A Novel Russian
Turgenev: A Life. By David Magarshack. (Faber. 25s.)
It was, in many ways, an eventful enough life, though no man of irhagination bore more passively the extremes of emotional frustra- tion. There were the years of domination by his mother, the evilly despotic mistress of Spasskoye, which left him scarred by fatigue in early life and by weakness of will. There was the tormented slavery —the sequel, in some sort, of this experience at his mother's hands— of Turgenev's lifelong passion for the opera singer Pauline Viardot, from which the agitated pattern of his comings and goings in Russia and western Europe took shape. There was the signal contribution of A Sportsman's Sketches to the whole climats of Russian feeling during the decade before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the explosive effect of Fathers and Sons upon Russian radical opinion in the decade afterwards. There was Turgenev's increasing loneliness and hypochondria in self-chosen exile, the pathos of his last attach- ments and of his death from cancer of the spinal cord. Rich material. for the biographer without a doubt, the strange record of Turgenev's relations with his Russian contemporaries apart, and yet, surpr,singly, it appears that no full English biography has been published until now.
For this there arc, I think, two special reasons, both relevant to the pleaSures of reading Turgencv today. One is simply that his novels and Stories lost ground here for a time during the 1920s and after. The first Russian writer to impress himself deeply upon the imagination of the west, his poetical illumination, his melancholy, his very European-ness then came undet a cloud; it was the headier stuff of the hypnotic and mystificatory Dostoevsky in translation which eclipsed all other Russian literature, even—fantastically—the work of Tolstoy. A second reason is that, in the revenges of time, all that was most topical in Turgenev's work has been assimil- ated into the perspective of Russian social and literary history—a refractory element in English biography. This difficulty in particular Mr. Magarshack has overcome very well, though at the cost of ignoring, for instance, the common idealistic roots of Westerner and Slavophil and similarly disregarding what is remote and unreal in the political atmosphere of the later novels.
The merits of his very thorough volume, which is clear and orderly in style, are considerable. Like recent Russian biographers, Mr. Magarshack has drawn extensively upon the correspondence and memoirs of Turgenev's Russian and French contemporaries, some of them published only in fairly late years. Perhaps he quotes from them rather too exhaustively; one weakness of this Life is that It describes rather than portrays. In piling up the first-hand evidence of Turgenev's moods and movements the author scareely ever pauses to take a good look at his subject or to glance back at the way he has come. As biography, in short, the book is always informative and intelligent but a little flat. Mr. Magarshack takes Turgenev's work, incidentally, very much in his stride, commenting pertinently on the early poetry and the plays but restricting what he has to say by way of criticism of the novels and stories to illustration of Turgenev's choice of character as a starting-point and not of ideas.
The generosity; with its touch of simple goodness, of Turgenev's temperament, as well as his besetting fatalism of mind, are most clearly apparent in his contacts with the other Russian writers of his day. It all makes a famous story, often comic and as oftentouching. A specifically Russian mischief bedevilled Turgenev's relations with Nekrasov, with Goncharov, with Herzen, with Dostoevsky, with Tolstoy, to none of whom he was able to convey the modesty and charm which endeared him to Flaubert and his French friends 4nd so deeply impressed Henry James. In these Russian relation- ships Turgenev was not always innocent of offence, but how wonder- Cully well he comes off beside the meanness of Nekrasov, for instance, the envy and spite of Dostoevsky, the boorishness and suspicion of Tolstoy. Turgenev bore no grudges. His famous last letter to Tolstoy, barely two months before he died, 'imploring Tolstoy to return to literature, breathes a noble spirit. There was, indeed, much of nobility and wisdom in him along with his negative traits of character.
R. D. CHARQUES
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