A pessimist is one who looks upon the unequal struggle of life and can discern no hand to succor the deserving weak from the rapacious strong. Sitting while a lad in a Russian garden, Turgenev beheld a fight-to-a-finish between a serpent and a toad. Then and there began his doubts of a beneficent Providence, which culminated in his quiet, and never aggressive, spiritual pessimism. In this he is only one with most great Russian literary artists. And, singularly enough, he too passed into a final era of mysticism, though not so completely as did his compeer Tolstoi, as witness that fine symbolical sketch, “The Song of Triumphant Love.”
An interesting contrast presents itself in the characters of Tolstoi and Turgenev. The one, aggressively Christian, harsh in the judgment of his opponents, and intolerant of what he adjudged to be error; the other, meek, gentle, considerate, largely tolerant, and quietly forceful. Tolstoi was the lion aroused and warring even when preaching non-resistance; Turgenev, the lion resting with dignified forbearance because of a great serenity within. Both were men of might, yet ethically and artistically at variance. It is pleasant to record, however, that the quarrel which separated them for sixteen years did not prevent Turgenev from responding at once when in later life Tolstoi sought a reconciliation. The interview was charged with amity, but, naturally, Turgenev could not adopt his old-time friend’s extreme religious views. So when they had parted, Tolstoi’s praise was modified—Turgenev was “an unpleasant man”—while the latter had only warm words for the religionist. In a later essay in this series it is recorded how Turgenev from his death-bed besought Tolstoi to return to the field of Romance, in which “thou hast no rival amongst us.”
Turgenev was one of the greatest novelists of all time—the greatest, as it seems to me, of all impressionistic novelists. Except in the one quality of unity—for his work was on its surface fragmentary in structure—this preëminent Russian met perfectly Poe’s ideal of impressionism: he felt an impression of character or of nature and then reproduced in his reader just what he himself felt. And this impression was oftenest elevated above the merely physical. Brutalities, gaucheries, physicalities, were to him expressions of the man in whose inner life the novelist was more deeply interested than in the outer. Thus his realism is neither so physical as Zola’s nor so materialistic in philosophy as Maupassant’s. Turgenev’s pessimism is social, and not primarily moral; hence character is always the big element in his novels and shorter fictional pieces.
As with Tolstoi, so with Turgenev, plot is a negligible quantity. Yet in a way that quite defies any explanation but one, the final impression is fairly unified, and certainly tremendously effective. That one explanation is that all the scattered pictures of traits, appearances, oddities, mannerisms of bearing and speech, and, above all, the marvellous reproduction of characteristically personal language, result in an individual presentment of character unequalled for vividness in all fiction. Turgenev lets no significant detail escape. The units may be trivial, the entire effect is almost always big. The little thing he seizes upon shows us with the infallibility of a master diagnostician the trends of character. The sum of it all is wizardry.
All this is true primarily of his great novels. Here I have space only for mention, at the same time venturing to place them in the order of their importance: “A House of Gentlefolk” (“A Nest of Nobles”), a masterpiece of depiction; “Fathers and Children,” a severe castigation of the old and the new in Russia; “On the Eve,” a pessimistic inquiry as to whether there is hope of better things for his fatherland; “Rudin,” a character study of unusual penetration; “Torrents of Spring,” in which a devilish woman ruins the hero; “Smoke,” a brilliant but bitter satire on things Russian; and “Virgin Soil,” whose “villain,” as in all of the author’s novels, is a woman!
In discussing Turgenev’s shorter fictions, we must remember that most of them were written from seventy to forty years ago, and all show that fine disregard of form which only a master may entertain without inviting failure. Here, as in his novels, character is all. Other story-tellers often make the story preëminent—Turgenev never. His favorite method is to hold up many facets of a character, letting the light—here a gleam, there a full radiance—fall on each. He is a master of monologue and of dialogue. Even the jerky pauses are eloquent. The vagueness of a mind is never asserted; it is shown indubitably. The inept man, the supernumerary of society, the man who is engrossed in self, the despairing peasant bound to the wheel, the reflective but weak-willed dreamer—speech, physical habits, and physical traits reveal them all as relentlessly as a scalpel uncovers diseased tissue. This is the wonder of Turgenev’s fictional power. He has brought suggestive description to the nth power. No fictionist has even approached him in this respect.
One further quality deserves special mention, for I have already referred to his hatred of serfdom and his scorn for the superfluous social orders it built up. It is that of nature description. Turgenev was an Englishman in his love of gunning (although in later life he disapproved of the needless slaughter of innocents). Consequently, many of his tales—particularly his notable “A Sportsman’s Sketches”—abound in fine nature passages. Here is one from “Yermolaï and the Miller’s Wife.”
A quarter of an hour before sunset in springtime you go out into the woods with your gun, but without your dog. You seek out a spot for yourself on the outskirts of the forest, take a look round, examine your caps, and glance at your companion. A quarter of an hour passes; the sun has set, but it is still light in the forest; the sky is clear and transparent; the birds are chattering and twittering; the young grass shines with the brilliance of emerald.... You wait. Gradually the recesses of the forest grow dark; the blood-red glow of the evening sky creeps slowly on to the roots and the trunks of the trees, and keeps rising higher and higher, passes from the lower, still almost leafless branches, to the motionless, slumbering tree-tops.... And now even the topmost branches are darkened; the purple sky fades to dark-blue. The forest fragrance grows stronger; there is a scent of warmth and damp earth; the fluttering breeze dies away at your side. The birds go to sleep—not all at once—but after their kinds; first the finches are hushed, a few minutes later the warblers, and after them the yellow buntings. In the forest it grows darker and darker. The trees melt together into great masses of blackness; in the dark-blue sky the first stars come timidly out. All the birds are asleep. Only the red starts and the nuthatches are still chirping drowsily.... And now they too are still. The last echoing call of the peewit rings over our heads; the oriole’s melancholy cry sounds somewhere in the distance; then the nightingale’s first note. Your heart is weary with suspense, when suddenly—but only sportsmen can understand me—suddenly in the deep hush there is a peculiar croaking and whirring sound, the measured sweep of swift wings is heard, and the snipe, gracefully bending its long beak, sails smoothly down behind a dark bush to meet your shot.