We cannot better finish this review of names loved by Turgénief than by letting the reader rest on this luminous portrait of George Sand. In the virtues which Turgénief ascribed to her, is it not allowed us to find many of his own?
FOOTNOTES:
[25] This is a mistake. His father died in 1835; and his mother reached the age of seventy, dying in 1850.
[26] Turgénief says in his Recollections: “About Easter, 1843, in Petersburg, an event took place, in itself indeed of small importance, and long ere this swallowed up in perfect oblivion. It was this: A short poem entitled Parasha, by a certain T. L., was published. That T. L. was I. With this poem I began my literary career.” He says further that Biélinsky’s praise was so extravagant that he felt more confusion than pleasure. “I could not believe it,” he adds; “and when in Moscow the late I. V. Kiréyevski came to me with congratulations, I hastened to disown my child, declaring that I was not the author.”—N. H. D.
[27] Zapiski Okhotnika.
[28] Yet Biélinsky wrote him: “‘Khor’ gives promise that you will be a remarkable writer—in the future.”—N. H. D.
[29] Turgénief says in his Recollections: “I should certainly never have written The Annals of a Sportsman if I had staid in Russia. I was in a state of mind singularly analogous to Gogol’s, who just about this time wrote his best pages about Russia from ‘the beautiful distance.’” The article on Gogol’s death was not passed by the Petersburg censor, but was admitted by the Moscow censor, and appeared in the Vyédomosti in March, 1852. Nevertheless, the article was construed as a violation of the law: “I was put under partial arrest for a month, and then sent into domicile in the country, where I lived two years.... But all for the best.... My being under arrest, and in the country, proved to my undeniable advantage: it brought me close to those sides of Russian life which, in the ordinary course of things, would probably have escaped my observation.”—N. H. D.
[30] A misquotation, of course, of
“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world!”—N. H. D.