Rudin: Introduction and Notes

Introduction and Notes

INTRODUCTION

I

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the
last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public,
first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England.

In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical
of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest
writers of our times: 'The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed
our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a
whole race,' because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his
mouth.' Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic
world, to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a
Master.'

This recognition was, however, of slow growth. It had nothing in it of
the sudden wave of curiosity and gushing enthusiasm which in a few
years lifted Count Tolstoi to world-wide fame. Neither in the
personality of Turgenev, nor in his talent, was there anything to
strike and carry away popular imagination.

By the fecundity of his creative talent Turgenev stands with the
greatest authors of all times. The gallery of living people, men, and
especially women, each different and perfectly individualised, yet all
the creatures of actual life, whom Turgenev introduces to us; the vast
body of psychological truths he discovers, the subtle shades of men's
feelings he reveals to us, is such as only the greatest among the
great have succeeded in leaving as their artistic inheritance to their
country and to the world.

As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into
mould, he stands even higher than as a pure creator. Tolstoi is more
plastical, and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative
power as Turgenev, and Dostoevsky is more intense, fervid, and
dramatic. But as an _artist_, as master of the combination of details
into a harmonious whole, as an architect of imaginative work, he
surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals
among the great novelists of other lands. Twenty-five years ago, on
reading the translation of one of his short stories (_Assya_), George
Sand, who was then at the apogee of her fame, wrote to him: 'Master,
all of us have to go to study at your school.' This was, indeed, a
generous compliment, coming from the representative of French
literature which is so eminently artistic. But it was not flattery.
As an artist, Turgenev in reality stands with the classics who may be
studied and admired for their perfect form long after the interest of
their subject has disappeared. But it seems that in his very devotion
to art and beauty he has purposely restricted the range of his
creations.

To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he
possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the
highest and the lowest, the noble as well as the base. From the height
of his superiority he saw all, understood all: Nature and men had no
secrets hidden from his calm, penetrating eyes. In his latter days,
sketches such as _Clara Militch_, _The Song of Triumphant Love_, _The
Dream_, and the incomparable _Phantoms_, he showed that he could equal
Edgar Poe, Hofmann, and Dostoevsky in the mastery of the fantastical,
the horrible, the mysterious, and the incomprehensible, which live
somewhere in human nerves, though not to be defined by reason.

But there was in him such a love of light, sunshine, and living human
poetry, such an organic aversion for all that is ugly, or coarse and
discordant, that he made himself almost exclusively the poet of the
gentler side of human nature. On the fringe of his pictures or in
their background, just for the sake of contrast, he will show us the
vices, the cruelties, even the mire of life. But he cannot stay in
these gloomy regions, and he hastens back to the realms of the sun and
flowers, or to the poetical moonlight of melancholy, which he loves
best because in it he can find expression for his own great sorrowing
heart.

Even jealousy, which is the black shadow of the most poetical of human
feelings, is avoided by the gentle artist. He hardly ever describes
it, only alluding to it cursorily. But there is no novelist who gives
so much room to the pure, crystalline, eternally youthful feeling of
love. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's
speciality. What Francesco Petrarca did for one kind of love--the
romantic, artificial, hot-house love of the times of
chivalry--Turgenev did for the natural, spontaneous, modern love in
all its variety of forms, kinds, and manifestations: the slow and
gradual as well as the sudden and instantaneous; the spiritual, the
admiring and inspiring, as well as the life-poisoning, terrible kind
of love, which infects a man as a prolonged disease. There is
something prodigious in Turgenev's insight into, and his inexhaustible
richness, truthfulness, and freshness in the rendering of those
emotions which have been the theme of all poets and novelists for two
thousand years.

In the well-known memoirs of Caroline Bauer one comes across a curious
legend about Paganini. She tells that the great enchanter owed his
unique command over the emotions of his audiences to a peculiar use of
one single string, G, which he made sing and whisper, cry and thunder,
at the touch of his marvellous bow.

There is something of this in Turgenev's description of love. He has
many other strings at his harp, but his greatest effect he obtains in
touching this one. His stories are not love poems. He only prefers to
present his people in the light of that feeling in which a man's soul
gathers up all its highest energies, and melts as in a crucible,
showing its dross and its pure metal.

Turgenev began his literary career and won an enormous popularity in
Russia by his sketches from peasant life. His _Diary of a Sportsman_
contains some of the best of his short stories, and his _Country Inn,_
written a few years later, in the maturity of his talent, is as good
as Tolstoi's little masterpiece, _Polikushka_.

He was certainly able to paint all classes and conditions of Russian
people. But in his greater works Turgenev lays the action exclusively
with one class of Russian people. There is nothing of the enormous
canvas of Count Tolstoi, in which the whole of Russia seems to pass in
review before the readers. In Turgenev's novels we see only educated
Russia, or rather the more advanced thinking part of it, which he knew
best, because he was a part of it himself.

We are far from regretting this specialisation. Quality can sometimes
hold its own against quantity. Although small numerically, the section
of Russian society which Turgenev represents is enormously
interesting, because it is the brain of the nation, the living ferment
which alone can leaven the huge unformed masses. It is upon them that
depend the destinies of their country. Besides, the artistic value of
his works could only be enhanced by his concentrating his genius upon
a field so familiar to him, and engrossing so completely his mind and
his sympathies. What he loses in dimensions he gains in correctness,
depth, wonderful subtlety and effectiveness of every minute detail,
and the surpassing beauty of the whole. The jewels of art he left us
are like those which nations store in the sanctuaries of their museums
and galleries to be admired, the longer they are studied. But we must
look to Tolstoi for the huge and towering monuments, hewn in massive
granite, to be put upon some cross way of nations as an object of
wonder and admiration for all who come from the four winds of heaven.

Turgenev did not write for the masses but for the _elite_ among men. The
fact that .he has won such a fame among foreigners, and that the
number of his readers is widening every year, proves that great art is
international, and also, I may say, that artistic taste and
understanding is growing everywhere.

II

It is written that no man is a prophet in his own country, and from
time immemorial all the unsuccessful aspirants to the profession have
found their consolation in this proverbial truth. But for aught we
know this hard limitation has never been applied to artists. Indeed it
seems absurd on the face of it that the artist's countrymen, for whom
and about whom he writes, should be less fit to recognise him than
strangers. Yet in certain special and peculiar conditions, the most
unlikely things will sometimes occur, as is proved in the case of
Turgenev.

The fact is that _as an artist_ he was appreciated to his full value
first by foreigners. The Russians have begun to understand him, and
to assign to him his right place in this respect only now, after his
death, whilst in his lifetime his _artistic genius_ was comparatively
little cared for, save by a handful of his personal friends.

This supreme art told upon the Russian public unconsciously, as it was
bound to tell upon a nation so richly endowed with natural artistic
instinct. Turgenev was always the most widely read of Russian authors,
not excepting Tolstoi, who came to the front only after his death. But
full recognition he had not, because he happened to produce his works
in a troubled epoch of political and social strife, when the best men
were absorbed in other interests and pursuits, and could not and would
not appreciate and enjoy pure art. This was the painful, almost
tragic, position of an artist, who lived in a most inartistic epoch,
and whose highest aspirations and noblest efforts wounded and
irritated those among his countrymen whom he was most devoted to, and
whom he desired most ardently to serve.

This strife embittered Turgenev's life.

At one crucial epoch of his literary career the conflict became so
vehement, and the outcry against him, set in motion by his very
artistic truthfulness and objectiveness, became so loud and unanimous,
that he contemplated giving up literature altogether. He could not
possibly have held to this resolution. But it is surely an open
question whether, sensitive and modest as he was, and prone to
despondency and diffidence, he would have done so much for the
literature of his country without the enthusiastic encouragement of
various great foreign novelists, who were his friends and admirers:
George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, in France; Auerbach, in Germany; W. D.
Howells, in America; George Eliot, in England.

We will tell the story of his troubled life piece by piece as far as
space will allow, as his works appear in succession. Here we will only
give a few biographical traits which bear particularly upon the novel
before us, and account for his peculiar hold over the minds of his
countrymen.

Turgenev, who was born in 1818, belonged to a set of Russians very
small in his time, who had received a thoroughly European education in
no way inferior to that of the best favoured young German or
Englishman. It happened, moreover, that his paternal uncle, Nicholas
Turgenev, the famous 'Decembrist,' after the failure of that first
attempt (December 14, 1825) to gain by force of arms a constitutional
government for Russia, succeeded in escaping the vengeance of the Tsar
Nicholas I., and settled in France, where he published in French the
first vindication of Russian revolution.

Whilst studying philosophy in the Berlin University, Turgenev paid
short visits to his uncle, who initiated him in the ideas of liberty,
from which he never swerved throughout his long life.

In the sixties, when Alexander Hertzen, one of the most gifted writers
of our land, a sparkling, witty, pathetic, and powerful journalist and
brilliant essayist, started in London his _Kolokol_, a revolutionary,
or rather radical paper, which had a great influence in Russia,
Turgenev became one of his most active contributors and
advisers,--almost a member of the editorial staff.

This fact has been revealed a few years ago by the publication, which
we owe to Professor Dragomanov, of the private correspondence between
Turgenev and Hertzen. This most interesting little volume throws quite
a new light upon Turgenev, showing that our great novelist was at the
same time one of the strongest--perhaps the strongest--and most
clear-sighted political thinkers of his time. However surprising such
a versatility may appear, it is proved to demonstration by a
comparison of his views, his attitude, and his forecasts, some of
which have been verified only lately, with those of the acknowledged
leaders and spokesmen of the various political parties of his day,
including Alexander Hertzen himself. Turgenev's are always the
soundest, the most correct and far-sighted judgments, as latter-day
history has proved.

A man with so ardent a love of liberty, and such radical views, could
not possibly banish them from his literary works, no matter how great
his devotion to pure art. He would have been a poor artist had he
inflicted upon himself such a mutilation, because freedom from all
restraints, the frank, sincere expression of the artist's
individuality, is the life and soul of all true art.

Turgenev gave to his country the whole of himself, the best of his
mind and of his creative fancy. He appeared at the same time as a
teacher, a prophet of new ideas, and as a poet and artist. But his own
countrymen hailed him in the first capacity, remaining for a long time
obtuse to the latter and greater.

Thus, during one of the most important and interesting periods of our
national history, Turgenev was the standard-bearer and inspirer of
the Liberal, the thinking Russia. Although the two men stand at
diametrically opposite poles, Turgenev's position can be compared to
that of Count Tolstoi nowadays, with a difference, this time in favour
of the author of _Dmitri Rudin_. With Turgenev the thinker and the
artist are not at war, spoiling and sometimes contradicting each
other's efforts. They go hand in hand, because he never preaches any
doctrine whatever, but gives us, with an unimpeachable, artistic
objectiveness, the living men and women in whom certain ideas,
doctrines, and aspirations were embodied. And he never evolves these
ideas and doctrines from his inner consciousness, but takes them from
real life, catching with his unfailing artistic instinct an incipient
movement just at the moment when it was to become a historic feature
of the time. Thus his novels are a sort of artistic epitome of the
intellectual history of modern Russia, and also a powerful instrument
of her intellectual progress.

III

_Rudin_ is the first of Turgenev's social novels, and is a sort of
artistic introduction to those that follow, because it refers to the
epoch anterior to that when the present social and political movements
began. This epoch is being fast forgotten, and without his novel it
would be difficult for us to fully realise it, but it is well worth
studying, because we find in it the germ of future growths.

It was a gloomy time. The ferocious despotism of Nicholas
I.--overweighing the country like the stone lid of a coffin, crushed
every word, every thought, which did not fit with its narrow
conceptions. But this was not the worst. The worst was that
progressive Russia was represented by a mere handful of men, who were
so immensely in advance of their surroundings, that in their own
country they felt more isolated, helpless, and out of touch with the
realities of life than if they had lived among strangers.

But men must have some outlet for their spiritual energies, and these
men, unable to take part in the sordid or petty pursuits of those
around them, created for themselves artificial life, artificial
pursuits and interests.

The isolation in which they lived drew them naturally together. The
'circle,' something between an informal club and a debating society,
became the form in which these cravings of mind or heart could be
satisfied. These people met and talked; that was all they were able to
do.

The passage in which one of the heroes, Lezhnyov, tells the woman he
loves about the circle of which Dmitri Rudin and himself were members,
is historically one of the most suggestive. It refers to a circle of
young students. But it has a wider application. All prominent men of
the epoch--Stankevitch, who served as model to the poetic and touching
figure of Pokorsky; Alexander Hertzen, and the great critic,
Belinsky--all had their 'circles,' or their small chapels, in which
these enthusiasts met to offer worship to the 'goddess of truth, art,
and morality.'

They were the best men of their time, full of high aspirations and
knowledge, and their disinterested search after truth was certainly a
noble pursuit. They had full right to look down upon their neighbours
wallowing in the mire of sordid and selfish materialism. But by living
in that spiritual hothouse of dreams, philosophical speculations, and
abstractions, these men unfitted themselves only the more completely
for participation in real life; the absorption in interests having
nothing to do with the life of their own country, estranged them still
more from it. The overwhelming stream of words drained them of the
natural sources of spontaneous emotion, and these men almost grew out
of feeling by dint of constantly analysing their feelings.

Dmitri Rudin is the typical man of that generation, both the victim
and the hero of his time--a man who is almost a Titan in word and a
pigmy in deed. He is eloquent as a young Demosthenes. An irresistible
debater, he carries everything before him the moment he appears. But
he fails ignominiously when put to the hard test of action. Yet he is
not an impostor. His enthusiasm is contagious because it is sincere,
and his eloquence is convincing because devotion to his ideals is an
absorbing passion with him. He would die for them, and, what is more
rare, he would not swerve a hair's-breadth from them for any worldly
advantage, or for fear of any hardship. Only this passion and this
enthusiasm spring with him entirely from the head. The heart, the deep
emotional power of human love and pity, lay dormant in him. Humanity,
which he would serve to the last drop of his blood, is for him a body
of foreigners--French, English, Germans--whom he has studied from
books, and whom he has met only in hotels and watering-places during
his foreign travels as a student or as a tourist.

Towards such an abstract, alien humanity, a man cannot feel any real
attachment. With all his outward ardour, Rudin is cold as ice at the
bottom of his heart. His is an enthusiasm which glows without warmth,
like the aurora borealis of the Polar regions. A poor substitute for
the bountiful sun. But what would have become of a God-forsaken land
if the Arctic nights were deprived of that substitute? With all their
weaknesses, Rudin and the men of his stamp--in other words, the men of
the generation of 1840--have rendered an heroic service to their
country. They inculcated in it the religion of the ideal; they brought
in the seeds, which had only to be thrown into the warm furrow of
their native soil to bring forth the rich crops of the future.

The shortcomings and the impotence of these men were due to their
having no organic ties with their own country, no roots in the Russian
soil. They hardly knew the Russian people, who appeared to them as
nothing more than an historic abstraction. They were really
cosmopolitan, as a poor makeshift for something better, and Turgenev,
in making his hero die on a French barricade, was true to life as well
as to art.

The inward growth of the country has remedied this defect in the
course of the three generations which have followed. But has the
remedy been complete? No; far from it, unfortunately. There are still
thousands of barriers preventing the Russians from doing something
useful for their countrymen and mixing freely with them. The
spiritual energies of the most ardent are still compelled--partially
at least--to run into the artificial channels described in Turgenev's
novel.

Hence the perpetuation of Rudin's type, which acquires more than an
historical interest.

In discussing the character of Hlestakov, the hero of his great
comedy, Gogol declared that this type is pretty nigh universal,
because 'every Russian,' he says, 'has a bit of Hlestakov in him.'
This not very flattering opinion has been humbly indorsed and repeated
since, out of reverence to Gogol's great authority, although it is
untrue on the face of it. Hlestakov is a sort of Tartarin in Russian
dress, whilst simplicity and sincerity are the fundamental traits of
all that is Russian in character, manner, art, literature. But it may
be truly said that every educated Russian of our time has a bit of
Dmitri Rudin in him.

This figure is undoubtedly one of the finest in Turgenev's gallery,
and it is at the same time one of the most brilliant examples of his
artistic method.

Turgenev does not give us at one stroke sculptured figures made from
one block, such as rise before us from Tolstoi's pages. His art is
rather that of a painter or musical composer than of a sculptor. He
has more colour, a deeper perspective, a greater variety of lights and
shadows--a more complete portraiture of the spiritual man. Tolstoi's
people stand so living and concrete that one feels one can recognise
them in the street. Turgenev's are like people whose intimate
confessions and private correspondence, unveiling all the secrets of
their spiritual life, have been submitted to one.

Every scene, almost every line, opens up new deep horizons, throwing
upon his people some new unexpected light.

The extremely complex and difficult character of the hero of this
story, shows at its highest this subtle psychological many-sidedness.
Dmitri Rudin is built up of contradictions, yet not for a moment does
he cease to be perfectly real, living, and concrete.

Hardly less remarkable is the character of the heroine, Natalya, the
quiet, sober, matter-of-fact girl, who at the bottom is an
enthusiastic and heroic nature. She is but a child fresh to all
impressions of life, and as yet undeveloped. To have used the
searching, analytical method in painting her would have spoiled this
beautiful creation. Turgenev describes her synthetically by a few
masterly lines, which show us, however, the secrets of her spirit;
revealing what she is and also what she might have become under other
circumstances.

This character deserves more attention than we can give it here.
Turgenev, like George Meredith, is a master in painting women, and his
Natalya is the first poetical revelation of a very striking fact in
modern Russian history; the appearance of women possessing a strength
of mind more finely masculine than that of the men of their time. By
the side of weak, irresolute, though highly intellectual men we see in
his first three novels energetic, earnest, impassioned women, who take
the lead in action, whilst they are but the man's modest pupils in the
domain of ideas. Only later on, in _Fathers and Children_, does
Turgenev show us in Bazarov a man essentially masculine. But of this
interesting peculiarity of Russian intellectual life, in the years
1840 to 1860, I will speak more fully when analysing another of
Turgenev's novels in which this contrast is most conspicuous.

I will say nothing of the minor characters of the story before us:
Lezhnyov, Pigasov, Madame Lasunsky, Pandalevsky, who are all excellent
examples of what may be called miniature-painting.

As to the novel as a whole, I will make here only one observation, not
to forestall the reader's own impressions.

Turgenev is a realist in the sense that he keeps close to reality,
truth, and nature. But in the pursuit of photographic faithfulness to
life, he never allows himself to be tedious and dull, as some of the
best representatives of the school think it incumbent upon them to be.
His descriptions are never overburdened with wearisome details; his
action is rapid; the events are never to be foreseen a hundred pages
beforehand; he keeps his readers in constant suspense. And it seems to
me in so doing he shows himself a better realist than the gifted
representatives of the orthodox realism in France, England, and
America. Life is not dull; life is full of the unforeseen, full of
suspense. A novelist, however natural and logical, must contrive to
have it in his novels if he is not to sacrifice the soul of art for
the merest show of fidelity.

The plot of Dmitri Rudin is so exceedingly simple that an English
novel-reader would say that there is hardly any plot at all. Turgenev
disdained the tricks of the sensational novelists. Yet, for a Russian
at least, it is easier to lay down before the end a novel by Victor
Hugo or Alexander Dumas than Dmitri Rudin, or, indeed, any of
Turgenev's great novels. What the novelists of the romantic school
obtain by the charm of unexpected adventures and thrilling situations,
Turgenev succeeds in obtaining by the brisk admirably concentrated
action, and, above all, by the simplest and most precious of a
novelist's gifts: his unique command over the sympathies and emotions
of his readers. In this he can be compared to a musician who works
upon the nerves and the souls of his audience without the intermediary
of the mind; or, better still, to a poet who combines the power of the
word with the magic spell of harmony. One does not read his novels;
one lives in them.

Much of this peculiar gift of fascination is certainly due to
Turgenev's mastery over all the resources of our rich, flexible, and
musical language. The poet Lermontov alone wrote as splendid a prose
as Turgenev. A good deal of its charm is unavoidably lost in
translation. But I am happy to say that the present one is as near an
approach to the elegance and poetry of the original as I have ever
come across.

S. STEPNIAK.

BEDFORD PARK, April 20, 1894.

THE NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOK

DMITRI NIKOLA'ITCH RU'DIN.

DAR-YA MIHA'ILOVNA LASU'NSKY.

NATA'L-YA ALEX-YE'VNA.

MIHA'ILO MIHA'ILITCH LE'ZH-NYOV (MISHA).

ALEXANDRA PA'VLOVNA LI'PIN (SASHA).

SERGEI (pron, Sergay) PA'VLITCH VOLI'NT-SEV (SEREZHA).

KONSTANTIN DIOMIDITCH PANDALE'VSKY.

AFRICAN SEME'NITCH PIGA'SOV.

BASSI'STOFF.

MLLE. BONCOURT.

In transcribing the Russian names into English--

a has the sound of a in father.
er , , air.
i , , ee.
u , , oo.
y is always consonantal except when it is the last letter of the word.
g is always hard.

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