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Updated: June 20, 2025
There is something prodigious in Turgenev's insight into, and his inexhaustible richness, truthfulness, and freshness in the rendering of those emotions which have been the theme of all poets and novelists for two thousand years. In the well-known memoirs of Caroline Bauer one comes across a curious legend about Paganini.
Turgenev disdained the tricks of the sensational novelists. Yet, for a Russian at least, it is easier to lay down before the end a novel by Victor Hugo or Alexander Dumas than Dmitri Rudin, or, indeed, any of Turgenev's great novels.
He hardly ever describes it, only alluding to it cursorily. But there is no novelist who gives so much room to the pure, crystalline, eternally youthful feeling of love. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's speciality.
He will watch a character, let us say, cross a field and enter a wood and sit down under a tree; good, it is an opportunity for gaining a first impression of the man or woman, it is a little scene, and Turgenev's touch is quick and light.
Turgenev's poorest novel, "Virgin Soil," which also gives us a picture of a factory, is immensely superior from every point of view. But if "Mother" is a dull book, "The Spy" is impossible. It is full of meaningless and unutterably dreary jargon; its characters are sodden with alcohol and bestial lusts. One abominable woman's fat body spreads out on an arm-chair "like sour dough."
While he was imbibing she would sit in a remote corner of the garden, and read a novel in the Reclam edition, as a daily German lesson. She was sitting there, the morning after the "at-home" at the Baroness von Maisen's, reading Turgenev's "Torrents of Spring," when she saw Count Rosek sauntering down the path with a glass of the waters in his hand.
In this inferno, amongst the pungent odours, musty smells and 'acrid exhalations from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease, blossomed a pure white lily, as radiant amid mean surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort confectioner's shop of Turgenev's Eaux Printanières.
To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the highest and the lowest, the noble as well as the base. From the height of his superiority he saw all, understood all: Nature and men had no secrets hidden from his calm, penetrating eyes.
But if Turgenev's popularity suffered a shock in Russia from which it with difficulty recovered, in western Europe it went on increasing. Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that was eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hallmark of good taste.... "Fathers and Children" is as beautifully constructed as a drama of Sophocles; the events move inevitably to a tragic close.
The year of the publication of Turgenev's book saw the death of Gogol: and the new author quite naturally wrote a public letter of eulogy. In no other country would such a thing have excited anything but favourable comment; in Russia it raised a storm; the government always jealous of anything that makes for Russia's real greatness became suspicious, and Turgenev was banished to his estates.
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