"VIRGIN SOIL"
The last words of _Virgin Soil_--
"A long while Paklin remained standing before this closed door.
"'Anonymous Russia!' he said at last"--
lay bare the inner meaning of the book. Anonymous Russia! It was
Anonymous Russia, as Turgenev saw, that had at last arisen to menace
the doors which shut out Russia from political liberty. And it is of
the spontaneous formation of the Nihilist party, and of the hurried and
uncertain steps it took preparatory to the serious Terrorist struggle,
that _Virgin Soil_ treats with equal skill and force. The educated
young Russian of the 'seventies had begun to live an underground life;
Turgenev studied this phenomenon, and, difficult though this study
was, so well did he foresee the future of Young Russia that _Virgin
Soil_ remains the best analysis made of the national elements that
were mingled in its loosely-knit secret organizations. _Virgin Soil_
gives us the historical justification of the Nihilist movement, and
the prophecy of its surface failure; it traces out the deep roots of
the necessity of such a movement; it shows forth the ironical and
inevitable weakness of this party of self-sacrifice. This effect
is obtained in this novel by a series of significant suggestions
underlying the words and actions of the characters.
These suggestions are delicate and fleeting like the quiet swirl of
water round the sunken rocks in a stream. And so delicately is the
Nihilist rising shadowed forth, that a foreign reader can enjoy the
novel simply for its human, and not for its political, interest.
Delicate, however, as is the technique of _Virgin Soil_, there is a
large, free carelessness in the spirit of its art which reminds one
much of the few last plays of Shakespeare, notably of _Cymbeline_,
where the action, so easygoing is it, is almost too natural and
effortless to be called _art_. In reality this large carelessness is
a sign that the stage of the artist's maturity has been reached, and
a little passed. _Virgin Soil_, one must admit, is artistically the
least perfect of the six great novels. The opening is too leisurely,
and not till the second volume is reached do we feel that Turgenev is
exerting his full power over us. The characterization is less subtle in
detail. While Markelov's figure is somewhat enigmatic, Paklin, though
extremely life-like, too obviously serves the purpose of a go-between.
But if people declare that Kallomyetsev is a type caricatured, we
protest that the portrait of Sipyagin, this statesman of "the most
liberal opinions," is priceless. The scene between Sipyagin and
Paklin in chapter xxxiv., especially the portion in the carriage,
is psychologically a gem of the first water. _Virgin Soil_ was the
last of Turgenev's great novels, and appropriately ends his career as
novelist; it was his last word to the young; it was one of the causes
of his final disgrace with the Government; it was his link with most of
Russia's great writers: they were exiled in life: Turgenev was exiled
after death. After his funeral at Petersburg, September 1883, attended
by 285 deputations, public comments on his labours were discreetly
veiled and discreetly suppressed by the Government,[21] that had feared
his power in life. And this fatuous act of the autocracy is the best
commentary on the truth of _Virgin Soil_.
[21] For an account of the suppression and prohibition of Tolstoy's
lecture on Turgenev, in Moscow, after the latter's death, see Maude's
_Life of Tolstoy_, vol. ii, p. 185.
To examine the characters of the novel is to see how representative
they were of Russian political life. Nezhdanov, the poet and
half-aristocrat, is one of the most important. Turgenev makes him
the child of a _mésalliance_, and he is, in fact, the bastard child
of Power allied to modern Sentimentality. Born with the brain of
an aristocrat, he represents the uneasy educated conscience of the
aristocrats, the conscience which is ever seeking to propitiate, and be
responsible for, "the people," but is ever driven back by its inability
to make itself understood by the masses, which have been crystallized
by hard facts, for hundreds of years, into a great caste of their own.
Nezhdanov understands instinctively how impossible, how fatal, is the
task of "going to the people": his sympathy is with them, but not of
them. Banished, by his attitude, from his own caste, he seeks refuge
in poetry and art; but there is not enough of reality, not enough of
the national life, in his art for him to feel himself more than a
dilettante. He feels he must identify himself with the real movements
around him, or perish. He fails in his impossible task of winning
over "the people," and perishes. The Nezhdanovs still exist in Europe:
they are the sign of a dislocation of the national life and of the
artificial conditions of the society in which they appear; and the
Russian Nezhdanov of the 'seventies was a type very much in evidence
in the Nihilist party, and by making his hero perish Turgenev wished
to show that hope for the future lay with far different men--with the
Mariannas, the moral enthusiasts, and with the Solomins, the practical
leaders who must come from "the people" itself.
In drawing Nezhdanov, Turgenev was on his own ground: the type was
very sympathetic to him, for he too felt all his life with despair
that the gulf that separated "the people" from those who would lead
them, was too great to be successfully crossed; and his own inner life
was a turning away from the politicians, who traduced him and watched
him with suspicion, to art as a refuge from reality. But in drawing
Solomin, the leader coming from the people, Turgenev did not achieve
perfect artistic success. The truth is, this type was then a scarce
one, and to-day it is not prominent. It is this type of man that
Russia needs more than any other, the man of firmness and _character_.
Solomin is admirably drawn in the amusing scene of his visit to the
Sipyagins (chaps. xxiii.-xxv.); also in his relations with Nezhdanov
and Marianna, as their host at the factory; but there is a slight veil
drawn over his inner life, and he is never sounded to the depths. Does
he present enough of the rich contradictions and human variations of
a living man? True, Solomin typifies the splendid sturdiness of the
Russian people, the caution and craftiness of the peasant-born and the
intellectual honesty of his race; but perhaps these qualities need
a more individual soul behind them to combine them into a perfect
creation. And in fact the Russian Solomins have not yet left the
factories: they are the foremen who do not speak up enough for "the
people" in the national life.[22]
[22] Passage written in 1896.
Marianna, however, the young girl, the Nihilist enthusiast, is the
success of the book. The splendid qualities shown by the Nihilist women
in the Terrorist campaign, a few years later than the publication
of _Virgin Soil_, are a striking testimony to Turgenev's genius in
psychology. The women of Young Russia were waiting to be used, and used
the women were. Marianna is the incarnation of that Russian fight
for progress, which, though half-hidden and obscure to foreign eyes,
has thrilled the nerves of Europe. This pure girl with passionate,
courageous soul is, in fact, the Liberty of Russia. Without experience
or help, with eyes bandaged by her destiny, she calmly goes forward on
the far journey whence there is no return. By necessity she must go
on: she lives by faith. In her figure is personified the flower of the
Russian youth, those who cast off from their generation the stigma of
inaction--that heart-eating inaction which is the vice of the Russian
temperament, as her great writers tell us--those who cast fear to the
Sipyagins, and the Kallomyetsevs, to the bureaucrats their enemies,
and went forth on that campaign, sublime in its recklessness, fruitful
in its consequences to their country and fatal in its consequences to
themselves. Marianna personifies the spirit of self-sacrifice which
led her comrades forth against autocracy. The path was closed; behind
them was only dishonour and cowardice; onward, then, for honour, for
liberty, for all that makes life worth living to the courageous in
heart. But the closed doors, the doors on which they knocked, were
the doors of the fortress: the fortress closed upon them, upon their
brothers and sisters: their leaders were sentenced, deported, exiled:
fresh leaders sprang up, each circle had its leaders, whose average
life, as free men, was reckoned, not by years but by months. The lives
of Marianna and her generation were spent in prison or in exile. But
by the very recklessness of their protest against autocracy, by their
very simplicity in "going to the people," by their self-immolation
for their principles Europe knew that there was no liberty in Russia
save in its prisons, and that the bloody reprisals that followed were
those of Marianna's brothers, who saw her helpless in the hands of a
great gendarmerie--a gendarmerie that had long shamelessly abused the
power it held, that had silenced brutally all who had protested, all,
all the independent spirits, all their great writers, all their _men_.
Marianna, Marianna herself, must seek the prison! Turgenev foresaw
this, and _Virgin Soil_ tells of her preparation for the ordeal, of the
why and the wherefore she went on her path.
And if anything remains obscure in _Virgin Soil_, the English reader
must remember that Turgenev was writing under special difficulties.
There must always be a little vagueness in one's speech, when
_Silence_ is written in an official writing above the doors. Anonymous
Russia! Anonymous Russia had arisen to mine the doors: the doors must
be shattered by secret hands that Europe might for once gaze through.
It was for Turgenev's breaking of this _Silence_ that Tolstoy was
forbidden to speak when Turgenev had been carried to his tomb. It was
for Marianna's transgression against this _Silence_ that Turgenev has
glorified her in _Virgin Soil_.
* * * * *
What was the Nihilist party of the 'seventies? It began, as we have
said, with the Socialistic movement of "going to the people." This
movement, again, was the natural outlet for the many liberal ideas
which, germinating in "advanced" heads, had been gathering in intensity
with each generation. With the liberation of the serfs Alexander II.'s
liberal policy had abruptly ended. To understand Russian politics
is to know that though there are many cliques there are only two
great parties, the one orthodox, the other unorthodox--the party of
Governmental Action, and the party of Liberal Ideas. There are no safe
politics in Russia outside the official world. If you can win over the
officials to your plans in various local work, well and good; if not,
your efforts are labelled "subversive"; and it is thus that, sooner or
later, every disciple of liberal ideas finds himself placed in direct
opposition to the Government. Though there are many liberal-minded men
among the officials, still, in Solomin's words, "the official is always
an outsider," and therefore it is that the unofficial thinking part
of Russia--the writers, the professors, the students, the press, and
the more intelligent of the professional world--form an unorganized
but permanent opposition. To this party gravitate naturally the
discontented spirits from all classes--nobles, military men, those who
have been hardly dealt with, and those who have an axe of their own to
grind--the Markelovs, and the Paklins. Accordingly, the autocracy, by
the solid, impermeable front it has presented for twenty-five years
to reform and to the education of the peasants, may be said to hold
the varying opposition together. The action of the Government, too, in
forbidding the public to comment on such matters as the late strike of
factory hands in Petersburg, where also the masters were "forbidden"
to yield to the men's demands, constantly creates a hostile public.
And it was in this manner that the Nihilist party of the 'seventies was
formed.
It was natural enough for the last generation of Young Russia "to go to
the people," for it is in the matter of the education of the peasants
that Russia's hope of social and political reform lies. Besides, this
plan of action meant for Young Russia the taking of the path of least
resistance. The other paths had been closed by reactionary decrees.
But to go actually among the peasantry and work for them and learn
from them had never been attempted, and by a natural impulse the Young
Russia theorists threw themselves into this Utopian campaign. The
movement, of course, was fore-doomed. Not only did the Government enact
harsh penalties against the Socialists, but the peasants themselves
were too ignorant, too far off in their life, to understand what
Young Russia meant. And the exiling and imprisonment of the leading
propagandists, when it came, could not fail to bring the Nihilists into
a direct war with autocracy itself.
The whole quarrel between the autocracy and the liberal opposition,
a quarrel which the Nihilists of the late 'seventies brought to a
head, is a question of liberty. Is Russia to be more Orientalized
or more Europeanized? If you believe in liberty of speech and of the
conscience, in a free press and the education of the peasants, if you
would reform the peculation and corruption of the official world, if
you wish to circulate European literature without hindrance, if you
detest the persecution of the Jews and the Stundists,--then you must
be silent or be prepared at any moment for bureaucratic warnings,
deprivations, detentions and possible exile. If you are a Conservative
you will acquiesce in every possible action of the bureaucracy, as
"necessary." It is simply a struggle between a very strongly organized
bureaucracy, armed with the modern weapons of centralized power, and
the public opinion of a large body of educated subjects with advanced
views. Though enormous power is in the hands of the Government, and the
gross credulity and ignorance of the peasants and the self-interest of
the officials all work to preserve the _status quo_, nevertheless there
is in the Russian mind, side by side with its natural Slavophilism, a
great susceptibility to European example, and therefore the work of
the Nihilists of yesterday and the Liberals of to-day was, and is,
_to awaken the public mind_. It does not matter very much how this
work is performed, so long as it is performed. The Russian mind is
naturally quick and sensitive; it moves quickly to conclusions when
once it is started, as we see in the quickness with which Russia was
semi-Europeanized by Peter the Great, and how easily the Emancipation
of the Serfs was effected owing to the weakness of the autocracy at the
close of the Crimean War. There is reaction now in Russia, but this may
be broken up by the pressure of a series of fresh economic difficulties
superimposed upon the old.
It can only, therefore, be claimed for the Nihilists of the 'seventies
that they represented an advanced section of the community, and not
the nation itself, in their struggle with the bureaucracy. They must
be regarded as enthusiasts who awoke public opinion when it had begun
to slumber. They vindicated the manliness of the nation, which had
always gone in fear of the official world: it was now the bureaucracy
that was afraid! The Nihilists became martyrs for their creed of
progress; they drew the attention of Europe to the strange spectacle
that Russia presents in its well-equipped bureaucracy of caste slowly
paralysing the old democratic institutions of the peasantry. A strong
Governmental system is absolutely necessary for the holding together
of the enormous Russian Empire; but the fact that the work of freeing
and educating the peasants had (with only the rarest exceptions), been
always violently or secretly opposed by the high officials, suggests
that the bureaucracy is like a parasite which strangles, though
appearing to protect, the tree itself. And the attitude of the official
world to its sun and centre, the autocracy, is something like that of
threatening soldiers surrounding the throne of a latter-day Caesarism.
Whether or no the Nihilists' belief in revolution in Russia was
justified by their measure of success, their rising was but a
long-threatened revolt of idealism and of the Russian conscience
against Russian cowardice; it was the fermentation of modern ideas in
the breast of a society iron-bound by officialism; it was the generous
aspiration of the Russian soul against sloth and apathy and greed. The
Nihilists failed, inasmuch as the battle of Liberty is yet to be won:
they succeeded, inasmuch as their revolt was a tremendous object-lesson
to Europe of the internal evils of their country. And the objection
that they borrowed their ideas of revolution from the Commune and were
not a genuine product of Russia, Turgenev has answered once for all
in _Virgin Soil_. Liberty must spring from the soil whence Marianna
springs.
In the words of that great poem of Whitman:
"The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent
advance and retreat,
The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,
The prison, scaffold, garotte, hand-cuffs, iron necklace,
and lead balls do their work,
The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,
The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick
in distant lands,
The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked
with their own blood.
The young men droop their eyelashes towards the ground
when they meet.
But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place,
nor the infidel entered into full possession,
When Liberty goes out of the place it is not the first to
go, nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last."
There is no going back for the Mariannas of Russia. They must go
forward, and to-day they are going forward. Honour to them and theirs,
to them who, if forbidden by authority to work in the light, are ready
again to work in the dark. Honour to that great party with whom their
country's liberties have remained--Anonymous Russia!
* * * * *
Much water has flowed under the bridge since the preface above was
written one-and-twenty years ago, but the author has only deemed it
necessary to correct a few lines of his criticism and to modify his
statement concerning Turgenev's funeral. Since 1896, we have seen
the spectacle of the Russo-Japanese war, the General Strike, the
creation of the Duma, the abortive Revolution of 1905, the excesses
of Terrorists, Agent-Provocateurs, "Black Hundreds" and Military
Court-Martials, Governmental illegalities, the rapid evolution,
economic and political, of a new Russia till 1914; and finally the
spectacle of the Great European War, the rally of all parties, under
the Prussian invasion, to the patriotic programme of the Progressive
Bloc, the falling away of even the old-fashioned Bureaucrats from "the
dark forces of the Empire," and the general situation, in the words of
the _Times_ Petrograd correspondent:
"A DELAYED DEVELOPMENT
"We know that had the Constitution signed by Alexander II. been
introduced, Russia might have been spared much suffering. The
assassination of the Tsar brought about a delay of 25 precious years.
Pobiedonostzeff persuaded Alexander III. that Russia enjoyed a
special dispensation of Providence; that the laws of history in other
lands did not apply to her. Thus the greatest of reforms, introduced
in the 'sixties, the abolition of slavery and the institution of the
Zemstvos granting the people a voice in the affairs of their country,
became stultified. It is true that serfdom could not be reintroduced,
that Zemstvos could not be abolished, but what happened was bad
enough. The education of the masses was neglected and the local
assemblies were placed under tutelage.
"Not till 1905 did Russia obtain relief from the reaction that
followed upon the tragedy of 1881. But Pobiedonostzeff had numerous
adherents among his contemporaries in the older bureaucracy, many of
whom survive to this day. The governing class in Russia forms a caste
which directs a huge and highly intricate mechanism of a centralized
administration ruling nearly 200,000,000 of people. These statesmen
could not suddenly be eliminated or instilled with new ideas alien
to all their habits or traditions. In the Senate or Supreme Court of
Justice, which promulgates all laws and sees to their enforcement,
and in the Upper House, which is half composed of members appointed
from the ranks of these elder statesmen, the old leaven was still
unhappily strong.... To these causes and agencies we owe the reaction
that has characterized Russian internal politics within recent
years....
"Slowly but surely the ranks of the old reactionary party have been
declining. By an infallible process of attrition they were bound
to disappear sooner or later, leaving the field clear for the New
Russia. The Great War came before the elimination was consummated.
It has hastened the process by convincing everybody, including the
bureaucracy, of the utter failure of the old system to cope with
great national problems. At the present time no section of the
population, and, therefore, no genuine political party, exists in
Russia that has a word to say in support of the Pobiedonostzeff
theory. The Nobles' Congress was the last stronghold to surrender. It
did so in the most emphatic manner by endorsing, _mirabile dictu!_
the resolutions of both Houses of Parliament demanding the formation
of a strong, united Ministry enjoying the confidence of the people.
Between the Army and the nation there is not, and there cannot be,
any difference of opinion on this subject.
"Within something like ten years the Russian people have become a
new people. What Pobiedonostzeff succeeded in doing 25 years ago
cannot, obviously, be attempted now. Russia has finally, irrevocably,
turned her back upon the old ideas. She has spoken her mind fully,
unanimously."--_The Times_, February 8, 1917.
As the writer is retouching his last chapter comes the news of the
Russian Revolution, an event of no less import to Europe than was
the French Revolution, and one no less fraught with incalculable
consequences.
This event carries back one's thought to the revolutionary attempt of
the Decembrists, 1825, and to the successive movements for political
reform in Turgenev's own day, from the men of the "'forties" (_Rudin_)
to the disastrous obscurantism of the heavy, stupid-minded Alexander
III., and his reactionary ministers. From _Virgin Soil_, 1877, one
follows in thought the succeeding forty years in which tract after
tract of stubborn political virgin soil has been slowly broken up
and sown with progressive seed. The changing economic conditions,
aggravated by the Great European War, and the weak obstinacy of
Nicholas II. have, at last, bankrupted the Autocracy.
The result signally vindicates Turgenev's political prescience and his
_rôle_ as the interpreter of Western culture and Western liberalism to
his countrymen. For until the great barrier of petrified Bureaucratic
Nationalism was broken down, true democratic Nationalism could not
flow in free channels. Slavophilism, with its leading idea of the
deliverance of Europe by the Autocracy, by Orthodoxy and the communal
love of the meek Russian peasant, must be replaced by a new movement,
spiritual in its essence, and give much-needed fresh conceptions to our
materialized Western civilization. Every reader of Russian literature,
from Gogol to our day, cannot fail to recognize that the Russian mind
is superior to the English in its emotional breadth and flexibility,
its eager responsiveness to new ideas, its spontaneous warmth of
nature. With all their faults the Russian people are more permeated
with humane love and living tenderness, in their social practice, than
those of other nations. Let us trust that the Russian earth, no longer
clouded by a dark, overcast sky, will be flooded with the fertilizing
sunlight of this new, democratic Nationalism.
Turgenev stood, in the 'seventies, between the camps of the extremists,
the old nobility who worked to prevent, hinder or suppress every
reform, and the shallow, hot-headed theorists, who wished to force the
pace, but whose talk ended in "smoke." Consequently he was frequently
accused of cowardice by the revolutionaries on the one hand, and by the
Conservatives of complicity with the revolutionaries, on the other.[23]
As _an artist_, while he stood aside from direct political action,
his attitude to the revolutionaries appeared necessarily ambiguous.
Pavlovsky, however, has well characterized it:
"We see therefore that Turgenev was too variable to be in any sense
a man of politics. He was never a Nihilist nor a Revolutionary,
and those episodes we have cited are advanced only to show he
considered the revolutionaries as _an artist_. As such they excited
his imagination and carried him away like a child. Immediately after
reflection he became sceptical and--this was his ordinary mental
disposition--never believing in solid results of these agitators,
though he retained always great sympathy for the Youth, whom he
esteemed beyond all for their constant spirit of self-sacrifice.
Both these mental tendencies are clearly to be seen in two of his
_Poems in Prose_, 'The Workman and the Man with White Hands,' and
'The Threshold!'"
[23] See the letter to Madame Viardot, of January 19, 1864, in which
Turgenev describes how he was summoned before a Tribunal of the Senate
to answer charges of plotting with the revolutionaries, which he did
without any trouble.
In Paris, in his last years, Turgenev was in active touch with the
colony of young Russians, and assisted with his purse and his advice a
number of protégés. A ridiculous hubbub arose in the Russian press on
the publication in the _Temps_ of Turgenev's preface to _En Cellule_, a
tale by one of these protégés, Pavlovsky, and Turgenev in a letter to
the _Malva_ thereupon defined his political faith:
"PARIS, _December 30, 1879_.
"Without vanity or circumlocution, and merely stating facts I have
the right to say that my convictions put on record in the press and
in other sources, have not changed an iota in the last forty years.
I have never hidden them from any one. To the young I have always
been and have remained a moderate, a liberal of the old-fashioned
stamp, a man who looks for reforms from above, and is opposed to the
revolution.
"If young Russia appreciated me it was in that light, and if the
ovations offered were dear to me, it was precisely because I did not
go to seek the young generation, but it who came to me."
Turgenev's political creed may be read without the slightest ambiguity
between the lines of _A Sportsman's Sketches_ and his great novels.
It is a creed of the necessity of the people's mental and spiritual
enlightenment, of the amelioration of bad social conditions and
of the establishment of constitutional government, in the place of
despotism.[24]
[24] Kropotkin tells us: "I saw Turgenev for the last time in the
autumn of 1881. He was very ill, and worried by the thought that it
was his duty to write to Alexander III. who had just come to the
throne, and hesitated as to the policy he should follow--asking him
to give Russia a constitution, and proving to him by solid arguments
the necessity of that step. With evident grief he said to me, 'I feel
that I must do it, but I feel I shall not be able to do it.' In fact,
he was already suffering awful pains occasioned by a cancer in the
spinal cord, and had the greatest difficulty in sitting up and talking
for a few moments. He did not write then, and a few weeks later it
would have been useless, Alexander III. had announced in a manifesto
his resolution to remain the absolute ruler of Russia."--_Memoirs of a
Revolutionist_, vol. ii. p. 222.
X
THE TALES