TURGENEV THE EMANCIPATOR
Turgenev was the most cosmopolitan of the Russian fiction-writers, yet with all his long residence in Berlin, Baden, and Paris, with all his broad culture and varied linguistic attainments, he never ceased to choose Russian themes and yield a passionate devotion to his fatherland.
Ivan Sergieevich Turgenev was born on the 28th of October, 1818, in the government of Orel. His father, a dissipated Russian military officer, died while Ivan was still young, leaving the lad in charge of his mother, who was about six years the senior of her husband. The woman was even less fitted by temperament to be a careful mother than was Lady Byron, and the youth of the future novelist was stained with bitter tears. Her vindictive spirit she retained to the last, and, dying in old age, she constantly refused to receive the visits of her son.
Doubtless these disillusioning home experiences affected young Turgenev, for he early declared that he would never marry—and maintained his resolution. Likewise, his ideals of motherhood seem to have suffered, for the maternal qualities of his women characters never rise to the highest.
German, French, and English he early learned from instructors at home—Russian he picked up from the servants of the ancestral estate on which he was born. First, he went to Moscow to study, later the University at St. Petersburg held him for three years as a student, and Berlin completed his academic training—particularly in philosophy, for the subject was at that time interdicted in the Russian schools for fear of its levelling effects.
That was a vitally formative thought-period for Europe, the years between 1835 and 1842, and during such of them as Turgenev spent in the German capital he became impregnated with free thought in all its phases, and never thereafter could he breathe without oppression the air of his restricted Russia. Thus the propaganda of emancipation which the great novelist subtly spread by means of his fiction, without ever becoming a physically present leader, was first of all inspired by his life at home and fanned to enthusiasm by contact with intrepid thinkers in Germany.
There must have been something sweetly noble in this fine, robust young giant for him to have emerged from his sad and jarring home-life, and the autocracy of his natal “Nest of Nobles,” with so deeply rooted a hatred of serfdom and all cruel inequalities. Like the young Lincoln, he swore to strike a blow against slavery; like Lincoln, he lived to witness its overthrow, though upon a more equitable and permanently satisfactory basis than did his American contemporary.
Turgenev, however, was not a militant emancipator. He was too calm, too forbearing, too much the typical man of culture, for this. Indeed, the Russian literary system of dealing with abuses may be said to be typified by Turgenev’s method—he merely described. But his pictures were so vital that he must have mixed his reds with the bloody sweat of knouted serfs, and gotten his blacks from the smoky gloom of pestilent cabins which lined the noisome roadways on ten thousand manors. All Russia saw and gasped—and reformed. Thus did his first work of distinction, the twenty-five “Sportsman’s Sketches”—published from 1847 to 1851, and in book-form in 1852—do their mighty work for mankind.
In earlier days Turgenev was, with all enlightened Russia, an admirer of the poet-fictionist Gogol. A letter in eulogy of this author on his death in 1852 was severely rebuked by the Czar’s banishing its writer to his estates, where he remained, busily engaged in writing, until 1855. Then he saw that Russia could best be served at a distance. He was out of sympathy with the extreme Slavophile party, yet he loved Russia. What better course opened before him than to live in an atmosphere where freedom could breathe, and where his powerful pen might not only do service for Russia among Russians, but in all of Europe as well.
And this ambition he abundantly realized. His residence in Baden as the friend of Madame Viardot, and, be it said, of her husband, and his later life in Paris, whither he repaired shortly after the close of the Franco-Prussian War—for he never lived again in Russia—brought him brilliantly before a constantly increasing company of notables, of whom he was at the last easily chief. His gigantesque figure, crowned with that silvery hair and beard, was a loved and familiar sight until he succumbed to a malignant cancer which attacked the spinal cord, and Turgenev passed over, on the 3rd of September, 1883, at the age of sixty-five.