THE TALES
In addition to his six great novels Turgenev published, between 1846
and his death in 1883, about forty tales which reflect as intimately
social atmospheres of the 'thirties, 'forties and 'fifties as do
Tchehov's stories atmospheres of the 'eighties and 'nineties. Several
of these tales, as _The Torrents of Spring_, are of considerable
length, but their comparatively simple structure places them definitely
in the class of the _conte_. While their form is generally free and
straightforward, the narrative, put often in the mouth of a character
who by his comments and asides exchanges at will his active rôle for
that of a spectator, is capable of the most subtle modulations. An
examination of the chronological order of the tales shows how very
delicately Turgenev's art is poised between realism and romanticism.
In his finest examples, such as _The Brigadier_ and _A Lear of the
Steppes_, the two elements fuse perfectly, like the meeting of wave
and wind in sea foam. "Nature placed Turgenev between poetry and
prose," says Henry James; and if one hazards a definition we should
prefer to term Turgenev _a poetic realist_.
In our first chapter we glanced at _The Duellist_, and in the same year
(1846) appeared _The Jew_, a close study, based on a family anecdote,
of Semitic double-dealing and family feeling: also _Three Portraits_,
a more or less faithful ancestral chronicle. This latter tale, though
the hero is of the proud, bad, "Satanic" order of the romantic school,
is firmly objective, as is also _Pyetushkov_ (1847), whose lively,
instinctive realism is so bold and intimate as to contradict the
compliment that the French have paid themselves--that Turgenev ever had
need to dress his art by the aid of French mirrors.
Although _Pyetushkov_ shows us, by a certain open _naïveté_ of style,
that a youthful hand is at work, it is the hand of a young master
carrying out Gogol's satiric realism with finer point, to find a
perfect equilibrium free from bias or caricature. The essential
strength of the realistic method is developed in _Pyetushkov_ to its
just limits, and note it is the Russian realism carrying the warmth of
life into the written page, which warmth the French so often lose in
clarifying their impressions and crystallizing them in art. Observe
how the reader is transported bodily into Pyetushkov's stuffy room,
how the Major fairly boils out of the two pages he lives in, and how
Onisim and Vassilissa and the aunt walk and chatter around the stupid
Pyetushkov, and laugh at him behind his back in a manner that exhales
the vulgar warmth of these people's lower-class world. One sees that
the latter holds few secrets for Turgenev. Three years earlier had
appeared _Andrei Kolosov_ (1844), a sincere diagnosis of youth's
sentimental expectations, raptures and remorse, in presence of the
other sex, in this case a girl who is eager for a suitor. The sketch
is characteristically Russian in its analytic honesty, but Turgenev's
charm is here lessened by his over-literal exactitude. And passing
to _The Diary of a Superfluous Man_ (1850), we must remark that this
famous study of a type of a petty provincial Hamlet reveals a streak of
suffused sentimentalism in Turgenev's nature, one which comes to the
surface the more subjective is the handling of his theme, and the less
his great technical skill in _modelling_ his subject is called for. The
last-named story belongs to a group with which we must place _Faust_
(1853), _Yakov Pasinkov_ (1855), _A Correspondence_ (1855) and even the
tender and charming _Acia_ (1857), all of which stories, though rich
in emotional shades and in beautiful descriptions, are lacking in fine
chiselling. The melancholy yearning of the heroes and heroines through
failure or misunderstanding, though no doubt true to life, seems
to-day too imbued with emotional hues of the Byronic romanticism of
the period, and in this small group of stories Turgenev's art is seen
definitely dated, even old-fashioned.
In _The Country Inn_ (1852), we are back on the firm ground of an
objective study of village types, with clear, precise outlines, a
detailed drawing from nature, strong yet subtle; as is also _Mumu_
(1852), one based on a household episode that passed before Turgenev's
youthful eyes, in which the deaf-mute Gerassim, a house serf, is
defrauded first of the girl he loves, and then of his little dog,
Mumu, whom he is forced to drown, stifling his pent-up affection, at
the caprice of his tyrannical old mistress. The story is a classic
example of Turgenev's tender insight and beauty of feeling. As
delicate, but more varied in execution is _The Backwater_, with its
fresh, charming picture of youth's _insouciance_ and readiness to
take a wrong turning, a story which in its atmospheric freshness and
emotional colouring may be compared with Tchehov's studies of youth in
_The Seagull_, a play in which the neurotic spiritual descendants of
Marie and Nadejda, Veretieff and Steltchinsky, appear and pass into the
shadows. This note of the fleetingness of youth and happiness reappears
in _A Tour of the Forest_ (1857), where Turgenev's acute sense of man's
ephemeral life in face of the eternity of nature finds full expression.
The description, here, of the vast, gloomy, murmuring pine forest, with
its cold, dim solitudes, is finely contrasted with the passing outlook
of the peasants, Yegor, Kondrat, and the wild Efrem. (See p. 16.)
The rich colour and perfume of Turgenev's delineation of romantic
passion are disclosed when we turn to _First Love_ (1860), which
details the fervent adoration of Woldemar, a boy of sixteen, for the
fascinating Zinaïda, an exquisite creation, who, by her mutability
and caressing, mocking caprice keeps her bevy of eager suitors in
suspense till at length she yields herself in her passion to Woldemar's
father. This study of the intoxication of adolescent love is, again,
based on an episode of Turgenev's youth, in which he and his father
played the identical rôles of Woldemar and his father. Here we tremble
on the magic borderline between prose and poetry, and the fragrance
of blossoming love instincts is felt pervading all the fluctuating
impulses of grief, tenderness, pity and regret which combine in the
tragic close. The profoundly haunting apostrophe to youth is indeed
a pure lyric. Passing to _Phantoms_ (1863), which we discuss with
_Prose Poems_ (see p. 200), the truth of Turgenev's confession that
spiritually and sensuously he was saturated with the love of woman and
ever inspired by it, is confirmed. In his description of Alice, the
winged phantom-woman, who gradually casts her spell over the sick hero,
luring him to fly with her night after night over the vast expanse of
earth, Turgenev has in a mysterious manner, all his own, concentrated
the very essence of woman's possessive love. Alice's hungry yearning
for self-completion, her pleading arts, her sad submissiveness,
her rapture in her hesitating lover's embrace, are artistically a
sublimation of all the impressions and instincts by which woman
fascinates, and fulfils her purpose of creation. The projection of this
shadowy woman's love-hunger on the mighty screen of the night earth,
and the merging of her power in men's restless energies, felt and
divined through the sweeping tides of nature's incalculable forces, is
an inspiration which, in its lesser fashion, invites comparison with
Shakespeare's creative vision of nature and the supernatural.
In his treatment of the supernatural Turgenev, however, sometimes
missed his mark. _The Dog_ (1866) is of a coarser and indeed of an
ordinary texture. With the latter story may be classed _The Dream_
(1876), curiously Byronic in imagery and atmosphere, and artistically
not convincing. Far more sincere, psychologically, is _Clara Militch_
(1882), a penetrating study of a passionate temperament, a story based
on a tragedy of Parisian life. In our opinion _The Song of Triumphant
Love_, though exquisite in its jewelled mediaeval details, has been
overrated by the French, and Turgenev's genius is here seen contorted
and cramped by the _genre_.
To return to the tales of the 'sixties. _Lieutenant Yergunov's Story_,
though its strange atmosphere is cunningly painted, is not of the
highest quality, comparing unfavourably with _The Brigadier_ (1867),
the story of the ruined nobleman, Vassily Guskov, with its tender,
sub-ironical studies of odd characters, Narkiz and Cucumber. _The
Brigadier_ has a peculiarly fascinating poignancy, and must be prized
as one of the rarest of Turgenev's high achievements, even as the
connoisseur prizes the original beauty of a fine Meryon etching. The
tale is a microcosm of Turgenev's own nature; his love of Nature, his
sympathy with all humble, ragged, eccentric, despised human creatures,
his unfaltering, keen gaze into character, his perfect eye for relative
values in life, all mingle in _The Brigadier_ to create for us a sense
of the vicissitudes of life, of how a generation of human seed springs
and flourishes awhile on earth and soon withers away under the menacing
gaze of the advancing years.
A complete contrast to _The Brigadier_ is the sombre and savagely
tragic piece of realism, _An Unhappy Girl_ (1868). As a study of a
coarse and rapacious nature the portrait of Mr. Ratsch, the Germanized
Czech, is a revelation of the depths of human swinishness. Coarse
malignancy is here "the power of darkness" which closes, as with a
vice, round the figure of the proud, helpless, exquisite girl, Susanna.
There is, alas, no exaggeration in this unrelenting, painful story. The
scene of Susanna's playing of the Beethoven sonata (chapter xiii.)
demonstrates how there can be no truce between a vile animal nature
and pure and beautiful instincts, and a faint suggestion symbolic of
the national "dark forces" at work in Russian history deepens the
impression. The worldly power of greed, lust and envy, ravaging,
whether in war or peace, which seize on the defenceless and innocent,
as their prey, here triumphs over Susanna, the victim of Mr. Ratsch's
violence. The last chapter, the banquet scene, satirizes "the dark
forest" of the heart when greed and baseness find their allies in the
inertness, sloth or indifference of the ordinary man.
_A Strange Story_ (1869) has special psychological interest for the
English mind in that it gives clues to some fundamental distinctions
between the Russian and the Western soul. Sophie's words, "You spoke
of the will--that's what must be broken," seems strange to English
thought. To be lowly, to be suffering, despised, to _be_ unworthy, this
desire implies that the Slav character is apt to be lacking in _will_,
that it finds it easier to resign itself than to make the effort to be
triumphant or powerful. The Russian people's attitude, historically,
may, indeed, be compared to a bowl which catches and sustains what
life brings it; and the Western people's to a bowl inverted to ward
off what fate drops from the impassive skies. The mental attitude of
the Russian peasant indeed implies that in blood he is nearer akin to
the Asiatics than the Russian ethnologists wish to allow. Certainly in
the inner life, intellectually, morally and emotionally, the Russian
is a half-way house between the Western and Eastern races, just as
geographically he spreads over the two continents.
Brilliant also is _Knock-Knock-Knock_ (1870), a psychological study,
of "a man fated," a Byronic type of hero, dear to the heart of the
writers of the romantic period. Sub-Lieutenant Teglev, the melancholy,
self-centred hero, whose prepossession of a tragic end nothing can
shake, so that he ends by throwing himself into the arms of death,
this portrait is most cunningly fortified by the wonderfully life-like
atmosphere of the river fog in which the suicide is consummated.
Turgenev's range of mood is disclosed in _Punin and Baburin_ (1874),
a leisurely reminiscence of his mother's household; but the delicious
blending of irony and kindness in the treatment of both Punin and
Baburin atones for the lengthy conclusion. Of _The Watch_ (1875), a
story for boys, nothing here need be said, except that it is inferior
to the delightful _The Quail_, a _souvenir d'enfance_ written at the
Countess Tolstoy's request for an audience of children. In considering
_A Lear of the Steppes_ (1870), _The Torrents of Spring_ (1871) and
_A Living Relic_ (1874), we shall sum up here our brief survey of
Turgenev's achievement in the field of the _conte_.
In _The Torrents of Spring_ the charm, the grace, the power of
Turgenev's vision are seen bathing his subject, revealing all its
delicate lineaments in a light as fresh and tender as that of a day
of April sunlight in Italy. _Torrents_ of Spring, not Spring Floods,
be it remarked, is the true significance of the Russian, telling of
a moment of the year when all the forces of Nature are leaping forth
impetuously, the mounting sap, the hill streams, the mating birds,
the blood in the veins of youth. The opening perhaps is a little
over-leisurely, this description of the Italian confectioner's family,
and its fortunes in Frankfort, but how delightful is the contrast in
racial spirit between the pedantic German shop-manager, Herr Klüber and
Pantaleone, and the lovely Gemma. But the long opening prelude serves
as a foil to heighten the significant story of the seduction of the
youthful Sanin by Maria Nikolaevna, that clear-eyed "huntress of men";
one of the most triumphant feminine portraits in the whole range of
fiction. The spectator feels that this woman in her ruthless charm is
the incarnation of a cruel principle in Nature, while we watch her
preparing to strike her talons into her fascinated, struggling prey.
Her spirit's essence, in all its hard, merciless joy of conquest, is
disclosed by Turgenev in his rapid, yet exhaustive glances at her
disdainful treatment of her many lovers, and of her cynical log of
a husband. The extraordinarily clear light in the narrative, that
of spring mountain air, waxes stronger towards the climax, and the
artistic effort of the whole is that of some exquisite Greek cameo,
with figures of centaurs and fleeing nymphs and youthful shepherds;
though the postscript indeed is an excrescence which detracts from the
main impression of pure, classic outlines.
Not less perfect as art though far slighter in scope is the exquisite
_A Living Relic_ (1874), one of the last of _A Sportsman's Sketches_.
Along with the narrator we pass, in a step, from the clear sunlight
and freshness of early morning, "when the larks' songs seemed steeped
in dew," into the "little wattled shanty with its burden of a woman's
suffering," poor Lukerya's, who lies, summer after summer, resigned to
her living death:
"... I was walking away....
"'Master, master! Piotr Petrovitch!' I heard a voice, faint, slow,
and hoarse, like the whispering of marsh rushes.
"I stopped.
"'Piotr Petrovitch! Come in, please!' the voice repeated. It came
from the corner where were the trestles I had noticed.
"I drew near, and was struck dumb with amazement. Before me lay a
living human being; but what sort of creature was it?
"A head utterly withered, of a uniform coppery hue--like some very
ancient and holy picture, yellow with age; a sharp nose like a
keen-edged knife; the lips could barely be seen--only the teeth
flashed white and the eyes; and from under the kerchief sometimes
wisps of yellow hair struggled on to the forehead. At the chin, where
the quilt was folded, two tiny hands of the same coppery hue were
moving, the fingers slowly twitching like little sticks. I looked
more intently; the face far from being ugly was positively beautiful,
but strange and dreadful; and the face seemed more dreadful to me
that on it--on its metallic cheeks--I saw struggling ... struggling
and unable to form itself--a smile.
"'You don't recognize me, master?' whispered the voice again; it
seemed to be breathed from the almost unmoving lips! 'And, indeed,
how should you? I'm Lukerya.... Do you remember, who used to lead the
dance at your mother's, at Spasskoe?... Do you remember, I used to be
leader of the choir, too?'
"'Lukerya!' I cried. 'Is it you? Can it be?'
"'Yes, it's I, master--I, Lukerya.'
"I did not know what to say, and gazed in stupefaction at the dark
motionless face with the clear, deathlike eyes fastened upon me.
Was it possible? This mummy Lukerya--the greatest beauty in all our
household--that tall, plump, pink-and-white, singing, laughing,
dancing creature! Lukerya, our smart Lukerya, whom all our lads were
courting, for whom I heaved some secret sighs--I a boy of sixteen!"
Lukerya tells her story. How one night she could not sleep, and,
thinking of her lover, rose to listen to a nightingale in the garden;
how half-dreaming she fell from the top stairs--and now she lives on, a
little shrivelled mummy. Something is broken inside her body, and the
doctors all shake their heads over her case. Her lover, Polyakov, has
married another girl, a good sweet woman. "He couldn't stay a bachelor
all his life, and they have children."
And Lukerya? All is not blackness in her wasted life. She is grateful
for people's kindness to her.... She can hear everything, see
everything that comes near her shed--the nesting swallows, the bees,
the doves cooing on the roof. Lying alone in the long hours she can
smell every scent from the garden, the flowering buckwheat, the lime
tree. The priest, the peasant girls, sometimes a pilgrim woman, come
and talk to her, and a little girl, a pretty, fair little thing, waits
on her. She has her religion, her strange dreams, and sometimes,
in her poor, struggling little voice that wavers like a thread of
smoke, she tries to sing, as of old. But she is waiting for merciful
death--which now is nigh her.
Infinitely tender in the depth of understanding is this gem of
art, and _A Living Relic's_ perfection is determined by Turgenev's
scrutiny of the warp and woof of life, in which the impassive forces
of Nature, indifferent alike to human pain or human happiness, pursue
their implacable way, weaving unwittingly the mesh of joy, anguish,
resignation, in the breast of all sentient creation. It is in the
_spiritual perspective_ of the picture, in the vision that sees the
whole in the part, and the part in the whole, that Turgenev so far
surpasses all his European rivals.
To those critics, Russian and English, who naïvely slur over the
aesthetic qualities of a masterpiece, such as _A Lear of the Steppes_
(1870), or fail to recognize all that aesthetic perfection implies,
we address these concluding remarks. _A Lear of the Steppes_ is great
in art, because it is a living organic whole, springing from the
deep roots of life itself; and the innumerable works of art that are
fabricated and pasted together from an ingenious plan--works that do
not grow from the inevitability of things--appear at once insignificant
or false in comparison.
In examining the art, the artist will note Turgenev's method of
introducing his story. Harlov, the Lear of the story, is brought
forward with such force on the threshold that all eyes resting on his
figure cannot but follow his after-movements. And absolute conviction
gained, all the artist's artful after-devices and subtle presentations
and side-lights on the story are not apparent under the straightforward
ease and the seeming carelessness with which the narrator describes
his boyish memories. Then the inmates of Harlov's household, his two
daughters, and a crowd of minor characters, are brought before us as
persons in the tragedy, and we see that all these people are living
each from the innate laws of his being, apparently independently of the
author's scheme. This conviction, that the author has no prearranged
plan, convinces us that in the story we are living a piece of life:
here we are verily plunging into life itself.
And the story goes on flowing easily and naturally till the people
of the neighbourhood, the peasants, the woods and fields around,
are known by us as intimately as is any neighbourhood in life.
Suddenly a break--the tragedy is upon us. Suddenly the terrific
forces that underlie human life, even the meanest of human lives,
burst on us astonished and breathless, precisely as a tragedy comes
up to the surface and bursts on us in real life: everybody runs about
dazed, annoyed, futile; we watch other people sustaining their own
individuality inadequately in the face of the monstrous new events
which go their fatal way logically, events which leave the people
huddled and useless and gasping. And destruction having burst out of
life, life slowly returns to its old grooves--with a difference to us,
the difference in the relation of people one to another that a death or
a tragedy always leaves to the survivors. Marvellous in its truth is
Turgenev's analysis of the situation after Harlov's death, marvellous
is the simple description of the neighbourhood's attitude to the Harlov
family, and marvellous is the lifting of the scene on the afterlife
of Harlov's daughters. In the pages (pages 140, 141, 146, 147) on
these women, Turgenev flashes into the reader's mind an extraordinary
sense of the inevitability of these women's natures, of their innate
growth fashioning their after-lives as logically as a beech puts out
beech-leaves and an oak oak-leaves. Through Turgenev's single glimpse
at their fortunes one knows the whole intervening fifteen years; he
has carried us into a new world; yet it is the old world; one needs to
know no more. It is life arbitrary but inevitable, life so clarified by
art that it is absolutely interpreted; but life with all the sense of
mystery that nature breathes around it in its ceaseless growth.
This sense of inevitability and of the mystery of life which Turgenev
gives us in _A Lear of the Steppes_ is the highest demand we can make
from art. If we contrast with it two examples of Turgenev's more
"romantic" manner, _Acia_, though it gives us a sense of mystery, is
not inevitable: the end is _faked_ to suit the artist's purpose, and
thus, as in other ways, it is far inferior to _Lear_. _Faust_ has
consummate charm in its strange atmosphere of the supernatural mingling
with things earthly, but it is not, as is _A Lear of the Steppes_, life
seen from the surface to the revealed depths; it is a revelation of
the strange forces in life, presented beautifully; but it is rather an
idea, a problem to be worked out by certain characters, than a piece
of life inevitable and growing. When an artist creates in us the sense
of inevitability, then his work is at its highest, and is obeying
Nature's law of growth, unfolding from out itself as inevitably as a
tree or a flower or a human being unfolds from out itself. Turgenev at
his highest never quits Nature, yet he always uses the surface, and
what is apparent, to disclose her most secret principles, her deepest
potentialities, her inmost laws of being, and whatever he presents he
presents clearly and simply. This combination of powers marks only
the few supreme artists. Even great masters often fail in perfect
_naturalness_: Tolstoy's _The Death of Ivan Ilytch_, for instance, one
of the most powerful stories ever written, has too little of what is
typical of the whole of life, too much that is strained towards the
general purpose of the story, to be perfectly _natural_. Turgenev's
special feat in fiction is that his characters reveal themselves by the
most ordinary details of their everyday life; and while these details
are always giving us the whole life of the people, and their inner life
as well, the novel's significance is being built up simply out of these
details, built up by the same process, in fact, as Nature creates for
us a single strong impression out of a multitude of little details.
Again, Turgenev's power as a poet comes in, whenever he draws a
commonplace figure, to make it bring with it a sense of the mystery
of its existence. In _Lear_ the steward Kvitsinsky plays a subsidiary
part; he has apparently no significance in the story, and very little
is told about him. But who does not perceive that Turgenev looks at
and presents the figure of this man in a manner totally different
from the way any clever novelist of the second rank would look at and
use him? Kvitsinsky, in Turgenev's hands, is an individual with all
the individual's mystery in his glance, his coming and going, his way
of taking things; but he is a part of the household's breath, of its
very existence; he breathes the atmosphere naturally and creates an
atmosphere of his own.
It is, then, in his marvellous sense of the growth of life that
Turgenev is superior to most of his rivals. Not only did he observe
life minutely and comprehensively, but he reproduced it as a constantly
growing phenomenon, growing naturally, not accidentally or arbitrarily.
For example, in _A House of Gentlefolk_, take Lavretsky's and Liza's
changes of mood when they are falling in love with one another; it is
Nature herself in them changing very delicately and insensibly; we
feel that the whole picture is alive, not an effect cut out from life,
and cut off from it at the same time, like a bunch of cut flowers, an
effect which many clever novelists often give us. And in _Lear_ we feel
that the life in Harlov's village is still going on, growing yonder,
still growing with all its mysterious sameness and changes, when, in
Turgenev's last words, "The story-teller ceased, and we talked a little
longer, and then parted, each to his home."
XI
NOTE ON TURGENEV'S LIFE