SOURCE: Lowe, David A. “Turgenev and the Critics.” In Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev, pp. 1-15. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

[In the following essay, Lowe provides an overview of the critical response to Turgenev's work.]

TURGENEV AND THE CRITICS

As an artist, Ivan Turgenev has long since acquired the reputation of an apostle of moderation. As Dmitry Merezhkovsky noted in a presentation delivered in 1909, “In Russia, in a land of every sort of maximalism, revolutionary and religious, a land of self-immolations, a land of the most frenzied excesses, Turgenev is practically our only genius of the right measure after Pushkin. …”¹ Predictably, however, especially in a Russian context, Turgenev's perceived moderation and minimalism evoked extreme responses in his lifetime and continue to produce partisan reactions even today.

The major issues in Turgenev criticism revolve around a few fundamental polarities, most of them interrelated and several of them having perhaps more to do with Turgenev's biography than with his art. One area of dispute concerns Turgenev's perceived, alleged, or proclaimed geopolitical stance with regard to Russia's centuries-old uncertainty about her national identity. The question may be summarized as Turgenev the Russian versus Turgenev the European. During Turgenev's lifetime, Western Europe generally saw him as piquantly Russian, while as far as someone like Dostoevsky was concerned, Turgenev compromised himself all the way around by showing a slavish devotion to Europe, especially to Germany. By regularly emphasizing Russia's status as a European nation, Turgenev himself strove for a synthesis on this point, but few of his critics have shown a desire to erase any boundaries, metaphoric or real, between Europe and Russia.

Although Turgenev always described himself as apolitical, a second, related motif in the literature about him emphasizes his political sympathies. Dostoevsky, for instance, saw Turgenev as an archetypical Westernizing Russian liberal of the 1840s. As part of his dramatization of the thesis that the liberals of Turgenev's generation had given metaphoric birth to the radicals and revolutionaries of the 1860s, Dostoevsky lampooned Turgenev in at least two characters in The Possessed—Karmazinov, the “famous writer,” and the elder Verkhovensky, an amoral, fatuous windbag. A quite contrary view of Turgenev's politics informs a Soviet article from the 1950s, wherein the author maintains that Soviet children should not be encouraged to read a novel as reactionary as Fathers and Sons.²

In his remarks on Turgenev, Merezhkovsky makes use of one of his favorite devices, the paradox, to explain the contradictory readings of Turgenev's political stance: “Turgenev, as opposed to our great creators and destroyers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is our only guardian, our only conservative, and like any true conservative, is at the same time a liberal” (58). Few other of Turgenev's critics have attempted to see both sides of this question, and much commentary on Turgenev, especially in the nineteenth century, assigns the writer praise or blame on the primary basis of the presumed political judgments expressed overtly or implicitly in specific works.

Whether Turgenev even lends himself to discussion in terms of geography or politics depends on the resolution of another major question in Turgenev criticism, namely, that of the nature of his subject matter. Critics tend to operate from one or the other of two presumptions—either that Turgenev's works reproduce Russian reality or that his writings reflect and treat universal, timeless human concerns. In the past century, critics of virtually all stripes paid the greatest heed to those works inviting or at least permitting discussion based on perceived similarities or discrepancies between the world portrayed in them and Russia at large. In practice, that meant a primary focus on the cycle Notes of a Hunter and on Turgenev's six novels. Few critics took cognizance of Turgenev's poetry, short stories, and plays, all of which offer relatively ungrateful material for interpreters who see literature as a branch of photojournalism.

An allied topic contrasts Turgenev the novelist with Turgenev the short story writer, poet, or playwright. During his lifetime, Turgenev's acclaim, though certainly due in no small part to Notes of a Hunter, ultimately rested on his novels. Since then, however, many of his stories and at least one of his plays, A Month in the Country, have captured the serious attention of both the critics and the public. Indeed, in the twentieth century, as influential a critic as D. S. Mirsky has argued that the sociopolitical aspect of Turgenev's oeuvre, the “stuffing” in his novels, has grown more and more stale, while the essential poetry and lyricism, especially of the stories, emerge with a freshness and purity that earlier critical stances and readers' attitudes in fact hindered.³ Not everyone would agree with that assessment, of course, and Turgenev's novels continue to generate studies with such titles as “Turgenev: The Politics of Hesitation.”⁴

A fifth major controversy in the literature about Turgenev arises from disagreement over whether Turgenev's manner of writing represents realism or something other than realism. In the Anglophone world, such influential critics as William Dean Howells and Henry James promoted Turgenev as a founding father of realism. Until quite recently, Soviet criticism, which made a fetish of realism and treated romanticism as an ideological malady not far removed from outright sedition, also proclaimed Turgenev one of the fountainheads of Russian realism. Many of Turgenev's contemporaries, however, observed that his art had deep roots in romanticism, a fact that Western scholarship has begun emphasizing in the last twenty years or so. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the twentieth century several Russian poets and prose writers of the modernist persuasion cited Turgenev as an important influence on their styles or themes. Contemporary Turgenev scholarship continues to try to distinguish the romantic or symbolist from the realistic elements in Turgenev's style. As a consequence, few critics nowadays, even in the Soviet Union, label Turgenev a realist without swathing that epithet in several layers of qualifications.

Although modern literary theory has considerably discredited the notion of style and content as discrete entities, much Turgenev criticism continues the nineteenth-century tradition of distinguishing the medium from the message in Turgenev's works. Radical critics in Turgenev's day almost completely discounted questions of style, while the so-called aesthetic critics discussed the perceived apparatus of Turgenev's art. In the early decades of this century, the Russian Formalists penned several important studies of Turgenev's poetry, plays, stories, and novels that evince little or no interest in hermeneutics, while post-Formalist criticism has tended to concern itself with the political, sociological, historical, or philosophical contexts of Turgenev's writings. In short, Turgenev criticism remains divided over what matters more in Turgenev's oeuvre—the “how” or the “what.” Turgenev himself wanted it both ways. In the foreword to his novels he maintains that in art the question of how is always more important than the question of what, but he also averred that there were times in the life of a nation when art had to give way to other, more important considerations.

A final major point of contention concerns Turgenev's general merit as a writer. Although his reputation both at home and abroad fluctuated dramatically during the major part of his career, by the end of his life the world at large had declared Turgenev a classic. Almost immediately upon his death, however, voices began to question the scale and relevance of Turgenev's art. Merezhkovsky summed up the situation in the early years of the twentieth century: “Turgenev, they say, is outmoded. The two gigantic caryatids of Russian literature—Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—really have overshadowed Turgenev for us. Forever? For long? Aren't we fated to return to him through them?” (58). Merezhkovsky's queries remain very much to the point today. Critics continue to argue about whether Turgenev belongs to the ranks of the geniuses or the journeymen.

All the polarities that shape discussion of Turgenev have their precedents in nineteenth-century criticism. Twentieth-century histories of Russian literary criticism generally identify three major groupings or schools of Russian criticism in the last century: radicals, conservatives, and aesthetic critics. These designations, a product of Russian cultural history and Soviet literary historiography, clearly demonstrate the confusion between political journalism and literary art characteristic of much nineteenth-century Russian writing about belles lettres. Furthermore, these conventional labels conceal important similarities between the radicals and conservatives and differences within individual camps. Nonetheless, as with the equally problematic terms realism and romanticism, the notion of nineteenth-century Russian critics as radicals, conservatives, or aesthetes has become such a fixture of literary discussion that it makes more sense to draw on it, albeit with reservations and disclaimers, than to attempt an entirely new system of classification.

In Soviet parlance the tag “radical democrats” almost always accompanies the radical critics. By and large, these literary commentators exerted the greatest influence of any critics of the age, and their views and general approach to literature have played a decisive role in the evolution of Soviet criticism as well. Few Soviet sources make any attempt to conceal the favored status granted the radicals. On the contrary, reference works often force the radicals upon the reading public in the same unsubtle way that Stalin made the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky a secular icon by dubbing him the “best and most talented poet” of the era and declaring indifference to his memory a crime. In Ye. Yefimov's I. S. Turgenev: Seminar, for instance, a standard guide for teachers, mention of nineteenth-century criticism of On the Eve is accompanied by the following unambiguous note of caution: “The treatment of the question of the appraisal of On the Eve by reactionary and liberal critics is to be limited to a few examples. The main attention is to be devoted to the criticism of the revolutionary democrats.”⁵

The radical critics generally continued a mode and style of civic-minded criticism founded by Turgenev's friend and mentor, Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48). In Turgenev's mind, and not only in his, Belinsky represented many of the noblest strivings and best traits of the “men of the 1840s.” That term, crucially important for any survey of the evolution of Russian culture in the last century, refers to the educated Russians of Turgenev and Belinsky's generation, men who helped shape modern Russian culture. Although the generation of the 1840s embraced both conservatives and revolutionaries, Slavophiles and Westernizers, theologians and atheists, virtually all the movers and shakers of the era shared a gentry provenance (the plebeian Belinsky being a major exception) and a dual commitment to art and the life of the mind. Thanks to their immersion in German idealism, the men of the 1840s in fact viewed art as the primary vehicle for describing and understanding the world.

Belinsky occasionally showed remarkable acumen, especially in spotting the talent of Lermontov, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev early on. One cannot overlook several lamentable aspects of his legacy, however. He boasted a leaden style, and as Mirsky observed, “It was Belinsky, more than anyone else, who poisoned literature by the itch for expressing ideas, which has survived so woefully long” (175). Mirsky means the Russian tendency, especially pronounced in the nineteenth century, to attempt to compensate for the lack of a free press by using writing about literature as an Aesopian forum, or even pulpit, from which to address the burning issues of the day. In this connection, a remark that Pushkin made in 1820 bears repeating: “We have literature of a sort, but we have no criticism.”⁶ Pushkin's complaint remained largely valid for the rest of the century. Russia's literary criticism, particularly in the nineteenth century and especially as practiced by Belinsky and his heirs, often reads like what the rest of the world would probably consider heavily politicized journalism on mostly nonliterary topics.

In his “Recollections of Belinsky,” Turgenev had the following to say about Belinsky's attitude toward his works: “As for me, I have to say that after the first salute that he made to my literary activity, he rather soon—and quite rightly—grew cold toward it; he could not have encouraged me in the composition of those verses and narrative poems which I had given myself up to at that time.”⁷ Turgenev is referring here to Belinsky's initial enthusiasm for such works as Parasha (1843), which the critic praised for their appeal to the intellect (the dread “ideas” to which Mirsky alludes) and for their “hints at Russian life.”⁸

As for Belinsky's reaction to Turgenev's first efforts in prose, Turgenev recalls: “Although he was more satisfied with my prose works, he placed no special hopes on me” (Vol. 14, 52). Turgenev somewhat understates the case here. Belinsky in fact identified the initial sketches of Notes of a Hunter as among the best works of 1847 and argued that in them Turgenev had “approached the people [the peasantry] from a side from which no one before him had yet approached them.”⁹ Moreover, said Belinsky in a letter to Turgenev, the sketch “Khor and Kalinych” showed Turgenev's “true forte.”¹⁰ In the final analysis, however, Belinsky left no significant critical writing about Turgenev, and his views had no appreciable influence on the poetry and short stories that Turgenev produced during Belinsky's sadly short life. In his novels, however, whose appearance Belinsky did not live to see, Turgenev clearly heeded Belinsky's implicit demand for a socially conscious art. Turgenev admitted as much when he dedicated his supreme novelistic achievement, Fathers and Sons, to Belinsky.

While Belinsky distinguished art from bald propaganda, such was not the case with his spiritual progeny of the 1850s and 1860s, Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828-89), Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836-61), and Dmitry Pisarev (1840-68), who lacked Belinsky's grounding in German idealism. The evolution of the radicals' views on art, from the stingy utilitarianism propounded by Chernyshevsky in his notorious M.A. thesis, “The Aesthetic Relation between Art and Reality,” to the wholesale destruction of aesthetics undertaken by Pisarev, follows an ascending curve of violence to the very concept of art as a legitimate form of human expression. Chernyshevsky launched the assault on art by declaring it at best a substitute for reality, and Pisarev brought the naive savagery to a simple-minded logical conclusion by declaring chemists always more useful than poets.

The arrival of the radicals on the literary scene in the late 1850s produced a dramatic change in the critical reception of Turgenev's works. Until then his stories and novels had garnered generally admiring reviews, but as a consequence of the radicalization of educated Russian society, Turgenev's works suddenly became the subject of vituperative polemical articles. Chernyshevsky's major contribution to the fray, a review of the story Asya (1858), bore the title “A Russian at the Rendezvous.”¹¹ Although Chernyshevsky sometimes showed himself capable of genuine insights into specific works of literature, especially Tolstoy's trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, “A Russian at the Rendezvous” sheds no light at all on Turgenev's story. Instead, in a manner typical of Russian literary criticism at its most irrelevant, this classic article uses Turgenev's utterly apolitical story as an opportunity to flail liberals in general and Turgenev in particular.

René Wellek points out that Chernyshevsky's junior colleague and protégé, Dobrolyubov, applied Chernyshevsky's views on aesthetics more systematically than did the senior critic himself.¹² As a consequence, Dobrolyubov occupies a position, modest, to be sure, in the evolution of a sociology of literature. In his articles he often dwelt on the differences between two generations of the Russian intelligentsia: the men of the 1840s and those of the 1860s. In Dobrolyubov's opinion, the representatives of Turgenev's generation suffered from a fatal attraction to endless and pointless philosophizing, while the radicals of the 1860s felt that the time had come to translate words into acts. In just that spirit Dobrolyubov wrote his most famous piece on Turgenev, a review of the novel On the Eve bearing the title “When Will the Real Day Come?”¹³

The hero of On the Eve, Insarov, is a Bulgarian freedom fighter. Reading Turgenev's novel as a documentary record of social history, Dobrolyubov accuses Turgenev's generation of an inability to produce men of action and resolve such as Insarov. In a passage that invites interpretation as a call to revolution, Dobrolyubov predicts the imminent appearance of a Russian Insarov:

We shall not have to wait long for him; the feverishly painful impatience with which we are expecting his appearance in real life is the guarantee of this. We need him; without him our lives seem to be wasted, and every day means nothing in itself, but is only the eve of another day. That day will come at last! At all events, the eve is never far from the next day; only a matter of one night separates them.

(226)

Of the radical critics of the 1850s and 1860s who addressed themselves to Turgenev's works, Pisarev alone demonstrated genuine insight. For all his usual extremism and iconoclasm, Pisarev's “Realists” and “Bazarov,” both about Fathers and Sons, offer observations about the novel and its protagonists that even today may be accepted almost without reservation.¹⁴ Pisarev understands, for instance, that as personalities, the nihilist Bazarov and the aristocrat Pavel Petrovich “are made of the same material.”¹⁵ More importantly, Pisarev sees what escaped many of his contemporaries—that the question of where Turgenev's sympathies lie in the novel lacks a pat answer.

All in all, in fact, Pisarev's articles on Fathers and Sons rank among the best nineteenth-century criticism of the work. Nevertheless, it should be noted that by their very perspicacity, “Realists” and “Bazarov” represent an exception within Pisarev's oeuvre, most of which sacrifices profundity for effect. Generally speaking, the radicals' criticism of Turgenev tells one much more about Russian cultural history than about Turgenev's works. However, an acquaintance with Chernyshevsky's and Dobrolyubov's otherwise irrelevant pieces on Turgenev serves as a valuable introduction to twentieth-century Turgenev criticism, much of which either continues the traditions of civic criticism or, conversely, rejects them in a frankly polemical manner.

The refusal to treat Turgenev's works as sociopolitical documents had its advocates among Turgenev's own contemporaries. By concentrating on Turgenev's stories of the 1850s and 1860s, the most important of the aesthetic critics, Alexander Druzhinin (1824-64), Vasily Botkin (1810-69), and Pavel Annenkov (1812-87)—all friends of Turgenev's—tried to divorce his art from politics. Druzhinin's major effort in that direction, the long article “Stories and Tales by I. Turgenev” (1857), attempts to counter earlier readings of Turgenev by radical critics or critics close to the radicals. Drawing on the nineteenth-century cliché that inanely dubbed Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) an art-for-art's sake poet devoid of a civic conscience and Nikolay Gogol (1809-52) a nitty-gritty realist, Druzhinin maintains that critics writing before him

… see a realist artist in the most charming idealist and dreamer who has ever appeared among us. They hail a creator of objective works in a person full of lyricism and impetuous, uneven subjectivity in his art. They dream of a continuer of Gogol in a person raised on Pushkin's poetry and too poetic to seriously tackle the role of anyone's continuer. … They expected from him what he could not give; they were not satisfied with what of his could and should have given true pleasure. …¹⁶

In Druzhinin's conception, then, Turgenev emerges as a pure artist unsullied by and unsuited for any sociopolitical orientation.

Annenkov shares with Druzhinin a determination to disassociate Turgenev's art from any burning social issues. In spite of the title of his “About Thought in Works of Fiction (Remarks on the Latest Works of Turgenev and Tolstoy)” (1855), Annenkov's article in fact analyzes Turgenev's poetics. Focusing on the stories from the 1850s, Annenkov distinguishes a new subtlety in Turgenev's art, a transformation that Turgenev himself was to describe as a move away from his “old manner” to “a new one.” Annenkov finds the growing sophistication of Turgenev's narrative technique especially apparent in rounded characterization, gentle humor, and all-embracing lyricism.¹⁷ Annenkov's observation has since become a cliché of Turgenev criticism, as has the remark, made in another article from 1855, that Turgenev's lyricism bears comparison with that of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73): “He [Turgenev] is a poet of the sun, summer, and only somewhat of autumn, just like Mr. Tyutchev, with whom he has much in common in his view of nature and his understanding of it.”¹⁸

Unlike aesthetic critics such as Druzhinin and Annenkov, who rejected the notion of Turgenev as an ideological writer, conservative critics did not dispute the radicals' contention that Turgenev's works encapsulated specific ideas and ideologies. The most important of these conservative critics, Apollon Grigoriev (1822-64) and Nikolay Strakhov (1828-95), represented a school of thought known as pochvennichestvo. This term, created from the Russian word pochva, “soil,” lacks any reasonable English equivalent but suggests links both with nature and with one's native soil. Attempting to reconcile Westernizing and Slavophile strands in Russian culture, the theorists of pochvennichestvo, who included Dostoevsky, drew on Belinsky's organic view of aesthetics, itself a heritage of German idealism, in their conception of a work of art as a biological organism of sorts, and of art in general as a way of understanding life and the world.¹⁹

Despite its considerable longueurs, Grigoriev's classic “A Nest of Gentlefolk by Ivan Turgenev” remains one of the most insightful nineteenth-century articles on the writer.²⁰ In charting the evolution of Turgenev's art, Grigoriev identifies important early influences on the writer, especially romanticism and the so-called natural school. Of the Russian romantics, Grigoriev points to Mikhail Lermontov and his hero Pechorin, from the novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), as especially significant sources of inspiration for Turgenev. The natural school, its role, and, indeed, its very existence, have become topics open to considerable debate among twentieth-century scholars and critics. Nonetheless, for Grigoriev the term clearly refers to Russian writers of the 1840s whose works echoed Gogol's. First among them, at least as far as posterity is concerned, is Dostoevsky, and Grigoriev anticipated twentieth-century scholarship that has drawn attention to the links between Turgenev's early works and Dostoevsky's.

The ideologist in Grigoriev comes to the fore when he analyzes Lavretsky, the hero of A Nest of Gentlefolk. In Grigoriev's treatment, Lavretsky's return from abroad to his family estate represents an instance of pochvennichestvo in action. All in all, Grigoriev sees Lavretsky as an authentic and positive Russian type. Both conservative and radical critics indulged in a nearly fanatical pursuit of positive heroes in works of literature, by the way, and they bequeathed this naive but potentially dangerous sport to socialist realism and its commentators.

Strakhov made his most important contribution to Turgenev criticism with a brilliant analysis of Fathers and Sons originally published in Dostoevsky's journal Time.²¹ In his lengthy review, Strakhov insists that Turgenev's poetic novel treats life, not politics, that it rises out of the particular to address the universal. Strakhov does not deny that Turgenev's poetry has ideological overtones, however. True to pochvennichestvo, Strakhov sees Fathers and Sons as a dramatization of the triumph of living life over arid theory: “Turgenev stands for the eternal foundations of human life, for those basic elements which may perpetually change their forms, but in essence always remain unchanged.”²² Here Strakhov admires both Turgenev's artistry and his ideological commitments, but that was not always so. Elsewhere Strakhov applauds the novelist's talent but deplores his Westernizing Weltanschauung.²³

The division of critics into radicals, aesthetes and conservatives reflects the overheated political climate of the 1860s. In that decade and atmosphere, Turgenev's determination to remain an ostensibly objective artist-observer made him enemies on virtually all sides. The publication of Fathers and Sons in 1862, a novel now generally regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of Russian literature, spelled the end of Turgenev's popularity in Russia for nearly two decades, until the very last years of his life.

While Turgenev's reputation suffered in his homeland, however, it gained considerably abroad. Turgenev in fact was gaining an international following—the first Russian writer ever to do so. In 1869, writing to Pyotr Vasiliev, the compiler of A Bibliographical Note on Translations of I. S. Turgenev's Works into Foreign Languages (Kazan, 1868), Turgenev noted:

Almost everything that I have written has been translated into French, under various titles. Besides Notes of a Hunter, A Nest of Gentlefolk, about ten stories, as well as Smoke, have been translated into German; the bookseller Behre in Riga has begun an edition of selected works of mine—the first volume includes Fathers and Sons, the second—“An Unfortunate Girl” and three other stories. Notes of a Hunter, Smoke, Fathers and Sons, and A Nest of Gentlefolk, have been translated into English. … Smoke and Fathers and Sons have been translated into Dutch; Smoke, A Nest of Gentlefolk, and several stories—into Swedish; a few stories have been translated into Czech, Serbian, and Hungarian. I have also been informed that Notes of a Hunter has been translated into Spanish and will soon be published. …²⁴

Toward the end of his life, Turgenev was gratified to see his reputation in Russia recover. By the late 1870s, Russian readers, critics, and the public in general reacted to his person and works at least with respect, and often with exaltation. On his visits to Russia in 1879, 1880, and 1881, Turgenev found large, enthusiastic crowds turning out for his readings. Upon his death, commentators both at home and abroad mourned the passing of one of the very greatest writers of the age.

In France, where Turgenev had enjoyed cordial relations with the literary community, especially in the last two decades of his life, Melchior de Vogüé's Le roman russe (1886) served to alert the non-Russian world in general to the virtues of Russian novelists, Turgenev not the least among them. The French critic especially admired the compassion that Turgenev demonstrated in his works and which seemed so lacking in French works of the era.²⁵ Writing at approximately the same time, Paul Bourget, in his Essais de psychologie contemporaine, generally agreed with de Vogüé about the essential healthiness of Turgenev's literary world. True, Bourget saw Turgenev as disillusioned, weak-willed, and pessimistic, but not decadent and despairing.²⁶

In the Anglophone world, the evolution of American and English critical attitudes toward Turgenev displayed an affinity to the contrapuntal pattern known as contrary motion. The elevation of Turgenev to the ranks of the classics occurred first of all thanks to American critics. As Royal Gettmann has demonstrated, until the mid-1880s, English critics either remained indifferent to Turgenev or treated his writings not as works of literature but as sources of documentary information about Russian life.²⁷ Meanwhile, in the United States, critics took an intense interest in Turgenev from the early 1870s on. Gettmann observes: “They approached the novels … as serious, artistic narratives. … In the effort to refine public taste and to raise the level of fiction, a group of writers associated with W. D. Howells deduced from the works of Turgenev a form of the novel they called ‘dramatic.’ This anticipated in several respects—withdrawal of the author, singleness of theme, restriction of time and place—the ‘well-made’ or ‘dramatic novel’ described by Percy Lubbock and J. W. Beach” (185).²⁸ Adding to the American chorus of praise for a great realist, Henry James, in the 1880s and 1890s, published several famous appreciations of Turgenev. Summing up his art, which James admired for its subtle combination of moral vigor and refined technique, James wrote: “Turgenev is in a peculiar degree what I may call the novelists' novelist,—an artistic influence extraordinarily valuable and ineradicably established.”²⁹

In spite of the advocacy of such an influential figure as James, however, Turgenev's reputation in the United States began to slip from the 1890s on, as the novels of his great contemporaries—first Tolstoy, then Dostoevsky—became generally known. Meanwhile, in England, as though to make up for earlier ill-use, and no doubt taking the lead from James, critics and fellow novelists created a veritable Turgenev cult. To quote Gettmann again: “The English were compelled to admit the sickly condition of their fiction, and they could no longer deny the existence of French realism. Using Turgenev as a shield against the French, the English moved toward what I have called the post-Victorian compromise—an ideal which accommodated Flaubert's care for art with Russian concern for the spirit” (186). As examples of the reverence with which Turgenev was treated, one might cite Arnold Bennett, who applauded Turgenev for having “uttered the last word of pure artistry,”³⁰ or Ford Madox Ford, who opined: “We are pretty certain that Turgenev was greater than Shakespeare … his characters are more human than Shakespeare's were.”³¹

In the years following World War I, the English at last joined in the reappraisal long since under way in America. Turgenev was measured against other Russian writers and found wanting. Often asking of him and his art what neither could give or even intended to, critics expressed doubts about Turgenev's reliability as a social historian, a hunger for richer subject matter, and objections to Turgenev's pessimism.

A reevaluation of Turgenev's art by Russian critics paralleled the one that occurred abroad. This reorientation was accomplished in two stages, both of which went against the traditional notion of Turgenev as a realist concerned with depicting Russian social reality. In the first, critics and writers associated with the turn-of-the-century phenomenon known in Russian cultural history as decadence or symbolism, claimed Turgenev as their own.³² In a famous programmatic article, “On the Reasons for the Decline of and the New Currents in Contemporary Russian Literature” (1893), Merezhkovsky identified three basic elements of the new art—mystical content, symbols, and a wider vision of reality—that are foreshadowed in Turgenev's works.³³ The poet Konstantin Balmont declared that symbolist poetry owed its primary inspiration to Turgenev:

The path from Pushkin to the refined and tender poetry of our days runs not so much through Lermontov and Nekrasov, not so much even through the sternly nocturnal Tyutchev and the starry-glowing Fet, as precisely through Turgenev, who educated our language, our singing reverie, who taught us to understand, through beautiful lover, that the best and truest essence … in art is the Maiden-Woman.³⁴

Other critics noted an affinity between symbolist prose and Turgenev's Poems in Prose and so-called mysterious tales. In general, symbolism and decadence proclaimed Turgenev a kindred spirit by focusing on his stories and ignoring the novels.

The second stage of reorientation came with Russian Formalism, a school of criticism that came to the fore at approximately the time of World War I and exerted an overwhelming influence on Russian criticism until the mid-1930s.³⁵ Generally speaking, the Formalists went against the nineteenth-century tradition of literary criticism as civic-minded journalism. In place of politicized commentary more or less totally divorced from the text, the Formalists hoped to forge an exact science based on close—even microscopic—attention to the text. In the process, the Formalists made many important contributions to the fields of literary theory, literary history, comparative literature, and the sociology of literature. In the case of Turgenev criticism, the Formalists and critics closely allied to the Formalists adopted a frankly polemical stance toward one of the most sacred tenets of nineteenth-century Turgenev criticism by flatly denying that Turgenev pursued political goals in his art. Having attempted to sweep that notion aside, Formalist critics went on to produce landmark studies of Turgenev's technique in the novel and short story and magisterial works on Turgenev's place in the evolution of Russian and European literature.

In the years since World War II Turgenev criticism, both in the Soviet Union and abroad, has proceeded along the parallel tracks of formal analysis and more or less traditional literary scholarship. The formal studies have forced a reappraisal of the nature of Turgenev's realism and an accompanying reinterpretation of many of this works. Scholars have made tremendous strides in the areas of textology and biography. The major achievements in this regard are the two complete editions of Turgenev works and letters undertaken by Leningrad's Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), the first completed in 1968, the second in progress. Such scholarly largesse is entirely unprecedented, even for the Soviet Union. It testifies, however, to the continuing vitality of Turgenev criticism and scholarship in the late twentieth century. Turgenev's reputation may not be what it once was, but to judge by both the quantity and the quality of criticism published in the major European languages over the last few decades, the awareness that Turgenev is not a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky has hardly spelled an end to the attraction that one of Russia's finest artists holds for critics. On the contrary, the healthy state of Turgenev criticism merely confirms the accuracy of Mirsky's assessment that it is “impossible to imagine a time when ‘The Singers,’ ‘A Quiet Spot,’ First Love, or Fathers and Sons will cease to be among the most cherished of joys to Russian readers” (208). One can only assume that Mirsky did not consciously intend to exclude non-Russians from the ranks of Turgenev's future admirers, because as we approach the twenty-first century, Turgenev's appeal has never seemed more universal and timeless.

Notes

1. D. S. Merezhkovsky, “Turgenev,” vol. 18, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Sytin, 1914), 58; hereafter cited in the text.

2. V. Arkhipov, “K tvorcheskoy istorii romana I. S. Turgeneva Ottsy i deti,” Russkaya literatura 1 (1958):132-62. For a discussion of Arkhipov's article and published responses to it by Soviet critics and scholars, see Zbigniew Folejewski, “The Recent Storm around Turgenev as a Point in Soviet Aesthetics,” Slavic and East European Journal 6, no. 1 (1962):21-27.

3. See D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Knopf, 1958), 207; hereafter cited in the text.

4. Irving Howe, “Turgenev: The Politics of Hesitation,” in Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), 129-33.

5. Ye. Yefimov, I. S. Turgenev: Seminar (Leningrad: Gosuchpedizdat, 1958), 131.

6. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1956-58), 145.

7. I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, vol. 14 (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960-68), 52; hereafter cited in text.

8. See Turgenev, vol. 1, 506, 515.

9. See Turgenev, vol. 4, 494, 511.

10. V. G. Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1956), 336.

11. An English translation of Chernyshevsky's “A Russian at the Rendez-vous” is included in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov, Selected Criticism, ed. Ralph Matlaw (New York: Dutton, 1962), 108-29.

12. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 4, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 249.

13. An English translation of Dobrolyubov's “When Will the Real Day Come?” may be found in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov, 176-226; hereafter cited in the text.

14. A substantial excerpt from “Bazarov,” translated into English by Lydia Hooke, may be found in Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, edited with a substantially new translation by Ralph Matlaw (New York: Norton, 1966), 195-218.

15. D. I. Pisarev, “Realisty,” in Bazarov; Realisty (Moscow: Khodozhestvennaya literatura, 1974), 109.

16. Alexander Druzhinin, “Povesti i rasskazy I. Turgeneva,” Sobranie sochinenni, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akademii nauk, 1865-67), 288.

17. See Pavel Annenkov, “O mysli v proizvedeniyakh izyashchnoy slovesnostyi (Zametki po povodu poslednikh proizvendenii g. Turgeneva i. L. N. T.),” Sovremennik (1855): section 3, 10-11.

18. Annenkov, in Sovremennik no. 1 (1855), quoted in Sobranie kriticheskikh materialov dlya izucheniya proizvedenii I. S. Turgeneva vol. 1, ed. V. Zelinsky (Moscow: Tipografiya Malinskogo, 1884), 111. For Annenkov in English, see the memoirs The Extraordinary Decade, ed. Arthur Mendel, trans. Irwin Titunik (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), and the 1858 article “The Literary Type of the Weak Man (Apropos of Turgenev's Story ‘Asya’),” trans. Tatiana Goerner, Ulbandus Review 1, no. 1 (Fall 1977):90-104, and 2, no. 2 (Spring 1978):74-85.

19. On Belinsky, Grigoriev, and Strakhov as organic critics, see Victor Terras, Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 99.

20. Apollon Grigoriev, “Dvoryanskoe gnezdo I. S. Turgeneva,” Russkoe slovo, nos. 4, 5, 6, 8 (1859); for an English translation, see A. A. Grigor'ev, “A Nest of Gentlefolk by Ivan Turgenev,” in Literature and National Identity, trans. and ed. by Paul Debreczeny and Jesse Zeldin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 65-118.

21. Nikolay Strakhov, “Ottsy i deti,” Vremya no. 4 (1862); for a substantial excerpt from the article, in an English translation by Ralph Matlaw, see Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 218-29.

22. Strakhov, quoted in O Turgenev: Russkaya i inostrannaya kritika, ed. P. P. Pertsov (Moscow: Kooperativnoe izd., 1918), 42-43.

23. The best treatment of Strakhov in English is Linda Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

24. I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1960-68), Pisma 8, no. 55. See p. 430 of the same volume for bibliographical information about the translations.

25. Melchior de Vogüé, Le roman russe (Paris: Plon-nourrit, 1886), 133-202.

26. Paul Bourget, “Ivan Tourguénev,” Nouveaux Essais de Psychologie contemporaine (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1886), 199-250.

27. Royal Gettmann, “Turgenev in England and America,” Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 27, no. 2 (1941); 185; hereafter cited in the text. For my remarks on English-language Turgenev criticism I have drawn extensively on the excellent study Gettmann compiled with Rissa Yachnin and David Stam, Turgenev in English: A Checklist of Works by and about Him, introduction by Marc Slonim (New York: New York Public Library, 1962); Allan Urbanic and Barbara Urbanic, “Ivan Turgenev: A Bibliography of Criticism in English, 1960-83,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 1983); 118-43; and Donald Davie, “Turgenev in England, 1850-1950,” in Studies in Russian and Polish Literature in Honor of Waclaw Lednicki, Zbigniew Folejewski et al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 168-84.

28. For a detailed discussion of Howell's views on Turgenev, see Gettmann, “Turgenev in England,” 53-61.

29. Quoted in Gettmann, “Turgenev in England,” 131. For an extensive treatment of James's evaluation of Turgenev and of Turgenev's influence on the American novelist, see Gettmann, 66-77, and Dale Peterson, The Clement Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James (London; Pt. Washington, N.Y. Kennikat, 1975).

30. Academy 57 (4 November 1899); 516; quoted in Gettmann, “Turgenev in England,” 156.

31. Ford Madox Ford, The Critical Attitude (London: Duckworth, 1911), 156-58; quoted in Gettmann, “Turgenev in England,” 165.

32. For a detailed study of Turgenev's links to symbolism, see Marina Ledkovsky, The Other Turgenev: From Romanticism to Symbolism (Würzburg: Jal-Verlag, 1972), 125-38, to which I am greatly indebted for my own remarks on Turgenev and symbolism.

33. Merezhkovsky, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, Vol. 12, 249.

34. Konstantin Balmont, “Rytsar Devushki-Zhenshchiny,” in N. L. Brosksy, ed. Turgenev i ego vremya (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1923), 16-17.

35. The most important English-language studies of Russian formalism are Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); Krystyna Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and its Poetic Ambiance (The Hague: Mouton, 1968); and Ewa Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).