Ivan Turgénief was born at Orel on the 28th of October, 1818. This date, given by Turgénief himself in a letter to the Russian journalist Suvarin, corresponds to the 9th of November in our calendar.
His father, Sergéi Nikolayevitch, and his mother, Várvara Petrovna, died early.[25] He was brought up by his grandmother, a Russian lady of the old school, haughty by nature and of despotic disposition. The portrait of this “severe and choleric” baruina is found sketched in vigorous outlines in the little story “Punin and Baburin.” This story, says Turgénief in the letter which I have just mentioned, “contains much biography.”
Turgénief’s grandmother lived in the country, on an estate a short distance from the city of Orel. Here the child became passionately fond of nature. From the age of twelve he entered into intimate relationship with trees and flowers; and he felt, when in contact with them, impressions whose vividness remains after more than forty years in the deeply stirred remembrances of the mature man.
“The garden belonging to my grandmother’s property was a large park of ancient date. On one side it sloped towards a pond of running water, wherein lived not only gudgeon and tench, but also salvelines, the famous salvelines, those little eels which are found scarcely anywhere nowadays. At the head of this pond grew a dense rose-bed; higher up, on both sides of the ravine, stretched a thicket of vigorous bushes,—hazel, elder, honeysuckle, black-thorn, in the lower part encroached upon by tall grass and lovage. Amid the clumps of trees, but only here and there, appeared very small bits of emerald-green lawn of fine and silken grass, prettily mottled with the dainty pink, yellow, lilac caps of those mushrooms called russules; and there the golden balls of the great celandine hung in luminous patches. There in springtime were heard the songs of nightingales, the whistling of blackbirds, and the cuckoos’ call. It was always cool there, even during the warmest days of summer; and I loved to bury myself in those depths where I had my favorite hiding-places, mysterious, known to myself alone—or at least so I imagined.”
Prepared by this beneficent influence of colors, perfumes, and the sounds of rustic life, the child’s moral education was directed, without anybody’s knowledge, and influenced for all time, by the presence of two outlandish servants, flitting members of the high-born lady’s household. One of them was a “philanthropic and philosophical plebeian,” destined to die in Siberia; the other, a sort of innocent enthusiast, a great reader of Russian epics then out of fashion. The former sowed in the young Turgénief’s soul the seeds of a liberalism which will bear fruit in the most manly resolves; the latter kindled in the lad’s lively imagination a poetic flame whose heat and glory will shine out in a score of masterpieces.
Towards the age of thirteen, the young Ivan was removed from these influences. He was given two tutors, one French and the other German. Having obtained his diploma as candidate in philology, he went to Berlin to finish, or rather begin anew, his studies in the humanities; and he brought them to a close by plunging into the current of the Hegelian philosophy. He came back to Russia converted to that “occidentalism” which we shall define later when we study Turgéniefs political theories.
He made his début as a writer in 1843, with a little poem, “Parasha.”[26] The critic Biélinsky gave it such praise that it covered the author with confusion. Towards the end of his life, Turgénief criticised his poetry with a severity that was absolutely sincere. Even at this period, he set as little value on his verses as though he had already shown his ability in a prose masterpiece. The masterpiece appeared three years later, in 1846. The first story in “The Annals of a Sportsman,”[27] “Khor and Kalinuitch,” was published in the Sovremennik (“Contemporary”); and at a single stroke Turgénief’s fame reached a height which will never be surpassed by any of his great works.[28]
[Most of] the other stories in Turgénief’s first collection were written abroad. The author came back to Russia in 1851, but only to leave it again two years later. He will still have a domicile there, and above all he will come back regularly to keep up his relations, and touch foot to earth; but it may be said that after 1863 he made only flying visits to his country. The Russians have heaped reproaches on Turgénief for this abandonment of his native soil. It has always been easily explained. There was, at least primarily, a sort of state reason. In 1852, owing to an article on Gogol’s death, Turgénief got into difficulty with the imperial censorship, which ended in a month of close imprisonment, and in the writer being interned at his estate. After two years of solitude and work, Turgénief felt the need of “gaining freedom, the knowledge of himself.” He acquired these conditions, outside of which it was impossible for him to write and to struggle, at the price of life in a foreign country.[29]
But behold what was not known, and what was revealed only by the posthumous publication of Turgénief’s letters. This Russian who made his home abroad, who dwelt twenty years in France, and died in the very heart of Paris, was overwhelmed during his forced or voluntary exile with the blackest melancholy of homesickness, and during the last part of his life suffered even the sharpest torment.
He did not succeed in acclimating himself, either at Baden Baden, in spite of the charm of the situation where his poet’s glance first rested; or at Paris, where he was to be enchained by the bonds of love which he himself called “imperishable, indissoluble.” It may be asked, in regard to this well-known friendship, whether Turgénief, exiled from Russia by his desire for liberty, succeeded in avoiding all the forms of dependence. It is a problem which I leave to the most inquisitive to settle. I confine myself to pointing out in Turgénief the expressions which now and again betray his weariness of exile, his restlessness as of a Northern bird, a captive swan or eider, languishing, mourning with regret for its cold natal seas. “I am condemned to a Bohemian life, and I must make up my mind never to build me a nest.” “In a foreign atmosphere,” he writes once more, “I decompose like a frozen fish in time of thaw.... I shall certainly come back to Russia in the spring.”
During the winter of 1856 Turgénief made this promise to return; and he repeats it many times, as though to assure himself further excuses for keeping it. From that time he knows all the disappointments of a wandering life; and to express the idea of not feeling at home where one is, he uses a word of rare power: “Say what you will, but in a foreign country a man is dislocated: you are needful to no one, and no one is needful to you.” Far from growing feeble, this painful impression will increase as time goes on; the flame of regret, instead of going out or dying down, will get fresh vigor, and break forth in new developments.
First it is the family instinct, which wakens and which speaks very eloquently at that ambiguous hour when youth begins to withdraw, and when, like the foliage in autumn, one feels a premonitory shiver, harbinger of the wintry winds. “Anenkof married,” says Turgénief smiling, “is handsomer than ever.” “Get thee a wife,” he writes seriously to another of his friends: “it is the one thing needful.”
Then there is also the acute feeling of the impoverishment of the creative faculty, the very disturbing realization or apprehension of a sort of literary anema due to the deprivation of the desired climate with its inspiring horizons, with its atmosphere filled with vivifying breezes and suggestive sounds. “I will admit, if you please, that the talent with which I was endowed by nature has not grown smaller; but I have nothing on which to set it to work. The voice is rested: there is naught to sing, so it is better to be silent. And I have nothing to sing, because I live away from Russia.” “Living abroad,” he says in another place, “the fountain from which my inspiration sprang has dried up.”
Finally, more than all, it is the lofty sadness and the noble remorse at not being on hand, at not mingling more intimately in the troublous, dangerous drama which is enacting on Russian soil. “In fact,” Turgénief writes his friend the great author, Lyof Tolstoï, “Russia is now passing through serious and gloomy times; but it is for that very reason that at this moment one feels the gnawing of conscience at living like a foreigner.”
And so this existence which seemed to be ruled by a certain indifference, a sort of elegant and fortunate dilettanteism, was early crossed, and to the very end disturbed, by fits of melancholy and splenetic depression, the secret of whose existence few people, I am inclined to think, ever discovered. Who seeing Turgénief unaffectedly smiling, in a humor not exactly sportive, but sweet, even, and obliging, would have suspected that after an interview with his Parisian friends, for whom he saved all the flower of his wit, he would shut himself up to confide his heart-secret to pages destined to fall only under the softened and by no means mocking eyes of his old Russian comrades?
One can easily imagine the sympathy roused in a Polonsky, for example, by passages such as this: “The chill of old age every day penetrates farther into my soul: it takes entire possession of it. The absolute indifference which I find in me makes me tremble for myself. I can now repeat with Hamlet,—
Perhaps this mood will pass; or, if it lasts, perhaps I shall succeed in lignifying, and in that case, it is all the same.”
Another day he tears out from his private journal this page, the disappearance of which is to be deeply regretted: “Again I am at my table, and in my soul it is gloomier than the gloomiest night. Thus, like a moment, passes the day, empty, aimless, colorless. A space to give a passing glance, and, lo! it is bedtime again. No right to life, no desire to live. Nothing to do, nothing to expect, nothing to hope for.... Thou speakest of halos of glory, and of enchanting tones. O my friend! we are the fragments of a vase broken long ago.”
When once the straits of old age were crossed, Turgénief enjoyed a few years of relative calm, of less bitter resignation. It was the time of his intimacy with George Sand and Flaubert. They both died. Illness falls upon Turgénief himself, and nails him pitilessly to the land of exile.
From the day when the way of return is cut off, the “occidental” is seized once more with the agony of homesickness for the mother country. His eyes and his heart are fastened immovably on the corner of Russia whither all the memories of childhood and youth draw him. Unable to see his village of Spaskoe, he sends his best friends to it, and establishes them there. He begs them to give him endless details about the peasants, about the women, the school, the chapel, the hospital. He worries about the garden, and urges Mrs. Polonskaïa to look upon its most humble products with “the eyes of the master.” He feels more keenly than ever the value of what he has lost. In addition to his ever renewed and lively regrets comes the feeling of bitterness and mourning which is born of the irreparable. His country calls him, and draws him with such force, that he has the sensation of a great “tearing asunder.” That is the expression to which it is necessary to hold fast. It is calculated to surprise even those who had the good fortune often to meet Ivan Sergéyevitch; but what regret it ought to cause those who, deceived by the way in which Turgénief persisted in living far away from the Russian land, cruelly upbraided him for having forgotten his country!
Turgénief was so far from forgetting Russia, that he went back almost every year; and he wrote almost all his works there. The critics scarcely had any suspicion of such a thing. They attacked Turgénief’s later novels, bringing up against them his residence abroad. “How could he know Russia any more? He no longer lives there.” Turgénief was indignant at this objection, which “that old woman called the public” persisted in hurling at him. He answered this argument once for all, in terms which must be quoted: “The objection can only be made to what I have published since 1863. Until that time,—that is, until my forty-fifth year,—I lived in Russia, scarcely going out of the country, except the years from 1848 to 1850. During just those years I wrote ‘The Annals of a Sportsman.’ On the other hand, ‘Rudin,’ ‘The Nest of Gentlemen,’ ‘On the Eve,’ and ‘Fathers and Sons’ were written in Russia. But that makes no difference to the old woman. Her mind is already made up.”
To be a little more precise, “Rudin” was published in 1855. “A Nest of Gentlemen”[31] appeared in 1859 [1858?], and the year 1862 was distinguished by the appearance of “Fathers and Sons.” Better than any one, Turgénief understood the necessity of writing nothing without his models before him; and he went to seek for them where they were to be found. Turgénief’s correspondence shows these scruples in a score of places, and especially in regard to “Fathers and Sons.” Having once conceived the plan of the work, the novelist has no rest until he finds himself in Russia. There only can he imagine, create, or, to speak more accurately, reproduce what he sees in real life. His pen, which refused to move as long as he was abroad, runs and flies over the paper. The sight of familiar landscapes refreshes the parched brain: inspiration flows.
Between the romance of “Fathers and Sons,” and that of “Smoke,” which was published in 1867, during the period when the Russian writer was an habitual resident of Baden Baden,[32] appeared quite a large number of shorter stories and tales of less pretension, but not of less value. There is more than one masterpiece of sentiment or imagination in “Apparitions,” in “Strange Stories,” “Spring Waters,” “Living Relics.” Not all these collections preceded “Smoke,” but they came shortly before or shortly after it.
Between “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil,” Turgénief’s last great novel, passes a period of nearly ten years. The cause of this long silence was the alienation which had arisen between the writer and his public. Russian readers had already begun to show their dissatisfaction with “Fathers and Sons,” and the causes of this displeasure deserve to be closely examined. We shall return to them in the course of this study. The spitefulness of the critics was let loose against the very satirical romance “Smoke;” other works, such as “The King Lear of the Steppe,” did not even have the success of causing scandal, and were “damned with faint praise.” “That,” said Turgénief, “for an author who is growing old, is worse than a fiasco. It is the best proof that it is time to stop, and I am going to stop.”
In such a resolution, there were other motives besides pique. Turgénief felt weary, and, as it were, short of inspiration or of subjects. In the intervals between the recuperative journeys which we have mentioned, he was obliged to nourish himself on his own substance. He knew that to suspend them, or even to postpone them too long, was at the risk of losing his strength and wasting away even to consumption. “I am compelled, like a bear in winter, to suck my paw; and thus it is that nothing comes forth.”
The weariness disappeared, the pique wore away, and gradually this firm resolution to enjoy rest and absolute silence was shaken. Turgénief finally even found excellent reason for resuming the pen. It was necessary, not to blot out, but to complete, the effect of “Fathers and Sons” by writing another romance, which this time should clear up misunderstandings, and put the author in the position and in the rank that he felt he ought to hold. This romance, “Virgin Soil,”[33] did not appear till 1876; but almost two years beforehand Turgénief was talking of it, thinking about it, and working at it. It can be seen in his correspondence, that the work is in some degree taking shape; and under each abstract formula one can already detect the outlines of a character who will be the realization of it.
It is easily understood how Turgénief, who expected so much from this last work, who thought that he had put into it the best of his talent, and reached the culmination of his creative faculty, was disappointed and discouraged to receive once more only reproaches and blame. “This time,” he says, “it is my last original work. Such is my decision, and it is irrevocable.... I may possibly busy myself still with translations. I am contemplating ‘Don Quixote’ and Montaigne.” In vain opinion calms down, changes base, turns to praise and admiration: he remains firm in his design of staying in retreat, and of “joining the veterans.” Indeed, for a few months at least, he seems to drop this implement of the writer, “which he has used for thirty years.”
He travels abroad, in England; and quickly finds himself too well known, too much entertained, too much exhibited. This excess of glory is incompatible with his modesty.
Was it the delight in his visit to Russia in the spring of 1878, was it the joy of renewing long-interrupted relations of intimacy with Count Lyof Tolstoï? At all events, Turgénief again finds literary work to his taste. At first, it is true, he is seen occupying himself only with the work of others. He wishes to do for Tolstoï the same service in France, as for Flaubert in Russia, by popularizing their works in translation. Or he publishes Pushkin’s correspondence, and supervises a superb edition of the complete works of his favorite poet.
He writes Bougival his “Song of Triumphant Love,” which he regretfully allows to be printed, and which is this time hailed as a marvel. He makes a selection of his “Poems in Prose.” He puts some personal reminiscences in the form of short stories; among others, “The Hopeless Man.” He already passes beyond the horizon of life,—which is ending for him amid the most cruel sufferings,—by writing that half-real vision entitled “The Morrow of Death.”
Turgénief, by these short works, endeavored to get himself into the mood of writing another great work. He was already beginning to speak of it to his friends; he explained the subject; he had, perhaps, blocked out his plan; and since we know his habits of work, and his method, we are safe in adding that he had conceived the principal types, that he had seen the majority of the characters pass and halt before his eyes. In this romance, Turgénief intended to compare the Russian with the French grévistes or anarchists. We see it is the subject which Zola had the ambition to take up in “Germinal;” and, in spite of the popularity of the work, I may be allowed to believe that this subject still remains to be treated.
The idea of this great romance must have been suggested to Turgénief’s mind, as a consequence of his almost triumphal journey in Russia, on the occasion of the Pushkin festival. A few years had sufficed absolutely to change the feelings of the younger generation in Russia. The popularity which the author of “The Annals of a Sportsman” so suddenly won was restored to him after a pretty long period of alienation, and at last beatified the author of “Virgin Soil.” The enthusiastic reception of the Moscow students filled his soul with the emotion of unexpected joy, and the ovation which he received had for him all the value of an improbable result. A Russian who was very near to Turgénief told me that, on this occasion, he found only a few hesitating and broken words to reply to the speeches of the orators, the leaders of this young generation; but he had the moistened eyes and the smile of a happy man.
Full of gratitude for this eleventh-hour homage, he would have been glad to express his thankfulness in his own manner; and doubtless the new work would have translated it. His illness put a stop to his project. On the 8th of April, 1882, Turgénief writes to Mrs. Polonskaïa to inform her of the physician’s diagnosis in regard to what they call his angina pectoris, or his gouty neuralgia of the heart. The term was not accurate. It is known that Turgénief died of cancer of the spinal marrow. Whatever the trouble was, the torment of it became atrocious, and the suffering which the invalid underwent lasted more than a year. He bore this slow agony with great sweetness. His complaints were rare, and they were for the most part hidden under a veil of irony which robbed them of every shade of bitterness.
Pinched by pain as by a vise, he still found the time and the power to address comforting raillery to those who were sadder than himself. “For your consolation,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I wish to quote one of Goethe’s remarks, made just before his death. It would seem as if he at least had to satiety all of the happiness that life can give. Think what a pitch of glory he reached, loved by women, and hated by fools; think that he had been translated even into Chinese; that all Europe was setting out in pilgrimage to salute him; that Napoleon himself said of him, ‘There is a man!’ think that our Russian critics, the Uvarofs and others, burned incense under his nose: and yet, at the age of eighty-two, he declared that during his long life he had not been happy a quarter of an hour all told. Then for you and me it is the will of God, isn’t it? Suppose the perfect health which Goethe always enjoyed is lacking to us, still he was bored.... But what is to be done about it?”
On the 3d of July, 1883, Turgénief with feeble hand, and at the cost of cruel pangs, wrote in pencil the following unsigned letter to his friend the great novelist Lyof Tolstoï: “It is long since I have written you, for I have been and I am literally on my death-bed. It is impossible for me to recover: it is not within the limits of thought. I write you simply to tell you that I am happy to have been your contemporary, and to express to you my last and most sincere request: my friend, return to literary work! This talent of yours came to you from the source whence come all our gifts. Ah! how happy I should be if my prayer were to have the effect upon you so deeply desired! As for me, I am a dead man. The doctors do not even know what name to give my ailment. Gouty neuralgia of the stomach; no walking, no eating, no sleeping. Bah! it is tiresome to repeat all this. My friend, great writer of the Russian land, hear my supplication. Let me know if you receive this slip of paper, and allow me once more to press you closely in my embrace,—you, your wife, and all your family. I cannot write you more, I am weary.”
Turgénief died a month later, on Monday, Sept. 3, 1883.
Turgéniefs features are so well known that it seems unnecessary to sketch them in his biography. One of his characters, the gigantic Karlof, thus defined the men of his race: “We are all born with light hair, brilliant eyes, and pale faces; for we have sprung up under the snow.” Turgénief himself had a good share of these race characteristics. But in France the majority of people knew the good giant only after he was well along in life, and when he already had the aspect of one of those venerable kings of whom the poet speaks:—
Turgénief was of a very honest, very obliging, and very affable nature.[34] Those who met him saw him to the best advantage at moments when he allowed himself to talk with a charming frankness. He talked deliciously, with abundance of feeling and a fluency of expression, which went with him even when he spoke in French. He enchanted those who listened to him in his moments of enthusiasm: always lively and original, his conversation then became passionate and brilliant, even lyrical. Listening to this stream of ideas and words hurrying in eager floods, not noisily, from the lips of this old man of heroic mould and structure, one involuntarily thought of some Homeric bard. There was also “the harmony of the cicadas” and “all the sweetness of honey” in the voice of the Nestor of the steppes.
Was Turgénief only an artist, only a dilettante?
We must give up this false definition which his enemies wished to become current, and which his friends even have been too willing to let go with contravention. Superficial critics deny in him all capacity, all enlightenment, on the questions of social order: they have gone so far as to say that in these respects he has neither teachings nor opinion. Certain fanatics, young or old, the Písarefs, the Dostoyevskys, have taken it upon them to advance this pretext for denying him the right to write and to print his works, and to be read as they are and more than they are.
It is true to say that Turgénief never laid down, or even sketched out, a programme; that he never made public speeches, that he did not peddle interviews, that he did not lucubrate leading articles for the editorial pages of journals. What am I saying? Perhaps he did not even reply to a sensational toast during his active life! Many persons obtain and grant the title of political man only by this test. In their judgment, Turgénief was not one.
As for believing that Turgénief had in political matters no definite opinions, or keen sympathies, or profound views, or well-digested purposes, it takes a pretty strong dose of passion or of naïveté to accept and to promulgate this mistake. Those who have read his works carefully suspected it; those who were in his intimate circle had no question about it: but no scepticism in this regard could withstand the revelations of his correspondence.
We know what popularity the Slavophile party gained from the moment of its birth. The declamations of the Pogodins and the Aksákofs against “occidental rot,” their dithyrambs in honor of the virtues of the Slavic race, their childish programmes pretending to put the Russian people on the right track, and to free it from the old vestment of foreign ideas and habits which Peter the Great had swaddled it with,—all this specious rhetoric, flattering at once the national vanity, ignorance, and indolence, found in Turgénief from his early youth a decided enemy. His conviction as an occidental, which was the foundation of all his other convictions, could not be shaken either by the constant effort of years or by the sudden shock of the most varied events.
But what was the characteristic of this occidentalism? Did it go so far as to dislike the special features of the Russian people, and desire to extirpate the individuality of the race, as one would demand the excision of a tumor or the extirpation of a wart? Turgénief was too proud of being a Russian, not to have a legitimate share in the development of these peculiarities of the national type; but, according to his own words, it was repugnant to him “to feel any vanity in this sort of exclusiveness, in whatever sphere it was manifested, pure art or politics.” In his eyes, Slavophilism was an artificial entity, a sort of hollow edifice, constructed on foreign models and in imitation of the German genius.
He could not reconcile himself to the idea of artificially isolating Russia from the rest of Europe, and of shutting her up in a sort of quarantine, where, in order to be free from foreign influences, the result would be that the natal air would not preserve its purity, but would grow vitiated and rarefied. And with still greater reason, he regarded as puerile the thought of giving new life to the European organism by the infusion of the Slavic element. This ambition of grafting the Russian shoot on the aged wood of other races tore from him protestations of very expressive irony. “I cannot accustom myself to this view of Aksákof’s, that it is necessary for Europe, if she would be saved, to accept our orthodox religion.” Every policy that adopted this narrow principle seemed to him worthy of reprobation, at least in its principle. “In freeing the Bulgarians we ought to be guided to this step, not because they are Christians, but because the Turks are massacring and robbing them.” “All that is human is dear to me,” he says again: “Slavophilism is as foreign to me as every other orthodoxy.”
In bringing these habits of moderation to his judgments of the acts of the government, and of the men who helped, who extolled, who blamed, who clogged its action, Turgénief might have expected to cause dissatisfaction, and to rouse for the most part only murmurs. Early in point of fact, and even to the end of his career, Turgénief is the object of violent attacks from the opposite party. At the very moment when the younger generation of Russians felt that they were travestied by him in “Fathers and Sons,” and when Tchernuishevsky, the author of the famous romance “What is to be Done?”[35] turns to his own profit the misunderstandings caused by the appearance of the hero Bazarof; Turgénief, for having created this same Bazarof, for having refused to exaggerate or blacken his character, makes for himself irreconcilable enemies in the reactionary party. He quarrels with Katkof, the officious journalist, the confidant of the heir-apparent, the inspirer of that retrograde policy which has prevailed in Russia of late years. “When I left ‘The Russian Messenger’ (Russki Vyestnik), Katkof sent me word that I did not know what it was to have him for an enemy. He is trying, therefore, to show me. Let him do his best. My soul is not in his power.”
No consideration of interest, no low ambition for popularity, could have decided Turgénief to deviate from this line of conduct. We remember the quite barren movement of agitation started a few years ago by those young people who called themselves, somewhat naïvely, “the new men.” A lady who was one of their sympathizers sends Turgénief a bundle of documents: it is the confession of one of the representatives of this progressive generation. Turgénief finds in this jumble of prose and verse only two characteristics,—an intoxicated, delirious self-conceit, and boundless incapacity and ignorance. It is vain to make allowance for time of life, and to attribute a part of their faults to the extreme youth of these individuals puffed up with a mighty sense of their small importance. Under it all there lies “only feebleness of thought, absence of all knowledge, a scantiness of talent verging on poverty.” He does not put his unfavorable judgment under any sort of subterfuge or oratorical disguise: his frankness costs him a storm of bitter criticisms.
Yet Turgénief is the very same man who will receive in Paris other young people, with still more trenchant opinions, still more angular forms; and “in their presence,” he says eloquently, “I, old man that I am, I open my heart, because I feel in them the ‘real presence,’ and force, and talent, and mind.” These virtues attracted him and disarmed him, no matter in what class of people or in what group of thinkers he found them. Thus he is seen giving the patronage of his name, and the cover of his authority, to the first work on the newspaper Le Temps of a young Russian, treated by the home government as a dangerous character. To punish Turgénief for this audacious deed, the minister causes him to be insulted, slandered by a paid scribbler. “Verily, among us,” writes Turgénief, “many shameful things are exposed to God’s air, like this vile article of the rascally....”
Now, a few days later, on the occasion of the attempted assassination of 1879, behold how the man whom “The Moscow Gazette” (edited by Katkof) affected to confound with the scatter-brains of Nihilism, expressed himself: “The last ignominious news has greatly troubled me. I foresee that certain people will use this senseless outrage to the disadvantage of the party which justly, in the interest of its liberal ideas, places the Tsar’s life above every thing; for salutary reforms are to be expected from him alone. In Russia, how can a reform be imagined which does not come from above?... I am deeply troubled and grieved. Here for two days I have not slept at the idea of it. I think about it, and think about it; but I cannot come to any conclusion.”
Whatever were his apprehensions, he could not foresee with what fury of re-action the Emperor would strive to stem the Liberal current, by which, when he first mounted the throne, he had allowed himself to be carried onward. Turgénief suffered from this aberration of power more than can be told. He foresaw new acts of despair, which would give a color of reason to measures of repression constantly growing more crushing. He attributed this infatuated policy to the influence of Pobyedonostsef, the Ober-Prokuror of the Holy Synod; and above all to the counsels of Katkof, that former Liberal, that exile converted to the most brutal absolutism. He writes: “Who can tell what is going on at home, Katkovio regnante?”
With what passion Turgénief uttered one day before two callers, one of whom was a Frenchman, this expression, which I find also in his correspondence! With what pathetic eloquence he mourned for the days of yore, the days of the old oppression! “We had then a bare wall before us,” he writes, “but we knew where it was necessary to make the breach. To-day the door is ajar, but to enter through this narrow opening is more difficult than to undermine and cast down the wall.”
I find, among some notes taken down after an afternoon call upon Ivan Turgénief during the winter of 1882, a rather expressive résumé of his conversation, which I beg permission to quote in its entirety. “At that time we felt sustained by an auxiliary which allows one to defy, and which finally softens, all the severities of power,—Opinion. We had on our side the two stimuli which lead to victory,—the feeling of duty, the presentiment of success. Who would have believed that the day would come when we should look back with regret upon this period of terror, but of hope; of oppression, but of activity! Indeed, were not the youth of that time happy and enviable compared to those of to-day? What sincere mind can help feeling the deepest pity for that handful of Russians, educated, or greedy for education, whom the misfortune of the times has driven to the most frightful extremes? You might say that every thinker is caught between the anvil of an ignorant populace and the hammer of a blinded power. The Russian people are afraid even of those who, scorning every danger, are laboring to gain them their rights; they are absolutely ignorant, and are afraid of every innovation. They have the anxious look, and the quick flashes of anger, of a wild beast. We have just seen them rush upon the Jews with a sort of frenzy. If the people were not kept like a bear fastened to a chain, they would treat the revolutionists with the same fairness and the same gentleness.
“As to the throne, the end of advance in the path of absolutism has just about been reached. It is now the formidable ideal of tyranny. During the preceding reign it took the initiative of reform. Alexander II. was carried away by the current of liberal ideas. He ordered measures to be taken; above all, he allowed projects to be elaborated. He wished, for example, to give the district assemblies power enough to struggle against the abuses of the tchinovniks, and to put a stop to corruption. But one day he was panic-struck. Karakózof’s pistol-shot drove back into the shade that phantom of liberty, the appearance of which all Russia had hailed with acclamation. From that moment, and even to the end of his life, the Emperor devoted himself to the undoing of all that he had done. If he could have cancelled with one stroke the glorious ukaz which had proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he would have been only too glad to disgrace himself.
“What can be said of his successor, that doting sovereign, that victim nailed to the throne? He shuts himself between four walls, and, what is worse, between four narrow, limited minds, the responsible editors of the policy of an anonymous tsar, the former Liberal and exile, Katkof. It is a war upon ideas, a crusade of ignorance. Russia is having its Inquisition, it has its Torquemada. What other name is to be given to that minister of creeds, or, to speak more exactly, that procuror-general of the Synod, Pobyedonostsef?
“The Tsar sees in Pobyedonostsef the most virtuous and the most saintly man in all the empire. He has for him all the tenderness of Orgon; and you might say that he likes to think, like that pig-headed dupe,—
“Just as the Tsar loves and venerates Pobyedonostsef, so he shows Katkof naïve admiration and respectful deference. In the one he sees science inborn; in the other, religion personified. But the more dangerous of these two fanatics is Katkof, the former Liberal, the companion of Herzen’s misfortunes, the ex-professor of philosophy at Moscow. He scorns to hold the reins of power; he likes better to give the word to those who carry the order for him and by him alone. The ministers are his valets; he has even his under-slaves; it would not be interesting to mention all their names. He is the disgraceful Richelieu behind the throne, who terrorizes Russia.”
Notwithstanding the very gloomy aspect of the present, Turgénief had unshaken faith in the future. “We must not expect that the future will be all roses. No matter, things will come out all right.” And what were the means, according to Turgénief’s idea, of realizing this? Give up illusions and fidgeting. Don’t imagine that you are going to find a panacea, a remedy for the great evils; and that, to cure the Russian colossus of all his tribulations, it will be sufficient to practise a sort of incantation “analogous to the spells used by old women to calm the toothache suddenly, miraculously.” According to Turgénief, the miraculous means alone changes: “sometimes it is a man, sometimes the natural sciences, sometimes a war;” but what is unchangeable is faith in the miracle. That is the superstition which first of all must be extirpated.
Likewise the idea of obtaining without delay “large, beautiful, and glorious” results, the idea of wishing “to move mountains,” must be renounced. It is necessary to know how to pay attention to little objects, to limit one’s self to a very narrow circle of action, not to step out of it; and there without glory, almost without result, work incessantly. The only activity that is fruitful was defined by Turgénief, in quoting the two verses of Schiller’s old man: “Unwearied activity is that which adds one grain of sand to another.” “What!” said he, “you begin by telling me that your constructive work is ended, that the school has just been begun; and, a little farther on, you speak of the despair which takes hold of you! I beg of you, for pity’s sake: your enterprise has already had some small result. It is not unfruitful. What more do you want? Let every one do as much in his own sphere, and there will be a grand, a splendid result.”
And Turgénief was one of the first to put his doctrine into practice. Just as in his youth he signed the charter for the emancipation of his serfs, with the same pen which wrote the indictment of serfage in “The Annals of a Sportsman;” so in the time of his old age, notwithstanding his absence, tortured as he was by the horrors of disease, he preached humbleness of aim and constancy of effort, but he preached it by his example. All his cares were directed to the improvement of the material and moral condition of his former serfs. He granted them a fifth of the sum settled upon for the redemption. At his own expense he built a school; he founded a hospital in his village of Selo Spaskoe; he succeeded in diminishing drunkenness, and in spreading a taste for reading in a region where, at the time of his boyhood, an educated, self-taught muzhik was a genuine rarity.
His correspondence shows that he was greatly concerned about his estate in the government of Orel: but it was not the revenue of his lands that troubled him; it was the happiness, the moral welfare, of his little people of Spaskoe. Behold the evolution which he wanted to see accomplished from one end to the other of his country, and which, so far as in him lay, he called forth, he prepared.
Any other policy seemed to him useless, dangerous, almost criminal. He hoped that the new reign was going to inaugurate a whole tradition of efforts in favor of the development of the rural classes. That was why he manifested his sympathy with the new Tsar, on the accession of Alexander III.: he applied to him the title, the “Emperor of the muzhiks,” and, if this was not a name of praise, it was found at least to contain a counsel.
“All that one can say,” wrote Turgénief again on the subject of the Tsar, “is that he is Russian, and nothing but Russian.... Seeing him anywhere, one would know his country.” I do not know whether these words went to the Tsar’s heart; but are they not honorable to him who penned them? What Slavophile would have imagined any thing more eloquent in their simplicity? In giving this emperor, “in whose veins runs scarce a drop of Russian blood,” his naturalization papers, Turgénief surely thought that he had reached the borders of eulogy.
After reading what has gone before, I trust that no one will be inclined to see a mere paradox in this affirmation: Turgénief was above all things interested in the question of politics and social order, and of this interest were born all his great works. This was the reason that Turgénief’s writings so stirred the public: hence the favor of his readers at first was, enthusiastic; hence came notorious alienation, irritation, almost calumnious fury, from the time when the public and the author no longer advanced with equal steps towards progress. For, here is the point to be noted: Turgénief never ceased to make progress; but as long as he walked slowly, with regular steps, like a man who holds aloof from the popular current, and is not dragged along against his will by the rising tide of the throng, the masses of the nation—I mean the majority of the educated classes—no longer regulated his gait, and, seeing him each day a little farther behind them, imagined that he was retrograding or was not following. Turgénief was advancing, and he went to great lengths. Let us see how great was the distance between “The Annals of a Sportsman” and “Virgin Soil.”
Turgénief somewhere expressed his sympathy and admiration for Don Quixote. He contrasted him with the dreamer Hamlet, in whom he took little stock. Did not he himself enter the career of letters like a knight-errant (campeador) in the lists? From the very beginning, when he had won all the glory of a victor, he gave his young talent to the service of the right and of truth; he turned his pen, like a sword, against egotism, against injustice, against prejudice,—in a word, against the different forms of error. His maiden book, “The Annals of a Sportsman,” was not merely a literary event: it brought about a political revolution. This picture of the wretched condition of the serfs contributed in large measure to call forth the ukaz that enfranchised Russia.
It was not the first time that fiction had attacked the social question. Gogol had already struck the first blow against the enemy which Turgénief had the honor of defeating. But the author of “Dead Souls” had laid himself out especially to depict the faults and foibles of the small Russian proprietors; and, while he made it sufficiently evident how miserable was the condition of the serfs under their grotesque or detestable tyranny, his book left the unfortunate muzhik in the background. Turgénief’s originality consisted in placing this pariah in full light. He dared to show not only his pity but his affection for the Russian peasant, often narrow-minded, ignorant, or brutal, but good at heart. He undertook to reveal to the Russians this being which they scarcely knew.
In the very first pages of his book he showed him with his instinctive qualities; and for this reason he took pains to place him in an exceptional condition, that is to say, in that sort of relative independence occasionally realized in spite of, or by favor of, the law. Khor and Kalinuitch are accordingly almost freed from the actual miseries of serfage,—the first by living in the midst of a swamp, avoiding statute labor by paying a quit-rent (obrok); the second by serving as whipper-in for his master, whom he passionately adores. The former is a muzhik, who has the feeling of reality, “who is settled in life;” the other is a dreamer, “who sticks to nothing, and smiles at all things.” Khor the cautious has carefully observed men and things, and his experiences are expressed with that humorous naïveté which gives such a color to the conversation of the Russian peasant. Kalinuitch the enthusiast has the inspired language of a poet. He is largely endowed with mysterious powers. The bees obey him as though he were an enchanter. Both of them are good. The one is devout and gentle; the other, simply cordial and hospitable. There is profit in listening to the former, and pleasure in holding intercourse with the latter. Under these features Turgénief pictured the Russian of the country districts. After showing him, so to speak, in his native state, he went on to explain the deformities from which the type was liable to suffer under the brutalizing influences of serfdom.
The first alteration of the character of the Russian muzhik is a sort of ferocious, even savage, humor, which takes the place of the original reason or ingenuity. The huntsman Yermolaï offers us a curious example of this reversion to barbarism, of this return of the muzhik towards the savage state. Emancipated in the manner of an outlaw, of a bandit, he lives in the woods or the marsh, sleeping on a roof, under a bridge, in the crotch of a tree, hunted down by the peasants like a hare, beaten sometimes like a dog, but, aside from these trials, enjoying to the full this strange independence. He does not support his wife or his dog, both of whom he beats with the same brutal indifference. He has all the instincts of the beast of prey in scenting game, in trapping birds, in catching fish. He already possesses the shrewdness of the savage: he would easily acquire his cruelty. “I did not like the expression which came over his face when he applied his teeth to the bird he had just brought to earth.”
However precarious and anxious this independent life may be, it appears very enviable when compared to the torment and degradations of slavery. The muzhik Vlas walks all the way to Moscow, where he comes to ask a reduction in his quit-rent; for his son who paid it for him is dead, and he himself is old. The barin slams the door in his face, with the words, “How do you dare to come to me?” Vlas sadly returns to his hut, where his wife is waiting for him, blowing in her fist from starvation. “His lip is drawn, and in his little bloodshot eyes stands a tear.” He suddenly bursts out into a laugh, thinking that they can’t take any thing more from him than his life,—“a wretched pledge,”—and that that damned German, the prikashchik Quintilian Semenitch, “will shuffle in vain:” that’s all he’ll get. That tear of anguish, and that desperate laugh, are never to be forgotten.
Here are other impressions not less cruel. The serf Sutchok, now employed at his trade of fisherman, tells how he began by working as a cook; and how, in changing his profession, according as he went from master to master, he found himself successively cook, restaurant-keeper, actor, then back to his ovens again, then wearing livery as sub-footman, then postilion, then huntsman, then cobbler, then journeyman in a paper-mill. These caprices of the mastership which weighs upon the muzhik have not only their ridiculous side: there is always something detestable about it. The last owner of this wretch, whose life is only an irksome apprenticeship, is an old maid, who vents her spleen at having been left in single-blessedness by forbidding all her household to marry. This abasement of a human being, condemned by his master to isolation, to barrenness, like a beast, is powerfully shown in the little tale entitled “Yermolaï and the Miller Girl.”
But what seems still more painful than the slavery itself is to see that it is endured with resignation, and sometimes even upheld, excused, by those who have to submit to it. “How do you live?” is asked of one of these victims of feudal despotism. “Do you get wages, a fixed salary?”—“A salary! Ekh! barin, we are given our victuals. Indeed, that’s all we need, God knows! And may Heaven grant long life to our baruina!” Another has just been tremendously flogged. He treats with very bad grace the stranger who presumes to express commiseration; he takes the part of the master who has so cruelly abused him for a trifle; he is proud of belonging to a man who makes strict use of his seignorial prerogatives. “No, no! there is not a barin like to him in the whole province!”
Turgénief does not confine himself to the expression of pity for the muzhiks: he is unsparing of the nobles. With what irony he depicts for us their false sentimentality, their detestable selfishness! How he lays his finger on their absurdities! How he scourges their cruelty! How he lays bare their hypocrisy! They all appear in the book, from the narrow and cringing citizen, to the cynically brutal country pomyeshchik, from the gentlemen of the steppe (stepniaks) up to the vanished nobles, those legendary vyelmozhui, personified in Count Alekséï Orlof, so handsome, so strong, so terrible, and at the same time so beloved! “If you were not acquainted with him, you would feel abashed; but after getting wonted to his presence, you felt warmed and delighted as by a beautiful sunrise.” The author finds in this vanished aristocracy the rather barbaric form of his own grandfather, and he cannot refrain here from a sort of admiration. It is true, that small men have a sympathy very differently marked for these ostentatious giants of the olden days. Besides, is it not enough that the author of “Annals of a Sportsman” makes no secret of the excesses committed by those of his race? Has he not the right to remember that the form of oppression has merely been changed, and that the serf is not less abused from falling from the mighty hands of the tyrants, into the hooked claws of tyrannical weaklings?
But the true tormentor of the serf was a man whose condition brought him nearest to the muzhik; the one who, more often than not, was himself only a muzhik polished up,—in other words, the representative of the proprietor, the superintendent (prikashchik), the burmistr. This subaltern master pays the peasant’s quit-rent until the latter, overwhelmed with debts, is absolutely in his power. He becomes his slave, his drudge. Now and then will be found in the woods the corpse of some wretch who has torn himself from this hell, by suicide. But what is the use of complaining? The proprietor receives his revenue, and is satisfied. And then the prikashchik has a thousand ways of getting hold of the fault-finder, and the wreaking of his vengeance brings a groan.
Proprietors, muzhiks, priskashchiks, all these characters strike, move, stir, by their fidelity to the truth. In a subject which lent itself so easily to declamation, the author succeeded in refraining from all excess of fine writing. This self-restraint in form gave greater force to the satire, and added weight to the argument. Besides, under the irony the bitterness was felt, and under the comic fervor was occasionally heard the rumbling of a generous wrath. Turgénief himself explained the feelings which animated him at this period of his life, which I would rather compare to the morning of a battle. He had just left Russia, the atmosphere of which seemed no longer fit to breathe. He went away to get a fresh start, so as to come back with a renewed impetus against his enemy serfage. “I swore that I would fight it even to the death; I vowed that I would never come to terms with it: that was my Hannibal’s oath.”
From one end of his work to the other, Turgénief never did aught else than thus reflect the feelings of the Russian people, express its hopes, note carefully, proclaim sincerely, all the forward and backward movements of opinion. In every one of his novels, there is to be found one person whose appearance, conduct, and worth may vary, but whose dominant characteristic holds throughout all changes. This personage, however alive he may be, serves to express an abstraction. He is, so to speak, the incarnation of the wishes, the fears, the claims, of the Russian people. Now, in Russia, as elsewhere, and still more than elsewhere, public opinion is undergoing constant modification: the novelist has followed with careful eye, and copied with accurate hand, all these rapid transformations.
In Dmitri Rudin, he depicts for us a lofty but inconsequential generation, eloquent, but lacking in depth, eager for every undertaking, but having no fixed purpose; as the youth of 1840 must have been, who had the power of speech, but were prevented from action.[36]
This was the epoch when there was a passion for words, and especially for words of foreign origin. Hegel’s philosophy frothed and foamed in these Russian brains, so little constituted for the digestion of metaphysical nutriment. But the fashion was for cosmopolitanism: they affected to scorn national habits; they dreamed only of going “beyond Russia.” Rudin, who personifies this error, was its first victim. At first he carries away, he rouses to enthusiasm, all whom he approaches; then his friends, his disciples, ultimately, sooner or later, turn against him. He succeeds in rousing only hatred, or exciting only distrust. Useless and inactive amid his own people, he goes to perish on a French barricade; and by a supreme but unconscious irony, the insurgent who fights at his side pronounces his funeral oration in these words: “Lo, they have killed our Pole!”
Is it true to say that the Rudins were of no advantage to their country? The author gives us to understand, that their words may have cast the germ of generous thoughts into more than one young soul to whom nature will not refuse the advantage of a fruitful activity.
To this same unfortunate family of forerunners, and to this same sacrificed but indispensable generation, belongs the character of Lavretsky in the romance entitled “A Nest of Noblemen.” Unlike Rudin, Lavretsky owes nothing to schooling. Scarcely does he have time for applying his simple and ingenuous mind to the acquisition of knowledge during the period between the moment when he escapes the durance of paternal despotism, and that when he takes upon him the more pleasing yoke of conjugal will. He therefore has remained Russian; he believes in the future of the national genius. He is lavish of himself, and of those of his age; but he admires the tendencies of the young, and he praises their endeavors. Departing from his country, happy, or at least under that delusion, he returns alone and crushed; but he has the consolation of doing his duty, that is to say, cultivating his estate, and improving the lot of his peasants. This unostentatious work of Lavretsky’s, better than Rudin’s brilliant declamations, pointed out to the rising generations what Russia henceforth expected from her sons: “You must act, and the benediction of us old men will fall upon you.”
But this period of action which they seem to be approaching will be postponed before the unanimous wishes of the novelist and the reader. In the book “On the Eve,” translated into French under the title “Hélène,”[37] the author’s aim is very evident. He contrasts two Russians with a Bulgarian; and the brilliant or solid qualities of the artist Shubin and the student Bersénief yield before the unique virtue of Insarof, a more common nature. This virtue of the barbarian is to go straight ahead; he does not delay for dreaming or discussion; there is nothing of the Hamlet about him. However strange be his ideal, however adventurous his lot, he carries with him Elena’s hesitating wisdom, just as Don Quixote overcame Sancho’s rebellious good sense. It is this decisiveness, this bold gait, this firm resolution not to fall back, and resolutely to emerge from the beaten path, which the author of “On the Eve” seems to hold up before the Russian people. But it might be said that he despaired of finding in his own country the man of action, destined to win the glory to come; and it was thus that the Russian critics explained his significant choice of a Bulgarian for the hero of his romance.
This ingenious explanation is not correct. Insarof and Elena have experienced life. This beautiful young Russian girl, who is anxious to devote herself to a noble cause, and who, not being able to die for her own country, clings to the lot of the foreigner who shows her the path of great sacrifices, was not a creature of Turgéniefs imagination. Not only did Elena exist, but there was a throng of Elenas who asked only for a chance to show themselves. This was seen as soon as the romance was published. All feminine hearts throbbed. One might say that the author had placed before the eyes of the virgins of Russia a mirror, where, for the first time, they were allowed to see themselves, and become conscious of their own existence. A few years later Elena would have had a chance to offer herself to Russia. She would have acted like Viéra Sasuluitch, or, not to go outside of fiction, like Marian in “Virgin Soil.”
In the famous novel “Fathers and Sons,” the young generation for the first time comes upon the scene. It is represented by the medical student Bazarof. Better to bring out his hero by a fortunate contrast, the author has put this brutal but thoroughly original plebeian face to face with a gentleman in whom are united all the qualities and the eccentricities of the conservative nobility. Again, it is German education which has fashioned Bazarof. But Hegel’s theories have given place to Schopenhauer’s; and Germanic pessimism, grafted on the Russian mind, has brought forth very strange fruit. The young men of whom Bazarof is a type are of the earth earthy, to the same degree as that generation of which Rudin was the shining example showed itself exalted. They have only one aim, action; they admit only one principle of action, utility; they see only one form of utility at the present time, absolute negation. “Yet isn’t it necessary to rebuild?—That does not concern us. Before all things we must clear the ground.”
Here, clearly formulated, is the theory of Nihilism. This word, invented by Turgénief, and spoken for the first time in “Fathers and Sons,” has in short space gone all over the world. We know that all Russian readers, young and old, blamed the author of the novel for slandering them. The older generation could not forgive him for having spurned their prejudices; the rising generation were angry with him for not preaching their errors. What strikes us to-day is that at this moment he was able to remain so clear-sighted and sincere; that he was able to unite so much nobility with Pavel Kirsánofs narrow-sightedness, and so much subtilty with Bazarof’s destructive scepticism.
But the character which Turgénief liked best in this romance of “Fathers and Sons” was Bazarof,—in other words, that personage representing the Russian soul with aspiration toward progress, no longer ideal and vague, but violent, and brutal. “What! do you, do you say that in Bazarof I desired to draw a caricature of our young men? You repeat (excuse the freedom of the expression), you repeat that stupid reproach? Bazarof! but he is my well-beloved son, who caused me to break with Katkof, for whom I expended all the colors on my palette. Bazarof, that quick spirit, that hero, a caricature!” And he took delight in returning to the definition of this enigmatic personage. He never wearies in commenting on “this harbinger type,” this “grand figure,” surrounded by a genuine “magic spell,” and, as it were, by some sort of “aureole.”
The conclusion of the book lies in the ironical and bitter advice given by Bazarof to his friend Arkad: “Take thee a wife as soon as thou canst, build thy nest well, and beget many children. They will certainly be people of brains, because they will come in due time, and not like thee and me.”
Thus is the solution of the social problem once more postponed. The rock of Sisyphus falls back as heavily on the new-comers as on their predecessors. The recoil is even so mighty that the observer feels that he too is attacked by pessimism; and if he does not take pride in absolute negation, like Bazarof or his young adepts, he just as surely comes to deny their qualities, to see any sense in their conduct. The romance “Smoke,” which is the expression of this new state of mind, roused in Russia all the clamors by which a satire is received. What was entirely overlooked was the feeling of painful compassion hidden under the aggressive form. It was an act of enlightened patriotism, to let daylight into the hollow declamations of the progressists, and to lay the scourge on the stupid folly, the idiotic depravity, of a nobility which had brought itself into discredit. Between Gubaref, that solemn imbecile, and Ramirof, the complaisant husband of a faithless wife, one must go to the hero of the story, Litvinof; that is to say, to the idealized Russia, whose gloomy and painful destiny we have followed across all Turgéniefs work, under the features of Rudin, of Lavretsky, of Bazarof. Like Lavretsky twenty years before, Litvinof returns to his country, overwhelmed with domestic troubles, which exasperate all his other feelings, and change the mishaps of his patriotism into despair. The vanity of love makes him find all things vain. In the tumult of the recent years, in the agitation of divers classes, in the words of others, in his own thoughts, he sees mere nothingness, sham, smoke. The desolation of this conclusion was brought up against the author of the book, by his compatriots, with a warmth which almost disgusted him with the rôle of political observer, and almost deprived us likewise of a masterpiece in which Turgénief seems to have reached his greatest height,—“Virgin Soil.”
The author of “Fathers and Sons” named and defined theoretic Nihilism: in “Virgin Soil,” the same author shows us the Nihilists at the very moment when, for the first time, they begin to act. Between the two books a pretty long time elapsed, during which Turgénief kept silent. There is lacking, therefore, among his works, a book which might let us into the secrets of the dark development and mysterious spread of the new theories. In regard to this Nihilist propaganda in its early years, when it was only an attempt at self-instruction, we find, in “Virgin Soil,” only hints, allusions. The very character, however, who is going to bring about the crisis, at the risk of destroying every thing along with himself, Markelof, still reads and propagates with naïve assurance the “brochures” which are secretly sent him, and which he passes on “under the mantle” to his other confederates. What subjects were treated in these books so carefully hidden? Those which were worth the trouble of reading were translations of foreign works on political economy; writings attacking, with greater or less ability, the problems of society. But this instruction, good or bad, could not have the least influence on the great mass of the Russian population, which does not read at all.
It was therefore necessary to find more efficacious means of action, and to organize actual preaching. Then it was that a pretty large number of people belonging to the educated classes, students like Nedzhanof, women voluntarily deserting their own rank in life, like Marian, undertook to go down among the people, to dress in their style, to speak their dialect, to lead their rough lives, to gain their confidence at the cost of this labor, to open their minds to the ideas of liberty and progress, to rescue them from the double curse of laziness and drunkenness, and, finally, to bring them into the path of action. The trouble was that these people who preached action did not themselves know where to begin the work. Each of them was waiting for the word of command, which no one could give; for in this concert of wills there was no one to direct, and the most violent efforts, from lack of determined purpose, were obliged to remain without results.
Another insurmountable obstacle lay in the repugnance of the people at emerging from their tremendous inertia. Nedzhanof compares Holy Russia to a colossus, whose head touches the north pole and his feet the Caucasus, and who, holding a jug of vodka in his clutched fingers, sleeps an endless sleep. Those who try to struggle against this sleep lose their time and their labor. Discouragement takes hold of them, and some of them, like Markelof, for having desired, having tried by themselves alone, to perform a part which needs the efforts of an army, go forth on the hopeless path by the gate that leads to Siberia; others, like Nedzhanof, having lost faith in this work for the regeneration and enfranchisement of a people to which they believed themselves capable of offering their devotion, throw down violently the double burden of their vain labor and their ridiculous lives. The Russian Hamlet gets rid of his mission by suicide.
This beautiful novel of “Virgin Soil,” which must be read through, appeared on the very eve of the great Nihilist suit against the One Hundred and Ninety-three. At first the cry was raised, that the author did not draw a true picture: the author was again slandering Russia. A few days later the critics, dismayed at his power of divination, accused Turgénief of having got into the confidence of the ruling power, and of having had in his hands the entire brief of the preparatory trial.[38] Some Nihilists were already dreaming of more tragic performances. “I also,” said one of them, who at this time was a refugee in Paris, “I also am a Nedzhanof; but I shall not kill myself as he did: there is a better way of doing it.” This better way was worse. It was assassination in the manner of Soloviéf, who, having resolved to kill himself, and for the same reasons that influenced Nedzhanof, will inaugurate suicide with a bloody preface.
Since “Virgin Soil,” the evolution of Nihilism has made new and rapid strides. The mania of descending among the people, and “being simplified” has given place to other fantastic notions, just as useless, but less innocent. We have said that Turgénief died before he had time to finish the romance in which he would have shown us the agitations of to-day, and possibly pointed out the social reforms of to-morrow.
Who knows what Russia is preparing for us? Hitherto the reforms have been decreed by the throne; and the ukazes have remained without effect, because they have not had the support in the lever of the people. The expenditure of energy, starting from above, did not make the nation stir. But now suddenly the nation seems to be shaking off its torpor. The peasants, hitherto deaf to all voices, and stubbornly resistant of all progress, have perhaps found for themselves the way of safety and redemption. They are assembling in their villages, and they are organizing the league against drunkenness. This strike against the wine-shop is terrifying to the Russian clergy: they see in it a new form of heresy. In their eyes, these water-drinkers are raskolniks, and the most dangerous kind. We know the Russian proverb versified by Nekrásof: “The muzhik has a head like a bull: when a folly finds lodgement there, it is impossible to drive it out, even with heavy blows of the goad.” It is this headstrong obstinacy which seemed to postpone forever, and which may precipitate to-morrow, the settlement of the social question.