“Two days afterwards there appeared in the Temps, ‘Les Souvenirs de Sebastopol,’ by Leòn Tolstoi.”—Tourguéneff and his French Circle, p. 188.
[26] “From the letters to Zola ... we shall see with what devotion, sparing neither time nor trouble, Tourguéneff endeavoured to make his friend’s books known in Russia. What he did for Zola, he had already done for Gustave Flaubert; afterwards came Goncourt’s turn and that of Guy de Maupassant. Never did he take such minute pains to safeguard his own interests, as those he took in the service of his friends.”—Tourguéneff and his French Circle, by E. Halpérine-Kaminsky, p. 186.
[27] Flaubert writing to George Sand says, “What an auditor and what a critic is Turgenev! He has dazzled me by the profundity of his judgments. Ah! if all those who dabble in literary criticism could have heard him, what a lesson! Nothing escapes him. At the end of a piece of a hundred lines he remembers a feeble epithet.”
The Poems in Prose (1878-1882), this exquisite collection of short, detached descriptions, scenes, memories, and dreams, yields a complete synthesis in brief of the leading elements in Turgenev’s own temperament and philosophy. The Poems in Prose are unique in Russian literature, one may say unsurpassed for exquisite felicity of language, and for haunting, rhythmical beauty. Turgenev’s characteristic, the perfect fusion of idea and emotion, takes shape here in æsthetic contours which challenge the antique. As with all poetry of a high order, the creative emotion cannot be separated from the imperishable form in which it is cast, and ten lines of the original convey what a lengthy commentary would fail to communicate. We therefore quote a translation of three of the Prose Poems from a version which, however careful, must inevitably fall short of the original:
“NECESSITAS-VIS-LIBERTAS
“A BAS-RELIEF
“A tall bony old woman, with iron face and dull fixed look, moves along with long strides, and, with an arm dry as a stick, pushes before her another woman.
“This woman—of huge stature, powerful, thickset, with the muscles of a Hercules, with a tiny head set on a bull neck, and blind—in her turn pushes before her a small, thin girl.
“This girl alone has eyes that see; she resists, turns round, lifts fair, delicate hands; her face full of life, shows impatience and daring.... She wants not to obey, she wants not to go, where they are driving her ... but, still, she has to yield and go.
“Necessitas-vis-Libertas!
“Who will, may translate.”
“THE SPARROW
“I was returning from hunting, and walking along an avenue of the garden, my dog running in front of me. Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along as though tracking game.
“I looked along the avenue and saw a young sparrow, with yellow about its beak and down on its head. It had fallen out of the nest (the wind was violently shaking the birch-trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move, helplessly fluffing its half-grown wings.
“My dog was slowly approaching it, when, suddenly darting down from a tree close by, an old dark-throated sparrow fell like a stone right before its nose, and all ruffled up, terrified, with despairing and pitiful cheeps, it flung itself twice toward the open jaws of shining teeth.
“It sprang to save; it cast itself before its nestling ... but all its tiny body was shaking with terror; its note was harsh and strange. Swooning with fear it offered itself up!
“What a huge monster must the dog have seemed to it! And yet it could not stay on its high branch out of danger.... A force stronger than its will flung it down.
“My Trésor stood still, drew back.... Clearly he, too, recognized this force.
“I hastened to call off the disconcerted dog, and went away, full of reverence.
“Yes; do not laugh. I felt reverence for that tiny, heroic bird, for its impulse of love.
“Love, I thought, is stronger than death, or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.”
The content, the quiet, the plenty of the Russian earth, “The Country”; the insignificance of man, “A Conversation”; there is no escape from death, “The Old Woman”; the tie between man and the animals, “The Dog”; death reconciles old enemies, “The Last Meeting”; Nature’s indifference to man, “Nature”; the beauty of untroubled, innocent youth, “How Fair and Fresh were the Roses”; the genius of poesy, “A Visit”; the joy of giving and taking, “Alms”; the rich misjudge the poor, “Cabbage Soup”; we always pray for miracles, “Prayer”; Christ is in all men, “Christ”; the immortal hour of genius, “Stay”; love and hunger, “The Two Brothers”; such are a few of the subjects of the Poems in Prose. The permanent appeal of these exquisite little pieces lies in their soft, deep humanity and emotional freshness, while æsthetically they are marked by the broad warm touch in which Turgenev indicates the infinite lights and tones of living nature. Turgenev’s supremacy in style rests, indeed, precisely here, in this faculty of concentrating in a few broad sweeping touches, a wealth of tones which, producing an individual effect, makes a universal appeal to feeling. It is mysterious, this faculty of so massing and concentrating your effect that one detailed touch does the work of half a dozen. Turgenev alone among his contemporaries had mastered this secret of Greek art. It is the emotional breadth, imparted in ease, sureness, and flexibility of stroke, that distinguishes the Poems in Prose from all other examples of the genre. Fresh as the rain, soft as the petal of a flower, warm as the touch of love is “The Rose,” so simple, yet so complete in its message.
“THE ROSE
“The last days of August.... Autumn was already at hand.
“The sun was setting. A sudden downpour of rain, without thunder or lightning, had just passed rapidly over our wide plain.
“The garden in front of the house glowed and steamed, all filled with the fire of the sunset and the deluge of rain.
“She was sitting at a table in the drawing-room, and with persistent dreaminess, gazing through the half-open door into the garden.
“I knew what was passing at that moment in her soul; I knew that, after a brief but agonising struggle, she was at that instant giving herself up to a feeling she could no longer master.
“All at once she got up, went quickly out into the garden, and disappeared.
“An hour passed ... a second; she had not returned.
“Then I got up, and, going out of the house, I turned along the walk by which—of that I had no doubt—she had gone.
“All was darkness about me; the night had already fallen. But on the damp sand of the path a roundish object could be discerned—bright red even through the mist.
“I stooped down. It was a fresh, new-blown rose. Two hours before I had seen this very rose on her bosom.
“I carefully picked up the flower that had fallen in the mud, and, going back to the drawing-room, laid it on the table before her chair.
“And now at last she came back, and with light footsteps, crossing the whole room, sat down at the table.
“Her face was both paler and more vivid; her downcast eyes, that looked somehow smaller, strayed rapidly in happy confusion from side to side.
“She saw the rose, snatched it up, glanced at its crushed, muddy petals, glanced at me, and her eyes, brought suddenly to a standstill, were bright with tears.
“‘What are you crying for?’ I asked.
“‘Why, see this rose. Look what has happened to it.’
“Then I thought fit to utter a profound remark.
“‘Your tears will wash away the mud,’ I pronounced with a significant expression.
“‘Tears do not wash, they burn,’ she answered. And turning to the hearth she flung the rose into the dying flame.
“‘Fire burns even better than tears,’ she cried with spirit; and her lovely eyes, still bright with tears, laughed boldly and happily.
“I saw that she, too, had been through the fire.”
A few of the Poems in Prose, profoundly ironical, as “The Fool,” “A Contented Man,” “The Egoist,” “A Rule of Life,” “Two Strangers,” “The Workmen and the Man with the White Hands,” show the indignation of a large generous heart with human baseness, pettiness, stupidity, and envy. A minority of the poems are instinct with Turgenev’s morbid apprehension of death’s stealthy approach, and the final, unescapable blotting out of life and love by his clutch. Turgenev’s dread of the malignant forces of decay and dissolution had found powerful expression nearly twenty years earlier in Phantoms, where a series of prose poems is enshrined in the setting of a story.
“‘Do not utter her name, not her name,’ Alice faltered hurriedly. ‘We must escape, or there will be an end to everything and for ever.... Look over there!’
“I turned my head in the direction in which her trembling hand was pointing and discerned something ... horrible indeed.
“This something was the more horrible since it had no definite shape. Something bulky, dark, yellowish-black, spotted like a lizard’s belly, not a storm-cloud, and not smoke, was crawling with a snakelike motion over the earth. A wide rhythmic undulating movement from above downwards, and from below upwards, an undulation recalling the malignant sweep of the wings of a vulture seeking its prey; at times an indescribably revolting grovelling on the earth, as of a spider stooping over its captured fly.... Who are you, what are you, menacing mass? Under its influence I saw it, I felt it—all sank into nothingness, all was dumb.... A putrefying, pestilential chill came from it. At this chill breath the heart turned sick and the eyes grew dim, and the hair stood up on the head. It was a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is subject, which, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all, knows all, and like a bird of prey, picks out its victims, stifles them and stabs them with its frozen sting.”
This passage, by the intensity of horror it evokes, shows how deeply entwined in the roots of Turgenev’s joy in life was his loathing of death; and the same note is struck with cumulative force in “The End of the World” and “The Insect,” where the chill atmosphere of frozen terror and suffocating dread is enforced by the gloomy imagery. There can be no doubt that Turgenev’s premonitory obsession of death in his last years was one of the manifestations of the malignant disease of which he died—cancer of the spinal marrow—which cast the darkening shadow of melancholy over his vital energies and intensified his sensation of spiritual isolation. In the struggle between his healthy instincts and the weariness and dejection diffused by this creeping, malignant cancer, his latter days may be likened to those of an autumnal landscape at evening, with the valleys shivering in the shadows of approaching night, while the higher ground remains still flushed with warm light. But the Poems in Prose, his last work, declare how comparatively little the morbid processes at work within his frame had impaired his serene intelligence, his wide unflinching vision, his deep generous heart, and passion to help others. This, although he had already written, “I have grown old, all seems tarnished around me and within me. The light which rays from the heart, showing life in its colour, in relief, in movement, this light is nearly extinguished within me: it flickers under the crust of cinders which grows thicker and thicker.” But his cruel malady in the last two years, when Turgenev endured “all that one can endure without dying,” did not embitter his character.[28] Pavlovsky tells us: