Turgenev Revisited
A hundred years ago, in 1855, the first translations from Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches appeared in French and British periodicals, and since that time his works have continued to gain an ever increasing acclaim in the Western world. Henry James, one of his fervent admirers, was not exaggerating when he wrote in 1874 that the Russian was “the first novelist of the day,” and Howells confessed a few years later that he had formed for Turgenev “one of the profoundest literary passions” of his life. At the beginning of the present century Arnold Bennett, asked to name the twelve best novels of world literature, included six of Turgenev’s in his honor list. Flaubert and Galsworthy, Conrad and Maupassant paid high tribute to Turgenev and ranked him with Fielding, Thackeray, and Balzac.
Turgenev was the first Russian writer to conquer large audiences outside his native land. He actually introduced Russian literature to Europe and America which, through him, discovered and admired the originality of Russian genius. The impact of his own work, moreover, was enhanced by his personal influence. For almost three decades Turgenev, who spent more time abroad than at home, was recognized as the ambassador of Russian letters in Europe. Friend of most outstanding representatives of European art and thought, he was a familiar figure in Western capitals, and the honorary degree awarded to him by the University of Oxford was but a small part of the homage paid to him by his devotees.
Yet despite his unique position and his wide following in almost every land, Turgenev’s fortunes declined sharply in the twentieth century, when many reservations were formulated about his work and person. Some of these qualifications revived old discussions and repeated arguments known already in Turgenev’s lifetime; some of them, however, were of more recent origin and expressed doubts peculiar to our century.
It is well known that most of Turgenev’s illustrious French colleagues as well as Henry James and the Scandinavian-American Boyesen, who met the Russian personally, always spoke of him as being “completely Russian.” The brothers Goncourt describe him in their Journal of 1863 as a “white haired giant who looked like the spirit of a mountain or a forest,” an embodiment of Russian soil; Henry James stressed his eminently Russian characteristics and his preoccupation with Russian affairs; and after his death Renan said that “he was the incarnation of the whole race ... his conscience was in some sort the conscience of a people.” It is curious that the main reservation of later times dealt precisely with the problem of Turgenev’s national authenticity. There is still a widespread opinion that the author of Fathers and Sons became dear to readers outside Russia because of his European formation and his Western leanings. Alfred Kazin stated not long ago that Turgenev “seemed of all the great Russians the least characteristic”; the American critic understands perfectly why Henry James “found it so easy in 1878 to include an appreciation of Turgenev in French Poets and Novelists.” The familiar thesis is that Europeans and Americans of the last century loved Turgenev for his moderation, his conformity to the rules of Victorian art, and his lack of irritating and disturbing Russian national traits. The supporters of this opinion point out that Turgenev’s novels and tales are as tame and respectable as their British counterparts of the same period; his heroines are not very different from the misses in the English family novels, and his nests of gentlefolk could be easily located in the countryside on the other side of the channel or even in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Turgenev’s urbane and restrained manners and his polished style, his gloss and grace, are considered as having been more suitable to and therefore more naturally appreciated in London and Boston than in Moscow and St Petersburg (not to speak of Leningrad).
When Tolstoy and Dostoevsky became known and widely read at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, they not only overshadowed Turgenev but were opposed to him as genuine interpreters of the Russian national scene. Compared to those two giants who shattered the world by the depth and frenzy of their moral and religious search, Turgenev lost in stature. Some critics advanced the theory that he was but an isolated phenomenon in Russian letters; that in any case he did not represent its main stream. His art, they argued, was strangely devoid of any serious moral intent, he never affirmed anything in any area of human endeavour, he never defended any doctrine and never fought on the side of any group. In this he differed fundamentally from other Russians. They were believers or searchers for truth and seekers after God, and he was an agnostic and a skeptic. He belonged much more to the old world of Western decadent culture than to the rising lands of the revolutionary East. And this is why, to quote Mr Kazin again, Turgenev’s “civilized and European art seems no longer in the foreground of Russian literature but behind it.” His unhappy noblemen and his delicately portrayed girls appeared elusive, sentimental, and pallid next to Dostoevsky’s holy sinners and Tolstoy’s robust, full blooded men and women. While the rest of Russian literature conveyed the feeling of exuberant vitality and deep passions, Turgenev’s watercolors exuded melancholy and passivity, and his protagonists (except for Bazarov) talked and acted like second rate Werthers or poor versions of Hamlet. Was he not, in fact, the author of a story entitled Hamlet of the Shchigrov District?
One of the few Russians who did not try to preach and to win over the reader to some credo or idea, Turgenev became suspect even as a chronicler of his society. Russian critics had always interpreted Turgenev’s novels as illustrations of the evolutionary process within the native educated classes between 1850 and 1880. Rudin (1855) represented the idealist of the forties, Lavretzky (1858) was typical of the fifties, On the Eve (1860) conveyed the atmosphere of expectation before the era of great reforms, and Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1861) personified the new generation of nihilists. Later Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1877) reflected the political debate and the beginnings of the populist movement. Already during Turgenev’s lifetime his pictures of Russia started numerous discussions, and, as Edward Garnett said in his essay in 1917, provoked much angry heat and raised great clouds of acrimonious smoke because the defenders and the detractors of the writer disagreed about the historical accuracy of his representation. And fifty years after his death his importance as a social realist was questioned again. His portrayals of superfluous men afflicted by idleness or paralysis of the will seemed particularly inappropriate at a time when the Revolution had unleashed such an astounding amount of energy in Russia and transformed the whole country into an immense workshop. Not only was Turgenev lacking in “publicity value” but when things Russian were popular or when everybody was trying to solve the riddles of Russia’s present regime, Turgenev could hardly help. Charles Morgan said in this connection that Turgenev was too unspectacular, too moderate and patient in spirit. Besides, his protagonists did not look like ancestors of twentieth-century Russians (again excepting Bazarov). And this led to an obvious conclusion: his novels and tales belonged to another age, they were visions of the past, and theirs was the quaint charm of early daguerreotypes in period frames. Turgenev was old fashioned, dated, and offered only an historical interest. Of course, it would be erroneous to identify any work of fiction with a straight representation of reality, but in Turgenev’s case it was assumed that, while not making an exception to the rule, he was especially insensitive to Russia’s historical development. He could not foresee its future and never went beyond the limitations of the small social group to which he belonged and which he depicted with an almost annoying monotony.
Doubts were also cast on Turgenev’s art. In the nineteenth century even those who wondered about Turgenev’s national authenticity or his social philosophy and historical accuracy recognized his craft and mastery. Yet the same George Moore who spoke of Turgenev’s “unfailing artistry” in the eighties, later reproached him as having “a thinness, an irritating reserve,” and repeated the quip of a British journalist who remarked that the Russian was “a very big man playing a very small instrument.” The same George Moore echoed the discontent of the younger generation with Turgenev’s lack of psychological depth: “he has often seemed to us to have left much unsaid, to have, as it were, only drawn the skin from his subject. Magnificently well is the task performed; but we should like to have seen the carcass disembowelled and hung up.” Maurice Baring wrote in the twenties that Turgenev’s works were dated, that he was inaccurate as a social historian and did not reflect the true Russia, and that his subject matter was too narrow. Others added in the thirties that Turgenev, this minor Hamlet who depicted unhappy love affairs of aristocratic ladies, covered only a small area of Russian reality. He was not sufficiently dynamic or varied, there was something effeminate about his manner, and his lyrical qualities were superficial. In general his art was too contrived and self conscious, its gentility simply expressing an organic lack of directness and vitality. A German critic of the thirties found “sweet and pleasant this art for convalescents which makes one agreeably drowsy.”
While Marxist critics were inclined to see in Turgenev a “literary ghost from a sunken world of landed gentry” whose pessimism expressed the doom of his own class, others attacked the very smoothness of Turgenev’s style. Alexis Remizov, an outstanding emigré novelist who appreciated Turgenev and refused to “simplify” problems deriving from his work, identified him nevertheless with the “Karamzine line of Russian letters”: in the opinion of Remizov and many of his followers, Karamzine initiated in the eighteenth century that artificial literary idiom of the upper classes which abandoned the racy genuine language of the people and imitated the literary models of the West. The Karamzine-Turgenev-Chekhov trend of elegance, restraint, and linguistic refinement was opposed by the truly national tradition of pre-Petrine Russia with its down-to-earth realism, Greek-Orthodox and pagan roots, and popular vernacular. From that point of view Turgenev again was declared “unfit for our times, not representative as a Russian writer,” edulcorated and conventional as an artist.
While all these criticisms were widespread in literary circles of the thirties, World War II and its aftermath brought about a change of heart and a revision of current judgments of Turgenev. Apparently readers both in Russia and the Western countries as well as throughout Asia (particularly in China and Japan) showed more stability than the critics: they did not seem to find Turgenev so dated as to drop him. Turgenev emerged as one of the most popular authors in the Soviet Union, particularly in the decade following the war with Hitler. Between 1948 and 1958 the USSR press turned out an average of three to four million copies of his works yearly, and in America and Europe there was a definite revival of interest. His novels and short stories were issued in new translations and found a large following among young and old.
It is evident that only few went to Turgenev for wisdom on the fate of communism or to gain some “first hand knowledge of Russia,” a fashionable slogan of the time. But historians of literature and students of Turgenev suddenly discovered more profound reasons for his hundred-year hold over the general public. Charles Morgan, in an essay in his Reflections in a Mirror (1944), observed that Turgenev was criticised for his calm and his outward lack of dynamism, but then appropriately quoted Tolstoy’s letter to Strakhov (Dostoevsky’s biographer and disciple) after Turgenev’s death: “The longer I live,” wrote Tolstoy, “the more I like horses that are not restive. You say that you are reconciled to Turgenev. And I have come to love him very much, and curiously enough, just because he is not restive but gets to his destination. Turgenev will outlive Dostoevsky and not for his artistic qualities but because he is not restive.”
Tolstoy pointed out that Turgenev’s quiet tone was the result of control and not indifference. The strength of his understatement, enhanced by the neatness of his composition, was based on his essential humanity. Therefore it is erroneous to rank Turgenev with the representatives of the “well-made novel.” Of course, he used the “dramatic technique,” followed strictly the rule of the withdrawal of the author from his narrative, and built the latter on the revelation of characters through their actions and words. But he never tried to conceal his aversions and sympathies. The spontaneity of his emotional response and the freedom of his treatment of topics and characters made his works totally different from conventional Anglo-Saxon standards and from the French logical formality in constructing the “well-made novel.”
What led to errors of evaluation were his serene diction and his belief that a good work of art must never lose its equilibrium or poise, even when dealing with anxiety and madness. He praised highly the “tranquillity in passion” of the French tragedian Rachel and spoke of her acting as a model of high esthetic fulfillment. Actually, the subject matter of Turgenev’s novels and tales is far from idyllic: his love stories inevitably terminate in doom and frustration, and none of his novels has a happy ending, death striking most of his heroes. Throughout his works Turgenev displays an acute sense of the tragic in life and a constant preoccupation with man’s condition on earth. Yet this pessimism is far from strident, and the writer’s most poignant emotions and reflections are always expressed in an even voice, without outbursts of despair. Turgenev loves order, symmetry, balance, and radiance, and he presents a harmonized picture of life which makes his work appear self-contained. There is a world which can rightly be called “Turgenevian,” and it stands in its own right as a complete and rounded achievement.
It could be argued that such an esthetic phenomenon is of sufficient importance to justify Turgenev’s appeal in 1961. But other factors should be noted to understand the recent revival of interest in his work. Today we find Turgenev much more “authentically Russian” than did readers of half a century ago. Fathers and Sons should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the psychology of the Russian post-revolutionary generation. Bazarov is the forerunner of all the men of action in Soviet literature, in much the same way that Elena, Marianna, and Natalia are typical representatives of Russia’s modern women. It is not difficult to discover that Turgenev’s characters, despite their old fashioned garb, are more fundamentally national than many exotic figures of post-Turgenev fiction who were branded by sensation-craving readers as “true Russians.”
For another thing, Turgenev, with his method of understatement (which Chekhov followed), is closer to modern literary trends than other realists of his own age. One can easily foresee that his tales—and they are probably the best and most enduring part of his work—will attract the attention and admiration of readers and writers for a long time, because they form a counterpart to the era of exaggerated psychologism which is rapidly approaching its decline. Nobody today will accuse Turgenev of “lack of psychological depth” or of over-simplicity. In his own unobtrusive manner, Turgenev hinted at all the complexities of the human soul and alluded to the hidden roots of human actions. In the dreams in Turgenev’s works is an unsuspected wealth of psychological insight.
Virginia Woolf, in her last essays, wrote that “his books were curiously of our own time, undecayed, and complete in themselves.... His novels are so short and yet they hold so much. The emotion is so intense and yet so calm. The form is in one sense so perfect, in another so broken. They are about Russia in the fifties and sixties of the last century, and yet they are about ourselves at the present moment.” What struck her as his greatest accomplishment was the union of fact and vision that he aimed at in all his writings. Turgenev himself formulated his ideal in a letter in which he said that the artist should not be simply satisfied to catch life in all its manifestations; he ought to understand them, to comprehend the laws according to which they evolve—even though those laws are not always visible.
While Turgenev’s national authenticity has been fully reestablished in the last decade and his universality and perfection often stressed by Western and Russian writers, a revision has also taken place with regard to his “objectivity.” The legend of his “impersonality” has been easily denounced by the psychological brand of criticism which found that Turgenev, as an individual, was prey to morbid complexes and obsessions, and suffered from many inner contradictions and fears. Already at the end of the nineteenth century George Moore assumed that “what influenced Turgenev’s life is put forward in his books,” and went on to argue that Turgenev exposed his own weaknesses and failures through the medium of his heroes and their unlucky experiences with life and women. Extremely representative of this trend in contemporary interpretation is the brilliant essay (1958) by Edmund Wilson which examines Turgenev’s art in the light of his biography.
Of course the flow of literary fortune is in constant ebb, and the rejection of yesterday’s formulae by critics and readers of our time is not final. Yet one has the feeling that we have overcome the biased and inimical judgments of the beginning of the century and particularly those of the twenties and thirties. Turgenev is returning to the Pantheon of world literature, not by sufferance but by merit. His lasting qualities as a story teller, as a painter of Russian life and character, and as an incomparable analyst of love seem more evident to us today than they did to the pre-war generation. He will remain a beloved writer for years to come—as long as elegiac grief combined with his exaltation of love and beauty and his vision of art as an orderly arrangement of emotional values can still quicken the feelings and the esthetic sense of men and women throughout the world.
M. S.
Sarah Lawrence College