II.
Was Turgénief only an artist, only a dilettante?
We must give up this false definition which his enemies wished to become current, and which his friends even have been too willing to let go with contravention. Superficial critics deny in him all capacity, all enlightenment, on the questions of social order: they have gone so far as to say that in these respects he has neither teachings nor opinion. Certain fanatics, young or old, the Písarefs, the Dostoyevskys, have taken it upon them to advance this pretext for denying him the right to write and to print his works, and to be read as they are and more than they are.
It is true to say that Turgénief never laid down, or even sketched out, a programme; that he never made public speeches, that he did not peddle interviews, that he did not lucubrate leading articles for the editorial pages of journals. What am I saying? Perhaps he did not even reply to a sensational toast during his active life! Many persons obtain and grant the title of political man only by this test. In their judgment, Turgénief was not one.
As for believing that Turgénief had in political matters no definite opinions, or keen sympathies, or profound views, or well-digested purposes, it takes a pretty strong dose of passion or of naïveté to accept and to promulgate this mistake. Those who have read his works carefully suspected it; those who were in his intimate circle had no question about it: but no scepticism in this regard could withstand the revelations of his correspondence.
We know what popularity the Slavophile party gained from the moment of its birth. The declamations of the Pogodins and the Aksákofs against “occidental rot,” their dithyrambs in honor of the virtues of the Slavic race, their childish programmes pretending to put the Russian people on the right track, and to free it from the old vestment of foreign ideas and habits which Peter the Great had swaddled it with,—all this specious rhetoric, flattering at once the national vanity, ignorance, and indolence, found in Turgénief from his early youth a decided enemy. His conviction as an occidental, which was the foundation of all his other convictions, could not be shaken either by the constant effort of years or by the sudden shock of the most varied events.
But what was the characteristic of this occidentalism? Did it go so far as to dislike the special features of the Russian people, and desire to extirpate the individuality of the race, as one would demand the excision of a tumor or the extirpation of a wart? Turgénief was too proud of being a Russian, not to have a legitimate share in the development of these peculiarities of the national type; but, according to his own words, it was repugnant to him “to feel any vanity in this sort of exclusiveness, in whatever sphere it was manifested, pure art or politics.” In his eyes, Slavophilism was an artificial entity, a sort of hollow edifice, constructed on foreign models and in imitation of the German genius.
He could not reconcile himself to the idea of artificially isolating Russia from the rest of Europe, and of shutting her up in a sort of quarantine, where, in order to be free from foreign influences, the result would be that the natal air would not preserve its purity, but would grow vitiated and rarefied. And with still greater reason, he regarded as puerile the thought of giving new life to the European organism by the infusion of the Slavic element. This ambition of grafting the Russian shoot on the aged wood of other races tore from him protestations of very expressive irony. “I cannot accustom myself to this view of Aksákof’s, that it is necessary for Europe, if she would be saved, to accept our orthodox religion.” Every policy that adopted this narrow principle seemed to him worthy of reprobation, at least in its principle. “In freeing the Bulgarians we ought to be guided to this step, not because they are Christians, but because the Turks are massacring and robbing them.” “All that is human is dear to me,” he says again: “Slavophilism is as foreign to me as every other orthodoxy.”
In bringing these habits of moderation to his judgments of the acts of the government, and of the men who helped, who extolled, who blamed, who clogged its action, Turgénief might have expected to cause dissatisfaction, and to rouse for the most part only murmurs. Early in point of fact, and even to the end of his career, Turgénief is the object of violent attacks from the opposite party. At the very moment when the younger generation of Russians felt that they were travestied by him in “Fathers and Sons,” and when Tchernuishevsky, the author of the famous romance “What is to be Done?”[35] turns to his own profit the misunderstandings caused by the appearance of the hero Bazarof; Turgénief, for having created this same Bazarof, for having refused to exaggerate or blacken his character, makes for himself irreconcilable enemies in the reactionary party. He quarrels with Katkof, the officious journalist, the confidant of the heir-apparent, the inspirer of that retrograde policy which has prevailed in Russia of late years. “When I left ‘The Russian Messenger’ (Russki Vyestnik), Katkof sent me word that I did not know what it was to have him for an enemy. He is trying, therefore, to show me. Let him do his best. My soul is not in his power.”
No consideration of interest, no low ambition for popularity, could have decided Turgénief to deviate from this line of conduct. We remember the quite barren movement of agitation started a few years ago by those young people who called themselves, somewhat naïvely, “the new men.” A lady who was one of their sympathizers sends Turgénief a bundle of documents: it is the confession of one of the representatives of this progressive generation. Turgénief finds in this jumble of prose and verse only two characteristics,—an intoxicated, delirious self-conceit, and boundless incapacity and ignorance. It is vain to make allowance for time of life, and to attribute a part of their faults to the extreme youth of these individuals puffed up with a mighty sense of their small importance. Under it all there lies “only feebleness of thought, absence of all knowledge, a scantiness of talent verging on poverty.” He does not put his unfavorable judgment under any sort of subterfuge or oratorical disguise: his frankness costs him a storm of bitter criticisms.
Yet Turgénief is the very same man who will receive in Paris other young people, with still more trenchant opinions, still more angular forms; and “in their presence,” he says eloquently, “I, old man that I am, I open my heart, because I feel in them the ‘real presence,’ and force, and talent, and mind.” These virtues attracted him and disarmed him, no matter in what class of people or in what group of thinkers he found them. Thus he is seen giving the patronage of his name, and the cover of his authority, to the first work on the newspaper Le Temps of a young Russian, treated by the home government as a dangerous character. To punish Turgénief for this audacious deed, the minister causes him to be insulted, slandered by a paid scribbler. “Verily, among us,” writes Turgénief, “many shameful things are exposed to God’s air, like this vile article of the rascally....”
Now, a few days later, on the occasion of the attempted assassination of 1879, behold how the man whom “The Moscow Gazette” (edited by Katkof) affected to confound with the scatter-brains of Nihilism, expressed himself: “The last ignominious news has greatly troubled me. I foresee that certain people will use this senseless outrage to the disadvantage of the party which justly, in the interest of its liberal ideas, places the Tsar’s life above every thing; for salutary reforms are to be expected from him alone. In Russia, how can a reform be imagined which does not come from above?... I am deeply troubled and grieved. Here for two days I have not slept at the idea of it. I think about it, and think about it; but I cannot come to any conclusion.”
Whatever were his apprehensions, he could not foresee with what fury of re-action the Emperor would strive to stem the Liberal current, by which, when he first mounted the throne, he had allowed himself to be carried onward. Turgénief suffered from this aberration of power more than can be told. He foresaw new acts of despair, which would give a color of reason to measures of repression constantly growing more crushing. He attributed this infatuated policy to the influence of Pobyedonostsef, the Ober-Prokuror of the Holy Synod; and above all to the counsels of Katkof, that former Liberal, that exile converted to the most brutal absolutism. He writes: “Who can tell what is going on at home, Katkovio regnante?”
With what passion Turgénief uttered one day before two callers, one of whom was a Frenchman, this expression, which I find also in his correspondence! With what pathetic eloquence he mourned for the days of yore, the days of the old oppression! “We had then a bare wall before us,” he writes, “but we knew where it was necessary to make the breach. To-day the door is ajar, but to enter through this narrow opening is more difficult than to undermine and cast down the wall.”
I find, among some notes taken down after an afternoon call upon Ivan Turgénief during the winter of 1882, a rather expressive résumé of his conversation, which I beg permission to quote in its entirety. “At that time we felt sustained by an auxiliary which allows one to defy, and which finally softens, all the severities of power,—Opinion. We had on our side the two stimuli which lead to victory,—the feeling of duty, the presentiment of success. Who would have believed that the day would come when we should look back with regret upon this period of terror, but of hope; of oppression, but of activity! Indeed, were not the youth of that time happy and enviable compared to those of to-day? What sincere mind can help feeling the deepest pity for that handful of Russians, educated, or greedy for education, whom the misfortune of the times has driven to the most frightful extremes? You might say that every thinker is caught between the anvil of an ignorant populace and the hammer of a blinded power. The Russian people are afraid even of those who, scorning every danger, are laboring to gain them their rights; they are absolutely ignorant, and are afraid of every innovation. They have the anxious look, and the quick flashes of anger, of a wild beast. We have just seen them rush upon the Jews with a sort of frenzy. If the people were not kept like a bear fastened to a chain, they would treat the revolutionists with the same fairness and the same gentleness.
“As to the throne, the end of advance in the path of absolutism has just about been reached. It is now the formidable ideal of tyranny. During the preceding reign it took the initiative of reform. Alexander II. was carried away by the current of liberal ideas. He ordered measures to be taken; above all, he allowed projects to be elaborated. He wished, for example, to give the district assemblies power enough to struggle against the abuses of the tchinovniks, and to put a stop to corruption. But one day he was panic-struck. Karakózof’s pistol-shot drove back into the shade that phantom of liberty, the appearance of which all Russia had hailed with acclamation. From that moment, and even to the end of his life, the Emperor devoted himself to the undoing of all that he had done. If he could have cancelled with one stroke the glorious ukaz which had proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he would have been only too glad to disgrace himself.
“What can be said of his successor, that doting sovereign, that victim nailed to the throne? He shuts himself between four walls, and, what is worse, between four narrow, limited minds, the responsible editors of the policy of an anonymous tsar, the former Liberal and exile, Katkof. It is a war upon ideas, a crusade of ignorance. Russia is having its Inquisition, it has its Torquemada. What other name is to be given to that minister of creeds, or, to speak more exactly, that procuror-general of the Synod, Pobyedonostsef?
“The Tsar sees in Pobyedonostsef the most virtuous and the most saintly man in all the empire. He has for him all the tenderness of Orgon; and you might say that he likes to think, like that pig-headed dupe,—
“‘He teaches me for naught to feel affection,
My soul from every friendship he estranges.’
“Just as the Tsar loves and venerates Pobyedonostsef, so he shows Katkof naïve admiration and respectful deference. In the one he sees science inborn; in the other, religion personified. But the more dangerous of these two fanatics is Katkof, the former Liberal, the companion of Herzen’s misfortunes, the ex-professor of philosophy at Moscow. He scorns to hold the reins of power; he likes better to give the word to those who carry the order for him and by him alone. The ministers are his valets; he has even his under-slaves; it would not be interesting to mention all their names. He is the disgraceful Richelieu behind the throne, who terrorizes Russia.”
Notwithstanding the very gloomy aspect of the present, Turgénief had unshaken faith in the future. “We must not expect that the future will be all roses. No matter, things will come out all right.” And what were the means, according to Turgénief’s idea, of realizing this? Give up illusions and fidgeting. Don’t imagine that you are going to find a panacea, a remedy for the great evils; and that, to cure the Russian colossus of all his tribulations, it will be sufficient to practise a sort of incantation “analogous to the spells used by old women to calm the toothache suddenly, miraculously.” According to Turgénief, the miraculous means alone changes: “sometimes it is a man, sometimes the natural sciences, sometimes a war;” but what is unchangeable is faith in the miracle. That is the superstition which first of all must be extirpated.
Likewise the idea of obtaining without delay “large, beautiful, and glorious” results, the idea of wishing “to move mountains,” must be renounced. It is necessary to know how to pay attention to little objects, to limit one’s self to a very narrow circle of action, not to step out of it; and there without glory, almost without result, work incessantly. The only activity that is fruitful was defined by Turgénief, in quoting the two verses of Schiller’s old man: “Unwearied activity is that which adds one grain of sand to another.” “What!” said he, “you begin by telling me that your constructive work is ended, that the school has just been begun; and, a little farther on, you speak of the despair which takes hold of you! I beg of you, for pity’s sake: your enterprise has already had some small result. It is not unfruitful. What more do you want? Let every one do as much in his own sphere, and there will be a grand, a splendid result.”
And Turgénief was one of the first to put his doctrine into practice. Just as in his youth he signed the charter for the emancipation of his serfs, with the same pen which wrote the indictment of serfage in “The Annals of a Sportsman;” so in the time of his old age, notwithstanding his absence, tortured as he was by the horrors of disease, he preached humbleness of aim and constancy of effort, but he preached it by his example. All his cares were directed to the improvement of the material and moral condition of his former serfs. He granted them a fifth of the sum settled upon for the redemption. At his own expense he built a school; he founded a hospital in his village of Selo Spaskoe; he succeeded in diminishing drunkenness, and in spreading a taste for reading in a region where, at the time of his boyhood, an educated, self-taught muzhik was a genuine rarity.
His correspondence shows that he was greatly concerned about his estate in the government of Orel: but it was not the revenue of his lands that troubled him; it was the happiness, the moral welfare, of his little people of Spaskoe. Behold the evolution which he wanted to see accomplished from one end to the other of his country, and which, so far as in him lay, he called forth, he prepared.
Any other policy seemed to him useless, dangerous, almost criminal. He hoped that the new reign was going to inaugurate a whole tradition of efforts in favor of the development of the rural classes. That was why he manifested his sympathy with the new Tsar, on the accession of Alexander III.: he applied to him the title, the “Emperor of the muzhiks,” and, if this was not a name of praise, it was found at least to contain a counsel.
“All that one can say,” wrote Turgénief again on the subject of the Tsar, “is that he is Russian, and nothing but Russian.... Seeing him anywhere, one would know his country.” I do not know whether these words went to the Tsar’s heart; but are they not honorable to him who penned them? What Slavophile would have imagined any thing more eloquent in their simplicity? In giving this emperor, “in whose veins runs scarce a drop of Russian blood,” his naturalization papers, Turgénief surely thought that he had reached the borders of eulogy.