‘Yes, there are some. Here is one of them. One night, we were at the
first representation of a new play. I was in a box with Flaubert,
Daudet, Zola.... (I am not quite sure whether he named both Daudet and
Zola, but he certainly named one of the two.) All were men of advanced
opinions. The subject of the play was this: A woman had separated from
her husband. She had had a new love and had settled with another man.
This man was represented in the play as an excellent person. For years
they had been quite happy. Her two children--a girl and a boy--were
babies at the moment of the separation; now, they had grown, and
throughout all these years they had considered the man as their real
father. The girl was about eighteen and the boy about seventeen. The
man treated them quite as a father, they loved him, and he loved them.
The scene represented the family meeting at breakfast. The girl comes
in, approaches her supposed father, and he is going to kiss her--when
the boy, who has learned in some way that they are not his children,
rushes forward towards him, and shouts out: “Don’t dare!” _N’osez pas!_
‘The hall was brought down by this exclamation. There was an outburst
of frantic applause. Flaubert and the others joined in it. I was
disgusted. “Why,” I said, “this family was happy; the man was a better
father to these children than their real father, ... their mother loved
him and was happy with him.... This mischievous, perverted boy ought
simply to be flogged for what he has said....” It was of no use. I
discussed for hours with them afterwards: none of them could understand
me!’
I was, of course, fully in accord with Turguéneff’s point of view. I
remarked, however, that his acquaintances were chiefly amongst the
middle classes. There the difference from nation to nation is immense
indeed. But my acquaintances were exclusively amongst the workers, and
there is an immense resemblance between the workers, and especially
amongst the peasants, of all nations.
In so saying, I was, however, quite wrong. After I had had the
opportunity of making a closer acquaintance with French workers, I
often thought of the rightness of Turguéneff’s remark. There is a real
chasm indeed between the conceptions which prevail in Russia upon
marriage relations and those which prevail in France: amongst the
workers as well as in the middle classes; and upon many other points
there is almost the same chasm between the Russian point of view and
that of other nations.
It was said somewhere, after Turguéneff’s death, that he intended to
write a novel upon this subject. If it was begun, the above mentioned
scene must be in his manuscript. What a pity that he did not write that
novel! He, a thorough ‘Occidental’ in his ways of thinking, could have
said very deep things upon a subject which must have so deeply affected
him personally throughout his life.
Of all novel-writers of our century, Turguéneff has certainly attained
the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds to the
Russian ear like music--music as deep as that of Beethoven. His
principal novels--the series of ‘Dmítri Rúdin,’ ‘A Nobleman’s Retreat,’
‘On the Eve,’ ‘Fathers and Sons,’ ‘Smoke,’ and ‘Virgin Soil’--represent
the leading ‘history-making’ types of the educated classes of Russia,
which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched with a
fulness of philosophical conception and humanitarian understanding and
an artistic beauty which have no parallel in any other literature. Yet
‘Fathers and Sons’--a novel which he rightly considered his profoundest
work--was received by the young people of Russia with a loud protest.
Our youth declared that the Nihilist Bazároff was by no means a true
representation of his class; many described him even as a caricature
of Nihilism. This misunderstanding deeply affected Turguéneff, and,
although a reconciliation between him and the young generation took
place later on at St. Petersburg, after he had written ‘Virgin Soil,’
the wound inflicted upon him by these attacks was never healed.
He knew from Lavróff that I was an enthusiastic admirer of his
writings; and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit
to Antokólsky’s studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazároff. I
frankly replied, ‘Bazároff is an admirable painting of the Nihilist,
but one feels that you did not love him as much as you did your other
heroes.’ ‘On the contrary, I loved him, intensely loved him,’ Turguéneff
replied, with unexpected vigour. ‘When we get home I will show you my
diary, in which I have noted how I wept when I had ended the novel with
Bazároff’s death.’
Turguéneff certainly loved the intellectual aspect of Bazároff. He so
identified himself with the Nihilist philosophy of his hero that he
even kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from
Bazároff’s point of view. But I think that he admired him more than he
loved him. In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided
the history-makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one or
the other of these characters. ‘Analysis first of all, and then egoism,
and therefore no faith--an egoist cannot even believe in himself:’ so
he characterized Hamlet. ‘Therefore he is a sceptic, and never will
achieve anything; while Don Quixote, who fights against windmills, and
takes a barber’s plate for the magic helmet of Mambrin (who of us has
never made the same mistake?), is a leader of the masses, because the
masses always follow those who, taking no heed of the sarcasms of the
majority, or even of persecutions, march straight forward, keeping
their eyes fixed upon a goal which they may be alone to see. They
search, they fall, but they rise again, and find it--and by right, too.
Yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does
not disbelieve in Evil. He hates it; Evil and Deceit are his enemies;
and his scepticism is not indifferentism, but only negation and doubt,
which finally consume his will.’
These thoughts of Turguéneff give, I think, the true key for
understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several of
his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved Hamlet,
and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazároff. He represented
his superiority admirably well: he understood the tragic character of
his isolated position; but he could not surround him with that tender,
poetical love which he bestowed, as on a sick friend, when his heroes
approached the Hamlet type. It would have been out of place.
‘Did you know Mýshkin?’ he once asked me, in 1878. At the trial of our
circle Mýshkin revealed himself as the most powerful personality. ‘I
should like to know all about him,’ he continued. ‘That _is_ a man; not
the slightest trace of Hamletism.’ And in so saying he was obviously
meditating on this new type in the Russian movement, which did not
exist in the phase that Turguéneff described in ‘Virgin Soil,’ but was
to appear two years later.
I saw him 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 even 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 intention to remain the absolute
ruler of Russia.