A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

by Ivan Turgenev

  And yet, Turgenev, with all his secret admiration for the Frankenstein he had created, did not hesitate at the last to crush him both in soul and body. The one real conviction of Turgenev’s life was pessimism, - - the belief that the man of the noblest aspiration and the man of the most brutish character are treated by Nature with equal indifference. Bazarov is the strongest individual that the novelist could conceive; and it is safe to say that most of us live all our lives through without meeting his equal. But his powerful mind, in its colossal egotism and with its gigantic ambitions, is an easy prey to the one thing he despised most of all - - sentiment; and his rugged body goes to the grave through a chance scratch on the finger. Thus the irony of this book - - and I know of no novel in the world that displays such irony - - is not the irony of intentional partisan burlesque. There is no attempt in the destruction of this proud character to prove that the “children” were wrong or mistaken; it is the far deeper irony of life itself, showing the absolute insignificance of the ego in the presence of eternal and unconscious nature. Thus Bazarov, who seems intended for a great hero of tragedy, is not permitted to fight for his cause, nor even to die for it. He is simply obliterated by chance, as an insect perishes under the foot of a passing traveller, who is entirely unaware that he has taken an individual life.

  Nature herself could hardly be colder or more passive than the woman with whom it was Bazarov’s bad luck to fall in love. The gradual change wrought in his temperament by Madame Odintsov is shown in the most subtle manner. To Bazarov, women were all alike, and valuable for only one thing; he had told this very woman that people were like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying an individual birch tree. Why, then, should this entirely unimportant individual woman change his whole nature, paralyse all his ambitions, ruin all the cheerful energy of his active mind? He fights against this obsession like a nervous patient struggling with a dreadful depression that comes over him like a flood. He fights like a man fighting with an enemy in the dark, whom he cannot see, but whose terrible blows rain on his face. When he first meets her, he remarks to the shocked Arkady, “What a magnificent body! Shouldn’t I like to see it on the dissecting table!” But he is unable long to admire her with such scientific aloofness. “His blood was on fire directly if he merely thought of her; he could easily have mastered his blood, but something else was taking root in him, something he had never admitted, at which he had always jeered, at which all his pride revolted.” It is this bewilderment at meeting the two things that are stronger than life - - love and death - - that both stupefy and torture this superman. It is the harsh amazement of one who, believing himself to be free, discovers that he is really a slave. Just before he dies, he murmurs: “You see what a hideous spectacle; the worm half - crushed, but writhing still. And, you see I thought too: I’d break down so many things, I wouldn’t die, why should I! there were problems to solve, and I was a giant! And now all the problem for the giant is how to die decently, though that makes no difference to any one either. . . . I was needed by Russia. . . . No, it’s clear, I wasn’t needed.”

  Madame Odintsov’s profound and subtle remark about happiness is the key to her character, and shows why she never could have been happy with Bazarov, or have given him any happiness.

  “We were talking of happiness, I believe. . . . Tell me why it is that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a fine evening, or a conversation with sympathetic people, it all seems an intimation of some measureless happiness existing apart somewhere rather than actual happiness such, I mean, as we ourselves are in possession of? Why is it? Or perhaps you have no feeling like that?”

  Many of us certainly have feelings like that; but while these two intellectuals are endeavouring to analyse happiness, and losing it in the process of analysis, the two young lovers, Arkady and Katya, whose brows are never furrowed by cerebration, are finding happiness in the familiar human way. In answer to his declaration of love, she smiled at him through her tears. “No one who has not seen those tears in the eyes of the beloved, knows yet to what a point, faint with shame and gratitude, a man may be happy on earth.”

  Although the character of Bazarov dominates the whole novel, Turgenev has, I think, displayed genius of a still higher order in the creation of that simple - minded pair of peasants, the father and mother of the young nihilist. These two are old - fashioned, absolutely pious, dwelling in a mental world millions of miles removed from that of their son; they have not even a remote idea of what is passing in his mind, but they look on him with adoration, and believe him to be the greatest man in all Russia. At the end of a wonderful sketch of the mother, Turgenev says: “Such women are not common nowadays. God knows whether we ought to rejoice!”

  This humble pair, whom another novelist might have treated with scorn, are glorified here by their infinite love for their son. Such love as that seems indeed too great for earth, too great for time, and to belong only to eternity. The unutterable pathos of this love consists in the fact that it is made up so largely of fear. They fear their son as only ignorant parents can fear their educated offspring; it is something that I have seen often, that every one must have observed, that arouses the most poignant sympathy in those that understand it. It is the fear that the boy will be bored at home; that he is longing for more congenial companionship elsewhere; that the very solicitude of his parents for his health, for his physical comfort, will irritate and annoy rather than please him. There is no heart - hunger on earth so cruel and so terrible as the hunger of father and mother for the complete sympathy and affection of their growing children. This is why the pride of so many parents in the development of their children is mingled with such mute but piercing terror. It is the fear that the son will grow away from them; that their caresses will deaden rather than quicken his love for them. They watch him as one watches some infinitely precious thing that may at any moment disappear forever. The fear of a mother toward the son she loves is among the deepest tragedies of earth. She knows he is necessary to her happiness, and that she is not to his.

  Even the cold - hearted Bazarov is shaken by the joy of his mother’s greeting when he returns home, and by her agony at his early departure. He hates himself for not being able to respond to her demonstrations of affection. Unlike most sons, he is clever enough to understand the slavish adoration of his parents; but he realises that he cannot, especially in the presence of his college friend, relieve their starving hearts. At the very end, he says “My father will tell you what a man Russia is losing. . . . That’s nonsense, but don’t contradict the old man. Whatever toy will comfort the child . . . you know. And be kind to mother. People like them aren’t to be found in your great world if you look by daylight with a candle.”

  The bewildered, helpless anguish of the parents, who cannot understand why the God they worship takes their son away from them, reaches the greatest climax of tragedy that I know of anywhere in the whole history of fiction. Not even the figure of Lear holding the dead body of Cordelia surpasses in tragic intensity this old pair whose whole life has for so long revolved about their son. And the novel closes with the scene in the little village churchyard, where the aged couple, supporting each other, visit the tomb, and wipe away the dust from the stone. Even the abiding pessimism of the novelist lifts for a moment its heavy gloom at this spectacle. “Can it be that their prayers, their tears, are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred, devoted love, is not all - powerful? Oh, no! However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of indifferent nature; they tell us too of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.”

  This is where the novel “Fathers and Children” rises above a picture of Russian politics in the sixties, and remains forever an immortal work of art. For the greatness of this book lies not in the use of the word Nihilist, nor in the reproduction of ephemeral political movements; its great
ness consists in the fact that it faithfully portrays not merely the Russian character, nor the nineteenth century, but the very depths of the human heart as it has manifested itself in all ages and among all nations.

  The next novel, “Smoke,” despite its extraordinary brilliancy, is in many ways unworthy of Turgenev’s genius. It was written at Baden, while he was living with the Viardots, and I suspect that the influence of Madame Viardot is stronger in this work than in anything else Turgenev produced. Of course he had discussed again and again with her the abuse that young Russia had poured on his head for “Fathers and Children;” and I suspect she incited him to strike and spare not. The smoke in this novel is meant to represent the idle vapour of Russian political jargon; all the heated discussions on both sides are smoke, purposeless, obscure, and transitory as a cloud. But the smoke really rose from the flames of anger in his own heart, fanned by a woman’s breath, who delighted to see her mild giant for once smite his enemies with all his force. If “Fathers and Children” had been received in Russia with more intelligence or more sympathy, it is certain that “Smoke” would never have appeared. This is the most bitter and purely satirical of all the works of Turgenev; the Slavophils, with their ignorance of the real culture of western Europe, and their unwillingness to learn from good teachers, are hit hard; but still harder hit are the Petersburg aristocrats, the “idle rich” (legitimate conventional target for all novelists), who are here represented as little better in intelligence than grinning apes, and much worse in morals. No one ever seems to love his compatriots when he observes them in foreign lands; if Americans complain that Henry James has satirised them in his international novels, they ought to read “Smoke,” and see how Turgenev has treated his travelling countrymen. They talk bad German, hum airs out of tune, insist on speaking French instead of their own tongue, attract everybody’s attention at restaurants and railway - stations, - - in short, behave exactly as each American insists other Americans behave in Europe.

  The book is filled with little portraits, made “peradventure with a pen corroded.” First comes the typical Russian gasbag, who talks and then talks some more.

  “He was no longer young, he had a flabby nose and soft cheeks, that looked as if they had been boiled, dishevelled greasy locks, and a fat squat person. Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in raptures over something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but exclamatory, over the face of our long - suffering mother - earth.”

  Dostoevski was so angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had “an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for his own appearance.”

  The portrait of the Pecksniffian Pishtchalkin: “In exterior, too, he had begun to resemble a sage of antiquity; his hair had fallen off the crown of his head, and his full face had completely set in a sort of solemn jelly of positively blatant virtue.”

  None but a great master could have drawn such pictures; but it is not certain that the master was employing his skill to good advantage. And while representing his hatred of all the Russian bores who had made his life weary, he selected an old, ruined man, Potugin, to express his own sentiments - - disgust with the present condition of Russia, and admiration for the culture of Europe and the practical inventive power of America. Potugin says that he had just visited the exposition at the Crystal Palace in London, and that he reflected that “our dear mother, Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without disarranging a single nail in the place.” Not a single thing in the whole vast exhibition had been invented by a Russian. Even the Sandwich Islanders had contributed something to the show. At another place in the story he declares that his father bought a Russian threshing machine, which remained five years useless in the barn, until replaced by an American one.

  Such remarks enraged the Slavophils beyond measure, for they were determined to keep out of Russia foreign inventions and foreign ideas. But that Turgenev was right is shown in the twentieth century by an acute German observer, Baron Von der Bruggen. In his interesting book, “Russia of To - day,” he says: “All civilisation is derived from the West. . . . People are now beginning to understand this in Russia after having lost considerable time with futile phantasies upon original Slavonic civilisation. If Russia wishes to progress, her Western doors must be opened wide in order to facilitate the influx of European culture.” The author of these words was not thinking of Turgenev: but his language is a faithful echo of Potugin. They sound like a part of his discourse. Still, the literary value of “Smoke” does not lie in the fact that Turgenev was a true prophet, or that he successfully attacked those who had attacked him. If this were all that the book contained, it would certainly rank low as a work of art.

  But this is not all. Turgenev has taken for his hero Litvinov, a young Russian, thoroughly commonplace, but thoroughly practical and sincere, the type of man whom Russia needed the most, and has placed him between two women, who represent the eternal contrast between sacred and profane love. This situation has all the elements of true drama, as every one knows who has read or heard “Carmen;” it is needless to say that Turgenev has developed it with consummate skill. Turgenev regarded brilliantly wicked women with hatred and loathing, but also with a kind of terror; and he has never failed to make them sinister and terrible. Irina as a young girl nearly ruined the life of Litvinov; and now we find him at Baden, his former passion apparently conquered, and he himself engaged to Turgenev’s ideal woman, Tanya, not clever, but modest, sensible, and true - hearted, another Lisa. The contrast between these two women, who instinctively understand each other immediately and the struggle of each for the soul of the hero, shows Turgenev at his best. It is remarkable, too, how clearly the reader sees the heart of the man, so obscure to himself; and how evident it is that in the very midst of his passion for Irina, his love for Tanya remains. Irina is a firework, Tanya a star; and even the biggest skyrockets, that illuminate all the firmament, do not for long conceal the stars.

  Turgenev thoroughly relieved his mind in “Smoke;” and in the novel that followed it, “Torrents of Spring,” he omitted politics and “movements” altogether, and confined himself to human nature in its eternal aspect. For this very reason the book attracted little attention in Russia, and is usually dismissed in one sentence by the critics. But it is a work of great power; it sings the requiem of lost youth, a minor melody often played by Turgenev; it gives us a curious picture of an Italian family living in Germany, and it contains the portrait of an absolutely devilish but unforgettable woman. We have a sincere and highly interesting analysis of the Russian, the German, and the Italian temperament; not shown in their respective political prejudices, but in the very heart of their emotional life. Once more the Russian hero is placed between God and Satan; and this time Satan conquers. Love, however, survives the burnt - out fires of passion; but it survives only as a vain regret - - it survives as youth survives, only as an unspeakably precious memory. . . . The three most sinister women that Turgenev has ever drawn are Varvara Pavlovna, in “A House of Gentlefolk;” Irina, in “Smoke;” and Maria Nikolaevna, in “Torrents of Spring.” All three are wealthy and love luxury; all three are professional wreckers of the lives of men. The evil that they do rises from absolute selfishness, rather than from deliberate sensuality. Not one of them could have been saved by any environment, or by any husband. Varvara is frivolous, Irina is cold - hearted, and Maria is a super - woman; she makes a bet with her husband that she can seduce any man he brings to the house. To each of her lovers she gives an iron ring, symbol of their slavery; and like Circe, she transforms men into swine. After she has hypnotised Sanin, and taken away his allegiance to the pure girl whom he loves, “her eyes, wide and clear, almost white, expressed nothing but the ruthlessness and glutted joy of conquest. The hawk, as it clutc
hes a captured bird, has eyes like that.” Turgenev, whose ideal woman is all gentleness, modesty, and calmness, must have seen many thoroughly corrupt ones, to have been so deeply impressed with a woman’s capacity for evil. In “Virgin Soil,” when he introduces Mashurina to the reader, he says: “She was a single woman . . . and a very chaste single woman. Nothing wonderful in that, some sceptic will say, remembering what has been said of her exterior. Something wonderful and rare, let us be permitted to say.” It is significant that in not one of Turgenev’s seven novels is the villain of the story a man. Women simply must play the leading role in his books, for to them he has given the power of will; they lead men upward, or they drag them downward, but they are always in front.

  The virtuous heroine of “Torrents of Spring,” Gemma, is unlike any other girl that Turgenev has created. In fact, all of his good women are individualised - - the closest similarity is perhaps seen in Lisa and Tanya, but even there the image of each girl is absolutely distinct in the reader’s mind. But Gemma falls into no group, nor is there any other woman in Turgenev with whom one instinctively classifies or compares her. Perhaps this is because she is Italian. It is a long time before the reader can make up his mind whether he likes her or not - - a rare thing in Turgenev, for most of his good women capture us in five minutes. Indeed, one does not know for some chapters whether Gemma is sincere or not, and one is angry with Sanin for his moth - like flitting about her radiance. She at once puzzles and charms the reader, as she did the young Russian. Her family circle are sketched with extraordinary skill, and her young brother is unique in Turgenev’s books. He has, as a rule, not paid much attention to growing boys; but the sympathy and tenderness shown in the depiction of this impulsive, affectionate, chivalrous, clean - hearted boy prove that the novelist’s powers of analysis were equal to every phase of human nature. No complete estimate of Turgenev can be made without reading “Torrents of Spring;” for the Italian menage, the character of Gemma and her young brother, and the absurd duelling punctilio are not to be found elsewhere. And Maria is the very Principle of Evil; one feels that if Satan had spoken to her in the Garden of Eden, she could easily have tempted him; at all events, he would not have been the most subtle beast in the field.