“All that one can say,” wrote Turgénief again on the subject of the Tsar, “is that he is Russian, and nothing but Russian.... Seeing him anywhere, one would know his country.” I do not know whether these words went to the Tsar’s heart; but are they not honorable to him who penned them? What Slavophile would have imagined any thing more eloquent in their simplicity? In giving this emperor, “in whose veins runs scarce a drop of Russian blood,” his naturalization papers, Turgénief surely thought that he had reached the borders of eulogy.
III.
After reading what has gone before, I trust that no one will be inclined to see a mere paradox in this affirmation: Turgénief was above all things interested in the question of politics and social order, and of this interest were born all his great works. This was the reason that Turgénief’s writings so stirred the public: hence the favor of his readers at first was, enthusiastic; hence came notorious alienation, irritation, almost calumnious fury, from the time when the public and the author no longer advanced with equal steps towards progress. For, here is the point to be noted: Turgénief never ceased to make progress; but as long as he walked slowly, with regular steps, like a man who holds aloof from the popular current, and is not dragged along against his will by the rising tide of the throng, the masses of the nation—I mean the majority of the educated classes—no longer regulated his gait, and, seeing him each day a little farther behind them, imagined that he was retrograding or was not following. Turgénief was advancing, and he went to great lengths. Let us see how great was the distance between “The Annals of a Sportsman” and “Virgin Soil.”
Turgénief somewhere expressed his sympathy and admiration for Don Quixote. He contrasted him with the dreamer Hamlet, in whom he took little stock. Did not he himself enter the career of letters like a knight-errant (campeador) in the lists? From the very beginning, when he had won all the glory of a victor, he gave his young talent to the service of the right and of truth; he turned his pen, like a sword, against egotism, against injustice, against prejudice,—in a word, against the different forms of error. His maiden book, “The Annals of a Sportsman,” was not merely a literary event: it brought about a political revolution. This picture of the wretched condition of the serfs contributed in large measure to call forth the ukaz that enfranchised Russia.
It was not the first time that fiction had attacked the social question. Gogol had already struck the first blow against the enemy which Turgénief had the honor of defeating. But the author of “Dead Souls” had laid himself out especially to depict the faults and foibles of the small Russian proprietors; and, while he made it sufficiently evident how miserable was the condition of the serfs under their grotesque or detestable tyranny, his book left the unfortunate muzhik in the background. Turgénief’s originality consisted in placing this pariah in full light. He dared to show not only his pity but his affection for the Russian peasant, often narrow-minded, ignorant, or brutal, but good at heart. He undertook to reveal to the Russians this being which they scarcely knew.
In the very first pages of his book he showed him with his instinctive qualities; and for this reason he took pains to place him in an exceptional condition, that is to say, in that sort of relative independence occasionally realized in spite of, or by favor of, the law. Khor and Kalinuitch are accordingly almost freed from the actual miseries of serfage,—the first by living in the midst of a swamp, avoiding statute labor by paying a quit-rent (obrok); the second by serving as whipper-in for his master, whom he passionately adores. The former is a muzhik, who has the feeling of reality, “who is settled in life;” the other is a dreamer, “who sticks to nothing, and smiles at all things.” Khor the cautious has carefully observed men and things, and his experiences are expressed with that humorous naïveté which gives such a color to the conversation of the Russian peasant. Kalinuitch the enthusiast has the inspired language of a poet. He is largely endowed with mysterious powers. The bees obey him as though he were an enchanter. Both of them are good. The one is devout and gentle; the other, simply cordial and hospitable. There is profit in listening to the former, and pleasure in holding intercourse with the latter. Under these features Turgénief pictured the Russian of the country districts. After showing him, so to speak, in his native state, he went on to explain the deformities from which the type was liable to suffer under the brutalizing influences of serfdom.
The first alteration of the character of the Russian muzhik is a sort of ferocious, even savage, humor, which takes the place of the original reason or ingenuity. The huntsman Yermolaï offers us a curious example of this reversion to barbarism, of this return of the muzhik towards the savage state. Emancipated in the manner of an outlaw, of a bandit, he lives in the woods or the marsh, sleeping on a roof, under a bridge, in the crotch of a tree, hunted down by the peasants like a hare, beaten sometimes like a dog, but, aside from these trials, enjoying to the full this strange independence. He does not support his wife or his dog, both of whom he beats with the same brutal indifference. He has all the instincts of the beast of prey in scenting game, in trapping birds, in catching fish. He already possesses the shrewdness of the savage: he would easily acquire his cruelty. “I did not like the expression which came over his face when he applied his teeth to the bird he had just brought to earth.”
However precarious and anxious this independent life may be, it appears very enviable when compared to the torment and degradations of slavery. The muzhik Vlas walks all the way to Moscow, where he comes to ask a reduction in his quit-rent; for his son who paid it for him is dead, and he himself is old. The barin slams the door in his face, with the words, “How do you dare to come to me?” Vlas sadly returns to his hut, where his wife is waiting for him, blowing in her fist from starvation. “His lip is drawn, and in his little bloodshot eyes stands a tear.” He suddenly bursts out into a laugh, thinking that they can’t take any thing more from him than his life,—“a wretched pledge,”—and that that damned German, the prikashchik Quintilian Semenitch, “will shuffle in vain:” that’s all he’ll get. That tear of anguish, and that desperate laugh, are never to be forgotten.
Here are other impressions not less cruel. The serf Sutchok, now employed at his trade of fisherman, tells how he began by working as a cook; and how, in changing his profession, according as he went from master to master, he found himself successively cook, restaurant-keeper, actor, then back to his ovens again, then wearing livery as sub-footman, then postilion, then huntsman, then cobbler, then journeyman in a paper-mill. These caprices of the mastership which weighs upon the muzhik have not only their ridiculous side: there is always something detestable about it. The last owner of this wretch, whose life is only an irksome apprenticeship, is an old maid, who vents her spleen at having been left in single-blessedness by forbidding all her household to marry. This abasement of a human being, condemned by his master to isolation, to barrenness, like a beast, is powerfully shown in the little tale entitled “Yermolaï and the Miller Girl.”
But what seems still more painful than the slavery itself is to see that it is endured with resignation, and sometimes even upheld, excused, by those who have to submit to it. “How do you live?” is asked of one of these victims of feudal despotism. “Do you get wages, a fixed salary?”—“A salary! Ekh! barin, we are given our victuals. Indeed, that’s all we need, God knows! And may Heaven grant long life to our baruina!” Another has just been tremendously flogged. He treats with very bad grace the stranger who presumes to express commiseration; he takes the part of the master who has so cruelly abused him for a trifle; he is proud of belonging to a man who makes strict use of his seignorial prerogatives. “No, no! there is not a barin like to him in the whole province!”