Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 1818-1883; Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 1818-1883 -- Criticism and interpretation
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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