The main features of his Art

For the artistic construction, the finish and the beauty of his novels, Turguéneff was very probably the greatest novel-writer of his century. However, the chief characteristic of his poetical genius lay not only in that sense of the beautiful which he possessed to so high a degree, but also in the highly intellectual contents of his creations. His novels are not mere stories dealing at random with this or that type of men, or with some particular current of life, or accident happening to fall under the author’s observation. They are intimately connected with each other, and they give the succession of the leading intellectual types of Russia which have impressed their own stamp upon each successive generation. The novels of Turguéneff, of which the first appeared in 1845, cover a period of more than thirty years, and during these three decades Russian society underwent one of the deepest and the most rapid modifications ever witnessed in European history. The leading types of the educated classes went through successive changes with a rapidity which was only possible in a society suddenly awakening from a long slumber, casting away an institution which hitherto had permeated its whole existence (I mean serfdom), and rushing towards a new life. And this succession of “historymaking” types was represented by Turguéneff with a depth of conception, a fulness of philosophical and humanitarian understanding, and an artistic insight, almost equal to foresight, which are found in none of the modern writers to the same extent and in that happy combination.

Not that he would follow a preconceived plan. “All these discussions about ‘tendency’ and ‘unconsciousness’ in art,” he wrote, “are nothing but a debased coin of rhetorics... Those only who cannot do better will submit to a preconceived programme, because a truly talented writer is the condensed expression of life itself, and he cannot write either a panegyric or a pamphlet: either would be too mean for him.” But as soon as a new leading type of men or women appeared amidst the educated classes of Russia, it took possession of Turguéneff. He was haunted by it, and haunted until he had succeeded in representing it to the best of his understanding in a work of art, just as for years Murillo was haunted by the image of a Virgin in the ecstasy of purest love, until he finally succeeded in rendering on the canvas his full conception.

When some human problem had thus taken possession of Tuguéneff’s mind, he evidently could not discuss it in terms of logic — this would have been the manner of the political writer — he conceived it in the shape of images and scenes. Even in his conversation, when he intended to give you an idea of some problem which worried his mind, he used to do it by describing a scene so vividly that it would forever engrave itself in the memory. This was also a marked trait in his writings. His novels are a succession of scenes — some of them of the most exquisite beauty — each of which helps him further to characterise his heroes. Therefore all his novels are short, and need no plot to sustain the reader’s attention. Those who have been perverted by sensational novel-reading may, of course, be disappointed with a want of sensational episode; but the ordinary intelligent reader feels from the very first pages that he has real and interesting men and women before him, with really human hearts throbbing in them, and he cannot part with the book before he has reached the end and grasped the characters in full. Simplicity of means for accomplishing far-reaching ends — that chief feature of truly good art — is felt in everything Turguéneff wrote.

George Brandes, in his admirable study of Turguéneff (in Moderne Geister), the best, the deepest, and the most poetical of all that has been written about the great novelist, makes the following remark:

“It is not easy to say quite definitely what makes of Turguéneff an artist of the first rank... That he has in the highest degree the capacity which makes a true poet, of producing living human beings, does not, after all, comprise everything. What makes the reader feel so much his artistic superiority is the concordance one feels between the interest taken by the poet in the person whom he depicts, or the poet’s judgment about this person, and the impression which the reader himself gets; because it is in this point — the relation of the artist to his own creations — that every weakness of either the man or the poet must necessarily appear.”

The reader feels every such mistake at once and keeps the remembrance of it, notwithstanding all the efforts of the author to dissipate its impression.

“What reader of Balzac, or of Dickens, or of Auerbach — to speak of the great dead only — does not know this feeling!” Brandes continues. “When Balzac swims in warmed-up excitement, or when Dickens becomes childishly touching, and Auerbach intentionally naïve, the reader feels repulsed by the untrue, the unpleasant. Never do we meet with anything artistically repulsive in Turguéneff.”

This remark of the great critic is absolutely true, and only a few words need be added to it, with reference to the wonderful architecture of all Turguéneff’s novels. Be it a small novel, or a large one, the proportion of the parts is wonderfully held; not a single episode of a merely “ethnographical” character comes in to disturb or to slacken the development of the inner human drama; not one feature, and certainly not one single scene, can be omitted without destroying the impression of the whole; and the final accord, which seals the usually touching general impression, is always worked out with wonderful finish. The only exception to be made is the scene with the two old people in Virgin Soil. It is useless and out of place. To have introduced it was simply “a literary whim.” ¹⁴

And then the beauty of the chief scenes. Every one of them could be made the subject of a most artistic and telling picture. Take, for instance, the final scenes of Helen and Insároff in Venice: their visit to the picture gallery, which made the keeper exclaim, as he looked at them, Poveretti! or the scene in the theatre, where in response to the imitated cough of the actress (who played Violetta in Traviata) resounded the deep, real cough of the dying Insároff. The actress herself, with her poor dress and bony shoulders, who yet took possession of the audience by the warmth and reality of her feeling, and created a storm of enthusiasm by her cry of dying joy on the return of Alfred; nay, I should even say, the dark harbour where one sees the gull drop from rosy light into the deep blackness of the night — each of these scenes comes to the imagination on canvas. In his lecture, Hamlet and Don Quixote, where he speaks of Shakespeare and Cervantes being contemporaries, and mentions that the romance of Cervantes was translated into English in Shakespeare’s lifetime, so that he might have read it, Turguéneff exclaims: “What a picture, worthy of the brush of a thoughtful painter: Shakespeare reading Don Quixote! “It would seem as if in these lines he betrayed the secret of the wonderful beauty — the pictorial beauty — of such a number of his scenes. He must have imagined them, not only with the music of the feeling that speaks in them, but also as pictures, full of the deepest psychological meaning and in which all the surroundings of the main figures — the Russian birch wood, or the German town on the Rhine, or the harbour of Venice — are in harmony with the feeling.

Turguéneff knew the human heart deeply, especially the heart of a young, thoroughly honest, and reasoning girl when she awakes to higher feelings and ideas, and that awakening takes, without her realising it, the shape of love. In the description of that moment of life Turguéneff stands quite unrivalled. On the whole, love is the leading motive of all his novels; and the moment of its full development is the moment when his hero — he may be a political agitator or a modest squire — appears in full light. The great poet knew that a human type cannot be characterised by the daily work in which such a man is engaged — however important that work may be — and still less by a flow of words. Consequently, when he draws, for instance, the picture of an agitator in Dmitri Rúdin, he does not report his fiery speeches — for the simple reason that the agitator’s words would not have characterised him. Many have pronounced the same appeals to Equality and Liberty before him, and many more will pronounce them after his death. But that special type of apostle of equality and liberty — the “man of the word, and of no action” which he intended to represent in Rúdin — is characterised by the hero’s relations to different persons, and particularly, above all, by his love. By his love — because it is in love that the human being appears in full, with its individual features. Thousands of men have made “propaganda by word,” all very much in the same expressions, but each of them has loved in a different way. Mazzini and Lassalle did similar work; but how different they were in their loves! You do not know Lassalle unless you know his relations to the Countess of Hatzfeld.