Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) (492 page)

“‘Come, that’s enough; don’t be timid. For shame! . . . why go back? . . . Sing the best you can, by God’s gift.’

“And the Wild Master looked down expectant. Yakov was silent for a minute; he glanced round, and covered his face with his hand. All had their eyes simply fastened upon him, especially the booth - keeper, on whose face a faint, involuntary uneasiness could be seen through his habitual expression of self - confidence and the triumph of his success. He leant back against the wall, and again put both hands under him, but did not swing his legs as before. When at last Yakov uncovered his face it was pale as a dead man’s; his eyes gleamed faintly under their drooping lashes. He gave a deep sigh, and began to sing. . . . The first sound of his voice was faint and unequal, and seemed not to come from his chest, but to be wafted from somewhere afar off, as though it had floated by chance into the room. A strange effect was produced on all of us by this trembling, resonant note; we glanced at one another, and Nikolai Ivanitch’s wife seemed to draw herself up. This first note was followed by another, bolder and prolonged, but still obviously quivering, like a harp - string when suddenly struck by a stray finger it throbs in a last, swiftly - dying tremble; the second was followed by a third, and, gradually gaining fire and breadth, the strains swelled into a pathetic melody. ‘ Not one little path ran into the field,’ he sang, and sweet and mournful it was in our ears. I have seldom, I must confess, heard a voice like it; it was slightly hoarse, and not perfectly true; there was even something morbid about it at first; but it had genuine depth of passion, and youth and sweetness, and a sort of fascinating careless, pathetic melancholy. A spirit of truth and fire, a Russian spirit, was sounding and breathing in that voice, and it seemed e to go straight to your heart, to go straight to all that was Russian in it. The song swelled and flowed. Yakov was clearly carried away by enthusiasm; he was not timid now; he surrendered himself wholly to the rapture of his art; his voice no longer trembled; it quivered; but with a scarce perceptible inward quiver of passion, which pierces like an arrow to the very soul of the listeners, and he steadily gained strength and - firmness and breadth. I remember I once saw at sunset on a flat sandy shore, when the tide was low and the sea’s roar came weighty and menacing from the distance, a great white sea - gull; it sat motionless, its silky bosom facing the crimson glow of the setting sun, and only now and then opening wide its great wings to greet the well - known sea, to greet the sinking lurid sun : I recalled it, as I heard Yakov. He sang, utterly forgetful of his rival and all of us; he seemed supported, as a bold swimmer by the waves, by our silent, passionate sympathy. He sang, and in every sound of his voice one seemed to feel something dear and akin to us, something of breadth and space, as though the familiar steppes were unfolding before our eyes and stretching away into endless distance. I felt the tears gathering in my bosom and rising to my eyes; suddenly I was struck by dull, smothered sobs. ... I looked round — the innkeeper’s wife was weeping, her bosom pressed close to the window. Yakov threw a quick glance at her, and he sang more sweetly, more melodiously than ever; Nikolai Ivanitch looked down; the Blinkard turned away; the Gabbler, quite touched, stood, his gaping mouth stupidly open; the humble peasant was sobbing softly in the corner and shaking his head with a plaintive murmur; and on the iron visage of the Wild Master, from under his overhanging brows there slowly rolled a heavy tear; the booth - keeper raised his clenched fists to his brow, and did not stir. ... I don’t know how the general emotion would have ended if Yakov had not suddenly come to a full stop on a high, exceptionally shrill note, as though his voice had broken. No one called out or even stirred; every one seemed to be waiting to see whether he was not going to sing more; but he opened his eyes as though wondering at our silence, looked round at all of us with a face of enquiry, and saw that the victory was his. . . .

“‘Yasha,’ said the Wild Master, laying his hand on his shoulder, and he could say no more.

“We stood, as it were, petrified. The booth - keeper softly rose and went up to Yakov.

“‘You . . . yours . . . you’ve won,’ he articulated at last with an effort, and rushed out of the room.”

An artist less consummate than Turgenev would have ended here. But the sequel immeasurably heightens the whole effect by plunging us into the mournful, ever - running springs of human tragedy — the eclipse of man’s spiritual instincts by the emergence of his underlying animalism. Observe there is not a trace of ethical feeling in the mournful close. It is simply the way of life :

“... When I waked up, everything was in darkness; the hay scattered around smelt strong, and was slightly damp; through the slender rafters of the half - open roof pale stars were faintly twinkling. I went out. The glow of sunset had long died away, and its last trace showed in a faint light on the horizon; but above the freshness of the night there was still a feeling of heat in the atmosphere, lately baked through by the sun, and the breast still craved for a draught of cool air. There was no wind nor were there any clouds; the sky all round was clear and transparently dark, softly glimmering with innumerable, but scarcely visible stars.

There were lights twinkling about the village; from the flaring tavern close by rose a confused, discordant din, amid which I fancied I recognized the voice of Yakov. Violent laughter came from there in an outburst at times. I went up to the little window and pressed my face against the pane. I saw a cheerless, though varied and animated scene; all were drunk — all from Yakov upwards. With breast bared, he sat on a bench, and singing in a thick voice a street song to a dance tune, he lazily fingered and strummed on the strings of a guitar. His moist hair hung in tufts over his fearfully pale face. In the middle of the room, the Gabbler, completely ‘ screwed,’ and without his coat, was hopping about in a dance before the peasant in the grey smock; the peasant, on his side, was with difficulty stamping and scraping with his feet, and grinning meaninglessly over his dishevelled beard; he waved one hand from time to time, as much as to say, ‘ Here goes! ‘ Nothing could be more ludicrous than his face; however much he twitched up his eyebrows, his heavy lids would hardly rise, but seemed lying upon his scarcely - visible, dim, and mawkish eyes. He was in that amiable frame of mind of a perfectly intoxicated man, when every passer - by, directly he looks him in the face, is sure to say, ‘ Bless you, brother, bless you!’ The Blinkard, as red as a lobster, and his nostrils dilated wide, was laughing malignantly in a corner; only Nikolai Ivanitch, as befits a good tavern - keeper, preserved his composure unchanged. The room was thronged with many new faces, but the Wild Master I did not see in it.

“I turned away with rapid steps and began descending the hill on which Kolotovka lies. At the foot of this hill stretches a wide plain; plunged in the misty waves of the evening haze, it seemed more immense, and was, as it were, merged in the darkening sky. I marched with long strides along the road by the ravine, when all at once, from somewhere far away in the plain, came a boy’s clear voice : ‘ Aiitropka! Antropka - a - a. . .!’ He shouted in obstinate and tearful desperation, with long, long drawing out of the last syllable.

“He was silent for a few instants, and started shouting again. His voice rang out clear in the still, lightly slumbering air. Thirty times at least he had called the name, Antropka. When suddenly, from the farthest end of the plain, as though from another world, there floated a scarcely audible reply :

“‘Wha - a - t? ‘

“The boy’s voice shouted back at once with gleeful exasperation :

“‘Come here, devil! woo - od imp! ‘

“‘What fo - or? ‘ replied the other, after a long interval.

“‘Because dad wants to thrash you! ‘ the first voice shouted back hurriedly.

“The second voice did not call back again, and the boy fell to shouting ‘ Antropka’ once more. His cries, fainter and less and less frequent, still floated up to my ears, when it had grown completely dark, and I had turned the corner of the wood that skirts my village and lies over three miles from Kolotovka . . . ‘ Antropka - a - a! ‘ was still audible in the air, filled with the shadows of the night.”

In the above passage the feeling of the shadowy earth, the mist, the great plain and the floating cries rarefies the village atmosphere of human commonness. By such a representation of the people’s figures, seen in just relation to their surroundings, to their fellows, and to nature, Turgenev’s art secures for his picture poetic harmony, and renders these finer cadences in the turmoil of life which ears less sensitive than his fail to hear! The parts in just relation to the whole scheme of human existence. Man, earth and heaven — it is the secret of the perfection of the great poets.

CHAPTER IV

“RUDIN”

The biographers tell us that Turgenev left Russia again in 1847, for the sake of being near Pauline Garcia, the famous singer (afterwards Madame Viardot), whom he adored all his life; that he left her in Berlin, visited Salzbrunn with the critic Byelinsky, who was dying of consumption, and then proceeded to Paris, Brussels, Lyons and Courtavenel. In Paris he works incessantly, producing plays and short stories and most of the series of A Sportsman’s Sketches; makes friends with Hertzen and George Sand; studies the French classics and avows his democratic sympathies, without any illusions as to the good - for - nothingness of “ the Reds.” In the autumn of 1858 he returns to Russia, recalled by news of the grave illness of his mother, who, however, refused to be reconciled with her two sons, whom she tried to disinherit on her deathbed. Turgenev was henceforward a rich man. In 1852 A Sportsman’s Sketches appeared in book form, and in April of the same year, for writing a sympathetic article on Gogol’s death, Turgenev was ordered a month’s detention in a police - station and then confined to his estate at Spasskoe.1

Turgenev notes that his imperious desire to escape to Europe indicated “ Possibly something lacking in my character or force of will.” But he declares, “ I should never have written A Sportsman’s Sketches had I remained in Russia. ... It was impossible for me to remain and breathe the same air that gave life to everything I abhorred.” The persecution of his literary forerunners and contemporaries by the Autocracy was continuous. Pushkin’s humiliation and subjection to official authority; Lermontov’s exile to the Caucasus; Tchaadaev declared insane by bureaucratic order 1 “ I am confined in a police - station by the Emperor’s orders for having printed a short article on Gogol in a Moscow journal. This was only a pretext, the article itself being perfectly insignificant. They have looked at me askance for a long time, and they have laid hold of this pretext at the first opportunity. I do not complain of the Emperor; the matter has been so deceitfully represented to him that he couldn’t have acted otherwise. They have wished to put a stop on all that is being said on Gogol’s death, and they have not been sorry, at the same time, to place an embargo on my literary activity.” — Letter to M. and Mme. Viardot, May 13, 1852.

and confined to a mad - house; Gogol’s recantation of Dead Souls and relapse into feeble mysticism; Hertzen’s expatriation; Dostoevsky’s and Petra - shevsky’s exile to the mines of Siberia; Saltykov’s banishment, etc., the list of the intellectual and creative minds gagged or stifled under Nicholas I. is endless. And Turgenev’s mild and generous spirit was designed neither for political partisanship nor for active revolt. He has indeed been accused of timidity,1 and cowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries. But his life - work is the answer to these ill - considered allegations. Spiritual enfranchisement was impossible in “ the swamp of Petersburg with its Winter Palace, eight Ministries, three Polices, the most Holy Synod, and all the exalted family with their German relatives,” as Hertzen wittily put it later; and by faring abroad and by inhaling deep draughts of free European air Turgenev was enabled, in his own phrase, “ to strike the enemy from a distance.”

His exile for a year and a half to his own estate was, however, by no means a bad thing for his own self - development. Years afterwards he wrote: “All 1 In an access of self - reproach he once declared to a friend that his character was comprised in one word — ”poltroon.”

was for the best. . . . My being under arrest and in the country proved to my undeniable advantage; it brought me close to those sides of Russian life which, in the ordinary course of things, would probably have escaped my observation.” He consoled himself with shooting, with music, with reading, with literary composition, and it is to this enforced detention in Russia that, no doubt, we owe the masterpiece Rudin (1855), which he rewrote many times, declaring to Aksakov that none of his other stories had ever given him so much trouble. In fact this novel, in grace, ease and strength, has the quality of finished statuary.

Though sixty years have passed since the appearance of Rudin, no dust has gathered on the novel, so original is the leading figure. The portrait of the hero who typifies the failure of the Russian intelligentsia of the ‘ ‘forties’ to do more than talk, is as arresting as the day on which it was painted. In him Turgenev creates a fresh variety of idealist, the orator sapped by the love of his own words. Rudin is Russian in the combination of his soft, wavering will, his lofty enthusiasm for ideas, and his rather naive sincerity : in other respects, he might be a western European. Behind him we feel generations of easygoing manorial gentlefolk regarding in surprise this curious descendant, whose clever brain is aglow with a passion for “ eternal truth “ and for the “ general principles” of German philosophy. One is haunted by a sense of Rudin’s cousinship to other famous idealists in life and literature; he shows affinities both to a contemporary, Coleridge, and to a famous successor, Ibsen’s Brand.

English idealism in general is both a covering for mundane interests, and a spiritual compromise with those same interests. An English Rudin would have gone into the Church, and as a Canon or Bishop would have attained celebrity by his gift of lofty and magnetic eloquence. But a Russian Rudin does not succeed in buttering his bread; it is both his unworldliness and lack of will that bring his powers to nought. Rudin can and does indeed, deceive himself; but the strands of hypocrisy in his nature are too fragmentary to bring him worldly success.

Of Turgenev’s six novels, Rudin is the most perfect in form, by the harmony of its parts and absolute grace of modelling.1 Everywhere the master’s chisel has fined away his material to attain the most delicately firm contours. The grouping of the character is a lesson in harmonious arrangement. Note by what simple, natural steps one passes from the outer circle of the neighbours of the wealthy patroness of art and letters, Darya Mihailovna, to the inner circle of her household. The cold, suave egoism of the lady of the manor is admirably set off by the sketches of her dependents, the simple young tutor, Bassistoff, her young Jewish protege Pandalevsky, and the cynic Pigasov. The household is expecting the arrival of a guest, a Baron Muffel, but in his place arrives his acquaintance, Dmitri Rudin, slightly shabby, but of prepossessing address.

A master of eloquent language, Rudin conquers his hearers by his fine bearing and brilliant talk. But notice that the effect he instantaneously produces holds in germ all the after development of 1 For a discussion of Turgenev’s debt to George Sand’s novel, Horace, see M. Halperine - Kaminsky’s Tourguineff and his French Circle, p. 301.

the story. Yolintsev fears in him a rival for Natalya’s love; Pandalevsky is on his guard against the clever stranger who may dispossess him in the favour of the mistress of the house; Natalya falls in love with the newcomer who has fired her girlish imagination; while her mother, Darya Mihailovna, is planning to keep Rudin, this coming lion, in her house to adorn her salon. The structure of the story, beautifully planned, is a lesson in the directness and ease of artistic development. Everything flows, simply and inevitably, from the actions of the group of characters, quickened and watchful after Rudin’s arrival.

As an example of Turgenev’s skill in drawing a man with a dozen touches, and of exposing the mainspring of his nature by a few of his words and actions, consider the Jewish - looking youth, Pandalevsky; with the slight, exact strokes of his chisel Turgenev here graves a perfect intaglio. Pandalevsky, in the opening pages, meeting the charming Alexandra Pavlovna on her walk, offers her his arm, unasked. “ She took it.” After some flowery remarks, Pandalevsky, presuming further, says,\” Allow me to offer you this lovely wild flower.” Alexandra Pavlovna did not refuse it, but “ after a few steps, let it drop on the path.” The sensitive woman is repelled by the young Jew’s familiarity and his thickness of skin, and indeed Pandalevsky has scarcely turned his back on her, when he transfers his interest to a peasant girl working in the field, and so coarse is his talk that she stops her ears and mutters, “ Go away, sir; upon my word!”

Again, note how the characters all reveal themselves by their unconscious behaviour. On the night of Rudin’s unexpected arrival, while Bassistoff sits up, pouring out his soul in an eloquent letter to a friend, and Natalya cannot sleep for thinking of Rudin’s glowing eloquence, “ Pandalevsky went to bed, and as he took off his daintily embroidered braces, he said aloud, ‘ A very smart fellow,’ and suddenly, looking harshly at his page, ordered him out of the room.” By this little revelation of his mean spirit the young Jew prepares us for his furtive suspicion of Rudin, and for his playing the spy subsequently. By a word, a gesture, a look, psychologically exact, Turgenev secures thus in a sentence effects which it takes his rivals a paragraph or a page to make clear to us. Thus his scenes always appeal by their aesthetic ease and grace.

Remark again how swift, precise and final is Turgenev’s exploration of Rudin’s character. Tired of wandering, Rudin, as Darya Mihailovna’s guest, is glad to have found a congenial circle, perhaps indeed a home, but while every one seems to listen eagerly to him, and he lays down the law to the household, a cold undercurrent of criticism is already felt threatening his position. One of the neighbours, Lezhnyov, had been at college with Rudin in youth, and from his talk about their past relations one learns why Rudin, despite his genius, has not succeeded in life. He is a theorist and he has never really understood human nature. So much so is this indeed that Rudin does not realize in time that Natalya, this girl “of an ardent, true and passionate nature,” has fallen in love with him, and exalts him as her spiritual teacher. And when Rudin’s eyes are opened this fatal flaw in his character is seen. He lives only for his ideas and for his audience; his great, his sole power lies in the magic of his stimulating, flowing oratory. He is a master of words, but he cannot act. Lezhnyov is right in declaring that Rudin in his relations with others, even in his love affairs, “ only needs a fresh opportunity of speechifying and giving vent to his f fine talk, and that’s what he can’t live without.” Rudin, carried away by the discovery of Natalya’s love, pretends and simulates love for her, but his “ passion “ is shown to be hollow when the young girl comes to warn him that Pandalevsky, spying on them, has betrayed their secret meetings to her mother, who is angry and jealous that Rudin should be paying court to her daughter. Rudin is in consternation at the news. He has been so intent on his eloquent feelings that he has not faced the practical difficulties. And he has made no plans to face the future. But let us quote the scene :

“‘And what advice can I give you, Natalya Alexyevna? ‘

“‘What advice? You are a man; I am used to trusting to you. I shall trust you to the end. Tell me, what are your plans? ‘

“‘My plans. . . . Your mother will certainly turn me out of the house.’

“‘Perhaps. . . . She told me yesterday that I must break off all acquaintance with you. . . . But you do not answer my question? ‘

“‘What question? ‘

“‘What do you think we must do now? ‘

“‘What we must do? ‘ replied Rudin; ‘ of course submit.’

“‘Submit,’ repeated Natalya slowly, and her lips turned white.

“‘Submit to destiny,’ continued Rudin. ‘ What is to be done? . . . I know very well how bitter it is, how painful, how unendurable. But consider yourself, Natalya Alexyevna; I am poor. It is true I could work; but even if I were a rich man, could you bear a violent separation from your family, your mother’s anger? . . . No, Natalya Alexyevna; it is useless even to think of it. It is clear it was not fated for us to live together, and the happiness of which I dreamed is not for me!’

“All at once Natalya hid her face in her hands and began to weep. Rudin went up to her.

“‘Natalya Alexyevna! dear Natalya!’ he said with . warmth, ‘ do not cry, for God’s sake do not torture me, be comforted.’

“Natalya raised her head.

“‘You tell me to be comforted! ‘ she began, and her eyes blazed through her tears; ‘ I am not weeping for what you suppose — I am not sad for that; I am sad because I have been deceived in you. . . . What! I come to you for counsel, and at such a moment! — and your first word is submit! submit! So this is how you translate your talk of independence, of sacrifice which . . .’

“Her voice broke down.

“‘But, Natalya Alexyevna,’ began Rudin in confusion, ‘ remember — I do not disown my words — only
      
‘

“‘You asked me,’ she continued with new force, ‘ what I answered my mother, when she declared she would sooner agree to my death than my marriage to you; I answered that I would sooner die than marry any other man. . . . And you say, “ Submit! “ It must be that she is right; you must, through having nothing to do, through being bored, have been playing with me.’