Later on we meet Rúdin once more. He has still found no work for himself, neither has he made peace with the conditions of life at that time. He remains poor, exiled by the government from one town to another, till at last he goes abroad, and during the insurrection of June, 1848, he is killed on a barricade in Paris. There is an epilogue to the novel, and that epilogue is so beautiful that a few passages from it must be produced here. It is Lézhneff, formerly Rúdin’s enemy, who speaks.
“I know him well,” continued Lézhneff, “I am aware of his faults. They are the more conspicuous because he is not to be regarded on a small scale.”
“His is a character of genius!” cried Bassístoff.
“Genius, very likely he has!” replied Lézhneff, “but as for character.... That’s just his misfortune: there’s no force of character in him.... But I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and, believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to anyone who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you remember, Sásha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. The coldness is in his blood—that is not his fault—and not in his head. He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people’s expense, not like a swindler, but like a child.... Yes; no doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want; but are we to throw stones at him for that? He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use, that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? Indeed, I myself, to begin with, have gained all that I have from him. Sásha knows what Rúdin did for me in my youth. I also maintained, I recollect, that Rúdin’s words could not produce an effect on men; but I was speaking then of men like myself, at my present age, of men who have already lived and been broken in by life. One false note in a man’s eloquence, and the whole harmony is spoiled for us; but a young man’s ear, happily, is not so over-fine, not so trained. If the substance of what he hears seems fine to him, what does he care about the intonation? The intonation he will supply for himself!”
“Bravo, bravo!” cried Bassístoff, “that is justly spoken! And as regards Rúdin’s influence, I swear to you, that man not only knows how to move you, he lifts you up, he does not let you stand still, he stirs you to the depths and sets you on fire!”[15]
However, with such men as Rúdin further progress in Russia would have been impossible: new men had to appear. And so they did: we find them in the subsequent novels of Turguéneff—but they meet with what difficulties, what pains they undergo! This we see in Lavrétskiy and Líza (A Nobleman’s Retreat) who belonged to the intermediate period. Lavrétskiy could not be satisfied with Rúdin’s rôle of an errant apostle; he tried his hands at practical activity; but he also could not find his way amidst the new currents of life. He had the same artistic and philosophical development as Rúdin; he had the necessary will; but his powers of action were palsied—not by his power of analysis in this case, but by the mediocrity of his surroundings and by his unfortunate marriage. Lavrétskiy ends also in wreck.
A Nobleman’s Retreat was an immense success. It was said that, together with the autobiographic tale, First Love, it was the most artistic of Turguéneff’s works. This, however, is hardly so. Its great success was surely due, first of all, to the wide circle of readers to whom it appealed. Lavrétskiy has married most unfortunately—a lady who soon becomes a sort of a second-rate Parisian lioness. They separate; and then he meets with a girl, Líza, in whom Turguéneff has given the best impersonation imaginable of the average, thoroughly good and honest Russian girl of those times. She and Lavrétskiy fall in love with each other. For a moment both she and Lavrétskiy think that the latter’s wife is dead—so it stood, at least, in a Paris feuilleton; but the lady reappears bringing with her all her abominable atmosphere, and Líza goes to a convent. Unlike Rúdin or Bazároff, all the persons of this drama, as well as the drama itself, are quite familiar to the average reader, and for merely that reason the novel appealed to an extremely wide circle of sympathisers. Of course, the artistic powers of Turguéneff appear with a wonderful force in the representation of such types as Líza and Lavrétskiy’s wife, Líza’s old aunt, and Lavrétskiy himself. The note of poetry and sadness which pervades the novel carries away the reader completely. And yet, I may venture to say, the following novel, On the Eve, far superseded the former both in the depth of its conception and the beauty of its workmanship.
Already, in Natásha, Turguéneff had given a life-picture of a Russian girl who has grown up in the quietness of village life, but has in her heart, and mind, and will the germs of that which moves human beings to higher action. Rúdin’s spirited words, his appeals to what is grand and worth living for, inflamed her. She was ready to follow him, to support him in the great work which he so eagerly and uselessly searched for, but it was he who proved to be her inferior. Turguéneff thus foresaw, since 1855, the coming of that type of woman who later on played so prominent a part in the revival of Young Russia. Four years later, in On the Eve, he gave, in Helen, a further and fuller development of the same type. Helen is not satisfied with the dull, trifling life in her own family, and she longs for a wider sphere of action. “To be good is not enough; to do good—yes; that is the great thing in life,” she writes in her diary. But whom does she meet in her surroundings? Shúbin, a talented artist, a spoiled child, “a butterfly which admires itself”; Berséneff, a future professor, a true Russian nature—an excellent man, most unselfish and modest, but wanting inspiration, totally lacking in vigour and initiative. These two are the best. There is a moment when Shúbin, as he rambles on a summer night with his friend Berséneff, says to him: “I love Helen, but Helen loves you.... Sing, sing louder, if you can; and if you cannot, then take off your hat, look above, and smile to the stars. They all look upon you, upon you alone: they always look on those who are in love.” But Berséneff returns to his small room, and—opens Raumer’s “History of the Hohenstauffens,” on the same page where he had left it the last time....
Thereupon comes Insároff, a Bulgarian patriot, entirely absorbed by one idea—the liberation of his mother-country; a man of steel, rude to the touch, who has cast away all melancholy philosophical dreaming, and marches straight forward, towards the aim of his life—and the choice of Helen is settled. The pages given to the awakening of her feeling and to its growth are among the best ever written by Turguéneff. When Insároff suddenly becomes aware of his own love for Helen, his first decision is to leave at once the suburb of Moscow, where they are all staying, and Russia as well. He goes to Helen’s house to announce there his departure. Helen asks him to promise that he will see her again to-morrow before he leaves, but he does not promise. Helen waits for him, and when he has not come in the afternoon, she herself goes to him. Rain and thunder overtake her on the road, and she steps into an old chapel by the roadside. There she meets Insároff, and the explanation between the shy, modest girl who perceives that Insároff loves her, and the patriot, who discovers in her the force which, far from standing in his way, would only double his own energy, terminates by Insároff exclaiming: “Well, then, welcome, my wife before God and men!”
In Helen we have the true type of that Russian woman who a few years later joined heart and soul in all movements for Russian freedom: the woman who conquered her right to knowledge, totally reformed the education of children, fought for the liberation of the toiling masses, endured unbroken in the snows and gaols of Siberia, died if necessary on the scaffold, and at the present moment continues with unabated energy the same struggle. The high artistic beauty of this novel has already been incidentally mentioned. Only one reproach can be made to it: the hero, Insároff, the man of action, is not sufficiently living. But both for the general architecture of the novel and the beauty of its separate scenes, beginning with the very first and ending with the last, On the Eve stands among the highest productions of the sort in all literatures.