Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated)

by Ivan Turgenev

  Since Turgenev is pre - eminently an intellectual force, as well as an artist with a consummate sense of beauty, it is difficult for a critic to hold the balance equitably between the social significance of Turgenev’s pictures of life and the beauty of his vision. Far too little attention has been paid to him as artist. This is no doubt not merely due to the fact that while the majority of critics either naively ignore or take for granted his supreme quality, the more perfect is a work of art the more impossible is it to do it critical justice. The great artists, as Botticelli, who are peculiarly mannered, it is far easier to criticize and comment on than is a great artist, as Praxiteles, whose harmony of form conceals subtleties of technique unique in spiritual handling. The discussion of technical beauties, however, is not only a thankless business but tends to defeat its own object. It is better to seek to appreciate the spirit of a master, and to dwell on his human value rather than on his aesthetic originality. The present writer need scarcely add that he is dissatisfied with his inadequate discussion of Turgenev’s masterpieces, but fragmentary as it is, he believes his is almost the only detailed attempt yet made in the English language.

  CHAPTER II

  YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK

  “All my life is in my works,” said Turgenev, and his biographers’ account of his education and youth reveals how it was that from the age of twenty - three Turgenev was to become both an interpreter of the Russian mind to Europe and an interpreter of Western culture to his countrymen. His father, Sergey Ivanovitch, a handsome, polished officer of impoverished but ancient family, married an heiress, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinov, and their eldest son, Ivan Sergeyevitch, was born, October 28, 1818, at Orel, in central Russia. The natural loathing of the soft, poetic and impulsive boy for tyrannical harshness was accentuated by his parents’, especially by his mother’s, severity, unmerited whippings and punishments being his portion in the “ noble and opulent country - house” at Spasskoe, where foreign tutors and governesses succeeded one another quickly. That Turgenev had before his eyes from his childhood in his capricious and despotic mother a distressing object - lesson of a typical Russian vice, viz. unbridled love of power, could only deepen his instinct for siding with weak and gentle natures. Turgenev’s psychological penetration into hard, coarse and heartless characters, so antithetic to - his own, seems surprising till we learn that the unscrupulous and cruel “ Lutchinov,” the hero of Three Portraits, was drawn from a maternal ancestor. From the Lutovinov family, cruel, despotic and grasping, Turgenev no doubt inherited a mental strand which enabled him to fathom the workings of hardness and cruelty in others. The injustice and humiliations he and his brothers, along with a large household of dependents, suffered at Madame Turgenev’s hands,1 early aroused in him a detestation of the system of serfdom. The touching story of Mumu, in which the deaf and dumb house - porter’s sweetheart is forced to marry another man, while he himself is ordered to drown his pet dog by his mistress’s caprice, is a true domestic chronicle. Though Madame Turgenev dearly loved her son Ivan Sergeyevitch, whose sweet and tender nature 1 See “ La mere d’lvan Turguenieff,” in Tourguinieff Inconnu, par Michel Delines influenced her for good, her insatiable desire to domineer over others, and her violent outbursts of rage kept the household trembling before her whims. “ Nobody had a right to sustain in her presence any ideas which contradicted her own,” while her jealousy of her handsome husband’s affaires de cceur embittered her days.1 She herself had been the victim of her own upbringing, and remembered with loathing her step - father’s lust and cruelty. Turgenev therefore was early inoculated with an aversion for tyrannizing in any shape or form, as well as for the prevalent forms of oppression, official or social, under Nicholas I., and as his biographers tell us, the Turgenevs were a stock noted for “ a hatred of slavery and for noble and humane temperaments.” a A second potent influence that turned the youthful Turgenev’s face definitely towards the West was his lengthy tour in Europe, 1838 - 41. His early education at Moscow University had been completed at the University of St. Petersburg, where his family had removed after his father’s death in 1835, and

  1 See the story First Love, where Turgenev describes his parents’ relations.

  2 Bruckner’s A Literary History of Russia, p. 338.

  where as a shy youth he saw the two great authors, Gogol and Pushkin, whose literary example was to have a profound influence on his own work. German philosophy, especially Hegel’s, was at this epoch fashionable in Russia, and Turgenev, after setting out on his tour with his mother’s blessing, attended by a valet, arrived in Berlin, where he drank deep of Goethe’s, Schiller’s and Heine’s works, and where his ardent discussions with his circle of students on life, art, politics and metaphysics crystallized his aspirations for European culture. A tour on the Rhine, in Switzerland and in Italy effectually widened his outlook, and he returned to Spasskoe in 1841, bringing with him his narrative poem “ Parasha.”

  Undoubtedly conflicting influences, such as Byron, Pushkin and Lermontov, are visible in Turgenev’s youthful, romantic poems, “Parasha,” and various others (1837 - 47), which we shall not discuss here, or his half - dozen plays (1845 - 52), which last, however excellent, did not give his genius sufficient scope.1

  1 “ Parasha “ was warmly praised by Byelinsky in 1843, in an article in Annals of the Fatherland. Of the six Plays, which were revived from time to time, The Bachelor (1849) is perhaps the strongest. In later years Turgenev disclaimed any interest in his dramas, and declared that towards his poems he felt an antipathy almost physical.

  Much ingenuity has been exercised, especially by French critics,1 in ascribing Turgenev’s literary debts to authors as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Auerbach, Dal, Grigorovitch, Dickens, etc. But it would be a waste of time to analyse Turgenev’s work for traces of contemporary authors, though George Sand’s stories of French peasant life had undoubtedly deeply influenced him. With Pushkin as classical model for clarity of style, and with Gogol as his model for direct painting from everyday life, Turgenev belongs to “ the natural school “ of the ‘forties, the school of the realists championed by the critic Byelinsky, then all - powerful with the rising men. It is true that a vein of romanticism crops up here and there in various of Turgenev’s tales, and that a definite strain of lyrical sentimentalism in occasional passages may be credited to German influence. But in almost his first story, The Duellist (1846), we find a complete break with the traditions of the romantic school, traditions which are indeed here turned inside out.2 Here it is evident that a 1 Haumant, Delines, Waliszewski, etc.

  a M. Haumant has been at great pains to show that Turgenev in his early prose and verse “ commenced by appropriating the form and the subjects of the romantics of the ‘twenties and the new master is in the field, “ a painter of realities “ as Byelinsky soon declared.1 The story is of much significance, as exemplifying Turgenev’s clear - eyed, deep apprehension of character, and his creative penetration through beauty of feeling. It is to be noted how the coarse bullying insolence of the officer, Lutchkov (who out of envious spleen kills in a duel his friend, the refined and generous Kister), is betrayed by the absence of any tender or chivalrous emotion for women. Filled with his own male self - complacency, and contemptuous of women, Lutchkov comes to his interview with the fresh, innocent ‘thirties, that his ‘ half revolt’ against the romantic convention became accentuated later, and that we find in the plays and poems a ‘ degradation of the romantic heroes ‘ of Pushkin and Lermontov “ (Haumant, pp. 113 - 122). Although there is not a little truth in his thesis, M. Haumant has forgotten to add that the social atmosphere of the preceding generation, as well as of its literature, music and art, was “ romantic,” and that the youth of the period, as well as the heroes of Goethe and Stendhal, did act, think and feel in a “ romantic “ manner.

  1 Byelinsky, in his criticism on Hor and Kalinitch, says: “ His talent is not suited to true lyrics. He can only paint from real life w
hat he has seen or studied. He can create, but only with the materials given by nature. It is not a copy of the real; nature has not given the author innate ideas, but he has to find them; the author transforms the real, following his artistic ideal, and so his picture becomes more living. He knows how to render faithfully a character or a fact he has observed.... Nature has given Turgenev this capacity of observing, of understanding, and of appreciating faithfully and quickly each fact, of divining its cause and consequences, and, when facts are lacking, of supplying the factors by just divination.”

  girl Masha, whom he alarms by his coarse swagger. To cover his brutal egoistic feeling he roughly kisses the shrinking girl, but she shudders and darts away. “ What are you afraid of? Come, stop that. . . . That’s all nonsense,” he says hoarsely, as he approaches her, terribly confused, with a disagreeable smile on his twisted lips, while patches of red came out on his face.

  Could anything describe better the brutal spirit of the man who, out of spiteful envy, to revenge his slighted self - love, kills his own friend, Kister, in a duel? Turgenev’s description of Kister must be remarked, for the latter in his “ good nature, modesty, warm - heartedness and natural inclination for everything beautiful” is the twin - soul of his creator. Turgenev’s life - long readiness to lose sight of himself in appreciation of others, even of the men who abused his good offices and repaid him with ingratitude, was notorious.1 One may assert that Turgenev’s character was thus early expressed in four dominant traits, viz. a generous tenderness of heart, an enthusiasm for the good, sensitiveness 1 For example, Turgenev warmly commended Dostoevsky’s works to foreign critics, after the latter had perpetrated the spiteful libel on him in The Possessed. to beauty of form and feeling, an infinite capacity for the passion of love. These qualities are manifest in his first work of importance, A Sportsman’s Sketches (1847 - 51), an epoch - making book which profoundly affected Russian society and had no small influence in hastening the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 - 63.

  CHAPTER III

  “A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES” — ”NATURE AND MAN” — THE SECRET OF TURGENEV’S ART

  At this date, 1847, Russia, long prostrate beneath the drill sergeants of that “ paternal”. autocrat Nicholas I.,1 with the lynx - eyed police rule, servile press and general atmosphere of bureaucratic subservience stupefying the country, was slowly awakening to the new ideas of reform. Grigoro - vitch’s novel The Village (1846), which painted the wretched life of the serfs, marked the changing current of social ideas, but to Turgenev was to fall the honour of hastening ‘‘ the Emancipation.’’ There is perhaps a little exaggeration in this eloquent

  1 “ The teaching of philosophy was proscribed in all the schools, and in all the universities of the Empire; admission to which had now been reduced in numbers. The classics were similarly ostracised. Historical publications were put under a censor’s control, which was tantamount to a prohibition. No history of modern times, i.e. of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, was allowed to be taught in any form whatsoever.” — E. M. de VOGUE.

  passage of M. de Vogiie: “ Russia saw its own image with alarm in the mirror of serfdom held towards it. A shiver passed through the land : in a day Turgenev became famous, and his cause was half won. ... I have said that serfdom stood condemned in everybody’s heart, even in the Emperor Nicholas’s.” But we are assured by Turgenev himself that Alexander II.’s resolution to abolish serfdom was due in no small part to A Sportsman’s Sketches. The old generation in fact was soon to pass away with Nicholas’s rule. As the sketch “ The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov “ demonstrates, to this old race of landowners, frankly despotic in their manners, was succeeding a milder class — one which “ did not like the old methods,” but was ineffective and self - distrustful. And it was to this younger Russia in silent protest against the “ official nationalism “ prescribed by the ministers of Nicholas, and against the stagnation of provincial life which Gogol had satirized so unsparingly in Dead Souls (1842), that Turgenev made his appeal with his first sketch “ Hor and Kalinitch “ in the magazine The Contemporary. Turgenev’s reputation was made, and Byelinsky, who declared that Turgenev was “ not a creator but a painter of realities,” immediately predicted his future greatness. The other, A Sportsman’s Sketches, as they appeared, one by one, were eagerly seized on by the public, who felt that this new talent was revealing deep - welling springs of individuality in the Russian nature, hitherto unrecorded.

  Though Russian society was profoundly moved by Turgenev’s picture of serfdom, it was in truth the triumph of the pure artist, of the writer who saw man’s fugitive life in relation to the vast, universal drama of nature, that made A Sportsman’s Sketches acceptable to all. One may compare the book’s atmosphere to some woodland’s tender morning air quivering with light, which transmits the ringing voices of men in all their meaning inflections. The voices rise, in joy or strife or passion, then die away in silence, and we hear the gentle stir and murmur of the leaves as the wind passes, while afar swells the roar of the deep forest. Turgenev’s spiritual vision resembles this silvery light and air which register equally the most exquisite vibration of human aspiration and the dissonance of men’s folly and misery. The sweet and tender depths of the author’s spirit served, so to say, as a sensitive mirror which reflected impassively the struggle between the forces of worldly craft and the appeal of all humble, neglected and suffering creatures. “ The Tryst “ is an example of the artist’s exquisite responsiveness both to the fleeting moods of nature and the conflicts of human feeling. Thus the sufferings of the young peasant girl, poor Akoulina, at the hands of her conceited lover, the pampered valet, Viktor, are so blended with the woodland scene and our last view of “ the empty cart rattling over the bare hillside, the low sinking sun in the pale clear sky, the gusty wind scudding over the stubble fields, the bright but chill smile of fading nature,” that one can scarcely dissociate the girl’s distress from the landscape. An illusion! but one that great literature — for example, the Odyssey — fosters. When we look over the face of a wide - stretching landscape each tiny hamlet and its dwellers appear to the eye as a little point of human activity, and each environment, again, as the outcome of an endless chain of forces, seen and unseen in nature. Man, earth and heaven — it is the trinity always suggested in the work of the great poets.

  But the vast background of nature need not be always before the eyes of an audience. In “The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District,” for instance, where — through the railings of an embittered man against the petty boredom of provincial life, together with a characteristically Russian confession of his own sloth and mediocrity — we breathe the heated air of a big landowner’s house, the window on nature is, so to say, shut down. So in “ Lebedyan “ the bustle and humours of a horse - fair in the streets of a small country town, and in “The Country House” the sordid manoeuvres of the stewards and clerks of the lazy landed proprietor, Madame Losnyakov, against their victims, the peasants on the estate, exclude the fresh atmosphere of forest and steppe. But even so we are conscious that the sky and earth encompass these people’s meetings in market - place and inns, in posting - stations, peasants’ huts and landowners’ domains, and always a faint undertone murmurs to us that each generation is like a wave passing in the immensity of sea. Sometimes, as in “ The District Doctor,” a tragedy within four walls is shut in by a feeling of sudden night and the isolation of the wintry fields. Sometimes, as in “ Biryuk,” the outbreak of a despairing peasant is reflected in the fleeting storm - clouds and lashing rain of a storm in the forest. But the people’s figures are always seen in just relation to their surroundings, to their fellows and to nature.

  By the relations of a man with his neighbours and their ideas, a man’s character is focussed for us and his place in his environment determined. Thus in “ Raspberry Spring “the old steward Tuman’s complacent panegyrics on the lavish ways of his former master, a grand seigneur of Catherine’s time, are a meaning accompaniment to t
he misery of Vlass the harassed serf. Vlass has just returned from his sad errand to Moscow (his son has died there penniless), where he has had his master’s door shut in his face, and he has been ordered to return and pay the bailiff his arrears of rent. Whether under the ancient regime of Catherine, or of Nicholas I., Vlass is the “ poor man “ of Scripture whose face is ground by the rich. All the irony of poor Vlass’s existence steals upon us while we hear the old steward’s voice descanting on the dead count’s sumptuous banquets, on his cooks and fiddlers and the low - born mistresses who brought him to ruin; while the humble peasant sits still and hears, too, of the “ embroidered coats, wigs, canes, perfumes, eau de cologne, snuff - boxes, of the huge pictures ordered from Paris! “ It is the cruelty, passive or active, innate in the web of human existence that murmurs here in the bass.