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Political bias is absolutely blinding in an attempt to estimate the significance of any book by Turgenev; for although be took the deepest interest in the struggles of his unfortunate country, he was, from the beginning to the end of his career, simply a supreme artist.
The prime difficulty was that in this book Turgenev had told a number of profound truths about life; and nobody wanted the truth.
In our days, when the period of development pointed at by Turgenev in his celebrated novel is almost entirely lived through, we can only wonder at that deep insight with which the author had guessed the fundamental characteristic in that life movement which had celebrated that period.
In fact, all of his good women are individualised the closest similarity is perhaps seen in Lisa and Tanya, but even there the image of each girl is absolutely distinct in the reader's mind. But Gemma falls into no group, nor is there any other woman in Turgenev with whom one instinctively classifies or compares her. Perhaps this is because she is Italian.
What Francesco Petrarca did for one kind of love the romantic, artificial, hot-house love of the times of chivalry Turgenev did for the natural, spontaneous, modern love in all its variety of forms, kinds, and manifestations: the slow and gradual as well as the sudden and instantaneous; the spiritual, the admiring and inspiring, as well as the life-poisoning, terrible kind of love, which infects a man as a prolonged disease.
By the side of weak, irresolute, though highly intellectual men we see in his first three novels energetic, earnest, impassioned women, who take the lead in action, whilst they are but the man's modest pupils in the domain of ideas. Only later on, in Fathers and Children, does Turgenev show us in Bazarov a man essentially masculine.
It is one of his most extraordinary powers that he was able to depict so many characters and so many life histories in so very few words. The reader has a sense of absolute completeness. It was in his first novel, "Rudin," that Turgenev made the first full-length portrait of the typical educated Russian of the nineteenth century.
It would be foolish, I know, to pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist; but he has that element in him. Mr. Conrad suggests a certain vice of misshapenness in Dostoevsky when he praises the characters of Turgenev in comparison with his. "All his creations, fortunate or unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors," he says in his fine tribute to Turgenev in Mr.
The little boy was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but ran away, as he did from a subsequent employer. By a curious irony of fate, this atheist learned to read out of a prayer-book, and this iconoclast was for a time engaged in the manufacture of ikons, holy images. As the aristocrat Turgenev learned Russian from a house servant, Gorki obtained his love for literature from a cook.
Turgenev's subsequent statement, that so far from Bazarov being a burlesque, he was his "favourite child," is hard to understand even to-day. The novelist said that with the exception of Bazarov's views on art, he himself was in agreement with practically all of the ideas expressed by the great iconoclast. Turgenev probably thought he was, but really he was not.
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