His appearance is well known. Tall, strongly built, the head covered with soft and thick gray hair, he was certainly beautiful; his eyes gleamed with intelligence, not devoid of a touch of humor, and his whole manner testified to that simplicity and absence of affectation which are characteristic of the best Russian writers. His fine head revealed a vast development of brain power, and when he died, and Paul Bert, with Paul Reclus (the surgeon), weighed his brain, it so much surpassed the heaviest brain then known—that of Cuvier—reaching something over two thousand grams, that they would not trust to their scales, but got new ones, to repeat the weighing.
His talk was especially remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. When he wanted to develop an idea, he did not resort to arguments, although he was a master in philosophical discussions; he illustrated his idea by a scene presented in a form as beautiful as if it had been taken out of one of his novels.
“You must have had a great deal of experience in your life amongst Frenchmen, Germans, and other peoples,” he said to me once. “Have you not remarked that there is a deep, unfathomable chasm between many of their conceptions and the views which we Russians hold on the same subjects—that there are points upon which we can never agree?”
I replied that I had not noticed such points.
“Yes, there are some. Here is one of them. One night we were at the first representation of a new play. I was in a box with Flaubert, Daudet, Zola. [I am not quite sure whether he named both Daudet and Zola, but he certainly named one of the two.] All were men of advanced opinions. The subject of the play was this: A woman had separated from her husband. She had loved again, and now lived with another man. This man was represented in the play as an excellent person. For years they had been quite happy. Her two children—a girl and a boy—were babies at the time of the separation; now they had grown, and throughout all these years they had supposed the man to be their real father. The girl was about eighteen and the boy about seventeen. The man treated them quite as a father; they loved him, and he loved them. The scene represented the family meeting at breakfast. The girl comes in and approaches her supposed father, and he is going to kiss her, when the boy, who has learned in some way the true state of affairs, rushes forward and shouts, ‘Don’t dare!’ (N’osez pas!)
“This exclamation brought down the house. There was an outburst of frantic applause. Flaubert and the others joined in it. I was disgusted.
“ ‘Why,’ I said, ‘this family was happy; the man was a better father to these children than their real father, … their mother loved him and was happy with him. … This mischievous, perverted boy ought simply to be whipped for what he has said.’ … It was of no use. I discussed for hours with them afterwards; none of them could understand me!”
I was, of course, fully in accordance with Turgenev’s point of view. I remarked, however, that his acquaintances were chiefly amongst the middle classes. There, the difference between nation and nation is immense indeed. But my acquaintances were exclusively amongst the workers, and there is an immense resemblance between the workers, and especially amongst the peasants, of all nations.
In so saying, I was quite wrong, however. After I had had the opportunity of making a closer acquaintance with French workers, I often thought of the truth of Turgenev’s remark. There is a real chasm indeed between Russian conceptions of marriage relations and those which prevail in France, amongst the workers as well as in the middle classes; and in many other things there is a similar difference between the Russian point of view and that of other nations.
It was said somewhere, after Turgenev’s death, that he had intended to write a novel upon this subject. If he had begun it, the above-mentioned scene must be in his manuscript. What a pity that he did not write it! He, a thorough “Occidental” in his ways of thinking, could have said very deep things upon a subject which must have so profoundly affected him personally throughout his life.
Of all novel-writers of our century, Turgenev has certainly attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds to the Russian ear like music—music as deep as that of Beethoven. His principal novels—the series of Dmitri Rúdin, A Nobleman’s Retreat, On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Virgin Soil—represent the leading “history-making” types of the educated classes of Russia, which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched with a fullness of philosophical conception and humanitarian understanding and an artistic beauty which have no parallel in any other literature. Yet Fathers and Sons—a novel which he rightly considered his profoundest work—was received by the young people of Russia with a loud protest. Our youth declared
