“The language, also, is richer, more flexible, more graceful; no Russian writer had ever carried it to such a degree of expression. It is not the clear and limpid prose of Pushkin, who had read much of Voltaire, and did not forget it. Turgénief’s periods run slow and voluptuous, like the surface of the mighty Russian rivers, without haste, harmonious, amid the reeds, bearing water-lilies, floating nests, wandering perfumes, showing luminous vistas, and long mirages of sky and land, and suddenly reappearing in shady depths. His discourse stops to gather up any thing,—the humming of a bee, the call of a night-bird, a passing, caressing, dying breeze. The most elusive accords of the grand register of nature it translates with the infinite resources of the Russian keys, flexible epithets, words welded together with poetic fancy, popular joinings of sound to sense.
“I dwell on that which makes the power of this book: it is only a song of the earth, and a murmur of a few poor souls directly heard by us. The writer takes us to the heart of his native land; he leaves us face to face with this country; he disappears, it seems: yet, if not he, who then has drawn from things, and condensed on their surface, that mysterious poetry which they hide within them, but which so few can see, and which we clearly see here? The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ have charmed many French readers; yet how much they lose in color across the double veil of the translation and the common ignorance of the country!...
“When these fragments were brought together into a volume, the public, till then uncertain, saw the significance of the work. Some one had appeared with courage to develop the meaning concealed in Gogol’s sinister jest about “Dead Souls.” What other name can be given to that gallery of portraits gathered by the sportsman,—small country proprietors, selfish and hard; sneaking overseers, idle and rapacious functionaries; beneath this cruel society, wretched helots, fallen, as it were, from the state of humanity, touching by force of misery and submission? The process—however well disguised it be, there is always a process—was invariably the same. The author causes a ludicrous being to pass again and again in his lantern, showing all its phases, laughable and pitiable, in turn, without wants, without resources, condemned to crepuscular life. By the side of the serf appeared the master, a half-civilized marionette, a good devil, after all, unconscious of the harm he was doing, led astray by the fatality of his environment. This painting, which would otherwise be ugly, repulsive, the writer clothed with grace and charm, in some sort contrary to his desire by the inborn virtue of his poetry. Why were all the mainsprings of life broken in all the heroes of the book? Whence came this malaria over the Russian land? What was the name of this pest? The reader was left the trouble of answering.
“It is not very exact to say that Turgénief attacked serfage. Russian writers, in consequence of the conditions under which they work, as well as by the peculiar turn of their genius, never attack openly; they neither argue nor declaim: they paint without drawing conclusions, and they appeal to pity rather than wrath. Twenty years later, when Dostoyevsky will publish his “Recollections of a Dead House” (Zapiski Mertvava Doma), his terrible memoirs of ten years in Siberia, he will proceed in the same way, without a word of mutiny, without a drop of gall, seeming to find what he describes as quite natural, only a trifle sad. It is the national trait in all things.... The public understands by a hint.
“It understood this time. The Russia of serfage looked at itself with horror in the mirror which was held before its eyes: a long shudder shook the country; between night and morning the author was famous, and his cause was half gained. The censorship was the last to comprehend, but finally it also comprehended. Possibly its sensitiveness will be wondered at: I have said that serfage was condemned even in the Emperor Nicholas’s heart. You must know that the wishes of the censorship do not always coincide with the emperor’s wishes; at least, it is backward, it is sometimes a reign behindhand. It gave up launching its thunder against the book, but it kept its eye on the author. Gogol being dead in the interim, Turgénief dedicated a warmly eulogistic article to the dead author. This article would seem inoffensive enough, as it appears in Turgénief’s complete works,[59] and we should have difficulty in discovering the crime if the criminal had not revealed the secret in a very gay note: ‘Apropos of that article, I remember that one day at Petersburg, a lady of very high rank criticised the punishment inflicted upon me, judging it to have been undeserved, or at least too severe. As she was warmly speaking in my defence, some one said to her, “Is it possible that you don’t know that in this article he called Gogol a great man?”—“It is impossible.”—“I assure you that it is so.”—“Ah! in that case, I have nothing more to say. I am sorry, but I see that they had to be severe upon him.”’
“This impertinent epithet, given to a simple writer, cost Turgénief a month of arrest; then he was advised to go and meditate in his domain. I imagine that he found that society was very ill arranged, so unfair are we to the power that wills our best good. It must be confessed, however, that this power sometimes serves our interest better than we ourselves, and lettres de cachet are generally in accordance with the views of Providence. Thirty years earlier an order of exile saved Pushkin by tearing the poet from the dissipations of Petersburg, where he was wasting his genius, and by sending him to the sun of the East, where his genius was to ripen. If Turgénief had remained at the capital, the warmth of youth and compromising friendships, perchance, might have brought him into some barren political quarrel: sent into the solitude of the woods, he lived there laborious years, studying the humble provincial life of Russia, and gathering materials for his first great novels.”
An anonymous writer, who knew Turgénief intimately, contributed, shortly after his death, to “The London Daily News,” an article, some of the details of which are worthy of preservation: “Turgénief hated luxury. The more he advanced in life, the more he prized simplicity in all things. His bedroom at Les Fresnes[60] had an almost austere aspect. The bed and toilet-stand were in iron; and the desk, drawers, and a large bookcase, in mahogany, of a plain design. Some photographs and engraved likenesses of literary and other friends broke the monotony of the wall. Portrait-cartes, many of which had autographs of those whom they represented, were stuck into the frame of the chimney glass.
“Turgénief was the youngest of three very distinguished brothers. Were the eldest of the trio now living, he would be almost a centenarian. He remembered Buonaparte, Bernardin, St. Pierre, Talleyrand, Sir Walter Scott,—of whom he was for some weeks a guest at Abbotsford,—Miss Edgeworth when she was in the zenith of her fame; visited Mme. de Staël at Coppet, and fell in with Byron as he was making a tour on the Rhine. The eldest Turgénief was a many-sided man. Though not a professional author, he had great literary qualities. His political insight and sagacity were no less remarkable, and he had a wider experience of human nature than perhaps any other European of his time. Though he belonged to a family which stood well with the Court and high in the administration, he enjoyed close intercourse with his ‘unmasked countrymen.’ He thus designated the serfs, who had learned to be patient and resigned, but were unable to dissimulate. Nevertheless, he was accomplished in every polite art, and, if he had chosen, might have risen to the highest diplomatic position. His education was French on Russian soil. Voltaire and Diderot were his early schoolmasters. When he grew up, he made wide incursions into English literature, and came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work. She took the world as she found it, and selected from it the material that she thought would be interesting to write about in a clear and natural style. It was Ivan Turgénief himself who told me this, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. He had not the advantage of knowing English;[61] but, as a youth, he used to hear his brother translate to visitors, at his country house in the Uralian, passages from ‘Irish Tales and Sketches,’ which he thought superior to her three-volume novels. Turgénief also said to me, ‘It is possible, nay, probable, if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of the County Longford, and the squires and squireens, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity, and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones of the earth.’
“Turgéniefs stature was far above the average. He was admirably proportioned, and, when young, could walk as far in a day as a tough horse would amble, and that without any oppressive sense of fatigue. The big bones supported tremendous muscles, which at no time of his life were clogged with adipose tissue. When I knew him, his thick, long hair and flowing beard were white as snow; but as the complexion was fresh, the eye bright, the carriage upright, the voice resonant, I never thought of him as an old man. This giant wrote a neat and almost delicate hand. I have before me a book of his with an autograph inscription which he sent me last winter.... This autograph, though almost ladylike in its delicacy, is very free and unconventional. Turgénief felt what was beautiful in minute and lowly things. He was one of those who are happy in admiring flowers in the valley of humiliation. In some respects he was a big child. Nobody was more easy to amuse. He used to say that Providence was so kind in throwing in his way the kind of persons who exactly suited him. Liking fine arts and music, and disliking fashion and worldly frivolity, he deemed it a piece of rare good luck to fall in with Louis Viardot and his gifted wife (née Garcia), and to be allowed to enter their family circle....
“Turgénief’s conversation was analogous to his handwriting. It was light, delicate, of a free and quite original style, and abounded in picturesque traits. Nothing was forced or far-fetched. His ideas came in the bright, easy flow of a quick-running and well-fed streamlet. It was all the same to him whether he was brought forward or unnoticed in society, for he was neither shy nor vain. He rarely, in talking, broached a subject; but there was no subject on which he could not talk with ease. The politician, philosopher, artist, poet, novelist, intelligent or simple, woman or child, found him good company. Whatever interested mankind appeared to concern him, and to be a thing to study. At the Universal Exhibition of 1878 I found Turgénief in the United States Agricultural Department studying horse-shoes and horse-shoe nails with as much zest as he afterwards showed in comparing the works of the English, Russian, and German schools of pictorial art. The person who explained to him the peculiar merits of the horse-shoe nails was a character; and his peculiarities, which were racy of the soil of Texas, acted as a stimulant on the Russian novelist.”