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Updated: May 3, 2025
Turguenieff, instead of setting out the situation in detail, throws himself on the reader: "It was dark. Lavretsky went into the garden, and walked up and down there till dawn." That is all. And it is enough. The reader who is not capable of sharing that night walk with Lavretsky, and entering into his thoughts, has read the novel to no purpose.
Originality is a term indiscriminately applied, and generally of trifling significance, but so far as any writer may be original, Turguenieff is so. He is no less original in the general scheme and treatment of his stories than in their details. Whatever he produces has the air of being the outcome of his personal experience and observation.
This faculty of selection is one of the highest artistic faculties, and it appears as much in the minor as in the major features of the narrative. It indicates that Turguenieff might, if he chose, produce a story as faultlessly symmetrical as was ever framed. Why, then, does he not so choose? The reason can only be that he deems the truth-seeming of his narrative would thereby be impaired.
Turguenieff is an artist by nature, yet his books are not intentionally works of art; they are fragments of history, differing from real life only in presenting such persons and events as are commandingly and exhaustively typical, and excluding all others.
It will show us not only what we are, but what we are to be; not only what to avoid, but what to do. It will rest neither in the tragic gloom of Turguenieff, nor in the critical composure of James, nor in the gentle deprecation of Howells, but will demonstrate that the weakness of man is the motive and condition of his strength.
I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder at my good fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its alloys.
We are thus brought face to face with the two men with whom every critic of American novelists has to reckon; who represent what is carefullest and newest in American fiction; and it remains to inquire how far their work has been moulded by the skeptical or radical spirit of which Turguenieff is the chief exemplar.
We have no past, in the European sense, and so are ready for whatever the present or the future may have to suggest. Nevertheless, the novelist who, in a larger degree than any other, seems to be the literary parent of our own best men of fiction, is himself not an American, nor even an Englishman, but a Russian Turguenieff.
I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder at my good fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its alloys.
If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so are Stendhal and Turguenieff, and half the great masters of the novel; and if he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it is perhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he may evoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies the necessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art.
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