| CHAPTER I | |
| page | |
| Turgenev’s Critics and his Detractors | [1] |
| CHAPTER II | |
| Youth, Family and Early Work | [25] |
| CHAPTER III | |
| “A Sportsman’s Sketches” | [35] |
| CHAPTER IV | |
| “Rudin” | [55] |
| CHAPTER V | |
| “A House of Gentlefolk” | [73] |
| CHAPTER VI | |
| “On the Eve” | [91] |
| CHAPTER VII | |
| “Fathers and Children” | [107] |
| CHAPTER VIII | |
| “Smoke” | [127] |
| CHAPTER IX | |
| “Virgin Soil” | [137] |
| CHAPTER X | |
| The Tales | [161] |
| CHAPTER XI | |
| Note on Turgenev’s Life—His Character and Philosophy—“Enough”—“Hamlet and Don Quixote”—The “Poems in Prose”—Turgenev’s Last Illness and Death—His Epitaph | [185] |
I
TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND
HIS DETRACTORS
CHAPTER I
TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS
A writer, Mr. Robert Lynd, has said: “It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the images of the rivals of the gods of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and another year, Turgenev. And no doubt the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.”
One had hoped that the disease, long endemic in Russia, of disparaging Turgenev, would not have spread to England, but some enthusiastic explorers of things Russian came back home with a mild virus and communicated the spores of the misunderstanding. That misunderstanding, dating at least fifty years back, was part of the polemics of the rival Russian political parties. The Englishman who finds it strange that Turgenev’s pictures of contemporary Russian life should have excited such angry heat and raised such clouds of acrimonious smoke may imagine the fate of a great writer in Ireland to-day who should go on his way serenely, holding the balance level between the Unionists, the Nationalists, the Sinn Féin, the people of Dublin, and the people of Belfast. The more impartial were his pictures as art, the louder would rise the hubbub that his types were “exceptional,” that his insight was “limited,” that he did not understand either the politicians or the gentry or the peasants, that he had not fathomed all that was in each “movement,” that he was palming off on us heroes who had “no real existence.” And, in the sense that Turgenev’s serene and beautiful art excludes thousands of aspects that filled the newspapers and the minds of his contemporaries, his detractors have reason.
Various Russian critics, however, whom Mr. Maurice Baring, and a French biographer, M. Haumant, have echoed, have gone further, and in their critical ingenuity have mildly damned the Russian master’s creations. It seems to these gentlemen that there is a great deal of water in Turgenev’s wine. Mr. Baring tells us that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky “reached the absolute truth of the life which was round them,” and that “people are beginning to ask themselves whether Turgenev’s pictures are true (!), whether the Russians that he describes ever existed, and whether the praise which was bestowed upon him by his astonished contemporaries all over Europe was not a gross exaggeration.”
“Turgenev painted people of the same epoch, the same generation; he dealt with the same material; he dealt with it as an artist and as a poet, as a great artist and a great poet. But his vision was weak and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky. His characters beside those of Tolstoy seem caricatures, and beside those of Dostoevsky they are conventional.... When all is said, Turgenev was a great poet. What time has not taken away from him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry in his work.... Turgenev never wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, the Sportsman’s Sketches. In this book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression.
“No one can deny that the characters of Turgenev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev is this: that Turgenev’s characters are as living as any characters are in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Turgenev’s characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them, and that they are permeated by the faults of the author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self-consciousness.
“... Than Bazarov there is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive ... (but he is) a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be.... Dostoevsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth.... (Virgin Soil) Here in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter-day judges who have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the real thing.
“The lapse of years has only emphasized the elements of banality—and conventionality—which are to be found in Turgenev’s work. He is a masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without convention. His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes, and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any elemental pictures of nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he rings the changes on delicate arrangements of wood, cloud, mist, and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures, after the manner of Corot.”—Landmarks in Russian Literature, pp. 99-110.