Turgenev’s Terrace

Ilya Repin painted him as a public face Europe already thought it knew: a novelist who could make Russian life travel without a manifesto. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, in William Richard Morfill’s life, calls him the descendant of an old Russian family, born at Orel in 1818. The date is a door, not a statue. Behind it is a cavalry colonel who died when the boy was sixteen, a mother who was a Litvinov heiress with large estates and many serfs, and a house in which German and French tutors did the educating because a great lady of the old school spoke Russian only to her servants. The first Russian literature the future novelist heard, Morfill says, came from a serf reading verses of Kheraskov’s Rossiad. The sentence is almost too neat. It is also the career’s first fact: the language arrived from below.

Morfill is unsparing about the mother. She was narrow-minded and vindictive; Ivan had often been witness of her cruelties. A lady brought up in the household later gave the European Messenger details he thought still worth repeating in 1911: the dumb porter of gigantic stature drawn with such power in Mumu was a real person. She could never understand how a Turgueniev had become an author, and thought he had degraded himself. How could a Turgueniev submit himself to be criticised? The question is snobbery with a genealogy. It is also the plot of the early books. A man who has seen serfdom as a family weather will not write peasants as furniture. He will write them as the first literature he heard, and as the cruelties he could not stop. The sketches that made his name are not a civic programme dressed as sport. They are a hunter who has looked at the kennels.

He studied for a year at the university of Moscow, then at St Petersburg, and was sent in 1843 to Berlin. Morfill’s ladder is short. The Gutenberg biographical note printed with Constance Garnett’s Fathers and Children fills the rooms: tutors in the family mansion at Spassk, Hegel among the ambitions that Berlin left him, a spell in the Ministry of the Interior, resignation in 1845, a mother who cut the allowance because a brilliant official career had been refused. Early poems and trifling sketches, Morfill says, may be passed over; they were not without indications of genius, and Belinsky, then the leading Russian critic, spoke of them favourably. Turgueniev cherished the regard. The blessing from the critic is not yet Sportsman’s Sketches. It is permission to treat Russian as a language that can carry a life, not only a salon. The serf who read Kheraskov had already begun that work. Belinsky named it.

He first made a name by the striking sketches The Papers of a Sportsman (Zapiski Okhotnika), in which the miserable condition of the peasants was described with startling realism. The work appeared in a collected form in 1852. It was read by all classes, including the emperor himself, and it undoubtedly hurried on the great work of emancipation. Morfill’s sentence is large and, in the 1911 manner, sure. The Gutenberg note adds that the first of the papers had appeared in 1847, and that in 1850, back in Russia, he found himself under suspicion on account of their popularity; for praising Gogol, who had just died, he was arrested and imprisoned for a short time, then kept under police surveillance. Treat the arrest as the biographical note’s report, not as a legend about a hunter. The sketches remain the way in. A man walks with a gun and notices who cannot leave the estate. The emperor reading is a fact Morfill wanted. The serfs are the fact the pages wanted.

The next production was A Nest of Nobles (Dvorianskoe gniezdo), a singularly pathetic story, which greatly increased his reputation. It appeared in 1859, and was followed the next year by On the Eve (Nakanune) — a tale which contains, Morfill says, one of his most beautiful female characters, Helen. The closing chapter of the Nest, in the same Britannica life, is one of the saddest and at the same time truest pages in the whole range of existing novels. The ranking is Edwardian and unembarrassed: worthy to be set with Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot, with whose genius he has many affinities. A melancholy, almost pessimist, feeling pervades the writings, a morbid self-analysis which seemed to Morfill natural to the Slavonic mind. The visitor can leave the racial weather. What remains is a gift for rooms in which love arrives too late, or too honestly, and a house cannot keep it. The nest is not a comfort. It is a structure that knows it will empty.

In 1862 was published Fathers and Children (Otzi i Dieti), in which the author admirably described the nihilistic doctrines then beginning to spread in Russia. According to some writers, Morfill records, he invented the word nihilism. Maurice Baring, in the criticisms printed with Garnett’s Gutenberg text, is more careful and more useful. The epithet had been in constant use since 1829, when Nadezhdin applied it to Pushkin, Polevoi, and some other subverters of the classic tradition. Turgenev only extended its meaning by a new interpretation, destined to be perpetuated by the tremendous success of the novel. If he was not the first to invent the word, Baring says, he was the first to apply it in this sense. The terrace scene is the baptism. Arkady smiles and offers to tell his uncle what Bazarov really is. The butter on Pavel Petrovitch’s knife stays in the air. The word has to be defined before the cocoa can be drunk.

A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.

Baring’s other fact is the storm. The revolutionary elements in Russia regarded Bazarov as a calumny and a libel; the reactionary elements looked upon the book as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. An impartial delineation of any character concerned in the political struggle was bound to displease both parties. If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must be a hero or a scoundrel. Turgenev drew a man who dissects frogs, insults art, and then cannot manage a love or a death as a theory would require. Baring calls the book as beautifully constructed as a drama of Sophocles, without a touch of banality, without an unnecessary word. Amidst the trivial crowd Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the strongest — the only strong character — that Turgenev created. The Lucifer is a doctor on a terrace. The tragedy is that strength does not save him from the mud he named as a workshop.

Nature's not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.

The Russian sentence is as flat and as famous: «Природа не храм, а мастерская, и человек в ней работник.» A temple would ask for reverence. A workshop asks for labour and will not bless it. Garnett’s Bazarov says nature, too, is foolery in the sense his friend understands it, then delivers the workshop. The line is the nihilist’s weather in one breath. It is also why the fathers cannot hear him as merely rude. He is offering a metaphysics of the estate: the trees are not a chapel. They are timber, or they are frogs under a lens. Morfill’s Mumu porter still stands in the earlier book as a body the household used. The later novel will not let nature be a consolation either. Between the serf who read Kheraskov and the doctor who will not bow, the same refusal of incense is at work. The difference is that Bazarov says it as a creed. The sketches had said it as looking.

In 1867 appeared Smoke (Dym), and in 1877 his last work of any length, Virgin Soil (Nov). Besides the longer stories, Morfill lists shorter ones of great beauty and subtle psychological analysis: Rudin, The Diary of a Useless Man, and others, later collected into three volumes. The last works of the great novelist were Poetry in Prose and Clara Milich, which appeared in the European Messenger. The Gutenberg biographical note, more novelistic than 1911, adds that Turgenev preaches no doctrine and has no remedy for the universe; he sees certain weaknesses of the Russian character and exposes them with candour yet without unkindness. Much as he lived abroad, the books are intensely Russian; yet of the great Russian novelists he alone rivals the masters of western Europe in the matter of form. Economy of means, condensation, felicity of language, excellence of structure: the note will not give those virtues to Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Fathers and Children does not argue a generation. It seats it at a table and lets the butter wait.

During the latter part of his life he did not reside much in Russia. He lived either at Baden-Baden or Paris, and chiefly with the family of the celebrated singer Viardot Garcia, to the members of which he was much attached. He occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the degree of D.C.L. was conferred upon him by the university of Oxford. He died at Bougival, near Paris, on the 4th of September 1883. Those are Morfill’s sentences, and they are enough for a map. The Gutenberg note fills the map with a hunter’s restlessness: Pauline Viardot in 1847, Courtavenel, a return, a surveillance, a wanderer’s income after the mother’s death, a house built at Baden when she left the stage in 1864, a villa at Bougival after the Franco-Prussian War. The dates do not have to agree in every particular for the shape to hold. He wrote Russia from a distance that was also a devotion. The Viardot household is not a scandal the page is here to try. It is the room in which the late work was possible.

There used to be Hegelists, and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will exist in void, in vacuum.

Pavel Petrovitch’s vacuum is the fathers’ fear spoken as a joke. Baring’s storm is what happened when the joke left the terrace. Revolutionaries heard a libel. Reactionaries heard a glorification. The novel is neither. It is a young man who will not take a principle on faith, and an uncle who cannot take a step without one, and a father who is milder than both and therefore more wounded. Garnett’s English is the door this site uses because it is complete, as Morfill already said, and excellent. The Russian terrace remains the original weather. A visitor who only knows the word nihilist as a later bomb has not yet sat through the cocoa. The butter on the knife is the comic timing. The definition is the tragedy’s first line. Everything after it — love that will not be a laboratory, a death that will not be a theory — follows as Baring said Sophocles follows: inevitably, without an unnecessary word.

Baring, writing for an English public that had made Turgenev an idol of all that was eclectic, says he did for Russian literature what Byron did for English: he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout Europe. Flaubert was astounded; George Sand looked up to him as to a master; Taine spoke of the work as the finest artistic production since Sophocles. In Turgenev’s work Europe not only discovered Turgenev; it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the naturalness of the Russian character. For the first time, Baring says, Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin was the first to paint. The sentence is a bridge this shelf already knows how to walk. Pushkin made the language flexible enough for ordinary life. Turgenev made the novel in which ordinary life could argue with its children without becoming a tract. Morfill’s ranking with George Eliot is the same claim in an older coat. Form, sympathy, a melancholy that does not excuse itself as a programme.

The writings were made familiar to persons unacquainted with Russian by French translations. There are many versions in English, Morfill notes: Ralston’s Nest of Nobles under the name of Lisa; Ashton Dilke’s Virgin Soil; and a complete and excellent translation by Mrs Garnett. This page reads Fathers and Children in that Garnett, and the Russian of Ottsy i deti beside it. The title in English wavers — children, sons — as the household wavers. Morfill’s Otzi i Dieti is the 1911 spelling of the same terrace. What does not waver is the method. A sportsman looks. A nest empties. A girl named Helen is “on the eve” of a life the men cannot quite enter. A doctor calls nature a workshop and then dies as if the workshop had tools he did not own. The last short pieces, Poetry in Prose and Clara Milich, are the residue of a gift that had already taught Europe how to hear a Russian sentence as a human one.

Begin with A Sportsman’s Sketches if you want the looking that, Morfill says, hurried emancipation: not a speech, a field. Stay for A Nest of Nobles if you want the sadness he thought as true as any page in the novel’s range. Fathers and Children is the book that made a word travel, and then made the man who spoke it too complicated for either camp to keep. On the Eve is the Helen Morfill loved. Smoke and Virgin Soil are the later arguments, written from Baden and Paris, about a country he would not live in and could not leave alone. He is not Tolstoy’s world and not Dostoevsky’s ordeal. He is the terrace between them, where a generation is named over cocoa, and the knife waits in the air until the name has been defined. After him, a Russian novel can be quiet and still change a vocabulary. The children are still sitting down. The fathers are still asking what the word means.