Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

* I cannot believe that even Mr. Edward Garnett loves him, though in his Introduction to Constance Garnett's translation, he says, "we love him."

Bazarov, as every one knows, was drawn from life. Turgenev had once met a Russian provincial doctor,* whose straightforward talk made a profound impression upon him. This man died soon after and had a glorious resurrection in Bazarov, speaking to thousands and thousands of people from his obscure and forgotten grave. It is rather interesting that Turgenev, who drew so many irresolute Russian characters, should have attained his widest fame by the depiction of a man who is simply Incarnate Will. If every other person in all Turgenev's stories should be forgotten, it is safe to say that Bazarov will always dwell in the minds of those who have once made his acquaintance.

* It is difficult to find out much about the original of Bazarov. Haumant says Turgenev met him while travelling by the Rhine in 1860; but Turgenev himself said that the young doctor had died not long before 1860, and that the idea of the novel first came to him in August, 1860, while he was bathing on the Isle of Wight. Almost every writer on Russian literature has his own set of dates and incidents.

And yet, Turgenev, with all his secret admiration for the Frankenstein he had created, did not hesitate at the last to crush him both in soul and body. The one real conviction of Turgenev's life was pessimism,--the belief that the man of the noblest aspiration and the man of the most brutish character are treated by Nature with equal indifference. Bazarov is the strongest individual that the novelist could conceive; and it is safe to say that most of us live all our lives through without meeting his equal. But his powerful mind, in its colossal egotism and with its gigantic ambitions, is an easy prey to the one thing he despised most of all--sentiment; and his rugged body goes to the grave through a chance scratch on the finger. Thus the irony of this book--and I know of no novel in the world that displays such irony--is not the irony of intentional partisan burlesque. There is no attempt in the destruction of this proud character to prove that the "children" were wrong or mistaken; it is the far deeper irony of life itself, showing the absolute insignificance of the ego in the presence of eternal and unconscious nature. Thus Bazarov, who seems intended for a great hero of tragedy, is not permitted to fight for his cause, nor even to die for it. He is simply obliterated by chance, as an insect perishes under the foot of a passing traveller, who is entirely unaware that he has taken an individual life.

Nature herself could hardly be colder or more passive than the woman with whom it was Bazarov's bad luck to fall in love. The gradual change wrought in his temperament by Madame Odintsov is shown in the most subtle manner. To Bazarov, women were all alike, and valuable for only one thing; he had told this very woman that people were like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying an individual birch tree. Why, then, should this entirely unimportant individual woman change his whole nature, paralyse all his ambitions, ruin all the cheerful energy of his active mind? He fights against this obsession like a nervous patient struggling with a dreadful depression that comes over him like a flood. He fights like a man fighting with an enemy in the dark, whom he cannot see, but whose terrible blows rain on his face. When he first meets her, he remarks to the shocked Arkady, "What a magnificent body! Shouldn't I like to see it on the dissecting table!" But he is unable long to admire her with such scientific aloofness. "His blood was on fire directly if he merely thought of her; he could easily have mastered his blood, but something else was taking root in him, something he had never admitted, at which he had always jeered, at which all his pride revolted." It is this bewilderment at meeting the two things that are stronger than life--love and death--that both stupefy and torture this superman. It is the harsh amazement of one who, believing himself to be free, discovers that he is really a slave. Just before he dies, he murmurs: "You see what a hideous spectacle; the worm half-crushed, but writhing still. And, you see I thought too: I'd break down so many things, I wouldn't die, why should I! there were problems to solve, and I was a giant! And now all the problem for the giant is how to die decently, though that makes no difference to any one either. . . . I was needed by Russia. . . . No, it's clear, I wasn't needed."

Madame Odintsov's profound and subtle remark about happiness is the key to her character, and shows why she never could have been happy with Bazarov, or have given him any happiness.

"We were talking of happiness, I believe. . . . Tell me why it is that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a fine evening, or a conversation with sympathetic people, it all seems an intimation of some measureless happiness existing apart somewhere rather than actual happiness such, I mean, as we ourselves are in possession of? Why is it? Or perhaps you have no feeling like that?"

Many of us certainly have feelings like that; but while these two intellectuals are endeavouring to analyse happiness, and losing it in the process of analysis, the two young lovers, Arkady and Katya, whose brows are never furrowed by cerebration, are finding happiness in the familiar human way. In answer to his declaration of love, she smiled at him through her tears. "No one who has not seen those tears in the eyes of the beloved, knows yet to what a point, faint with shame and gratitude, a man may be happy on earth."

Although the character of Bazarov dominates the whole novel, Turgenev has, I think, displayed genius of a still higher order in the creation of that simple-minded pair of peasants, the father and mother of the young nihilist. These two are old-fashioned, absolutely pious, dwelling in a mental world millions of miles removed from that of their son; they have not even a remote idea of what is passing in his mind, but they look on him with adoration, and believe him to be the greatest man in all Russia. At the end of a wonderful sketch of the mother, Turgenev says: "Such women are not common nowadays. God knows whether we ought to rejoice!"

This humble pair, whom another novelist might have treated with scorn, are glorified here by their infinite love for their son. Such love as that seems indeed too great for earth, too great for time, and to belong only to eternity. The unutterable pathos of this love consists in the fact that it is made up so largely of fear. They fear their son as only ignorant parents can fear their educated offspring; it is something that I have seen often, that every one must have observed, that arouses the most poignant sympathy in those that understand it. It is the fear that the boy will be bored at home; that he is longing for more congenial companionship elsewhere; that the very solicitude of his parents for his health, for his physical comfort, will irritate and annoy rather than please him. There is no heart-hunger on earth so cruel and so terrible as the hunger of father and mother for the complete sympathy and affection of their growing children. This is why the pride of so many parents in the development of their children is mingled with such mute but piercing terror. It is the fear that the son will grow away from them; that their caresses will deaden rather than quicken his love for them. They watch him as one watches some infinitely precious thing that may at any moment disappear forever. The fear of a mother toward the son she loves is among the deepest tragedies of earth. She knows he is necessary to her happiness, and that she is not to his.