Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 1818-1883; Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 1818-1883 -- Criticism and interpretation
And the story goes on flowing easily and naturally till the people
of the neighbourhood, the peasants, the woods and fields around,
are known by us as intimately as is any neighbourhood in life.
Suddenly a break--the tragedy is upon us. Suddenly the terrific
forces that underlie human life, even the meanest of human lives,
burst on us astonished and breathless, precisely as a tragedy comes
up to the surface and bursts on us in real life: everybody runs about
dazed, annoyed, futile; we watch other people sustaining their own
individuality inadequately in the face of the monstrous new events
which go their fatal way logically, events which leave the people
huddled and useless and gasping. And destruction having burst out of
life, life slowly returns to its old grooves--with a difference to us,
the difference in the relation of people one to another that a death or
a tragedy always leaves to the survivors. Marvellous in its truth is
Turgenev's analysis of the situation after Harlov's death, marvellous
is the simple description of the neighbourhood's attitude to the Harlov
family, and marvellous is the lifting of the scene on the afterlife
of Harlov's daughters. In the pages (pages 140, 141, 146, 147) on
these women, Turgenev flashes into the reader's mind an extraordinary
sense of the inevitability of these women's natures, of their innate
growth fashioning their after-lives as logically as a beech puts out
beech-leaves and an oak oak-leaves. Through Turgenev's single glimpse
at their fortunes one knows the whole intervening fifteen years; he
has carried us into a new world; yet it is the old world; one needs to
know no more. It is life arbitrary but inevitable, life so clarified by
art that it is absolutely interpreted; but life with all the sense of
mystery that nature breathes around it in its ceaseless growth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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