[Most of] the other stories in Turgénief’s first collection were written abroad. The author came back to Russia in 1851, but only to leave it again two years later. He will still have a domicile there, and above all he will come back regularly to keep up his relations, and touch foot to earth; but it may be said that after 1863 he made only flying visits to his country. The Russians have heaped reproaches on Turgénief for this abandonment of his native soil. It has always been easily explained. There was, at least primarily, a sort of state reason. In 1852, owing to an article on Gogol’s death, Turgénief got into difficulty with the imperial censorship, which ended in a month of close imprisonment, and in the writer being interned at his estate. After two years of solitude and work, Turgénief felt the need of “gaining freedom, the knowledge of himself.” He acquired these conditions, outside of which it was impossible for him to write and to struggle, at the price of life in a foreign country.[29]
But behold what was not known, and what was revealed only by the posthumous publication of Turgénief’s letters. This Russian who made his home abroad, who dwelt twenty years in France, and died in the very heart of Paris, was overwhelmed during his forced or voluntary exile with the blackest melancholy of homesickness, and during the last part of his life suffered even the sharpest torment.
He did not succeed in acclimating himself, either at Baden Baden, in spite of the charm of the situation where his poet’s glance first rested; or at Paris, where he was to be enchained by the bonds of love which he himself called “imperishable, indissoluble.” It may be asked, in regard to this well-known friendship, whether Turgénief, exiled from Russia by his desire for liberty, succeeded in avoiding all the forms of dependence. It is a problem which I leave to the most inquisitive to settle. I confine myself to pointing out in Turgénief the expressions which now and again betray his weariness of exile, his restlessness as of a Northern bird, a captive swan or eider, languishing, mourning with regret for its cold natal seas. “I am condemned to a Bohemian life, and I must make up my mind never to build me a nest.” “In a foreign atmosphere,” he writes once more, “I decompose like a frozen fish in time of thaw.... I shall certainly come back to Russia in the spring.”
During the winter of 1856 Turgénief made this promise to return; and he repeats it many times, as though to assure himself further excuses for keeping it. From that time he knows all the disappointments of a wandering life; and to express the idea of not feeling at home where one is, he uses a word of rare power: “Say what you will, but in a foreign country a man is dislocated: you are needful to no one, and no one is needful to you.” Far from growing feeble, this painful impression will increase as time goes on; the flame of regret, instead of going out or dying down, will get fresh vigor, and break forth in new developments.
First it is the family instinct, which wakens and which speaks very eloquently at that ambiguous hour when youth begins to withdraw, and when, like the foliage in autumn, one feels a premonitory shiver, harbinger of the wintry winds. “Anenkof married,” says Turgénief smiling, “is handsomer than ever.” “Get thee a wife,” he writes seriously to another of his friends: “it is the one thing needful.”
Then there is also the acute feeling of the impoverishment of the creative faculty, the very disturbing realization or apprehension of a sort of literary anema due to the deprivation of the desired climate with its inspiring horizons, with its atmosphere filled with vivifying breezes and suggestive sounds. “I will admit, if you please, that the talent with which I was endowed by nature has not grown smaller; but I have nothing on which to set it to work. The voice is rested: there is naught to sing, so it is better to be silent. And I have nothing to sing, because I live away from Russia.” “Living abroad,” he says in another place, “the fountain from which my inspiration sprang has dried up.”
Finally, more than all, it is the lofty sadness and the noble remorse at not being on hand, at not mingling more intimately in the troublous, dangerous drama which is enacting on Russian soil. “In fact,” Turgénief writes his friend the great author, Lyof Tolstoï, “Russia is now passing through serious and gloomy times; but it is for that very reason that at this moment one feels the gnawing of conscience at living like a foreigner.”
And so this existence which seemed to be ruled by a certain indifference, a sort of elegant and fortunate dilettanteism, was early crossed, and to the very end disturbed, by fits of melancholy and splenetic depression, the secret of whose existence few people, I am inclined to think, ever discovered. Who seeing Turgénief unaffectedly smiling, in a humor not exactly sportive, but sweet, even, and obliging, would have suspected that after an interview with his Parisian friends, for whom he saved all the flower of his wit, he would shut himself up to confide his heart-secret to pages destined to fall only under the softened and by no means mocking eyes of his old Russian comrades?
One can easily imagine the sympathy roused in a Polonsky, for example, by passages such as this: “The chill of old age every day penetrates farther into my soul: it takes entire possession of it. The absolute indifference which I find in me makes me tremble for myself. I can now repeat with Hamlet,—
“‘How stale, flat, and unprofitable