A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

by Ivan Turgenev

  Let us end here with a repetition of a simple passage that, echoing through the last pages of Fathers and Children, must find an echo in the hearts of Turgenev’s readers : “ ‘ To the memory of Bazarov,’ Katya whispered in her husband’s ear, . . . but Arkady did not venture to propose the toast aloud.” We, at all events, can drink the toast to - day as a poor tribute in recompense for those days when Turgenev in life proposed it, and his comrades looked on him with distrust, with coldness and with anger.

  CHAPTER VIII

  “SMOKE”

  Smoke was first published in 1867, several years after Turgenev had fixed his home in Baden, with his friends the Viardots. Baden at this date was a favourite resort for all circles of Russian society, and Turgenev was able to study at his leisure his countrymen as they appeared to foreign critical eyes. The novel is therefore the most cosmopolitan of all Turgenev’s works. On a veiled background of the great world of European society, little groups of representative Russians, members of the aristocratic and the Young Russia parties, are etched with an incisive, unfaltering hand. Smoke, as an historical study, though it yields in importance to Fathers and Children and Virgin Soil, is of great significance to Russians. It might with truth have been named Transition, for the generation it paints was then midway between the early philosophical Nihilism of the ‘sixties and the active political Nihilism of the ‘seventies.

  Markedly transitional, however, as was the Russian mind of the days of Smoke, Turgenev, with the faculty that distinguishes the great artist from the artist of the second rank, the faculty of seeking out and stamping the essential under confused and fleeting forms, has once and for ever laid bare the fundamental weakness of the Slav nature, its weakness of will. Smoke is an attack, a deserved attack, not merely on the Young Russia party, but on all the Parties; not on the old ideas or the new ideas, but on the proneness of the Slav nature to fall a prey to a consuming weakness, a moral stagnation, a feverish ennui, the Slav nature that analyses everything with force and brilliancy, and ends, so often, by doing nothing. Smoke is the attack, bitter yet sympathetic, of a man who, with growing despair, has watched the weakness of his countrymen, while he loves his country all the more for the bitterness their sins have brought upon it. Smoke is the scourging of a babbling generation, by a man who, grown sick to death of the chatter of reformers and reactionists, is visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, with a contempt out of patience for the hereditary vice in the Slav blood. And this time the author cannot be accused of partisanship by any blunderer. “ A plague o’ both your houses “ is his message equally to the Bureaucrats and the Revolutionists. And so skilfully does he wield the thong that every lash falls on the back of both parties. An exquisite piece of political satire is Smoke; for this reason alone it would stand unique among novels.

  The attention that Smoke aroused was immediate and great; but the hue - and - cry that assailed it was even greater. The publication of the book marks the final rupture between Turgenev and the party of Young Russia. The younger generation never quite forgave him for drawing Gubaryov and Bambaev, Voroshilov and Madame Suhantchikov — types, indeed, in which all revolutionary or unorthodox parties are painfully rich. Or, perhaps, Turgenev was forgiven for it when he was in his grave, a spot where forgiveness flowers to a late perfection. And yet the fault was not Turgenev’s. No, his last novel, Virgin Soil, bears splendid witness that it was Young Russia that was one - eyed.

  Let the plain truth here be set down. Smoke is not a complete picture of the Young Russia of the day; it was not yet time for that picture; and that being so, Turgenev did the next best thing in attacking the windbags, the charlatans and their crowd of shallow, chattering followers, as well as the empty formulas of the laissez - faire party. It was inevitable that the attack should bring on him the anger of all young enthusiasts working for “ the Cause “; it was inevitable that” the Cause “ of reform in Russia should be mixed up with the Gubaryovs, just as reforms in France a generation ago were mixed up with Boulanger; and that Turgenev’s waning popularity for the last twenty years of his life should be directly caused by his honesty and clear - sightedness in regard to Russian Liberalism, was inevitable also. To be crucified by those you have benefited is the cross of honour of all great, single - hearted men.

  But though the bitterness of political life flavours Smoke, although its points of departure and arrival are wrapped in the atmosphere of Russia’s dark and insoluble problems, nevertheless the two central figures of the book, Litvinov and Irina, are not political figures. Luckily for them, in Gubaryov’s words, they belong “ to the undeveloped.” Litvinov himself may be dismissed in a sentence. He is Turgenev’s favourite type of man, a character much akin to his own nature, gentle, deep and sympathetic. Turgenev often drew such a character; Lavretsky, for example, in A House of Gentlefolk, is a first cousin to Litvinov, an older and a sadder man.

  But Irina — Irina is unique; for Turgenev has in her perfected her type till she reaches a destroying witchery of fascination and subtlety. Irina will stand for ever in the long gallery of great creations, smiling with that enigmatical smile which took from Litvinov in a glance half his life, and his love for Tatyana. The special triumph of her creation is that she combines that exact balance between good and evil which makes good women seem insipid beside her and bad women unnatural. And, by nature irresistible, she is made doubly so to the imagination by the situation which she re - creates between Litvinov and herself. She ardently desires to become nobler, to possess all that the ideal of love means for the heart of woman; but she has only the power given to her of enervating the man she loves. Can she become a Tatyana to him? No, to no man. She is born to corrupt, yet never to be corrupted. She rises mistress of herself after the first measure of fatal delight. And, never giving her whole heart absolutely to her lover, she, nevertheless, remains ever to be desired.

  Further, her wit, her scorn, her beauty preserve her from all the influences of evil she does not deliberately employ. Such a woman is as old and as rare a type as Helen of Troy. It is most often found among the mistresses of great princes, and it was from a mistress of Alexander II. that Turgenev modelled Irina.

  Of the minor characters, Tatyana is an astonishing instance of Turgenev’s skill in drawing a complete character with half a dozen strokes of the pen. The reader seems to have known her intimately all his life — her family life, her girlhood, her goodness and individual ways to the smallest detail; yet she only speaks on two or three occasions. Potugin is but a weary shadow of Litvinov, but it is difficult to say how much this is a telling refinement of art. The shadow of this prematurely exhausted man is cast beforehand by Irina across Litvinov’s future. For Turgenev to have drawn Potugin as an ordinary individual would have vulgarized the novel and robbed it of its skilful proportions, for Potugin is one of those shadowy figures which supply the chiaroscuro to a brilliant etching.

  As a triumphant example of consummate technical skill, Smoke will repay the most exact scrutiny. There are a lightness and a grace about the novel that conceal its actual strength. The political argument glides with such ease in and out of the love story, that the hostile critic is absolutely baffled; and while the’ most intricate steps are executed in the face of a crowd of angry enemies, the performer lands smiling and in safety. The art by which Irina’s disastrous fascination results in falsity, and Litvinov’s desperate striving after sincerity ends in rehabilitation — the art by which these two threads are spun, till their meaning colours the faint political message of the book, is so delicate that, ‘like the silken webs which gleam only for the first fresh hours in the forest, it leaves no trace, but becomes a dream in the memory. And yet this book, which has the freshness of windy rain and the whirling of autumn leaves, is the story of disintegrating weakness, of the passion that saps and paralyses, that renders life despicable, as Turgenev himself says. Smoke is the finest example in literature of a subjective psychological study of passion rendered clearly and objectively in terms
of art. Its character — we will not say its superiority — lies in the extraordinary clearness with which the most obscure mental phenomena are analysed in relation to the ordinary values of daily life. At the precise point of psychological analysis where Tolstoy wanders and does not convince the reader, and at the precise point where Dostoevsky’s analysis seems exaggerated and obscure, like a figure looming through the mist, Turgenev throws a ray of light from the outer to the inner world of man, and the two worlds are revealed in the natural depths of their connection. It is in fact difficult to find among the great modern artists men whose natural balance of intellect can be said to equalize their special genius. The Greeks alone present to the world a spectacle of a triumphant harmony in the critical and creative mind of man, and this is their great pre - eminence. But Smoke presents the curious feature of a novel (Slav in virtue of its modern psychological genius) which is classical in its treatment and expression throughout; the balance of Turgenev’s intellect reigns ever supreme over the natural morbidity of his subject.

  CHAPTER IX

  “VIRGIN SOIL”

  The last words of Virgin Soil —

  “A long while Paklin remained standing before this closed door.

  “‘Anonymous Russia!’ he said at last “ —

  lay bare the inner meaning of the book. Anonymous Russia! It was Anonymous Russia, as Turgenev saw, that had at last arisen to menace the doors which shut out Russia from political liberty. And it is of the spontaneous formation of the Nihilist party, and of the hurried and uncertain steps it took preparatory to the serious Terrorist struggle, that Virgin Soil treats with equal skill and force. The educated young Russian of the ‘seventies had begun to live an underground life; Turgenev studied this phenomenon, and, difficult though this study was, so well did he foresee the future of Young Russia that Virgin Soil remains the best analysis made of the national elements that were mingled in its loosely - knit secret organizations. Virgin Soil gives us the historical justification of the Nihilist movement, and the prophecy of its surface failure; it traces out the deep roots of the necessity of such a movement; it shows forth the ironical and inevitable weakness of this party of self - sacrifice. This effect is obtained in this novel by a series of significant suggestions underlying the words and actions of the characters.

  These suggestions are delicate and fleeting like the quiet swirl of water round the sunken rocks in a stream. And so delicately is the Nihilist rising shadowed forth, that a foreign reader can enjoy the novel simply for its human, and not for its political, interest. Delicate, however, as is the technique of Virgin Soil, there is a large, free carelessness in the spirit of its art which reminds one much of the few last plays of Shakespeare, notably of Cymbeline, where the action, so easy - going is it, is almost too natural and effortless to be called art. In reality this large carelessness is a sign that the stage of the artist’s maturity has been reached, and a little passed. Virgin Soil, one must admit, is artistically the least perfect of the six great novels. The opening is too leisurely, and not till the second volume is reached do we feel that Turgenev is exerting his full power over us. The characterization is less subtle in detail. While Markelov’s figure is somewhat enigmatic, Paklin, though extremely life - like, too obviously serves the purpose of a go - between. But if people declare that Kallomyetsev is a type caricatured, we protest that the portrait of Sipyagin, this statesman of “ the most liberal opinions,” is priceless. The scene between Sipyagin and Paklin in chapter xxxiv., especially the portion in the carriage, is psychologically a gem of the first water. Virgin Soil was the last of Turgenev’s great novels, and appropriately ends his career as novelist; it was his last word to the young; it was one of the causes of his final disgrace with the Government; it was his link with most of Russia’s great writers : they were exiled in life : Turgenev was exiled after death. After his funeral at Petersburg, September 1883, attended by 285 deputations, public comments on his labours were discreetly veiled and discreetly suppressed by the Government,1 that had feared his power in 1 For an account of the suppression and prohibition of Tolstoy’s lecture on Turgenev, in Moscow, after the latter’s death, see Maude’s Life of Tolstoy, vol. ii. p. 185.

  life. And this fatuous act of the autocracy is the best commentary on the truth of Virgin Soil.

  To examine the characters of the novel is to see how representative they were of Russian political life. Nezhdanov, the poet and half - aristocrat, is one of the most important. Turgenev makes him the child of a misalliance, and he is, in fact, the bastard child of Power allied to modern Sentimentality. Born with the brain of an aristocrat, he represents the uneasy educated conscience of the aristocrats, the conscience which is ever seeking to propitiate, and be responsible for, “ the people,” but is ever driven back by its inability to make itself understood by the masses, which have been crystallized by hard facts, for hundreds of years, into a great caste of their own. Nezhdanov understands instinctively how impossible, how fatal, is the task of “ going to the people “: his sympathy is with them, but not of them. Banished, by his attitude, from his own caste, he seeks refuge in poetry and art; but there is not enough of reality, not enough of the national life, in his art for him to feel himself more than a dilettante. He feels he must identify himself with the real movements around him, or perish. He fails in his impossible task of winning over “ the people,” and perishes. The Nezhdanovs still exist in Europe : they are the sign of a dislocation of the national life and of the artificial conditions of the society in which they appear; and the Russian Nezhdanov of the ‘seventies was a type very much in evidence in the Nihilist party, and by making his hero perish Turgenev wished to show that hope for the future lay with far different men — with the Mariannas, the moral enthusiasts, and with the Solomins, the practical leaders who must come from “ the people “ itself.

  In drawing Nezhdanov, Turgenev was on his own ground : the type was very sympathetic to him, for he too felt all his life with despair that the gulf that separated “ the people “ from those who would lead them, was too great to be successfully crossed; and his own inner life was a turning away from the politicians, who traduced him and watched him with suspicion, to art as a refuge from reality. But in drawing Solomin, the leader’ Coming from the people, Turgenev did not achieve perfect artistic success. The truth is, this type was then a scarce one, and to - day it is not prominent. It is this type of man that Russia needs more than any other, the man of firmness and character. Solomin is admir

  ably drawn in the amusing scene of his visit to the Sipyagins (chaps, xxiii. - xxv.); also in his relations with Nezhdanov and Marianna, as their host at the factory; but there is a slight veil drawn over his inner life, and he is never sounded to the depths. Does he present enough of the rich contradictions and human variations of a living man? True, Solomin typifies the splendid sturdiness of the Russian people, the caution and craftiness of the peasant - born and the intellectual honesty of his race; but perhaps these qualities need a more individual soul behind them to combine them into a perfect creation. And in fact the Russian Solomins have not yet left the factories: they are the foremen who do not speak up enough for “the people” in the national life.1

  Marianna, however, the young girl, the Nihilist enthusiast, is the success of the book. The splendid qualities shown by the Nihilist women in the Terrorist campaign, a few years later than the publication of Virgin Soil, are a striking testimony to Turgenev’s genius in psychology. The women of Young Russia were waiting to be used, and used the women were. Marianna is the incarnation of 1 Passage written in 1896.

  that Russian fight for progress, which, though half - hidden and obscure to foreign eyes, has thrilled the nerves of Europe. This pure girl with passionate, courageous soul is, in fact, the Liberty of Russia. Without experience or help, with eyes bandaged by her destiny, she calmly goes forward on the far journey whence there is no return. By necessity she must go on : she lives by faith. In her figure is personified the flower of the Russian
youth, those who cast off from their generation the stigma of inaction — that heart - eating inaction which is the vice of the Russian temperament, as her great writers tell us — those who cast fear to the Sipyagins, and the Kallomyetsevs, to the bureaucrats their enemies, and went forth on that campaign, sublime in its recklessness, fruitful in its consequences to their country and fatal in its consequences to themselves. Marianna personifies the spirit of self - sacrifice which led her comrades forth against autocracy. The path was closed; behind them was only dishonour and cowardice; onward, then, for honour, for liberty, for all that makes life worth living to the courageous in heart. But the closed doors, the doors on which they knocked, were the doors of the fortress : the fortress closed upon them, upon their brothers and sisters : their leaders were sentenced, deported, exiled: fresh leaders sprang up, each circle had its leaders, whose average life, as free men, was reckoned, not by years but by months. The lives of Marianna and her generation were spent in prison or in exile. But by the very recklessness of their protest against autocracy, by their very simplicity in “ going to the people,” by their self - immolation for their principles Europe knew that there was no liberty in Russia save in its prisons, and that the bloody reprisals that followed were those of Marianna’s brothers, who saw her helpless in the hands of a great gendarmerie — a gendarmerie that had long shamelessly abused the power it held, that had silenced brutally all who had protested, all, all the independent spirits, all their great writers, all their men. Marianna, Marianna herself, must seek the prison! Turgenev foresaw this, and Virgin Soil tells of her preparation for the ordeal, of the why and the wherefore she went on her path.