A Strange Story (1869) has special psychological interest for the English mind in that it gives clues to some fundamental distinctions between the Russian and the Western soul. Sophie’s words, “You spoke of the will—that’s what must be broken,” seems strange to English thought. To be lowly, to be suffering, despised, to be unworthy, this desire implies that the Slav character is apt to be lacking in will, that it finds it easier to resign itself than to make the effort to be triumphant or powerful. The Russian people’s attitude, historically, may, indeed, be compared to a bowl which catches and sustains what life brings it; and the Western people’s to a bowl inverted to ward off what fate drops from the impassive skies. The mental attitude of the Russian peasant indeed implies that in blood he is nearer akin to the Asiatics than the Russian ethnologists wish to allow. Certainly in the inner life, intellectually, morally and emotionally, the Russian is a half-way house between the Western and Eastern races, just as geographically he spreads over the two continents.
Brilliant also is Knock-Knock-Knock (1870), a psychological study, of “a man fated,” a Byronic type of hero, dear to the heart of the writers of the romantic period. Sub-Lieutenant Teglev, the melancholy, self-centred hero, whose prepossession of a tragic end nothing can shake, so that he ends by throwing himself into the arms of death, this portrait is most cunningly fortified by the wonderfully life-like atmosphere of the river fog in which the suicide is consummated. Turgenev’s range of mood is disclosed in Punin and Baburin (1874), a leisurely reminiscence of his mother’s household; but the delicious blending of irony and kindness in the treatment of both Punin and Baburin atones for the lengthy conclusion. Of The Watch (1875), a story for boys, nothing here need be said, except that it is inferior to the delightful The Quail, a souvenir d’enfance written at the Countess Tolstoy’s request for an audience of children. In considering A Lear of the Steppes (1870), The Torrents of Spring (1871) and A Living Relic (1874), we shall sum up here our brief survey of Turgenev’s achievement in the field of the conte.
In The Torrents of Spring the charm, the grace, the power of Turgenev’s vision are seen bathing his subject, revealing all its delicate lineaments in a light as fresh and tender as that of a day of April sunlight in Italy. Torrents of Spring, not Spring Floods, be it remarked, is the true significance of the Russian, telling of a moment of the year when all the forces of Nature are leaping forth impetuously, the mounting sap, the hill streams, the mating birds, the blood in the veins of youth. The opening perhaps is a little over-leisurely, this description of the Italian confectioner’s family, and its fortunes in Frankfort, but how delightful is the contrast in racial spirit between the pedantic German shop-manager, Herr Klüber and Pantaleone, and the lovely Gemma. But the long opening prelude serves as a foil to heighten the significant story of the seduction of the youthful Sanin by Maria Nikolaevna, that clear-eyed “huntress of men”; one of the most triumphant feminine portraits in the whole range of fiction. The spectator feels that this woman in her ruthless charm is the incarnation of a cruel principle in Nature, while we watch her preparing to strike her talons into her fascinated, struggling prey. Her spirit’s essence, in all its hard, merciless joy of conquest, is disclosed by Turgenev in his rapid, yet exhaustive glances at her disdainful treatment of her many lovers, and of her cynical log of a husband. The extraordinarily clear light in the narrative, that of spring mountain air, waxes stronger towards the climax, and the artistic effort of the whole is that of some exquisite Greek cameo, with figures of centaurs and fleeing nymphs and youthful shepherds; though the postscript indeed is an excrescence which detracts from the main impression of pure, classic outlines.
Not less perfect as art though far slighter in scope is the exquisite A Living Relic (1874), one of the last of A Sportsman’s Sketches. Along with the narrator we pass, in a step, from the clear sunlight and freshness of early morning, “when the larks’ songs seemed steeped in dew,” into the “little wattled shanty with its burden of a woman’s suffering,” poor Lukerya’s, who lies, summer after summer, resigned to her living death:
“... I was walking away....
“‘Master, master! Piotr Petrovitch!’ I heard a voice, faint, slow, and hoarse, like the whispering of marsh rushes.
“I stopped.
“‘Piotr Petrovitch! Come in, please!’ the voice repeated. It came from the corner where were the trestles I had noticed.
“I drew near, and was struck dumb with amazement. Before me lay a living human being; but what sort of creature was it?
“A head utterly withered, of a uniform coppery hue—like some very ancient and holy picture, yellow with age; a sharp nose like a keen-edged knife; the lips could barely be seen—only the teeth flashed white and the eyes; and from under the kerchief sometimes wisps of yellow hair struggled on to the forehead. At the chin, where the quilt was folded, two tiny hands of the same coppery hue were moving, the fingers slowly twitching like little sticks. I looked more intently; the face far from being ugly was positively beautiful, but strange and dreadful; and the face seemed more dreadful to me that on it—on its metallic cheeks—I saw struggling ... struggling and unable to form itself—a smile.
“‘You don’t recognize me, master?’ whispered the voice again; it seemed to be breathed from the almost unmoving lips! ‘And, indeed, how should you? I’m Lukerya.... Do you remember, who used to lead the dance at your mother’s, at Spasskoe?... Do you remember, I used to be leader of the choir, too?’
“‘Lukerya!’ I cried. ‘Is it you? Can it be?’
“‘Yes, it’s I, master—I, Lukerya.’
“I did not know what to say, and gazed in stupefaction at the dark motionless face with the clear, deathlike eyes fastened upon me. Was it possible? This mummy Lukerya—the greatest beauty in all our household—that tall, plump, pink-and-white, singing, laughing, dancing creature! Lukerya, our smart Lukerya, whom all our lads were courting, for whom I heaved some secret sighs—I a boy of sixteen!”
Lukerya tells her story. How one night she could not sleep, and, thinking of her lover, rose to listen to a nightingale in the garden; how half-dreaming she fell from the top stairs—and now she lives on, a little shrivelled mummy. Something is broken inside her body, and the doctors all shake their heads over her case. Her lover, Polyakov, has married another girl, a good sweet woman. “He couldn’t stay a bachelor all his life, and they have children.”
And Lukerya? All is not blackness in her wasted life. She is grateful for people’s kindness to her.... She can hear everything, see everything that comes near her shed—the nesting swallows, the bees, the doves cooing on the roof. Lying alone in the long hours she can smell every scent from the garden, the flowering buckwheat, the lime tree. The priest, the peasant girls, sometimes a pilgrim woman, come and talk to her, and a little girl, a pretty, fair little thing, waits on her. She has her religion, her strange dreams, and sometimes, in her poor, struggling little voice that wavers like a thread of smoke, she tries to sing, as of old. But she is waiting for merciful death—which now is nigh her.
Infinitely tender in the depth of understanding is this gem of art, and A Living Relic’s perfection is determined by Turgenev’s scrutiny of the warp and woof of life, in which the impassive forces of Nature, indifferent alike to human pain or human happiness, pursue their implacable way, weaving unwittingly the mesh of joy, anguish, resignation, in the breast of all sentient creation. It is in the spiritual perspective of the picture, in the vision that sees the whole in the part, and the part in the whole, that Turgenev so far surpasses all his European rivals.
To those critics, Russian and English, who naïvely slur over the aesthetic qualities of a masterpiece, such as A Lear of the Steppes (1870), or fail to recognize all that aesthetic perfection implies, we address these concluding remarks. A Lear of the Steppes is great in art, because it is a living organic whole, springing from the deep roots of life itself; and the innumerable works of art that are fabricated and pasted together from an ingenious plan—works that do not grow from the inevitability of things—appear at once insignificant or false in comparison.
In examining the art, the artist will note Turgenev’s method of introducing his story. Harlov, the Lear of the story, is brought forward with such force on the threshold that all eyes resting on his figure cannot but follow his after-movements. And absolute conviction gained, all the artist’s artful after-devices and subtle presentations and side-lights on the story are not apparent under the straightforward ease and the seeming carelessness with which the narrator describes his boyish memories. Then the inmates of Harlov’s household, his two daughters, and a crowd of minor characters, are brought before us as persons in the tragedy, and we see that all these people are living each from the innate laws of his being, apparently independently of the author’s scheme. This conviction, that the author has no prearranged plan, convinces us that in the story we are living a piece of life: here we are verily plunging into life itself.