I.
Ivan Turgénief was born at Orel on the 28th of October, 1818. This date, given by Turgénief himself in a letter to the Russian journalist Suvarin, corresponds to the 9th of November in our calendar.
His father, Sergéi Nikolayevitch, and his mother, Várvara Petrovna, died early.[25] He was brought up by his grandmother, a Russian lady of the old school, haughty by nature and of despotic disposition. The portrait of this “severe and choleric” baruina is found sketched in vigorous outlines in the little story “Punin and Baburin.” This story, says Turgénief in the letter which I have just mentioned, “contains much biography.”
Turgénief’s grandmother lived in the country, on an estate a short distance from the city of Orel. Here the child became passionately fond of nature. From the age of twelve he entered into intimate relationship with trees and flowers; and he felt, when in contact with them, impressions whose vividness remains after more than forty years in the deeply stirred remembrances of the mature man.
“The garden belonging to my grandmother’s property was a large park of ancient date. On one side it sloped towards a pond of running water, wherein lived not only gudgeon and tench, but also salvelines, the famous salvelines, those little eels which are found scarcely anywhere nowadays. At the head of this pond grew a dense rose-bed; higher up, on both sides of the ravine, stretched a thicket of vigorous bushes,—hazel, elder, honeysuckle, black-thorn, in the lower part encroached upon by tall grass and lovage. Amid the clumps of trees, but only here and there, appeared very small bits of emerald-green lawn of fine and silken grass, prettily mottled with the dainty pink, yellow, lilac caps of those mushrooms called russules; and there the golden balls of the great celandine hung in luminous patches. There in springtime were heard the songs of nightingales, the whistling of blackbirds, and the cuckoos’ call. It was always cool there, even during the warmest days of summer; and I loved to bury myself in those depths where I had my favorite hiding-places, mysterious, known to myself alone—or at least so I imagined.”
Prepared by this beneficent influence of colors, perfumes, and the sounds of rustic life, the child’s moral education was directed, without anybody’s knowledge, and influenced for all time, by the presence of two outlandish servants, flitting members of the high-born lady’s household. One of them was a “philanthropic and philosophical plebeian,” destined to die in Siberia; the other, a sort of innocent enthusiast, a great reader of Russian epics then out of fashion. The former sowed in the young Turgénief’s soul the seeds of a liberalism which will bear fruit in the most manly resolves; the latter kindled in the lad’s lively imagination a poetic flame whose heat and glory will shine out in a score of masterpieces.
Towards the age of thirteen, the young Ivan was removed from these influences. He was given two tutors, one French and the other German. Having obtained his diploma as candidate in philology, he went to Berlin to finish, or rather begin anew, his studies in the humanities; and he brought them to a close by plunging into the current of the Hegelian philosophy. He came back to Russia converted to that “occidentalism” which we shall define later when we study Turgéniefs political theories.
He made his début as a writer in 1843, with a little poem, “Parasha.”[26] The critic Biélinsky gave it such praise that it covered the author with confusion. Towards the end of his life, Turgénief criticised his poetry with a severity that was absolutely sincere. Even at this period, he set as little value on his verses as though he had already shown his ability in a prose masterpiece. The masterpiece appeared three years later, in 1846. The first story in “The Annals of a Sportsman,”[27] “Khor and Kalinuitch,” was published in the Sovremennik (“Contemporary”); and at a single stroke Turgénief’s fame reached a height which will never be surpassed by any of his great works.[28]
[Most of] the other stories in Turgénief’s first collection were written abroad. The author came back to Russia in 1851, but only to leave it again two years later. He will still have a domicile there, and above all he will come back regularly to keep up his relations, and touch foot to earth; but it may be said that after 1863 he made only flying visits to his country. The Russians have heaped reproaches on Turgénief for this abandonment of his native soil. It has always been easily explained. There was, at least primarily, a sort of state reason. In 1852, owing to an article on Gogol’s death, Turgénief got into difficulty with the imperial censorship, which ended in a month of close imprisonment, and in the writer being interned at his estate. After two years of solitude and work, Turgénief felt the need of “gaining freedom, the knowledge of himself.” He acquired these conditions, outside of which it was impossible for him to write and to struggle, at the price of life in a foreign country.[29]
But behold what was not known, and what was revealed only by the posthumous publication of Turgénief’s letters. This Russian who made his home abroad, who dwelt twenty years in France, and died in the very heart of Paris, was overwhelmed during his forced or voluntary exile with the blackest melancholy of homesickness, and during the last part of his life suffered even the sharpest torment.
He did not succeed in acclimating himself, either at Baden Baden, in spite of the charm of the situation where his poet’s glance first rested; or at Paris, where he was to be enchained by the bonds of love which he himself called “imperishable, indissoluble.” It may be asked, in regard to this well-known friendship, whether Turgénief, exiled from Russia by his desire for liberty, succeeded in avoiding all the forms of dependence. It is a problem which I leave to the most inquisitive to settle. I confine myself to pointing out in Turgénief the expressions which now and again betray his weariness of exile, his restlessness as of a Northern bird, a captive swan or eider, languishing, mourning with regret for its cold natal seas. “I am condemned to a Bohemian life, and I must make up my mind never to build me a nest.” “In a foreign atmosphere,” he writes once more, “I decompose like a frozen fish in time of thaw.... I shall certainly come back to Russia in the spring.”
During the winter of 1856 Turgénief made this promise to return; and he repeats it many times, as though to assure himself further excuses for keeping it. From that time he knows all the disappointments of a wandering life; and to express the idea of not feeling at home where one is, he uses a word of rare power: “Say what you will, but in a foreign country a man is dislocated: you are needful to no one, and no one is needful to you.” Far from growing feeble, this painful impression will increase as time goes on; the flame of regret, instead of going out or dying down, will get fresh vigor, and break forth in new developments.
First it is the family instinct, which wakens and which speaks very eloquently at that ambiguous hour when youth begins to withdraw, and when, like the foliage in autumn, one feels a premonitory shiver, harbinger of the wintry winds. “Anenkof married,” says Turgénief smiling, “is handsomer than ever.” “Get thee a wife,” he writes seriously to another of his friends: “it is the one thing needful.”
Then there is also the acute feeling of the impoverishment of the creative faculty, the very disturbing realization or apprehension of a sort of literary anema due to the deprivation of the desired climate with its inspiring horizons, with its atmosphere filled with vivifying breezes and suggestive sounds. “I will admit, if you please, that the talent with which I was endowed by nature has not grown smaller; but I have nothing on which to set it to work. The voice is rested: there is naught to sing, so it is better to be silent. And I have nothing to sing, because I live away from Russia.” “Living abroad,” he says in another place, “the fountain from which my inspiration sprang has dried up.”
Finally, more than all, it is the lofty sadness and the noble remorse at not being on hand, at not mingling more intimately in the troublous, dangerous drama which is enacting on Russian soil. “In fact,” Turgénief writes his friend the great author, Lyof Tolstoï, “Russia is now passing through serious and gloomy times; but it is for that very reason that at this moment one feels the gnawing of conscience at living like a foreigner.”
And so this existence which seemed to be ruled by a certain indifference, a sort of elegant and fortunate dilettanteism, was early crossed, and to the very end disturbed, by fits of melancholy and splenetic depression, the secret of whose existence few people, I am inclined to think, ever discovered. Who seeing Turgénief unaffectedly smiling, in a humor not exactly sportive, but sweet, even, and obliging, would have suspected that after an interview with his Parisian friends, for whom he saved all the flower of his wit, he would shut himself up to confide his heart-secret to pages destined to fall only under the softened and by no means mocking eyes of his old Russian comrades?
One can easily imagine the sympathy roused in a Polonsky, for example, by passages such as this: “The chill of old age every day penetrates farther into my soul: it takes entire possession of it. The absolute indifference which I find in me makes me tremble for myself. I can now repeat with Hamlet,—
“‘How stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems me that life!’[30]
Perhaps this mood will pass; or, if it lasts, perhaps I shall succeed in lignifying, and in that case, it is all the same.”
Another day he tears out from his private journal this page, the disappearance of which is to be deeply regretted: “Again I am at my table, and in my soul it is gloomier than the gloomiest night. Thus, like a moment, passes the day, empty, aimless, colorless. A space to give a passing glance, and, lo! it is bedtime again. No right to life, no desire to live. Nothing to do, nothing to expect, nothing to hope for.... Thou speakest of halos of glory, and of enchanting tones. O my friend! we are the fragments of a vase broken long ago.”
When once the straits of old age were crossed, Turgénief enjoyed a few years of relative calm, of less bitter resignation. It was the time of his intimacy with George Sand and Flaubert. They both died. Illness falls upon Turgénief himself, and nails him pitilessly to the land of exile.
From the day when the way of return is cut off, the “occidental” is seized once more with the agony of homesickness for the mother country. His eyes and his heart are fastened immovably on the corner of Russia whither all the memories of childhood and youth draw him. Unable to see his village of Spaskoe, he sends his best friends to it, and establishes them there. He begs them to give him endless details about the peasants, about the women, the school, the chapel, the hospital. He worries about the garden, and urges Mrs. Polonskaïa to look upon its most humble products with “the eyes of the master.” He feels more keenly than ever the value of what he has lost. In addition to his ever renewed and lively regrets comes the feeling of bitterness and mourning which is born of the irreparable. His country calls him, and draws him with such force, that he has the sensation of a great “tearing asunder.” That is the expression to which it is necessary to hold fast. It is calculated to surprise even those who had the good fortune often to meet Ivan Sergéyevitch; but what regret it ought to cause those who, deceived by the way in which Turgénief persisted in living far away from the Russian land, cruelly upbraided him for having forgotten his country!
Turgénief was so far from forgetting Russia, that he went back almost every year; and he wrote almost all his works there. The critics scarcely had any suspicion of such a thing. They attacked Turgénief’s later novels, bringing up against them his residence abroad. “How could he know Russia any more? He no longer lives there.” Turgénief was indignant at this objection, which “that old woman called the public” persisted in hurling at him. He answered this argument once for all, in terms which must be quoted: “The objection can only be made to what I have published since 1863. Until that time,—that is, until my forty-fifth year,—I lived in Russia, scarcely going out of the country, except the years from 1848 to 1850. During just those years I wrote ‘The Annals of a Sportsman.’ On the other hand, ‘Rudin,’ ‘The Nest of Gentlemen,’ ‘On the Eve,’ and ‘Fathers and Sons’ were written in Russia. But that makes no difference to the old woman. Her mind is already made up.”
To be a little more precise, “Rudin” was published in 1855. “A Nest of Gentlemen”[31] appeared in 1859 [1858?], and the year 1862 was distinguished by the appearance of “Fathers and Sons.” Better than any one, Turgénief understood the necessity of writing nothing without his models before him; and he went to seek for them where they were to be found. Turgénief’s correspondence shows these scruples in a score of places, and especially in regard to “Fathers and Sons.” Having once conceived the plan of the work, the novelist has no rest until he finds himself in Russia. There only can he imagine, create, or, to speak more accurately, reproduce what he sees in real life. His pen, which refused to move as long as he was abroad, runs and flies over the paper. The sight of familiar landscapes refreshes the parched brain: inspiration flows.
Between the romance of “Fathers and Sons,” and that of “Smoke,” which was published in 1867, during the period when the Russian writer was an habitual resident of Baden Baden,[32] appeared quite a large number of shorter stories and tales of less pretension, but not of less value. There is more than one masterpiece of sentiment or imagination in “Apparitions,” in “Strange Stories,” “Spring Waters,” “Living Relics.” Not all these collections preceded “Smoke,” but they came shortly before or shortly after it.
Between “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil,” Turgénief’s last great novel, passes a period of nearly ten years. The cause of this long silence was the alienation which had arisen between the writer and his public. Russian readers had already begun to show their dissatisfaction with “Fathers and Sons,” and the causes of this displeasure deserve to be closely examined. We shall return to them in the course of this study. The spitefulness of the critics was let loose against the very satirical romance “Smoke;” other works, such as “The King Lear of the Steppe,” did not even have the success of causing scandal, and were “damned with faint praise.” “That,” said Turgénief, “for an author who is growing old, is worse than a fiasco. It is the best proof that it is time to stop, and I am going to stop.”
In such a resolution, there were other motives besides pique. Turgénief felt weary, and, as it were, short of inspiration or of subjects. In the intervals between the recuperative journeys which we have mentioned, he was obliged to nourish himself on his own substance. He knew that to suspend them, or even to postpone them too long, was at the risk of losing his strength and wasting away even to consumption. “I am compelled, like a bear in winter, to suck my paw; and thus it is that nothing comes forth.”
The weariness disappeared, the pique wore away, and gradually this firm resolution to enjoy rest and absolute silence was shaken. Turgénief finally even found excellent reason for resuming the pen. It was necessary, not to blot out, but to complete, the effect of “Fathers and Sons” by writing another romance, which this time should clear up misunderstandings, and put the author in the position and in the rank that he felt he ought to hold. This romance, “Virgin Soil,”[33] did not appear till 1876; but almost two years beforehand Turgénief was talking of it, thinking about it, and working at it. It can be seen in his correspondence, that the work is in some degree taking shape; and under each abstract formula one can already detect the outlines of a character who will be the realization of it.
It is easily understood how Turgénief, who expected so much from this last work, who thought that he had put into it the best of his talent, and reached the culmination of his creative faculty, was disappointed and discouraged to receive once more only reproaches and blame. “This time,” he says, “it is my last original work. Such is my decision, and it is irrevocable.... I may possibly busy myself still with translations. I am contemplating ‘Don Quixote’ and Montaigne.” In vain opinion calms down, changes base, turns to praise and admiration: he remains firm in his design of staying in retreat, and of “joining the veterans.” Indeed, for a few months at least, he seems to drop this implement of the writer, “which he has used for thirty years.”
He travels abroad, in England; and quickly finds himself too well known, too much entertained, too much exhibited. This excess of glory is incompatible with his modesty.
Was it the delight in his visit to Russia in the spring of 1878, was it the joy of renewing long-interrupted relations of intimacy with Count Lyof Tolstoï? At all events, Turgénief again finds literary work to his taste. At first, it is true, he is seen occupying himself only with the work of others. He wishes to do for Tolstoï the same service in France, as for Flaubert in Russia, by popularizing their works in translation. Or he publishes Pushkin’s correspondence, and supervises a superb edition of the complete works of his favorite poet.
He writes Bougival his “Song of Triumphant Love,” which he regretfully allows to be printed, and which is this time hailed as a marvel. He makes a selection of his “Poems in Prose.” He puts some personal reminiscences in the form of short stories; among others, “The Hopeless Man.” He already passes beyond the horizon of life,—which is ending for him amid the most cruel sufferings,—by writing that half-real vision entitled “The Morrow of Death.”
Turgénief, by these short works, endeavored to get himself into the mood of writing another great work. He was already beginning to speak of it to his friends; he explained the subject; he had, perhaps, blocked out his plan; and since we know his habits of work, and his method, we are safe in adding that he had conceived the principal types, that he had seen the majority of the characters pass and halt before his eyes. In this romance, Turgénief intended to compare the Russian with the French grévistes or anarchists. We see it is the subject which Zola had the ambition to take up in “Germinal;” and, in spite of the popularity of the work, I may be allowed to believe that this subject still remains to be treated.
The idea of this great romance must have been suggested to Turgénief’s mind, as a consequence of his almost triumphal journey in Russia, on the occasion of the Pushkin festival. A few years had sufficed absolutely to change the feelings of the younger generation in Russia. The popularity which the author of “The Annals of a Sportsman” so suddenly won was restored to him after a pretty long period of alienation, and at last beatified the author of “Virgin Soil.” The enthusiastic reception of the Moscow students filled his soul with the emotion of unexpected joy, and the ovation which he received had for him all the value of an improbable result. A Russian who was very near to Turgénief told me that, on this occasion, he found only a few hesitating and broken words to reply to the speeches of the orators, the leaders of this young generation; but he had the moistened eyes and the smile of a happy man.
Full of gratitude for this eleventh-hour homage, he would have been glad to express his thankfulness in his own manner; and doubtless the new work would have translated it. His illness put a stop to his project. On the 8th of April, 1882, Turgénief writes to Mrs. Polonskaïa to inform her of the physician’s diagnosis in regard to what they call his angina pectoris, or his gouty neuralgia of the heart. The term was not accurate. It is known that Turgénief died of cancer of the spinal marrow. Whatever the trouble was, the torment of it became atrocious, and the suffering which the invalid underwent lasted more than a year. He bore this slow agony with great sweetness. His complaints were rare, and they were for the most part hidden under a veil of irony which robbed them of every shade of bitterness.
Pinched by pain as by a vise, he still found the time and the power to address comforting raillery to those who were sadder than himself. “For your consolation,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I wish to quote one of Goethe’s remarks, made just before his death. It would seem as if he at least had to satiety all of the happiness that life can give. Think what a pitch of glory he reached, loved by women, and hated by fools; think that he had been translated even into Chinese; that all Europe was setting out in pilgrimage to salute him; that Napoleon himself said of him, ‘There is a man!’ think that our Russian critics, the Uvarofs and others, burned incense under his nose: and yet, at the age of eighty-two, he declared that during his long life he had not been happy a quarter of an hour all told. Then for you and me it is the will of God, isn’t it? Suppose the perfect health which Goethe always enjoyed is lacking to us, still he was bored.... But what is to be done about it?”
On the 3d of July, 1883, Turgénief with feeble hand, and at the cost of cruel pangs, wrote in pencil the following unsigned letter to his friend the great novelist Lyof Tolstoï: “It is long since I have written you, for I have been and I am literally on my death-bed. It is impossible for me to recover: it is not within the limits of thought. I write you simply to tell you that I am happy to have been your contemporary, and to express to you my last and most sincere request: my friend, return to literary work! This talent of yours came to you from the source whence come all our gifts. Ah! how happy I should be if my prayer were to have the effect upon you so deeply desired! As for me, I am a dead man. The doctors do not even know what name to give my ailment. Gouty neuralgia of the stomach; no walking, no eating, no sleeping. Bah! it is tiresome to repeat all this. My friend, great writer of the Russian land, hear my supplication. Let me know if you receive this slip of paper, and allow me once more to press you closely in my embrace,—you, your wife, and all your family. I cannot write you more, I am weary.”
Turgénief died a month later, on Monday, Sept. 3, 1883.
Turgéniefs features are so well known that it seems unnecessary to sketch them in his biography. One of his characters, the gigantic Karlof, thus defined the men of his race: “We are all born with light hair, brilliant eyes, and pale faces; for we have sprung up under the snow.” Turgénief himself had a good share of these race characteristics. But in France the majority of people knew the good giant only after he was well along in life, and when he already had the aspect of one of those venerable kings of whom the poet speaks:—
... Nosco crines incanaque menta.
Turgénief was of a very honest, very obliging, and very affable nature.[34] Those who met him saw him to the best advantage at moments when he allowed himself to talk with a charming frankness. He talked deliciously, with abundance of feeling and a fluency of expression, which went with him even when he spoke in French. He enchanted those who listened to him in his moments of enthusiasm: always lively and original, his conversation then became passionate and brilliant, even lyrical. Listening to this stream of ideas and words hurrying in eager floods, not noisily, from the lips of this old man of heroic mould and structure, one involuntarily thought of some Homeric bard. There was also “the harmony of the cicadas” and “all the sweetness of honey” in the voice of the Nestor of the steppes.