# Great Russia/Chapter 10

PART III
The Great Russian Triumvirate
​CHAPTER X
TURGENEV AND WESTERN INFLUENCES
I. Russian Ideals as Revealed by Russian Literature
IN the previous chapters I have attempted to give the meaning of the political achievements of the Russian people, and to vindicate the prominent place which they may claim in the history of modern civilization. I have described the guiding principles which, amidst many errors and deflections, have directed Russian policy. I have also shown how the internal and external policy of the Government is rooted in the ideas and aspirations of the people, and how those ideas have been affected by the peculiar geographical and physiographical conditions of the Russian Empire. No survey of Russian history would, however, be complete which would fail to explain, however briefly, how those Russian ideals and inspirations have found adequate expression in the masterpieces of Russian literature.
​In one sense it may be asserted that the Russian people are inarticulate, as the great mass of the people are illiterate peasants. But the instincts and aspirations of those inarticulate peasants have been voiced by some of the greatest creative artists of world literature. No modern literature certainly can boast of producing in one and the same generation such a triumvirate as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. To outward view there seems very little in common between them: yet all three writers are pre-eminently representative men. Turgenev is an agnostic and a Liberal, a cynic and a sceptic, enamoured of Western habits and ideas, and he spent the greater part of his life outside of Russia. Tolstoy is a believer, an enthusiast and a passionate reformer, and he spent all his life between Moscow and his paternal estate. Dostoevsky's life is a pathetic tale of hardship and suffering. An epileptic on the verge of insanity, he spent part of his life in prison and in exile. Yet those three great writers, so different in their personal characteristics, are bound by a unity of ideals. They are all characterized by the same Russian depth, the same love of reality and veracity. They have all the same hatred of ​cant and convention; they have all the same unconquerable love of freedom; they are all democrats and pacifists. And although typical Russians, they are equally good Europeans. Although educated in the darkest days of political reaction, they all have the same generous and magnanimous belief in humanity. They all repudiate the gospel of Prussianism; they are all in communion and sympathy with the common people. And if we may judge of the aspirations of the Russian nation from the writings of her greatest sons, we can be left in no doubt as to the ultimate Orientation of the Russian people.
II
Russian literature is the finest of all heroic literatures. No other has raised to a higher level the dignity of a novelist. The Russian novelist is at the same time a man of thought and a man of action. He has a cure of souls; he is an apostle. The Russian novel of the nineteenth century, like the French novel of the eighteenth, has been the chief and almost the only instrument of political and social freedom. The novel in Russia under Nicholas I took the place of the newspaper, the pulpit, and ​the platform, for under his autocratic Government the Press was gagged, the Church had sold her birthright for a mess of pottage, and no Duma existed.
Nothing is more sad or more tragic, more monotonous, and at the same time more touching and more glorious, than the life-story of Russian writers of an earlier generation. Nearly all these lives resemble one another. What a lamentable list of martyrs! Radischef, one of the first who dared to expose the horrors of serfdom, exiled to Siberia by Catherine the Great and forced into committing suicide! Pushkin and Lermontov killed in a duel! Griboiedov assassinated! Bielinski, the greatest of critics, Soloviov, the greatest of philosophers, and Chekhov, the most celebrated of story writers, carried off prematurely by a pitiless climate! Herzen, Saltikov, Tchernitchevski, and Kropotkin condemned to exile! Dostoevsky, sentenced to the mines—damnatus ad metalla—and spending the best of his years in "The House of the Dead." Plescheeff, Pisarev, Maxim Gorky, put in prison! All suspected, hunted, and condemned under a hostile Government to a life of sickness and misery.
On this list of martyrs, in this struggle for ​freedom of thought and of conscience, Turgenev occupies, in spite of his failings, a place of honour. He also knew what prison life meant. He was exiled to his distant property. He was placed under police vigilance, and if he suffered less than others from the harshness of those in power it is because he put the frontier between himself and the police. Far from his country, he continued to fight the good fight.
III
Born in 1818, that is ten years before Tolstoy, in the Province of Orel, in old Russia, and on the borders of that black soil which is the granary of Europe, Turgenev belonged to the illustrious liberal and liberating generation of the forties. Attaining his intellectual majority when the despotic power of Nicholas I was at its height, he bore the marks of that terrible régime, and the misery of serfhood branded itself indelibly upon his soul. Descended from the country aristocracy, and bred of a long line of noblemen, he was the last witness of feudal customs, and became the acknowledged chronicler of a society now for ever abolished. A sad childhood was his, whose memory served to darken his whole life. His ​father was a rake. His mother, a strange, despotic woman, who lorded it over an estate of 5000 souls, quarrelled with him, and never forgave him for losing caste by becoming an author, when he might have achieved a brilliant military career in the Tchin. He received a double education—à la française, at the hands of indifferent preceptors and dancing masters, and à la Tartare, that is, at the point of the lash. At eighteen he was glad to escape from the maternal home, with its atmosphere of violence and servility, and to make his way first to Moscow for a season of pleasure, then to Petrograd to taste the comparative liberty of student life. These were the darkest days of political despotism, and the temptation to breathe the air of freer lands was very strong. At twenty Turgenev left Russia, and spent three years at the University of Berlin.
IV
This first absence of three years determined his future life. On his return to Russia he could no longer breathe his native air, at twenty-nine years of age, in 1847, he returned to a wandering life, and left his country for good, returning to it only for a few weeks each year in ​order to settle his business affairs. And if at first the love of his native land seized upon the exile and brought him back for a time to Spasskoi, the tyrannical reign of Nicholas did its best to kill these regrets. In 1852, the day after the publication of "A Sportsman's Sketches," he received in prison, as did every âme bien née in the Russia of those days, his baptism of liberty. His crime was the discreet praise he had given to Gogol and his "Dead Souls," just as Lermontov had been punished for praising Pushkin. It was a warning. From henceforth Turgenev was cured of his nostalgia. He became more and more "Westernized." For years he wandered across Europe in the pursuit of his artistic ideal, and in the train of Madame Viardot, the famous prima donna and sister of Malibran, to whom he was united by a friendship which death alone was to end. He resided alternately in Germany and France, and built himself a villa at Baden-Baden. He, the Scythian and the Tartar, became a type of the uprooted absentee landlord. Far from Russia, he understood her no more, and was no more understood by her, and he lived to be depreciated and disowned by the coming generation of his compatriots.
​After 1870 he left Germany, and settled permanently in Paris, and France was grateful to the stranger who preferred the hospitality of the Conquered to that of the Conqueror. An intimate friend of Flaubert, who had organized in his honour the famous dinners at Magny, of which Edmond de Goncourt became the chronicler (see "The Diary of the Goncourts"), translated by Mérimée, extolled by About and George Sand, by Taine and Renan, recognized as a master by Zola and Daudet, Turgenev became almost a French classic, and the first on the lists of the new realistic and naturalistic school. In spite of such adulation and affection, exile was not good for him. His popularity in France, besides being a little artificial, could never reconcile him to his unpopularity at home, and he carried in his heart till death the wound struck by an alienated and ungrateful country. His mental sufferings, his irregular life had prematurely undermined his vigorous constitution. Turgenev died in 1883, after years of excruciating suffering caused by cancer of the spinal cord. By a strange irony of fate, he who lived as a disregarded exile returned after death to his native country, and Russia, who had disowned him, gave to his dead ​body the honours she had refused to his genius.
V
It is important for an understanding of Turgenev to trace the main currents of his tortured existence, to remember at what date and under what influences each of his books came into being, and, above all, to recall the successive environments in which his lot was cast: Old Russia, the Black Soil, Serfdom, German Universities, the Russian Colony of Baden, the cosmopolitan society of Paris. For Turgenev was a chronicler. He could only describe with microscopic minuteness what he had seen, and make the scenes he had actually passed through live again. If he had had the magnifying imagination of a Balzac or of a Dickens, he would have transformed actuality; if he had had the historical imagination of Walter Scott, he would have taken refuge in "the past"; if he had had the reforming and Christian temperament of Tolstoy, his books would have been speeches and discussions. But Turgenev had none of these. On the one hand he had scarcely any creative faculty; on the other hand, he was entirely detached from all positive Christianity. ​He was a complete Nihilist in religion, and even in politics he disclaimed any didactic intention. Possessing to a supreme degree the genius of observation and of psychological analysis, he contented himself with reproducing the reality which surrounded him, and the society and personalities which he knew. This surrounding reality, this society, and these personalities he saw thus through an artistic temperament, which received its profoundest impressions from its environment. To understand this temperament of his, his moral physiognomy, his jarring discords, his eccentricities, his contrasts, one must transport oneself to the Russia of former days.
Tradition has it that Turgenev was a fatherly and patriarchal "grand old man," six feet in height, with white hair and a flowing beard, the soul of a child in the body of a giant, full of kindness and good nature, ingenuousness, and simplicity. In reality, no one was less ingenuous than Turgenev, as Daudet and Zola learnt to their sorrow. The simplicity of the Slav in him was mingled with the duplicity of the Byzantine.
Turgenev is full of contradictions and fundamentally obscure; and these contradictions ​explain the contradictory judgments of which he has been the subject, especially in Russia, on the part of the Slavophiles, as well as the "Zapadniki." He is at once a mystic and a mystifier, an enthusiast and a sceptic, keen on revolution, and yet without illusions concerning revolutionaries ("Fathers and Children"); gentle and violent; a believer in ideas, and yet knowing all the time that these ideas will be dissipated in "smoke." ("Smoke.")
Very intelligent, very yielding, and very feeble, he was always influenced by his surroundings. Very young and very old, at once barbaric and refined, he is the product of a civilization which had a fitful and irregular development. When it was the fashion to be Byronic, and to assume a romantic pose, Turgenev startled Herzen and Tolstoy by his dandified affectation as he sported an eyeglass in the Perspective Nevski. When he was in Germany he was a Gallophobe. When he was in Paris he was a Gallophile; yet he did not hesitate to write some very bitter criticisms on the country of his adoption to his friends in Russia.
In fine, his was a nature wavering and complex, a character profoundly sympathetic, but undecided and vacillating, a luminous ​intelligence, but lacking focus. His virtues really belonged to him; his faults he owed to his education, and to the demoralizing conditions of his exiled and uprooted existence.
And as these conditions explained in a great measure the personality of the novelist, they also explained the physiognomy of his characters, the atmosphere of his work. That atmosphere is depressing, and the physiognomy of the "heroes" is still more so. These heroes have nothing heroic about them. They are nearly all without energy, or they waste what energy they have in words, or in evanescent accessions of violence. They discant incessantly upon the Russian genius, its destiny, and its superiority over the European genius; but they submit to all the indignities of the present moment. Nearly all are "Useless Men." (See "The Diary of a Superfluous Man.") They go from one extreme to another, not having their centre of gravity within themselves. They ask from love both the joys and the sufferings of life, but in that very love they reveal the same want of character, of stability and consistence.
Sometimes they sacrifice to a caprice the woman they love; sometimes they commit ​suicide when crossed in love, without any resource against temptation or misfortune. This paralysis of the will, this aboulie—no one has described and diagnosed with a surer penetration than Turgenev, because he himself was so profoundly affected by it, and because it is the constitutional malady of the Russian soul. How can one escape being boulique, like Rudin, at a time when the will of one individual could break everything and substitute itself for everything? How could one help being fantastic, like Irène, in a country where despotism and caprice reign supreme? How can one avoid violence and Nihilism, like that of Bazarov, under a régime where nothing could be obtained by reason and persuasion, and where one must be either a victim or a despot?
VI
As a writer, Turgenev is without a rival. He is the purest of stylists, the first classical prose writer of his country. Like Pushkin, he had the most intimate knowledge and mastery of the resources and the riches of the Russian tongue. I remember once, when in the Crimea, and wishing to learn the Russian language, I asked Maxim Gorky what would be the best ​method to follow. Gorky, the least artistic, the least Westernized of writers, sent me first of all to Turgenev. It is a fact that foreigners begin their study of Russian by reading Turgenev. It is he who initiates them into the secrets of the most complex, the most finely graded, the most varied and most subtle of modern languages—perhaps of all languages the sole heir to the genius of the Greek tongue.
But Turgenev is still more; he is a master of European literature. He has neither the inspiration of Gogol, nor the epic grandeur or the prophetic breath of Tolstoy, nor the profound tragedy of Dostoevsky, nor the democratic sentiment of Gorky and Chekhov. His horizon is as limited and monotonous as the horizon of the steppes. He works with certain ever-recurring types of lovers, proprietors, peasants, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. If his talent remains personal and original, if he has not (whatever may be said against him) copied from his predecessors, he is for ever copying himself. But in his limited world, which is his own, Turgenev is without a rival. The best judges in all countries—Mérimée, Taine, and Hennequin in France; Brandes in Denmark; Henry James in America; Galsworthy in ​England—have recognized, in spite of the obscuring medium of translation, the mastery of his art. He has colour, meaning, order, composition. He has moderation and proportion. He knows how to sum up a situation in a few lines, how to draw a character with a few strokes. He has none of the tedious speeches which make Dostoevsky, and sometimes Tolstoy, so difficult to read. He excels in telling a story. He probably inspired Maupassant, and there is no doubt that Chekhov owed much to him.
As an artist Turgenev seems to have profited by all his experiences, even by the harshness of the censorship; and the failings of mankind ministered to his art no less than its virtues. Narrowly watched by censors, he was forced into those reticences and reserves, and into that veiled delicacy of illusion which heightens artistic effect. Being a pessimist, he had no illusions about his characters, but maintained throughout a Shakespearean objectivity towards them. Had he been more optimistic and idealistic, and more of a reformer, he would have interposed his own reflections between his characters and the reader, using them, too, as vehicles of his own favourite doctrine. But being a fatalist, he believed in the immutability ​of his characters, and made them all act according to the strict logic of their temperaments.
It should be added that, though Turgenev contemplates the "Human Comedy" with the disillusioned smile of the sceptic, his smile is often mixed with tears, and his scepticism never excludes tenderness, emotion, and sympathy. So far from excluding goodness and indulgence, his fatalism rather implies them; for to him to understand all is to pardon all. One pre-eminently Christian virtue has survived the shipwreck of his Christianity—the virtue of resignation, and he has kept the best part of Christian piety, which is pity. Like all great Russian writers, he has, amid the loss of many beliefs, retained the religion of human suffering.