"SMOKE"
_Smoke_ was first published in 1867, several years after Turgenev
had fixed his home in Baden, with his friends the Viardots. Baden at
this date was a favourite resort for all circles of Russian society,
and Turgenev was able to study at his leisure his countrymen as they
appeared to foreign critical eyes. The novel is therefore the most
cosmopolitan of all Turgenev's works. On a veiled background of the
great world of European society, little groups of representative
Russians, members of the aristocratic and the Young Russia parties, are
etched with an incisive, unfaltering hand. _Smoke_, as an historical
study, though it yields in importance to _Fathers and Children_ and
_Virgin Soil_, is of great significance to Russians. It might with
truth have been named _Transition_, for the generation it paints was
then midway between the early philosophical Nihilism of the 'sixties
and the active political Nihilism of the 'seventies.
Markedly transitional, however, as was the Russian mind of the days
of _Smoke_, Turgenev, with the faculty that distinguishes the great
artist from the artist of the second rank, the faculty of seeking out
and stamping the essential under confused and fleeting forms, has once
and for ever laid bare the fundamental weakness of the Slav nature, its
weakness of will. _Smoke_ is an attack, a deserved attack, not merely
on the Young Russia party, but on all the Parties; not on the old ideas
or the new ideas, but on the proneness of the Slav nature to fall a
prey to a consuming weakness, a moral stagnation, a feverish _ennui_,
the Slav nature that analyses everything with force and brilliancy,
and ends, so often, by doing nothing. _Smoke_ is the attack, bitter
yet sympathetic, of a man who, with growing despair, has watched
the weakness of his countrymen, while he loves his country all the
more for the bitterness their sins have brought upon it. _Smoke_ is
the scourging of a babbling generation, by a man who, grown sick to
death of the chatter of reformers and reactionists, is visiting the
sins of the fathers on the children, with a contempt out of patience
for the hereditary vice in the Slav blood. And this time the author
cannot be accused of partisanship by any blunderer. "A plague o'
both your houses" is his message equally to the Bureaucrats and the
Revolutionists. And so skilfully does he wield the thong that every
lash falls on the back of both parties. An exquisite piece of political
satire is _Smoke_; for this reason alone it would stand unique among
novels.
The attention that _Smoke_ aroused was immediate and great; but the
hue-and-cry that assailed it was even greater. The publication of the
book marks the final rupture between Turgenev and the party of Young
Russia. The younger generation never quite forgave him for drawing
Gubaryov and Bambaev, Voroshilov and Madame Suhantchikov--types,
indeed, in which all revolutionary or unorthodox parties are painfully
rich. Or, perhaps, Turgenev was forgiven for it when he was in his
grave, a spot where forgiveness flowers to a late perfection. And yet
the fault was not Turgenev's. No, his last novel, _Virgin Soil_, bears
splendid witness that it was Young Russia that was one-eyed.
Let the plain truth here be set down. _Smoke_ is not a complete picture
of the Young Russia of the day; it was not yet time for that picture;
and that being so, Turgenev did the next best thing in attacking
the windbags, the charlatans and their crowd of shallow, chattering
followers, as well as the empty formulas of the _laissez-faire_ party.
It was inevitable that the attack should bring on him the anger of all
young enthusiasts working for "the Cause"; it was inevitable that "the
Cause" of reform in Russia should be mixed up with the Gubaryovs, just
as reforms in France a generation ago were mixed up with Boulanger;
and that Turgenev's waning popularity for the last twenty years of his
life should be directly caused by his honesty and clear-sightedness
in regard to Russian Liberalism, was inevitable also. To be crucified
by those you have benefited is the cross of honour of all great,
single-hearted men.
But though the bitterness of political life flavours _Smoke_, although
its points of departure and arrival are wrapped in the atmosphere
of Russia's dark and insoluble problems, nevertheless the two
central figures of the book, Litvinov and Irina, are not political
figures. Luckily for them, in Gubaryov's words, they belong "to the
undeveloped." Litvinov himself may be dismissed in a sentence. He
is Turgenev's favourite type of man, a character much akin to his
own nature, gentle, deep and sympathetic. Turgenev often drew such a
character; Lavretsky, for example, in _A House of Gentlefolk_, is a
first cousin to Litvinov, an older and a sadder man.
But Irina--Irina is unique; for Turgenev has in her perfected her type
till she reaches a destroying witchery of fascination and subtlety.
Irina will stand for ever in the long gallery of great creations,
smiling with that enigmatical smile which took from Litvinov in a
glance half his life, and his love for Tatyana. The special triumph
of her creation is that she combines that exact balance between good
and evil which makes good women seem insipid beside her and bad women
unnatural. And, by nature irresistible, she is made doubly so to the
imagination by the situation which she re-creates between Litvinov and
herself. She ardently desires to become nobler, to possess all that
the ideal of love means for the heart of woman; but she has only the
power given to her of enervating the man she loves. Can she become a
Tatyana to him? No, to no man. She is born to corrupt, yet never to
be corrupted. She rises mistress of herself after the first measure
of fatal delight. And, never giving her whole heart absolutely to her
lover, she, nevertheless, remains ever to be desired.
Further, her wit, her scorn, her beauty preserve her from all the
influences of evil she does not deliberately employ. Such a woman is
as old and as rare a type as Helen of Troy. It is most often found
among the mistresses of great princes, and it was from a mistress of
Alexander II. that Turgenev modelled Irina.
Of the minor characters, Tatyana is an astonishing instance of
Turgenev's skill in drawing a complete character with half a dozen
strokes of the pen. The reader seems to have known her intimately all
his life--her family life, her girlhood, her goodness and individual
ways to the smallest detail; yet she only speaks on two or three
occasions. Potugin is but a weary shadow of Litvinov, but it is
difficult to say how much this is a telling refinement of art. The
shadow of this prematurely exhausted man is cast beforehand by Irina
across Litvinov's future. For Turgenev to have drawn Potugin as an
ordinary individual would have vulgarized the novel and robbed it of
its skilful proportions, for Potugin is one of those shadowy figures
which supply the chiaroscuro to a brilliant etching.
As a triumphant example of consummate technical skill, _Smoke_ will
repay the most exact scrutiny. There are a lightness and a grace about
the novel that conceal its actual strength. The political argument
glides with such ease in and out of the love story, that the hostile
critic is absolutely baffled; and while the most intricate steps are
executed in the face of a crowd of angry enemies, the performer lands
smiling and in safety. The art by which Irina's disastrous fascination
results in falsity, and Litvinov's desperate striving after sincerity
ends in rehabilitation--the art by which these two threads are spun,
till their meaning colours the faint political message of the book, is
so delicate that, like the silken webs which gleam only for the first
fresh hours in the forest, it leaves no trace, but becomes a dream in
the memory. And yet this book, which has the freshness of windy rain
and the whirling of autumn leaves, is the story of disintegrating
weakness, of the passion that saps and paralyses, that renders life
despicable, as Turgenev himself says. _Smoke_ is the finest example in
literature of a subjective psychological study of passion rendered
clearly and objectively in terms of art. Its character--we will not
say its superiority--lies in the extraordinary clearness with which
the most obscure mental phenomena are analysed in relation to the
ordinary values of daily life. At the precise point of psychological
analysis where Tolstoy wanders and does not convince the reader, and
at the precise point where Dostoevsky's analysis seems exaggerated and
obscure, like a figure looming through the mist, Turgenev throws a ray
of light from the outer to the inner world of man, and the two worlds
are revealed in the natural depths of their connection. It is in fact
difficult to find among the great modern artists men whose natural
balance of intellect can be said to equalize their special genius. The
Greeks alone present to the world a spectacle of a triumphant harmony
in the critical and creative mind of man, and this is their great
pre-eminence. But _Smoke_ presents the curious feature of a novel (Slav
in virtue of its modern psychological genius) which is classical in
its treatment and expression throughout; the balance of Turgenev's
intellect reigns ever supreme over the natural morbidity of his
subject.
IX
"VIRGIN SOIL"