A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

by Ivan Turgenev

  Lavretzky, sorely tried as he is, is perhaps the happiest of our author’s heroes. He suffers great pain, but he has not the intolerable sense of having inflicted it on others. This is the lot, both of the hero of “Smoke” and of the fatally passive youth whose adventures we follow in the author’s latest work. On “Smoke” we are unable to linger, as its theme is almost identical with that of “Spring - Torrents,” and the latter will be a novelty to a greater number of our readers. “Smoke,” with its powerful and painful interest, lacks, to our mind, the underlying sweetness of most of its companions. It has all their talent, but it has less of their spirit. It treats of a dangerous beauty who robs the loveliest girl in Russia of her plighted lover, and the story duly absorbs us; but we find that, for our own part, there is always a certain langour in our intellectual acceptance of the grand coquettes of fiction. It is obviously a hard picture to paint; we always seem to see the lady pushing about her train before the foot - lights, or glancing at the orchestra - stalls during her victim’s agony. In the portrait of Irene, however, there are very fine intentions, .and the reader is charmed forward very much as poor Litvinof was. The figure of Tatiana, however, is full of the wholesome fragrance of nature. “Smoke” was preceded by “Fathers and Sons,” which dates from ten years ago, and was the first of M. Turgenieff’s tales to be translated in America. In none of them is the sub ject of wider scope or capable of having more of the author’s insidious melancholy expressed from it; for the figures with which he has filled his foreground are, with their personal interests and adventures, but the symbols of the shadowy forces that are fighting for ever a larger battle — the battle of the old and the new, the past and the future, of the ideas that arrive with the ideas that linger. Half the tragedies in human history are born of this conflict; and in all that poets and philosophers tell us of it the clearest fact is still its perpetual necessity. The opposing forces in M. Turgenieff’s novel are an elder and a younger generation; the drama can indeed never have a more poignant interest than when we see the young world, as it grows to a sense of its strength and its desires, turning to smite the old world which has brought it forth with a mother’s tears and a mother’s hopes. The young world, in “Fathers and Sons,” is the fiercer combatant; and the old world in fact is simply for ever the victa causa that even stoics pity. And yet with M. Turg6nieff, characteristically, the gaining cause itself is purely relative, and victors and vanquished are commingled in a common assent to fate. Here, as always, his rare discretion serves him, and rescues him from the danger of exaggerating his representative types. Few figures in his pages are more intelligibly human than Pavel Petrovitsch and Eugene Bazaroff — human each of them in his indefeasible weakness; the one in spite of his small allowances, the other in spite of his brutal claims. In the elder Kirsanoff the author has imaged certain things he instinctively values — the hundred fading traditions of which the now vulgarized idea of the “gentleman” is the epitome. He loves him, of course, as a romancer must, but he has done the most impartial justice to the ridiculous aspect of his position. Bazaroff is a so - called “nihilist” — a red - handed radical, fresh from the shambles of criticism, with Btichner’s St off und Kraft as a text - book, and everything in nature and history for his prey. He is young, strong, and clever, and strides about, rejoicing in his scepticism, sparing nothing, human or divine, and proposing to have demolished the universe before he runs his course. But he finds there is something stronger, cleverer, longer - lived than himself, and that death is a fiercer nihilist than even Dr. BUchner. The tale traces the course of the summer vacation that he comes to spend in the country with a college - friend, and is chiefly occupied with the record of the various trials to which, in this short period, experience subjects his philosophy. They all foreshadow, of course, the supreme dramatic test. He falls in love, and tries to deny his love as he denies everything else, but the best he can do is only to express it in a coarse formula. Mr. Turgenieff is always fond of contrasts, and he has not failed to give Bazaroff a foil in his young comrade, Arcadi Kirsanoff, who represents the merely impermanent and imitative element that clings to the skirts of every great movement. Bazaroff is silenced by death, but it takes a very small dose of life to silence Arcadi. The latter belongs to the nobility, and BazarofT’s exploits in his tranquil, conventional home are those of a lusty young bull in a cabinet of rococo china. Exquisitely imagined is the whole attitude and demeanour of Pavel Petro - vitsch, Arcadi’s uncle, and a peculiarly happy invention the duel which this perfumed conservative considers it his manifest duty to fight in behalf of gentlemanly opinions. The deeper interest of the tale, however, begins when the young Btichnerite repairs to his own provincial home and turns to a pinch of dust the tender superstitions of the poor old parental couple who live only in their pride in their great learned son and have not even a genteel prejudice, of any consequence, to oppose to his terrible positivism. M. Turgdnieff has written nothing finer than this last half of his story; every touch is masterly, every detail is eloquent. In Vassili Ivanovitsch and Arina Vlassievna he has shown us the sentient heart that still may throb in disused forms and not be too proud to subsist a while yet by the charity of science. Their timid devotion to their son, their roundabout caresses, their longings and hopes and fears, and their deeply pathetic stupefaction when it begins to be plain that the world can spare him, all form a picture which, in spite of its dealing with small things in a small style, carries us to the uttermost limits of the tragical. A very noticeable stroke of art, also, is Bazaroff’s ever - growing discontentment — a chronic moral irritation, provoked not by the pangs of an old - fashioned conscience, but, naturally enough, by the absence of the agreeable in a world that he has subjected to such exhaustive disintegration. We especially recommend to the reader his long talk with Arcadi as they lie on the grass in the midsummer shade, and Bazaroff kicks out viciously at everything suggested by his ingenuous companion. Toward him too he feels vicious, and we quite understand the impulse, identical with that which in a nervous woman would find expression in a fit of hysterics, through which the overwrought young rationalist, turning to Arcadi with an alarming appearance of real gusto, pro poses to fight with him, “to the extinction of animal heat.” We must find room for the portrait of Arina Vlassievna.

  She “was a real type of the small Russian gentry of the old rigime; she ought to have come into the world two hundred years sooner, in the time of the grand - dukes of Moscow. Easily impressed, deeply pious, she helieved in all signs and tokens, divinations, sorceries, dreams; she helieved in the lourodivi [half - witted persons, popularly held sacred], in familiar spirits, in those of the woods, in evil meetings, in the evil eye, in popular cures, in the virtue of salt placed upon the altar on Good Friday, in the impending end of the world; she believed that if the tapers at the midnight mass in Lent do not go out, the crop of buckwheat will be good, and that mushrooms cease to grow as soon as human eye has rested on them; she helieved that the Devil likes places where there is water, and that all Jews have a blood - spot on their chests; she was afraid of mice, snakes, toads, sparrows, leeches, thunder, cold water, draughts of air, horses, goats, red - haired men and black cats, and considered crickets and dogs as impure creatures; she ate neither veal, nor pigeons, nor lobsters, nor cheese, nor asparagus, nor hare, nor watermelon (because a melon opened resembled the dissevered head of John the Baptist), and the mere idea of oysters, which she did not know even by sight, caused her to shudder; she liked to eat well, and fasted rigorously; she slept ten hours a day, and never went to bed at all if Vassili Ivanovitsch complained of a headache. The only book that she had read was called ‘Alexis, or The Cottage in the Forest’; she wrote at most one or two letters a year, and was an excellent judge of sweetmeats and preserves, though she put her own hand to nothing, and, as a general thing, preferred not to move. . . . She was anxious, was perpetually expecting some great misfortune, and began to cry as soon as she remembered anything sad. Women of this kind are beginning to be r
are; God knows whether we should he glad of it.”

  The rfbvel which we have chosen as the text of these remarks was published some six years since. It strikes us at first as a reproduction of old material, the subject being identical with that of “Smoke” and very similar to that of the short masterpiece called “A Correspondence.” The subject is one of the saddest in the world, and we shall have to reproach M. Tur - genieff with delighting in sadness. But “Spring - Torrents” has a narrative charm that sweetens its bitter waters, and we may add that, from the writer’s point of view, the theme does differ by several shades from that of the tales we have mentioned. These treat of the fatal weakness of will that M. Turgenieff apparently considers the peculiar vice of the new generation in Russia; “Spring - Torrents” illustrates, more generally, the element of folly which mingles, in a certain measure, in all youthful spontaneity, and makes us grow to wisdom by the infliction of suffering. The youthful folly of Dmitri Sanin has been great; the memory of it haunts him for years and lays on him at last such an ioy grip that his heart will break unless he can repair it. The opening sentences of the story indicate the key in which it is pitched. We may quote them as an example of the way in which M. Turgenieff almost invariably appeals at the outset to our distinctively moral curiosity, our sympathy with character. Something tells us, in this opening strain, that we are not invited to lend ear to the mere dead rattle that rises for ever from the surface of life.

  “... Towards two o’clock at night, he came back into his sitting - room. The servant who had lighted the candles he sent away, threw himself into a chair by the chimney - piece, and covered his face with his hands. Never had he felt such a weariness of body and soul. He had been spending the whole evening with graceful women, with cultivated men; some of the women were pretty, almost all the men were distinguished for wit and talent; he himself had talked with good effect, even brilliantly; and yet with all this, never had that tcedium vita, of which the Romans already speak, that sense of disgust with life, pressed upon him and taken possession of him in such an irresistible fashion. Had he been somewhat younger, he would have wept for sadness, for ennui and overwrought nerves: a corroding, burning bitterness, like the bitterness of wormwood, filled his whole soul. Something inexpugnable — cold, sickening, oppressive — crowded in upon him from all sides like autumn dusk, and he knew not how he could free himself from this duskiness and bitterness. He could not count upon sleep; he knew he should not sleep He began to muse — slowly, sadly, bitterly He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the common falsity of the whole human race. . . . He shook his head, sprang up from his seat, walked several times up and down the room, sat down at his writing - table, pulled out one drawer after the other, and began to fumble among old papers, mostly letters in a woman’s hand. He knew not why he did it — he was looking for nothing, he simply wished to seek refuge in an outward occupation from the thoughts that tormented him He got up, went back to the fireplace, sank into his chair again, and covered his face with his hands ‘Why to - day, just to - day?’ he thought; and many a memory from the long - vanished past rose up in him. He remembered — this is what he remembered.”

  On his way back to Russia from a foreign tour he meets, at Frankfort, a young girl of modest origin but extraordinary beauty — the daughter of an Italian confectioner. Accident brings them together, he falls in love with her, holds himself ardently ready to marry her, obtains her mother’s consent, and has only, to make the marriage possible, to raise money on his Russian property, which is of moderate value. While he is revolving schemes he encounters an old schoolfellow, an odd personage, now married to an heiress who, as fortune has it, possesses an estate in the neighbourhood of Sanin’s own. It occurs to the latter that Madame Polosoff may be induced to buy his land, and, as she understands “business” and manages her own affairs, he repairs to Wiesbaden, with leave obtained from his betrothed, to make his proposal. The reader of course foresees the sequel — the reader, especially, who is versed in Turgenieff. Madame Polosoff understands business and much else besides. She is young, lovely, unscrupulous, dangerous, fatal. Sanin succumbs to the spell, forgets honour, duty, tenderness, prudence, everything, and after three days of bewildered resistance finds himself packed into the lady’s travelling - carriage with her other belongings and rolling toward Paris. But we foresee that he comes speedily to his senses; the spring - torrent is spent. The years that follow are as arid as brooding penitence can make them. Penitence, after that night of bitter memories, takes an active shape. He makes a pilgrimage to Frankfort and seeks out some trace of the poor girl he had deserted. With much trouble he obtains tidings, and learns that she is married in America, that she is happy, and that she serenely forgives him. He returns to St. Petersburg, spends there a short, restless interval, and suddenly disappears. People say he has gone to America. The spring - torrents exhale themselves in autumn mists. Sanin, in the Frankfort episode, is not only very young, but very Russian; how young, how Russian, this charming description tells.

  “He was, to begin with, a really very good - looking fellow. He had a tall, slender figure, agreeable, rather vague features, kindly blue eyes, a fair complexion suffused with a fresh red, and, above all that genial, joyous, confiding, upright expression, which at the first glance, perhaps, seems to give an air of limitation, but by which, in former times, you recognised the son of a tranquil aristocratic family — a son of the ‘fathers,’ a good country gentleman, born and grown up, stoutly, in those fruitful provinces of ours which border on the steppe; then a somewhat shuffling gait, a slightly lisping way of speaking, a childlike laugh as soon as any one looked at him, .... health, in short, freshness and a softness, — a softness! .... there you have all Sanin. Along with this he was by no means dull, and had leamt a good many things. He had remained fresh in spite of his journey abroad; those tumultuous impulses that imposed themselves upon the best part of the young men of that day were little known to him.”