A LETTER: TURGENEV (1917) – By Joseph Conrad
Dear Edward,
I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What greater luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in the English - speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes of Turgenev’s complete edition, the last of which came into the light of public indifference in the ninety - ninth year of the nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in the Preface to Smoke “to all time.”
Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short stories and of A Sportsman’s Sketches — those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev’s art, which has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for “all time” it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women would not have changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently and so passionately — they, at least, are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole - souledly national. But for non - Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of Shakespeare.
In the larger, non - Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the English - speaking world, is his essential humanity. All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever - receding future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of “cleverness” must be fatal to any man’s influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don’t want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian. It wouldn’t be true. I know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of his conscience — no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken - hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror - haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy — and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world’s fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn’t get one per cent. of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double - headed Nightingale or of some weak - kneed giant grinning through a horse collar.
J. C.
The Biography
Turgenev with fellow Russian Writers. From left to right: Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Dimitri Grigorovich, Alexandre Drujinin, and Alexandr Ostrovsky
TURGENEV: A STUDY by Edward Garnett
WITH A FOREWORD BY JOSEPH CONRAD
In 1917 this biographical book on Turgenev’s life and works was published by Edward Garnett, an English writer, critic and literary editor. As well as a firm supporter of Turgenev’s literary form, Garnett was also instrumental in having D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers published.
Please note: The original footnotes have been included to aid the reader.
Edward Garnett, the famous literary critic
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
CHAPTER I
TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS
CHAPTER II
YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK
CHAPTER III
“A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES” — ”NATURE AND MAN” — THE SECRET OF TURGENEV’S ART
CHAPTER IV
“RUDIN”
CHAPTER V
“A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK”
CHAPTER VI
“ON THE EVE”
CHAPTER VII
“FATHERS AND CHILDREN”
CHAPTER VIII
“SMOKE”
CHAPTER IX
“VIRGIN SOIL”
CHAPTER X
THE TALES
CHAPTER XI
NOTE ON TURGENEV’S LIFE — HIS CHARACTER AND PHILOSOPHY — ENOUGH — HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE — THE POEMS IN PROSE — TURGENEV’S LAST ILLNESS AND DEATH — HIS EPITAPH.
FOREWORD
Dear Edward — I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What greater luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in the English - speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship too) I may well permit myself to make that s
tatement, while thinking of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes of Turgenev’s complete edition, the last of which came into the light of public indifference in the ninety - ninth year of the nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev had come to an end too; only work so simple and human, so independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art belongs as you point out in the Preface to Smoke “ to all time.”
Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short stories and of A Sportsman’s Sketches — those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev’s art, which has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for “all time “ it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and characters to the test of love we may hope that it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women would not have changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently and so passionately — they, at least, are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole - souledly national. But for non - Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of Shakespeare.
In the larger, non - Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the English - speaking world, is his essential humanity.
All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever - receding future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of “ cleverness “ must be fatal to any man’s influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don’t want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian. It wouldn’t be true. I know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of his conscience — no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken - hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror - haunted Dostoevski but the serene Turgenev who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle : absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy — and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world’s - fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn’t get one per cent of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double - headed Nightingale or of some weak - kneed giant grinning through a horse collar. —
Yours, J. C.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
For permission to use certain Prefaces, which I wrote originally for my wife’s Translations of the Novels and Tales of Ivan Turgenev, and for the use of a few quotations from her versions I have to thank Mr. William Heinemann, the publisher of the Collected Edition.
E. G.
March 1917.
CHAPTER I
TURGENEV’S CRITICS AND HIS DETRACTORS
A writer, Mr. Robert Lynd, has said: “It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the images of the rivals of the gods of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and another year, Turgenev. And no doubt the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.”
One had hoped that the disease, long endemic in Russia, of disparaging Turgenev, would not have spread to England, but some enthusiastic explorers of things Russian came back home with a mild virus and communicated the spores of the misunderstanding. That misunderstanding, dating at least fifty years back, was part of the polemics of the rival Russian political parties. The Englishman who finds it strange that Turgenev’s pictures of contemporary Russian life should have excited such angry heat and raised such clouds of acrimonious smoke may imagine the fate of a great writer in Ireland to - day who should go on his way serenely, holding the balance level between the Unionists, the Nationalists, the Sinn F&n, the people of Dublin, and the people of Belfast. The more impartial were his pictures as art, the louder would rise the hubbub that his types were “exceptional,” that his insight was “ limited,” that he did not understand either the politicians or the gentry or the peasants, that he had not fathomed all that was in each “ movement,” that he was palming off on us heroes who had “ no real existence.” And, in the sense that Turgenev’s serene and beautiful art excludes thousands of aspects that filled the newspapers and the minds of his contemporaries, his detractors have reason.
Various Russian critics, however, whom Mr. Maurice Baring, and a French biographer, M. Haumant, have echoed, have gone further, and in their critical ingenuity have mildly damned the Russian master’s creations. It seems to these gentlemen that there is a great deal of water in Turgenev’s wine. Mr. Baring tells us that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky “ reached the absolute truth of the life which was round them,” and that “ people are beginning to ask themselves whether Turgenev’s pictures are true (!), whether the Russians that he describes ever existed, and whether the praise which was bestowed upon him by his astonished contemporaries all over Europe was not a gross exaggeration.”
“Turgenev painted people of the same epoch, the same generation; he dealt with the same material; he dealt with it as an artist and as a poet, as a great artist and a great poet. But his vision was weak and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoevsky. His characters beside those of Tolstoy seem caricatures, and beside those of Dostoevsky they are conventional. . . . When all is said, Turgenev was a great poet. Wha
t time has not taken away from him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry in his work. . . . Turgenev never wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, the Sportsman’s Sketches. In this book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression.
“No one can deny that the characters of Turgenev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev is this: that Turgenev’s characters are as living as any characters are in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Turgenev’s characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them, and that they are permeated by the faults of the author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self - consciousness.
“... Than Bazarov there is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive . . . (but he is) a book - character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be. . . . Dostoevsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth. . . . (Virgin Soil) Here in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter - day judges who have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the real thing. ‘
Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) Page 390
