Could anything describe better the brutal spirit of the man who, out of spiteful envy, to revenge his slighted self-love, kills his own friend, Kister, in a duel? Turgenev’s description of Kister must be remarked, for the latter in his “good nature, modesty, warm-heartedness and natural inclination for everything beautiful” is the twin-soul of his creator. Turgenev’s lifelong readiness to lose sight of himself in appreciation of others, even of the men who abused his good offices and repaid him with ingratitude, was notorious.[11] One may assert that Turgenev’s character was thus early expressed in four dominant traits, viz. a generous tenderness of heart, an enthusiasm for the good, sensitiveness to beauty of form and feeling, an infinite capacity for the passion of love. These qualities are manifest in his first work of importance, A Sportsman’s Sketches (1847-51), an epoch-making book which profoundly affected Russian society and had no small influence in hastening the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861-63.
[11] For example, Turgenev warmly commended Dostoevsky’s works to foreign critics, after the latter had perpetrated the spiteful libel on him in The Possessed.
III
“A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES”
CHAPTER III
“A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES”—“NATURE
AND MAN”—THE SECRET OF TURGENEV’S ART
At this date, 1847, Russia, long prostrate beneath the drill sergeants of that “paternal” autocrat Nicholas I.,[12] with the lynx-eyed police rule, servile press and general atmosphere of bureaucratic subservience stupefying the country, was slowly awakening to the new ideas of reform. Grigorovitch’s novel The Village (1846), which painted the wretched life of the serfs, marked the changing current of social ideas, but to Turgenev was to fall the honour of hastening “the Emancipation.” There is perhaps a little exaggeration in this eloquent passage of M. de Vogüé: “Russia saw its own image with alarm in the mirror of serfdom held towards it. A shiver passed through the land: in a day Turgenev became famous, and his cause was half won.... I have said that serfdom stood condemned in everybody’s heart, even in the Emperor Nicholas’s.” But we are assured by Turgenev himself that Alexander II.’s resolution to abolish serfdom was due in no small part to A Sportsman’s Sketches. The old generation in fact was soon to pass away with Nicholas’s rule. As the sketch “The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov” demonstrates, to this old race of landowners, frankly despotic in their manners, was succeeding a milder class—one which “did not like the old methods,” but was ineffective and self-distrustful. And it was to this younger Russia in silent protest against the “official nationalism” prescribed by the ministers of Nicholas, and against the stagnation of provincial life which Gogol had satirized so unsparingly in Dead Souls (1842), that Turgenev made his appeal with his first sketch “Hor and Kalinitch” in the magazine The Contemporary. Turgenev’s reputation was made, and Byelinsky, who declared that Turgenev was “not a creator but a painter of realities,” immediately predicted his future greatness. The other, A Sportsman’s Sketches, as they appeared, one by one, were eagerly seized on by the public, who felt that this new talent was revealing deep-welling springs of individuality in the Russian nature, hitherto unrecorded.
[12] “The teaching of philosophy was proscribed in all the schools, and in all the universities of the Empire; admission to which had now been reduced in numbers. The classics were similarly ostracised. Historical publications were put under a censor’s control, which was tantamount to a prohibition. No history of modern times, i.e. of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, was allowed to be taught in any form whatsoever.”—E. M. de Vogüé.
Though Russian society was profoundly moved by Turgenev’s picture of serfdom, it was in truth the triumph of the pure artist, of the writer who saw man’s fugitive life in relation to the vast, universal drama of nature, that made A Sportsman’s Sketches acceptable to all. One may compare the book’s atmosphere to some woodland’s tender morning air quivering with light, which transmits the ringing voices of men in all their meaning inflections. The voices rise, in joy or strife or passion, then die away in silence, and we hear the gentle stir and murmur of the leaves as the wind passes, while afar swells the roar of the deep forest. Turgenev’s spiritual vision resembles this silvery light and air which register equally the most exquisite vibration of human aspiration and the dissonance of men’s folly and misery. The sweet and tender depths of the author’s spirit served, so to say, as a sensitive mirror which reflected impassively the struggle between the forces of worldly craft and the appeal of all humble, neglected and suffering creatures. “The Tryst” is an example of the artist’s exquisite responsiveness both to the fleeting moods of nature and the conflicts of human feeling. Thus the sufferings of the young peasant girl, poor Akoulina, at the hands of her conceited lover, the pampered valet, Viktor, are so blended with the woodland scene and our last view of “the empty cart rattling over the bare hillside, the low sinking sun in the pale clear sky, the gusty wind scudding over the stubble fields, the bright but chill smile of fading nature,” that one can scarcely dissociate the girl’s distress from the landscape. An illusion! but one that great literature—for example, the Odyssey—fosters. When we look over the face of a wide-stretching landscape each tiny hamlet and its dwellers appear to the eye as a little point of human activity, and each environment, again, as the outcome of an endless chain of forces, seen and unseen in nature. Man, earth and heaven—it is the trinity always suggested in the work of the great poets.