Turgenev: A Study

by Edward Garnett

CHAPTER X

THE TALES

In addition to his six great novels Turgenev published, between 1846 and his death in 1883, about forty tales which reflect as intimately social atmospheres of the ’thirties, ’forties and ’fifties as do Tchehov’s stories atmospheres of the ’eighties and ’nineties. Several of these tales, as The Torrents of Spring, are of considerable length, but their comparatively simple structure places them definitely in the class of the conte. While their form is generally free and straightforward, the narrative, put often in the mouth of a character who by his comments and asides exchanges at will his active rôle for that of a spectator, is capable of the most subtle modulations. An examination of the chronological order of the tales shows how very delicately Turgenev’s art is poised between realism and romanticism. In his finest examples, such as The Brigadier and A Lear of the Steppes, the two elements fuse perfectly, like the meeting of wave and wind in sea foam. “Nature placed Turgenev between poetry and prose,” says Henry James; and if one hazards a definition we should prefer to term Turgenev a poetic realist.

In our first chapter we glanced at The Duellist, and in the same year (1846) appeared The Jew, a close study, based on a family anecdote, of Semitic double-dealing and family feeling: also Three Portraits, a more or less faithful ancestral chronicle. This latter tale, though the hero is of the proud, bad, “Satanic” order of the romantic school, is firmly objective, as is also Pyetushkov (1847), whose lively, instinctive realism is so bold and intimate as to contradict the compliment that the French have paid themselves—that Turgenev ever had need to dress his art by the aid of French mirrors.

Although Pyetushkov shows us, by a certain open naïveté of style, that a youthful hand is at work, it is the hand of a young master carrying out Gogol’s satiric realism with finer point, to find a perfect equilibrium free from bias or caricature. The essential strength of the realistic method is developed in Pyetushkov to its just limits, and note it is the Russian realism carrying the warmth of life into the written page, which warmth the French so often lose in clarifying their impressions and crystallizing them in art. Observe how the reader is transported bodily into Pyetushkov’s stuffy room, how the Major fairly boils out of the two pages he lives in, and how Onisim and Vassilissa and the aunt walk and chatter around the stupid Pyetushkov, and laugh at him behind his back in a manner that exhales the vulgar warmth of these people’s lower-class world. One sees that the latter holds few secrets for Turgenev. Three years earlier had appeared Andrei Kolosov (1844), a sincere diagnosis of youth’s sentimental expectations, raptures and remorse, in presence of the other sex, in this case a girl who is eager for a suitor. The sketch is characteristically Russian in its analytic honesty, but Turgenev’s charm is here lessened by his over-literal exactitude. And passing to The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850), we must remark that this famous study of a type of a petty provincial Hamlet reveals a streak of suffused sentimentalism in Turgenev’s nature, one which comes to the surface the more subjective is the handling of his theme, and the less his great technical skill in modelling his subject is called for. The last-named story belongs to a group with which we must place Faust (1853), Yakov Pasinkov (1855), A Correspondence (1855) and even the tender and charming Acia (1857), all of which stories, though rich in emotional shades and in beautiful descriptions, are lacking in fine chiselling. The melancholy yearning of the heroes and heroines through failure or misunderstanding, though no doubt true to life, seems to-day too imbued with emotional hues of the Byronic romanticism of the period, and in this small group of stories Turgenev’s art is seen definitely dated, even old-fashioned.

In The Country Inn (1852), we are back on the firm ground of an objective study of village types, with clear, precise outlines, a detailed drawing from nature, strong yet subtle; as is also Mumu (1852), one based on a household episode that passed before Turgenev’s youthful eyes, in which the deaf-mute Gerassim, a house serf, is defrauded first of the girl he loves, and then of his little dog, Mumu, whom he is forced to drown, stifling his pent-up affection, at the caprice of his tyrannical old mistress. The story is a classic example of Turgenev’s tender insight and beauty of feeling. As delicate, but more varied in execution is The Backwater, with its fresh, charming picture of youth’s insouciance and readiness to take a wrong turning, a story which in its atmospheric freshness and emotional colouring may be compared with Tchehov’s studies of youth in The Seagull, a play in which the neurotic spiritual descendants of Marie and Nadejda, Veretieff and Steltchinsky, appear and pass into the shadows. This note of the fleetingness of youth and happiness reappears in A Tour of the Forest (1857), where Turgenev’s acute sense of man’s ephemeral life in face of the eternity of nature finds full expression. The description, here, of the vast, gloomy, murmuring pine forest, with its cold, dim solitudes, is finely contrasted with the passing outlook of the peasants, Yegor, Kondrat, and the wild Efrem. (See p. 16.)

The rich colour and perfume of Turgenev’s delineation of romantic passion are disclosed when we turn to First Love (1860), which details the fervent adoration of Woldemar, a boy of sixteen, for the fascinating Zinaïda, an exquisite creation, who, by her mutability and caressing, mocking caprice keeps her bevy of eager suitors in suspense till at length she yields herself in her passion to Woldemar’s father. This study of the intoxication of adolescent love is, again, based on an episode of Turgenev’s youth, in which he and his father played the identical rôles of Woldemar and his father. Here we tremble on the magic borderline between prose and poetry, and the fragrance of blossoming love instincts is felt pervading all the fluctuating impulses of grief, tenderness, pity and regret which combine in the tragic close. The profoundly haunting apostrophe to youth is indeed a pure lyric. Passing to Phantoms (1863), which we discuss with Prose Poems (see p. 200), the truth of Turgenev’s confession that spiritually and sensuously he was saturated with the love of woman and ever inspired by it, is confirmed. In his description of Alice, the winged phantom-woman, who gradually casts her spell over the sick hero, luring him to fly with her night after night over the vast expanse of earth, Turgenev has in a mysterious manner, all his own, concentrated the very essence of woman’s possessive love. Alice’s hungry yearning for self-completion, her pleading arts, her sad submissiveness, her rapture in her hesitating lover’s embrace, are artistically a sublimation of all the impressions and instincts by which woman fascinates, and fulfils her purpose of creation. The projection of this shadowy woman’s love-hunger on the mighty screen of the night earth, and the merging of her power in men’s restless energies, felt and divined through the sweeping tides of nature’s incalculable forces, is an inspiration which, in its lesser fashion, invites comparison with Shakespeare’s creative vision of nature and the supernatural.

In his treatment of the supernatural Turgenev, however, sometimes missed his mark. The Dog (1866) is of a coarser and indeed of an ordinary texture. With the latter story may be classed The Dream (1876), curiously Byronic in imagery and atmosphere, and artistically not convincing. Far more sincere, psychologically, is Clara Militch (1882), a penetrating study of a passionate temperament, a story based on a tragedy of Parisian life. In our opinion The Song of Triumphant Love, though exquisite in its jewelled mediaeval details, has been overrated by the French, and Turgenev’s genius is here seen contorted and cramped by the genre.

To return to the tales of the ’sixties. Lieutenant Yergunov’s Story, though its strange atmosphere is cunningly painted, is not of the highest quality, comparing unfavourably with The Brigadier (1867), the story of the ruined nobleman, Vassily Guskov, with its tender, sub-ironical studies of odd characters, Narkiz and Cucumber. The Brigadier has a peculiarly fascinating poignancy, and must be prized as one of the rarest of Turgenev’s high achievements, even as the connoisseur prizes the original beauty of a fine Meryon etching. The tale is a microcosm of Turgenev’s own nature; his love of Nature, his sympathy with all humble, ragged, eccentric, despised human creatures, his unfaltering, keen gaze into character, his perfect eye for relative values in life, all mingle in The Brigadier to create for us a sense of the vicissitudes of life, of how a generation of human seed springs and flourishes awhile on earth and soon withers away under the menacing gaze of the advancing years.

A complete contrast to The Brigadier is the sombre and savagely tragic piece of realism, An Unhappy Girl (1868). As a study of a coarse and rapacious nature the portrait of Mr. Ratsch, the Germanized Czech, is a revelation of the depths of human swinishness. Coarse malignancy is here “the power of darkness” which closes, as with a vice, round the figure of the proud, helpless, exquisite girl, Susanna. There is, alas, no exaggeration in this unrelenting, painful story. The scene of Susanna’s playing of the Beethoven sonata (chapter xiii.) demonstrates how there can be no truce between a vile animal nature and pure and beautiful instincts, and a faint suggestion symbolic of the national “dark forces” at work in Russian history deepens the impression. The worldly power of greed, lust and envy, ravaging, whether in war or peace, which seize on the defenceless and innocent, as their prey, here triumphs over Susanna, the victim of Mr. Ratsch’s violence. The last chapter, the banquet scene, satirizes “the dark forest” of the heart when greed and baseness find their allies in the inertness, sloth or indifference of the ordinary man.