What led to errors of evaluation were his serene diction and his belief that a good work of art must never lose its equilibrium or poise, even when dealing with anxiety and madness. He praised highly the “tranquillity in passion” of the French tragedian Rachel and spoke of her acting as a model of high esthetic fulfillment. Actually, the subject matter of Turgenev’s novels and tales is far from idyllic: his love stories inevitably terminate in doom and frustration, and none of his novels has a happy ending, death striking most of his heroes. Throughout his works Turgenev displays an acute sense of the tragic in life and a constant preoccupation with man’s condition on earth. Yet this pessimism is far from strident, and the writer’s most poignant emotions and reflections are always expressed in an even voice, without outbursts of despair. Turgenev loves order, symmetry, balance, and radiance, and he presents a harmonized picture of life which makes his work appear self-contained. There is a world which can rightly be called “Turgenevian,” and it stands in its own right as a complete and rounded achievement.
It could be argued that such an esthetic phenomenon is of sufficient importance to justify Turgenev’s appeal in 1961. But other factors should be noted to understand the recent revival of interest in his work. Today we find Turgenev much more “authentically Russian” than did readers of half a century ago. Fathers and Sons should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the psychology of the Russian post-revolutionary generation. Bazarov is the forerunner of all the men of action in Soviet literature, in much the same way that Elena, Marianna, and Natalia are typical representatives of Russia’s modern women. It is not difficult to discover that Turgenev’s characters, despite their old fashioned garb, are more fundamentally national than many exotic figures of post-Turgenev fiction who were branded by sensation-craving readers as “true Russians.”
For another thing, Turgenev, with his method of understatement (which Chekhov followed), is closer to modern literary trends than other realists of his own age. One can easily foresee that his tales—and they are probably the best and most enduring part of his work—will attract the attention and admiration of readers and writers for a long time, because they form a counterpart to the era of exaggerated psychologism which is rapidly approaching its decline. Nobody today will accuse Turgenev of “lack of psychological depth” or of over-simplicity. In his own unobtrusive manner, Turgenev hinted at all the complexities of the human soul and alluded to the hidden roots of human actions. In the dreams in Turgenev’s works is an unsuspected wealth of psychological insight.
Virginia Woolf, in her last essays, wrote that “his books were curiously of our own time, undecayed, and complete in themselves.... His novels are so short and yet they hold so much. The emotion is so intense and yet so calm. The form is in one sense so perfect, in another so broken. They are about Russia in the fifties and sixties of the last century, and yet they are about ourselves at the present moment.” What struck her as his greatest accomplishment was the union of fact and vision that he aimed at in all his writings. Turgenev himself formulated his ideal in a letter in which he said that the artist should not be simply satisfied to catch life in all its manifestations; he ought to understand them, to comprehend the laws according to which they evolve—even though those laws are not always visible.
While Turgenev’s national authenticity has been fully reestablished in the last decade and his universality and perfection often stressed by Western and Russian writers, a revision has also taken place with regard to his “objectivity.” The legend of his “impersonality” has been easily denounced by the psychological brand of criticism which found that Turgenev, as an individual, was prey to morbid complexes and obsessions, and suffered from many inner contradictions and fears. Already at the end of the nineteenth century George Moore assumed that “what influenced Turgenev’s life is put forward in his books,” and went on to argue that Turgenev exposed his own weaknesses and failures through the medium of his heroes and their unlucky experiences with life and women. Extremely representative of this trend in contemporary interpretation is the brilliant essay (1958) by Edmund Wilson which examines Turgenev’s art in the light of his biography.
Of course the flow of literary fortune is in constant ebb, and the rejection of yesterday’s formulae by critics and readers of our time is not final. Yet one has the feeling that we have overcome the biased and inimical judgments of the beginning of the century and particularly those of the twenties and thirties. Turgenev is returning to the Pantheon of world literature, not by sufferance but by merit. His lasting qualities as a story teller, as a painter of Russian life and character, and as an incomparable analyst of love seem more evident to us today than they did to the pre-war generation. He will remain a beloved writer for years to come—as long as elegiac grief combined with his exaltation of love and beauty and his vision of art as an orderly arrangement of emotional values can still quicken the feelings and the esthetic sense of men and women throughout the world.
M. S.
Sarah Lawrence College