' 'What is Bazarov?' Arkadi smiled. 'Would you like me, Uncle, to tell you precisely what he is?'
'If you will be so obliging, Nephew.' 'He's a nihilist. . . .'
51
' 'A nihilist,' Nikolay Petrovich managed to say. 'That's from the Latin,
' 'Say, 'who respects nothing,' ' put in his brother, and he set to work on the butter again.
'Who regards everything from the critical point of view,' observed Arkadi.
' 'Isn't that the same thing?' inquired the uncle. 'No, it isn't. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith no matter what an aura of reverence may surround that principle.'. . .
' 'So that's it. Well, I see it's not in our line. . . . There used to be Hegelists, but now you have nihilists. We shall see how you will exist in a void, in a vacuum. And now please ring, brother Nikolay Petrovich—it's time I had my cocoa.'
Immediately after this Fenichka appears. Note her admirable description: 'She was a young woman of about three-and-twenty, all dainty whiteness and softness, with dark hair and eyes, red, childishly plump small lips, and delicate little hands.
She wore a neat print dress; a new blue kerchief lay lightly on her soft shoulders. She was carrying a large cup of cocoa and, having set it down before Pavel Petrovich, she was overwhelmed with confusion; the hot blood rushed in a wave of crimson over the delicate skin of her endearing face. She dropped her eyes and stood at the table, leaning a little on the very tips of her fingers. Apparently ashamed of having come in, she at the same time felt she had a right to come.'
Bazarov, the frog hunter, returns at the end of the chapter, and in the next one the breakfast table is the arena of the first round between Uncle Pavel and the young nihilist, both men scoring heavily:
' 'Arkadi was telling us just now that you do not acknowledge any authorities whatsoever—that you do not believe in them?'
' 'But why should I acknowledge them? And what should I believe in? When anyone talks sense, I agree, and that's all.'
' 'And all the Germans [scientists] talk sense?' asked Pavel Petrovich, and his face assumed an expression as impassive, as remote, as if he had withdrawn to some empyrean height.
' 'Not all,' replied Bazarov with a short yawn. He obviously did not care to continue the debate. . . .
''For my own part,' Pavel Petrovich began again, not without some effort, 'I am so unregenerate as not to like Germans. . . .
My brother, for instance, is very favorably inclined toward them. . . . But now they've all turned chemists and materialists—'
' 'A chemist who knows his business is twenty times as useful as any poet,' broke in Bazarov.'
On a collecting expedition Bazarov has found what he and Turgenev call a rare specimen of beetle. The term of course, is not specimen, but species, and that particular water-beetle is not a rare species. Only people who know nothing about natural history confuse specimen with species. In general Turgenev's descriptions of Bazarov's collecting are rather lame.
One will notice that despite Turgenev having prepared the first clash rather carefully, Uncle Pavel's rudeness strikes the reader as not very realistic. By 'realism,' of course, I merely indicate what an average reader in an average state of civilization feels as conforming to an average reality of life. Now in the reader's mind Uncle Pavel has already been imprinted as an image of a very fashionable, very experienced, very well groomed gentleman who would hardly take the trouble to heckle so viciously a chance boy, his nephew's friend and his brother's guest.
I have mentioned that a curious feature of Turgenev's structure is the spreading of antecedents over the action part of the story. An illustration comes at the end of chapter 6, 'And Arkadi told Bazarov the story of Uncle Pavel.' The story is passed on to the reader in chapter 7 and conspicuously interrupts the flow of the story which has already started. We read here 52
about Uncel Pavel's love affair with the fascinating and fateful Princess R. back in the 1830s. This romantic lady, a sphinx with a riddle who finally found its solution in organized mysticism, around 1838 leaves Pavel Kirsanov and in 1848 she dies.
Since then, till now, 1859, Pavel Kirsanov has retired to his brother's country seat.
Now further on we discover that Fenichka has not only replaced his [dead] wife Mary in the affections of Nikolay Kirsanov but has also replaced Princess R. in the affections of Uncle Pavel, another case of simple structural symmetry. We are shown Fenichka's room through Uncle Pavel's eyes:
'The small low-ceiled room in which he found himself was very clean and cozy. It smelt of the freshly painted floor, of camomile and melissa. Along the walls were ranged chairs with lyre-shaped backs, bought by the late general [as far back as the campaign of 1812]; in one corner was a high, small bedstead under a muslin canopy, near an ironbound chest with a rounded lid. In the opposite corner a little image-lamp was burning before a big dark icon of St. Nikolay the Wonder-Worker, a tiny porcelain egg hung by a red ribbon from the protruding gold halo down the saint's breast; on the window sills stood greenish glass jars of last year's jam, carefully tied and with the light green showing through them; on their paper tops Fenichka herself had written in big letters
Near the ceiling, on a long cord, hung a cage with a bobtailed siskin; it was constantly chirping and hopping about, and the cage was constantly shaking and swinging, while hempseeds fell with a light tap on the floor. On the wall, just above a small chest of drawers, hung some rather poor photographs of Nikolay Petrovich in various poses, taken by some itinerant photographer; there, too, hung a photograph of Fenichka herself, which was an absolute failure: an eyeless face wearing a forced smile, in a dingy frame—one could make out nothing more. And above Fenichka, General Yermolov, in a Circassian felt cloak, scowled menacingly upon the Caucasian mountains in the distance, from beneath a little pincushion in the form of a shoe, which came down right over his eyebrows.'
Now look at the way the story pauses again to allow the author to describe Fenichka's past:
'Nikolay Petrovich had made Fenichka's acquaintance three years before when he happened to stay overnight at an inn in a remote district town. He was agreeably struck by the cleanness of the room assigned to him, by the freshness of the bed linen. . . . Nikolay Kirsanov had at that time just moved into his new home and not wishing to keep serfs in the house, was on the lookout for hired servants; the landlady for her part complained of the small number of transients in the town, and the hard times; he proposed to her to come into his house in the capacity of housekeeper; she consented. Her husband had long been dead, leaving her an only daughter—Fenichka . . . who was at that time seventeen . . . she lived ever so quietly, ever so unassumingly, and only on Sundays did Nikolay Petrovich notice in the parish church, somewhere off on the side, the delicate profile of her small white face. More than a year passed thus.'
Nikolay treats her for an inflamed eye, which was soon well again, 'but the impression she had made on Nikolay did not pass away so soon. He was forever haunted by that pure, delicate, timorously lifted face; he felt on his palms that soft hair, and saw those innocent, slightly parted lips, through which pearly teeth gleamed moistly in the sun. He began to watch her with great attention in church, he tried to get into conversation with her. . . .
'By degrees she began to get used to him, but was still shy in his presence, when suddenly Arina, her mother, died of cholera. Which way was Fenichka to turn? She inherited from her mother a love for order, common sense, and sedateness; but she was so young, so lonely. Nikolay Petrovich was himself so good and modest. There is no need to relate the rest.'
The details are admirable, that inflamed eye is a work of art, but the structure is lame and the paragraph concluding the account is lame and coy. 'There is no need to relate the rest.' A strange and silly remark implying that some things are so well known to readers that they are not worth describing. Actually the gentle reader should not find it very difficult to imagine precisely the event which Turgenev so prudently and prudishly masks.
Bazarov meets Fenichka—and no wonder her baby falls for him. We know already about that way Bazarov has with simple little souls—bearded peasants, urchins, maid-servants. We also hear, with Bazarov, old Kirsanov playing Schubert.
