A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

by Ivan Turgenev

  And if anything remains obscure in Virgin Soil, the English reader must remember that Turgenev was writing under special difficulties. There must always be a little vagueness in one’s speech, when Silence is written in an official writing above the doors. Anonymous Russia! Anonymous Russia had arisen to mine the doors : the doors must be shattered by secret hands that Europe might for once gaze through. It was for Turgenev’s breaking of this Silence that Tolstoy was forbidden to speak when Turgenev had been carried to his tomb. It was for Marianna’s transgression against this Silence that Turgenev has glorified her in Virgin Soil.

  What was the Nihilist party of the ‘seventies? It began, as we have said, with the Socialistic movement of “ going to the people.” This movement, again, was the natural outlet for the many liberal ideas which, germinating in “ advanced” heads, had been gathering in intensity with each generation. With the liberation of the serfs Alexander II.’s liberal policy had abruptly ended. To understand Russian politics is to know that though there are many cliques there are only two great parties, the one orthodox, the other unorthodox — the party of Governmental Action, and the party of Liberal Ideas. There are no safe politics in Russia outside the official world. If you can win over the officials to your plans in various local work, well and good; if not, your efforts are labelled “ subversive “; and it is thus that, sooner or later, every disciple of liberal ideas finds himself placed in direct opposition to the Government. Though there are many liberal - minded men among the officials, still, in Solomin’s words, “ the official is always an outsider,” and therefore it is that the unofficial thinking part of Russia — the writers, the professors, the students, the press, and the more intelligent of the professional world — form an unorganized but permanent opposition. To this party gravitate naturally the discontented spirits from all classes — nobles, military men, those who have been hardly dealt with, and those who have an axe of their own to grind — the Markelovs, and the Paklins. Accordingly, the autocracy, by the solid, impermeable front it has presented for twenty - five years to reform and to the education of the peasants, may be said to hold the varying opposition together. The action of the Government, too, in forbidding the public to comment on such matters as the late strike of factory hands in Petersburg, where also the masters were “ forbidden “ to yield to the men’s demands, constantly creates a hostile public.

  And it was in this manner that the Nihilist party of the ‘seventies was formed.

  It was natural enough for the last generation of Young Russia “to go to the people,” for it is in the matter of the education of the peasants that Russia’s hope of social and political reform lies. Besides, this plan of action meant for Young Russia the taking of the path of least resistance. The other paths had been closed by reactionary decrees. But to go actually among the peasantry and work for them and learn from them had never been attempted, and by a natural impulse the Young Russia theorists threw themselves into this Utopian campaign. The movement, of course, was foredoomed. Not only did the Government enact harsh penalties against the Socialists, but the peasants themselves were too ignorant, too far off in their life, to understand what Young Russia meant. And the exiling and imprisonment of the leading propagandists, when it came, could not fail to bring the Nihilists into a direct war with autocracy itself.

  The whole quarrel between the autocracy and the liberal opposition, a quarrel which the Nihilists of the late ‘seventies brought to a head, is a question of liberty. Is Russia to be more Orientalized or more Europeanized? If you believe in liberty of speech and of the conscience, in a free press and the education of the peasants, if you would reform the peculation and corruption of the official world, if you wish to circulate European literature without hindrance, if you detest the persecution of the Jews and the Stundists, — then you must be silent or be prepared at any moment for bureaucratic warnings, deprivations, detentions and possible exile. If you are a Conservative you will acquiesce in every possible action of the bureaucracy, as “ necessary.” It is simply a struggle between a very strongly organized bureaucracy, armed with the modern weapons of centralized power, and the public opinion of a large body of educated subjects with advanced views. Though enormous power is in the hands of the Government, and the gross credulity and ignorance of the peasants and the self - interest of the officials all work to preserve the status quo, nevertheless there is in the Russian mind, side by side with its natural Slavophilism, a great susceptibility to European example, and therefore the work of the Nihilists of yesterday and the Liberals of to - day was, and is, to awaken the public mind. It does not matter very much, how this work is performed, so long as it is performed. The Russian mind is naturally quick and sensitive; it moves quickly to conclusions when once it is started, as we see in the quickness with which Russia was semi - Europeanized by Peter the Great, and how easily the Emancipation of the Serfs was effected owing to the weakness of the autocracy at the close of the Crimean War. There is reaction now in Russia, but this may be broken up by the pressure of a series of fresh economic difficulties superimposed upon the old.

  It can only, therefore, be claimed for the Nihilists of the ‘seventies that they represented an advanced section of the community, and not the nation itself, in their struggle with the bureaucracy. They must be regarded as enthusiasts who awoke public opinion when it had begun to slumber. They vindicated the manliness of the nation, which had always gone in fear of the official world : it was now the bureaucracy that was afraid! The Nihilists became martyrs for their creed of progress; they drew the attention of Europe to the strange spectacle that Russia presents in its well - equipped bureaucracy of caste slowly paralysing the old democratic institutions of the peasantry. A strong Governmental system is absolutely necessary for the holding together of the enormous Russian Empire; but the fact that the work of freeing and educating the peasants had (with only the rarest exceptions), been always violently or secretly opposed by the high officials, suggests that the bureaucracy is like a parasite which strangles, though appearing to protect, the tree itself. And the attitude of the official world to its sun and centre, the autocracy, is something like that of threatening soldiers surrounding the throne of a latter - day Caesarism.

  Whether or no the Nihilists’ belief in revolution in Russia was justified by their measure of success, their rising was but a long - threatened revolt of idealism and of the Russian conscience against Russian cowardice; it was the fermentation of modern ideas in the breast of a society iron - bound by officialism; it was the generous aspiration of the Russian soul against sloth and apathy and greed. The Nihilists failed, inasmuch as the battle of Liberty is yet to be won : they succeeded, inasmuch as their revolt was a tremendous object - lesson to Europe of the internal evils of their country. And the objection that they borrowed their ideas of revolution from the Commune and were not a genuine product of Russia, Turgenev has answered once for all in Virgin Soil. Liberty must spring from the soil whence Marianna springs.

  In the words of that great poem of Whitman :

  “The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat, The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs, The prison, scaffold, garotte, hand - cuffs, iron necklace - , and lead balls do their work, The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres, The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands, The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with their own blood. The young men droop their eyelashes towards the ground when they meet. But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the infidel entered into full possession, When Liberty goes out of the place it is not the first to go, nor .the second or third to go, It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.”

  There is no going back for the Mariannas of Russia. They must go forward, and to - day they are going forward. Honour to them and theirs, to them who, if forbidden by authority to work in the light, are ready again to work in the dark. Honour to that great party with whom their country’s liberties hav
e remained — Anonymous Russia!

  Much water has flowed under the bridge since the preface above was written one - and - twenty years ago, but the author has only deemed it necessary to correct a few lines of his criticism and to modify his statement concerning Turgenev’s funeral. Since 1896, we have seen the spectacle of the Russo - Japanese war, the General Strike, the creation of the Duma, the abortive Revolution of 1905, the excesses of Terrorists, Agent - Provocateurs, “ Black Hundreds” and Military Court - Martials, Governmental illegalities, the rapid evolution, economic and political, of a new Russia till 1914; and finally the spectacle of the Great European War, the rally of all parties, under the Prussian invasion, to the patriotic programme of the Progressive Bloc, the falling away of even the old - fashioned Bureaucrats from “ the dark forces of the Empire,” and the general situation, in the words of the Times Petrograd correspondent:

  “A Delayed Development “ We know that had the Constitution signed by Alexander II. been introduced, Russia might have been spared much suffering. The assassination of the Tsar brought about a delay of 25 precious years. Pobie - donostzeff persuaded Alexander III. that Russia enjoyed a special dispensation of Providence; that the laws of history in other lands did not apply to her. Thus the greatest of reforms, introduced in the ‘sixties, the abolition of slavery and the institution of the Zemstvos granting the people a voice in the affairs of their country, became stultified. It is true that serfdom could not be reintroduced, that Zemstvos could not be abolished, but „what happened was bad enough. The education of the masses was neglected and the local assemblies were placed under tutelage.

  “Not till 1905 did Russia obtain relief from the reaction that followed upon the tragedy of 1881. But Pobiedonostzeff had numerous adherents among his contemporaries in the older bureaucracy, many of whom survive to this day. The governing class in Russia forms a caste which directs a huge and highly intricate mechanism of a centralized administration ruling nearly 200,000,000 of people. These statesmen could not suddenly be eliminated or instilled with new ideas alien to all their habits or traditions. In the Senate or Supreme Court of Justice, which promulgates all laws and sees to their enforcement, and in the Upper House, which is half composed of members appointed from the ranks of these elder statesmen, the old leaven was still unhappily strong. ... To these causes and agencies we owe the reaction that has characterized Russian internal politics within recent years. . . .

  “Slowly but surely the ranks of the old reactionary party have been declining. By an infallible process of attrition they were bound to disappear sooner or later, leaving the field clear for the New Russia. The Great War came before the elimination was consummated. It has hastened the process by convincing everybody, including the bureaucracy, of the utter failure of the old system to cope with great national problems. At the present time no section of the population, and, therefore, no genuine political party, exists in Russia that has a word to say in support of the Pobiedonostzeff theory. The Nobles’ Congress was the last stronghold to surrender. It did so in the most emphatic manner by endorsing, mirabile dictu! the resolutions of both Houses of Parliament demanding the formation of a strong, united Ministry enjoying the confidence of the people. Between the Army and the nation there is not, and there cannot be, any difference of opinion on this subject.

  “Within something like ten years the Russian people have become a new people. What Pobiedonostzeff succeeded in doing 25 years ago cannot, obviously, be attempted now. Russia has finally, irrevocably, turned her back upon the old ideas. She has spoken her mind fully, unanimously.” — The Times, February 8, 1917.

  As the writer is retouching his last chapter comes the news of the Russian Revolution, an event of no less import to Europe than was the French Revolution, and one no less fraught with incalculable consequences.

  This event carries back one’s thought to the revolutionary attempt of the Decembrists, 1825, and to the successive movements for political reform in Turgenev’s own day, from the men of the “ ‘forties “ {Rudin) to the disastrous obscurantism of the heavy, stupid - minded Alexander III., and his reactionary ministers. From Virgin Soil, 1877, one follows in thought the succeeding forty years in which tract after tract of stubborn political virgin soil has been slowly broken up and sown with progressive seed. The changing economic conditions, aggravated by the Great European War, and the weak obstinacy of Nicholas II. have, at last, bankrupted the Autocracy.

  The result signally vindicates Turgenev’s political prescience and his rdle as the interpreter of Western culture and Western liberalism to his countrymen. For until the great barrier of petrified Bureaucratic Nationalism was broken down, true democratic Nationalism could not flow in free channels. Slavophilism, with its leading idea of the deliverance of Europe by the Autocracy, by Orthodoxy and the communal love of the meek Russian peasant, must be replaced by a new movement, spiritual in its essence, and give much - needed fresh conceptions to our materialized Western civilization. Every reader of Russian literature, from Gogol to our day, cannot fail to recognize that the Russian mind is superior to the English in its emotional breadth and flexibility, its eager responsiveness to new ideas, its spontaneous warmth of nature. With all their faults the Russian people are more permeated with humane love and living tenderness, in their social practice, than those of other nations. Let us trust that the Russian earth, no longer clouded by a dark, overcast sky, will be flooded with the fertilizing sunlight of this new, democratic Nationalism.

  Turgenev stood, in the ‘seventies, between the camps of the extremists, the old nobility who worked to prevent, hinder or suppress every reform, and the shallow, hot - headed theorists, who wished to force the pace, but whose talk ended in “ smoke.” Consequently he was frequently accused of cowardice by the revolutionaries on the one hand, and by the Conservatives of complicity with the revolutionaries, on the other.1 As an artist, while he stood aside from direct political action, his attitude to the revolutionaries appeared necessarily ambiguous. Pavlovsky, however, has well characterized it:

  “We see therefore that Turgenev was too variable to be in any sense a man of politics. He was never a Nihilist nor a Revolutionary, and those episodes we have cited are advanced only to show he considered the revolutionaries as an artist. As such they excited his imagination and carried him away like a child. Immediately after reflection he became sceptical and — this was his ordinary mental disposition — never believing in solid results of these agitators, though he retained always great sympathy for the Youth, whom he esteemed beyond all for their constant spirit of self - sacrifice.

  1 See the letter to Madame Viardot, of January 19, 1864, in which Turgenev describes how he was summoned before a Tribunal of the Senate to answer charges of plotting with the revolutionaries, which he did without any trouble.

  Both these mental tendencies are clearly to be seen in two of his Poems in Prose,’ The Workman and the Man with White Hands,’ and ‘ The Threshold!’“

  In Paris, in his last years, Turgenev was in active touch with the colony of young Russians, and assisted with his purse and his advice a number of proteges. A ridiculous hubbub arose in the Russian press on the publication in the Temps of Turgenev’s preface to En Cellule, a tale by one of these proteges, Pavlovsky, and Turgenev in a letter to the Malva thereupon defined his political faith :

  “Paris, December 30, 1879.

  “Without vanity or circumlocution, and merely stating facts I have the right to say that my convictions put on record in the press and in other sources, have not changed an iota in the last forty years. I have never hidden them from any one. To the young I have always been and have remained a moderate, a liberal of the old - fashioned stamp, a man who looks for reforms from above, and is opposed to the revolution.

  “If young Russia appreciated me it was in that light, and if the ovations offered were dear to me, it was precisely because I did not go to seek the young generation, but it who came to me.”

  Turgenev’s political creed
may be read without the slightest ambiguity between the lines of A Sportsman’s Sketches and his great novels. It is a creed of the necessity of the people’s mental and spiritual enlightenment, of the amelioration of bad social conditions and of the establishment of constitutional government, in the place of despotism.1

  1 Kropotkin tells us : “I saw Turgenev for the last time in the autumn of 1881. He was very ill, and worried by the thought that it was his duty to write to Alexander III. who had just come to the throne, and hesitated as to the policy he should follow — asking him to give Russia a constitution, and proving to him by solid arguments the necessity of that step. With evident grief he said to me, ‘ I feel that I must do it, but I feel I shall not be able to do it.’ In fact, he was already suffering awful pains occasioned by a cancer in the spinal cord, and had the greatest difficulty in sitting up and talking for a few moments. He did not write then, and a few weeks later it would have been useless, Alexander III. had announced in a manifesto his resolution to remain the absolute ruler of Russia.” — Memoirs of a Revolutionist, vol. ii. p. 222.

  CHAPTER X

  THE TALES

  In addition to his six great novels Turgenev published, between 1846 and his death in 1883, about forty tales which reflect as intimately social atmospheres of the ‘thirties, ‘forties and ‘fifties as do Tchehov’s stories atmospheres of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties. Several of these tales, as The Torrents of Spring, are of considerable length, but their comparatively simple structure places them definitely in the class of the conte. While their form is generally free and straightforward, the narrative, put often in the mouth of a character who by his comments and asides exchanges at will his active role for that of a spectator, is capable of the most subtle modulations. An examination of the chronological order of the tales shows how very delicately Turgenev’s art is poised between realism and romanticism. In his finest examples, such as The Brigadier and A Lear of the Steppes, the two elements fuse perfectly, like the meeting of wave and wind in sea foam. “ Nature placed Turgenev between poetry and prose,” says Henry James; and if one hazards a definition we should prefer to term Turgenev a poetic realist.