The young birds of the old nest can give no answer to the questions he longs to ask, for they have quite forgotten the vanished one; and they return to their game, in which they are quite absorbed. He reflects, in his desolation, how the self-same words describe the same scene of other days: nature’s smile is quite the same; the same joys are new to other children; just as, in a sonata of Chopin’s, the original theme of the melody recurs in the finale.
In this romance, the melancholy contrast between the perennity of nature and the change and decay of man through the cruel and pitiless work of time is very strikingly portrayed. We have become so attached to the former characters painted by our author, that these children, in the heyday of their lives, are almost hateful to us.
I am strongly tempted to quote these pages in full, but they would lose too much in being separated from what precedes them; and, unwillingly leaving the subject, I can only apply to Turgenef his own words in regard to one of his heroes:—
“He possessed the great secret of that divine eloquence which is music; for he knew a way to touch certain chords in the heart which would send a vibrating thrill through all the others.”
The “Nest of Nobles” established the author’s renown. Such a strange world is this that poets, conquerors, women also, gain the hearts of men the more effectually by making them suffer and weep. All Russia shed tears over this book; and the unhappy Liza became the model for all the young girls. No romantic work since “Paul and Virginia” had produced such an effect upon the people. The author seems to have been haunted by this type of woman. His Ellen in “On the Eve” has the same indomitable will. She has a serious, reserved, and obstinate nature, has been reared in solitude; and, free from all outside influences, and scorning all obstacles, she is capable of the most complete self-renunciation. But in this instance the circumstances are quite different. The beloved one is quite free, but cast out by his family. As Liza fled to the cloister in spite of the supplications of her friends, so Ellen joins her lover and devotes herself to him, not suspecting for a moment her act to be in any way a criminal one; but it is redeemed, in any case, by her devoted constancy through a life of many trials. These studies of character show a keen observation of the national temperament. The man is irresolute, the woman decided; she it is who rules fate, knows what she wants to do, and does it. Everything which, with our ideas, would seem in a young girl like boldness and immodesty, is pictured by the artist with such simplicity and delicacy that we are tempted to see in it only the freedom of a courageous, undaunted spirit. These upright and passionate natures which he creates seem capable of anything but fear, treachery, and deceit.
The poet seems to have poured the accumulated emotion of his whole youth into the “Nest of Nobles” as a vent to the long repressed sentiment of his inmost heart. He now set himself to study the social conditions of the life around him; and in the midst of the great intellectual movement of 1860, on the eve of the emancipation, he wrote “Fathers and Sons.” This book marks a date in the history of the Russian mind. The novelist had the rare good-fortune to recognize a new growth of thought, and to give it a fixed form and name, which no other had been able to do.
In “Fathers and Sons,” an old man of the past generation, discussing his character of Bazarof, asked: “What is your opinion of Bazarof?”—“What is he?—he is a nihilist,” replied a young disciple of the terrible medical student.—“What do you say?”—“I say he is a nihilist!”—“Nihilist?” repeated the old man. “Ah, yes! that comes from the Latin word nihil, and our Russian word nitchevo; as well as I can judge, that must be a man who will neither acknowledge nor admit anything.”—“Say, rather,” added another, “who respects nothing.”—“Who considers everything from a critical point of view,” resumed the young man.—“That is just the same thing.”—“No, it is not the same thing; a nihilist is a man who bows to no authority, and will admit no principle as an article of faith, no matter how deeply respected that principle may be.”
We must go back still farther than the Latin to find the root of the word and the philosophy it expresses; to the old Aryan stock, of which the Slavonic race is one of the main branches. Nihilism is the Hindu nirvâna; the yielding of the primitive man before the power of matter and the obscurity of the moral world; and the nirvâna necessarily engenders a furious reaction in the conquered being, a blind effort to destroy that universe which can crush and circumvent him. But I have already touched upon this subject, which is too voluminous to dwell upon here. So Nihilism, as we understand it, is only in its embryo state in this famous book of Turgenef’s. I would merely call the attention of the reader to another passage in this book which reveals a finer understanding of the word than volumes written upon the subject. It is in another discussion of Bazarof’s character, this time between an intelligent young girl and a young disciple of Bazarof, who honestly believes himself a nihilist. She says:—
“Your Bazarof you cannot understand, neither can he understand you.”—“How so?”—“How can I explain it?… He is a wild animal, and we, you and I, are tamed animals.”
This comparison shows clearly the shade of difference between Russian Nihilism and the similar mental maladies from which human nature has suffered from time immemorial down to the present day.