“And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought....”
This lecture fully explains, I believe, the attitude of Turguéneff towards Bazároff. He himself belonged to a great extent to the Hamlets. Among them he had his best friends. He loved Hamlet; yet he admired Don Quixote—the man of action. He felt his superiority; but, while describing this second type of men, he never could surround it with that tender poetical love for a sick friend which makes the irresistible attraction of those of his novels which deal with one or other of the Hamlet type. He admired Bazároff—his roughness as well as his power; Bazároff overpowered him; but he could by no means have for him the tender feelings which he had had for men of his own generation and his own refinement. In fact, with Bazároff they would have been out of place.
This we did not notice at that time, and therefore we did not understand Turguéneff’s intention of representing the tragic position of Bazároff amidst his surroundings. “I entirely share Bazároff’s ideas,” he wrote later on. “All of them, with the exception of his negation of art.” “I loved Bazároff; I will prove it to you by my diary,” he told me once in Paris. Certainly he loved him—but with an intellectually admiring love, quite different from the compassionate love which he had bestowed upon Rúdin and Lavrétskiy. This difference escaped us, and was the chief cause of the misunderstanding which was so painful for the great poet.
Turguéneff’s next novel, Smoke (1867), need not be dwelt upon. One object he had in it was to represent the powerful type of a Russian society lioness, which had haunted him for years, and to which he returned several times, until he finally succeeded in finding for it, in Spring Flood, the fullest and the most perfect artistic expression. His other object was to picture in its true colours the shallowness—nay, the silliness, of that society of bureaucrats into whose hands Russia fell for the next twenty years. Deep despair in the future of Russia after the wreck of that great reform movement which had given to us the abolition of serfdom pervades the novel; a despair which can by no means be attributed entirely, or even chiefly, to the hostile reception of Fathers and Sons by the Russian youth, but must be sought for in the wreck of the great hopes which Turguéneff and his best friends had laid in the representatives of the reform movement of 1859-1863. This same despair made Turguéneff write “Enough; from the Memoirs of a Dead Artist” (1865), and the fantastic sketch, “Ghosts” (1867), and he recovered from it only when he saw the birth in Russia of a new movement, “towards the people!” which took place amongst our youth in the early seventies.
This movement he represented in his last novel of the above-mentioned series, Virgin Soil (1876). That he was fully sympathetic with it is self-evident; but the question, whether his novel gives a correct idea of the movement, must be answered to some extent in the negative—even though Turguéneff had, with his wonderful intuition, caught some of the most striking features of the movement. The novel was finished in 1876 (we read it, in a full set of proofs, at the house of P. L. Lavróff, in London, in the autumn of that year)—that means, two years before the great trial of those who were arrested for this agitation took place. And in 1876 no one could possibly have known the youth of our circles unless he had himself belonged to them. Consequently, Virgin Soil could only refer to the very beginnings of the movement. Besides, Turguéneff did not meet with any of the best representatives of it. Much of the novel is true, but the general impression it conveys is not precisely the impression which Turguéneff himself would have received if he had better known the Russian youth at that time.
With all the force of his immense talent, he could not supply by intuition the lack of knowledge. And yet he understood two characteristic features of the earliest part of the movement: misconception of the peasantry, the peculiar incapacity of most of the early promoters of the movement to understand the Russian peasant, on account of the bias of their false literary, historical, and social education; and the Hamletism: the want of resolution, or rather “resolution sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought,” which really characterised the movement at its outset. If Turguéneff had lived a few years more he surely would have noticed coming into the arena the new type of men of action—the new modification of Insároff’s and Bazároff’s type, which grew up in proportion as the movement was taking firm root. He had already perceived them through the dryness of official records of the trial of “the hundred-and-ninety three,” and in 1878 he asked me to tell him all I knew about Mýshkin, one of the most powerful individualities of that trial.
He did not live to accomplish this. A disease which nobody understood and was mistaken for “gout,” but which was in reality a cancer of the spinal cord, kept him for the last few years of his life an invalid, rivetted to his couch. Only his letters, full of thought and life, where sadness and merriment go on in turn, are what remains from his pen during that period of life, when he seems to have meditated upon several novels which he left unfinished or perhaps unwritten. He died at Paris in 1883 at the age of sixty-five.
In conclusion, a few words, at least, must be said about his “Verse in Prose,” or “Senilia” (1882). These are “flying remarks, thoughts, images,” which he wrote down from 1878 onwards under the impression of this or that fact of his own personal life, or of public life. Though written in prose, they are true pieces of excellent poetry, some of them real gems; some deeply touching and as impressive as the best verses of the best poets (Old Woman; The Beggar; Másha; How Beautiful, how Fresh were the Roses); while others (Nature, The Dog) are more characteristic of Turguéneff’s philosophical conceptions than anything else he has written. And finally, in On the Threshold, written a few months before his death, he expressed in most poetical accents his admiration of those women who gave their lives for the revolutionary movement and went on the scaffold, without being even understood at the time by those for whom they died.