A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

by Ivan Turgenev

  And the story goes on flowing easily and naturally till the people of the neighbourhood, the peasants, the woods and fields around, are known by us as intimately as is any neighbourhood in life. Suddenly a break — the tragedy is upon us. Suddenly the terrific forces that underlie human life, even the meanest of human lives, burst on us astonished and breathless, precisely as a tragedy comes up to the surface and bursts on us in real life : everybody runs about dazed, annoyed, futile; we watch other people sustaining their own individuality inadequately in the face of the monstrous new events which go their fatal way logically, events which leave the people huddled and useless and gasping. And destruction having burst out of life, life slowly returns to its old grooves — with a difference to us, the difference in the relation of people one to another that a death or a tragedy always leaves to the survivors. Marvellous in its truth is Turgenev’s analysis of the situation after Harlov’s death, marvellous is the simple description of the neighbourhood’s attitude to the Harlov family, and marvellous is the lifting of the scene on the afterlife of Harlov’s daughters. In the pages (pages 140, 141, 146, 147) on these women, Turgenev flashes into the reader’s mind an extraordinary sense of the inevitability of these women’s natures, of their innate growth fashioning their after - lives as logically as a beech puts out beech - leaves and an oak oak - leaves. Through Turgenev’s single glimpse at their fortunes one knows the whole intervening fifteen years; he has carried us into a new world; yet it is the old world; one needs to know no more. It is life arbitrary but inevitable, life so clarified by art that it is absolutely interpreted; but life with all the sense of mystery that nature breathes around it in its ceaseless growth.

  This sense of inevitability and of the mystery of life which Turgenev gives us in A Lear of the Steppes is the highest demand we can make from art. If we contrast with it two examples of Turgenev’s more “romantic “ manner, Ada, though it gives us a sense of mystery, is not inevitable : the end is faked to suit the artist’s purpose, and thus, as in other ways, it is far inferior to Lear. Faust has consummate charm in its strange atmosphere of the supernatural mingling with things earthly, but it is not, as is A Lear of the Steppes, life seen from the surface to the revealed depths; it is a revelation of the strange forces in life, presented beautifully; but it is rather an idea, a problem to be worked out by certain characters, than a piece of life inevitable and growing. When an artist creates in us the sense of inevitability, then his work is at its highest, and is obeying Nature’s law of growth, unfolding from out itself as inevitably as a tree or a flower or a human being unfolds from out itself. Turgenev at his highest never quits Nature, yet he always uses the surface, and what is apparent, to disclose her most secret principles, her deepest potentialities, her inmost laws of being, and whatever he presents he presents clearly and simply. This combination of powers marks only the few supreme artists. Even great masters often fail in perfect naturalness: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilytch, for instance, one of the most powerful stories ever written, has too little of what is typical of the whole of life, too much that is strained towards the general purpose of the story, to be perfectly natural. Turgenev’s special feat in fiction is that his characters reveal themselves by the most ordinary details of their everyday life; and while these details are always giving us the whole life of the people, and their inner life as well, the novel’s significance is being built up simply out of these details, built up by the same process, in fact, as Nature creates for us a single strong impression out of a multitude of little details.

  Again, Turgenev’s power as a poet comes in, whenever he draws a commonplace figure, to make it bring with it a sense of the mystery of its existence. In Lear the steward Kvitsinsky plays a subsidiary part; he has apparently no significance in the story, and very little is told about him. But who does not perceive that Turgenev looks at and presents the figure of this man in a manner totally different from the way any clever novelist of the second rank would look at and use him? Kvitsinsky, in Turgenev’s hands, is an individual with all the individual’s mystery in his glance, his coming and going, his way of taking things; but he is a part of the household’s breath, of its very existence; he breathes the atmosphere naturally and creates an atmosphere of his own.

  It is, then, in his marvellous sense of the growth of life that Turgenev is superior to most of his rivals. Not only did he observe life minutely and comprehensively, but he reproduced it as a constantly growing phenomenon, growing naturally, not accidentally or arbitrarily. For example, in A House of Gentlefolk, take Lavretsky’s and Liza’s changes of mood when they are falling in love with one another; it is Nature herself in them changing very delicately and insensibly; we feel that the whole picture is alive, not an effect cut out from life, and cut off from it at the same time, like a bunch of cut flowers, an effect which many clever novelists often give us. And in Lear we feel that the life in Harlov’s village is still going on, growing yonder, still growing with all its mysterious sameness and changes, when, in Turgenev’s last words, “ The story - teller ceased, and we talked a little longer, and then parted, each to his home.”

  CHAPTER XI

  NOTE ON TURGENEV’S LIFE — HIS CHARACTER AND PHILOSOPHY — ENOUGH — HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE — THE POEMS IN PROSE — TURGENEV’S LAST ILLNESS AND DEATH — HIS EPITAPH.

  If we have said nothing hitherto about the twenty years of Turgenev’s life (1855 - 1877), in which the six great novels were composed, it is because his cosmopolitan activities, social, political, intellectual, were too many to be chronicled in the compass of a short Study. ‘ They may be here indicated in a few lines. Lengthy stays in France, and visits to Germany, Italy, England, were alternated with residence every year at Spasskoe. His attachment to Madame Viardot and her family (which may be studied in Lettres d Madame Viardot, Paris, 1907, a series unfortunately not published in its’ entirety) led to his joining their household at Courtavenel and Paris, and later (1864) to settling with them at Baden. His residence in France brought him into contact with nearly all the celebrated French men 187

  of letters, Merimee, Taine, Renan, Victor Hugo, Sainte - Beuve, Flaubert, etc., and later with the chiefs of the young naturalistic school, as Zola, Daudet, Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev’s political outlook and Liberal creed are best represented in his Correspondence with Hertzen, to whom he communicated Russian news for The Bell: his relations and quarrel with Tolstoy, and his enthusiastic appreciation of the latter’s genius are recorded in Biriukoff’s Life of Tolstoy, and in Halperine - Kaminsky’s Correspondence. For his relations with Russian contemporary men of letters, Fet, Grigoro - vitch, Nekrassov, Dostoevsky, Annenkov, Aksakov, etc., there exists a mass of documents, letters and reminiscences in the Russian. For a general sketch of Turgenev’s life the English reader can turn to E. Haumant’s Ivan Tourguinief, Paris, 1906; for an account of Turgenev’s youth, his relations with the Nihilists, his later life in Paris, etc., to Michel Delines’ Tourguenief Inconnu, and also to the much - abused but valuable volume, Souvenirs sur Tourgueneff, by Isaac Pavlovsky.

  All these sources reveal Turgenev in much the same light, a man of boundless cosmopolitan interests, of a broad, sane, fertile mind, of the most generous and tender heart. Some of his contemporaries touch on certain weaknesses, his vacillating will, his fits of hypochondria, his romantic affectation in youth, etc., but everybody bears witness (as does his Correspondence) to his lovableness, and the extraordinary altruism and sweetness of his nature. Thus Maupassant, a keen judge of character, records :

  “He was one of the most remarkable writers of this century, and at the same time the most honest, straightforward, universally sincere and affectionate man one could possibly meet. He was simplicity itself, kind and honest to excess, more good - natured than any one in the world, affectionate as men rarely are, and loyal to his friends whether living or dead.

  “No more cultivated, penetrating spirit, no more loyal, generous heart than his ever existed.”

  Such a man�
�s philosophy can in no sense be termed “ pessimistic,” since the wells of his spirit are constantly fed by springs of understanding, love and charity. The whole body of Turgenev’s work appeals to our faith in the ever - springing, renovating power of man’s love of the good and the beautiful, and to his spiritual struggle with evil. But, faced by the threatening mass of wrong, of human stupidity and greed, of men’s pettiness and blindness, Turgenev’s beauty of feeling often recoils in a wave of melancholy and of sombre mournfulness. Thus in Enough (1864), a fragment inspired by the seas of acrimonious misunderstanding raised by Fathers and Children, Turgenev has concentrated in a prose poem of lyrical beauty, an access of profound dejection. Here we see laid bare the roots of Turgenev’s philosophic melancholy, — man’s insignificance in face of “ the deaf, blind, dumb force of nature . . . which triumphs not even in her conquests but goes onward, onward devouring all things. . . . She creates destroying, and she cares not whether she creates or she destroys. . . . How can we stand against those coarse and mighty waves, endlessly, unceasingly, moving upward? How have faith in the value and dignity of the fleeting images, that in the dark, on the edge of the abyss, we shape out of dust for an instant? “ After recording many exquisite memories of nature and of love, Turgenev, then, compares human activities to those of gnats on the forest edge on a frosty day when the sun gleams for a moment: “At once the gnats swarm up on all sides; they sport in the warm rays, bustle, flutter up and down, circle round one another. . . . The sun is hidden — the gnats fall in a feeble shower, and there is the end of their momentary life. And men are ever the same.” “ What is terrible is that there is nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting and degradingly inane.”

  “But are there no great conceptions, no great words of consolation : patriotism, right, freedom, humanity, art? Yes, those words there are and many men live by them and for them. And yet it seems to me that if Shakespeare could be born again he would have no cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear. His searching glance would discover nothing new in human life : still the same motley picture — in reality so little complex — would unroll beside him in its terrifying sameness. The same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name . . . why in the name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in which the many - headed beast, the multitude, is caught so easily, the same workings of power, the same traditions of slavishness, the same innateness of falsehood — in a word, the same busy squirrel’s turning in the old, unchanged wheel. .; .”

  With this passage of weary disillusionment and disgust of life we may compare one in Phantoms, written a year earlier: “ These human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings glued together with filth, the pitiful traces of their tiny, monotonous bustle, of their comic struggle with the unchanging and inevitable, how revolting it all suddenly was to me “; and one, no less significant, in the opening pages of The Torrents of Spring:

  “He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human. . . . Everywhere the same everlasting pouring of water into a sieve, the everlasting beating of the air, everywhere the same self - deception — half in good faith, half conscious — any toy to amuse the child, so long as it keeps him from crying. And then all of a sudden old age drops down like snow on the head, and with it the ever - growing, ever - growing and devouring dread of death . . . and the plunge into the abyss.”

  But to show these waves of pessimistic exhaustion in right relation to the whole volume of Turgenev’s work, one must contrast them with many hundreds of passages where the struggle of love, faith and courage, where the impulse of pity and beauty of conduct rank supreme in all human endeavour. And in his illuminating essay on Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860), Turgenev holds the balance level between humanity’s blind faith in the power of the good (Don Quixote), and the disillusionment of its knowledge (Hamlet). Here Turgenev shows us that sincerity and force of conviction in the justice or goodness of a cause (however wrong - headed or absurd the idealist’s judgment may be) is the prime basis for the pursuit of virtue, and that true enthusiasm for goodness and beauty exacts self - sacrifice, disregard of one’s own interest, and forgetfulness of the “I.” Hamlet by his sceptical intelligence becomes so conscious of his own weakness, of the worthlessness of the crowd, of the self - regarding motives of men, that he is unable to love them. Hence his irony, his melancholy, his despair in the triumph of the good, for which he, too, struggles, while paralysed by his thoughts which sap his will and condemn him to inactivity. “ The Hamlets,” says Turgenev, “ find nothing, discover nothing, and leave no trace in their passage through the world but the memory of their personality : they have no spiritual legacy to bequeath. They do not love: they do not believe. How, then, should they find?”

  Love and faith in the good and beautiful — based on forgetfulness of self — must therefore be set against and balance the rule of the intelligence, and this is precisely the effect Turgenev’s work makes on us and the effect which his personality made on his acquaintances. This man was all good,” says Vogue. “ I think one would have to search the literary world for a long time before finding a writer capable of such modesty and such effacement,” says Halp&ine - Kaminsky. “I am always thinking about Turgenev. I love him terribly,” says Tolstoy naively, after his lifelong hostility to Turgenev’s o genius had been removed by the latter’s death. And all Turgenev’s acquaintances agreed that no one was so devoid of egoism, so generous in his enthusiasm for the works of other men as he.1 The guiding law of his being was shown not only in his unmeasured desire to exalt the works of his rivals,2 but to find excellent, absorbing qualities in the works of obscure, unsuccessful writers. This trait often appeared, to his own circle, to be proof of mere uncritical misplaced enthusiasm, but in fact Turgenev was a most severe and impartial critic.3

  1 “ On arriving at his rooms, Tourgueneff took from his writing - table a roll of paper. I give what he said word for word.

  “‘Listen,’ he said. ‘ Here is “ copy “ for your paper of an absolutely first - rate kind. This means that I am not its author. The master — for he is a real master — is almost unknown in France, but I assure you, on my soul and conscience, that I do not consider myself worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes.’

  “Two days afterwards there appeared in the Temps, ‘ Les Souvenirs de Sebastopol,’ by Ledn Tolstoi.” — Tourgu&nejf and his French Circle, p. 188.

  2 “ From the letters to Zola ... we shall see with what devotion, sparing neither time nor trouble, Tourgufeneff endeavoured to make his friend’s books known in Russia. What he did for Zola, he had already done for Gustave Flaubert; afterwards came Goncourt’s turn and that of Guy de Maupassant. Never did he take such minute pains to safeguard his own interests, as those he took in the service of his friends.” — Tour - guSneff and his French Circle, by E. Halperine - Kaminsky, p. 186.

  3 Flaubert writing to George Sand says, “ What an auditor and what a critic is Turgenev! He has dazzled me by the profundity of his judgments. Ah! if all those who dabble in literary criticism could have heard him, what a lesson! Nothing escapes him. At the end of a piece of a hundred lines he remembers a feeble epithet.”

  There is in even the humblest work of art, that is not false, a nucleus of individual feeling, experience, insight which cannot be replaced. And Turgenev, always searching for the good, instantly detected any individual excellence and emphasized its value, without dwelling on a work’s mediocre elements. The world, and the generality of men, do exactly the reverse; they take pleasure in pointing out and publishing defects and weaknesses and in ignoring the points of strength.

  The Poems in Prose (1878 - 1882), this exquisite collection of short, detached descriptions, scenes, memories, and dreams, yields a complete synthesis in brief of the leading elements in Turgenev’s own temperament and philosop
hy. The Poems in Prose are unique in Russian literature, one may say unsurpassed for exquisite felicity of language, and for haunting, rhythmical beauty. Turgenev’s characteristic, the perfect fusion of idea and emotion, takes shape here in aesthetic contours which challenge the antique. As with all poetry of a high order, the creative emotion cannot be separated from the imperishable form in which it is cast, and ten lines of the original convey what a lengthy commentary would fail to communicate. We therefore quote a translation of three of the Prose Poems from a version which, however careful, must inevitably fall short of the original:

  “NECESSITAS - VIS - LIBERTAS

  “a bas - relief “ A tall bony old woman, with iron face and dull fixed look, moves along with long strides, and, with an arm dry as a stick, pushes before her another woman.

  “This woman — of huge stature, powerful, thickset, with the muscles of a Hercules, with a tiny head set on a bull neck, and blind — in her turn pushes before her a small, thin girl.

  “This girl alone has eyes that see; she resists, turns round, lifts fair, delicate hands; her face full of life, shows impatience and daring. . . . She wants not to obey, she wants not to go, where they are driving her . . . but, still, she has to yield and go.

  “Necessitas - vis - Libertas!

  “Who will, may translate.”

  “THE SPARROW

  “I was returning from hunting, and walking along an avenue of the garden, my dog running in front of me. Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along as though tracking game.

  “I looked along the avenue and saw a young sparrow, with yellow about its beak and down on its head. It had fallen out of the nest (the wind was violently shaking the birch - trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move, helplessly fluffing its half - grown wings.