Read Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) Online
Authors: IVAN TURGENEV
Again, despite the change of fashion in schools of landscape painters, it is amusing to hear that Turgenev — ” this masterly landscape painter “ — is charged with “ never getting face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth — and Gorky “! But Mr. Baring is echoing his French authority, M.
Haumant, who in turn is modestly echoing, it would seem, MM. Mihallovsky and Strahov.1 These eminent authorities on nature are agreed in comparing Turgenev with Corot, “ whose subjects and methods scarcely alter.” Vogue, who knew the province of Orel, Turgenev’s country, however, does not agree. He says pointedly, “ One has to live in the country described by Turgenev to admire how on every page he corroborates our personal impressions, how he brings back to our soul every emotion experienced, and to our senses every subtle odour breathed in that country.” This seems explicit.
Never getting face to face with nature! Could a more baseless charge have been made, one falsified by the innermost spirit of Turgenev’s work, and by countless passages in his writings, of the most intimate observation?2 We cite a specimen from
1
TourguSnief, la vie et I’ceuvre.
Par £mile Haumant. Paris, 1906.
2
“ Their predecessors had lived more or less with Nature, but had always looked upon her as something foreign to themselves, with an existence separated from theirs. In Tourgueniev’s case this external intercourse becomes a fusion, a mutual pervasion. He feels and recognizes portions of his own being in the wind that shakes the trees, in the light that beams on surrounding objects. . . .” — A History of Russian Literature, by K. Waliszewski, p. 290.
A Tour in the Forest, showing the penetrating freshness and warmth of his description :
“I fed my horses, and I too was ferried over. After struggling for a couple of miles through the boggy prairie, I got at last on to a narrow raised wooden causeway to a clearing in the forest. The cart jolted unevenly over the round beams of the causeway; I got out and went along on foot. The horses moved in step, snorting and shaking their heads from the gnats and flies. The forest took us into its bosom. On the outskirts, nearer to the prairie, grew birches, aspens, limes, maples, and oaks. Then they met us more rarely. The dense firwood moved down on us in an unbroken wall. Further on were the red, bare trunks of pines, and then again a stretch of mixed copse, overgrown with underwood of hazelnut, mountain ash, and bramble, and stout, vigorous weeds. The sun’s light threw a brilliant light on the tree - tops, and, filtering through the branches, here and there reached the ground in pale streaks and patches. Birds I scarcely heard — they do not like great forests. Only from time to time there came the doleful and thrice - repeated call of a hoopoe, and the angiy screech of a nut - hatch or a jay; a silent, always a solitary bird kept fluttering across the clearing, with a flash of golden azure from its lovely feathers. At times the trees grew further apart, ahead of us the light broke in, the cart came out on a cleared, sandy, open space. Thin rye was growing over it in rows, noiselessly nodding its pale ears. On one side there was a dark, dilapidated little chapel with a slanting cross over a well. An unseen brook was bubbling peacefully with changing, ringing sounds, as though it were flowing into an empty bottle. And then suddenly the road was cut in half by a birch - tree recently fallen, and the forest stood around, so old, lofty and slumbering, that the air seemed pent in. In places the clearing lay under water. On both sides stretched a forest bog, all green and dark, all covered with reeds and tiny alders. Ducks flew up in pairs, and it was strange to see those. water - birds darting rapidly about among the pines. ‘ Ga, ga, ga, ga,’ their drawn - out call kept rising unexpectedly. Then a shepherd drove a flock through the underwood; a brown cow with short, pointed horns broke noisily through the bushes, and stood stock - still at the edge of the clearing, her big dark eyes fixed on the dog running before me. A slight breeze brought the delicate pungent smell of burnt wood. A white smoke in the distance crept in eddying rings over the pale, blue forest air, showing that a peasant was charcoal - burning for a glass - factory or for a foundry. The further we went on, .the darker and stiller it became all round us. In the pine - forest it is always still; there is only, high overhead, a sort of prolonged murmur and subdued roar in the tree tops. . . . One goes on and on, and this eternal murmur of the forest never ceases, and the heart gradually begins to sink, and a man longs to come out quickly into the open, into the daylight; he longs to draw a full breath again, and is oppressed by the pungent damp and decay.” — A Tour in the Forest, pp. 105 - 107.
Anybody who. has lived amid forests and woods must agree that in the passage above Turgenev has seized with unerring exactitude the character, the breath itself of a great woodland, and similarly all his descriptions of nature in A Sportsman’s Sketches are inspired by profound sensitiveness and close fidelity. “ Vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures! “ This is the accusation of townsmen.
Another and more insidious line of critical detrac - C - tion has been followed by M. Haumant in Ivan Tourguenief, la vie et I’ceuvre, a volume, painstaking and well documented, assuredly of great interest to the student. Intent on his efforts to track down to their source “ the origins of Turgenev’s thoughts,” the French critic has forgotten to applaud the aesthetic appeal, and the very perfection of these creations! It is as though a critic of Keats, in trying to discover “the sources” of “Hyperion” or “An Ode to a Grecian Urn,” had neglected to appraise the imperishable essence of these masterpieces. Thus M. Haumant, searching profoundly for “ echoes “ in Turgenev’s “ inner voices,” gravely informs us that in The Brigadier Turgenev has constructed “ a Russian Werther “! while a passage in Phantoms, it appears, is inspired by a passage in De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium - Eater. A page is devoted to the discussion of the latter conjecture,1 but nothing at all is said as to the unique spiritual beauty and the haunting atmosphere of these tales. And A Lear of the Steppes, that masterpiece, incomparable in its force of genius, is dismissed in half a line! The effect of such “ comments,” both on those who know and those who do not know their 1 Haumant, p. 174.
Turgenev, is equally unfortunate. For it really looks, but of course one may be wrong, as though the French critic, like his latter - day Russian confreres, did not recognize a masterpiece when he sees one. Has not, indeed, a Russian literary teacher, A. D. Alfyorov, publicly declared that “ Turgenev’s work is, of course, only of historical importance.”
But enough! Indeed one may well be asked, Is it necessary to defend so great a classic as Turgenev against modern criticisms of this character? Perhaps it is not a mere waste of time, for certain reasons. Turgenev’s supremacy, as artist, accepted by the elite in France, Renan, Taine, Flaubert, Maupassant, etc., and by the best European critics, such as Brandes, was impaired in Russian eyes by his growing unpopularity after 1867. Bruckner says justly:
“To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without liberty of assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion, literature became the last refuge of his freedom of thought, the only means of propagating higher ideas. He expected and demanded of his country’s literature not merely aesthetic recreation; he placed it at the service of everything noble and good, of his aspiration, of the enlightenment and emancipation of the spirit. Hence the striking partiality, nay, unfairness, displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own literature when they did not answer to the claims or the expectations of their party or their day. A purely aesthetic handling of the subject would not gain it full acceptance.”
Indeed, to read the contemporary Russian onslaughts directed against Turgenev’s successive masterpieces is to imagine one must be dreaming. Nearly every popular critic of the periodical press, righteous or self - righteous, is seen, tape - measure in hand, arbitrarily finding fault with Turgenev’s subject, conception and treatment, disdaining or ignoring its aesthetic force, beauty and harmonious perfection. It is a crowd of critical gnats dancing airily round the great master and eagerly driving their little stings into his flesh. Even before the publication of Smoke (1867) Turgenev was accused of being out of date, and his frequent spells of residence abroad, at Baden, Paris, etc. (though he returned to Russia nearly every year), and his “ life devotion “ to a foreigner, Madame Viardot, helped to consolidate the story that he no longer knew the Russia of the day. And indeed there is truth in the dictum that Turgenev was pre - eminently a chronicler of the Pre - Reform days, or as he himself said, “ a writer of the transition period.” But the bulk of his works, even those into which no tendency could be read, such as The Torrents of Spring or A Lear of the Steppes, was never properly appreciated as aesthetic creations, so deeply imbued was the intelligent Russian with the “ war - like “ criticism of Drobrolu - bov, Tchernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mihailovsky, etc., critics who, in Bruckner’s words, “ relegated aesthetics to ladies’ society, and turned its critical report into a sort of pulpit for moral and social preaching.” A strong reaction in Turgenev’s favour was manifested at the Pushkin statue celebration in Moscow, 1879, and at his funeral obsequies in Petersburg, 1883, when two hundred and eighty - five deputations met at his grave. But, later, MM. Mihailovsky and Strahov, and latterly MM. Haumant, Bruckner and Baring, have declared that “the general admiration” for Turgenev’s genius has greatly weakened, and that Turgenev’s star has paled b’efore the stars of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This undercutting style of criticism — ” They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat with Shakespeare,” as Meredith puts it — seems a little clumsy when one reflects that not merely in vision and temperament, but in aesthetic quality, Turgenev is irreplaceable. The spiritual kingdoms of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are separated as widely as are the kingdoms of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. It is true that for our triumphant bourgeoisies, who, bewildered, grapple with the rich profusion of facts, problems and aspects of our congested civilization, quality in art is little understood or prized. And Turgenev, by his art’s harmonious union of form and subject, of grace and strength, of thought and emotion, in fact belongs, as Renan said, to the school of Greek perfection.
Since Turgenev is pre - eminently an intellectual force, as well as an artist with a consummate sense of beauty, it is difficult for a critic to hold the balance equitably between the social significance of Turgenev’s pictures of life and the beauty of his vision. Far too little attention has been paid to him as artist. This is no doubt not merely due to the fact that while the majority of critics either naively ignore or take for granted his supreme quality, the more perfect is a work of art the more impossible is it to do it critical justice. The great artists, as Botticelli, who are peculiarly mannered, it is far easier to criticize and comment on than is a great artist, as Praxiteles, whose harmony of form conceals subtleties of technique unique in spiritual handling. The discussion of technical beauties, however, is not only a thankless business but tends to defeat its own object. It is better to seek to appreciate the spirit of a master, and to dwell on his human value rather than on his aesthetic originality. The present writer need scarcely add that he is dissatisfied with his inadequate discussion of Turgenev’s masterpieces, but fragmentary as it is, he believes his is almost the only detailed attempt yet made in the English language.
“All my life is in my works,” said Turgenev, and his biographers’ account of his education and youth reveals how it was that from the age of twenty - three Turgenev was to become both an interpreter of the Russian mind to Europe and an interpreter of Western culture to his countrymen. His father, Sergey Ivanovitch, a handsome, polished officer of impoverished but ancient family, married an heiress, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinov, and their eldest son, Ivan Sergeyevitch, was born, October 28, 1818, at Orel, in central Russia. The natural loathing of the soft, poetic and impulsive boy for tyrannical harshness was accentuated by his parents’, especially by his mother’s, severity, unmerited whippings and punishments being his portion in the “ noble and opulent country - house” at Spasskoe, where foreign tutors and governesses succeeded one another quickly. That Turgenev had before his eyes from his childhood in his capricious and despotic mother a distressing object - lesson of a typical Russian vice, viz. unbridled love of power, could only deepen his instinct for siding with weak and gentle natures. Turgenev’s psychological penetration into hard, coarse and heartless characters, so antithetic to - his own, seems surprising till we learn that the unscrupulous and cruel “ Lutchinov,” the hero of Three Portraits, was drawn from a maternal ancestor. From the Lutovinov family, cruel, despotic and grasping, Turgenev no doubt inherited a mental strand which enabled him to fathom the workings of hardness and cruelty in others. The injustice and humiliations he and his brothers, along with a large household of dependents, suffered at Madame Turgenev’s hands,1 early aroused in him a detestation of the system of serfdom. The touching story of Mumu, in which the deaf and dumb house - porter’s sweetheart is forced to marry another man, while he himself is ordered to drown his pet dog by his mistress’s caprice, is a true domestic chronicle. Though Madame Turgenev dearly loved her son Ivan Sergeyevitch, whose sweet and tender nature 1 See “ La mere d’lvan Turguenieff,” in Tourguinieff Inconnu, par Michel Delines influenced her for good, her insatiable desire to domineer over others, and her violent outbursts of rage kept the household trembling before her whims. “ Nobody had a right to sustain in her presence any ideas which contradicted her own,” while her jealousy of her handsome husband’s affaires de cceur embittered her days.1 She herself had been the victim of her own upbringing, and remembered with loathing her step - father’s lust and cruelty. Turgenev therefore was early inoculated with an aversion for tyrannizing in any shape or form, as well as for the prevalent forms of oppression, official or social, under Nicholas I., and as his biographers tell us, the Turgenevs were a stock noted for “ a hatred of slavery and for noble and humane temperaments.” a A second potent influence that turned the youthful Turgenev’s face definitely towards the West was his lengthy tour in Europe, 1838 - 41. His early education at Moscow University had been completed at the University of St. Petersburg, where his family had removed after his father’s death in 1835, and
1
See the story First Love, where Turgenev describes his parents’ relations.
2
Bruckner’s A Literary History of Russia, p. 338.
where as a shy youth he saw the two great authors, Gogol and Pushkin, whose literary example was to have a profound influence on his own work. German philosophy, especially Hegel’s, was at this epoch fashionable in Russia, and Turgenev, after setting out on his tour with his mother’s blessing, attended by a valet, arrived in Berlin, where he drank deep of Goethe’s, Schiller’s and Heine’s works, and where his ardent discussions with his circle of students on life, art, politics and metaphysics crystallized his aspirations for European culture. A tour on the Rhine, in Switzerland and in Italy effectually widened his outlook, and he returned to Spasskoe in 1841, bringing with him his narrative poem “ Parasha.”
Undoubtedly conflicting influences, such as Byron, Pushkin and Lermontov, are visible in Turgenev’s youthful, romantic poems, “Parasha,” and various others (1837 - 47), which we shall not discuss here, or his half - dozen plays (1845 - 52), which last, however excellent, did not give his genius sufficient scope.1
1 “ Parasha “ was warmly praised by Byelinsky in 1843, in an article in Annals of the Fatherland. Of the six Plays, which were revived from time to time, The Bachelor (1849) is perhaps the strongest. In later years Turgenev disclaimed any interest in his dramas, and declared that towards his poems he felt an antipathy almost physical.
Much ingenuity has been exercised, especially by French critics,1 in ascribing Turgenev’s literary debts to authors as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Auerbach, Dal, Grigorovitch, Dickens, etc. But it would be a waste of time to analyse Turgenev’s work for traces of contemporary authors, though George Sand’s stories of French peasant life had undoubtedly deeply influenced him. With Pushkin as classical model for clarity of style, and with Gogol as his model for direct painting from everyday life, Turgenev belongs to “ the natural school “ of the ‘forties, the school of the realists championed by the critic Byelinsky, then all - powerful with the rising men. It is true that a vein of romanticism crops up here and there in various of Turgenev’s tales, and that a definite strain of lyrical sentimentalism in occasional passages may be credited to German influence. But in almost his first story, The Duellist (1846), we find a complete break with the traditions of the romantic school, traditions which are indeed here turned inside out.2 Here it is evident that a 1 Haumant, Delines, Waliszewski, etc.
a M. Haumant has been at great pains to show that Turgenev in his early prose and verse “ commenced by appropriating the form and the subjects of the romantics of the ‘twenties and the new master is in the field, “ a painter of realities “ as Byelinsky soon declared.1 The story is of much significance, as exemplifying Turgenev’s clear - eyed, deep apprehension of character, and his creative penetration through beauty of feeling. It is to be noted how the coarse bullying insolence of the officer, Lutchkov (who out of envious spleen kills in a duel his friend, the refined and generous Kister), is betrayed by the absence of any tender or chivalrous emotion for women. Filled with his own male self - complacency, and contemptuous of women, Lutchkov comes to his interview with the fresh, innocent ‘thirties, that his ‘ half revolt’ against the romantic convention became accentuated later, and that we find in the plays and poems a ‘ degradation of the romantic heroes ‘ of Pushkin and Lermontov “ (Haumant, pp. 113 - 122). Although there is not a little truth in his thesis, M. Haumant has forgotten to add that the social atmosphere of the preceding generation, as well as of its literature, music and art, was “ romantic,” and that the youth of the period, as well as the heroes of Goethe and Stendhal, did act, think and feel in a “ romantic “ manner.
1 Byelinsky, in his criticism on Hor and Kalinitch, says: “ His talent is not suited to true lyrics. He can only paint from real life what he has seen or studied. He can create, but only with the materials given by nature. It is not a copy of the real; nature has not given the author innate ideas, but he has to find them; the author transforms the real, following his artistic ideal, and so his picture becomes more living. He knows how to render faithfully a character or a fact he has observed.... Nature has given Turgenev this capacity of observing, of understanding, and of appreciating faithfully and quickly each fact, of divining its cause and consequences, and, when facts are lacking, of supplying the factors by just divination.”
girl Masha, whom he alarms by his coarse swagger. To cover his brutal egoistic feeling he roughly kisses the shrinking girl, but she shudders and darts away. “ What are you afraid of? Come, stop that. . . . That’s all nonsense,” he says hoarsely, as he approaches her, terribly confused, with a disagreeable smile on his twisted lips, while patches of red came out on his face.
Could anything describe better the brutal spirit of the man who, out of spiteful envy, to revenge his slighted self - love, kills his own friend, Kister, in a duel? Turgenev’s description of Kister must be remarked, for the latter in his “ good nature, modesty, warm - heartedness and natural inclination for everything beautiful” is the twin - soul of his creator. Turgenev’s life - long readiness to lose sight of himself in appreciation of others, even of the men who abused his good offices and repaid him with ingratitude, was notorious.1 One may assert that Turgenev’s character was thus early expressed in four dominant traits, viz. a generous tenderness of heart, an enthusiasm for the good, sensitiveness 1 For example, Turgenev warmly commended Dostoevsky’s works to foreign critics, after the latter had perpetrated the spiteful libel on him in The Possessed.
to beauty of form and feeling, an infinite capacity for the passion of love. These qualities are manifest in his first work of importance, A Sportsman’s Sketches (1847 - 51), an epoch - making book which profoundly affected Russian society and had no small influence in hastening the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 - 63.