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Yet Turgenev is not typical of that Russian school of novelists of which Tolstoy and Gorki are distinguished examples; rather he belongs to the school of Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens. I. A Student's Marriage Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky came of an ancient noble family. His father, a strangely whimsical man, determined that his son should grow up a Spartan.
There is no better illustration in modern history of the grand old name of gentleman. His pessimism was the true Slavonic pessimism, quiet, profound, and undemonstrative. I heard the late Professor Boyesen say that he had never personally known any man who suffered like Turgenev from mere Despair.
Turgenev even reaches a stage of hopeless nihilism, and one of his heroes, Bazarov, in "Fathers and Sons," reflecting one day on the lot of the peasant, considering it better than his, says sadly, "He, at least, will have his little hut, while all I can hope for is a bed of thorns."
Considered simply as stories, "Fathers and Sons" and "Smoke" are to all intents and purposes independent of each other, yet in important particulars the latter is a sequel to the first. Once on his arrival at St. Petersburg, Turgenev was met with the words, "Just see what your Nihilists are doing! They have almost gone so far as to burn the city."
Turgenev not only gave such a definition, not only illumined the inner sense of the new movement in the life of that time, but he also has pointed out its principal characteristic sign negation in the name of realism, as the opposition to the old ideally liberal conservatism.
This fact has been revealed a few years ago by the publication, which we owe to Professor Dragomanov, of the private correspondence between Turgenev and Hertzen. This most interesting little volume throws quite a new light upon Turgenev, showing that our great novelist was at the same time one of the strongest perhaps the strongest and most clear-sighted political thinkers of his time.
It was Turgenev who spoke of the half hundred countesses in Europe who claimed to have held the dying Chopin in their arms. In reality he died in Gutmann's, raising that pupil's hand to his mouth and murmuring "cher ami" as he expired. Solange Sand was there, but not her mother, who called and was not admitted so they say. Gutmann denies having refused her admittance.
In all the contemporaneous questions, intellectual movements, debates and ideals with which the young generation is occupied, Turgenev finds not the least common sense and gives us to understand that they lead only to demoralisation, emptiness, prosaic shallowness, and cynicism. Turgenev finds his ideal in quite a different place, namely in the 'fathers, in the more or less old generation.
In the last of his wonderful "Poems in Prose," Turgenev cried out: "In these days of doubt, in these days of painful brooding over the fate of my country, thou alone art my rod and my staff, O great, mighty, true and free Russian language! If it were not for thee, how could one keep from despairing at the sight of what is going on at home?
The boy inherited much from his father; but, unlike Turgenev, he had the best of all private tutors, a good mother, of whom his biographer says, Elle demeure toujours sa plus intime amie.* *For the facts in Gogol's life, I have relied chiefly on the doctor's thesis by Raina Tyrneva, Aix, 1901. At the age of twelve, Nikolai was sent away to the high school at Nezhin, a town near Kiev.
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