In 1838 Turgénief went to Berlin. On his way the ship took fire, and he narrowly escaped with his life. He afterwards embodied the recollection in his story, or sketch, “A Fire at Sea.” “I was then nineteen years old,” he says, in his “Reminiscences,” “and I had been dreaming about this trip. I was convinced that it was possible to acquire in Russia only elementary knowledge, but that the source of real knowledge was abroad. Among the number of the professors in the St. Petersburg University at that time, there was not one who could have shaken that conviction in me. Moreover, they themselves felt the same way. Even the ministry itself, including its chief, Count Uvarof, was convinced of this same thing; and the latter used to send at his own expense young men to the universities of Germany. I was at Berlin (at two different times) for about two years. I studied philosophy, the ancient languages, history, and with special eagerness I devoted myself to Hegel under the guidance of Professor Werder. As proof of the insufficiency of the knowledge to be gained at our own colleges, I am going to quote this fact: I studied Latin antiquity with Zumpt, the history of Greek literature with Beck; but at my own home I was compelled to learn by heart Latin and Greek grammar, of which I had a very slim acquaintance, and I was not one of the worst candidates.”
In his “Reminiscences” he throws further light on the causes which induced him to live abroad. He says that there was nothing to keep him in Russia. Every thing around him was calculated to fill him with indignation, contempt, and scorn. “I could not hesitate long. It was necessary either to submit to humiliation, and calmly make up my mind to follow the general rut over the beaten road, or boldly to push away ‘every thing and all,’ even at the risk of losing much that was dear and near to my heart. And so I did. I threw myself head first into the ‘German sea,’ which should purify and regenerate me; and, when at last I emerged from its billows, I became a Zapadnik,—a Western man, and such I remained for all my life.”
In 1841 Turgénief returned to Russia, going directly to Moscow, where his mother was living. Here he became acquainted with the Slavophiles Aksákof, Khomiakof, and the Kiriyevskys, who at this time were just beginning to promulgate their ideas. But Turgénief found them hopelessly in the “general rut.”
He tells in his “Reminiscences” how he first thought of “Fathers and Sons.” “I was taking baths at Ventnor, a little town on the Isle of Wight, in August, 1860, when the first thought of ‘Fathers and Sons’ entered my mind,—that narrative which checked, as it seems to me, forever the kindly disposition of the Russian younger generation. More than once I read in journals, and heard that ‘I was off the track,’ or was ‘bringing in new ideas.’ Some praised me; others, on the contrary, blamed me. On my part, I must confess that I never attempted to ‘create a figure.’ I always had for my starting-point, not an idea, but a living person, to whom I would gradually add and join suitable elements. The same thing happened in ‘Fathers and Sons.’ As the foundation of the main figure, Bazarof, the person of a young provincial doctor, who surprised me very much at the time, was chosen. He died just before 1860. This remarkable man appeared to me to contain all the elements of what has since received the name of Nihilism, but which at that time was just beginning to rise, and had not yet been formulated. The impression made upon me by this person was very strong, and at the same time not very clear. At first I could not account for him very well; and I used my utmost endeavors to hear and see every thing about me, with a view of vivifying the truthfulness of my own impressions. This fact confused me. In no book of our literature could I find a single hint of what seemed to me to be everywhere. Reluctantly the doubt arose in me whether I was not hunting for a shadow.”
What he found at last was Bazarof, in which type he predicted the spirit of a new epoch, and showed “the new man” at the very moment of his appearance. No one understood it, and hence arose the storm which assailed the author.
“I experienced impressions,” says Turgénief, “of different kinds, but all equally disagreeable to me. I noticed coolness, even going so far as indignation, in many who had been near and dear to me. I received almost fulsome congratulations from people who belonged to the camp of my enemies. This confused me: ... it grieved me. But my conscience did not reproach me. I knew well that I had been true to the type which I had described.”
M. le Vicomte E. Melchior de Vogüé, in a capital study of Turgénief’s life and works, thus speaks of the reason for the novelist’s popularity and influence in Russia: “We read books as the passer-by glances at a painting in a shop-window, for an instant, from the corner of the eye, as he goes to his business. If you knew how differently they read their poets there [in Russia]! What for us is only a feast for enjoyment is for them the daily bread of the soul. It is the golden age of lofty literature, which all very youthful peoples in Asia, in Greece, in the Middle Ages have seen flourishing. The writer is the guide for his race, the master of a multitude of commingling thoughts; still in a measure the creator of his language, poet in the ancient and complete meaning of the word vates, poet, prophet. Simple-hearted and serious readers, new-comers into the world of ideas, eager for direction, full of illusions about the power of human genius, ask their intellectual guide for a doctrine, for a reason for life, for a perfect revelation of the ideal. In Russia the few members of the aristocratic élite long ago reached, and perhaps went beyond, our dilettanteism; but the lower classes are beginning to read: they read passionately, with faith and hope, as we read ‘Robinson’ at twelve.... For the Moscow merchant, the son of the village priest, the small country proprietor, to whom a few volumes of Pushkin, of Gogol, of Nekrásof represent the encyclopædia of the human mind, this novel [“Virgin Soil,” or “Fathers and Sons,” or “A Nest of Noblemen”] is one of the books of the national Bible: it assumes the importance and the epic significance which the story of Esther had for the people of Judæa, the story of Ulysses for the people of Athens, the romance of ‘The Rose’ or of ‘Renart’ for our ancestors.
“Three years ago, in dedicating the statue of Pushkin at Moscow, Turgénief quoted a characteristic remark made by a peasant standing near the monument. In reply to a comrade who asked the name of this gentleman in bronze, the muzhik said, ‘He was a schoolmaster.’ The orator appropriated the remark, and developed it, saying rightly that the peasant in his ignorance had hit upon the true name of the hero of the celebration. The first Russian poet had been the schoolmaster of his countrymen, he had given new life to their language and their thought. The day, not far distant, doubtless, when Turgénief’s statue will be erected at Moscow, the muzhik will be able to repeat his saying: he also was a schoolmaster.
“His generation listened to him more willingly than to any other. It would be a mistake to seek solely in what we call talent for the reasons of this popular adoption. How many among his primitive and passionate readers troubled themselves about the question of talent, of devices of form, delicacies of thought? In literature, as in politics, a people follow instinctively the men whom they feel belong to themselves, made of their flesh and their genius, marked by their virtues and their failings. Ivan Sergeyévitch personified the master qualities of the Russian people,—their simple-hearted goodness, simplicity, and resignation. He was, as it is said popularly, une âme du bon Dieu: that mighty brain was ruled by a child’s heart. Never did I approach him without better comprehending the magnificent meaning of the gospel saying about the “simple in spirit,” and how this state of soul can be allied to the artist’s exquisite gifts and knowledge. Devotion, generosity of heart and of hand, brotherly kindness—all were as natural to him as an organic function. In our cautious, complicated society, where every one is armed for the rough struggle of life, he seemed like a person from another sphere, from some pastoral and fraternal tribe of the Ural;—some grand, self-forgetful child, following his thoughts under the sky, as a shepherd follows his flocks in the steppe.
“Physically, likewise, this tall, calm old man, with his somewhat coarse features, his sculpturesque head, and his thoughtful gaze, brought to mind certain Russian peasants,—the elder who sits at the head of the table in patriarchal families,—but ennobled and transfigured by the labor of thought, like those peasants of old who became monks, were worshipped as saints, and are seen represented on the ikonostas with the aureole and the majesty of prayer. The first time that I met this good giant, the symbolical statue of his country, I had great difficulty in making my impression clear: it seemed to me that I saw and heard a muzhik upon whom had descended the fire of genius, who had been raised to the pinnacles of mind without losing any of his native candor. He would assuredly not have been offended by the comparison, he who so loved his people.”
M. de Vogüé goes on to speak of Turgénief’s work. “The public,” he says, referring to the “Annals of a Sportsman,” “did not at first perceive their hidden significance: the watchful censor was deceived. All that was seen in them was a literary manifestation of the first order, a new note in Russia. Doubtless Gogol’s influence was apparent in the young writer’s style, in his comprehension of nature: the ‘Evenings at the Farm’ set the model for the class. It was always the grand and melancholy symphony of the Russian land; but this time the interpretation by the artist was quite different. No longer were seen Gogol’s sharp humor, the frankly popular character of his paintings, his warm outbursts of enthusiasm suddenly checked by touches of irony: in Turgénief, no jests or enthusiasm; a soberer note, a more subdued emotion; landscapes and men are seen in the pale twilight, through an idealizing mistiness, yet clearly outlined and focussed, as it were, under the eyes of the ever watchful observer.
“The language, also, is richer, more flexible, more graceful; no Russian writer had ever carried it to such a degree of expression. It is not the clear and limpid prose of Pushkin, who had read much of Voltaire, and did not forget it. Turgénief’s periods run slow and voluptuous, like the surface of the mighty Russian rivers, without haste, harmonious, amid the reeds, bearing water-lilies, floating nests, wandering perfumes, showing luminous vistas, and long mirages of sky and land, and suddenly reappearing in shady depths. His discourse stops to gather up any thing,—the humming of a bee, the call of a night-bird, a passing, caressing, dying breeze. The most elusive accords of the grand register of nature it translates with the infinite resources of the Russian keys, flexible epithets, words welded together with poetic fancy, popular joinings of sound to sense.
“I dwell on that which makes the power of this book: it is only a song of the earth, and a murmur of a few poor souls directly heard by us. The writer takes us to the heart of his native land; he leaves us face to face with this country; he disappears, it seems: yet, if not he, who then has drawn from things, and condensed on their surface, that mysterious poetry which they hide within them, but which so few can see, and which we clearly see here? The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ have charmed many French readers; yet how much they lose in color across the double veil of the translation and the common ignorance of the country!...
“When these fragments were brought together into a volume, the public, till then uncertain, saw the significance of the work. Some one had appeared with courage to develop the meaning concealed in Gogol’s sinister jest about “Dead Souls.” What other name can be given to that gallery of portraits gathered by the sportsman,—small country proprietors, selfish and hard; sneaking overseers, idle and rapacious functionaries; beneath this cruel society, wretched helots, fallen, as it were, from the state of humanity, touching by force of misery and submission? The process—however well disguised it be, there is always a process—was invariably the same. The author causes a ludicrous being to pass again and again in his lantern, showing all its phases, laughable and pitiable, in turn, without wants, without resources, condemned to crepuscular life. By the side of the serf appeared the master, a half-civilized marionette, a good devil, after all, unconscious of the harm he was doing, led astray by the fatality of his environment. This painting, which would otherwise be ugly, repulsive, the writer clothed with grace and charm, in some sort contrary to his desire by the inborn virtue of his poetry. Why were all the mainsprings of life broken in all the heroes of the book? Whence came this malaria over the Russian land? What was the name of this pest? The reader was left the trouble of answering.
“It is not very exact to say that Turgénief attacked serfage. Russian writers, in consequence of the conditions under which they work, as well as by the peculiar turn of their genius, never attack openly; they neither argue nor declaim: they paint without drawing conclusions, and they appeal to pity rather than wrath. Twenty years later, when Dostoyevsky will publish his “Recollections of a Dead House” (Zapiski Mertvava Doma), his terrible memoirs of ten years in Siberia, he will proceed in the same way, without a word of mutiny, without a drop of gall, seeming to find what he describes as quite natural, only a trifle sad. It is the national trait in all things.... The public understands by a hint.
“It understood this time. The Russia of serfage looked at itself with horror in the mirror which was held before its eyes: a long shudder shook the country; between night and morning the author was famous, and his cause was half gained. The censorship was the last to comprehend, but finally it also comprehended. Possibly its sensitiveness will be wondered at: I have said that serfage was condemned even in the Emperor Nicholas’s heart. You must know that the wishes of the censorship do not always coincide with the emperor’s wishes; at least, it is backward, it is sometimes a reign behindhand. It gave up launching its thunder against the book, but it kept its eye on the author. Gogol being dead in the interim, Turgénief dedicated a warmly eulogistic article to the dead author. This article would seem inoffensive enough, as it appears in Turgénief’s complete works,[59] and we should have difficulty in discovering the crime if the criminal had not revealed the secret in a very gay note: ‘Apropos of that article, I remember that one day at Petersburg, a lady of very high rank criticised the punishment inflicted upon me, judging it to have been undeserved, or at least too severe. As she was warmly speaking in my defence, some one said to her, “Is it possible that you don’t know that in this article he called Gogol a great man?”—“It is impossible.”—“I assure you that it is so.”—“Ah! in that case, I have nothing more to say. I am sorry, but I see that they had to be severe upon him.”’
“This impertinent epithet, given to a simple writer, cost Turgénief a month of arrest; then he was advised to go and meditate in his domain. I imagine that he found that society was very ill arranged, so unfair are we to the power that wills our best good. It must be confessed, however, that this power sometimes serves our interest better than we ourselves, and lettres de cachet are generally in accordance with the views of Providence. Thirty years earlier an order of exile saved Pushkin by tearing the poet from the dissipations of Petersburg, where he was wasting his genius, and by sending him to the sun of the East, where his genius was to ripen. If Turgénief had remained at the capital, the warmth of youth and compromising friendships, perchance, might have brought him into some barren political quarrel: sent into the solitude of the woods, he lived there laborious years, studying the humble provincial life of Russia, and gathering materials for his first great novels.”
An anonymous writer, who knew Turgénief intimately, contributed, shortly after his death, to “The London Daily News,” an article, some of the details of which are worthy of preservation: “Turgénief hated luxury. The more he advanced in life, the more he prized simplicity in all things. His bedroom at Les Fresnes[60] had an almost austere aspect. The bed and toilet-stand were in iron; and the desk, drawers, and a large bookcase, in mahogany, of a plain design. Some photographs and engraved likenesses of literary and other friends broke the monotony of the wall. Portrait-cartes, many of which had autographs of those whom they represented, were stuck into the frame of the chimney glass.
“Turgénief was the youngest of three very distinguished brothers. Were the eldest of the trio now living, he would be almost a centenarian. He remembered Buonaparte, Bernardin, St. Pierre, Talleyrand, Sir Walter Scott,—of whom he was for some weeks a guest at Abbotsford,—Miss Edgeworth when she was in the zenith of her fame; visited Mme. de Staël at Coppet, and fell in with Byron as he was making a tour on the Rhine. The eldest Turgénief was a many-sided man. Though not a professional author, he had great literary qualities. His political insight and sagacity were no less remarkable, and he had a wider experience of human nature than perhaps any other European of his time. Though he belonged to a family which stood well with the Court and high in the administration, he enjoyed close intercourse with his ‘unmasked countrymen.’ He thus designated the serfs, who had learned to be patient and resigned, but were unable to dissimulate. Nevertheless, he was accomplished in every polite art, and, if he had chosen, might have risen to the highest diplomatic position. His education was French on Russian soil. Voltaire and Diderot were his early schoolmasters. When he grew up, he made wide incursions into English literature, and came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work. She took the world as she found it, and selected from it the material that she thought would be interesting to write about in a clear and natural style. It was Ivan Turgénief himself who told me this, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. He had not the advantage of knowing English;[61] but, as a youth, he used to hear his brother translate to visitors, at his country house in the Uralian, passages from ‘Irish Tales and Sketches,’ which he thought superior to her three-volume novels. Turgénief also said to me, ‘It is possible, nay, probable, if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of the County Longford, and the squires and squireens, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity, and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones of the earth.’
“Turgéniefs stature was far above the average. He was admirably proportioned, and, when young, could walk as far in a day as a tough horse would amble, and that without any oppressive sense of fatigue. The big bones supported tremendous muscles, which at no time of his life were clogged with adipose tissue. When I knew him, his thick, long hair and flowing beard were white as snow; but as the complexion was fresh, the eye bright, the carriage upright, the voice resonant, I never thought of him as an old man. This giant wrote a neat and almost delicate hand. I have before me a book of his with an autograph inscription which he sent me last winter.... This autograph, though almost ladylike in its delicacy, is very free and unconventional. Turgénief felt what was beautiful in minute and lowly things. He was one of those who are happy in admiring flowers in the valley of humiliation. In some respects he was a big child. Nobody was more easy to amuse. He used to say that Providence was so kind in throwing in his way the kind of persons who exactly suited him. Liking fine arts and music, and disliking fashion and worldly frivolity, he deemed it a piece of rare good luck to fall in with Louis Viardot and his gifted wife (née Garcia), and to be allowed to enter their family circle....
“Turgénief’s conversation was analogous to his handwriting. It was light, delicate, of a free and quite original style, and abounded in picturesque traits. Nothing was forced or far-fetched. His ideas came in the bright, easy flow of a quick-running and well-fed streamlet. It was all the same to him whether he was brought forward or unnoticed in society, for he was neither shy nor vain. He rarely, in talking, broached a subject; but there was no subject on which he could not talk with ease. The politician, philosopher, artist, poet, novelist, intelligent or simple, woman or child, found him good company. Whatever interested mankind appeared to concern him, and to be a thing to study. At the Universal Exhibition of 1878 I found Turgénief in the United States Agricultural Department studying horse-shoes and horse-shoe nails with as much zest as he afterwards showed in comparing the works of the English, Russian, and German schools of pictorial art. The person who explained to him the peculiar merits of the horse-shoe nails was a character; and his peculiarities, which were racy of the soil of Texas, acted as a stimulant on the Russian novelist.”
“Theoretically, there was no depth of human degradation with which the Russian novelist was not acquainted; but it was said that personally no vice ever touched him. ‘Gros innocent’ was a term which M. Viardot often applied to him in their intimate conversation. The giant was ‘naïf.’ He preserved until old age the impressionable eyes of childhood, and a freshness of nature which to those who did not know him must seem incompatible with his extensive knowledge of human nature, which he studied as a student at Moscow and Berlin, as a functionary at St. Petersburg and in other parts of Russia, and as an exile in Paris. Although an old bachelor, he was free from crotchets and angles. He was glad to oblige, often obliged, sometimes was heartily thanked; and, when he met with ingratitude, he did not think about it. Flaubert was the French novelist whom he best liked as a man and a writer. But he was of opinion that he travelled too far south when he went to Carthage[62] to look for a heroine. His eyes were not used to the glaring landscape of North Africa. They discerned better the cool tints of the Normandy landscape. Plots, he thought, spoiled novels, which were peintures de mœurs; and he was glad to see that the taste for them was dying out. Dickens, in his opinion, was at his best in the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ because he had not to be thinking about a plot, instead of letting his pen run on according to the humor of the moment. The plot was necessary for a drama, but in the way of a novelist, who should, above every thing else, keep truth in view....
“Turgénief was of opinion that a splendidly picturesque country was a bad soil for literary or artistic production. Strong emotions or sensations tended to dethrone the faculty of exact observation upon which we are dependent for æsthetic enjoyment in flat districts. We console ourselves for the prose of a landscape in looking with an almost microscopic eye at the plants and insects, and come to see a world replete with beauty and animation in a tangle of gorse, brambles, and humble field-flowers. In expressing to me this theory, he asked, ‘Did you ever see a mountaineer who was sensible to the beauty and song of a small bird? He watches the flight of game and birds of prey. But, for my part, I have found him indifferent to the lark and swallow. My first acquaintance with the skylark was precisely in looking about for compensation for the ugliness of a flat near Berlin. I shall never forget the broadening out of the æsthetic faculty on this occasion. The little creature rose almost from under my feet, and went up singing her joyful song, which I heard long after she was invisible. I then remarked the beauty of the sky and of many other things which I should not otherwise have noticed.’”
A few sentences from the “noble discourse” spoken by M. Renan at Turgénief’s tomb, on Oct. 1, 1883, will fittingly bring this note to a close.
“Turgénief was an eminent writer. He was, above all, a great man. I shall speak to you only of his soul as it always appeared to me in the pleasant retreat which an illustrious friendship had provided for him among us.
“Turgénief received, by that mysterious decree which makes human avocations, the noblest gift of all: he was born essentially impersonal. His consciousness was not that of an individual more or less finely endowed by nature: he was in some sort the consciousness of a people. Before his birth he had lived thousands of years; infinite series of visions were concentrated in the depths of his heart. No man has been to such a degree the incarnation of an entire race. A world lived in him, spoke by his lips; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of ages, without voices, through him came to life and to speech.
“The silent genius of collective masses is the source of all great things. But the masses have no voice. They can only feel and stammer. They need an interpreter, a prophet, to speak for them. Who shall be this prophet? Who shall tell their sufferings, denied by those who are interested in not seeing them, their secret aspirations which upset the sanctimonious optimism of the contented? The great man, gentlemen, when he is at once a man of genius and a man of heart. That is why the great man is least free of all men. He does not do, he does not say, what he wishes. A God speaks in him; ten centuries of suffering and of hope possess him and rule him. Sometimes it happens to him, as to the seer in the ancient stories of the Bible, that, when called upon to curse, he blesses; according to the spirit which moves, his tongue refuses to obey.
“It is to the honor of the great Slav race, whose appearance in the world’s foreground is the most unexpected phenomenon of our century, that it was first expressed by a master so accomplished. Never were the mysteries of an obscure and still contradictory consciousness revealed with such marvellous insight. It was because Turgénief at once felt, and perceived that he felt: he was the people, and he was of the elect. He was as sensitive as a woman and as impassive as a surgeon, as free from illusions as a philosopher and as tender as a child. Happy the race, which, at its beginning a life of reflection, can be represented by such images, simple-hearted as well as learned, at once real and mystical.
“When the future shall have brought to their real proportions the surprises kept in reserve for us by this wonderful Slav genius, with its ardent faith, its depth of intuition, its individual idea of life and death, its martyr spirit, its thirst for the ideal, Turgénief’s paintings will be priceless documents, something, as it were, like the portrait of a man of genius, if it were possible to be had, taken in his infancy. The perilous solemnity of his duty as interpreter of one of the great families of humanity, Turgénief clearly saw. He felt that he had souls in his charge; and, as he was a man of honor, he weighed each of his words. He trembled for what he said, and what he did not say.
“His mission was thus wholly that of the peacemaker. He was like the God of the Book of Job, who ‘makes peace upon the heights.’ What everywhere else caused discord became with him a principle of harmony. In his great bosom, contradictions united. Cursing and hatred were disarmed by the magic enchantments of his art.
“That is why he is the common glory of schools, between which so many disagreements exist. This great race, divided because it is great, finds in him its unity. Hostile brethren separated by different ways of interpreting the ideal, come all of you to his tomb. All of you have the right to love him; for he belonged to all of you, he held you all in his heart. Admirable privilege of genius! The repellent sides of things do not exist for him. In him all finds reconciliation. Parties most opposed unite to praise him and admire. In the region whither he carries us, words which stir irritation in the vulgar lose their sting. Genius accomplishes in a day what it takes centuries to do. It creates an atmosphere of higher peace when those who were foes find that in reality they have been co-laborers; it opens the era of the grand amnesty when those who have been battling in the arena of progress sleep side by side and hand in hand.
“Above the race, in fact, stands humanity; or, if you prefer, reason. Turgénief was of a race by his manner of feeling and painting. He belonged to all humanity by his lofty philosophy, facing with calm eyes the conditions of human existence, and seeking without prejudice to know the reality. This philosophy brought him sweetness, joy in life, pity for creatures, for victims above all. Ardently he loved this poor humanity, often blind, in sooth, but so often betrayed by its leaders. He applauded its spontaneous effort towards well being and truth. He did not reprove its illusions; he was not angry because it complained. The iron policy which mocked at those who suffer was not for him. No disappointment arrested him. Like the universe, he would have begun a thousand times the ruined work: he knew that justice can wait; the end will always be success. He had truly the words of eternal life, the words of peace, of justice, of love, and of liberty.”
Count Tolstoï traces his ancestry back to Count Piotr Andreyévitch Tolstoï, a friend and companion of Peter the Great. In all probability the unnamed atavus who lurks in the patronymic Andreyévitch was merely distinguished by his size,—Andrew the Stout. Many Russian family names, just as is the case with our own English appellations, are derived from characteristics or resemblances. The great Speransky was a hopeful foundling; Soloviéf recalls our nightingales; Pobyedonovtsof means “of the victorious;” the name of Katkof may refer to the proverbial rolling stone; Gogol is a species of duck called the golden eye; the report of cannon may be heard in Pushkin’s name; the ancestor of Griboyédof was probably an eater of mushrooms.
Tolstoï’s father was a retired lieutenant-colonel, who died in 1839. His mother, the Princess Marya Nikolayevna Volkonskaïa, died when Count Lyof was only two years old, and he was brought up by a distant relative, Mme. Yergolskaïa. At Yasnaïa Polyana his education was desultory. In 1840 the five children were taken in charge by a relative of their mother, Pelagia Ilinishna Yushkovaïa, who lived at Kazan. It was thus that Lyof Tolstoï happened to enter the university of that city in 1843. After a few years of study, he suddenly determined to leave the university without graduation. The rektor and the professors argued with him, but in vain; and he went back to his ancestral estate, where he lived till 1851, very rarely visiting the capital. A visit from his beloved brother Nikolaï, who was an officer in the army of the Caucasus, inspired him to see “cities of men and manners, climates, councils,” though least of all the cities of men. Especially strong was his desire to be with his brother in the Kavkaz, where Russia’s greatest poets had won their proudest laurels. The impressions made on him by the splendid scenery of the ‘white mountains,’ and by the rough, half-savage life, were so strong that in 1851 he entered the service, like Olénin, as a yunker, or ensign-bearer in the Fourth Battery of the Twentieth Artillery, the same in which his brother was an officer.
Here in the Caucasus Count Tolstoï first began to write fiction. He planned to weave his recollections of family life and old traditions into a great novel. Fragments of this work were written and afterwards published in the “Sovremennik.” “Infancy” (Dyetstvo) came out in 1852. “Adolescence” (Otrotchestvo) was also written then, and several of his brilliant sketches of wild life,—“The Invasion,” “The Felling of the Forest,” and, as has been said, “The Cossacks.” “The Cossacks” is translated into English by Mr. Eugene Schuyler. A very little polishing would make it a brilliant piece of literary work: in its present form it is crude and rough.
Count Tolstoï lived two years in the Caucasus, taking part in various guerilla expeditions, and enduring in common with the soldiers all the hardships of frontier warfare. Here on the spot he made his powerful and life-like studies of the Russian soldier, which are seen in his “War Sketches” (Voyennuié Razskazui). At the breaking out of the Crimean War, Count Tolstoï was transferred to the army of the Danube, and served on Prince M. D. Gortchakof’s staff. At Sevastópol, whither he went after the Russian army was driven from the principalities, he was attached to the artillery. His literary work had attracted attention in high quarters, and orders were sent to the front to see that he was not exposed to danger. In May, 1855, he was appointed division commander: he took part in the battle of the Tchernaïa, was in the celebrated storming of Sevastópol, and after the battle was sent as special courier to Petersburg. At the end of the campaign Count Tolstoï retired, and the next winter he spent at Moscow and Petersburg. This was a period of great literary activity. Besides his stories, “Sevastópol in December,” and “Sevastópol in May,” there appeared in the magazines “Youth” (Yunost), “Sevastópol in August,” “Two Hussars” (Dva Gusári), and “Three Deaths” (Tri Smerti).
After the liberation of the serfs, Count Tolstoï, like many conscientious Russian proprietors, felt it his duty to live on his estate. He was profoundly interested in agronomic questions, and in the application to the Slavic commune of Occidental methods, which he studied abroad for himself. He was still more interested in popular education; and a school journal, called “Yasnaïa Polyana,” which he established, discussed all pedagogical questions. He also published a series of primers, readers, spellers, in paper covers and large type. It was about this time that a Russian journalist met Count Tolstoï; and his account of the interview is interesting, as showing the novelist’s views a quarter of a century ago. He says,—
“In 1862 I became acquainted with him in Moscow. I saw before me a tall, wide-shouldered, thin-waisted man, about thirty-five years old, with a mustache, but without a beard, with a serious, even gloomy expression of face, which, however, was softened by a gleam of kindliness whenever he laughed. Our conversation turned on the occurrences which at that time were exciting Russian life. Count Tolstoï immediately showed that he lived outside of this life, that the interests of the class which regards itself as cultured were foreign to him. He seemed to be opposed to progress, which, in his opinion, was only advantageous for the smaller portion of society, having plenty of time to spend, and which was absolutely injurious for the majority, for the people; and for them it was just as disadvantageous as it was profitable for the minority.... Those present argued angrily with him: he himself sometimes was drawn away, sometimes he spoke ironically. I listened more than I spoke. At the time when all were infatuated with progress, such original boldness of thought was remarkable; and I felt an involuntary sympathy for this Rousseau, who began to contrast the products of nature with the products of civilization,—forests, wild creatures, rivers, physical development, purity of morals, and other such things. It seemed that this man was living the life of the peasantry, sharing their views, that he was devoted to the welfare of the people with all the strength of his soul, though he understood the people in different way from others. The proof was his school,—those maltchiks, of whom he spoke with evident love, praising their talents, their powers of comprehension, their artistic sense, their moral virginity, which was so far from being the case with children of other nationalities.”
The latter years of Count Tolstoï’s life, since the publication of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karénina,” are somewhat wrapped in mystery. Various wild stories, founded on the evident bias of “My Confession” and “My Religion,” have assumed almost the proportions of myth. It may be that at the present day, that we of the calm, rational, sceptical, Western world are granted the privilege of seeing the actual evolution of a myth, as a boy may see a chrysalis unfold.
The Russian race, standing with its Janus face towards the sunset and the more mystical sunrise, a link, as it were, between Occidental fact and Oriental fancy, might well allow us the spectacle. “My Religion” declares that titles, emoluments, dignities, and all such things, are vain. Next we hear that Count Tolstoï is only a muzhik. No man has a right to wealth. We hear that the opulent aristocrat has stripped himself to give to the poor. All must earn their bread by the sweat of the brow. The young sons of the count are next heard of as crossing-sweepers. The truth probably is, that Count Tolstoï has in reality changed little from the Olénin of “The Cossacks,” praying for occasion of self-sacrifice, for chance of renunciation, changed little from the threefold manifestation of himself in “War and Peace,” working for the same end, or from the twofold and simpler manifestation of himself, morally in Levin, socially in Vronsky, of “Anna Karénina.” The little picture of him given by the Russian journalist casts a flood of light on the man; and therefore it was but a fulfilment of prophecy to read that Count Tolstoï, instead of beggaring his children, instead of deserting the pen of the writer for the awl of the cobbler, was brave and cheerful and healthy in body and mind, superintending his schools, cultivating his ancestral desyatins, and writing stories when the mood was on him.
This brief sketch of Count Tolstoï’s life may fitly come to a conclusion with an acute bit of criticism from a Russian writer. It is very possible that his marriage to Sofia Andreyevna Beers, the daughter of a Muscovite professor, which took place in 1862, may have cast a back gleam, and inspired the thought of creating the gracious forms that move through Count Tolstoï’s later novels. At all events, this is what the critic said when “War and Peace” appeared, at the end of 1860, “It is remarkable, that in all Tolstoï’s works, until the appearance of “Voïna i Mir,” there is not a single female figure brought out in strong relief; but here were seen a whole pleiad, wonderfully clear, psychologically true, and beautifully described. The richness and variety in the figures of the men, the splendid description of the battles, a perfect mass of marvellously described scenery, in which persons of all classes appear, beginning with emperors, and ending with muzhiks and babas, make this work one of the greatest ornaments of our literature.”
It is commonly reported in Russia, that Tchernuishevsky wrote yet another novel besides Tchto Dyélat, entitled Prolog Prologof (a Prologue of Prologues), which may possibly be still in existence in manuscript.
Feódor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoyevsky’s father was a doctor. The boy, who was one of a large family, grew up pale and thin. He had a nervous and impressionable nature, with some tendency to hallucination. He was very fond of the woods. He tells in his recollections of his childhood, that his “special delight was the forest, with its mushrooms and wild cherries, with its beetles and birds, its porcupines and squirrels, with its delicious damp of the flying leaves.” He had all the books that he desired. By the time that he was twelve, he had read all of Sir Walter Scott’s and Cooper’s novels, besides some Russian authors, including Karamzin’s great history. At fifteen, Dostoyevsky was sent to Petersburg, where he entered the main engineering school. Notwithstanding his passion for literature, which was shared by many of his school-mates, he distinguished himself in mathematics, and graduated number three in a class of thirty. About this time he was deprived of both father and mother.
“While he was living in Petersburg,” says Mr. S. S. Skidelsky, “he visited all the slums and haunts of poverty, for the sake of collecting materials for his future literary work.” Dostoyevsky tells in his recollections, quoted by Polevoï, that in the winter of 1845 he began his first story, “Poor People” (Byédnuié Liudi). “When I finished the tale, I did not know what to do with it, or where to place it. I had no literary acquaintances, except possibly Grigoróvitch, who at that time had written nothing except ‘Petersburg Organ-grinders,’ in a magazine.... He came to me one day in May, and said, ‘Show me the manuscript: Nekrásof is going to publish a magazine next year, and I want to show it to him.’ I took it over to Nekrásof. We shook hands; I became confused at the thought that I had come with my writing, and I quickly beat a retreat without saying another word. I had very little hope of success; for I stood in awe of the party of ‘the Country Annals,’ as the literary men of that day were called. I read Byélinsky’s criticisms eagerly, but he seemed to me too severe and cruel; and ‘he will make sport of my “Poor People,”’ I used to think at times, but only at times. ‘I wrote it with passion, almost with tears. Is it really possible that all these minutes spent with pen in hand over this story, that all this is falsehood, mirage, untrue feeling?’ But I had these thoughts only now and then, and immediately the doubts returned again.
“On the evening of the very day that I handed him the manuscript, I went a long way to see one of my former classmates. We talked all night about ‘Dead Souls,’ and we read it again,—I don’t know how many times it made. At that time it was fashionable, when two or three young men met, to say, ‘Hadn’t we better read some Gogol, gentlemen?’ and then to sit down and read late into the night.... I returned home at four o’clock, in the white Petersburg night, bright as day. It was a beautiful warm time; and when I reached my room I could not go to sleep, but opened the window, and sat down by it. Suddenly the bell rang: it surprised me greatly; and in an instant Grigoróvitch and Nekrásof were hugging me in a glory of enthusiasm, and both of them were almost in tears. The evening before they had returned home early, took up my manuscript, and began to read it for a trial: ‘By ten pages we shall be able to judge.’ But after they had finished ten pages they decided to read ten more. And afterwards, without budging, they sat the whole night through till early morning, taking turns in reading aloud when one got tired. ‘He read about the death of the student,’ said Grigoróvitch, after we were alone; ‘and suddenly I noticed, that, when he reached the place where the father runs after his son’s coffin, Nekrásof’s voice broke once, and a second time, and all at once it failed entirely. He pounded with his fist on the manuscript: “Akh, what a man!” That was said about you; and so we spent the whole night.’
“When they finished the manuscript, they exclaimed, simultaneously, ‘Let us go and find him right away. Suppose he is asleep, this is more important than sleep.’... They staid half an hour. For half an hour we talked about, God knows what, understanding each other by half words, by exclamations, so eager were we. We talked about poetry, about prose, about the ‘situation of affairs,’ and of course about Gogol, quoting from the ‘Revizor’ and ‘Dead Souls,’ but chiefly about Byélinsky.... Nekrásof took the manuscript to Byélinsky that very day. ‘A new Gogol has appeared,’ shouted Nekrásof, entering with ‘Poor People.’ ‘Gogols with you spring up like mushrooms,’ remarked Byélinsky severely; but he took the manuscript. When Nekrásof returned that same evening, Byélinsky met him in perfect enthusiasm. ‘Bring him, bring him as soon as you can!’”
On the next day an interview took place between Dostoyevsky and the great Russian critic. Dostoyevsky thus describes it: “He began to speak with me ardently, with flashing eyes. ‘Do you understand yourself what you have written?’ he shouted at me several times, in his own peculiar way. ‘Only by your own unassisted genius as an artist, could you have written this. But have you realized all the terrible truth which you have presented before us? It is impossible that you, at the age of twenty, could understand it.... You have touched the very essence of the matter, you have reached the most vital inwardness. We journalists and critics only argue; we try to explain it with words: but you are an artist, and with a single stroke put the very truth into shape so that it is tangible, so that the simplest reader can understand instantly. Here lies the secret of the artistic, the truth of art. Here is the service that the artist performs for truth. The truth is revealed and imparted to you; it is your gift as an artist. Value your talent, and be true to it, and you will be a great writer.’
“I went from him in a state of rapture. I stopped at the corner of his house, looked up at the sky, at the bright sun, on the passing people, and all; and with my whole body I felt that a glorious moment had come into my life,—a most important crisis; that a new life had begun, such as I had never anticipated in my most passionate dreams (and at that time I was a great dreamer). ‘Is it really true that I am so great?’ I asked myself, full of shame, full of timid glory.—Oh, do not laugh!—Never again did I have an idea that I was great. But at that time was it possible to bear it calmly? Oh! I will be worthy of this praise.”
His name from this time began to stand with Turgénief’s, Byélinsky’s, Iskander’s (Herzen’s), and others, in the pages of the Russian magazines. This period, which began so auspiciously, was clouded by a catastrophy which greatly affected his whole life. In 1849 he was arrested and imprisoned on the charge of being engaged in a secret political society. His older brother, a married man, the father of three children, was also arrested on the same charge. Dostoyevsky knew that his brother’s family was almost penniless, that his brother had taken no active part in the Petrashevsky Society, and had only borrowed books from the general library. The brother, however, was soon released by the interposition of the Emperor Nicholas. While he was in prison, Feódor Mikhaïlovitch wrote his beautiful story, “The Little Hero.” He was condemned to death; but the sentence, without his knowledge, was commuted to transportation to the mines. He wrote his brother on the 3d of January, 1850: “To-day we were taken to the Semyónovsky Place. Here the sentence of death was read to us, we were given the cross to kiss, the sabres were broken over our heads, and our death-toilet was prepared,—white shirts. Then three of our number were placed at the ‘disgraceful post,’ ready for execution. I was the sixth. Three were summoned at a time: consequently my turn came next, and I had only a second to live. I remembered thee, my brother, and all of thy household; at the last moment thou alone wert in my mind; here, only, I learned how I loved thee, my dear brother!... At last the drums sounded a retreat. Those who were fastened to the ‘disgraceful post’ were taken down, and it was announced that his Imperial Majesty had granted us our lives.”
“Dostoyevsky, as a thoroughly religious and highly moral man,” says Polevoï, “endured all the deprivations of his life in the mines with remarkable firmness and undisturbed equanimity. His faith was strengthened, not by the Bible alone, which was the only book allowed him in prison, but by his love for ‘Poor People,’ to whom he had sworn to be true till he died.”
After he spent a number of years in the mines, he entered the military service, and was quickly promoted to be an officer. He says, “I remember that soon after leaving the Siberian prison, in 1854, I began to read all the literature written during the five years since my imprisonment. The ‘Annals of a Sportsman’ had just begun to be published; and Turgénief’s first stories I read at one draught. The sun of the steppe shone upon me, spring began, and with it an entirely new life, an end to prison,—freedom!”
His passion for literature, so long restrained, broke out with energy and strength; and even before he quitted military service and returned to Petersburg, he wrote a few little trifles. In Petersburg he took part in the journal, “The Times” (Vremya), edited by his brother Mikhaïl Mikhaïlovitch. In 1860 appeared the first collection of his works, and shortly after appeared his great novel, “The Degraded and Insulted” (Unizhónnuie i Oskorblonnuie). At this time Turgénief, Gontcharóf (author of “Oblómof”), Grigoróvitch, and Count Lyof Tolstoï were in the full bloom of production, and Dostoyevsky’s book was not warmly received. But the most antagonistic critics were silenced when “The Recollections of a Dead House” appeared. It immediately gave him the reputation as one of the greatest lights of Russian literature.
In 1863 Dostoyevsky’s wife died; and in the following year he lost his beloved brother, whose journal, “The Times,” passed into his hands. But he was entirely unused to business, and was placed in a very embarrassing situation, which was intensified by a strange public impression that it was the novelist who was dead. Consequently its circulation was greatly reduced, and Feódor Mikhaïlovitch had to give it up. As a distraction for all these tribulations, Dostoyevsky devoted himself to literary work, and wrote his great story, “Crime and Punishment,” which established his reputation as a psychological analyst. In 1867 he married again, and lived abroad for four years. He also, looking from the “beautiful distance” upon the pitiful side of Russian social life, wrote his two stories, “Idiot” and “Devils.” After he came back he wanted to analyze the abnormal relationship between the rising generation and the older writers; and he founded a new journal, and wrote a novel entitled “Podrostok” (The Adult). The journal was given up at the end of 1877; but Dostoyevsky, who had new novels in view, promised ultimately to continue the journal at some future time. He died on the 9th of February, 1881; and on the day of his funeral the first number of the long-looked-for journal, which he did not live to see, was issued. All Petersburg escorted the beloved remains to the tomb; tens of thousands of people were counted in the procession. Dostoyevsky’s faith in humanity is summed up in his own words: “I never could understand the reason why one-tenth part of our people should be cultured, and the other nine-tenths must serve as the material support of the minority and themselves remain in ignorance. I do not want to think or to live with any other belief than that our ninety millions of people (and those who shall be born after us) will all be some day cultured, humanized, and happy. I know and I firmly believe that universal enlightenment will harm none of us. I also believe that the kingdom of thought and light is possible of being realized in our Russia, even sooner than elsewhere maybe, because with us, even now, no one defends the idea of one part of the population being enlisted against the other, as is found everywhere in the civilized countries of Europe.’
The Banya (from “The Recollections of a Dead-House”).
“In the whole city, there were only two public baths. The first, which was kept by a Hebrew, was numbered, with an entrance-fee of fifty kopeks for each number, and was designed for high-toned people. The other banya was pre-eminently common, old, filthy, small; and to this banya our prisoners were going. It was cold and sunny. The men were already rejoicing because they were going to get out of prison, and have a glimpse of the city. Jests, laughter, did not cease during the walk. A whole squad of soldiers escorted us with loaded guns, to the wonder of the whole city. At the banya they immediately divided us into two detachments. The second had to wait in the cold ante-room while the first detachment soaped themselves, and this was necessary on account of the smallness of the banya; but, notwithstanding this fact, the banya was so small, that it was hard to imagine how our half could find accommodation in it. But Petrof did not leave me: he himself, without my asking him, hurried to help me, and even offered to wash me. Bakliushin, as well as Petrof, offered me his services. He was a prisoner from a special cell, and was known among us as the pioneer, and him I remembered as the gayest and liveliest of the arestants, as indeed he was. We had already become somewhat well acquainted. Petrof helped me undress myself, because, as I was not used to it, it took me long; and the dressing-room was cold, almost as cold as the street. By the way, it is very hard for a prisoner to undress if he has not had some practice. In the first place, it is necessary to know how to unfasten quickly the shin-protectors.[63] These shin-protectors are made of leather, about seven inches long; and they are fastened to the underclothes directly under the iron anklet which encircles the leg. A pair of shin-protectors are worth not less than sixty kopeks; but, nevertheless, every prisoner gets himself a pair, at his own expense of course, because without them it is impossible to walk. The iron ring does not encircle the leg tightly, and it is easy to thrust a finger between the ring and the leg. Thus the iron strikes the leg, chafes it; and a prisoner without shin-protectors would in a single day have bad wounds. But to take off the shin-protectors is not the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to learn to get off the clothes when one wears the rings (kandalui). This is the whole trick: Suppose you are taking off the drawers from the left leg, it is necessary first to let the garment slip through between the leg and the ring. Afterwards you have to put it on again the same way. The same process must be gone through with when you put on clean clothes. For a newcomer it is even hard to guess how it is accomplished. The first one who ever taught us how to do it was the prisoner Kóryenef in Tobolsk, who had once been atamán of a gang of cut-throats, and had been fastened to a chain five years. But the prisoners get used to it, and do it without any difficulty. I gave several kopeks to Petrof to get soap and scrubbers. To be sure, the authorities furnished the prisoners with soap. Every one would get a little piece about the size of a two-kopek coin, and as thick as the slice of cheese served at evening lunch by middle-class people. Soap was sold here in the dressing-room, together with sbiten [a kind of mead], twists, and hot water. Every prisoner would get, according to the agreement made with the proprietor of the banya, a single pail of hot water. Whoever wanted to wash himself cleaner could get for a grosh, or half kopek, an extra pail, which was handed into the banya itself through a window made for that purpose from the dressing-room. After helping me to undress, Petrof led me by the hand, observing that it was very hard for me to walk in the rings. “Pull them up a little higher over the calf,” he added, supporting me as though he were my uncle (dyadka). “Be a little careful here, there is a door-sill.” I even felt a little ashamed. I wanted to assure Petrof that I could get along by myself, but he would not have believed me. He treated me just like a young and incapable child, whom everybody was obliged to help. Petrof was far from being a servant, by no means was he a servant. Had I insulted him, he would have understood how to behave to me. I did not offer him any money for his services, and he did not ask for any. What, then, prompted him to take such care of me?
“When we opened the door of the banya, I thought that we were going into Gehenna. Imagine a room about twelve feet long, and as wide, stuffed with probably a hundred men at once, and, at the very least, surely eighty, because the prisoners were divided into two detachments, and the whole number of us who went to the banya were two hundred men; the steam blinding our eyes, the sweat, the filth, such a crowd that there was no room to get a leg in. I was alarmed, and wanted to go back, but Petrof immediately encouraged me. Somehow, with the greatest difficulty, we squeezed ourselves through to the benches, over the heads of those who were sitting on the floor, asking them to bend down so that we could pass. But all the places on the benches were occupied. Petrof told me that it was necessary to buy a place, and immediately entered into transactions with a prisoner who had taken a place near the window. For a kopek the prisoner surrendered his place, immediately took the money from Petrof, who had it tight in his fist, having foreseen that it would be necessary to bring it with him into the banya. The man threw himself under the bench, directly under my place, where it was dark, filthy, and where the slimy dampness was almost half a finger in thickness. But the places under the benches were also taken; even there, the crowd clustered. On the whole floor, there was not a free place as large as the palm of the hand where the prisoners would not be sitting doubled up, washing themselves in their pails. Others stood upright among these, and, holding their pails in their hands, washed themselves as best they could. The dirty water ran down directly on the shaven heads of those who sat beneath them. On the platform, and on all the steps leading to it, were men washing themselves, bent down and doubled up. But precious little washing they got. Plebeians wash themselves very little with hot water and soap: they only steam themselves tremendously, and then pour cold water over them, and that’s their whole bath. Fifty brooms or so on the platform were rising and falling in concert: they all broomed themselves into a state of intoxication. Every instant steam was let in. It was not merely heat, it was hell let loose. It was all one uproar and hullaballoo (gogotalo), with the rattling of a hundred chains dragging over the floor.... Some, trying to pass, entangled themselves with the chains of others, and they themselves bumped against the heads of those sitting below, and they tumbled over, and scolded, and dragged into the quarrel those whom they hit. The filth was streaming on every side. All were in an excited, and as it were intoxicated, state of mind. Shrieks and cries were heard. At the dressing-room window, where the water was handed through, there was a tumult, a pushing, even fighting. The hot water ordered was spilt on the heads of those sitting on the floor, before it reached its destination. Now and then, at the window or in the half-opened door, a soldier with mustachioed face would show himself, with gun in hand, ready to quell any disorder. The shaven heads and red, parboiled bodies of the prisoners seemed uglier than ever. On their parboiled shoulders clearly appeared, oftentimes, the welts caused by the strokes and lashes which they may have received in days gone by; so that now all these backs seem to be freshly wounded. Horrid welts! A chill went through my skin at seeing them. “Give us more steam;” and the steam would spread in a thick hot cloud over the whole banya. From under the cloud of steam gleamed scarred backs, shaven heads, disfigured arms and legs. And as a fit climax Isaï Fomitch (the Jew) would roar with all his throat, from the top of the platform. He steams himself into insanity, but it seems as if no heat could satisfy him. For a kopek he hires a washer (parilshchik); but at last it gets too warm for him, and he throws down the broom, and runs to pour cold water on him. Isaï Fomitch does not give up hope, but hires a second, a third: he makes up his mind, on such occasions, not to grudge any expense, and he has as many as half a dozen washers. “You are tough, Isaï Fomitch, you are a fine fellow,” shout the prisoners from below. And Isaï Fomitch himself feels that at this moment he stands above them all, and could thrust them all under his belt; he is in a glory; and with a sharp, crazy voice he shouts out his aria lya-lya-lya-lya, drowning all other voices.[64] The thought entered my mind, that, if we were ever to be all in hell, then it would look very much like this place. I could not refrain from imparting this thought to Petrof: he only looked around, but said nothing.”