Turgenev: A Study

by Edward Garnett

CHAPTER VII

“FATHERS AND CHILDREN”

I

While On the Eve signalizes the end of the Crimea epoch and the break-up of the crushing, overwhelming régime of Nicholas, Fathers and Children is a forecast of the new Liberal movement which arose in the Russia of the ’sixties, and an analysis of the formidable type appearing on the political horizon—the Nihilist.

Turgenev was the first man to detect the existence of this new type, the Nihilist. His own account of his discovery gives us such an interesting glimpse of his method in creative work that we transcribe a passage from his paper on Fathers and Children, written at Baden in 1869:

“It was in the month of August 1860, when I was taking sea baths at Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight, that the first idea of Fathers and Children came into my head; that novel, thanks to which the favourable opinion of the younger generation about me, has come to an end. Many times I have heard and read in critical journals that I have only been elaborating an idea of my own.... For my part, I ought to confess that I never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, in whom the various elements were harmonised together, to work from. I have always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly. This was the case with Fathers and Children. At the foundation of the principal figure Bazarov was the personality of a young provincial doctor. He died not long before 1860. In that remarkable man was incarnated to my ideas the just rising element, which, still chaotic, afterwards received the title of Nihilism. The impression produced by this individual was very strong. At first I could not clearly define him to myself. But I strained my eyes and ears, watching everything surrounding me, anxious to trust simply in my own sensations. What confounded me was that I had met not a single idea or hint of what seemed appearing to me on all sides. And the doubt involuntarily suggested itself....”

Fathers and Children was published in the spring of 1862 in Katkoff’s paper, The Russian Messenger, the organ of the Younger Generation, and the stormy controversy that the novel immediately provoked was so bitter, deep and lasting that the episode forms one of the most interesting chapters in literary history. Rarely has so great an artist so thoroughly drawn public attention to a scrutiny of new ideas rising in its midst; rarely has so great an artist come into such violent collision with his own party thereby; never, perhaps, has there been so striking an illustration of the incapacity of the public, swayed by party passion, to understand a pure work of art. The effect of the publication was widespread excitement in both political camps. Everybody was, at the time, on the alert to see what would be the next move on the political board. The recent Emancipation of the Serfs was looked upon by Young Russia as only the prelude to many democratic measures, while the Reactionists professed to see in that measure the ruin of the country and the beginning of the end. The fast-increasing antipathy between the Old Order and the New, like a fire, required only a puff of wind to set it ablaze. And Bazarov’s character and aims came as a godsend to the Reactionists, who hailed in it the portrait of the insidious revolutionary ideas current in Young Russia; and they hastened to crowd round Turgenev, ironically congratulating the former champion of Liberalism on his penetration and honesty in unmasking the Nihilist. But we will quote Turgenev’s own words:

“I will not enlarge on the effect produced by this novel. I will only say that everywhere the word Nihilist was caught up by a thousand tongues, and that on the day of the conflagration of the Apraksinsky shops, when I arrived in St. Petersburg, the first exclamation with which I was greeted was, ‘Just see what your Nihilists are doing!’ ... I experienced a coldness approaching to indignation from people near and sympathetic to me. I received congratulations, almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy.... While some attack me for outraging the Younger Generation, and promise me, with a laugh of contempt, to burn my photograph, others, on the contrary, with indignation, reproach me for my servile cringing to the Younger Generation.... ‘You are grovelling at the feet of Bazarov. You pretend to find fault with him, and you are licking the dust at his feet,’ says one correspondent. Another critic represented M. Katkoff and me as two conspirators, ‘plotting in the solitude of our chamber our traps and slanders against the forces of Young Russia.’ An effective picture!... My critics called my work a pamphlet, and referred to my wounded and irritated vanity.... A shadow has fallen on my name. I don’t deceive myself. I know that shadow will remain.”

Politics is a game where the mistakes and admissions of your adversary are your good character in public opinion—a definition which goes far to account for the easy predominance of the political sharper,—and so Turgenev, the great artist, he who, in creating Bazarov for an ungrateful public, to use his own words, “simply did not know how to work otherwise,” found to his cost. The Younger Generation, irritated by the public capital made out of Bazarov and his Nihilism by “the Fathers,” flew into the other extreme, and refused to see in Bazarov anything other than a caricature of itself. It denied Bazarov was of its number, or represented its views in any way; and to this day surviving Nihilists will demonstrate warmly that the creation of his sombre figure is “a mistake from beginning to end.” The reason for this wholesale rejection of Bazarov is easy to account for; and Turgenev, whose clear-sightedness about his works was unaffected either by vanity, diffidence or the ignorant onslaughts of the whole tribe of minor critics, penetrates at once to the heart of the matter:

“The whole ground of the misunderstanding lay in the fact that the type of Bazarov had not time to pass through the usual phases. At the very moment of his appearance the author attacked him. It was a new method as well as a new type I introduced—that of Realizing instead of Idealizing.... The reader is easily thrown into perplexity when the author does not show clear sympathy or antipathy to his own child. The reader readily gets angry.... After all, books exist to entertain.”