CHAPTER V
THE EPOCH OF REFORM
For seven years after the death of Belinsky in 1848, all literary development ceased. This period was the darkest hour before the dawn of the second great renascence of Russian literature. Criticism was practically non-existent; the Slavophiles were forbidden to write; the Westernizers were exiled. An increased severity of censorship, an extreme suspicion and drastic measures on the part of the Government were brought about by the fears which the Paris revolution of 1848 had caused. The Westernizers felt the effects of this as much as the Slavophiles; a group of young literary men, schoolmasters and officers, the Petrashevtsy, called after their leader, a Foreign Office official Petrashevsky, met together on Fridays and debated on abstract subjects; they discussed the emancipation of the serfs, read Fourier and Lamennais, and considered the establishment of a secret press: the scheme of a popular propaganda was thought of, but nothing had got beyond talk—and the whole thing was in reality only talk—when the society was discovered by the police and its members were punished with the utmost severity. Twenty-one of them were condemned to death, among whom was Dostoyevsky, who, being on the army list, was accused of treason. They were reprieved on the scaffold; some sent into penal servitude in Siberia, and some into the army. This marked one of the darkest hours in the history of Russian literature. And from this date until 1855, complete stagnation reigned. In 1855 the Emperor Nicholas died during the Crimean War; and with the accession of his son Alexander II, a new era dawned on Russian literature, the Era of the Great Reforms. The Crimean War and the reforms which followed it—the emancipation of the serfs, the creation of a new judicial system, and the foundation of local self-government—stabbed the Russian soul into life, relieved it of its gag, produced a great outburst of literature which enlarged and enriched the literature of the world, and gave to the world three of its greatest novelists: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky.
Ivan Turgenev (1816-83), whose name is of Tartar origin, came of an old family which had frequently distinguished itself in the annals of Russian literature by a fearless outspokenness. He began his literary career by writing verse (1843); but, like Maupassant, he soon understood that verse was not his true vehicle, and in 1847 gave up writing verse altogether; in that year he published in The Contemporary his first sketch of peasant life, Khor and Kalinych, which afterwards formed part of his Sportsman’s Sketches, twenty-four of which he collected and published in 1852. The Government rendered Turgenev the same service as it had done to Pushkin, in exiling him to his own country estate for two years. When, after the two years, this forced exile came to an end, he went into another kind of exile of his own accord; he lived at first at Baden, and then in Paris, and only reappeared in Russia from time to time; this accounts for the fact that, although Turgenev belongs chronologically to the epoch of the great reforms, the Russia which he paints was really more like the Russia before that epoch; and when he tried to paint the Russia that was contemporary to him his work gave rise to much controversy.
His Rudin was published in 1856, The Nest of Gentlefolk in 1859, On the Eve in 1860, Fathers and Sons in 1862, Smoke in 1867. Turgenev did for Russian literature what Byron did for English literature; he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe. And in Europe his work reaped a glorious harvest of praise. Flaubert was astounded by him, George Sand looked up to him as to a Master, Taine spoke of his work as being the finest artistic production since Sophocles. In Turgenev’s work, Europe not only discovered Turgenev, but it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the naturalness of the Russian character; and this came as a revelation. For the first time, Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin was the first to paint; for the first time Europe came into contact with the Russian soul; and it was the sharpness of this revelation which accounts for the fact of Turgenev having received in the West an even greater meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled to.
In Russia, Turgenev attained almost instant popularity. His Sportsman’s Sketches made him known, and his Nest of Gentlefolk made him not only famous but universally popular. In 1862 the publication of his masterpiece Fathers and Sons dealt his reputation a blow. The revolutionary elements in Russia regarded his hero, Bazarov, as a calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary elements in Russia looked upon Fathers and Sons as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. This, perhaps, could only happen in Russia to this extent; and for the same reason as that which made Russian criticism didactic. The conflicting elements of Russian society were so terribly in earnest in fighting their cause, that any one whom they did not regard as definitely for them was at once considered an enemy, and an impartial delineation of any character concerned in the political struggle was bound to displease both parties. If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must either be a hero or a scoundrel, if either the revolutionaries or the reactionaries were to be pleased. If in England the militant suffragists suddenly had a huge mass of educated opinion behind them and a still larger mass of educated public opinion against them, and some one were to draw in a novel an impartial picture of a suffragette, the same thing would happen. On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes are concerned, it has happened in the case of Mr. Wells. But, if Turgenev’s popularity suffered a shock in Russia from which it with difficulty recovered, in Western Europe it went on increasing. Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that was eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hall-mark of good taste.
In Russia, Turgenev’s work recovered from the unpopularity caused by his Fathers and Sons when Nihilism became a thing of the past, and revolution took an entirely different shape; but, with the growing up of new generations, his popularity suffered in a different way and for different reasons. A new element came into Russian literature with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and later with Gorky, and Turgenev’s work began to seem thin and artificial beside the creations of these stronger writers; but in Russia, where Turgenev’s work has the advantage of being read in the original, it had an asset which ensured it a permanent and safe harbour, above and beyond the fluctuations of literary taste, the strife of political parties, and the conflict of social ideals; and that was its art, its poetry, its style, which ensured it a lasting and imperishable niche among the great classics of Russian literature. And there it stands now. Turgenev’s work in Russia is no longer disputed or a subject of dispute. It is taken for granted; and, whatever the younger generation will read and admire, they will always read and admire Turgenev first. His work is a necessary part of the intellectual baggage of any educated man and, especially, of the educated adolescent.
The position of Tennyson in England offers in a sense a parallel to that of Turgenev in Russia. Tennyson, like Turgenev, enjoyed during his lifetime not only the popularity of the masses, but the appreciation of all that was most eclectic in the country. Then a reaction set in. Now I believe the young generation think nothing of Tennyson at all. And yet nothing is so sure as his permanent place in English literature; and that permanent place is secured to him by his incomparable diction. So it is with Turgenev. One cannot expect the younger generation to be wildly excited about Turgenev’s ideas, characters, and problems. They belong to an epoch which is dead. At the same time, one cannot help thinking that the most advanced of the symbolist writers would not have been sorry had he happened by chance to write Bezhin Meadow and the Poems in Prose. Just so one cannot help thinking that the most modern of our poets, had he by accident written The Revenge or Tears, Idle Tears, would not have thrown them in the fire!
There is, indeed, something in common between Tennyson and Turgenev. They both have something mid-Victorian in them. They are both idyllic, and both of them landscape-lovers and lords of language. They neither of them had any very striking message to preach; they both of them seem to halt, except on rare occasions, on the threshold of passion; they both of them have a rare stamp of nobility; and in both of them there is an element of banality. They both seem to a certain extent to be shut off from the world by the trees of old parks, where cultivated people are enjoying the air and the flowers and the shade, and where between the tall trees you get glimpses of silvery landscapes and limpid waters, and soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of course, there is more than this in Turgenev, but this is the main impression.
Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he describes beautifully from the outside, making you feel its existence, but not convincing you that he felt it himself; but on the other hand what an artist he is! How beautifully his pictures are painted; and how rich he is in poetic feeling!
Turgenev is above all things a poet. He carried on the work of Pushkin, and he did for Russian prose what Pushkin did for Russian poetry; he created imperishable models of style. His language has the same limpidity and absence of any blur that we find in Pushkin’s work. His women have the same crystal radiance, transparent simplicity, and unaffected strength; his pictures of peasant life, and his country episodes have the same truth to nature; as an artist he had a severe sense of proportion, a perfect purity of outline, and an absolute harmony between the thought and the expression. Now that modern Europe and England have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is possible that a reaction will set in to the detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a certain extent this reaction has set in in Western Europe, as M. Haumant, one of Turgenev’s ablest critics and biographers, pointed out not long ago. And, as the majority of Englishmen have not the advantage of reading him in the original, they will be unchecked in this reaction, if it comes about, by their appreciation of what is perhaps most durable in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev adequately, it would require an English poet gifted with a sense of form and of words as rare as that of Turgenev himself. However this may be, there is no doubt about the importance of Turgenev in the history of Russian literature, whatever the future generations in Russia or in Europe may think of his work. He was a great novelist besides being a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed his early Sportsman’s Sketches in freshness of inspiration and the perfection of artistic execution.