Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Like most Russian writers, he was melancholy. Beyond the circle of his scene seems to lie a great space, which flows in at the window, presses upon people, isolates them, makes them incapable of action, indifferent to effect, sincere, and open-minded. Some background of that sort is common to much of Russian literature. But Turgenev adds to this scene a quality which we find nowhere else. They are sitting as usual talking round the samovar, talking gently, sadly, charmingly, as Turgenev’s people always do talk, when one of them ceases, gets up, and looks out of the window. ‘But the moon must have risen,’ she says, ‘that’s moonlight on the tops of the poplars.’ And we look up and there it is - the moonlight on the poplars. Or take, as an example of the same power, the description of the garden in Three Meetings’:

  Everything was slumbering. The air, warm and fragrant, did not stir; only from time to time it quivered as water quivers at the fall of a twig. There was a feeling of languor, of yearning in it... I bent over the fence; a red field poppy lifted its stalk above the rank grass...and so on. Then the woman sings, and her voice sounds straight into an atmosphere which has been prepared to wrap it up, to enhance it, and float it away. No quotation can convey the impression, for the description is part of the story as a whole. What is more, we feel again and again that Turgenev evades his translator. It is not Mrs Garnett’s fault. The English language is not the Russian. But the original description of the garden in the moonlight must be written, not with this inevitable careful exactness, but flowingly; there must be melody, variety, transparency. But the general effect is there even if we miss the beauty with which it is rendered. Turgenev, then, has a remarkable emotional power; he draws together the moon and the group round the samovar, the voice and the flowers and the warmth of the garden - he fuses them in one moment of great intensity, though all round are the silent spaces, and he turns away, in the end, with a little shrug of his shoulders.

  A Giant with Very Small Thumbs.

  In this substantial book Mr Yarmolinsky has collected an immense amount of information about Turgenev, but the value is seriously diminished by the fact that the statements are taken from books which are not accessible to Western readers and no references are given. Mr Yarmolinsky is, if not a disillusioned, still a highly critical biographer. The faults of his subject are very clear to him. But we must be grateful to him for raising the whole question of Turgenev again, and for giving us a profusion of material on which to found our own judgment. Of all the great Russian writers, Turgenev is, perhaps, the one who has had least justice done him in England. It is easy to guess the reason; here is a new country, people said, and therefore its literature must be different, if it is true literature, from any other. They sought out and relished in Chekhov and Dostoevsky those qualities which they supposed to be peculiarly Russian and therefore of peculiar excellence. They welcomed joyously an abandonment to emotion, an introspection, a formlessness which they would have detested in the French or in the English. People drank tea endlessly and discussed the soul without stopping in a room where nothing could be seen distinctly; such was our supposition.

  But Turgenev was different altogether. In the first place he was a cosmopolitan, who hunted in England and lived, rather ambiguously, in France. His domestic circumstances indeed were not such as to attach him to his native land. His mother was a woman of extraordinary character. In the heart of Russia she tried to mimic the ceremonies and splendour of the French aristocracy before the Revolution. She was despotic to the verge of mania. She banished serfs for neglecting to bow to her. She had her porridge brought hot by relays of horsemen from a village where they made it to her liking ten miles away. A waterfall was turned from its course because it disturbed her sleep. Whether or not these stories are true, it is certain that she drove her sons from the house. The novelist, in particular, with his democratic sympathies, detested his mother’s behaviour, and being, as he was fond of saying, a man with very small thumbs, he found it simpler to withdraw. Pauline Viardot received him. He had a seat allotted to him on one of the gilt paws of the bear skin on which her admirers sat and talked to her between the acts of the play. Nor was he ever to find another lodging. At the end of his life he advised young men with melancholy humour to find a home of their own and not to sit ‘on the edge of another man’s nest’. Madame Viardot, it is said, never asked him to come inside. There he sat, ‘a large man with a weak mouth and a skull padded with fat, who gave the impression of being as soft as butter’, until he died in her presence. But for all his melancholy and his loneliness, it was probable that the arrangement, with its mixture of freedom and intimacy, was the one that suited him best. The rigours of domesticity would have thwarted him. He was always late for meals; he was extremely generous, but very untidy; and he had, after all, a passion for art.

  It is this passion of his that makes him so unlike the English idea of what a Russian should be. For Turgenev novels might well be the late ripe fruit on a very old tree. Such restraint, such selection one attributes to ages of endeavour. All his books are so small in bulk that one can slip them into one’s pocket. Yet they leave behind them the impression that they contain a large world in which there is ample room for men and women of full size and the sky above and the fields around. He is the most economical of writers. One of his economies is at once obvious. He takes up no room with his own person. He makes no comments upon his characters. He places them before the reader and leaves them to their fate. The contact between ourselves and Bazarov, for instance, is peculiarly direct. No saying is underlined, no conclusion is forced upon us. But the reader’s imagination is perpetually stimulated to work for itself, and hence each scene and each character has a peculiar vitality. Hence, too, another peculiarity; we are never able to say that the point lies here or the point lies there. Return to a definite page, and the meaning, the power, seems to have fled. For in this highly suggestive art the effect has been produced by a thousand small touches which accumulate, but cannot be pinned down in one emphatic passage or isolated in one great scene. For this reason Turgenev can handle, with a sweetness and wholeness which put our English novelists to shame, such burning questions as the relations of fathers and sons, of the new order and the old. The treatment is of such width and dispassionateness that we are not coerced in our sympathies, and so do not harbour a grudge against the writer which we shall liberate when opportunity serves. After all these years ‘Fathers and Sons’ still keeps its hold on our emotions. In this clarity lie profound depths; its brevity holds in it a large world. For though Turgenev was, according to his present biographer, full of weaknesses and obsessed with a sense of the futility of all things, he held strangely rigorous views on the subject of literature. Be truthful to your own sensations, he counselled; deepen your experience with study; be free to doubt everything; above all, do not let yourself be caught in the trap of dogmatism. Sitting on the edge of another man’s nest, he practised these difficult counsels to perfection. Untidy in his habits, a giant with very small thumbs, he was nevertheless a great artist.

  Dostoevsky the Father.

  It would be a mistake to read this book as if it were a biography. Mlle Dostoevsky expressly calls it a study, and to this the reader must add that it is a study by a daughter. The letters, the facts, the testimonies of friends, even to a great extent the dates which support the orthodox biography are here absent or are introduced as they happen to suit the writer’s purpose. And what is a daughter’s purpose in writing a study of her father? We need not judge her very severely if she wishes us to see him as she saw him - upright, affectionate, infallible, or, if he had his failings, she is to be excused if she represents them as the foibles of greatness. He was extravagant perhaps. He gambled sometimes. There were seasons when, misled by the wiles of women, he strayed from the paths of virtue. We can make allowance for these filial euphemisms; and if we come to feel, as this book makes us feel, that the daughter was fond as well as proud of her father, that is a real addition to our knowledge. At the same time we sh
ould have listened more sympathetically if Mile Dostoevsky had suppressed her version of the quarrel between Dostoevsky and Turgenev. To make out that your father is a hero is one thing; to insist that his enemies are villains is another. Yet she must have it that all the blame was on Turgenev’s side; that he was jealous, a snob, ‘even more cruel and malicious than the others’. She neglects the testimony supplied by Turgenev’s own works, and, what is more serious, makes no mention of the evidence on the other side which must be known to her. The effect is naturally to make the reader scrutinize Dostoevsky’s character more closely than he would otherwise have done. He asks himself inevitably what there was in the man to cause this shrill and excited partisanship on the part of his daughter. The search for an answer among the baffling yet illuminating materials which Mlle Dostoevsky supplies is the true interest of this book.

  If we were to be guided by her we should base our inquiry upon the fact that Dostoevsky was of Lithuanian descent on his father’s side. Mlle Dostoevsky has read Gobineau, and shows a perverse ingenuity and considerable industry in attributing almost every mental and moral characteristic to race heredity. Dostoevsky was a Lithuanian and thus loved purity; he was a Lithuanian and thus paid his brother’s debts; he was a Lithuanian and thus wrote bad Russian; he was a Lithuanian and thus a devout Catholic. When he complained that he had a strange and evil character he did not realize that it was neither strange nor evil, but simply Lithuanian. As Dostoevsky himself never attached much importance to his descent, we may be allowed to follow his example. We shall not come much closer to him by pursuing that track. But Mlle Dostoevsky increases our knowledge by more indirect methods. A clever little girl cannot run about her father’s house without picking up many things which she is not expected to know. She knows whether the cook is grumbling; which of the guests bores her parents; whether her father is in a good temper, or whether there has been some mysterious grown-up catastrophe. Considering that Aimée was very young when her father died, she could scarcely be expected to observe anything of much greater importance than this. But then she is a Russian. She has that apparently involuntary candour which must make family life so disconcerting in Russia. Her father’s greatness subdues her to a dutiful attitude, which, if reverent, is also a little colourless. But no one else has that power over her. ‘Her self-esteem was always excessive, almost morbid; a trifle would offend her, and she easily fell a victim to those who flattered her.’ Thus she describes her mother, and her mother is still alive. As for her uncles and aunts, her step-brother, her father’s first wife, his mistress, she is completely outspoken about them all and - were it not that she qualifies her blame by detecting strains of Slav, Norman, Ukrainian, Negro, Mongol, and Swedish blood - equally severe. That, indeed, is her contribution to our knowledge of Dostoevsky. No doubt she exaggerates; but there can also be no doubt that her bitterness is the legacy of old family quarrels - sordid, degrading, patched-up, but bursting out afresh and pursuing Dostoevsky to the verge of his death-chamber. The pages seem to ring with scoldings and complainings and recriminations; with demands for more money and with replies that all the money has been spent. Such, or something like it, we conclude, was the atmosphere in which Dostoevsky wrote his books.

  His father was a doctor who had to resign his appointment owing to drunkenness; and it was on account of his drunken savagery that his serfs smothered him one day beneath the cushions of his carriage as he was driving on his estate. The disease was inherited by his children. Two of Dostoevsky’s brothers were drunkards; his sister was miserly to the verge of insanity, and was also murdered for her money. Her son was ‘so stupid that his folly verged on idiocy. My uncle An drey’s son, a young and brilliant savant, died of creeping paralysis. The whole Dostoevsky family suffered from neurasthenia.’ And to the family eccentricity one must add what appears to the English reader the national eccentricity - the likelihood, that is to say, that if Dostoevsky escapes death on the scaffold and survives imprisonment in Siberia he will marry a wife who has a handsome young tutor for her lover, and will take for his mistress a girl who arrives at his bedside at seven in the morning brandishing an enormous knife with which she proposes to kill a Frenchman. Dostoevsky dissuades her, and off they go to Wiesbaden where ‘my father played roulette with passionate absorption, was delighted when he won, and experienced a despair hardly less delicious when he lost’. It is all violent and extreme, later, even, when Dostoevsky was happily married, there was still a worthless stepson who expected to be supported; still the brothers’ debts to pay; still the sisters trying to make mischief between him and his wife; and then the rich aunt Kumanin must needs die and leave her property to stir up the last flames of hatred among the embittered relations. ‘Dostoevsky lost patience and, refusing to continue the painful discussion, left the table before the meal was finished.’ Three days later he was dead. One thinks of Farringford flourishing not so very far away. One wonders what Matthew Arnold, who deplored the irregularities of the Shelley set, would have said to this one.

  And yet, has it anything to do with Dostoevsky? One feels rather as if one had been admitted to the kitchen where the cook is smashing the china, or to the drawing-room where the relations are gossiping in corners, while Dostoevsky sits upstairs alone in his study. He had, it is clear, an extraordinary power of absenting his mind from his body. The money troubles alone, one would think, were enough to drive him distracted. On the contrary, it was his wife who worried, and it was Dostoevsky, says his daughter, who remained serene, saying, ‘in tones of conviction, “We shall never be without money.” ‘ We catch sight of his body plainly enough, but it is rather as if we passed him taking his afternoon walk, always at four o’clock, always along the same road, so absorbed in his own thoughts that ‘he never recognized the acquaintance he met on the way’. They travelled in Italy, visited the galleries, strolled in the Boboli gardens, and ‘the roses blooming there struck their Northern imaginations’. But after working at The Idiot’ all the morning how much did he see of the roses in the afternoon? It is the waste of his day that is gathered up and given us in place of his life. But now and then, when Mlle Dostoevsky forgets the political rancours of the moment and the complex effect of the Norman strain upon the Lithuanian temperament, she opens the study door and lets us see her father as she saw him. He could not write if he had a spot of candle-grease on his coat. He liked dried figs and kept a box of them in a cupboard from which he helped his children. He liked eau-de-Cologne to wash with. He liked little girls to wear pale green. He would dance with them and read aloud Dickens and Scott. But he never spoke to them about his own childhood. She thinks that he dreaded discovering signs of his father’s vices in himself; and she believes that he ‘wished intensely to be like others’. At any rate, it was the greatest pleasure of her day to be allowed to breakfast with him and to talk to him about books. And then it is all over. There is her father laid out in his evening dress in his coffin; a painter is sketching him; grand dukes and peasants crowd the staircase; while she and her brother distribute flowers to unknown people and enjoy very much the drive to the cemetery.

  More Dostoevsky.

  Each time that Mrs Garnett adds another red volume to her admirable translations of the works of Dostoevsky we feel a little better able to measure what the existence of this great genius who is beginning to permeate our lives so curiously means to us. His books are now to be found on the shelves of the humblest English libraries; they have become an indestructible part of the furniture of our rooms, as they belong for good to the furniture of our minds. The latest addition to Mrs Garnett’s translation, The Eternal Husband’, including also The Double’ and ‘The Gentle Spirit’, is not one of the greatest of his works, although it was produced in what may be held to be the greatest period of his genius, between The Idiot’ and The Possessed’. If one had never read anything else by Dostoevsky, one might lay the book down with a feeling that the man who wrote it was bound to write a very great novel some day; but with a feeling also t
hat something strange and important had happened. This strangeness and this sense that something important has happened persist, however, although we are familiar with his books and have had time to arrange the impression that they make on us.

  Of all great writers there is, so it seems to us, none quite so surprising, or so bewildering, as Dostoevsky. And although ‘The Eternal Husband’ is nothing more than a long short story which we need not compare with the great novels, it too has this extraordinary power; nor while we are reading it can we liberate ourselves sufficiently to feel certain that in this or that respect there is a failure of power, or insight, or craftsmanship; nor does it occur to us to compare it with other works either by the same writer or by other writers. It is very difficult to analyse the impression it has made even when we have finished it. It is the story of one Velchaninov, who, many years before the story opens, has seduced the wife of a certain Pavel Pavlovitch in the town of T — . Velchaninov has almost forgotten her and is living in Petersburg. But now as he walks about Petersburg he is constantly running into a man who wears a crêpe hat-band and reminds him of someone he cannot put a name to. At last, after repeated meetings which bring him to a state bordering on delirium, Velchaninov is visited at two o’clock in the morning by the stranger, who explains that he is the husband of Velchaninov’s old love, and that she is dead. When Velchaninov visits him the next day he finds him maltreating a little girl, who is, he instantly perceives, his own child. He manages to take her away from Pavel, who is a drunkard and in every way disreputable, and give her lodging with friends, but almost immediately she dies. After her death Pavel announces that he is engaged to marry a girl of sixteen, but when, as he insists, Velchaninov visits her, she confides to him that she detests Pavel and is already engaged to a youth of nineteen. Between them they contrive to pack Pavel off to the country; and he turns up finally at the end of the story as the husband of a provincial beauty, and the lady, of course, has a lover.