Seems me that life!’[30]
Perhaps this mood will pass; or, if it lasts, perhaps I shall succeed in lignifying, and in that case, it is all the same.”
Another day he tears out from his private journal this page, the disappearance of which is to be deeply regretted: “Again I am at my table, and in my soul it is gloomier than the gloomiest night. Thus, like a moment, passes the day, empty, aimless, colorless. A space to give a passing glance, and, lo! it is bedtime again. No right to life, no desire to live. Nothing to do, nothing to expect, nothing to hope for.... Thou speakest of halos of glory, and of enchanting tones. O my friend! we are the fragments of a vase broken long ago.”
When once the straits of old age were crossed, Turgénief enjoyed a few years of relative calm, of less bitter resignation. It was the time of his intimacy with George Sand and Flaubert. They both died. Illness falls upon Turgénief himself, and nails him pitilessly to the land of exile.
From the day when the way of return is cut off, the “occidental” is seized once more with the agony of homesickness for the mother country. His eyes and his heart are fastened immovably on the corner of Russia whither all the memories of childhood and youth draw him. Unable to see his village of Spaskoe, he sends his best friends to it, and establishes them there. He begs them to give him endless details about the peasants, about the women, the school, the chapel, the hospital. He worries about the garden, and urges Mrs. Polonskaïa to look upon its most humble products with “the eyes of the master.” He feels more keenly than ever the value of what he has lost. In addition to his ever renewed and lively regrets comes the feeling of bitterness and mourning which is born of the irreparable. His country calls him, and draws him with such force, that he has the sensation of a great “tearing asunder.” That is the expression to which it is necessary to hold fast. It is calculated to surprise even those who had the good fortune often to meet Ivan Sergéyevitch; but what regret it ought to cause those who, deceived by the way in which Turgénief persisted in living far away from the Russian land, cruelly upbraided him for having forgotten his country!
Turgénief was so far from forgetting Russia, that he went back almost every year; and he wrote almost all his works there. The critics scarcely had any suspicion of such a thing. They attacked Turgénief’s later novels, bringing up against them his residence abroad. “How could he know Russia any more? He no longer lives there.” Turgénief was indignant at this objection, which “that old woman called the public” persisted in hurling at him. He answered this argument once for all, in terms which must be quoted: “The objection can only be made to what I have published since 1863. Until that time,—that is, until my forty-fifth year,—I lived in Russia, scarcely going out of the country, except the years from 1848 to 1850. During just those years I wrote ‘The Annals of a Sportsman.’ On the other hand, ‘Rudin,’ ‘The Nest of Gentlemen,’ ‘On the Eve,’ and ‘Fathers and Sons’ were written in Russia. But that makes no difference to the old woman. Her mind is already made up.”
To be a little more precise, “Rudin” was published in 1855. “A Nest of Gentlemen”[31] appeared in 1859 [1858?], and the year 1862 was distinguished by the appearance of “Fathers and Sons.” Better than any one, Turgénief understood the necessity of writing nothing without his models before him; and he went to seek for them where they were to be found. Turgénief’s correspondence shows these scruples in a score of places, and especially in regard to “Fathers and Sons.” Having once conceived the plan of the work, the novelist has no rest until he finds himself in Russia. There only can he imagine, create, or, to speak more accurately, reproduce what he sees in real life. His pen, which refused to move as long as he was abroad, runs and flies over the paper. The sight of familiar landscapes refreshes the parched brain: inspiration flows.
Between the romance of “Fathers and Sons,” and that of “Smoke,” which was published in 1867, during the period when the Russian writer was an habitual resident of Baden Baden,[32] appeared quite a large number of shorter stories and tales of less pretension, but not of less value. There is more than one masterpiece of sentiment or imagination in “Apparitions,” in “Strange Stories,” “Spring Waters,” “Living Relics.” Not all these collections preceded “Smoke,” but they came shortly before or shortly after it.
Between “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil,” Turgénief’s last great novel, passes a period of nearly ten years. The cause of this long silence was the alienation which had arisen between the writer and his public. Russian readers had already begun to show their dissatisfaction with “Fathers and Sons,” and the causes of this displeasure deserve to be closely examined. We shall return to them in the course of this study. The spitefulness of the critics was let loose against the very satirical romance “Smoke;” other works, such as “The King Lear of the Steppe,” did not even have the success of causing scandal, and were “damned with faint praise.” “That,” said Turgénief, “for an author who is growing old, is worse than a fiasco. It is the best proof that it is time to stop, and I am going to stop.”
In such a resolution, there were other motives besides pique. Turgénief felt weary, and, as it were, short of inspiration or of subjects. In the intervals between the recuperative journeys which we have mentioned, he was obliged to nourish himself on his own substance. He knew that to suspend them, or even to postpone them too long, was at the risk of losing his strength and wasting away even to consumption. “I am compelled, like a bear in winter, to suck my paw; and thus it is that nothing comes forth.”