"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"--"NATURE AND MAN"--THE SECRET OF TURGENEV'S ART
At this date, 1847, Russia, long prostrate beneath the drill sergeants
of that "paternal" autocrat Nicholas I.,[12] with the lynx-eyed
police rule, servile press and general atmosphere of bureaucratic
subservience stupefying the country, was slowly awakening to the new
ideas of reform. Grigorovitch's novel _The Village_ (1846), which
painted the wretched life of the serfs, marked the changing current
of social ideas, but to Turgenev was to fall the honour of hastening
"the Emancipation." There is perhaps a little exaggeration in this
eloquent passage of M. de Vogüé: "Russia saw its own image with
alarm in the mirror of serfdom held towards it. A shiver passed
through the land: in a day Turgenev became famous, and his cause was
half won.... I have said that serfdom stood condemned in everybody's
heart, even in the Emperor Nicholas's." But we are assured by Turgenev
himself that Alexander II.'s resolution to abolish serfdom was due
in no small part to _A Sportsman's Sketches_. The old generation in
fact was soon to pass away with Nicholas's rule. As the sketch "The
Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov" demonstrates, to this old race of
landowners, frankly despotic in their manners, was succeeding a milder
class--one which "did not like the old methods," but was ineffective
and self-distrustful. And it was to this younger Russia in silent
protest against the "official nationalism" prescribed by the ministers
of Nicholas, and against the stagnation of provincial life which Gogol
had satirized so unsparingly in _Dead Souls_ (1842), that Turgenev made
his appeal with his first sketch "Hor and Kalinitch" in the magazine
_The Contemporary_. Turgenev's reputation was made, and Byelinsky, who
declared that Turgenev was "not a creator but a painter of realities,"
immediately predicted his future greatness. The other, _A Sportsman's
Sketches_, as they appeared, one by one, were eagerly seized on by
the public, who felt that this new talent was revealing deep-welling
springs of individuality in the Russian nature, hitherto unrecorded.
[12] "The teaching of philosophy was proscribed in all the schools,
and in all the universities of the Empire; admission to which had
now been reduced in numbers. The classics were similarly ostracised.
Historical publications were put under a censor's control, which was
tantamount to a prohibition. No history of modern times, _i.e._ of the
seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, was allowed to be taught in any
form whatsoever."--E. M. DE VOGÜÉ.
Though Russian society was profoundly moved by Turgenev's picture of
serfdom, it was in truth the triumph of the pure artist, of the writer
who saw man's fugitive life in relation to the vast, universal drama
of nature, that made _A Sportsman's Sketches_ acceptable to all. One
may compare the book's atmosphere to some woodland's tender morning
air quivering with light, which transmits the ringing voices of men
in all their meaning inflections. The voices rise, in joy or strife
or passion, then die away in silence, and we hear the gentle stir and
murmur of the leaves as the wind passes, while afar swells the roar of
the deep forest. Turgenev's spiritual vision resembles this silvery
light and air which register equally the most exquisite vibration of
human aspiration and the dissonance of men's folly and misery. The
sweet and tender depths of the author's spirit served, so to say, as
a sensitive mirror which reflected impassively the struggle between
the forces of worldly craft and the appeal of all humble, neglected
and suffering creatures. "The Tryst" is an example of the artist's
exquisite responsiveness both to the fleeting moods of nature and the
conflicts of human feeling. Thus the sufferings of the young peasant
girl, poor Akoulina, at the hands of her conceited lover, the pampered
valet, Viktor, are so blended with the woodland scene and our last view
of "the empty cart rattling over the bare hillside, the low sinking sun
in the pale clear sky, the gusty wind scudding over the stubble fields,
the bright but chill smile of fading nature," that one can scarcely
dissociate the girl's distress from the landscape. An illusion! but one
that great literature--for example, the _Odyssey_--fosters. When we
look over the face of a wide-stretching landscape each tiny hamlet and
its dwellers appear to the eye as a little point of human activity, and
each environment, again, as the outcome of an endless chain of forces,
seen and unseen in nature. Man, earth and heaven--it is the trinity
always suggested in the work of the great poets.
But the vast background of nature need not be always before the eyes of
an audience. In "The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District," for instance,
where--through the railings of an embittered man against the petty
boredom of provincial life, together with a characteristically Russian
confession of his own sloth and mediocrity--we breathe the heated
air of a big landowner's house, the window on nature is, so to say,
shut down. So in "Lebedyan" the bustle and humours of a horse-fair
in the streets of a small country town, and in "The Country House"
the sordid manoeuvres of the stewards and clerks of the lazy landed
proprietor, Madame Losnyakov, against their victims, the peasants on
the estate, exclude the fresh atmosphere of forest and steppe. But even
so we are conscious that the sky and earth encompass these people's
meetings in market-place and inns, in posting-stations, peasants' huts
and landowners' domains, and always a faint undertone murmurs to us
that each generation is like a wave passing in the immensity of sea.
Sometimes, as in "The District Doctor," a tragedy within four walls is
shut in by a feeling of sudden night and the isolation of the wintry
fields. Sometimes, as in "Biryuk," the outbreak of a despairing peasant
is reflected in the fleeting storm-clouds and lashing rain of a storm
in the forest. But the people's figures are always seen _in just
relation to their surroundings, to their fellows and to nature_.
By the relations of a man with his neighbours and their ideas, a
man's character is focussed for us and his place in his environment
determined. Thus in "Raspberry Spring" the old steward Tuman's
complacent panegyrics on the lavish ways of his former master, a
grand seigneur of Catherine's time, are a meaning accompaniment to
the misery of Vlass the harassed serf. Vlass has just returned from
his sad errand to Moscow (his son has died there penniless), where he
has had his master's door shut in his face, and he has been ordered
to return and pay the bailiff his arrears of rent. Whether under the
ancient régime of Catherine, or of Nicholas I., Vlass is the "poor man"
of Scripture whose face is ground by the rich. All the irony of poor
Vlass's existence steals upon us while we hear the old steward's voice
descanting on the dead count's sumptuous banquets, on his cooks and
fiddlers and the low-born mistresses who brought him to ruin; while the
humble peasant sits still and hears, too, of the "embroidered coats,
wigs, canes, perfumes, _eau de cologne_, snuff-boxes, of the huge
pictures ordered from Paris!" It is the cruelty, passive or active,
innate in the web of human existence that murmurs here in the bass.
_The parts in just relation to the whole scheme of existence_, that
is the secret of Turgenev's supremacy, and what a piercing instinct
for the relative values of men's motives and actions is revealed by
his calm, clear scrutiny! Observe in "The Agent" how the old serf
Antip's weeping protest against his family's ruin at the hands of the
tyrannous agent Sofron is made in _the model village_ Shiplova, with
its tidy farm-buildings and new windmill and threshing-floors, its
rich stacks and hemp-fields "all in excellent order." It is Sofron,
the man of "first rate administrative power," so honey-tongued before
the gentry, who farms four hundred acres of his own, and trades in
horses and stock and corn and hemp, it is this petty despot in his
prosperity who "is harrying the peasants out of their lives." "He is
sharp, awfully sharp, and rich, too, the beast!" says the Ryabovo
peasant. Behind the tyrannous bailiff Sofron is the owner of Shiplova,
the polished Mr. Pyenotchkin, a retired officer of the Guards, who
has mixed in the highest society. Mr. Pyenotchkin is a man _comme il
faut_, but when he finds that his luckless footman has forgotten to
warm the wine, he simply raises his eyebrows and orders his major-domo
to "make the necessary arrangements"--to have Fyodor flogged! Here
is progress on Western lines comfortably cheek by jowl with serfdom!
Of course the sting, here, for the Russian conscience lay precisely
in this juxtaposition of old and new, and in the knowledge that the
most progressive landowner could exercise his legal right to sell
his peasants, send a man away as a conscript, and separate him from
his family. But it is well to note that only three or four of the
_Sportsman's Sketches_ expose typical cases of a landlord's tyranny and
the anachronism of this mediaeval survival--serfdom.
One of these cases is "Yermolai and the Miller's Wife," a sketch
which for the calm breadth of vision in its exposure of serfdom is
flawless. In "Yermolai" note how Turgenev by a series of discreet
intermittent touches brings his people on the scene, and how the
tranquil description of the winding river, the Ista, with its stony
banks and cold clear streams and rugged precipitous banks, prepares
us for the story of poor Arina's sorrows and of the self-complacent
master's tyranny. Because Madame Zvyerkoff makes it a rule never to
keep married lady's maids, poor Arina is disgraced, her lover sent
away as a soldier, and she herself is married to the miller, who has
offered a price for her. This distressing episode, though the central
theme, is introduced subtly by a side wind after we have accompanied
the narrator and the tall gaunt huntsman, Yermolai, to the Ista's
banks, where the two sportsmen are benighted and seek sleep in the
outhouse of a mill. The bull-necked, fat-bellied miller sends out his
wife with a message to them, and this woman with her refined, mournful
eyes is none other than the unfortunate Arina, with whom Yermolai is
on old, familiar terms. The sportsman-narrator, who has been dozing in
the hay, wakes and soon gathers from the snatches of talk between the
pair the details of Arina's listless melancholy days after her child's
death. Her bitter situation is flashed upon us in Yermolai's suggestion
that she shall pay a visit to him in his hut when his own wife is away
from home! She changes the subject and soon walks away, and Yermolai's
peasant callousness is indicated in his yawning answer to his master's
questions. Then this story of a woman's sorrow is brought to a close by
one of those exquisite nature touches which brings us back again to
the infinite life of the encompassing earth and sky:
"'And do you know her lover, Petrushka?'
"'Piotr Vassilyevitch? Of course I know him.'
"'Where is he now?'
"'He was sent for a soldier.'
"We were silent for a while.
"'She doesn't seem very well?' I asked Yermolai at last.
"'I should think not! To-morrow, I say, we shall have good sport. A
little sleep now would do us no harm.'
"A flock of wild ducks swept whizzing over our heads, and we heard
them drop down into the river not far from us. It was quite dark, and
it began to be cold; in the thicket sounded the melodious notes of a
nightingale. We buried ourselves in the hay and fell asleep!"
By the descriptions of the landscape in "Yermolai and the Miller's
Wife" Turgenev subtly introduces the sense into our minds of nature's
vastness, of her infinity, of which the spectacle of man's social
injustice and distress becomes indissolubly part. Here there is nothing
of the reformer's _parti-pris_ in the picture. Turgenev's fluid,
sympathetic perceptions blend into a flow of creative mood, in which
the relations of men to their surroundings, and the significance of
their actions, their feelings, their fate are seen as parts of the
universal, dominating scheme of things. And this flow of mood in
Turgenev is his creative secret: as when music flows from a distance
to the listener over the darkening fields immediately the rough coarse
earth, with all its grinding, petty monotony melts into harmony, and
life is seen in its mysterious immensity, not merely in its puzzling
discrepancy of gaps, and contradictions and confusions. Turgenev's
work, at its best, gives us the sense of looking beyond the heads of
the moving human figures, out to the infinite horizon.
Although in Turgenev's pellucid art each touch seems simple, the
whole effect is highly complex, depending upon an infinite variety of
shades of tone. Let us finish by examining his complex method in "The
Singers." In the first twenty lines the author etches the cheerless
aspect of "the unlucky hamlet of Kolotovka, which lies on the slope of
a barren hill ... yet all the surrounding inhabitants know the road
to Kolotovka well; they go there often and are always glad to go." It
is not merely the tavern "The Welcome Resort," but the tavern-keeper
Nikolai Ivanitch that attracts them, for his shrewd alertness and
geniality are an influence far and wide in the neighbourhood. Turgenev
now introduces his main theme by a variation _in tempo_. He describes
how the narrator on a blazing hot July day is slowly dragging his
feet up the Kolotovka ravine towards the Inn, when he overhears one
man calling to another to come and hear a singing competition between
Yashka the Turk and the booth-keeper from Zhizdry. The narrator's
curiosity is stirred, and he follows the villagers into the bar-room,
where he finds the assembled company, who are urging the two singers
to begin. The men toss and the lot falls on the booth-keeper. Having
riveted our attention, Turgenev now increases his hold on us by
sketching the life and character of three village characters, "the
Gabbler," "the Blinkard" and "the Wild Master." We examine the village
audience till the booth-keeper at last steps forward and sings. For a
time the booth-keeper does not evoke the enthusiasm of the critical
villagers, but at last they are conquered by his bold flourishes and
daring trills, and they shout their applause. The booth-keeper's song
is the triumph of technique and of training, and he carries away his
hearers, while "the Gabbler" bawls: "You've won, brother, you've won!"
But "the Wild Master" silences "the Gabbler" with an oath and calls
on Yashka to begin. And now follows an entrancing description of the
power of genius to sway the heart:
"'Come, that's enough; don't be timid. For shame! ... why go back?...
Sing the best you can, by God's gift.'
"And the Wild Master looked down expectant. Yakov was silent for a
minute; he glanced round, and covered his face with his hand. All had
their eyes simply fastened upon him, especially the booth-keeper,
on whose face a faint, involuntary uneasiness could be seen through
his habitual expression of self-confidence and the triumph of his
success. He leant back against the wall, and again put both hands
under him, but did not swing his legs as before. When at last Yakov
uncovered his face it was pale as a dead man's; his eyes gleamed
faintly under their drooping lashes. He gave a deep sigh, and began
to sing.... The first sound of his voice was faint and unequal, and
seemed not to come from his chest, but to be wafted from somewhere
afar off, as though it had floated by chance into the room. A strange
effect was produced on all of us by this trembling, resonant note;
we glanced at one another, and Nikolai Ivanitch's wife seemed to
draw herself up. This first note was followed by another, bolder and
prolonged, but still obviously quivering, like a harp-string when
suddenly struck by a stray finger it throbs in a last, swiftly-dying
tremble; the second was followed by a third, and, gradually gaining
fire and breadth, the strains swelled into a pathetic melody. 'Not
one little path ran into the field,' he sang, and sweet and mournful
it was in our ears. I have seldom, I must confess, heard a voice
like it; it was slightly hoarse, and not perfectly true; there was
even something morbid about it at first; but it had genuine depth
of passion, and youth and sweetness, and a sort of fascinating
careless, pathetic melancholy. A spirit of truth and fire, a Russian
spirit, was sounding and breathing in that voice, and it seemed to
go straight to your heart, to go straight to all that was Russian in
it. The song swelled and flowed. Yakov was clearly carried away by
enthusiasm; he was not timid now; he surrendered himself wholly to
the rapture of his art; his voice no longer trembled; it quivered;
but with a scarce perceptible inward quiver of passion, which pierces
like an arrow to the very soul of the listeners, and he steadily
gained strength and firmness and breadth. I remember I once saw at
sunset on a flat sandy shore, when the tide was low and the sea's
roar came weighty and menacing from the distance, a great white
sea-gull; it sat motionless, its silky bosom facing the crimson glow
of the setting sun, and only now and then opening wide its great
wings to greet the well-known sea, to greet the sinking lurid sun:
I recalled it, as I heard Yakov. He sang, utterly forgetful of his
rival and all of us; he seemed supported, as a bold swimmer by the
waves, by our silent, passionate sympathy. He sang, and in every
sound of his voice one seemed to feel something dear and akin to us,
something of breadth and space, as though the familiar steppes were
unfolding before our eyes and stretching away into endless distance.
I felt the tears gathering in my bosom and rising to my eyes;
suddenly I was struck by dull, smothered sobs.... I looked round--the
innkeeper's wife was weeping, her bosom pressed close to the window.
Yakov threw a quick glance at her, and he sang more sweetly, more
melodiously than ever; Nikolai Ivanitch looked down; the Blinkard
turned away; the Gabbler, quite touched, stood, his gaping mouth
stupidly open; the humble peasant was sobbing softly in the corner
and shaking his head with a plaintive murmur; and on the iron visage
of the Wild Master, from under his overhanging brows there slowly
rolled a heavy tear; the booth-keeper raised his clenched fists to
his brow, and did not stir.... I don't know how the general emotion
would have ended if Yakov had not suddenly come to a full stop on a
high, exceptionally shrill note, as though his voice had broken. No
one called out or even stirred; every one seemed to be waiting to
see whether he was not going to sing more; but he opened his eyes as
though wondering at our silence, looked round at all of us with a
face of enquiry, and saw that the victory was his....
"'Yasha,' said the Wild Master, laying his hand on his shoulder, and
he could say no more.
"We stood, as it were, petrified. The booth-keeper softly rose and
went up to Yakov.
"'You ... yours ... you've won,' he articulated at last with an
effort, and rushed out of the room."
An artist less consummate than Turgenev would have ended here. But the
sequel immeasurably heightens the whole effect by plunging us into the
mournful, ever-running springs of human tragedy--the eclipse of man's
spiritual instincts by the emergence of his underlying animalism.
Observe there is not a trace of ethical feeling in the mournful close.
It is simply the way of life:
"... When I waked up, everything was in darkness; the hay scattered
around smelt strong, and was slightly damp; through the slender
rafters of the half-open roof pale stars were faintly twinkling. I
went out. The glow of sunset had long died away, and its last trace
showed in a faint light on the horizon; but above the freshness
of the night there was still a feeling of heat in the atmosphere,
lately baked through by the sun, and the breast still craved for a
draught of cool air. There was no wind nor were there any clouds; the
sky all round was clear and transparently dark, softly glimmering
with innumerable, but scarcely visible stars. There were lights
twinkling about the village; from the flaring tavern close by rose
a confused, discordant din, amid which I fancied I recognized the
voice of Yakov. Violent laughter came from there in an outburst at
times. I went up to the little window and pressed my face against
the pane. I saw a cheerless, though varied and animated scene; all
were drunk--all from Yakov upwards. With breast bared, he sat on a
bench, and singing in a thick voice a street song to a dance tune, he
lazily fingered and strummed on the strings of a guitar. His moist
hair hung in tufts over his fearfully pale face. In the middle of
the room, the Gabbler, completely 'screwed,' and without his coat,
was hopping about in a dance before the peasant in the grey smock;
the peasant, on his side, was with difficulty stamping and scraping
with his feet, and grinning meaninglessly over his dishevelled
beard; he waved one hand from time to time, as much as to say, 'Here
goes!' Nothing could be more ludicrous than his face; however much
he twitched up his eyebrows, his heavy lids would hardly rise, but
seemed lying upon his scarcely-visible, dim, and mawkish eyes. He was
in that amiable frame of mind of a perfectly intoxicated man, when
every passer-by, directly he looks him in the face, is sure to say,
'Bless you, brother, bless you!' The Blinkard, as red as a lobster,
and his nostrils dilated wide, was laughing malignantly in a corner;
only Nikolai Ivanitch, as befits a good tavern-keeper, preserved his
composure unchanged. The room was thronged with many new faces, but
the Wild Master I did not see in it.
"I turned away with rapid steps and began descending the hill on
which Kolotovka lies. At the foot of this hill stretches a wide
plain; plunged in the misty waves of the evening haze, it seemed more
immense, and was, as it were, merged in the darkening sky. I marched
with long strides along the road by the ravine, when all at once,
from somewhere far away in the plain, came a boy's clear voice:
'Antropka! Antropka-a-a...!' He shouted in obstinate and tearful
desperation, with long, long drawing out of the last syllable.
"He was silent for a few instants, and started shouting again. His
voice rang out clear in the still, lightly slumbering air. Thirty
times at least he had called the name, Antropka. When suddenly, from
the farthest end of the plain, as though from another world, there
floated a scarcely audible reply:
"'Wha-a-t?'
"The boy's voice shouted back at once with gleeful exasperation:
"'Come here, devil! woo-od imp!'
"'What fo-or?' replied the other, after a long interval.
"'Because dad wants to thrash you!' the first voice shouted back
hurriedly.
"The second voice did not call back again, and the boy fell to
shouting 'Antropka' once more. His cries, fainter and less and less
frequent, still floated up to my ears, when it had grown completely
dark, and I had turned the corner of the wood that skirts my village
and lies over three miles from Kolotovka ... 'Antropka-a-a!' was
still audible in the air, filled with the shadows of the night."
In the above passage the feeling of the shadowy earth, the mist, the
great plain and the floating cries rarefies the village atmosphere of
human commonness. By such a representation of the people's figures,
seen in just relation to their surroundings, to their fellows, and to
nature, Turgenev's art secures for his picture poetic harmony, and
renders these finer cadences in the turmoil of life which ears less
sensitive than his fail to hear! _The parts in just relation to the
whole scheme of human existence._ Man, earth and heaven--it is the
secret of the perfection of the great poets.
IV
"RUDIN"