
school" of the 'forties, the school of the realists championed by
the critic Byelinsky, then all-powerful with the rising men. It is
true that a vein of romanticism crops up here and there in various of
Turgenev's tales, and that a definite strain of lyrical sentimentalism
in occasional passages may be credited to German influence. But in
almost his first story, _The Duellist_ (1846), we find a complete break
with the traditions of the romantic school, traditions which are indeed
here turned inside out.[9] Here it is evident that a new master is in
the field, "a painter of realities" as Byelinsky soon declared.[10] The
story is of much significance, as exemplifying Turgenev's clear-eyed,
deep apprehension of character, and his creative penetration through
_beauty of feeling_. It is to be noted how the coarse bullying
insolence of the officer, Lutchkov (who out of envious spleen kills
in a duel his friend, the refined and generous Kister), is betrayed
_by the absence of any tender or chivalrous emotion for women_. Filled
with his own male self-complacency, and contemptuous of women, Lutchkov
comes to his interview with the fresh, innocent girl Masha, whom he
alarms by his coarse swagger. To cover his brutal egoistic feeling he
roughly kisses the shrinking girl, but she shudders and darts away.
"What are you afraid of? Come, stop that.... That's all nonsense,"
he says hoarsely, as he approaches her, terribly confused, with a
disagreeable smile on his twisted lips, while patches of red came out
on his face.
[7] "Parasha" was warmly praised by Byelinsky in 1843, in an article in
_Annals of the Fatherland_. Of the six Plays, which were revived from
time to time, _The Bachelor_ (1849) is perhaps the strongest. In later
years Turgenev disclaimed any interest in his dramas, and declared that
towards his poems he felt an antipathy almost physical.
[8] Haumant, Delines, Waliszewski, etc.
[9] M. Haumant has been at great pains to show that Turgenev in his
early prose and verse "commenced by appropriating the form and the
subjects of the romantics of the 'twenties and the 'thirties, that his
'half revolt' against the romantic convention became accentuated later,
and that we find in the plays and poems a 'degradation of the romantic
heroes' of Pushkin and Lermontov" (Haumant, pp. 113-122). Although
there is not a little truth in his thesis, M. Haumant has forgotten to
add that the _social atmosphere_ of the preceding generation, as well
as of its literature, music and art, was "romantic," and that the youth
of the period, as well as the heroes of Goethe and Stendhal, did act,
think and feel in a "romantic" manner.
[10] Byelinsky, in his criticism on _Hor and Kalinitch_, says: "His
talent is not suited to true lyrics. He can only paint from real
life what he has seen or _studied_. He can create, but only with the
materials given by nature. It is not a copy of the real; nature has
not given the author innate ideas, but he has to find them; the author
transforms the real, following his artistic ideal, and so his picture
becomes more living. He knows how to render faithfully a character or
a fact he has observed.... Nature has given Turgenev this capacity of
observing, of understanding, and of appreciating faithfully and quickly
each fact, of divining its cause and consequences, and, when facts are
lacking, of supplying the factors by just divination."
Could anything describe better the brutal spirit of the man who, out
of spiteful envy, to revenge his slighted self-love, kills his own
friend, Kister, in a duel? Turgenev's description of Kister must be
remarked, for the latter in his "good nature, modesty, warm-heartedness
and _natural inclination for everything beautiful_" is the twin-soul
of his creator. Turgenev's lifelong readiness to lose sight of himself
in appreciation of others, even of the men who abused his good offices
and repaid him with ingratitude, was notorious.[11] One may assert that
Turgenev's character was thus early expressed in four dominant traits,
viz. a generous tenderness of heart, an enthusiasm for the good,
sensitiveness to beauty of form and feeling, an infinite capacity for
the passion of love. These qualities are manifest in his first work of
importance, _A Sportsman's Sketches_ (1847-51), an epoch-making book
which profoundly affected Russian society and had no small influence in
hastening the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861-63.
[11] For example, Turgenev warmly commended Dostoevsky's works to
foreign critics, after the latter had perpetrated the spiteful libel on
him in _The Possessed_.
III
"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"