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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.
There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the bacchanal in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoïevsky; there is an old mujik who seems to have stepped out of Dostoïevsky, yet is evidently a portrait taken from life.
If one reads Turgénieff's stories with the knowledge that they were composed or rather that they came into being in this way, one can trace the process in every line. Story, in the conventional sense of the word a fable constructed, like Wordsworth's phantom, 'to startle and waylay' there is as little as possible.
When one reads Turgenieff's letters to my father, one sees that from the very beginning of their acquaintance misunderstandings were always arising, which they perpetually endeavored to smooth down or to forget, but which arose again after a time, sometimes in another form, necessitating new explanations and reconciliations.
"They don't know the real import of what they say." He hugged this sentence with satisfaction. "They are like the young Russians one reads about in Turgenieff's novels," said Henriette "all ideas, no common-sense." "And you really believe ?" Henriette's hand was laid comfortingly on her brother's arm. "Dear Hubert, I know something of my sex.
As long as Russian, sonorous and beautiful tongue, is spoken, they will never die. And their successors? What is the actual condition of Russian literature at the present time? It is the bare truth to say that a period of stagnation set in during the decade after Turgenieff's death. Emigration carried with it the best brains of the land.
Apropos of this letter of Turgenieff's, I should like to say that my father was sincerely annoyed, when he heard applied to himself the epithet "great writer of the land of Russia," which was taken from this letter. He always hated cliches, and he regarded this one as quite absurd. "Why not 'writer of the land'? I never heard before that a man could be the writer of a land.
I was tremendously delighted at the idea that I was to have a real central-fire gun. Unfortunately, Turgenieff never came to Russia again. I tried afterward to buy the gun he had spoken of from his legatees not in the quality of a central-fire gun, but as Turgenieff's gun; but I did not succeed.
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