SOURCE: Briggs, A. D. P. “One Man and His Dogs: An Anniversary Tribute to Ivan Turgenev.” Irish Slavonic Studies 14 (1993): 1-20.

[In the following essay, Briggs examines the importance of dogs in Turgenev's life and literature.]

TURGENEV'S DOGS

I wish to honour the name of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev in a curious way—though it is one which certainly would have appealed to him—by drawing attention to his interest in dogs.¹ Dogs played a significant role for him, both in real life and in literature. He grew up surrounded by them at Spasskoye; one of his earliest recorded memories is of going out hunting with his father at the age of nine or ten and observing the behaviour of a bird defending its young against their dog, Trezor. This incident was recorded twice by Turgenev, in the autobiographical sketch entitled ‘The Quail’ (1880) and in an earlier Poem in Prose (May 1878), ‘The Sparrow’, which is a fictional adaptation of the same event. From then on his biography is punctuated with continual references to dogs of one kind or another, though mainly in connection with hunting. In 1857 one of his reasons for visiting England was to acquire a pair of dogs for the summer shooting back home in Russia. Patrick Waddington refers to this interest of Turgenev's as an ‘obsession with dogs’. Pauline Viardot apparently implored Ivan Sergeyevich not to send any more to Courtavenel where they created bloody havoc among the Viardots' own hounds.² The obsession extended beyond hunting dogs. In 1871, again in England, Turgenev was vastly amused by a dog in a circus acting the part of a clown and doing so with what he described as an ‘undoubted flair for comedy’.³ He wrote a famous essay describing the redoubtable qualities of the best dog he ever owned, Pegasus, a cross between an English Setter and a German Sheepdog.⁴ Pegasus was a fine animal who seems to have gained a European reputation for the excellence of his nose and the precision of his professional behaviour. In this essay Turgenev also waxes eloquent about dogs in general. Surveying the age-old history of the man—dog relationship he comes to this conclusion:

Envy, jealousy and—a capacity for friendship; desperate bravery, devotion to the point of self-sacrifice and—ignominious cowardice and fickleness; suspiciousness, spitefulness and—good nature, cunning and straightforwardness—all these qualities manifest themselves—sometimes with astonishing force—in the dog that has been re-educated by man and that deserves more than the horse to be called the noblest of all man's conquests. …⁵

He goes on to remind us of the breadth of his own experience in this field:

Like many another ‘inveterate’ sportsman, I've had many dogs, bad, good and excellent—I even had one that was positively mad and that committed suicide by jumping out of the dormer window of a drying room on the fourth floor of a paper mill.

Pegasus aged before his time. By his ninth year his famous old skills had atrophied and Turgenev, who was beginning to feel that this was true of himself also in 1871, took his leave of the dog that had been in these words which close his essay:

I took leave of him not without a feeling of sadness. ‘Goodbye’ I thought, ‘my incomparable dog! I shall never forget you, and I shall never have such a friend as you!’ I don't suppose I shall go hunting any more either.⁶

These sentiments call to mind similar ones voiced famously three-quarters of a century earlier by Lord Byron. Burying his beloved Newfoundland at Newstead Abbey in November 1808, he described him in a protracted inscription as

… the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend …

and brought the epitaph to a rousing conclusion with these phrases:

To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

For good measure, one can see a fine portrait of this dog, Bosun, still hanging in Newstead. It will not escape notice that Byron's grandiloquence is left resonating in the Nottinghamshire air whereas Turgenev's valediction is lowered in tone immediately after its utterance by a sentence which, as well as achieving that purpose, also associates the writer with the dog in a personal and genuine-sounding way.

The difference is important. There is no doubt that Lord Byron loved his dog. What is in doubt is whether he could possibly have known anything like the deeply experienced, lifelong attachment to the canine species that was ineradicable from the character of Ivan Turgenev. The Russian makes countless references to dogs throughout his career as a writer—as we shall see—but there is never anything theoretical, sentimental, hyperbolical or in the slightest way rhetorical about them.

SOME DOGS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Turgenev was not the first, last or only Russian writer to know and love dogs, or to make references to them in his work. In this respect he is working within a well-established and still living tradition. It is not clear how far back this tradition goes, although it probably began in Russia with fables such as those of Khemnitser and Dmitriev in the eighteenth century (‘The Dog and the Lions’ and ‘The Dog and the Quail’ are two examples). Krylov develops the idea early in the nineteenth century with such fables as ‘The Elephant and the Pug’, ‘The Sheep and the Dogs’ and ‘The Two Dogs’. In the last-named poem the animals are personalised by being given the names Barbos and Zhuzhu.

Griboyedov makes intelligent use of a dog reference in Woe from Wit. His hero, Chatsky, reminds the audience of a landowner who repaid his serfs for years of devoted care by swapping some of them for three borzois! (This was a reference on an actual recent event.) Pushkin was no stranger to the dog world, as we can remind ourselves by glancing at a number of the lyrics; for instance, the barking of dogs echoes through the sleeping autumn woods to particular effect in Osen'. Dogs are referred to in The Gypsies and in The Tale of the Dead Princess; in Count Nulin the borzois and an anonymous yard dog who appear early on are eclipsed by the maid's pet Pomeranian who is given a decisive role at the climax of the story. In Eugene Onegin dogs come out (in the Turgenevan manner) to welcome Tatyana as she approaches Onegin's manor house in Chapter 7 (XXI), and, earlier on, in her nightmare one of the monsters is a horned creature with a dog's snout (5, XVI). It will also be remembered that when Masha visits the Imperial Park at the end of The Captain's Daughter to plead for Grinev, the presence of the unrecognised Empress is announced first of all by ‘a little white dog of English breed’ running ahead of her.

Gogol is probably the first Russian writer to have made a serious story out of the canine species. The demented Proprishchin (in Notes of a Madman) believes he can understand both the spoken and written language exchanged between two dogs, Madgie and Fidèle. Eventually he comes to imagine he is no less than the King of Spain, which possibly lends credence to the proposal that Gogol may have borrowed his basic idea from Cervantes's story ‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’. Meanwhile in Dead Souls Gogol has fun with the name Sobakevich, which is derived from the Russian for ‘dog’, and perhaps with Nozdrev, a sniffing word derived from ‘nostril’; much is also made of a dogs' chorus when Chichikov arrives at Korobochkina's house in Chapter 3.

Later in the century the modern fabulist Saltykov-Shchedrin gives us a fable in prose entitled Faithful Trezor—the sad story, with thinly veiled political overtones, of three dogs, Trezor, Kutka, Arapka, and their city fraternity. Before that Nekrasov presented the world with Hunting with Dogs, which appeared to celebrate that sport but used the occasion to satirise the nobility. Again, the dogs are personally identified and there are plenty of them: Zmeyka, Nabat, Sokol, Khandra, Nakhal, Svirep, Terzay, Rugay, Ugar, Zamashka and Pobedka. (Nekrasov's mid-century rival, Fet, wrote a less successful, less interesting poem with precisely the same title.)

In the case of Tolstoy we are dealing with a countryman who knew his dogs almost as intimately as did Turgenev. Bulka, Terza, Karay, Lyam, Lyubin, Milka, Milton, Rugay, Trunila, Ulyashin, Viflyanka, Voltorn, Zhiran and Zhuchka—there are a dozen and a half named animals populating his prose from Childhood onwards. The best known are, of course, in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the latter, memorable moments occur between Levin and his dog Laska, who always welcomes him home from the city; and on a famous occasion he and Stiva go hunting together, striving to outshoot each other and setting Laska in competition with Oblonsky's dog, Krak. Tolstoy's best-known dog of all comes on the scene towards the end of War and Peace and he has not one name but four. Platon Karatayev adopts an anonymous, unprepossessing mongrel, named Azor by the French soldiers and Femgalka by the Russian story-teller. Karatayev calls him Seryy or Vislyy (Grey or Floppy), according to his mood.

This dog is used by Tolstoy to create a powerful and lasting impression, in fact a double impression: of unselfconscious, spontaneous enjoyment of life, notwithstanding its disadvantages and setbacks, and of fidelity. When Karatayev is shot by the French and left behind in the snow his little friend remains there howling over the body, and that is our last memory of him as we march away with the semi-conscious Pierre. Nothing is incredible or even exaggerated in this moving scene but there is a sense of Tolstoy's exploiting his rich material, as on so many other occasions, for his own symbolic and didactic purposes. Turgenev will never use his own dogs in that manner.

Dostoyevsky's dogs, as one might expect, are a run-down, mistreated lot. At the beginning of The Insulted and the Injured the old man Smith has a dog, Azorka, who is said to look about eighty years old, older than any other dog on earth and, sure enough, he expires before our eyes, quietly, not long before his master does the same. In The Idiot we come across the bitch Norma and hear of a lapdog thrown out of a train window. In The Brothers Karamazov the young Ilyusha keeps a dog called Perezvon and recalls an awful trick played on another dog, Zhuchka. Earlier Dostoyevsky has recalled the cruelty meted out to dogs by the prisoners in Notes from the House of the Dead; Sharik is treated with indifference, Belka is ridiculously deformed and poor Kul'pyaka is quietly disposed of by an inmate who later emerges with a luxurious dog-skin lining to his boots.

Dogs continued to attract the attention of Russian writers down to the end of the century. Among Kuprin's animal stories at least three are devoted wholly or partly to dogs: A Slav Soul, The White Poodle and Dogs' Happiness. Stephen Graham says of this writer: ‘… it is part of Kuprin's sentiment to love dogs almost as much as men and he tells no tales at dogs' expense’.⁷ With Chekhov several tales come immediately to mind, such as The Lady with the Little Dog, Kashtanka and perhaps even Whitebrow.

This tradition continues in the twentieth century. Leonid Andreyev wrote a story about a dog called Snapper and a play called The Waltz of the Dogs. An important figure in Blok's famous poem The Twelve is a mangy cur. Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog and Nazhivin's The Dogs belong to the 1920s. In later years Zoshchenko and Ilf and Petrov include dog stories in their satirical pieces: in particular Dog Scent and Ich Bin from Head to Foot, starring the wonderful talking dog, Brunhilde. Just when one might have thought the tradition was dying out it was given a boost more recently with a dog story which is assured of lasting fame, Vladimov's Faithful Ruslan (a title which perhaps looks back to Saltykov-Shchedrin's Faithful Trezor).

This survey is anything but exhaustive. It is the result of arbitrary recollection, some desultory hunting along a few bookshelves and a little help from one or two colleagues. (Perhaps there is an appetising research topic here for a dog-loving Russophile.) Nevertheless it is very interesting. It shows that one has little difficulty in discovering twenty Russian authors who have used dogs in their writings, and determining the personal names of about fifty such fictional animals. And this provokes one or two pointed questions. Can there be any other European literature which has been as rich in dog stories (or references) over the last couple of hundred years? Where do we British now stand in regard to our claim to pre-eminence as animal-lovers? Finally, in the present context, what was Ivan Turgenev's contribution to this rich national tradition?

TURGENEV'S NOVELS

We should begin by stating clearly that he is the major contributor, outranking everyone else in both the range and the numerical extent of his dog references—there are at least a hundred of them—and in sheer quality. To put it simply, Turgenev wrote the finest dog story in Russian literature, and one of the finest to be found anywhere.

The outstanding characteristic of Turgenev's dogs is that, although they are ubiquitous, they are normally so unobtrusive as to be almost transparent. In literature as in life dogs were his natural companions; sometimes you noticed them, usually you did not, but they were nearly always there at your side. How many readers, for instance, retain a conscious recollection of any dogs at all in Turgenev's novels? Most likely, very few. Yet they are there in abundance.

Let us look first at the six novels. In Rudin there is one example of a merely decorative role for three unnamed dogs when, in Chapter 12, Lezhnev arrives home in his carriage. We are informed that ‘Two enormous house dogs were running in front of his horse, one yellow, one grey; he had recently acquired them.’ But not all dogs look and behave like aristocrats. Turgenev adds, ‘An old mongrel came out at the gate to meet them, opened his mouth as if he was going to bark but ended up yawning and turning back again with a friendly wag of his tail.’ Writing like this, although of modest significance, is based on close observation of the species, and a deep affection for it. Earlier in the novel, dogs are used more functionally, to demonstrate Pigasov's silliness. He treats the company at dinner to a flatulent commentary on human nature, dividing mankind into two sorts, like dogs, the long-tailed (who are self-confident and successful whatever their actual qualities) and the bob-tailed (who are timid creatures and born losers). Rudin dismisses this as turgid nonsense and Volyntsev attacks him for his lack of charity. The embarrassment is dispelled only by Darya Mikhailovna's plunging into a distracting story—about another dog belonging to her friend, the Minister X.

In both A Nobleman's Nest and On the Eve dogs are used in symbolic roles. Lavretsky returns to Vasilevskoye after a long absence (Chapter 18). The all-too-evident run-down character of the place is emphasised by the fact that ‘not even a dog appeared’ as he drove up. Then, in fact, we do hear a funny croaky barking from some hidden place. In the next chapter the uselessness and backwardness of the whole estate is summarised in the figure of the decrepit dog responsible for this miserable noise: he has been worn down by being heavily chained to his kennel for an entire decade. Elsewhere the lassitude and indifference of everything and everyone is epitomised in a single phrase: ‘even the dogs barked indifferently’. At the beginning of Chapter 20 Lavretsky performs the inevitable symbolic action of releasing the dog from his chain, although, realistically enough, the poor chap does not recognise his newly found advantage and stays in his kennel, sunk in a peaceful torpor. Resonating against this experience is an interesting moment described in the epilogue. Lavretsky makes another return visit, not to Vasilevskoye but to the Kalitins' household, where everything has changed. The old folk have died off and been replaced by youngsters; the replacement is expressed symbolically by the presence of new, young houseboys and the fact that ‘where once the podgy Roska [the old house-dog] used to waddle solemnly, two setters raced frantically about, jumping over the sofas … running and barking …’. Then in Turgenev's next novel, On the Eve, Yelena's tenderness, charity and potential for positive activity are twice epitomised in her relations with dogs. In Chapter 6 we learn of her propensity for extending succour and protection to ‘every underfed dog’ and, in case the reader should imagine that this remark is mere rhetoric, at the outset of Chapter 14 he is informed that ‘The next day, shortly after one o'clock, Yelena was standing in the garden in front of a box in which she was rearing two mongrel puppies.’ (The gardener had found them abandoned … and brought them to her, the washerwoman having told him that the young lady was fond of any sort of animal. He had not erred in his calculation; she had rewarded him with a quarter of a rouble.)

In Fathers and Children the mutual suitability between Katya and her dog amounts to an association not far short of symbolism. At Odintsova's, Katya is preceded into the room (in Chapter 15) by a splendid young dog, a borzoi brimming with vitality and sporting a sky-blue collar. Her name is Fifi. She is still close to Katya in Chapter 25, where emphasis is placed upon her shapeliness, graceful attitude and connection with hunting. Her obvious aristocratism accords well with Katya's love of Mozart and the natural world, and places her well within the camp of the traditionalists, despite her youth, rather than that of the nihilists. Fifi is not far from her mind when she tells Arkady, also in Chapter 25, that Bazarov is a wild creature, whereas he and she are tame animals. The dog has also a minor functional role in the earlier chapter when Arkady begins stroking her in order to cover his growing embarrassment. Fifi may not be very noticeable in the novel but she is sweetly integrated and well observed.

Turgenev's last novel Virgin Soil resembles A Nobleman's Nest in its use of canine symbolism. In Chapter 16 Nezhdanov and Markelov look round the factory where Solomin works as manager. The place is busy but neglected and dirty, such is the emphasis on profit-making and the disregard for the needs of the people. Among the numerous details evinced to emphasise how run-down the whole place is we cannot fail to notice ‘some shaggy hungry-looking dogs [which] wandered to and fro, too listless to bark’. By Chapter 23, however, the emphasis has changed. Much is now being made of Solomin's closeness to the people. He walks four miles back to the factory and is admitted with pleasure and respect by the watchman, who is followed by ‘three house dogs wagging their tales with great delight’. The most pointed use of the dog in this novel, however, comes later still, in Chapter 29. Nezhdanov's failure in his attempt at ‘going to the people’ is recorded in its every last detail. The particularity which concerns us is that, among the several misadventures which he suffered on this occasion, he was bitten by a dog.

These references to dogs in Turgenev's novels are unassertive, almost unnoticed. They range from the purely decorative to the overtly symbolic and they are handled with a natural ease and discretion. If anything is remarkable it is merely that there are rather a lot of them—and we make no claim to have made a comprehensive survey which searches out every last one.

EARLY AND LATE WORKS

Another measure of Turgenev's enduring interest in dogs may be taken from allusions appearing in both his earliest and his last works. Three of the four narrative poems by which his name was first established in the early and mid-1840s bring dogs unobtrusively into the story. Only one of them is named—inevitably, perhaps, as Trezor, in ‘The Landowner’. At the other end of his career, in the late 1870s, Turgenev put together a series of sketches and meditations known as Senilia, or Poems in Prose. We have already observed that one of these, ‘The Sparrow’, is a fictionalised version of a hunting incident involving the real-life Trezor; he, or someone very like him, also appears in ‘The Partridges’. Much the most interesting of these pieces, however, is one which bears the title ‘Sobaka’ (‘The Dog’). The master and his dog are sitting looking at each other indoors on a stormy evening. The man is struck with a sudden awareness of the similarity between the two of them. Both embody the precious spirit of life, and this unique similarity makes the differences between them seem unremarkable. The two huddle together in spirit, sharing the short-lived and doomed sensation of being in existence. In view of his abiding sympathy for the species it is neither inappropriate nor the least bit surprising that Ivan Sergeyevich should choose a dog for this expression of sudden spiritual illumination. Incidentally, this moving little sketch should not be confused with a story of the same name in which the ghost of a dog is exorcised by the purchase of a puppy; despite recent attempts to suggest that we should take this tale seriously⁸ it remains what the author described it as, a mere trifle.

The narrative poems and Senilia represent the relatively feeble beginning and end of Turgenev's literary career. In between, there are occasions when one might expect to meet dogs and others when it is less likely. It seems improbable, for instance, that there will be many allusions to dogs in the plays, and they probably do not exist there. On the other hand, anyone asked to select a work where dogs might be expected to abound would be likely to suggest A Sportsman's Sketches. One would be right to do so. The standard collection of these sketches numbers twenty-five; no fewer than twenty-three of these contain dog references. (Only the strongly narrative indoor story ‘The Country Doctor’ and ‘Two Landowners’, with its static portraiture, are entirely devoid of them.) No fewer than eleven named animals appear before us: Ammalat, Astronom, Dianka, Esperans, Konteska, Milovidka, Saiga, Seryy, Valetka, Venzor and Zhuchka. Numberless anonymous fellow-travellers accompany them throughout the sketches. The amount of detail accorded to each specimen varies from the merest mention to the most intimately detailed portrait. The breed of dog ranges from the scruffiest, scraggiest mongrel to the lordliest hound. There are tiny puppies and ageing patriarchs. Every conceivable canine posture and behaviour pattern is represented and also one or two which might hitherto have been considered inconceivable.

In some sketches all we are given is a passing reminder that the narrator is a hunter and is therefore accompanied by a dog. In ‘The Meeting’, for instance, we learn that ‘my dog and I’ passed through a spinney, entered a birch wood and lay down to sleep. The rest of the sketch tells of what was observed when they awoke. Complete silence was needed in order not to be discovered by Akulina and Viktor; the dog is not mentioned again but we know he is there and his patient attitude is a tribute to that master-to-dog bonded relationship from which both participants derived such pleasure and pride. At the other end of the scale ‘Yermolay and the Miller's Wife’ gives a detailed picture of the pointer, Valetka, a typical exemplar of that canine devotion which survives even in the face of maltreatment by humans. The first thing we learn of him is that Yermolay never fed him. ‘Why should I?’ he argued. ‘A dog's a clever beast and ought to be able to find its own food.’ We see Valetka for the last time in a later sketch, ‘The Rumble of Wheels’, when Yermolay failed to say goodbye because he was too busy beating the daylights out of his dog. Despite everything—including his ugliness—Valetka never complained or ran away, and his life, if not deliriously happy, was meaningful and long.

The sketch with the greatest number of dogs in it is ‘Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin’. One after another they come, mongrels, borzois, hounds and beagles, packs of dogs, puppy dogs, a dog trodden by a clumsy horse and, strange to relate, even a poodle by the name of Venzor who is being taught, albeit with little success, to read. Another amusing example of human rather than canine absurdity occurs when Pyotr Petrovich Karatayev, in the sketch that bears his name, tells of his experiences with dogs. He once kept a dozen pairs of the finest hounds and his best companion was a pointer called Konteska. Not only did she—like Turgenev's real-life Pegasus—possess the best nose in the business, but her capabilities ran to the most sophisticated of behaviour indoors. ‘Give her a bit of bread with your left hand and say “A Jew ate it” (zhid yel) and she would refuse it. But give it to her with your right hand and say “A lady ate it” (Baryshnya kushala)—and she'd snap it up at once.’

It is well established that throughout the Sketches the land-owning class emerges as vulgar and brutal whereas the lower orders are depicted with sympathy. What has not been noticed so far is that something similar occurs in the relationship between men (those of all classes and stations) and their dogs. True, the understanding and love which exists between a hunter and his dog remains something special. As for the rest, however, if the owner is not thrashing his pitiful mongrel without sense or mercy, he is probably dressing him up in gaudy collars or silken leads or otherwise treating him as something more precious than humankind. In ‘Ovskyanikov the Freeholder’ we read of a bitch with the agreeable name of Milovidka (Nice-looker) who rode in her master's carriage during her lifetime and who, when she died, was given a funeral with music in his park and an inscribed headstone on her grave.

In the course of A Sportsman's Sketches Man's best friend attracts scores of references. Almost all of them are literal rather than figurative. On only two occasions are dogs used in any oblique sense; both are deliberate and memorable. At the end of ‘The Bailiff’ the narrator asks one of the peasants what he thinks of the bailiff in question. ‘He's not a man, he's a dog’, comes the reply. This bitter denunciation of a cruel brute is repeated no fewer than three times, which sharpens Turgenev's attack on those who control the peasants' destinies, though the quadruple reference does no service to the animal which he loved so much. In that moving sketch entitled ‘The Living Relic’ the cheerful but moribund Lukerya has a nightmare in which she is threatened by a large, mad, fierce, red dog—an original and frightening representation of what she herself recognises as her own illness.

Elsewhere the references are all literal and, of course, exact in the observation of detail. Dogs are seen and heard, walking, running, lying, barking, growling, dozing, sneezing, yawning and performing those half-and-half actions which begin in one form (as a bark or a growl) and end in another (a cough, a yawn, a whine or a smile). We are treated to the occasional passing generalisation about the canine species, and it is clear that the generaliser knows whereof he speaks. In ‘Yermolay and the Miller's Wife’ he tells us, ‘It is well known that dogs can smile, and smile very sweetly too.’ ‘All borzois are extraordinarily stupid’, he says in ‘Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin’. And in ‘L'gov’ he turns an expert eye on an occasion when dogs first meet each other, describing the whole curious wary and sniffy business as ‘that Chinese ceremonial which is the special custom of their kind’.

Turgenev is knowledgeable and confident enough not to have to resist the temptation from time to time to invest his dogs with apparently human characteristics. His animals are credited with ‘a constrained smile’, ‘a dignified growl’, ‘noble self-importance’ and so on. There is no danger here of sentimentalising his dogs through tasteless anthropomorphism. Human-like behaviour is observed in, rather than forced upon, the non-human creatures. We have all seen these same characteristics in canine behaviour. Dogs do positively invite and deserve depiction as imitators of men. Turgenev recognises a basic truth about them: that they are themselves voluntary anthropomorphists, inveterate and unrepentant. The one sure conclusion about his treatment of this subject, in general terms and particularly in A Sportsman's Sketches, is that it suffers from not a single lapse of knowledge, judgement or taste.

MUMU

Up to this point our subject has been only semi-serious. It may be of interest that Turgenev was a lover of dogs and that this affection found in his work a broader reflexion than has been generally observed: but where does this discovery lead us? Is there no special significance in his fascination and close knowledge which might validate our otherwise rather ponderous consideration of a small corner of the great man's work? In point of fact there is good reason to direct attention towards this area, since it includes what may safely be described as one of Turgenev's finest and most significant works, a story of some ten thousand words, ‘Mumu’. It is true that this story is not usually described in quite such generous terms, but there is a strong case for asserting that the work has been undervalued. It is certainly worth reconsidering, especially in the light of what we have learnt about Turgenev's general fascination for dogs.

The facts about the writing of the story, and the details of the tale itself, although fairly well known, are worth repeating. When Nikolai Gogol died in 1852 Turgenev wrote an appreciative obituary which was turned down by the censor in St Petersburg. The authorities wanted as little publicity as possible given to the memory of a man who had written a good deal of critical, anti-establishment literature. Turgenev reacted by giving it a new title, ‘A Letter from St Petersburg’, and sending it to a Moscow journal. For this he was imprisoned for a whole month and then exiled to his estate at Spasskoye. The sentence was served in the house of a police chief and the conditions of imprisonment were hardly draconian. It was during this spell that he wrote ‘Mumu’, which turned out to be by far his most revealing and persuasive condemnation of the serf system.

The story tells of Gerasim, a giant of a man who is also a deaf-mute. (We say ‘giant’, although at six feet five he was only two inches taller than Turgenev himself.) At the whim of the mistress-landowner he is brought from his native countryside into the city, where eventually he settles down and falls in love with one of the house laundrymaids, Tatyana. She, alas, is married off to a drunken shoemaker in an attempt to reform him. Gerasim is consoled on the very day of her departure by his chance discovery of a tiny spaniel puppy whom he rescues from drowning in the river. He raises her and they become devoted companions. He calls her by the only kind of name he can pronounce—‘Mumu’. All goes well for a time, but the little dog manages to offend the mistress and she orders them to get rid of the spaniel. The first attempt fails when Mumu, who has been sold down at the market without Gerasim's knowledge, chews through her rope and returns home. From then on he keeps her hidden away, but to no avail. The mistress discovers the trickery and now insists that the dog be put down. Rather than entrust this solemn task to anyone else Gerasim takes Mumu out on the river and drowns her himself. This is not quite the end of the story, however. Instead of returning home, Gerasim walks all the way back to his old village, and even the tyrannical mistress makes only the feeblest attempt to get him back. The embarrassing situation is, in any case, shortly resolved by the death of the old woman.

This ending is of critical importance, indicating as it does a kind of breaking-point beyond which even the traditionally submissive Russian serf cannot safely be pushed. For the middle-of-the-road Turgenev this is strong stuff, amounting almost to a prediction of revolution or even a disguised call to arms. He seems to be saying that Russian society must either mend its ways or risk pushing its lower orders eventually into determined resistance. With Mumu herself safely dispatched a little earlier, it is clear from this conclusion that we are dealing with something more than a lachrymose animal story. All the more important then that critics should get the details right. A. V. Knowles has things the wrong way round when he sets down Mumu as an example of ‘the admirable quiet submission of the Russian peasant to his unhappy lot’; it is not true that Gerasim, in his words, ‘continues to serve the widow faithfully despite her actions’.⁹ Similarly, Leonard Schapiro leads us in the wrong direction by this summary of the story: ‘The man drowns the dog, and after a period of wandering returns to his post and continues to serve his mistress.’¹⁰ He does no such thing. These writers have confused the real-life prototype, Andrei, with Turgenev's fictional character, Gerasim. Of the former we are told by Mme V. Zhitova, a ward of Turgenev's mother, that ‘Everyone knows the unhappy fate of Mumu, with this difference only, that the devotion of Andrew to his mistress remained unchanged … he loved her very much. He even forgave her for Mumu's death.’¹¹ Turgenev will have none of this. He tells us that when the old lady found out where Gerasim had gone ‘at first she gave orders for him to be sent straight back to Moscow; then she declared that such an ungrateful man was of no use whatever to her. However, she died soon after this. …’ Gerasim's defiance, and the old lady's unprecedented impotence in the face of it, are clearly expressed.

It may be seen from the circumstances under which the story was written, and the nature of the tale itself, that it bristles with dangers, political and artistic. Turgenev is not simply writing a story: he is wreaking vengeance upon the government and society that have afflicted him, taking issue with a sworn enemy—the system of serfdom, castigating his own mother for her well-documented brutality and dabbling in details with the most tremendous potential for sentimentality. Can it be possible for the literary art to survive and succeed in such adverse circumstances?

Some people have thought not. The story of Mumu has been neglected by most critics, usually being dismissed by them in a few passing words. One of the best known and most reliable among them, Prince Mirsky, however, claims that ‘Mumu … is a “philanthropic” story … where an intense sensation of pity is arrived at by methods that strike the modem reader as illegitimate, working on the nerves rather than on the imagination.’¹² The use of the word ‘modern’ here is interesting. It seems to suggest that new standards had come into literary criticism which might invalidate certain excesses to which earlier generations had been prone. And there were such apparent excesses. Annenkov, who attended the first reading, claimed that the story had a ‘truly moving effect because of its calm yet distressing narrative tone’;¹³ Herzen said that it made him tremble with rage¹⁴ and, in England, Christina Rossetti described it as ‘consummate, but so fearfully painful’¹⁵ and Thomas Carlyle went so far as to say it was the most beautiful and touching story he had ever read.¹⁶ How are we to decide whether Mirsky is right, or whether he has misread the story and undervalued it?

We must first acknowledge that ‘Mumu’ is an unusual creation for Ivan Turgenev. It is more energetic, filled with greater narrative interest and altogether more compelling than any of his other stories. It is not a love story tout court. It does not work with gradual persuasion on the reader's imagination and sensitivity, but rather commands attention. It is the strongest story that he ever wrote. There can be no doubt as to its ability to evoke powerful passions in its readers, now as then: pathos, hatred, admiration, disgust and fury. We may reasonably suggest that it does so by literary means which remain entirely legitimate, even for the so-called ‘modern reader’. If we are dealing with a strong story, skilfully told, also fulfilling a socio-political purpose and capable of moving the reader to a variety of passions, it may be that this is one of Turgenev's finest literary achievements.

Mirsky's point about ‘illegitimate’ narrative methods amounts to a suggestion that Turgenev works on the heartstrings of his readers (or his ‘nerves’) by exploiting sentimental material in a meretricious way. This is an unfair accusation—unless one is prepared to accept that the very choice of the subject matter is self-disqualifying. Turgenev's treatment of it can hardly be described as indelicate, insensitive or in any way cheap. To begin with, the story, despite its title, is not about Mumu; it is about Gerasim. The spaniel herself appears in less than half of the narrative. And the first purpose of the story is not to move us to tears: it is to mobilise all available narrative skill and literary art in order to expose the cruelty and injustice of contemporary Russian life. Thus the sad moments in the story—the destruction of Gerasim's relationship with Tatyana and the drowning of his dog—are not the reason for its existence nor its highest achievement: they are stages in a long, progressive argument. Turgenev has manifestly avoided the temptation to write a self-enclosed tear-jerker.

The same kind of discipline attends also the manner in which the story is told. Here there are two temptations to be resisted: the narrator must not overdo the pathos and must not overemphasise the social injustices which it is his aim to portray. Turgenev proceeds with the greatest of restraint. He adopts a narrative attitude which is light-hearted rather than portentous and he spares us details which a lesser artist might well have found irresistible. The casual tone is everywhere apparent. It is achieved by the narrator's renouncing of omniscience. ‘What they talked about is something we do not know …’, he admits on one occasion, and on others he shares a friendly generalisation with the reader, such as ‘To think what trifles will upset a person!’ or ‘But a man can get used to anything and …’, ‘Now you can understand why the butler was so upset …’ and so forth. The ordinariness and good sense of the narrator establish a tone of moderation from which there are no lapses, not even when the dirtiest of details have to be recounted. Gerasim's agonising move from the country to the town is expressed in the simplest of terms: ‘the mistress had him taken from the village where he lived alone’. Her unlimited power over all her vassals is never overstated. Referring to Kapiton, the shoemaker, she asks her butler ‘Now then, Gavrila—perhaps we ought to marry him off. What do you think?’ Gavrila says later to Kapiton ‘You don't get beaten enough!’ We learn that Gerasim was about to ask permission to marry Tatyana—not her permission but the mistress's. Tatyana herself submits to her marriage with eloquent taciturnity. When the experiment of reforming her husband fails we are simply told ‘Kapiton had gone to the dogs with his drinking and so, since he was a person of no use, he was despatched along with his wife on a convoy going to a remote village.’ Such instances could easily be multiplied. The moving around of ordinary people at the whim of their mistress, marrying them off, rearranging their personal destinies, ordering their punishment, the expecting and receiving of no opposition—all of this is depicted as lightly and easily as it came to the mistress herself, as if it were natural and normal. Not once does the narrator lose his temper, or even his objectivity. Thus the socio-political purpose which is the real point of the story achieves a tremendous thrust from the delicate artistry with which it is handled. Turgenev knows well that no argument gains by being overstated.

If he does not err in narrative manner, selection of detail or the pursuance of a political argument, does Turgenev perhaps fail in the characterisation of ‘Mumu’? Bryusov saw the difficulty here. ‘“Mumu”,’ he said, ‘[is] classically simple and clear; the only criticism to be made of it would be a tendency towards caricature in the figure of the mistress.’¹⁷ Yes indeed, and in some of the other characters, too. Tatyana stands for submissiveness, Kapiton for depraved conduct, the house doctor for sycophantic quackery, and so on. Perhaps they do tend towards the one-dimensional. They are, however, minor characters. If this had been a novel, no doubt Turgenev would have given us half a chapter on the doctor Khariton, nicely establishing him as a rounded figure. Instead, all we have is the following: ‘This doctor, whose entire art consisted in wearing soft-soled shoes, had a light touch when taking the pulse, slept fourteen hours a day and spent the rest of the time sighing and treating the mistress with drops of laurel water.’ This is not much of a character-sketch but what it loses in complexity or verisimilitude it gains in sheer flippancy—a much-needed commodity in a story of this nature. (There is, incidentally, a good deal of humour in ‘Mumu’, another of its saving graces, but, as is commonly the case elsewhere, Turgenev has been given little credit for it).

The major characters in this story—setting aside the eponymous spaniel—are Gerasim and the mistress. Is it possible to determine, in her case, whether ‘a tendency towards caricature’ ever becomes caricature itself? For that would also be an ‘illegitimate’ literary method and Mirsky's charge would be upheld. One suspects that the real-life Varvara Petrovna had her own very authentic tendency towards self-dramatisation, which must have been all too familiar to those who had to live with it but which must also have seemed over-dramatic to visiting outsiders. Are we really to believe that the mistress of this story—she is not named—displays a capriciousness or a cruelty beyond the reality on which she is founded? Edmund Wilson took her very seriously in his essay on Turgenev, and saw her as motivated in an entirely understandable way. ‘The bitterness of the mistress at not being loved herself’, he suggests, ‘figures here as a motive, and we appreciate the story more if we have some independent knowledge of Varvara Petrovna's life.’¹⁸

As for Gerasim, no one has ever seen fit to diminish his gigantic physical, moral or literary stature. His behaviour throughout this story, through one undeserved misadventure after another, is nothing short of magnificent. People expect him to display rage and tantrums, using some of that enormous energy to express his disappointment. He will not give them that satisfaction. His dignity and grandeur remain intact. Understated indications prove the depths of his emotion but neither he nor the narrator of his story is prepared to be belittled or cheapened by any overt display of feeling. On the cruel day of Tatyana's marriage to Kapiton we are told that ‘he did not change his deportment. Only he returned from the river without any water—somehow his barrel had got broken on the way. And that evening in the stable he brushed and wiped down his horse so vigorously that she swayed about like grass in the wind and rocked from one foot to another under his iron fists.’ Once again hints and suggestions stand in place of turgid explication, and understatement serves the story well. Gerasim is an unusual character, but his reality has never been questioned. He is one of Turgenev's greatest successes in characterisation, belonging to that gallery of archetypes by which this writer's name is known, an equal to Rudin, Bazarov, Lukerya, the Hamlets and Don Quixotes whom he depicted in such elemental and substantive terms. Ivan Aksakov saw Gerasim as a metaphorical representation of the Russian people, filled with a terrifying energy, yet impotent and inarticulate.¹⁹ In a broader sense he stands for the rare human capacity to withstand adversity with dignity and to wait for the proper moment and manner to resist.

Mumu herself presents no problem. We have seen in some detail the extent of Turgenev's expertise in the matter of dogs. Without going into further detail we may state with every confidence that each particularity of Mumu's character and behaviour is accurately represented. Perhaps it is the very introduction of a dog as a central character that Mirsky regards as an illegitimate method. The danger arises from the likelihood of exaggerated sentimentality or anthropomorphism. The facts are simple. Ivan Turgenev knew his dogs so well and brought them into his work with such frequency that he is on the surest of grounds. He simply did not sentimentalise his dogs, in real life or in literature, and his only anthropomorphism is that small amount which is cultivated, as we all recognise, by dogs themselves. Thus it emerges that the chief qualities of this story—its restraint, light tone, mild and sad humour, and the certainty deriving from Turgenev's close personal knowledge of the actual protagonists, including the dog—safely discharge the tension of embarrassment or prurience which might build up if a lesser artist were to approach the same subject. Even the details of those awful, last-minute preparations made by Gerasim, grooming his dog and giving her a final meal, and the sparing account of the actual execution on the river, are so authentic, economical and under-assertive that they pass before us without the slightest trace of bad taste. With all the respect due to a great man, Mirsky here is barking up the wrong tree.

This story is not about dogs. It is about unfair arrangements in human society, the abuse of power, the need for humanitarian generosity, the inevitability of suffering while we wait for that to emerge, and the hope of dignity while ever adversity has to be endured. If the story has been neglected, this may be because it is far from typical of the Turgenev with whom we are familiar. It is more energetic, suspenseful and optimistic than anything else he wrote. It is also full of literary quality.

When Turgenev died, a hundred and ten years ago, he was remembered by many people in Britain who had come to know him personally or by reputation. One of the wreaths which found its way to Russia to be placed upon his grave was addressed ‘To the author of “Moomoo”’. It was sent by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.²⁰ If these well-meaning people seriously believed that ‘Mumu’ was written with something like their own purposes in mind they were mistaken. If, on the other hand, they wished merely to pay tribute to one of Russia's greatest writers, who was also a great dog-lover and more successful than any other at incorporating dogs and using them in his work, the committee members who sent the wreath were not far from the truth.

Notes

1. In 1983 the centenary of Turgenev's death was marked at a weekend conference of the British Universities Association of Slavists at the University of Liverpool. This paper was given on that occasion, but not published. It is now re-presented to mark the 110th anniversary.

2. Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and England, New York University Press, New York, 1981, p.24.

3. See footnote to Pegaz, the last essay in Litiraturnyi i zitijsкii vоspоminaniy; Turgenev, Sоbranii sоcininij, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, Moscow, 1962, Vol.10, p.192.

4. Ibid. An excellent translation of this essay (Pégas) may be found in David Magarshack (translator and editor), Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, Faber & Faber, London, 1957, pp.238-44.

5. Op.cit., p.192 (Magarshack, p.238).

6. Ibid., p.197 (Magarshack, p.244).

7. A. Kuprin, A Slav Soul and Other Stories, Constable, London, 1916, p.x.

8. See, for example, Frank Friedeberg Seeley, Turgenev: A Reading of his Fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp.258-62.

9. A. V. Knowles, Ivan Turgenev, Twayne, Boston, 1988, pp.40-41.

10. Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978, p.86.

11. V. Zhitova, The Turgenev Family, Harvill Press, London, 1947, pp.87 and 89.

12. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, Knopf, New York, 1972, p.189.

13. See N. Bogoslovsky, Zizns zamicatilsnyk lydij: Turginiv, Molodaya gvardiya, Moscow, 1964, p.186.

14. I. S. Turgenev, Sоbranii sоcininij, Vol.5, p.331.

15. Waddington, op.cit., p.197.

16. Ibid.,p.87.

17. V. Bryusov, letter of 25 July 1896, in M. P. Alekseyev, ed., Turginiv i igо sоvriminniкi, Nauka, Leningrad, 1977, p.179.

18. Edmund Wilson, ‘Turgenev and the Life-giving Drop’, in Magarshack, op.cit., p.21.

19. Quoted in Schapiro, op.cit., p.88.

20. A. Yarmolinsky, Turgenev: The Man, his Art and his Age, Collier, New York, 1961, p.368.