Turgenev's ‘remarkable decade’ (1843-52) saw first the brief, four-year efflorescence of his narrative poetry; simultaneously, but extending beyond that, his ten-year-long experimentation with play-writing that culminated in the psychological drama A Month in the Country; and thirdly, his struggles with the genre in which he was to achieve his greatest triumphs: the prose fiction that was to bring him national and international fame.

But the road to fame was no easy one: in fact, when Turgenev left Russia for the West in January 1847, he was sufficiently depressed by the level of recognition he had reached to be ready to play with the idea of giving up literature. Admittedly, this was an idea which was to return to him periodically in the following thirty-odd years; but at this date it was plain to him that he had no great future as a poet and it was not yet plain that he had any future as a playwright (neither of the two plays then written had been staged) or as a writer of fiction (none of his three published stories had won critical acclaim, though the second had won some praise from Belinsky and Apollon Grigor'ev).

Turgenev's fiction in the remarkable decade can be seen to pass through several phases. First, in the roughly three years between the first half of 1844 and the first half of 1847 he wrote five stories, varying in length from about 4,000 to about 13,000 words,¹ at least four of which foreshadow thematic developments of subsequent decades; then, in a little more than four years, between late 1846 and early 1851, he produced the twenty-two sketches republished in book form in 1852 as A Sportsman's Sketches; finally, in the three years between the beginning of 1850 and the end of 1852, he completed four more stories, two of which² are closely bound up with the main theme of A Sportsman's Sketches, while a third³ represents a variation on the theme of one of those sketches⁴ and points ahead to a series of later heroes.

Turgenev began to write fiction only two years after the publication, in 1842, of Gogol's Collected Works—the last fiction, as it proved, that Gogol was to publish. Belinsky, the literary lawgiver for progressive young writers, saw Gogol, and presented him to Russia, as a realist, a social reformer and a model for the literature of his age. Turgenev, like his young contemporaries, tried to adopt Belinsky's literary creed and to assimilate whatever he could of Gogol's literary techniques; but his vision of social reality was much wider and more various than Gogol's and in temperament and culture the two had very little in common. The most ‘Gogolian’ of his works—whether plays, such as Moneyless and Breakfast with the Marshal of the Nobility or stories such as ‘The Jew’—are not among his best, but Gogolian attention to squalid aspects of life and addiction to caricature served to infuse his natural lyricism with a certain astringency or to overlay his original Romanticism with a patina of ‘realism’.

Following Byron, Pushkin and Lermontov had endowed the narrator in a number of their narrative poems with an independent or quasi-independent existence, and Turgenev, as we have seen, had followed their example in Parasha and, to a lesser extent, in Andrei. Similarly, in their early prose tales, not only Pushkin and Lermontov but Gogol too had distanced themselves from their subjects by interposing two narrators between author and text.⁵ Turgenev in three of his first five stories adopted the distancing device of hiding the author behind one or more narrators,⁶ but discarded the idea of a collection and therefore had no need of an ‘editor’, or rather, the editor was transformed into an anonymous ‘I’ who provided the frame for the story proper. His other two early stories are told by an ominiscient author.

The settings are even more varied than the narrative techniques and, in all but one of the five tales, such as to minimize any temptation to subjectivity. One is laid in a ‘nest of gentry’, but in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a couple of generations before Turgenev's; two deal with adventures of army officers: in war in 1812, in peace in 1829; in a fourth the scene is provincial lower middle class (though the protagonist is a middle-aged lieutenant). Only the students of the first story project elements of their author's own history.

As a corollary, we have a fair variety of characters, drawn perhaps with less than Turgenev's later subtlety and depth, but already alive and distinctive and representing both sexes, half a dozen social groups, and all ages from late teens to old age (as he conceived old age).

It should be borne in mind that the stories as we read them were thoroughly revised by Turgenev for the first edition (three volumes, 1856) of his Stories and Tales. The revision was mainly stylistic, in a broad sense: it involved the excision of prolixities, curtailment of authorial (or narrator's) commentary, including a deal of often heavy irony, besides the usual sort of tidying-up in the interests of precision, conciseness, clarity or elegance; only in one or two cases was new material introduced (for instance, the eighth chapter of ‘Petushkov’) or a character somewhat modified (e.g., the relation between the heroine and her mother in ‘The Duellist’: cf. W, v, 557). Our concern is, of course, with the stories in their final form.

‘ANDREI KOLOSOV’

Turgenev's first play had been a pseudo-Spanish melodrama more redolent of his Romantic past than of his ‘realist’ future. His first story, ‘Andrei Kolosov’, can be criticized in analogous terms, although it was not based on any foreign model nor set in an unfamiliar social scene. But it is not only one of the most subjective (in Turgenev's sense) of his stories, it is virtually a pièce à thèse, and in both respects it sins against his later artistic creed. Moreover, the subjectivity has impaired the artistry: the two principal figures, seen from too close up, are slightly blurred and fail to carry the ‘message’, which is spelt out with uncharacteristic bluntness on the last page.

Thus the narrator, who had begun by asserting that ‘the most poorly told story is more effective than the most excellent ratiocination’, is made to trample on his own principle (and Turgenev's); or are we to say that Turgenev has here sacrificed his own principle to psychological consistency inasmuch as his narrator has been shown throughout to be a mass of contradictions?

Turgenev says somewhere⁷ that his failed lovers are always to some extent projections of himself. And this applies to his first story as much as to any later work. A few years earlier he had … briefly fancied himself in love with Tat'yana Bakunina and his attempts to extricate himself from the relationship were relatively protracted and somewhat clumsy. They were variously reflected in a number of his lyrics and in two or three of his stories. ‘Andrei Kolosov’ was his first prose attempt to talk out his experience, and he does not so much come to terms with it as pass judgment on it.

If the narrator is an avatar of Turgenev, the figure of Kolosov is said to owe a great deal to his dead friend Stankevich, and the modalities of Kolosov's break with Varya may have been inspired by those of Stankevich's break with his young German mistress Bertha (though in his relationships with the two Bakunin sisters with whom he had been, successively, in love Stankevich had proved no more immune from Romanticism than the narrator of this story). Of course, the story, as distinct from the characters of the two young men, is, so far as we know, invented: if it contains any autobiographical materials, they have been transposed and radically refashioned. Kolosov and the narrator are students, in or hardly out of their teens; Turgenev and Stankevich, at the time of their respective involvements with Tat'yana and Bertha, were in their mid-twenties; Turgenev and Stankevich were in love with two different girls in two different decades, Kolosov and his friend fall in love with one and the same girl in the space of a single year; and no heroine could have been less like the high-strung, well-educated and intellectual Bakunina or the fun-loving, sharp-witted and mercenary Bertha than the artless little Varya of the story. (Something of Bertha's personality may be hinted in the shadowy Tanyusha to whom the narrator attributes Kolosov's break with Varya.) Perhaps all this concentration and simplification is designed to ram home the point of the tale, which is to exalt immediacy, ‘naturalness’, over Romanticism with its rôle-playing, rhetoric and self-deception.

In spite of Lenin's adolescent (and later) enthusiasm for ‘Andrei Kolosov’,⁸ the thesis fails to carry conviction because Turgenev tips the scales too blatantly. He is too harsh to the narrator (himself) and too indulgent to his friend Kolosov: that is, he is blind to the significance of the behaviour he reports.

Kolosov uses his friends. He uses Gavrilov to distract Varya's father through the six months leading up to Gavrilov's death; presumably even galloping consumption shows forth some premonitory signs, but Kolosov notices nothing. For six more months he uses the narrator, who, as a poor card-player, suffers not only boredom but embarrassment and is hardly even thanked. The narrator's joy on being chosen to succeed Gavrilov as Kolosov's confidant evokes not an answering surge of warmth but gentle laughter (Kolosov … tikhon'ko posmeivalsya), yet the narrator persuades himself that his idol was touched. Kolosov expects to be followed unquestioningly: when the narrator enquires where they are going, he retorts, ‘Gavrilov would not have asked.’ When, later, the narrator reproaches him for having deserted Varya, he does vouchsafe an explanation of his conduct, but only after clearly hinting that this is a condescension on his part.

In the narrator's eyes Kolosov was, and has remained, an ‘extraordinary’ person, simply in virtue of his ‘naturalness’. But what is ‘naturalness’? On close inspection it appears to mean neither more nor less than a disposition (the narrator might prefer the term ‘ability’) to act on one's immediate feelings in total disregard of other people's opinions, and feelings.

Kolosov is young, attractive, full of the joy of life. His vitality and unself-consciousness charm his fellow students, make them ‘fall head over heels in love with him’. He accepts and enjoys their love, but admits to intimacy only those whose services he needs. He falls in love with Varya and courts her for a year, without looking beyond his immediate enjoyment, without considering the long-term cost to her. She obviously lives in and for him; but ‘Kolosov had not relinquished his freedom; when she was not with him, I don't think he even remembered her; he remained the same carefree, cheerful, happy man we had always known.’ When he tires of her, he takes the easy way out. Rather than make a clean break, rather than face her and confess his change of heart, he spaces—and finally ceases—his visits, leaving her to pine in uncertainty and hope. He does not even bother to send her word that all is over till stung by the narrator's chiding. And then it does not occur to him to let her know how much she has meant to him: it is only to the narrator he admits he is deeply in her debt. His parting word is cool and dismissive: if not the prince to the beggar-maid, we hear the ‘extraordinary’ man announcing her fate to the ordinary girl.

It is true we are shown Kolosov only as the narrator sees him; but we look in vain for any slightest hint that the author sees him differently. The narrator, an unreclaimed Romantic, continues throughout life to see Kolosov as a hero. He is a hero because he is able to live and to act, while the narrator is capable only of dreaming and suffering. Yet it is the narrator's devotion that enables Kolosov to continue enjoying his love after Gavrilov's death and that helps Varya to readjust to life after her loss of Kolosov. And Kolosov lives and acts, whenever ‘necessary’, at the expense of others: he is able to live to the full by pressing others into his service and shutting his eyes to what that service costs them.

Kolosov and his friend are polar opposites. Kolosov is simple: that is, he lives in and for the day, and his desires and motives are unitary or integrated: that is what frees him to live and act; the narrator is inhibited from living and acting for himself by conflicting desires and motives of which he becomes conscious when he needs to pass from dreaming to decision and action. Evidently he feels this defect in himself as so painful that the possession of what he lacks is seen by him as not merely a virtue but as virtue par excellence, blinding him to the egoism and exploitation in which it is rooted. But we shall meet the types foreshadowed in these two young men often enough in Turgenev's later work not to need to linger over an analysis of the narrator at this point.

‘THREE PORTRAITS’

Whether Turgenev realized that in ‘Andrei Kolosov’ he had handicapped himself by choosing a subject too close to him or whether he just followed an artistic instinct, he turned for his next story to the period of his grandparents. If ‘Three Portraits’⁹ was based on a page of his family history, it dealt with people who had lived and died more than thirty years before he was born.

Belinsky found nothing much to say about ‘Three Portraits’: in a forty-page review of the miscellany in which it appeared he devoted only four lines to this tale, commending the skill and liveliness of the narration and opining that it read less like fiction than like a memoir of ‘the good old days’.¹⁰ Apollon Grigor'ev, one of the most imaginative critics of his generation, not only reviewed the story on its first appearance but felt impelled to reconsider it on two further occasions, nine years and thirteen years after his original assessment.¹¹ There is a characteristic inconsistency between the three articles, but, first and last, Grigor'ev is fascinated by the figure of Vasili Luchinov, in whom he sees a ‘hero of his time’, a Russian Don Juan or Lovelace, an eighteenth-century forerunner of Pechorin.

This is to promote Luchinov to very exalted literary company, but the critic's intuition of affinities is near the mark. The trouble is, we are shown too little of Luchinov: enough to convince us of his reckless courage and his ruthlessness, but we have to take his charm on trust. His thoughts and feelings are apparently all reducible to their expression in his behaviour: his suborning of the devoted Yudich, his defiance of his father (which in that day and age could have cost him his liberty, if not his life), his seduction of his mother's ward (no doubt, his half-sister), his pinning his own guilt on the girl's fiancé, and his murder of the defenceless young man.

Here, then, we have a man who lives for his own pleasure and in pursuit of that pleasure will stop at nothing. Such a character can be made interesting if he is endowed with the intelligence and/or emotional complexity of a Pechorin, or if he is pitted, like Lovelace, against a personality of comparable strength and opposite quality. But Luchinov is manifestly all of a piece, impervious to what the narrator of ‘Andrei Kolosov’ had called ‘the petty good feelings of pity and remorse’;¹² and he lives and moves among men of straw, shadows, who laugh when he laughs, tremble when he frowns, and who either submit to him unresisting or are broken by him without effort.

The three portraits which give the story its title are matched by Turgenev's three verbal portraits: of the narrator, the murderer and his victim (the other personages are mere sketches). One can detect a subtle counterpoint in both triads. On canvas, the two lovers contrast with the heroine as man with woman; they contrast with one another both physically and morally inasmuch as their characters are expressed in their faces; and, as symbolized by the hole in the heart of the one, they contrast in the kind of love that relates them to the woman. In the narrative portraits the central position is occupied by Luchinov—a striking villain between two unremarkable good men. At first sight, the narrator and the fiancé have not a little in common: their girth, their good nature, their bucolic mode of life. Yet they too are contrasted: as a country gentleman of the 1840s with a country gentleman of the 1780s: the latter ignorant of French, a collector of butterflies and a man of a single love, the former an assiduous reader of French books and journals, a breakneck hunter of wolves and foxes, and a man who enjoys flirting with all his pretty neighbours while taking care not to get involved with any of them.

The lively flow of the narration is highlighted by three dramatic scenes: the interrogation and flogging of Yudich culminating in the confrontation between father and son; Luchinov's prevailing on his mother to pardon Ol'ga's ‘sin’ and to attribute it to her fiancé; and Luchinov's compelling Rogachëv to ‘fight’ and killing him.

Nothing, perhaps, is more impressive than the economy of the means by which the hero achieves his purposes. We are first given a glimpse of the virtually unlimited power—the power of life and death—of the landowner over the members of his household; then the young man enters, acknowledges his responsibility for the theft of the money, overawes the serfs who are holding Yudich, outfaces his infuriated father and checkmates him with the mere gesture of half drawing his sword. In the scene with his mother, he imposes his will with the single word, ‘Remember’: she is to remember her own sin, which disqualifies her from judging her ward; but he does not say it. The old lady is silenced by his tone; Ol'ga is stunned by his cold-blooded mendacity in accusing her fiancé. In the duel scene, Luchinov toys with his victim as if he had all time at his disposal, when actually—in enemy territory—his own life is hanging by a thread.

There are, incidentally, a few loose ends, as if to show that Turgenev is still learning his craft. Ol'ga is given a birth-date some ten years earlier than the rest of the chronology requires. There is no explanation of how Luchinov was able to return from banishment to St Petersburg. Nor are the three deaths of the final paragraph prepared or justified. Surely, it is not a case of ‘The wages of sin …’?

‘THE DUELLIST’

‘The Duellist’ (or ‘The Swashbuckler’—but Bretër is more aggressive than the first, less colourful than the second of these renderings) is the longest of the stories in this [essay], and, although not the most original, arguably the subtlest in its psychological portrayals.

It is a commonplace of modern life that any figure who can capture the imagination of any significant section of society—any figure (writer, actor, athlete, political leader, financial wizard) who achieves star status—is liable to become the object of a cult in the form of slavish imitation. Since the imitators lack most or all of the gifts that made their idol a star, they are mostly reduced to imitating at best, his superficial, at worst, his negative traits. Before the age of our mass media the cult object was as likely to be a figure in literature as a person in real life: St Preux rather than Rousseau, Werther rather than Goethe—but Byron (or Napoleon) no less than the Byronic hero. The latest analogue of the Byronic hero in Russia was Pechorin, the protagonist of Lermontov's 1840 novel, A Hero of Our Time.¹³ Pechorin, like the Byronic hero, was a man of dark and complex passions, at war with himself and at war with society; a man of reckless courage; a brilliant and fascinating personality, and endowed—like Lermontov and Byron but unlike the heroes of Byron's ‘Eastern’ poems—with superior intelligence and scathing wit.

Conservative critics of the time disapproved of Pechorin's subversive stance, conventional critics disapproved of his donjuanism. Both groups were only too glad to pretend that Turgenev's Luchkov was a scaled-down Pechorin or a Pechorin merely stripped of his surface polish, instead of recognizing in the story a satire on the Pechorin cult and in its protagonist a satirized product of the cult.

Luchkov is a poor career officer trying to play Pechorin, when all he understands of Pechorin is the duelling and the aura of mystery, and even here his attempts at imitation are caricatural. Pechorin sought dangers of every kind, for the sake of the excitement or to test himself and because he held his life cheap, and only occasionally or incidentally to avenge some slight to his pride; Luchkov seeks to make himself feared, usually risking as little as possible: provoking and attacking the ‘new boys’ in his regiment like a school bully. Pechorin was mysterious because he was really a puzzle, partly even to himself, whereas Luchkov's taciturnity covers only a void: he is uneducated, unintelligent, unfeeling. Pechorin was an original—rara avis in terris; Luchkov is a shoddy counterfeit, of a kind destined to proliferate at least till the turn of the century, as witness the figure of Solëny in Chekhov's Three Sisters.¹⁴

Kister also represents a type not uncommon in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the so-called Schillerian idealist. Brought up by women, construing life in terms of his reading, he surrounds himself with an orderliness and cleanness which set him apart—as symbolized by the locks on his doors—from the world of his regiment.¹⁵ He is the direct antithesis of Luchkov—cultured, modest, kindly, sensitive, principled.

Masha is another early avatar of the ‘Turgenev heroine’: less formed, perhaps, than the Parasha or the Dunya of his poems, but much more alive than the passive little Varya of ‘Andrei Kolosov’. Her predicament is one which Turgenev was to develop, more maturely and effectively, two years later in the play A Chain is as Strong as its Weakest Link. Like Vera in the play, Masha has to choose between a supposed or would-be Byronic hero and a merely good man who truly loves her. Both girls nerve themselves to probe the reality behind the mask of the mystery man, both recoil disillusioned from their dreams of romance to embrace sense with friendship, although poor Masha is not allowed to enjoy even that.

And there is poetic justice in the catastrophe. Vera is an extraordinary girl and, therefore, entitled to look for a mate of her own calibre; Gorski was actually above average in many respects; and their duel is conducted with intelligence and spirit, in style. Masha is not an extraordinary girl. She is, of course, not to be blamed for letting Kister mislead her regarding Luchkov's true character and status nor for the youthful clumsiness of her attempts to get past his guard; but she misconceives herself: both as to the kind of man she really wants and needs and as to her fitness to win and keep the interest of a remarkable man (some real-life Pechorin). But, of course, the main responsibility for the tragedy rests on the ‘idealist’, Kister. He has had ample opportunity to get to know Luchkov, but he has deluded himself, as he later goes on to delude Masha; and he has failed to recognize in time the true nature of his feeling for her. Instead, he sets out to play Providence: to redeem his friend through love and to bestow happiness on the girl at his side in the form of the kind of lover she (thinks she) wants.

This Schillerism costs Kister his life and Masha her happiness; Luchkov, needless to say, emerges from his involvement with no more than a scratch to his vanity which will leave no trace: Masha had turned out to be a silly little chit who didn't know what she wanted, and he had demonstrated his superiority over Kister in the only way that counted for him.

There is an added piquant irony in the fact that, while the educated protagonists fatally misjudge themselves and their closest associates, the rough rude officers of the regiment are able not only to understand and assess Luchkov—a grosser variation on a not unfamiliar type—but to appreciate and admire Kister, to take him to their hearts, although he differs so utterly from their conception of what an officer should be. Even Luchkov is a better judge of himself and (until embittered by his humiliation at Masha's hands) of Kister than Kister is of Luchkov or, arguably, of himself. Luchkov has enough honesty—one might almost say: enough intellectual courage—to recognize that he is not only ignorant but unintelligent (though he perceives that Kister is in love before Kister himself does); while Kister convinces himself that Luchkov is ‘a fine and remarkable man’, a man with a ‘kind heart’, and that he, Kister, ought to make a match between the girl he doesn't know he loves and his goodhearted and remarkable friend.

Luchkov is a study in vanity and frustration. Inferior to his peers in looks, brains and emotional resources, he cannot bear to be ignored or despised, and therefore imposes himself on their notice and regard in the only way open to him—through fear. He gravitates towards Kister because Kister is the first man to accept him: Kister in his innocence not only does not judge him but invests him with virtues he does not possess. Left to his own devices, Luchkov has enough sound sense to steer clear of romances; Kister unwittingly makes the mistake of playing on his vanity in persuading him that Masha is interested in him; from there on, events follow their inevitable course.

So whereas in ‘Three Portraits’ the good are destroyed by an external evil beyond their control, in ‘The Duellist’ the destruction of the good is due, as in true tragedy, to flaws in their own nature.

‘THE JEW’

In ‘The Jew’,¹⁶ written in the same year as ‘The Duellist’ (1846), Turgenev continues to keep subjectivity at bay by choosing for portrayal a period and setting and events and, presumably, characters from outside the limits of his own experience. The story is told by a veteran of the wars against Napoleon, recalling an incident in his life during the 1813 siege of Danzig.

After winning a large sum at cards, he is approached by a Jewish camp-follower, who offers to bring a beautiful girl to his tent—for payment, of course—and does so. The girl, Sara, is very beautiful, but obviously frightened and quite inexperienced: she takes flight the first time she is kissed. On her second visit, she bursts into tears, and the chivalrous young lieutenant, himself only nineteen, lets her go as she has come. Some time later, while on a foraging expedition, he chances on the village where she and her family live, and saves them from the depredations of his soldiers. She promises to pay him a third visit on the following day; but that very morning the Jew is caught drawing a plan of the Russian camp and condemned by the commanding general to be hanged as a spy. It turns out that Sara is his daughter, and she and the young lieutenant make frantic efforts to secure his pardon; but the sentence is carried out and the girl curses his executioners and collapses.

The whole second half of the story pivots on descriptions of the Jew's abject terror at the prospect of death. He tries to deny what his map clearly establishes; he tries to flatter and bribe his captors; he tells the lieutenant that whereas he had no intention, earlier, of letting him touch Sara, now, if his life is spared, he will hand her over to him. All this is accompanied by a crescendo of pitiful and grotesque manifestations of panic and horror.

In later life Turgenev had rich Jewish friends, interceded with Russian authorities on behalf of poor Jewish victims of administrative action, unreservedly deplored Russian anti-Semitism and condemned the pogroms in private (while declining to speak out against them publicly), and was variously extolled or decried as the most cosmopolitan or least nationalistic of Russian writers; but at this stage he had apparently not emancipated himself from one of the most widespread attitudes of his caste.¹⁷

If the protagonist, as a personification of cunning greed and comic cowardice, is a stereotype, much the same can be said of the other male characters: the Germanic general with his kind heart at odds with the letter of the law and the gallant narrator with his wild gambling and chivalrous respect for beauty in distress. The latter two are thumbnail sketches, as is the romantic heroine; only the spy is drawn, if not in the round, at something like full length. It is a repellent picture, in spite of the pity professed by the narrator and demonstrated by the general; it makes its impact on the reader in the manner of ‘slice of life’ journalism.

Oddly enough, its publication was held up by the Imperial censorship for several months. One wonders why. One may also wonder why it never occurred to Turgenev to exclude it from his Collected Works (as he excluded all his poetry, for instance).

‘PETUSHKOV’

‘Petushkov’ is the most Gogolian of the six stories. Although the protagonist of ‘The Jew’ is in some respects a Gogolian figure, there is nothing Gogolian about the setting or the other characters. In ‘Petushkov’ the urban lower-middle-class setting is distinctly Gogolian; so is the vein of comedy, which sets this story apart from the other five. The same can be said of at least four of the six personages: the major, the aunt of the heroine, the servant and the friend of the hero. Petushkov himself is a Gogolian type viewed through the prism of ‘sentimental humanism’. Gogol was notoriously incapable of depicting lifelike girls or young women, but Vasilisa may approximate what Gogol might have produced if he had been able to depict a lifelike girl and had condescended to depict a girl of Vasilisa's social class. On the other hand, the theme of ‘Petushkov’ is eminently Turgenevan: the theme of love as an obsession that degrades and morally destroys its bearer.

Although it would be rash to read either autobiographical or programmatic intentions into this story at this date, it cannot escape notice that the hero ends up dreeing his weird ‘on the edge of another man's nest’, as Turgenev will later define his situation vis-à-vis the Viardots, nor, on the other hand, that Petushkov's ‘passion’ is not merely unromantic but anti-romantic: so that this story would involve another line of attack on Romanticism, following those in ‘Andrei Kolosov’ and ‘The Duellist’.

The tradition of courtly love, out of which Romantic love developed, posited the excellence of the beloved, her superiority to the lover, and the ennobling effect of such love on the lover; Petushkov's infatuation for Vasilisa runs counter to all three of these postulates. Nor is it a case of quixotic delusion. He does not invest his Dulcinea with imaginary virtues: he sees her as she is; he even comes to see that she does not love him, that she feels nothing for him.

The nature of Petushkov's infatuation may raise some questions in the reader's mind. From the one sentence in which we are informed that he and Vasilisa did become lovers (‘Ivan Afanas'evich, to put it delicately, attained his purpose’) one might infer that his interest in her was predominantly sexual. And this appears to be borne out by the jesting commentary of the following sentences: ‘Men are usually cooled by the attainment of their purposes, but Petushkov, on the contrary, became more and more ardent with every passing day … Petushkov became passionately attached to Vasilisa. He was completely happy.’

But, first, we have to ask how much of this passage is Turgenev's. The editors of his Works assume that the sentence in brackets above is Nekrasov's.¹⁸ But then how can we be sure that Nekrasov's editing was limited to that one sentence? And if one or more of the following sentences are his, how can we take the passage as a basis for characterizing Petushkov's passion?

However, if the whole passage is Turgenev's, how far is an interpretation of the passion as mainly sexual borne out by the rest of the story? The glimpses we are given of the brief happy stage of the relationship seem redolent not of romantic or sexual ardours but rather of a humdrum domesticity.

Petushkov at the age of forty has remained a gentle, childlike soul, too timid to form a close relationship with anybody. Chance causes him to notice the pretty face of 17-year-old Vasilisa, who has just arrived in the neighbourhood to help in her aunt's bakery. Goaded by the strictures of his flighty visitor, Bublitsyn, and of his morose servant, Onisim, both of whom scoff at his lack of enterprise, he pursues the acquaintance, is prompted to visit the aunt, and almost before he (or the reader) knows what is happening, has, as the narrator delicately puts it, attained his purpose (if we can believe that he ever had a purpose).

Bublitsyn, or any of his ilk, would have enjoyed the adventure as a side-line, while continuing to live in his social world; but Petushkov has no social world to hold on to—or return to—and therefore sinks as into a quagmire into the warm squalor of the bakery. He is cold-shouldered by his fellow officers and finally hauled over the coals by his choleric commander for losing caste, but even this somewhat frightening experience fails to rouse him from the trance-like state into which he has lapsed.

What does disturb him is his gradual realization of Vasilisa's unfaithfulness and indifference. His attempts to win her back swing between appeals to sentiment and efforts to assert his dignity, culminating in half-threats of rupture, which sound like nothing so much as a small child's threats to run away from home. When his bluff is called, he backs down; when he is given his congé, he goes to pieces. He pines for her, wastes away, and by the time his faithful servant has realized the seriousness of the crisis and goes to fetch her, he has sought relief or distraction in alcohol.

Alcohol is supposed to show a man in his true colours, and that is certainly its effect on Petushkov. When Onisim returns with Vasilisa, he receives her courteously and gently, as an honoured guest. No reproaches to her: only to himself. And no prevarication: it is kind of her to say he is unwell, but the truth is, he is drunk. He is drunk because he is destroyed (ubit)—destroyed by her, but he does not hold that against her. It is not her fault, it is his: he loved her and he ought to have offered to marry her in spite of their social disparity. She could have had a good life with him,¹⁹ for he is a goodhearted man. But now he is drunk, destroyed: he has lost his self-respect and turned to vice.

But how could she have wounded him so cruelly, leaving it to her aunt to give him his dismissal? He had loved and respected her. Even now, she has only to say the word and he will marry her. But if not, he is ready to beg her on his knees to readmit him to her life: only to let him visit her again, be with her as before but making no claims on her, leaving her completely free. Finally he breaks down in tears, and Vasilisa and Onisim, though they have not drunk a drop, are moved to weep with him. Evidently his last plea is granted. Vasilisa leads her own life, inherits the bakery, marries a man of her own class (and age, perhaps). Petushkov has come to live in a small closet in the bakery, and continues to drink.

Surely it is plain that if sex brought Petushkov and Vasilisa together, it had ceased to be what bound him to her, at least by the time of his dismissal, if not before. A key word in Petushkov's cogitations is ‘orphan’ (sirota), a word used with less narrow literalness and perhaps more pregnant with desolation in Russian than in some other languages. His intimacy with Vasilisa may have brought home to him in a new and more poignant way the utter loneliness of his existence up till that time. In clinging to her, in sharing her life or even only watching her live, his existence had taken on a new dimension of meaning, which had become essential to his survival. Cut off from her, he would probably have drunk himself to death quite soon; allowed back within the borders of her life, he lives on into old age (as defined by Turgenev), but only with the prop of alcohol, so at the cost of his self-respect, steeped in what he regards as vice.

‘THREE MEETINGS’

‘Three Meetings’²⁰ was written towards the end of Turgenev's ‘remarkable decade’; it attracted little critical attention and less approval, although it moved Dobrolyubov to tears and Nekrasov and Botkin paid tribute to the poetry of its first half. Between ‘Petushkov’ and ‘Three Meetings’ Turgenev produced ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’, which looks forward to his writings of the middle and late 1850s and will be considered together with them.

The three meetings on which this story hinges took place in Southern Italy, in Central Russia and in St Petersburg. Observers of life know well that coincidence plays a much larger part in real life than it is supposed to do in ‘realistic’ literature; but Turgenev was criticized for regressing to the Romanticism of earlier decades. His narrator was seen as too obtrusive and not interesting enough; it was objected that the parts did not hang together; not only was the contrast too strident between the ‘poetry’ of the first part and the banality of the second, but the suicide of old Luk'yanych appeared a pointless digression, irrelevant and unmotivated.²¹

It must be conceded that the last two criticisms have some validity; but it should also be recognized that the story has merits. It is strikingly different in tone and theme from any of Turgenev's first five tales: in his fiction no less than in his plays, he persists in experimenting and innovating, so playing a leading part in extending the range of Russian literature to bring it abreast of the richest of Western literatures.

Granted that the love-story is in itself fairly ordinary, it is all the more surprising that the image of a woman happily in love is communicated to the reader with such force and vividness, and doubly surprising when it has to be conveyed solely through the sense-impressions of the narrator, without any direct access to her thoughts and feelings. Yet surely we do see and feel and believe we are present with the narrator.

No less of a tour de force—no less evocative and ‘infectious’—is the portrayal of the two summer nights, at Sorrento and in the province of Orël. Botkin, known for his aesthetic discernment, wrote to Turgenev of the excitement aroused in him by the reading of such pages.²² A reader of today might be put in mind of the verses of an Italian poet of our century:

Tutto era silenzio, luce, forza, desio.
L'attesa del prodigio gonfiava questo mio
Cuore come il cuor del mondo …(23)
(There all was stillness, power, light, desire.
In expectation of the miracle
My heart had swelled, become the whole world's heart).

Although the Italian night is alight with colours and perfumes, it is, as we might expect, the Russian night that reveals the longer and subtler spectrum of hues and modulations. It is in the Russian night that the tension reaches its highest intensity. In both nights the tension finds sudden and magical release in a song of triumphant love sung to the night by a woman who, believing herself to be alone, feels free to pour all her soul into the incantation.

It is for these hymns to night and for the picture of the woman riding hand in hand with her lover through the early morning silences that ‘Three Meetings’ deserves to be read and remembered.

Notes

1. ‘Andrei Kolosov’ (1844); ‘Three Portraits’ (Tri portreta: 1845, published 1846); ‘The Duellist’ (Bretër: 1846, published 1847); ‘The Jew’ (Zhid: 1846, published 1847); ‘Petushkov’ (1847, published 1848).

2. ‘Mumu’ (1852, published 1854); ‘The Inn’ (Postoyaly dvor: 1852, published 1855).

3. ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’ (Dnevnik lishnego cheloveka: 1850).

4. ‘A Hamlet of the Shchigry District’ (Gamlet shchigrovskogo uezda: 1848, published 1849).

5. Pushkin in his Tales of Belkin (1831) and Gogol in his Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka (vol. i, 1831; vol. ii, 1832) introduced ‘editors’ (Belkin, Pan'ko) who had heard the tales from different narrators and published or prepared to publish them. Belkin died suddenly before he could publish; his intention was carried out by an anonymous metropolitan man of letters. Lermontov took a further step by introducing the future editor of the stories that were later to evolve into the novel A Hero of Our Time as a character, who hears the first story from a narrator who had taken part in it and then, in the second story, witnesses the meeting between the narrator of the first story and its protagonist (Pechorin, the protagonist of the whole novel).

6. In two of the three, the narrator of the main story is one of its principal personages; in the third, he has taken no part in it.

7. See n. 54 to ch. 2 above.

8. N. K. Krupskaya, ‘Detstvo i rannyaya yunost' Il'icha’, first published in Bol'shevik, no. 12 (1938); cited from W. v, 548.

9. Written not later than 1845 and published at the beginning of 1846. So it antedates ‘The Duellist’, written in 1846 and published at the beginning of 1847, although in all editions of Turgenev's Works—both in his lifetime and since—it has appeared in third place, that is, after ‘The Duellist’.

10. V. G. Belinsky, ‘Peterburgski sbornik’ in Otechestvennye zapiski (1846), no. 3: cited from Belinsky, Sobranie sochineni v trëkh tomakh (Moscow, 1948)), vol. iii, p. 86.

11. Summarized in W. v, 563-4.

12. Of course, Kolosov differs from Luchinov in having ‘a sense of honour’: he does not seduce Varya; if her heart breaks, that is not his fault.

13. The ‘Byronic hero’ was first popularized in Pushkin's ‘Southern’ poems (The Captive of the Caucasus, 1822; The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, 1824; The Gypsies, 1827); but the somewhat tenuous heroes, especially of the first two, were soon overshadowed, if not eclipsed, by the eponymous hero of Evgeni Onegin, ‘a novel in verse’ in eight chapters (1825-32), whose affinities are not with Byron's ‘Eastern’ poems but with his Don Juan. For the relationships between Onegin, Pechorin, Turgenev's Rudin, see Seeley, 1952, and for the continuation of the line in Goncharov's Oblomov, Seeley, ‘Oblomov’, Slavonic and East European Review (July, 1976).

14. As noted by several Russian critics: see W. v, 558, citing an allusion to Luchkov in a letter of Chekhov dated 6 Feb. 1898.

15. Vsë v komnate Fëdora Fëdorovicha dyshalo poryadkom i chistotoi (Everything in Kister's room was redolent of order and cleanness—or purity: ‘chistota’ means both).

16. Turgenev uses not the neutral term evrei but the derogatory zhid.

17. Cf. the references to Jews in Stankevich's letters to his family during his journey from his home to Berlin in 1837: N. V. Stankevich, Perepiska 1830-40, edited and published by Aleksei Stankevich (Moscow, 1914).

18. Nekrasov was the editor of the journal in which ‘Petushkov’ was to appear. Turgenev wrote from abroad (L. 68, to V. G. Belinsky, 26 Nov. 1847) requesting Belinsky to read the proofs, mark any feeble passages, and ask Nekrasov to improve them in a few words—‘for instance, to make it clear that Vasilisa became his lover, etc., etc.’

19. In this he is certainly mistaken: Vasilisa was not yet ready to give up enjoying herself and settle down.

20. Written December 1851 or January 1852, published February 1852.

21. See W. v, 590-3.

22. Quoted W. v, 591.

23. Gabriele D'Annunzio, Laudi del cielo, del mare, della terra e degli eroi (Milan, 1928), bk i, ‘L'Annunzio’, p. 11.