Flemish glory of Gogol's art gallery—inserted here and there into his prose, that we still admire to-day. These plums are especially numerous in
Turgenev's presentation in the
There is some very good writing in
[a starry summer night which 'seemed to nestle and to let one's soul nestle too'—a great exponent of the 'music and night' theme was Turgenev], said Rudin,—'reminds me of my student years in Germany.' ' He is asked how students dress.
'—Well, at Heidelberg I used to wear riding boots with spurs and a Hungarian jacket with braidings; I had let my hair grow, so that it almost reached down to my shoulders.' Rudin is a rather pompous young man.
Russia in those days was one huge dream: the masses slept—figuratively ; the intellectuals spent sleepless nights—
literally—sitting up and talking about things, or just meditating until five in the morning and then going out for a walk.
There was a lot of the flinging-oneself-down-on-one's-bed-without-undressing-and-sinking-into-a-heavy- slumber stuff, or jumping into one's clothes. Turgenev's maidens are generally good get-uppers, jumping into their crinolines, sprinkling their faces with cold water, and running out, as fresh as roses, into the garden, where the inevitable meeting takes place in a bower.
Before going to Germany, Rudin had been a student at Moscow University. A friend of his thus tells us of their youth: 'Half-a-dozen youths, a single tallow candle burning . . . the cheapest brand of tea, dry old biscuits . . . but our eyes glow, our cheeks are flushed, our hearts beat . . . and the subjects of our talk are God, Truth, the Future of Mankind, Poetry—we talk nonsense sometimes, but what is the harm?'
As a character, Rudin, the progressive idealist of the 1840s, can be summed up by Hamlet's answer 'words, words, words.'
He is quite ineffectual in spite of his being wholly wrapped up in progressive ideas. His whole energy spends itself in 46
passionate streams of idealistic babble. A cold heart and a hot head. An enthusiast lacking in staying power, a busybody incapable of action. When the girl who loves him, and whom, he thinks, he loves too, tells him there is no hope of her mother consenting to their marriage, he at once gives her up, although she was ready to follow him anywhere. He departs and roams all over Russia; all his enterprises fizzle out. But the bad luck that haunts him and which at the outset was the inability to express the energy of his brain otherwise than by a flow of eloquent words finally shapes him, hardens the outline of his personality, and leads him to a useless but heroic death on the barricades of 1848 in remote Paris.
In
Elena prefers Insarov, who is a man of action, to the ineffectual young men who surround her in her Russian youth. Insarov dies of consumption and Elena continues bravely in his path.
After showing the moral defeat of the idealists of the 1840s, after making his only male active hero a Bulgarian, Turgenev was reproached for not having created a single positive active type of a Russian male. This he tried to do in
'frogs,' meaning nothing but the results of his own practical scientific experience. He knows neither pity nor shame. And he is, par excellence, the active man. Though Turgenev rather admired Bazarov, the radicals whom he thought he was flattering in the face of this strong active young man were indignant at the portrait and saw in Bazarov only a caricature drawn to please their opponents. Turgenev, it was declared, was a finished man who had expended all his talent. Turgenev was dumbfounded. From the darling of the progressive society he suddenly saw himself transformed into a sort of detestable bogey. Turgenev was a very vain man; not only fame, but the outward marks of fame, meant a lot to him. He was deeply offended and disappointed. He was abroad at the time and remained abroad for the rest of his life, making but rare short visits to Russia.
His next piece of writing was a fragment, 'Enough,' in which he declared his decision to give up literature. In spite of this he wrote two more novels and continued writing to the end of his life. Of these last two novels,
moreover, weak and hampered in everything by a morbid sense of inferiority and his own uselessness; (2) Marianna, the pure, true, austerely-naive girl, ready to die there and then for the 'cause'; (3) Solomin, the strong silent man; (4) Markelov, the honest blockhead. On the other side we find the sham liberals and frank reactionaries, such as Sipyagin and Kallomeytsev. It is a very tame affair, this novel, with the author's fine talent struggling, and just failing, to keep alive the characters and the plot he had selected not so much because his art urged him, but rather because he was eager to air his own views upon the political problems of his day.
Incidentally, Turgenev, as most writers of his time, is far too explicit, leaving nothing to the reader's intuition; suggesting and then ponderously explaining what the suggestion was. The labored epilogues of his novels and long short stories are painfully artificial, the author doing his best to satisfy fully the reader's curiosity regarding the respective destinies of the characters in a manner that can hardly be called artistic.
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He is not a great writer, though a pleasant one. He never achieved anything comparable to
