SOURCE: Fisher, Vladimir. “Story and Novel in Turgenev's Work.” In Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev, edited by David A. Lowe, pp. 43-63. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1920, Fisher discusses features found in Turgenev's short stories and novels that reveal the author's experiences and observations.]

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENT

Turgenev's novels have overshadowed his stories. And in general, the latter were somehow unlucky. The critics, in the person of Belinsky, met the first story¹ rather coldly. The success of Notes of a Hunter at the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s prevented the public and the critics from appreciating the great merits of the stories. The reflected light of the fame of Notes of a Hunter fell on two of the stories—“Mumu” and “The Inn.” But after that began the era of the novels, which happened to coincide with the blossoming of the Turgenev story. But the vivid social significance of the novels crowded the stories out of the foreground. True, our socially minded critics noted some stories, but more was said apropos of them than about them (Chernyshevsky's article about Asya²); some stories provoked bewilderment (“Phantoms,” “Enough,” “The Dog”); others enjoyed success among the public as entertaining reading (“The Song of Triumphant Love”); they were always published enthusiastically in journals, they were translated, but they were little studied.

In the scholarly literature that has arisen recently, the stories have been addressed in order to treat questions of one sort or another that occur in connection with the study of the writer's worldview (Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky)³ or of his “manner” (Istomin).⁴

But the Turgenev story has its special interest if only because it is the product of the writer's pure inspiration, which does not lay claim here to the solution of any social questions, for which solution, in the opinion of certain people, Turgenev had no gift.

The autobiographical significance of Turgenev's stories, however, has been established, although hardly studied thoroughly. The writer's declaration that his entire biography is in his works relates primarily and especially to his stories. He himself pointed especially to the story First Love. But that does not mean that the Turgenev story is of purely subjective origin. On the contrary, its interest is more objective, and the subjective image in the story stands not in the foreground, but, for the most part, at a double or triple remove: the person in whom we recognize the author is often the witness in a story, the observer, the narrator, but not the hero. The author draws not so much on experiences from his own life as on observations.

If one looks at Turgenev's stories from the biographical point of view, one will have to single out, in the first place, those that treat family legends and the author's family recollections; the first such story in time is “Three Portraits,” which treats the author's ancestors on his maternal side; the figure of his mother is encountered, as is well known, in the stories “Mumu,” “A King Lear of the Steppe,” and “Punin and Baburin”; that of his father, in the story First Love.

Other stories shed light on the author's school years: the narrator or hero is a university student or preparing to be one, and, moreover, at Moscow University; the author's brief stay at the latter left an incomparably greater mark on his artistic memory than did his stay at Saint Petersburg University, about which so much is said in “Memoirs of Literature and Life.” But a Moscow coloration prevails in a great number of Turgenev's stories, beginning with “Andrey Kolosov” and ending with “Klara Milich,” and also forms an organic part of the majority of his novels.

The stories in a third category cover the “years of wandering”: the narrator or hero travels abroad, as Turgenev himself travelled after finishing his education; these are “Three Meetings,” Asya, and “Spring Freshets,” the autobiographical nature of which has been established.

The other stories are probably also autobiographical to a certain degree, although that is more difficult to establish, so varied is their coloration.

Establishing the autobiographical element in Turgenev's stories is extraordinarily important for elucidating the process of their creation, but not for elucidating their essence: Turgenev's stories do not give a sequential history of the author's inner life, as do Tolstoy's works. Personal recollections, meetings, and observations only gave Turgenev the material out of which there arose something, but in its essence something different from poetic autobiography.

Even more insignificant and incidental is the autobiographical element in the novels. Certain features of Lavretsky's joyless childhood (“Woe to a heart that has not loved in youth!”), the student life of Lezhnev, who had written “an entire drama in imitation of Manfred” (Turgenev's Steno), the character Shubin, which reproduces in part Turgenev in his youth, with his eccentricity, self-analysis, and childish playfulness—that is approximately all of the autobiographical details that the existing evidence about Turgenev allows one to establish in the novels.

THE NARRATORS OF THE STORIES

The autobiographical origin of the majority of Turgenev's stories affects their form noticeably: the majority of them (twenty-five out of thirty-four) are narrated in the first person, while in the novels, whose plots are for the most part invented, that form of narration is not encountered. At the same time, the first person in the story is not the main person, and often is quite peripheral. But the author needs him for the form, and he, the author, expends considerable energy to create him, and in such a way that the reader does not confuse him with the author. …

Thus, Turgenev, while needing the fiction of narrators, is anxious in every way to leave him in the shade, not to introduce him into the plot if at all possible, and not to restrict himself with his manner. In fact only in a few stories is the narrator the main person, for instance, Asya; in the majority of instances he plays a secondary role, as in the story “Yakov Pasynkov,” or he plays no role at all other than that of a viewer, observer, witness, for instance, “The Brigadier.”

And nonetheless in the corpus of Turgenev's stories autobiographical or subjective traits appear every now and then; now we see a young master, the son of a female estate owner, then a young university student, now a traveller, then a hunter, now simply an elderly tall gentleman with graying hair. From time to time the narrator is a mouthpiece for the author's worldview or the author's artistic credo.

But there are quite objective narrator characters too: such is the Kaluga estate owner Porfiry Kapitonych (“The Dog”), the priest (“Father Alexey's Story”), and the old man (“The Watch”). There are absolutely undistinguished, fictional narrators, for instance, Mr. X (“A Strange Story”).

Turgenev's lack of desire to imitate a narrator's manner does not come, of course, from an inability to create experiments such as Karl Ivanovich's story in Tolstoy.⁵ A superb authority on mores, Turgenev has a masterful command of other people's speech and knows how to convey its slightest nuances, including pronunciation.⁶

But poetic autobiography is present in Turgenev's stories only as an element and does not comprise their essence. Cultural realia,⁷ which saturate many of Turgenev's stories, are an element and a material, too, but cultural realia do not comprise their essence either. …

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE STORIES

One additional surface aspect of Turgenev's stories that ought to be recognized as such is the socio-historical element. In telling about Sanin and Gemma's love (“Spring Freshets”), the writer notes the awkwardness that Sanin feels when the prospect of selling his peasants presents itself to him. It is clear that this has very slight relation to the story's plot. But it is remarkable that Turgenev always dates his narratives precisely and indicates the place of action precisely. In general, that is the accepted practice in historical novels; it is also understandable that Turgenev indicates the years in his novels, which depict a specific moment in the history of educated Russian society. But what need have we to know that the action of the story “Klara Milich” transpires precisely in 1878?

In Turgenev the reader almost always learns in what year, or at least in what decade the action transpires. We learn that the action of “The Desperado” takes place in 1829, that of First Love in 1833, that of “A Misfortunate Girl” in 1835, that Sanin meets Gemma in 1840, and that he is 22 then, that “A Correspondence” relates to the years 1840-42, the action of “Faust” to 1850. The separate parts of the story “Punin and Baburin” are headed with figures: “1836,” “1837,” “1849,” and “1861.” Moreover, the time is marked by historical and historico-literary information. The story “The Jew” coincides with the forays abroad after the War of 1812; “The Watch,” with Alexander I's ascension to the throne; Baburin's exile, with the arrests that raged in 1849. The action of First Love occurs right “at the height of romanticism”; that of “A Misfortunate Girl,” at the time when Pushkin's Onegin is fresh in everyone's memory; “Knock—Knock—Knock” relates to the time of Marlinsky's great renown; Gemma reads Malss, a Frankfurt writer of the 1840s; the reader always knows what the heroes of a story read and what their literary tastes are: that characterizes them and the time. But, of course, only in part. So be it that Sanin was born in 1818, loves Gemma in 1840, reads Malss with her and contemplates selling his peasants. But if he had been born in 1848 and in 1870 loved a Gemma who was born later, the essence of their love would remain the same: the only difference would be that they would read someone other than Malss, and Sanin would have had to sell his estate instead of live people. Why does Turgenev need this chronology and illusion?

It is an almost unprecedented phenomenon. … This “historicity” of Turgenev's stories is only a surface aspect, an element, material, like autobiography and cultural realia. It is not an artistic necessity, but it is, for Turgenev, a psychological one.

In order to understand this, one must turn to those stories that happen to lack this chronology.

PESSIMISM

These are primarily those stories that are the almost unmediated expression of the author's worldview—“Phantoms,” “Enough,” and “A Dream.” Here Turgenev's creativity is bared; here those “surface aspects” that were mentioned earlier do not turn up.

First, there is nothing autobiographical here: the author conveys his own attitude and worldview, true, but a general one that is not linked to any particular moment in his personal life.

Second, there are no conditions of place here, that is, cultural realia. In this regard, an especially interesting example is the story “A Dream,” where there is not even a single name, but human relations are shown in their essence.

Third, there are no conditions of time here: no dates, no historical or historico-literary information.

And in order to understand the Turgenev story at all, one has to disengage oneself from the autobiographical element, from cultural realia, from the historical background, because none of these things is of the essence; it is essential to contemplate human relations presented by Turgenev in the purity in which they are shown in the story “A Dream.”

Thus, a Turgenev story's main interest is psychological and philosophical, although only in a few cases are the philosophy and psychology not made up in the colors of place and time.

In the story “Phantoms” precisely the absolute freedom from the fetters of time and space is observed. Ellis carries the hero off to distant places and distant eras. The result is horror, melancholy, despair. …

Of course the essence of Sanin and Gemma's relations would remain the same in another era as well, but Turgenev wants to see them alive; and for that he needs specifically Frankfurt, specifically 1840, Gemma's Italian gestures, and the reading of Malss, specifically Malss, not of Sudermann.

Nature as an elemental force, as a substance, is horrible. And life in its essence is petty, boring, flat, and terrifying in that there is nothing terrifying in it. But

Look around—and the everyday world
Is multicolored and marvellous

And so, fettering a person to a place, fixing him in the framework of chronological dates, and observing him in that little corner, after forgetting about the infinity that surrounds him—that is Turgenev's artistic mission.

“Stay!” he exclaims in the Poems in Prose, “remain forever in my memory as I now see you!”

FATALISM

Another feature of Turgenev's worldview that influences the concepts of his stories in a specific way is a distinctive fatalism. While seeing only a phenomenon in the individual human, Turgenev sees a substance in human life, in the life of the masses. The aggregate life of people is such a complex combination of individual wills, such an interweaving of intersecting aspirations, that it is ruled by chance, which is not envisioned by any individual consciousness and for which no individual principle can establish norms. An individual thrown into the mass is powerless, like a straw in the wind, like a raindrop in a current: the drops create the current, but each individual drop is completely in the power of the current. Turgenev's most powerful poem, “The Crowd,” expresses this sad capitulation of the individual to the mass.

An individual in an elemental mass of other individuals is given up to chance. The story “Three Meetings” is built on the play of chance. But in portraying life in general, Turgenev often ponders “the mysterious play of fate that we blind ones call blind chance” (“Faust”). “Neither can one alter one's fate, nor does anyone know himself, and besides, it's also impossible to foresee the future. In reality, nothing else happens in life except the unexpected, and we spend our whole lives doing nothing but accommodating ourselves to events” (“A Correspondence”).

Chance rules in life. Chance sends Vyazovnin to Paris, where he so stupidly runs up against a sword; chance brings Alexey Petrovich (“A Correspondence”) to the ballet, where he falls in love with a ballerina; chance brings N. N. together with Asya, Sanin with Gemma; chance turns Ridel's joke into the fatal reason for Teglev's suicide (“Knock—Knock—Knock”); chance governs the watch that invades the lives of the boys (“The Watch”); but fate often peeps out from behind chance. …

Therefore the life of an individual is not defined by his character. By virtue of his position an individual is inevitably passive; the active principle is the reality surrounding him. The perceived opinion about a weakness of will as the main trait of Turgenev's heroes has begun to waver recently. It is not weakness of will that makes many of Turgenev's heroes impotent in life and “superfluous,” but something else, located outsides themselves—fate.

In the story “The Watch,” the narrator's father, a minor business agent, after quarreling with his friend Latkin, curses him. “Fate itself seemed intent upon discharging my father's last wish. Soon after the rupture … Latkin's wife, who, true, had been ill a long while, died; his second daughter, a three-year-old child, went deaf and dumb from terror in a single day: a beehive had gotten stuck around her head; Latkin himself had an apoplectic stroke and fell into extreme poverty.” No matter how Lavretsky's break with his wife may be motivated psychologically, one should not forget his Aunt Glafira's curse: “You won't make a nest for yourself anywhere!” In the story “The Inn” there is also the fickle finger of fate: Naum, who gets the inn through deceit, keeps being lucky; but “after being a successful manager for some fifteen years, he arranged to sell his inn at a profit to another petty bourgeois. He would never have parted with his fortune if the following apparently insignificant circumstance had not occurred: for two mornings in a row his dog, sitting in front of the windows, howled long and plaintively; he went out onto the street for the second time, took a good look at the howling dog, shook his head, set off for town, and on that very day agreed on a price with the petit bourgeois who had long wanted to buy the inn. A week later he left for somewhere far away—outside the province; the new owner moved in, and what do you think? That same evening the inn burned down, not a single closet survived, and Naum's successor was left a beggar.” Fate sends Porfiry Kapitonych, a Kaluga estate owner with a bald spot and a belly, a dog who perishes after playing a definite role in his life (“The Dog”). The same fate sends Lukeria (“Living Relics”) a disease and turns her from a “giggler, singer, dancer” into a saint.

Lukeria believes that that is God; but it is an unjust god who at the same time has a beehive get stuck to an innocent child's head; it is a god who gives Naum success in unfair business practices but punishes the innocent petty bourgeois who buys the inn from him; it is a god who manifests incomprehensible sympathy for Porfiry Kapitonych; it is a god who listens attentively to the curses of evil people, not the prayers of the good. His whims resemble those of the crotchety old woman who causes the mute Gerasim suffering (“Mumu”).

In Turgenev there are no people who forge their own happiness: all are blamelessly guilty, lucky without reason. All are doomed.

THE COMPOSITION OF A STORY

That is precisely what a Turgenev story tells about. Generally speaking, it tells about how an outside force irrupts into a person's life, takes him into its universe, throws him here and there according to its arbitrary rule, and, finally, casts the shipwrecked person up unto his bank as a pathetic piece of debris. Moreover, fate does not reckon with a given person's predisposition toward one thing or another, but imposes a role upon him that is often beyond his strength. You would think him a Gogolian hero, but an adventure in the spirit of Pechorin⁸ happens to him.

So, Lieutenant Yergunov, a blood brother of Gogol's Zhevakin, has an adventure reminiscent of Lermontov's story “Taman.”

Aratov, a relative of Podkolyosin,⁹ experiences a mysterious poem of love with a mystical ending (“Klara Milich”).

Porfiry Kapitonych, the Kaluga estate owner, “a middle-aged man of average height, with a belly and a bald spot,” experiences “something supernatural,” before which “common sense” completely retreats.

Turgenev portrays the contact of tawdry people with the romance of life, of shallow and weak people with the mystery of love, and of sober people with the mysteries of nature.

In accordance with this, three moments are distinguishable in a Turgenev story:

• (1) The norm. The depiction of an individual in the ordinary conditions of life in which another writer would in fact leave that person, for instance, Goncharov.
• (2) The catastrophe. The violation of the norm thanks to the incursion of unforeseen circumstances that do not arise from the given situation.
• (3) The finale. The end of the catastrophe and its psychological consequences.

The moments are laid out in just such a sequence in, for instance, the story Asya, where N. N.'s trip is the norm; the catastrophe, his love for Asya; and the finale, N. N.'s lonely old age.

But these moments may follow in reverse sequence: the finale, that is, the depiction of the consequence of the catastrophe, may be at the beginning; then follows the story of the norm and of the catastrophe that came after it. The story “A Correspondence,” for instance, is composed in that way, where the hero's death is told at the beginning, and then the norm unfolds from his correspondence—his relations with Marya Alexandrovna; and the catastrophe—his affair with the French singer.

The repetition of similar moments sometimes occurs in one and the same story: a finale turns into a norm which, in turn, is violated by a second recurrent catastrophe, which leads to a new finale.

That is how the story “A Dream” is constructed. The first norm here is the narrator's parents' happy, easygoing trip, about which his mother tells him later (chapter 9); the catastrophe is the appearance of the stranger, who becomes the narrator's father; the finale is the ruined life described at the beginning of the story, in the first chapter. That finale has turned into a norm. The new appearance of the stranger and his death comprise the second catastrophe in the story, which brings with it a new finale that comprises the contents of the last fragment of the story (beginning with the words “My mother and I never spoke of him”).

It remains to make a separate analysis of each of these moments.

THE NORM

The moment in a Turgenev story that I have called the norm consists of a realistic depiction of the hero's circumstances of life. These norms can be reduced to several types. The main ones are the following:

• (1) The narrator of the hero of the story is a student or preparing to be one; he lives in Moscow more or less independently, more or less sociably.
• (2) The narrator or hero of the story travels abroad, without definite aims.
• (3) The narrator or the hero of the story arrives in his village on business or as a consequence of the absence of business.

The transition from the norm to the catastrophe is accomplished by Turgenev with the help of a plot that provides the story's surface interest. The appearance of a female character usually serves to put the plot in motion. The moment of the appearance by the woman—usually the one who enters the room—is a very important turning point in the story. If the norm is portrayed for the most part realistically, then the plot intrigue is distinguished by its romantic character. The female character who appears in Turgenev is almost always full of enigmatic, mysterious, enticing beauty. Moreover, she stands in contradiction to the surrounding milieu. … The question of how that creature could turn up in this milieu arises; interest is aroused, the story's tempo increases. This tension is already felt in the conveying of the impression made by the heroine's appearance: it stuns, amazes, strikes, and rivets the narrator to the spot. The center of attention from that moment on is the female character, and the narrator's role is unimportant: he may be the hero of the story, like Sanin, or the hero of Asya, or he may remain an accomplice, a go-between, a witness, as in the stories “A Misfortunate Girl,” “Punin and Baburin.”

And so, the realistic exposition in a Turgenev story represents a sort of thesis; the romantic plot intrigue, which thanks to the realistic grounding, accounts for the whole effect of the story, an antithesis.

The further transition to the catastrophe form the synthesis. The female character does not remain a romantic daydream: having surprised the reader, she gradually stands out in bolder and bolder relief, becoming persuasive and lifelike. The realistic writer comes into his own. Upon the hero or narrator's close acquaintance with the heroine, the realistic and almost always wretched, sometimes difficult conditions of her life come to light. At home Zinaida (First Love) has decay, slovenly poverty, and a vulgar mother with an inclination to malicious litigation. Asya is the illegitimate daughter of an estate owner and has grown up in extremely abnormal conditions. It is depressing at the Zlotnitskys' home (“Yakov Pasynkov”): “The very furniture, the red wallpaper with yellow cracks in it in the living room, the multitude of wicker chairs in the dining room, the faded worsted pillows depicting maidens and dogs on the sofas, the horn lamps and gloomy portraits on the walls—everything instilled in one an involuntary melancholy. …” And girls who know how to love only once in life grow up in those surroundings. Finally, the enchanting Gemma (“Spring Freshets”), a representative of the petit bourgeoisie, the fiancée of the solid merchant Klyber, called upon to use her beauty to save her impoverished family's situation, and later—the wife of an American businessman. When her mother discusses quite practically the benefits of her marriage to Sanin, in the presence of the latter, Gemma feels extremely awkward.

However, a female character does not always initiate the intrigue in a Turgenev story; sometimes an animal (twice a dog, once a horse), sometimes things (“The Watch”) are the instrument of fate that brings on the catastrophe. But no matter what, the plot intrigue is always romantically unexpected; as is well known, Turgenev took special pains with it, finding that the absence of “invention” was the weak side of Russian writers. As Gutyar notes quite justly, the outline of a Turgenev work “is suggested only in part by the fate of those people who served as the protoypes of the story's protagonists.”

THE CATASTROPHE

As applied to a Turgenev story, the term “catastrophe” does not have quite the same meaning as in a tragedy.

There is little of the tragedic in Turgenev, or the tragic in his works consists of the absence of tragedy where it ought to be, of the fact that the most terrible thing in life is that there is nothing terrible. But the term “catastrophe” is applicable here because what happens to Turgenev's protagonists bears the imprint of fate: both good fortune, which they are incapable of apprehending adequately, and misfortune, which turns out to be beyond their powers. The mother's story in “The Dream” is characteristic in this regard.

She is alone in a hotel room—her husband has gone to the club; she goes to bed. “And suddenly she felt so awful that she even turned cold all over and began to shiver. She thought she heard a light knocking behind the wall—the way a dog scratches—and she began watching that wall. An icon camp burned in the corner; the room was hung all around with damask. Suddenly something moved over there, rose a bit, opened up. And all black, long, that horrible man with the evil eyes came right out of the wall! She wanted to cry out and could not. She froze in fear. He came up to her quickly, like a beast of prey, threw something over her head, something stifling, heavy, white.”

And so, that is how fate functions. Its emissaries penetrate walls covered with damask in which unclean doors are revealed. The turning point in the story is quite unreal. But Turgenev's devices are bared in general in “A Dream,” and if one ponders the essence of life's phenomena, the stranger's emergence from the wall is not the least bit any stranger than the appearance first of Gemma in Sanin's life, and then of Marya Nikolaevna; it is just that in the latter instance a realistic motivation is given such as is lacking in the first.

It has already been noted more than once that for Turgenev the supreme confirmation of the individual is love, and that at the same time love is a pernicious, destructive, and dangerous force. Fate lures Turgenev's heroes into a whirlwind of passion, and whether they want that or not, it leaves them no choice: if they meet it head on, ruin and devastation threaten them; if they lack courage, they will be punished—by the misery of later regrets, like the hero of Asya, by the horror of emptiness and the fear of death, like Sanin, or a rejected love will make its claims on them from beyond the grave, as happens to the hero of “Klara Milich.”

However, there are people on whom fate does not bestow its attention. There is a certain level of life, a fullness of sensations, to which not everyone is capable of rising. Only a person who rises to that point will experience life in full measure, but he will also drink the bitter cup of suffering; only with the level of passion do life and beauty begin. The idyll that Turgenev paints in the story “Old Portraits,” an idyll of old-world land owners, does not move him; Malanya Pavlovna's impenetrable stupidity, which her loving husband is also aware of, does not increase the delight of the idyll; and the fact with which the story ends destroys the idyll. In the story “Two Friends” that tranquil life is established in the finale: good Verochka, with her phlegmatic right, remains deaf to the language of passion, marries a husband once “without rapture,” then marries a second time, to a person more comprehensible to her. “Pyotr Vasilievich, his wife, and all their domestics spend the time very monotonously—peacefully and quietly; they enjoy their happiness, because on earth there is no other happiness.” A specter of life, however, arises above theirs, and that is the memory of Vyazovnin; but he, himself incapable of rising to the level of passion, has flashed by in their life like a shadow, and they remain on the bottom. No catastrophe has occurred.

A catastrophe is possible only for those people who have the attributes necessary for reaching life in its fullness, even though they may have no desire to do so: passion nevertheless will pull them into the whirlpool. In the story “Faust,” Vera, thanks to her mother's efforts, has been seemingly insured against the element of passion since childhood. Its most powerful conductor, art, was removed. Vera leaves for the canopy of a marriage “without rapture,” like Verochka; but a person from another world, with a copy of Goethe's Faust in his hands, turns up and “ploughed up raging voices” in the young woman. …

Real life prudently creates one marriage; fate, the romance of life, erects above it its own mighty superstructure, which crushes that marriage.¹⁰

But the topic here has been individuals unwillingly carried away by passion, who shun it out of “fear” or good sense. There are those who play with fire, who set out into the ocean of passion without worrying about an anchor. Such is Zinaida (First Love). But the highest degree is to accept the cup of life without faint-hearted fear, but to limit oneself to the lofty commands of duty. Such is Yakov Pasynkov, who has made denial his principle. Those who have not stood at the necessary height also come to this conclusion. “Life is hard work. Denial, constant denial—that is its secret meaning, its unriddling: not the fulfilling of favorite ideas and dreams, no matter how elevated they might be, but the fulfilling of duty—that is what a person should worry about; without putting chains on himself, the iron chains of duty, he cannot reach the end of his days without falling.” Only if a person is anchored to duty will he not be swept away by a catastrophe.

That is the meaning of Liza Kalitina's ideal.¹¹

THE FINALE

The catastrophic nature of events in Turgenev's stories is often overshadowed by descriptions of storms; they are rather frequent (“A Quiet Spot,” “Faust,” “Spring Freshets,” “A Dream”). And where there is no storm or tempest, it is overshadowed with the help of similes and metaphors. …

The storm of life, the storm of passion does its work and leaves debris. The debris of life's storm includes Chulkaturin, the heroine of “Three Meetings,” Alexey Petrovich of “A Correspondence,” the hero of “Faust,” Zinaida of First Love, the Brigadier, King Lear of the Steppe, and Sanin. Others perish, like the baron in the story “A Dream,” or Vera (“Faust”), or the hero of the story “Klara Milich.” Others remain debris; moreover, something from the past remains in their hands, a romantic recollection. …

FROM STORY TO NOVEL

Turgenev began his literary activity in the era of romanticism's decline. … Turgenev himself was profoundly imbued with romanticism, enthusiastic about its very important representatives Goethe and Byron. But in the 1840s Turgenev surrendered his romantic individualism. That capitulation can be heard in his first narrative poems, Parasha and A Conversation, and especially in the poem “The Crowd,” which has a greater significance for Russian literature than is usually imagined. It is a sad rejection of Byronism. The individual who has proudly torn himself away from the crowd cannot hold out in his solitary position, becomes conscious of his weakness, and recognizes the victory of the crowd. It was not easy for Turgenev to accomplish that rejection. The poem echoes with sadness and resignation. The young Turgenev, himself broken inside, given to excessive analysis, lacking in will, began his search for a strong, integrated, beautiful person. But how and where to look? The Byronic method had been rejected. The Byronic heroes married their Parashas and began living happily on their estates. The romantic phantasmagoria had been dispelled. …

In his early stories, too, he angrily condemns romanticism. It is enough to read “Andrey Kolosov” and “The Diary of a Superfluous Man” to get an idea of that anger.

The poet feels that there is no room for him in the crowd, but neither is there room outside it. And he escapes to simple people, to nature, to the heroes of Notes of a Hunter, who have extracted wholeness and simplicity from the innermost depths of mother nature. But here too he remained an outside observer: there was no point even in talking of a return to nature for Turgenev, of taking to plain living—it was not for nothing that he had broken with romanticism. He will return to a higher arena of life; he needs to determine the relationship of the individual to society, to the people, to humanity. After all, romanticism was a temporary cutting away of the individual; he has to be reunited with the society around him, because it is impossible to live outside it. So that the individual personality will not be swallowed up, like a speck of dust, in infinity, Turgenev will try to attach it more firmly to the moment, to tie it to societal evolution, and only then to raise the question of what to do. Because the individual, torn away from the conditions of time and place, seemed to Turgenev to be so horrifyingly impotent that in reply to the question of what to do, he said: “After crossing one's useless arms on one's empty chest, preserve the last and only virtue accessible to him [to man], that of the recognition of one's own insignificance” (“Enough”).

It was from that state that Turgenev in fact fled to the world of his novels, where the broadly understood feeling of duty was, on the one hand, to persuade a person that “his arms” were not “useless,” but that, on the contrary, mankind needs their work; on the other hand, that very feeling of duty was to safeguard a person against the storms of the universe of passion threatening him on all sides.

That is how the novel grew out of Turgenev's story. And in the majority of those novels one can distinguish with greater or lesser clarity the layerings that turned the story into a novel.

At the same time as Natalya's love for Rudin arises, develops, and is concluded on Lasunskaya's estate, conversations about Rudin are being held on a neighboring estate, the story of his youth is being told, about the milieu that produced him. The first element is a typical Turgenev story; the second gives this story a sociohistorical background; a third element—Rudin's story about his activity—deepens the sociohistorical aspects of the novel.

In A Nest of Gentlefolk two stories can be found: the heroine of the first is Varvara Pavlovna; the heroine of the second, Liza. Lavretsky's genealogy, his conversations with Panshin and Mikhalevich, and his life in the countryside create a social novel.

The novel Fathers and Sons consists of three episodes: (1) Bazarov at the Kirsanovs', (2) Bazarov at Odintsova's, (3) Bazarov at his parents'; the first episode has sociohistorical interest; the two others, universally human.

Smoke includes the story of Litvinov's student love for Irina; the episode in Baden makes up the sociohistorical aspect of the novel.

Hence the inserted episodes, biographical digressions, genealogies that are so typical for Turgenev. There he is unburdening his heart, talking about the universal while creating a novel; on the other hand—the chronological dates and historical background.

However, while depicting the personal side of his heroes' lives in his novels, Turgenev feels at home, but he seems to avoid portraying them on a wide arena of activity, although that apparently was in fact supposed to provide the basis of the novel's design. Rudin at Lasunskaya's estate is drawn graphically and vividly; we hear only a fleeting account of his years of study and activity. Lavretsky's love for and life with his wife, Lavretsky and Liza's love are drawn vividly; but the fact that Lavretsky realizes his goal of “plowing the soil” and what he does for the peasants are related in a general way, casually. The author is passionately interested in how Yelena comes to love Insarov and how she leaves with him; but Insarov's preparation for future activity is spoken of in passing, and the author decides not to depict that activity and kills off the hero. And Bazarov is depicted not where he developed, not in the milieu of which he is a representative, but on gentry estates, where he argues, loves, and dies. The same goes for Litvinov.¹² Only in Virgin Soil is an attempt made to depict the activity itself, but here too the arena of the novel's action is a gentry estate, and moreover, the depiction of the activity itself does not belong to Turgenev's best pages.

How Tolstoy's Nekhlyudov,¹³ Levin, and Vronsky¹⁴ manage their estates—that we know clearly and definitely; how Lezhnyov, Lavretsky, Litvinov¹⁵ manage their estates—Lord only knows.

They simply manage them.

Obviously, Turgenev the artist needs his heroes' social activity only as an outside force that defines a human in a certain way. His attention is concentrated on individuals; everything else is kept at a distance. What is interesting is how an individual lives, loves, and dies; for the sake of fullness and expressiveness of image conditions of time and place that are in and of themselves perhaps not very important are taken into account. Such is the writer's unconscious worldview.

Consciously, Turgenev may have had claims to the solution or raising of questions of the day; that was precisely what the critics looked for in his novels. And all the misunderstandings that have arisen because of that have occurred because critics were unable to appreciate what Turgenev had to offer, and demanded what he could not offer, although he tried. Perhaps unaware of it himself, he transferred these questions to a completely different plane.¹⁶ Recent criticism, not without grounds, has expressed doubt about Turgenev as a social writer. But the desire to be one cost Turgenev dearly; he had to seek new devices, more or less successful ones, in order to give the novel social significance; he had to write such a decidedly weak work as Virgin Soil.

DIALOGUE IN THE NOVEL

In the Turgenev novel, as compared to the story, dialogue plays a large role. Avoiding depicting his contemporary heroes in deed, the writer portrays them marvelously in word. It is no accident that the hero of the first novel is an orator; and all the succeeding heroes speak interestingly and expressively. Turgenev conveys the charm of Rudin's speech, who speaks out against scepticism and who by striking certain strings of the heart forces others to sound at the same time; Lavretsky's speech about Russia echoes with sober sense; Bazarov's speech echoes with sharp and casual expressiveness. And many interesting and sensible conversations are related on the pages of Turgenev's novels. And the subject of these conversations is always Russia, the current moment, the contemporary generation's view.

Of course, there are dialogues of a purely personal character, just as in the stories; in them Turgenev is an incomparable master, now conveying Liza's sometimes simply unclear but profound speech, now Homerically reproducing the speech of secondary characters—Marfa Timofeevna, N. A. Astakhov, or Bazarov's parents.

But the dialogues on contemporary topics that constitute a peculiarity of Turgenev's novels can be subdivided into the categories of debates and didactic dialogues. …

We shall call didactic dialogues those whose ideal nature can in no way be concealed: the speech of the author himself can be heard—what in the old days was called that of a spokesman for the author. The presence of such dialogues, interesting as they may be in and of themselves, cannot be considered a virtue in a novel: Turgenev falls back on them when he lacks power of invention. That can be especially felt in Rudin, where Lezhnyov provides an evaluation of Rudin on the reader's behalf. There is no concern for the style of the person speaking here; there is no debate here—the listeners offer only the necessary responses; the voice of the author can be heard distinctly.

This device, which subsides in Turgenev's best novels (A Nest of Gentlefolk and Fathers and Sons), is repeated in the others. In On the Eve we again hear authorial speech in Shubin, when he talks to Yelena about Uvar Ivanovich. In Smoke Potugin speaks for the author; in Virgin Soil it is Nezhdanov, in his poem about Russia. …

DIDACTIC CHARACTERS

This Lezhnyov, who plays the role of a chorus in Rudin, has another importance as well. “Here's the sort of person we need more of,” the writer seems to want to say. Indeed, Lezhnyov puts into practice ahead of time the activity that Turgenev, using Lavretsky as a mouthpiece, will later proclaim the most necessary and greatest one: he plows the soil and apparently does so as well as possible. For that Turgenev rewards him with personal happiness: the novel ends with Lezhnyov's idyll. …

In On the Eve a didactic character again appears, the one least successful in an artistic sense but most successful in a didactic one—Insarov. That character is put together mechanically from traits that Russians lack but that are desirable and are essential, the very first condition for any action, without which even the quality of genius will turn out to be barren. Turgenev deprives Insarov of everything human: the absence of any spiritual struggle when deciding to leave Yelena, on the grounds that she is a person who does not correspond to his goals, the examination for the rank of wife that he gives her—those things alienate one; and one refuses to believe that Insarov will accomplish something great, because greatness is also accomplished through passion and feeling—and Turgenev knows that perfectly well.

Litvinov is the new result of Turgenev's “search for a man.” His goal is the same as Lezhnyov's and Lavretsky's. He is more alive than Lezhnyov because he is more subject to the effect of the passionate element; but he is deader than Lavretsky. His gesture when he indicates to Irina the place beside him in the train car is splendid, but it is didacticism. Turgenev seems to have sensed a certain betrayal of artistic truth here and wrote the story “Spring Freshets” after Smoke; Sanin experiences approximately the same thing as Litvinov, but he ends in a more Turgenevian fashion; he remains in the company of the temptress, enduring all the humiliation of his false position and, after the need has passed, breaks free. But what is allowable in a story of his is impermissible in a Turgenev novel.

Turgenev the didactic strives generously to award his businesslike “good” people with personal happiness, leads them solicitously to the family idyll with the beloved; sometimes he sets obstacles for them—passion, but he helps them overcome delusive temptations. But where Turgenev remains a pure artist, in the stories, those temptations turn out to be insuperable. …

PSYCHOLOGY

Didacticism, satire, philosophizing—all these devices result from Turgenev's desire to make a social statement. But the eternal triumphs over that element, and the artist defeats the social critic. No matter what practical means the writer proposes, no matter how he calls for “small deeds,” no matter how he rewards his “good people” with prosperity and happiness, he knows at the bottom of his heart that this is all “smoke”; that a lost life is lost, even though its experience was useful for the future generation; that the proud individual is threatened by the monster of death; that in life the individual is manipulated by fate; that man is insignificant. This profound consciousness of the individual's helplessness determines Turgenev's special manner of depicting individual psychology. That manner is absolutely contrary to Dostoevsky's. The latter extremely individualizes every psychological experience; Turgenev sadly makes it part of a general law, seemingly devaluing the personal in this way. He does this with the help of experienced aphorisms that he always seems to have ready. …

This basic view of Turgenev's gives rise to two peculiarities of his psychological manner: laconicism or negligence in the depiction of psychological experiences. Turgenev's laconicism is often distinguished by great power; he uses it when he has an especially solicitous attitude toward the person being portrayed, as though afraid of reducing him to a category, sparing him.

After receiving the news of the death of his wife, “Lavretsky dressed, went out into the garden, and walked up and down a single lane until morning.”

After Varvara Pavlovna's arrival and Liza's meeting her, “Marfa Timofeevna sat up all night long at the head of Liza's bed.”

Lavretsky's last meeting with Liza, at the monastery:

Making her way from choir to choir, she walked past him close by, walked past in the even, hurryingly humble tread of a nun—and did not look at him; the lashes of the eye directed at him just trembled slightly, she just inclined her emaciated face even more—and the fingers of her compressed hands, wrapped round with rosaries, pressed against each other even more tightly. What did they both think, what did they feel? Who can know? Who can say? There are certain moments in life, certain feelings. One can only point at them—and pass on by.

Here is supreme economy of means, supreme solicitude for feeling. And along with that extreme negligence of human psychology turns up in Turgenev. … Hence the total ignoring of individual psychology in many characters unattractive to Turgenev. …

THE ELEGY

The pessimism of Turgenev's consciousness, which manifests itself in the conclusions of his novels and in his psychological manner, finds, however, a distinctive antidote in his creative intuition. There are forces that he counterposes to the individual's helplessness and insignificance in the face of death. Those forces are love and simplicity. This surmounting of pessimism is expressed in Turgenev lyrically, and his best novels conclude with solemn lyric chords.

If, as has been pointed out, Turgenev flees the horror of eternity by escaping to the temporal, then the dissatisfaction with the temporal and the limited awaken in him, on the other hand, an elevated longing for the eternal, the nontransitory. Although Rudin has not accomplished anything, he has left in young souls some sparks of enthusiasm, love, and truth, and those sparks will live; Rudin's temporal existence stretches into eternity, and he is spoken of in Lezhnyov's cozy home. Although Lavretsky and Liza have left the walk of life without touching “the cherished goblet in which the golden wine of enjoyment bubbles and plays,” in the worlds he addresses to the young generation there is no bitterness: he gives them a blessing, and there is something Pushkinian in these reconciling chords of his speech.

Although Bazarov has died, and his mighty, proud powers turned out to be fruitless, he is silently present at the festival of life in the Kirsanovs' home, he lives in their memories and in his parents' tears. “Can it really be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless? Can it really be that love, sacred, devoted love is not all-powerful?” Turgenev asks. As a thinker, he should have answered: “Yes, fruitless and powerless.” But the lyric poet answers: “Oh, no! No matter how passionate, sinful, and rebellious a heart is hidden in the grave, the flowers growing on it look at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they speak to us not only of eternal peace, that great peace of ‘indifferent’ nature; they also speak of eternal reconciliation and of life eternal.”

Turgenev's creative thought has made its circle from the horror of infinity to the framework of the temporal; from the temporal it stretches its wings toward the infinite.

The result is an elegy in the form of a novel.

THE PICTORIAL AND MUSICAL ASPECT OF THE TURGENEV NOVEL

One of the means of overcoming Turgenev's elegiac longing that is developed in his novels is beauty. He needs colors and sounds in order to justify life, and he generously scatters moonbeams and the sounds of the piano throughout his novels. The action of his novels always occurs in the spring or summertime, the sun shines brightly during the day, at night the moon and stars come out, and in the gentry manors pianos are heard. …

The sounds of the piano and the cello that are always heard in Turgenev's manor houses give a musical charm to his images. But A Nest of Gentlefolk is especially noteworthy in this regard. Here music sets off the contents of the novel. When his unrecognized love for Liza begins in Lavretsky, the old man Lemm dreams of composing a cantata about the stars. On that wonderful night when Lavretsky's mouth brushes against Liza's pale lips, the old musician's dream is fulfilled; inspired, he plays his piece for Lavretsky, a “song a triumphant love.” But on the following days these sounds die down in order to give way to the more bravura melodies played by Varvara Pavlovna and Panshin. The years pass. Lavrestky visits the Kalinin estate, where everything has changed, where a new generation is having a good time. He goes up to the piano, plays a chord—it is the first chord of the piece by the deceased Lemm. It rings out like a memory, and then falls silent.

That chord of recollection can be heard in all of Turgenev's stories. Past experience is dear to him. Like shadows, like smoke, everything temporal passes, but the eternal is left—and we are allowed to fell that eternal by the poet, who, like Lavretsky, goes up to the piano in a gentry manor and plays a memorable chord.

Notes

1. [“Story” as used in the title seems the best rendering of the Russian povest in this context. Readers unfamiliar with Russian, however, should be aware that in the final analysis, povest lacks an adequate English equivalent, primarily because the Russian term is a very slippery one. In the twentieth century it has come to indicate a work of prose fiction longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, but in many cases a writer's choice between povest and roman (novel) can only strike one as subjective and even arbitrary. Moreover, in the nineteenth century the term was applied to such disparate works as Pushkin's short stories and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.]

2. [For information about Chernyshevsky and his article, see the introduction to this volume.]

3. [D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, “I. S. Turgenev,” vol. 2, Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Prometey, 1910-1911).]

4. [K. K. Istomin, “‘Staraya manera’ Turgeneva (1834-1855). Opyt psikhologii tvorchestva,” Izvestia Otdelenia russkogo yazyka i slovesnosti Akademii nauk 2 (1913):294-347; 3 (1913);120-194.]

5. [Reference to Tolstoy's Childhood.]

6. Yu. I. Aykhenvald reproaches Turgenev for mocking errors in French pronunciation. Turgenev does not mock, but, rather, conveys the errors in any pronunciation—the accent of Germans speaking Russian or French, the accent of Frenchmen pronouncing Russian names, the accent of an Italian speaking French. Turgenev hears his heroes' speech, he hears how the heroes of the novel Fathers and Sons pronounce the same word, “principle.” Not to mention the speech of the masses, one can point out Bersenev's involved, academically meandering speech (On the Eve), the speech of Kollomeytsev, who pronounces “brrr” the French way, as remarkable masterpieces of this sort.

7. [The Russian word that Fisher uses here, byt, is notoriously difficult to render into English. In this context the word suggests the sorts of sociocultural details that anchor a literary work in a specific time and place.]

8. [Hero of Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time (1840).]

9. [Hero of Gogol's comedy The Marriage (1842).]

10. This motif is outlined sketchily in the narrative poem The Priest, published at the beginning of 1917.

11. [Reference to the heroine of A Nest of Gentlefolk.]

12. [The references in the paragraph are to Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons, in that order.]

13. [Hero of Resurrection.]

14. [Major protagonists in Anna Karenina.]

15. [Characters from Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, and Smoke, respectively.]

16. A strange fact, it would seem: for a half-century Russian criticism has viewed Turgenev's novels as historical criticism of the Russian intelligentsia; over the course of the same half-century Western Europe has been interested in those novels and has been reading them avidly; it is not the fate of the Russian intelligentsia, after all, that interests Western Europe!