Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

Even the cold-hearted Bazarov is shaken by the joy of his mother's greeting when he returns home, and by her agony at his early departure. He hates himself for not being able to respond to her demonstrations of affection. Unlike most sons, he is clever enough to understand the slavish adoration of his parents; but he realises that he cannot, especially in the presence of his college friend, relieve their starving hearts. At the very end, he says "My father will tell you what a man Russia is losing. . . . That's nonsense, but don't contradict the old man. Whatever toy will comfort the child . . . you know. And be kind to mother. People like them aren't to be found in your great world if you look by daylight with a candle."

The bewildered, helpless anguish of the parents, who cannot understand why the God they worship takes their son away from them, reaches the greatest climax of tragedy that I know of anywhere in the whole history of fiction. Not even the figure of Lear holding the dead body of Cordelia surpasses in tragic intensity this old pair whose whole life has for so long revolved about their son. And the novel closes with the scene in the little village churchyard, where the aged couple, supporting each other, visit the tomb, and wipe away the dust from the stone. Even the abiding pessimism of the novelist lifts for a moment its heavy gloom at this spectacle. "Can it be that their prayers, their tears, are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred, devoted love, is not all-powerful? Oh, no! However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of indifferent nature; they tell us too of eternal reconciliation and of life without end."

This is where the novel Fathers and Children rises above a picture of Russian politics in the sixties, and remains forever an immortal work of art. For the greatness of this book lies not in the use of the word Nihilist, nor in the reproduction of ephemeral political movements; its greatness consists in the fact that it faithfully portrays not merely the Russian character, nor the nineteenth century, but the very depths of the human heart as it has manifested itself in all ages and among all nations.

The next novel, Smoke, despite its extraordinary brilliancy, is in many ways unworthy of Turgenev's genius. It was written at Baden, while he was living with the Viardots, and I suspect that the influence of Madame Viardot is stronger in this work than in anything else Turgenev produced. Of course he had discussed again and again with her the abuse that young Russia had poured on his head for Fathers and Children; and I suspect she incited him to strike and spare not. The smoke in this novel is meant to represent the idle vapour of Russian political jargon; all the heated discussions on both sides are smoke, purposeless, obscure, and transitory as a cloud. But the smoke really rose from the flames of anger in his own heart, fanned by a woman's breath, who delighted to see her mild giant for once smite his enemies with all his force. If Fathers and Children had been received in Russia with more intelligence or more sympathy, it is certain that Smoke would never have appeared. This is the most bitter and purely satirical of all the works of Turgenev; the Slavophils, with their ignorance of the real culture of western Europe, and their unwillingness to learn from good teachers, are hit hard; but still harder hit are the Petersburg aristocrats, the "idle rich" (legitimate conventional target for all novelists), who are here represented as little better in intelligence than grinning apes, and much worse in morals. No one ever seems to love his compatriots when he observes them in foreign lands; if Americans complain that Henry James has satirised them in his international novels, they ought to read Smoke, and see how Turgenev has treated his travelling countrymen. They talk bad German, hum airs out of tune, insist on speaking French instead of their own tongue, attract everybody's attention at restaurants and railway-stations,--in short, behave exactly as each American insists other Americans behave in Europe.

The book is filled with little portraits, made "peradventure with a pen corroded." First comes the typical Russian gasbag, who talks and then talks some more.

"He was no longer young, he had a flabby nose and soft cheeks, that looked as if they had been boiled, dishevelled greasy locks, and a fat squat person. Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in raptures over something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but exclamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother-earth."

Dostoevski was so angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for his own appearance."

The portrait of the Pecksniffian Pishtchalkin: "In exterior, too, he had begun to resemble a sage of antiquity; his hair had fallen off the crown of his head, and his full face had completely set in a sort of solemn jelly of positively blatant virtue."

None but a great master could have drawn such pictures; but it is not certain that the master was employing his skill to good advantage. And while representing his hatred of all the Russian bores who had made his life weary, he selected an old, ruined man, Potugin, to express his own sentiments--disgust with the present condition of Russia, and admiration for the culture of Europe and the practical inventive power of America. Potugin says that he had just visited the exposition at the Crystal Palace in London, and that he reflected that "our dear mother, Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without disarranging a single nail in the place." Not a single thing in the whole vast exhibition had been invented by a Russian. Even the Sandwich Islanders had contributed something to the show. At another place in the story he declares that his father bought a Russian threshing machine, which remained five years useless in the barn, until replaced by an American one.

Such remarks enraged the Slavophils beyond measure, for they were determined to keep out of Russia foreign inventions and foreign ideas. But that Turgenev was right is shown in the twentieth century by an acute German observer, Baron Von der Bruggen. In his interesting book, Russia of To-day, he says: "All civilisation is derived from the West. . . . People are now beginning to understand this in Russia after having lost considerable time with futile phantasies upon original Slavonic civilisation. If Russia wishes to progress, her Western doors must be opened wide in order to facilitate the influx of European culture." The author of these words was not thinking of Turgenev: but his language is a faithful echo of Potugin. They sound like a part of his discourse. Still, the literary value of Smoke does not lie in the fact that Turgenev was a true prophet, or that he successfully attacked those who had attacked him. If this were all that the book contained, it would certainly rank low as a work of art.