In the above passage the feeling of the shadowy earth, the mist, the great plain and the floating cries rarefies the village atmosphere of human commonness. By such a representation of the people’s figures, seen in just relation to their surroundings, to their fellows, and to nature, Turgenev’s art secures for his picture poetic harmony, and renders these finer cadences in the turmoil of life which ears less sensitive than his fail to hear! The parts in just relation to the whole scheme of human existence. Man, earth and heaven—it is the secret of the perfection of the great poets.
IV
“RUDIN”
CHAPTER IV
“RUDIN”
The biographers tell us that Turgenev left Russia again in 1847, for the sake of being near Pauline Garcia, the famous singer (afterwards Madame Viardot), whom he adored all his life; that he left her in Berlin, visited Salzbrunn with the critic Byelinsky, who was dying of consumption, and then proceeded to Paris, Brussels, Lyons and Courtavenel. In Paris he works incessantly, producing plays and short stories and most of the series of A Sportsman’s Sketches; makes friends with Hertzen and George Sand; studies the French classics and avows his democratic sympathies, without any illusions as to the good-for-nothingness of “the Reds.” In the autumn of 1858 he returns to Russia, recalled by news of the grave illness of his mother, who, however, refused to be reconciled with her two sons, whom she tried to disinherit on her deathbed. Turgenev was henceforward a rich man. In 1852 A Sportsman’s Sketches appeared in book form, and in April of the same year, for writing a sympathetic article on Gogol’s death, Turgenev was ordered a month’s detention in a police-station and then confined to his estate at Spasskoe.[13]
[13] “I am confined in a police-station by the Emperor’s orders for having printed a short article on Gogol in a Moscow journal. This was only a pretext, the article itself being perfectly insignificant. They have looked at me askance for a long time, and they have laid hold of this pretext at the first opportunity. I do not complain of the Emperor; the matter has been so deceitfully represented to him that he couldn’t have acted otherwise. They have wished to put a stop on all that is being said on Gogol’s death, and they have not been sorry, at the same time, to place an embargo on my literary activity.”—Letter to M. and Mme. Viardot, May 13, 1852.
Turgenev notes that his imperious desire to escape to Europe indicated “Possibly something lacking in my character or force of will.” But he declares, “I should never have written A Sportsman’s Sketches had I remained in Russia.... It was impossible for me to remain and breathe the same air that gave life to everything I abhorred.” The persecution of his literary forerunners and contemporaries by the Autocracy was continuous. Pushkin’s humiliation and subjection to official authority; Lermontov’s exile to the Caucasus; Tchaadaev declared insane by bureaucratic order and confined to a mad-house; Gogol’s recantation of Dead Souls and relapse into feeble mysticism; Hertzen’s expatriation; Dostoevsky’s and Petrashevsky’s exile to the mines of Siberia; Saltykov’s banishment, etc., the list of the intellectual and creative minds gagged or stifled under Nicholas I. is endless. And Turgenev’s mild and generous spirit was designed neither for political partisanship nor for active revolt. He has indeed been accused of timidity,[14] and cowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries. But his life-work is the answer to these ill-considered allegations. Spiritual enfranchisement was impossible in “the swamp of Petersburg with its Winter Palace, eight Ministries, three Polices, the most Holy Synod, and all the exalted family with their German relatives,” as Hertzen wittily put it later; and by faring abroad and by inhaling deep draughts of free European air Turgenev was enabled, in his own phrase, “to strike the enemy from a distance.”
[14] In an access of self-reproach he once declared to a friend that his character was comprised in one word—“poltroon.”