Turgenev was the first Russian writer to conquer large audiences outside his native land. He actually introduced Russian literature to Europe and America which, through him, discovered and admired the originality of Russian genius. The impact of his own work, moreover, was enhanced by his personal influence. For almost three decades Turgenev, who spent more time abroad than at home, was recognized as the ambassador of Russian letters in Europe. Friend of most outstanding representatives of European art and thought, he was a familiar figure in Western capitals, and the honorary degree awarded to him by the University of Oxford was but a small part of the homage paid to him by his devotees.
Yet despite his unique position and his wide following in almost every land, Turgenev’s fortunes declined sharply in the twentieth century, when many reservations were formulated about his work and person. Some of these qualifications revived old discussions and repeated arguments known already in Turgenev’s lifetime; some of them, however, were of more recent origin and expressed doubts peculiar to our century.
It is well known that most of Turgenev’s illustrious French colleagues as well as Henry James and the Scandinavian-American Boyesen, who met the Russian personally, always spoke of him as being “completely Russian.” The brothers Goncourt describe him in their Journal of 1863 as a “white haired giant who looked like the spirit of a mountain or a forest,” an embodiment of Russian soil; Henry James stressed his eminently Russian characteristics and his preoccupation with Russian affairs; and after his death Renan said that “he was the incarnation of the whole race ... his conscience was in some sort the conscience of a people.” It is curious that the main reservation of later times dealt precisely with the problem of Turgenev’s national authenticity. There is still a widespread opinion that the author of Fathers and Sons became dear to readers outside Russia because of his European formation and his Western leanings. Alfred Kazin stated not long ago that Turgenev “seemed of all the great Russians the least characteristic”; the American critic understands perfectly why Henry James “found it so easy in 1878 to include an appreciation of Turgenev in French Poets and Novelists.” The familiar thesis is that Europeans and Americans of the last century loved Turgenev for his moderation, his conformity to the rules of Victorian art, and his lack of irritating and disturbing Russian national traits. The supporters of this opinion point out that Turgenev’s novels and tales are as tame and respectable as their British counterparts of the same period; his heroines are not very different from the misses in the English family novels, and his nests of gentlefolk could be easily located in the countryside on the other side of the channel or even in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Turgenev’s urbane and restrained manners and his polished style, his gloss and grace, are considered as having been more suitable to and therefore more naturally appreciated in London and Boston than in Moscow and St Petersburg (not to speak of Leningrad).
When Tolstoy and Dostoevsky became known and widely read at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, they not only overshadowed Turgenev but were opposed to him as genuine interpreters of the Russian national scene. Compared to those two giants who shattered the world by the depth and frenzy of their moral and religious search, Turgenev lost in stature. Some critics advanced the theory that he was but an isolated phenomenon in Russian letters; that in any case he did not represent its main stream. His art, they argued, was strangely devoid of any serious moral intent, he never affirmed anything in any area of human endeavour, he never defended any doctrine and never fought on the side of any group. In this he differed fundamentally from other Russians. They were believers or searchers for truth and seekers after God, and he was an agnostic and a skeptic. He belonged much more to the old world of Western decadent culture than to the rising lands of the revolutionary East. And this is why, to quote Mr Kazin again, Turgenev’s “civilized and European art seems no longer in the foreground of Russian literature but behind it.” His unhappy noblemen and his delicately portrayed girls appeared elusive, sentimental, and pallid next to Dostoevsky’s holy sinners and Tolstoy’s robust, full blooded men and women. While the rest of Russian literature conveyed the feeling of exuberant vitality and deep passions, Turgenev’s watercolors exuded melancholy and passivity, and his protagonists (except for Bazarov) talked and acted like second rate Werthers or poor versions of Hamlet. Was he not, in fact, the author of a story entitled Hamlet of the Shchigrov District?
One of the few Russians who did not try to preach and to win over the reader to some credo or idea, Turgenev became suspect even as a chronicler of his society. Russian critics had always interpreted Turgenev’s novels as illustrations of the evolutionary process within the native educated classes between 1850 and 1880. Rudin (1855) represented the idealist of the forties, Lavretzky (1858) was typical of the fifties, On the Eve (1860) conveyed the atmosphere of expectation before the era of great reforms, and Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1861) personified the new generation of nihilists. Later Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1877) reflected the political debate and the beginnings of the populist movement. Already during Turgenev’s lifetime his pictures of Russia started numerous discussions, and, as Edward Garnett said in his essay in 1917, provoked much angry heat and raised great clouds of acrimonious smoke because the defenders and the detractors of the writer disagreed about the historical accuracy of his representation. And fifty years after his death his importance as a social realist was questioned again. His portrayals of superfluous men afflicted by idleness or paralysis of the will seemed particularly inappropriate at a time when the Revolution had unleashed such an astounding amount of energy in Russia and transformed the whole country into an immense workshop. Not only was Turgenev lacking in “publicity value” but when things Russian were popular or when everybody was trying to solve the riddles of Russia’s present regime, Turgenev could hardly help. Charles Morgan said in this connection that Turgenev was too unspectacular, too moderate and patient in spirit. Besides, his protagonists did not look like ancestors of twentieth-century Russians (again excepting Bazarov). And this led to an obvious conclusion: his novels and tales belonged to another age, they were visions of the past, and theirs was the quaint charm of early daguerreotypes in period frames. Turgenev was old fashioned, dated, and offered only an historical interest. Of course, it would be erroneous to identify any work of fiction with a straight representation of reality, but in Turgenev’s case it was assumed that, while not making an exception to the rule, he was especially insensitive to Russia’s historical development. He could not foresee its future and never went beyond the limitations of the small social group to which he belonged and which he depicted with an almost annoying monotony.
Doubts were also cast on Turgenev’s art. In the nineteenth century even those who wondered about Turgenev’s national authenticity or his social philosophy and historical accuracy recognized his craft and mastery. Yet the same George Moore who spoke of Turgenev’s “unfailing artistry” in the eighties, later reproached him as having “a thinness, an irritating reserve,” and repeated the quip of a British journalist who remarked that the Russian was “a very big man playing a very small instrument.” The same George Moore echoed the discontent of the younger generation with Turgenev’s lack of psychological depth: “he has often seemed to us to have left much unsaid, to have, as it were, only drawn the skin from his subject. Magnificently well is the task performed; but we should like to have seen the carcass disembowelled and hung up.” Maurice Baring wrote in the twenties that Turgenev’s works were dated, that he was inaccurate as a social historian and did not reflect the true Russia, and that his subject matter was too narrow. Others added in the thirties that Turgenev, this minor Hamlet who depicted unhappy love affairs of aristocratic ladies, covered only a small area of Russian reality. He was not sufficiently dynamic or varied, there was something effeminate about his manner, and his lyrical qualities were superficial. In general his art was too contrived and self conscious, its gentility simply expressing an organic lack of directness and vitality. A German critic of the thirties found “sweet and pleasant this art for convalescents which makes one agreeably drowsy.”
While Marxist critics were inclined to see in Turgenev a “literary ghost from a sunken world of landed gentry” whose pessimism expressed the doom of his own class, others attacked the very smoothness of Turgenev’s style. Alexis Remizov, an outstanding emigré novelist who appreciated Turgenev and refused to “simplify” problems deriving from his work, identified him nevertheless with the “Karamzine line of Russian letters”: in the opinion of Remizov and many of his followers, Karamzine initiated in the eighteenth century that artificial literary idiom of the upper classes which abandoned the racy genuine language of the people and imitated the literary models of the West. The Karamzine-Turgenev-Chekhov trend of elegance, restraint, and linguistic refinement was opposed by the truly national tradition of pre-Petrine Russia with its down-to-earth realism, Greek-Orthodox and pagan roots, and popular vernacular. From that point of view Turgenev again was declared “unfit for our times, not representative as a Russian writer,” edulcorated and conventional as an artist.
While all these criticisms were widespread in literary circles of the thirties, World War II and its aftermath brought about a change of heart and a revision of current judgments of Turgenev. Apparently readers both in Russia and the Western countries as well as throughout Asia (particularly in China and Japan) showed more stability than the critics: they did not seem to find Turgenev so dated as to drop him. Turgenev emerged as one of the most popular authors in the Soviet Union, particularly in the decade following the war with Hitler. Between 1948 and 1958 the USSR press turned out an average of three to four million copies of his works yearly, and in America and Europe there was a definite revival of interest. His novels and short stories were issued in new translations and found a large following among young and old.
It is evident that only few went to Turgenev for wisdom on the fate of communism or to gain some “first hand knowledge of Russia,” a fashionable slogan of the time. But historians of literature and students of Turgenev suddenly discovered more profound reasons for his hundred-year hold over the general public. Charles Morgan, in an essay in his Reflections in a Mirror (1944), observed that Turgenev was criticised for his calm and his outward lack of dynamism, but then appropriately quoted Tolstoy’s letter to Strakhov (Dostoevsky’s biographer and disciple) after Turgenev’s death: “The longer I live,” wrote Tolstoy, “the more I like horses that are not restive. You say that you are reconciled to Turgenev. And I have come to love him very much, and curiously enough, just because he is not restive but gets to his destination. Turgenev will outlive Dostoevsky and not for his artistic qualities but because he is not restive.”
Tolstoy pointed out that Turgenev’s quiet tone was the result of control and not indifference. The strength of his understatement, enhanced by the neatness of his composition, was based on his essential humanity. Therefore it is erroneous to rank Turgenev with the representatives of the “well-made novel.” Of course, he used the “dramatic technique,” followed strictly the rule of the withdrawal of the author from his narrative, and built the latter on the revelation of characters through their actions and words. But he never tried to conceal his aversions and sympathies. The spontaneity of his emotional response and the freedom of his treatment of topics and characters made his works totally different from conventional Anglo-Saxon standards and from the French logical formality in constructing the “well-made novel.”