Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Life of Tolstoy, p. 38.

[8] Matthew Arnold is a notable exception.

[9] Tolstoy as Man and Artist, pp. 93, 95. This passage is translated from the Russian edition.

[10] It should be said that this portrait is so unfair, and yet contains elements of truth so acutely observed, that for some people it spoils the whole book.

[11] With the exception of Marianna, one of his most beautiful and noble characters.

[12] Life, p. 189.

[13] Life, p. 312.

[14] The popular edition of Paradise Lost in Russian prose, with rough coloured pictures, is published by the Tipografia, T. D. Sitin, Piatnitzkaia Oolitza, Moscow.

CHAPTER V
THE PLACE OF TOURGENIEV

In the preceding I have tried very briefly to point out the state of the barometer of public opinion (the barometer of the average educated man and not of any exclusive clique) with regard to Tourgeniev’s reputation in Russia at the present day.

That and no more. I have not devoted a special chapter in this book to Tourgeniev for the reasons I have already stated: namely, that his work is better known in England than most other Russian classics, and that admirable appreciations of his work exist already, written by famous critics, such as Mr. Henry James and M. Melchior de Vogüé. There is in England, among people who care for literature and who study the literature of Europe, a perfectly definite estimate of Tourgeniev. It is for this reason that I confined myself to trying to elucidate what the average Russian thinks to-day about Tourgeniev compared with other Russian writers, and to noticing any changes which have come about with regard to the estimate of his work in Russia and in Europe during the last twenty years. I thought this was sufficient.

But I now realise from several able criticisms on my study of Tolstoy and Tourgeniev when it appeared in the Quarterly Review, that I had laid myself open to be misunderstood. It was taken for granted in several quarters not only that I underrated Tourgeniev as a writer, but that I wished to convey the impression that his reputation was a bubble that had burst. Nothing was farther from my intention than this. And here lies the great danger of trying to talk of any foreign writer from the point of view of that writer’s country and not from that of your own country. You are instantly misunderstood. For instance, if you say Alfred de Musset is not so much admired now in France as he used to be in the sixties, the English reader, who may only recently have discovered Alfred de Musset, and, indeed, may be approaching French poetry as a whole for the first time, at once retorts: “There is a man who is depreciating one of France’s greatest writers!”

Now what I wish to convey with regard to Tourgeniev is simply this:

Firstly, that although he is and always will remain a Russian classic, he is not, rightly or wrongly, so enthusiastically admired as he used to be: new writers have risen since his time (not necessarily better ones, but men who have opened windows on undreamed-of vistas); and not only this, but one of his own contemporaries, Dostoievsky, has been brought into a larger and clearer light of fame than he enjoyed in his lifetime, owing to the dissipation of the mists of political prejudices and temporary and local polemics, differences, quarrels and controversies.

But the English reader has, as a general rule, never got farther than Tourgeniev. He is generally quite unacquainted with the other Russian classics; and so when it is said that there are others greater than he—Dostoievsky and Gogol, for instance,—the English reader thinks an attempt is being made to break a cherished and holy image. And if he admires Tourgeniev,—which, if he likes Russian literature at all he is almost sure to do,—it makes him angry.

Secondly, I wish to say that owing to the generally prevailing limited view of the educated intellectual Englishman as to the field of Russian literature as a whole, I do think he is inclined to overrate the genius and position of Tourgeniev in Russian literature, great as they are. There is, I think, an exaggerated cult for Tourgeniev among intellectual Englishmen.[15] The case of Tennyson seems to me to afford a very close parallel to that of Tourgeniev.

Mr. Gosse pointed out not long ago in a subtle and masterly article that Tennyson, although we were now celebrating his centenary, had not reached that moment when a poet is rapturously rediscovered by a far younger generation than his own, but that he had reached that point when the present generation felt no particular excitement about his work. This seems to me the exact truth about Tourgeniev’s reputation in Russia at the present day. Everybody has read him, and everybody will always read him because he is a classic and because he has written immortal things, but now, in the year 1909, there is no particular excitement about Fathers and Sons in Russia: just as now there is no particular excitement about the “Idylls of the King” or “In Memoriam” in England to-day. Tourgeniev has not yet been rediscovered.

Of course, there are some critics who in “the fearless old fashion” say boldly that Tennyson’s reputation is dead; that he exists no longer, and that we need not trouble to mention him. I read some such sweeping pronouncement not long ago by an able journalist. There are doubtless Russian critics who say the same about Tourgeniev. As to whether they are right or wrong, I will not bother myself or my readers, but I do wish to make it as clear as daylight that I myself hold no such opinion either with regard to Tourgeniev or to Tennyson.

I believe Tennyson to have written a great quantity of immortal and magnificently beautiful verse. I believe that Tennyson possesses an enduring throne in the Temple of English poets. I believe Tourgeniev to have written a great quantity of immortal and inexpressibly beautiful prose, and I believe that he will hold an enduring seat in the Temple of Russian literature. I think this is clear. But supposing a Russian critic were to write on the English literature and the English taste of the present day, and supposing he were to say, “Of course, as we Russians all feel, there is only one English poet in the English literature of the last hundred years, and that is Tennyson. Tennyson is the great and only representative of English art; the only writer who has expressed the English soul.” We should then suspect he had never studied the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Browning and Swinburne. Well, this, it seems to me, is exactly how Tourgeniev is treated in England. All I wished to point out was that the point of view of a Russian was necessarily different, owing to his larger field of vision and to the greater extent and depth of his knowledge, and to his closer communion with the work of his national authors.

But, as I have said, it was taken for granted by some people that I wished to show that Tourgeniev was not a classic. I will therefore, at the risk of wearying my readers, repeat—with as much variation as I can muster—what I consider to be some of Tourgeniev’s special claims to enduring fame.

I have said he was a great poet; but the words seem bare and dead when one considers the peculiar nature of the shy and entrancing poetry that is in Tourgeniev’s work. He has the magic that water gives to the reflected images of trees, hills and woods; he touches the ugly facts of life, softens and transfigures them so that they lose none of their reality, but gain a majesty and a mystery that comes from beyond the world, just as the moonlight softens and transfigures the wrinkled palaces and decaying porticoes of Venice, hiding what is sordid, heightening the beauty of line, and giving a quality of magic to every stately building, to each delicate pillar and chiselled arch.

Then there is in his work a note of wistful tenderness that steals into the heart and fills it with an incommunicable pleasureable sadness, as do the songs you hear in Russia on dark summer nights in the villages, or, better still, on the broad waters of some huge silent river,—songs aching with an ecstasy of homesickness, songs which are something half-way between the whining sadness of Oriental music and the rippling plaintiveness of Irish and Scotch folk-song; songs that are imperatively melodious, but strange to us in their rhythm, constantly changing yet subordinated to definite law, varying indeed with an invariable law; songs whose notes, without being definitely sharp or flat, seem a little bit higher, or a shade lower than you expect, and in which certain notes come over and over again with an insistent appeal, a heartbreaking iteration, and an almost intolerable pathos; songs which end abruptly and suddenly, so that you feel that they are meant to begin again at once and to go on for ever.

This is how Tourgeniev’s poetical quality—as manifested in his Sportsman’s Sketches, his Poems in Prose, and in many other of his works—strikes me. But I doubt if any one unacquainted with the Russian language would derive such impressions, for it is above all things Tourgeniev’s language—the words he uses and the way in which he uses them—that is magical. Every sentence is a phrase of perfect melody; limpid, simple and sensuous. And all this must necessarily half disappear in a translation, however good.

But then Tourgeniev is not only a poet. He is a great novelist and something more than a great novelist. He has recorded for all time the atmosphere of a certain epoch. He has done for Russia what Trollope did for England: he has exactly conveyed the atmosphere and the tone of the fifties. The characters of Trollope and Tourgeniev are excelled by those of other writers—and I do not mean to put Tourgeniev on the level of Trollope, because Tourgeniev is an infinitely greater writer and an artist of an altogether higher order—; but for giving the general picture and atmosphere of England during the fifties, I do not believe any one has excelled Trollope; and for giving the general atmosphere of the fifties in Russia, of a certain class, I do not believe any one—with the possible exception of Aksakov, the Russian Trollope,—has excelled what Tourgeniev did in his best known books, Fathers and Sons, Virgin Soil, and A House of Gentlefolk.

Then, of course, Tourgeniev has gifts of shrewd characterisation, the power of creating delightful women, gifts of pathos and psychology, and artistic gifts of observation and selection, the whole being always illumined and refined by the essential poetry of his temperament, and the magical manner in which, like an inspired conductor leading an orchestra of delicate wood and wind instruments, he handles the Russian language. But when it comes to judging who has interpreted more truly Russian life as a whole, and who has gazed deepest into the Russian soul and expressed most truly and fully what is there, then I can but repeat that I think he falls far short of Tolstoy, in the one case, and of Dostoievsky, in the other. Judged as a whole, I think he is far excelled, for different reasons, by Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and by Gogol, who surpasses him immeasurably alike in imagination, humour and truth. I have endeavoured to explain why in various portions of this book. I will not add anything further here, and I only hope that I have made it sufficiently clear that although I admire other Russian writers more than Tourgeniev, I am no image-breaker; and that although I worship more fervently at other altars, I never for a moment intended either to deny or to depreciate the authentic ray of divine light that burns in Tourgeniev’s work.[16]