By GABRIEL MONOD.
France has just lost an author who, though he never wrote in French,
had made France his adopted country, and had been adopted by her as one
of her most illustrious novelists—Ivan Tourgénief. From the time when
the petty persecution of the Russian government obliged him to leave
his native land, he settled in France with his friends the Viardots,
paying only short occasional visits to Russia. It was at Bougival, near
Paris, that he died on the third of September, of a painful disease
from which he had been suffering for more than two years. His works
were often translated into French from the manuscript itself, and
appeared simultaneously in French and in Russian; and though he depicted
Russian types and manners exclusively, his reputation was as great in
Paris as at St. Petersburg, and he passed with the general public for
a great French writer. He has contributed, more than any one else, to
make Russia understood in France, and to create a sympathy between the
two nations. Contemporary Russia lives complete in his works. In his
“Memoirs of a Russian Nobleman,” or “Recollections of a Sportsman,” he
has given expression to the sufferings, the melancholy, the poetry, of
the Russian country-folk, and prepared the way for the emancipation of
the peasants; in “A Nest of Nobles” he has depicted the monotonous life
of the lesser gentry, living on their small fortunes in the heart of
Russia; in “Dimitri Roudine,” in “Smoke,” and in “The Vernal Waters,” we
find those Russian types which are met with all over Europe—those nomads
whose incoherent brains are seething with all sorts of ideas, social,
political, and philosophical; those spirits in search of an ideal and a
career, whom the narrow and suffocating social life of Russia has turned
into idlers and weaklings; those worldlings, with their eccentric or
vulgar frivolity; those women, amongst whom we may find all that is most
cruel in coquetry and most sublime in self-devotion. Last of all, in
“Fathers and Sons,” he has revealed, with a prophetic touch, the first
symptoms of that moral malady of Nihilism which is eating at the heart
of modern Russia, and in “Virgin Soil” he has given us a faithful and
impartial description of the society created by the Nihilistic spirit.
Tourgénief is a realist; his personages are real, his pictures are drawn
from life, his works are full of true facts; but he is at the same time
a true artist, not only in virtue of the power with which he reproduces
what he has seen, but because he has the faculty of raising his
personages to the dignity of human types of lasting truth and universal
significance, and because he describes, not all he sees, but only what
strikes the imagination and moves the heart. He is wholesomely objective;
he does not describe his heroes, he makes them act and speak; the reader
sees and hears and knows them as if they were living people—loves them
and is sorry for them—hates and despises them. Tourgénief is one of those
novelists who have created the greatest number of living types; he is one
of those in whom we find the largest, the most sensitive, the most human
heart. He has shown, like Dickens, all that warmth of heart can add to
genius.—_The Contemporary Review._