TOLSTOY AND TOURGENIEV
The eightieth birthday of Count Tolstoy, which was celebrated in
Russia on August 28 (old style), 1908, was closely followed by the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Tourgeniev, who died on
September 3, 1883, at the age of sixty-five. These two anniversaries
followed close upon the publication of a translation into English of
the complete works of Count Tolstoy by Professor Wiener; and it is
not long ago that a new edition of the complete works of Tourgeniev,
translated into English by Mrs. Garnett, appeared. Both these
translations have been made with great care, and are faithful and
accurate. Thirty years ago it is certain that European critics, and
probable that Russian critics, would have observed, in commenting on
the concurrence of these two events, that Tolstoy and Tourgeniev were
the two giants of modern Russian literature. Is the case the same
to-day? Is it still true that, in the opinion of Russia and of Europe,
the names of Tolstoy and Tourgeniev stand pre-eminently above all their
contemporaries?
With regard to Tolstoy the question can be answered without the
slightest hesitation. Time, which has inflicted such mournful damage
on so many great reputations in the last twenty-five years, has not
only left the fame of Tolstoy’s masterpieces unimpaired, but has
increased our sense of their greatness. The question arises, whose work
forms the complement to that of Tolstoy, and shares his undisputed
dominion of modern Russian literature? Is it Tourgeniev? In Russia at
the present day the answer would be “No,” it is not Tourgeniev. And
in Europe, students of Russian literature who are acquainted with the
Russian language--as we see in M. Emile Haumant’s study of Tourgeniev’s
life and work, and in Professor Brückner’s history of Russian
literature--would also answer in the negative, although their denial
would be less emphatic and not perhaps unqualified.
The other giant, the complement of Tolstoy, almost any Russian
critic of the present day without hesitation would pronounce to be
Dostoievsky; and the foreign critic who is thoroughly acquainted with
Dostoievsky’s work cannot but agree with him. I propose to go more
fully into the question of the merits and demerits of Dostoievsky later
on; but it is impossible not to mention him here, because the very
existence of his work powerfully affects our judgment when we come to
look at that of his contemporaries. We can no more ignore his presence
and his influence than we could ignore the presence of a colossal
fresco by Leonardo da Vinci in a room in which there were only two
other religious pictures, one by Rembrandt and one by Vandyck. For
any one who is familiar with Dostoievsky, and has felt his tremendous
influence, cannot look at the work of his contemporaries with the same
eyes as before. To such a one, the rising of Dostoievsky’s red and
troubled planet, while causing the rays of Tourgeniev’s serene star
to pale, leaves the rays of Tolstoy’s orb undiminished and undimmed.
Tolstoy and Dostoievsky shine in the firmament of Russian literature
like two planets, one of them as radiant as the planet Jupiter, the
other as ominous as the planet Mars. Beside either of these the light
of Tourgeniev twinkles, pure indeed, and full of pearly lustre, like
the moon faintly seen in the east at the end of an autumnal day.
* * * * *
It is rash to make broad generalisations. They bring with them a
certain element of exaggeration which must be discounted. Nevertheless
I believe that I am stating a fundamental truth in saying that the
Russian character can, roughly speaking, be divided into two types, and
these two types dominate the whole of Russian literature. The first is
that which I shall call, for want of a better name, Lucifer, the fallen
angel. The second type is that of the hero of all Russian folk-tales,
Ivan Durak, Ivan the Fool, or the Little Fool. There are innumerable
folk-tales in Russian which tell the adventures of Ivan the Fool, who,
by his very simplicity and foolishness, outwits the wisdom of the
world. This type is characteristic of one Russian ideal. The simple
fool is venerated in Russia as something holy. It is acknowledged that
his childish innocence is more precious than the wisdom of the wise.
Ivan Durak may be said to be the hero of all Dostoievsky’s novels. He
is the aim and ideal of Dostoievsky’s life, an aim and ideal which he
fully achieves. He is also the aim and ideal of Tolstoy’s teaching, but
an aim and ideal which Tolstoy recommends to others and only partly
achieves himself.
The first type I have called, for want of a better name, since I can
find no concrete symbol of it in Russian folk-lore, Lucifer, the fallen
angel. This type is the embodiment of stubborn and obdurate pride, the
spirit which cannot bend; such is Milton’s Satan, with his
“Courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.”
This type is also widely prevalent in Russia, although it cannot be
said to be a popular type, embodied, like Ivan the Fool, in a national
symbol. One of the most striking instances of this, the Lucifer
type, which I have come across, was a peasant called Nazarenko, who
was a member of the first Duma. He was a tall, powerfully built,
rugged-looking man, spare and rather thin, with clear-cut prominent
features, black penetrating eyes, and thick black tangled hair. He
looked as if he had stepped out of a sacred picture by Velasquez. This
man had the pride of Lucifer. There was at that time, in July 1905,
an Inter-parliamentary Congress sitting in London. Five delegates of
the Russian Duma were chosen to represent Russia. It was proposed that
Nazarenko should represent the peasants. I asked him once if he were
going. He answered:
“I shan’t go unless I am unanimously chosen by the others. I have
written down my name and asked, but I shall not ask twice. I never ask
twice for anything. When I say my prayers, I only ask God once for
a thing, and if it is not granted, I never ask again. So it is not
likely I would ask my fellow-men twice for anything. I am like that. I
leave out that passage in the prayers about being a miserable slave. I
am not a miserable slave, either of man or of Heaven.”
Such a man recognises no authority, human or divine. Indeed he not only
refuses to acknowledge authority, but it will be difficult for him to
admire or bow down to any of those men or ideas which the majority have
agreed to believe worthy of admiration, praise, or reverence.
Now, while Dostoievsky is the incarnation of the first type, of Ivan
the Fool, Tolstoy is the incarnation of the second. It is true that, at
a certain stage of his career, Tolstoy announced to the world that the
ideal of Ivan Durak was the only ideal worth following. He perceives
this aim with clearness, and, in preaching it, he has made a multitude
of disciples; the only thing he has never been able to do is to make
the supreme submission, the final surrender, and to become the type
himself.
* * * * *
We know everything about Tolstoy, not only from the biographical
writings of Fet and Behrs, but from his own autobiography, his novels,
and his _Confession_. He gives us a panorama of events down to the
smallest detail of his long career, as well as of every phase of
feeling, and every shade and mood of his spiritual existence. The
English reader who wishes to be acquainted with all the important
facts of Tolstoy’s material and spiritual life cannot do better than
read Mr. Aylmer Maude’s _Life of Tolstoy_, which compresses into one
well-planned and admirably executed volume all that is of interest
during the first fifty years of Tolstoy’s career. In reading this
book a phrase of Tourgeniev’s occurs to one. “Man is the same, from
the cradle to the grave.” Tolstoy had been called inconsistent; but
the student of his life and work, far from finding inconsistency,
will rather be struck by the unvarying and obstinate consistency of
his ideas. Here, for instance, is an event recorded in Tolstoy’s
_Confession_ (p. 1):
“I remember how, when I was about eleven, a boy, Vladimir Miliutin,
long since dead, visited us one Sunday, and announced as the latest
novelty a discovery made at his school. The discovery was that there
is no God at all, and all we are taught about Him is a mere invention.
I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news. They
called me to their council, and we all, I remember, became animated,
and accepted the news as something very interesting and fully
possible.”
There is already the germ of the man who was afterwards to look with
such independent eyes on the accepted beliefs and ideas of mankind,
to play havoc with preconceived opinions, and to establish to his own
satisfaction whether what was true for others was true for himself or
not. Later he says:
“I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was
taught it in childhood and all through my boyhood and youth. Before I
left the university, in my second year, at the age of eighteen, I no
longer believed anything I had been taught.”[7]
A Russian writer, M. Kurbski, describes how, when he first met Tolstoy,
he was overwhelmed by the look in Tolstoy’s eyes. They were more than
eyes, he said; they were like electric searchlights, which penetrated
into the depths of your mind, and, like a photographic lens, seized and
retained for ever a positive picture. In his _Childhood and Youth_,
Tolstoy gives us the most vivid, the most natural, the most sensitive
picture of childhood and youth that has ever been penned by the hand of
man. And yet, after reading it, one is left half-unconsciously with the
impression that the author feels there is something wrong, something
unsatisfactory behind it all.
Tolstoy then passes on to describe the life of a grown-up man, in _The
Morning of a Landowner_, in which he tells how he tried to work in his
own home, on his property, and to teach the peasants, and how nothing
came of his experiments. And again we have the feeling of something
unsatisfactory, and something wanting, something towards which the man
is straining, and which escapes him.
A little later, Tolstoy goes to the Caucasus, to the war, where life
is primitive and simple, where he is nearer to nature, and where man
himself is more natural. And then we have _The Cossacks_, in which
Tolstoy’s searchlights are thrown upon the primitive life of the old
huntsman, the Cossack, Yeroshka, who lives as the grass lives, without
care, without grief, and without reflection. Once more we feel that the
soul of the writer is dissatisfied, still searching for something he
has not found.
In 1854, Tolstoy took part in the Crimean War, which supplied him with
the stuff for what are perhaps the most truthful pictures of war that
have ever been written. But even here, we feel he has not yet found
his heart’s desire. Something is wrong. He was recommended for the St.
George’s Cross, but owing to his being without some necessary official
document at the time of his recommendation, he failed to receive it.
This incident is a symbol of the greater failure, the failure to
achieve the inward happiness that he is seeking--a solid ground to
tread on, a bridge to the infinite, a final place of peace. In his
private diary there is an entry made at the commencement of the war,
while he was at Silistria, which runs as follows:
“I have no modesty; that is my great defect.... I am ugly, awkward,
uncleanly, and lack society education. I am irritable, a bore to
others, not modest; intolerant, and as shamefaced as a child.... I am
almost an ignoramus. What I do know I have learnt anyhow, by myself,
in snatches, without sequence, without a plan, and it amounts to very
little. I am incontinent, undecided, inconstant, and stupidly vain
and vehement, like all characterless people. I am not brave.... I am
clever, but my cleverness has as yet not been thoroughly tested on
anything.... I am honest; that is to say, I love goodness.... There
is a thing I love more than goodness, and that is fame. I am so
ambitious, and so little has this feeling been gratified, that, should
I have to choose between fame and goodness, I fear I may often choose
the former. Yes, I am not modest, and therefore I am proud at heart,
shamefaced, and shy in society.”
At the time that Tolstoy wrote this he was a master, as Mr. Aylmer
Maude points out, of the French and German languages, besides having
some knowledge of English, Latin, Arabic, and Turco-Tartar. He had
published stories which had caused the editors of the best Russian
magazines to offer him the rate of pay accorded to the best-known
writers. Therefore his discontent with his position, both intellectual
and social, was in reality quite unfounded.
After the Crimean War, Tolstoy went abroad. He found nothing in Western
Europe to satisfy him. On his return he settled down at Yasnaya
Polyana, and married; and the great patriarchal phase of his life
began, during which every gift and every happiness that man can be
blessed with seemed to have fallen to his lot. It was then that he
wrote _War and Peace_, in which he describes the conflict between one
half of Europe and the other. He takes one of the largest canvases
ever attacked by man; and he writes a prose epic on a period full of
tremendous events. His piercing glance sees through all the fictions of
national prejudice and patriotic bias; and he gives us what we feel to
be the facts as they were, the very truth. No detail is too small for
him, no catastrophe too great. He traces the growth of the spreading
tree to its minute seed, the course of the great river to its tiny
source. He makes a whole vanished generation of public and private men
live before our eyes in such a way that it is difficult to believe that
these people are not a part of our actual experience; and that his
creations are not men and women we have seen with our own eyes, and
whose voices we have heard with our own ears.
But when we put down this wonderful book, unequalled as a prose
epic, as a panorama of a period and a gallery of a thousand finished
portraits, we are still left with the impression that the author
has not yet found what he is seeking. He is still asking why? and
wherefore? What does it all mean? why all these horrors, why these
sacrifices? Why all this conflict and suffering of nations? What do
these high deeds, this heroism, mean? What is the significance of
these State problems, and the patriotic self-sacrifice of nations? We
are aware that the soul of Tolstoy is alone in an awful solitude, and
that it is shivering on the heights, conscious that all round it is
emptiness, darkness and despair.
Again, in _War and Peace_ we are conscious that Tolstoy’s proud nature,
the “Lucifer” type in him, is searching for another ideal; and that in
the character of Pierre Bezuhov he is already setting up before us the
ideal of Ivan Durak as the model which we should seek to imitate. And
in Pierre Bezuhov we feel that there is something of Tolstoy himself.
Manners change, but man, faced by the problem of life, is the same
throughout all ages; and, whether consciously or unconsciously, Tolstoy
proves this in writing _Anna Karenina_. Here again, on a large canvas,
we see unrolled before us the contemporary life of the upper classes in
Russia, in St. Petersburg, and in the country, with the same sharpness
of vision, which seizes every outward detail, and reveals every recess
of the heart and mind. Nearly all characters in all fiction seem
bookish beside those of Tolstoy. His men and women are so real and so
true that, even if his psychological analysis of them may sometimes
err and go wrong from its oversubtlety and its desire to explain too
much, the characters themselves seem to correct this automatically, as
though they were independent of their creator. He creates a character
and gives it life. He may theorise on a character, just as he might
theorise on a person in real life; and he may theorise wrong, simply
because sometimes no theorising is necessary, and the very fact of
a theory being set down in words may give a false impression; but,
as soon as the character speaks and acts, it speaks and acts in the
manner which is true to itself, and corrects the false impression of
the theory, just as though it were an independent person over whom the
author had no control.
Nearly every critic, at least nearly every English critic,[8] in
dealing with _Anna Karenina_, has found fault with the author for the
character of Vronsky. Anna Karenina, they say, could never have fallen
in love with such an ordinary commonplace man. Vronsky, one critic
has said (in a brilliant article), is only a glorified “Steerforth.”
The answer to this is that if you go to St. Petersburg or to London,
or to any other town you like to mention, you will find that the men
with whom the Anna Kareninas of this world fall in love are precisely
the Vronskys, and no one else, for the simple reason that Vronsky is a
man. He is not a hero, and he is not a villain; he is not what people
call “interesting,” but a man, as masculine as Anna is feminine, with
many good qualities and many limitations, but above all things alive.
Nearly every novelist, with the exception of Fielding, ends, in spite
of himself, by placing his hero either above or beneath the standard
of real life. There are many Vronskys to-day in St. Petersburg, and
for the matter of that, _mutatis mutandis_, in London. But no novelist
except Tolstoy has ever had the power to put this simple thing, an
ordinary man, into a book. Put one of Meredith’s heroes next to
Vronsky, and Meredith’s hero will appear like a figure dressed up for
a fancy-dress ball. Put one of Bourget’s heroes next to him, with all
his psychological documents attached to him, and, in spite of all the
analysis in the world, side by side with Tolstoy’s human being he will
seem but a plaster-cast. Yet, all the time, in _Anna Karenina_ we
feel, as in _War and Peace_, that the author is still unsatisfied and
hungry, searching for something he has not yet found; and once again,
this time in still sharper outline and more living colours, he paints
an ideal of simplicity which is taking us towards Ivan Durak in the
character of Levin. Into this character, too, we feel that Tolstoy
has put a great deal of himself; and that Levin, if he is not Tolstoy
himself, is what Tolstoy would like to be. But the loneliness and the
void that are round Tolstoy’s mind are not yet filled; and in that
loneliness and in that void we are sharply conscious of the brooding
presence of despair, and the power of darkness.
We feel that Tolstoy is afraid of the dark; that to him there is
something wrong in the whole of human life, a radical mistake. He is
conscious that, with all his genius, he has only been able to record
the fact that all that he has found in life is not what he is looking
for, but something irrelevant and unessential; and, at the same time,
that he has not been able to determine the thing in life which is not a
mistake, nor where the true aim, the essential thing, is to be found,
nor in what it consists. It is at this moment that the crisis occurred
in Tolstoy’s life which divides it outwardly into two sections,
although it constitutes no break in his inward evolution. The fear of
the dark, of the abyss yawning in front of him, was so strong that he
felt he must rid himself of it at all costs.
“I felt terror” (he writes) “of what was awaiting me, though I knew
that this terror was more terrible than my position itself; I could
not wait patiently for the end; my horror of the darkness was too
great, and I felt I must rid myself of it as soon as possible by noose
or bullet.”
This terror was not a physical fear of death, but an abstract fear,
arising from the consciousness that the cold mists of decay were rising
round him. By the realisation of the nothingness of everything, of
what Leopardi calls “l’infinita vanità del tutto,” he was brought to
the verge of suicide. And then came the change which he describes thus
in his _Confession_: “I grew to hate myself; and now all has become
clear to me.” This was the preliminary step of the development which
led him to believe that he had at last found the final and everlasting
truth. “A man has only got not to desire lands or money, in order to
enter into the kingdom of God.” Property, he came to believe, was
the source of all evil. “It is not a law of nature, the will of God,
or a historical necessity; rather a superstition, neither strong
nor terrible, but weak and contemptible.” To free oneself from this
superstition he thought was as easy as to stamp on a spider. He
desired literally to carry out the teaching of the Gospels, to give up
all he had and to become a beggar.
This ideal he was not able to carry out in practice. His family,
his wife, opposed him: and he was not strong enough to face the
uncompromising and terrible sayings which speak of a man’s foes being
those of his own household, of father being divided against son, and
household against household, of the dead being left to bury their dead.
He put before him the ideal of the Christian saints, and of the early
Russian martyrs who literally acted upon the saying of Christ: “Whoso
leaveth not house and lands and children for My sake, is not worthy
of Me.” Tolstoy, instead of crushing the spider of property, shut his
eyes to it. He refused to handle money, or to have anything to do with
it; but this does not alter the fact that it was handled for him, so
that he retained its advantages, and this without any of the harassment
which arises from the handling of property. His affairs were, and still
are, managed for him; and he continued to live as he had done before.
No sane person would think of blaming Tolstoy for this. He was not by
nature a St. Francis; he was not by nature a Russian martyr, but the
reverse. What one does resent is not that his practice is inconsistent
with his teaching, but that his teaching is inconsistent with the
ideal which it professes to embody. He takes the Christian teaching,
and tells the world that it is the only hope of salvation, the only key
to the riddle of life. At the same time he neglects the first truth
on which that teaching is based, namely, that man must be born again;
he must humble himself and become as a little child. It is just this
final and absolute surrender that Tolstoy has been unable to make.
Instead of loving God through himself, and loving himself for the God
in him, he hates himself, and refuses to recognise the gifts that God
has given him. It is for this reason that he talks of all his great
work, with the exception of a few stories written for children, as
being worthless. It is for this reason that he ceased writing novels,
and attempted to plough the fields. And the cause of all this is simply
spiritual pride, because he was unwilling “to do his duty in that state
of life to which it had pleased God to call him.” Providence had made
him a novelist and a writer, and not a tiller of the fields. Providence
had made him not only a novelist, but perhaps the greatest novelist
that has ever lived; yet he deliberately turns upon this gift, and
spurns it, and spits upon it, and says that it is worth nothing.
The question is, has a human being the right to do this, especially if,
for any reasons whatever, he is not able to make the full and complete
renunciation, and to cut himself off from the world altogether? The
answer is that if this be the foundation of Tolstoy’s teaching, people
have a right to complain of there being something wrong in it. If he
had left the world and become a pilgrim, like one of the early Russian
saints, not a word could have been said; or if he had remained in the
world, preaching the ideals of Christianity and carrying them out
as far as he could, not a word could have been said. But, while he
has not followed the first course, he has preached that the second
course is wrong. He has striven after the ideal of Ivan Durak, but has
been unable to find it, simply because he has been unable to humble
himself; he has re-written the Gospels to suit his own temperament.
The cry of his youth, “I have no modesty,” remains true of him after
his conversion. It is rather that he has no humility; and, instead of
acknowledging that every man is appointed to a definite task, and that
there is no such thing as a superfluous man or a superfluous task, he
has preached that all tasks are superfluous except what he himself
considers to be necessary; instead of preaching the love of the divine
“image of the King,” with which man is stamped like a coin, he has told
us to love the maker of the coin by hatred of His handiwork, quite
regardless of the image with which it is stamped.
This all arises from the dual personality in the man, the conflict
between the titanic “Lucifer” and the other element in him, for ever
searching for the ideal of Ivan Durak. The Titan is consumed with
desire to become Ivan Durak; he preaches to the whole world that they
should do so, but he cannot do it himself. Other proud and titanic
natures have done it; but Tolstoy cannot do what Dante did. Dante was
proud and a Titan, but Dante divested himself of his pride, and seeing
the truth, said: “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.” Nor can Tolstoy
attain to Goethe’s great cry of recognition of the “himmlische Mächte,”
“Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass.” He remains isolated in his high
and terrible solitude:
“In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb.”
Tourgeniev said of Tolstoy, “He never loved any one but himself.”
Merejkowski, in his _Tolstoy as Man and Artist_, a creative work of
criticism, is nearer the truth when he says, He has never loved any
man, “_not even himself_!” But Merejkowski considers that the full
circle of Tolstoy’s spiritual life is not closed. He does not believe
he has found the truth which he has sought for all his life, nor that
he is, as yet, at rest.
“I cannot refuse to believe him” (he writes) “when he speaks of
himself as a pitiable fledgling fallen from the nest. Yes, however
terrible, it is true. This Titan, with all his vigour, is lying on
his back and wailing in the high grass, as you and I and all the rest
of us. No, he has found nothing; no faith, no God. And his whole
justification is solely in his hopeless prayer, this piercing and
plaintive cry of boundless solitude and dread.... Will he at last
understand that there is no higher or lower in the matter; that the
two seemingly contradictory and equally true paths, leading to one
and the same goal, are not two paths, but one path which merely seems
to be two; and that it is not by going against what is earthly or
fleeing from it, but only through what is earthly, that we can reach
the Divine; that it is not by divesting ourselves of the flesh, but
through the flesh, that we can reach that which is beyond the flesh?
Shall we fear the flesh? we, the children of Him who said, ‘My blood
is drink indeed, and My flesh is meat indeed’; we, whose God is that
God whose Word was made flesh?”[9]
Yet, whatever the mistakes of Tolstoy’s teaching may be, they do not
detract from the moral authority of the man. All his life he has
searched for the truth, and all his life he has said exactly what
he thought; and though he has fearlessly attacked all constituted
authorities, nobody has dared to touch him. He is too great. This is
the first time independent thought has prevailed in Russia; and this
victory is the greatest service he has rendered to Russia _as a man_.
Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky could endure Tourgeniev; their dislike
of him is interesting, and helps us to understand the nature of their
work and of their artistic ideals, and the nature of the distance that
separates the work of Tourgeniev from that of Tolstoy. “I despise the
man,” Tolstoy wrote of Tourgeniev to Fet. Dostoievsky, in his novel
_The Possessed_,[10] draws a scathing portrait of Tourgeniev, in which
every defect of the man is noted but grossly exaggerated. This portrait
is not uninstructive.
“I read his works in my childhood,” Dostoievsky writes, “I even
revelled in them. They were the delight of my boyhood and my youth.
Then I gradually grew to feel colder towards his writing.” He goes
on to say that Tourgeniev is one of those authors who powerfully
affect one generation, and are then put on the shelf, like the scene
of a theatre. The reason of this dislike, of the inability to admire
Tourgeniev’s work, which was shared by Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, is
perhaps that both these men, each in his own way, reached the absolute
truth of the life which was round them. Tolstoy painted the outer and
the inner life of those with whom he came in contact, in a manner such
as has never been seen before or since; and Dostoievsky painted the
inner life (however fantastic he made the outer machinery of his work)
with an insight that has never been attained before or since. Now
Tourgeniev painted people of the same epoch, the same generation; he
dealt with the same material; he dealt with it as an artist and as a
poet, as a great artist, and as a great poet. But his vision was weak
and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was
cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoievsky. His characters,
beside those of Tolstoy, seem caricatures, and beside those of
Dostoievsky they are conventional.
In Europe no foreign writer has ever received more abundant praise from
the most eclectic judges than has Tourgeniev. Flaubert said of him:
“Quel gigantesque bonhomme que ce Scythe!” George Sand said: “Maître,
il nous faut tous aller à votre école.” Taine speaks of Tourgeniev’s
work as being the finest artistic production since Sophocles.
Twenty-five years have now passed since Tourgeniev’s death; and, as M.
Haumant points out in his book, the period of reaction and of doubt,
with regard to his work, has now set in even in Europe. People are
beginning to ask themselves whether Tourgeniev’s pictures are true,
whether the Russians that he describes ever existed, and whether the
praise which was bestowed upon him by his astonished contemporaries all
over Europe was not a gross exaggeration.
One reason of the abundant and perhaps excessive praise which was
showered on Tourgeniev by European critics is that it was chiefly
through Tourgeniev’s work that Europe discovered Russian literature,
and became aware that novels were being written in which dramatic
issues, as poignant and terrible as those of Greek tragedy, arose
simply out of the clash of certain characters in everyday life. The
simplicity of Russian literature, the naturalness of the characters
in Russian fiction, came like a revelation to Europe; and, as this
revelation came about partly through the work of Tourgeniev, it is
not difficult to understand that he received the praise not only due
to him as an artist, but the praise for all the qualities which are
inseparable from the work of any Russian.
Heine says somewhere that the man who first came to Germany was
astonished at the abundance of ideas there. “This man,” he says, “was
like the traveller who found a nugget of gold directly he arrived in
El Dorado; but his enthusiasm died down when he discovered that in El
Dorado there was nothing but nuggets of gold.” As it was with ideas
in Germany, according to Heine, so was it with the naturalness of
Tourgeniev. Compared with the work of Tolstoy and that of all other
Russian writers, Tourgeniev’s naturalness is less astonishing, because
he possesses the same qualities that they possess, only in a less
degree.
When all is said, Tourgeniev was a great poet. What time has not taken
away from him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty of
his language and the poetry in his work. Every Russian schoolboy has
read the works of Tourgeniev before he has left school; and every
Russian schoolboy will probably continue to do so, because Tourgeniev’s
prose remains a classic model of simple, beautiful, and harmonious
language, and as such it can hardly be excelled. Tourgeniev never
wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, the
_Sportsman’s Sketches_. In this book nearly the whole of his talent
finds expression. One does not know which to admire more--the delicacy
of the art in choosing and recording his impressions, or the limpid
and musical utterance with which they are recorded. To the reader who
only knows his work through a translation, three-quarters of the beauty
are lost; yet so great is the truth, and so moving is the poetry of
these sketches, that even in translation they will strike a reader as
unrivalled.
There is, perhaps, nothing so difficult in the world to translate as
stories dealing with Russian peasants. The simplicity and directness
of their speech are the despair of the translator; and to translate
them properly would require literary talent at once as great and as
delicate as the author’s. Mrs. Garnett’s version of Tourgeniev’s work
is admirable; yet in reading the translation of the _Sportsman’s
Sketches_, and comparing it with the original, one feels that the
task is an almost impossible one. Some writers, Rudyard Kipling for
instance, succeed in conveying to us the impression which is made by
the conversation of men in exotic countries. When Rudyard Kipling gives
us the speech of an Indian, he translates it into simple and biblical
English. There is no doubt this is the right way to deal with the
matter; it is the method which was adopted with perfect success by the
great writers of the eighteenth century, the method of Fielding and
Smollett in dealing with the conversation of simple men. One cannot
help thinking that it is a mistake, in translating the speech of
people like Russian peasants, or Indians, or Greeks, however familiar
the speech may be, to try to render it by the equivalent colloquial
or slang English. For instance, Mrs. Garnett, in translating one of
Tourgeniev’s masterpieces, _The Singers_, turns the Russian words
“nie vryosh” (Art thou not lying?) by “Isn’t it your humbug?” In the
same story she translates the Russian word “molchat” by the slang
expression “shut up.” Now “shut up” might, in certain circumstances,
be the colloquial equivalent of “molchat”; but the expression conveyed
is utterly false, and it would be better to translate it simply “be
silent”; because to translate the talk of the Russian peasant into
English colloquialisms conveys precisely the same impression, to any
one familiar with the original, which he would receive were he to come
across the talk of a Scotch gillie translated into English cockney
slang.
This may seem a small point, but in reality it is the chief problem
of all translation, and especially of that translation which deals
with the talk and the ways of simple men. It is therefore of cardinal
importance, when the material in question happens to be the talk of
Russian peasants; and I have seen no translation in which this mistake
is not made. How great the beauty of the original must be is proved by
the fact that even in a translation of this kind one can still discern
it, and that one receives at least a shadow of the impression which
the author intended to convey. If the _Sportsman’s Sketches_ be the
masterpiece of Tourgeniev, he rose to the same heights once more at the
close of his career, when he wrote the incomparable _Poems in Prose_.
Here once more he touched the particular vibrating string which was
his special secret, and which thrills and echoes in the heart with so
lingering a sweetness.
So much for Tourgeniev as a poet. But Tourgeniev was a novelist, he
was famous as a novelist, and must be considered as such. His three
principal novels, _A House of Gentlefolk_, _Fathers and Sons_, and
_Virgin Soil_, laid the foundation of his European fame. Their merits
consist in the ideal character of the women described, the absence of
tricks of mechanism and melodrama, the naturalness of the sequence
of the events, the harmony and proportion of the whole, and the
vividness of the characters. No one can deny that the characters of
Tourgeniev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to
life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy
and Tourgeniev is this: that Tourgeniev’s characters are as living
as any characters ever are in books, but they belong, comparatively
speaking, to bookland, and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s
characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with
Tourgeniev’s characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is
an element of caricature in them; and that they are permeated by the
faults of the author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and, above
all, his self-consciousness. M. Haumant points out that the want of
backbone in all Tourgeniev’s characters does not prove that types of
this kind must necessarily be untrue or misleading pictures of the
Russian character, since Tourgeniev was not only a Russian, but an
exceptionally gifted and remarkable Russian. Tourgeniev himself divides
all humanity into two types, the Don Quixotes and the Hamlets. With but
one notable exception, he almost exclusively portrayed the Hamlets.
Feeble, nerveless people, full of ideas, enthusiastic in speech,
capable by their words of exciting enthusiasm and even of creating
belief in themselves, but incapable of action and devoid of will; they
lack both the sublime simplicity and the weakness of Ivan Durak, which
is not weakness but strength, because it proceeds from a profound
goodness.
To this there is one exception. In _Fathers and Sons_, Tourgeniev
drew a portrait of the “Lucifer” type, of an unbending and inflexible
will, namely, Bazarov. There is no character in the whole of his work
which is more alive; and nothing that he wrote ever aroused so much
controversy and censure as this figure. Tourgeniev invented the type
of the intellectual Nihilist in fiction. If he was not the first to
invent the word, he was the first to apply it and to give it currency.
The type remains, and will remain, of the man who believes in nothing,
bows to nothing, bends to nothing, and who retains his invincible pride
until death strikes him down. Here again, compared with the Nihilists
whom Dostoievsky has drawn in his _Possessed_, we feel that, so far
as the inner truth of this type is concerned, Tourgeniev’s Bazarov is
a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be; and
that Dostoievsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may
seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth.
Tourgeniev never actually saw the real thing as Tolstoy might have seen
it and described it; nor could he divine by intuition the real thing
as Dostoievsky divined it, whether he saw it or not. But Tourgeniev
evolved a type out of his artistic imagination, and made a living
figure which, to us at any rate, is extraordinarily striking. This
character has proved, however, highly irritating to those who knew the
prototype from which it was admittedly drawn, and considered him not
only a far more interesting character than Tourgeniev’s conception, but
quite different from it. But whatever fault may be found with Bazarov,
none can be found with the description of his death. Here Tourgeniev
reaches his high-water mark as a novelist, and strikes a note of manly
pathos which, by its reserve, suggests an infinity of things all the
more striking for being left unsaid. The death of Bazarov is one of the
great pages of the world’s fiction.
In _Virgin Soil_, Tourgeniev attempts to give a sketch of underground
life in Russia--the revolutionary movement, helpless in face of the
ignorance of the masses and the unpreparedness of the nation at large
for any such movement. Here, in the opinion of all Russian judges,
and of most latter-day critics who have knowledge of the subject, he
failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with
great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the
revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may
be as fiction, are not the real thing.[11] Nevertheless, in spite of
Tourgeniev’s limitations, these three books, _A House of Gentlefolk_,
_Fathers and Sons_, and _Virgin Soil_, must always have a permanent
value as reflecting the atmosphere of the generation which he paints,
even though his pictures be marred by caricatures, and feeble when
compared with those of his rivals.
Of his other novels, the most important are _On the Eve_, _Smoke_,
_Spring Waters_, and _Rudin_ (the most striking portrait in his gallery
of Hamlets). In _Spring Waters_, Tourgeniev’s poetry is allowed free
play; the result is therefore an entrancing masterpiece. With regard to
_On the Eve_, Tolstoy writes thus:[12]
“These are excellent negative characters, the artist and the father.
The rest are not types; even their conception, their position, is not
typical, or they are quite insignificant. That, however, is always
Tourgeniev’s mistake. The girl is hopelessly bad. ‘Ah, how I love
thee!... Her eyelashes were long.’ In general it always surprises
me that Tourgeniev, with his mental powers and poetic sensibility,
should, even in his methods, not be able to refrain from banality.
There is no humanity or sympathy for the characters, but the author
exhibits monsters whom he scolds and does not pity.”
Again, in writing of _Smoke_, Tolstoy says:[13]
“About _Smoke_, I think that the strength of poetry lies in love; and
the direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength
of love there is no poetry; but strength falsely directed--the result
of the poet’s having an unpleasant, weak character--creates dislike.
In _Smoke_ there is hardly any love of anything, and very little pity;
there is only love of light and playful adultery; and therefore the
poetry of that novel is repulsive.”
These criticisms, especially the latter, may be said to sum up the case
of the “Advocatus Diaboli” with regard to Tourgeniev. I have quoted
them because they represent what many educated Russians feel at the
present day about a great part of Tourgeniev’s work, however keenly
they appreciate his poetical sensibility and his gift of style. The
view deserves to be pointed out, because all that can be said in praise
of Tourgeniev has not only been expressed with admirable nicety and
discrimination by widely different critics of various nationalities,
but their praise is constantly being quoted; whereas the other side
of the question is seldom mentioned. Yet in the case of _On the Eve_,
Tolstoy’s criticism is manifestly unfair. Tolstoy was unable by his
nature to do full justice to Tourgeniev. Perhaps the most impartial
and acute criticism of Tourgeniev’s work that exists is to be found
in M. de Vogüé’s _Roman Russe_. M. de Vogüé is not indeed blind to
Tourgeniev’s defects; he recognises the superiority both of Tolstoy
and Dostoievsky, but he nevertheless gives Tourgeniev his full meed of
appreciation.
The lapse of years has only emphasised the elements of banality and
conventionality which are to be found in Tourgeniev’s work. He is a
masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without convention.
His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes, and are seldom
varied. He seems never to get face to face with nature, after the
manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any elemental pictures of
nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he rings the
changes on delicate arrangements of wood, cloud, mist and water, vague
backgrounds and diaphanous figures, after the manner of Corot. This
does not detract from the beauty of his pictures, and our admiration
for them is not lessened; but all temptation to exaggerate its merits
vanishes when we turn from his work to that of stronger masters.
To sum up, it may be said that the picture of Russia obtained from
the whole of Tourgeniev’s work has been incomplete, but it is not
inaccurate; and such as it is, with all its faults, it is invaluable.
In 1847, Bielinski, in writing to Tourgeniev, said: “It seems to me
that you have little or no creative genius. Your vocation is to depict
reality.” This criticism remained true to the end of Tourgeniev’s
career, but it omits his greatest gift, his poetry, the magical echoes,
the “unheard melodies,” which he sets vibrating in our hearts by the
music of his utterance. The last of Tourgeniev’s poems in prose is
called “The Russian Language.” It runs as follows:
“In days of doubt, in the days of burdensome musing over the fate
of my country, thou alone art my support and my mainstay, oh great,
mighty, truthful, and unfettered Russian language! Were it not for
thee, how should I not fall into despair at the sight of all that is
being done at home? But how can I believe that such a tongue was given
to any but a great people?”
No greater praise can be given to Tourgeniev than to say that he was
worthy of his medium, and that no Russian prose writer ever handled the
great instrument of his inheritance with a more delicate touch or a
surer execution.
When Tourgeniev was dying, he wrote to Tolstoy and implored him to
return to literature. “That gift,” he wrote, “came whence all comes to
us. Return to your literary work, great writer of our Russian land!”
All through Tourgeniev’s life, in spite of his frequent quarrels with
Tolstoy, he never ceased to admire the works of his rival. Tourgeniev
had the gift of admiration. Tolstoy is absolutely devoid of it.
The “Lucifer” spirit in him refuses to bow down before Shakespeare
or Beethoven, simply because it is incapable of bending at all. To
justify this want, this incapacity to admire the great masterpieces
of the world, Tolstoy wrote a book called _What is Art?_ in which he
condemned theories he had himself enunciated years before. In this,
and in a book on Shakespeare, he treats all art, the very greatest,
as if it were in the same category with that of æsthetes who confine
themselves to prattling of “Art for Art’s sake.” Beethoven he brushes
aside because, he says, such music can only appeal to specialists.
“What proportion of the world’s population,” he asks, “have ever heard
the Ninth Symphony or seen ‘King Lear’? And how many of them enjoyed
the one or the other?” If these things be the highest art, and yet the
bulk of men live without them, and do not need them, then the highest
art lacks all claim to such respect as Tolstoy is ready to accord to
art. In commenting on this, Mr. Aylmer Maude writes: “The case of the
specialists, when Tolstoy calls in question the merits of ‘King Lear’
or of the Ninth Symphony, is an easy one.”
But the fallacy does not lie here. The fallacy lies in thinking
the matter is a case for specialists at all. It is not a case for
specialists. Beethoven’s later quartettes may be a case for the
specialist, just as the obscurer passages in Shakespeare may be a
case for the specialist. This does not alter the fact that the whole
of the German nation, and multitudes of people outside Germany, meet
together to hear Beethoven’s symphonies played, and enjoy them. It does
not alter the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are translated into every
language and enjoyed, and, when they are performed, are enjoyed by
the simplest and the most uneducated people. The highest receipts are
obtained at the Théâtre Français on holidays and feast days, when the
plays of Molière are given. Tolstoy leaves out the fact that very great
art, such as that of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Beethoven,
Mozart, appeals at the same time, and possibly for different reasons,
to the highly trained specialist and to the most uncultivated
ignoramus. This, Dr. Johnson points out, is the great merit of Bunyan’s
_Pilgrim’s Progress_: the most cultivated man cannot find anything
to praise more highly, and a child knows nothing more amusing. This
is also true of _Paradise Lost_, an appreciation of which is held in
England to be the highest criterion of scholarship. And _Paradise
Lost_, translated into simple prose, is sold in cheap editions, with
coloured pictures, all over Russia,[14] and greedily read by the
peasants, who have no idea that it is a poem, but enjoy it as a tale
of fantastic adventure and miraculous events. It appeals at the same
time to their religious feeling and to their love of fairy tales, and
impresses them by a certain elevation in the language (just as the
chants in church impress them) which they unconsciously feel does them
good.
It is this inability to admire which is the whole defect of Tolstoy,
and it arises from his indomitable pride, which is the strength
of his character, and causes him to tower like a giant over all
his contemporaries. Therefore, in reviewing his whole work and his
whole life, and in reviewing it in connection with that of his
contemporaries, one comes to this conclusion. If Tolstoy, being as
great as he is, has this great limitation, we can only repeat the
platitude that no genius, however great, is without limitations; no
ruby without a flaw. Were it otherwise--Had there been combined with
Tolstoy’s power and directness of vision and creative genius, the large
love and the childlike simplicity of Dostoievsky--we should have had,
united in one man, the complete expression of the Russian race; that is
to say, we should have had a complete man--which is impossible.
Tourgeniev, on the other hand, is full to the brim of the power of
admiration and appreciation which Tolstoy lacks; but then he also
lacks Tolstoy’s strength and power. Dostoievsky has a power different
from Tolstoy’s, but equal in scale, and titanic. He has a power of
admiration, an appreciation wider and deeper than Tourgeniev’s, and
the humility of a man who has descended into hell, who has been face
to face with the sufferings and the agonies of humanity and the vilest
aspects of human nature; who, far from losing his faith in the divine,
has detected it in every human being, however vile, and in every
circumstance, however hideous; and who in dust and ashes has felt
himself face to face with God. Yet, in spite of all this, Dostoievsky
is far from being the complete expression of the Russian genius, or
a complete man. His limitations are as great as Tolstoy’s; and no one
was ever more conscious of them than himself. They do not concern us
here. What does concern us is that in modern Russian literature, in the
literature of this century, leaving the poets out of the question, the
two great figures, the two great columns which support the temple of
Russian literature, are Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. Tourgeniev’s place is
inside that temple; there he has a shrine and an altar which are his
own, which no one can dispute with him, and which are bathed in serene
radiance and visited by shy visions and voices of haunting loveliness.
But neither as a writer nor as a man can he be called the great
representative of even half the Russian genius; for he complements the
genius of neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky. He possesses in a minor
degree qualities which they both possessed; and the qualities which
are his and his only, exquisite as they are, are not of the kind which
belong to the greatest representatives of a nation or of a race.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] _Life of Tolstoy_, p. 38.
[8] Matthew Arnold is a notable exception.
[9] _Tolstoy as Man and Artist_, pp. 93, 95. This passage is translated
from the Russian edition.
[10] It should be said that this portrait is so unfair, and yet
contains elements of truth so acutely observed, that for some people it
spoils the whole book.
[11] With the exception of Marianna, one of his most beautiful and
noble characters.
[12] _Life_, p. 189.
[13] _Life_, p. 312.
[14] The popular edition of _Paradise Lost_ in Russian prose, with
rough coloured pictures, is published by the Tipografia, T. D. Sitin,
Piatnitzkaia Oolitza, Moscow.