The weariness disappeared, the pique wore away, and gradually this firm resolution to enjoy rest and absolute silence was shaken. Turgénief finally even found excellent reason for resuming the pen. It was necessary, not to blot out, but to complete, the effect of “Fathers and Sons” by writing another romance, which this time should clear up misunderstandings, and put the author in the position and in the rank that he felt he ought to hold. This romance, “Virgin Soil,”[33] did not appear till 1876; but almost two years beforehand Turgénief was talking of it, thinking about it, and working at it. It can be seen in his correspondence, that the work is in some degree taking shape; and under each abstract formula one can already detect the outlines of a character who will be the realization of it.
It is easily understood how Turgénief, who expected so much from this last work, who thought that he had put into it the best of his talent, and reached the culmination of his creative faculty, was disappointed and discouraged to receive once more only reproaches and blame. “This time,” he says, “it is my last original work. Such is my decision, and it is irrevocable.... I may possibly busy myself still with translations. I am contemplating ‘Don Quixote’ and Montaigne.” In vain opinion calms down, changes base, turns to praise and admiration: he remains firm in his design of staying in retreat, and of “joining the veterans.” Indeed, for a few months at least, he seems to drop this implement of the writer, “which he has used for thirty years.”
He travels abroad, in England; and quickly finds himself too well known, too much entertained, too much exhibited. This excess of glory is incompatible with his modesty.
Was it the delight in his visit to Russia in the spring of 1878, was it the joy of renewing long-interrupted relations of intimacy with Count Lyof Tolstoï? At all events, Turgénief again finds literary work to his taste. At first, it is true, he is seen occupying himself only with the work of others. He wishes to do for Tolstoï the same service in France, as for Flaubert in Russia, by popularizing their works in translation. Or he publishes Pushkin’s correspondence, and supervises a superb edition of the complete works of his favorite poet.
He writes Bougival his “Song of Triumphant Love,” which he regretfully allows to be printed, and which is this time hailed as a marvel. He makes a selection of his “Poems in Prose.” He puts some personal reminiscences in the form of short stories; among others, “The Hopeless Man.” He already passes beyond the horizon of life,—which is ending for him amid the most cruel sufferings,—by writing that half-real vision entitled “The Morrow of Death.”
Turgénief, by these short works, endeavored to get himself into the mood of writing another great work. He was already beginning to speak of it to his friends; he explained the subject; he had, perhaps, blocked out his plan; and since we know his habits of work, and his method, we are safe in adding that he had conceived the principal types, that he had seen the majority of the characters pass and halt before his eyes. In this romance, Turgénief intended to compare the Russian with the French grévistes or anarchists. We see it is the subject which Zola had the ambition to take up in “Germinal;” and, in spite of the popularity of the work, I may be allowed to believe that this subject still remains to be treated.
The idea of this great romance must have been suggested to Turgénief’s mind, as a consequence of his almost triumphal journey in Russia, on the occasion of the Pushkin festival. A few years had sufficed absolutely to change the feelings of the younger generation in Russia. The popularity which the author of “The Annals of a Sportsman” so suddenly won was restored to him after a pretty long period of alienation, and at last beatified the author of “Virgin Soil.” The enthusiastic reception of the Moscow students filled his soul with the emotion of unexpected joy, and the ovation which he received had for him all the value of an improbable result. A Russian who was very near to Turgénief told me that, on this occasion, he found only a few hesitating and broken words to reply to the speeches of the orators, the leaders of this young generation; but he had the moistened eyes and the smile of a happy man.
Full of gratitude for this eleventh-hour homage, he would have been glad to express his thankfulness in his own manner; and doubtless the new work would have translated it. His illness put a stop to his project. On the 8th of April, 1882, Turgénief writes to Mrs. Polonskaïa to inform her of the physician’s diagnosis in regard to what they call his angina pectoris, or his gouty neuralgia of the heart. The term was not accurate. It is known that Turgénief died of cancer of the spinal marrow. Whatever the trouble was, the torment of it became atrocious, and the suffering which the invalid underwent lasted more than a year. He bore this slow agony with great sweetness. His complaints were rare, and they were for the most part hidden under a veil of irony which robbed them of every shade of bitterness.
Pinched by pain as by a vise, he still found the time and the power to address comforting raillery to those who were sadder than himself. “For your consolation,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I wish to quote one of Goethe’s remarks, made just before his death. It would seem as if he at least had to satiety all of the happiness that life can give. Think what a pitch of glory he reached, loved by women, and hated by fools; think that he had been translated even into Chinese; that all Europe was setting out in pilgrimage to salute him; that Napoleon himself said of him, ‘There is a man!’ think that our Russian critics, the Uvarofs and others, burned incense under his nose: and yet, at the age of eighty-two, he declared that during his long life he had not been happy a quarter of an hour all told. Then for you and me it is the will of God, isn’t it? Suppose the perfect health which Goethe always enjoyed is lacking to us, still he was bored.... But what is to be done about it?”
On the 3d of July, 1883, Turgénief with feeble hand, and at the cost of cruel pangs, wrote in pencil the following unsigned letter to his friend the great novelist Lyof Tolstoï: “It is long since I have written you, for I have been and I am literally on my death-bed. It is impossible for me to recover: it is not within the limits of thought. I write you simply to tell you that I am happy to have been your contemporary, and to express to you my last and most sincere request: my friend, return to literary work! This talent of yours came to you from the source whence come all our gifts. Ah! how happy I should be if my prayer were to have the effect upon you so deeply desired! As for me, I am a dead man. The doctors do not even know what name to give my ailment. Gouty neuralgia of the stomach; no walking, no eating, no sleeping. Bah! it is tiresome to repeat all this. My friend, great writer of the Russian land, hear my supplication. Let me know if you receive this slip of paper, and allow me once more to press you closely in my embrace,—you, your wife, and all your family. I cannot write you more, I am weary.”