Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) (489 page)

FOREWORD

Dear Edward — I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What greater luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in the English - speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.

After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes of Turgenev’s complete edition, the last of which came into the light of public indifference in the ninety - ninth year of the nineteenth century.

With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev had come to an end too; only work so simple and human, so independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art belongs as you point out in the Preface to Smoke “ to all time.”

Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short stories and of A Sportsman’s Sketches — those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.

Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev’s art, which has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for “all time “ it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and characters to the test of love we may hope that it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women would not have changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently and so passionately — they, at least, are certainly for all time.

Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole - souledly national. But for non - Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of Shakespeare.

In the larger, non - Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the English - speaking world, is his essential humanity.

All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever - receding future.

I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of “ cleverness “ must be fatal to any man’s influence with his contemporaries.

Frankly, I don’t want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian. It wouldn’t be true. I know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of his conscience — no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken - hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.

And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror - haunted Dostoevski but the serene Turgenev who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle : absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy — and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world’s - fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn’t get one per cent of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double - headed Nightingale or of some weak - kneed giant grinning through a horse collar. —

Yours,
J. C.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

For permission to use certain Prefaces, which I wrote originally for my wife’s Translations of the Novels and Tales of Ivan Turgenev, and for the use of a few quotations from her versions I have to thank Mr. William Heinemann, the publisher of the Collected Edition.

E. G.

March 1917.

CHAPTER I

TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS

A writer, Mr. Robert Lynd, has said: “It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the images of the rivals of the gods of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and another year, Turgenev. And no doubt the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.”

One had hoped that the disease, long endemic in Russia, of disparaging Turgenev, would not have spread to England, but some enthusiastic explorers of things Russian came back home with a mild virus and communicated the spores of the misunderstanding. That misunderstanding, dating at least fifty years back, was part of the polemics of the rival Russian political parties. The Englishman who finds it strange that Turgenev’s pictures of contemporary Russian life should have excited such angry heat and raised such clouds of acrimonious smoke may imagine the fate of a great writer in Ireland to - day who should go on his way serenely, holding the balance level between the Unionists, the Nationalists, the Sinn F&n, the people of Dublin, and the people of Belfast. The more impartial were his pictures as art, the louder would rise the hubbub that his types were “exceptional,” that his insight was “ limited,” that he did not understand either the politicians or the gentry or the peasants, that he had not fathomed all that was in each “ movement,” that he was palming off on us heroes who had “ no real existence.” And, in the sense that Turgenev’s serene and beautiful art excludes thousands of aspects that filled the newspapers and the minds of his contemporaries, his detractors have reason.

Various Russian critics, however, whom Mr. Maurice Baring, and a French biographer, M. Haumant, have echoed, have gone further, and in their critical ingenuity have mildly damned the Russian master’s creations. It seems to these gentlemen that there is a great deal of water in Turgenev’s wine. Mr. Baring tells us that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky “ reached the absolute truth of the life which was round them,” and that “ people are beginning to ask themselves whether Turgenev’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.”

“Turgenev 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 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 Dostoevsky. His characters beside those of Tolstoy seem caricatures, and beside those of Dostoevsky they are conventional. . . . When all is said, Turgenev 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. . . . Turgenev 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.

“No one can deny that the characters of Turgenev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev is this: that Turgenev’s characters are as living as any characters 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 Turgenev’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.

“... Than Bazarov there is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive . . . (but he is) a book - character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be. . . . Dostoevsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth. . . . (Virgin Soil) Here in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter - day judges 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. ‘

“The lapse of years has only emphasized the elements of banality — and conventionality — which are to be found in Turgenev’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.” — Landmarks in Russian Literature, pp. 99 - 110.

It is obvious from the above criticisms of Mr. Baring and the Russian critics whom he represents that what is the matter with Turgenev in their eyes is his “ vision,” his “ temperament.” They admire his language, his beautiful style: they pay lip service to him as “ a poet.” They even admit that he was “ a great artist,” but they do not suspect that his intellectual pre - eminence is disguised from them by his very aesthetic qualities, balance, contrast, grouping, perspective, harmony of form and perfect modelling, qualities in which Turgenev not only far surpasses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but any nineteenth - century European. Further, it is evident that these critics, having themselves never seen or felt in nature’s life those shades of “ truth “ which Turgenev’s poetical vision reveals to us, imagine that such have no “ real “ existence! Otherwise these critics would have laid stress on these special shades and tones and not passed them by with a perfunctory nod. One may go further and assert that it is precisely this same “ poetic vision “ which irritates Turgenev’s detractors; they resent it, because it conflicts with the more prosaic, everyday point of view. They mean by “ truth “ something both more photographic and commonplace, something more striking or more ordinary in the “ lighting,” something observed with less beautiful shades of feeling, less exquisitely stamped and recorded in classical contours.

Let us examine some of these charges. “ Tur - genev’s characters are as living as any in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland, and are thus conventional.” But why conventional? Why damn all the great creations in books, from Don Quixote downwards, as bookish? Are Turgenev’s women characters, say Maria Nikolaevna, Zinai’da, Varvara Pavlovna, Irene, Elena, Anna Martinovna, creations which are more highly individualized than are Tolstoy’s women, conventional? No more than are Shakespeare’s women, Lady Macbeth, Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Desdemona, Portia. Mr. Baring cannot mean this absurdity. But he repeats the charge “ Bazarov is a ‘ book - character,’ extraordinarily vivid and living though he be,” evidently thinking that because Bazarov is a figure synthesizing social tendencies and a mental attitude peculiar to his time, he is inferior as a creation to, say, Tolstoy’s Vronsky. On the contrary, that is why Bazarov is both psychologically and humanly a much more interesting figure, and one higher in the creative scale than Vronsky. Nature denied Tolstoy the power of constructing a Rudin or a Bazarov. It is because these types are personifications incarnate of tendencies, traits, and a special mode of thought and action of a particular period, and yet are brimming with individual life, that they are suigeneris, and are irreplaceable creations. This is Turgenev’s glory. We have only to compare Rudin or Bazarov with such heroes as Lermontov’s Petchorin or Herzen’s Beltoff to recognize that while these latter have all the force of autobiography, they are not shown us in the round. Mr. Baring has been seduced, one imagines, by our generation’s preference for the “ photographic likeness “ in art, which nevertheless, at critical moments, often leaves us in the air : for example, the scene of Vronsky’s attempted suicide in Anna Karenin. Turgenev could never have been guilty of this piece of banal, doubtful psychology. And the latter - day school of Russian critics, when they ask with Mr. Baring, “ Did men ever meet the double of a Bazarov or a Rudin in flesh and in blood? if not, then these characters are bookishly exaggerated or have an element of caricature in them,” may be asked in reply, “ Did you ever meet Dostoevsky’s Alyosha or Prince Myshkin walking and talking in life? “ Again, are not three - fourths of Dostoevsky’s people permeated by “ the faults of the author’s own character “? Do they not behave extravagantly or fantastically in a manner all their own? Is there not a strong element of caricature in them? Of course there is, and Mr. Baring and his Russian critics delight in it, and for that very reason exalt Dostoev - sky above Turgenev. They exalt the exaggerated Satanic element in Dostoevsky’s work, even while they declare “ Dostoevsky’s Nihilists are not only truer than Turgenev’s, but the very quintessence of truth “! We are more humble in our claims for Nezhdanov and Marianna and Mashurina in Virgin Soil; we do not assert that they are “ the very quintessence of truth “; but we know that these creations are not “ caricatures “ in the sense that Stepan Trofimovitch and Karmazinov in The Possessed are caricatures. We know, on the contrary, that Turgenev’s Nihilists, in Kropotkin’s words, are real representatives of “ the very earliest phases of the movement. . . . Turgenev had, with his wonderful intuition, caught some of the most striking features of the movement, viz. the early promoters’ ‘ Hamletism,’ and their misconception of the peasantry.” How curious it is that Stepniak and Kropotkin, who themselves lived with and knew intimately these early Nihilists, bear witness to the truth of Turgenev’s portraiture, while MM. Baring and Bruckner and Haumant, these critics of our own generation, tell us “ Turgenev’s Nihilists are not the real thing “! While admitting that Turgenev had his comparative failures, such as Insarov in On the Eve, one observes that Turgenev’s detractors demand from his social pictures what they demand from no other of his contemporaries, “ the whole objective truth and nothing but the truth.” And this curious demand, fundamentally at the root of the widespread misunderstanding about Turgenev’s work, has been spread and caught up and re - echoed by the great tribe of partisan critics, political propagandists, Slavophils, reactionaries, progressives, for two generations. Necessarily Turgenev, this consummate artist whose contemporary pictures synthesize many aspects of the social and political movements of his time, colours and tones his work with his own personality, as do all the other great creators. Just as the hero, Olenin in The Cossacks, Levin in Anna Karenin, and Pierre in War and Peace, are projections of Tolstoy’s individuality, so Lavretski, Litvinov, Sanin, and other characters, are projections of Turgenev’s personality. It is the same with Fielding, with Balzac and Maupassant, with Dostoevsky and Gontcharov, whose characters also “ are compacted of the result of their observation, with all their own inner feelings, their loves and hates, their anger and disdain.” But only in Turgenev’s case, it appears, it is a sin that the creations should contain a certain amount of “ subjective reality.” It must therefore be the case that it is precisely Turgenev’s “ temperament” which is at fault in the eyes of critics who assert that “ his vision was weak and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky.” How curious that the vision which created Fathers and Children and The Poems in Prose should have been relatively weak and narrow! and that the understanding which created A House of Gentlefolk and A Sportsman’s Sketches should have been cold and shallow! And yet in the same breath we are instructed that Turgenev “ dealt with his generation as a great poet and a great artist.” A great poet with a relatively weak and narrow vision, a great artist with a relatively cold and shallow understanding! This is an enigma to us, but not to Turgenev’s detractors.

No! One must fall back on other explanations of Turgenev’s comparative unpopularity. The first is that beauty of form, a master’s sense of composition, an exquisite feeling for balance are less and less prized in modern opinion. Our age has turned its back on the masters possessed of these classic qualities. Modern life flows along congested roads, and modern art responds in bewilderment to an embarrassment of forces. Corot’s example in painting is no longer extolled save by the true connoisseur. The grace of beauty is more or less out of fashion. The wider becomes the circle of modern readers and the more the audience enfolds the great bourgeois class, the less are form, clarity and beauty prized. The second explanation is that the inspiration of Love, and the range of exquisite feelings of Love, so manifest in Turgenev’s vision, are slightly vieux jeu. When Dostoevsky is sentimental, as in The Insulted and Injured, he turns one’s stomach. It is impossible to read him, so false, exaggerated and unreal are his characters’ emotions. But when Turgenev is sentimental, as he is in passages in The Diary of a Superfluous Man, A Correspondence, Faust, one finds oneself to be in the atmosphere of a faded drawing - room of the “ ‘forties.” This perishable element undoubtedly exists in some of Turgenev’s short stories: it was the heritage he received from the Romantic movement of his fathers, and occasionally, here and there, streaks of this romanticism appear and are detrimental to the firm and delicate objectivity of his creations. But, apart from the question of these streaks of sentimentalism, it is obvious that Turgenev in his attitude towards love and women is nearer to Shakespeare than is, say, Tchehov. Liza and Elena are almost as far removed from the range of our modern creators as are Imogen and Desdemona. It is not that we do not believe firmly in their existence, but that the changed social atmosphere of our times does not so sharply develop and outline woman’s spiritual characteristics : such heroines are now free to act in many directions denied to Turgenev’s heroines. A girl might say, to - day, of Elena, “ Grandmother was like that! so father says, and grandfather saw her like that! Isn’t it interesting? “ And this change in our social atmosphere, undoubtedly, is a bar to Turgenev’s popularity in the eyes of the younger generation.