YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK
“All my life is in my works,” said Turgenev, and his biographers’ account of his education and youth reveals how it was that from the age of twenty-three Turgenev was to become both an interpreter of the Russian mind to Europe and an interpreter of Western culture to his countrymen. His father, Sergey Ivanovitch, a handsome, polished officer of impoverished but ancient family, married an heiress, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinov, and their eldest son, Ivan Sergeyevitch, was born, October 28, 1818, at Orel, in central Russia. The natural loathing of the soft, poetic and impulsive boy for tyrannical harshness was accentuated by his parents’, especially by his mother’s, severity, unmerited whippings and punishments being his portion in the “noble and opulent country-house” at Spasskoe, where foreign tutors and governesses succeeded one another quickly. That Turgenev had before his eyes from his childhood in his capricious and despotic mother a distressing object-lesson of a typical Russian vice, viz. unbridled love of power, could only deepen his instinct for siding with weak and gentle natures. Turgenev’s psychological penetration into hard, coarse and heartless characters, so antithetic to his own, seems surprising till we learn that the unscrupulous and cruel “Lutchinov,” the hero of Three Portraits, was drawn from a maternal ancestor. From the Lutovinov family, cruel, despotic and grasping, Turgenev no doubt inherited a mental strand which enabled him to fathom the workings of hardness and cruelty in others. The injustice and humiliations he and his brothers, along with a large household of dependents, suffered at Madame Turgenev’s hands,[4] early aroused in him a detestation of the system of serfdom. The touching story of Mumu, in which the deaf and dumb house-porter’s sweetheart is forced to marry another man, while he himself is ordered to drown his pet dog by his mistress’s caprice, is a true domestic chronicle. Though Madame Turgenev dearly loved her son Ivan Sergeyevitch, whose sweet and tender nature influenced her for good, her insatiable desire to domineer over others, and her violent outbursts of rage kept the household trembling before her whims. “Nobody had a right to sustain in her presence any ideas which contradicted her own,” while her jealousy of her handsome husband’s affaires de coeur embittered her days.[5] She herself had been the victim of her own upbringing, and remembered with loathing her step-father’s lust and cruelty. Turgenev therefore was early inoculated with an aversion for tyrannizing in any shape or form, as well as for the prevalent forms of oppression, official or social, under Nicholas I., and as his biographers tell us, the Turgenevs were a stock noted for “a hatred of slavery and for noble and humane temperaments.”[6]
A second potent influence that turned the youthful Turgenev’s face definitely towards the West was his lengthy tour in Europe, 1838-41. His early education at Moscow University had been completed at the University of St. Petersburg, where his family had removed after his father’s death in 1835, and where as a shy youth he saw the two great authors, Gogol and Pushkin, whose literary example was to have a profound influence on his own work. German philosophy, especially Hegel’s, was at this epoch fashionable in Russia, and Turgenev, after setting out on his tour with his mother’s blessing, attended by a valet, arrived in Berlin, where he drank deep of Goethe’s, Schiller’s and Heine’s works, and where his ardent discussions with his circle of students on life, art, politics and metaphysics crystallized his aspirations for European culture. A tour on the Rhine, in Switzerland and in Italy effectually widened his outlook, and he returned to Spasskoe in 1841, bringing with him his narrative poem “Parasha.”
Undoubtedly conflicting influences, such as Byron, Pushkin and Lermontov, are visible in Turgenev’s youthful, romantic poems, “Parasha,” and various others (1837-47), which we shall not discuss here, or his half-dozen plays (1845-52), which last, however excellent, did not give his genius sufficient scope.[7] Much ingenuity has been exercised, especially by French critics,[8] in ascribing Turgenev’s literary debts to authors as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Auerbach, Dal, Grigorovitch, Dickens, etc. But it would be a waste of time to analyse Turgenev’s work for traces of contemporary authors, though George Sand’s stories of French peasant life had undoubtedly deeply influenced him. With Pushkin as classical model for clarity of style, and with Gogol as his model for direct painting from everyday life, Turgenev belongs to “the natural school” of the ’forties, the school of the realists championed by the critic Byelinsky, then all-powerful with the rising men. It is true that a vein of romanticism crops up here and there in various of Turgenev’s tales, and that a definite strain of lyrical sentimentalism in occasional passages may be credited to German influence. But in almost his first story, The Duellist (1846), we find a complete break with the traditions of the romantic school, traditions which are indeed here turned inside out.[9] Here it is evident that a new master is in the field, “a painter of realities” as Byelinsky soon declared.[10] The story is of much significance, as exemplifying Turgenev’s clear-eyed, deep apprehension of character, and his creative penetration through beauty of feeling. It is to be noted how the coarse bullying insolence of the officer, Lutchkov (who out of envious spleen kills in a duel his friend, the refined and generous Kister), is betrayed by the absence of any tender or chivalrous emotion for women. Filled with his own male self-complacency, and contemptuous of women, Lutchkov comes to his interview with the fresh, innocent girl Masha, whom he alarms by his coarse swagger. To cover his brutal egoistic feeling he roughly kisses the shrinking girl, but she shudders and darts away. “What are you afraid of? Come, stop that.... That’s all nonsense,” he says hoarsely, as he approaches her, terribly confused, with a disagreeable smile on his twisted lips, while patches of red came out on his face.
Could anything describe better the brutal spirit of the man who, out of spiteful envy, to revenge his slighted self-love, kills his own friend, Kister, in a duel? Turgenev’s description of Kister must be remarked, for the latter in his “good nature, modesty, warm-heartedness and natural inclination for everything beautiful” is the twin-soul of his creator. Turgenev’s lifelong readiness to lose sight of himself in appreciation of others, even of the men who abused his good offices and repaid him with ingratitude, was notorious.[11] One may assert that Turgenev’s character was thus early expressed in four dominant traits, viz. a generous tenderness of heart, an enthusiasm for the good, sensitiveness to beauty of form and feeling, an infinite capacity for the passion of love. These qualities are manifest in his first work of importance, A Sportsman’s Sketches (1847-51), an epoch-making book which profoundly affected Russian society and had no small influence in hastening the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861-63.
III
“A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES”
