Note on Turgenev’s Life—His Character and Philosophy—Enough —Hamlet and Don Quixote—The Poems in Prose—Turgenev’s last Illness and Death—His Epitaph.

If we have said nothing hitherto about the twenty years of Turgenev’s life (1855-1877), in which the six great novels were composed, it is because his cosmopolitan activities, social, political, intellectual, were too many to be chronicled in the compass of a short Study. They may be here indicated in a few lines. Lengthy stays in France, and visits to Germany, Italy, England, were alternated with residence every year at Spasskoe. His attachment to Madame Viardot and her family (which may be studied in Lettres À Madame Viardot, Paris, 1907, a series unfortunately not published in its entirety) led to his joining their household at Courtavenel and Paris, and later (1864) to settling with them at Baden. His residence in France brought him into contact with nearly all the celebrated French men of letters, MÉrimeÉ, Taine, Renan, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, etc., and later with the chiefs of the young naturalistic school, as Zola, Daudet, Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev’s political outlook and Liberal creed are best represented in his Correspondence with Hertzen, to whom he communicated Russian news for The Bell: his relations and quarrel with Tolstoy, and his enthusiastic appreciation of the latter’s genius are recorded in Biriukoff’s Life of Tolstoy, and in Halperine-Kaminsky’s Correspondence. For his relations with Russian contemporary men of letters, Fet, Grigorovitch, Nekrassov, Dostoevsky, Annenkov, Aksakov, etc., there exists a mass of documents, letters and reminiscences in the Russian. For a general sketch of Turgenev’s life the English reader can turn to E. Haumant’s Ivan TourguÉnief, Paris, 1906; for an account of Turgenev’s youth, his relations with the Nihilists, his later life in Paris, etc., to Michel Delines’ TourguÉnief Inconnu, and also to the much-abused but valuable volume, Souvenirs sur TourguÉneff, by Isaac Pavlovsky.

All these sources reveal Turgenev in much the same light, a man of boundless cosmopolitan interests, of a broad, sane, fertile mind, of the most generous and tender heart. Some of his contemporaries touch on certain weaknesses, his vacillating will, his fits of hypochondria, his romantic affectation in youth, etc., but everybody bears witness (as does his Correspondence) to his lovableness, and the extraordinary altruism and sweetness of his nature. Thus Maupassant, a keen judge of character, records:

“He was one of the most remarkable writers of this century, and at the same time the most honest, straightforward, universally sincere and affectionate man one could possibly meet. He was simplicity itself, kind and honest to excess, more good-natured than any one in the world, affectionate as men rarely are, and loyal to his friends whether living or dead.

“No more cultivated, penetrating spirit, no more loyal, generous heart than his ever existed.”

Such a man’s philosophy can in no sense be termed “pessimistic,” since the wells of his spirit are constantly fed by springs of understanding, love and charity. The whole body of Turgenev’s work appeals to our faith in the ever-springing, renovating power of man’s love of the good and the beautiful, and to his spiritual struggle with evil. But, faced by the threatening mass of wrong, of human stupidity and greed, of men’s pettiness and blindness, Turgenev’s beauty of feeling often recoils in a wave of melancholy and of sombre mournfulness. Thus in Enough (1864), a fragment inspired by the seas of acrimonious misunderstanding raised by Fathers and Children, Turgenev has concentrated in a prose poem of lyrical beauty, an access of profound dejection. Here we see laid bare the roots of Turgenev’s philosophic melancholy,—man’s insignificance in face of “the deaf, blind, dumb force of nature ... which triumphs not even in her conquests but goes onward, onward devouring all things.... She creates destroying, and she cares not whether she creates or she destroys.... How can we stand against those coarse and mighty waves, endlessly, unceasingly, moving upward? How have faith in the value and dignity of the fleeting images, that in the dark, on the edge of the abyss, we shape out of dust for an instant?” After recording many exquisite memories of nature and of love, Turgenev, then, compares human activities to those of gnats on the forest edge on a frosty day when the sun gleams for a moment: “At once the gnats swarm up on all sides; they sport in the warm rays, bustle, flutter up and down, circle round one another.... The sun is hidden—the gnats fall in a feeble shower, and there is the end of their momentary life. And men are ever the same.” “What is terrible is that there is nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting and degradingly inane.”

“But are there no great conceptions, no great words of consolation: patriotism, right, freedom, humanity, art? Yes, those words there are and many men live by them and for them. And yet it seems to me that if Shakespeare could be born again he would have no cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear. His searching glance would discover nothing new in human life: still the same motley picture—in reality so little complex—would unroll beside him in its terrifying sameness. The same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name ... why in the name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in which the many-headed beast, the multitude, is caught so easily, the same workings of power, the same traditions of slavishness, the same innateness of falsehood—in a word, the same busy squirrel’s turning in the old, unchanged wheel....”

With this passage of weary disillusionment and disgust of life we may compare one in Phantoms, written a year earlier: “These human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings glued together with filth, the pitiful traces of their tiny, monotonous bustle, of their comic struggle with the unchanging and inevitable, how revolting it all suddenly was to me”; and one, no less significant, in the opening pages of The Torrents of Spring:

“He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human.... Everywhere the same everlasting pouring of water into a sieve, the everlasting beating of the air, everywhere the same self-deception—half in good faith, half conscious—any toy to amuse the child, so long as it keeps him from crying. And then all of a sudden old age drops down like snow on the head, and with it the ever-growing, ever-growing and devouring dread of death ... and the plunge into the abyss.”

But to show these waves of pessimistic exhaustion in right relation to the whole volume of Turgenev’s work, one must contrast them with many hundreds of passages where the struggle of love, faith and courage, where the impulse of pity and beauty of conduct rank supreme in all human endeavour. And in his illuminating essay on Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860), Turgenev holds the balance level between humanity’s blind faith in the power of the good (Don Quixote), and the disillusionment of its knowledge (Hamlet). Here Turgenev shows us that sincerity and force of conviction in the justice or goodness of a cause (however wrong-headed or absurd the idealist’s judgment may be) is the prime basis for the pursuit of virtue, and that true enthusiasm for goodness and beauty exacts self-sacrifice, disregard of one’s own interest, and forgetfulness of the “I.” Hamlet by his sceptical intelligence becomes so conscious of his own weakness, of the worthlessness of the crowd, of the self-regarding motives of men, that he is unable to love them. Hence his irony, his melancholy, his despair in the triumph of the good, for which he, too, struggles, while paralysed by his thoughts which sap his will and condemn him to inactivity. “The Hamlets,” says Turgenev, “find nothing, discover nothing, and leave no trace in their passage through the world but the memory of their personality: they have no spiritual legacy to bequeath. They do not love: they do not believe. How, then, should they find?”

Love and faith in the good and beautiful—based on forgetfulness of self—must therefore be set against and balance the rule of the intelligence, and this is precisely the effect Turgenev’s work makes on us and the effect which his personality made on his acquaintances. “This man was all good,” says VogÜÉ. “I think one would have to search the literary world for a long time before finding a writer capable of such modesty and such effacement,” says HalpÉrine-Kaminsky. “I am always thinking about Turgenev. I love him terribly,” says Tolstoy naÏvely, after his lifelong hostility to Turgenev’s genius had been removed by the latter’s death. And all Turgenev’s acquaintances agreed that no one was so devoid of egoism, so generous in his enthusiasm for the works of other men as he.[25] The guiding law of his being was shown not only in his unmeasured desire to exalt the works of his rivals,[26] but to find excellent, absorbing qualities in the works of obscure, unsuccessful writers. This trait often appeared, to his own circle, to be proof of mere uncritical misplaced enthusiasm, but in fact Turgenev was a most severe and impartial critic.[27] There is in even the humblest work of art, that is not false, a nucleus of individual feeling, experience, insight which cannot be replaced. And Turgenev, always searching for the good, instantly detected any individual excellence and emphasized its value, without dwelling on a work’s mediocre elements. The world, and the generality of men, do exactly the reverse; they take pleasure in pointing out and publishing defects and weaknesses and in ignoring the points of strength.

The Poems in Prose (1878-1882), this exquisite collection of short, detached descriptions, scenes, memories, and dreams, yields a complete synthesis in brief of the leading elements in Turgenev’s own temperament and philosophy. The Poems in Prose are unique in Russian literature, one may say unsurpassed for exquisite felicity of language, and for haunting, rhythmical beauty. Turgenev’s characteristic, the perfect fusion of idea and emotion, takes shape here in Æsthetic contours which challenge the antique. As with all poetry of a high order, the creative emotion cannot be separated from the imperishable form in which it is cast, and ten lines of the original convey what a lengthy commentary would fail to communicate. We therefore quote a translation of three of the Prose Poems from a version which, however careful, must inevitably fall short of the original:

“NECESSITAS-VIS-LIBERTAS

“A BAS-RELIEF

“A tall bony old woman, with iron face and dull fixed look, moves along with long strides, and, with an arm dry as a stick, pushes before her another woman.

“This woman—of huge stature, powerful, thickset, with the muscles of a Hercules, with a tiny head set on a bull neck, and blind—in her turn pushes before her a small, thin girl.

“This girl alone has eyes that see; she resists, turns round, lifts fair, delicate hands; her face full of life, shows impatience and daring.... She wants not to obey, she wants not to go, where they are driving her ... but, still, she has to yield and go.

“Necessitas-vis-Libertas!

“Who will, may translate.”

“THE SPARROW

“I was returning from hunting, and walking along an avenue of the garden, my dog running in front of me. Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along as though tracking game.

“I looked along the avenue and saw a young sparrow, with yellow about its beak and down on its head. It had fallen out of the nest (the wind was violently shaking the birch-trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move, helplessly fluffing its half-grown wings.

“My dog was slowly approaching it, when, suddenly darting down from a tree close by, an old dark-throated sparrow fell like a stone right before its nose, and all ruffled up, terrified, with despairing and pitiful cheeps, it flung itself twice toward the open jaws of shining teeth.

“It sprang to save; it cast itself before its nestling ... but all its tiny body was shaking with terror; its note was harsh and strange. Swooning with fear it offered itself up!

“What a huge monster must the dog have seemed to it! And yet it could not stay on its high branch out of danger.... A force stronger than its will flung it down.

“My TrÉsor stood still, drew back.... Clearly he, too, recognized this force.

“I hastened to call off the disconcerted dog, and went away, full of reverence.

“Yes; do not laugh. I felt reverence for that tiny, heroic bird, for its impulse of love.

“Love, I thought, is stronger than death, or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.”

The content, the quiet, the plenty of the Russian earth, “The Country”; the insignificance of man, “A Conversation”; there is no escape from death, “The Old Woman”; the tie between man and the animals, “The Dog”; death reconciles old enemies, “The Last Meeting”; Nature’s indifference to man, “Nature”; the beauty of untroubled, innocent youth, “How Fair and Fresh were the Roses”; the genius of poesy, “A Visit”; the joy of giving and taking, “Alms”; the rich misjudge the poor, “Cabbage Soup”; we always pray for miracles, “Prayer”; Christ is in all men, “Christ”; the immortal hour of genius, “Stay”; love and hunger, “The Two Brothers”; such are a few of the subjects of the Poems in Prose. The permanent appeal of these exquisite little pieces lies in their soft, deep humanity and emotional freshness, while Æsthetically they are marked by the broad warm touch in which Turgenev indicates the infinite lights and tones of living nature. Turgenev’s supremacy in style rests, indeed, precisely here, in this faculty of concentrating in a few broad sweeping touches, a wealth of tones which, producing an individual effect, makes a universal appeal to feeling. It is mysterious, this faculty of so massing and concentrating your effect that one detailed touch does the work of half a dozen. Turgenev alone among his contemporaries had mastered this secret of Greek art. It is the emotional breadth, imparted in ease, sureness, and flexibility of stroke, that distinguishes the Poems in Prose from all other examples of the genre. Fresh as the rain, soft as the petal of a flower, warm as the touch of love is “The Rose,” so simple, yet so complete in its message.

“THE ROSE

“The last days of August.... Autumn was already at hand.

“The sun was setting. A sudden downpour of rain, without thunder or lightning, had just passed rapidly over our wide plain.

“The garden in front of the house glowed and steamed, all filled with the fire of the sunset and the deluge of rain.

“She was sitting at a table in the drawing-room, and with persistent dreaminess, gazing through the half-open door into the garden.

“I knew what was passing at that moment in her soul; I knew that, after a brief but agonising struggle, she was at that instant giving herself up to a feeling she could no longer master.

“All at once she got up, went quickly out into the garden, and disappeared.

“An hour passed ... a second; she had not returned.

“Then I got up, and, going out of the house, I turned along the walk by which—of that I had no doubt—she had gone.

“All was darkness about me; the night had already fallen. But on the damp sand of the path a roundish object could be discerned—bright red even through the mist.

“I stooped down. It was a fresh, new-blown rose. Two hours before I had seen this very rose on her bosom.

“I carefully picked up the flower that had fallen in the mud, and, going back to the drawing-room, laid it on the table before her chair.

“And now at last she came back, and with light footsteps, crossing the whole room, sat down at the table.

“Her face was both paler and more vivid; her downcast eyes, that looked somehow smaller, strayed rapidly in happy confusion from side to side.

“She saw the rose, snatched it up, glanced at its crushed, muddy petals, glanced at me, and her eyes, brought suddenly to a standstill, were bright with tears.

“‘What are you crying for?’ I asked.

“‘Why, see this rose. Look what has happened to it.’

“Then I thought fit to utter a profound remark.

“‘Your tears will wash away the mud,’ I pronounced with a significant expression.

“‘Tears do not wash, they burn,’ she answered. And turning to the hearth she flung the rose into the dying flame.

“‘Fire burns even better than tears,’ she cried with spirit; and her lovely eyes, still bright with tears, laughed boldly and happily.

“I saw that she, too, had been through the fire.”

A few of the Poems in Prose, profoundly ironical, as “The Fool,” “A Contented Man,” “The Egoist,” “A Rule of Life,” “Two Strangers,” “The Workmen and the Man with the White Hands,” show the indignation of a large generous heart with human baseness, pettiness, stupidity, and envy. A minority of the poems are instinct with Turgenev’s morbid apprehension of death’s stealthy approach, and the final, unescapable blotting out of life and love by his clutch. Turgenev’s dread of the malignant forces of decay and dissolution had found powerful expression nearly twenty years earlier in Phantoms, where a series of prose poems is enshrined in the setting of a story.

“‘Do not utter her name, not her name,’ Alice faltered hurriedly. ‘We must escape, or there will be an end to everything and for ever.... Look over there!’

“I turned my head in the direction in which her trembling hand was pointing and discerned something ... horrible indeed.

“This something was the more horrible since it had no definite shape. Something bulky, dark, yellowish-black, spotted like a lizard’s belly, not a storm-cloud, and not smoke, was crawling with a snakelike motion over the earth. A wide rhythmic undulating movement from above downwards, and from below upwards, an undulation recalling the malignant sweep of the wings of a vulture seeking its prey; at times an indescribably revolting grovelling on the earth, as of a spider stooping over its captured fly.... Who are you, what are you, menacing mass? Under its influence I saw it, I felt it—all sank into nothingness, all was dumb.... A putrefying, pestilential chill came from it. At this chill breath the heart turned sick and the eyes grew dim, and the hair stood up on the head. It was a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is subject, which, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all, knows all, and like a bird of prey, picks out its victims, stifles them and stabs them with its frozen sting.”

This passage, by the intensity of horror it evokes, shows how deeply entwined in the roots of Turgenev’s joy in life was his loathing of death; and the same note is struck with cumulative force in “The End of the World” and “The Insect,” where the chill atmosphere of frozen terror and suffocating dread is enforced by the gloomy imagery. There can be no doubt that Turgenev’s premonitory obsession of death in his last years was one of the manifestations of the malignant disease of which he died—cancer of the spinal marrow—which cast the darkening shadow of melancholy over his vital energies and intensified his sensation of spiritual isolation. In the struggle between his healthy instincts and the weariness and dejection diffused by this creeping, malignant cancer, his latter days may be likened to those of an autumnal landscape at evening, with the valleys shivering in the shadows of approaching night, while the higher ground remains still flushed with warm light. But the Poems in Prose, his last work, declare how comparatively little the morbid processes at work within his frame had impaired his serene intelligence, his wide unflinching vision, his deep generous heart, and passion to help others. This, although he had already written, “I have grown old, all seems tarnished around me and within me. The light which rays from the heart, showing life in its colour, in relief, in movement, this light is nearly extinguished within me: it flickers under the crust of cinders which grows thicker and thicker.” But his cruel malady in the last two years, when Turgenev endured “all that one can endure without dying,” did not embitter his character.[28] Pavlovsky tells us:

“After terrible sufferings, during which the sick man could neither sit nor remain standing nor lying down, his condition improved. He could work and read free from pain, except when he moved about. That gave him hope that with many precautions, he would live a few years longer. But very soon a fresh access arrived, followed with fresh prostration of spirit.

“‘When my sufferings are unendurable,’ said Turgenev, ‘I follow Schopenhauer’s advice. I analyse my sensations and my agony departs for a period. For example, if my sufferings are terrible I can easily tell myself of what kind they are. First there is a stinging pain which, in itself, is not insupportable. To this is added a burning feeling, and next a shooting pang; then a difficulty in breathing. Separately each one is endurable and when I analyse them thus, it is easy for me to endure them. One must always do this in life, if you analyse your sufferings you will not suffer so much.’

“On another occasion he said to me:

“‘I do not regret dying. I have had all the pleasures I could wish for. I have done much work. I have had success. I have loved people; and they have, also, loved me. I have reached old age. I have been as happy as one can be. Many have not had that. It is bad to die before the time comes, but for me it is time.’

“One need not say that these words were those of a sick man wishing to console himself. Turgenev knew well that he could still create, and he did not wish to die.

“In speaking of the condition of Viardot, who was also dying, Turgenev said to me:

“‘A bad thing this death! One couldn’t complain if she killed one at a stroke; then it would be over; but she glides behind you like a robber, takes from man all his soul, his intelligence, his love of the beautiful; she attacks the essence of the human being. The envelope alone remains.’

“And he added, after a moment’s silence, in a whisper, strangely passionate:

“‘Yes, death is the lie!’ ...

“A thing strange and most characteristic was that during his last illness Turgenev never ceased to occupy himself with the affairs of others.... Moreover, he did not wait to be solicited to render people services.”

In his last days Turgenev addressed to Tolstoy the famous letter in which he adjured him to return to literature,[29] and bequeathed to others as his creed and example his farewell words, “Live and love others as I have always loved them.” After renewed cruel sufferings he sank into a delirium, and died at Bougival on September 3, 1883. Madame Viardot describes his end, thus:

“He had lost consciousness since two days. He no longer suffered, his life slowly ebbed away, and after two convulsions, he breathed his last. He looked as beautiful again as ever. On the first day after death, there was still a deep wrinkle, caused by the convulsions, between his eyebrows; the second day his habitual expression of goodness reappeared. One would have expected to see him smile.”[30]

The autopsy made by the French doctors revealed that the weight of Turgenev’s brain, 2012 grammes, surpassed by a third the normal weight, and, though Turgenev’s high stature partly accounted for this, the doctors were astonished by its volume, which much exceeded Cuvier’s, hitherto the largest brain known.

Turgenev was buried, according to his wish, in the Volkov cemetery at Petersburg, by the side of his friend, the critic Byelinsky. A crowd of 100,000 people accompanied the funeral procession, including 285 deputations from all parts of Russia. The Russian Government declined to take part in it![31] Renan, in France, pronounced the valedictory oration, and the passage we extract stands as Turgenev’s noble epitaph:

“Au-dessus de la race, en effect, il y a l’humanitÉ, ou, si l’on veut, la raison. TourguÉneff fut d’une race par sa maniÈre de sentir et de peindre; il appartenait À l’humanitÉ tout entiÈre par une haute philosophie, envisageant d’un oeil ferme les conditions de l’existence humaine et cherchant sans parti pris À savoir la rÉalitÉ. Cette philosophie aboutissait chez lui À la douceur, À la joie de vivre, À la pitiÉ pour les crÉatures, pour les victimes surtout. Cette pauvre humanitÉ souvent aveugle assurÉment, mais si souvent aussi trahie par ses chefs, il l’aimait ardemment. Il applaudissait À son effort spontanÉ vers le bien et le vrai. Il ne gourmandait pas ses illusions; il ne lui en voulait pas de se plaindre. La politique de fer qui raille ceux qui souffrent n’Était pas la sienne. Aucune dÉception ne l’arrÊtait. Comme l’univers, il eut recommencÉ mille fois l’oeuvre manquÉe; il savait que la justice peut attendre; on finira toujours par y revenir. Il avait vraiment les paroles de la vie Éternelle, les paroles de paix, de justice, d’amour et de libertÉ.”

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

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