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‘The Least Unsafe Man of Genius’

Henry Gifford APRIL 5, 1979 ISSUE

Turgenev: His Life and Times

by Leonard Schapiro
Random House, 382 pp., $15.95

Professor Schapiro’s extremely well-prepared biography of Turgenev is the latest word on the
subject, taking into account all the new material of the recent decade. It is particularly strong
on the social and political background, the “times” at the center of which Turgenev so
unerringly stood; and it is throughout discreet, judicious, fair-minded—a book of which
Turgenev would have approved, for it has been written very much in his spirit. The authors
does not claim to have altered a by now familiar picture. Turgenev’s is a story that has been
often told, and told satisfactorily. Nor does Schapiro allow himself to “interpret” Turgenev.
He presents the facts of his literary and personal life, with scrupulous care to ensure that these
will be reliable; and he maintains that readers will probably find his book confirming them in
views they already hold. He does, however, express one central conviction about the man:

What makes him remarkable and exceptional on the Russian scene is that he cannot be
readily labeled—unless love of liberty, decency, and humanity in all relations can be
called a “label.” Everything in Russian conditions conspired to force people into
categories: if you were critical of the radicals, you belonged in the same box with
Katkov and the other avowed reactionaries; if you attacked inhumanity and
obscurantism in government policy, you were for practical purposes a Red. Turgenev
was one of the very few nineteenth-century Russian figures who rejected this typically
Russian tyranny of categories and labels, which is one reason why his political outlook
is more acceptable to a Western European liberal than that of Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy.

Nobody would quarrel with that description of Turgenev. These are the virtues that Isaiah
Berlin has praised so warmly in his Romanes lecture of 1970, Fathers and Children, and the
whole tenor of this biography makes it clear that Professor Schapiro shares his admiration,
though he adds to the paragraph quoted above one important caveat: “Turgenev was no
Western European liberal in the accepted sense.” And Schapiro is also careful to point out the
very real predicament of Herzen, for example, from whom Turgenev was separated, despite
an eventual show of bonhomie on both sides, by deep disagreement once their common cause,

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the abolition of serfdom, had led to the Emancipation of 1861 and the growing
disillusionment of radical thinkers with its outcome.

The most conspicuous fact about Turgenev is that he lived for long stretches of time abroad.
His position was unusually privileged: to an exceptional degree, having a large, though
wastefully administered, estate he could please himself. The reason for residence abroad was
the devotion of some forty years to Pauline Viardot and her family, the one constant in his
emotional life, on which Schapiro writes with sensitivity and understanding. It might have
hampered Turgenev disastrously as a recorder of the Russian scene. But the opposite would
seem to have been the case. The greater part of his first success, the Sketches from a
Sportsman’s Notebook, was written abroad; Fathers and Children began to take shape in the
Isle of Wight. He had doubts that his last novel, Virgin Soil, might prove him to have lost all
touch with his country, and he returned there to complete it. In fact, the book showed him to
have been more keenly aware of what was happening in Russia of the 1870s than most people
on the spot. The distance from home would appear to have clarified his seeing, and he could
bring to the work that sense of European civilization by which he judged Russia, a “binocular
vision” not unlike Tocqueville’s of the United States.

Russian intellectual life, then as now, spilled over into the emigration, where Turgenev could
meet Herzen, living in permanent exile, and later the populist Lavrov. He was able to form a
network of friendships astonishing in its catholicity. Who else could have been the intimate—
even if at different times—of Belinsky (“the Savonarola of his generation,” as Berlin calls
him) and of Belinsky’s very opposite, Flaubert? Not all his attempts at friendship succeeded.
Tolstoy got on far more comfortably with the poet Fet than Turgenev did with either of them.
He could make no headway whatever with the intransigent radical, Dobroliubov—ideological
and class differences went too deep—though with another critic of that stamp, Pisarev (“a
member of the gentry, which no doubt helped!” and a Westerner too), he had relations that
were surprisingly cordial. The full diapason of his friendships must be unrivaled. If Turgenev
had ever shared Yeats’s vanity and cared to devise a memorial phrase for himself, he too
could have proclaimed “my glory was I had such friends.”

In his writing, as in his life, there is a good deal to admire. Fathers and Children beyond any
doubt is one of the best Russian novels of the century (though less remarkable, I should say,
than either Dead Souls or Oblomov, which bring a dimension of myth denied to Turgenev—
not to call into comparison the major works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky). Some of the other
novels, such as Rudin or Smoke, have at least a historical interest for their bearing on the
political scene; On the Eve and Virgin Soil, though not free from imperfections, both said
something of real importance in their day. The Sketches from a Sportsman’s Notebook made a
protest against serfdom beautifully calculated to win assent, including that which most
counted at the hour, that of Tsar Alexander II. This work reveals a social critic no less
effective in his appeal than Harriet Beecher Stowe, but subtle to the degree of James in The

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Bostonians.

A Nest of the Landed Gentry won everybody’s approval, and no other book by him so plainly
exhibits what is meant by that term, scarcely tolerable today, the “charm” of Turgenev. He
writes in his stories, his memoirs, and his letters with a notable felicity (well caught by
Constance Garnett in her translations). But for this felicity there was a price to pay. He falls,
when below his best, into that “dialect as it were of Parnassian” to which Hopkins believed
“great poets” are liable:

at last…they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian
tongue, without further effort of inspiration.

Turgenev was never, in any sense, a “great poet,” though he began his career as a competent
practitioner in verse. But he is often praised for his “poetry.” His notion of poetry—to judge
by the obtuse rearrangements of Tiutchev’s rhythms he made as editor (which recall
Higginson’s dealings with Emily Dickinson), or his total resistance to the admittedly uneven
distinction of Nekrasov—was quite as conventional as his preferences in music and painting.
Turgenev often has no more to give than a refined mediocrity (the mediocrity, however, of a
golden age in prose fiction). There are times when his felicity is closer to Addison’s than to
Jane Austen’s.

Implicit in this biography is a question that at certain moments makes itself felt, as when
Schapiro looks forward to the celebrated volume of essays, Landmarks, appearing in 1909 as
a critique of the Russian intelligentsia in what was now recognized to be its crisis. It aroused,
as Schapiro says, “a storm of protest from the entire Russian radical movement, from the
recently formed liberal parties to Lenin.” He points out that “Herzen would have understood
and sympathized with this attitude because he too felt that the only decent position which any
self-respecting critic of the Russian regime could occupy was on the barricades….” Turgenev
saved the honor of his empty spellbinder, the “superfluous man,” Rudin, by the afterthought
of death on a Parisian barricade in 1848. But he was by every instinct a moderate. His
predicament was indeed that exposed by Berlin as befalling the sensitive liberal who detests
violence and must steel himself against the obloquy of both left and right.

Turgenev, like many of his contemporaries, shivered in the cold wind of Schopenhauer. But
he had an optimistic view of human nature (and regarded the Russian language as a
reassurance of the people’s moral worth, one day to be realized). He knew that men are
capable of extreme cruelty: the dark annals of his mother’s family and certain savage caprices
of her own had revealed this. He understood also that love could be a devastating rage in the
blood, undoing even the disciplined Bazarov. But his reading of human nature was too
benevolent for him to realize another form of frenzy which, like sexual passion, has its own
irresistible and heady excitement. In the 1870s, to which he brought political insights of an
undoubted finesse, Turgenev quite missed the import of terrorism. His famous prose-poem of

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1878, “Threshold,” hesitates between two descriptions of the girl who will resort to crime
(meaning murder) for the sake of the revolution. One voice calls her “Fool!,” another “Saint!”

That ambivalent response, from one who, a skeptical Hamlet himself—to quote the
distinction he made in a famous lecture—always admired the self-sacrificing Quixote, was
not cowardly. Turgenev was here, as nearly everywhere, honest in his dilemma, and it often
exposed him to much scorn. If solitude and misapprehension are the lot of the original artist,
who cares only for the truth burned upon his consciousness, then Turgenev has his
credentials.

But is he really such an artist?

Professor Schapiro does not “claim to offer a work of literary analysis,” and he remarks
justly enough that others have provided this, and with much distinction. All the same, it was
as a novelist, with unusual responsiveness to the Russia of his day, that Turgenev became
celebrated, and some attempt is called for, I feel, to evaluate the political attitudes in their
effect on the art.

Berlin, whose view of Turgenev as artist would probably not be rejected by Schapiro, claims
for him, in the closing words of the Romanes lecture, that he recognized already in his time
the dilemma of the modern liberal mind “and described it with incomparable sharpness of
vision, poetry, and truth.” But it must be admitted that Turgenev, though acute as a social
observer, lacked generally the “passion of creative contemplation” that Pasternak found in
Tolstoy. Nor was his “vision” anything like the uncanny divinatory power of Dostoevsky.
“Vision” and “poetry” in the fullest sense work for a different order of truth.

He belongs, of course, to an honorable company—one thinks of Arnold, Renan, George Eliot,

Henry James, with the last three of whom he was on terms of sympathetic acquaintance, and
in that high liberal culture he was truly at home. Turgenev stands for many of the things we
approve in Arnold—for civilization, for the mind open to a current of fresh ideas, for
“urbanity,” “the tone of the center.” It is easy to see why he was so readily received by those
cultivated readers in Great Britain or in New England who could appreciate the Revue des
deux mondes. Turgenev’s well-mannered melancholy, the light elegiac touch, the
countryman’s eye (he had all the field lore of a good shot), his strong sense of domestic order,
his conviction that the company of men without the presence of an intelligent woman is like
“a great cart with ungreased wheels”—all these preferences and assumptions make him a
European gentleman of the nineteenth century, “the most practicable, the least unsafe man of
genius” it had been James’s fortune to meet.

Two leading Russian poets of this century must be allowed to break the spell. Blok in his
diary for March 28, 1919, is arguing with himself about the relation between art and politics.
He says that for the humanists of his day there was no more sacred name than that of

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Turgenev, in whom however “were so diabolically united a great artist with a feeble, playing-
the-squire, liberal-constitutionalist.” Hence for Blok the “anti-musical” quality in Turgenev,
his “lack of full resonance.” Twenty years later Anna Akhmatova, in conversation with Lydia
Chukovskaya, gave a similar judgment. “Everything is shallow in him, the characters shallow
and the events, and himself he is utterly shallow.” Some while before she had said that he
described people too much in a lordly way—“from the outside, disdainfully.”

These are very severe strictures, and many readers will find them unacceptable. But we must
remember their setting—for Blok, the grim Petrograd of “War Communism,” for Akhmatova
the scarcely less grim Leningrad of a breathing space between the Great Purge and the Nazi
blockade. Turgenev’s moderation in politics was a congenital virtue with him, and it called for
nerve and honesty. Yet the fact has to be faced that Turgenev does not speak powerfully to the
Russian emigration in our time. Did he allow reasonableness, a longing for consensus,
perhaps even an undue diffidence, to infiltrate his art overmuch? The sensitive liberal has one
failing not always enough recognized—he still hankers secretly for the respect of the Jacobin.
But it might be argued that the greatest writers have in them an assurance that is akin to that
of the Jacobin—a conviction of exceptional force that goes with the exceptional force of their
vision.

Turgenev, I suggest, does not stir passionate inquiry because there is not enough in his art
with which to wrestle. From the actual excesses and setbacks of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—
from their exaggerations of a necessary truth, or their momentary admissions of a tormenting
failure—those who succeed them have most to learn. The final test of a great Russian writer
from a previous age will not always, one hopes, be what he can do for the emigration. But it is
there for the present that the most cruel and urgent problems have to be confronted. Turgenev,
“the least unsafe man of genius,” is not challenging enough for its needs. To have identified
the attitudes that make up Bazarov was a remarkable stroke. To have seen the Russia of his
day with such steady attention, and with so much delicate feeling, was also no ordinary merit.
And yet with Turgenev there can be so little exchange, outside the terms and conditions of his
day. In that setting he was undoubtedly a true servant of civilization. But the day and most of
the civilization have gone. As a representative figure he does them credit. Today’s needs may
call for men whose significance could not be contained by their own time.

These reservations should not deter the reader from exploring Professor Schapiro’s biography.
Turgenev moved so freely and with such a hospitable grace among the eminent people of his
age that it is always a pleasure to accompany him. We may reckon his sociable, ironic,
generous spirit to be among our lost amenities.

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