Ivan Sergyevitch Turgenev came of an old stock of the Russian nobility.
He was born in Orel, in the province of Orel, which lies more than a
hundred miles south of Moscow, on October 28, 1818. His education was
begun by tutors at home in the great family mansion in the town of
Spask, and he studied later at the universities of Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and Berlin. The influence of the last, and of the
compatriots with whom he associated there, was very great; and when he
returned to Moscow in 1841, he was ambitious to teach Hegel to the
students there. Before this could be arranged, however, he entered the
Ministry of the Interior at St. Petersburg. While there his interests
turned more and more toward literature. He wrote verses and comedies,
read George Sand, and made the acquaintance of Dostoevsky and the
critic Bielinski. His mother, a tyrannical woman with an ungovernable
temper, was eager that he should make a brilliant official career; so,
when he resigned from the Ministry in 1845, she showed her disapproval
by cutting down his allowance and thus forcing him to support himself
by the profession he had chosen.
Turgenev was an enthusiastic hunter; and it was his experiences in the
woods of his native province that supplied the material for "A
Sportsman's Sketches," the book that first brought him reputation. The
first of these papers appeared in 1847, and in the same year he left
Russia in the train of Pauline Viardot, a singer and actress, to whom
he had been devoted for three or four years and with whom he maintained
relations for the rest of his life. For a year or two he lived chiefly
in Paris or at a country house at Courtavenel in Brie, which belonged
to Madame Viardot; but in 1850 he returned to Russia. His experiences
were not such as to induce him to repatriate himself permanently. He
found Dostoevsky banished to Siberia and Bielinski dead; and himself
under suspicion by the government on account of the popularity of "A
Sportsman's Sketches." For praising Gogol, who had just died, he was
arrested and imprisoned for a short time, and for the next two years
kept under police surveillance. Meantime he continued to write, and by
the time that the close of the Crimean War made it possible for him
again to go to western Europe, he was recognized as standing at the
head of living Russian authors. His mother was now dead, the estates
were settled, and with an income of about $5,000 a year he became a
wanderer. He had, or imagined he had, very bad health, and the eminent
specialists he consulted sent him from one resort to another, to Rome,
the Isle of Wight, Soden, and the like. When Madame Viardot left the
stage in 1864 and took up her residence at Baden-Baden, he followed her
and built there a small house for himself. They returned to France
after the Franco-Prussian War, and bought a villa at Bougival, near
Paris, and this was his home for the rest of his life. Here, on
September 3, 1883, he died after a long delirium due to his suffering
from cancer of the spinal cord. His body was taken to St. Petersburg
and was buried with national honors.
The two works by Turgenev contained in the present volume are
characteristic in their concern with social and political questions,
and in the prominence in both of them of heroes who fail in action.
Turgenev preaches no doctrine in his novels, has no remedy for the
universe; but he sees clearly certain weaknesses of the Russian
character and exposes these with absolute candor yet without
unkindness. Much as he lived abroad, his books are intensely Russian;
yet of the great Russian novelists he alone rivals the masters of
western Europe in the matter of form. In economy of means,
condensation, felicity of language, and excellence of structure he
surpasses all his countrymen; and "Fathers and Children" and "A House
of Gentlefolk" represent his great and delicate art at its best.
W. A. N.
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
I
BY EMILE MELCHIOR, VICOMTE DE VOGÜÉ
Ivan Sergyevitch (Turgenev) has given us a most complete picture of
Russian society. The same general types are always brought forward;
and, as later writers have presented exactly similar ones, with but few
modifications, we are forced to believe them true to life. First, the
peasant: meek, resigned, dull, pathetic in suffering, like a child who
does not know why he suffers; naturally sharp and tricky when not
stupefied by liquor; occasionally roused to violent passion. Then, the
intelligent middle class: the small landed proprietors of two
generations. The old proprietor is ignorant and good-natured, of
respectable family, but with coarse habits; hard, from long experience
of serfdom, servile himself, but admirable in all other relations of
life.
The young man of this class is of quite a different type. His
intellectual growth having been too rapid, he sometimes plunges into
Nihilism. He is often well educated, melancholy, rich in ideas but poor
in executive ability; always preparing and expecting to accomplish
something of importance, filled with vague and generous projects for
the public good. This is the chosen type of hero in all Russian novels.
Gogol introduced it, and Tolstoy prefers it above all others.
The favorite hero of young girls and romantic women is neither the
brilliant officer, the artist, nor rich lord, but almost universally
this provincial Hamlet, conscientious, cultivated, intelligent, but of
feeble will, who, returning from his studies in foreign lands, is full
of scientific theories about the improvement of mankind and the good of
the lower classes, and eager to apply these theories on his own estate.
It is quite necessary that he should have an estate of his own. He will
have the hearty sympathy of the reader in his efforts to improve the
condition of his dependents.
The Russians well understand the conditions of the future prosperity of
their country; but, as they themselves acknowledge, they know not how
to go to work to accomplish it.
In regard to the women of this class, Turgenev, strange to say, has
little to say of the mothers. This probably reveals the existence of
some old wound, some bitter experience of his own. Without a single
exception, all the mothers in his novels are either wicked or
grotesque. He reserves the treasures of his poetic fancy for the young
girls of his creation. To him the young girl of the country province is
the corner-stone of the fabric of society. Reared in the freedom of
country life, placed in the most healthy social conditions, she is
conscientious, frank, affectionate, without being romantic; less
intelligent than man, but more resolute. In each of his romances an
irresolute man is invariably guided by a woman of strong will.
Such are, generally speaking, the characters the author describes,
which bear so unmistakably the stamp of nature that one cannot refrain
from saying as he closes the book, "These must be portraits from life!"
which criticism is always the highest praise, the best sanction of
works of the imagination.--From "Turgenev", in "The Russian Novelists,"
translated by J. L. Edmands (1887).
II
BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Turgenev was of that great race which has more than any other fully and
freely uttered human nature, without either false pride or false shame
in its nakedness. His themes were oftenest those of the French
novelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner
and with the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramatic
punishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the
personal sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of
peace. If the end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable
always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I
had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with
mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American
horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient,
agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me
through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are
passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn
from the reader's own knowledge: who else but Turgenev and one's own
most secret self ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air
drawing in at the open window, of the fires burning in the darkness on
the distant fields? I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle
sympathy with nature which scarcely put itself into words with him. As
for the people of his fiction, though they were of orders and
civilizations so remote from my experience, they were of the eternal
human types whose origin and potentialities every one may find in his
own heart, and I felt their verity in every touch.
I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impart
some sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I had
been waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richly
content forever. I do not mean to say that the art of Turgenev
surpasses the art of Björnson; I think Björnson is quite as fine and
true. But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstances
for the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has
to do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his
scene is often as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway,
it is still related to the great capitals by the history if not the
actuality of the characters. Most of Turgenev's books I have read many
times over, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of
years I read them again and again without much caring for other
fiction. It was only the other day that I read "Smoke" through once
more, with no diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less
than my first satisfaction in its art. Perhaps this was because I had
reached the point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was
impatient even of the artifice that hid itself. In "Smoke" I was now
aware of an artifice that kept out of sight, but was still always
present somewhere, invisibly operating the story.--From "My Literary
Passions" (1895).
III
BY K. WALISZEWSKI
The second novel of the series, "Fathers and Children," stirred up a
storm the suddenness and violence of which it is not easy, nowadays, to
understand. The figure of Bazarov, the first "Nihilist"--thus baptized
by an inversion of epithet which was to win extraordinary success--is
merely intended to reveal a mental condition which, though the fact had
been insufficiently recognized, had already existed for some years. The
epithet itself had been in constant use since 1829, when Nadiéjdine
applied it to Pushkin, Polevoï, and some other subverters of the
classic tradition. Turgenev only extended its meaning by a new
interpretation, destined to be perpetuated by the tremendous success of
"Fathers and Children." There is nothing, or hardly anything, in
Bazarov, of the terrible revolutionary whom we have since learnt to
look for under this title. Turgenev was not the man to call up such a
figure. He was far too dreamy, too gentle, too good-natured a being.
Already, in the character of Roudine, he had failed, in the strangest
way, to catch the likeness of Bakounine, that fiery organiser of
insurrection, whom all Europe knew, and whom he had selected as his
model. Conceive Corot or Millet trying to paint some figure out of the
Last Judgment after Michael Angelo! Bazarov is the Nihilist in his
first phase, "in course of becoming," as the Germans would say, and he
is a pupil of the German universities. When Turgenev shaped the
character, he certainly drew on his own memories of his stay at Berlin,
at a time when Bruno Bauer was laying it down as a dogma that no
educated man ought to have opinions on any subject, and when Max
Stirner was convincing the young Hegelians that ideas were mere smoke
and dust, seeing that the only reality in existence was the individual
_Ego_. These teachings, eagerly received by the Russian youth, were
destined to produce a state of moral decomposition, the earliest
symptoms of which were admirably analysed by Turgenev.
Bazarov is a very clever man, but clever in thought, and especially in
word, only. He scorns art, women, and family life. He does not know
what the point of honour means. He is a cynic in his love affairs, and
indifferent in his friendships. He has no respect even for paternal
tenderness, but he is full of contradictions, even to the extent of
fighting a duel about nothing at all, and sacrificing his life for the
first peasant he meets. And in this the resemblance is true, much more
general, indeed, than the model selected would lead one to imagine; so
general, in fact, that, apart from the question of art, Turgenev--he
has admitted it himself--felt as if he were drawing his own portrait;
and therefore it is, no doubt, that he has made his hero so
sympathetic.--From "A History of Russian Literature" (1900).
IV
BY RICHARD H. P. CURLE
But for the best expression of the bewilderment of life we have to turn
to the portrait of a man, to the famous Bazarov of "Fathers and
Children." Turgenev raises through him the eternal problem--Has
personality any hold, has life any meaning at all? The reality of this
figure, his contempt for nature, his egoism, his strength, his mothlike
weakness are so convincing that before his philosophy all other
philosophies seem to pale. He is the one who sees the life-illusion,
and yet, knowing that it is the mask of night, grasps at it, loathing
himself. You can hate Bazarov, you cannot have contempt for him. He is
a man of genius, rid of sentiment and hope, believing in nothing but
himself, to whom come, as from the darkness, all the violent questions
of life and death. "Fathers and Children" is simply an exposure of our
power to mould our own lives. Bazarov is a man of astonishing
intellect--he is the pawn of an emotion he despises; he is a man of
gigantic will--he can do nothing but destroy his own beliefs; he is a
man of intense life--he cannot avoid the first, brainless touch of
death. It is the hopeless fight of mind against instinct, of
determination against fate, of personality against impersonality.
Bazarov disdaining everyone, sick of all smallness, is roused to fury
by the obvious irritations of Pavel Petrovitch. Savagely announcing the
creed of nihilism and the end of romance, he has only to feel the calm,
aristocratic smile of Madame Odintsov fixed on him and he suffers all
the agony of first love. Determining to live and create, he has only to
play with death for a moment, and he is caught. But though he is the
most positive of all Turgenev's male portraits, there are others
linking up the chain of delusion. There is Rudin, typical of the unrest
of the idealist; there is Nezhdanov ("Virgin Soil"), typical of the
self-torture of the anarchist. There is Shubin ("On the Eve"), hiding
his misery in laughter, and Lavretsky ("A House of Gentlefolk"), hiding
his misery in silence. It is not necessary to search for further
examples. Turgenev put his hand upon the dark things. He perceived
character, struggling in the "clutch of circumstances," the tragic
moments, the horrible conflicts of personality. His figures have that
capability of suffering which (as someone has said) is the true sign of
life. They seem like real people, dazed and uncertain. No action of
theirs ever surprises you, because in each of them he has made you hear
an inward soliloquy.--From "Turgenev and the Life-Illusion," in "The
Fortnightly Review" (April, 1910).
V
BY MAURICE BARING
Turgenev did for Russian literature what Byron did for English
literature; he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout all
Europe. And in Europe his work reaped a glorious harvest of praise.
Flaubert was astounded by him, George Sand looked up to him as to a
master, Taine spoke of his work as being the finest artistic production
since Sophocles. In Turgenev's work, Europe not only discovered
Turgenev, but it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the naturalness
of the Russian character; and this came as a revelation. For the first
time Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin was the first to
paint; for the first time Europe came into contact with the Russian
soul; and it was the sharpness of this revelation which accounts for
the fact of Turgenev having received in the west an even greater meed
of praise than he was perhaps entitled to.
In Russia Turgenev attained almost instant popularity. His "Sportsman's
Sketches" and his "Nest of Gentlefolk" made him not only famous but
universally popular. In 1862 the publication of his masterpiece
"Fathers and Children" dealt his reputation a blow. The revolutionary
elements in Russia regarded his hero, Bazarov, as a calumny and a
libel; whereas the reactionary elements in Russia looked upon "Fathers
and Children" as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he satisfied nobody.
He fell between two stools. This, perhaps, could only happen in Russia
to this extent; and for that same reason as that which made Russian
criticism didactic. The conflicting elements of Russian society were so
terribly in earnest in fighting their cause, that anyone whom they did
not regard as definitely for them was at once considered an enemy, and
an impartial delineation of any character concerned in the political
struggle was bound to displease both parties. If a novelist drew a
Nihilist, he must be one or the other, a hero or a scoundrel, if either
the revolutionaries or the reactionaries were to be pleased. If in
England the militant suffragists suddenly had a huge mass of educated
opinion behind them and a still larger mass of educated public opinion
against them, and some one were to draw in a novel an impartial picture
of a suffragette, the same thing would happen. On a small scale, as far
as the suffragettes are concerned, it has happened in the case of Mr.
Wells. But if Turgenev's popularity suffered a shock in Russia from
which it with difficulty recovered, in western Europe it went on
increasing. Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that
was eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hallmark of good taste....
"Fathers and Children" is as beautifully constructed as a drama of
Sophocles; the events move inevitably to a tragic close. There is not a
touch of banality from beginning to end, and not an unnecessary word;
the portraits of the old father and mother, the young Kirsanov, and all
the minor characters are perfect; and amidst the trivial crowd Bazarov
stands out like Lucifer, the strongest--the only strong character--that
Turgenev created, the first Nihilist--for if Turgenev was not the first
to invent the word, he was the first to apply it in this sense.
Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer type that recurs again and
again in Russian history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the meek,
humble type of Ivan Durak. Lermontov's Pechorin was in some respects an
anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many Russian rebels. He is the man
who denies, to whom art is a silly toy, who detests abstractions,
knowledge, and the love of Nature; he believes in nothing; he bows to
nothing; he can break, but he cannot bend; he does break, and that is
the tragedy, but, breaking, he retains his invincible pride, and
"not cowardly puts off his helmet,"
and he dies "valiantly vanquished."
In the pages which describe his death Turgenev reaches the high-water
mark of his art, his moving quality, his power, his reserve. For manly
pathos they rank among the greatest scenes in literature, stronger than
the death of Colonel Newcome and the best of Thackeray. Among English
novelists it is, perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such strong,
piercing chords, nobler than anything in Daudet or Maupassant, more
reserved than anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the great poets,
of the tragic pathos of Goethe and Dante. The character of Bazarov, as
has been said, created a sensation and endless controversy. The
revolutionaries thought him a caricature and a libel, the reactionaries
a scandalous glorification of the Devil; and impartial men such as
Dostoevsky, who knew the revolutionaries at first hand, thought the
type unreal. It is impossible that Bazarov was not like the Nihilists
of the sixties; but in any case as a figure in fiction, whatever the
fact may be, he lives and will continue to live....--From "An Outline
of Russian Literature" (1914).
LIST OF CHARACTERS
NIKOLAI PETROVITCH KIRSANOV, a landowner.
PAVEL PETROVITCH KIRSANOV, his brother.
ARKADY (ARKASHA) NIKOLAEVITCH (_or_ NIKOLAITCH), his son.
YEVGENY (ENYUSHA) VASSILYEVITCH (_or_ VASSILYITCH) BAZAROV, friend of
Arkady.
VASSILY IVANOVITCH (_or_ IVANITCH), father of Bazarov.
ARINA VLASYEVNA, mother of Bazarov.
FEDOSYA (FENITCHKA) NIKOLAEVNA, second wife of Nikolai.
ANNA SERGYEVNA ODINTSOV, a wealthy widow.
KATYA SERGYEVNA, her sister.
PORFIRY PLATONITCH, her neighbor.
MATVY ILYITCH KOLYAZIN, government commissioner.
EVDOKSYA (_or_ AVDOTYA) NIKITISHNA KUKSHIN, an emancipated lady.
