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Or, it may be, how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in Japan perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is this melancholy tale by Turgenieff.
This may be found, if we remember aright, in the Halperine-Kaminsky memoir. Turgenieff, who was the greater artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist.
Turgenieff understood Tolstoy; so did Dostoïevsky, and so does latterly the novelist Dmitri Merejkowski. Turgenieff's appeal to Tolstoy is become historic, and all the more pathetic because written on the eve of his death. Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch: I have not written to you for a long time, for I lie on my deathbed. I cannot get well; that is not to be thought of.
Since Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons, no tale like Metal Worker Schevyrjow has appeared in European literature. In it the bedrock of Slavic fatalism, an anarchistic pessimism is reached. It has been done into French by Jacques Povolozky. The Russian author reveals plentiful traces of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoïevsky, and Gorky in his pages; Tchekov, too, is not absent.
I am joking, but I really do wish beyond all things to see you under way at last, with all sails set. It seems to me that Turgenieff, as an artist, saw nothing in my father beyond his great literary talent, and was unwilling to allow him the right to be anything besides an artist and a writer.
I am not thin-skinned, and Under Western Eyes is my favourite novel, but the closing section is lacerating music for the nerves. Under Western Eyes is a masterpiece of irony, observation, and pity. I once described it as being as powerful as Dostoïevsky and as well written as Turgenieff. The truth is that it is Conrad at his best, although I know that I may seem to slight the Eastern tales.
But it is only common-sensible to state that chronological sequence should be sacrificed merely for the sake of making clear the logical relation of events; and whenever juggling with chronology tends to obscure instead of clarify that logical relation, it is evidence of an error of judgment on the part of the narrator. Turgénieff is often guilty of this error of judgment.
Literature in Russia since the Crimean War: School of Nature; Turgenieff; Ultra-realistic School; Science: Mendeleeff. THE LANGUAGE. In the Russian language three principal dialects are to be distinguished; but the Russian proper, as it is spoken in Moscow and all the central and northern parts of European Russia, is the literary language of the nation.
The most artistic of Russia's novelists, Turgenieff, was cosmopolitan; and it was a frequent reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was too European, not sufficiently national. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. It was altogether different in the case of Modeste Moussorgsky.
"I shall soon be dead," he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most important of all, they will forget." Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoïevsky, Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics.
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