Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) (498 page)

It can only, therefore, be claimed for the Nihilists of the ‘seventies that they represented an advanced section of the community, and not the nation itself, in their struggle with the bureaucracy. They must be regarded as enthusiasts who awoke public opinion when it had begun to slumber. They vindicated the manliness of the nation, which had always gone in fear of the official world : it was now the bureaucracy that was afraid! The Nihilists became martyrs for their creed of progress; they drew the attention of Europe to the strange spectacle that Russia presents in its well - equipped bureaucracy of caste slowly paralysing the old democratic institutions of the peasantry. A strong Governmental system is absolutely necessary for the holding together of the enormous Russian Empire; but the fact that the work of freeing and educating the peasants had (with only the rarest exceptions), been always violently or secretly opposed by the high officials, suggests that the bureaucracy is like a parasite which strangles, though appearing to protect, the tree itself. And the attitude of the official world to its sun and centre, the autocracy, is something like that of threatening soldiers surrounding the throne of a latter - day Caesarism.

Whether or no the Nihilists’ belief in revolution in Russia was justified by their measure of success, their rising was but a long - threatened revolt of idealism and of the Russian conscience against Russian cowardice; it was the fermentation of modern ideas in the breast of a society iron - bound by officialism; it was the generous aspiration of the Russian soul against sloth and apathy and greed. The Nihilists failed, inasmuch as the battle of Liberty is yet to be won : they succeeded, inasmuch as their revolt was a tremendous object - lesson to Europe of the internal evils of their country. And the objection that they borrowed their ideas of revolution from the Commune and were not a genuine product of Russia, Turgenev has answered once for all in Virgin Soil. Liberty must spring from the soil whence Marianna springs.

In the words of that great poem of Whitman :

“The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat, The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs, The prison, scaffold, garotte, hand - cuffs, iron necklace - , and lead balls do their work, The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres, The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands, The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with their own blood. The young men droop their eyelashes towards the ground when they meet. But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the infidel entered into full possession, When Liberty goes out of the place it is not the first to go, nor .the second or third to go, It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.”

There is no going back for the Mariannas of Russia. They must go forward, and to - day they are going forward. Honour to them and theirs, to them who, if forbidden by authority to work in the light, are ready again to work in the dark. Honour to that great party with whom their country’s liberties have remained — Anonymous Russia!

Much water has flowed under the bridge since the preface above was written one - and - twenty years ago, but the author has only deemed it necessary to correct a few lines of his criticism and to modify his statement concerning Turgenev’s funeral. Since 1896, we have seen the spectacle of the Russo - Japanese war, the General Strike, the creation of the Duma, the abortive Revolution of 1905, the excesses of Terrorists, Agent - Provocateurs, “ Black Hundreds” and Military Court - Martials, Governmental illegalities, the rapid evolution, economic and political, of a new Russia till 1914; and finally the spectacle of the Great European War, the rally of all parties, under the Prussian invasion, to the patriotic programme of the Progressive Bloc, the falling away of even the old - fashioned Bureaucrats from “ the dark forces of the Empire,” and the general situation, in the words of the Times Petrograd correspondent:

“A Delayed Development “ We know that had the Constitution signed by Alexander II. been introduced, Russia might have been spared much suffering. The assassination of the Tsar brought about a delay of 25 precious years. Pobie - donostzeff persuaded Alexander III. that Russia enjoyed a special dispensation of Providence; that the laws of history in other lands did not apply to her. Thus the greatest of reforms, introduced in the ‘sixties, the abolition of slavery and the institution of the Zemstvos granting the people a voice in the affairs of their country, became stultified. It is true that serfdom could not be reintroduced, that Zemstvos could not be abolished, but „what happened was bad enough. The education of the masses was neglected and the local assemblies were placed under tutelage.

“Not till 1905 did Russia obtain relief from the reaction that followed upon the tragedy of 1881. But Pobiedonostzeff had numerous adherents among his contemporaries in the older bureaucracy, many of whom survive to this day. The governing class in Russia forms a caste which directs a huge and highly intricate mechanism of a centralized administration ruling nearly 200,000,000 of people. These statesmen could not suddenly be eliminated or instilled with new ideas alien to all their habits or traditions. In the Senate or Supreme Court of Justice, which promulgates all laws and sees to their enforcement, and in the Upper House, which is half composed of members appointed from the ranks of these elder statesmen, the old leaven was still unhappily strong. ... To these causes and agencies we owe the reaction that has characterized Russian internal politics within recent years. . . .

“Slowly but surely the ranks of the old reactionary party have been declining. By an infallible process of attrition they were bound to disappear sooner or later, leaving the field clear for the New Russia. The Great War came before the elimination was consummated. It has hastened the process by convincing everybody, including the bureaucracy, of the utter failure of the old system to cope with great national problems. At the present time no section of the population, and, therefore, no genuine political party, exists in Russia that has a word to say in support of the Pobiedonostzeff theory. The Nobles’ Congress was the last stronghold to surrender. It did so in the most emphatic manner by endorsing, mirabile dictu! the resolutions of both Houses of Parliament demanding the formation of a strong, united Ministry enjoying the confidence of the people. Between the Army and the nation there is not, and there cannot be, any difference of opinion on this subject.

“Within something like ten years the Russian people have become a new people. What Pobiedonostzeff succeeded in doing 25 years ago cannot, obviously, be attempted now. Russia has finally, irrevocably, turned her back upon the old ideas. She has spoken her mind fully, unanimously.” — The Times, February 8, 1917.

As the writer is retouching his last chapter comes the news of the Russian Revolution, an event of no less import to Europe than was the French Revolution, and one no less fraught with incalculable consequences.

This event carries back one’s thought to the revolutionary attempt of the Decembrists, 1825, and to the successive movements for political reform in Turgenev’s own day, from the men of the “ ‘forties “ {Rudin) to the disastrous obscurantism of the heavy, stupid - minded Alexander III., and his reactionary ministers. From Virgin Soil, 1877, one follows in thought the succeeding forty years in which tract after tract of stubborn political virgin soil has been slowly broken up and sown with progressive seed. The changing economic conditions, aggravated by the Great European War, and the weak obstinacy of Nicholas II. have, at last, bankrupted the Autocracy.

The result signally vindicates Turgenev’s political prescience and his rdle as the interpreter of Western culture and Western liberalism to his countrymen. For until the great barrier of petrified Bureaucratic Nationalism was broken down, true democratic Nationalism could not flow in free channels. Slavophilism, with its leading idea of the deliverance of Europe by the Autocracy, by Orthodoxy and the communal love of the meek Russian peasant, must be replaced by a new movement, spiritual in its essence, and give much - needed fresh conceptions to our materialized Western civilization. Every reader of Russian literature, from Gogol to our day, cannot fail to recognize that the Russian mind is superior to the English in its emotional breadth and flexibility, its eager responsiveness to new ideas, its spontaneous warmth of nature. With all their faults the Russian people are more permeated with humane love and living tenderness, in their social practice, than those of other nations. Let us trust that the Russian earth, no longer clouded by a dark, overcast sky, will be flooded with the fertilizing sunlight of this new, democratic Nationalism.

Turgenev stood, in the ‘seventies, between the camps of the extremists, the old nobility who worked to prevent, hinder or suppress every reform, and the shallow, hot - headed theorists, who wished to force the pace, but whose talk ended in “ smoke.” Consequently he was frequently accused of cowardice by the revolutionaries on the one hand, and by the Conservatives of complicity with the revolutionaries, on the other.1 As an artist, while he stood aside from direct political action, his attitude to the revolutionaries appeared necessarily ambiguous. Pavlovsky, however, has well characterized it:

“We see therefore that Turgenev was too variable to be in any sense a man of politics. He was never a Nihilist nor a Revolutionary, and those episodes we have cited are advanced only to show he considered the revolutionaries as an artist. As such they excited his imagination and carried him away like a child. Immediately after reflection he became sceptical and — this was his ordinary mental disposition — never believing in solid results of these agitators, though he retained always great sympathy for the Youth, whom he esteemed beyond all for their constant spirit of self - sacrifice.

1 See the letter to Madame Viardot, of January 19, 1864, in which Turgenev describes how he was summoned before a Tribunal of the Senate to answer charges of plotting with the revolutionaries, which he did without any trouble.

Both these mental tendencies are clearly to be seen in two of his Poems in Prose,’ The Workman and the Man with White Hands,’ and ‘ The Threshold!’“

In Paris, in his last years, Turgenev was in active touch with the colony of young Russians, and assisted with his purse and his advice a number of proteges. A ridiculous hubbub arose in the Russian press on the publication in the Temps of Turgenev’s preface to En Cellule, a tale by one of these proteges, Pavlovsky, and Turgenev in a letter to the Malva thereupon defined his political faith :

“Paris, December 30, 1879.

“Without vanity or circumlocution, and merely stating facts I have the right to say that my convictions put on record in the press and in other sources, have not changed an iota in the last forty years. I have never hidden them from any one. To the young I have always been and have remained a moderate, a liberal of the old - fashioned stamp, a man who looks for reforms from above, and is opposed to the revolution.

“If young Russia appreciated me it was in that light, and if the ovations offered were dear to me, it was precisely because I did not go to seek the young generation, but it who came to me.”

Turgenev’s political creed may be read without the slightest ambiguity between the lines of A Sportsman’s Sketches and his great novels. It is a creed of the necessity of the people’s mental and spiritual enlightenment, of the amelioration of bad social conditions and of the establishment of constitutional government, in the place of despotism.1

1 Kropotkin tells us : “I saw Turgenev 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 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 resolution to remain the absolute ruler of Russia.” — Memoirs of a Revolutionist, vol. ii. p. 222.

CHAPTER X

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 role 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 naiveti 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 Pyetnshkov’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 Ada (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 Zinaida, 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 roles 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 lifelike 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 Kliiber 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 :