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Thus far Sanine is his masterpiece. Two decades ago, more or less, John M. Robertson published several volumes chiefly concerned with the gentle art of criticism. Mr. Robertson introduced to the English-reading world the critical theories of Emile Hennequin, whose essays on Poe, Dostoïevsky, and Turgenieff may be remembered.
But in this sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff whereof men are made. Certainly the Russian soul has its peculiarities, and these peculiarities we feel in Dostoievsky as nowhere else. He, not Tolstoi or Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men feel.
With him, charming artist, it is a matter of temperament. He admires with a latitude quite foreign to English-speaking critics such diverse genius as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Galdos, Jane Austen, Emilia Pardo Bázan, Mathilde Serao greater than any modern woman writer of fiction Henry James, and George Moore. But he admires each on his or her native heath.
Why should I not make French my auxiliary language, like Turgenieff and Hillebrandt! Taine knew nothing of German belles lettres. As far as philosophy was concerned, he despised German Aesthetics altogether, and laughed at me for believing in "Aesthetics" at all, even one day introducing me to a stranger as "A young Dane who does not believe in much, but is weak enough to believe in Aesthetics."
I even remember my father reproaching me a little for having sounded the alarm when there was no sufficient cause for it, and for a little while I felt rather ashamed and awkward before him. Of course when he talked to the peasants he asked each of them if he remembered Turgenieff and eagerly picked up anything they had to say about him.
Nikolai Turgenieff, the Russian historian, writing while the emancipation act was bearing its first fruits, describes its workings and effects as observed by one intimately connected with the serfs and the movement that resulted in their freedom. Close upon the end of the fifteenth century the Muscovite ideas of right were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great and compressed into a code.
He preferred solitude, he asserts more than once, to the company of common folk or mediocre persons. He gives Tolstoy at his true rating, but is cruel to Turgenieff who never wished him harm. The Dostoïevsky caricature portrait of Turgenieff infinitely the superior artist of the two in The Possessed is absurd. Turgenieff forgave, but Dostoïevsky never forgave Turgenieff for this forgiveness.
Since Turgenieff wrote his "Fathers and Sons" and the "New Generation," the appearance of the Revolutionary army in Russia has changed features. At that time only the intellectuals and college youths, a small coterie of idealists, who knew no distinction between class and caste, took part in the tremendous work of reconstruction.
I hereby declare to Sasha Kropotkin and Cunninghame Graham that my heart is with their Russia, the Russia of Tolstoy and Turgenieff and Dostoieffsky, of Gorki and Tchekoff, of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Drury Lane Ballet, of Peter Kropotkin and all the great humanitarians, great artists, and charming people whom their very North German Tsars exile and imprison and flog and generally do what in them lies to suppress and abolish.
In the letter accompanying the pages which we are now about to print, I. S. Turgénieff says, in conclusion: "... Let not your reader peruse these 'Poems in Prose' at one sitting; he will probably be bored, and the book will fall from his hands. But let him read them separately, to-day one, to-morrow another, and then perchance some one of them may leave some trace behind in his soul...."
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