Part 8
As with Tolstoi, so with Turgenev, plot is a negligible quantity. Yet in a way that quite defies any explanation but one, the final impression is fairly unified, and certainly tremendously effective. That one explanation is that all the scattered pictures of traits, appearances, oddities, mannerisms of bearing and speech, and, above all, the marvellous reproduction of _characteristically_ personal language, result in an individual presentment of character unequalled for vividness in all fiction. Turgenev lets no significant detail escape. The units may be trivial, the entire effect is almost always big. The little thing he seizes upon shows us with the infallibility of a master diagnostician the trends of character. The sum of it all is wizardry.
All this is true primarily of his great novels. Here I have space only for mention, at the same time venturing to place them in the order of their importance: “A House of Gentlefolk” (“A Nest of Nobles”), a masterpiece of depiction; “Fathers and Children,” a severe castigation of the old and the new in Russia; “On the Eve,” a pessimistic inquiry as to whether there is hope of better things for his fatherland; “Rudin,” a character study of unusual penetration; “Torrents of Spring,” in which a devilish woman ruins the hero; “Smoke,” a brilliant but bitter satire on things Russian; and “Virgin Soil,” whose “villain,” as in all of the author’s novels, is a woman!
* * * * *
In discussing Turgenev’s shorter fictions, we must remember that most of them were written from seventy to forty years ago, and all show that fine disregard of form which only a master may entertain without inviting failure. Here, as in his novels, character is all. Other story-tellers often make the story preëminent--Turgenev never. His favorite method is to hold up many facets of a character, letting the light--here a gleam, there a full radiance--fall on each. He is a master of monologue and of dialogue. Even the jerky pauses are eloquent. The vagueness of a mind is never asserted; it is shown indubitably. The inept man, the supernumerary of society, the man who is engrossed in self, the despairing peasant bound to the wheel, the reflective but weak-willed dreamer--speech, physical habits, and physical traits reveal them all as relentlessly as a scalpel uncovers diseased tissue. This is the wonder of Turgenev’s fictional power. He has brought suggestive description to the _n_^{th} power. No fictionist has even approached him in this respect.
One further quality deserves special mention, for I have already referred to his hatred of serfdom and his scorn for the superfluous social orders it built up. It is that of nature description. Turgenev was an Englishman in his love of gunning (although in later life he disapproved of the needless slaughter of innocents). Consequently, many of his tales--particularly his notable “A Sportsman’s Sketches”--abound in fine nature passages. Here is one from “Yermolaï and the Miller’s Wife.”
A quarter of an hour before sunset in springtime you go out into the woods with your gun, but without your dog. You seek out a spot for yourself on the outskirts of the forest, take a look round, examine your caps, and glance at your companion. A quarter of an hour passes; the sun has set, but it is still light in the forest; the sky is clear and transparent; the birds are chattering and twittering; the young grass shines with the brilliance of emerald.... You wait. Gradually the recesses of the forest grow dark; the blood-red glow of the evening sky creeps slowly on to the roots and the trunks of the trees, and keeps rising higher and higher, passes from the lower, still almost leafless branches, to the motionless, slumbering tree-tops.... And now even the topmost branches are darkened; the purple sky fades to dark-blue. The forest fragrance grows stronger; there is a scent of warmth and damp earth; the fluttering breeze dies away at your side. The birds go to sleep--not all at once--but after their kinds; first the finches are hushed, a few minutes later the warblers, and after them the yellow buntings. In the forest it grows darker and darker. The trees melt together into great masses of blackness; in the dark-blue sky the first stars come timidly out. All the birds are asleep. Only the red starts and the nuthatches are still chirping drowsily.... And now they too are still. The last echoing call of the peewit rings over our heads; the oriole’s melancholy cry sounds somewhere in the distance; then the nightingale’s first note. Your heart is weary with suspense, when suddenly--but only sportsmen can understand me--suddenly in the deep hush there is a peculiar croaking and whirring sound, the measured sweep of swift wings is heard, and the snipe, gracefully bending its long beak, sails smoothly down behind a dark bush to meet your shot.
It is illuminating to observe Turgenev’s well-nigh invariable method of story-telling. First he will draw in a setting with much attention to detail and introducing characters who add nothing to the story proper but do add immeasurably to the atmosphere--and atmosphere is miraculously handled by this master. Then he will begin to show phases of the leading character. And when at last we have formed a perfect picture of the person in his surroundings, a dramatic, a pathetic, a deep-revealing flash comes forth in the form of an anecdote or an incident--and the story is done. Character pictures, mostly _in statu quo_--these are the master’s offerings. Plot, in the modern sense, is almost unknown to Turgenev--as character-drawing, alas, is almost a lost art to the short-story writer of today! But it must be said that only an artist of the first order could carry his method to success.
A list of Turgenev’s short fictional pieces--technical short-stories they are not--would number more than fifty, many of them almost novelettes in length. Some of the best are “Assia,” “The Jew,” “A Lear of the Steppes,” “Mumu,” “First Love,” “The Brigadier,” and “The Song of Triumphant Love.”
In the following outline and translated passages taken from M. de Vogüé’s distinguished discussion of “Russian Novelists,” we may gain a good view of Turgenev’s method and style.
In “A Living Relic,”[2] Turgenev as the narrator strongly wakes a human chord. On a hunting expedition, he enters by chance an abandoned shed, where he finds a wretched human being, a woman, deformed, and unable to move. He recognizes in her a former serving-maid of his mother’s, once a gay, laughing girl, now paralyzed, stricken by some strange and terrible disease. This poor creature, reduced to a skeleton, lying forgotten in this miserable shed, has no longer any relations with the outside world. No one takes care of her; kind people sometimes replenish her jar with fresh water. She requires nothing else. The only sign of life, if life it can be called, is in her eyes and her faint respiration. But this hideous wreck of a body contains an immortal soul, purified by suffering, utterly resigned, lifted above itself, this simple peasant nature, into the realms of perfect self-renunciation.
Lukerya relates her misfortune: how she was seized with this illness after a fall in the dark; how she had gone out one dark evening to listen to the songs of the nightingales; how gradually every faculty and every joy of life had forsaken her.
Her betrothed was so sorry; but, then, afterwards he married; what else could he do? She hopes he is happy. For years her only diversion has been to listen to the church-bells, and the drowsy hum of the bees in the hives of the apiary near-by. Sometimes a swallow comes and flutters about in the shed, which is a great event, and gives her something to think about for several weeks. The people that bring water to her are so kind, she is so grateful to them! And gradually, almost cheerfully, she goes back with the young master to the memories of old days, and reminds him how vain she was of being the leader in all the songs and dances; at last, she even tries to hum one of those songs.
“I really dreaded to have this half-dead creature try to sing. Before I could speak, she uttered a sound very faintly, but the note was correct; then another, and she began to sing ‘In the Fields.’... As she sang there was no change of expression in her paralyzed face or in her fixed eyes. This poor little forced voice sounded so pathetic, and she made such an effort to express her whole soul, that my heart was pierced with the deepest pity.”
Lukerya relates her terrible dreams, how Death has appeared before her; not that she dreads his coming, but he always goes away and will not deliver her. She refuses all offers of assistance from her young master; she desires nothing, needs nothing, is perfectly content. As her visitor is about to leave her, she calls him back for a last word. She seems to be conscious (how feminine is this!) of the terrible impression she must have made upon him, and says:
“Do you remember, master, what beautiful hair I had? You know it reached to my knees.... I hesitated a long time about cutting it off, but what could I do with it as I am? So--I cut it off.... Adieu, master!”
* * * * *
In “The District Doctor,” which is appended in a new translation, we find a fuller and even more characteristic specimen of Turgenev’s story-telling. Both reveal the warm heart of the great man, and his unfailing sympathy, which his own painful despair was never allowed to suppress.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] From “A Sportman’s Sketches.”
THE DISTRICT DOCTOR _By Ivan Turgenev_
Returning from a distant field one autumn day, I fell ill with a bad cold. Luckily for me, the fever caught me in the district town, in a hotel. I sent for the doctor. After a half-hour, the district physician appeared--a dark, meagre little man. He prescribed the customary sudorific and a mustard-plaster; and dexterously inserting into his cuff my five-ruble note--coughing dryly and glancing sideways as he did so--he was about to depart, but somehow began to talk and remained. The fever made me restless; anticipating a sleepless night, I was glad to have some one to chat with. Tea was brought in. The doctor was in a conversational mood. He was not a bad fellow, and expressed himself well and divertingly. How strange it is with men! You have known one for a long time and are intimate with him, yet not once have you ventured to talk with him frankly, from your very soul; another you have hardly become acquainted with, and yet--either you tell him or else he tells you, as if in confessional, his very inmost thoughts. I do not know how I earned the confidence of my new acquaintance; but he somehow or other “got started,” as they say, and told me a really remarkable tale, which I present here to the sympathetic reader. I shall try to express the story in the doctor’s own words.
“You don’t know,” he began in a faltering, trembling voice (such is the effect of the unmixed Berezovsk snuff)--“you don’t know the judge of this place, Pavel Luikich Muilov?... No?... Well, it doesn’t matter.” The doctor coughed and wiped his eyes. “Any way, to be exact, it happened during Lent, in the thaw season. I was sitting in the judge’s house, playing ‘preference.’ Our judge is a good fellow, and loves to play the game. Suddenly”--the doctor employed the word _suddenly_ often--“I was informed that some one came for me. ‘What does he want?’ I asked. ‘It’s some one with a note; it must be from a sick person.’ I read the note, and, sure enough, it was from some one ill.... Well, all right--that, you see, is my bread.... The note was from a widow, and here was the case as she put it:
“My daughter is dying; come at once, for God’s sake! I am sending the horses to fetch you.”
“But that was not all.... Her house was some twenty versts from town; a black night outdoors, and the roads simply mean! She was as poor as a mouse, too. ‘Lucky,’ I thought, ‘if I get two rubles.’ Still, duty before everything--you can’t let a person die! Suddenly I handed over my cards to Councillor Kalliopin, and started for home. To be sure, there was a coach waiting for me near the porch; and a couple of working horses, very big-bellied, and with hides like felt; the driver, out of respect, was sitting with his hat off. ‘Well,’ said I to myself, ‘it’s plain to be seen your masters haven’t got much gold.’... You may laugh, but here is a fact worth considering.... When the driver sits like a prince, and keeps his cap on his head, and even laughs under his beard, and flourishes his whip--you may count on a couple of bank-notes! But this, you could see, was an altogether different matter. Still, there was no way out of it; duty before everything. Quickly I collected my most indispensable medicines, and off I went.
“Believe me, I don’t see how I got there. A wretched road, puddles, snow, mud, ruts, suddenly a dam burst somewhere--misery, in short! Any way, I got there. It was a small, thatched-roofed house. There was a light in the windows. It meant they were awaiting me. I was met by a little old lady, very dignified-looking, in a cap. ‘Save her!’ she cried. ‘She is dying!’ ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ I told her, and asked to be shown the patient.... ‘This way, please!’
“I was led into a small but clean room, in one corner of which hung an ikon-lamp. On the bed lay a twenty-year-old maiden, unconscious; in a high fever. Here also were her two sisters, frightened and in tears. ‘Only yesterday,’ they said, ‘she was altogether well, and ate with appetite; but this morning she complained of pains in her head, and tonight suddenly she is like this.’... ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ I once more reassured them--as you know, it’s one of the doctor’s obligations--and proceeded to my task. I bled her, applied mustard-plasters, and prescribed a mixture. And all the time I couldn’t take my eyes from her--upon my word, I never saw such a face ... a beauty, in fact! I was torn by compassion. Such a lovely face, and eyes!... There, thank God, she had grown quieter; perspiration had set in. She was coming to herself; she glanced around her, smiled, moved her hand across her face.... Her sisters bent over her, they asked her, ‘What is the matter with you?’ ‘Nothing,’ she answered, and turned away.... When I looked again she was asleep. I advised quiet; and so we all, on our tiptoes, made our way out, and the maid alone remained in the room, in case of an emergency.
“In the drawing-room the samovar was steaming. They gave me tea, and I was invited to stay overnight.... I agreed; it was late, where else could I go? The little old lady continued to sigh. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to her. ‘Your daughter shall live. And you too need some rest--it is two o’clock.’... ‘And you’ll see that I’m awakened if anything should happen?’ ... I promised.
“The old lady and the girls went to their rooms; my own bed was made in the drawing-room. I lay down, but could not sleep, which was unusual for me. I could not get my patient out of my mind. Finally, I could stand it no longer, and arose. I thought to myself I’d take a peep at her and see how she was coming along. Her bedroom was right next to the drawing-room. I opened the door quietly--and my heart beat violently. There was the maid asleep, her mouth agape; and snoring, mind you, the wretch! As for the patient, she lay with her face turned in my direction, her arms stretched out, poor girl! I approached closer. Suddenly she opened her eyes and fixed them on me!... ‘Who are you? Who are you?’... I became confused. ‘Don’t be frightened, miss. I’m the doctor come to attend to you.’ ‘You are the doctor?’ ‘Yes, the doctor.... Your mother sent to town for me; and in a day or two, with God’s help, we’ll put you on your feet.’ ‘Yes, yes, Doctor, please don’t let me die ... please.’ ‘Miss, what are you saying!’ ‘She’s feverish again,’ I thought to myself. I felt her pulse; sure enough, high fever. She looked at me ... and suddenly she took my hand.... ‘I will tell you,’ she went on, ‘why I do not wish to die. I will tell you, I will tell you ... now we are alone; only to you, to no one else.... Listen.’... I bent over her; she placed her lips to my very ear, brushing my cheek with her hair--I must confess, it made my head swim--and began to whisper.... I understood nothing.... Delirious.... She continued to whisper very rapidly; it didn’t at all sound like Russian. When she ceased she trembled, let her head drop on the pillow, and shook a warning finger at me. ‘Remember, Doctor, tell no one!’... Somehow, I managed to quiet her; I then gave her a drink, awakened the maid, and left her.”
At this juncture the doctor again, with a movement of exasperation, took a pinch of snuff, and for an instant seemed affected.
“However,” he continued, “the next day, contrary to my expectation, my patient did not improve. After some deliberation on my part, I suddenly made up my mind to remain, despite the fact that other patients were awaiting me.... As you know, one can’t afford to neglect these--the practice suffers. Well, in the first place, my patient was really in desperate straits; and then again, to confess the truth to you, I felt strongly attracted towards her; besides, I took a liking to the entire family. Though poor people, they were highly educated.... The father of the family was a learned man, an author; I need not add that he died poor. He managed, however, to give his children an excellent bringing-up. He also left quite a number of books. Whether it was because of this that I attended the patient so assiduously or for other reasons, there is no question that those in the house grew to love me like one of their own kin....
“In the meantime the thaw made the roads very bad; all communication, one might say, was cut off. The medicine was obtained from town with considerable difficulty.... The patient did not improve.... Days came, and days went.... Just then something ... something----” The doctor paused. “Upon my word, I don’t know how to express myself.”... Once more he helped himself to the snuff; he laughed, and swallowed his tea in a gulp. “Well, not to beat about the bush, my patient ... how should one put it? ... she fell in love with me.... Or rather, you see, it was not exactly that ... but ... upon my word, how should one----” The doctor grew embarrassed and blushed.
“No,” he went on with some animation; “how could she fall in love with me? One must know one’s own value. She was an educated, clever, and well-read girl; while I had almost entirely forgotten even the little Latin that I once knew. As for my looks”--the doctor surveyed himself with a smiling glance--“it seems to me I also have nothing to boast of. Still, God did not make me a fool; I will not call black that which is white. I know a thing or two. For instance, I understood perfectly that Alexandra Andreyevna--that was her name--did not actually love me, but rather felt a sort of friendliness towards me, or perhaps it was just respect. Though it is possible she herself misunderstood this feeling, yet she was in such a state that--well, you may judge for yourself.... However,” the doctor added, as he continued his broken speeches, which he uttered without stopping to take breath, and with evident confusion, “it seems I have gotten off the track somewhat.... You simply will not understand what I am saying.... Well, I will try to tell everything in its order.”
He finished his glass of tea, and, speaking more calmly, resumed his story.
“That’s the way it happened. My patient grew worse and worse. You, my friend, are not a physician; therefore, it is hard for you to understand just what the young doctor experiences in his soul when he begins to suspect that the disease is mastering him. Where is his self-confidence then? Your courage simply oozes out of you; words can’t describe it. A notion takes possession of you that you have forgotten all you ever knew, that the patient has lost faith in you, and that the others are beginning to notice your bewilderment and to report new symptoms to you reluctantly; they glance at you from under their eyebrows, they whisper among themselves.... How mortifying! There should be some medicine, you permit yourself to think, to counteract this disease--if you only knew which one! Perhaps that’s the one. You try it--no, that’s not it! You haven’t given the mixture sufficient time to work ... and you try another. Or you turn the pages of your pharmacopœia ... thinking you might hit upon something.... In the meantime a person is dying; another doctor might have saved him. A consultation is necessary, you argue to yourself; you don’t feel like taking the entire responsibility. What a fool you are made to look, under the circumstances! After a time, of course, you get used to it. A person dies--well, it isn’t your fault, you have done everything according to rules. It is even more painful when the relatives show blind faith in you, while in your own heart you know you are unable to help.
“It was such a faith that the family of Alexandra Andreyevna exhibited towards me, forgetting that the daughter was in danger. I too, on my part, reassured them that it was nothing; and all the time my heart was in my mouth. To add to my misfortunes, the roads grew so bad from the thaw that it took the driver a whole day sometimes to fetch the medicines.