TURGENEV THE EMANCIPATOR
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 learnedfrom 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 sworeto 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 Russianliterary 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 returnto 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 ofcharacteristicallypersonal 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 thatfine 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 thenthpower. 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 “ASportsman’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 echoingcall 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.
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 echoingcall 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, mostlyin 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 animmortal 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 theFields.’... 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.