Lectures on Russian Literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, TolstoyPanin, Ivan
History
Lectures on Russian Literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy
Panin, Ivan
Russian literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
country, and stood even ready to become the head of the revolutionary
movement in Russia; but for his artistic career all this came too late.
In fact, his faith in God he never regained, though his hope for man did
come back at last in his old age with the glow of his younger days.
11. This fundamental philosophic scepticism which had poisoned
Turgenef's mind throughout the best years of his life accounts for a
striking change which in time took place in the method of his art.
Hitherto his art had been photographic of individuals. His "Memoirs of a
Sportsman" is a gallery, not of ideals, not of types, but of actual
men,--a gallery put on exhibition for the same end for which the rogues'
gallery is exposed at the police headquarters. It is a means towards the
welfare of the country. But after that book, when the scepticism had
become part of his being, his method changes. For he now becomes
convinced that the misrule of Russia is not so much due to the
government as to the people themselves; that existence is in itself
evil; that salvation, therefore, if it can come at all, must come not
from without, but from within; that reform, therefore, was needed not so
much for the institution, as for the men themselves. And to him men are
diseased. He no longer therefore paints individual men, but henceforth
he paints types; just as the physician first studies the disease not as
affecting this patient or that, but as likely to affect all men, every
man.
12. For much of this scepticism before life and irreverence before God
Turgenef had to thank the paternal government of his fatherland. There
are indeed those to whom sorrow comes like a messenger from the skies
above, and lifts them heavenward on its wings. Turgenef alas! was not
one of these. His was one of those souls whom sorrow deprives not only
of the joys of the present, but also of the hopes of the future; and the
government saw to it that of sorrows poor Turgenef have enough.
Homelessness is an affliction to all sons of Adam, but to none is the
sorrow of exile so intense as to the Russian. And to exile Turgenef was
soon driven. Hid under glowing pictures of nature and fascinating
figures of men, the real meaning of the "Memoirs of a Sportsman," while
they appeared in detached sketches, eluded readily enough the Argus-eyed
censor. But when these sketches were gathered into a living book, then
whatever had eye could behold, and whatever had ear could hear, their
heavenly message. The book therefore creates a sensation, the censor is
astir, hurried consultation takes place, his Majesty himself is roused;
but all this too late; the living book can no longer be strangled. The
government saw that the monster was hydra-headed, and resolved to let it
alone rather than by cutting one of its heads to rouse twenty in its
stead. The book then was spared, but the writer was henceforth doomed;
and the occasion for the final blow is soon enough at hand. The great
Gogol had at last departed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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