Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

Heine says somewhere that the man who first came to Germany was astonished at the abundance of ideas there. “This man,” he says, “was like the traveller who found a nugget of gold directly he arrived in El Dorado; but his enthusiasm died down when he discovered that in El Dorado there was nothing but nuggets of gold.” As it was with ideas in Germany, according to Heine, so was it with the naturalness of Tourgeniev. Compared with the work of Tolstoy and that of all other Russian writers, Tourgeniev’s naturalness is less astonishing, because he possesses the same qualities that they possess, only in a less degree.

When all is said, Tourgeniev was a great poet. What time has not taken away from him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry in his work. Every Russian schoolboy has read the works of Tourgeniev before he has left school; and every Russian schoolboy will probably continue to do so, because Tourgeniev’s prose remains a classic model of simple, beautiful, and harmonious language, and as such it can hardly be excelled. Tourgeniev never wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, the Sportsman’s Sketches. In this book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression. One does not know which to admire more—the delicacy of the art in choosing and recording his impressions, or the limpid and musical utterance with which they are recorded. To the reader who only knows his work through a translation, three-quarters of the beauty are lost; yet so great is the truth, and so moving is the poetry of these sketches, that even in translation they will strike a reader as unrivalled.

There is, perhaps, nothing so difficult in the world to translate as stories dealing with Russian peasants. The simplicity and directness of their speech are the despair of the translator; and to translate them properly would require literary talent at once as great and as delicate as the author’s. Mrs. Garnett’s version of Tourgeniev’s work is admirable; yet in reading the translation of the Sportsman’s Sketches, and comparing it with the original, one feels that the task is an almost impossible one. Some writers, Rudyard Kipling for instance, succeed in conveying to us the impression which is made by the conversation of men in exotic countries. When Rudyard Kipling gives us the speech of an Indian, he translates it into simple and biblical English. There is no doubt this is the right way to deal with the matter; it is the method which was adopted with perfect success by the great writers of the eighteenth century, the method of Fielding and Smollett in dealing with the conversation of simple men. One cannot help thinking that it is a mistake, in translating the speech of people like Russian peasants, or Indians, or Greeks, however familiar the speech may be, to try to render it by the equivalent colloquial or slang English. For instance, Mrs. Garnett, in translating one of Tourgeniev’s masterpieces, The Singers, turns the Russian words “nie vryosh” (Art thou not lying?) by “Isn’t it your humbug?” In the same story she translates the Russian word “molchat” by the slang expression “shut up.” Now “shut up” might, in certain circumstances, be the colloquial equivalent of “molchat”; but the expression conveyed is utterly false, and it would be better to translate it simply “be silent”; because to translate the talk of the Russian peasant into English colloquialisms conveys precisely the same impression, to any one familiar with the original, which he would receive were he to come across the talk of a Scotch gillie translated into English cockney slang.

This may seem a small point, but in reality it is the chief problem of all translation, and especially of that translation which deals with the talk and the ways of simple men. It is therefore of cardinal importance, when the material in question happens to be the talk of Russian peasants; and I have seen no translation in which this mistake is not made. How great the beauty of the original must be is proved by the fact that even in a translation of this kind one can still discern it, and that one receives at least a shadow of the impression which the author intended to convey. If the Sportsman’s Sketches be the masterpiece of Tourgeniev, he rose to the same heights once more at the close of his career, when he wrote the incomparable Poems in Prose. Here once more he touched the particular vibrating string which was his special secret, and which thrills and echoes in the heart with so lingering a sweetness.

So much for Tourgeniev as a poet. But Tourgeniev was a novelist, he was famous as a novelist, and must be considered as such. His three principal novels, A House of Gentlefolk, Fathers and Sons, and Virgin Soil, laid the foundation of his European fame. Their merits consist in the ideal character of the women described, the absence of tricks of mechanism and melodrama, the naturalness of the sequence of the events, the harmony and proportion of the whole, and the vividness of the characters. No one can deny that the characters of Tourgeniev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Tourgeniev is this: that Tourgeniev’s characters are as living as any characters ever are in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland, and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Tourgeniev’s characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them; and that they are permeated by the faults of the author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self-consciousness. M. Haumant points out that the want of backbone in all Tourgeniev’s characters does not prove that types of this kind must necessarily be untrue or misleading pictures of the Russian character, since Tourgeniev was not only a Russian, but an exceptionally gifted and remarkable Russian. Tourgeniev himself divides all humanity into two types, the Don Quixotes and the Hamlets. With but one notable exception, he almost exclusively portrayed the Hamlets. Feeble, nerveless people, full of ideas, enthusiastic in speech, capable by their words of exciting enthusiasm and even of creating belief in themselves, but incapable of action and devoid of will; they lack both the sublime simplicity and the weakness of Ivan Durak, which is not weakness but strength, because it proceeds from a profound goodness.

To this there is one exception. In Fathers and Sons, Tourgeniev drew a portrait of the “Lucifer” type, of an unbending and inflexible will, namely, Bazarov. There is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive; and nothing that he wrote ever aroused so much controversy and censure as this figure. Tourgeniev invented the type of the intellectual Nihilist in fiction. If he was not the first to invent the word, he was the first to apply it and to give it currency. The type remains, and will remain, of the man who believes in nothing, bows to nothing, bends to nothing, and who retains his invincible pride until death strikes him down. Here again, compared with the Nihilists whom Dostoievsky has drawn in his Possessed, we feel that, so far as the inner truth of this type is concerned, Tourgeniev’s Bazarov is a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be; and that Dostoievsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth. Tourgeniev never actually saw the real thing as Tolstoy might have seen it and described it; nor could he divine by intuition the real thing as Dostoievsky divined it, whether he saw it or not. But Tourgeniev evolved a type out of his artistic imagination, and made a living figure which, to us at any rate, is extraordinarily striking. This character has proved, however, highly irritating to those who knew the prototype from which it was admittedly drawn, and considered him not only a far more interesting character than Tourgeniev’s conception, but quite different from it. But whatever fault may be found with Bazarov, none can be found with the description of his death. Here Tourgeniev reaches his high-water mark as a novelist, and strikes a note of manly pathos which, by its reserve, suggests an infinity of things all the more striking for being left unsaid. The death of Bazarov is one of the great pages of the world’s fiction.

In Virgin Soil, Tourgeniev attempts to give a sketch of underground life in Russia—the revolutionary movement, helpless in face of the ignorance of the masses and the unpreparedness of the nation at large for any such movement. Here, in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter-day critics who have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the real thing.[11] Nevertheless, in spite of Tourgeniev’s limitations, these three books, A House of Gentlefolk, Fathers and Sons, and Virgin Soil, must always have a permanent value as reflecting the atmosphere of the generation which he paints, even though his pictures be marred by caricatures, and feeble when compared with those of his rivals.

Of his other novels, the most important are On the Eve, Smoke, Spring Waters, and Rudin (the most striking portrait in his gallery of Hamlets). In Spring Waters, Tourgeniev’s poetry is allowed free play; the result is therefore an entrancing masterpiece. With regard to On the Eve, Tolstoy writes thus:[12]

“These are excellent negative characters, the artist and the father. The rest are not types; even their conception, their position, is not typical, or they are quite insignificant. That, however, is always Tourgeniev’s mistake. The girl is hopelessly bad. ‘Ah, how I love thee!... Her eyelashes were long.’ In general it always surprises me that Tourgeniev, with his mental powers and poetic sensibility, should, even in his methods, not be able to refrain from banality. There is no humanity or sympathy for the characters, but the author exhibits monsters whom he scolds and does not pity.”

Again, in writing of Smoke, Tolstoy says:[13]