Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated)

by Ivan Turgenev

  If we place beside this vivid portrait the sketch, hardly less expressive, of Madame Polosoff, we find in the mere apposition the germ of a novel.

  “Not that she was a perfect heauty; the traces of her plebeian origin were perceptible enough. Her forehead was low, her nose rather thick and inclining to an upward inflection; she could boast neither of a fine skin nor of pretty hands and feet. But what did all this signify? Not before the ‘sanctity of beauty’ — to use Pusch - kin’s words — would he who met her have stood lingering, but before the charm of the powerful half - Russian, half - Bohemian, blooming, womanly body — and he would not have lingered without a purpose.”

  Madame Polosoff, though her exploits are related in a short sixty - five pages, is unfolded in the large dramatic manner. We seem to be in her presence, to listen to her provoking, bewildering talk, to feel the danger of her audacious, conscious frankness. Her quite peculiar cruelty and depravity make a large demand on our credulity; she is perhaps a trifle too extravagantly vicious. But she is strangely, vividly natural, and our imagination goes with her in the same charmed mood as with M. Turgenieff’s other evil - doers. Not without an effort, too, do we accept the possibility of Sanin’s immediate infidelity to the object of the pure still passion with which his heart even yet overflows. But these are wonderful mysteries; its im mediacy, perhaps, best accounts for it; spring - torrents, the author would seem to intimate, must flow, and ravage their blooming channels. To give a picture of the immeasurable blindness of youth, of its eagerness of desire, its freshness of impression, its mingled rawness and ripeness, the swarming, shifting possibilities of its springtime, and to interfuse his picture with something of the softening poetizing harmony of retrospect — this has been but half the author’s purpose. He has designed beside to paint the natural conflict between soul and sense, and to make the struggle less complex than the one he has described in “Smoke,” and less brutal, as it were, than the fatal victory of sense in “A Correspondence.” “When will it all come to an end?” Sanin asks, as he stares helpless at Maria Nikolaievna, feeling himself ignobly paralysed. “Weak men,” says the author, “never themselves make an end — they always wait for the end.” Sanin’s history is weighted with the moral that salvation lies in being able, at a given moment, to turn on one’s will like a screw. If M. Turgenieff pays his tribute to the magic of sense he leaves us also eloquently reminded that soul in the long run claims her own. He has given us no sweeter image of uncorrupting passion than this figure of Gemma, the frank young Italian nature blooming in northern air from its own mere wealth of joyousness. Yet, charming as Gemma is, she is but a half - sister to Lisa and Tatiana. Neither Lisa or Tatiana, we suspect, would have read popular comedy with her enchanting mimicry; but, on the other hand, they would have been withheld by a delicate, indefinable conscientiousness from caricaturing the dismissed lover of the day before for the entertainment of the accepted lover of the present. But Gemma is a charming piece of colouring, and all this only proves how many different ways there are of being the loveliest girl in the world. The accessories of her portrait are as happily rendered; the whole picture of the little Italian household, with its narrow backshop life, in the German town, has a mellow enclosed light in which the reader gratefully lingers. It touches the figure of the usual half - fantastic house - friend, the poor old ex - barytone Pantaleone Cippatola, into the most vivacious relief.

  III.

  We always desire more information about the writers who greatly interest us than we find in their works, and many American readers have probably a friendly curiosity as to the private personality of M. Turgenieff. We are reduced, however, to regretting our own meagre knowledge. We gather from his writings that our author is much of a cosmopolitan, a dweller in many cities and a frequenter of many societies, and, along with this, an indefinable sense of his being of a so - called “aristocratic” temperament; so that if a man’s genius were visible to the eye, like his fleshly integument, that of M. Turgenieff would be observed to have, say, very shapely hands and feet, and a nose expressive of the patrician graces. A friend of ours, indeed, who has rather an irresponsible fancy, assures us that the author of “Smoke” (which he deems his masterpiece) is, personally, simply his own Pavel Kirsanoff. Twenty to one our friend is quite wrong; but we may nevertheless say that, to readers disposed now and then to risk a conjecture, much of the charm of M. Turg£nieff’s manner resides in this impalpable union of an aristocratic temperament with a democratic intellect. To his inquisitive intellect we owe the various, abundant, human substance of his tales, and to his fastidious temperament their exquisite form. But we must not meddle too freely with causes when results themselves are so suggestive. The great question as to a poet or a novelist is, How does he feel about life? what, in the last analysis, is his philosophy? When vigorous writers have reached maturity we are at liberty to look in their works for some expression of a total view of the world they have been so actively observing. This is the most interesting thing their works offer us. Details are interesting in proportion as they contribute to make it clear.

  The foremost impression of M. TurgeniefF’s reader is that he is morbidly serious, that he takes life terribly hard. We move in an atmosphere of unrelieved sadness. We go from one tale to the other in the hope of finding something cheerful, but we only wander into fresh agglomerations of gloom. We try the shorter stories with a hope of chancing upon something pitched in the traditional key of “light reading,” but they strike us alike as so many ingenious condensations of melancholy. “A Village Lear” is worse than “The Antchar”; “The Forsaken” is hardly an improvement on “A Correspondence”; “The Journal of a Superfluous Man” does little to lay the haunting ghost of “Three Portraits.” The author has written several short dramas. Appealing to them to beguile us of our dusky vapours, we find the concentrated tragedy of “The Bread of Charity,” and, by way of an after - piece, 16*

  the lugubrious humour of “The Division.” Sad beginnings, worse endings, good people ineffably wretched, happy ones hugely ridiculous; disappointment, despair, madness, suicide, degrading passions, and blighted hopes — these seem, on first acquaintance, the chief ingredients of M. Turgenieff’s version of the human drama; and to deepen our sense of its bitterness we discover the author in the background winding up his dismal demonstration with a chuckle. We set him down forthwith as a cold - blooded pessimist, caring for nothing in life but its misery and for nothing in misery but its pictorial effects — its capacity for furnishing cynical epigrams. What is each of the short tales we have mentioned, we ask, but a ruthless epigram, in the dramatic form, upon human happiness? Evlampia Charloff, in “A Village Lear,” drives her father to madness and death by her stony depravity, and then joins a set of religious fanatics, among whom she plays a great part as the “Holy Mother of God.” In “The Bread of Charity,” a young heiress brings home to her estates her newly - wedded husband, and introduces him to’ her old neighbours. They dine with him, and one of them, an officious coxcomb, conceives the brilliant idea of entertaining him by an exhibition of a poor old gentleman who has long been hanging about the place as a pensioner of the late parents of the young wife, and is remarkable for a dumb canine attachment to herself. The heartless guest plies the modest old man with wine, winds him up and makes him play the fool. But suddenly Kusofkin, through the fumes of his potations, perceives that he is being laughed at, and breaks out into a passionate assurance that, baited, and buffeted as he is, he is nothing less than the father of the mistress of the house. Shf overhears his cry, and though he, horrified at his indiscretion, attempts to retract it, she wins from him a confession of the fact that he had been her mother’s lover. The husband, however, makes him swallow his words, and do public penance. He turns him out of the house with a small pension, and the curtain falls on the compliment offered this fine fellow by the meddlesome neighbour on his generosity: “You are a true Russian gentleman!” The most perfectly epigrammatic of our author’s stories, h
owever, is perhaps that polished little piece of misery, “A Correspondence.” A young man, idle, discontented, and longing for better things, writes, for a pastime, to a young girl whom he has formerly slightly known and greatly esteemed, who has entertained an unsuspected and unrequited passion for him, and who lives obscurely in the country, among very common people. A correspondence comes of it, in the course of which they exchange confidences and unburden their hearts. The young girl is most pitiable, most amiable, in her sadness, and her friend begins to suspect that she, at last, may give a meaning to his aimless life. She, on her side, is compassionately interested, and we see curiosity and hope throbbing timidly beneath the austere resignation to which she had schooled herself, and the expression of which, mingled with our sense of her blooming beauty of character, makes of Maria Alexandrovna the most nobly fascinating, perhaps, of our author’s heroines. Alexis Petrovitsch writes at last that he must see her, that he will come to her, that she is to expect him at such a date, and we imagine tenderly, in the unhastening current of her days, the gentle eddy of her expectation. Her next letter, after an interval, expresses surprise at his non - appearance; her next, several months later, is a last attempt to obtain news of him. The correspondence closes with his confession, written as he lies dying at Dresden. Just as he was starting to join her, he had encountered another woman, a dancing - girl at the opera, with whom he had fallen madly in love. She was low, stupid, heartless; she had nothing to recommend her to anything but his senses. It was ignoble, but so it was. His passion has led him such a life that his health is gone. He has brought on disease of the lungs, by waiting for the young lady at the opera - door in the winter nights. Now his hours are numbered, and this is the end of all! And on this lugubrious note the story closes. We read with intent curiosity, for the tale is a masterpiece of narration; but we wonder, in some vexation, what it all means. Is it a piece of irony for irony’s sake, or is it a disinterested picture of the struggle between base passion and pure passion? Why, in that case, should it seem a matter of course for the author that base passion should carry the day? Why, as for Rudin, for Sanin, for the distracted hero of “Smoke,” should circumstances also have been too many, as the phrase is, for poor Alexis Petrovitsch? If we pursue our researches, in the hope of finding some method in this promiscuous misery, examples continue to seem more numerous than principles. The author continues everywhere to imply that there is something essentially ridiculous in human nature, something indefeasibly vain in human effort. We are amazed, as we go, at the portentous number of his patent fools; no novelist has drawn a tenth as many. The large majority of his people are the people we laugh at, and a large fraction of the remainder the people we half disgustedly pity. There is little room left, therefore, for the people we esteem, and yet room enough perhaps, considering that our very benevolence is tempered with scepticism. What with the vicious fools and the well - meaning fools, the prosperous charlatans and the grotesque nonentities, the dead failures and the sadder failures that regret and protest and rebel, the demoralized lovers and the jilted maidens, the dusky pall of fatality, in a word, suspended over all human things, it may be inferred that we are not invited to a particularly exhilarating spectacle. Not a single person in the novel of “Fathers and Sons” but has, in some degree, a lurking ironical meaning. Every one is a more or less ludicrous parody on what he ought to have been, or an ineffectual regret at what he might have been. The only person who compasses a reasonable share of happiness is Arcadi, and even his happiness is a thing for strenuous minds to smile at — a happiness based on the pot au feu, the prospect of innumerable babies and the sacrifice of “views.” Arcadi’s father is a vulgar failure; Pavel Petrovitsch is a poetic failure; Bazaroff is a tragic failure; Anna Sergheievna misses happiness from an ungenerous fear of sacrificing her luxurious quietude; the elder Bazaroff and his wife seem a couple of ingeniously grotesque manikins, prepared by a melancholy fantoccinista to illustrate the mocking vanity of parental hopes. We lay down the book, and we repeat that, with all the charity in the world, it is impossible to pronounce M. Turgenieff anything better than a pessimist.

  The judgment is just, but it needs qualifications, and it finds them in a larger look at the author’s position. M. Turgenieff strikes us, as we have said, as a man disappointed, for good reasons or for poor ones, in the land that is dear to him. Harsh critics will say for poor ones, reflecting that a fastidious imagination has not been unconcerned in his discontentment. To the old Muscovite virtues, and especially the old Muscovite na’iveU, his imagination filially clings, but he finds these things, especially in the fact that his country turns to the outer world, melting more and more every day into the dimness of tradition. The Russians are clever, and clever people are ambitious. Those with whom M. Turgenieff has seen himself surrounded are consumed with the desire to pass for intellectual cosmopolites, to know, or seem to know, everything that can be known, to be astoundingly modern and progressive and European. Madame Kukshin, the poor little literary lady with a red nose, in “Fathers and Sons,” gives up George Sand as “nowhere” for her want of knowledge of embryology, and, when asked why she proposes to remove to Heidelberg, replies with “Bunsen, you know.” The fermentation of social change has thrown to the surface in Russia a deluge of hollow pretensions and vicious presumptions, amid which the love either of old virtues or of new achievements finds very little gratification. It is not simply that people flounder laughably in deeper waters than they can breast, but that in this discord of crude ambitions the integrity of character itself is compromised and men and women make, morally, a very ugly appearance. The Russian colony at Baden - Baden, depicted in “Smoke,” is a collection of more or less inflated profligates. Panschin, in “A Nest of Noblemen,” is another example; Sitnikoff, in “Fathers and Sons,” a still more contemptible one. Driven back, depressed and embittered, into his imagination for the edification which the social spectacle immediately before him refuses him, and shaped by nature to take life hard and linger among its shadows, our observer surrenders himself with a certain reactionary, irresponsible gusto to a sombre portrayal of things. An imaginative preference for dusky subjects is a perfectly legitimate element of the artistic temperament; our own Hawthorne is a signal case of its being innocently exercised; innocently, because with that delightfully unconscious genius it remained imaginative, sportive, inconclusive, to the end. When external circumstances, however, contribute to confirm it, and reality lays her groaning stores of misery at its feet, it will take a rarely elastic genius altogether to elude the charge of being morbid. M. Turgenieff’s pessimism seems to us of two sorts — a spontaneous melancholy and a wanton melancholy. Sometimes in a sad story it is the problem, the question, the idea, that strikes him; sometimes it is simply the picture. Under the former influence he has produced his masterpieces; we admit that they are intensely sad, but we consent to be moved, as we consent to sit silent in a death - chamber. In the other case he has done but his second best; we strike a bargain over our tears, and insist that when it comes to being simply entertained, wooing and wedding are better than death and burial. “The Antchar,” “The Forsaken,” “A Superfluous Man,” “A Village Lear,” “Toe . . . toe . . . toe,” all seem to us to be gloomier by several shades than they need have been; for we hold to the good old belief that the presumption, in life, is in favour of the brighter side, and we deem it, in art, an indispensable condition of our interest in a depressed observer that he should have at least tried his best to be cheerful. The truth, we take it, lies for the pathetic in poetry and romance very much where it lies for the “immoral.” Morbid pathos is reflective pathos; ingenious pathos, pathos not freshly born of the occasion; noxious immorality is superficial immorality, immorality without natural roots in the subject. We value most the “realists” who have an ideal of delicacy and the elegiasts who have an ideal of joy.

  “Pictorial gloom, possibly,” a thick and thin ad mirer of M. Turgenieff’s may say to us, “at least you will admit that i
t is pictorial.” This we heartily concede, and, recalled to a sense of our author’s brilliant diversity and ingenuity, we bring our restrictions to a close. To the broadly generous side of his imagination it is impossible to pay exaggerated homage, or, indeed, for that matter, to its simple intensity and fecundity. No romancer has created a greater number of the figures that breathe and move and speak, in their habits as they might have lived; none, on the whole, seems to us to have had such a masterly touch in portraiture, none has mingled so much ideal beauty with so much unsparing reality. His sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element of f wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand. So much as this we seem to decipher between the lines of M. Turg6nieff’s minutely written chronicle. He himself has sought to understand as zealously as his most eminent competitors. He gives, at least, no meagre account of life, and he has done liberal justice to its infinite variety. This is his great merit; his great defect, roughly stated, is a tendency to the abuse of irony. He remains, nevertheless, to our sense, a very welcome mediator between the world and our curiosity. If we had space, we should like to set forth that he is by no means our ideal story - teller — this honourable genius possessing, attributively, a rarer skill than the finest required for producing an artful richaufft of the actual. But even for better romancers we must wait for a better world. Whether the world in its higher state of perfection will occasionally offer colour to scandal, we hesitate to pronounce; but we are prone to conceive of the ultimate novelist as a personage altogether purged of sarcasm. The imaginative force now expended in this direction he will devote to describing cities of gold and heavens of sapphire. But, for the present, we gratefully accept M. Turgenieff, and reflect that his manner suits the most frequent mood of the greater number of readers. If he were a dogmatic optimist we suspect that, as things go, we should long ago have ceased to miss him from our library. The personal optimism of most of us no romancer can confirm or dissipate and our personal troubles, generally, place fictions of all kinds in an impertinent light. To our usual working mood the world is apt to seem M. Turgenieff’s hard world, and when, at moments, the strain and the pressure deepen, the ironical element figures not a little in our form of address to those short - sighted friends who have whispered that it is an easy one.