UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES \ \ "k ^^J^ ••?v? A- ''^' IVAN TURGENEV. fl'rontispiece. TWO RUSSIAN REFORMERS IVAN TURGENEV LEO TOLSTOY BY J. A. T, LLOYD a (^ 7 ^ 7 ''.'Vi i-' \ i-' '-^ ' NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY 1911 PBIMED IN GREAT blUTAIN » • , • • • < • • • • • • < • • • • • • • • • • •• • . • • • . " • •,«,•• •••• •••• •• »• • * lJi\ -i-^ki-,ir« TWO RUSSIAN REFORMERS CONTENTS PAGE IVAN TURGENEV II LEO TOLSTOY . ... . . . 219 ILLUSTRATIONS IVAN TURGENEV Frontisptece PAGE AVENUE AT SPASSKO^ S^ A TYPICAL ISBA lOI SPORT IN THE STEPPES 135 TURGENEV IN OLD AGE ....... 169 COUNT LEO TOLSTOY 235 TOLSTOY'S WORKROOM .....•• 269 TOLSTOY AT WORK 3^3 -' My one desire for my tomb is that they shall engrave upon it what my book has accomplished for the emancipation of the serfs." Ivan Turgenev. TURGENEV II CHAPTER I 'J. ^ ? (p 7 CHILDHOOD is only too often a bondage which is never explained ; but the child- hood of genius, a martyrdom though it may be, not infrequently finds eventual ex- pression. This interpretation, however, of the vague years with*their formless misgivings and regrets, their unreasoned revolts, their gasps of antipathy and thankfulness — all this is usually toned down delicately in a mirage of memory in which resentment escapes in a half-whimsical sigh or a smile of forgiving irony. But in some very rare instances the dreams of early youth penetrate into the world of art without any such softening process of memory. One of these exceptional cases is the childhood of Ivan Tur- genev. Born at Orel on October 28, 1818, Turgenev was the son of a rich landed proprietor, and re- ceived at Spasskoe, his mother's property, the usual cosmopolitan education of Russians of his class. Here Fraulein, " Misses," and '* Mammzell" instructed him in their respective languages. Here, too, he was constantly beaten, and ex- 13 V 14 Two Russian Reformers perienced in all its bitterness the acrid distress of childhood. Long afterwards, in one of those projections of memory almost physical in their intensity, he was to picture himself as " drinking, with a kind of bitter pleasure, the salt water of his tears." But it was here, too, that he breathed in those unforgettable impressions of Russian country life with which he was after- wards to charm and to astonish Europe. At Spasskoe he learned to become a sportsman, and commenced those wandering habits which were to give liberty, through his " Annals of a Sportsman," to millions of human beings. His love of nature was at this time almost a passion, and he has told us that in the evenings he would often steal out by himself to meet and to embrace — a lime-tree. Over and over again in his novels he returns to that mysterious Russian garden in which there seemed to ferment the drowsy, humming life of all the summers in the world. One sees him escaping to the solace of this haunted garden, a lonely boy, spied upon by parasites and often punished with malignant severity. One sees him becoming involuntarily a watcher, as though he had been born a con- noisseur of souls. For, here on the very thres- liold of youth, disillusion has come to him. The difficult relations between his father and mother were not concealed from these young, questioning eyes. Child as he was, he had learned to suspect Turgenev 15 those nearest to him. Long afterwards he ex- claimed, with a knowledge of life that had its origin in his very childhood : " But as for marry- ing, what a cruel irony ! " And it was not only with lime trees that he kept appointments in this garden of wonder. Very soon he knew what it was to wait breathlessly for hurried footsteps on the fine sand. Very soon he divined some, at least, of the secrets of that human passion which retained for him to the very end something of freshness and mystery and tenderness. He met once suddenly among the raspberry bushes a young serf girl in whose presence he became speechless. Perhaps it was she who came to him in the blazing heat of a summer daj^ and, though he was the master, seized him by the hair as she uttered the one word, " Come." The name of this girl was Claudie, and forty years later Turgenev recalled with intense emotion "ce doux empoignement " of his hair. But neither Claudie nor any other serf girl taught him to believe in love, and he had already ceased to believe in the bounty of Providence. ** It is here in this same garden," he wrote from Spasskoe in 1868, " that I witnessed, when quite a child, the contest of an adder and a toad which made me for the first time doubtful of a good Providence." In order to understand not only the childhood of Ivan Turgenev but also the whole trend of his work, his aspirations, his reasonable patience, one i6 Two Russian Reformers must know something of Madame Turgenev, his mother. For, it was she, more than any one else, who imbued his youth with the idea of tyranny and his manhood with an unceasing resistance to it. Madame Turgenev had experienced tyranny in her own childhood. Her step-father hated her and ill-treated her until she reached her seventeenth year, when he began to persecute her with still more sinister attentions. She escaped from his house half-dressed, and took refuge with her uncle, Ivan Loutovinoff, at Spasskoe. In spite of the demands of her mother, her uncle retained the guardianship of his niece, and at the age of thirty she inherited his immense fortune, including the property of Spasskoe, where her husband, Serguei Nicolaevitch Turgenev, whom she married soon after her uncle's death, came to live. Here she lived the life of a Russian chatelaine of the old school. She had her own chapel and her own theatre, the actors being recruited from her serfs, who also provided her with an orchestra. Her adopted daughter admits, in one passage at least, that though she was neither young nor beautiful, and in spite of the fact that her face was pitted with small-pox, she was so spirituelle that she was always surrounded by a crowd of adorers. Her relations with both her sons seem to have been always more or less difficult, but this entry in her private journal, dated 1839, i^ addressed to her son Ivan : " C'est que Jean, c'est mon Turgenev 17 soleil a moi ; je ne vols que lui, et lorsqu'il s' eclipse, je ne vols plus clair, je ne sais plus ou j'en suis. Le coeur d'une mere ne se trompe jamais, et vous savez, Jean, que mon instinct est plus sur que ma raison." It was stated in a review that Madame Turgenev bequeathed this journal to her son, but her adopted daughter maintains that it was burnt in the garden before her eyes in 1849. " ^^ i^ i^ virtue," she asks, " of the fatal law of heredity that Ivan Turgenev in his turn refused to publish his own journal, and, following the example of his mother, burnt it at Bougival in a garden ? " Both of these journals are a loss, the one to literature, the other to all those who would seek to understand the mental attitude of the serf-owners of long ago. Madame Turgenev could not understand how her son, who was a noble, could wish to become a writer. A writer, she tells him, is a man who scratches paper for money. Her son should enter the army and serve the Czar. She was not, how- ever, wholly hostile to the Arts ; and when Liszt came to Moscow, as he did that very year, Madame Turgenev went with her son to the concert-hall. She was unable to walk, and as, through an over- sight, the customary means of conveying her had been neglected, Ivan carried her in his arms up the steep steps of the concert-hall. When Madame Viardot came to Moscow in 1846 Madame Turgenev, in spite of her disapproval of her son's enthusiasm, i8 Two Russian Reformers went to hear her. " II faut avouer pourtant," she admitted grudgingly, " que cette maudite bohemienne chante fort bien ! " But if Madame Turgenev was disdainful towards artists, she was absolutely tyrannous towards her serfs, even towards the doctor, Porphyre Karta- cheff, who accompanied Ivan when he was a university student in Berlin. Porphyre acted as a kind of superior valet, and when they returned to Russia the relations between master and servant were most cordial and Madame Turgenev alone continued to treat him as a serf. Ivan implored his mother to emancipate him, but she absolutely refused. Once, when her adopted daughter was ill, Madame Turgenev wished to call in other doctors, but Porphyre assured her that it was un- necessary and that he himself would cure the patient. Madame Turgenev looked him in the eyes as she said : " Remember, if you do not cure her you will go to Siberia." Porphyre accepted the risk and, fortunately for him, his patient recovered. The chatelaine was equally inflexible in her attitude towards her son, Nicolas, who aroused her anger by wishing to make a love-match with a Mile Schwartz. " Just as Ivan Turgenev," com- ments his adopted sister, "was Russian in appear- ance, so his brother was English. When I read the romance of * Jane Eyre ' I could not represent to myself Rochester except with the features of Turgenev 19 Nicolas Turgenev." For the rest, Nicolas seemed to her to be a born tease, was a master of languages, had a strong voice as opposed to Ivan's shrill one, and was far less anxious than Ivan to render services to his fellow beings. Under the heading " A mon fils Nicolas " there was a note in Madame Turgenev's journal warning him against the trammels of passion. She was unable, however, to prevent this marriage, but when she learnt that her son Nicolas had children in St. Petersburg she would not allow them to enter her house. She ordered them to be brought in front of the window, from which she observed them dis- passionately, remarking that the eldest resembled his father at the same age. And this was her only comment on her grandchildren. She always asserted, indeed, that this union was illegal, and she tried uselessly to bribe her son to desert his wife and children. In 1849, however, she actually gave her consent to this marriage, just as a teirible affliction had fallen upon her son's household, the three children having died in one winter. ^'One might say," Nicolas observed long afterwards to his adopted sister, " that it was the malediction of my mother which brought about the death of my children." This recalled a repellent and characteristic scene. Madame Turgenev, for some reason or other, had asked her son for the portrait of his children, but when it arrived at Spasskoe she tore it into fragments. 2 20 Two Russian Reformers Such violence was by no means unusual, and as one gradually realises the picture of Turgenev's home one begins to understand those half-savage interiors into which he introduces us so often in " The Annals of a Sportsman." There was a major-domo named Soboleff upon whom she was accustomed to vent her spleen. One of his duties was to bring her a glass of water, of which she constantly complained, finding it always of the wrong temperature. On one occasion, she threw the water in his face, after which he brought her more in another glass. Then, standing in front of an Icon, the serf exclaimed : "I swear before this sacred image that I have not changed the water. . . . That which Madame has just drunk is the same as the other." Madame Turgenev ordered him out of the room at once, and when he was next seen he appeared altogether a changed being : " Instead of the elegant evening coat, he was wearing a wretched grey cloth caftan and held a broom in his hand. An order from his mistress had made him forfeit his position of major-domo for that of sweeper of the yard. He remained for four years in this new employment, until he was replaced by the mute, the master of Moumou." The old despot remembered well the tyranny that had warped her own youth. Once she visited with her adopted daughter her mother's property, and together they explored the silent Turgenev 21 old house. As they came out of the drawing- room they passed into a corridor, where Madame Turgenev's companion was astonished at seeing a door barricaded by planks. " I went up to it and placed my hand on the old brass latch which stuck out between the planks, when Madame Turgenev seized my hand and cried out : ' Don't touch it, don't touch it ; these rooms are accursed.' I shall never forget her accent nor the expression of her face, such fear and hatred and fury were written in it." Madame Turgenev dragged her away from these apartments of her step-father, which she remembered with all the old fierce bitterness unassuaged. Life with Madame Turgenev, towards the end, became utterly intolerable for everybody. On October 28, 1845, the birthday of Ivan was being celebrated with the customary fete, which included sucking-pigs and a plentiful supply of brandy. The festivities took place as usual, but in the evening Madame Turgenev pretended to be dying. She sent for her confessor, and placing before her the portrait of her son Ivan, exclaimed, " Adieu, Ivan ! Adieu, Nicolas ! Adieu, my children ! " Then she ordered her forty' servants and all the men employed about the house, from the attendant to the cashier, to say " Good-bye " to her. When they had filed out of the room, Madame Turgenev declared that she felt better, and asked for tea. The next day the following " order " appeared : 22 Two Russian Reformers " I give orders that to-morrow morning the dis- obedient servants, Nicolas Jakovlef, Ivan Petrof and Egor Kondratatief, shall sweep the court in front of my windows." These names were those of the servants who had not appeared at her bed- side, possibly because they were a little drunk that evening. " Good-for-nothings ! drunkards ! " exclaimed Madame Turgenev — " they rejoiced at the death of their mistress ! " At another time the chatelaine said that she was too ill to allow the fetes of Easter week to take place. But Madame Turgenev had the courage of her qualities, and when cholera broke out in the village she exhibited not the faintest trace of fear. When it had diminished she went to confession, and with all her old arrogance insisted upon con- fessing in the presence of her little court, in spite of the fact that it was against the rules of the Church. Her despotism was quite as merciless as that of any one of the Russian serf-owners who appear in " The Annals of a Sportsman." When she discovered the marriage of her son, Nicolas, she was enraged against Poliakoff, her major-domo, for having kept the news from her. So furious was she on this occasion that she was on the point of throwing a huge crutch at his head when the entrance of Nicolas Turgenev, her brother-in-law, checked her, thus probably saving Poliakoff's life. The next day he was banished to a distant property and was reduced from the rank of major-domo Turgenev 23 to that of a simple copyist. His wife, Agatha, was enceinte at the time and sick with grief, but Madame Turgenev was immovable. The next year, however, she did repent of this particular act of tyranny, and not only restored Poliakoff to his old position but actually asked Agatha to pardon her. But it was almost impossible to make Madame Turgenev realise the very idea of liberty, and Turgenev championed the cause of the serfs in vain. But even in those early days he prophesied that the day of freedom would assuredly come. He also championed his brother's cause, now that Madame Turgenev had depiived Nicolas of all means of existence. To every demand his mother opposed a deep cunning under the mask of generosity. She offered, in fact, a property to each of her sons, but always declined to legalise the action. Nothing, indeed, seems to have given her greater amusement than this comedy of giving which meant nothing at all. " I pity my brother," protested Ivan Turgenev. '* Why have you made him so wretched ? You accorded him authority to marry, you made him leave the service and come here with his family, while at St. Petersburg he was earning his living . . . and since he has arrived, you torture him . . . you torment him ceaselessly. ..." Neither of her sons was allowed to come into her presence without permission, and once when Ivan asked to see her she flew into a rage and tore up his portrait. But she was 24 Two Russian Reformers furious when she heard that the critics had attacked his work ; " Comment ! toi un noble, un Tour- gueneff, on ose te critiquer ! " Towards the end the brothers left for Tour- guenevo, their father's property, and Madame Turgenev, on hearing the news, started off for Spasskoe in a rage. On arrival she was informed that her sons had entered the house for an hour or two, whereupon she lashed Poliakoff across the face for alluding to them as " our masters." The brothers continued to live at Tourguenevo, which was only a few miles away, and Nicolas saw his mother on November 15, 1850. The next day Ivan tried to see her, but was too late, for she was already dead. She had certainly become softer in these last days, for she left not only money but liberty to Poliakoff and Porph3Te. ** Yes ! " commented Agatha, " I have suffered a great deal from the late Madame Turgenev ; but none the less, I was very fond of her. She was a real mistress." As one reads the intimately personal memoir by his adopted sister, one sees how Turgenev struggled hopelessly against this coma of tyranny which lay everywhere around him. It was un- necessary to convince his reason ; by temperament he was antagonistic to the idea of owning a fellow- creature, and yet even he violated this deep inner conviction and purchased a serf gi'rl. Turgenev had a rich uncle at Moscow, at whose house he met Turgenev 25 a cousin, Elizabeth Turgenev, a blonde of about sixteen who possessed a property near Orel. She administered the affairs of this village herself, and Turgenev paid her a visit once or twice every week. Elizabeth had a young femme de chambre, a serf girl named Feoctista who was called Fetistka. She was not at all beautiful, but she appealed to Turgenev just as some of the wistful serf girls in his sketches appealed to him. " Fetistka," writes Pavlovsky, " did not strike one at first glance ; her beauty was not at all extraordinary. A brunette, thinnish, not ugly but not pretty, nothing more, one might have pictured her readily thus ; but on observing her more closely, one found in her drawn features, in her pretty face tanned by the sun, in her sad glances, something which attracted and charmed." Turgenev observed her closely ; he was charmed. Elizabeth Turgenev was very fond of Fetistka and had her dressed like a lady. Her cousin had already sworn to do his best to bring about the abolition of the serfs, but none the less he desired to purchase Fetistka. Elizabeth refused his price, saying that on no account would she be separated from her maid. After much bargaining the price of seven hundred roubles was arranged, though a serf girl at that time was valued at a maximum of fifty roubles. Turgenev took her to Spasskoe- Celo, where he remained in retirement with her for about a year. During this time he tried to 26 Two Russian Reformers teach her to read, but apparently with very Uttle success. He seems, indeed, to have wearied of her quickly enough, and to have taken to shooting as a distraction. None the less, it was probably this romance manque that inspired that sensitive sympathy with a serf girl in a false position which is so significant in '' Fathers and Sons." In that book it is the old-fashioned Pavel who bids his brother realise that a serf girl is a fellow human being, and it is by his advice, and not at all at the advice of Bazaroff, the new type, that he finally marries her. Turgenev sinned against his own conscience in this sinister purchase, but at least he did everything in his power for Fetistka's daughter, Assia, whose education was superintended by Madame Viardot, about whose methods Turgenev very nearly fought a duel with Count Tolstoy. It was at Spasskoe that Ivan Turgenev turned away from his cosmopolitan education and sought from a serf named Pounine the inspiration of Russian poetry. In " Pounine and Babourine " he has sketched the old serf reading aloud from a big book to the young master, who has just escaped from the French governess. The boy hangs on every word, renewing in the quiet garden the ancient traditions of his race from which all these foreign preceptors were endeavouring to tear him away. Turgenev never lost his boyish absorption in nature, which is so different from verbose admiration of scenery. He loved best the land- Turgenev 27 scapes with which human hfe blends with neither disdain nor terror. The magnificence of Switzer- land was too remote from human life to appeal to him whose dreams came always from the mountainless steppes. Turgenev was not merely to recall the childish incidents of the garden of Spasskoe. He was to recreate, almost as if in a trance, each of those poignant impressions that had been stamped upon his youth. Suddenly, at one or other of those dinners recorded so minutely in the " Journal des Goncourts," in the midst of all the Parisian gossip, arid, mocking, fatigued, the Russian giant would feel himself transplanted into that old garden of his Russian home. Once more to his nostrils, suffocated by the boulevards of Paris, there would return the old sweet, sharp scents, and he would hear through all that mordant chatter, the sound of hurrying footsteps darting through the shadows or the love-laugh of a young girl in the fading light. It is no wonder that these Parisians listened to him as he visualised across their dinner table these pictures penetrated by the distilled perfume of youth and regret. And these impressions, physical in their intensity and in- voluntarily truthful, he was to reproduce, as in a veritable potpourri of memories, in two exquisite works. Turgenev's " First Love " has in it more than a hint of actual memory — has in it, indeed, the very 28 Two Russian Reformers aroma of illusion which words are usually impotent to disclose. It is the preservation of a boyish idolatry which, in at least one instance, survived as a stab of actual pain. Turgenev, according to the account of his mother's adopted daughter, was very much missed at home after fame had come to him in the outer world. One person in particular regretted his absence, and when he returned on a visit she came over and over again to the house in order to attract the man whom years before she had dismissed as a foolish boy. " For a woman who is nearly forty," observed Madame Turgenev, " she is really not so bad. She has put herself to all this trouble for you, and you have shown yourself scarcely grateful." " It is true," replied Turgenev in all seriousness, *' but at the time that I loved her I was still almost a child. What did I not suffer then ! ... I re- member that when she passed close to me, my heart seemed ready to leap out of my breast. . . . But that very happy time has passed ! Now, I understand that love no more. ... I have no longer that ardour of youth ; it was made up of that love which contented itself with a glance, with a flower that fell from her hair. It was enough for me to pick up that flower, and I was happ3% and I asked for nothing more." It is the desire of the moth for the star incon- gruously blended with the scrutinising analysis of Turgenev that gives an acrid tenderness to this Turgenev 29 emotional experience, making, again with dis- concerting incongruity, a human document out of a work of art. The memory of " Spring Torrents " was also precious to Turgenev, in spite of the attacks made upon it by the Russian critics. One day Pavlovsky expressed his appreciation of it, and Turgenev was delighted. " The whole of that story," said he, " is true. I have lived it and felt it personally. It is my own history. Madame Polozoff is an incarnation of the Princess Trou- betzkoi, whom I knew very well. In her time she made a great deal of sensation in Paris, and she is still remembered there. Pantaleone lived at her house. He occupied there an intermediate position between the role of friend and that of servitor. The Italian family, too, is taken from life. But I have changed the details and I have transposed, for I cannot photograph blindly. For example, the Princess was a native of Bohemia by birth ; I have drawn the type of a Russian grande dame of plebeian extraction. As for Pantaleone, I have placed him in the Italian family. ... I wrote this romance with real pleasure, and I love it as I love all my works written in this spirit." In the course of this conversation Turgenev protested bitterly against the Russian critics, who demanded always from him a thesis instead of an experience, a political proclamation instead 30 Two Russian Reformers of a work of art. That is the old grudge against Turgenev, and it survives to the present day. But the charm of such exquisite regrets also sur- vives, and one might as well protest against the torrents of Spring as against this book to which they have lent their name, their power and their first rush of happiness. Asked which of his books he loved best, Turgenev replied : " 'First Love.' It is a true story, which happened just as I have related it and whose principal hero even is my father." Here, indeed, we have not merely a record of early passion but the first love of youth itself. Others have sought to recapture the aroma of love's first lost illusion, but they have done so almost invariably with lyric intensity of feeling. Turgenev, in this book, as in all his works, remains a psychologist. The boy watches Zinaiaida, unobserved, as he thinks, and from that moment he is " translated " like Titania's weaver. He is her slave from that moment, and nobody, least of all himself, can tell her what he feels. But in spite of all the magic of his dream he is curiously observant of her and of everybody and of everything around her. He notes accurately the signs of poverty in her home. He notices the objectionable manners of the old princess, her mother. Boy as he is, he analyses each one of her admirers and differentiates between the phases of their homage. He is sensitive to the slightest change in the girl's attitude towards him- Turgenev 31 self. He is a poet to whom the sUghtest concrete detail preserves the significance of its moment. He is a lover and at the same time a realist. His realism, here, as always, is part of himself, in- voluntary, and shows itself even in the most exalted moments — when, for example, he kisses for the first time that cool white hand. Not for an instant does acumen lose itself in ecstasy. The boy knows that all do not love Zinaiaida as he himself loves her. Already he divines that there is in the atmosphere of passion something mena- cing and evil. Something lurks below the fair outer surface. All is not good in the sunlight ; he had learnt that lesson once and for ever in the Eden of Spasskoe ; and so even in this first love- dream of youth Turgenev was to detect the suggestion of passion, withering and baneful. The attitude of the younger towards the older generation is divulged in every page of this treasury of the heart's secrets. It is his own father and mother whom he reveals in this clear-eyed scrutiny of youth. How well he knew the exteriors of those familiar figures ! How well he divined what he was always forbidden to know — the inner recesses of their temperaments ! One sees the elderly, jealous woman dissatisfied with life and incapable of either adaptability or submission. She is suspicious of her husband and suspicious of her son. That bitter boyhood of the great novelist is mercilessly revealed without any softening 32 Two Russian Reformers process of memory. The old quarrels, the old insults, the old recriminations vibrate into life after the interval of years. It is as though all the unuttered secrets of that old garden of his child- hood had been preserved in the cylinders of some mysterious phonograph, a phonograph to which nature had communicated the drowsy whispers of summer, a phonograph which had caught and mellowed all this life that had so long passed away. Everybody lives in this old house as though the novelist had restored them to life by the intensity of his memory. All the old bitter jealousy, the brooding doubt, the rancour of long ago stirs again restlessly in these pages. And it is in this hostile, difficult atmosphere that the boy's delicate secret swells into tremulous life. As he tells the story he drops a hint here and there, as it were half by accident, about one or other of these unknown people. We catch a chance fragment of a conversation. An exclamation is overheard, and gradually we know these people in precisely the same sense that the young lover of Zinaiaida knows them. Like him, we are, after a fashion, learning them. Like him, too, we divine only too quickly that all is not well in this idyl of first love. And then the Russian magician presents to us the ultimate illusion of his art. The boy cnscovers that Zinaiaida is in love. Not for a moment had he been deceived by this or that swift, sudden caprice. Turgenev 33 He had suffered on those occasions, but he had known always that the thing he feared had not happened as yet. When it did happen, he recog- nised instantly the malady, the consuming malady of Phaedra, because, to no small extent, he shared it. Now love has come to her, but not for him. Somebody has the right to wait for her beside the fountain in the garden. Somebody is able to rouse the wonderful love-light in those mocking, restless eyes. Who is it ? All youth is stammering out the eternal question. And the change in the girl is at once as significant in its external simphcity and its internal complexity as the change in her boy lover. Each now is drawn to each because they breathe a common atmosphere, the baneful atmosphere of passion, which, even in the garden of Spasskoe, Turgenev had learned to suspect. The boy suspects now, and the little drama, in which all youth is compressed, develops slowly like youth's own secret, and without any obtrusion of merely fictitious incident. It is life that we are watching, and in spite of his equivocal in- souciance Turgenev has infused something of the terror of life into this idyl of regret. Somebody is waiting for the woman he loves. Somebody is waiting for Zinaiaida in the pervaded darkness of the night. Somebody will peer into those gleaming eyes through the shadows to learn the secret that had been always withheld from him. The boy will kill him ; he will kill the 34 Two Russian Reformers enemy who has slain his dream. The fantasy of boyish passion has become a nightmare of hatred. Knife in hand he awaits the man whom Zinalaida is luring into this garden which has lost its in- nocence. Through the long hours of the night he watches, and then he hears footsteps at last. He is ready to kill now, to kill swiftly and surely ; but all at once he stays his hand. It is his own father who is approaching the fountain in that mysterious garden. Instantly the boy's soul seems to shrivel, driven back into the timidity of youth. All the hidden, hideous background of his dear fantasy reveals itself. That is what life is, it seems. The suffer- ing of love strikes at each in turn. And now — so infinitely deeper is the psychology of Turgenev than the inflamed Byronism of the Romantics— - the boy feels drawn towards his father by reason of this mystery which has entered the life of each. He continues to share this mystery and to be drawn towards the master of Zinaiaida, even when he sees her kissing her naked arm, red from the lash of his father's horsewhip. Yes, love is like that, too ; it has room for everything, the implacable malady. Here, as in all his works, Turgenev refuses to make life fit in with the little plots and plans of the experienced novelist. Zinaiaida, after all this inner tragedy which is regarded as comedy by the outside world, survives and marries. Her boy lover will see her again. Turgenev 35 and will consciously seek to renew that spell which had brought the magic of regret into his youth. But some wretched little accident intervenes, and when at last he calls at her house it is only to hear that she is dead. In the quiet of Spasskoe the slow years followed each other languidly as the whisper of the outer world comes to those who cling to the steppes. It was the steppes and the natural life of the Russian peasant, stifled and starved though it was, that saved the future novelist from the artificial influences of his home. He was badly treated, but his brother Nicolas fared even worse. Only the servants deigned to speak the mother tongue. The conversations between his parents, often bitter and quarrelsome, were carried on in French, and when Varvara Petrovna uttered a prayer to her God it was in the polite language of France. Sympathy between parents and children was non-existent, and in his childhood Turgenev acquired that intensified sense of injustice which was afterwards to find expression in so many of his works. The days of foreign governesses and tutors passed, and Turgenev was placed in a school kept by a German in Moscow, after which he entered the Institut Lazaref in the same city. Here, too, his native language was ignored, but the boy became enthusiastic on the subject of Zagoskino, one of whose works was being read aloud by a 3 36 Two Russian Reformers professor. "I know him by heart," he writes; " one day I fell on a pupil who interrupted the reading with my lists clenched." In 1832, in his fifteenth year, he left the Institut Lazaref in order to prepare for the University. A complete period of his life had already closed, a period which, so far as his art is concerned, was unconsciously fruitful. Already there had come into being that curious duality which is so significant in the evasive temperament of Turgenev. It is a com- monplace to explain this duality by the statement that there were two Turgenevs, the one occidental and the other oriental. The duality, however, lies far deeper than this, and had already asserted itself in his suppressed and imaginative youth. There were already formed, in embryo as it were, the two Turgenevs who were to exist always side by side, the one luminous, receptive, impassive, with a deep love of nature and a sympathy for his fellow man, sensitive to all impressions whether of life or art, the other equally sensitive, but sus- picious almost to the point of malady, distrustful alike of nature and of man, sombre with the ineradicable doubt of the ultimate purpose of life, as though his whole future had been shadowed by that combat between an adder and a toad in the garden of Spasskoe. The one Turgenev was to become docile, affectionate, fond of home and of the simplest domestic pleasures, while the other Turgenev, remembering all the enigmatic Turgenev 37 secrets and bitter suspicions of his early home, was to insist, sometimes sadly, sometimes ironic- ally, on celibacy. Already passion had entered those curious twin lives, for the first of which it was to retain always the aroma of tenderness, of romance, of the eternally unexpected, while for the other life of that other Turgenev it was to be ever tainted by the poison of suspicion, by the gnawing regret for the misunderstood moment and the ironical caress. To Turgenev, as to Alfred de Musset, there sounded even in childhood a haunting whisper of a companion who was never to forsake him : Je ne suis ni dieu ni demon, Et tu m'as nommd par mon nom Quand tu m'as appel<^ ton frere ; Ou tu vas, j'y serai toujours, Jusqu'au dernier de tes jours, Ou j'irai m'asseoir sur ta pierre. Le ciel m'a confie ton coeur ; Quand tu seras dans la douleur, Viens k moi sans inquietude ; Je te sui\Tai sur le chemin, Mais je ne puis toucher ta main. Ami, je suis la Solitude. What solitude was to the French poet, suspicion became for the Russian novelist. But in the early university days Turgenev sur- rendered himself to the generous influence of ideas. At the University of Moscow he came under the 38 Two Russian Reformers spell of German philosophy, and particularly under that of Hegel. These influences, however, which inspired so many young Russians, did not damp the normal high spirits of youth. The devotees of Hegel seem to have been rather uproarious undergraduates, and there were frequent disturb- ances in the class-rooms and even the lectures were occasionally interrupted. In 1835, on the death of his father and the entry of his brother into the School of Artillery, the family moved to the new capital, and Turgenev entered the University of St. Petersburg. Here, no less a person than Gogol was one of the examiners, but it was not until he had resigned that the students became aware that he was the famous author of the " Revizor." "