Turgenev stood, in the ’seventies, between the camps of the extremists, the old nobility who worked to prevent, hinder or suppress every reform, and the shallow, hot-headed theorists, who wished to force the pace, but whose talk ended in “smoke.” Consequently he was frequently accused of cowardice by the revolutionaries on the one hand, and by the Conservatives of complicity with the revolutionaries, on the other.[23] As an artist, while he stood aside from direct political action, his attitude to the revolutionaries appeared necessarily ambiguous. Pavlovsky, however, has well characterized it:

“We see therefore that Turgenev was too variable to be in any sense a man of politics. He was never a Nihilist nor a Revolutionary, and those episodes we have cited are advanced only to show he considered the revolutionaries as an artist. As such they excited his imagination and carried him away like a child. Immediately after reflection he became sceptical and—this was his ordinary mental disposition—never believing in solid results of these agitators, though he retained always great sympathy for the Youth, whom he esteemed beyond all for their constant spirit of self-sacrifice. Both these mental tendencies are clearly to be seen in two of his Poems in Prose, ‘The Workman and the Man with White Hands,’ and ‘The Threshold!’”

[23] See the letter to Madame Viardot, of January 19, 1864, in which Turgenev describes how he was summoned before a Tribunal of the Senate to answer charges of plotting with the revolutionaries, which he did without any trouble.

In Paris, in his last years, Turgenev was in active touch with the colony of young Russians, and assisted with his purse and his advice a number of protégés. A ridiculous hubbub arose in the Russian press on the publication in the Temps of Turgenev’s preface to En Cellule, a tale by one of these protégés, Pavlovsky, and Turgenev in a letter to the Malva thereupon defined his political faith:

“Paris, December 30, 1879.

“Without vanity or circumlocution, and merely stating facts I have the right to say that my convictions put on record in the press and in other sources, have not changed an iota in the last forty years. I have never hidden them from any one. To the young I have always been and have remained a moderate, a liberal of the old-fashioned stamp, a man who looks for reforms from above, and is opposed to the revolution.

“If young Russia appreciated me it was in that light, and if the ovations offered were dear to me, it was precisely because I did not go to seek the young generation, but it who came to me.”

Turgenev’s political creed may be read without the slightest ambiguity between the lines of A Sportsman’s Sketches and his great novels. It is a creed of the necessity of the people’s mental and spiritual enlightenment, of the amelioration of bad social conditions and of the establishment of constitutional government, in the place of despotism.[24]

[24] Kropotkin tells us: “I saw Turgenev for the last time in the autumn of 1881. He was very ill, and worried by the thought that it was his duty to write to Alexander III. who had just come to the throne, and hesitated as to the policy he should follow—asking him to give Russia a constitution, and proving to him by solid arguments the necessity of that step. With evident grief he said to me, ‘I feel that I must do it, but I feel I shall not be able to do it.’ In fact, he was already suffering awful pains occasioned by a cancer in the spinal cord, and had the greatest difficulty in sitting up and talking for a few moments. He did not write then, and a few weeks later it would have been useless, Alexander III. had announced in a manifesto his resolution to remain the absolute ruler of Russia.”—Memoirs of a Revolutionist, vol. ii. p. 222.

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THE TALES