Turgenev was the most cosmopolitan of the Russian fiction-writers, yet
with all his long residence in Berlin, Baden, and Paris, with all his
broad culture and varied linguistic attainments, he never ceased to
choose Russian themes and yield a passionate devotion to his fatherland.
Ivan Sergieevich Turgenev was born on the 28th of October, 1818, in
the government of Orel. His father, a dissipated Russian military
officer, died while Ivan was still young, leaving the lad in charge
of his mother, who was about six years the senior of her husband. The
woman was even less fitted by temperament to be a careful mother than
was Lady Byron, and the youth of the future novelist was stained with
bitter tears. Her vindictive spirit she retained to the last, and,
dying in old age, she constantly refused to receive the visits of her
son.
Doubtless these disillusioning home experiences affected young
Turgenev, for he early declared that he would never marry--and
maintained his resolution. Likewise, his ideals of motherhood seem to
have suffered, for the maternal qualities of his women characters never
rise to the highest.
German, French, and English he early learned from instructors at
home--Russian he picked up from the servants of the ancestral estate
on which he was born. First, he went to Moscow to study, later the
University at St. Petersburg held him for three years as a student, and
Berlin completed his academic training--particularly in philosophy, for
the subject was at that time interdicted in the Russian schools for
fear of its levelling effects.
That was a vitally formative thought-period for Europe, the years
between 1835 and 1842, and during such of them as Turgenev spent in
the German capital he became impregnated with free thought in all its
phases, and never thereafter could he breathe without oppression the
air of his restricted Russia. Thus the propaganda of emancipation which
the great novelist subtly spread by means of his fiction, without ever
becoming a physically present leader, was first of all inspired by his
life at home and fanned to enthusiasm by contact with intrepid thinkers
in Germany.
There must have been something sweetly noble in this fine, robust young
giant for him to have emerged from his sad and jarring home-life, and
the autocracy of his natal “Nest of Nobles,” with so deeply rooted a
hatred of serfdom and all cruel inequalities. Like the young Lincoln,
he swore to strike a blow against slavery; like Lincoln, he lived to
witness its overthrow, though upon a more equitable and permanently
satisfactory basis than did his American contemporary.
Turgenev, however, was not a militant emancipator. He was too calm,
too forbearing, too much the typical man of culture, for this. Indeed,
the Russian literary system of dealing with abuses may be said to be
typified by Turgenev’s method--he merely described. But his pictures
were so vital that he must have mixed his reds with the bloody sweat
of knouted serfs, and gotten his blacks from the smoky gloom of
pestilent cabins which lined the noisome roadways on ten thousand
manors. All Russia saw and gasped--and reformed. Thus did his first
work of distinction, the twenty-five “Sportsman’s Sketches”--published
from 1847 to 1851, and in book-form in 1852--do their mighty work for
mankind.
In earlier days Turgenev was, with all enlightened Russia, an admirer
of the poet-fictionist Gogol. A letter in eulogy of this author on his
death in 1852 was severely rebuked by the Czar’s banishing its writer
to his estates, where he remained, busily engaged in writing, until
1855. Then he saw that Russia could best be served at a distance. He
was out of sympathy with the extreme Slavophile party, yet he loved
Russia. What better course opened before him than to live in an
atmosphere where freedom could breathe, and where his powerful pen
might not only do service for Russia among Russians, but in all of
Europe as well.
And this ambition he abundantly realized. His residence in Baden as
the friend of Madame Viardot, and, be it said, of her husband, and his
later life in Paris, whither he repaired shortly after the close of
the Franco-Prussian War--for he never lived again in Russia--brought
him brilliantly before a constantly increasing company of notables, of
whom he was at the last easily chief. His gigantesque figure, crowned
with that silvery hair and beard, was a loved and familiar sight until
he succumbed to a malignant cancer which attacked the spinal cord, and
Turgenev passed over, on the 3rd of September, 1883, at the age of
sixty-five.
A pessimist is one who looks upon the unequal struggle of life and
can discern no hand to succor the deserving weak from the rapacious
strong. Sitting while a lad in a Russian garden, Turgenev beheld a
fight-to-a-finish between a serpent and a toad. Then and there began
his doubts of a beneficent Providence, which culminated in his quiet,
and never aggressive, spiritual pessimism. In this he is only one with
most great Russian literary artists. And, singularly enough, he too
passed into a final era of mysticism, though not so completely as did
his compeer Tolstoi, as witness that fine symbolical sketch, “The Song
of Triumphant Love.”
An interesting contrast presents itself in the characters of Tolstoi
and Turgenev. The one, aggressively Christian, harsh in the judgment
of his opponents, and intolerant of what he adjudged to be error;
the other, meek, gentle, considerate, largely tolerant, and quietly
forceful. Tolstoi was the lion aroused and warring even when preaching
non-resistance; Turgenev, the lion resting with dignified forbearance
because of a great serenity within. Both were men of might, yet
ethically and artistically at variance. It is pleasant to record,
however, that the quarrel which separated them for sixteen years
did not prevent Turgenev from responding at once when in later life
Tolstoi sought a reconciliation. The interview was charged with
amity, but, naturally, Turgenev could not adopt his old-time friend’s
extreme religious views. So when they had parted, Tolstoi’s praise was
modified--Turgenev was “an unpleasant man”--while the latter had only
warm words for the religionist. In a later essay in this series it is
recorded how Turgenev from his death-bed besought Tolstoi to return to
the field of Romance, in which “thou hast no rival amongst us.”
* * * * *
Turgenev was one of the greatest novelists of all time--the greatest,
as it seems to me, of all impressionistic novelists. Except in the
one quality of unity--for his work was on its surface fragmentary
in structure--this preëminent Russian met perfectly Poe’s ideal of
impressionism: he felt an impression of character or of nature and then
reproduced in his reader just what he himself felt. And this impression
was oftenest elevated above the merely physical. Brutalities,
gaucheries, physicalities, were to him expressions of the man in whose
inner life the novelist was more deeply interested than in the outer.
Thus his realism is neither so physical as Zola’s nor so materialistic
in philosophy as Maupassant’s. Turgenev’s pessimism is social, and
not primarily moral; hence character is always the big element in his
novels and shorter fictional pieces.
As with Tolstoi, so with Turgenev, plot is a negligible quantity.
Yet in a way that quite defies any explanation but one, the final
impression is fairly unified, and certainly tremendously effective.
That one explanation is that all the scattered pictures of traits,
appearances, oddities, mannerisms of bearing and speech, and, above
all, the marvellous reproduction of _characteristically_ personal
language, result in an individual presentment of character unequalled
for vividness in all fiction. Turgenev lets no significant detail
escape. The units may be trivial, the entire effect is almost always
big. The little thing he seizes upon shows us with the infallibility of
a master diagnostician the trends of character. The sum of it all is
wizardry.
All this is true primarily of his great novels. Here I have space only
for mention, at the same time venturing to place them in the order
of their importance: “A House of Gentlefolk” (“A Nest of Nobles”), a
masterpiece of depiction; “Fathers and Children,” a severe castigation
of the old and the new in Russia; “On the Eve,” a pessimistic inquiry
as to whether there is hope of better things for his fatherland;
“Rudin,” a character study of unusual penetration; “Torrents of
Spring,” in which a devilish woman ruins the hero; “Smoke,” a brilliant
but bitter satire on things Russian; and “Virgin Soil,” whose
“villain,” as in all of the author’s novels, is a woman!
* * * * *
In discussing Turgenev’s shorter fictions, we must remember that
most of them were written from seventy to forty years ago, and all
show that fine disregard of form which only a master may entertain
without inviting failure. Here, as in his novels, character is all.
Other story-tellers often make the story preëminent--Turgenev never.
His favorite method is to hold up many facets of a character, letting
the light--here a gleam, there a full radiance--fall on each. He is
a master of monologue and of dialogue. Even the jerky pauses are
eloquent. The vagueness of a mind is never asserted; it is shown
indubitably. The inept man, the supernumerary of society, the man
who is engrossed in self, the despairing peasant bound to the wheel,
the reflective but weak-willed dreamer--speech, physical habits, and
physical traits reveal them all as relentlessly as a scalpel uncovers
diseased tissue. This is the wonder of Turgenev’s fictional power. He
has brought suggestive description to the _n_^{th} power. No fictionist
has even approached him in this respect.
One further quality deserves special mention, for I have already
referred to his hatred of serfdom and his scorn for the superfluous
social orders it built up. It is that of nature description. Turgenev
was an Englishman in his love of gunning (although in later life he
disapproved of the needless slaughter of innocents). Consequently,
many of his tales--particularly his notable “A Sportsman’s
Sketches”--abound in fine nature passages. Here is one from “Yermolaï
and the Miller’s Wife.”
A quarter of an hour before sunset in springtime you go out
into the woods with your gun, but without your dog. You seek
out a spot for yourself on the outskirts of the forest, take a
look round, examine your caps, and glance at your companion.
A quarter of an hour passes; the sun has set, but it is still
light in the forest; the sky is clear and transparent; the
birds are chattering and twittering; the young grass shines
with the brilliance of emerald.... You wait. Gradually the
recesses of the forest grow dark; the blood-red glow of the
evening sky creeps slowly on to the roots and the trunks of
the trees, and keeps rising higher and higher, passes from
the lower, still almost leafless branches, to the motionless,
slumbering tree-tops.... And now even the topmost branches
are darkened; the purple sky fades to dark-blue. The forest
fragrance grows stronger; there is a scent of warmth and damp
earth; the fluttering breeze dies away at your side. The birds
go to sleep--not all at once--but after their kinds; first the
finches are hushed, a few minutes later the warblers, and after
them the yellow buntings. In the forest it grows darker and
darker. The trees melt together into great masses of blackness;
in the dark-blue sky the first stars come timidly out. All
the birds are asleep. Only the red starts and the nuthatches
are still chirping drowsily.... And now they too are still.
The last echoing call of the peewit rings over our heads;
the oriole’s melancholy cry sounds somewhere in the distance;
then the nightingale’s first note. Your heart is weary with
suspense, when suddenly--but only sportsmen can understand
me--suddenly in the deep hush there is a peculiar croaking and
whirring sound, the measured sweep of swift wings is heard, and
the snipe, gracefully bending its long beak, sails smoothly
down behind a dark bush to meet your shot.
It is illuminating to observe Turgenev’s well-nigh invariable method
of story-telling. First he will draw in a setting with much attention
to detail and introducing characters who add nothing to the story
proper but do add immeasurably to the atmosphere--and atmosphere is
miraculously handled by this master. Then he will begin to show phases
of the leading character. And when at last we have formed a perfect
picture of the person in his surroundings, a dramatic, a pathetic,
a deep-revealing flash comes forth in the form of an anecdote or an
incident--and the story is done. Character pictures, mostly _in statu
quo_--these are the master’s offerings. Plot, in the modern sense, is
almost unknown to Turgenev--as character-drawing, alas, is almost a
lost art to the short-story writer of today! But it must be said that
only an artist of the first order could carry his method to success.
A list of Turgenev’s short fictional pieces--technical short-stories
they are not--would number more than fifty, many of them almost
novelettes in length. Some of the best are “Assia,” “The Jew,” “A Lear
of the Steppes,” “Mumu,” “First Love,” “The Brigadier,” and “The Song
of Triumphant Love.”
In the following outline and translated passages taken from M. de
Vogüé’s distinguished discussion of “Russian Novelists,” we may gain a
good view of Turgenev’s method and style.
In “A Living Relic,”[2] Turgenev as the narrator strongly wakes a
human chord. On a hunting expedition, he enters by chance an abandoned
shed, where he finds a wretched human being, a woman, deformed, and
unable to move. He recognizes in her a former serving-maid of his
mother’s, once a gay, laughing girl, now paralyzed, stricken by
some strange and terrible disease. This poor creature, reduced to a
skeleton, lying forgotten in this miserable shed, has no longer any
relations with the outside world. No one takes care of her; kind people
sometimes replenish her jar with fresh water. She requires nothing
else. The only sign of life, if life it can be called, is in her eyes
and her faint respiration. But this hideous wreck of a body contains
an immortal soul, purified by suffering, utterly resigned, lifted
above itself, this simple peasant nature, into the realms of perfect
self-renunciation.
Lukerya relates her misfortune: how she was seized with this illness
after a fall in the dark; how she had gone out one dark evening to
listen to the songs of the nightingales; how gradually every faculty
and every joy of life had forsaken her.
Her betrothed was so sorry; but, then, afterwards he married; what else
could he do? She hopes he is happy. For years her only diversion has
been to listen to the church-bells, and the drowsy hum of the bees in
the hives of the apiary near-by. Sometimes a swallow comes and flutters
about in the shed, which is a great event, and gives her something to
think about for several weeks. The people that bring water to her are
so kind, she is so grateful to them! And gradually, almost cheerfully,
she goes back with the young master to the memories of old days, and
reminds him how vain she was of being the leader in all the songs and
dances; at last, she even tries to hum one of those songs.
“I really dreaded to have this half-dead creature try to sing. Before
I could speak, she uttered a sound very faintly, but the note was
correct; then another, and she began to sing ‘In the Fields.’... As
she sang there was no change of expression in her paralyzed face or in
her fixed eyes. This poor little forced voice sounded so pathetic, and
she made such an effort to express her whole soul, that my heart was
pierced with the deepest pity.”
Lukerya relates her terrible dreams, how Death has appeared before
her; not that she dreads his coming, but he always goes away and will
not deliver her. She refuses all offers of assistance from her young
master; she desires nothing, needs nothing, is perfectly content. As
her visitor is about to leave her, she calls him back for a last word.
She seems to be conscious (how feminine is this!) of the terrible
impression she must have made upon him, and says:
“Do you remember, master, what beautiful hair I had? You know it
reached to my knees.... I hesitated a long time about cutting it off,
but what could I do with it as I am? So--I cut it off.... Adieu,
master!”
* * * * *
In “The District Doctor,” which is appended in a new translation, we
find a fuller and even more characteristic specimen of Turgenev’s
story-telling. Both reveal the warm heart of the great man, and his
unfailing sympathy, which his own painful despair was never allowed to
suppress.