He speaks without too much feeling about his enemies, unless he finds a settled aversion for their work, and for their conception of art. “I am sorry for Tchernuishevsky’s dryness, his tendency to crudeness, his unceremonious treatment of living writers; but I find nothing in him corpse-like. I see a living fountain spouting.” To be sure, he has little to praise in the man of whom he thus speaks; but malice, arising from personal attacks, could not draw him far from the truth. “These are spring waters,” said he in regard to certain injurious writings directed against him. “They will run off, and no trace of them will be left.”
It is not the same with him when teachings wound him, and when the literary form disgusts him. After having loved Nekrásof, he goes so far as no longer to recognize any talent in him, so shocked, so disgusted, is he by his intentional brutalities. His verses “leave behind them an after-taste which makes me nauseated.” “What a son of a dog!” he says in another place. “He is a vulture, ravening and gorging.” But Nekrásof[42] died before him; and he modifies, he explains the judgment which he had passed upon him. “No matter if the young have been infatuated with him, this has done no harm. The chords set in vibration by his poetry (if you can give the name of poetry to what he wrote) are good chords. But when St. ——, addressing these young people, tells them that they are right in placing Nekrásof above Pushkin and Lermontof,[43] and tells them so with an imperturbable smile, I find it hard to restrain my indignation, and I repeat the lines of Schiller:—
“‘I have seen splendid crowns of glory woven for most common brows.’”
His early sympathy for the novelist Dostoyevsky[44] was soon changed to dislike, owing to their differences of opinion. The sharp features in the character of the author of “Crime and Punishment” were not slow to disgust Turgénief. He could not be brought back by the reading of works, the clearly marked tendency of which is sometimes to put a check upon his own. He was not sparing of admiration for the “Recollections of a Dead House.” “The picture of the banya (bath) is really worthy of Dante. In the character of the various people (that of Petrof, for example), there is much fine and true psychology.”
But when Dostoyevsky’s faults grow more pronounced; when his qualities become extravagant, and themselves turn to mannerisms; when this keenness, once so fine and delicate, loses itself in subtleties; when the writer’s sensitiveness changes into supersensitiveness; when his imagination goes beyond the bounds of reason, and gloats over the pursuit of the horrible,—Turgénief does not hide his disgust, his scorn. “God, what a sour smell! What a vile hospital odor! What idle scandal! What a psychological mole-hole!”[45]
Turgénief prefers as he debars, he loves as he detests; that is to say, with a passion which is contagious, and carries the reader with him. One should see with what pleasure he receives the works of the satirist Soltuikof, better known and more appreciated under the nom de guerre of Shchedrin. What a feast it was for him, when a new “Letter to my Aunt” appeared! With what joy he applauded its satirical features which were “powerful even to gayety”! Soltuikof seems disturbed at the flood of hatred which he stirs up. “If you only had a title of hereditary nobility, nothing of the sort would have happened to you. But you are Soltuikof-Shchedrin, a writer to whom it will have been given to leave a deep and permanent impress on our literature: then you will be hated, and you will be loved also; that only depends on the person.”
The most striking example of this generosity of Turgénief’s is shown us by the spectacle of his relations with his great rival Tolstoï. From the moment when Tolstoï’s first book appeared, Turgénief, already famous, distinguishes the young author, welcomes him as a new star, and feels impelled by an irresistible desire to love him. “My heart goes out to you as towards a brother.” “Childhood and Youth” appear. Turgénief’s admiration is expressed in this fashion: “When this young wine shall have finished fermenting, there will come forth a drink worthy of the gods.”
Life separates them; the most diverse mental tendencies still further increase this separation. There is even, at one time, an inopportune meeting, conflict, violent rupture, almost tragic, since a duel narrowly escaped being the result. There are noticeable in Turgénief, from that moment, movements of vexation. The admiration which he was the first to arouse in Tolstoï’s favor turns, becomes fashionable, and goes to commonplace unreason: still he continues to be glad that “War and Peace” is praised to the skies; “but it is by its most dubious merits that the public want to regard it as unequalled.” In his opinion, there are not such good reasons for falling into ecstasies about “Anna Karénina.” “Tolstoï this time has taken the wrong track; and that is due to the influence of Moscow, of the Slavophile nobility, of orthodox old maids, to the isolation in which the author lives, to the impossibility of finding in Russia the requisite degree of artistic liberty.”
But excessive strictures are rare in him; and how richly they are compensated by the generous crusade, which, from the year 1878, Turgénief undertakes for the sake of popularizing Tolstoï in France, and of building him a pedestal which at the present time threatens to rise higher than his own! If, unfortunately for French readers, a “Russian lady” had not got ahead of him, he would have translated the masterpiece which he liked the best, which seemed to him to give the highest idea of Tolstoï’s great powers,—“The Cossacks.”
In last resort, he contents himself with the most active propaganda in favor of another translation, that of “War and Peace.” His correspondence shows him to us, going about carrying the book to Flaubert, to Taine, to Edmond About, to those who are capable of enjoying this foreign dish without further advice. He hopes that their articles will enlighten those who need to be told in order to get the taste of it. His illness alone turns him away from this occupation which I have no need of qualifying: it is too characteristic.