TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS

A writer, Mr. Robert Lynd, has said: “It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the images of the rivals of the gods of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and another year, Turgenev. And no doubt the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.”

One had hoped that the disease, long endemic in Russia, of disparaging Turgenev, would not have spread to England, but some enthusiastic explorers of things Russian came back home with a mild virus and communicated the spores of the misunderstanding. That misunderstanding, dating at least fifty years back, was part of the polemics of the rival Russian political parties. The Englishman who finds it strange that Turgenev’s pictures of contemporary Russian life should have excited such angry heat and raised such clouds of acrimonious smoke may imagine the fate of a great writer in Ireland to-day who should go on his way serenely, holding the balance level between the Unionists, the Nationalists, the Sinn FÉin, the people of Dublin, and the people of Belfast. The more impartial were his pictures as art, the louder would rise the hubbub that his types were “exceptional,” that his insight was “limited,” that he did not understand either the politicians or the gentry or the peasants, that he had not fathomed all that was in each “movement,” that he was palming off on us heroes who had “no real existence.” And, in the sense that Turgenev’s serene and beautiful art excludes thousands of aspects that filled the newspapers and the minds of his contemporaries, his detractors have reason.

Various Russian critics, however, whom Mr. Maurice Baring, and a French biographer, M. Haumant, have echoed, have gone further, and in their critical ingenuity have mildly damned the Russian master’s creations. It seems to these gentlemen that there is a great deal of water in Turgenev’s wine. Mr. Baring tells us that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky “reached the absolute truth of the life which was round them,” and that “people are beginning to ask themselves whether Turgenev’s pictures are true (!), whether the Russians that he describes ever existed, and whether the praise which was bestowed upon him by his astonished contemporaries all over Europe was not a gross exaggeration.”

“Turgenev painted people of the same epoch, the same generation; he dealt with the same material; he dealt with it as an artist and as a poet, as a great artist and a great poet. But his vision was weak and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky. His characters beside those of Tolstoy seem caricatures, and beside those of Dostoevsky they are conventional.... When all is said, Turgenev was a great poet. What time has not taken away from him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry in his work.... Turgenev never wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, the Sportsman’s Sketches. In this book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression.

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“No one can deny that the characters of Turgenev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev is this: that Turgenev’s characters are as living as any characters are in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Turgenev’s characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them, and that they are permeated by the faults of the author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self-consciousness.

“... Than Bazarov there is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive ... (but he is) a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be.... Dostoevsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth.... (Virgin Soil) Here in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter-day judges who have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the real thing.

“The lapse of years has only emphasized the elements of banality—and conventionality—which are to be found in Turgenev’s work. He is a masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without convention. His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes, and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any elemental pictures of nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he rings the changes on delicate arrangements of wood, cloud, mist, and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures, after the manner of Corot.”—Landmarks in Russian Literature, pp. 99-110.

It is obvious from the above criticisms of Mr. Baring and the Russian critics whom he represents that what is the matter with Turgenev in their eyes is his “vision,” his “temperament.” They admire his language, his beautiful style: they pay lip service to him as “a poet.” They even admit that he was “a great artist,” but they do not suspect that his intellectual pre-eminence is disguised from them by his very aesthetic qualities, balance, contrast, grouping, perspective, harmony of form and perfect modelling, qualities in which Turgenev not only far surpasses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but any nineteenth-century European. Further, it is evident that these critics, having themselves never seen or felt in nature’s life those shades of “truth” which Turgenev’s poetical vision reveals to us, imagine that such have no “real” existence! Otherwise these critics would have laid stress on these special shades and tones and not passed them by with a perfunctory nod. One may go further and assert that it is precisely this same “poetic vision” which irritates Turgenev’s detractors; they resent it, because it conflicts with the more prosaic, everyday point of view. They mean by “truth” something both more photographic and commonplace, something more striking or more ordinary in the “lighting,” something observed with less beautiful shades of feeling, less exquisitely stamped and recorded in classical contours.

Let us examine some of these charges. “Turgenev’s characters are as living as any in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland, and are thus conventional.” But why conventional? Why damn all the great creations in books, from Don Quixote downwards, as bookish? Are Turgenev’s women characters, say Maria Nikolaevna, ZinaÏda, Varvara Pavlovna, Irene, Elena, Anna Martinovna, creations which are more highly individualized than are Tolstoy’s women, conventional? No more than are Shakespeare’s women, Lady Macbeth, Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Desdemona, Portia. Mr. Baring cannot mean this absurdity. But he repeats the charge “Bazarov is a ‘book-character,’ extraordinarily vivid and living though he be,” evidently thinking that because Bazarov is a figure synthesizing social tendencies and a mental attitude peculiar to his time, he is inferior as a creation to, say, Tolstoy’s Vronsky. On the contrary, that is why Bazarov is both psychologically and humanly a much more interesting figure, and one higher in the creative scale than Vronsky. Nature denied Tolstoy the power of constructing a Rudin or a Bazarov. It is because these types are personifications incarnate of tendencies, traits, and a special mode of thought and action of a particular period, and yet are brimming with individual life, that they are sui generis, and are irreplaceable creations. This is Turgenev’s glory. We have only to compare Rudin or Bazarov with such heroes as Lermontov’s Petchorin or Herzen’s Beltoff to recognize that while these latter have all the force of autobiography, they are not shown us in the round. Mr. Baring has been seduced, one imagines, by our generation’s preference for the “photographic likeness” in art, which nevertheless, at critical moments, often leaves us in the air: for example, the scene of Vronsky’s attempted suicide in Anna Karenin. Turgenev could never have been guilty of this piece of banal, doubtful psychology. And the latter-day school of Russian critics, when they ask with Mr. Baring, “Did men ever meet the double of a Bazarov or a Rudin in flesh and in blood? if not, then these characters are bookishly exaggerated or have an element of caricature in them,” may be asked in reply, “Did you ever meet Dostoevsky’s Alyosha or Prince Myshkin walking and talking in life?” Again, are not three-fourths of Dostoevsky’s people permeated by “the faults of the author’s own character”? Do they not behave extravagantly or fantastically in a manner all their own? Is there not a strong element of caricature in them? Of course there is, and Mr. Baring and his Russian critics delight in it, and for that very reason exalt Dostoevsky above Turgenev. They exalt the exaggerated Satanic element in Dostoevsky’s work, even while they declare “Dostoevsky’s Nihilists are not only truer than Turgenev’s, but the very quintessence of truth”! We are more humble in our claims for Nezhdanov and Marianna and Mashurina in Virgin Soil; we do not assert that they are “the very quintessence of truth”; but we know that these creations are not “caricatures” in the sense that Stepan Trofimovitch and Karmazinov in The Possessed are caricatures. We know, on the contrary, that Turgenev’s Nihilists, in Kropotkin’s words, are real representatives of “the very earliest phases of the movement.... Turgenev had, with his wonderful intuition, caught some of the most striking features of the movement, viz. the early promoters’ ‘Hamletism,’ and their misconception of the peasantry.” How curious it is that Stepniak and Kropotkin, who themselves lived with and knew intimately these early Nihilists, bear witness to the truth of Turgenev’s portraiture, while MM. Baring and BrÜckner and Haumant, these critics of our own generation, tell us “Turgenev’s Nihilists are not the real thing”! While admitting that Turgenev had his comparative failures, such as Insarov in On the Eve, one observes that Turgenev’s detractors demand from his social pictures what they demand from no other of his contemporaries, “the whole objective truth and nothing but the truth.” And this curious demand, fundamentally at the root of the widespread misunderstanding about Turgenev’s work, has been spread and caught up and re-echoed by the great tribe of partisan critics, political propagandists, Slavophils, reactionaries, progressives, for two generations. Necessarily Turgenev, this consummate artist whose contemporary pictures synthesize many aspects of the social and political movements of his time, colours and tones his work with his own personality, as do all the other great creators. Just as the hero, Olenin in The Cossacks, Levin in Anna Karenin, and Pierre in War and Peace, are projections of Tolstoy’s individuality, so Lavretski, Litvinov, Sanin, and other characters, are projections of Turgenev’s personality. It is the same with Fielding, with Balzac and Maupassant, with Dostoevsky and Gontcharov, whose characters also “are compacted of the result of their observation, with all their own inner feelings, their loves and hates, their anger and disdain.” But only in Turgenev’s case, it appears, it is a sin that the creations should contain a certain amount of “subjective reality.” It must therefore be the case that it is precisely Turgenev’s “temperament” which is at fault in the eyes of critics who assert that “his vision was weak and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky.” How curious that the vision which created Fathers and Children and The Poems in Prose should have been relatively weak and narrow! and that the understanding which created A House of Gentlefolk and A Sportsman’s Sketches should have been cold and shallow! And yet in the same breath we are instructed that Turgenev “dealt with his generation as a great poet and a great artist.” A great poet with a relatively weak and narrow vision, a great artist with a relatively cold and shallow understanding! This is an enigma to us, but not to Turgenev’s detractors.

No! One must fall back on other explanations of Turgenev’s comparative unpopularity. The first is that beauty of form, a master’s sense of composition, an exquisite feeling for balance are less and less prized in modern opinion. Our age has turned its back on the masters possessed of these classic qualities. Modern life flows along congested roads, and modern art responds in bewilderment to an embarrassment of forces. Corot’s example in painting is no longer extolled save by the true connoisseur. The grace of beauty is more or less out of fashion. The wider becomes the circle of modern readers and the more the audience enfolds the great bourgeois class, the less are form, clarity and beauty prized. The second explanation is that the inspiration of Love, and the range of exquisite feelings of Love, so manifest in Turgenev’s vision, are slightly vieux jeu. When Dostoevsky is sentimental, as in The Insulted and Injured, he turns one’s stomach. It is impossible to read him, so false, exaggerated and unreal are his characters’ emotions. But when Turgenev is sentimental, as he is in passages in The Diary of a Superfluous Man, A Correspondence, Faust, one finds oneself to be in the atmosphere of a faded drawing-room of the “’forties.” This perishable element undoubtedly exists in some of Turgenev’s short stories: it was the heritage he received from the Romantic movement of his fathers, and occasionally, here and there, streaks of this romanticism appear and are detrimental to the firm and delicate objectivity of his creations. But, apart from the question of these streaks of sentimentalism, it is obvious that Turgenev in his attitude towards love and women is nearer to Shakespeare than is, say, Tchehov. Liza and Elena are almost as far removed from the range of our modern creators as are Imogen and Desdemona. It is not that we do not believe firmly in their existence, but that the changed social atmosphere of our times does not so sharply develop and outline woman’s spiritual characteristics: such heroines are now free to act in many directions denied to Turgenev’s heroines. A girl might say, to-day, of Elena, “Grandmother was like that! so father says, and grandfather saw her like that! Isn’t it interesting?” And this change in our social atmosphere, undoubtedly, is a bar to Turgenev’s popularity in the eyes of the younger generation.

Again, despite the change of fashion in schools of landscape painters, it is amusing to hear that Turgenev—“this masterly landscape painter”—is charged with “never getting face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth—and Gorky”! But Mr. Baring is echoing his French authority, M. Haumant, who in turn is modestly echoing, it would seem, MM. MihaÏlovsky and Strahov.[1] These eminent authorities on nature are agreed in comparing Turgenev with Corot, “whose subjects and methods scarcely alter.” VogÜÉ, who knew the province of Orel, Turgenev’s country, however, does not agree. He says pointedly, “One has to live in the country described by Turgenev to admire how on every page he corroborates our personal impressions, how he brings back to our soul every emotion experienced, and to our senses every subtle odour breathed in that country.” This seems explicit.

Never getting face to face with nature! Could a more baseless charge have been made, one falsified by the innermost spirit of Turgenev’s work, and by countless passages in his writings, of the most intimate observation?[2] We cite a specimen from A Tour in the Forest, showing the penetrating freshness and warmth of his description:

“I fed my horses, and I too was ferried over. After struggling for a couple of miles through the boggy prairie, I got at last on to a narrow raised wooden causeway to a clearing in the forest. The cart jolted unevenly over the round beams of the causeway; I got out and went along on foot. The horses moved in step, snorting and shaking their heads from the gnats and flies. The forest took us into its bosom. On the outskirts, nearer to the prairie, grew birches, aspens, limes, maples, and oaks. Then they met us more rarely. The dense firwood moved down on us in an unbroken wall. Further on were the red, bare trunks of pines, and then again a stretch of mixed copse, overgrown with underwood of hazelnut, mountain ash, and bramble, and stout, vigorous weeds. The sun’s light threw a brilliant light on the tree-tops, and, filtering through the branches, here and there reached the ground in pale streaks and patches. Birds I scarcely heard—they do not like great forests. Only from time to time there came the doleful and thrice-repeated call of a hoopoe, and the angry screech of a nut-hatch or a jay; a silent, always a solitary bird kept fluttering across the clearing, with a flash of golden azure from its lovely feathers. At times the trees grew further apart, ahead of us the light broke in, the cart came out on a cleared, sandy, open space. Thin rye was growing over it in rows, noiselessly nodding its pale ears. On one side there was a dark, dilapidated little chapel with a slanting cross over a well. An unseen brook was bubbling peacefully with changing, ringing sounds, as though it were flowing into an empty bottle. And then suddenly the road was cut in half by a birch-tree recently fallen, and the forest stood around, so old, lofty and slumbering, that the air seemed pent in. In places the clearing lay under water. On both sides stretched a forest bog, all green and dark, all covered with reeds and tiny alders. Ducks flew up in pairs, and it was strange to see those water-birds darting rapidly about among the pines. ‘Ga, ga, ga, ga,’ their drawn-out call kept rising unexpectedly. Then a shepherd drove a flock through the underwood; a brown cow with short, pointed horns broke noisily through the bushes, and stood stock-still at the edge of the clearing, her big dark eyes fixed on the dog running before me. A slight breeze brought the delicate pungent smell of burnt wood. A white smoke in the distance crept in eddying rings over the pale, blue forest air, showing that a peasant was charcoal-burning for a glass-factory or for a foundry. The further we went on, the darker and stiller it became all round us. In the pine-forest it is always still; there is only, high overhead, a sort of prolonged murmur and subdued roar in the tree tops.... One goes on and on, and this eternal murmur of the forest never ceases, and the heart gradually begins to sink, and a man longs to come out quickly into the open, into the daylight; he longs to draw a full breath again, and is oppressed by the pungent damp and decay.”—A Tour in the Forest, pp. 105-107.

Anybody who has lived amid forests and woods must agree that in the passage above Turgenev has seized with unerring exactitude the character, the breath itself of a great woodland, and similarly all his descriptions of nature in A Sportsman’s Sketches are inspired by profound sensitiveness and close fidelity. “Vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures!” This is the accusation of townsmen.

Another and more insidious line of critical detraction has been followed by M. Haumant in Ivan TourguÉnief, la vie et l’oeuvre, a volume, painstaking and well documented, assuredly of great interest to the student. Intent on his efforts to track down to their source “the origins of Turgenev’s thoughts,” the French critic has forgotten to applaud the aesthetic appeal, and the very perfection of these creations! It is as though a critic of Keats, in trying to discover “the sources” of “Hyperion” or “An Ode to a Grecian Urn,” had neglected to appraise the imperishable essence of these masterpieces. Thus M. Haumant, searching profoundly for “echoes” in Turgenev’s “inner voices,” gravely informs us that in The Brigadier Turgenev has constructed “a Russian Werther”! while a passage in Phantoms, it appears, is inspired by a passage in De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater. A page is devoted to the discussion of the latter conjecture,[3] but nothing at all is said as to the unique spiritual beauty and the haunting atmosphere of these tales. And A Lear of the Steppes, that masterpiece, incomparable in its force of genius, is dismissed in half a line! The effect of such “comments,” both on those who know and those who do not know their Turgenev, is equally unfortunate. For it really looks, but of course one may be wrong, as though the French critic, like his latter-day Russian confrÈres, did not recognize a masterpiece when he sees one. Has not, indeed, a Russian literary teacher, A. D. Alfyorov, publicly declared that “Turgenev’s work is, of course, only of historical importance.”

But enough! Indeed one may well be asked, Is it necessary to defend so great a classic as Turgenev against modern criticisms of this character? Perhaps it is not a mere waste of time, for certain reasons. Turgenev’s supremacy, as artist, accepted by the Élite in France, Renan, Taine, Flaubert, Maupassant, etc., and by the best European critics, such as Brandes, was impaired in Russian eyes by his growing unpopularity after 1867. BrÜckner says justly:

“To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without liberty of assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion, literature became the last refuge of his freedom of thought, the only means of propagating higher ideas. He expected and demanded of his country’s literature not merely aesthetic recreation; he placed it at the service of everything noble and good, of his aspiration, of the enlightenment and emancipation of the spirit. Hence the striking partiality, nay, unfairness, displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own literature when they did not answer to the claims or the expectations of their party or their day. A purely aesthetic handling of the subject would not gain it full acceptance.”

Indeed, to read the contemporary Russian onslaughts directed against Turgenev’s successive masterpieces is to imagine one must be dreaming. Nearly every popular critic of the periodical press, righteous or self-righteous, is seen, tape-measure in hand, arbitrarily finding fault with Turgenev’s subject, conception and treatment, disdaining or ignoring its aesthetic force, beauty and harmonious perfection. It is a crowd of critical gnats dancing airily round the great master and eagerly driving their little stings into his flesh. Even before the publication of Smoke (1867) Turgenev was accused of being out of date, and his frequent spells of residence abroad, at Baden, Paris, etc. (though he returned to Russia nearly every year), and his “life devotion” to a foreigner, Madame Viardot, helped to consolidate the story that he no longer knew the Russia of the day. And indeed there is truth in the dictum that Turgenev was pre-eminently a chronicler of the Pre-Reform days, or as he himself said, “a writer of the transition period.” But the bulk of his works, even those into which no tendency could be read, such as The Torrents of Spring or A Lear of the Steppes, was never properly appreciated as aesthetic creations, so deeply imbued was the intelligent Russian with the “war-like” criticism of Drobrolubov, Tchernyshevsky, Pisarev, MihaÏlovsky, etc., critics who, in BrÜckner’s words, “relegated aesthetics to ladies’ society, and turned its critical report into a sort of pulpit for moral and social preaching.” A strong reaction in Turgenev’s favour was manifested at the Pushkin statue celebration in Moscow, 1879, and at his funeral obsequies in Petersburg, 1883, when two hundred and eighty-five deputations met at his grave. But, later, MM. MihaÏlovsky and Strahov, and latterly MM. Haumant, BrÜckner and Baring, have declared that “the general admiration” for Turgenev’s genius has greatly weakened, and that Turgenev’s star has paled before the stars of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This undercutting style of criticism—“They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat with Shakespeare,” as Meredith puts it—seems a little clumsy when one reflects that not merely in vision and temperament, but in aesthetic quality, Turgenev is irreplaceable. The spiritual kingdoms of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are separated as widely as are the kingdoms of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. It is true that for our triumphant bourgeoisies, who, bewildered, grapple with the rich profusion of facts, problems and aspects of our congested civilization, quality in art is little understood or prized. And Turgenev, by his art’s harmonious union of form and subject, of grace and strength, of thought and emotion, in fact belongs, as Renan said, to the school of Greek perfection.

Since Turgenev is pre-eminently an intellectual force, as well as an artist with a consummate sense of beauty, it is difficult for a critic to hold the balance equitably between the social significance of Turgenev’s pictures of life and the beauty of his vision. Far too little attention has been paid to him as artist. This is no doubt not merely due to the fact that while the majority of critics either naÏvely ignore or take for granted his supreme quality, the more perfect is a work of art the more impossible is it to do it critical justice. The great artists, as Botticelli, who are peculiarly mannered, it is far easier to criticize and comment on than is a great artist, as Praxiteles, whose harmony of form conceals subtleties of technique unique in spiritual handling. The discussion of technical beauties, however, is not only a thankless business but tends to defeat its own object. It is better to seek to appreciate the spirit of a master, and to dwell on his human value rather than on his aesthetic originality. The present writer need scarcely add that he is dissatisfied with his inadequate discussion of Turgenev’s masterpieces, but fragmentary as it is, he believes his is almost the only detailed attempt yet made in the English language.

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II
YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK